National groundwater strategy needed for Australia

NATIONAL CENTRE FOR GROUNDWATER RESEARCH & TRAINING

Share on print “Most Australians are simply not aware that the vast bulk of our fresh water is underground, out of sight, out of mind." Image: Trout55/iStockphoto Australia will not have enough fresh water to meet the combined needs of a rapidly-growing population, expanding industries and conservation of native landscapes in the mid-21st century if it fails to articulate a national groundwater strategy for the future. The caution comes from two of the nation’s most eminent water scientists, Professor Craig Simmons and Professor Peter Cook of the National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training (NGCRT), as the National Groundwater Action Plan winds up and the latest Murray-Darling Plan proposes changes to groundwater rules. “Though many things have been accomplished under the Groundwater Plan, much still remains to be done to secure the nation’s groundwater resources into the future,” the scientists say. In a discussion paper circulated among water policy and scientific experts they identify twelve issues which need to be addressed to achieve greater national water security in future. These include understanding and resolving issues surrounding the current brawl over the impact of coal seam gas, geothermal, mining and farming activity on groundwater resources, better understanding of the links between ground-and surface waters, and resolving legal and technical questions over the storage of surplus water in underground aquifers. “Some of the biggest challenges concern public trust and confidence issues regarding groundwater,” Professor Simmons says. “Most Australians are simply not aware that the vast bulk of our fresh water is underground, out of sight, out of mind. They do not realise it supplies much of the water we see in our surface rivers and wetlands, and hence much of our drinking water.” The researchers argue there is an urgent need for public education and “mythbusting” about groundwater – especially the widely-held view that it represents a more-or-less unlimited resource for the future. “Australia is a very old continent, and many of its groundwaters are fossil – meaning they can be tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years old. They take that amount of time to recharge. Any plan to make use of them needs to take their age and recharge rate into account,” says Professor Cook. “We also seek to exploit an exceptional opportunity for Australia to store more of its surface water underground, where it avoids evaporation, by deliberately recharging suitable aquifers. But many of the legal, social and public acceptance issues around this remain to be worked out,” he adds. Another vital issue is how climate change will affect Australia’s native landscapes through its effect on groundwater, they say. If aquifers contract out of reach of the deep roots of eucalypts, mallees, acacias and other important native species, whole landscapes can die. A related issue is the intrusion of seawater into coastal aquifers, as they are pumped out for human use. This could affect the viability of many coastal cities and communities which rely on groundwater, they warn. “Then there is simply the question of whether we understand enough about our hidden groundwaters and are able to model impacts on them with sufficient accuracy to be able to manage them adequately,” Professor Cook says. Professor Simmons adds that governance of Australian groundwater is still far from optimal, including having a common understanding of terms and of the resource itself. “We need frameworks that connect high-level national resource management to the interests of local communities, industries and other users, in a way that makes for rational decisions and sound resource use,” he says. “When industries, communities and the environment are competing for the same water resource – as is bound to happen increasingly from now on – we need better ways for allocating the water that meet social, economic and environmental needs. The National Water Initiative provides a good basis – but it is important it is fully adopted.” Finally the team warn that Australia faces an acute scarcity of skilled water managers and will need to redouble its efforts to train more. “You can’t run the mining industry without geologists or agriculture without farmers. Water is a resource vital to both and to every other facet of Australian life – and needs to be equally well-planned, managed and allocated.” The researchers have called for a group of top-level water managers, government departments and water scientists to develop a draft for a National Groundwater Strategic Plan which addresses all these issues, and more. “Because it has rained across much of Australia and drought issues have receded from the headlines, does not mean we can afford to be complacent,” Professor Simmons says. “We are still on track to more than double our water use by mid-century – and there are no big, new water resources to be found, so we have to address the situation by being far more clever in how we manage what we’ve got.” Without a such plan major cities, industries such as mining, energy, agriculture and manufacturing and the preservation of the Australian landscape could all run into water scarcity problems within a decade or two, the NCGRT researchers caution. “Also, we need to waterproof the nation in preparation for future droughts. “We urge all Australian governments, political parties and industry bodies to give strategic water planning absolutely top priority. It is Australia’s future which is at stake.” Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.

