by Dani Cooper, ABC Science Online The mystery of how the brain develops the sense of ownership that recognizes our body belongs to us is a step closer to being solved. Australian researchers have shown that along with the sense of touch and vision, signalling receptors in the muscles and joints also play a critical role. The finding, published recently in the Journal of Physiology, will help in designing treatments for disorders of body ownership that can occur with conditions such as stroke and epilepsy. Lead author Lee Walsh, of Neuroscience Research Australia, explained we instinctively know our body parts "belong" to us. However, how the brain develops that map of what belongs to it is still in part unknown. "How do I know my hand is mine and not yours and that the telephone is not a part of my body," he said. Previous research shows people can be deluded into claiming ownership of an artificial hand. This is done by simultaneously stroking the subject's hidden hand and a visible artificial rubber hand. "Once the illusion of ownership of the hand is established, subjects have physiological responses to threats made against the rubber hand," Walsh and his colleagues wrote in the paper. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Vision
Link ID: 15469 - Posted: 06.21.2011

Nicola Nosengo If you are a small animal, it is useful to know whether there is anything around that might want to eat you. Stephen Liberles from Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues have analysed urine samples from a variety of zoo inhabitants, including lions and bears, and discovered how rodents can use smell to do just that. In a research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the team identifies a chemical found in high concentrations in the urine of carnivores that makes mice and rats run for cover1. Chemicals have already been identified that allow prey to recognize a known predator. But this is the first example of a generic clue that allows an animal to detect any potential predator, irrespective of whether the two species have ever come into contact. The researchers started by analysing an engimatic group of olfactory receptors discovered in 2001 called trace amine-associated receptors (TAARs)2. They are found in most vertebrates, in varying numbers. Mice, for example, have 15, rats 17 and humans have just 6. Very little is known about what chemicals bind to them. Liberles and his colleagues found that one member of the receptor family, TAAR4, is strongly activated by bobcat urine, which is sold online and used by gardeners to keep rodents and rabbits away. They managed to extract the molecule responsible for activating the receptor, called 2-phenylethylamine. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Emotions
Link ID: 15468 - Posted: 06.21.2011

by Tim Wogan Atherosclerosis, the buildup of fatty deposits on the walls of major arteries, can kill without warning. The disease causes few symptoms in its early stages, so sufferers are often hit with a heart attack or stroke before they realize anything is wrong. Now researchers have devised a way to spot the deposits before they cause serious harm by using a combination of infrared light and ultrasound. To detect atherosclerosis early, doctors need to spot fat inside artery walls. They can glean some information by bombarding soft tissue (anything that's not bone) with infrared radiation from a laser, which passes through the tissue until it hits a specific chemical bond, causing it to vibrate like a spring. Different chemical bonds absorb infrared radiation of different wavelengths, so the radiation absorbed by a tissue sample can give doctors some clue to what's inside it. But to diagnose atherosclerosis, doctors not only need to know that tissue contains fat but also need to see that it's on the inside of an artery wall. In the new study, researchers took advantage of the fact that infrared-induced vibration of chemical bonds is swiftly damped by surrounding tissue; the energy is converted to heat. This leads to rapid expansion of the tissue, which sends a pressure wave traveling outward in all directions to the surface of the sample, where it is emitted as ultrasound. By using a series of detectors to pick up the ultrasound, the team realized that it could work out where the expansion took place—a technique called photoacoustic imaging. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Stroke; Alzheimers
Link ID: 15467 - Posted: 06.21.2011

By KAY E. HOLEKAMP After nine months trapped behind my desk in Michigan, I’m finally back in the African bush, the one place I love above all others on earth. Only here are the skies so vast you can see both rainbows and bright sunshine while sitting under a drenching downpour from a massive black thunderhead. Only here can you be sure to see some weird and interesting form of animal life no matter where you look. Ever heard of a duiker? A solifugid? A pangolin? A springhare? A cameroptera? They all live here, along with hundreds of other animal species. Elephants forage in the riverbed that runs beside our camp, hippos chuckle in the pool below my tent, the shrill calls of white-browed robin-chats tell me when I have overslept, baboons steal our sugar jar whenever one of us is dumb enough to leave it unattended, and giraffes browse silently through camp after dark like great ships drifting in the night. But the best thing about the African bush is that it is where you can find spotted hyenas. As I have done every spring since I joined the faculty in the department of zoology at Michigan State University, I’ve once again traded sitting through endless committee meetings and grading overwhelming stacks of student papers for life in a tented camp where my most pressing concern every day is whether or not I will encounter a grumpy hippo on the footpath connecting my sleeping tent to our lab tent and dining area. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15466 - Posted: 06.21.2011

