By JANE E. BRODY Despite widespread belief among both doctors and lay people that cerebral palsy results from lack of oxygen to the baby's brain during labor and delivery, a new report says that birth asphyxia alone accounts for 10 percent of cases at most. The study found that the vast majority of children who develop cerebral palsy experience prenatal problems, including maternal infections, clotting disorders and strokes, that damage the developing brain long before labor begins. The findings were described yesterday at a news conference in Albany held by the New York division of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which has been concerned about the growing unwillingness of doctors to practice obstetrics because of litigation risks, skyrocketing jury awards and soaring rates of malpractice insurance. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 3480 - Posted: 02.26.2003

CHAPEL HILL -- The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has named Drs. Linda Buck and Richard Axel co-recipients of the third annual Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize. Buck is a member of the basic sciences division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and affiliate professor at the University of Washington. Axel is University professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Columbia University. Both scientists are Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators. The prize carries a $10,000 award and is given to recognize a seminal achievement in the field of neuroscience. Previous awardees were Dr. David Julius from the University of California at San Francisco and Dr. Roderick MacKinnon from Rockefeller University.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 3479 - Posted: 02.26.2003

By Louis Charbonneau VIENNA, Austria (Reuters) - The use of synthetic drugs like ecstasy is booming among the party-goers of the rich world, the United Nations said Wednesday. The U.N. International Narcotics Control Board also said Afghanistan was back as top producer of opium used for heroin, making some 3,500 tons in 2002, 100 tons more than in 2001. "Synthetic drugs like ecstasy could become the main illicit drugs of the future," it said in its report for 2002. © 2003 Reuters

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 3478 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NewScientist.com news service The traditionally "female" hormone progesterone makes male mice aggressive towards their offspring, shows a new gene knockout study. It overturns the textbook view that testosterone prompts males to threaten their pups. US researchers made the discovery after silencing the actions of progesterone in male mice. They did this by knocking out the gene which makes progesterone receptors, molecules which enable cells to respond to the hormone. This dramatically reduced aggression and enhanced paternal behaviour when infants were placed near their fathers. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 3477 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Opponents of proposed UC Davis facility go ape over security breach Elizabeth Fernandez, Chronicle Staff Writer The escape of a small gray and tan monkey from a UC Davis medical research center may threaten a proposed high-security lab on campus to study deadly infectious organisms such as anthrax and smallpox that could be used as terrorist weapons. The 4-pound rhesus macaque monkey vanished two weeks ago as her cage was being cleaned at the California National Primate Research Center, where she was used for breeding purposes and was "disease free," according to the university. But the primate's disappearance is raising grave concerns among the many opponents of a proposed $150 million biocontainment facility that would be entrusted to study the world's most dangerous diseases. ©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 3476 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER This year, the genetic revolution that James D. Watson and Francis Crick ushered in with their discovery of the structure of DNA celebrates its 50th birthday. The molecule that for so long exemplified youthful bravado, vast promise and vaster self-regard has become another aging, pot-bellied baby boomer. In the view of some biologists, nothing would better suit the DNA industry than a genuine midlife crisis, a realization that this most mythologized of bio-abbreviations may not, after all, be the fulcrum around which the Milky Way wheels. As these biologists see it, DNA may be elegant, but it often has been accorded far greater powers than it possesses. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 3475 - Posted: 02.25.2003

Many gene mutations can extend life--at least in fruit flies. Although most of these life-extending mutations cause crippling side effects, researchers now report that the most potent longevity mutation known leaves flies relatively vigorous. In 2000, molecular geneticist Stephen Helfand of the University of Connecticut in Farmington and colleagues discovered that a mutated "Indy" gene (the name is an acronym for the line "I'm not dead yet" from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail ) nearly doubled the average lifetime of flies to roughly 70 days. That was a promising improvement--previously discovered mutations extended life by only 35% to 80% and most drastically curtailed metabolic rates, physical activity, or fecundity. Not so for the Indy mutants, Helfand and colleagues report online 24 February in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . The mutant flies exhaled just as much carbon dioxide as normal flies, they found, indicating a comparable metabolic rate. And digital movies revealed that they flew at least as fast as normal flies. In addition, the mutants had 10% to 20% higher egg-laying rates than normal flies when fed high-calorie diets. However, on lower calorie diets that approximate what flies eat in the wild, egg laying was cut in half. "This could be why this mutation does not dominate in the wild," Helfand says. Copyright © 2003 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 3474 - Posted: 06.24.2010

