By Larry Greenemeier For all their sophistication, computers still can't compete with nature's gift—a brain that sorts objects quickly and accurately enough so that people and primates can interpret what they see as it happens. Despite decades of development, computer vision systems still get bogged down by the massive amounts of data necessary just to identify the most basic images. Throw that same image into a different setting or change the lighting and artificial intelligence is even less of a match for good old gray matter. These shortcomings become more pressing as demand grows for security systems that can recognize a known terrorist's face in a crowded airport and car safety mechanisms such as a sensor that can hit the brakes when it detects a pedestrian or another vehicle in the car's path. Seeking the way forward, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers are looking to advances in neuroscience for ways to improve artificial intelligence, and vice versa. The school's leading minds in both neural and computer sciences are pooling their research, mixing complex computational models of the brain with their work on image processing. This cross-disciplinary approach began to yield fruit a year ago, when a group of researchers led by Tomaso Poggio, a professor in M.I.T.'s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and an investigator at the school's McGovern Institute for Brain Research, used a brain-inspired computer model to interpret a series of photographs. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 11317 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Listening to music in the early stages after a stroke can improve a patient's recovery, research suggests. The researchers compared patients who listened to music for a couple of hours a day, with those who listened only to audio books, or nothing at all. The music group showed better recovery of memory and attention skills, and a more positive general frame of mind. Writing in journal Brain, the Finnish team who studied 60 patients said music could be a useful addition to therapy. Lead researcher Teppo Sarkamo, from the University of Helsinki, said music could be particularly valuable for patients not yet ready for other forms of rehabilitation. It also had the advantage of being cheap and easy-to-conduct. The study focused on 60 stroke patients who took part in the research as soon as possible after they had been admitted to hospital. Dot Johnson, 60, had a stroke 15 years ago, and spent seven months in hospital. She had physiotherapy and other treatments, but she remembers that music and sound from the television were always on in her room. She thinks that stimulated her mind, and helped her get better. She said: "I genuinely think that music actually helped." The aim was to offer music therapy before the changes in the brain that can take place in the aftermath of a stroke had a chance to kick in. Most of the patients had problems with movement and with cognitive processes, such as attention and memory. Patients in the music group were able to chose the type of music they listened to. All patients received standard stroke rehabilitation. After three months, verbal memory improved by 60% in the music group, compared with18% in the audio book group, and 29% in the non-listeners. (C)BBC

