Most Recent Links

Follow us on Facebook or subscribe to our mailing list, to receive news updates. Learn more.


Links 81 - 100 of 28621

By Kristin Kiesel and Richard J. Sexton Many public health advocates and scholars see sugar-sweetened-beverage taxes (often simply called soda taxes) as key to reducing obesity and its adverse health effects. But a careful look at the data challenges this view. We reviewed close to 100 studies that have analyzed current taxes in more than 50 countries and conducted our own research on the effectiveness of soda taxes in the US. There is no conclusive evidence that soda taxes have reduced how much sugar or calories people consume in any meaningful way. Soda taxes alone simply cannot nudge consumers toward healthier food choices. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 17 million people die prematurely each year from chronic noncommunicable diseases. Being overweight or obese is a major risk factor for many of these conditions, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, asthma and several types of cancer. A widely publicized 2019 Lancet Commission report pegged annual obesity-related health-care costs and economic productivity losses at $2 trillion, about 3 percent of the global gross domestic product. Consuming large amounts of added sugars is a key part of this problem. A single 12-ounce can of soda can have more than 10 teaspoons of sugar; drinking just one exceeds the American Heart Association’s recommended daily limits on added sugars. It is easy to see why reducing soda consumption has been a popular target in the war against obesity. One would think that taxing sodas would raise their prices and discourage consumers from purchasing them. With this idea in mind, a wave of taxes has been slapped on sugar-sweetened beverages across the world. For example, cities in California’s Bay Area have imposed a tax of 1 cent per ounce on sugary beverages (a seemingly large price increase given soda’s cost of about 5 cents per ounce in the western US).

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 29143 - Posted: 02.10.2024

By Benjamin Breen When I began researching Tripping on Utopia in 2018, I was aware that many midcentury scientists and psychiatrists had shown a keen interest in the promise of psychedelics. But what I didn’t realize was how remarkably broad-based this interest was. As I dug deeper into the archival record, I was struck by the public enthusiasm for the use of substances like LSD and mescaline in therapy—as manifested not just in scientific studies, but in newspaper articles and even television specials. (My favorite is this remarkable 1957 broadcast which shows a woman taking LSD on camera, then uttering memorable lines like “I’ve never seen such infinite beauty in my life” and “I wish I could talk in Technicolor.”) Above all, I was surprised by the public response to the Hollywood actor Cary Grant’s reveal that he was regularly using LSD in psychedelic therapy sessions. In a series of interviews starting in 1959—the same year he starred in North by Northwest—Grant went public as an unlikely advocate for psychedelic therapy. It was the surprisingly positive reaction to Grant’s endorsement that most struck me. As recounted in my book, the journalist who broke the story was overwhelmed by phone calls and letters. “Psychiatrists called, complaining that their patients were now begging them for LSD,” he remembered. “Every actor in town under analysis wanted it.” Nor was this first wave of legal psychedelic therapy restricted to Hollywood. Two other very prominent advocates of psychedelic therapy in the late 1950s were former Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce and her husband Henry Luce, the founder of Time and Life magazines. It is not an exaggeration to say that this married couple dominated the media landscape of the 20th century. Nor is it an exaggeration to say that psychedelics profoundly influenced Clare Boothe Luce’s life in the late 1950s. She credited LSD with transformative insights that helped her to overcome lasting trauma associated with her abusive childhood and the death of her only daughter in a car accident. © 2024 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Consciousness
Link ID: 29142 - Posted: 02.10.2024

Rhitu Chatterjee In recent years, there's been growing interest in psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in "magic mushrooms" or "shrooms" as a potentially beneficial therapy for mental health conditions. At the same time, drug busts of mushrooms went way up between 2017 and 2022, and the amount of the psychedelic substance seized by law enforcement more than tripled, according to a new study. "What I think the results indicate is that shroom availability has likely been increasing," says Joseph Palamar, an epidemiologist at NYU Langone Health and the main author of the new study published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence. Sponsor Message The findings come at a time when there's a "psychedelic renaissance" happening in the country, says Dr. Joshua Siegel of Washington University in St. Louis, who wasn't involved in the new study. There's growing public and scientific interest in psychedelics' potential therapeutic effects on various mental and behavioral health issues, says Siegel, who also studies how psychedelics affect the human brain. At the same time, a small number of states have already decriminalized psychedelic drugs, and many more are looking into doing the same. The new study is "an important part of the bigger picture of where we are headed as a nation" with psychedelics, says Siegel. "It's important to understand what's happening in terms of the health care side of things. It's important to understand what's happening recreationally and legally." The new study found that the total amount of mushrooms seized by law enforcement across the country went from nearly 500 pounds in 2017 to more than 1,800 pounds in 2022. The largest amount (42.6% of total) seized was in the West, followed closely by the Midwest (41.8%). © 2024 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 29141 - Posted: 02.08.2024

