By GARDINER HARRIS An experimental drug succeeded in a small clinical trial in bringing about what the researchers called substantial improvements in the behaviors associated with retardation and autism in people with fragile X syndrome, the most common inherited cause of these mental disabilities. The surprising results, disclosed in an interview this week by Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant that makes the drug, grew out of three decades of painstaking genetic research, leaps in the understanding of how the brain works, the advocacy of families who refused to give up, and a chance meeting between two scientists who mistakenly showed up at the same conference. “Just three years ago, I would have said that mental retardation is a disability needing rehab, not a disorder needing medication,” said Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, who was told of the Novartis trial results. “Any positive results from clinical trials will be amazingly hopeful.” Dr. Mark C. Fishman, president of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, cautioned against too much optimism. The trial involved only a few dozen patients, only some of whom benefited from treatment. The drug is likely to be years away from being commercially available and could fail in further clinical trials, he said. “We have been reluctant to make this public because we still need to do more experiments, do them correctly and in a bigger way,” Dr. Fishman said. “But our group feels pretty good about the data.” Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Intelligence
Link ID: 14033 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By TARA PARKER-POPE After we hit 40, many of us begin to worry about our aging brains. Will we spend our middle years searching for car keys and forgetting names? The new book “The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind,” by Barbara Strauch, has the answers, and the news is surprisingly upbeat. Sure, brains can get forgetful as they get old, but they can also get better with age, reports Ms. Strauch, who is also the health editor at The New York Times. Ms. Strauch, who previously tackled teenage brains in her book “The Primal Teen,” spoke with me this week about aging brains and the people who have them. Here’s our conversation: Q. After exploring the teenage brain, why did you decide to write a book about grown-ups? A. Well, I have a middle-aged brain, for one thing. When I would go give talks about “The Primal Teen,” I’d be driven to the airport or back by a middle-aged person, and they’d turn to me and say: “You should do something about my brain. My brain is suddenly horrible. I can’t remember names.” That’s why I started looking into it. I had my own middle-aged issues like going into an elevator and seeing somebody and thinking, “Who are you?” Q. So what’s the bad news about the middle-aged brain? A. Obviously, there are issues with short-term memory. There are declines in processing speed and in neurotransmitters, the chemicals in our brain. But as it turns out, modern middle age is from 40 to 65. During this long time in the middle, if we’re relatively healthy our brains may have a few issues, but on balance they’re better than ever during that period. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 14032 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Dave Munger Across the animal kingdom, the decision of whether or not to be faithful to a mate often comes down to Darwinian considerations. Dear Darwin, I’m seeking the ideal mate, and I just don’t know what to do. I could mate with the biggest, strongest male in my niche, but all the other females are just as interested in him as I am, and I’m worried he won’t give our offspring and me the attention we deserve. I could have a less-attractive male all to myself, but then I run the risk of having inferior offspring. I’m half-tempted to pair up with a runt, but then mate with the hunk on the side. What do you think? Is monogamy all it’s cracked up to be? — Evolving in Evanston Dear Evolving, You said it, sister! True monogamy is actually quite rare among animals. Take birds, for example. While there are lots of socially monogamous birds, pairing up for a season or even for life, true loyalty is much more rare. As Jeremy Yoder, a graduate student who studies symbiosis in moths and Joshua trees notes on his blog, as many as 90 percent of bird species “cheat” on their mates, and about 11 percent of chicks aren’t fathered by the bird the mother has paired with. ©2005-2009 Seed Media Group LLC.