Play, humor needed to overcome aggression

BOSTON, Apr 24, 2009 (UPI via COMTEX) -- A U.S. psychologist says from a developmental viewpoint, fierce competition is a step back in human development.

In an article published in the American Journal of Play, Dr. Peter Gray of Boston College suggests early hunters and gatherers made cooperative living possible by using play and humor to overcome innate tendencies toward aggression and dominance.

"Play and humor were not just means of adding fun to their lives," Gray says in a statement. "They were means of maintaining the band's existence -- means of promoting actively the egalitarian attitude, intense sharing, and relative peacefulness for which hunter-gatherers are justly famous and upon which they depended for survival."

Gray says the most important skill for social life is how to please other people while still fulfilling one's own needs and desires.

To play well, and to keep others interested in continuing to play with you, you must be able to see the world from the other players' points of view, he says.

Play still serves children, who even when playing pickup baseball or card games, have relatively little concern for winning, Gray says.

"It is the presence of adult supervisors and observers that pushes play in a competitive direction -- and if it gets pushed too far in that direction it is no longer truly play." Gray says.

The Week Ahead

The below video is from My Bloody Valentine. The video is rather dated by their music is pretty good. They were very influential to 1990s and 2000s alternative.

VH1 TV Shows | Music Videos | Celebrity Photos | News & Gossip

Monday: 4/27
1. Present Treaties
2. Review for Exam
HW: STUDY!

Tuesday: 4/28
WWI: EXAM
HW: TBA

Wednesday: 4/29
-Russian Revolution
--Discuss HW
--Video Clip
--Reading
HW: NONE

Thursday: 4/30
-Stalin!
--Notes and Reading
--Activity
HW: Handout

Friday: 5/1
-Stalin
--Present Totalitarian States
-Current Events
HW: TBA

Swine Flu FAQ
WebMD Provides Answers to Your Questions About Swine Flu
By Daniel J. DeNoon
WebMD Health News
Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

The swine flu virus in the U.S. is the same one causing a deadly epidemic in Mexico. What is swine flu? What can we do about it? WebMD answers your questions.
What Is Swine Flu?

Like humans, pigs get the flu. Four different type A swine flu strains commonly circulate among pigs. Most recent swine flu viruses have belonged to the H1N1 and H3N2 subtypes. Pigs typically get sick but usually don't die from swine flu.

The new swine flu virus infecting humans is very unusual. It's somehow acquired genes from swine, bird, and human flu bugs. And it's also got genes from Eurasian swine flu viruses that aren't supposed to be in North America.

Do Humans Get Swine Flu?

Normally, swine flu bugs don't infect people. Historically, there's a case every year or two in the U.S. among people who have contact with live pigs.

But from December 2005 to January 2009 there was an uptick in swine flu cases. There were 12 human swine flu infections during this time. Eleven of these people had direct or indirect contact with pigs; in the twelfth case it was not known whether there was pig contact.

It's possible this uptick was due to improved reporting systems, but the CDC says "genetic changes in swine flu viruses and other factors might also be a factor."

The new swine flu virus is different. It's not yet clear that it's here to stay. But it is infecting humans, and that has world health officials keeping a close eye on it.

What Are the Symptoms of Swine Flu?

Swine flu symptoms are similar to regular flu symptoms and include cough, sore throat, fever, chills, headache, and fatigue. Some patients have also reported nausea and diarrhea. There is no easy way to distinguish swine flu from other types of flu or other germs. It takes a lab test to tell whether it's swine flu.

Can Swine Flu Spread From Person to Person?

The U.S. residents infected with swine flu virus had no direct contact with pigs. The CDC says it's likely that the infections represent widely separated cycles of human-to-human infections.

Have There Been Previous Swine Flu Outbreaks?

If swine flu sounds familiar to you, it's probably because you remember or have read about the 1976 swine flu outbreak at Fort Dix, N.J., among military recruits. It lasted about a month and then went away as mysteriously as it appeared. As many as 240 people were infected; one died.

The swine flu that spread at Fort Dix was the H1N1 strain. That's the same flu strain that caused the disastrous flu pandemic of 1918-1919, resulting in tens of millions of deaths.

Concern that a new H1N1 pandemic might return with winter led to a crash program to create a vaccine and vaccinate all Americans against swine flu. That vaccine program ran into all kinds of problems -- not the least of which was public perception that the vaccine caused excessive rates of dangerous reactions. After more than 40 million people were vaccinated, the effort was abandoned.

