Three years ago, Ady Barkan, a longtime activist and a leader of the Fed Up campaign pushing for policies that would encourage full employment and higher wages, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The neurodegenerative disease, which paralyzes the body and has an average survival rate of three years, has put Barkan, now 35, in a wheelchair. He can no longer speak on his own. But he remains an organizer for the Center for Popular Democracy, now focusing on health care after co-founding the Be A Hero Project, and in April came to Washington from his home in California to testify for the Democrats’ Medicare-for-all bill. He spoke assisted by a computer. Barkan’s memoir, “Eyes to the Wind,” is being published Tuesday. He was interviewed recently by Lucy Kalanithi, host of a forthcoming podcast about hardship. She is an internist on the faculty at the Stanford University School of Medicine and widow of neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, who wrote the memoir “When Breath Becomes Air.” Here is an excerpt from their conversation, edited for clarity and length: LK: You have built this whole career defined around resistance and resisting injustice, and then you suddenly become a person for whom acceptance is this big priority, and the resistance part has to recede. How did you get there? AB: There were, perhaps, two different components to my acceptance. The first was intellectual: acknowledging that the disease is no joke and no bad dream, that it will almost certainly kill me and that the long future we had planned for was not going to happen. That intellectual acceptance happened very quickly. It was informed by my awareness of my tremendous privilege compared to most of the world’s 7 billion people and the others who came before us. Knowing what others have gone through made me feel less disbelieving that this could happen to me. But I think when we talk about acceptance, we mean something deeper, like finding peace in the new reality. © 1996-2019 The Washington Post

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 26589 - Posted: 09.09.2019

By Gregg Easterbrook Sunday marks the opening weekend of the 100th season of the National Football League. Many can’t get enough professional football. During the 2018-19 prime-time TV schedule, three of the four top-rated shows among adults ages 18 to 49 were pro football games. Only “Game of Thrones” bested pigskin in the ratings, and that series concluded, while the N.F.L. goes on. Still, many people presume the sport is in an irreversible tailspin. They think that mounting evidence of brain trauma from concussions, along with the sort of routine brutality that led to last month’s surprise retirement of the 29-year-old quarterback Andrew Luck, will result in football losing its mass appeal. It is also assumed that parents of young athletes will refuse to allow their children to play football at the youth and high school levels, depleting the talent pool. But the future of football looks much brighter than that. It’s true that the game faces multiple challenges involving player safety, especially at the youth and high school levels. But recent reforms in pro, college and high school football appear to be reducing the harm caused by the sport. With a handful of additional reforms at all levels of play, none of which would threaten the fundamental character of the game, the N.F.L.’s second century could look as good as its first. Andrew Luck’s retirement should not be taken as an omen. Generally, N.F.L. longevity is improving. Peyton Manning won the Super Bowl in 2016 at age 39; in February, Tom Brady hoisted the trophy at age 41. The 40-year-old quarterback Drew Brees is likely to be in the Super Bowl mix again this season. Football brought Mr. Luck wealth and celebrity, then he quit while he was ahead. Good for him! Mr. Luck’s injuries were similar in severity to those suffered by the cyclist Alessandro de Marchi during the Tour de France, which often has bicycle crashes, and by the skiing star Lindsey Vonn in many incidents. Athletics cannot be made free of danger of bodily harm. A more significant omen is that N.F.L. neurological damage is not getting worse but rather is in decline. Concussions are down. Numerous rules changes led to the N.F.L. reporting 214 concussions last season, versus 281 the season before. Over the five prior seasons, the average was 243 concussions. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 26588 - Posted: 09.09.2019

