By Erik Stokstad All across the world, people are polluting waterways with estrogen. Excreted in urine, the hormone passes through most wastewater plants and ends up in streams and lakes, where some studies suggest it is feminizing male fish. Now a large experiment has shown that even a very low level of estrogen in a lake can cause enough reproductive harm to wipe out an entire population of minnows in 2 years. Extra estrogen isn't good for male fish. Laboratory studies have shown that chronic exposure to low doses causes males to produce eggs in their testes and takes away their secondary sex characteristics, such as darker coloration and tubercules on their noses. The big question was what those levels mean for populations in the wild. To find out, researchers led by Karen Kidd of the University of New Brunswick, Canada, performed an experiment in a lake in western Ontario. Each summer for 3 years, they spiked the lake with a few parts per trillion of 17á-ethynylestradiol--the active ingredient in birth-control pills--in concentrations like those found in streams and lakes elsewhere. The experiment took place in a remote area set aside for research. Within weeks of the first doses, male minnows started making vitellogenin, a protein that helps eggs mature in females. They wound up with levels 8000 to 10,000 times normal. (Females increased production to 8 to 80 times their usual levels, and the estrogen somehow slowed egg development.) Sexual development was delayed in the males, and fewer and fewer fish were found; apparently, the fish had stopped reproducing. After the second year, the researchers couldn't find any fathead minnow nests. "We didn't expect to see such a dramatic and quick response," Kidd says. It took more than 2 years after researchers stopped adding estrogen for the population to begin to recover. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 10318 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Reilly A new way of monitoring brain activity can help predict a clinically depressed patient's response to a drug, leading to more effective treatment. Drug treatments for the disease take an average of six to eight weeks to start working. But side effects like headache, dizziness and nausea often begin immediately, making patients feel worse long before they begin feeling better. For this reason some quit their medication within three to four weeks. Now a team of researchers has shown that a technique called frontal quantitative electroencephalography (fqEEG) can help predict whether a drug will work. The test can be used effectively just a week after a patient begins taking the medication. The researchers used an array of five electrodes placed across the forehead to measure the electrical activity in the frontal lobes of 111 patients who had been on the antidepressant drug Lexapro (escitalopram) for a week. Patients displaying low levels of activity were considered likely to respond to the drug and were kept on Lexapro for six more weeks. Those with higher levels of activity were thought unlikely to respond, and were chosen at random to either switch to Wellbutrin (bupropion), or stay on Lexapro despite the fqEEG's readings. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 10317 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Heidi Ledford It's a safe bet that most people who take sildenafil — better known under its commercial name, Viagra — aren't looking for a good night's rest. But it turns out that the 'little blue pill' commonly used to treat erectile dysfunction is also good for relieving some forms of jetlag. Well, at least in hamsters. Diego Golombek and his colleagues at the National University of Quilmes in Buenos Aires, Argentina, injected hamsters with sildenafil and then pushed the animals' light/dark schedule ahead by six hours, roughly the equivalent of putting them on a plane from New York to Paris. Hamsters who'd had a dose of sildenafil adjusted their busy wheel-running schedules to the new light regime 50% faster, the team reports in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Although the results seem to provide relief to jetsetting hamsters, whether sildenafil will have the same effect in humans remains to be seen. If the drug does work in humans, it could be easier to use than melatonin, a hormone used to overcome jetlag that requires several doses to have a significant effect. Golombek's hamsters only needed a single dose of sildenafil to accelerate their adjustment to new time zones. But the drug was administered by injection and it isn't yet known whether taking one of those little blue pills will have the same effect. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 10316 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — With the male grunting and the female emitting loud and long operatic calls, mating chacma baboons produce an incredible amount of noise. And a new study has found that other males take advantage of the din by eavesdropping on mating couples to determine the status of relationships. If the couple quarrels or parts, for even just a brief moment, the snooping male then takes advantage of the situation by mating with the female, himself. "For male baboons, copulation calls are the most interesting vocalizations because they are only given by females and are clearly associated with females mating," lead author Catherine Crockford told Discovery News. Crockford, a researcher in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Psychology, explained that eavesdropping sometimes provides low-status male baboons with such mating opportunities, since higher-ranked, more dominant males otherwise monopolize high-ranked females. High-status baboons form what are known as consortships, which can last for a few hours up to a week. During this mini marriage-like period, the male follows a female closely and guards her against other approaching males. © 2007 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 10315 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Steroid use may be more than twice as common as official figures suggest, a leading expert has told the BBC. According to the British Crime Survey there are 42,000 regular anabolic steroid users in the UK. Drugs expert Jim McVeigh said there could be as many as 100,000. "Basically we're looking at numbers being on a par with heroin users," he added. One treatment centre in Merseyside reports that steroid use has rocketed in the last three years. Staff now treat four new steroid users for every new heroin user - a reversal of the situation in 2004. There is a particular problem with users aged under 25. Nurse Deborah Jones, who works at the harm reduction centre in Wirral, says steroid use has increased particularly among the under 25s. Mr McVeigh, of Liverpool John Moores University, insists the problem is hidden because people do not admit to using steroids. "At any one time in Liverpool there are approximately 1,000 anabolic steroid users - nationally we're looking at over 100,000," he told BBC Radio Five Live. Every month, the Wirral centre sees about 21 users aged under 25, and the youngest patient is just 16. Ms Jones says the use among younger people is growing as more and more strive for the "perfect body". "It's all about being big, muscular, toned, and they can gain that much quicker using steroids than they ever can working out," she says. "It does take over. They want to have the rippling six pack with the golden body, but most of them end up as the Arnold Schwarzenegger - that's what they see as success." (C)BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 10314 - Posted: 05.22.2007

