By Kas Roussy, Robert Van Herpt was 53 when he decided to overhaul his life. A heavy drinker and smoker, he quit both at once cold turkey. He started a new antidepressant. It was, in many ways, a new beginning. But it didn't go according to plan. Before long, Van Herpt stopped sleeping. And that's when he started seeing things. The fruit flies came first. "I'd be sitting and here's a swarm," he said. "I honestly put my arm out and said I could feel them up against my arm. It was that true." Then in the nighttime, from his upstairs bedroom window, in Kingston, Ont., he thought he could see someone damaging his wife's car. He also thought people were partying downstairs in his home. "He was definitely seeing things that weren't there," said his wife, Joanne. "The hallucinations were very drastic in the evening. Really vivid hallucinations." To emphasize the point, Robert repeated: "Really vivid." The couple left home for Kingston General Hospital's emergency department, where the hallucinations continued. At one point, while Joanne was talking to one of the attending doctors, Robert thought he saw another doctor spitting on him. Eventually, the Van Herpts learned that Robert was in the throes of delirium tremens, a condition that can be caused by abruptly stopping a long period of drinking. "Basically when you quit cold turkey, the brain goes through a chemical reaction," Joanne was told. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24769 - Posted: 03.20.2018

Amy Fleming Charles Ryan has a clinic in San Francisco at which he regularly relieves men of their testosterone. This “chemical castration”, as it is sometimes known, is not a punishment, but a common treatment for prostate cancer. Testosterone doesn’t cause the disease (currently the third most deadly cancer in the UK), but it fuels it, so oncologists use drugs to reduce the amount produced by the testicles. Ryan gets to know his patients well over the years, listening to their concerns and observing changes in them as their testosterone levels fall. Because it involves the so-called “male hormone”, the therapy poses existential challenges to many of those he treats. They know that every day, millions of people – from bodybuilders and cheating athletes to menopausal women – enhance their natural levels of testosterone with the aim of boosting their libido, muscle mass, confidence and energy. So what happens when production is suppressed? Might they lose their sex drive? Their strength? Their will to win? The fears are not always groundless. Side-effects can also include fatigue and weight gain. But Ryan has witnessed positives, too. As professor of medicine and urology at the University of California, he has noticed that the medical students who have passed through his clinic in the 18 years that he has been treating prostate cancer invariably comment: “Dr Ryan, your patients are so nice.” He replies, jokingly: “It’s because they don’t have any testosterone. They can’t be mean.” © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Aggression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 24768 - Posted: 03.20.2018

Fergus Walsh Doctors say a stem cell transplant could be a "game changer" for many patients with multiple sclerosis. Results from an international trial show that it was able to stop the disease and improve symptoms. It involves wiping out a patient's immune system using cancer drugs and then rebooting it with a stem cell transplant. Louise Willetts, 36, from Rotherham, is now symptom-free and told me: "It feels like a miracle." A total of 100,000 people in the UK have MS, which attacks nerves in the brain and spinal cord. Just over 100 patients took part in the trial, in hospitals in Chicago, Sheffield, Uppsala in Sweden and Sao Paolo in Brazil. They all had relapsing remitting MS - where attacks or relapses are followed by periods of remission. The interim results were released at the annual meeting of the European Society for Bone and Marrow Transplantation in Lisbon. The patients received either haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) or drug treatment. After one year, only one relapse occurred among the stem cell group compared with 39 in the drug group. After an average follow-up of three years, the transplants had failed in three out of 52 patients (6%), compared with 30 of 50 (60%) in the control group. Those in the transplant group experienced a reduction in disability, whereas symptoms worsened in the drug group. Prof Richard Burt, lead investigator, Northwestern University Chicago, told me: "The data is stunningly in favour of transplant against the best available drugs - the neurological community has been sceptical about this treatment, but these results will change that. Prof John Snowden, director of blood and bone marrow transplantation at Sheffield's Royal Hallamshire Hospital, told me: "We are thrilled with the results - they are a game changer for patients with drug resistant and disabling multiple sclerosis". © 2018 BBC

