By Carolyn Gramling The fin whale’s call is among the loudest in the ocean: It can even penetrate into Earth’s crust, a new study finds. Echoes in whale songs recorded by seismic instruments on the ocean floor reveal that the sound waves pass through layers of sediment and underlying rock. These songs can help probe the structure of the crust when more conventional survey methods are not available, researchers report in the Feb. 12 Science. Six songs, all from a single whale that sang as it swam, were analyzed by seismologists Václav Kuna of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague and John Nábělek of Oregon State University in Corvallis. They recorded the songs, lasting from 2.5 to 4.9 hours, in 2012 and 2013 with a network of 54 ocean-bottom seismometers in the northeast Pacific Ocean. The songs of fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) can be up to 189 decibels, as noisy as a large ship. Seismic instruments detect the sound waves of the song, just like they pick up pulses from earthquakes or from air guns used for ship-based surveys. The underwater sounds can also produce seismic echoes: When sound waves traveling through the water meet the ground, some of the waves’ energy converts into a seismic wave (SN: 9/17/20). Those seismic waves can help scientists “see” underground: As the penetrating waves bounce off different rock layers, researchers can estimate the thickness of the layers. Changes in the waves’ speed can also reveal what types of rocks the waves traveled through. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2021.

Keyword: Hearing; Animal Communication
Link ID: 27686 - Posted: 02.13.2021

By Warren Cornwall Prozac might need a new warning label: “Caution: This antidepressant may turn fish into zombies.” Researchers have found that long-term exposure to the drug makes guppies act more alike, wiping out some of the typical behavioral differences that distinguish them. That could be a big problem when the medication—technically named fluoxetine—washes into streams and rivers, potentially making fish populations more vulnerable to predators and other threats. In recent decades, scientists have uncovered a plethora of ways that pharmaceuticals affect animals in the lab and in the wild, such as by altering courtship, migration, and anxiety. The drugs find their way into the environment through water that pours from sewage treatment plants, which is rarely filtered to remove the chemicals. But the findings are usually based on an average taken from combining measurements of all the individual animals in a group. Giovanni Polverino, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Western Australia, Perth, and colleagues wondered whether this calculation obscured important but subtle insights about individual animals. Did the drug change behavior similarly in all the creatures in a group? Or were certain kinds of “personalities” affected more strongly? To find out, Polverino’s team captured 3600 guppies (Poecilia reticulata)—a common silvery fish often used in labs that grows to half the length of an average human’s pinkie—from a creek in northeastern Australia. In the laboratory, the fish and their offspring—as many as six generations—spent 2 years in tanks filled with either freshwater, water with fluoxetine at levels common in the wild, or a higher dose similar to places near sewage outflows. © 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Depression; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 27685 - Posted: 02.13.2021

Elizabeth Landau At a sleep research symposium in January 2020, Janna Lendner presented findings that hint at a way to look at people’s brain activity for signs of the boundary between wakefulness and unconsciousness. For patients who are comatose or under anesthesia, it can be all-important that physicians make that distinction correctly. Doing so is trickier than it might sound, however, because when someone is in the dreaming state of rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, their brain produces the same familiar, smoothly oscillating brain waves as when they are awake. Lendner argued, though, that the answer isn’t in the regular brain waves, but rather in an aspect of neural activity that scientists might normally ignore: the erratic background noise. Some researchers seemed incredulous. “They said, ‘So, you’re telling me that there’s, like, information in the noise?’” said Lendner, an anesthesiology resident at the University Medical Center in Tübingen, Germany, who recently completed a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley. “I said, ‘Yes. Someone’s noise is another one’s signal.’” Lendner is one of a growing number of neuroscientists energized by the idea that noise in the brain’s electrical activity could hold new clues to its inner workings. What was once seen as the neurological equivalent of annoying television static may have profound implications for how scientists study the brain. All Rights Reserved © 2021

