Bianca Nogrady As droughts go, the one plaguing the antidepressant drug development landscape for the past few decades has been noteworthy. Since the advent of serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors in the 1980s and 1990s, there has been a dearth of new pharmacological therapies for mood disorders, says psychiatrist Samantha Meltzer-Brody, director of the University of North Carolina’s Perinatal Psychiatry Program. “The same medications largely that were there when I went to medical school a long time ago were still the ones we’ve been using.” Given this state of affairs, Meltzer-Brody says she had the “most modest” of expectations a few years ago when she got involved in the first clinical trial testing a new drug, SAGE-547, for postpartum depression. Developed by Massachusetts-based Sage Therapeutics, SAGE-547 is a solution of allopregnanolone, a neuroactive metabolite of the sex hormone progesterone, which plays key roles in the female reproductive system. Progesterone and allopregnanolone levels peak during the third trimester of pregnancy, then crash immediately after delivery. Preclinical data suggested the drop in allopregnanolone could be a trigger for postpartum depression in some women. The company-funded trial involved administering SAGE-547 to a handful of patients with postpartum depression as an intravenous infusion over 48 hours. The response in the first patient treated with SAGE-547 was dramatic. From being withdrawn and depressed with no appetite before treatment, she began smiling, talking, eating, and interacting, Meltzer-Brody says. “After that first patient, we thought either that’s one heck of a placebo or maybe there’s a signal.” Three more patients were treated, with similar results. Known by the generic name brexanolone, the drug sped through Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials before being approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on March 19. © 1986–2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 26689 - Posted: 10.10.2019

By Gina Kolata A new drug, created to treat just one patient, has pushed the bounds of personalized medicine and has raised unexplored regulatory and ethical questions, scientists reported on Wednesday. The drug, described in the New England Journal of Medicine, is believed to be the first “custom” treatment for a genetic disease. It is called milasen, named after the only patient who will ever take it: Mila (mee-lah) Makovec, who lives with her mother, Julia Vitarello, in Longmont, Colo. Mila, 8, has a rapidly progressing neurological disorder that is fatal. Her symptoms started at age 3. Within a few years, she had gone from an agile, talkative child to one who was blind and unable to stand or hold up her head. She needed a feeding tube and experienced up to 30 seizures a day, each lasting one or two minutes. Ms. Vitarello learned in December 2016 that Mila had Batten’s disease. But the girl’s case was puzzling, doctors said. Batten’s disease is recessive — a patient must inherit two mutated versions of a gene, MFSD8, to develop the disease. Mila had one just mutated gene, and the other copy seemed normal. That should have been sufficient to prevent the disease. In March 2017, Dr. Timothy Yu and his colleagues at Boston Children’s Hospital discovered that the problem with the intact gene lay in an extraneous bit of DNA that had scrambled the manufacturing of an important protein. That gave Dr. Yu an idea: Why not make a custom piece of RNA to block the effects of the extraneous DNA? Developing such a drug would be expensive, but there were no other options. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 26688 - Posted: 10.10.2019

Jessica Wright Delicate lines dance across a screen mounted on the wall of the operating room. Their peaks and valleys become pronounced, suddenly flatten into a straight line—and then return, stronger than before. These digital traces represent the buzz of neurons in 12-year-old Kevin Lightner, read by two thin electrodes that surgeons have inserted deep into his brain. Kevin, who has autism and has had seizures since he was 8 years old, lies uncharacteristically still in the center of the room, draped under a blue sheet, his tiger-print pajamas neatly folded on a nearby shelf. What’s happening in this room may be the last chance to bring Kevin’s seizures under control. An hour and a half ago, neurosurgeon Saadi Ghatan removed a roughly 2-inch by 1-inch piece of the top of Kevin’s skull. He replaced it with a rectangular metal device, carefully screwed into the newly exposed edges of bone. The implant, a “responsive neurostimulation device,” is now transmitting signals from the electrodes planted in Kevin’s thalamus. The surgeons’ hope is that the device will learn to recognize what kind of brain activity precedes Kevin’s seizures and discharge electrical pulses to prevent them—like a “defibrillator for the brain,” as Ghatan puts it. If it works, it could save Kevin’s life. Ghatan projects the device’s readout to the screen by gently placing a black wand over the exposed metal in Kevin’s skull. The signal on the screen is surprisingly strong, given that it stems from the thalamus, a brain region that reveals its activity only weakly, if at all—and so is rarely the choice for monitoring seizures. © 1986–2019 The Scientist.

