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

By JENNIFER MALIA In “Meet Julia,” an episode of “Sesame Street” that will air April 10 on PBS and HBO, Elmo and Abby Cadabby introduce Big Bird to Julia, a new muppet character with autism. Big Bird says, “Hi, Julia, I’m Big Bird. Nice to meet you.” But Julia continues painting without making eye contact or responding to Big Bird. On “60 Minutes,” Big Bird tells Lesley Stahl, who was on the set when “Sesame Street” was filming the new Muppet’s debut, that he thought Julia didn’t like him at first. Elmo then explains, “Julia has autism so sometimes it takes her a little longer to do things.” I can relate. When my daughter started preschool, she would run laps around the perimeter of the fenced-in playground without responding to kids who said “hi” as she passed by. One day, she stopped in her tracks to pick up a jacket that had fallen to the ground, handed it to a girl without saying a word, and continued running. The kids on the playground probably assumed she didn’t like them — just as Big Bird did. Within the past year, my daughter, who is now 3, my 2-year-old son and I were all given diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder because of our repetitive behaviors, obsessive interests, sensory issues and difficulty with social interactions and pragmatic communication skills. My kids are on the mild to moderate part of the spectrum, having language, but not intellectual, impairments. (I also have a 4-year-old daughter who does not have a diagnosis.) Julia gives me hope that my children and their peers will grow up in a world where autism is normalized, rather than stigmatized. Preschoolers are the primary audience for “Sesame Street,” an educational television program where young children watching Julia’s interactions with her peers can learn by example to support autism acceptance. Since one in 68 American children have an autism diagnosis, wider understanding of the condition is valuable for them as well as for their peers. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 23462 - Posted: 04.07.2017

By Tracy Vence Last year, 5 percent of the babies born to nearly 1,000 mothers in the U.S. who showed signs of Zika virus infection during their pregnancies had birth defects, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported this week (April 3). Among babies born to the 250 US mothers with confirmed Zika infection during their pregnancies, just shy of 10 percent had birth defects. The agency’s latest analysis is based on data from the US Zika Pregnancy Registry, which does not include information from Puerto Rico (where CDC has a separate database). During a press briefing, CDC Acting Director Anne Schuchat told reporters that researchers and clinicians have observed a variety of brain-related birth defects in babies with congenital Zika infection, beyond microcephaly. “Some seemingly healthy babies . . . may have developmental problems that become evident months after birth,” she said. “Although we’re still learning about the full range of birth defects that can occur when a women is infected with Zika during pregnancy, we’ve seen that it can cause brain abnormalities, vision problems, hearing problems, and other consequences of brain damage that might require lifelong specialized care.” Schuchat described cases of congenital Zika infection in which babies experienced seizures, reduced motor control, feeding difficulties, missed developmental milestones (like sitting up), or inconsolable crying. “These circumstances are just heartbreaking,” she said. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23461 - Posted: 04.07.2017

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, What really happens when we make and store memories has been unravelled in a discovery that surprised even the scientists who made it. The US and Japanese team found that the brain "doubles up" by simultaneously making two memories of events. One is for the here-and-now and the other for a lifetime, they found. It had been thought that all memories start as a short-term memory and are then slowly converted into a long-term one. Experts said the findings were surprising, but also beautiful and convincing. 'Significant advance' Two parts of the brain are heavily involved in remembering our personal experiences. The hippocampus is the place for short-term memories while the cortex is home to long-term memories. This idea became famous after the case of Henry Molaison in the 1950s. His hippocampus was damaged during epilepsy surgery and he was no longer able to make new memories, but his ones from before the operation were still there. So the prevailing idea was that memories are formed in the hippocampus and then moved to the cortex where they are "banked". The team at the Riken-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics have done something mind-bogglingly advanced to show this is not the case. The experiments had to be performed on mice, but are thought to apply to human brains too. They involved watching specific memories form as a cluster of connected brain cells in reaction to a shock. Researchers then used light beamed into the brain to control the activity of individual neurons - they could literally switch memories on or off. The results, published in the journal Science, showed that memories were formed simultaneously in the hippocampus and the cortex. Prof Susumu Tonegawa, the director of the research centre, said: "This was surprising." He told the BBC News website: "This is contrary to the popular hypothesis that has been held for decades. Copyright © 2017

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23460 - Posted: 04.07.2017

A gene variant may explain why some people prefer to stay up late and hate early mornings. The variant is a mutated form of the CRY1 gene, known to play a role in the circadian clock. Michael Young, at The Rockerfeller University, New York, and his team discovered the mutation in a person diagnosed with delayed sleep phase disorder – a condition that describes many so-called “night-owls”. The team found that five of this person’s relatives also had this mutation, all of whom had a history of sleep problems. They then studied six families in Turkey whose members included 39 carriers of the CRY1 variant. The sleep periods of those with the mutation was shifted by 2 to 4 hours, and some had broken, irregular sleep patterns. The mutation seems to slow the body’s internal biological clock, causing people to have a longer circadian cycle and making them stay awake later. The team have calculated that the variant may be present in as many as one in 75 people in some populations, such as Europeans of non-Finnish descent. But those who have a longer circadian cycle need not despair. Young says many people with delayed sleep phase disorder are able to control their sleep cycles by sticking to strict schedules. “It’s a bit like cigarette smoking in that there are things we can do to help the problem before turning to drugs,” he says. Journal reference: Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2017.03.027 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 23459 - Posted: 04.07.2017

