Maria Temming A new analysis of people’s brain waves when surrounded by different magnetic fields suggests that people have a “sixth sense” for magnetism. Birds, fish and some other creatures can sense Earth’s magnetic field and use it for navigation (SN: 6/14/14, p. 10). Scientists have long wondered whether humans, too, boast this kind of magnetoreception. Now, by exposing people to an Earth-strength magnetic field pointed in different directions in the lab, researchers from the United States and Japan have discovered distinct brain wave patterns that occur in response to rotating the field in a certain way. These findings, reported in a study published online March 18 in eNeuro, offer evidence that people do subconsciously respond to Earth’s magnetic field — although it’s not yet clear exactly why or how our brains use this information. “The first impression when I read the [study] was like, ‘Wow, I cannot believe it!’” says Can Xie, a biophysicist at Peking University in Beijing. Previous tests of human magnetoreception have yielded inconclusive results. This new evidence “is one step forward for the magnetoreception field and probably a big step for the human magnetic sense,” he says. “I do hope we can see replications and further investigations in the near future.” During the experiment, 26 participants each sat with their eyes closed in a dark, quiet chamber lined with electrical coils. These coils manipulated the magnetic field inside the chamber such that it remained the same strength as Earth’s natural field but could be pointed in any direction. Participants wore an EEG cap that recorded the electrical activity of their brains while the surrounding magnetic field rotated in various directions. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26052 - Posted: 03.19.2019

By Michael Price Female twins who shared a womb with a brother tend to get less education, earn less money, and have fewer children than girls who shared a womb with another girl, according to an analysis of hundreds of thousands of births over more than a decade. Researchers suspect the cause is testosterone exposure during fetal development, though the exact mechanism remains a mystery. “I think it’s a really interesting look at how this really complicated system might impact females,” says Talia Melber, a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana who wasn’t involved in the study. Still, she cautions, a lot more work needs to be done to establish a causal link. Fraternal twins, in which each of two eggs is fertilized by a different sperm cell, occur in about four of every 1000 births. About half of those result in male-female twin pairs. Typically, about 8 to 9 weeks into gestation, a male fetus begins to produce massive amounts of testosterone, which helps jump-start the development of male reproductive organs and brain architecture; female fetuses receive only modest amounts of the sex hormone. In male-female twins, though, small amounts of the male fetus’s testosterone can seep into the female twin’s separate amniotic sac. Scientists have known about this phenomenon for decades, and have been arguing for just as long over what effects, if any, it has on women later in life. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 26051 - Posted: 03.19.2019

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent Scientists have grown a miniature brain in a dish with a spinal cord and muscles attached, an advance that promises to accelerate the study of conditions such as motor neurone disease. The lentil-sized grey blob of human brain cells were seen to spontaneously send out tendril-like connections to link up with the spinal cord and muscle tissue, which was taken from a mouse. The muscles were then seen to visibly contract under the control of the so-called brain organoid. The research is is the latest in a series of increasingly sophisticated approximations of the human brain grown in the laboratory – this time with something approaching a central nervous system attached. Madeline Lancaster, who led the work at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, said: “We like to think of them as mini-brains on the move.” The scientists used a new method to grow the miniature brain from human stem cells, which allowed the organoid to reach a more sophisticated stage of development than previous experiments. The latest blob shows similarities, in terms of the variety of neurons and their organisation, to the human foetal brain at 12-16 weeks of pregnancy. However, the scientists said the structure was still too small and primitive to have anything approaching thoughts, feelings or consciousness. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26050 - Posted: 03.19.2019

By: Kelly Howell, Ph.D., Rebecca Gibbs, and Lee L. Rubin, Ph.D. Editor’s Note: Spinal muscular atrophy is the number one genetic cause of infant death. Until recently, half the babies born with it would die before their second birthdays, their hearts and lungs becoming too weak to continue. Medical care improved the odds somewhat, but new discoveries and therapeutic developments have improved survival rates significantly—and more good news may be on the horizon. In 2016, Bloomberg published an article that described Lauren Gibbs, who was born with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and enrolled in a clinical trial for a drug called nusinersen. The story reported that Gibbs enjoyed wheelchair basketball but was known primarily for her defense because she didn’t have enough strength to heave the ball high enough to reach the rim. “After the second time I got the drug, I hit probably 50 baskets in a row,” said Gibbs, who later attended Baylor University. Later that year, nusinersen became the first SMA treatment to be approved by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA). It is one of many promising developments in the past decade in understanding and treating SMA, a genetic neuromuscular disorder first described in the 1890s by Austrian physicians Guido Werdnig and Johann Hoffman. The pair observed infants with flaccid limb and trunk muscles, accompanied by the degeneration of motor neurons in the spinal cord.1 They learned that the loss of these neurons—specialized nerve cells responsible for stimulating skeletal muscle contraction—results in muscle atrophy and weakness, the hallmarks of SMA. Over the next century, further studies revealed highly variable disease severity and age of onset, making it unclear if SMA was one disease with a broad array of symptoms in different patients, or a number of distinct diseases. © 2019 The Dana Foundation.

