Laura Sanders I’m making my way through my third round of breastfeeding a newborn and taking stock of how things are going. Some aspects are definitely easier: My milk came in really quickly (a perk of being a repeat lactator), the fancy breastfeeding baby holds are no longer mysterious to me and I already own all of the weird pillows I need to prop up my tiny baby. But one thing isn’t easier this time around: the bone-crushing, mind-numbing exhaustion. Just like my other two, this sweet baby seems to eat all the time. All day. All night. Sometimes multiple times an hour, especially in the witching hours of the evening. This frequency got me curious about the biology of newborns’ stomachs. Just how small are they? Are they so microscopic that one can hold only enough sustenance to keep my newborn satisfied for a thousandth of a second? Birth educators and medical professionals often use a marble to illustrate the size of a newborn’s stomach, a tiny orb that holds about 5 to 7 milliliters of liquid. But that small estimate has come into question. A 2008 review published in the Journal of Human Lactation points out that there aren’t many solid studies on the size of the infant stomach, and some of the ones that do exist come to different conclusions. Another review of existing studies concluded that the average newborn stomach is slightly smaller than a Ping-Pong ball and can hold about 20 milliliters, or about two-thirds of an ounce. © Society for Science and the Public

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25189 - Posted: 07.10.2018

Layal Liverpool Working night shifts can mess up the body’s natural rhythms so much that the brain and digestive system end up completely out of kilter with one another, scientists say. Three night shifts in a row had little impact on the body’s master clock in the brain, researchers found, but it played havoc with gut function, throwing the natural cycle out by a full 12 hours. The finding highlights the dramatic impact that night shifts can have on the different clocks that govern the natural rhythms of organs and systems throughout the human body. Internal disagreements over night and day may explain why people on night shifts, and those with jet lag, can suffer stomach pains and other gut problems, which clear up once their body has had time to adjust. “One of the first symptoms people experience when traveling across time zones is gastrointestinal discomfort and that’s because you knock their gut out of sync from their central biological clock,” said Hans Van Dongen, director of the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington State University. For the study, Van Dongen invited 14 healthy volunteers aged 22 to 34 into his sleep lab and split them into two groups. The first spent three days on a simulated day shift and could sleep from 10pm to 6am each night. Those in the second group stayed awake for three nights in a row and were only allowed to sleep from 10am to 6pm. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Obesity
Link ID: 25188 - Posted: 07.10.2018

Laura Sanders Mouse mothers can transmit stress signals to offspring, changing the way the pups’ bodies and brains develop. Some of these stress messages get delivered during birth, scientists suggest July 9 in Nature Neuroscience. Researchers suspected that vaginal microbes from stressed-out moms could affect male pups in ways that leave them vulnerable to stress later in life (SN: 12/14/2013, p. 13). But earlier studies hadn’t demonstrated whether those microbes, picked up during birth, actually caused some of the changes seen in offspring, or if other aspects of life in utero were to blame. Tracy Bale of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore and colleagues subjected pregnant mice to stressful trials that included smelling the scent of a fox for an hour, listening to unusual sounds overnight and being restrained in a tube for 15 minutes. Other pregnant mice didn’t experience these stressors. Then, researchers delivered pups by cesarean section, so that the pups weren’t exposed to their mothers’ community of vaginal microorganisms, or microbiome. After delivery, researchers dosed the pups with vaginal fluid taken from stressed or unstressed mothers. For male pups not exposed to stress in the womb, vaginal microbes from a stressed mother changed the amount of certain kinds of gut bacteria. (Just as in earlier studies, female pups didn’t show effects of their mothers’ stress.) When those male pups were older, being restrained led them to release more of the stress hormone corticosteroid than mice dosed with microbiota from unstressed moms. And in the brains of adult mice that had experienced chronic stress, genes involved in metabolism and the development of nerve cells behaved differently depending on whether early microbes came from stressed or unstressed mothers. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25187 - Posted: 07.10.2018

