WASHINGTON - Federal regulators on Friday cleared the first treatment approved in the United States for Huntington’s, a rare inherited disease that causes uncontrolled movements, deterioration of mental abilities and, ultimately, death. The medication, called Xenazine, will not cure the condition—and it has some potentially serious side effects, such as raising the risk of suicidal behavior. However, it does provide relief for a major disabling symptom of Huntington’s: the jerky, involuntary movements known by the medical term chorea and force many patients to live as shut-ins. “A lot of patients won’t go out because they are embarrassed by those movements,” said Dr. Frederick J. Marshall, a University of Rochester Medical Center neurologist who led the clinical study that provided evidence of the drug’s effectiveness. “Suppressing those movements means a lot to people with Huntington’s disease.” The disease affects only about 30,000 patients in the United States. Developing and testing medications for such a small population is a difficult process, with uncertain financial rewards. So the Food and Drug Administration granted Xenazine a special “orphan drug” designation that provides additional years of patent protection and allows the manufacturer, Prestwick Pharmaceuticals, to write off some development costs. The medication had already been approved in Canada, Europe and Australia. © 2008 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 11942 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Sharon Begley If there is one thing experts on child development agree on, it is that kids learn best when they are allowed to make mistakes and feel the consequences. So Mom and Dad hold back as their toddler tries again and again to cram a round peg into a square hole. They feel her pain as playmates shun her for being pushy, hoping she'll learn to back off. They let their teen stay up too late before a test, hoping a dismal grade will teach her to get a good night's sleep but believing that ordering her to get to bed right now will not: kids who experience setbacks rather than having them short-circuited by a controlling parent learn not to repeat the dumb behavior. But not, it seems, all kids. In about 30 percent, the coils of their DNA carry a glitch, one that leaves their brains with few dopamine receptors, molecules that act as docking ports for one of the neurochemicals that carry our thoughts and emotions. A paucity of dopamine receptors is linked to an inability to avoid self-destructive behavior such as illicit drug use. But the effects spill beyond such extremes. Children with the genetic variant are unable to learn from mistakes. No matter how many tests they blow by partying the night before, the lesson just doesn't sink in. The discovery, reported last December, is part of what is fast becoming the newest frontier in studies of why children turn out as they do. Since the first advice book for American parents appeared in 1811, the child-rearing industry, as well as researchers who have made child development a science, have assumed that, although every child is an individual, there are certain universals. If parents are too take-charge about homework, the child becomes disengaged and eventually gives up; if they are warm and affectionate, kids don't act out. But while most children do respond the way research shows, there have always been "outliers," kids who don't turn out the way experts promise. © 2008 Newsweek, Inc.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11941 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Melinda Wenner You probably think you're doing everything you can to stay healthy: you get lots of sleep, exercise regularly and try to avoid fried foods. But you may be forgetting one important thing. Relax! Stress has a bigger impact on your health than you might realize, according to research presented yesterday at the annual conference of the American Psychological Association in Boston. Ohio State University psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser and her partner, Ronald Glaser, an OSU virologist and immunologist, have spent 20-odd years researching how stress affects the immune system, and they have made some startling discoveries. An easy example comes from their work with caregivers, people who look after chronically ailing spouses or parents (no one would argue that this role is quite stressful). In one experiment, Kiecolt-Glaser and her colleagues administered flu vaccines to caregivers and control subjects and compared the numbers of antibodies—proteins involved in immune reactions—that the two groups produced in response. Only 38 percent of the caregivers produced what is considered an adequate antibody response compared to 66 percent of their relaxed counterparts, suggesting that the caregivers' immune systems weren't doing their jobs very well—and that the stress of caregiving ultimately put them at an increased risk of infection. If stress affects immune responses, then it should also affect how well the body heals itself. In one particularly cringe-worthy study, Kiecolt-Glaser and her colleagues afflicted a group of caregivers with small arm wounds using a tool dermatologists use to perform skin biopsies. The caregivers' wounds took 24 percent longer to heal than wounds that they had afflicted to non-caregivers. