By Debbie Jackson BBC Scotland "Fluffing your son's hair, really hugging him, holding his hand." For someone who has been through what she has in the space of a year, Corinne Hutton doesn't need much to make her happy. Last January she got the double hand transplant she had been waiting more than five years for, and feared would never happen. This January, she will celebrate her "handiversary", a year since a surgeon handed her back her independence. Being able to do the simplest things for 11-year-old son Rory means the world to Finding Your Feet charity founder Cor. "From an emotional point of view to be able to do things for him - make the packed lunches or the washing, or do the ironing is great," she said. "But on top of that, being able to hold his hand, fluff his hair, little things that might not be hugely exciting to him - but they matter a lot to me. "People don't appreciate what it means to have lost them," she said. Cor became the first Scot to undergo a double hand transplant when, in a 12-hour procedure, Prof Simon Kay attached two donor hands to her arms at Leeds general Infirmary. The 48-year-old lost her hands and feet in 2013 after suffering acute pneumonia and sepsis, which almost killed her. After more than a dozen false alarms over the years, a match for her own blood group, skin tone and hand size had been found. Much celebration and wonder was made of the news that the transplant had finally happened, but the aftermath was far from easy. © 2019 BBC.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26922 - Posted: 12.30.2019

By Sarah Bate Alice is six years old. She struggles to make friends at school and often sits alone in the playground. She loses her parents in the supermarket and approaches strangers at pickup. Once she became separated from her family on a trip to the zoo, and she now has an intense fear of crowded places. Alice has a condition called face blindness, also known as prosopagnosia. This difficulty in recognising facial identity affects 2 percent of the population. Like Alice, most of these people are born with the condition, although a small number acquire face-recognition difficulties after brain injury or illness. Unfortunately, face blindness seems largely resilient to improvement. Yet a very recent study offers more promising findings: children’s face-recognition skills substantially improved after they played a modified version of the game Guess Who?over a two-week period. In the traditional version of Guess Who?, two players see an array of 24 cartoon faces, and each selects a target. Both then take turns asking yes/no questions about the appearance of their opponent’s chosen face, typically inquiring about eye color, hairstyle and accessories such as hats or spectacles. The players use the answers to eliminate faces in the array; when only one remains, they can guess the identity of their opponent’s character. The experimental version of the game preserved this basic setup but used lifelike faces that differed only in the size or spacing of the eyes, nose or mouth. That is, the hairstyle and outer face shape were identical, and children had to read the faces solely on the basis of small differences between the inner features. This manipulation is thought to reflect a key processing strategy that underlies human face recognition: the ability to account not only for the size and shape of features but also the spacing between them. Evidence suggests this ability to process faces “holistically” is impaired in face blindness. The Guess Who? training program aimed to capitalize on this link. Children progressed through 10 levels of the game, with differences between the inner features becoming progressively less obvious. Children played for half an hour per day on any 10 days over a two-week period, advancing to the next level when they won the game on two consecutive rounds. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 26921 - Posted: 12.27.2019

By Christie Aschwanden When she was 24, Susannah Cahalan developed a sudden psychosis. She grew paranoid — convinced her apartment was infested with bedbugs, that people were spying on her, that her boyfriend was cheating. She started to believe she could age people with her mind. As she recounted in her 2013 bestseller, “Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness,” she received several misdiagnoses (bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder) before an alert doctor discovered the true culprit: autoimmune encephalitis. The moment her illness was deemed neurological, ”as in physical, in the body, real,” rather than psychiatric, “in the mind and therefore somehow less real,” the quality of her care drastically improved, Cahalan writes in her new book, “The Great Pretender.” Sympathy and understanding replaced the detached attitude that had defined her treatment as a mental patient, “as if a mental illness were my fault, whereas a physical illness was something unearned, something ‘real,’” she writes. Cahalan, a journalist, recovered from her brief psychosis, but the distinction between physical and mental illness continued to perplex her. “What does mental illness mean, anyway, and why would one affliction be more ‘real’ than another?” she asks. These questions form the backbone of “The Great Pretender.” The book centers on the work of David Rosenhan, a Stanford psychologist whose paper, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” was an instant sensation when it was published in the journal Science in 1973. The paper begins with a question: “If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?”

