By Darren Incorvaia The idea of a chicken running around with its head cut off, inspired by a real-life story, may make it seem like the bird doesn’t have much going on upstairs. But Sonja Hillemacher, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Bonn in Germany, always knew that chickens were more than mindless sources of wings and nuggets. “They are way smarter than you think,” Ms. Hillemacher said. Now, in a study published in the journal PLOS One on Wednesday, Ms. Hillemacher and her colleagues say they have found evidence that roosters can recognize themselves in mirrors. In addition to shedding new light on chicken intellect, the researchers hope that their experiment can prompt re-evaluations of the smarts of other animals. The mirror test is a common, but contested, test of self-awareness. It was introduced by the psychologist Gordon Gallup in 1970. He housed chimpanzees with mirrors and then marked their faces with red dye. The chimps didn’t seem to notice until they could see their reflections, and then they began inspecting and touching the marked spot on their faces, suggesting that they recognized themselves in the mirror. The mirror test has since been used to assess self-recognition in many other species. But only a few — such as dolphins and elephants — have passed. After being piloted on primates, the mirror test was “somehow sealed in a nearly magical way as sacred,” said Onur Güntürkün, a neuroscientist at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany and an author of the study who worked with Ms. Hillemacher and Inga Tiemann, also at the University of Bonn. But different cognitive processes are active in different situations, and there’s no reason to think that the mirror test is accurate for animals with vastly different sensory abilities and social systems than what chimps have. The roosters failed the classic mirror test. When the team marked them with pink powder, the birds showed no inclination to inspect or touch the smudge in front of the mirror the way that Dr. Gallup’s chimps did. As an alternative, the team tested rooster self-awareness in a more fowl friendly way. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Consciousness; Intelligence
Link ID: 28978 - Posted: 10.28.2023

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre A gray cat stares quietly at a nearby orange tabby, squinting her eyes, flattening her ears, and licking her lips. The tabby glares back, wrinkles his nose, and pulls back his whiskers. Cat people know what’s about to go down: a fight. If looks and growls don’t resolve the budding tiff, claws will pop out and fur will fly. Those faces aren’t the only ones cats make at each other, of course—not by a long shot. In a study published this month in Behavioural Processes, researchers tallied 276 different feline facial expressions, used to communicate hostile and friendly intent and everything in between. What’s more, the team found, we humans might be to thank: Our feline friends may have evolved this range of sneers, smiles, and grimaces over the course of their 10,000-year history with us. “Many people still consider cats—erroneously—to be a largely nonsocial species,” says Daniel Mills, a veterinary behaviorist at the University of Lincoln who was not involved in the study. The facial expressions described in the new study suggest otherwise, he notes. “There is clearly a lot going on that we are not aware of.” Cats can be solitary creatures, but they often form friendships with fellow kitties in people’s homes or on the street; feral cats can live in colonies of thousands, sometimes taking over entire islands. Lauren Scott, a medical student and self-described cat person at the University of Kansas, long wondered how all these felines communicated with one another. There has to be love and diplomacy, not just fighting, yet most studies of feline expression have focused on aggression. Fortunately in 2021, Scott was studying at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), just minutes from the CatCafé Lounge. There, human visitors can interact—and even do yoga—with dozens of group-housed, adoptable cats. From August to June, Scott video recorded 194 minutes of cats’ facial expressions, specifically those aimed at other cats, after the café had closed for the day. Then she and evolutionary psychologist Brittany Florkiewicz, also at UCLA at the time but now at Lyon College, coded all their facial muscle movements—excluding any related to breathing, chewing, yawning, and the like.