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 11940 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Imagine, for a moment, that you are smaller than a speck of dust and in the mood for some teeny-tiny sightseeing. It’s a perfect opportunity to take a scenic trip to the inner ear. First, stroll up the ear canal. This is a fantasy, so no waxy buildup blocks the way. At the end of the fleshy tunnel, squeeze around the huge, circular membrane better known as the eardrum. Gingerly sidestep the precariously balanced, oddly shaped middle ear bones and proceed into the inner ear. Up ahead, rising like skyscrapers from a flat landscape, looms a cluster of stereocilia. These slender, interconnected projections sit atop the basic sensory elements of hearing — the inner ear hair cells. Bundles of gently waving stereocilia serve as receptacles for sound waves delivered from hair cells, transforming those waves into electrical signals that travel to the brain to be interpreted. But the inner ear is more than just the mediator of hearing. As a core player in the human system for receiving and creating spoken language, it’s a hotbed of recent evolutionary change as well. In a new study, anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin–Madison finds that eight hearing-related genes show signs of having evolved systematically in human populations over the past 40,000 years. Some alterations on these genes took root as recently as 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Hearing; Language
Link ID: 11939 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Tamsin Osborne Bisexual men might have their "hyper-heterosexual" female relatives to thank for their orientation. Previous work has suggested that genes influencing sexual orientation in men also make women more likely to reproduce. Andrea Camperio Ciani and colleagues at the University of Padua, Italy, showed that the female relatives of homosexual men tend to have more children, suggesting that genes on the X chromosome are responsible. Now the team have shown that the same is true for bisexuality. "It helps to answer a perplexing question - how can there be 'gay genes' given that gay sex doesn't lead to procreation?" says Dean Hamer of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who was not involved in the work. "The answer is remarkably simple: the same gene that causes men to like men also causes women to like men, and as a result to have more children." The researchers asked 239 men to fill out questionnaires about their families and their past sexual experiences. On the basis of their answers, the men were classified as heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual. The results showed that the maternal aunts, grandmothers and mothers of both bisexual men and homosexuals had more children than those of heterosexual men. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11938 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Amber Dance When shopping for a mate, female zebra finches might choose males with the sweetest song because singing ability advertises intellectual prowess. Neeltje Boogert of McGill University in Montreal, found that the males who sang the most complex melodies were also quicker at solving a problem to find food. Boogert presented her research on 11 August at the International Behavioral Ecology Congress at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The same finches then faced a puzzle. Boogert hid millet seeds in small wells in a wooden board. The finches had to peer into the wells to find the seeds, and in later trials had to pry lids off the wells to get the snack. Some figured it out in four tries, others still hadn’t mastered the lid after 17 attempts. Birds with more elements in their songs solved the puzzle in fewer trials. Boogert notes that the ability to spot and prise out food in dense vegetation or mud is just the sort of thing a female might be looking for — skills that will help feed her chicks, and genes that will make those chicks good foragers when they grow up. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Intelligence
Link ID: 11937 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Brandon Keim Drugs that make soldiers want to fight. Robots linked directly to their controllers' brains. Lie-detecting scans administered to terrorist suspects as they cross U.S. borders. These are just a few of the military uses imagined for cognitive science -- and if it's not yet certain whether the technologies will work, the military is certainly taking them very seriously. "It's way too early to know which -- if any -- of these technologies is going to be practical," said Jonathan Moreno, a Center for American Progress bioethicist and author of Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense. "But it's important for us to get ahead of the curve. Soldiers are always on the cutting edge of new technologies." Moreno is part of a National Research Council committee convened by the Department of Defense to evaluate the military potential of brain science. Their report, "Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies," was released today. It charts a range of cognitive technologies that are potentially powerful -- and, perhaps, powerfully troubling. © 2008 CondéNet, Inc.

