By SHIVANI VORA Forget that he’s 87. Eric R. Kandel, who specializes in the biology of memory and is a professor in the neuroscience and psychiatry departments at Columbia University, works more than he ever has before, he said. Dr. Kandel, who won a Nobel Prize in 2000, continues to write books and is co-director of the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia and a senior investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md. He lives with his wife of 60 years, Denise Kandel, 84, an epidemiology professor at Columbia, in Harlem. AN EXTRA HOUR Denise and I usually get up at 6:30, but on Sundays we’re out of bed between 7:30 and 8, so instead of sleeping eight hours, we sleep nine. I wake refreshed and ready to go. CREATURES OF HABIT We eat breakfast first thing and have had the same meal for the last five years: a half a grapefruit each, a cup of coffee and oatmeal. We eat at our kitchen table while we read The New York Times. We compete for the National section, but I also like the Book Review. JOG THE MEMORY I’ve been an exerciser my whole life. I think that activity is good for your memory, your body and your mental state. Plus, it’s fun. During the week I swim, and on Saturdays I play tennis, but on Sundays I work out at home. I start with shoulder stretches on the floor, do 15 push-ups and then walk for 15 minutes on our treadmill. Then, our trainer, Chris, comes over and takes us through an hourlong routine of weight lifting and more stretching. THE JOY OF SEPARATE BATHROOMS Right after Chris leaves, we get dressed for the day. Denise and I each have our own bathrooms, which means two things: I don’t have to deal with her nudging me to put away my toiletries I leave on the counter. Also, we can shower and get ready at the same time. LIGHT LUNCH It may be a banana and a yogurt or a vegetable soup. New York has so many great restaurants, but we like eating at home. Denise is a great cook, we have a nice collection of wine that we like to drink, and we have more control over what we eat. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23582 - Posted: 05.06.2017

By Jef Akst Drawing on data on organ-, tissue-, and individual-specific gene expression from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTex) Portal, Shmuel Pietrokovski and Moran Gershoni of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel developed a comprehensive map of genes that are differentially expressed in men and women. The study was inspired by work the duo conducted several years ago, in which they found that mutations accumulated in genes for sperm formation likely because they were expressed only in men, not in women. As a result, even harmful mutations would only cause problems to half the population; unaffected women would continue to pass on the defective gene without any hit to their fitness. To explore whether other genes expressed differentially between the sexes might be similarly subject to mutation accumulation, Pietrokovski and Gershoni examined some 20,000 protein-coding genes, of which around 6,500 were expressed more in one sex than the other somewhere in the body. And sure enough, selection was effectively weaker in these genes, leading to the pile up of deleterious mutations. “The more a gene was specific to one sex, the less selection we saw on the gene,” Gershoni told the institute’s news publication, Weizmann Wonder Wander, this week (May 3). “The basic genome is nearly the same in all of us, but it is utilized differently across the body and among individuals,” he continued. “Thus, when it comes to the differences between the sexes, we see that evolution often works on the level of gene expression.” © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 23581 - Posted: 05.06.2017

By RICHARD O. PRUM In a mossy forest in the western Andes of Ecuador, a small, cocoa-brown bird with a red crown sings from a slim perch. Bip-Bip-WANNGG! It sounds like feedback from an elfin electric guitar. Three rival birds call back in rapid response. These male club-winged manakins are showing off to attract female mates. Their strange songs are associated with an even stranger movement. Instead of opening their beaks, they flick their wings open at their sides to make the Bips, and then snap their wings up over their backs to produce the extraordinary WANNGG. They are singing with their wings, and their potential mates seem to find the sound very alluring. This is an evolutionary innovation — a whole new way to sing. But the evolutionary mechanism behind this novelty is not adaptation by natural selection, in which only those who survive pass on their genes, allowing the species to become better adapted to its environment over time. Rather, it is sexual selection by mate choice, in which individuals pass on their genes only if they’re chosen as mates. From the peacock’s tail to the haunting melodies of the wood thrush, mate choice is responsible for much of the beauty in the natural world. Most biologists believe that these mechanisms always work in concert — that sex appeal is the sign of an objectively better mate, one with better genes or in better condition. But the wing songs of the club-winged manakin provide new insights that contradict this conventional wisdom. Instead of ensuring that organisms are on an inexorable path to self-improvement, mate choice can drive a species into what I call maladaptive decadence — a decline in survival and fecundity of the entire species. It may even lead to extinction. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 23580 - Posted: 05.06.2017

