By Alexandra Horowitz Recently, in communities under quarantine or stay-at-home orders, residents have looked out their windows to find wild animals that usually stay on the fringes of the city or emerge only at night suddenly appearing in daylight in the middle of the street. The reason is us: Human activity disturbs animals. Even our presence — simply observing, as bird-watchers, or field biologists, or nature-loving hikers — changes their behavior. The ecologist Carl Safina (author of “Beyond Words” and “Song for the Blue Ocean”) is no agnostic observer. He sees humans as destroying the world for nonhuman animals, to say nothing of destroying the animals themselves, and would like us to stop, please. The question for him, and for anyone with this conviction, is: Short of quarantining the human race, what’s the best way to do this? Fifty years ago, the biologist Robert Payne first eavesdropped on a humpback whale community and heard whale song. He spread the word about their ethereal, beautiful forms of communication, and the world looked at whales differently. Since that time, whaling has sharply declined. Today, many advocates for animals appeal to species’ cognitive abilities to argue for their better treatment. They’re so smart or humanlike, the argument goes, we should be treating them better. Such is the vestige of the scala naturae that has awarded all lives a certain value — with humans on top, of course. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 27185 - Posted: 04.14.2020

By Pragya Agarwal If you have seen the documentary Free Solo, you will be familiar with Alex Honnold. He ascends without protective equipment of any kind in treacherous landscapes where, above about 15 meters, any slip is generally lethal. Even just watching him pressed against the rock with barely any handholds makes me nauseous. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) test with Honnold, neurobiologist Jane Joseph found there was near zero activation in his amygdala. This is a highly unusual brain reaction and may explain why Alex feels no threat in free solo climbs that others wouldn’t dare attempt. But this also shows how our amygdala activates in that split second to warn us, and why it plays an important role in our unconscious biases. Having spent many years researching unconscious bias for my book, I have realized that it remains problematic to pinpoint as it is hidden and is often in complete contrast to what are our expected beliefs. Neuroimaging research is beginning to give us more insight into the formation of our unconscious biases. Recent fMRI neuroscience studies demonstrate that people use different areas of the brain when reasoning about familiar and unfamiliar situations. The neural zones that respond to stereotypes primarily include the amygdala, the prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate and the anterior temporal cortex, and that they are described as all “lighting up like a Christmas tree” when stereotypes are activated (certain parts of the brain become more activated than others during certain tasks). People also use different areas of the brain when reasoning about familiar and unfamiliar situations. When we meet someone new, we are not merely focusing on our verbal interaction. © 2020 Scientific American,

Keyword: Attention; Brain imaging
Link ID: 27184 - Posted: 04.13.2020

By Andrew Solomon For nearly 30 years — most of my adult life — I have struggled with depression and anxiety. While I’ve never felt alone in such commonplace afflictions — the family secret everyone shares — I now find I have more fellow sufferers than I could have ever imagined. Within weeks, the familiar symptoms of mental illness have become universal reality. A new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation found nearly half of respondents said their mental health was being harmed by the coronavirus pandemic. Nearly everyone I know has been thrust in varying degrees into grief, panic, hopelessness and paralyzing fear. If you say, “I’m so terrified I can barely sleep,” people may reply, “What sensible person isn’t?” But that response can cause us to lose sight of the dangerous secondary crisis unfolding alongside the more obvious one: an escalation in both short-term and long-term clinical mental illness that may endure for decades after the pandemic recedes. When everyone else is experiencing depression and anxiety, real, clinical mental illness can get erased. While both the federal and local governments (some alarmingly slower than others) have responded to the spread of the coronavirus in critical ways, acknowledgment of the mental illness vulnerabilities has been cursory. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has so far enlisted more than 8,000 mental health providers to help New Yorkers in distress, is a fortunate exception. The Chinese government moved psychologists and psychiatrists to Wuhan during the first stage of self-quarantine. No comparable measures have been initiated by our federal government. The unequal treatment of the two kinds of health — physical over mental — is consonant with our society’s ongoing disregard for psychological stability. Insurance does not offer real parity of coverage, and treatment for mood disorders is generally deemed a luxury. But we are in a dual crisis of physical and mental health, and those facing psychiatric challenges deserve both acknowledgment and treatment. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Stress
Link ID: 27183 - Posted: 04.13.2020

