By Richard C. Paddock CIDAHU, Indonesia — Thousands of children with crippling birth defects. Half a million people poisoned. A toxic chemical found in the food supply. Accusations of a government cover-up and police officers on the take. This is the legacy of Indonesia’s mercury trade, a business intertwined with the lucrative and illegal production of gold. More than a hundred nations have joined a global campaign to reduce the international trade in mercury, an element so toxic there is “no known safe level of exposure,” according to health experts. But that effort has backfired in Indonesia, where illicit backyard manufacturers have sprung up to supply wildcat miners and replace mercury that was previously imported from abroad. Now, Indonesia produces so much black-market mercury that it has become a major global supplier, surreptitiously shipping thousands of tons to other parts of the world. Much of the mercury is destined for use in gold mining in Africa and Asia, passing through hubs such as Dubai and Singapore, according to court records — and the trade has deadly consequences. “It is a public health crisis,” said Yuyun Ismawati, a co-founder of an Indonesian environmental group, Nexus3 Foundation, and a recipient of the 2009 Goldman Environmental Prize. She has called for a worldwide ban on using mercury in gold mining. Mercury can be highly dangerous as it accumulates up the food chain, causing a wide range of disorders, including birth defects, neurological problems and even death. ImageA small mine on Sumbawa. Miners often dig for ore on land without permission or government permits. Today, despite the risks, small-scale miners using mercury operate in about 80 countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas. They produce up to 25 percent of all gold sold. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 26809 - Posted: 11.11.2019

By Denise Grady A form of vitamin E has been identified as a “very strong culprit” in lung injuries related to vaping THC, health officials reported on Friday, a major advance in a frightening outbreak that has killed 40 people and sickened 2,051. Many patients with the mysterious illness have wound up hospitalized in intensive care units, needing ventilators or even more desperate measures to help them breathe. Most are young, male adults or even teenagers. “For the first time, we have detected a potential toxin of concern, vitamin E acetate, from biological samples from patients,” with lung damage linked to vaping, Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a news briefing. The new report, based on samples taken from the lungs of 29 patients, including two who died, she said, “provided evidence of vitamin E acetate at the primary site of injury in the lungs.” She added, “These findings tell us what entered the lungs of some patients with these injuries.” The patients came from 10 states scattered around the country, so the findings are considered broadly applicable and unlikely to have resulted from a single vaping product or supplier. The results mesh with other research that found the vitamin compound in vaping products. But Dr. Schuchat left open the possibility that other chemicals or toxins from vaping fluids or devices could also be causing the severe respiratory ailments. The outbreak has revealed the existence of a vast, unregulated, shadowy marketplace of illicit or bootleg vaping products that are essentially a stew of unknown chemicals concocted, packed and sold by unknown manufacturers and sellers. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 26808 - Posted: 11.09.2019

Adam Miller · CBC News · New research is shedding light on how the brain interacts with music. It also highlights how challenging it is to study the issue effectively due to the highly personalized nature of how we interpret it. "Music is very subjective," says Dr. Daniel Levitin, a professor of neuroscience and music at McGill University in Montreal and author of the bestselling book This is Your Brain on Music. "People have their own preferences and their own experience and to some extent baggage that they bring to all of this — it is challenging." Levitin says there are more researchers studying the neurological effects of music now than ever before. From 1998 to 2008 there were only four media reports of evidence-based uses of music in research, while from 2009 to 2019 there were 185, Levitin said in a recent paper for the journal Music and Medicine. It's a "great time for music and brain research" because more people are well-trained and skilled at conducting rigorous experiments, according to Levitin. Emerging research reveals challenges A new study by researchers in Germany and Norway used artificial intelligence to analyze levels of "uncertainty" and "surprise" in 80,000 chords from 745 commercially successful pop songs on the U.S. Billboard charts. The research, published Thursday in Current Biology, found that chords provided more pleasure to the listener both when there is uncertainty in anticipating what comes next, and from the surprise the music elicits when the chords deviate from expectations. ©2019 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 26807 - Posted: 11.09.2019

