On Whether Tactile Sensitivity can be Improved by Exercise

Letter to the Editors: Respected Comrades: In June 1962, I. M. Gol'dberg, physician and neuropathologist, presented a communication to the Department of Education and Psychology of the Nizhnii Tagil Teacher Training Institute with respect to interesting observations he had made of one of his patients, Roza K.     

Integrating systems biology data to yield functional genomics insights

A report of the recent EMBO Conference 'From Functional Genomics to Systems Biology' held at the EMBL Advanced Training Centre, Heidelberg, Germany, 13-16 November 2010.     

Human carbonic anhydrases. VII. A new C type isozyme in erythrocytes of American Negroes

An unusual erythrocyte carbonic anhydrase C type isozyme tentatively designated as H has been found in American Negroes. It has an electrophoretic mobility near that of carbonic anhydrase B. In about 18% of the individuals studied the H isozyme replaces half of the normal C isozyme, and in about 1% of this population only the H isozyme is present.This work was supported in part by Grant CA-01786 from the United States Public Health Service. One of us (M.J.M.) is a recipient of a National Institutes of Health predoctoral traineeship on U.S. Public Health Training Grant No. 5-T01-GM0125-05 to the Department of Anthropology.     

The interrelationships of disease and culture in a primitive New Guinea community

This article explores links between disease and social standing in a primitive New Guinea community. Social and cultural events have modified the incidence of certain diseases. Furthermore, the changing patterns of disease may have influenced the development and form of social distinctions.This work is based on data collected as a predoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Fieldwork in New Guinea was done with NIH support under Training Grant 1 T01-MH11775-01 (related to 2 F1 MH301640-02), with Dr. Margaret Mead as the sponsor. Additional funding for analysis of data was obtained from the Harvard School of Public Health, the Department of Preventive Medicine of the Harvard Medical School, and the Institute for Transcultural Studies in New York.     

Biochemical genetics of Fundulus heteroclitus (L.). III. Inheritance of isocitrate dehydrogenase (Idh-A and Idh-B), 6-phosphogluconate dehydrogenase (6-Pgdh-A), and serum esterase (Est-S) polymorphisms

Starch gel electrophoresis has shown that natural populations of Fundulus heteroclitus have variants at four enzyme-coding loci: Idh-A, Idh-B, 6-Pgdh-A, and Est-S. Analysis of the phenotypic distribution of the F₁ generation suggests that each of the variants segregates as autosomally inherited codominant alleles. Tissue specificity and intracellular localization were also determined for the IDH and 6PGDH isozymes.This work was supported by Grants DEB 76-19877 and DEB 79-12216 from the National Science Foundation and by Grant P60-80-04 from the State of Maryland. RVB and REC were supported by NIH Training Grant GM07231 to the Department of Biology.Contribution No. 1103 from the Department of Biology, The Johns Hopkins University.     

Cooperative coordination as a social behavior

Coordinating behavior is widespread in contexts that include courtship, aggression, and cooperation for shared outcomes. The social significance of cooperative coordination (CC) is usually downplayed by learning theorists, evolutionary biologists, and game theorists in favor of an individual behavior → outcome perspective predicated on maximizing payoffs for all participants. To more closely model CC as it occurs under free-ranging conditions, pairs of rats were rewarded for coordinated shuttling within a shared chamber with unrestricted social interaction. Results show that animals learned to work together with sensitivity to the task and type of partner. Moreover, social interaction and coordination influenced both consumption of the reward solution immediately following a session and preference for cooperation, suggesting that affective states and incentives related to cooperation extend beyond the outcomes obtained. These results support field studies by showing not only how cooperation is performed but also the importance of considering how the behavior of cooperating affects outcomes and preference for cooperating. This article and some of the research described here were supported in part by Grant 96-00293 from the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation to the author and Peter R. Killeen of Arizona State University. Richard Schuster (Ph.D. in Psychology, Harvard University 1968) has been a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Zambia (1971–1977), with field research on antelopes, and a Lecturer at the Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Israel (1977-present). His main research focus is on laboratory models of social behavior.     

How ultrasound first came to new England

Diagnostic ultrasound came to Yale in the 1960s and was first developed in Glasgow and London. This story tells us that ultrasound was well-established in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Yale University School of Medicine in the Yale-New Haven Hospital by 1970. By then it had caught up with the pioneers in New York, Denver, and even Glasgow.     