Keyword: Sleep; Attention
Link ID: 27684 - Posted: 02.13.2021

By Jamie Talan When Fred “Rusty” Gage began his career in neuroscience more than four decades ago, the general thinking was that adult human brain cells just don’t reproduce and that their numbers are fixed. You lose them, they are gone forever. But Gage’s studies on adult human brain cells in the 1990s surprised everyone, including himself, when he and his colleagues found that exercise — such as running — and enriched, complex and variable environments can give rise to new populations of cells that serve the brain well. He has been a serious runner most of his life, so this was good news on every level. Now 70 and president of the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in the La Jolla neighborhood in San Diego, Gage is still trying to figure out how adults can continue to make new brain cells and keep their brains healthier and resistant to disease. As head of the institute, he also supports his colleagues’ broader work in novel approaches to treating cancer, how the properties in the food we eat shape our brains, the effect of isolation on brain functioning, and plant biology and climate change. The Washington Post spoke with Gage on a video conference call recently to talk about growing up overseas, including in Frankfurt, Germany, and Rome; honing his interests in various labs; and giving mice a running wheel in their cages that sparked a key finding in understanding neuron growth in the brain © 1996-2021 The Washington Post

Keyword: Neurogenesis
Link ID: 27683 - Posted: 02.13.2021

Bevil R. Conway Danny Garside Is the red I see the same as the red you see? At first, the question seems confusing. Color is an inherent part of visual experience, as fundamental as gravity. So how could anyone see color differently than you do? To dispense with the seemingly silly question, you can point to different objects and ask, “What color is that?” The initial consensus apparently settles the issue. But then you might uncover troubling variability. A rug that some people call green, others call blue. A photo of a dress that some people call blue and black, others say is white and gold. You’re confronted with an unsettling possibility. Even if we agree on the label, maybe your experience of red is different from mine and – shudder – could it correspond to my experience of green? How would we know? Neuroscientists, including us, have tackled this age-old puzzle and are starting to come up with some answers to these questions. One thing that is becoming clear is the reason individual differences in color are so disconcerting in the first place. Scientists often explain why people have color vision in cold, analytic terms: Color is for object recognition. And this is certainly true, but it’s not the whole story. The color statistics of objects are not arbitrary. The parts of scenes that people choose to label (“ball,” “apple,” “tiger”) are not any random color: They are more likely to be warm colors (oranges, yellows, reds), and less likely to be cool colors (blues, greens). This is true even for artificial objects that could have been made any color. © 2010–2021, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 27682 - Posted: 02.08.2021

By Brooke N. Dulka Think back to years past. When you were a kid, you most likely had more friends than you do now. There were probably a lot of children on the playground you considered a friend, but not all of these friendships were very deep. As you grew up, your friendship circle most likely grew smaller. Instead of having many superficial relationships, you now have just a few really important friendships. This is normal. When we are older, we tend to focus on maintaining positive, meaningful relationships. One idea suggests that we become more selective about our friends because we become increasingly aware of our own mortality. In other words, we have future-oriented cognition. However, a recent study published in Science on the wild chimpanzees living in Uganda’s Kibale National Park suggests that our friendships may not actually be tied to thinking about the future. Alexandra Rosati, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan and one of the study’s lead investigators, had heard about this long-term field study in Uganda. “It seemed like it all could sort of fit together, in this cool way, this primatology data to actually test this idea about human cognition,” she says. Advertisement In this study, a team of researchers analyzed 78,000 hours of observations of 21 male chimpanzees made between 1995 and 2016 at the Kibale National Park. According to Rosati, a unique feature of this study is the value that exists in the long-term collection of data. “We used 20 years of data for this paper. [It] lets us look at this really detailed information about what's going on in these chimpanzees’ social lives,” she says. The findings surprised her. © 2021 Scientific American

