By Gina Kolata At least six million obese teenagers in the United States are candidates for weight-loss surgery, experts estimate. Fewer than 1,000 of them get it each year. Many of these adolescents already have complications of obesity, like diabetes or high blood pressure. But doctors have been uncertain just how well surgery works for young patients, and whether they can handle the consequences, including a severely restricted diet. A new study provides some hopeful answers. Researchers followed 161 teenagers aged 13 to 19, and 396 adults aged 25 to 50, for five years after weight-loss surgery. The teenagers actually fared better than the adults. The adolescents lost at least as much weight, and were more likely to see high blood pressure and diabetes ease or go away, the investigators reported on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. “This really changes the game,” said Dr. Amir Ghaferi, a bariatric surgeon at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the research. The paper, he said, added to evidence that obesity, like cancer, is best treated early, before long-term damage from related conditions, such as high blood pressure and diabetes, sets in. To have the surgery, teenagers in the study had to meet the same criteria as adults: a body mass index of at least 35 — for instance, a person who is 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighs 192 pounds or more — and obesity-related health problems. Alternately, the adolescents could have a B.M.I. of at least 40 — such as a person who is 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighs at least 220 pounds — without other conditions linked to obesity. There is no exact data on the number of teenagers who meet those criteria in the United States, said Dr. Thomas Inge, chief of pediatric surgery at Children’s Hospital Colorado and lead author of the new study. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 26242 - Posted: 05.17.2019

Aimee Cunningham Nutrition advice can be confusing. Studies that bolster the health benefits of a food or nutrient seem inevitably to be followed by other work undercutting the good news. One reason for the muddle is that nutrition studies sometimes depend on people’s self-reporting of past meals. And because people may forget or even lie about what they’ve been consuming, that data can be flawed, creating conflicting reports about what’s healthy and what’s not, research has shown. But even if people had a photographic memory of all of their meals, that alone wouldn’t provide enough information. How bodies react to and process food can vary widely from person to person and be dependent on genes, the microbes that live inside the gut, a person’s current health, what the food contains or even how it was made (SN: 1/9/16, p. 8). “The problem is that nutrition research is rocket science,” says David Ludwig, a pediatric endocrinologist at Boston Children’s Hospital. “There are potentially thousands of different nutrients and factors in food that could influence our biology or our senses as we eat. Those can interact in unpredictable and complicated ways.” Given the complexity that comes with researching diet, one approach is to study people in a controlled environment, so that researchers know exactly what the participants are eating. A study that tied eating highly processed foods to weight gain, published online May 16 in Cell Metabolism, did just that. Here’s what the researchers learned — and what they still can’t answer. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 26241 - Posted: 05.17.2019

By Kim Tingley Humans have been drinking fermented concoctions since the beginning of recorded time. But despite that long relationship with alcohol, we still don’t know what exactly the molecule does to our brains to create a feeling of intoxication. Likewise, though the health harms of heavy drinking are fairly obvious, scientists have struggled to identify what negative impacts lesser volumes may lead to. Last September, the prestigious peer-reviewed British medical journal The Lancet published a study that is thought to be the most comprehensive global analysis of the risks of alcohol consumption. Its conclusion, which the media widely reported, sounded unequivocal: “The safest level of drinking is none.” Sorting through the latest research on how to optimize your well-being is a constant and confounding feature of modern life. A scientific study becomes a press release becomes a news alert, shedding context at each stage. Often, it’s a steady stream of resulting headlines that seem to contradict one another, which makes it easy to justify ignoring them. “There’s so much information on chocolate, coffee, alcohol,” says Nicholas Steneck, a former consultant to the Office of Research Integrity for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “You basically believe what you want to believe unless people are dropping dead all over the place.” Scientific studies are written primarily for other scientists. But to make informed decisions, members of the general public have to engage with them, too. Does our current method of doing so — study by study, conclusion by conclusion — make us more informed as readers or simply more mistrustful? As Steneck asks: “If we turn our back on all research results, how do we make decisions? How do you know what research to trust?” It’s a question this new monthly column aims to explore: What can, and can’t, studies tell us when it comes to our health? © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26240 - Posted: 05.17.2019