As it turned out, there was no swine flu epidemic.

I Got a Flu Shot. Am I Protected Against Swine Flu?

No. There is currently no swine flu vaccine.

It's possible that the seasonal flu vaccine might provide partial protection against H3N2 swine flu bugs. But the strain that appeared in California is the H1N1 swine flu strain. It is very different from the H1N1 human flu strain included in the seasonal flu vaccine.

It's not known whether previous infection with human type A H1N1 flu might provide partial protection against the type A H1N1 swine flu in the current outbreak.

However, the CDC has made a "vaccine seed" from swine flu isolated from an infected person, and has begun the process of developing a vaccine should the need arise. Whether a vaccine could be produced in quantity by next flu season is a huge question.
How Serious Is the Public Health Threat of a Swine Flu Epidemic?

Any flu epidemic is worrisome, especially when a new strain of flu bug is involved.

"Influenza A viruses new to the human population that are able to efficiently transmit from person to person and cause illness may represent a pandemic threat," the CDC warns.

It's worrisome that, unlike seasonal flu, the swine flu outbreak in Mexico is attacking healthy young people. That's a hallmark of pandemic flu bugs.

But it takes more than a new virus spreading among humans to make a pandemic. The virus has to be able to spread efficiently from one person to another, and transmission has to be sustained over time. In addition, the virus has to spread geographically.

Is There a Treatment for Swine Flu?

Yes. While the swine flu bug is resistant to older flu medicines, it remains sensitive to Tamiflu and to Relenza.

Can You Get Swine Flu by Eating Pork?

No. You can only catch swine flu from being around an infected pig -- or, if it's the new swine flu virus, from an infected person.

The Week Ahead

Monday: 4/20
World War I: continued
-Trench Warfare
--Share short stories
--Reading
-The Turning of the Tide
--Notes
HW: TBA

Tuesday: 4/21
World War I: continued
-The United States and WWI
--Notes/Reading
HW: TBA

Wednesday: 4/22
ACT TESTING...

Thursday: 4/23
World War I: continued
The End: Finding True Peace
--Notes
--Activity: Wilson's 14 Points vs. Treaty of Versailles vs. Causes of WWI (DBQ)
HW: TBA

Friday: 4/24
World War I: continued
The End: Finding True Peace
--Activity: Wilson's 14 Points vs. Treaty of Versailles
HW: STUDY

THS: BAN COMIC SANS FONT...PLEASE!

By EMILY STEEL

Vincent Connare designed the ubiquitous, bubbly Comic Sans typeface, but he sympathizes with the world-wide movement to ban it.

Mr. Connare has looked on, alternately amused and mortified, as Comic Sans has spread from a software project at Microsoft Corp. 15 years ago to grade-school fliers and holiday newsletters, Disney ads and Beanie Baby tags, business emails, street signs, Bibles, porn sites, gravestones and hospital posters about bowel cancer.

The font, a casual script designed to look like comic-book lettering, is the bane of graphic designers, other aesthetes and Internet geeks. It is a punch line: "Comic Sans walks into a bar, bartender says, 'We don't serve your type.'" On social-messaging site Twitter, complaints about the font pop up every minute or two. An online comic strip shows a gang kicking and swearing at Mr. Connare.

The jolly typeface has spawned the Ban Comic Sans movement, nearly a decade old but stronger now than ever, thanks to the Web. The mission: "to eradicate this font" and the "evil of typographical ignorance."

"If you love it, you don't know much about typography," Mr. Connare says. But, he adds, "if you hate it, you really don't know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby."

Typefaces convey meaning, typographers say. Helvetica is an industry standard, plain and reliable. Times New Roman is classic. Depending on your point of view, Comic Sans is fun, breezy, silly or vulgar and lazy. It can be "analogous to showing up for a black-tie event in a clown costume," warns the Ban Comic Sans movement's manifesto. The font's original name was Comic Book, but Mr. Connare thought that didn't sound like a font name. He used Sans (short for sans-serif) because most of the lettering, except for the uppercase I, doesn't have serifs, the small features at the end of strokes.

