By Elizabeth Preston A pack of baldheaded, boldly plumaged birds steps through the grass shoulder to shoulder, red eyes darting around. They look like middle schoolers seeking a cafeteria table at lunchtime. Perhaps they’re not so different. A study published Monday in Current Biology shows that the vulturine guineafowl of eastern Africa, like humans, have many-layered societies. In the past, scientists hypothesized that such social structures require a lot of brainpower. But the pea-brained guineafowl are revealing the flaws in that assumption. Damien Farine, who led the research and is an ornithologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior who studies collective behavior, first worked in Kenya during his postdoctoral research on baboon societies. Baboons are a model for researchers trying to understand how human society evolved. Some kinds of baboons live in groups within groups, a structure that’s called a multilevel society. “Humans are the classic multilevel society,” Dr. Farine said. Imagine a human family living in a village: The family might be friendly with other families within the village, which in turn might have ties to neighboring villages, and so on. “People have long hypothesized that living in complex society is one of the reasons why we’ve evolved such large brains,” Dr. Farine said. Researchers have found evidence for multilevel societies in some other large-brained mammals, such as monkeys, elephants, giraffes and sperm whales. But as Dr. Farine studied baboons, he also watched the vulturine guineafowl wandering around his study site. “I was really struck by the social behavior that they exhibited,” he said. These hefty birds can fly, but rarely choose to. Instead, they stroll across the landscape in packs, often walking so closely that their bodies touch. They may chase each other or fight to maintain their strict hierarchies. But at other times they engage in friendly behaviors like sharing food. Their groups are unusually large for birds, sometimes including 60 or more individuals. And while most other social birds are very territorial, Dr. Farine says, groups of vulturine guineafowl don’t mind sharing turf. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 26789 - Posted: 11.05.2019

By Christoph Droesser In 2004, a paper appeared in the journal Psychological Science, titled “Music Lessons Enhance IQ.” The author, composer and University of Toronto Mississauga psychologist Glenn Schellenberg, had conducted an experiment with 144 children randomly assigned to four groups: one learned the keyboard for a year, one took singing lessons, one joined an acting class, and a control group had no extracurricular training. The IQ of the children in the two musical groups rose by an average of seven points in the course of a year; those in the other two groups gained an average of 4.3 points. Schellenberg had long been skeptical of the science underpinning claims that music education enhances children’s abstract reasoning, math, or language skills. If children who play the piano are smarter, he says, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are smarter because they play the piano. It could be that the youngsters who play the piano also happen to be more ambitious or better at focusing on a task. Correlation, after all, does not prove causation. The 2004 paper was specifically designed to address those concerns. And as a passionate musician, Schellenberg was delighted when he turned up credible evidence that music has transfer effects on general intelligence. But nearly a decade later, in 2013, the Education Endowment Foundation funded a bigger study with more than 900 students. That study failed to corroborate Schellenberg’s findings, finding no evidence that music lessons improved math and literacy skills.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Intelligence
Link ID: 26788 - Posted: 11.04.2019

By Austin Frakt Daylight Saving Time ended on Sunday, and for many of us the extra hour of sleep has provided a small energy boost. It’s widely known that sleep affects our mood and health. Less understood is how it can also affect our paychecks. A study published last year in the Review of Economics and Statistics found that workers who live in locations where people get more sleep tend to earn more than those in areas where people get less. One theory: Better-rested workers are more productive and are compensated for it with additional income. “There are other explanations, but we consider them less likely,” said an author of the study, Matthew Gibson, an economist at Williams College. It’s not as if simply sleeping more will cause your boss to pay you more. In fact, if you get that extra sleep by being late for work, you might earn less or even lose your job. So how would the sleep-income relationship actually work? Studying the issue is complicated by reverse causality: Not only does sleep affect work, but work also affects sleep. On an individual level, people who work more, and earn more for it, often sleep less. Studies show that higher-income earners sleep less than lower-income ones. That could be because higher-income people are spending more time working, so they have less time for sleep. Additionally, working more is stressful, and stress disrupts sleep. But poor sleep contributes to stress, too. A study in Sleep Health found that a poorer night’s sleep is followed by more stress and distracting thoughts at work. Other studies also find that less and poorer sleep is associated with more conflict and stress the next day. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Stress
Link ID: 26787 - Posted: 11.04.2019

