By David Grimm The number of federally regulated animals used in U.S. biomedical research dropped last year to its lowest level since data collection began in 1972, according to new statistics posted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Approximately 834,000 rabbits, nonhuman primates, and other regulated animals were used in research last year, compared with more than 1.5 million in the early 1970s. The use of these animals has been on a downward trend since 1993, with a 6% decrease from 2013 to 2014. Since USDA first started posting its numbers on its website in 2008, total use has dropped 17%. The figures do not include most mice, rats, birds, and fish, which make up 98% of lab animals but are not covered under the 1966 Animal Welfare Act (AWA). “It’s a continuation of a long-running trend that’s showing no sign of slowing down—in fact it’s speeding up,” says Tom Holder, the director of Speaking of Research, a U.K.-based organization that supports the use of animals in research. Animal rights activists are “very pleased,” says Alka Chandna, the senior laboratory oversight specialist at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which opposes the use of animals in research. The use of nearly every kind of AWA-covered animal dropped from 2013 to 2014. Twelve percent fewer dogs were used from 2013 to 2014 (16% fewer since 2008), 11% fewer rabbits (36% fewer since 2008), 11% fewer Guinea pigs (26% fewer since 2008), and 10% fewer nonhuman primates (19% fewer since 2008). The only animals to see an increase were “all other covered species,” which includes ferrets, squirrels, and some rodents (such as sand rats and deer mice) that are not excluded from the AWA. © 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 21153 - Posted: 07.11.2015

By Sarah Schwartz In a possible step toward treating genetic human deafness, scientists have used gene therapy to partially restore hearing in deaf mice. Some mice with genetic hearing loss could sense and respond to noises after receiving working copies of their faulty genes, researchers report July 8 in Science Translational Medicine. Because the mice’s mutated genes closely correspond to those responsible for some hereditary human deafness, the scientists hope the results will inform future human therapies. “I would call this a really exciting big step,” says otolaryngologist Lawrence Lustig of Columbia University Medical Center. The ear’s sound-sensing hair cells convert noises into information the brain can process. Hair cells need specific proteins to work properly, and alterations in the genetic blueprints for these proteins can cause deafness. To combat the effects of two such mutations, the scientists injected viruses containing healthy genes into the ears of deaf baby mice. The virus infected some hair cells, giving them working genes. The scientists tried this therapy on two different deafness-causing mutations. Within a month, around half the mice with one mutation showed brainwave activity consistent with hearing and jumped when exposed to loud noises. Treated mice with the other mutation didn’t respond to noises, but the gene therapy helped their hair cells — which normally die off quickly due to the mutation — survive. All of the untreated mice remained deaf. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2015

Keyword: Hearing; Regeneration
Link ID: 21152 - Posted: 07.09.2015

Patricia Neighmond Some antidepressants may increase the risk of birth defects if taken early in pregnancy, while others don't seem to pose the same risks, a study finds. The question of whether antidepressants can cause birth defects has been debated for years, and studies have been all over the map. That makes it hard for women and their doctors to make decisions on managing depression during pregnancy. To try to untangle the question, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed federal data on more than 38,000 women who gave birth between 1997 and 2009. They looked at the number of birth defects among babies and asked women whether they took any antidepressants in the month before getting pregnant or during the first three months of pregnancy. The study, published Wednesday in The BMJ, found no association between the most commonly used antidepressant, sertraline (Zoloft), and birth defects. Forty percent of the women who took antidepressants took sertraline. They also found no increased risk of birth defects with the antidepressants citalopram (Celexa) and escitalopram (Lexapro). But the analysis did find an association between birth defects and the antidepressants fluoxetine (Prozac) or paroxetine (Paxil). That included heart defects, abdominal wall defects, and missing brain and skull defects with paroxetine, and heart wall defects and irregular skull shape with fluoxetine. The relative risk increased 2 to 3.5 times, depending on the defect and the medication. That may sound like a lot, but Jennita Reefhuis, an epidemiologist and lead researcher in the study, says "the overall risk is still small." © 2015 NPR