By NICHOLAS WADE In an eighth-floor laboratory overlooking the East River, Cornelia I. Bargmann watches two colleagues manipulate a microscopic roundworm. They have trapped it in a tiny groove on a clear plastic chip, with just its nose sticking into a channel. Pheromones — signaling chemicals produced by other worms — are being pumped through the channel, and the researchers have genetically engineered two neurons in the worm’s head to glow bright green if a neuron responds. These ingenious techniques for exploring a tiny animal’s behavior are the fruit of many years’ work by Dr. Bargmann’s and other labs. Despite the roundworm’s lowliness on the scale of intellectual achievement, the study of its nervous system offers one of the most promising approaches for understanding the human brain, since it uses much the same working parts but is around a million times less complex. Caenorhabditis elegans, as the roundworm is properly known, is a tiny, transparent animal just a millimeter long. In nature, it feeds on the bacteria that thrive in rotting plants and animals. It is a favorite laboratory organism for several reasons, including the comparative simplicity of its brain, which has just 302 neurons and 8,000 synapses, or neuron-to-neuron connections. These connections are pretty much the same from one individual to another, meaning that in all worms the brain is wired up in essentially the same way. Such a system should be considerably easier to understand than the human brain, a structure with billions of neurons, 100,000 miles of biological wiring and 100 trillion synapses. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15465 - Posted: 06.21.2011

By PATRICIA COHEN It was less than 20 years ago that the National Institutes of Health abruptly withdrew funds for a conference on genetics and crime after outraged complaints that the idea smacked of eugenics. The president of the Association of Black Psychologists at the time declared that such research was in itself “a blatant form of stereotyping and racism.” The tainted history of using biology to explain criminal behavior has pushed criminologists to reject or ignore genetics and concentrate on social causes: miserable poverty, corrosive addictions, guns. Now that the human genome has been sequenced, and scientists are studying the genetics of areas as varied as alcoholism and party affiliation, criminologists are cautiously returning to the subject. A small cadre of experts is exploring how genes might heighten the risk of committing a crime and whether such a trait can be inherited. The turnabout will be evident on Monday at the annual National Institute of Justice conference in Arlington, Va. On the opening day criminologists from around the country can attend a panel on creating databases for information about DNA and “new genetic markers” that forensic scientists are discovering. “Throughout the past 30 or 40 years most criminologists couldn’t say the word ‘genetics’ without spitting,” Terrie E. Moffitt, a behavioral scientist at Duke University, said. “Today the most compelling modern theories of crime and violence weave social and biological themes together.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15464 - Posted: 06.21.2011

By JIMMY CARTER IN an extraordinary new initiative announced earlier this month, the Global Commission on Drug Policy has made some courageous and profoundly important recommendations in a report on how to bring more effective control over the illicit drug trade. The commission includes the former presidents or prime ministers of five countries, a former secretary general of the United Nations, human rights leaders, and business and government leaders, including Richard Branson, George P. Shultz and Paul A. Volcker. The report describes the total failure of the present global antidrug effort, and in particular America’s “war on drugs,” which was declared 40 years ago today. It notes that the global consumption of opiates has increased 34.5 percent, cocaine 27 percent and cannabis 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008. Its primary recommendations are to substitute treatment for imprisonment for people who use drugs but do no harm to others, and to concentrate more coordinated international effort on combating violent criminal organizations rather than nonviolent, low-level offenders. These recommendations are compatible with United States drug policy from three decades ago. In a message to Congress in 1977, I said the country should decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, with a full program of treatment for addicts. I also cautioned against filling our prisons with young people who were no threat to society, and summarized by saying: “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15463 - Posted: 06.20.2011

By Rachael Rettner Surgery for obesity began with a simple premise: if you make the stomach smaller, people will eat less, so they will lose weight. But in recent years the results of obesity surgery have been so outstanding, researchers went back to the drawing boards to figure out what was going on. Their findings are beginning to present a far more complicated picture of weight — and of how much diet and exercise can really do to change it. Turns out, a slew of hormones from the gut, and their communication with the brain, play a role in the way the body maintains and loses weight. Chasing down the answer to exactly how obesity surgeryworks is providing new insights into human weight loss and appetite regulation, researchers say. "As a result of weight loss surgery, we finally are beginning to understand the physiology of weight loss better than we've ever understood it before," said Dr. Sunil Bhoyrul, a weight-loss surgeon at Olde Del Mar Surgical in La Jolla, Calif. Their investigations may reveal how to replicate the results of the surgery without requiring patients to go under the knife. Patients can lose up to 60 to 80 percent of their excess weight in one to four years after surgery, and many have an easier time keeping it off than they did through dieting, Bhoyrul said. However, up to a third can end up back at their pre-surgical weight seven to 10 years later, he noted. © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 15462 - Posted: 06.20.2011