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 27681 - Posted: 02.08.2021

by Peter Hess A new engineered protein that glows in the presence of serotonin enables researchers to track the neurotransmitter’s levels and location in the brains of living mice, according to a new study. This ‘serotonin sensor’ could help elucidate serotonin’s role in autism, experts say. Serotonin helps regulate mood, circulation and digestion, among other functions. Some people with autism have elevated levels of serotonin in their blood. Other evidence links serotonin to social behavior in mice. “Serotonin is wildly important both for basic research and human health. And for the longest time, ways to measure it were very indirect,” says co-lead researcher Loren Looger, professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego. “Only with sensors like this can one follow it in vivo, which is critical.” Unlike other tools for measuring serotonin, the sensor can also show changes in serotonin activity over time, making it an exciting tool for autism research, says Jeremy Veenstra-VanderWeele, professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, who was not involved in the study. “This tool will make it possible to understand the relationships between serotonin release and complex behaviors, including in different genetic mouse models related to autism,” he says. “I imagine that this tool will come into fairly broad use.” Programmable protein: The new sensor originated from one described last year that detects a different neurotransmitter, acetylcholine. Looger and his team used a computer algorithm to redesign the acetylcholine-binding portion of the sensor protein so that it could attach to serotonin instead. © 2021 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Depression; Obesity
Link ID: 27680 - Posted: 02.08.2021

By Laura Sanders In the late 1800s, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Spanish brain scientist, spent long hours in his attic drawing elaborate cells. His careful, solitary work helped reveal individual cells of the brain that together create wider networks. For those insights, Cajal received a Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 1906. Now, a group of embroiderers has traced those iconic cell images with thread, paying tribute to the pioneering drawings that helped us see the brain clearly. The Cajal Embroidery Project was launched in March of 2020 by scientists at the University of Edinburgh. Over a hundred volunteers — scientists, artists and embroiderers — sewed panels that will ultimately be stitched into a tapestry, a project described in the December Lancet Neurology. Catherine Abbott, a neuroscientist at the University of Edinburgh, had the idea while talking with her colleague Jane Haley, who was planning an exhibit of Cajal’s drawings. These meticulous drawings re-created nerve cells, or neurons, and other types of brain cells, including support cells called astrocytes. “I said, off the cuff, ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to embroider some of them?’” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2021.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 27679 - Posted: 02.08.2021

Cassandra Willyard In 2006, soon after she launched her own laboratory, neuroscientist Jane Foster discovered something she felt sure would set her field abuzz. She and her team were working with two groups of mice: one with a healthy selection of microorganisms in their guts, and one that lacked a microbiome. They noticed that the mice without gut bacteria seemed less anxious than their healthy equivalents. When placed in a maze with some open paths and some walled-in ones, they preferred the exposed paths. The bacteria in the gut seemed to be influencing their brain and behaviour. Foster, at McMaster University in Toronto, Canada, wrote up the study and submitted it for publication. It was rejected. She rewrote it and sent it out again. Rejected. “People didn’t buy it. They thought it was an artefact,” she says. Finally, after three years and seven submissions, she got an acceptance letter1. John Cryan, a neuroscientist at University College Cork in Ireland, joined the field about the same time as Foster did, and knows exactly how she felt. When he began talking about the connections between bacteria living in the gut and the brain, “I felt very evangelical”, he says. He recalls one Alzheimer’s disease conference at which he presented in 2014. “I’ve never given a talk in a room where there was less interest.” Today, however, the gut–brain axis is a feature at major neuroscience meetings, and Cryan says he is no longer “this crazy guy from Ireland”. Thousands of publications over the past decade have revealed that the trillions of bacteria in the gut could have profound effects on the brain, and might be tied to a whole host of disorders. Funders such as the US National Institutes of Health are investing millions of dollars in exploring the connection. © 2021 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Obesity; Alzheimers
Link ID: 27678 - Posted: 02.03.2021

