Katarina Zimmer Occasionally, as the nematode worm C. elegans meanders across rotten fruit on the prowl for bacteria to eat, it comes across ones it shouldn’t dine on. Some bacteria are lethal to the animals when ingested, and unfortunately, the worms can’t always distinguish them from the nutritious kind until it’s too late. Nevertheless, this doesn’t stop them from teaching their young not to make the same mistake, researchers recently realized when watching the nematodes in the lab. Before the animals die from the pathogen, they often lay eggs. These offspring, researchers at Princeton University observed, consistently avoid that particular bacterial species. Evidently, pathogen avoidance—a behavioral habit the mothers learned towards the end of their lifetime—can be transmitted to the next generation, aiding their survival. But it’s not a hard-wired trait; instead, an epigenetic mechanism involving small RNAs appears to be responsible. That’s the finding of a paper published in Cell yesterday (June 6). Alongside it in the journal, a group at Tel Aviv University also reports on transgenerational inheritance of behavior traits in C. elegans. This team took a different approach, demonstrating how a small RNA–based mechanism allows information from the nervous system to be transmitted to germline cells and into future generations. While it’s known that traits involved in immunity and stress can be inherited across generations in C. elegans, the two papers are among the first to show that complex behaviors can be transmitted in the same way. © 1986–2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Epigenetics
Link ID: 26322 - Posted: 06.11.2019

By Lenny Bernstein Five years ago, a study of death certificate data attracted notice for suggesting that states that passed medical marijuana laws saw 25 percent fewer opioid overdose deaths on average than states that barred medical cannabis. The authors were careful to point out that this finding was only a correlation, an intriguing hint at something that needed further exploration. There was no way to establish whether the availability of medical cannabis in some states protected against overdosing on harder drugs, even if some people used marijuana for pain. Nevertheless, the cannabis industry took up the study to help win passage of medical cannabis laws in more states, even as medical experts expressed skepticism. In a 2018 report, for example, Maryland’s medical marijuana commission found “no credible scientific evidence” that marijuana could treat opioid addiction. Now comes a study from Stanford University School of Medicine showing that when researchers looked at a longer period of time, states that introduced medical marijuana actually had 23 percent more deaths from opioid overdoses. The new work appears to be a cautionary tale about inferring cause and effect — wanting research to show something it can’t because the nation is in the grip of a deadly opioid epidemic or because there is money to be made by offering possible solutions. The nation’s opioid crisis, now more than two decades old, has taken more than 400,000 lives, according to government data. “A lot of people interpreted the first study as causal because it’s congenial to their goals,” said Chelsea L. Shover, a postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry who was part of the Stanford research team. “It did not say that one is causing the other.” © 1996-2019 The Washington Post

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26321 - Posted: 06.11.2019

By Malia Wollan “Fasting is mental over physical, just like basketball and most other stuff in life,” says Enes Kanter, the 6-foot-11 center for the Portland Trail Blazers. Raised in Turkey, Kanter, 27, is a Muslim who has fasted from sunrise to sunset during the month of Ramadan since he was 8. This season, Ramadan aligned with the N.B.A. playoffs, so Kanter fasted through seven playoff games. During the year he forgoes food and water a day or two a week. “Don’t be scared to try it,” he says. Intermittent fasting has become a trendy tool for losing weight and boosting mental acuity and productivity. Adherents typically restrict eating to a window of eight or fewer hours during the day, or they limit caloric intake a few days per week. Studies suggest that following such diets can lead to weight loss and reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and may even protect against age-related neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s. For his part, though, Kanter is trying desperately not to lose any weight. His team’s trainers worried about him going 16 hours without food or water on game days, and so before dawn and twice after dark he partook of carbohydrate feasts: pasta, quesadillas, burritos, sandwiches, sports drinks and nutrition bars. “As many calories as I can put in my body,” he says. Don’t fast if you are at all prone to eating disorders or have a medical condition that might make it dangerous. (While Ramadan fasting is compulsory for Muslims, exceptions are made for children, pregnant women and the ill, among others.) Break your fast carefully by resisting the hurried, gobbler mind-set. “Don’t lose control of yourself,” Kanter says. “Go slow.” Start with lighter fare like soup or salad. Wait 10 minutes before beginning heavier courses. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 26320 - Posted: 06.11.2019

