Lizzie Buchen A popular political advertisement from early this summer begins with US President Barack Obama addressing a crowd of moon-eyed supporters. Suddenly, the screen goes dark to a crescendo of minor chords. Phrases such as “Fear and Loathing”, “Nauseating” and “Divide and Conquer” flash onto the screen, along with video clips of commentators complaining that Obama has used scare tactics to manipulate voters. In the final scene, the iconic poster from Obama's 2008 election campaign appears, the word HOPE transforming into FEAR as it bursts into flames. The advertisement, produced by the conservative organization American Crossroads in Washington DC, is typical of those that have come to dominate the US airwaves and YouTube in preparation for next month's presidential election. Emerging from both the right and the left, these commercials increasingly resemble horror films as they seek to sway voters by triggering basic emotions such as fear, anger and disgust. That strategy fits with emerging scientific evidence about how people acquire their political beliefs. In the past, political scientists agreed that social forces — most importantly, parents and the childhood environment — strongly influenced whether people became conservative or liberal, and whether they voted or engaged in politics at all. “We now know that it is probably not the whole story,” says John Jost, a psychologist at New York University. An increasing number of studies suggest that biology can exert a significant influence on political beliefs and behaviours. Biological factors including genes, hormone levels and neurotransmitter systems may partly shape people's attitudes on political issues such as welfare, immigration, same-sex marriage and war. And shrewd politicians might be able to take advantage of those biological levers through clever advertisements aimed at voters' primal emotions. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Emotions; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 17421 - Posted: 10.25.2012

by Helen Thomson Paralysis may no longer mean life in a wheelchair. A man who is paralysed from the trunk down has recovered the ability to stand and move his legs unaided thanks to training with an electrical implant. Andrew Meas of Louisville, Kentucky, says it has changed his life (see "I suddenly noticed I can move my pinkie", below). The stimulus provided by the implant is thought to have either strengthened persistent "silent" connections across his damaged spinal cord or even created new ones, allowing him to move even when the implant is switched off. The results are potentially revolutionary, as they indicate that the spinal cord is able to recover its function years after becoming damaged. Previous studies in animals with lower limb paralysis have shown that continuous electrical stimulation of the spinal cord below the area of damage allows an animal to stand and perform locomotion-like movements. That's because the stimulation allows information about proprioception – the perception of body position and muscle effort – to be received from the lower limbs by the spinal cord. The spinal cord, in turn, allows lower limb muscles to react and support the body without any information being received from the brain (Journal of Neuroscience, doi.org/czq67d). Last year, Susan Harkema and Claudia Angeli at the Frazier Rehab Institute and University of Louisville in Kentucky and colleagues tested what had been learned on animals in a man who was paralysed after being hit by a car in 2006. He was diagnosed with a "motor complete" spinal lesion in his neck, which means that no motor activity can be recorded below the lesion. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 17420 - Posted: 10.25.2012

By Katherine Harmon Getting seven to eight solid hours of sleep each night might seem an almost impossible luxury to many people. But not getting enough sleep is known to impair mental function and increase the risk for heart disease, among other ill effects. Accumulating evidence also suggests that even short-term, partial sleep deprivation could pave the way for weight gain and other negative metabolic consequences. More than 28 percent of adults in the U.S. report that they get less than six hours of sleep a night, with this cumulative deprivation becoming more common in the past three decades. And now that more than 35 percent of U.S. adults are currently obese, researchers have been searching for potential links between the two conditions, in hopes of reducing the increasing health and economic burden of obesity. Establishing lack of sleep as a risk factor for weight gain could have important clinical and public health effects, possibly allowing people to make simple lifestyle changes to improve their metabolic health. A new report, published online October 24 in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, reviews 18 carefully controlled laboratory studies that tested human subjects' physiological and behavioral responses to sleep deprivation as they relate to metabolic health. Reena Mehra, an associate professor of medicine who studies sleep and health at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and who was not involved in the new analysis, notes that the new paper is "a well done review of the experimental data." © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Obesity; Sleep
Link ID: 17419 - Posted: 10.25.2012