Keyword: Autism; Epilepsy
Link ID: 26687 - Posted: 10.10.2019

By Elizabeth Preston Heidi the octopus is sleeping. Her body is still, eight arms tucked neatly away. But her skin is restless. She turns from ghostly white to yellow, flashes deep red, then goes mottled green and bumpy like plant life. Her muscles clench and relax, sending a tendril of arm loose. From the outside, the cephalopod looks like a person twitching and muttering during a dream, or like a napping dog chasing dream-squirrels. “If she is dreaming, this is a dramatic moment,” David Scheel, an octopus researcher at Alaska Pacific University, said in the documentary. Heidi was living in a tank in his living room when her snooze was captured by the film crew, and he speculates that she is imagining catching and eating a crab. But an octopus is almost nothing like a person. So how much can anyone really say with accuracy about what Heidi was doing? When our two branches of the animal family tree diverged, backbones hadn’t been invented. Yet octopuses, cuttlefish and squid, on their own evolutionary path, developed impressive intelligence. They came up with their own way to build big brains. Much of an octopus’s brain is spread throughout its body, especially its arms. It makes sense to be cautious when we guess what’s going on in these animals’ minds. Looking at a behavior like Heidi’s is “a bit like going to a crime scene,” said Nicola Clayton, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge who studies comparative cognition. “You’ve got some evidence in front of you, but you’d need to know so much more to understand better what’s causing the behavior.” It’s only conjecture to say the octopus is dreaming without more data, she said. Does the sequence of Heidi’s color changes match an experience she had while awake? Dreaming in humans mostly happens during rapid-eye movement, or R.E.M., sleep. Could we observe something similar in octopuses? Dr. Clayton points out that a human sleeper might flush red because she’s overheated. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 26686 - Posted: 10.09.2019

Ashley Yeager In March 2018, researchers reported evidence suggesting that adult humans do not generate new neurons in the hippocampus—the brain’s epicenter of learning and memory. The result contradicted two decades of work that said human adults actually do grow new neurons there, and revealed a need for new and better tools to study neurogenesis, Salk Institute President Fred Gage, who generated foundational evidence for adult human neurogenesis, told The Scientist at the time. Since that study was published, several other teams have used similar techniques—but have come to different conclusions, publishing evidence that adult humans do indeed grow new hippocampal neurons, even at the age of 99. Despite the equivocal results, Maura Boldrini, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, and a number of other neuroscientists tell The Scientist they think neurogenesis does occur in the adult human brain, bolstering learning and memory and possibly also our stress and emotional responses. Neurogenesis is “fundamentally important for the brain to react to all sorts of different insults and prevent neurological and psychiatric problems,” Boldrini says. Because of its role in brain function, researchers want to learn how neurogenesis works to potentially use it to treat brain trauma, neurodegeneration, psychiatric disorders, such as depression, and possibly even the ill effects of aging. The growth of new neurons is well studied in newborn and adult animals, especially rodents. There’s prolific neurogenesis as the brain develops, which then drops off and plateaus in adulthood, only occurring in particular areas of the brain. Examinations of human postmortem tissue suggest that the process is similar in people, based on antibody markers that label neural progenitors and young neurons. But those signals can be hard to detect in preserved cells, and the gap in time between the death of a donor and when her tissue is fixed and analyzed can affect the reliability of the markers, scientists say, which might explain the disparities in findings between different studies. © 1986–2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Neurogenesis
Link ID: 26685 - Posted: 10.09.2019