By Sarah Baird Few topics occupy pregnant women’s minds in the months leading up to birth more than devising a plan for pain management during labor. In the United States, the options during delivery have long been pretty limited. On one side of the dichotomy is a completely unmedicated childbirth, where visualization and breathing techniques offer a mind-over-matter approach to labor pain. On the other side, epidurals are the pain-eliminating gold standard — but can come with plenty of trade-offs. Across the world, though, nitrous oxide (yes, “laughing gas”) has long been standard — dating back to the turn-of-the-century — in delivery rooms, allowing women to help mitigate the pain of labor while remaining present and, perhaps best of all, maintaining their sense of control. Now, this low-stakes form of delivery room relief is finally taking hold in the United States as women seek out a wider range of options for their birthing experience. Nitrous oxide is a blend of 50 percent nitrous and 50 percent oxygen that women are able to self-administer during labor by holding a face mask over their nose and mouth and breathing deeply. (The 50/50 ratio is a set concentration and cannot be raised or lowered, unlike the dialed system in a dentist’s office which can be increased up to 70 percent nitrogen.) The option, unlike other types of pain relief, requires no I.V., does not limit mobility and will not slow contractions. The effects of nitrous kick in within 30 to 50 seconds of beginning inhalation, providing a very different form of pain management than other methods available. “It’s been described as a dissociative effect, so it reduces anxiety related to pain and kind of disassociates [women] from their pain,” said Kelly Curlee, R.N., director of inpatient nursing at Texas Health Cleburne in Cleburne, Tex. “Pain breeds fear, fear breeds pain. That’s kind of a cycle that nitrous helps break.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26319 - Posted: 06.10.2019

By John Horgan I can live without God, but I need free will. Without free will life makes no sense, it lacks meaning. So I’m always on the lookout for strong, clear arguments for free will. Christian List, a philosopher at the London School of Economics, provides such arguments in his succinct new book Why Free Will Is Real (Harvard 2019). I met List in 2015 when I decided to attend, after much deliberation, a workshop on consciousness at NYU. I recently freely chose to send him some questions, which he freely chose to answer. –John Horgan Horgan: Why philosophy? Was your choice pre-determined? List: I don’t think it was. As a teenager, I wanted to become a computer scientist or mathematician. It was only during my last couple of years at high school that I developed an interest in philosophy, and then I studied mathematics and philosophy as an undergraduate. For my doctorate, I chose political science, because I wanted to do something more applied, but I ended up working on mathematical models of collective decision-making and their implications for philosophical questions about democracy. Can majority voting produce rational collective outcomes? Are there truths to be found in politics? So, I was drawn back into philosophy. But the fact that I now teach philosophy is due to contingent events, especially meeting some philosophers who encouraged me. Horgan: Free-will denial seems to be on the rise. Why do you think that is? List: The free-will denial we are now seeing appears to be a by-product of the growing popularity of a reductionistic worldview in which everything is thought to be reducible to physical processes. If we look at the world solely through the lens of fundamental physics, for instance, then we will see only particles, fields, and forces, and there seems no room for human agency and free will. People then look like bio-physical machines. My response is that this kind of reductionism is mistaken. I want to embrace a scientific worldview, but reject reductionism. In fact, many scientists reject the sort of reductionism that is often mistakenly associated with science. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26318 - Posted: 06.10.2019

