by Sarah C. P. Williams All for one, or in it for yourself? That depends on how you were brought up, according to a new study involving the prisoner's dilemma, perhaps the most famous scenario in game theory. In the game, you can either cooperate or betray your partner. And adult males who were exposed as children to violence, crime, conflict, and neglect turn on their partners earlier and more often in the game than males who grew up in more stable environments, the study finds. Imagine that you're a thief, and you and your partner have been nabbed by the police. If you both stay silent, you both get a month in jail. But if you rat out your partner, or "defect," while he stays silent, he gets 2 years and you go free. Alas, if you both snitch, you both get a year. Dreamed up decades ago, the prisoner's dilemma has now become a staple of social psychology experiments. "It's really an assay for how your mind is built to tradeoff between different ways of living in the world," says psychologist Michael McCullough of the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. "Are you going to be tempted by short-term payoffs or are you going to invest again and again to try to get long-term benefits?" McCullough and colleagues wanted to explore how these choices might vary based on a person's background. The researchers recruited 244 male and female undergraduate students to participate in multiple iterations of the prisoner's dilemma game in which points—later converted into real money—were won in each round depending on the choices made. Each student was told they were playing at least 20 rounds of the game via a computer. They were told their opponents were human—but instead the computer was programmed to take a "tit for tat" strategy: The computer repeats the moves made by the player in the previous round. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17441 - Posted: 10.31.2012

By ANDREW POLLACK Allergan said Tuesday that it was looking to divest itself of its Lap-Band, the once-popular weight-loss device that has experienced several years of falling sales, loss of market share and controversies about its safety and effectiveness. The falling sales “do not fit the profile of a high-growth company like Allergan,” David E. I. Pyott, the company’s chief executive, told analysts Tuesday morning on a call announcing the company’s third-quarter financial results. In an interview, Mr. Pyott said Allergan had already hired an investment banking firm, which he would not name, and was sending letters to other medical device companies and private equity firms seeking a buyer for its obesity business, which also includes a balloonlike device that is not approved in the United States but is used in some other countries. The Lap-Band, a silicone ring that is wrapped around the stomach and can be inserted in an outpatient procedure, once appeared to have a bright future as a less drastic, if less effective, alternative to gastric bypass, which involves rerouting the digestive tract. But Allergan’s obesity business sales have fallen from a peak of $296 million in 2008 to an expected $160 million this year. In the third quarter, the sales fell by 25 percent to $37.4 million from a year earlier. The obesity business, while still profitable, represents less than 3 percent of total product sales for Allergan, which is known most for its Botox treatment for wrinkles, migraine headaches and other conditions. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17440 - Posted: 10.31.2012

by Rachel Nuwer The dungeon is pitch black—until the dungeon master blazes a torch, confirming your worst fears. A Beholder monster lurches at you, its eyeballs wriggling on tentacular stems. As you prepare to wield your Vorpal sword, where do you focus your gaze: at the monster's head or at its tentacle eyes? Such a quandary from the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons may seem like a meaningless trifle, but it holds within it the answer to a scientific question. In fact, a father-son team has used images of such monsters to show that most people will look to another creature's eyes, no matter where they are located on the body. "Dungeons & Dragons monsters have eyes all over the place," says Julian Levy, a ninth grader at Lord Byng Secondary School in Vancouver, Canada. Two years ago, Levy's knowledge of the role-playing game led him to a unique solution for solving a basic scientific question: Do people focus their gaze on another person's eyes or on the center of the head, where the eyes just happen to be located? "We were eating dinner and my dad was talking about how, after publishing a paper about gaze tracking, a reviewer said that you could never prove whether people are looking at the eyes or the center of the face," Levy recalls. So he piped up with an idea, offering Dungeons & Dragons characters as an experimental solution. Because many characters have eyes located on their hands, torso, or other areas of the body, a researcher could track viewers' gazes to see what part of the characters they focus on first. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 17439 - Posted: 10.31.2012