New preclinical research reported in animal models shows that exposure to compounds found in marijuana called cannabinoids (CBs), which includes cannabidiol (CBD) and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), during early pregnancy can cause malformations in the developing embryo. The research also demonstrated that co-exposure to CBs and alcohol increased the likelihood of birth defects involving the face and brain. The study, funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health, was published in Scientific Reports. “Prenatal alcohol exposure is a leading preventable cause of birth defects and neurodevelopmental abnormalities in the United States,” said NIAAA Director, George F. Koob, Ph.D. “Since marijuana and alcohol are frequently used simultaneously, the combined effects of cannabinoids and alcohol are worrisome as well as the dangers of either substance alone.” The detrimental effects of prenatal alcohol exposure on human development are well known and include an array of lifelong physical, cognitive, and behavioral problems collectively called fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD). Alcohol can disrupt fetal development at any stage during pregnancy, even the earliest stages before a woman knows she is pregnant. The effects of marijuana exposure during pregnancy and the combined effect of alcohol and marijuana are less known. In the study, scientists led by Scott Parnell, Ph.D., at the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, administered a variety of CBs alone and in combination with alcohol in varying amounts to mice on day eight of pregnancy, which is similar to the third and fourth weeks of pregnancy in humans. The CBD amounts administered were within what is considered a therapeutic range for several medical conditions in humans. The THC concentration administered was similar to levels reached by a person smoking marijuana.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26806 - Posted: 11.09.2019

By Jake Buehler Tetrodotoxin, the chemical weapon of choice for pufferfish, is such a potent neurotoxin that a single animal contains enough poison to paralyze and kill dozens of predators, and even adult humans who dare to eat their delicate flesh. But new research suggests the poison serves another purpose for the fish entirely: stress relief. Japanese, or tiger, puffers (Takifugu rubripes) don’t make their own tetrodotoxin (TTX), but instead accumulate it in their organs and skin from TTX-making bacteria in their diet. Those raised in captivity tend to have different diets and, thus, lose their toxicity. To find out how the toxin affects developing fish, researchers augmented the diets of young, captive puffers with a dosage of purified TTX for 1 month. Puffers with replenished toxin stores grew a median of 6% longer and 24% heavier than those raised on a nontoxic diet. They were also less aggressive, nipping at each other’s tail fins less frequently. Growth rate and aggression are influenced by stress, so researchers also looked at levels of two stress-linked hormones: cortisol in the blood and corticotropin-releasing hormone in the brain. The nontoxic fish had higher levels of both, with a median level of cortisol four times that of the toxic fish, the researchers report online in Toxicon. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 26805 - Posted: 11.09.2019

By Tina Hesman Saey A newly discovered type of mitochondrial self-destruction may make some brain cells vulnerable to ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. In mice genetically engineered to develop some forms of a degenerative nerve disease similar to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, energy-generating organelles called mitochondria appear to dismantle themselves without help from usual cell demolition crews. This type of power plant self-destruction was spotted in upper motor neurons, brain nerve cells that help initiate and control movements, but not in neighboring cells, researchers report November 7 in Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience. Death of those upper motor neurons is a hallmark of ALS, and the self-destructing mitochondria may be an early step that sets those cells up to die later. Pembe Hande Özdinler, a cellular neuroscientist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, and her colleagues have dubbed the mitochondrial dissolution “mitoautophagy.” It is a distinct process from mitophagy, the usual way that cellular structures called autophagosomes and lysosomes remove damaged mitochondria from the cell, Özdinler says. Usually, clearing out old or damaged mitochondria is important for cells to stay healthy. When mitochondria sustain too much damage, they may trigger the programmed death of the entire cell, known as apoptosis (SN: 8/9/18). Özdinler’s team spotted what she describes as “awkward” mitochondria in electron microscope images of upper motor neurons from 15-day-old mice. These unweaned mice are equivalent to human teenagers, Özdinler says. ALS typically doesn’t strike until people are 40 to 70 years old. But by the time symptoms appear, motor neurons are already damaged, so Özdinler’s group looked at the young mice to capture the earliest signs of the disease. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 26804 - Posted: 11.08.2019

