By Lynne Peeples Living things began tracking the incremental passage of time long before the human-made clock lent its hands. As life grew in harmony with the sun’s daily march through the sky, and with the seasons, phases of the moon, tides, and other predictable environmental cycles, evolution ingrained biology with the timekeeping tools to keep a step ahead. It gifted an ability to anticipate changes, rather than respond to them, and an internal nudge to do things when most advantageous and to avoid doing things when not so advantageous. Of course, that optimal timing depended on a species’ niche on the 24-hour clock. When mammals first arose, for example, they were nocturnal — most active during the hours that the dinosaurs slept. Now mammals occupy both their choice territories on a spinning planet and their preferred space on a rotating clock. Timing is everything when it comes to seeking and digesting food, storing food, avoiding becoming food, dodging exposure to DNA-damaging ultraviolet radiation, and many more vital activities, such as navigating, migrating, and reproducing. Take the Eudyptula minor, a tiny penguin species that lives on Phillip Island in Australia. The slate-blue plumaged seabird speed waddles from the ocean to burrow home at the same “sun time” each day — just after sunset. Finding that precise window between day and night maximizes the penguins’ fishing time, allows them enough light to see their way to their burrows, and minimizes the chances they become visible food along the way for nighttime predators, such as orcas, seabirds, and feral cats. An internal clock off by just 10 minutes could prove fatal, one source told me. The island’s tourism industry capitalizes on this predictable “Penguin Parade.” A website lists approximate penguin arrival times for every month of the year and sells tickets to witness the spectacle. A higher ticket price grants visitors access to an underground viewing structure where they can watch the procession of waddlers at eye level. In October 2022, lucky visitors got to view a record-breaking 5,440 little penguins storm the shore and hurry home.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 29549 - Posted: 11.09.2024

Andrew Gregory Health editor Doing more than an hour of moderate intensity exercise each week may reduce the severity of “baby blues” and almost halve the risk of new mothers developing major clinical depression, the largest analysis of evidence suggests. However, researchers behind the study acknowledged that finding the time amid so many new responsibilities and challenges would not be easy, and recovery from childbirth should be prioritised. New mothers could restart exercise with “gentle” walks, which they could do with their babies, and then increase to “moderate” activity when they were ready, they added. This moderate physical activity could include brisk walking, water aerobics, stationary cycling or resistance training, according to the team of academics in Canada. Maternal depression and anxiety are relatively common after giving birth and associated with reduced self-care and compromised infant caregiving and bonding, which could in turn affect the child’s cognitive, emotional and social development, the researchers said. Conventional treatments for depression and anxiety in the first weeks and months after giving birth mostly involve drugs and counselling, which are often associated with, respectively, side-effects and poor adherence, and lack of timely access and expense. Research has previously shown that physical activity is an effective treatment for depression and anxiety in general. But until now it has not been known whether it could reduce the severity of the baby blues in the first few weeks after giving birth or lower the risk of major postpartum depression several months later. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Depression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 29548 - Posted: 11.09.2024

By Sara Reardon Elephants love showering to cool off, and most do so by sucking water into their trunks and spitting it over their bodies. But an elderly pachyderm named Mary has perfected the technique by using a hose as a showerhead, much in the way humans do. The behavior is a remarkable example of sophisticated tool use in the animal kingdom. But the story doesn’t end there. Mary’s long, luxurious baths have drawn so much attention that an envious elephant at the Berlin Zoo has figured out how to shut the water off on her supersoaking rival—a type of sabotage rarely seen among animals. Both behaviors, reported today in Current Biology, further cement elephants as complex thinkers, says Lucy Bates, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Portsmouth not involved in the study. The work, she says, “suggests problem solving or even ‘insight.’” Many elephants enjoy playing with hoses, probably because they remind them of trunks, says Michael Brecht, a computational neuroscientist at Humboldt University of Berlin. But Mary takes the activity to another level. Using her trunk, the 54-year-old Asian elephant (Elephas maximus)—a senior citizen, given the average captive life span of her species of 48 years—holds a hose over her head and waves it back and forth. She also changes her grip on the hose to spray different parts of her body and swings it like a lasso to throw water over her back. Brecht’s graduate student, Lena Kaufmann, noticed Mary’s hose use while studying other types of behavior in the zoo’s elephants; the zookeepers told her Mary did this frequently. So Kaufman and her colleagues started to record the showering on video over the course of a year, testing how Mary reacted to changes in the setup.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 29547 - Posted: 11.09.2024

