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Sara Reardon, Jeff Tollefson, Alexandra Witze & Erin Ross Funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s weather satellites, which track hurricanes, would be maintained under the Trump plan. When it comes to science, there are few winners in US President Donald Trump’s first budget proposal. The plan, released on 16 March, calls for double-digit cuts for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It also lays the foundation for a broad shift in the United States’ research priorities, including a retreat from environmental and climate programmes. Rumours of the White House proposal have swirled for weeks, alarming many researchers who depend on government funding — and science advocates who worry that the Trump administration’s stance will jeopardize US leadership in fields ranging from climate science to cancer biology. It is not clear, however, how much of the plan will survive negotiations in Congress over the coming months. What could Trump’s budget for science mean for you? “Cutting [research and development] funding from our budget is the same as cutting the engines off an airplane that’s too heavy for take-off,” says Jason Rao, director of international affairs at the American Society for Microbiology in Washington DC. The greatest threats to the United States, he says, are those presented by infectious diseases, climate change and energy production — none of which can be addressed effectively without scientific research. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 23376 - Posted: 03.20.2017

There has been much gnashing of teeth in the science-journalism community this week, with the release of an infographic that claims to rate the best and worst sites for scientific news. According to the American Council on Science and Health, which helped to prepare the ranking, the field is in a shoddy state. “If journalism as a whole is bad (and it is),” says the council, “science journalism is even worse. Not only is it susceptible to the same sorts of biases that afflict regular journalism, but it is uniquely vulnerable to outrageous sensationalism”. News aggregator RealClearScience, which also worked on the analysis, goes further: “Much of science reporting is a morass of ideologically driven junk science, hyped research, or thick, technical jargon that almost no one can understand”. How — without bias or outrageous sensationalism, of course — do they judge the newspapers and magazines that emerge from this sludge? Simple: they rank each by how evidence-based and compelling they subjectively judge its content to be. Modesty (almost) prevents us from naming the publication graded highest on both (okay, it’s Nature), but some names are lower than they would like. Big hitters including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian score relatively poorly. It’s a curious exercise, and one that fails to satisfy on any level. It is, of course, flattering to be judged as producing compelling content. But one audience’s compelling is another’s snoozefest, so it seems strikingly unfair to directly compare publications that serve readers with such different interests as, say, The Economist and Chemistry World. It is equally unfair to damn all who work on a publication because of some stories that do not meet the grade. (This is especially pertinent now that online offerings spread the brand and the content so much thinner.) © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 23334 - Posted: 03.09.2017

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

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 23306 - Posted: 03.03.2017

By R. Douglas Fields With American restrictions on travel lifting, interest in Cuba has skyrocketed, especially among scientists considering developing collaborations and student exchange programs with their Caribbean neighbors. But few researchers in the United States know how science and higher education are conducted in communist Cuba. Undark met with Dr. Mitchell Valdés-Sosa, director of the Cuban Neuroscience Center, in his office in Havana to learn how someone becomes a neuroscientist in Cuba, and to discuss what the future may hold for scientific collaborations between the two nations. It is helpful to appreciate some of the ways that higher education and research operate differently in communist Cuba. In contrast to the local institutional and individual control of decisions in the U.S., the central government in Cuba makes career and educational decisions for its citizens. Scientific research is directed by authorities to meet the needs of the developing country, and Ph.D. dissertation proposals must satisfy this goal for approval. Much of the graduate education takes place in biotechnology companies and research centers that are authorized by the government — a situation resembling internships in the U.S. Development, production, and marketing of products from biomedical research and education are all carried out in the same center, and the sales of these products provide financial support to the institution. Copyright 2017 Undark

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 23124 - Posted: 01.19.2017

By Jessica Hamzelou One woman’s unique experiences are helping us understand the nature of synaesthesia. We don’t know yet what causes synaesthesia, which links senses and can enable people to taste words or smell sounds, for example. It may be at least partly genetic, as it tends to run in families. Some researchers think a brain chemical called serotonin might play a role, because hallucinogenic drugs that alter serotonin levels in the brain can create unusual perceptions. There’s also some evidence that synaesthesia can change or disappear, and a detailed assessment of one woman’s experiences is helping Kevin Mitchell at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland and his team investigate. The woman, referred to as “AB”, sees colours when she hears music, linked to pitch, volume or instrument – higher notes have more pastel shades. She also associates colours with people, largely based on personality. Green is linked to loyalty, for instance. But several experiences in her life have caused her synaesthesia to change. “To say she had a series of unfortunate events would be an understatement,” says Mitchell. As a teenager and young adult, AB sustained several concussions, had migraines, contracted viral meningitis and was struck by lightning. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 8: General Principles of Sensory Processing, Touch, and Pain; Chapter 3: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System; Chapter 2: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Link ID: 23054 - Posted: 01.04.2017