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14031 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nikhil Swaminathan The argument over whether intelligence is innate or environmentally influenced has raged for more than a century. One of the most recent issues in the nature versus nurture debate is the effect of breast-feeding on IQ. Research shows that the fatty acids in human milk may influence brain development. Using that data as a springboard, a group of scientists, led by a team at the King's College London Institute of Psychiatry, set out to determine how the makeup of infants interacts with their mothers' milk to affect intelligence. Their findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA: breastfeeding can boost a baby's intelligence quotient if the newborn has a certain version of a gene, called FADS2 (fatty acid desaturase 2), which affects how fatty acids are processed. "We were searching for an empirical example that would allow us to show scientists that it is possible to use the environment as a tool, to uncover novel genes that are important for human outcomes—including diseases," says study co-author Terrie Moffitt, a psychiatry professor of at King's College. "Our chain of logic from environment to genetic marker allowed us to discover for the first time the link between the FADS2 gene and the IQ, an important child health outcome." The genetic marker that Moffitt refers to is located in the FADS2 gene, which has two primary variations. The new study, based on 1,000 New Zealander children (a portion of whom were breast-fed) in the early 1970s as well as on more than 2,000 breast-fed kids who lived in the U.K. in the mid 1990s, showed that 90 percent of the subjects had at least one copy of the more common version of FADS2 and 50 percent of them had two copies. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 14030 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Yoshiaki Kikuchi and Madoka Noriuchi It’s probably not surprising that mothers excel at recognizing and interpreting the moods and emotions of their infants. Although infants can’t speak, mothers seem to know what their babies are thinking: they smile when their baby smiles and they frown when their baby is upset. Research suggests that the mother’s ability to understand the needs of her infant is very important for establishing a secure mother-infant relationship. However, the neural mechanisms that underlie these behaviors are poorly understood. Such knowledge is crucial for understanding normal as well as abusive and neglectful mothering. In recent years, several studies have been carried out using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to better understand how a mother’s brain responds to her own child’s cues. The most recent, led by neuroscientist Lane Strathearn and colleagues at Baylor College of Medicine, investigated what happens inside the brain of a mother when she looks at the facial expressions of her own infant. In the study, 28 first-time mothers were shown pictures of their seven-month old child that they had never seen before. (The pictures were taken when the mother was not present.) The pictures spanned a wide range of human emotion and included images of the child making happy, sad or neutral faces. These pictures were then matched with images of an unknown infant. The central finding was that seeing the happy face of the mother’s own infant activated all of the key areas in the brain associated with reward processing. These regions include the ventral tegmental area, substantia nigra and the striatum. This finding suggests that for mothers the sight of their smiling baby is a potent reward and represents a uniquely pleasurable experience. Furthermore, this neural response was graded, so that happy faces led to more activation than neutral faces. Sad faces generated the least activation. In other words, the response of mothers in their reward areas seemed to directly mirror the emotions the infant displayed. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 14029 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Shaoni Bhattacharya CAN'T find a mate? Try parthenogenesis. The type of asexual reproduction may be part of an extreme survival strategy for sharks. In parthenogenesis, females' eggs start dividing without being fertilised. This produces daughters that are genetically similar to the mother. It was first observed in a captive hammerhead shark in 2001, but this was an isolated incident, and the shark pup died after three days, making it difficult to say much about its evolutionary significance. Kevin Feldheim at the Field Museum in Chicago, and an international team of colleagues, have now shown that the incident was not exceptional and sharks born from a virgin mother can survive for many years (Journal of Heredity, vol 101, p 374). The team were inspired by the 2001 birth to keep eggs produced by a captive white-spotted bamboo shark at the Belle Isle Aquarium of the Detroit Zoological Institute. The female had never encountered a male during her adult life and biologists had assumed the eggs were infertile. To their surprise seven incubated eggs produced two pups that survived five years before they were transferred to another facility. Genetic analysis confirmed that they were parthenogens. "This suggests that parthenogenesis is a viable shark survival strategy," says Paulo Prodöhl of Queen's University Belfast, UK, who is investigating a possible case of virgin birth in the whitetip reef shark. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 14028 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Greg Miller For most people, it's trivially easy to reach for an object with one hand and keep the other hand still. But in people with a rare inherited condition, when the brain orders one hand to move, the other hand performs the same movement at the same time. Now scientists think they've found a gene mutation that's responsible for this "mirror movement" disorder. The find could yield insights into how the brain gets wired during development. The discovery is exciting, says Susan Ackerman, a neurogeneticist at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, who was not involved in the research. The mutation affects a receptor for a signaling molecule called netrin that is involved in one of the best-studied pathways in developmental neuroscience, she says, but all of that work has been done in animals such as mice, worms, and fruit flies. "To my knowledge, this is the first indication that it's really important in humans too." Mirror movements are a rare and puzzling phenomenon. Babies often exhibit mirror movements in which, for example, an intentional grasping movement with one hand or a kick with one leg is accompanied by a similar involuntary movement by the other side. But these anomalies almost never persist into adulthood, says Guy Rouleau, a neurologist at the University of Montreal in Canada. However, Rouleau and colleagues have recently identified two families—one in Iran and one in Canada—in which some individuals exhibit mirror movements as adults. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Laterality; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14027 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Nora Schultz HANDICRAFTS were never my strong point at school. For each project I attempted, I'd struggle with tools and techniques that didn't suit a left-hander like me, which often made me wonder why humans are wired to prefer using one side of the body over the other. Apart from a few wrist aches, though, my handedness hasn't been too much of a burden. Contrast this with the bad luck of a toad that fails to jump away from a snake approaching from its right, just because its right eye is much worse at spotting the danger than its left. Clearly, such asymmetry can have fatal consequences. All the more perplexing, then, that creatures across the animal kingdom - including mammals, birds, fish and invertebrates - prefer to use one paw, eye or even antenna for certain tasks, even though they may then be let down in crucial situations by their weaker side. The cause of this trait, called lateralisation, is fairly simple: one side of the brain, which generally controls the opposite side of the body, is more dominant than the other when processing certain tasks. Why would animal brains ever have evolved a characteristic that seems to put them in harm's way? Armed with a spate of ingenious cognitive tests, a group of animal psychologists think they've finally found the answer, in the shape of some previously overlooked benefits to a lopsided brain-body connection. Not before time. Up until the not-too-distant past, it had been broadly assumed that handedness was a uniquely human trait that evolved as a by-product of our amazing capacity for language. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Laterality; Evolution
Link ID: 14026 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Helen Briggs Brain surgery to treat Parkinson's disease is more effective than medication alone, a study has found. More than 300 patients in the UK were fitted with electrodes that deliver an electric current deep within the brain. The technique, known as deep brain stimulation, activates areas of the brain that control movement, improving symptoms such as tremors and stiffness. One person in every 500 has Parkinson's but surgery is generally used only as a last resort. Deep brain stimulation involves implanting a wire, with electrodes at its tip, into one of three areas of the brain. The wire is connected to a small "neurostimulator" unit rather like a pacemaker, which is implanted under the skin of the chest. This unit sends electrical impulses along the wire and into the brain. The impulses block the electrical signals that cause Parkinson's disease symptoms. The UK team investigated 366 patients, who received either surgery and medication, or medication alone. When followed up after a year, the researchers, based in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Oxford and London, found those who had undergone surgery reported a better quality of life. Writing in Lancet Neurology, they say surgery is an important treatment option for patients with Parkinson's. Professor Keith Wheatley of the University of Birmingham told the BBC: "It is not a cure. What it does is help control symptoms more than medication alone." The 10-year study, funded by the charity Parkinson's UK, the Medical Research Council and the Department of Health, is said to be the largest trial of its kind in the world. (C)BBC

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 14025 - Posted: 04.29.2010