Moon bubbles hold nanoparticles

QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

Share on print This is the first time these lunar glass bubbles have been studied, and the researchers were expecting to find gas or vapour, not nanoparticles. Image: NASA/JPL/USGS A stunning discovery by QUT soil scientist Marek Zbik of nano particles inside bubbles of glass in lunar soil could solve the mystery of why the moon's surface topsoil has many unusual properties. Dr Zbik, from Queensland University of Technology's Science and Engineering Faculty, said scientists had long observed the strange behaviour of lunar soil but had not taken much notice of the nano and submicron particles found in the soil and their source was unknown. Dr Zbik took the lunar soil samples to Taiwan where he could study the glass bubbles without breaking them using a new technique for studying nano materials call synchrotron-based nano tomography to look at the particles. Nano tomography is a transmission X-ray microscope which enables 3D images of nano particles to be made. "We were really surprised at what we found," Dr Zbik said. "Instead of gas or vapour inside the bubbles, which we would expect to find in such bubbles on Earth, the lunar glass bubbles were filled with a highly porous network of alien-looking glassy particles that span the bubbles' interior. "It appears that the nano particles are formed inside bubbles of molten rocks when meteorites hit the lunar surface. Then they are released when the glass bubbles are pulverised by the consequent bombardment of meteorites on the moon's surface. "This continuous pulverising of rocks on the lunar surface and constant mixing develop a type of soil which is unknown on Earth." Dr Zbik said nano particles behaved according to the laws of quantum physics which were completely different from so called 'normal' physics' laws. Because of this, materials containing nano particles behave strangely according to our current understanding. "Nano particles are so tiny, it is their size and not what they are made of that accounts for their exceptional properties. "We don't understand a lot about quantum physics yet but it could be that these nano particles, when liberated from their glass bubble, mix with the other soil constituents and give lunar soil its unusual properties. "Lunar soil is electro-statically charged so it hovers above the surface; it is extremely chemically active; and it has low thermal conductivity eg it can be 160 degrees above the surface but -40 degrees two metres below the surface. "It is also very sticky and brittle such that its particles wear the surface off metal and glass." Dr Zbik said the moon had no atmosphere to cushion the impact of meteorites like Earth had. "When they hit the moon there is a very violent reaction. Huge temperatures are generated which melts the rock. The pressure goes and a vacuum is created. Bubbles occur in the molten glass rock like soft drink bubbles trying to escape the bottle. "Our work now is to understand how those particles evolve from this process. It may also lead us to completely different way of manufacturing nanomaterials." Dr Zbik and his research team's study was published in the International Scholarly Research Network Astronomy and Astrophysics. To find out more and also view a 3D image from inside the lunar bubble using transmission X-Ray microscopy go here. You can see what is inside the lunar bubble with 3D glasses. Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.

Psychologists reveals how brain performs 'motor chunking' tasks

This image shows identified brain regions linked to the parsing (left) and concatenation (right) processes involved in motor chunking. Trials with greater parsing showed increased activation of the left prefrontal and parietal cortex and trials with greater concatenation showed increased activation of the putamen. Credit: Photo by Nicholas Wymbs

You pick up your cell phone and dial the new number of a friend. Ten numbers. One. Number. At. A. Time. Because you haven't actually typed the number before, your brain handles each button press separately, as a sequence of distinct movements.

After dialing the number a few more times, you find yourself typing it out as a series of three successive bursts of movement: the area code, the first three numbers, the last four numbers. Those three separate chunks allow you to type the number faster, and with greater precision. Eventually, dialed often enough, the number is stored in your brain as one chunk. Who needs speed dial?

"You can think about a chunk as a rhythm," said Nicholas Wymbs, a postdoctoral researcher in UC Santa Barbara's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, and the lead author of a new study on motor chunking in the journal Neuron, published by Cell Press. "We highlight the two-part process that seems to occur when we are chunking. This is demonstrated by the rhythm we use when typing the phone number: rapid bursts of finger movements that are interspersed by pauses."

The rhythm is the human brain taking information and processing it in an efficient way, according to Wymbs. "On one level, the brain is going to try to divide up, or parse, long sequences of movement," he said. "This parsing process functions to group or cluster movements in the most efficient way possible."

But it is also in our brain's best interest to assemble single or short strings of movements into longer, integrated sequences so that a complex behavior can be made with as little effort as possible. "The motor system in the brain wants to output movement in the most computational, low-cost way as possible," Wymbs said. "With this integrative process, it's going to try to bind as many individual motor movements into a fluid, uniform movement as it possibly can."

This diagram illustrates how the subjects in the experiment used their left hands to respond to the "notes" on a button box. Credit: Illustration by Nicholas Wymbs

The two processes are at odds with each other, and it's how the brain reconciles this struggle during motor learning that intrigues Wymbs and the study's other authors, including Scott Grafton, professor of psychology and director of the UCSB Brain Imaging Center. "What we are interested in is functional plasticity of the brain –– how the brain changes when we learn actions, or motor sequences as we refer to them in this paper," Wymbs said.