Keyword: Stroke; Regeneration
Link ID: 11316 - Posted: 02.20.2008

By CARL ZIMMER WOODS HOLE, Mass. — The cuttlefish in Roger Hanlon’s laboratory were in fine form. Their skin was taking on new colors and patterns faster than the digital signs in Times Square. Dr. Hanlon inspected the squidlike animals as he walked past their shallow tubs, stopping from time to time to ask, “Whoa, did you see that?” One cuttlefish added a pair of eye spots to its back, a strategy cuttlefish use to fool predators. The spots lingered a few seconds, then vanished. When Dr. Hanlon stuck his finger into another tub, three squirrel-size cuttlefish turned to chocolate, and one streaked its back and arms with wavy white stripes. “Look at the pattern on that guy,” he said with a smile as they lunged for his finger. In other tubs, the cuttlefish put on subtler but no less sophisticated displays. Dr. Hanlon’s students had put sand in some tubs, and there the cuttlefish assumed a smooth beige. On top of gravel, their skins were busy fields of light and dark. Dr. Hanlon likes to see how far he can push their powers of camouflage. He sometimes put black and white checkerboards in the tubs. The cuttlefish respond by forming astonishingly sharp-edged blocks of white. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision; Animal Communication
Link ID: 11315 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By REED ABELSON For more than four decades, on telethons featuring celebrity performers and children in wheelchairs, Jerry Lewis has been raising money each Labor Day for the Muscular Dystrophy Association and the disease that helped make “poster child” part of the American idiom. On the most recent telethon, which was staged in Las Vegas and raised $63.8 million, the “Law and Order” actress Mariska Hargitay spoke of patients’ “hope that M.D.A. research will lead to treatments and cures.” Mr. Lewis, who has never disclosed why he chose this disease as his cause, once again closed the broadcast with an emotional rendition of the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” But for all the money collected toward a cure, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, the most common form of the disease, still confines thousands of boys in this country to wheelchairs in their early teens. Many do not live past their 20s. It is a stark reminder of how American medicine — with its focus on breakthrough treatments — can sometimes fail a complex, rare and stubbornly uncurable disease. Single-minded in their pursuit of a cure, doctors and researchers for years all but ignored the necessary and unglamorous work of managing Duchenne (pronounced doo-SHEN) as a chronic condition. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Muscles; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11314 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Is a woman's choice of valentine really a choice? As this ScienCentral news video explains, researchers studying mice have found that alpha males can trigger growth of new brain cells in females — that make them want only alpha males. "It turns out that male mice do actually belong to two kind of categories — the dominant and the subordinate. The dominant male mouse will in fact bully, scratch and push around the subordinate male mice," says neuroscientist Samuel Weiss, director of Hotchkiss Brain Institute in Canada. "Females choose dominant mice, male mice, over subordinate male mice in order to mate with the dominant male mouse so that more of her babies will be dominant as well," explains Weiss. Weiss and colleagues wanted to find out the mechanism behind female mouse preference for alpha males. Weiss wondered if female mice's choice of dominant males had something to do with pheromones, chemical signals found in the urine of male mice. (Pheromones have been found in mouse tears as well by other researchers.) He says that dominant mice and subordinate mice have what he calls different "pheromonal signatures." First, Weiss took virgin female mice and exposed them for a few days to a mix of the bedding from both dominant and subordinate mice, because the bedding contains the male pheromones. He found that that had no effect on the brains of the females. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Neurogenesis
Link ID: 11313 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Rowan Hooper Do animals think like autistic savants? Intriguing as that question is, it now seems as if they don't, despite the "savant-like" behaviour many show. The question was raised in a book by animal scientist Temple Grandin, of Colorado State University, Fort Collins. Animals in Translation became a best-seller, and Grandin's views gained widespread attention. Grandin herself is autistic, and it is her experience of processing memories using images rather than words that forms the basis of her theory. "If you want to understand animals, you have to get away from language," she says. There is no doubt that some animals have amazing abilities. Birds such as Clark's nutcrackers can remember the locations of thousands of caches of nuts; Australian magpies are able to mimic the entire song of a different species after just one listen. But is this savant-like, or an evolutionary adaptation? Giorgio Vallortigara, of the University of Trento, Italy, and colleagues think it is the latter. "Autism is a pathological condition," he says. "The extraordinary feats of remembering thousands of caches or sounds shown by some animal species are exhibited by healthy animals." If Grandin is right, there should be similarities between the brains of autistic people and animals. Autism is often associated with a malfunction of the brain's left hemisphere, which can lead to an over-emphasis on details at the expense of an understanding of the big picture. Vallortigara and colleagues give the example of an autistic boy who learned the concept of "giraffe" by concentrating on the pattern of the coat. This led him to misidentify a leopard as a giraffe. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Intelligence; Autism
Link ID: 11312 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sid Perkins More than one-fifth of living mammal species are bats, and most of those use echolocation to track prey or avoid obstacles. The fossil record of these delicate-boned creatures is sparse, but analyses hint that even the earliest known bats—those flitting through the skies between 54 million and 50 million years ago—could echolocate, says Nancy B. Simmons, a vertebrate paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In fact, of the six bat species previously known from that era and with enough remains to analyze, all apparently were sonar capable, she notes. Evidence includes a large cochlea, or inner ear, that enabled the bats to detect the echoes of their high-pitched squeaks. Paleontologists have long debated whether bats' ability to fly preceded, followed, or evolved in tandem with their ability to echolocate. Now, in the Feb. 14 Nature, Simmons and her colleagues describe the almost complete fossils of a creature that suggests the "flight-first" hypothesis is correct. The ancient bat, dubbed Onychonycteris finneyi, had a 30-centimeter-wingspan and lived in what is now western Wyoming about 52.5 million years ago, says Simmons. Onychonycteris, which means "clawed bat" in Greek, refers to the creature's most distinctive feature: It has claws on all five digits of its forelimbs, whereas all living bats and previously studied fossil bats have claws on no more than two digits. The name finneyi honors the fossil collector who excavated the specimens, says Simmons. ©2008 Society for Science & the Public.

