By Carl Zimmer In the early 1900s, primatologists noticed a group of apes in central Africa with a distinctly slender build; they called them “pygmy chimpanzees.” But as the years passed, it became clear that those animals, now known as bonobos, were profoundly different from chimpanzees. Chimpanzee societies are dominated by males that kill other males, raid the territory of neighboring troops and defend their own ground with border patrols. Male chimpanzees also attack females to coerce them into mating, and sometimes even kill infants. Among bonobos, in contrast, females are dominant. Males do not go on patrols, form alliances or kill other bonobos. And bonobos usually resolve their disputes with sex — lots of it. Bonobos became famous for showing that nature didn’t always have to be red in tooth and claw. “Bonobos are an icon for peace and love, the world’s ‘hippie chimps,’” Sally Coxe, a conservationist, said in 2006. But these sweeping claims were not based on much data. Because bonobos live in remote, swampy rainforests, it has been much more difficult to observe them in the wild than chimpanzees. More recent research has shown that bonobos live a more aggressive life than their reputation would suggest. In a study based on thousands of hours of observations in the wild published on Friday, for example, researchers found that male bonobos commit acts of aggression nearly three times as often as male chimpanzees do. “There is no ‘hippie ape,’” said Maud Mouginot, a biological anthropologist at Boston University who led the analysis. As our closest living relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees can offer us clues about the roots of human behavior. We and the two species share a common ancestor that lived about 7 million years ago. About 5 million years later, bonobos split off from chimpanzees. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 29256 - Posted: 04.13.2024

By Bob Holmes Like many of the researchers who study how people find their way from place to place, David Uttal is a poor navigator. “When I was 13 years old, I got lost on a Boy Scout hike, and I was lost for two and a half days,” recalls the Northwestern University cognitive scientist. And he’s still bad at finding his way around. The world is full of people like Uttal — and their opposites, the folks who always seem to know exactly where they are and how to get where they want to go. Scientists sometimes measure navigational ability by asking someone to point toward an out-of-sight location — or, more challenging, to imagine they are someplace else and point in the direction of a third location — and it’s immediately obvious that some people are better at it than others. “People are never perfect, but they can be as accurate as single-digit degrees off, which is incredibly accurate,” says Nora Newcombe, a cognitive psychologist at Temple University who coauthored a look at how navigational ability develops in the 2022 Annual Review of Developmental Psychology. But others, when asked to indicate the target’s direction, seem to point at random. “They have literally no idea where it is.” While it’s easy to show that people differ in navigational ability, it has proved much harder for scientists to explain why. There’s new excitement brewing in the navigation research world, though. By leveraging technologies such as virtual reality and GPS tracking, scientists have been able to watch hundreds, sometimes even millions, of people trying to find their way through complex spaces, and to measure how well they do. Though there’s still much to learn, the research suggests that to some extent, navigation skills are shaped by upbringing. Nurturing navigation skills

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 29255 - Posted: 04.13.2024

By Joanne Silberner In March, the sons of Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian writer, published a posthumous novel against the specific wishes their father expressed before he died in 2014 at the age of 87. García Márquez had struggled through several versions of the book as dementia set in, and, perhaps stung by uncharacteristic negative reviews from his previous novel, didn’t want the new one published. “Until August,” the story of a woman who travels to her mother’s grave once a year and takes a new lover on each visit, got mixed reviews. Some were outright harsh. In The New York Times, Michael Greenberg wrote “It would be hard to imagine a more unsatisfying goodbye.” García Márquez’s decline, he continued, “seems to have been steep enough to prevent him from holding together the kind of imagined world that the writing of fiction demands.” Wendy Mitchell, who was an administrator with England’s National Health Service until her diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in 2014, recalled the moment she learned of the publication plans last year. “I type every day for fear of dementia snatching away that creative skill, which I see as my escape from dementia,” she wrote last October in The Guardian. “Maybe Márquez thought the same?” The novel’s publication raises some vital questions about living with an aging and perhaps ailing brain. What do mild cognitive impairment and dementia do to our creativity? How do these conditions affect our ability to use words, formulate sentences, and craft stories? Neuroscientists have been exploring these questions for several decades. First, a few definitions. People with mild cognitive impairment have lost more of their cognitive functioning than others their age, and often struggle to remember things. But they’re capable of managing daily activities like dressing, eating, bathing, and finding their way around. In dementia, cognitive difficulties have increased enough to interfere with daily life, and personality changes are more likely.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 29254 - Posted: 04.13.2024

