Friday, 16 March 2012

Article/Video for discusion, March 20th.

Sexually deprived Drosophila become bar flies

By Christie Wilcox | March 15, 2012 |

“He caresses every bottle like it’s the first one he’s had, saying it ain’t love, but it ain’t bad.”
- Ani DiFranco

Rejection stinks. It literally hurts. But worse, it has an immediate and negative impact on our brains, producing withdrawal symptoms as if we’re quitting a serious addiction cold turkey. It’s no wonder, then, that we are tempted to turn to drugs to make ourselves feel better.

But we’re not the only species that drowns our sorrows when we’re lonely – as a new study in Science reveals, rejected Drosophilado, too. Scientists have found not only will these sexually frustrated flies choose to consume more alcohol than their happily mated peers, sex and alcohol consumption activate the same neurological pathway in their brains.

Drosophila melanogaster males sure know how to woo a lady. When placed in the same container as a potential mate, a male fly will play her a delicate love song by vibrating one wing, caress her rear end, and gently nuzzle her most private of parts with his proboiscis to convince her that he is one heck of a lover. But even the most romantic fly can’t convince an already mated female Drosophila to give up the goods, so scientists were able to use the girls’ steely resolve to see how rejection affects fly drinking behavior.

“Alcohol is one of the most widely used and abused drugs in the world,” explains lead author Galit Shohat-Ophir. “The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is an ideal model organism to study how the social environment modulates behavior.” Previous studies have found that Drosophila melanogaster exhibit complex addiction-like behaviors. So in the controlled setting of Ulrike Heberlein’s lab at the University of California San Francisco, researchers paired male fruit flies with three types of females: 1) unmated females, which were willing and happy to mate; 2) mated females, which actively rejected the men; and 3) decapitated females, which didn’t actively reject the guys but, well, weren’t exactly willing partners either. After the flies were satisfied or frustrated, they were offered regular food and food spiked with ethanol, and the researchers measured which type they preferred to see if there was any connection between sex and drinking.

The flies that were rejected drank significantly more than their satisfied peers, but so did the ones paired with incapacitated girls, suggesting that it wasn’t the social aspect of rejection but sexual deprivation that drives male flies to increase their ethanol consumption (see the video at the end!). This alcoholic behavior was very directly related to the guy fly ever getting laid, for even after days of blue balls, if he was allowed to spend some time with a willing woman, he no longer preferred the spiked food.

What the scientists really wanted to understand, though, was why. What drives a frustrated fly to the flask? So to look at the underlying mechanism of this phenomenon, the scientists examined the flies’ brains. A body of scientific literature has connected one particular neurotransmitter, neuropeptide F (NPF), to ethanol-related behaviors in Drosophila, so it was a logical place to start. A very similar neurotransmitter in our brains, called neuropeptide Y (NPY), is linked to alcoholism.

Increased expression of NPF in mated male brains, as shown through immunochemistry.

The team found that sexual frustration caused an immediate decrease in the expression of NPF, while sex increased expression. Furthermore, when they used genetics to artificially knock down NPF levels in the satisfied flies, they drank as much as their not-so-satisfied friends. Similarly, when the researchers artificially increased NPF levels, flies stayed sober. This is the first time NPF levels have connected sexual activity to drinking. Clearly, NPF levels controlled the flies’ desire to drink, so the team further explored how NPF works in the fly’s brain.

Many animals, including ourselves, possess a neurological reward system which reinforces good behavior. Through this system, we ascribe pleasure or positive feelings to things we do that are necessary for species survival, including sex, eating, and social interaction. Drugs tap into this system, stimulating pleasure which can lead to addiction. Previous studies have shown that flies find intoxication rewarding, so the researchers hypothesized that NPF may play a role in the reward system.

Preference tests showed that artificially increasing NPF levels in the absence of sex or ethanol was rewarding to the flies, confirming the scientists’ hypothesis. This was further supported by the discovery that constantly activating NPF abolished the flies’ tendency to consider ethanol rewarding.