Mr. Connare, 48 years old, now works at Dalton Maag, a typography studio in London, and finds his favorite creation -- a sophisticated typeface called Magpie -- eclipsed by Comic Sans. He cringes at the most improbable manifestations of his Frankenstein's monster font and rarely uses it himself, but he says he tries to be polite when he meets people excited to be in the presence of the creator. Googling himself, he once found a Black Sabbath band fan site that used Comic Sans. The site's creators even credited him. "You can't regulate bad taste," he says.

Still, he is tickled by -- and trades on -- his reputation. A picture signed by Mickey Mouse that was sent to Mr. Connare to thank him after Disney used the font in ads hangs in his house. His wife, Sue Rider, introduces him at parties as the father of Comic Sans. A friend of his claims to know someone who broke up with her boyfriend in a letter written in Comic Sans to soften the blow. But there certainly hasn't been much money in it for Mr. Connare since Microsoft owns the font.

Of course, there would be no movement to ban Comic Sans if it weren't so popular. "We've been using that font for years," says Peter Phyo, a manager at O'Neals' restaurant across the street from Lincoln Center in Manhattan. "That is just the procedure. I wouldn't know the exact reasoning. It also looks nice on the menu." Mr. Phyo says he hasn't had any complaints.

The proliferation of Comic Sans is something of a fluke. In 1994, Mr. Connare was working on a team at Microsoft creating software that consumers eventually would use on home PCs. His designer's sensibilities were shocked, he says, when, one afternoon, he opened a test version of a program called Microsoft Bob for children and new computer users. The welcome screen showed a cartoon dog named Rover speaking in a text bubble. The message appeared in the ever-so-sedate Times New Roman font.

Mr. Connare says he pulled out the two comic books he had in his office, "The Dark Knight Returns" and "Watchmen," and got to work, inspired by the lettering and using his mouse to draw on a computer screen. Within a week, he had designed his legacy.

A product manager recognized the font's appeal and included it as a standard typeface in the operating system for Microsoft Windows. As home computers became widespread, Comic Sans took on a goofy life of its own.

Out to crush that goofy life is Ban Comic Sans, whose weapons include disapproving stickers, to be slapped on inappropriate uses of the font wherever they are found.

Ban Comic Sans was conceived in the fall of 1999, when Holly Sliger was a senior at the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, studying typography and graphic design. Designing a museum gallery guide for a children's hands-on artifact exhibit, Ms. Sliger says she was horrified when her bosses told her to use Comic Sans. She told them it was a cliché, and printed out a list of other typefaces she thought better suited the project. They insisted on Comic Sans.

"It was like hell for me," she says. "It was everywhere, like an epidemic."

In the midst of the project, she met her future husband, Dave Combs, at synagogue one Saturday. He was a recent college graduate working as a graphic designer, and she knew he would sympathize. "This is horrible," he remembers saying. She says, "That's when I knew he's the guy I would marry." The couple did wed a year later and continued to gripe about the font.

Mr. Connare says he first realized that the tide had turned against Comic Sans in January 2003, while studying for his master's degree in type design at the University of Reading in Berkshire, England. He got an email from Mr. Combs asking for permission to use his photo for stickers, T-shirts and coffee mugs to promote "typography awareness" for the movement to ban Comic Sans that he and his wife had founded. Busy and distracted, Mr. Connare said OK.

"It sounded a bit silly," he says. He didn't think it would amount to much.

But the Combses had global ambitions. A map hangs in their daughter's bedroom, marked with little red flags to show the dozens of locations around the world from which people have requested their stickers. "They're like parking tickets," Mr. Combs says. As the movement grew, Mr. Connare's image became the logo for Comic Sans bashing.

Mr. Connare eventually, in February 2004, asked the Combses to stop using his picture, and they did.

Today, Mr. Connare sometimes speaks at Internet conferences, using 41-page PowerPoint presentations written in you-know-what. He talks with the Combses about creating an "I Love/I Hate Comic Sans" picture book together.

The font has become so popular that it's approaching retro chic. Design shop Veer is selling a T-shirt with a picture of human heart on it made entirely of tiny Comic Sans characters. Veer's text: "Love it, love to hate it, or hate that you love it."

For Hints on Humans, Scientists Study Dogs' Thinking

CAMBRIDGE - Studying a species known to chase its own tail may seem an unlikely way to better understand the human mind. But scientists at Harvard University's new Canine Cognition Lab hope to gain insight into more than the psychology of dogs from visiting pet pooches - including an alert German shepherd named Celia and a rottweiler called Taylor who loves to eat chicken.

