By Matt Richtel and Sheila Kaplan The Food and Drug Administration for the first time on Tuesday authorized an electronic cigarette to be sold in the United States, a significant turn in one of the most contentious public health debates in decades. In greenlighting a device and tobacco-flavored cartridges marketed by R.J. Reynolds under the brand name Vuse, the agency signaled that it believed that the help certain vaping devices offer smokers to quit traditional cigarettes is more significant than the risks of ensnaring a new generation. “The authorized products’ aerosols are significantly less toxic than combusted cigarettes based on available data,” the F.D.A. said in a statement announcing the decision. The statement concluded, “The F.D.A. determined that the potential benefit to smokers who switch completely or significantly reduce their cigarette use, would outweigh the risk to youth.” The watershed decision could pave the way for authorization of some other electronic cigarettes, including those of the once-dominant maker Juul, to stay on the market. For more than a year, the manufacturers of e-cigarettes have been in a holding pattern — most of their products on the market but awaiting official authorization — as the F.D.A. has investigated whether they were a benefit or a danger to public health. “The importance of the F.D.A. authorizing a vaping product as ‘appropriate for the protection of public health’ should not be understated,” said Gregory Conley, president of the American Vaping Association, an industry group. He added, “Now that the F.D.A. has acted, we are hopeful that adult consumers and health communicators will begin to understand the harm reduction benefits offered by these and other smoke-free products.” © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 28032 - Posted: 10.13.2021

Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian Christelle Langley Katrin Amunts While humans have walked on the Moon and sent probes all over the solar system, our understanding of our own brain is still severely lacking. We do not have complete knowledge of how brain structure, chemicals and connectivity interact to produce our thoughts and behaviours. But this isn’t from an absence of ambition. It is nearly eight years since the start of the Human Brain Project (HBP) in Europe, which aims to unravel the brain’s mysteries. After a difficult start, the project has made substantial discoveries and innovation, relevant for tackling clinical disorders, as well as technological advances – and it has two more years to go. It has also created EBRAINS, an open research infrastructure built on the scientific advances and tools developed by the project’s research teams, and making them available to the scientific community via a shared digital platform – a new achievement for collaborative research and instrumental in the achievements listed below. 1. Human brain atlas The project has created a unique multilevel human brain atlas based on several aspects of brain organisation, including its structure on the smallest of scales, its function and connectivity. This atlas provides a large number of tools to visualise data and work with them. Researchers can automatically extract data from the atlas using a special tool to run a simulation for modelling the brains of specific patients. This can help to inform clinicians of the optimal treatment option. © 2010–2021, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 28031 - Posted: 10.13.2021

By Dave Itzkoff Selma Blair could only talk for a half-hour in our first session. That was as long as she trusted her brain and her body to cooperate — any longer and she feared that her focus might start to wander or her speech might begin to trail. “We’re being responsible in knowing that smaller moments will be clearer moments,” she said. For Blair no day is free from the effects of multiple sclerosis, the autoimmune disease that she learned she had in 2018 but that she believes began attacking her central nervous system many years earlier. This particular Friday in September had started out especially tough: She said she woke up in her Los Angeles home feeling “just bad as all get out,” but she found that talking with people helped alleviate her discomfort. Blair said she had had good conversations earlier in the day and that she had been looking forward to ours. So, if she needed to take a break during this interview, she said with a delighted cackle, “it just means you’re boring me.” An unparalleled lack of inhibition has always defined Blair’s best-known work. She is 49 now, with a résumé that includes seminal works of teensploitation (“Cruel Intentions”), comedy (“Legally Blonde”) and comic-book adventure (“Hellboy”). ImageBlair in one of her signature roles, as a fellow law student opposite Reese Witherspoon in “Legally Blonde.” That same unbridled bluntness persists in all her interactions, whether scripted or spontaneous, with cameras on or off, even when she is sharing her account of the time she went on “The Tonight Show” wearing a strappy top she accidentally put on sideways. It is a story she told me proudly, within five minutes of our introduction on a video call, while her fingers made a maelstrom of her close-cropped, bleached-blond hair. (By way of explaining this style choice, she burst into a brassy, Ethel Merman-esque voice and sang, “I want to be a shiksa.”) But Blair’s candor has come to mean something more in the three years since she went public about her M.S. diagnosis. Now, whether she is posting personal diaries on social media or appearing on a red carpet, she understands she is a representative with an opportunity to educate a wider audience about what she and others with M.S. are experiencing. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 28030 - Posted: 10.13.2021

