Rebecca Adler, a freelance writer in Sacramento, has lived with Harlequin Syndrome for 29 years. Rebecca Adler writes: My game face has been known to cause genuine panic on the field -- mostly among race officials and umpires worried they've got some kind of medical emergency on their hands. Either they think I've somehow been severely sunburned on just one side of my face or they worry that I'm on my way to having heat stroke. I have a condition called Harlequin Syndrome, which causes me to sweat and flush red on only on the left side of my body. I got it the day after I was born, in the same way that anyone gets it -- by sustaining an injury to the sympathetic nervous system (the part of the nervous system that reacts to stress and flight-or-fight circumstances), according to Peter Drummond, a professor at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. (FYI, it was Drummond who first researched the condition and coined the catchy term "Harlequin Syndrome" in 1988 after researching others who have it.) But it isn't just general trauma to the sympathetic nervous system. It occurs at a very specific area of that system: the space right between the shoulder blades where the sympathetic nerves leave the spinal cord. © 2010 msnbc.com

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 14527 - Posted: 10.05.2010

There's a male-female gap in perceptions of orgasm in the U.S., with 85 per cent of the men saying their latest sexual partner had an orgasm, compared with 64 per cent of women saying they had one, a new study suggests. The 130-page report in a special issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, published Monday, also: * Examined the sex lives of 14-year-olds. * Broke down condom usage rates by age and ethnicity, with teens emerging as more safe-sex-conscious than boomers. * Found about seven per cent of women and eight per cent of men surveyed said they are gay, lesbian or bisexual, but the number of people who have had same-gender sex is higher. In all, 5,865 people, ranging in age from 14 to 94, participated in the survey. The U.S. survey, published Monday in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, broke down condom usage rates by age and ethnicity, with teens emerging as more conscious of safe-sex than boomers.The U.S. survey, published Monday in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, broke down condom usage rates by age and ethnicity, with teens emerging as more conscious of safe-sex than boomers. (Frank Franklin II/Associated Press) The lead researchers were from Indiana University's Center for Sexual Health Promotion in Bloomington. They said the study fills a void that has grown since the last comparable endeavour — the National Health and Social Life Survey — was published 16 years ago. © CBC 2010

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14526 - Posted: 10.05.2010

By RONI CARYN RABIN It may sound counterintuitive, but a study that randomly assigned dieters to different sleep regimens found that participants allowed only five and a half hours in bed at night lost less flab than those who spent eight and a half hours in bed and got more sleep. The total amount of weight loss did not differ — both groups lost about six and a half pounds over two weeks — but the optimal outcome of a diet is to lose fat, not muscle, researchers said. The sleep-deprived participants felt hungrier than the others, and had higher levels of ghrelin, a hormone that drives appetite, the study found. “The bottom line is that if people are trying to diet and lose weight for health reasons, it makes sense to get a sufficient amount of sleep,” said Dr. Plamen D. Penev, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago and the senior author of the study, which is being published Tuesday in Annals of Internal Medicine. “If they’re not getting enough sleep as they diet, they may have higher levels of hunger and be struggling to adhere to the regimen.” The study was small, including only 10 adults; they lived in a clinical research center for weeks at a time so their exercise, food intake and sleep schedules could be tightly controlled and monitored. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Sleep
Link ID: 14525 - Posted: 10.05.2010

By KATHERINE ELLISON You sit in a chair, facing a computer screen, while a clinician sticks electrodes to your scalp with a viscous goop that takes days to wash out of your hair. Wires from the sensors connect to a computer programmed to respond to your brain’s activity. Try to relax and focus. If your brain behaves as desired, you’ll be encouraged with soothing sounds and visual treats, like images of exploding stars or a flowering field. If not, you’ll get silence, a darkening screen and wilting flora. This is neurofeedback, a kind of biofeedback for the brain, which practitioners say can address a host of neurological ills — among them attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, depression and anxiety — by allowing patients to alter their own brain waves through practice and repetition. The procedure is controversial, expensive and time-consuming. An average course of treatment, with at least 30 sessions, can cost $3,000 or more, and few health insurers will pay for it. Still, it appears to be growing in popularity. Cynthia Kerson, executive director of the International Society for Neurofeedback and Research, an advocacy group for practitioners, estimates that 7,500 mental health professionals in the United States now offer neurofeedback and that more than 100,000 Americans have tried it over the past decade. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD; Attention
Link ID: 14524 - Posted: 10.05.2010