By Tamlyn Hunt The neuron, the specialized cell type that makes up much of our brains, is at the center of today’s neuroscience. Neuroscientists explain perception, memory, cognition and even consciousness itself as products of billions of these tiny neurons busily firing their tiny “spikes” of voltage inside our brain. These energetic spikes not only convey things like pain and other sensory information to our conscious mind, but they are also in theory able to explain every detail of our complex consciousness. At least in principle. The details of this “neural code” have yet to be worked out. While neuroscientists have long focused on spikes travelling throughout brain cells, “ephaptic” field effects may really be the primary mechanism for consciousness and cognition. These effects, resulting from the electric fields produced by neurons rather than their synaptic firings, may play a leading role in our mind’s workings. In 1943 American scientists first described what is known today as the neural code, or spike code. They fleshed out a detailed map of how logical operations can be completed with the “all or none” nature of neural firing—similar to how today’s computers work. Since then neuroscientists around the world have engaged in a vast endeavor to crack the neural code in order to understand the specifics of cognition and consciousness. To little avail. “The most obvious chasm in our understanding is in all the things we did not meet on our journey from your eye to your hand,” confessed neuroscientist Mark Humphries in 2020’s The Spike, a deep dive into this journey: “All the things of the mind I’ve not been able to tell you about, because we know so little of what spikes do to make them.” © 2024 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 29546 - Posted: 11.09.2024

By Heidi Ledford To unlock the secrets of human ageing, researchers might do better to look to the pet napping on their couch than to a laboratory mouse. As cats age, their brains show signs of atrophy and cognitive decline that more closely resemble the deterioration seen in ageing humans than do the changes in the brains of ageing mice, according to findings presented last month at the Lake Conference on Comparative and Evolutionary Neurobiology near Seattle, Washington. The results are part of a large project, called Translating Time, that compares brain development across more than 150 mammal species, and is now expanding to include data on aging. The hope is that the data will aid researchers trying to crack the causes of age-related diseases, particularly conditions that affect the brain, such as Alzheimer’s disease. “To address challenges in human medicine, we need to draw from a wide range of model systems,” says Christine Charvet, a comparative neuroscientist at Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine in Alabama, who presented the work. “Cats, lemurs, mice are all useful. We shouldn’t focus all our efforts on one.” The Translating Time project started in the 1990s as a tool for developmental biologists1. Project scientists compiled data on how long it takes for the brain to reach a range of developmental milestones in a variety of mammals and used these data to graph the relative development of two species over time. This can help researchers to link observations of animal development to the corresponding human age. Over the years, however, as Charvet presented these data at conferences, researchers kept asking her to extend the database to include not only early development, but also how the brain changes as animals age. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29545 - Posted: 11.06.2024

By Angie Voyles Askham Keeping track of social hierarchies is crucial for any animal. Primates in particular must adapt their behaviors based on the status of those around them, or risk losing their own rank. “True, smart social behavior in humans and in monkeys is dependent on a full adjustment to the context,” says Katalin Gothard, professor of physiology and neuroscience at the University of Arizona. Multiple brain areas keep track of social information. Among them, the amygdala—known for processing emotions—responds to faces, facial expressions and social status, and activates as people learn social hierarchies. But the brain adapts this information for different social settings, a new study reveals: Neurons in the macaque amygdala encode knowledge about social status in a context-specific way, Gothard and her colleagues discovered. Just like people, macaques can infer social standing from videos, and the activity of amygdala cells captures information about both the identity of the individual they are watching and how that animal relates to others in the scene. These findings help explain how primates process information about social position, says Ralph Adolphs, professor of psychology and neuroscience at California Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the work. And because the monkeys could successfully learn this information from videos, the results open up a new avenue for studying how the primate brain encodes these relationships in a complex and dynamic way, he adds. “That’s a big step forward.” Like people, macaques have no physical traits that directly convey dominance, Gothard says. “The status of these individuals is inferred.” So she and her colleagues tested two macaques’ ability to understand a hierarchy that the team invented among four unfamiliar monkeys in a series of videos. Each clip simulated status-appropriate interactions between two of the four monkeys on a split screen to convey those two animals’ relative positions: a scene of a higher-ranked animal acting aggressive juxtaposed with one of a lower-ranked monkey smacking its lips in appeasement, for example. © 2024 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Emotions; Attention
Link ID: 29544 - Posted: 11.06.2024