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 24767 - Posted: 03.19.2018

By LEONARD MLODINOW Ten years ago, when my son Nicolai was 11, his doctor wanted to put him on medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “It would make him less wild,” I explained to my mother, who was then 85. “It would slow him down a bit.” My mother grumbled. “Look around you,” she said in Yiddish. “Look how fast the world is changing. He doesn’t need to slow down. You need to speed up.” It was a surprising recommendation from someone who had never learned to use a microwave. But recent research suggests she had a point: Some people with A.D.H.D. may be naturally suited to our turbocharged world. Today the word “hyperactive” doesn’t just describe certain individuals; it also is a quality of our society. We are bombarded each day by four times the number of words we encountered daily when my mother was raising me. Even vacations are complicated — people today use, on average, 26 websites to plan one. Attitudes and habits are changing so fast that you can identify “generational” differences in people just a few years apart: Simply by analyzing daily cellphone communication patterns, researchers have been able to guess the age of someone under 60 to within about five years either way with 80 percent accuracy. To thrive in this frenetic world, certain cognitive tendencies are useful: to embrace novelty, to absorb a wide variety of information, to generate new ideas. The possibility that such characteristics might be associated with A.D.H.D. was first examined in the 1990s. The educational psychologist Bonnie Cramond, for example, tested a group of children in Louisiana who had been determined to have A.D.H.D. and found that an astonishingly high number — 32 percent — did well enough to qualify for an elite creative scholars program in the Louisiana schools. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 24766 - Posted: 03.19.2018

By Daniel S. Barron It was midday when an ambulance brought Rose to the Emergency Department. The triage nurses, with their characteristic knack for brevity, had written “50 year old schizophrenic woman hearing/seeing dead boyfriend.” The medical team had done the standard workup—temperature, blood pressure, EKG, labs to screen for an electrolyte imbalance, drug or toxin that might explain Rose’s condition. Everything seemed normal, making Rose (whose name and narrative details have been changed to protect her privacy) a psychiatry patient. So I made my way to the B wing of the E.D., which serves as a Limbo of sorts between the medical and psychiatric services. The B wing invariably bustles with activity. A long concierge-style counter with three computers faces the center of the room, which is essentially a large rectangle. When seated at one of these computers, you can see into each of the nine patient rooms that wrap around the three outer walls. From this vantage, the B wing becomes an amphitheater, with patients in gurney-sized niches showcasing some emergent medical concern: B7, chest pain; B9, acute shortness of breath. Rose was medically cleared, so her gurney had been downgraded to stage right, to the end of the counter. I entered at stage left and noticed her across the room, feet at the head of the gurney propped on a pillow; her head was at the foot, neck slightly bent over the edge. Her hands were neatly resting on her belly while her thick hair formed a graying river that reached towards the linoleum. In a firm yet conversational tone, Rose said towards the ceiling, “Why would Steven say he isn’t dead? How could anyone be so cruel?” Her mouth moved widely like a Claymation character as she slowly enunciated every syllable, chopping cruel into CRU-EL. She was smiling. I stood quietly, observing the scene as Rose stared intensely upwards. A few seconds later, it occurred to me that she was waiting for the ceiling to reply. “I see,” I muttered, recalling the triage nurses’ note, and went in search of a stool for my interview. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 24765 - Posted: 03.19.2018