Researchers have long looked at other species' reasoning abilities and behavior to discern what makes humans distinct. The Harvard team is now turning to dogs because on certain tasks, such as understanding pointing, dogs easily outperform animals much more closely related to humans, even chimpanzees.

Scientists are also drawn to dogs because of their unique history growing up in the same environment as people, and they hope to learn whether domestication has led to dogs that think and act more like their masters - or whether we just think they have human traits.

"Here's this species we live with. Everyone has their views about how smart they are. No doubt we are overinterpreting - and in some cases underinterpreting," said Marc Hauser, a Harvard professor who has long studied cognition in cottontop tamarin monkeys and who heads the new lab.

"To what extent is an animal that's really been bred to be with humans capable of some of the same psychological mechanisms?"

Can dogs understand such abstract concepts as "same," for example? Or, can dogs be patient? To answer such canine conundrums, Hauser is recruiting both purebreds and mutts and running them through simple tests. In return, they earn tasty treats.

Dogs are interesting in their own right - for animals that are an intimate part of millions of families, they are still surprisingly mysterious to us.

Researchers at Harvard and more established dog labs say their work could have many practical results, including new therapies for misbehaving dogs and more stimulating ways to play with your pet.

At an animal cognition conference last month, there were two sessions devoted solely to dogs, a scenario that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, according to Clive Wynne, a psychology professor at the University of Florida who also studies the pets. While Ivan Pavlov famously studied dog behavior in the late 19th century, dogs have mostly been neglected by scientists studying animal thought.

"Psychologists have been ignoring animals that were sleeping quietly at their feet while they were doing work on rats and pigeons," Wynne said.

"Darwin wrote about his dog. ... We couldn't bring ourselves to take them seriously."

In Hauser's lab, researchers are starting their work by testing whether dogs can understand simple communicative gestures, such as pointing to a bucket that has food in it, as well as more complicated tasks.

During a recent videotaped session, assistant lab manager Natalie Shelton stared a fluffy white Samoyed straight in the eye, dropping a dog treat into a bucket marked with a triangle on the outside. Then she hid the bucket behind a screen and revealed two other buckets: one marked with a triangle and the other with a circle. (Both held treats to ensure the dog couldn't cheat by using its sense of smell.)

Shelton bowed her head and the dog was released. The Samoyed headed straight for the bucket with the circle, suggesting it didn't grasp the concept of "same."

In another trial, researchers tested whether dogs can use pictures as signs to figure out which bucket contains food. They presented Celia, the German shepherd, with a choice between a bucket marked with a picture of steak and one marked with a pair of pliers. Celia picked the steak.

Katie Levesque, Celia's owner, said she tries to give her dog challenging tasks at home but was surprised that her dog picked pictures of food three times, also choosing a hot dog over a hammer, and three biscuits over one.

"I was kind of laughing," said Levesque, who sat in a corner of the room with Celia at her feet during the experiment. Owners can also watch their dogs from behind a one-way mirror. Only about 20 dogs have been tested, so it's too early to draw conclusions about dogs' comprehension of pictures.

As Hauser's lab recruits more dogs, he hopes to ask more sophisticated questions and gauge the limits of dog reasoning.

Some of the most interesting results could come from studies that test the qualities people ascribe to their pets: loyalty, for example, or guilt.

Alexandra Horowitz, who teaches psychology and animal behavior at Barnard College in New York, has probed the guilty look that dogs give, flattening their ears back and ducking their heads.

In work recently accepted for publication in the journal Behavioural Processes, Horowitz had owners show their dog a desirable treat and then tell the dog not to eat it. They would leave the room and the experimenter would either give the dog the treat or take it away. When the owners returned, some dogs were scolded, even if they had not disobeyed.

Researchers found that dogs looked most guilty when they were scolded, especially when they did not eat the treat. That suggests dogs are responding to a social cue. Even though we may associate a certain look with the way we feel, teasing out dogs' actual thoughts and feelings requires careful experimentation.

Peter Mendelsohn of Sedgwick, Maine, said he brought Taylor to the lab because he was attracted to the idea of using science to understand animal behavior. As much as he tries not to anthropomorphize, he said, he often finds himself saying such phrases as "my dog thought ..." or "my dog believed."

