More stuff we thought we knew

Science Daily
Source: Cornell University
Date: August 30, 2007
Current Not Flowing Through Ion Channels

Science Daily — In studying how neurotransmitters travel between cells -- by analysis of events in the dimensions of nanometers -- Cornell researchers have discovered that an electrical current thought to be present during that process does not, in fact, exist.

These results were reported July 22 in the online edition of the journal Nature Cell Biology by Cornell researchers Liang-Wei Gong and Manfred Lindau, applied and engineering physics, as well as their colleague Guillermo Alvarez de Toledo at the University of Seville, Spain.

Lindau explained that neurotransmitters and hormones are stored in neurons -- nerve cells -- in small packets, membrane-bound vesicles, typically 30 to 300 nanometers in diameter (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter). When a cell is stimulated by electrical activity, calcium ions enter the cell and the vesicles release their contents by fusion with the plasma membrane surrounding the cell.

Prior experiments had suggested that the vesicles contain ion channels that carry charged neurotransmitters from the cell vesicle out of the cell, generating an electrical current flowing out of the cell.

Lindau and colleagues report in their paper that there is no such current present. Their experiments further showed that, instead, the charge compensation is generated by the influx of positive sodium ions from the outside into the vesicles, a process known as electrodiffusion.

"Therefore, the ion channels in these vesicles must play a different role that is yet to be discovered," Lindau explained.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Cornell University.

Mind and matter

Hypnosis reduces pain and costs in breast cancer surgery

August 29, 2007 - The use of hypnosis prior to breast cancer surgery reduced the amount of anesthesia administered during the operation, the level of pain reported afterwards, and the time and cost of the procedure, according to a study published online August 28 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Breast cancer surgery patients often suffer side effects such as pain, nausea, and fatigue during and after their operation. These complications can lengthen their hospital stay, lead to hospital readmission, or require additional medications-all of which increase medical costs. Several previous studies have suggested that hypnosis may reduce pain, recovery time, and the need for medications after surgery.

Guy Montgomery, Ph.D., of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and colleagues conducted a clinical trial to examine the effects of hypnosis when it is given within one hour before surgery. Two hundred women were randomly assigned to either 15 minutes of hypnosis by a psychologist or a control session in which they spoke with a psychologist. The researchers then compared the use of pain medications and sedatives during surgery, as well as the levels of pain and other side effects reported afterwards.

The hypnosis session began with suggestions for relaxation and pleasant visual imagery. The patients were also given suggestions on how to reduce pain, nausea, and fatigue, and instructions on how to use hypnosis on their own.

Patients in the hypnosis group required less anesthesia than patients in the control group. They also reported less pain, nausea, fatigue, discomfort, and emotional upset after surgery. They spent less time in surgery (almost 11 minutes less), and their surgical costs were reduced by about $773 per patient, mainly due to the time savings.

"Together, the combination of potential improvements in symptom burden for the hundreds of thousands of women facing breast cancer surgery each year and the economic benefit for institutions argues persuasively for the more widespread application of brief presurgical hypnosis," the authors write.

In an accompanying editorial, David Spiegel, M.D., of the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, Calif., describes the history of hypnosis in medicine and the evidence for why hypnosis could reduce pain.

"It has taken us a century and a half to rediscover the fact that the mind has something to do with pain and can be a powerful tool in controlling it - It is now abundantly clear that we can retrain the brain to reduce pain: 'float rather than fight,'" Spiegel writes.

Journal of the National Cancer Institute

La Lune est Rouge -redux

lunar eclipse

The moon glowing red looms over the gutted Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, western Japan, during a lunar eclipse on Tuesday night, August 28, 2007. The Earth's shadow crept across the moon's surface slowly eclipsing it and turning it to shades of orange and red during second total lunar eclipse this year.
8:46 a.m. ET, 8/28/07

Jack Flash in cuffs

The Underwire

Burners Plan to Resurrect the Man After Arson Shocks the Playa
By Lewis Wallace EmailAugust 28, 2007 | 6:23:32 PMCategories: Burning Man

BLACK ROCK CITY, Nevada -- Resurrection, or possibly a big fiery bird, might be an appropriate theme for this year's burn on the playa. Like the phoenix, the wooden Man will rise from the ashes after it caught fire early Tuesday, only to be burned again.

Addis_3

Burning Man staffers claim the Man will be ready to be set alight again within two days -- plenty of time for Saturday's regularly scheduled burn. A San Francisco man was booked into Pershing County Jail in St. Lovelock, Nevada, for allegedly setting the giant sculpture on fire around 3 a.m. Tuesday.

"We have the means and the will to rebuild," said Andi Grace, Burning Man director of communications, at a playa press conference Tuesday morning. "I imagine we'll see a completely reconstructed man. It looks pretty goth right now."

Paul Addis, 35, of San Francisco was booked into the Pershing County Jail on charges of arson, possession of fireworks, destruction of property and resisting a public officer, according to a sheriff's dispatcher who declined to give her name for publication. The incident is still under investigation, said the dispatcher.

In his mug shot, Addis grins, his face covered with red, black and silver paint.

"That's how he was when we booked him in," said the dispatcher.

Addis -- who has no prior arrests, according to the dispatcher -- is part of the production team behind Gonzo, a Brutal Chrysalis, a show about the life of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Addis goes by "B. Duke" as is identified as a "freelance counter-intelligence operative" on the show's website.

While the dispatcher said the investigation is ongoing into a possible motive for setting the sculpture ablaze, some burners were not so gentle.

"Someone went to a great extent to interfere with everyone else's burn. I think, frankly, an attention whore has made a plea for attention," a Burning Man volunteer named Ranger Sasquatch told the San Francisco Chronicle. "In three days, we will have this rebuilt."

Paul_3

Others' reactions to the early conflagration were mixed.

"It really wasn't all that exciting," said veteran burner Djinnaya Cassatt. "You'd think it would be, but it wasn't."

Some thought it was new way of celebrating the big burn.

"It's like a burnwich -- a burn on each side of it," said burner Alan Nichols.

"It smelled really toxic -- like the burn doesn't usually smell that way," said Catherine Levy-Barnard.

Kaihea, a fire performer, said she talked to the man who apprehended Addis.

"A big 6-foot, 3-inch ranger guy said a guy climbed up to the foot of the man and lit it with a blowtorch," said Kaihea. "(The ranger) got him."

For his efforts, Kaihea awarded the ranger, who she identified as Ranger Crizzly, with a medal. "He caught the guy. I wanted to thank him," she said.

The sheriff's dispatcher said there have been no other arrests of any magnitude at the festival this year, just the usual DUI and general disturbance complaints.

Reporting by Eli Milchman and Lewis Wallace.

The great festivals of Avebury, Stonehenge, and Newgrange during the Neolithic era were based around the movements of the stars, planets, and eclipses of the moon. Addis knew the true time to light the Man on fire! May the Goddess bless the Brave Man who understood the Earth’s shadow.
http://www.lovolution.net/MainPages/essays/TwinFlames/TwinFlamesTitle.htm

Posted by: Doctress Neutopia | Aug 28, 2007 9:44:07 PM

I'd just like to point out that St. Lovelock does not exsist in Pershing County. It is Lovelock, Nevada. No St. about it.

Posted by: Max | Aug 28, 2007 9:59:18 PM

Whole lotta Nothing

University of Minnesota astronomers have found an enormous hole in the Universe, nearly a billion light-years across, empty of both normal matter such as stars, galaxies and gas, as well as the mysterious, unseen “dark matter.” While earlier studies have shown holes, or voids, in the large-scale structure of the Universe, this new discovery dwarfs them all.

“Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size,” said Lawrence Rudnick of the University of Minnesota astronomy professor. Rudnick, along with grad student Shea Brown and associate professor Liliya Williams, also of the University of Minnesota, reported their findings in a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

Astronomers have known for years that, on large scales, the Universe has voids largely empty of matter. However, most of these voids are much smaller than the one found by Rudnick and his colleagues. In addition, the number of discovered voids decreases as the size increases.

