By Cara Giaimo If you’ve ever taken a big bite of wasabi, you know what comes next: a painful zing that creeps over your whole scalp. You aren’t the only animal that feels this way. The condiment’s sinus-burning kick comes from a chemical compound called allyl isothiocyanate, or AITC, that actively damages proteins within cells. Flies and flatworms shun it, as do mice and wolf spiders. “Practically every animal you look at will avoid AITC,” said Gary Lewin, a molecular physiologist at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. But there is one exception. In a paper published Thursday in Science, scientists including Dr. Lewin showed that the highveld mole rat, a rodent found in South Africa, is entirely impervious to the substance. The study “demonstrates the power of studying naturally occurring differences in pain sensitivity,” said Ewan St. John Smith, a neurobiologist at the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the research. The work could eventually lead to more effective pain treatment in humans. The scientists didn’t originally set out to find a wasabi aficionado. They were simply hoping to compare how several mole rat species respond to things that cause pain. Years ago, Dr. Lewin and others discovered that naked mole rats — pink, bucktoothed creatures known for their uncanny longevity, insectlike social cultures and blasé attitude toward oxygen — aren’t sensitive to acid or capsaicin, the compound that gives peppers their burn. To see whether their close relatives shared these traits, they exposed nine species of mole rat to a few pain agents. The naked mole rats didn’t react well to AITC. Neither did most of the other species the group studied, including the humans administering the trials. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26282 - Posted: 05.31.2019

By George Musser, Even the slightest touch can consume Kirsten Lindsmith’s attention. When someone shakes her hand or her cat snuggles up against her, for example, it becomes hard for her to think about anything else. “I’m taken out of the moment for however long the sensation lasts,” she says. Some everyday sensations, such as getting her hands wet, can feel like torture: “I usually compare it to the visceral, repulsive feeling you’d get plunging your hand into a pile of rotting garbage,” says the 27-year-old autistic writer. Stephanie Dehennin, an autistic illustrator who lives in Belgium, detests gentle touches but doesn’t mind firm hugs. “I will feel actual rage if someone strokes me or touches me very lightly,” she says. Dehennin seeks out deep pressure to relieve her stress. “I’ll sit between my bed and my nightstand, for example — squeezed between furniture.” Strong reactions to touch are remarkably widespread among people who have autism, despite the condition’s famed heterogeneity. “The touch thing is as close to universal as they come,” says Gavin Bollard, an autistic blogger who lives in Australia and writes about his and his autistic sons’ experiences. These responses are often described as a general hypersensitivity, but they are more complex than that: Sometimes autistic people crave touch; sometimes they cringe from it. For many people on the spectrum, these sensations are so intense that they take measures to shape their ‘touchscape.’ Some pile on heavy blankets at night for the extra weight; others cut off their clothing tags. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Autism; Emotions
Link ID: 26281 - Posted: 05.30.2019

By Diana Kwon Few things are more refreshing than enjoying a cool beverage after spending a day under the hot summer sun. But gulping down a drink does not always quench thirst. Seawater, for example, may look appealing to someone stranded in the middle of the ocean, but taking a swig of it will only worsen dehydration. Scientists have now discovered that in rodents, signals from both the throat and gut control feelings of thirst. These distinct pathways may explain why consuming a beverage is typically refreshing but does not always sate one’s thirst, according to a study by Yuki Oka, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology, and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology, published May 29 in Neuron. Last year, Oka’s team reported that the simple act of gulping activated a circuit in the lamina terminalis, a region near the front of the brain, which ultimately led to the suppression of activity in neurons responsible for generating feelings of thirst. This throat-brain pathway, which the researchers identified in mice, switched on regardless of what an animal consumed—water, saline solution and oil produced similar effects. But the fact that all of these substances were able to inhibit the brain’s “thirst” neurons indicated that there was something missing. After all, if any liquid could satisfy an animal’s thirst, it might not consume enough water to remain hydrated. According to Oka, behavioral studies in animals dating back decades suggested that there was an additional mechanism in the gut that signaled the presence of water to the brain. So in their latest investigation, Oka’s team set out to map the brain circuits responsible for receiving these signals. By injecting fluids directly into the guts of mice, the researchers discovered that in order for the rodents to feel fully hydrated, this second gut-based circuit needed to be activated. Without these gastrointestinal signals—which, unlike ones from the throat, selectively responded to the presence of water—the brain’s “thirst” neurons quickly revved up again, driving the animals to drink more. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 26280 - Posted: 05.30.2019

