By Knvul Sheikh On Sálvora Island, off the coast of Spain, thousands of yellow-legged gulls dot the grassy cliffs from April to late July. It is a riot of white wings and plaintive calls. Occasionally, the chorus changes as the seabirds engage in courtship and chick-feeding. And when the adults notice a predator, such as a dusky-coated mink, the chorus shifts again, to a characteristic alarm call — ha-ha-ha. These acoustic cues reach not just young and adult gulls but unhatched embryos, too. In 2018, researchers found that when gull eggs hatch, the ones that were exposed to alarm calls were able to crouch and hide from predators a couple of seconds faster than others. A few other bird species, including quails, fairywrens and zebra finches, are known to relay similar cues about the environment to their unhatched young, to prepare hatchlings to fend for themselves. But embryos aren’t receiving wisdom only from their parents. A new study, published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, suggests that they’re also receiving cues from nearby unhatched siblings. “Paying attention to cues from the outside is important for survival,” said Jose C. Noguera, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Vigo in Spain, who led the study. Embryos that do so develop traits that provide an advantage in avoiding predators, identifying other species of birds or building their own nests in warmer temperatures later in life, he said. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Communication; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26442 - Posted: 07.23.2019

By Lauren Aguirre, STAT Scientists who study Alzheimer’s disease have mostly ignored the role of seizures, but that is beginning to change, and new research suggests they may provide insight into the progression of the disease and pave the way for treatments. It’s no surprise to neurologists that some people experience convulsive seizures in the later stages of the disease. In fact, the second patient ever to receive an Alzheimer’s diagnosis more than a century ago suffered from them. But because brain damage can cause seizures, they were long thought to be just one more casualty of a deteriorating brain. Now evidence is accumulating that such abnormal electrical activity is far more common and occurs much earlier—and perhaps even precedes obvious signs of memory loss. This raises the possibility that seizures may be intimately tied up with the progression of the disease. New research that lends credence to this hypothesis was shared at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Los Angeles this week. One study looked at 55 patients between the ages of 50 and 69 who were admitted to an Israeli medical center with their first known seizure. A quarter of them went on to develop dementia—with a mean time to the diagnosis of eight and a half years. Another study of nearly 300,000 U.S. veterans over the age of 55 found that seizures were associated with twice the risk for developing dementia between one and nine years later. © 2019 Scientific American,

Keyword: Alzheimers; Epilepsy
Link ID: 26441 - Posted: 07.23.2019

Ed Yong On July 22, 2009, the neuroscientist Henry Markram walked onstage at the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, England, and told the audience that he was going to simulate the human brain, in all its staggering complexity, in a computer. His goals were lofty: “It’s perhaps to understand perception, to understand reality, and perhaps to even also understand physical reality.” His timeline was ambitious: “We can do it within 10 years, and if we do succeed, we will send to TED, in 10 years, a hologram to talk to you.” If the galaxy-brain meme had existed then, it would have been a great time to invoke it. It’s been exactly 10 years. He did not succeed. One could argue that the nature of pioneers is to reach far and talk big, and that it’s churlish to single out any one failed prediction when science is so full of them. (Science writers joke that breakthrough medicines and technologies always seem five to 10 years away, on a rolling window.) But Markram’s claims are worth revisiting for two reasons. First, the stakes were huge: In 2013, the European Commission awarded his initiative—the Human Brain Project (HBP)—a staggering 1 billion euro grant (worth about $1.42 billion at the time). Second, the HBP’s efforts, and the intense backlash to them, exposed important divides in how neuroscientists think about the brain and how it should be studied. Markram’s goal wasn’t to create a simplified version of the brain, but a gloriously complex facsimile, down to the constituent neurons, the electrical activity coursing along them, and even the genes turning on and off within them. From the outset, the criticism to this approach was very widespread, and to many other neuroscientists, its bottom-up strategy seemed implausible to the point of absurdity.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 26440 - Posted: 07.23.2019