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 26920 - Posted: 12.27.2019

Getting a Good Night’s Sleep Without Drugs By Jane E. Brody As many as 20 percent to 30 percent of people in the general population sleep poorly. They may have difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, some awaken much too early, while others do not feel rested despite spending a full night seemingly asleep in bed. For one person in 10, insomnia is a chronic problem that repeats itself night after night. Little wonder that so many resort to sleeping pills to cope with it. But experts report that there are better, safer and more long-lasting alternatives than prescription drugs to treat this common problem. The alternatives are especially valuable for older people who metabolize drugs more slowly, are more likely to have treatable underlying causes of their insomnia and are more susceptible to adverse side effects of medications. Is Your Sleep Cycle Out of Sync? It May Be Genetic By Jane E. Brody Early to bed, early to rise — a fine plan for a dairy farmer who has to get up long before dawn to milk the cows. But if you’re someone who works all day with stocks and clients and may want to enjoy an evening out now and then, it would be better not to be getting up at 2 a.m. and have to struggle to stay awake through dinner or a show. Such is the challenge faced by a friend who has what sleep specialists call an advanced sleep phase. Her biological sleep-wake cycle, or circadian rhythm, is out of sync with the demands of the modern world. Read more>>> By Perri Klass, M.D. The biology of adolescent sleep reflects a natural and normal delay in melatonin secretion that leads to a later sleep onset time, which unfortunately coincides with early high school start times, creating a high-stress set up. Pediatricians often see adolescents with insomnia, who have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, waking up too early or finding sleep not restful or refreshing. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26919 - Posted: 12.27.2019

Alejandra Manjarrez When he was a postdoc at KU Leuven in Belgium, Daniel Vigo helped analyze results from an experiment that simulated a spaceflight to Mars. Six crew members were secluded in an artificially lit, spacecraft-like facility for 520 days starting in June 2010. Part of an international project known as the Mars500 mission, the experiment aimed to assess the psychological, social, and biological effects of prolonged confinement and isolation, along with the absence of normal day and night rhythms. That isolation, of course, was just an illusion, manufactured by the Institute for Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the European Space Agency. The simulation took place in central Moscow, where any sudden medical problems could have received immediate attention—as Vigo, now a researcher at the Catholic University of Argentina and a member of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), tells The Scientist in Spanish. He began wondering what would happen in a less artificial scenario. One of the key findings from the study, for example, was that confinement—in this case in an artificially lit building—disrupted normal sleep patterns: the crew members in the Mars500 experiment had suffered from sleep problems and rapidly fell into sleep-wake routines that were out of sync with one another. But what would the story be like for people experiencing a similarly extreme living environment, Vigo wondered, without the safety net provided by a carefully controlled simulation? © 1986–2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Sleep; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 26918 - Posted: 12.27.2019

By Nicholas Bakalar The right diet might help you sleep better. In a study of 77,860 postmenopausal women, researchers found that consuming foods that had a low glycemic index is associated with a reduced risk for insomnia. Foods with low glycemic indexes — for example, vegetables, nuts and whole grain breads — have carbohydrates that are slowly absorbed and cause lower, and slower, rises in blood glucose and insulin levels after being consumed. For this study, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, participants completed lengthy questionnaires about what foods they ate and how often. They also reported their degree of insomnia at the start of the study and after three years of follow-up. Compared with the one-fifth of participants whose diet had the lowest glycemic index, those with the highest were 11 percent more likely to have insomnia. Some low-glycemic index foods — whole grains and dairy foods, for example — were not associated with reduced insomnia. But people who ate the most fruits and vegetables were about 14 percent less likely to have insomnia, and the largest consumers of fiber were 13 percent less likely. In contrast, women who ate the most refined grains had a 16 percent higher risk of insomnia than those who ate the least. Although the study controlled for many health and behavioral characteristics, the study showed only an association and could not prove cause and effect. “Randomized controlled trials examining dietary patterns in relation to insomnia are needed to clarify these findings,” the authors write. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Obesity
Link ID: 26917 - Posted: 12.27.2019