By Austin Frakt OxyContin, and the aggressive, misleading way that Purdue Pharma marketed it, might have been even more damaging than was previously understood. Recent research shows how the company focused its marketing in states with lighter prescription regulation — to devastating effect. Also, a new version of OxyContin introduced a decade ago — which was meant to reduce harm — had unintended consequences. Besides contributing to heroin overdoses, it led to hepatitis C and other infections. Careful studies are only now starting to reveal the extent of the damage. OxyContin is an opioid painkiller that Purdue Pharma first brought to the U.S. market in 1996. Its chief innovation was its 12-hour timed release of oxycodone. This made it ripe for abuse, since by crushing or dissolving OxyContin pills, abusers of the drug could ingest the entire dose at once. Several studies have pointed to Purdue’s aggressive marketing of OxyContin as a significant contributor to the opioid epidemic. The marketing took various forms, including calling and visiting doctors; paying them for meals and travel; providing gifts; and funding pain treatment groups that urged liberalization of opioid prescribing. Some of the company’s marketing messages minimized the potential for OxyContin to lead to addiction, for which it paid over $600 million in fines in 2007. A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper published last fall sheds light on Purdue’s role. The researchers, economists from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Notre Dame and the RAND Corporation, looked at variations in prescribing regulations that led Purdue to market OxyContin more aggressively in some states than in others. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 27182 - Posted: 04.13.2020

By Jennifer Couzin-Frankel In college in the 1990s, Alix Timko wondered why she and her friends didn’t have eating disorders. “We were all in our late teens, early 20s, all vaguely dissatisfied with how we looked,” says Timko, now a psychologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Her crowd of friends matched the profile she had seen in TV dramas—overachievers who exercised regularly and whose eating was erratic, hours of fasting followed by “a huge pizza.” “My friends and I should have had eating disorders,” she says. “And we didn’t.” It was an early clue that her understanding of eating disorders was off the mark, especially for the direst diagnosis of all: anorexia nervosa. Anorexia is estimated to affect just under 1% of the U.S. population, with many more who may go undiagnosed. The illness manifests as self-starvation and weight loss so extreme that it can send the body into a state resembling hibernation. Although the disorder also affects boys and men, those who have it are most often female, and about 10% of those affected die. That’s the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric condition after substance abuse, on par with that of childhood leukemia. With current treatments, about half of adolescents recover, and another 20% to 30% are helped. As a young adult, Timko shared the prevailing view of the disease: that it develops when girls, motivated by a culture that worships thinness, exert extreme willpower to stop themselves from eating. Often, the idea went, the behavior arises in reaction to parents who are unloving, controlling, or worse. But when Timko began to treat teens with anorexia and their families, that narrative crumbled—and so did her certainties about who is at risk. Many of those young people “don’t have body dissatisfaction, they weren’t on a diet, it’s not about control,” she found. “Their mom and dad are fabulous and would move heaven and Earth to get them better.” © 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 27181 - Posted: 04.10.2020

By Jan Hoffman Anxious times — like a pandemic — can lead to unhealthy but self-soothing habits, whether it’s reaching for a bag of potato chips, more chocolate or another glass of wine. But some stress-reducing behaviors are alarming to medical experts right now — namely vaping and smoking of tobacco or marijuana. Because the coronavirus attacks the lungs, this is exactly the moment, they say, when people should be tapering — or better yet, stopping — their use of such products, not escalating them. ”Quitting during this pandemic could not only save your life, but by preventing the need for your treatment in a hospital, you might also save someone else’s life,” said Dr. Jonathan Winickoff, director of pediatric research at the Tobacco Research and Treatment Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. On Thursday, Dr. Winickoff joined the Massachusetts attorney general, Maura Healey, to issue an advisory alerting the public and particularly young people that smoking and vaping can also exacerbate the risks of spreading Covid-19. “You bring this device or cigarette to your mouth to inhale and you do so repeatedly,” explained Dr. Winickoff, who is also a professor at Harvard Medical School. “You touch the cartridge. You put it next to your face. You are spreading whatever is in your hand into your body. At the same time, many of my patients who smoke or vape have increased coughing or expectorating. And that’s a recipe for increased spread.” Studies already amply show that cigarette smoking weakens the immune system and compromises lung function. Research into the health effects of vaping is limited because the devices are relatively new, but studies suggest that e-cigarettes may cause inflammation in the airways and lungs. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 27180 - Posted: 04.10.2020