Bruce Bower People and Neandertals separated from a common ancestor more than 800,000 years ago — much earlier than many researchers had thought. That conclusion, published online May 15 in Science Advances, stems from an analysis of early fossilized Neandertal teeth found at a Spanish site called Sima de los Huesos. During hominid evolution, tooth crowns changed in size and shape at a steady rate, says Aida Gómez-Robles, a paleoanthropologist at University College London. The Neandertal teeth, which date to around 430,000 years ago, could have evolved their distinctive shapes at a pace typical of other hominids only if Neandertals originated between 800,000 and 1.2 million years ago, she finds. Gómez-Robles’ study indicates that, if a common ancestor of present-day humans and Neandertals existed after around 1 million years ago, “there wasn’t enough time for Neandertal teeth to change at the rate [teeth] do in other parts of the human family tree” in order to end up looking like the Spanish finds, says palaeoanthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Many researchers have presumed that a species dubbed Homo heidelbergensis, thought to have inhabited Africa and Europe, originated around 700,000 years ago and gave rise to an ancestor of both Neandertals and Homo sapiens by roughly 400,000 years ago. Genetic evidence that Sima de los Huesos fossils came from Neandertals raised suspicions that a common ancestor with H. sapiens existed well before that (SN Online: 3/14/16). Recent Neandertal DNA studies place that common ancestor at between 550,000 and 765,000 years old. But those results rest on contested estimates of how fast and how consistently genetic changes accumulated over time. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 26239 - Posted: 05.17.2019

By LUKE DITTRICH On Valentine’s Day, 2018, five months after Hurricane Maria made landfall, Daniel Phillips stood at the edge of a denuded forest on the eastern half of a 38-acre island known as Cayo Santiago, a clipboard in his hand, his eyes on the monkeys. The island sits about a half-mile off the southeast coast of Puerto Rico, near a village called Punta Santiago. Phillips and his co-workers left the mainland shortly after dawn, and the monkeys had already begun to gather by the time they arrived, their screams and oddly birdlike chirps louder than the low rumble of the motorboat that ferried the humans. The monkeys were everywhere. Some were drinking from a large pool of stagnant rainwater; some were grooming each other, nit-picking; some were still gnawing on the plum-size pellets of chow that Phillips hurled into the crowd a half-hour before. Two sat on the naked branch of a tree, sporadically mating. They were all rhesus macaques, a species that grows to a maximum height of about two and a half feet and a weight of about 30 pounds. They have long, flexible tails; dark, expressive eyes; and fur ranging from blond to dark brown. Phillips’s notebook was full of empty tables. There were places for the monkeys’ ID numbers, which were tattooed on their chests and inner thighs, places for a description of their behavior, places for the time of day. There was a place for his own name, too, and he wrote it at the top of each page. Daniel Phillips is not a Puerto Rican name, whatever that means, but he was born here, in a big hospital in Fajardo. He arrived more than a month early and spent his first weeks in an incubator, but grew up to be a high school and college wrestler; as a biology major, he became interested in monkeys, and was invited by a primatologist from Duke University to take a job as a research assistant here on Cayo Santiago.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 26238 - Posted: 05.15.2019

