By John Horgan I'm 54, with all that entails. Gray hair, trick knee, trickier memory. I still play a mean game of hockey, and my love life requires no pharmaceutical enhancement. But entropy looms ever larger. Suffice it to say, I would love to believe that we are rapidly approaching “the singularity.” Like paradise, technological singularity comes in many versions, but most involve bionic brain boosting. At first, we'll become cyborgs, as stupendously powerful brain chips soup up our perception, memory, and intelligence and maybe even eliminate the need for annoying TV remotes. Eventually, we will abandon our flesh-and-blood selves entirely and upload our digitized psyches into computers. We will then dwell happily forever in cyberspace where, to paraphrase Woody Allen, we'll never need to look for a parking space. Sounds good to me! Notably, singularity enthusiasts tend to be computer specialists, such as the author and retired computer scientist Vernor Vinge, the roboticist Hans Moravec, and the entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil. Intoxicated by the explosive progress of information technologies captured by Moore's Law, such singularitarians foresee a “merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence,” as Kurzweil puts it, that will culminate in “immortal software-based humans.” It will happen not within a millennium, or a century, but no later than 2030, according to Vinge. These guys—and, yes, they're all men—are serious. Kurzweil says he has adopted an antiaging regimen so that he'll “live long enough to live forever.”

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 11800 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Colin Barras Nine years ago, a brain-stem stroke left Erik Ramsey almost totally paralysed, but with his mental faculties otherwise intact. Today he is learning to talk again – although so far he can only manage basic vowel sounds. In 2004, Ramsey had an electrode implanted in his speech-motor cortex by Philip Kennedy's team at Neural Signals, a company based in Duluth, Georgia, US, who hoped the signal from Ramsey's cortex could be used to restore his speech. Interpreting these signals proved tricky, however. Fortunately, another team headed by Frank Guenther at Boston University, Massachusetts, US, has been working on the same problem from the opposite direction. Guenther and his colleagues have used information from brain scans of healthy patients to monitor neural activity during speech. These studies show that the brain signals don't code for words, but instead control the position of the lips, tongue, jaw and larynx to produce basic sounds. Guenther's research group then developed software that could recognise and translate the patterns of brain activity during speech. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stroke; Language
Link ID: 11799 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Virginia Morell To a female frog, the mating season must sound like a cacophony of rock, rap, and country-and-western tunes as males of all species croak and bellow for attention. So how does she find Mr. Right--and most importantly, Mr. Right Species? It turns out that she doesn't evaluate each call but rather blocks those that are biologically meaningless to her. Researchers already knew that female túngara frogs (Physalaemus pustulosus) that are ready to lay eggs and thus searching for mates pay more attention to the calls of their own species. Placed in a confined space and given a choice between a speaker emitting the "whine-chuck" of a túngara male or the call of another species, the females invariably hopped toward the túngara speaker. But male túngara frogs showed no such discrimination; they amped up their own calls whether they heard another túngara male or a male from another species. Kim Hoke, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas, Austin, suspected that males and females process the calls differently. To find out what part of the brain is involved, Hoke and colleagues tested 60 wild-caught túngara frogs (30 males and 30 females) that were ready for mating. Each frog listened for 30 minutes to a recording of a male túngara calling, to a different species, or to silence. They were immediately euthanized and their brains frozen and treated with a radioactive marker to reveal neural activity. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Hearing; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11798 - Posted: 06.24.2010

No doubt about it, autism rates have skyrocketed in the U.S. and beyond in recent years. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the disease affects one in every 150 children born today in the U.S., up from one in 500 as recently as just 10 years ago. It’s become the fastest-growing developmental disability—more prevalent than childhood cancer, juvenile diabetes and pediatric AIDS combined—and it continues to grow at a rate of 10 to 17 percent per year. While researchers think there is a genetic component to autism, they also believe environmental factors are playing a role in its recent increase. Environmental mercury and other heavy metal exposure, contaminated water, pesticides, a greater reliance on antibiotics—and even extensive television viewing by very young children—may be factors in mounting autism rates. Researchers at the American Academy of Pediatrics and other institutes have also identified flame retardants as possible culprits. Vaccines containing the mercury preservative thimerosal (now mostly removed from the market) have long been blamed for causing autism, but scientific links are inconclusive. In lieu of a smoking gun, a more complex picture of autism’s environmental causes is now emerging. Some researchers are focusing on the role of food in a young child’s development. Many autistic children suffer from digestive diseases or have genetic dispositions rendering them unable to naturally rid their bodies of toxins. As such, exposure to heavy metals, pesticides, contaminated water and even processed food could have a devastating cumulative effect, some researchers think. According to Brian MacFabe, a researcher at the University of Western Ontario who has studied autism triggers in rats, simple changes such as removing wheat and dairy from the diet could potentially bring about improvements. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 11797 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Eric Bland -- The only definitive diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease is a brain slice from a cadaver -- which is obviously not much help for the living. But now a new laser that harmlessly penetrates deep into the live brain could help diagnose Alzheimer's before its most tragic effects are apparent. The laser won't treat the disease -- no cure for Alzheimer's exists -- but it could give scientists a better understanding of the disease, which could then lead to better treatments. "The ability to detect [Alzheimer's-linked brain plaques] early would be a great boon," said Eugene Hanlon, a doctor at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Mass. and co-author on the study that appears in Optics Express. "Doing therapy early on is when it would be most effective." There have been other physical diagnostics for Alzheimer's, such as lasers, MRI, and PET scans, but none of them have had the power to penetrate skin, bone and brain to find the protein groups that scientists think gum up neurons. The new system involves shining a near-infrared laser into the brain. When the light hits the protein clumps linked with Alzheimer's, the light scatters in a "distinctive" pattern that is the picked up by detectors, said Hanlon. Hanlon and his colleagues have tested the laser on brain tissue and hope to have a clinical trial involving live patients within a couple years. © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 11796 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Daniel Cressey Fossilized fish provide a snapshot of evolution in action.NatureThe flatfish has always been regarded as an oddity. Although the immature fish has eyes on opposite sides of its head, one of the eyes migrates around its skull before it reaches maturity. Yet there was no evidence for this development process in the fossil record. Some evolutionary biologists, including Darwin, have argued that the trait evolved gradually over many generations of flatfish. If true, intermediate flatfish with partially offset eyes would once have lived — but no such fossils have ever been identified, giving succour to both creationists and those arguing for sudden jumps in evolution. But Matt Friedman, a PhD student studying evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has now found three examples of these transitional forms. In the process, he unearthed an entirely new species of ancient flatfish in Vienna and re-interpreted already known fossil fish in London. His work is reported in this week's Nature1 (see video). Friedman says that the fossils are important because "they help to settle a long-standing evolutionary debate and shed light on the mode and tempo of evolutionary change". "From my standpoint as a palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist, I"m pleased that I've been able to showcase the power of fossil data in solving a problem that seemed so baffling from examining living diversity alone," he adds. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 11795 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Amy Maxmen Dopamine conducts a frenzied song of craving at one end of a tiny brain region and a panic-stricken hymn at the other. Depending on where along the length of the region the neurotransmitter is triggered, it elicits emotions ranging from desire to disgust, a new study shows. “The roles [of dopamine] may be partitioned, and perhaps defined, by anatomy,” comments Emily Hueske, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With the recent study, researchers have come one step closer to explaining how dopamine performs a spectrum of functions. Dopamine interacts with spatially coded signals so that its output varies from one end of a brain region to the other, the team reports in the July 9 Journal of Neuroscience. In the long-term, drugs might be developed to locally treat various dopamine-mediated disorders such as drug addiction, obsession, obesity and anxiety. Kent Berridge, a neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and his colleagues set out to understand how dopamine could lead to desire for a reward, and then turn around and cause fear, pain and stress. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Emotions
Link ID: 11794 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Controlling blood pressure from middle-age onwards may dramatically reduce the chances of developing dementia, researchers have said. Two studies support a link between high blood pressure and dementia risk - with one by an Imperial College London team suggesting treatment could cut this. This study, by published in the Lancet Neurology journal, found blood pressure drugs reduce dementia by 13%. The Alzheimer's Society said better control could save 15,000 lives a year. As many as one in four people has high blood pressure, in many cases undiagnosed or untreated. The precise reasons why high blood pressure might increase the risk of dementia are not fully understood although many scientists believe that it can starve the brain of bloodflow and the oxygen it carries. Patients suffering this restricted bloodflow are often described as having "vascular dementia", and account for approximately a quarter of dementia patients. Other types of dementia, such as Alzheimer's disease, have no obvious link to bloodflow, but some experts think that blood pressure may still be somehow contributory in some cases. The Lancet Neurology study looked at a trial of elderly patients with high blood pressure to see if those who were receiving treatment were less likely to develop any form of dementia compared with those left untreated. The trial was stopped early after the benefits of treatment in terms of reducing strokes and heart disease were so obvious it became unethical to deny them to everyone. Although this meant that no benefits in terms of dementia could be found, when these results were combined with other similar studies in different age groups, the incidence of dementia was 13% lower in the treated groups. (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 11793 - Posted: 07.08.2008