Keyword: Robotics; Stress
Link ID: 11936 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Gary Stix Last year Sean A. Spence, a professor at the school of medicine at the University of Sheffield in England, performed brain scans that showed that a woman convicted of poisoning a child in her care appeared to be telling the truth when she denied committing the crime. This deception study, along with two others performed by the Sheffield group, was funded by Quickfire Media, a television production company working for the U.K.’s Channel 4, which broadcast videos of the researchers at work as part of a three-part series called “Lie Lab.” The brain study of the woman later appeared in the journal European Psychiatry. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) purports to detect mendacity by seeing inside the brain instead of tracking peripheral measures of anxiety—such as changes in pulse, blood pressure or respiration­­—measured by a polygraph. Besides drawing hundreds of thousands of viewers, fMRI has pulled in entrepreneurs. Two companies—Cephos in Pepperell, Mass., and No Lie MRI in Tarzana, Calif.—claim to predict with 90 percent or greater certitude whether you are telling the truth. No Lie MRI, whose name evokes the casual familiarity of a walk-in dental clinic in a strip mall, suggests that the technique may even be used for “risk reduction in dating.” Many neuroscientists and legal scholars doubt such claims—and some even question whether brain scans for lie detection will ever be ready for anything but more research on the nature of deception and the brain. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 11935 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Markus Ullsperger September 22, 2006: On a trial run, experimental maglev train Transrapid 08 plows into a maintenance vehicle at 125 mph near Lathen, Germany, spewing wreckage over hundreds of yards, killing 23 passengers and severely injuring 10 others. Human error was behind both accidents. Of course, people make mistakes, both large and small, every day, and monitoring and fixing slipups is a regular part of life. Although people understandably would like to avoid serious errors, most goofs have a good side: they give the brain information about how to improve or fine-tune behavior. In fact, learning from mistakes is likely essential to the survival of our species. In recent years researchers have identified a region of the brain called the medial frontal cortex that plays a central role in detecting mistakes and responding to them. These frontal neurons become active whenever people or monkeys change their behavior after the kind of negative feedback or diminished reward that results from errors. Much of our ability to learn from flubs, the latest studies show, stems from the actions of the neurotransmitter dopamine. In fact, genetic variations that affect dopamine signaling may help explain differences between people in the extent to which they learn from past goofs. Meanwhile certain patterns of cerebral activity often foreshadow miscues, opening up the possibility of preventing blunders with portable devices that can detect error-prone brain states. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 11934 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Peter Aldhous THE next time you hear someone blaming "beer goggles" for their behaviour, you may have to believe them. People really do appear more attractive when our perceptions are changed by drinking alcohol. There have been few previous attempts to investigate the idea that people seem to find others more attractive when drunk. In 2003, psychologists at the University of Glasgow, UK, published a study in which they asked heterosexual students in campus bars and cafés whether they had been drinking, and then got them to rate photos of people for attractiveness. While the results supported the beer goggles theory, another explanation is that regular drinkers tend to have personality traits that mean they find people more attractive, whether or not they are under the influence of alcohol at the time. To resolve the issue, a team of researchers led by Marcus Munafň at the University of Bristol in the UK conducted a controlled experiment. They randomly assigned 84 heterosexal students to consume either a non-alcoholic lime-flavoured drink or an alcoholic beverage with a similar flavour. The exact amount of alcohol varied according to the individual but was designed to have an effect equivalent to someone weighing 70 kilograms drinking 250 millitres of wine - enough to make some students tipsy. After 15 minutes, the students were shown pictures of people their own age, from both sexes. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11933 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Matt Kaplan The dawn chorus – when male birds sing their hearts out at sunrise – has puzzled biologists for almost as long as it has inspired poetry. The birds probably do it to show off to females – but is it a signal of strength from being able to sing on an empty stomach, or being tough enough to sing in the cold? Owls, whose activity patterns are the reverse of diurnal birds, could hold the answer, says Loďc Hardouin at the Chizé Centre for Biological Studies, France. Hardouin's team recorded the song of male little owls and measured ambient temperatures over two months. They found that owls spontaneously called much more often just after dusk than later in the night. This is the first time that evidence for a "dusk chorus" has been established, says Hardouin. The birds sang more in the early evening than they did later at night as temperatures got cooler, which suggests that the key message behind the display of toughness is the ability to sing on an empty stomach rather than in the cold, the team says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 11932 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rachel Zelkowitz Weight gain and moodiness top the list of the unpleasant side effects of birth control pills. But could the pill also desensitize a woman's sniffer? New research suggests that oral contraceptives can reduce a woman's ability to smell the best mate. Although birth control can't be blamed for every bad relationship, the findings could help explain how people find their ideal love. Most guys splash on a little cologne before a first date, but