If you want to have lots of kids, look for a Barry White instead of a Justin Timberlake. Men with a deep voices have more offspring, a new study suggests. Previous studies conducted by David Feinberg of McMaster University in Canada have shown that women are more attracted to men with deeper voices, judging them to be older, healthier and more masculine than their higher-pitched rivals. Men, on the other hand, go for women with higher pitched voices because they find them more attractive, subordinate, feminine, healthier and younger-sounding. In the new study, detailed in a recent issue of the journal Biology Letters, Feinberg set out to see how that attraction to deeper-voiced men affected reproduction and the survival of offspring. "While we find in this new study that voice pitch is not related to offspring mortality rates," Feinberg said, "we find that men with low voice pitch have higher reproductive success and more children born to them." To look for any relationship between voice pitch and birth rates, the researchers studied the Hadza tribe of Tanzania, one of the last true hunter-gatherer cultures. Because the Hadza have no modern birth control, the researchers were able to compare birth rates without any outside influencing factors. © 2007 MSNBC.com © 2007 Microsoft

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 10774 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers at the University of Warwick's Warwick Medical School studied 10,308 British civil servants in two different time periods: between 1985 and 1988, and between 1992 and 1993. Study participants who slept longer than eight hours were more than twice as likely to die as those who kept sleeping for seven. Researchers believe depression, low socioeconomic status and cancer-related fatigue could play a part. (CBC) With seven hours seen as the optimal amount of sleep for the average adult, the study subjects who cut the duration of their sleep from seven hours to five hours a night had a 1.7-fold increased risk of death from all causes, according to the research, presented Monday to the British Sleep Society. They also had twice the increased risk of death from a cardiovascular problem. More surprisingly, scientists found those individuals who increased the number of hours they slept per night from seven to eight hours or more were more than twice as likely to die as those who kept sleeping for seven. They were also more likely to die from non-cardiovascular diseases. "Short sleep has been shown to be a risk factor for weight gain, hypertension and Type 2 diabetes sometimes leading to mortality,' said Francesco Cappuccio, an author of the study. © CBC 2007

Keyword: Sleep; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 10773 - Posted: 06.24.2010

LONDON - People who do not get enough sleep are more than twice as likely to die of heart disease, according to a large British study released on Monday. Although the reasons are unclear, researchers said lack of sleep appeared to be linked to increased blood pressure, which is known to raise the risk of heart attacks and stroke. A 17-year analysis of 10,000 government workers showed those who cut their sleeping from seven hours a night to five or less faced a 1.7-fold increased risk in mortality from all causes and more than double the risk of cardiovascular death. The findings highlight a danger in busy modern lifestyles, Francesco Cappuccio, professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Warwick's medical school, told the annual conference of the British Sleep Society in Cambridge. "A third of the population of the U.K. and over 40 percent in the U.S. regularly sleep less than five hours a night, so it is not a trivial problem," he said in a telephone interview. "The current pressures in society to cut out sleep, in order to squeeze in more, may not be a good idea — particularly if you go below five hours." © 2007 MSNBC.com © 2007 Microsoft

Keyword: Sleep; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 10772 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — Big-headed people could be brainier too, according to a new analysis of a 1939 study comparing head size and intelligence in a group of male prisoners. Although the effect of head size on IQ is minimal, it does exist, says Jeremy Genovese, who conducted the new research and is an associate professor of human development and educational psychology at Cleveland State University. "The correlations between head size and IQ are quite modest, and you cannot determine someone's intelligence with a tape measure," he told Discovery News. "However, the correlation is real and might have some clinical significance, such as predicting susceptibility to dementia." Genovese explained that "larger bodies do require larger brains to support larger nervous systems," but he added that the notable difference in body size between men and women appears to have "no relationship to intelligence." For the study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, Genovese obtained copies of the 1939 inmate data, which was collected by Harvard anthropologist Earnest Albert Hooten. Hooten gathered anthropological and sociological records on roughly 12 percent of American prison inmates. © 2007 Discovery Communications