by Lynn Peterson Mobley We started our ascent of Italy’s Stromboli volcano at dusk, as the Tyrrhenian Sea darkened behind us. It was a long, steady trek upward, but not an exhausting one. At the crater’s rim, with fountains and bombs of glowing lava exploding into the night sky, we soon forgot the effort it had taken to get there. Going down, however, was unforgettably harder. The trail through the deep black sand blanketing the massive cone was impossible to follow by the paltry light of our helmet lamps. I had never witnessed my athletic husband struggle before. He stumbled down the mountain for two hours with borrowed walking sticks, falling more than once. We had been hiking along the Volcano Route: Vesuvius, Amalfi’s Trail of the Gods, Vulcano, Etna. Robert was a fit 70-year-old then, never sick in his life. But after Stromboli, things weren’t quite the same. Back in Rome for a few days before our flight home, he was aware of weakness in his feet and lower legs. His shoes slapped the sidewalks as if they were too big. It took forever to get back to our hotel after a day of sightseeing. He was tired, yes, but this was different. Later that year, in 2010, he was diagnosed with a disease that we had never heard of, and that he shared with millions of other Americans: peripheral neuropathy, or PN. As we were to learn, the nervous system is composed of two parts. The brain and spinal cord make up the central nervous system, while the nerves running from them form the peripheral nervous system. PN encompasses damage to the nerves that deliver messages to or from the brain. Damage to the sensory nerves can mean tingling or numbness in the hands, feet and legs; damage to motor nerves that control the muscles causes loss of strength and balance; damage to the autonomic nervous system, which regulates automatic functions, affects things such as heart rate, blood pressure, bladder control and digestion, along with a host of other involuntary responses. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 25186 - Posted: 07.09.2018

By Jane E. Brody I wonder how we all survived — and even thrived — in our younger years without the plethora of water bottles that nearly everyone seems to carry around these days. In reading about the risks and consequences of dehydration, especially for the elderly and anyone who exercises vigorously in hot weather, it’s nothing short of a miracle that more of us hadn’t succumbed years ago to the damaging physical, cognitive and health effects of inadequate hydration. Even with the current ubiquity of portable water containers, far too many people still fail to consume enough liquid to compensate for losses suffered especially, though not exclusively, during the dehydrating months of summer. For those of you who know or suspect that you don’t drink enough to compensate for daily water losses, the good news is you don’t have to rely entirely on your liquid intake to remain well-hydrated. Studies in societies with limited supplies of drinking water suggest you can help to counter dehydration and, at the same time, enhance the healthfulness of your diet by consuming nutritious foods that are laden with a hidden water source. Plant foods like fruits, vegetables and seeds are a source of so-called gel water — pure, safe, hydrating water that is slowly absorbed into the body when the foods are consumed. That’s the message in a newly published book, “Quench,” by Dr. Dana Cohen, an integrative medicine specialist in New York, and Gina Bria, an anthropologist whose studies of the water challenges faced by desert dwellers led to the establishment of the Hydration Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes understanding and consumption of nonliquid sources of water. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 25185 - Posted: 07.09.2018

By John Horgan Last spring, I descended into the basement of a suburban home with two-dozen people and swilled fluid from a plastic cup. It was ayahuasca, a tea brewed from two South American plants, which contains the psychedelic compound dimethyltryptamine, DMT. Ayahuasca has the viscosity of spit, it tastes like beer dregs into which someone has dropped a cigar, and it is nauseating, literally. Our guides gave each of us a plastic pail in case we vomited (which I did). The brew induces visions that can be blissful, excruciating, terrifying, sometimes all at once. As our guides played music and sang, we groaned, retched, cried, laughed, stared open-mouthed into space, retched again. A young man beside me oscillated between giggles and sobs. We each paid $200 for this experience, which lasted about five hours. Why, you might ask, would anyone in his right mind want to do this? I raised this question 15 years ago in Rational Mysticism, my investigation of psychedelics, meditation and other mystical technologies (and I’ll tell you my answer below). That same year, 2003, I proposed in Slate that psychedelics be dispensed by “licensed therapists, who can screen clients for mental instability and advise them on how to make their experiences as rewarding as possible.” © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25184 - Posted: 07.09.2018

