Lauran Neergaard, Associated Press — Can you get smarter than a fifth-grader? Of course, but new research suggests some of the brain's basic building blocks for learning are nearing adult levels by age 11 or 12. It is the first finding from a study of how children's brains grow. The most interesting results are yet to come. About 500 super-healthy newborns to teenagers, recruited from super-healthy families, are having periodic MRI scans of their brains as they grow up. They also get a battery of age-appropriate tests of such abilities as IQ, language skills and memory. The project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, is tricky work. Move during an MRI, and the image blurs. Because scientists cannot sedate healthy children, they are having to get crafty to keep their subjects still. Tired toddlers are put in the scanners at naptime; mom squeezes in for a cuddle and earplugs help block the machines' noisy banging. Six-year-olds wear earphones and watch favorite videos beamed into the scanner. The MRI images measure how different parts of the brain grow and reorganize throughout childhood. © 2007 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 10311 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi Disney's Nemo spoke in English, but real clownfish also communicate in a unique way, research reveals. High-speed video imaging and X-ray technology show that clownfish clack their jaws together to produce warning sounds before they attack. This is the first time that fish have been shown to communicate in this way, the researchers say. Scientists have known for nearly 80 years that clownfish produced a swift succession of clacking noises when they spot an intruder in their territory or want to attract a potential mate (listen to the clownfish warning noise). "It is like someone knocking on a door," describes Eric Parmentier at the University of Liege in Belgium, who studies fish behaviour. Clownfish generate about five clicking sounds per second when communicating, but exactly how they produce the noises has been a mystery. Parmentier and colleagues used high-speed video to record and analyse the body movements of Amphiprion clarkii clownfish. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Aggression
Link ID: 10310 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alan I. Leshner People are fascinated by the brain, in large part because of a great interest in understanding their own minds and mental health. Over a century of neuroscience and psychological research has convinced most people that "Descartes died," leaving the old mind/brain dualism behind. The reality that we don't have a mind separate from the rest of our body has been brought home in many experimental ways, perhaps especially by modern neuroimaging techniques that allow investigators to look into the brains of living, awake, and behaving human beings--watching minds in action. That the brain is the seat of the mind does not necessarily mean that a purely reductionist approach will, in the long run, fully explain the workings of the mind. In fact, there is no evidence that we will be able to understand all aspects of the mind simply in molecular neurobiological terms. At the same time, a purely "up-uctionist" approach won't meet the need either. We can't understand the mind through working only at the behavioral level. Instead, we will need both biological and behavioral research, separately and in combination. Great progress has been made in the past decade in neuroscience, behavioral science, and behavioral neuroscience, and we now have the scientific sophistication to make even more rapid advances in understanding the brain and mind. Neuroscience is among the fastest-growing disciplines of biology and has shown extraordinary recent productivity. Indeed, we have probably learned more about the brain in the past 20 years than in all of recorded history. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10309 - Posted: 06.24.2010

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Mayo Clinic researchers and a group of international collaborators have discovered a correlation between an extreme form of sleep disorder and eventual onset of parkinsonism or dementia. The findings appear in the current issue of the journal Brain http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/. Clinical observations and pathology studies, as well as research in animal models, led to the findings that patients with the violent rapid eye movement sleep (REM) behavior disorder (RBD) have a high probability of later developing Lewy body dementia, Parkinson’s disease or multiple system atrophy (a Parkinson’s-like disorder), because all of these conditions appear to stem from a similar neurodegenerative origin. "Our data suggest that many patients with idiopathic (not associated with any other neurologic symptoms) RBD may be exhibiting early signs of an evolving neurodegenerative disease, which in most cases appear to be caused by some mishap of the synuclein protein," says Bradley Boeve, M.D., Mayo Clinic neurologist and lead author of the study. Synuclein proteins are associated with synapses in the brain, and clumps of abnormal alpha-synuclein protein are present in some forms of dementia. "The problem does not seem to be present in the synuclein gene itself, but it’s something that happens to the protein following gene expression. Just what happens to it to cause the conditions isn’t clear." The result, however, is quite clear. The patients -- usually older males -- strike out violently, often yelling, when they enter REM sleep. Mayo researchers following these individuals over many years saw many of them develop symptoms of dementia.