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 11311 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Diabetes is known to impair the cognitive health of people, but now scientists have identified one potential mechanism underlying these learning and memory problems. A new National Institutes of Health (NIH) study in diabetic rodents finds that increased levels of a stress hormone produced by the adrenal gland disrupt the healthy functioning of the hippocampus, the region of the brain responsible for learning and short-term memory. Moreover, when levels of the adrenal glucocorticoid hormone corticosterone (also known as cortisol in humans) are returned to normal, the hippocampus recovers its ability to build new cells and regains the "plasticity" needed to compensate for injury and disease and adjust to change. The study appears in the Feb. 17, 2008, issue of Nature Neuroscience and was conducted by the NIA's Mark Mattson, Ph.D., and colleagues. "This research in animal models is intriguing, suggesting the possibility of novel approaches in preventing and treating cognitive impairment by maintaining normal levels of glucocorticoid," said Richard J. Hodes, M.D., NIA director. "Further study will provide a better understanding of the often complex interplay between the nervous system, hormones and cognitive health." Cortisol production is controlled by the hypothalamic-pituitary axis (HPA), a hormone-producing system involving the hypothalamus and pituitary gland in the brain and the adrenal gland located near the kidney. People with poorly controlled diabetes often have an overactive HPA axis and excessive cortisol produced by the adrenal gland. To study the interaction between elevated stress hormones and the hippocampal function, researchers tested the cognitive abilities and examined the brain tissue in animal models of rats with Type 1 diabetes (insulin deficient) and mice with Type 2 diabetes (insulin resistant).

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 11310 - Posted: 02.20.2008

By GINA KOLATA One of the great unanswered questions in physiology is why muscles get tired. The experience is universal, common to creatures that have muscles, but the answer has been elusive until now. Scientists at Columbia say they have not only come up with an answer, but have also devised, for mice, an experimental drug that can revive the animals and let them keep running long after they would normally flop down in exhaustion. For decades, muscle fatigue had been largely ignored or misunderstood. Leading physiology textbooks did not even try to offer a mechanism, said Dr. Andrew Marks, principal investigator of the new study. A popular theory, that muscles become tired because they release lactic acid, was discredited not long ago. In a report published Monday in an early online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Marks says the problem is calcium flow inside muscle cells. Ordinarily, ebbs and flows of calcium in cells control muscle contractions. But when muscles grow tired, the investigators report, tiny channels in them start leaking calcium, and that weakens contractions. At the same time, the leaked calcium stimulates an enzyme that eats into muscle fibers, contributing to the muscle exhaustion. In recent years, says George Brooks of the University of California, Berkeley, muscle researchers have had more or less continuous discussions about why muscles fatigue. It was his work that largely discredited the lactic-acid hypothesis, but that left a void. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Muscles
Link ID: 11309 - Posted: 02.20.2008