应激与自杀、睡眠障碍的关系

自杀是复杂且致死率高的重要公共健康问题,应激和睡眠障碍均为自杀的重要风险因素,且三者之间具有密切的关联。由于应激和睡眠障碍具有可改变性,了解应激、睡眠和自杀的关系及其生理机制,有助于了解自杀的病理基础,探寻识别和干预自杀的关键靶点,促进对自杀的预防和干预。本文介绍有关应激、自杀、睡眠关联的最新研究结果,分别从 HPA轴功能、多胺应激反应系统等神经生理基础,以及基因、表观遗传修饰等遗传学的角度探讨三者关联的生理机制,探索该领域的研究挑战及未来的研究方向。     

Wavelength discrimination in the ‘visible’ and ultraviolet spectrum by pigeons

Summary Using operant conditioning methods, the pigeon's wavelength discrimination abilities were assessed in two experiments to generate discrimination functions. Both these functions showed three minima at 460, 530 and 595 nm. In the second wavelength discrimination experiment, extending measurements into the UV spectral region, pigeons also maintained good discrimination between wavelengths within the UV range tested. A fourth minimum was indicated at the lower end of the spectral range tested (365–385 nm). The results point to the complexity of the pigeon's chromatic system, which must be at least tetrachromatic, probably pentachromatic.Abbreviations S+ positive stimulus - S– negative stimulus We thank the technical staff of the Psychology Department at Durham University for their assistance and. in particular, Mr. D. Harper who collected some of the data in the second experiment. Mrs. C. Thompson gave us much helpful advice about the computer programming. The work was, in part, supported by an SRC Research Grant to J.D. Delius; J. Emmerton received a Durham University Research Studentship. The paper was prepared while the authors were supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through its Sonderforschungsbereich 114.     

Social roles,prestige, and health risk

Selection pressure from health risk is hypothesized to have shaped adaptations motivating individuals to attempt to become valued by other individuals by generously and recurrently providing beneficial goods and/or services to them because this strategy encouraged beneficiaries to provide costly health care to their benefactors when the latter were sick or injured. Additionally, adaptations are hypothesized to have co-evolved that motivate individuals to attend to and value those who recurrently provide them with important benefits so they are willing in turn to provide costly care when a valued person is disabled or in dire need. Individuals in egalitarian foraging bands can provide a number of valuable benefits, such as defense, diplomacy, food, healing, information, technical skill, or trading savvy. We therefore expect that humans have evolved psychological mechanisms motivating the pursuit and cultivation of a difficult-to-replace social role based on the provisioning of a benefit that confers a fitness advantage on its recipients. We call this phenomenon social niche specialization. One such niche that has been well-documented is meat-sharing. Here we present cross-cultural evidence that individuals cultivate two other niches, information and tool production, that serve (among other things) to buffer health risk. Michelle Scalise Sugiyama studied at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she received her Ph.D. in literature in 1997. She is currently an affiliate of the English Department and the Institute for Cognitive and Decision Sciences at the University of Oregon, Eugene, and also directs the Cognitive Cultural Studies branch of the Human Universals Project at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology. Her work attempts to understand narrative and other art behaviors in terms of the cognitive architecture that underlies them and the ancestral conditions under which they emerged; published results can be found in Human Nature, Evolution and Human Behavior, Philosophy and Literature, and Mosaic. Lawrence Sugiyama holds a joint appointment in the Anthropology Department and the Institute for Cognitive and Decision Sciences at the University of Oregon, Eugene. He did his graduate work at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he cofounded the Human Universals Project and the Ecuadorian Oriente Research Station, which he now directs. His research among the Shiwiar, Yora, and Yanomamo examines health risk, cooperation, reciprocity, subsistence, and life history patterns among contemporary forager-horticulturalists, with the ultimate goal of furthering our understanding of pat selection pressures and the psychology evolved to surmount them. Published results can be found in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, and Adaptation and Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective.     

