By James Gorman Among the many lessons of the coronavirus pandemic is how close humans are to the rest of the animal kingdom. We get diseases from other animals, and then we use more animals to figure out how to stop the diseases. As research ramps up treatments and vaccines, animals are crucial to fighting the pandemic. There are different animals at each end of the pandemic, of course. The new disease almost certainly began with a bat virus, scientists agree. That virus probably passed through another animal, perhaps pangolins, on its way to humans. But the animals that scientists will depend on in the lab are mice, first of all, and then perhaps ferrets or hamsters or monkeys. Around the world, different laboratories are racing to breed stocks of mice genetically engineered for research and testing the susceptibility of other animals to infection with the virus that causes Covid-19. There are, of course, many objections to animal testing, particularly when it comes to primates, but researchers are deeply concerned about the hazards to humans of treatments or vaccines that have not been tried on other animals first. No single kind of animal will serve all test purposes and scientists have several criteria for what makes an animal useful in testing therapies and vaccines for effectiveness. First, it must be susceptible to infection, and not all animals are. Despite the quarantining of one dog in Hong Kong, with a “weak positive” test for coronavirus, various health agencies are not taking a single, ambiguous result as evidence for concern. Advisories state there is no evidence yet that pets are susceptible to the disease. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 27125 - Posted: 03.17.2020

By Adrienne Raphel Let me tell you a tale of two grandfathers, Irv and Murray. For decades, Irv, an introverted, quiet, retired bartender and former military engineer, had the same morning routine: coffee and cream; a roll; and the puzzle page of the Press of Atlantic City. He methodically and religiously worked his way through each one, from the crossword to the jumble to the cryptoquip, a substitution cipher that asks solvers to decode clues and figure out the pun. Extroverted and spontaneous Murray, a successful businessman and local politician, also had his morning routine: coffee with lots of sugar; oatmeal; and tinkering on one of his many writing projects, such as a loosely autobiographical musical about a traveling salesman. Murray swam a few times a week, devoured books and loved to travel. But he never did crosswords. Irv died at age 94, and he barely experienced any cognitive loss before the last six months of his life, when he exhibited rapid mental decline. Murray lived to be 91, but the last several years of his life were marked with severe dementia. When I was researching my book Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them, I was fascinated by my family’s case study. The evidence, it seemed, couldn’t be clearer: doing crosswords late in life prevents dementia. And at first, all the studies I found seemed to bear this hypothesis out. “Regular crosswords and number puzzles linked to sharper brain in later life,” a May 2019 Science Daily headline proclaims. According to a University of Exeter study, older adults who regularly did word and number puzzles had increased mental acuity. A 2011 experiment with members of the Bronx Aging Study found that a regular regimen of crosswords might delay the onset of cognitive decline. Belief in puzzle power has fueled multimillion-dollar industry of brain-training games like Lumosity or Dakim. © 2020 Scientific American,

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 27124 - Posted: 03.17.2020

By Linda Searing Alzheimer’s disease, the most common dementia among older adults, now affects about 5.8 million U.S. residents 65 and older — 10 percent of that age group, according to a new report from the Alzheimer’s Association. Age is considered the biggest risk factor for Alzheimer’s, with 3 percent of people 65 to 74, 17 percent of those 75 to 84 and 32 percent of people 85 and older — or nearly a third — having the disease. By 2050, the number of U.S. adults 65 and older with Alzheimer’s is expected to reach 13.8 million, with about half of them 85 or older. The association’s report attributes the growing number of Americans with Alzheimer’s to the projected aging of the U.S. population, with the West and Southeast regions of the country expected to experience the largest increases in the next five years. Sometimes, people under 65 develop what is called early-onset Alzheimer’s, but that is much less common. Although there is no known average age for the onset of Alzheimer’s, symptoms tend to be noticeable in the mid-60s, with memory issues typically one of the first signs. Alzheimer’s is an irreversible brain disorder that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills, can alter mood and personality and eventually disrupts the ability to carry out simple day-to-day tasks. Hallucinations, agitation and aggression are common symptoms as the condition advances. Although there is no cure for the disease — or even drugs to slow or stop progression — some medications can temporarily improve cognitive or behavioral symptoms. Non-medication therapies — exercise, music to stir recall or special lighting to ease sleep disorders — also can be helpful, but the report says that they also do not stop or slow the disease.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 27123 - Posted: 03.17.2020

