Yesterday we talked about how Kathleen Cagney’s research appeared to reveal an effect of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the body mass index of people more than a thousand miles away in Dallas. By coincidence, Discover magazine published a book excerpt (from “Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives” by Annie Murphy Paul) yesterday that touches on how the fall of the World Trade Center might have caused post-traumatic stress disorder not just in people near the towers that morning, but also the fetuses being carried by pregnant women near the towers. Can PTSD be transmitted from mother to unborn child? And did 9/11 leave a wide swath of medical impact across the country? Fascinating research.

Oh cruel search for alien habitable worlds: new data released at an astronomy symposium this week appears to refute the existence of Gliese 581g, the “Goldilocks” planet that had everyone daydreaming of intergalactic travel two weeks ago. Though the debate over the planet’s existence is far from settled, it’s a quick, nasty reminder that leaping from a handful of data points to bold claims of Earth-like planets and alien life is a dangerous gamble. (Also, Google News hits for original Gliese 581g story = 1407 articles. For the “Gliese 581g may not exist” story = 91.)

As part of the “It Gets Better” campaign reacting to the recent run of tragic suicides by homosexual teenagers, Scientific American’s psychology blogger Jesse Bering begins a long, detailed look at the evolutionary history of suicide. Why would an organism evolve the capacity to kill itself? Bering dials down to insects that are cannibalized after copulation and explains a mathematical equation for suicidal motivation in the first part of his series.

If University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne is too prolific for you on his blog, Why Evolution is True, you can get a primer on his views regarding the incompatibility of science and religion from his USA Today editorial this week. There were, of course, letters,  and a blog response from Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

An in-depth Reuters article about the increasing use of cardiac assist devices and the end-of-life ethics questions they raise talks to our chief of cardiac and thoracic surgery Valluvan Jeevanandam, among other experts. For more on the topic, see our post on ethicist Daniel Sulmasy, who has written about when it is ethical for physicians to turn off a person’s cardiac device, knowing that it may hasten death.

It’s great to have a treatment that’s proven to work in a difficult psychiatric condition such as anorexia nervosa. It’s even better to have two treatments for such a disorder. But having multiple options also creates a quandary for psychiatrists: with a new patient, which treatment do you try first? Creatures of habit like the rest of us, many doctors will simply stick with the method they know best until given convincing evidence that it’s worth switching gears. To be the new treatment of choice, a method must beat out the current champion in a head-to-head battle.

One such comparison, conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago Medical Center and Stanford University, was published yesterday afternoon in the Archives of General Psychiatry. The trial compared the most common form of treatment for adolescents with anorexia, known as adolescent-focused therapy (AFT), with the newer, family-based treatment (FBT), also sometimes known as the Maudsley Approach. The latter name comes from the Maudsley Hospital in London, where Daniel Le Grange, now director of the Eating Disorders Clinic at the University of Chicago, helped develop a new approach to bringing anorexic teens back to healthy weight and eating habits.

Under adolescent-focused therapy, the therapist works directly with the patient on a one-to-one basis, emphasizing the importance of weight gain and helping them accept personal responsibility for healthy eating. Family-based treatment, as you might expect from the name, does more to incorporate the parents into that process, equipping the patient’s mother and father with the tools to encourage healthy eating at home. By doing so, the therapist hopes to avoid hospitalizing the patient while permanently adjusting the home environment, removing factors that could lead to relapse after therapy is completed.

“No one is more available to care for the kids than the parents are; no one would put the time aside in the way that parents would, and no one loves their kids more than parents do,” Le Grange told NPR’s Morning Edition (where you can also hear the perspective of one patient’s mother on family-based treatment).

The two therapies had been compared previously, but in smaller studies with only two or three dozen patients. True convincing evidence requires a randomized trial, with enough patients for the statistics to make a strong case for one of the treatments. So, combining forces between Chicago and Stanford, Le Grange and his collaborator, James Lock at Stanford, were able to gather 120 patients with anorexia nervosa (with an average age of 14-1/2) for the study.

Split evenly between FBT and AFT, the patients were followed for a year of therapy and another year of follow-up. At the end of treatment, 42 percent of those enrolled in FBT showed full remission back to at least 95 percent of expected body weight, compared to only 23 percent of those enrolled in AFT. While that comparison fell just short of statistical significance, with a p-value of .055, Le Grange said that the higher standards used in the study spoke to the effectiveness of FBT.

“We used the higher yardstick for remission of 95 percent of body weight, which we felt was clinically more appropriate,” said Le Grange, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience.