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 21151 - Posted: 07.09.2015

By STEVE FEATHERSTONE One evening in April, Ethan Darbee, a 24-year-old paramedic in Syracuse, responded to a call on the city’s south side: unknown man down. Rolling up to the scene, he saw a figure lying motionless on the sidewalk. Darbee raked his knuckles across the man’s sternum to assess his level of consciousness. His eyelids fluttered. Inside the ambulance, Darbee hooked him up to a heart monitor, and he jerked involuntarily. The odd reaction puzzled Darbee. Why would the guy recoil from an electrode sticker but not a sternal rub? The driver started for the hospital. Darbee sat in the captain’s chair in the back of the rig, typing on a laptop. Then he heard a sound no paramedic ever wants to hear: the click of a patient’s shoulder harness unlatching. Swiveling around, he found himself eyeball to eyeball with his patient, who was now crouched on all fours on top of the stretcher, growling. That same evening, Heather Drake, a 29-year-old paramedic, responded to a call at an apartment complex on the west side. When she arrived, four firefighters were grappling with a 120-pound woman who was flailing and flinging vomit at anyone who came near her. A bystander shouted that the woman was high on ‘‘spike’’ — the prevailing local term for synthetic marijuana, which is more commonly known around the country as spice. But Drake didn’t believe it. Spike didn’t turn people into violent lunatics. Phencyclidine (PCP) or synthetic cathinones (‘‘bath salts’’) could do that, maybe even a joint soaked in formaldehyde — but not spike. Drake sprayed a sedative up the woman’s nose and loaded her into the ambulance. A mayday call from another crew came over the radio. In the background static of the transmission, Drake could hear Ethan Darbee yelling. Darbee’s patient had sprung off the stretcher and knocked him to the floor of the ambulance, punching him repeatedly in the face. Darbee grasped the side-door handle and tumbled into the street. Within moments, the police arrived and quickly subdued the man. Two days later, 19 more spike overdoses would swamp local emergency rooms, more in one day in Syracuse than the number of overdoses reported statewide in most states for all of April. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 21150 - Posted: 07.09.2015

Computers built to mimic the brain can now recognise images, speech and even create art, and it’s all because they are learning from data we churn out online Do androids dream of electric squid? (Image: Reservoir Lab at Ghent University) I AM watching it have a very odd dream – psychedelic visions of brain tissue folds, interspersed with chunks of coral reef. The dreamer in question is an artificial intelligence, one that live-streams from a computer on the ground floor of the Technicum building in Ghent University, Belgium. This vision has been conjured up after a viewer in the chat sidebar suggests "brain coral" as a topic. It's a fun distraction – and thousands of people have logged on to watch. But beyond that, the bot is a visual demonstration of a technology that is finally coming of age: neural networks. The bot is called 317070, a name it shares with the Twitter handle of its creator, Ghent graduate student Jonas Degrave. It is based on a neural network that can recognise objects in images, except that Degrave runs it in reverse. Given static noise, it tweaks its output until it creates images that tally with what viewers are requesting online. The bot's live-stream page says it is "hallucinating", although Degrave says "imagining" is a little more accurate. Degrave's experiment plays off recent Google research which aimed to tackle one of the core issues with neural networks: that no one knows how neural networks come up with their answers. The images the network creates to satisfy simple instructions can give us some insights. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 21149 - Posted: 07.09.2015