By RONI CARYN RABIN It was going to be a study that could change the American diet, a huge clinical trial that might well deliver all the medical evidence needed to recommend a daily alcoholic drink as part of a healthy lifestyle. That was how two prominent scientists and a senior federal health official pitched the project during a presentation at the luxurious Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Fla., in 2014. And the audience members who were being asked to help pay for the $100 million study seemed receptive: They were all liquor company executives. The 10-year government trial is now underway, and Anheuser Busch InBev, Heineken and other alcohol companies are picking up most of the tab, through donations to a private foundation that raises money for the National Institutes of Health. The N.I.H., a federal agency, is considered one of the world’s foremost medical research centers, investing over $30 billion of taxpayer money in biomedical research each year. The vast majority of the funding goes to scientists outside the N.I.H., which manages the grants and provides oversight. The alcohol study is overseen by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, one of 27 centers under the N.I.H. The lead investigator and N.I.H. officials have said repeatedly that they never discussed the planning of the study with the industry. But a different picture emerges from emails and travel vouchers obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, as well as from interviews with former federal officials. The documents and interviews show that the institute waged a vigorous campaign to court the alcohol industry, paying for scientists to travel to meetings with executives, where they gave talks strongly suggesting that the study’s results would endorse moderate drinking as healthy. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24764 - Posted: 03.19.2018

/ By Venkat Srinivasan It started as a tremor in his left hand and arm. It seemed harmless, but it surprised him. He was a gardener in his 50s and had no history of rheumatism or seizures or any other significant pain. He brushed it off at first, chalking it up to the exhausting daily work. But it wouldn’t go away. Writing and reading became difficult. He could not direct his fork to his mouth, and had to be fed. “It’s like a Russian doll. Within each molecule, there are so many functions.” It was the early 1800s, and a surgeon in London had started to collect notes — not just on the gardener but on a number of patients with similar symptoms. Their hands simply failed “to answer with exactness to the dictates of the will.” The years dragged on; the disease spread to the gardener’s legs, and his trunk started to bow significantly. People couldn’t understand him when he spoke. He passed urine without knowing. The tremors became more and more violent, waking him at night. Nobody understood what he was suffering from. Finally, in 1817, Dr. James Parkinson published an essay on this shaking palsy. He apologized for his speculative approach, writing that “analogy is the substitute for anatomical examination, the only sure foundation for pathological knowledge.” Two centuries later, the disease named for Parkinson is still a puzzle. It is now known that the telltale external symptoms — rigidity, slow movement, a resting tremor — result from a loss of dopamine-rich neurons in a region of the brain called the substantia nigra. But the complete network of steps leading to this cell death is still vague, and the underlying causes remain one of medicine’s great mysteries. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 24763 - Posted: 03.16.2018

by Laurie McGinley The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday took the first concrete action to reduce nicotine in cigarettes to make them much less addictive, opening a regulatory process described as a “historic first step” by the agency's top official. Commissioner Scott Gottlieb unveiled an “advance notice of proposed rulemaking,” the earliest step in what promises to be a long, complicated regulatory effort to lower nicotine levels to be minimally addictive or nonaddictive. The notice, to be published Friday in the Federal Register, includes new data published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday based on a possible policy scenario. That FDA-funded analysis found that slashing nicotine levels could push the smoking rate down to 1.4 percent from the current 15 percent of adults. That in turn would result in 8 million fewer tobacco-related deaths through the end of the century — which Gottlieb termed “an undeniable public health benefit.” The evaluation was based on reducing nicotine levels to 0.4 milligrams per gram of tobacco filler, FDA officials told reporters during a teleconference. Many adults try to quit smoking each year but fail because nicotine is such an addictive substance, said Mitch Zeller, director of the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products. Cutting the nicotine level would not only help them succeed, but it also could keep young people who may be experimenting with cigarettes from becoming addicted, he said. The nicotine notice will be open for public comment for 90 days. FDA officials are seeking input on what the maximum nicotine level in cigarettes should be and whether such a limit should be implemented all at once or gradually. Nicotine levels can be manipulated by leaf blending, chemical extraction and genetic engineering. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24762 - Posted: 03.16.2018

