By Jia Naqvi He loves dancing to songs, such as Michael Jackson’s "Beat It" and the "Macarena," but he can't listen to music in the usual way. He laughs whenever someone takes his picture with a camera flash, which is the only intensity of light he can perceive. He loves trying to balance himself, but his legs don't allow him to walk without support. He is one in a million, literally. Born deaf-blind and with a condition, osteopetrosis, that makes bones both dense and fragile, 6-year-old Orion Theodore Withrow is among an unknown number of children with a newly identified genetic disorder that researchers are just beginning to decipher. It goes by an acronym, COMMAD, that gives little away until each letter is explained, revealing an array of problems that also affect eye formation and pigmentation in eyes, skin and hair. The rare disorder severely impairs the person's ability to communicate. Children such as Orion, who are born to genetically deaf parents, are at a higher risk, according to a recent study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. The finding has important implications for the deaf community, said its senior author, Brian Brooks, clinical director and chief of the Pediatric, Developmental and Genetic Ophthalmology Section at the National Eye Institute. “It is relatively common for folks in deaf community to marry each other,” he said, and what's key is whether each of the couple has a specific genetic "misspelling" that causes a syndrome called Waardenburg 2A. If yes, there's the likelihood of a child inheriting the mutation from both parents. The result, researchers found, is COMMAD. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Hearing; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 23317 - Posted: 03.06.2017

By PHILIP FERNBACH and STEVEN SLOMAN How can so many people believe things that are demonstrably false? The question has taken on new urgency as the Trump administration propagates falsehoods about voter fraud, climate change and crime statistics that large swaths of the population have bought into. But collective delusion is not new, nor is it the sole province of the political right. Plenty of liberals believe, counter to scientific consensus, that G.M.O.s are poisonous, and that vaccines cause autism. The situation is vexing because it seems so easy to solve. The truth is obvious if you bother to look for it, right? This line of thinking leads to explanations of the hoodwinked masses that amount to little more than name calling: “Those people are foolish” or “Those people are monsters.” Such accounts may make us feel good about ourselves, but they are misguided and simplistic: They reflect a misunderstanding of knowledge that focuses too narrowly on what goes on between our ears. Here is the humbler truth: On their own, individuals are not well equipped to separate fact from fiction, and they never will be. Ignorance is our natural state; it is a product of the way the mind works. What really sets human beings apart is not our individual mental capacity. The secret to our success is our ability to jointly pursue complex goals by dividing cognitive labor. Hunting, trade, agriculture, manufacturing — all of our world-altering innovations — were made possible by this ability. Chimpanzees can surpass young children on numerical and spatial reasoning tasks, but they cannot come close on tasks that require collaborating with another individual to achieve a goal. Each of us knows only a little bit, but together we can achieve remarkable feats. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 23316 - Posted: 03.06.2017

Bruce Bower The social lives of macaques and baboons play out in what primatologist Julia Fischer calls “a magnificent opera.” When young Barbary macaques reach about 6 months, they fight nightly with their mothers. Young ones want the “maternal embrace” as they snooze; mothers want precious alone time. Getting pushed away and bitten by dear old mom doesn’t deter young macaques. But they’re on their own when a new brother or sister comes along. In Monkeytalk, Fischer describes how the monkey species she studies have evolved their own forms of intelligence and communication. Connections exist between monkey and human minds, but Fischer regards differences among primate species as particularly compelling. She connects lab studies of monkeys and apes to her observations of wild monkeys while mixing in offbeat personal anecdotes of life in the field. Fischer catapulted into a career chasing down monkeys in 1993. While still in college, she monitored captive Barbary macaques. That led to fieldwork among wild macaques in Morocco. In macaque communities, females hold central roles because young males move to other groups to mate. Members of closely related, cooperative female clans gain an edge in competing for status with male newcomers. Still, adult males typically outrank females. Fischer describes how the monkeys strategically alternate between attacking and forging alliances. After forging her own key scientific alliances, Fischer moved on to study baboons in Africa, where she entered the bureaucratic jungle. Obtaining papers for a car in Senegal, for instance, took Fischer several days. She first had to shop for a snazzy outfit to impress male paper-pushers, she says. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017.

