By Katarina Zimmer Scientists can trace the evolutionary histories of bats and humans back to a common ancestor that lived some tens of millions of years ago. And on the surface, those years of evolutionary divergence have separated us from the winged mammals in every way possible. But look on a sociobehavioral level, as some bat researchers are doing, and the two animal groups share much more than meets the eye. Like humans, bats form huge congregations of up to millions of individuals at a time. On a smaller scale, they form intimate social bonds with one another. And recently, scientists have suggested that bats are capable of vocal learning—the ability to modify vocalizations after hearing sounds. Researchers long considered this skill to be practiced only by humans, songbirds, and cetaceans, but have more recently identified examples of vocal learning in seals, sea lions, elephants—and now, bats. In humans, vocal learning can take the form of adopting styles of speech—for example, if a Brit were to pick up an Australian accent after moving down under. Yossi Yovel, a physicist turned bat biologist at Tel Aviv University who has long been fascinated by animal behavior, recently demonstrated that bat pups can acquire “dialects” in a similar way. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 24529 - Posted: 01.16.2018

By PATRICK SHARKEY Over the past few years, the discussion of crime and violence in the United States has focused on police brutality, mass incarceration and the sharp rise in violence in cities like Baltimore, St. Louis and Chicago. This is entirely appropriate: Any spike in violence should garner attention, and redressing the injustices of our criminal justice system is a matter of moral urgency. But it is also worth reflecting on how much the level of violence has fallen in this country over the past 25 years and how widespread the benefits of that decline have been. From the 1970s through the early part of the 1990s, the murder rate in some cities in the United States rose to levels seen only in the most violent, war-torn nations of the developing world. In the years since, violent crime has decreased in almost every city, in many cases by more than 75 percent. For well-off urbanites, the decline of crime is most visible in sanitized, closely guarded city spaces where tourists and others can now comfortably wander about. But far more consequential have been the changes in low-income, highly segregated urban communities. Indeed, my research has shown that the most disadvantaged people have gained the most from the reduction in violent crime. Start with the lives saved. Though homicide is not a common cause of death for most of the United States population, for African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34 it is the leading cause, which means that any change in the homicide rate has a disproportionate impact on them. The sociologist Michael Friedson and I calculated what the life expectancy would be today for blacks and whites had the homicide rate never shifted from its level in 1991. We found that the national decline in the homicide rate since then has increased the life expectancy of black men by roughly nine months. That figure may not seem like much, but it is exceedingly rare for any change in society to generate such a degree of change in life expectancy. For example, researchers have estimated that if the obesity epidemic in the United States was eliminated, life expectancy would increase by a similar amount. The drop in homicides is probably the most important development in the health of black men in the past several decades. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Attention
Link ID: 24528 - Posted: 01.15.2018

By Adam Bear, Rebecca Fortgang and Michael Bronstein Have you ever felt as though you predicted exactly when the light was going to turn green or sensed that the doorbell was about to ring? Imagine the possibility that these moments of clairvoyance occur simply because of a glitch in your mind’s time logs. What happened first — your thought about the doorbell or its actual ringing? It may have felt as if the thought came first, but when two events (ringing of doorbell, thought about doorbell) occur close together, we can mistake their order. This leads to the sense that we accurately predicted the future when, in fact, all we did is notice the past. In a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we found that this tendency to mix up the timing of thoughts and events may be more than a simple mental hiccup. We supposed that if some people are prone to mixing up the order of their thoughts and perceptions in this way, they could develop a host of odd beliefs. Most obviously, they might come to believe they are clairvoyant or psychic — having abilities to predict such things as whether it is going to rain. Further, these individuals might confabulate — unconsciously make up — explanations for why they have these special abilities, inferring that they are particularly important (even godlike) or are tapping into magical forces that transcend the physical world. Such beliefs are hallmarks of psychosis, seen in mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but they are not uncommon in less-extreme forms in the general population. Would even ordinary people who mistime their thoughts and perceptions be more likely to hold ­delusion-like ideas? © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Attention; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 24527 - Posted: 01.15.2018

