By Jeanna Bryner The jury is still out on why the chicken crossed the road. But new research reveals an inbuilt magnetic compass guides domestic chickens when they do venture across the asphalt and other surfaces. Many animals have an innate sense of direction, finding their way along migration routes that extend thousands of miles. Often, they detect Earth’s magnetic field and use that for orientation. The new study focuses on birds. Study leader Wolfgang Wiltschko of Frankfurt University had been the first to show that migrating European robins rely on the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate during migrations. That finding came more than 40 years ago, and since then a similar magnetic compass has been found in more than 20 bird species, mostly songbirds. Most recently, Wiltschko and his colleagues found domestic chickens are equipped with magnetic sensors that work like compasses. They trained newly hatched chicks of domestic chickens to associate a red ball with their “mother.” At each corner of a pen (where the chicks were kept), designed to correspond to a magnetic North, South, East and West grid, they placed a white screen. Then they hid the ball behind one of the four screens and taught the chicks that the red-ball mother was always behind the screen in the magnetic North corner. © 2007 MSNBC.com © 2007 Microsoft

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 10480 - Posted: 06.24.2010

From The Economist print edition PSYCHOLOGISTS have known for a long time that economists are wrong. Most economists—at least, those of the classical persuasion—believe that any financial gain, however small, is worth having. But psychologists know this is not true. They know because of the ultimatum game, the outcome of which is often the rejection of free money. In this game, one player divides a pot of money between himself and another. The other then chooses whether to accept the offer. If he rejects it, neither player benefits. And despite the instincts of classical economics, a stingy offer (one that is less than about a quarter of the total) is, indeed, usually rejected. The question is, why? One explanation of the rejectionist strategy is that human psychology is adapted for repeated interactions rather than one-off trades. In this case, taking a tough, if self-sacrificial, line at the beginning pays dividends in future rounds of the game. Rejecting a stingy offer in a one-off game is thus just a single move in a larger strategy. And indeed, when one-off ultimatum games are played by trained economists, who know all this, they do tend to accept stingy offers more often than other people would. But even they have their limits. To throw some light on why those limits exist, Terence Burnham of Harvard University recently gathered a group of students of microeconomics and asked them to play the ultimatum game. All of the students he recruited were men. © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2007