The study was conducted using human subjects in the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner in the Brain Imaging Center. The experiment involved three days of training with people performing and practicing three separate motor sequences for up to 200 trials each during the collection of functional MRI data. The subjects were all right-handed but they were asked to learn the sequences using the four fingers of their left hands. Participants practiced the sequences during the operation of the MRI scanner by tapping out responses with a button box that looked like a set of piano keys, with long, rectangular buttons.

"People would see a static image shown on a video screen that detailed the sequence to be typed out," Wymbs said. "They're lying down inside the scanner and they see this image above their eyes. Interestingly, some people reported that the images looked like something out of (the video game) Guitar Hero, and, indeed, it does look a bit like guitar tablature. They would have to type out the 'notes' from left to right, as you normally would when reading music.

"After practicing a sequence for 200 trials, they would get pretty good at it," Wymbs added. "After awhile, the note patterns become familiar. At the start of the training, it would take someone about four and a half seconds to complete each sequence of 12 button presses. By the end of the experiment, the average participant could produce the same sequence in under three seconds."

The researchers' goal was to look at which areas of the brain support the two-part process of chunking. "We feel that the motor process, or the concatenation process as we refer to it in the paper, tends to take over as you continue to practice and continue to learn the sequences," Wymbs said. "That's the one that's tied to the motor output system –– the thing that's actually accomplishing what we set out to do."

With the experience of repeating a motor sequence, such as typing out a phone number, speaking, typing on a computer, or even texting, it becomes more automatic. "With automaticity comes the recruitment of core motor output regions," Wymbs said.

The scientists discovered that the putamen –– a brain region that is critically important to movement –– supports the concatenation process of motor chunking, with robust connectivity to parts of the brain that are intimately tied to the output of skilled motor behavior. On the other hand, they found that cortical regions in the left hemisphere respond more during the parsing process of motor chunking. "These regions have been linked to the manipulation of motor information, which is something that we probably do more of when we just begin to learn the sequences as chunks," Wymbs said.

"Initially, when you're doing one of these 12-element sequences, you want to pause," Wymbs added. "That would evoke more of the parsing mechanism. But then, over time, as you learn a sequence so that it becomes more automatic, and the concatenation process takes over and it wants to put all of these individual elements into a single fluid behavior."

According to Wymbs, the findings could have implications for the study and diagnosis of Parkinson's and other diseases of the motor system that involve action. "We show here that there are two potentially competing systems that lead to the isolation of different systems that both work to allow us to process things efficiently when we're learning," Wymbs said.

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"Psychologists reveals how brain performs 'motor chunking' tasks." June 12th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-psychologists-reveals-brain-motor-chunking.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek

Water Treatment (DEC)

குடிநீரின் Ph இனை மாற்றக் கூடி​ய தொடுதிரை வசதி கொண்ட சாதனம்

நீரினால் ஏற்படும் நோய்களைத் தவிர்ப்பதற்காக சுடவைத்து அருந்துவது வழக்கமாகக் காணப்படுகின்ற அதே வேளை சிலர் குளிர்ந்த நிலையிலும் நீரை பருக விரும்புவார்கள். இதனால் நடுநிலையான Ph கொண்ட நீர் புதிய Ph மாற்றத்திற்கு உட்படுகின்றது. இச்செயற்பாடு காரணமாக குறித்த நீரானது அமிலத் தன்மை கொண்டதாகவோ அல்லது காரத்தன்மை கொண்டதாகவோ மாறலாம். எனவே இப்படியான Ph மாற்றத்தை செயற்கையான முறையில் சமநிலைப்படுத்தக்கூடியதும், ஐ போன்களின் பயனர் இடைமுகத்திற்கு ஒப்பான தொடுதிரை அம்சத்தையும் கொண்ட புதிய கருவி ஒன்று கண்டுபிடிக்கப்பட்டுள்ளது. இதன் பெறுமதியானது 2,795 அமெரிக்க டொலர்கள் என்பது குறிப்பிடத்தக்கது.

Vinayakar

Many poor pregnant women with HIV go untreated for depression

It seems logical that programs to screen and manage depression in pregnant, HIV-positive Medicaid patients should already be in place, but they aren't.

It's the kind of glaring oversight that Rajesh Balkrishnan, associate professor at the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy, said he finds all the time in his research on health disparities. Balkrishnan also has an appointment in the School of Public Health.

"We find that many of these things are such common sense that they should already be in place and being done," said Balkrishnan. "Yet, time and again, we find nothing is being done, though these problems exist."

In a recent paper, Balkrishnan and co-authors found that roughly 28 percent of the low-income, HIV-positive pregnant women reported depression. The numbers could be much higher because the study only captured the women who were being treated for depression.

About 20 percent of the 431 African-American women and 43 percent of the 219 white women in the study reported depression. However, the incidence of depression could be higher for African-American women—twice as many of whom are on Medicaid and pregnant compared to whites, Balkrishnan said.