By Simon Makin Something in elderly blood is bad for brains. Plasma from old mice or humans worsens cognition and biological indicators of brain health, when infused into young mice. Conversely, plasma from young mice (or humans) rejuvenates old brains. Much of this research has come from neurobiologist Tony Wyss-Coray’s group at Stanford University, which is pursuing what constituents of blood might be responsible. One previous study identified a protein, which declines with age, that has powerful beneficial effects. That protein can cross from the blood into the brain, but Wyss-Coray wondered how certain molecules contained in blood typically “talk” to the brain. Must they interact with brain cells directly, or can they communicate indirectly, through the gateway to the brain, the blood-brain barrier? To investigate, Wyss-Coray’s team tried a new approach in their latest study, published May 13 in Nature Medicine. “We reasoned that the most obvious way plasma would interact with the brain is through blood vessels,” Wyss-Coray says. “So, we looked at proteins that change with age and had something to do with the vasculature.” One protein that becomes more abundant with age, VCAM1, stood out, and the team showed that it appears to play a pivotal role in the effects of aged blood on the brain. Biological and cognitive measures alike indicated that blocking VCAM1 not only prevents old plasma from damaging young mouse brains but can even reverse deficits in old mice. The work has important implications for age-related cognitive decline and brain diseases. “Cognitive dysfunction in aging is one of our biggest biomedical challenges, and we have no effective medical therapies. None,” says neuroscientist Dena Dubal, of the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study. “It’s such an important line of investigation; it has tremendous implications.” © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26237 - Posted: 05.15.2019

By MOISES VELASQUEZ-MANOFF When Catherine Jacobson first heard about the promise of cannabis, she was at wits’ end. Her 3-year-old son, Ben, had suffered from epileptic seizures since he was 3 months old, a result of a brain malformation called polymicrogyria. Over the years, Jacobson and her husband, Aaron, have tried giving him at least 16 different drugs, but none provided lasting relief. They lived with the grim prognosis that their son — whose cognitive abilities never advanced beyond those of a 1-year-old — would likely continue to endure seizures until the cumulative brain injuries led to his death. In early 2012, when Jacobson learned about cannabis at a conference organized by the Epilepsy Therapy Project, she felt a flicker of hope. The meeting, in downtown San Francisco, was unlike others she had attended, which were usually geared toward lab scientists and not directly focused on helping patients. This gathering aimed to get new treatments into patients’ hands as quickly as possible. Attendees weren’t just scientists and people from the pharmaceutical industry. They also included, on one day of the event, families of patients with epilepsy. The tip came from a father named Jason David, with whom Jacobson began talking by chance outside a presentation hall. He wasn’t a presenter or even very interested in the goings-on at the conference. He had mostly lost faith in conventional medicine during his own family’s ordeal. But he claimed to have successfully treated his son’s seizures with a cannabis extract, and now he was trying to spread the word to anyone who would listen. The idea to try cannabis extract came to David after he found out that the federal government held a patent on cannabidiol, a molecule derived from the cannabis plant that is commonly referred to as CBD. Unlike the better-known marijuana molecule delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, CBD isn’t psychoactive; it doesn’t get users high. But in the late 1990s, scientists at the National Institutes of Health discovered that it could produce remarkable medicinal effects. In test tubes, the molecule shielded neurons from oxidative stress, a damaging process common in many neurological disorders, including epilepsy.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Epilepsy
Link ID: 26236 - Posted: 05.15.2019

Sarah Boseley Health editor A drug that could prolong the lives of children with a rare muscle-wasting disease has been approved by the NHS in England after lengthy negotiations with the manufacturer over the high price. Spinraza could help between 600 and 1,200 children and adults in England and Wales who have the genetic condition spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). It affects the nerves in the spinal cord, making muscles weaker and causing problems with movement, breathing and swallowing. It can shorten the life expectancy of babies and toddlers. The drug can slow the progress of the disease but the company making the drug, Biogen, was asking for a high price, that effectively amounted to more than £400,000 for a year of good quality life, according to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), which assesses value for money. Nice said there was limited data on its long-term effectiveness and turned it down last August, to the distress of affected families. Simon Stevens, the NHS England chief executive, said agreement had been reached and children would shortly get Spinraza, the market name of the drug nusinursen. “This promising treatment has the potential to be life changing for children and their families,” said Stevens. “The NHS has now reached one of the most comprehensive deals in the world, which allows us to assess real-world evidence of its long-term benefits. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Muscles
Link ID: 26235 - Posted: 05.15.2019

