Steve Connor In 2000 President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair announced in a joint satellite broadcast from the White House and Downing Street that scientists had completed the first draft of the human genome. Ten years on and medical researchers are now enjoying a 'genome bonanza' that has begun to elucidate the complex role of genes in human health. Three such studies are published today. One describes how a gene linked to obesity is also associated with mental deterioration, a second shows how another gene affects memory and thinking in old age and the third study identifies the part of the human genome affected by a healthy Mediterranean diet – or more specifically virgin olive oil. When the draft genome was published, President Clinton ruffled a few atheistic feathers when he suggested that the milestone represents the translation of a mysterious code designed by a higher being. "Today, we are learning the language in which God created life," he said. Whether God-given or not, it took another three years for scientists to finally complete the entire 'book of life', as the human genome came to be called. And it was soon clear that as a powerful research tool it would unleash untold insights into the workings of the human body, as well as our relationships to the wider living world. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13993 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Sandra G. Boodman For Susan Benda, the ritual was becoming routine: She would awaken in the middle of the night and pad to the bathroom, then stick her head under a steaming hot shower. That was the only way to briefly quell the infuriating scalp itch that had plagued her for more than a year. A lawyer for the federal government who lives in the District, Benda had amassed an impressive array of shampoos, ranging from cheap drugstore brands to expensive prescription remedies, some foul-smelling, others floral-scented. She had consulted three dermatologists, one of whom said her unremitting itching, which grew worse at night, had a psychiatric cause; the other two said it was allergic. Her internist had raised the ominous prospect of cancer. She had undergone a biopsy on her neck to check for a rare digestive problem after a mysterious itchy rash appeared there. In February, when an allergist took one look at Benda's neck and told her what was really wrong, she was dumbfounded. "Do I laugh or do I cry?" she remembers thinking. "What kept the doctors from seeing what I have? And why didn't I think of it?" In August 2008 Benda made an appointment with a well-known Washington dermatologist; her head had been itching for several weeks. As the doctor inspected her scalp, Benda described the problem and said it felt as though "red ants were crawling all over my head." That description, and the lack of any apparent cause, led the doctor to tell Benda her itch was neurotic in origin. © 2010 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 13992 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Celeste Biever A gene variant that helps us gain weight may shrink our brains into the bargain. Elderly obese people are more likely to develop dementia and their brains tend to be smaller than those of people of normal weight. This has been put down to clogged arteries slowing the blood flow to the brain, killing neurons. But now Paul Thompson's team at the University of California, Los Angeles, has found that a gene variant linked to obesity may harm the brain directly. Half of Europeans and West Africans have a variant of a gene called FTO that increases the risk of obesity by two-thirds. The variant is thought to affect metabolism and fat storage. When Thompson's team looked at brain scans of 206 healthy people aged 70 to 80, they found that those with at least one copy of the FTO variant had 8 per cent less volume in their frontal lobes and 12 per cent less in the occipital lobes, compared with their counterparts lacking the variant. The brains of those with the variant "looked 16 years older", Thompson reckons. The study's participants did not have cognitive problems. However, these brain areas are critical to problem-solving and perception, and brain atrophy there increases the risk of dementia and memory problems, Thompson says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13991 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By HENRY FOUNTAIN Songbirds are not born with songs in their heads, but learn them from others. And as in a game of telephone, it would seem natural that, over generations, the songs might change. That is what happens with many species, some more dramatically than others. The songs of indigo buntings change so much, for example, that songs that are five years apart are almost completely different. But with other species, the songs are more stable. Now, thanks to some old audio recordings, researchers have determined just how stable some songbirds’ songs can be. The songbird in question is not just any old bird, but a member of a famous group of finches that Charles Darwin studied in the Galápagos Islands. Using recordings of Geospiza fortis, the medium ground finch, made 38 years apart, Jeffrey Podos of the University of Massachusetts and Eben Goodale, who is now at the University of California, San Diego, found that some songs have persisted over four decades. The researchers conducted a statistical analysis of songs, using elements like number of notes, note duration and trill rate. As they report in Biology Letters, in each year’s recordings there is a lot of variability in the songs. But from one period to another, there are some songs that match quite closely. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 13990 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Ingrid Wickelgren MONTREAL—When we're under immediate stress—say, we are about to give a speech or about to be mugged—we either fight or flee, or so scientists have long preached. But some psychologists are now suggesting that this scenario may apply mainly to males. Men get antisocial under pressure, but women tend to react in the opposite way: they "tend and befriend," engaging in nurturing and social networking, perhaps as a way to protect their offspring, according to a theory proffered by neuroscientist Shelley Taylor of the University of California, Los Angeles. Here at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society 2010 annual meeting, psychologist Mara Mather of the University of Southern California presented powerful new support for Taylor's hypothesis in the divergent ways that stressed men and women respond to faces. Mather and her colleagues asked male and female subjects to place their hand in ice water for three minutes, an activity that makes levels of the stress hormone cortisol shoot up over the next hour or so. Then these subjects—and a comparison group whose hands had been comfortably immersed in warm water—looked at angry or neutral faces while lying inside a brain scanner. These conditions revealed a striking sex difference in the brain in the extent to which men and women process faces, and perform emotional assessments of others, under stress. The men under the influence of high cortisol levels showed less activity in a key face-processing region of the brain (the fusiform face area or FFA) than the unstressed men did, suggesting that stressful situations diminish the ability of men to evaluate facial expressions. By contrast, the brains of the women under strain worked harder on the faces: in these females, the FFA was more active than it was in women who did not experience the cortisol boost. © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Stress; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 13989 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The brains of children with attention-deficit disorders respond to on-the-spot rewards in the same way as they do to medication, say scientists. A Nottingham University team measured brain activity as children played a computer game, offering extra points for less impulsive behaviour. Their findings, published in Biological Psychiatry, could mean lower doses of drugs such as Ritalin in severe cases. But they warn teachers and parents may often struggle to give instant rewards. Estimates vary, but it is believed that up to 5% of children in the UK have some form of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This can lead to behavioural problems including impulsive actions, fidgeting and poor attention span, and can affect a child's academic and social progress. In severe cases, stimulant drugs such as Ritalin, which act on parts of the brain associated with attention and behaviour, can be given. In addition, parents are often asked to try to influence the child's actions directly by rewarding positive behaviour and making sure that there are negative consequences if a child behaves badly. Research has suggested that, unlike in non-ADHD children, these incentives and disincentives only work well if delivered on the spot, as opposed to later in the day or week. The Nottingham team wanted to look at the effects of this "behaviour therapy" in the brain of the child. They devised a computer game in which children had to "catch" aliens of a certain colour, while avoiding aliens of a different colour. The game was designed to test the children's ability to resist the impulse to grab the wrong sort of alien. To test whether incentives made a difference, in one variant of the game the reward for catching the right alien was increased fivefold, as was the penalty for catching the wrong one. (C)BBC

Keyword: ADHD; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13988 - Posted: 04.19.2010