Jon Hamilton There's new evidence that girls start out with the same math abilities as boys. A study of 104 children from ages 3 to 10 found similar patterns of brain activity in boys and girls as they engaged in basic math tasks, researchers reported Friday in the journal Science of Learning. "They are indistinguishable," says Jessica Cantlon, an author of the study and professor of developmental neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University. The finding challenges the idea that more boys than girls end up in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) because they are inherently better at the sort of thinking those fields require. It also backs other studies that found similar math abilities in males and females early in life. "The results of this study are not too surprising because typically we don't see sex differences at the ages assessed in this study or for the types of math tasks they did, which were fairly simple," says David Geary, a psychologist and curator's distinguished professor at the University of Missouri who was not involved in the research. But there is evidence of sex differences in some exceptional older students, Geary says. For example, boys outnumber girls by about three to one when researchers identify adolescents who achieve "very, very high-end performance in mathematics," Geary says, adding that scientists are still trying to understand why that gap exists. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 26803 - Posted: 11.08.2019

By Dan Falk At the moment, you’re reading these words and, presumably, thinking about what the words and sentences mean. Or perhaps your mind has wandered, and you’re thinking about dinner, or looking forward to bingeing the latest season of “The Good Place.” But you’re definitely experiencing something. How is that possible? Every part of you, including your brain, is made of atoms, and each atom is as lifeless as the next. Your atoms certainly don’t know or feel or experience anything, and yet you — a conglomeration of such atoms — have a rich mental life in which a parade of experiences unfolds one after another. The puzzle of consciousness has, of course, occupied the greatest minds for millennia. The philosopher David Chalmers has called the central mystery the “hard problem” of consciousness. Why, he asks, does looking at a red apple produce the experience of seeing red? And more generally: Why do certain arrangements of matter experience anything? Anyone who has followed the recent debates over the nature of consciousness will have been struck by the sheer variety of explanations on offer. Many prominent neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, and physicists have put forward “solutions” to the puzzle — all of them wildly different from, and frequently contradicting, each other. “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26802 - Posted: 11.08.2019

Sean McMinn Three years ago, only about one in ten high school students reported having recently used e-cigarettes. But a study published this week in JAMA shows the proportion of students vaping nicotine has now grown to more than one in four. Researchers from the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed data from the 2019 National Youth Tobacco Survey, which is conducted annually. They drilled down on e-cigarette use among high school and middle school students based on data from 19,000 students in the eighth, tenth and twelfth grades. Teen nicotine vaping has become so prevalent in recent years that the Food and Drug Administration has called it an "epidemic." An estimated 5.3 million teens use e-cigarettes, according to the study. It is illegal in all states for people under 18 to purchase e-cigarettes, and some states have raised that age to 21. Despite this and recent efforts to crack down on retailers selling to youth, rates of teen vaping have continued to rise. "For young people, this is of particular concern," the study's authors wrote, "because it could promote ... nicotine dependence, making it easier to initiate and proceed to regular e-cigarette use or transition to cigarette or other combustible tobacco product use." Students who took the survey, however, didn't appear to have moved on to traditional cigarettes yet. Just 6% of high schoolers reported having smoked a cigarette in the last month — a decrease from last year's survey. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26801 - Posted: 11.08.2019

By Sofie Bates Some people may be able to smell even without key structures that relay odor information from the nose to the brain. Researchers used brain scans to identify two women who appear to be missing their olfactory bulbs, the only parts of the brain known to receive signals about smell sensations from the nose and send them to other parts of the brain for processing. Both individuals performed similarly to other women with olfactory bulbs on several tests to identify and differentiate odors, the scientists report November 6 in Neuron. The findings challenge conventional views of the olfactory system, and may lead to treatments for people with no sense of smell (SN: 7/2/07). “I’m not sure that our textbook view of how the [olfactory] system works is right,” says Noam Sobel, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. MRI scans of the women’s brains revealed that where most people have two olfactory bulbs, these two appeared to have cerebrospinal fluid instead. To the researchers, this indicated that the women didn’t have olfactory bulbs. But Jay Gottfried, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study, says “I am not convinced that the women are indeed missing their bulbs.” Some evidence for olfactory bulbs may be undetectable with MRI, like microscopic structures or olfactory tissue that could be found with antibodies, he says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 26800 - Posted: 11.07.2019