By Ian Randall René Descartes began with doubt. “We cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt. … I think, therefore I am,” the 17th century philosopher and scientist famously wrote. Now, modern scientists are trying to figure out what made the genius’s mind tick by reconstructing his brain. Scientists have long wondered whether the brains of geniuses (especially the shapes on their surfaces) could hold clues about their owners’ outsized intelligences. But most brains studied to date—including Albert Einstein’s—were actual brains. Descartes’s had unfortunately decomposed by the time scientists wanted to study it. So with techniques normally used for studying prehistoric humans, researchers created a 3D image of Descartes’s brain (above) by scanning the impression it left on the inside of his skull, which has been kept for almost 200 years now in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. For the most part, his brain was surprisingly normal—its overall dimensions fell within regular ranges, compared with 102 other modern humans. But one part stood out: an unusual bulge in the frontal cortex, in an area which previous studies have suggested may process the meaning of words. That’s not to say this oddity is necessarily indicative of genius, the scientists report online in the Journal of the Neurological Sciences. Even Descartes might agree: “It is not enough to have a good mind,” he wrote. “The main thing is to use it well.” © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Intelligence
Link ID: 23579 - Posted: 05.06.2017

Laura Beil Scientists have shown why fruit flies don’t get lost. Their brains contain cells that act like a compass, marking the direction of flight. It may seem like a small matter, but all animals — even Siri-dependent humans — have some kind of internal navigation system. It’s so vital to survival that it is probably linked to many brain functions, including thought, memory and mood. “Everyone can recall a moment of panic when they took a wrong turn and lost their sense of direction,” says Sung Soo Kim of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Va. “This sense is central to our lives.” But it’s a complex system that is still not well understood. Human nerve cells involved in the process are spread throughout the brain. In fruit flies, the circuitry is much more straightforward. Two years ago, Janelia researchers reported that the flies appear to have a group of about 50 cells connected in a sort of ring in the center of their brains that serve as an internal compass. But the scientists could only theorize how the system worked. In a series of experiments published online May 4 in Science, Kim and his Janelia colleagues describe how nerve cell activity in the circle changes when the insects fly. The scientists tethered Drosophila melanogaster flies to tiny metal rods that kept them from wriggling under a microscope. Each fly was then surrounded with virtual reality cues — like a passing landscape — that made it think it was moving. As a fly flapped its wings, the scientists recorded which nerve cells, or neurons, were active, and when. The experiments clusters of about four to five neurons would fire on the side of the ring corresponding to the direction of flight: one part of the ring for forward, another next to it for left, and so on. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017.

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 23578 - Posted: 05.05.2017

Natalie Jacewicz Sometimes people develop strange eating habits as they age. For example, Amy Hunt, a stay-at-home mom in Austin, Texas, says her grandfather cultivated some unusual taste preferences in his 80s. "I remember teasing him because he literally put ketchup or Tabasco sauce on everything," says Hunt. "When we would tease him, he would shrug his shoulders and just say he liked it." But Hunt's father, a retired registered nurse, had a theory: Her grandfather liked strong flavors because of his old age and its effects on taste. When people think about growing older, they may worry about worsening vision and hearing. But they probably don't think to add taste and smell to the list. "You lose all your senses as you get older, except hopefully not your sense of humor," says Steven Parnes, an ENT-otolaryngologist (ear, nose and throat doctor) working in Albany, N.Y. To understand how aging changes taste, a paean to the young tongue might be appropriate. The average person is born with roughly 9,000 taste buds, according to Parnes. Each taste bud is a bundle of sensory cells, grouped together like the tightly clumped petals of a flower bud. These taste buds cover the tongue and send taste signals to the brain through nerves. Taste buds vary in their sensitivity to different kinds of tastes. Some will be especially good at sensing sweetness, while others will be especially attune to bitter flavors, and so on. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23577 - Posted: 05.05.2017