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 23315 - Posted: 03.06.2017

By Ruth Williams Scientists at New York University’s School of Medicine have probed the deepest layers of the cerebral cortices of mice to record the activities of inhibitory interneurons when the animals are alert and perceptive. The team’s findings reveal that these cells exhibit different activities depending on the cortical layer they occupy, suggesting a level of complexity not previously appreciated. In their paper published in Science today (March 2), the researchers also described the stimulatory and inhibitory inputs that regulate these cells, adding further details to the picture of interneuron operations within the cortical circuitry. “It is an outstanding example of circuit analysis and a real experimental tour de force,” said neuroscientist Massimo Scanziani of the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the work. Christopher Moore of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who also did not participate in the research, echoed Scanziani’s sentiments. “It’s just a beautiful paper,” he said. “They do really hard experiments and come up with what seem to be really valid [observations]. It’s a well-done piece of work.” The mammalian cerebral cortex is a melting pot of information, where signals from sensory inputs, emotions, and memories are combined and processed to produce a coherent perception of the world. Excitatory cells are the most abundant type of cortical neurons and are thought to be responsible for the relay and integration of this information, while the rarer interneurons inhibit the excitatory cells to suppress information flow. Interneurons are “a sort of gatekeeper in the cortex,” said Scanziani. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 23314 - Posted: 03.04.2017

By Timothy Revell A smartphone app that uses deep learning lets people with Parkinson’s disease test their symptoms at home in just 4 minutes. The app could help people monitor the disease’s progression more closely, and uncover how lifestyle factors may affect their symptoms. “There’s very little understanding as to how Parkinson’s arises, and patients say that every day the condition is different,” says George Roussos at Birkbeck, University of London. People report symptom changes related to everything from exercise to socialising to diet, but it’s not yet possible to build a solid picture of how these factors interact. “To understand these differences, we need to monitor the condition regularly, in a quick and easy way, over a long period of time,” says Roussos. People with Parkinson’s usually only see a specialist once or twice a year. This makes it hard to track the disease progression in an individual in detail, and means that side effects of medication such as deterioration of mood can go unnoticed. With their Android app, called CloudUPDRS, Roussos and his colleagues want to make it easier to track symptoms and flag potential problems earlier. Similar to how a clinician would conduct a Parkinson’s severity test, the app includes both self-assessment questions and physical tests using a smartphone’s sensors. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 23313 - Posted: 03.04.2017

By Alistair Steele, CBC News The opioid crisis that's claiming lives across the country has taken a particularly sinister turn in the nation's capital. Or so it appears. Much of the public discussion — and a good deal of the news coverage — surrounding the growing number of deaths by opioid overdose in Ottawa has concentrated on the cruel toll the drugs are taking on the city's teenagers, particularly those living in the western suburb of Kanata. The fake prescription pills they take recreationally are cheap and easy to find, but they can also be laced with potentially lethal doses of fentanyl. This tragic trend was given a fresh, young face when Grade 9 student Chloe Kotval, just 14, died from an overdose on Valentine's Day. Police later confirmed pills found near the girl's body contained fentanyl. In a statement released the day of their daughter's funeral, Kotval's parents wrote: "We are concerned about the epidemic nature of the use of high-grade pharmaceuticals amongst young people and their lack of knowledge about them — the consequences of using them are real and terrible." While families have every right to be concerned and to prepare for the worst, there's no evidence showing young people are any more susceptible to opioid overdoses than any other group of drug users in Ottawa. Sean O'Leary, whose own teenage daughter became addicted to counterfeit percocets, told CBC about coming home one night to find a 17-year-old boy who had overdosed in his garage. ©2017 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 23312 - Posted: 03.04.2017

By Catherine Caruso When a football player clocks an opponent on the field, it often does not look so bad—until we see it in slow motion. Suddenly, a clean, fair tackle becomes a dirty play, premeditated to maim (as any bar full of indignant fans will loudly confirm). But why? A study published last August in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA suggests that slow motion leads us to believe that the people involved were acting with greater intent. Researchers designed experiments based on a place where slow-motion video comes up a lot: the courtroom. They asked subjects to imagine themselves as jurors and watch a video of a convenience store robbery and shooting, either in slow motion or in real time. Those who watched the slow-motion video reported thinking the robber had more time to act and was acting with greater intent. The effect persisted even when the researchers displayed a timer on the screen to emphasize exactly how much time was passing, and it was reduced yet still present when subjects watched a combination of real-time and slow-motion videos of the crime (as they might in an actual courtroom). Participants also ascribed greater intent to a football player ramming an opponent when they viewed the play in slow motion. Werner Helsen, a kinesiologist at the University of Leuven in Belgium, who was not involved in the study, says the findings are in line with his own research on perception and decision making in crime scene interventions and violent soccer plays. One possible explanation for this slo-mo effect stems from our sense of time, which author Benjamin Converse, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, describes as “quite malleable.” He explains that when we watch footage in slow motion, we cannot help but assume that because we as viewers have more time to think through the events as they unfold, the same holds true for the people in the video. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 23311 - Posted: 03.04.2017