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 26049 - Posted: 03.19.2019

Emery N. Brown, Francisco J. Flores General anesthetics work by altering the activity of specific neurons in the brain. One main class of these drugs, which includes propofol and the ether-derivative sevoflurane, work primarily by increasing the activity of inhibitory GABAA receptors, while a second class that includes ketamine primarily blocks excitatory NMDA receptors. The GABAA receptor is a channel that allows chloride ions to flow into the neuron, decreasing the voltage within the cell relative to the extracellular space. Such hyper­polarization decreases the probability that the neuron will fire. Propofol and sevoflurane increase the chloride current going into the cell, making the inhibition more potent. The NMDA receptor allows sodium and calcium ions to flow into the cell, while letting potassium ions out, increasing the voltage within the cell relative to the extra­cellular space and increasing the probability of neural firing. Ketamine blocks this receptor, decreasing its excitatory actions. Anesthetics’ interactions with neural receptors alter how neurons work, and as a consequence, how different brain regions communicate. These alterations manifest as highly structured oscillations in brain activity that are associated with the dramatic behavioral changes characteristic of general anesthesia. © 1986 - 2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26048 - Posted: 03.19.2019

By Haider Warraich The United States uses a third of the world’s opioids but a fifth of Americans still say they suffer from chronic pain. The only demonstrable effect of two decades of widespread prescription of opioids has been catastrophic harm. With more than 47,000 Americans dying of opioid overdoses in 2017 and hundreds of thousands more addicted to them, it was recently reported that, for the first time, Americans were more likely to die of opioids than of car accidents. This has forced many to take a step back and ponder the very nature of pain, to understand how best to alleviate it. The ancient Greeks considered pain a passion — an emotion rather than a sensation like touch or smell. During the Dark Ages in Europe, pain was seen as a punishment for sins, a spiritual and emotional experience alleviated through prayers rather than prescriptions. In the 19th century, the secularization of Western society led to the secularization of pain. It was no longer a passion to be endured but a sensation to be quashed. The concept of pain as a purely physical phenomenon reached its zenith in the 1990s, when medical organizations such as the American Pain Society and the Department of Veterans Affairs succeeded in having pain designated a “fifth vital sign,” alongside blood pressure, temperature and breathing and heart rate. This coincided with the release of long-acting opioids like OxyContin. Doctors believed they now had an effective remedy for their patients’ suffering. While opioids do help many patients with acute pain from injuries, surgeries or conditions like cancer, looking back it’s clear that using opioids to treat chronic pain — backaches, bum knees and the like — might well be considered the worst medical mistake of our era. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26047 - Posted: 03.18.2019

By Jill U. Adams I hear it often: A friend swears that her running practice staves off bouts of low spirits. Another says going to the gym before work keeps him mentally steady. Perhaps you’ve heard similar stories; perhaps you believe it for yourself. Those anecdotes prompt some questions. Is there evidence to support the idea that exercise can have an effect on depression? And if so, how much exercise? A number of research studies have been done to answer those questions and others. One study assigned participants, 202 depressed adults at least 40 years old, to one of four groups. One group attended supervised group exercise sessions three times per week, where they monitored their heart rate as they walked or jogged on a treadmill for 30 minutes. A second group received similar instructions but were left to work out on their own at home. Groups three and four took pills: either the antidepressant medication sertraline or a placebo. After 16 weeks, researchers rescreened participants for depression and found 45 percent of the people in the supervised exercise group no longer met the criteria for major depression. In the other groups, 40 percent of home exercisers, 47 percent of medicine takers and 31 percent of placebo pill takers were no longer depressed. That’s right, the supervised exercisers did as well as the people who took an antidepressant. As promising as these results were, however, it was a small study. James Blumenthal, a psychologist at Duke University who co-wrote the paper, says there are a number of studies that, like his, support the idea that exercise might be helpful in treating depression. Like his, most of the studies are small. “There are no large, multicenter clinical trials,” he says, which are typical for drug studies funded by pharmaceutical companies.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 26046 - Posted: 03.18.2019