by Douglas Heaven Timing is everything. But exactly how the brain keeps time, which it does very well, has been something of a mystery. One widely held theory suggests that a single brain region acts as a centralised timekeeper – possibly in the basal ganglia or cerebellum. However, a study now suggests that timekeeping is decentralised, with different circuits having their own timing mechanisms for each specific activity. The finding could help explain why certain brain conditions affect our sense of timing, and even raise the possibility of artificially manipulating time perception. Geoffrey Ghose and Blaine Schneider, at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, investigated timing in the brain by training two rhesus macaques to perform tasks in which they moved their eyes between two dots on a screen at regular 1-second intervals. There were no external cues available to help them keep track of time. After three months, the monkeys had learned to move their eyes between the two dots with average intervals of 1.003 and 0.973 seconds, respectively. The researchers then used electrodes to record brain activity across 100 neurons in the lateral intraparietal cortex – associated with eye movement – while the monkeys performed the task. The activity of these neurons decreased during the interval between each eye movement, and the rate of decrease correlated with the monkeys' timing. Using this information, Ghose and Schneider were able to predict the interval between eye movements by measuring the preceding decay rate. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 17438 - Posted: 10.31.2012

By Scicurious Treating alcoholism is incredibly difficult on many levels. One of the most difficult areas to deal with is social interaction, how people with alcoholism can interact with others. Alcoholics can have many problems with social exclusion. This is partially due to the severe stigma that accompanies alcoholism, but it’s also due to the difficulties that being an alcoholic can produce on social interaction. Regardless, being an alcoholic can result in ostracism and a breaking down of social support networks, and that can make recovery, especially in times of stress, that much more difficult. But of course, it’s not just the act of being socially ostracized or excluded, it also matters how the person being excluded responds. And there are some indications that alcoholics have a larger response to social exclusion than controls. But do they? And if so, why? So the authors of this study wanted to look at how people with alcoholism respond to things like social rejection compared to controls. They took 22 recovering alcoholics (abstinent, all male, all inpatient treatment and in the 3rd week of detox), and 22 controls, and put them in an fMRI scanner to look at changes in blood oxygenation in the brian. By determining where more or less oxygenated blood is going, fMRI gives an idea of where more or less activity may be taking place. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Emotions
Link ID: 17437 - Posted: 10.30.2012

By WILLIAM C. RHODEN We’ve seen it hundreds of times. An athlete is injured and within seconds is surrounded by an armada of medical personnel: trainers, assistant trainers, team doctors. The athlete is helped off the field, given a diagnosis, treated and sent to physical therapy, often to return miraculously in a week or two. But when that same athlete has a mental disorder, there is no armada of trainers, no team doctors. That athlete is often abandoned. For all of the current focus on traumatic brain injury as a result of concussions, mental illness, often overlooked, exists at every level of sports. Sports too often is a masking agent that hides deeply rooted mental health issues. The better the athlete, the more desperate to reach the next level, the less likely he or she will reach out for help. The gladiator mentality remains a primary barrier. “Mental health has a stigma that is tied into weakness and is absolutely the antithesis of what athletes want to portray,” said Dr. Thelma Dye Holmes, the executive director of the Northside Center for Child Development, one of New York’s oldest mental health agencies, serving more than 1,500 children and their families. “Mental health is not something that you can easily know,” Holmes said. “You feel a pain in your side, you have discomfort. Mental illness is vague and makes us uneasy. Especially when it comes to athletes, there tends to be a stigma around coming forward.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 17436 - Posted: 10.30.2012