By Moheb Costandi Pain in infants is heartbreaking for new parents, and extremely difficult to treat effectively—if at all. Every year an estimated 15 million babies are born prematurely, most of whom will then undergo numerous lifesaving but painful procedures, such as heel pricking or insertion of a thin tube known as a cannula to deliver fluids or medicine. Preterm babies in the intensive care unit are subjected to an average of 11 such “skin-breaking” procedures per day, but analgesia is only used just over one third of the time. We know that repetitive, painful procedures in early infancy can impact brain development negatively—so why is pain in infants so undertreated? One reason is the lack of standard guidelines for administering the drugs. Some analgesics given to adults are unsuitable for infants, and those that can be used often have different effects in children, making dosing a problem. What is more, newborn babies are incapable of telling us how they feel, making it impossible to determine how effective any painkiller might be. Researchers at the University of Oxford may now have overcome this latter challenge, however. They report May 3 in Science Translational Medicine having identified a pain-related brain wave signal that responds to analgesics, and could be used to measure the drugs’ efficacy. Until as recently as the 1980s, it was assumed that newborn babies do not feel pain, and that giving them analgesics would do more harm than good. Although these misconceptions have been cleared up, we still have very little understanding of infant pain, and so treating it is a huge challenge for clinicians. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 23576 - Posted: 05.05.2017

Ian Sample Science editor It isn’t big and it isn’t clever. But the benefits, known to anyone who has moved home, climbed a mountain, or pushed a broken-down car, have finally been confirmed: according to psychologists, swearing makes you stronger. The upside of letting profanities fly emerged from a series of experiments with people who repeated either a swear word or a neutral word as they pounded away on an exercise bike, or performed a simple hand-grip test. When people cursed their way through the half-minute bike challenge, their peak power rose by 24 watts on average, according to the study. In the 10-second grip task, swearers boosted their strength by the equivalent of 2.1kg, researchers found. “In the short period of time we looked at there are benefits from swearing,” said Richard Stephens, a psychologist at Keele University, who presented the results at the British Psychological Society meeting in Brighton. Stephens enrolled 29 people aged about 21 for the cycling test, and 52 people with a typical age of 19 for the hand-grip test. All were asked to choose a swearword to repeat in the studies, based on a term they might utter if they banged their head. For the neutral word, the volunteers were asked to pick a word they might use to describe a table, such as “wooden” or “brown”. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Attention; Language
Link ID: 23575 - Posted: 05.05.2017

Mark Zdechlik Health officials in Minnesota have been scrambling to contain a measles outbreak that has sickened primarily Somali-American children in the state. So far health officials have identified 34 cases, still mostly in Hennepin County, and they're worried there will be more. In Minnesota, the vast majority of kids under two get vaccinated against measles. But state health officials say most Somali-American 2-year-olds have not had the vaccine — about six out of ten. As the outbreak spreads, that statistic worries health officials, including Michael Osterholm, who directs the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. Understanding The History Behind Communities' Vaccine Fears Shots - Health News Understanding The History Behind Communities' Vaccine Fears "It is a highly concentrated number of unvaccinated people," he says. "It is a potential kind of gas-and-match situation." Measles is a highly contagious respiratory disease that causes a rash and fever. It can be deadly, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says two doses of vaccination are about 97 percent effective in heading off the disease. The Minnesota Department of Health says the outbreak began in Hennepin County, home to Minneapolis and the heart of the nation's Somali-American community. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 23574 - Posted: 05.05.2017

Douglas Fox Six times a day, Katrin pauses whatever she's doing, removes a small magnet from her pocket and touches it to a raised patch of skin just below her collar bone. For 60 seconds, she feels a soft vibration in her throat. Her voice quavers if she talks. Then, the sensation subsides. The magnet switches on an implanted device that emits a series of electrical pulses — each about a milliamp, similar to the current drawn by a typical hearing aid. These pulses stimulate her vagus nerve, a tract of fibres that runs down the neck from the brainstem to several major organs, including the heart and gut. The technique, called vagus-nerve stimulation, has been used since the 1990s to treat epilepsy, and since the early 2000s to treat depression. But Katrin, a 70-year-old fitness instructor in Amsterdam, who asked that her name be changed for this story, uses it to control rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disorder that results in the destruction of cartilage around joints and other tissues. A clinical trial in which she enrolled five years ago is the first of its kind in humans, and it represents the culmination of two decades of research looking into the connection between the nervous and immune systems. For Kevin Tracey, a neurosurgeon at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York, the vagus nerve is a major component of that connection, and he says that electrical stimulation could represent a better way to treat autoimmune diseases, such as lupus, Crohn's disease and more. Several pharmaceutical companies are investing in 'electroceuticals' — devices that can modulate nerves — to treat cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. But Tracey's goal of controlling inflammation with such a device would represent a major leap forward, if it succeeds. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 23573 - Posted: 05.04.2017