How much money would it take to get you to stick a pin into your palm? How much to stick a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know? How much to slap a friend in the face (with his or her permission) as part of a comedy skit? Well, what about slapping you father (with his permission) as part of a skit? How you answer questions such as these may reveal something about your morality, and even your politics—conservatives, for example, tend to care more about issues of hierarchy and respect, while liberals concentrate on caring and fairness. (You can take a short test of your moral intuitions by visiting www.yourmorals.org). In a review to be published in the May 18 issue of the journal Science, Jonathan Haidt, associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, discusses a new consensus scientists are reaching on the origins and mechanisms of morality. Haidt shows how evolutionary, neurological and social-psychological insights are being synthesized in support of three principles: 1) Intuitive primacy, which says that human emotions and gut feelings generally drive our moral judgments; 2) Moral thinking if for social doing, which says that we engage in moral reasoning not to figure out the truth, but to persuade other people of our virtue or to influence them to support us; and 3) Morality binds and builds, which says that morality and gossip were crucial for the evolution of human ultrasociality, which allows humans – but no other primates – to live in large and highly cooperative groups.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 10313 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower Flies aren't deep thinkers. Yet these humble creatures display a penchant for spontaneous behavior that represents an evolutionary building block of voluntary choice, also known as free will, a controversial new study suggests. By mathematically analyzing flight maneuvers, a team of scientists showed for the first time that fruit flies move in a way that is neither wholly random nor predetermined. An evolved brain mechanism in the fly must generate spontaneous, unpredictable flight shifts to aid in vital tasks such as avoiding predators and tracking potential mates, conclude neuroscientist Björn Brembs of the Free University of Berlin and his colleagues. "Our results provide strong evidence that the exact prediction of an individual [fly]'s behavior is impossible," Brembs says. This finding dovetails with other evidence that people must have a neural ability to generate spontaneous behavior. Without such an ability, "it's hard to imagine people having access to free will," he adds. The researchers reject the traditional assumption that flies and other animals search for food and engage in other critical behaviors primarily by using their senses to glean clues from their surroundings. Instead, the new results suggest that circuitous foraging routes and other behavioral signatures of flies arise spontaneously, although sensory clues may also play a role. Brembs' team describes its findings in the May PLoS ONE. ©2007 Science Service

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10312 - Posted: 06.24.2010

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