Kas Roussy · CBC News · At the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, Dr. Andrea Furlan, a pain specialist, is holding a regular meeting with some of her colleagues. Sitting around the table are physiotherapists, pharmacists, doctors and nurses. Other health-care professionals have joined in via teleconferencing. The discussion focuses on chronic pain and the role opioids have in treating the condition at a time when current prescribing guidelines in Canada advises doctors to put the prescription pad down. On a monitor, someone asks Furlan how she should start tapering her patient who is prescribed opioids. "Each patient is different," Furlan said. "I don't have a recipe for everyone. The patients are afraid of the pain getting worse. They are afraid of the withdrawal symptoms. You need to provide a lot of education." She also suggests exercise and physiotherapy — even diet and sleep can have an impact on chronic pain. One in five Canadians suffers from chronic pain (i.e., pain that is ongoing and lasts longer than six months like low back pain, nerve damage or arthritis). For these pain sufferers, opioids are a lifesaver. But access to the pain medication is getting harder because of doctors' concerns about addiction and abuse. More than 12,800 apparent opioid-related deaths occurred from January 2016 to March 2019, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada, the vast majority from illicit fentanyl use. "I have had patients referred to us because their doctors cut them from opioids," said Furlan. "That's ridiculous because they were not addicted. They were not having any complications. They were not on a high dose." ©2019 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26786 - Posted: 11.04.2019

Nicola Davis A potential route to reducing brain injury in premature babies has been found, say researchers who have discovered a way to tackle overactive immune cells in the brain. Microglia are a type of immune cell that play an important part in the building of a baby’s brain. However, if these cells go into overdrive as a result of inflammation – often because of a bacterial infection of the foetal membranes, a maternal infection or even sepsis after delivery of the baby – they can cause harm to the child’s brain. In particular, they can damage white matter, reducing the degree to which neurons are insulated and thereby affecting connectivity in the brain. It is thought that of the 15 million infants born before 37 weeks every year, up to 9 million are left with lifelong harm to the brain, sometimes resulting in conditions such as epilepsy or cerebral palsy. Now researchers say they have found a signalling pathway in these immune cells that is behind their transformation. “We have actually identified the immune switch that turns these immune cells in the developing brain from being helpful in building a brain and taking care of the brain to causing damage,” said Dr Bobbi Fleiss from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, a co-author of the study. What is more, the researchers say, it might even be possible to intervene and turn rogue microglia back into helpful workhorses. Writing in the journal Brain, Fleiss and colleagues reported how they took mouse pups just after birth and injected them with proteins that mimic an infection in the mother or foetus, inducing the transformation of microglia from helpful to harmful. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Glia
Link ID: 26785 - Posted: 11.02.2019

By Emily Eakin Ten years ago, Susannah Cahalan was hospitalized with mysterious and terrifying symptoms. She believed an army of bedbugs had invaded her apartment. She believed her father had tried to abduct her and kill his wife, her stepmother. She believed she could age people using just her mind. She couldn’t eat or sleep. She spoke in gibberish and slipped into a catatonic state. Had it not been for an ingenious doctor brought in to consult on her case, Cahalan might well have ended up in a psychiatric ward. Instead, as she recounted in “Brain on Fire,” her best-selling 2012 memoir about her ordeal, she was eventually found to have a rare — or at least newly discovered — neurological disease: anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. In plain English, Cahalan’s body was attacking her brain. She was only the 217th person in the world to be diagnosed with the disorder and among the first to receive the concoction of steroids, immunoglobulin infusions and plasmapheresis she credits for her recovery. Cahalan’s condition is what in medicine is called a “great pretender”: a disorder that mimics the symptoms of various disorders, confounding doctors and leading them astray. “The Great Pretender” also happens to be the title of Cahalan’s new book, which comes out on Tuesday. It, too, is a medical detective story, only this time at the heart of the mystery is not a patient or a disease but a member of the profession: David Rosenhan, a Stanford psychologist and the author of “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” a landmark 1973 study that, by questioning psychiatrists’ ability to diagnose mental illness, plunged the field into a crisis from which it has still not fully recovered. Cahalan, 34, learned about Rosenhan six years ago, while on tour for the paperback edition of “Brain on Fire.” She was inundated with letters, hundreds a week, from desperate patients and their families, convinced that they too might have a neurological condition masquerading as mental illness. She was haunted by the idea that sheer luck had allowed her to escape a similar fate. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 26784 - Posted: 11.02.2019