Will Stone It started with a rolled ankle during a routine training exercise. Shannon Hubbard never imagined it was the prologue to one of the most debilitating pain conditions known to exist, called ­­­­­­­complex regional pain syndrome. It's a condition that causes the nervous system to go haywire, creating pain disproportionate to the actual injury. It can also affect how the body regulates temperature and blood flow. For Hubbard, it manifested several years ago following surgery on her foot. That's a common way for it to take hold. "My leg feels like it's on fire pretty much all the time. It spreads to different parts of your body," the 47-year-old Army veteran says. Hubbard props up her leg, careful not to graze it against the kitchen table in her home east of Phoenix. It's red and swollen, still scarred from an ulcer that landed her in the hospital a few months ago. "That started as a little blister and four days later it was like the size of a baseball," she says. "They had to cut it open and then it got infected and because I have blood flow issues, it doesn't heal." She knows that soon it will happen again. "Over the past three years, I've been prescribed over sixty different medications and combinations, none have even touched the pain," she says. She holds up a plastic bag filled with discarded pill bottles — evidence of her elusive search for a solution to the pain. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25183 - Posted: 07.09.2018

Sukanya Charuchandra Like humans, mice experience a period of amnesia when they lose their memories of experiences from infancy. Now, researchers report that these memories are not entirely forgotten by mice but simply difficult to recollect—and can be brought out of storage. These findings were published today (July 5) in Current Biology. According to this study, early life experiences “leave very long-lasting traces even if the memories are not expressed,” writes Cristina Alberini, who studies memory at New York University’s Center for Neural Science and was not involved in the study, in an email to The Scientist. Having encountered patients who couldn’t remember their early years, Sigmund Freud first coined the term infantile amnesia in the late 19th century. Since then, scientists have tried to understand why humans, nonhuman primates, and rodents alike experience this phenomenon. Whether these lost memories were due to improper storage or inefficient recollection was unknown. In this latest study, Paul Frankland, a psychologist at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, and his colleagues sought to establish which of these possibilities was operating in mice. To first induce memory formation in the animals, the scientists placed the mice in a box and gave them a mild foot shock. While young adult mice retained this memory and froze when put in the box a second time, infant mice forgot this fear-related memory after a day and behaved normally when they encountered the box again. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Emotions
Link ID: 25182 - Posted: 07.07.2018

Arran Frood The use of drugs by people hoping to boost mental performance is rising worldwide, finds the largest ever study of the trend. In a survey of tens of thousands of people, 14% reported using stimulants at least once in the preceding 12 months in 2017, up from 5% in 2015. The non-medical use of substances — often dubbed smart drugs — to increase memory or concentration is known as pharmacological cognitive enhancement (PCE), and it rose in all 15 nations included in the survey. The study looked at prescription medications such as Adderall and Ritalin — prescribed medically to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) — as well as the sleep-disorder medication modafinil and illegal stimulants such as cocaine. The work, published in the International Journal of Drug Policy1 in June, is based on the Global Drug Survey — an annual, anonymous online questionnaire about drug use worldwide. The survey had 79,640 respondents in 2015 and 29,758 in 2017. US respondents reported the highest rate of use: in 2017, nearly 30% said they had used drugs for PCE at least once in the preceding 12 months, up from 20% in 2015. But the largest increases were in Europe: use in France rose from 3% in 2015 to 16% in 2017; and from 5% to 23% in the United Kingdom (see ‘Quest for cognitive enhancement’). An informal reader survey by Nature in 2008 found that one in five respondents had used drugs to boost concentration or memory. The latest analysis is impressive in its size, says Barbara Sahakian, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, UK, who was not involved in the work. There is an increasing ‘lifestyle use’ of cognitive-enhancing drugs by healthy people, which raises ethical concerns, she says. © 2018 Springer Nature Limited.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Attention
Link ID: 25181 - Posted: 07.07.2018

by Erin Blakemore What if you wanted to speak but couldn’t string together recognizable words? What if someone spoke to you but you couldn’t understand what they were saying? These situations aren’t hypothetical for the more than 1 million Americans with aphasia, which affects the ability to understand and speak with others. Aphasia occurs in people who have had strokes, traumatic brain injuries or other brain damage. Some victims have a scrambled vocabulary or are unable to express themselves; others find it hard to make sense of the words they read or hear. The disorder doesn’t reduce intelligence, only a person’s ability to communicate. And although there is no definitive cure, it can be treated. Many people make significant recoveries from aphasia after a stroke, for example. July is Aphasia Awareness Month, a fine time to learn more about the disorder. The TED-Ed series offers a lesson on aphasia, complete with an engaging video that describes the condition, its causes and its treatment, along with a quiz, discussion questions and other resources. Created by Susan Wortman-Jutt, a speech-language pathologist who treats aphasia, it’s a good introduction to the disorder and how damage to the brain’s language centers can hamper an individual’s ability to communicate. Another resource is the National Aphasia Association. Its website, aphasia.­org, contains information about the disorder and links to support and treatment options. Aphasia can have lasting effects, but there is hope for people whose brains are injured. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Language; Stroke
Link ID: 25180 - Posted: 07.07.2018