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In 1994, Italy’s Roberto Baggio was widely considered to be the best soccer player in the world. Having led his country to the final of the World Cup, played before over 100,000 people in the Rose Bowl, Baggio was the obvious choice to take his team’s critical fifth penalty shot in the shootout that would determine the championship. All he had to do was kick the ball past the goalkeeper from 12 yards away, something a star such as Baggio could probably do in his sleep. But at the biggest moment on the biggest stage in world sports, he flubbed it, skying his penalty shot over the crossbar and giving Brazil the World Cup.

Sportswriters and fans love to label such failures as abstract incidents of “choking,” and worse, often use them as evidence of an athlete’s lack of character and resolve. But research from the lab of Sian Beilock, associate professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, has found that choking actually results from information overload in the brain, with active thought overwhelming the more reflexive working memory. That research is the centerpiece of her new book, called  Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting it Right When You Have To, released just this week.

ScienceLife has written about Beilock’s research in the past, when her laboratory looked at how hockey players’ brains process active language differently from non-athletes. But Beilock hasn’t restricted herself to the NHL; she’s also invited golfers into the lab for putting experiments and tested how the attitudes of female teachers toward math affects the performance of their female students. Taken together, her work is less about the sports fans’ concept of “choking” and more about how external and internal factors keep the brain from performing optimally, knowledge that you don’t have to be a world-class soccer player to use.

Coverage of the book has run this week at Time, US News & World Report, and NPR.

Elsewhere…

An experiment published in Science this week demonstrates a central tenet of Einstein’s theory of relativity, by showing that a clock on the floor runs slightly slower than a clock one meter above it. Wired and Discover both offer blogs explaining why that’s important for everything from clock calibration to air travel. Quote the paper’s first author in Wired: “It’s interesting to think about - are frequent flyers getting younger [because they move so much] or aging faster [because they spend so much time in the air]?”

How has mad scientist research changed over the years? Gawker blog io9 made a graph.

The MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago is oldest such program in the United States, has trained scores of physicians in ethical matters, and administers an excellent seminar series that has provided ample material for this here blog. Mark Siegler, the center’s first and so far only director, will receive a lifetime achievement award next month from the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.

Loneliness is bad for your health. The work of John Cacioppo and others has proven this connection repeatedly over the last decade, finding links between loneliness and blood pressure, sleep quality, dementia, gene expression, and many other medical measures. The evidence has built to the point that loneliness could be considered a serious risk factor for poor health, joining more established factors such as obesity or smoking.

But for those risk factors, there are established treatments. These may not be easy for patients, but there are methods supported by science to help a person stop smoking or reduce their weight, thereby decreasing their risk of disease. However, the correct strategy for reducing a person’s loneliness is not so obvious. Is it simply a matter of surrounding a lonely person with people, giving them more opportunities to socialize? Do they need help developing social skills? Or does a lonely person need a sort of cognitive tune-up, a realignment to break out of the cycle of negative social thoughts and perceptions?

“If we know that loneliness is involved in health problems, the next question is what can we do to mitigate it,” Cacioppo, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, said.

Looking to build a better intervention for loneliness, Cacioppo teamed up with Christopher Masi, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago Medical Center, for what’s called a meta-analysis, a wide review of the existing body of research on reducing loneliness. Essentially, the researchers looked at every study published between 1970 and 2009 that tested an intervention designed to directly target loneliness. The search brought in studies of all different types and sizes, and much of the work involved finding a way to boil their diverse study designs and results into numbers that would allow for comparison.

“Over the years there have been some qualitative reviews, not looking at the numbers quantitatively, but getting a gestalt for what seems to work and what doesn’t seem to work,” Masi said. “We thought that while that’s helpful, a quantitative meta-analysis would be more helpful and more reliable.”

In social science as well as medicine, not all studies are created equal. Some interventions were tried on a single group, with the amount of loneliness assessed before and after the treatment. Others compared a group receiving an intervention to a control group. But the gold standard was studies which compared randomized groups, minimizing any sample biases that could distort results.

Though there were only 20 such studies amidst the hundreds that the researchers uncovered, pooling their results yielded interesting findings. Previous qualitative meta-analyses concluded that group interventions were more effective than one-on-one interventions, but crunching the numbers revealed no difference between the two. Yet when all the studies were combined, the average effect on loneliness was significant, providing evidence that loneliness is indeed sensitive to treatment.

“We rigorously focused on the best studies and we still found a significant effect,” Masi said.