By Eryn Brown, On March 30, 1981, 25-year-old John W. Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan and three other people. The following year, he went on trial for his crimes. Defense attorneys argued that Hinckley was insane, and they pointed to a trove of evidence to back their claim. Their client had a history of behavioral problems. He was obsessed with the actress Jodie Foster, and devised a plan to assassinate a president to impress her. He hounded Jimmy Carter. Then he targeted Reagan. In a controversial courtroom twist, Hinckley’s defense team also introduced scientific evidence: a computerized axial tomography (CAT) scan that suggested their client had a “shrunken,” or atrophied, brain. Initially, the judge didn’t want to allow it. The scan didn’t prove that Hinckley had schizophrenia, experts said—but this sort of brain atrophy was more common among schizophrenics than among the general population. It helped convince the jury to find Hinckley not responsible by reason of insanity. Nearly 40 years later, the neuroscience that influenced Hinckley’s trial has advanced by leaps and bounds—particularly because of improvements in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and the invention of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which lets scientists look at blood flows and oxygenation in the brain without hurting it. Today neuroscientists can see what happens in the brain when a subject recognizes a loved one, experiences failure, or feels pain. Despite this explosion in neuroscience knowledge, and notwithstanding Hinckley’s successful defense, “neurolaw” hasn’t had a tremendous impact on the courts—yet. But it is coming. Attorneys working civil cases introduce brain imaging ever more routinely to argue that a client has or has not been injured. Criminal attorneys, too, sometimes argue that a brain condition mitigates a client’s responsibility. Lawyers and judges are participating in continuing education programs to learn about brain anatomy and what MRIs and EEGs and all those other brain tests actually show. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 26587 - Posted: 09.09.2019

Selena Simmons-Duffin Peter Grinspoon got addicted to Vicodin in medical school, and still had an opioid addiction five years into practice as a primary care physician. Then, in February 2005, he got caught. "In my addicted mindframe, I was writing prescriptions for a nanny who had since returned back to another country," he says. "It didn't take the pharmacist long to figure out that I was not a 19-year-old nanny from New Zealand." One day, during lunch, the state police and the DEA showed up at his medical office in Boston. "I start going all, 'I'm glad you're here. How can I help you?' " he says. "And they're like, 'Doc, cut the crap. We know you're writing bad scripts.' " He was fingerprinted the next day and charged with three felony counts of fraudulently obtaining a controlled substance. He also was immediately referred to a Physician Health Program, one of the state-run specialty treatment programs developed in the 1970s by physicians to help fellow physicians beat addiction. Known to doctors as PHPs, these programs now cover other sorts of health providers, too. The programs work with state medical licensing boards — if you follow the treatment and monitoring plan they set up for you, they'll recommend to the board that you get your medical license back, Grinspoon explains. It's a significant incentive. "The PHPs basically say, 'Do whatever we say or we won't give you a letter that will help you get back to work,' " Grinspoon says. "They put a gun to your head." But the problem, he and other critics say, is that, for various reasons, most PHPs don't allow medical professionals access to the same evidence-based, "gold standard" treatment that addiction specialists today recommend for most patients addicted to opioids: medication-assisted treatment. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26586 - Posted: 09.07.2019

By: Michael L. Lipton, M.D., Ph.D., F.A.C.R. I n December 1960, President-elect John F. Kennedy (JFK) penned The Soft American for Sports Illustrated, in which he described the importance of physical fitness to brain health: “Physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body; it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity.” As with many of JFK’s public statements, these prescient words remain spot-on today. Neuroscientists continue to uncover the remarkable connection between physical well-being and brain health on many levels: cognitive, behavioral, social, emotional, and more. Boxing, JFK noted, was one of the sports the ancient Greek states pursued to enhance national fitness. But the idea that boxing could promote “dynamic and creative intellectual activity” certainly runs counter to current sensibilities, much like the advertisement for Marlboro cigarettes that graced the back cover of Sports Illustrated at the time. While JFK did not name other collision sports, it seems reasonable to assume that American football would have also qualified as a rung on his ladder to physical fitness and mental well-being. From a 2019 vantage point, it seems shocking that JFK was touting the benefits of sport for brain health while ignoring risks of sport-related brain injury. In 1960, however, when he proposed a comprehensive national program to improve physical fitness, the adverse impact of sport-related head trauma on brain development and function was not on anyone’s radar. Even forty-five years later, when “ Iron Mike ” Webster ’s chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) was reported in the journal Neurosurgery, adverse effects of sport-related head trauma were largely unknown to the general public and, at best, widely under-recognized among the medical community. It is worth noting that Mike Webster himself had never been diagnosed with a concussion or other form of brain injury during his time on the gridiron. Attitudes have changed dramatically since, but in what way has our understanding of head trauma and its adverse effects actually evolved? And most importantly, how can our expanding knowledge inform a viable path forward? © 2019 The Dana Foundation.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26585 - Posted: 09.07.2019