By McKenzie Prillaman It was hailed as a potentially transformative technique for measuring brain activity in animals: direct imaging of neuronal activity (DIANA), held the promise of mapping neuronal activity so fast that neurons could be tracked as they fired. But nearly two years on from the 2022 Science paper1, no one outside the original research group and their collaborators have been able to reproduce the results. Now, two teams have published a record of their replication attempts — and failures. The studies, published on 27 March in Science Advances2,3, suggest that the original results were due to experimental error or data cherry-picking, not neuronal activity after all. But the lead researcher behind the original technique stands by the results. “I’m also very curious as to why other groups fail in reproducing DIANA,” says Jang-Yeon Park, a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) physicist at Sungkyunkwan University in Suwon, South Korea. Science said in an e-mail to Nature that, although it’s important to report the negative results, the Science Advances studies “do not allow a definitive conclusion” to be drawn about the original work, “because there were methodological differences between the papers”. In conventional functional MRI (fMRI), researchers monitor changes in blood flow to different brain regions to estimate activity. But this response lags by at least one second behind the activity of neurons, which send messages in milliseconds. Park and his co-authors said that DIANA could measure neuronal activity directly, which is an “extraordinary claim”, says Ben Inglis, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29253 - Posted: 04.11.2024

By Joanne Silberner A hug, a handshake, a therapeutic massage. A newborn lying on a mother’s bare chest. Physical touch can buoy well-being and lessen pain, depression and anxiety, according to a large new analysis of published research released on Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. Researchers from Germany and the Netherlands systematically reviewed years of research on touch, strokes, hugs and rubs. They also combined data from 137 studies, which included nearly 13,000 adults, children and infants. Each study compared individuals who had been physically touched in some way over the course of an experiment — or had touched an object like a fuzzy stuffed toy — to similar individuals who had not. For example, one study showed that daily 20-minute gentle massages for six weeks in older people with dementia decreased aggressiveness and reduced the levels of a stress marker in the blood. Another found that massages boosted the mood of breast cancer patients. One study even showed that healthy young adults who caressed a robotic baby seal were happier, and felt less pain from a mild heat stimulus, than those who read an article about an astronomer. Positive effects were particularly noticeable in premature babies, who “massively improve” with skin-to-skin contact, said Frédéric Michon, a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and one of the study’s authors. “There have been a lot of claims that touch is good, touch is healthy, touch is something that we all need,” said Rebecca Boehme, a neuroscientist at Linkoping University in Sweden, who reviewed the study for the journal. “But actually, nobody had looked at it from this broad, bird’s eye perspective.” © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Emotions
Link ID: 29252 - Posted: 04.11.2024

By Nicole Rust We readily (and reasonably) accept that the causes of memory dysfunction, including Alzheimer’s disease, reside in the brain. The same is true for many problems with seeing, hearing and motor control. We acknowledge that understanding how the brain supports these functions is important for developing treatments for their corresponding dysfunctions, including blindness, deafness and Parkinson’s disease. Applying the analogous assertion to mood—that understanding how the brain supports mood is crucial for developing more effective treatments for mood disorders, such as depression—is more controversial. For brain researchers unfamiliar with the controversy, it can be befuddling. You might hear, “Mental disorders are psychological, not biological,” and wonder, what does that mean, exactly? Experts have diverse opinions on the matter, with paper titles ranging from “Brain disorders? Not really,” to “Brain disorders? Precisely.” Even though a remarkable 21 percent of adults in the United States will experience a mood disorder at some point in their lives, we do not fully understand what causes them, and existing treatments do not work for everyone. How can we best move toward an impactful understanding of mood and mood disorders, with the longer-term goal of helping these people? What, if anything, makes mood fundamentally different from, say, memory? The answer turns out to be complex and nuanced—here, I hope to unpack it. I also ask brain and mind researchers with diverse perspectives to chime in. Among contemporary brain and mind researchers, I have yet to find any whose position is driven by the notion that some force in the universe beyond the brain, like a nonmaterial soul, gives rise to mood. Rather, the researchers generally agree that our brains mediate all mental function. If everyone agrees that both memory and mood disorders follow from things that happen in the brain, why would the former but not the latter qualify as “brain disorders”? © 2024 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Depression; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 29251 - Posted: 04.11.2024