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Many neurological disorders struggle with the same problem as their cousins, the psychiatric disorders: a fuzziness of diagnosis. Even well-known diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s are tricky for physicians to diagnose, since their hallmark symptoms (dementia, or movement issues) show up late and can reflect any number of conditions with different treatment strategies. Meanwhile, the subjective elements of diagnosis for a disease like autism can produce even more confusion, particularly in parents wanting the best care for their child.

The hope is that, someday, diagnosing Alzheimer’s or autism will be as simple as running a quick test that says Yes or No. Two studies this week produced excitement that physicians are nearer to such a goal, but also revealed how difficult it will be to obtain such a definitive answer. The coverage of the papers also revealed the importance of carefully reading the results of testing the test, knowing the difference between the testing terminology of “sensitivity” and “specificity.”

The most glaring example of this confusion was over a paper announcing a new biomarker test for Alzheimer’s Disease in the journal Archives of Neurology. Here, a group of scientists used an interesting technique to find the best way to predict Alzheimer’s disease from a spinal tap test, working from a data set of hundreds of patients with Alzheimer’s, mild cognitive impairment, or no dementia. With an unbiased analysis, the researchers determined thresholds for two markers involved in the pathology of Alzheimer’s (beta-amyloid and tau protein) that successfully predicted a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s from the spinal tap alone. This “sensitivity,” the ability to make the correct diagnosis in someone who has the disease and avoid false negatives, was reported at impressive levels of 94 to 100 percent.

However, news reports mistakenly said that the new biomarkers were a “100 percent accurate” test for Alzheimer’s. As many blogs have already pointed out, that’s just not, well, accurate, and in fact obscures the most interesting part of the study. As reported by the authors, the biomarkers misidentified about one-third of “control” subjects, that is patients who showed no signs of dementia or impairment, as being positive for Alzheimer’s. That’s a pretty low “specificity,” since it means the test generates significant false positives. But are they really false? The authors also report preliminary results that “there was a tendency for more progression to MCI in cognitively normal subjects with the AD feature,” meaning that people who were normal at baseline, but showed biomarkers for Alzheimer’s, may be on the cusp of developing symptoms of the disease. The “wrong” answers might just be the most useful answers, drawing attention to people on the verge of developing Alzheimer’s, a population that may be helped more by early treatment.

Another neurological condition where an early, clear diagnosis would be very helpful is autism. The current psychiatric means of diagnosing autism may be the main driver of its steadily increasing rates, a fact which has caused some to wonder whether those guidelines are specific enough, and whether autism is even one single disease at all. Rather than basing the diagnosis on interviews and psychiatric assessments, some are working towards genetic or imaging techniques that can give more definitive answers on autism.

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Married life is stressful, as any stand-up comedian or therapist will tell you. But being married or in a long-term relationship can also change not only your mood, but also your hormones and behavior as well. Biologists have known for a while that when male birds or monkeys stop mating and start raising offspring, they experience a large drop in testosterone. Now, in a recent study published in the journal Stress, researchers find that this may also happen in an advanced kind of primate: University of Chicago business school students.

The study was originally designed for an entirely different purpose: correlating hormone levels with financial risk-taking behavior in students training for a career in business. A collaboration between Dario Maestripieri, a professor of comparative human development at the University of Chicago, and two business school professors (Luigi Zingales of UChicago’s Booth Business School and Paola Sapienza of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management), the project used 500 Booth students as their subjects. The students were asked to play a series of computer games that tested economic decision-making, and saliva samples were taken before and after the test to assess hormone levels and changes.

A primary finding of the study, published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was that testosterone levels correlated with risk-taking behavior - students with high baseline testosterone were more likely to take chances in a lottery-style game. The result explained away the commonly observed gender difference in risk-taking, as men have much higher average testosterone levels than females. Published in the middle of the financial crisis, media outlets ran with the implication that the recession might have been avoided if more women had been in charge of our banks and trading firms.

“It’s clear that there are sex differences in aggressiveness and violent behavior - look at who commits all the murders, who fights all the wars,” Maestripieri said. “On average, males are clearly more aggressive, more violent, and take more risks than women, and this affects society and also business. If business is male-dominated, things are going to be done a certain way and if business were female-dominated, things probably would be done differently.”

Aside from assessing the students’ financial behavior, the test also provided the opportunity for an experiment on stress. The students were told that the test was required for a course and would impact future career placement, a scenario designed to inspire both honesty and stress. That allowed researchers to look for effects on cortisol, often called the stress hormone. Cortisol is traditionally a tricky hormone to measure, due to wide variation in its changes between people - and even within the same person - when faced with a stressful stimulus. But the large size of this project helped get around that problem.

“As far as I know, this is the largest study ever done that has looked at the hormonal effects of psychosocial stress,” Maestripieri said. “I think it clarifies some things that were not very clear in the stress literature.”

