Bat specimens dating back more than 50 years may help scientists understand high rates of a killer disease on a Pacific island. Guam is known for incredibly high rates of a degenerative disease which has some of the hallmarks of motor neuron, Parkinson's and dementia, but cannot be firmly identified as any of them. Among the Chamorro people on the island, rates of the mysterious condition run at between 50 and 100 times the "normal" rate of motor neuron disease found in other communities. Many theories have been put forward as to the cause of the disease, but the mystery has yet to be solved. In recent years, some researchers have suggested that islanders habit of catching and eating a type of bat called a flying fox may be to blame. It is suggested that the flying foxes feed on seed containing a chemical highly toxic to human brain cells. (C) BBC

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 4155 - Posted: 08.24.2003

By SELENA ROBERTS IT'S the end of training camp, and the breathing is easy for the N.F.L. All is swell, because their plus-sized lugs were misted, spritzed and watered until their rhino hides beaded up in the blazing sun. All is fine, because there were only a few dizzy spells and not one belly flop amongst them. In fact, the league's ever-expanding linemen left camp hydrated and happy this past week, buoyed by the self-esteem any 335-pound guy would have when his Hungry-Man lifestyle is appreciated with a hefty contract in a society that pays supermodels to purge their carbs. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 4154 - Posted: 08.24.2003

By NICHOLAS WADE The most improbable item in science fiction movies is not the hardware — the faster-than-light travel, the tractor beams, the levitation — but the people. Strangely, they always look and behave just like us. Yet the one safe prediction about the far future is that humans will be a lot further along in their evolution. Last week population geneticists, rummaging in DNA's ever-fascinating attic, set dates on two important changes in the human form. Dr. Alan R. Rogers of the University of Utah figured out that the ancestral human population had acquired black skin, as a protection against the sun, at least 1.2 million years ago, and therefore that it must have shed its fur some time before this date. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4153 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scans of the brain cells of rats are helping scientists to understand what happens in the mind as the body gets older. The study backs up theories which suggest that physical changes in the brain mean that an old brain finds it harder to "learn new tricks" than a younger one. The findings could eventually contribute to treatments for disease - and help patients whose brains are failing to develop in the normal way. The scientists, from three universities in the US, were trying to look at how the brain formed connections between different cells. It is thought that making these connections are key to the way that the brain develops and "learns". The connections are not fixed - the brain has the ability to rearrange them, although the factors that control how and when it does this are still poorly understood. What the US scientists found was that, in one brain area at least, as the brain of the rat aged, it seemed to lose the ability to carry out these changes quite so often, and many of the junctions of the cells become more rigidly fixed. (C) BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 4152 - Posted: 08.23.2003

St. Paul, MN – Excessive gambling could be an unfortunate yet rare side effect in Parkinson’s patients who take certain dopamine agonists, according to a study in the August 12 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Researchers at Muhammad Ali Parkinson Research Center in Phoenix, Ariz., examined the data of 1,884 Parkinson’s patients who were seen during a one-year period. Nine patients – seven men and two women – were identified with pathological gambling. “The risk of gambling problems in a Parkinson’s patient is very small,” said study author Mark Stacy, MD, who is now the medical director of the Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders Center at Duke University Medical Center, Durham, N.C. “However, it may be appropriate for doctors to inform patients of this potential risk, particularly in their patients taking relatively high dosages of a dopamine agonist, and with a documented history of depression or anxiety disorder.”

