By Alex Fox Deposits of a mineral found in tooth enamel at the back of the eye could be hastening the progression of age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of deteriorating eyesight in people over 50. Now researchers have identified a protein called amelotin that experiments suggest is involved in producing the mineral deposits that are the hallmark of “dry” age-related macular degeneration, the most common of the two forms of the disease. Age-related macular degeneration, or AMD, affects about 3 million people in the United States. But the new finding, if confirmed, could change that. While the “wet” form of AMD, which comprises up to 30 percent of AMD cases, can be treated with injections, there are currently no treatments for dry AMD. “Finding amelotin in these deposits makes it a target to try to slow the progression of mineralization, which, if it’s borne out, could result in new therapies,” says Imre Lengyel, an ophthalmologist at Queen’s University Belfast in Scotland who was not involved in the research. These deposits, first documented in 2015, are made of a type of mineralized calcium called hydroxyapatite and appear beneath the retinal pigment epithelium — a layer of cells just outside the retina that keeps its light-sensing rods and cones happy and healthy. The deposits may worsen vision by blocking the flow of oxygen and nutrients needed to nourish those light-sensitive cells of the retina. By contrast, in wet AMD abnormal blood vessels intrude into the retina and often leak. Both types of AMD distort a person’s central vision — the focused, detailed sight needed for reading and recognizing faces — which can make independent living difficult. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2020

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 27136 - Posted: 03.24.2020

By Roni Caryn Rabin A mother who was infected with the coronavirus couldn’t smell her baby’s full diaper. Cooks who can usually name every spice in a restaurant dish can’t smell curry or garlic, and food tastes bland. Others say they can’t pick up the sweet scent of shampoo or the foul odor of kitty litter. Anosmia, the loss of sense of smell, and ageusia, an accompanying diminished sense of taste, have emerged as peculiar telltale signs of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and possible markers of infection. On Friday, British ear, nose and throat doctors, citing reports from colleagues around the world, called on adults who lose their senses of smell to isolate themselves for seven days, even if they have no other symptoms, to slow the disease’s spread. The published data is limited, but doctors are concerned enough to raise warnings. “We really want to raise awareness that this is a sign of infection and that anyone who develops loss of sense of smell should self-isolate,” Prof. Claire Hopkins, president of the British Rhinological Society, wrote in an email. “It could contribute to slowing transmission and save lives.” She and Nirmal Kumar, president of ENT UK, a group representing ear, nose and throat doctors in Britain, issued a joint statement urging health care workers to use personal protective equipment when treating any patients who have lost their senses of smell, and advised against performing nonessential sinus endoscopy procedures on anyone, because the virus replicates in the nose and the throat and an exam can prompt coughs or sneezes that expose the doctor to a high level of virus. Two ear, nose and throat specialists in Britain who have been infected with the coronavirus are in critical condition, Dr. Hopkins said. Earlier reports from Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus first emerged, had warned that ear, nose and throat specialists as well as eye doctors were infected and dying in large numbers, Dr. Hopkins said. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 27135 - Posted: 03.23.2020

By Amanda McCracken Over 30 years ago, Tom Johnson identified a gene that extended the very short life of a tiny roundworm, propelling him to the forefront of research on aging and raising the tantalizing possibility that aging could someday be slowed down in people, too. His work transformed the mind-set of scientists, launching a new field in the science of aging when he demonstrated that identifying and manipulating genes could lengthen life span. Although Johnson’s research has led to drug development to slow the effects of age-related diseases, he has yet to find the secret to stop aging. Now the soft-spoken redheaded scientist is running out of time as he confronts his own mortality. Five years ago, at age 66, work got confusing for Johnson, a professor in the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He found it impossible to keep track of his many projects. He began wondering whether he had Alzheimer’s like his newly diagnosed sister. He spoke to his wife, Vicki Simpson, about the little dogs he frequently saw running around the house (even though he knew they weren’t real). Simpson, a retired anesthesiologist, later learned such hallucinations are a trademark sign of Lewy body dementia. At first, she praised his imagination and then after several months suggested they visit a memory clinic. There he was diagnosed with probable Lewy body — a fatal disease with inescapable dementia that can be diagnosed with certainty only at death. Right now, there is no cure, only ways to ease symptoms.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 27134 - Posted: 03.23.2020

