By NATALIE ANGIER In this country, the most popular cosmetic surgery procedure is liposuction: doctors vacuum out something like two million pounds of fat from the thighs, bellies, buttocks, jowls and man-breasts of 325,000 people a year. What happens to all that extracted adipose tissue? It’s bagged and disposed of as medical waste; or maybe, given the recent news about socially contagious fat, it’s sent by FedEx to the patients’ old college chums. But one thing the fat surely is not, and that is given due thanks for serving as scapegoat, and for a job well done. We are now in what feels like the 347th year of the fastidiously vilified “obesity epidemic.” Health officials repeatedly warn that everywhere in the world people are gaining too much weight and putting themselves at risk of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and other obesity-linked illnesses, not to mention taking up more than their fair share of molded plastic subway seat. It’s easy to fear and despise our body fat and to see it as an unnatural, inert, pointless counterpoint to all things phat and fabulous. Yet fat tissue is not the problem here, and to castigate fat for getting too big and to blame it for high blood pressure or a wheezing heart is like a heavy drinker blaming the liver for turning cirrhotic. Just as the lush’s liver was merely doing its hepatic best to detoxify the large quantities of liquor in which it was doused, and just as the alcoholic would have been far worse off had the liver not been playing Hepa-filter in the first place, so our fat tissue, by efficiently absorbing the excess packets of energy we put in our mouths, has our best interests at heart. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 10581 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Hopkin Two fossils unearthed in Kenya have added a new dimension to our view of life at the birth of our Homo genus. They show that two ancestral human species seem to have lived cheek-by-jowl in the same area, much as gorillas and chimpanzees do today. Both skull fragments were found by anthropologists digging near Kenya's Lake Turkana, adding to the impressive list of early human fossils unearthed here. One of the fossils, an upper jawbone from the species Homo habilis, is dated at 1.44 million years, much younger than most fossils of this species. The other fossil is an almost complete — but faceless — Homo erectus skull. Dated at 1.55 million years, the skull is far smaller than any other from this species — suggesting to the researchers that, as is the case with modern gorillas, there was a large size differences between the sexes in H. erectus. The fact that these two species seem to have been contemporaries is a surprise to anthropologists, say Fred Spoor of University College London and his colleagues, who discovered the hominin fossils seven years ago and now describe them in this week's Nature. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 10580 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By the time they reached adulthood, graduates of an intensive early childhood education program for poor children showed higher educational attainment, lower rates of serious crime and incarceration, and lower rates of depressive symptoms than did non-participants in the program, reported researchers in a study funded in part by the National Institutes of Health. The Child-Parent Centers (CPC) program in the Chicago Public School System provided intensive instruction in reading and math from pre-kindergarten through third grade, combined with frequent educational field trips. The children’s parents received job skills training, parenting skills training, educational classes and social services. They also volunteered in their children’s classrooms, assisted with field trips and attended parenting support groups. The CPC program is distinct from the federally funded Head Start program. “These results strongly suggest that comprehensive early education programs can have benefits well into adult life,” said Duane Alexander, Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the NIH institute that funded the study. “A comparatively small investment early in life is associated with gains in education, economic standing, mental health, and other areas.” The researchers followed the children from ages 3 or 4 through age 24 to assess the possible benefits of the CPC program in terms of the children’s educational achievement, need for remedial education, involvement with the child welfare and foster care system, economic status, involvement with the criminal justice system, health status and mental health. The study appears in the August Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Depression
Link ID: 10579 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi Educational DVDs may hinder rather than help a young child's learning. Infants who watch DVDs such as Brainy Baby and Baby Einstein know fewer words than those who do not watch such programmes, a new study suggests. In recent years the popularity of such infant programmes has soared, particularly in the US. Parents hope the programmes, which typically consist of brief dialogue and picture sequences, will boost the learning ability of children as young as eight months old, even though the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that youngsters not watch television until two years of age. To find out what effect these programmes have, Dimitri Christakis at the University of Washington in Seattle, US, and his colleagues contacted about 500 families with a child born in the previous 16 months. During telephone interviews – which each lasted around 45 minutes – parents heard a list of about 90 words, such as "truck" and "cookie", and indicated which their 8- to 16-month-old children understood. They also gave other details, including how much they read to their children, and the amount and type of television their youngsters watched. The results contradict claims that baby DVDs help toddlers to communicate with their parents. After controlling for other factors, such as parents' educational status and the number of children per household, the analysis revealed that for every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs, toddlers understood an average of six to eight words fewer than those who did not view them. On average the children recognised about 25 words, although the number varied according to age. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Language
Link ID: 10578 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Vaudine England A study by doctors in Hong Kong has concluded that epilepsy can be induced by the Chinese tile game of mahjong. The findings, published in the Hong Kong Medical Journal, were based on 23 cases of people who had suffered mahjong-induced seizures. The report's four authors, from Hong Kong's Queen Mary Hospital, said the best prevention - and cure - was to avoid playing mahjong. The study led the doctors to define mahjong epilepsy as a unique syndrome. Eileptic seizures can be provoked by a wide variety of triggers, but one cause increasingly evident to researchers is the playing - or even watching - of mahjong. This Chinese tile game, played by four people round a table, can involve gambling and quickly becomes compulsive. The game, which is intensely social and sometimes played in crowded mahjong parlours, involves the rapid movement of tiles in marathon sessions. The doctors conclude that the syndrome affects far more men than women; that their average age is 54; and that it can hit sufferers anywhere between one to 11 hours into a mahjong game. They say the attacks were not just caused by sleep deprivation or gambling stress. (C)BBC