On average, the study found that women experienced larger surges in cortisol when measured after the stressful test, while men showed a larger test-induced decrease in testosterone. But the more interesting difference went beyond gender to another factor: relationship status. Male subjects who were not married or in a long-term relationship had higher average levels of testosterone, corroborating several previous observations. But they also responded differently to the stress of taking the test, with larger increases in cortisol compared to men in a committed relationship.

“Although marriage can be pretty stressful, it should make it easier for people to handle other stressors in their lives,” Maestripieri said. “What we found is that marriage has a dampening effect on cortisol responses to psychological stress, and that is very new.”

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Building a Better Poker Face

In my semi-regular poker game with a crew of graduate school buddies, I have a reputation for honesty. This has its upside and its downside. When I bet, the other players generally assume I have good cards, which allows me to bluff - but scares everyone off when I actually do have good cards and want to maximize my return. In the end, I usually do okay, but can’t help but wonder how much better I could have done had I suckered someone into betting against my pocket aces.

According to a study published last month in PLoS One, I could possibly take those reactions as a compliment. In the experiment, researchers from Harvard, the California Institute of Technology, and MIT set out to determine the most effective poker face. Recruits were instructed to play a simplified version of Texas Hold ‘Em against a computer player represented with a random face - one of 300 different faces along a scale of trustworthiness to untrustworthiness. With each hand, the face changed, and the players chose to either fold their cards or call the bet of the computer player (who bet every hand).

Traditional wisdom goes that a poker face should be as neutral as possible, but that’s not what the study concluded. Human players tightened up against trustworthy faces, calling less, folding more and making more mistakes relative to match-ups with neutral or untrustworthy faces. The authors concluded that avoidance cues (dominant, angry, masculine) led to more aggressive decisions, while approach cues (happy, friendly, trustworthy, attractive) caused more conservative behavior.

“This suggests that poker players who bluff frequently may actually benefit from appearing trustworthy, since the natural tendency seems to be inferring that a trustworthy-looking player bluffs less,” the authors advise. Give it a try next poker night.

(And yes, that’s a Lady Gaga reference in the headline, in reference to Lollapalooza tonight. Couldn’t resist.)

Gamerz Help the March of Science

Speaking of poker, most of my playing these days takes place within the context of Red Dead Redemption, the XBox game that has been wasting the nation’s free time all summer. But a study appearing in Nature this week suggested that all those hours pounding away on a controller could actually help in the rather esoteric field of protein structure biology. Scientists often know the basic recipe of a protein - its amino acid structure - but are unable to determine how the protein folds into its three-dimensional structure without the use of advanced computation out of the reach of many laboratories.

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Everyone gets angry from time to time. But there’s angry, and there’s angry - wall-punching, object-throwing, call-the-police angry. The latter type of tantrum, if it’s a recurrent problem, could be a symptom of a psychiatric condition currently known as intermittent explosive disorder, or IED. Though it has appeared in every edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (albeit under different names), IED remains a hazy sort of diagnosis to many both inside and outside psychiatry. But over the last 20 years, Emil F. Coccaro, M.D., Chair and the E.C. Manning Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Chicago Medical Center, has built up a diverse body of research defining the causes, consequences, and best available treatments for IED.

Coccaro’s research group is currently in the midst of a flurry of publications that break down IED from a number of angles: its familial nature, its association with other negative health outcomes, its correlation with brain activity. So I sat down with him to talk about what is currently known about the disorder, what distinguishes a person from IED from a person with “a temper,” and how it is currently treated by psychiatrists. Coccaro was blunt about the history of the disorder, saying that some of the mystery surrounding the disease is due to early difficulties defining it.

“There have been controversies about it because people have wondered how much of it is out there and does it really exist,” Coccaro said. “The criteria in DSM-3 and DSM-4 were never that good.”

The problem, he said, was in the dynamics of the disorder. While it was clear that patients with IED had recurring, out-of-proportion episodes of aggression, the original criteria stated that the patient would be relatively “even-keeled” between. But Cocaro said that psychiatrists have come to understand that IED - which may appear in between 4 and 7 percent of the United States population - is more likely to reflect quieter impulsive aggressive “rumblings” between the big “blow-ups”.

“People who have this explosive problem are not like Bruce Banner where they get angry and become this monster and then come back to baseline,” Coccaro said. “They’ll have big explosions, but at baseline they are a bit irritable, still, and are at high risk for blowing up when somebody frustrates or angers them.”

