Ruth Williams The brains of people in vegetative, partially conscious, or fully conscious states have differing profiles of activity as revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), according to a report today (February 6) in Science Advances. The results of the study indicate that, compared with patients lacking consciousness, the brains of healthy individuals exhibit highly dynamic and complex connectivity. “This new study provides a substantial advance in characterizing the ‘fingerprints’ of consciousness in the brain” Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, UK, who was not involved in the project, writes in an email to The Scientist. “It opens new doors to determining conscious states—or their absence—in a range of different conditions.” A person can lose consciousness temporarily, such as during sleep or anesthesia, or more permanently as is the case with certain brain injuries. But while unconsciousness manifests behaviorally as a failure to respond to stimuli, such behavior is not necessarily the result of unconsciousness. Some seemingly unresponsive patients, for example, can display brain activities similar to those of fully conscious individuals when asked to imagine performing a physical task such as playing tennis. Such a mental response in the absence of physical feedback is a condition known as cognitive-motor dissociation. Researchers are therefore attempting to build a better picture of what is happening in the human brain during consciousness and unconsciousness. In some studies, electroencephalography (EEG) recordings of the brain’s electrical activities during sleep, under anesthesia, or after brain injury have revealed patterns of brain waves associated with consciousness. But, says Jacobo Sitt of the Institute of Brain and Spinal Cord in Paris, such measurements do not provide good spatial information about brain activity. With fMRI, on the other hand, “we know where the activity is coming from.” © 1986 - 2019 The Scientist.

Keyword: Consciousness; Brain imaging
Link ID: 25941 - Posted: 02.08.2019

By Lee Dugatkin Like many breakthroughs in science, Dmitri Belyaev’s silver fox domestication experiment began with a thunderbolt: one simple, powerful, new idea. Born of a parish priest in early 20th century Russia, the geneticist proposed that all domestic animals were tamed through a generations-long process in which our distant ancestors repeatedly chose the calmest animals — those that were friendliest to people — for breeding. Whether horses for transport, dogs for protection, pigs for food, or oxen for labor, the essential trait was that the animals not try to bite the hand that fed them. Belyaev went on to speculate that all of the other characteristics we tend to see in domesticated species — their curly tails, floppy ears, juvenile facial, and body features — were somehow byproducts of this selection for the friendliest of the friendly. As a test, Belyaev decided that he would build a dog out of a fox, in real time, to understand how man’s best friend came to be. No one had ever attempted anything like it. No matter, he would try. At the time, in Stalinist Russia, the idea was considered radical and out of line with State orthodoxy. There were men who might very well have thrown the scientist in prison for what he was dreaming. But he would perform his magic in a far off, frozen land: The Siberian town of Novosibirsk, where winter temperatures can plummet to a bone-chilling -50 degrees Fahrenheit. Some 60 years later, his experiment is still going. It is one of the longest running science experiments ever, having outlived even its creator. And after all this time, it is still shaping the way we think about fundamental questions in biology — and even influencing the way we understand our own evolutionary trajectory. Copyright 2019 Undark

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 25940 - Posted: 02.08.2019

By Lisa L. Gill People have been turning to cannabis for its possible health benefits for a long, long time. Its ability to help people, for example, is mentioned in the Atharvaveda, a Hindu text that dates back to around 1500 B.C., and its use for inducing sleep is described in a 1200 A.D. Chinese medical text. Today, people are still using cannabis to help them sleep, particularly one form of it: CBD, or cannabidiol. That’s a compound found in marijuana and hemp that doesn’t get you high, and that has recently exploded in popularity because of its potential to treat other health problems, including pain and anxiety. In a recent nationally representative Consumer Reports survey, about 10 percent of Americans who reported trying CBD said they used it to help them sleep, and a majority of those people said it worked. It’s easy to understand why people are turning to CBD to help with sleep: Almost 80 percent of Americans say they have trouble sleeping at least once a week, according to another recent nationally representative CR survey of 1,267 U.S. adults. And many existing treatments, particularly prescription and over-the-counter drugs, are often not very effective—and are risky, too. A small but growing body of scientific research provides some support for CBD as a sleep aid. A study out this month, for example, suggests CBD might help people with short-term sleep problems. © 2019 Consumer Reports, Inc.