/ By Hope Reese In her new book “Gender and Our Brains,” cognitive neuroimaging professor Gina Rippon explains that brains aren’t gendered, but research can be. The differences among women as a group, or men as a group, are greater than the differences between men and women, Rippon says. Rippon sifts through centuries of research into supposed differences in areas such as behavior, skills, and personality, and shows that external factors like gender stereotypes and real-world experiences are the likely cause of any detectable differences in mental processing. And she demonstrates that the differences among women as a group, or among men as a group, are much greater than the differences between men and women. She cites a 2015 study looking at 1,400 brain scans as an example. Comparing 160 brain structures in the scans — identifying areas that were, on average, larger in men or in women — researchers could not find any scans that had all “male” traits, or all “female” traits — physical attributes such as weight or tissue thickness. “The images were, literally, of a mosaic,” she says. “We’re trying to force a difference into data that doesn’t exist.” Rippon teaches cognitive neuroimaging — the study of behavior through brain images — at Aston University in England. For this installment of the Undark Five, I spoke with her about how neuroimages are misinterpreted and whether PMS is real, among other topics. Here is our conversation, edited for length and clarity. Undark: Scientists have been trying to find differences in the brains of men and women for years. What are some examples of how the cherry-picking approach is problematic? Gina Rippon: It’s what I call the “hunt the differences” agenda, which started about 200 years ago when scientists were starting to understand the importance of the brain in explaining human behavior and human ability. Copyright 2019 Undark

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 26584 - Posted: 09.07.2019

Bill Sullivan As author George R.R. Martin would attest, good writing takes time. For eons, DNA has been writing genetic scripts for “survival machines,” evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s term for living organisms—their primary purpose being to live long enough to propagate their DNA. As author Samuel Butler recognized in 1877, “A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.” But our planet has limited resources, so survival machines that had a leg up on the competition won the DNA replication relay. Selfish genes were locked in an arms race to craft survival machines that were better, stronger, faster. About 600 million years ago, an ancestral neuron emerged that heralded a new weapon: intelligence. It took nearly 4 billion years, but DNA has finally built a survival machine intelligent enough to expose DNA’s game. We are the first species to meet our maker. The realization that we’re an apparatus for the dissemination of genes is quite different from traditional creationist narratives. It is even more humbling to reflect on the power of a related revelation: instead of passively watching genetic stories unfold, we can now become the authors. Are we ready for this awesome responsibility? In just a half century, we resolved the structure of DNA, made genome sequencing easy, and discovered ways to edit genes. Although we don’t fully understand its language, some are now eager to take a red pen to the genome. With the help of the first human genome, published in 2003, researchers have revealed genes involved in certain diseases, and this knowledge is guiding the discovery of novel therapeutics. © 1986–2019 The Scientist.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 26583 - Posted: 09.07.2019

Randi Hagerman When I visited Ricaurte, Colombia, in 2016, I was surrounded by men with long faces and prominent ears. As we spoke, they would ask repetitive questions while mumbling and failing to maintain eye contact, and when they shook my hand, they turned their body away from me. They were interested in me but were too shy to interact. This type of anxiety-related approach-withdrawal behavior is typical of those with fragile X syndrome (FXS), a well-characterized genetic disease that is the most common inherited form of intellectual disability and the most common single-gene cause of autism. Even many of the Ricaurte women, who usually have at least one good copy of the X chromosome, showed similar social deficits. I had never seen so many individuals with FXS all together. I thought to myself: This is ground zero for FXS. Likely because the founding families of this small village had one or more carriers of the causative mutation, Ricaurte has the highest known prevalence of FXS in the world. Last year, our team published the results of genetic testing of almost all of the inhabitants in this village. We found that nearly 5 percent of male and more than 3 percent of female inhabitants of Ricaurte have FXS,1 compared to around 0.02 percent of people living in the US and in Europe. In Ricaurte, the residents are supportive of these individuals, who work in the community and are well accepted. Their behavior does not seem unusual to those living in the village. Relatives who have moved away from Ricaurte and then subsequently have had a child with FXS will move back to this town for the acceptance and support they find there. This pattern further enhances the genetic cluster of FXS-causing mutations in this area. © 1986–2019 The Scientist.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Epigenetics
Link ID: 26582 - Posted: 09.06.2019