Bob McDonald · CBC Radio Technology used to determine the structure of the Earth's interior using seismic waves has been adapted into a prototype brain scanner that could give results in real time. It could also be cheaper and simpler to use than technologies like MRI or CT scans. For decades, geologists have used sound waves travelling through the Earth, either from earthquakes or artificial sources, to search for oil, image fault lines and attempt to predict earthquakes. Reading reflections and refraction of the waves as they pass through different kinds of rocks and deposits can help geologists essentially do an ultrasound to build up a picture of the Earth. But in recent years seismology has been supercharged by a computational technique called full waveform inversion (FWI), which uses complex computer algorithms to scavenge ever more information from seismic data, and make much more detailed and accurate 3D maps of the Earth's crust. Now scientists at Imperial College London have adapted the same technology into a prototype head-mounted scanner that produced imaging information they say could be used in the future to produce high-resolution 3D images of the brain. The wavefield is shown as it propagates across the head. (Dr Lluís Guasch / Imperial College London / University College London / Nature Digital Medicine) The device uses a helmet fitted with an array of acoustic transducers that act as both sound transmitters and receivers. The system uses low frequency sound waves that are able to penetrate the skull and pass through the brain without harming brain tissue. The sound waves are altered as they pass through different brain structures, then the signals are read and run through the FWI algorithm. In simulations the team got results that make them confident they can produce high-resolution 3D images that may be as good, if not better, than more traditional approaches. ©2020 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 27122 - Posted: 03.16.2020

By Scott Barry Kaufman For many years, researchers have treated the individual traits and characteristics of autistic people as an enduring essence of their autism-- in isolation of the social context and without even asking autistic people what their social life is actually like. However, perspective matters. Who is to say it's autistic people who are the "awkward" ones? A number of myths about autistic people abound. For one, it's a great myth that autistic people lack empathy. This is how they were depicted for so many years in the clinical literature and in the media-- as emotionless, socially clueless robots. However, the more you get to know an autistic person, the more you realize just how caring they can be, even though they may have some difficulties reading social cues. As Steve Silberman points out, empathy is a two-way street. Another common misconception is that autistic people aren't social. I really like some recent approaches that add greater complexity to this issue, showing that when you take a contextual strengths-based approach you can see that people on the autism spectrum are much more social than researchers ever realized. The lens upon which we look at a person matters. As Megan Clark and Dawn Adams put it, "When autism is viewed through a deficit lens the strengths, positive attributes and interests of individuals on the spectrum can be overshadowed." In one recent study, Clark and Adams asked 83 children on the autism spectrum (aged 8 to 15 years) various questions about themselves. When asked "What do you like most about yourself?", the most common themes were "I am a good friend or person to be around" and "I am good at particular things."When asked "What do you enjoy the most?", one of the most endorsed themes was social interaction. © 2020 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 27121 - Posted: 03.16.2020

Joanna Moorhead For artist and writer Charlotte Amelia Poe, 30, every day feels like a walk across a frozen pond. “It’s how it’s always been,” she explains. “You’re trying to navigate it and stay safe, but you’re aware that at any moment the ice is likely to crack, and at that point you will sink into the water.” The worst of it is that, when she feels that way, she has no idea how she can avoid going under. “You think you’re doing fine and you’re treading carefully enough not to crack the ice. But suddenly you’ve gone under. You’ve got it completely wrong – and you’ve no idea why.” Poe is describing how it feels to be autistic. She wants the rest of us to understand, she says, because it really matters, perhaps more than it’s ever mattered (of which more later). Her mission to break open the mystery of how it feels to be autistic has already been impressively successful: last year she won the Spectrum art prize for her video piece How To Be Autistic and recently she wrote a book of the same name. Her hope is that, by opening up about her own journey through childhood, school and adolescence, she can change other people’s perceptions and expectations about what autism is like, from the inside. We are talking in the sitting room of the semi-detached house overlooking a Suffolk field that Poe shares with three generations of her family. She has never left home and doesn’t expect to; her nephews and niece are playing outside in the garden, and one day their mother, her sister, will be her carer in the way that her parents are at the moment. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 27120 - Posted: 03.16.2020