by Amber Angelle For nearly 30 years, researchers have gathered evidence that a group of bizarre, fatal brain diseases—including mad cow and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease—are caused not by a virus or bacterium but by an abnormal form of a protein, called a prion. New studies lend the strongest support yet to this once-controversial idea and are also starting to reveal the beneficial natural functions these proteins perform before they go bad. Molecular biochemist Jiyan Ma at Ohio State University and colleagues were able to transform a normal protein produced by E. coli bacteria into a prion whose properties match those of the infectious version: It forms clumps, resists being cut by enzymes, and converts other normal proteins into the aberrant form. When the prion was injected into the brains of mice, the brains became spongy and riddled with holes, the telltale signs of prion disease. “Next we plan to take a closer look at the system we used to create infectious prions to identify the molecular mechanisms behind the change,” Ma says. In a separate experiment, researchers in the United States and Austria used a prion protein generated by E. coli to infect hamsters with a transmissible brain disease. The disease progressed very gradually, just as it does in humans, suggesting that the hamsters could provide a useful animal model system. Copyright © 2010, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 14523 - Posted: 10.05.2010

By JEROME GROOPMAN After the birth of each of our three children, my wife and I breathed a deep sigh of relief. We had been meticulous in following our obstetrician’s advice: we had been screened for the Tay-Sachs trait, and had an amniocentesis to check for chromosomal changes associated with Down syndrome, and ultrasound to assess the fetus’s growth. Everything looked normal. But with the acute awareness of two physicians, we knew that these tests did not reveal all the problems that can occur during gestation. So when we heard the piercing cry of our newborn and were told the baby had a high Apgar score, we believed we had successfully skirted the perils of pregnancy. But in the decades since our children’s birth, results from research studies have suggested that we do not put fetal life so readily behind us. Rather, as Annie Murphy Paul writes in her informative and wise new book, “fetal origins research suggests that the lifestyle that influences the development of disease is often not only the one we follow as adults, but the one our mothers practiced when they were pregnant with us as well.” This hypothesis was initially put forth by David Barker, a British physician who in 1989 published data indicating that poor maternal nutrition put offspring at risk for heart disease decades later. Barker’s hypothesis was initially dismissed by the medical establishment as an artifact of looking in hindsight at birth-weight and the later development of disease, without detailed knowledge of what happened in the interim. Of necessity, research on fetal development involves observing pregnant women in their daily lives; no one would purposefully have one group eat in a possibly risky way or be exposed to a potentially dangerous substance, and compare outcomes with an unperturbed control group. We have, at best, only correlations between a mother’s lifestyle and her child’s future health, not clear causation. Nonetheless, a growing number of observational studies conducted in different parts of the world since Barker’s initial report bolster the notion that in the nature-nurture dynamic, nurture begins at the time of conception. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Obesity
Link ID: 14522 - Posted: 10.04.2010

By Emily Singer A massive new project to scan the brains of 1,200 volunteers could finally give scientists a picture of the neural architecture of the human brain and help them understand the causes of certain neurological and psychological diseases. The National Institutes of Health announced $40 million in funding this month for the five-year effort, dubbed the Human Connectome Project. Scientists will use new imaging technologies, some still under development, to create both structural and functional maps of the human brain. The project is novel in its size; most brain-imaging studies have looked at tens to hundreds of brains. Scanning so many people will shed light on the normal variability within the brain structure of healthy adults, which will in turn provide a basis for examining how neural "wiring" differs in such disorders as autism and schizophrenia. The researchers also plan to collect genetic and behavioral data, testing participants' sensory and motor skills, memory, and other cognitive functions, and deposit this information along with brain scans in a public database (although the patients' personal information will be stripped out). Scientists around the world can then use the database to search for the genetic and environmental factors that influence the structure of the brain. © 2010 Technology Review.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 14521 - Posted: 10.04.2010

By David Biello Name: Greg Graffin Title: Lead singer for the punk rock band Bad Religion; Lecturer in life sciences and paleontology at U.C.L.A. How are evolution and punk rock related? The idea with both is that you challenge authority, you challenge the dogma. It's a process of collective discovery. It's debate, it's experimentation, and it's verification of claims that might be false. In your new book Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science and Bad Religion in a World without God you talk about the "anarchic exuberance of life." What do you mean by that? The trick is: how do you talk about natural selection without implying the rigidity of law? We use it as almost an active participant, almost like a god. In fact, you could substitute the word "god" for "natural selection" in a lot of evolutionary writings and you'd think you were listening to a theologian. It's a routine we know doesn't exist but we teach it anyway: Genetic mutation and some active force chooses the most favorable one. That simply isn't a complete explanation of what's going on. We need to stop thinking about lawlike behaviors and embrace the surprises. Was Darwin a punk? He was very straight-laced because of English Victorian culture, but he sure did like to hobnob with the radicals. There are punk fans who kind of stand in the back and never in their lives go slam dancing but love the music and what it represents. Darwin may have been that kind of contemplative and pensive anti-authoritarian. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14520 - Posted: 10.04.2010

