Jon Brooks Max, age 13, is agender — neither male nor female. When referring to Max, you don't use "he" or "she;" you use "they." Once strictly a pronoun of the plural variety, "they" is now doing double duty as singular, too — referring to individuals, like Max, who do not see gender as an either/or option. (NPR agreed not to use Max's last name, because the family feared the sort of online threats that have been made to other transgender families.) If the whole he/she pronoun thing feels awkward to you, Max is sympathetic — and patient. 'We are seeing more and more kids saying, 'You know what? What's with this either-or business? What's with this boy-girl and you have to fit in one box or the other?' " Diane Ehrensaft, psychologist, Child and Adolescent Gender Center, UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital "I can't expect anyone to use the right pronouns for me because it's not a thing that people know," Max tells me. "It's been great being myself, but it's also been really hard for people to get it, and for even family to get pronouns and stuff." We're talking in Max's room at home, where posters on the wall showcase the teen's love of theater: Peter Pan, Tarzan, The Pirates of Penzance. Max is old enough now to enjoy using make-up — blush, foundation, lipstick — but still young enough to enjoy going with their mom to see "Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory." (The review from Max: Gene Wilder's great!) From these surroundings, you wouldn't think the room's occupant is someone who has already poked and prodded at the most fundamental sense of who they are. Really, this is just a kid's room. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 23562 - Posted: 05.02.2017

Miriam E. Tucker In July 2012, a science reporter for The Washington Post, Brian Vastag, was in Wisconsin visiting his family when a high fever hit. He became instantly bedridden with flu-like symptoms that never went away. "It didn't feel like anything I'd ever had before. ... The things that distinguished it were the dizziness and the feeling of unreality in the head," Vastag says. Now, nearly five years later, the 45-year-old can no longer concentrate or read even a few sentences without becoming exhausted. A short walk to the mailbox means lying down for the rest of the day. In September, he'll qualify for Medicare due to his disability. That level of severity isn't the picture most people — including physicians — think of when they hear the term "chronic fatigue syndrome." But that was the diagnosis Vastag finally received after 18 months of visiting numerous doctors, submitting countless vials of blood and initially being misdiagnosed with West Nile virus. Actually, Vastag's condition is now termed "myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome," or ME/CFS for short, and is estimated to affect at least 1 million people in the U.S. alone. Many with the condition dislike the name "chronic fatigue syndrome" because they feel it's trivializing and misleading, giving the impression that they're simply tired or depressed when in fact many are quite ill. Nailing down the cause — or, more likely, causes — of the illness has proven exceptionally difficult, since patients' symptoms vary tremendously. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 23561 - Posted: 05.02.2017

Nicola Davis From Beyoncé to Benedict Cumberbatch, celebrities have flocked to diets based on intermittent fasting, but it turns out such regimes might be less effective than previously thought. Among the diets experiencing a boom in popularity is the alternate-day fasting diet – a regime many experts believed would be more palatable than daily calorie counting for those hoping to lose weight. But a new study suggests it is tougher to stick to than expected, making it no better than a traditional diet in helping people to shed the pounds. “We thought that it would be easier to stick to alternate-day fasting, just because you get that day off every [other] day where you don’t have to diet,” said Krista Varady, co-author of the research from the University of Illinois at Chicago. “We were really just expecting the traditional [daily diet] group to cheat a lot more.” Writing in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, Varady and colleagues from four US institutions described how they recruited 100 overweight or obese participants, 86% of whom were women, and randomly allocated them to one of three regimes: eating as normal, daily calorie counting and an alternate-day fasting diet. For the first month all participants ate as normal, after which they spent six months on their allocated diet. In the fasting diet, participants consumed 25% of their normal daily calorie intake on the “fast” day, and 125% the following “feast” day, while the calorie-restricted group consumed 75% of their normal calorie intake every day. The third group made no changes to their typical diet.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 23560 - Posted: 05.02.2017

