Jules Howard It’s a bit garbled but you can definitely hear it in the mobile phone footage. As the chimpanzees arrange their branches into a makeshift ladder and one of them makes its daring escape from its Belfast zoo enclosure, some words ring out loud and clear: “Don’t escape, you bad little gorilla!” a child onlooker shouts from the crowd. And … POP … with that a tiny explosion goes off inside my head. Something knocks me back about this sentence. It’s a “kids-say-the-funniest things” kind of sentence, and in any other situation I’d offer a warm smile and a chuckle of approval. But not this time. This statement has brought out the pedant in me. At this point, you may wonder if I’m capable of fleshing out a 700-word article chastising a toddler for mistakenly referring to a chimpanzee as a gorilla. The good news is that, though I am more than capable of such a callous feat, I don’t intend to write about this child’s naive zoological error. In fact, this piece isn’t really about the (gorgeous, I’m sure) child. It’s about us. You and me, and the words we use. So let’s repeat it. That sentence, I mean. “Don’t escape, you bad little gorilla!” the child shouted. The words I’d like to focus on in this sentence are the words “you” and “bad”. The words “you” and “bad” are nice examples of a simple law of nearly all human languages. They are examples of Zipf’s law of abbreviation, where more commonly used words in a language tend to be shorter. It’s thought that this form of information-shortening allows the transmission of more complex information in a shorter amount of time, and it’s why one in four words you and I write or say is likely to be something of the “you, me, us, the, to” variety. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 25971 - Posted: 02.18.2019

Bruce Bower WASHINGTON — Beliefs among some university professors that intelligence is fixed, rather than capable of growth, contribute to a racial achievement gap in STEM courses, a new study suggests. Those professors may subtly communicate stereotypes about blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans allegedly being less intelligent than Asians and whites, say psychologist Elizabeth Canning of Indiana University in Bloomington and her colleagues. In turn, black, Hispanic and Native American undergraduates may respond by becoming less academically motivated and more anxious about their studies, leading to lower grades. Even small dips in STEM grades — especially for students near pass/fail cutoffs — can accumulate across the 15 or more science, technology, engineering and math classes needed to become a physician or an engineer, Canning says. That could jeopardize access to financial aid and acceptance to graduate programs. “Our work suggests that academic benefits could accrue over time if all students, and particularly underrepresented minority students, took STEM classes with faculty who endorse a growth mind-set,” Canning says. Underrepresented minority students’ reactions to professors with fixed or flexible beliefs about intelligence have yet to be studied. But over a two-year period, the disparity in grade point averages separating Asian and white STEM students from black, Hispanic and Native American peers was nearly twice as large in courses taught by professors who regarded intelligence as set in stone, versus malleable, Canning’s team reports online February 15 in Science Advances. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019.

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25970 - Posted: 02.18.2019

A genetic variant found only in people of African descent significantly increases a smoker’s preference for cigarettes containing menthol, a flavor additive. The variant of the MRGPRX4 gene is five to eight times more frequent among smokers who use menthol cigarettes than other smokers, according to an international group of researchers supported by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. The multiethnic study is the first to look across all genes to identify genetic vulnerability to menthol cigarettes. The paper was published online in the journal PLOS Genetics (link is external) on Feb. 15. Menthol provides a minty taste and a cooling or soothing sensation, and plays a particularly troubling role in U.S. cigarette smoking patterns. According to the FDA, nearly 20 million people in the United States smoke menthol cigarettes, which are particularly popular among African-American smokers and teen smokers. In the U.S., 86 percent of African-American smokers use menthol cigarettes, compared to less than 30 percent of smokers of European descent. In addition, menthol cigarettes may be harder to quit than other cigarettes. Although not originally the focus of the study, researchers also uncovered clues as to how menthol may reduce the irritation and harshness of smoking cigarettes. “This study sheds light on the molecular mechanisms of how menthol interacts with the body,” said Andrew Griffith, M.D., Ph.D., scientific director and acting deputy director of NIH’s National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders (NIDCD). “These results can help inform public health strategies to lower the rates of harmful cigarette smoking among groups particularly vulnerable to using menthol cigarettes.”