By Roger Dobson Falling in love is not as simple as it seems, but it is very quick. Those intense over-powering feelings of being truly, madly, deeply in love are the result of complex and rapid brain activity. Being in love – or more precisely being in an emotional state of intense longing for union with another, involving chemical, cognitive, and goal-directed behavioural components – is a pretty complicated affair. According to new research, it's not a basic emotion, as some thought, but a highly complex and businesslike process involving 12 areas of the brain working together to produce and sustain that magic moment. And researchers have discovered that the first brain activity specific to love starts within one fifth of a second of being smitten. According to a new study, The Neuroimaging of Love, brain regions with decidedly unromantic names, like the dorsolateral middle frontal gyrus and the anterior cingulate, as well chemicals like nerve growth factor, dopamine and oxytocin, are all involved in orchestrating these feelings of love. Some of these areas are those that are also active when people are under the influence of euphoria-inducing drugs – suggesting that falling in love may have a similar effect on the brain as using cocaine. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 14519 - Posted: 10.04.2010

REWARD pathways in the brains of overweight people become less responsive as they gain weight. This causes them to eat more to get the same pleasure from their food, which in turn reduces the reward response still further. Eric Stice, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, and colleagues used fMRI brain scans to monitor 26 obese or overweight volunteers as they sipped either a tasty milkshake or a flavourless liquid resembling saliva. They compared the effect of both drinks on brain activity in the dorsal striatum, a key part of the brain's reward circuitry. Six months later, they retested the volunteers. Those who had gained weight since the first test also showed reduced activity in the dorsal striatum in response to the milkshake. In contrast, no change was seen in people who had lost or maintained weight (Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.2105-10.2010). The result suggests that overeating may push people onto a slippery slope akin to a drug addict's craving for ever-larger doses. "People are having to eat more and more to chase the high," says Stice. It remains to be seen whether losing weight can reverse the cycle and restore normal functioning of the reward pathway. Issue 2780 of New Scientist magazine © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 14518 - Posted: 10.04.2010

By Matt Walker When two dolphin species come together, they attempt to find a common language, preliminary research suggests. Bottlenose and Guyana dolphins, two distantly related species, often come together to socialise in waters off the coast of Costa Rica. Both species make unique sounds, but when they gather, they change the way they communicate, and begin using an intermediate language. That raises the possibility the two species are communicating in some way. Details are published in the journal Ethology. It is not yet clear exactly what is taking place between the two dolphin species, but it is the first evidence that the animals modify their communications in the presence of other species, not just other dolphins of their own kind. Biologist Dr Laura May-Collado of the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan made the discovery studying dolphins swimming in the Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge of the southern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) are larger, measuring up to 3.8m long, with a long dorsal fin. Guyana dolphins (Sotalia guianensis) are much smaller, measuring 2.1m long, and have a smaller dorsal fin and longer snout, known as a rostrum. BBC © MMX

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 14517 - Posted: 10.02.2010

Arran Frood Smoking cannabis has long been associated with poor short-term memory, but a study now suggests that the strain of cannabis makes all the difference. In a test of short-term memory skills, only users of 'skunk'-type strains exhibited impaired recall when intoxicated, whereas people who smoked hashish or herbal cannabis blends performed equally well whether they were stoned or sober. The findings suggest that an ingredient more plentiful in some types of marijuana than in others may help to reduce the memory loss that some users suffer. The key difference between the types of cannabis is the ratio of two chemicals found in all strains. Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the primary active ingredient, and is responsible for the effects associated with the classic 'high', including euphoria and giddiness but also anxiety and paranoia. The second chemical, cannabidiol, has more calming effects, and brain-imaging studies have shown that it can block the psychosis-inducing effects of THC2. Skunk-type strains of cannabis contain a higher ratio of THC to cannabidiol than do hashish or herbal types. Valerie Curran, a psychopharmacologist from University College London who led the latest study, says that if habitual users must partake they should be encouraged to use strains with higher levels of cannabidiol, rather than using skunk. She also argues that studying cannabidiol could provide insight into the mechanics of memory formation, and that it may have therapeutic benefits for disorders involving memory deficits. The findings are published in the British Journal of Psychiatry today1. marijuana leafLevels of THC in 'skunk' marijuana are higher than in other varieties. © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 14516 - Posted: 10.02.2010