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 28977 - Posted: 10.28.2023

By Charles Digges Is there any kind of fence that can make humans and elephants good neighbors? It’s a question Dominique Gonçalves has had to ponder as she leads the elephant ecology project at Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, which is not surrounded by a physical barrier. A number of pioneering studies throughout Sub-Saharan Africa over the past several years showed a solution that was simple and natural: bees. As it turns out, the tiny, ubiquitous honeybee has the power to terrify a mammal that’s 22 million times its size. In fact, even the sound of the insect’s buzz is enough to send a family of elephants into a panic, showed studies by Lucy King, an Oxford zoologist and preeminent researcher in human-elephant coexistence at the nonprofit Save the Elephants. Upon hearing the telltale hum, elephants will run, kick up dust, shake their heads as if trying to swat the bees out of the air, trumpeting distressed warnings to other elephants as they flee. Of course, a bee’s stinger can’t penetrate the thick hide of an elephant. But when bees swarm—and African bees swarm aggressively—hundreds of bees might sting an elephant in its most sensitive areas, like the trunk, the mouth, and eyes. And it works. Building on King’s insights, Paola Branco of the University of Idaho conducted a massive two-year-long experiment in Gorongosa that culminated in a 2019 paper she co-authored with King, Marc Stalmans, Gorongosa’s director of scientific services, Princeton zoologist Robert Pringle, and others.1 Their research aimed to settle tensions between human farmers and the park’s growing population of marauding pachyderms—with the help of bees. © 2023 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 28976 - Posted: 10.28.2023

By Bruce Bower Female chimps living in an East African forest experience menopause and then survive years, even decades, after becoming biologically unable to reproduce. The apes are the first known examples of wild, nonhuman primates to go through the fertility-squelching hormonal changes and live well beyond their reproductive years. The finding raises new questions about how menopause evolved, UCLA evolutionary anthropologist Brian Wood and colleagues conclude in the Oct. 27 Science. Until now, females who experience menopause and keep living for years have been documented only in humans and five whale species. It’s unclear what evolutionary benefit exists to explain such longevity past the point of being able to give birth and pass on one’s genes. Although evolutionary explanations for menopause remain debatable, the new finding reflects an especially close genetic relationship between humans and chimps, Wood says. “Both [species] are more predisposed to post-reproductive survival than other great apes.” Some evidence suggests that female fertility ends at similar ages in humans and chimps (Pan troglodytes) if our ape relatives live long enough, says anthropologist Kristen Hawkes of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. But in other studies, female chimps, such as those studied by Jane Goodall at Tanzania’s Gombe National Park starting in 1960, aged quickly and often died in their early 30s, usually while still having menstrual cycles, she says. “What’s surprising [in Wood’s study] is so many females living so long after menopause,” Hawkes says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2023.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 28975 - Posted: 10.28.2023

By Hallie Levine Every 40 seconds, someone in the United States has a stroke, and about three-quarters occur in people ages 65 and older. “As people age, their arteries have a tendency to become less flexible,” and clogged arteries are more likely, says Doris Chan, an interventional cardiologist at NYU Langone Health. This hikes the risk of an ischemic stroke — the most common type — when a blood vessel to the brain becomes blocked by a blood clot. But about 80 percent of all strokes are preventable, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the lifestyle steps you take can be especially powerful in fending off stroke. Here’s what you can do to reduce your risk. 1. Watch these issues. Keeping certain conditions at bay or managing them properly can cut the likelihood of a stroke. Take high blood pressure, which some research suggests is responsible for almost half of strokes. A heart-healthy eating plan may help control it. Also, try to limit sodium to less than 1,500 milligrams a day, maintain a healthy weight and exercise regularly, says Sahil Khera, an interventional cardiologist at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. If your blood pressure is high even with the above measures, ask your doctor what levels you should strive for and whether meds are appropriate. Staying out of the hypertensive range can be challenging with age because of the higher potential for medication side effects. While blood pressure below 120/80 can reduce cardiovascular risk, that target should be adjusted if side effects such as dizziness occur, says Hardik Amin, an associate professor of neurology at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn. Another important condition to watch for is atrial fibrillation (AFib), an irregular and often rapid heartbeat, which affects at least 10 percent of people over age 80, according to a 2022 study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. People with AFib are about five times as likely to have a stroke.