By BENEDICT CAREY Artful persuasion depends on eye contact, but not just any kind. If one person prefers brief glances and the other is busy staring deeply, then it may not matter how good the jokes are or how much they both loved “Juno.” Rhythm counts. Voice cadence does, too. People who speak in loud, animated bursts tend to feed off others who do the same, just as those who are lower key tend to relax in a cool stream of measured tones. “Myself, I’m very conscious of people’s body position,” said Ray Allieri of Wellesley, Mass., a former telecommunications executive with 20 years in marketing and sales. “If they’re leaning back in their chair, I do that, and if they’re forward on their elbows, I tend to move forward,” Psychologists have been studying the art of persuasion for nearly a century, analyzing activities like political propaganda, television campaigns and door-to-door sales. Many factors influence people’s susceptibility to an appeal, studies suggest, including their perception of how exclusive an opportunity is and whether their neighbors are buying it. Most people are also strongly sensitive to rapport, to charm, to the social music in the person making the pitch. In recent years, researchers have begun to decode the unspoken, subtle elements that come into play when people click. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 11308 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL Twenty-five years ago, when Kanwaljeet Anand was a medical resident in a neonatal intensive care unit, his tiny patients, many of them preterm infants, were often wheeled out of the ward and into an operating room. He soon learned what to expect on their return. The babies came back in terrible shape: their skin was gray, their breathing shallow, their pulses weak. Anand spent hours stabilizing their vital signs, increasing their oxygen supply and administering insulin to balance their blood sugar. "What’s going on in there to make these babies so stressed?” Anand wondered. Breaking with hospital practice, he wrangled permission to follow his patients into the O.R. “That’s when I discovered that the babies were not getting anesthesia,” he recalled recently. Infants undergoing major surgery were receiving only a paralytic to keep them still. Anand’s encounter with this practice occurred at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England, but it was common almost everywhere. Doctors were convinced that newborns’ nervous systems were too immature to sense pain, and that the dangers of anesthesia exceeded any potential benefits. Anand resolved to find out if this was true. In a series of clinical trials, he demonstrated that operations performed under minimal or no anesthesia produced a “massive stress response” in newborn babies, releasing a flood of fight-or-flight hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Potent anesthesia, he found, could significantly reduce this reaction. Babies who were put under during an operation had lower stress-hormone levels, more stable breathing and blood-sugar readings and fewer postoperative complications. Anesthesia even made them more likely to survive. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 11307 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY AN expression of true love or raw hatred, of purest faith or mortal sin, of courageous loyalty or selfish cowardice: The act of suicide has meant many things to many people through history, from the fifth-century Christian martyrs to the Samurais’ hara-kiri to more recent literary divas, Hemingway, Plath, Sexton. But now the shadow of suicide has slipped into the corridors of modern medicine as a potential drug side effect, where it is creating a scientific debate as divisive and confounding as any religious clash. And the shadow is likely to deepen. After a years-long debate about whether antidepressant drugs like Prozac and Paxil increase the risk of suicide in some people, the Food and Drug Administration in recent days reported that other drugs, including medications used to treat epilepsy, also appear to increase the remote risk of suicide. The agency has been evaluating suicide risk in a variety of medicines, and more such reports — and more headlines — are expected. Many doctors who treat epilepsy patients said they were bewildered by the recent reports and concerned that regulators were scaring patients away from valuable medications based on limited evidence. On the other side, critics of the agency have charged that the reports were long overdue. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 11306 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nora Schultz Macaques may just seem to be indulging in monkey banter, but they can distinguish one another's voices in much the same way that humans do, suggests a new study. In the human brain, the "voice region" in the auditory cortex activates when we hear others speak. It had been unclear if the human voice area was a specialist adaptation that evolved with our spoken language skills. Now Chris Petkov at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, and colleagues have found that monkey brains, too, have a voice region. They played a variety of sounds to seven macaques and used fMRI to detect any brain areas with increased activity. One region, corresponding to a site close to the voice region in the human brain, lit up in response to macaque coos and grunts, but was less active when the monkeys heard other animals or natural sounds, such as those of insects, thunder and rain. Journal reference: Nature Neuroscience (DOI: 10.1038/nn2043) © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language; Hearing
Link ID: 11305 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By John Russell At first blush, Chuck Clauson seems to have as much energy as the next guy. He works full time as a bank loan officer, is raising two teenagers as a single dad, does plenty of housework and enjoys short walks. But the 40-year-old Pendleton man, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis nine years ago, admits he gets tired quickly, especially in hot weather. He takes five medications every day to treat an array of symptoms, from fatigue to nerve pain. Like many people who suffer from multiple sclerosis, Clauson wishes there were a single treatment, or even a cure, for the disease that affects 21/2 million people worldwide, including about 400,000 Americans. Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co. is pushing to find a new treatment. Better known for developing medicine for diabetes, depression and schizophrenia, Lilly recently signed a deal with a Canadian biotechnology company, BioMS Medical Corp., to help it complete development of an experimental drug called MBP9289. The two companies say MBP9289 has shown promise in delaying progression and worsening of multiple sclerosis. The drug is in two Phase 3 clinical trials and one Phase 2 trial, and is still years away from the market.

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 11304 - Posted: 02.11.2008

Nigel Hawkes Consuming low-calorie drinks may increase the risk of putting on weight, according to scientists in the United States. They have suggested that people who choose diet drinks containing artificial sweeteners tend to overcompensate and consume more calories than those who do not. Although the rise in obesity has corresponded with a growth in low-calorie soft drinks, designed to make keeping weight down easy by replacing sugar with saccharine or other sweeteners, scientists who conducted experiments using rats at Purdue University, in Indiana, have suggested that the opposite may be happening. They found that rats fed on yoghurt sweetened with saccharine ate more calories, gained more weight and put on more body fat than rats that were given yoghurt sweetened with glucose. Susan Swithers and Terry Davidson, who conducted the experiments, have suggested that, by breaking the connection between a sweet sensation and high-calorie food, the use of saccharine changes the body’s ability to regulate how many calories it consumes. “The data clearly indicate that consuming a food sweetened with no-calorie saccharine can lead to greater body-weight gain and adiposity than would consuming the same food sweetened with a higher-calorie sugar,” they conclude in their report, which is published in the journal Behavioural Neuroscience. © Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 11303 - Posted: 06.24.2010

BOSTON - If you’re sad and shopping, watch your wallet: A new study shows people’s spending judgment goes out the window when they’re down, especially if they’re a bit self-absorbed. Study participants who watched a sadness-inducing video clip offered to pay nearly four times as much money to buy a water bottle than a group that watched an emotionally neutral clip. The so-called “misery is not miserly” phenomenon is well-known to psychologists, advertisers and personal shoppers alike, and has been documented in a similar study in 2004. The new study released Friday by researchers from four universities goes further, trying to answer whether temporary sadness alone can trigger spendthrift tendencies. The study found a willingness to spend freely by sad people occurs mainly when their sadness triggers greater “self-focus.” That response was measured by counting how frequently study participants used references to “I,” “me,” “my” and “myself” in writing an essay about how a sad situation such as the one portrayed in the video would affect them personally. The brief video was about the death of a boy’s mentor. Another group watched an emotionally neutral clip about the Great Barrier Reef, the vast coral reef system off Australia’s coast. © 2008 The Associated Press