By Lena H. Sun State and federal health officials investigating mysterious lung illnesses linked to vaping have found the same chemical in samples of marijuana products used by people sickened in different parts of the country and who used different brands of products in recent weeks. The chemical is an oil derived from vitamin E. Investigators at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found the oil in cannabis products in samples collected from patients who fell ill across the United States. FDA officials shared that information with state health officials during a telephone briefing this week, according to several officials who took part in the call. That same chemical was also found in nearly all cannabis samples from patients who fell ill in New York in recent weeks, a state health department spokeswoman said. While this is the first common element found in samples from across the country, health officials said it is too early to know whether this is causing the injuries. Vitamin E is found naturally in certain foods, such as canola oil, olive oil and almonds. The oil derived from the vitamin, known as vitamin E acetate, is commonly available as a nutritional supplement and is used in topical skin treatments. It is not known to cause harm when ingested as a vitamin supplement or applied to the skin. Its name sounds harmless, experts said, but its molecular structure could make it hazardous when inhaled. Its oil-like properties could be associated with the kinds of respiratory symptoms that many patients have reported: cough, shortness of breath and chest pain, officials said. “We knew from earlier testing by New York that they had found vitamin E acetate, but to have FDA talk about it from their overall testing plan, that was the most remarkable thing that we heard,” said one official who listened to the briefing but was not authorized to speak publicly. © 1996-2019 The Washington Post

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26581 - Posted: 09.06.2019

By Benedict Carey The announcement on Wednesday that Johns Hopkins Medicine was starting a new center to study psychedelic drugs for mental disorders was the latest chapter in a decades-long push by health nonprofits and wealthy donors to shake up psychiatry from the outside, bypassing the usual channels. “Psychiatry is one of the most conservative specialties in medicine,” said David Nichols, a medicinal chemist who founded the Heffter Research Institute in 1993 to fund psychedelic research. “We haven’t really had new drugs for years, and the drug industry has quit the field because they don’t have new targets” in the brain. “The field was basically stagnant, and we needed to try something different.” The fund-raising for the new Hopkins center was largely driven by the author and investor Tim Ferriss, who said in a telephone interview that he had put aside most of his other projects to advance psychedelic medicine. “It’s important to me for macro reasons but also deeply personal ones,” Mr. Ferriss, 42, said. “I grew up on Long Island, and I lost my best friend to a fentanyl overdose. I have treatment-resistant depression and bipolar disorder in my family. And addiction. It became clear to me that you can do a lot in this field with very little money.” Mr. Ferriss provided funds for a similar center at Imperial College London, which was introduced in April, and for individual research projects at the University of San Francisco, California, testing psilocybin as an aide to therapy for distress in long-term AIDS patients. Experiments using ecstasy and LSD, for end-of-life care, were underway by the mid-2000s. Soon, therapists began conducting trials of ecstasy for post-traumatic stress, with promising results. One of the most influential scientific reports appeared in 2006: a test of the effects of a strong dose of psilocybin on healthy adults. In that study, a team led by Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins found that the volunteers “rated the psilocybin experience as having substantial personal meaning and spiritual significance and attributed to the experience sustained positive changes in attitudes and behavior.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 26580 - Posted: 09.06.2019

Alison Abbott A small clinical study in California has suggested for the first time that it might be possible to reverse the body’s epigenetic clock, which measures a person’s biological age. For one year, nine healthy volunteers took a cocktail of three common drugs — growth hormone and two diabetes medications — and on average shed 2.5 years of their biological ages, measured by analysing marks on a person’s genomes. The participants’ immune systems also showed signs of rejuvenation. The results were a surprise even to the trial organizers — but researchers caution that the findings are preliminary because the trial was small and did not include a control arm. “I’d expected to see slowing down of the clock, but not a reversal,” says geneticist Steve Horvath at the University of California, Los Angeles, who conducted the epigenetic analysis. “That felt kind of futuristic.” The findings were published on 5 September in Aging Cell. “It may be that there is an effect,” says cell biologist Wolfgang Wagner at the University of Aachen in Germany. “But the results are not rock solid because the study is very small and not well controlled.” Marks of life The epigenetic clock relies on the body’s epigenome, which comprises chemical modifications, such as methyl groups, that tag DNA. The pattern of these tags changes during the course of life, and tracks a person’s biological age, which can lag behind or exceed chronological age. © 2019 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Epigenetics
Link ID: 26579 - Posted: 09.06.2019