Tina Hesman Saey A friendly gut bacterium can help lessen ALS symptoms, a study of mice suggests. Mice that develop a degenerative nerve disease similar to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, fared better when bacteria making vitamin B3 were living in their intestines, researchers report July 22 in Nature. Those results suggest that gut microbes may make molecules that can slow progression of the deadly disease. The researchers uncovered clues that the mouse results may also be important for people with ALS. But the results are too preliminary to inform any changes in treating the disease, which at any given time affects about two out of every 100,000 people, or about 16,000 people in the United States, says Eran Elinav, a microbiome researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. “With respect to ALS, the jury is still out,” says Elinav, also of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. “We have to prove that what we found in mice is reproducibly found in humans.” Elinav and his colleagues examined the gut microbiomes — bacteria, archaea and other microbes that live in the colon, or large intestine — of mice that produce large amounts of a mutated form of the SOD1 protein. In the mice, as in human ALS patients, faulty SOD1 proteins clump together and lead to the death of nerve cells. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 26439 - Posted: 07.23.2019

Mariam Alexander It might come as quite a surprise to learn that, as a psychiatrist, if I ever had the misfortune to develop severe depression, my treatment of choice would be electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Why? Well, to put it simply, ECT is the most rapid treatment for severe depression that we currently have to offer – with a recent study in the BMJ highlighting its effectiveness. For the uninitiated, ECT is a medical procedure in which an anaesthetised patient has a small electrical current applied to their scalp in order to induce a seizure for the purposes of treating severe mental illnesses and occasionally neurological disorders too. Each treatment takes just a few minutes and is usually administered two or three times a week. ECT course length varies depending on the needs of the patient, but on average eight to 12 treatments are given. It’s almost impossible to discuss ECT without the word “barbaric” being used. For anyone who is familiar with the psychiatric era of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, this is understandable. But things have moved on a great deal since then. Indeed, if you’re looking for a “b” word to describe the process of contemporary ECT, top of my list would be “boring” – the use of a general anaesthetic and muscle relaxant means there’s probably more drama involved in having a filling than ECT. That’s not to say ECT isn’t a significant intervention, but treatments should always be considered in relation to the condition that needs to be managed. Most people would be totally opposed to the idea of a surgeon amputating their leg. However, if there was an infection rapidly rising from their foot and an amputation was the best option to save their life, I suspect most people would then see it as a necessity. Context is key. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 26438 - Posted: 07.23.2019

Kelly Crowe · CBC News Scientists are slowly chipping away at one of the most mysterious aspects of weight loss: why does the lost weight often seem to come back? It's now clear that it's not simply a matter of willpower. "We know people are good at losing weight with diet and exercise," said Gregory Steinberg, Canada Research Chair in Metabolism and Obesity at McMaster University. "It's not that people just give up." The problem is rooted in the body's physiology. After people lose weight, their bodies' energy use also changes by burning fewer calories. "Quickly you hit a plateau at five to 10 per cent weight loss and you can't lose more weight than that because your metabolism slows down too much," said Steinberg. "This explains why relapse weight gain is so high." But why the body's calorie-burning capacity drops has so far not been explained. "No one knows why," said Steinberg. There are theories that something is putting the brakes on the body's ability to turn up its fat-burning machinery. And last week, a new paper published in Cell Reports, describes one possible system. At New York University, Ann Marie Schmidt is studying a receptor on fat cells that appears to interfere with weight loss. When she created a mouse model without any of those receptors the mice didn't get fat even though they ate more food. "When you delete [the receptor] it completely resets their metabolic program so that they are resistant to the diet-induced obesity," said Schmidt. "It's totally unexpected and it has so many implications for human health." Although scientists have identified the receptor — called RAGE — in humans, so far most of the research has been done in mice. ©2019 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 26437 - Posted: 07.23.2019

Selena Simmons-Duffin Good news came out from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wednesday: Preliminary data shows reported drug overdoses declined 4.2% in 2018, after rising precipitously for decades. "It looks like this is the first turnaround since the opioid crisis began," says Bertha Madras who served on President Trump's opioid commission, and is a professor of psychobiology at Harvard Medical School. She says it won't be entirely clear until the CDC finalizes the numbers but, "I think the tide could be turning." But not everyone was celebrating. Some states actually saw double-digit increases. "It's deflating," Rachel Winograd says. She's an associate research professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. "It's incredibly discouraging to see the increase in Missouri in 2018 that happened at the same time as we really ramped up so many efforts to save lives and improve lives in our state." The provisional data shows Missouri deaths increased by 17% — one of 18 states that saw a year-over-year increase. Over the last several years, Missouri has received $65 million in federal grants to address the opioid crisis, Winograd says, and she has helped the state decide where and how to spend that money. They've focused on expanding access to medication-assisted treatment, and "saturating our communities with naloxone — the opiate overdose antidote," she says. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26436 - Posted: 07.20.2019