Amy Schleunes Preti was a leading expert on human odors who sought to understand the chemistry of odor in the underarm and the behavior aspects of human scents, and an ambassador to patients suffering from rare metabolic diseases who provided communities worldwide with knowledge about their condition and how to cope with it. Preti was also dedicated to using odor biomarkers to detect cancer in its early stages, contributing both research and money to the cause, according to a Monell Center press release. Born on October 7, 1944 in Brooklyn, New York, Preti received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1966. He then went on to MIT, where he earned a PhD in chemistry in 1971. His thesis was titled, “A Study of the Organic Compounds in the Lunar Crust and in Terrestrial Model Systems,” according to the Monell Center’s statement. Preti coauthored a paper published in Science on the same topic, and reportedly saved a vial of “moon dust” that he sometimes showed off to visitors to his lab. Upon completing his doctorate in 1971, he immediately accepted a postdoc at Monell and later become a member of the Monell Chemical Senses Center and an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. While Preti and his colleagues investigated a range of odors in different species—anal sac emissions from dogs, scent marks by marmoset monkeys, urine from guinea pigs and mice—Preti’s main focus was on the meaning of human odors. He studied the scents of human underarms and melanoma cells as well as the odors associated with generalized stress. Along with his collaborator, Charles Wysocki, Preti published papers on how human physiology and behavior are affected by body odor. Preti was skeptical of human pheromones and their associated hype, telling The Scientist in 2018, “I am not compelled by any studies that are out there that say there is an active steroid component from the underarm that causes [sexual attraction].” © 1986–2020 The Scientist

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 27133 - Posted: 03.23.2020

Peter Hess The coronavirus pandemic has shuttered universities and institutes, leaving scientists scrambling to continue their research. Hundreds of colleges and universities in the United States have dispatched students home and are aiming to transition to remote learning. Scientific organizations are canceling conferences or moving them online. And scientists have had to put research projects and clinical trials on hold. These decisions—all done with the intention of slowing the pandemic—may stall and stymie research, with long-term consequences for the field. It may also hurt career prospects for graduate students who rely on conference presentations to gain exposure. “From everything that we’re seeing, this isn’t like a two-week hiatus,” says Helen Egger, chair of the child and adolescent psychiatry department at NYU Langone Health in New York City. “We’re in the middle of the hurricane, and there’s no indication how much worse it’s going to get or when it will end.” One long-term benefit is that the crisis may give universities and professional organizations a crash course in embracing technology. “These types of experiences—as long as we are having them, unfortunately—are giving autism [researchers] and other researchers more skills to be able to have online conferences and online teaching as needed,” says Steven Kapp, lecturer in psychology at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. Backup plans: Some labs were prepared to meet the challenge, and they quickly put their emergency plans into place when news of the pandemic intensified. But, illustrating how rapidly the situation is changing, some of their plans derailed over the weekend. © 1986–2020 The Scientist

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 27132 - Posted: 03.21.2020

By Monica Schoch-Spana The novel coronavirus has touched off another stealthy and growing public health crisis that calls for an equally matched emergency response. Like other pandemics and emerging disease outbreaks, COVID-19 is creating immense psychosocial disturbances. The disease involves an unfamiliar threat that is difficult to detect and challenging to distinguish from more benign illnesses. Protracted and dynamic pandemic conditions will draw out the anxiety. Things will get worse before they get better. Absent a vaccine, nonpharmaceutical interventions are the only way to prevent infections, and they dramatically upset everyday bodily habits, social interactions and economic exchanges. Recent grocery store runs are a sign of concern in the community. Personal actions to avoid infection such as stockpiling hand sanitizer also confer a sense of control over an uncertain danger. Improvements to current risk communication can alleviate widespread distress. Top elected officials and health authorities should empathize with people’s fear, normalize stress reactions, provide clear guidance on recommended health behaviors, instruct in concrete protections including those for mental health and share solidarity and resilience messages. Advertisement However, more interventions are essential because specific groups are at a higher risk of both acute and lingering emotional distress. Health care workers on the epidemic front lines face compounding stressors: the prospect of more and longer shifts, the need to improvise childcare coverage, finite supplies of personal protective equipment, fear of bringing infection home, witnessing co-workers becoming ill, and making tough allocation decisions about scarce, lifesaving resources like mechanical ventilators. © 2020 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 27131 - Posted: 03.21.2020