By Rachel Ehrenberg Chimps, gibbons and other primates are not just humans’ evolutionary cousins; a new analysis suggests they are also our blood brothers. The A, B and O blood types in people evolved at least 20 million years ago in a common ancestor of humans and other primates, new research suggests. The analysis deepens a mystery surrounding the evolutionary history of the ABO blood system, and should prompt further research into why the different blood groups have persisted over time, Laure Ségurel of the University of Chicago and colleagues report online October 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Their evidence is rather convincing that this is a shared, very old capability that has remained throughout the divergence of the species,” says doctor and transfusion specialist Martin Olsson of Lund University in Sweden. Different forms of a single blood type gene determine what types of molecules sit on your red blood cells: type A molecules, type B molecules, A and B together, or no intact surface molecules in the case of type O (O was originally called type C, then was changed to O for the German “ohne,” meaning “without”). The A, B and O versions of the gene differ only slightly, and scientists have debated two scenarios to explain their evolution. One posits that the A version of the gene existed long ago, and the B and/or O versions later cropped up independently in several species (including humans, gorillas, baboons and chimps). Alternatively, all of those species may have inherited the A and B types from a single ancestor. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 17418 - Posted: 10.25.2012

By Ferris Jabr Scientists have mapped, charted, modeled and visualized the human brain in many different ways. They have marked the boundaries of the organ’s four major lobes: the frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes. They have divvied up the cortex into more than 50 Broadmann areas—small regions characterized by particular cell types and specific cognitive functions, such as processing speech and recognizing faces. Researchers have tagged individual neurons with fluorescent proteins, transforming gray tissue into stunning brainbows, and followed water molecules as they move through the nervous system to trace ribbons of neural tissue linking one brain region to another. More recently, some scientists have championed the importance of connectomes—detailed wiring diagrams of all the connections between neurons in a given nervous system or brain. Thoroughly understanding the brain, proponents of connectomics argue, requires precise maps of its neural circuits. The standard way of making a connectome is serial electron microscopy—chopping up an animal’s brain into thin sheets, taking photos of all the resident neurons through an electron microscope and using those photos to painstakingly reconstruct the connections between neurons. In the 1970s biologist Sydney Brenner and his colleagues began using this technique to map the 302 neurons and 7,000 neural connections, or synapses, in the nervous system of a tiny worm known as Caenorhabditis elegans. It took them more than 12 years to finish the map. So far, C. elegans is the only animal with such a thorough connectome. Since mammalian brains contain millions or billions of neurons and billions or trillions of synapses, depending on the species, researchers are searching for faster and cheaper ways to create connectomes. At Harvard University, for example, Jeff Lichtman and his colleagues have constructed an Automatic Tape-Collecting Lathe Ultramicrotome (ATLUM)—a machine that speeds up the business of slicing up brain tissue into thin sheets with conveyor-belt efficiency. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 17417 - Posted: 10.24.2012

Why some people respond to treatments that have no active ingredients in them may be down to their genes, a study in the journal PLoS ONE suggests. The so-called "placebo effect" was examined in 104 patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) in the US. Those with a particular version of the COMT gene saw an improvement in their health after placebo acupuncture. The scientists warn that while they hope their findings will be seen in other conditions, more work is needed. Edzard Ernst, a professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter, said: "This is a fascinating but very preliminary result. "It could solve the age-old question of why some individuals respond to placebo, while others do not. "And if so, it could impact importantly on clinical practice. "But we should be cautious - the study was small, we need independent replications, and we need to know whether the phenomenon applies just to IBS or to all diseases." Gene variants The placebo effect is when a patient experiences an improvement in their condition while undergoing an inert treatment such as taking a sugar pill or, in this case, placebo acupuncture, where the patient believes they are receiving acupuncture but a sham device prevents the needles going into their body. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 17416 - Posted: 10.24.2012

