By Partha Mitra Intricate, symmetric patterns, in tiles and stucco, cover the walls and ceilings of Alhambra, the “red fort,” the dreamlike castle of the medieval Moorish kings of Andalusia. Seemingly endless in variety, the two dimensionally periodic patterns are nevertheless governed by the mathematical principles of group theory and can be classified into a finite number of types: precisely seventeen, as shown by Russian crystallographer Evgraf Federov. The artists of medieval Andalusia are unlikely to have been aware of the mathematics of space groups, and Federov was unaware of the art of Alhambra. The two worlds met in the 1943 PhD thesis of Swiss astronomer Edith Alice Muller, who counted eleven of the seventeen planar groups in the adornments of the palace (more have been counted since). All seventeen space groups can also be found in the periodic patterns of Japanese wallpaper. Without conscious intent or explicit knowledge, the creations of artists across cultures at different times nevertheless had to conform to the constraints of periodicity in two dimensional Euclidean space, and were thus subject to mathematically precise theory. Does the same apply to the “endless forms most beautiful,” created by the biological evolutionary process? Are there theoretical principles, ideally ones which may be formulated in mathematical terms, underlying the bewildering complexity of biological phenomema? Without the guidance of such principles, we are only generating ever larger digital butterfly collections with ever better tools. In a recent article, Krakauer and colleagues argue that by marginalizing ethology, the study of adaptive behaviors of animals in their natural settings, modern neuroscience has lost a key theoretical framework. The conceptual framework of ethology contains in it the seeds of a future mathematical theory that might unify neurobiological complexity as Fedorov’s theory of wallpaper groups unified the patterns of the Alhambra. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 23482 - Posted: 04.12.2017

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR About a year and a half ago, Robin Collier and her husband, Wayne, were like millions of other Americans: overweight and living with Type 2 diabetes. Despite multiple diets, the couple could not seem to lose much weight. Then Ms. Collier’s doctor told her she was going to need daily insulin shots to control her diabetes. That was the motivation she needed. “I made up my mind right then and there,” said Ms. Collier, 62, an administrator at an accounting firm in Lafayette, Ind. “I said to myself, ‘I’m not going on insulin. I’m too young to have this disease.’” Instead, Ms. Collier and her husband entered a study sponsored by a company called Virta Health, one of a new crop of high-tech companies that have designed programs aimed at helping people prevent or even reverse their diabetes. On the program, patients video-chat with a remote Virta doctor, who consults with their primary care doctor, reviews their blood tests and medical history, and makes diet and drug recommendations. While studies show that a variety of different diets can benefit people with Type 2 diabetes, Virta, based in San Francisco, takes a low-carbohydrate approach, training patients to swap foods like pastries, pasta and sugary snacks for veggie omelets, almonds and salads with grilled chicken and beef. Every day, patients use an app to upload their blood sugar levels, blood pressure, body weight and other measurements. A health coach, usually a registered dietitian, monitors their data and checks in by phone, text or email to discuss any problems or just to provide daily encouragement. Today, Ms. Collier has lost 75 pounds and has avoided taking insulin. Her husband has lost 45 pounds and was able to stop two diabetes medications. Both are still in the program, which she called “life changing,” as part of an ongoing clinical trial. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 23481 - Posted: 04.12.2017

Consider two children who have childhood absence epilepsy (CAE), the most common form of pediatric epilepsy. They both take the same drug — one child sees an improvement in their seizures, but the other does not. A new study in the Annals of Neurology identified the genes that may underlie this difference in treatment outcomes, suggesting there may be potential for using a precision medicine approach to help predict which drugs will be most effective to help children with CAE. The study was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), both part of the National Institutes of Health. “A better understanding of genetic factors underlying a disease and the way that people respond to treatments may help healthcare providers select the best therapies for children with CAE,” said Vicky Whittemore, Ph.D., program director at NINDS. A team led by Tracy A. Glauser, M.D., director of the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and professor of pediatrics in the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, investigated whether there may be a genetic basis for different responses to three drugs used for CAE (ethosuximide, valproic acid, and lamotrigine). The experiments focused on three genes that code for T-type calcium channels that are involved in CAE and one gene that codes for a transporter that shuttles the drugs out of the brain. T-type calcium channels help control the firing rate of brain cells. The current study is part of a 32-center, randomized, controlled clinical trial that compared the effects of the three most commonly used drugs in 446 children who were recently diagnosed with CAE.