David Cyranoski A Japanese committee has provisionally approved the use of reprogrammed stem cells to treat diseased or damaged corneas. Researchers are now waiting for final approval from the health ministry to test the treatment in people with corneal blindness, which affects millions of people around the world. The cornea, a transparent layer that covers and protects the eye, contains stem cells that repair it when damaged. But these can be destroyed by disease or by trauma from chemicals or burns, which can result in patients losing their vision. Currently, cornea transplants from donors who have died are used to treat damaged or diseased corneas, but good-quality tissue is scarce. A team led by ophthalmologist Kohji Nishida at Osaka University plans to treat damaged corneas using sheets of tissue made from induced pluripotent stem cells. These are created by reprogramming cells from a donor into an embryonic-like state that can then transform into other tissue, such as corneal cells. Nishida’s team plans to lay 0.05-millimetre-thick sheets of corneal cells across patients’ eyes. Animal studies have shown1 that this can save or restore vision. The health ministry is expected to decide soon. If Nishida and his team receive approval, they will treat four people, whom they will then monitor for a year to check the safety and efficacy of the treatment. The first treatment is planned to take place before the end of July. Other Japanese researchers have carried out clinical studies using induced pluripotent stem cells to treat spinal cord injury, Parkinson's disease and another eye disease. © 2019 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Keyword: Vision; Stem Cells
Link ID: 26045 - Posted: 03.18.2019

Jon Hamilton In the U.S., older people with dementia are usually told they have Alzheimer's disease. But a range of other brain diseases can also impair thinking, and memory and judgment, according to scientists attending a summit on dementias held Thursday and Friday at the National Institutes of Health. These include strokes, a form of Parkinson's disease, and a disease that damages brain areas that regulate emotion and behavior. "There's a host of things that can cause loss of cognitive function," says Dr. Julie Schneider, a professor at the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center in Chicago and scientific chair of the NIH summit. And many patients have more than one disease affecting the brain, she says. Most of these diseases can't be stopped, Schneider says. But it's important that families get the right diagnosis in order to get the best care and plan for the future. The emphasis on non-Alzheimer's dementias reflects a change in doctors' understanding of what happens to aging brains. When Schneider was training to be a doctor in the 1980s and '90s, dementia was simple. "We were taught that almost all dementia is Alzheimer's disease," she says. But since then, studies have shown that 20 percent to 40 percent of the nation's 5.8 million dementia patients have some other disease. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26044 - Posted: 03.18.2019

By Jonathan N. Stea Cannabis is deeply misunderstood. It has been hailed as a potential hero in the fight against all ailments, including cancer and the opioid epidemic. It has also been called the devil’s lettuce, with claims that its use will lead to laziness, madness and even murder. In part, this polarization in beliefs can be explained by the complexity of cannabis. It is not helpful or accurate to think about cannabis as a single substance, but rather as a mixture of over 500 chemicals with varying combinations of dosages. Given that cannabis is essentially a chemical soup that until recently had mostly been prepared in the black marketplace, it has been difficult to draw conclusions from research about its effects. This is particularly true in the area of addiction and mental health, where many factors contribute to the muddy the picture of whether cannabis can be helpful or harmful. In recent years, it has been suggested that cannabis could be the white knight of the opioid epidemic. Indeed, recent state regulations in the United States (e.g., Illinois, New York) have explicitly approved medical cannabis as a treatment for opioid addiction. Critics of these policy decisions have argued that there is not yet enough evidence to support and promote cannabis as an effective treatment. They are correct. There have been no randomized controlled trials evaluating cannabis specifically for the treatment of opioid addiction. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26043 - Posted: 03.16.2019