“What we’ve found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the Universe,” Williams said.

The astronomers drew their conclusion by studying data from the NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS), a project that imaged the entire sky visible to the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope, part of the National Science Foundation's National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). Their study of the NVSS data showed a remarkable drop in the number of galaxies in a region of sky in the constellation Eridanus, southwest of Orion.

“We already knew there was something different about this spot in the sky,” Rudnick said. The region had been dubbed the “WMAP Cold Spot,” because it stood out in a map of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation made by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotopy Probe (WMAP) satellite, launched by NASA in 2001. The CMB, faint radio waves that are the remnant radiation from the Big Bang, is the earliest “baby picture” available of the Universe. Irregularities in the CMB show structures that existed only a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.

The WMAP satellite measured temperature differences in the CMB that are only millionths of a degree. The cold region in Eridanus was discovered in 2004.

Astronomers wondered if the cold spot was intrinsic to the CMB, and thus indicated some structure in the very early Universe, or whether it could be caused by something more nearby through which the CMB had to pass on its way to Earth. Finding the dearth of galaxies in that region by studying NVSS data resolved that question.

“Although our surprising results need independent confirmation, the slightly lower temperature of the CMB in this region appears to be caused by a huge hole devoid of nearly all matter roughly 6-10 billion light-years from Earth,” Rudnick said.

How does a lack of matter cause a lower temperature in the Big Bang’s remnant radiation as seen from Earth"

The answer lies in dark energy, which became a dominant force in the Universe very recently, when the Universe was already three-quarters of the size it is today. Dark energy works opposite gravity and is speeding up the expansion of the Universe. Thanks to dark energy, CMB photons that pass through a large void just before arriving at Earth have less energy than those that pass through an area with a normal distribution of matter in the last leg of their journey.

In a simple expansion of the universe, without dark energy, photons approaching a large mass -- such as a supercluster of galaxies -- pick up energy from its gravity. As they pull away, the gravity saps their energy, and they wind up with the same energy as when they started.

But photons passing through matter-rich space when dark energy became dominant don't fall back to their original energy level. Dark energy counteracts the influence of gravity and so the large masses don’t sap as much energy from the photons as they pull away. Thus, these photons arrive at Earth with a slightly higher energy, or temperature, than they would in a dark energy-free Universe.

Conversely, photons passing through a large void experience a loss of energy. The acceleration of the Universe's expansion, and thus dark energy, were discovered less than a decade ago. The physical properties of dark energy are unknown, though it is by far the most abundant form of energy in the Universe today. Learning its nature is one of the most fundamental current problems in astrophysics.

Source: University of Minnesota

Lunar Eclipse

The moon shadowed by the Earth is seen during an eclipse observed from Algeria in March. The Moon will fall into the Earths deep shadow on Tuesday taking on a lustrous red or orange hue during the second total eclipse of 2007.
The moon shadowed by the Earth is seen during an eclipse observed from Algeria, in March. The Moon will fall into the Earth's deep shadow on Tuesday, taking on a lustrous red or orange hue during the second total eclipse of 2007.

The Moon will fall into the Earth's deep shadow on Tuesday, taking on a lustrous red or orange hue during the second total eclipse of 2007.

Star gazers in east Asia and across the Americas will be able to watch as our planet's natural satellite is consumed by celestial dragons, as the Chinese once thought.

And night owls in the Pacific basin, from eastern Australia to the west coast of the north America, will be treated to the full eclipse at 10:37 GMT, corresponding to early evening in Sydney and a couple hours before sunrise in Los Angeles and Vancouver.

The perfect spot for spectators will be French Polynesia, according to NASA, but the eclipse will not be visible at all in Europe or Africa.

The Moon does not disappear from view during a full eclipse, but is shielded by Earth for about 90 minutes from the Sun's direct light.

The longest possible duration for the total phase is 107 minutes, and last occurred in July 2000.

A total eclipse can only take place at full Moon, and only if the Moon passes through the zone, called the umbra, in which the Earth blocks all of the Sun's rays.

The color cast by refracted light -- which can range from bright orange to blood red to copper to dark gray -- depends on the amount of volcanic gas and dust in the atmosphere blocking the Sun's light.

In the absence of recent eruptions, the Moon should be a vivid red or orange, according to NASA.

Total lunar eclipses normally occur roughly every couple of years, but this year there will have been two, the other having taken place on March 3.

The next chance to see the Moon slip entirely into terrestrial shadows will be on February 21, 2008, but after that the wait is longer: December 2010.

Further details on these eclipses and information on eclipses in general can be found on http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/lunar.html

What we don't know

10 Unsolved Mysteries Of The Brain | Mind & Brain | DISCOVER Magazine

07.31.2007
by David Eagleman


Of all the objects in the universe, the human brain is the most complex: There are as many neurons in the brain as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. So it is no surprise that, ­despite the glow from recent advances in the science of the brain and mind, we still find ourselves squinting in the dark somewhat. But we are at least beginning to grasp the crucial mysteries of neuroscience and starting to make headway in addressing them. Even partial answers to these 10 questions could restructure our understanding of the roughly three-pound mass of gray and white matter that defines who we are.


Pyramidal neuron in medial prefrontal cortex of macaque.

Image courtesy of brainmaps.org

1. How is information coded in neural activity?

Neurons, the specialized cells of the brain, can produce brief spikes of voltage in their outer membranes. These electrical pulses travel along specialized extensions called axons to cause the release of chemical signals elsewhere in the brain. The binary, all-or-nothing spikes appear to carry information about the world: What do I see? Am I hungry? Which way should I turn? But what is the code of these millisecond bits of voltage? Spikes may mean different things at different places and times in the brain. In parts of the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord), the rate of spiking often correlates with clearly definable external features, like the presence of a color or a face. In the peripheral nervous system, more spikes indicates more heat, a louder sound, or a stronger muscle contraction.

As we delve deeper into the brain, however, we find populations of neurons involved in more complex phenomena, like reminiscence, value judgments, simulation of possible futures, the desire for a mate, and so on—and here the signals become difficult to decrypt. The challenge is something like popping the cover off a computer, measuring a few transistors chattering between high and low voltage, and trying to guess the content of the Web page being surfed.

It is likely that mental information is stored not in single cells but in populations of cells and patterns of their activity. However, it is currently not clear how to know which neurons belong to a particular group; worse still, current technologies (like sticking fine electrodes directly into the brain) are not well suited to measuring several thousand neurons at once. Nor is it simple to monitor the connections of even one neuron: A typical neuron in the cortex receives input from some 10,000 other neurons.

Although traveling bursts of voltage can carry signals across the brain quickly, those electrical spikes may not be the only—or even the main—way that information is carried in nervous systems. ­Forward-looking studies are examining other possible information couriers: glial cells (poorly understood brain cells that are 10 times as common as neurons), other kinds of signaling mechanisms between cells (such as newly discovered gases and peptides), and the biochemical cascades that take place inside cells.


2. How are memories stored and retrieved?

When you learn a new fact, like someone’s name, there are physical changes in the structure of your brain. But we don’t yet comprehend exactly what those changes are, how they are orchestrated across vast seas of synapses and neurons, how they embody knowledge, or how they are read out decades later for retrieval.

One complication is that there are many kinds of memories. The brain seems to distinguish short-term memory (remembering a phone number just long enough to dial it) from long-term memory (what you did on your last birthday). Within long-term memory, declarative memories (like names and facts) are distinct from non­declarative memories (riding a bicycle, being affected by a subliminal message), and within these general categories are numerous subtypes. Different brain structures seem to support different kinds of learning and memory; brain damage can lead to the loss of one type without disturbing the others.

