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By Max Kozlov Neurons (shown here in a coloured scanning electron micrograph) mend broken DNA during memory formation. Credit: Ted Kinsman/Science Photo Library When a long-term memory forms, some brain cells experience a rush of electrical activity so strong that it snaps their DNA. Then, an inflammatory response kicks in, repairing this damage and helping to cement the memory, a study in mice shows. The findings, published on 27 March in Nature1, are “extremely exciting”, says Li-Huei Tsai, a neurobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who was not involved in the work. They contribute to the picture that forming memories is a “risky business”, she says. Normally, breaks in both strands of the double helix DNA molecule are associated with diseases including cancer. But in this case, the DNA damage-and-repair cycle offers one explanation for how memories might form and last. It also suggests a tantalizing possibility: this cycle might be faulty in people with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, causing a build-up of errors in a neuron’s DNA, says study co-author Jelena Radulovic, a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. This isn’t the first time that DNA damage has been associated with memory. In 2021, Tsai and her colleagues showed that double-stranded DNA breaks are widespread in the brain, and linked them with learning2. To better understand the part these DNA breaks play in memory formation, Radulovic and her colleagues trained mice to associate a small electrical shock with a new environment, so that when the animals were once again put into that environment, they would ‘remember’ the experience and show signs of fear, such as freezing in place. Then the researchers examined gene activity in neurons in a brain area key to memory — the hippocampus. They found that some genes responsible for inflammation were active in a set of neurons four days after training. Three weeks after training, the same genes were much less active. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 29223 - Posted: 03.28.2024

By Ingrid Wickelgren You see a woman on the street who looks familiar—but you can’t remember how you know her. Your brain cannot attach any previous experiences to this person. Hours later, you suddenly recall the party at a friend’s house where you met her, and you realize who she is. In a new study in mice, researchers have discovered the place in the brain that is responsible for both types of familiarity—vague recognition and complete recollection. Both, moreover, are represented by two distinct neural codes. The findings, which appeared on February 20 in Neuron, showcase the use of advanced computer algorithms to understand how the brain encodes concepts such as social novelty and individual identity, says study co-author Steven Siegelbaum, a neuroscientist at the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University. The brain’s signature for strangers turns out to be simpler than the one used for old friends—which makes sense, Siegelbaum says, given the vastly different memory requirements for the two relationships. “Where you were, what you were doing, when you were doing it, who else [was there]—the memory of a familiar individual is a much richer memory,” Siegelbaum says. “If you’re meeting a stranger, there’s nothing to recollect.” The action occurs in a small sliver of a brain region called the hippocampus, known for its importance in forming memories. The sliver in question, known as CA2, seems to specialize in a certain kind of memory used to recall relationships. “[The new work] really emphasizes the importance of this brain area to social processing,” at least in mice, says Serena Dudek, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, who was not involved in the study. © 2024 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 29222 - Posted: 03.28.2024

By Dennis Normile By the time a person shows symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, neurons in a part of their brain key to movement have already quietly died. To learn how this process unfolds, identify warning signs, and test treatments, researchers have long wanted an animal model of the disease’s early stages. Now, they may have one: a cohort of transgenic marmosets, described at a conference on nonhuman primate models in Hong Kong last month. The animals, which neuroscientist Hideyuki Okano of Keio University and colleagues created using a mutated protein that seems to drive Parkinson’s in some people, closely mimic the disease’s onset and progression. And they have enabled Okano’s team to identify what could be an early, predictive sign of disease in brain imaging. The model could be “transformative” for Parkinson’s studies, says neurobiologist Peter Strick of the University of Pittsburgh, who attended the meeting, organized by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Stanford University, and the University of California San Francisco. “We desperately need nonhuman primate models that recapitulate the natural onset and progression” of conditions like Parkinson’s, he says. Parkinson’s, which afflicts an estimated 8.5 million people, is thought to be triggered by a combination of genetic and environmental factors, such as exposure to toxic chemicals. It sets in as neurons that produce the chemical messenger dopamine in the substantia nigra, an area of the brain that controls movement, die off. Early symptoms include tremors, muscle stiffness, and hesitant motions. The disease can later affect cognition and lead to dementia. Researchers think one cause of neuronal death may be abnormal versions of a protein called alpha-synuclein that misfold and form toxic clumps in the brain years before symptoms emerge. © 2024 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 29221 - Posted: 03.28.2024

