Tame Brains - Stem Cells - Cognitive Chickens - Genius Genes?

[Marc Breedlove]

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/350422/description/Tamed_fox_shows_domestications_effects_on_the_brain

Tamed fox shows domestication's effects on the brain

By Tina Hesman Saey

COLD SPRING HARBOR, N.Y. – Taming foxes changes
not only the animals’ behavior but also their
brain chemistry, a new study shows.

The finding could shed light on how the foxes’
genetic cousins, wolves, morphed into man’s best
friend. Lenore Pipes of Cornell University
presented the results May 10 at the Biology of Genomes conference.

The foxes she worked with come from a long line
started in 1959 when a Russian scientist named
Dmitry Belyaev attempted to recreate dog
domestication, but using foxes instead of wolves.
He bred silver foxes (Vulpes vulpes), which are
actually a type of red fox with white-tipped
black fur. Belyaev and his colleagues selected
the least aggressive animals they could find at
local fox farms and bred them. Each generation,
the scientists picked the tamest animals to mate,
creating ever friendlier foxes. Now, more than 50
years later, the foxes act like dogs, wagging
their tails, jumping with excitement and leaping
into the arms of caregivers for caresses.

At the same time, the scientists also bred the
most aggressive foxes on the farms. The
descendents of those foxes crouch, flatten their
ears, growl, bare their teeth and lunge at people who approach their cages.

The foxes’ tame and aggressive behaviors are
rooted in genetics, but scientists have not found
DNA changes that account for the differences.
Rather than search for changes in genes
themselves, Pipes and her colleagues took an
indirect approach, looking for differences in the
activity of genes in the foxes’ brains.

© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013
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http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/05/new-fossils-provide-earliest-gli.html?ref=hp

Fossils May Pinpoint Critical Split Between Apes and Monkeys

by Michael Balter

From the human perspective, few events in
evolution were more momentous than the split
among primates that led to apes (large, tailless
primates such as today's gorillas, chimpanzees,
and humans) and Old World monkeys (which today
include baboons and macaques). DNA studies of
living primates have estimated that the rift took
place between 25 million and 30 million years
ago, but the earliest known fossils of both
groups date no earlier than 20 million years ago.
Now, a team working in Tanzania has found teeth
and partial jaws from what it thinks are
25-million-year-old ancestors of both groups. If
the interpretations hold up, the finds would
reconcile the molecular and fossil evidence and
possibly provide insights into what led to the split in the first place.

Researchers have long been frustrated by a
paucity of fossils from this key period in
evolution, which sits at the borderline between
two major geological epochs: the Miocene (about
23 million to 5 million years ago) and the
Oligocene (about 34 million to 23 million years
ago). The earliest known fossils of early apes
and Old World monkeys date from the early Miocene
and have been found in just a handful of sites in
Kenya, Uganda, and North Africa. Meanwhile,
molecular studies of existing primates
consistently suggest that these two groups arose
during the Oligocene, leading scientists to
wonder whether the molecular dates are wrong or
if paleontologists have been looking in the wrong places.

For more than a decade, researchers from the
United States and Tanzania have been combing
Tanzania's Rukwa Rift Basin, searching for
fossils of all kinds. During the 2011 and 2012
seasons, a team led by Nancy Stevens, a
vertebrate paleontologist at Ohio University in
Athens, discovered fossils that it identified as
belonging to two previously unknown species of
primates: one, an apparent ape ancestor the team
has named Rukwapithecus fleaglei; the other, a
claimed Old World monkey ancestor dubbed Nsungwepithecus gunnelli.

© 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/oregon-scientists-get-stem-cells-from-cloned-human-embryos/2013/05/15/dc011cbc-bdac-11e2-9b09-1638acc3942e_story.html

Oregon scientists get stem cells from cloned human embryos

By David Brown,

A team of researchers said Wednesday that it had
produced embryonic stem cells ­ a possible source
of disease-fighting spare parts ­ from a cloned human embryo.

Scientists at the Oregon Health and Science
University accomplished in humans what has been
done over the past 15 years in sheep, mice,
cattle and several other species. The achievement
is likely to, at least temporarily, reawaken
worries about “reproductive cloning” ­ the
production of one-parent duplicate humans.

But few experts think that production of stem
cells through cloning is likely to be medically useful soon, or possibly ever.

“An outstanding issue of whether it would work in
humans has been resolved,” said Rudolf Jaenisch,
a biologist at MIT’s Whitehead Institute in
Cambridge, Mass., who added that he thinks the
feat “has no clinical relevance.”

“I think part of the significance is technical
and part of the significance is historical,” said
John Gearhart, head of the Institute for
Regenerative Medicine at the University of
Pennsylvania. “Many labs attempted it, and no one
had ever been able to achieve it.”