“NPF is a currency of reward” explains Shohat-Ophir. High NPF levels signal good behavior in Drosophila brains, thus reinforcing any activities which led to that state. This is a truly novel discovery, for while NPF and the mammal version, NPY, have been linked to alcohol consumption, no animal model has ever placed NPF/NPY in the reward system.

Understanding the role of NPF in reward-seeking behaviors may lead to better treatments for addicts. “In mammals, including humans, NPY may have a similar role [as NPF],” says Shohat-Ophir. “If so, one could argue that activating the NPY system in the proper brain regions might reverse the detrimental effects of traumatic and stressful experiences, which often lead to drug abuse.” Already, NPY and drugs that affect the function of its receptors are in clinical trials for anxiety, PTSD, mood disorders and obesity. This study suggests that perhaps they should be tested as treatment for alcoholism, too, as well as other reward-based addictions.

Research: Shohat-Ophir, G, KR Kaun & R Azanchi (2012). Sexual Deprivation Increases Ethanol Intake in Drosophila. Science 335: 1351-1355.

Flies turn to drinking after sexual refusal

This sequence of three videos shows a male fly courting and successfully mating with a female fly, another male fly being rejected by a female, and a male choosing to consume an alcohol-infused solution over a non-alcohol solution. Video © Science/AAAS

Images:
Fruit fly from Wikimedia Commons, posted by Thomas Wydra, edited in Photoshop.
Immunochemistry reproduced from Shohat-Ophir, G, KR Kaun & R Azanchi. Science 335: 1351-1355 (2012).

Article for discusion, March 20th.

Video game art gets the gallery treatment

By Jane O'BrienBBC News, Washington

A still from the 2009 game Flower. Experts say the rich visuals share a common heritage with simple vintage games like Pong and Pac-Man

In today's Magazine

Video games represent more than an evolving form of entertainment. They are also a platform for innovative art.

In the late 1970s, my best friend was given a video game called Pong. We plugged it into the TV and became instant addicts.

For hours we sat in a darkened room, mesmerised by the two-dimensional ball that we batted back and forth across the screen while our parents muttered about time-wasting and the perils of modern technology.

It did not occur to anybody that we might have been experiencing a new form of art.

But in the succeeding decades, video games have attained such a unique place in popular culture that the Smithsonian American Art Museum believes they deserve recognition. On 16 March, it opens the The Art of Video Games, the first major exhibition to feature work from the industry.

"The goal of the exhibition isn't to determine once and for all whether video games are art," says guest curator Chris Melissinos. "But us 'bit-babies' - those of us who were born in the 1970s and first appropriated these technologies into our lives - we've always viewed them as art, as something bigger than ourselves."

“Start Quote

In the same way that cave paintings led to Expressionism, Pac-Man led to Flower.”

Ross NivenAmerican University

Mr Melissinos wrote his first game when he was 12 years old and went on to become the chief gaming officer at Sun Microsystems, a pioneering computer software company. He believes video game art is unique because it has three separate perspectives.

The first belongs to the game's creator, who crafts an environment he or she wants to share. The second is contained within the game itself: its mechanics and how it presents itself to the gamer. And the third comes from the player, whose personal response and interaction create an individual experience.

"This conversation among the game, the artist, and the player is critical to understanding video games as art," says Mr Melissinos. "It's at this moment that it transcends just being a game."

Pac-Man cave paintings

It has taken him three years to put together the Smithsonian exhibit, which traces the history of the gaming industry from Pac-Man in 1980 (a ghost-eating blob trapped in a maze) to Flower in 2009 - an immersive game in which barren landscapes are transformed by collecting colourful petals.

Flower's designer, Jenova Chen, was inspired by the rolling hills of California. Having moved there from the metropolis of Shanghai, he had never seen such natural beauty. The only way to capture the experience, he felt, was through artistic exaggeration and the invention of a computer code for 200,000 3D blades of grass.