Skin temperature biofeedback and migraine headaches

To assess the relative contribution of specific and nonspecific effects of skin temperature biofeedback upon migraine headache, 11 migraine patients were taught to increase the temperature of their hand. Training to decrease the skin temperature of the hand served as a control for 12 other migraine patients. An additional 11 control subjects were not trained but kept records of migraine activity. Under carefully controlled double-blind procedures, migraine patients who learned to raise finger temperatures showed statistically significant and clinically therapeutic improvement during a 6-week follow-up period. However, they were not significantly better than those trained to lower finger temperatures, those who did not meet a learning criterion, or those receiving no training. While these groups did show some significant improvement when compared to subjects who learned to decrease finger temperature, the results are most parsimoniously explained through nonspecific rather than specific factors. The necessity of using double-blind procedures in evaluating therapeutic effectiveness is again stressed.This article was presented as a Citation Award Paper at the Biofeedback Society of America meetings, San Diego, 1979. The work was supported in part by Rehabilitation Services Administration Grant No. 16-P-56810/5-17 to the University of Minnesota Medical Rehabilitation Research and Training Center and by a grant from the Division of Health Care Psychology, University of Minnesota. We would like to acknowledge the advice and support of Lee Willerman and John Belknap. We are grateful for the assistance of John Hendrickson, Dale Armin Miller, and Stephanie Waddingham in conducting the study and for the technical assistance of Robert Patterson, Steve Sheffield, P. Thain Marston, Kathy Guttormson, and Nancy Belknap.     

Improving recognition of respiratory sensations in healthy adults

In two discrimination training studies, we noted improvements in the ability of healthy individuals to discriminate between respiratory sensations. We trained individuals to discriminate between respiratory sensations elicited during inspiration in Experiment 1 and during expiration in Experiment 2. We elicited respiratory sensations by having participants breathe through circuits that differed in their resistance to air flow. Training, in both experiments, was conducted within the context of a task in which individuals judged which member of a series of respiratory circuit pairs was easier to breathe through. To improve the accuracy of judgments, we gave participants feedback of their performance, and we faded air flow resistance. The latter procedure consisted of presenting circuit pairs in order of increasing similarity. Individuals who received performance feedback with fading of air flow resistance demonstrated reliable improvements in discrimination from pre- to posttraining in both experiments, but controls, who received either performance feedback or practice in discrimination did not. These findings may contribute to improving awareness of respiratory sensations in asthma patients, and thereby bolster efforts to manage asthma.This research was supported by a Biomedical Research Support Grant from the National Institute of Health to Ohio University and by an Academic Challenge Grant from the State of Ohio to the Ohio University Psychology Department.     

Enabling BioSharing - a report on the Annual Spring Workshop of the HUPO-PSI April 11-13, 2011, EMBL-Heidelberg, Germany

The Annual Spring workshop of the HUPO-PSI was this year held at the EMBL International Centre for Advanced Training (EICAT) in Heidelberg, Germany. Delegates briefly reviewed the successes of the group to date. These include the wide spread implementation of the molecular interaction data exchange formats, PSI-MI XML2.5 and MITAB, and also of mzML, the standard output format for mass spectrometer output data. These successes have resulted in enhanced accessibility to published data, for example the development of the PSICQUIC common query interface for interaction data and the development of databases such as PRIDE to act as public repositories for proteomics data and increased biosharing, through the development of consortia, for example IMEx and ProteomeXchange which will both share the burden of curating the increasing amounts of data being published and work together to make this more accessible to the bench scientist. Work then started over the three days of the workshop, with a focus on advancing the draft format for handling quantitative mass spectrometry data (mzQuantML) and further developing TraML, a standardized format for the exchange and transmission of transition lists for SRM experiments.     

TransACTS: from science to innovation

The ACTS (Advanced Chemical Technologies for Sustainability) Symposium is a Dutch national meeting that brought together representatives of academia, industry and the Dutch government for innovation-driven research on sustainable chemical technologies. It provides an excellent network opportunity where all ACTS research programmes presented their work, focussing on their specific sustainable technologies. The ACTS symposium was held from 12 to 13 of January 2011 at De Werelt, Lunteren, The Netherlands. For more information about TransACTS, please visit .     

The neuroscience of remote memory

Recently, there has been renewed interest in the organization and neurobiology of remote memory, and the pace of work in this area has accelerated. Yet the recent literature does not suggest that a consensus is developing, and there is disagreement about both facts and their interpretation. This article undertakes a comprehensive review of the three kinds of evidence that have been most prominent in recent discussion: studies of retrograde amnesia in memory-impaired patients who have well-characterized lesions, neuroimaging of healthy volunteers, and work with experimental animals including lesion studies, imaging and mouse genetics. The available evidence tells a coherent story and leads to some straightforward conclusions about the neuroscience of remote memory.     

Multidimensional Scaling of Perceived Odour of Bicyclo [2.2.1] heptane, 1,7,7-Trimethylbicyclo [2.2.1] heptane and Cyclohexane derivatives.