Keyword: Sleep; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25939 - Posted: 02.08.2019

By Alex Fox If math is the language of the universe, bees may have just uttered their first words. New research suggests these busybodies of the insect world are capable of addition and subtraction—using colors in the place of plus and minus symbols. In the animal kingdom, the ability to count—or at least distinguish between differing quantities—isn’t unusual: It has been seen in frogs, spiders, and even fish. But solving equations using symbols is rare air, so far only achieved by famously brainy animals such as chimpanzees and African grey parrots. Enter the honey bee (Apis mellifera). Building on prior research that says the social insects can count to four and understand the concept of zero, researchers wanted to test the limits of what their tiny brains can do. Scientists trained 14 bees to link the colors blue and yellow to addition and subtraction, respectively. They placed the bees at the entrance of a Y-shaped maze, where they were shown several shapes in either yellow or blue. If the shapes were blue, bees got a reward if they went to the end of the maze with one more blue shape (the other end had one less blue shape); if the shapes were yellow, they got a reward if they went to the end of the maze with one less yellow shape. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Attention; Evolution
Link ID: 25938 - Posted: 02.08.2019

By James Gorman If you want to know what makes hummingbirds tick, it’s best to avoid most poetry about them. Bird-beam of the summer day, — Whither on your sunny way? Whither? Probably off to have a bloodcurdling fight, that’s whither. John Vance Cheney wrote that verse, but let’s not point fingers. He has plenty of poetic company, all seduced by the color, beauty and teeny tininess of the hummingbird but failed to notice the ferocity burning in its rapidly beating heart. The Aztecs weren’t fooled. Their god of war, Huitzilopochtli, was a hummingbird. The Aztecs loved war, and they loved the beauty of the birds as well. It seems they didn’t find any contradiction in the marriage of beauty and bloodthirsty aggression. Scientists understood that aggression was a deep and pervasive part of hummingbird life. But they, too, have had their blind spots. The seemingly perfect match of nectar-bearing flowers to slender nectar-sipping beaks clearly showed that hummingbirds were shaped by co-evolution. It seemed clear that, evolutionarily, plants were in charge. Their need for reliable pollinators produced flowers with a shape that demanded a long slender bill. Hummingbird evolution obliged. But hummingbirds also heard the call of battle, which demanded a different evolutionary course. Some of those slender, delicate beaks have been reshaped into strong, sharp and dangerous weapons. In a recent paper organizing and summing up 10 years of research, Alejandro Rico-Guevara and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, shared evidence gathered by high-speed video about how the deadly beaks are deployed in male-to-male conflict. Like the horns of bighorn sheep or the giant mandibles of stag beetles, hummingbird beaks are used to fight off rivals for mates. This is sexual selection, a narrow part of natural selection, in which the improvement of mating chances is the dominant force. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 25937 - Posted: 02.06.2019

Sujata Gupta The task was designed to scare the kids. One by one, adults guided children, ranging in age from 3 to 7, into a dimly lit room containing a mysterious covered mound. To build anticipation, the adults intoned, “I have something in here to show you,” or “Let’s be quiet so it doesn’t wake up.” The adult then uncovered the mound — revealed to be a terrarium — and pulled out a realistic looking plastic snake. Throughout the 90-second setup, each child wore a small motion sensor affixed to his or her belt. Those sensors measured the child’s movements, such as when they sped up or twisted around, at 100 times per second. Researchers wanted to see if the movements during a scary situation differed between children diagnosed with depression or anxiety and children without such a diagnosis. It turns out they did. Children with a diagnosis turned further away from the perceived threat — the covered terrarium — than those without a diagnosis. In fact, the sensors could identify very young children who have depression or anxiety about 80 percent of the time, researchers report January 16 in PLOS One. Such a tool could be useful because, even as it’s become widely accepted that children as young as age 3 can suffer from mental health disorders, diagnosis remains difficult. Such children often escape notice because they hold their emotions inside. It’s increasingly clear, though, that these children are at risk of mental and physical health problems later in life, says Lisabeth DiLalla, a developmental psychologist at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine in Carbondale. “The question is: ‘Can we turn that around?’” |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Depression
Link ID: 25936 - Posted: 02.06.2019