By Matt Richtel For decades, eating disorders were thought to afflict mostly, if not exclusively, women and girls. In fact, until 2013, the loss of menstruation had long been considered an official symptom of anorexia nervosa. Over the last decade, however, health experts have increasingly recognized that boys and men also suffer from eating disorders, and they have gained a better understanding of how differently the illness presents in that group. A small but growing body of scientists and physicians have dedicated themselves to identifying the problem, assessing its scope and developing treatments. Recently, two of these experts spoke to The New York Times about how the disease is affecting adolescent boys, what symptoms and behaviors parents should look for, and which treatments to consider. Dr. Jason Nagata is a pediatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, who specializes in eating disorders; he is senior editor of the Journal of Eating Disorders and editor of the book “Eating Disorders in Boys and Men.” Dr. Sarah Smith is a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Toronto who specializes in eating disorders; she was the lead author on a study published in JAMA Open Network in December that showed sharp increases in the rates of hospitalizations for boys with eating disorders. The medical and scientific understanding of eating disorders is changing and expanding. What happened? Dr. Smith: Historically, eating disorders have been conceptualized mostly as anorexia, which has been portrayed as an illness of adolescent females who want to lose weight for aesthetic reasons. Dr. Nagata: There’s increasing recognition, particularly in the last decade or so, that some people with body image dissatisfaction are not trying to lose weight at all. Some men and boys are trying to become large and muscular. In fact, one-third of teenage boys across the United States report that they’re trying to bulk up and get more muscular. And a subset of those may develop eating disorders or muscle dysmorphia that can lead to significant psychological distress and physical health complications. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 29140 - Posted: 02.08.2024

By Harriet Brown The minute I saw the headline — “Should Patients Be Allowed to Die From Anorexia?” — in The New York Times Magazine last month, my heart sank. Over the last two years, more and more psychiatrists have floated the idea that it’s OK to stop trying to cure some people with anorexia nervosa. People with anorexia develop a deep fear of food and eating, often losing so much weight that they die of starvation or complications. About 20 percent die by suicide. Anorexia is a terrible disease, one that inflicts maximum pain on the person diagnosed and their families and friends. The suffering is continuous and intense, and it gets even worse during recovery. Our family experienced this for eight years. Having to watch my daughter suffer made me realize that anorexia is not a choice or a question of vanity but a tsunami of fear and anxiety that makes one of the most basic human acts, the act of eating, as terrifying as jumping out of a plane without a parachute. It usually takes years of steady, consistent, calorie-dense eating to fully heal the body and brain of a person with anorexia. Without the right kind of support and treatment, it’s nearly impossible. So when psychiatrists suggest that maybe some people can’t recover and should be allowed to stop trying, they’re sidestepping their own responsibility. What they should be saying instead is that current views on and treatments of anorexia are abysmal, and medicine needs to do better. If you’ve never experienced anorexia firsthand, consider yourself blessed. Anorexia has one of the highest mortality rates of any psychiatric illness. People with anorexia are 18 times as likely to die from suicide as their peers. Fewer than half of those with anorexia make a full recovery.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 29139 - Posted: 02.08.2024

Ian Sample Science editor After a decades-long and largely fruitless hunt for drugs to combat Alzheimer’s disease, an unlikely candidate has raised its head: the erectile dysfunction pill Viagra. Researchers found that men who were prescribed Viagra and similar medications were 18% less likely to develop the most common form of dementia years later than those who went without the drugs. The effect was strongest in men with the most prescriptions, with scientists finding a 44% lower risk of Alzheimer’s in those who received 21 to 50 prescriptions of the erectile dysfunction pills over the course of their study. While the findings are striking, the observational study cannot determine whether Viagra and similar pills protect against Alzheimer’s or whether men who are already less prone to the condition are simply more likely to use the tablets. “We can’t say that the drugs are responsible, but this does give us food for thought on how we move into the future,” said the lead author Dr Ruth Brauer at University College London. “We now need a proper clinical trial to look at the effects of these drugs on Alzheimer’s in women as well as men.” Brauer and her colleagues analysed medical records for more than 260,000 men who were diagnosed with erectile dysfunction but had no evidence of memory or thinking problems. Just over half were taking PDE5 inhibitor drugs, including sildenafil (sold as Viagra), avanafil, vardenafil and tadalafil. The men were followed for an average of five years to record any new cases of Alzheimer’s. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 29138 - Posted: 02.08.2024