By Sara Manning Peskin, M.D. At 66, Bob Karger was losing language. It was not the tip-of-the-tongue feeling that melts when you recall a sought-after word. He had lost the connection between sounds and meaning — the way ba-na-na recalls a soft, yellow fruit or ea-gle calls to mind a large bird of prey. In a recent conversation, he had thought acorns grew on pine trees. Mr. Karger did not know how to use items around the house, either. When he picked up a can opener, he would not realize it could remove the top from a tin. If he held a hammer, he might grasp it by the head, turning it around in his palm, not knowing he could swing it into a nail. His world was filled with incomprehensible items. His wife, Sandy Karger, noticed other changes. When she told her husband about a family member who died, Mr. Karger laughed instead of comforting her. He tipped excessively, slipping $20 bills to strangers, because they reminded him of close friends. He fixated on obese people. “Look at that person, they’re really fat,” he would say loudly, in public. Overcome by impatience, he would push people ahead of him in line at the store. “Can’t you hurry up?” he’d yell. “Do you really need to buy that?” In other ways, Mr. Karger’s mind was as sharp as it had ever been. He could remember upcoming appointments and recent dinners. He didn’t repeat himself in conversation. His long-term memory was at times better than Ms. Karger’s. After two years of worsening symptoms, the Kargers found Dr. Murray Grossman at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Grossman is short and charismatic, a quick-witted Montreal native who has mentored me since I began training in neurology. For the past several decades, he has pioneered research on neurodegenerative diseases that change behavior and language. When he saw Mr. Karger in 2007, the diagnosis was clear within the hour: Mr. Karger had a type of frontotemporal dementia. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 26799 - Posted: 11.07.2019

Lenny Bernstein A surgeon has implanted electrodes in the brain of a patient suffering from severe opioid use disorder, hoping to cure the man’s in­trac­table craving for drugs in the first such procedure performed in the United States. The device, known as a deep brain stimulator, is designed to alter the function of circuits in the man’s brain. It has been used with varying degrees of success in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, dystonia, epilepsy, obsessive-compulsive disorder and even depression. It is seen as a last-resort therapy after the failure of standard care, such as medication that reduces the craving for drugs. The deep brain stimulator, which functions much like a heart pacemaker, was implanted by Ali Rezai, executive chairman of the West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute. His patient, 33-year-old hotel worker Gerod Buckhalter, said he had been unable to remain sober for more than four months since the age of 15, despite trying a variety of medications and other inpatient and outpatient treatments. Buckhalter is the first of four people in a pilot program, which aims to demonstrate that the technique is safe so that a full-scale clinical trial can be conducted. It is aimed at a small percentage of opioid abusers with the most treatment-resistant cravings for opioids, who may face a lifetime of overdoses, relapses, inability to hold a job and other consequences of addiction.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26798 - Posted: 11.07.2019

Maheen Mausoof Adamson, Ph.D. The 1982 science fiction film classic Blade Runner is a gritty detective story set in the dystopian future that raises questions about what it means to be human. In the film, Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckard, a police officer turned bounty hunter searching the streets of Los Angeles for a replicant (human-like androids) rebellion leader Roy Batty. Batty is presented as a technologically perfected being fitted with a human-template brain completely rewired to create an enemy to be deathly feared. Fear of the perfect altered brain is prominent in science fiction—and may be particularly prevalent today, amid growing concerns about genetic editing and artificial intelligence. The prospect of a fully artificial human brain remains very distant. However, we are in the midst of a neuromodulation revolution that will increase our ability to treat disease and optimize human performance. We must, however, carefully consider the benefits and risks of these techniques in fully evaluating their potential for society as well as the individual. A large number of patients suffering from neurological or psychiatric disorders—depression, pain, and post-traumatic stress disorder among them—are resistant to or can develop resistance to standard medication and psychotherapy, suggesting the need for new approaches. Neuromodulation may possibly be such an approach. The term (aka neurostimulation) refers to direct stimulation and modification of the nervous system through the use of electrical, chemical, or mechanical signals. Neuromodulation therapy is already used to treat many brain disorders, most commonly movement disorders, chronic pain, and depression. © 2019 The Dana Foundation.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Depression
Link ID: 26797 - Posted: 11.07.2019