by Michael Marshall Some people with autism have an unusually large head: This fact has been known since autism was first described in the 1940s. But debate about this finding has raged ever since. How many people with autism have a large head? What causes the enlargement? And does it have any bearing on outcome? Here is what researchers do and do not know about head size in autism. What proportion of people with autism have a large head? When Leo Kanner first described 11 children with autism in a 1943 paper, he noted many unusual features. “Five had relatively large heads,” he reported, and he said no more on the matter. But the sample size was small. Many other scientists noted the same link over the following decades. A 1999 review estimated that 20 percent of people with autism have statistically large head size, or ‘macrocephaly’1. In 2011, the Autism Phenome Project refined this estimate to 15 percent of autistic boys2. The team followed boys with autism from their diagnosis throughout childhood. They focused on whether head size is disproportionate to the rest of the body, rather than simply large. The researchers call this ‘disproportionate megalencephaly’ and say it marks a distinct subgroup of autistic people. “We’ve defined a big-brain form of autism,” says lead investigator David Amaral, distinguished professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of California, Davis MIND Institute. No one contests the 15 percent figure, but scientists differ in their interpretation of the finding. “It only applies to a small proportion of children with autism,” says Katarzyna Chawarska, Emily Fraser Beede Professor of Child Psychiatry at Yale University. © 2020 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Autism; Brain imaging
Link ID: 27179 - Posted: 04.10.2020

By Lydia Denworth, It is lunchtime on a Sunday in January. At a long table inside a delicatessen in midtown Manhattan, a group of young people sit together over sandwiches and salads. Most of them have their phones out. One boy wears headphones around his neck. But there is less conversation than you might expect from a typical group of friends: One of the boys seems to talk only to himself, and a girl looks anxious and occasionally flaps her hands. The young people in this group are all on the spectrum. They met through a program organized by the nonprofit Actionplay, in which young people with autism or other disabilities work together to write and stage a musical. Each Sunday, the members refine characters and the script, block scenes and compose songs—and then some of them head across the street to have lunch together. “You meet other people just like you,” says Lexi Spindel, 15. The members share a group text in which they call themselves the Wrecking Crew. A few months ago, six of the girls went to see the movie “Frozen II” together. And Lexi and Actionplay veteran Adelaide DeSole, 21, spent a long afternoon at the Spindels’ apartment over the holiday season. The two young women played games and watched “SpongeBob SquarePants” and “Kung Fu Panda” on television. “That was the first time my daughter had a friend over,” says Lexi’s father, Jay Spindel. “That never happened before Actionplay.” © 2020 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 27178 - Posted: 04.10.2020

Amy Schleunes The brains of Australopithecus afarensis, a hominin species that lived in eastern Africa more than 3 million years ago, were organized in a manner similar to those of apes, report the authors of a study published on April 1 in Science Advances, but they also indicate a slow growth period like that found in modern humans. “The fact that protracted brain growth emerged in hominins as early as 3.3 Ma ago could suggest that it characterized all of subsequent hominin evolutionary history,” the authors write in the paper, though brain development patterns in hominins may not have followed a linear trajectory in the evolutionary process that led to modern humans. Whatever the evolutionary pattern, they say, the extended brain growth period in A. afarensis “provided a basis for subsequent evolution of the brain and social behavior in hominins and was likely critical for the evolution of a long period of childhood learning.” P. Gunz et al., “Australopithecus afarensis endocasts suggest ape-like brain organization and prolonged brain growth,” Science Advances, doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaz4729, 2020. © 1986–2020 The Scientist

