Roxanne Khamsi Spelling tricky words – such as "yacht" – is no day at the beach, it seems. New brain-scan images have shown how our minds struggle when the sound of the word does not closely match its spelling. The scans show that spelling irregular words requires more brainpower than simple ones. Specifically, areas of the brain that process word meaning show greater activity. Researchers say their findings could prompt schools to change how they teach children language. Laura-Ann Petitto of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, US, and colleagues asked 12 young adults to imagine spelling a word they heard via headphones. They were then asked to judge whether the same word presented on a screen was correctly spelt. Each participant was tested on a total of 90 words while lying in a brain-scanning machine. A third of these words had regular, phonetic spelling – such as "blink" – in which their letters corresponded directly to the sounds of the word. Another 30 words had irregular spelling, including the word "yacht", while the remaining 30 were nonsense words, like "shelm". "We wanted to know how words are stored in our mental dictionary," explains Petitto. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 10231 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LISA CORNWELL CINCINNATI -- Seventeen-year-old Amanda Munson gained confidence and energy as she lost 40 of her 296 pounds after weight-loss surgery and her diabetes went into remission. "People have told me I not only look thinner, but I seem to glow _ maybe because I'm so much happier," she said. The 5-foot-5 high school senior from nearby Burlington, Ky., hopes to lose 75 to 100 more pounds. Munson is the first of 200 teenagers who will be enrolled in a five-year, federally funded study on the benefits and risks of bariatric surgery on adolescents. Surgery has been effective in treating extreme obesity in adults. Researchers want to find out if adults and adolescents who have the surgery have significantly different health problems and whether there is any benefit to having the operation earlier in life. The researchers are responding to the growing problem of extreme obesity among the young. "We know bariatric surgery is effective for weight-loss. We just need to carefully document how teenagers respond," said Dr. Thomas Inge, associate professor of pediatrics and surgery at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, which is leading the study. Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that about 2 million U.S. adolescents may be severely obese and have complications of obesity previously seen only in adults. © 2007 The Associated Press

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 10230 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Reyhan Harmanci When Sam Gosling, a psychology professor and researcher at University of Texas at Austin first thought about studying animal personalities, he was working from the premise that animals didn't really have them. Which, any pet owner can tell you, is absurd. "I got into it, and realized, well, why wouldn't they have personalities? There's no good reason, evolutionarily, for them not to." The first time Gosling broached the subject was in 1996, when he was doing graduate work at Berkeley. It was an ideal situation, Gosling says, because a group of observers had been working closely with a colony of 34 spotted hyenas since they were cubs. After getting positive results for personality -- by demonstrating that animals such as hyenas had patterns of behavior over time that could be defined as personality -- Gosling says that he sees possibilities for research in both theoretical and applied areas. For the theoretical, you can use animals as stand-ins for humans and examine aspects of personality. "It's the same sort of idea as doing animal research in any field," he says. "You can do studies with animals that you can't do on humans. I don't just mean studies or cutting them open -- you can address questions you just can't do with humans." © 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 10229 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The best animal model yet discovered for studying bipolar disorder is a mouse with a mutation in a single gene, say researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. And the gene is one that controls the body's internal biological clock. Colleen McClung and her team studied mice with a disruption in a gene scientists aptly named, "Clock." "The Clock gene was discovered around 10 years ago," she says, "but nobody had looked at the effect of this gene on measures of mood and reward and things associated with psychiatric disorders." The team compared mice with a mutation in their Clock gene to normal mice using a battery of behavioral tests. They found the mice exhibit many of symptoms of human bipolar mania. "There are two phases of bipolar disease people suffer through," explains McClung. "Periods of depression, and also periods of mania. "Mania is characterized by an increase in activity, a decrease in need for sleep, feelings of euphoria, greater risk taking, impulsivity and also, sometimes, aggression. And it's coupled often with drug addiction ... and the search for other rewarding stimuli like gambling, shopping, things like that." © ScienCentral, 2000-2007.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 10228 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Inside the bodies of animals from fruit flies to humans, internal clocks are constantly ticking, making sure activity levels and a host of physiological functions rise and fall in a 24-hour cycle. Inside cells, many of the proteins that keep the internal clocks ticking on time have their own cycles, accumulating when they are needed, then vanishing when their work is done for the day. A newly identified gene mutation in mice has now revealed how these molecular oscillations are kept on track. Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Joseph Takahashi and his colleagues discovered the gene's role in regulating circadian rhythms, which they reported in the journal Cell, published online as an immediate early publication on April 26 and published in print on June 1, 2007. Joint lead authors in Takahashi's Northwestern University laboratory were Sandra Siepka and Seung-Hee Yoo, and another co-author, Choogon Lee, is from Florida State University. The team named the mutated gene Overtime because it knocks the mouse's circadian clock out of whack, lengthening its sleep-wake cycle to 26 hours. Circadian rhythms, the activity patterns that occur on a 24-hour cycle, are important biological regulators in virtually every living creature. In humans and other animals, the brain's internal circadian clock regulates sleep and wake cycles, as well as body temperature, blood pressure, and the release of various endocrine hormones. © 2007 Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 10227 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ned Stafford An Austrian judge turned down a request this week to appoint a woman as legal guardian of a chimpanzee. The decision is a blow to a growing movement in Europe attempting to give apes some of the legal rights of humans, such as protection from being owned. But proponents of ape rights say they will appeal the decision and continue fighting for the cause elsewhere in Europe. In Spain, for example, they are pushing for a national law that would extend some human rights to apes. Paula Casal, a vice-president of the Great Ape Project branch in Spain, says the Spanish law, first proposed a year ago, might finally be put to a vote soon in parliament. "After that battle is won, then we will have momentum to start organizing groups in other countries to do the same," said Casal, a philosopher at the University of Reading, UK. The goal of the Great Ape Project is to extend basic human rights to apes, such as the right to life, protection of individual liberty and prohibition of torture. Apes are no longer used in most western nations for research, with the United States being a major exception. New Zealand passed an ape rights law in 1999, backed by the Great Ape Project, which prohibits using apes in any experiments that would benefit humans. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 10226 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi When dogs learn new tricks, they do not simply copy what they see, but interpret it, suggests a new study, which provides evidence that man's best friend possesses a human-like ability to understand the goals and intentions of others. In the experiment, a well-trained Border collie bitch demonstrated to untrained dogs how to pull a lever for food using her paw. If she did this while carrying a toy ball between her teeth, the dogs in her audience would instead tug the lever with their mouths when their turn arrived. These animals appeared to be thinking that she used her paw only because her mouth held a ball, say researchers. Friederike Range at the University of Vienna in Austria and colleagues trained the collie to always pull the lever with her paw. They also taught her to do the same while carrying a toy ball in her mouth. Watch a demonstration of this trick (3.4MB, mpg format). Forty other dogs – none of which had seen the food lever before – observed the well-trained collie pull it for a biscuit 10 times. Half of them saw the collie carry out the task with nothing in her mouth. Almost all of these observers used their paws when given a chance to tug the lever for food. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 10225 - Posted: 06.24.2010

CBC News Men with migraine headaches may be at higher risk of heart disease, including heart attacks, suggests a new study that follows research that produced similar findings for women. In this week's issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, Dr. Tobias Kurth of Harvard Medical School and his team report on the results of a study of more than 20,000 men aged 40 to 84 without a history of heart disease who were followed for about 15 years. "Compared with men who did not report migraine, those who reported migraine were at significantly increased risk of major cardiovascular disease and myocardial infarction," or heart attack, the team concluded. Migraines are recurring moderate to severe headaches that may be accompanied by visual disturbances, dizziness, nausea, vomiting or sensitivity to light and sound. About 3.5 million Canadians are believed to suffer from migraines. In July, researchers reported that women who had migraines with aura — a combination of dizziness, flashes, spots of lights and temporary vision loss before the severe throbbing headaches — may have double the risk of heart disease, compared to women without a history of the headaches. © CBC 2007

