By Charles Q. Choi Here's the new taste sensation — your tongue might be able to taste calcium. The capability to taste calcium has now been discovered in mice. With these rodents and humans sharing many of the same genes, the new finding suggests that people might also have such a taste. The four tastes we are most familiar with are sweet, sour, salty and bitter. Recently scientists have discovered tongue molecules called receptors that detect a fifth distinct taste — "umami," or savory. Story continues below ↓advertisement "But why stop there?" asked researcher Michael Tordoff, a behavioral geneticist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. "My group has been investigating what we believe is another taste quality — calcium." So assuming the human palate can detect calcium, what does the mineral taste like? "Calcium tastes calcium-y," Tordoff said. "There isn't a better word for it. It is bitter, perhaps even a little sour. But it's much more because there are actual receptors for calcium, not just bitter or sour compounds." One way we might regularly perceive calcium is when it comes to minute levels found in drinking water. "In tap water, it's fairly pleasant," Tordoff said. "But at levels much above that, the taste becomes increasingly bad." © 2008 Microsoft

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 11962 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Pregnant women who endure the psychological stress of being in a war zone may be more likely to give birth to a child who develops schizophrenia, psychiatry researchers say. Dr. Dolores Malaspina, a professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine and her colleagues analyzed medical records from more than 88,000 people who were born in Jerusalem from 1964 to 1976. Females born to women who were in their second month of pregnancy during the Six-Day War between Arabs and Israelis in June 1967 were 4.3 times more likely to develop schizophrenia than females born at other times, the team reported in Wednesday's online issue of the journal BMC Psychiatry. Males born to women at the same stage of pregnancy were 1.2 more likely to develop schizophrenia. "It's a very striking confirmation of something that has been suspected for quite some time," Malaspina said. "The placenta is very sensitive to stress hormones in the mother. These hormones were probably amplified during the time of the war." © CBC 2008

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Stress
Link ID: 11961 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Sunita Reed Skin cancer is the most common type of cancer in the U.S. and for chemist Michelle Gallagher, it hits close to home. “Skin cancer actually affects a lot of people in my family, so it really made me excited to know what they had been through in their diagnosis of skin cancer, that there could be in the future a much easier and less painful way to get their diagnosis,” says Gallagher. Today, Gallagher presented the first odor profile for skin cancer at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting in Philadelphia. She conducted the study while working as a post-doctoral researcher under George Preti, also a chemist, at the Monell Chemical Senses Center. She now works for Rohm and Haas. Gallagher and Preti were inspired by previous research reports that dogs, with their superior sniffing abilities, could be trained to detect the scent of cancer. First they studied what compounds are released into the air by healthy skin. Using an instrument that looks like an upside down martini glass, the researchers sampled the air above healthy skin from volunteers who varied in age and gender. The device uses an absorbent fiber that’s exposed to the air above the skin for 30 minutes to collect a sample of the air. The researchers analyzed the chemicals in the samples using mass spectroscopy and detected 92 chemicals in all. ©2008 ScienCentral