Keyword: Intelligence
Link ID: 10771 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi Hormone replacement therapy massively boosts sexual interest in post-menopausal women, suggests a new study. Women taking HRT therapy, typically used to treat symptoms of menopause such as "hot flashes", reported a 44% increase in sexual interest in the recent trial. Researchers say this finding supports the idea that the hormone treatment, which consists of oestrogen and progesterone, can help women frustrated by a decline in libido following menopause. Experts say, however, that patients must carefully weigh the benefits of such treatment against the possible negative side effects, which include an increased risk of cancer. Menopause has a huge impact on women, leading sometimes to bone loss known as osteoporosis and facial hair growth. The hormonal changes of menopause can also lead to clitoral atrophy and vaginal dryness, which can make sex less pleasurable. Previous studies have estimated that anywhere from 30% to 70% of women report a decline in libido following menopause for various reasons, according to Jim Pfaus at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec in Canada. Pfaus adds that sex therapy cannot necessarily boost libido in women who have passed menopause since their loss of interest in sex often has a biological cause. “You can't cognitively treat your hormone levels,” he says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 10770 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Deborah Mitchell CHICAGO (Reuters Health) - Physicians, nurses and other health care providers should be aware that patients receiving intravenous treatment with the antifungal drug voriconazole may develop a range of neurological side effects, including auditory and visual hallucinations, according to a report presented at the 47th annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. Voriconazole, sold under the trade name Vfend, is a relatively new drug used to treat serious fungus infections, such as invasive mold infections and invasive candidiasis. Many of these patients are extremely ill and are receiving several different drugs, which makes it difficult to distinguish the side effects of specific drugs from the symptoms of the underlying illness. To estimate the frequency and seriousness of voriconazole side effects, Dr. Dimitrios Zonios and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, evaluated patients in an ongoing prospective study that was assessing voriconazole toxicity. The researchers focused on side effects of the central nervous system, which are not well characterized for the drug. Between March 2006 and June 2007, the researchers evaluated 66 cancer patients who were being treated with intravenous voriconazole at their institution. Careful interviews and toxicity evaluations were conducted for each patient. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 10769 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Brian Vastag Zakir Ramazanov first encountered Rhodiola rosea in 1979 as a Soviet soldier in Afghanistan. A comrade often received boxes full of the yellow-flowered mountain herb from his home in Siberia and would prepare and share a sweet-smelling tea from the root. Ramazanov found that the drink seemed to quicken his hiking and speed his recovery after a taxing mission. After Ramazanov left the army, he forgot about the Siberian herb. Despite having a good job, he felt depressed, and flashbacks from the war interfered with his daily tasks. After trying various drugs and natural remedies to ease his symptoms, he happened upon a lecture about rhodiola. He learned that the Soviets had been studying the herb since the 1940s, feeding it to Olympic athletes and cosmonauts. Government scientists had noted that rhodiola boosted the body's response to stress. If it was good enough for weight lifters and space travelers, it was good enough for him, Ramazanov thought. He began taking rhodiola extracts, and after a month his symptoms lifted. He had more energy during the day and could finally sleep at night. The horrific war images faded and his concentration improved. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Ramazanov moved to New York State, began translating Russian rhodiola research, and started a small business to import the herb. A few years later, Richard Brown, a psychiatrist at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, heard about rhodiola from two of his patients. They independently mentioned that the herb, sold as a dietary supplement in the United States by a company affiliated with Ramazanov, had eased their depression. ©2007 Science Service