Alison Abbott Imagine looking at Earth from space and being able to listen in on what individuals are saying to each other. That’s about how challenging it is to understand how the brain works. From the organ’s wrinkled surface, zoom in a million-fold and you’ll see a kaleidoscope of cells of different shapes and sizes, which branch off and reach out to each other. Zoom in a further 100,000 times and you’ll see the cells’ inner workings — the tiny structures in each one, the points of contact between them and the long-distance connections between brain areas. Scientists have made maps such as these for the worm1 and fly2 brains, and for tiny parts of the mouse3 and human4 brains. But those charts are just the start. To truly understand how the brain works, neuroscientists also need to know how each of the roughly 1,000 types of cell thought to exist in the brain speak to each other in their different electrical dialects. With that kind of complete, finely contoured map, they could really begin to explain the networks that drive how we think and behave. Such maps are emerging, including in a series of papers published this week that catalogue the cell types in the brain. Results are streaming in from government efforts to understand and stem the increasing burden of brain disorders in their ageing populations. These projects, launched over the past decade, aim to systematically chart the brain’s connections and catalogue its cell types and their physiological properties. It’s an onerous undertaking. “But knowing all the brain cell types, how they connect with each other and how they interact, will open up an entirely new set of therapies that we can’t even imagine today,” says Josh Gordon, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland. © 2021 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Brain imaging; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 28029 - Posted: 10.09.2021

ByJocelyn Kaiser A common genetic variant called APOE4 raises a person’s risk of Alzheimer’s disease. It also poses a puzzle: If APOE4 is so bad for us, why hasn’t it been weeded out from the population? A new study finds that, surprisingly, the APOE4 variant has positive cognitive impacts: It may not only boost short-term memory, but also protect against subtle memory loss early in the course of Alzheimer’s disease. “There is something about the possession of an APOE4 allele which is providing some positive impacts on your cognitive function,” even in people whose brains are primed for Alzheimer’s, says neurologist Jonathan Schott of University College London (UCL), co-leader of the study. That could not only help explain why the variant persists, but also guide Alzheimer’s treatments, he says. The APOE gene codes for a protein called apolipoprotein E, which helps metabolize fats. About one in four people carry one copy of the version called APOE4 that roughly triples the risk for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease. (A few people have two copies of APOE4, which raises the risk 12-fold or more.) When a harmful gene remains in a population across hundreds of thousands of years, one possible explanation for its staying power is that one copy is beneficial. For example, people with one copy of the sickle cell gene are protected from malaria. Scientists have known for years that people with APOE4 are more likely to develop sticky amyloid protein plaques in their brains; many researchers think these may contribute to Alzheimer’s by triggering other changes that lead to neuronal death. Yet several small studies have hinted that APOE4 could have benefits, such as boosting fertility and cognition. Last year, a larger study found that APOE4 carriers across a range of ages perform slightly better than noncarriers on a test requiring them to quickly recall an object and its location. © 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 28028 - Posted: 10.09.2021

Allison Aubrey The "diet" in diet drinks may be a false promise for some soda lovers. True, they deliver the fizz and taste of a soda experience, without the calories. Yet, new research shows they also can leave people with increased food cravings. A study published recently in JAMA Network Open adds to the evidence that drinks made with sucralose may stimulate the appetite, at least among some people, and the study gives some clues as to why. "We found that females and people with obesity had greater brain reward activity" after consuming the artificial sweetener, says study author Katie Page, a physician specializing in obesity at the University of Southern California. Both groups also had a reduction in the hormone that inhibits appetite, and they ate more food after they consumed drinks with sucralose, compared with after regular sugar-sweetened drinks. In contrast, the study found males and people of healthy weight did not have an increase in either brain reward activity or hunger response, suggesting they're not affected in the same way. The study notes that most earlier research focused on males and people of normal weight. But this finding suggests that diet drinks sweetened with sucralose could be disadvantageous to the people who could benefit most from an effective diet strategy. © 2021 npr