By Ariana Eunjung Cha Congress unveiled a bipartisan budget late Sunday that contains a number of welcome surprises for researchers who had been panicking since March, when President Trump proposed deep funding cuts for science and health. Under the deal, the National Institutes of Health will get a $2 billion boost in fiscal year 2017, as it did the previous year. Trump had proposed cutting the NIH budget by about one-fifth, or $6 billion, in a draft 2018 budget. The NIH budget continues support for key areas of research, such as precision medicine and neuroscience, that were priorities under President Barack Obama; adds funding to target diseases such as Alzheimer's and cancer; and combats emerging threats such as antibiotic-resistant infections. Here are some of the big research winners: 1) Cancer: 2) Alzheimer's: Alzheimer's is now the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, yet it remains a mystery in terms of its cause and possible treatments. Public health experts expect the number of Americans with Alzheimer's to increase dramatically in the coming years as baby boomers age into their 70s and 80s. The new budget sets aside an additional $400 million for a total of $1.39 billion for Alzheimer's research. 5) BRAIN: Another Obama-era initiative, the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies program, seeks to create a comprehensive guide to the anatomy and functioning of the brain. The budget includes $110 million for efforts to map the human brain. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 23559 - Posted: 05.02.2017

By Mo Costandi The world is an unpredictable place. But the brain has evolved a way to cope with the everyday uncertainties it encounters—it doesn’t present us with many of them, but instead resolves them as a realistic model of the world. The body’s central controller predicts every contingency, using its stored database of past experiences, to minimize the element of surprise. Take vision, for example: We rarely see objects in their entirety but our brains fill in the gaps to make a best guess at what we are seeing—and these predictions are usually an accurate reflection of reality. The same is true of hearing, and neuroscientists have now identified a predictive textlike brain mechanism that helps us to anticipate what is coming next when we hear someone speaking. The findings, published this week in PLoS Biology, advance our understanding of how the brain processes speech. They also provide clues about how language evolved, and could even lead to new ways of diagnosing a variety of neurological conditions more accurately. The new study builds on earlier findings that monkeys and human infants can implicitly learn to recognize artificial grammar, or the rules by which sounds in a made-up language are related to one another. Neuroscientist Yukiko Kikuchi of Newcastle University in England and her colleagues played sequences of nonsense speech sounds to macaques and humans. Consistent with the earlier findings, Kikuchi and her team found both species quickly learned the rules of the language’s artificial grammar. After this initial learning period the researchers played more sound sequences—some of which violated the fabricated grammatical rules. They used microelectrodes to record responses from hundreds of individual neurons as well as from large populations of neurons that process sound information. In this way they were able to compare the responses with both types of sequences and determine the similarities between the two species’ reactions. © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Language; Attention
Link ID: 23558 - Posted: 05.01.2017

Irina Zhorov On July 17, 2014 Kurt Hinrichs, of Gladstone, Mo., went to bed early. As often happens, he woke in the middle of the night. When he tried to get out of bed, he crashed to the floor, which woke his wife, Alice. "At first it was like, 'What's going on?' " Alice says. "Are you dreaming? Are you sleepwalking?" Kurt wasn't responding to anything Alice asked him, so she called 911. "I [was] thinking, 'this is a nightmare,' " Kurt says. By the time the ambulance arrived, just a few minutes later, Kurt wasn't speaking and his entire right side was paralyzed. Paramedics recognized that Kurt was having a stroke. When they wheeled Kurt out of the house, Alice thought he might never come home again. And if he did, he would be bedridden or in a wheelchair. "I really didn't have a lot of hope that my husband would be normal again, ever," she says. Speeding towards St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., Kurt realized this was no nightmare. He was awake, "but there was something major and massively wrong with me," Kurt says. About 800,000 people suffer strokes every year in the U.S. Most of them are ischemic strokes, caused by a clot which blocks a vessel supplying blood to the brain. If blood can't reach the brain, cells are deprived of oxygen and start to die. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 23557 - Posted: 05.01.2017

