By Rachel Zelkowitz It could be an ad in a fashion magazine: Miracle fat prevents weight-gain! Researchers aren't promising that, but they do say they've isolated a fat molecule in mice that prevents the animals from storing even more fat. The discovery could open a new front in the battle against the bulge if the molecule has the same effect in humans. The word "fat" typically evokes the image of clogged arteries or cellulite jiggling on a thigh. But fat has a good side, too. Fat cells make up adipose tissue, which helps regulate insulin levels and breaks down dietary fat for energy. This breakdown is accomplished via proteins in fat cells called fatty acid–binding proteins. Mice genetically engineered to lack these proteins gain less weight and are less susceptible to metabolic diseases such as diabetes than are regular mice. Biochemist Gökhan Hotamisligil of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and his colleagues wanted to understand how this process works. They set up an experiment to compare normal mice that produce the binding proteins with mice engineered to lack them. Half the mice in each group ate a high-fat diet for 16 weeks while their counterparts crunched on low-cal food. At the end of the treatment, the researchers tested how much and what types of fat built up in adipose tissue, blood, liver, and muscle. They also tested metabolic function in mice. They saw that mice on the high-fat diet without fatty acid–binding proteins did gain weight but less weight than the control mice on the high-fat diet. Most surprisingly, the mice without binding proteins had better metabolic function and more of the fat that's considered healthy than the controls, the team reports today in Cell. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 12062 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Brain researchers have begun to explore what might be called faith-based analgesia. Stimulating a religious state of mind in devout Catholics triggers brain processes associated with substantial relief from physical pain, report neuroscientist Katja Wiech of the University of Oxford, England, and her colleagues in an upcoming issue of Pain. “Our data suggest that religious belief alters the brain in a way that changes how a person responds to pain,” says Oxford neuroscientist and study coauthor Irene Tracey. Practicing Catholics perceived electrical pulses delivered to one hand while viewing an image of the Virgin Mary as less painful than pulses delivered while looking at a non-religious picture. Functional MRI showed a change in these volunteers’ brain activity only while viewing the religious icon. In contrast, professed atheists and agnostics derived no pain relief from viewing the same religious image while getting uncomfortably zapped on the hand. “What’s exciting is that this new study shows a neural mechanism by which religious belief affects pain perception,” remarks psychiatrist Harold Koenig, codirector of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at Duke University in Durham, N.C. ecause the images spark religious thoughts and feelings, comments neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman of the University of California, Los Angeles. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 12061 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers have discovered a communications “hot line” that lets a worm's nervous system dial the immune system to help coordinate the response to infectious pathogens. The new research is the first to identify direct evidence that specific cells in the nervous system coordinate initial defenses against toxic bacteria. Those first responders are part of the innate immune system, a kind of “sixth sense” that is hard-wired and fends off invading microbes until the adaptive immune response is mobilized. “It has been recognized for at least 20 years that there must be bidirectional communication between the nervous and the immune systems,” says Alejandro Aballay at Duke University Medical Center. “But because of the complexity of the communication network it has been very difficult to prove this connection conclusively. The complexity of the nervous and immune systems of mammals, including humans, makes sorting out neural-immune communications a daunting task.” To cut through this complexity, Aballay and his colleagues turned to the simple roundworm, C. elegans. It proved to be an ideal model for dissecting those elusive connections—and for bringing together a diverse research team whose only connection was a signaling protein known primarily for its effect on the social life of worms. The research team included Aballay, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator Cornelia Bargmann at the Rockefeller University, as well as Sarah Steele, an undergraduate research student funded by an HHMI science education grant to Duke. The research is reported in the September 18, 2008 edition of Science Express, which provides electronic publication of selected Science papers. © 2008 Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Keyword: Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 12060 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Multiple sclerosis is more common among people living in northern latitudes, but they aren't the only ones affected, according to a new report. The World Health Organization and the London-based Multiple Sclerosis International Federation published the MS Atlas on Wednesday. It summarizes information on the disease in 112 countries, none of which were free of the disease. MS is a neurodegenerative disease that attacks the brain and spinal cord, and can lead to paralysis and sometimes blindness. Some people with MS experience little disability during their lifetime. But up to 60 per cent are no longer fully able to walk 20 years after onset, which has major implications for their quality of life and costs to society, the report said. Symptoms appear around 30 years of age on average. “The Atlas of MS reveals how these implications impact women more than men, by at least two to one, at an age when they are starting a family and developing a career,” said Dr. Benedetto Saraceno, director of the WHO's department of mental health and substance dependence. The study confirms that MS is a global disease, not solely of the more developed “northern” and “western” countries, the report said. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 12059 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Carl Zimmer If you had to sum up the past 40 years of research on the mind, you could do worse than to call it the Rise of the Zombies. We like to see ourselves as being completely conscious of our thought processes, of how we feel, of the decisions we make and our reasons for making them. When we act, it is our conscious selves doing the acting. But starting in the late 1960s, psychologists and neurologists began to find evidence that our self-aware part is not always in charge. Researchers discovered that we are deeply influenced by perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and desires about which we have no awareness. Their research raised the disturbing possibility that much of what we think and do is thought and done by an unconscious part of the brain—an inner zombie. Some of the earliest evidence for this zombie came from studies of people who had suffered brain injuries. In 1970 British psychologists Elizabeth Warrington and Lawrence Weiskrantz showed a series of words to a group of people with amnesia, who promptly forgot the list. A few minutes later Warrington and Weiskrantz showed them the first three letters of each of the words they had just seen and forgotten and asked the amnesiacs to add some additional letters to make a word. Any word would do. The amnesiacs consistently chose the words they had seen and forgotten; the inner zombie, somewhere beyond awareness, retained memories of the words.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 12058 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Different areas of the brain mature at different rates, which helps explain many of the intellectual and emotional changes seen in children, teens and young adults. While no two children develop in exactly the same way, scientists have been able to link certain developmental milestones to changes in brain tissue, observed by MRI scans taken repeatedly over years. Move the slider below to see how the brain matures. Red, yellow and orange patterns indicate undeveloped brain tissue, while green, blue and purple indicate a maturing of the brain. Brain images courtesy of Dr. Paul Thompson, University of California, Los Angeles. Source information provided by Dr. Jay Giedd, National Institutes of Mental Health. Produced by Tara Parker-Pope, Jon Huang, and Mike Mason/The New York Times Home Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 12057 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jeremy Hsu When Brad Pitt tells Eric Bana in the 2004 film Troy that “there are no pacts between lions and men,” he is not reciting a clever line from the pen of a Hollywood screenwriter. He is speaking Achilles’ words in English as Homer wrote them in Greek more than 2,000 years ago in the Iliad. The tale of the Trojan War has captivated generations of audiences while evolving from its origins as an oral epic to written versions and, finally, to several film adaptations. The power of this story to transcend time, language and culture is clear even today, evidenced by Troy’s robust success around the world. Popular tales do far more than entertain, however. Psychologists and neuroscientists have recently become fascinated by the human predilection for storytelling. Why does our brain seem to be wired to enjoy stories? And how do the emotional and cognitive effects of a narrative influence our beliefs and real-world decisions? The answers to these questions seem to be rooted in our history as a social animal. We tell stories about other people and for other people. Stories help us to keep tabs on what is happening in our communities. The safe, imaginary world of a story may be a kind of training ground, where we can practice interacting with others and learn the customs and rules of society. And stories have a unique power to persuade and motivate, because they appeal to our emotions and capacity for empathy. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 12056 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Heather Mayer It seems that as people settle into old age, they slow down, mellow out, and generally get less of a kick out of life. Now researchers at the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) have a clue as to why this may be: The pleasure circuits of our brains change dramatically with aging. New research indicates that as we get older, our brains may stop responding to the neural signals that used to bring us pleasure. “I think something that many people as they age fear the most is having something wrong with their brains — either a dementia of some type or being depressed or not being able to enjoy life,” says Karen Berman, a neuroscientist at NIMH. Berman and her team of researchers conducted a first-of-its-kind study, looking at the brain chemical dopamine in healthy young and old people. Dopamine is a chemical that is responsible for the pleasure responses that people feel, and Berman’s team found that dopamine receptors decrease with age, causing a decrease in the brain’s pleasure and reward response. “Dopamine in the brain is very important for motivating us, for keeping us happy, for letting us experience rewards and for helping us to go about our daily lives and carry out our plans,” Berman explains. ©2008 ScienCentral

