-- Older people who already suffer brain impairment may be further stressed by a lack of sleep if findings about mice prove true for humans, U.S. scientists say. The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found a response on the cellular level to the stress caused by sleep deprivation -- known as the unfolded protein response -- was impaired in the brains of older mice. The researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia find the unfolded protein response activated in 10-week- old mice deprived of sleep helped prevent misfolded proteins from accumulating. However in 2-year-old mice, the unfolded protein response often failed and misfolded proteins clogged the endoplasmic reticulum -- the cellular compartment where some proteins are made. Old mice also had less of the proteins that refold abnormal proteins and more of the proteins that cause cell death than the young mice. "We could speculate that sleep disturbance in older humans places an additional burden on an already-stressed protein folding and degradation system," study first author Nirinjini Naidoo says in a statement. © 2008 United Press International,

Keyword: Sleep; Stress
Link ID: 11759 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Michael Balter Why are some people gay? Most researchers who study sexual orientation think that both genetic and environmental factors play a role, but the relative contributions of each remain unclear. A new study of Swedish twins reinforces earlier findings that environmental influences--including the environment in the womb--may play a greater role than genes. Scientists studying complex human behaviors often turn to twin studies. Researchers look at both identical and fraternal twins to see how often they share a trait--a parameter called concordance. The greater the concordance among genetically identical twins compared with fraternal twins--who share only half of their genes--the more likely that genetic factors are involved. Earlier twin studies of sexual orientation have suggested varying degrees of genetic and environmental influences. But they have suffered from the limitations typical of all twin studies. These include small sample sizes and assumptions that identical and fraternal twins both have the same family environments; if identical twins are treated more similarly by their parents than fraternal twins, for example, this could be mistaken for a genetic influence. Recruitment biases are also an issue: Some studies have enlisted participants who openly identify themselves as gay, who may not be typical of the entire homosexual population. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11758 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By PEGGY ORENSTEIN For weeks before a store down the street from where I live in Berkeley opened, it was unclear what it would sell — materially, anyway. Rather than having a sign describing the merchandise, the windows were papered over with foot-high aphorisms in punchy red and white type. “Friends are more important than money.” “Jealousy works the opposite way you want it to.” True enough, I suppose. But the one that caught my attention was this: “Stress is related to 99 percent of all illness.” I tried to imagine how that claim made it past the copywriters and project managers who must have approved it. It was hardly as benign as the suggestions that people should floss daily or drink lots of water. Or was it? Somewhere along the line, maybe when yoga studios began to outnumber Starbucks outlets, the notion, at once modern and primitive, of the mind’s irrefutable power over the flesh became the conventional wisdom. It’s not that I think the mind-body connection is a total sham. But even where it would seem most established, say in the relationship between stress and heart disease, the mechanism is unclear. Is stress an independent risk factor or does it merely influence others, raising blood pressure or encouraging over-eating? Either way, popular mythology both simplifies and generalizes the potential harm, applying it to everything that ails us. After all, it feels true: I’m more at peace with my frenetic life after a few rounds of sun salutations. Yet, what does that prove? Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 11757 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Audrey McAvoy -- The Navy has adopted a new plan for training in Hawaii waters that it says will allow it to accelerate some exercises and hold them more frequently while continuing to limit the effects of its sonar on marine mammals. The Navy created the training plan after completing environmental studies to ensure the plan complies with federal law. It is conducting similar studies for training ranges off California, the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. Environmentalists say active sonar can hurt or kill whales and other marine mammals. The Navy says it takes steps to protect marine mammals from its sonar. The plan adopted Thursday leaves in place key elements of Navy training. The Navy will continue to hold a series of undersea warfare exercises that train sailors to use sonar, or bounced sound waves, to find submarines. Rim of the Pacific international maritime drills, which the Navy hosts off Hawaii every two years, will also be allowed to continue. B.J. Penn, Navy assistant secretary for installations and environment, said the plan allows the Navy to provide sailors with the skills