By Jan Hoffman, Katie Thomas and Danny Hakim The Walgreens employee was bewildered by the quantity of opioids the company was shipping to just one store. Its pharmacy in Port Richey, Fla. (population 2,831) was ordering 3,271 bottles of oxycodone a month. “I don’t know how they can even house this many bottles to be honest,” Barbara Martin, whose job was to review suspicious drug orders, wrote to a colleague in a January 2011 email. The next month, the company shipped another outsized order to the same store. The email was among thousands of documents from corporations across the pharmaceutical and retail industries — internal memos, depositions, sales and shipping reports, experts’ analyses, and other confidential information — filed Friday in federal court in Cleveland by lawyers for cities, towns and counties devastated by addiction. They lay out a detailed case of how diverse corporate interests — far beyond the familiar players like Purdue Pharma — fed a deadly opioid epidemic that persisted for nearly two decades. From the team at NYT Parenting: Get the latest news and guidance for parents. We'll celebrate the little parenting moments that mean a lot — and share stories that matter to families. Little-known manufacturers of generic pills, superstores like Walmart and chain retailers like Rite Aid also flooded the country with billions of pills, according to the filings. The devastation was so extreme that one Ohio county resorted to a mobile morgue to handle all the corpses of people who died from overdoses. As the epidemic crested, the suppliers with the greatest sales were not the branded manufacturers but those who made generic prescription drugs. Between 2003 and 2011, lawyers for the plaintiffs said in one filing, Mallinckrodt, the Ireland-based manufacturer of generic and branded drugs, sold 53 million orders of opioids. Yet the company stopped and then reported to federal authorities at most 33 orders as suspicious, a ratio the lawyers described as defying credibility. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26435 - Posted: 07.20.2019

Scientists say they may have discovered why more women than men have Alzheimer's disease and dementia. It has always been thought that women living longer than men was the reason. But new research presented at an international conference suggests this may not be the whole story. Differences in brain connectivity and sex-specific genes linked to risk could explain the numbers, the researchers say. Most people living with Alzheimer's - the most common cause of dementia - are women. In the UK, about 500,000 women have dementia, compared with 350,000 men. Most people who develop the disease are over the age of 65 but it is not a normal part of ageing. Alzheimer's disease can affect younger people too. Researchers from Vanderbilt University Medical Centre studied brain scans of hundreds of men and women, looking at the pattern of a protein called tau. One of the characteristic features of Alzheimer's is the build-up of proteins called tau and amyloid in the brain. When they form toxic, tangled clumps, this causes brain cells to die, leading to memory problems. The researchers found differences between the sexes in how tau was spread across regions of the brain. Women appeared to have better connectivity between the regions where tau protein builds up - and this had implications for the brain, the study said. With this higher connectivity, women's brains may be at risk of faster spread of tau - and of cognitive decline. Dr Jana Voigt, head of research at Alzheimer's Research UK, said the study revealed "sex-specific differences in brain connectivity that could contribute to differing Alzheimer's risk in men and women". © 2019 BBC.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 26434 - Posted: 07.20.2019

By Carl Zimmer In a laboratory at the Stanford University School of Medicine, the mice are seeing things. And it’s not because they’ve been given drugs. With new laser technology, scientists have triggered specific hallucinations in mice by switching on a few neurons with beams of light. The researchers reported the results on Thursday in the journal Science. The technique promises to provide clues to how the billions of neurons in the brain make sense of the environment. Eventually the research also may lead to new treatments for psychological disorders, including uncontrollable hallucinations. “This is spectacular — this is the dream,” said Lindsey Glickfeld, a neuroscientist at Duke University, who was not involved in the new study. In the early 2000s, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Stanford, and other scientists engineered neurons in the brains of living mouse mice to switch on when exposed to a flash of light. The technique is known as optogenetics. In the first wave of these experiments, researchers used light to learn how various types of neurons worked. But Dr. Deisseroth wanted to be able to pick out any individual cell in the brain and turn it on and off with light. So he and his colleagues designed a new device: Instead of just bathing a mouse’s brain in light, it allowed the researchers to deliver tiny beams of red light that could strike dozens of individual brain neurons at once. To try out this new system, Dr. Deisseroth and his colleagues focused on the brain’s perception of the visual world. When light enters the eyes — of a mouse or a human — it triggers nerve endings in the retina that send electrical impulses to the rear of the brain. There, in a region called the visual cortex, neurons quickly detect edges and other patterns, which the brain then assembles into a picture of reality. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 26433 - Posted: 07.19.2019