Keyword: Epilepsy; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 23480 - Posted: 04.12.2017

Laura Sanders Soon after systems biologist Juergen Hahn published a paper describing a way to predict whether a child has autism from a blood sample, the notes from parents began arriving. “I have a bunch of parents writing me now who want to test their kids,” says Hahn, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. “I can’t do that.” That’s because despite their promise, his group’s results, reported March 16 in PLOS Computational Biology, are preliminary — nowhere close to a debut in a clinical setting. The test will need to be confirmed and repeated in different children before it can be used to help diagnose autism. Still, the work of Hahn and colleagues, along with other recent papers, illustrates how the hunt for a concrete biological signature of autism, a biomarker, is gaining speed. Currently, pediatricians, child psychologists and therapists rely on behavioral observations and questionnaires, measures with limitations. Barring genetic tests for a handful of rare mutations, there are no blood draws, brain scans or other biological tests that can reveal whether a child has — or will get — autism. Objective tests would be incredibly useful, helping provide an early diagnosis that could lead to therapy in the first year of life, when the brain is the most malleable. A reliable biomarker might also help distinguish various types of autism, divisions that could reveal who would benefit from certain therapies. And some biomarkers may reveal a deeper understanding of how the brain normally develops. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017

Keyword: Autism; Brain imaging
Link ID: 23479 - Posted: 04.11.2017

By Michael Price Do the anatomical differences between men and women—sex organs, facial hair, and the like—extend to our brains? The question has been as difficult to answer as it has been controversial. Now, the largest brain-imaging study of its kind indeed finds some sex-specific patterns, but overall more similarities than differences. The work raises new questions about how brain differences between the sexes may influence intelligence and behavior. For decades, brain scientists have noticed that on average, male brains tend to have slightly higher total brain volume than female ones, even when corrected for males’ larger average body size. But it has proved notoriously tricky to pin down exactly which substructures within the brain are more or less voluminous. Most studies have looked at relatively small sample sizes—typically fewer than 100 brains—making large-scale conclusions impossible. In the new study, a team of researchers led by psychologist Stuart Ritchie, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh, turned to data from UK Biobank, an ongoing, long-term biomedical study of people living in the United Kingdom with 500,000 enrollees. A subset of those enrolled in the study underwent brain scans using MRI. In 2750 women and 2466 men aged 44–77, Ritchie and his colleagues examined the volumes of 68 regions within the brain, as well as the thickness of the cerebral cortex, the brain’s wrinkly outer layer thought to be important in consciousness, language, memory, perception, and other functions. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 23478 - Posted: 04.11.2017

By Andy Coghlan “PRENATAL exposure to progesterone affects sexual orientation in humans”. A bold and unequivocal-sounding title for a scientific paper. And certainly important if true. But is it? The study claimed to show that women given extra progesterone during pregnancy, routinely prescribed to prevent miscarriage, bleeding or premature delivery, have children who are “29 per cent more likely” to later identify as bisexual. It would be a landmark finding, allowing us to also ground in biology the established social science contention that sexuality has more dimensions than straight and gay. We suspected that exposing a fetus to strong hormones can shape sexual orientation. But there are no animal models of sexual orientation, and doing this kind of experiment in humans would be deeply unethical. The next best thing would be a retrospective analysis looking at a birth cohort exposed to a specific hormone “in the wild”. And that’s what this study did. June Reinisch of the Kinsey Institute in Indiana and her colleagues trawled a public database containing records of more than 9000 pregnancies in Denmark between 1959 and 1961. They identified women who were given a progesterone-mimicking hormone by the trade name lutocyclin to prevent miscarriage. Lutocyclin did seem to have mild effects on sexual orientation: later in life, exposed individuals were five times more likely to self-identify as non-heterosexual, and were more likely to report relationships with the same sex, than unexposed controls. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 23477 - Posted: 04.11.2017