Nonetheless, similar molecular mechanisms may be at work in these memory types. Almost all theories of memory propose that memory storage depends on synapses, the tiny connections between brain cells. When two cells are active at the same time, the connection between them strengthens; when they are not active at the same time, the connection weakens. Out of such synaptic changes emerges an association. Experience can, for example, fortify the connections between the smell of coffee, its taste, its color, and the feel of its warmth. Since the populations of neurons connected with each of these sensations are typically activated at the same time, the connections between them can cause all the sensory associations of coffee to be triggered by the smell alone.

But looking only at associations—and strengthened connections between neurons—may not be enough to explain memory. The great secret of memory is that it mostly encodes the relationships between things more than the details of the things themselves. When you memorize a melody, you encode the relationships between the notes, not the notes per se, which is why you can easily sing the song in a different key.

Memory retrieval is even more mysterious than storage. When I ask if you know Alex Ritchie, the answer is immediately obvious to you, and there is no good theory to explain how memory retrieval can happen so quickly. Moreover, the act of retrieval can destabilize the memory. When you recall a past event, the memory becomes temporarily susceptible to erasure. Some intriguing recent experiments show it is possible to chemically block memories from reforming during that window, suggesting new ethical questions that require careful consideration.


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3. What does the baseline activity in the brain represent?

Neuroscientists have mostly studied changes in brain activity that correlate with stimuli we can present in the laboratory, such as a picture, a touch, or a sound. But the activity of the brain at rest—its “baseline” activity—may prove to be the most important aspect of our mental lives. The awake, resting brain uses 20 percent of the body’s total oxygen, even though it makes up only 2 percent of the body’s mass. Some of the baseline activity may represent the brain restructuring knowledge in the background, simulating future states and events, or manipulating memories. Most things we care about—reminiscences, emotions, drives, plans, and so on—can occur with no external stimulus and no overt output that can be measured.

One clue about baseline activity comes from neuroimaging experiments, which show that activity decreases in some brain areas just before a person performs a goal-directed task. The areas that decrease are the same regardless of the details of the task, hinting that these areas may run baseline programs during downtime, much as your computer might run a disk-defragmenting program only while the resources are not needed elsewhere.

In the traditional view of perception, information from the outside world pours into the senses, works its way through the brain, and makes itself consciously seen, heard, and felt. But many scientists are coming to think that sensory input may merely revise ongoing internal activity in the brain. Note, for example, that sensory input is superfluous for perception: When your eyes are closed during dreaming, you still enjoy rich visual experience. The awake state may be essentially the same as the dreaming state, only partially anchored by external stimuli. In this view, your conscious life is an awake dream.


The awake state may be essentially the same as the dreaming state. In this view, your conscious life is an awake dream.

4. How do brains simulate the future?

When a fire chief encounters a new blaze, he quickly makes predictions about how to best position his men. Running such simulations of the future—without the risk and expense of actually attempting them—allows “our hypotheses to die in our stead,” as philosopher Karl Popper put it. For this reason, the emulation of possible futures is one of the key businesses that intelligent brains invest in.

Yet we know little about how the brain’s future simulator works because traditional neuroscience technologies are best suited for correlating brain activity with explicit behaviors, not mental emulations. One idea suggests that the brain’s resources are devoted not only to processing stimuli and reacting to them (watching a ball come at you) but also to constructing an internal model of that outside world and extracting rules for how things tend to behave (knowing how balls move through the air). Internal models may play a role not only in motor acts, like catching, but also in perception. For example, vision draws on significant amounts of information in the brain, not just on input from the retina. Many neuroscientists have suggested over the past few decades that perception arises not simply by building up bits of data through a hierarchy but rather by matching incoming sensory data against internally generated expectations.

But how does a system learn to make good predictions about the world? It may be that memory exists only for this purpose. This is not a new idea: Two millennia ago, Aristotle and Galen emphasized memory as a tool in making successful predictions for the future. Even your memories about your life may come to be understood as a special subtype of emulation, one that is pinned down and thus likely to flow in a certain direction.


5. What are emotions?

We often talk about brains as information-processing systems, but any account of the brain that lacks an account of emotions, motivations, fears, and hopes is incomplete. Emotions are measurable physical responses to salient stimuli: the increased heartbeat and perspiration that accompany fear, the freezing response of a rat in the presence of a cat, or the extra muscle tension that accompanies anger. Feelings, on the other hand, are the subjective experiences that sometimes accompany these processes: the sensations of happiness, envy, sadness, and so on. Emotions seem to employ largely unconscious machinery—for example, brain areas involved in emotion will respond to angry faces that are briefly presented and then rapidly masked, even when subjects are unaware of having seen the face. Across cultures the expression of basic emotions is remarkably similar, and as Darwin observed, it is also similar across all mammals. There are even strong similarities in physiological responses among humans, reptiles, and birds when showing fear, anger, or parental love.

Modern views propose that emotions are brain states that quickly assign value to outcomes and provide a simple plan of action. Thus, emotion can be viewed as a type of computation, a rapid, automatic summary that initiates appropriate actions. When a bear is galloping toward you, the rising fear directs your brain to do the right things (determining an escape route) instead of all the other things it could be doing (rounding out your grocery list). When it comes to perception, you can spot an object more quickly if it is, say, a spider rather than a roll of tape. In the realm of memory, emotional events are laid down differently by a parallel memory system involving a brain area called the amygdala.

One goal of emotional neuroscience is to understand the nature of the many disorders of emotion, depression being the most common and costly. Impulsive aggression and violence are also thought to be consequences of faulty emotion regulation.


6. What is intelligence?

Intelligence comes in many forms, but it is not known what intelligence—in any of its guises—means biologically. How do billions of neurons work together to manipulate knowledge, simulate novel situations, and erase inconsequential information? What happens when two concepts “fit” together and you suddenly see a solution to a problem? What happens in your brain when it suddenly dawns on you that the killer in the movie is actually the unsuspected wife? Do intelligent people store knowledge in a way that is more distilled, more varied, or more easily retrievable?

We all grew up with the near-future promise of smart robots, but today we have little better than the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. What went wrong? There are two camps for explaining the weak performance of artificial intelligence: Either we do not know enough of the fundamental principles of brain function, or we have not simulated enough neurons working together. If the latter is true, that’s good news: Computation gets cheaper and faster each year, so we should not be far from enjoying life with Asimovian robots who can effectively tend our households. Yet most neuroscientists recognize how distant we are from that dream. Currently, our robots are little more intelligent than sea slugs, and even after decades of clever research, they can barely distinguish figures from a background at the skill level of an infant.

Recent experiments explore the possible relationship of intelligence to the capacity of short-term memory, the ability to quickly resolve cognitive conflict, or the ability to store stronger associations between facts; the results are not yet conclusive. Many other possibilities—better restructuring of stored information, more parallel processing, or superior emulation of possible futures—have not yet been probed by experiments.

Intelligence may not be underpinned by a single mechanism or a single neural area. Whatever intelligence is, it lies at the heart of what is special about Homo sapiens. Other species are hardwired to solve particular problems, while our ability to abstract allows us to solve an open-ended series of problems. This means that studies of intelligence in mice and monkeys may be barking up the wrong family tree.


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7. How is time represented in the brain?

Hundred-yard dashes begin with a gunshot rather than a strobe light because your brain can react more quickly to a bang than to a flash. Yet as soon as we get outside the realm of motor reactions and into the realm of perception (what you report that you saw and heard), the story changes. When it comes to awareness, the brain goes through a good deal of trouble to synchronize incoming signals that are processed at very different speeds.

For example, snap your fingers in front of you. Although your auditory system processes information about the snap about 30 milliseconds faster than your visual system, the sight of your fingers and the sound of the snap seem simultaneous. Your brain is employing fancy editing tricks to make simultaneous events in the world feel simultaneous to you, even when the different senses processing the information would individually swear otherwise.

For a simple example of how your brain plays tricks with time, look in the mirror at your left eye. Now shift your gaze to your right eye. Your eye movements take time, of course, but you do not see your eyes move. It is as if the world instantly made the transition from one view to the next. What happened to that little gap in time? For that matter, what happens to the 80 milliseconds of darkness you should see every time you blink your eyes? Bottom line: Your notion of the smooth passage of time is a construction of the brain. Clarifying the picture of how the brain normally solves timing problems should give insight into what happens when temporal calibration goes wrong, as may happen in the brains of people with dyslexia. Sensory inputs that are out of sync also contribute to the risk of falls in elderly patients.