Keyword: Obesity; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 28027 - Posted: 10.09.2021

By Trishla Ostwal Juan Negro crouched in the shadows just outside a cave, wearing his headlamp. For a brief moment, he wasn’t an ornithologist at the Spanish National Research Council’s Doñana Biological Station in Seville. He was a Neandertal, intent on catching dinner. As he waited in the cold, dark hours of the night, crowlike birds called choughs entered the cave. The “Neandertal” then stealthily snuck in and began the hunt. This idea to role-play started with butchered bird bones. Piles of ancient tool- and tooth-nicked choughs bones have been found in the same caves that Neandertals frequented, evidence suggesting that the ancient hominids chowed down on the birds. But catching choughs is tricky. During the day, they fly far to feed on invertebrates, seeds and fruits. At night though, their behavior practically turns them into sitting ducks. The birds roost in groups and often return to the same spot, even if they’ve been disturbed or preyed on there before. So the question was, how might Neandertals have managed to catch these avian prey? To find out, Negro and his colleagues decided to act like, well, Neandertals. Wielding bare hands along with butterfly nets and lamps — proxy for nets (SN: 04/09/20) and fire (SN: 2/20/14) that Neandertals may have had at hand— teams of two to 10 researchers silently snuck into caves and other spots across Spain, where the birds roost to see how many choughs they could catch. a person inside a building attempting to catch a bird © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2021

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 28026 - Posted: 10.09.2021

Jordana Cepelewicz We often appreciate the world around us in terms of its glorious sights, stirring sounds and evocative smells, all of which mark important stimuli and changes in our environment. But senses that are no less crucial to our survival are often taken for granted, including our abilities to register heat, cold and touch, a form of perception called somatosensation. Because of them, we can feel the warmth of the sun or the gentle caress of a breeze against our skin, as well as the positions and movement of our own bodies. In fact, the somatosensory neurons that make all these sensations possible constitute the largest sensory system in mammals. Scientists knew that for somatosensation to occur, there must be molecular receptors on some cells that could detect temperature and touch, and could convert those stimuli into electrical and chemical signals for the nervous system to process. For the discovery of some of those receptors David Julius, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and Ardem Patapoutian, a molecular biologist and neuroscientist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, have now been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Julius and his colleagues started with questions about receptors for heat and pain. To find answers, they turned to capsaicin, the compound that causes us to experience a burning and sometimes painful sensation when we eat chili peppers or other spicy food. Based on our physiological response to the chemical, which includes sweating, capsaicin seemed to be inducing the nervous system to register a change in body temperature. To figure out how, Julius and his team screened millions of DNA fragments for a gene that could induce a response to the compound in cells that typically don’t react to it at all. After an arduous search, and what the Nobel Prize committee called “a high-risk project,” the researchers identified a gene that allowed cells to sense capsaicin. It encoded a novel ion channel protein, later called TRPV1, that Julius and his team discovered could be activated by hot temperatures perceived as painful. All Rights Reserved © 2021