Nicola Davis Scientists have unpicked the regions of the brain involved in dreaming, in a study with significant implications for our understanding of the purpose of dreams and of consciousness itself. What’s more, changes in brain activity have been found to offer clues as to what the dream is about. Dreaming had long been thought to occur largely during rapid eye-movement (REM) sleep, a period of slumber involving fast brain activity similar to that when awake, but dreams have also been reported to occur during non-REM sleep, leaving scientists scratching their heads as to the hallmark of dreaming. “It seemed a mystery that you can have both dreaming and the absence of dreaming in these two different types of stages,” said Francesca Siclari, co-author of the research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US. Now it seems the puzzle has been solved. In addition the team found that dreaming about faces was linked to increased high-frequency activity in the region of the brain involved in face recognition, with dreams involving spatial perception, movement and thinking similarly linked to regions of the brain that handle such tasks when awake. “[It is] a proof for the fact that dreaming really is an experience that occurs during sleep, because many researchers up until now have suggested that it is just something you invent when you wake up,” said Siclari.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 23476 - Posted: 04.11.2017

By Knvul Sheikh For the past five decades pharmaceutical drugs like levodopa have been the gold standard for treating Parkinson’s disease. These medications alleviate motor symptoms of the disease, but none of them can cure it. Patients with Parkinson’s continue to lose dopamine neurons critical to the motor control centers of the brain. Eventually the drugs become ineffective and patients’ tremors get worse. They experience a loss of balance and a debilitating stiffness takes over their legs. To replace the lost dopamine neurons, scientists have begun investigating stem cell therapy as a potential treatment or even a cure. But embryonic cells and adult stem cells have proved difficult to harness and transplant into the brain. Now a study from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm shows it is possible to coax the brain’s own astrocytes—cells that typically support and nurture neurons—into producing a new generation of dopamine neurons. The reprogrammed cells display several of the properties and functions of native dopamine neurons and could alter the course of Parkinson’s, according to the researchers. “You can directly reprogram a cell that is already inside the brain and change the function in such a way that you can improve neurological symptoms,” says senior author Ernest Arenas, a professor of medical biochemistry at Karolinska. Previously, scientists had to nudge specialized cells like neurons into becoming pluripotent cells before they could develop a different kind of specialized cell, he says. It was like having to erase all the written instructions for how a cell should develop and what job it should do and then rewriting them all over again. But Arenas and his team found a way to convert the instructions into a different set of commands without erasing them. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Parkinsons; Glia
Link ID: 23475 - Posted: 04.11.2017

By Jef Akst | Previous research has shown that high doses of broad-spectrum antibiotics can affect the behavior of adult animals, and numerous epidemiological studies have begun to link early-life antibiotic use to diverse ailments in humans. A study published last week (April 4) in Nature Communications adds to this growing literature, demonstrating that even low, clinically relevant doses of the classic narrow-spectrum antibiotic penicillin can trigger changes in the gut microbiome, in the blood-brain barrier and brain chemistry, and in the behaviors of mice exposed at a young age. Treating the mice with Lactobacillus rhamnosus bacteria, however, helped protect the mice against the effects of early-life, low-dose penicillin exposure. “There are almost no babies in North America that haven’t received a course of antibiotics in their first year of life,” McMaster University coauthor John Bienenstock, who is also the director of the Brain-Body Institute at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, said in a press release. “In this paper, we report that low-dose penicillin taken late in pregnancy and in early life of mice offspring, changes behavior and the balance of microbes in the gut. While these studies have been performed in mice, they point to popular increasing concerns about the long-term effects of antibiotics. Furthermore, our results suggest that a probiotic might be effective in preventing the detrimental effects of the penicillin.” Bienenstock and colleagues gave pregnant female mice low doses of penicillin during their last week of gestation, and continued to treat their pups until they weaned a few weeks after birth. At six weeks old, mice exposed to the antibiotic were less social, slightly less anxious, and more aggressive than unexposed mice, the team reported. In the animals’ brains, the researchers found evidence of a thinned blood-brain barrier, as well as increased production of cytokines and heightened activity of a gene that has been linked to aggressive behavior. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Aggression
Link ID: 23474 - Posted: 04.11.2017