This is an excerpt from Second Opinion, a weekly roundup of eclectic and under-the-radar health and medical science news emailed to subscribers every Saturday morning. If you haven't subscribed yet, you can do that by clicking here. A review of 40 years' worth of studies suggests cannabis may not be effective in treating mental health disorders, but experts say that might have more to do with the lack of high-quality research than the drug itself. The review, published in Lancet Psychiatry this week, looked at 83 studies dating back to 1980 on cannabis and constituent cannabinoids as a treatment for depression, anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, Tourette syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder and psychosis. The study concluded there was "scarce evidence" to suggest cannabis, including active ingredients such as cannabinoids tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD), improves the symptoms of any of these conditions based on 3,513 participants. There was also "very low-quality evidence" that it leads to a "small improvement" in anxiety symptoms for individuals, but only in those with other medical conditions like chronic pain and multiple sclerosis. "There remains insufficient evidence to provide guidance on the use of cannabinoids for treating mental disorders," Prof. Michael Farrell, co-author of the report and director of the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre in New South Wales, Australia, said in an email. 'Risk of error' in research While experts say the review itself is credible, the decades-old research could be flawed due to a number of challenges — including the fact that cannabis is still illegal in much of the world, which has made securing funding for research challenging. "The research in these conditions, in general, have been hampered by, obviously, the illegality of these compounds and these products," said Dr. Peter Selby, chief of medicine in the psychiatry division of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. ©2019 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stress
Link ID: 26783 - Posted: 11.02.2019

By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online An infectious disease that can harm the brain and is spread to people by tick bites has been identified in ticks in the UK for the first time. Public Health England (PHE) says it has confirmed cases of tick-borne encephalitis virus in ticks from two parts of England - Thetford Forest and an area on the Hampshire-Dorset border. PHE says the risk to people is still "very low". It is monitoring the situation to check how common the infected ticks may be. What is it? A tick is a tiny, spider-like creature that lives in undergrowth and on animals, including deer and dogs. People who spend time walking in countryside areas where infected ticks can be found are at risk of being bitten and catching diseases they carry. Tick-borne encephalitis virus is already circulating in mainland Europe and Scandinavia, as well as Asia. Evidence now shows it has reached the UK. How it got here is less clear. Experts say infected ticks may have hitched a ride on migratory birds. Earlier this year, a European visitor, who has since recovered, became ill after being bitten by a tick while in the New Forest area, Public Health England says. Further investigations revealed infected ticks were present in two locations in England. Should I worry? Ticks are becoming more common across many parts of the UK, largely due to increasing deer numbers. Being bitten by one doesn't necessarily mean you will get sick. Dr Nick Phin, from Public Health England, said: ''These are early research findings and indicate the need for further work. However, the risk to the general public is currently assessed to be very low." Most people who catch the virus will have no or only mild flu-like symptoms. But the disease can progress to affect the brain and central nervous system and can sometimes be fatal. © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 26782 - Posted: 11.02.2019