Rhitu Chatterjee People addicted to prescription opioids or heroin are far more likely to have run-ins with the law than those who don't use opioids, according to a study published Friday in JAMA Network Open. The study provides the first nationwide estimate for the number of people using opioids who end up in the American criminal justice system. The results suggest a need to engage law enforcement officials and corrections systems to tackle the opioid epidemic. The connection between the criminal justice system and substance abuse is well-known. About 65 percent of people who are incarcerated are known to have a substance use disorder, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. And yet there is little national data tracking the intersection of the criminal justice system and the ongoing opioid epidemic. "There have been reports that jails and prisons are bearing the brunt of the opioid epidemic, but we didn't know nationally how many people who use opioids are involved in the criminal justice system," says Tyler Winkelman, a clinician-investigator at Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis and the lead author of the study. To get that national picture, Winkelman and his colleagues analyzed data from 78,976 respondents to the annual National Survey on Drug Use And Health, which collects information on substance use by respondents, as well as information on their socioeconomic status, education and health. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25179 - Posted: 07.07.2018

Laura Sanders Newly identified nerve cells deep in the brains of mice compel them to eat. Similar cells exist in people, too, and may ultimately represent a new way to target eating disorders and obesity. These neurons, described in the July 6 Science, are not the first discovered to control appetite. But because of the mysterious brain region where they are found and the potential relevance to people, the mouse results “are worth pursuing,” says neurobiologist and physiologist Sabrina Diano of Yale University School of Medicine. Certain nerve cells in the human brain region called the nucleus tuberalis lateralis, or NTL, are known to malfunction in neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s. But “almost nothing is known about [the region],” says study coauthor Yu Fu of the Singapore Bioimaging Consortium, Agency for Science, Technology and Research. In people, the NTL is a small bump along the bottom edge of the hypothalamus, a brain structure known to regulate eating behavior. But in mice, a similar structure wasn’t thought to exist at all, until Fu and colleagues discovered it by chance. The researchers were studying cells that produce a hormone called somatostatin — a molecular signpost of some NTL cells in people. In mice, that cluster of cells in the hypothalamus seemed to correspond to the human NTL. Not only do these cells exist in mice, but they have a big role in eating behavior. The neurons sprang into action when the mice were hungry, or when the hunger-signaling hormone ghrelin was around, the team found. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 201

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 25178 - Posted: 07.06.2018

Christine Calder A yawn consists of an extended gaping of the mouth followed by a more rapid closure. In mammals and birds, a long intake of breath and shorter exhale follows the gaping of the mouth, but in other species such as fish, amphibians and snakes there is no intake of breath. But what’s behind a yawn, why does it occur? In the past, people have had many hypotheses. As far back as 400 B.C., Hippocrates thought yawning removed bad air from the lungs before a fever. In the 17th and 18th century, doctors believed yawning increased oxygen in the blood, blood pressure, heart rate and blood flow itself. More recently, consensus moved toward the idea that yawning cools down the brain, so when ambient conditions and temperature of the brain itself increase, yawning episodes increase. Despite all these theories, the truth is that scientists do not know the true biological function of a yawn. What we do know is that yawning occurs in just about every species. It happens when an animal is tired. It can be used as a threat display in some species. Yawning can occur during times of social conflict and stress, something researchers call a displacement behavior. And that wide-open mouth can be contagious, especially in social species such as humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, macaques and wolves. Watching someone yawn – heck, even reading about yawns – can lead you to yawn yourself. Why? © 2010–2018, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Sleep; Attention
Link ID: 25177 - Posted: 07.06.2018