By Gretchen Reynolds A need and desire to be in motion may have been bred into our DNA before we even became humans and could have helped to guide the evolution of our species, according to a fascinating new study of the genetics of physical activity. The study uses big data and sophisticated genetic analyses to determine that some of the gene variants associated with how much and whether people move seem to have joined our ancestors’ genome hundreds of thousands of years ago, making them integral to human existence and well-being and raising interesting questions about what that means today, when most humans are sedentary. There has been evidence for some time that whether and how much people and other animals move depends to some extent on family history and genetics. Past twin studies and genome-wide association studies — which scan genomes looking for snippets of DNA shared by individuals who also share certain traits — suggest that about 50 percent of physical activity behavior in people may depend on genes. Our tendency to move or not is different from our innate aerobic fitness. Someone could be born with a large inherited endurance capacity and no interest at all in leaving the couch, or vice versa. Little has been known, though, about when any of the gene variants associated with moving became integrated into the human genome, and that question matters. Many of the most common chronic illnesses and conditions in people today, including Type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease, osteoarthritis and others, are associated with being inactive. But some other species, including chimps, which share much of our DNA, retain robust good health even when they move relatively little. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 26234 - Posted: 05.15.2019

Mitchel Daniel If you’re looking for love, it pays to stand out from the crowd. Or at least that’s how it works in some parts of the animal kingdom. Scientists have found that in several species – green swordtail fish, Trinidadian guppies, fruit flies, Poecilia parae fish – ladies overwhelmingly go for the guy that looks different from the rest. But the reason for this attraction to novelty has remained a mystery. So my colleagues and I used the Trinidadian guppy to investigate the psychology behind why many females have an affinity for the unusual. Male features that attract females The guppy has long been a workhorse for biologists like me who are interested in understanding the mating decisions that animals make and the evolutionary forces behind those decisions. Male guppies attempt to woo females using courtship dances that show off the elaborate color patterns adorning their bodies. The females of the species are color pattern connoisseurs, carefully choosing among their suitors based, in large part, on their visual appeal. This tendency has made the guppy an excellent model for studying mate choice. Male guppies showcase their colors during their courtship dances. Many types of animals exhibit what evolutionary biologists call directional preferences, an attraction to more of a certain thing – think bigger antlers, a longer tail or brighter color spots. And there are evolutionary theories that help make sense of these preferences. If a male can grow more extreme features, that can be a sign that he is in good physical condition, has good genes, or would make a good parent. What’s less clear, though, is why females should value unusualness in a mate. © 2010–2019,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 26233 - Posted: 05.15.2019

By Benedict Carey The research on brain stimulation is advancing so quickly, and the findings are so puzzling, that a reader might feel tempted to simply pre-order a genius cap from Amazon, to make sense of it all later. In just the past month, scientists reported enhancing the working memory of older people, using electric current passed through a skullcap, and restoring some cognitive function in a brain-damaged woman, using implanted electrodes. Most recently, the Food and Drug Administration approved a smartphone-size stimulator intended to alleviate attention-deficit problems by delivering electric current through a patch placed on the forehead. Last year, another group of scientists announced that they, too, had created a brain implant that boosts memory storage. All the while, a do-it-yourself subculture continues to grow, of people who are experimenting with placing electrodes in their skulls or foreheads for brain “tuning.” Predicting where all these efforts are headed, and how and when they might converge in a grand methodology, is an exercise in rank speculation. Neuro-stimulation covers too many different techniques, for various applications and of varying quality. About the only certainties are the usual ones: that a genius cap won’t arrive anytime soon, and that any brain-zapping gizmo that provides real benefit also is likely to come with risk. Nevertheless, the field is worth watching because it hints at some elementary properties of brain function. Unlike psychiatric drugs, or psychotherapy, pulses of current can change people’s behavior very quickly, and reliably. Turn the current on and things happen; turn it off and the effect stops or tapers. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 26232 - Posted: 05.14.2019