By Jane E. Brody Many people who have struggled for years with excess weight know that the hardest and often the most frustrating job is not getting it off but keeping it off. Recent decades have seen countless popular diet schemes that promised to help people shed unwanted pounds, and as each of these diets failed in the long run, they spawned their successors. A diet, after all, is something people go on to go off. Most people think of a diet as a means to an end, and few who go on a food-restricted diet to lose weight expect to have to eat that way indefinitely. And therein lies the rub, with the current unchecked epidemic of obesity as the sorry result. We live in a land of incredible excess. Rich or poor, most of us are surrounded by calorie-rich vittles, many of them tasty but deficient in ingredients that nourish healthy bodies. “We can’t go two minutes without being assaulted by a food cue,” said Suzanne Phelan, lead author of an encouraging new study in the journal Obesity. Even the most diligent dieters can find it hard to constantly resist temptation. And once people fall off the diet wagon, they often stay off, and their hard-lost pounds reappear a lot faster than it took to shed them. But these facts need not discourage anyone from achieving lasting weight loss. Researchers have identified the strategies and thought processes that have enabled many thousands of people to lose a significant amount of weight and keep it off for many years, myself among them. The new study led by Dr. Phelan, professor of kinesiology and public health at California Polytechnic State University, identified habits and strategies that can be keys to success for millions. Yes, like most sensible weight-loss plans, they involve healthful eating and regular physical activity. But they also include important self-monitoring practices and nonpunitive coping measures that can be the crucial to long-term weight management. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 27119 - Posted: 03.16.2020

A protein that normally deposits mineralized calcium in tooth enamel may also be responsible for calcium deposits in the back of the eye in people with dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD), according to a study from researchers at the National Eye Institute (NEI). This protein, amelotin, may turn out to be a therapeutic target for the blinding disease. The findings were published in the journal Translational Research. NEI is part of the National Institutes of Health. “Using a simple cell culture model of retinal pigment epithelial cells, we were able to show that amelotin gets turned on by a certain kind of stress and causes formation of a particular kind of calcium deposit also seen in bones and teeth. When we looked in human donor eyes with dry AMD, we saw the same thing,” said Graeme Wistow, Ph.D., chief of the NEI Section on Molecular Structure and Functional Genomics, and senior author of the study. There are two forms of AMD – wet and dry. While there are treatments that can slow the progression of wet AMD, there are currently no treatments for dry AMD, also called geographic atrophy. In dry AMD, deposits of cholesterol, lipids, proteins, and minerals accumulate at the back of the eye. Some of these deposits are called soft drusen and have a specific composition, different from deposits found in wet AMD. Drusen form under the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), a layer of cells that transports nutrients from the blood vessels below to support the light-sensing photoreceptors of the retina above them. As the drusen develop, the RPE and eventually the photoreceptors die, leading to blindness. The photoreceptors cannot grow back, so the blindness is permanent.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 27118 - Posted: 03.14.2020

By Judson A. Brewer, M.D. Anxiety is a strange beast. As a psychiatrist, I have learned that anxiety and its close cousin, panic, are both born from fear. As a behavioral neuroscientist, I know that fear’s main evolutionary function is helping us survive. In fact, fear is the oldest survival mechanism we have. Fear helps us learn to avoid dangerous situations in the future through a process called negative reinforcement. For example, if we step out into a busy street, turn our head and see a car coming right at us, we instinctively jump back onto the safety of the sidewalk. Evolution made this really simple for us. So simple that we only need three elements in situations like this to learn: an environmental cue, a behavior and a result. In this case, walking up to a busy street cues us to look both ways before crossing. The result of not getting killed helps us remember to repeat the action again in the future. Sometime in the last million years, humans evolved a new layer on top of our more primitive survival brain, called the prefrontal cortex. Involved in creativity and planning, the prefrontal cortex helps us think and plan for the future. It predicts what will happen in the future based on past experience. If information is lacking, our prefrontal cortex lays out different scenarios about what might happen, and guesses which will be most likely. It does this by running simulations based on previous events that are most similar. Defined as “a feeling of worry, nervousness or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome,” anxiety comes up when our prefrontal cortexes don’t have enough information to accurately predict the future. We see this right now with coronavirus. Without accurate information, it is easy for our brains to spin stories of fear and dread. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 27117 - Posted: 03.14.2020