By Jen Gunter Pregnant women are given a long list of medical recommendations that can come across as patriarchal don’ts: Don’t eat raw fish. Don’t consume deli meats. Don’t do hot yoga! Don’t drink. There’s scientific evidence that these activities can have negative impacts on the health of the fetus, but the one that seems to be the source of most debate is alcohol. After all, the French do it, don’t they? And many people born in the 1960s or earlier had mothers who drank. And we’re fine, right? My mother had a fairly regular glass of rye and ginger ale when she was pregnant with me. And she smoked. And I graduated from medical school at the age of 23. So my opinion, especially as someone who believes strongly in a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body, may come as a surprise: It’s medically best not to drink alcohol in pregnancy. Not even a little. The source of that viewpoint? My training and practice as an OB/GYN. Some attribute this abstinence approach to the patriarchy: Clearly we doctors know that moderate alcohol is safe (we don’t!), and we just don’t trust women with that knowledge. According to this theory, we think a woman who hears that an occasional drink is O.K. will blithely go on a bender. (We don’t think that.) Some also say that, in an effort to avoid frivolous lawsuits, doctors advise against alcohol while using a nudge-nudge-wink-wink to insinuate that a glass or two is fine. But this isn’t about sexism (not this time) or dodging litigation. This is about facts. How women use those facts is, of course, their choice. The truth is that fetal alcohol syndrome is far more common than people think, and we have no ability to say accurately what level of alcohol consumption is risk free. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25935 - Posted: 02.06.2019

Catherine Offord Researchers in the UK and New Zealand have created the largest-ever database of protein expression changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study published today (February 4) in Communications Biology. The data, which are freely available to researchers online, reveal new insights into the brain areas affected by Alzheimer’s, as well as the molecular pathways leading to the disease. “This database provides a huge opportunity for dementia researchers around the world to progress and to follow-up new areas of biology and develop new treatments,” study coauthor Richard Unwin of the University of Manchester says in a statement. “It’s very exciting to be able to make these data public so scientists can access and use this vital information.” The team analyzed the expression data of more than 5,500 proteins spanning six brain regions in postmortem tissue of nine healthy and nine Alzheimer’s-affected patients. The results provide a map of changes associated with the disease, identifying certain areas of the brain as more affected than others. Heavily affected areas include the hippocampus, the entorhinal cortex, and the cingulate gyrus, the analysis showed. The researchers also found that the cerebellum, an area of the brain thought to be less damaged by Alzheimer’s disease, showed substantial changes in protein expression, but that these changes qualitatively differed from those in other regions. © 1986 - 2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25934 - Posted: 02.06.2019

Jon Hamilton Women tend to have more youthful brains than their male counterparts — at least when it comes to metabolism. While age reduces the metabolism of all brains, women retain a higher rate throughout the lifespan, researchers reported Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Females had a younger brain age relative to males," says Dr. Manu Goyal, an assistant professor of radiology and neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. And that may mean women are better equipped to learn and be creative in later life, he says. The finding is "great news for many women," says Roberta Diaz Brinton, who wasn't connected with the study and directs the Center for Innovation in Brain Science at the University of Arizona Health Sciences. But she cautions that even though women's brain metabolism is higher overall, some women's brains experience a dramatic metabolic decline around menopause, leaving them vulnerable to Alzheimer's. The study came after Goyal and a team of researchers studied the brain scans of 205 people whose ages ranged from 20 to 82. Positron emission tomography scans of these people assessed metabolism by measuring how much oxygen and glucose was being used at many different locations in the brain. The team initially hoped to use the metabolic information to predict a person's age. So they had a computer study how metabolism changed in both men and women. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 25933 - Posted: 02.05.2019