By Kelly Crowe, "Scientists identify a sixth taste sense." It's a claim that has made headlines several times over the last few years — first for fat, then for starch and even for water. Now the new candidate for the sixth taste is calcium, after scientists identified the first calcium taste receptors in fruit flies. Researchers at the University of California studied fruit fly behaviour and discovered the flies could taste toxic levels of calcium and didn't like it. Then they used genetics to show that the calcium taste sense is hardwired into the fruit fly brain. University of California professor Craig Montell believes humans might share the fruit fly's taste sensor for calcium. (UC Santa Barbara) And because fruit flies and humans share the other main taste senses — sweet, sour, bitter, salty and savoury (called "umami") — the study's lead author, Craig Montell, thinks there's a good chance that humans also have specific calcium taste receptors. "I would say there is very good reason that, given that all the other tastes have been well conserved between flies and humans, that there probably is," said Montell. But the science of taste is surprisingly complicated. Even the idea that there might be additional taste receptors is controversial. As far back as Aristotle's time, scientists have been puzzling over the question. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 24526 - Posted: 01.15.2018

By Linda Searing That’s the number of babies in the United States who die each year as the result of a sleep-related issue, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The causes vary, but child health experts believe many of the deaths would be preventable if more parents adhered to safe-sleep practices. For instance, babies should be placed on their backs to sleep, but the CDC found that 22 percent of moms placed babies on their side or stomach. Soft bedding — blankets, pillows, bumper pads — should be kept out of the sleep area, but 39 percent of moms said they used soft bedding. And it’s a good idea to share a room with an infant but not a bed with a baby. Still, 61 percent of moms told the CDC they had slept with their babies. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 24525 - Posted: 01.15.2018

By Katarina Zimmer Human mothers will usually cradle their infants on their left sides, such that they can gaze into each other’s left eyes, a position thought to favor processing in the brain’s right hemisphere. A new study in Biology Letters today (January 10) shows that walruses and flying foxes are no different, having such lateralized cuddling biases during maternal care, too. “Several decades ago, it was a popular belief that [this] brain asymmetry is only a human thing,” says the lead author of the study, Andrey Giljov, a zoologist at St. Petersburg University. But recent research has shown that in addition to humans, primate mothers tend to hold their infants to the left, and some of Giljov’s previous work demonstrated that several species of mammal infants like to keep their mothers in their left visual fields when approaching their parents from behind. A bias towards keeping a social partner on a certain side, the new study explains, reflects specialization of the brain’s right hemisphere for processing social information, as visual information is handled by an animal’s contralateral brain hemisphere. The work reveals that flying foxes and walruses not only have a left-biased cuddling preference, but also tend to rest face-to-face in the position that allows mother and young to keep each other within their left visual fields. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Laterality; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24524 - Posted: 01.12.2018

Alison Abbott The brain’s navigation system — which keeps track of where we are in space — also monitors the movements of others, experiments in bats and rats suggest. In a study published in Science1 on 11 January, neuroscientists in Israel pinpoint individual brain cells that seem specialized to track other animals or objects. These cells occur in the same region of the brain — the hippocampus — as cells that are known to map a bat’s own location. In a second paper2, scientists in Japan report finding similar brain activity when rats watched other rats moving. The unexpected findings deepen insight into the mammalian brain’s complex navigation system. Bats and rats are social animals that, like people, need to know the locations of other members of their group so that they can interact, learn from each other and move around together. Researchers have already discovered several different types of cell whose signals combine to tell an animal where it is: ‘place’ cells, for example, fire when animals are in a particular location, whereas other types correspond to speed or head direction, or even act as a kind of compass. The latest reports mark the first discovery of cells that are attuned to other animals, rather than the self. “Obviously, the whereabouts of others must be encoded somewhere in the brain, but it is intriguing to see that it seems be in the same area that tracks self,” says Edvard Moser, a neuroscientist at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in Trondheim, Norway, who shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for revealing elements of the navigation system. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 24523 - Posted: 01.12.2018

