by Anika Burgess Art and science are often treated as distinct realms, but sometimes they overlap in unexpected ways. A neuroscientist, for example, creates a chart based on how an animal’s brain responds to rewards. The chart is informative to scientists who can interpret it—but it is also a compelling, monochrome image reminiscent of an iconic album cover. That neuroscientist is named Sean Cavanagh, of University College London, and his artwork based on the neural responses of rhesus macaques, called Unknown Variability, won the 2017 Art of Neuroscience competition. This competition has been held each year since 2011 by the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN). NIN has existed in one form or another since the early 1900s and carries out research into brain function. Recently, the competition has opened up to include artists and their own interpretations of the brain. We know a great deal more about how the mind works than we did when NIN was founded, but there are still gaps in our understanding. Artificial intelligence is being taught to appreciate, and even create, art, for example, but the biological nature of creativity remains at the edge of our knowledge. This competition both provides scientists with the opportunity to tap into their inner Dalí, Miró, or Pollock, and offers a visual representation of research into the mysteries of thought and behavior. For the nonscientist, it might be difficult to understand “somato-dendritic morphology,” but it’s easy to appreciate its beauty when it is represented as a multicolored mosaic. © 2017 Atlas Obscura.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 23946 - Posted: 08.11.2017

By Kai Sinclair It’s hard to see underwater, and not just because of the chlorine. The image-producing light rays that enter our eyes have trouble bending and focusing when the water’s density is almost same as that of eye fluid. Sea creatures experience the same problem, but squid use a type of lens notorious for blurry images to correct that, researchers report today in Science. Spherical lenses, like the squids’, usually can’t focus the incoming light to one point as it passes through the curved surface, which causes an unclear image. The only way to correct this is by bending each ray of light differently as it falls on each location of the lens’s surface. S-crystallin, the main protein in squid lenses, evolved the ability to do this by behaving as patchy colloids—small molecules that have spots of molecular glue that they use to stick together in clusters. The S-crystallins feature a pair of loops that act as the proteins’ sticky patches and attract the loops of other S-crystallins. Globs of six proteins link together during the squid’s larval stage and form a gel that eventually becomes the center of the lens. As the gel becomes too dense with protein clumps, smaller particles struggle to diffuse through, and a new layer of protein packages forms with just under six S-crystallins in each clump. The process continues until the outer edge of the lens is formed with pairs of S-crystallins. This allows light rays to bend a little differently in each region of the lens, which yields a clearer image. Some fish eyes are nearly identical to squids’, but it’s unknown whether their eye proteins exhibit patchy colloidlike behavior. Other cephalopods, like octopuses and nautiluses, lack S-crystallin lens proteins. So they, unlike squid, likely have blurry vision. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 23945 - Posted: 08.11.2017

Kerri Smith Marta Zlatic owns what could be the most tedious film collection ever. In her laboratory at the Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, the neuroscientist has stored more than 20,000 hours of black-and-white video featuring fruit-fly (Drosophila) larvae. The stars of these films are doing mundane maggoty things, such as wriggling and crawling about, but the footage is helping to answer one of the biggest questions in modern neuroscience: how the circuitry of the brain creates behaviour. It's a major goal across the field: to work out how neurons wire up, how signals move through the networks and how these signals work together to pilot an animal around, to make decisions or — in humans — to express emotions and create consciousness. Even under the most humdrum conditions — “normal lighting; no sensory cues; they're not hungry”, says Zlatic — her fly larvae can be made to perform 30 different actions, including retracting or turning their heads, or rolling. The actions are generated by a brain comprising just 15,000 neurons. That is nothing compared with the 86 billion in a human brain, which is one of the reasons Zlatic and her teammates like the maggots so much. “At the moment, really, the Drosophila larva is the sweet spot,” says Albert Cardona, Zlatic's collaborator and husband, who is also at Janelia. “If you can get the wiring diagram, you have an excellent starting point for seeing how the central nervous system works.” © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 23944 - Posted: 08.10.2017