Allison Aubrey The condition strikes young children. It can start with run-of-the-mill virus symptoms, like fever or sniffles. But, then the kids lose control of their limbs, may have trouble swallowing or breathing, or even end up paralyzed. This terrifying experience happened to more than 570 families since 2014, whose children were struck with an illness called acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM. "It was really scary," says Susan Coyne, the mother of a son, Evan Mazanec, who developed AFM back in 2014 when he was 7 years old. "When this first started, no one really knew what it was," she says. It came on quickly, starting with a fever and an ear infection. Coyne says the limb weakness and paralysis began several days later — just as Evan was getting over the fever. He lost control of his arms and legs. "He couldn't move them, he couldn't lift them, he couldn't walk," Coyne says. He spent a year and a half in intensive rehab. He had to learn to walk and move his arms again. "It set him back years," Coyne says. Scientists have struggled to understand what causes this rare childhood disease. Now, one theory is gaining ground. A paper published Monday in the journal Pediatrics finds the condition may be triggered by a virus. The disease follows a pattern: Scientists have documented outbreaks every other year, beginning in 2014, and again in 2016 and 2018. Last year, there were 233 cases in the U.S. It strikes young kids, average age of 6. And, it can lead to long-term paralysis. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26684 - Posted: 10.09.2019

Angela Saini How should we remember historical figures who we know have done terrible things? It’s a dilemma we face more often, as universities and public institutions critically examine their histories, reassessing the past with 21st-century eyes. And over the last year, University College London has been in the midst of a historical inquiry into its role as the institutional birthplace of eugenics – the debunked “science” that claimed that by selectively breeding humans we could improve racial quality. We tend to associate eugenics with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, but it was in fact developed in London. Its founder was Francis Galton, who established a laboratory at UCL in 1904. Already, some students and staff have called on the university to rename its Galton lecture theatre. Galton’s seductive promise was of a bold new world filled only with beautiful, intelligent, productive people. The scientists in its thrall claimed this could be achieved by controlling reproduction, policing borders to prevent certain types of immigrants, and locking away “undesirables”, including disabled people. University College London is investigating its role as the birthplace of eugenics. In hindsight, it’s easy to say that only a moral abyss could have given rise to such a pseudo-scientific plan, not least because we have borne witness to its horrifying consequences through the 20th century, when it was used to justify genocide and mass sterilisations. And by the standards of today, Galton does resemble a monster. He was a brilliant statistician but also a racist (not just my assessment, but that of Veronica van Heyningen, the current president of the Galton Institute). He was obsessed with human difference, and determined to remove from British society those he considered inferior. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Intelligence
Link ID: 26683 - Posted: 10.09.2019

By Caroline Wyatt BBC News "I don't like to think of the future. It's such a big question mark. I just keep living in the present." Karine Mather was diagnosed with MS when she was 27, although she noticed the first symptoms much earlier. It started off as a mental-health issue with anxiety and depression, she remembers. Later, she noticed she was starting to limp when she walked longer distances. Karine began using a walker to help with her balance and stamina, and then a scooter when she could no longer walk very far. "I got to the stage where the wheelchair became quite liberating, and gave me back a sense of freedom again. Now I rely on the power-chair full-time because I can't stand by myself any more." Now Karine and her wife, Sarah, have had to give up their full-time jobs. Karine was forced to stop working as a customer service adviser at a bank because she could no longer fulfil the physical demands of work and Sarah gave up working as a data analyst so she could take care of Karine. Now 34, Karine retains the use of just one hand, and suffers pain, stiffness and spasticity in her body that has got worse as the disease has progressed. "It feels like a fist clenching all the time. And I have days when my mind is cloudy and I miss out words and sentences." Both remain upbeat but the financial, as well as the emotional, impact of MS has been huge. Karine's MS is the type known as "primary progressive", or PPMS, which meant that for the first years after diagnosis, no disease-modifying treatment was available. One new drug - Ocrevus, or ocrelizumab - was recently licensed for early PPMS in the UK but came too late to help Karine. Now the MS Society is launching an ambitious "Stop MS" appeal, aiming to raise £100m to fund research over the next decade into treatments that can stop the progression of disability in MS. © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 26682 - Posted: 10.09.2019