By Elle Hunt The first time Nick (not his real name) tried ketamine, he felt as if he’d entered another dimension. Though he smoked marijuana regularly and had experimented with other drugs, Nick had never even heard of ketamine. But when his friend pulled out a bag of white powder, “I did what anybody else would do at 20 years old. I tried it,” he says. “And I found it really fun, to be honest.” The floaty feeling, like he’d been lifted out of his own body, was “euphoric”, he says. “Like you’re in a fairy world.” Sixteen years later, reality is biting hard. Nick, now 36, has spent the past three months in recovery for ketamine addiction after more than a decade of heavy use. His bladder is a fifth of the size it should be, he says. It’s “more than likely” that it will have to be removed and replaced with a urostomy bag. That’s setting aside all the other “brutal things” he’s gone through as a consequence of ketamine addiction – from being bed-bound by pain to embarrassing bladder failures. Now six months clean, Nick still cannot last half an hour without needing to use the toilet. “I am now a disabled person, having been such a fit lad,” he says. Nick is sharing his story to warn others of the dangers of ketamine, which is rapidly emerging as gen Z’s recreational drug of choice. Widely used in human and veterinary medicine as an anaesthetic, in illicit use the class B substance is typically snorted for its dissociative effects. According to the most recent government figures, use in England and Wales has more than doubled since 2016; among 16- to 24-year-olds, it has more than tripled, and there are stories of addicts as young as 12 or 13. The story is similar elsewhere. In Australia, recreational use of ketamine was reported to have reached a record high last year. In the US, seizures of illicit ketamine grew by 349% between 2017 and 2022. The death of Friends actor Matthew Perry at the age of 54 from “acute effects” of ketamine raised awareness of the risks of addiction. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited o

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29543 - Posted: 11.06.2024

By Mariana Lenharo Immune cells rush to the brain and promote deep sleep after a heart attack, according to a new study1 involving both mice and humans. This heavy slumber helps recovery by easing inflammation in the heart, the study found. The findings, published today in Nature, could help to guide care for people after a heart attack, says co-author Cameron McAlpine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, who studies immune function in the cardiovascular and nervous systems. “Getting sufficient sleep and rest after a heart attack is important for long-term healing of the heart,” he notes. The implications of the study go beyond heart attack, says Rachel Rowe, a specialist in sleep and inflammation at the University of Colorado Boulder. “For any kind of injury, your body’s natural response would be to help you sleep so your body can heal,” she says. Scientists have long known that sleep and cardiovascular health are linked. People who sleep poorly are at a higher risk of developing high blood pressure, for example, than are sound sleepers. But how cardiovascular disease affects sleep has been less explored. To learn more, the authors induced heart attacks in mice and investigated the animals’ brainwaves. The researchers found that these mice spent much more time in slow-wave sleep — a stage of deep sleep that has been associated with healing — than did mice that hadn’t had a heart attack. Next, the authors sought to understand what was causing that effect. One obvious place to look was the brain, which controls sleep, notes McAlpine. After a heart attack, immune cells trigger a massive burst of inflammation in the heart, he says, and the researchers wondered whether these immune changes also occurred in the brain. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 29542 - Posted: 11.06.2024

By Maria Temming If you want to have a dream where you know you’re dreaming, you might be in luck. A phone app seems to boost users’ odds of having lucid dreams. Before bed, the app has users listen to a specific sound, such as a series of beeps, and practice associating that cue with a keen awareness of their thoughts and body. When the app plays that sound again six hours later, it’s meant to reactivate that self-awareness in the sleeping user, coaxing them to become lucid mid-dream. These types of sensory cues have proved fairly effective for inducing lucid dreams in sleep studies. But a researcher usually tracks someone’s sleep to play sounds during the REM stage, when lucid dreams are most likely. New experiments now show that a rough approximation of the technique using an app can promote lucid dreaming at home, researchers report in the October Consciousness and Cognition. This DIY approach might help more people have lucid dreams for recreation or research on the nature of consciousness (SN: 8/27/23). Researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., built and tested the app. In one experiment, 19 people used it every night for a week. During the previous week, the group reported an average 0.74 lucid dreams. During the week of app use, that ramped up to an average 2.11 lucid dreams. “That’s a really big increase for lucid dreaming,” says Northwestern cognitive neuroscientist Karen Konkoly. “Lucid dreaming once a week is a lot.” But it wasn’t completely clear that the app’s sound cues led to that increase. “It could be that just focusing on lucid dreaming for a week or expectations or something was responsible,” Konkoly says. So the team ran another experiment with 112 people. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 29541 - Posted: 11.06.2024