By Malin Fezehai Muazzez Kocek, 46, is considered one of the best whistlers in Kuşköy, a village tucked away in the picturesque Pontic Mountains in Turkey’s northern Giresun province. Her whistle can be heard over the area’s vast tea fields and hazelnut orchards, several miles farther than a person’s voice. When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey visited Kuşköy in 2012, she greeted him and proudly whistled, “Welcome to our village!” She uses kuş dili, or “bird language,” which transforms the full Turkish vocabulary into varied-pitch frequencies and melodic lines. For hundreds of years, this whistled form of communication has been a critical for the farming community in the region, allowing complex conversations over long distances and facilitating animal herding. Today, there are about 10,000 people in the larger region that speak it, but because of the increased use of cellphones, which remove the need for a voice to carry over great distances, that number is dwindling. The language is at risk of dying out. Of Ms. Kocek’s three children, only her middle daughter, Kader, 14, knows bird language. Ms. Kocek began learning bird language at six years old, by working in the fields with her father. She has tried to pass the tradition on to her three daughters; even though they understand it, only her middle child, Kader Kocek, 14, knows how to speak, and can whistle Turkey’s national anthem. Turkey is one of a handful of countries in the world where whistling languages exist. Similar ways of communicating are known to have been used in the Canary Islands, Greece, Mexico, and Mozambique. They fascinate researchers and linguistic experts, because they suggest that the brain structures that process language are not as fixed as once thought. There is a long-held belief that language interpretation occurs mostly in the left hemisphere, and melody, rhythm and singing on the right. But a study that biopsychologist Onur Güntürkün conducted in Kuşköy, suggests that whistling language is processed in both hemispheres. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 26279 - Posted: 05.30.2019

By James Gallagher Health and science correspondent, BBC News Ultra-processed foods - such as chicken nuggets, ice cream and breakfast cereals - have been linked to early death and poor health, scientists say. Researchers in France and Spain say the amount of such food being eaten has soared. Their studies are not definite proof of harm but do come hot on the heels of trials suggesting ultra-processed foods lead to overeating. Experts expressed caution but called for further investigation. What are ultra-processed foods? The term comes from a way of classifying food by how much industrial processing it has been through. The lowest category is "unprocessed or minimally processed foods", which include: • fruit • vegetables • milk • meat • legumes such as lentils • seeds • grains such as rice • eggs "Processed foods" have been altered to make them last longer or taste better - generally using salt, oil, sugar or fermentation. This category includes: • cheese • bacon • home-made bread • tinned fruit and vegetables • smoked fish • beer Then come "ultra-processed foods", which have been through more substantial industrial processing and often have long ingredient lists on the packet, including added preservatives, sweeteners or colour enhancers. Prof Maira Bes-Rastrollo, from the University of Navarra, told BBC News: "It is said that if a product contains more than five ingredients, it is probably ultra-processed." Examples include: • processed meat such as sausages and hamburgers • breakfast cereals or cereal bars • instant soups • sugary fizzy drinks • chicken nuggets • cake • chocolate • ice cream • mass-produced bread • many "ready to heat" meals such as pies and pizza | meal-replacement shakes How bad were the findings? The first study, by the University of Navarra, in Spain, followed 19,899 people for a decade and assessed their diet every other year. There were 335 deaths during the study. But for every 10 deaths among those eating the least ultra-processed food, there were 16 deaths among those eating the most (more than four portions a day). © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 26278 - Posted: 05.30.2019

