Health & WellnessS


Health

US: Crews to clean up mystery mercury

Paula Horton
Tri-City Herald
Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:55 UTC
A mercury mystery has prompted Richland, Washington fire crews and state and federal officials to block off a four-foot area in a yard on Gage Boulevard.

The state Department of Health, state Department of Ecology and the federal Environmental Protection Agency will meet today to determine how to clean up the mercury spill, said Richland fire Battalion Chief Todd Ricci.

The mercury, which looks like thick water or aluminum foil in a liquid state, was found around 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in a yard behind 631 Gage Blvd. The yard is between two businesses and an apartment complex.

About an ounce of mercury, equal to about one or two tablespoons, was found on the ground.
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The Improvising Brain: Getting to the Neural Roots of the Musical Riff

Lesley Bannatyne
PhysOrg
Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:12 UTC
Aaron Berkowi
© UnknownAaron Berkowitz at the keyboard.
What's involved when a musician sits down at the piano and plays flurries of notes in a free fall, without a score, without knowing much about what will happen moment to moment? Is it possible to find the sources of a creative process? Is it possible to determine how improvisation occurs?

Aaron Berkowitz, a Harvard graduate student in ethnomusicology, and Daniel Ansari, a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, recently collaborated on an experiment designed to study brain activity during musical improvisation in order to get closer to answering these questions. The Harvard Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative awarded the collaborators a grant to look at musical improvisation in trained musicians, utilizing brain scans done with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology. A resulting paper, "Generation of Novel Motor Sequences: The Neural Correlates of Musical Improvisation," was published in the journal NeuroImage, and received the journal's 2008 Editor's Choice Award in Systems Neuroscience.

"There are essentially two basic questions in music cognition," says Berkowitz. "First, how does the brain 'do' music? That is, what parts of the brain are involved, and how do they interact, when people listen to or perform music? Second, what can studying music tell us about the brain? When music is heard or played, the brain calls on many more general cognitive processes, for example, perceiving patterns in sounds or converting visual information [in a musical score] to auditory or motor information."
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How Teenagers Find Themselves

Charles Q. Choi
Scientific American
Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:29 UTC
The development of a key brain area leads to self-consciousness.

Teens are notoriously self-conscious. Now brain-imaging experiments are revealing how this adolescent predilection might be the result of changes in brain anatomy linked with the self, and the findings may hint at how the sense of self develops in the brain.

One way we build a sense of self is by reflecting on how others perceive us, a concept psychologists have dubbed "the looking-glass self." To see how teenagers reacted to what other people thought of them, researchers asked adolescent girls ages 10 to 18 to imagine a variety of scenarios involving onlookers that were designed to evoke social emotions such as guilt or embarrassment - for example, "You were quietly picking your nose, but your friend saw you."

Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of University College London and her colleagues found that when compared with scenarios describing basic emotions that did not involve the opinions of others, such as fear and disgust, girls who thought about onlookers' opinions engaged a brain region known as the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) more during social emotional scenarios than adult women did. This area is one of the last regions to develop before adulthood, and it is known to activate in adults when they think about themselves, about other people and even about the personality traits of animals.
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The Origins of Suicidal Brains

Melinda Wenner
Scientific American
Fri, 06 Feb 2009 13:00 UTC
Certain life experiences may lead to brain changes in suicide victims.

Suicide rates in the U.S. have increased for the first time in a decade, according to a report published in October by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. But what leads a person to commit suicide? Three new studies suggest that the neurological changes in a brain of a suicide victim differ markedly from those in other brains and that these changes develop over the course of a lifetime.

The most common pathway to suicide is through depression, which afflicts two thirds of all people who kill themselves. In October researchers in Canada found that the depressed who commit suicide have an abnormal distribution of receptors for the chemical GABA, one of the most abundant neurotransmitters in the brain. GABA's role is to inhibit neuron activity. "If you think about the gas pedal and brakes on a car, GABA is the brakes," explains co-author Michael Poulter, a neuroscientist at the Robarts Research Institute at the University of Western Ontario.
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Nuke

Cell phone use linked to brain tumors - Russian scientist


Russian News & Information Agency Novosti
Fri, 06 Feb 2009 12:42 UTC
Moscow - A leading Russian scientist said on Thursday, citing a Swedish study, that the use of cell phones from an early age could lead to brain tumors.