By Eva Frederick Few things are more adorable—or destructive—than a new puppy. When they pee on rugs, chew furniture, and get aggressive with other pups, their stressed-out owners usually turn to dog training. Now, a novel study suggests programs that use even relatively mild punishments like yelling and leash-jerking can stress dogs out, making them more “pessimistic” than dogs that experience reward-based training. “[Punishment] training may seem to work in the short run … but these methods can have future negative consequences,” says Marc Bekoff, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder who was not involved in the new study. “[These dogs are] living in perpetual stress.” Previous studies have suggested that although both reward-based and punishment-based training methods are effective, punishment-based training can have negative effects. But those studies tend to focus on police and laboratory dogs instead of family pets, and most used shock collars, which have been banned in several countries, as punishment. To find out how companion dogs react to more routine punishments, scientists led by Ana Catarina Vieira de Castro at the University of Porto in Portugal recruited 42 dogs from reward-based training schools, which use food or play to encourage good behaviors. The team also enlisted 50 dogs from aversive-based programs, which use negative reinforcement like yelling and leash jerking to train dogs, or even pressuring their rumps to get them to sit. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 26796 - Posted: 11.07.2019

By Andrew Joseph, STAT Chinese regulators have granted conditional approval to an Alzheimer’s drug that is derived from seaweed, potentially shaking up the field after years of clinical failures involving experimental therapies from major drug companies. The announcement over the weekend has been met with caution as well as an eagerness from clinicians and others to see full data from the drug maker, Shanghai Green Valley Pharmaceuticals. The company said its drug, Oligomannate, improved cognitive function in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s compared to placebo in a Phase 3 trial, with benefits seen in patients as early as week four and persisting throughout the 36 weeks of the trial. It has been almost two decades since any Alzheimer’s drug was approved. Oligomannate has received scant attention in the United States during its development. Advertisement Although full data on the drug have not yet been made available, the conditional approval by regulators means Oligomannate, also known as GV-971, will on the market in China by the end of the year, Green Valley said. The company will have to submit additional research on the mechanism of the drug and its long-term safety and effectiveness to the country’s National Medical Products Administration, Reuters reported. Green Valley also said it would launch a global Phase 3 trial next year in hopes of filing for approval in other countries as well. “It’s good to see that drug regulators in China are prioritizing emerging treatments for Alzheimer’s, but we do still need to see more evidence that this drug is safe and effective,” Carol Routledge, the director of research at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said in a statement. “For any potential drug to gain a stamp of approval by regulators in the UK, we’ll need to see larger trials in countries around the world to back up the evidence from China.” © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26795 - Posted: 11.06.2019

By Gretchen Reynolds Being physically fit may sharpen the memory and lower our risk of dementia, even if we do not start exercising until we are middle-aged or older, according to two stirring new studies of the interplay between exercise, aging, aerobic fitness and forgetting. But both studies, while underscoring the importance of activity for brain health, also suggest that some types of exercise may be better than others at safeguarding and even enhancing our memory. The scientific evidence linking exercise, fitness and brain health is already hefty and growing. Multiple studies have found that people with relatively high levels of endurance, whatever their age, tend to perform better on tests of thinking and memory than people who are out of shape. Other studies associate better fitness with less risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease. But many of these studies have been one-time snapshots of people’s lives and did not delve into whether and how changing fitness over time might alter people’s memory skills or dementia risk. They did not, in other words, tell us whether, by midlife or retirement age, it might be too late to improve our brain health with exercise. So, for the first of the new studies, which was published this month in The Lancet Public Health, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, helpfully decided to look into that very issue, taking advantage of the reams of health data available on average Norwegians. They began by turning to records from a large-scale health study that had enrolled almost every adult resident in the region around Trondheim beginning in the 1980s. The participants completed health and medical testing twice, about 10 years apart, that included estimates of their aerobic fitness. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26794 - Posted: 11.06.2019

By Erica Tennenhouse Live in the urban jungle long enough, and you might start to see things—in particular humanmade objects like cars and furniture. That’s what researchers found when they melded photos of artificial items with images of animals and asked 20 volunteers what they saw. The people, all of whom lived in cities, overwhelmingly noticed the manufactured objects whereas the animals faded into the background. To find out whether built environments can alter peoples’ perception, the researchers gathered hundreds of photos of animals and artificial objects such as bicycles, laptops, or benches. Then, they superimposed them to create hybrid images—like a horse combined with a table (above, top left) or a rhinoceros combined with a car (above, bottom right). As volunteers watched the hybrids flash by on a screen, they categorized each as a small animal, a big animal, a small humanmade object, or a big humanmade object. Overall, volunteers showed a clear bias toward the humanmade objects, especially when they were big, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The bias itself was a measure of how much the researchers had to visually “amp up” an image before participants saw it instead of its partner image. That bias suggests people’s perceptions are fundamentally altered by their environments, the researchers say. Humans often rely on past experiences to process new information—the classic example is mistaking a snake for a garden hose. But in this case, living in industrialized nations—where you are exposed to fewer “natural” objects—could change the way you view the world. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 26793 - Posted: 11.06.2019