By Sheila Kaplan LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Alex Carll was presenting his research about the impact of e-cigarette smoke on mouse hearts at an American Heart Association conference when a man from Juul Labs approached him and started asking questions. “He seemed genuinely concerned about the health implications of Juul,” said Dr. Carll, who recalled meeting the e-cigarette company’s medical liaison, Jeff Vaughan, in November as he stood by a poster of his research findings. “He said they were looking for people to collaborate with and that they could offer up to $200,000.” As a 37-year-old assistant professor of physiology at the University of Louisville medical school, with his eyes on his own research lab, Dr. Carll was tempted. “Two hundred thousand is a lot, just for supplies and equipment,” Dr. Carll said. “That would get me off the ground and running.” Wary of hurting his reputation, however, Dr. Carll turned Juul down. That scenario is playing out at medical conferences and universities across the country, as the company aggressively recruits scientists to prove to the Food and Drug Administration, and to the public, that “juuling” offers more public health benefit than risk. If it fails to submit proper evidence by 2022, the agency could halt all sales. Company representatives have been stalking e-cigarette researchers at conferences, blitzing speakers with emails and phone calls to ask for meetings and slides, and offering tantalizing amounts of money for academics. But rejections like Dr. Carll’s have created a troubling cycle for Juul, whose popular vaping products have contributed to what health officials have called an epidemic of e-cigarette use and nicotine addiction among teenagers. Because many researchers have spurned the company’s lucrative offers, Juul has had to rely on scientists with tobacco industry ties — further damaging the company’s credibility and making it even tougher to attract independent investigators. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26277 - Posted: 05.29.2019

Nicholas A. Christakis What is our conscience, and where does it come from? In her highly readable Conscience, the philosopher Patricia Churchland argues that “we would have no moral stance on anything unless we were social”. That we have a conscience at all relates to how evolution has shaped our neurobiology for social living. Thus, we judge what is right or wrong using feelings that urge us in a general direction and judgement that shapes these urges into actions. Such judgement typically reflects “some standard of a group to which the individual feels attached”. This idea of conscience as a neurobiological capacity for internalizing social norms contrasts with strictly philosophical accounts of how and why we tell right from wrong. There is a strand of thought in evolutionary biology (advanced, for instance, by the theorist Bret Weinstein) that the capacity for moral debate itself has a social function, binding groups regardless of the topics contested or their abstract moral ‘rightness’. Moreover, many of our moral rules — such as the idea that we should not betray our friends or abandon our children — have clearly been shaped by natural selection to optimize our capacity to live in groups. Other rules, for instance regarding the correctness of reciprocity, are similar: we feel quite intensely and innately that if someone gives us a gift of food, we should reciprocate on a future occasion. © 2019 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Keyword: Emotions; Consciousness
Link ID: 26276 - Posted: 05.29.2019

By Jan Hoffman Opening statements in the country’s first trial over whether a pharmaceutical company is liable for the opioid crisis began as a battle between fire and ice: Lawyers for Oklahoma, a state brought to its knees by addiction and overdose deaths, heatedly accused Johnson & Johnson of creating a deadly demand for the drugs, while the company coolly responded that it had acted responsibly and lawfully in its quest to offer relief to chronic pain patients. The trial, heard by a judge without a jury but livestreamed to the public, is being closely watched not only by those affected by prescription opioid addiction, but also by lawyers in almost 1,900 similar federal and state cases nationwide. Two other defendants who manufacture opioids settled with Oklahoma — Purdue Pharma will pay $270 million, Teva Pharmaceuticals, $85 million — leaving only J & J on trial. The state directly confronted what many legal experts have predicted will be the highest hurdle in the case: connecting one manufacturer of opioids to the cascading harms wrought by the entire industry. J & J pushed back hard, arguing that the state itself looked the other way as its own drug review board and prescription monitoring program for years neglected to swoop down on sources of diverted opioids. In addition, it said, Oklahoma could not tie any death directly to the company’s products — Duragesic, a fentanyl patch, and Nucynta, an opioid pill it no longer makes. “You hear about pill mills,” said Larry D. Ottaway, the lead counsel for a J & J subsidiary, Janssen Pharmaceuticals. “You don’t hear about patch mills.” Indeed both sides introduced what are sure to be their signature earworms, themes that will be echoed throughout the trial, estimated to take about two months. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26275 - Posted: 05.29.2019