Kevin Davis When his criminal trial begins next week, attorneys for Andres “Andy” Avalos, a Florida man charged with murdering his wife, a neighbor and a local pastor, will mount an insanity defense on behalf of their client because, as they announced last summer, a PET scan revealed that Avalos has a severely abnormal brain. In March, shortly after an Israeli American teenager was arrested on suspicion that he made bomb threats against Jewish institutions in the U.S. and abroad, his lawyer declared that the teenager had a brain tumor that might have affected his behavior. Both cases are part of a growing movement in which attorneys use brain damage in service of a legal defense. To support such claims in court, lawyers are turning to neuroscience. The defense brings in hired guns to testify that brain scans can identify areas of dysfunction linked to antisocial behavior, poor decision-making and lack of impulse control. The prosecution calls their own expert witnesses to argue that what a scientist might observe in brain scans shows nothing about that person’s state of mind or past actions. The truth is that even the most sophisticated brain scans cannot show direct correlations between brain dysfunction and specific criminal behavior, nor can they prove whether someone is legally insane. What neuroscience can show is that a person’s decision to commit a crime — or to do anything in life for that matter — is triggered by a series of chemical and electrical interactions in the brain. It can also show approximately where those interactions are occurring.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 23572 - Posted: 05.04.2017

Long assumed to be a mere “relay,” an often-overlooked egg-like structure in the middle of the brain also turns out to play a pivotal role in tuning-up thinking circuity. A trio of studies in mice funded by the National Institutes of Health are revealing that the thalamus sustains the ability to distinguish categories and hold thoughts in mind. By manipulating activity of thalamus neurons, scientists were able to control an animal’s ability to remember how to find a reward. In the future, the thalamus might even become a target for interventions to reduce cognitive deficits in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, researchers say. “If the brain works like an orchestra, our results suggest the thalamus may be its conductor,” explained Michael Halassa, M.D., Ph.D. (link is external), of New York University (NYU) Langone Medical Center, a BRAINS Award grantee of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and also a grantee of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). “It helps ensembles play in-sync by boosting their functional connectivity.” Three independent teams of investigators led by Halassa, Joshua Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., formerly of Columbia University, New York City, now NIMH director, in collaboration with Christoph Kellendonk, Ph.D. (link is external) of Columbia, and Karel Svoboda, PhD (link is external), at Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Research Campus, Ashburn, Virginia, in collaboration with Charles Gerfen, Ph.D., of the NIMH Intramural Research Program, report on the newfound role for the thalamus online May 3, 2017 in the journals Nature and Nature Neuroscience.

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23571 - Posted: 05.04.2017

By Lore Thaler, Liam Norman Echolocation is probably most associated with bats and dolphins. These animals emit bursts of sounds and listen to the echoes that bounce back to detect objects in their environment and to perceive properties of the objects (e.g. location, size, material). Bats, for example, can tell the distance of objects with high precision using the time delay between emission and echo, and are able to determine a difference in distance as small as one centimeter. This is needed for them to be able to catch insects in flight. People, remarkably, can also echolocate. By making mouth clicks, for example, and listening for the returning echoes, they can perceive their surroundings. Humans, of course, cannot hear ultrasound, which may put them at a disadvantage. Nonetheless, some people have trained themselves to an extraordinary level. Daniel Kish, who is blind and is a well-known expert echolocator, is able to ride his bicycle, hike in unfamiliar terrain, and travel in unfamiliar cities on his own. Daniel is the founder and president of World Access for the Blind, a non-profit charity in the US that offers training in echolocation alongside training in other mobility techniques such as the long cane. Since 2011, the scientific interest in human echolocation has gained momentum. For example, technical advances have made it feasible to scan people’s brains while they echolocate. This research has shown that people who are blind and have expertise in echolocation use ‘visual’ parts of their brain to process information from echoes. It has also been found that anyone with normal hearing can learn to use echoes to determine the sizes, locations, or distance of objects or to use it to avoid obstacles during walking. Remarkably, both blind and sighted people can improve their ability to interpret and use sound echoes within a session or two. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 23570 - Posted: 05.04.2017