Keyword: Sleep; Alzheimers
Link ID: 10308 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Troops exposed to sarin risk brain damage: report U.S. Army 1st Armored Division elements pass a burning Iraqi tank during Operation Desert Storm. Scientists have found evidence that the kind of low-level exposure to sarin gas experienced by more than 100,000 U.S. troops in the first Gulf war can cause "lasting brain deficits," The New York Times reported on Wednesday. REUTERS/U.S. Army/Handout WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have found evidence that the kind of low-level exposure to sarin gas experienced by more than 100,000 U.S. troops in the first Gulf war can cause "lasting brain deficits," The New York Times reported on Wednesday. While the results are preliminary, scientists working with the U.S. Department of Defense said they found apparent changes in the brain's connective tissue -- known as white matter -- in soldiers exposed to the gas. The extent of the changes -- less white matter and slightly larger brain cavities -- correspond to the extent of exposure, the Times reported on its Web site. The results are to be published in the June issue of the journal NeuroToxicology, it said. The report is likely to revive the debate over why so many troops returned from the 1991 Gulf conflict with unexplained physical problems. Many scientists have questioned whether Gulf war-related illnesses have a physiological basis. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 10307 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Gisela Telis Social bees have surprisingly strong body armor against microbes, researchers have found. And the more gregarious the bees--the larger their colonies and the more closely related--the better they are at beating disease. The discovery is the first clear link between the evolution of immune systems and social behavior, and it dangles a new hope for bioprospectors on the trail of the next generation of antibiotics. Insects, like humans, face greater risks of catching and spreading infectious diseases when they're crowded together. Scientists have long suspected that bees and other bugs combat the added risk that being social incurs by evolving stronger disease defenses, such as secreting antimicrobial agents to cover their bodies. The theory is that bigger colonies with more crowded conditions would require insects to evolve better immune defenses, which in turn enable the insects to evolve still-bigger colonies. To test the idea, biologists Adam Stow, Andrew Beattie, and their colleagues at Macquarie University in New South Wales and the South Australian Museum in Adelaide collected bees from across the social spectrum: blue-banded bees and teddy bear bees, which are solitary and live in their own nests without partners or workers; semisocial reed bees that partner with their sisters and their offspring in small colonies; and Australian native honey bees, which form large colonies of closely related individuals with sophisticated divisions of labor. The scientists then washed the protective coatings from the bees' bodies and applied the resulting solution to the notorious Staphylococcus aureus (staph) bacterium. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 10306 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Philip Ball Gluing a fly's head to a wire and watching it trying to fly sounds more like the sort of experiment a naughty schoolboy would conduct than one that turns out to have philosophical and legal implications. But that's the way it is for the work reported this week by a team of neurobiologists in the online journal PLoS One1. They say their study of the 'flight' of a tethered fly reveals that the fly's brain has the ability to be spontaneous — to make decisions that aren't predictable responses to environmental stimuli. The researchers think this might be what underpins the notorious cussedness of laboratory animals, wryly satirized in the so-called Harvard Law of Animal Behavior: "Under carefully controlled experimental circumstances, an animal will behave as it damned well pleases." In humans, this apparently volitional behaviour is traditionally ascribed to our free will. Björn Brembs of the Free University of Berlin, Germany, and his colleagues make the somewhat radical claim that their experiment shows that even flies, although not making conscious decisions, have a kind of primitive 'free will' circuit wired into their brains. That's an intriguing idea, not least because it forces us to confront the question of what on earth 'free will' could mean in a neuroscientific context. My suspicion is that such a meaning doesn't exist. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10305 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi Testosterone can help protect against brain shrinkage in men with multiple sclerosis (MS), a small, preliminary trial suggests. Patients who applied a gel containing the hormone every day for a year showed less brain shrinkage than expected for people of their age with MS. The study participants also showed an increase in muscle mass over the course of the one-year trial. Researchers say the new findings are encouraging and suggest testosterone could one day help men with MS preserve their mind and muscle function. In multiple sclerosis, the immune system is thought to turn on the body, attacking the protective coating on nerves that enables them to swiftly send signals. This process can ultimately lead to neurological problems such as poor coordination and paralysis. In many cases, people in their 40s and 50s who have had MS for more than a decade will start showing signs of impaired memory, says Rhonda Voskuhl at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the US. For example, they might have difficulty remembering three questions asked in quick succession. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 10304 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Charles Q. Choi A spark of free will may exist in even the tiny brain of the humble fruit fly, based on new findings that could shed light on the nature and evolution of free will in humans. Future research delving further into free will could lead to more advanced robots, scientists added. The result, joked neurobiologist Björn Brembs from the Free University Berlin, could be "world robot domination." "Seriously though," Brembs said that programming robots with aspects of free will "may lead to more realistic and probably even more efficient behavior, which could be decisive in truly autonomous robots needed for planetary exploration." Better understanding aspects of free will in humans also could aid in the treatment of mental disorders where people face problems controlling how they feel, think or act, such as depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia nervosa, schizophrenia or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Brembs told LiveScience. For centuries, the question of whether or not humans possess free will — and thus control their own actions — has been a source of hot debate. © 2007 MSNBC.com © 2007 Microsoft