By Michael Price Anthropologists have waited decades to find the complete cranium of a Miocene ape from Africa—one that lived in the hazy period before the human lineage split off from the common ancestors we share with chimpanzees some 7 million years ago. Now, scientists in Kenya have found their prize at last: an almost perfectly preserved skull roughly the size of a baseball. The catch? It’s from an infant. That means that although it can give scientists a rough idea of what the common ancestor to all living apes and humans would have looked like, drawing other meaningful conclusions could be challenging. “This is the sort of thing that the fossil record loves to do to us,” says James Rossie, a biological anthropologist at the State University of New York in Stony Brook who wasn’t involved with the study. “The problem is that we learn from fossils by comparing them to others. When there are no other infant Miocene ape skulls to which to make those comparisons, your hands are tied.” The remarkably complete skull was discovered in the Turkana Basin of northern Kenya 3 years ago. As the sun sank behind the Napudet Hills west of Lake Turkana, primate paleontologist Isaiah Nengo of De Anza College in Cupertino, California, and his team started walking back to their jeep. Kenyan fossil hunter John Ekusi raced ahead to smoke a cigarette. Suddenly he began circling in place. When Nengo caught up, he saw a dirt-clogged eye socket staring up at him. “There was this skull just sticking out of the ground,” Nengo recalls. “It was incredible because we had been going up and down that path for weeks and never noticed it.” © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 23943 - Posted: 08.10.2017

By Aggie Mika Individuals who possess an innate resilience to age-related brain pathologies may offer molecular clues to unexplored therapeutics for neurodegenerative disease. After having accidentally discovered rapid aging and disease in mice with mutations in the gene that encodes the protein klotho—named after the Greek Fate Clotho, daughter of Zeus and spinner of the thread of life—independent researchers have shown that some people with genetic variants that promote elevated klotho levels live longer and tend to stave off age-related cognitive decline. In a paper published today (August 8) in Cell Reports, scientists report that a fragment of klotho, similar to what winds up in circulation after cleavage from the cell membrane, boosted spatial and short-term memory in young and aging mice and improved both memory and mobility in a transgenic mouse model of neurodegenerative disease. Notably, in each type of mouse, the protein fragment was injected into the animals’ bodies either a day or a few hours before cognitive testing took place. Previously, neurologist and researcher Dena Dubal of the University of California, San Francisco, and others have demonstrated that transgenic overexpression of klotho throughout an organism’s lifespan produces similar cognitive improvements. Dubal’s current work, she says, provides a promising answer to a “big, burning question” of klotho’s therapeutic utility: “could you give it acutely, and would it increase cognition in a rapid way?” © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 23942 - Posted: 08.10.2017

Conor Friedersdorf This week, headlines across a diverse array of media outlets proclaimed that at least one Google employee was so antagonistic to women that he circulated a 10-page “anti-diversity screed.” That is how Gizmodo characterized the now infamous internal memo when publishing it Saturday. Similar language was used in headlines at Fox News, CNN, ABC News, the BBC, NBC News, Time, Slate, Engadget, The Huffington Post, PBS, Fast Company, and beyond (including a fleeting appearance in a headline here at The Atlantic). But love or hate the memo, which makes a number of substantive claims, some of which I regard as wrongheaded (and which would’ve benefitted greatly from an editor with more emotional intelligence than the author to help him avoid alienating his audience, even if he was determined to raise all of the same arguments), the many characterizations of the memo as “anti-diversity” are inaccurate. Using that shorthand is highly misleading. As many who read past the headlines would later observe, its author, who was later fired, began, “I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem.” The balance of his memo argues that he is not against pursuing greater gender diversity at Google; he says it is against the current means Google is using to pursue that end and the way the company conceives of tradeoffs between the good of diversity and other goods. (c) 2017 by The Atlantic Monthly Group.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 23941 - Posted: 08.10.2017

By Philip Jaekl In 1959, two French scientists, Michel Jouvet and François Michel, recorded strange patterns of neural activity in the brainstem of sleeping cats. The brain waves seemed remarkably synced to rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which University of Chicago researchers had connected with dreaming six years earlier. These new brain activity patterns seemed as though they might also correspond with dreaming. In the 1960s, Jouvet and collaborators showed that cats with a lesion introduced into that same brainstem area—the pons—exhibited odd behavior. Cats displayed REMs as though they were asleep, while reacting to nonexistent prey or predators, pouncing, or hiding. Humans can also experience REMs while dreaming, hallucinating, or even recalling deeply emotional memories while awake. But do humans also exhibit the same patterns of neural activity—dubbed PGO waves? The waves are so named because they are generated in a part of the brain stem called the pons, and propagate to the lateral geniculate nuclei of the brain—relay stations in the thalamus for incoming visual information—and then to the occipital lobe, where most visual processing takes place. Studies have suggested that this neural pathway is crucial for functions ranging from basic ones such as the control of eye muscle movements to more-complex phenomena, including visual experiences during dreams and in hallucinations, memory consolidation, and even psychotic behavior. Researchers have recently proposed that a common thread shared by these phenomena is the overriding of retinal visual input by internally created visual experiences (Front Hum Neuro, doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00089, 2017). © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Sleep; Vision
Link ID: 23940 - Posted: 08.10.2017