A far less controversial way to get stem cells is
now available. It involves reprogramming mature
cells (often ones taken from the skin) so that
they return to what amounts to a second childhood
from which they can grow into a new and different
adulthood. Learning how to make and manipulate
those “induced pluripotent stem” (IPS) cells is
one of biology’s hottest fields.

© 1996-2013 The Washington Post
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http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/2013/05/15/cognitive-chickens-and-memorable-sea-slugs/

Cognitive Chickens and Memorable Sea Slugs

By Jason G. Goldman

There is a rich tradition in psychology and
neuroscience of using animals as models for
understanding humans. Humans, after all, are
enormously complicated creatures to begin even
from a strictly biological perspective. Tacking
on the messiness that comes with culture makes
the study of the human mind tricky, at best. So,
just as biomedical scientists have relied upon
the humble mouse, psychological and cognitive
scientists have too turned to our evolutionary
cousins in the animal kingdom as a means of better understanding ourselves.

In her new book Animal Wise, journalist Virginia
Morrell recounts a conversation with one
researcher who pointed out that decades of
research were built upon “rats, pigeons, and
college sophomores, preferably male.” The college
undergrads stood in for all of humanity, the rats
served as representatives of all other mammals,
and pigeons served as a model for the rest of the animal kingdom.

The silly part isn’t that non-human animals can
be used effectively as a means of understanding
more about our own species. The idea is simple:
understand how a simple system works, and you can
make careful inferences about the way that
complex systems work. That is (or should be)
obvious. In his interview with CNN today, memory
research pioneer and Nobel Prize winner Eric
Kandel said as much: “Rather than studying the
most complex form of memory in a very complicated
animal, we had to take the most simple form ­ an
implicit form of memory ­ in a very simple animal.”

© 2013 Scientific American
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http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23543-malaria-bug-may-give-mosquitoes-a-super-sense-of-smell.html

Malaria bug may give mosquitoes a super sense of smell

by Meera Senthilingam

Malaria parasites give mosquitoes a keener sense
of smell, it seems. A small-scale study in the
lab finds that mosquitoes infected by the
parasite are three times as likely as uninfected
mosquitoes to respond to human odours. If the
same results are seen in malaria-carrying
mosquitoes in the wild, it could lead to new ways to combat the disease.

Female anopheles mosquitoes are attracted to the
chemicals in human odours, which help them find
the source of blood they need to grow their eggs.
When these mosquitoes carry Plasmodium falciparum
– the most lethal form of malaria parasite – the
likelihood that they will target humans rises.

"We knew already that mosquitoes bite more often
when they're infected. They probe the skin more
frequently," says James Logan from the London
School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

To quantify the effect – and try to work out its
cause – Logan and his colleagues infected some
lab-grown Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes with
Plasmodium parasites, while leaving others
uninfected. They then tested how both groups were attracted to human smells.

Mosquitoes are particularly attracted to foot
odours, so Logan's team used nylon stockings
containing the volatile chemicals produced by our
feet. Over a period of three minutes,
Plasmodium-infected mosquitoes landed and
attempted to bite the stockings around 15 times
on average. By contrast, the uninfected
mosquitoes attempted to bite only around five
times on average during that time.

© Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.
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http://www.nature.com/news/chinese-project-probes-the-genetics-of-genius-1.12985

Chinese project probes the genetics of genius

Ed Yong

The US adolescents who signed up for the Study of
Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) in the
1970s were the smartest of the smart, with
mathematical and verbal-reasoning skills within
the top 1% of the population. Now, researchers at
BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute) in
Shenzhen, China, the largest gene-sequencing
facility in the world, are searching for the
quirks of DNA that may contribute to such gifts.
Plunging into an area that is littered with
failures and riven with controversy, the
researchers are scouring the genomes of 1,600 of
these high-fliers in an ambitious project to find
the first common genetic variants associated with human intelligence.

The project, which was launched in August 2012
and is slated to begin data analysis in the next
few months, has spawned wild accusations of
eugenics plots, as well as more measured
objections by social scientists who view such
research as a distraction from pressing societal
issues. Some geneticists, however, take issue
with the study for a different reason. They say
that it is highly unlikely to find anything of
interest ­ because the sample size is too small
and intelligence is too complex.

Earlier large studies with the same goal have
failed. But scientists from BGI’s Cognitive
Genomics group hope that their super-smart sample
will give them an edge, because it should be
enriched with bits of DNA that confer effects on
intelligence. “An exceptional person gets you an
order of magnitude more statistical power than if
you took random people from the population ­ I’d
say we have a fighting chance,” says Stephen Hsu,
a theoretical physicist from Michigan State
University in East Lansing, who acts as a
scientific adviser to BGI and is one of the project’s leaders.

© 2013 Nature Publishing Group,
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