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 10479 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK I was driving up the Massachusetts Turnpike one evening last February when I knocked over a bottle of water. I grabbed for it, swerved inadvertently--and a few seconds later found myself blinking into the flashlight beam of a state trooper. "How much have you had to drink tonight, sir?" he demanded. Before I could help myself, I blurted out an answer that was surely a new one to him. "I haven't had a drink," I said indignantly, "since 1981." It was both perfectly true and very pertinent to the trip I was making. By the time I reached my late 20s, I'd poured down as much alcohol as normal people consume in a lifetime and plenty of drugs--mostly pot--as well. I was, by any reasonable measure, an active alcoholic. Fortunately, with a lot of help, I was able to stop. And now I was on my way to McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., to have my brain scanned in a functional magnetic-resonance imager (fMRI). The idea was to see what the inside of my head looked like after more than a quarter-century on the wagon. Back when I stopped drinking, such an experiment would have been unimaginable. At the time, the medical establishment had come to accept the idea that alcoholism was a disease rather than a moral failing; the American Medical Association (AMA) had said so in 1950. But while it had all the hallmarks of other diseases, including specific symptoms and a predictable course, leading to disability or even death, alcoholism was different. Its physical basis was a complete mystery--and since nobody forced alcoholics to drink, it was still seen, no matter what the AMA said, as somehow voluntary. © 2007 Time Inc.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 10478 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Hopkin Researchers have identified a cellular switch that triggers the production of 'good' fat cells, which pump out heat and raise the body's metabolic rate. The discovery, made in mice, might one day provide a way to treat or prevent obesity in humans. In adult humans, nearly all fat tissue is made of white fat cells, which store excess energy for later use. But brown fat cells have a high metabolic rate and burn up the chemical fuel, rather than store it. A higher proportion of babies' fat is brown, probably as a way to keep warm. But these deposits are mostly lost after infancy. Researchers led by Bruce Spiegelman at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, have now identified the protein that induces developing fat cells to become brown, not white. The next step, he says, is to find drugs that can manipulate this process in adults. Spiegelman's team found that brown fat cells in mice contain large amounts of a protein called PRDM16, which is rare in white fat cells and other cells such as muscle and liver. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 10477 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BARRON H. LERNER, M.D. When I was growing up, the word “willpower” was used a lot. If only one was strong enough to resist sweets, according to logic of the time, one could stay thin. Yet today, based on a series of scientific discoveries, the importance of willpower in promoting weight loss is becoming an obsolete notion. Is it worth saving? The concept of willpower came less from scientific data than from Christian teachings about the dangers of temptation. Gluttony, after all, was one of the seven deadly sins, up there with pride, greed, extravagance, envy, wrath and sloth. The late 19th century was perhaps the heyday of the revolt against what John C. Burnham, a historian at Ohio State University, calls “bad habits.” Groups like the Salvation Army and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union urged sinners to stop drinking, gambling and smoking. Comparable sentiments characterized writings about obesity. In 1946, Wilson G. Smillie, a public health professor at Cornell, wrote that the physician should appeal to the obese patient’s “ability to manifest self-control.” Weight-loss programs like Overeaters Anonymous and Weight Watchers have reflected this philosophy. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 10476 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By AMANDA SCHAFFER Mary O’Regan more or less ignored her left arm for 20 years. As a sophomore in college, in 1986, she fell off the back of a friend’s dirt bike and hit her head on concrete, later suffering a stroke. After intensive medical and physical therapy, she learned to speak and walk again. She went back to school and then to work. (And, as it happened, two of her brothers ended up marrying two of the nurses who had taken care of her.) Still, much of her left side remained numb, and she did not regain use of her left arm. Last year, however, Ms. O’Regan, now 40 and living in Westwood, Mass., enrolled in a clinical trial for a new robotic device called the Myomo e100, designed to help stroke patients regain motion in their arms. The device, worn as an arm brace, works by sensing weak electrical activity in patients’ arm muscles and providing just enough assistance that they can complete simple exercises, like lifting boxes or flipping on light switches. By practicing such tasks, patients may begin to relearn how to extend and flex the arm, rebuilding and strengthening neurological pathways in the process. “The device is designed to help get patients over a functional hump” so they can start moving the weakened arm again, said John McBean, a mechanical engineer who developed the technology with Kailas Narendran, an electrical engineer and computer scientist. (The two began the project in 2002, in a graduate robotics class at M.I.T.) Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke; Robotics
Link ID: 10475 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Laura Zigman Everyone has a moment in time that divides his or her life into "before" and "after." For me that moment was 10 years ago, when I was 34. I had just left New York and moved to Washington -- trading my soul-deadening career and size-0 studio apartment for a 9-to-5 job and a big one-bedroom overlooking Rock Creek Park and the zoo, trading my no-life life for an actual life, not to put too fine a point on it, and feeling really good about it -- when depression struck. Again. The way it had repeatedly since second grade. It was then that I finally realized that I would never be able to outrun myself; wherever I went, wherever I moved, however stealthily I tried to sneak away, I would always bring myself with me. And at the thought of that -- at the thought of a life sentence with chronic clinical depression as my cellmate and no chance of parole -- I finally knew the jig was up. Uncle, I cried at long last. Give me the meds. Describing what depression feels like is a little like trying to describe what chocolate tastes like or what classical music sounds like or what red looks like. But for me, being depressed was like being inside a sealed glass box right in the middle of a big huge party: I could see out and people could see in, but that's about as far as it went. © 2007 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 10474 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Larry O'Hanlon, Discovery News — Whether or not women really talk more than men, there may be one sure way to level the verbal playing field — fasting. The longer a woman fasts, the lower her voice gets and the less she uses it, according to Lebanese speech researchers who made use of Ramadan fasts to study how voices changed in 28 healthy women. "The subjects were tested when they were not fasting and while fasting after the first week of intermittent fasting during Ramadan," report Abdul-Latif Hamdan, Abla Sibai and Charcel Rameh of American University of Beirut. Their study appears in the July issue of Journal of Voice. All of the women had their voices acoustically analyzed and their larynxes inspected by video-endostroboscopy. They were also asked to describe how easy or difficult it was to speak. The biggest complaint, made by 23 of the women, was that it was simply harder to say anything while fasting. About half of the women also reported vocal fatigue, which also tended to reduce the amount they said. The next most common symptom was a lowering of the voice, which was seen in one-fifth of the fasting women. A few of the women also showed some harshening of their voices as well. © 2007 Discovery Communications