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR The incidence of stroke has declined in recent years, but only in men. Researchers studied stroke incidence in four periods from 1993 to 2010 in five counties in Ohio and Kentucky. There were 7,710 strokes all together, 57.2 percent of them in women. After adjusting for age and race, they found that stroke incidence in men had decreased to 192 per hundred thousand men in 2010, down from 263 in 1993–94. But for women the incidence was 198 per hundred thousand in 2010, down from 217 in 1993–94, a statistically insignificant change. The study is in Neurology. Most of the difference was in ischemic stroke, the most common cause, resulting from a blocked blood vessel supplying blood to the brain. No one knows why there has been no improvement in women, but the lead author, Dr. Tracy E. Madsen, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Brown, said that some risk factors have a stronger effect in women than in men. Risk factors for stroke include high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes and smoking. “Maybe we’re not controlling risk factors to the same extent in women. Or maybe there’s a biological difference in the way these risk factors cause strokes in men versus women.” In any case, Dr. Madsen said, “It’s important for women to know they are at risk. Stroke has been considered a male disease, but we know that it is very prevalent in women and has a high risk of disability and death.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 23939 - Posted: 08.10.2017

By Stephen Smith, Playing first-person shooter video games causes some users to lose grey matter in a part of their brain associated with the memory of past events and experiences, a new study by two Montreal researchers concludes. Gregory West, an associate professor of psychology at the Université de Montréal, says the neuroimaging study, published Tuesday in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, is the first to find conclusive evidence of grey matter loss in a key part of the brain as a direct result of computer interaction. "A few studies have been published that show video games could have a positive impact on the brain, namely positive associations between action video games, first-person shooter games, and visual attention and motor control skills," West told CBC News. "To date, no one has shown that human-computer interactions could have negative impacts on the brain — in this case the hippocampal memory system." The four-year study by West and Véronique Bohbot, an associate professor of psychiatry at McGill University, looked at the impact of action video games on the hippocampus, the part of the brain that plays a critical role in spatial memory and the ability to recollect past events and experiences. The neuroimaging study's participants were all healthy 18- to 30-year-olds with no history of playing video games. Brain scans conducted on the participants before and after the experiment looked for differences in the hippocampus between players who favour spatial memory strategies and so-called response learners — that is, players whose way of navigating a game favours a part of the brain called the caudate nucleus, which helps us to form habits. ©2017 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23938 - Posted: 08.09.2017

Amy Maxmen Despite strides in maternal medicine, premature birth remains a vexing problem for obstetricians worldwide. But an analysis of medical records from almost 3 million pregnant women in California1 suggests that a surprisingly simple intervention — better sleep — might help to address the issue. Researchers found that women who had been diagnosed with insomnia or sleep apnea were about twice as likely as women without sleep disorders to deliver their babies more than six weeks early. “It seems obvious, but strangely this study has not been done before,” says Laura Jelliffe-Pawlowski, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and an author of the research, which was published on 8 August in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology1. “Seeing this relationship is important because we are just starved for interventions that can make a difference.” Public-health experts say that better treatment for pregnant women with serious sleep disorders could save babies' lives, and do so with approaches that avoid the use of medication. Every year, 15 million babies worldwide are born prematurely — more than three weeks before the typical full-term pregnancy of 40 weeks. These children have less time to develop in the womb, and 1.1 million will die from birth-related complications. Many others are left with hearing impairment, learning disabilities, cerebral palsy and other health issues. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23937 - Posted: 08.09.2017