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 10768 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower The earliest known human ancestors that trekked from Africa into Asia possessed legs, feet, and spines much like ours, even as they sported relatively apelike arms and small brains, according to an analysis of 1.77-million-year-old fossils unearthed in the central Asian nation of Georgia. A team led by David Lordkipanidze of the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi recovered 33 lower-body bones from at least three adults and one teenager at a site called Dmanisi. The researchers had previously found four skulls and four lower jaws, as well as simple stone tools, in the same sediment (SN: 5/13/00, p. 308). In several cases, skull and lower-body remains come from the same individual. The researchers classify these ancient finds as early Homo. The fossils might be from an early form of Homo erectus that left eastern Africa for the Asian hinterlands, but a definitive species identity remains unclear, Lordkipanidze cautions. A description of the new finds appears in the Sept. 20 Nature. "The Dmanisi individuals weren't the first hominids [fossil ancestors of humans] to leave Africa," Lordkipanidze says. "They must have had more-primitive ancestors that passed through the Near East before reaching Georgia." ©2007 Science Service.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 10767 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nikhil Swaminathan The phrase "Mozart Effect" conjures an image of a pregnant woman who, sporting headphones over her belly, is convinced that playing classical music to her unborn child will improve the tyke's intelligence. But is there science to back up this idea, which has spawned a cottage industry of books, CDs and videos? A short paper published in Nature in 1993 unwittingly introduced the supposed Mozart effect to the masses. Psychologist Frances Rauscher's study involved 36 college kids who listened to either 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata in D-major, a relaxation track or silence before performing several spatial reasoning tasks. In one test—determining what a paper folded several times over and then cut might look like when unfolded—students who had listened to Mozart seemed to show significant improvement in their performance (by about eight to nine spatial IQ points). Rauscher—whose work, unlike most scientists, is sometimes cited on the liner notes of CDs—remains puzzled as to how this narrow effect of classical music extended from a paper-folding task to general intelligence and from college students to children (and fetuses). "I think parents are very desperate to give their own children every single enhancement that they can," she surmises. In addition to a flood of commercial products in the wake of the finding, in 1998 then-Georgia governor Zell Miller mandated that mothers of newborns in the state be given classical music CDs. And in Florida, day care centers were required to pipe symphonies through their sound systems. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Hearing
Link ID: 10766 - Posted: 06.24.2010

FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. - Before they leave for Iraq, thousands of troops with the 101st Airborne Division line up at laptop computers to take a test: basic math, matching numbers and symbols, and identifying patterns. They press a button quickly to measure response time. It’s all part of a fledgling Army program that records how soldiers’ brains work when healthy, giving doctors baseline data to help diagnose and treat the soldiers if they suffer a traumatic brain injury — the signature injury of the Iraq war. “This allows the Army to be much more proactive,” said Lt. Col. Mark McGrail, division surgeon for the 101st. “We don’t want to wait until the soldier is getting out of the Army to say, ’But I’ve had these symptoms.”’ The mandatory brain-function tests are starting with the 101st at Fort Campbell and are expected to spread to other military bases in the next couple of months. Commanders at each base will decide whether to adopt the program. The tests provide a standard, objective measurement for each soldier’s reaction time, their short-term memory and other cognitive skills. That data would be used when the soldiers come home to identify mild brain trauma that can often go unnoticed and untreated. © 2007 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Stress; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 10765 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Christie Nicholson About three years ago Eva Salem got into some trouble with a crocodile. It snapped her hand in its jaws. In a panic, she managed to knock out the crocodile and free herself. Then, she woke up. "I imagine that's what it's like when you're on heroin. That's what my dreams were like—vivid, crazy and active," she says. Salem, a new mother, had been breast-feeding her daughter for five months before the croc-attack dream, living on four hours of sleep a night. If she did sleep a full night, her dreams boomeranged, becoming so vivid that she felt like she wasn't sleeping at all. Dreams are amazingly persistent. Miss a few from lack of sleep and the brain keeps score, forcing payback soon after eyelids close. "Nature's soft nurse," as Shakespeare called sleep, isn't so soft after all. "When someone is sleep deprived we see greater sleep intensity, meaning greater brain activity during sleep; dreaming is definitely increased and likely more vivid," says neurologist Mark Mahowald of the University of Minnesota and director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis. The phenomenon is called REM rebound. REM refers to "rapid eye movement," the darting of the eyes under closed lids. In this state we dream the most and our brain activity eerily resembles that of waking life. Yet, at the same time, our muscles go slack and we lie paralyzed—a toe might wiggle, but essentially we can't move, as if our brain is protecting our bodies from acting out the stories we dream. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 10764 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Robin Hilmantel, USA TODAY Whenever Leslie Lipton was handed a menu, she'd freeze. She suddenly would feel that all eyes were upon her, noticing and judging her eating habits. This was something she couldn't quite swallow when she was a teenager. "I'd sit there, and I'd wait, and I'd see what everyone else was ordering before I ordered," says Lipton, now 21 and a student at Barnard College in New York City. Lunch in the high school cafeteria felt like a competition. "Everyone would be looking at everyone else's tray to see what everyone else was eating," says Lipton. "If you eat less, at least the comparisons are good." Lipton says this reluctance to eat in public was the prologue to her anorexia, the starvation eating disorder from which she has since recovered. But, she says, many girls across the country avoid food in public even if they eat normally at home. This self-conscious group is convinced that without the classical symptoms of an eating disorder, such as extreme weight loss, there's no problem. But parents and friends are often left wondering at what point such behavior indicates that an eating disorder is brewing. Lipton, who now speaks to girls across the country about eating disorders and her recovery, says the phenomenon is "rampant." The author of Unwell: A Novel, which was published last year, Lipton blames society's emphasis on thinness. "People don't seem to look at girls as needing food," she says. Copyright 2007 USA TODAY,