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 27177 - Posted: 04.10.2020

The first published data from the Anti-Amyloid Treatment in Asymptomatic Alzheimer's Disease (A4) study supports the hypothesis that higher levels of the amyloid protein in the brain represent an early stage of Alzheimer’s disease. Results of an analysis of participant screening data for the study, published April 6 in JAMA Neurology, also show that amyloid burden in clinically normal older adults is associated with a family history of disease, lower cognitive test scores, and reports of declines in daily cognitive function. Major funding was provided by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health; all data is now freely available to the broader research community. With completion expected in late 2022, the A4 study is an ongoing prevention trial launched in 2014 to test whether the drug solanezumab, a monoclonal antibody, could slow cognitive decline associated with elevated brain amyloid if started before clinical symptoms appear. Amyloid, long considered a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, has been the target of therapies in clinical trials in people who already show symptoms of the disease. “A major issue for amyloid-targeting Alzheimer’s disease clinical trials, and one that is being addressed with the A4 study, is that previous trials may have been intervening too late in the disease process to be effective,” said NIA Director, Richard J. Hodes, M.D. “A4 is pioneering in the field because it targets amyloid accumulation in older adults at risk for developing dementia before the onset of symptoms."

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 27176 - Posted: 04.07.2020

Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press While the new coronavirus is known to cause respiratory illness, some scientists suggest it can also potentially lead to brain and nerve damage in certain patients. Beyond the typical symptoms of COVID-19, including fever, cough and difficulty breathing, doctors around the world have reported cases of infected patients with an array of neurological problems, including stroke, seizures, anosmia, or a loss of smell, and encephalopathy, a broad term used to describe brain damage or dysfunction. Since these reports have so far been limited to anecdotal case studies, it is still too early to know whether the virus is to blame for these neurological symptoms, said clinical epidemiologist Jose Tellez-Zenteno, a professor of neurology at the University of Saskatchewan. Nevertheless, he said, it’s important for the public and health care providers to know this is a possibility. “The virus can go to the brain potentially,” Dr. Tellez-Zenteno said. “And not only for neurologists, but for [front-line] doctors …, they have to be aware that neurological complications can happen and be ready to diagnose and ready to treat, if there is some treatment for them.” He noted that in one study of 214 hospitalized COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, China, researchers reported more than 35 per cent had neurological complications, including decreased levels of consciousness, stroke and muscle damage. These were more likely to occur among the hospitalized patients who were severely ill with COVID-19. Dr. Tellez-Zenteno emphasized that the vast majority of individuals who catch COVID-19 have mild or no symptoms. © Copyright 2020 The Globe and Mail Inc.

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 27175 - Posted: 04.07.2020

Anne Trafton | MIT News Office Imagine you are meeting a friend for dinner at a new restaurant. You may try dishes you haven’t had before, and your surroundings will be completely new to you. However, your brain knows that you have had similar experiences — perusing a menu, ordering appetizers, and splurging on dessert are all things that you have probably done when dining out. MIT neuroscientists have now identified populations of cells that encode each of these distinctive segments of an overall experience. These chunks of memory, stored in the hippocampus, are activated whenever a similar type of experience takes place, and are distinct from the neural code that stores detailed memories of a specific location. The researchers believe that this kind of “event code,” which they discovered in a study of mice, may help the brain interpret novel situations and learn new information by using the same cells to represent similar experiences. “When you encounter something new, there are some really new and notable stimuli, but you already know quite a bit about that particular experience, because it’s a similar kind of experience to what you have already had before,” says Susumu Tonegawa, a professor of biology and neuroscience at the RIKEN-MIT Laboratory of Neural Circuit Genetics at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. Tonegawa is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Nature Neuroscience. Chen Sun, an MIT graduate student, is the lead author of the paper. New York University graduate student Wannan Yang and Picower Institute technical associate Jared Martin are also authors of the paper.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Attention
Link ID: 27174 - Posted: 04.07.2020