May-Britt Moser & Edvard Moser There was something of the Viking about Per Andersen. The intrepid and steadfast Norwegian was renowned for his attacks on the deepest puzzle of the brain: how its wiring and electrical activity give rise to behaviour and experience. When he was a student in the 1950s, most neuroscientists studied accessible parts of the mammalian nervous system — the junctions between nerves and muscles, say. Andersen worked on the cerebral cortex, which processes higher-level functions: perception, voluntary movement, planning and abstract thinking. His pioneering recordings of electrical activity in the hippocampus — a part of the cortex involved in memory — launched a new era in physiological understanding of the brain and laid the foundations of modern systems neuroscience. He died on 17 February, aged 90. In 1949, it was predicted that learning might depend on repeated activity strengthening the connections — synapses — in networks of neurons. Andersen saw that this was the case in the hippocampus. As the effect was too fleeting to account directly for memory storage, he encouraged his student Terje Lømo to investigate. In 1973, in one of the greatest discoveries of twentieth-century neuroscience, Lømo and British visiting scholar Tim Bliss reported from Andersen’s laboratory that many bursts of electrical stimulation at certain frequencies enhanced connectivity for hours or days. This phenomenon — long-term potentiation (LTP) — remains the main explanation for how we form and store memories (T. V. P. Bliss and T. Lømo J. Physiol. 232, 331–356; 1973). We met Andersen as students, in the late 1980s. Our work with him on LTP and animal learning found differences in function between regions of the hippocampus and demonstrated changes in connectivity related to behaviour. His hunch that we should record activity from single cells led to our discovery of specialized neurons in the cortex that support the sense of where the body is in space. The work was a direct result of his insight. © 2020 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 27130 - Posted: 03.21.2020

By Inés Gutiérrez, Rodrigo Pérez Ortega Earlier this month, Mexico’s leading university, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), announced that renowned neuroscientist Ranulfo Romo Trujillo would leave his position after being disciplined for an unspecified offense. According to a 4 March press release from UNAM, Romo Trujillo voluntarily asked to be separated from his job at UNAM’s University City campus in Mexico City. Sources close to the case say he had been temporarily suspended because a female worker made a formal complaint of sexual harassment against him following an incident in January. But current and former UNAM students and staff say that reports of inappropriate behavior by Romo Trujillo had circulated for years before his departure. Romo Trujillo, who works at UNAM’s Institute of Cellular Physiology (IFC), did not respond to repeated requests for comment. He is arguably the most famous neuroscientist in Mexico, studying perception, working memory, and decision-making. He has more than 150 publications, including in top journals such as Science and Nature; is on the editorial board of Neuron and other journals; and is one of 11 Mexican members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. IFC physiologist Marcia Hiriart Urdanivia acknowledged in an email to Science that, while director of IFC from 2009 to 2017, she received multiple accounts of sexual harassment or inappropriate conduct by Romo Trujillo. Hiriart Urdanivia says she warned Romo Trujillo that “his career was endangered by such actions.” But the women involved did not choose to file official complaints, she says. As a result, “I had no authority to do anything else.” © 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 27129 - Posted: 03.21.2020

