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Explaining A Dog's 'Guilty Look'
What dog owner has not come home to a broken vase or other valuable items and a guilty-looking dog slouching around the house? By ingeniously setting up conditions where the owner was misinformed as to whether their dog had really committed an offense, Alexandra Horowitz, Assistant Professor from Barnard College in New York, uncovered the origins of the "guilty look" in dogs in the recently published "Canine Behaviour and Cognition" Special Issue of Elsevier"s Behavioural Processes.
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Desert Sun Publishes Series On HIV/AIDS Amid Proposed Funding Cuts In California State Budget
The Desert Sun published a series of articles related to HIV/AIDS. The articles include a feature profiling people living with the virus and others looking at efforts by advocates to offer culturally appropriate information on HIV to Hispanics, blacks and other minorities; the efficacy of antiretrovirals, and how the drugs are enabling people to live longer; and the potential effects of proposed state budget cuts on HIV/AIDS programs in Riverside County (Brambila, Desert Sun, 6/10).
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Gene For Deadly Inherited Lung Disease Identified By Scientists
A rare, deadly developmental disorder of the lungs called alveolar capillary dysplasia with misalignment of pulmonary veins (ACD/MPV) that usually kills the infants born with it within the first month of life results from deletions or mutations in the FOXF1 transcription factor gene, said a consortium of researchers led by Baylor College of Medicine (www.bcm.edu) in a report that appears in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
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Darkness Linked To 'Brain Drain' In Depressed People

A lack of sunlight is associated with reduced cognitive function among depressed people. Researchers writing in BioMed Central"s open access journal Environmental Health used weather data from NASA satellites to measure sunlight exposure across the United States and linked this information to the prevalence of cognitive impairment in depressed people. Shia Kent, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, led a team of US researchers who used cross-sectional data from 14,474 people in the NIH-NINDS-funded REGARDS study, a longitudinal study investigating stroke incidence and risk factors, to study associations between depression, cognitive function and sunlight. He said, "We found that among participants with depression, low exposure to sunlight was associated with a significantly higher predicted probability of cognitive impairment. This relationship remained significant after adjustment for season. This new finding that weather may not only affect mood, but also cognition, has significant implications for the treatment of depression, particularly seasonal affective disorder". Kent and his colleagues speculate that the physiological mechanisms that give rise to seasonal depression may also be involved in sunlight"s effect on cognitive function in the context of depressive symptoms. Cognitive function was assessed by measurement of short-term recall and temporal orientation. As well as regulating the hormones serotonin and melatonin, light has been shown to also affect brain blood flow, which has in turn been linked with cognitive functions. The researchers write, "Discovering the environment"s impact on cognitive functioning within the context of seasonal disorders may lead not only to better understanding of the disorders, but also to the development of targeted interventions to enhance everyday functioning and quality of life". Notes: Effect of sunlight exposure on cognitive function among depressed and non-depressed participants: a REGARDS cross-sectional study Shia T Kent, Leslie A McClure, William L Crosson, Donna K Arnett, Virginia G Wadley and Nalini Sathiakumar Environmental Health (in press) http://www.ehjournal.net/ Graeme Baldwin BioMed Central


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