"It's just nuts," Mendelsohn said. "If you have an animal and it's more than that, it's truly a member of your family, you see things every day that you don't have the ability to explain or describe, but you know how important it is to you."

The Canine Cognition Lab is recruiting dogs. For more information, visit http://doglab.wjh.harvard.edu.

Secrets of World War I

This was found by Kacey! Thanks so much! Very interesting!

The Great War: World War I

It was thought to be the war to end all wars. We are upon The Great War: World War I. The empires of Europe will clash resulting in the death of an entire generation of European males and cities and towns across Europe and Asia razed to the ground. In the end, Europe will reflect back on itself and wonder how and why did it ever come to this.

The Week Ahead
Tuesday (4/14)
World War I: an introduction
--Reading w/Questions
World War I
--Lecture
HW: NONE!

Wednesday (4/15)
World War I
--Lecture
--Video clips
HW: TBA

Thursday (4/16)
World War I
--Lecture
--Interview A Picture II
HW: Readings -- Handout

Friday (4/17)
World War I
--Lecture
--Current Events -- NEW TEAMS!
HW: Textbook Reading

METROPOLIS is BACK! Someone made this video using a new Royksopp Track, "The Girl and The Robot". Some of you thought this movie was weird...If you watch the below video, the last part is from scenes we did not see in class! See what you missed out on! This flick is awesome!




PSYCHOLOGY:::

The health benefits of happiness

More than 25 million people received treatment for depression last year and the American Psychological Association reports: more than half of Americans say they are stressed. It's becoming a primary focus for doctors world-wide.

Here's what you need to know, to protect you mind and your body.

These days, world-renowned speaker Deepak Chopra teaches that happiness is no longer just a mental quest, but a physical one. Chopra recently released his newest DVD "The Prescription for Happiness." Doctors are on the same page. They now have solid evidence your happiness directly affects your health.

"We discovered where ever a thought goes, a molecule goes and it affects your biology," he says. Well-being translates into a biological response because your brain secretes things like dopamine, and opiates and serotonin, oxytocin, all of which are hormones which make you happy."

Serotonin is the hormone that gives us that happy "feeling." Low levels can lead to, among other things, insomnia, fatigue and depression.

Doctors with the National Institute of Health have found during bouts of depression certain parts of the brain shrink by as much as 40%, and over-time that can do permanent damage.

Dopamine, known as the "pleasure system," controls emotional responses and movement. People with Parkinson's disease often have low dopamine levels.

Liz Vaccariello, author of the flat belly diet, studies why people who are depressed or stressed typically gain weight.

"Cortisol is the hormone that we create when we are stressed out and that makes us crave sweets and makes your body store extra calories that we consume as belly fat," she says.

What we can do about it is not rocket science, but some might be more obvious than others.

-Regular Exercise: most of us know this one. Regular exercise provides a host of benefits including maintaining weight and lowering blood pressure.

-Get "Good" Sleep: the body burns the most fat during "deep sleep", and re-sets chemical patterns in the body-which regulates everything from moods to memory.

-Get a Well-Balanced Diet: which includes vitamins b, d, and omega oils-which all help manage depression.

-Think Happy Thoughts: thinking happy thoughts might sound a bit fluffy, but Vaccariello found, for example, a sense of happiness in athletes--even if it's "faked"--improved performance.

"Runners, for example, hit a wall and start to get fatigued and think 'I can't go on any longer.' If they just do one thing, 'smile,' just the act of smiling changes what is hormonally going on in the body. There is a 30% increase in their ability to perform for the next several minutes," she says.

-And Maintain Relationships: Chopra says people in countries outside the US are typically happier, because they pay more attention to relationships.

"Happy people are generally not only healthier, they're able to accomplish a lot more because they come from a place of strength and power," he says.
--The Baltimore Sun

GRADES

Grades are being posted throughout the day. Due to time and space, if you would like your work back, please retrieve it Tuesday. Otherwise I will recycle it. YOU DO NOT need it for the fourth quarter. The final exam is NOT comprehensive from 3rd Quarter.

I am looking forward to the 4th quarter! We begin with WWI! I will post the week's agenda tonight.

Cheers!
Caro

End of the Third Quarter!

We are in the final stretch of the year peoples! Enjoy the weekend.

Cheers!
Caro




Longer schooling 'cuts dementia'

The raising of the school leaving age to 15 over 50 years ago could go some way to reducing dementia rates in the elderly, a study has suggested.

