By Stephen Smith It’s a story that rings familiar: A couple tries and tries — frustration surging — to have a baby, finally deciding to adopt. Then, lo and behold, the woman receives the news that once proved elusive: You’re pregnant. Maybe, armchair psychiatrists have long opined, it has something to do with a cloud of stress dissipating. Or consider women who swear that the fatigue, bloat, and irritability that herald a menstrual period are magnified when life’s anxieties rage with particular ferocity. For generations, such anecdotes existed largely in the realm of accepted wisdom, evoking dismissive entreaties to women to “just relax.’’ And studies of reproductive health sometimes consisted of little more than asking infertile couples to jot down their levels of stress. “We thought there has to be something better than that,’’ said Germaine Buck Louis, a top scientist at the National Institute of Child Health & Human Development. Now, researchers at her agency are opening a wider window onto the fraught relationship between stress and women’s reproductive health — research that could one day lead to use of saliva tests for stress and better methods for muting it. Two studies released last month by federal scientists offer tantalizing clues. One suggests that elevated levels of a stress-related enzyme might predict whether a woman will have difficulty getting pregnant. The other shows that a wave of stress in the days before a woman’s period may act like an accelerant for premenstrual symptoms. © 2010 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Stress; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14447 - Posted: 09.13.2010

By TARA PARKER-POPE Both mothers and fathers face an increased risk of depression after the birth of a child, and remain at some increased risk well into a child’s adolescence, a new British study shows. The research, which tracked nearly 87,000 families in the United Kingdom between 1993 and 2007, found the highest risk for depression occurred in the first year after a child’s birth. Over all, 39 percent of mothers and 21 percent of fathers had experienced an episode of depression during the first 12 years of their child’s life. After the first year of parenting, a mother’s risk for depression dropped by half, while experienced fathers faced only about a quarter of the depression risk compared with new fathers. Although depression risk for both parents dropped considerably in the second year, it remained steady through a child’s 12th year. (No data were collected from families with older children.) Parents who had an earlier history of depression, who had children at a relatively young age or who had lower incomes were at highest risk for a depressive episode during their parenting years, according to the study, published online in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. Although the study wasn’t designed to determine the causes of the higher depression rates among parents, researchers speculated that several potential triggers could occur because of the everyday demands of parenting. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Stress
Link ID: 14446 - Posted: 09.13.2010

Janelle Weaver Practice makes perfect when it comes to remembering things, but exactly how that works has long been a mystery. A study published in Science this week1 indicates that reactivating neural patterns over and over again may etch items into the memory. People find it easier to recall things if material is presented repeatedly at well-spaced intervals rather than all at once. For example, you're more likely to remember a face that you've seen on multiple occasions over a few days than one that you've seen once in one long period. One reason that a face linked to many different contexts — such as school, work and home — is easier to recognize than one that is associated with just one setting, such as a party, could be that there are multiple ways to access the memory. This idea, called the encoding variability hypothesis, was proposed by psychologists about 40 years ago2. Each different context or setting activates a distinct set of brain regions; the hypothesis suggests that it is these differing neural responses that improve the memory. But neuroimaging research led by Russell Poldrack, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Texas, Austin, now suggests that the opposite is true — items are better remembered when they activate the same neural patterns with each exposure. Poldrack's team measured brain activity in 24 people using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The subjects saw 120 unfamiliar faces, each one repeated four times at varying intervals during the fMRI scan. One hour later, they were shown the faces again, mixed with 120 new ones, and asked to rate the familiarity of each. © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 14445 - Posted: 09.11.2010

By Rachel Ehrenberg Cockroaches may be nasty bugs, but they could help fight even nastier ones. New research finds that the rudimentary brains of cockroaches and locusts teem with antimicrobial compounds that slay harmful E. coli and MRSA, the antibiotic-resistant staph bacterium. The work could lead to new compounds for fighting infectious diseases in humans. Extracts of ground-up brain and other nerve tissue from the American cockroach, Periplaneta americana, and desert locust, Schistocerca gregaria, killed more than 90 percent of a type of E. coli that causes meningitis, and also killed methicillin-resistant staph, microbiologist Simon Lee reported September 7 at the Society for General Microbiology meeting at the University of Nottingham in England. “Some of these insects live in the filthiest places ever known to man,” says Naveed Khan, coauthor of the new study. “These insects crawl on dead tissue, in sewage, in drainage areas. We thought, 'How do they cope with all the bacteria and parasites?’” Khan and his colleagues became intrigued by insect antimicrobials when they noticed that many soldiers were returning from the Middle East with unusual infections, yet locusts living in the same areas were unperturbed. So the researchers, all from the University of Nottingham, began investigating how the insects ward off disease. The team ground up various body parts from both cockroaches and locusts that had been reared in the lab and incubated them for two hours with different bacteria. Leaving these mixtures overnight on petri dishes revealed that the extracts from brains and from locust thorax nerve tissue killed nearly 100 percent of the bacteria. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Evolution
Link ID: 14444 - Posted: 09.11.2010