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 28025 - Posted: 10.06.2021

By Gretchen Reynolds For better health and a longer life span, exercise is more important than weight loss, especially if you are overweight or obese, according to an interesting new review of the relationships between fitness, weight, heart health and longevity. The study, which analyzed the results of hundreds of previous studies of weight loss and workouts in men and women, found that obese people typically lower their risks of heart disease and premature death far more by gaining fitness than by dropping weight or dieting. The review adds to mounting evidence that most of us can be healthy at any weight, if we are also active enough. I have written frequently in this column about the science of exercise and weight loss, much of which is, frankly, dispiriting, if your goal is to be thinner. This past research overwhelmingly shows that people who start to exercise rarely lose much, if any, weight, unless they also cut back substantially on food intake. Exercise simply burns too few calories, in general, to aid in weight reduction. We also tend to compensate for some portion of the meager caloric outlay from exercise by eating more afterward or moving less or unconsciously dialing back on our bodies’ metabolic operations to reduce overall daily energy expenditure, as I wrote about in last week’s column. Glenn Gaesser, a professor of exercise physiology at Arizona State University in Phoenix, is well versed in the inadequacies of workouts for fat loss. For decades, he has been studying the effects of physical activity on people’s body compositions and metabolisms, as well as their endurance, with a particular focus on people who are obese. Much of his past research has underscored the futility of workouts for weight loss. In a 2015 experiment he oversaw, for instance, 81 sedentary, overweight women began a new routine of walking three times a week for 30 minutes. After 12 weeks, a few of them had shed some body fat, but 55 of them had gained weight. In other studies from Dr. Gaesser’s lab, though, overweight and obese people with significant health problems, including high blood pressure, poor cholesterol profiles or insulin resistance, a marker for Type 2 diabetes, showed considerable improvements in those conditions after they started exercising, whether they dropped any weight or not. Seeing these results, Dr. Gaesser began to wonder if fitness might enable overweight people to enjoy sound metabolic health, whatever their body mass numbers, and potentially live just as long as thinner people — or even longer, if the slender people happened to be out of shape. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 28024 - Posted: 10.06.2021

Linda Geddes Your dog might follow commands such as “sit”, or become uncontrollably excited at the mention of the word “walkies”, but when it comes to remembering the names of toys and other everyday items, most seem pretty absent-minded. Now a study of six “genius dogs” has advanced our understanding of dogs’ memories, suggesting some of them possess a remarkable grasp of the human language. Hungarian researchers spent more than two years scouring the globe for dogs who could recognise the names of their various toys. Although most can learn commands to some degree, learning the names of items appears to be a very different task, with most dogs unable to master this skill. Max (Hungary), Gaia (Brazil), Nalani (Netherlands), Squall (US), Whisky (Norway), and Rico (Spain) made the cut after proving they knew the names of more than 28 toys, with some knowing more than 100. They were then enlisted to take part in a series of livestreamed experiments known as the Genius Dog Challenge. “These gifted dogs can learn new names of toys in a remarkable speed,” said Dr Claudia Fugazza at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, who led the research team. “In our previous study we found that they could learn a new toy name after hearing it only four times. But, with such short exposure, they did not form a long-term memory of it.” To further push the dogs’ limits, their owners were tasked with teaching them the names of six, and then 12 new toys in a single week. © 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 28023 - Posted: 10.06.2021

By Laura Sanders A personalized brain implant eased the crushing symptoms of a woman’s severe depression, allowing her to once again see the beauty of the world. “It’s like my lens on the world changed,” said Sarah, the research volunteer who requested to be identified by her first name only. The technology, described October 4 in Nature Medicine, brings researchers closer to understanding how to detect and change brain activity in ultraprecise ways (SN: 2/10/19). The device was bespoke; it was built specifically for Sarah’s brain. The details of the new system may not work as a treatment for many other people, says Alik Widge, a psychiatrist and neural engineer at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Still, the research is “a really significant piece of work,” he says, because it points out a way to study how brain activity goes awry in depression. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco implanted temporary thin wire electrodes into Sarah’s brain. The 36-year-old woman had suffered from severe depression for years. These electrodes allowed researchers to monitor the brain activity that corresponded to Sarah’s depression symptoms — a pattern that the researchers could use as a biomarker, a signpost of trouble to come. In Sarah’s case, a particular sign emerged: a fast brain wave called a gamma wave in her amygdala, a brain structure known to be involved in emotions. With this biomarker in hand, the researchers then figured out where to stimulate the brain to interrupt Sarah’s distressing symptoms. A region called the ventral capsule/ventral striatum, or VC/VS, seemed to be the key. That’s not surprising; previous research suggests the region is involved with feeling good and other emotions. When researchers applied tiny jolts of electrical current to this region, Sarah’s mood improved. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2021.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 28022 - Posted: 10.06.2021