As we get older, we become more easily distracted, but it isn't always a disadvantage, according to researchers. Tarek Amer, a psychology postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University, says that although our ability to focus our attention on specific things worsens as we get older, our ability to take in broad swaths of information remains strong. So in general, older adults are able to retain information that a more focused person could not. For the last few years, Amer's research has focused mainly on cognitive control, a loose term that describes one's ability to focus their attention. His work at the University of Toronto, where he received his PhD in 2018, looked specifically at older adults aged 60 to 80. Amer joined Spark host Nora Young to discuss his research and how it could be implemented in practical ways. What happens to our ability to concentrate as we get older? There's a lot of research that shows as we get older, this ability tends to decline or is reduced with age. So essentially, what we see is that relative to younger adults, older adults have a harder time focusing on one thing while ignoring distractions. This distraction can be from the external world. This can also be internally based distractions, such as our own thoughts, which are usually not related to the task at hand. With respect to mind wandering specifically, the literature is ... mixed. [The] typical finding is that older adults tend to, at least in lab-based tasks, mind wander less. So I know that you've been looking, in your own research, at concentration and memory formation. So what exactly are you studying? One of the things I was interested in is whether this [decline in the ability to concentrate] could be associated with any benefits in old age. For example, one thing that we showed is that when older and younger adults perform a task that includes both task-relevant as well as task-irrelevant information, older adults are actually processing both types of information. So if we give them a memory task at the end that actually is testing memory for the irrelevant information … we see that older adults actually outperform younger adults. ©2020 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Attention; Alzheimers
Link ID: 27116 - Posted: 03.14.2020

Deborah Becker Alcoholics Anonymous may be just as good or better than scientifically proven treatments to help people quit drinking, according to a new review. But AA still doesn't work for everyone. AILSA CHANG, HOST: Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA, has been around for almost 85 years. But up until this week, medical researchers weren't quite sure just how well AA worked. Well, now a new review published by the Cochrane Collaboration has found that AA may lead to longer breaks from alcohol compared to other evidence-based treatments. Deborah Becker has been following all of this. She's a senior correspondent and host at WBUR and joins us now. Hey, Deborah. DEBORAH BECKER, BYLINE: Hi. CHANG: So for quite some time now, people weren't sure how effective AA was, and now they are. So what's changed? BECKER: Well, what they say has changed is that they have more and better studies about AA and professional programs that are based on AA principles. So the researchers here looked at 27 studies of AA programs involving more than 10,000 people. And the most striking finding of looking at all of this research was that the folks who were in AA or AA-based programs tended to stay away from alcohol longer. CHANG: OK. So can you just very briefly explain the mechanism by which AA is supposed to work? BECKER: Well, AA is primarily a social support network for people, so they can discuss how they are trying to achieve recovery and what they're doing to stay in recovery. And AA is based on what are known as the 12 steps. And these are 12 steps that folks take to guide them to recovery. CHANG: And this leaning into social networks, is that something that's unique to AA? BECKER: Well, I don't know if it's unique to AA, but certainly the support network theory of alcoholism and even addiction treatment is something that's widely used. And one of the lead authors of this Cochrane review is Dr. John Kelly at Massachusetts General Hospital. And he says what this review shows is that AA helps people shift their social networks away from heavy drinkers and toward people in recovery. And he says that's what professional therapy tries to do, but this - AA - does it in a more accessible and obviously less expensive way. © 2020 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 27115 - Posted: 03.14.2020

By R. Douglas Fields Our concepts of how the two and a half pounds of flabby flesh between our ears accomplish learning date to Ivan Pavlov’s classic experiments, where he found that dogs could learn to salivate at the sound of a bell. In 1949 psychologist Donald Hebb adapted Pavlov’s “associative learning rule” to explain how brain cells might acquire knowledge. Hebb proposed that when two neurons fire together, sending off impulses simultaneously, the connections between them—the synapses—grow stronger. When this happens, learning has taken place. In the dogs’ case, it would mean the brain now knows that the sound of a bell is followed immediately by the presence of food. This idea gave rise to an oft-quoted axiom: “Synapses that fire together wire together.” The theory proved sound, and the molecular details of how synapses change during learning have been described in detail. But not everything we remember results from reward or punishment, and in fact, most experiences are forgotten. Even when synapses do fire together, they sometimes do not wire together. What we retain depends on our emotional response to an experience, how novel it is, where and when the event occurred, our level of attention and motivation during the event, and we process these thoughts and feelings while asleep. A narrow focus on the synapse has given us a mere stick-figure conception of how learning and the memories it engenders work. It turns out that strengthening a synapse cannot produce a memory on its own, except for the most elementary reflexes in simple circuits. Vast changes throughout the expanse of the brain are necessary to create a coherent memory. Whether you are recalling last night’s conversation with dinner guests or using an acquired skill such as riding a bike, the activity of millions of neurons in many different regions of your brain must become linked to produce a coherent memory that interweaves emotions, sights, sounds, smells, event sequences and other stored experiences. Because learning encompasses so many elements of our experiences, it must incorporate different cellular mechanisms beyond the changes that occur in synapses. This recognition has led to a search for new ways to understand how information is transmitted, processed and stored in the brain to bring about learning. In the past 10 years neuroscientists have come to realize that the iconic “gray matter” that makes up the brain’s outer surface—familiar from graphic illustrations found everywhere, from textbooks to children’s cartoons—is not the only part of the organ involved in the inscription of a permanent record of facts and events for later recall and replay. It turns out that areas below the deeply folded, gray-colored surface also play a pivotal role in learning. © 2020 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Glia
Link ID: 27114 - Posted: 03.12.2020

