Myeline surrounding nerve cells. Protective myelin is stripped away by MS.

Pregnancy
hormones may help repair the damage to nerves caused by multiple sclerosis, Canadian research suggests.
The Journal of Neuroscience study, by the University of Calgary, may explain why MS tends to go into remission while women are pregnant, BBC reports.
Working on mice, the researchers found the hormone--prolactin--encourages production of myelin, the fatty substance that protects nerve cells.
Myelin is degraded by MS, damaging nerves’ ability to transmit messages.
The latest finding raises hopes of new treatments for MS, and other neurological disorders, which potentially reverse, rather than stabilise symptoms.
The researchers showed that prolactin was directly responsible for the formation of new myelin in the brains and spinal cords of pregnant mice.
When mice with MS-like nerve damage were injected with the hormone, their myelin was also repaired.
MS is caused by the body’s immune system attacking the myelin surrounding nerves. This leads to progressive loss of sensation and movement.
Lead researcher Dr Samuel Weiss said: “It is thought that during pregnancy, women’s immune systems no longer destroyed the myelin. The researchers found pregnant mice had twice as many myelin-producing cells (oligodendrocytes) as virgin mice, and continued to generate new ones during pregnancy.
“Women nearly always have a much easier time with their MS during pregnancy and at last some research is starting to show precisely why.“
MS Trust chief executive Chris Jones said: “It is already well documented that sex hormones such as oestrogen can influence the development and course of MS.
“The suggestion that this can also have a role in replacing myelin is encouraging, but we will have to wait and see if the studies in mice with the experimental equivalent of MS will translate into a successful treatment for people with MS.“

Making robots that interact with people emotionally is the goal of a European project led by British scientists.
According to BBC, Feelix Growing is a research project involving six countries, and 25 roboticists, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists.
Co-ordinator Dr Lola Canamero said the aim was to build robots that “learn from humans and respond in a socially and emotionally appropriate manner“.
“The human emotional world is very complex but we respond to simple cues, things we don’t notice or we don’t pay attention to, such as how someone moves,“ said Dr Canamero, who is based at the University of Hertfordshire.
“We are most interested in programming and developing behavioural capabilities, particularly in social and emotional interactions with humans.“
The project involves building a series of robots that can take sensory input from the humans they are interacting with and then adapt their behaviour accordingly.
The robots will learn from the feedback they receive from humans.
The robots will get the feedback from simple vision cameras, audio, contact sensors, and sensors that can work out the distance between the machine and the humans.
“One of the things we are going to use to detect expressions in faces and patterns in motion is a (artificial) neural network.“
Artificial neural networks are being used because they are very useful for adapting to changing inputs--in this case detecting patterns in behaviour, voice, movement etc.
“Neural networks learn patterns from examples of observation,“ said Dr Canamero.
One of the areas the robots will be learning from is human movement.
“Motion tells you a lot about your emotional state.
“The physical proximity between human and robot, and the frequency of human contact - through those things we hope to detect the emotional states we need.“
The robots will not be trying to detect emotional states such as disgust but rather will focus on states such as anger, happiness, loneliness; emotions which impact on how the robot should behave.
“It is very important to detect when the human user is angry and the robot has done something wrong or if the human is lonely and the robot needs to cheer him or her up.
“We have a prototype of a robot that follows people around and can adapt to the way humans interact with it.
Dr Canamero says robots that can adapt to people’s behaviours are needed if the machines are to play a part in human society.

Cycling cosmos obeys thermodynamics without ripping itself apart.
It has to be the closest ever shave. Two physicists have proposed that, a fraction of a second before a cataclysm that would destroy space-time itself, the Universe may escape by abruptly collapsing to a virtually empty state that ’resets’ it for a fresh cycle of cosmic expansion, Nature.com says.
The theory claims to reconcile the notion of a cyclic universe, which expands and contracts for eternity, with the second law of thermodynamics, which seems to imply that the current expansion cannot reverse.
The Universe has already gone through an infinite number of cycles, the model predicts an already infinite number of parallel universes, Lauris Baum and Paul Frampton of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill report in Physical Review Letters1.
In a cyclic universe, says Frampton, physics need not break down.
But a ’bouncing’ universe seems to conflict with one of the most fundamental physical principles, the second law of thermodynamics. This states that the entropy of the Universe--a kind of measure of its disorder--must increase. How can you reverse cosmic expansion without reversing this?
If the idea is right, we and everything we can see came from a patch of space lodged somewhere between two subatomic particles in a previous universe--and so on ad infinitum.

A pigeon contemplates the shape of an object on a video monitor in an experiment on the visual cues the birds use to identify objects.