By Christian Jarrett We all know a narcissist or two — the often-annoying colleagues, friends, and family members who seem to be constantly talking about themselves and touting their own achievements. In some ways, these characters are a paradox. They seem to be in love with themselves — and when they’re asked in questionnaires, they claim to have very high self-esteem — but their behavior poses an obvious question: If you were genuinely happy with yourself, why would you feel the need to constantly boast and seek admiration from others? A new study in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience potentially solves the mystery: Narcissists may talk and act confident, but their brains don’t lie. At a neural level, narcissists are needy. A research team led by David Chester at the University of Kentucky at Lexington recruited 50 undergrad students and had them complete a standard measure of narcissism. Participants who agreed with statements like “I think I am a special person” were allocated high narcissism scores. Next, the researchers invited the students to lie in a special kind of brain scanner that uses diffusion tensor imaging, a technology that measures the amount of connectivity between different brain areas. Such scans produce beautiful “wiring diagrams” of the brain, in contrast to structural MRI scans that show the brain’s gray matter, and functional MRI scans that measure neural activity — this allows researchers to better understand how much “conversation” there is between the brain’s various functional hubs.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 21148 - Posted: 07.09.2015

by Bob Holmes Bonobos can be just as handy as chimpanzees. In fact, bonobos' tool-using abilities look a lot like those of early humans, suggesting that observing them could teach anthropologists about how our own ancestors evolved such skills. Until now, bonobos have been more renowned for their free and easy sex lives than their abilities with tools. They have never been seen to forage using tools in the wild, although only a handful of wild populations have been studied because of political instability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where they live. As for those in captivity, Itai Roffman of Haifa University in Israel and his colleagues previously observed one captive bonobo, called Kanzi, using stone tools to crack a log and extract food. However, it was possible that Kanzi was a lone genius, raised by humans and taught sign language, as well as once being shown how to use tools. To find out if other captive bonobos shared Kanzi's aptitude, Roffman's team looked to animals at a zoo in Germany and a bonobo sanctuary in Iowa. The team gave them a series of problems that required tools to solve – for example, showing the bonobos that food was buried under rocks, then leaving a tray of potential aids such as sticks and antlers nearby. Two of eight zoo animals and four of seven in the sanctuary made use of the tools – in some cases almost immediately. The bonobos used sticks, rocks and antlers to dig, and also used long sticks as levers to move larger rocks out of the way (see video above). Some used different tools in sequence. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 21147 - Posted: 07.08.2015

By Lenny Bernstein Primed by widespread use of prescription opioid pain-killers, heroin addiction and the rate of fatal overdoses have increased rapidly over the past decade, touching parts of society that previously were relatively unscathed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday. The death rate from overdoses nearly quadrupled to 2.7 per 100,000 people between 2002 and 2013, CDC Director Tom Frieden said during a telephone news conference Tuesday. In 60 percent of those cases, the cause of death was attributed to heroin and at least one other drug, often cocaine, according to Chris Jones, lead author of the report and a member of the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Public Health Strategy and Analysis. But it is the highly addictive pain-killing opioids, prescribed and sometimes over-prescribed by physicians who are not highly trained in pain management, that concerns officials most, Frieden said. "A few doses and someone can have a life of addiction, a few too many and someone can die of an overdose," Frieden said. With heroin an estimated five times less expensive than prescription drugs and widely available on the street, people with opioid addictions are turning to the drug in large numbers, he said. The annual rate of heroin use rose from 1.6 per 1,000 people between 2002 and 2004 to 2.6 per 1,000 between 2011 and 2013, according to the report. That includes a doubling among women, a 114 percent increase for whites and a 109 percent rise among people ages 18 to 25, the report shows.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 21146 - Posted: 07.08.2015