by Joel Winston Never mind the bitter end – it is the bitter beginning of an infection that triggers an immune response. We know that taste receptors on the tongue can detect bitter foods, but it turns out that there are also identical taste receptors in the upper airway. Noam Cohen at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and his team think they know why. They grew cell cultures from sinus tissue samples collected from surgical patients, and found that bitter taste receptors in the tissue picked up the presence of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium that can cause pneumonia. The sinus tissue responded by producing nitric oxide to kill the invading microbes. "Certain people have strong innate defences against these bacteria, which is based on their ability to detect bitterness," says Cohen. "Others who don't really 'taste' these bitter compounds have a weakened defence." The research could lead to nasal sprays designed to activate the taste receptors and boost people's natural defences against sinus infections. "This is probably the most exciting clinical link found for bitter receptors," says Liquan Huang of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the study. "However, further work is needed to see if this can be translated into treatments." Journal reference: Journal of Clinical Investigation, doi.org/jj4 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 17415 - Posted: 10.24.2012

by Elizabeth Norton The ability to recognize faces is so important in humans that the brain appears to have an area solely devoted to the task: the fusiform gyrus. Brain imaging studies consistently find that this region of the temporal lobe becomes active when people look at faces. Skeptics have countered, however, that these studies show only a correlation, but not proof, that activity in this area is essential for face recognition. Now, thanks to the willingness of an intrepid patient, a new study provides the first cause-and-effect evidence that neurons in this area help humans recognize faces—and only faces, not other body parts or objects. An unusual collaboration between researchers and an epilepsy patient led to the discovery. Ron Blackwell, an engineer in Santa Clara, California, came to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, in 2011 seeking better treatment for his epilepsy. He had suffered seizures since he was a teenager, and at age 47, his medication was becoming less effective. Stanford neurologist Josef Parvizi suggested some tests to locate the source of the seizures—and also suggested that it might be possible to eliminate the seizures by surgically destroying a tiny area of brain tissue where they occurred. Parvizi used electrodes placed on Blackwell's scalp to trace the seizures to the temporal lobe, about an inch above Blackwell's right ear. Then, surgeons placed more electrodes on the surface of Blackwell's brain, near the suspect point of origin in the temporal lobe. Parvizi stimulated each electrode in turn with a mild current, trying to trigger Blackwell's seizure symptoms under safe conditions. "If we get those symptoms, we know that we are tickling the seizure node," he explains. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 17414 - Posted: 10.24.2012

by Shaoni Bhattacharya Talk about having your cake and eating it. Fasting might not be the only route to a longer life – a hormone seems to work just as well, for mice at least. We know that some animals can extend their lifespan by consuming fewer calories. Engineered mice can get the same effect by simply pumping out high levels of a hormone normally produced during a fast, according to Steven Kliewer and David Mangelsdorf at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Their team found that mice engineered to make higher levels of the hormone, FGF21, increased their lifespan on average by over a third. "What we are seeing is the benefit of caloric restriction without having to diet," he says. Humans have the hormone too, and Kliewer believes FGF21 has the potential to extend the human "health-span" – the time we live healthy lives. The researchers believe FGF21 may act to prolong life by affecting pathways such as the insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) pathway implicated in ageing. "It blocks growth hormones promoting pathways which are associated with diseases, including cancers and metabolic diseases, and as a consequence these animals live longer," says Kliewer. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 17413 - Posted: 10.24.2012

By Maggie Fox and Linda Carroll Does this sound like you? Two cups of coffee in the morning, a coffee break at 11 or so, another cup in the afternoon and a cup after dinner? That might be enough to interfere with sleep or even give some people the jitters, but it’s nowhere near an overdose. It may also be nothing compared to what some teenagers are consuming to deal with schoolwork or job pressures. James Stone, a 19-year-old from Wallingford, Conn., died in 2006 after he took nearly two dozen NoDoz tablets. Each tablet has about 200 mg of caffeine – about twice that found in a cup of coffee. But while it would be near impossible to down 48 cups of coffee in a few hours, it’s relatively easy to pop a handful of small tablets. Now the question is whether guzzling energy drinks might be as dangerous as popping No-Doz. The Food and Drug Administration is investigating reports that five people died and one survived a heart attack after consuming energy drinks. It is not yet clear whether the drinks actually caused – or even contributed to - those adverse events, said FDA spokeswoman Shelly Burgess. “So far there’s been no causal link,” Burgess said. “There could have been other products involved. We don’t know that yet and that’s why we’re taking this seriously and looking into it.” © 2012 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 17412 - Posted: 10.24.2012

