In some ways, stress is all in our heads, said Bruce McEwen, a neuroendocrinologist at Rockefeller University in New York City, since our brains are responsible for recognizing and responding to stressors. Three sections in particular: the amygdale, the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex work with the hypothalamus to flip on (and hopefully shut down) production of stress hormones and other automatic responses to stress, like increased heart rate. But researchers are now learning how stressors can physically alter our brains, which in turn, may impact how we learn, form memories, and even make decisions. The effects are sometimes reversible but sometimes not, the scientists reported.

Among the findings:

Stress the monkey. Simona Spinelli of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland and colleagues placed 13 young monkeys in the care of their peers for 6 months, while another 15 monkeys spent the same time with their mothers. Both sets of monkeys then rejoined typical social groups, and the researchers scanned their brains after several months of exposure to the normal environment. The monkeys raised under Lord of the Flies-like conditions showed enlarged brain regions in areas related to stress, compared to the control group, even after spending time in the normal environment. This suggests that early stress can have long-lasting impacts on the brain, Spinelli says, though follow-up studies in humans are necessary.

Brain shrink. Fred Helmstetter of the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee examined the effect of chronic stress, akin to post-traumatic stress disorder, in adult rats by examining their hipocampal volumes. They found that this memory-forming region of the brain actually shrank slightly in rats exposed to chronic stress, which sheds some insight for the controversy of whether Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can actually shrink the hippocampus or if people with smaller hippocampuses may be more prone to the syndrome.

Many of these studies have implications for how stress impacts our ability to learn and form memories, the researchers reported. And scientists at the University of Washington in Seattle are also starting to examine whether stress interferes with decision-making capacities. With all this talk of stress, Thanksgiving vacation couldn't come any sooner.

--Rachel Zelkowitz

In a poster presented here today, team member and self-reported gum chewer Xue Wang, laid out the case. Ten healthy subjects performed short-term memory tasks, like trying to identify letters that repeated themselves among a series of letters, while intermittently solving math problems. The researchers ramped up the volunteers' stress levels (as measured via a skin conductor, which operates like a lie detector) by telling the subjects when they got a math answer wrong and pushing them to solve the problems faster.

Gum kept the volunteers sharp. When they chewed, activity increased in the parts of their brains associated with short-term memory—and indeed, they performed better on the memory tests. Their stress levels also went down: Subjects who didn't chew gum were 240% more stressed than baseline; those who did were only 50% more stressd. "It's unbelievable that chewing gum can do so much," says Wang.

Still, not everyone is ready to bite. Hector Vargas-Perez, a drug addiction researcher at the University of Toronto who visited the poster, says it's difficult to know what accounted for the gum's effect. "There are a bunch of variables that are involved: the sugar, the flavor, the mechanical part." Vargas-Perez said that he doesn't chew gum on a regular basis--and that the findings aren't quite enough to convince him to take up the habit.

--Haley Stephenson

Attendance (as of noon Nov 18)
31,640 total attendance
9,016 international attendees
73 countries represented
577 exhibiting organizations

The poster floor
15,555 abstracts
110,000 push pins are ordered for the poster sessions--enough to fill a 55 gallon drum.

Mass Transit (as of noon Nov 17)
14,100 miles: Distance traveled by shuttle buses between hotels and the convention center.  This is more than the round-trip distance between DC and Tianjin, China.

Catering (as of noon Nov. 17)
400 Dozen Cookies Baked
335 Dozen Muffins Baked
2515 Gallons of Coffee Brewed
1 Ton of Fruit Cubed
2750 potatoes turned into fries

--Greg Miller

Harvard biologist Catherine Dulac and colleagues wanted to see what would happen if they disrupted these systems. In one set of experiments, the team removed the veromonasal organ (VNO), either via genetic manipulation or destructive virus. The change essentially turned the males bisexual--they mated normally with females but also tried to have sex with males. But if their MOE systems were disabled instead, they lost interest in normal mating with females.             

Next year's attendees will hear from James Randi (aka The Amazing Randi) and Apollo Robbins. "For centuries magicians have been practicing their craft based on the way we perceive and encode information about the world," said Carew. Their tricks have a lot to teach neuroscientists about perception, awareness and attention, he said. At the same time, neuroscientists may be able to help magicians understand why the tricks they've discovered and perfected by trial and error fool the brain so effectively.

It sounds like an interesting dialogue, and it's one that has already started. Randi and Robbins are co-authors on a paper in this month's Nature Reviews Neuroscience urging neuroscientists to adopt "magical methods"--such as what happens in the brain when perceptions don't match reality.