By Laura Sanders A genetic tweak makes it easier to see neurons at work in living, breathing animals. The method, described in the Oct. 18 Neuron, capitalizes on a property of a busy neuron: When the cell fires, calcium ions flood in. Using an altered version of the protein GFP that lights up when calcium is present in a mouse’s brain, neuroscientist Guoping Feng of MIT and colleagues could see smell-sensing neurons respond to an odor, and movement neurons light up during walking. Q. Chen et al. Imaging Neural Activity Using Thy1-GCaMP Transgenic Mice. Neuron. Vol. 76, October 18,2012, p. 297. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.07.011. [Go to] © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 17435 - Posted: 10.30.2012

by Anil Ananthaswamy For the first time, one of the tics that bedevil people with Tourette's has been induced in volunteers who don't themselves have the disorder, an experiment that might help us to understand and even treat the condition. Jennifer Finis of Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, and her colleagues suspected that a type of Tourette's tic called echophenomena, which involves mimicking other's movements, may be caused by over-excitation of the supplementary motor area (SMA) – a brain region involved in the initiation of movement. To investigate further, her team used a non-invasive technique called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), which involves delivering brief but strong magnetic pulses to the scalp. By changing the frequency of rTMS, the stimulation could either inhibit or excite the SMA. Thirty seconds before and after rTMS, 30 volunteers were shown video clips of someone making a spontaneous movement. Those who'd had their SMA excited were three times as likely to imitate the kind of behaviour they saw in the clips than those who'd had it suppressed. "We suspect that this is a mechanism that might underlie tics more generally than just echophenomena in people with Tourette's syndrome," says Peter Enticott of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, who worked on the study. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Tourettes
Link ID: 17434 - Posted: 10.30.2012

By Neil Swidey IMAGINE THAT ONE NIGHT you put your bright, athletic, well-adjusted 8-year-old son to bed, a kid who loves playing baseball and cracking jokes and scarfing down chocolate chip cookies. The next morning, he wakes up as someone entirely different, and in subsequent days turns into someone unrecognizable. He’s manic, spending hours doing sit-ups or running laps on the driveway — unwilling to sit down even for a minute. He alternates between tears of soul-crushing sadness and tantrums of rage directed at you and your spouse. He’s obsessed with the unhealthiness of food, refusing to eat or drink much of anything. More than anything, though, all the comforting touchstones of his life — home, school, even sleep — have suddenly been transformed into dangers. He seems trapped in a horror movie, his fear unmistakable in the way his pupils have overtaken the irises of both his eyes. As this bizarre behavior continues, you find yourself staring at your formerly normal, healthy son and you can’t help but wonder, Where did my boy go? You ask yourself: Is this what children of Alzheimer’s patients mean when they talk about looking at a loved one who’s no longer there? You take your son to your pediatrician, a sympathetic and smart woman who is nonetheless flummoxed. Because some of your son’s symptoms appear to be compulsions, she refers you to a psychologist. Actually, because the need for pediatric mental health treatment dwarfs the supply of mental health professionals, your pediatrician turns to a state referral service called MCPAP, or Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Project. © 2012 NY Times Co.

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 17433 - Posted: 10.29.2012

A screening test for children starting school that could accurately detect early signs of a persistent stutter is a step closer, experts say. The Wellcome Trust team says a specific speech test accurately predicts whose stutter will persist into their teens. About one in 20 develops a stutter before age five - but just one in 100 stutter as a teen and identifying these children has so far been difficult. Campaigners said it was key for children to be diagnosed early. Stuttering tends to start at about three years old. Four out of five will recover without intervention, often within a couple of years. But for one in five, their stutter will persist and early therapy can be of significant benefit. The researchers, based at University College London, used a test developed in the US called SSI-3 (stuttering severity instrument). In earlier work, they followed eight-year-olds with a stutter into their teens. They found that the SSI-3 test was a reliable indicator of who would still have a stutter and who would recover - while other indicators such as family history, which have been used, were less so. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17432 - Posted: 10.29.2012

