Dogs, humans affected by OCD have similar brain abnormalities

June 4, 2013 ? Another piece of the puzzle to better understand and treat obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) has fallen into place with the publication of new research that shows that the structural brain abnormalities of Doberman pinschers afflicted with canine compulsive disorder (CCD) are similar to those of humans with OCD. The research suggests that further study of anxiety disorders in dogs may help find new therapies for OCD and similar conditions in humans.

Published online in advance of print on April 13 in Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry, the findings are a collaboration between veterinarians at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University and researchers at the McLean Imaging Center at McLean Hospital, in Belmont, Mass.

The causes of OCD, which affects about 2 percent of the population, are not well understood and the disorder often goes untreated or undiagnosed for decades. People with OCD often exhibit repetitive behaviors or persistent thoughts that are time consuming and interfere with daily routines. Dogs with CCD engage in repetitious and destructive behaviors such as flank- and blanket-sucking, tail chasing, and chewing. However, both OCD and CCD often respond to similar treatments.

"While the study sample was small and further research is needed, the results further validate that dogs with CCD can provide insight and understanding into anxiety disorders that affect people. Dogs exhibit the same behavioral characteristics, respond to the same medication, have a genetic basis to the disorder, and we now know have the same structural brain abnormalities as people with OCD," said Nicholas Dodman, BVMS, DACVB, professor of clinical sciences at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University.

The Tufts/McLean research team, led by Niwako Ogata, BVSc, Ph.D., who was a behavior researcher at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and is now an assistant professor of animal behavior at Purdue University College of Veterinary Medicine, examined a sample of 16 Dobermans. Comparing MRI brain images of eight Dobermans with CCD to the control group, Ogata found that the CCD group had higher total brain and gray matter volumes, lower gray matter densities in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and right anterior insula, and higher fractional anisotropy in the splenium of the corpus callosum (the degree of which correlated with the severity of the behavioral traits). These findings are consistent with those reported in humans with OCD.

"It has been very gratifying to me to use our imaging techniques developed to diagnose human brain disorders to better understand the biological basis for anxiety/compulsive disorders in dogs, which may lead to better treatments for dogs and humans with these disorders," said Marc J. Kaufman, Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the McLean Hospital Translational Imaging Laboratory.

"Canines that misbehave are often labeled as 'bad dogs' but it is important to detect and show the biological basis for certain behaviors," said Ogata. "Evidence-based science is a much better approach to understanding a dog's behavior."

The study builds on existing research to better understand the etiology of compulsive disorders in animals such as CCD, which affects Doberman pinschers and other canine breeds. In 2010, researchers from the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology identified a genetic locus on canine chromosome 7 that coincides with an increased risk of OCD.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/TWlhdQfPn8A/130604093830.htm

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Seeing our errors keeps us on our toes

June 4, 2013 ? If people are unable to perceive their own errors as they complete a routine, simple task, their skill will decline over time, Johns Hopkins researchers have found -- but not for the reasons scientists assumed. The researchers report that the human brain does not passively forget our good techniques, but chooses to put aside what it has learned.

The term "motor memories" may conjure images of childhood road trips, but in fact it refers to the reason why we're able to smoothly perform everyday physical tasks. The amount of force needed to lift an empty glass versus a full one, to shut a car door or pick up a box, even to move a limb accurately from one place to another -- all of these are motor memories.

In a report published May 1 in the The Journal of Neuroscience, the Johns Hopkins researchers describe their latest efforts to study how motor memories are formed and lost by focusing on one well-known experimental phenomenon: When people learn to do a task well, but are asked to keep doing it while receiving deliberately misleading feedback indicating that their performance is perfect every time, their actual performance will gradually get worse.

It had been assumed that the decline was due to the decay of memories in the absence of reinforcement, says Reza Shadmehr, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

But when Shadmehr and graduate student Pavan Vaswani asked volunteers to learn a simple task with a few twists designed to deliberately manipulate the brain's motor control system, they learned otherwise.

The volunteers were told to push a joystick quickly toward a red dot on a computer screen. But the volunteers' hands were placed under the screen, where they couldn't see them, and their starting point was shown on the screen as a blue dot. In addition, as the volunteers moved the joystick toward the red dot, a force within the contraption would suddenly push the joystick to the left. So the volunteers practiced until they could move the blue dot straight to and past the red dot by compensating for the leftward push with pressure toward the right.