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 11960 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Josie Glausiusz A tangle of tubes and polyurethane pouches binds a naked man and woman—he, paunchy and unperturbed, she, slim and similarly unself-conscious. This setup is not some esoteric sex game; it’s “Smell Blind Date,” an installation created by artist James Auger on display this past spring in New York City as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind. The PVC tubes—which run between the subjects’ chests, with outlets extending to pouches attached to their noses, armpits and genitals—allow the man and woman to inhale each other’s body odor through a wall that divides them. In theory, they are on a truly blind date, each undistracted by the other’s looks, assessing the other’s potential as a mating partner by his or her smell alone. The human sense of smell is often seen as insignificant, dismissed as a distant also-ran to our keen eyesight or sensitive hearing. But this sense is keener and more influential on our species than many people realize. In particular, as Auger’s fanciful art project illustrates, smell facilitates a variety of human social interactions, both casual and intimate. Indeed, people who lose their sense of smell often gain a new appreciation for its importance [see “When the Nose Doesn’t Know,” by Eleonore von Bothmer; Scientific American Mind, October/November 2006]. Much of this influence goes unnoticed because it falls under the radar of consciousness. For instance, research demonstrates that we subconsciously use smell to assess a person’s likability, sexual attractiveness and emotional state. Through scent, people can distinguish stranger from friend, male from female and gay from straight. Thus, olfaction may facilitate reproduction and prevent risky encounters. “If you look at nature, you see that every living organism has some form of chemosensory detection mechanism” that enables it to sense threats at a distance, explains neuroscientist Johan Lundström of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. By the same token, deficiencies in olfaction may contribute to social withdrawal, such as that which accompanies schizophrenia. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 11959 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Constance Holden The next time a fight breaks out at an ice hockey game, blame the guy with the wide face. Although the findings aren't quite that clear-cut, new research indicates that males with larger facial width-to-height ratios tend to be more aggressive--both on and off the field. When boys reach puberty, testosterone often lengthens and enlarges their jaws and makes their brow ridges more prominent. The hormone also increases their facial width-to-height ratio, a comparison of the distance between the cheekbones to the distance between the upper lip and brows. Last year, paleontologist Eleanor Weston of the Natural History Museum in London concluded from an analysis of skulls that this ratio is larger in males and that the difference is independent of the male-female inequality in body size. Intrigued by this finding, behavioral neuroscientist Cheryl McCormick and psychologist Justin Carré of Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada, decided to see if the ratio correlated with aggressiveness, which also depends on testosterone levels. To find out, the researchers first measured facial width-to-height ratios in 88 male and female volunteers. They then gave the subjects a test that involved pushing buttons to gain points, to protect points from an opponent, or to take points away from the opponent. In the last instance, the player doesn't gain the point but merely gets the satisfaction of robbing the opponent. Males take points from opponents more often than do females, and psychologists regard the behavior as a reliable measure of aggressive tendencies. Results of the test didn't predict anything about faces for the women, but men with relatively wider faces tended to show more aggression; 15% of the individual differences in aggressive behavior could be explained by individual differences in facial ratios, the team reports online this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Aggression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 11958 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Tony Scully It was three years ago that electrophysiologist Francisco Bezanilla heard that the squid were back. That summer he had already travelled from the University of California, Los Angeles, to the Woods Hole Marine Laboratory, Massachusetts, in pursuit of the creatures. Like other researchers, he spent two months there each year when the Atlantic or longfin inshore squid, Loligo pealeii, bred in local waters. He found their giant nerve cells the best biological preparation for studying the electrical signals that cross the cell membrane. But he still struggled to isolate the weak signal generated by the flow of potassium ions. So when Bezanilla heard what fellow Chilean Miguel Holmgren had to say, his ears pricked up. Holmgren, a neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, had word from family back home that the jumbo Humboldt squid, Dosidicus gigas, were in plentiful supply at fish markets throughout Chile. Memories from more than 40 years ago came flooding back to Bezanilla: of his old mentor, Mario Luxoro; of the bustling Laboratory of Cell Physiology in Montemar, Chile, that lured scientists from all over the world; and of long summer days spent hunched over the squid's spaghetti-like nerve axons. Bezanilla and other researchers had been forced to leave Montemar when the Humboldt squid mysteriously disappeared from local waters in 1970. Bezanilla thought that the squid's return might allow him to resurrect the old laboratory, and that the squid's giant axons — on average twice the diameter of its Atlantic cousin and loaded with many more ion pumps — might generate the stronger potassium signal he sought. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 11957 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Heidi Ledford To most dieters, no fat is good fat. But in work published this week in Nature, an insight into the origin of a special class of calorie-burning fat cells could lead to new ways of boosting metabolism and combating obesity, researchers say. foodYou'll be needing some more brown fat after eating that lot.Punchstock The sworn enemy of the dieter is the 'white' fat cell. Such cells are little more than sacks of fat, storing energy and providing padding. Less known — and less reviled — is brown fat, made up of heat-producing cells chock full of fat and energy-generating structures called mitochondria. The iron attached to proteins in these mitochondria gives brown fat its characteristic colour. White fat is by far the more abundant of the two; adults carry many pounds of white fat, but only a few grams of brown fat, concentrated mainly in the front part of the neck and the upper chest. Brown-fat pads between the shoulder blades are thought to help newborns stay warm, but precisely what purpose the cells serve in adults is still unclear. What is clear is that brown fat burns a tremendous amount of energy: about 50 grams of brown fat could burn up 20% of a person's daily caloric intake, says Ronald Kahn of the Joslin Diabetes Center at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and one of the researchers involved in the latest study. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 11956 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Free Will vs. the Programmed Brain By Shaun Nichols Many scientists and philosophers are convinced that free will doesn’t exist at all. According to these skeptics, everything that happens is determined by what happened before—our actions are inevitable consequences of the events leading up to the action—and this fact makes it impossible for anyone to do anything that is truly free. This kind of anti-free will stance stretches back to 18th century philosophy, but the idea has recently been getting much more exposure through popular science books and magazine articles. Should we worry? If people come to believe that they don’t have free will, what will the consequences be for moral responsibility? In a clever new study, psychologists Kathleen Vohs at the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler at the University of California at Santa Barbara tested this question by giving participants passages from The Astonishing Hypothesis, a popular science book by Francis Crick, a biochemist and Nobel laureate (as co-discoverer, with James Watson, of the DNA double helix). Half of the participants got a passage saying that there is no such thing as free will. The passage begins as follows: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11955 - Posted: 06.24.2010