By Elizabeth Pennisi Of all the many ways the teeming ecosystem of microbes in a person’s gut and other tissues might affect health, its potential influences on the brain may be the most provocative. Now, a study of two large groups of Europeans has found several species of gut bacteria are missing in people with depression. The researchers can’t say whether the absence is a cause or an effect of the illness, but they showed that many gut bacteria could make substances that affect nerve cell function—and maybe mood. “It’s the first real stab at tracking how” a microbe’s chemicals might affect mood in humans, says John Cryan, a neuroscientist at University College Cork in Ireland who has been one of the most vocal proponents of a microbiome-brain connection. The study “really pushes the field from where it’s been” with small studies of depressed people or animal experiments. Interventions based on the gut microbiome are now under investigation: The University of Basel in Switzerland, for example, is planning a trial of fecal transplants, which can restore or alter the gut microbiome, in depressed people. Several studies in mice had indicated that gut microbes can affect behavior, and small studies of people suggested this microbial repertoire is altered in depression. To test the link in a larger group, Jeroen Raes, a microbiologist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, and his colleagues took a closer look at 1054 Belgians they had recruited to assess a “normal” microbiome. Some in the group—173 in total—had been diagnosed with depression or had done poorly on a quality of life survey, and the team compared their microbiomes with those other participants. Two kinds of microbes, Coprococcus and Dialister, were missing from the microbiomes of the depressed subjects, but not from those with a high quality of life. The finding held up when the researchers allowed for factors such as age, sex, or antidepressant use, all of which influence the microbiome, the team reports today in Nature Microbiology. They also found the depressed people had an increase in bacteria implicated in Crohn disease, suggesting inflammation may be at fault. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25932 - Posted: 02.05.2019

By Perri Klass, M.D. I believe my mother thought that needing to medicate her own discomfort would be a kind of moral and physical weakness. This applied only to herself; if I told her that I was hurting, or that one of her grandchildren was in pain, she would have been anxious for something to help. She felt our pain, you might say, but she denied her own. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks thinking about pain in children and writing about pain in children — acute pain and chronic pain, pain with shots and pain after surgery, pain medicines and pain specialists. I asked the pain experts I interviewed about the different ways that different people experience pain from the same stimulus: Why does one child cry inconsolably after a needle stick while another, same age, same size needle, watches with curiosity as the shot is administered and doesn’t even flinch? There is a great deal of variation in how much pain people experience, I was told, and by and large we should take people at their word. Some people are more prone to soreness, some are relatively less sensitive, some hypersensitive, and there are differences in the ways that different people process pain, and in the ways they respond to drugs. And “hypersensitive” is not a code word for “complains more” — it’s a neurological category. And then of course there are psychological factors. That is not to say that pain is psychogenic, said Dr. Charles Berde, the founder of the division of pain medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, and one of my teachers when I did my training there. People who are anxious or terrified of pain, people who have post-traumatic stress disorder, may actually experience more pain, he said, because the pain circuits in their brains are revved up. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25931 - Posted: 02.04.2019