by Peter Hess Mice with a mutated copy of MYT1L, a leading autism candidate gene, have unusually small brains and many other physical and behavioral traits mirroring those seen in people with similar mutations, according to a study published today in Neuron. The mice represent the first model of MYT1L syndrome, a rare genetic condition marked by autism, intellectual disability, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obesity and microcephaly, or a smaller-than-average head. “Generating a mouse line is always a gamble,” says lead investigator Joseph Dougherty, associate professor of genetics and psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. “The stars really aligned for us.” MYT1L encodes a transcription factor, a type of protein that influences gene expression. But few studies have explored how mutations in the gene lead to the traits seen in people, partly because there are likely fewer than 100 cases worldwide. Dougherty and his colleagues used CRISPR to engineer mice with a MYT1L mutation that resembles one identified in an autistic person. The mice have neurons that mature earlier than expected, which could help explain the traits seen in people. As the first mouse model of MYT1L mutations, “this is a landmark piece of work, and is certainly promising for fundamental science exploration and as a preclinical model,” says Charis Eng, chair of the Cleveland Clinic’s Genomic Medicine Institute in Ohio, who was not involved in the work. © 2021 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Autism; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 28021 - Posted: 10.06.2021

By Erin Blakemore Methamphetamine overdoses are on the rise, a study published in JAMA Psychiatry says. When researchers from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed data from 2015 to 2019, they found that meth overdose deaths in the United States had almost tripled. During that time span, meth-related overdoses rose from 5,526 to 15,489. This was accompanied by a 43 percent increase in people reporting meth use. Researchers believe over 2 million adults used meth during the period, up from 1.4 million. They used data from the National Vital Statistics System, which tracks births, deaths and the reasons people die. Then they looked at data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which analyzes a random sample of adults in the United States. Advertisement The study shows stark differences in who uses meth. American Indians and Alaska Natives were the most likely to report methamphetamine-use disorder, meth injection and overall meth use. Black people who don’t inject meth also experienced a sharp rise in meth use, which increased more than tenfold. Gay men had the highest prevalence of meth injection. More than three times the women who reported meth use in previous years said they used the drug between 2015 and 2019. Age was a factor, too. Young adults 18 to 23 showed a fourfold increase in meth use without injection. Overall, the number rose by nearly half for all U.S. adults.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 28020 - Posted: 10.06.2021

Sruthi S. Balakrishnan For nearly two decades, academic and industry researchers working to find ways to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease have focused chiefly on the amyloid-β plaques that accumulate among neurons. Dozens of clinical trials have tested drugs designed to remove or reduce these plaques, but successes have been few. Aducanumab, Biogen’s amyloid-attacking antibody drug (brand name Aduhelm) that was approved earlier this year following a long drought in new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), has been mired in controversy after scientists raised questions about the drug’s efficacy. This lack of progress has prompted many research groups to look instead at non-neuronal cells in the brain, and in particular, at immune cells known as microglia. Vital in both developing and mature brains, these cells help shape neurons, control how they communicate, keep an eye out for pathogenic intruders, and mediate neuroinflammation. This last role has emerged as particularly important as researchers uncover evidence that inflammation is linked to many neurological diseases—including AD—as well as to other conditions associated with aging. Many scientists have been waiting for the pharmaceutical industry to take notice of this link. “We knew all this ten years before, the rest of the world just didn’t pay attention to it,” says Jean Harry, a neurotoxicologist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Durham, North Carolina. Key players in driving change have been recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which have pointed to AD–associated mutations in genes that are highly expressed in microglia, strengthening the evidence for links between these cells and the disease. “You can’t ignore it anymore,” says Bobbi Fleiss, a microglial neurobiologist at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. © 1986–2021 The Scientist.