By Gary Greenberg The retail showroom of INSA, a farm-to-bong cannabis company in western Massachusetts, is a clean industrial space on the first floor of a four-story brick building in the old mill town Easthampton. When I visited recently, before the coronavirus shut down recreational sales and forbade crowds, the crew of eight behind the glass display cases looked a lot like the staff you’d see dispensing lattes at Starbucks or troubleshooting iPads at the Genius Bar: young, racially diverse, smiling. They were all wearing black T-shirts with the INSA motto, “Uncommon Cannabis.” Standing in line with me were a white-haired couple leaning on canes; a 40-something woman in a black pantsuit, who complained that the wait would be longer than her lunch break; a bald man in a tweed jacket; and a pair of women in perms and polyester discussing the virtues of a strain called Green Crack. We were all waiting at a discreet distance from the counter, as you would at the bank, for the next available “budtender.” I got Ben, who described for me the wares that fill the cases like rings and watches in a jewelry store: waxes and dabs and oils and buds and edibles, most of them, he said, processed in a lab and kitchen on the other side of the wall behind him, using weed grown on the upper three floors. He sounded a little apologetic when he told me that while he knew why the bud I was pointing to was called Peyote Critical — “It speaks a little bit to its parentage, Peyote Purple and Critical Kush” — he hadn’t tried it, so he wasn’t entirely sure how it would affect me. Ben took me around a corner to another glass case, this one displaying vaporizers in different shapes and sizes. He pulled a box off a shelf behind him. It was a $35, 350-milligram disposable vape pen loaded with Jack Herer, a strain named for a legendary grower. If I bought this, he said, I should “resist the temptation to take big rips — four seconds at the max, then pull that pen away and inhale to get a nice full set of lungs.” Ben felt more certain about the effects of Jack Herer than Peyote Critical, especially after he took a look at the label. “The primary terpene in here is limonene,” he said, which should make me “energetic and uplifted.” But there were more terpenes at work, Ben said. “You’ve got pinene coming in at 2.83 percent, good for memory retention and alertness, and then myrcene, which should help balance out some of the raciness from the limonene. Myrcene is good for your brain’s absorption of metabolizing THC but also has relaxing, sedating qualities.” © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stress
Link ID: 27173 - Posted: 04.06.2020

By Christie Aschwanden In February, pharmaceutical companies Roche and Eli Lilly announced that two experimental drugs they had developed for Alzheimer’s disease had failed in clinical trials. Roche’s drug, gantenerumab, and Eli Lilly’s solanezumab joined more than 100 other potential Alzheimer’s drugs that have flopped, including aducanumab, a much-heralded drug from Biogen. In March 2019, Biogen announced that it had halted two clinical trials of the drug early after an interim analysis showed they weren’t working, but the company has since changed course, saying it intends to seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration based on a new analysis of the data. A lot is riding on Biogen's experimental drug. If approved, it "would be the first disease-modifying drug ever," says George Vradenburg, chairman and co-founder of the advocacy group UsAgainstAlzheimer's. The last time a drug was approved specifically for Alzheimer's was 2003, and since then, the Alzheimer's drug pipeline has spit out a bunch of duds. More than 200 promising leads have fallen through just in the past decade. There has been an ongoing search for Alzheimer's drugs since the 1990s, but "the long and short of it is that it's not been successful," says Lon Schneider, an Alzheimer's researcher at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine. These failures aren’t for lack of trying. Instead, they are evidence that the disease and its causes are much more complex than researchers first appreciated. “We were blind to this [complexity]. Things looked simpler than they really are,” says Richard Hodes, director of the National Institute on Aging (NIA).