We grew up with the near-future promise of smart robots, but today we have little better than the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. What went wrong?

8. Why do brains sleep and dream?

One of the most astonishing aspects of our lives is that we spend a third of our time in the strange world of sleep. Newborn babies spend about twice that. It is inordinately difficult to remain awake for more than a full day-night cycle. In humans, continuous wakefulness of the nervous system results in mental derangement; rats deprived of sleep for 10 days die. All mammals sleep, reptiles and birds sleep, and voluntary breathers like dolphins sleep with one brain hemisphere dormant at a time. The evolutionary trend is clear, but the function of sleep is not.

The universality of sleep, even though it comes at the cost of time and leaves the sleeper relatively defenseless, suggests a deep importance. There is no universally agreed-upon answer, but there are at least three popular (and nonexclusive) guesses. The first is that sleep is restorative, saving and replenishing the body’s energy stores. However, the high neural activity during sleep suggests there is more to the story. A second theory proposes that sleep allows the brain to run simulations of fighting, problem solving, and other key actions before testing them out in the real world. A third theory—the one that enjoys the most evidence—is that sleep plays a critical role in learning and consolidating memories and in forgetting inconsequential details. In other words, sleep allows the brain to store away the important stuff and take out the neural trash.

Recently, the spotlight has focused on REM sleep as the most important phase for locking memories into long-term encoding. In one study, rats were trained to scurry around a track for a food reward. The researchers recorded activity in the neurons known as place cells, which showed distinct patterns of activity depending upon the rats’ location on the track. Later, while the rats dropped off into REM sleep, the recordings continued. During this sleep, the rats’ place cells often repeated the exact same pattern of activity that was seen when the animals ran. The correlation was so close, the researchers claimed, that as the animal “dreamed,” they could reconstruct where it would be on the track if it had been awake—and whether the animal was dreaming of running or standing still. The emerging idea is that information replayed during sleep might determine which events we remember later. Sleep, in this view, is akin to an off-line practice session. In several recent experiments, human subjects performing difficult tasks improved their scores between sessions on consecutive days, but not between sessions on the same day, implicating sleep in the learning process.

Understanding how sleeping and dreaming are changed by ­trauma, drugs, and disease—and how we might modulate our need for sleep—is a rich field to harvest for future clues.


9. How do the specialized systems of the brain integrate with one another?

To the naked eye, no part of the brain’s surface looks terribly different from any other part. But when we measure activity, we find that different types of information lurk in each region of the neural territory. Within vision, for example, separate areas process motion, edges, faces, and colors. The territory of the adult brain is as fractured as a map of the countries of the world.

Now that neuroscientists have a reasonable idea of how that territory is divided, we find ourselves looking at a strange assortment of brain networks involved with smell, hunger, pain, goal setting, temperature, prediction, and hundreds of other tasks. Despite their disparate functions, these systems seem to work together seamlessly. There are almost no good ideas about how this occurs.

Nor is it understood how the brain coordinates its systems so rapidly. The slow speed of spikes (they travel about one foot per second in axons that lack the insulating sheathing called myelin) is one hundred-millionth the speed of signal transmission in digital computers. Yet a human can recognize a friend almost instantaneously, while digital computers are slow—and usually unsuccessful—at face recognition. How can an organ with such slow parts operate so quickly? The usual answer is that the brain is a parallel processor, running many operations at the same time. This is almost certainly true, but what slows down parallel-processing digital computers is the next stage of operations, where results need to be compared and decided upon. Brains are amazingly fast at this. So while the brain’s ability to do parallel processing is impressive, its ability to rapidly synthesize those parallel processes into a single, behavior-guiding output is at least as significant. An animal running must go left or right around a tree; it cannot do both.

There is no special anatomical location in the brain where information from all the different systems converges; rather, the specialized areas all interconnect with one another, forming a network of parallel and recurring links. Somehow, our integrated image of the world emerges from this complex labyrinthine network of brain structures. Surprisingly little study has been done on large, loopy networks like the ones in the brain—probably in part because it is easier to think about brains as tidy assembly lines than as dynamic networks.


10. What is consciousness?

Think back to your first kiss. The experience of it may pop into your head instantly. Where was that memory before you became conscious of it? How was it stored in your brain before and after it came into consciousness? What is the difference between those states

An explanation of consciousness is one of the major unsolved problems of modern science. It may not turn out to be a single phenomenon; nonetheless, by way of a preliminary target, let’s think of it as the thing that flickers on when you wake up in the morning that was not there, in the exact same brain hardware, moments before.

Neuroscientists believe that consciousness emerges from the material stuff of the brain primarily because even very small changes to your brain (say, by drugs or disease) can powerfully alter your subjective experiences. The heart of the problem is that we do not yet know how to engineer pieces and parts such that the resulting machine has the kind of private subjective experience that you and I take for granted. If I give you all the Tinkertoys in the world and tell you to hook them up so that they form a conscious machine, good luck. We don’t have a theory yet of how to do this; we don’t even know what the theory will look like.

One of the traditional challenges to consciousness research is studying it experimentally. It is probable that at any moment some active neuronal processes correlate with consciousness, while others do not. The first challenge is to determine the difference between them. Some clever experiments are making at least a little headway. In one of these, subjects see an image of a house in one eye and, simultaneously, an image of a cow in the other. Instead of perceiving a house-cow mixture, people perceive only one of them. Then, after some random amount of time, they will believe they’re seeing the other, and they will continue to switch slowly back and forth. Yet nothing about the visual stimulus changes; only the conscious experience changes. This test allows investigators to probe which properties of neuronal activity correlate with the changes in subjective experience.

The mechanisms underlying consciousness could reside at any of a variety of physical levels: molecular, cellular, circuit, pathway, or some organizational level not yet described. The mechanisms might also be a product of interactions between these levels. One compelling but still speculative notion is that the massive feedback circuitry of the brain is essential to the production of consciousness.

In the near term, scientists are working to identify the areas of the brain that correlate with consciousness. Then comes the next step: understanding why they correlate. This is the so-called hard problem of neuroscience, and it lies at the outer limit of what material explanations will say about the experience of being human.

Mad Love

Puppy love makes teenagers lose the plot - health - 14 August 2007 - Print Article - New Scientist

Puppy love makes teenagers lose the plot * 16:06 14 August 2007 * NewScientist.com news service * Roxanne Khamsi Adolescents who claim they are "madly in love" might not be too far off the mark: a new study suggests that they show almost manic behaviours. Serge Brand of the Psychiatric University Clinics in Basel, Switzerland, and his colleagues surveyed 113 teenagers at around 17 years of age, asking them to complete questionnaires about their conduct and mood and to keep a log of their sleep patterns. Of those, 65 indicated they had recently fallen in love and experienced intense romantic emotions. The lovestruck teenagers showed many behaviours resembling "hypomania" – a less intense form of mania. For example, they required about an hour less sleep each night than teens who didn't have a sweetheart. They were also more likely to report acting compulsively, with 60% saying they spent too much money compared with fewer than 30% of teenagers who were not in love. Moreover, the lovestruck teens were more than twice as likely to say they had lots of ideas and creative energy. Worryingly, they were also more likely to say they drove fast and took risks on the road. "We were able to demonstrate that adolescents in early-stage intense romantic love did not differ from patients during a hypomanic stage," say the researchers. This leads them to conclude that intense romantic love in teenagers is a "psychopathologically prominent stage". They add that psychiatrists should take this information into account when assessing adolescent patients who are having trouble sleeping and are showing other behavioural changes. The symptoms of hypomania overlap with those of mania, which is diagnosed as bipolar disorder when accompanied by periods of depression. Journal reference: Journal of Adolescent Health (DOI: 10.1016/j.adohealth.2007.01.012)

Hide your women!!