Keyword: Glia; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 28019 - Posted: 10.02.2021

By Christina Caron For about 1 in 20 people in the northern half of the United States, cooling temperatures and shorter, darker days may signal the onset of seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, a type of depression that typically arrives in the fall or winter, then goes away in the spring. Unlike mild cases of the “winter blues,” SAD symptoms make it difficult to function. It tends to start with so-called “vegetative symptoms”: an increased appetite and a craving for carbohydrates like french fries or ice cream, the urge to sleep longer hours, difficulty getting up in the morning and feeling wiped out at work. Then, in three to four weeks, “the mood plummets,” said Michael Terman, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University and an expert in seasonal affective disorder. Patients with SAD develop major depression, which includes persistent feelings of sadness, withdrawal from friends and family and a loss of interest in activities that were once enjoyable. Researchers don’t yet know why some people develop SAD and others do not, but the disorder is believed to run in families and is more common among women. SAD develops in the fall and winter because shorter daylight hours and less sunlight shift the body’s internal clock, and certain mood-regulating hormones, like serotonin, oscillate with the seasons. The good news is that because SAD is tied to the changing seasons, “you can predict its onset and ward it off,” Dr. Terman said. If you have already started experiencing vegetative symptoms — for example you are sleeping longer and having more difficulty waking up — or if you already know you are susceptible to seasonal affective disorder, experts said it’s best to start implementing preventive measures before major depression sets in. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 28018 - Posted: 10.02.2021

By Jackie Rocheleau Elevated blood levels of a specific protein may help scientists predict who has a better chance of bouncing back from a traumatic brain injury. The protein, called neurofilament light or NfL for short, lends structural support to axons, the tendrils that send messages between brain cells. Levels of NfL peak on average at 10 times the typical level 20 days after injury and stay above normal a year later, researchers report September 29 in Science Translational Medicine. The higher the peak NfL blood concentrations after injury, the tougher the recovery for people with TBI six and 12 months later, shows the study of 197 people treated at eight trauma centers across Europe for moderate to severe TBI. Brain scans of 146 participants revealed that their peak NfL concentrations predicted the extent of brain shrinkage after six months, and axon damage at six and 12 months after injury, neurologist Neil Graham of Imperial College London and his colleagues found. These researchers also had a unique opportunity to check that the blood biomarker, which gives indirect clues about the brain injury, actually measured what was happening in the brain. In 18 of the participants that needed brain surgery, researchers sampled the fluid surrounding injured neurons. NfL concentrations there correlated with NfL concentrations in the blood. “The work shows that a new ultrasensitive blood test can be used to accurately diagnose traumatic brain injury,” says Graham. “This blood test can predict quite precisely who’s going to make a good recovery and who’s going to have more difficulties.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2021.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 28017 - Posted: 10.02.2021

Annie Melchor After finishing his PhD in neuroscience in 2016, Thomas Andrillon spent a year road-tripping around Africa and South America with his wife. One evening, on a particularly difficult road in Patagonia, his mind began to wander and he ended up accidentally flipping the car. Luckily, no one was hurt. As locals rushed in to help, they asked Andrillon what had happened. Was there an animal on the road? Had he fallen asleep at the wheel? “I had difficulty explaining that I was just thinking about something else,” he remembers. This experience made him think. What had happened? What was going on in his brain when his mind began to wander? In 2017, Andrillon started his postdoctoral research with neuroscientists Naotsugu Tsuchiya and Joel Pearson at Monash University in Melbourne. Shortly after, Tsuchiya and Andrillon teamed up with philosopher Jennifer Windt, also at Monash, to dive into the neural basis of mind wandering. Initially, Andrillon says, they wanted to know if they could detect mind wandering from facial expressions, recalling how teachers claim to be very good at knowing when their students are not paying attention. So they did a pilot experiment in which they filmed their test subjects performing a tedious, repetitive task. After reviewing the videos, one of Andrillon’s students came to him, concerned. “I think we have a problem,” said the student. “[The subjects] look exhausted.” Sure enough, even though all the study participants were awake, they were obviously struggling to not fall asleep, says Andrillon. It was this observation that gave them the idea to broaden their focus, and start looking at the connection between wavering attention and sleep. © 1986–2021 The Scientist.=