EVANSTON, Ill. -- In an unexpected discovery, a team led by Northwestern University scientists has become the first to show that progesterone, a hormone usually associated with female reproduction and maternal behavior, plays a key role in regulating male aggression toward infants in mice. Testosterone, not progesterone, had been thought to be responsible. The researchers found that the absence of progesterone's actions reduced aggression while promoting positive paternal behavior. The findings, to be published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the week of Feb. 24, suggest a new approach to studying an area of biology that has been poorly understood. "We discovered that the hormone progesterone and its receptor are important in males, not just females," said Jon E. Levine, professor of neurobiology and physiology, who led the provocative study. "Paternal behavior may be based in the same biology as maternal behavior."

Keyword: Aggression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 3473 - Posted: 02.25.2003

For the first time, researchers have shown that the brains of dyslexic children can be rewired - after undergoing intensive remediation training - to function more like those found in normal readers. The training program, which is designed to help dyslexics understand rapidly changing sounds that are the building blocks of language, helped the participants become better readers after just eight weeks. The findings were released Monday in ``Neural deficits in children with dyslexia ameliorated by behavioral remediation: Evidence from functional MRI,`` published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.

Keyword: Dyslexia
Link ID: 3472 - Posted: 02.25.2003

Toni Baker Dr. Paul Sohal, developmental biologist at the Medical College of Georgia, is exploring the potential for a possible new cell type he's found that is capable of making all four of the major human tissues.] A cell type with the potential for making the four major types of human tissue has been found in the stomach and small intestine by a Medical College of Georgia researcher. These VENT cells have been found in addition to the three sources of cells typically associated with gastrointestinal development, says Dr. Paul Sohal, MCG developmental biologist, who first identified these cells nearly a decade ago. Identification of VENT -- ventrally emigrating neural tube -- cells within the stomach and small intestine is another piece in Dr. Sohal’s effort to fully define and describe the cells that he first found migrating out from the neural tube of a chick embryo. Copyright 2003 Medical College of Georgia All rights reserved.