Laura Reiley A study published in the journal Cell Metabolism by a group of Yale researchers found that the consumption of the common artificial sweetener sucralose (which is found in Splenda, Zerocal, Sukrana, SucraPlus and other brands) in combination with carbohydrates can swiftly turn a healthy person into one with high blood sugar. From whole grain English muffins to reduced-sugar ketchup, sucralose is found in thousands of baked goods, condiments, syrups and other consumer packaged goods — almost all of them containing carbs. The finding, which researchers noted has yet to be replicated in other studies, raises new questions about the use of artificial sweeteners and their effects on weight gain and overall health. In the Yale study, researchers took 60 healthy-weight individuals and separated them into three groups: A group that consumed a regular-size beverage containing the equivalent of two packets of sucralose sweetener, a second group that consumed a beverage sweetened with table sugar at the equivalent sweetness, and a third control group that had a beverage with the artificial sweetener as well as a carbohydrate called maltodextrin. The molecules of maltodextrin don’t bind to taste receptors in the mouth and are impossible to detect. While the sensation of the third group’s beverage was identical to the Splenda-only group, only this group exhibited significant adverse health effects. The artificial sweetener by itself seemed to be fine, the researchers discovered, but that changed when combined with a carbohydrate. Seven beverages over two weeks and the previously healthy people in this group became glucose intolerant, a metabolic condition that results in elevated blood glucose levels and puts people at an increased risk for diabetes.

Keyword: Obesity; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 27113 - Posted: 03.12.2020

By Alex Gatenby Victoria Derbyshire programme The mental health charity Mind says it is signposting people to street drug charities to help them withdraw from antidepressants because of the lack of alternatives available. Those affected can experience debilitating symptoms. "Within a couple of days of coming off, it was overwhelming - agitation, anxiety, akathisia [restlessness], just restlessness, can't sleep, suicidal ideations, all that stuff going on very quickly," Stuart Bryan tells the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme. The 48-year-old has been taking anti-depressants on and off for more than two decades. "The withdrawals are far worse than the original depression, for me and so many other people." Stuart has tried to stop more than 10 times, but has struggled with what he calls his withdrawal "hell" - and has now had to stop working. He says doctors have advised him to take anything between "a few weeks" to three months to slowly stop using the drugs. But he believes people coming off anti-depressants are being "abandoned by the system". Image caption Mind's Stephen Buckley says it is not fully understood how difficult a process coming off anti-depressants can be While antidepressants are not addictive, just over half of those who stop or reduce their dosage experience withdrawal symptoms, according to one review of 24 studies last year. The mental health charity Mind's head of information Stephen Buckley says it is having to signpost patients to street-drug charities, even though they have been prescribed the drugs on the NHS. Street-drug charities usually help those misusing alcohol and illegally-obtained drugs. © 2020 BBC