An ambitious 'Janelia Farm-style' neuroscience institute to lead international efforts in understanding the brain and behaviour at the level of basic neural circuits is being planned for London. University College London (UCL) will host the new centre, after beating rival universities Oxford and Cambridge, Nature has learned. The £140-million (US$261-million) institute will be funded by the Wellcome Trust, the largest UK research charity, and the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, founded by David Sainsbury, a British politician and businessman. The individuals involved declined to comment, but Richard Morris, head of neuroscience at the Wellcome Trust, says no decision has been made. The aim of the centre will be to "elucidate how neural circuits carry out information processing that underpins behaviour", according to the charities' letter to the universities competing for the project, sent earlier this year. The institute will take an interdisciplinary approach, combining state-of-the-art molecular and cellular biology with computational modelling. UCL may have beaten competitors because its 400-strong neuroscience department is one of the most productive in the country. And it already has a world-class computational neuroscience centre, also funded by the Gatsby foundation. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 11954 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Turning conventional neuroscience on its head, new research suggests the human visual system processes sound and helps us see. Here's the basics of what was Neuroscience 101: The auditory system records sound, while the visual system focuses, well, on the visuals, and never do they meet. Instead, a "higher cognitive" producer, like the brain's superior colliculus, uses these separate inputs to create our cinematic experiences. The textbook rewrite: The brain can, if it must, directly use sound to see and light to hear. The study was published last week in the journal BMC Neuroscience. Researchers trained monkeys to locate a light flashed on a screen. When the light was very bright, they easily found it; when it was dim, it took a long time. But if a dim light made a brief sound, the monkeys found it in no time - too quickly, in fact, than can be explained by the old theories. Recordings from 49 neurons responsible for the earliest stages of visual processing, researchers found activation that mirrored the behavior. That is, when the sound was played, the neurons reacted as if there had been a stronger light, at a speed that can only be explained by a direct connection between the ear and eye brain regions, said researcher Ye Wang of the University of Texas in Houston. © 2002-2008 redOrbit.com.

Keyword: Vision; Hearing
Link ID: 11953 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roger Highfield. A team at Oxford has found hitherto unrecognised cells in the eye that respond to blue light which shift our body clocks to new time zones and allow recovery from jet-lag. Today, in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Prof Russell Foster's group have now shown that these light sensors do more than regulate our body clocks and also play an important role in directly regulating levels of sleepiness and alertness. Prof Foster said the cells are a brand new target for the development of highly selective drugs to regulate sleep and wakefulness and that he has started work on their development. "The results may also have enormous practical value as currently the drugs available for the regulation of sleep and alertness are fairly crude," he said. The work will pave the way to a new class of sleeping pill and stimulants that would have the same effect as bright light, or darkness, depending on the design of the drug. He already has some candidate chemicals but he believes it will take another decade for tests on patients to see if these drugs will be of value for either treating insomnia or excessive sleepiness. © Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2008

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sleep
Link ID: 11952 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Michael Mosley Twenty-eight year old Kathryn Proctor, a florist, had been having epileptic fits for about four years. "It started off with eye spasms - they were actually seizures and they developed into full fits. "The fits can be controlled with medication but they found a lump on my brain and there's a 50% chance that it's causing the epilepsy. "It's on the right-hand side, about halfway up on the frontal lobe." The lump they found was a cavernoma, an abnormality in one of the veins in her brain. It had to come out, not only because it was triggering fits but because it could haemorrhage. Kathryn agreed to let us film her operation as part of a series I was making, Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery. In fact she not only agreed, she was enthusiastic. "I would be happy for you to film because I want to sit down and watch it with my girlfriends afterwards" Kathryn was well aware that the operation she was about to undergo was complex and risky. Potential complications included heavy bleeding and, when removing the cavernoma, accidental injury to parts of her brain. Because of this she had to be operated on while fully awake. (C)BBC