A Cambridge University team compared the mental abilities of elderly people, and found those born after the change fared better.

They say that further changes to the school leaving age could improve mental abilities and curb dementia rates more.

Experts said more information on how education affected dementia was needed.
“ It's not going to prevent what is essentially an epidemic of dementia, but it may mean it might not be quite as bad as we have predicted ”
Dr David Llewellyn, Cambridge University

Around 700,000 people in the UK currently have dementia. Experts have estimated that by 2051, the number could stand at 1.7m.

In this study, researchers compared a group of over 9,000 people aged over 65 tested in 1991 with over 5,000 over-65s tested in 2002

They were all given a standard test used to detect early signs of dementia, which involves naming as many animals as possible within a minute.

The researchers identified a small but potentially significant increase in the number of words a minute people used in the later group.

Projection

Poor cognitive function is known to be linked to developing dementia, and it is already known that dementia is less likely in people who been educated for longer.

Previous research has shown that education is beneficial because it increases the number of neural connections in the brain.

The school leaving age was set at 15 in 1947, rising to 16 in 1972. The government announced two years ago that, by 2015, teenagers would have to stay in education or training until they were 18.

Writing in the journal Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition, the researchers say "The increase in educational levels that we observed is consistent with changes in the mandatory school leaving age in England."

Other factors including fewer heart attacks, increased prescription of drugs to reduce high blood pressure, fewer people smoking and improvements in early life nutrition are also likely to have had an effect on the cognitive abilities of the 2002 group.
SCHOOL RULES
# 1918 - full-time education compulsory for children aged five to 14
# 1947 - leaving age raised to 15
# 1972 - leaving age goes up to 16
# 2015 - teenagers will have to stay in education or training until they are 18

Dr David Llewellyn, who led the study, said: "Dementia happens when people decline cognitively to the point where it interferes with their ability to do basic things like cook.

"It tends to happen later in life, but the changes that lead to it tend to start much earlier.

"These findings are important because they affect our projection of what's likely to happen in the future.

"It's not going to prevent what is essentially an epidemic of dementia, but it may mean it might not be quite as bad as we have predicted."

Dr Llewellyn said changes to the school leaving age after the period covered in the study would should also lead to improvements in cognitive abilities, and therefore mitigate dementia rates.

And he added: "When talking about what we should do in terms of education and changes to the school leaving age, this kind of study should feed into it."

But Neil Hunt, chief executive of the Alzheimer's Society said: "Whilst we have a lot of really good evidence on healthy lifestyles and the fact that they can decrease risk of dementia, there isn't enough evidence on education and dementia to draw any conclusions.

"We know conditions such as diabetes and obesity are on the rise and that they increase people's risk of dementia - unfortunately this may have the opposite effect. "

Update

Prepare for the exam by studying the following:

1.Causes of European imperialism
--specific examples for each cause

2.Effects of European imperialism
--specific examples of each

3.Compare multiple examples of imperialism: Congo, South Africa, Japan, Middle East, India

4. Be able to explain the relationships among: industrialization, nationalism, and imperialism

Cheers!
Caro

The Week Ahead

Monday (4/6)
Imperialism in Africa:
Guns, Germs, and Steel 2
HW: Three paragraph essay

Tuesday (4/7)
Imperialism in the Middle East
--Discuss HW
Imperialism in India
--DBQ
HW: Textbook TBA

Wednesday (4/8)
Imperialism in Japan
--Notes
--Video
HW: Study for exam

Thursday (4/9)
Review Imperialism
Exam - Short Answer
HW: NONE

Friday (4/10)
Introduction to World War I
Current Events
HW: NONE!

Sleep may help clear brain for learning

ST. LOUIS, Apr 3, 2009 (UPI via COMTEX) -- Sleep, already recognized as a promoter of long-term memories, also helps clear room in the brain for new learning, U.S. researchers said.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis said neurologists believe creation of new synapses is one key way the brain encodes memories and learning.

"There are a number of reasons why the brain can't indefinitely add synapses, including the finite spatial constraints of the skull," senior author Paul Shaw of Washington University School of Medicine said in a statement.

"We were able to track the creation of new synapses in fruit flies during learning experiences and to show that sleep pushed that number back down."