By Emily Schmall It’s time to change the clocks again, and getting out of bed may feel harder than usual: Research has shown the sudden shift can be disruptive to sleep. But for many adults in the United States, sleep deprivation is a year-round problem that can affect both their physical and mental health. Research suggests that chronic poor sleep raises your risk of cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure and metabolic issues, and can make you more prone to infections. Some long-term studies have also linked a lack of sleep to depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders. Getting enough sleep, on the other hand, can reduce stress, sharpen attention and even bolster our immune systems. You don’t need to miss out on a lot of sleep every night to experience negative health effects. If a person is consistently getting even 15 minutes less sleep than they need to function well, experts said, that can be considered sleep deprivation. How common is sleep deprivation? Ideally, adults should aim for seven to nine hours of sleep every night, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet, about one in three adults in the United States logs less than seven hours of sleep a day. Studies suggest that insufficient sleep has become more common in recent decades, in part because Americans work longer hours and spend more time on blue-light-generating computers and phones that can affect their ability to sleep. Blue light, like the sun’s rays, sets off brain receptors that are designed to keep us awake. “As we become more and more plugged in, this becomes more and more of an issue,” said Dr. Charlene Gamaldo, a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Generally speaking, experts consider someone sleep-deprived if that person gets less sleep than needed or not enough quality sleep for several days a week over several months, Dr. Gamaldo said. Not sleeping enough within the ideal window for your biological clock — for most people, that is between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., but it can vary — can result in lower-quality rest, causing sleep deprivation, she said. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 29540 - Posted: 11.06.2024

By Kerri Smith Infographics by Nik Spencer There must be something about the human brain that’s different from the brains of other animals — something that enables humans to plan, imagine the future, solve crossword puzzles, tell sarcastic jokes and do the many other things that together make our species unique. And something that explains why humans get devastating conditions that other animals don’t — such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Brain size is tightly correlated with body size in most animals. But humans break the mould. Our brains are much larger than expected given our body size. Here are some animals’ brains ranked according to size. Researchers often use a ratio called the encephalization quotient (EQ) to get an idea of how much larger or smaller an animal’s brain is compared with what would be expected given its body size. The EQ is 1.0 if the brain to body mass ratio meets expectations. Here are their brains scaled according to their EQ, with the actual brain sizes represented by dotted lines. The mouse brain is half as big as expected for its body size. The human brain is more than seven times the expected size. Although evolution has enlarged the human brain, it hasn’t done so uniformly: some brain areas have ballooned more than others. One particularly enlarged region is the cortex, an area that carries out planning, reasoning, language and many other behaviours that humans excel at. Other areas, such as the cerebellum — an area at the back of the brain that is densely populated with neurons, and which helps to conduct movement and planning — have expanded too. The prefrontal cortex has a similar structure in both chimps and humans, although it takes up much more real estate in the human brain than in the chimp brain.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 29539 - Posted: 11.02.2024