By David Shultz Like many arthropods, spiders don’t have penises. Instead they rely on a set of modified appendages—termed pedipalps—to transfer sperm during reproduction. Previous studies had concluded that the pedipalps, which are basically modified arms emanating from the arachnid’s head, were lacking any sort of neurons that might convey a sense of touch. But new research, published online today in Biology Letters, suggests that the spider’s sex life isn’t an entirely numb deal. Using a combination of histological and computer-based techniques, scientists have identified neurons in the pedipalps of the Tasmanian cave spider (Hickmania troglodytes, seen above). Two main groups of nervous tissue were present: a nerve running to the tip of the sex organ, and two clusters of neurons in the palpal bulb—the region of the pedipalps used for transferring sperm. Though further research is needed to confirm the hypothesis, the team suspects that the sense of touch may enable the males to stimulate the females and even provide feedback about the quality of their mate. The latter hypothesis is especially intriguing because the analyses also revealed that one of the glands in the spider’s sex organ was directly innervated. The team believes this might mean the spiders can control the quality and volume of their ejaculate—reserving the best secretions for the choicest mates. © 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 21145 - Posted: 07.08.2015

By Sarah C. P. Williams The next time you forget where you left your car keys, you might be able blame an immune protein that builds up in your blood as you age. The protein impairs the formation of new brain cells and contributes to age-related memory loss—at least in mice, according to a new study. Blocking it could help prevent run-of-the-mill memory decline or treat cognitive disorders, the researchers say. “The findings are really exciting,” says neurologist Dena Dubal of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), who was not involved in the study. “The importance of this work cannot be underestimated as the world’s population is aging rapidly.” Multiple groups of scientists have shown that adding the blood of older mice to younger animals’ bodies makes them sluggish, weaker, and more forgetful. Likewise, young blood can restore the memory and energy of older mice. Neuroscientist Saul Villeda of UCSF homed in on one actor he thought might be responsible for some of that effect: β2 microglobulin (B2M), an immune protein normally involved in distinguishing one’s own cells from invading pathogens. B2M has also been found at increased levels in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and other cognitive disorders. Villeda and his colleagues first measured B2M levels in the blood of both people and mice of different ages; they found that those levels increased with age. When the researchers injected B2M into 3-month-old mice, the young animals suddenly had trouble remembering how to complete a water maze, making more than twice as many errors after they’d already been trained to navigate the maze. Moreover, their brains had fewer new neurons than other mice. Thirty days later, however, when the protein had been cleared from their bodies, the animals' memory troubles were gone as well, and the number of newly formed brain cells was back to normal. © 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 21144 - Posted: 07.07.2015

By Michael T. Ullman and Mariel Y. Pullman The human brain possesses an incredible capacity to adapt to new conditions. This plasticity enables us not only to constantly learn but also to overcome brain injury and loss of function. Take away one capability, and little by little we often compensate for these deficits. Our brain may be especially well suited to overcome limitations in the case of psychiatric or neurological conditions that originate early in life, what clinicians call neurodevelopmental disorders. Given the brain's considerable plasticity during early years, children with these disorders may have particular advantages in learning compensatory strategies. It now appears that a single brain system—declarative memory—can pick up slack for many kinds of problems across multiple neurodevelopmental disorders. This system, rooted in the brain's hippocampus, is what we typically refer to when we think of learning and memory. It allows us to memorize facts and names or recall a first grade teacher or a shopping list. Whereas other memory systems are more specialized—helping us learn movements or recall emotional events, for instance—declarative memory absorbs and retains a much broader range of knowledge. In fact, it may allow us to learn just about anything. Given declarative memory's powerful role in learning, one might expect it to help individuals acquire all kinds of compensatory strategies—as long as it remains functional. Indeed, research suggests that it not only remains largely intact but also compensates for diverse impairments in five common conditions that are rarely studied in conjunction: autism spectrum disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), Tourette's syndrome, dyslexia and developmental language disorder (which is often referred to as specific language impairment, or SLI). © 2015 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 21143 - Posted: 07.07.2015