By Ben Guarino A sleeping brain can form fresh memories, according to a team of neuroscientists. The researchers played complex sounds to people while they were sleeping, and afterward the sleepers could recognize those sounds when they were awake. The idea that humans can learn while asleep, a concept sometimes called hypnopedia, has a long and odd history. It hit a particularly strange note in 1927, when New York inventor A. B. Saliger debuted the Psycho-phone. He billed the device as an “automatic suggestion machine.” The Psycho-phone was a phonograph connected to a clock. It played wax cylinder records, which Saliger made and sold. The records had names like “Life Extension,” “Normal Weight” or “Mating.” That last one went: “I desire a mate. I radiate love … My conversation is interesting. My company is delightful. I have a strong sex appeal.” Thousands of sleepers bought the devices, Saliger told the New Yorker in 1933. (Those included Hollywood actors, he said, though he declined to name names.) Despite his enthusiasm for the machine — Saliger himself dozed off to “Inspiration” and “Health” — the device was a bust. But the idea that we can learn while unconscious holds more merit than gizmos named Psycho-phone suggest. In the new study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, neuroscientists demonstrated that it is possible to teach acoustic lessons to sleeping people. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23936 - Posted: 08.09.2017

(By Ashley Juavinett) We love talking about cortex. It’s bumpy, it’s got layers, and it’s probably the brain structure that makes us the very verbal, skilled primates that we are. We also love all of the different areas of cortex—there’s one for face recognition, another for motion detection, and many for decision-making. Often, labs stake claims on their cortical area of interest, diving deep into how that particular patch gets its job done. But how well can we really divvy up that important sheet of tissue that makes us human? Can we confidently say we’ve left one area, and moved into the next? And how well can we translate these borders to smaller animal models, such as mice? Tiny brains with big aspirations Mice are super important to neuroscientists. Sure, they’re quite small and not exactly the most brilliant animals, but we’ve been able to engineer them to mark specific cell types, express glowing proteins, and more. As a result of this powerful murine toolbox, mice have gained a lot of attention from scientists who want to understand circuits and cell types in the brain. In particular, the visual cortex of the mouse has been the site of a lot of discussion, with many researchers hoping that we could use our extensive knowledge about the coarse organization of the primate visual system to ask detailed questions in the mouse brain. However, if we want to use powerful genetic and recording tools in mice, we first need to understand how their cortex is organized. So, many neuroscientists have been working to combine textbook knowledge about primate brain organization with novel techniques designed for the tiny mouse brain.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 23935 - Posted: 08.09.2017

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Some types of exercise may be better than others at blunting appetite and potentially aiding in weight management, according to an interesting new study of workouts and hunger. It finds that pushing yourself during exercise affects appetite, sometimes in surprising ways. As anyone who has begun an exercise program knows, the relationships between exercise, appetite, weight control and hunger are complex and often counterintuitive. The arithmetic involved seems straightforward. You burn calories during exercise and, over time, should drop pounds. But the reality is more vexing. In both scientific studies and the world inhabited by the rest of us, most people who start exercising lose fewer pounds than would be expected, given the number of calories they are burning during workouts. Many people even gain weight. The problem with exercise as a weight-loss strategy seems to be in large part that it can make you hungry, and many of us wind up consuming more calories after a workout than we torched during it, a biological response that has led some experts and frustrated exercisers to conclude that exercise by itself — without strict calorie reduction — is useless for shedding pounds. But much of the past research into exercise and appetite has concentrated on walking or other types of relatively short or light activities. Some scientists have begun to wonder whether exercise that was physically taxing, either because it was prolonged or intense, might affect appetite differently than more easeful exercise. So for the new study, which was published recently in the Journal of Endocrinology, scientists from Loughborough University in Britain and other institutions who have been studying exercise and appetite for years recruited 16 healthy, fit young men. (They did not include women because this was a small, pilot study, the authors say, and controlling for the effects of women’s menstrual cycles would have been difficult.) © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 23934 - Posted: 08.09.2017

By Jamie Strashin, The look on Melissa Bishop's face said it all. The Canadian 800-metre star had just run the race of her life, at the best possible moment, on the world's biggest stage. "I have never run faster in my life. It's the smartest race I have ever put down on a track," Bishop said of her performance in the final at the Rio Olympics last summer. But it still wasn't enough. Despite setting a new Canadian record (which she has since broken by running a 1:57.01), Bishop finished fourth in the Rio final, missing a bronze medal by 13 hundredths of a second. Perhaps more distressingly, she crossed the line close to two seconds slower than gold medallist Caster Semenya. "I remember seeing my agent and just falling into his arms, thinking, I can't believe this just happened. What just happened?" Bishop recalled. "And then I saw my dad, and my dad is a very emotional man and he was livid. Not because of how I raced, but because of the scenario we were in. And he just kept telling me, 'You have nothing to be ashamed of.'" The "scenario" of finishing well behind Semenya is a familiar one for competitors since the South African burst onto the scene at the 2009 world track and field championships. As an 18-year-old in Berlin, Semenya blasted away her competition, winning by almost two and a half seconds and clocking the fastest time of the year. Caster Semenya dominates 800m at 2009 world championships ©2017 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 23933 - Posted: 08.09.2017