Keyword: Stem Cells
Link ID: 3471 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rob Stein, Washington Post Staff Writer For as long as she can remember, Laurie Lucchina was kind of strange about food. Sweets, like cheesecake and ice cream, were too rich for her. Spicy food was so hot it felt as if it was literally burning her mouth. She didn't just dislike many vegetables -- they made her sick. "There were a lot of foods I really didn't like," said Lucchina. "I was always a skinny kid." It wasn't until years later that Lucchina discovered she wasn't just a picky eater. Lucchina is a "supertaster" -- born with a genetic trait that makes her extremely sensitive to certain tastes. © 2003 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 3470 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Males impress mates with gaudy décor. JOHN WHITFIELD Fish like flash, researchers have discovered. Give a male stickleback some shiny baubles and he'll decorate his nest with them - females prefer males with colourful abodes. In the lab, males' favourite knick-knacks seem to be red foil sticks, report ecologists Sara Östlund-Nilsson and Mikael Holmlund of the University of Oslo in Norway - they offered the fish blue beads, and blue and silver foil sticks, as well as the red ones1. Females spent nearly 90% of their time inspecting gaudy nests rather than plain ones. In the wild, male three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) weave tunnels from pondweed or twigs. Females lay their eggs in these tunnels, and tend them until they hatch. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 3469 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ARTHUR P. GROLLMAN, M.D. An elite athlete has once again succumbed to the extraordinary promises of weight loss coupled with enhanced performance made by the manufacturers of an ephedra-related product and paid the ultimate price. This time, it was the Baltimore Orioles pitching prospect Steve Bechler, 23, who died last Monday, leaving a wife who was pregnant with the couple's first child. Before this latest death, the Minnesota Vikings star Korey Stringer, the Northwestern University football player Rashidi Wheeler and the Florida State linebacker Devaughn Darling had used supplements containing ephedra before their untimely demises. How many more deaths of young, apparently healthy athletes will have to happen before all sports organizations — from amateur to professional — officially ban ephedra-related supplements? Ephedra has been banned by the N.C.A.A., the N.F.L. and the International Olympic Committee, but what about Major League Baseball, the N.B.A. and numerous other athletic associations? They have all had the opportunity to tighten their drug policies but have continually failed to do so. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 3468 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LAUREN SLATER You've been in therapy for years.You've time-traveled back to your childhood home, to your mother's makeup mirror with its ring of pearl lights. You've uncovered, or recovered, the bad baby sitter, his hands on you, and yet still, you're no better. You feel foggy and low; you flinch at intimate touch; you startle at even the slightest sounds, and you are impaired. Hundreds of sessions of talk have led you here, back to the place you started, even though you've followed all advice. You have self-soothed and dredged up; you have cried and curled up; you have aimed for integration in your fractured, broken brain. This is common, the fractured, broken brain and the uselessness of talk therapy to make it better. A study done by H.J. Eysenck in 1952, a study that still causes some embarrassment to the field, found that psychotherapy in general helped no more, no less, than the slow passing of time. As for insight, no one has yet demonstrably proved that it is linked to recovery. What actually does help is anyone's best guess -- probably some sort of fire, directly under your behind -- and what leads to relief? Maybe love and work, maybe medicine. Maybe repression. Repression? Isn't that the thing that makes you sick, that splits you off, so demons come dancing back? Doesn't that cause holes in the stomach and chancres in the colon and a general impoverishment of spirit? Maybe not. New research shows that some traumatized people may be better off repressing the experience than illuminating it in therapy. If you're stuck and scared, perhaps you should not remember but forget. Avoid. That's right. Tamp it down. Up you go. The new research is rooted in part in the experience of Sept. 11, when swarms of therapists descended on New York City after the twin towers fell. There were, by some estimates, three shrinks for every victim, which is itself an image you might want to repress, the bearded, the beatnik, the softly empathic all gathered round the survivors urging talk talk talk. ''And what happened,'' says Richard Gist, a community psychologist and trauma researcher who, along with a growing number of colleagues, has become highly critical of these debriefing procedures, ''is some people got worse. They were either unhelped or retraumatized by our interventions.'' Gist, who is an associate professor at the University of Missouri and who has been on hand to help with disasters from the collapse of the Hyatt Regency pedestrian skywalks in Kansas City, Mo., in 1981 to the United Airlines crash in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1989, has had time to develop his thoughts regarding how, or how not, to help in times of terror. ''Basically, all these therapists run down to the scene, and there's a lot of grunting and groaning and encouraging people to review what they saw, and then the survivors get worse. I've been saying for years, 'Is it any surprise that if you keep leading people to the edge of a cliff they eventually fall over?''' Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Depression
Link ID: 3467 - Posted: 02.23.2003

By COLIN McGINN Once scientists returned, at last, to the study of consciousness it was only a matter of time before emotions engaged their attention, not just emotional behavior, but the inner conscious feelings that accompany it: experiences of fear, anger, sadness, joy and more. These, after all, are mainly what constitute human well-being, so it would be nice to understand them, particularly as they relate to the brain, where the mechanics lie. Antonio Damasio, chief neurologist at the University of Iowa Medical Center, is a leader in this developing field, having written two well-regarded books on emotions and the brain: ''Descartes' Error'' and ''The Feeling of What Happens.'' Now, in ''Looking for Spinoza,'' he sets out to explain what precisely an emotion is, and what parts of the brain give rise to emotions of different kinds. Spinoza, the enigmatic 17th-century philosopher, enters the story because of his interest in emotion and will, and his foreshadowing of the theory Damasio favors. Damasio advances three central claims. The first is that emotions do not cause their bodily symptoms but are caused by the symptoms: we do not cry because we are sad; we are sad because we cry. The emotional behavior comes first, causally and in evolution, with the conscious feelings a later byproduct: ''feelings . . . are mostly shadows of the external manner of emotions,'' he writes. The second claim is that an emotional feeling is identical to the bodily sensations that manifest it: ''A feeling in essence is an idea -- an idea of the body and, even more particularly, an idea of a certain aspect of the body, its interior, in certain circumstances. A feeling of emotion is an idea of the body when it is perturbed by the emoting process.'' The thought here is that an emotion, say fear of being attacked by a bear, consists simply of the awareness one has of the bodily symptoms of the emotion -- the racing heart, the adrenaline release, the sweaty palms, the tensed muscles. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 3466 - Posted: 02.23.2003