Keyword: Language; Obesity
Link ID: 10473 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SHERWIN B. NULAND Noga Arikha’s “Passions and Tempers” illustrates some of the rewards and some of the pitfalls of historical scholarship. To Arikha’s immense credit, she provides a thoroughly documented account of the ways in which a wrong-headed theory dominated medical thinking for more than 2,000 years, refusing to yield place at the bedside long after it had been proved erroneous by clear-eyed observation and the development of experimental science. One of Arikha’s contributions to the general reader’s knowledge, in fact, is to use the history of the humors — those bodily fluids once thought to hold the key to understanding human health and personality — to demonstrate the difficulty that physicians have always had in giving up outmoded ways of treating actual patients. This has almost invariably been the case, even when not only the theoretical but also the practical basis for a changed approach has already been established, sometimes by the very clinicians who cannot bring themselves to abandon the discredited practices. Arikha is hardly treading new ground here, but she does provide convincing and very specific evidence of a human failing that dogged the profession until at least the middle of the 20th century, and in certain ways continues to influence modern-day diagnosis and therapy. The complex of notions constituting the background of Arikha’s narrative would eventually form the basis from which Western scientific medicine emerged. Its preliminary formulations were brought together over the course of several centuries, in a body of writings that came to be associated with the name of Hippocrates, born on the Greek island of Kos around 460 B.C. But its ultimate codification was the work of the great physician Galen, who lived in the Roman Empire from about A.D. 130 to 201, leaving behind a multitude of texts with claims stated so authoritatively that his influence did not begin to dissipate until the 16th century. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 10472 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Evidence shows that a lack of sleep can have a negative impact on our health, increasing the risk for accidents as well as health problems like obesity, infections, and heart disease. Extensive research is beginning to give scientists clues as to why this might be so. Sleep plays a critical role in how well we concentrate and perform, helps consolidate memories and set the stage for learning, and may affect how the immune system responds to attack. Teasing apart patterns like these will help us understand why we sleep and how sleep helps keep us healthy. An apple a day may keep the doctor away, but can the same be said for 40 winks a day? Losing sleep can leave you more than just a little cranky. Evidence is building that sleep may have a fundamental role in keeping you healthy and in fighting off disease. Sleep is critical for concentration, memory, and coordination. People simply don't perform as well when they shortchange sleep. Studies show, for example, that truck drivers, doctors, and pilots are at greater risk of crashes and near misses as a result of sleep deprivation. In fact, sleep loss can have as big an effect on performance as drinking. One study showed that truck drivers who had gone 28 hours without sleep performed as poorly as if they had blood alcohol levels of 0.1 percent, which is above the legal limit in much of the world. © 2007 Society for Neuroscience

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 10471 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By DAVID DOBBS If a person suffers the small genetic accident that creates Williams syndrome, he’ll live with not only some fairly conventional cognitive deficits, like trouble with space and numbers, but also a strange set of traits that researchers call the Williams social phenotype or, less formally, the “Williams personality”: a love of company and conversation combined, often awkwardly, with a poor understanding of social dynamics and a lack of social inhibition. The combination creates some memorable encounters. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author, once watched as a particularly charming 8-year-old Williams girl, who was visiting Sacks at his hotel, took a garrulous detour into a wedding ceremony. “I’m afraid she disrupted the flow of this wedding,” Sacks told me. “She also mistook the bride’s mother for the bride. That was an awkward moment. But it very much pleased the mother.” Another Williams encounter: The mother of twin Williams boys in their late teens opened her door to find on her stoop a leather-clad biker, motorcycle parked at the curb, asking for her sons. The boys had made the biker’s acquaintance via C.B. radio and invited him to come by, but they forgot to tell Mom. The biker visited for a spell. Fascinated with how the twins talked about their condition, the biker asked them to speak at his motorcycle club’s next meeting. They did. They told the group of the genetic accident underlying Williams, the heart and vascular problems that eventually kill many who have it, their intense enjoyment of talk, music and story, their frustration in trying to make friends, the slights and cruelties they suffered growing up, their difficulty understanding the world. When they finished, most of the bikers were in tears. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Emotions
Link ID: 10470 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nora Schultz Who ever heard of a fish being in two minds about something? Yet it seems that like humans, fish process information - and perhaps emotions - on different sides of the brain. Fish growing up in the wild among predators use their left eye to look at novel objects, while their offspring raised in captivity use the right eye. This suggests that life experiences can affect which side of the brain fish use, and even, says Victoria Braithwaite of the University of Edinburgh, UK, that they have emotional mindsets, since different sides of the brain may correspond to a curious or suspicious attitude. "The lab-reared fish could process information about novel objects in the left brain [which means they are looking at things with their right eye] because they feel more comfortable, whereas their parents are more cautious." “Lab-reared fish could process information about novel objects in the left brain because they feel more comfortable”Humans use their left and right brain lobes differently, the most well-known consequence being handedness. Brain lateralisation has been found in an increasing number of other species in recent years. "Especially for animals that have to cope with many predators, it is an advantage if they can use one hemisphere to keep an eye on predators while they use the other hemisphere to do other things," says Culum Brown, now at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Laterality; Emotions
Link ID: 10469 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Fergus Walsh Scientists in Cambridge say they are moving a step closer to developing an artificial pancreas for people with diabetes. They are conducting trials in Cambridge with 12 youngsters aged five to 18. All have type-one diabetes which means their pancreas does not produce insulin - the hormone that regulates blood sugar levels. Jeremy Smith, who is studying for his A Levels, is one of the volunteers. The 17-year-old has had several overnight stays at the city's Addenbrookes hospital. Each time the diabetes care team fit him with a continuous glucose sensor which sits just under the skin. The idea then is for a computer program to work out the right dose of insulin, which is delivered via an insulin pump. The artificial pancreas would automate diabetes care and free people from the repeated need for finger prick blood tests and insulin injections. But the system has not gone live yet. Instead, Jeremy's glucose levels are checked every 15 minutes throughout the night and his insulin dose is altered manually. It will be another six months before the first automated, hands-free trial is conducted. The main stumbling block in the development of an artificial pancreas has been mathematical: no-one has perfected a computer program sophisticated enough to work out the right dose of insulin at any moment of the day. (C)BBC

