Susan Milius A little brain can be surprisingly good at nothing. Honeybees are the first invertebrates to pass a test of recognizing where zero goes in numerical order, a new study finds. Even small children struggle with recognizing “nothing” as being less than one, says cognitive behavioral scientist Scarlett Howard of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. But honeybees trained to fly to images of greater or fewer dots or whazzits tended to rank a blank image as less than one, Howard and colleagues report in the June 8 Science. Despite decades of discoveries, nonhuman animals still don’t get due credit outside specialist circles for intelligence, laments Lars Chittka of Queen Mary University of London, who has explored various mental capacities of bees. For the world at large, he emphasizes that the abilities described in the new paper are “remarkable.” Researchers recognize several levels of complexity in grasping zero. Most animals, or maybe all, can understand the simplest level — just recognizing that the absence of something differs from its presence, Howard says. Grasping the notion that absence could fit into a sequence of quantities, though, seems harder. Previously, only some primates such as chimps and vervet monkeys, plus an African gray parrot named Alex, have demonstrated this level of understanding of the concept of zero (SN: 12/10/16, p. 22). |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 25069 - Posted: 06.08.2018

by Amy Ellis Nutt Suicide rates rose in all but one state between 1999 and 2016, with increases seen across age, gender, race and ethnicity, according to a report released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In more than half of all deaths in 27 states, the people had no known mental health condition when they ended their lives. In North Dakota, the rate jumped more than 57 percent. In the most recent period studied (2014 to 2016), the rate was highest in Montana, at 29.2 per 100,000 residents, compared with the national average of 13.4 per 100,000. Only Nevada recorded a decline — of 1 percent — for the overall period, although its rate remained higher than the national average. Increasingly, suicide is being viewed not only as a mental health problem but a public health one. Nearly 45,000 suicides occurred in the United States in 2016 — more than twice the number of homicides — making it the 10th-leading cause of death. Among people ages 15 to 34, suicide is the second-leading cause of death. The most common method used across all groups was firearms. “The data are disturbing,” said Anne Schuchat, the CDC's principal deputy director. “The widespread nature of the increase, in every state but one, really suggests that this is a national problem hitting most communities.” It is hitting many places especially hard. In half of the states, suicide among people age 10 and older increased more than 30 percent. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25068 - Posted: 06.08.2018

By Heather Murphy Reports of Kate Spade’s suicide and struggle with depression have transformed her from symbol of polished prep to a blunt reminder that suffering affects all types. Her death has inspired hundreds to tweet some version of the same message: Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of. But deep in the comment threads, some also debated a more uncomfortable question: What do you do when a friend is depressed for such a long time that you’ve started to feel that that nothing you can do will make a difference, and your empathy reserves are tapped out? There are no easy answers. But here are some tips from experts: Don’t underestimate the power of showing up You may not feel that your presence is wanted. But just being by the side of someone who is depressed, and reminding her that she is special to you, is important to ensuring that she does not feel alone, said Dr. Norman Rosenthal, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine. If she acknowledges she’s depressed, that’s a good sign, said Dr. Rosenthal. He recalled the story of a patient who stopped feeling suicidal after telling people he was close to how he was feeling. “When you shine the light on the shame, it gets better,” Dr. Rosenthal said. Your brother has an enviable job and two lovely children. He’s still ridiculously handsome even though he hasn’t gone to the gym for six months. It’s tempting to want to remind him of all these good things. Not only is that unlikely to boost his mood, it could backfire by reinforcing his sense that you just don’t get it, said Megan Devine, a psychotherapist and the author of “It’s O.K. That You’re Not O.K.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25067 - Posted: 06.08.2018

By Lauren Waldron, M.D. I was on a camping trip in Jackson Hole with my cousins at 4 years old when I realized there was something different about me. We were climbing a tree and I saw that, unlike me, my cousins used both hands to navigate its branches. Because I had a stroke when I was 8 months old, the right side of my body is hypertonic, meaning it does not move easily. I got stuck in the tree (as usual), and my mom had to come to get me down. As my cousins hopped out of the tree without difficulty and ran off, a question came to me. I asked my mom, for the first time, “Mommy, do all kids have a stroke when they are babies?” A pause. “No, sweetheart. They don’t.” What had moments before been a benign fact of my existence suddenly became a frustrating impediment. I was angry that my right arm and leg were always stuck when I wanted to move them. It was not fair. “Can I not have a stroke?” I asked. “I don’t want it.” My parents had never been secretive about my stroke. My earliest memories include my parents telling me that when I was a baby a blood vessel in my brain had broken and bled. The bleeding had damaged a part of the left side of my brain called the left internal capsule, which helps to control movement on the right side of my body. That was why my right fingers didn’t move, why my right arm was stiff, why I wore a leg brace, and why I went to physical therapy. But until that day in the tree, I never thought that having a blood vessel bleed in my brain made me different. Twenty-three years later, as a medical student at Temple University, I stood in a pediatric exam room listening to my attending speak to our patient’s mother. He was describing motor deficits the 2-year-old would likely experience after surgeons removed the part of her brain causing her seizures. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 25066 - Posted: 06.07.2018