By Laura Sanders Every 20 seconds, a wave of fresh cerebrospinal fluid rolls into the sleeping brain. These slow, rhythmic blasts, described for the first time in the Nov. 1 Science, may help explain why sleep is so important for brain health. Studies on animals have shown that the fluid, called CSF, can wash harmful proteins, including those implicated in Alzheimer’s disease, out of the brain. The new results give heft to the idea that a similar power wash happens in sleeping people. Researchers studied 13 healthy, young people in an MRI scanner as they fell into non-REM sleep, the type of slumber that takes up most of the night. At the same time, the scientists monitored different sorts of activity in participants’ heads. Electrodes measured the activity of large collections of nerve cells, and functional MRI measured the presence of oxygenated blood that gives energy to those nerve cells. By using a form of rapid fMRI, the team also measured another type of activity — the movements of CSF in the brain. Fast fMRI revealed waves of fresh CSF that flowed rhythmically into the sleeping brains, a pattern that was obvious — and big, says study coauthor Laura Lewis, a neuroscientist and engineer at Boston University. “I’ve never had something jump out at me to this degree,” she says. “It was very striking.” Awake people have small, gentle waves of CSF that are largely linked to breathing patterns. In contrast, the sleep waves were tsunamis. “The waves we saw during sleep were much, much larger, and higher velocity,” Lewis says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26781 - Posted: 11.01.2019

By Christof Koch “And death shall have no dominion”—Dylan Thomas, 1933 You will die, sooner or later. We all will. For everything that has a beginning has an end, an ineluctable consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. Few of us like to think about this troubling fact. But once birthed, the thought of oblivion can’t be completely erased. It lurks in the unconscious shadows, ready to burst forth. In my case, it was only as a mature man that I became fully mortal. I had wasted an entire evening playing an addictive, first-person shooter video game—running through subterranean halls, flooded corridors, nightmarishly turning tunnels, and empty plazas under a foreign sun, firing my weapons at hordes of aliens relentlessly pursuing me. I went to bed, easily falling asleep but awoke abruptly a few hours later. Abstract knowledge had turned to felt reality—I was going to die! Not right there and then but eventually. Advertisement Evolution equipped our species with powerful defense mechanisms to deal with this foreknowledge—in particular, psychological suppression and religion. The former prevents us from consciously acknowledging or dwelling on such uncomfortable truths while the latter reassures us by promising never-ending life in a Christian heaven, an eternal cycle of Buddhist reincarnations or an uploading of our mind to the Cloud, the 21st-century equivalent of rapture for nerds. Death has no such dominion over nonhuman animals. Although they can grieve for dead offspring and companions, there is no credible evidence that apes, dogs, crows and bees have minds sufficiently self-aware to be troubled by the insight that one day they will be no more. Thus, these defense mechanisms must have arisen in recent hominin evolution, in less than 10 million years. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26780 - Posted: 11.01.2019

By Kelly Servick CHICAGO, ILLINOIS—In 2014, U.S. regulators approved a futuristic treatment for blindness. The device, called Argus II, sends signals from a glasses-mounted camera to a roughly 3-by-5-millimeter grid of electrodes at the back of eye. Its job: Replace signals from light-sensing cells lost in the genetic condition retinitis pigmentosa. The implant’s maker, Second Sight, estimates that about 350 people in the world now use it. Argus II offers a relatively crude form of artificial vision; users see diffuse spots of light called phosphenes. “None of the patients gave up their white cane or guide dog,” says Daniel Palanker, a physicist who works on visual prostheses at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “It’s a very low bar.” But it was a start. He and others are now aiming to raise the bar with more precise ways of stimulating cells in the eye or brain. At the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience here last week, scientists shared progress from several such efforts. Some have already advanced to human trials—“a real, final test,” Palanker says. “It’s exciting times.” Several common disorders steal vision by destroying photoreceptors, the first cells in a relay of information from the eye to the brain. The other players in the relay often remain intact: the so-called bipolar cells, which receive photoreceptors’ signals; the retinal ganglion cells, which form the optic nerve and carry those signals to the brain; and the multilayered visual cortex at the back of the brain, which organizes the information into meaningful sight. Because adjacent points in space project onto adjacent points on the retina, and eventually activate neighboring points in an early processing area of the visual cortex, a visual scene can be mapped onto a spatial pattern of signals. But this spatial mapping gets more complex along the relay, so some researchers aim to activate cells as close to the start as possible. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 26779 - Posted: 11.01.2019