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 27112 - Posted: 03.12.2020

By Jonathan Lambert To a sea turtle, plastic debris might smell like dinner. As the plastic detritus of modern human life washes into oceans, marine creatures of all kinds interact with and sometimes eat it (SN: 11/13/19). Recent research suggests that this is no accident. Plastic that’s been stewing in the ocean emits a chemical that, to some seabirds and fish, smells a lot like food (SN: 11/9/16). That chemical gas, dimethyl sulfide, is also produced by phytoplankton, a key food source for many marine animals. Now, scientists have determined that loggerhead sea turtles may also confuse the smell of plastic with food, according to a study published March 9 in Current Biology. Over two weeks in January 2019, 15 captive loggerheads in tanks were exposed at the water surface to a slew of scents, including the largely neutral scent of water as a control, of food such as shrimp and of new and ocean-soaked plastic. The turtles (Caretta caretta) largely ignored smells of water and clean plastic. But when the scientists puffed air containing scents of either food or ocean-stewed plastic, the reptiles increased their sniffing above water — a typical foraging behavior. In fact, those responses to food and ocean-soaked plastic were indistinguishable to the researchers, suggesting that the plastic can induce foraging behavior in sea turtles, the team says. That might explain why sea turtles get entangled in or eat plastic, which can be harmful. Along with previous research, this study expands the breadth of marine life that may confuse plastic with food. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2020

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 27111 - Posted: 03.12.2020

By Denise Grady Year after year for two decades, Nancy Wexler led medical teams into remote villages in Venezuela, where huge extended families lived in stilt houses on Lake Maracaibo and for generations, had suffered from a terrible hereditary disease that causes brain degeneration, disability and death. Neighbors shunned the sick, fearing they were contagious. “Doctors wouldn’t treat them,” Dr. Wexler said. “Priests wouldn’t touch them.” She began to think of the villagers as her family, and started a clinic to care for them. “They are so gracious, so kind, so loving,” she said. Over time, Dr. Wexler coaxed elite scientists to collaborate rather than compete to find the cause of the disorder, Huntington’s disease, and she raised millions of dollars for research. Her work led to the discovery in 1993 of the gene that causes Huntington’s, to the identification of other genes that may have moderating effects and, at long last, to experimental treatments that have begun to show promise. Now, at 74, Dr. Wexler is facing a painful and daunting task that she had long postponed. She has decided it’s time to acknowledge publicly that she has the disease she’s spent her life studying and that killed her mother, uncles and grandfather. “There is such stigma, and such ostracization,” Dr. Wexler, a professor of neuropsychology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, said in a lengthy interview. “I think it’s important to destigmatize Huntington’s and make it not as scary. Of course it is scary. Having a fatal disease is scary and I don’t want to trivialize that. But if I can say, I’m not stopping my life, I’m going to work, we’re still trying to find a cure, that would help. If I can do anything to take the onus off having this thing, I want to do it.” Among her greatest concerns are the thousands of Venezuelans from the families full of the disease, whose willingness to donate blood and skin samples, and the brains of deceased relatives, made it possible to find the gene. But they live in an impoverished region, and, Dr. Wexler said, they are still outcasts. The clinic that she and her colleagues opened has been shut down by Venezuela’s government. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Huntingtons; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 27110 - Posted: 03.10.2020

Christina Marvin This story originally appeared on Massive Science, an editorial partner site that publishes science stories by scientists. Subscribe to their newsletter to get even more science sent straight to you. As a spectator, it's easy to forget the long term consequences of 300 pound humans crashing into each other at over 20 miles per hour. But this is the reality of American football. During play, the brain is one of the most susceptible parts of the body and the long-term danger may remain hidden until years after retirement. New safety rules and improved helmets prevent injuries such as skull fractures. But no amount of training or equipment is yet known to prevent concussions, internal brain injuries caused when the brain shakes back and forth, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the neurodegenerative disease that results from accumulated hits to the head. The best thing we can do is stop playing these types of sports. The second best option is to mitigate the risks. The NFL is plagued with controversy over the league's relationship with head injuries. Traditional helmets are designed to prevent skull fractures. However, concussions are not just blunt force trauma, but results of rotational forces exerted when the head snaps back and forth. If the NFL wants to get serious about concussion prevention, as many believe they morally have a responsibility to do, independent neuroscience has to have a leading role in how helmets are designed. While the NFL denies bias in how they use science, it is impossible to deny that they have a large financial interest in the results, and this has led to questionable measures on head protection. From 1994 to 2009, the NFL actually employed their own research committee. But the committee was overhauled in 2009 after criticism from Congress for their continued denial of the link between football and brain disease. © 2019 Salon.com, LLC.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 27109 - Posted: 03.10.2020