Nicola Davis Sitting in a padded car seat, a small black and white bullseye stuck to his cheek, four-month-old Teo Bosten-Lam gazes at a computer. The screen is a mottled grey, like the snow on a old-fashioned television, but in the top right-hand corner is a deep blue circle. Teo has spotted it. He glances at the circle and, as he does so, it morphs into a smiley face and a triumphant jingle fills the darkened room. Buoyed by the reaction, he looks around. Suddenly a black and white spinning disc appears on the screen, issuing a sound that can only be described as “boing”. “Babies can’t resist the black and white swirl things,” says researcher Alice Skelton. “When they look away we play it and it brings them back to the screen.” A PhD student in the baby lab at the University of Sussex, Skelton is attempting to unpick a conundrum that has fascinated parents and scientists alike: when it comes to colour, exactly what can babies can see? It’s a mission that takes technology: Teo’s ability to pick up on colour is being probed with an eye-tracking system. The sticker on his cheek directs the camera to his face, while his corneal reflections and the position of his pupils are automatically detected. “What we are looking to see is, do you have to have a more saturated blue for a baby to see it than you would for a red, for example,” says Skelton. If Teo can see a colour, the novelty will attract his attention, triggering the smiley face and jingle. And this isn’t the only ingenious idea. At the first sound that indicates our participant is becoming fed up with this science lark, the screen flashes to a clip from the 1980s cartoon Dogtanian. Teo, once again, is transfixed.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Vision
Link ID: 23473 - Posted: 04.11.2017

By C. CLAIBORNE RAY. The yellow stuff in the outer part of the ear canal, scientifically named cerumen, is only partly a waxy substance, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. The rest of the so-called wax is an accretion of some dust and lots of dead skin cells, which normally collect in the passage as they are shed. The waxy part, which holds the compacted waste together and smooths the way for it to leave the ear, comes from the ceruminous glands, which secrete lipids and other substances. They are specialized sweat glands just under the surface of the skin in the outer part of the canal. Besides lubricating the skin of the canal while keeping it dry, the lipids also help maintain a protective acidic coating, which helps kill bacteria and fungi that can cause infection and irritation. The normal working of muscles in the head, especially those that move the jaw, help guide the wax outward along the ear canal. The ceruminous glands commonly shrink in old age, producing less of the lipids and making it harder for waste to leave the ear. Excess wax buildup can usually be safely softened with warm olive or almond oil or irrigated with warm water, though specialized softening drops are also sold. Take care not to compress the buildup further with cotton swabs or other tools. If it cannot be safely removed, seek medical help. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 23472 - Posted: 04.11.2017

By Paul Taylor One of the bummers of getting older, as most baby boomers can attest, is that the list of stuff you don’t do as well as you once did keeps getting longer. Bennett Beach, 67, can measure his decline with a stopwatch. Three hours, 27 minutes, 56 seconds: That’s the difference between his best time in the Boston Marathon (2:27:26) and his worst (5:55:22). On April 17, he’ll be running the famous race once again. If he completes the course in less than six hours, he will have officially finished his 50th consecutive Boston Marathon. No one has ever done that. Nor, as far as he knows, will any of his 32,000 fellow racers be coping, as he is, with the rare and debilitating neurological movement disorder known as task-specific dystonia. Whenever he strides, Beach’s left leg gets hijacked by erratic signals from his brain. His walk is nearly normal, but for the past 15 years he has been running with a severe limp. His pursuit of the milestone has been fueled in roughly equal measure by antithetical parts — an Ahab-grade obsession mixed with an older-but-wiser acceptance of his body’s limits. “If someone had told me 30 years ago I’d be struggling to finish this race in six hours, I’d have said, ‘Spare me.’ Now I’m grateful.” Beach is a marathoner by demeanor: quiet, unassuming, self-effacing, iron-willed. And by body type: 5-foot-7, 125 pounds. He played all sports as a kid, distinguishing himself at none: “I just didn’t have the size or strength.” As a senior in prep school, he happened upon a radio broadcast of the Boston Marathon. “It was 30 degrees, it was sleeting, and these guys were out there running 26 miles,” he remembers. “Just the sort of bizarre, crazy thing I was drawn to. I already knew I’d be in Boston the next year, so I decided I’d give it a shot.” © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 23471 - Posted: 04.10.2017