More specific criteria have not only helped psychiatrists diagnose the disorder, it has also allowed for more thorough research. A breakthrough finding by Coccaro in 1989 was that the function of the serotonin system - a neurotransmitter also known to be involved in depression - correlated with aggressive behavior. People with lower serotonin function were, on average, more aggressive and impulsive, a relationship that only strengthened as diagnoses of IED became more accurate.

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The Mars 500 "spaceship." (taken from http://mars500.imbp.ru)

One of my favorite rides at the Magic Kingdom in Disneyworld was the now-defunct Mission to Mars, a perfect representative of the space age optimism on display in Tomorrowland. For those of you too young to experience it firsthand, it was charmingly simple: a circular theater with video screens above (showing Mars getting bigger) and below (where Earth got smaller) as audio cues played and the seats vibrated a little bit. As a simulation of real space travel, it was hardly SpaceCamp - or even Space Mountain - but you took what you could get in the ’80s.

Nowadays, when an actual mission to Mars seems slightly less improbable, Russian scientists are about to begin a slightly more accurate simulation of what such a journey might entail. Only in this case, the experience will take a little longer than the Disneyworld ride - it’s a 520-day isolation experiment called Mars 500 to study the psychological effects on astronauts kept in a confined space for that lengthy time. Yesterday, the “astronauts” entered their capsule, which looks kind of like a human-sized hamster tube system and includes kitchens, a gym, an experimental greenhouse and even a “simulator of the Martian surface.” The questions that the experiment hopes to answer - such as the all-important “how do you not get bored?” and “how do you avoid fights and sexual harassment?”- are addressed by New Scientist and Discover and you can watch video of the “launch” at the New York Times.

Labapalooza Kicks Off

Summertime means music festivals - overdosing on bands, getting sunburned and dehydrated and eating expensive food. It’s great. But before the street fairs and tent cities get into the full swing, you can enjoy a different kind of festival from your own couch this weekend. The World Science Festival, which has been held each year in New York City since 2008, is running a number of live webcasts from the event through Sunday night. It actually started rolling yesterday, with the announcement of the Kavli Prize winners and a panel on black holes and holographic worlds (hosted by famous science geek Alan Alda), both of which are archived and viewable any time. Tonight features some intense math, while tomorrow they will broadcast on panel on animal intelligence and a nighttime discussion of hyperspace, which I only know about from comics. It looks like a cool event, accessible to both casual and serious sci-curious.

Elsewhere...

The ginormous American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting kicks off today in Chicago, with five solid days of presentations about the latest in cancer research and treatments. I’ll be there for a couple days of the conference, and will have some blog coverage next week. In the meantime, if you dare take a glimpse of the complicated world of science journalism and publicity, Ron Winslow at the Wall Street Journal Health Blog has a very funny post about some embargo shenanigans in the run-up to the meeting.

I’m sad to report that Philip S. Ulinski, a neuroscientist, professor emeritus and former department chair who spent 35 years at the University of Chicago, passed away last week. Here’s the obituary I prepared for the University. Dr. Ulinski leaves behind a remarkable legacy: the Committee on Computational Neuroscience, one of the first programs to offer a PhD in the study of the brain using the latest computational tools. 

Since I wrote about the Nature Neuroscience acupuncture study on Tuesday, there has been some more commentary from around the web - most of it unfavorable to the study’s authors and the media coverage of their finding. Here’s the blog Respectful Insolence (who does a great job monitoring and debunking “alternative therapies” built on shaky science) pointing out the true interesting result of the paper, and DC’s Improbable Science dissecting the media coverage and press release.

Since it’s one of those days where I feel like one of the few people working a full day, I’ll keep the links brief. Regular programming will resume next Tuesday.

1) You can set your watch by the timing of the predictable backlash to major scientific announcements, particularly in this age of instant internet vetting. Much of the immediate criticism tends to focus on how the media handled/exaggerated the scientific finding; i.e. the transition of my twitter feed’s take on J. Craig Venter’s “synthetic life” from enthusiasm to calling him “the Paris Hilton of science.”

But the more interesting wave takes place months later, when publications rebutting the original journal article begin appearing. This week, that slower wave crashed against last year’s unveiling of Ardi, the 4.4-million-year-old partial skeleton argued to be a human ancestor by its discoverers. Today in Science, the same journal that published the original paper, two groups attempt to chip away at the conclusions surrounding Ardi - whether the species lived in a woodland habitat and where it falls on the human family tree, closer to us or apes. Science allowed the original authors to respond to both comments, and the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle played the role of referee.

