By NATALIE ANGIER The theory of relativity showed us that time and space are intertwined. To which our smarty-pants body might well reply: Tell me something I didn’t already know, Einstein. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time. As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore. The deviations were not exactly Tower of Pisa leanings, amounting to some two or three millimeters’ shift one way or the other. Nevertheless, the directionality was clear and consistent. “When we talk about time, we often use spatial metaphors like ‘I’m looking forward to seeing you’ or ‘I’m reflecting back on the past,’ ” said Lynden K. Miles, who conducted the study with his colleagues Louise K. Nind and C. Neil Macrae. “It was pleasing to us that we could take an abstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in body movements.” The new study, published in January in the journal Psychological Science, is part of the immensely popular field called embodied cognition, the idea that the brain is not the only part of us with a mind of its own. “How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body,” said Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam. “We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.” Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13733 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katherine Harmon Despite living in a culture obsessed with physical flawlessness, most people in the U.S. have a relatively realistic perception of their own form and face—blemishes, bulges and all. About one to two percent of the population, however, suffers from a recognized psychological illness, known as body dysmorphic disorder (or BDD), which causes them to be preoccupied with physical defects that they think make them look repugnant. Such tendencies can lead some people to extreme and frequent plastic surgeries and even suicide. A new study used brain scans to see how patients' minds worked when looking at faces—both of others and themselves. The results, published online February 1 in Archives of General Psychiatry, show that people with BDD seem to get hung up on details and hint at a link with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The new case-control study used functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) to study brain activity among 33 people (17 control subjects and 16 with BDD) as the subjects looked at photos of their face and that of a familiar celebrity. Previous research and clinical observation had found that people with BDD tend to "focus primarily on details of their appearance at the expense of global or configural aspects," the researchers wrote. So following this lead, the researchers (led by Jamie Feusner, of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles) showed subjects standard photos as well as altered versions: one in which only the details remained and another in which only basic, blurred information remained. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13732 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Daniel Elkan TWO polar bears are perched on a block of floating ice. One says to the other: "Do you know, I keep thinking it's Thursday..." To some, this kind of surreal humour is side-splitting. Others are baffled by it and can't even raise a smile. Yet despite the importance of humour to human psychology, it is only the advances in brain imaging during the past decade that have enabled neuroscientists to pin down how the brain reacts when a joke tickles us. Armed with this knowledge, they are now solving the puzzle of why some jokes are funny to some people but leave others cold. So what is a joke, exactly? Most theories agree that one condition is essential: there must be some kind of incongruity between two elements within the joke, which can be resolved in a playful or unexpected way. Take the following exchange from the classic British sitcom Only Fools and Horses, when an anxious "Del Boy" Trotter visits his doctor for a heart check-up. "Do you smoke, Mr Trotter?" asks the doctor. "Not right now, thank you doctor," he responds. The joke's incongruity, of course, lies in the unlikely offer of a cigarette by a doctor to a patient concerned about his heart. It is only once we understand the mismatch that we get the joke. "Humour seems to be a product of humans' ability to make rapid, intuitive judgements" about a situation, followed by "slower, deliberative assessments" which resolve incongruities, says Karli Watson of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 13731 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway So much for the "hippy chimp". Bonobos, known for their peaceable ways and casual sex, have been caught in the act of cannibalism. An account of a group of wild bonobos consuming a dead infant, published last month, is the first report of cannibalism in these animals – making the species the last of the great apes to reveal a taste for the flesh of their own kind. The account comes from a group of primatologists led by Gottfried Hohmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The team has studied bonobos in the wild at a site in Salonga national park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on hundreds of days since 2002. Few were more eventful than 9 and 10 July, 2008. Early on the morning of 9 July, Andrew Fowler spotted an ape known as Olga with her two daughters: 5 or 6-year-old Ophelia, and Olivia, who was three years her junior. "By 8 o'clock Olivia was dead," says Fowler. She showed no obvious traces of blood or bruises, so it seems unlikely she had been killed by other members of her group. Decomposing corpse Fowler's team lost sight of the apes not long afterwards, but early the following day he saw Olga join them carrying Olivia's body, which had already begun to decompose. "It was smelling, limp and wet," he recalls. Olga and seven others spent the rest of the day devouring the corpse. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 13730 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey One small step for skin cells could mean one big leap for regenerative medicine. For the first time, scientists have converted adult cells directly into neurons. If the technique, performed on mouse cells, works for human cells, the achievement may bypass the need to revert a patient’s cells to an embryonic state before producing the type of cell needed to repair damage due to disease or injury. Researchers at Stanford University transformed skin fibroblast cells from mice into working neurons by inserting genes that encode transcription factors. Transcription factors are proteins that help regulate gene activity, usually by turning genes on. To convert skin cells into neurons, only three genes for regulatory proteins needed to be added, the team reported online January 27 in Nature. The three transcription factors, called Ascl1, Brn2 and Myt1l, normally appear while new neurons are being born. Scientists previously thought that this type of flexibility required taking cells several steps backward in development to become pluripotent stem cells, which are capable of adopting nearly any identity. Both embryonic stem cells and other pluripotent stem cells that are created in the lab have these capabilities. The new technique skips the stem cell stage entirely, converting one cell type directly into another. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Stem Cells; Regeneration
Link ID: 13729 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LESLEY ALDERMAN MIGRAINES may be right up there with root canals and childbirth as one of life’s more painful experiences. But unlike childbirth or dental surgery — the pain of which can be dulled with standard medications — migraines are notoriously tricky to treat. Those who suffer from these disabling headaches often try a dozen or so medications before they find something that works. What’s more, many migraines do not get properly diagnosed, according to the doctors and researchers I spoke with. That can lead to a lot of extra pain — and expense — for the afflicted. A reason migraines are so maddeningly elusive is that they are not simply bad headaches. They stem from a genetic disorder (yes, you have your parents to blame) that afflicts 36 million Americans and manifests as a group of symptoms that besides head pain may include dizziness, visual disturbances, numbness and nausea. Some of the symptoms resemble those from other disorders, like sinus headaches, epilepsy, eye problems or even strokes. And to further complicate matters, sufferers react in varied ways to medications. “What might be a miracle drug for one person could be a dud for another,” said Dr. Joel Saper, director of the Michigan Headache and Neurological Institute, a treatment and research center in Ann Arbor. “There is no universally effective therapy.” Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 13728 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists have firmed up the evidence that misshapen protein are responsible for brain-wasting diseases by showing how these infectious prions are created. Researchers from the United States and China have artificially created a disease-causing prion using proteins from mice. Prions are proteins that occur naturally in the cells of mammals. Infectious prions are abnormal, misshapen versions of this protein that cause neurodegenerative diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease. The scientists used a mouse prion protein, called PrP, created through genetic engineering in bacterial cells in their experiments. They found that the protein interacts with lipids, the fatty molecules in the structures of cell membranes, and becomes contorted and improperly folded, changing it into a disease-causing prion. Jiyan Ma of Ohio State University said the experiment, published this week in Science, is the strongest evidence yet that prions are the cause of these brain-wasting diseases. "The major thing we showed in this study is that the infectious agent in these diseases is truly a misfolded protein," Ma said in a statement. © CBC 2010

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 13727 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Tiny worm-like creatures that have no males and reproduce by cloning can escape disease by drying up and floating away on the breeze, researchers have found. The rotifers reproduce by laying eggs, but without males, the eggs hatch without being fertilized, a process called parthenogenetic cloning. The offspring are exact genetic clones of their mothers. "Generally, when organisms lose males and start reproducing asexually, they go extinct relatively quickly afterwards," Chris Wilson, a doctoral student in neurobiology at Cornell University, told CBC Radio's As It Happens. Rotifers, though, have diversified into 450 different species and have survived for 30 million years reproducing only by parthenogenesis. This type of asexual reproduction is seen in nematode worms, and in some species of insects, crustaceans, reptiles and sharks. But reproduction exclusively by cloning is rare. Cloning is efficient because it essentially doubles the reproductive output of a species by eliminating the need for two parents. However, since the offspring are genetically identical to their mothers, a parasite or virus can wipe out a large population if it is genetically susceptible to it. Scientists think sex allows a species to swap and recombine genetic material in new ways and avoid such diseases. © CBC 2010

