Scientists are developing a pill which could boost women's libido and reduce their appetite. The hormone-releasing pill has so far only been given to female monkeys and shrews who displayed more mating behaviour and ate less. The team from the Medical Research Council's Human Reproduction Unit in Edinburgh believe a human version could be available within a decade. But a psychologist said low-libido was usually caused by relationship issues. Up to 40% of women are thought to experience a lack of sex drive at some point in their lives. The Edinburgh team, led by Professor Robert Millar, have been looking at the properties Type 2 Gonadotrophin-releasing hormone. When it was given to monkeys, they displayed mating behaviour such as tongue-flicking and eyebrow-raising to the males, while female shrews displayed their feelings via "rump presentation and tail wagging". But the animals also ate around a third less food than they normally would. Professor Millar hopes to achieve a similar rise in libido and fall in appetite in a pill for women. He told the Scotland on Sunday newspaper: "This hormone is distributed in the brain in areas that we suspect affect reproductive behaviour. It is considered a major pharmaceutical endeavour to address the area of libido. So the next stage is to produce a drug that simulates the actions of this hormone. It is most likely that we will do it in partnership with a pharmaceutical firm. It could be available to women within the next 10 years." (C)BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 10251 - Posted: 05.01.2007

Scientists have shown how cannabis may trigger psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia. A King's College London team gave healthy volunteers the active ingredient tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). They then recorded reduced activity in an area of the brain which keeps inappropriate thoughts at bay. THC levels are thought to have doubled in street cannabis in recent years - at the expense of other ingredients which may have a beneficial effect. A separate study has shown that one of these ingredients - cannabidiol (CBD) - has the potential to dampen down psychotic symptoms, and could form the basis of new treatments. The research will be discussed at a conference on the impact of cannabis use to be held at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College this week. Although figures are not kept, it is estimated that as many as 500,000 people in the UK may be dependent on cannabis. Increasing numbers of people are seeking help for cannabis problems at specialist clinics. In 2005, only heroin users accounted for a greater proportion of patients. Experts are concerned that street cannabis is becoming increasingly potent. It is thought that average THC content has risen from 6% to 12% in recent years. The Institute of Psychiatry study gave THC, CBD or placebo capsules to adult male volunteers who had not abused cannabis. They then carried out brain scans, and a battery of tests, and found that those who took THC showed reduced activity in an area of the brain called the inferior frontal cortex, which keeps inappropriate thoughts and behaviour, such as swearing and paranoia in check. (C)BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Attention
Link ID: 10250 - Posted: 05.01.2007