Philip Lieberman In the 1960s, researchers at Yale University’s Haskins Laboratories attempted to produce a machine that would read printed text aloud to blind people. Alvin Liberman and his colleagues figured the solution was to isolate the “phonemes,” the ostensible beads-on-a-string equivalent to movable type that linguists thought existed in the acoustic speech signal. Linguists had assumed (and some still do) that phonemes were roughly equivalent to the letters of the alphabet and that they could be recombined to form different words. However, when the Haskins group snipped segments from tape recordings of words or sentences spoken by radio announcers or trained phoneticians, and tried to link them together to form new words, the researchers found that the results were incomprehensible.1 That’s because, as most speech scientists agree, there is no such thing as pure phonemes (though some linguists still cling to the idea). Discrete phonemes do not exist as such in the speech signal, and instead are always blended together in words. Even “stop consonants,” such as [b], [p], [t], and [g], don’t exist as isolated entities; it is impossible to utter a stop consonant without also producing a vowel before or after it. As such, the consonant [t] in the spoken word tea, for example, sounds quite different from that in the word to. To produce the vowel sound in to, the speakers’ lips are protruded and narrowed, while they are retracted and open for the vowel sound in tea, yielding different acoustic representations of the initial consonant. Moreover, when the Haskins researchers counted the number of putative phonemes that would be transmitted each second during normal conversations, the rate exceeded that which can be interpreted by the human auditory system—the synthesized phrases would have become an incomprehensible buzz. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 25176 - Posted: 07.06.2018

by Sarah Kaplan For years, scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama had whispered about the remote island where monkeys used stone tools. A botanist had witnessed the phenomenon during a long-ago survey — but, being more interested in flora than fauna at the time, she couldn't linger to investigate. A return to the site would require new funds, good weather for a treacherous 35-mile boat ride, and days of swimming, hiking and camping amid rocky, wave-pounded shorelines and dense tropical forest. “For while, it kind of just stayed a rumor,” said Brendan Barrett, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany and a visiting researcher at STRI. But when Barrett and his colleagues finally arrived at Jicarón Island in Panama's Coiba National Park last year, what they found was well-worth the effort: Tiny white-faced capuchin monkeys were using stones almost half their body weight as hammers to smash open shellfish, nuts and other foods. “We were stunned,” said Barrett, the lead author of a new paper on the discovery posted on the preprint website bioRxiv. The capuchins are the first animals of their genus observed using stone tools, and only the fourth group of nonhuman primates known to do so. Sophisticated, social, and tolerant of observation, they also provide scientists with an ideal system for studying what causes a species to venture into the stone age — and could help researchers understand how and why our own ancestors first picked up stone tools more than 2 million years ago. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 25175 - Posted: 07.06.2018

By JoAnna Klein Owl eyes are round, but not spherical. These immobile, tubular structures sit on the front of an owl’s face like a pair of built-in binoculars. They allow the birds to focus in on prey and see in three dimensions, kind of like humans — except we don’t have to turn our whole heads to spot a slice of pizza beside us. Although owls and humans both have binocular vision, it has been unclear whether these birds of prey process information they collect from their environments like humans, because their brains aren’t as complex. But in a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience on Monday, scientists tested the ability of barn owls to find a moving target among various shifting backgrounds, a visual processing task earlier tested only in primates. The research suggests that barn owls, with far simpler brains than humans and other primates, also group together different elements as they move in the same direction, to make sense of the world around them. “Humans are not so different from birds as you may think,” said Yoram Gutfreund, a neuroscientist at Technion Israel Institute of Technology who led the study with colleagues from his university and RWTH Aachen University in Germany. A critical part of perception is being able to distinguish an object from its background. One way humans do this is by grouping elements of a scene together to perceive each part as a whole. In some cases, that means combining objects that move similarly, like birds flying in a flock, or the single bird that breaks away from it. Scientists have generally considered this type of visual processing as a higher level task that requires complex brain structures. As such, they’ve only studied it in humans and primates. But Dr. Gutfreund and his team believed this ability was more basic — like seeing past camouflage. A barn owl, for example, might have evolved a similar mechanism to detect a mouse moving in a meadow as wind blows the grass in the same direction. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 25174 - Posted: 07.05.2018