By Lisa Sanders, M.D. “We were thinking about going bowling with the kids tomorrow,” the woman told her 43-year-old brother as they settled into their accustomed spots in the living room of their mother’s home in Chicago. It was late — nearly midnight — and he had arrived from Michigan to spend the days between Christmas and New Year’s with this part of his family. She and her husband and her brother grew up together and spent many late nights laughing and talking. She knew her brother was passionate about bowling. He had spent almost every day in his local alley two summers ago. So she was taken by surprise when he answered, “I can’t do that anymore.” Certainly, her brother had had a tough year. It seemed to start with his terrible heartburn. For most of his life, he had what he described as run-of-the-mill heartburn, usually triggered by eating late at night, and he would have to take a couple of antacid tablets. But that year his heartburn went ballistic. His mouth always tasted like metal. And the reflux of food back up the esophagus would get so bad that it would make him vomit. Nothing seemed to help. He quit drinking coffee. Quit drinking alcohol. Stopped eating spicy foods. He told his doctor, who started him on a medication known as a proton pump inhibitor (P.P.I.) to reduce the acid or excess protons his stomach made. That pill provided relief from the burning pain. But he still had the metallic taste in his mouth, still felt sick after eating. He still vomited several times a week. When he discovered that he wouldn’t throw up when he drank smoothies, he almost completely gave up solid foods. When he was still feeling awful after weeks on the P.P.I., his gastroenterologist used a tiny camera to take a look at his esophagus. His stomach looked fine, but the region where the esophagus entered the stomach was a mess. Normally the swallowing tube ends with a tight sphincter that stays closed to protect delicate tissue from the harsh acid of the stomach. It opens when swallowing, to let the food pass. But his swallowing tube was wide open and the tissue around the sphincter was red and swollen. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 29137 - Posted: 02.08.2024

Nicholas J. Kelley In the middle of 2023, a study conducted by the HuthLab at the University of Texas sent shockwaves through the realms of neuroscience and technology. For the first time, the thoughts and impressions of people unable to communicate with the outside world were translated into continuous natural language, using a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and brain imaging technology. This is the closest science has yet come to reading someone’s mind. While advances in neuroimaging over the past two decades have enabled non-responsive and minimally conscious patients to control a computer cursor with their brain, HuthLab’s research is a significant step closer towards accessing people’s actual thoughts. As Alexander Huth, the neuroscientist who co-led the research, told the New York Times: Combining AI and brain-scanning technology, the team created a non-invasive brain decoder capable of reconstructing continuous natural language among people otherwise unable to communicate with the outside world. The development of such technology – and the parallel development of brain-controlled motor prosthetics that enable paralysed patients to achieve some renewed mobility – holds tremendous prospects for people suffering from neurological diseases including locked-in syndrome and quadriplegia. In the longer term, this could lead to wider public applications such as fitbit-style health monitors for the brain and brain-controlled smartphones. On January 29, Elon Musk announced that his Neuralink tech startup had implanted a chip in a human brain for the first time. He had previously told followers that Neuralink’s first product, Telepathy, would one day allow people to control their phones or computers “just by thinking”. © 2010–2024, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29136 - Posted: 02.08.2024

By Nora Bradford Whenever you’re actively performing a task — say, lifting weights at the gym or taking a hard exam — the parts of your brain required to carry it out become “active” when neurons step up their electrical activity. But is your brain active even when you’re zoning out on the couch? The answer, researchers have found, is yes. Over the past two decades they’ve defined what’s known as the default mode network, a collection of seemingly unrelated areas of the brain that activate when you’re not doing much at all. Its discovery has offered insights into how the brain functions outside of well-defined tasks and has also prompted research into the role of brain networks — not just brain regions — in managing our internal experience. In the late 20th century, neuroscientists began using new techniques to take images of people’s brains as they performed tasks in scanning machines. As expected, activity in certain brain areas increased during tasks — and to the researchers’ surprise, activity in other brain areas declined simultaneously. The neuroscientists were intrigued that during a wide variety of tasks, the very same brain areas consistently dialed back their activity. It was as if these areas had been active when the person wasn’t doing anything, and then turned off when the mind had to concentrate on something external. Researchers called these areas “task negative.” When they were first identified, Marcus Raichle, a neurologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, suspected that these task-negative areas play an important role in the resting mind. “This raised the question of ‘What’s baseline brain activity?’” Raichle recalled. In an experiment, he asked people in scanners to close their eyes and simply let their minds wander while he measured their brain activity. All Rights Reserved © 2024

