By Alison Abbott Marco Tamietto was aware that animal rights activists might target him after his team won ethical approval for an experiment in monkeys on blindness. But he hadn’t anticipated the threats of violence. “I found photographs of my face, my mobile phone number, and home address on Facebook posts,” he says, “with messages like: ‘We will find you and kill you.’” Tamietto, a neuroscientist at the University of Turin in Italy, is under police protection. Now, his colleagues may face similar threats. He learned this month that the Italian Ministry of Health, which approved the experiment in October 2018, has released the names and university affiliations of others involved in the study to Lega Anti Vivisezione (LAV), an animal rights group in Rome. “It’s unpleasant that a public office would do such a thing,” says Roberto Caminiti, a neuroscientist at Sapienza University of Rome whose monkey lab was filmed by undercover activists in 2014. “And paradoxical that the ministry that authorized the research would actually expose those doing the research to danger.” Lawyers at the University of Turin and University of Parma—where the monkey experiments will be carried out—say they are considering civil proceedings in relation to the leak of sensitive information and intellectual property associated with the experimental protocols. Animal research regulations in Italy are already the strictest in Europe. Yet in the past few years, activists have pressed their advantage. Tamietto’s case is a sign that they have a sympathetic ear in government: Minister of Health Giulia Grillo, a member of the populist Five Star party and a declared friend of animal rights groups. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Animal Rights; Vision
Link ID: 26529 - Posted: 08.22.2019

By Bruce Bower A 20-million-year-old monkey skull that fits in the palm of an adult’s hand may contain remnants of piecemeal brain evolution in ancient primates. Neural landmarks preserved on the skull fit a scenario in which specific primate brain regions expanded or, at times, contracted while other regions remained unchanged, a new study finds. In an early clue to that evolutionary process, researchers say, a small part of the monkey’s brain devoted to odor perception was not counterbalanced by an enlarged visual system, as is typical of primates today. Primate visual systems expanded in size and complexity over millions of years without requiring substantial changes elsewhere in the brain, contend paleontologist Xijun Ni of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and colleagues. And comparisons of the skull with fossils of African primates from 30 million years ago or more indicate that major brain structures evolved at different rates in different primate lineages, as did increases in brain size relative to body size, the team reports August 21 in Science Advances. The study adds evidence to the idea that the brains of primates, a group that includes humans, evolved in a piecemeal way, instead of progressively getting bigger overall as time passed. The skull, from an extinct monkey called Chilecebus carrascoensis, was reported discovered in Chile’s Andes Mountains in 1995 by a team led by paleontologist John Flynn of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In the new study, Flynn and colleagues used high-resolution scanning and a digital, 3-D cast of the inner surface of the skull’s tiny braincase to reveal impressions made by a set of neural folds. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 26528 - Posted: 08.22.2019

By Greg Miller Can a three-digit phone number avert suicides on a grand scale? Last week, the Federal Communications Commission recommended designating 988 as a nationwide suicide prevention hotline number. Currently, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can be reached around the clock through the more cumbersome 1-800-273-TALK (8255). Many paths in life can bring someone to the brink of suicide, and a shorter phone number might seem to be a naïvely simple solution. But researchers have repeatedly found that simple works: Callers routinely credit the existing hotline, which is on track to take 2.5 million calls this year, with keeping them safe. "It's one of the most basic human realities," says Lifeline Director John Draper, a counseling psychologist with Vibrant Emotional Health, the New York City nonprofit that administers the hotline. "Helping people feel understood and cared about saves lives." More than 47,000 people died by suicide in the United States in 2017. Although the global suicide rate has dropped, in the United States it has increased 33% since 1999. Beating back that number is challenging. Although suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, it's still rare enough that designing large studies to probe interventions is difficult—and the high stakes bring ethical worries. "For a long time, the field was just kind of demoralized," says Jane Pearson, a clinical psychologist and researcher who helps strategize suicide prevention research for the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland. But Pearson and others see glimmers of optimism. NIMH spent $51 million on suicide prevention research in 2018, twice as much as in 2015 though still well below research funding for other conditions that cause similar numbers of deaths. Other government agencies and nonprofits now spend tens of millions more. Suicide has shed some of its stigma and is increasingly viewed as a public health issue. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 26527 - Posted: 08.22.2019