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 13726 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer Viegas Squeaker catfish of all ages communicate with each other by, you guessed it, squeaking, according to a new study in the journal BMC Biology. Previously it was thought that young fish had under-developed hearing organs and could not perceive sounds made by older fish. The findings add to the growing body of evidence that fish have complex communication systems and aren't always the strong, silent types. For the study, researchers studied the catfish Synodontis schoutedeni. This species rubs the spines of its pectoral fins into grooves on its shoulder, thus creating the squeak sound. By placing the fish in a combined fish tank and sound-proof chamber, the scientists were not only able to measure the produced sounds, but also how well each fish heard them. Young and old squeaker catfish were tested. "This study is the first to demonstrate that absolute hearing sensitivity changes as catfish grow up," said the University of Vienna's Walter Lechner. He added, "This contrasts with prior studies on the closely related goldfish and zebrafish, in which no such change could be observed. Furthermore, S. schoutedeni can detect sounds at all stages of development, again contrasting with previous findings." © 2009 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 13725 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Emily Sohn There may be a simple way to ease the memory lapses and brain slips that typically accompany old age: Eat more blueberries. In a small study, older adults who drank a couple cups of blueberry juice a day improved their scores on a learning and memory task by 20 percent. Studies in animals have linked blueberries with brain function, but this is one of the first such studies in people. The results, while still preliminary, suggest that blueberries might just live up to their reputation as "superfoods." Among other health benefits, adding the tasty little, blue marbles to your diet could help slow the march of memory decline and possibly even prevent memories from slipping in the first place. "We're getting the first signal in humans that this might work," said Robert Krikorian, a neuropsychologist at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. "There's so much research now suggesting that fruits and vegetables are beneficial. I don't have any qualms about recommending that people eat blueberries." The case for blueberries has been building for more than a decade. In animal studies, older individuals that consume blueberry extract improve their performance on memory tasks, sometimes to the point of being just as sharp as their younger counterparts. © 2009 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13724 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway In a feat of cellular alchemy, connective tissue from a mouse's tail has been transformed directly into working brain cells. Ordinarily, so drastic a makeover would require the creation of so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells and then turning these into neurons, an inefficient process that can take weeks. Marius Wernig and colleagues at Stanford University in California discovered that inserting a cocktail of three genes into fibroblasts turns them directly into neurons in just days. "The real surprise was that this conversion is extremely efficient," he says. By many indications, these neurons are the real deal. Under a microscope, they look like a kind of mouse brain cell found in the cortex and they can form synapses to send and receive signals from others. Wernig expects that the cells will integrate into a mouse's brain - an experiment that's in the works. If they do, cells produced using a similar process might one day be used to treat conditions such as Parkinson's disease in humans. Because such cells are derived from adult cells, not pluripotent cells – which have the potential to form a kind of tumour called a teratoma – they might be safer than iPS cells. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stem Cells; Regeneration
Link ID: 13723 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katie Moisse You can tell a lot about a person by their face—even their political affiliation, new research claims. In a study published in the January 18 issue of PLoS One, subjects were able to accurately identify candidates from the 2004 and 2006 U.S. Senate elections as either Democrats or Republicans based on black-and-white photos of their faces. And subjects were even able to correctly identify college students as belonging to Democratic or Republican clubs based on their yearbook photos. To investigate the basis of these judgments, subjects were asked to rate photos of faces on a seven-point scale assessing personality traits such as assertiveness, maturity, likeability and trustworthiness. Subjects consistently associated Democrats with warmth (likeable and trustworthy) and Republicans with power (dominant and mature). These findings were independent of the gender of the person in the photo. The authors concluded that people possess "a general and imperfect" ability to infer political affiliation based on facial appearance, which is related to stereotypes about Democrat and Republican personalities. The ability to surmise other perceptually ambiguous traits, such as sexual orientation and religious group membership, has been reported in similar studies. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 13722 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Marla Cone and Environmental Health News Children exposed in the womb to chemicals in cosmetics and fragrances are more likely to develop behavioral problems commonly found in children with attention deficit disorders, according to a study of New York City school-age children published Thursday. Scientists at Mount Sinai School of Medicine reported that mothers who had high levels of phthalates during their pregnancies were more likely to have children with poorer scores in the areas of attention, aggression and conduct. Children were 2.5 times more likely to have attention problems that were “clinically significant” if their mothers were among those highest exposed to phthalates, the study found. The types of behavior that increased are found in children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and other so-called disruptive behavior disorders. “More phthalates equaled more behavioral problems,” Stephanie Engel, a Mount Sinai associate professor of preventive medicine and lead author of the study, said in an interview Thursday. “For every increase of exposure, we saw an increase in frequency and severity of the symptoms.” The connection was only detected for the types of phthalates used in perfumes, shampoos, nail polishes, lotions, deodorants, hair sprays and other personal care products. No behavioral effects were found for the phthalates used in vinyl toys and other soft plastics. © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: ADHD; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 13721 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Susan Gaidos It could have been a scene from a sequel to Jurassic Park: Peering down at the tiny worms wriggling under the lens of her microscope, biologist Alexandra Bely witnessed a performance that hadn’t been played in nature in millions of years. The beastie was sprouting a second head. Actually, two-headed worms are common in Bely’s lab at the University of Maryland in College Park. But this specimen belongs to a species that had long ago lost the unusual regenerative ability. That species, Paranais litoralis, is part of an ancient family of worms called naidids that settle in the soft sediments alongside streams and ponds. Generally, if a sudden rush of water or a hungry predator causes a naidid to lose its head, it will simply grow another one. But some species that Bely and colleagues have studied, including Pa. litoralis, seem to have lost this power. So it surprised Bely to see that, with the right timing, the creature could regain its head-popping potential. “That’s very exciting, because it indicates that the ability to regenerate is still there, in a dormant state,” Bely says, “though it probably hasn’t been expressed or seen in millions of years.” Bely’s finding and other recent results have encouraged researchers who are trying to figure out why some animals can reconstruct their body parts while others can’t. Most species have the ability to regenerate some body parts, yet this talent is highly variable. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 13720 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Greg Miller Chimpanzees have an aggressive reputation and often fight rather than share. Bonobos, on the other hand, are famously playful and friendly. A new study hints at a difference in how the two apes develop, suggesting that bonobos retain a youthful lack of social inhibition longer than chimpanzees do. Understanding how and why these two apes--the closest living relatives to humans--differ from each other could yield clues about how our own species evolved to be so social. Anatomical studies of ape skulls have suggested that bonobos' brains mature more slowly than those of chimps, says the lead author of the new study, Victoria Wobber, a graduate student in the lab of Harvard University primatologist Richard Wrangham. But no one had looked for corresponding differences in the development of social behaviors in the two apes, Wobber says. So she and colleagues conducted experiments on about 60 apes of various ages at the Tchimpounga Sanctuary in the Republic of the Congo and the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the first experiment, the researchers put a bowl of fruit in an enclosure and allowed pairs of age-matched chimps or bonobos to enter. The apes scored high marks for social tolerance if they shared the food, particularly if they came close together and ate from the bowl at the same time. Young animals of both species were good at sharing, the researchers found. Although older bonobos appeared to maintain their youthful tolerance, chimps tended to be less tolerant with age. In pairs of older chimps, the more dominant one often hogged all the food. And even when sharing occurred, two individuals rarely ate from the bowl at the same time. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Evolution
Link ID: 13719 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway Ageing may cloud your financial judgement, thanks to "noise" in an area of the brain critical for predicting pay-offs, suggests a study of people who played an investment game in a brain scanner. Gregory Samanez-Larkin and Brian Knutson of Stanford University in California, scanned the brains of 110 men and women aged 19 to 85 with functional MRI as they played 100 rounds of a game in which they had to choose one of three possible investments. One was in a safe bond that always delivers $1, another was a stock twice as likely to pay off $10 than to lose $10. The third was a highly risky stock with those odds flipped. "What we're doing is trying to get closer and closer to real investing," Samanez-Larkin says. Shrewd investors will keep picking bonds until they figure out which is the profitable stock. The researchers found that volunteers between 67 and 85 took longer to figure this out than their younger counterparts. "When older adults are choosing risky assets they make more errors," says Samanez-Larkin. What's more activity in the striatum, a region critical to sensing reward, was more sporadic in these older volunteers – this area only lit up strongly in some rounds, whereas in younger volunteers activation was consistent. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Alzheimers; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13718 - Posted: 06.24.2010