By Charles Digges My default mode for writing term papers during my student days was the all-night slog, and I recall the giddy, slap-happy feeling that would steal over me as the sun rose. There was a quality of alert focus that came with it, as well as a gregariousness that would fuel bonding sessions with my other all-night companions. After we’d turned in the products of our midnight oil to our professors, we would all head out for pancakes. Then I’d go home and sleep the magic off. For years, I’d wondered if there was any basis for this temporary euphoria that I—though certainly not all my classmates—experienced after those sleepless nights. That I should feel so expansive and goofy after skipping sleep while many of them turned into drowsy grouches seemed to defy logic. Going without sleep isn’t supposed to be a good thing, especially for folks who experience depression, as I have. But it turns out this paradox has been the subject of inquiry for at least two centuries. In 1818, University of Leipzig psychiatrist Johann Christian August Heinroth was reportedly the first to suggest that partial or total sleep deprivation could be temporarily effective against “melancholia,” as depression was called in those days. He found this to be true only in a certain subset of patients—around 60 percent. More than a hundred years later, in the 1970s, evidence emerged that a “resynchronization” of disturbed circadian rhythms could be responsible for the improved moods of depressed patients after a night without sleep. And more recently, researchers have found that a neurotransmitter involved in reward known as dopamine may play a role in this effect, as may neuroplasticity—the nervous system’s ability to rearrange itself in response to stimuli. But the precise neural mechanisms responsible have remained unclear. © 2024 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Sleep; Depression
Link ID: 29220 - Posted: 03.28.2024

Ian Sample Science editor Two nights of broken sleep are enough to make people feel years older, according to researchers, who said consistent, restful slumber was a key factor in helping to stave off feeling one’s true age. Psychologists in Sweden found that, on average, volunteers felt more than four years older when they were restricted to only four hours of sleep for two consecutive nights, with some claiming the sleepiness made them feel decades older. The opposite was seen when people were allowed to stay in bed for nine hours, though the effect was more modest, with participants in the study claiming to feel on average three months younger than their real age after ample rest. “Sleep has a major impact on how old you feel and it’s not only your long-term sleep patterns,” said Dr Leonie Balter, a psychoneuroimmunologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and first author on the study. “Even when you only sleep less for two nights that has a real impact on how you feel.” Beyond simply feeling more decrepit, the perception of being many years older may affect people’s health, Balter said, by encouraging unhealthy eating, reducing physical exercise, and making people less willing to socialise and engage in new experiences. The researchers ran two studies. In the first, 429 people aged 18 to 70 answered questions about how old they felt and on how many nights, if any, they had slept badly in the past month. Their sleepiness was also rated according to a standard scale used in psychology research. For each day of poor sleep the volunteers felt on average three months older, the scientists found, while those who reported no bad nights in the preceding month felt on average nearly six years younger than their true age. It was unclear, however, whether bad sleep made people feel older or vice versa. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 29219 - Posted: 03.28.2024

By Robert D. Hershey Jr. Daniel Kahneman, who never took an economics course but who pioneered a psychologically based branch of that field that led to a Nobel in economic science in 2002, died on Wednesday. He was 90. His death was confirmed by his partner, Barbara Tversky. She declined to say where he died. Professor Kahneman, who was long associated with Princeton University and lived in Manhattan, employed his training as a psychologist to advance what came to be called behavioral economics. The work, done largely in the 1970s, led to a rethinking of issues as far-flung as medical malpractice, international political negotiations and the evaluation of baseball talent, all of which he analyzed, mostly in collaboration with Amos Tversky, a Stanford cognitive psychologist who did groundbreaking work on human judgment and decision-making. (Ms. Tversky, also a professor of psychology at Stanford, had been married to Professor Tversky, who died in 1996. She and Professor Kahneman became partners several years ago.) As opposed to traditional economics, which assumes that human beings generally act in fully rational ways and that any exceptions tend to disappear as the stakes are raised, the behavioral school is based on exposing hard-wired mental biases that can warp judgment, often with counterintuitive results. “His central message could not be more important,” the Harvard psychologist and author Steven Pinker told The Guardian in 2014, “namely, that human reason left to its own devices is apt to engage in a number of fallacies and systematic errors, so if we want to make better decisions in our personal lives and as a society, we ought to be aware of these biases and seek workarounds. That’s a powerful and important discovery.” © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 29218 - Posted: 03.28.2024