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 12055 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Emma Young Crows seem to be able to use causal reasoning to solve a problem, a feat previously undocumented in any other non-human animal, including chimps. Alex Taylor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and his team presented six New Caledonian crows with a series of "trap-tube" tests. A choice morsel of food was placed in a horizontal Perspex tube, which also featured two round holes in the underside, with Perspex traps below. For most of the tests, one of the holes was sealed, so the food could be dragged across it with a stick and out of the tube to be eaten. The other hole was left open, trapping the food if the crows moved it the wrong way. Three of the crows solved the task consistently, even after the team modified the appearance of the equipment. This suggested that these crows weren't using arbitrary features – such as the colour of the rim of a hole – to guide their behaviour. Instead they seemed to understand that if they dragged food across a hole, they would lose it. To investigate further, the team presented the crows with a wooden table, divided into two compartments. A treat was at the end of each compartment, but in one, it was positioned behind a rectangular trap hole. To get the snack, the crow had to consistently choose to retrieve food from the compartment without the hole. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 12054 - Posted: 06.24.2010

High testosterone in women makes them more attracted to masculine actors such as Daniel Craig, with men favouring the femininity typified by Natalie Portman. The claim has been made by the University of Aberdeen's Face Research Laboratory. Their research says that changes in testosterone levels affect the extent to which men and women are attracted to different types of faces. This is rather than people being attracted to particular types. James Bond actor Daniel Craig and fellow star of the big screen Russell Crowe were highlighted as masculine. Star Wars actress Natalie Portman and Lost star Evangeline Lilly were said to typify feminine faces. The researchers asked male and female volunteers to complete short face preference tests in which they were shown pairs of masculine and feminine faces. Participants were asked to choose which face from each pair was more attractive. They completed four different test sessions that were each a week apart. In each session, volunteers also provided a saliva sample which was used to measure testosterone levels. Dr Ben Jones, a psychology lecturer, said: "People preferred different types of face in the session where their testosterone level was highest than in the session where it was lowest." (C)BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 12053 - Posted: 09.16.2008

By EMERSON MORAN Jr. Pat’s nursing home, Chatsworth, is a short walk through a neighborhood park, past a gazebo, across player-worn soccer fields. On good-weather days I bike, hauling her laundry in a backpack; folding her clothes helps me feel normal. Pat has lived here for more than two years, one of 18 residents of a locked-down dementia unit called Chelsea Meadows. Though she is 20 years younger than the others, Alzheimer’s has already done just about everything it will do to her. Except kill her. That will happen here. The hospice calls it “dying in place.” Enter through the double doors, and you are at one end of a bright and airy great room that is half a football field long and does not look it. The space is residence hall, living room, dining room, lounge and kitchen all in one. Columns, arches, recessed bedroom doorways, hanging baskets of silken ivy and planters of crafts-store bougainvillea bring the scale down to size. Walls washed with South Beach pastels are spotted with pictures of laughing children, sailboats, beach scenes, a three-foot-tall banana split. A wide hardwood walkway for the wanderers rings the space. Alzheimer’s closed in on Pat early, grindingly taking over more than half of our years together. Her memory went first, then reasoning, intuition, eventually every cognitive spark that lit her being. Her personality, once exquisitely compassionate, lost color and aspect — a fading work of art. Eventually unable to walk, talk or feed herself, incontinent, weakened by ministrokes, she could no longer remain at home. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 12052 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By RONALD PIES, M.D Let’s say a patient walks into my office and says he’s been feeling down for the past three weeks. A month ago, his fiancée left him for another man, and he feels there’s no point in going on. He has not been sleeping well, his appetite is poor and he has lost interest in nearly all of his usual activities. Should I give him a diagnosis of clinical depression? Or is my patient merely experiencing what the 14th-century monk Thomas à Kempis called “the proper sorrows of the soul”? The answer is more complicated than some critics of psychiatric diagnosis think. To these critics, psychiatry has medicalized normal sadness by failing to consider the social and emotional context in which people develop low mood — for example, after losing a job or experiencing the breakup of an important relationship. This diagnostic failure, the argument goes, has created a bogus epidemic of increasing depression. In their recent book “The Loss of Sadness” (Oxford, 2007), Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield assert that for thousands of years, symptoms of sadness that were “with cause” were separated from those that were “without cause.” Only the latter were viewed as mental disorders. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Emotions
