A segment of animated footage promoting the 2012 Olympics has been removed from the organisers' website after fears it could trigger epileptic seizures. Prof Graham Harding, who developed the test used to measure photo-sensitivity levels in TV material, said it should not be broadcast again. Charity Epilepsy Action said it had received calls from people who had suffered fits after seeing it. Organiser London 2012 said it will re-edit the film. The new logo for the event, which is a jagged emblem based on the date 2012, was unveiled on Monday. A London 2012 spokeswoman said the health concerns surrounded a piece of animation shown at the launch, which was recorded by broadcasters and put on the official website. Emphasising that it was not the logo itself which was the focus of worries, she said: "This concerns a short piece of animation which we used as part of the logo launch event and not the actual logo." She said the section of footage concerned showed a "diver diving into a pool which had a multi-colour ripple effect". The spokeswoman said: "We are taking it very seriously and are looking into it as a matter of urgency." Prof Harding is an expert in clinical neuro-physiology and he designed a test which all moving adverts need to undergo to check they will not trigger a reaction in people with epilepsy. He told BBC London 94.9FM: "It fails the Harding FPA machine test which is the machine the television industry uses to test images. And so it does not comply with Ofcom guidelines and is in contravention of them. The brand incorporates both the Olympic and Paralympic Games, which is ironic as the latter is a showcase for athletes with disabilities (C)BBC

Keyword: Epilepsy; Vision
Link ID: 10378 - Posted: 06.09.2007

Roxanne Khamsi Mice that lack the gene for an important brain-signalling chemical are 10 times less physically active and carry twice as much body fat as their control counterparts, a study reveals. The researchers speculate that mutations in this gene - known as brain specific homeobox transcription factor (Bsx) - could explain why some people fidget less than others and as a result put on more weight, even on a healthy diet. Mathias Treier at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, and colleagues engineered a set of mice to lack the Bsx gene and tagged the animals with transponders. Over the course of the experiment the team monitored the animals' weight and movements within the cages. By the time these mice reached three months of age they had about 3 grams of body fat - roughly twice the amount of their control counterparts, even though both groups ate the same healthy diet. According to Treier, this difference persisted in subsequent months as the mice matured. Treier noticed something that could explain this disparity: the mice lacking Bsx engaged in far less spontaneous activity and sat in place for long stretches of time - much like a human "couch potato". The normal mice, by comparison, fidgeted frequently, regularly wandering about the cage. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10377 - Posted: 06.24.2010

UK scientists are attempting to restore vision in people with a leading cause of blindness using stem cells. The team have already repaired the vision of a handful of patients with age-related macular degeneration using cells from the patients' own eyes. With the help of a £4m donation, they are now planning to carry out the same operation using retinal cells grown from stem cells in the lab. It is hoped the first patients would be treated within five years. Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) affects around 25% of over-60s in the UK to some degree and causes blindness in 14 million people across Europe. There are two types - dry - which makes up 90% of cases, and wet, which makes up the other 10%. It is caused by the failure of retinal pigment epithelial cells (RPE) - a layer of cells under the retina. Using stem cells - which are far more adaptable - can only improve success of what has already been achieved and in addition establish this as a global therapy Mr Lyndon Da Cruz, consultant ophthalmic surgeon at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London has carried out an operation in a handful of patients to take cells from the periphery of the eye in patients with wet AMD and transplant them into the affected area. The procedures have been successful but are associated with complications, take more than two hours and require two operations. To make the procedure quicker, easier and more widely available, researchers at the University of Sheffield have grown RPE cells from embryonic stem cell lines. The hope is that this can be processed into a layer that can be injected into the patients' eye during a simple 45-minute operation. Tests of the laboratory grown RPE cells in rats with AMD showed they restored blindness. (C)BBC

Keyword: Vision; Stem Cells
Link ID: 10376 - Posted: 06.05.2007

Agricultural workers exposed to high levels of pesticides have a raised risk of brain tumours, research suggests. The French study also indicated a possible higher risk among people who used pesticides on houseplants. All agricultural workers exposed to pesticides had a slightly elevated brain tumour risk, it suggested. But the Occupational and Environmental Medicine study found the risk was more than doubled for those exposed to the highest levels. The risk of a type of central nervous system tumour known as a glioma was particularly heightened among this group - more than three times the risk in the general population. Gliomas are more common in men than women, and the researchers speculate that part of the reason might be that men are more often exposed to pesticides. However, the overall risk of developing a brain tumour remained very low. UK experts said the findings were inconclusive. The findings were based on an analysis of 221 cases of brain tumours by the French Institute of Public Health, Epidemiology and Development. The research took place in the Bordeaux wine-growing region, where 80% of all pesticides used are fungicides. The chemicals are mixed and sprayed in a mist to protect vines from fungal attack. However, the researchers were unable to get specific enough data to pin down exactly which types of pesticide were associated with the development of brain tumours. (C)BBC