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 10577 - Posted: 08.06.2007

US scientists have genetically modified mice to exhibit both the anatomical and behavioural defects associated with the complex condition schizophrenia. Previous studies that rely on drugs can only mimic the symptoms of the disease, such as delusions and paranoia. But the new work, based on a key genetic change, could aid a much greater understanding of the disease. The Johns Hopkins University study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Animal models of schizophrenia have been hard to design since many different causes underlie this disease. However, the Johns Hopkins team were able to take advantage of the recent discovery of a major risk factor for the disease. Scientists pinpointed a key gene - dubbed DISC 1 - which makes a protein that helps nerve cells assume their proper positions in the brain. The Johns Hopkins team generated mice that make an incomplete, shortened form of the DISC 1 protein in addition to the regular type. The short form of the protein attaches to the full-length one, disrupting its normal duties. As these mice matured, they became more agitated when placed in an open field, had trouble finding hidden food, and did not swim as long as regular mice - behaviours that echo the hyperactivity, smell defects and apathy observed in schizophrenia patients. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) also revealed characteristic defects in brain structure, including enlarged lateral ventricles, a region that circulates the spinal fluid and helps protect against physical trauma. Researcher Professor Akira Sawa said the defects in these mice were not as severe as those typically seen in people with schizophrenia, because more than one gene is required to trigger the clinical disease. (C)BBC