People often don't know how many calories they're eating, how many they burn off, or what they need, say doctors who are calling for prominent calorie labels at the point of sale. The Canadian Obesity Network, a group of obesity experts, showed people examples of foods and asked them to guess how many calories the items contained. Many people don't know their recommended daily intake of calories.Many people don't know their recommended daily intake of calories. (Lee Jae Won/Reuters) "A lot of Canadians were quite off the mark," said Dr. Arya Sharma, chair in obesity research and management at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. "When we showed people food labels and asked them to calculate how many calories they'd be getting if they consumed say a can of soup, very few Canadians were able to figure out that number." Sharma is concerned about the consequences of caloric illiteracy considering two-thirds of Canadians are carrying extra pounds and a quarter of adults are considered to be medically obese, according to Statistics Canada. "Ultimately calories are the currency of weight management," Sharma said. "If you don't know how many calories you're eating, you don't know what your body's doing with the calories, you don't know where the calories are going. That's like trying to manage your bank account without knowing how much money you make or how much money things cost." © CBC 2012

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17431 - Posted: 10.29.2012

David Cyranoski More than a decade of research hinting that magnesium supplements might boost your brain power is finally being put to the test in a small clinical trial. The research, led by biopharmaceutical company Magceutics of Hayward, California, began testing the ability of its product Magtein to boost magnesium ion (Mg2+) levels in the brain earlier this month. The trial will track whether the ions can decrease anxiety and improve sleep quality, as well as following changes in the memory and cognitive ability of participants. But critics caution that the trial in just 50 people is too small to draw definitive conclusions. Neuroscientist Guosong Liu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who founded Magceutics, plans eventually to test whether Magtein can be used to treat a wider range of conditions, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Alzheimer’s disease. But Liu knows that it will be difficult to convince other scientists that something as simple as a magnesium supplement can have such profound effects. It is almost “too good to be true”, he says. Many scientists contacted by Nature agreed with that sentiment. One clinical researcher cautioned against “over-excitement about a magic drug for a major disorder”. And others wonder whether the study will even be able to prove anything conclusively. “I am very sceptical that the proposed trial will provide the answer to the question being tested,” says Stephen Ferguson, a biochemist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Sleep
Link ID: 17430 - Posted: 10.27.2012

By Katherine Harmon With a juicy insect dinner perched on a leaf above the water, what is a hungry little archer fish down below to do? Knock it down with a super-powered, super-precise jet of water that packs six times the power the fish could generate with its own muscles, according to new findings published online October 24 in PLoS ONE. The stunning spitting power of the amazing archer fish (Toxotes jaculatrix) was first described in the 18th century. The creature lives in mostly in mangrove forests and estuaries where insects are prevalent—above water, that is. And these tasty treats are not easily knocked off of the plants that hang over the archer fish’s territory. The insects, such as grasshoppers, can hang on with a force some 10 times their own body weight. So the archer fish has developed an impressive strategy for fetching food that not many other fish can reach. Its water jet can target and dislodge a single insect so that it falls into the water for the fish to eat. Just how the fish manages to do this—and in less than a second—had remained a mystery. Many scientists figured that the source must be a special organ in the fish’s body. “The origin of the effectiveness of the jet squirted by the archer fish has been searched for inside of the fish for nearly 250 years,” Alberto Vailati, a physicist at the University of Milan and co-author of the new paper, said in a prepared statement. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Biomechanics; Vision
Link ID: 17429 - Posted: 10.27.2012

With bright blue hair and tattoos, Dr Caspar Addyman is not your average scientist. But then Britain's "Babylab" is not your average laboratory. Here, inside one of the world's leading infant-research units, Dr Addyman has spent the morning filtering through the results of his new Baby Laughter project. It is the first in-depth study since the Sixties into what makes infants chuckle. Last time around, the experiment involved a toy clown attached to a piece of string, which scientists held in front of their tiny, unwitting human guinea pigs to see if and when they would laugh. Fortunately Dr Addyman's experiment, which he launched in August this year, is a little more complex. "Smiling and laughing are indices of our understanding of the world. Adults laugh at something when they find it surprising or unusual; it is exactly the same for babies," he explains. "Finding out what makes infants laugh teaches us more generally about how humans understand and respond to the world around them, and also the ways in which that can change." His gleeful subjects, who are all aged between two months and two years, are helping him to hunt for information that could eventually be used to determine how different developmental groups – for instance, people with autism or Down syndrome – respond to stimuli at different stages, which might ultimately lead to interventions. It is all smiles in Babylab HQ, at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London. The lab was responsible earlier this year for a breakthrough study in autism which demonstrated a difference in brainwave patterns in infancy between children who later went on to develop the condition and those who did not. © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Emotions; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17428 - Posted: 10.27.2012