Keyword: Obesity; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 10468 - Posted: 07.07.2007

By Christopher Mims It's commonly assumed that testosterone, that stereotypically male hormone, is intimately tied to violence. The evidence is all around us: weight lifters who overdose on anabolic steroids experience "roid rage," and castration—the removal of the source of testosterone—has been a staple of animal husbandry for centuries. But what is the nature of that relationship? If you give a normal man a shot of testosterone, will he turn into the Incredible Hulk? And do violent men have higher levels of testosterone than their more docile peers? "[Historically,] researchers expected an increase in testosterone levels to inevitably lead to more aggression, and this didn't reliably occur," says Frank McAndrew, a professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. Indeed, the latest research about testosterone and aggression indicates that there's only a weak connection between the two. And when aggression is more narrowly defined as simple physical violence, the connection all but disappears. "What psychologists and psychiatrists say is that testosterone has a facilitative effect on aggression," comments Melvin Konner, an anthropologist at Emory University and author of The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit. "You don't have a push-pull, click-click relationship where you inject testosterone and get aggressiveness." Castration experiments demonstrate that testosterone is necessary for violence, but other research has shown that testosterone is not, on its own, sufficient. In this way, testosterone is less a perpetrator and more an accomplice—one that's sometimes not too far from the scene of the crime. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc

Keyword: Aggression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 10467 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Erin Allday, Chronicle Staff Writer Men, it turns out, talk just as much as women. Sure, maybe guys talk more about cars and sports and the new iPhone, and women talk about their feelings, but at the end of the day, each sex uses an average 16,000 words a day, say researchers who studied the conversational habits of 396 men and women for six years. "I was a little surprised there wasn't any gender influence, because this stereotype of women talking more is such a powerful, popular idea," said Richard Slatcher, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Texas and one of the authors of the study. "But we were able to directly test the notion, and it's totally unfounded." The study, results of which were published today in the journal Science, debunks an age-old assumption that women aren't just the fairer sex, they're the chattier one, too. Tony Bennett sang about it in "Girl Talk" in the 1960s: "The weaker sex, the 'speaker' sex we mortal males behold, but though we joke, we wouldn't trade you for a ton of gold." The stereotype is so pervasive that even scientists have long assumed that women talk more, and they incorporated that assumption in psychological gender profiles. When UCSF psychiatrist Louann Brizendine published "The Female Brain" last year, one statistic in particular jumped off the pages and became the main talking point among radio-show hosts and Internet bloggers -- women, Brizendine wrote, use an average of 20,000 words a day; men use only 7,000. © 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Language
Link ID: 10466 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Janet Raloff Betty (not her real name) remembers the day 9 years ago when she fully experienced an orange. As she split the fruit's skin, the sections, citrus scents sprayed into the air and the 51-year-old woman experienced a sensory epiphany: "Whoa! This is an orange. My God, this is what an orange smells like." Even now, she says, recalling that day "makes me tear up because that orange was the very first thing I smelled." Ever. "There are probably around 25 million people in this country who have some olfactory problem," observes Barry Davis, who directs the taste and smell program at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Md. Few people lack all sense of smell. Among these, Davis notes, only a tiny share were either born that way, as Betty was, or lost olfaction so early that they can't recall being able to smell. More common is a gradual diminution of olfaction among seniors, notes Beverly J. Cowart, a sensory psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. By age 70, she says, "some degree of smell loss will be close to universal." Smell loss can also follow head trauma, arise as a complication of respiratory or brain disease, or signal pollutant poisoning of nasal cells. ©2007 Science Service.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 10465 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower There's more to the intelligence of autistic people than meets the IQ. Unlike most individuals, children and adults diagnosed as autistic often score much higher on a challenging, nonverbal test of abstract reasoning than they do on a standard IQ test, say psychologist Laurent Mottron of Hôpital Rivière-des-Prairies in Montreal and his colleagues. The same autistic individuals who score near or below the IQ cutoff for "low functioning" or "mental retardation" achieve average or even superior scores on a test that taps a person's ability to infer rules and to think abstractly about geometric patterns, Mottron's team reports in the August Psychological Science. "Intelligence has been underestimated in autistics," Mottron says. Autistic people solve problems and deploy neural resources in unusual ways, which are poorly understood and might contribute to problems with IQ tests, he asserts. Mottron regards autism as a variant of healthy neural development. For that reason, his group—including study coauthor Michelle Dawson, herself diagnosed as autistic—prefers the term "autistic" to "person with autism." The researchers studied 38 autistic children, ages 7 to 16; 13 autistic adults, ages 16 to 43; 24 nonautistic children, ages 6 to 16; and 19 nonautistic adults, ages 19 to 32. ©2007 Science Service.