By NATALIE ANGIER As May dawns and the mothers among us excitedly anticipate the clever e-cards that we soon will be linking to and the overpriced brunches that we will somehow end up paying for, the following job description may ring a familiar note: Must be exceptionally stable yet ridiculously responsive to the needs of those around you; must be willing to trail after your loved ones, cleaning up their messes and compensating for their deficiencies and selfishness; must work twice as hard as everybody else; must accept blame for a long list of the world’s illnesses; must have a knack for shaping young minds while in no way neglecting the less glamorous tissues below; must have a high tolerance for babble and repetition; and must agree, when asked, to shut up, fade into the background and pretend you don’t exist. As it happens, the above precis refers not only to the noble profession of motherhood to which we all owe our lives and guilt complexes. It is also a decent character sketch of the chromosome that allows a human or any other mammal to become a mother in the first place: the X chromosome. The X chromosome, like its shorter, stubbier but no less conspicuous counterpart, the Y chromosome, is a so-called sex chromosome, a segment of DNA entrusted with the pivotal task of sex determination. A mammalian embryo outfitted with an X and Y chromosomal set buds into a male, while a mammal bearing a pair of X chromosomes emerges from the maternal berth with birthing options of her own. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10249 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Depression is associated with an increased risk for diabetes in older adults, even in people who have no other risk factors for the disease, a new study reports. Researchers studied 4,681 men and women over 65, following them over a 10-year period, after excluding anyone who already had diabetes at the start of the project. They used a well-validated questionnaire to measure symptoms of depression each year, and tested all participants at two- to four-year intervals for blood sugar. They also calculated body mass index and noted alcohol intake, smoking status and antidepressant use. After controlling for these factors, they found that even a single report of high depressive symptoms was associated with an increase in the incidence of diabetes. Increases in symptoms over time and persistently high symptoms of depression were also associated with the disease. Over all, people with the highest scores on the depression questionnaire were roughly 50 percent more likely to develop diabetes than those with the lowest scores. Adjusting for race, sex, smoking status, alcohol intake and body mass index made no difference in the result. Mercedes R. Carnethon, the lead author and an assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University, said there was no evidence one way or the other on whether treating depression could reduce the risk for diabetes. “People in our study who were on antidepressants didn’t have an elevated risk for diabetes,” she said. “But we don’t know if that’s because of the antidepressants” or for some other reason. The study appeared April 23 in The Archives of Internal Medicine. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Obesity
Link ID: 10248 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By CARL ZIMMER LITCHFIELD, Conn. — “This guy’s the champion,” said Patricia Brennan, a behavioral ecologist, leaning over the nether regions of a duck — a Meller’s duck from Madagascar, to be specific — and carefully coaxing out his phallus. Patricia Brennan, a behavioral ecologist, visits the Livingston Ripley Waterfowl Sanctuary in Connecticut regularly to continue her study of duck phalluses. The duck was quietly resting upside-down against the stomach of Ian Gereg, an aviculturist here at the Livingston Ripley Waterfowl Sanctuary. Dr. Brennan, a post-doctoral researcher at Yale University and the University of Sheffield, visits the sanctuary every two weeks to measure the phalluses of six species of ducks. When she first visited in January, the phalluses were the size of rice grains. Now many of them are growing rapidly. The champion phallus from this Meller’s duck is a long, spiraling tentacle. Some ducks grow phalluses as long as their entire body. In the fall, the genitalia will disappear, only to reappear next spring. The anatomy of ducks is especially bizarre considering that 97 percent of all bird species have no phallus at all. Most male birds just deliver their sperm through an opening. Dr. Brennan is investigating how this sexual wonder of the world came to be. Part of the answer, she has discovered, has gone overlooked for decades. Male ducks may have such extreme genitals because the females do too. The birds are locked in an evolutionary struggle for reproductive success. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 10247 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sharon Weinberger U.S. Special Forces may soon have a strange and powerful new weapon in their arsenal: a pair of high-tech binoculars 10 times more powerful than anything available today, augmented by an alerting system that literally taps the wearer's prefrontal cortex to warn of furtive threats detected by the soldier's subconscious. In a new effort dubbed "Luke's Binoculars" -- after the high-tech binoculars Luke Skywalker uses in Star Wars -- the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is setting out to create its own version of this science-fiction hardware. And while the Pentagon's R&D arm often focuses on technologies 20 years out, this new effort is dramatically different -- Darpa says it expects to have prototypes in the hands of soldiers in three years. The agency claims no scientific breakthrough is needed on the project -- formally called the Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System. Instead, Darpa hopes to integrate technologies that have been simmering in laboratories for years, ranging from flat-field, wide-angle optics, to the use of advanced electroencephalograms, or EEGs, to rapidly recognize brainwave signatures. © 2007 CondéNet Inc. All rights reserved