By Eva Frederick One day in 2014, primatologist Yuko Hattori was trying to teach a mother chimpanzee in her lab to keep a beat. Hattori would play a repetitive piano note, and the chimp would attempt to tap out the rhythm on a small electronic keyboard in hopes of receiving a tasty piece of apple. Everything went as expected in the experiment room, but in the next room over, something strange was happening. Another chimpanzee, the mother’s son, heard the beat and began to sway his body back and forth, almost as if he were dancing. “I was shocked,” Hattori says. “I was not aware that without any training or reward, a chimpanzee would spontaneously engage with the sound.” Hattori has now published her research showing that chimps respond to sounds, both rhythmic and random, by “dancing.” “This study is very thought-provoking,” says Andrea Ravignani, a cognitive biologist at the Seal Rehabilitation and Research Centre who researches the evolution of rhythm, speech, and music. The work, she says, could shed light on the evolution of dancing in humans. For their the study, Hattori and her colleague Masaki Tomonaga at Kyoto University played 2-minute clips of evenly spaced, repetitive piano tones (heard in the video above) to seven chimpanzees (three males and four females). On hearing the sound, the chimps started to groove, swaying back and forth and sometimes tapping their fingers or their feet to the beat or making howling “singing” sounds, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. All of the chimps showed at least a little bit of rhythmic movement, though the males spent much more time moving to the music than females. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution; Hearing
Link ID: 26916 - Posted: 12.26.2019

Stephanie O'Neill For many Americans, hallucinogens still evoke the psychedelic '60s, bringing to mind the sex-and-drugs lifestyle of the hippie counterculture. But that stereotype lags behind reality, by several decades. Today, psychedelic experimentation is more likely to refer to dozens of clinical trials taking place at universities and research facilities. The psychedelics under study range from psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, to MDMA (also known as Ecstasy or Molly), to LSD, among others. Researchers are studying them for their therapeutic potential in treating hard-to-treat conditions such as PTSD, addiction, depression and anxiety. The promise of freedom from cigarettes was what compelled Carine Chen-McLaughlin, 65, to enroll in an experimental study of psilocybin therapy for smokers. She was desperate to break free from her decades-long physical addiction to nicotine. Quitting smoking had felt impossible for so long. "It's basically saying good-bye to a very old friend, and worrying about: Am I going to be OK without this good friend?'" the Baltimore resident says. Like many of the 49 million tobacco users in the U.S., Chen-McLaughlin wanted to quit and had tried various methods: nicotine gum, the nicotine patch and even stopping cold turkey. But nothing worked for more than a couple days. The clinical trial she joined took place in her hometown of Baltimore, at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. While she was a bit anxious about the experiment, Chen-McLaughlin says she was nevertheless hopeful about trying something totally different. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26915 - Posted: 12.26.2019

By Richard Sima Luke Miller, a cognitive neuroscientist, was toying with a curtain rod in his apartment when he was struck by a strange realization. When he hit an object with the rod, even without looking, he could tell where it was making contact like it was a sensory extension of his body. “That’s kind of weird,” Miller recalls thinking to himself. “So I went [to the lab], and we played around with it in the lab.” Sensing touch through tools is not a new concept, though it has not been extensively investigated. In the 17th century, philosopher René Descartes discussed the ability of blind people to sense their surroundings through their walking cane. While scientists have researched tool use extensively, they typically focused on how people move the tools. “They, for the most part, neglected the sensory aspect of tool use,” Miller says. In a 2018 Nature study, Miller and his colleagues at Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University in France reported that humans are actually quite good at pinpointing where an object comes into contact with a handheld tool using touch alone, as if the object were touching their own skin. A tool is not innervated like our skin, so how does our brain know when and where it is touched? Results in a follow-up study, published in December in Current Biology, reveal that the brain regions involved with sensing touch on the body similarly processes it on the tool. “The tool is being treated like a sensory extension of your body,” Miller says. In the initial experiment, the researchers asked 16 right-handed subjects to determine where they felt touches on a one-meter-long wooden rod. In a total of 400 trials, each subject compared the locations of two touches made on the rod: If they were felt in different locations, participants did not respond. If they were in the same location, the people in the study tapped a foot pedal to indicate whether the touches were close or far from their hand. Even without any experience with the rod or feedback on their performance, the participants were, on average, 96 percent accurate. © 2019 Scientific American,