Keyword: Stroke; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 28974 - Posted: 10.28.2023

By Laura Dattaro A brain is nothing if not communicative. Neurons are the chatterboxes of this conversational organ, and they speak with one another by exchanging pulses of electricity using chemical messengers called neurotransmitters. By repeating this process billions of times per second, a brain converts clusters of chemicals into coordinated actions, memories and thoughts. Researchers study how the brain works by eavesdropping on that chemical conversation. But neurons talk so loudly and often that if there are other, quieter voices, it might be hard to hear them. For most of the 20th century, neuroscientists largely agreed that neurons are the only brain cells that propagate electrical signals. All the other brain cells, called glia, were thought to serve purely supportive roles. Then, in 1990, a curious phenomenon emerged: Researchers observed an astrocyte, a subtype of glial cell, responding to glutamate, the main neurotransmitter that generates electrical activity. In the decades since, research teams have come up with conflicting evidence, some reporting that astrocytes signal, and others retorting that they definitely do not. The disagreement played out at conferences and in review after review of the evidence. The two sides seemed irreconcilable. A new paper published in Nature in September presents the best proof yet that astrocytes can signal, gathered over eight years by a team co-led by Andrea Volterra, visiting faculty at the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuro Engineering in Geneva, Switzerland. The study includes two key pieces of evidence: images of glutamate flowing from astrocytes, and genetic data suggesting that these cells, dubbed glutamatergic astrocytes, have the cellular machinery to use glutamate the way neurons do. The paper also helps explain the decades of contradictory findings. Because only some astrocytes can perform this signaling, both sides of the controversy are, in a sense, right: A researcher’s results depend on which astrocytes they sampled. All Rights Reserved © 2023

Keyword: Glia
Link ID: 28972 - Posted: 10.25.2023

Christie Wilcox Adult horsehair worms look about how you’d expect given their name: They’re long, noodlelike creatures that resemble wiggling horse hairs. They live and reproduce in water, but their young only develop inside the bodies of other animals—usually terrestrial insects such as praying mantises. Once they’ve finished growing inside their unwitting vessel, the worms must convince their hosts to drown themselves to complete their life cycle. How these parasites manage to lethally manipulate their hosts has long puzzled scientists. Researchers behind a new study published today in Current Biology suggest horsehair worms possess hundreds of genes that allow them to hijack a mantis’ movement—and they may have acquired these genes directly from their ill-fated hosts. “The results are amazing,” says Clément Gilbert, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Paris-Saclay who wasn’t involved in the work. If it turns out to be true that so many of the mantises’ genes jumped over to the parasitic worms—a process known as horizontal gene transfer—then “this is by far the highest number of horizontally transferred genes that have been reported between two species of animals,” he adds. The phenomenon of parasites mind-controlling their hosts to an early grave has always intrigued Tappei Mishina, an evolutionary biologist at Kyushu University and the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research. “For more than 100 years, there have been horrifying observations of terrestrial insects jumping into water right before our eyes all over the world,” he says. He teamed up with ecologist Takuya Sato of the Center for Ecological Research at Kyoto University to investigate the genetic basis of their parasitism. They focused on horsehair or gordian worms, a group of parasitic animals related to nematodes. Many have complex life cycles involving multiple hosts, and the ones that live in freshwater must generally find their way into an insect to finish developing into adults. The genus Mishina, Sato, and their colleagues specialize in, known as Chordodes, infect mantises and can grow to nearly 1 meter long inside the palm-size insects’ abdomens.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 28971 - Posted: 10.25.2023