By Jessica Wright, The prevalence of autism in the United States remained relatively stable from 2014 to 2016, according to a new analysis. The results were published January 2 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The researchers report the frequency of autism in the U.S. as 2.24 percent in 2014, 2.41 percent in 2015 and 2.76 percent in 2016, respectively. The new data come from the National Health Interview Survey—a yearly interview in which trained census workers ask tens of thousands of parents about the health of their children. These questions include whether a healthcare professional has ever told them that their child has autism. The new figures, released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), represent the highest autism prevalence in the U.S. reported by the agency to date. “We cannot consider autism as rare a condition as people previously thought,” says lead researcher Wei Bao, assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Iowa. The peak is likely to result from the fact that the data are based on parent reports. These reports may capture children with relatively mild autism features better than do approaches that rely on medical records, Bao says. Autism’s reported prevalence in the U.S. has climbed steadily in the past few decades. Researchers attribute most of this increase to changes in how the prevalence is measured, increased awareness of the condition and shifts in the criteria for diagnosing autism. © 2018 Scientific American,

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 24522 - Posted: 01.12.2018

By Asha Tomlinson, Tyana Grundig, CBC News Barb Litt, 49, decided to have gastric band surgery at a private clinic in Toronto two years ago because she'd hit a low point in her life. She was depressed, unemployed and desperate to lose weight. But rather than shedding a few pounds, the mother of two ended up gaining a $12,000 debt she can't shake and a shooting pain in her side that ultimately required a second operation in hospital to remove the silicone band around her stomach that was supposed to shrink her appetite. A new Marketplace investigation reveals Litt's painful experience is hardly unique. The clinic that performed Litt's surgery, Slimband, no longer offers the procedure. Its former chief surgeon had his licence temporarily suspended by the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons last April, following years of complaints from clients. But the financing company linked to the clinic, Credit Medical, is still busy collecting money from clients like Litt, who took out high-interest loans to pay for the procedure. Because of the many complications with gastric bands, including erosion, bleeding, slippage and blockages, 2,363 of the devices have had to be surgically removed in public hospitals across Canada, excluding Quebec, since 2010, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Each removal costs between $3,000 and $14,000, meaning taxpayers are on the hook for up to $33 million. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 24521 - Posted: 01.12.2018

Helen Shen For someone who’s not a Sherlock superfan, cognitive neuroscientist Janice Chen knows the BBC’s hit detective drama better than most. With the help of a brain scanner, she spies on what happens inside viewers’ heads when they watch the first episode of the series and then describe the plot. Chen, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, has heard all sorts of variations on an early scene, when a woman flirts with the famously aloof detective in a morgue. Some people find Sherlock Holmes rude while others think he is oblivious to the woman’s nervous advances. But Chen and her colleagues found something odd when they scanned viewers’ brains: as different people retold their own versions of the same scene, their brains produced remarkably similar patterns of activity1. Chen is among a growing number of researchers using brain imaging to identify the activity patterns involved in creating and recalling a specific memory. Powerful technological innovations in human and animal neuroscience in the past decade are enabling researchers to uncover fundamental rules about how individual memories form, organize and interact with each other. Using techniques for labelling active neurons, for example, teams have located circuits associated with the memory of a painful stimulus in rodents and successfully reactivated those pathways to trigger the memory. And in humans, studies have identified the signatures of particular recollections, which reveal some of the ways that the brain organizes and links memories to aid recollection. Such findings could one day help to reveal why memories fail in old age or disease, or how false memories creep into eyewitness testimony. These insights might also lead to strategies for improved learning and memory. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24520 - Posted: 01.11.2018

James Gorman Humans, chimpanzees, elephants, magpies and bottle-nosed dolphins can recognize themselves in a mirror, according to scientific reports, although as any human past age 50 knows, that first glance in the morning may yield ambiguous results. Not to worry. Scientists are talking about species-wide abilities, not the fact that one’s father or mother makes unpredictable appearances in the looking glass. Mirror self-recognition, at least after noon, is often taken as a measure of a kind of intelligence and self-awareness, although not all scientists agree. And researchers have wondered not only about which species display this ability, but about when it emerges during early development. Children start showing signs of self-recognition at about 12 months at the earliest and chimpanzees at two years old. But dolphins, researchers reported Wednesday, start mugging for the mirror as early as seven months, earlier than humans. Diana Reiss a psychologist at Hunter College, and Rachel Morrison, then a graduate student working with Reiss, studied two young dolphins over three years at the National Aquarium in Baltimore. Dr. Reiss first reported self-recognition in dolphins in 2001 with Lori Marino, now the head of The Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy. She and Dr. Morrison, now an assistant professor in the psychology department at the University of North Carolina Pembroke collaborated on the study and published their findings in the journal PLoS One. Dr. Reiss said the timing of the emergence of self-recognition is significant, because in human children the ability has been tied to other milestones of physical and social development. Since dolphins develop earlier than humans in those areas, the researchers predicted that dolphins should show self-awareness earlier. Seven months was when Bayley, a female, started showing self-directed behavior, like twirling and taking unusual poses. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Consciousness; Evolution
Link ID: 24519 - Posted: 01.11.2018