By Rob Stein Scientists have invented an efficient way to produce apparently safe alternatives to human embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos, a long-sought step toward bypassing the moral morass surrounding one of the most promising fields in medicine. A team of researchers at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Boston published a series of experiments Thursday showing that synthetic biological signals can quickly reprogram ordinary skin cells into entities that appear virtually identical to embryonic stem cells. Moreover, the same strategy can then turn those cells into ones that could be used for transplants. "This is going to be very exciting to the research community," said Derrick J. Rossi of the Children's Hospital Boston, who led the research published in the journal Cell Stem Cell. "We now have an experimental paradigm for generating patient-specific cells highly efficiently and safely and also taking those cells to clinically useful cell types." Scientists hope stem cells will lead to cures for diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, spinal cord injuries, heart attacks and many other ailments because they can turn into almost any tissue in the body, potentially providing an invaluable source of cells to replace those damaged by disease or injury. But the cells can be obtained only by destroying days-old embryos. © 2010 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Stem Cells; Regeneration
Link ID: 14515 - Posted: 10.02.2010

By NOAH SNYDER-MACKLER To the untrained eye, all geladas look alike. Complicating matters, they form some of the largest aggregations of any nonhuman primate. We have seen groups in excess of 1,000 individuals. Most days we want to find a specific monkey or group of monkeys. We do not tag, mark or radio-collar the geladas, though countless times I have wished to do so out of frustration. Fortunately my colleagues and I are trained for this. The leaders of our project, Thore Bergman and Jacinta Beehner from the University of Michigan, are especially adept at distinguishing individual gelada monkeys. There are the easy monkeys to identify, like Tail, the female with half of her tail missing. And then there are the hard ones, which make up a vast majority of our monkeys. To identify these individuals we look for subtle differences, like small scars or discolorations on their ears or face. This was tough when I first started last year, but after a month I was an expert at picking my specific monkey out of the group. Unfortunately, the ability to identify 180 individual geladas wasn’t stored into my long-term memory. This is my first week back, and I am having a terribly difficult time with the monkeys. I started by relearning the easy ones. Tail is still alive — one down, 179 to go. It will be a slow process, but I’m lucky to have some of the most experienced teachers here to help me — my research colleagues. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14514 - Posted: 10.02.2010

by Anil Ananthaswamy When the going got tough in prehistoric East Africa, some of humanity's closest relatives went for bigger jaws, rather than bigger brains. Big mistake By some 30 million years ago, the primate upstarts had come to dominate the canopies of the once more lush tropical rainforests. For one particular group, this was a mere staging post. Before about 20 million years ago, east Africa boasted Amazon-like jungles that were a stable and plentiful home to our forebears, still swinging from the trees. Then the Earth moved, quite literally. A plume of magma started pushing up from beneath what is now northern Ethiopia. During the following 15 million years, two massive mountain ranges running north to south, each about 2 kilometres high, rose up out of the east African plateau. Saddled in the middle was the Great Rift Valley, a depression a kilometre above sea level. The mountains to the east deflected moisture-laden winds arriving from the Indian Ocean, and those in the west stopped similar winds from the Congo. Deprived of rain, the valley gradually began to change from lush rainforest to sparser savannah. For our African ancestors, living in the trees was no longer such a viable survival strategy. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14513 - Posted: 10.02.2010

by Andy Coghlan For the first time, evidence has emerged of genetic mutations linked to attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But how strong is the link, and how far does the finding undermine claims that children with the condition are simply naughty kids, victims of bad parenting or driven to hyperactivity by dietary additives? What did the researchers do? A research team in the UK screened DNA across the entire genome from 366 children with ADHD and 1047 children without the condition for rare but massive regions of DNA that were either missing from where they should be or duplicated. They looked for these abnormalities, called copy-number variants or CNVs, because some had been linked previously with other psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia and autism. And what was the result? They found that 16 per cent of the children with ADHD had abnormally high numbers of CNVs, double the 8 per cent of normal children who had them: the ADHD children had double the risk of carrying these genetic abnormalities. Is that a big deal? "We have the first scientific evidence of a direct genetic link," said their leader, Anita Thapar of Cardiff University, at a press conference in London. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: ADHD; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14512 - Posted: 10.02.2010