Ashley Yeager The US Food and Drug Administration has approved a new treatment for a rare childhood disorder that costs $2.125 million for single dose—the most expensive medicine on the market. The medicine is designed to treat spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a condition driven by defects in the SMN1 gene, which causes afflicted babies to lose muscle control. The illness affects about 400 babies in the US each year and kills those with the most common form of the disease in just a few years. The new treatment is a gene therapy that uses genetically modified viruses to deliver healthy copies of the SMN1 gene to patients’ cells so they can generate a protein that helps the babies develop normally. In tests of the treatment, babies who received it by 6 months of age didn’t have as severe muscle problems as those who didn’t get the drug. Infants getting the drug after six months also didn’t lose muscle control, but they suffered irreversible damage. Babies who got the treatment the earliest were the healthiest, according to the Associated Press. “We saw just remarkable results for these kids,” David Lennon tells NPR. Lennon is the president of AveXis, the company, owned by Novartis that developed the drug, called Zolgensma. It is only the second FDA-approved gene therapy designed to treat a genetic disorder. While the success of the treatment is being celebrated, the price tag is taking heat. “It's absolutely stunning,” Peter Bach, who studies health policy at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, tells NPR. The drug’s price tag, he says, drains resources from society, and it’s not alone. © 1986–2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Muscles
Link ID: 26274 - Posted: 05.29.2019

By C. Claiborne Ray Q. Humans can’t drink seawater. So what do sea lions, whales, dolphins and sea birds drink? A. Marine animals may consume both freshwater and saltwater. They rely on various adaptations for survival when only saltwater is available. Many marine mammals have specialized organs called reniculate kidneys with multiple lobes, increasing their urine-concentrating efficiency beyond that of humans. These animals can handle high concentrations of salt in seawater without becoming dehydrated by salt buildup, as humans would. Experts now believe, however, that many of these creatures drink seawater only occasionally. Instead they get low-salt water from what they eat or manage to produce it on their own. Whales, for example, have the specialized kidneys but need far less water than land mammals. Whales get water mostly from the small sea creatures, like krill, that form much of their diet. Seabirds, on the other hand, have special organs called salt glands above their eyes that extract excess salt from the bloodstream and excrete it through the nostrils. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 26273 - Posted: 05.29.2019

By Jane E. Brody Although the woman in her 50s had been effectively treated for depression, she remained plagued by symptoms that often accompany it: fatigue, sleepiness and lethargy, even though she thought she was getting enough sleep. With depression no longer causing her persistent symptoms, her psychiatrist advised her to consult a sleep specialist. Sure enough, a night in the sleep lab at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine revealed that while the woman was supposedly asleep, she experienced micro-awakenings about 18 times an hour, resulting in sleep that restored neither body nor brain. All night long, she would stop breathing for more than 10 seconds at a time, followed by a mini-arousal and a snore as she gasped for breath to raise the depleted oxygen level in her blood. Diagnosis: Obstructive sleep apnea, an increasingly common yet often missed or untreated condition that can result in poor quality of life, a risk of developing heart disease, stroke, diabetes and even cancer, and perhaps most important of all, a threefold increased risk of often-fatal motor vehicle accidents. Obstructive sleep apnea afflicts about 9 percent of women and 24 percent of men, most of them middle-aged or older, yet as many as 9 in 10 adults with this treatable condition remain undiagnosed, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. The condition is on the rise because the most frequent cause is obesity, which continues its unrelenting climb among American adults. Sleep apnea afflicts more than two people in five who have a body mass index of more than 30, and three in five adults with metabolic syndrome, Dr. Sigrid C. Veasey and Dr. Ilene M. Rosen wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine in April. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26272 - Posted: 05.28.2019