Previous studies have shown that African-American women are less likely to seek treatment or report depressive symptoms in the first place; are more likely to report physician stereotyping and sometimes a general mistrust of physicians and the medical community; and do not receive the same quality of care as white women.

This means if they do report depression, they may not be taken seriously or receive the best treatments, Balkrishnan said. Physicians also have reported feeling undertrained to communicate with African-American and nonwhite women about depression.

"Because African-American women are less likely to seek treatment for their depression, it makes it even more of an issue," Balkrishnan said. "Basically, the takeaway is that depression is very common in this very vulnerable population. I think we need to make sure depression is screened and treated in this population."

Left untreated, depression can lead to suicide or substance abuse that could harm the mother or the fetus, or both.

More information: The paper, "Racial Differences in Perinatal Depression among HIV-Infected Women," appears online in the journalHealth Outcomes Research in Medicine. Study: http://www.healtho … 2-2/abstract

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"Many poor pregnant women with HIV go untreated for depression." June 12th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-poor-pregnant-women-hiv-untreated.html

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With altered brain chemistry, fear is more easily overcome

Researchers at Duke University and the National Institutes of Health have found a way to calm the fears of anxious mice with a drug that alters their brain chemistry. They've also found that human genetic differences related to the same brain chemistry influence how well people cope with fear and stress.

It's an advance in understanding the brain's fear circuitry that the research team says may hold particular promise for people at risk for anxiety disorders, including those suffering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

"What is most compelling is our ability to translate first from mice to human neurobiology and then all the way out to human behavior," said Ahmad Hariri, a neurobiologist at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. "That kind of translation is going to define the future of psychiatry and neuroscience."

The common thread in their studies is a gene encoding an enzyme called fatty acid amide hydrolase, or FAAH. The enzyme breaks down a natural endocannabinoid chemical in the brain that acts in essentially the same way that Cannabis, aka marijuana, does (hence the name endocannabinoid).

Earlier studies had suggested that blocking the FAAH enzyme could decrease fear and anxiety by increasing endocannabinoids. (That's consistent with the decreased anxiety some experience after smoking marijuana.) In 2009, Hariri's lab found that a common variant in the human FAAH gene leads to decreased enzyme function with affects on the brain's circuitry for processing fear and anxiety.

In the new study, Andrew Holmes' group at the National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse tested the effects of a drug that blocks FAAH activity in fear-prone mice that had also been trained to be fearful through experiences in which they were delivered foot shocks.

Tests for the ability of those mice to get over their bad experiences found that the drug allowed a faster recovery from fear thanks to higher brain endocannabinoid levels. More specifically, the researchers showed that those drug effects traced to the amygdala, a small area of the brain that serves as a critical hub for fear processing and learning.

To test for the human relevance of the findings, Hariri's group went back to the genetic variant they had studied earlier in a group of middle-aged adults. They showed study participants a series of pictures depicting threatening faces while they monitored the activity of their amygdalas using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. They then looked for how the genetic variant affected this activity.

While the activity of the amygdala in all participants decreased over repeated exposures to the pictures, people who carried the version of the FAAH gene associated with lower enzyme function and higher endocannabinoid levels showed a greater decrease in activity. Hariri says that suggests that those individuals may be better able to control and regulate their fear response.

Further confirmation came from an analysis led by Duke's Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt of 1,000 individuals in the Dunedin Study (http://dunedinstudy.otago.ac.nz/), who have been under careful observation since their birth in the 1970s in New Zealand. Consistent with the mouse and brain imaging studies, those New Zealanders carrying the lower-expressing version of the FAAH gene were found to be more likely to keep their cool under stress.

"This study in mice reveals how a drug that boosts one of the brain's naturally occurring endocannaboids enables fear extinction, a process that forms the basis of exposure therapy for PTSD," Holmes said. "It also shows how human gene variation in the same chemical pathways modulates the amygdala's processing of threats and predicts how well people cope with stress."

Studies are now needed to further explore both the connections between FAAH variation and PTSD risk as well as the potential of FAAH inhibition as a novel therapy for fear-related disorders, the researchers say.

More information: "Convergent Translational Evidence of a Role for Anandamide in Amygdala-Mediated Fear Extinction, Threat Processing and Stress-Reactivity," O Gunduz-Cinar, KP MacPherson et al. Molecular Psychiatry, June 12th. doi:10.1038/mp.2012.72

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"With altered brain chemistry, fear is more easily overcome." June 12th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-brain-chemistry-easily.html

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A father's love is one of the greatest influences on personality development

A father's love contributes as much — and sometimes more — to a child's development as does a mother's love. That is one of many findings in a new large-scale analysis of research about the power of parental rejection and acceptance in shaping our personalities as children and into adulthood.