By Scicurious Picture this: the prince has won his way past the dragon, past the huge walls of briars. He paces slowly through the sleeping castle, toward the tower where the princess lies, in a deep, deep sleep. Finally he sees her, leans over her lovely form… …and gently inserts a probe into her brain, letting a yellow light activate her locus coeruleus. Within moments, the princess awakes. Now THAT’S a kiss. I’ll admit, this post isn’t about sleeping beauty. Instead, it’s about sleep-wake transitions, and how they might work. And the answer involves an up and coming molecule, hypocretin (aka orexin), and an area of the brain called the locus coeruleus (LC). And it involves mice, who are little sleeping beauties in their own way. We’ll start with hypocretin (or orexin*). Hypocretin is a small peptide released from the hypothalamus of the brain. It’s a very recently discovered molecule (published in 1998), and has been enjoying a recent explosion in popularity, due to its interesting involvement in drug addiction and feeding behavior, and its very clear role in sleep. You see, hypocretin controls sleep/wake cycles by mediating what we call “arousal” (which is not that, though it’s that, too). Neurons that produce hypocretin are silent while you are asleep, but burst of firing and the release of hypocretin from these neurons comes immediately before wakefulness. And hypocretin is such a strong mediator of sleep/wake transitions that loss of hypocretin produces some very striking narcolepsy. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 17411 - Posted: 10.23.2012

By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online Exercising in your 70s may stop your brain from shrinking and showing the signs of ageing linked to dementia, say experts from Edinburgh University. Brain scans of 638 people past the age of retirement showed those who were most physically active had less brain shrinkage over a three-year period. Exercise did not have to be strenuous - going for a walk several times a week sufficed, the journal Neurology says. But giving the mind a workout by doing a tricky crossword had little impact. The study found no real brain-size benefit from mentally challenging activities, such as reading a book, or other pastimes such as socialising with friends and family. When the researchers examined the brain's white matter - the wiring that transmits messages round the brain - they found that the people over the age of 70 who were more physically active had fewer damaged areas than those who did little exercise. And they had more grey matter - the parts of the brain where the messages originate. Experts already know that our brains tend to shrink as we age and that this shrinkage is linked to poorer memory and thinking. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 17410 - Posted: 10.23.2012

By Maria Konnikova I don’t remember if I had any problems paying attention to Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park when I first read it. I doubt it, though. I devoured all of my Austen in one big gulp, book after book, line after line, sometime around the eighth grade. My mom had given a huge, bright blue hardcover, with text as small as the book was weighty, that contained the Jane Austen oeuvre from start to finish. And from start to finish I went. I’ve since revisited most of the novels—there’s only so much you retain, absorb, and process on a thirteen-year-old’s reading binge—but Mansfield Park hasn’t fared quite as well as some of the others. I’m not sure why. I’ve just never gone back. Until a few weeks ago, that is, when I saw that this somewhat neglected (and often frowned upon) novel had been made the center of an intriguing new study of reading and attention. “This is your brain on Jane Austen,” rang the headline. Oh, no, not another one, went my head. It seems like every day, we get another “your brain on…” announcement, and at this point, an allergic reaction seems in order. This one, however, proved to be different. It’s not about your brain on Jane Austen. Not really. It’s about a far more interesting question: can our brains pay close attention in different ways? The neural correlates of attention are a hot research topic—and with good reason. After all, with the explosion of new media streams, new ways of digesting material, new ways of interacting with the world, it would make sense for us to be curious about how it all affects us at the most basic level of the brain. Usually, though, the research deals with the differences between paying attention, like really paying attention, and not paying attention all that much, be it because of increased cognitive load or other forms of multitasking or divided attention. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 17409 - Posted: 10.23.2012