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26914 - Posted: 12.26.2019

Nell Greenfieldboyce Shepherds in Christmas Nativity scenes that were painted, carved or sculpted hundreds of years ago sometimes have throats with large, abnormal growths. These are realistic depictions of goiter, an enlargement of the thyroid gland caused by iodine deficiency. The condition was common in those days in northern Italy, where the soil and water are depleted of iodine. "Goiter is more often seen in poor people," says retired surgeon Renzo Dionigi of the University of Insubria in Varese, Italy, who notes that the working classes in this region would historically not have a varied diet that might supply this vital nutrient. "That's why, probably, the poor shepherds are depicted with goiters," he says. He and his son, an endocrine surgeon named Gianlorenzo Dionigi, have for years enjoyed studying art and looking for signs of medical conditions. In the Sacri Monti ("Sacred Mountains") of Piedmont and Lombardy, they have visited chapels and churches created in the 16th and 17th centuries. "In all the Sacri Monti that I and my son visited, we have been able to observe representations of goiters very, very often," says the elder Dionigi. In one Nativity tableau from 1694, for example, a young horn player with a large goiter plays for the Holy Family. And in one fresco over the main door of the Aosta Cathedral, a shepherd with goiter plays his bagpipe for the newborn Jesus. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 26913 - Posted: 12.26.2019

By Douglas Martin Baba Ram Dass, who epitomized the 1960s of legend by popularizing psychedelic drugs with Timothy Leary, a fellow Harvard academic, before finding spiritual inspiration in India, died on Sunday at his home on Maui, Hawaii. He was 88. His death was announced on his official Instagram account. Having returned from India as a bushy-bearded, barefoot, white-robed guru, Ram Dass, who was born Richard Alpert, became a peripatetic lecturer on New Age possibilities and a popular author of more than a dozen inspirational books. The first of his books, “Be Here Now” (1971), sold more than two million copies and established him as an exuberant exponent of finding salvation through helping others. ImageRam Dass’s book “Be Here Now,” originally published in 1971, has had more than three dozen printings and sold more than two million copies. Ram Dass’s book “Be Here Now,” originally published in 1971, has had more than three dozen printings and sold more than two million copies. He started a foundation to combat blindness in India and Nepal, supported reforestation in Latin America, and developed health education programs for American Indians in South Dakota. He was particularly interested in the dying. He started a foundation to help people use death as a journey of spiritual awakening and spoke of establishing a self-help line, “Dial-a-Death,” for this purpose. A year later, Ram Dass suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that left him partly paralyzed, unable to speak and in a wheelchair. From his home in Maui, he learned to “surf the silence” at first, he said, but over time he painstakingly reacquired a halting form of speech and was able to lecture on the internet and make tapes. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26912 - Posted: 12.26.2019

By Nicholas Bakalar Living with a pet dog in childhood may be linked to a reduced risk of schizophrenia in adulthood. Researchers studied adult patients at Sheppard Pratt Health System in Baltimore, 396 with schizophrenia and 381 with bipolar disorder. They compared them with 594 healthy controls. The participants reported whether they had had a dog or a cat in the household when they were children and, if so, the first and most recent time they had contact with the animal. The findings appeared this month in PLOS One. More than half of the subjects had dogs, and about a third had cats before their 13th birthdays. After adjusting for other characteristics, the scientists found that exposure to a dog at any time in childhood was associated with a 24 percent reduced risk for schizophrenia. Those exposed to dogs at birth were 55 percent less likely to have schizophrenia than people who had not been exposed at all. There was no significant effect of exposure to cats, and no effect of either animal on the risk for bipolar disorder. “We don’t know the mechanism,” said the lead author, Dr. Robert H. Yolken, a professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, though he noted that the microbiome, or collection of gut bacteria, of people with schizophrenia is different from that of controls. “One possibility is that having a dog in the house causes a different microbiome and changes the likelihood of developing a psychiatric disorder,” he said. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Stress
Link ID: 26911 - Posted: 12.26.2019