By LIESL SCHILLINGER In the movie ''Harold and Maude,'' an 80-year old woman coaxes a young man into trying out a rickety machine that plays fragrances the way a Victrola plays tunes. The scents she has hoarded are not Joy or Chanel No. 5, they are everyday smells from a long, fully enjoyed life -- roast beef, old books, mown grass. ''Odorifics,'' Maude calls them. ''Here's one you'll like,'' she exclaims, plunging a canister into the contraption: ''Snowfall on 42nd Street!'' Harold inhales. ''What do you smell?'' she demands. ''Subway?'' he asks. She nods. ''Perfume. Cigarettes.'' He coughs . . . then there's a pause. With quiet wonder, he says, ''Snow.'' When the movie came out in 1971, Maude's odorifics seemed like a pipe dream, because, of course, you can't capture the scent of a subway in a canister. Only it turns out you can. If you drop by the Demeter Fragrance Library in Manhattan's East Village, you can buy cologne in the scents of Pruning Shears, Laundromat or, indeed, Snow. The difference between fantasy and reality turns out to be just a matter of time. But why do these things have a recognizable smell that all of us can agree on? The answer to this question has been debated since classical times, when Parmenides, Democritus, Xenophanes and later Lucretius tried to hash these things out. The debate raged on into the 20th century as scientists like John Amoore, Malcolm Dyson and R. H. Wright tried to establish solid olfactory rules with the aid of technological gadgetry far beyond the grasp of the Greeks and Romans. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 3465 - Posted: 02.23.2003

BY TRACY WHEELER Knight Ridder Newspapers AKRON, Ohio - KRT NEWSFEATURES (KRT) - His friends abandoned him. His parents fired him for his own safety. Dating? Not a chance. Epilepsy - and the frequent seizures that came with it - was stealing Mike Tribout's life. ``I didn't want to accept that I had epilepsy,'' the 32-year-old Canton resident says. ``It took me a long time to accept it. Friends who I thought were my friends didn't want anything to do with me. ... I was getting pretty depressed about it. © 2003, Akron Beacon Journal

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 3464 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NewScientist.com news service When it comes to pain, a tiny variation in a single gene divides the men from the boys, reveals a new study. US researchers have pinpointed differences in the way people withstand pain - both physical and emotional stress - to a gene which makes a protein important for brain chemistry. The gene makes catechol-O-methyl transferase (COMT), an enzyme vital for mopping up the dopamine brain chemical linked with sensing pain. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 3463 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Kendall Morgan A single 2-hour exposure to the microwaves emitted by some cell phones kills brain cells in rats, a group of Swedish researchers claims. If confirmed, the results would be the first to directly link cell-phone radiation to brain damage in any animal. No such evidence exists for people. But with cell-phone use skyrocketing, some scientists recommend precautionary measures—for example, avoiding excessive gabbing on the phones. Digital cell phones send out compressed information through microwave pulses of electromagnetic radiation. In the United States, standard phones emit 50 such pulses per second, while so-called GSM phones—which operate under the international standard called Global System for Mobile Communications—emit 217. Those pulses scatter low-level microwave radiation across the brain. To date, convincing evidence linking the phones to serious health problems, such as cancer, is lacking, says Leif G. Salford of Lund University Hospital in Sweden. From Science News, Vol. 163, No. 8, Feb. 22, 2003, p. 115. Copyright ©2003 Science Service. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 3462 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A longstanding debate among scholars of human evolution centers on the number of hominid species that existed in the past. Whereas some paleoanthropologists favor a sleek family tree, others view the known fossil record of humans as indicative of a tangled bush. The latter view has gained popularity in recent years, but a new fossil from Tanzania suggests that a bit of pruning might be in order. Researchers writing today in the journal Science report that a specimen unearthed from Olduvai Gorge--a site made famous several decades ago by Louis and Mary Leakey--bridges two previously established species, indicating that they are instead one and the same. © 1996-2003 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 3461 - Posted: 06.24.2010