by Ann Gibbons Eating a raw food diet is a recipe for disaster if you're trying to boost your species' brainpower. That's because humans would have to spend more than 9 hours a day eating to get enough energy from unprocessed raw food alone to support our large brains, according to a new study that calculates the energetic costs of growing a bigger brain or body in primates. But our ancestors managed to get enough energy to grow brains that have three times as many neurons as those in apes such as gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. How did they do it? They got cooking, according to a study published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "If you eat only raw food, there are not enough hours in the day to get enough calories to build such a large brain," says Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a neuroscientist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil who is co-author of the report. "We can afford more neurons, thanks to cooking." Humans have more brain neurons than any other primate—about 86 billion, on average, compared with about 33 billion neurons in gorillas and 28 billion in chimpanzees. While these extra neurons endow us with many benefits, they come at a price—our brains consume 20% of our body's energy when resting, compared with 9% in other primates. So a long-standing riddle has been where did our ancestors get that extra energy to expand their minds as they evolved from animals with brains and bodies the size of chimpanzees? © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Evolution
Link ID: 17408 - Posted: 10.23.2012

Ewen Callaway “Who told me to get out?” asked a diver, surfacing from a tank in which a whale named NOC lived. The beluga’s caretakers had heard what sounded like garbled phrases emanating from the enclosure before, and it suddenly dawned on them that the whale might be imitating the voices of his human handlers. The outbursts — described today in Current Biology1 and originally at a 1985 conference — began in 1984 and lasted for about four years, until NOC hit sexual maturity, says Sam Ridgway, a marine biologist at National Marine Mammal Foundation in San Diego, California. He believes that NOC learned to imitate humans by listening to them speak underwater and on the surface. A few animals, including various marine mammals, songbirds and humans, routinely learn and imitate the songs and sounds of others. And Ridgway’s wasn’t the first observation of vocal mimicry in whales. In the 1940s, scientists heard wild belugas (Delphinapterus leucas) making calls that sounded like “children shouting in the distance”2. Decades later, keepers at the Vancouver Aquarium in Canada described a beluga that seemed to utter his name, Lagosi. Ridgway’s team recorded NOC, who is named after the tiny midges colloquially known as no-see-ums found near where he was legally caught by Inuit hunters in Manitoba, Canada, in the late 1970s. His human-like calls are several octaves lower than normal whale calls, a similar pitch to human speech. After training NOC to 'speak' on command, Ridgway’s team determined that he makes the sounds by increasing the pressure of the air that courses through his naval cavities. They think that he then modified the sounds by manipulating the shape of his phonic lips, small vibrating structures that sit above each nasal cavity. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 17407 - Posted: 10.23.2012

By SINDYA N. BHANOO Most people have a moment or two they would rather not remember. The brain has two opposite ways of dealing with those memories, researchers report in a new study. The first is to simply block out the memory. The second is to recall a substitute memory. Take the case of a fight with a loved one, said Roland Benoit, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, England. “You don’t want to think about it because you want to just go on with life,” Dr. Benoit said. “You can somehow push it out, or you could try to think of something else, like maybe that nice vacation to France you had together.” Dr. Benoit and his colleagues asked study participants to associate the words “beach” and “Africa.” Then one group was told to avoid thinking about the associated words altogether. Another group was told to start thinking about the word “snorkel” in association with “beach,” rather than “Africa.” The participants were put under a functional M.R.I. scanner, and the researchers found that in the case of memory substitution, the left prefrontal cortex works in conjunction with the hippocampus, an area of the brain connecting to conscious remembering. But when an unwanted memory is simply suppressed or blocked out, the prefrontal cortex actually inhibits the functioning of the hippocampus. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17406 - Posted: 10.23.2012

by Sara Reardon We talk to ourselves all day, whether it's convincing ourselves to get out of bed, or avoid that second piece of cake. But this internal voice uses a lot of brainpower. People who have to concentrate on resisting an addiction appear to sacrifice this ability in order to conserve brainpower for other tasks. The average person can juggle about four mental tasks at any time, says Monica Faulkner of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. How much you can multitask is related to working memory. With the assumption that recovering addicts must think constantly about their addiction, Faulkner and her colleagues wondered whether this comes at the cost of using up one of those four "slots", possibly impairing their overall working memory. Faulkner and Cherie Marvel, also of Johns Hopkins, recruited six people who had never used drugs and six recovering from a heroin addiction who were taking methadone to help. They showed the volunteers an image, either of a word, a Chinese character, or a pattern. They then waited six seconds, and showed the volunteers a second image. During those six seconds, the researchers recorded the volunteers' brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The volunteers' task was to press a button if the second image matched the first. The people recovering from addiction took a few hundred milliseconds longer than the controls to determine whether they had seen the images previously. But the more interesting result came from the pattern of activity in their brains throughout the 6 second window. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Attention
Link ID: 17405 - Posted: 10.23.2012