Keyword: Parkinsons; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 4151 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Gene therapy has been heralded as a way to not only treat genetic diseases, but to cure them as well. But it has had some major safety setbacks in recent years. In 1999, 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger died in a gene therapy trial for an inherited liver disease called ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency. And last year in France, two children who received gene therapy to treat the immune deficiency known as X-linked Severe Combined Immunodeficiency syndrome (XSCID), or "bubble boy disease," developed leukemia. In both cases, experts blamed the tragic side effects on the viruses used by gene therapists as so-called "vectors" to carry the corrective genes into patients' body cells. "The vector is the vehicle for carrying the gene into the appropriate tissues in the body," explains Mark Kay, professor of pediatrics and genetics at Stanford University. "Viruses…normally carry their own genetic information into cells of the body. That's the process of how viruses make you sick. But what we as genetic therapists do is basically use the vehicle of the virus to carry therapeutic genetic information into cells rather than the viral genetic information." © ScienCentral, 2000-2003.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 4150 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alcoholism researchers have been looking long and hard for genes associated with the disease, and so far they've had little to show for it. But they can toast a new study of America's prime breeding grounds for alcoholism--college campuses. It indicates that youthful binge drinkers are significantly more likely than moderate drinkers to have a particular version of a gene involved in transmission of serotonin, a key brain chemical. The gene in question comes in two versions, or alleles: long and short. People inherit one copy from each parent. Previous research found that people with two short alleles are more prone to anxiety and are more susceptible to depression triggered by adverse experiences (Science, 18 July, p. 291). Now it appears they're also more likely to get drunk. The researchers, from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), took DNA samples from and gave questionnaires to 204 Caucasian college students, asking them how often they drink, how much they drink, and whether they drink to get drunk. Copyright © 2003 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4149 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The Guardian The phrase "boys will be boys" is often used by parents as a throwaway comment to excuse rough-and-tumble games. Delve deeper and you might question why a girl barely out of nappies can't help but rifle through your make-up bag and why your small son insists on brandishing plastic swords and toy guns around the house. But at what stage in childhood does our gender identity become fixed - and what if there is a mismatch with the biological sex we are given? The fact is that most people conform to the body they are born with, but for a small minority of children, this acceptance can be a daily battle. Gender identity disorder (GID) is when the biological sex of a person does not match their gender identity, but those with GID often describe it as "feeling trapped inside the body of the wrong sex". According to science, our biological sex is determined by our chromosomes and hormones, but accepting the gender we are given is not always so simple. © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4148 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Power has been restored to the entire Northeast, and for many, the biggest blackout in North American history was a stressful ordeal. However, as this ScienCentral News video reports, stress in the short-term could actually be good for us. Whether coping with the blackout of 2003, or watching the stock market rise and fall, we’ve all felt stressed at some point in our lives. Normally, we think stress is bad for us. But some neuroscientists say that in small doses it can actually be good for us. "I think of 'stress' as a word that we give to a challenge of any kind, like getting out of bed in the morning and doing almost anything that we have to do in our daily lives," says Bruce McEwen, professor and head the neuroendocrinology lab at Rockefeller University. "And when we are challenged, our body system produces mediators, hormones like cortisol and adrenaline , which help to get us going and actually do all sorts of good things that keep us alive. They improve our memory, they enhance our immune system, they get our heart rate going and get our energy mobilized. And these are the chemicals in our body that actually help us to cope with things that happen to us everyday." © ScienCentral, 2000-2003.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 4147 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Why do African-American women have a higher risk of obesity, while European-American women have a higher risk of osteoporosis? As this ScienCentral News video reports, genetics researchers are attacking these questions through the touchy topic of race. All human populations are so closely related that there are very few genes that are different between one human and another. However, statistics seem to show that certain races have higher rates of certain diseases. "Black women are more prone to obesity," says Mark Shriver, assistant professor of anthropology and genetics at Penn State University. "There's a higher risk, about twofold, than white women. Also, white women are more prone to osteoporosis than black women." © ScienCentral, 2000-2003.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 4146 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NewScientist.com news service Humans can be trained to crave food in response to abstract prompts just like Pavlov's dogs, reveals new research. But whereas Pavlov's dogs were conditioned to drool at the sound of a bell, Jay Gottfried and colleagues at University College London, UK, trained humans to yearn for vanilla ice cream and peanut butter at the sight of fractal-based computer images. Importantly, the team also showed that the human brain can put a "brake" on the powerful desire for certain foods once the appetite has been sated. This system to turn the "delectable into the distasteful" may be crucial in regulating behaviour, they say. Detecting faults in this system might in future help shed light on compulsive eating disorders and substance addictions, speculates Gottfried, a neurologist. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Obesity
Link ID: 4145 - Posted: 06.24.2010

How your brain weighs the odds of disaster By Eric Haseltine Our prehistoric ancestors faced many lethal hazards. Sanitary conditions in the wild weren't great, so people were in constant danger of becoming ill from tainted foods. Worse, while foraging for snacks, they could easily become something else's dinner. On balance, however, our forebears must have evolved good ways of assessing risk, or I wouldn't be writing this—and you wouldn't be reading it. Recent neurological research suggests that we are innately wired to avoid dangers by calculating odds based on factors that you'd expect as well as others that may surprise you. Let's see how accurate your brain is at calculating risk and what factors it considers in making these assessments. © Copyright 2003 The Walt Disney Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 4144 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bob Beale, ABC Science Online — Languages evolve and compete with each other much like plants and animals, but those driven to extinction are almost always tongues with a low social status, U.S. research shows. The social status of a language is the most accurate way of predicting whether it will survive, argue researchers in a paper appearing in the journal Nature. They also suggest that active intervention to boost the status of rare and endangered languages can save them. "Thousands of the world's languages are vanishing at an alarming rate, with 90 percent of them being expected to disappear with the current generation," warned Daniel Abrams and Steven Strogatz, both of Cornell University in New York. Copyright © 2003 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 4143 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sequencing project reveals two different versions make a female, one a male. JOHN WHITFIELD Researchers have discovered the gene that controls honeybees' sex. The finding could help us understand insect behaviour and evolution, and keep beehives healthy1. To become female, an insect needs two different versions of the gene, called csd. A male has one, occasionally two copies of the same version. There are at least a dozen different forms of csd. Such a gene was mooted 50 years ago, and entomologist Robert Page of the University of California, Davis, has spent the past 15 years looking for it. "I expected it to take ten," he says. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 4142 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Findings reported in Science may offer clues to eating disorders, addiction There's a little of Pavlov's dog in all of us, according to new research. Instead of using meat and a ringing bell, scientists have trained humans to hunger for vanilla ice cream, at the sight of an abstract computer image. Not only do we mentally connect the enjoyment of certain foods with unrelated stimuli, our brains can also relax these connections once we're full of that food, the researchers discovered. They report their findings in the journal Science, published by AAAS, the science society. If that mental relaxing process doesn't happen properly, it might leave us with the urge to eat even once we're full. An inability to disconnect the anticipation of food from various sights, sounds, or other stimuli may play a role in compulsive eating, according to author Jay Gottfried of the Institute of Neurology in London.