by Jessica Griggs Manoeuvring the colourful tiles of Tetris can help block flashbacks of traumatic events, even after the memory has fixed itself in your mind. Playing the game could be an easy way to reduce the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). After any event, there is a window of about six hours where memories are consolidated and cemented in the mind, says Emily Holmes at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK. Sleeping on the memory strengthens it further. If an event is particularly traumatic, vivid memories of it can reoccur. These intrusive flashbacks are distressing for anyone, but in a proportion of cases they can persist and contribute to PTSD. For example, about half of people who have been raped go on to develop PTSD, as do a number of asylum seekers and people who have been tortured. About 20 per cent of people who have been in a serious car accident are affected by the condition. There are effective treatments for people who are diagnosed with PTSD, but nothing currently exists to help prevent people from developing it in the days and weeks after the initial trauma. Holmes and her colleagues think a dose of Tetris could be the answer. In 2009, they showed that playing the game four hours after being exposed to trauma reduced the number of subsequent flashbacks. But getting the game into a person's hands immediately after they have been raped, for example, won't always be practical, so the team tested whether it could still work a day later – after the memory had been consolidated and slept on. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stress; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 21142 - Posted: 07.07.2015

By JAMES GORMAN Call it the case of the homing lizards. It’s a small mystery. No one of any species is murdered. But the central question is one that has prompted plenty of scientific research: How do animals find their way home? The lizards in this case are anoles — abundant, mostly small reptiles that thrive in the Caribbean. The species is Anolis gundlachi. The lead detective is Manuel Leal, a biologist at the University of Missouri. He has been studying the behavior of anoles for more than 20 years. For about three years, Dr. Leal has been trying to understand how the anole finds its way back to its own territory after being carried into the rain forest. And as he told an audience in June at the annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society in Anchorage, the case is far from closed. First, a bit of background. Anoles are particularly abundant in the dense vegetation of the rain forests in Puerto Rico, where Dr. Leal studies them. Each species is tied to a very specific environment. For instance, many live on tree trunks, but only a particular part of the trunk. Trunk-ground anoles live only in the space from the ground up to six feet or so. Trunk-crown anoles live above them, up to the crown of the tree. Twig anoles live way up high. Several years ago, Dr. Leal was studying competition between two species. If he removed all of the trunk-ground anoles, he wondered, would the trunk-crown lizards extend their territory farther down the tree? He ran into a problem, however. He would take the trunk-ground lizards far from their home territory to make room for their upstairs neighbors, and then release them. But in a reptilian version of the children’s song, “The Cat Came Back,” the lizards wouldn’t stay away. “Lizards kept showing up in the territory that had just been scoured for lizards,” he said. Dr. Leal wondered whether new anoles were appearing in empty territory or the old ones were returning. But how could a lizard that had never left home find its way back through 25 yards or so of dense rain forest? © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 21141 - Posted: 07.07.2015

By Sabrina Imbler To our knowledge, there’s no correlation between a man’s singing ability and his care and attentiveness as a father. But any Pavarotti among the nightingales will serenade his mate while she sits on her eggs. And after they hatch he will visit the nest about 16 times each hour to feed their offspring. Because, among nightingales at least, the best singers also make the best fathers. So finds a study in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology. [Conny Bartsch, Michael Weiss and Silke Kipper, Multiple song features are related to paternal effort in common nightingales] Some 80 percent of birds practice biparental care, meaning both the male and female rear their offspring together. So it’s crucial for a female bird to pick as a mate the most promising father—both genetically and behaviorally. Female birds look for signs of fitness that range from the flamboyant plumage of the peacock to the bizarre dances of birds of paradise. And for nightingales, it’s the most elaborate song that apparently wins the day. The average male has some 180 tunes in his repertoire. These avian Sinatras vocalize highly variable song types including buzzes, whistles and trills. And such virtuoso singing seems to signal the female that this is a guy she can count on. That is, when it’s time to help raise the kids, he’s not a flight risk. © 2015 Scientific American