By Skyler Ware The occasional sweet treat likely won’t ruin your health. But too much added sugar at a young age could increase the risk of health complications later in life. Limiting added sugars during the first 1,000 days after conception — so during pregnancy and a baby’s first two years — reduces the risk of a child developing diabetes and hypertension in adulthood, researchers report October 31 in Science. “In the first 1,000 days of life, the brain and body are gearing up to finish developing,” says Sue-Ellen Anderson-Haynes, a registered dietician in Boston and a spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. Nutrition during that timeframe is particularly important, she says, because “everything the mother eats gets transformed into nutrients for the fetus.” Current nutritional guidelines recommend that adults consume less than 40 grams of added sugars per day and that children under age 2 consume no added sugars. But by age 2, the average American child consumes about 29 grams of added sugars a day; the average adult consumes nearly 80 grams per day. To study the effects of excess added sugars early in life, economist Tadeja Gracner of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and colleagues took advantage of a natural experiment: the end of sugar rationing in the United Kingdom after World War II. While rationing was in effect, each person was allotted about 8 ounces (about 227 grams) of sugar per week. Once sugar rationing ended in September 1953, daily sugar consumption for adults jumped to around 80 grams per day. Even though other foods were rationed during and after WWII, sugar intake increased the most after rationing was lifted. Consumption of other rationed foods, such as cheese, milk and fresh fruits remained relatively constant once rationing ended. Similarly, the end of butter rationing caused many families to switch from margarine, with its unsaturated fats, back to butter, so overall fat consumption did not increase significantly. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 29538 - Posted: 11.02.2024

Ian Sample Science editor Humans may have turned drinking into something of an art form but when it comes to animals putting alcohol away, Homo sapiens are not such an outlier, researchers say. A review of published evidence shows that alcohol occurs naturally in nearly every ecosystem on Earth, making it likely that most animals that feast on sugary fruits and nectar regularly imbibe the intoxicating substance. Although many creatures have evolved to tolerate a tipple and gain little more than calories from their consumption, some species have learned to protect themselves with alcohol. Others, however, seem less able to handle its effects. “We’re moving away from this anthropocentric view that alcohol is used by just humans and that actually ethanol is quite abundant in the natural world,” said Anna Bowland, a researcher in the team at the University of Exeter. After trawling research papers on animals and alcohol, the scientists arrived at a “diverse coterie” of species that have embraced and adapted to ethanol in their diets, normally arising through fermented fruits, sap and nectar. Ethanol became plentiful on Earth about 100m years ago when flowering plants began to produce sugary fruits and nectar that yeast could ferment. The alcohol content is typically low, at around 1% to 2% alcohol by volume (ABV), but in over-ripe palm fruit the concentration can reach 10% ABV. In one study, wild chimpanzees in south eastern Guinea were caught on camera bingeing on the alcoholic sap of raffia palms. Meanwhile, spider monkeys on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, are partial to ethanol-laden yellow mombin fruit, revealed to contain between 1% and 2.5% alcohol. “Evidence is growing that humans are not drinking alone,” the authors write in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Evolution
Link ID: 29537 - Posted: 11.02.2024

By Claire Murashima What do you think of when you hear the term “OCD”? In pop culture, people with obsessive-compulsive disorder are often portrayed as meticulous to an extreme degree. They’re highly organized, perfectionistic, or germophobic — like Jack Nicholson’s character in the film As Good As It Gets, who tosses out bars of soap after using them once. Depictions like that aren’t inaccurate, but they’re not the whole story. Research shows that 1 in 40 American adults have OCD or will develop it at some point in their lives, according to the International OCD Foundation. Although the term “OCD” is often used casually, the disorder must be diagnosed by a medical professional. We wanted to take a closer look at how people with OCD cope with it every day as OCD Awareness Month wraps up. I live with OCD, and it impacts just about every aspect of my life. Growing up, I had to say a prayer before I ate anything, because I thought I’d vomit if I didn’t. Later in life, I struggled with flying, because I feared that I might vomit on the plane, or that someone might vomit near me. The fear of vomiting is called emetophobia, and it’s a common symptom of OCD — though it’s not talked about as often. People with OCD can experience very specific intrusive thoughts known as obsessions, and then engage in compulsions, which are ritualized behaviors to address them, according to the International OCD Foundation. Anxiety can be the underlying emotion of OCD — but unlike generalized anxiety disorder, the underlying emotion could also be a sense of disgust, wrongness or incompleteness, according to Dr. Christopher Pittenger, the director of the Yale School of Medicine OCD Research Clinic. © 2024 npr