Many aspects of fly sleep are similar to human sleep. The study, published in the journal Science, used flies genetically altered to make it possible to track the development of new synapses -- the junctures at which brain cells communicate.

"The biggest surprise was that out of 200,000 fly brain cells, only 16 were required for the formation of new memories," first author Jeffrey Donlea, a graduate student, said. "These 16 cells are part of the circadian circuitry that let the fly brain perform certain behaviors at particular times of day."

Tough times add to panic, anxiety disorders

Simply picking up the paper or turning on the TV these days can make a person anxious.

The Dow is down, unemployment is up and major cities have neighborhoods full of empty, foreclosed-on houses.

Americans have so much anxiety about personal finances, the economy and job losses that the federal government's Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration released this week online a "Guide to Getting Through Tough Economic Times."

For most, the collective anxiety causes a few moments of panic in the daily routine or the occasional sleepless night. For the 40 million U.S. adults who suffer from anxiety disorders, however, it can mean a daily routine of persistent panic.

And those who have Generalized Anxiety Disorder -- characterized by persistent, excessive, and unrealistic worry about everyday things -- may be in a constant state of panic, overly concerned about money, health, family, work, or other issues -- even when there is no apparent reason for concern, according to the Anxiety Disorders Association of America.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder is treatable, and clinical trials have shown the best way to treat it is a combination of medicines and group or individual psychotherapy, said Craig Stevens. He's the chairman of the pharmacology and physiology department at Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences. For decades, the most popular drugs prescribed to treat anxiety disorders were benzodiazepines -- drugs such as Valium and Xanax that relax

the brain and body in a way similar to alcohol, but carry a risk of dependency and potential for abuse.

Due to that risk and other side effects, doctors have started to move away from treating long-term anxiety disorders with benzo drugs -- and toward a class of medicines known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs) or serotonin-norepinephrine re-uptake inhibitors (SNRIs), commonly used as antidepressants, Stevens said.

Because these medications are used to fix serotonin imbalances in the brain, they may be able to repair the misfiring neurons that are triggering anxiety attacks.

"Anxiety is normally an adaptive response in humans, one of the normal adaptive responses that help us survive in life," Stevens said. "For those with chronic anxiety, it's possible (their brain's neurons) are miswired or overactive."

People who have anxiety disorders can't just "snap out of it," so to speak.

"In the same way you can't just run a four-minute mile, they can't get out of the door because of agoraphobia or anxiety," he said. "They can't inhibit these ruminating thoughts -- their brain is wired differently."

That's why antidepressants are promising as a method of treating anxiety disorders, he said.

"The brain is very plastic, much more than we ever thought. There's some amazing brain data that shows new neurons being made with the use of antidepressants such as Prozac."

Fixing that imbalance could mean a more balanced, less panic-stricken life for those with anxiety disorders. And it may fix other medical problems, Stevens said, that can stem from chronic anxiety -- such as high blood pressure, stomach disorders, and substance abuse as a way of self-medicating.

But some with anxiety disorders are reluctant to seek treatment, either because of the stigma attached to seeing a doctor for mental health issues or because of fears of addiction, dependence or side effects of the medications.

"People shouldn't be afraid if they take them the right way, under a doctor's supervision," Stevens said. "We are making progress, and the stigma is going away. But quite frankly, it's also a matter of compassion."

Tough times: Possible health risks

Economic turmoil can result in a host of negative health e9ects --physical and mental. For some, it can substantially increase the risk for developing problems such as:

--Depression

--Anxiety

--Compulsive behaviors (overeating, excessive gambling, spending, etc.)

--Substance abuse

--Need help? Visit tulsaworld.com/economicanxiety.

More than just temporary anxiety?

Think you might su9er from Generalized Anxiety Disorder? Take the following self-test. If you answer "yes" to several of the following questions, talk to your doctor.

Are you troubled by:

--Excessive worry, occurring more days than not, for at least six months

--Unreasonable worry about a number of events or activities, such as work or school and/or health

--The inability to control the worry

Are you bothered by at least three of the following?

--Restlessness, feeling keyed-up or on edge

--Being easily tired

--Problems concentrating

--Irritability

--Muscle tension

--Trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, or restless and unsatisfying sleep

--Anxiety interfering with daily life

Source: Anxiety Disorders Association of America

April Fools!

Fourth Period got me! Here is an interesting article on some more April fools gags!
Internet hoaxes launched for April Fool's gags