MIGRATORY bats have smaller brains than their stay-at-home cousins, suggesting they cannot afford the luxury of lugging large, energetically expensive brains on long journeys. The discovery might also be true for birds. The brains of migratory birds tend to be smaller than those of similar-sized species that do not migrate. But biologists have been unsure whether this is because non-migratory birds need larger brains to cope with the challenges of finding food through the changing seasons, or because migrators need to pare down their weight for travel. Larger brains burn more energy and their extra weight makes flight more costly too. Liam McGuire, an ecologist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, and his colleague John Ratcliffe of the University of Southern Denmark in Odense turned to bats for the answer. Non-migratory species of bat typically hibernate through the winter months, so they do not need to adjust their foraging behaviour to survive. Yet the researchers still found that migratory bats had smaller brains than non-migratory ones (Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2010.0744). Other factors may also be important in birds, which show a greater difference in brain size than bats. But the finding suggests that the need to reduce weight in migrators is a sufficient evolutionary force to drive some of the difference. Issue 2780 of New Scientist magazine © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution; Animal Migration
Link ID: 14511 - Posted: 10.02.2010

By GARDINER HARRIS Infant sleep positioners that are used to keep babies on their backs and protect them from sudden infant death syndrome have led 12 children to suffocate in the past 13 years and should no longer be used, federal officials said Wednesday. Officials warned against using any products that have extensive foam, memory foam or significant cushioning in cribs. Most of the infants suffocated after rolling from a side position to a stomach position. In addition to the reported deaths, the government has received dozens of reports of infants who were placed on their backs or sides in sleep positioners, only to be found later in potentially hazardous positions within or next to the sleep positioners. The two main types of infant sleep positioners are flat mats with side bolsters or inclined mats with side bolsters. Both types of sleep positioners typically claim to help keep infants on their backs and reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, but the Food and Drug Administration has never approved these products as safe. And the government said it was unaware of any scientific studies demonstrating that infant positioners prevented death or were proven to prevent suffocation or other life-threatening harm. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 14510 - Posted: 09.30.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey The brain almost always has a plan B, even when deciding which hand to use to press a button, a new study finds. A part of the brain called the left posterior parietal cortex plans button-pressing movements for both hands simultaneously, shows the study, published online September 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. After a very brief neural tussle, one hand wins the competition and the other’s movement is suppressed, Flavio Oliveira, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues demonstrate. Scientists actually know very little about how decisions such as which hand to use for a task are made in the brain, says Scott Frey, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Oregon in Eugene. While he may quibble with some of the details of the new study, “It helps to address a pretty blatant gap in the literature and it does it in an elegant way,” he says. “I think it’s one we’re going to be citing for a long time.” Oliveira and his collaborators studied right-handed people, as most such studies do. The volunteers placed their hands on a table containing a motion-tracking system. When a target was illuminated, the participants were supposed to reach as quickly as possible to hit the target. At first the volunteers were instructed to use only the right hand or left hand for the task. Then the participants were given a choice of which hand to use. Having to decide slowed the volunteers’ reaction times by about 30 milliseconds, especially when the target was about equidistant from both hands. The participants reached for an equidistant target more often with their right hands. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14509 - Posted: 09.30.2010

By Bruce Bower Rhesus monkeys typically don’t check themselves out in a mirror — unless they’re wearing funky acrylic forehead blocks attached to hair-thin electrodes implanted in their brains. Given that fashion-forward apparel, these monkeys avidly use mirrors to examine and groom their heads and to inspect hard-to-see body areas, say neuroscientist Luis Populin of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his colleagues. Animals with head implants sometimes turned themselves upside down or adjusted mirrors to get a better view of out-of-the-way body parts, the scientists report in a paper published online September 29 in PLoS ONE. “Rhesus monkeys recognize themselves in the mirror and have some form of self-awareness,” Populin holds. As in previous studies, monkeys with colored marks on their faces failed to inspect the marks when provided with mirrors and sometimes made aggressive moves as if the marked reflection were another monkey. Researchers generally regard such behavior as showing a lack of self-awareness. Unlike facial marks, though, implanted head devices presented monkeys with a bodily change striking enough to trigger self-inspection with a mirror, Populin proposes. “It is hard to say what is going on, as the head implant is not only seen but felt by monkeys,” remarks psychologist Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta. This new evidence supports the idea that monkeys recognize their own reflections as special and don’t misidentify the images as other monkeys, he says, even if it doesn’t establish that the animals have a concept of self (SN: 7/23/05, p. 53). © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Attention; Intelligence
Link ID: 14508 - Posted: 09.30.2010