Now motorcycle gangs can take to the water...

wjz.com - Maryland Wire

Western Md. man's invention a good platform for fly fishing, fun
Sunday, August 19, 2007

CORRIGANVILLE, Md. (AP) Years of puttering around the workshop finally have paid off for a local inventor, who was featured in the July edition of Popular Mechanic.

Jim Garlitz, who operates a pizza shop in this small unincorporated town in the western Maryland mountains, was featured for a watercraft he assembled using a 1985 red Yamaha Virago frame, a 1990 9.9-horsepower Nissan outboard motor and other ``readily available materials.''

He calls it a water chopper.

The chopper's hydrofoils, like the wings on a plane, can propel the rider off the surface of the water, for a noiseless, smooth ride. The magazine noted the water chopper would make an excellent platform for fly-fishing.

``You can sustain that flight on the foils for as long as you want to,'' Garlitz said. ``That's the beauty of it. You're virtually flying.''

Heading out for the first test run, Garlitz said he felt something similar to what the Wright brothers must have felt. The waterbike, he said, worked ``almost flawlessly,'' reaching a maximum speed of 37 mph.

``It's stable. It doesn't tilt, tip or anything,'' he said. ``It can ride backwards. It doesn't matter who you are, you can get on it and ride it.''

For Garlitz, creating the water chopper caps a more than 40-year fascination with motorcycles.

``This was the first prototype I ever put together,'' he said, showing pictures of the craft in action on Jennings Randolph Lake. ``I didn't draw up plans. I just had it in my head this would work.''

It took about two months of work and $1,000 before the bike was ready to hit the water in 2004.

Garlitz is seeking an investor to start selling the choppers.

Garlitz said invention is in his blood. He has six other inventions he's looking to get patented, including a safety lock for handguns. ``(The waterbike) lends credibility to my ideas,'' he said. ``My ideas are kind of far-fetched in a way.''

``I really enjoy this kind of thing, building stuff and seeing if it will work,'' he continued. ``To me, if you can build something that will work, then you can put together the details later.''

Information from: Cumberland (Md.) Times-News, http://www.times-news.com/timesnew.html

Big Brother plunging to new depths

Scientific American: Flushing Out a Record of Local Drug Use

August 21, 2007

Flushing Out a Record of Local Drug Use

Researchers have perfected a method of taking a small sample of incoming sewage at a water treatment plant and extracting the record of local drug use


In the latest attempt to crack down on illegal drug use, scientists say they can determine the extent and pattern of illicit drug use—from marijuana to heroin to cocaine—by sampling sewage and extracting the telltale by-products.

For example, cocaine is snorted, does its brain-altering business and then passes through the liver and the kidneys on its way out of the body. It emerges in urine as benzoylecgonine and, as that urine travels from toilet to treatment plant, it mixes with a host of other by-products of human activity.

Environmental analytical chemist Jennifer Field of Oregon State University and her colleagues, using an automated system they developed, test small samples automatically collected at wastewater treatment plants over a 24-hour period. Solids are centrifuged out and the sewage sample then travels at high pressure through a machine that chemically separates the various compounds of interest chemically, such as benzoylecgonine. By measuring the relative mass of the various residual chemicals, the chemists can then identify what specific drugs have been recently used in that community.

"Here's a new tool for taking snapshots of communities over space and in time and getting a less biased view of drug use," Field says. Current methods, she notes, rely on either self-reporting in surveys or actual overdoses. "Certainly compared to the statistics approach, which is waiting for people to die," she adds, "this is more real-time."

The technique has been tried in at least 10 U.S. cities, ranging from towns with populations hovering around 17,000 people to medium-size cities of 600,000, according to Fields, though she declined to specify the municipalities by name. One trend: use of methadone and methamphetamine (a prescription opiate withdrawal aid and speed) remained constant over 24 days in these cities, but cocaine consumption routinely spiked on the weekends. "You can see this upswing in the recreational use of cocaine as evidenced by increases in some cases starting as early as Thursday," of each week studied, Field says.

The researchers presented the new drug testing technique at the biannual American Chemical Society conference in Boston today and hope to form partnerships in the future with interested communities. The work is part of a growing trend to monitor drug use via sewage pioneered in the Po River valley by toxicologist Roberto Fanelli of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan. The U.S. government has undertaken such drug-testing experiments since 2006 in more than 30 municipalities, ranging from San Diego to Fairfax County, Va. (just outside of Washington, D.C.).

The technique might help communities determine where to apply law enforcement or track the success of targeted drug-use prevention efforts, the researchers say—for example, helping to get a handle on methamphetamine-related deaths in Oregon, which have tripled over the past decade. But the strategy also raises privacy concerns, Field says. She notes it would be extremely difficult to track individual drug use with this method, both because it is hard to reliably estimate from a community-wide measure how many individuals are actually using the drug and sampling would have to take place almost all the way back in the individual toilet to trace it to a particular household. "It's not getting back to the individual," she emphasizes.

The next step, Fields says, will be to trace the unique by-products of extremely common drugs, such as caffeine and nicotine, to enable even more precise readings of local use. "We will be exploring are there ways to use human urinary biomarkers to try and assess the population?" she says. "Can you follow worker populations? Students moving in and out? And then answer questions about trends in drug use."

Underwater turbines set to generate record power

Underwater turbines set to generate record power

19:15 21 August 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Kurt Kleiner

By the end of the year, twin underwater turbines should be generating 1.2 megawatts of electricity off the coast of Northern Ireland in a landmark demonstration of tidal power technology. Marine Current Turbines, a company based in Bristol, UK, had hoped to begin installing the turbines at Strangford Lough (Google map) on Monday, but the construction barge scheduled to deliver the turbines was delayed. A company spokesman says the installation will now take place later in 2007. It will be the world's largest tidal power project. The underwater turbines look and work very much like wind power turbines. Each blade is 15 to 20 metres across and is mounted on an axis that attaches to a 3-metre-wide pile driven into the seabed.

Tide-driven currents will move the rotors at speeds of between 10 and 20 revolutions per minute, which the company claims is too slow to affect marine life. The turbines will drive a gearbox that will, in turn, drive an electric generator and the resulting electricity will be transmitted to the shore via an underwater cable. The Strangford Lough tidal generator is intended purely as a demonstration project. Eventually, MCT intends to build farms of turbines consisting of 10 to 20 pairs each. Each turbine requires a piece of equipment called a jack-up barge for installation. The barge anchors itself to the sea floor and drills a hole that sets the turbines in place. "Of the 60-odd [tidal power] projects I've seen, this seems like the best," says Dave Elliott , a professor in technology policy at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK."It's an interesting period," Elliott adds. "You have lots of approaches andlots of innovative projects. The straightforward underwater propeller seems like the winner.

Elliott says that tidal and wave power could eventually provide between 15% and
20% of the UK's electricity needs. But he believes that operators need
to develop experience with the technology before the price of energy
generated in this way falls to levels comparable to wind power.

Domystuff.com

Your Brain on Music

Music moves brain to pay attention
Medical Studies/Trials
Published: Sunday, 5-Aug-2007


Using brain images of people listening to short symphonies by an obscure 18th-century composer, a research team from the Stanford University School of Medicine has gained valuable insight into how the brain sorts out the chaotic world around it.

The research team showed that music engages the areas of the brain involved with paying attention, making predictions and updating the event in memory. Peak brain activity occurred during a short period of silence between musical movements - when seemingly nothing was happening.

Beyond understanding the process of listening to music, their work has far-reaching implications for how human brains sort out events in general. Their findings will be published in the Aug. 2 issue of Neuron.

The researchers caught glimpses of the brain in action using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, which gives a dynamic image showing which parts of the brain are working during a given activity. The goal of the study was to look at how the brain sorts out events, but the research also revealed that musical techniques used by composers 200 years ago help the brain organize incoming information.