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 10224 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Kerri Smith Analysis of two damaged brains, preserved in a museum since the nineteenth century, could force neuroscientists to rethink the area where language resides in the brain. In 1861, the French surgeon and anatomist Paul Broca described two patients who had lost the ability to speak. One patient, Lelong, could produce only five words, and the second, Leborgne, could utter only one sound — "tan". After their deaths, Broca examined their brains and noticed that both had damage to a region in the frontal area on the left side. Broca's area, as it became known, is now thought to be the brain's speech-processing centre. Broca kept the patients' brains for posterity, preserving them in alcohol and placing them in a Paris museum. And that's where Nina Dronkers, of the VA Northern California Health Care System in Martinez, and her colleagues picked them up, in order to reinspect the damage using magnetic resonance imaging. Leborgne's brain had been scanned twice before, but not Lelong's. And neither had been compared with modern interpretations of Broca's area. After the team put the two brains through a scanner, they came up with a surprising finding: in both patients, the damaged area was much larger than the region that is now considered to be Broca's area. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 10223 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Tom Simonite A substance that mimics mucus has been used by UK researchers to improve the performance of odour-sensing "electronic noses". The enhanced devices can pick apart more complex smells, the team says. Humans detect smells using more than 100 million specialised receptors on the roof of the nasal cavity, just behind the bridge of the nose. The complex manner in which multiple receptors react to a molecule is used to identify and differentiate them. Electronic smell sensors work on the same principal but have just tens of sensors. They are used commercially, in food manufacturing quality control, for example, and can sometimes even detect diseases like cancer. But electronic nose are far less sensitive than biological ones. This is partly because the receptors in a human nose are covered in a thin layer of mucus, which helps them detect scents. This layer of mucus dissolves scents and separates their components chemically, using chromatography. Different odour molecules then reach receptors at slightly varied times. As a result, the receptors have another way to distinguish between compounds. Julian Gardner and colleagues at Warwick University, UK, along with researchers at Leicester University, UK, created an artificial mucus layer to mimic this process. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 10222 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Brendan I. Koerner Remedies designed for the infirm seldomly aid the healthy, too. Donning bifocals won't turn 20/20 eyesight into X-ray vision, and wearing a hearing aid can't endow a nonmusician with the gift of perfect pitch. It's a little baffling, then, that so many consumers assume ginkgo biloba will sharpen their memories. Reputable medical researchers generally agree that ginkgo pills and powders, extracted from an ornamental tree whose seeds smell like rancid butter, show promise for treating Alzheimer's disease and other cases of age-related dementia. But scant scientific evidence supports the notion that ginkgo can also increase mental acuity among the young and fit. Even so, Nutrition Business Journal estimates that Americans spent $109 million on ginkgo in 2005, making it the nation's best-selling herbal brain booster, ahead of such rivals as gotu kola, Bacopa monnieri, and Siberian ginseng. Native to East Asia, the ginkgo biloba tree likely existed during the Mesozoic Era; Charles Darwin referred to it as a "living fossil." Its seeds and leaves have been part of Chinese medicine for centuries, used to treat everything from coughs to bladder infections to unwanted freckling. 2007 Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 10221 - Posted: 04.26.2007

By Max Linsky I always lose at the gym. And I don't mean pounds. About twice a year, I'll head down to the YMCA in my ratty mesh shorts only to jump on a treadmill next to some woman training for the marathon, or pick up a pair of 5-pound dumbbells next to a guy bench-pressing a small car. I know the gym is supposed to be about personal growth and all, but it's hard to boost your self-confidence when you're working out next to an American Gladiator. But this January, a brand-new health club opened near my home in Sarasota, Fla.—not another meat market like the YMCA, but the kind of place where I could finally compete. A brain gym. Founder George Rozelle calls his new operation the "Neurobics Club," and it's aimed mostly at seniors trying to delay the mind's inevitable decline. (He's not the only one betting on neurobics; brain fitness centers are popping up in retirement homes around the country.) It works a lot like a traditional gym: Members—there are 10 so far—pay a monthly fee of $175 for unlimited access to the club's mental exercise machines. You even get a consultation with a personal trainer, who tailors a customized workout to target your particular cranial love handles. 2007 Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 10220 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By William Saletan The human brain has spent its evolutionary history learning about everything else in the world. Since last summer, it has learned quite a bit about itself. It has discovered lots of things about female sexuality, incest, psychopaths, IQ, brain death, addiction, compulsive buying, and how to remotely control animals through cranial implants. But five major trends and breakthroughs stand out. Here they are, with links to related news items and columns. 1. The arrival of mind reading. Scientists in Germany used pattern recognition software to predict, from functional magnetic resonance imaging of people's brains, whether each person had secretly decided to add or subtract two numbers he was looking at. The computer correctly predicted the decision 71 percent of the time. The advertised application of this technology is computers that can discern and execute your will when you want them to—for example, if you're paralyzed or don't want to use a mouse. The feared application is mental surveillance. 