By Gina Kolata Is it possible to predict who will develop Alzheimer’s disease simply by looking at writing patterns years before there are symptoms? According to a new study by IBM researchers, the answer is yes. And, they and others say that Alzheimer’s is just the beginning. People with a wide variety of neurological illnesses have distinctive language patterns that, investigators suspect, may serve as early warning signs of their diseases. For the Alzheimer’s study, the researchers looked at a group of 80 men and women in their 80s — half had Alzheimer’s and the others did not. But, seven and a half years earlier, all had been cognitively normal. The men and women were participants in the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running federal research effort that requires regular physical and cognitive tests. As part of it, they took a writing test before any of them had developed Alzheimer’s that asks subjects to describe a drawing of a boy standing on an unsteady stool and reaching for a cookie jar on a high shelf while a woman, her back to him, is oblivious to an overflowing sink. The researchers examined the subjects’ word usage with an artificial intelligence program that looked for subtle differences in language. It identified one group of subjects who were more repetitive in their word usage at that earlier time when all of them were cognitively normal. These subjects also made errors, such as spelling words wrongly or inappropriately capitalizing them, and they used telegraphic language, meaning language that has a simple grammatical structure and is missing subjects and words like “the,” “is” and “are.” The members of that group turned out to be the people who developed Alzheimer’s disease. The A.I. program predicted, with 75 percent accuracy, who would get Alzheimer’s disease, according to results published recently in The Lancet journal EClinicalMedicine. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Language
Link ID: 27677 - Posted: 02.03.2021

by Laura Dattaro Genetic variants that contribute to autism may also be involved in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Tourette syndrome, according to a new study. In 2019, researchers from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium linked variants associated with autism to seven neuropsychiatric conditions, including anorexia, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Despite the genetic overlap, though, some of those conditions, such as anorexia and Tourette syndrome, don’t tend to co-occur. The new work homes in on Tourette syndrome — a motor and tic condition — and three diagnoses that often present with it: More than half of people with Tourette also have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) or ADHD, and up to 20 percent have autism. Because all four conditions can involve impulsive and compulsive behaviors, some scientists have proposed that they exist along a spectrum, with ADHD on one end, OCD on the other, and autism and Tourette in the middle. The goal of looking at all the conditions on this spectrum together is to elucidate the genetics underlying their traits, says lead investigator Peristera Paschou, associate professor of biological sciences at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. “There is a lot of value in zooming out and trying to think across what would be strict diagnostic categories,” Paschou says. Gene associations: The researchers analyzed data from previous studies that involved a total of 93,294 people with at least one of the four conditions, along with 51,311 controls. They looked at common variants — single-letter changes to DNA that appear in more than 1 percent of the population — shared by any two of the four conditions. © 2021 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Autism; Tourettes
Link ID: 27676 - Posted: 02.03.2021

By Jason Castro Pursued by poets and artists alike, beauty is ever elusive. We seek it in nature, art and philosophy but also in our phones and furniture. We value it beyond reason, look to surround ourselves with it and will even lose ourselves in pursuit of it. Our world is defined by it, and yet we struggle to ever define it. As philosopher George Santayana observed in his 1896 book The Sense of Beauty, there is within us “a very radical and wide-spread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it.” Philosophers such as Santayana have tried for centuries to understand beauty, but perhaps scientists are now ready to try their hand as well. And while science cannot yet tell us what beauty is, perhaps it can tell us where it is—or where it isn’t. In a recent study, a team of researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing and their colleagues examined the origin of beauty and argued that it is as enigmatic in our brain as it is in the real world. There is no shortage of theories about what makes an object aesthetically pleasing. Ideas about proportion, harmony, symmetry, order, complexity and balance have all been studied by psychologists in great depth. The theories go as far back as 1876—in the early days of experimental psychology—when German psychologist Gustav Fechner provided evidence that people prefer rectangles with sides in proportion to the golden ratio (if you’re curious, that ratio is about 1.6:1). © 2021 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions; Vision
Link ID: 27675 - Posted: 02.03.2021