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10576 - Posted: 08.06.2007

By David Biello Female lab mice tend to be docile, passive creatures. But by either genetically shutting down or surgically removing their ability to smell pheromones, scientists transformed them into aggressive, pelvic-thrusting, vocalizing lotharios—without any significant rise in testosterone or other steroid hormones. "The female brain has the neuronal circuit both to control male and female behavior," says molecular neuroscientist Catherine Dulac of Harvard University. "What is sexually dimorphic is the switch that allows one to be silenced." The key to gender-specific behavior, in mice at least, is a cluster of receptors in their noses that allows them to smell pheromones, special chemicals that deliver information about sexual readiness, among other things, between members of the same species. Called the vomeronasal organ (VNO), it connects to the brain and registers the gender of other mice, triggering the appropriate response. But when the researchers genetically disabled the VNO, female mice began to chase their male peers, mount them and attempt to pelvic thrust [see video here ]. "From a behavioral standpoint you could not recognize the animal from being any different than the male," Dulac adds. "All the thinking until now was that female brains can produce feminine behaviors while male brains can produce masculine behaviors, with little or no cross talk between them," says Marc Breedlove, a neuroscientist at Michigan State University in East Lansing. "These results do suggest that, at least for mice, the brain retains circuitry to display both masculine and feminine behaviors into adulthood." © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 10575 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GINA KOLATA IN a way it all seems so obvious. Your friend found a lump in her breast, so you have that long-delayed mammogram. One by one your friends stop smoking, so you stop, too. Of course people are affected by their friends’ habits and their health. But what seems obvious in the abstract can lead to surprising findings. A recent study found that obesity can spread from friend to friend much like a virus. When one person gains weight, close friends tend to gain weight, too. The study, published recently in The New England Journal of Medicine, involved a detailed analysis of a large social network of 12,067 people who had been closely followed for 32 years, from 1971 to 2003. Now, scientists believe that social networks not only can spread diseases, like the common cold, but also may influence many types of behavior — negative and positive — which then affect an individual’s health, as well as a community’s. “In the past few years we have been seeing a network revolution,” says Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a physics professor at the University of Notre Dame. “People sensed that networks were out there, but they never had large enough data sets to start understanding them in a quantitative fashion.” Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 10574 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By EMILY BAZELON Caitlyn & Marguerite sat knee to knee in a sunny room at the Hawks Camp in Park City, Utah. On one wall was a white board with these questions: What’s your favorite vacation and why? What’s your favorite thing about yourself? If you could have any superpower, what would it be? Caitlyn, who is 13, and Marguerite, who is 16 (I’ve used only their first names to protect their privacy), held yellow sheets of paper on which they had written their answers. It was the third day of the weeklong camp, late for icebreakers. But the Hawks are kids with autistic disorders accompanied by a normal or high I.Q. And so the main goal of the camp, run on a 26-acre ranch by a Utah nonprofit organization called the National Ability Center, is to nudge them toward the sort of back and forth — “What’s your favorite video game?” — that comes easily to most kids. Along with Caitlyn and Marguerite, there were nine boys in the camp between the ages of 10 and 18. They also sat across from one another in pairs, with the exception of one 18-year-old who was arguing with a counselor. “All I require is a purple marker,” the boy said over and over again, refusing to write with the black marker he had been given. A few feet away, an 11-year-old was yipping and grunting while his partner read his answers in a monotone, eyes trained on his yellow paper. Another counselor hurried over to them. Marguerite was also reading her answers without eye contact or inflection. “My favorite vacations were to India and Thailand my favorite thing about myself is that I’m nice to people if I could choose any superpower I’d be invisible,” she said in an unbroken stream. She looked up from her paper and past Caitlyn. The girls didn’t look uncomfortable, just unplugged. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 10573 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Christoph Uhlhaas Could you buy a used car online, sight unseen and without a test-drive? How about a plane? A vehicle changes hands on eBay Motors every 60 seconds, including one private business jet that sold for $4.9 million. Every second buyers collectively swap more than $1,839 for products through eBay, sending money to complete strangers with no guarantee that the goods they buy will in fact arrive, let alone in the condition they expect. As a rule, they are not disappointed. To some economists, this is a borderline miracle, because it contradicts the concept of Homo economicus (economic man) as a rational, selfish person who single-mindedly strives for maximum profit. According to this notion, sellers should pocket buyers’ payments and send nothing in return. For their part, buyers should not trust sellers—and the market should collapse. Economist Axel Ockenfels of the University of Cologne in Germany and his colleagues have spent the past several years figuring out why this does not happen. It turns out that humans do not always behave as if their sole concern is their personal financial advantage—and even when they do, they consider social motives in the profit-making equation. As Ockenfels has discovered, a sense of fairness often plays a big role in people’s decisions about what to do with their money and possessions, and it is also an essential part of what drives trust in markets full of strangers such as eBay. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 10572 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nikhil Swaminathan Researchers have discovered how the brain chunks an unbroken river of information. It's a classic cocktail party conundrum: How do our brains decide where we should train our attention when people are milling all about us chatting away—some to us, some to others? In an attempt to find out, researchers at Stanford University and McGill University in Montreal scanned the brains of 18 subjects who were listening to classical music by 18th-century British composer William Boyce. "You have to kind of segment these streams [of information] into chunks," says senior study author Vinod Menon, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Stanford. The process of slicing the data, he continues, requires that you "identify something that's interesting and then you have to switch on the attentional network." "Memory doesn't work like video recorder, it's more like DVD," in how it recalls events as discrete chapters, explains study co-author Daniel Levitin, a psychology professor at McGill. But why music? Simple, says Sridhar Devarajan, a Stanford neuroscience graduate student involved in the project. "Transitions between musical movements," he notes, "offer an ideal setting to study the dynamically changing landscape of activity in the brain during this segmentation process." © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Hearing; Attention
Link ID: 10571 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower Look, up in the trees. A barrel-chested, long-limbed creature covered with wispy, reddish hair sits on a branch far above the ground. The animal rises to a fully erect posture, reaches up to grab an overhead branch for balance, and promenades across the precarious platform. Upon reaching a cluster of hanging fruit, the animal plucks off a snack with a free hand. Still standing, it consumes the treat with gusto. Then it saunters back the way it came, striding from one padded foot to the other while continuing to grasp branches above its head. Witness the red-ape stroll, as practiced by an orangutan living on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. New field observations of these animals, conducted by anthropologist Susannah K.S. Thorpe of the University of Birmingham in England and her colleagues, show that orangutans, unlike knuckle-walking chimpanzees and gorillas, at times walk upright much as people do. This suggests to the researchers that two-legged walking, or bipedalism, evolved in a common ancestor of all living apes at least 20 million years ago. Among scientists who study hominids, the fossil ancestors of people, that's a heretical notion. These investigators have long assumed that an upright stance is a unique trait of hominids, a skeletal smoking gun that separates members of our evolutionary family from other ancient primates. From this perspective, hominids that walked on two legs evolved from a chimplike ancestor with a body structure suited to scooting across the ground on all fours. ©2007 Science Service.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 10570 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jeanna Bryner Our brains can fathom the beginning of time and the end of the universe, but is any brain capable of understanding itself? With billions of neurons, each with thousands of connections, one's noggin is a complex, and yes congested, mental freeway. Neurologists and cognitive scientists nowadays are probing how the mind gives rise to thoughts, actions, emotions and ultimately consciousness. The complex machine is difficult for even the brainiest of scientists to wrap their heads around. But the payoff for such an achievement could be huge. “If we understand the brain, we will understand both its capacities and its limits for thought, emotions, reasoning, love and every other aspect of human life,” said Norman Weinberger, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine. According to Scott Huettel of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University, the standard answer to this question goes something like: “The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe ... complexity makes simple models impractical and accurate models impossible to comprehend.” While that stock answer is correct, Huettel said, it’s incomplete. The real snag in brain science is one of navel gazing. Huettel and other neuroscientists can’t step outside of their own brains (and experiences) when studying the brain itself. © 2007 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10569 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Susan Brink, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer Her front brain is telling her he's trouble. Look at the facts, it says. He's never made a commitment, he drinks too much, he can't hold down a job. But her middle brain won't listen. Man, it swoons, he looks great in those jeans, his black hair curls onto his forehead so adorably, and when he drags on a cigarette, he's so bad he's good. His front brain is lecturing, too: She's flirting with every guy in the place, and she can drink even you under the table, it says. His mid-brain is unresponsive, distracted by her legs, her blouse and her come-hither stare. "What could you be thinking?" their front brains demand. Their middle brains, each on a quest for reward, pay no heed. Alas, when it comes to choosing mates, smart neurons can make dumb choices. Sure, if the brain's owner is in her 40s and has been around the block a few times, she might grab her bag and scram. If the guy has reached seasoned middle age, he might think twice about that cleavage-baring temptress. Wisdom -- at least a little -- does come with experience. Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 10568 - Posted: 08.03.2007