By George Musser They call it the hard problem of consciousness, but a better term might be the impossible problem of consciousness. The whole point is that the qualitative aspects of our conscious experience, or “qualia,” are inexplicable. They slip through the explanatory framework of science, which is reductive: It explains things by breaking them down into parts and describing how they fit together. Subjective experience has an intrinsic je ne sais quoi that can’t be decomposed into parts or explained by relating one thing to another. Qualia can’t be grasped intellectually. They can only be experienced firsthand. For the past five years or so, I’ve been trying to untangle the cluster of theories that attempt to explain consciousness, traveling the world to interview neuroscientists, philosophers, artificial-intelligence researchers, and physicists—all of whom have something to say on the matter. Most duck the hard problem, either bracketing it until neuroscientists explain brain function more fully or accepting that consciousness has no deeper explanation and must be wired into the base level of reality. Although I made it a point to maintain an outsider’s view of science in my reporting, staying out of academic debates and finding value in every approach, I find both positions defensible but dispiriting. I cling to the intuition that consciousness must have some scientific explanation that we can achieve. But how? It’s hard to imagine how science could possibly expand its framework to accommodate the redness of red or the awfulness of fingernails on a chalkboard. But there is another option: to suppose that we are misconstruing our experience in some way. We think that it has intrinsic qualities, but maybe on closer inspection it doesn’t. Not that this is an easy position to take. Two leading theories of consciousness take a stab at it. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) says that the neural networks in our head are conscious since neurons act together in harmony—they form collective structures with properties beyond those of the individual cells. If so, subjective experience isn’t primitive and unanalyzable; in principle, you could follow the network’s transitions and read its mind. “What IIT tries to do is completely avoid any intrinsic quality in the traditional sense,” the father of IIT, Giulio Tononi, told me. © 2023 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 28970 - Posted: 10.25.2023

By Mike Baker In a carpeted office suite, Alex Beck settled onto a mattress and, under the watch of a trained guide, began chomping through a handful of “Pumpkin Hillbilly” mushrooms. A Marine Corps veteran who was sexually assaulted during his time in the armed forces, Mr. Beck had long been searching unsuccessfully for a way to put those nightmarish years behind him. Now he was ready for a different kind of journey, a psychedelic trip through the nether regions of his own mind. As he felt his thoughts starting to spin, his “facilitator,” Josh Goldstein, urged him to surrender and let the mushrooms guide him. “It’s like the idea of planting a seed and then letting it go,” he said. Stigmatized in law and medicine for the past half-century, psychedelics are in the midst of a sudden revival, with a growing body of research suggesting that the mind-altering compounds could upend psychiatric care. Governments in several places have cautiously started to open access, and as Oregon voters approved a broad drug decriminalization plan in 2020, they also backed an initiative to allow the use of mushrooms as therapy. This summer, the state debuted a first-of-its-kind legal market for psilocybin mushrooms, more widely known as magic mushrooms. Far from the days of illicit consumption in basements and vans, the program allows people to embark on a therapeutic trip, purchasing mushrooms produced by a state-approved grower and consuming them in a licensed facility under the guidance of a certified facilitator. Mr. Beck, 30, was one of the first clients at a facility in the central Oregon city of Bend that began conducting sessions this summer in a building that on other days of the week offers chiropractic services. In his youth, Mr. Beck had experimented with psychedelics for recreation. But as he struggled with his lingering post-traumatic stress in adulthood, he learned about what seemed to be promising new research into plant-based psychedelics for mental health issues that did not respond to other treatments. He wondered if they could help him clear his head from the horrors of the past. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Depression
Link ID: 28969 - Posted: 10.25.2023