By MAGGIE FOX WASHINGTON - Despite years of speculation about the best way to prevent Alzheimer's disease, there's no proof yet that anything can stave off the devastating and incurable brain breakdown, an expert panel has concluded. "We wish we could tell people that taking a pill or doing a puzzle every day would prevent this terrible disease, but current evidence doesn't support this," said Dr. Martha Daviglus of Northwestern University in Chicago, who chaired an independent panel meeting at the National Institutes of Health outside Washington. The group of experts looked at the dozens of studies that have suggested ways to prevent Alzheimer's — everything from doing puzzles to increasing social interaction — and found none were strong enough to constitute proof. Most of the studies that have been done show associations, but not cause and effect, Daviglus said. "These associations are examples of the classic chicken or the egg quandary. Are people able to stay mentally sharp over time because they are physically active and socially engaged or are they simply more likely to stay physically active and socially engaged because they are mentally sharp?" she asked. The 15 experts met under the NIH's state-of-the-science conference program, which aims to direct future research in an important study area. Copyright 2010 Reuters.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 14024 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Brandon Keim The most detailed genetic investigation ever of multiple sclerosis has produced more questions than answers. Using extremely fine-grained analytical tools, scientists compared genetic information in three sets of identical twins. One of each pair had MS, and the other didn’t — yet their genes proved essentially identical. “We find no smoking gun on the genetic level,” said National Center for Genome Resources geneticist Stephen Kingsmore, co-author of the study published April 28 in Nature. The research cost $1.5 million, and the scientists took 18 months to sequence 2.8 billion DNA units in each twin, and determine whether they came from the mother or father. Most genomic comparisons look for differences in a just handful of suspect genes, and even whole-genome approaches don’t differentiate between parental contributions. The researchers also analyzed the twins’ CD4 cells, a type of white blood cell that plays a central role in the development of MS. In these cells, the researchers sequenced epigenomes — chemical instructions that turn genes on and off — and transcriptomes, or a chemical record of genes that are actively coding proteins. Wired.com © 2009 Condé Nast Digital.

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14023 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Imagine seeing better by thinking differently. That’s a vision with a future, according to Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer. Eyesight markedly improved when people were experimentally induced to believe that they could see especially well, Langer and her colleagues report in the April Psychological Science. Such expectations actually enhanced visual clarity, rather than simply making volunteers more alert or motivated to focus on objects, they assert. Langer’s new findings build on long-standing evidence that visual perception depends not just on relaying information from the eyes to the brain but on experience-based assumptions about what can be seen in particular situations. Those expectations lead people to devote limited attention to familiar scenes and, as a result, to ignore unusual objects and events. In perhaps the most eye-popping of Langer’s new findings, 20 men and women who saw a reversed eye chart — arranged so that letters became progressively larger further down the chart, with a giant “E” at the bottom — accurately reported more letters from the smallest two lines than they did when shown a traditional eye chart with the big letters on top. All volunteers had normal eyesight. These results reflect people’s expectation, based on experience with standard eye charts, that letters are easy to see at the top and become increasingly difficult to distinguish on lower lines, the researchers suggest. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 14022 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Liz Else What's so special about this centre? It opens this week at the University of Sussex, a university founded along interdisciplinary lines in the 1960s. Instead of single-discipline schools, there was, for example, the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, where I studied. It had a mixture of philosophers, psychologists, linguists and artificial intelligence researchers. Which disciplines are you bringing together? Mainly psychology, neuroscience, medical sciences including psychiatry, and informatics, computer science and AI. A key feature of the centre will be to integrate theoretical research and practical work into treatments for conditions ranging from coma to schizophrenia. One of the dominant theoretical approaches was championed by Francis Crick and Christof Koch, who wanted to take a pure, simple, conscious experience and match it to something going on in the brain. This correlational approach can leave you dissatisfied, however, because while someone can be conscious of, say, the redness of something, and we can see activity in a region of their brain, it doesn't tell us why that activity and the redness go together. It is very challenging. We think there is no such thing as an experience of pure redness. Every experience is composed of many different parts and influenced by many common things, but they are all bound together into an integrated whole - you, the person having the conscious experience. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14021 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Studying chilli peppers is helping scientists create a new type of painkiller which could stop pain at its source. A team at the University of Texas says a substance similar to capsaicin, which makes chilli peppers hot, is found in the human body at sites of pain. And blocking the production of this substance can stop chronic pain, the team found. They report their findings in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Capsaicin is the primary ingredient in hot chilli peppers which causes a burning sensation. It does this by binding to receptors present on the cells inside the body. Similarly, when the body is injured, it releases capsaicin-like substances - fatty acids called oxidized linoleic acid metabolites or OLAMs - and these, via receptors, cause pain, the researchers have found. Dr Kenneth Hargreaves, senior researcher at the Dental School at the University of Texas, and his team next set out to see if they could block these newly discovered pain pathways. Lab work on mice showed that by knocking out a gene for the receptors, there was no sensitivity to capsaicin. Armed with this knowledge they set about making drugs to do the same. (C)BBC

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 14020 - Posted: 04.27.2010

Janelle Weaver Mammals may possess the biochemical machinery to produce morphine — a painkiller found in the opium poppy, according to a new study. Meinhart Zenk of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St Louis, Missouri, and colleagues detected traces of morphine in the urine of mice after injecting chemical precursors of the drug. They report their findings today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Like other opioids, morphine is a potent, potentially addictive pain reliever. Scientists have speculated for decades that animals naturally synthesize morphine because specialized receptors in the brain respond to the drug. Trace amounts of morphine had been found in human urine and cells2. But studies using living animals yielded inconclusive results because of possible contamination from external sources of morphine in their food or in the environment. "This paper seems to be one of the most definitive I've seen," says Chris Evans, a neurobiologist and expert on opioid drugs at the University of California, Los Angeles. "They've convincingly shown that there's a pathway there which could possibly produce morphine." Alkaloids are ring-shaped chemical compounds that contain nitrogen. The presence of an alkaloid called tetrahydropapaveroline (THP) in brain tissue and urine has led to speculation that it may be a precursor to morphine made naturally inside the body. Opium poppyThe mouse pathway for making morphine is likely to have evolved independently from that of the opium poppy.A. Kohlberg, Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 14019 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By S.I. Rosenbaum BELMONT — The tiny red eye of the Quotient diagnostic device can’t see a child’s face. It can’t see him fidget in class. It doesn’t know what his grades are. But it can see even the subtle moves a child makes, down to the millimeter. According to the company that manufactures the device and the McLean Hospital psychiatrist who invented it, the Quotient’s motion tracker can help a doctor determine whether a child has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. The makers call it the first objective test for ADHD. But BioBehavioral Diagnostics must overcome skepticism among many doctors, who have seen other diagnostic tests for ADHD flop. The absence of a reliable test, combined with the wide use of behavior-modifying drugs, has made ADHD a controversial disorder. Often, parents are left unsure about what to do when their child is one of the 5 to 10 percent of children diagnosed with ADHD, which is characterized by hyperactivity, inattention, and impulsivity. “These diagnoses are based on behavioral descriptors, or subjective states of being,’’ said Judith Warner, author of “We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication.’’ “That makes it suspect in the eyes of people who don’t understand it.’’ BioBehavioral Diagnostics, of Westford and Philadelphia, says its device can change that, by distinguishing between the restlessness and jitters of a child with ADHD and the movements of one who does not have the disorder. © 2010 NY Times Co.