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25969 - Posted: 02.18.2019

By Emily Underwood Alert! “Cats Can Literally Make You Crazy.” Wait! “Cats Don't Cause Mental Illness.” The news headlines are as alarming as they are contradictory. All refer to Toxoplasma gondii, a brain parasite carried by our feline companions that infects roughly one in three people. Scientists have long hypothesized that T. gondii plays a role in mental illness, including schizophrenia. But though more than 100 studies have found a correlation, none has shown that the parasite actually causes mental illness. So what’s really going on? Here’s what you need to know: T. gondii is not a bacterium or a virus, but a single-celled microscopic organism distantly related to the parasite that causes malaria. Cats get T. gondii and the disease it causes, toxoplasmosis, by eating infected rodents, birds, and other animals. Estimates suggest about 40% of cats in the United States are infected; most don’t show any symptoms, but they can develop jaundice or blindness and experience personality changes if the parasite spreads to the liver or nervous system. In the first few weeks after infection, a cat can shed millions of hardy egg pods called oocysts into its litterbox each day. Although some people get toxoplasmosis from direct contact with domestic cats and cat feces, many more are infected when oocysts shed by cats make it into the soil and water, where they can survive for a year or longer. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 25968 - Posted: 02.15.2019

The brain function of very late risers and "morning larks" during the hours of the working day is different, according to a study. Researchers scanned the brains of night owls with a bedtime of 02:30 and a wake time of 10:15, along with early risers. The tests - performed between 08:00 and 20:00 - found night owls had less connectivity in brain regions linked to maintaining consciousness. They also had poorer attention, slower reactions and increased sleepiness. Researchers said it suggested that night owls were disadvantaged by the "constraints" of the typical working day. They called for more research to understand the health implications of night owls performing on a work or school schedule to which they are not naturally suited. Scientists took 38 people who were either night owls or morning larks (people who went to bed just before 23:00 and woke at 06:30) and investigated their brain function at rest using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. The volunteers then carried out a series of tasks at various times, from 08:00 to 20:00, and were asked to report on their levels of sleepiness. Morning larks were least sleepy and had their fastest reaction time in the early morning tests. They were also found to perform significantly better at this time than night owls. In contrast, night owls were least sleepy and had their fastest reaction time at 20:00, although they did not do significantly better than the larks at this time. The brain connectivity in the regions that predicted better performance and lower sleepiness was significantly higher in larks at all time points, suggesting connectivity in late risers is impaired throughout the whole working day, researchers said. © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 25967 - Posted: 02.15.2019

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News, Washington DC New results suggest ageing brains can potentially be rejuvenated, at least in mice, according to researchers. Very early-stage experiments indicate that drugs can be developed to stop or even reverse mental decline. The results were presented at the 2019 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The US and Canadian researchers took two new approaches to trying to prevent the loss of memory and cognitive decline that can come with old age. One team, from the University of California, Berkeley, showed MRI scans which indicated that mental decline may be caused by molecules leaking into the brain. Blood vessels in the brain are different from those in other parts of the body. They protect the organ by allowing only nutrients, oxygen and some drugs to flow through into the brain, but block larger, potentially damaging molecules. This is known as the blood-brain barrier. The scans revealed that this barrier becomes increasingly leaky as we get older. For example, 30-40% of people in their 40s have some disruption to their blood-brain barrier, compared with 60% of 60-year-olds. The scans also showed that the brain was inflamed in the leaky areas. Prof Daniela Kaufer, who leads the Berkeley group, said that young mice altered to have leaky blood-brain barriers showed many signs of aging. She discovered a chemical that stops the damage to the barrier from causing inflammation to the brain. Prof Kaufer told BBC News that not only did the chemical stop the genetically altered young mice from showing signs of aging, it reversed the signs of aging in older mice. © 2019 BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25966 - Posted: 02.15.2019

By Kelly Servick Rough sleep is bad for your mind—and your heart. It can increase the risk of clogged arteries, which can lead to stroke or heart attacks. But how these two things are connected has been a mystery. Now, a study in mice reveals a link, based on signals the brain sends to bone marrow. If the story holds true in humans, the mechanism could help explain the connection between sleep and other conditions, from obesity to cancer. “Not everyone who is sleep-deprived develops cardiovascular disease,” says Namni Goel, a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia who was not involved in the work. The new mouse work “opens the door for human studies” that could sort out who is most at risk. In many forms of cardiovascular disease, fatty deposits build up on artery walls (a condition called atherosclerosis) and can rupture to cause a stroke or heart attack. Immune cells—in particular, white blood cells called monocytes—also play a key role. They flock to sites where these deposits have damaged blood vessels and they spawn cells that can contribute to the growing plaque. To follow up on the known connection between sleep and heart disease, immunologist Filip Swirski of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston wanted to explore whether sleep somehow triggered an immune process that spurs this dangerous buildup. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25965 - Posted: 02.14.2019