Jon Hamilton A sibling can change your life — even before you're born. That's because when males and females share a womb, sex hormones from one fetus can cause lasting changes in the others. It's called the intrauterine position phenomenon, or intrauterine position effects, and different versions of it have been observed in rodents, pigs, sheep — and, probably, humans. "It's really kind of strange to think something so random as who you develop next to in utero can absolutely change the trajectory of your development," says Bryce Ryan, a professor of biology at the University of Redlands. The phenomenon is more than a scientific oddity. It helped establish that even tiny amounts of hormone-like chemicals, like those found in some plastics, could affect a fetus. Cattle breeders in ancient Rome may have been the first people to recognize the importance of a sibling's sex. They realized that when a cow gives birth to male-female twins, the female is usually sterile. These females, known as freemartins, also act more like males when they grow up. Scientists began to understand why in the early 1900s. They found evidence that hormones from the male twin were affecting the female's development. The effect is less obvious in other mammals, Ryan says. Female offspring in rodents, for example, can still reproduce, but they have measurable differences in sexual development and tend to be more aggressive. © 2024 npr

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 29250 - Posted: 04.11.2024

Matthew Farrer Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative movement disorder that progresses relentlessly. It gradually impairs a person’s ability to function until they ultimately become immobile and often develop dementia. In the U.S. alone, over a million people are afflicted with Parkinson’s, and new cases and overall numbers are steadily increasing. There is currently no treatment to slow or halt Parkinson’s disease. Available drugs don’t slow disease progression and can treat only certain symptoms. Medications that work early in the disease, however, such as Levodopa, generally become ineffective over the years, necessitating increased doses that can lead to disabling side effects. Without understanding the fundamental molecular cause of Parkinson’s, it’s improbable that researchers will be able to develop a medication to stop the disease from steadily worsening in patients. Many factors may contribute to the development of Parkinson’s, both environmental and genetic. Until recently, underlying genetic causes of the disease were unknown. Most cases of Parkinson’s aren’t inherited but sporadic, and early studies suggested a genetic basis was improbable. Nevertheless, everything in biology has a genetic foundation. As a geneticist and molecular neuroscientist, I have devoted my career to predicting and preventing Parkinson’s disease. In our newly published research, my team and I discovered a new genetic variant linked to Parkinson’s that sheds light on the evolutionary origin of multiple forms of familial parkinsonism, opening doors to better understand and treat the disease. In the mid-1990s, researchers started looking into whether genetic differences between people with or without Parkinson’s might identify specific genes or genetic variants that cause the disease. In general, I and other geneticists use two approaches to map the genetic blueprint of Parkinson’s: linkage analysis and association studies. © 2010–2024, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 29249 - Posted: 04.11.2024

By Helen Bradshaw Walk into a gas station in the United States, and you may see more than just boxes of cigarettes lining the back wall. Colorful containers containing delta-8, a form of the substance THC, are sold in gas stations and shops across the country, and teens are buying them. A recent survey of more than 2,000 U.S. high school seniors found that more than 11 percent of them had used delta-8 in the past year, researchers report March 12 in JAMA. This is the first year the Monitoring the Future study, one of the leading nationally representative surveys of drug use trends among adolescents in the United States, looked at delta-8 use. Because more than 1 in 10 senior students said they used the drug, the survey team plans to monitor delta-8 use every year going forward. “We don’t really want to see any kids being exposed to cannabis, because it potentially increases their risk for developmental harms … and some psychiatric reactions” such as suicidal thoughts, says Alyssa Harlow, a researcher on the survey and an epidemiologist at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles. Despite its prevalence, especially in the South and the Midwest, delta-8 is still new to consumers and research. Science News talked with Harlow and addiction researcher Jessica Kruger of the University of Buffalo in New York to help explain the delta-8 craze and its effects on kids. What is delta-8-THC? Cannabis plants contain over 100 compounds known as cannabinoids. Delta-8 is one of them. The most well-known is delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or delta-9-THC. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29248 - Posted: 04.11.2024