THE brains of monkeys whose mothers had flu while pregnant resemble those of people with schizophrenia. The finding backs up studies in people that suggest flu in mothers-to-be affects the brain of the developing fetus. Previous research had found that the children of women who caught flu while pregnant are more likely to develop schizophrenia later in life. To investigate further, Sarah Short and Chris Coe at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, infected 12 pregnant rhesus monkeys with mild flu. Their 19 offspring seemed to develop normally. Yet MRI scans of the 1-year-old juveniles - equivalent in age to a 5 to 7-year-old human child - revealed that their brains had features similar to those seen in people with schizophrenia, including less grey matter in the cortex and enlarged ventricles. Monkeys whose mothers had not had flu did not have these features (Biological Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2009.11.026). The team will now monitor the monkeys for behaviour similar to that seen in schizophrenia. In the meantime, Coe advises would-be mothers to get seasonal flu shots. "The implication for people is that if women are planning to get pregnant it makes more sense being immunised in advance rather than risking having a bad flu infection when pregnant," Coe says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 13717 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Pam Rutherford Many of us struggle sometimes to put a name to a face, but what if you could recognise someone many years after seeing them for a moment? You know the woman crossing the street. But where from? Ah, she was one of the volunteers staffing the polling station where you voted several years before. You probably saw her for a couple of minutes. Several years ago. Sound like the kind of face you would place immediately? It is for Jennifer. She is a "super recogniser", someone with a significantly above average ability to place a face. In fact, she can almost never forget a face. She first noticed something might be unusual on holiday with her family when she spotted a very minor actor on a plane. Her family were disbelieving but she was proved right. But it really hit home at college that she was different from those around her. "I'd meet so many people in the first few weeks and I'd remember everyone no matter how brief the encounter. I'd then meet them at a party and they wouldn't remember me. I'd think: 'That person is SO fake, I can't believe they're pretending they don't remember me when we met for 30 seconds in the cafeteria three weeks ago.'" It doesn't matter if years have lapsed since seeing them. She describes seeing someone she saw a few times as child, on the subway, now over 20 years older with greying hair and dreadlocks and knowing exactly who she was. "People can get older but their faces look the same to me," says Jennifer. "They don't look different to me whether they're children or adults. I don't know why my mind is able to make the leap." It sounds like a neat party trick, or perhaps something useful in business, but it may mean more than that to scientists. Jennifer's ability may help scientists who are investigating people in the opposite position, those who suffer from the condition prosopagnosia, popularly known as face blindness. (C)BBC

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13716 - Posted: 01.28.2010

New mothers who are taking a common class of antidepressants may have a delay in lactation and need extra support to breastfeed, researchers say. The selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRI type of antidepressants such as Prozac and Paxil may be linked with a delay in the start of full milk secretion, according to a study to be published in the February issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. The body's production and regulation of the hormone serotonin is closely related to the ability of the breasts to secrete milk at the right time, said study co-author Nelson Horseman of the University of Cincinnati. While SSRI drugs can affect mood, emotion and sleep, "they may also impact serotonin regulation in the breast, placing new mothers at greater risk of a delay in the establishment of a full milk supply," he said in a release. In the study, researchers looked at the effects of SSRI on milk production in 431 new mothers. The average onset of lactation was 85.8 hours postpartum for the SSRI-treated mothers and 69.1 hours for mothers not treated with SSRI drugs, the team found. They defined a delay as 72 hours after the birth. 'Very helpful medications' "SSRI drugs are very helpful medications for many moms, so understanding and ameliorating difficulties moms experience can help them achieve their goals for breastfeeding their babies," said Horseman. © CBC 2010

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 13715 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Amanda Feilding and Paul Morrison THE effects of cannabis on mental health have attracted much attention over the years. As far back as the 19th century it was recognised that cannabis could induce a transient psychosis which mimics the symptoms of schizophrenia. Despite this, until the last decade or so, most psychiatrists regarded cannabis as essentially benign. This, however, is at odds with recent research which concludes that in a susceptible minority, cannabis use can push the brain towards long-term psychosis requiring mental health treatment. Susceptible young people who use cannabis increase their risk of developing a chronic psychotic disorder such as schizophrenia, and the more cannabis they consume, the higher the risk. Additionally, people with schizophrenia who have a history of cannabis use tend to go through their first breakdown up to five years earlier in life than those who do not use the drug. Psychotic patients who fail to give up cannabis experience more symptoms, more relapses and end up in hospital more often. These discoveries about the link between cannabis and psychosis have been widely reported in the media, often accompanied by warnings that street cannabis has risen in strength in recent years and therefore poses a major health risk to the susceptible minority. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 13714 - Posted: 06.24.2010