By Sharon Begley @sxbegle The filmgoers didn’t flinch at the scene of the dapper man planting a time bomb in the trunk of the convertible, or tense up as the unsuspecting driver and his beautiful blonde companion drove slowly through the town teeming with pedestrians, or jump out of their seats when the bomb exploded in fiery carnage. And they sure as heck weren’t wowed by the technical artistry of this famous opening shot of Orson Welles’ 1958 noir masterpiece, “Touch of Evil,” a single three-minute take that ratchets up the suspense to 11 on a scale of 1 to 10. In fairness, lab mice aren’t cineastes. But where the rodents fell short as film critics they more than delivered as portals into the brain. As the mice watched the film clip, scientists eavesdropped on each one’s visual cortex. By the end of the study, the textbook understanding of how the brain “sees” had been as badly damaged as the “Touch of Evil” convertible, scientists reported on Monday. The new insights into the workings of the visual cortex, they said, could improve technologies as diverse as self-driving cars and brain prostheses to let the blind see. “Neuroscience lets us make better object recognition systems” for, say, self-driving cars and artificial intelligence-based diagnostics, said Joel Zylberberg of York University, an expert on machine learning and neuroscience who was not involved in the new research. “But computer vision has been hampered by an insufficient understanding of visual processing in the brain.” The “unprecedented” findings in the new study, he said, promise to change that. The textbook understanding of how the brain sees, starting with streams of photons landing on the retina, reflects research from the 1960s that won two of its pioneers a Nobel prize in medicine in 1981. It basically holds that neurons in the primary visual cortex, where the signals go first, respond to edges: vertical edges, horizontal edges, and every edge orientation in between, moving and static. We see a laptop screen because of how its edges abut what’s behind it, sidewalks because of where their edges touch the curb’s. Higher-order brain systems take these rudimentary perceptions and process them into the perception of a scene or object. © 2019 STAT

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 26910 - Posted: 12.21.2019

By Gina Kolata Not long ago, the only way to know if someone had Alzheimer’s disease was to examine the brain in an autopsy. That is changing — and fast — with brain scans and spinal taps that can detect beta amyloid, the telltale Alzheimer’s protein. There is a blood test on the horizon that can detect beta amyloid, and researchers are experimenting with scans to look for another protein, called tau, also characteristic of Alzheimer’s. As this sort of diagnostic testing becomes widespread, more people who fear their memories are slipping will face a difficult question: Would I really want to know if I were getting Alzheimer’s disease? “This is a new era, and we are just at the precipice,” said Dr. Gil Rabinovici, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco. A positive test could help you get your affairs in order and plan your future. And a drug company, Biogen, claims to have the first treatment that may slow the course of the disease if begun early enough. Health insurers are prohibited by law — for now, at least — from denying coverage if you have Alzheimer’s. But there is nothing that prevents long-term-care and life insurers from denying you. Will your friends stay with you? How about your spouse? What would it be like to live with the knowledge that you will eventually be unable to recognize your family, or even to speak? For some who have been given diagnostic tests, those questions are all too real. When Dr. Daniel Gibbs, 68, a neurologist in Portland, Ore., noticed his memory starting to slip, he wanted to know if it was Alzheimer’s. He had seen its damage all too often in his patients. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26909 - Posted: 12.21.2019