By Lisa Feldman Barrett My husband found me sobbing on the kitchen floor. My job was in upheaval, my travel schedule was grueling, and with two hours left before my next departure, I’d discovered that my laptop was dead. This was the moment my husband walked in to console me, and in an impressive feat of bad timing, he also asked whether I was premenstrual. I went from sobbing to supernova in about two seconds, enraged by his presumption that surging female hormones were responsible for my emotional distress. The only thing that saved him was that, a few days later, I discovered that he’d been right. I am a scientist who studies the nature of emotions. For most of my scientific career, I didn’t believe that women systematically had emotional eruptions right before their period, even though I experienced them occasionally. Studies suggested that women who believe in premenstrual syndrome, when asked about it in retrospect, tend to misremember the symptoms as more severe than they were. The evidence for PMS overall was inconsistent. Certainly, I knew of no neurological reason that women should feel, just before their period, that the world was crashing down on them. My doubt was also political in nature. During my clinical internship over 20 years ago, my boss, a psychiatrist, asked me to research how PMS prevents women from thinking clearly. I told him he was a relic of the Stone Age. Women were as consistently clearheaded as men, if not more so. But recently, a researcher in my lab, Joe Andreano, an expert on female hormones, showed me some surprising data. As a woman’s levels of progesterone and estrogen vary, so does the connectivity between two brain networks: the default mode network and the salience network. These networks play key roles in creating your emotional life. If I hadn’t seen the data with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 26317 - Posted: 06.10.2019

Patti Neighmond Jeannine, who is 37 and lives in Burbank, Calif., has endured widespread pain since she was 8. She has been examined by dozens of doctors, but none of their X-rays, MRIs or other tests have turned up any evidence of physical injury or damage. Over the years, desperate for relief, she tried changing her diet, wore belts to correct her posture and exercised to strengthen muscles. Taking lots of ibuprofen helped, she says, but doctors warned her that taking too much could cause gastric bleeding. Nothing else eased her discomfort. On a pain scale of 0 to 10, her pain ranged from "7 to 9, regularly," she says. Around 50 million Americans suffer from chronic pain. Most of us think of pain as something that arises after a physical injury, accident or damage from an illness or its treatment. But researchers are learning that, in some people, there can be another source of chronic pain. Repeated exposure to psychological trauma, or deep anxiety or depression — especially in childhood — can leave a physical imprint on the brain that can make some people, like Jeannine, more vulnerable to chronic pain, scientists say. (We are not using her last name for reasons of privacy.) Jeannine was eventually diagnosed with fibromyalgia — a condition characterized by widespread pain throughout the body, among other symptoms. The cause is unknown and likely varies from person to person. The pain Jeannine experienced was physical. She'd feel "lightning bolts, kind of going up through my shoulders to my neck to my head," she says. Other times, she'd suddenly experience the shooting pain of sciatica in her legs, and she often suffered from a "grinding pain" in her hips. "I would feel like I can't walk anymore — it was just so very painful to walk." © 2019 npr

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26316 - Posted: 06.10.2019

By Jane E. Brody How did you sleep last night? If you’re over 65, I hope it was better than many others your age. In a study by the National Institute on Aging of over 9,000 Americans aged 65 and older, more than half said they had difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep. Many others who believe they spend an adequate number of hours asleep nonetheless complain of not feeling rested when they get up. Chronic insomnia, which affects 5 percent to 10 percent of older adults, is more than just exhausting. It’s also linked to an increased risk of developing hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, heart attack, depression, anxiety and premature death. It may also be a risk factor for dementia, especially Alzheimer’s disease. Studies based on more than 1,700 men and women followed over many years by researchers at Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine found that the risk of developing hypertension was five times greater among those who slept less than five hours a night and three and a half times greater for those who slept between five and six hours. But there was no increased risk among those who regularly slept six or more hours. Likewise, the risk of developing diabetes was three times greater for the shortest sleepers and twice as great for those who slept between five and six hours. People with insomnia often complain that they can’t concentrate or focus and have memory problems. While the evidence for this is inconsistent, the Penn State studies showed that people with insomnia are more likely to perform poorly on tests of processing speed, switching attention and visual memory. And most studies have shown that insomnia impairs cognitive performance, a possible risk factor for mild cognitive impairment and dementia. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Alzheimers
Link ID: 26315 - Posted: 06.10.2019