By Elizabeth Pennisi Bats and their prey are in a constant arms race. Whereas the winged mammals home in on insects with frighteningly accurate sonar, some of their prey—such as the tiger moth—fight back with sonar clicks and even jamming signals. Now, in a series of bat-moth skirmishes (above), scientists have shown how other moths create an “acoustic illusion,” with long wing-tails that fool bats into striking the wrong place. The finding helps explain why some moths have such showy tails, and it may also provide inspiration for drones of the future. Moth tails vary from species to species: Some have big lobes at the bottom of the hindwing instead of a distinctive tail; others have just a short protrusion. Still others have long tails that are thin strands with twisted cuplike ends. In 2015, sensory ecologist Jesse Barber of Boise State University in Idaho and colleagues discovered that some silk moths use their tails to confuse bat predators. Now, graduate student Juliette Rubin has shown just what makes the tails such effective deterrents. Working with three species of silk moths—luna, African moon, and polyphemus—Rubin shortened or cut off some of their hindwings and glued longer or differently shaped tails to others. She then tied the moths to a string hanging from the top of a large cage and released a big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus) inside. She used high-speed cameras and microphones to record the ensuing fight. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 25173 - Posted: 07.05.2018

By Gretchen Reynolds Can working out help us to drop pounds after all? A provocative new study involving overweight men and women suggests that it probably can, undercutting a widespread notion that exercise, by itself, is worthless for weight loss. But the findings also indicate that, to benefit, we may need to exercise quite a bit. In theory, exercise should contribute substantially to weight loss. It burns calories. If we do not replace them, our bodies should achieve negative energy balance, use stored fat for fuel and shed pounds. But life and our metabolisms are not predictable or fair, as multiple exercise studies involving people and animals show. In these experiments, participants lose less weight than would be expected, given the energy they expend during exercise. The studies generally have concluded that the exercisers had compensated for the energy they had expended during exercise, either by eating more or moving less throughout the day. These compensations were often unwitting but effective. Some researchers had begun to wonder, though, if the amount of exercise might matter. Many of the past human experiments had involved about 30 minutes a day or so of moderate exercise, which is the amount generally recommended by current guidelines to improve health. But what if people exercised more, some researchers asked. Would they still compensate for all the calories that they burned? To find out, scientists from the University of North Dakota and other institutions decided to invite 31 overweight, sedentary men and women to a lab for measurements of their resting metabolic rate and body composition. The volunteers also recounted in detail what they had eaten the previous day and agreed to wear a sophisticated activity tracker for a week. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 25172 - Posted: 07.05.2018

by Amy Ellis Nutt The possibility of using brain stimulation to help prevent future violence just passed a proof of concept stage, according to new research published Monday in the Journal of Neuroscience. In a double-blind, randomized controlled study, a group of volunteers who received a charge to their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that lies directly behind the forehead and is responsible for planning, reasoning and inhibition were — were less likely to say they would consider engaging in aggressive behavior compared to a similar group that received a sham treatment. The experiment looked at aggressive intent as well as how people reasoned about violence and found that a sense of moral wrongfulness about hypothetical acts of aggression was heightened in the group receiving the transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). This form of brain stimulation delivers targeted impulses to the brain through electrodes placed on a person's scalp. "Zapping offenders with an electrical current to fix their brains sounds like pulp fiction, but it might not be as crazy as it sounds," said Adrian Raine, a neurocriminologist at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the study's investigators. "This study goes some way toward documenting a causal association by showing that enhancing the prefrontal cortex puts the brakes on the impulse to act aggressively." © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 25171 - Posted: 07.03.2018

David Cyranoski An ambitious Chinese study tracking tens of thousands of babies and their mothers has begun to bear fruit — just six years after the study’s leaders recruited their first sets of mothers and babies. Researchers have already published results based on the cohort study, which collects biological, environmental and social data, some with important public-health implications. And many more investigations are under way. One, in particular, will examine infants’ microbiomes, the collections of bacteria and other microorganisms that inhabit their bodies — a hot topic in health research and a key goal of the cohort study. The Born in Guangzhou Cohort Study has recruited about 33,000 babies and their mothers since 20121. The study’s leaders are hoping to reach 50,000 baby–mother sets by 2020. And this year, investigators started recruiting 5,000 maternal grandmothers to the project, enabling studies across multiple generations. “The data is vast, and there is space for many different groups globally to mine this information,” says Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, a microbiologist at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in New Brunswick, who is not involved in the study. “I really admire this effort from the Chinese team. Very few countries can achieve this scale.” © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Obesity; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 25170 - Posted: 07.03.2018