By Gina Kolata Robert D. Moir, a Harvard scientist whose radical theories of the brain plaques in Alzheimer’s defied conventional views of the disease, but whose research ultimately led to important proposals for how to treat it, died on Friday at a hospice in Milton, Mass. He was 58. His wife, Julie Alperen, said the cause was glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer. Dr. Moir, who grew up on a farm in Donnybrook, a small town in Western Australia, had a track record for confounding expectations. He did not learn to read or write until he was nearly 12; Ms. Alperen said he told her that the teacher at his one-room schoolhouse was “a demented nun.” Yet, she said, he also knew from age 7 that he wanted to be a scientist. He succeeded in becoming a researcher who was modest and careful, said his Ph.D. adviser, Dr. Colin Masters, a neuropathologist at the University of Melbourne. So Dr. Masters was surprised when Dr. Moir began publishing papers proposing an iconoclastic rethinking of the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Moir’s hypothesis “was and is a really novel and controversial idea that he alone developed,” Dr. Masters said. “I never expected this to come from this quiet achiever.” Dr. Moir’s theory involved the protein beta amyloid, which forms plaques in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Conventional wisdom held that beta amyloid accumulation was a central part of the disease, and that clearing the brain of beta amyloid would be a good thing for patients. Dr. Moir proposed instead that beta amyloid is there for a reason: It is the way the brain defends itself against infections. Beta amyloid, he said, forms a sticky web that can trap microbes. The problem is that sometimes the brain goes overboard producing it, and when that happens the brain is damaged. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26908 - Posted: 12.21.2019

By Catherine Matacic Falling in love is never easy. But do it in a foreign language, and complications pile up quickly, from your first fumbling attempts at deep expression to the inevitable quarrel to the family visit punctuated by remarks that mean so much more than you realize. Now, a study of two dozen terms related to emotion in nearly 2500 languages suggests those misunderstandings aren’t all in your head. Instead, emotional concepts like love, shame, and anger vary in meaning from culture to culture, even when we translate them into the same words. “I wish I had thought of this,” says Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Northeastern University in Boston. “It’s a very, very well-reasoned, clever approach.” People have argued about emotions since the ancient Greeks. Aristotle suggested they were essential to virtue. The stoics called them antithetical to reason. And in his “forgotten” masterpiece, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin wrote that they likely had a single origin. He thought every culture the world over shared six basic emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. Since then, psychologists have looked for traces of these emotions in scores of languages. And although one common experiment, which asks participants to identify emotions from photographs of facial expressions, has led to many claims of universality, critics say an overreliance on concepts from Western, industrialized societies dooms such attempts from the start. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions; Language
Link ID: 26907 - Posted: 12.21.2019

People with severe epilepsy will be able to access a cannabis-based medicine on the NHS from early next year after it was fast-tracked for use. NHS England said doctors would be able to prescribe Epidyolex from 6 January. It will be for children from age two, as well as adults, but some campaigners warn it is "too little too late". Clinical trials have shown the oral solution, which contains cannabidiol (CBD), could reduce the number of seizures by up to 40% in some children. The medicine will be used to treat two rare, but severe, forms of childhood epilepsy - Lennox Gastaut syndrome and Dravet syndrome - which can cause multiple seizures a day. Epilepsy Action's chief executive Philip Lee welcomed the announcement, saying it "brings much-needed hope and could be life-changing for some". However, he added that Epidyolex was not "a silver bullet" and there was more work to be done to "collect robust high-quality evidence of the effectiveness of other cannabis-based medicines". Medical cannabis campaigner Peter Carroll said it was "too little, too late" as he urged action towards making medicinal cannabis with CBD and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) available for families in need. THC is the psycho-active component of cannabis. Speaking to BBC News, he said: "What's shown to have a transforming effect for children in desperate need is a CBD medicine with a little bit of THC, but those are unlicensed in the UK at the moment." Mr Carroll added: "The law was changed in November 2018 so that specialist doctors could write a prescription for medical cannabis with the CBD and THC, even though they are unlicensed. © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26906 - Posted: 12.21.2019