2) The Gulf of Mexico offshore oil spill continues unabated, and the major journals are both doing a nice job of explaining the scientific aspects of the story without getting mucked up in the politics. Science has dedicated a page to their spill coverage, where I found this interesting article about the oil-eating bacteria of the ocean (and how BP’s dispersants might interfere with their natural activity). Nature’s page features posts from a reporter on the research ship Pelican, which was in the Gulf studying the effects of the spill earlier this month. To explain the “top kill” strategy employed yesterday by BP to plug up the oil spill, CNN turned to esteemed scientific communicator Bill Nye the Science Guy. Thus far, the top kill clog appears to be working; let’s hope it stays that way.

3) Mars Phoenix RIP. The Knight Science Journalism Tracker has a roundup of obituaries written for the NASA Mars probe, which was officially declared inoperable this week. Charlie Petit also raises a good question: was it really a success? Often, space projects are given the benefit of the doubt because of the wonder they inspire, but the high cost of such efforts mean they should receive just as much, if not more, scrutiny than other scientific experiments.

4) The increased risk-taking behavior of younger siblings is illustrated with a real world example: stolen bases by baseball players.

5) And finally, celebrate the opening of beach season with this excellent article by my former Tribune colleague Joel Hood about how scientists are developing new methods of measuring and forecasting harmful bacteria in Lake Michigan. Good to see science on the front page in Chicago.

The newborn. (courtesy: J. Craig Venter Institute)

The biggest science story of the year may have broken yesterday, though it’s hard to say either the topic or the source was a surprise. J. Craig Venter, one of the driving forces of the Human Genome Project, announced via the Institute that bears his name the creation of the first synthetic cell - a bacterium with DNA entirely constructed in the laboratory. Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 might not have the catchiest of names, but it’s a landmark of scientific achievement: the first time man has moved beyond studying life to creating it.

The paper, published yesterday in Science, is a technical marvel of laboratory perseverance. It turns out creating a genome from scratch isn’t as easy as just sticking a bunch of nucleotides together; the final string of more than 1 million base-pairs had to be laboriously constructed from hundreds of smaller cassettes, and even the tiniest errors could be catastrophic. “Our success was thwarted for many weeks by a single pair deletion in the essential gene, dnaA,” the article reports (and you can almost feel the frustration). “One wrong base out of over one million in an essential gene rendered the genome inactive.”

There’s no doubting the magnitude of the achievement, but is Venter’s creation truly “synthetic life,” as many media outlets are ready to claim? Some interesting perspectives are provided in Science’s rival Nature, who asked several scientists and ethicists to write essays on the meaning of the announcement. Steen Rasmussen from the University of Southern Denmark argues that it is not truly synthetic life, because the Venter’s team created only the DNA, which was placed into a pre-existing, natural cell. Another expert, Jim Collins from Boston University, calls the synthetic genome a “stitched-together copy of the DNA of an organism that exists in nature, with a few small tweaks thrown in.” Indeed, the Venter genome is built from 300+ bacterial genes the group determined to be the minimal amount necessary to create a functional cell, with the only significant addition being “watermarks” left by the researchers (including quotes from Richard Feynman and James Joyce).

But if science is like crossing the Atlantic Ocean one lily pad at a time, Thursday’s announcement was still a pretty damn cool lily pad. The ultimate dream - of creating new life that can generate fuel, clean up pollution and produce faster, better vaccines - may still be years if not decades away from reality. So too, may be the ultimate fear of human-created organisms running wild in the natural ecosystem. As Carl Zimmer wrote in 2007, with just the right mixture of awe and caution, about the future of synthetic biology, someday “out of a million garages, a million new species may bloom.”

Blog founding father Jeremy Manier covered Venter’s project back in 2008 for the Chicago Tribune.

Elsewhere…

I never get tired of hearing about the story of Phineas Gage, the 1800’s railroad worker who suffered a particularly gross brain injury and came away with a radically altered personality. The damage to his frontal lobe helped scientists figure out the role of that brain region in controlling impulses and behavior. But a new article, highlighted on Mind Hacks, finds evidence that Gage showed signs of recovery from his injury later in life, adding both a new chapter to a favorite psychology-class story and testimony to the brain’s ability to adapt after even the most extreme injury.

Speaking of brain trauma, A new JAMA article reports that patients who have suffered a traumatic brain injury are almost 8 times more likely to experience depressive symptoms after the injury. Joseph Fink, an assistant professor of neuropsychology at the University of Chicago Medical Center, weighed in on the findings with MedPage Today. The study reminded me of a poster I saw just last week presented by medical student Maxwell Rovner at the Pritzker Senior Scientific Session, where a smaller study of epilepsy patients found very high rates (88%) of depression in the 72 hours after a seizure. Clearly, any shock to the brain can lead to severe psychiatric consequences on top of the more direct neurological issues; if the mechanism for those disturbances could be unraveled, it could say a lot about the origins of mental illness.