"In a concert setting, for example, different individuals listen to a piece of music with wandering attention, but at the transition point between movements, their attention is arrested," said the paper's senior author Vinod Menon, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of neurosciences.

"I'm not sure if the baroque composers would have thought of it in this way, but certainly from a modern neuroscience perspective, our study shows that this is a moment when individual brains respond in a tightly synchronized manner," Menon said.

The team used music to help study the brain's attempt to make sense of the continual flow of information the real world generates, a process called event segmentation. The brain partitions information into meaningful chunks by extracting information about beginnings, endings and the boundaries between events.

"These transitions between musical movements offer an ideal setting to study the dynamically changing landscape of activity in the brain during this segmentation process," said Devarajan Sridharan, a neurosciences graduate student trained in Indian percussion and first author of the article.

No previous study, to the researchers' knowledge, has directly addressed the question of event segmentation in the act of hearing and, specifically, in music. To explore this area, the team chose pieces of music that contained several movements, which are self-contained sections that break a single work into segments. They chose eight symphonies by the English late-baroque period composer William Boyce (1711-79), because his music has a familiar style but is not widely recognized, and it contains several well-defined transitions between relatively short movements.

The study focused on movement transitions - when the music slows down, is punctuated by a brief silence and begins the next movement. These transitions span a few seconds and are obvious to even a non-musician - an aspect critical to their study, which was limited to participants with no formal music training.

The researchers attempted to mimic the everyday activity of listening to music, while their subjects were lying prone inside the large, noisy chamber of an MRI machine. Ten men and eight women entered the MRI scanner with noise-reducing headphones, with instructions to simply listen passively to the music.

In the analysis of the participants' brain scans, the researchers focused on a 10-second window before and after the transition between movements. They identified two distinct neural networks involved in processing the movement transition, located in two separate areas of the brain. They found what they called a "striking" difference between activity levels in the right and left sides of the brain during the entire transition, with the right side significantly more active.

In this foundational study, the researchers conclude that dynamic changes seen in the fMRI scans reflect the brain's evolving responses to different phases of a symphony. An event change - the movement transition signaled by the termination of one movement, a brief pause, followed by the initiation of a new movement - activates the first network, called the ventral fronto-temporal network. Then a second network, the dorsal fronto-parietal network, turns the spotlight of attention to the change and, upon the next event beginning, updates working memory.

"The study suggests one possible adaptive evolutionary purpose of music," said Jonathan Berger, PhD, professor of music and a musician who is another co-author of the study. Music engages the brain over a period of time, he said, and the process of listening to music could be a way that the brain sharpens its ability to anticipate events and sustain attention.

According to the researchers, their findings expand on previous functional brain imaging studies of anticipation, which is at the heart of the musical experience. Even non-musicians are actively engaged, at least subconsciously, in tracking the ongoing development of a musical piece, and forming predictions about what will come next. Typically in music, when something will come next is known, because of the music's underlying pulse or rhythm, but what will occur next is less known, they said.

Having a mismatch between what listeners expect to hear vs. what they actually hear - for example, if an unrelated chord follows an ongoing harmony - triggers similar ventral regions of the brain. Once activated, that region partitions the deviant chord as a different segment with distinct boundaries.

The results of the study "may put us closer to solving the cocktail party problem - how it is that we are able to follow one conversation in a crowded room of many conversations," said one of the co-authors, Daniel Levitin, PhD, associate professor of psychology and music from McGill University, who has written a popular book called This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.

http://med-www.stanford.edu/

Love is in the air

Hormone spray could banish shyness * 18 July 2007
It was hailed as the "trust" hormone, then the "mind-reading" hormone. Now it seems oxytocin may also help people with social phobia to interact. Markus Heinrichs at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and colleagues are studying 70 people with generalised social phobia, characterised by overwhelming anxiety and self-consciousness in social situations. Half an hour before undergoing standard cognitive behavioural therapy, which is designed to alter negative thoughts and behaviour, the patients were given a dose of oxytocin by nasal spray. Preliminary results suggest oxytocin improved their readiness to interact in role-playing and their confidence in tackling social challenges outside the sessions, says Heinrichs, who will present his results at the World Congress of Neuroscience in Melbourne, Australia, this week. In a separate study, Heinrichs and colleagues report that oxytocin reduces the response of the amygdala - a brain region involved in the fear response - to pictures of fearful, happy or angry faces (Biological Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2007.03.025). This may explain why patients are more ready to engage in social situations, Heinrichs believes.

Animated beer

Still from a video clip of beer bubbling and foaming while being poured in a glass. Credit: CSIRO Still from a video clip of beer bubbling and foaming while being poured in a glass. Credit: CSIRO Researchers from CSIRO and Korea’s ETRI will pour a virtual glass of beer in San Diego next week at SIGGRAPH 07, the world’s largest computer graphics conference, to showcase their innovative fluid special effects software. CSIRO fluids researcher Dr Mahesh Prakash says the physics of bubble creation in carbonated drinks like beer is complex. “As you pour beer into a glass, you see bubbles appearing on what are called nucleation sites, where the glass isn’t quite smooth,” Dr Prakash says. “The bubbles expand to a certain size then rise up in streams to the surface, where they bump into each other and form a raft of foam that floats on the top.” Dr Prakash and his colleagues have captured the maths describing these processes in software that allows movie makers, film production houses and others to create super-realistic special effects. The four-year project is being undertaken jointly by CSIRO and South Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, one of the world’s largest computer graphics developers for games, with most of the research being done in Melbourne. Clever maths called smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) helps the software do its job by working smarter not harder. The software uses less computer power and takes less time to get better results than other special effects software it has been benchmarked against. CSIRO Business and Commercialisation Manager, Andrew Dingjan says CSIRO and ETRI hope this will bring the fluid animation software within reach of smaller film production houses. “Big Hollywood studios spend vast sums on single-use solutions when they make blockbusters like ‘Poseidon’ and ‘The Perfect Storm’ but we’d like our software to make realistic special effects easier to come by,” Mr Dingian says. Computer animation is a US$55billion global industry. Discussions with potential global commercialisers of the software will follow next year. CSIRO and ETRI’s presentation, ‘Bubbling and Frothing Liquids,’ is part of a technical session on animating fluids at the San Diego Convention Center on Thursday 9 August. Beer animation available: http://www.csiro.au/multimedia/FluidSpecialEffects.html Source: CSIRO Australia This news is brought to you by PhysOrg.com

Dreamy Lunar Eclipse

Credit: Antonio Finazzi and Michele Festa of Lago di Garda, Italy.

Close your eyes, breath deeply, let your mind wander to a distant seashore: It's late in the day, and the western sun is sinking into the glittering waves. At your feet, damp sand reflects the twilight, while overhead, the deep blue sky fades into a cloudy mélange of sunset copper and gold, so vivid it almost takes your breath away.

A breeze touches the back of your neck, and you turn to see a pale full Moon rising into the night. Hmmm. The Moon could use a dash more color. You reach out, grab a handful of sunset, and drape the Moon with phantasmic light. Much better.

Too bad it's only a dream...

Early Tuesday morning, August 28th, the dream will come true. There's going to be a colorful lunar eclipse visible from five continents including most of North America: map.

[Dreamy Lunar Eclipse]


The event begins 54 minutes past midnight PDT (0754 UT) on August 28th when the Moon enters Earth's shadow. At first, there's little change. The outskirts of Earth's shadow are as pale as the Moon itself; an onlooker might not even realize anything is happening. But as the Moon penetrates deeper, a startling metamorphosis occurs. Around 2:52 am PDT (0952 UT), the color of the Moon changes from moondust-gray to sunset-red. This is totality, and it lasts for 90 minutes.

To understand why the change occurs, close your eyes and dream yourself all the way to the Moon. Once again, you're standing on a seashore—the Sea of Tranquillity. There's no water. You're surrounded by hundreds of miles of dusty, hardened lava. Overhead hangs Earth, nightside down, completely hiding the Sun behind it. The eclipse is underway.