Robin McKie Sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together. Thus wrote the English playwright Thomas Dekker in the 16th century, reflecting a view that has persisted through the centuries. Sleep is crucial to our wellbeing. Disturb it and you will find your constitution troubled and twisted out of joint. It is a view supported by science. Experiments in which men and women have endured periods of up to 11 days without shut-eye have shown that if we cannot sleep we develop increasingly severe symptoms: progressive decreases in concentration, perception and other higher mental processes. Intriguingly, these problems vanish once subjects are allowed a couple of nights curled up in their beds in a state of blissful unconsciousness. Just why we need sleep has been more difficult to answer. Freud argued that sleep allows us to have dreams in which we can act out wishes that are too disturbing to contemplate while awake. Others have maintained that sleep is a leftover from our stone age past, when it would have been dangerous to blunder around in the night at the mercy of nocturnal carnivores. So we evolved the habit of sleep to keep us safe, sound and unconscious in our caves. More recently, scientists have argued that sleep is involved in helping our bodies to recover from the vicissitudes of the day and for our brains to process the experiences of the previous 12 hours. All these theories have their proponents and opponents – for scientists are certainly far from reaching an agreement about the biological causes of sleep. However, a couple of papers published last week suggest there may be new avenues for researchers to explore so that they can learn how sleep works and why animals need it so badly.

Keyword: Sleep; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 23470 - Posted: 04.10.2017

Doctors trialling the use of ketamine to treat depression are calling for the treatment to be rolled out. Ketamine is licensed to be used as an anaesthetic but has a reputation as an illegal party drug. Writing in The Lancet Psychiatry, Dr Rupert McShane, who has led a trial in Oxford, since 2011 says ketamine can work on patients with depression "where nothing has helped before". However, he is calling for a national registry to monitor its use. Dr McShane says tens of thousands of people who have not responded to other treatment could be helped by the drug. But he adds there should be a national registry for those who prescribe the treatment to monitor the results and avoid misuse of the Class B substance. Of the 101 people taking part who had failed to find a successful depression treatment, 42 of them responded to the ketamine. "The first ketamine infusion literally saved my life," says one patient. "I had felt so desperate I was going to end it all. "Subsequent ketamine treatment has enabled me to return to my job full-time. I still struggle at times but being able to work again has given me such a boost." Dr McShane hopes more doctors will use it to treat depression but fears that the UK could follow the US where there are private ketamine clinics that vary in their clinical checks. © 2017 BB