I can barely wrap my mind around the scale of the Gulf oil spill disaster, so I’ve taken refuge in stories that emphasize the scientific angles of this environmental story. Here’s a nice NatureNews piece on the use of dispersant chemicals, a strategy I’ve seen a lot of skepticism about on my news feed. An AP story explains why it has been so hard to get a firm grasp of the size and spread of the oil spill. Of course, even the science surrounding the oil spill gets political, as yesterday’s New York Times reported.

Nothing like a good scientific explanation for a paranormal phenomenon. In this case, it’s ball lightning, which two physicists theorize could be the result of stroke-induced tiny magnetic fields that produce hallucinations.

Jet lag is the perennial unwelcome companion of the air traveler, an experience that can make one’s mind feel like it was left back at the airport. That powerful disorientation has made jet lag a topic of interest for scientists, who have looked at changes to a person’s  brain chemistry and physiology after lengthy, intercontinental trips. But unless you’re a serious jetsetter, most of your flights only cross a time zone or two or three, enough to produce a milder form of jet lag’s mind-scramble. Few studies have looked at physiological changes after these more routine flights, until an almost accidental opportunity to do so occurred to a team of researchers studying an unusual subject pool: hundreds of sets of twin brothers.

The Vietnam Era Twin Registry is a pool of military veterans that have been tested in a multitude of studies examining genetic and environmental factors for everything from pathological gambling to cardiovascular disease. In one such study, designed to study different parameters associated with aging, the subjects flew to medical centers in Boston or San Diego for a full day of medical and psychiatric tests. Several scientific papers were published from those results, including one by a team including the University of Chicago assistant professor of psychiatry Kristen Jacobson on the heritability of levels of cortisol, sometimes called the “stress hormone.”

But the researchers in that study realized that there could be an important influence on their data: jet lag. Long-distance flights have previously been shown to throw off a person’s natural cortisol rhythms, the ebb and flow of the hormone normally experienced during a given day. So the researchers in the Vietnam Era study had their participants spit in a vial several times at home, then repeat their spitting during their Boston or San Diego visits. Those salivary samples - used to measure cortisol levels - allowed researchers to look for changes in the hormone before and after air travel for people who are less than frequent fliers.

“A person traveling 5 days a week or repeatedly traveling to Hong Kong on business is not representative of the general population,” Jacobson said. “But we all know how it feels when you’re going to California versus going to DC from Chicago and struggling with waking up. This paper links what we all think to be true about jet-lag with an existing body of research that had shown effects under fairly extreme circumstances and said yeah, this is in fact what’s going on, there are changes in the body even with short-term travel.”

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I’ve come down with a severe case of baseball fever this week, earlier than ever before. Could climate change be to blame? Regardless, I thought I’d put that condition to good use with a couple pieces of science news from the sports world.

The Touchy-Feely Strategy

To tide me over through the long, slow crawl of spring training, I’ll be paying extra attention to college basketball as March Madness gets into full swing. As I start to ponder my bracket, I might do some scouting of how the top-ranked teams perform in an unusual statistical category: high-fives. That’s based on an unusual paper, reported recently in the New York Times, that correlated “tactile communication” with better performance in NBA teams analyzed during the 2008-09 season. The vocabulary of such communication includes the following, according to the paper: “fist bumps, high fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team huddles.” What, no Christian side hugs?

The authors, from the University of California, Berkeley, wanted to test their hypothesis that touch is an important way by which humans build “trust, cooperation, and group functioning” (The paper has not yet been published, but is available from lead author Michael Kraus’ website). The background section mentions that primates spend as much as a fifth of their time grooming each other, and that several psychology experiments have found that brief touches increase trust and bonding between two people. That benefit, they reasoned, would be especially useful in team sports, where working together presumably increases chances of success (don’t tell Allen Iverson).

Testing this hypothesis involved “scoring” a number of basketball games from early in the 08-09 season for the above list of hands-on celebrations, as well as less overt “expressions of cooperation and trust,” such as talking, gesturing, passing the ball and helping on defense. The researchers then correlated those touch scores to individual players’ and teams’ performances over the rest of the season, and found a positive correlation for both. In other words, the touchier a player was, the better season they had; the touchier a team was as a whole, the more successful they were over the course of a season.