By Emily Anthes Every spring, throngs of garden warblers make a treacherous, multiweek journey from their winter homes in Africa to their summer breeding grounds in Europe. The small, brown-and-white songbirds fly thousands of miles, across the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea, en route to their destinations. It’s an exhausting, arduous trip, and the warblers make numerous pit stops to rest and refuel along the way. During these layovers, the birds need to catch up on sleep, replenish their fat stores, and somehow manage to avoid being eaten by predators, including the hungry raptors that migrate alongside them. A study published on Monday in Current Biology revealed one way that migrating warblers manage these dangers and demands: They adjust their sleep postures depending on their physical condition and physiological needs. Plump, well-muscled birds tend to sleep with their heads held upright, while scrawnier warblers tuck their heads into their feathers, a posture that makes them more vulnerable to predation but helps them conserve their much needed energy. “Migratory warblers have to make trade-offs between staying safe and saving energy,” said Leonida Fusani, a behavioral physiologist at the University of Vienna and the lead author of the paper. Dr. Fusani worked with a doctoral student, Andrea Ferretti, and several other colleagues to study garden warblers that had stopped on the island of Ponza during their spring migration. The small, craggy isle, off the western coast of Italy, is a popular stopover for northbound birds, which typically arrive drained after a 300-plus-mile flight over open water. The researchers caught warblers with nets, then gave each one a brief physical exam before transferring it to a custom-built cage for observation. Some of the warblers were thriving, with heavy bodies, big muscles and ample body fat. Others seemed to be struggling, appearing gaunt and worn down by their journeys. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26526 - Posted: 08.21.2019

Natalie Parletta Poor air quality has been associated with higher rates of bipolar disorder and major depression in observational research involving more than 150 million people in the US and Denmark. The link was found to be more pronounced in Denmark, with research also suggesting that pollution exposure during childhood more than doubled the risk of schizophrenia and personality disorders. Genetic studies now reveal that genes only explain a small fraction of psychiatric illness onset. Therefore, researchers are exploring environmental factors in the search to comprehend the global increase in these complex disorders of brain function. “We were hoping to understand what aspects of human environments are driving psychiatric and neurological disease prevalence,” says senior author Andrey Rzhetsky from the University of Chicago, US. The findings are published in the journal PLOS ONE. The search thus far has focussed largely on family environments and childhood trauma, including prenatal influences. Other possible avenues include social circumstances, stressful life events, substance abuse, and emerging evidence for poor diet. Far less attention has been given to physical environments. Yet as the numerous adverse health impacts of air pollution have come to light, inspection of its potential role in neurological disorders has lagged.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 26525 - Posted: 08.21.2019

By Emily Underwood By his late 20s, Moe had attained the young adult dream. A technology job paid for his studio apartment just blocks from the beach in Santa Barbara, California. Leisure time was crowded with close friends and hobbies, such as playing the guitar. He had even earned his pilot's license. "There was nothing I could have complained about," he says. Yet Moe soon began a slide he couldn't control. Insomnia struck, along with panic attacks. As the mild depression he'd experienced since childhood deepened, Moe's life collapsed. He lost his job, abandoned his interests, and withdrew from his friends. "I lost the emotions that made me feel human," Moe says. (He asked that this story not use his full name.) Although many people with depression respond well to treatment, Moe wasn't one of them. Now 37, he has tried antidepressant drugs and cycled through years of therapy. Moe has never attempted suicide, but he falls into a high-risk group: Though most people with depression don't die by suicide, about 30% of those who don't respond to multiple antidepressant drugs or therapy make at least one attempt. Moe was desperate for relief and fearful for his future. So when he heard about a clinical trial testing a new approach to treating depression at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, near his home, he signed up. People like Moe present a conundrum to doctors but an opportunity for researchers: a group whose health could be transformed by precision psychiatry. Depression is often treated as a single disease, but many researchers agree that it is actually multiple, distinct ailments. Some of those conditions may heighten suicide risk more than others. How many depression subtypes exist—and how they differ—is hotly debated. One way researchers are trying to settle the question is by peering into the brain. They're studying the neural circuits that light up during specific tasks and then correlating those patterns of activation with symptoms. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 26524 - Posted: 08.21.2019

