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A hard-boiled news editor here at msnbc.com was recently amazed by the way the mood and sound of an entire newsroom changed when a baby appeared. Somebody brought the infant into the offices, and suddenly cooing, high-pitched voices, replaced the chatter and hum of reporters.

Which, naturally, led to a question: What’s up with that?

It’s not just squiggly, bright-eyed babes that can induce this reaction, but tiny baby clothes, or even non-human babies, like puppies and kittens. We all know we do this -- we’ve seen and heard it hundreds of times -- but why?

The short answer is that we like “cute.” Cute makes us feel good, and, in reaction, we want to approach whatever it is that’s cute, so we speak in higher voices, say gentle, soothing things, and are easily distracted from, say, reporting a story about politics or food safety.

In 1943, the famous ethologist Konrad Lorenz created a term he called “baby schema.” The baby schema is how a baby appears, with chubby cheeks; big, round eyes; soft chubby body; a head that seems far too big for its body. Babies are helpless. The only tool they have to motivate others to care for them is cuteness, and they wield the tool with amazing effect.

In 2009, a German-American team led by Melanie Glocker of the University of Muenster put adult women who had never given birth into an fMRI machine to look at their brains. They exposed the women to images of babies, and they manipulated the images to make the babies appear to be closer to, or further from, the ideal baby schema. (In other words, they uglied up the babies.)

The images that most adhered to the baby schema were deemed “cuter” by the women. All the images activated key brain regions involved in face processing and reward, especially the nucleus accumbens, a key reward region, but the higher the baby schema, the more powerful the accumbens activation. The cuter the baby, the better the women liked it, the more motivated they were to approach it. 

Other studies have shown that men react this way to babies, too, just not as powerfully as women. And one experiment showed that when adults looked at “very cute” images of puppies and kittens, or grown dogs and cats, those who looked at the puppies and kittens performed better on the kids’ game “Operation” indicating, the researchers said, that “human sensitivity to those possessing cute features may be an adaptation that facilitates caring for delicate human young.” 

In a fascinating study of how well cute sells, marketing researchers led by Curt Dommeyer of California State University Northridge, positioned themselves outside a Los Angeles grocery store and asked store patrons to stop and complete a survey about organ donation. Half the time, they displayed a picture of a baby boy dressed in a tiny tropical flower shirt on the table.

Without the picture, 26 percent of passersby agreed to complete the survey. With the picture, 49 percent did. A similar test, using a puppy this time, also got a higher response rate, though the difference wasn’t as big. In both tests, women were more likely to complete surveys than men, showing a stronger effect of cuteness on females.

No studies seem to have documented the raised voice pitch when we encounter babies, but it seems likely it’s the result of our brain’s motivating us to nurture. Evolution has wired our brains to be drawn in by cuteness which is why Knut, the baby polar bear, sparked nationwide love across Germany, while, say, the Hungerford’s Crawling Water Beetle goes unloved.     

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com)  to be published Sept. 13.

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Courtesy of Sean Myles

When then-post-doctoral student Sean Myles visited the Solomon Islands, he took this photo after noticing a large number of indigenous children with naturally blond hair. A few years later this photo sparked a study that identified the genetic cause of the striking hair and skin color combination.

When Sean Myles worked as post-doctoral student in Carlos Bustamante’s lab, he showed Bustamante a photo of a Melanesian child with cocoa-colored skin and bright blond hair, wearing a U.S. military jacket.

Like others, Bustamante,a professor of genetics at Stanford University, initially believed the Melanesians’ blond hair came from Europeans who visited the islands and paired with islanders. But Myles, now an assistant professor at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College, insisted it was something different. When Myles had visited the Solomon Islands for another research project, he estimated that 5 to 10 percent of the children possessed light locks. So Bustamante and Myles designed an experiment to understand the origin of the blond Solomon Islanders.  

“I think there was some debate that the scientific community was sort of hypothesizing about,” says Eimear Kenny, a co-author and post-doctoral scholar in Bustamante’s lab at Stanford.

Bustamante, Myles, and their colleagues discovered the Melanesians’ blond hair comes from a gene mutation specific only to them. The variant is recessive, meaning that both a mother and father must carry the gene for a child to inherit flaxen hair.   