Lauran Neergaard, Associated Press — It's called the "word spurt," that magical time when a toddler's vocabulary explodes, seemingly overnight. New research offers a decidedly un-magical explanation: Babies start really jabbering after they've mastered enough easy words to tackle more of the harder ones. It's essentially a snowball effect. That explanation, published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, is far simpler than scientists' assumptions that some special brain mechanisms must click to trigger the word boom. Instead, University of Iowa psychology professor Bob McMurray contends that what astonishes parents is actually the fairly guaranteed outcome of a lot of under-the-radar work by tots as they start their journey to learn 60,000 words by adulthood. If McMurray is right, it could have implications for parents bombarded with technology gimmicks that claim to boost language. He thinks simply talking and reading to a child a lot is the key. "Children are soaking up everything," he said. "You might use 'serendipity' to a child. It will take that child maybe hundreds of exposures, or thousands, to learn what 'serendipity' means. So why not start early?" © 2007 Discovery Communications

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 10567 - Posted: 06.24.2010

From The Economist print edition PEOPLE remember emotionally charged events more easily than they recall the quotidian. A sexual encounter trumps doing the grocery shopping. A mugging trumps a journey to work. Witnessing a massacre trumps pretty well anything you can imagine. That is hardly surprising. Rare events that might have an impact on an individual's survival or reproduction should have a special fast lane into the memory bank—and they do. It is called the á2b-adrenoceptor, and it is found in the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in processing strong emotions such as fear. The role of the á2b-adrenoceptor is to promote memory formation—but only if it is stimulated by adrenaline. Since emotionally charged events are often accompanied by adrenaline secretion, the á2b-adrenoceptor acts as a gatekeeper that decides what will be remembered and what discarded. However, the gene that encodes this receptor comes in two varieties. That led Dominique de Quervain, of the University of Zurich, to wonder if people with one variant would have better emotional memories than those with the other. The short answer, just published in Nature Neuroscience, is that they do. Moreover, since the frequencies of the two variants are different in different groups of people, whole populations may have different mixtures of emotional memory. The reason Dr de Quervain suspected the variants might work differently is that the rarer one looks like the commoner one when the latter has a memory-enhancing drug called yohimbine attached to it. His prediction, therefore, was that better emotional memory would be associated with the rarer version. © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2007.