By Jyoti Madhusoodanan When the Philadelphia-based company Bioquark announced a plan in 2016 to regenerate neurons in brain-dead people, their proposal elicited skepticism and backlash. Researchers questioned the scientific merits of the planned study, which sought to inject stem cells and other materials into recently deceased subjects. Ethicists said it bordered on quackery and would exploit grieving families. Bioquark has since folded. But quietly, a physician who was involved in the controversial proposal, Himanshu Bansal, has continued the research. Bansal recently told Undark that he has been conducting work funded by him and his research team at a private hospital in Rudrapur, India, experimenting mostly with young adults who have succumbed to traffic accidents. He said he has data for 20 subjects for the first phase of the study and 11 for the second — some of whom showed glimmers of renewed electrical activity — and he plans to expand the study to include several more. Bansal said he has submitted his results to peer-reviewed journals over the past several years but has yet to find one that would publish them. Bansal may be among the more controversial figures conducting research with people who have been declared brain dead, but not by any stretch is he the only one. In recent years, high-profile experiments implanting non-human organs into human bodies, a procedure known as xenotransplantation, have fueled rising interest in using brain-dead subjects to study procedures that are too risky to perform on living people. With the support of a ventilator and other equipment, a person’s heart, kidneys, immune system, and other body parts can function for days, sometimes weeks or more, after brain death. For researchers who seek to understand drug delivery, organ transplantation, and other complexities of human physiology, these bodies can provide a more faithful simulacrum of a living human being than could be achieved with animals or lab-grown cells and tissues.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 29217 - Posted: 03.26.2024

By Maria Popova I once dreamed a kiss that hadn’t yet happened. I dreamed the angle at which our heads tilted, the fit of my fingers behind her ear, the exact pressure exerted on the lips by this transfer of trust and tenderness. Freud, who catalyzed the study of dreams with his foundational 1899 treatise, would have discounted this as a mere chimera of the wishful unconscious. But what we have since discovered about the mind — particularly about the dream-rich sleep state of rapid-eye movement, or REM, unknown in Freud’s day — suggests another possibility for the adaptive function of these parallel lives in the night. One cold morning not long after the kiss dream, I watched a young night heron sleep on a naked branch over the pond in Brooklyn Bridge Park, head folded into chest, and found myself wondering whether birds dream. The recognition that nonhuman animals dream dates at least as far back as the days of Aristotle, who watched a sleeping dog bark and deemed it unambiguous evidence of mental life. But by the time Descartes catalyzed the Enlightenment in the 17th century, he had reduced other animals to mere automatons, tainting centuries of science with the assumption that anything unlike us is inherently inferior. In the 19th century, when the German naturalist Ludwig Edinger performed the first anatomical studies of the bird brain and discovered the absence of a neocortex — the more evolutionarily nascent outer layer of the brain, responsible for complex cognition and creative problem-solving — he dismissed birds as little more than Cartesian puppets of reflex. This view was reinforced in the 20th century by the deviation, led by B.F. Skinner and his pigeons, into behaviorism — a school of thought that considered behavior a Rube Goldberg machine of stimulus and response governed by reflex, disregarding interior mental states and emotional response. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 29216 - Posted: 03.26.2024

By Nico Dosenbach, Scott Marek In 2022, we caused a stir when, together with Brenden Tervo-Clemmens and Damien Fair, we published an article in Nature titled “Reproducible brain-wide association studies require thousands of participants.” The study garnered a lot of attention—press coverage, including in Spectrum, as well as editorials and commentary in journals. In hindsight, the consternation we caused in calling for larger sample sizes makes sense; up to that point, most brain imaging studies of this type were based on samples with fewer than 100 participants, so our findings called for a major change. But it was an eye-opening experience that taught us how difficult it is to convey a nuanced scientific message and to guard against oversimplifications and misunderstandings, even among experts. Being scientific is hard for human brains, but as an adversarial collaboration on a massive scale, science is our only method for collectively separating how we want things to be from how they are. The paper emerged from an analysis of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, a large longitudinal brain-imaging project. Starting with data from 2,000 children, Scott showed that an average brain connectivity map he made using half of the large sample replicated almost perfectly in the other half. But when he mapped the association between resting-state activity—a measure of the brain during rest—and intelligence in two matched sets of 1,000 children, he found large differences in the patterns. Even with a sample size of 2,000—large in the human brain imaging world—the brain-behavior maps showed poor reproducibility. For card-carrying statisticians, the result was not surprising. It reflected a pattern known as the winner’s curse, namely that large cross-sectional correlations can occur by chance in small samples. Paradoxically, the largest correlations will be “statistically significant” and therefore most likely to be published, even though they are the most likely to be wrong. © 2024 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29215 - Posted: 03.26.2024