By Sheila Kaplan and Matt Richtel Dr. Scott Gottlieb became commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration in 2017 with an ambitious plan to reduce cigarette smoking, a habit that kills nearly half a million Americans each year, by shifting smokers to less harmful alternatives like e-cigarettes. But he was quickly embroiled in an unexpected crisis: the explosion of vaping among millions of middle and high school students, many of whom were getting addicted to nicotine. Dr. Gottlieb will depart at the end of this month, following his sudden announcement last week that he would resign, with his plans to toughen regulation of both vaping and smoking unfinished and powerful lobbying forces quietly celebrating the exit of a politically canny administrator who aggressively wielded his regulatory powers. Opponents are already swooping in, making their case to Congress and reaching out to the White House. A coalition of conservative organizations that oppose government intervention in the marketplace has harshly criticized Dr. Gottlieb’s crackdown on e-cigarettes. Retailers, including convenience store and gas station owners, are on Capitol Hill lobbying against guidelines Dr. Gottlieb proposed on Wednesday to restrict sales of most flavored e-cigarettes to separate adult-only areas and to require age verification of customers. And major tobacco companies are likely to seize on his departure to try to scuttle his long-term plans to lower nicotine levels in cigarettes to nonaddictive levels and to ban menthol cigarettes, which make up more than a third of the cigarette market and dominate sales to African-Americans. Some longtime officials inside the F.D.A. said privately that they fear these ideas could be delayed indefinitely. “There have been well-intentioned commissioners before Gottlieb,” said Jonathan Havens, a former F.D.A. tobacco lawyer now in private practice. “But they were not as good at capturing the attention of the nation, of the stakeholders. I think that momentum could very well stall on some of these products, or be lost completely.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26042 - Posted: 03.16.2019

Patricia Neighmond A study published Thursday in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology finds the percentage of U.S. teens and young adults reporting mental distress, depression and suicidal thoughts and actions has risen significantly over the past decade. While these problems also increased among adults 26 and older, the increase was not nearly as large as among younger people. The study findings suggest a generational shift says psychologist Jean Twenge, with San Diego State University who headed the study and is author of the book iGen. To see a significant increase in negative psychological states "among our vulnerable population of teens and young adults is absolutely heartbreaking," she says. Twenge and her colleagues analyzed data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a government survey that tracks mental health and substance use in individuals age 12 and over in the U.S. They looked at survey responses from more than 200,000 adolescents ages 12 to 17 and almost 400,000 young adults ages 18 and over between 2005 and 2017. They found the rate of individuals reporting symptoms consistent with major depression over the past year increased 52 percent in teens and 63 percent in young adults over a decade. Girls were more vulnerable than boys. By 2017 one out of every five teenage girls had experienced major depression in the last year.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 26041 - Posted: 03.16.2019

By Pam Belluck Could people’s eyes and ears help fix the damage Alzheimer’s disease does to the brain? Just by looking at flashing light and listening to flickering sound? A new study led by a prominent M.I.T. neuroscientist offers tantalizing promise. It found that when mice engineered to exhibit Alzheimer’s-like qualities were exposed to strobe lights and clicking sounds, important brain functions improved and toxic levels of Alzheimer’s-related proteins diminished. What’s more, the rapid-fire soundtrack appeared to make mice better at cognitive and memory skills, like navigating mazes and recognizing objects. Of course, mice are not people. And many drugs that have helped Alzheimer’s-engineered mice haven’t done much for people with Alzheimer’s, which affects 44 million people worldwide, including 5.5 million Americans. Also, because the technique didn’t have long-lasting effects — results faded about a week after the sensory stimulation was stopped — any therapy developed from the research might have to be repeated regularly. Still, seeing that a noninvasive daily dose of light and sound could have such significant effects in mice give some experts reason for optimism. “It’s exciting, I think,” said Dr. Lennart Mucke, director of the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease, who was not involved in the study. “Reading the paper made me quite enthusiastic about seeing this move forward into some well-crafted clinical trials.” The experiments were led by Li-Huei Tsai, director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. She and her colleagues showed that light and sound delivered to mice at a certain frequency — 40 hertz or 40 flashes or clicks per second — appears to synchronize the rhythm of the brain’s gamma waves, which is disrupted in patients with Alzheimer’s. Gamma waves are among several types of electrical brain waves believed to be involved in concentration, sleep, perception and movement. The experiment setup where flickering light and sound were delivered to Alzheimer’s-engineered mice in the tubs.CreditPicower Institute for Learning and Memory, M.I.T. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 26040 - Posted: 03.15.2019