they need to be effective in combat. "The Navy must train its deploying forces in the most realistic manner possible," he said in a statement. © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 11756 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ewen Callaway Want to quit smoking? Next time the urge to light up strikes, think of snow-capped peaks instead of the fleeting pleasure of a white cigarette. That's the conclusion of a new brain study which shows that thinking happy thoughts could help dampen cravings. Mauricio Delgado, a cognitive neuroscientist at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and his colleague Elizabeth Phelps of New York University measured the brain activity of 15 volunteers as they played a simple game. The researchers told their subjects to associate blue cards with a real $4 payoff, and yellow cards with nothing. To control for potential biases, they swapped the colour assignments for half the volunteers. Before either a yellow or blue card flashed onto a computer screen, the volunteers received an instruction to either concentrate on their prize or instead on some calming, natural object – a blue ocean, for instance. Delgado's team measured how excited volunteers were by attaching an electrode to each volunteer's finger, as increased excitement changes the electrical behaviour of the skin, possibly because of changes in sweat levels. When there was not $4 up for grabs, volunteers stayed perfectly calm no matter what they were thinking. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Emotions
Link ID: 11755 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Andrea Lu With all the heartache it causes, why do some people have so much trouble letting go of their grief? In an ironic twist, new research shows that the brain's pleasure center may be to blame. Most people, when confronted with the death of a loved one, mourn intensely for a few weeks or months and then gradually manage to move on. A small percentage, however, become debilitated by the loss and can't resume their normal lives; they experience what psychologists call complicated grief. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures blood flow to various parts of the brain, has shown that grief activates regions of the brain associated with processing pain. However, no study had yet observed what happens in the brain during complicated grief. In the new work, which will be published in the 15 August issue of NeuroImage, researchers led by clinical psychologist Mary-Frances O'Connor of the University of California, Los Angeles, looked at 23 women who had lost a mother or sister to breast cancer within the past 5 years. Based on a clinical assessment, the researchers divided the women into complicated and noncomplicated grievers. They then showed the women a series of 60 pictures that paired a photo of a stranger or the deceased loved one with either a grief-related word (e.g., cancer) or a similar-looking but emotionally neutral word (e.g., ginger). The purpose of the words was to make the images of relatives seem fresh, even if the women had already viewed them several times on their own. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11754 - Posted: 06.24.2010

An implantable device that blocks a stomach nerve has shown promise in treating obesity in a less invasive way than traditional surgery, a study has found. The device is implanted under the skin in the abdomen and is regulated by patients through a switch. It emits a low-level electrical charge that blocks the vagal nerve, which signals a person when to eat. This blocking causes obese patients to feel full after a normal-sized meal rather than to continue eating. The study, a collaborative effort by the Mayo Clinic and researchers in Norway, Mexico and Australia, is published in the June issue of the journal Surgery. EnteroMedics, the manufacturer of the device, funded the research. The device is being touted as a less invasive alternative to bariatric surgery, in which the stomach is surgically decreased in size or removed. It is reversible, unlike the surgery, and can be shut off by patients during the night. According to researchers, there is no damage to the vagal nerves or stomach. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 11753 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GARDINER HARRIS Federal health officials on Sunday will call together some of the world’s leading experts on an obscure disease to discuss the controversial case of a 9-year-old girl from Athens, Ga., who became autistic after receiving numerous vaccinations. But the government has so far kept quiet a second case that some say is more disturbing and more relevant to the meeting. On Jan. 11, a 6-year-old girl from Colorado received FluMist, a flu vaccine, and about a week later “became weak with multiple episodes of falling to ground” and “difficulty walking,” according to a case report filed with federal health officials and obtained by The New York Times. The girl grew increasingly weak and feverish and “became more limp, appears sleepy, acts as if drunk,” the report said. She was hospitalized and underwent surgery and was finally withdrawn from life support. She died on April 5, according to the report. Both the 9- and 6-year-olds had mitochondrial disorders, a spectrum of genetic diseases that have received almost no attention from federal health officials. The 9-year-old, Hannah Poling, was 19 months old and developing normally in 2000 when she received five shots against nine infectious diseases. Two days later, she developed a fever, cried inconsolably and refused to walk. In the next seven months, she spiraled downward, and in 2001 doctors diagnosed autism. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 11752 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sabin Russell An international team of researchers has spotted a previously unknown genetic mutation that can raise the risk of Alzheimer's disease by 44 percent and is carried by about a quarter of the U.S. and European populations studied. It is only the second gene ever linked to so-called late-onset Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of the devastating brain-wasting condition that afflicts 5.2 million Americans and creates untold heartache for victims and their families. The first gene linked to the late-onset condition, which affects people over age 65 - was discovered 15 years ago. That finding has yet to lead to meaningful therapies. Researchers said the newly implicated genetic flaw, a mutation in a gene called CALHM1, plays a role in biological processes within the brain that may be more amenable to treatment. While the prospects for new drugs remain theoretical, the study to be published in Friday's edition of the journal Cell is a rare flicker of hope in the long struggle against Alzheimer's disease. "I don't know anybody who thinks there will be one silver bullet," said William Fisher, chief executive of the Alzheimer's Association of Northern California. "What we're finding out is that there is a whole range of complexity. Maybe this is one of the answers." © 2008 Hearst Communications Inc

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11751 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman A new study may reveal a genetic reason for why people with Fragile X syndrome and autism have trouble sleeping.If you’ve got rhythm, thank a pair of RNA-binding proteins. A new study in mice shows that the way these proteins function is crucial for synchronizing the biological clocks throughout a person’s body. The study aimed to understand the source of a symptom in people with Fragile X syndrome, the most common inherited form of mental retardation and the most common known cause of autism. The syndrome is caused by a defect in a gene called fragile X mental retardation 1 or FMR1. People with the syndrome often have unusual sleeping patterns. Parents often report that it takes two to four years for children with Fragile X syndrome to begin sleeping through the night. Typically developing children usually adopt normal sleep patterns by the time they are six to eight months old. Many neurological disorders are accompanied by sleep difficulties, says Yung-Hui Fu of the University of California, San Francisco, but the reason for those sleeping problems is often unknown. An international team of scientists led by David Nelson, a human geneticist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, set out to investigate why. The study appears in the July American Journal of Human Genetics and is the first to suggest a mechanism for the sleep disruptions that accompany Fragile X syndrome. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 11750 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Linda Geddes Birds may not be as "bird-brained" as we thought. Zebra finches show many features of sleep, which had previously been assumed to be the sole preserve of mammals. The finding raises new questions about the complexity of the bird brain and about the evolution of sleep as we know it. Mammalian sleep is characterised by distinct stages: slow wave sleep (SWS), intermediate sleep (IS) and rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, with a progression towards more REM sleep. EEG recordings of the brain's electrical activity also show specific landmarks called "K-complexes" and "spindles" during SWS. Since K-complexes had only ever been observed in mammals, neuroscientists assumed that a neocortex – an area of the brain involved in higher functions such as conscious thought and language – was needed to generate them. Philip Low at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, California, US, and his colleagues monitored five zebra finches during the night, tracking eye and body movements, and brain activity. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 11749 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves. The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision -- an eternity at the speed of thought. Their findings challenge conventional notions of choice. "We think our decisions are conscious," said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. "But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn't rule out free will, but it does make it implausible." Through a series of intriguing experiments, scientists in Germany, Norway and the U.S. have analyzed the distinctive cerebral activity that foreshadows our choices. They have tracked telltale waves of change through the cells that orchestrate our memory, language, reason and self-awareness. In ways we are only beginning to understand, the synapses and neurons in the human nervous system work in concert to perceive the world around them, to learn from their perceptions, to remember important experiences, to plan ahead, and to decide and act on incomplete information. In a rudimentary