By Christina Caron Anxious ahead of a big job interview? Worried about giving a speech? First date nerves? The solution, some digital start-ups suggest, is a beta blocker, a type of medication that can slow heart rate and lower blood pressure — masking some of the physical symptoms of anxiety. Typically a trip to the doctor’s office would be necessary to get a prescription, but a number of companies are now connecting patients with doctors for quick virtual visits and shipping the medication to people’s homes. “No more ‘Shaky and Sweaty,’” one online ad promised. “Easy fast 15 minute intake.” That worries Dr. Yvette I. Sheline, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. “The first question is: What is going on with this person?” Dr. Sheline said. Are they depressed in addition to anxious? Do they have chronic anxiety or is it just a temporary case of stage fright? “You don’t want to end up prescribing the wrong thing,” she added. In addition, although beta blockers are generally considered safe, experts say they can carry unpleasant side effects and should be used with caution. What are beta blockers? Beta blockers such as propranolol hydrochloride have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for chest pain, migraine prevention, involuntary tremors, abnormal heart rhythms and other uses. Some are still prescribed for hypertension, although they’re no longer considered the preferred treatment, mainly because other medications are more effective in preventing stroke and death. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 29247 - Posted: 04.06.2024

Kimberly Rosvall Liz Aguilar The total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, coincides with an exciting time for wild birds. Local birds are singing for mates and fighting for territories as they gear up for their once-a-year chance to breed. Tens of millions of migrating birds will be passing through the path of totality, and they mostly migrate at night. Because birds use light to match their behaviors to their environment, scientists like us have lots of questions about how they will respond to the eclipse. Will they pause their fighting and wooing and shift toward bedtime-like behaviors? How about a nocturnal animal like an owl or those nighttime migrants – will they start to rustle from their roosts before they realize it’s not night? As behavioral biologists at Indiana University, we research wild breeding birds, with a goal of understanding why animals behave the way that they do in response to environmental challenges and opportunities. For the 2024 eclipse, our team is launching a new project and developing an app. If everything goes as planned, we should end up with a large dataset after the eclipse, collected by community scientist volunteers across the country. On average, a total solar eclipse occurs in the same place only once every 375 years. Most wild animals, like most people, have never seen the sky quickly switch to night in the middle of the day. These rare events are a natural experiment that can help scientists like us understand how animals respond to an unusual sudden change in light. Most past research on animal behavior during total solar eclipses is anecdotal. Observers have reported that zoo animals acted distressed or went into their enclosures. Scientists have spotted spiders starting the nightly deconstruction of their webs in the middle of the day, and farmers have heard their roosters start to crow after totality, as if it’s once again dawn. Other reports suggest more subtle effects on animal behavior. © 2010–2024, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Vision
Link ID: 29246 - Posted: 04.06.2024

By Saima May Sidik In 2010, Theresa Chaklos was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia — the first in a series of ailments that she has had to deal with since. She’d always been an independent person, living alone and supporting herself as a family-law facilitator in the Washington DC court system. But after illness hit, her independence turned into loneliness. Loneliness, in turn, exacerbated Chaklos’s physical condition. “I dropped 15 pounds in less than a week because I wasn’t eating,” she says. “I was so miserable, I just would not get up.” Fortunately a co-worker convinced her to ask her friends to help out, and her mood began to lift. “It’s a great feeling” to know that other people are willing to show up, she says. Many people can’t break out of a bout of loneliness so easily. And when acute loneliness becomes chronic, the health effects can be far-reaching. Chronic loneliness can be as detrimental as obesity, physical inactivity and smoking according to a report by Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general. Depression, dementia, cardiovascular disease1 and even early death2 have all been linked to the condition. Worldwide, around one-quarter of adults feel very or fairly lonely, according to a 2023 poll conducted by the social-media firm Meta, the polling company Gallup and a group of academic advisers (see go.nature.com/48xhu3p). That same year, the World Health Organization launched a campaign to address loneliness, which it called a “pressing health threat”. But why does feeling alone lead to poor health? Over the past few years, scientists have begun to reveal the neural mechanisms that cause the human body to unravel when social needs go unmet. The field “seems to be expanding quite significantly”, says cognitive neuroscientist Nathan Spreng at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. And although the picture is far from complete, early results suggest that loneliness might alter many aspects of the brain, from its volume to the connections between neurons.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 29245 - Posted: 04.06.2024