By Joan Capuzzi Matthias was a playful, energetic dog with a penchant for chasing squirrels. He always knew his boundaries, though, thanks to the electric fence that has rimmed the yard for most of his life. But a couple of years ago, the aging English setter - he'll turn 15 tomorrow - stopped heeding that barrier. "He started wandering out of it," his owner, Vicki Sayles, recalls. "The shocks no longer seemed to bother him." Tests by the veterinarian ruled out various medical conditions that might have explained the behavior. Her diagnosis: cognitive dysfunction syndrome, more commonly known as dementia. First recognized in dogs in the early 1990s, the disease causes progressive cognitive and behavioral decline. Changes in the canine brain mirror those seen in people suffering from dementias such as Alzheimer's disease. Cats get dementia as well, though they are diagnosed less frequently, perhaps because felines are less social. Similar deterioration has been seen in the brains of aging rodents, sheep, goats, bears and primates. The changes in Matthias, subtle at first, became more pronounced. A lean, muscular blue belton bred from championship bloodlines, he was losing weight, urinating in the house, sleeping excessively, and withdrawing socially.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 11792 - Posted: 07.08.2008

Parents might say a baby lights up their life, but a new study shows that an image of a smiling baby also "lights up" the reward centres of the mother's brain. Researchers wanted to find out more about the effects of different factors in child development, and made use of a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine to scan the moms' brains as they looked at photos of their own baby as well as unknown babies. "One of the most critical factors is the relationship an infant develops with the parent," said Dr. Lane Strathearn, assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital. "So I wanted to look at those factors more closely," he said in a phone interview from Houston. The researchers recruited 28 pregnant women in their final trimester who remained in the study for a year and a half. Strathearn said that several months after birth, the research team videotaped the babies, and extracted still images of their faces in all different stages of emotion — smiling, crying, neutral and everything in between. "And then we were able to use these images to present to the mothers while they were being scanned in the MRI scanner, to look at how their brains responded when they saw pictures of their own baby compared to a matched unknown baby that they'd never seen before," he said. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Emotions; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11791 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Claire Panosian Dunavan When my friend Nikki Tal died in 2004, the world lost a strong, brave soul -- despite a thuggish disease that had by then utterly ravaged her body. From her earliest years, Nikki had been a reader. She also loved the ocean. Her favorite book was "Life of Pi," about a shipwrecked boy trapped on a raft with a hungry predator. The parallels with her own life weren't hard to see. Nikki's predator was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease. As any doctor will tell you, for patients with neurologic blights, ALS is about as bad as it gets. In less than a year, it can extinguish an entire set of motor neurons, rendering its victims limp and powerless. It was October 1996 when Nikki first learned something was wrong. While attending a baby shower, the 5-foot-8 lawyer realized she couldn't lift a 10-pound newborn. Later that month, she destroyed her car's ignition after repeatedly mis-inserting her key; then she begged off timing duty at her daughter's swim meets because she could no longer depress a stopwatch. A few months later came the inability to walk or care for herself; the big, padded wheelchair and the handicap van; and, eventually, the feeding tube and the portable ventilator. Finally, ALS robbed Nikki of the ability to hold her head erect and of producing even remotely intelligible speech. © 2008 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 11790 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER WOODS HOLE, Mass. — It is summertime, when people everywhere honor the 40 percent of body mass devoted to skeletal muscle tissue by doing what they avoid doing the other 75 percent of the year — putting those muscles to strenuous, possibly dangerous use. They hike, bike and run very long distances, or they take up a new hybrid water sport like kitesurfing, which sounds sweet in concept but often looks embarrassing in execution. They may even make an inexcusably heroic sprint through four lanes of high-speed traffic, as my husband did the other day when the bicycle rack on our car broke and he decided he had to retrieve my instantly totaled bike from the middle of the interstate because, he said, “somebody could get hurt.” Yes, dear, like you, or the woman hyperventilating hysterically on the side of the road. This is why I argue that, when it comes to a sensible display of excessive muscular activity, the male toadfish has the right idea. A male toadfish may not look the part of an animal Olympian. He spends his time sitting nearly motionless on the bottom of a marsh, his body like a smeared scoop of pudding and old coffee beans, his full, fleshy lips pulled downward in a perpetual Churchillian scowl. Yet it turns out that inside the belly of this gelatinous, seemingly languorous beast are some of the fastest muscles in the vertebrate world, and the most instructive. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11789 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde How could we have missed it? Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of visual scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists, visual artists, architects, engineers and biologists all missed it—until now. The “it” in question is the Leaning Tower Illusion, discovered by Frederick Kingdom, Ali Yoonessi, and Elena Gheorghiu of McGill University. In this illusion, two identical side-by-side images of the same tilted and receding object appear to be leaning at two different angles [see slideshow]. This incredible effect was first noticed just last year in images of the famed Leaning Tower of Pisa, but it also works with paired images of other tilted objects. The Leaning Tower Illusion is one of the simplest visual tricks one can produce, but also one of the most profound to our understanding of depth perception. This fact is why vision scientists are shaking their heads in disbelief that they did not notice the illusion earlier. Kingdom and colleagues first announced the illusion at the 2007 Best Visual Illusion of the Year contest, where it won the First Prize. The annual contest, which we organized and which is hosted by the Neural Correlate Society, celebrates the ingenuity and creativity of the world’s premier visual illusion creators, both artists and scientists. Contestants submit novel visual illusions (that is, unpublished, or published no earlier than the previous year). An international panel of impartial judges conducts the initial review, and narrows the dozens of submissions down to the Top Ten best entries. The Top Ten creators then compete in Naples, Florida, during a gala celebration, in which the audience chooses the Top Three winners. First, Second and Third prizes take home the coveted “Guido” (a 3-D illusion sculpture created by the renowned Italian sculptor, Guido Moretti). © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 11788 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas, -- Spotted hyenas are well known for their laughs, but scientists have just determined that the carnivores communicate with their cubs using the hyena version of baby talk: melodic groans. The find highlights what a complicated vocal repertoire these very social animals possess. In addition to the laughing, each hyena has its own "whoop" sound that identifies individuals, so "whoop" in hyena speak is somewhat equivalent to a person yelling out his or her name. "Their lifestyle requires recognizing individuals within their social groups and adjusting their behavior accordingly," co-author Steve Glickman told Discovery News. "Communication is central to complex, flexible social organization," Glickman, a professor of psychology and integrative biology at the University of California at Berkeley, added. For the study, presented at the Acoustics08 conference in Paris last week, Glickman and his colleagues focused on hyena groans. To elicit the sounds, the researchers presented hyenas at the Berkeley Field Station for Behavioral Research with three things: meaty bones, unfamiliar spotted hyena cubs and an empty transport cage used to contain bones or cubs during other experiments. The adults groaned more at the cubs than the objects, with cub groans sounding much more melodic and gentle. When the animals groaned at the bones and the cage, the vocalizations were less tonal and had a lower identified frequency. © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 11787 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Rachel Nowak Love is blind, said Shakespeare. Now it seems there may be some truth in the bard's words. Researchers have found that people who are in love pay less visual attention to attractive people of the opposite sex. Jon Maner at Florida State University in Tallahassee, US, and colleagues asked 57 students in heterosexual relationships to write about occasions they felt extreme love towards their partner. Another 56 students wrote about feeling extreme happiness. The students then viewed 500 microsecond flashes of 60 photos, comprising equal numbers of highly attractive men, highly attractive women, average-looking men, and average-looking women. As the faces disappeared, a square or a circle appeared elsewhere on the screen. The students were instructed to identify the object as quickly as possible – a measure of a person's visual attention at a subconscious level. Students primed with thoughts of love took significantly less time to identify shapes after viewing an attractive face of the opposite sex, compared with those who had written essays on happiness. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11786 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Atul Gawande It was still shocking to M. how much a few wrong turns could change your life. She had graduated from Boston College with a degree in psychology, married at twenty-five, and had two children, a son and a daughter. She and her family settled in a town on Massachusetts’ southern shore. She worked for thirteen years in health care, becoming the director of a residence program for men who’d suffered severe head injuries. But she and her husband began fighting. There were betrayals. By the time she was thirty-two, her marriage had disintegrated. In the divorce, she lost possession of their home, and, amid her financial and psychological struggles, she saw that she was losing her children, too. Within a few years, she was drinking. She began dating someone, and they drank together. After a while, he brought some drugs home, and she tried them. The drugs got harder. Eventually, they were doing heroin, which turned out to be readily available from a street dealer a block away from her apartment. One day, she went to see a doctor because she wasn’t feeling well, and learned that she had contracted H.I.V. from a contaminated needle. She had to leave her job. She lost visiting rights with her children. And she developed complications from the H.I.V., including shingles, which caused painful, blistering sores across her scalp and forehead. With treatment, though, her H.I.V. was brought under control. At thirty-six, she entered rehab, dropped the boyfriend, and kicked the drugs. She had two good, quiet years in which she began rebuilding her life. Then she got the itch. Copyright © 2008 CondéNet.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11785 - Posted: 06.24.2010