"In our half-century of international research, we've not found any other class of experience that has as strong and consistent effect on personality and personality development as does the experience of rejection, especially by parents in childhood," says Ronald Rohner of the University of Connecticut, co-authored the new study in Personality and Social Psychology Review. "Children and adults everywhere — regardless of differences in race, culture, and gender — tend to respond in exactly the same way when they perceived themselves to be rejected by their caregivers and other attachment figures."

Looking at 36 studies from around the world that together involved more than 10,000 participants, Rohner and co-author Abdul Khaleque found that in response to rejection by their parents, children tend to feel more anxious and insecure, as well as more hostile and aggressive toward others. The pain of rejection — especially when it occurs over a period of time in childhood — tends to linger into adulthood, making it more difficult for adults who were rejected as children to form secure and trusting relationships with their intimate partners. The studies are based on surveys of children and adults about their parents' degree of acceptance or rejection during their childhood, coupled with questions about their personality dispositions.

Moreover, Rohner says, emerging evidence from the past decade of research in psychology and neuroscience is revealing that the same parts of the brain are activated when people feel rejected as are activated when they experience physical pain. "Unlike physical pain, however, people can psychologically re-live the emotional pain of rejection over and over for years," Rohner says.

When it comes to the impact of a father's love versus that of a mother, results from more than 500 studies suggest that while children and adults often experience more or less the same level of acceptance or rejection from each parent, the influence of one parent's rejection — oftentimes the father's — can be much greater than the other's. A 13-nation team of psychologists working on the International Father Acceptance Rejection Project has developed at least one explanation for this difference: that children and young adults are likely to pay more attention to whichever parent they perceive to have higher interpersonal power or prestige. So if a child perceives her father as having higher prestige, he may be more influential in her life than the child's mother. Work is ongoing to better understand this potential relationship.

One important take-home message from all this research, Rohner says, is that fatherly love is critical to a person's development. The importance of a father's love should help motivate many men to become more involved in nurturing child care. Additionally, he says, widespread recognition of the influence of fathers on their children's personality development should help reduce the incidence of "mother blaming" common in schools and clinical setting. "The great emphasis on mothers and mothering in America has led to an inappropriate tendency to blame mothers for children's behavior problems and maladjustment when, in fact, fathers are often more implicated than mothers in the development of problems such as these."

More information: The paper "Transnational Relations Between Perceived Parental Acceptance and Personality Dispositions of Children and Adults: A Meta-Analytic Review" was published in the May 2012 Personality and Social Psychology Review, a journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP).

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"A father's love is one of the greatest influences on personality development." June 12th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-father-greatest-personality.html

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Avatars may help children with social anxiety overcome fears

 
Researchers at the University of Central Florida's Anxiety Disorders Clinic and the Atlanta-based company Virtually Better want to give more children with social anxiety the practice they need to become comfortable in social situations. They have developed a new, one-of-a-kind computer simulation program that enables children to interact with avatars playing the roles of classmates, teachers and a principal. The simulation, designed for children ages 8 to 12, allows clinicians to play the roles of the avatars while the children sit at a computer in a different room and respond to situations they encounter routinely. The children practice greetings, giving and receiving compliments, being assertive and asking and answering questions. Credit: Virtually Better Inc.

A principal standing in the hallway says, "You are one of my favorite students!" In class, a smart girl says, "You are the nicest person in our class!"

Many children would smile and eagerly return those compliments, but some with social anxiety may be too terrified to respond.

Researchers at the University of Central Florida's Anxiety Disorders Clinic and the Atlanta-based company Virtually Better want to give more children with social anxiety the practice they need to become comfortable in social situations. They have developed a new, one-of-a-kind computer simulation program that enables children to interact with avatars playing the roles of classmates, teachers and a principal.

The simulation, designed for children ages 8 to 12, allows clinicians to play the roles of the avatars while the children sit at a computer in a different room and respond to situations they encounter routinely. The children practice greetings, giving and receiving compliments, being assertive and asking and answering questions.

"These kids come in and say, 'I don't know how to make a friend,'" said Deborah Beidel, director of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic and a psychology professor at UCF. "We have to teach them the skills that most people learn from being around other people."

The National Institute of Mental Health, part of the National Institutes of Health, provided a $500,000 grant to fund the development of the software and a 12-week study that will begin this summer. The study will involve 30 Central Florida children ages 8 to 12.

Many children are nervous and slow to warm up in new social situations, but those with social anxiety disorders have severe distress that doesn't go away, Beidel said.