Keyword: Obesity; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 4141 - Posted: 08.22.2003

Rehovot, Israel--- Is it possible to intentionally forget specific memories, without affecting other memories? Many would undoubtedly be happy to learn that unpleasant memories might be erased. This ability could be especially significant when it comes to the kind of traumatic memories that are debilitating to those experiencing them. It may well be that in the future, we will be able to wipe out, or at least dim, certain types of memories with controlled accuracy. A new fundamental rule governing the workings of the brain, recently discovered by a team of scientists in the Weizmann Institute of Science, headed by Prof. Yadin Dudai of the Neurobiology Department, constitutes a step towards reaching this goal. Every memory that we acquire undergoes a "ripening" process (called consolidation) immediately after it is formed. In this process, it becomes impervious to outside stimulation or drugs that would obliterate it. Until recently, the accepted dogma was that for each separate item of memory, consolidation occurs just once, after which the time window that allows for "memory erasing" closes (usually about an hour or two after the memory is acquired).

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 4140 - Posted: 08.22.2003

By Aaron Levin, Staff Writer Most of the reported health benefits of moderate drinking on brain functioning in middle age become moot when a person’s mental abilities as a teenager are factored in, a new study suggests. For years researchers have debated the pros and cons of moderate alcohol drinking. No one suggests that alcoholism is healthy, but there has been evidence that having no more than one drink a day may actually bolster the heart or the brain, compared to drinking too much or not at all. The connection between alcohol consumption and cognition — the processes of thinking, learning and memory — remains controversial. “Studies have reported negative, positive and nonsignificant effects of alcohol consumption on cognition,” say Dean Krahn, M.D., M.S., and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin. So Krahn decided to test whether the apparent differences in cognition in middle age corresponded more closely to drinking habits or to cognitive abilities in youth.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 4139 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences have identified a gene called RFX4 that is responsible for the birth defect hydrocephalus in mice. Loss of a single copy of this gene in mice leads to a failure of drainage of cerebrospinal fluid from the brain cavity which causes the skull to swell. About one child in 2,000 worldwide is afflicted by hydrocephalus. Identification of the mouse gene provides a means for researchers to study the possible genetic origins of this common birth defect in humans. The gene was discovered when researchers noticed that pups in one line of transgenic mice from a completely different study developed head swelling and neurological abnormalities shortly after birth. The NIEHS research team then cloned the defective gene and found that it was responsible for development of a critical structure in the brain that controls cerebrospinal fluid drainage. All of the mice with the defective gene developed the classic symptoms of hydrocephalus, whereas none of the littermates with the normal gene developed this condition.. Although the head-swelling led to rapid neurological deterioration and death in many of the transgenic animals, a number have survived to reproduce and propagate the line.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4138 - Posted: 08.22.2003

Leon Trotsky's Great-Granddaughter Is Following Her Own Path to Greatness By Guy Gugliotta, Washington Post Staff Writer Nora Volkow was born three years after Stalin died, and 16 years after the Soviet dictator sent a student with an ice ax to kill her great-grandfather. Her grandmother committed suicide, and her grandfather was shot to death in a Stalinist prison. She grew up in Mexico City knowing that her family was both steeped in greatness and marked by tragedy. Today, Volkow is the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and one of the United States' leading experts on the science of drug addiction. "I've studied alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, marijuana and more recently obesity. There's a pattern in compulsion," she says. "I've never come across a single person that was addicted that wanted to be addicted. Something has happened in their brains that has led to that process, and I want to know what it is." By all accounts, Volkow is an inspired, and sometimes electrifying, thinker. Oh, and she also is the great-granddaughter of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. © 2003 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 4137 - Posted: 06.24.2010

St. Paul, MN –Fifty-year-old museum specimens of the Guamanian flying fox may shed more light on why Guam’s Chamorro people once had an extremely high incidence of ALS-parkinsonism dementia complex (ALS/PDC). At the same time, the study, supported by the ALS Association, introduces the role that biomagnification of neurotoxins might play in the development of symptoms similar to those of ALS, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. The Chamorro people once had an incidence rate of ALS-parkinsonism dementia complex that was 50 to 100 times higher than the rate of ALS elsewhere. The decline in the incidence of ALS/PDC among the Chamorro mirrored the decline of the population of flying foxes (a type of bat), by the 1960s and 1970s. Researchers report in the August 12 issue of Neurology that skin tissues of the flying foxes contained elevated quantities of BMAA (ß-methylamino-L-alanine), a non-protein amino acid that has shown to kill neurons in cell culture, and is believed to be a possible cause of ALS/PDC.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 4136 - Posted: 06.24.2010