Ian Sample Science editor Dogs understand what certain words stand for, according to researchers who monitored the brain activity of willing pooches while they were shown balls, slippers, leashes and other highlights of the domestic canine world. The finding suggests that the dog brain can reach beyond commands such as “sit” and “fetch”, and the frenzy-inducing “walkies”, to grasp the essence of nouns, or at least those that refer to items the animals care about. “I think the capacity is there in all dogs,” said Marianna Boros, who helped arrange the experiments at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. “This changes our understanding of language evolution and our sense of what is uniquely human.” Scientists have long been fascinated by whether dogs can truly learn the meanings of words and have built up some evidence to back the suspicion. A survey in 2022 found that dog owners believed their furry companions responded to between 15 and 215 words. More direct evidence for canine cognitive prowess came in 2011 when psychologists in South Carolina reported that after three years of intensive training, a border collie called Chaser had learned the names of more than 1,000 objects, including 800 cloth toys, 116 balls and 26 Frisbees. However, studies have said little about what is happening in the canine brain when it processes words. To delve into the mystery, Boros and her colleagues invited 18 dog owners to bring their pets to the laboratory along with five objects the animals knew well. These included balls, slippers, Frisbees, rubber toys, leads and other items. At the lab, the owners were instructed to say words for objects before showing their dog either the correct item or a different one. For example, an owner might say “Look, here’s the ball”, but hold up a Frisbee instead. The experiments were repeated multiple times with matching and non-matching objects. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Language; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 29214 - Posted: 03.26.2024

By Darren Incorvaia Be it an arched eyebrow, a shaken head or a raised finger, humans wordlessly communicate complex ideas through gestures every day. This ability is rare in the animal kingdom, having been observed only in primates (SN: 8/10/10). Scientists now might be able to add a feathered friend to the club. Researchers have observed Japanese tits making what they call an “after you” gesture: A bird flutters its wings, cuing its mate to enter the nest first. The finding, reported in the March 25 Current Biology, “shows that Japanese tits not only use wing fluttering as a symbolic gesture, but also in a complex social context involving a sender, receiver and a specific goal, much like how humans communicate,” says biologist Toshitaka Suzuki of the University of Tokyo. Suzuki has been listening in on the calls of Japanese tits (Parus minor) for more than 17 years. During his extensive time in the field, he noticed that Japanese tits bringing food to the nest would sometimes perch on a branch and flutter their wings. At that point, their partners would enter the nest with the flutterer close behind. “This led me to investigate whether this behavior fulfills the criteria of gestures,” Suzuki says. Suzuki and Norimasa Sugita, a researcher at Tokyo’s National Museum of Nature and Science, observed eight mated pairs make 321 trips to their nests. A pattern quickly emerged: Females fluttered their wings far more often than males, with six females shaking it up while only one male did. Females almost always entered the nest first — unless they fluttered their wings. Then the males went first. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Evolution
Link ID: 29213 - Posted: 03.26.2024