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23469 - Posted: 04.10.2017

By Jia Naqvi An experimental technique reduces the tics, or involuntary movements and vocal outbursts, associated with severe Tourette's syndrome in young adults, a study published Friday found. The surgical technique, called thalamic deep brain stimulation (DBS), sends electrical impulses to a specific area of the brain that reduces the tics, according to the study published in the Journal of Neurosurgery. The finding adds to the growing body of evidence about the safety and effectiveness of deep brain stimulation, which might eventually lead the Food and Drug Administration to approve the treatment for Tourette's syndrome, according to the researchers. “Our study shows that deep brain stimulation is a safe, effective treatment for young adults with severe Tourette syndrome that cannot be managed with current therapies,” said Alon Mogilner, an associate professor in the departments of neurosurgery and anesthesiology at New York University Langone and director of its Center for Neuromodulation, in a news release. “This treatment has the potential to improve the quality of life for patients who are debilitated through their teenage years and young adulthood.” Tourette's syndrome, a type of neurological disorder, according to various studies afflicts from 0.3 to 0.6 percent of children in the United States, with around 138,000 ages 6 to 17 being diagnosed with the condition. The causes for the syndrome are not well known and are thought to be largely genetic, with unidentified environmental factors increasing the likelihood of the condition. Usually the syndrome begins in childhood and the condition improves with age for some people, but for others the symptoms become more severe to the point that people become socially isolated and unable to work or attend school. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Tourettes
Link ID: 23468 - Posted: 04.08.2017

By PENELOPE GREEN At M.I.T.’s Media Lab, the digital futurist playground, David Rose is investigating swaddling, bedtime stories and hammocks, as well as lavender oil and cocoons. Mr. Rose, a researcher, an inventor-entrepreneur and the author of “Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire and the Internet of Things,” and his colleagues have been road-testing weighted blankets to induce a swaddling sensation and listening to recordings of Icelandic fairy tales — all research into an ideal sleep environment that may culminate in a nap pod, or, as he said, “some new furniture form.” “For me, it’s a swinging bed on a screened porch in northwestern Wisconsin,” he said. “You can hear the loons and the wind through the fir trees, and there’s the weight of 10 blankets on top of me because it’s a cold night. We’re trying a bunch of interventions.” Meanwhile, at the University of California, Berkeley, Matthew P. Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology and the director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory there, is working on direct current stimulation as a cure for sleeplessness in the aging brain. Dr. Walker is also sifting through the millions of hours of human sleep data he has received from Sense, a delicately lovely polycarbonate globe designed to look like the National Stadium in Beijing that measures air quality and other intangibles in your bedroom, then suggests tweaks to help you sleep better. “I’ve got a mission,” he said. “I want to reunite humanity with the sleep it is so bereft of.” Sense is the first product made by Hello Inc., a technology company started by James Proud, a British entrepreneur, for which Dr. Walker is the chief scientist. In Paris, Hugo Mercier, a computer science engineer, has invested in sound waves. He has raised over $10 million to create a headband that uses them to induce sleep. The product, called Dreem, has been beta-tested on 500 people (out of a pool of 6,500 applicants, Mr. Mercier said) and will be ready for sale this summer. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 23467 - Posted: 04.08.2017

By PENELOPE GREEN I’m exhausted. Aren’t you? For an article about how Silicon Valley and other innovators have taken on the challenge of sleeplessness, a $32 billion market once populated mostly by mattress and pharmaceutical companies, I tested but a few of the many hundreds of gadgets, apps, podcasts and other inventions now devoted to a good night’s sleep. As the gizmos grow more elaborate, imbued by ever more exotic technologies, they are creating a ruckus in our bedrooms, and sleep experts advocate a simpler approach. Here are a few of their tips (and a gizmo or two): ​Have someone read to you “Sleep With Me,” a wildly popular podcast by Drew Ackerman, a gravelly voiced librarian who tells excruciatingly boring bedtime stories, has millions of fans, but it makes me anxious. Mr. Rose and his colleagues stumbled upon recordings of Icelandic folk tales, which they found incomprehensible, of course, and therefore more soothing and soporific. ​Take a bath Arianna Huffington, author of “The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time,” suggests following the bedtime rituals we gave our children. “You didn’t just throw your baby in bed,” she said. “There was a transition. A hot bath makes it easier for you to wash away the day.” ​Tuck in with a weighted blanket At M.I.T.’s Media Lab, the researcher David Rose and his colleagues are investigating what makes an ideal sleep environment. To evoke the feeling of many blankets on a cold night, Mr. Rose turned to the weighted blankets used as sensory therapy for autistic children. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 23466 - Posted: 04.08.2017