By Laura Sanders Researchers have created a growth curve for the brain, similar to the height and weight charts pediatricians use to monitor their patients’ development. Scientists came up with the new developmental milestones by aggregating the results of brain scans that reveal active connections throughout the organ. Published September 10 in Science, the study reveals how a typical brain’s connections evolve with age, information that could help doctors detect a variety of disorders — many of which are marked by disordered neural connections — earlier. “It’s really remarkable how much information can be gleaned with just a five-minute resting-state scan,” says neuroscientist Olaf Sporns of Indiana University in Bloomington. “The techniques they’ve developed here may be very powerful in making predictions for individual patients.” Researchers led by Nico Dosenbach and Bradley Schlaggar, both of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, constructed the brain maturity curve using data from 238 volunteers of ages 7 to 30. Each subject spent about five minutes quietly resting while an MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging, machine recorded patterns of blood movement in over a hundred different brain regions. Because no tasks are required of the patient, the quick scan can be used on infants or patients who are unable to respond to directions. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14443 - Posted: 09.11.2010

By Alyssa Danigelis The thoughts are there, but there is no way to express them. For "locked in" patients, many with Lou Gehrig's disease, the only way to communicate tends to be through blinking in code. But now, words can be read directly from patients' minds by attaching microelectrode grids to the surface of the brain and learning which signals mean which words, a development that will ultimately help such patients talk again. "They're perfectly aware. They just can't get signals out of their brain to control their facial expressions. "They're the patients we'd like to help first," said University of Utah's Bradley Greger, an assistant professor of bioengineering who, with neurosurgery professor Paul House, M.D., published the study in the October issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering. Some severely-epileptic patients have the seizure-stricken parts of the brain removed. This standard procedure requires cutting the skull open and putting large, button-sized electrodes on the brain to determine just what needs removal. The electrodes are then taken off the brain. The University of Utah team worked with an epileptic patient who let them crowd together much smaller devices, called micro-electrocorticography, onto his brain prior to surgery. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Robotics; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14442 - Posted: 09.11.2010

By Jennifer Viegas Great bowerbirds are known for their dramatic mating displays and elaborate constructions. Now researchers have determined males of this crafty species build staged scenes that make themselves look larger or smaller than they actually are. As a result, the scientists believe great bowerbirds are the first known non-human animals that create scenes with altered visual perspectives for viewing by other individuals. In this case, those other individuals are female great bowerbirds seeking mates. Architects, set designers and artists frequently employ the technique when creating certain paintings, gardens, amusement parks and other constructions that feature optical illusions. But we're relatively new at this. "Bowerbirds have been doing it longer than we have," lead author John Endler told Discovery News. "Good human perspective didn't get started until the 15th century." Endler, a professor of sensory ecology and evolution at Deakin University, and colleagues Lorna Endler and Natalie Doerr studied great bowerbird bowers in Queensland, Australia. Each male-made bower consists of an avenue -- two rows of tightly packed sticks with a stick floor -- that opens onto a court. The court functions as a stage where the male displays for females. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Vision
Link ID: 14441 - Posted: 09.11.2010

Jessica Hamzelou, reporter Can cheap vitamin supplements really defend you from Alzheimer's? In a paper published today, David Smith and colleagues at the University of Oxford have claimed that dosing up on B vitamins can protect an ageing brain from shrinking. The team instructed a group of 168 people over the age of 70 with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to take a 2 year course of either daily vitamin B supplements or placebo pills. The vitamins included folic acid, B6 and B12. Each person had an fMRI brain scan at the start and end of the study, in order to compare how their brains had atrophied or shrunk over the period. While the brains of the placebo group shrunk by an average of 1.08 per cent per year, those taking vitamin B supplements experienced an average atrophy of "only" 0.76 per cent per year. Smith's team only looked at brain scans, and didn't carry out cognitive tests on the study participants, but the authors reckon that B vitamins might slow the onset of Alzheimer's disease. The results certainly sound dramatic when you consider that vitamin B supplements reduced the rate of atrophy by 30 per cent. But in absolute terms this was only an average difference of 0.32 per cent. On top of this, the sample was small - only 85 people received the treatment. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 14440 - Posted: 09.11.2010