By Jennifer Welsh WASHINGTON — Suit pressed, mind ready and resume in hand. When preparing for a job interview, most people take every precaution to convey the best impression possible. But aside from body odor, not many people pay attention to the odors that surround them. That onion-laden lunch could give your potential boss-to-be the wrong impression, according to new research presented in May at the Association for Psychological Science annual meeting. "There's a lot of research that's begun now, where people are looking at how the environment affects our well-being," said Jeannette Haviland-Jones, of Rutgers University in New Jersey. "We tend to think of ourselves as separate from the environment, but we're not. We create our environment." Hers and others' research is showing that smell can influence our thoughts and behaviors more expected. Many things in the environment, including verbal and physical cues, can influence how we perceive others. New research presented by Nicole Hovis and Theresa White of Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., shows that certain smells can influence a first impression. They asked 65 volunteer undergraduates (who were mostly female) to sniff a vial holding either a lemon or onion scent, or no scent, while standing near a gender-neutral silhouette. They were asked to form an impression of the personality of the silhouette and later filled out a form rating several personality traits. © 2011 LiveScience.com

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 15461 - Posted: 06.20.2011

By KATHRYN HARRISON Readers who can’t identify Jean-Martin Charcot as the name of the French neurologist whose 19th-century experiments with hypnosis influenced Sigmund Freud’s theory of neurosis may yet recognize the work he conducted at the Saltpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Photographs and illustrations of Charcot’s patients, all women suffering hysteria, remain in currency today, 140 years after they were made, if more as curiosities than as clinically valuable documents. Once seen, these images — of, for example, a woman wearing little more than a tangle of bed sheets, her eyes rolled up into her head in either “ecstasy” or “delirium,” or fixed on the invisible object of her “amorous supplication” — are not easily forgotten, let alone dismissed. Poses classified as “passionate attitudes,” they have the disquieting aspect of pornography masquerading as intellectual inquiry. Charcot, as portrayed in Asti Hust­vedt’s consistently enthralling “Medical Muses,” focused intently — myopically, one could argue — on using hypnosis to induce hysteria and make “his hysterics, with their bizarre fits and spasms, into ideal medical specimens.” But the provocative behavior of those “specimens” transformed Saltpêtrière into something closer to a carnival than a teaching hospital. As much showman as physician, Charcot gave weekly two-hour lectures to a packed amphitheater, including demonstrations designed to captivate an audience accustomed to staged séances and exhibitions of mesmerism or telepathy. One of Charcot’s students described the dramatic potential of exhibiting hypnotized women: “We can cut them, prick them and burn them, and they feel nothing.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 15460 - Posted: 06.20.2011

By John Matson Does junior really have his father's nose? A common bit of parenting folklore holds that babies tend to look more like their fathers than their mothers, a claim with a reasonable evolutionary explanation. Fathers, after all, do not share a mother's certainty that a baby is theirs, and are more likely to invest whatever resources they have in their own offspring. Human evolution, then, could have favored children that resemble their fathers, at least early on, as a way of confirming paternity. The paternal-resemblance hypothesis got some scientific backing in 1995, when a study in Nature by Nicholas Christenfeld and Emily Hill of the University of California, San Diego, showed that people were much better at matching photos of one-year-old children with pictures of their fathers than with photos of their mothers. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Case closed? Hardly. "It's a very sexy result, it's seductive, it's what evolutionary psychology would predict—and I think it's wrong," says psychologist Robert French of the National Center for Scientific Research in France. A subsequent body of research, building over the years in the journal Evolution & Human Behavior, has delivered results in conflict with the 1995 paper, indicating that young children resemble both parents equally. Some studies have even found that newborns tend to resemble their mothers more than their fathers. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15459 - Posted: 06.20.2011