Paula Span At first, the pills helped her feel so much better. Jessica Falstein, an artist living in the East Village in Manhattan, learned she had an anxiety disorder in 1992. It led to panic attacks, a racing pulse, sleeplessness. “Whenever there was too much stress, the anxiety would become almost intolerable, like acid in the veins,” she recalled. When a psychopharmacologist prescribed the drug Klonopin, everything brightened. “It just leveled me out,” Ms. Falstein said. “I had more energy. And it helped me sleep, which I was desperate for.” After several months, however, the horrible symptoms returned. “My body became accustomed to half a milligram, and the drug stopped working,” she said. “So then I was up to one milligram. And then two.” Her doctor kept increasing the dosage and added Ativan to the mix. Now 67, with her health and stamina in decline, Ms. Falstein has been diligently working to wean herself from both medications, part of the class called benzodiazepines that is widely prescribed for insomnia and anxiety. “They turn on you,” she said. For years, geriatricians and researchers have sounded the alarm about the use of benzodiazepines among older adults. Often called “benzos,” the problem drugs include Valium (diazepam), Klonopin (clonazepam), Xanax (alprazolam) and Ativan (lorazepam). The cautions have had scant effect: Use of the drugs has risen among older people, even though they are particularly vulnerable to the drugs’ ill effects. Like Ms. Falstein, many patients take them for years, though they’re recommended only for short periods. The chemically related “z-drugs” — Ambien, Sonata and Lunesta — present similar risks. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24761 - Posted: 03.16.2018

By Anna Azvolinsky Researchers have tried to dissect the effects of an older father on kids’ longevity. One study found that kids with older dads had longer telomeres, which may indicate better health and longer lifespan, while another observed that kids with older dads have an increased risk of psychiatric disorders. So far, there have been very few experimental studies in animals that directly test whether paternal age has an affect on offspring telomere length and lifespan. Now, a team of researchers shows that bird embryos sired from old zebra finch fathers have shorter telomeres compared to those with the same moms and younger fathers. The study, published today (March 14) in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is among the first to address whether paternal age affects telomere length of offspring using an experimental approach. “The experimental design of this study looking at the effect of paternal age on telomere length of [zebra finch] embryos is particularly strong, allowing for confidence in these results,” writes Dan Eisenberg, an anthropologist at the University of Washington who studies the effects of paternal age on telomere length in humans and chimpanzees, in an email to The Scientist. Jose Noguera, now at the University of Vigo, along with colleagues at the University of Glasgow, bred 32 middle-aged, female zebra finches first with both 16 four-month-old males and later with 16 four-year-old male birds. The team harvested the eggs, 139 in total, artificially incubated them for several days, then analyzed the telomere lengths of the embryos. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24760 - Posted: 03.16.2018

Jeff Tollefson Early humans in eastern Africa crafted advanced tools and displayed other complex behaviours tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought, according to a trio of papers published on 15 March in Science1,2,3. Those advances coincided with — and may have been driven by — major climate and landscape changes. The latest evidence comes from the Olorgesailie Basin in Southern Kenya, where researchers have previously found traces of ancient relatives of modern human as far back as 1.2 million years ago. Evidence collected at sites in the basin suggests that early humans underwent a series of profound changes at some point before roughly 320,000 years ago. They abandoned simple hand axes in favour of smaller and more advanced blades made from obsidian and other materials obtained from distant sources. That shift suggests the early people living there had developed a trade network — evidence of growing sophistication in behaviour. The researchers also found gouges on black and red rocks and minerals, which indicate that early Olorgesailie residents used those materials to create pigments and possibly communicate ideas. All of these changes in human behaviour occurred during an extended period of environmental upheaval, punctuated by strong earthquakes and a shift towards a more variable and arid climate. These changes occurred at the same time as larger animals disappeared from the site and were replaced by smaller creatures. “It’s a one-two punch combining tectonic shifts and climate shifts,” says Rick Potts, who led the work as director of the human origins programme at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. “That’s the kind of stuff out of which evolution arises.” Researchers from the Smithsonian Institution digging in the Olorgesailie Basin in Kenya. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 24759 - Posted: 03.16.2018