Anil Oza Scientists once considered sleep to be like a shade getting drawn over a window between the brain and the outside world: when the shade is closed, the brain stops reacting to outside stimuli. A study published on 12 October in Nature Neuroscience1 suggests that there might be periods during sleep when that shade is partially open. Depending on what researchers said to them, participants in the study would either smile or frown on cue in certain phases of sleep. “You’re not supposed to be able to do stuff while you sleep,” says Delphine Oudiette, a cognitive scientist at the Paris Brain Institute in France and a co-author of the study. Historically, the definition of sleep is that consciousness of your environment halts, she adds. “It means you don’t react to the external world.” Dream time A few years ago, however, Oudiette began questioning this definition after she and her team conducted an experiment in which they were able to communicate with people who are aware that they are dreaming while they sleep — otherwise known as lucid dreamers. During these people’s dreams, experimenters were able to ask questions and get responses through eye and facial-muscle movements2. Karen Konkoly, who was a co-author on that study and a cognitive scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, says that after that paper came out, “it was a big open question in our minds whether communication would be possible with non-lucid dreamers”. So Oudiette continued with the work. In her latest study, she and her colleagues observed 27 people with narcolepsy — characterized by daytime sleepiness and a high frequency of lucid dreams — and 22 people without the condition. While they were sleeping, participants were repeatedly asked to frown or smile. All of them responded accurately to at least 70% of these prompts. © 2023 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 28968 - Posted: 10.25.2023

By Hope Reese There is no free will, according to Robert Sapolsky, a biologist and neurologist at Stanford University and a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. Dr. Sapolsky worked for decades as a field primatologist before turning to neuroscience, and he has spent his career investigating behavior across the animal kingdom and writing about it in books including “Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst” and “Monkeyluv, and Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals.” In his latest book, “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will,” Dr. Sapolsky confronts and refutes the biological and philosophical arguments for free will. He contends that we are not free agents, but that biology, hormones, childhood and life circumstances coalesce to produce actions that we merely feel were ours to choose. It’s a provocative claim, he concedes, but he would be content if readers simply began to question the belief, which is embedded in our cultural conversation. Getting rid of free will “completely strikes at our sense of identity and autonomy and where we get meaning from,” Dr. Sapolsky said, and this makes the idea particularly hard to shake. There are major implications, he notes: Absent free will, no one should be held responsible for their behavior, good or bad. Dr. Sapolsky sees this as “liberating” for most people, for whom “life has been about being blamed and punished and deprived and ignored for things they have no control over.” He spoke in a series of interviews about the challenges that free will presents and how he stays motivated without it. These conversations were edited and condensed for clarity. To most people, free will means being in charge of our actions. What’s wrong with that outlook? It’s a completely useless definition. When most people think they’re discerning free will, what they mean is somebody intended to do what they did: Something has just happened; somebody pulled the trigger. They understood the consequences and knew that alternative behaviors were available. But that doesn’t remotely begin to touch it, because you’ve got to ask: Where did that intent come from? That’s what happened a minute before, in the years before, and everything in between. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Consciousness; Attention
Link ID: 28967 - Posted: 10.17.2023

Max Kozlov Rich, high-fat foods such as ice cream are loved not only for their taste, but also for the physical sensations they produce in the mouth — their ‘mouthfeel’. Now scientists have identified a brain area that both responds to the smooth texture of fatty foods and uses that information to rate the morsel’s allure, guiding eating behaviour1. These findings, published on 16 October in The Journal of Neuroscience, “add a new dimension” of the eating experience to scientists’ understanding of what motivates people to choose certain foods, says Ivan de Araujo, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, who was not involved in the study. To explore how food textures influence eating habits, Fabian Grabenhorst, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, and his colleagues set out to quantify the mouthfeel of fatty foods. The authors prepared several milkshakes with varying fat and sugar contents and placed a sample of each between two pig tongues procured from a local butcher. The researchers then slid the tongues across each other and measured the amount of friction between the two surfaces, providing a numerical index of each shake’s smoothness. The researchers then gave 22 participants milkshakes with the same compositions as those tested on the pig tongues. After tasting each milkshake, participants placed bids on how much they would spend to drink a full glass of it after the experiment. Accompanying brain scans showed that activity patterns in an area called the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which is involved in reward processing, reflected the shakes’ texture. The scans also identified OFC activity patterns that reflected participants’ bids, suggesting that this brain region links mouthfeel to the value placed on that food. © 2023 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Obesity; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 28966 - Posted: 10.17.2023