Keyword: Emotions; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 10566 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jenny Marder 4 years ago, Russell Romeo committed a small act of subterfuge. Without telling his boss, he ordered 60 white lab rats from an animal research facility in Harlan, NY, and had them shipped to his laboratory at Rockefeller University. They arrived, 10 to a box, on a crisp, cloudless Tuesday in March. He gave them a week to recover from the move. Then he started an experiment that would change the course of his career. Romeo was only 31 at the time, and as a young neuroscientist working in one of the best stress research labs in the country, he was fascinated by recent research on the vast remodeling that takes place in the human brain during adolescence. Rats, Romeo felt, would provide a good model for better understanding the adolescent stress response in humans. For humans and rats, the same brain regions - the hypothalamus, hippocampus, and amygdala - are engaged under stress. Likewise, the same neuroendocrine glands - the pituitary and the adrenal - are activated. The impacts of adrenal steroid hormones on the adult rat brain had been widely studied, but hardly anything was known about stress and the adolescent brain. Was it possible that stress affected young brains and older brains differently, in ways that researchers and clinicians had overlooked? © 1986-2007 The Scientist

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 10565 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A type of cell found in the eye has stem cell properties and could be used within the next decade to regrow damaged retinas and restore vision, British researchers say. Certain Muller glial cells can migrate to the retina and morph into different retinal cells, potentially rebuilding damaged tissue, according to the study, published Wednesday in the journal Stem Cells. Retinal disease is one of the primary causes of blindness. Researchers were able to extract the cells from deceased adult donors and develop them in vitro into all the types of neurons found in the retina. In studies on rats with diseased retinas, the grafted cells travelled to the retina and took on the characteristics of surrounding neurons. "Muller cells with stem cell properties could potentially restore sight to someone who is losing or has lost their sight due to diseased or damaged retina," Dr. Astrid Limb, who led the study, said in a news release. "Our findings have enormous potential." Researchers are now exploring what barriers exist in the human body that prevent the cells from regenerating. © CBC 2007

Keyword: Vision; Regeneration
Link ID: 10564 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY A 38-year-old man who spent more than five years in a mute, barely conscious state as a result of a severe head injury is now communicating regularly with family members and recovering his ability to move after having his brain stimulated with pulses of electric current, neuroscientists are reporting. “I still cry every time I see him, but now it’s tears of joy,” said the man’s mother, in a conference call with reporters on Wednesday; her name was withheld, to protect the patient’s privacy. “He can speak, he can watch movies without falling asleep, he can say ‘Mom’ and ‘Pop,’ and ‘I love you, Mommy.’ ” He eats without the assistance of a feeding tube. He has regained some movement in his arms. When he speaks, usually with only a word or two, he is engaged in the conversation. He recently recited the first 16 words of the Pledge of Allegiance. The new report, which appears in the journal Nature, provides the first rigorous evidence that any procedure can initiate and sustain recovery in such a severely disabled person, years after the injury occurred. An estimated 100,000 to 300,000 Americans subsist in states of partial consciousness, and most are written off as beyond help. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Sleep
Link ID: 10563 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Hopkin Brain function has been improved in a patient who was in a minimally conscious state, by electrically stimulating a specific brain region with implanted electrodes. The achievement raises questions about the treatment of other patients who have been in this condition for years, the researchers say. Patients in a minimally conscious state, often the result of severe brain trauma, show only intermittent evidence of awareness of the world around them. Typically, they are assumed to have little chance of further recovery if they show no improvement during their initial 12-month rehabilitation programme. In the latest case study, neuroscientists describe how they implanted electrodes in the brain of a 38-year-old man who had been in a minimally conscious state for more than six years following a serious assault. By electrically stimulating a brain region called the central thalamus, they were able to help him name objects on request, make precise hand gestures, and chew food without the aid of a feeding tube (see 'Behavioural improvements with thalamic stimulation after severe traumatic brain injury'). The thalamus is involved in motor control, arousal and in relaying sensory signals — from the visual systems, for example — to the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain involved in consciousness. Nicholas Schiff of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, and his colleagues chose the patient because they believed his condititon was due to impairment of the arousal system, and that despite considerable damage to his cerebral cortex, many essential areas were preserved. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 10562 - Posted: 06.24.2010