"We have a very cautious attitude as regards children, our future generation. There is data suggesting that brain tumors could develop," Yury Grigoryev, a leading scientist at the Burnazyan medical biophysical center, told a RIA Novosti press conference.

Grigoryev cited Swedish research data, which he said showed that if a child uses a cell phone from 8 to 12, then the risk of developing a brain tumor by the age of 21 increases fivefold.
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People

Young teens really are shortsighted, but don't blame impulsivity


Society for Research in Child Development
Fri, 06 Feb 2009 06:57 UTC
According to popular stereotype, young teenagers are shortsighted, leaving them prone to poor judgment and risky decision-making when it comes to issues like taking drugs and having sex. Now a new study confirms that teens 16 and younger do think about the future less than adults, but explains that the reasons may have less to do with impulsivity and more to do with a desire to do something exciting.

The study, by scientists at Temple University, the University of California, Los Angeles, Georgetown University, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Colorado, is published in the January/February 2009 issue of the journal Child Development.
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Display

Playing violent video games has risks: study

Joene Hendry
Reuters
Fri, 06 Feb 2009 01:06 UTC
New York - Among young college students, the frequency and type of video games played appears to parallel risky drug and alcohol use, poorer personal relationships, and low levels of self-esteem, researchers report.

"This does not mean that every person who plays video games has low self-worth, or that playing video games will lead to drug use," Laura M. Padilla-Walker told Reuters Health.

Rather, these findings simply indicate video gaming may cluster with a number of negative outcomes, "at least for some segment of the population," said Padilla-Walker, an associate professor at the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

She and colleagues examined the previous 12-months' frequency and type of video game and Internet use reported by 500 female and 313 male undergraduate college students in the United States.

The students, who were 20 years old on average and mostly received course credit for their study participation, also recounted their drug and alcohol use, perceptions of self-worth and social acceptance, and the quality of their relationships with friends and family.
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Health

Study: 9/11 lung problems persist years later

Amy Westfeldt
Associated Press
Thu, 05 Feb 2009 23:27 UTC
Researchers tracking Sept. 11 responders who became ill after working at the World Trade Center site found many had lung problems years later in a study the authors said proves persistent illness in people exposed to toxic dust caused by the twin towers' collapse.

The study by the Mount Sinai Medical Center's medical monitoring program examined more than 3,000 responders between 2004 and 2007, repeating exams conducted between the middle of 2002 and 2004. Slightly more than 24 percent of the patients had abnormal lung function, the study found. In the earlier examinations, about 28 percent of the patients had similar results.

"We know people we are following are still sick. It's confirming what we've been seeing clinically," said Dr. Jacqueline M. Moline, who treats ailing responders and co-authored the study.
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Attention

India: 14 people die of mysterious disease in Tripura


Indo-Asian News Service
Thu, 05 Feb 2009 23:20 UTC
Agartala - At least 14 people died and several more were taken ill after a mysterious disease struck Tripura in the past one week, officials said here Thursday. "After getting reports of death due to some mysterious disease during the past one week, we have sent medical teams to the affected Longtharai valley areas of Dhalai district to find out the cause," a Tripura health department spokesman said.
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Ambulance

Injured man dies after rejection by 14 hospitals

Mari Yamaguchi
Yahoo News
Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:56 UTC
Tokyo - After getting struck by a motorcycle, an elderly Japanese man with head injuries waited in an ambulance as paramedics phoned 14 hospitals, each refusing to treat him.

He died 90 minutes later at the facility that finally relented - one of thousands of victims repeatedly turned away in recent years by understaffed and overcrowded hospitals in Japan.

Paramedics reached the accident scene within minutes after the man on a bicycle collided with a motorcycle in the western city of Itami. But 14 hospitals refused to admit the 69-year-old citing a lack of specialists, equipment and staff, according to Mitsuhisa Ikemoto, a fire department official.
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