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 10763 - Posted: 09.21.2007

The developing nervous system is a seemingly chaotic and exceedingly complex jumble of cells with specialized missions, unique architectures, and stereotyped patterns of neuronal connections, or synapses. How neurons' dendrites and axons weave themselves into precise neural circuits during development remains a challenging question in neurobiology. What are the molecular tags on the surface of neurons that allow them to distinguish between each other? A single gene capable of producing more than 38,000 cell surface proteins is an essential tool in assuring the assembly of precise neural circuits in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. Now, two teams of researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) have demonstrated how these closely related proteins establish the specificity that allows them to serve as identification tags for individual neurons. In work published in the September 21, 2007, issue of the journal Cell, research teams led by HHMI researchers S. Lawrence Zipursky of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and David Baker of the University of Washington worked together to describe how each of 18,048 different versions of the Dscam protein is able to recognize and bind only to an identical form of the protein. © 2007 Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10762 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NATASHA SINGER CONTROVERSIAL new procedures in cosmetic medicine, like genital rejuvenation or buttock implant surgery, tend to take hold on the West or East Coasts and then move inland. But, during the last two years, a procedure called lipodissolve, which uses injections of a drug compound to target unwanted fat deposits, has captured the attention of thousands of cosmetic patients in Missouri and Kansas. “Two years ago, nobody in St. Louis had heard of it,” said Laurie Calzada, a petite blond self-help author who last year completed a series of anti-fat shots on her outer thighs and abdomen. “But now lipodissolve is practically a household word.” Anti-fat injections are one of the most hotly debated procedures in cosmetic medicine because they are spreading faster than the science behind them. Unlike mesotherapy, a process that entails superficially injecting vitamins and other substances into the skin, lipodissolve involves deeper injections of a compound drug that is supposed to break down cells in the fatty layer under skin. But the Food and Drug Administration has not approved any drug to be used cosmetically in anti-fat injections. Neither the drug formula used in lipodissolve nor the method of treatment is standardized. And researchers disagree whether the shots eliminate fat cells, or merely liquefy fat so that it shifts around in the body, raising the possibility of long-term consequences such as the aggravation of heart disease. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 10761 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By AMY LORENTZEN DES MOINES, Iowa -- An Iowa researcher is studying a little-known eating disorder that some doctors may miss: purging disorder. Though similar to women with bulimia, patients who fit this description don't binge-eat. Yet they feel compelled to purge, usually by vomiting, even after eating only a small or normal amount of food, said Pamela Keel, the University of Iowa researcher who led a study on the subject. Keel, a psychology professor, and colleagues from Iowa and the Harvard Medical School describe their research in this month's issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. "Purging disorder is new in the sense that it has not been officially recognized as a unique condition in the classification of eating disorders. But it's not a new problem," Keel said. "Women were struggling with purging disorder long before we began studying it." If further study supports that it is a distinct disorder, Keel said the American Psychiatric Association could revise its criteria for diagnosing eating disorders. That's important because doctors could then better screen these patients and identify treatments for them. Otherwise, they might be missed because they are normal weight and don't report binge-eating, she said. © 2007 The Associated Press

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 10760 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A pioneering experiment to scan the brains of babies has shown there is much more going on in their little heads than scientists had realised. For more than a decade, scientists have used a range of technologies to scan the brain as it works, highlighting the regions that are most active compared with when the brain is idle. But today's study by Peter Fransson and colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, has studied the baby brain in a resting state, that is, not performing a specific task, and found activity that might help them to recognise their mother and feed, though probably not to daydream. Work published last year by an Anglo-Dutch team showed that around 10 circuits are always active in the adult brain, where different parts have spontaneous synchronised activity, notably to coordinate the right and left sides of the body, generally for hearing and vision. In the dozen babies who took part, the Swedish team found that far from being a blank slate, the babies' brains were abuzz with activity. The findings are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In all, there were five networks of spontaneous brain activity, said Dr Fransson. "The newborn brain is far from being a 'blank slate'," he said. © Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2007