Ian Tucker Dr Hannah Critchlow is a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge. Her debut book, The Science of Fate, examines how much of our life is predetermined at birth and to what extent we are in control of our destiny. How has the slow march of scientific research affected our concept of fate? On one hand, we know more about how genetics drives our lives, yet we also have more good evidence for things that we can do to shape our own outcomes. This concept of fate and destiny has around since the Greeks – it threads through different cultures and is deeply rooted in the way that we speak today; for instance, we often say that babies are born destined for greatness. It’s a seductive idea. If outcomes are predetermined, that absolves us of blame when things go wrong. Yeah, in some ways it’s a really nice idea, it’s a get-out-of-jail card: we are who we are, so we can just rest on our laurels. It’s quite reassuring. As a parent, I find it quite comforting for my child, because there are a millions of decisions that I have to make for him and it’s quite nice to think a lot of the work has been done now. The genes, the basic neural circuitry that acts as foundation for his life is already there. But as your book explains, our brains are quite plastic… In 2000, a landmark study demonstrated how the brains of London black-cab drivers changed as they took the Knowledge. The hippocampus, which is involved in navigation, learning and memory, enlarged in cabbies who passed the test. This study got a lot of attention and informed the idea that we can hone our brains in the same way as muscle and therefore change our ingrained habits, even become superhumans if we just train our brains in the right way. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26231 - Posted: 05.14.2019

By Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik The man and the woman sat down, facing each other in the dimly illuminated room. This was the first time the two young people had met, though they were about to become intensely familiar with each other—in an unusual sort of way. The researcher informed them that the purpose of the study was to understand “the perception of the face of another person.” The two participants were to gaze at each other’s eyes for 10 minutes straight, while maintaining a neutral facial expression, and pay attention to their partner’s face. After giving these instructions, the researcher stepped back and sat on one side of the room, away from the participants’ lines of sight. The two volunteers settled in their seats and locked eyes—feeling a little awkward at first, but suppressing uncomfortable smiles to comply with the scientist’s directions. Ten minutes had seemed like a long stretch to look deeply into the eyes of a stranger, but time started to lose its meaning after a while. Sometimes, the young couple felt as if they were looking at things from outside their own bodies. Other times, it seemed as if each moment contained a lifetime. Throughout their close encounter, each member of the duo experienced their partner’s face as everchanging. Human features became animal traits, transmogrifying into grotesqueries. There were eyeless faces, and faces with too many eyes. The semblances of dead relatives materialized. Monstrosities abounded. The bizarre perceptual phenomena that the pair witnessed were manifestations of the “strange face illusion,” first described by the psychologist Giovanni Caputo of the University of Urbino, Italy. Urbino’s original study, published in 2010, reported a new type of illusion, experienced by people looking at themselves in the mirror in low light conditions. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 26230 - Posted: 05.14.2019

By Cara Giaimo Here’s a pop quiz for you. Tom is taller than Dick. Dick is taller than Harry. Who’s taller, Harry or Tom? If you said Tom, congratulations! You just demonstrated what’s called “transitive inference” — the ability to compare things indirectly, based on previous juxtapositions. But before you pat yourself on the back too much, you should know that this skill was recently demonstrated by another creature: the humble paper wasp that might be living in your backyard right now. In the summer of 2017, researchers at the University of Michigan put two species of paper wasps through a transitive inference test. A statistically significant portion of the time, the wasps passed. Other animals — including rats, geese and cichlid fish — have also exhibited this capacity. But this study, which was published Tuesday in Biology Letters, is the first to successfully showcase it in an invertebrate (honeybees failed a similar test in 2004). Paper wasps are found on every continent except Antarctica. You might be near some right now. “They tend to nest in the eaves of houses, or inside barbecue grills,” said Elizabeth Tibbetts, the study’s lead author. In a previous study, Dr. Tibbetts showed that individual female wasps can identify one another by their distinct facial patterns, which resemble Rorschach ink blots. “When two wasps meet, they learn, ‘Oh, that’s what Suzy looks like,’” she said. “And the next time they meet, they remember who Suzy is.” In the spring, the females spend a lot of time brawling, getting in each other’s faces and trading slaps with their appendages. These matchups look like schoolyard tussles. “Some wasps will be fighting; some wasps will be watching the fights,” said Dr. Tibbetts. “It’s a very exciting time.” The wasps remember the winners and losers, and use them to establish a social hierarchy: the strongest reproduce, while the weaker ones do all the work. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 26229 - Posted: 05.11.2019