By Kelly Servick Every Wednesday afternoon, an alert flashes on the cellphones of about 50 teenagers in New York and Pennsylvania. Its questions are blunt: "In the past week, how often have you thought of killing yourself?" "Did you make a plan to kill yourself?" "Did you make an attempt to kill yourself?" The 13- to 18-year-olds tap their responses, which are fed to a secure server. They have agreed, with their parents' support, to something that would make many adolescents cringe: an around-the-clock recording of their digital lives. For 6 months, an app will gobble up nearly every data point their phones can offer, capturing detail and nuance that a doctor's questionnaire cannot: their text messages and social media posts, their tone of voice in phone calls and facial expression in selfies, the music they stream, how much they move around, how much time they spend at home. Most of these young people have recently attempted suicide or are having suicidal thoughts. All have been diagnosed with a mental illness such as depression. The study they're part of, Mobile Assessment for the Prediction of Suicide (MAPS), is one of several fledgling efforts to test whether streams of information from mobile devices can help answer a question that has long confounded scientists and clinicians: How do you predict when someone is at imminent risk of attempting suicide? © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 26523 - Posted: 08.21.2019

By Gretchen Reynolds For women with serious depression, a single session of exercise can change the body and mind in ways that might help to combat depression over time, according to a new study of workouts and moods. Interestingly, though, the beneficial effects of exercise may depend to a surprising extent on whether someone exercises at her own pace or gets coaching from someone else. Already, a wealth of recent research tells us that exercise buoys moods. Multiple studies show that physically active people are more apt to report being happy than sedentary people and are less likely to experience anxiety or depression. In a few experiments, regular exercise reduced the symptoms of depression as effectively as antidepressant medications. But science has yet to explain how exercise, a physical activity, alters people’s psychological health. Many exercise scientists speculate that working out causes the release of various proteins and other biochemical substances throughout our bodies. These substances can enter the bloodstream, travel to our brains and most likely jump-start neural processes there that affect how we feel emotionally. But it has not been clear which of the many substances released during exercise matter most for mental health and which kinds of exercise prompt the greatest gush in those biochemicals. Those open questions prompted Jacob Meyer, an assistant professor of kinesiology at Iowa State University in Ames, to start considering endocannabinoids and the runner’s high. As the name indicates, endocannabinoids are self-produced psychoactive substances, similar to the psychoactive compounds in cannabis, or marijuana. Created in many of our body’s tissues all the time, endocannabinoids bind to specialized receptors in our brains and nervous systems and help to increase calm and improve moods, among other effects. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 26522 - Posted: 08.21.2019

By Ken Belson COLLEGE STATION, Tex. — On a steamy afternoon in June, Jim Poynter, the coach of the 7-on-7 touch football team at Lamar High School in Arlington, Tex., escorted one of his former players around the state tournament. In a game last spring, the player, Brett Green Jr., was knocked out after his head collided with a teammate’s shoulder as they jumped to intercept a pass. Green was airlifted to a hospital, where bleeding in his brain was discovered. He spent weeks in the hospital recovering from dizziness, headaches and blurred vision, and had eye surgery and physical therapy. He will never play football again. Poynter wanted Green to know that some good came of his misfortune. Spread across the fields, about 4,000 players on 128 teams from across Texas ran pass routes, defended receivers and celebrated with high fives. What mattered most to Poynter, though, was that every player wore a soft-shell helmet. For years, 7-on-7 touch football has been billed as a safe way for players to stay in shape until tackle football starts up in the late summer. Most injuries involve twisted ankles, sprained knees and pulled muscles. But Green’s injury prompted the Texas State 7on7 Organization, aware that parents are more concerned than ever about safety, to become the first statewide group in the country to require that all of its players wear soft-shell helmets, starting at this year’s state tournament. “I don’t want that to happen to anyone else,” Green said. “It felt good to see in person because you know for sure they are wearing protection. I wish the decision had been made earlier, but I try to look for the good in everything.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 26521 - Posted: 08.21.2019