Link ID: 12051 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By KATE MURPHY When people have a heart attack, a classic symptom is shooting pain down the left arm. That symptom, it turns out, has something in common with a far more benign kind of pain: the headache one can get from eating ice cream too fast. Both are examples of what doctors call referred pain, or pain in an area of the body other than where it originates. Such sensory red herrings include a toothache resulting from a strained upper back, foot soreness caused by a tumor in the uterus, and hip discomfort when the problem is really arthritis in the knee. Referred pain can make diagnoses difficult and can lead to off-target or wholly unnecessary cortisone injections, tooth extractions and operations. Now, in trying to discover the patterns and causes of the phenomenon, researchers say they are gaining a greater understanding of how the nervous system works and how its signals can go awry. “The body can really fool you in terms of determining pathology,” said Karen J. Berkley, a professor of neuroscience at Florida State University. Her research has focused on referred pain caused by endometriosis — pain that can be felt as far away as the jaw. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 12050 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS Dr. Nancy C. Andreasen concentrates on the big questions. A neuroscientist and psychiatrist at the University of Iowa, she uses M.R.I. to ask questions like: How do the nervous systems of extremely creative people differ from those of the rest of us? How is the brain physiology of the mentally ill different from that of normal people? For nearly two decades, she has been conducting a study that tracks long-term changes in the brain. We spoke this summer when she visited New York City. An edited version of a three-hour conversation follows: Q. HOW DID YOU BECOME A PSYCHIATRIST? A. I was an English professor in the early 1960s. I’d done a book on John Donne. Then, in 1964, I gave birth to my first child and nearly died from a postpartum infection — the very thing that had killed millions of birthing women in the centuries before antibiotics. As I recovered, I realized I had been given back my life, and that caused me to rethink everything in it. I decided to quit literature studies and go back to school to become a doctor. From the outset, I knew I wanted to do research and patient care. Because I relish complexity, I chose psychiatry — it’s more complicated than neurology. And I chose brain research because the brain is the most complicated organ in the body. I wanted to do something as important as the discovery of penicillin, the thing that had saved me. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 12049 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER You are shopping in a busy supermarket and you’re ready to pay up and go home. You perform a quick visual sweep of the checkout options and immediately start ramming your cart through traffic toward an appealingly unpeopled line halfway across the store. As you wait in line and start reading nutrition labels, you can’t help but calculate that the 529 calories contained in a single slice of your Key lime cheesecake amounts to one-fourth of your recommended daily caloric allowance and will take you 90 minutes on the elliptical to burn off and you’d better just stick the thing behind this stack of Soap Opera Digests and hope a clerk finds it before it melts. One shopping spree, two distinct number systems in play. Whenever we choose a shorter grocery line over a longer one, or a bustling restaurant over an unpopular one, we rally our approximate number system, an ancient and intuitive sense that we are born with and that we share with many other animals. Rats, pigeons, monkeys, babies — all can tell more from fewer, abundant from stingy. An approximate number sense is essential to brute survival: how else can a bird find the best patch of berries, or two baboons know better than to pick a fight with a gang of six? When it comes to genuine computation, however, to seeing a self-important number like 529 and panicking when you divide it into 2,200, or realizing that, hey, it’s the square of 23! well, that calls for a very different number system, one that is specific, symbolic and highly abstract. By all evidence, scientists say, the capacity to do mathematics, to manipulate representations of numbers and explore the quantitative texture of our world is a uniquely human and very recent skill. People have been at it only for the last few millennia, it’s not universal to all cultures, and it takes years of education to master. Math-making seems the opposite of automatic, which is why scientists long thought it had nothing to do with our ancient, pre-verbal size-em-up ways. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 12048 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Laura Vanderkam What he's doing now: As Purdon was wandering around M.I.T. one spring day a few years ago, looking for an excuse not to work, a classmate mentioned that he planned to attend a talk by neuroscientist Christof Koch on consciousness. At the end, Koch mentioned that anesthesia was one of the big question marks in the field. Anesthesiologists "cause loss of consciousness every day and have no idea how it works," Purdon says. But they do know how to control it precisely—and because of that, Purdon thought that anesthesia might be a great tool for studying consciousness. He went back to the lab immediately afterward and made plans to study images of anesthetized people's brains. He's been working on this question for several years now, discovering that "there's a lot going on in the brain after you've lost consciousness under anesthesia." He was appointed an instructor in anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, and currently does research at Massachusetts General Hospital. "General anesthesia is one of the biggest mysteries of modern medicine," says Emery Brown, a professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and Purdon's faculty mentor. Purdon's work has "major significance," because it will help us understand how activity in different areas of the brain changes under anesthesia. "This new knowledge will help us design better, safer anesthesia drugs that can reduce morbidity and unwanted side effects by targeting only those areas that are needed to induce general anesthesia and leaving other areas untouched," he says. "These new insights will also help us design better monitoring devices to follow brain activity when patients are under general anesthesia."