Keyword: Emotions; Depression
Link ID: 11302 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Doctors are increasingly prescribing exercise for people with depression, mental health campaigners have found. In a survey of 200 English GPs, the Mental Health Foundation found 22% suggest exercise to help people with milder forms of the condition. This compares with just 5% in a similar survey three years ago. The foundation said it was important that doctors did not just prescribe antidepressants for patients, and looked for other options. Research has shown that exercise can help people with mild forms of depression by improving self-esteem - through better body image or achieving goals, and by relieving feelings of isolation which can fuel their depression. It also releases feel-good brain chemicals such as endorphins. Celia Richardson, campaigns director for the Mental Health Foundation, said: "It can help people physically, socially and biologically. They often meet others who have been in the same situation as them, but are now further down the line and feeling better." The survey found there is now a wider belief by GPs that exercise therapy can be beneficial. (C)BBC

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 11301 - Posted: 02.09.2008

By Yvonne Raley and Robert Talisse In 2003 nearly half of all Americans falsely assumed that the U.S. government had found solid evidence for a link between Iraq and al Qaeda. What is more, almost a quarter of us believed that investigators had all but confirmed the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a 2003 report by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes and Knowledge Networks, a polling and market research firm. How did the true situation in Iraq become so grossly distorted in American minds? Many people have attributed such misconceptions to a politically motivated disinformation campaign to engender support for the armed struggle in Iraq. We do not think the deceptions were premeditated, however. Instead they are most likely the result of common types of reasoning errors, which appear frequently in discussions in the news media and which can easily fool an unsuspecting public. News shows often have an implicit bias that may motivate the portrayal of facts and opinions in misleading ways, even if the information presented is largely accurate. Nevertheless, by becoming familiar with how spokespeople can create false impressions, media consumers can learn to ignore certain claims and thereby avoid getting duped. We have detected two general types of fallacies—one of them well known and the other newly identified—that have permeated discussion of the Iraq War and that are generally ubiquitous in political debates and other discourse. (C)1996-2007 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11300 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By David A. Fahrenthold and Steven Mufson A federal appeals court yesterday threw out the Environmental Protection Agency's approach to limiting mercury emitted from power-plant smokestacks, saying the agency ignored laws and twisted logic when it imposed new standards that were favorable to plant owners. The ruling, issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, was another judicial rejection of the Bush administration's pollution policies. It comes less than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court rebuked the administration and the EPA for refusing to regulate greenhouse gases. This court's critique -- which undid a controversial program to "trade" emissions of mercury, a potent neurotoxin -- was especially sharp. It compared the EPA to the capricious Queen of Hearts in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," saying the agency had followed its own desires and ignored the "plain text" of the law. "What the administration did when they came in was to essentially try to torpedo environmental regulations," said James Pew, a lawyer with the activist group Earthjustice who worked on the case. "This really is a repudiation of the Bush administration's environmental legacy." Coal-fired power plants are responsible for about a third of the country's total mercury emissions. In the Washington area, mercury pollution in waterways has triggered advisories against consuming too much fish from the Chesapeake Bay, the Potomac River and other bodies of water. © Copyright 1996-2008 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 11299 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By M. P. DUNLEAVEY WHEN I invited a friend to dinner one day last summer, she mentioned that she would bring some Blue Nun white wine, in a box. If you’re not accustomed to hearing the words “box” and “wine” in the same sentence, the idea might sound unappealing. Perhaps even déclassé. Not that I wanted to admit these thoughts to my friend, but my exclamation — “Blue Nun? In a box?” — did make my skepticism rather clear. Fortunately she just laughed at my snobbery, and said that boxed wine today was far from the old Chablis with a spigot, which some of us may recall from college bars and family picnics. She even used the word “tasty” — which although not top of the oenophile vocabulary, sounded promising. And she was right. Blue Nun in a box was surprisingly tasty, all things considered, and the embarrassing experience of having my cheap wine prejudice exposed has forced me to examine how far this financial bias goes. I feared that the wine incident was evidence that somehow I actually believed that paying more for things means they’re better, even though I know it isn’t true. There is research suggesting that the bias toward higher-priced goods may have something to do with the way the brain links price with pleasure — and thus leads people to make assumptions about quality. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11298 - Posted: 06.24.2010