By Vicky Hallett Anything can happen while you’re performing karaoke at a dive bar in Scotland. As Lauren Marks found out 10 years ago at age 27, that includes having an aneurysm rupture in your brain. After being rushed to the hospital, the American actress/writer underwent emergency surgery that saved her life. But she lost two things that night: a single black high heel and much of her ability to use language. “A Stitch of Time,” her memoir that focuses on the year that followed, offers a deeply personal — and often surprising — perspective on aphasia, the medical term for this kind of communication disorder. The initial sensation, which Marks describes as “The Quiet,” was pleasurable. “The smallest of activities would enthrall me,” she writes. “Dressing myself, I was awed by the orbital distance between cloth and flesh. Brushing my teeth, I was enchanted by the stiffness of the bristles and the sponginess of my gums.” The Quiet, she explains, was what temporarily replaced her inner monologue. It was as muted as her external speech, which was initially limited to about 40 words. Beginning soon after she was stricken, Marks kept a journal, which she describes as initially “this confetti of fractured words.” Today, Marks can’t imagine what compelled her to scribble down “cathrene prussia horse-donk.” On the same page, she also wrote “speshul,” “Tibet” and “chorus.” © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Stroke; Language
Link ID: 23556 - Posted: 05.01.2017

By Dave A. Chokshi, In medicine, we speak of “seeing patients” when we are rounding in the hospital or caring for those who come to our clinics. But what about those people who may be sick but do not seek care? What is our responsibility to the patients we do not see? This question takes on greater urgency in the current political climate, as patients face the threat of losing health insurance. Renewed efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act leave millions wondering whether they will be covered. For me, as a physician practicing in the safety net, abstract numbers evoke the very real stories of my uninsured patients. One of my patients, whom I’ll call Elsa, had not seen a doctor since immigrating to the United States 15 years ago. That abruptly changed one morning: She awoke to find the room spinning around her and, terrifyingly, she could not articulate the words to explain to her husband what was going on. She was having a stroke. There are many reasons that patients like Elsa may not seek care – until they have no choice. Although she felt no symptoms before her stroke, Elsa was one of about 13 million U.S. adults with undiagnosed high blood pressure. I wondered if making her aware of her blood pressure would have been enough to avoid her suffering. But even if high blood pressure may sit atop the list of problems I write out, from his or her perspective it may not crack the top five. Food security, job stability, child care and affordable housing understandably feel more urgent. Time and again, I have learned that taking care of my patients starts by trying to walk a mile in their shoes. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Stroke; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 23555 - Posted: 05.01.2017

Amy Maxmen Psychedelic drugs could soon help people, including soldiers, who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder with the pain of recalling traumatic memories. Psychologists have occasionally given people psychedelic drugs such as LSD or magic mushrooms to induce altered states, in an attempt to treat mental illness. Today, many of those drugs are illegal, but if clinical trials testing their efficacy yield positive results, a handful could become prescription medicines in the next decade. The furthest along in this process is MDMA — a drug sold illegally as ecstasy or Molly — which is showing promise in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Last week, at the Psychedelic Science 2017 conference in Oakland, California, researchers presented unpublished results from phase II trials involving a total of 107 people diagnosed with PTSD. The trial treatment involved a combination of psychotherapy and MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine). The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reviewed these data in November, which were not released to the public at the time. The agency recommended that the researchers move forward with phase III trials, the final stage before potential approval of the drug. At the conference, researchers affiliated with the non-profit organization that is sponsoring the trials, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in Santa Cruz, California, presented some of their latest resutls. They used a cinically validated scale that assesses PTSD symptoms such as frequency of nightmares and anxiety levels. More than one year after two or three sessions of MDMA-assisted therapy, about 67% of participants no longer had the illness, according to that scale. About 23% of the control group — who received psychotherapy and a placebo drug — experienced the same benefit. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stress
Link ID: 23554 - Posted: 04.29.2017

Elizabeth Eaton Researchers have pinpointed a gene that keeps important brain cells in mice from crossing their wires, providing a possible link between brain wiring and mood disorders like depression. Without the gene, called Pcdhαc2, mice acted more depressed, researchers report April 28 in Science. Nerve cells, or neurons, that produce the chemical messenger molecule serotonin extend long projections called axons to various parts of the brain. Serotonin released from the tips of the axons signal other neurons in these target areas to influence mood and other aspects of behavior. For efficient signaling, the axon tips must be properly spaced. In the new work, scientists from New York City, St. Louis and China found that such spacing is disrupted in mice lacking the Pcdhαc2 gene. As a result, serotonin-signaling circuits are not properly assembled and the mice exhibited behaviors indicating depression. Pcdhαc2 is found in a cluster of genes that contain the blueprints for proteins that protrude from the surface of cells. These proteins work like ID cards, says study coauthor Joseph Dougherty, a neurogeneticist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. As serotonin neuron axons branch out through the brain, they can recognize other axons carrying identical IDs and spread out to keep out of each other’s paths. This process, called tiling, evenly spaces the axons in their target areas within the brain. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017