Keyword: Attention; Consciousness
Link ID: 29135 - Posted: 02.06.2024

By David Marchese Our memories form the bedrock of who we are. Those recollections, in turn, are built on one very simple assumption: This happened. But things are not quite so simple. “We update our memories through the act of remembering,” says Charan Ranganath, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, and the author of the illuminating new book “Why We Remember.” “So it creates all these weird biases and infiltrates our decision making. It affects our sense of who we are.” Rather than being photo-accurate repositories of past experience, Ranganath argues, our memories function more like active interpreters, working to help us navigate the present and future. The implication is that who we are, and the memories we draw on to determine that, are far less fixed than you might think. “Our identities,” Ranganath says, “are built on shifting sand.” What is the most common misconception about memory? People believe that memory should be effortless, but their expectations for how much they should remember are totally out of whack with how much they’re capable of remembering.1 Another misconception is that memory is supposed to be an archive of the past. We expect that we should be able to replay the past like a movie in our heads. The problem with that assumption is that we don’t replay the past as it happened; we do it through a lens of interpretation and imagination. Semantic memory is the term for the memory of facts and knowledge about the world. standpoint? It’s exceptionally hard to answer the question of how much we can remember. What I’ll say is that we can remember an extraordinary amount of detail that would make you feel at times as if you have a photographic memory. We’re capable of these extraordinary feats. I would argue that we’re all everyday-memory experts, because we have this exceptional semantic memory, which is the scaffold for episodic memory. I know it sounds squirmy to say, “Well, I can’t answer the question of how much we remember,” but I don’t want readers to walk away thinking memory is all made up. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 29134 - Posted: 02.06.2024

By Shruti Ravindran When preparing to become a butterfly, the Eastern Black Swallowtail caterpillar wraps its bright striped body within a leaf. This leaf is its sanctuary, where it will weave its chrysalis. So when the leaf is disturbed by a would-be predator—a bird or insect—the caterpillar stirs into motion, briefly darting out a pair of fleshy, smelly horns. To humans, these horns might appear yellow—a color known to attract birds and many insects—but from a predator’s-eye-view, they appear a livid, almost neon violet, a color of warning and poison for some birds and insects. “It’s like a jump scare,” says Daniel Hanley, an assistant professor of biology at George Mason University. “Startle them enough, and all you need is a second to get away.” Hanley is part of a team that has developed a new technique to depict on video how the natural world looks to non-human species. The method is meant to capture how animals use color in unique—and often fleeting—behaviors like the caterpillar’s anti-predator display. Most animals, birds, and insects possess their own ways of seeing, shaped by the light receptors in their eyes. Human retinas, for example, are sensitive to three wavelengths of light—blue, green, and red—which enables us to see approximately 1 million different hues in our environment. By contrast, many mammals, including dogs, cats, and cows, sense only two wavelengths. But birds, fish, amphibians, and some insects and reptiles typically can sense four—including ultraviolet light. Their worlds are drenched in a kaleidoscope of color—they can often see 100 times as many shades as humans do. Hanley’s team, which includes not just biologists but multiple mathematicians, a physicist, an engineer, and a filmmaker, claims that their method can translate the colors and gradations of light perceived by hundreds of animals to a range of frequencies that human eyes can comprehend with an accuracy of roughly 90 percent. That is, they can simulate the way a scene in a natural environment might look to a particular species of animal, what shifting shapes and objects might stand out most. The team uses commercially available cameras to record video in four color channels—blue, green, red, and ultraviolet—and then applies open source software to translate the picture according to the mix of light receptor sensitivities a given animal may have. © 2024 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 29133 - Posted: 02.06.2024