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 10246 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Rachel Konrad, Associated Press — A convincing twin of Darth Vader stalks the beige cubicles of a Silicon Valley office, complete with ominous black mask, cape and light saber. But this is no chintzy Halloween costume. It's a prototype, years in the making, of a toy that incorporates brain wave-reading technology. Behind the mask is a sensor that touches the user's forehead and reads the brain's electrical signals, then sends them to a wireless receiver inside the saber, which lights up when the user is concentrating. The player maintains focus by channeling thoughts on any fixed mental image, or thinking specifically about keeping the light sword on. When the mind wanders, the wand goes dark. Engineers at NeuroSky Inc. have big plans for brain wave-reading toys and video games. They say the simple Darth Vader game — a relatively crude biofeedback device cloaked in gimmicky garb — portends the coming of more sophisticated devices that could revolutionize the way people play. Technology from NeuroSky and other startups could make video games more mentally stimulating and realistic. It could even enable players to control video game characters or avatars in virtual worlds with nothing but their thoughts. Adding biofeedback to "Tiger Woods PGA Tour," for instance, could mean that only those players who muster Zen-like concentration could nail a put. In the popular action game "Grand Theft Auto," players who become nervous or frightened would have worse aim than those who remain relaxed and focused. © 2007 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 10245 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Rowan Hooper Human spoken language may have evolved from a currency of hand and arm gestures, not simply through improvements in the basic vocalisations made by primates. This "gesture theory" of language evolution has been given weight by new findings showing that the meaning of a primate's gesture depends on the context in which it is used, and on what other signals are being given at the same time. Gesture is used more flexibly than vocalised communication in nonhuman primates, the researchers found. A proto-language using a combination of gesture and vocalisation is therefore more likely to have given rise to human language, than simply an improvement in the often involuntary vocalisations that primates make, they say. Amy Pollick and Frans de Waal at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia, US, tested the idea by looking at how strongly gesture and vocal signals are tied to context in our closest primate relatives – chimpanzees and bonobos. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 10244 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi An overabundance of cell-killing molecules called "death factors" may explain why some people have no sense of smell, a new study reveals. Some patients born without the ability to smell have 10 times more of these molecules in their nasal mucus than individuals with a normal sense of smell, the researchers say. Experts believe the finding suggests new ways that doctors might treat anosmia – lack of a sense of smell. An estimated 400,000 people in the US alone were born without an ability to smell. While 12% of those affected have clear anatomical abnormalities that can explain the cause of their olfactory handicap, the remaining 88% have no obvious defect that could explain their failure to smell. Robert Henkin, a cognitive neurologist and director of the Washington DC Taste and Smell Clinic, asked 20 of his anosmic patients to carry sterile containers the size of shot glasses with them during the day. Whenever these patients felt the need to clear their noses, they would do so directly into the container, seal it, and then return it to Henkin's lab for analysis. His team also asked 61 people with a normal sense of smell to do the same. When researchers analysed the samples, they confirmed that people with anosmia had slightly lower levels of certain molecules that promote cell growth, such as cyclic AMP, as indicated by previous research. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Apoptosis
Link ID: 10243 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Hopkin The language you speak may influence how you perceive colours, according to new research. Russian speakers, who have separate words for light and dark blue, are better at discriminating between the two, suggesting that they do indeed perceive them as different colours. Russian speakers divide what the English language regard as 'blue' into two separate colours, called 'goluboy' (light blue) and 'siniy' (dark blue). And a test now shows that this seems to help them view light and dark blue as distinct. Researchers led by Jonathan Winawer of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge presented Russian and English speakers with sets of three blue squares, two of which were identical shades with a third 'odd one out'. They asked the volunteers to pick out the identical squares. Russian speakers performed the task more quickly when the two shades straddled their boundary between goluboy and siniy than when all shades fell into one camp. English speakers showed no such distinction. What's more, when the researchers interfered with volunteers' verbal abilities by asking them to recite a string of numbers in their head while performing the task, the Russian effect vanished. This shows that linguistic effects genuinely do influence colour perception, they report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 10242 - Posted: 06.24.2010

US scientists have devised a drug that can switch on a gene to burn body fat, offering hope of an exercise pill. Mice given the drug burned off fat, even when they did not exercise, and were resistant to weight gain despite a high-fat diet. The ultimate use would be to treat people at risk of obesity-related diseases like diabetes, rather than offer a "no-work six-pack" pill. The Salk Institute team presented their work at Experimental Biology 2007. The drug mimics normal fat and chemically triggers a gene switch called PPAR-delta. Turning on this switch activates the same fat-burning process that occurs during exercise. Lead researcher Dr Ronald Evans believes the same will occur in humans. UK expert Dr Fredrik Karpe, from the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism, is hoping to test this in the near future. Commenting on the work, he said: "There has never been a method to 'medically' switch on fat burning before. "The finding that PPAR-delta co-ordinates this process, not only by switching on fat burning, but also to rebuild the muscle in a way making it more fit for fat burning, is of major interest, not least as a completely novel approach for the treatment of the metabolic derangements accompanying obesity." But he cautioned; "Although this might become an 'exercise pill', it is unlikely to provide all the other benefits of real physical exercise." (C)BBC

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 10241 - Posted: 04.30.2007

By MALCOLM RITTER PITTSBURGH -- A 4-year-old boy lay on an operating table here a few weeks ago with a tumor that had eaten into his brain and the base of his skull. Standard surgery would involve cutting open his face, leaving an ugly scar and hindering his facial growth as he matured. But doctors at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center knew a way to avoid those devastating consequences. They removed much of the tumor through the boy's nose. Since then, doctors in New York and in France have announced they removed gall bladders through the vaginas of two women. And doctors in India say they have performed appendectomies through the mouth. It's a startling concept and a little unpleasant to contemplate. But researchers are exploring new ways to do surgery using slender instruments through the body's natural openings, avoiding cutting through the skin and muscle. Many questions remain about that approach. But doctors say it holds the promise of providing a faster recovery with less pain and no visible scars. And in the brain, it can avoid a need for manipulating tissue that could disturb brain and eye function. © 2007 The Associated Press