Ian Sample Science editor Dogs understand what certain words stand for, according to researchers who monitored the brain activity of willing pooches while they were shown balls, slippers, leashes and other highlights of the domestic canine world. The finding suggests that the dog brain can reach beyond commands such as “sit” and “fetch”, and the frenzy-inducing “walkies”, to grasp the essence of nouns, or at least those that refer to items the animals care about. “I think the capacity is there in all dogs,” said Marianna Boros, who helped arrange the experiments at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. “This changes our understanding of language evolution and our sense of what is uniquely human.” Scientists have long been fascinated by whether dogs can truly learn the meanings of words and have built up some evidence to back the suspicion. A survey in 2022 found that dog owners believed their furry companions responded to between 15 and 215 words. More direct evidence for canine cognitive prowess came in 2011 when psychologists in South Carolina reported that after three years of intensive training, a border collie called Chaser had learned the names of more than 1,000 objects, including 800 cloth toys, 116 balls and 26 Frisbees. However, studies have said little about what is happening in the canine brain when it processes words. To delve into the mystery, Boros and her colleagues invited 18 dog owners to bring their pets to the laboratory along with five objects the animals knew well. These included balls, slippers, Frisbees, rubber toys, leads and other items. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 29212 - Posted: 03.23.2024

By Anna Gibbs Imagine a person’s face. Now imagine that whenever you looked at that face, there was a chance it would appear distorted. That’s what life is like for a person with prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO. Now, thanks to a new study, you can see through the eyes of someone with this rare condition. Relying on feedback from a 58-year-old man who has had PMO for nearly three years, researchers at Dartmouth College altered photos of faces to mimic the “demonic” distortions he experienced. This is believed to be the first time that images have been created to so closely replicate what a patient with the condition is seeing, psychologist Antônio Mello and colleagues report in the March 23 Lancet. “We hope this has a big impact in the way people think about PMO, especially for them to be able to understand how severe PMO can be,” Mello says. For instance, he says, this particular patient didn’t like to go to the store because fellow shoppers looked like “an army of demons.” PMO is poorly understood, with fewer than 100 cases cited since 1904. Patients report a wide variety of facial distortions. While the patient in this study sees extremely stretched features with deep grooves on the face, others may see distortions that cause features to move position or change size. Because of that, this visualization is patient-specific and wouldn’t apply for everyone with PMO, says Jason Barton, a neurologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver who has worked with the researchers before but was not involved in this study. Still, “I think it’s helpful for people to understand the kinds of distortions people can see.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 29211 - Posted: 03.23.2024

By David Adam The drug ketamine is enjoying a second life. First developed as an anaesthetic that was used widely by US battlefield surgeons during the Vietnam war, it is growing in popularity as a treatment for depression and other mental-health conditions. And this week, the drug got its highest-profile endorsement yet. In an interview with US journalist Don Lemon that was released online on Monday, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and head of social-media platform X (formerly Twitter), spoke about his own experiences of using the drug to manage what he called a “negative chemical state” similar to depression. Musk said he has a prescription for the drug from “a real doctor” and uses “a small amount once every other week or something like that”. His comments follow the fatal drowning of Friends actor Matthew Perry last October, an incident that an investigation blamed on the drug’s acute effects. It’s complicated. Approved as an anaesthetic by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1970, the drug was delivered intravenously to people undergoing surgery. Ketamine is often still given that way for depression. That requires supervision — typically people attend a private clinic and are monitored by an anaesthetist as well as the prescribing psychiatrist and members of the support staff. Because it’s long out of patent, there’s little commercial interest in developing new versions of the drug. Some companies are trying to package it into more-convenient oral lozenges, but that’s a challenging formulation. “The problem with ketamine is if you take it orally, by and large it doesn’t get through to the system because it’s got low bioavailability,” says Allan Young, a consultant psychiatrist at King’s College London who studies mood disorders.

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29210 - Posted: 03.23.2024

By Holly Barker Our understanding of memory is often summed up by a well-worn mantra: Neurons that fire together wire together. Put another way, when two brain cells simultaneously send out an impulse, their synapses strengthen, whereas connections between less active neurons slowly diminish. But there may be more to it, a new preprint suggests: To consolidate memories, synapses may also influence neighboring neurons by using a previously unknown means of communication. When synapses strengthen, they release a virus-like particle that weakens the surrounding cells’ connections, the new work shows. This novel form of plasticity may aid memory by helping some synapses to shout above the background neuronal hubbub, the researchers say. The mechanism involves the neuronal gene ARC, which is known to contribute to learning and memory and encodes a protein that assembles into virus-like capsids—protein shells that viruses use to package and spread their genetic material. ARC capsids enclose ARC messenger RNA and transfer it to nearby neurons, according to a 2018 study. This leads to an increase in ARC protein and, in turn, a decrease in the number of excitatory AMPA receptors at those cells’ synapses, the preprint shows. “ARC has this crazy virus-like biology,” says Jason Shepherd, associate professor of neurobiology at the University of Utah, who led the 2018 study and the new work. But how ARC capsids form and eject from neurons was unclear, he says. As it turns out, synaptic strengthening spurs ARC capsid release, according to the preprint. When neuronal connections strengthen, ARC capsids are packaged into vesicles, which then bubble out of neurons through their interactions with a protein called IRSp53. Surrounding cells absorb the vesicles containing ARC, which tamps down their synapses, the new work suggests. © 2024 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 29209 - Posted: 03.23.2024