By Bruce Bower Homo erectus, a humanlike species that dispersed from Africa into parts of Europe and Asia roughly 2 million years ago, eventually reached the Indonesian island of Java before dying out. Scientists say they have now resolved a controversy over just how long ago the last known H. erectus inhabited the Southeast Asian island. New evidence narrows the timing of this hominid’s final stand on Java to between 117,000 and 108,000 years ago, says a team led by geochronologists Yan Rizal of Indonesia’s Bandung Institute of Technology and Kira Westaway of Macquarie University in Sydney. The scientists present their results December 18 in Nature. If the findings hold up to scrutiny, the fossils would be the last known occurrence of H. erectus anywhere in the world, and would show that the hominid was part of a complex interplay among different Homo species in Southeast Asia that started more than 100,000 years ago. Excavations at Java’s Ngandong site from 1931 to 1933 uncovered 12 skullcaps and two lower leg bones from H. erectus. Since then, uncertainty about how Ngandong sediment layers formed and confusion about the original location of the excavated fossils has led to dramatically contrasting age estimates for the finds. A 1996 report in Science dated the Ngandong specimens to between 53,000 and 27,000 years ago, suggesting that H. erectus had lived alongside Homo sapiens in Indonesia (SN: 12/14/96). But a more recent analysis greatly increased the estimated age of the Java fossils, dating them to around 550,000 years ago (SN: 4/16/10). © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 26905 - Posted: 12.19.2019

By John Horgan Philosophy has taken a beating lately, even, or especially, from philosophers, who are compulsive critics, even, especially, of their own calling. But bright young women and men still aspire to be full-time truth-seekers in our corrupt, capitalist world. Over the past five years, I have met a bunch of impressive young philosophers while doing research on the mind-body problem. Hedda Hassel Mørch, for example. I first heard Mørch (pronounced murk) speak in 2015 at a New York University workshop on integrated information theory, and I ran into her at subsequent events at NYU and elsewhere. She makes a couple of appearances—one anonymous--in my book Mind-Body Problems. We recently crossed tracks in online chitchat about panpsychism, which proposes that consciousness is a property of all matter, not just brains. I’m a panpsychism critic, she’s a proponent. Below Mørch answers some questions.—John Horgan Horgan: Why philosophy? And especially philosophy of mind? Mørch: I remember thinking at some point that if I didn’t study philosophy I would always be curious about what philosophers know. And even if it turned out that they know nothing then at least I would know I wasn’t missing anything. Advertisement One reason I was attracted to philosophy of mind in particular was that it seemed like an area where philosophy clearly has some real and useful work to do. In other areas of philosophy, it might seem that many central questions can either be deflated or taken over by science. For example, in ethics, one might think there are no moral facts and so all we can do is figure out what we mean by the words “right” and “wrong”. And in metaphysics, questions such as “is the universe infinite” can now, at least arguably, be understood as scientific questions. But consciousness is a phenomenon which is obviously real, and the question of how it arises from the brain is clearly a substantive, not merely verbal question, which does not seem tractable by science as we know it. As David Chalmers says, science as we know it can only tackle the so-called easy problems of consciousness, not the hard problem. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26904 - Posted: 12.19.2019

By Elizabeth Pennisi Over 20 years, citizen scientists across North America tagged more than 1 million monarch butterflies as they flitted their way southward on one of nature’s more mysterious migrations. Now, scientists analyzing data from those journeys have discovered what may trigger them: the angle of the high noon Sun—which changes over time and as one moves closer to the equator. That “critical environmental factor” also seems to help monarchs time their daily travels and the end of their fall migration, says Steven Reppert, a neurobiologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester who studies monarch migrations, but was not involved with this work. As a result, adds University of California, Berkeley, evolutionary biologist Noah Whiteman, “a marvel of the natural world is a little closer to being understood.” The annual migration of monarchs (Danaus plexippus) from across the United States and eastern Canada to one small region of southwestern Mexico has long defied understanding. Ten years ago, lab and field studies showed that these butterflies have an internal clock in their antennae that helps them navigate based on the horizontal movements of the Sun. But no one knew what the trigger for their trek was—or how they paced their daily journeys. To learn more, a nonprofit organization called Monarch Watch began to distribute pinkie nail–size adhesive tags to thousands of volunteers, who put them on monarchs flying through their area and recorded the dates and locations of each tagging. From 1998 to 2015, more than 1.38 million butterflies were tagged, says Orley Taylor, an insect ecologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence who started the program in 1992. After the butterflies arrived at their destination in southwestern Mexico, volunteers there searched for the tags. Altogether, they gathered more than 13,000. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Migration; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 26903 - Posted: 12.19.2019