By Anahad O’Connor Low-carbohydrate diets have fallen in and out of favor since before the days of Atkins. But now an even stricter version of low-carb eating called the ketogenic diet is gaining popular attention, igniting a fierce scientific debate about its potential risks and benefits. Both the Atkins and ketogenic diets encourage followers to cut carbs from their diets. But while the Atkins diet gradually increases carbs over time, keto places firm limits on carbs and protein. This way of eating depletes the body of glucose, forcing it to primarily burn fat and produce an alternate source of fuel called ketones. A typical ketogenic diet restricts carbs to less than 10 percent of calories and limits protein to 20 percent, while fat makes up the rest. The keto diet has been popularized in best-selling books, promoted by celebrities and touted on social media as an antidote to various ailments. Proponents say it causes substantial weight loss and can help those with Type 2 diabetes dramatically improve their blood sugar levels, which fall when people avoid carbs. There have been many studies of the ketogenic diet over the years, but most have been small and of fairly short duration. A federal registry of clinical research shows that more than 70 trials looking at the diet’s impact on brain, cardiovascular and metabolic health are either underway or in the beginning stages. Dr. Ethan Weiss, a researcher and preventive cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, had long been skeptical of low-carb diets but decided to experiment with the ketogenic diet a couple years ago. In a typical day he skips breakfast and eats mostly salads, nuts, cheese, roasted vegetables and grilled chicken, fish or tofu, as well as dark chocolate for dessert. The result, he says: He lost 20 pounds and had to buy a new wardrobe. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 26520 - Posted: 08.20.2019

Nicola Davis People who struggle with sleep might be at greater risk of developing cardiovascular problems, research suggests. Scientists have found that people who are genetically predisposed to insomnia have a greater risk of heart failure, stroke and coronary artery disease. Researchers say the study backs previous work that has found links between poor sleep and cardiovascular problems, with the latest study supporting the idea that insomnia could play a role in causing such conditions. “If that really is the case, then if we can improve or reduce sleep disturbances, that might reduce the risk of stroke,” said Prof Hugh Markus, co-author of the research from the University of Cambridge. The new study relies on previous findings that there are about 250 genetic variants, each of which slightly increases the risk of someone having insomnia. “Most people don’t have all of them, people will have a number of them, a few or many of them,” said Markus. The crucial point is the way the genetic variants are inherited. Whether an individual carries them is random: their presence does not depend on the rest of that person’s genetic makeup or environmental factors, such as where they live, their wealth or how much they exercise. That means it is theoretically possible to look at whether an increased risk of insomnia could play a role in causing stroke, heart failure and coronary artery disease, while reducing the impact of other factors that can muddy the waters. This is a different approach to previous studies which could only show association, not causation. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26519 - Posted: 08.20.2019