By Matthew Hutson Imagine searching through your digital photos by mentally picturing the person or image you want. Or sketching a new kitchen design without lifting a pen. Or texting a loved one a sunset photo that was never captured on camera. A computer that can read your mind would find many uses in daily life, not to mention for those paralyzed and with no other way to communicate. Now, scientists have created the first algorithm of its kind to interpret—and accurately reproduce—images seen or imagined by another person. It might be decades before the technology is ready for practical use, but researchers are one step closer to building systems that could help us project our inner mind’s eye outward. “I was impressed that it works so well,” says Zhongming Liu, a computer scientist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who helped develop an algorithm that can somewhat reproduce what moviegoers see when they’re watching a film. “This is really cool.” Using algorithms to decode mental images isn’t new. Since 2011, researchers have recreated movie clips, photos, and even dream imagery by matching brain activity to activity recorded earlier when viewing images. But these methods all have their limits: Some deal only with narrow domains like face shape, and others can’t build an image from scratch—instead, they must select from preprogrammed images or categories like “person” or “bird.” This new work can generate recognizable images on the fly and even reproduce shapes that are not seen, but imagined. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Vision; Brain imaging
Link ID: 24518 - Posted: 01.11.2018

Richard Harris The results of an IQ test can depend on the gender of the person who's conducting the test. Likewise, studies of pain medication can be completely thrown off by the gender of the experimenter. This underappreciated problem is one reason that some scientific findings don't stand the test of time. Colin Chapman found out about this problem the hard way. He had traveled to Sweden on a Fulbright scholarship to launch his career in neuroscience. And he decided to study whether a nasal spray containing a hormone called oxytocin would help control obesity. The hormone influences appetite and impulsive behavior in obese men. "I was really excited about this project, from what I understood about how the brain works, I thought it was kind of a slam dunk," he says. Chapman set up the experiment and then left for a few years to attend Harvard Law School. When he returned, the findings were not at all what he expected, "and I was really disappointed because this was my baby, it was my big project going into neuroscience." But Chapman, who is now a graduate student at the University of Uppsala, says his idea turned out to be right after all. "There was another research group that around the same time came up with the same idea," he says. "And they ran basically the same project and they got exactly the results I was expecting to get." © 2018 npr

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 24517 - Posted: 01.11.2018

By KAREN WEINTRAUB Male sea turtles are disappearing from Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. A new study of gender ratios found that 99 percent of immature green turtles born in the northern part of the reef are female. Among adult turtles, 87 percent are female, suggesting that there has been a shift in gender ratios over the last few decades. A sea turtle’s sex is determined by its nesting environment. As sands warm, more females will hatch relative to males; if the sand temperature tops 84.7 degrees during incubation, only females will emerge. The gender shift suggests that climate change is having a significant effect on one of the biggest green turtle populations in the world, said Michael Jensen, lead author of the new study, published in Current Biology. “We’re all trying to wrap our heads around how these populations are going to respond to those changes,” said Dr. Jensen, a marine biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in San Diego. The gender shift has been noticed before by people who study hatchlings, said Jeanette Wyneken, a sea turtle expert and professor at Florida Atlantic University, who was not involved in the new research. But it wasn’t clear until this study that the shift was so dramatic and happening in such a large population across time, she said. “This is the first paper that’s shown this multigenerational effect,” influencing the gender of juveniles, older adolescents and adults, Dr. Wyneken said. It takes 35 to 40 years for a green sea turtle to reach sexual maturity, she said. “These animals are teenagers for an awfully long time,” Dr. Wyneken said. “We won’t see the effects of what’s happening today for several decades.” David Owens, a professor emeritus from the College of Charleston in South Carolina, was not involved in the new study, but said he’s dreamed of doing such research for years. He praised the way the study team — which included a wide range of expertise — was able to link temperature with turtle gender. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24516 - Posted: 01.11.2018