Ricardo F. Muñoz I have been convinced of the importance of prevention in addressing mental-health problems since the early 1970s, when I began my doctorate in clinical psychology. But only now is there sufficient evidence from clinical trials of the effectiveness of preventive interventions, using approaches derived from interpersonal and cognitive behavioural therapy, to justify deploying them. And only now are the tools available to make such interventions available to people worldwide. Two recent reports underline this conclusion. In February, the US Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of experts in evidence-based medicine, urged clinicians to “provide or refer pregnant and postpartum persons who are at increased risk of perinatal depression to counseling interventions”1. And last month, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) released a report2 calling on various stakeholders, from educators to policymakers, to prevent mental-health disorders and to promote healthy mental, emotional and behavioural development in the under 25s. (I was a member of the committees that prepared this document and two previous NASEM reports in 1994 and 2009 on preventive interventions3,4.) The latest NASEM call to action2 is so all-encompassing, it is hard to know where to begin. I propose that initial efforts focus on preventing depression in pregnant women or in women who have recently given birth (perinatal depression). There is substantial evidence for the effectiveness of providing such women with basic skills in mood management5. These interventions could have an impact across generations, because better maternal mental health is linked to babies’ healthier development2. And if researchers and health-care systems were to monitor and compare the epidemiology of depression in thousands of mothers and their children in areas that have or have not deployed preventive interventions, stakeholders could measure their effect on entire communities. © 2019 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 26778 - Posted: 11.01.2019

By Derek Lowe So Amgen has exited the neuroscience area, with a good-sized round of layoffs at their research site Cambridge. The company has a migraine drug (Aimovig) that they’ll continue to support, and they’ll stick with their existing clinical programs, but it looks like all the early-stage stuff is gone. What does this mean? Not as much as you might think. Neuroscience is indeed hard, and Amgen’s not the only company to rethink its commitment to it (Eli Lilly did something similar last month with their neuro efforts in the UK). But there are still plenty of participants, large and small – it’s not that the field is being totally abandoned by pharma. It’s just being abandoned by Amgen, because they have other areas that look a lot more promising for them. And let’s face it, Amgen is a bit of an oddity, anyway – it’s not for nothing that they get referred to as a law firm with fume hoods. Enbrel is what pays a lot of the bills over there, and Enbrel is (and has long been) a patent-court story, not a research one. Inflammation, cardiovascular disease, and oncology are going to be the focus there, and given the company’s portfolio, that makes a lot of sense. It looks like the only neuro programs going on will be the ones that intersect with the larger inflammation area. One interesting thing that came out of the company’s statements was that management felt that a lot of the neuroscience landscape is focused on what their CFO David Meline called “orphan or niche diseases”, and that the company wants to work on things that will have a broader impact. Now, it’s not like there isn’t a neuroscience disease with a huge health impact, and it’s one that even has some inflammation and cardiovascular connections. So one of the things that Amgen is saying is “No Alzheimer’s research for us, thanks”. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26777 - Posted: 11.01.2019

By Vanessa Barbara SÃO PAULO, Brazil — It’s hard to feel normal when you wake up at 4 p.m. every day. No, I’m not a nurse who works the evening shift. No, I’m not the hard-partying heir to a Brazilian agribusiness fortune. And before you think it, I’m not lazy, either — I’ve written seven books so far! I sleep until the late afternoon because I’ve finally learned, after fighting it for years, that it’s better to come across as pathetic than to be always exhausted, depressed or sick. I have a severe case of delayed sleep phase syndrome, a chronic misalignment of the body’s circadian rhythms with the daily light-dark cycle of our environment. The phrase “night owl” doesn’t really do it justice; my natural bedtime is around 6 a.m. While we as a culture are gradually becoming more aware of the many ways that bodies can differ from the norm, much of the world still takes for granted that people sleep at night and are awake during the day. Not me. I miss having lunch. According to conventional wisdom, going to bed early and waking up with the birds is a mere matter of habit and will power. This misconception is widespread, even among doctors. And for a long time, I believed it. I spent years taking melatonin and Ambien in order to fall asleep by 2 a.m.; I used to wake up at 11 a.m. and then spend the rest of the day on stimulants such as Provigil and Ritalin. Yet I was always tired and depressed — the outcome that so often results when we try to force ourselves to be different from what we naturally need to be. The last two decades have seen rapid advances in the field of chronobiology, the study of the biochemical clocks that keep our natural physiological rhythms. The 2017 Nobel Prize in Medicine, for instance, was awarded to three American geneticists for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythms in fruit flies. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sleep
Link ID: 26776 - Posted: 10.31.2019