By Robert C. Cantu and Mark Hyman If U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams asked for our advice (he hasn’t), we’d recommend that he issue the following statement: SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Tackle football is dangerous for children. Children who play tackle football absorb repeated hits to the head. As adults, they’re at higher risk of suffering cognitive deficits as well as behavioral and mood problems. We’d suggest that, as the nation’s top doctor, the surgeon general put this warning on every youth football helmet and place it in bold type on all youth tackle football registration forms. A parent or guardian wouldn’t be able to sign up their child without seeing it. It’s hard to overstate the importance of these steps. It’s fair to say that millions of sports-playing kids would enter adulthood with healthier brains and better futures. Forty million children participate in organized sport each year. Protecting them from head injury is a big task. Youth sports organizations generally do an admirable job. In the past decade, the U.S. Soccer Federation has banned heading for players 10 years old and younger and limited heading for players 11 to 13. USA Hockey no longer allows body checking until players are 13. Even tackle football is safer — marginally. Pop Warner, the largest national youth football league, has eliminated kickoffs for the youngest players — 5- to 10-years-old — and limited full-contact practice time. Of late, we’re learning more about brain injury among youth players in rougher “collision” sports such as football. These young athletes are at greater risk than we knew and than many parents and coaches would find acceptable. Recent studies of youth football are particularly alarming. Since 2015, Boston University’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center (which Robert C. Cantu co-founded) has published three studies all leading to a disquieting conclusion: Adults who played tackle football as children were more likely to deal with emotional and cognitive challenges in later life. © 1996-2019 The Washington Post

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26518 - Posted: 08.20.2019

By Aaron E. Carroll In many areas of health policy, the best of intentions can lead to more harm than good. Such is the case with America’s approach to alcohol and pregnancy. The best evidence shows that punitive policies — such as equating drinking while pregnant as child abuse and threatening to involve child protective services — can dissuade women from getting prenatal care. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders refer to a collection of problems in babies and children. These include low birth weight; impaired growth; and problems in the heart, kidneys and brain. Children can have developmental delays, communication difficulties, learning disabilities and lower I.Q. Some of these last a lifetime. It’s hard to know how many American children are affected. Studies done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have estimated that between 2 and 15 infants per 10,000 born in the United States have fetal alcohol syndrome, the most severe form of the disorders. Some community-based studies that use the broader definition of the disorder have found more affected children, up to 5 percent. We know that infants of women who drink alcohol in pregnancy may develop these disorders. The problem is what we don’t know. We don’t know the level of alcohol exposure in utero that could cause a child to develop these disorders. We don’t know if the timing of the exposure matters. We don’t know why some women who drink little might have a child who is affected, while some can binge drink during pregnancy and have a child with no apparent problems. Because of this, most medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the C.D.C., recommend that women forgo alcohol during pregnancy. The only dose known to be “safe” is none, they say, and therefore women should not drink at all. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26517 - Posted: 08.20.2019

By Michael Price First piloted as an experiment to reduce dental cavities in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1945, fluoridated drinking water has since been hailed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta as “one of public health’s greatest success stories.” Today, about two-thirds of people in the United States receive fluoridated tap water, as do many people in Australia, Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Now, a controversial new study links fluoridation to lower IQ in young children, especially boys whose mothers drank fluoridated water while pregnant. Longtime fluoridation critics are lauding the study, but other researchers say it suffers from numerous flaws that undercut its credibility. Either way, “It’s a potential bombshell,” says Philippe Grandjean, an environmental health researcher at Harvard University who wasn’t involved in the work. Fluoride is well-known for protecting teeth against cavities by strengthening tooth enamel. It’s found naturally in low concentrations in both freshwater and seawater, as well as in plant material, especially tea leaves. Throughout the 1940s and ’50s, public health researchers and government officials in cities around the world experimentally added fluoride to public drinking water; they found it reduced the prevalence of cavities by about 60%. Today, fluoridated water flows through the taps of about 5% of the world’s population, including 66% of Americans and 38% of Canadians. Yet skepticism has dogged the practice for as long as it has existed. Some have blamed fluoridated water for a wide range of illnesses including cancer, but most criticism has been dismissed as pseudoscience. Over the years, though, a small number of scientists have published meta-analyses casting doubt on the efficacy of water fluoridation in preventing cavities. More recently, scientists have published small-scale studies that appear to link prenatal fluoride exposure to lower IQ, although dental research groups were quick to challenge them. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 26516 - Posted: 08.19.2019