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 10759 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Elizabeth Pennisi A gene implicated in the evolution of human language may have also helped bats make sounds of their own. Various bat species that emit high-frequency squeaks to detect prey and avoid obstacles share a high degree of variation in the FOXP2 gene, according to a new study, suggesting that genetic changes in the gene helped promote the evolution of this ability. FOXP2 codes for a protein that seems to influence coordination between mouth movements and speech. The gene first attracted wide attention in 2001 when it was linked to speech and language disorders (ScienceNOW, 3 October 2001). A year later, researchers discovered that FOXP2 likely played a key role in the development of spoken language (ScienceNOW, 14 August 2002). Mice use the gene as well: Those without it cannot communicate using ultrasonic sounds (ScienceNOW, 21 June 2005). Geneticist Stephen Rossiter of Queen Mary, University of London, and his colleagues wondered whether bats also rely on FOXP2. These mammals make human speech look simple: In a behavior called echolocation, a bat must coordinate its nose, mouth, ears, and larynx to emit and receive calls, all the while executing flight maneuvers guided in part by these signals. Working with Rossiter, Gang Li and Shuyi Zhang, both from East China Normal University in Shanghai, and their colleagues sequenced the entire FOXP2 gene in 13 bats from six families, including some that use echolocation and some that do not. They also looked at the gene in 23 other mammals, including the platypus, as well as in two birds and a reptile. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10758 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Rex Dalton A trove of the oldest human skeletal bones outside Africa is reported in Nature this week — a find that will help researchers to improve their understanding of the biology of the 1.8-million-year-old hominins. The work, led by researchers from the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi, describes three-dozen fossils from the skeletons of four primitive Homo erectus individuals found in recent years at Dmanisi in Georgia, central Asia. H. erectus is thought to have migrated across Asia after coming out of Africa, where the oldest relative of man is traced to nearly 7 million years ago. H. erectus fossils have been found from Africa across Asia as far as Indonesia. Typically there are only a few scattered fossils at one location. A single site with so many bones from so many individuals is rare. And they date back to very soon after H. erectus's exodus from Africa. "Dmanisi is a real gift, because nothing in the world exists like this for this time," says lead author David Lordkipanidze. "The really important point is you have multiple individuals from the same time and location," adds Tim White, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the work. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 10757 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Debora MacKenzie The menopause may be an ordeal for women experiencing a 'hot flash', but new research suggests it had a good evolutionary cause – freeing women to be good grandmothers. Data from Africa indicates that the menopause creates grandmothers without young children of their own that can improve the survival chances of their daughters' offspring. Human female reproductive functions stop around age 50, and start tapering off even earlier. In other mammals, female reproduction simply stops because of ageing, at a variety of ages. But in humans the shutdown is deliberate and early. And it is genetically controlled, meaning the genes responsible were selected by evolution. However, since winning at evolution equals reproductive success, scientists have puzzled over what advantage giving up reproducing could have. Two hypotheses have been proposed: the first is that the difficulty of human childbirth is more likely to kill older women, so a woman who stops getting pregnant at 50 will still have time to raise her last child. The second is that the process allows a woman to help take care of her grandchildren – who she knows are carrying her genes. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 10756 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alison Motluk The brains of people with seasonal depression may be too efficient at bundling away a key chemical, a new study suggests. The finding in people with (SAD) backs the prevailing theory about the biochemical causes of depression, and could give clues into new ways to treat the condition. The prevailing theory of depression is that affected people do not have enough of certain neurotransmitters called monoamines – serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine – in the spaces between neurons. Most modern antidepressants work by blocking the absorption of these neurotransmitters back into the cell. However, there is little agreement on why levels are inadequate in the first place. It could be that depressed people produce lower volumes of the neurotransmitters, or they could break them down too rapidly. Or it could be that the neurotransmitters are removed from the junction between neurons, called the synaptic cleft, too quickly. Matthaeus Willeit and Harald Sitte at the University of Vienna in Austria and their colleagues now have evidence for the last of these – that serotonin is being removed too efficiently. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Depression; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 10755 - Posted: 06.24.2010