"If a fear is so severe that it prevents a child from doing something he or she should be doing, such as going to school, playing on a sports team, being in a dance recital, going to birthday parties or making friends, then a parent should call a mental health professional," she said.

Under Beidel's leadership, the UCF Anxiety Disorders Clinic has treated children with anxiety disorders for five years. The clinic offers what Beidel calls the "gold standard" of treatments. Children with anxiety disorders are paired with socially comfortable peers for outings to places such as bowling alleys, restaurants and miniature golf courses.

The new study will give parents multiple treatment options at UCF. But parents in most communities aren't so fortunate. Many clinicians who treat children don't have the time or resources to recruit socially comfortable children and organize regular outings. Guiding clients through a simulation in the office may be the only feasible solution for them.

The simulation features a realistic school setting, designed with the help of elementary school teachers. The pre-programmed responses of the avatar classmates – which include a cool girl, a smart girl and a bully -- were recorded by children to ensure the language reflects how they talk.

"The most important thing is that this was designed by clinicians with a very specific intention to help people get better. That's the big difference between this and a game, and there is nothing like this on the market," said Josh Spitalnick, clinical psychologist and director of research and clinical services at Virtually Better, an Atlanta-based company bringing interactive technologies to behavioral healthcare for treatment and training.

The six characters and the varying levels of difficulty in the simulation allow clinicians to design scenarios appropriate for their patients. More challenging scenarios include dealing with a bully who is demanding that a child give up some of her lunch money.

If the initial trial goes well, researchers hope to conduct a yearlong trial with more children. If that is successful, the simulation could then become available to clinicians. The program eventually could be expanded to include other settings, such as playgrounds, and to serve other children who need help improving social skills.

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"Avatars may help children with social anxiety overcome fears." June 12th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-avatars-children-social-anxiety.html

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Losing money, emotions and evolution

Financial loss can lead to irrational behavior. Now, research by Weizmann Institute scientists reveals that the effects of loss go even deeper: Loss can compromise our early perception and interfere with our grasp of the true situation. The findings, which recently appeared in the Journal of Neuroscience, may also have implications for our understanding of the neurological mechanisms underlying post-traumatic stress disorder.

The experiment was conducted by Dr. Rony Paz and research student Offir Laufer of the Neurobiology Department. Subjects underwent a learning process based on classic conditioning and involving money. They were asked to listen to a series of tones composed of three different notes. After hearing one note, they were told they had earned a certain sum; after a second note, they were informed that they had lost some of their money; and a third note was followed by the message that their bankroll would remain the same. According to the findings, when a note was tied to gain, or at least to no loss, the subjects improved over time in a learned task – distinguishing that note from other, similar notes. But when they heard the "lose money" note, they actually got worse at telling one from the other.

Functional MRI (fMRI) scans of the brain areas involved in the learning process revealed an emotional aspect: The amygdala, which is tied to emotions and reward, was strongly involved. The researchers also noted activity in another area in the front of the brain, which functions to moderate the emotional response. Subjects who exhibited stronger activity in this area showed less of a drop in their abilities to distinguish between tones.

Paz: "The evolutionary origins of that blurring of our ability to discriminate are positive: If the best response to the growl of a lion is to run quickly, it would be counterproductive to distinguish between different pitches of growl. Any similar sound should make us flee without thinking. Unfortunately, that same blurring mechanism can be activated today in stress-inducing situations that are not life-threatening – like losing money – and this can harm us."

That harm may even be quite serious: For instance, it may be involved in post-traumatic stress disorder. If sufferers are unable to distinguish between a stimulus that should cause a panic response and similar, but non-threatening, stimuli, they may experience strong emotional reactions in inappropriate situations.

This perceptional blurring may even expand over time to encompass a larger range of stimuli. Paz intends to investigate this possibility in future research.

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"Losing money, emotions and evolution." June 12th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-money-emotions-evolution.html

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Early menopause linked to increased risk of brain aneurysm

The younger a woman is when she goes through the menopause, the greater may be her risk of having a brain (cerebral) aneurysm, suggests research published online first in the Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery.

A cerebral aneurysm refers to an abnormal bulging of one of the arteries in the brain, which is often only discovered when it ruptures, causing a potentially fatal and/or disabling bleed.

Women are more prone to cerebral aneurysms than men. And fluctuations in the female hormone oestrogen have been implicated in the development of aneurysms, the incidence of which, along with cardiovascular disease, rises sharply after menopause.

The authors base their findings on 76 postmenopausal women who had had a cerebral aneurysm, which, in most cases had not ruptured, and who were subsequently quizzed about their medical and reproductive histories.

Conditions, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol and an underactive thyroid gland (hypothyroidism) can all boost the risk of a stroke, while the number of pregnancies and the age at which periods start and stop determine lifetime exposure to oestrogen.