With the Sun blocked, you might expect utter darkness, but no, the ground at your feet is aglow. Why? Look back up at Earth. The rim of the planet seems to be on fire. Around Earth's circumference you see every sunrise and sunset in the world—all at once. This incredible light beams into the heart of Earth's shadow, transforming the Moon into a landscape of copper moondust and golden hills.

Wake up! This is really going to happen, and some planning is necessary. Start times of totality are listed in the table below. Set your alarm an hour or so in advance to gather snacks and dress warmly. (Even in August, four o'clock in the morning can be chilly.) Waking up early also allows you to catch some of the partial eclipse before totality.

The eclipse will be visible from Australia, Japan, parts of Asia and most of the Americas, but not from Africa or Europe. Pacific observers are favored. On the west coast of the United States, the entire eclipse will unfold high in the post-midnight sky. On the east coast, totality will be truncated by sunrise. That's okay; even a little eclipse can be a dream.

Source: Science@NASA, by Dr. Tony Phillips




This news is brought to you by PhysOrg.com

Why Women Get More Migraines Than Men? -One guess...

Why Women Get More Migraines Than Men For every man with a migraine, three women are struck by the severe headaches that often come with nausea, sensitivity to light and sound, and aura. That means a staggering 18 to 25 percent of women suffer from migraines, making it one of the most common disabling conditions faced by women around the globe. This 3-to-1 ratio raises the obvious question: Why? The reason, suggest researchers at UCLA, is that women may have a faster trigger than men for activating the waves of brain activity thought to underlie migraines. If the theory is correct, this triggering mechanism may be a new target for migraine treatment. Reporting in the Annals of Neurology, currently online, Dr. Andrew Charles, director of the Headache Research and Treatment Program in the UCLA Department of Neurology; Dr. Kevin C. Brennan, a clinical and research fellow in Charles' lab; and colleagues used a mouse model to discover a big difference between males and females with regard to a phenomenon called cortical spreading depression (CSD), which is thought to be a chief culprit in causing migraines. In a separate study, to be published in the September issue of the Journal of Headache and Pain, the researchers report preliminary success in preventing migraines using memantine, a drug that blocks CSD waves. Migraines were once thought to be caused primarily by constriction and dilation of blood vessels, Charles said. Now, thanks to various neuroimaging techniques, it has been shown that migraines may begin as a problem of brain excitability. Patients with migraines show cortical spreading depression, which is characterized by dramatic waves of activity that spread across the surface of the brain. CSD may in turn trigger not only the pain of migraine but the visual symptoms, nausea, dizziness and difficulty concentrating so common in migraine patients. Brennan, working in Charles' lab, used imaging techniques to visualize the initiation and spread of CSD in anesthetized male and female mice. Female mice showed a significantly lower threshold for CSD when compared with males. In other words, it was much easier to evoke the waves of brain activity believed to underlie migraine in females than it was in males. "The results were very clear," said Charles. "The strength of the stimulus required to trigger CSD in males was up to two or three times higher than that required to trigger the response in females." A variety of factors may reduce the CSD threshold in both sexes, making them more susceptible to migraines — these include genes, hormones and environmental triggers such as stress, diet, changes in sleep patterns and a host of others. While it is known that migraines in females fluctuate with the menstrual cycle and are more frequent during the menstrual period, the study results appear to be independent of a specific phase of the cycle, according to Charles. "We didn't monitor the estrous cycle in the female mice, so it's likely we sampled from different estrous phases in different animals," Charles said. "Yet we still found a consistent difference in the CSD threshold between males and females. Our results suggest that the female brain has an intrinsic excitability that predisposes them to migraine that may not be simply linked to a specific phase of the menstrual cycle." These results are exciting, Charles said, because they may represent a model for understanding the mechanisms underlying the increased prevalence of migraine in women. In addition, they add to growing evidence that CSD is a key target for the development of new migraine treatments. In a separate study, the researchers identified what they hope will eventually be a new treatment option for migraine. They found that a medication called memantine (brand name Namenda), which is currently approved for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, inhibits CSD and appears to be a highly effective treatment for some patients with frequent migraine. In the retrospective study, 54 patients who were treated with memantine for at least two months were asked to fill out a survey describing their experience with the medication. The majority, 36, reported a substantial reduction in estimated headache frequency. These were all patients who had previously tried other treatments without success. While Charles cautioned that these results need to be confirmed with a larger study, the encouraging results are an example of how new insights into the basic mechanisms of migraine are leading to novel approaches for therapy for the hundreds of millions of individuals worldwide who suffer from this disabling condition. The full text of the journal article can be found at www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/114230925/HTMLSTART Source: UCLA This news is brought to you by PhysOrg.com

Crashing the Hacker's Ball

An undercover NBC television reporter Friday fled from outraged computer hackers that caught her spying on their Las Vegas gathering with a camera hidden in he ... A file photo shows the NBC peacock logo on the NBC studios building in Burbank, California. An undercover NBC television reporter Friday fled from outraged computer hackers that caught her spying on their Las Vegas gathering with a camera hidden in her handbag. An undercover television reporter Friday fled from outraged computer hackers that caught her spying on their Las Vegas gathering with a camera hidden in her handbag. Dateline NBC associate producer Michelle Madigan was heckled and derided as she ran from DefCon, the world's largest computer hackers conference, and raced away in a car. "They sent a moderately attractive young lady with a purse cam whose mission was to first capture someone on film admitting to a felony, which is really not cool, and second to catch a fed on film," said DefCon spokesman "Priest." "She was basically trying to do a slam piece." Federal agents openly, and covertly, mingle with hackers at the conference, which features a panel discussion titled "Meet the Fed." "This is the Switzerland of hacking, neutral ground on which hackers and feds meet with a common goal of making computers safer," said Priest. Dateline did not respond to AFP requests for comment but issued a general statement saying it does not discuss reporting tactics. DefCon organizers were alerted to Madigan's mission prior to her arrival and contacted her, offering her a press badge that would give her free rein of the conference while letting attendees easily see she is a reporter, Priest said. Madigan declined the offer. She opted to attend with a "Human" badge granting access to hackers and other general attendees. Priest and DefCon founder Jeff Moss, whose hacker name is Dark Tangent, lured Madigan to a packed conference room by putting out word they were going to have hackers finger federal agents in a game called "spot the fed." After she was in the audience, it was announced the game was actually "spot the undercover reporter." Without naming Madigan, Moss condemned her stealth tactics from a stage. Boos and jeers erupted from hundreds of hackers, one calling for her to be tarred and feathered. Madigan shoved aside a DefCon "goon," one of the volunteers working at the event, and dashed from the room as the mob called for her to be booted from the premises. Madigan's flight was followed by hackers and reporting peers openly disapproving her methods. "If I had 150 people from this place chasing me across the parking lot, I wouldn't be in a hurry to come back," Priest said. This news is brought to you by PhysOrg.com