“It is interesting to have one gene that is associated with pigmentation in a tropical population with blond hair,” says Rasmus Nielsen, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkley, who is not part of this study. “There are lots of different mutations that impact skin and hair color and in this case there is one mutation that impacts it, which is quite unusual.”

In 2009, Myles collected 1,000 samples by traveling from village to village on the Solomon Islands, working with local chiefs for permission. The researchers first tested 100 samples to look for genetic mutations and were shocked to find one gene contributed to the blond hair—and this gene differed from what caused blondness in Northern Europeans and their descendants.

The test of the remaining 1,000 samples yielded the same results. The researchers noticed a signal on chromosome 9 and when they dug deeper, they discovered that TYRP1, known for influencing pigmentation in mice and humans, caused the blond hair.

“Pretty much everything about these results was surprising. This is really not what we were expecting,” says Kenny. “We did not expect to find a single gene.”

Generally, a number of genes contribute to skin or hair color, for example. There could be anywhere from 10 to hundreds of genes impacting whether a person is blond.  

While this discovery might appear to answer a simple question, the results have larger implications. Most genetic studies look at North Americans or Europeans and researchers translate the results to represent all people.

“[This impacts] how we think about the design of medical genetic studies and the importance of broadening representations in medical studies,” Bustamante says.

And Nielson believes that researchers will gain a better understanding of the human genome by rethinking experiments.  

“You can look at small isolated populations and find very interesting genetic variants,” Nielson says.

The study was published Friday in Science.

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By Jennifer Welsh
LiveScience 

What gives you the motivation to go the extra mile for a promotion or a perfect test score? It may be your levels of a brain chemical called dopamine. Researchers have found amounts of this chemical in three brain regions determine if a person is a go-getter or a procrastinator.

Dopamine does different things in different areas of the brain. So while high levels in some brain regions were associated with a high work ethic, a spike in another brain region seemed indicate just the opposite — a person more likely to slack off, even if it meant smaller monetary rewards.

"To our surprise, we also found a different region of the brain, the anterior insula, that showed a strong negative relationship between dopamine level and willingness to work hard," study researcher Michael Treadway, graduate student at Vanderbilt University, told LiveScience.

The fact that dopamine can have opposing effects on different parts of the brain puts a wrench in how psychotropic drugs that affect dopamine levels are used for the treatment of attention-deficit disorder (ADD), depression and schizophrenia, Treadway noted. The general assumption has been that these dopamine-releasing drugs have the same effect throughout the brain.

The researchers scanned the brains of 25 young adult volunteers and put them through a test to see how hard they were willing to work for a monetary reward. They would choose either an easy or a difficult button-pushing task, and get rewarded either $1 or a variablevalue of up to $4. They repeated these 30-second tasks for 20 minutes.

Some of the participants opted to work harder for the larger reward by completing thedifficult task, while others chose the easier task more often and accepted the small reward. Does this choice make them lazy? Maybe, Treadway said: "They were less motivated by this particular task. We suspect it predicts, to a certain extent, how motivated they might be in other contexts."

They compared testing data with brain scans of these patients, with and without administration of the dopamine-releasing drug amphetamine, which provides a reading of how much dopamine is normally released in different areas in the brain. [Inside the Brain: A Journey Through Time]

"You've got someone deciding, 'Do I want to work a bit more or a bit less? How do I factor in these odds?' Some people just went for it," Treadway said. The researchers found that these hardworking people had the most dopamine in two areas of the brain known to play an important role in reward and motivation, and low dopamine levels in the anterior insula, a region linked to motivation and risk perception.

These differences may mean that the choice between working hard and slacking off depend on how the brain weighs risk and reward, the researchers said. Some people are more wary about taking a risk and expending extra energy for an unlikely, but larger, reward. Other people concentrate more on the big reward they could get, and downplay the possible losses (of energy and time).