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR Remaining physically active as you age, a new study shows, may help protect parts of your brain from shrinking, a process that has been linked to declines in thinking and memory skills. Physical exercise not only protected against such age-related brain changes, but also had more of an effect than mentally and socially stimulating activities. In the new report, published in the journal Neurology, a team at the University of Edinburgh followed more than 600 people, starting at age 70. The subjects provided details on their daily physical, mental and social activities. Three years later, using imaging scans, the scientists found that the subjects who engaged in the most physical exercise, including walking several times a week, had less shrinkage and damage in the brain’s white matter, which is considered the “wiring” of the brain’s communication system. The relationship remained even after the researchers controlled for things like age, health status, social class and I.Q. As far as mental exercise, “we can only say we found no benefit in our sample,” said Dr. Alan J. Gow, an author of the study and a senior research fellow at Edinburgh. He added: “There might be associations earlier in the life course. Such activities also have important associations with well-being and quality of life, so we would certainly agree it is important for older adults to continue to pursue them.” Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 17427 - Posted: 10.27.2012

Smoking cigarettes throughout adulthood reduces life expectancy by about 11 years in women but quitting avoids much of the extra risk, a new large study shows. The Million Women Study in the UK recruited 1.3 million British women who were born in the early 1940s to look at the hazards of smoking and the benefits of stopping at various ages. Women in North America took up smoking decades later than men. Women in North America took up smoking decades later than men. (Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters) In most of Europe, Canada and the U.S., the popularity of smoking among young women reached its peak in the 1960s, decades later than for men. Among women in the study who smoked cigarettes through their adult lives, the mortality rate was three times that of women who never smoked or who stopped well before middle age, Sir Richard Peto of the University of Oxford and his co-authors said in Saturday's issue of the journal Lancet. "Stopping before 40 years of age, and preferably well before, avoids more than 90 per cent of this excess mortality; stopping before 30 years of age avoids more than 97 per cent of it," the study's authors concluded. "This does not, however, mean that it is safe to smoke until 40 years and then stop, for women who do so have throughout the next few decades a mortality rate 1.2 times that of never-smokers." Study participants were recruited from 1996 to 2001. They filled in questionnaires about the lifestyle, medical and social factors and were resurveyed by mail three and eight years later. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 17426 - Posted: 10.27.2012

By Laura Sanders Anesthesiologists aren’t totally lying when they say they’re going to put you to sleep. Some anesthetics directly tap into sleep-promoting neurons in the brain, a study in mice reveals. The results may help clarify how drugs that have been used around the world for decades actually put someone under. “It’s kind of shocking that after 170 years, we still don’t understand why they work,” says study coauthor Max Kelz of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Most neurons in the brain appear to be calmed by anesthetics, says neuropharmacologist and anesthesiologist Hugh Hemmings Jr. of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. But the new results, published online October 25 in Current Biology, show that two common anesthetics actually stimulate sleep-inducing neurons. “It’s unusual for neurons to be excited by anesthetics,” Hemmings says. In the study, Kelz, Jason Moore, also of the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues studied the effects of the anesthetics isoflurane and halothane. Mice given the drugs soon became sleepy, as expected. Along with this drowsiness came a jump in nerve cell activity in a part of the brain’s hypothalamus called the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus, or VLPO. Not all neurons in the VLPO are the same. Some are involved in kicking off sleep, while neighboring neurons don’t seem to play a role. The anesthetics affected only the VLPO neurons that promote sleep, Moore and his colleagues found. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 17425 - Posted: 10.27.2012