Keyword: Depression; Brain imaging
Link ID: 23553 - Posted: 04.29.2017

By Abigail Beall You can’t eat, you can’t sleep and all you can think about is your next fix. You may be addicted to love. Intense romance can often come with symptoms resembling addiction – euphoria, craving, dependence, withdrawal and relapse – and brain scans have shown that it can be linked to drug-addiction-like activity in the brain’s reward centres. But the idea that people can be addicted to love is contentious. “It gets complicated because people disagree on the correct theory of addiction, and people especially disagree about what we mean when we use the term ‘love’ ”, says Brian Earp, at the Oxford University Centre for Neuroethics. “I think it is when you realise you do not want to be in love yet cannot avoid it, and it causes bad things, like abuse, that we cross the line into something addiction-like,” says Anders Sandberg, also at the Oxford University Centre for Neuroethics. Now Earp and his team have found evidence that there are in fact two different types of love addiction, after reviewing 64 studies of love and addiction published between 1956 and 2016. They found that people who feel desperately alone when not in a relationship, and try to replace an ex-partner straight away, could have what the team has called a “narrow” form of love addiction.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 23552 - Posted: 04.29.2017

By Brian Handwerk When you go to a movie or a concert with your friend, oftentimes it seems that you shared a similar experience. Your brains, you say, are on the same wavelength. Now, neurological science gives that phrase some new backing. Using new portable headsets that monitor brain activity, researchers have found that the brainwaves of people who are engaged in the same class really do “sync up.” Thanks to studies performed in laboratory settings, we had an inkling that this might be the case. A growing body of brain-scanning research is beginning to reveal how human brains display synchronicity—likely a key factor that makes many of our cooperative behaviors possible, from performance art to team sport. “If you pay more attention, you're more in sync,” explains Suzanne Dikker, a cognitive neuroscientist at both New York University and Utrecht University in the Netherlands and a co-author on the new study. “Now we've gone out there and confirmed that this is true in a real world setting,” she says. That remarkable feat was made possible thanks to portable electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets, which researchers used to monitor students' brain activity during an entire semester of biology classes at a New York high school. Each week, 12 high school seniors and their teacher attended class wearing the headsets, for a total of 11 classes overall. The more engaged those students were with their teacher and classmates, it turned out, the more their brainwave patterns were in sync with one another.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23551 - Posted: 04.29.2017

By Ruth Williams | When the immune system has eliminated the last traces of Zika virus from the blood, low-level infection may continue at certain sites around the body. A study published in Cell today (April 27) reveals that the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is one such sanctuary, which, if also true for infected humans, may have implications for long-term neurological health. “Up until now, everyone was focused on the acute [infection]—what happens when a person gets infected initially by a mosquito bite. But what this paper tells us is that maybe, two months down the line, symptoms could manifest from this later stage of virus replication in the central nervous system and other sites,” said microbiologist and immunologist Andres Pekosz of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore who was not involved in the research. “Right now, we may be missing some of the disease associated with infection because we’re not looking far enough down the path.” Zika virus infection generally causes a short acute illness of fever, fatigue, headache and other mild symptoms, or can be entirely asymptomatic. But, in pregnant women, infection can cause grievous fetal abnormalities, including microcephaly. In rare cases, Zika can also induce Guillain-Barré syndrome and other neurological symptoms in adults. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23550 - Posted: 04.29.2017