By Jyoti Madhusoodanan The human body undergoes daily cycles in gene expression, protein levels, enzymatic activity, and overall function. Light is the strongest regulator of the central circadian rhythm. When light strikes a mammal’s eyes, it triggers an electrical impulse that activates neurons in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), the seat of the brain’s timekeeping machinery. The SCN sets the pace for neuronal and hormonal signals that regulate body temperature, feeding behavior, rest or activity, immune cell functions, and other daily activities, which in combination with direct signals from the SCN keep the body’s peripheral organs ticking in synchrony. Sunlight reaches the eyes, controls the central clock in the brain. The brain, in turn, controls different physiological processes, such as body temperature and rest-activity cycles, which then affect metabolites, hormones, the sympathetic nervous system, and other biological signals. These processes ensure that the different organ systems of the body cycle together. Timing Treatments to the Clock Regulated by peripheral clocks and interactions with other organs, many metabolic pathways in the body peak and ebb in specific circadian patterns. As a result, drugs targeting these pathways can work better when taken at particular times of day. Here are a few examples. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 23458 - Posted: 04.07.2017

Nicola Davis Apes are on a par with human infants in being able to tell when people have an accurate belief about a situation or are actually mistaken, researchers say. While previous work has shown that great apes understand the goals, desires and perceptions of others, scientists say the latest finding reveals an important cognitive ability. “For the last 30 or more years people thought that belief understanding is the key marker of humans and really differentiates us from other species – and this does not seem to be the case,” said David Buttelmann, co-author of the research from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. Apes can guess what others are thinking - just like humans, study finds Read more The results follow on the heels of a study published last year which also suggests that apes understand the concept of false beliefs – after research that used eye-tracking technology to monitor the gaze of apes exposed to various pranks carried out by an actor dressed in a King Kong suit. But the new study, says Buttelmann, is an important step forward, showing that apes not only understand false belief in others, but apply that understanding to their own actions. Writing in the journal Plos One, Buttelmann and colleagues described exploring the understanding of false belief in 34 great apes, including bonobos, chimpanzees and orangutans, using a test that can be passed by human infants at one to two years of age. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Attention; Consciousness
Link ID: 23457 - Posted: 04.06.2017

Rebecca Hersher Do you pop up from your seat during meetings and finish other people's sentences? And maybe you also procrastinate, or find yourself zoning out in the middle of one-on-one conversations? It's possible you have adult ADHD. Six simple questions can reliably identify adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, according to a World Health Organization advisory group working with two additional psychiatrists. The questions are: How often do you have difficulty concentrating on what people say to you, even when they are speaking to you directly? How often do you leave your seat in meetings and other situations in which you are expected to remain seated? How often do you have difficulty unwinding and relaxing when you have time to yourself? When you're in a conversation, how often do you find yourself finishing the sentences of the people you are talking to before they can finish them themselves? How often do you put things off until the last minute? How often do you depend on others to keep your life in order and attend to details? The response options are "never," "rarely," "sometimes," "often" or "very often." "It's very important to look at the questions in their totality, not each individual symptom," says Dr. David Goodman, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. "No single question stands out as indicating ADHD." © 2017 npr

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 23456 - Posted: 04.06.2017

by Laura Sanders The way babies learn to speak is nothing short of breathtaking. Their brains are learning the differences between sounds, rehearsing mouth movements and mastering vocabulary by putting words into meaningful context. It’s a lot to fit in between naps and diaper changes. A recent study shows just how durable this early language learning is. Dutch-speaking adults who were adopted from South Korea as preverbal babies held on to latent Korean language skills, researchers report online January 18 in Royal Society Open Science. In the first months of their lives, these people had already laid down the foundation for speaking Korean — a foundation that persisted for decades undetected, only revealing itself later in careful laboratory tests. Researchers tested how well people could learn to identify and speak tricky Korean sounds. “For Korean listeners, these sounds are easy to distinguish, but for second-language learners they are very difficult to master,” says study coauthor Mirjam Broersma, a psycholinguist of Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands. For instance, a native Dutch speaker would listen to three distinct Korean sounds and hear only the same “t” sound. Broersma and her colleagues compared the language-absorbing skills of a group of 29 native Dutch speakers to 29 South Korea-born Dutch speakers. Half of the adoptees moved to the Netherlands when they were older than 17 months — ages at which the kids had probably begun talking. The other half were adopted as preverbal babies younger than 6 months. As a group, the South Korea-born adults outperformed the native-born Dutch adults, more easily learning both to recognize and speak the Korean sounds. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23455 - Posted: 04.06.2017