By Kelly Servick WASHINGTON, D.C. —Sending a mouse through a maze can tell you a lot about how its little brain learns. But what if you could change the size and structure of its brain at will to study what makes different behaviors possible? That’s what Elan Barenholtz and William Hahn are proposing. The cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, both at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, are running versions of classic psychology experiments on robots equipped with artificial intelligence. Their laptop-size robotic rovers can move and sense the environment through a camera. And they’re guided by computers running neural networks–models that bear some resemblance to the human brain. Barenholtz presented this “robopsychology” approach here last week at the American Psychological Association’s Technology Mind & Society Conference. He and Hahn told Science how they’re using their unusual new test subjects. The interview has been edited for clarity and length. Q: Why put neural networks in robots instead of just studying them on a computer? Elan Barenholtz: There are a number of groups trying to build models to simulate certain functions of the brain. But they’re not making a robot walk around and recognize stuff and carry out complex cognitive functions. William Hahn: What we want is the organism itself to guide its own behavior and get rewards. One way to think about it would be to try to build the simplest possible models. What is the minimum complexity you need to put in one of these agents so that it acts like a squirrel or it acts like a cat? © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Robotics
Link ID: 26681 - Posted: 10.08.2019

By Evan Cooper Early one summer morning, I was awakened by a hammering on the inside of my skull. It felt as if a prisoner were trying to Shawshank it out through my left eye socket. When I sat up in bed to reach for the Advil on my nightstand, I became panic-stricken. Both eyes were open, but I could see through only one. I’d been known to leap to worst-case scenarios at the first sign of any physical discomfort. (Pain in my abdomen? Appendicitis! Headache? Definitely a brain tumor.) But this was different: I wasn’t paranoid, I was blind in my left eye. At the ophthalmologist’s office later that morning, I tried not to panic. I was nearly 20 years old, midway through my studies at U.C.L.A. Everything is fine, I told myself. You’re FINE. Like a mantra, I repeated this over and over, determined that, for once, I was not going to catastrophize. I briefly thought I might be imagining it all, conjuring up some drama for attention. Once when I was 11, I called my dad, who lived 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles, and begged him to send an ambulance to my house in Cleveland because I was certain that I had a collapsed lung and my mom was refusing to take me to the hospital. But the doctor I saw told me with some urgency that I needed to see a specialist, immediately. I overheard his assistant quietly consider potential diagnoses: “multiple sclerosis, lupus, another autoimmune disease?” I closed my eyes and imagined myself on the sort of carnival ride where you stick to the wall as you spin round and round until the floor falls away. Beyond disbelief and dread, however, I also felt a familiar swell of self-loathing. Of course I have an incurable, degenerative disease, I reprimanded myself. This is my fault. After all, up until this point, I had lived as if an internal army of drill sergeants were commanding me to eat less, exercise harder, study more, stand out, be The Best. No achievement was ever good enough. And what is an autoimmune disease if not the Self waging a war upon the Self? © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 26680 - Posted: 10.08.2019

Joe Palca It's hard for doctors to do a thorough eye exam on infants. They tend to wiggle around — the babies, that is, not the doctors. But a new smart phone app takes advantage of parents' fondness for snapping pictures of their children to look for signs that a child might be developing a serious eye disease. The app is the culmination of one father's the five-year quest to find a way to catch the earliest signs of eye disease, and prevent devastating loss of vision. Five years ago, NPR reported the story of Bryan Shaw's son Noah, and how he lost an eye to cancer. Doctors diagnosed Noah Shaw's retinoblastoma when he was 4 months old. To make the diagnosis, the doctors shined a light into Noah's eye, and got a pale reflection from the back of the eyeball, an indication that there were tumors there. Noah's father Bryan is a scientist. He wondered if he could see that same pale reflection in flash pictures his wife was always taking of his baby son. Sure enough, he saw the reflection or glow, which doctors call "white eye," in a picture taken right after Noah was born. "We had white eye showing up in pictures at 12 days old," Shaw said at the time, months before his ultimate diagnosis Shaw is a chemist, not an eye doctor nor a computer scientist, but he decided to create software that could scan photos for signs of this reflection. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 26679 - Posted: 10.08.2019