Dean Burnett Every now and then, you see news reports of people with incredible memories, able to recall every single thing from their life at a moment’s notice. Initially, it may sound like an incredibly useful ability. No more searching for your car keys that you had in your hand minutes ago, no more desperately stalling for time as you flounder to remember the name of the casual acquaintance who’s just said hello to you, no more taking notes at all. Why would you need to? It’s no wonder it pops up often in pop culture. Indeed, there are many people who can demonstrate incredible memory prowess, having trained their memories to be as efficient and thorough as possible via useful and approved techniques, in order to compete in memory sports, which are an actual thing. Clearly, for some people at least, there is potential to greatly boost the brain’s ability to store and recall information to well above average levels. Ben Carson even claimed to be able to induce this with a simple bit of surgery (which is utterly wrong) What’s far more rare are reports of people who do this without even trying, without having to learn and train with an endless series of mnemonics and so on. Like one of Marvel’s mutants discovering a hitherto unexpected super power, some people seem to be born with seemingly-infallible memories. There are a number of terms that are used to describe such abilities. Photographic memory, eidetic memory, Hyperthymesia, Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, perfect recall, there are a number of labels to choose from when discussing formidable memory prowess.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23549 - Posted: 04.28.2017

New research from the National Institutes of Health found that pairing the antidepressant amitriptyline with drugs designed to treat central nervous system diseases, enhances drug delivery to the brain by inhibiting the blood-brain barrier in rats. The blood-brain barrier serves as a natural, protective boundary, preventing most drugs from entering the brain. The research, performed in rats, appeared online April 27 in the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism. Although researchers caution that more studies are needed to determine whether people will benefit from the discovery, the new finding has the potential to revolutionize treatment for a whole host of brain-centered conditions, including epilepsy, stroke,human amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), depression, and others. The results are so promising that a provisional patent application has been filed for methods of co-administration of amitriptyline with central nervous system drugs. According to Ronald Cannon, Ph.D., staff scientist at NIH’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), the biggest obstacle to efficiently delivering drugs to the brain is a protein pump called P-glycoprotein. Located along the inner lining of brain blood vessels, P-glycoprotein directs toxins and pharmaceuticals back into the body’s circulation before they pass into the brain. To get an idea of how P-glycoprotein works, Cannon said to think of the protein as a hotel doorman, standing in front of a revolving door at a lobby entrance. A person who is not authorized to enter would get turned away, being ushered back around the revolving door and out into the street.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 23548 - Posted: 04.28.2017

By Olga Mecking When I was a new mother, the parenting books I read encouraged me to treat child-rearing like a science project. I was told to pay particular attention to my baby’s developing brain, which was malleable and awe-inspiring, but also fragile. I thought I was supposed to provide an optimal environment for my children’s brain growth, because didn’t they deserve the very best? And the earlier I started the better, because the stakes were high. If I failed, my children could develop any number of mental disorders. At least, that was my impression after having read nearly every parenting book on the market. I also expected to spontaneously and intuitively know how to care for my babies. But I didn’t have a clue, and articles like these made me feel like a failure. Was it so unnatural for a mother to want time to herself, or to not want to become one with her baby? It seemed that way, but Jan Macvarish, author of the recent book, “Neuroparenting: The Expert Invasion of Family Life,” disagrees. Macvarish is deeply concerned about this ultra-scientific approach to parenting, in part because it reduces everything to the mother-child relationship. “To talk about parenting in this way is untruthful because this isn’t the way that any child is raised,” she says. “There are always other people involved.” And she’s right. I felt that I was solely responsible for my children’s well-being, and that pressure started to get to me. What kind of mother was I if I couldn’t take care of my babies’ developing brains properly? © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23547 - Posted: 04.28.2017

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Diabetes may be bad for the brain, especially if you are overweight. Researchers studied 50 overweight and 50 normal weight people in the early stages of Type 2 diabetes. All had been given a diagnosis within the previous five years. They compared both groups with 50 healthy control subjects. The scientists performed M.R.I. examinations of their brains and psychological tests of memory, reaction time and planning. Those with diabetes scored worse than the healthy controls on tests of memory and reaction times. M.R.I. scans revealed significant differences in brain areas related to memory, planning and the visual processing of information. Compared with the controls, those with Type 2 diabetes had more severe thinning of the cortex and more white matter abnormalities. Overweight people with diabetes had more brain deterioration than diabetic people of normal weight. Are these changes reversible? Probably not, according to a co-author, Dr. Donald C. Simonson of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “When structural changes are seen on an M.R.I. scan, the processes leading up to them have probably been going on for years,” he said. “On the positive side, patients who maintain good control of their diabetes do seem to have a slower rate of deterioration.” The findings were published in Diabetologia. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Obesity
Link ID: 23546 - Posted: 04.28.2017