By Matt Richtel An Oxford University researcher and her team showed that digital wearable devices can track the progression of Parkinson’s disease in an individual more effectively than human clinical observation can, according to a newly published paper. By tracking more than 100 metrics picked up by the devices, researchers were able to discern subtle changes in the movements of subjects with Parkinson’s, a neurodegenerative disease that afflicts 10 million people worldwide. The lead researcher emphasized that the latest findings were not a treatment for Parkinson’s. Rather, they are a means of helping scientists gauge whether novel drugs and other therapies for Parkinson’s are slowing the progression of the disease. Quotable Quotes The sensors — six per subject, worn on the chest, at the base of the spine and one on each wrist and foot — tracked 122 physiological metrics. Several dozen metrics stood out as closely indicating the disease’s progression, including the direction a toe moved during a step and the length and regularity of strides. “We have the biomarker,” said Chrystalina Antoniades, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford and the lead researcher on the paper, which was published earlier this month in the journal npj Parkinson’s Disease. “It’s super exciting. Now we hope to be able to tell you: Is a drug working?” Until now, Dr. Antoniades said, drug trials for Parkinson’s had relied on clinical assessment of whether a treatment was slowing the progression of the disease. But clinical observation can miss changes that happen day to day or that might not show up clearly in periodic visits to a doctor, she added. In the paper, the study’s authors concluded that the sensors proved more effective at tracking the disease progression “than the conventionally used clinical rating scales.” © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 28965 - Posted: 10.17.2023

By Hallie Levine Finding that a good night’s rest has become more elusive over the years? Live well every day with tips and guidance on food, fitness and mental health, delivered to your inbox every Thursday. Older people need about the same amount of sleep as younger ones — generally, seven to eight hours, says Rosanne M. Leipzig, a professor of geriatrics and palliative medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. But about 30 percent of older people get less than seven hours of sleep daily, and almost 20 percent report either frequent insomnia or poor sleep quality, according to a 2022 study published in the journal BMC Public Health. If you have been struggling with sleep, consider the following. How your sleep cycle changes Older adults tend to have less deep (what’s called non-REM) sleep, says Ronald Chervin, chief of the Division of Sleep Medicine at University of Michigan Health in Ann Arbor. So “you may find that you’re woken more by things that would not have disturbed you before,” Leipzig says. You may also notice that you become sleepy earlier in the evening. “As we get older, our circadian rhythm — the body’s internal clock — changes,” Chervin says. This may lead you to head off to sleep earlier at night and wake up earlier in the morning. In addition, at night, older people tend to produce less antidiuretic hormone — which “instructs” the kidneys to cut back on creating fluid — than they once did, Leipzig says. As a result, you may wake up more often at night with the need to urinate. Other medical conditions, such as prostate problems or diabetes, can also contribute to those middle-of-the-night bathroom visits.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 28964 - Posted: 10.17.2023

By Carl Zimmer An international team of scientists has mapped the human brain in much finer resolution than ever before. The brain atlas, a $375 million effort started in 2017, has identified more than 3,300 types of brain cells, an order of magnitude more than was previously reported. The researchers have only a dim notion of what the newly discovered cells do. The results were described in 21 papers published on Thursday in Science and several other journals. Ed Lein, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle who led five of the studies, said that the findings were made possible by new technologies that allowed the researchers to probe millions of human brain cells collected from biopsied tissue or cadavers. “It really shows what can be done now,” Dr. Lein said. “It opens up a whole new era of human neuroscience.” Still, Dr. Lein said that the atlas was just a first draft. He and his colleagues have only sampled a tiny fraction of the 170 billion cells estimated to make up the human brain, and future surveys will certainly uncover more cell types, he said. Biologists first noticed in the 1800s that the brain was made up of different kinds of cells. In the 1830s, the Czech scientist Jan Purkinje discovered that some brain cells had remarkably dense explosions of branches. Purkinje cells, as they are now known, are essential for fine-tuning our muscle movements. Later generations developed techniques to make other cell types visible under a microscope. In the retina, for instance, researchers found cylindrical “cone cells” that capture light. By the early 2000s, researchers had found more than 60 types of neurons in the retina alone. They were left to wonder just how many kinds of cells were lurking in the deeper recesses of the brain, which are far harder to study. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 28963 - Posted: 10.14.2023