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10240 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ALLEN G. BREED -- When 7-month-old Natalie Beard's body arrived in the autopsy room, there were no outward signs of physical abuse. No broken bones, bruises or abrasions. But behind her pretty brown eyes and beneath her fine dark-brown hair, there was chaos. Both retinas were puckered and clouded red. And there was acute bleeding outside and beneath the brain's outer membrane _ the kind of bleeding most often associated with a burst aneurysm. To forensic experts, these were classic signs that Natalie was shaken to death. The common wisdom in such "shaken-baby" cases was that the last person with the child before symptoms appeared was the guilty party, and a Wisconsin jury convicted baby sitter Audrey Edmunds of first-degree reckless homicide. Edmunds is now 10 years into her 18-year prison sentence, and she's seeking a new trial. In the decade since her conviction, her attorneys say, many experts have studied the physics and biomechanics of shaken-baby syndrome and have concluded that shaking alone could not have produced Natalie's injuries without leaving other evidence of abuse. © 2007 The Associated Press

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 10239 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JANE GROSS On an Internet chat room popular with breast cancer survivors, one thread — called “Where’s My Remote?” — turns the mental fog known as chemo brain into a stand-up comedy act. One woman reported finding five unopened gallons of milk in her refrigerator and having no memory of buying the first four. A second had to ask her husband which toothbrush belonged to her. At a family celebration, one woman filled the water glasses with turkey gravy. Another could not remember how to carry over numbers when balancing the checkbook. Once, women complaining of a constellation of symptoms after undergoing chemotherapy — including short-term memory loss, an inability to concentrate, difficulty retrieving words, trouble with multitasking and an overarching sense that they had lost their mental edge — were often sent home with a patronizing “There, there.” But attitudes are changing as a result of a flurry of research and new attention to the after-effects of life-saving treatment. There is now widespread acknowledgment that patients with cognitive symptoms are not imagining things, and a growing number of oncologists are rushing to offer remedies, including stimulants commonly used for attention-deficit disorder and acupuncture. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10238 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tom Avril It might seem hard to convince a roomful of strangers to let you gouge a few skin cells from their arms for genetic testing, especially when you are a foreigner in a poor Venezuelan community ravaged by disease, and you speak very bad Spanish. So, Nancy Wexler played her ace card. She held out her arm. A bilingual nurse then guided the American scientist through the crowd. ˇMira! the nurse said, again and again. Ella tiene la marca. "Look! She has the mark." Wexler had undergone the same skin biopsy that she was asking of the skeptical villagers. The reason, they were astonished to learn, was that she, like them, was at risk for Huntington's disease - a killer that slowly lays waste to the brain, causing its victims to speak as if they are drunk, to jerk uncontrollably, and, finally, to die. Wexler, a Columbia University neuropsychologist, is in Philadelphia this week as one of nine people being honored by the Franklin Institute for achievement in science and technology. Other winners of the prestigious awards range from a native of Wenonah, Gloucester County, who is the lead scientist on NASA's Mars Rover mission, to an IBM engineer whose work transformed computers.

Keyword: Huntingtons; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10237 - Posted: 04.30.2007

Zoe Smeaton It may be possible to restore lost memories with drugs that trigger the natural "rewiring" of brain cells, a new study in mice suggests. The findings could lead to new treatments for neurodegenerative diseases in humans associated with impaired learning and memory loss, such as dementia, the researchers say. Li-Huei Tsai at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, and colleagues used mice that were genetically modified to produce a protein (p25) when fed an antibiotic. Previous studies have suggested that p25 is linked to brain cell death. Before triggering p25 production, the mice were placed in a tank of water and trained to find their way to a platform submerged just below the surface. After the mice had developed a long-term memory of the task, the team induced p25 in the rodents, which led to loss of neurons, learning ability and memory. To see if these faculties could be restored, the mice were placed in an environment enriched with toys and wheels. When the stimulated mice were retested, the researchers found they did better at the memory task than before. "If memories can be recovered then that suggests they were never erased and indicates that perceived memory loss is likely to be due to an inability to retrieve memories," Tsai says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 10236 - Posted: 06.24.2010