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 21140 - Posted: 07.07.2015

By DACHER KELTNER and PAUL EKMAN FIVE years ago, the writer and director Pete Docter of Pixar reached out to us to talk over an idea for a film, one that would portray how emotions work inside a person’s head and at the same time shape a person’s outer life with other people. He wanted to do this all in the mind of an 11-year-old girl as she navigated a few difficult days in her life. As scientists who have studied emotion for decades, we were delighted to be asked. We ended up serving as scientific consultants for the movie, “Inside Out,” which was recently released. Our conversations with Mr. Docter and his team were generally about the science related to questions at the heart of the film: How do emotions govern the stream of consciousness? How do emotions color our memories of the past? What is the emotional life of an 11-year-old girl like? (Studies find that the experience of positive emotions begins to drop precipitously in frequency and intensity at that age.) “Inside Out” is about how five emotions — personified as the characters Anger, Disgust, Fear, Sadness and Joy — grapple for control of the mind of an 11-year-old girl named Riley during the tumult of a move from Minnesota to San Francisco. (One of us suggested that the film include the full array of emotions now studied in science, but Mr. Docter rejected this idea for the simple reason that the story could handle only five or six characters.) Riley’s personality is principally defined by Joy, and this is fitting with what we know scientifically. Studies find that our identities are defined by specific emotions, which shape how we perceive the world, how we express ourselves and the responses we evoke in others. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 21139 - Posted: 07.07.2015

By VIRGINIA HUGHES An extraterrestrial dropping into a modern-day hospital might be forgiven for thinking it was run by machines. Against a techno soundtrack of whirs and beeps, sleep-deprived doctors file in and out of exam rooms. They ask patients a series of standard questions, and make a few clicks on a computer to order a blood test or chest X-ray or pain meds. Then they hustle out the door to repeat the protocol on the impossibly large number of other patients under their watch. When their shifts end, some 12 or 18 or even 28 hours later, these zombies in blue scrubs are replaced by others, while the unflappable computers ease the handoff. The tech-centric approach to medicine has its benefits, to be sure. Imaging machines and genetic screening give doctors biological clues otherwise hidden. Computers can make hospitals more efficient, and prevent dumb mistakes. But the practice of medicine cannot be reduced to algorithms, pixels and protocols, as the neurologist Dr. Allan H. Ropper subtly argues in his entertaining book, “Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole.” (Read excerpt.) To Dr. Ropper, medicine is a craft — an art — that depends on the human interaction between doctor and patient. Like an episode of the popular television series “House,” the book presents mysterious medical cases from the behemoth Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. The 10th floor holds the neurology inpatient ward, a place where, as Dr. Ropper and his co-author, Brian David Burrell, put it, “the strangest and most challenging cases are sent to be sorted out.” © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 21138 - Posted: 07.07.2015

By David Robson William’s internal clock is eternally jammed at 13:40 on 14 March 2005 – right in the middle of a dentist appointment. A member of the British Armed Forces, he had returned to his post in Germany the night before after attending his grandfather’s funeral. He had gym in the morning, where he played volleyball for 45 minutes. He then entered his office to clear a backlog of emails, before heading to the dentist’s for root-canal surgery. “I remember getting into the chair and the dentist inserting the local anaesthetic,” he tells me. After that? A complete blank. It is as if all new memories are being written in invisible ink that slowly disappears. Since then, he has been unable to remember almost anything for longer than 90 minutes. So while he can still tell me about the first time he met the Duke of York for a briefing at the Ministry of Defence, he can’t even remember where he’s living now; he wakes up every morning believing he is still in Germany in 2005, waiting to visit the dentist. Without a record of new experiences, the passing of time means nothing to him. Today, he only knows that there is a problem because he and his wife have written detailed notes on his smartphone, in a file labelled “First thing – read this”. It is as if all new memories are being written in invisible ink that slowly disappears. How could minor dental work have affected his brain in such a profound way? This real-life medical mystery offers a rare glimpse at the hidden depths of the brain’s workings. © 2015 BBC.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 21137 - Posted: 07.06.2015