By Scott Barry Kaufman Who are you and how did you become interested in free will? I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Iona College where I also serve as a faculty member for the Iona Neuroscience program. I have previously worked in the Scientific and Philosophical Studies of Mind program at Franklin and Marshall College as well as previous appointments as a Lecturer at King’s College London and University of Alabama. My recent and forthcoming publications focus on issues of autonomy in terms of philosophical accounts of free will as well as how it intersects with neuroscience and psychiatry. One of the main questions I investigate is what neuroscience can tell us about meaningful agency (see here for my recent review of the topic as part of an extended review of research on agency, freedom, and responsibility for the John Templeton Foundation). I became interested in free will via an interdisciplinary route. As an undergraduate at Grinnell College, I majored in psychology with a strong emphasis on experimental psychology and clinical psychology. During my senior year at Grinnell I realized that I was fascinated by the theoretical issues operating in the background of the psychological studies that we read and conducted, especially issues of how the mind is related to the brain, prospects for the scientific study of consciousness, and how humans as agents fit into a natural picture of the world. So I followed these interests to the study of philosophy of psychology and eventually found my way to the perfect fusion of these topics: the neuroscience of free will. What is free will? Free will seems to be a familiar feature of our everyday lives — most of us believe that (at least at times) what we do is up to us to some extent. For instance, that I freely decided to take my job or that I am acting freely when I decide to go for a run this afternoon. Free will is not just that I move about in the world to achieve a goal, but that I exercise meaningful control over what I decide to do. My decisions and actions are up to me in the sense that they are mine — a product of my values, desires, beliefs, and intentions. I decided to take this job because I valued the institution’s mission or I believed that this job would be enriching or a good fit for me. Correspondingly, it seems to me that at least at times I could have decided to and done something else than what I did. I decided to go for a run this afternoon, but no one made me and I wasn’t subject to any compulsion; I could have gone for a coffee instead, at least it seems to me. Philosophers take these starting points and work to construct plausible accounts of free will. Broadly speaking, there is a lot of disagreement as to the right view of free will, but most philosophers believe that a person has free will if they have the ability to act freely, and that this kind of control is linked to whether it would be appropriate to hold that person responsible (e.g., blame or praise them) for what they do. For instance, we don’t typically hold people responsible for what they do if they were acting under severe threat or inner compulsion. © 2020 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 27128 - Posted: 03.17.2020

Jonathan Kanter and Adam Kuczynski To fight the spread of coronavirus, government officials have asked Americans to swallow a hard pill: Stay away from each other. In times of societal stress, such a demand runs counter to what evolution has hard-wired people to do: Seek out and support each other as families, friends and communities. We yearn to huddle together. The warmth of our breath and bodies, of holding hands and hugging, of talking and listening, is a primary source of soothing. These connections are pivotal for responding to and maximizing our survival in times of stress. Priority number one is to follow the recommended social distancing guidelines to control the virus. The cure is definitely not worse than the disease – experts’ projections of disease spread and mortality without strong intervention make this clear. But as with any pill, there are side effects. As psychological scientists at the University of Washington’s Center for the Science of Social Connection, our lab studies social connectedness, why it is important and how to maximize its benefits. Our clinical and research experiences help us understand the side effects of social distancing and suggest strategies for addressing them. In times of stress and illness, being deprived of social connection can create more stress and illness. People who are lonely have higher levels of the hormone cortisol, an indicator of stress; show weaker immune responses to pathogens; and are at increased risk for premature death. Isolation can lead to depression, suicidal thoughts and other clinical conditions. © 2010–2020, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 27127 - Posted: 03.17.2020

By Maria Temming When it comes to identifying scents, a “neuromorphic” artificial intelligence beats other AI by more than a nose. The new AI learns to recognize smells more efficiently and reliably than other algorithms. And unlike other AI, this system can keep learning new aromas without forgetting others, researchers report online March 16 in Nature Machine Intelligence. The key to the program’s success is its neuromorphic structure, which resembles the neural circuitry in mammalian brains more than other AI designs. This kind of algorithm, which excels at detecting faint signals amidst background noise and continually learning on the job, could someday be used for air quality monitoring, toxic waste detection or medical diagnoses. The new AI is an artificial neural network, composed of many computing elements that mimic nerve cells to process scent information (SN: 5/2/19). The AI “sniffs” by taking in electrical voltage readouts from chemical sensors in a wind tunnel that were exposed to plumes of different scents, such as methane or ammonia. When the AI whiffs a new smell, that triggers a cascade of electrical activity among its nerve cells, or neurons, which the system remembers and can recognize in the future. Like the olfactory system in the mammal brain, some of the AI’s neurons are designed to react to chemical sensor inputs by emitting differently timed pulses. Other neurons learn to recognize patterns in those blips that make up the odor’s electrical signature. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2020

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Robotics
Link ID: 27126 - Posted: 03.17.2020