The children of women who experience severe stress when pregnant are nearly 10 times more likely to develop a personality disorder by the age of 30, a study suggests. Even moderate prolonged stress may have an impact on child development and continue after a baby's birth, it said. More than 3,600 pregnant women in Finland were asked about their stress levels, and their children followed up. Psychiatrists say mums-to-be must have access to mental health support. Other important factors, such as how children are brought up, the family's financial situation and trauma experienced during childhood, are known to contribute to the development of personality disorders and could have played a role. What is a personality disorder? It means that certain aspects of someone's personality make life difficult for them and for other people. They can be overly anxious or emotionally unstable, for example, or paranoid or anti-social - there are a wide range of types. Personality disorders are thought to affect about one in 20 people. They are more likely to have other mental health problems, such as depression, or drug and alcohol problems. Like other mental disorders, upbringing, brain problems and genes can play a part in their development. What did the study do? Every month during pregnancy, the study - in the British Journal of Psychiatry - asked women to answer questions about their mental stress levels. They had to say if they had notable stress, some stress or no stress. The women lived around Helsinki, Finland, and their babies were born between 1975 and 1976. When those children turned 30, any diagnoses of personality disorder were noted - there were 40 in total, which were all severe cases involving admission to hospital. © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26578 - Posted: 09.06.2019

By Benedict Carey Since childhood, Rachael Petersen had lived with an unexplainable sense of grief that no drug or talk therapy could entirely ease. So in 2017 she volunteered for a small clinical trial at Johns Hopkins University that was testing psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, for chronic depression. “I was so depressed,” Ms. Petersen, 29, said recently. “I felt that the world had abandoned me, that I’d lost the right to exist on this planet. Really, it was like my thoughts were so stuck, I felt isolated.” The prospect of tripping for hours on a heavy dose of psychedelics was scary, she said, but the reality was profoundly different: “I experienced this kind of unity, of resonant love, the sense that I’m not alone anymore, that there was this thing holding me that was bigger than my grief. I felt welcomed back to the world.” On Wednesday, Johns Hopkins Medicine announced the launch of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, to study compounds like LSD and psilocybin for a range of mental health problems, including anorexia, addiction and depression. The center is the first of its kind in the country, established with $17 million in commitments from wealthy private donors and a foundation. Imperial College London launched what is thought to be the world’s first such center in April, with some $3.5 million from private sources. “This is an exciting initiative that brings new focus to efforts to learn about mind, brain and psychiatric disorders by studying the effects of psychedelic drugs,” Dr. John Krystal, chair of psychiatry at Yale University, said in an email about the Johns Hopkins center. The centers at Johns Hopkins and Imperial College give “psychedelic medicine,” as some call it, a long-sought foothold in the scientific establishment. Since the early 2000s, several scientists have been exploring the potential of psychedelics and other recreational drugs for psychiatric problems, and their early reports have been tantalizing enough to generate a stream of positive headlines and at least two popular books. The emergence of depression treatment with the anesthetic and club drug ketamine and related compounds, which cause out-of-body sensations, also has piqued interest in mind-altering agents as aids to therapy. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26577 - Posted: 09.05.2019