/ By Michael Schulson Biswaroop Roy Chowdhury is an Indian engineer with, he says, an honorary Ph.D. in diabetes science from Alliance International University, a school in Zambia that bears many of the hallmarks of an online scam. He runs a small nutrition clinic near Delhi. Two months ago, Chowdhury posted a brief video on YouTube arguing that HIV is not real, and that anti-retroviral medication actually causes AIDS. He offered to inject himself with the blood of someone who had tested positive. Within weeks, the video had more than 380,000 views on YouTube. Tens of thousands more people watched on Facebook. Most of the viewers appear to be in India, where some 60,000 people die of HIV-related causes each year. After the March video, Chowdhury kept on posting. Follow-up videos on HIV racked up hundreds of thousands more hits. He also distributed copies of an ebook titled “HIV-AIDS: The Greatest Lie of 21st Century.” When I spoke with Chowdhury by phone last month, he claimed that 700 people had gotten in touch to say they had gone off their HIV medications. The actual number, he added, might be even higher. “We don’t know what people are doing on their own. I can only tell you about the people who report to us,” he said. Chowdhury’s figures are impossible to verify, but his skills with digital media are apparent — as are the troubling questions they raise about the role of Silicon Valley platforms in spreading misinformation. Such concerns, of course, aren’t new: Over the past two years, consumers, lawmakers, and media integrity advocates in the United States and Europe have become increasingly alarmed at the speed with which incendiary, inaccurate, and often deliberately false content spreads on sites like Facebook and YouTube — the latter a Google subsidiary. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 25065 - Posted: 06.07.2018

Leah Rosenbaum Migraines have plagued humans since time immemorial. Now a new migraine prevention treatment, recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, promises long-awaited relief from the debilitating condition. But whether the drug will turn out to be a real solution for the 1 in 7 Americans who suffer from migraines, severe headaches that often come with nausea and visual auras, isn’t yet clear. Here’s what we know, and don’t know, about the new therapy. How does the drug work in the body? The new drug, Aimovig, generically called erenumab, is a type of monoclonal antibody treatment, a class of medications that resemble the antibodies that the body naturally produces to bind to infectious pathogens. These treatments work by using specially designed antibodies to target specific proteins and their receptors that contribute to disease. Aimovig, released by pharmaceutical companies Amgen Inc. and Novartis, targets the receptor for a protein called calcitonin gene-related peptide, or CGRP, that is increased in people suffering a migraine attack. The protein is released from nerve endings throughout the body, including in the meninges, the membranes that surround the brain. When it attaches to the receptor, CGRP widens blood vessels and can contribute to inflammation and pain transmission. Aimovig, delivered once a month with an EpiPen-like injector, works by blocking the receptor for CGRP, reducing pain. Blocking the protein’s receptor is kind of like putting gum in a lock, says Elizabeth Loder, a neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and at Harvard Medical School. The CGRP protein “key” is still floating around, but it can’t become activated. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25064 - Posted: 06.07.2018

…but has yet to reach Base Camp 1 By Gary Stix LONG ISLAND, N.Y.—Brains & Behavior,* a conference at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) held from May 30 to June 4—furnished a captivating look at the work of neuroscientists toiling to isolate the multitude of missing links that bind B&B. Of course, everyone knows about the close ties between the two, but generation after generation of researchers will be needed toto figure out the how of it all. At the end of the conference, Adam Kepecs, a CSHL researcher who had given a talk about his lab’s work on how the brain computes confidence in its own decision-making, summarized several emerging themes to be derived from the conference—novel technologies driving progress in the field and the conversion of some basic research into treatments—not just pharmaceuticals but technologies such as electrical stimulation of the brain. The still relatively slow pace toward clinical trials follows from the size of the challenge. “Understanding the brain functionally—and its dysfunctions—is arguably one of the greatest challenges of humanity,” Kepecs said. CSHL asked me to interview three of the presenters for the lab’s YouTube channel, CSHL Leading Strand. The videos, just a few of those from the conference on the lab’s channel, provide more detail about what the scientists there are up to—and the halting steps toward that initial base camp. There was Li-Huei Tsai of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory who talked to me about using noninvasive, flickering light that alters brain rhythms to potentially aid Alzheimer’s patients. Ricardo Dolmetsch, global head of neuroscience with the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, recounted the development of a gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy. And Robert Malenka, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University Medical School continues to investigate a brain pathway that promotes social interactions—as well as the street drug, MDMA (aka ecstasy), which enhances prosocial behavior, also through its actions on the neurotransmitter serotonin. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 25063 - Posted: 06.07.2018