These findings could be important in getting a better grip on mental illnesses characterized by a lack of motivation, such as ADD, depression and schizophrenia, the researchers said. "Understanding some of these region-specific patterns may help us, at some point down the line, do a better job of predicting how patients may respond to different types of medication,"

"We think that part of what is going on in depression is some alteration in motivation pathways and part of the impetus for this study was working towards a model to be able to test the role of motivation in depression," Treadway said. "This may be a way to assess the motivational side of depression."

The study was published today (May 1) in the Journal of Neuroscience.

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Yikes!

That’s was the reaction of many of our readers after seeing burnt-to-a-crisp New Jersey mom Patricia Krentcil, who made news after authorities arrested her for taking her 5-year-old daughter to a tanning salon to tan, a claim she denies.

Krentcil does admit that she enjoys tanning -- perhaps a bit too much -- but all those hours in UV light have likely damaged the collagen in Krentcil's skin, causing her leathery, brown visage. 

“That’s a result of chronic exposure, which causes darkening of the skin,” says Dr. Shannon Campbell, clinical assistant professor of general dermatology and cutaneous oncology at The Ohio State University James Cancer Center. 

While many people just desire a bronze color, a tan is actually the body’s way of protecting itself. “Why is she so dark?  Tanning is a protective mechanism that the body has and it is sign of skin damage if the body tans. That explains why her skin is so dark,” says Campbell.

TODAY

New Jersey mom Patricia Krentcil is denying charges of child endangerment after taking her 5-year-old daughter to a tanning salon. But what many msnbc.com readers couldn't help but focus on was her leathery visage.

Collagen, which is in the dermis, the second layer of the skin, gives the skin its elasticity. Collagen keeps skin strong and elastic, but as it lessens due to age or UV damage, the skin sustains cracks or wrinkles. It’s what makes skin pliable and the less one has, the more wrinkles occur. That's what's causing Krentcil to look prematurely aged and leathery (she's 44, but could easily pass as a Golden Girl). 

And tanning — especially indoor tanning — causes more than just hideous looks. Campbell says that people who use tanning beds are 2.5 times more likely to develop squamous cell carcinomas (SCC) and 1.5 times more likely to develop basal cell carcinomas (BCC). Someone with such a tanning history would also suffer from a weakened immune system (people often develop cold sores after tanning) and an increased chance of getting cataracts and ocular melanoma, a rare and often overlooked eye cancer caused by overexposure to UV light.

Krentcil's excessive tanning has focused attention on "tanorexia," a habit that research indicates can be as addictive as alcohol or smoking. A small study from 2006 found that when people who compulsively sunbathe -- whether in a tanning booth or outdoors -- stop, they can feel withdrawal symptoms from their UV high. And an earlier msnbc.com story reported that many teen girls hit the tanning salon for the first time with mom. Researchers from East Tennessee state University found that nearly 40 percent of young women, ages 18 to 30, who participated in a small study said their first experience with indoor tanning was with their mother.

Whether someone is hooked on rays -- artificial or real -- the World Health Organization classifies ultraviolet radiation as a known carcinogen, Dr. Jennifer Ashton, author of "Your Body Beautiful," told TODAY Thursday. "They put it on the same level as cigarettes, on the same level as plutonium. So it's dangerous."  

But there is hope for Krentcil. If she stops tanning her skin might lighten and different treatments could repair her collagen, leading to a more youthful appearance. Yet, Krentcil will probably always be at higher risk for cancer:

“To a degree the damage has already been done,” Campbell says. 

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For most people, sleep is undisturbed by the need to pee, because our bladders seem to hold more urine over night. But just how this happens, and why some people are unable to do this, has remained a mystery until now.

New research shows that the body's internal clock controls the production of a key protein that helps regulate the bladder's capacity to hold urine before needing to empty.

The findings may someday yield new therapies to help children who involuntarily wet the bed or adults who frequently wake up at night to urinate, researchers said.

"In certain conditions there may be a derangement of the circadian rhythm so that the wrong amount of [the protein] is produced at the wrong time of day," Andrea Meredith, an assistant professor of physiology at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the study, told LiveScience.