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent Smartphone sleep-tracking apps are making people so anxious and obsessed about their sleep that they are developing insomnia, a leading neurologist has said. Speaking at the Cheltenham science festival, Dr Guy Leschziner, a sleep disorder specialist and consultant at Guy’s hospital in London, said a growing preoccupation with getting enough sleep was backfiring. “We’ve seen a lot of people who have developed significant insomnia as a result of either sleep trackers or reading certain things about how devastating sleep deprivation is for you,” Leschziner said before his talk. A high proportion of patients seeking treatment for insomnia turn up at his clinic with data about their sleep patterns and are often reluctant to delete the app, he said. “It’s rather difficult to dissuade them from using it.” Most apps have not been clinically validated and only track movement, so do not provide insight into the quality of sleep, he added. “My view of sleep trackers is fairly cynical. If you wake up feeling tired and you’ve had an unrefreshing night’s sleep then you know you’ve got a problem,” he said. “If you wake up every day and feel refreshed, are awake throughout the day and are ready to sleep at the same time every night then you’re probably getting enough sleep for you and you don’t need an app to tell you that.” Similar concerns were highlighted in a series of case studies published last year by a team in Chicago that described patients whose micromanagement of sleep using apps had led to a disorder called orthosomnia. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26314 - Posted: 06.10.2019

By Darcey Steinke The J in “juice” was the first letter-sound, according to my mother, that I repeated in staccato, going off like a skipping record. This was when I was 3, before my stutter was stigmatized as shameful. In those earliest years my relationship to language was uncomplicated: I assumed my voice was more like a bird’s or a squirrel’s than my playmates’. This seemed exciting. I imagined, unlike fluent children, I might be able to converse with wild creatures, I’d learn their secrets, tell them mine and forge friendships based on interspecies intimacy. School put an end to this fantasy. Throughout elementary school I stuttered every time a teacher called on me and whenever I was asked to read out loud. In the third grade the humiliation of being forced to read a few paragraphs about stewardesses in the Weekly Reader still burns. The ST is hard for stutterers. What would have taken a fluent child five minutes took me an excruciating 25. It was around this time that I started separating the alphabet into good letters, V as well as M, and bad letters, S, F and T, plus the terrible vowel sounds, open and mysterious and nearly impossible to wrangle. Each letter had a degree of difficulty that changed depending upon its position in the sentence. Much later when I read that Nabokov as a child assigned colors to letters, it made sense to me that the hard G looked like “vulcanized rubber” and the R, “a sooty rag being ripped.” My beloved V, in the Nabokovian system, was a jewel-like “rose quartz.” My mother, knowing that kids ridiculed me — she once found a book, “The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot,” that had been tossed onto our lawn — wanted to eradicate my speech impediment. She encouraged me to practice the strategies taught to me by a string of therapists, bouncing off an easy sound to a harder one and unclenching my throat, trying to slide out of a stammer. When I was 13 she got me a scholarship to a famous speech therapy program at a college near our house in Virginia. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 26313 - Posted: 06.10.2019

By Joshua Sokol For half the year, a little brown bird on the northernmost islands of the Galápagos uses its wickedly sharp beak to pick at seeds, nectar and insects. But when the climate dries out, it drinks blood. Yes, there is such a thing as a vampire finch. Yes, it is what it sounds like. Galápagos finches have been used since Darwin’s time to illustrate evolution in action. Even among them, Geospiza septentrionalis is an outlier, one of the few birds in the world to intentionally draw and drink blood. And the species is only found on Wolf and Darwin islands, two of the most remote and off-limits places in the entire archipelago. The vampire finch has a method. First, one bird hops on the back of a resting Nazca booby, pecks at the base of the seabird’s wing, and drinks. Blood stains the booby’s white feathers. Other finches crowd around to wait their turn, or to watch and learn. Because adult boobies can fly away, the attacks are almost never fatal. The only casualties are chicks that flee from the finches on foot and, unable to find their way back, starve. Drinking blood is an unusual diet, and research published last year showed that vampire finches have evolved specialized bacteria in their guts to aid digestion. Even more surprising, according to a paper this week in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, is that some of these bacteria are similar to ones found in the vampire bats of Central and South America. Se Jin Song, a biologist at the University of California San Diego and the study’s lead author, had previously studied the convergent evolution of gut bacteria. Do disparate animals with the equivalent of fad diets — eating only ants and termites, for instance — develop similar gut microbiota over evolutionary time? © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Obesity
Link ID: 26312 - Posted: 06.10.2019