Video's artistic evolution

The Smithsonian American Art Museum uses five games to highlight the evolution of the industry:

Pac-Man (1980) This classic game introduced the "maze and chase" genre at a time when video arcade games were dominated by space shooters
Super Mario Brothers (1985) The game's rich environment, full of hidden objects and secret areas for players to explore, and engaging music laid the foundation for many subsequent action-adventure games. (The still above is from the third version of the game, released in Japan in 1990)
The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) In this playful pirate adventure, players navigate through realistic, animated environments by interacting with objects, locations, and people.
Myst (1995) The enigmatic story line, coupled with beautiful, photo-realistic graphics and immersive audio, provided an almost limitless world for a patient player to explore.
Flower (2009) put the player in an unusual role—that of the wind. The controller translates the player's movements into visual feedback, creating a gentle parting of the grass on screen.

GALLERY: Video game art through the years

The result is visually stunning. The accompanying orchestral score adds a cinematic touch. Flower's artistic input is unmistakable and isn't trivialised by being a game. But Pac-Man?

"It qualifies as art in terms of being a step along the way," argues Professor Ross Nover, who teaches graphic design at American University in Washington DC.

"You couldn't have Flower without the game before that, and the game before that. In the same way that cave paintings led to Expressionism, Pac-Man led to Flower."

Prof Nover also appreciates the simplicity of early games. "There's a great kind of minimalism that you lose nowadays," he says. "It's nice to have a game that is just up and down, left and right, and doesn't need a manual."

Court-approved art

America's gaming industry is now worth around $25bn (£16bn) a year. But in the 1980s sales collapsed, partly because the market became saturated with hundreds of poor-quality games and consoles. Many companies went bankrupt and the industry was written off as a niche market that should be ignored.

Today, according to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), nearly three-quarters of all American households play games and the average game player is 37-years-old. In fact, adult women outnumber young boys when it comes to playing video games.

But the industry arguably reached artistic maturity last year when the Supreme Court decided that video games were like other works of art and should be protected under the First Amendment to the US constitution, which guarantees free speech.

The ruling was in response to a California law that attempted to regulate the sale and rental of computer and video games. The Supreme Court said even though the medium was new, games should not be treated differently to books, plays, movies and other forms of entertainment and art.

ESA spokesman Dan Hewitt says the Smithsonian American Art exhibition is another watershed moment.

"To have an institution as prestigious as the Smithsonian to say that video games are such an art form that we're going to include them and have an exhibit on them is a remarkable validation of what we've known for a while," he says.

Mr Melissinos goes further: "I believe it's society's duty and responsibility to protect and nurture this medium because it will be the next great medium for expression, thought, poetry and art for generations to come. That's incredibly exciting, and this is just one small step toward that goal."

I hope my friend kept her Pong.

Article for discusion, March 20th.

$100 to Fly Through the Airport

By Scott McCartney | The Wall Street Journal – Wed, Mar 14, 2012 11:31 PM EDT

Hate the full-body scans, pat-downs and slow going at TSA airport security screening checkpoints? For $100, you can now bypass the hassle.

The Transportation Security Administration is rolling out expedited screening at big airports called "Precheck." It has special lanes for background-checked travelers, who can keep their shoes, belt and jacket on, leave laptops and liquids in carry-on bags and walk through a metal detector rather than a full-body scan. The process, now at two airlines and nine airports, is much like how screenings worked before the Sept. 11 attacks.

To qualify, frequent fliers must meet undisclosed TSA criteria and get invited in by the airlines. There is also a backdoor in. Approved travelers who are in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's "Global Entry" program can transfer into Precheck using their Global Entry number.

"It's a completely different experience than what you're used to," said Matt Stegmeir, a platinum-level Delta Air Lines Inc. (DAL) frequent flier who was invited into Precheck when it opened at his home airport, Minneapolis-St. Paul. Besides zipping through security screening quickly and easily, Mr. Stegmeir noticed another difference: TSA agents at the Precheck lane are usually smiling.

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"It's really a jarring contrast. It reminds you just how much of a hassle the security procedures in place really are," he said.

Global Entry has been extremely popular with frequent international travelers. Approved travelers get to use a kiosk to enter the country rather than waiting in often-long lines to get their passports stamped and go through Customs inspection.