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10303 - Posted: 06.24.2010

An experiment aimed at finding ways to help astronauts adapt to life on Mars could end up helping insomniacs on Earth, researchers said on Monday. They found that two 45-minute exposures to bright light in the evening could help people adjust to a longer, Martian-style day. During the experiment, they found that individuals have a wider-than-expected variation in an internal system the human body uses to keep track of days and nights. The researchers believe their treatment might help people with certain disorders of this system. "The results have powerful implications for the treatment of circadian rhythm sleep disorders, including shift work disorder and advanced sleep phase disorder," said Dr. Charles Czeisler, chief of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, US. NASA had asked Czeisler's lab to find ways to help astronauts adjust to life on Mars, where the days are about 24 hours and 39 minutes long, or 24.65 hours. This nearly 25-hour day is enough to throw most people into a state of jet lag, which Czeisler has shown interferes with the ability to learn, remember things, react quickly and to sleep. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 10302 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Debra Rosenberg - Growing up in Corinth, Miss., J. T. Hayes had A legacy to attend to. His dad was a well-known race-car driver and Hayes spent much of his childhood tinkering in the family's greasy garage, learning how to design and build cars. By the age of 10, he had started racing in his own right. Eventually Hayes won more than 500 regional and national championships in go-kart, midget and sprint racing, even making it to the NASCAR Winston Cup in the early '90s. But behind the trophies and the swagger of the racing circuit, Hayes was harboring a painful secret: he had always believed he was a woman. He had feminine features and a slight frame—at 5 feet 6 and 118 pounds he was downright dainty—and had always felt, psychologically, like a girl. Only his anatomy got in the way. Since childhood he'd wrestled with what to do about it. He'd slip on "girl clothes" he hid under the mattress and try his hand with makeup. But he knew he'd find little support in his conservative hometown. In 1991, Hayes had a moment of truth. He was driving a sprint car on a dirt track in Little Rock when the car flipped end over end. "I was trapped upside down, engine throttle stuck, fuel running all over the racetrack and me," Hayes recalls. "The accident didn't scare me, but the thought that I hadn't lived life to its full potential just ran chill bumps up and down my body." That night he vowed to complete the transition to womanhood. Hayes kept racing while he sought therapy and started hormone treatments, hiding his growing breasts under an Ace bandage and baggy T shirts. Finally, in 1994, at 30, Hayes raced on a Saturday night in Memphis, then drove to Colorado the next day for sex-reassignment surgery, selling his prized race car to pay the tab. © 2007 MSNBC.com

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 10301 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Sharon Begley - When Doug Kirby sat down recently to update his 2001 analysis of sex-education programs, he had 111 studies that were scientifically sound, using rigorous methods to evaluate whether a program met its goals of reducing teen pregnancy, cutting teens' rates of sexually transmitted diseases and persuading them to practice abstinence (or, if they didn't, to use condoms). He also had a pile of studies that were too poorly designed to include. It measured three feet high. For us civilians, it's hard to grasp how much of science is subjective, and especially how much leeway there is in choosing how to conduct a study. No one is alleging that scientists stack the deck on purpose. Let's just say that depending on how you design a study you can practically preordain the outcome. "There is an amazing array of things people do to botch a study," says Rebecca Maynard of the University of Pennsylvania. For instance, 153 out of 167 government-funded studies of bisphenol-A, a chemical used to make plastic, find toxic effects in animals, such as low sperm counts. No industry-funded studies find any problem. It's not that the taxpayer-funded scientists are hallucinating, or that the industry scientists are blind. But here's a clue: many industry studies tested this estrogenlike chemical on a strain of rat that is insensitive to estrogen. That's like trying to measure how stress affects lactation ... using males. © 2007 MSNBC.com