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Using a sauna may be more than just relaxing and refreshing. It may also reduce the risk for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, a new study suggests. Researchers in Finland analyzed medical records of 2,315 healthy men ages 42 to 60, tracking their health over an average of about 20 years. During that time, they diagnosed 204 cases of dementia and 123 cases of Alzheimer’s disease. The study, in Age and Ageing, controlled for alcohol intake, smoking, blood pressure, diabetes and other health and behavioral factors. It found that compared with men who used a sauna once a week, those who used a sauna four to seven times a week had a 66 percent lower risk for dementia and a 65 percent lower risk for Alzheimer’s disease. The senior author, Jari Antero Laukkanen, a professor of clinical medicine at the University of Eastern Finland, said that various physiological mechanisms may be involved. Sauna bathing may, for example, lead to reduced inflammation, better vascular function or lowered blood pressure. “Overall relaxation and well-being can be another reason,” he added, though the findings were only an association. “We need more studies to clarify mechanisms and confirm our findings.” © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 23018 - Posted: 12.26.2016

A graduate student has been charged with murder in the fatal stabbing of beloved USC neuroscience professor, Bosco Tjan on campus Friday. David Jonathan Brown, 28, of Los Angeles is expected to be arraigned Tuesday in downtown Los Angeles, according to the L.A. County district attorney’s office. If he is convicted, Brown faces up to 26 years to life in prison. Prosecutors allege that Brown used a knife when he attacked and stabbed Tjan in the chest at 4:30 p.m. Friday in his office in the Seeley G. Mudd Building on campus. Brown was immediately taken into custody. It was the last day of classes. Tjan, who joined the faculty in 2001, was a professor of psychology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and a vision loss expert. As co-director of the Dornsife Cognitive Neuroimaging Center, Tjan ran a laboratory devoted to studying human sight. Brown was a doctoral student in Tjan’s lab, according to a USC website. The district attorney’s announcement comes a day after hundreds of students, staff and faculty gathered to honor the slain professor. “Bosco died doing what he loved, doing what he believed in — serving his students and building up a new generation of scholars,” USC President C.L. Max Nikias said. “His achievements are real, his influence enduring.” Tjan led a number of research projects and conducted a lab course on functional imaging. He was also a member of the Society for Neuroscience and Vision Sciences Society.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 22957 - Posted: 12.07.2016

Emily Conover A bird in laser goggles has helped scientists discover a new phenomenon in the physics of flight. Swirling vortices appear in the flow of air that follows a bird’s wingbeat. But for slowly flying birds, these vortices were unexpectedly short-lived, researchers from Stanford University report December 6 in Bioinspiration and Biomimetics. The results could help scientists better understand how animals fly, and could be important for designing flying robots (SN: 2/7/15, p. 18). To study the complex air currents produced by birds’ flapping wings, the researchers trained a Pacific parrotlet, a small species of parrot, to fly through laser light — with the appropriate eye protection, of course. Study coauthor Eric Gutierrez, who recently graduated from Stanford, built tiny, 3-D‒printed laser goggles for the bird, named Obi. Gutierrez and colleagues tracked the air currents left in Obi’s wake by spraying a fine liquid mist in the air, and illuminating it with a laser spread out into a two-dimensional sheet. High-speed cameras recorded the action at 1,000 frames per second. The vortex produced by the bird “explosively breaks up,” says mechanical engineer David Lentink, a coauthor of the study. “The flow becomes very complex, much more turbulent.” Comparing three standard methods for calculating the lift produced by flapping wings showed that predictions didn’t match reality, thanks to the unexpected vortex breakup. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 20

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 9: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 22952 - Posted: 12.06.2016

Twenty-seven Canadians a day are diagnosed with a brain tumour. Often, the prognosis isn't good, but it might be improved thanks to a new technique that targets tumours deep inside the brain that are too dangerous to remove surgically. The technique was created by Mark Torchia and Richard Tyc of the University of Manitoba and consists of heating the cancerous tissue with a laser, making it more receptive to chemotherapy. Carling Muir of B.C. is hoping the method, known as NeuroBlate, will help her survive the rare form of recurring brain cancer that she has been living with for the past decade. Muir, who was diagnosed when she was 19, has taken some inspiration from how Tragically Hip singer Gord Downie has handled his own diagnosis of brain cancer this past summer. "I worry more about, like, what it does to my family? That's the part that gets me," she told CBC's Reg Sherren. Sherren was granted exclusive access to the operating room at Vancouver General Hospital where Muir underwent the NeuroBlate procedure. Watch the video to see how surgeons used the laser ablation method to target the cancer cells in Muir's left frontal lobe and read more about the procedure below. ©2016 CBC/Radio-Canada