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Parkinsons
Link ID: 10375 - Posted: 06.05.2007

By BENEDICT CAREY DENVER — Almost every parent of young children has heard an anguished cry or two (or 200) something like: “This shirt is scratchy, this shirt is scratchy, get it off!” “This oatmeal smells like poison, it’s poisonous!” “My feet are hot, my feet are hot, my feet are boiling!” Such bizarre, seemingly overblown reactions to everyday sensations can end in tears, parents know, or escalate into the sort of tantrum that brings neighbors to the door asking whether everything’s all right. Usually, it is. The world for young children is still raw, an acid bath of strange sights, smells and sounds, and it can take time to get used to it. Yet for decades some therapists have argued that there are youngsters who do not adjust at all, or at least not normally. They remain oversensitive, continually recoiling from the world, or undersensitive, banging into things, duck-walking through the day as if not entirely aware of their surroundings. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Hearing
Link ID: 10374 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Every day humans make thousands of decisions, small and large, based on the information at hand and their assessment of the potential outcome of those choices. Now, in a pioneering study of rhesus macaque monkeys, a team of researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) at the University of Washington has caught primates in the act of probabilistic reasoning. They have measured the electrical activity at play in brain cells as the animals make a choice based on their interpretation of a set of visual cues and the potential for reward. Writing June 3, 2007 in an advance online publication of the journal Nature, a team of researchers led by HHMI investigator Michael N. Shadlen at the University of Washington describes experiments in which monkeys learned to base their decisions on the combined probabilities for reward of a random sequence of shapes presented on a video screen. In the process, Shadlen and colleague Tianming Yang, also of the University of Washington, measured the response of neurons in a region of the brain associated with vision, motor planning and attention. “It's amazing the monkeys can do this,” said Shadlen, “and it's pretty incredible you can find neurons in the brain that are doing these calculations.” © 2007 Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 10373 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Kathi Mestayer The hardest thing I've had to come to terms with in the 17 years since my hearing started to fail is not silence but intrusive noises: They ring in my ears, obscure the sounds I want to listen to and startle me when they amplify themselves without warning. There I am, working quietly at my desk, when the knock at my door becomes -- Crash! -- a tympanic interruption, and I leap to attention. Mine is what's called sensorineural hearing loss, which can be caused by loud noises and is often associated with aging (I was 35 when it began) but in my case is probably genetic. Most of my immediate family members have lost their hearing as they've aged, and they walk around, like me, with hunks of beige-ish plastic in and around their ears. Fifteen percent of American adults have some kind of hearing loss, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. Those of us in that group have learned to adapt to a world that ever larger numbers of people are likely to share because more of us are getting, well, older. You have to wonder whether kids these days are ruining their hearing with all that loud music piped from iPods directly into their ear canals. There's no doubt that noise causes hearing loss, but there is no hard evidence yet that noise-induced hearing loss is on the rise. In any event, I'm hardly in a position to give that lecture, having danced through my share of rock concerts, right in front of amps that were bigger than I was. © 2007 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 10372 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Reilly A note to the forgetful: be thankful you don’t remember everything. It means your brain is working properly. According to a new study, the brain only chooses to remember memories it thinks are most relevant, and actively suppresses those that are similar but less used, helping to lessen the cognitive load and prevent confusion. Brice Kuhl at Stanford University in California, US, and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the brain activity of 20 healthy adults while they performed a simple memory test. Participants were given three words pairs to memorise, including two pairs that were closely associated, as follows: ATTIC dust ATTIC junk MOVIE reel After studying "ATTIC dust" a second time, subjects were asked to recall all three pairs using the first words as cues. On average, people were 15% worse at recalling "ATTIC junk" than they were at recalling the unrelated pair, "MOVIE reel". Comparing these findings to the fMRI data taken during the test, the team found participants’ brains were highly active in a region known for handling competing memories, and also in an area believed to induce memory suppression. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 10371 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Katharine Sanderson Pairs of Australian magpie-larks (Grallina cyanoleuca) that sing in tune and in tempo are more threatening to rivals whose territory they move in on than pairs that can't quite get their twittering coordinated. Michelle Hall from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, working at the Australian National University in Canberra with Robert Magrath, listened closely to the shared songs of breeding pairs of the birds. The most coordinated magpie-lark pairs sang alternating notes of the song in a way that, to an untrained ear, gave the impression of being a single voice. Uncoordinated pairs don't get the alternation quite right and produce overlapping notes. Hall then played recordings of coordinated and uncoordinated songs within the territory of 12 magpie-lark pairs. The most closely coordinated songs provoked the most aggressive territorial defence response from the male birds being 'invaded'. These birds who thought their territory was under threat responded by singing more in return. The research raises a number of questions, not least what is so intimidating about a coordinated song, says Peter Slater, an expert in bird duetting at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. "They're producing a song that might as well be produced by an individual," says Slater. "High coordination might be an indication that these are rivals not to be messed with," he suggests. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 10370 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists have shown how having a stroke - or even snoring heavily - can increase the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. A Leeds team found a lack of oxygen in the brain, which occurs during strokes or even in heavy snorers, can affect brain cells called astrocytes. The changes to the cells let glutamate, a neurotransmitter, build up - which could contribute to Alzheimer's. The Journal of Neuroscience study may help scientists prevent Alzheimer's. Under normal circumstances astrocytes mop up glutamate in the brain. However, the Leeds team found a lack of oxygen decreased the expression of proteins required by the cells to carry out this task. Glutamate is toxic if allowed to build up in high levels, so the accumulation could lead to brain cell death, and eventually to the onset of Alzheimer's. Lead researcher Professor Chris Peers said the study was important as it suggested why beta amyloid, the protein that builds up in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, is key to the process of triggering disease. It is already known that low oxygen can cause astrocytes to increase their production of beta amyloid. The latest research suggests it may be this increased production of beta amyloid that blocks expression of the proteins needed for astrocytes to mop up excess glutamate. Professor Peers said: "This is an important factor in what's going on in hypoxic brains. Even though the patient may outwardly recover, the hidden cell damage may be irreversible." (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers; Stroke
Link ID: 10369 - Posted: 06.04.2007