By Hiroko Tabuchi If a sparrow sings his heart out on an oil field, but his would-be sweetheart can’t hear him above the oil pumps, what’s a bird to do? In Alberta, Canada, researchers analyzed hundreds of hours of Savannah sparrow love songs and discovered something extraordinary: To be heard above the din, the birds are changing their tune in complex ways that scientists are only starting to understand. “They’re tailoring their songs depending on which part of their message is the most affected,” said Miyako Warrington, a University of Manitoba biologist who led a recent study on how sparrows cope with noise from the oil and gas infrastructure that dots Canada’s landscape. “This seems to show a complex level of adaptation. It’s not just everybody talking louder.” Dr. Warrington is one of a growing number of scholars who study the noise generated by human activity — drills, turbines, roaring jet engines — and how that affects the natural world around us. Mining on the fringes of the Brazilian rain forest, for instance, is disrupting the calls of local black-fronted titi monkeys, a study found last year. Whales and dolphins are known to be particularly vulnerable to the groans of ship engines or offshore drilling, which can disrupt the complex ways they communicate. Research has shown that noise pollution has doubled the background sound levels in more than 60 percent of protected areas in the United States. And humans are not immune to the din. Epidemiologists have linked traffic noise to cardiovascular and other diseases. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24758 - Posted: 03.15.2018

by Ben Guarino Only male birds sing. For years that was the assumption among amateur birdwatchers and ornithologists alike. After all, male birds are “the obvious ones,” says Lauryn Benedict, a biologist at the University of Northern Colorado. “They're out there showing off, strutting their stuff.” But Benedict and fellow birdsong expert Karan Odom, a biologist at Cornell University, want you to look closer if you hear a chirp or warble. Female birds are not, on the whole, silent. In a call-to-ears published Wednesday in the journal the Auk, the two scientists say that “birders and researchers need to be aware that female birds regularly sing, and they need to take the time to evaluate the sex of singing birds.” The tipping point for Odom came in 2014, when she concluded that birdsong is an ancestral trait shared by both sexes. Female birds sang in 71 percent of 323 species surveyed, she and her colleagues reported then in a Nature Communications paper. They traced this behavior through the bird family tree, winding back the generations to a common singing ancestor. At that point in history, they wrote, both male and female birds sang. Benedict, who was not involved with that work, described it like this: Instead of males evolving to be loud, “females have evolved to be quiet.” © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24757 - Posted: 03.15.2018

By RICH MONAHAN “You must really love that song,” my mother says, and for a moment my heart stops. Both of us are plainly aware she need not be more specific than that. I attempt to read her body language out of the corner of my eye. Does she know? There’s no way, right? “Yeah, it’s a favorite.” I nod, smiling, before turning back toward the television with what I hope is all the nonchalance of a typical 14-year-old boy. What I definitely do not do is glance back and say, “Funny story about that song, while you’ve clearly noticed I’ve listened to it every single weeknight this entire school year, would you believe I only ever press play at exactly 8:38 p.m.? “And check this out, once that cable box hits 9:52 p.m., I will casually retire to my bedroom to initiate the final sequence of what has recently ballooned into a nearly 90-minute nightly routine of humiliating compulsions: I’ll touch the same four CDs laid out on my dresser in ‘order’; turn the stereo on and off; move to the entertainment center; touch the ‘Twisted Metal’ video game case; turn on the TV; boot up the PlayStation; shut it off once the load screen finishes; press ‘channel up’ on the cable box until I hit channel 20, then 22, then 40; turn off the cable box, then touch nothing else until it’s lights out at 9:58 p.m. “And that’s not even the craziest part; the craziest part is that I do these things because I believe they will somehow increase my social standing among other ninth graders. Anywho, Mom, the song’s called ‘Daysleeper,’ and I’m pretty sure I’ve lost my mind.” It started in seventh grade, when two childhood friends aged out of hanging out with me. Already depressed and on the verge of friendlessness, I was desperate to preserve life as it had been. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 24756 - Posted: 03.15.2018