Gretchen Cuda Kroen When Kate Klein began working as a nurse in the Cleveland Clinic's Neurointensive Care Unit, one of the first things she noticed was that her patients spent a lot of time in bed. She knew patients with other injuries benefitted from getting up and moving early on, and she wondered why not patients with brain injuries. "I asked myself that question. I asked my colleagues that question," Klein says. "Why aren't these patients getting out of bed? Is there something unique about patients with neurologic injury?" Doctors have long encouraged their surgical patients to get out of bed as soon as it's safe to do so. Movement increases circulation, reduces swelling, inflammation and the risk of blood clots, and it speeds healing. But that wasn't the thinking with brain injuries, explains Edward Manno, director of the Neurointensive Care Unit at the Cleveland Clinic and one of the neurologists who works with Klein. "The predominant thinking was that rest was better suited for the brain," Manno says. Often the damaged brain is susceptible to lack of blood flow. Increased activity may make things worse if initiated too quickly, Manno says. "So many of us thought for quite some time that we needed to put the brain to rest after the initial insult of stroke or other neurologic injury." © 2015 NPR

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 21136 - Posted: 07.06.2015

CONCORD, N.H. — Can an algorithm pass for an author? Can a robot rock the house? A series of contests at Dartmouth College is about to find out. Dartmouth is seeking artificial intelligence algorithms that create "human-quality" short stories, sonnets and dance music sets that will be pitted against human-produced literature, poetry and music selections. The judges won't know which is which. The goal is to determine whether people can distinguish between the two, and whether they might even prefer the computer-generated creativity. "Historically, often when we have advances in artificial intelligence, people will always say, 'Well, a computer couldn't paint a sunset,' or 'a computer couldn't write a beautiful love sonnet,' but could they? That's the question," said Dan Rockmore, director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth. Rockmore, a mathematics and computer science professor, spun off the idea for the contests from his experience riding a stationary bike. He started thinking about how the music being played during his spin class helped him pedal at the right the pace, and he was surprised when the instructor told him he selected the songs without the help of computer software. "I left there thinking, 'I wonder if I could write a program that did that, or somebody could?'" he said. "Because that is a creative act — a good spin instructor is a total artist. It sort of opened my mind to thinking about whether a computer or algorithm could produce something that was indistinguishable from or even perhaps preferred over what the human does." The competitions are variations of the "Turing Test," named for British computer scientist Alan Turing, who in 1950 proposed an experiment to determine if a computer could have humanlike intelligence. The classic Turing test involves intelligent computer programs that can fool a person carrying on a conversation with it, and there have been many competitions over the years, said Manuela Veloso, professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University and past president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 21135 - Posted: 07.06.2015

Taunya English What do we know about the power of food to rev up sex drive? Not much. "Really, science has not figured out what determines sexual motivation and sexual attraction. If we knew the answer to that, we'd probably be richer than Pfizer after they invented Viagra," says Dolores Lamb, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. She hasn't seen any compelling evidence that any particular food can intensify desire. Lamb is a men's health researcher and knows a lot about the intricacies of male plumbing, but she says desire is largely psychological. Even medicines that treat erectile dysfunction can't create enthusiasm. "So the trigger still has to be up in the brain," Lamb says. Still, the idea persists that ginger stirs up lust, or that hot peppers make you hot. "Probably for some folks they do, and it's certainly fun to try," Lamb says. Some legendary aphrodisiacs do have a chemical here or a nutrient there that might support sexual health, but not enough of it to make an immediate difference in the bedroom. Red, juicy watermelon, for example, contains the amino acid citrulline, and that plant nutrient is healthy for erectile tissue in both men and women. But most of the amino acid is found in the rind of the fruit. Consider chili peppers. Capsaicin, which is what provides the heat in a jalapeno, also raises your metabolism and releases feel-good endorphins. "You get kind of a chill down the back of your neck and kind of a tingly, good sensation," Lamb says. "Gets blood flowing better." © 2015 NPR

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 21134 - Posted: 07.06.2015