By Perri Klass, M.D. When you talk about sibling issues, everyone takes it personally. Whether it’s birth order and the supposed advantages of being the oldest (or youngest, or middle), or the question of having (or being) the favorite child, people tend to respond immediately with their own sometimes very individual and emotional stories. What I want to talk about today are sibling sex ratios — having a sibling of the other sex versus growing up in all-boy or all-girl sibling configurations. The most evocative phrase I’ve seen for this is “family constellations,” which I like because it suggests that there are lots of interesting — and even beautiful — arrangements, but that differences are real. But let’s take one step further back: Are there actually parents, or parent pairs, who are more likely to conceive boys or girls? Does the five-daughter family (from “Pride and Prejudice” or “Fiddler on the Roof”) or the seven-son setup (“Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”) just reflect five (or seven) random rolls of the dice, or is there actually something going on from an evolutionary point of view? The evolutionary theory, which has been advanced to explain sex ratio, goes back to Darwin, but was fully formulated in 1930 by a British scientist named Ronald Fisher, who made the argument that if individuals vary in the sex ratio among their offspring (that is, some are more likely to produce more males or more females), the reproductive advantage in a population will always lie with the rarer sex, and thus the sex ratio will equilibrate toward 1:1. After all, Fisher argued, half of the genetic material of the next generation must come by way of those who tend to produce males, and half from those who tend to produce females. But are there such tendencies? I’ve heard people say that having boys “runs in the family,” or that their cousins are almost all girls, that’s the “family pattern.” But a very large study of 4.7 million births in Sweden published in February in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society argues that there is no evidence of a genetic tendency toward one sex or the other, or a family tendency. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 27108 - Posted: 03.10.2020

By Karen Weintraub At age 16, German Aldana was riding in the back seat of a car driven by a friend when another car headed straight for them. To avoid a collision, his friend swerved and hit a concrete pole. The others weren’t seriously injured, but Aldana, unbuckled, was tossed around enough to snap his spine just below his neck. For the next five years, he could move only his neck, and his arms a little. Right after he turned 21 and met the criteria, Aldana signed up for a research project at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine near his home. Researchers with the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis carefully opened Aldana's skull and, at the surface of the brain, implanted electrodes. Then, in the lab, they trained a computer to interpret the pattern of signals from those electrodes as he imagines opening and closing his hand. The computer then transfers the signal to a prosthetic on Aldana's forearm, which then stimulates the appropriate muscles to cause his hand to close. The entire process takes 400 milliseconds from thought to grasp. A year after his surgery, Aldana can grab simple objects, like a block. He can bring a spoon to his mouth, feeding himself for the first time in six years. He can grasp a pen and scratch out some legible letters. He has begun experimenting with a treadmill that moves his limbs, allowing him to take steps forward or stop as he thinks about clenching or unclenching the fingers of his right hand. But only in the lab. Researchers had permission to test it only in their facility, but they’re now applying for federal permission to extend their study. The hope is that by the end of this year, Aldana will be able to bring his device home — improving his ability to feed himself, open doors and restoring some measure of independence.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 27107 - Posted: 03.09.2020

By Susana Martinez-Conde Parents tend to be just a bit biased about their children’s looks (not me though—my kids are objectively beautiful), but as it turns out, this type of self-deception is not as benign as one might think. According to recent research, many parents appear to suffer from a sort of denial concerning their kids’ weights, which poses a considerable obstacle to remediating childhood obesity by way of promoting healthy eating habits at home. The latest of such studies was published last month in the American Journal of Human Biology, and conducted by a team of scientists at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. Daniela Rodrigues and her collaborators, Aristides Machado-Rodrigues and Cristina Padez, recruited hundreds of parents and children for their research. All the participating children were between 6 and 10 years old and attended elementary school in Portugal. A total of 834 parents completed questionnaires that included a variety of questions, such as whether they thought that their children’s weight was a bit too little, a bit too much, way too much, or just fine. In turn, the team collected the weights and heights of the 793 participating children, at their respective schools. The results were in line with the researchers’ predictions, but nonetheless remarkable. Of the 33% parents who misperceived their children’s weight, 93% underestimated it. Moreover, parents who underestimated their kids’ weights were 10 to 20 times more likely to have an obese child. Several factors were associated with the parental weight underestimation, including a higher BMI (body mass index) for the mothers, younger ages for the children, lower household income (for girls) and urban living (for boys). However, such associations did not explain why parents underestimated their children’s weights to begin with. © 2020 Scientific American

Keyword: Obesity; Attention
Link ID: 27106 - Posted: 03.09.2020