way, they predetermine our choices. Copyright © 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11748 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SAM WANG and SANDRA AAMODT FALSE beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories — and mislead us along the way. The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it. This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true. With time, this misremembering only gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11747 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Not many people think about what it's like to be a bat, but for those who do, it's enlightening and potentially groundbreaking for understanding aspects of the human brain and nervous system. Cynthia Moss, a member of the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science program at the University of Maryland, College Park, Md., is one of few researchers who spend time trying to get into the heads of bats. Her new research suggests there is more to studying bats than figuring out how they process sound to distinguish environments. Partially supported by the National Science Foundation, her research paper appears in the June 18 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "For decades it's been recognized that a bat's voice produces sounds that give the bat information about the location of objects," says Moss. "We're now recognizing that every time a bat produces a sound there are changes in brain activity that may be important for scene analysis, sensorimotor control and spatial memory and navigation." The research could help neurobiologists understand mechanisms in the human brain and ultimately benefit human health, but that may not happen for some time as more research is needed.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 11746 - Posted: 06.28.2008

Scientists have located a region of the brain that encourages humans to indulge in adventurous behaviour. Sophisticated scans showed the region, located in a primitive area of the brain, is activated when people choose unfamiliar options. The researchers believe this suggests that taking a chance is an ancient human trait that may have given humans an evolutionary advantage. The University College London study features online in the journal Neuron. The research took place at UCL's Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging. Volunteers were shown a selection of images with which they had already been made familiar. Each card had a unique probability of reward attached to it and, over the course of the experiment, the volunteers would be able to work out which selection would provide the highest rewards. However, when unfamiliar images were introduced the researchers found that volunteers were more likely to take a chance and select one of these options than continue with their familiar - and arguably safer - option. Using fMRI scanners, which measure blood flow in the brain to highlight which areas are most active, the researchers showed that when the subjects selected an unfamiliar option an area of the brain known as the ventral striatum lit up, indicating that it was more active. The ventral striatum is in one of the evolutionarily primitive regions of the brain - suggesting that the process can be advantageous and will be shared by many animals. Lead researcher Dr Bianca Wittmann said: "Seeking new and unfamiliar experiences is a fundamental behavioural tendency in humans and animals." (C)BBC

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11745 - Posted: 06.26.2008

By Diane Mapes For Tiffanie Williams, a marketing executive from Boston, it’s chips and salsa and sappy movie marathons. For Paul Niemi, a communications specialist from Manhattan, it’s Chinese food and long weekends in bed. And for Susan Biali, a physician and life coach who splits her time between Vancouver, Canada, and Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, it’s skipped meals and late nights glued to the computer. Say hello to the many faces of stress. While health experts urge people to exercise, eat right and get enough sleep in order to keep stress and its harmful effects at bay, many of us tend to fall into all-too-predictable and all-too-unhealthy patterns when life gets out of whack — we smoke more, we drink more, we ignore the gym and make tracks for the shopping mall. But the place stress seems to hammer us the hardest is right where we live: in our bedrooms and bellies. In an October 2007 American Psychological Association study, nearly half of the 2,000 surveyed (48 percent) said they’d lost sleep during the last month thanks to stress, 36 percent said they’d skipped a meal during the last month because of pressure and 43 percent said stress caused them to overeat or eat unhealthy foods. Yes, stress makes us eat more. Or eat less. It keeps us awake at night. Or sends us into hiding in our beds. These stress responses often pair up to form “coping combos.” Some people are sleepers who can’t eat while others are insomniacs who eat too much. There are non-sleepers who pick at their food and sleepyheads who repeatedly surrender to the siren song of the starch cupboard. © 2008 MSNBC Interactive