Marcelo Gleiser The idea that neuroscience is rediscovering the soul is, to most scientists and philosophers, nothing short of outrageous. Of course it is not. But the widespread, adverse, knee-jerk attitude presupposes the old-fashioned definition of the soul — the ethereal, immaterial entity that somehow encapsulates your essence. Surely, this kind of supernatural mumbo-jumbo has no place in modern science. And I agree. The Cartesian separation of body and soul, the res extensa (matter stuff) vs. res cogitans (mind stuff) has long been discarded as untenable in a strictly materialistic description of natural phenomena. After all, how would something immaterial interact with something material without any exchange of energy? And how would something immaterial — whatever that means — somehow maintain the essence of who you are beyond your bodily existence? So, this kind of immaterial soul really presents problems for science, although, as pointed out here recently by Adam Frank, the scientific understanding of matter is not without its challenges. But what if we revisit the definition of soul, abandoning its canonical meaning as the "spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal" for something more modern? What if we consider your soul as the sum total of your neurocognitive essence, your very specific brain signature, the unique neuronal connections, synapses, and flow of neurotransmitters that makes you you? © 2017 npr

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 23454 - Posted: 04.06.2017

Smoking causes one in 10 deaths worldwide, a new study shows, half of them in just four countries - China, India, the US and Russia. Despite decades of tobacco control policies, population growth has seen an increased number of smokers, it warned. Researchers said mortality could rise further as tobacco companies aggressively targeted new markets, especially in the developing world. The report was published in the medical journal The Lancet. "Despite more than half a century of unequivocal evidence of the harmful effects of tobacco on health, today, one in every four men in the world is a daily smoker," said senior author Dr Emmanuela Gakidou. "Smoking remains the second largest risk factor for early death and disability, and so to further reduce its impact we must intensify tobacco control to further reduce smoking prevalence and attributable burden." The Global Burden of Diseases report was based on smoking habits in 195 countries and territories between 1990 and 2015. It found that nearly one billion people smoked daily in 2015 - one in four men and one in 20 women. That was a reduction from one in three men and one in 12 women who lit up in 1990. However, population growth meant there was an increase in the overall number of smokers, up from 870 million in 1990. © 2017 BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23453 - Posted: 04.06.2017

David Cyranoski For decades, scientists have wondered how animals can navigate huge distances using the weak signals of Earth’s magnetic field. So, interest was piqued in 2015 when two teams released papers in quick succession describing the functions of a protein found in animals that seemed to sense magnetic fields. But the claims have proved controversial, and questions have been piling up. The basic science behind the discovery was reported by Xie Can, a biophysicist at Peking University in Beijing, and his colleagues. In a paper in Nature Materials1, they claimed that a protein in animal cells forms a structure that responds to magnetic fields, and so might help in navigation. In the same year, a group led by Zhang Sheng-jia, then at Tsinghua University in Beijing, had published a paper in Science Bulletin2 reporting that the same protein could offer a powerful means of controlling brain cells. An academic battle has long raged between Xie and Zhang, but mounting evidence has cast doubt on both of their discoveries. Several researchers have challenged Xie’s claims that the protein reacts to magnetic fields. And last month, Xie co-authored a paper in Frontiers in Neural Circuits3 disputing Zhang’s work on the protein’s potential to magnetically control cells. This has all given rise to serious questions about the role of the molecule at the centre of the dispute. In their 2015 paper1, Xie and his colleagues reported that a protein called IscA1 forms a complex with another protein, Cry4, that explains how organisms pick up magnetic cues. The study found that this complex incorporates iron atoms, which gives it magnetic properties, and has a rod-like shape that aligns with an applied magnetic field. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 23452 - Posted: 04.05.2017

Jon Hamilton The U.S. military is trying to figure out whether certain heavy weapons are putting U.S. troops in danger. The concern centers on the possibility of brain injuries from shoulder-fired weapons like the Carl Gustaf, a recoilless rifle that resembles a bazooka and is powerful enough to blow up a tank. A single round for the Carl Gustaf can weigh nearly 10 pounds. The shell leaves the gun's barrel at more than 500 miles per hour. And as the weapon fires, it directs an explosive burst of hot gases out of the back of the barrel. For safety reasons, troops are trained to take positions to the side of weapons like this. Even so, they get hit by powerful blast waves coming from both the muzzle and breech. "It feels like you get punched in your whole body," is the way one Army gunner described the experience in a military video made in Afghanistan. "The blast bounces off the ground and it overwhelms you." During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military recognized that the blast from a roadside bomb could injure a service member's brain without leaving a scratch. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops sustained this sort of mild traumatic brain injury, which has been linked to long-term problems ranging from memory lapses to post-traumatic stress disorder. Also during those wars, the military began to consider the effects on the brain of repeated blasts from weapons like the Carl Gustaf. And some members of Congress became concerned. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Hearing
Link ID: 23451 - Posted: 04.05.2017