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 14018 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Virginia Morell East Africa’s elephants face few threats in their savanna home, aside from humans and lions. But the behemoths are terrified of African bees, and with good reason. An angry swarm can sting elephants around their eyes and inside their trunks and pierce the skin of young calves. Now, a new study shows that the pachyderms utter a distinctive rumble in response to the sound of bees, the first time an alarm call has been identified in elephants. “It’s an important finding,” says Karen McComb a behavioral ecologist at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. “It not only provides the first demonstration that elephants use alarm calls but also shows that these may have very specific meanings.” Indeed, the study suggests that this alarm call isn’t just a generalized vocalization but means specifically, “Bees!” says Lucy King, a postgraduate zoologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and the study’s lead author. Several other species, including primates and birds, make calls that warn others of danger. Because elephants also have an extensive repertoire of vocalizations, researchers have long suspected that certain calls have specific meanings. But it’s not easy for researchers to link the pachyderms’ calls—many of which are beyond the range of human hearing—to particular events. A few years ago, however, King and colleagues documented the fear elephants have of bees via a series of playback experiments: When they hear buzzing bees, the pachyderms turn and run away, shaking their heads while making a call that King terms the “bee rumble." © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Evolution
Link ID: 14017 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By TARA PARKER-POPE Parents and teachers often tell children to pay attention — to be a “good listener.” But what if your child’s brain doesn’t know how to listen? That’s the challenge for children with auditory processing disorder, a poorly understood syndrome that interferes with the brain’s ability to recognize and interpret sounds. It’s been estimated that 2 to 5 percent of children have the disorder, said Gail D. Chermak, an expert on speech and hearing sciences at Washington State University, and it’s likely that many cases have gone undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. The symptoms of A.P.D. — trouble paying attention and following directions, low academic performance, behavior problems and poor reading and vocabulary — are often mistaken for attention problems or even autism. But now the disorder is getting some overdue attention, thanks in part to the talk-show host Rosie O’Donnell and her 10-year-old son, Blake, who has A.P.D. In the foreword to a new book, “The Sound of Hope” (Ballantine) — by Lois Kam Heymann, the speech pathologist and auditory therapist who helped Blake — Ms. O’Donnell recounts how she learned something was amiss. It began with a haircut before her son started first grade. Blake had already been working with a speech therapist on his vague responses and other difficulties, so when he asked for a “little haircut” and she pressed him on his meaning, she told the barber he wanted short hair like his brother’s. But in the car later, Blake erupted in tears, and Ms. O’Donnell realized her mistake. By “little haircut,” Blake meant little hair should be cut. He wanted a trim. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Hearing
Link ID: 14016 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Wendy Zukerman Rats with damaged spines can walk again thanks to acupuncture. But it's not due to improvements in their energy flow or "chi". Instead, the ancient treatment seems to stop nerve cell death by reducing inflammation. Acupuncture's scientific credentials are growing. Trials show that it improves sensory and motor functions in people with spinal cord injuries. To find out why, Doo Choi and his colleagues at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, South Korea, damaged the spines of 75 rats. One-third were given acupuncture in two locations: Shuigou – between their snout and mouth, and Yanglingquan – in the upper hind leg. Others received no treatment or "simulated acupuncture". After 35 days, the acupuncture group were able to stand at a steeper incline than the others and walk better. Staining their paws with ink revealed that their forelimb-hindlimb coordination was fairly consistent and that there was very little toe dragging, whereas the control groups still dragged their feet. The rats in the acupuncture group also had less nerve cell death and lower levels of proteins known to induce inflammation after spinal cord injury and make neural damage worse. One explanation is that sharp needles prompt a stress response that dampens down inflammation. In humans, the inflammation that follows spinal cord injury is known to be responsible for nerve cell death. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 14015 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Pansy the chimpanzee died surrounded by friends and family who cared for her as best they could and reacted to her demise with silent somberness. Pansy’s story, as well as those of two mothers unable to let go of their deceased infants, raises the possibility that chimpanzees know when a companion has died and realize that he or she will never return, two new studies report in the April 27 Current Biology. “Chimpanzees may have greater awareness of the finality of death than has previously been believed,” says psychologist James Anderson of the University of Stirling in Scotland, who directed the study of Pansy’s death. Pansy’s case provides the first glimpse of chimps’ responses to a companion’s natural death, Anderson says. Two video cameras in an indoor enclosure at a safari park recorded what happened before and after Pansy’s death on December 7, 2008. In the days before Pansy’s demise three adult chimps, including her daughter, groomed her regularly. Grooming increased as Pansy’s breathing became labored in the 10 minutes preceding death. A male chimp stood over Pansy’s lifeless body and pulled at her left arm and then tried to open her mouth. He jumped onto the platform where Pansy lay and charged in an aggressive display. After pounding on Pansy’s body, he ran off. The next day, the three chimps watched silently as keepers removed Pansy’s body. None of them slept on Pansy’s deathbed for five days. For several weeks, survivors did little and ate less than usual. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 14014 - Posted: 06.24.2010