By Pam Belluck The woman’s genetic profile showed she would develop Alzheimer’s by the time she turned 50. She, like thousands of her relatives, going back generations, was born with a gene mutation that causes people to begin having memory and thinking problems in their 40s and deteriorate rapidly toward death around age 60. But remarkably, she experienced no cognitive decline at all until her 70s, nearly three decades later than expected. How did that happen? New research provides an answer, one that experts say could change the scientific understanding of Alzheimer’s disease and inspire new ideas about how to prevent and treat it. In a study published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, researchers say the woman, whose name they withheld to protect her privacy, has another mutation that has protected her from dementia even though her brain has developed a major neurological feature of Alzheimer’s disease. This ultra rare mutation appears to help stave off the disease by minimizing the binding of a particular sugar compound to an important gene. That finding suggests that treatments could be developed to give other people that same protective mechanism. “I’m very excited to see this new study come out — the impact is dramatic,” said Dr. Yadong Huang, a senior investigator at Gladstone Institutes, who was not involved in the research. “For both research and therapeutic development, this new finding is very important.” A drug or gene therapy would not be available any time soon because scientists first need to replicate the protective mechanism found in this one patient by testing it in laboratory animals and human brain cells. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 26792 - Posted: 11.05.2019

Darian Woods Recently, Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy as part of a tentative multi-billion dollar settlement with state and local governments over lawsuits alleging that the company misled doctors and the public about the addictive nature of their well-known painkiller, Oxycontin. But Purdue Pharma's story is part of a pattern that has repeated itself throughout the history of the opium trade. It's a pattern documented by the book Opium: How An Ancient Flower Shaped And Poisoned Our World by Dr. John H. Halpern and David Blistein. The cycle begins when an opium product proves devastating to users. Innovators come along, promising a safer alternative, and virtually every time, they downplay the risks of addiction. Addiction ensues. Then come new innovators, promising something better and less addictive, and the cycle continues. This cycle, Halpern and Blistein recount, goes all the way back to Ancient Greece. Aulus Cornelius Celsus was a doctor famous for writing one of the world's first medical encyclopedias, which included a recipe for opium pills. He recommended it for insomnia, bad headaches, and joint pain. It didn't turn out so well. Opium addiction spread, and its victims included Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Around 1000 AD, Persian physician Avicenna developed standard opium doses the size of chickpeas. Dose standardization helped prevent overdoses but opium addiction rose in Persia over the following centuries. Avicenna himself died of an opium overdose. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26791 - Posted: 11.05.2019

By David Z. Hambrick, Daisuke S. Katsumata Disagreements are virtually inevitable in a romantic relationship. More than 90 percent of couples argue, according to a survey by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, with nearly half quarreling at least once a month. Common topics of marital disagreement are money, sex and time spent together. None of this will surprise anyone who has been in a long-term relationship. But a new study indicates that a cognitive ability may help to explain why some couples are more successful in resolving their differences. University of North Carolina Greensboro psychologist Levi Baker and his colleagues report that spouses who were high in working memory capacity had better memory for each other’s statements in discussions about problems. In turn, these couples showed greater progress in resolving their problems over time. The study suggests that it’s not just dogged commitment that gets couples through rough spots, but a cognitive factor that directly affects the quality of partners’ communication with each other. The sample included 101 couples (93 heterosexual, 7 lesbian and 1 gay) that had been married for less than three months. Working individually, the newlyweds first completed tests of working memory capacity, which is the ability to hold information in the focus of attention over a short period, as when following what someone is saying to you in a conversation. In one of the tests used by Baker and his colleagues, called “operation span,” the test-taker sees an arithmetic problem on the screen and attempts to solve it, after which a letter appears. After some number of these trials, the person is prompted to recall the letters in the order in which they were presented. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Intelligence
Link ID: 26790 - Posted: 11.05.2019