The earliest eye damage from prion disease takes place in the cone photoreceptor cells, specifically in the cilia and the ribbon synapses, according to a new study of prion protein accumulation in the eye by National Institutes of Health scientists. Prion diseases originate when normally harmless prion protein molecules become abnormal and gather in clusters and filaments in the human body and brain. Understanding how prion diseases develop, particularly in the eye because of its diagnostic accessibility to clinicians, can help scientists identify ways to slow the spread of prion diseases. The scientists say their findings, published in the journal Acta Neuropathologica Communications, may help inform research on human retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited disease with similar photoreceptor degeneration leading to blindness. Prion diseases are slow, degenerative and usually fatal diseases of the central nervous system that occur in people and some other mammals. Prion diseases primarily involve the brain, but also can affect the eyes and other organs. Within the eye, the main cells infected by prions are the light-detecting photoreceptors known as cones and rods, both located in the retina. In their study, the scientists, from NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, used laboratory mice infected with scrapie, a prion disease common to sheep and goats. Scrapie is closely related to human prion diseases, such as variant, familial and sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). The most common form, sporadic CJD, affects an estimated one in one million people annually worldwide. Other prion diseases include chronic wasting disease in deer, elk and moose, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle.

Keyword: Prions; Vision
Link ID: 27674 - Posted: 02.03.2021

By Jonathan Lambert When one naked mole-rat encounters another, the accent of their chirps might reveal whether they’re friends or foes. These social rodents are famous for their wrinkly, hairless appearance. But hang around one of their colonies for a while, and you’ll notice something else — they’re a chatty bunch. Their underground burrows resound with near-constant chirps, grunts, squeaks and squeals. Now, computer algorithms have uncovered a hidden order within this cacophony, researchers report in the Jan. 29 Science. These distinctive chirps, which pups learn when they’re young, help the mostly blind, xenophobic rodents discern who belongs, strengthening the bonds that maintain cohesion in these highly cooperative groups. “Language is really important for extreme social behavior, in humans, dolphins, elephants or birds,” says Thomas Park, a biologist at the University of Illinois Chicago who wasn’t involved in the study. This work shows naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber) belong in those ranks as well, Park says. Naked mole-rat groups seem more like ant or termite colonies than mammalian societies. Every colony has a single breeding queen who suppresses the reproduction of tens to hundreds of nonbreeding worker rats that dig elaborate subterranean tunnels in search of tubers in eastern Africa (SN: 10/18/04). Food is scarce, and the rodents vigorously attack intruders from other colonies. While researchers have long noted the rat’s raucous chatter, few actually studied it. “Naked mole-rats are incredibly cooperative and incredibly vocal, and no one has really looked into how these two features influence one another,” says Alison Barker, a neuroscientist at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2021.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 27673 - Posted: 01.30.2021

By Brooke Jarvis Danielle Reed stopped counting after the 156th email arrived in a single afternoon. It was late March, and her laboratory at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia had abruptly gone into Covid-19 lockdown. For weeks, there had been little to do. Reed, who is famous in her field for helping to discover a new family of receptors that perceive bitter flavors, had spent years studying the way human genetics affect the way we experience smell and taste. It was important but niche science that seemingly had little to do with a dangerous respiratory virus spreading around the globe. And then one Saturday, she checked her email. Reed watched in amazement as the messages proliferated. It wasn’t how many threads there were, though that was overwhelming, but the way they seemed to grow like Hydras, sprouting in all directions. Recipients copied other people they thought might be interested in the discussion, who added more people, who added still others, across a huge range of countries and disciplines. The cascading emails were all responding to the same rather obscure news alert, meant for ear, nose and throat doctors based in Britain. It was titled: “Loss of smell as marker of Covid-19 infection.” The week before, Claire Hopkins, the president of the British Rhinological Society and an author of the alert, was seeing patients in her clinic in London when she noticed something odd. Hopkins, who specializes in nose and sinus diseases, especially nasal polyps, was accustomed to seeing the occasional patient — usually about one per month — whose sense of smell disappeared after a viral infection. Most of the time, such losses were fairly self-explanatory: A stuffy, inflamed nose keeps odorants from reaching the smell receptors at the top of the airway. Sometimes these receptors are also damaged by inflammation and need time to recover. But patients were now arriving with no blockage or swelling, no trouble breathing, no notable symptoms, other than the sudden and mysterious disappearance of their ability to smell. And there were nine of them. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 27672 - Posted: 01.30.2021