By Mitch Leslie If papers published in the past 6 months are right, a single number is enough to show whether people are likely to suffer a premature heart attack, land first authorship on published papers, become dependent on alcohol, or put on fat around the middle. That magic number is the ratio between the lengths of the second and fourth fingers, known as the 2D:4D ratio. It tends to be lower in men—meaning their fourth fingers tend to be longer than their second—than in women. Researchers who believe in its predictive power say it reflects a fetus's exposure to testosterone and other hormones that guide development, including that of the brain. The idea that the lengths of human fingers reveal so much stems from the work of evolutionary biologist John Manning, now at Swansea University in the United Kingdom. But the field he inspired has ballooned beyond what he could have imagined. More than 1400 papers in just over 20 years have linked the finger ratio to attributes such as personality, cognitive abilities, and sexual orientation as well as to risk of illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Researchers have even tried to use ratios gleaned from stenciled handprints on cave walls to determine whether the artists behind ancient paintings were men or women. But the notion has also riled plenty of critics, who argue that researchers who rely on the 2D:4D comparison have been seduced by a simplistic, faulty measure. Some doubters contend that the difference in ratios between the sexes is an illusion resulting from men's larger hands or that the measure itself is statistically problematic. "I'm skeptical about every single finding involving that ratio," says physiologist and biostatistician Douglas Curran-Everett of National Jewish Health in Denver. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 26311 - Posted: 06.07.2019

By Aiyana Bailin To my dismay, Simon Baron-Cohen’s recent article “The Concept of Neurodiversity is Dividing the Autism Community” perpetuates a common misunderstanding of the neurodiversity movement: that it views autism as a difference but not a disability. Baron-Cohen presents the issue as one of opposing sides: the medical model, which sees autism as a set of symptoms and deficits to be cured or treated, and the neurodiversity model, which he believes ignores any disabling aspects of autism. Unfortunately, this confuses the neurodiversity movement with the social model of disability, and it is an incomplete understanding of the social model at that. Before I go into details, let me summarize what the neurodiversity movement does believe: Autism and other neurological variations (learning disabilities, ADHD, etc.) may be disabilities, but they are not flaws. People with neurological differences are not broken or incomplete versions of normal people. Disability, no matter how profound, does not diminish personhood. People with atypical brains are fully human, with inalienable human rights, just like everyone else. People with disabilities can live rich, meaningful lives. Neurological variations are a vital part of humanity, as much as variations in size, shape, skin color and personality. None of us has the right (or the wisdom) to try and improve upon our species by deciding which characteristics to keep and which to discard. Every person is valuable. Disability is a complicated thing. Often, it’s defined more by society’s expectations than by individual conditions. Not always, but often. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 26310 - Posted: 06.07.2019

Ian Sample Science editor If the dead-end job, the pokey flat and the endless failings of the neighbours are getting on your wick, then spare a thought for the dog. In research that confirms what many owners will have worked out for themselves, scientists have found that the household pets are not oblivious to their owners’ anxieties, but mirror the amount of stress they feel. The finding comes from a study of cortisol, a stress hormone, which circulates in the blood and leaves its mark in strands of hair. Over time, as the hormone is bound into the growing hair, each shaft becomes a biological record of the stress an individual experiences. After engaging the willing services of 25 border collies, 33 Shetland sheepdogs, and the animals’ female owners, researchers in Sweden found that higher cortisol in human hair was matched by more of the hormone in the dog hair. All of the dogs lived indoors with their owners. “This is the first time we’ve seen a long-term synchronisation in stress levels between members of two different species,” said Lina Roth, an ethologist who led the work at Linköping University in Sweden. “We haven’t seen this between humans and dogs before.” Roth’s team measured concentrations of cortisol in short strands of hair cut close to the skin in the winter and summer of 2017 and 2018. The link between human and dog cortisol held through the seasons, but was higher in dogs in the winter. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 26309 - Posted: 06.07.2019