Ian Sample Science editor An experimental drug that bolsters ailing brain cells has raised hopes of a treatment for memory loss, poor decision making and other mental impairments that often strike in old age. The drug could be taken as a daily pill by over-55s if clinical trials, which are expected to start within two years, show that the medicine is safe and effective at preventing memory lapses. Tests in the lab showed that old animals had far better memory skills half an hour after receiving the drug. After two months on the treatment, brain cells which had shrunk in the animals had grown back, scientists found. Etienne Sibille, at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, said the treatment was aimed not only at the “normal” cognitive decline that leads to senior moments, but at memory loss and mental impairments that commonly afflict people with depression, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. If the drug did well in human trials, Sibille said it was possible that “anybody over the age of 55-60 who may be at risk of cognitive problems later on could benefit from this treatment”. “Our findings have direct implications for poor cognition in normal ageing,” he said, with the drug potentially improving learning, memory, decision making and essential life planning. “But we see this deficiency across disorders from depression to schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s.” © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25964 - Posted: 02.14.2019

Shawna Williams Watch a bacterium chase down the source of an enticing molecular trail using chemo-taxis, and it’s clear that its sensory and navigation abilities are tightly linked. But could the same be true for humans? In 2014, Louisa Dahmani, then a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal, set out to answer that question. After having reviewed the literature on studies of spatial memory and olfaction in people, “I realized that the two functions seemed to rely on similar brain regions,” she explains. “But no one had actually looked at it directly and tested the same sample of participants on an olfaction and on a spatial memory task.” Dahmani, her advisor Véronique Bohbot, and their colleagues set out to rectify that. The group recruited 60 volunteers and tested their ability to identify 40 odors, from menthol to cucumber to lavender. The researchers also had the subjects do a computer-based task in which they moved through a virtual town. After their exploration, the subjects navigated through the virtual town from one of its eight landmarks to a different destination via the shortest route possible. “People who are better at finding their way are also better at identifying smells,” Dahmani says, summing up the study’s biggest takeaway. The scientists also imaged participants’ brains using MRI and found that a larger medial orbitofrontal cortex—a brain region known to be associated, along with the hippocampus, with spatial navigation—correlated with both better smell identification and fewer errors on the navigation task (Nat Comm, 9:4162, 2018). © 1986 - 2019 The Scientist.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25963 - Posted: 02.14.2019

By Nicholas Bakalar Chronic inflammation in middle age may lead to memory and thinking problems later in life. Unlike acute inflammation, which arises in response to injury, chronic inflammation persists over months or years. Autoimmune disease, lingering infection, exposure to polluted air, psychological stress and other conditions can all promote chronic inflammation. Researchers did blood tests on 12,336 men and women, average age 57, assigning them an “inflammation composite score” based on white blood cell count, clotting factors and other tests. They also assessed their cognition with standardized tests of memory, processing speed and verbal fluency. The study is in Neurology. After controlling for age, education, blood pressure, cholesterol, heart disease and many other factors, they found that the greater the number of inflammatory factors, the steeper the cognitive decline over 20 years of follow-up. Inflammation was most strongly associated with declines in memory. “We know that dementia starts earlier than the appearance of symptoms,” said the lead author, Keenan A. Walker, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins, “and we’ve shown that levels of inflammation matter for dementia risk. Reducing chronic inflammation involves the same health behaviors that we already know are important for other reasons — regular exercise, healthy diet, avoiding excessive weight gain and so on.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 25962 - Posted: 02.14.2019