--Greg Miller

There was only slightly more elbow room at this afternoon's press conference, where half a dozen researchers described their recent work investigating the possible roles of epigenetic mechanisms in everything from learning and memory to problems such as obesity, drug addiction and anxiety.

In a nutshell, epigenetics means altering gene expression without messing with DNA sequences. It includes DNA methylation, a chemical alteration to DNA that prevents genes from being read out to make proteins, and histone deacetylation, which accomplishes the same thing by keeping DNA strands tightly wound around spool-like histone proteins. Epigenetics has been a growing area of exploration  in cancer biology over the last 20 years. Drugs that inhibit histone deacetylation, for example, have shown promise as cancer-fighting drugs. 

Relatively little is known about the role of epigenetic mechanisms in the brain, but researchers described several intriguing findings at the press conference. Among them:

Tracy Bale of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia presented findings suggesting that high-fat diets during pregnancy can increase the body size of subsequent generations via epigenetic mechanisms in mice. 

Quincey LaPlant of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City described evidence that exposure to cocaine alters gene expression in reward pathways in the rodent brain via epigenetic mechanisms. 

In the final presentation, Michael Ahlijanian of EnVivo Pharmaceuticals in Watertown, Massachusetts described the cognitive enhancing effects of an compound called EVP-0334. The drug inhibits histone deacetylation, and Ahlijanian and colleagues have found that it improves short- and long-term memory in standard lab tests with mice. But Ahlijanian raised a few eyebrows when he said EnVivo hopes to soon begin a phase I clinical trial with EVP-0334 to assess its safety in healthy volunteers (ultimately the team hopes it might restore memory in Alzheimer's patients). After all, it's not known what genes are affected and how permanently their activity is altered. "We don't think we're globally changing gene expression with this molecule," Ahlijanian said, but he added that something like 5% of genes might be affected. Mice given high doses of the drug for 28 days suffer no ill effects, he said. Well, I guess that's encouraging. But given the lasting effects described in some of the other talks and all the unanswered questions, I know one guy who's not quite ready to swallow that pill.

--Greg Miller

The researchers imaged the brains of 17 young Americans and 17 young Chinese who had been in intense love relationships for 6 months. The team compared how the volunteers' brains reacted to a photograph of a loved one versus a photo of someone they didn't know. When viewing a loved one, the brains of the volunteers registered activity in "several regions associated with addiction," said Fisher--notably in the ventral tegmental area, a region of the brain stem that are rich in receptors for dopamine, the chief actor in the brain's "reward circuit".

"We now have physiological evidence that romantic love can last,"  said Fisher triumphantly. "It now appears from this study that romantic love exists not only to initiatie pair-bonding but to maintain and enhance long-term relationships."

--Constance Holden

The allegations arise from an investigation led by Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) that has uncovered evidence that several high-profile researchers violated ethics rules by failing to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting income from pharmaceutical companies. In one case, NIH suspended a grant to a psychiatrist, Charles Nemeroff of Emory University in Atlanta, who allegedly reported only $1.2 million of at least $2.4 million he received from device and drug companies between 2000 and 2007.

So what's being done about it? According to Insel, NIH is constrained by 1995 Public Health Service regulations that put the responsibility for policing financial conflicts of interest squarely on universities and other institutions. These rules require researchers to report outside income to their institutions and obligates institutions to make sure researchers comply and tell NIH if they don't. "NIH is hemmed in to being there after the fact," Insel said.

Should NIH have a more direct role in policing its grantees? Insel wouldn't answer directly. "The question you and the public should be asking is--is this the best policy?" Apparently someone at NIH thinks there might be room for improvement: the agency has announced that it is preparing an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to solicit public comments for a possible revision of the regulations.

--Greg Miller

In one experiment, Mimi Kao in Doupe's lab used microelectrodes to record the activity of neurons in a brain region called LMAN, a component of the avian basal ganglia. When a male finch sang to a female, LMAN neurons fired in a predictable pattern, with individual neurons firing when he sang a particular element of the song.  But when the same male sang on his own, the pattern deteriorated and became less precise--much like his song. 

Doupe proposes that switching between performance and exploratory modes may be a crucial part of what the basal ganglia does, and she argues that figuring out how this switch works in songbirds could have implications for understanding human disorders associated with basal ganglia damage. Could a switch stuck in performance mode produce symptoms such as the rigidity of  Parkinson's disease or the repetitiveness of obsessive compulsive disorder? Would a switch stuck in exploratory mode result in the erratic movements of Huntington's disease? Perhaps these questions are for the birds.