By Douglas Woods It often starts with a simple, subtle behavior like a rapid eye blink. Sometimes it’s a nose-scrunch or a sniff that is confused with a lingering cold or an allergy. Often, these habits go away on their own, but in about 1 percent of children (boys more so than girls), these blinks, twitches, and coughs become the persistent tic disorder known as Tourette syndrome (TS), a misunderstood and stigmatizing neurological condition. Media portrayals of TS often overemphasize the rare (fewer than 15 percent of cases) symptoms, in which people with TS shout obscene words—a symptom known as coprolalia—but most patients have a wide range of movements and sounds, ranging from simple tics to more complex ones that often look intentional but are not. Hidden beneath the tics, people with TS often experience "premonitory urges”—unpleasant sensations that build until the tic occurs. Ticcing brings a brief sense of relief, but the urges soon return. We know that TS is a genetically-based neurological disorder that is strongly influenced by a person’s surroundings. The disorder stems from a problem within the basal ganglia, a series of structures in the brain that are responsible for selecting and inhibiting our movements. When neurons fire, signaling us to move, the basal ganglia serves as a filter, allowing some of these signals to pass through and become movements. Other movement signals that are not needed in a particular situation are held back. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Tourettes; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25062 - Posted: 06.06.2018

By Ingfei Chen Each year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, roughly 820,800 guinea pigs, dogs, cats, and other animals covered by the Animal Welfare Act are used in research in the U.S.; of those, about 71,370 are subjected to unalleviated pain. These stats don’t track the millions of mice and rats that are used in lab experiments and excluded from the animal protection law (although the rodents are covered by other federal regulations). Scientists and their institutions say they’re committed to keeping pain or distress to a minimum in lab animals where they can. But how do you know how much pain a mouse or a zebrafish feels? And who decides how much pain is too much? “We know if they’re in really bad pain, as much as they want a nice nest, they’re not gonna put the work into doing that.” The issue of animal suffering was in the headlines earlier this year, when landlocked Switzerland banned the culinary practice of boiling lobsters alive. No one knows for sure whether these big-clawed crustaceans, equipped with only a rudimentary nervous system, experience pain. Nonetheless, Swiss authorities now require stunning lobsters in a humane way before tossing them into the pot. I read of this milestone in crustacean rights with bemused fascination and anthropomorphic cringing, as I imagined the lobster’s hypothetical plight. But the Swiss move also made me wonder how scientists measure and deal with animal pain in research studies. Experiments that use critters to simulate human illness or injury are stepping stones to the medical treatments we all use. Yet, the benefits we reap must outweigh the costs to animal welfare for those sacrifices to be justified, ethicists and animal advocates say. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Animal Rights; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25061 - Posted: 06.06.2018

Emine Saner One of the fun parts of being a disgustologist – as researchers who study the emotion of disgust sometimes call themselves – must be coming up with revolting scenarios. Repulsive enough to test a theory, but not quite so stomach-turning as to repel the people who have volunteered to take the test. In a recent study led by Prof Val Curtis, director of the environmental health group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the vignettes were admirably imaginative. People were asked to rate their levels of disgust at more than 70 scenarios. These included imagining a hairless old cat rubbing up against one’s leg, stepping on a slug in bare feet, shaking hands with someone with “scabby fingers”, finding out a friend eats roadkill, finding out another attempted to have sex with a piece of fruit, and seeing “pus come from a genital sore”. And, my personal favourite, for warped imagination alone: learning your neighbour defecates in his back garden. The findings, published this week in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions B journal, reveal six categories of disgust: poor hygiene, animals that are vectors of disease (such as rats or cockroaches), sexual behaviours, atypical appearance, lesions and visible signs of infection, and food that shows signs of decay. “The fact we’ve found there is an architecture of disgust that has six components to it tells us something about the way in which emotions work,” says Curtis. “It tells us that emotions are for doing particular behaviours. The emotion of disgust is about doing certain things that avoid disease – they’re about not eating spoiled food, not sticking your fingers in somebody’s weeping sore, not having sex with somebody you know is having sex with lots of other people, not picking up cockroaches and kissing them. It confirms the hypothesis that disgust really is about avoiding infection.” © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 25060 - Posted: 06.06.2018