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 27172 - Posted: 04.06.2020

Brandie Weikle · CBC News The strains of worry and upended routine during the COVID-19 crisis aren't exactly helping people sleep well at night. You or someone you love may be battling the novel coronavirus, or your employment may have been blown up by business shutdowns and stay-home directives. You're juggling health care with child care and cabin fever. Even if you're healthy and gainfully employed, pandemic living isn't easy. "Everyone's routine is being disrupted. It's a severely stressful event," said Dr. Atul Khullar, an Edmonton psychiatrist and senior consultant for MedSleep, a group of sleep clinics. This provokes anxiety and stress, exacerbating any pre-existing mental health and insomnia problems, or causing new ones, he said. "And for some people it can be very traumatizing. They're facing losing their livelihoods. They're faced with losing their way of life. Notwithstanding that your kids are home. It's just stressor after stressor after stressor." This isn't the stuff of which sweet dreams are made. If you're a parent wondering how to talk to your kids about the coronavirus, here's a video that'll help start the conversation. 1:27 Whether or not you're occupied at any given moment with the task or activity in front of you, below the surface remains the psychological weight of being in unprecedented and life-altering times, said Khullar. "It's kind of this dull ache for a lot of people, and you can only ignore it so much." ©2020 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 27171 - Posted: 04.06.2020

Ruth Williams If a mouse is in a lot of pain, an experienced handler may see it in the animal’s facial expression—its narrowed eyes and bulging cheeks. But, subtler facial expressions may be more difficult to match to their moods. So researchers developed an unbiased machine learning approach to study hundreds of videos of mice and, as a result, have now catalogued a range of emotion-specific facial expressions. These expressions, the researchers show, can serve as handy readouts for studying the neural basis of emotions. “It’s a tour de force in terms of techniques,” says neuroscientist Sheena Josselyn of the University of Toronto who was not involved in the research. “Using the techniques . . . they are really beginning to give [emotion] a scientific definition, which I think is really important.” “The results provide an important advance by adding quantitative analysis of facial motor patterns to the repertoire of ‘emotional’ behaviors that can be measured in mice,” David Anderson, a neuroscientist at Caltech, writes in an email to The Scientist. That’s important, he adds, because “facial expressions have been considered as key indicators of emotion state in mammals, but have previously been measured in rodents only in a more qualitative, subjective manner.” Anderson, who studies the neurobiology of emotional behaviors, was also not involved in the project. Previous investigations of facial expressions in mice and other animals not only lacked objectivity, they tended to focus on just one or two emotions, says Nadine Gogolla of the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology. “None of those studies looked at a whole spectrum [of emotions] and whether they can be distinguished from each other.” © 1986–2020 The Scientist.

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 27170 - Posted: 04.04.2020

Oliver Wainwright Some whisper gently into the microphone, while tapping their nails along the spine of a book. Others take a bar of soap and slice it methodically into tiny cubes, letting the pieces clatter into a plastic tray. There are those who dress up as doctors and pretend to perform a cranial nerve exam, and the ones who eat food as noisily as they can, recording every crunch and slurp in 3D stereo sound. To an outsider, the world of ASMR videos can be a baffling, kooky place. In a fast-growing corner of the internet, millions of people are watching each other tap, rattle, stroke and whisper their way through hours of homemade videos, with the aim of being lulled to sleep, or in the hope of experiencing “the tingles” – AKA, the autonomous sensory meridian response. “It feels like a rush of champagne bubbles at the top of your head,” says curator James Taylor-Foster. “There’s a mild sense of euphoria and a feeling of deep calm.” Taylor-Foster has spent many hours trawling the weirdest depths of YouTube in preparation for a new exhibition, Weird Sensation Feels Good, at ArkDes, Sweden’s national centre for architecture and design, on what he sees as one of the most important creative movements to emerge from the internet. (Though the museum has been closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, the show will be available to view online.) It will be the first major exhibition about ASMR, a term that was coined a decade ago when cybersecurity expert Jennifer Allen was looking for a word to describe the warm effervescence she felt in response to certain triggers. She had tried searching the internet for things like “tingling head and spine” or “brain orgasm”. In 2009, she hit upon a post on a health message board titled WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Hearing; Attention
Link ID: 27169 - Posted: 04.04.2020