By Brian Alexander, contributor The student naval aviator was flying in formation — a high pressure maneuver anytime, but especially when you’re still trying to make the grade — when he suddenly started laughing. Hysterically laughing. Laughing so hard he endangered the flight. This wasn’t the first time the man had broken out in uncontrollable laughter at a seemingly strange moment. In fact, the young pilot had been waking up other members of his household in the middle of night as he, sound asleep, broke out in peals of laughter. As it turned out, the pilot, who showed no other symptoms when he was documented with the problem in 1997, was experiencing a rare form of epileptic episode called gelastic seizure. The main symptom of a gelastic seizure is uncontrolled laughter. Laughing or crying at inappropriate moments, or out of context to one’s circumstances — crying in the middle of a lecture, for example, or laughing at a funeral — is something most of us experience at least once. However, as the case of the pilot illustrates, there can be a variety of underlying causes for these ill-timed outbursts. Multiple sclerosis, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease or any number of conditions can cause brain lesions or damage the communications between different parts of the brain. The result is pathological laughing or crying, also sometimes called involuntary emotional expression disorder. Now, Cleveland Clinic researchers are testing an experimental treatment, a combination of two medications, dextromethorphan and low-dose quinidine, to help control the involuntary outbursts. © 2010 Microsoft

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 13987 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A tropical parasitic disease is becoming an increasingly common cause of stroke, experts say. Some 18m people worldwide have Chagas disease, caused by an infection with the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi. Recently, researchers discovered having this disease puts the individual at increased risk of stroke due to heart complications and blood clots. In Lancet Neurology, the Spanish team warns of a growing but neglected stroke burden as the infected population ages. Chagas disease is endemic in Latin America. But emigration of millions of people to Europe, North America, Japan and Australia over the past 20 years has also made Chagas disease an emerging health problem in these countries with the potential to cause a substantial disease burden, say the investigators. One study estimates that more than 300,000 Latin American immigrants with Chagas disease could be living in the US. Another problem, say the research team, is that many patients with Chagas disease do not know they are infected. Dr Francisco Javier Carod-Artal from the Virgen de la Luz hospital in Cuenca said a recent study showed that in just under half of Chagas patients treated for a stroke had not yet been diagnosed with the infection. He and colleague Joaquim Gascon, from Barcelona, say stroke patients from endemic countries should be screened for Chagas. And doctors and the public need to be made aware of the increased risk of stroke with this disease. "Clinical trials are needed," they add, to assess if blood thinning drugs might help prevent stroke in Chagas. (C)BBC

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 13986 - Posted: 04.19.2010

by Carl Zimmer The qualities that set a great athlete apart from the rest of us lie not just in the muscles and the lungs but also between the ears. That’s because athletes need to make complicated decisions in a flash. One of the most spectacular examples of the athletic brain operating at top speed came in 2001, when the Yankees were in an American League playoff game with the Oakland Athletics. Shortstop Derek Jeter managed to grab an errant throw coming in from right field and then gently tossed the ball to catcher Jorge Posada, who tagged the base runner at home plate. Jeter’s quick decision saved the game—and the series—for the Yankees. To make the play, Jeter had to master both conscious decisions, such as whether to intercept the throw, and unconscious ones. These are the kinds of unthinking thoughts he must make in every second of every game: how much weight to put on a foot, how fast to rotate his wrist as he releases a ball, and so on. In recent years neuroscientists have begun to catalog some fascinating differences between average brains and the brains of great athletes. By understanding what goes on in athletic heads, researchers hope to understand more about the workings of all brains—those of sports legends and couch potatoes alike. As Jeter’s example shows, an athlete’s actions are much more than a set of automatic responses; they are part of a dynamic strategy to deal with an ever-changing mix of intricate challenges. Even a sport as seemingly straightforward as pistol shooting is surprisingly complex. A marksman just points his weapon and fires, and yet each shot calls for many rapid decisions, such as how much to bend the elbow and how tightly to contract the shoulder muscles.