By Abby Olena Diagnosing neurobiological disorders, such as the autism spectrum disorders, focuses on complex clinical evaluations. But a study published last week (March 6) in eLife shows that an objective measure—how the pupil varies in size while viewing an optical illusion—reveals differences in perceptual styles and correlates with a self-reported score of autistic traits. The findings suggest that tracking fluctuations in pupil size, which is called pupillometry, could be used alongside clinical assessments to help researchers and clinicians understand autism. “We used to think that the pupil was a simple light reflex or that it just indexed arousal,” says Stefan Van der Stigchel, an attention and perception researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands who did not participate in the work. This study shows “how the pupil can be informative of, in this situation, perceptual styles.” Previous research has shown that people with autism spectrum disorders allocate their attention differently—and therefore may perceive things differently—than people in the general population. For instance, rather than perceiving an image as a forest, they might focus on the individual trees, says coauthor David Burr of the University of Florence. It’s possible to measure what people pay attention to by having them look at images with both bright and dark areas. Their pupils are slightly larger when they attend to the dark parts and slightly smaller when they attend to the light parts. Burr, Paola Binda of the University of Pisa in Italy, and Marco Turi, a postdoc at the University of Pisa, decided to take advantage of this phenomenon and study how attention, via pupil size, tracks with autistic traits. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Autism; Attention
Link ID: 24755 - Posted: 03.15.2018

Researchers at the University of Calgary say they have developed a portable brain-imaging system that would literally shed light on concussions. Symptoms of a concussion can vary greatly between individuals and include headaches, nausea, loss of memory and lack of co-ordination, which make it difficult to find treatment options. U of C scientist Jeff Dunn says there has been no accepted way to get an image of a concussion, but he and his team have developed a device, called a Near-Infrared Spectroscopy, that measures communication in the brain by measuring oxygen levels in blood. Results show these patterns change after concussion. The device — a cap that contains small lights with sensors connected to a computer — is placed on the top of the head to monitor and measure brain activity while the patient looks at a picture or does a simple activity. "When the brain activates, blood flow goes up but oxygen levels also go up, so the blood actually becomes redder as the brain activates," Dunn said. "And we measure that so we shine a light in and we can see that change in oxygen level and measure the change in absorption." Dunn hopes the images will show a connection between symptoms and abnormalities in the brain that could help doctors identify treatment protocols and recovery timelines. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Brain imaging
Link ID: 24754 - Posted: 03.15.2018

Sue Blackmore Are you longing for your brain and all its memories to be preserved for ever? That once fanciful idea seems creepily closer now that a complete pig’s brain has been successfully treated, frozen, rewarmed and found to have its neural connections still intact. This achievement, by the cryobiology research company 21st Century Medicine (21CM), has just won the final phase of the Brain Preservation Foundation’s prize – a prize that demanded all of a brain’s synaptic connections be preserved in a way that allowed for centuries-long storage of the entire information content of a whole large mammal’s brain. They used a pig’s brain, which was perfused with lethal glutaraldehyde before being frozen at –135C, a method called aldehyde-stabilised cryopreservation (ASC). This process kills any chance of the brain being brought to life again, but they won because when the treated brain was warmed up again its connectome – the brain’s wiring diagram – was amazingly well preserved. In fact it was so well preserved that even the fine ultrastructural details of dendritic spine synapses could still be seen with a 3D electron microscope. This means potentially 150 trillion connections, all of which may be implicated in storing memory. A human brain treated this way could never be brought back to life. Yet all its preserved information could potentially be uploaded into an artificial or virtual body indistinguishable from the previously living one – like “uploading a person’s mind” after a long wait. Would this then be “you”? © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 24753 - Posted: 03.15.2018