By Sabrina Malhi Researchers have found a possible link between the common hormone disorder PCOS and cognitive decline later in life. PCOS, which stands for polycystic ovary syndrome, is the most common endocrine disorder among women ages 15 to 44. However, it is often underdiagnosed because many of its symptoms, including abnormal menstrual cycles and excess hair, can be attributed to other causes. The syndrome was first described in 1935 by American gynecologists Irving F. Stein and Michael L. Leventhal. They published a paper documenting a group of women with lack of periods, excess body hair and enlarged ovaries with multiple cysts. Their work helped identify and characterize PCOS as it is known today. Health experts hypothesize that genetic factors could contribute to the development of the condition, but the exact causes are still unknown. Here’s what to know about PCOS and its potential link to cognitive health. PCOS is a chronic hormonal disorder characterized by overproduction of androgens, which are typically considered male hormones. High androgen levels can lead to irregular menstrual cycles and fertility issues when excessively produced in women. In the United States, 6 to 12 percent of people assigned female at birth who are of reproductive age are affected by PCOS, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The condition is associated with an increased risk of obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and endometrial cancer. PCOS is also often linked to insulin resistance, which can result in elevated blood sugar levels and an escalated risk of Type 2 diabetes. The condition can contribute to various metabolic issues, including high blood pressure, excess abdominal fat, and abnormal cholesterol or triglyceride levels. People with PCOS face an elevated risk of developing cardiovascular problems, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels and an increased risk of heart disease. A recent study in the journal Neurology found that people with PCOS performed lower than normal on a suite of cognitive tests.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 29132 - Posted: 02.06.2024

By Ashley Juavinett In the 2010 award-winning film “Inception,” Leonardo DiCaprio’s character and others run around multiple layers of someone’s consciousness, trying to implant an idea in the person’s mind. If you can plant something deep enough, the film suggests, you can make them believe it is their own idea. The film was billed as science fiction, but three years later, in 2013, researchers actually did this — in a mouse, at least. The work focused on the hippocampus, along with its closely interconnected structures, long recognized by scientists to hold our dearest memories. If you damage significant portions of just one region of your hippocampus, the dentate gyrus, you’ll lose the ability to form new memories. How these memories are stored, however, is still up for debate. One early but persistent idea posits that enduring changes in our neural circuitry, or “engrams,” may represent the physical traces of specific memories. An engram is sometimes thought of as a group of cells, along with their synaptic weights and connections throughout the brain. In sum, the engram is what DiCaprio’s character would have had to discreetly manipulate in his target. In 2012, a team in Susumu Tonegawa’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) showed that you could mark the cells of a real memory engram and reactivate them later. Taking that work one step further, Steve Ramirez, Xu Liu and others in Tonegawa’s lab demonstrated the following year that you can implant a memory of something that never even happened. In doing so, they turned science fiction into reality, one tiny foot shock at a time. Published in Science, Ramirez and Liu’s study is a breath of fresh air, scientifically speaking. The abstract starts with one of the shortest sentences you’ll ever find in a scientific manuscript: “Memories can be unreliable.” The entire paper is extremely readable, and there is no shortage of related papers and review articles that you could give your students to read for additional context. © 2024 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 29131 - Posted: 02.06.2024

By Ernesto Londoño Seizures of psychedelic mushrooms across the nation by law enforcement officials have increased significantly in recent years as attitudes regarding their use have grown more permissive, according to a government-funded study released Tuesday. Researchers found that law enforcement officials confiscated 844 kilos of mushrooms containing psilocybin in 2022, an increase of 273 percent from 2017. Psilocybin is the psychoactive component in the fungi commonly known as magic mushrooms. Officials at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which commissioned the study, said that the increase in seizures of magic mushroom reflected rising use of the drugs, rather than an indication that counternarcotics officials were pursuing the substances more aggressively than before. The marketplace for magic mushrooms, which are illegal under federal law, has boomed in recent years as several clinical studies have shown that they may be effective as therapies to treat depression and other serious conditions. But many medical professionals say they worry that the hype surrounding psychedelics has moved faster than the science. Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the N.I.D.A, said that preliminary clinical studies had shown that psychedelics might one day become an important tool for the treatment of psychiatric disorders, including addiction to other drugs. But she said she worried that many people were self-medicating with psychedelics. “Psychedelic drugs have been promoted as a potential cure for many health conditions without adequate research to support these claims,” Dr. Volkow said. “There are people who are very desperate for mental health care, and there are businesses that are very eager to make money by marketing substances as treatments or cures.” © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 29130 - Posted: 02.06.2024