Patricia Churchland Three myths about morality remain alluring: only humans act on moral emotions, moral precepts are divine in origin, and learning to behave morally goes against our thoroughly selfish nature. Converging data from many sciences, including ethology, anthropology, genetics, and neuroscience, have challenged all three of these myths. First, self-sacrifice, given the pressing needs of close kin or conspecifics to whom they are attached, has been documented in many mammalian species—wolves, marmosets, dolphins, and even rodents. Birds display it too. In sharp contrast, reptiles show no hint of this impulse. Second, until very recently, hominins lived in small groups with robust social practices fostering well-being and survival in a wide range of ecologies. The idea of a divine lawgiver likely played no part in their moral practices for some two million years, emerging only with the advent of agriculture and larger communities where not everyone knew everyone else. The divine lawgiver idea is still absent from some large-scale religions, such as Confucianism and Buddhism. Third, it is part of our genetic heritage to care for kith and kin. Although self-sacrifice is common in termites and bees, the altruistic behavior of mammals and birds is vastly more flexible, variable, and farsighted. Attachment to others, mediated by powerful brain hormones, is the biological platform for morality. © 1986–2019 The Scientist.

Keyword: Consciousness; Emotions
Link ID: 26678 - Posted: 10.08.2019

By Nicholas Bakalar During pregnancy, sleeping on your back may be a bad idea. Previous studies have found that sleeping in a supine position causes compression of veins and arteries that can lead to a reduction in blood flow to the placenta severe enough to double the risk for stillbirth after 28 weeks of gestation. Now a new study, in JAMA Network Open, concludes that supine sleeping is also associated with low birth weight in full-term babies. Of 1,760 pregnant women in the analysis, 57 went to sleep lying on their backs. (The initial sleep position is the one maintained for the longest time during the night.) After controlling for age, body mass index, previous pregnancies, hypertension, diabetes and other factors, they found that compared with those sleeping in other positions, women who slept on their backs had babies who were three times as likely to be in the lowest 10th percentile for birth weight. “It’s a small number of pregnant women who go to sleep on their backs — only about 3 percent,” said the lead author, Dr. Ngaire H. Anderson, a senior lecturer in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Auckland. “But we are keen to encourage the message that sleeping on one’s side is a way to optimize the baby’s health, both in reducing stillbirth and optimizing the baby’s growth.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26677 - Posted: 10.08.2019

By Jason Gutierrez MANILA — President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines has revealed that he has a neuromuscular disease that has led to a slew of medical problems, including making his eye droop. Mr. Duterte, who was in Russia for a state visit, told the Filipino community there on Saturday night that he has myasthenia gravis, a chronic autoimmune disease that leads to skeletal muscle weakness. He said the disease ran in his family. The revelation came amid continued public speculation about his health. There have been periods when the famously bombastic president has been out of the public eye for days, prompting headlines guessing about his whereabouts, and even rumors of his death. But his communications officers have said that Mr. Duterte, 74, like any other older person, needs his own personal time. The president revealed the ailment after he apparently made a joke about not being able to look straight at a woman with whom he had danced a duet during the event in Moscow. “I have a talent,” Mr. Duterte said, according to official transcripts provided by his office afterward. “When I look at you, my other eye droops. Do you see? The other eye is smaller. It goes where it wants.” He added: “Actually, that’s myasthenia gravis. It’s a nerve malfunction.” Mr. Duterte said his grandfather had also had the disease, adding, “So I believe, really, in genetics.” The disease often affects the muscles that control the eyes, facial expression, speaking and swallowing, according to the Philippine Medical Association. Mr. Duterte came to power in 2016 vowing to rid the country of drug dealers and to wipe out other crimes. Since then, the Philippines’ war on drugs has led to thousands of killings allegedly by the police and vigilantes, which rights groups have denounced as an atrocity. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 26676 - Posted: 10.07.2019