Liam Drew A mouse scurries down a hallway, past walls lined with shifting monochrome stripes and checks. But the hallway isn’t real. It’s part of a simulation that the mouse is driving as it runs on a foam wheel, mounted inside a domed projection screen. While the mouse explores its virtual world, neuroscientist Aman Saleem watches its brain cells at work. Light striking the mouse’s retinas triggers electrical pulses that travel to neurons in its primary visual cortex, where Saleem has implanted electrodes. Textbooks say that these neurons each respond to a specific stimulus, such as a horizontal or vertical line, so that identical patterns of inputs should induce an identical response. But that’s not what happens. When the mouse encounters a repeat of an earlier scene, its neurons fire in a different pattern. “Five years ago, if you’d told me that, I’d have been like, ‘No, that’s not true. That’s not possible’,” says Saleem, in whose laboratory at University College London we are standing. His results, published last September1, show that cells in the hippocampus that track where the mouse has run along the hallway are somehow changing how cells in the visual cortex fire. In other words, the mouse’s neural representation of two identical scenes differs, depending on where it perceives itself to be. It’s no surprise that an animal’s experiences change how it sees the world: all brains learn from experience and combine multiple streams of information to construct perceptions of reality. But researchers once thought that at least some areas in the brain — those that are the first to process inputs from the sense organs — create relatively faithful representations of the outside world. According to this model, these representations then travel to ‘association’ areas, where they combine with memories and expectations to produce perceptions.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Vision
Link ID: 26039 - Posted: 03.15.2019

Bruce Bower Humankind’s gift of gab is not set in stone, and farming could help to explain why. Over the last 6,000 years or so, farming societies increasingly have substituted processed dairy and grain products for tougher-to-chew game meat and wild plants common in hunter-gatherer diets. Switching to those diets of softer, processed foods altered people’s jaw structure over time, rendering certain sounds like “f” and “v” easier to utter, and changing languages worldwide, scientists contend. People who regularly chew tough foods such as game meat experience a jaw shift that removes a slight overbite from childhood. But individuals who grow up eating softer foods retain that overbite into adulthood, say comparative linguist Damián Blasi of the University of Zurich and his colleagues. Computer simulations suggest that adults with an overbite are better able to produce certain sounds that require touching the lower lip to the upper teeth, the researchers report in the March 15 Science. Linguists classify those speech sounds, found in about half of the world’s languages, as labiodentals. And when Blasi and his team reconstructed language change over time among Indo-European tongues (SN: 11/25/17, p. 16), currently spoken from Iceland to India, the researchers found that the likelihood of using labiodentals in those languages rose substantially over the past 6,000 to 7,000 years. That was especially true when foods such as milled grains and dairy products started appearing (SN: 2/1/03, p. 67). “Labiodental sounds emerged recently in our species, and appear more frequently in populations with long traditions of eating soft foods,” Blasi said at a March 12 telephone news conference. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 26037 - Posted: 03.15.2019

By Andrew Jacobs What do these ads featuring Joe Camel, Kool-Aid Man and the maniacal mascot for Hawaiian Punch have in common? All three were created by Big Tobacco in the decades when cigarette makers, seeking to diversify their holdings, acquired some of America’s iconic beverage brands. They used their expertise in artificial flavor, coloring and marketing to heighten the products’ appeal to children. That tobacco companies once sold sugar-sweetened drinks like Tang, Capri Sun and Kool-Aid is not exactly news. But researchers combing through a vast archive of cigarette company documents at the University of California, San Francisco stumbled on something revealing: Internal correspondence showed how tobacco executives, barred from targeting children for cigarette sales, focused their marketing prowess on young people to sell sugary beverages in ways that had not been done before. The archive, known as the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents, was created as part of a settlement between major cigarette companies and states that were seeking to recoup smoking-related health care costs. The researchers published their findings on Thursday in the medical publication BMJ. Using child-tested flavors, cartoon characters, branded toys and millions of dollars in advertising, the companies cultivated loyalty to sugar-laden products that health experts said had greatly contributed to the nation’s obesity crisis. At a time of mounting childhood obesity, with nearly a third of children in the United States overweight or obese and rates of type 2 diabetes soaring among adolescents, the study’s authors said it was important to chart how companies created and marketed junk food and sugary drinks to youngsters. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Obesity
Link ID: 26036 - Posted: 03.15.2019

Ashley Yeager Brown and yellow mice nestle side by side in their cages in Anne Ferguson-Smith’s molecular genetics lab at the University of Cambridge. The mice are Agouti Viable Yellow, naturally occurring mutants, which, though genetically identical, have coats that vary in color—a phenomenon that researchers have long studied as an example of epigenetic inheritance. All of the mutant mice have a gene, Agouti, that influences coat color, and an adjacent transposable element—a DNA sequence that can move about the genome, creating or reversing mutations—that promotes the gene’s expression. In the brown mice, this element is methylated and, therefore, silenced. But in the yellow mice, it isn’t methylated, meaning that these animals overexpress Agouti signaling protein in many tissues, leading to their yellow hue. Importantly, Ferguson-Smith says, yellow mother mice tend to have yellow baby mice and brown mother mice tend to have brown baby mice, suggesting that the methylation mark—or lack of it—is passed down from generation to generation. This phenomenon has sparked scientists to hypothesize that other methylation marks on transposable elements can also be passed directly from parent to child, raising the possibility that parents’ diet, behavior, and experiences might affect future generations via this route. © 1986 - 2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Epigenetics
Link ID: 26035 - Posted: 03.15.2019