By Claudia López Lloreda As animals carry out complex behaviors, multiple brain areas turn on and talk to one another. But neuroscientists have had limited means to measure that neuronal dialogue. Electrical recordings, for example, are typically constrained to one brain area at a time, or require that mice have their head fixed in a specific position. A new technology overcomes those restrictions. The device, called E-Scope, reported in a peer-reviewed preprint in eLife, effectively measures the activity of neurons in two different areas at the same time, even as rodents move freely. The headset captures images of calcium currents, made using a microscope, and recordings of neurons’ electrical activity through electrodes to show how the cerebellum communicates with other brain regions during social interaction in mice. “Everything [is] synchronized together that way,” says Peyman Golshani, assistant professor of neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles and a study investigator. This approach holds the potential to illuminate how coordination between brain areas in conditions marked by impaired social interaction, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism, is disrupted, Golshani says. By combining technologies, researchers who use the E-Scope “don’t need separate electrophysiology and imaging hardware,” he adds. It’s also much more comfortable for the animals, according to Golshani. A single wire conveys all of the small headset’s data, so mice can move more freely than when wearing other devices. © 2024 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29244 - Posted: 04.06.2024

By Matt Richtel Historically speaking, it’s not a bad time to be the liver of a teenager. Or the lungs. Regular use of alcohol, tobacco and drugs among high school students has been on a long downward trend. In 2023, 46 percent of seniors said that they’d had a drink in the year before being interviewed; that is a precipitous drop from 88 percent in 1979, when the behavior peaked, according to the annual Monitoring the Future survey, a closely watched national poll of youth substance use. A similar downward trend was observed among eighth and 10th graders, and for those three age groups when it came to cigarette smoking. In 2023, just 15 percent of seniors said that they had smoked a cigarette in their life, down from a peak of 76 percent in 1977. Illicit drug use among teens has remained low and fairly steady for the past three decades, with some notable declines during the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2023, 29 percent of high school seniors reported using marijuana in the previous year — down from 37 percent in 2017, and from a peak of 51 percent in 1979. There are some sobering caveats to the good news. One is that teen overdose deaths have sharply risen, with fentanyl-involved deaths among adolescents doubling from 2019 to 2020 and remaining at that level in the subsequent years. Dr. Nora Volkow has devoted her career to studying use of drugs and alcohol. She has been the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse since 2003. She sat down with The New York Times to discuss changing patterns and the reasons behind shifting drug-use trends. What’s the big picture on teens and drug use? People don’t really realize that among young people, particularly teenagers, the rate of drug use is at the lowest risk that we have seen in decades. And that’s worth saying, too, for legal alcohol and tobacco. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29243 - Posted: 04.06.2024

By Meghan Willcoxon In the summer of 1991, the neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese was studying how movement is represented in the brain when he noticed something odd. He and his research adviser, Giacomo Rizzolatti, at the University of Parma were tracking which neurons became active when monkeys interacted with certain objects. As the scientists had observed before, the same neurons fired when the monkeys either noticed the objects or picked them up. But then the neurons did something the researchers didn’t expect. Before the formal start of the experiment, Gallese grasped the objects to show them to a monkey. At that moment, the activity spiked in the same neurons that had fired when the monkey grasped the objects. It was the first time anyone had observed neurons encode information for both an action and another individual performing that action. Those neurons reminded the researchers of a mirror: Actions the monkeys observed were reflected in their brains through these peculiar motor cells. In 1992, Gallese and Rizzolatti first described the cells in the journal Experimental Brain Research and then in 1996 named them “mirror neurons” in Brain. The researchers knew they had found something interesting, but nothing could have prepared them for how the rest of the world would respond. Within 10 years of the discovery, the idea of a mirror neuron had become the rare neuroscience concept to capture the public imagination. From 2002 to 2009, scientists across disciplines joined science popularizers in sensationalizing these cells, attributing more properties to them to explain such complex human behaviors as empathy, altruism, learning, imitation, autism and speech. Then, nearly as quickly as mirror neurons caught on, scientific doubts about their explanatory power crept in. Within a few years, these celebrity cells were filed away in the drawer of over-promised, under-delivered discoveries. Vittorio Gallese wears round glasses.