Keyword: Attention; Sleep
Link ID: 28016 - Posted: 10.02.2021

By Sierra Carter Black women who have experienced more racism throughout their lives have stronger brain responses to threat, which may hurt their long-term health, according to a new study I conducted with clinical neuropsychologist Negar Fani and other colleagues. I am part of a research team that for more than 15 years has studied the ways stress related to trauma exposure can affect the mind and body. In our recent study, we took a closer look at a stressor that Black Americans disproportionately face in the United States: racism. My colleagues and I completed research with 55 Black women who reported how much they’d been exposed to traumatic experiences, such as childhood abuse and physical or sexual violence, and to racial discrimination, experiencing unfair treatment due to race or ethnicity. We asked them to focus on a task that required attention while simultaneously looking at stressful images. We used functional MRI to observe their brain activity during that time. We found that Black women who reported more experiences of racial discrimination had more response activity in brain regions that are associated with vigilance and watching out for threat — that is, the middle occipital cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Their reactions were above and beyond the response caused by traumatic experiences not related to racism. Our research suggests that racism had a traumalike effect on Black women’s health; being regularly attuned to the threat of racism can tax important body-regulation tools and worsen brain health.

Keyword: Stress; Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 28015 - Posted: 10.02.2021

Amanda Heidt Qin Liu studies sneezing for a personal reason: her entire family suffers from seasonal allergies. “Until you experience something chronically, it is really hard to appreciate how disruptive it can be,” says Liu, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis. And given the role of sneezing in pathogen transmission, a better understanding of the molecular underpinnings of the phenomenon could one day help scientists mitigate or treat infectious diseases. When Liu first started looking into the mechanisms governing sneezing, she found that scientists know surprisingly little about how this process works. While prior research had identified a region in the brains of cats and humans that is active during sneezing, the exact pathways involved in turning a stimulus like pollen or spicy food into a sneeze remained unknown. To study sneezing in more detail, Liu and her team developed a new model by exposing mice to irritants such as histamine and capsaicin—a chemical in spicy peppers—and characterizing the physical properties of their resulting sneezes. Then, focusing on that previously discovered sneeze center, located in the brain’s ventromedial spinal trigeminal nucleus (SpV), Liu attempted to map the neural pathway. SNEEZE TRIGGER: When exposed to allergens such as histamine or chemical irritants such as capsaicin (1), sensory neurons in the noses of mice produce a peptide called neuromedin B (NMB). This signaling molecule binds to neurons in a region of the brainstem known as the ventromedial spinal trigeminal nucleus (SpV), which is known to be active during sneezing (2). These neurons send electrical signals (3) to neurons in another brainstem region called the caudal ventral respiratory group (cVRG), which controls exhalation, thus driving the initiation and propagation of sneezing (4). Ablating the nasal neurons or disrupting NMB signaling led to a significantly reduced sneezing reflex in the mice. WEB | PDF © 1986–2021 The Scientist.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 28014 - Posted: 10.02.2021

By Sam Roberts Washoe was 10 months old when her foster parents began teaching her to talk, and five months later they were already trumpeting her success. Not only had she learned words; she could also string them together, creating expressions like “water birds” when she saw a pair of swans and “open flower” to gain admittance to a garden. Washoe was a chimpanzee. She had been born in West Africa, probably orphaned when her mother was killed, sold to a dealer, flown to the United States for use of testing by the Air Force and adopted by R. Allen Gardner and his wife, Beatrix. She was raised as if she were a human child. She craved oatmeal with onions and pumpkin pudding. “The object of our research was to learn how much chimps are like humans,” Professor Gardner told Nevada Today, a University of Nevada publication, in 2007. “To measure this accurately, chimps would be needed to be raised as human children, and to do that, we needed to share a common language.” Washoe ultimately learned some 200 words, becoming what researchers said was the first nonhuman to communicate using sign language developed for the deaf. Professor Gardner, an ethologist who, with his wife, raised the chimpanzee for nearly five years, died on Aug. 20 at his ranch near Reno, Nev. He was 91. His death was announced by the University of Nevada, Reno, where he had joined the faculty in 1963 and conducted his research until he retired in 2010. When scientific journals reported in 1967 that Washoe (pronounced WA-sho), named after a county in Nevada, had learned to recognize and use multiple gestures and expressions in sign language, the news electrified the world of psychologists and ethologists who study animal behavior. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 28013 - Posted: 10.02.2021