Dawn Megli In late 2022, Sarah Gutilla's treatment-resistant depression had grown so severe that she was actively contemplating suicide. Raised in foster care, the 34-year-old's childhood was marked by physical violence, sexual abuse and drug use, leaving her with life-threatening mental scars. Out of desperation, her husband scraped together $600 for the first of six rounds of intravenous ketamine therapy at Ketamine Clinics Los Angeles, which administers the generic anesthetic for off-label uses such as treating depression. When Gutilla got into an Uber for the 75-mile ride to Los Angeles, it was the first time she had left her home in Llano, Calif., in two years. The results, she says, were instant. "The amount of relief I felt after the first treatment was what I think 'normal' is supposed to feel like," she says. "I've never felt so OK and so at peace." For-profit ketamine clinics have proliferated over the past few years, offering infusions for a wide array of mental health issues, including obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression and anxiety. Although the off-label use of ketamine hydrochloride, a Schedule III drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration as an anesthetic in 1970, was considered radical just a decade ago, now between 500 and 750 ketamine clinics have cropped up across the United States. Market analysis firm Grand View Research pegged industry revenues at $3.1 billion in 2022, and it projects them to more than double to $6.9 billion by 2030. Most insurance doesn't cover ketamine for mental health, so patients must pay out-of-pocket. While it's legal for doctors to prescribe ketamine, the FDA hasn't approved it for mental health treatment, which means that individual practitioners develop their own treatment protocols. The result is wide variability among providers, with some favoring gradual, low-dosage treatments while others advocate larger amounts that can induce hallucinations, as the drug is a psychedelic at the right doses. "Ketamine is the Wild West," says Dustin Robinson, the managing principal of Iter Investments, a venture capital firm specializing in hallucinogenic drug treatments. © 2024 npr

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29129 - Posted: 02.03.2024

By Carolyn Todd Any sleep tracker will show you that slumber is far from a passive affair. And no stage of sleep demonstrates that better than rapid eye movement, or REM, commonly called dream sleep. “It’s also called paradoxical sleep or active sleep, because REM sleep is actually very close to being awake,” said Dr. Rajkumar Dasgupta, a sleep medicine and pulmonary specialist at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. Before scientists discovered REM sleep in the 1950s, it wasn’t clear that much of anything was happening in the brain at night. Researchers today, however, understand sleep as a highly active process composed of very different types of rest — including REM, which in some ways doesn’t seem like rest at all. While the body typically remains “off” during REM sleep, the brain is very much “on.” It’s generating vivid dreams, as well as synthesizing memories and knowledge. Scientists are still working to unravel exactly how this strange state of consciousness works. “It is fair to say that there is a lot left to learn about REM sleep,” Dr. Dasgupta said. But from what researchers do understand, REM is critical to our emotional health and brain function — and potentially even our longevity. Where does REM sleep fall in the sleep cycle? Throughout the night, “We’re going in and out of this rhythmic, symphonic pattern of the various stages of sleep: non-REM 1, 2, 3 and REM,” said Rebecca Robbins, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and an associate scientist in the division of sleep and circadian disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 29128 - Posted: 02.03.2024

April Smith Did you know that anorexia is the most lethal mental health condition? One person dies from an eating disorder every hour in the U.S. Many of these deaths are not from health consequences related to starvation, but from suicide. Up to 1 in 5 women and 1 in 7 men in the U.S. will develop an eating disorder by age 40, and 1 in 2 people with an eating disorder will think about ending their life. About 1 in 4 people with anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa will attempt to kill themselves, and those with anorexia have a risk of death by suicide 31 times higher than peers without the disorder. In fact, nonsuicidal self-injury, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts and suicide deaths are all more prevalent among those with any type of eating disorder compared to those without an eating disorder. Why might that be? I am a clinical psychologist who studies eating disorders and self-harm, and I have spent the past 15 years researching this question. We still don’t have the answer. But new work on perception of the internal state of the body points to some promising possibilities for treatment. And what we’re learning could help anyone improve their relationship with their body. To understand why people with eating disorders are at risk of dying by suicide, I first want to ask you to do a little thought exercise. I’d like you to really think about your body: Think about your hair, face, arms, stomach, chest and legs. What words and feelings come to mind? Are there any things you wish you could change? Feel free to close your eyes and try this out. © 2010–2024, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 29127 - Posted: 02.03.2024