By Lindsey Bever Doctors had broken the disheartening news to Rachel Palma, explaining that the lesion on her brain was suspected to be a tumor, and her scans suggested that it was cancerous. Palma, a newlywed entering a new chapter in her life, said she was in shock, unwilling to believe it was true. In September, scrubbed-up surgeons in an operating room at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City opened Palma’s cranium and steeled themselves for a malignant brain tumor, said Jonathan Rasouli, chief neurosurgery resident at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. But instead, Rasouli said, they saw an encapsulated mass resembling a quail egg. “We were all saying, ‘What is this?’ ” Rasouli recalled Thursday in a phone interview with The Washington Post. “It was very shocking. We were scratching our heads, surprised at what it looked like.” The surgeons removed it from Palma’s brain and placed it under a microscope to get a closer look. Then they sliced into it — and found a baby tapeworm. Palma, from Middletown, N.Y., said she had mixed emotions about it. “Of course I was grossed out,” the 42-year-old said Thursday, explaining that no one wants to think there’s a tapeworm growing inside an egg in his or her brain. “But of course, I was also relieved. It meant that no further treatment was necessary.” A scan showing the tapeworm in Rachel Palma's brain. (Mount Sinai Health System) © 1996-2019 The Washington Post

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 26308 - Posted: 06.07.2019

By Christopher Rowland A team of researchers inside Pfizer made a startling find in 2015: The company’s blockbuster rheumatoid arthritis therapy Enbrel, a powerful anti-inflammatory drug, appeared to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by 64 percent. The results were from an analysis of hundreds of thousands of insurance claims. Verifying that the drug would actually have that effect in people would require a costly clinical trial — and after several years of internal discussion, Pfizer opted against further investigation and chose not to make the data public, the company confirmed. Researchers in the company’s division of inflammation and immunology urged Pfizer to conduct a clinical trial on thousands of patients, which they estimated would cost $80 million, to see if the signal contained in the data was real, according to an internal company document obtained by The Washington Post. “Enbrel could potentially safely prevent, treat and slow progression of Alzheimer’s disease,’’ said the document, a PowerPoint slide show that was prepared for review by an internal Pfizer committee in February 2018. The company told The Post that it decided during its three years of internal reviews that Enbrel did not show promise for Alzheimer’s prevention because the drug does not directly reach brain tissue. It deemed the likelihood of a successful clinical trial to be low. A synopsis of its statistical findings prepared for outside publication, it says, did not meet its “rigorous scientific standards.’’ The surprising reasons why drug prices in the U.S. are higher than in the rest of the world © 1996-2019 The Washington Post

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26307 - Posted: 06.06.2019

By: Karen Moxon, Ph.D., Ignacio Saez, Ph.D., and Jochen Ditterich, Ph.D. Technology that is sparking an entirely new field of neuroscience will soon let us simply think about something we want our computers to do and watch it instantaneously happen. In fact, some patients with severe neurological injury or disease are already reaping the benefits of initial advances by using their thoughts to signal and control robotic limbs. This brain-computer interface (BCI) idea is spawning a new area of neuroscience called cognitive neuroengineering that holds the promise of improving the quality of life for everyone on the planet in unimaginable ways. But the technology is not yet ready for prime time. There are three basic aspects of BCIs—recording, decoding, and operation, and progress will require refining all three. BCI works because brain activity generates a signal—typically an electrical field—that can be recorded through a dedicated device, which feeds it to a computer whose analysis software (i.e., a decoding algorithm) “translates” the signal to a simple command. This command signal operates a computer or other machine. The resulting operation can be as simple as moving a cursor on a screen, for which the command need contain just X and Y coordinates, or as complex as controlling a robotic arm, which requires information about position, orientation, speed, rotation, and more. Recent work from University of Pittsburgh has shown that subjects with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) can control a complex robot arm—having it pick up a pitcher and pour water into a glass—just by thinking about it. The downside is that it is necessary to surgically implant recording microelectrodes intothe brain and that, most importantly, such electrodes are not reliable for more than a few years. © 2019 The Dana Foundation.