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 29242 - Posted: 04.04.2024

By Esther Landhuis When Angela Tang’s teenage son came down with a baffling illness, few households could have been better equipped to deal with it. The family lives in a wealthy Los Angeles suburb. Both parents are doctors — Tang in internal medicine, her husband in infectious disease — and their son, a straight-A student well-liked at school, had been cared for by the family’s pediatrician since birth. Still, the parents worried as their son’s symptoms appeared, seemingly out of the blue, in September 2018: He’d meticulously line up pencils in groups of five, recite prayers unrelentingly, make homework illegible as he had to erase or cross out every C, D, and F. Eating, too, became a chore. If he had a contaminating thought while taking a bite, he’d have to spit out the food, wash his mouth, and try again, but the new bite couldn’t have touched the old one. It got to the point where he could only eat mushy or semi-liquid foods carefully placed “in little aliquots on his plate, so that if one bite got contaminated,” it wouldn’t touch the others, Tang said. Before long, she and her husband were working around the clock just to get him through the day. In a panic, Tang consulted their pediatrician, and recalls the doctor asking an intriguing question: “Has he had any unusual infections recently — because you know about PANDAS, right?” At the time, Tang knew nothing about PANDAS. She had completed her own medical residency two years before the illness — short for pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections — was first outlined in a 1998 paper. That publication detailed how a child’s behavior could change alarmingly after a strep infection, and may include symptoms of obsessive-compulsive behavior and tics. It has also stirred controversy: Many doctors hesitate to diagnose or treat the condition even today.

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 29241 - Posted: 04.04.2024

By David Adam A diabetes drug related to the latest generation of obesity drugs can slow the development of the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, a clinical trial suggests1. Participants who took the drug, called lixisenatide, for 12 months showed no worsening of their symptoms — a gain in a condition marked by progressive loss of motor control. Further work is needed to control side effects and determine the best dose, but researchers say that the trial marks another promising step in the decades-long effort to tackle the common and debilitating disorder. “This is the first large-scale, multicentre clinical trial to provide the signs of efficacy that have been sought for so many years,” says Olivier Rascol, a Parkinson’s researcher at Toulouse University Hospital in France, who led the study. The diabetes connection Lixisenatide is a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist, making it part of a large family of similar compounds used to treat diabetes and, more recently, obesity. (The weight-loss drug semaglutide, sold under the brand name Wegovy, is a GLP-1 compound.) Many studies have shown a link between diabetes and Parkinson’s2. People with diabetes are around 40% more likely to develop Parkinson’s. And people who have both Parkinson’s and diabetes often see more rapid progression of symptoms than do those who have only Parkinson’s. Animal studies3 have suggested that some GLP-1 drugs, which influence levels of insulin and glucose, can slow the symptoms of Parkinson’s. Smaller trials, published in 20134 and 20175, suggested that the GLP-1 molecule exenatide, another diabetes drug, could do the same in people.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 29240 - Posted: 04.04.2024

