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

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

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

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10303 - Posted: 06.24.2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 10299 - Posted: 06.24.2010

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

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 10298 - Posted: 05.15.2007

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

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

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

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 10296 - Posted: 06.24.2010

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

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

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

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 10294 - Posted: 05.14.2007

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

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

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

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 10292 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have identified small regions within a yeast protein that control the protein's conversion to an infectious agent known as a prion. Yeast prions are proteins that are conceptually similar to the mammalian prions that have gained notoriety for their roles in such fatal brain-destroying human diseases as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and kuru, and in the animal diseases, scrapie and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or “mad cow disease.” “No one knew that prion conversion was controlled by such a small region, and in such a specific way,” said HHMI investigator Susan Lindquist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Lindquist and postdoctoral fellow Peter Tessier published a research article describing their findings on May 10, 2007, in the journal Nature. The precision of this process offers key insights into the mysterious behavior of prions, Lindquist observed. Different configurations of the recognition region cause the prion to assume different shapes, or variants. “We've been able to understand some fundamental questions about how prions form different strains and how they establish and overcome species barriers,” said Tessier. First isolated and purified in the early 1980s, prions are proteins that can fold into self-templating configurations, so that proteins of the same type adopt the same configuration. © 2007 Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 10291 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — The audio world of dinosaurs, especially larger species like T. rex, was deep and low, according to new research on hearing in archosaurs, a group that includes birds, crocodiles, alligators and the extinct dinosaurs. The discovery reveals how similar the ear anatomical structure is among living birds, crocodilians and their distant dino relatives. The findings, which will be presented in June at the Acoustical Society of America Meeting in Utah, also suggest that dinosaurs produced noises that were similar to the sounds they could hear. "As a general rule, animals can hear the sounds that they produce," lead author Robert Dooling told Discovery News. Dooling is a professor of psychology and co-director of the Center for the Comparative and Evolutionary Biology of Hearing at the University of Maryland at College Park. He conducted the comparative study on archosaur ear data with German neuroanatomists Otto Gleich and Geoffrey Manley. In addition to gathering inner ear measurements for living animals, the team took these same measurements from fossil remains of brachiosaurus, allosaurus and archeoptryx. © 2007 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 10290 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower Intensive meditation training does more than foster inner peace and relaxation. Mental practice of this type boosts control over attention and expands a person's ability to notice rapidly presented items, at least during a laboratory test. The new results demonstrate that mental resources devoted to attention can be amplified through mental training, say psychologist Richard J. Davidson of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his colleagues. Davidson's team studied a phenomenon known as the attentional blink. Because visual perception requires time and effort, paying close attention to one object flashed on a computer screen often causes a person to overlook a second object presented within the next half second. Scientists suspect that attention momentarily shuts down as the first image is perceived. During that attentional blink, the second image sneaks by unnoticed. "The previous practice of meditation improves performance on this task," Davidson says. "Attention capabilities can be enhanced through learning." His team studied 17 volunteers, ages 22 to 64, who attended a 3-month-long meditation retreat. They spent most of each day practicing Vipassana meditation, which focuses on reducing mental distractions and heightening sensory awareness. ©2007 Science Service

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 10289 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Susan Milius In 1939, a man walking his dog in Brooklyn noticed Hollywood finches for sale in a store. The reddish-brownish seed eaters are native to the dry Southwest, including Southern California. A 1918 law was supposed to have protected such North American migratory birds from capture and sale as caged birds—though the rule was seldom enforced. The dog walker complained to authorities, and this time they began a crackdown. When some store owners around the city realized that they would get in trouble, they opened the cages and let the evidence fly away. The odds would seem to be against desert birds from the other side of the continent surviving in New York City, but the finches settled into Central Park. From there, the population spread to New Jersey, and then—watch out, world. During the next 60 years, what are now called house finches (Carpodacus mexicanus) moved into all the other lower-48 states and beyond. They now thrive in places as different climatically as Ontario and Florida. With such extreme adaptability, they're "like birds made of interchangeable plastic parts," says Alex Badyaev of the University of Arizona in Tucson. One of the differences that Badyaev has observed among the widely scattered house finches shows up in their egg laying. The order in which mothers lay eggs containing male and female embryos isn't random, he finds. ©2007 Science Service

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Vision
Link ID: 10288 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Arran Frood Vaporizing cannabis leaves instead of burning them can release the drug's active ingredient just as effectively — while avoiding the harmful toxins inhaled through smoking the drug, according to a pilot study. The result could be good news for those who choose to use marijuana medicinally. The potential benefits of marijuana include pain relief for multiple-sclerosis sufferers, a treatment for glaucoma, as an appetite stimulant for AIDS patients and an anti-nausea agent for people on chemotherapy. But smoking isn't a good method of drug delivery because the harmful effects — such as lung cancer and heart disease — outweigh the likely merits of marijuana for all but terminal cases. Rather than smoking, some use the leaves to make tea or cakes for consumption. But this means that the active agents are metabolized by the liver rather than entering the bloodstream unaltered. Others have focused on extracting active ingredients such as tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and delivering them alone in a pill or oral spray. However, many think that the isolated ingredients are not as effective as the whole plant, and it is more difficult to customize the dose for each individual with a pill. Donald Abrams of the University of California, San Francisco, and his team decided to investigate the benefits of the 'Volcano', a commercially available vaporizer. The device heats marijuana leaves to a temperature between 180 and 200 °C so that THC is released from oils on the surface of the leaf but no actual combustion takes place. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 10287 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than 200 proteins are affected in Huntington's disease, researchers reported on Thursday in a study that offers scientists many potential routes to finding treatments for the fatal brain disease. Tests on fruit flies show that the mutated Huntington's protein that underlies the disease interacts with 200 other proteins, the researchers report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Genetics. Many of these interactions damage brain cells. "It's the gene producing something that seems to interfere with the normal activities of the cell in many, many different places and ways," Dr. Eugene Oliver, who oversees some Huntington's disease work at the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said in a telephone interview. Dr. Juan Botas of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, who worked on the study, said researchers can experiment with the proteins and the genes responsible for their production. "When you tinker with some of these genes, you find that some of them improve the symptoms. These could be potential therapeutic targets," Botas said in a statement. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 10286 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Maria Cheng, Associated Press — If it really is what's on the inside that counts, then a lot of thin people might be in trouble. Some doctors now think that the internal fat surrounding vital organs like the heart, liver or pancreas — invisible to the naked eye — could be as dangerous as the more obvious external fat that bulges underneath the skin. "Being thin doesn't automatically mean you're not fat," said Dr. Jimmy Bell, a professor of molecular imaging at Imperial College, London. Since 1994, Bell and his team have scanned nearly 800 people with MRI machines to create "fat maps" showing where people store fat. According to the data, people who maintain their weight through diet rather than exercise are likely to have major deposits of internal fat, even if they are otherwise slim. "The whole concept of being fat needs to be redefined," said Bell, whose research is funded by Britain's Medical Research Council. Without a clear warning signal — like a rounder middle — doctors worry that thin people may be lulled into falsely assuming that because they're not overweight, they're healthy. "Just because someone is lean doesn't make them immune to diabetes or other risk factors for heart disease," said Dr. Louis Teichholz, chief of cardiology at Hackensack Hospital in New Jersey, who was not involved in Bell's research. © 2007 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 10285 - Posted: 06.24.2010