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 22902 - Posted: 11.23.2016

Amir Kheradmand, When we spin—on an amusement park ride or the dance floor—we often become disoriented, even dizzy. So how do professional athletes, particularly figure skaters who spin at incredible speeds, avoid losing their balance? The short answer is training, but to really grasp why figure skaters can twirl without getting dizzy requires an understanding of the vestibular system, the apparatus in our inner ear that helps to keep us upright. This system contains special sensory nerve cells that can detect the speed and direction at which our head moves. These sensors are tightly coupled with our eye movements and with our perception of our body's position and motion through space. For instance, if we rotate our head to the right while our eyes remain focused on an object straight ahead, our eyes naturally move to the left at the same speed. This involuntary response allows us to stay focused on a stationary object. Spinning is more complicated. When we move our head during a spin, our eyes start to move in the opposite direction but reach their limit before our head completes a full 360-degree turn. So our eyes flick back to a new starting position midspin, and the motion repeats as we rotate. When our head rotation triggers this automatic, repetitive eye movement, called nystagmus, we get dizzy. © 2016 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 9: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 22878 - Posted: 11.17.2016

By Clare Wilson It’s one of the boldest treatments in medicine: delivering an electrical current deep into the brain by implanting a long thin electrode through a hole in the skull. Such “deep brain stimulation” (DBS) works miracles on people with otherwise untreatable epilepsy or Parkinson’s disease – but drilling into someone’s head is an extreme step. In future, we may be able to get the same effects by using stimulators placed outside the head, an advance that could see DBS used to treat a much wider range of conditions. DBS is being investigated for depression, obesity and obsessive compulsive disorder, but this research is going slowly. Implanting an electrode requires brain surgery, and carries a risk of infection, so the approach is only considered for severe cases. But Nir Grossman of Imperial College London and his team have found a safer way to experiment with DBS – by stimulating the brain externally, with no need for surgery. The technique, unveiled at the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego, California, this week, places two electrical fields of different frequencies outside the head. The brain tissue where the fields overlap is stimulated, while the tissue under just one field is unaffected because the frequencies are too high. For instance, they may use one field at 10,000 hertz and another at 10,010 hertz. The affected nerve cells are stimulated at 10 hertz – the difference between the two frequencies. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 3: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Link ID: 22875 - Posted: 11.16.2016

By Gary Stix Renowned neuroscientist Mu-Ming Poo is playing a key role in China’s contribution to the push by national and regional governments to set up gargantuan neuroscience research endeavors. The China Brain Project has yet to put forward funding specifics. But Poo, who directs the Institute of Neuroscience of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and has held multiple academic posts at U.S. universities, is helping to shape the project’s 15-year timeline. To circumvent the paucity of drugs for neurological illnesses, Poo’s own team wants to focus on finding solid evidence for video games and other behavioral training methods that might produce near-term cognitive benefits for China’s aging population. Poo talked to Scientific American recently about these plans. Can you tell us about the Chinese Brain Project? Its goal is similar to the brain projects that have been launched in other regions but I think we’ve put more emphasis on the brain disease aspect than the U.S. project has. The U.S. project is more concentrated on developing new technologies for observing and manipulating the activity of brain circuits. In China there is a particular urgency to solve problems related to brain diseases because of its large population and an aging society saddled with neurodegenerative diseases. If we don’t find a solution for Alzheimer's by 2050, the entire medical system is going broke. In China there is an estimate that there could be many tens of millions of Alzheimer's or Parkinson’s disease patients by 2050 if no cure is found, given the rate of increasing life expectancy. © 2016 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 22870 - Posted: 11.16.2016