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR There is some evidence that stress prompts people to turn to sweet, high-calorie “comfort foods.” Now scientists have confirmed a link between long-term stress and obesity. The study, published in Obesity, tested 2,527 men and women over 50 years old, quantifying stress by measuring levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, in 2-centimeter hair clippings, or about two months’ growth. After controlling for age, sex, ethnicity, smoking, diabetes and other factors that might be linked to obesity, they found that the higher the level of cortisol, the greater the body weight, B.M.I. and waist circumference. Higher cortisol levels were also associated with persistence of obesity over time. Other studies have relied on measures of cortisol in blood, urine or saliva, which can vary by time of day and be affected by temporary stressors and other factors. But this study was able to measure general stress levels over two months to get a picture of the long-term effect. The researchers acknowledge that they were unable to determine whether chronically high cortisol levels are a cause or a consequence of obesity (feeling “fat,” for example, could raise your stress levels). The lead author, Sarah E. Jackson, an epidemiologist at University College London, said that while it may not be possible to eliminate stress, “you may be able to find ways to control it. Even just being aware that stress might make you eat more may help.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Obesity
Link ID: 23310 - Posted: 03.04.2017

Amanda Montañez A couple of weeks ago I listened to an excellent podcast series on poverty in America. One message that stuck with me is just how many factors the poor have working against them—factors that, if you’re not poor, are all too easy to deny, disregard, or simply fail to notice. In the March issue of Scientific American, neuroscientist Kimberly Noble highlights one such invisible, yet very real, element of poverty: its effect on brain development in children. When considering such a complex topic, any sort of data-driven approach can feel mired in confounding factors and variables. After all, it’s not as if money itself has any impact on the structure or function of one’s brain; rather, it is likely to be an amalgamation of environmental and/or genetic influences accompanying poverty, which results in an overall trend of relatively low achievement among poor children. By definition, this is a multifaceted problem in which correlation and causation seem virtually impossible to untangle. Nonetheless, Noble’s lab is tackling this challenge using the best scientific tools and methods available. First, it is essential to define the problem: in what specific ways does poverty impact brain function? To address this question, Noble recruited some 150 children from various socioeconomic backgrounds and used standard psychological testing methods to evaluate their abilities in several cognitive areas associated with particular parts of the brain. As outlined in the graphs below, the relationships are clear, especially in terms of language skills. © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Brain imaging
Link ID: 23309 - Posted: 03.03.2017

By Daniel Engber It took scientists six months to train Alexandra the red-footed tortoise, but by midsummer 2009 she’d finally learned to fake a yawn. A formal experiment came right after. Once per day for several weeks, the research team placed Alexandra on one side of a small tank and another tortoise—either Moses, Aldous, Wilhemina, Quinn, Esme, or Molly—just across from her. They then signaled her to tilt back her head and drop her jaw, just as she’d been taught, while they watched the other tortoise. Would Moses drop his jaw? Would Aldous or Wilhemina? Was there any sign at all that Alexandra’s tortoise yawn could be contagious? There was not. The research team tried again, this time having Alexandra fake her yawn not just once but twice or three times over; still, the observer tortoises did not respond. Next the scientists made Moses and the others watch a video of Alexandra in the middle of a natural yawn, not the fake one that she’d been practicing for months. Again, the yawn was not contagious. “It is possible that a real yawn is necessary to stimulate the observer tortoise,” the authors concluded in their 2011 paper, published in Current Zoology. But “our findings are more consistent with the suggestion that tortoises do not yawn in a contagious manner.” This finding, or lack thereof, may on its surface seem banal. But given what we know about the replication crisis in science, the tortoise paper might be a sign of things to come. Is it possible that the entire body of research on contagious yawning—a small but lively field that dates back 30 years—is resting on a shaky premise?