Lizzie Buchen After dropping a pair of male and female adult rats into a rectangular Plexiglas container, Frances Champagne can expect one of a few scenarios to ensue. The male will definitely try to mate with the female — but the female is less predictable. She might approach him, appraise his scents and arch her back to allow him to mount her. Should a second male enter the cage after she's mated with the first, she may be similarly hospitable. Some females play it coy, however, evading the male, requiring more courtship and, if mating does occur, avoiding another go. A number of factors can influence what the female does, but to Champagne, a behavioural scientist at Columbia University in New York, one is particularly beguiling: how often the female rat's mother licked and groomed her during her first week of life1. Doting mothers have prudish daughters, whereas the daughters of inattentive rats cavort around like mini Mae Wests. At the heart of these differences lies the sex hormone oestrogen, which drives female sexual behaviour. Champagne says that neglected rats might respond to it more strongly than those raised by attentive mums. The phenomenon is just one example of how experiences early in life can shape behaviour, and it may apply to humans. It is known, for example, that children who grow up in poverty are at greater risk as adults for problems such as drug addiction and depression than those with more comfortable upbringings, regardless of their socioeconomic situation later in life. But what is it about early experiences that has such a lasting effect? For Champagne and many of her colleagues, the answer has been apparent for nearly a decade. Life experiences alter DNA; not necessarily its sequence but rather its form and structure, including the chemicals that decorate it and how tightly it winds and packs around proteins inside the cell. These changes, often referred to as epigenetic modifications, make genes easier or more difficult for the cell's protein-making machinery to read (see 'The marking of a genome'). © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14439 - Posted: 09.09.2010

Can powerful noises affect whales? There's circumstantial evidence to suggest that they might. Now a team of researchers is attempting to find out for sure. The notion that at least some species of whales might be adversely affected by loud noises rests on two pillars. First, the cetacean world is one of sound, rather than vision; toothed whales use echolocation to find their way around and locate prey, and several species of baleen whales in particular emit deep vocalizations that can travel hundreds, possibly thousands, of miles across the ocean. Secondly, there have been more than a few occasions on which whales have beached or been found dead in close proximity to a powerful noise source. In particular, accusatory fingers have frequently been pointed at military use of powerful active sonar, which has been linked to numerous cases of strandings and death, particularly in various beaked whale species. While few if any of the individual cases can be linked unequivocally to a specific use of sonar, the accumulation of incidents is making a powerful case for the prosecution. Some have theorized that the sound panics the whales, forcing them to flee to the surface too quickly, causing them to suffer from rapid decompression. But there is still surprisingly little clarity on the precise mechanisms by which sound could impact a cetacean, or even how an external source would propagate inside a cetacean's head — a hole in the knowledge base that a joint US-Swedish team is attempting to fill. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Hearing; Animal Migration
Link ID: 14438 - Posted: 09.09.2010

By David Biello Can the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms" help those with terminal cancer cope with their fate? That was the question asked by researchers, who published the results of their investigation September 6 in Archives of General Psychiatry. After all, impending death wreaks havoc on the psyche of not only the terminally ill patient but also their family and friends. More broadly, our society spends so much time avoiding death that it can be well nigh impossible to cope with its reality. To try and address this, UCLA psychiatrist Charles Grob and his colleagues enlisted 12 cancer patients—11 of them women—between June 2004 and May 2008. All suffered from fatal cancers, ranging from breast cancer to multiple myeloma, as well as "acute stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, anxiety disorder due to cancer, or adjustment disorder with anxiety." All agreed to take a "moderate dose" (0.2 milligrams per kilogram of body weight) of psilocybin (and niacin on another occasion) to see if the psychedelic drug might offer some relief from their fear of death and disease. The unusual decision to have each patient serve as both a subjects and then as a control—rather than having two separate groups, one treated with psilocybin and one with niacin—was taken because the researchers believed "that to be the ethical course to take, given the life circumstances subjects were encountering," (i.e. imminent demise). In other words, Grob and his colleagues felt that all the terminally ill patients should be allowed to experience any potential benefit from the psilocybin treatment. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 14437 - Posted: 09.09.2010