A U.S.-based drug researcher who led a team that hunted through a massive database of patient records says the anesthetic ketamine shows potential as an antidepressant and should be further studied for its potential as a psychiatric drug. Doctors currently use ketamine to relieve pain during surgery and it is approved for that purpose. The drug's potential to relieve suicidal depression is also well known, but that information is based on anecdotes and small studies rather than a large clinical trial. Ruben Abagyan, a professor in the school of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of California San Diego, said ketamine is a "possible alternative treatment and definitely in particularly difficult cases." Those cases could include suicidal depression, where the weeks of treatment that traditional antidepressants require to take effect might be too long, Abagyan said. Search for beneficial signal Abagyan is the senior author of a study published in Wednesday's issue of the journal Scientific Reports, based on an analysis of a large U.S. database of adverse effect reports that were made for any reason. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's adverse effects database, which contains over 8 million patient records of reports made for a wide range of reasons, is normally used to look for potentially harmful side-effects. But in a twist, the researchers turned this on its head, looking for reduction in depression symptoms among patients who took ketamine. "If we can look at the reduction of their complaints about depression that can be a signal for the beneficial effect of ketamine," Abagyan said. ©2017 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23569 - Posted: 05.04.2017

By Colleen Kimmett, Dr. Rebecca Carey admits to being a little embarrassed about what her son, Mark, eats every day. Hamburger patties for breakfast, or bacon. A pack of raisins and a cookie for lunch; a turkey and cheese sandwich “if I’m lucky,” says Carey, but it usually comes back home. His favorite dinner is fish cakes and pasta, but all vegetables remain firmly untouched. It’s the kind of diet—low in fruits and vegetables, high in carbs—that a doctor like herself might caution against. But it’s also low in milk, sugar, and artificial food additives — all things Carey believes worsen 10-year-old Mark’s attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, symptoms. Twice a day, in the morning at their home in Newburgh, Ind., and from the school nurse at lunch, he takes a vitamin and mineral supplement, which helps make up for the lack of veggies. It’s been six months on this diet, which Carey researched herself and tested out on Mark, and in that time he has transitioned off his ADHD medication. It wasn’t all smooth sailing; there were fights in the candy section of the grocery store, and Carey struggled to find quick, high-protein breakfasts. “But honestly, I would never go back,” she said. Carey is not the only one who’s trying this approach. Medication and therapy remain the most effective treatments for ADHD. But driven by concerns about the short- and long-term side effects of psychiatric medications on children, some parents are looking for ways to keep their kids on lower doses of the drugs, or to quit the drugs entirely. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 23568 - Posted: 05.04.2017

Jon Hamilton A little spit may help predict whether a child's concussion symptoms will subside in days or persist for weeks. A test that measures fragments of genetic material in saliva was nearly 90 percent accurate in identifying children and adolescents whose symptoms persisted for at least a month, a Penn State team told the Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting in San Francisco, Calif. In contrast, a concussion survey commonly used by doctors was right less than 70 percent of the time. If the experimental test pans out, "a pediatrician could collect saliva with a swab, send it off to the lab and then be able to call the family the next day," says Steven Hicks, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Penn State Hershey. Hicks helped develop the test and consults for a company that hopes to market concussion tests. A reliable test would help overcome a major obstacle in assessing and treating concussions, which affect more than one million children and adolescents in the U.S. each year. Many of the injuries are related to sports. In most cases, concussion symptoms last only a few days. But up to 25 percent of young patients "go on to have these prolonged headaches, fatigue, nausea, and those symptoms can last sometimes one to four months," Hicks says. And, right now, there's no way to know which kids are going to have long-term problems, he says. "Parents often say that their biggest concern is, 'When is my child going to be back to normal again?' " Hicks says. "And that's something we have a very difficult time predicting." © 2017 npr

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 23567 - Posted: 05.04.2017

Laura Sanders An electrode on top of a newborn’s scalp, near the soft spot, can measure when the baby feels pain. The method, described online May 3 in Science Translational Medicine, isn’t foolproof, but it brings scientists closer to being able to tell when infants are in distress. Pain assessment in babies is both difficult and extremely important for the same reason: Babies don’t talk. That makes it hard to tell when they are in pain, and it also means that their pain can be more easily overlooked, says Carlo Bellieni, a pediatric pain researcher at the University Hospital Siena in Italy. Doctors rely on a combination of clues such as crying, wiggling and facial grimacing to guess whether a baby is hurting. But these clues can mislead. “Similar behaviors occur when infants are not in pain, for example if they are hungry or want a cuddle,” says study coauthor Rebeccah Slater of the University of Oxford. By relying on brain activity, the new method promises to be a more objective measurement. Slater and colleagues measured brain activity in 18 newborns between 2 and 5 days old. Electroencephalography (EEG) recordings from electrodes on the scalp picked up collective nerve cell activity as babies received a heel lance to draw blood or a low-intensity bop on the foot, a touch that’s a bit like being gently poked with a blunt pencil. One electrode in particular, called the Cz electrode and perched on the top of the head, detected a telltale neural spike between 400 and 700 milliseconds after the painful event. This brain response wasn’t observed when these same babies received a sham heel lance or an innocuous touch on the heel. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23566 - Posted: 05.04.2017