Specialized brain activation “replays” the possible routes that rats can take as they navigate a space, helping them keep track of the paths they’ve already taken and choose among the routes that they can take next, according to a National Institutes of Health-funded study published in the journal Neuron. “These findings reveal an internal ‘replay’ process in the brain that allows animals to learn from past experiences to form memories of paths leading toward goals, and subsequently to recall these paths for planning future decisions,” said Shantanu Jadhav, Ph.D., assistant professor at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, and senior author of the study. “These results help us better understand how coordinated activation at the level of neurons can contribute to the complex processes involved in learning and decision-making.” The hippocampus, a structure located in the middle of the brain, is critical to learning and memory and contains specialized “place” cells that relay information about location and orientation in space. These place cells show specific patterns of activity during navigation that can be “replayed” later in forward or reverse order, almost as if the brain were fast-forwarding or rewinding through routes the rats have taken. In previous research, Jadhav and colleagues had discovered these replay events, marked by bursts of neural activity called sharp-wave ripples, lead to coordinated activity in the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain just behind the forehead that is involved in decision-making.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 26775 - Posted: 10.31.2019

Terry Gross Ever since childhood, author Kevin Wilson has lived with disturbing images that flash through his mind without warning. "I've always had this kind of agitation and looping thoughts and small tics," he says. "Falling off of tall buildings, getting stabbed, catching on fire — they were these just quick, kind of violent bursts in my head." Not that Wilson would ever harm anyone else — the harm in these quick, intrusive thoughts was strictly internal. The images fed off of his own anxiety, and left him feeling terrified. It wasn't until Wilson was diagnosed with Tourette's syndrome as an adult that he began to understand what he was seeing. At first, he was skeptical of the diagnosis; Tourette's is a neurological disorder often characterized by involuntary vocal or motor tics, and Wilson's version wasn't what he'd seen portrayed on TV or in books. "Mine is so much more internal," he says. "Those images and looping tics are in my head. And so a lot of the work that I'm doing is just keeping it in there." One way that Wilson helps control the images is to include them through his writing. His new novel, Nothing to See Here, is about a woman who takes over the care of twin children who burst into flames when they're afraid or angry. "Writing is, I think, the thing that saved me — being able to transfer what was in my head onto the page," he says. "There's this freedom that once it ... goes out into the world and you publish it, you're kind of free of it for a little while — at least it's somebody else's problem." © 2019 npr

Keyword: Tourettes
Link ID: 26774 - Posted: 10.31.2019

By Aimee Cunningham At age 37, Hope Hartman developed a painful, burning rash in her right ear, in the part “you would clean with a Q-tip,” the Denver resident says. The pain got so bad she went to a local emergency room, where the staff was flummoxed. Hartman was admitted to the hospital, where she started to lose sensation on the right side of her face. During that 2013 health crisis, Hartman’s husband, Mike, sent a picture of the ear to his mom, a nurse. She said it looked like zoster, better known as shingles, which is caused by the varicella zoster virus. She “diagnosed it from an iPhone photo,” Hartman recalls. Antiviral treatment didn’t fully clear the infection. For about two weeks after her release from the hospital, Hartman coped with severe pain, hearing loss and difficulty eating. Her right eye wouldn’t fully open or close. Following an appointment with neurologist Maria Nagel of the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora, Hartman was admitted to the university’s hospital to get another antiviral drug intravenously. The pain subsided, and Hartman regained her hearing and the feeling in her face. To spare others the same trauma of a delayed diagnosis, Hartman arranged for Nagel to give a talk on the virus at the local hospital where staff missed the signs of the illness, known as Ramsay Hunt syndrome. That’s the name for a shingles infection that strikes the facial nerve important to facial movement. As Hartman experienced, varicella zoster virus can cause a grab bag of symptoms that go beyond the typical torso rash. Hartman’s young age didn’t help with the diagnosis. Shingles is more common in people 50 and older. But no one is risk-free. Varicella zoster virus lives in about 95 percent of the U.S. adult population, thanks to the virus’s first line of attack: chicken pox. The body eventually clears the itchy, red pox from the skin, but the virus remains, dormant in nerve cells. The rash kept scores of U.S. children home from school until about 1995 (when a vaccine became available). © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26773 - Posted: 10.31.2019