Susan Endersbe, a schizophrenic who lived in Minneapolis, battled depression all her life. When her illness worsened, she usually checked into a hospital, which she did for the last time on May 7, 1994. On that occasion, doctors gave her an antidepressant, and three weeks later she said she felt ready to leave soon, according to nurses’ notes. The next day, she was referred to Dr. Faruk Abuzzahab and agreed to participate in a drug study he was being paid to conduct, although her suicidal tendencies should have excluded her. Dr. Abuzzahab stopped giving her the antidepressant, and she was forced to wait nearly two weeks before receiving either an experimental drug or a placebo. Throughout those weeks, Dr. Abuzzahab recorded Ms. Endersbe’s adverse effects as “0,” but nurses documented a steady decline. Ms. Endersbe expressed reservations about being part of a study. “I guess I didn’t understand that I would be going off all my other medications,” she told a hospital worker, according to records. She spoke repeatedly of killing herself, even telling a nurse in a late-night talk on June 8 that she planned to jump off the Franklin Avenue Bridge, “but says she is safe in the hospital,” a hospital worker wrote. On June 10, Dr. Abuzzahab wrote in her chart that Ms. Endersbe was “medically improving.” He gave her permission to visit her apartment alone, although leaving the hospital violated the study’s rules and she had spoken of suicide only the night before. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 10368 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Susan DeFord Randy and Lynn Gaston received the distressing diagnosis not once but three times. Their sons, Zachary, Hunter and Nicholas, are triplets, and as the brown-haired boys grew into toddlers, Lynn noticed how oddly they played, how little they babbled, how they cried inconsolably at doctor's offices and family gatherings. Two years ago, when the boys were 4, specialists confirmed the Gastons' suspicions: The boys have varying degrees of autism, a neurological disorder that hampers communication and social interactions and can include obsessive-compulsive behavior. "It was shocking," Lynn said, "but in my heart, I knew, yes, somebody finally sees it." The diagnosis launched a transformation of the Gastons' lives. Now even mundane details of the daily routine are carefully orchestrated, driven by the boys' need for sameness: identical sheets on their beds, baths in the same order every night, the same kind of pizza from the same kind of box. The Gastons rarely go out as a couple; it's difficult to find babysitters. The family has never eaten in a restaurant together, because crowded, unfamiliar environments sometimes make the boys anxious and upset. And the couple never get a full night's rest. Like many autistic children, the boys don't sleep well, going to bed at 8 p.m. and often waking for the day between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. © 2007 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 10367 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alison Abbott You've walked your normal route home a thousand times. Twice, a lurking gang of teenagers jeered as you went by. Most people would see the threat of attack on any day for what it is — minimal. But a few would be too scared to risk the journey alone ever again. Such over-anxious people tend to interpret a potentially dangerous situation as intolerably threatening, even when the risk is tiny. Researchers have now uncovered the neural circuits behind this inappropriate behaviour — at least in mice. Humans probably have a similar system, say the researchers who made the discovery. Knowing the actual cells involved in one manifestation of anxiety might help those developing new therapies. If normal mice are given an electric shock every time they are exposed to a flash of light, they will quickly learn to freeze with fear every time the light flashes. If they get the shock only occasionally, they will show less fear after the cue. But mice lacking a particular receptor for the neurotransmitter serotonin, called 5-Htr1a, show the same level of fear in both cases. Such mice are anxious, and cannot evaluate the true threat of an ambiguous situation. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Emotions; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10366 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bob Holmes Rhesus monkeys turn out to be pretty good statisticians, a study reveals. They can accurately assess which of two behaviours is more likely to bring them a reward by summing together a series of probabilistic clues. And their reasoning is reflected in the firing rate of individual neurons in their brain. Tianming Yang and Michael Shadlen at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Washington in Seattle, US, tested the reasoning of two rhesus macaques by showing them a series of abstract shapes on a video screen. Each shape corresponded to a different probability that a drink reward would be associated with a red instead of a green target. In each trial, the monkey saw a sequence of 4 of 10 possible shapes then, had to choose which target to look at. The probability that the red target would give the reward was the sum of the probabilities for each of the four shapes; otherwise, the green target yielded the drink. After several weeks of training on thousands of trials per day - clearly, the monkeys are no Einsteins - both macaques learned to match their choices closely to the actual probabilities revealed by the shapes they saw, choosing the correct target more than 75% of the time. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10365 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Tracy Staedter, Discovery News — Stimulating different parts of the brain with implanted electrodes could help treat the nearly two million people in the United States who suffer from severe depression but fail to respond to conventional treatment. "It's a very dangerous disorder. Twenty percent of patients suffering from major depression commit suicide," said Thomas Schlaepfer, professor of psychiatry and psychotherapy at University Hospital in Bonn, Germany and associate professor of psychiatry and mental health at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. Schlaepfer and his team are among a handful of researchers using deep brain stimulation — a therapy successfully used to treat tremors associated with Parkinson's disease — to treat depression. The idea is to reset disordered neural activity in the brain in a similar way to how a person might reboot a computer to override a glitch. The system consists of a neurostimulator, a device about the size of a hockey puck, that is implanted in the chest wall. Wires attached to the stimulator run under the skin to two electrodes that are inserted through tiny holes in the skull and glued to the bone. The stimulator, which can be switched on or off by the patient, delivers electrical current to the electrodes. Depending on its intensity and frequency (parameters that are controlled by a medical team member), the current influences brain activity in a particular region. © 2007 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 10364 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Adding folic acid to their diet can cut a person's stroke risk by a fifth, cumulative evidence suggests. Food advisors have already recommended to ministers that the vitamin should be added to flour or bread. This is to benefit pregnant women and those trying to conceive, by protecting the unborn child against birth defects. The Lancet review of eight studies shows the benefits could be more widespread, but experts warn that this must be balanced against other risks. An increase in folic acid can mask a vitamin B12 deficiency in older people. This type of anaemia can cause serious health problems, like nerve damage. Folate is a water-soluble B vitamin that occurs naturally in food. Folic acid is the synthetic form of folate that is found in supplements and added to fortified foods Both folic acid and vitamin B12 are essential for good health and good levels can be achieved by eating a healthy, balanced diet. Green vegetables are rich in folic acid or folate, while B12 is found in foods such as eggs and meat. Yet 13 million people do not consume enough folate, according to the Food Standards Agency. The current advice is that all adults consume 200 micrograms of folate per day, and that women who are pregnant or thinking of having a baby should take a daily 400 microgram supplement from the time they start trying for a baby until the 12th week of pregnancy. Mandatory fortification of flour with folic acid is already in place in several countries, including the US, to help ensure this. Experts have known for some time that folic acid appears to carry brain benefits. (C)BBC