By Andrew Curry ZURICH, SWITZERLAND—The children living in SOS Children's Villages orphanages in Pakistan have had a rough start in life. Many have lost their fathers, which in conservative Pakistani society can effectively mean losing their mothers, too: Destitute widows often struggle to find enough work to support their families and may have to give up their children. The orphanages, in Multan, Lahore, and Islamabad, provide shelter and health care and send kids to local schools, trying to provide "the best possible support," says University of Zurich (UZH) physician and neuroscientist Ali Jawaid. "But despite that, these children experience symptoms similar to PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]," including anxiety and depression. Beyond these psychological burdens, Jawaid wonders about a potential hidden consequence of the children's experience. He has set up a study with the orphanages to probe the disturbing possibility that the emotional trauma of separation from their parents also triggers subtle biological alterations—changes so lasting that the children might even pass them to their own offspring. That idea would have been laughed at 20 years ago. But today the hypothesis that an individual's experience might alter the cells and behavior of their children and grandchildren has become widely accepted. In animals, exposure to stress, cold, or high-fat diets has been shown to trigger metabolic changes in later generations. And small studies in humans exposed to traumatic conditions—among them the children of Holocaust survivors—suggest subtle biological and health changes in their children. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Epigenetics; Stress
Link ID: 26432 - Posted: 07.19.2019

Sara Reardon Nearly every scientist who has used mice or rats to study depression is familiar with the forced-swim test. The animal is dropped into a tank of water while researchers watch to see how long it tries to stay afloat. In theory, a depressed rodent will give up more quickly than a happy one — an assumption that has guided decades of research on antidepressants and genetic modifications intended to induce depression in lab mice. But mental-health researchers have become increasingly sceptical in recent years about whether the forced-swim test is a good model for depression in people. It is not clear whether mice stop swimming because they are despondent or because they have learnt that a lab technician will scoop them out of the tank when they stop moving. Factors such as water temperature also seem to affect the results. “We don’t know what depression looks like in a mouse,” says Eric Nestler, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Now, the animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is jumping into the fray. The group wants the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland, to stop supporting the use of the forced-swim test and similar behavioural assessments by its employees and grant recipients. The tests “create intense fear, anxiety, terror, and depression in small animals” without providing useful data, PETA said in a letter to the agency on 12 July. © 2019 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Keyword: Depression; Animal Rights
Link ID: 26431 - Posted: 07.19.2019

Jon Hamilton Researchers are prescribing exercise as if it were a drug in a study that aims to see if it can prevent Alzheimer's disease. "We are testing if exercise is medicine for people with a mild memory problem," says Laura Baker, principal investigator of the nationwide EXERT study and associate director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Wake Forest School of Medicine. The study, funded by the National Institute on Aging, could help determine whether exercise can protect people from the memory and thinking problems associated with Alzheimer's. "The evidence in science has been building for the last 20 years to suggest that exercise at the right intensity could protect brain health as we age," Baker says. But much of that evidence has come from studies that were small, ran for only a few months or relied on people's own estimates of how much they exercised. The EXERT study is different. It's taking 300 people at high risk for Alzheimer's and randomly assigning them to one of two groups for 18 months. Half the participants do aerobic exercise, like running on a treadmill. The other half do stretching and flexibility exercises for comparison. By subscribing, you agree to NPR's terms of use and privacy policy. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26430 - Posted: 07.19.2019

By Diana Kwon Your brain is a bit like a concert hall. To drive our cognitive processes, several groups of neurons need to become active—and, like the various sections of an orchestra, work in harmony to produce the symphony of computations that allow us to perceive and interact with our surroundings. As with an orchestra, the brain likely requires a conductor to keep all its active parts in sync. There are neuroscientists who think that gamma rhythms, fast brain waves that fluctuate at a frequency of approximately 40 cycles per second, play this role. By ticking at regular intervals, these oscillations are thought to act like a clock that coordinates information transfer from one group of neurons to another. There is ample evidence suggesting that gamma waves are important for the brain's computations: decades of studies in humans and other animals have found these patterns in many parts of brain and have associated them with a range of cognitive processes, such as attention and the mental scratchpad of working memory. Some studies have even linked disturbances in these oscillations to various neurological diseases, including schizophrenia and Alzheimer's. But a consensus does not exist. Some neuroscientists think that these gamma waves may not do much at all. Rather than a relevant physiological signal, one camp believes that these rhythms are simply “an exhaust fume of computation,” says Chris Moore, a neuroscientist at the Carney Institute for Brain Science at Brown University. In the same way your car releases emissions each time you drive it—the gamma signal could be perfectly correlated with brain activity, but not provide any meaningful contribution to the actual function of the car, he explains. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Attention
Link ID: 26429 - Posted: 07.19.2019