By Christina Agapakis Smell is notoriously subjective and hard to define. Odors can be perceived differently by different people depending on genetics, culture, past experience, the environment, and whether they’ve had a really bad sinus infection or not. Even worse, the same person can perceive the same smell differently at different times, depending on how the smell is described and other sensory fluctuations. Leslie Vosshall’s Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior at Rockefeller University studies how complex behaviors are influenced by the chemical senses in organisms ranging from mosquitoes to humans. In order to better understand how human odor perception varies, both within individuals at different times and between different people, the lab asked nearly 400 New Yorkers to describe and rate the intensity and pleasantness of 66 different smells, at the same time collecting demographic data (significantly more diverse than the typical study of undergraduate psychology students) as well as data about their eating habits and perfume usage, finding many instances of variability in how people perceive smells. The lab recently published their extensive survey titled “An olfactory demography of a diverse metropolitan population” in the open-access journal BMC Neuroscience. They’ve also made their data freely available (you can download the huge excel file here) for further analysis or data-mining. This study has been ongoing for several years, and two years ago inspired Nicola Twilley’s wonderful Scratch-and-Sniff Map of New York’s olfactory psychogeography. Rather than mapping what people smell, the odors that they would encounter in different neighborhoods, she mapped how they smell, mapping odor preferences by neighborhood using homemade scratch-and-sniff stickers, sampling some of the variation in our smell universe. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 17404 - Posted: 10.22.2012

By ERIC NAGOURNEY There are any number of reasons you might be up at 2 in the morning instead of snuggled asleep in bed. Maybe you are finishing some work — an article, say, that you owe the editor of that new Booming blog. Maybe you are one of those people who decided to have a baby at an age when parents would once have been making their last tuition payments. Or maybe the condo you bought over that all-night bowling alley was so cheap for a reason. But there could be another explanation. Maybe you are not asleep because you can’t sleep. As baby boomers age, many may find that a basic act they once took for granted (or intentionally neglected) has become a lot more complicated. They are finding it harder to get to sleep or stay asleep, and they may feel the consequences during the day. “The older we get, the more likely we are to develop sleep problems,” said Dr. William C. Kohler, a Florida sleep specialist and a past official of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. This is not to say that trouble sleeping is inevitable. “Healthy aging is not necessarily associated with poor sleep,” said Dr. Nathaniel F. Watson, a director of the University of Washington Medicine Sleep Center. “Some people have this sense that ‘Oh, I’m just going to sleep badly when I get older, because that’s what happens to everybody.'” That said (and you knew this was coming), even in the absence of illness, as people age, the “sleep architecture,” as Dr. Watson put it, tends to change. They spend less time in deep non-REM sleep. And all the while, their old circadian rhythm is shifting ever earlier for reasons no one really understands. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17403 - Posted: 10.22.2012

By Caroline Parkinson Health editor, BBC News website The brains of teenage girls with behavioural disorders are different to those of their peers, UK researchers have found. The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry study of 40 girls revealed differences in the structure of areas linked to empathy and emotions. Previous work has found similar results in boys. Experts suggest it may be possible to use scans to spot problems early, then offer social or psychological help. An estimated five in every 100 teenagers in the UK are classed as having a conduct disorder. It is a psychiatric condition which leads people to behave in aggressive and anti-social ways, and which can increase the risk of mental and physical health problems in adulthood. Rates have risen significantly among adolescent girls in recent years, while levels in males have remained about the same. In this study, funded by the Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council, UK and Italian researchers conducted brain scans of 22 teenage girls who had conduct disorder and compared them with scans of 20 who did not. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Aggression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17402 - Posted: 10.22.2012