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 10363 - Posted: 06.01.2007

By Betsy Mason Elephants know the difference between good vibrations and bad, according to new research into the big animals' low, rumbling alarm calls. They pay attention to seismic waves made by elephants they know and ignore those of strangers. Behavioral ecologist Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, discovered in 2004 that African elephants communicate with each other from kilometers away through ground vibrations. Although they make the calls with their trunks, the sounds also travel several kilometers along the surface of the ground, about as far as airborne sounds. O'Connell-Rodwell witnessed groups of Namibian elephants stopping in their tracks, leaning forward onto their toes, and pressing their trunks to the ground. The animals often adopted this listening posture before the arrival of another group of elephants. O'Connell-Rodwell recorded various elephant calls and found that wild elephants responded to ground vibrations alone. Researchers aren't sure how elephants detect the waves, but they have vibration-sensitive cells in their feet and trunks. In the new study, O'Connell-Rodwell asked whether the elephants can tell who is making the alarm calls. So the team recorded alarm calls made by elephants encountering lions in Kenya and Namibia. Then they converted the sounds into seismic waves and played them back to Namibian elephants visiting a water hole. The elephants responded to the Namibian vibrations by freezing, huddling, and leaving the area sooner. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Hearing; Animal Communication
Link ID: 10362 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Matt Kaplan A study of orangutans walking through the tree-tops suggests that humans' ancestors may also have first stood upright in the trees, say researchers. The apes stand on two legs when moving along narrow branches, using their hands to steady them, say Robin Crompton at the University of Liverpool, UK, and his colleagues. They believe that a similar behaviour is the most plausible precursor of true bipedal walking. The question of how humans came to walk upright has perplexed anthropologists. It is difficult to work out which came first: living on the ground, or walking on two legs. The problem is finding an evolutionary advantage for standing upright. It's been proposed, for example, that standing exposes the body to less sunburn on the savannah, but our ape ancestors might have spent most of their time in shady forest. The new research shows that a tree-dweller can benefit from standing up. "This research makes the strongest case yet that bipedalism could have evolved arboreally," comments Dennis Bramble, who studies animal locomotion at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 10361 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nora Schultz Stress in a pregnant woman may be experienced by her unborn fetus as early as 17 weeks into gestation, researchers say. A new study, which measured levels of a maternally produced stress hormone that are excreted by the fetus, also demonstrates that testing amniotic fluid samples offers a useful alternative to fetal blood sampling, which is a more risky, invasive procedure. Researchers have long suspected that maternal stress can damage a developing fetus, when stress hormones such as cortisol cross the placenta. Now scientists have new evidence that the unborn child's exposure to cortisol following maternal stress is evident earlier in gestation than previously believed. Pampa Sarkar and colleagues at Imperial College, London, UK, analysed blood and amniotic fluid samples from 267 pregnant women, and found a strong correlation in levels of cortisol in the two fluids in each woman. The correlation between the mothers' blood cortisol levels and the amount of cortisol found in her amniotic fluid could be seen from as early as 17 weeks gestation. "Before then, the placenta may allow less cortisol to leak across to the fetus", says Sarkar, who wants to investigate this possibility further in her next study. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 10360 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ALAN SCHWARZ For the past seven years, Mel Renfro, a former star defensive back for the Dallas Cowboys and a member of the National Football League’s Hall of Fame, has wondered why he wakes up most mornings with a malaise that seems only to be getting worse. Last week he got a clearer idea, and reassurance that he is not alone. A study by the University of North Carolina’s Center for the Study of Retired Athletes, to be published today by the journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, claims that the rate of diagnosed clinical depression among retired N.F.L. players is strongly correlated with the number of concussions they had sustained on the football field. Renfro, 65, recalled receiving nine concussions as a football player — three in high school, three at the University of Oregon and three in the N.F.L. — including one in which he regained consciousness at the end of the Cowboys’ bench with no idea of who or where he was. Renfro said he was glad to learn more about this possible factor in his depression, which he said was first diagnosed several years ago. “At least I know,” Renfro said. “At least I have the understanding of what it is. You feel funny all the time, foggy, you’re in and out of depression. Just to know — the unknown is what bothered me more than anything else.” Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 10359 - Posted: 06.24.2010