Consider that in January at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, the average wait in line was 35 minutes between 4 and 5 p.m., and the longest wait was 137 minutes. The wait at Terminal 1 at New York's Kennedy International Airport averaged 44 minutes in January for people arriving between 10 and 11 a.m. Enrolling requires a $100 application fee for a background check, plus a brief interview with a Customs officer.

For domestic travel, Global Entry pays off because it gets you into Precheck. Once TSA announced in the fall that enrollment in Global Entry and CBP's other "trusted travel" programs (Nexus for frequent travel across the Canadian border and Sentri for frequent travel across the Mexican border) would get you into Precheck, applications for Global Entry took off.

In February, for example, 26,602 people applied, more than triple the number of applications in February 2011, according to CBP. And February applications were up 42% from January as more and more travelers catch on.

"We want as many people as possible in the program," said John Wagner, CBP's executive director of admissibility and passenger programs.

TSA says it also wants as many people as possible in Precheck, which is still in pilot-testing phase. Both agencies say the programs can enhance screening of people they know nothing about if they can move low-risk people who submit to background checks out of the main queues.

"We can reduce the size of the haystack when we are looking for that one-in-a-billion terrorist," said TSA Administrator John Pistole.

Mr. Pistole, an FBI veteran who took over TSA in 2010, said that by studying frequent-flier histories as well as conducting background checks, he's confident the U.S. now has the technology and the intelligence information to make less-rigorous, faster screening work. TSA has been trying to move to more "risk-based" security—something critics have suggested for many years.

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Once in Precheck, TSA still checks names against terrorism watch lists before every flight, just as it does for other travelers. If a passenger is cleared for Precheck screening, a code is embedded in a traveler's boarding pass.

Precheck members usually get to use security lines set up for first-class and elite-level frequent fliers. But Precheck travelers actually don't know if they will get to use the easy screening until the TSA officer checking IDs actually scans the boarding pass. If the pass has the code, a Precheck passenger is steered to a separate screening lane for what amounts to old-style airport screening.

TSA says Precheck members are selected randomly for regular screening to enhance security. But that unpredictability irks frequent travelers. The agency doesn't make travelers go to the end of the regular screening line, however, but instead slips them into the front of the regular queue.

"I like Precheck, but it would be much more valuable to me if I were able to know before leaving for the airport whether or not I had Precheck approval for that day's flights," said Beth Allen, a University of Minnesota economist and frequent traveler.

Gary Kaminsky, who travels 100,000 miles a year domestically, says he's gotten Precheck screening on about 80% of his trips so far out of Los Angeles International Airport, his home base, on AMR Corp.'s American Airlines. "When it does work, it's phenomenal," he said. "It cuts security screening down to about 30 seconds."

For now, travelers say Precheck lanes are almost always empty—no waiting. In fact, Precheck may be making regular lines longer since equipment and officers are devoted to a little-used lane. Mr. Pistole said that will change as the program expands.

Currently, TSA is working with only two airlines, American and Delta, because they were able to handle computing requirements set by TSA for the frequent-flier aspect. Even if you get into Precheck through Global Entry, it will currently only work for you on American and Delta domestic flights at airports with Precheck lanes. Also, Precheck lanes are in place only at nine airports. Currently, American passengers can use it in Dallas-Fort Worth, New York Kennedy, Los Angeles and Miami. Delta passengers have Precheck access in Atlanta, Detroit and Salt Lake City. Passengers on both airlines can use Precheck in Las Vegas and Minneapolis-St. Paul.

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Later this month, Precheck is set to expand to Washington's Reagan National Airport for Delta passengers and certain members of the U.S. military, and Chicago O'Hare with American.

By the end of the year, Mr. Pistole said Precheck will be in place at 35 airports and six airlines, covering most major U.S. airports and airlines. Expansion will continue in 2013, but Precheck probably won't be available at all 450 commercial airports, since many have a small number of travelers each day. "The goal is to cover the broadest cross-section of travelers," he said.