This information was then compared with that taken from more than 4,500 women participants of the 2002 National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Contraceptive and Reproductive Experiences Study, and matched for age and educational attainment.

The average age at which women in both groups had started the menopause was similar, and analysis of the results showed that later menopause and use of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) protected against the risk of a cerebral aneurysm, lessening the risk by 21% and 77%, respectively.

Premature menopause - before the age of 40 - had occurred in one in four (26%) of the women who had had an aneurysm compared with around one in five (19%) of those in the comparison group.

And each successive four year increase in the age at which a woman went through the menopause lessened the likelihood of a cerebral aneurysm by around 21%.

Smoking did not seem to be linked to an increase in risk, while alcohol consumption was of borderline significance.

The outcomes for ruptured cerebral aneurysms are poor, with around one in two people who have one likely to die. One in 10 people die before they reach hospital and of those who survive, one in five is severely disabled, say the authors, so finding a potential marker may help to detect the condition earlier.

"Loss of oestrogen earlier in a woman's life may contribute to the [development] of cerebral aneurysm," conclude the authors, adding that HRT may protect against this. And they suggest: "These data may identify a risk factor for [the development of this condition] and also a potential target for future therapies."

More information: Younger age of menopause in women with cerebral aneurysms Online First doi: 10.1136/neurointsurg-2012-010364

Provided by British Medical Journal

"Early menopause linked to increased risk of brain aneurysm." June 11th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-early-menopause-linked-brain-aneurysm.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

Statistics show people more likely to die on their birthday

Image: Wikipedia

(Phys.org) -- Researchers studying mortality rates on over two million people over a forty year time span have found that statistically speaking, people are more likely to die on their birthday, than any other day of the year. Bumping the numbers are suicides by men, who apparently find the ultimate milestone a little too hard to bear. But those deaths aren’t enough to account for the overall fourteen percent increased likelihood that any given person will die on the same day of the years as the day they were born compared to any other day of the year.

Because the research is still so new, it’s hard to say why people are more likely to die on their birthday, but it seems likely that it’s due to the stress of facing the fact that they have grown another year older, which for many is a time for looking over a lifetime and comparing time left with aspirations, goals and dreams. Such stress can of course lead to heart attacks, strokes and even in some cases accidents as those marking the passage of another year may attempt to do things to prove they are still as capable as when they were younger, things that can lead to an untimely death, e.g. sky diving, mountain climbing, etc. Bolstering this theory is the fact that in the study, the team found that dying on a birthday was most common for people over the age of 60.

The study, led by Vladeta Ajdacic-Gross, has led to a paper being published in the Annals of Epidemiology, in which the researchers say that they found their numbers by studying almost two and a half million deaths over the period 1969 to 2008. They say that people on average have an almost twenty percent more of a chance of dying on their birthday from cardiovascular disease, than any other day, and the number is slightly higher for strokes. Interestingly, they also found that there is even a slightly greater risk of dying (10.8) on that special day from cancer.

But the number that really stands out, of course, is the 34.9% greater chance of dying by suicide by men on their birthdays. A sobering statistic if ever there was one. Women on the other hand showed no statistical increase in suicides on their birthdays, which might indicate that women don’t take getting older so hard, or are more concerned about those they will be leaving behind.

The research team says that thus far, some have suggested higher death rates on birthdays is likely attributable to those trying to hang-on for whatever reasons, to reach their birthday. They say their research doesn’t agree with such speculation however and that added stress on birthdays is most likely the culprit, noting that average alcohol consumption goes up on birthdays as well.

More information: Death has a preference for birthdays—an analysis of death time series,doi:10.1016/j.annepidem.2012.04.016

Abstract  
Purpose 
To examine the relation between the day of death and the day of birth. To determine whether the “death postponement” hypothesis or the “anniversary reaction” hypothesis is more appropriate. 
Methods 
We analyzed data from the Swiss mortality statistics 1969–2008. Deaths below the age of 1 were excluded from the analysis. Time series of frequencies of deaths were based on differences between the day of death and the day of birth. We applied autoregressive integrated moving average modeling with intervention effects both in straight and reverse time series. 
Results 
The overall death excess on the day of birth was 13.8%, mainly because of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases (more in women than in men) as well as suicides and accidents (in particular, falls in men). Unexpectedly, we also found an excess of deaths in cancers. An (negative) aftereffect was found in cancers, and (positive) anticipatory effects were found in falls in men. 
Conclusions 
In general, birthdays do not evoke a postponement mechanism but appear to end up in a lethal way more frequently than expected (“anniversary reaction”).