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 10300 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Tracy Staedter, Discovery News — Before venturing out into an unfamiliar area, most people scope out a map. But for the blind or visually impaired, using a map to get oriented is not an option. An interactive computer program in development could change that. It paints a picture of a city, not with images, but with sounds. Not only could the technology aide the visually impaired by giving them a sense of place before they explore the unknown, it could also offer sighted people audio cues when in "blind" situations. "A firefighter could get a signal through a helmet headset as soon as he is losing track inside a dangerous building or if he needs to be directed to a doorway or a victim," said professor Susanne Boll of the University of Oldenburg in Germany. The interactive map allows a person to explore a city either from a bird's eye perspective or by walking through a virtual, three-dimensional environment. The traveler explores the city by moving a stylus across a tablet PC. The stylus and the edges of the PC help the person feel the extent of the map and develop a mental model of the space. Geographic features such as buildings, parks, lakes and tourist sites are represented by corresponding sounds. For example, a park sounds like singing birds, lakes sound like dabbling water and sightseeing spots sound like camera shutter clicks. © 2007 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 10299 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alzheimer's drugs currently being denied to some NHS patients may have a dramatic impact on the pathology of the brain, research in the UK indicates. Neurology says that post-mortem tests on 24 patients found a 70% fall of a protein linked to dementia in those who had taken cholinesterase inhibitors. Campaigners are fighting to get the drugs available on the NHS after they were rejected for use in mild cases. Experts said the study was interesting but small and inconclusive as a result. Post-mortem examinations were done on 12 patients who took part in UK trials of the drugs - donepezil, rivastigmine, tacrine and galantamine. Professor Clive Ballard, director of research at the Alzheimer's Society, and colleagues measured the concentrations of two proteins associated with the build up of plaques found in the brains with people with dementia. The results were compared with 12 patients studied before cholinesterase drugs were available. Deposits of one of the proteins - beta amyloid - in the plaques were 70% lower in the brains of people who received the drugs in the trial. There was no difference in amounts of the other protein known as tau. Professor Ballard said: "We knew there may be some reduction in the levels of beta-amyloid among people prescribed cholinesterase drugs, but the sheer magnitude of the reduction was a real surprise. "The study looked at dementia with Lewy bodies but beta-amyloid is also a hallmark in Alzheimer's disease. "The results suggest that if we want to slow down the progression of these diseases the earlier we start prescribing these treatments the better." (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 10298 - Posted: 05.15.2007

By NATALIE ANGIER I never much cared for royalty, although I admit that, for reasons my family and I are still struggling to understand, I named my first cat “Princess Bubbles.” Nevertheless, as I watched Queen Elizabeth II float serenely last week through her swooning colonial multitudes, here chatting with Goddard engineers on the wonders of the space age, there catching the president on blunders about the queen’s age, I couldn’t help but doff a small mental tiara to the great lady. Such sober poise and unpompous stances! She’s majestic, all right, her regalness clearly born, made and thrust upon her every day of her life. In so many ways, Elizabeth reminded me of another monarch I admire: the honeybee queen, that stoical, beloved mother to the worker masses in a beehive. Sure, Her Highness may go in for pastel solids and Her Hymenoptera for fuzzy stripes, but both are tiny, attractive celebrities prone to being swarmed. Both are kept meticulously well-groomed by a retinue of handlers and are fed high-quality foods generally unavailable to the proletariat. Both are, yes, long-lived. And both share the dubious honor of having enormous social responsibility but very little power. “The queen bee, like the queen of England, is not the ruler, and she doesn’t tell anybody what to do,” said Gene E. Robinson, a professor of integrative biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “But she makes things work, and she makes everything better by being around.” Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 10297 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bob Holmes The earliest ancestors of old-world monkeys, apes and humans had surprisingly small brains, a new study shows. This finding - based on a newly described fossil skull - means that large brains evolved independently in new- and old-world primates. It also suggests that evolutionary anthropologists may have to rethink some cherished theories about why such big, powerful brains evolved. The skull in question, which belongs to a roughly cat-sized primate called Aegyptopithecus zeuxis, is remarkable because it is so well preserved. "It's unbelievably complete, and there's very little distortion to it," says Elwyn Simons, a physical anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, US, who led the research team that found it near Cairo, Egypt. This completeness allowed Simons' team to measure the skull's cranial capacity very accurately using micro CT scans. The brain turned out to be much smaller than they expected – in fact, no larger in proportion to the body than the brain of lower primates such as lemurs. This implies that higher primates, or anthropoids, must have still had small brains when Aegyptopithecus lived, about 29 million years ago – which is after old-world anthropoids diverged from their new-world cousins. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 10296 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Mairi Macleod Female chimpanzees can be as ferocious and deadly as males, given the right set of circumstances – even participating in infanticide, primatologists report. Males of the species are infamous for their violent behaviour, but now a gang of female chimpanzees have been spotted killing an infant in Budongo forest in Uganda. Simon Townsend at the University of St Andrews, UK, and colleagues, suspect that two other infants met their ends in similar ways. Infanticide by female chimps has been reported before, notably by Jane Goodall in Gombe, Tanzania. In that case, several infants were killed and eaten by a mother-daughter pair. It was not clear if those killings were the result of pathological behaviour, or if there were other contributory factors. From long-term observations at Gombe, primatologist Anne Pusey of the Jane Goodall Institute Center for Primate Studies at the University of Minnesota, St Paul, US, suggested that ecological competition may be a factor. Now, Townsend's team support this interpretation They suggest the infanticide in Budongo was adaptive behaviour because females from the resident community attacked immigrant females and their newborns. Adult males, far from instigating the aggression, tried to defend the infants. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stress; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 10295 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jane Elliott When Richard Murray called his banking clients, his strong Birmingham accent heavily laced with a Hereford twang made him instantly recognisable. But a year ago, Richard, 30, had a stroke and lost the power of speech. Now he speaks with a heavy foreign accent. Some say his accent is definitely French, others are sure it is Eastern European or Italian. "Now when I call my clients and say 'It is me, Richard Murray', they say 'Who?'. They don't recognise my voice. "So now when I speak to people I preface it with: 'I have had a stroke and this is why I speak with a foreign accent'. "When I was first re-learning to speak the only words I could say were hi, bye, yes and no. So if anyone asked me anything else I was lost. I remember being at the till at the supermarket when I heard someone say 'bloody foreigner'. I have also had people expecting me to speak in foreign languages because of my accent." Richard's health problems started when he broke his toe while on honeymoon in Mauritius in September 2005. He flew back to the UK days later and developed a deep vein thrombosis (DVT), or blood clot. Unbeknown to him, Richard had a hole in his heart which had been present from birth. The blood clot had travelled through the hole into his brain and led to him having a stroke nine days later. (C)BBC