Jenny Kitzinger In 1991, a car crash left Munira Abdulla, a 32-year-old woman from the United Arab Emirates, with devastating brain injuries. Doctors reportedly thought she might never regain full consciousness. However, in late 2018, almost three decades after her initial injury, Abdulla showed signs of recovery – including calling out her son’s name. Abdulla’s story became public on April 22 2019, when an interview with her son was published in The National (a major news outlet in the United Arab Emirates). The following day it was reported by international media under headlines such as “Modern-day miracle: Woman wakes after almost three decades in a coma”. The story was framed as extraordinary and inspiring – and I received a flurry of calls from journalists asking me to explain what had happened. Was she trapped in her body all along? How will she adjust to the modern world? What does this mean for families considering whether it would be kinder to let a loved one die? Just like these journalists – working to a tight timeframe – I relied on The National’s report to try to contribute to the public discussion of Abdulla’s case. This is far from ideal but, looking at this original source, there were clues that, although a very unusual case, the “miracle” might have been overstated and oversimplified. © 2010–2019, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26228 - Posted: 05.11.2019

By Maggie Koerth-Baker Where is the loudest place in America? You might think New York City, or a major airport hub, or a concert you have suddenly become too old to appreciate. But that depends on what kind of noise you’re measuring. Sound is actually a physical thing. What we perceive as noise is the result of air molecules bumping into one another, like a Newton’s cradle toy. That movement eventually reaches our eardrums, which turn that tiny wiggle into an audible signal. But human ears can’t convert all molecular motion to sound. Sometimes the particles are jostling one another too fast. Sometimes they’re too slow. Sometimes, the motion is just happening in the wrong medium — through the Earth, say, instead of through the air. And when you start listening for the sounds we can’t hear, the loudest place in America can end up being right under your feet. Scientists have tools that can detect these “silent” waves, and they’ve found a lot of noise happening all over the U.S. Those noises are made by the cracking of rocks deep in the Earth along natural fault lines and the splashing of whitecaps on the ocean. But they’re also made by our factories, power plants, mines and military. “Any kind of mechanical process is going to generate energetic waves, said Omar Marcillo, staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Some of that goes through the atmosphere as acoustic waves, and some goes through the ground as seismic waves.” Marcillo’s work focuses on the seismic. © 2019 ABC News Internet Ventures.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 26227 - Posted: 05.11.2019

By David Grimm CORVALLIS, OREGON—Carl the cat was born to beat the odds. Abandoned on the side of the road in a Rubbermaid container, the scrawny black kitten—with white paws, white chest, and a white, skunklike stripe down his nose—was rescued by Kristyn Vitale, a postdoc at Oregon State University here who just happens to study the feline mind. Now, Vitale hopes Carl will pull off another coup, by performing a feat of social smarts researchers once thought was impossible. In a stark white laboratory room, Vitale sits against the back wall, flanked by two overturned cardboard bowls. An undergraduate research assistant kneels a couple of meters away, holding Carl firmly. "Carl!" Vitale calls, and then points to one of the bowls. The assistant lets go. Toddlers pass this test easily. They know that when we point at something, we're telling them to look at it—an insight into the intentions of others that will become essential as children learn to interact with people around them. Most other animals, including our closest living relative, chimpanzees, fail the experiment. But about 20 years ago, researchers discovered something surprising: Dogs pass the test with flying colors. The finding shook the scientific community and led to an explosion of studies into the canine mind. Cats like Carl were supposed to be a contrast. Like dogs, cats have lived with us in close quarters for thousands of years. But unlike our canine pals, cats descend from antisocial ancestors, and humans have spent far less time aggressively molding them into companions. So researchers thought cats couldn't possibly share our brain waves the way dogs do. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 26226 - Posted: 05.10.2019