Three series of structurally related compounds, bicyclo [2.2.1]heptane, 1,7,7-trimethylbicyclo [2.2.1] heptane and cyclohexanederivatives along with five reference compounds were scaledin a perceived-odour space using a Euclidean representationvia INDSCAL and POLYCON multidimensional scaling programs. Eachof the series cluster with some secondary ordering related tothe functionality of the molecules. ¹ The experimental work reported in this paper was done in fulfilmentof Ph.D. requirements jointly in the departments of Psychologyand Chemistry in the University of Canterbury by R.G.Paddick. ² Offprint requests to R.A.M.Gregson, Department of Psychology,University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.     

密闭生态系统中大黑甲生长发育及虫沙营养成分的初步研究

密闭受控生态系统中,大黑甲(俗称大麦虫)不仅可以作为乘员日常饮食中动物蛋白的重要来源之一,且对作物秸秆、餐厨垃圾等物质转化起到重要作用,其虫沙可配制新型有机肥料。本试验在密闭受控生态系统中,通过测定大黑甲日增数量、质量及大黑甲各生长阶段呼吸代谢量,研究密闭生态环境对大黑甲的生长发育及其虫沙营养成分价值的影响。试验表明,大黑甲在受控密闭生态系统中生长良好,生长速率为0.79%,大黑甲幼虫时期CO_2产生速率为0.0439 g/g虫/d,O_2消耗速率为0.027 g/g虫/d,大黑甲成年期CO_2产生速率为0.0109 g/g虫/d,O_2消耗速率为0.0126 g/g虫/d,大黑甲的呼吸代谢对密闭系统中大气循环起到一定作用。此外,大黑甲每日能够消耗一定量的植物不可食部分,其虫沙营养全面,具有用作植物培养基质的潜力。     

Biochemical genetics of Fundulus heteroclitus (L.). IV. Spatial variation in gene frequencies of Idh-A,Idh-B, 6-Pgdh-A,and Est-S

The spatial variation in gene frequencies of four unlinked polymorphic loci was studied in the teleost Fundulus heteroclitus. Three loci (Idh-A, Idh-B, and Est-S) exhibit significant north-south clinal variation in allelic frequencies along the Atlantic Coast of North America, while a fourth locus (6-Pgdh-A) shows a modest clinal variation. These data, together with our previous data for Ldh-B, Mdh-A, Gpi-B, and Pgm-A, reveal a pattern of low gene diversity in the colder northern extremes of the species range and high gene diversity in warmer southern latitudes.This work was supported by Grants DEB76-19877 and DEB79-12216 from the National Science Foundation and by Grant P60-80-04 from the State of Maryland. REC and RVB were supported by NIH Training Grant GM07231 to the Department of Biology.Contribution No. 1104 from the Department of Biology, The Johns Hopkins University.     

Allelic inhibition at the autosomally inherited gene locus for liver alcohol dehydrogenase in chicken-quail hybrids

At the gene locus for liver alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) of the Japanese quail, three alleles which give electrophoretic variants, A, B, and C, exist. This enzyme is autosomally inherited. Allelic polymorphism was not observed in the chicken, but the wild-type ADH of the chicken can readily be distinguished from A, B, and C of the quail by starch gel electrophoresis. In the development of both species, ADH activity reached a near adult level at about the nineteenth day (a few days after hatching in the quail and a few days before hatching in the chicken). Chicken-quail hybrids at the day of hatching (nineteenth day) revealed the presence of maternally derived quail ADH only, and their ADH activities were about half that of both parental species. Those hybrids which received either A or C allele from the mother quail showed three bands of ADH at the third day after hatching. The chicken and quail alleles began to function in synchronous harmony. One 3-day-old and two adult hybrids which received B allele from the quail, however, still revealed complete absence of the paternally derived chicken ADH.This work was supported in part by a grant (CA-05138) from the National Cancer Institute, U.S. Public Health Service, and in part by a research fund established in honor of General James H. Doolittle. Contribution No. 20-67, Department of Biology, City of Hope Medical Center.Dr. Eduardo Castro-Sierra is a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Learning of the City of Hope Medical Center.     

C.-E.A. Winslow and the later years of public health at Yale, 1940-1945

This paper is one of a series of papers in which I consider contemporary Yale medical education in general and the Yale Department of Epidemiology and Public Health in particular. It tells of the retirement in 1945 of C.-E.A. Winslow, Professor and Chairman of the Yale Department of Public Health since its inception in 1915; of the committees established by the dean of the School of Medicine and the president of the University, charged with determining the future direction of the department; and of the outcome, which, in 1945, proved favorable to Winslow's public health philosophy in contrast to the medical school's clinical needs and desires.