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 11951 - Posted: 08.19.2008

By Susan Milius Tiny ants enslaved inside acorns across the northeastern United States could be resisting their captors with a covert army of killer nannies. About the size of newspaper commas, ants in the genus Temnothorax fall prey to a marginally larger ant species that doesn't do its own housework. Instead the do-little ants, Protomognathus americanus, raid smaller species' nests and steal babies in the larval and pupal stages. The youngsters grow up inside the acorn home of the slave-makers’ queen, doing her housework and nursemaiding her young. Biologists have seen that the species vulnerable to enslavement evolve ways to try to fight off raids. But ways for the kidnapped youngsters to resist captivity haven’t shown up. Theorists have even argued that post-enslavement resistance couldn’t evolve. But observers are giving up on the slaves too fast, says Susanne Foitzik of Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. Kidnapped workers of two Temnothorax species kill off a good portion of their charges in the nurseries of slave-maker colonies, Foitzik said at the 12th International Behavioral Ecology Congress held August 9 through 15 at Cornell University. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 11950 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rachel Zelkowitz Ask a woman if she thinks actor Brad Pitt's body is attractive, and the answer will most likely be a resounding yes. But she might be hard-pressed to explain why that heartthrob excels over the merely buff. Researchers can now provide some help. Pretty people such as Pitt tend to have more symmetrical bodies, scientists have found. But questions remain about whether symmetry reflects any kind of evolutionary advantage. With two hands, two legs, and two sides of the brain, humans are clearly bilateral beings. But bilateral doesn't mean perfectly symmetrical: One earlobe might hang slightly lower than the other, someone's left wrist might be just a bit wider than their right. Studies of faces have shown that people perceive more symmetrical faces of either gender as more attractive, perhaps because these subtle differences, called fluctuating asymmetry, somehow reflect susceptibility to environmental stresses such as disease. Vulnerability to stress might make someone less healthy and therefore less suitable as a mate, according to the theory. Isolating asymmetry in the rest of the body has proven difficult because researchers lacked instruments designed to measure these differences. William Brown, an evolutionary psychologist at Brunel University in the U.K., decided to take the problem to people who know bodies best: doctors and fashion designers. Physicians sometimes use three-dimensional body scanners to make images of a burn victim's skin, and designers use them to make more accurate models for fitting clothing. Brown's team used the device to scan the bodies of 40 male and 37 female college students. A computer gave precise measurements for 24 traits: ankle girth, shoulder width, and others. The computer also created a full-scale, rotating image of each subject's body. The model displayed no information about skin color, clothing, or hairstyle. The researchers then asked 37 men and 50 women to rate attractiveness of the opposite-sex models. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 11949 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alison Motluk Self-recognition, once thought to be an ability enjoyed only by select primates, has now been demonstrated in a bird. The finding has raised questions about part of the brain called the neocortex, something the self-aware magpie does not even possess. In humans, the ability to recognise oneself in a mirror develops around the age of 18 months and coincides with the first signs of social behaviour. So-called "mirror mark tests", where a mark is placed on the animal in such a way that it can only be observed when it looks at its reflection, have been used to sort the self-aware beasts from the rest. Of hundreds tested, in addition to humans, only four apes, bottlenose dolphins and Asian elephants have passed muster. Helmut Prior at Goethe University in Frankfurt and his colleagues applied a red, yellow or black spot to a place on the necks of five magpies. The stickers could only be seen using a mirror. Then he gave the birds mirrors. Catch a glimpse The feel of the mark on their necks did not seem to alarm them. But when the birds with coloured neck spots caught a glimpse of themselves, they scratched at their necks - a clear indication that they recognised the image in the mirror as their own. Those who received a black sticker, invisible against the black neck feathers, did not react. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 11948 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Randolph Schmid -- Answer this without counting: Are there more X's here XXXXXX, or here XXXXX? That's a problem facing people whose languages don't include words for more than one or two. Yet researchers say children who speak those languages are still able to compare quantities. "We argue that humans possess an innate system for enumeration that doesn't rely on words," says Brian Butterworth of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. In an attempt to prove it, Butterworth compared the numerical skills of children from two indigenous Australian groups whose languages don't contain many number words with similar children who speak English. All the groups performed equally well, his research team reports in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Basic number and arithmetic skills are built on a specialized innate system," Butterworth said in an interview via e-mail. Using words for exact numbers is "useful but not necessary," the researchers concluded. Co-author Robert Reeve of the University of Melbourne, Australia, agreed: "Our findings are consistent with the idea that we have an innate system for representing quantity ideas and that the lack of number words in a language should not prevent us from completing simple number and computation tasks." © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 11947 - Posted: 06.24.2010