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 12047 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rachel Zelkowitz Christmas morning: The kids throw on their clothes and wolf down breakfast so they can rip open their presents, while their grandparents loiter over their toast and coffee, seemingly more intent on finishing their meals than examining the holiday loot. It's not that Grandma and Grandpa hate Santa. Rather, new research shows, the same neurochemical that triggers excitement and rapid decision-making in the young just doesn't have the same effect for older folks. Presents and other rewards cause a release of dopamine in the brain. Animal research has shown too little or too much dopamine can throw off activity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), where most of our high-level decision-making takes place. Research in young adults suggests a similar relationship, but no one had examined dopamine's effect on PFC activity in the elderly. To fill this gap, Karen Berman, clinical neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues turned to the two workhorses of human neuroscience research: positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). PET tracks how much of a particular chemical the brain produces; fMRI tracks moment-to-moment blood flow, pointing researchers toward areas of increased neural firing. To examine the relationship between dopamine and the brain's response to rewards, the researchers recruited 20 individuals averaging 25 years of age and 13 individuals averaging 66 years of age. While inside an fMRI scanner, the subjects viewed a series of 16 slot machine games on a computer screen. The slot machine first showed the chance of winning a set amount of money. After a 15-second delay, the screen showed how much money the subjects actually received. The researchers repeated the test, this time using PET to measure overall dopamine production during the testing period. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 12046 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY AFTER inflicting months of sleep deprivation on their parents, young children often switch course and begin what could be called a thought-deprivation campaign. This is the stage, around age 2 or 3, when their brains seem to send multiple messages to the body at once — eat, scream, spill juice, throw crayons — and good luck to anyone trying to form a complete sentence or thought in their presence. Toddlers are interruption machines, all impulse and little control. One reason is that an area of the brain that is critical to inhibiting urges, the prefrontal cortex, is still a work in progress. The density of neural connections in the 2-year-old prefrontal cortex, for instance, is far higher than in adults, and levels of neurotransmitters, the mind’s chemical messengers, are lower. Some children’s brains adapt quickly, while others’ take time — and, as a result, classmates, friends and adults are interrupted for years along the way. But just as biology shapes behavior, so behavior can accelerate biology. And a small group of educational and cognitive scientists now say that mental exercises of a certain kind can teach children to become more self-possessed at earlier ages, reducing stress levels at home and improving their experience in school. Researchers can test this ability, which they call executive function, and they say it is more strongly associated with school success than I.Q. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 12045 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jordan Lite You're in pain, and ibuprofen just won't cut it. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs, don't agree with your stomach, and you're wary of stronger meds. Fortunately, you have alternatives — natural ones. From herbs that attack inflammation to techniques that leverage the brain's remarkable healing powers, nature offers many treatments for conditions such as arthritis, fibromyalgia, and even muscle strains. Here are eight natural remedies that may enhance or replace conventional antidotes, and leave you happier, healthier, and pain free. Capsaicin: For arthritis, shingles, or neuropathy What the science says: An active component of chile pepper, capsaicin temporarily desensitizes pain-prone skin nerve receptors called C-fibers; soreness is diminished for 3 to 5 weeks while they regain sensation. Nearly 40 percent of arthritis patients reduced their pain by half after using a topical capsaicin cream for a month, and 60 percent of neuropathy patients achieved the same after 2 months, according to a University of Oxford study. Patients at the New England Center for Headache decreased their migraine and cluster headache intensity after applying capsaicin cream inside their nostrils. © 2008 Microsoft

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 12044 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY A new government study published Monday has found that the medicines most often prescribed for schizophrenia in children and adolescents are no more effective than older, less expensive drugs and are more likely to cause some harmful side effects. The standards for treating the disorder should be changed to include some older medications that have fallen out of use, the study’s authors said. The results, being published online by The American Journal of Psychiatry, are likely to alter treatment for an estimated one million children and teenagers with schizophrenia and to intensify a broader controversy in child psychiatry over the newer medications, experts said. Prescription rates for the newer drugs, called atypical antipsychotics, have increased more than fivefold for children over the past decades and a half, and doctors now use them to settle outbursts and aggression in children with a wide variety of diagnoses, despite serious side effects. A consortium of state Medicaid directors is currently evaluating the use of these drugs in children on state Medicaid rolls, to ensure they are being prescribed properly. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 12043 - Posted: 06.24.2010