by Helen Fields Hey, guys, want to impress ladies on the dance floor? Keep your head and torso moving, and don't flail your arms and legs. This useful advice comes courtesy of a new study, which finds that women are more attracted to computer avatars that rock these moves. Humans aren't the only animals that move in special ways to lure females. Male fiddler crabs wave an outsized claw to show off, and male hummingbirds display their flying prowess with a flamboyant mating dive. These moves probably show off their strength and motor skills. Evolutionary psychologist Nick Neave of Northumbria University in Newcastle Upon Tyne wondered whether there was something about male human dancing that impressed females as well. Neave and colleagues couldn't just round up a bunch of men and ask them to gyrate in front of women, however. That's because it's hard to separate a man's physical appearance from his dancing skills. "You could be the best dancer in the world, but if you've got an awful haircut or something like that," women may still find you unattractive, says Neave. So he and colleagues cut out the effect of physical appearance by using motion-capture technology, like the techniques moviemakers use to make digital characters. The researchers stuck 38 reflective markers to the joints and other body parts of 30 male students at Northumbria University. Then they asked the guys to dance for 30 seconds as if they were in a nightclub, while a thumping drum beat played over speakers. Twelve video cameras recorded the action. A computer used data on the location of the markers to construct an avatar of each man (see videos). © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 14436 - Posted: 09.09.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Being obese has long been linked to infertility in females, but researchers may have been wrong about how the link was forged, a new study suggests. Doctors and scientists have thought that the fertility problems were caused by resistance to the hormone insulin. Chronically high levels of insulin often accompany obesity, eventually making muscles and other tissues impervious to the hormone’s signals. A new study in mice shows that the pituitary gland, which helps regulate the release of fertility-associated hormones, remains sensitive to insulin. But in obese mice, insulin’s constant signaling to release the fertility hormones leads to an overabundance of those hormones, and consequently infertility, researchers report in the Sept. 8 Cell Metabolism. The discovery firmly ties metabolism to fertility in an unexpected way and may have implications for treating women with a condition known as polycystic ovary syndrome, which is characterized by abnormal menstrual cycles and is often associated with obesity and type 2 diabetes. Researchers led by Andrew Wolfe of Johns Hopkins University stumbled upon the discovery when studying mice genetically engineered to lack proteins called insulin receptors that sit on the surface of a cell, latch onto insulin and pass along the hormone’s message to the rest of the cell. The team had engineered the mice so that insulin receptors were missing only from cells in the pituitary, a gland that it is important for regulating many important body functions, including fertility. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Obesity; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14435 - Posted: 09.09.2010

by Timothy McDonald, Babies born with low vitamin D levels are twice as likely to develop schizophrenia later in life, researchers from the Queensland Brain Institute have found. But the researchers say the good news from the study is that it suggests it may be possible to prevent schizophrenia. John McGrath from the Queensland Brain Institute says there have been suggestions for some time that there may be a link between sunlight, vitamin D and brain development. He says it is increasingly clear children with low vitamin D levels are more likely to develop schizophrenia. "For the babies who had very low vitamin D, their risk was about twice as high as those babies who had optimal vitamin D," said McGrath. "But the amazing thing was that the study that was based in Denmark, where low vitamin D is quite common, we found that if vitamin D is linked to schizophrenia our statistics suggest that it could explain about 40 percent of all schizophrenias. That's a much bigger effect than we're used to seeing in schizophrenia research." While the simplest way to get enough vitamin D is to spend more time in the sun, it remains unclear whether there are fewer cases of schizophrenia in a country like Australia which sees a lot more sunlight. "We don't have high-quality data on that, but some statistics suggest we do have slightly lower incidences and prevalence of schizophrenia," said McGrath. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 14434 - Posted: 09.09.2010

by Michael Marshall Changing sex is more common than you might think. Many animals start out as one sex, and then change into the other part-way through their lives. There are also plenty of animals that are both male and female at the same time. But a few go one step further. They start out as one sex, and then transform into hermaphrodites. The peppermint shrimp is one of these rare beasts. It gets its name from the red stripes that run along its translucent body, which make it look like a peppermint stick or candy cane. It first matures as a male, and sometimes turns into a hermaphrodite with both male and female sexual organs. This lifestyle, named by an extreme-pronunciation enthusiast, is called protandric simultaneous hermaphroditism. But most peppermint shrimps prefer to stay male. All-male shrimps are more successful at finding mates than hermaphrodites acting as males – probably because they can put more effort into trying to find a mate – and they will delay changing sex if there are hermaphrodites present. In fact, the decision whether or not to change is determined by the size of the social group. To maximise their chances of one day being able to mate, shrimp living on their own always turn into hermaphrodites, even though they end up growing more slowly because of the energy spent on making eggs. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14433 - Posted: 09.09.2010