By Ruth Williams Four patients with chronic spinal damage and a complete loss of motor and sensory functions below their waists have received transplants of human neural stem cells in a first-of-its-kind clinical trial. A report in Cell Stem Cell today (June 1) documents the procedure and the subsequent clinical follow up of the patients, who exhibit no signs of untoward effects but rather tiny hints of improvement. “It’s an extremely interesting and important piece of work,” says neurologist Eva Feldman of the University of Michigan who was not involved with the work. “The rodent model results were very compelling and . . . laid the groundwork for this very small, proof-of-concept safety trial.” While these results seem tantalizing, “the numbers [of patients] are extremely small,” says Feldman, and “the patients themselves notice no change in function or quality of life.” Severe spinal injuries can have devastating consequences, often leaving patients with complete paralysis below the injury site and with little hope of recovery. While there is currently no therapy that can promote neuronal repair in such patients, evidence from animal studies, including those carried out in primates, has indicated that transplantation of human-derived neural stem cells to the site of injury can promote some functional recovery of downstream musculature. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Regeneration; Stem Cells
Link ID: 25059 - Posted: 06.05.2018

Sheryl Ubelacker · A little over a year ago, Julie Tomaino had a stroke that affected both sides of her brain, leaving her "locked in" — conscious but unable to speak or move — for about 10 days. The former professional dancer who works in theatre directing and choreographing plays was just 38 years old. "I couldn't respond to anything and I could just move my eyeballs," the Toronto resident recalled Monday from Vancouver Island, where she is in rehearsals for a production of the musical Grease. Tomaino had been having daily headaches for two weeks and knew there was something seriously wrong. But after examining her earlier that day at the hospital, doctors had sent her home with a diagnosis of migraine and anxiety. That evening, she started vomiting uncontrollably and began experiencing double vision. Her husband called an ambulance and she remembers being put into the vehicle. "And then it's all black for 12 hours." Tomaino had suffered a major stroke, the result of the inner carotid arteries on both sides of her neck dissecting, or tearing, which caused blood to pool in the vessels and send clots to her brain. While stroke at her age isn't all that common — the average female victim is close to four decades older — her story illustrates a message the Heart and Stroke Foundation is trying to bring to public awareness with a report released Tuesday showing how stroke can affect women differently than men. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Stroke; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25058 - Posted: 06.05.2018

By Randi Hutter Epstein My son Jack was born in London a month before his due date. The pediatrician said he was fine and we could go home. A few minutes later another doctor came in and asked to draw blood to try to figure out why Jack was premature. I refused, because we had already been given the go-ahead to leave. I heard the doctor tell the nurses to mark in my medical record, “Mother refuses treatment for her son.” “I’m not refusing treatment! I’m refusing a needless test!” I said from my bed. To which she mumbled, “Write down, ‘Mother is hormonal.’” And so began my rant. I stormed out of my room, dressed only in my husband’s white T-shirt and nestling my 12-hour-old son to my chest, and hollered after the fleeing doctor, “I am not hormonal!” The truth is I was hormonal. I had just given birth, so my progesterone (the hormone that maintained my pregnancy) had plummeted and my oxytocin (the hormone that squeezed my uterus to get the baby out, got the milk flowing and fostered mother-baby bonding) had skyrocketed. But that’s not what the doctor meant when she used the word “hormonal.” She meant I was a woman going off the rails. In 1939, James E. King, the president of the American Association of Obstetricians, Gynecologists and Abdominal Surgeons, devoted part of his presidential address to hormones and women’s craziness, or as he called it, their “peculiarities” and “inconsistencies.” He said hormone therapy, which was brand new at the time, would not only treat conditions like menstrual irregularities and infertility but would also help women manage their emotions and make them prettier (estrogen would supposedly bring back aging women’s youthful splendor). Then he concluded with this snide remark: “Will she, as some timid souls fear, mentally and physically dominate and enslave us as we in the past enslaved her? Probably not; so long as she is controlled by her reproductive glands, she will remain basically the same lovable and gracious homemaker.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25057 - Posted: 06.05.2018