By targeting the protein, called connexin43, researchers may be able to induce the correct amount of the protein at the right times, she said. [ 10 Things You Didn't Know About You ]

 Previous research has shown that mice with an increased amount of connexin43 have a lower functional bladder capacity — that is, their bladders require less liquid before it triggers the need to pee. The researchers in Japan wondered what role the protein plays in normal bladder function and how it's affected by the time of day. While scientists have long known that humans and other animals have day-night differences in functional bladder capacity, it's been unclear if these differences are due to light or if they are governed by an intrinsic circadian (daily) rhythm.

To find out, the researchers needed to determine how much and how often mice urinate throughout the day, a measurement that is more difficult than it sounds. "Mouse urination events are very tiny; it's not as simple as them peeing in a cup, you measuring it and moving on," Meredith explained.

So the researchers developed a machine that constantly moves filter paper beneath a mouse cage to capture the urine — they saw that the mice's day-night urination differences exist even when they are in 24-hour darkness. Moreover, this normal urination pattern was lost in mice with defective biological clocks, showing, for the first time, that urination is an intrinsic circadian rhythm, Meredith said.

The researchers also found that mice with an abnormal connexin43gene, which produces the connexin43 protein, urinate less frequently than normal mice. And when they looked at the bladder muscle cells of normal mice, they found that the expression of the connexin43 gene oscillates throughout the day and is governed by a certain circadian clock molecule.

Taken together, the results show that connexin43, which helps regulate functional bladder capacity, changes according to our biological clocks. If your body is producing the incorrect amount of connexin43 or if your biological clock is off, you may find yourself in the bathroom at night more than you'd like, the study suggests.

"This research explains why healthy people do not urinate during sleep, from the standpoint of bladder function," study co-author and urologist Dr. Akihiro Kanematsu, of the Hyogo College of Medicine in Japan, told LiveScience in an email.

However, both Kanematsu and Meredith stress that other circadian-regulated proteins and genes likely affect functional bladder capacity.

Whatever the case, the research has implications for treating nighttime urination problems in children and the elderly, Kanematsu said. Solving such problems, he explained, may involve looking at the urine production in kidneys and the arousal levels of the brain, in addition to bladder capacity.

"Thus we can conceive to treat these patients from two sides," Kanematsu said. The first approach is to fix the circadian rhythms themselves, either through behavioral means or medications. "The other way is to find therapeutic targets in each organ, like [connexin43] in the bladder."

The study was published today (May 1) in the journal Nature Communications.

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Nick Koudis / Getty Images stock

Nice to meet you! ... What's your name again?

Tired of finding yourself in that awkward situation where you recognize someone's face, yet you can't recall their name? New research in Psychological Science sheds some light on the phenomenon.

Scientists recently discovered that a face's features, more than the entire face per se, are the key to recognizing a person.

"In the past, it was believed that we look at faces holistically in order to recognize the face," says Jason M. Gold, coauthor of the study and associate professor of psychology at Indiana University. "But surprisingly, we found that the whole was not greater than the sum of its parts."

Avoid a Memory Meltdown

But how can you put this ability to hone in on features to good use? We reached out to Scott Hagwood, author of Memory Power and four-time National Memory Champion, to teach you how to utilize that memory of yours and never forget a name again.

Wordplay
The key to remembering someone's name is making a connection between their name and something that you can easily remember, says Hagwood. So right off the bat, see if the name itself does the work for you. Alliteration and rhyming can be very helpful, says Hagwood. For example, you remember Lucy due to her luscious lips (alliteration), or you were introduced to Cole, who has a large facial mole (rhyming).

Form a trigger
Let's say you meet "Henry," yet this isn't the first "Henry" you know. Since you have an old Henry in mind, try to form a connection between the new Henry's features and the original Henry, says Hagwood. By drawing this parallel, this conditions the brain to use that feature as a memory trigger. A weak example: Both men have short hair. "Since hair styles can frequently change, it's not the wisest choice to make connections to," says Hagwood. A better method: Pick something you despise about old Henry and compare it to the new. Maybe Old Henry has absolutely horrible skin, yet the new once looks like he just stepped out of a Clinique ad.

A simple way to get an individual's name to go hand in hand with their face is to say their name aloud in conversation. This technique practices mindfulness and can condition your brain to associate the sound of their name to their face, says Hagwood. Just don't overdo the repetition, otherwise the interaction feels forced.

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