2. The neural alteration of morality. Six people with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex were presented with moral dilemmas (e.g., would you smother a baby to prevent bad guys from finding and killing people in hiding) and were found to be two to three times more willing to kill than people without brain damage. The advertised conclusion is that such willingness to kill is objectively immoral. The feared conclusion is that if brain design determines what's moral, you can change morality by changing the brain—and once technology manipulates ethics, ethics can no longer judge technology. 2007 Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10219 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ALEX BERENSON The Food and Drug Administration is examining whether Eli Lilly & Company provided it with accurate data about the side effects of the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, a potent medicine that has been linked to weight gain and diabetes. The F.D.A. has questions about a Lilly document from February 2000 in which the company found that patients taking Zyprexa in clinical trials were three and a half times as likely to develop high blood sugar as those who did not take the drug. That document was not submitted to the agency. But a few months later, Lilly provided data to the F.D.A. that showed almost no difference in blood sugar between patients who took Zyprexa and those who did not. The F.D.A. confirmed its inquiry in response to questions from The New York Times. The agency said it had not yet decided whether to take any action against Lilly. “The F.D.A. continues to explore the concerns raised recently regarding information provided to the F.D.A. on Zyprexa’s safety,” Dr. Mitchell Mathis, a deputy director in the psychiatry division of the agency’s center for drug evaluation and research, said. A Lilly spokesman, Phil Belt, said the company had rechecked its database and found errors in the original statistics. The data submitted later was accurate, Mr. Belt said. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 10218 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Les Carpenter PITTSBURGH -- Bennet Omalu knows why his phone calls often bring silence on the other end. He introduces himself as a forensic pathologist, which means he is trained to examine dead people. He explains that he's also a neuropathologist, which means he is trained to examine dead people's brains. He says all this through a thick accent that is the result of a childhood spent in Nigeria. Then there is the matter of what he is seeking in those calls: the brains of recently deceased professional football players. Coming over the phone in slightly broken English, with a complicated explanation of a medical phenomena that most coroners have never heard of or believe to be true, the request to have the brain pulled from the freshly deceased player's head and shipped here to be studied might as well come from Mars. "They insult me," Omalu said. "They say, 'What do you think you are doing?' " Then they say no. Omalu, 37, a man who knew nothing about football and was a soccer goalie in his homeland, believes he has proven that repeated concussions in football lead to early-onset dementia, very similar to the boxing ailment known as "punch-drunk syndrome," possibly leading to dementia and depression. © 2007 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 10217 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Phil Berardelli The trick to restoring vision in people blinded by injury or disease may be to bypass the eyes entirely. By establishing a connection between a video device and the part of the brain that receives visual stimuli, researchers have shown that the brain can interpret electronic signals in the same way it interprets light waves. For years, scientists have tried with limited success to provide sight to the blind via prosthetic devices. One approach is to stimulate the remaining healthy neurons in the retina, the light-sensitive lining of the inside of the eyeball, with miniature electrodes that mimic the effects of incoming light. But retinal tissue is so fragile that it is easily damaged. Another tactic involves inserting microelectrodes into the primary visual cortex--the main part of the brain responsible for processing visual signals-- and stimulating visual nerve cells with electrical impulses. So far, however, no one has been able to achieve more than simple behavioral responses in test animals because of the complexity of that cerebral area and the nature of visual signals. A team from Harvard Medical School has tried a new approach. Reporting online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers describe how they got lab animals to track preselected artificial visual signals with their eyes--just as though they were watching lights flashing on a real video screen--by precisely inserting two minute electrodes into the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) of the thalamus. This part of the brain acts like a relay station for visual information. All signals from the eyes run through the LGN to the visual cortex. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 10216 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Zoe Smeaton Meerkats, famous for their cooperative behaviour, live in groups where every member has a socially defined role. But researchers have discovered a degree of insubordination in subordinate male members. These low-status male meerkats struggle to mate with females in the group where the dominant male reigns. Now, a new study reveals they have a clever tactic to pass on their genes – they are sneaking off in the night to mate with females in other groups. Meerkats live in groups of about 30 individuals, and the behaviour of the subordinate males has long been questioned by evolutionary biologists. "One of the reasons people are drawn to these societies is the apparent cooperation between individuals – subordinate males don't breed in the groups but they help to rear the dominants' young," says Andrew Young at the University of Cambridge in the UK. "But natural selection favours those who maximise their own reproductive success, so it seems paradoxical that these males are helping others." Young and colleagues monitored 15 groups of the cooperative meerkat, Suricata suricatta, on ranch land in the southern Kalahari desert. Over a five-year period, the researchers carried out genetic tests to establish the paternity of the pups born during that time. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 10215 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A part of the brain first affected by Alzheimer’s disease (http://www.nia.nih.gov/Alzheimers/) is thinner in youth with a risk gene for the disorder, a brain imaging study by researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has found. A thinner entorhinal cortex, a structure in the lower middle part of the brain’s outer mantle, may render these youth more susceptible to degenerative changes and mental decline later in life, propose Drs. Philip Shaw, Judith Rapoport, Jay Giedd, and NIMH and McGill University colleagues. They report on how variation in the gene for apoliproprotein (ApoE), which plays a critical role in repair of brain cells, affects development of this learning and memory hub in the June, 2007 Lancet Neurology. “People with the Alzheimer’s-related variant of the ApoE gene might not be able to sustain much aging-related tissue loss in the entorhinal cortex before they cross a critical threshold,” explained Shaw. “But the early thinning appears to be a harmless genetic variation rather than a disease-related change, as it did not affect youths’ intellectual ability. Only long-term brain imaging studies of healthy aging adults will confirm whether this anatomical signature detectible in childhood predisposes for Alzheimer’s.” It was already known that adults destined to develop Alzheimer’s disease tend to have a smaller and less active entorhinal cortex (http://www.nia.nih.gov/Alzheimers/ResearchInformation/NewsReleases/Archives/PR2000/PR20000329MRI.htm). This structure is the first to shrink in volume and to develop the neurofibrillary tangles (http://www.nia.nih.gov/Alzheimers/Publications/UnravelingTheMystery/Part1/Hallmarks.htm) characteristic of the disorder.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10214 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Catherine Brahic Sea turtles travel hundreds of miles back to their favourite feeding sites after breeding, retracing exactly same route they used up to five years earlier, a new tracking study has revealed. Sea turtles are well-known to have a strong homing instinct for their nesting sites, but these new findings could have further implications for efforts to conserve sea turtles. Annette Broderick at the University of Exeter in the UK, and colleagues used satellite transmitters to track 20 female loggerhead- and green turtles nesting at two sites in Cyprus. In doing so, they also recorded the longest ever breath-holding dive for any vertebrate, lasting an incredible 10 hours and 12 minutes. "The extent to which turtles showed fidelity to specific foraging sites and routes was a surprise," says Broderick. "Marine turtles migrate hundreds of miles between breeding and foraging grounds, so it is amazing that they are able to return to exactly the same sites via very similar routes." Broderick's group tracked the turtles' migration to foraging sites along the coast of Libya. Five years later, the team returned to the two beaches and recaptured five of the turtles. They then tracked these turtles' migration once more. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 10213 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The age at which a woman had her first period can help predict her children's risk of obesity, say UK researchers. A study of 6,000 children found those born to mothers with an early puberty were more likely to grow rapidly as babies and be overweight as children. This faster growth pattern is also linked to obesity in adulthood. The findings could help identify children at risk of weight problems early on, the Public Library of Science Medicine (PLOS) report concludes. It is already known that age at which a girl has her first period - or reaches "menarche" - is largely inherited. And women who start their periods early are at increased risk of obesity in later life, and are likely to be overweight even before puberty. In the latest study, mothers who began their periods before age 11 were five times more likely to be obese than mothers who had their first period after the age of 15. Children of mothers who had early first periods were taller by the age of nine and weighed more. Girls were also more likely to start their periods before the age of 11. Those whose mothers had their first period under the age of 11 were three times more likely to be obese than those who started their periods after the age of 15. The researchers also looked in more detail at growth measurements from birth to nine years in 900 children, and found that mothers' age at first period was associated with faster growth in weight and height in children up until the age of two years. Children who have a fast growth pattern tend to start puberty earlier, but stop growing sooner - so they may not be particularly tall as adults. (C)BBC

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 10212 - Posted: 04.24.2007