By Daisy Yuhas We're all familiar with the feeling—waking up from a restless night only to realize that this will be a very long, sleepy day. Recent research reveals that honeybees are also sensitive to sleep deprivation, and although a cup of coffee may give you a morning buzz, the bees aren't so lucky. Neurobiologists at the Free University of Berlin have found that sleepy bees fail to remember lessons learned the day before, a finding that could help scientists discover the neural processes involved in sleep and memory formation. They present their research October 25 in the Journal of Experimental Biology. "We started with the idea that we could look for a neural substrate of learning and memory in bees, since they have a wonderful memory, can be easily trained, and we know their brain well at the neuronal level," says study co-author Randolf Menzel. After characterizing how honeybees find their way home when released in a new location, the scientists captured and then released bees in unfamiliar territory some 600 meters from their hive. In addition to tracking how long the bees needed to return home, the researchers monitored bee sleep. Bees take brief naps throughout the day in addition to longer periods of nocturnal sleep. (Snoozing bees are easy to spot because their antennae droop.) The scientists made their observations both by watching bees in person and by tracking their activity via radio-frequency devices that they glued onto some of the insects. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17424 - Posted: 10.27.2012

By Michael Balter “What would you do with a brain if you had one?” Dorothy’s question to the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz elicited one of the movie’s most delightful songs, in which her straw-filled friend assured her that, among other things, he could “think of things I’d never thunk before.” But the Scarecrow seemed to do quite well without one, thus avoiding the high energy costs of fueling and cooling a human brain—which, with an average volume of about 1,400 cubic centimeters, is humongous relative to our body size. How did our brains get so big? Researchers have put forward a number of possible explanations over the years, but the one with the most staying power is an idea known as the social brain hypothesis. Its chief proponent, psychologist Robin Dunbar of Oxford University, has argued for the past two decades that the evolution of the human brain was driven by our increasingly complex social relationships. We required greater neural processing power so that we could keep track of who was doing what to whom. Our expanded brains could have been practical for other things, of course, such as innovations in tool use and food gathering. Most researchers, including Dunbar, agree that these hypotheses are not mutually exclusive. Whatever the reasons for the very large human noggin, there is a lot of explaining to do, because big brains have a lot going against them. The oversized Homo sapiens brain let us take over the planet, build cities, send space probes to Mars, and do all the other marvelous things that we humans are so proud of. But none of these things makes us much better at reproducing, and in terms of evolution, that’s really all that matters. © 2012 The Slate Group, LLC.

Keyword: Evolution; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17423 - Posted: 10.26.2012

by Sara Reardon Sleeping helps us reset our brains and calm our emotions. Perhaps it can do more, though: if sleepers are exposed to odours they associate with bad memories, it appears they can lose the fear those memories bring. Previous studies have shown that sleep helps eliminate fear in general. But whether it is possible to focus this effect through the careful use of odours has not been tested in humans. Katherina Hauner and Jay Gottfried of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, exposed subjects to four pictures of faces and a series of inoffensive smells such as mint. When one of the faces appeared, the volunteers got a painful electric shock. Afterwards, the researchers measured the amount of electricity conducted by the subjects' skin – a measure that goes up when afraid, because the sweat produced is a good conductor. The researchers found that conductance spiked whenever the volunteers saw the face associated with the shock. They then let half the subjects sleep, and exposed this group to variable amounts of the odour that had been presented along with the "painful" face. The next day, these volunteers were much less afraid of the face – and those with the least fear were those that had received the highest exposure to the odour while asleep. Brain scans also showed that brain areas associated with fear and with memory were less active after this exposure. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17422 - Posted: 10.25.2012