Keyword: Intelligence
Link ID: 13985 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jeanna Bryner Catching a partner checking out a hot guy or gal can do a number on even the most confident person. New research suggests the resulting jealousy can actually distract a person so much they miss what's right in front of their eyes. In the study, heterosexual romantic couples sat near each other at individual computers separated by a curtain. The women had to pick out certain landscape and architectural photos that were rotated 90-degrees within images of streams that flashed onto the screen. During the photo session, the participants also had to ignore occasional emotionally unpleasant images that were gruesome or graphic in some way. Meanwhile, the guys were asked to rate the attractiveness of landscapes that appeared on their screens. Simple enough. Then, partway through the experiment, the experimenter announced the male partner would rate the attractiveness of other single women. At the end of the experiment, the gals indicated how uneasy they felt about their partner scoping out other women. Jealous women were found to be more distracted. The more jealous they reported feeling, the more distracted they were by the emotional images and therefore they were less able to pick out the targets they were being tested on. © 2010 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 13984 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Intense, robot-assisted therapy can help stroke victims regain some arm movement years after their brain injury, U.S. researchers have found. Rehabilitation normally starts immediately after a stroke and lasts six months. Conventional thinking has been that any rehabilitation beyond that initial period has little benefit for stroke survivors, but recent studies are starting to suggest otherwise. A three-year randomized control trial of 127 veterans in the U.S. found that stroke victims who had 12 weeks of robot-assisted therapy for their stroke-damaged arm had an improved quality of life compared with those who had no additional therapy beyond the initial rehabilitation period. The results of the study appear in Friday's online issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The veterans in the study had experienced a stroke that resulted in moderate to severe disability in an arm. The strokes had occurred at least six months earlier and, on average, five years earlier. After six months, the 49 patients who received robotic therapy designed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed clinically significant upper-arm function compared with the 28 patients who did not receive specific therapy for their upper limb. Another 50 patients did similar high-intensity exercises with a therapist but without the aid of the robotic device. © CBC 2010

Keyword: Stroke; Regeneration
Link ID: 13983 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Lizzie Buchen Ecstasy, a drug that is illegal in most countries, is showing increasing potential as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to clinical-trial results presented at a conference in San Jose, California, today. The effect seems to continue for years after the initial treatment. People can develop PTSD after traumatic experiences such as sexual abuse, or witnessing extreme acts of violence. Patients are plagued by flashbacks and nightmares, and often become emotionally numb and easily frightened. Treatment includes cognitive behavioural therapy and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as paroxetine (Paxil) and sertraline (Zoloft), but many people with PTSD do not respond to these treatments. Ecstasy, otherwise known as MDMA (3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine), causes the release of neurotransmitters such as serotonin in the brain, and so could help to decrease the patient's fear and defensiveness during treatment The drug was used during therapy in the 1970s but with the rise of rave culture in the 1980s, the US Drug Enforcement Agency and the World Health Organization listed MDMA as a Schedule I drug — a classification reserved for drugs with no medical use and high potential for abuse — making it nearly impossible to use in clinical trials. Since 1986, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit research group based in Santa Cruz, California, has struggled to obtain permission to study the therapeutic potential of MDMA, other psychedelic drugs and marijuana, but now the group's efforts are beginning to bear fruit. © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Stress
Link ID: 13982 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Connor The human mind may be inherently incapable of dealing with more than two tasks at a time according to a study showing that "multi-tasking" skills are limited by the physical division of the brain into two hemispheres. Scientists have found that when people have to carry out two tasks simultaneously their brains divide each job up so that one is performed largely by the left side of the brain and the other is carried out mainly on the right. The study suggests that this basic division of the brain into two halves may explain why human beings tend to prefer a simple choice between two options rather than three or more. It might even explain why the Liberal Democrats, as the third political party, find it hard to get a look in at general elections. Sylvain Charron and Etienne Koechlin of France's National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris, discovered the way the brain divides up two simultaneous tasks. They asked 32 volunteers to carry out two different mental puzzles while their brains were being scanned by an MRI machine. "Each subject was performing two tasks concurrently. One task was to pair upper case letters and the other task was to pair lower case letters together. It was a very simple task and the subjects had to switch back and forth between them," Dr Koechlin said. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13981 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By John Horgan You know that psychedelics are making a comeback when the New York Times says so on page 1. In “Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In,” John Tierney reports on how doctors at schools like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, UCLA and NYU are testing the potential of psilocybin and other hallucinogens for treating depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism—and for inducing spiritual experiences. Tierney’s brisk overview neglects to mention the most mind-bending of all psychedelics: dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. It was first synthesized by a British chemist in the 1930s, and its psychotropic properties were discovered some 20 years later by the Hungarian-born chemist Stephen Szara, who later became a researcher for the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Why is DMT so fascinating? For starters, DMT is the only psychedelic known to occur naturally in the human body. In 1972, the Nobel laureate Julius Axelrod of the National Institutes of Health discovered DMT in human brain tissue, leading to speculation that the compound plays a role in psychosis. Research into that possibility—and into psychedelics in general--was abandoned because of the growing backlash against these compounds. In 1990, however, Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico, obtained permission from federal authorities to inject DMT into human volunteers. Strassman, a Buddhist, suspected that endogenous DMT might contribute to mystical experiences. © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13980 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Erik Vance Big test coming up? Having trouble concentrating? Try a little estrogen. Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, report in a recent study that hormone fluctuations during a woman’s menstrual cycle may affect the brain as much as do substances such as caffeine, methamphetamines or the popular attention drug Ritalin. Scientists have known for decades that working memory (short-term information processing) is dependent on the chemical dopamine. In fact, drugs like Ritalin mimic dopamine to help people concentrate. Researchers have also had evidence that in rats, estrogen seems to trigger a release of dopamine. The new study from Berkeley, however, is the first to show that cognition is tied to estrogen levels in people—explaining why some women have better or worse cognitive abilities at varying points in their menstrual cycles. The Berkeley team examined 24 healthy women, some of whom had naturally high levels of dopamine and some of whom had low levels, as indicated by genetic testing. As expected, those with the lower levels struggled with complicated working memory tasks, such as repeating a series of five numbers in reverse order. When the test was repeated during ovulation, however, when estrogen levels are highest (usually 10 to 12 days after menstru­ation), these women fared markedly better, improving their performance by about 10 per­cent. Surprisingly, those with naturally high dopamine levels took a nosedive in their ability to do complicated mental tasks at that point in their cycle.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; ADHD
Link ID: 13979 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Emily Sohn To be an American woman and feel good about your body requires a powerful inner strength and the will to resist an unrealistically skinny social ideal. But even women who truly accept themselves as they are have internalized the desire to be thin, suggests a new study that looked deep into women's brains. The study found that the brains of healthy women resemble those of bulimic women when confronted with the idea that they might be overweight. The findings might eventually help doctors better evaluate and treat body image issues, no matter how subtle. "This is kind of validating the suspicion that most women are teetering on the edge of an eating disorder," said Mark Allen, a neuroscientist at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. "If the brain response is so strong in these apparently healthy women, maybe most of us could use a little dose of what it is that you go through in an eating disorder therapy." Who are you? What makes you unique? What fulfills you? Are you friendly, cheerful, grumpy or important? When people consider questions like these that force them to engage in serious self-reflection, activity picks up in a part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex. Scientists have suspected that this self-reflective part of the brain could betray subconscious thoughts that people might not even know they have. For example, other studies have shown that, in tasks like word-associations, people who don't think they're racist still show racist tendencies when they don't have time to consciously override what's under the surface. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 13978 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Wendy Zukerman She's only horny for a few hours a year – so there's no time to lose. To ensure the male tammar wallaby (Macropus eugenii) is ready for action, he experiences a surge of testosterone when females are on heat. But it has been unclear whether this effect is seasonally hard-wired or somehow caused by the presence of females. It's the latter, says Marilyn Renfree of the University of Melbourne, Australia. With colleagues, she has induced female tammar wallabies to come on heat out of season, and found males still experienced testosterone surges. Adult female tammar wallabies mate once a year – at the end of January, just hours after giving birth. The fertilised embryo then lies dormant for months while the female lactates and tends to her current baby. The embryo's development is reactivated in December, and as soon as it's born, the race to mate is on once more as oestrogen surges through the females for a few hours, making them highly receptive to male advances. The female reproductive cycle is controlled during the first half of the year by suckling young, and in the second half by the hormone melatonin, which responds to the changing light levels of the seasons. If young are removed from their pouch in the first half of the year or females are injected with melatonin in the second half, embryonic development restarts out of season. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 13977 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Helen Thomson BRAIN cells that may underlie our ability to empathise with others have been detected directly in people for the first time. Monkey brains have been shown to contain so-called "mirror" neurons, which fire both when the animal performs an action and when it observes others performing that action. Until now, the only evidence that our brains contain similar neurons has been indirect, derived from functional MRI scans. Now Roy Mukamel at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues have observed mirror neurons directly in humans. They used electrodes to record brain activity in the medial frontal and temporal cortices of 21 people awaiting surgery to treat epilepsy, while they made - or observed others making - grasping actions and facial expressions. The majority of these neurons responded only to the observation or execution of an action, but 8 per cent of the cells responded to both (Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2010.02.045). These areas of the brain are involved in planning and controlling actions, abstract thinking and memory. Mirror neurons were thought to exist primarily in regions of the brain involved in performing actions, so their presence in other regions suggests that this is not their only role. Other studies have found that people who appear to have more active mirror neurons also tend to be more empathetic. Marco Iacoboni, another member of the team and also at UCLA, says his team's results suggest that human mirror neurons provide "a rich reflection of the actions of others". © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 13976 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By CYNTHIA GORNEY Here we are, two fast-talking women on estrogen, staring at a wall of live mitochondria from the brain of a rat. Mitochondria are cellular energy generators of unfathomably tiny size, but these are vivid and big because they were hit with dye in a petri dish and enlarged for projection purposes. They’re winking and zooming, like shooting stars. “Oh, my God,” Roberta Diaz Brinton said. “Look at that one. I love these. I love shooting mitochondria.” Brinton is a brain scientist. Estrogen, particularly in its relationship to the health of the brain, is her obsession. At present it is mine too, but for more selfish reasons. We’re inside a darkened lab room in a research facility at the University of Southern California, where Brinton works. We are both in our 50s. I use estrogen, by means of a small oval patch that adheres to my skin, because of something that began happening to me nine years ago — to my brain, as a matter of fact. Brinton uses estrogen and spends her work hours experimenting with it because of her own brain and also that of a woman whose name, Brinton will say, was Dr. A. She’s dead now, this Dr. A. But during the closing years of her life she had Alzheimer’s, and Brinton would visit her in the hospital. Dr. A. was a distinguished psychotherapist and had vivid stories she could still call to mind about her years in Vienna amid the great European psychologists. “We’d spend hours, me listening to her stories, and I’d walk out of the room,” Brinton told me. “Thirty seconds later, I’d walk back in. I’d say, ‘Dr. A., do you remember me?’ And she was so lovely. She’d say: ‘I’m so sorry. Should I?’ ” The problem with the estrogen question in the year 2010 is that you set out one day to ask it in what sounds like a straightforward way — Yes or no? Do I or do I not go on sticking these patches on my back? Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 13975 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer Viegas Remains of a 1.9-million-year-old human ancestor are so well preserved that they may contain a remnant of the male individual's brain, according to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, where the remains were recently examined. While DNA is very fragile and deteriorates over time, the discovery opens up the remote possibility that soft tissue with preserved DNA still exists in the prehistoric hominid, which could hold an important place on the human family tree. The examination also turned up what seemed to be fossilized insect eggs, according to scientists. They said larvae from the eggs could have fed on the flesh of the human ancestor, Australopithecus sediba, right after his death. While gazing at the hominid's skull as it was being studied with a powerful electromagnetic radiation X-ray process, project leader Lee Berger said he and his team were seeing "structures we can't even imagine in a way that's quite literally unprecedented in paleontological sciences." Berger, a senior research officer and director of the School of Geosciences at the University of Witwatersrand, and his colleagues focused on the teeth and "parts of the body that don't normally fossilize," such as the brain. While further testing is needed, the researchers believe an "extended shadow" hints that a remnant of the brain after its bacterial decay is still present in the ancient remains. © 2010 Discovery Channel

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 13974 - Posted: 06.24.2010