By Matthew Hutson Every year, tens of millions of Americans toss and turn with chronic sleep disorders. But diagnosis isn’t easy: It usually means sleeping in a lab entangled in gadgets that track breathing, heart rate, movement, and brain activity, followed by expert analysis of the data. Now, a new technique that uses machine learning and radio signals can get rid of the sleep lab—and the expert. First, an in-home device bounces radio waves—similar to those in cellphones and Wi-Fi routers—off the sleeper, measuring the returning signal. Then, the system builds on previous radio-frequency sleep monitoring by using three machine-learning algorithms to analyze breathing and pulse and identify the stage of sleep: light, deep, REM, or wakefulness. One algorithm uses a type of neural network common in image recognition to parse the spectrograms, or snapshots, of the data; another uses a type of neural net typically employed in tracking temporal patterns to look at the dynamics of sleep stages; a third refines the analysis to make it more generalizable across people and environments. Researchers trained the tool on about 70,000 30-second sleep intervals and tested it on about 20,000. Measured against an electroencephalogram system that was about as proficient as humans, the system identified sleep stages with 80% accuracy, versus 64% for the previous best radio frequency method, the researchers will report tomorrow at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Sydney, Australia. If the system makes it to market, doctors might soon be able to diagnose you in their sleep. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 23932 - Posted: 08.09.2017

By Kerry Grens The popular chemogenetic technique for controlling cells does not operate in vivo in the way scientists had assumed. Reporting in Science yesterday (August 3), researchers show that CNO, a drug used in the DREADDs method (designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs), is not actually responsible for the effects scientists observe. Rather, it’s clozapine, a metabolite of CNO with numerous cellular targets, that binds the receptors. These results make it imperative for researchers to do proper controls with clozapine, and indicate that they should change their protocols altogether. “I’m glad I don’t own stock in CNO,” says Scott Sternson, a neuroscientist at the Janelia Research Campus. “There’s no reason to use CNO anymore.” Although it may be the end of CNO in these studies, coauthor Mike Michaelides of the National Institute on Drug Abuse tells The Scientist the results don’t necessarily mean the end of DREADDs. In fact, his findings might simplify things. Rather than using CNO, researchers can just administer clozapine instead because it’s the real actuator of the technique. “If they use proper controls, then hopefully it should be fine,” he says. The idea behind DREADDs is that a receptor is introduced into cells that will only respond to a particular drug, in this case CNO. Likewise, the drug will only target that receptor. The technique allows researchers to control neural activity. Michaelides says that although it’s a commonly used method, no one had done the critical experiments to observe CNO interacting directly with DREADDs in vivo. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 23931 - Posted: 08.08.2017

By TAFFY BRODESSER-AKNER James Chambers was watching membership sign-ups on Jan. 4, 2015, like a stock ticker — it was that first Sunday of the year, the day we all decide that this is it, we’re not going to stay fat for one more day. At the time, he was Weight Watchers’ chief executive, and he sat watching, waiting for the line on the graph to begin its skyward trajectory. Chambers knew consumer sentiment had been changing — the company was in its fourth year of member-recruitment decline. But they also had a new marketing campaign to help reverse the generally dismal trend. But the weekend came and went, and the people never showed up. More than two-thirds of Americans were what public-health officials called overweight or obese, and this was the oldest and most trusted diet company in the world. Where were the people? Weight Watchers was at a loss. Chambers called Deb Benovitz, the company’s senior vice president and global head of consumer insights. ‘‘We’re having one of the worst Januaries that anyone could have imagined,’’ she remembers him telling her. In the dieting business, January will tell you everything you need to know about the rest of the year. ‘‘Nothing like we had anticipated.’’ Chambers and Benovitz knew that people had developed a kind of diet fatigue. Weight Watchers had recently tried the new marketing campaign, called ‘‘Help With the Hard Part,’’ an attempt at radical honesty. No one wanted radical honesty. Chambers told Benovitz that they needed to figure out what was going on and how to fix it before the February board meeting. Benovitz got to work. She traveled the country, interviewing members, former members and people they thought should be members about their attitudes toward dieting. She heard that they no longer wanted to talk about ‘‘dieting’’ and ‘‘weight loss.’’ They wanted to become ‘‘healthy’’ so they could be ‘‘fit.’’ They wanted to ‘‘eat clean’’ so they could be ‘‘strong.’’ © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 23930 - Posted: 08.08.2017