Making a butch mouse

ScientificAmerican.com August 05, 2007 Inside Every Girl Mouse Brain Is a Swaggering Boy Mouse—And It Doesn't Take Much to Bring Him Out All it takes is a little genetic manipulation or brain surgery to make female mice act like pelvic thrusting, rump-sniffing, aggressive males Female lab mice tend to be docile, passive creatures. But by either genetically shutting down or surgically removing their ability to smell pheromones, scientists transformed them into aggressive, pelvic-thrusting, vocalizing lotharios—without any significant rise in testosterone or other steroid hormones. "The female brain has the neuronal circuit both to control male and female behavior," says molecular neuroscientist Catherine Dulac of Harvard University. "What is sexually dimorphic is the switch that allows one to be silenced." The key to gender-specific behavior, in mice at least, is a cluster of receptors in their noses that allows them to smell pheromones, special chemicals that deliver information about sexual readiness, among other things, between members of the same species. Called the vomeronasal organ (VNO), it connects to the brain and registers the gender of other mice, triggering the appropriate response. But when the researchers genetically disabled the VNO, female mice began to chase their male peers, mount them and attempt to pelvic thrust [see video here ]. "From a behavioral standpoint you could not recognize the animal from being any different than the male," Dulac adds. "All the thinking until now was that female brains can produce feminine behaviors while male brains can produce masculine behaviors, with little or no cross talk between them," says Marc Breedlove, a neuroscientist at Michigan State University in East Lansing. "These results do suggest that, at least for mice, the brain retains circuitry to display both masculine and feminine behaviors into adulthood." Surgically removing the VNO also provoked the same behavior, the researchers report online in Nature. The full range of male mouse behaviors were on offer: from pelvic thrusting to high-pitched songs designed to woo mates. "Females never do this—ultrasound vocalizations," Dulac notes. "People thought that they didn't have the larynx." Although the females acted macho at times, they also retained the biological functions of their gender, ultimately becoming pregnant when paired with males (though only after aggressively trying to mount said males). Their maternal instinct was not as strong, however, as they wandered off from their pups after a few days, unlike normal mouse mothers. It remains unclear if disabling the VNO in males would make them act like females, because female lab mice are largely passive and do not exhibit any particularly distinct behaviors, Dulac says. But it is very clear female and male mouse brains are functionally identical. "It's easier to do it that way," Dulac adds. "If you have to imagine how to build two entirely different circuits, it's complicated." It also remains unclear how broadly the finding may apply. Fruit flies display similar behavior, but additional studies will be needed to assess the wider effect. "For other animals, we need to explore whether the VNO has this same dramatic effect," Breedlove says. "Is this true for all rodents? What about carnivores?" As for humans, we appear to lack VNOs and pheromones may play a less critical role in our mating rituals. "Humans are relying much more on visual cues," Dulac notes. But our brains may be wired similarly with "both circuits present and one is constantly inhibited." The key to gender-specific behaviors may have less to do with hormones and more to do with how various neural circuitry gets triggered.

Better Births

When it comes to giving birth, some traditional approaches could result in happier and healthier moms and newborns, according to two research reviews.

Women who have a midwife, doula or a supportive family member with them throughout labor are more likely to have a shorter labor, less likely to use painkillers during labor and more likely to be satisfied with their childbirth experience, compared to those who receive regular hospital care.

In addition, women who practice “kangaroo care” — skin-to-skin snuggling with their newborns — directly after birth are more successful early on at breastfeeding, compared to births where the newborns are taken away to be swaddled or washed.

The reviews appear in The Cochrane Library, a publication of The Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates medical research. Systematic reviews draw evidence-based conclusions about medical practice after considering both the content and quality of existing medical trials on a topic.

Skin-to-skin contact and supportive labor care were the norm for centuries, before hospital births became the accepted practice in Western culture. However, “concerns about the consequent dehumanization of women’s birth experiences have led to calls for a return” to some of these practices, said Ellen Hodnett of the University of Toronto.

Hodnett and colleagues reviewed 16 studies of 13,391 women that compared supportive one-on-one care with routine hospital care during labor. In the studies, supportive care included a variety of elements, from encouragement and massage to relaying a woman’s wishes to the attending medical staff.

In general, the researchers found that supportive care worked best when it began in early labor and someone other than hospital staff provided it. The authors conclude, “Continuous support during labor should be the norm, rather than the exception.”

Early skin-to-skin contact between mother and newborn is another practice that has fallen by the wayside in hospital births. In skin-to-skin contact, the naked baby rests on the mother’s bare chest immediately after birth, taking advantage of what Elizabeth Moore, Ph.D., calls “a sensitive period for programming future behavior.”

In 30 studies of 1,925 mother-infant pairs analyzed by Moore and colleagues, pairs who had early skin-to-skin contact were more likely to breastfeed and to breastfeed for longer than those who did not. The review also showed that babies who had kangaroo care immediately after birth “interacted more with their mothers, stayed warmer and cried less,” said Moore.

The University of Toronto, Canada; the University of the Witwatersrand, Fort Hare University, and East Long Hospital Complex, South Africa; National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit and Warwick Clinical Trials Unit, UK; and Childbirth Connection in the United States supported the Hodnett study.

References: Moore ER, Anderson GC, Bergman N. Early skin-to-skin contact for mothers and their healthy newborn infants. The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2007, Issue 3.

Hodnett ED, et al. Continuous support for women during childbirth. The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2007, Issue 3.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Center For Advancement Of Health.

Architects Not Teachers Caused School Failures

Science Daily — The lack of space in halls, gyms, canteens and other areas is to blame for many problems which blight today' s secondary schools, according to a University of Manchester study.

Naomi Breen, who is studying secondary school buildings for a PhD, says school design impacts on the curriculum and encourages gender stereotyping, bullying, anti-social behaviour and alienation.

Mrs Breen, who is also a teacher, surveyed 18 secondary schools – nine in Burnley and nine in Berkshire - gaining access to historical records and documents which threw new light on the issue.

A root of the problem, she says, is the shortages of space and overcrowding created by the raising of the school leaving age to 16 planned in 1944 and implemented in 1972.

In 1944, architects were not allowed to plan and build schools for future changes in educational approach, use or size.

The shortages were compounded by 1950 government regulations to save space and costs resulting in dual purpose areas such as combined hall and dining rooms and merged corridors and classrooms.

She said: The problems in building design provide a powerful illustration of how secondary moderns were inevitably inferior to the established grammar schools.

“Unlike secondary moderns, many grammar schools had sixth forms which meant they were large enough to offer a full five or seven year secondary school education.

"As a result of chronic lack of space, multipurpose rooms are still common in many of these schools today, despite the problems of food, mess, noise and waste.

“After 1944, the shanty towns of temporary school buildings became a permanent feature of many modern secondary schools and this impacted on their effectiveness.”

She added: "Teachers had little or no say in the design of schools and interpretations of the architect' s work lay firmly at the feet of educational theorists. "Educationalists wanted architects to design buildings to fulfil their latest theories, but that posed problems when those theories fell out of favour."

Bike sheds and toilets

Mrs Breen said: " Because of the cost saving requirements, rising populations and lack of consultation with teachers, new buildings were too small and schools were forced to expand.

"But that meant the original shape was lost and the ability to enforce discipline diminished.

"Temporary classrooms, bike sheds, toilets and other out of sight spaces became sites for bullying, hiding, smoking and other anti-social behaviours."

Dining Areas

Mrs Breen said: "As space became a premium, It soon became apparent that the 1944 promise of the single purpose dining room in each school had to be abandoned.

"Local education authorities were encouraged to reduce costs of building programmes by adopting dual use dining rooms that doubled as entrance halls, corridors or classrooms.

"One result was that before 1944, teachers were usually expected to eat with pupils and act as role models.

"But as modern schools emerged, welfare staff and dinner ladies became responsible for pupils manners and behaviour and teachers were able to eat separately.

"Dining areas became noisy places, where poor behaviour and indiscipline were inbuilt - a fact recognised by the schools themselves.

Halls

Mrs Breen said: " Before 1944, many schools had daily whole school assemblies for prayer, communal discipline and a shared cultural experience.

"But the lack of space in many secondary problems put paid to that.

"Halls became a source of considerable noise and disturbance to the whole school."

Gyms

Mrs Breen said: " Gyms also suffer from dual use of space.

"In many schools, gyms are used for examinations - not exactly the ideal environment for such important activity for what has become a central educational activity.

“There is also a detrimental impact on the physical education curriculum.

"This is virtually unheard of in established grammar schools where the exam has always been central to a school' s function."

Labs and workshops

Mrs Breen said: " Workshop and science labs are masculine spaces which mirror ' work' whereas textiles and housecraft rooms are female spaces which mirror home.

"That accepts and embellishes gender stereotyping."

Corridors

Mrs Breen said: "Teachers thought long corridors wasteful and inconvenient.

"The distance a pupil at a school must travel between one subject and another has become so vast that time spent in corridors and out of lessons has increased."

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of Manchester.