By LISA FOGARTY The last time I tasted my birthday cake was the spring I turned 13, a few months before I discovered the elimination game. The game went like this: first, stop eating sweets. Second, blot sauces, oils and dressings with paper towels while no one was looking. Third, count grams of fat, reject any food with over 3 grams, and keep a calorie tally in the back of your math notebook (where, if someone found it, they’d assume it was just math). The elimination game also involved adding. Add the toilet bowl and the sewer down the street to the list of places you could discard food. Add candy bar wrappers and empty full-fat yogurt containers to your bedroom nightstand as evidence that you’re not sick. Finally, add up the pounds you’ve lost that week that signify victory. So easy. Repeat. At 38, I am a former anorexic in recovery. Over the years, I’ve discovered my strengths — making my two children feel loved, encouraging sources to open up for stories I write as a magazine reporter — but I’ve never been as good at anything as I was at the elimination game. Growing up in leafy suburban Queens, N.Y., I became obsessed with made-for-TV movies from the ’80s and ’90s about anorexia. All of my early eating disorder role models — a nightmarish choice of words, but when you’re in the grip of this mental disorder, that’s what they are — were scared, sad and relatable. They were also all very, very young. My stars were Karen Carpenter, Tracy Gold and my favorite, Jennifer Jason Leigh, who, in the 1981 movie “The Best Little Girl in the World,” appeared appealingly helpless in high-waisted jeans. With one exception, these movies wrapped up anorexia in tidy boxes where therapy, feeding tubes, weight gain, finding release from a controlling mother’s grip and discovering the joys of food led to a happy ending. I was a kid who no longer ate dessert when I watched Ms. Leigh’s character jovially lick an ice cream cone beside her therapist. But even I knew then that ice cream was neither the problem nor the solution. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 24515 - Posted: 01.11.2018

Nicola Davis The quest to develop drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease has experienced a new setback, with a promising medication failing to show benefits in the latest series of clinical trials. Earlier trials had suggested that the drug idalopirdine, from the Danish international pharmaceutical company Lundbeck, might improve cognition in those with Alzheimer’s disease when taken alongside existing drugs – known as cholinesterase inhibitors – acting to improve symptoms rather than stopping the disease from developing. But the latest trials have dashed such hopes. “I was personally very excited,” said professor Clive Ballard, co-author of the study from the University of Exeter, pointing out that previous trials had appeared promising. “It is very disappointing that it then didn’t pan out.” Analysis This may be a turning point in treating neurodegenerative diseases Success in trials for Huntington’s and Spinal Muscular Atrophy, raises hopes that diseases such as Alzheimer’s and ALS could be tackled using a new class of drugs Read more Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, an international team of researchers report how they carried out three clinical trials involving a total of 2,525 participants in 34 countries, to explore the impact of idalopirdine. All participants were aged 50 years or older and had mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 24514 - Posted: 01.10.2018

By Diana Kwon Centuries ago, humans believed that seizures were tied to the lunar cycle. Although scientific evidence for this association is scarce, physicians have long suspected that temporal patterns connected with epilepsy may exist. These days, the condition’s link to our sleep-wake cycles, or circadian rhythms, is well-documented, primarily through observations that seizures are more prevalent at night or tend to occur at specific times of day. Scientists now report the existence of seizure-associated brain rhythms with longer periods, most commonly within the 20- to 30-day range, in a study published today (January 8) in Nature Communications. “People have made these observations since antiquity and have wanted to speculate and explain these oscillations for a long time,” study coauthor Vikram Rao, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, tells The Scientist. “But only recently [have we gotten] the tools that might allow us to actually unravel this.” Rao and his colleagues analyzed data collected from one such tool—the NeuroPace device, an FDA-approved, implanted brain stimulator that continuously monitors neural activity and sends electrical pulses when a seizure is imminent. It acts, in some sense, like a “pacemaker for the brain,” Rao says. The device detects and records both seizures and interictal epileptiform discharges, pathological brain activity associated with these events, using electroencephalography (EEG). “In between seizures, we see electric discharges that signify irritability of the brain and a propensity to have seizures,” Rao explains. “It’s like seeing sparks from a match, where you say, wow, that looks like there’s potential for a fire but it’s not the fire itself.” © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Epilepsy; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 24513 - Posted: 01.10.2018