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 29536 - Posted: 11.02.2024

By Talia Barrington Growing up in England, Caragh McMurtry wasn’t your typical future Olympic rower. Born to parents who worked in a local factory, raised in low-income housing, frequently in trouble for being a “terror,” she didn’t exactly fit the mold of a sport known for a certain elitism. But when an after-school program funded by British Rowing was offered at her school, McMurtry gave it a try. With rowing, unlike at school, where she struggled to connect with peers, rules were clear. Everyone had a defined job, it was always the same, and because the rowers sat in a single row, she didn’t feel that people were looking at her. “It was cathartic,” she told me. “Pushing hard gave me that sensory feedback,” and the repetitive action was “calming.” At first, everything seemed to go well. She made it to the World Rowing Junior Championships and the under 23s and senior championships, and the medals started rolling in. But then things went a little haywire. Her coaches labeled her difficult and told her she asked too many questions and was too blunt and honest with her peers. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which is known for its extreme mood swings, and she was put on lithium and a cocktail of other drugs that did not work. It would take five more years before a doctor would figure out why she struggled to connect with her teammates and others around her but was so focused, so “regulated” when it came to extreme and continued physical exertion: She had a form of autism. Experts call a key aspect of what McMurtry experiences when engaged in physical activity “hyperfocus,” and it’s an overlapping hallmark of both autism and ADHD. “People with ADHD and autism have an incredibly high ability to focus on tasks that they find interesting or stimulating,” said Laura Huckins, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Yale Center for Genomic Health. “They tend to be drawn towards professions that require or include novelty, that include regular challenges, and that require high performance under stress and pressure.”

Keyword: Autism; Attention
Link ID: 29535 - Posted: 11.02.2024

By Thomas Fuller Over and over, the crows attacked Lisa Joyce as she ran screaming down a Vancouver street. They dive bombed, landing on her head and taking off again eight times by Ms. Joyce’s count. With hundreds of people gathered outdoors to watch fireworks that July evening, Ms. Joyce wondered why she had been singled out. “I’m not a fraidy-cat, I’m not generally nervous of wildlife,” said Ms. Joyce, whose crow encounters grew so frequent this past summer that she changed her commute to work to avoid the birds. “But it was so relentless,” she said, “and quite terrifying.” Ms. Joyce is far from alone in fearing the wrath of the crow. CrowTrax, a website started eight years ago by Jim O’Leary, a Vancouver resident, has since received more than 8,000 reports of crow attacks in the leafy city, where crows are relatively abundant. And such encounters stretch well beyond the Pacific Northwest. A Los Angeles resident, Neil Dave, described crows attacking his house, slamming their beaks against his glass door to the point where he was afraid it would shatter. Jim Ru, an artist in Brunswick, Maine, said crows destroyed the wiper blades of dozens of cars in the parking lot of his senior living apartment complex. Nothing seemed to dissuade them. Renowned for their intelligence, crows can mimic human speech, use tools and gather for what seem to be funeral rites when a member of their murder, as groups of crows are known, dies or is killed. They can identify and remember faces, even among large crowds. They also tenaciously hold grudges. When a murder of crows singles out a person as dangerous, its wrath can be alarming, and can be passed along beyond an individual crow’s life span of up to a dozen or so years, creating multigenerational grudges. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Intelligence; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 29534 - Posted: 10.30.2024

By RJ Mackenzie Microglia were once thought to have one job—as the brain’s resident garbage collectors. If neurons became damaged or diseased, microglia would spring into action, engulfing dead or infected cells and pumping up the local immune response. Between clean-up operations, scientists believed, they rested in a deep sleep. In 2005, though, researchers got their first direct look at what microglia were doing in the brain, and they promptly tore up this cellular CV. The grainy live-cell imaging footage, published in Science, showed that the supposedly “resting” microglia were actually marauding around in the neocortex of adult mice, firing out processes and furtively feeling out the surrounding parenchyma. “This, for me, was a game changer,” says Rosa Paolicelli, associate professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Lausanne, who was about to embark on a Ph.D. at the time. “People started to think about the physiological role of microglia. What do they do in the intact, healthy brain?” The work kick-started two decades of research that has changed how the field classifies microglia, and led to new tools to help scientists define and scrutinize the cells’ functions in detail. Many studies have focused on “critical windows”—at the beginning and end of an animal’s life, Paolicelli says. During these time frames, microglia take on many side jobs: as sculptors of the developing brain, cultivators of new neural connections and fighters of neurodegeneration, for example. Along with this rise in profile from garbage collector to cellular polymath has come controversy. “There are some players that are trying to bring forward some ideas that are a bit too simplistic or restrictive. And I feel it’s very dangerous not to stay open-minded regarding the implications of the findings, not to stay open-minded regarding the limitations of all these models,” says Marie-Ève Tremblay, professor of medical sciences at the University of Victoria, who studies microglial function in health and disease. © 2024 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Glia; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 29533 - Posted: 10.30.2024