Keyword: Robotics; ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 26306 - Posted: 06.06.2019

By Neuroskeptic If you delve into the wildest depths of the scientific literature, you will find a trilogy of papers so weird, that they have become legendary. In these articles, spanning a 12 year period, author Jarl Flensmark says that heeled shoes cause mental illness, while flat footwear promotes brain health: Is there an association between the use of heeled footwear and schizophrenia? (2004) Physical activity, eccentric contractions of plantar flexors, and neurogenesis: therapeutic potential of flat shoes in psychiatric and neurological disorders (2009) Flat shoes increase neurogenesis (2016) The abstract of the first paper gives a good sense of Flensmark’s ideas: A selective literature review and synthesis is used to present a hypothesis that finds support in all facts and is contradicted by none. Heeled footwear began to be used more than a 1000 years ago, and led to the occurrence of the first cases of schizophrenia. Industrialization of shoe production increased schizophrenia prevalence. The neurobiological mechanism for this shoe-induced psychosis is said to be that: During walking synchronised stimuli from mechanoreceptors in the lower extremities increase activity in cerebello-thalamo-cortico-cerebellar loops through their action on NMDA-receptors. Using heeled shoes leads to weaker stimulation of the loops. Reduced cortical activity changes dopaminergic function which involves the basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical-nigro-basal ganglia loops. And so it goes on.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 26305 - Posted: 06.06.2019

By Marisa Iati A bill in Alabama awaiting the governor’s signature would require people convicted of certain sex offenses to undergo “chemical castration” as a condition of parole — a requirement meant to keep perpetrators from committing similar crimes. The proposed law, passed by the state legislature, says a judge must order anyone convicted of a sex offense involving a child under the age of 13 to start receiving testosterone-inhibiting medication a month before their release from prison. Most offenders would have to pay for their treatment, which would be administered by the Department of Public Health, until a judge decides the medication is no longer necessary. Under the proposed law, a judge — and not a doctor — would tell the offender about the effects of the treatment. An offender could choose to stop getting the medication and return to prison to serve the remainder of their term. Anyone who stopped receiving the castration treatment without approval would be considered guilty of a Class C felony, punishable under Alabama law by up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $15,000. “Chemical castration” is a misnomer, as the process leaves the testes intact, can be reversed and does not prevent a man from reproducing. It does not guarantee a man’s sexual urge will be eliminated. (There’s no consensus on whether chemical castration would be effective for women.) © 1996-2019 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 26304 - Posted: 06.06.2019

Children can keep full visual perception — the ability to process and understand visual information — after brain surgery for severe epilepsy, according to a study funded by the National Eye Institute (NEI), part of the National Institutes of Health. While brain surgery can halt seizures, it carries significant risks, including an impairment in visual perception. However, a new report by Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, researchers from a study of children who had undergone epilepsy surgery suggests that the lasting effects on visual perception can be minimal, even among children who lost tissue in the brain’s visual centers. Normal visual function requires not just information sent from the eye (sight), but also processing in the brain that allows us to understand and act on that information (perception). Signals from the eye are first processed in the early visual cortex, a region at the back of the brain that is necessary for sight. They then travel through other parts of the cerebral cortex, enabling recognition of patterns, faces, objects, scenes, and written words. In adults, even if their sight is still present, injury or removal of even a small area of the brain’s vision processing centers can lead to dramatic, permanent loss of perception, making them unable to recognize faces, locations, or to read, for example. But in children, who are still developing, this part of the brain appears able to rewire itself, a process known as plasticity. “Although there are studies of the memory and language function of children who have parts of the brain removed surgically for the treatment of epilepsy, there have been rather few studies that examine the impact of the surgery on the visual system of the brain and the resulting perceptual behavior,” said Marlene Behrmann, Ph.D., senior author of the study. “We aimed to close this gap.”

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Vision
Link ID: 26303 - Posted: 06.05.2019