By Lucy Cooke When Frans de Waal was a psychology student at Nijmegen University (renamed in 2004 to Radboud University), in the Netherlands, he was tasked with looking after the department’s resident chimpanzees—Koos and Nozem. De Waal couldn’t help but notice how his charges became sexually aroused in the presence of his fellow female students. So, one day, de Waal decided to don a skirt, a pair of heels, and speak “in a high-pitched voice” to test their response. The chimps remained resolutely unstimulated by de Waal’s drag act, leading the young scientist to conclude there must be more to primate sexual discrimination than previously thought. De Waal died from stomach cancer on March 14 at his home in Georgia. He was 75. One of de Waal’s first forays into scientific experimentation demonstrates the playful curiosity and taboo-busting that underscored his extraordinary career as a primatologist. He was the recipient of numerous high-profile awards from the prestigious E.O. Wilson Literary Science Award to the Ig Nobel Prize—a satirical honor for research that makes people laugh and think. De Waal won the latter, with equal pride, for co-authoring a paper on chimpanzees’ tendency to recognize bums better than faces. It was this combination of humor, compassion, and iconoclastic thinking that drew me to his work. I first met him through his popular writing. The acclaimed primatologist was author of hundreds of peer-reviewed academic papers, but he was also that rare genius who could translate the complexities of his research into a highly digestible form, readily devoured by the masses. He was the author of 16 books, translated into over 20 languages. His public lectures were laced with deadpan humor, and a joy to attend. He saw no tension between being taken seriously as a pioneering scientist and hosting a Facebook page devoted to posting funny animal content. De Waal just loved watching animals. He was, by his own admission, a born naturalist. Growing up in a small town in southern Netherlands, he’d bred stickleback fish and raised jackdaw birds. So, it was only natural he’d wind up scrutinizing animal behavior for a career. What set de Waal’s observations apart was his ability to do so with fresh eyes. Where others could only see what they expected to see, de Waal managed to study primates outside of the accepted paradigms of the time. © 2024 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Evolution; Emotions
Link ID: 29208 - Posted: 03.23.2024

By Frances Vinall More than two-thirds of young children in Chicago could be exposed to lead-contaminated water, according to an estimate by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Stanford University School of Medicine. The research, published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, estimated that 68 percent of children under the age of 6 in Chicago are exposed to lead-contaminated drinking water. Of that group, 19 percent primarily use unfiltered tap water, which was associated with a greater increase in blood lead levels. “The extent of lead contamination of tap water in Chicago is disheartening — it’s not something we should be seeing in 2024,” lead author Benjamin Huynh, assistant professor of environmental health and engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said in a news release. The study suggested that residential blocks with predominantly Black and Hispanic populations were less likely to be tested for lead, but also disproportionately exposed to contaminated water. Gina Ramirez, Midwest regional lead of environmental health for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said she grew up in Chicago drinking bottled water, but now uses filtered water for her own family, because of a generational awareness of “not trusting my tap” to be safe. The study “confirmed my worst fears that children living in vulnerable populations in the city are the most impacted,” she said. “All children deserve to grow up in a healthy city, and to learn that something inside their home is impacting so many kids health and development is a huge wake-up call.”