By Laura Sanders A new look at the human brain is beginning to reveal the inner lives of its cellular residents. The human brain holds a dizzying collection of diverse cells, and no two brains are the same, cellularly speaking. Those are the prevailing conclusions of an onslaught of 21 papers published online October 12 in Science, Science Advances and Science Translational Medicine. The results just start to scratch the surface of understanding the mysteries of the brain. Still, they provide the most intimate look yet at the cells that build the brain, and offer clues about how the brain enables thoughts, actions and memories. The collection of data may also guide researchers in their hunt for the causes of brain disorders such as schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease and depression. The new brain map is a result of a coordinated international research effort called the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Initiative Cell Census Network, or BICCN, which ramped up in 2017. Many of the studies in the collection are based on a powerful technology called single-cell genomics. The method reveals which genes are active inside of a single cell, information that provides clues about the cell’s identity and job. As part of the BICCN, researchers examined all sorts of brains. One project detailed the cells in small pieces of live brain tissue taken from 75 people undergoing surgery for tumors or epilepsy, an approach that’s been used on smaller scales before (SN: 8/7/19). Another looked at samples taken from the brains of 17 deceased children. Still another looked at brain tissue from seven people, seven chimpanzees, four gorillas, three rhesus macaques and three marmosets. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2023.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Brain imaging
Link ID: 28962 - Posted: 10.14.2023

Marlys Fassett Itching can be uncomfortable, but it’s a normal part of your skin’s immune response to external threats. When you’re itching from an encounter with poison ivy or mosquitoes, consider that your urge to scratch may have evolved to get you to swat away disease-carrying pests. However, for many people who suffer from chronic skin diseases like eczema, the sensation of itch can fuel a vicious cycle of scratching that interrupts sleep, reduces productivity and prevents them from enjoying daily life. This cycle is caused by sensory neurons and skin immune cells working together to promote itching and skin inflammation. But, paradoxically, some of the mechanisms behind this feedback loop also stop inflammation from getting worse. In our newly published research, my team of immunologists and neuroscientists and I discovered that a specific type of itch-sensing neuron can push back on the itch-scratch-inflammation cycle in the presence of a small protein. This protein, called interleukin-31, or IL-31, is typically involved in triggering itching. This negative feedback loop – like the vicious cycle – is only possible because the itch-sensing nerve endings in your skin are closely intertwined with the millions of cells that make up your skin’s immune system. The protein IL-31 is key to the connection between the nervous and immune systems. This molecule is produced by some immune cells, and like other members of this molecule family, it specializes in helping immune cells communicate with each other. © 2010–2023, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 28961 - Posted: 10.14.2023

Mariana Lenharo The treatment of obesity has been revolutionized by new drugs such as semaglutide and tirzepatide. In clinical trials, these medications led to substantial weight loss — as much as an average of 21% of participants’ body weight1 — and semaglutide has also been shown to cut the risk of severe cardiovascular problems, which specialists celebrated as a groundbreaking result. But as demand for the drugs increases, there’s a growing interest in investigating their potential side effects. Researchers have been looking into the gastrointestinal problems and loss of muscle mass connected with the medications and shared some findings earlier this month. Gastrointestinal problems The latest generation of anti-obesity drugs mimic a hormone called glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1), which is associated with appetite regulation. Semaglutide was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2017, under the name Ozempic, to treat type 2 diabetes, and later, in 2021, as Wegovy, for the treatment of obesity. Tirzepatide, marketed as Mounjaro, was approved in 2022 to treat diabetes, but is also prescribed off-label for weight loss. A research letter published last week in JAMA2 looked at a sample of people with obesity in a large health-insurance database. The authors found that the incidence of pancreatitis — inflammation of the pancreas — was 4.6 times higher in people taking semaglutide than in people taking a weight-loss medication that does not mimic GLP-1. The study also found that semaglutide and liraglutide, another GLP-1 medication, were associated with an increased incidence of gastroparesis, a disorder that slows or stops the movement of food from the stomach to the intestine. Clinical trials had already shown an association between GLP-1 drugs and gastrointestinal side effects, including nausea, constipation and rare cases of pancreatitis3. “What’s new is that, for all of them, we actually gave an incidence number,” says Mahyar Etminan, an epidemiologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and an author of the JAMA research. © 2023 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 28960 - Posted: 10.14.2023

