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

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 10244 - Posted: 06.24.2010

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

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

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

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 10242 - Posted: 06.24.2010

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

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 10241 - Posted: 04.30.2007

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

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10240 - Posted: 06.24.2010

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

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

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

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10238 - Posted: 06.24.2010

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

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

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

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

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

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10235 - Posted: 04.28.2007

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

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10234 - Posted: 06.24.2010

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

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

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

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

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