By James Gorman Among the many lessons of the coronavirus pandemic is how close humans are to the rest of the animal kingdom. We get diseases from other animals, and then we use more animals to figure out how to stop the diseases. As research ramps up treatments and vaccines, animals are crucial to fighting the pandemic. There are different animals at each end of the pandemic, of course. The new disease almost certainly began with a bat virus, scientists agree. That virus probably passed through another animal, perhaps pangolins, on its way to humans. But the animals that scientists will depend on in the lab are mice, first of all, and then perhaps ferrets or hamsters or monkeys. Around the world, different laboratories are racing to breed stocks of mice genetically engineered for research and testing the susceptibility of other animals to infection with the virus that causes Covid-19. There are, of course, many objections to animal testing, particularly when it comes to primates, but researchers are deeply concerned about the hazards to humans of treatments or vaccines that have not been tried on other animals first. No single kind of animal will serve all test purposes and scientists have several criteria for what makes an animal useful in testing therapies and vaccines for effectiveness. First, it must be susceptible to infection, and not all animals are. Despite the quarantining of one dog in Hong Kong, with a “weak positive” test for coronavirus, various health agencies are not taking a single, ambiguous result as evidence for concern. Advisories state there is no evidence yet that pets are susceptible to the disease. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 27125 - Posted: 03.17.2020

By Adrienne Raphel Let me tell you a tale of two grandfathers, Irv and Murray. For decades, Irv, an introverted, quiet, retired bartender and former military engineer, had the same morning routine: coffee and cream; a roll; and the puzzle page of the Press of Atlantic City. He methodically and religiously worked his way through each one, from the crossword to the jumble to the cryptoquip, a substitution cipher that asks solvers to decode clues and figure out the pun. Extroverted and spontaneous Murray, a successful businessman and local politician, also had his morning routine: coffee with lots of sugar; oatmeal; and tinkering on one of his many writing projects, such as a loosely autobiographical musical about a traveling salesman. Murray swam a few times a week, devoured books and loved to travel. But he never did crosswords. Irv died at age 94, and he barely experienced any cognitive loss before the last six months of his life, when he exhibited rapid mental decline. Murray lived to be 91, but the last several years of his life were marked with severe dementia. When I was researching my book Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them, I was fascinated by my family’s case study. The evidence, it seemed, couldn’t be clearer: doing crosswords late in life prevents dementia. And at first, all the studies I found seemed to bear this hypothesis out. “Regular crosswords and number puzzles linked to sharper brain in later life,” a May 2019 Science Daily headline proclaims. According to a University of Exeter study, older adults who regularly did word and number puzzles had increased mental acuity. A 2011 experiment with members of the Bronx Aging Study found that a regular regimen of crosswords might delay the onset of cognitive decline. Belief in puzzle power has fueled multimillion-dollar industry of brain-training games like Lumosity or Dakim. © 2020 Scientific American,

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 27124 - Posted: 03.17.2020

By Linda Searing Alzheimer’s disease, the most common dementia among older adults, now affects about 5.8 million U.S. residents 65 and older — 10 percent of that age group, according to a new report from the Alzheimer’s Association. Age is considered the biggest risk factor for Alzheimer’s, with 3 percent of people 65 to 74, 17 percent of those 75 to 84 and 32 percent of people 85 and older — or nearly a third — having the disease. By 2050, the number of U.S. adults 65 and older with Alzheimer’s is expected to reach 13.8 million, with about half of them 85 or older. The association’s report attributes the growing number of Americans with Alzheimer’s to the projected aging of the U.S. population, with the West and Southeast regions of the country expected to experience the largest increases in the next five years. Sometimes, people under 65 develop what is called early-onset Alzheimer’s, but that is much less common. Although there is no known average age for the onset of Alzheimer’s, symptoms tend to be noticeable in the mid-60s, with memory issues typically one of the first signs. Alzheimer’s is an irreversible brain disorder that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills, can alter mood and personality and eventually disrupts the ability to carry out simple day-to-day tasks. Hallucinations, agitation and aggression are common symptoms as the condition advances. Although there is no cure for the disease — or even drugs to slow or stop progression — some medications can temporarily improve cognitive or behavioral symptoms. Non-medication therapies — exercise, music to stir recall or special lighting to ease sleep disorders — also can be helpful, but the report says that they also do not stop or slow the disease.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 27123 - Posted: 03.17.2020