Jon Hamilton Tiny, 3-D clusters of human brain cells grown in a petri dish are providing hints about the origins of disorders like autism and epilepsy. An experiment using these cell clusters — which are only about the size of the head of a pin — found that a genetic mutation associated with both autism and epilepsy kept developing cells from migrating normally from one cluster of brain cells to another, researchers report in the journal Nature. "They were sort of left behind," says Dr. Sergiu Pasca, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford. And that type of delay could be enough to disrupt the precise timing required for an actual brain to develop normally, he says. The clusters — often called minibrains, organoids or spheroids — are created by transforming skin cells from a person into neural stem cells. These stem cells can then grow into structures like those found in the brain and even form networks of communicating cells. Brain organoids cannot grow beyond a few millimeters in size or perform the functions of a complete brain. But they give scientists a way to study how parts of the brain develop during pregnancy. "One can really understand both a process of normal human brain development, which we frankly don't understand very well, [and] also what goes wrong in the brain of patients affected by diseases," says Paola Arlotta, a professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard who was not involved in the cell migration study. Arlotta is an author of a second paper in Nature about creating a wide variety of brain cells in brain organoids. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Autism
Link ID: 23545 - Posted: 04.27.2017

By KAREN BARROW The World Health Organization estimates that more than 50 million people worldwide have some form of epilepsy, a neurological disorder that is characterized by recurring episodes of seizure. While seizures come in various forms, those with epilepsy cope with similar issues: social stigma, complex treatment options and a feeling of powerlessness. Here, eight men, women and children discuss what it’s like to live with epilepsy. Denise L. Pease, an assistant comptroller for New York City, began having complex partial seizures after a car accident in which she suffered a traumatic brain injury. But because Ms. Pease lives alone, it wasn’t until a relative saw her having a tonic-clonic seizure, what used to be known as a grand mal seizure, that she realized she had developed epilepsy. Tonic-clonic seizures typically involve the whole body and can be very dramatic. Ms. Pease began to notice that she would get a strange taste in her mouth before a seizure, so whenever that happened she made sure she was seated in a safe location and waited for the seizure to pass. This sensation of an oncoming seizure, called an aura, is common among people with epilepsy. After eight years of trying different medications to control her epilepsy, Ms. Pease is happy to be back at work and no longer lives in fear of an imminent seizure. Ms. Pease is hopeful that she will soon be able to drive, and she continues to plan for her future. “When you have epilepsy, you have to be your own advocate,” she said. Sallie Gallagher’s son, Michael, started having complex partial seizures at age 4. This type of seizure doesn’t cause the full-body twitching associated with tonic-clonic seizure, but it can cause a person to start to act strangely or be completely unaware of his surroundings. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 23544 - Posted: 04.27.2017

By Sam Wong Six years ago, a chimpanzee had the bright idea to use moss to soak up water, then drink from it, and seven others soon learned the trick. Three years later, researchers returned to the site to see if the practice had persisted to become part of the local chimp culture. They now report that the technique has continued to spread, and it’s mostly been learned by relatives of the original moss-spongers. This adds to earlier evidence that family ties are the most important routes for culture to spread in animals. After the first report of chimps using moss as a sponge in Budongo Forest, Uganda, researchers rarely saw the behaviour again, and wondered whether chimps still knew how to do it. So they set up an experiment, providing moss and leaves at the clay pit where the chimps had demonstrated the technique before. Then they watched to see whether chimpanzees would use leaves – a more common behaviour – or moss to soak up the mineral-rich water from the pit. The eight original moss-spongers all used moss again during the experiment, and so did another 15 chimps, showing the practice had become more widespread. The researchers wondered what factors influenced which individuals adopted it: were they connected socially, or through families, for instance? © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 23543 - Posted: 04.27.2017