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 11744 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nikhil Swaminathan A drug already on the market for a completely unrelated condition could be used to treat a form of mental retardation linked to autism—if the results of a study in mice hold up, researchers report. Scientists used rapamycin—a medication doctors prescribe to patients who have had transplants to prevent their bodies from rejecting the new organs—to treat learning disorders associated with a disease called tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) in mice. TSC is a rare genetic disorder that causes brain tumors, seizures, learning disabilities, skin lesions and kidney tumors in the 50,000 Americans and one million people worldwide who have the disease. Half of those with TSC are autistic, and as many as one in five people with the condition also suffer from mental retardation, so the hope is that rapamycin may be used to treat learning disabilities and short-term memory deficits in all kinds of autism as well, says neurobiologist and co-author of a study in Nature Medicine, Alcino Silva of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. Silva and his colleagues created mice with TSC by removing one copy of the gene TSC2. (If researchers delete both copies of the gene, the resulting mice die shortly after birth.) When the both copies of the gene are turned on in either mice and humans, they produce and regulate proteins that help strengthen connections between nerve cells, which the brain needs to remember and learn. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11743 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Philip Ball When Snowball, a sulphur-crested male cockatoo, was shown last year in a YouTube video apparently moving in time to pop music, he became an Internet sensation. But only now has his performance been subjected to scientific scrutiny. And the conclusion is that Snowball really can dance. Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues say that Snowball’s ability to shake his stuff is much more than a cute curiosity. It could shed light on the biological bases of rhythm perception, and might even hold implications for the use of music in treating neurodegenerative disease. "Music with a beat can sometimes help people with Parkinson’s disease to initiate and coordinate walking," says Patel. "But we don’t know why. If non-human animals can synchronize to a beat, what we learn from their brains could be relevant for understanding the mechanisms behind the clinical power of rhythmic music in Parkinson’s." Anyone watching Snowball can see that his bopping seems to be well synchronized with the beat. But it was possible that in the original videos he was using timing cues from people dancing off camera. His previous owner says that he and his children would encourage Snowball’s ‘dancing’ with rhythmic gestures of their own. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Hearing; Parkinsons
Link ID: 11742 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A. One term used in studying the phenomenon is saccular acoustical sensitivity (the saccule is a bed of sensory cells in the inner ear), but the goosebumps and extreme aversion are unexplained. Furthermore, recent research into sounds that drive people crazy ranks screeching blackboards well below several other sounds, like vomiting. Trevor J. Cox of the Acoustics Research Centre at the University of Salford in England has done extensive research on nasty noises using a Web site, www.sound101.org, that allows people to rate their reactions to 34 repellent or disgusting sounds. After thousands of responses, vomiting is in the lead. Other top offenders are crying babies, microphone feedback and a dentist’s drill. The blackboard screech comes in at No. 16. Mr. Cox suggested in the journal Applied Acoustics early this year that the reaction to vomiting might be partly related to an inborn desire to avoid sick people and thus infection, but that cultural and etiquette factors might also be involved. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 11741 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LAURIE TARKAN Ramona Lamascola thought she was losing her 88-year-old mother to dementia. Instead, she was losing her to overmedication. Last fall her mother, Theresa Lamascola, of the Bronx, suffering from anxiety and confusion, was put on the antipsychotic drug Risperdal. When she had trouble walking, her daughter took her to another doctor — the younger Ms. Lamascola’s own physician — who found that she had unrecognized hypothyroidism, a disorder that can contribute to dementia. Theresa Lamascola was moved to a nursing home to get these problems under control. But things only got worse. “My mother was screaming and out of it, drooling on herself and twitching,” said Ms. Lamascola, a pediatric nurse. The psychiatrist in the nursing home stopped the Risperdal, which can cause twitching and vocal tics, and prescribed a sedative and two other antipsychotics. “I knew the drugs were doing this to her,” her daughter said. “I told him to stop the medications and stay away from Mom.” Not until yet another doctor took Mrs. Lamascola off the drugs did she begin to improve. The use of antipsychotic drugs to tamp down the agitation, combative behavior and outbursts of dementia patients has soared, especially in the elderly. Sales of newer antipsychotics like Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa totaled $13.1 billion in 2007, up from $4 billion in 2000, according to IMS Health, a health care information company. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 11740 - Posted: 06.24.2010