Pigeons and humans use similar visual cues to identify objects, a finding that could have promising implications in the development of novel technologies, according to new research conducted by a University of New Hampshire professor.
Brett Gibson, an assistant professor of psychology who studies animal behavior, details his latest research in the journal article, “Non-accidental properties underlie shape recognition in mammalian and non-mammalian vision,“ published in Current Biology. Gibson and his colleagues found that humans and pigeons, which have different visual systems, have evolved to use similar techniques and information to recognize objects, Science Daily reported.
“Understanding how avian visual systems solve problems that require considerable computational prowess may lead to future technological advances, such as small visual prosthetics for the visually impaired, in the same way that understanding visual processing in honeybees has led to the development of flying robots and unmanned helicopters,“ the researchers say.
The researchers employed a new procedure, which Gosselin and Schyns developed, called Bubbles, to determine what features humans and pigeons were using to recognize objects. Three pigeons were trained to recognize four objects: an arch, a barrel, a brick, and a wedge. The researchers then partially revealed different parts of the object pictures. They then conducted the same experiment with six people.
Not only did both the pigeons and people recognize the four objects based mostly on corners, but they used these properties more than the shading information contained in the images. More notably, the pigeons and people used corner information more than a computer programmed to extract the most useful information for recognizing the object pictures, which suggests that the pigeons and people were using comparable information.
“When members of different species respond similarly to the same visual information, we gain confidence in the prominence of this information, irrespective of cultural or genetic influences. Birds represent an important group to compare with mammals, the other major class of warm-blooded, highly mobile, visually oriented animals,“ the researchers say.
“Because of the unique demands of flight, for the last 200 million years birds have been under strong evolutionary pressures to keep their overall size to a minimum. Although a very large portion of the avian central nervous system is devoted to visual processing, the bird brain is still just a fraction of the size of our own. It is this extraordinary mixture of visual competence and small size that makes the study of birds critical to our understanding of the general mechanisms of visual cognition,“ they say.

Androgen deprivation therapy--one of the most common treatments for prostate cancer--may increase the risk of death from heart disease in patients over age 65, according to a new study by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and other institutions. Although the findings need to be confirmed in clinical trials, the study authors state that oncologists should weigh the benefits of androgen deprivation therapy, or ADT, against the risk of heart problems in older prostate cancer patients, Science Daily reported.
The goal of ADT is to block the level of circulating androgens (male hormones), which can fuel the growth of prostate cancers. “Androgen deprivation therapy is associated with elevated body mass index, increased body fat deposits and diabetes, all of which raise the risk of death from heart diseased,“ explains the study’s lead author, Henry Tsai, MD, a resident physician at Dana-Farber, Brigham and Women’s and the Harvard Radiation Oncology Program.
“Although our findings demonstrated that older men receiving this treatment may be at increased risk, even after taking into account other cardiovascular risk factors, a prospective clinical trial would be needed to confirm a cause-and-effect relationship.“
After factoring in other known risks for cardiovascular disease (such as diabetes, hypertension, body mass index and smoking), researchers found that the longer patients received ADT, the sooner they were likely to die from heart disease. When the researchers analyzed the data by patients’ age, the link between ADT use and death from heart disease was significant in patients over age 65, but not in those under 65. After five years, 3 percent of older men who received androgen deprivation therapy died of cardiac causes, compared with only 0.9 percent of men who did not receive the therapy.
“These findings should help oncologists determine which older patients are the best candidates for ADT,“ Tsai remarks. “If a patient is at high risk of cardiovascular disease, it would be advisable for an oncologist to discuss the pros and cons of ADT treatment with him before proceeding on a course of treatment.“

University of California-Davis biologist, Terry Ord said his research on lizards shows how well animals can adapt to their environment.
Scientists have shown how animal species, such as birds, monkeys and frogs, alter their acoustic signals to stand out against a noisy backdrop.
A new study broadens this phenomenon to organisms that communicate visually, said lead scientist Terry Ord of the University of California-Davis.Ê
To advertise ownership of territory, a male anole lizard bobs its head, extends a colorful throat pouch and sweeps its tail up and down in an arc. The lizard can spot a rival lizard up to 80 feet away.
Terry Ord observed two different species of Anole lizards, which stake out their territory by sitting on tree trunks, bobbing their heads up and down and extending a colorful throat pouchm, Live Science says.
Their forest system is a “visually noisy“ place, Ord said, so the lizards have to signal strongly enough for a rival to see, but not vividly enough for a predator to take interest. “They have to have a strategy to get their message across,“ Ord said.
After videotaping the lizards, Ord could see that the more visually “noisy“ their environment, the faster and more exaggerated the lizards’ movements became.
“We all know that people speak more loudly in a noisy party,“ said John Byers of the National Science Foundation, which funded the research. “These researchers have shown that lizards can do the same. We are only beginning to understand how perfectly adapted the behavior of animals can be.“