/ By Ronnie Cohen Dr. Samir Grover was taken aback when, early in his gastroenterology career, he saw one physician speak two times and present contradictory conclusions about the same medication. Each time, the speaker presented identical data on a drug used to treat inflammatory bowel disease. First, he recommended the pharmaceutical. A week later, he deemed it ineffective. “How could this exact same data be spun in two very different ways?” asked Grover, a professor at the University of Toronto. One fact did change — the drug manufacturer that sponsored and paid for the lecture. “Simply following clinical practice guidelines could lead doctors — even those who shun all industry gifts — to unwittingly dispense financially tainted medicine” It’s no secret that drug makers pay doctors to hype their products to other doctors. But few outside the halls of hospitals witness physicians bending a single set of facts in opposing ways. After watching similar acts of statistical wizardry throughout his nine years of medical practice, Grover set out to investigate a more sweeping question about conflicts of interest. Do they infect clinical practice guidelines? Professional societies produce thousands of these documents every year. They steer the decisions of health care professionals and insurance companies about how to prevent and treat an ever-widening range of conditions — from diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease to arthritis, hepatitis, cancer, and depression. Grover and his colleagues’ paper and a companion study recently published in JAMA Internal Medicine suggest that simply following clinical practice guidelines could lead doctors — even those who shun all industry gifts — to unwittingly dispense financially tainted medicine. More than half of the authors of guidelines examined in the two studies had financial conflicts of interest. In many cases, the doctors who wrote the guidelines were paid by the same companies that produced the drugs they recommended. In addition, a significant portion of the doctors who took pharmaceutical money failed to disclose the payments, many of which amounted to $10,000 or more. Copyright 2019 Undark

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25930 - Posted: 02.04.2019

by Esmé Weijun Wang "Schizophrenia terrifies." Those are the first two words of The Collected Schizophrenias, Esmé Weijun Wang's new book — part memoir, part scientific chronicle of her journey towards a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder. She first noticed that her brain worked differently than others, she says, when she was just five or six years old. And then, she says, "severe depression started when I was about 11, depression that was diagnosed by a doctor probably happened when I was 15 or 16. Bipolar disorder was diagnosed when I was about 17 or 18, and then the schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, was diagnosed when I was in my late 20s." Interview Highlights On her experience of schizoaffective disorder I like to kind of jokingly say that it's like a marriage between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. So my first hallucination that I ever had was actually when I was in the shower in college, and I heard a voice very clearly say to me, "I hate you." And it was so clear to me, and this is why I say that hallucinations really effectively kidnap the senses, because it's exactly like someone is standing next to you and saying this thing to you. And I started thinking, oh, is there something going on with the pipes, where I can hear maybe something on the floor below me, or maybe the floor above me, but it didn't really make sense to me physically, so I started thinking, maybe this is a hallucination, and it kind of went off from there ... and then later I started having delusions in which I was believing that my loved ones were replaced by doubles, or replaced by robots — so it's been an interesting journey. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 25929 - Posted: 02.04.2019

By Jordana Cepelewicz Genitals are among the fastest-evolving features in the animal kingdom. They’re also among the most diverse, arrayed in all shapes and sizes, adorned with spines, hooks and even teeth. Ducks have corkscrew-shaped genitalia. The male sea horse has a brood pouch that receives his mate’s eggs for fertilization and in which he nurtures the resulting offspring until birth. Female cabbage white butterflies have a hinged jaw inside their genital tract. Nature is full of strange reproductive organs with unusual uses. For the most part, though, certain genital morphologies are associated with males, others with females. But in 2014, a tiny insect called the barklouse broke even that rule when researchers reported that the females of all four species of a genus found in the caves of Brazil had a penis. It didn’t just look like a penis but acted like one, too: a penetrative organ the female insects used to anchor themselves to their mates during copulation. Moreover, complementary changes in the genitalia of the males had left them with a small pumping mechanism inside a membranous “vagina-like” cavity. Content from The Coca-Cola Company Sustainability and closed-loop recycling systems must now become a global priority, from emerging nations to the world's largest economies. Read More The finding not only piqued widespread interest (and amusement — the team was awarded a comedic Ig Nobel Prize in 2017), but also led to a debate about whether the scientists involved were correct to refer to the structure, called a gynosome, as a “female penis.” (Some experts, for instance, disagree with that characterization because the gynosome collects sperm rather than delivering it.) © 1996-2019 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 25928 - Posted: 02.04.2019