Bob McDonald · CBC Radio Technology used to determine the structure of the Earth's interior using seismic waves has been adapted into a prototype brain scanner that could give results in real time. It could also be cheaper and simpler to use than technologies like MRI or CT scans. For decades, geologists have used sound waves travelling through the Earth, either from earthquakes or artificial sources, to search for oil, image fault lines and attempt to predict earthquakes. Reading reflections and refraction of the waves as they pass through different kinds of rocks and deposits can help geologists essentially do an ultrasound to build up a picture of the Earth. But in recent years seismology has been supercharged by a computational technique called full waveform inversion (FWI), which uses complex computer algorithms to scavenge ever more information from seismic data, and make much more detailed and accurate 3D maps of the Earth's crust. Now scientists at Imperial College London have adapted the same technology into a prototype head-mounted scanner that produced imaging information they say could be used in the future to produce high-resolution 3D images of the brain. The wavefield is shown as it propagates across the head. (Dr Lluís Guasch / Imperial College London / University College London / Nature Digital Medicine) The device uses a helmet fitted with an array of acoustic transducers that act as both sound transmitters and receivers. The system uses low frequency sound waves that are able to penetrate the skull and pass through the brain without harming brain tissue. The sound waves are altered as they pass through different brain structures, then the signals are read and run through the FWI algorithm. In simulations the team got results that make them confident they can produce high-resolution 3D images that may be as good, if not better, than more traditional approaches. ©2020 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 27122 - Posted: 03.16.2020

By Scott Barry Kaufman For many years, researchers have treated the individual traits and characteristics of autistic people as an enduring essence of their autism-- in isolation of the social context and without even asking autistic people what their social life is actually like. However, perspective matters. Who is to say it's autistic people who are the "awkward" ones? A number of myths about autistic people abound. For one, it's a great myth that autistic people lack empathy. This is how they were depicted for so many years in the clinical literature and in the media-- as emotionless, socially clueless robots. However, the more you get to know an autistic person, the more you realize just how caring they can be, even though they may have some difficulties reading social cues. As Steve Silberman points out, empathy is a two-way street. Another common misconception is that autistic people aren't social. I really like some recent approaches that add greater complexity to this issue, showing that when you take a contextual strengths-based approach you can see that people on the autism spectrum are much more social than researchers ever realized. The lens upon which we look at a person matters. As Megan Clark and Dawn Adams put it, "When autism is viewed through a deficit lens the strengths, positive attributes and interests of individuals on the spectrum can be overshadowed." In one recent study, Clark and Adams asked 83 children on the autism spectrum (aged 8 to 15 years) various questions about themselves. When asked "What do you like most about yourself?", the most common themes were "I am a good friend or person to be around" and "I am good at particular things."When asked "What do you enjoy the most?", one of the most endorsed themes was social interaction. © 2020 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 27121 - Posted: 03.16.2020

Joanna Moorhead For artist and writer Charlotte Amelia Poe, 30, every day feels like a walk across a frozen pond. “It’s how it’s always been,” she explains. “You’re trying to navigate it and stay safe, but you’re aware that at any moment the ice is likely to crack, and at that point you will sink into the water.” The worst of it is that, when she feels that way, she has no idea how she can avoid going under. “You think you’re doing fine and you’re treading carefully enough not to crack the ice. But suddenly you’ve gone under. You’ve got it completely wrong – and you’ve no idea why.” Poe is describing how it feels to be autistic. She wants the rest of us to understand, she says, because it really matters, perhaps more than it’s ever mattered (of which more later). Her mission to break open the mystery of how it feels to be autistic has already been impressively successful: last year she won the Spectrum art prize for her video piece How To Be Autistic and recently she wrote a book of the same name. Her hope is that, by opening up about her own journey through childhood, school and adolescence, she can change other people’s perceptions and expectations about what autism is like, from the inside. We are talking in the sitting room of the semi-detached house overlooking a Suffolk field that Poe shares with three generations of her family. She has never left home and doesn’t expect to; her nephews and niece are playing outside in the garden, and one day their mother, her sister, will be her carer in the way that her parents are at the moment. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 27120 - Posted: 03.16.2020