--Greg Miller

"It's like driving a car, you're just there," Morris said. His panel discussion "Dance: Movement in Time & Space" was billed as a forum to explore questions that seemed to overlap the worlds of dance and neuroscience, like how the dancers in Morris' famous company learn and remember the complicated sequence of body movements for both their roles in the piece and the roles of their fellow dancers.

His remarks seemed to resonate with the scientists in the audience, who submitted dozens of index cards marked with questions for the artist.  But the discussion also revealed the challenge of reconciling the gap --one could say the synaptic gap-- between the neuroscience's approach of dissecting the components of a movement and explaining how they're planned and executed by the brain, and the dancer's goal of producing the same movement with comprehensive fluidity.

Morris' hands undulate in the air as he speaks. More than once, his hands lifted in mock exasperation as he struggled to articulate exactly how he can listen to rhythms and translates their motion. "I don't dance in words," he says. That may not be what some neuroscientists want to hear, since their goals include putting words to the neural process that produce motions like a child's wild skipping and a dancer's grande jete leap. But it signifies the tremendous challenges facing any researcher who seeks to understand how and why our brains work the way they do.

--Rachel Zelkowitz

And if you want even more ESOF 2008, check out the posts on the Science Careers blog--one explores a discussion on whether women scientists can do both family and research and another notes that a free bag is not what new researchers want from ESOF.

See you in Turin in 2010.

--Science's European News Staff

Europe has always tended to spread the wealth--most of its science funding, for example, goes to so-called Framework Programmes that must involve scientists from multiple countries, even if focusing money on one group might get more accomplished. Yet that's starting to change, both for the European Union as a whole and for its member countries. France, for example, has dared to throw money at a small number of universities, hoping to make R&D powerhouses. Germany has done the same, seeking "elite" universities. In both cases, the schools not selected were none too pleased. The E.U. now has its own way of picking science's top echelon: the European Research Council, which picks the best grant proposals from researchers no matter their location, and those scientists can go work anywhere in the E.U. Yet the ERC's budget remains only about 15% of all E.U. science funding.

Some of the discussion at the session noted a July 15 letter in the Financial Times by Esko Aho, Finland's former prime minister and now president of the Finnish innovation fund Sitra, and Frank Brown, dean of the Insead business school (Aho also led a group that produced a 2006 report on "Creating An Innovative Europe"). The European Commission will soon issue a policy statement on how to create a European "Silicon Valley" and the letter urges the Commission to be brave and only pick a few existing science "clusters" to get new money instead of continuing the strategy of making everyone happy by adding more centers. Aho and Brown write:

And they conclude with a challenge: "Europe’s politicians can no longer afford the luxury of playing big spender to all regions, great and small. They need to be bold, brave and selective."

Indeed, at the ESOF session, another speaker, Luke Georghiou of the University of Manchester, spoke about the need to bet on the best and "de-democratize" European R&D if the region is to achieve its innovation goals. It's an odd thought that the best way to compete with the U.S. might be to abandon democracy--at least when it comes to who gets research funding.

--John Travis

"Science has flourished for the past 400 years in Europe," said Schenkel, "but today the U.S. dominates." Why? The reason is the nature  of the two beasts, he says. "The U.S. is a single massive economy,"  while the European Union (E.U.)--though collectively the larger economy-- is composed of many countries pursuing their own interests. To put  that into perspective, said Schenkel, "imagine a U.S.A in which the  federal government managed only 5% of overall R&D expenditure with  95% managed individually by 50 independent states." On an optimistic  note, he pointed out that the E.U.'s share of the world's peer-reviewed  scientific articles is 38% to the U.S.'s 33%. But a scientist in the  audience pointed out that the E.U. papers have a much lower total impact  factor. "The reason is that we speak 15 languages," he said before  proposing that all publicly-funded E.U. scientists be forced to publish their research in English. (Schenkel shot that idea down as unworkable.)

Leshner focused on the increasing tension between science and society  in the U.S., arguing that the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks have "skewed" research priorities. The budgets for research on "biosecurity" have ballooned, he said, while many of those for basic  research stagnated. But the biggest flies in the ointment between science and society, according to Leshner are "current scientific issues that abut against core values:  embryonic stem cell research, studies of sex, genetics of behavior, neuroscience (challenging concepts of mind/body), and the teaching of intelligent design versus evolution in science classrooms." Leshner also shared some optimism.  "Both Obama and McCain seem to be science friendly," he said. Then again, "we are facing the largest fiscal deficit in the history of the U.S." Europe's economy is facing tough times too. The science "boat" for each powerhouse region may soon encounter rough waters.

--John Bohannon