By Nicholas Bakalar A healthy diet may help relieve the symptoms of depression. There is good evidence from observational studies that diet can affect mood, and now a randomized controlled trial suggests that healthy eating can modestly improve clinical levels of depression. The study, in PLOS One, randomized 76 college students with poor diet and depression symptoms to two groups. One group was put on a Mediterranean-style diet high in fruits, vegetables, fish, olive oil, nuts and seeds, and low in refined carbohydrates, sugar and saturated fat. The other continued their usual eating habits. At the beginning and end of the three-week trial, all participants were assessed with well-validated scales measuring depression, anxiety, current mood, memory and self-efficacy (confidence in one’s ability to exert control over behavior). Symptoms of depression improved, on average, in the diet group, shifting from the moderate severity range to the normal range. Depressive symptoms among the controls, meanwhile, remained stable, staying within the moderate severity range. On tests of anxiety and stress, the diet group had significantly lower scores than the controls, after controlling for levels of anxiety and stress at the start of the study. There were no differences between the two groups in memory or self-efficacy scores. The study controlled for smoking, physical activity, B.M.I. and other factors. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Obesity
Link ID: 26772 - Posted: 10.31.2019

By Gretchen Reynolds Taking more steps during the day may be related to better sleep at night, according to an encouraging new study of lifestyle and sleep patterns. The study, which delved into the links between walking and snoozing, suggests that being active can influence how well we sleep, whether we actually exercise or not. Sleep and exercise scientists have long been intrigued and befuddled by the ties between physical activity and somnolence. To most of us, it might seem as if that relationship should be uncomplicated, advantageous and one-way. You work out, grow tired and sleep better that night. But a variety of past studies indicate that the effects of exercise on sleep are more scrambled than that. In some studies, when people work out strenuously, they sleep relatively poorly, suggesting that intense exercise might disrupt slumber. Other experiments have found that the impacts of exertion and sleep work both ways; after a night of ragged sleep, people often report finding their normal workout extra wearing. Past research also has produced conflicting results about whether and how the timing of exercise matters, and if afternoon workouts aid or impair that night’s sleep. Most of these past studies have focused on planned exercise, though, not more incidental, everyday physical activity, and much of the research has involved people with clinical sleep problems, such as insomnia. Little has been known about whether simply moving around more during the day, absent formal exercise, might influence sleep, particularly in people who already tend to sleep fairly well. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26771 - Posted: 10.30.2019

By Robert Martone We humans have evolved a rich repertoire of communication, from gesture to sophisticated languages. All of these forms of communication link otherwise separate individuals in such a way that they can share and express their singular experiences and work together collaboratively. In a new study, technology replaces language as a means of communicating by directly linking the activity of human brains. Electrical activity from the brains of a pair of human subjects was transmitted to the brain of a third individual in the form of magnetic signals, which conveyed an instruction to perform a task in a particular manner. This study opens the door to extraordinary new means of human collaboration while, at the same time, blurring fundamental notions about individual identity and autonomy in disconcerting ways. Direct brain-to-brain communication has been a subject of intense interest for many years, driven by motives as diverse as futurist enthusiasm and military exigency. In his book Beyond Boundaries one of the leaders in the field, Miguel Nicolelis, described the merging of human brain activity as the future of humanity, the next stage in our species’ evolution. (Nicolelis serves on Scientific American’s board of advisers.) He has already conducted a study in which he linked together the brains of several rats using complex implanted electrodes known as brain-to-brain interfaces. Nicolelis and his co-authors described this achievement as the first “organic computer” with living brains tethered together as if they were so many microprocessors. The animals in this network learned to synchronize the electrical activity of their nerve cells to the same extent as those in a single brain. The networked brains were tested for things such as their ability to discriminate between two different patterns of electrical stimuli, and they routinely outperformed individual animals. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Robotics; Language
Link ID: 26770 - Posted: 10.30.2019