/ By Jennie Erin Smith Piedad’s house sits above the cemetery in Girardota, Colombia, just north of Medellín. From her front porch, the view gives way to green hills, each home to hamlets with sugarcane plots and tile-roofed houses tucked in among the trees. One of these hillside hamlets is where Piedad and her 11 siblings grew up. Their father, Horacio, worked in cane fields and sugar mills, and their mother sold fruit from her orchard; their grandmother made pots from clay she dug across the river. When earthquakes destroyed their home in 1979, the family moved into town and left rural life behind. Why should two families with parallel mutations co-exist in one tiny corner of the Andes? Horacio showed the first symptoms of dementia soon afterward. He ignored the food he was served and got lost returning from church. He grew aggressive and delusional, and Piedad would return from her job at a sugar-packing plant to help bathe him, holding back tears as he kicked and punched. Horacio died in 1984 from what his doctors called senile dementia, the same disease that killed his father and three of his siblings. By the early 2000s, four of Piedad’s own siblings, then in their 40s and 50s, were showing signs of dementia. A local doctor referred them to a group of investigators in Medellín who studied families with a unique genetic mutation that causes early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Nicknamed the Paisa mutation after the people of Colombia’s Antioquia region, who call themselves paisas, it occurred on a gene, called presenilin-1, implicated in familial Alzheimer’s. The families affected tended to be white farmers living in remote mountain towns that felt untouched by time. Copyright 2019 Undark

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 26271 - Posted: 05.28.2019

by Scott Alexander The first thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is its size. By conservative estimates, a quarter of the psychiatrists in the United States are packed into a single giant San Francisco convention center, more than 15,000 people. Being in a crowd of 15,000 psychiatrists is a weird experience. You realize that all psychiatrists look alike in an indefinable way. The men all look balding, yet dignified. The women all look maternal, yet stylish. Sometimes you will see a knot of foreign-looking people huddled together, their nametags announcing them as the delegation from the Nigerian Psychiatric Association or the Nepalese Psychiatric Association or somewhere else very far away. But however exotic, something about them remains ineffably psychiatrist. The second thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that the staircase is shaming you for not knowing enough about Vraylar®. Seems kind of weird. Maybe I’ll just take the escalator… …no, the escalator is advertising Latuda®, the “number one branded atypical antipsychotic”. Aaaaaah! Maybe I should just sit down for a second and figure out what to do next… AAAAH, CAN’T SIT DOWN, VRAYLAR® HAS GOTTEN TO THE BENCHES TOO! Surely there’s a non-Vraylar bench somewhere in this 15,000 person convention center! …whatever, close enough. You know how drug companies pay six or seven figures for thirty-second television ads just on the off chance that someone with the relevant condition might be watching? You know how they employ drug reps to flatter, cajole, and even seduce doctors who might prescribe their drug? Well, it turns out that having 15,000 psychiatrists in one building sparks a drug company feeding frenzy that makes piranhas look sedate by comparison. Every flat surface is covered in drug advertisements.

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 26270 - Posted: 05.28.2019

Sandeep Ravindran In 2012, computer scientist Dharmendra Modha used a powerful supercomputer to simulate the activity of more than 500 billion neurons—more, even, than the 85 billion or so neurons in the human brain. It was the culmination of almost a decade of work, as Modha progressed from simulating the brains of rodents and cats to something on the scale of humans. The simulation consumed enormous computational resources—1.5 million processors and 1.5 petabytes (1.5 million gigabytes) of memory—and was still agonizingly slow, 1,500 times slower than the brain computes. Modha estimates that to run it in biological real time would have required 12 gigawatts of energy, about six times the maximum output capacity of the Hoover Dam. “And yet, it was just a cartoon of what the brain does,” says Modha, chief scientist for brain-inspired computing at IBM Almaden Research Center in northern California. The simulation came nowhere close to replicating the functionality of the human brain, which uses about the same amount of power as a 20-watt lightbulb. Since the early 2000s, improved hardware and advances in experimental and theoretical neuroscience have enabled researchers to create ever larger and more-detailed models of the brain. But the more complex these simulations get, the more they run into the limitations of conventional computer hardware, as illustrated by Modha’s power-hungry model. © 1986–2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 26269 - Posted: 05.28.2019