Ashley Yeager Drops of blood, filter paper, bacteria, a bacterial inhibitor, and a baking dish—that’s all it took for microbiologist Robert Guthrie to develop a basic test for phenylketonuria, a genetic metabolic disease that, if left untreated in infants, soon leads to neurological dysfunction and intellectual disability. The test would lay the foundation for screening newborns for diseases. In 1957, Guthrie met Robert Warner, a specialist who diagnosed individuals with mental disabilities. Warner told Guthrie about phenylketonuria (PKU), now known to affect roughly 1 in 10,000 children. The disease makes it impossible to break down the amino acid phenylalanine, so that it builds up to toxic levels in the body and disrupts neuronal communication. Once a child was diagnosed, a strict low-phenylalanine diet could prevent further damage, but Warner had no easy way to measure phenylalanine levels in his PKU patients’ blood to monitor the diet’s effects. He asked Guthrie for help. Guthrie reported back to Warner three days later with a solution. Guthrie knew from past work that the bacterial inhibitor β-2-thienylalanine blocked Bacillus subtilis from flourishing by substituting for phenylalanine in growing peptide chains, resulting in inactive proteins. He also knew that adding phenylalanine to the cell cultures restored normal protein function and spurred the bacterium’s growth. So his solution was simple: prick the skin, collect a few drops of blood on filter paper, and place the filter paper in a baking pan covered in β-2-thienylalanine. Add Bacillus subtilis to the filter paper and heat the pan overnight. If the bacterium grows exponentially, the level of phenylalanine is high. The assay worked well, so Guthrie used it as a model to develop tests for other metabolic diseases. © 1986–2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 26515 - Posted: 08.19.2019

Helena Blackstone The first study looking into the use of MDMA to treat alcohol addiction has shown the treatment is safe and early results show encouraging outcomes from the approach, scientists have said. Doctors in Bristol are testing whether a few doses of the drug, in conjunction with psychotherapy, could help patients overcome alcoholism more effectively than conventional treatments. Those who have completed the study have so far reported almost no relapse and no physical or psychological problems. In comparison, eight in 10 alcoholics in England relapse within three years after current treatment approaches. Dr Ben Sessa, an addiction psychiatrist and senior research fellow at Imperial College London, and who led the trial, said: “With the very best that medical science can work with, 80% of people are drinking within three years post alcohol detox.” Eleven people have so far completed the safety and tolerability study, which involves nine months of follow-ups. “We’ve got one person who has completely relapsed, back to previous drinking levels, we have five people who are completely dry and we have four or five who have had one or two drinks but wouldn’t reach the diagnosis of alcohol use disorder,” Sessa said. Most addiction is based on underlying trauma, often from childhood, explained Sessa. “MDMA selectively impairs the fear response,” he said. “It allows recall of painful memories without being overwhelmed. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26514 - Posted: 08.19.2019

Researchers believe that stuttering — a potentially lifelong and debilitating speech disorder — stems from problems with the circuits in the brain that control speech, but precisely how and where these problems occur is unknown. Using a mouse model of stuttering, scientists report that a loss of cells in the brain called astrocytes are associated with stuttering. The mice had been engineered with a human gene mutation previously linked to stuttering. The study (link is external), which appeared online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers insights into the neurological deficits associated with stuttering. The loss of astrocytes, a supporting cell in the brain, was most prominent in the corpus callosum, a part of the brain that bridges the two hemispheres. Previous imaging studies have identified differences in the brains of people who stutter compared to those who do not. Furthermore, some of these studies in people have revealed structural and functional problems in the same brain region as the new mouse study. The study was led by Dennis Drayna, Ph.D., of the Section on Genetics of Communication Disorders, at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), part of the National Institutes of Health. Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and from NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, and National Institute of Mental Health collaborated on the research. “The identification of genetic, molecular, and cellular changes that underlie stuttering has led us to understand persistent stuttering as a brain disorder,” said Andrew Griffith, M.D., Ph.D., NIDCD scientific director. “Perhaps even more importantly, pinpointing the brain region and cells that are involved opens opportunities for novel interventions for stuttering — and possibly other speech disorders.”