By Laura Sanders Although it’s tricky for us humans to see, mouse feelings are written all over their furry little faces. With machine learning tools, researchers reliably spotted mice’s expressions of joy, fear, pain and other basic emotions. The results, published in the April 3 Science, provide a field guide for scientists seeking to understand how emotions such as joy, regret and empathy work in animals other than humans (SN: 11/10/16; SN: 6/9/14; SN: 12/8/11). Using machine learning to reveal mice’s expressions is “an extraordinarily exciting direction,” says Kay Tye, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif. The findings “lay the foundation for what I expect will be a game changer for neuroscience research on emotional states.” Neuroscientist Nadine Gogolla of the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried, Germany, and colleagues gave mice experiences designed to elicit distinct emotions. Sugar water evoked pleasure, a shock to the tail triggered pain, bitter quinine water created disgust, an injection of lithium chloride evoked a nauseated malaise, and a place where shocks previously had been delivered sparked fear. For each setup, high-speed video cameras captured subtle movements in the mice’s ears, noses, whiskers and other parts of the face. Observers can generally see that something is happening on the mouse’s face, Gogolla says. But translating those subtle clues into emotions is really hard, “especially for an untrained human being,” she says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2020

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 27168 - Posted: 04.03.2020

By Katherine Rosman The coronavirus outbreak has turned many of us into nervous germophobes, seeking to protect ourselves from infection by washing our hands methodically and frequently, avoiding unnecessary contact with so called high-touch surfaces and methodically sanitizing packages, our homes and our bodies. For people diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or O.C.D., the worry created by the threat of coronavirus has the potential for more intense and longer-lasting implications. According to the International OCD Foundation, there are about three million Americans who have been diagnosed with O.C.D. It’s a condition characterized by unwanted thoughts or urges that generate high levels of anxiety and repetitive acts meant to neutralize the obsessional thought. The cleaning and sanitizing practices that help prevent coronavirus infection are bringing people with O.C.D. into closer orbit to behaviors that are a gateway to detrimental patterns that could interfere with their ability to engage meaningfully with the world outside their homes for years to come. Courtenay Patlin, a 28-year-old in Los Angeles, is trying to find balance between appropriate caution and overreaction. Several weeks ago, before the California shelter-in-place order, Ms. Patlin decided to mostly stay indoors. She had read enough about how quickly coronavirus had spread in China, Italy and then Seattle, and how very sick it was making so many. She felt she could rely on only herself and her Clorox to stay healthy. “I keep a very clean apartment, and I feel safe at home,” she said. Ms. Patlin, a graduate student studying clinical psychology, was diagnosed with O.C.D. about five years ago, she said, after years of being afraid of public toilets, refusing to eat off dishes that she hadn’t scrubbed herself or witnessed being sufficiently cleaned by others and being fearful of being hugged by basically anyone. ImageMs. Patlin’s hands. She used to clean her hands and apartment with pure bleach and cleaning solutions until the skin on her fingers started to peel off, which she would take as a sign that she was cleaning the proper amount. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 27167 - Posted: 04.03.2020

By Mitch Leslie Like many animals, you couldn’t see without proteins called opsins, which dwell in the light-sensitive cells of your eyes. A new study reveals for the first time that fruit flies can also use some of these proteins, nestled at the tip of their nose, to taste noxious molecules in their food. Opsins in our bodies could also serve the same function, researchers speculate. The results are “paradigm shifting,” says sensory biologist Phyllis Robinson of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who wasn’t connected to the research. The most famous opsin forms the backbone of rhodopsin, the pigment in eye cells known as rods that allow you to see in low light. Your cone cells, which permit vision in bright light, harbor different opsins. Altogether, researchers have uncovered about 1000 other varieties of the proteins in various animals and microbes since rhodopsin was discovered more than 150 years ago. But the opsin molecular family still offers some surprises, notes neuroscientist Craig Montell of the University of California, Santa Barbara. A handful of studies, including one in 2011 by Montell and his team, have implicated opsins in hearing, touch, and temperature detection. Montell and colleagues wanted to determine whether any opsins play a role in taste—specifically, whether flies use them to detect a bitter molecule they are known to dislike. The researchers set up a taste test for unmodified Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies and for seven strains that had been genetically altered to each lack a different opsin. All of the flies had the choice between two sugar solutions, one of which was spiked with the bitter compound. © 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Vision; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 27166 - Posted: 04.03.2020