By Susan Rudnick I was a month shy of turning 16 when a red-faced man in a white coat told me I had been born without a uterus. With a huge dark desk between us, he told me I would never menstruate, and would need plastic surgery to correct the anomaly of my vaginal opening that was a mere dimple, so that one day I would to be able to have sexual intercourse. I have M.R.K.H. These four letters stand for Mayer, Rokitansky, Küster and Hauser, the names of the four doctors who discovered the syndrome over a hundred years ago. This anatomical condition occurs during the first trimester of pregnancy, when the duct that normally forms the uterus, cervix and vaginal canal fails to develop. Ovaries do develop, but there is no menstruation. Although the condition is rare, impacting just one in every 4,500 women, for over 40 years I thought I was like nobody else. At the time of the diagnosis, he described my symptoms but neglected to tell that the condition had a name. Without a name for my syndrome, I couldn’t connect with others like me. I was left to navigate my life feeling defective, marginalized and alone. I carried my difference as a secret shame, acting as if I were just like other people. In high school I learned to pretend I had my period. I even talked about having period cramps, which I never had. Even though swimming and water ballet club were my favorite activities, I didn’t go swimming a few times so that it would seem as if I had my period, like all the other girls. There was nothing I wouldn’t do to be like everybody else. One day in college I was lying in my dorm room bed with a gaggle of women, when the conversation turned to diaphragms, something I would never need, but which seemed a rite of passage. Birth control was way beyond my knowledge base. This was in the early 60s, when abortions were still illegal, but you could go to Planned Parenthood and get fitted for a diaphragm. While my girlfriends laughed about looking at condoms in the drugstore, I spaced out. I felt like such an outsider carrying the pain of my secret. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 26268 - Posted: 05.28.2019

Bryan Clark Last spring, a study set the internet ablaze with sensational headlines promising an early death for those with nontraditional sleep schedules. It wasn’t the conclusion of the study, or its researchers. But in the bombastic world of science reporting, it didn’t really matter. Originally published in the journal Chronobiology International, the study looked at the chronotypes — a means of classifying one’s predisposition for sleeping at certain hours — of more than 430,000 people over a six-and-a-half-year period. Scouring data from the National Health Service in England and the NHS Central Register in Scotland, researchers sought to find out what, if any, negative health impacts awaited those with a night-owl schedule. After sorting nearly half a million people into four groups — definite larks (larks are early birds, those most likely to rise with the sun), definite owls (those more likely to retire to bed with the sun than to wake with it), moderate larks and moderate owls — researchers reported some troubling findings. More than 10,000 participants died during the study period. Of those deaths, the bulk seemed to be the result of natural causes. The study didn’t necessarily seek to link death with sleep deprivation, but rather to “comorbidity” — the occurrence in one person of two or more conditions, such as psychological or neurological disorders, diabetes and the like. With each incremental shift toward a night-owl schedule, comorbidities became more common, increasing the risk of an early death. But while saying that night owls are going to die early makes for an eye-catching headline, the real story isn’t quite that simple. The story behind the study It’s evident that owls’ nontraditional schedules put them at risk of significant health problems. Nearly every study on this chronotype has returned troubling findings. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 26267 - Posted: 05.24.2019

By Megan Schmidt “The women’s winter is here. The freeze is upon us,” warns a Game of Thrones parody about men and women’s office temperature preferences. If you have a Y chromosome, you probably haven’t experienced “women’s winter.” As the video explains, women’s winter is “when spring turns to summer and there’s blossom on the trees, the office air doth turns to ice and all the women freeze.” Although the skit is now a few years old, it perfectly captures women’s daily struggle with overly air-conditioned workplaces. To some people, thermostat complaints might seem trivial. But a new study has found that cold offices do more than make women shiver. Thermostat settings geared for men’s comfort — typically cooler temperatures — may actually disadvantage women by lowering their ability to perform some tasks. The study, published in PLOS One, found that women are better at math and word tests when room temperatures are warmer. The women in the study answered more questions correctly and submitted more answers overall during the timed tests. Men, on the other hand, performed marginally better on the same tests at cooler room temperatures, the researchers found. Temperature didn’t influence performance on the logic test for either gender. Study author Agne Kajackaite, a behavioral economics researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, said the research illustrates that “the battle for the thermostat is not just a complaint about comfort levels.” When it comes to women succeeding in the classroom or in the workplace, room temperatures may make a big difference.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 26266 - Posted: 05.24.2019

