Fatty Foods May Boost Memory

A hormone released during the digestion of certain fats triggers long-term memory formation in rats, a new study says.
Researchers found that administering a compound produced in the small intestine called oleoylethanolamide (OEA) to rats improved memory retention during two different tasks.

When cell receptors activated by OEA were blocked, the animals' performance decreased.

Though the study involved rats, OEA's effects should be similar in other animals, including humans, said study team member Daniele Piomelli, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine.

Follow the Fat

The team suspects OEA's memory-enhancing activity likely evolved to help animals remember where and when they ate a fatty meal, so they could return to that spot later.

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Texas judge allows collection of dead son's sperm

A judge has granted a mother's request to have someone harvest sperm from her dead son's body, so she can have the option of carrying out his wish to have children. Nikolas Colton Evans, 21, died Sunday at a Brackenridge hospital after being punched and falling outside an Austin bar March 27.

His mother, Marissa Evans, told the Austin American-Statesman newspaper that he wanted to have three sons someday and had even picked out their names: Hunter, Tod and Van.

"I want him to live on. I want to keep a piece of him," she told the newspaper.

Travis County Probate Judge Guy Herman ruled Monday in an emergency hearing requested by the mother, because of the urgency of collecting the sperm intact.

Court documents said the sperm had to be collected within 24 hours of Nikolas Evans being removed from life support unless the body was cooled to no more than 39.2 degrees.

Herman ordered the county medical examiner's office to continue storing the body at the proper temperature until the sperm could be collected.

Other organs and tissues were already going to be harvested from Evans' body, the judge noted, and there would be no other remedy for the mother if time expired.

Evans and her attorneys were trying on Tuesday to find a urologist or other medical professional willing to collect the sperm for a possible surrogate pregnancy in the future.

University of Texas law professor John Robertson, who specializes in bioethics, said state law gives parents control over a child's body for organ and tissue donations but its use for sperm "is very unclear."

"There are no strong precedents in favor of a parent being able to request post-mortem sperm retrieval," he said.

No arrests have been made in the assault on Nikolas Evans. Investigators said Evans hit his head on the ground after he was punched during an argument with a group of men.

From: Perez Hilton

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Fish Can Count

When it comes to counting, fish do swimmingly, according to a new study that describes the first published evidence of such behavior.

Captive mosquitofish—a North and Central American freshwater fish named for its taste for mosquito larvae—successfully counted geometric shapes in recent laboratory experiments.
Ten of the naturally social fish were first trained inside their tank to associate a door permitting them to move into different compartments and join their larger group with a certain number of shapes.

The same fish were then tested several times in an otherwise empty, unfamiliar tank to see whether they would choose to swim through the door marked with the right number of shapes.

The results showed that the fish chose the correct door more often than by chance alone, said study lead author Christian Agrillo, a psychologist at the University of Padova in Italy.

To make sure the fish weren't using non-numerical cues—for instance, estimating how much space objects take up—the Agrillo and colleagues placed sets of shapes that varied in size, brightness, and distance.

The sets were randomly selected so that only the number of shapes stayed the same.

"Only [these] kinds of studies may permit us to definitively understand whether an animal is counting, or, in contrast, using other quantitative mechanisms," Agrillo said in an email.

Although mosquitofish now join humans, monkeys, and other animals known to count, the ability in fish is probably a "last resort" strategy that has evolutionary underpinnings, Agrillo said.

(Related: "Monkeys Can Subtract, Study Finds.")

That's because non-numerical cues probably come more easily to fish as they make rapid-fire decisions.

Being able to count may require more brainpower than simply judging numbers based on size. But counting might sometimes be necessary as the fish seek safety in numbers to shield themselves from predators, Agrillo said.

by: Christine Dell'Amore
From: http://news.nationalgeographic.com

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