By Eva Frederick Yellow is usually the color of happy, joyful emotions. But according to a new study, not all people associate the sunshiney shade with good vibes. To find out what factors might play a role, researchers tested a new hypothesis: What if people’s physical surroundings affect their feelings about certain colors? For instance, if someone lived in cold and rainy Finland, would they feel differently about the color yellow from someone who lived near the Sahara Desert? The researchers looked at color-emotion data from an ongoing international survey of 6625 people in 55 countries. The survey asks participants to rate 12 colors on how closely they are associated with feelings including joy, pride, fear, and shame. Yellow is not so fun in the sun The darker the shade in the below map, the higher the likelihood of people associating the color yellow with joyful emotions. Overall, people were more likely to associate yellow with joy when they lived in rainier countries that lay farther from the equator, researchers report in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 26675 - Posted: 10.07.2019

By Jane E. Brody My grandson Stefan was about 8 years old when he began to get migraine headaches. As soon as he could after getting home from school, he would lie down and go to sleep, awakening an hour or two later, usually with the headache gone. But before the pain abated, he sometimes vomited, prompting him and his relatives to keep barf bags handy at all times. Then as Stefan approached puberty, these debilitating headaches stopped as mysteriously as they had begun. Though Stefan’s headaches were disruptive and disabling, he was luckier than his grandma. My migraine attacks (misdiagnosed as sinus headaches) began around puberty, usually occurred three times a month, each lasting for three days, and didn’t end until menopause. Even though sleep can often terminate a migraine attack, nothing I tried brought relief, and there were no prescription medications at the time to treat or prevent them. Attention parents, teachers, coaches, doctors and anyone else who interacts with children and teens: Too often, adults tell them to “suck it up, it’s just a headache.” A migraine is not “just a headache,” nor is it something they can ignore. A migraine makes you feel sick all over, often acutely sensitive to light and noise, nauseated and unable to concentrate on anything but the desire for relief. Very young children with migraine may be spared the head pain and instead get only gastrointestinal symptoms like vomiting and stomach pain. Migraine is a disease with a genetic component and often runs in families. The pounding, nauseating headache is a symptom of that disease. Before puberty, the disorder affects boys and girls equally, but after puberty, when testosterone kicks in to suppress migraine attacks in boys, the incidence among girls becomes very much higher. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26674 - Posted: 10.07.2019

By Benedict Carey For more than a decade, doctors have been using brain-stimulating implants to treat severe depression in people who do not benefit from medication, talk therapy or electroshock sessions. The treatment is controversial — any psychosurgery is, given its checkered history — and the results have been mixed. Two major trials testing stimulating implant for depression were halted because of disappointing results, and the approach is not approved by federal health regulators. Now, a team of psychiatric researchers has published the first long-term results, reporting Friday on patients who had stimulating electrodes implanted as long ago as eight years. The individuals have generally fared well, maintaining their initial improvements. The study, appearing in the American Journal of Psychiatry, was small, with just 28 subjects. Even still, experts said the findings were likely to extend interest in a field that has struggled. “The most impressive thing here is the sustained response,” Dr. Darin Dougherty, director of neurotherapeutics at Massachusetts General Hospital, said. “You do not see that for anything in this severe depression. The fact that they had this many people doing well for that long, that’s a big deal.” The implant treatment is known as deep brain stimulation, or D.B.S., and doctors have performed it for decades to help people control the tremors of Parkinson’s disease. In treating depression, surgeons thread an electrode into an area of the brain that sits beneath the crown of the head and is known to be especially active in people with severe depression. Running electrical current into that region, known as Brodmann Area 25, effectively shuts down its activity, resulting in relief of depression symptoms in many patients. The electrode is connected to a battery that is embedded in the chest. The procedure involves a single surgery; the implant provides continuous current from then on. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26673 - Posted: 10.04.2019