Keyword: Language; Glia
Link ID: 26513 - Posted: 08.19.2019

Laura Sanders Seconds before a memory pops up, certain nerve cells jolt into collective action. The discovery of this signal, described in the Aug. 16 Science, sheds light on the mysterious brain processes that store and recall information. Electrodes implanted in the brains of epilepsy patients picked up neural signals in the hippocampus, a key memory center, while the patients were shown images of familiar people and places, including former President Barack Obama and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. As the participants took in this new information, electrodes detected a kind of brain activity called sharp-wave ripples, created by the coordinated activity of many nerve cells in the hippocampus. Later blindfolded, the patients were asked to remember the pictures. One to two seconds before the participants began describing each picture, researchers noticed an uptick in sharp-wave ripples, echoing the ripples detected when the subjects had first seen the images. That echo suggests that these ripples are important for learning new information and for recalling it later, Yitzhak Norman of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and colleagues write in the study. Earlier studies suggested that these ripples in the hippocampus were important for forming memories. But it wasn’t clear if the ripples also had a role in bringing memories to mind. In another recent study, scientists also linked synchronized ripples in two parts of the brain to better memories of word pairs (SN Online: 3/5/19). |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 26512 - Posted: 08.19.2019

John Pappas A confidential government document containing evidence so critical it had the potential to change the course of an American tragedy was kept in the dark for more than a decade. The document, known as a “prosecution memo,” details how government lawyers believed that Purdue Pharma, the maker of the powerful opioid, OxyContin, knew early on that the drug was fueling a rise in abuse and addiction. They also gathered evidence indicating that the company’s executives had misled the public and Congress. “The Weekly” shines a light on that 2006 Justice Department memo and its consequences for today’s wave of lawsuits against opioid makers and members of the Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharma. We go with Barry Meier, the New York Times reporter who for two decades has chronicled how opioid abuse has ravaged America, as he travels back to where the crisis began. Barry Meier covered business, public policy, health and safety for nearly 30 years for The New York Times. He began covering the marketing of the painkiller OxyContin and the resulting epidemic of opioid addiction as early as 2001. He is also the author of “Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic,” first published in 2003 and recently reissued. The Confidential Memo Revealed Prosecutors cited evidence in their 2006 memo that Sackler family members who own Purdue were sent reports about problems with the company’s drugs. But that evidence never came to light because the recommended felony charges against Purdue executives never went forward. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26511 - Posted: 08.17.2019

By John Horgan At the beginning of my book Mind-Body Problems, I describe one of my earliest childhood memories: I am walking near a river on a hot summer day. My left hand grips a fishing rod, my right a can of worms. One friend walks in front of me, another behind. We’re headed to a spot on the river where we can catch perch, bullheads and large-mouth bass. Weeds bordering the path block my view of the river, but I can smell its dank breath and feel its chill on my skin. The seething of cicadas builds to a crescendo. I stop short. I’m me, I say. My friends don’t react, so I say, louder, I’m me. The friend before me glances over his shoulder and keeps walking, the friend behind pushes me. I resume walking, still thinking, I’m me, I’m me. I feel lonely, scared, exhilarated, bewildered. Advertisement That moment was when I first became self-conscious, aware of myself as something weird, distinct from the rest of the world, demanding explanation. Or so I came to believe when I recalled the incident in subsequent decades. I never really talked about it, because it was hard to describe. It meant a lot to me, but I doubted it would mean much to anyone else. Then I learned that others have had similar experiences. One is Rebecca Goldstein, the philosopher and novelist, whom I profiled in Mind-Body Problems. Before interviewing Goldstein, I read her novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, and I came upon a passage in which the hero, Cass, a psychologist, recalls a recurrent “metaphysical seizure” or “vertigo” that struck him in childhood. Lying in bed, he was overcome by the improbability that he was just himself and no one else. “The more he tried to get a fix on the fact of being Cass here,” Goldstein writes, “the more the whole idea of it just got away from him.” Even as an adult, Cass kept asking himself, “How can it be that, of all things, one is this thing, so that one can say, astonishingly, ‘Here I am’”? © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26510 - Posted: 08.17.2019