By Liz Fuller-Wright, The latest exploration of music in the natural world is taking place in Mala Murthy ’s lab at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, where Murthy and her research group have used neural imaging, optogenetics, motion capture, modeling and artificial intelligence to pinpoint precisely where and how a fruit fly’s brain toggles between its standard solo and its mating serenade. Their research appears in the current issue of the journal Nature. “For me it is very rewarding that, in a team of exceptional scientists coming from different backgrounds, we joined forces and methodologies to figure out the key characteristics of a neural circuit that can explain a complex behavior — the patterning of courtship song,” said Frederic Römschied, first author on this paper and a former postdoctoral fellow in Murthy’s lab. He is now a group leader at the European Neuroscience Institute in Göttingen, Germany. “It might be a surprise to discover that the fruit flies buzzing around your banana can sing, but it’s more than music, it’s communication,” said Murthy, the Karol and Marnie Marcin ’96 Professor and the director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. “It’s a conversation, with a back and forth. He sings, and she slows down, and she turns, and then he sings more. He’s constantly assessing her behavior to decide exactly how to sing. They’re exchanging information in this way. Unlike a songbird, belting out his song from his perch, he tunes everything into what she’s doing. It’s a dialogue.” It might be a surprise to discover that the fruit flies buzzing around your banana can sing, but it’s more than music, it’s communication. By studying how these tiny brains work, researchers hope to develop insights that will prove useful in the larger and more complex brains that are millions of times harder to study. In particular, Murthy’s team is trying to determine how the brain decides what behavior is appropriate in which context. © 2023 The Trustees of Princeton University

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 28959 - Posted: 10.14.2023

By Benjamin Mueller Once their scalpels reach the edge of a brain tumor, surgeons are faced with an agonizing decision: cut away some healthy brain tissue to ensure the entire tumor is removed, or give the healthy tissue a wide berth and risk leaving some of the menacing cells behind. Now scientists in the Netherlands report using artificial intelligence to arm surgeons with knowledge about the tumor that may help them make that choice. The method, described in a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, involves a computer scanning segments of a tumor’s DNA and alighting on certain chemical modifications that can yield a detailed diagnosis of the type and even subtype of the brain tumor. That diagnosis, generated during the early stages of an hourslong surgery, can help surgeons decide how aggressively to operate, the researchers said. In the future, the method may also help steer doctors toward treatments tailored for a specific subtype of tumor. “It’s imperative that the tumor subtype is known at the time of surgery,” said Jeroen de Ridder, an associate professor in the Center for Molecular Medicine at UMC Utrecht, a Dutch hospital, who helped lead the study. “What we have now uniquely enabled is to allow this very fine-grained, robust, detailed diagnosis to be performed already during the surgery.” A brave new world. A new crop of chatbots powered by artificial intelligence has ignited a scramble to determine whether the technology could upend the economics of the internet, turning today’s powerhouses into has-beens and creating the industry’s next giants. Here are the bots to know: ChatGPT. ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence language model from a research lab, OpenAI, has been making headlines since November for its ability to respond to complex questions, write poetry, generate code, plan vacations and translate languages. GPT-4, the latest version introduced in mid-March, can even respond to images (and ace the Uniform Bar Exam). © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Robotics; Intelligence
Link ID: 28958 - Posted: 10.12.2023