Laura Sanders Advantages of speaking a second language are obvious: easier logistics when traveling, wider access to great literature and, of course, more people to talk with. Some studies have also pointed to the idea that polyglots have stronger executive functioning skills, brain abilities such as switching between tasks and ignoring distractions. But a large study of bilingual children in the U.S. finds scant evidence of those extra bilingual brain benefits. Bilingual children performed no better in tests measuring such thinking skills than children who knew just one language, researchers report May 20 in Nature Human Behaviour. To look for a relationship between bilingualism and executive function, researchers relied on a survey of U.S. adolescents called the ABCD study. From data collected at 21 research sites across the country, researchers identified 4,524 kids ages 9 and 10. Of these children, 1,740 spoke English and a second language (mostly Spanish, though 40 second languages were represented). On three tests that measured executive function, such as the ability to ignore distractions or quickly switch between tasks with different rules, the bilingual children performed similarly to children who spoke only English, the researchers found. “We really looked,” says study coauthor Anthony Dick, a developmental cognitive neuroscientist at Florida International University in Miami said. “We didn’t find anything.” |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 26265 - Posted: 05.24.2019

By Anna Groves | Bipolar patients are seven times more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease, according to a new study. Though the news may be disheartening to those suffering from the already-trying condition, the link might also lead to clues about the causes behind the two conditions. Parkinson’s is a complex disease associated with a gradual decline in dopamine levels produced by neurons, or brain cells. It eventually leads to impaired movements and other bodily functions. The causes are unknown, and there is no cure. Bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depressive illness, is characterized by episodic fluctuations in mood, concentration or energy levels. Its causes are also unknown, though some bipolar-associated genes have been identified. Researchers are still figuring out how brain structure and function changes under the disease. Previous research has linked Parkinson’s with depression. So when the authors of the new study, most of whom are practicing physicians, noticed some of their bipolar patients developing Parkinson’s, they wondered if there was a connection. The study, out today in Neurology, was led by Huang Mao-Hsuan, who practices in the department of psychiatry at Taipei Veterans General Hospital. The researchers compared data from two groups of adults in the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database. Members of one group — over 56,000 individuals — were diagnosed with bipolar disorder between 2001 and 2009. The other — 225,000 individuals — had never been diagnosed with the disorder. No one in either cohort had received a Parkinson’s diagnosis and all the patients were over 20. And researchers ensured the two groups had similar ages, socioeconomic status, and other traits that might influence health.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 26264 - Posted: 05.23.2019

By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online Patients who have had a stroke caused by bleeding in the brain can safely take aspirin to cut their risk of future strokes and heart problems, according to a new study. Aspirin thins the blood and so doctors have been cautious about giving it, fearing it could make bleeds worse. But The Lancet research suggests it does not increase the risk of new brain bleeds, and may even lower it. Experts say the "strong indication" needs confirming with more research. Only take daily aspirin if your doctor recommends it, they advise. Aspirin benefits and risks Aspirin is best known as a painkiller and is sometimes also taken to help bring down a fever. But daily low-dose (75mg) aspirin is used to make the blood less sticky and can help to prevent heart attacks and stroke. Most strokes are caused by clots in the blood vessels of the brain but some are caused by bleeds. Because aspirin thins the blood, it can sometimes make the patient bleed more easily. And aspirin isn't safe for everyone. It can also cause indigestion and, more rarely, lead to stomach ulcers. Never give aspirin to children under the age of 16 (unless their doctor prescribes it). It can make children more likely to develop a very rare but serious illness called Reye's syndrome (which can cause liver and brain damage). The study The research involved 537 people from across the UK who had had a brain bleed while taking anti-platelet medicines, to stop blood clotting, including aspirin, dipyridamole or another drug called clopidogrel. Half of the patients were chosen at random to continue on their medicine (following a short pause immediately after their brain bleed), while the other half were told to stop taking it Over the five years of the study, 12 of those who kept taking the tablets suffered a brain bleed, compared with 23 of those who stopped © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 26263 - Posted: 05.23.2019