By Catherine Matacic Italians are some of the fastest speakers on the planet, chattering at up to nine syllables per second. Many Germans, on the other hand, are slow enunciators, delivering five to six syllables in the same amount of time. Yet in any given minute, Italians and Germans convey roughly the same amount of information, according to a new study. Indeed, no matter how fast or slowly languages are spoken, they tend to transmit information at about the same rate: 39 bits per second, about twice the speed of Morse code. “This is pretty solid stuff,” says Bart de Boer, an evolutionary linguist who studies speech production at the Free University of Brussels, but was not involved in the work. Language lovers have long suspected that information-heavy languages—those that pack more information about tense, gender, and speaker into smaller units, for example—move slowly to make up for their density of information, he says, whereas information-light languages such as Italian can gallop along at a much faster pace. But until now, no one had the data to prove it. Scientists started with written texts from 17 languages, including English, Italian, Japanese, and Vietnamese. They calculated the information density of each language in bits—the same unit that describes how quickly your cellphone, laptop, or computer modem transmits information. They found that Japanese, which has only 643 syllables, had an information density of about 5 bits per syllable, whereas English, with its 6949 syllables, had a density of just over 7 bits per syllable. Vietnamese, with its complex system of six tones (each of which can further differentiate a syllable), topped the charts at 8 bits per syllable. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 26576 - Posted: 09.05.2019

By James Gallagher Health and science correspondent, BBC News Scientists have found the first genetic instructions hardwired into human DNA that are linked to being left-handed. The instructions also seem to be heavily involved in the structure and function of the brain - particularly the parts involved in language. The team at the University of Oxford say left-handed people may have better verbal skills as a result. But many mysteries remain regarding the connection between brain development and the dominant hand. What does this tell us? About one in 10 people is left handed. Studies on twins have already revealed genetics - the DNA inherited from parents - has some role to play. However, the specifics are only now being revealed. The research team turned to the UK Biobank - a study of about 400,000 people who had the full sequence of their genetic code, their DNA, recorded. Just over 38,000 were left-handed. And the scientists played a giant game of spot-the-difference to find the regions of their DNA that influenced left-handedness. The study, published in the journal Brain, found four hotspots. "It tells us for the first time that handedness has a genetic component," Prof Gwenaëlle Douaud, one of the researchers, told BBC News. But how does it work? The mutations were in instructions for the intricate "scaffolding" that organises the inside of the body's cells, called the cytoskeleton. Similar mutations that change the cytoskeleton in snails have been shown to lead to the molluscs having an anticlockwise or "lefty" shell. © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Laterality; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 26575 - Posted: 09.05.2019

by Nicholette Zeliadt Problems with protein-filled parcels called exosomes contribute to Rett syndrome, a condition related to autism, a new study suggests1. Exosomes traverse the blood and deliver their cargo by fusing with cells. When the cells are neurons, this triggers the birth and maturation of neurons and their connections, the new study found. Mutations linked to autism and Rett syndrome may disrupt this newly identified role of exosomes in brain development. “Maybe something about [cellular] communication, broadly across space and time — which could occur by exosomes — goes wrong in Rett syndrome and is critical for normal brain development,” says lead investigator Hollis Cline, professor of neuroscience at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. The results also point to a new treatment strategy: Exosomes from typical neurons restore the development of neurons derived from a person with Rett syndrome and their connections. The work hints at a new mechanism that contributes to Rett syndrome, says Xinyu Zhao, professor of neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in the study. “I’m convinced that exosomes could be a target for [Rett] treatment.” Cline and her colleagues grew neurons from stem cells derived from a boy with a harmful mutation in MECP2 that is known to cause Rett syndrome, and from cells derived from the boy in which the mutation had been repaired. Over seven days, they added exosomes from each set of neurons to standard cultures of neurons. © 2019 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 26574 - Posted: 09.05.2019

Nicola Davis Squirrels eavesdrop on the chatter of songbirds to work out whether the appearance of a predator is cause for alarm, researchers have found. Animals including squirrels have previously been found to tune in to cries of alarm from other creatures, while some take note of “all-clear” signals from another species with which they co-exist to assess danger. But the latest study suggests animals may also keep an ear out for everyday chitchat among other species as a way to gauge whether there is trouble afoot. “This study suggests that eavesdropping on public information about safety is more widespread and broader than we originally thought,” said Prof Keith Tarvin, co-author of the study from Oberlin College, Ohio. “It may not require tight ecological relationships that allow individuals to carefully learn the cues provided by other species,” he added, noting that the grey squirrels and songbirds in the study moved from place to place without regard for the other. Writing in the journal Plos One, Tarvin and colleagues reported on how they made their discovery by observing 67 grey squirrels as they pottered about different areas in the parks and residential regions of Oberlin. After 30 seconds of observing a squirrel, researchers played it a recording of the call of a red-tailed hawk, which lasted a couple of seconds – and their behaviour in the next 30 seconds was monitored. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Animal Communication; Hearing
Link ID: 26573 - Posted: 09.05.2019