By Howard M. Fillit Alzheimer's disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S., and unlike with cancer and heart disease, we lack the tools to effectively diagnose and treat it. In sharp contrast to other illnesses and despite many efforts, huge expense and hundreds of clinical trials, no new treatments have been approved in the past 16 years. The emphasis has been on drugs targeting beta-amyloid proteins, which clump into plaques in the brains of afflicted people. Unfortunately, these approaches have not yet yielded the results we hoped for. So now it is time to target novel pathways to tackle this incredibly complex disease. This has been a challenge because of the absence of affordable and noninvasive tests based on biomarkers that doctors can easily use in their offices. The alternatives have been expensive and invasive spinal taps or neuroimaging tests that can be performed only in a hospital or freestanding radiology office. New biomarkers are needed for specific molecular targets that can be used to subtype patients; for predicting the likelihood that they will acquire Alzheimer's; and possibly for providing a diagnosis even before symptoms are noticeable, enabling prevention. That is, they could do what currently available amyloid positron-emission tomography (PET) scans and cerebrospinal fluid tests do. Biomarkers can also be used to enroll patients in clinical trials directed to a specific target, such as beta-amyloid, and to measure how the body responds to a treatment—as was done most recently by Biogen with its anti-beta-amyloid monoclonal antibody. Ultimately biomarkers can determine which therapies would be most effective for an individual. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25927 - Posted: 02.02.2019

Jef Akst Whether you’re an early bird or a night owl is partly dependent on your genome, according to a study published this week (January 29) in Nature Communications. Scanning nearly 700,000 human genomes available through the UK Biobank and the consumer genetics testing company 23andMe and comparing the results with reported sleep preferences, an international team of researchers identified more than 350 variations associated with being a morning person. Additional analyses using the device-recorded activity patterns of more than 85,000 of these participants revealed that people who carried the most gene variants linked with being an early bird went to bed an average of 25 minutes earlier than those who carried the fewest. The team went on to study the potential roles of these gene variants, and found that many had functions in regulating circadian rhythms. Some were active in the brain, while others were active in the retina. One of the genes participates in the body’s responses to caffeine and nicotine. But, coauthor Michael Weedon, a bioinformaticist at the University of Exeter in the UK, tells The New York Times, “the most interesting ones are the ones where we don’t know what it is.” The researchers found links between people’s sleep preferences, or chronotypes, and their mental health, with those who identified as morning people being less likely to report having depression or schizophrenia and reporting higher levels of general well-being. But chronotype is not a simple variable, Suzanne Hood, an assistant professor of psychology at Bishop’s University in Quebec who was not involved in the study, tells CNN, and future studies should take the nuance of the phenotype into account. “It would be interesting to follow up these findings with other kinds of methods that can track sleep variables with more precision.” © 1986 - 2019 The Scientist.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25926 - Posted: 02.02.2019

Emily Conover Lasers can send sounds straight to a listener’s ear, like whispering a secret from afar. Using a laser tuned to interact with water vapor in the air, scientists created sounds in a localized spot that were loud enough to be picked up by human hearing if aimed near a listener’s ear. It’s the first time such a technique can be used safely around humans, scientists from MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Mass., report in the Feb. 1 Optics Letters. At the wavelengths and intensities used, the laser won’t cause burns if it grazes eyes or skin. The scientists tested out the setup on themselves in the laboratory, putting their ears near the beam to pick up the sound. “You move your head around, and there’s a couple-inch zone where you go ‘Oh, there it is!’… It’s pretty cool,” says physicist Charles Wynn. The researchers also used microphones to capture and analyze the sounds. The work relies on a phenomenon called the photoacoustic effect, in which pulses of light are converted into sound when absorbed by a material, in this case, water vapor. Based on this effect, the researchers used two different techniques to make the sounds. The first technique, which involves rapidly ramping the intensity of the laser beam up and down, can transmit voices and songs. “You can hear the music really well; you can understand what people are saying,” says physicist Ryan Sullenberger, who coauthored the study along with Wynn and physicist Sumanth Kaushik. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 25925 - Posted: 02.02.2019