The Physics arXiv Blog One of the best-studied networks in neuroscience is the brain of a fruit fly, in particular, a part called the mushroom body. This analyzes sensory inputs such as odors, temperature, humidity and visual data so that the fly can learn to distinguish friendly stimuli from dangerous ones. Neuroscientists have long known how this section of the brain is wired. It consists of a set of cells called projection neurons that transmit the sensory information to a population of 2,000 neurons called Kenyon cells. The Kenyon cells are wired together to form a neural network capable of learning. This is how fruit flies learn to avoid potentially hazardous sensory inputs — such as dangerous smells and temperatures — while learning to approach foodstuffs, potential mates, and so on. But the power and flexibility of this relatively small network has long raised a curious question for neuroscientists: could it be re-programmed to tackle other tasks? Now they get an answer thanks to the work of Yuchan Liang at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and colleagues. This team has hacked the fruit fly brain network to perform other tasks, such as natural language processing. It's the first time a naturally occurring network has been commandeered in this way. And this biological brain network is no slouch. Liang and the team says it matches the performance of artificial learning networks while using far fewer computational resources. © 2021 Kalmbach Media Co.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 27671 - Posted: 01.30.2021

Paul Tullis On a sunny day in London in 2015, Kirk Rutter rode the Tube to Hammersmith Hospital in hopes of finally putting an end to his depression. Rutter had lived with the condition off and on for years, but the burden had grown since the death of his mother in 2011, followed by a relationship break-up and a car accident the year after. It felt as if his brain was stuck on what he describes as “an automatic circuit”, repeating the same negative thoughts like a mantra: “‘Everything I do turns to crap.’ I actually believed that,” he recalls. The visit to Hammersmith was a preview. He would be returning the next day to participate in a study, taking a powerful hallucinogen under the guidance of Robin Carhart-Harris, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Imperial College London. Years of talking therapy and a variety of anti-anxiety medications had failed to improve Rutter’s condition, qualifying him for the trial. “Everyone was super nice, like really lovely, and especially Robin,” Rutter recalls. Carhart-Harris led him to a room with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, so researchers could acquire a baseline of his brain activity. Then he showed Rutter where he would spend his time while on the drug. Carhart-Harris asked him to lie down and played him some of the music that would accompany the session. He explained that he would have on hand a drug that could neutralize the hallucinogen, if necessary. Then the two practised a grounding technique, to help calm Rutter in the event that he became overwhelmed. Without warning, Rutter burst into tears. “I think I knew this was going to be unpacking a lot — I was carrying a bit of a load at the time,” Rutter says. © 2021 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 27670 - Posted: 01.30.2021

By Veronique Greenwood Last spring, robins living on an Illinois tree farm sat on some unusual eggs. Alongside the customary brilliant blue ovoids they had laid were some unusually shaped objects. Although they had the same color, some were long and thin, stretched into pills. Others were decidedly pointy — so angular, in fact, that they bore little resemblance to eggs at all. If robins played Dungeons and Dragons, they might have thought, “Why do I have an eight-sided die in my nest?” The answer: Evolutionary biologists were gauging how birds decide what belongs in their nests, and what is an invasive piece of detritus that they need to throw out. Thanks to the results of this study, published Wednesday in Royal Society Open Science, we now know what the robins thought of the eggs, which were made of plastic and had been 3-D printed by the lab of Mark Hauber, a professor of animal behavior at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a fellow at Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst, Germany. He and his colleagues reported that the thinner the fake eggs got, the more likely the birds were to remove them from the nest. But curiously, the robins were more cautious about throwing out the pointy objects like that eight-sided die, which were closer in width to their own eggs. Birds, the results suggest, are using rules of thumb that are not intuitive to humans when they decide what is detritus and what is precious cargo. It’s not as uncommon as you’d think for robins to find foreign objects in their nests. They play host to cowbirds, a parasitic species that lays eggs in other birds’ nests, where they hatch and compete with the robins’ own offspring for nourishment. Confronted with a cowbird egg, which is beige and squatter than its blue ovals, parent robins will often push the parasite’s eggs out. That makes the species a good candidate for testing exactly what matters when it comes to telling their own eggs apart from other objects, Dr. Hauber said. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Evolution
Link ID: 27669 - Posted: 01.30.2021