Once the volunteers had mastered the task, Shadmehr and Vaswani changed it up without their knowing. For one group of 24 volunteers, they added a stiff spring to the joystick device that would guide the user straight to the target, but would also measure the amount of rightward force the volunteers were applying. To the volunteers, it looked as though they were now doing the task perfectly every time, and, as in previous experiments, they gradually stopped pushing to the right, apparently "forgetting" what they had learned.

For a different group of 19 volunteers, though, the researchers not only added the spring, but also changed the feedback on the screen not to reflect what was actually happening during each task, but to show feedback similar to reruns of earlier efforts. The volunteers weren't seeing the errors they were actually making, but feedback that looked convincingly like errors they might have made. This group continued to do the task as they'd learned, applying the right amount of force to the joystick hundreds of times.

This shows that decline in technique "isn't just a process of forgetting," says Vaswani. "Your brain notices that you are doing this task perfectly, and you see what you can do differently."

Adds Shadmehr, "Our results correct a component of knowledge we thought we understood. Neuroscientists thought decay was intrinsic to motor memories, but in fact it's not decay -- it's selection."

The study was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (grant number NS078311) and the Human Frontier Science Program.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/RggCWIqZFrE/130604153331.htm

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Holy Crap, This Crazy New Wireless Plan Is Totally Free

We've been seeing a whole bunch of hungry little alternative service providers trying to cut into the big boys with low, low prices, but how about free? FreedomPop, the folks behind hotspots and routers that come with free data, just announced the first free wireless service plan. No, really. Free minutes, free texts, and free data. For free. Freeeee.

People who sign up for the new service will receive 200 free anytime minutes (FreedomPop to FreedomPop calls are unlimited), 500MB of free 4G data, and unlimited free texts every month. If they go over, users can pick up unlimited minutes for any given month for $10. Data's just slightly more complicated: it's $.02 per additional MB ($20 per GB) if the user has a free plan, or $.01 per additional MB if the user opts for a $18 for 2GB or a $29 for 4GB monthly plan.

Of course there are a couple of catches. To get on FreedomPop's plan, you'll have to buy a special (doubtlessly unsubsidized) phone loaded with custom OS-level software up front. And that's bound to cost you a few hundred dollars. FreedomPop says the stable will include "select, popular Android handsets," but if other, similar MVNOs are any indication, this probably means aging LG devices (like the trusty Optimus). We're hoping against hope for something a little more enticing than that.

Then of course there's the network. FreedomPop will be hopping on Sprint's fledgling LTE network eventually, but until then its WiMax and CDMA, and WiMax is preeeeeeeeetty spotty. CDMA, on the other hand, is sluggish but ubiquitous.

The service has only just been announced and won't actually but up and running until sometime later this summer, but users can sign up for early access on FreedomPop's website. Discount providers have yet to really unseat major carriers so far, but sliding that monthly cost all the way down to free is pretty insane. Here's to hoping there's no bad news hiding in the details, because this looks like it could be one hell of a shakeup.

Image credit: Shutterstock/Christian Delbert

Source: http://gizmodo.com/holy-crap-this-crazy-new-wireless-plan-is-totally-free-511301241

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Is There a Limit to How Tall a Tree Can Grow?

It seems like the towering Redwoods and Sequoias of the Pacific Northwest could grow to the edge of space, had they enough time. But it turns out that's not the case. Like with the enormous skyscrapers man has built, trees can only grow so high because of the logistics imposed by gravity.

In theory, we could build a skyscraper that's over a mile tall. But it would take so many elevators to move humans to the highest floors that there would be little usable space left, and with no space for businesses, it simply wouldn't be a profitable venture. And similar issues with gravity limit tree growth. Instead of moving humans, however, they have to move water to their highest branches. And with every foot this gets increasingly difficult, resulting in smaller and smaller leaves on its highest branches that are less effective at evaporation which is what pulls the water up the trunk.

So, while the world's tallest tree measures in at an impressive 377 feet, researchers believe that in ideal conditions with enough room to spread out their roots, a Redwood or Sequoia could reach a mind boggling 400 to 426 feet.