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If we’re lucky, we spend about one-third of our lives sleeping, a fact that appears on its face to be a colossal waste of time. Wouldn’t us humans  be able to get so much more done if we weren’t required to shut down for 8 hours a night? But the fact that the need for sleep is shared across the majority of animal species indicates that there must be some important role that the behavior plays, otherwise evolution would have likely done away with it millions of years ago.

The laboratories of Daniel Margoliash and Howard Nusbaum at the University of Chicago focus on how birds and humans learn to use language. But over the past decade, their research has also discovered some pretty interesting things about the role that sleep plays in language learning. In Margoliash’s laboratory, studies of juvenile zebra finches learning to sing found that the brains of birds will “replay” in sleep the symphony of neural activity that was present during the day when they listened to song. Separate human studies by Margoliash and Nusbaum found that sleep helped stabilize the learning of a language perception task - college students learning to comprehend computer-generated speech similar to heavily-accented English performed better on the task after a night’s sleep.

The latter experiment tested the principle of memory consolidation, the process by which short-term memories are stabilized into long-term storage. Sleep’s role in facilitating consolidation has been studied in many different ways in humans, including a 2008 paper by Timothy Brawn and Kimberly Fenn with Margoliash and Nusbaum that found that sleep enhanced people’s ability to learn how to play a first-person shooter video game. But despite accumulating evidence in humans that sleep-dependent consolidation was a real phenomenon, a true animal model had not yet been established. So Brawn once again used the unique partnership between Margoliash and Nusbaum to demonstrate that the stabilization of memories through sleep was not a uniquely human characteristic, but was also present in a bird species, the starling.

In the video below, you can hear Brawn, Margoliash and Nusbaum talk about the experiment, which was published today in The Journal of Neuroscience. You can also watch one of the experimental subjects - a starling - perform the learning task that was used in the experiment, called a “go-nogo” task. After a day of learning what birdsong cue signaled them to poke their beaks into a hole to receive food, and what cue meant to avoid poking, the starlings were tested before and after a period of sleep. As in humans, sleep improved the starlings’ performance of the task, suggesting that sleep-dependent consolidation is a common feature of at least two species.

“We really wanted to behaviorally show that these types of sleep-dependent memory benefits are occurring in animals,” Brawn said. “What was remarkable was that the pattern here looks very similar to what we see in humans. There wasn’t anything that was terribly different.”

Now that the similarities between birds and humans have been proven for this phenomenon, the story is just beginning. Further experiments in the starlings will look for the mechanisms of how sleep-dependent consolidation occurs, offering clues to how memories are stabilized in the brain that would be difficult or impossible to gather from human studies alone.

“The result suggests this is a very broad, general phenomenon that might be shared across a great many vertebrates,” Margoliash said. “It was quite important to show that and it now opens the possibility for mechanistic and behavioral experiments in animals that are difficult to do in humans.”

Hyde Park Research Flurries

There’s been a lot of great research around the University of Chicago this week that hasn’t fallen into our territory at the Medical Center. Not that we’re jealous - we had cancer-fighting nanodiscs and sharp-toothed dinosaurs, after all! But in case you missed these stories from other departments around campus, here’s a quick review.

From our colleagues in Psychology came the latest in a fascinating series of papers looking at how social isolation affects the risk of acquiring breast cancer. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the paper by Gretchen Hermes and Martha McClintock found that isolating rats elevated the stress-related hormone corticosterone, an observation previously seen in the very social species. But as the animals were allowed to grow into “middle age” (about 15 months) the isolated rats also showed a much increased chance of contracting mammary tumors - 135% more tumors and 84 times the tumor load (which takes into account tumor size) of socialized control rats. “There is growing interest in relationships between the environment, emotion and disease,” Hermes told the BBC. “This study offers insight into how the social world gets under the skin.” (see also Time, Reuters, and U.S. News & World Report)

A good case of lemonade-from-lemons came from the Divinity School, where a miniature book thought to be a 16th-century artifact turned out to be a very well-crafted forgery. The Archaic Mark, an illustrated Greek translation of the Gospel of Mark, has been in the University’s collection since 1937. But questions have always lingered about the book’s authenticity, until Alice Schreyer, Director of the Special Collections Research Center brought together experts in imaging and Biblical texts to settle once and for all whether it was the real deal. The conclusion? It’s a fake, possibly made as late as the early 20th century. But it’s a good one, with an animal hide covering that legitimately dates back to Medieval times, and the University will give it a second life as an example of skilled forgery. “It’s actually tremendously satisfying to have a definite result,” Margaret Mitchell, a Divinity School professor, told the Chicago Sun-Times. “Scholarship depends as much as possible [about] being absolutely certain about these things.”

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