By Meredith Wadman BethAnn McLaughlin has no time for James Watson, especially not when the 90-year-old geneticist is peering out from a photo on the wall of her guest room at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Banbury Center. “I don’t need him staring at me when I’m trying to go to sleep,” McLaughlin told a December 2018 gathering at the storied New York meeting center as she projected a photo of her redecorating job: She had hung a washcloth over the image of Watson, who co-discovered DNA’s structure, directed the lab for decades—and is well-known for racist and sexist statements. The washcloth image was part of McLaughlin’s unconventional presentation—by turns sobering, hilarious, passionate, and profane—to two dozen experts who had gathered to wrestle with how to end gender discrimination in the biosciences. McLaughlin, a 51-year-old neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) in Nashville, displayed the names of current members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) who have been sanctioned for sexual harassment. She urged other NAS members—several of whom sat in the room—to resign in protest, “as one does.” She chided institutions for passing along “harassholes” to other universities. “The only other places that do this are the Catholic Church and the military,” she said. In the past 9 months, McLaughlin has exploded into view as the public face of the #MeToo movement in science, wielding her irreverent, sometimes wickedly funny Twitter presence, @McLNeuro, as part cudgel, part cheerleader’s megaphone. In June 2018, she created a website, MeTooSTEM.com, where scores of women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) have posted mostly anonymous, often harrowing tales of their own harassment. In just 2 days that month, she convinced the widely used website RateMyProfessors.com to remove its “red hot chili pepper” rating for “hotness.” And after launching an online petition, she succeeded last fall in spurring AAAS, which publishes Science, to adopt a policy allowing proven sexual harassers to be stripped of AAAS honors. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 25961 - Posted: 02.13.2019

Sara Reardon A form of the hallucinogenic party drug ketamine has cleared one of the final hurdles toward clinical use as an antidepressant. At a 12 February meeting at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Silver Spring, Maryland, an independent advisory panel voted 14-2 in favour of recommending a compound known as esketamine for use in treating depression. If the FDA approves the drug, it could buoy the chances of other ketamine-inspired treatments currently under development. But questions remain about esketamine’s overall effectiveness at lifting mood and its potential to be abused. Mental health researchers rejoiced at the news. “I’m still a little bit in shock,” says James Murrough, a psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.If approved, esketamine would be the first truly novel antidepressant to enter the market in several decades. “If this comes to pass, we’ll have done what people have been quick to point out hasn’t been done since the original discovery of antidepressants.” The FDA is expected to make a decision on esketamine by 4 March. Researchers discovered ketamine’s antidepressant properties in the early 2000s. It’s unclear how ketamine, which is a mixture of two molecules that are mirror images of each other, works in the brain. But scientists do know that it acts extremely quickly to alleviate symptoms of depression — in a matter of hours as opposed to weeks — and in a very different way than other drugs approved to treat depression. © 2019 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25960 - Posted: 02.13.2019

By Pam Belluck For the first time, a national health panel has recommended a way to prevent depression during and after pregnancy. This condition, known as perinatal depression, affects up to one in seven women and is considered the most common complication of pregnancy. The panel, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, said two types of counseling can help keep symptoms at bay. Its recommendation means that under the Affordable Care Act, such counseling must be covered by insurance with no co-payment. Here’s a guide to what to look for and how to get help. What is perinatal depression and what are the signs that you or a loved one might be experiencing it? Perinatal depression can occur during pregnancy or any time within a year after childbirth. As defined by the panel, it can involve major or minor depressive symptoms that last for at least two weeks, including loss of energy or concentration, changes in sleeping and eating patterns, feelings of worthlessness or suicidal thoughts. It’s not the same as the “baby blues,” which is less severe and doesn’t last as long. The panel said “baby blues” can occur right after childbirth and can include crying, irritability, fatigue and anxiety, symptoms that usually disappear within 10 days. Many things can raise a woman’s risk of depression during and after pregnancy. Having a personal or family history of depression is a significant risk factor. Others include a range of experiences that can generate stress: recent divorce or relationship strain; being a victim of abuse or domestic violence; being a single mother or a teenager; having an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy. Economic burdens increase the risk — about one in three low-income women develops depression during or after pregnancy. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25959 - Posted: 02.13.2019