Cordelia Fine and Rebecca Jordan-Young At a time when both science and feminism are under attack, there are welcome signs that neuroscience is showing new openness to critiques of research into sex differences. Mainstream journals increasingly publish studies that reveal how misleading assumptions about the sexes bias the framing of hypotheses, research design and interpretation of findings – and these critiques increasingly come with constructive recommendations, discussions and debates. For example, we, together with other colleagues, made recommendations in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience on best practice in sex/gender neuroscience. Some of the errors and traps we identified included human neuroimaging studies with small sample sizes, and the common “snapshot” approach, which interprets neural associations with sex as a matter of timeless and universal male and female essences, without taking seriously the fact that biological associations might as easily be the effect of social differences as the cause of them. For example, a study reporting female-male differences in spatial processing should take into account that women and men have different life experiences, on average, that can build such skills – such as practice with aiming at targets that comes from certain kinds of sports and video games. We also expressed concern about studies that draw on and reinforce stereotypes, even as they slip and slide regarding specific predictions about sex differences in the brain, and what findings might mean for how women and men think, feel, and behave.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 23465 - Posted: 04.08.2017

Sallie Baxendale, Temporal lobe epilepsy—a common form of epilepsy characterized by seizures that begin in the memory-regulating temporal lobe—does appear to influence personality, though not in the way many may think and certainly not in the way people have believed throughout history. The idea of the epileptic personality is an ancient one. Thousands of years ago people with epilepsy were thought to be possessed by either divine beings or demons. In fact, the notion that a seizure represents a kind of communion with another spiritual realm still holds sway in some societies today. In more recent history, Westerners largely perceived epilepsy as a punishment for morally lax behavior. In one 1892 paper, the author claimed that debauchery and excessive lust frequently led to epilepsy and that a person could trigger a seizure by listening to love songs and eating chocolate. More recently, scientists began investigating whether epilepsy, in fact, altered personality. In 1975 neurologists Stephen Waxman and Norman Geschwind, both then at Harvard University, published an analysis based on observations of their patients with temporal lobe epilepsy in which they reported that many patients had a tendency toward religiosity, intense emotions, detailed thoughts, and a compulsion to write or draw. This cluster of characteristics became known as the epileptic personality. Over the next decade other researchers added hostility, aggression, lack of humor and obsessiveness to the list of personality traits supposedly associated with the condition. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Epilepsy; Emotions
Link ID: 23464 - Posted: 04.08.2017

Ed Yong 12:00 PM ET Science Octopuses have three hearts, parrot-like beaks, venomous bites, and eight semi-autonomous arms that can taste the world. They squirt ink, contort through the tiniest of spaces, and melt into the world by changing both color and texture. They are incredibly intelligent, capable of wielding tools, solving problems, and sabotaging equipment. As Sy Montgomery once wrote, “no sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange” as an octopus. But their disarming otherness doesn’t end with their bodies. Their genes are also really weird. A team of scientists led by Joshua Rosenthal at the Marine Biological Laboratory and Eli Eisenberg at Tel Aviv University have shown that octopuses and their relatives—the cephalopods—practice a type of genetic alteration called RNA editing that’s very rare in the rest of the animal kingdom. They use it to fine-tune the information encoded by their genes without altering the genes themselves. And they do so extensively, to a far greater degree than any other animal group. “They presented this work at a recent conference, and it was a big surprise to everyone,” says Kazuka Nishikura from the Wistar Institute. “I study RNA editing in mice and humans, where it’s very restricted. The situation is very different here. I wonder if it has to do with their extremely developed brains.” It certainly seems that way. Rosenthal and Eisenberg found that RNA editing is especially rife in the neurons of cephalopods. They use it to re-code genes that are important for their nervous systems—the genes that, as Rosenthal says, “make a nerve cell a nerve cell.” And only the intelligent coleoid cephalopods—octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish—do so. The relatively dumber nautiluses do not. “Humans don’t have this. Monkeys don’t. Nothing has this except the coleoids,” says Rosenthal.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 23463 - Posted: 04.07.2017