Allyson Chiu Sleep and circadian rhythms have long been associated with the powerful effects of the sun cycle. But in recent years, a growing number of studies have suggested that another familiar celestial body might also be impacting your ability to get a restful night’s sleep: the moon. A paper published this week in the journal Science Advances found that people tend to have a harder time sleeping in the days leading up to a full moon. Researchers reported that sleep patterns among the study’s 98 participants appeared to fluctuate over the course of the 29½ -day lunar cycle, with the latest bedtimes and least amount of rest occurring on nights three to five days before the moon reaches its brightest phase. They found a similar pattern in sleep data from another group of more than 460 people. Ahead of the full moon, it took people, on average, 30 minutes longer to fall asleep and they slept for 50 minutes less, said Leandro Casiraghi, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. “What we did is we came up with a set of data that shockingly proves that this is real, that there’s an actual effect of the moon on our sleep,” Casiraghi said. Previous studies examining the moon’s effect on sleep have produced contradictory results. Some research has found minimal or no association between the lunar cycle and sleep, while other studies have demonstrated correlations in controlled settings. The findings of the Jan. 27 paper support existing observations that there is a link, Casiraghi said. But, he noted that the work he and his fellow scientists did is distinct from past research by a critical difference in methodology. © 1996-2021 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 27668 - Posted: 01.30.2021

Research shows that hallucinogens can be highly effective treatments for anxiety, depression, addiction, and trauma. Here's everything you need to know: Aren't psychedelic drugs illegal? Under federal and most states' laws, they are, but a push to legalize or decriminalize the drugs is gaining momentum. On Election Day, Oregon voters made their state the first to legalize the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms" — psilocybin — for mental health therapy in a controlled setting with a therapist. Washington, D.C., voters passed Initiative 81, making the city at least the fifth to decriminalize magic mushrooms. Similar legislation has been proposed in California, Vermont, and Iowa. Last summer, Canada issued four terminally ill patients exemptions to take psilocybin for end-of-life anxiety and depression. British Columbia resident Mona Strelaeff, 67, got an exemption for treatment for trauma, addiction, depression, and anxiety. "All the unresolved trauma," Strelaeff said, "it came back and I was beyond terrified, shaking uncontrollably, and crying." She said that psilocybin therapy helped her conquer "those tough memories" and today she "ain't afraid of jack (s---)." How does psychedelic therapy work? Participants usually take psilocybin or LSD in a relaxing setting, lying down with blindfolds and headphones on, listening to music. Trained supervisors encourage them to "go inward and to kind of experience whatever is going to come up," said Alan Davis, who studies psychedelics at Johns Hopkins University. Bad psilocybin trips are rare — Johns Hopkins and NYU researchers conducted 500 sessions without observing any "serious adverse effects" — but they can occur. Advocates say careful dose control, supervision, and controlled settings are very important. Psilocybin sessions typically last between four and six hours, while LSD sessions go on for 12. Robin Carhart-Harris, who runs the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College in London, theorized that such sessions can "reboot" the brain in a way similar to a near-death or intense spiritual experience. ® 2021 The Week Publications Inc.,

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 27667 - Posted: 01.27.2021