Terry Gross Growing up, neuroscientist Judith Grisel would take little sips of alcohol at family events, but it wasn't until she was 13 that she experienced being drunk for the first time. Everything changed. "It was so complete and so profound," she says. "I suddenly felt less anxious, less insecure, less inept to cope with the world. Suddenly I was full and OK in a way that I had never been." Grisel began chasing that feeling. Over the years, she struggled with alcohol, marijuana and cocaine. But along the way, she also became interested in the neuroscience of addiction. "I'm always interested in the mechanisms of things," she says. "And when I heard that I had a disease, I kind of felt naturally that that would have a biological basis, and I figured that I could study that biological basis and understand it and then maybe fix it." Now it has been 30 years without using drugs or alcohol for Grisel, a professor of psychology at Bucknell University, where she studies how addictive drugs work on the brain. Her new book is Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction. Interview Highlights On how drug and alcohol abuse affects the brains of young people The changes in behavior that happen during adolescence are so important and lasting because the brain is forming permanent structures. So whatever you experience as an adolescent is going to have a much more impactful influence on the rest of your life trajectory than it would, say, if you did this at another time in development when your brain wasn't so prone to changing. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25958 - Posted: 02.13.2019

By Zoe Dubno When I was 12, I became part of the very select group of people who have had a life-changing experience at a fondue restaurant. After repeatedly grabbing my brother’s green fondue fork and eating his steak from the broth pot, I found myself accused of elder-sibling entitlement. But my father, who is colorblind, said I had done nothing wrong; like me, he was unable to see any difference between my brother’s green fork and my orange one. The Ishihara color-vision test he administered on his computer later that night confirmed that I was among those few women with red-green colorblindness. He was excited that I saw “correctly” — which is to say, like him. Back then, the ability to understand his frame of reference was mostly limited to other people barred from becoming astronauts. Now there’s an app for it. Colorblindness can be sort of a fun affliction. Sometimes I see my own private colors, and objects lose their prescribed meanings. Someone’s fashionable, Instagram-friendly sand-colored apartment might become, just for me, a garish baby-food green. The English scientist John Dalton described something similar in “Extraordinary Facts Relating to the Vision of Colours” (1794), the first known scientific study of anomalous color vision: He would often earnestly ask people whether a flower was blue or pink “but was generally considered to be in jest.” I attended a liberal-arts college, so I know full well that philosophizing about the subjective experience of color is best done barefoot in a field while listening to Alice Coltrane music. Biologically, though, the mechanics are relatively straightforward. Humans are trichromats: We see color because three sets of cones inside the eye absorb light at different wavelengths, from red to blue. Colorblindness is, typically, a congenital weakness in one set or another. The cones in my eyes that are meant to detect long red wavelengths are abnormal; I may see red and orange, but they’re dim and green-tinted, their energy registering partly on the cones that detect medium-length green wavelengths. (For some colorblind people, the entire season of “autumn” must feel like an elaborate prank.) Those with no working cones in one group — dichromats — experience almost total blindness of that color. Red becomes black. Orange, now redless, becomes yellow. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 25957 - Posted: 02.13.2019

By Gretchen Reynolds Jogging for 15 minutes a day, or walking or gardening for somewhat longer, could help protect people against developing depression, according to an innovative new study published last month in JAMA Psychiatry. The study involved hundreds of thousands of people and used a type of statistical analysis to establish, for the first time, that physical activity may help prevent depression, a finding with considerable relevance for any of us interested in maintaining or bolstering our mental health. Plenty of past studies have examined the connections between exercise, moods and psychological well-being, of course. And most have concluded that physically active people tend to be happier and less prone to anxiety and severe depression than people who seldom move much. But those past studies showed only that exercise and depression are linked, not that exercise actually causes a drop in depression risk. Most were longitudinal or cross-sectional, looking at people’s exercise habits over a certain period or at a single point of time and then determining whether there might be statistical relationships between the two. In other words, active people might be less likely to become depressed than inactive people. But it’s also possible that people who aren’t prone to depression may be more likely to exercise. Those types of studies may be tantalizing, but they can’t prove anything about cause and effect. To show causation, scientists rely on randomized experiments, during which they assign people to, for instance, exercise or not and then monitor the outcomes. Researchers have been using randomized trials to look at whether exercise can treat depression after people already have developed the condition, and the results have been encouraging. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25956 - Posted: 02.13.2019