By Laura Sanders A sleeping rat may look peaceful. But inside its furry, still head, a war is raging. Two types of brain waves battle over whether the rat will remember new information, or forget it, researchers report October 3 in Cell. Details of this previously hidden clash may ultimately help explain how some memories get etched into the sleeping brain, while others are scrubbed clean. By distinguishing between these dueling brain waves, the new study helps reconcile some seemingly contradictory ideas, including how memories can be strengthened (SN: 6/5/14) and weakened during the same stage of sleep (SN: 6/23/11). “It will help unite the field of sleep and learning, because everyone gets to be right,” says neuroscientist Gina Poe of the University of California, Los Angeles, who wasn’t involved in the study. Researchers led by neuroscientist and neurologist Karunesh Ganguly of the University of California, San Francisco, have been teaching rats to control a mechanical water spout with nothing but their neural activity. The team soon realized that the rats’ success with these brain-computer interfaces depended heavily on something that came after the training: sleep. To study how the new learning was strengthened during snoozing, Ganguly and his team monitored the brains of sleeping rats after they practiced moving the spout. The scientists focused on brain waves that wash over the motor cortex, the part of the brain that was controlling the external water spout, during non-REM sleep. That stage of sleep usually makes up more than half of an adult human’s night. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019.

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 26672 - Posted: 10.04.2019

Ariana Eunjung Cha After Danielle Rizzo’s first son and then her second were diagnosed with autism, she has struggled with the how and why. She wondered whether she could have prevented the condition in her second child by putting him on a gluten-free and casein-free diet. Did she have her children, born 14 months apart, too close together? She even held off on vaccinating her younger son before he, too, was diagnosed not long after the first. (The supposed link between vaccines and autism has been debunked by extensive research. The American Academy of Pediatrics; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and other medical groups have compiled some of the many scientific papers.) Rizzo came to suspect a genetic link involving the sperm donor for both children, after finding several other children conceived with the same donor’s sperm who have also been diagnosed with autism or related developmental challenges. A geneticist with expertise in autism identified possible autism-risk genes carried by the children. Her story, in a report published by The Washington Post on Sept. 14, prompted an outpouring of comments and questions — legal, scientific and ethical — about her case. While there is no central database of donors and their children in the United States, some sperm banks try to mitigate risks of donors passing on genetic conditions by testing them for up to 400 common heritable conditions. However, genetic testing is not required and is by no means comprehensive, as evident by the case studies reported in medical journals regularly.

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 26671 - Posted: 10.04.2019

By James Gallagher Health and science correspondent A man has been able to move all four of his paralysed limbs with a mind-controlled exoskeleton suit, French researchers report. Thibault, 30, said taking his first steps in the suit felt like being the "first man on the Moon". His movements, particularly walking, are far from perfect and the robo-suit is being used only in the lab. But researchers say the approach could one day improve patients' quality of life. And he can control each of the arms, manoeuvring them in three-dimensional space How easy was it to use? Thibault, who does not want his surname revealed, was an optician before he fell 15m in an incident at a night club four years ago. The injury to his spinal cord left him paralysed and he spent the next two years in hospital. But in 2017, he took part in the exoskeleton trial with Clinatec and the University of Grenoble. Initially he practised using the brain implants to control a virtual character, or avatar, in a computer game, then he moved on to walking in the suit. "It was like [being the] first man on the Moon. I didn't walk for two years. I forgot what it is to stand, I forgot I was taller than a lot of people in the room," he said. It took a lot longer to learn how to control the arms. © 2019 BBC.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 26670 - Posted: 10.04.2019