By GINA KOLATA For middle-aged women struggling with their weight, a recent spate of scientific findings sounds too good to be true. And they may be, researchers caution. Studies in mice indicate that a single hormone whose levels rise at menopause could be responsible for a characteristic redistribution of weight in middle age to the abdomen, turning many women from “pears” to “apples.” At the same time, the hormone may spur the loss of bone. In mouse studies, blocking the hormone solves those problems, increasing the calories burned, reducing abdominal fat, slowing bone loss and even encouraging physical activity. The notion that such a simple intervention could solve two big problems of menopause has received the attention of researchers and has prompted commentaries in prestigious journals like The New England Journal of Medicine and Cell Metabolism. “It’s a super interesting idea,” said Dr. Daniel Bessesen, an obesity expert and professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. With obesity rising, “we definitely need some new ideas.” The work began when Dr. Mone Zaidi, a professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, became curious about whether a reproductive hormone — F.S.H., or follicle-stimulating hormone — affects bone density. It had long been assumed that the hormone’s role was limited to reproduction. F.S.H. stimulates the production of eggs in women and sperm in men. Researchers knew that blood levels of F.S.H. soar as women’s ovaries start to fail before menopause. At the same time, women rapidly lose bone — even when blood levels of estrogen, which can preserve bone, remain steady. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 23929 - Posted: 08.08.2017

/ By Robin Lloyd While broadly welcomed by public health advocates as an important step to further curb tobacco use, many of the commitments in a new plan to tackle the problem, announced last Friday by Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, actually involve gathering more input for future policies, rather than taking action now. “We expect to take meaningful steps in 2017 to advance important regulatory components that address the key aspects of this new policy,” FDA spokesman Michael Felberbaum said in an email message to Undark. “We do not have any additional details to share at this time.” That strikes some public health advocates as a bit of foot-dragging. “A lot of these issues they’re raising that they say they have to consider have been considered, have been researched, have been studied,” says Eric Lindblom, director for tobacco control and food and drug law at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. Lindblom has a long resume for developing tobacco control policies to improve public health, including a 2011-2014 stint at the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products. “FDA saying that ‘We’re going to look into nicotine reduction,’ without also saying, ‘We’re going to issue a proposed rule before the end of this year, or before June of next year,’ just opens the door to continued discussion and talking and all the rest, without actually ever getting anything done,” Lindblom said. Copyright 2017 Undark

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23928 - Posted: 08.08.2017

By Helen Thomson People with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) may get relief simply from watching someone else perform their compulsive actions. If the finding holds up, we may be able to develop apps that help people with OCD stop needing to repeatedly wash their hands or pull their hair. When we watch someone else perform an action, the same parts of our brains become active as when we do the action ourselves. This is called the mirror neuron system, and it is thought to help us understand the actions and feelings of others. Baland Jalal at the University of Cambridge wondered whether this system could be used to help people with OCD. Working with his colleague Vilayanur Ramachandran, at the University of California, San Diego, he studied 10 people with OCD symptoms, who experience disgust when touching things they consider even mildly contaminated. The anxiety this causes forces them to wash their hands compulsively. First, Jalal and Ramachandran showed each participant something to make them feel disgusted – either an open bag of vomit, a bowl containing blood-soaked bandages or a bedpan of faeces and toilet paper. The participants were unaware that each stimulus was in fact fake. In a variety of conditions, either the participant or a researcher touched the bag, bowl or bedpan for 15 seconds while wearing latex gloves. The participants were then asked to rate how disgusted they felt, before being allowed to wash their hands, or watch the researcher do the same. They then rated how relieved they now felt. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 23927 - Posted: 08.08.2017