By Caroline Parkinson Health editor, BBC News website People who eat vegan and vegetarian diets have a lower risk of heart disease and a higher risk of stroke, a major study suggests. They had 10 fewer cases of heart disease and three more strokes per 1,000 people compared with the meat-eaters. The research, published in the British Medical Journal, looked at 48,000 people for up to 18 years. However, it cannot prove whether the effect is down to their diet or some other aspect of their lifestyle. Diet experts said, whatever people's dietary choice, eating a wide range of foods was best for their health. What does this study add? It analyses data from the EPIC-Oxford study, a major long-term research project looking at diet and health. Half of participants, recruited between 1993 and 2001, were meat-eaters, just over 16,000 vegetarian or vegan, with 7,500 who described themselves as pescatarian (fish-eating). They were asked about their diets, when they joined the study and again in 2010. Medical history, smoking and physical activity were taken into account, Altogether, there were 2,820 cases of coronary heart disease (CHD) and 1,072 cases of stroke - including 300 haemorrhagic strokes, which happen when a weakened blood vessel bursts and bleeds into the brain. The pescatarians were found to have a 13% lower risk of CHD than the meat-eaters, while the vegetarians and vegans had a 22% lower risk. But those on plant-based diets had a 20% higher risk of stroke. The researchers suggested this could be linked to low vitamin B12 levels but said more studies were needed to investigate the connection. It is also possible that the association may have nothing to do with people's diets and may just reflect other differences in the lives of people who do not eat meat. © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 26572 - Posted: 09.05.2019

By Emily Underwood Of the many proposed triggers for autism, one of the most controversial is the “extreme male brain” hypothesis. The idea posits that exposure to excess testosterone in the womb wires both men and women to have a hypermasculine view of the world, prioritizing stereotypically male behaviors like building machines over stereotypically female behaviors like empathizing with a friend. Now, a study is raising new doubts about this theory, finding no effect of testosterone on empathy in adult men. The work does not directly address whether high levels of prenatal testosterone cause autism or lack of empathy. That would require directly sampling the hormone in utero, which can endanger a developing fetus. But the new study’s large size—more than 600 men—makes it more convincing than similar research in the past, which included no more than a few dozen participants, experts say. The extreme male brain hypothesis was first proposed by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. In 2001, he and colleagues found that women given a single hefty dose of testosterone fared significantly worse at the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test (RMET), which asked them to gauge the emotional states of others based on their facial expressions. The women’s performance seemed to track with a controversial metric called the 2D:4D ratio, the relative lengths of the second and fourth fingers. Men—and people with autism—tend to have a longer ring finger than index finger, and some researchers believe that is due to higher prenatal exposure to testosterone. (Others are skeptical.) © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Autism; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 26571 - Posted: 09.04.2019

Cristina Robinson, Kate Snyder, Nicole Creanza Bonjour! Ni hao! Merhaba! If you move to a new country as an adult, you have to work much harder to get past that initial “hello” in the local language than if you’d moved as a child. Why does it take so much effort to learn a new language later in life? Our human ability to learn language slows down as we get older, but scientists are not sure how or why this happens. An unexpected way to understand this learning process might come from listening to birds sing. After all, songbirds have a lot to learn. They don’t hatch knowing what songs to sing, or how to sing them. Instead, they must learn their species’ song. Young birds listen to adult birds and then practice copying the adult’s song syllables until they sound right. If they fail to learn an appropriate song, male birds will have difficulty attracting mates or defending their territories. How do birds learn to sing? This process of vocal learning is remarkably similar to how humans learn language: Babies listen to their parents speaking and then practice making the same sounds by babbling. Because these processes are so similar, birds have long been used to study vocal learning. However, while these learning processes are similar, the functions of speech and song are quite different. Human speech is complex and made up of many sounds that we use to convey an infinite number of ideas to each other. Birds only need to announce their presence to mates and rivals, yet their song can also be made of a repertoire of hundreds or thousands of unique syllables. What benefit could these more elaborate songs offer males? © 2010–2019, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 26570 - Posted: 09.04.2019