Keyword: Autism; Intelligence
Link ID: 10464 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Philip Ball A potential new drug for treatment of bipolar disorder (sometimes called manic depression) is being designed by researchers in Chicago and New York. The team hopes that their compound, which works as well in mice as do the currently prescribed drugs, will ultimately provide relief without the side-effects of present treatments. Bipolar disorder, which afflicts about 1% of adults, is typically treated with drugs called mood stabilizers, especially lithium and a compound called valproic acid. These medications can have unpleasant side effects, such as weight gain and excessive thirst, making it important to find alternatives. But although these drugs were discovered decades ago, nothing better has yet emerged. Mood stabilizers such as lithium are thought to act by blocking the function of an enzyme called glycogen synthase kinase-3 (GSK-3) in the brain. Researchers have found other substances that can block GSK-3 elsewhere in the body for treatment of other conditions, but these can't combat bipolar disorder because they don't get into the brain. Alan Kozikowski of the University of Illinois in Chicago and his co-workers took a directed, rational approach to searching out a new drug candidate. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 10463 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Yawning may appear the height of rudeness, but in fact your body is desperately trying to keep you awake, according to research from the US. Psychologists who studied 44 students concluded that yawning sent cooler air to the brain, helping it to stay alert. Yawning therefore delays sleep rather than promotes it, the study in Evolutionary Psychology suggested. The desire to yawn when others do so may also be a mechanism to help a group stay alert in the face of danger. The common wisdom is that people yawn because they need oxygen, but the researchers at the University of Albany in New York said their experiments showed that raising or lowering oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the blood did not produce that reaction. Their evidence suggested instead that drawing in air helps cool the brain and helps it work more effectively. In a study of the 44 students, researchers found that those who breathed through the nose rather than the mouth were less likely to yawn when watching a video of other people yawning. This was because vessels in the nasal cavity sent cool blood to the brain, they said. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sleep; Attention
Link ID: 10462 - Posted: 07.06.2007

By LIBBY SANDER CHICAGO, — Frustrated with the federal government’s response to the mental health needs of soldiers, Illinois officials announced on Tuesday that members of the state’s National Guard would be routinely screened for traumatic brain injuries after serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. The mandatory program, which appears to be the first in the nation, will also offer the screening to other veterans in the state and will include a 24-hour hot line providing psychological counseling to veterans of all military branches. The program is expected to cost $10.5 million a year. “It’s been shown that the federal government simply was not prepared to deal with the number of war injured coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Tammy Duckworth, the director of the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs and a former Blackhawk helicopter pilot who lost both legs on active duty in Iraq. “This is a way that we in Illinois can react much more quickly,” Ms. Duckworth said at a news conference with Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich, a Democrat. There are currently 1,100 members of the Illinois Army National Guard serving, or preparing to serve, in Iraq or Afghanistan. Traumatic brain injuries afflict 14 percent to 20 percent of military service members, according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, a federally financed program. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Brain imaging
Link ID: 10461 - Posted: 06.24.2010