by Wendy Zukerman A hooked herb, root extract and a dash of bark – it may sound like a witches' brew, but these compounds could provide treatments for diseases that have so far foiled western doctors, such as Parkinson's and irritable bowel syndrome. For over 2000 years Chinese doctors have treated "the shakes" – now known as Parkinson's disease – with gou teng, a herb with hook-like branches. Early this year, 115 people with Parkinson's were given a combination of traditional Chinese medical herbs, including gou teng, or a placebo for 13 weeks. At the end of the study, volunteers who had taken the herbs slept better and had more fluent speech than those taking the placebo. Parkinson's symptoms, such as muscle tremors, slowness of movement and rigidity, are caused by the progressive destruction of brain cells that produce dopamine. Previous work has suggested that an abundance of a protein called alpha-synuclein may be to blame. Current treatments aim to boost levels of dopamine, which only partly alleviates symptoms and does not affect the protein clusters. It is thought that clumps of alpha-synuclein accumulate because brain cells cannot remove them through autophagy – a type of programmed cell death. Mice without the genes needed for autophagy quickly develop Parkinson's-like symptoms. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 15458 - Posted: 06.18.2011

Sandrine Ceurstemont, video producer Stare at a psychedelic image for long enough and you'll be able to colour in a greyscale photo with your eyes. You can try it out in the video above. Fix your eyes on the dot in the middle of the picture and watch what happens when the image changes. The animation was originally submitted to psychologist Richard Wiseman's blog and is one of the best examples of the afterimage effect we've come across. It's a well-known optical illusion that occurs when the eyes' photoreceptors are overstimulated from staring at an image. These receptors lose sensitivity but when you look at a neutral image, the surrounding cells that were not being excited send out a strong signal and you perceive complementary colours. Now you can create these illusions with your own images using Photoshop. One tutorial available online was created by graphic designer John Sadowski. Let us know if you manage to create any stunning examples of the illusion. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15457 - Posted: 06.18.2011

By Dave Mosher Kids spend an increasing fraction of their formative years online, and it is a habit they dutifully carry into adulthood. Under the right circumstances, however, a love affair with the Internet may spiral out of control and even become an addiction. Whereas descriptions of online addiction are controversial at best among researchers, a new study cuts through much of the debate and hints that excessive time online can physically rewire a brain. The work, published June 3 in PLoS ONE, suggests self-assessed Internet addiction, primarily through online multiplayer games, rewires structures deep in the brain. What's more, surface-level brain matter appears to shrink in step with the duration of online addiction. "I'd be surprised if playing online games for 10 to 12 hours a day didn't change the brain," says neuroscientist Nora Volkow of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who wasn't involved in the study. "The reason why Internet addiction isn't a widely recognized disorder is a lack of scientific evidence. Studies like this are exactly what is needed to recognize and settle on its diagnostic criteria," she says. Loosely defined, addiction is a disease of the brain that compels someone to obsess over, obtain and abuse something, despite unpleasant health or social effects. And "internet addiction" definitions run the gamut, but most researchers similarly describe it as excessive (even obsessive) Internet use that interferes with the rhythm of daily life. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15456 - Posted: 06.18.2011

Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have discovered that the innate ability to estimate quantities is impaired in children who have a math learning disability. The link between difficulty estimating quantities and math difficulties was seen only in children who had a math learning disability, and not in those who did poorly in math but were not considered to be learning disabled. "The findings suggest that students may struggle with math for very different reasons," said Kathy Mann Koepke, Ph.D., director of the Mathematics and Science Cognition and Learning program at the NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), which funded the study. "Research to identify these reasons may lead to new ways of identifying those at risk, and developing the means to help them." Math learning disability is also referred to as dyscalculia. The study was published in Child Development and was conducted by Michèle Mazzocco, Ph.D., at the Kennedy Krieger Institute and the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and her colleagues, Lisa Feigenson, Ph.D., and Justin Halberda, Ph.D., also at Johns Hopkins. In earlier research, Drs. Feigenson and Halberda have shown that the innate ability to estimate and compare quantities is present in infancy and improves with age.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15455 - Posted: 06.18.2011

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News Researchers in Oxford have begun creating a bank of artificially grown brain cells from Parkinson's patients, BBC news has learned. They are using a new stem cell technique that allows them to turn a small piece of skin from the patient into a small piece of brain. This is the first time this has been done in a large-scale study aimed at finding cures for the disease. Researchers say they can analyse nerve cells as they start to deteriorate. The first batch of nerve cells have been grown from a 56-year-old Oxfordshire man, Derek Underwood. He had to take early retirement because of the progression of the disease. Mr Underwood will be the first of 50 patients whose skin cells will be grown into brain cells as part of a five year study. According Dr Richard Wade Martins of Oxford University, who is leading the study, the aim is to build up a "brain bank" which will enable researchers to study how the disease develops in unprecedented detail. "The brain is an inaccessible organ and you can't get bits of people's brain to study very easily," he said. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Parkinsons; Stem Cells
Link ID: 15454 - Posted: 06.18.2011