past research shows that their natural scent may be the better attractant. Natural odor reflects a person's immune system composition, a collection of genes called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). In a 1995 study, women sniffed men's shirts and rated the shirts of men with dissimilar MHCs as more appealing than clothes worn by men who had similar MHCs to their own. Having a different MHC--and thus a different genetic profile--from your mate ensures hardier children, the thinking goes, as your offspring inherit the ability to resist a wider range of diseases. The study did find an exception to this rule, however: Women on birth control tended to prefer the shirts of men with MHC profiles similar to their own. To further explore the effect of birth control, Craig Roberts, a biologist at the University of Liverpool in the U.K., and colleagues repeated the T-shirt test with 37 women. Before the women began taking oral contraceptives, they showed no preference between shirts--a finding that conflicted with the 1995 study, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biology. After women started taking the pill, however, they marked shirts from men with similar MHCs as more desirable than shirts from men with different MHCs. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11931 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Marlowe Hood -- Meet Gordon, probably the world's first robot to be controlled exclusively by living brain tissue. Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon's primitive grey matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who unveiled the neuron-powered machine on Wednesday. Their groundbreaking experiments explore the vanishing boundary between natural and artificial intelligence, and could shed light on the fundamental building blocks of memory and learning, one of the lead researchers said. "The purpose is to figure out how memories are actually stored in a biological brain," said Kevin Warwick, a professor at the University of Reading and one of the robot's principle architects. Observing how the nerve cells cohere into a network as they fire off electrical impulses, he said, may also help scientists combat neurodegenerative diseases that attack the brain such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. "If we can understand some of the basics of what is going on in our little model brain, it could have enormous medical spinoffs," he said. © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 11930 - Posted: 06.24.2010

People with schizophrenia have an alteration in a pattern of brain electrical activity associated with learning and memory. Now, researchers from the National Institutes of Health and Sweden’s Karolinska Institute have identified in mouse brain tissue a molecular switch that, when thrown, increases the strength of this electrical pattern. The researchers found that adding the brain chemical Neuregulin-1 to the brain tissue boosted the electrical signals that the tissue generated. "This finding may yield new insights into a form of altered brain activity occurring in schizophrenia," said Duane Alexander, M.D., director of NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). "It may also lead to new methods for screening drugs with potential as schizophrenia treatments." The findings appear online in the journal Cerebral Cortex. The research was conducted by Andre Fisahn, Ph.D, of the Karolinska Institute, in collaboration with Andres Buonanno, Ph.D, and his colleagues in NICHD’s section on Molecular Neurobiology. Dr. Buonanno was the study’s senior author. Schizophrenia affects about 1.1 percent of the U.S. population. Symptoms include delusions, hallucinations, disordered thinking and social withdrawal. As nerve impulses travel through the brain, they emit weak electrical signals that can be measured through sensors attached to the scalp. The different parts of the brain emit different kinds of electrical signals. These signals vary with the kinds of mental activity taking place within the brain.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 11929 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Lucy Elkins The human brain: Numerous system which link up and work together The human brain is the most complex organ in the body and contains 20 billion cells, responsible for everything from dreaming and movement to appetite and emotions. It consists mainly of grey matter - the brain cells or neurons where information is processed. It also contains white matter - the nerve fibres which, like electric cables, send out chemical messengers and relay information between the cells. In fact, the brain contains more nerve fibres than there are wires in the entire international telephone network and sometimes the brain's 'wires' can become crossed, as a result of injury, illness or genetics. Scientists used to think a brain injury resulted in permanent damage to the brain's functions, but new research suggests this is not necessarily the case. 'When one area of our brain is damaged we now know from scans that the functions of that area are distributed elsewhere,' says Dr Keith Muir, a senior lecturer in neuroscience at Glasgow University. © 2008 Associated Newspapers Ltd

Keyword: Regeneration; Stroke
Link ID: 11928 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Low levels of the sunshine vitamin, vitamin D, may contribute to chronic pain among women, scientists believe. The link does not apply to men, suggesting hormones may be involved, according to a study published in the Annals of Rheumatic Diseases said. The team from the Institute of Child Health in London said studies were now needed to see if vitamin D supplements can guard against chronic pain. About one in 10 people are affected by chronic pain at any one time in the UK. The causes are not well understood and much of the focus to date has been on emotional factors. Dr Elina Hyppönen and colleagues believe, at least in women, vitamin D levels could play a role in some cases of chronic pain. The nutrient, essential for healthy bones, is produced in the body when exposed to sunlight and is also found in oily fish, egg yolks and margarine. Among the 7,000 men and women aged 45 from across England, Scotland and Wales that they studied, those who were smokers, non-drinkers, the overweight and the underweight all reported higher rates of chronic pain. Among the women, vitamin D levels also appeared to be important. This finding was not explained by gender differences in lifestyle or social factors, such as levels of physical activity and time spent outdoors, say the authors. Women with vitamin D levels between 75 and 99 mmol/litre - a level deemed necessary for bone health - had the lowest rates of this type of pain, at just over 8%. Women with levels of less than 25 mmol/litre had the highest rates, at 14.4%. Severe lack of vitamin D in adults can lead to the painful bone disease osteomalacia. But the researchers said osteomalacia did not account for their findings. (C)BBC