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 23308 - Posted: 03.03.2017

By Veronique Greenwood A number of studies have used functional MRI to see what our brain looks like as we recall pleasant memories, watch scary movies or listen to sad music. Scientists have even had some success telling which of these stimuli a subject is experiencing by looking at his or her scans. But does this mean it is possible to tell what emotions we are experiencing in the absence of prompts, as we let our mind wander naturally? That is a difficult question to answer, in part because psychologists disagree about how emotions should be defined. Nevertheless, some scientists are trying to tackle it. In a study reported in the June 2016 issue of Cerebral Cortex, Heini Saarimäki of Aalto University in Finland and her colleagues observed volunteers in a brain scanner who were being prompted to recall memories they associated with words drawn from six emotional categories or to reflect on a movie clip selected to provoke certain emotions. The participants also completed a questionnaire about how closely linked different emotions were—rating, for instance, whether “anxiety” is closer to “fear” than to “happiness.” The researchers found that pattern-recognition software could detect which category of emotion a person had been prompted with. In addition, the more closely he or she linked words in the questionnaire, the more his or her brain scans for those emotions resembled one another. Another study, published in September 2016 in PLOS Biology by Kevin LaBar of Duke University and his colleagues, attempted to match brain scans of people lying idle in a scanner to seven predefined patterns associated with specific emotions provoked in an earlier study. The researchers found they could predict the subjects' self-reported emotions from the scans about 75 percent of the time. © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Emotions; Brain imaging
Link ID: 23307 - Posted: 03.03.2017

Sam Nastase was taking a break from his lab work to peruse Twitter when he saw a tweet about his manuscript. A PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Dartmouth College, Nastase had sent his research out for review at a journal, and hadn’t yet heard back from the scientists who would read the paper and—normally—provide anonymous comments. But here, in this tweet, was a link to a review of his paper. “I was like, ‘Oh that’s my paper, OK.’ So that was a little bit nerve-wracking,” says Nastase. A few weeks later, he received the same review as part of a response from the journal, “copied and pasted, basically.” So much for secret, anonymous peer review. The tweet linked to the blog of a neuroscientist named Niko Kriegeskorte, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council in the UK who, since December 2015, has performed all of his peer review openly. That means he publishes his reviews as he finishes them on his personal blog—sharing on Twitter and Facebook, too—before a paper is even accepted. Scientists traditionally keep reviews of their papers to themselves. The reviewers are anonymous, and publishers protect their reviewers’ identities fastidiously, all in the name of honest, uncensored appraisal of scientific work. But for many, the negatives of this system have started to outweigh the positives. So scientists like Kriegeskorte, and even the journals themselves, are starting to experiment. Kriegeskorte’s posting policy has made a lot of people uncomfortable. He’s faced resistance from journal staff, scientific editors, and even one scientist who anonymously reviewed a paper that he reviewed openly. “People in the publishing business, my feeling is that they feel that this is deeply illicit,” Kriegeskorte says, “but they don’t know exactly which rule it breaks.” Still, after more than a year of this experiment with exclusively writing reviews on his blog—he’s done 12 now—Kriegeskorte says he’ll never write a secret review again.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 23306 - Posted: 03.03.2017

By Jessica Wright, Spectrum The prevalence of autism in the United States has risen steadily since researchers first began tracking it in 2000. The rise in the rate has sparked fears of an autism ‘epidemic.’ But experts say the bulk of the increase stems from a growing awareness of autism and changes to the condition’s diagnostic criteria. Here’s how researchers track autism’s prevalence and explain its apparent rise. How do clinicians diagnose autism? There is no blood test, brain scan or any other objective test that can diagnose autism—although researchers are actively trying to develop such tests. Clinicians rely on observations of a person’s behavior to diagnose the condition. In the U.S., the criteria for diagnosing autism are laid out in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (DSM). The criteria are problems with social communication and interactions, and restricted interests or repetitive behaviors. Both of these ‘core’ features must be present in early development. What is the prevalence of autism in the U.S.? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 1 in 68children in the U.S. have autism. The prevalence is 1 in 42 for boys and 1 in 189 for girls. These rates yield a gender ratio of about five boys for every girl. © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 23305 - Posted: 03.03.2017