By The Editorial Board When President Trump mused that the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., in February might have been prevented if the United States had more mental institutions, he revived a not-quite-dormant debate: Should the country bring back asylums? Psychiatric facilities are unlikely to prevent crimes similar to the Parkland shooting because people are typically not committed until after a serious incident. Still, a string of news articles, editorials and policy forums have noted that plenty of mental health experts agree with the president’s broader point. The question of whether to open mental institutions tends to divide the people who provide, use and support mental health services — let’s call them the mental health community — into two camps. There are just 14 or so psychiatric beds per every 100,000 people in the United States, a 95 percent decline from the 1950s. One camp says this profound shortage is a chief reason that so many people suffering from mental health conditions have ended up in jail, on the streets or worse. The other argues that large psychiatric institutions are morally repugnant, and that the problem is not the lack of such facilities but how little has been done to fill the void since they were shut down. Neither side wants to return to the era of “insane asylums,” the warehouselike hospitals that closed en masse between the 1960s and 1980s. Nor does anyone disagree that the “system” that replaced them is a colossal failure. Nearly 10 times as many people suffering from serious mental illnesses are being kept in jails and prisons as are receiving treatment in psychiatric hospitals. What’s more, both sides broadly agree that mental institutions alone would not be the solution. “Bring back the asylums” sounds catchy, but here are some more useful slogans to help steer the conversation: © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 25056 - Posted: 06.04.2018

By David Noonan Neuroscientist James Hudspeth has basically been living inside the human ear for close to 50 years. In that time Hudspeth, head of the Laboratory of Sensory Neuroscience at The Rockefeller University, has dramatically advanced scientists’ understanding of how the ear and brain work together to process sound. Last week his decades of groundbreaking research were recognized by the Norwegian Academy of Science, which awarded him the million-dollar Kavli Prize in Neuroscience. Hudspeth shared the prize with two other hearing researchers: Robert Fettiplace from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Christine Petit from the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Advertisement As Hudspeth explored the neural mechanisms of hearing over the years, he developed a special appreciation for the intricate anatomy of the inner ear—an appreciation that transcends the laboratory. “I think we as scientists tend to underemphasize the aesthetic aspect of science,” he says. “Yes, science is the disinterested investigation into the nature of things. But it is more like art than not. It’s something that one does for the beauty of it, and in the hope of understanding what has heretofore been hidden. Here’s something incredibly beautiful, like the inner ear, performing a really remarkable function. How can that be? How does it do it?” After learning of his Kavli Prize on Thursday, Hudspeth spoke with Scientific American about his work and how the brain transforms physical vibration into the experience of a symphony. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 25055 - Posted: 06.04.2018

Jon Hamilton For six years now, life has been really good for James. He's got a great job as the creative director of an advertising firm in New York City. He enjoys spending time with his wife and kids. And it's all been possible, he says, because for the past six years he's been taking a drug called ketamine. Before ketamine, James was unable to work or focus his thoughts. His mind was filled with violent images. And his mood could go from ebullient to dark in a matter of minutes. Ketamine "helped me get my life back," says James, who asked that we not use his last name to protect his career. Ketamine was developed as a human and animal anesthetic in the 1960s. And almost from the time it reached the market it's also been used as a mind-bending party drug. But ketamine's story took a surprising turn in 2006, when researchers at the National Institutes of Health showed that an intravenous dose could relieve severe depression in a matter of hours. Since then, doctors have prescribed ketamine "off label" to thousands of depressed patients who don't respond to other drugs. And pharmaceutical companies are testing several new ketamine-related drugs to treat depression. Johnson & Johnson expects to seek approval for its nasal spray esketamine later this year. Meanwhile, doctors have begun trying ketamine on patients with a wide range of psychiatric disorders other than depression. And there is now growing evidence it can help people with anxiety, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and perhaps even obsessive-compulsive disorder. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25054 - Posted: 06.04.2018