by Jessica Hamzelou CRASH! A deafening roar and the cinema screen explodes with light. The scene is certainly startling, but is this movie stirring up the right emotional reactions deep down? Rather than ask your opinion, it's now possible to cut out the middleman and go straight to your brain for the verdict. This new approach, known as neurocinematics, is beginning to make itself felt in movie-making and could one day help regulatory bodies implement appropriate age restrictions on films. Neurocinematics is a term coined by Uri Hasson at Princeton University, who was among the first to investigate how the brain responds to movies using an fMRI brain scanner. His team looked at the similarity in the brain responses of a group of viewers to different types of films. When volunteers watched a section of Alfred Hitchcock's Bang! You're Dead, for example, they found that about 65 per cent of the frontal cortex - the part of the brain involved in attention and perception - was responding in the same way in all the viewers. Only 18 per cent of the cortex showed a similar response when the participants watched more free-form footage, of sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm (Projections, DOI: 10.3167/proj.2008.020102). The level of correlation between people indicates how much control the director has over the audience's experience, Hasson claims. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14432 - Posted: 09.09.2010

People with a severe mental illness are no more likely to be violent than anyone else - unless they abuse drugs or alcohol, a study has suggested. The relationship between bipolar disorder and violence largely came down to substance abuse, researchers said.. The study compared the behaviour of people with the disorder with their siblings and the wider population. One of the authors said it was probably more dangerous to walk past a pub at night than a mental health hospital. The study, led by Oxford University's Department of Psychiatry, examined the lives and behaviour of 3,700 people in Sweden who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, commonly known as manic depression. The disorder leads to sudden and unpredictable mood swings which are more severe than the normal ups and downs of life. The team, led by consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr Seena Fazel, wanted to examine the public perception that there is a link between the disorder and violent crime. They did this by comparing the experiences of the patients with some 4,000 siblings of people with bipolar disorder - and a further group of 37,000 people selected from the general population. (C)BBC

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 14431 - Posted: 09.07.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies). And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? Maybe the child isn’t “a good fit” for the school. Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how. Yet there are effective approaches to learning, at least for those who are motivated. In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying. The findings can help anyone, from a fourth grader doing long division to a retiree taking on a new language. But they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on. For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 14430 - Posted: 09.07.2010

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR THE FACTS In the world of sleep research, dreams are something of a black box. But one tidbit that scientists have discerned is the peculiar but predictable pattern in which dreams tend to occur. Research suggests that much of what happens in a dream is unique to that dream. But some events from a person’s day can be incorporated into dreams in two stages. First there is the “day residue” stage, in which emotional events may work their way into a person’s dreams that night. But that is followed by the more mysterious “dream lag” effect, in which those events disappear from the dream landscape — often to be reincorporated roughly a week later. This lag has been documented in studies dating to the 1980s. A 2004 study in The Journal of Sleep Research began to shed some light on this cycle. Researchers reviewed the journals of 470 people who recorded their dreams over a week. The dream-lag effect was strongest among people who viewed their dreams as a chance for self-understanding; their dreams often involved the resolution of problems or emotions tied to relationships. The researchers speculated that the delayed dreams were the mind’s way of working through interpersonal difficulties and even “reformulating” negative memories into more positive ones. Other studies have also shown a connection between dreams and this type of emotional memory processing. THE BOTTOM LINE The dream cycle can be much longer than a single night. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 14429 - Posted: 09.07.2010

By JANE E. BRODY You may think you know why Americans continue to get fatter and develop obesity-related diseases. But the explanation may start long before people have an opportunity to eat too much of the wrong foods and exercise too little. Increasing evidence indicates that the trouble often starts in the womb, when women gain more weight than is needed to produce a healthy, full-size baby. Excessive weight gain in pregnancy, recent findings show, can result in bigger-than-average babies who are prenatally programmed to become overweight children — who, in turn, are more likely to develop diabetes, heart disease and cancer later in life. The Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, reported last year that more than a third of normal-weight women and more than half of overweight and obese women gain more weight than is recommended during pregnancy. Over all, “fewer than 40 percent of pregnant women gain only the recommended amount of weight during their pregnancy,” Dr. Sylvia R. Karasu and Dr. T. Byram Karasu report in their new book “The Gravity of Weight.” While genes play a role in weight issues for some people, recent studies indicate that genetics is not the main reason babies are born too fat. Rather, the new evidence suggests that in addition to gaining significantly more weight than is recommended during pregnancy, more women now start out fatter before they become pregnant. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14428 - Posted: 09.07.2010