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 10294 - Posted: 05.14.2007

By Lynda L. Sharpe Two meerkats wrestle joyfully, tumbling over each other in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa. Such play-fighting, to which the animals devote around 3 percent of their day, costs a lot of energy. So unless play also confers an adaptive benefit, evolution would have favored meerkats that do not play. Because meerkat groups are known for social harmony, the animals seemed good candidates for investigating whether play leads to better social bonding—less aggression, stronger alliances among individuals, and greater contributions to the group. n the cool freshness of dawn, two meerkat pups raced down the dune toward me. Turning suddenly, they reared up on their stumpy hind legs and clasped each other like little sumo wrestlers. Shuffling to and fro, each pup tried to topple the other, each arching its head back to avoid its opponent’s snapping teeth. Without warning, Bandit (or so we named him for his extra-large, dark eye patches) lost his footing and tumbled backward in a spray of red sand. As he lay wriggling on his back, paws waving in the air, Imp, a smaller but feisty pup, leapt on top of him, pinned him down, and nipped enthusiastically at any appendage that came within her reach. The two young meerkats were acting out one of the greatest mysteries in the world of animal behavior. They were playing. And those of us who study that behavior have no idea why. © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2007

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Emotions
Link ID: 10293 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Many people with pathological aggression go undiagnosed. Currently, no drugs for aggression have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and social programs are often under-funded or under pressure to serve all who need help. However, researchers have uncovered specific brain chemicals that can be manipulated to control different kinds of aggression in humans. This may lead to anti-aggression drugs that provide the first effective treatments for this disorder. And each day, violence claims many victims. In 2003, 5,570 people between 10 and 24 years old were murdered in the United States -- an average of 15 a day. Figures from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) estimate that roughly 3.5 million violent crimes were committed against family members between 1998 and 2002. Although DOJ figures suggest that violent crime in the United States is declining overall, a person still faces an 80 percent chance of being a victim of a violent crime -- including homicide, rape, assault, and theft -- at some point in their lifetime. Aggression is a complex social behavior, and it also can signal another clinically defined condition, such as bipolar disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder. Researchers place most aggression by individuals into one of three general categories: predatory aggression against other species, social aggression against the same species, and defensive aggression in response to a threat. The latter two categories are the ones behind many of the headlines. © 2007 Society for Neuroscience

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 10292 - Posted: 06.24.2010