Jon Hamilton Sam and John Fetters, 19, are identical twins at opposite ends of the autism spectrum. Sam is a sophomore at Amherst College who plans to double major in history and political science. In his free time, he runs marathons. John attends a special school, struggles to form sentences, and likes to watch "Teletubbies" and "Sesame Street." Two brothers. Same genes. Different flavors of autism. To scientists, twins like Sam and John pose an important question: How can a disorder that is known to be highly genetic look so different in siblings who share the same genome? "That is one of the greatest mysteries right now in research on autism," says Dr. Stephanie Morris, a pediatric neurologist at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore. Solving that mystery could help explain autism's odd mix of nature and nurture, Morris says. It also might help "modify the trajectory" of autistic children experiencing speech and language delays, or difficulty with social communication. Identical twins on separate paths Sam and John are spending the weekend with their mom, Kim Leaird, at the family's apartment in West Tisbury, a small town on Martha's Vineyard. The twins are crowded together on a couch. Even seated, they look tall. Standing, Sam is 6 feet five inches, his brother just an inch shorter. John lets Sam do most of the talking. He frequently touches his brother, who sometimes takes his hand. John has "a truly tremendous amount of empathy," Sam says. "He's able to be very supportive." © 2024 npr

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 29239 - Posted: 04.04.2024

By Emily Makowski & I spend my days surrounded by thousands of written words, and sometimes I feel as though there’s no escape. That may not seem particularly unusual. Plenty of people have similar feelings. But no, I’m not just talking about my job as a copy editor here at Scientific American, where I edit and fact-check an endless stream of science writing. This constant flow of text is all in my head. My brain automatically translates spoken words into written ones in my mind’s eye. I “see” subtitles that I can’t turn off whenever I talk or hear someone else talking. This same speech-to-text conversion even happens for the inner dialogue of my thoughts. This mental closed-captioning has accompanied me since late toddlerhood, almost as far back as my earliest childhood memories. And for a long time, I thought that everyone could “read” spoken words in their head the way I do. What I experience goes by the name of ticker-tape synesthesia. It is not a medical condition—it’s just a distinctive way of perceiving the surrounding world that relatively few people share. Not much is known about the neurophysiology or psychology of this phenomenon, sometimes called “ticker taping,” even though a reference to it first appeared in the scientific literature in the late 19th century. Ticker taping is considered a form of synesthesia, an experience in which the brain reroutes one kind of incoming sensory information so that it is processed as another. For example, sounds might be perceived as touch, allowing the affected person to “feel” them as tactile sensations. As synesthesia goes, ticker taping is relatively uncommon. “There are varieties of synesthesia which really have just been completely under the radar..., and ticker tape is really one of those,” says Mark Price, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bergen in Norway. The name “ticker-tape synesthesia” itself evokes the concept’s late 19th-century origins. At that time stock prices transmitted by telegraph were printed on long paper strips, which would be torn into tiny bits and thrown from building windows during parades. © 2024 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Attention; Language
Link ID: 29238 - Posted: 04.04.2024

By Javier C. Hernández The pianist Alice Sara Ott, barefoot and wearing a silver bracelet, was smiling and singing to herself the other day as she practiced a jazzy passage of Ravel at Steinway Hall in Midtown Manhattan. A Nintendo Switch, which she uses to warm up her hands, was by her side (another favored tool is a Rubik’s Cube). A shot of espresso sat untouched on the floor. “I feel I have finally found my voice,” Ott said during a break. “I feel I can finally be myself.” Ott, 35, who makes her New York Philharmonic debut this week, has built a global career, recording more than a dozen albums and appearing with top ensembles. She has become a force for change in classical music, embracing new approaches (playing Chopin on beat-up pianos in Iceland) and railing against stuffy concert culture (she performs without shoes, finding it more comfortable). And Ott, who lives in Munich and has roots in Germany and Japan, has done so while grappling with illness. In 2019, when she was 30, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She says she has not shown any symptoms since starting treatment, but the disorder has made her reflect on the music industry’s grueling work culture. “I learned to accept that there is a limit and to not go beyond that,” she said. “Everybody knows how to ignore their body and just go on. But there’s always a payback.” Ott has used her platform to help dispel myths about multiple sclerosis, a disorder of the central nervous system that can cause a wide range of symptoms, including muscle spasms, numbness and vision problems. She has taken to social media to detail her struggles and to challenge those who have suggested that the illness has affected her playing. She said she felt she had no choice but to be transparent, saying it was important to show that people with multiple sclerosis could lead full lives. “I don’t consider it as a weakness,” she said. “It’s a fact. I live with it. And I don’t want to make a big drama out of it.” © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 29237 - Posted: 04.04.2024