By John Bohannon When it comes to influential neuroscience research, University College London (UCL) has a lot to boast about. That's not the opinion of a human but rather the output of a computer program that has now parsed the content of 2.5 million neuroscience articles, mapped all of the citations between them, and calculated a score of each author's influence on the rest. Three of the top 10 most influential (see table below) neuroscientists hail from UCL: Karl Friston (1st), Raymond Dolan (2nd), and Chris Frith (7th). The secret of their success? "We got into human functional brain imaging very early," Frith says. Getting in early made it possible to "be first to do many of the obvious studies." The program, called Semantic Scholar, is an online tool built at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in Seattle, Washington. When it debuted in April, it calculated the most influential computer scientists based on 2 million papers from that field. Since then, the AI2 team has expanded the corpus to 10 million papers, 25% of which are from neuroscience. They hope to expand that to all of the biomedical literature next year, over 20 million papers. When Semantic Scholar looks at a paper published online, what does it actually see? Much more than the typical academic search engine, says Oren Etzioni, CEO of AI2 who has led the project. "We are using machine learning, natural language processing, and [machine] vision to begin to delve into the semantics." © 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 22855 - Posted: 11.12.2016

Alison Abbott Psychiatrist Joshua Gordon wants to use mathematics to improve understanding of the brain. The US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has a new director. On 12 September, psychiatrist Joshua Gordon took the reins at the institute, which has a budget of US$1.5 billion. He previously researched how genes predispose people to psychiatric illnesses by acting on neural circuits, at Columbia University in New York. His predecessor, Thomas Insel, left the NIMH to join Verily Life Sciences, a start-up owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, in 2015. Gordon says that his priorities at the NIMH will include “low-hanging clinical fruit, neural circuits and mathematics — lots of mathematics", and explains to Nature exactly what that means. What do you plan to achieve in your first year in office? I won’t be doing anything radical. I am just going to listen to and learn from all the stakeholders — the scientific community, the public, consumer advocacy groups and other government offices. But I can say two general things. In the past twenty years, my two predecessors, Steve Hyman [now director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts] and Tom Insel, embedded into the NIMH the idea that psychiatric disorders are disorders of the brain, and to make progress in treating them we really have to understand the brain. I will absolutely continue this legacy. This does not mean we are ignoring the important roles of the environment and social interactions in mental health — we know they have a fundamental impact. But that impact is on the brain. Second, I will be thinking about how NIMH research can be structured to give pay-outs in the short-, medium- and long-terms. © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 22794 - Posted: 10.27.2016

by Bethany Brookshire Most of us spend our careers trying to meet — and hopefully exceed — expectations. Scientists do too. But the requirements for success in a job in academic science don’t always line up with the best scientific methods. The net result? Bad science doesn’t just happen — it gets selected for. What does it mean to be successful in science? A scientist gets a job and funding by publishing a lot of high-impact papers with novel findings. Those papers and findings beget awards and funding to do more science — and publish more papers. “The problem that we face is that the incentive system is focused almost entirely on getting research published, rather than on getting research right,” says Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. This idea of success has become so ingrained that scientists are even introduced when they give talks by the number of papers they have published or the amount of grant funding they have, says Marc Edwards, a civil engineer at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. But rewarding researchers for the number of papers they publish results in a “natural selection” of sloppy science, new research shows. The idea of scientific “success” equated as number of publications promotes not just lazy science but also unethical science, another paper argues. Both articles proclaim that it’s time for a culture shift. But with many scientific labs to fund and little money to do it, what does a new, better scientific enterprise look like? © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 22779 - Posted: 10.24.2016

By Clare Wilson Glug glug glug. I’m drinking a big glass of ice water after getting thirsty, and it’s flowing easily down my throat like a river. But a study of thirsty and well hydrated people suggests this isn’t always the case. We rarely pay attention to the business of swallowing, but it may play a subtle role in controlling our fluid intake, on top of our conscious feelings of thirst. If we are dehydrated, swallowing is effortless; if we are overhydrated, swallowing feels more difficult, putting us off drinking, according to a study by Michael Farrell at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and his team. “Normally it’s something we are not really conscious of – away it goes,” says Farrell. But when his team asked volunteers to rate the sensation of taking a small sip of water, they found that people who had recently drunk a lot of water said it took much more effort to swallow than those who were mildly hydrated – their difficult ratings rose from one out of ten to nearly five. Is eight really great? When people were overhydrated, brain scans showed that swallowing was linked with more activity in certain regions of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for conscious thought processes. “It suggests a mechanism for inhibition of drinking that we don’t usually think about,” says Zachary Knight at the University of California, San Francisco. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 22739 - Posted: 10.11.2016