Aimee Cunningham Internist Gail Povar has many female patients making their way through menopause, some having a tougher time than others. Several women with similar stories stand out in her mind. Each came to Povar’s Silver Spring, Md., office within a year or two of stopping her period, complaining of frequent hot flashes and poor sleep at night. “They just felt exhausted all the time,” Povar says. “The joy had kind of gone out.” And all of them “were just absolutely certain that they were not going to take hormone replacement,” she says. But the women had no risk factors that would rule out treating their symptoms with hormones. So Povar suggested the women try hormone therapy for a few months. “If you feel really better and it makes a big difference in your life, then you and I can decide how long we continue it,” Povar told them. “And if it doesn’t make any difference to you, stop it.” At the follow-up appointments, all of these women reacted the same way, Povar recalls. “They walked in beaming, absolutely beaming, saying, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t do this a year ago. My life! I’ve got my life back.’ ” That doesn’t mean, Povar says, that she’s pushing hormone replacement on patients. “But it should be on the table,” she says. “It should be part of the discussion.” Hormone replacement therapy toppled off the table for many menopausal women and their doctors in 2002. That’s when a women’s health study, stopped early after a data review, published results linking a common hormone therapy to an increased risk of breast cancer, heart disease, stroke and blood clots. The trial, part of a multifaceted project called the Women’s Health Initiative, or WHI, was meant to examine hormone therapy’s effectiveness in lowering the risk of heart disease and other conditions in women ages 50 to 79. It wasn’t a study of hormone therapy for treating menopausal symptoms. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24512 - Posted: 01.10.2018

By Abby Olena Most mammalian cells have a primary cilium, an antenna-like, immobile surface projection that senses the surrounding environment. Researchers report in Nature Genetics today (January 8) that proteins localized to the cilia of neurons in the hypothalamus control food intake in mice. Furthermore, two human genetics studies published in Nature Genetics today tie variants of a neuronal ciliary gene, adenylyl cyclase 3 (ADCY3), identified in people from Pakistan, Greenland, and the United States, to an increased risk of obesity and diabetes. “This [mouse] paper contributes nicely to a consensus that cilia are important in the brain for energy homeostasis and feeding behaviors,” says Nick Berbari, a biologist at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis who did not participate in the study. “It’s interesting to think about how cilia function could be important for the general population, [not] just in rare instances of ciliopathies,” he adds. Ciliopathies—rare diseases caused by mutations in genes that affect the primary cilia—can produce a variety of symptoms, including extra fingers or toes, retinal degeneration, and obesity, coauthor Christian Vaisse, a geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco, tells The Scientist. “Relatively recently, it was found that the obesity in ciliopathies was linked to a role of the primary cilium in neurons because the genetic removal of primary cilia from all neurons in an adult mouse leads to obesity,” he explains. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 24511 - Posted: 01.10.2018

Want to eat better? Sleep more. Increasing the amount of sleep a person gets has been linked to eating fewer sugary foods, and making better nutritional choices. Wendy Hall, at King’s College London, and her team enlisted 42 volunteers to help them investigate the link between sleep and diet. Half the participants were given advice on how to get more sleep – such as avoiding caffeine before bed, establishing a relaxing routine, and trying not to go to bed too full or hungry. This advice was intended to help them boost the amount of sleep they each got by 90 minutes a night. The remaining 21 volunteers received no such advice. The team found that, of those who were given the advice, 86 per cent spent more time in bed, and around half slept for longer than they used to. These extended sleep patterns were associated with an average reduction in the intake of free sugars of 10 grams a day. People who were getting more sleep also ate fewer carbohydrates. There were no significant changes in diet in the control group. Free sugars include those that are added to foods by manufacturers or during cooking at home, as well as sugars in honey, syrups and fruit juice. “The fact that extending sleep led to a reduction in intake of free sugars suggests that a simple change in lifestyle may really help people to consume healthier diets,” says Hall. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Sleep; Obesity
Link ID: 24510 - Posted: 01.10.2018