Source: http://gizmodo.com/is-there-a-limit-to-how-tall-a-tree-can-grow-510997678

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Keen On? Stephen Wolfram: Confessions Of The Most Quantified Person On The Planet

Stephen Wolfram, the founder and CEO of the software company Wolfram Research, may well be the smartest and most interesting guy in tech. A PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech at the age of twenty, the youngest ever recipient of the MacArthur "genius" fellowship, the inventor of both Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram's life has been dedicated to the capture and organization of all the knowledge in the world.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/W_ROSuPv7hI/

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Lawmakers seek better cooperation from Russia after Boston bombs

By Steve Gutterman

MOSCOW (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers on a mission to Russia said on Sunday they had found no evidence that an American intelligence error enabled the Boston bombings, but that closer cooperation between Washington and Moscow might have helped to thwart the attack.

U.S. investigators suspect two brothers who emigrated from Russia, one since shot dead by police, staged the attack at the Boston Marathon on April 15 that killed three people and wounded 264 others.

Two congressmen on the fact-finding visit said the countries - former Cold War foes now at odds over issues from Syria to President Vladimir Putin's treatment of opponents - had to work together better against a shared threat from Islamist militants.

"Radical Islam is at our throat in the United States, and it is at the throat of the Russian people," said Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher, who led a group of six U.S. lawmakers on the weeklong visit to Russia.

President Barack Obama's administration and U.S. intelligence have faced scrutiny over claims they failed to see the danger from the suspects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, ethnic Chechens who emigrated with their parents a decade ago.

"We've been asked a number of times, do we believe that the Boston Marathon massacre could have been thwarted - could it have been prevented? And the answer is, there's nothing specific that could have been done that we can point to that, had it been done differently, would have prevented this," Rohrabacher said.

"But we can say that had we had a much higher level of cooperation all along, so that the whole situation would have been different, I believe that would have been one of the type of things we could have thwarted," he told a news conference at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

The U.S. lawmakers met Federal Security Service (FSB) officials and visited the North Caucasus town of Beslan, scene of a deadly 2004 school siege some Russians call their country's equivalent of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

"The Cold War is over now, so we have to make friends with the Russians and recognize there is a mutual threat to both of us," Rohrabacher told the news conference. It was attended by U.S. action film actor Steven Seagal, a friend of Putin's who helped arrange the representatives' meetings in Russia.

U.S. officials have said Russian security services asked the FBI about Tamerlan Tsarnaev in early 2011 out of concern he had embraced radical Islam and would travel to Russia to join insurgents.

FBI agents interviewed him in Massachusetts in 2011 but said they found no serious reason for alarm. U.S. officials say Russia's FSB security services later failed to respond to the FBI's requests for more information about him.

SECURITY AND RIGHTS

Reading from notes from a briefing with FSB officials, Republican Representative Steve King said they indicated the FSB had told the FBI that Tamerlan was "very close to radical Islam and very religious".

"I suspect that he was raised to do what he did," King said of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who died in an April 19 shootout with police. Dzhokhar, 19, is in a Massachusetts prison hospital awaiting trial on charges that can carry the death penalty.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev travelled to Russia early in 2012 and spent six months in Dagestan, a North Caucasus province that is now at the centre of the Islamist insurgency rooted in two post-Soviet separatist wars in neighboring Chechnya.

The FBI did not tell the FSB that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had returned to Russia, the congressmen said. Representative Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat, said it appeared the FSB had been unaware that he was in Dagestan.

Rohrabacher, asked whether U.S. authorities reacted appropriately to the information conveyed by Russia, said: "I think that given the circumstances and the level of cooperation, I would say they did - but I would also say that the level of cooperation was unacceptable."

He said some in the U.S. intelligence community are "still playing Cold War games" and that Putin is overly demonized.

The Kremlin has called for closer intelligence cooperation after the Boston bombings and high-level meetings have been held, but Russia's expulsion of an alleged U.S. spy recruiter last month underscored persistent tension.

U.S. officials have said they consider counterterrorism information from the North Caucasus suspect because Russian "watch lists" often include dissidents and rights activists mixed together with militants.

Cohen said the United States must not give Russia a free ride on human rights, an issue that has clouded relations since Putin started his third Kremlin term last year.

He disagreed with Rohrabacher and King over the jailing of members of punk band Pussy Riot for a protest in a church, calling the trial unfair and the two-year sentences excessive.

"We have a role in the world and we need to continue to observe that role as a place of ... due process and justice and fairness," Cohen said of the United States.

(Editing by David Stamp and Christopher Wilson)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/lawmakers-seek-better-cooperation-russia-boston-bombs-031105143.html

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