Eating mushrooms more than twice a week could prevent memory and language problems occurring in the over-60s, research from Singapore suggests. A unique antioxidant present in mushrooms could have a protective effect on the brain, the study found. The more mushrooms people ate, the better they performed in tests of thinking and processing. But researchers said it was not possible to prove a direct link between the fungi and brain function. The National University of Singapore study's findings were based on 663 Chinese adults, aged over 60, whose diet and lifestyle were tracked from 2011 to 2017. Over the six-year study the researchers found that eating more than two portions of mushrooms a week lowered the chances of mild cognitive impairment by 50%, compared with those who ate fewer than one portion. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) can make people forgetful, affect their memory and cause problems with language, attention and locating objects in spaces - but the changes can be subtle. It is not serious enough to be defined as dementia. The participants in the study were asked how often they ate six different types of mushrooms: oyster, shiitake, white button, dried, golden and tinned. Mushroom eaters performed better in brain tests and were found to have faster processing speed - and this was particularly noticeable in those who ate more than two portions a week, or more than 300g (10.5oz). "This correlation is surprising and encouraging," said assistant professor Lei Feng, the lead study author, from the university's department of psychological medicine. Image copyright Getty Images "It seems that a commonly available single ingredient could have a dramatic effect on cognitive decline. © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 26034 - Posted: 03.15.2019

By Tiffany Hsu Amazon has removed the online listings for two books that claim to contain cures for autism, a move that follows recent efforts by several social media sites to limit the availability of anti-vaccination and other pseudoscientific material. The books, “Healing the Symptoms Known as Autism” and “Fight Autism and Win,” which had previously been listed for sale in Amazon’s marketplace, were not available on Wednesday. The company confirmed that the listings had been removed, but declined to discuss why or whether similar books would be taken down in the future. Several such books were still listed on Wednesday. In an article published this week, Wired magazine noted that Amazon is crowded with titles promoting unproven treatments for autism that include “sex, yoga, camel milk, electroconvulsive therapy and veganism.” There is no cure for autism spectrum disorder, but there are medications that can help address associated symptoms like high energy levels and depression, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency has found that as many as a third of parents with an autistic child have tried treatments that most pediatricians do not recommend, and that up to 10 percent may be using potentially dangerous tactics. The books that were listed on Amazon were both written more than five years ago and have together generated more than 600 customer reviews. “Healing the Symptoms Known as Autism” recommends that autistic children drink and bathe in chlorine dioxide, a compound often referred to as “Miracle Mineral Solution.” In 2010, the Food and Drug Administration described it as “a potent bleach used for stripping textiles and industrial water treatment” that “can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and symptoms of severe dehydration.” Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, wrote an open letter this month to Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, chiding the company about the failure of its algorithms to “distinguish quality information from misinformation or misleading information.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 26033 - Posted: 03.14.2019

Jayshree Pandya Even though neuroscience has made amazing advances, the origin of consciousness in humans -- and its nature and processes -- still remain largely unknown; the underlying physiological mechanisms of generating conscious beings are still not clearly understood. However, with the advances in brain mapping and neuroscience, we are perhaps much closer to finally understanding the fundamentals of consciousness in humans than ever before. It is said that what we cannot create we do not understand. While the very nature of human consciousness is difficult to understand, there is an intense effort going on to build a conscious computer mind out of computer chips (now neuromorphic chips). Understandably, there are growing concerns and questions about building a conscious mind using neuromorphic chips when there is so little clarity about the human mind and the very nature of human consciousness. Now, we can perhaps understand the human brain as a functional computer and compare it with functional computer systems/machines. Now, over the years, we have wondered: to what degree are machines aware of their internal and external surroundings? Are computer systems/machines truly aware? Are self-aware machines already here? The answer to these questions perhaps raises only more questions, as comparing consciousness in functional machines to consciousness in functional humans is more difficult than expected. ©2019 Forbes Media LLC.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26032 - Posted: 03.14.2019