© 2012 Phys.Org

"Statistics show people more likely to die on their birthday." June 12th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-statistics-people-die-birthday.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

One Radio to Rule Them All

A new cognitive radio demonstrates innovations that enable smarter use of wireless spectrum.

• BY DAVID TALBOT

Audio »

Radio innovation: This cognitive radio can sense and rapidly switch between the widest-ever range of frequencies, at record speeds, while sending the equivalent of 20 HD movies at once.
Radio Technology Systems

With a rising tide of smart-phone data threatening to drown the airwaves, a White House advisory panel is poised to suggest that wireless carriers and research labs ramp up efforts to use computing to far more efficiently tap spectrum.

This will require, among other things, so-called "cognitive" radios, which sense unused radio bands and can intelligently switch heavy data loads between different frequencies without any interruption.

A New Jersey startup has come out with the fastest cognitive radio yet. It works on the widest possible range of spectrum, and is part of a crop of improved technologies that are crucial to bringing the technology to market and avert network overload.

The gadget in question, called Cogradio, and made by Radio Technology Systems of Ocean City, New Jersey, can switch at fast-enough rates to be imperceptible for, say, a video viewer; as well as in sufficient quantities that any research done on it, or software written for it, will be applicable in future real-world commercial devices.

"It's the most usable and versatile wideband radio the research community has ever had access to," says Dipankar Raychaudhuri, director of the Winlab, the wireless research lab at Rutgers University, where the technology was codeveloped. Existing models, he says, can't switch fast enough, and have limited spectrum range and data-carrying capacity. "Today, it is the best available experimental cognitive radio, and this is crucial because the whole community is gearing up" to test and deploy such technology.

The device is the first that can operate from 100 megahertz to 7.5 gigahertz, meaning all the way from AM and FM bands though television and Wi-Fi and cellular frequencies. It can also sense available spectrum and switch between frequencies at around at 50 microseconds, and in some cases as little as one microsecond. This is a record speed, according to Peter Woliansky, a Bell Labs alumnus who made the gadget and founded the startup behind it.  

Finally, it can handle 400 megabits per second of data—about eight times what the best home Wi-Fi can do. With this kind of rate—and since it can send on multiple frequencies at once—it could conceivably dispatch 20 HD movies at the same time.

Ultimately, intelligent commercial wireless technologies using such features could allow for more services. And as new and disruptive wireless technologies enter a field now dominated by a few major carriers, it could create competition that lowers costs for average consumers. 

The gadget costs close to $6,000, but that's cheaper than existing models. As prices keep coming down, such gadgets become available to wider swaths of code writers, not just well-heeled labs. "For people studying wireless technology, building the radio and getting it to work is ridiculously hard," says Woliansky.

One of Cogradio's jobs will be to serve as the test bed for the National Science Foundation's research efforts to build a mobile-centric Internet, in which radio communications and smart phones are seen as the major delivery vehicle for Internet access, a project headquartered at Raychaudhuri's lab. 

Cogradio will also be used in one of the first outdoor tests of cognitive radios, underway at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where its software was developed. (Cognitive radio research has mainly been conducted in shielded labs because of the potential for dangerous interference, but the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has started granting outdoor permits to promote research.)

And researchers at Virginia Tech will use the gadgets to develop next-gen high-speed broadband police and fire and other emergency radios that include video and Internet access.

Cognitive radio technology could enable a range of new services. For example, it could route cellular calls to Wi-Fi signals—something that is done today in small wireless base stations called small cells—but also avoid having to use fiber to send the signal out over the Internet, and instead use available television spectrum in the 400 megahertz range.

With all such projects, the big challenge is rapid switching speed and high bandwidth—all things that pound on radio hardware. "You want to jump around in radio spectrum as fast as possible and as far as possible, and when you land somewhere, you want to grab as much spectrum as you can, and pump it in and out of the radio, and these are actually very challenging to do," says Chip Elliot, project director for the NSF's cognitive radio project at BBNin Cambridge, Massachusetts. "This radio is perfect for things like that."

Someday, future smart phones and other gadgets will incorporate portions of such technologies. "While this is an important milestone for realizing high-performance and usable cognitive radios, much more work needs to be done by industry on chip design, interfaces, and much else," Raychaudhuri says. Other companies and research groups are working on developing better and cheaper cognitive radios. 

The field is heating up as demands on mobile networks rise. Bell Labs estimates that mobile data traffic will grow by a factor of 25 by 2016, and Cisco says it will grow 18-fold by that year. With the FCC making clear that existing spectrum will run out by next year, new technologies will be needed. 

The forthcoming White House report is being co-authored by Google chairman Eric Schmidt and others, including Craig Mundie, the chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft. FCC chairman Julius Genachowski has also been pushing industry to develop intelligent spectrum-sharing technologies.