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11927 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Beth Baker Some aging experts worry that, when it comes to mind games, the marketing has galloped ahead of the science and that consumers and retirement communities may be plunking down hundreds, even thousands, of dollars on products with little evidence to support their claims. The brain-game craze began with the 2005 launch of Nintendo's Brain Age. The video game's latest version challenges you to speed-memorize 25 numbers, beat the computer at rock-paper-scissors and tell time on an upside-down clock. Given recent research suggesting some mind work might maintain or even improve aging brains, gamemakers are hot to bill their products as something more than just entertainment. "Everybody's looking for a computer game," says psychologist Judah Ronch, a professor of practice at the Erickson School of Aging, Management and Policy at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. "Is there any evidence that they're any better [at staving off dementia than exercise or social engagement]? No. But because of the commercial potential, people are beating that horse and hoping it comes in." Last year, revenue for the brain fitness software market reached $225 million, up from $100 million in 2005, according to SharpBrains, a company that tracks the cognitive fitness market. Consumers spent $80 million of that, up from $5 million in 2005; the rest came from school systems, the military, corporations, sports teams, senior facilities and other health organizations. SharpBrains expects the growth to continue. © 2008 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11926 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By HENRY FOUNTAIN Like many other plants, the chili has a strategy for survival: make its fruit, the pepper, so nutritionally desirable that birds and other creatures will eat it and disperse the seeds. But the same things that make a chili pepper attractive to animals also draw bacteria and funguses that can kill the seeds. It has been thought that the chemicals known as capsaicinoids, which surround the seeds and give peppers their characteristic heat, are the chili’s way of deterring microbes. But if so, then microbial infestation should bring selective pressure on chilis — the more bugs, the hotter the peppers should be. That has never been shown in the wild. Now, however, in a study of wild chili plants, Joshua J. Tewksbury of the University of Washington and colleagues show that the variation in heat reflects the risk that the plants will be attacked by a seed-destroying fungus. The researchers studied a species in Bolivia (where chilis are thought to have originated) that was earlier determined to be polymorphic — some plants produce hot peppers, while identical plants produce fruit that have no heat at all. The new research showed that in populations of the plant across Bolivia, the proportion of hot and not-hot plants varied. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 11925 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Greta Munger and David Munger When most people think of someone who's tone deaf, they're likely to conjure up images of an American Idol contestant who's is shocked when the judges tell her she's got a horrible singing voice—or perhaps the man who belts out every hymn in church but always seems to be at least two notes off from the rest of the congregation. Being tone deaf often doesn't refer just to poor hearing, but also to poor singing. But it's also possible that bad singing isn't actually caused by bad hearing. A recent report by cognitive neuroscientists Peter Q. Pfordresher at the State University of New York at Buffalo and Steven Brown at Simon Fraser University suggests that poor music perception is actually just one of four possible causes of tuneless warbling. Yes, bad hearing might be at fault, but poor control of the vocal system is another possible factor. In other words, even if you can hear the note, you still might not be able to produce it. Third might be an inability to imitate: you can hear the sound and you know what sound you want to produce, but you can't combine the two—just as a baseball player might see a pitch and know how to swing the bat, but still strike out. Fourth, it might be that awful singers have bad memory: between the time they hear a song and when they sing it back, they forget the notes. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 11924 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Eric Bland -- A new pill stops the euphoric effects of alcohol, but it won't prevent a hangover the next day. By blocking a key receptor involved in stress, scientists at Oregon Health and Science University are testing a drug that stops the happy feelings brought on by a drink of alcohol. Scientists say the drug could stop not only alcoholics from relapsing, but it could also stop pleasurable feelings gained from cocaine and even food. "This drug has great potential to treat not only alcoholism, but other stress-related disorders as well," said Tamara Phillips, a professor at Oregon Health and Science University and a co-author of the study, which appeared recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The drug, called CP 154,526, was originally developed and donated for testing by drug giant Pfizer, maker of the popular drug Viagra. CP 154,526 physically binds to a receptor in the brain called corticotrophin-releasing factor one (CRF1). The receptor blocks corticotrophin-releasing factor (CRF), a chemical released by alcohol that is thought to create pleasurable feelings. © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11923 - Posted: 06.24.2010