Susan Milius Fitbit-style tracking of two wild African elephants suggests their species could break sleep records for mammals. The elephants get by just fine on about two hours of sleep a day. Much of that shut-eye comes while standing up — the animals sleep lying down only once every three or four days, new data show. Most of what scientists previously knew about sleeping elephants came from captive animals, says neuroethologist Paul Manger of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. In zoos and enclosures, elephants have been recorded snoozing about three hours to almost seven over a 24-hour period. Monitoring African elephants in the wild, however, so far reveals more extreme behavior. Data are hard to collect, but two females wearing activity recorders for about a month averaged less sleep than other recorded mammals. Especially intriguing is the elephants’ ability to skip a night’s sleep without needing extra naps later, Manger and colleagues report March 1 in PLOS ONE. “The remarkably short amount of sleep in wild elephants is a real elephant in the room for several theories for the function of sleep,” says Niels Rattenborg of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany. Ideas that sleep restores or resets aspects of the brain for peak performance can’t explain animals that sleep only a little and don’t need catch-up rest, says Rattenborg, who wasn’t involved in the elephant study. The results also don’t fit well with the thought that animals need sleep to consolidate memories. “Elephants are usually not considered to be forgetful animals,” he says. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017.

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 23304 - Posted: 03.02.2017

Sleeping too much or too little can increase the likelihood of becoming obese, researchers have discovered. The study found abnormal sleeping patterns increased the risk of being overweight for those genetically predisposed to obesity. The effect was seen regardless of diet, health or socio-demographic group. The University of Glasgow study also found no clear link between sleep duration and body weight in those with a low genetic risk of obesity. Researchers looked at the effects of a short sleep of less than seven hours a night and a long sleep - more than nine hours - along with daytime napping and shift work. Negative effect They found that in people with a high genetic risk of obesity, both short-sleep and long-sleep durations further increased risk of carrying excess weight, compared with people who slept for normal durations of between seven and nine hours a night. Long sleepers with a risk of obesity were about 4kg heavier and short sleepers were about 2kg heavier than those with a similarly high genetic obesity risk with normal sleep durations. The negative affect happened irrespective of what subjects ate, their health concerns or socio-demographic factors, the research team said. The findings, based on data from almost 120,000 UK Biobank participants, showed no obvious link between sleep duration and body weight in those considered to be at a low genetic risk of obesity. Dr Jason Gill, from the Institute of Cardiovascular and Medical Sciences, said: "These data show that in people with high genetic risk for obesity, sleeping for too short or too long a time, napping during the day and shift work appears to have a fairly substantial adverse influence on body weight. © 2017 BBC.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 23303 - Posted: 03.02.2017

By Matt Reynolds If you’re happy and you know it, clap someone else’s hands. A muscle stimulation system aims to evoke empathy by triggering involuntary hand gestures in one person in response to mood changes in another. “If you’re moving in the same way as another person you might understand that person better,” says Max Pfeiffer at the University of Hannover in Germany. Pfeiffer and his team wired up four people to an EEG machine that measured changes in the electrical activity in their brain as they watched film clips intended to provoke three emotional responses: amusement, anger and sadness. These people were the “emotion senders”. Each sender was paired with an “emotion recipient” who wore electrodes on their arms that stimulated their muscles and caused their arms and hands to move when the mood of their partner changed. The gestures they made were based on American Sign Language for amusement, anger and sadness. To express amusement, volunteers had their muscles stimulated to raise one arm, to express anger they raised an arm and made a claw gesture, and to express sadness they slowly slid an arm down their chest. These resemble natural movements associated with the feelings, so the team hypothesised that they would evoke the relevant emotion. Asked to rate how well the gestures corresponded to the emotions, the volunteers largely matched the gestures to the correct mood. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 23302 - Posted: 03.02.2017