Chauncey DeVega Human behavior is a function of both nature and nurture. This, of course, extends to politics. Hence, researchers have shown that, on average, the brains of conservative authoritarians as compared to liberals are quite different from one another. For example, conservative authoritarians are more fear-centered, tend to fixate on negativity, default to order and hierarchy, and are averse to new stimuli. By comparison, liberals are more tolerant of ambiguity and are more open to new experiences. The brains of liberals also seek out novelty. However, there is an important qualifier: the social dynamics of a given society at a specific time also have a profound impact on how nature and nurture interact and the types of human behavior which results. Ultimately, human beings are much more than the sum of their parts — though biology may, in fact, play a very outsize role in human behavior. In the United States and Europe, the relationship between nature, nurture and politics is particularly important in light of our shared authoritarian moment. How are right-wing authoritarian leaders such as Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen are able to use fear to stir up racism, nativism, bigotry, and even violence among their supporters? © 2018 Salon Media Group, Inc

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 26225 - Posted: 05.10.2019

By Elizabeth Pennisi When the ancestors of cave fish and certain crickets moved into pitchblack caverns, their eyes virtually disappeared over generations. But fish that ply the sea at depths greater than sunlight can penetrate have developed super-vision, highly attuned to the faint glow and twinkle given off by other creatures. They owe this power, evolutionary biologists have learned, to an extraordinary increase in the number of genes for rod opsins, retinal proteins that detect dim light. Those extra genes have diversified to produce proteins capable of capturing every possible photon at multiple wavelengths—which could mean that despite the darkness, the fish roaming the deep ocean actually see in color. The finding "really shakes up the dogma of deep-sea vision," says Megan Porter, an evolutionary biologist studying vision at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu who was not involved in the work. Researchers had observed that the deeper a fish lives, the simpler its visual system is, a trend they assumed would continue to the bottom. "That [the deepest dwellers] have all these opsins means there's a lot more complexity in the interplay between light and evolution in the deep sea than we realized," Porter says. At a depth of 1000 meters, the last glimmer of sunlight is gone. But over the past 15 years, researchers have realized that the depths are pervaded by a faint bioluminescence from flashing shrimp, octopus, bacteria, and even fish. Most vertebrate eyes could barely detect this subtle shimmer. To learn how fish can see it, a team led by evolutionary biologist Walter Salzburger from the University of Basel in Switzerland studied deep-sea fishes' opsin proteins. Variation in the opsins' amino acid sequences changes the wavelength of light detected, so multiple opsins make color vision possible. One opsin, RH1, works well in low light. Found in the eye's rod cells, it enables humans to see in the dark—but only in black and white. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 26224 - Posted: 05.10.2019

Sara Reardon The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be required to reduce its use of non-human primates in research, under a spending bill approved on 8 May by a committee in the US House of Representatives. The bill would direct the NIH “to accelerate efforts to reduce and replace the use of nonhuman primates with alternative research models” in its laboratories. It would apply to the 2020 budget year, which begins on 1 October, 2019. The agency would also be required to produce a report on the number and purpose of primates it uses in research, the amount of pain they feel and a timeline for replacing and retiring the animals. To become law, the bill would need to win approval from the full House, the Senate and President Donald Trump. Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard (Democrat, California), who has worked for years to curb and regulate animal research, added the provision to the spending legislation for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the NIH’s parent. Roybal-Allard and three other members of Congress requested a bioethical review of experiments involving baby monkeys at an NIH lab in 2014. The review resulted in adjustments to some of the procedures involving the animals. The agency ended those studies in late 2015.

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 26223 - Posted: 05.10.2019