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, America’s most celebrated baby doctor since Benjamin Spock and the pediatrician who revolutionized our understanding of how children develop psychologically, died on Tuesday at his home in Barnstable, Mass., on Cape Cod. He was 99. His daughter Christina Brazelton confirmed the death. Before Dr. Brazelton began practicing medicine in the early 1950s, the conventional wisdom about babies and child rearing was unsparingly authoritarian. It was believed that infants could not feel pain. Parents were instructed to set strict schedules, demand obedience and refrain from kissing or cuddling. Babies were to be fed every four hours, by the clock, preferably from a bottle. When children were hospitalized, parents were allowed few if any visiting hours. Dr. Brazelton, echoing Dr. Spock, whose book “The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” became a best seller in 1946, rejected such beliefs and practices as being senseless, if not barbaric. “He put the baby at the center of the universe,” Dr. Barry Lester, a pediatrician and director of the Center for the Study of Children at Risk at Brown University, said in an interview for this obituary in 2009. “We take for granted all the changes he helped bring about. He more than anyone is responsible for the return to natural childbirth, breast feeding and the ability of parents to stay with a hospitalized child.” Nevertheless, Dr. Brazelton’s work never entered mainstream pediatrics and is not taught in most medical curriculums. But the public loved the charismatic Dr. Brazelton. He wrote nearly 40 books and a column in Family Circle magazine, and he was the host of an Emmy Award-winning show, “What Every Baby Knows,” which ran for 12 years on the Lifetime cable channel. He also worked with Congress to pass parental leave legislation and other parent-friendly measures. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24752 - Posted: 03.15.2018

By Frankie Schembri When you go to catch a Frisbee, you don’t need to stare at your hand until it makes contact. You have an intuitive sense of where your arm is—and where it’s going—based on how your muscles and joints feel. This sense of body position, known as kinesthesia, has proved tricky to build into prosthetic arms. Now, researchers have recreated the feeling of kinesthesia in six arm amputees by sending finely tuned vibrations into the skin of their upper arms and shoulders. The approach improved their ability to feel and control their prosthetic arms when performing actions such as gripping and pinching, the team reports today in Science Translational Medicine. The amputees in the study had previously undergone surgery to rewire the nerves in their upper bodies to act as messengers for the specific electric signals associated with arm and hand movement. Three also completed tests where they were asked to close their hand as if gripping a cylinder, while not being able to see their prosthetic arm. When the subjects performed the task again while receiving kinesthesia vibrations simulating the feeling of the motion, they more instinctively moved their prosthetics into the grip and were faster in correcting their mistakes, such as when some of their fingers had not closed into the grip. The subjects also indicated in surveys that they felt greater control over their prosthetic arms when receiving the kinesthesia vibrations. The authors of the study say that more experiments need to be run in order to determine the effectiveness of the vibrations in helping with everyday activities such as picking up objects, and on a test group larger than six people. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Robotics
Link ID: 24751 - Posted: 03.15.2018

Laura Sanders We can’t see it, but brains hum with electrical activity. Brain waves created by the coordinated firing of huge collections of nerve cells pinball around the brain. The waves can ricochet from the front of the brain to the back, or from deep structures all the way to the scalp and then back again. Called neuronal oscillations, these signals are known to accompany certain mental states. Quiet alpha waves ripple soothingly across the brains of meditating monks. Beta waves rise and fall during intense conversational turns. Fast gamma waves accompany sharp insights. Sluggish delta rhythms lull deep sleepers, while dreamers shift into slightly quicker theta rhythms. Researchers have long argued over whether these waves have purpose, and what those purposes might be. Some scientists see waves as inevitable but useless by-products of the signals that really matter — messages sent by individual nerve cells. Waves are simply a consequence of collective neural behavior, and nothing more, that view holds. But a growing body of evidence suggests just the opposite: Instead of by-products of important signals, brain waves are key to how the brain operates, routing information among far-flung brain regions that need to work together. MIT’s Earl Miller is among the neuro­scientists amassing evidence that waves are an essential part of how the brain operates. Brain oscillations deftly route information in a way that allows the brain to choose which signals in the world to pay attention to and which to ignore, his recent studies suggest. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 24750 - Posted: 03.14.2018