By Virginia Morell A bold claim about gorilla societies is drawing mixed reviews. Great apes, humans’ closest evolutionary relatives, were thought to lack our social complexity. Chimpanzees, for example, form only small bands that are aggressive toward strangers. But based on years of watching gorillas gather in food-rich forest clearings, a team of scientists has concluded the apes have hierarchical societies similar to those of humans, perhaps to help them exploit rich troves of food. The finding, reported in the current issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, challenges the prevailing notion that such sophisticated societies evolved relatively recently, after humans split from chimpanzees. Instead, these researchers say, the origins of such social systems extend at least as far back as the common ancestor of humans and gorillas, but were lost in chimpanzees. The group has presented “a pretty convincing case for a hierarchical social structure in gorillas,” says Richard Connor, a cetacean biologist and expert on dolphin society at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth. But because other primates that are not great apes—notably baboons, geladas, and colobine monkeys—show similar hierarchies, he’s not surprised they have turned up in gorillas, too. Gorillas spend most of their time in dense forests, travel great distances to a new home spot daily, and are slow to get used to observers, making their social lives hard to study. But western gorillas in the Republic of Congo gather periodically at swampy clearings in the forests to feed primarily on the highly abundant vegetation, but also on favorite and rare foods such as certain fig trees that produce massive amounts of fruit only every 3 to 5 years, says Robin Morrison, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and the study’s lead author. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 26428 - Posted: 07.18.2019

By Tanya Lewis Late on Tuesday evening, Elon Musk, the charismatic and eccentric CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, took to the stage at the California Academy of Sciences to make a big announcement. This time, he was not unveiling a new rocket or electric car but a system for recording the activity of thousands of neurons in the brain. With typical panache, Musk talked about putting this technology into a human brain by as early as next year. The work is the product of Neuralink, a company Musk founded in 2016 to develop a high-bandwidth, implantable brain-computer interface (BCI). He says the initial goal is to enable people with quadriplegia to control a computer or smartphone using just their thoughts. But Musk’s vision is much more ambitious than that: he seeks to enable humans to “merge” with AI, giving people superhuman intelligence—an objective that is much more hype than an actual plan for new technology development. Neuralink prototype device. Credit: Neuralink On a more practical note, “the goal is to record from and stimulate [signals called] spikes in neurons” with an order of magnitude more bandwidth than what has been done to date and to have it be safe, Musk said at Tuesday’s event, which was livestreamed. Advertisement The system unveiled last night was a long way from Musk’s sci-fi vision. But it was nonetheless marked an impressive technical development. The team says it has now developed arrays with a very large number of “channels”—up to 3,072 flexible electrodes—which can be implanted in the brain’s outer layer, or cortex, using a surgical robot (a version of which was described as a “sewing machine” in a preprint paper posted on bioRxiv earlier this year). The electrodes are packaged in a small, implantable device containing custom-built integrated circuits, which connects to a USB port outside the brain (the team hopes to ultimately make the port wireless). © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging; Regeneration
Link ID: 26427 - Posted: 07.18.2019

By Brian X. Chen For the last two weeks, I’ve added an extra step to my bedtime routine: strapping a computer around my wrist. The new nightly move was prompted by a cascade of wearable gadgets from companies like Fitbit and Apple, which claim that their sensor-laden bracelets and watches can improve our lives by helping us detect health problems so that we can come up with solutions. For many years, fitness gadgets have measured basic data, like footsteps or calories burned, to motivate us to stay active or shed pounds. Sleep tracking is still a nascent area that tech companies are experimenting with — one that I’ve watched with interest as someone who has been sleep deprived for many years. In the past, I’ve tried several gadgets with sleep tech, including Fitbit watches and Bose’s sleep-aid earbuds. But I hadn’t consistently tracked my sleep habits and patterns before. Would it really make a difference, I wondered, to have this data? Would it help me to sleep better? I decided to test it out. I wore an Apple Watch, since it is one of the most popular health-tracking devices. I also downloaded a top-rated app called AutoSleep, which uses the Apple Watch’s sensors to follow my movements and determine when I fell asleep and woke up. (The Apple Watch lacks a built-in sleep tracker.) Here’s what AutoSleep gathered on my sleep habits. But the excitement ended there. Ultimately, the technology did not help me sleep more. It didn’t reveal anything that I didn’t already know, which is that I average about five and a half hours of slumber a night. And the data did not help me answer what I should do about my particular sleep problems. In fact, I’ve felt grumpier since I started these tests. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26426 - Posted: 07.18.2019