Davide Castelvecchi The 2016 film Arrival starred Amy Adams as a linguistics professor who was drafted in to communicate with aliens.Credit: Moviestore Coll./Alamy Sheri Wells-Jensen is fascinated by languages no one has ever heard — those that might be spoken by aliens. Last week, the linguist co-hosted a day-long workshop on this field of research, which sits at the boundary of astrobiology and linguistics. The meeting, at a conference of the US National Space Society in Los Angeles, California, was organized by Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI). METI, which is funded by private donors, organizes the transmission of messages to other star systems. The effort is complementary to SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which aims to detect messages from alien civilizations. METI targets star systems relatively close to the Sun that are known to host Earth-sized planets in their ‘habitable zone’ — where the conditions are right for liquid water to exist — using large radar dishes. Last year, it directed a radio message, which attempted to explain musical language, towards a nearby exoplanet system. The message started from basic arithmetic (encoded in binary as two radio wavelengths) and introduced increasingly complex concepts such as duration and frequency. Nature spoke to Wells-Jensen, who is a member of METI’s board of directors, about last week’s meeting and the field of alien linguistics. Was this the first workshop of this kind ever? We’ve done two workshops on communicating with aliens before, but this is the first one specifically about linguistics. If we do make contact, we should try and figure out what would be a reasonable first step in trying to communicate. Right now, we are trying to put our heads together and figure out what’s likely and what could be done after that. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 25053 - Posted: 06.04.2018

By Ruth Williams The sun’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation is a major cause of skin cancer, but it offers some health benefits too, such as boosting production of essential vitamin D and improving mood. Today (May 17), a report in Cell adds enhanced learning and memory to UV’s unexpected benefits. Researchers have discovered that, in mice, exposure to UV light activates a molecular pathway that increases production of the brain chemical glutamate, heightening the animals’ ability to learn and remember. “The subject is of strong interest, because it provides additional support for the recently proposed theory of ultraviolet light’s regulation of the brain and central neuroendocrine system,” dermatologist Andrzej Slominski of the University of Alabama who was not involved in the research writes in an email to The Scientist. “It’s an interesting and timely paper investigating the skin-brain connection,” notes skin scientist Martin Steinhoff of University College Dublin’s Center for Biomedical Engineering who also did not participate in the research. “The authors make an interesting observation linking moderate UV exposure to . . . [production of] the molecule urocanic acid. They hypothesize that this molecule enters the brain, activates glutaminergic neurons through glutamate release, and that memory and learning are increased.” © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 25052 - Posted: 06.02.2018

Will Stone Hundreds of survivors of domestic violence have come through the doors of neurologist Glynnis Zieman's Phoenix clinic in the past three years. "The domestic violence patients are the next chapter of brain injury," she says. Zieman begins every new patient visit with a simple question: "What are the symptoms you hope I can help you with?" For most, it's the first time anyone has ever asked even how they may have been injured in the first place. "I actually heard one patient tell me the only person who ever asked her if someone did this to her was a paramedic, as she was being wheeled into an ambulance," Zieman says. "And the husband was at the foot of her stretcher." While many patients initially seek out the clinic because of physical symptoms, such as headaches, exhaustion, dizziness or problems sleeping, Zieman says her research shows anxiety, depression and PTSD usually end up being the most severe problems. Studies of traumatic brain injury have revealed links to dementia and memory loss in veterans and athletes. And TBI has also been linked to PTSD in current or former service members. Another group may be suffering, still largely in silence — survivors of domestic violence. About 70 percent of people seen in the ER for such abuse are never actually identified as survivors of domestic violence. It's a health crisis cloaked in secrecy and shame, one that Zieman is uncovering through her work at the Barrow Concussion and Brain Injury Center. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Aggression
Link ID: 25051 - Posted: 06.02.2018

By Matt Warren Scientists regularly comb through 3D data, from medical images to maps of the moon, yet they are often stuck using flat computer screens that can’t fully represent 3D data sets. Now, researchers have developed a method of 3D printing that lets scientists produce stunning, high-definition 3D copies of their data. Conventional 3D-printing converts data into a computer model made up of tiny, connected triangles. But this process can create awkward images: The fine lines of the brain’s white matter, for example, show up as bulky tubes. Conventional printing also has problems creating objects where solid parts (or data points) are separated by empty space. The new process is far more direct. Instead of transforming into a computer model, the data set is sliced up into thousands of horizontal images, each consisting of hundreds of thousands of voxels, or 3D pixels. Each voxel is printed with droplets of colored resin hardened by ultraviolet light. Different colors can be combined to create new ones, and transparent resin is used to represent empty space. Each layer is printed, one on top of another, to gradually build up a 3D structure. So far, the researchers have used the voxel printing process to produce high-definition models of brain scans, topographical maps, and laser-scanned statues. And although it may take some time to get there, the team sees a day when anyone will be able to print off a copy of their data at the press of a button, from archaeologists reproducing important artifacts for conservation to doctors creating models of body parts to plan surgical procedures. Posted in: © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 25050 - Posted: 06.02.2018