By Phie Jacobs Whether it’s two newlyweds going in for a smooch after saying “I do” or a parent soothing their child’s scraped knee, kissing is one of humanity’s most recognizable symbols of affection. Clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia dating to 2500 B.C.E. provide the earliest archaeological evidence of romantic kissing. But the behavior may be older than civilization itself, with some studies suggesting Neanderthals swapped spit with modern humans—and shared each other’s oral microbes—more than 100,000 years ago. Some researchers have suggested kissing evolved from behaviors such as sniffing, nursing babies, or even parents passing chewed-up food to their offspring. But in an article published this month in Evolutionary Anthropology, evolutionary psychologist Adriano Lameira of the University of Warwick offers another hypothesis. Drawing on his knowledge of great ape behavior, Lameira suggests kissing got its start as a fur grooming ritual still observed in modern-day chimpanzees and other great apes. Science sat down with Lameira to learn more about his work. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Q: What made you want to study kissing? A: It’s a behavior that is charged with so much meaning and symbolism, perhaps the most iconic way of how we show affection on an individual and societal level. I was surprised to find that we know so little about its evolution and nature. In our lab, we’re mostly intrigued by the evolution of language, dance, and imagination. But in the largest sense we’re interested in behaviors and rituals that are evolutionary heirlooms from our apelike ancestors—things our ancestors did that set us on course towards who we are today. Q: Do other animals kiss, or is the behavior unique to humans? © 2024 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 29532 - Posted: 10.30.2024

PA Media Digital characters – avatars – could help people with psychosis hear voices less often and reduce the distress caused, research suggests. The therapy involves a series of guided sessions during which patients are able to have a conversation with an animated digital representation of their distressing voice. Often in psychosis, as in other conditions, the voices people hear can be abusive or bullying and affect people’s day-to-day life. The voices can be experienced as powerful and almost omniscient, seeming to know what the person is thinking and feeling, and preventing them from taking the steps they want to every day. According to the research from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London, the avatar therapy using computer-generated animations is an effective way of helping people with psychosis who hear voices. Philippa Garety, professor emerita of clinical psychology at King’s IoPPN and the study’s lead author, said: “To our knowledge, this is the first therapeutic intervention that has a direct and sustained impact upon the frequency with which people hear voices. “This is an extremely important finding, as it is a clear priority for voice-hearers, and hearing fewer voices, less often, or voices going away altogether can have a hugely positive impact on their day-to-day lives. “People who hear voices rarely only hear one. In an interesting development, the extended version of the therapy proved effective at reducing voice frequency in total, despite participants only creating one avatar for one voice.” © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 29531 - Posted: 10.30.2024

Emily Anthes In the summer of 2018, off the coast of British Columbia, an orca named Tahlequah gave birth. When the calf died after just half an hour, Tahlequah refused to let go. For more than two weeks, she carried her calf’s body around, often balancing it on her nose as she swam. The story went viral, which came as no surprise to Susana Monsó, a philosopher of animal minds at the National Distance Education University in Madrid. Despite the vast chasm that seems to separate humans and killer whales, this orca mother was behaving in a way that was profoundly relatable. “This idea of a mother clinging on to the corpse of her baby for 17 days seems like something we can understand, something we can relate to, for those of us who have experienced loss,” Dr. Monsó said. Of course, projecting our own human experiences onto other species can be a tricky business, and scientists often warn about the mistakes we can make when we engage in this sort of anthropomorphism. But we can also be misled by our tendency to assume that many cognitive and emotional traits are unique to humans, Dr. Monsó said. And in her new book, “Playing Possum,” she argues that a variety of animal species have at least a rudimentary concept of death. Dr. Monsó spoke with The New York Times about her work. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. How did you get interested in this aspect of animal minds? I’ve always been interested in those capacities that are understood to be uniquely human, such as morality or rationality. Death was a natural topic to pick up. There had been a growing number of reports of animals reacting in different ways to corpses. This seemed to be the birth of a new discipline, which is called comparative thanatology: the study of animals’ relationship with death. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Intelligence; Animal Communication
Link ID: 29530 - Posted: 10.30.2024