PITY the poor male salmon. In the race to become a father, it's the female who calls the shots. Fluid she releases into the water with her eggs can tip the balance in favour of a particular male by speeding up the rate at which his sperm swim - a strategy thought to help select the best possible mate. "We were really struck by this result," says Neil Gemmell at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, who looked at the sperm of blue-green chinook salmon. Females of animal species such at crickets, which fertilise their eggs inside their bodies, are already known to exert some control over which sperm get lucky, but until now it was not obvious how fish which release their eggs and sperm into the water around them could do the same. Gemmell's team found that while sperm from one particular male crawled along at 20 micrometres per second in one female's fluid, they raced four times as fast in another's (Behavioural Ecology, DOI: 10.1093/beheco/arn089). The difference is crucial, as speed rather than quantity determines which male's sperm fertilises an egg, Gemmell points out. Females might be favouring males with a compatible immune system, or a dissimilar genetic make-up to ensure healthier offspring, Gemmell suggests. Variation in the concentration of ions in the fluid such as calcium may be what is affecting sperm motility. From issue 2669 of New Scientist magazine, 16 August 2008, page 15 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11946 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON - Two genes that influence the activity of nerve cells in the brain may play a key role in a person's risk for bipolar disorder, marked by dramatic swings from depression to manic behavior, researchers said on Sunday. The findings are not expected to lead to a genetic test for the risk of the condition but could help unravel the mystery of how it arises and lead to better treatments, they reported in the journal Nature Genetics. An international team of scientists examined the genomes of 10,596 people mainly from Britain and the United States, including 4,387 with bipolar disorder, also sometimes known as manic-depression. Story continues below ↓advertisement The researchers found those with bipolar disorder more likely to have certain variants of the ANK3 and CACNA1C genes. Proteins made by the two genes help govern the flow of sodium and calcium ions into and out of neurons in the brain, influencing the activity of these nerve cells. "The key importance of this is that it gives us a clear idea of the sorts of chemicals and mechanisms in the brain that are involved in bipolar disorder," Nick Craddock of Britain's Cardiff University, who helped lead the study, said in a telephone interview. Copyright 2008 Reuters.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11945 - Posted: 08.18.2008

By ERIK ECKHOLM and OLGA PIERCE Suffering from excruciating spinal deterioration, Robby Garvin, 24, of South Carolina, tried many painkillers before his doctor prescribed methadone in June 2006, just before Mr. Garvin and his friend Joey Sutton set off for a weekend at an amusement park. On Saturday night Mr. Garvin called his mother to say, “Mama, this is the first time I have been pain free, this medicine just might really help me.” The next day, though, he felt bad. As directed, he took two more tablets and then he lay down for a nap. It was after 2 p.m. that Joey said he heard a strange sound that must have been Robby’s last breath. Methadone, once used mainly in addiction treatment centers to replace heroin, is today being given out by family doctors, osteopaths and nurse practitioners for throbbing backs, joint injuries and a host of other severe pains. A synthetic form of opium, it is cheap and long lasting, a powerful pain reliever that has helped millions. But because it is also abused by thrill seekers and badly prescribed by doctors unfamiliar with its risks, methadone is now the fastest growing cause of narcotic deaths. It is implicated in more than twice as many deaths as heroin, and is rivaling or surpassing the tolls of painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11944 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A history of severe ear infections or tonsil trouble may increase the chances of being obese later in life, according to scientists. About a third of children get recurrent otitis media and research presented at a US conference suggests a link. Infections may affect food choices by damaging nerves involved in taste, the researchers said. However, a number of UK experts raised doubts about the findings, with one saying a link was "extremely unlikely". In the first, more than 6,000 adults were quizzed about their history of ear infections and the results suggested that those with a moderate to severe history were 62% more likely to be obese. Dr Linda Bartoshuk, who led the study at the University of Florida College of Dentistry, said that the finding was of "considerable" public health interest. Another research project found that women who had impaired taste functioning were more likely to prefer sweet and high fat foods and more likely to be overweight. The study authors suggested that nerve damage caused by severe infections could be to blame for this. Dr Kathleen Daly, from the University of Minnesota Twin-Cities, presented research which suggested that babies treated with grommets for recurrent ear infections were likely to increase in terms of "body mass index" (BMI). She said: "Obesity has doubled over the past 20 years among pre-school children. The more data we collect on what contributes to this major public health problem, the greater likelihood that we can help prevent it." Having tonsils removed can be a sign of recurrent infection problems in the ear, nose and throat, and a survey of almost 14,000 people found that those who had had tonsils removed were 40% more likely to be overweight as adults. (C)BBC

Keyword: Obesity; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 11943 - Posted: 08.16.2008