Recently, an international team of researchers reported that the cerebellum may play a previously unforeseen role in brain alterations associated with the addictive consumption of drugs. Until now, the cerebellum—which has historically been viewed by most neuroscientists as primarily the seat of fine-tuned motor control and coordination—has gone under the radar of drug addiction specialists. The latest reports linking the cerebellum and drug addiction were based on a broad range of groundbreaking research published over the past two years. These findings were recently compiled and featured in two different journals: Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews and the Journal of Neuroscience. Bringing all of this research together was the brainchild of Marta Miquel, professor in the research group Addiction and Neuroplasticity at the Universitat Jaume I (UJI) in Spain. Miguel spearheaded her own original research as well as the initiative to collect multidisciplinary research from a broad spectrum of international institutions and to present these cerebellar findings cohesively under one umbrella. (Cerebellar is the sister word to cerebral and means “relating to or located in the cerebellum.”) In addition to the UJI team, contributing research for this compilation of studies on the cerebellum and addiction came from the University of Cambridge and University of Leeds (United Kingdom); University of Turin (Italy); Universidad Veracruzana (Mexico); the University of Kentucky, Washington State University, and McLean Hospital Translational Neuroscience Laboratory and Mailman Research Center (USA). Psychology Today © 1991-2017 Sussex Publishers, LLC

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23301 - Posted: 03.02.2017

By Andy Coghlan People who have autoimmune disorders may be 20 per cent more likely to develop dementia. That’s according to an analysis of 1.8 million hospital cases in England. Based on data collected between 1999 and 2012, the study’s findings add to mounting evidence that chronic inflammation – a common feature of many autoimmune disorders – may be a trigger of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Previous studies have found that if infections or chronic inflammatory diseases – including diabetes – have pushed a person’s immune system into overdrive, this can lead to immune cells attacking healthy brain tissue. Varying effect According to the analysis, people with multiple sclerosis are among those with autoimmune disorders who are most likely to develop dementia. This finding isn’t very surprising, as the disorder is caused by the immune system attacking the central nervous system. The study, led by Michael Goldacre at the University of Oxford, found that people with the condition have double the risk of developing dementia. But other autoimmune disorders were also associated with rises in dementia risk. The skin condition psoriasis was linked to a 29 per cent increase, while the risk of developing dementia was 46 per cent higher in people who have lupus erythematosus, a disorder that involves rashes and fatigue. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 23300 - Posted: 03.02.2017

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Acupuncture can relieve wrist pain, and researchers have tracked the brain and nervous system changes that may help explain why. Scientists randomized 80 people with mild or moderate carpal tunnel syndrome — pain caused by nerve compression at the wrist — to one of three groups. The first received acupuncture at the wrist and ankle. The second got acupuncture at the wrist alone. And the third received sham acupuncture, using “fake” needles near the affected wrist, as a placebo. Using functional M.R.I. and nerve conduction tests before and after the procedures, they measured the effect on brain and nerves. All three groups found relief from pain, but both of the true acupuncture groups showed measurable physiological improvements in pain centers in the brain and nerves, while sham acupuncture did not produce such changes. Improvement in brain measures predicted greater pain relief three months after the tests, a long-term effect that placebo did not provide. The study is in Brain. “What’s really interesting here is that we’re evaluating acupuncture using objective outcomes,” said the senior author, Vitaly Napadow, a researcher at Harvard. Sham acupuncture was good at relieving pain temporarily, he said, but true acupuncture had objective physiological — and enduring — effects. “Acupuncture is a safe, low-risk, low side-effect intervention,” he continued. “It’s perfect for a first-line approach, and it’s something patients should consider before trying more invasive procedures like surgery.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 23299 - Posted: 03.02.2017

By Hanoch Ben-Yami Human intelligence, even in its most basic forms, is expressed in our language, and is also partly dependent on our linguistic capacity. Homer, Darwin and Einstein could obviously not have achieved what they did without language—but neither could a child in kindergarten. And this raises an important question about animal intelligence. Although we don’t expect a chimpanzee to write an epic or a dolphin to develop a scientific theory, it has frequently been asked whether these or other animals are close in intelligence to children in young children. If so, we must wonder whether animals can acquire a language. In the last half century, much effort has been put trying answer that question by teaching animals, primarily apes, a basic language. There have been some limited successes, with animals using signs to obtain things in which they were interested, for instance. But no animal has yet acquired the linguistic capability that children have already in their third year of life. “Why?” This is a question children start asking during by the age of three at the latest. No animal has yet asked anything. “Why?” is a very important question: it shows that those asking it are aware they don’t know something they wish to know. Understanding the why-question is also necessary for the ability to justify our actions and thoughts. The fact that animals don’t ask “why?” shows they don’t aspire to knowledge and are incapable of justification. “No!” © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 23298 - Posted: 03.01.2017