By Natalie Angier Most female flies take a low-rent approach to parenthood, depositing scores of seed-sized eggs in the trash or on pet scat to hatch, leaving the larvae to fend for themselves. Not so the female tsetse fly. She gestates her young internally, one at a time, and gives birth to them live. When each extravagantly pampered offspring pulls free of her uterus after nine days, fly mother and child are pretty much the same size. “It’s the equivalent of giving birth to an 18-year-old,” said Geoffrey Attardo, an entomologist who studies tsetse flies at the University of California, Davis. The newborn tsetse fly looks like a hand grenade and moves like a Slinky, and if you squeeze it too hard the source of its plumpness becomes clear — or rather a telltale white. The larva, it seems, is just a big bag of milk. “Rupture the gut,” Dr. Attardo said, “and the milk comes spilling out.” And milk it truly is — a nutritional, biochemical and immunological designer fluid that the mother fly’s body has spun from her blood meals and pumped into her uterus, where her developing young greedily gulped it down. Thus fattened on maternal largess, a tsetse fly larva can safely burrow underground and pupate for 30 days before emerging as a full-blown adult with a nasty bite and a notorious capacity to transmit a deadly disease called sleeping sickness. In a recent chemical and genetic analysis of tsetse fly milk, Dr. Attardo and his colleagues were startled to discover how similar it was to the product of the beloved gland that stamps us as mammals. “I was expecting something completely off the wall and different,” he said. “But there are frightening, fascinating overlaps with mammalian milk in the kinds of proteins we see.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25955 - Posted: 02.12.2019

By Lisa Rapaport New mothers who have friends ready to step in and help them, tend to have toddlers who score better on cognitive tests than the babies of women with smaller social support networks, a U.S. study suggests. Strong social ties to friends and family have long been linked to better behavioral and physical health outcomes for adults. And plenty of previous research also indicates that infants’ and toddlers’ bonds with caregivers can have a lasting impact on children’s emotional, intellectual and social development. But less is known about how the caregivers’ own social connections might influence early childhood cognitive development. For the current study, researchers examined data on 1,082 mother-child pairs. They questioned women about their family structure, friendships and relationships in their communities and also looked at test results from cognitive assessments done when children were 2 years old. Overall, mothers had an average of 3.5 friends in their social support networks. The kids of mothers with more than that tended to have higher cognitive test scores than the kids of those who had fewer, suggesting “network conditions were significantly associated with early cognitive development in children,” the study authors wrote. © 1996-2019 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25954 - Posted: 02.12.2019

By Ricardo Muñoz More than 300 million individuals worldwide suffer from major depression. About 16 million of them are in the U.S., where 90 percent report difficulties with work, home or social activities related to their symptoms. While there are many effective treatments for depression, including medications and psychological therapies, the rate of depression is not going down, and treatment is not enough to reduce the burden. Recently, research has emerged indicating that about half of all cases of depression are preventable. Yet we’re not doing much to prevent it. In much the same way we vaccinate against other debilitating diseases, it is our moral obligation to begin concerted prevention efforts to reduce the number of new cases of depression in our communities. Depression is the number one cause of disability worldwide. It produces substantial suffering not only for the depressed individual, but also for those around them—when it leads to suicide, the impact on surviving loved ones is devastating. Depression is also related to a number of other health problems. Take smoking, for example, which is the leading cause of preventable death in the world, and how it is affected by depression. People who suffer from depression are more likely to start smoking, less likely to quit, and, if they quit, more likely to start again. This is the case with the use of alcohol and other drugs as well. Adolescent girls who have suffered at least one episode of major depression have a greater probability of having sexual relations as teenagers, having more than one sexual partner and having unintended pregnancies. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25953 - Posted: 02.12.2019

By C. Claiborne Ray Q. What keeps squirrels from gaining huge amounts of weight as they gorge on acorns and nuts each fall? A. In fact, many squirrels do achieve huge weight gain ahead of the privations of winter. Common gray squirrels may increase their weight by 25 percent in the harvest season. But not because they hibernate — they don’t. Winter foraging is hard, and gray squirrels tend to spend the winter months mostly in their nests. But they must make forays every few days to seek squirreled-away food and other nourishment. Among hibernating squirrels, much of the stored nourishment is needed to survive the cold season without foraging. A study of the Arctic ground squirrel found extreme weight gains during the active season: 42 percent among males and 63 percent among females. They slow their activity drastically before hibernating in order to maintain peak mass. While some do emerge from winter lighter, a significant share of their fat stores may remain. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 25952 - Posted: 02.12.2019