Jonathan Lambert It's cold outside, you're sick and all you want to do is curl up under the covers until you feel better. In fact, the need for sleep can be so strong when we're sick that this may be all we can do. Scientists don't fully understand how this excessive sleepiness is different from your normal, everyday tiredness. Previous work in nematodes found a gene that dampens activity of wakefulness neurons in response to infection. Other research in mammals suggests elements of the immune response can influence behavior. Overall, scientists still have a lot to learn about what makes us feel sleepy, when we're healthy or sick. Some genes have been identified that seem to affect sleep, but none that actively induce sleepiness when turned on. But a study, published Thursday in the journal Science, finds one potential piece of the puzzle — in fruit flies. Scientists discovered a single protein that both puts flies to sleep when they're sick and also has antimicrobial properties. "This is a very interesting finding," says Dragana Rogulja, a sleep neurobiologist at Harvard who wasn't involved in the study. "It's pretty clear that infection or something that requires an immune response does lead to sleep, and this gene seems to do that." Neuroscientist Amita Sehgal led the study at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine. She didn't set out to find a gene linked to both sleep and immunity. Instead, her lab was interested in understanding the molecular triggers of sleep. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Sleep; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 25924 - Posted: 02.01.2019

/ By Jacob Appel One of the most upsetting illnesses any psychiatrist encounters is Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome (WKS). Caused by a deficiency of thiamine (vitamin B1), it results in devastating impairment of muscle control and memory. Able-bodied men and women develop a severe and irreversible amnesia that wipes clean their pasts and prevents them from forming new memories. Those who survive — and many patients don’t — are often relegated to nursing homes. Yet the neurological damage WKS causes is only part of what makes it so upsetting to emergency room psychiatrists; after all, many neurological and psychiatric illnesses inflict irreversible cognitive harm. The tragedy of WKS is that, with appropriate public health measures, it could be easily prevented. Historically, thiamine deficiency afflicted the indigent, prisoners of war, and societies with rice-based diets. Its most serious chronic manifestation, beriberi, can present in a “wet” form that results in cardiac overload and massive edema, or in a “dry” variant — of which WKS is a subset — that affects the peripheral nervous system, the brain, or both. In addition to amnesia, victims of WKS often display striking degrees of spontaneous confabulation, in which they volunteer personal stories that they believe to be true but are not. Prevalence rates for WKS at autopsy have been found to run as high as 2.8 percent in Australia, and between 0.1 to 2.2 percent in the U.S. Copyright 2019 Undark

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25923 - Posted: 02.01.2019

By Virginia Morell It’s hard to imagine a teen asking their mother for approval on anything. But a new study shows that male zebra finches—colorful songbirds with complex songs—learn their father’s tune better when mom “fluffs up” to signal her approval. This is the first time the songbirds, thought to be mere memorization machines, have been shown to use social cues for learning—putting them in an elite club that includes cowbirds, marmosets, and humans. The finding suggests other songbirds might also learn their tunes this way, and that zebra finches are better models for studying language development than thought. “Female zebra finches play an important role in male learning, in some ways even rivaling that of the male tutors,” says Karl Berg, an avian ecologist at the University of Texas in Brownsville, who was not involved in the new study. Previously, scientists knew only that the nonsinging females played some role in song acquisition, because males raised with deaf females develop incorrect songs. Researchers have long known that female brown-headed cowbirds make quick, lateral wing strokes to approve the songs of juvenile males (as in finches, only male cowbirds learn to sing). Most scientists discounted the cowbirds’ social cues as an isolated oddity, because the birds are brood parasites. But cowbirds’ similarities to zebra finches—both are highly social and use their songs to attract mates rather than claim territories—led Cornell University developmental psychobiologists Samantha Carouso-Peck and Michael Goldstein to wonder whether female finches also use social cues to help young males learn the best, mate-attracting songs. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25922 - Posted: 02.01.2019