by Carl Zimmer; For tens of millions of Americans, pain is not just an occasional 
nuisance—a stubbed toe, a paper cut—but a constant and torturous companion. Chronic pain can be focused on an arthritic knee or a bad back, diffused throughout the body, or even located virtually in an amputated limb. It can linger for years. And it can transform the world so that merely the light brush of a finger is an agonizing experience. The daily devastation can be so intense that people with chronic pain are up to six times as likely as those who are pain-free to report suicidal thoughts. Despite the toll, chronic pain has been relatively neglected by 
doctors. Perhaps that’s because it seems less real to them than other, more tangible medical disorders. With no equivalent of a stethoscope 
or thermometer to measure pain objectively, they have had to rely 
entirely on their patients’ testimony. As neuroscientists learn more about the biological basis of pain, the situation is finally beginning to change. Most remarkably, unfolding research shows that chronic pain can cause concrete, physiological changes in the brain. After several months of chronic pain, a person’s brain begins to shrink. The longer people suffer, the more gray matter they lose. With that bad news, though, comes a message of hope. In documenting the damage that chronic pain causes, neuroscientists are also beginning to decipher how it comes to exist in the first place. Those insights suggest better treatments and cures. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15453 - Posted: 06.18.2011

A man in the US, who was blinded in one eye 55 years ago, has had his sight restored, according to the Journal of Medical Case Reports. The patient was eight when his retina was detached after he was hit in the right eye with a stone. When the retina is detached for a long time it can be permanently damaged, so re-attaching it might not restore vision. Doctors said restoring sight after this length of time was a medical first. The man was 63 when he went to the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, saying he had pain and redness in his eye. There was swelling, bleeding and a high fluid pressure in his right eye. After washing the eye out and treatment with a drug which stopped new blood vessels forming - the eye went from completely blind to being able to detect the source of a bright light. Doctors thought this was encouraging enough to try re-attaching the retina. After surgery he was able to see again. Surgeons believe it was successful because of the low "height" of the retinal detachment. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15452 - Posted: 06.18.2011

By Ben Harder, Those who believe in free will might be troubled to learn a few secrets about viruses, bacteria and parasites. While it may sound like science fiction, science hints at the potential for microbes to influence our minds, or at least our behavior. Granted, with very limited exceptions, there’s no conclusive proof that foreign agents can control us from within. But when you consider the evidence with an open mind, it’s interesting to consider the possibilities. The latest relevant finding seems innocuous enough. Last month, three insect and plant disease researchers in the University of California system reported a discovery about the tomato spotted wilt virus. As its name suggests, this virus infects and damages tomato plants. It’s harmless to people. To jump from plant to plant, the virus relies on insects known as thrips. A thrip feeds by sticking its oral probe into a plant’s cells and sucking out the contents. If a cell happens to contain the virus, the thrip sucks it up, too. Scientists already knew that virus-infected tomato plants are more appealing to thrips than uninfected plants. The California researchers discovered something else: Once a thrip consumes the virus, its behavior changes. It spends more time feeding, and it licks more plant cells in the process, coating the next tomato plant with the virus. © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Keyword: Miscellaneous; Stress
Link ID: 15451 - Posted: 06.18.2011

By Bruce Bower Bare-knuckled brawlers sometimes have to fight to be seen. College students chasing a person across campus frequently don’t notice two guys beating up a lone victim in plain sight, a new set of experiments finds. That result has real-world implications, say psychologist Christopher Chabris of Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and his colleagues. Consider a Boston police officer who was sentenced to prison in 1998 because jurors didn’t believe his claim that, while running after a murder suspect, he passed but didn’t see fellow officers pummeling a misidentified suspect. Science can’t determine what the Beantown cop actually saw, but his story was plausible, Chabris’ team reports in a paper published June 9 in the online journal i-Perception. “Even under less demanding conditions than the police officer must have experienced, it’s possible to miss something as obvious as a fight,” says psychologist and study coauthor Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois in Champaign. Previous attention research has found, for example, that volunteers counting passes made by basketball players on a video don’t see a gorilla-suited person walk through the scene (SN: 5/21/11, p. 16). Related research conducted by psychologist Jason Watson of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City indicates that talking on a cell phone distracts most car drivers from noticing road hazards (SN Online: 3/31/10). © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 15450 - Posted: 06.18.2011