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29207 - Posted: 03.23.2024

By Nora Bradford Early in her research, forensic anthropologist Alexandra Morton-Hayward came across a paper describing a 2,500-year-old brain preserved in a severed skull. The paper referenced another preserved brain. She found another. And another. By the time she’d reached 12, she noticed all of the papers described the brains as a unique phenomenon. She kept digging. Naturally preserved brains, it turns out, aren’t so rare after all, Morton-Hayward, of the University of Oxford, and colleagues report March 20 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The researchers have built an archive of 4,400 human brains preserved in the archaeological record, some dating back nearly 12,000 years. The archive includes brains from North Pole explorers, Inca sacrificial victims and Spanish Civil War soldiers. Because the brains have been described as exceptionally rare, little research has been done on them. “If they’re precious, one-of-a-kind materials, then you don’t want to analyze them or disturb them,” Morton-Hayward says. Less than 1 percent of the archive has been investigated. Matching where the brains were found with historical climate patterns hints at what might keep the brains from decaying. Over a third of the samples persisted because of dehydration; others were frozen or tanned. Depending on the conditions, the brains’ texture could be anywhere from dry and brittle to squishy and tofulike. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29206 - Posted: 03.21.2024

By Shaena Montanari When Nacho Sanguinetti-Scheck came across a seal study in Science in 2023, he saw it as confirmation of the “wild” research he had recently been doing himself. In the experiment, the researchers had attached portable, noninvasive electroencephalogram caps, custom calibrated to sense brain waves through blubber, to juvenile northern elephant seals. After testing the caps on five seals in an outdoor pool, the team attached the caps to eight seals free-swimming in the ocean. The results were striking: In the pool, the seals slept for six hours a day, but in the open ocean, they slept for just about two. And when seals were in REM sleep in the ocean, they flipped belly up and slowly spiraled downward, hundreds of meters below the surface. It was “one of my favorite papers of the past years,” says Sanguinetti-Scheck, a Harvard University neuroscience postdoctoral researcher who studies rodent behavior in the wild. “It’s just beautiful.” It was also the kind of experiment that needed to be done beyond the confines of a lab setting, he says. “You cannot see that in a pool.” Sanguinetti-Scheck is part of a growing cadre of researchers who champion the importance of studying animal behavior in the wild. Studying animals in the environment in which they evolved, these researchers say, can provide neuroscientific insight that is truly correlated with natural behavior. But not everyone agrees. In February, a group of about two dozen scientists and philosophers gathered in snowy, mountainous Terzolas, Italy, to wrestle with what, exactly, “natural behavior” means. “People don’t really think, ‘Well, what does it mean?’” says Mateusz Kostecki, a doctoral student at Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology in Poland. He helped organize the four-day workshop as “a good occasion to think critically about this trend.” © 2024 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Evolution; Sleep
Link ID: 29205 - Posted: 03.21.2024

By Rachel Nuwer In 2011, archaeologists in the Netherlands discovered an ancient pit filled with 86,000 animal bones at a Roman-Era farmstead near the city of Utrecht. It fell to Martijn van Haasteren, an archaeozoologist at the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, to sort through them. Deep into the cataloging process, Mr. van Haasteren was cleaning the mud from yet another bone when something unexpected happened: Hundreds of black specks the size of poppy seeds came pouring out from one end. The specks turned out to be seeds of black henbane, a potently poisonous member of the nightshade family that can be medicinal or hallucinogenic depending on the dosage. The bone — hollowed-out and sealed with a tar plug — was an ancient stash pouch that had kept the seeds safe for some 1,900 years. Researchers determined that the bone was deposited in the pit somewhere between A.D. 70 and 100 — a time when the Netherlands represented the Roman Empire’s northern border. Parts of the container were smooth, suggesting frequent handling. This “very special” discovery provides the first definitive evidence that Indigenous people living in such a far-flung Roman province had knowledge of black henbane’s powerful properties, said Maaike Groot, an archaeozoologist at the Free University of Berlin and a co-author of a paper published in the journal Antiquity last month describing the finding. At the time that the original owner stuffed the container full of seeds, the properties of black henbane were already well known in Rome. Writings by Pliny the Elder and others testify to the medicinal use of black henbane seeds and leaves, but warn that an overindulgence will result in mind-altering effects. The plant was mostly used during Roman times as an ointment for pain relief, although some sources also reference smoking its seeds or adding its leaves to wine. It seems its psychedelic effects came to the fore in the Middle Ages, when black henbane became associated “with witches and summoning demons,” said Mr. van Haasteren, who is a co-author of the paper. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29204 - Posted: 03.21.2024