If you haven’t read the recent New Yorker article, “The Itch,” by Dr. Atul Gawande, then you should stop reading this post now and go read it. But if you did read “The Itch,'’ then you, like me, are probably still thinking about it. “The Itch” tells the story of a chronic itch experienced by a patient called M. and details her subsequent suffering. The article also explores how the brain interprets various stimuli and includes fascinating insights into the phantom limb sensations of amputees. But mostly, it’s about itching. Many people who read the article, however, were disappointed by the end, which left them hanging about what happened to patient M.’s itch. Other readers on this blog have expressed disbelief about some of the more shocking aspects of the story. I e-mailed Dr. Gawande, who kindly agreed to answer a few of your questions about “The Itch.'’ Q. A reader on the blog states that it would be impossible for M. to scratch through her skull with her fingernail. What is your response to that concern? A. As for being able to scratch through one’s skull — it’s the same thing the doctors thought when they saw her. And they therefore kept surmising that she had used some kind of metal implement to scratch. But gradually what they figured out was that the open skin wound had allowed bacteria in. This led to osteomyelitis — infection of the skull — and that softened the skull to the point of allowing her to gradually scratch through. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11784 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rachel Ehrenberg A tiny, eyeless, roundworm that lives underground can see the light. Research reported in the July 6 Nature Neuroscience identifies several nerve cells that appear to act as the worm’s light receptors and elucidates how these light-sensitive cells pass environmental information to the worm. It turns out that the lowly roundworm trips the light fantastic via a cellular messaging system that is similar to the light-sensing pathway in vertebrates. This finding suggests that the worm’s light-sensitive nerve cells are possible precursors to receptors found in vertebrate eyes, says Russell Fernald of Stanford University, who was not involved in the research. “This is really quite interesting,” he says. The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, a soil-dwelling nematode, is transparent and has only 302 nerve cells, making it the teacher’s pet of researchers trying to understand nervous system genetics and development patterns in animals. But while C. elegans has been the subject of intense scrutiny, no one had looked closely at the worm’s relationship to light. Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 11782 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SCOTT ANDERSON “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,” Albert Camus wrote, “and that is suicide.” How to explain why, among the only species capable of pondering its own demise, whose desperate attempts to forestall mortality have spawned both armies and branches of medicine in a perpetual search for the Fountain of Youth, there are those who, by their own hand, would choose death over life? Our contradictory reactions to the act speak to the conflicted hold it has on our imaginations: revulsion mixed with fascination, scorn leavened with pity. It is a cardinal sin — but change the packaging a little, and suicide assumes the guise of heroism or high passion, the stuff of literature and art. Beyond the philosophical paradox are the bewilderingly complex dynamics of the act itself. While a universal phenomenon, the incidence of suicide varies so immensely across different population groups — among nations and cultures, ages and gender, race and religion — that any overarching theory about its root cause is rendered useless. Even identifying those subgroups that are particularly suicide-prone is of very limited help in addressing the issue. In the United States, for example, both elderly men living in Western states and white male adolescents from divorced families are at elevated risk, but since the overwhelming majority in both these groups never attempt suicide, how can we identify the truly at risk among them? Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Stress
Link ID: 11781 - Posted: 06.24.2010

LINTHICUM, Md. — Military binoculars may soon get information directly from the brains of the soldiers using them. With the idea that that the brain absorbs and assesses more visual information than it lets on — and that it could make more sense out of what's visible through high-power binoculars if it stopped filtering that information — the Pentagon has awarded contracts to two defense firms to develop brainwave-aided binoculars. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, is betting that intelligent binoculars can tap into the brain's ability to spot patterns and movement and help soldiers detect threats from miles farther away than they can with traditional binoculars. Electrodes on the scalp inside a helmet will record the user's brain activity as it processes information about high-resolution images produced by wide-angle military binoculars. Those responses will train the binoculars over time to recognize threats. "You need to present the soldier with many images and then use the person's brain to figure out what is of interest," said Yuval Boger, CEO of Sensics, a Baltimore-based maker of panoramic head-mounted displays. Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Vision; Brain imaging
Link ID: 11780 - Posted: 06.24.2010