By Simon Makin The past few decades have seen intensive efforts to find the genetic roots of neurological disorders, from schizophrenia to autism. But the genes singled out so far have provided only sketchy clues. Even the most important genetic risk factors identified for autism, for example, may only account for a few percent of all cases. Much frustration stems from the realization that the key mutations elevating disease risk tend to be rare, because they are less likely to be passed on to offspring. More common mutations confer only small risks (although those risks become more significant when calculated across an entire population). There are several other places to look for the missing burden of risk, and one surprising possible source has recently emerged—an idea that overturns a fundamental tenet of biology and has many researchers excited about a completely new avenue of inquiry. Accepted dogma holds that—although every cell in the body contains its own DNA—the genetic instructions in each cell nucleus are identical. But new research has now proved this assumption wrong. There are actually several sources of spontaneous mutation in somatic (nonsex) cells, resulting in every individual containing a multitude of genomes—a situation researchers term somatic mosaicism. “The idea is something that 10 years ago would have been science fiction,” says biochemist James Eberwine of the University of Pennsylvania. “We were taught that every cell has the same DNA, but that's not true.” There are reasons to think somatic mosaicism may be particularly important in the brain, not least because neural genes are very active. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 23565 - Posted: 05.04.2017

By Elizabeth Pennisi When, 6 years ago, divers captured on video a cuckolding attempt among squidlike animals called cuttlefish, experts were stunned. “The violence was beyond anything we had ever seen in the laboratory,” says Roger Hanlon, an ecologist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, who had been studying captive cuttlefish for years. Now, by carefully analyzing the behavior of the two males involved, he and his colleagues suggest the stepwise escalation of their fight likely required more brainpower than many researchers thought invertebrates had, they report this week in American Naturalist. The video (above) first shows a common European male cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) mating with a female. While he escorts her to where she will lay her eggs, a second male suddenly appears and chases him away. But the first male doesn’t give up, and as his rival starts to get fresh with the female, the scuffle gets ever more intense. The rivals squirt ink at each other and jet about. Then, their dark markings turn even darker, and they engage in a quick battle of biting, grappling, and cork-screwing that soon sends the intruder scurrying off. Now that the scientists know how such explosive situations come about, they hope to recreate those circumstances in the lab to study male rivalries more systematically. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science. A

Keyword: Aggression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 23564 - Posted: 05.04.2017

By Christof Koch | Imagine you are an astronaut, untethered from your safety line, adrift in space. Your damaged radio lets you hear mission control's repeated attempts to contact you, but your increasingly desperate cries of “I'm here, I'm here” go unacknowledged—you are unable to signal that you're alive but injured. After days and weeks of fruitless pleas from your loved ones, their messages cease. You become lost to the world. How long do you keep your sanity when you are locked in your own echo chamber? Days? Months? Years? This nightmarish scenario is vividly described by British neuroscientist Adrian Owen in his upcoming book Into the Gray Zone (Scribner). Taking my evening bath while dipping into its opening pages, I only put the book down after finishing hours later, with the water cold. The story of communicating with the most impaired neurological patients at a greater distance from us than an astronaut lost in space is told by Owen in a most captivating manner. A professor at Western University in Ontario, Canada, Owen pioneered brain-imaging technology to establish what islands of awareness persist in patients with severe disorders of consciousness. These people are bedridden and seriously disabled, unable to speak or otherwise articulate their mental state following traumatic brain injury, encephalitis, meningitis, stroke, or drug or alcohol intoxication. Two broad groups can be distinguished among those who do not quickly succumb to their injuries. Vegetative state patients, in the first group, cycle in and out of sleep. When they are awake, their eyes are open, but attempts to establish bedside communications with them—“if you hear me, squeeze my hand or look down”—meet only with failure. These patients can move their eyes or head, swallow and yawn but never in an intentional manner. Nothing is left but surviving brain stem reflexes. With proper nursing care to avoid bedsores and infections, these individuals can live for years. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 23563 - Posted: 05.02.2017