By Jane E. Brody Many people who have struggled for years with excess weight know that the hardest and often the most frustrating job is not getting it off but keeping it off. Recent decades have seen countless popular diet schemes that promised to help people shed unwanted pounds, and as each of these diets failed in the long run, they spawned their successors. A diet, after all, is something people go on to go off. Most people think of a diet as a means to an end, and few who go on a food-restricted diet to lose weight expect to have to eat that way indefinitely. And therein lies the rub, with the current unchecked epidemic of obesity as the sorry result. We live in a land of incredible excess. Rich or poor, most of us are surrounded by calorie-rich vittles, many of them tasty but deficient in ingredients that nourish healthy bodies. “We can’t go two minutes without being assaulted by a food cue,” said Suzanne Phelan, lead author of an encouraging new study in the journal Obesity. Even the most diligent dieters can find it hard to constantly resist temptation. And once people fall off the diet wagon, they often stay off, and their hard-lost pounds reappear a lot faster than it took to shed them. But these facts need not discourage anyone from achieving lasting weight loss. Researchers have identified the strategies and thought processes that have enabled many thousands of people to lose a significant amount of weight and keep it off for many years, myself among them. The new study led by Dr. Phelan, professor of kinesiology and public health at California Polytechnic State University, identified habits and strategies that can be keys to success for millions. Yes, like most sensible weight-loss plans, they involve healthful eating and regular physical activity. But they also include important self-monitoring practices and nonpunitive coping measures that can be the crucial to long-term weight management. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 27119 - Posted: 03.16.2020

A protein that normally deposits mineralized calcium in tooth enamel may also be responsible for calcium deposits in the back of the eye in people with dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD), according to a study from researchers at the National Eye Institute (NEI). This protein, amelotin, may turn out to be a therapeutic target for the blinding disease. The findings were published in the journal Translational Research. NEI is part of the National Institutes of Health. “Using a simple cell culture model of retinal pigment epithelial cells, we were able to show that amelotin gets turned on by a certain kind of stress and causes formation of a particular kind of calcium deposit also seen in bones and teeth. When we looked in human donor eyes with dry AMD, we saw the same thing,” said Graeme Wistow, Ph.D., chief of the NEI Section on Molecular Structure and Functional Genomics, and senior author of the study. There are two forms of AMD – wet and dry. While there are treatments that can slow the progression of wet AMD, there are currently no treatments for dry AMD, also called geographic atrophy. In dry AMD, deposits of cholesterol, lipids, proteins, and minerals accumulate at the back of the eye. Some of these deposits are called soft drusen and have a specific composition, different from deposits found in wet AMD. Drusen form under the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), a layer of cells that transports nutrients from the blood vessels below to support the light-sensing photoreceptors of the retina above them. As the drusen develop, the RPE and eventually the photoreceptors die, leading to blindness. The photoreceptors cannot grow back, so the blindness is permanent.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 27118 - Posted: 03.14.2020

By Judson A. Brewer, M.D. Anxiety is a strange beast. As a psychiatrist, I have learned that anxiety and its close cousin, panic, are both born from fear. As a behavioral neuroscientist, I know that fear’s main evolutionary function is helping us survive. In fact, fear is the oldest survival mechanism we have. Fear helps us learn to avoid dangerous situations in the future through a process called negative reinforcement. For example, if we step out into a busy street, turn our head and see a car coming right at us, we instinctively jump back onto the safety of the sidewalk. Evolution made this really simple for us. So simple that we only need three elements in situations like this to learn: an environmental cue, a behavior and a result. In this case, walking up to a busy street cues us to look both ways before crossing. The result of not getting killed helps us remember to repeat the action again in the future. Sometime in the last million years, humans evolved a new layer on top of our more primitive survival brain, called the prefrontal cortex. Involved in creativity and planning, the prefrontal cortex helps us think and plan for the future. It predicts what will happen in the future based on past experience. If information is lacking, our prefrontal cortex lays out different scenarios about what might happen, and guesses which will be most likely. It does this by running simulations based on previous events that are most similar. Defined as “a feeling of worry, nervousness or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome,” anxiety comes up when our prefrontal cortexes don’t have enough information to accurately predict the future. We see this right now with coronavirus. Without accurate information, it is easy for our brains to spin stories of fear and dread. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 27117 - Posted: 03.14.2020