By Laura Sanders Under extremely rare circumstances, it appears that Alzheimer’s disease can be transmitted between people. Five people who received contaminated injections of a growth hormone as children went on to develop Alzheimer’s unusually early, researchers report January 29 in Nature Medicine. The findings represent “the first time iatrogenic Alzheimer’s disease has been described,” neurologist John Collinge said January 25 in a news briefing, referring to a disease caused by a medical procedure. That sounds alarming, but researchers are quick to emphasize that Alzheimer’s disease is not contagious in everyday life, including caretaking and most medical settings. Support Science Today. Thank you for being a subscriber to Science News! Interested in more ways to support STEM? Consider making a gift to our nonprofit publisher, Society for Science, an organization dedicated to expanding scientific literacy and ensuring that every young person can strive to become an engineer or scientist. Donate Now “We are not suggesting for a moment that you can catch Alzheimer’s disease,” said Collinge, of the University College London’s Institute of Prion Diseases. “This is not transmissible in the sense of a viral or bacterial infection.” The reassurance is echoed by Carlo Condello, a neurobiologist at the University of California, San Francisco who wasn’t involved in the study. “In no way do we believe sporadic Alzheimer’s disease is a communicable disease,” he says. “Only under incredibly artificial, now out-of-date, medical practices is this appearing. It’s no longer an issue.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–202

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 29126 - Posted: 01.31.2024

By Ben Guarino Billionaire technologist Elon Musk announced this week that his company Neuralink has implanted its brain-computer interface into a human for the first time. The recipient was “recovering well,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) on Monday evening, adding that initial results showed “promising neuron spike detection”—a reference to brain cells’ electrical activity. Each wireless Neuralink device contains a chip and electrode arrays of more than 1,000 superthin, flexible conductors that a surgical robot threads into the cerebral cortex. There the electrodes are designed to register thoughts related to motion. In Musk’s vision, an app will eventually translate these signals to move a cursor or produce text—in short, it will enable computer control by thinking. “Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer. That is the goal,” Musk wrote of the first Neuralink product, which he said is named Telepathy. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had approved human clinical trials for Neuralink in May 2023. And last September the company announced it was opening enrollment in its first study to people with quadriplegia. Monday’s announcement did not take neuroscientists by surprise. Musk, the world’s richest man, “said he was going to do it,” says John Donoghue, an expert in brain-computer interfaces at Brown University. “He had done the preliminary work, built on the shoulders of others, including what we did starting in the early 2000s.” Neuralink’s original ambitions, which Musk outlined when he founded the company in 2016, included meshing human brains with artificial intelligence. Its more immediate aims seem in line with the neural keyboards and other devices that people with paralysis already use to operate computers. The methods and speed with which Neuralink pursued those goals, however, have resulted in federal investigations into dead study animals and the transportation of hazardous material. © 2024 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 29124 - Posted: 01.31.2024

By Ben Guarino Billionaire technologist Elon Musk announced this week that his company Neuralink has implanted its brain-computer interface into a human for the first time. The recipient was “recovering well,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) on Monday evening, adding that initial results showed “promising neuron spike detection”—a reference to brain cells’ electrical activity. Each wireless Neuralink device contains a chip and electrode arrays of more than 1,000 superthin, flexible conductors that a surgical robot threads into the cerebral cortex. There the electrodes are designed to register thoughts related to motion. In Musk’s vision, an app will eventually translate these signals to move a cursor or produce text—in short, it will enable computer control by thinking. “Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer. That is the goal,” Musk wrote of the first Neuralink product, which he said is named Telepathy. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had approved human clinical trials for Neuralink in May 2023. And last September the company announced it was opening enrollment in its first study to people with quadriplegia. Monday’s announcement did not take neuroscientists by surprise. Musk, the world’s richest man, “said he was going to do it,” says John Donoghue, an expert in brain-computer interfaces at Brown University. “He had done the preliminary work, built on the shoulders of others, including what we did starting in the early 2000s.” Neuralink’s original ambitions, which Musk outlined when he founded the company in 2016, included meshing human brains with artificial intelligence. Its more immediate aims seem in line with the neural keyboards and other devices that people with paralysis already use to operate computers. The methods and speed with which Neuralink pursued those goals, however, have resulted in federal investigations into dead study animals and the transportation of hazardous material. © 2024 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 29123 - Posted: 01.31.2024