Shuai Xu, Arun Jayaraman and John A. Rogers. Thin, soft electronic systems that stick onto skin are beginning to transform health care. Millions of early versions1 of sensors, computers and transmitters woven into flexible films, patches, bandages or tattoos are being deployed in dozens of trials in neurology applications alone2; and their numbers growing rapidly. Within a decade, many people will wear such sensors all the time. The data they collect will be fed into machine-learning algorithms to monitor vital signs, spot abnormalities and track treatments. Medical problems will be revealed earlier. Doctors will monitor their patients’ recovery remotely while the patient is at home, and intervene if their condition deteriorates. Epidemic spikes will be flagged quickly, allowing authorities to mobilize resources, identify vulnerable populations and monitor the safety and efficacy of drugs issued. All of this will make health care more predictive, safe and efficient. Where are we now? The first generation of biointegrated sensors can track biophysical signals, such as cardiac rhythms, breathing, temperature and motion3. More advanced systems are emerging that can track certain biomarkers (such as glucose) as well as actions such as swallowing and speech. Small companies are commercializing soft biosensor systems that measure clinical data continuously. These include Vital Connect in San Jose, California; iRhythm in San Francisco, California; MC10 in Lexington, Massachusetts; and Sibel Health in Evanston, Illinois. For example, iRhythm’s single-use Zio patch monitors electrical pulses from the heart for 14 days, and is more effective than intermittent hospital check-ups at detecting abnormal rhythms4. But it is bulky and temporary, and the data must be downloaded after use, rather than transmitted in real time.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Robotics
Link ID: 26425 - Posted: 07.18.2019

By Jessica Hamzelou Anorexia nervosa isn’t just a psychiatric condition – it is a metabolic one, too, according to a genetic study of around 72,500 people. The findings help to explain some of the symptoms of anorexia, and could help to shape future treatments. Anorexia affects between 0.9 and 4 per cent of women and 0.3 per cent of men, but is still poorly understood. “Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder,” says Cynthia Bulik at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “We’re not very good at treating anorexia. There’s no medication, and that’s probably because we don’t understand the underlying causes.” Previous research has found that genetic factors, as well as environmental ones, can increase a person’s risk of anorexia. To investigate, Bulik and her colleagues compared the genomes of just under 17,000 people with anorexia with those of 55,500 people who didn’t have the condition. The team used a technique that applies thousands of markers to the genome, and compares these markers across all the volunteers. “It points you to where in the genome the differences lie,” says Bulik. The search pinpointed eight locations across the genome that seem to play a role in anorexia. But this is likely to represent only a tiny fraction of all the genetic factors involved in the condition, says Bulik. “It’s a complex trait, so we expect lots of genes to each have a small to moderate effect,” she says. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 26424 - Posted: 07.16.2019

Nicola Davis The belief that men are more likely to get turned on by sexual images than women may be something of a fantasy, according to a study suggesting brains respond to such images the same way regardless of biological sex. The idea that, when it comes to sex, men are more “visual creatures” than women has often been used to explain why men appear to be so much keener on pornography. But the study casts doubt on the notion. “We are challenging that idea with this paper,” said Hamid Noori, co-author of the research from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany. “At least at the level of neural activity … the brains of men and women respond the same way to porn.” Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Noori and his colleagues report how they came to their conclusions by analysing the results of 61 published studies involving adults of different biological sex and sexual orientation. The subjects were shown everyday images of people as well as erotic images while they lay inside a brain-scanning machine. Noori said all participants rated the sexual images as arousing before being scanned. Previously studies based on self-reporting have suggested men are more aroused by images than women, and it has been proposed that these differences could be down to the way the brain processes the stimuli – but studies have returned different results. Now, looking at the whole body of research, Noori and his colleagues say they have found little sign of functional differences. For both biological sexes, a change in activity was seen in the same brain regions including the amygdala, insula and striatum when sexual images were shown. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 26423 - Posted: 07.16.2019