US researchers have simulated half a virtual mouse brain on a supercomputer. The scientists ran a "cortical simulator" that was as big and as complex as half of a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer. In other smaller simulations the researchers say they have seen characteristics of thought patterns observed in real mouse brains. Now the team is tuning the simulation to make it run faster and to make it more like a real mouse brain. Brain tissue presents a huge problem for simulation because of its complexity and the sheer number of potential interactions between the elements involved. The three researchers, James Frye, Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, and Dharmendra S Modha, laid out how they went about it in a very short research note entitled "Towards Real-Time, Mouse-Scale Cortical Simulations". Half a real mouse brain is thought to have about eight million neurons each one of which can have up to 8,000 synapses, or connections, with other nerve fibres. Modelling such a system, the trio wrote, puts "tremendous constraints on computation, communication and memory capacity of any computing platform". The team, from the IBM Almaden Research Lab and the University of Nevada, ran the simulation on a BlueGene L supercomputer that had 4,096 processors, each one of which used 256MB of memory. Using this machine the researchers created half a virtual mouse brain that had 8,000 neurons that had up to 6,300 synapses. The vast complexity of the simulation meant that it was only run for ten seconds at a speed ten times slower than real life - the equivalent of one second in a real mouse brain. (C)BBC

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10235 - Posted: 04.28.2007

By Karen Schrock The patient opens her eyes, but they are unfocused. She is awake yet apparently unaware of anything going on in the hospital room around her. After the accident, she lies in her bed, unresponsive, day after day. What is she thinking? Soon we may be able to communicate with such "locked-in" minds--trapped in bodies that no longer respond to their mental control. In a blitz of publicity last fall, a team of British researchers announced they had imaged the brain of one of their "vegetative" patients and discovered that she was in fact conscious and aware. Now that same team has developed a way to ask yes-or-no questions of such patients. The idea is radical: we might soon be able to reach a number of people, including 250,000 Americans, who suffer from consciousness disorders--patients who, until now, had been considered beyond treatment. "We are now able to detect when somebody is consciously aware, when existing clinical methods have been unable to provide that information," says Adrian Owen of the University of Cambridge, leader of the team of researchers who imaged the woman's brain as she responded to doctors' requests that she imagine such activities as playing tennis. Because of recent advances in imaging technology, patients "can literally communicate without having to say or do anything," Owen says. "People have felt until now that this patient group isn't worth investing in. The attitude has been, 'There's nothing that can be done,' " Owen adds. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10234 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nikhil Swaminathan A single dose of morphine can block a process in the brain associated with learning and memory for as long as a full day after being ingested, according to a new study. The disruption causes a neuronal imbalance that researchers say could be the first step in the development of addiction. They add that therapies designed to prevent this from happening during drug use could one day help to thwart chemical dependency. A team of Brown University scientists found that morphine disrupts an inhibitory mechanism in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), a cluster of neurons in the center of the brain responsible for processing naturally rewarding actions, such as eating and sexual activity. The resulting imbalance between excitation and inhibition allows the levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, a pleasure chemical, to surge. Morphine blocks a process called long-term potentiation (LTP), which strengthens the synapses (connections between neurons) to make the transfer of information between cells more efficient. Neuroscientists have identified this mechanism as a cellular process behind memory and learning. In the current study, scientists focused on synapses between dopamine-containing neurons and those that contain GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), an inhibitory chemical. "The ability to have LTP at these synapses is probably a natural mechanism to balance excitation and inhibition," says senior study author Julie Kauer, "so the synapse won't get crazily excited." © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 10233 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nikhil Swaminathan Scientists have suspected for more than two decades that schizophrenia is linked to defects in the brain's white matter. They could not tell, however, whether changes in the information-transmitting region of the brain detected by brain scans or autopsies were the cause or the symptoms of the illness. A new study not only clarifies the association but also links it to genes previously tied to the debilitating mental disorder and chemical changes believed to occur in the schizophrenic brain. "[The report] provides evidence that alterations in myelin [the lipid layers that sheath and insulate nerve fibers and are the main constituent of white matter] can cause defects in neurons and the central nervous system in general that are related to neuropsychiatric disease," says the study's senior author Gabriel Corfas, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School's Children's Hospital Boston. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, could help physicians detect schizophrenia earlier and lead to new treatments for sufferers. Schizophrenia, which affects about 2.5 million people in the U.S., is characterized by a distorted sense of reality, such as hallucinations and imaginary voices, erratic behavior and speech, and the absence of emotion. Symptoms do not typically show up until late adolescence or early adulthood. Corfas's team studied mice in which they blocked the erbB4 receptor, in oligodendrocytes, which make up the myelin sheath over a neuron's communication hub. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Glia
Link ID: 10232 - Posted: 06.24.2010