Doctors describe 16-year-old Sebastian DeLeon as a walking miracle — he is only the fourth person in the U.S. to survive an infection from the so-called brain-eating amoeba. Infection from Naegleria fowleri is extremely rare but almost always fatal. Between 1962 and 2015, there were only 138 known infections due to the organism, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Just three people survived. This summer, two young people, one in Florida and one in North Carolina, became infected after water recreation. Only one had a happy ending. DeLeon is a 16-year-old camp counselor. The Florida Department of Health thinks he got the infection while swimming in unsanitary water on private property in South Florida before his family came to visit Orlando's theme parks. So many things had to go right for DeLeon to survive. On a Friday, he had a bad headache. The next day, his parents decided this was way more than just a migraine and took him to the emergency room at Florida Hospital for Children. Doctors persuaded the family to do a spinal tap to rule out meningitis, even though he didn't have a stiff neck, the telltale symptom. Sheila Black, the lab coordinator, looked at the sample and assumed she saw white blood cells. But then she took a second, longer look. "We are all detectives," Black said. "We literally had to look at this and study it for a while and watch for the movement because the amoeba can look like a white cell. So unless you're actually visually looking for this and looking for the movement, you're going to miss it." © 2016 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 22608 - Posted: 08.29.2016

Dean Burnett A lot of people, when they travel by car, ship, plane or whatever, end up feeling sick. They’re fine before they get into the vehicle, they’re typically fine when they get out. But whilst in transit, they feel sick. Particularly, it seems, in self-driving cars. Why? One theory is that it’s due to a weird glitch that means your brain gets confused and thinks it’s being poisoned. This may seem surprising; not even the shoddiest low-budget airline would get away with pumping toxins into the passengers (airline food doesn’t count, and that joke is out of date). So where does the brain get this idea that it’s being poisoned? Despite being a very “mobile” species, humans have evolved for certain types of movement. Specifically, walking, or running. Walking has a specific set of neurological processes tied into it, so we’ve had millions of years to adapt to it. Think of all the things going on in your body when you’re walking, and how the brain would pick up on these. There’s the steady thud-thud-thud and pressure on your feet and lower legs. There’s all the signals from your muscles and the movement of your body, meaning the motor cortex (which controls conscious movement of muscles) and proprioception (the sense of the arrangement of your body in space, hence you can know, for example, where your arm is behind your back without looking at it directly) are all supplying particular signals. © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 9: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 22570 - Posted: 08.18.2016

By Gary Stix In recent decades neuroscience has emerged as a star among the biological disciplines. But its enormous popularity as an academic career choice has been accompanied by a drop in the percentage of trained neuroscientists who actually work in academic research positions—largely because of a lack of funding. In 2014 the National Academies organized a workshop to ponder the question of whether this trend bodes well for the scientists-to-be who are now getting their Ph.D.s. The findings were published this summer in Neuron. Steven Hyman of the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, who helped to plan the workshop and was recently president of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), welcomes the flood of doctoral students choosing the field but warns: “Insofar as talented young people are discouraged from academic careers by funding levels so low that they produce debilitating levels of competition or simply foreclose opportunities, the U.S. and the world are losing an incredibly precious resource.” Because there are not enough academic positions to go around, it is now the responsibility of professors to prepare students for alternative careers, says Huda Akil of the University of Michigan Medical School, lead author of the paper. “It's not just academia and industry” where trained neuroscientists can make contributions to society, says Akil, also a former SfN president: “It's nonprofits. It's social policy. It's science writing. It's man-machine interfaces. It's Big Data, or education, or any area where knowledge of the brain is relevant.” © 2016 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 22564 - Posted: 08.17.2016

By Jonathan Webb Science reporter, BBC News Scientists have glimpsed activity deep in the mouse brain which can explain why we get thirsty when we eat, and why cold water is more thirst-quenching. A specific "thirst circuit" was rapidly activated by food and quietened by cooling down the animals' mouths. The same brain cells were already known to stimulate drinking, for example when dehydration concentrates the blood. But the new findings describe a much faster response, which predicts the body's future demand for water. The researchers went looking for this type of system because they were puzzled by the fact that drinking behaviour, in humans as well as animals, seems to be regulated very quickly. "There's this textbook model for homeostatic regulation of thirst, that's been around for almost 100 years, that's based on the blood," said the study's senior author Zachary Knight, from the University of California, San Francisco. "There are these neurons in the brain that… generate thirst when the blood becomes too salty or the blood volume falls too low. But lots of aspects of everyday drinking can't possibly be explained by that homeostatic model because they occur much too quickly." Take the "prandial thirst" that comes while we consume a big, salty meal - or the fact that we feel quenched almost as soon as we take a drink. © 2016 BBC.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 22518 - Posted: 08.04.2016