By Amy Harmon It has been more than a decade since James D. Watson, a founder of modern genetics, landed in a kind of professional exile by suggesting that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than whites. In 2007, Dr. Watson, who shared a 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the double-helix structure of DNA, told a British journalist that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says, not really.” Moreover, he added, although he wished everyone were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.” Dr. Watson’s comments reverberated around the world, and he was forced to retire from his job as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, although he retains an office there. He apologized publicly and “unreservedly,’’ and in later interviews he sometimes suggested that he had been playing the provocateur — his trademark role — or had not understood that his comments would be made public. Ever since, Dr. Watson, 90, has been largely absent from the public eye. His speaking invitations evaporated. In 2014, he became the first living Nobelist to sell his medal, citing a depleted income from having been designated a “nonperson.’’ But his remarks have lingered. They have been invoked to support white supremacist views, and scientists routinely excoriate Dr. Watson when his name surfaces on social media. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Intelligence
Link ID: 25831 - Posted: 01.01.2019

By Kara Manke A new neurostimulator developed by engineers at UC Berkeley can listen to and stimulate electric current in the brain at the same time, potentially delivering fine-tuned treatments to patients with diseases like epilepsy and Parkinson’s. The device, named the WAND, works like a “pacemaker for the brain,” monitoring the brain’s electrical activity and delivering electrical stimulation if it detects something amiss. These devices can be extremely effective at preventing debilitating tremors or seizures in patients with a variety of neurological conditions. But the electrical signatures that precede a seizure or tremor can be extremely subtle, and the frequency and strength of electrical stimulation required to prevent them is equally touchy. It can take years of small adjustments by doctors before the devices provide optimal treatment. WAND, which stands for wireless artifact-free neuromodulation device, is both wireless and autonomous, meaning that once it learns to recognize the signs of tremor or seizure, it can adjust the stimulation parameters on its own to prevent the unwanted movements. And because it is closed-loop — meaning it can stimulate and record simultaneously — it can adjust these parameters in real-time. © 2019 UC Regents;

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 25830 - Posted: 01.01.2019

Katie Brown When polite people talk, they take turns speaking and adjust the timing of their responses on the fly. So do wild macaques, a team of Japanese ethologists reports. Analysis of 20-minute vocal exchanges involving 15 adult female Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) revealed that the monkeys altered their conversational pauses depending on how quickly others answered, the researchers report in a study in an upcoming issue of Current Zoology. It’s unclear whether the monkeys were actually talking in any way analogous to how humans converse. While macaques have the vocal equipment to form humanlike words, their brains are unable to transform that vocal potential into human talk (SN Online: 12/19/16). The primates instead communicate in grunts, coos and other similar sounds. But the length of pauses between those grunts and coos closely match the length of pauses in human chats, says coauthor Noriko Katsu of the University of Tokyo. The researchers analyzed 64 vocal exchanges, called bouts, between at least two monkeys that were recorded between April and October 2012 at the Iwatayama Monkey Park in Kyoto, Japan. The team found that the median length of time between the end of one monkey’s calls and the beginning of another’s was 250 milliseconds — similar to the average 200 milliseconds in conversational pause time between humans. That makes the macaques’ gaps between turns in chattering one of the shortest call-and-response pauses yet measured in nonhuman primates. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 25829 - Posted: 01.01.2019

By Penelope Green On winter nights, the white-noise app on my phone is tuned to Air Conditioner: a raspy, metallic whir that sounds like the mechanical noise that might echo deep inside the ductwork of a huge commercial building. (Among the app’s other offerings are Dishwasher Rinsing, Crowded Room and Vacuum Cleaner.) It lulls me to sleep nonetheless, because it blankets the din in my apartment (the ragged snore of a roommate; the clanking of the steam radiator; the cat’s skidding pursuit of something only he can see). It may also soothe because it replicates an early sound environment, probably that of a Manhattan childhood, though perhaps it suggests something much, much older. Some sleep experts note that babies, their ears accustomed to the whisper of the maternal circulatory system and the slosh of the womb, sleep better accompanied by a device that mimics those familiar whooshings. My app is but one note in the mighty chorus of white-noise generators, an exploding industry of mechanical and digital devices; apps and websites, and Sonos and Spotify playlists that grows ever more refined, as if to block out the increased rate of speeding, the wrecks, on the information superhighway. Car Interior? Oil Tanker? Laundromat? These ballads are in the vast soundscape library created by Stephane Pigeon, a Belgian electrical engineer, and ready to play on Mynoise.net, a sound generator he put online in 2013 that now has one million page views each month. It’s a nearly philanthropic enterprise, as it runs on donations. “I have enough stress,” Dr. Pigeon said. Reddit, among other message boards, offers D.I.Y. white-noise hacks for light sleepers, shift workers and tinnitus sufferers. Rough up the blades of a box fan with a box cutter, suggested Christopher Suarez, a field service technician from Riverside, Calif., whose wife is an insomniac, on one captivating thread there. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Hearing
Link ID: 25828 - Posted: 12.28.2018

Kohske Takahashi We report a novel illusion––curvature blindness illusion: a wavy line is perceived as a zigzag line. The following are required for this illusion to occur. First, the luminance contrast polarity of the wavy line against the background is reversed at the turning points. Second, the curvature of the wavy line is somewhat low; the right angle is too steep to be perceived as an illusion. This illusion implies that, in order to perceive a gentle curve, it is necessary to satisfy more conditions––constant contrast polarity––than perceiving an obtuse corner. It is notable that observers exactly “see” an illusory zigzag line against a physically wavy line, rather than have an impaired perception. We propose that the underlying mechanisms for the gentle curve perception and those of obtuse corner perception are competing with each other in an imbalanced way and the percepts of corner might be dominant in the visual system. Perception of contour and shape is one of basic functions of vision. To this end, visual system processes information in a hierarchical way; first it extracts local orientations, then it integrates the local orientations into intermediate representations of contour, and finally it forms global shape percepts (Loffler, 2008). The intermediate representation of contour would include concavity, convexity, corner angle, curvature, and so forth. Although it is obvious that the physical shape is determined by combination of the local orientations, perceptual shape is susceptible to several factors. Accordingly, as visual illusions demonstrate, percepts are not necessarily veridical. For example, the café wall illusion (Pierce, 1898) demonstrates that parallel horizontal lines are perceived as different angles to each other.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 25827 - Posted: 12.28.2018

Incorporating genetic diversity into a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease resulted in greater overlap with the genetic, molecular and clinical features of this pervasive human disease, according to a study funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health. The study also suggests that adding genetic diversity may be key to improving the predictive power of studies using mouse models and increasing their usability for precision medicine research for Alzheimer’s. This research comes out of the newly established Resilience-Alzheimer’s Disease Consortium (Resilience-AD) and was published online Dec. 27, 2018 in the journal Neuron. “This is the first study to show that you can replicate many of the molecular features of Alzheimer’s disease in a genetically diverse mouse model,” said NIA Director Richard J. Hodes, M.D. “It points to a strategy for better use of mouse models for precision medicine research—both basic and translational—for Alzheimer’s disease.” Alzheimer's disease is an irreversible, progressive brain disorder that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills and, eventually, the ability to carry out simple tasks. As many as 5.5 million Americans age 65 and older are estimated to be living with Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia. A key tool among the multiple efforts to find a treatment or cure for Alzheimer’s, mouse models allow researchers to explore genetic, molecular and even behavioral aspects of disease that can’t be done in humans. The researchers, led by Catherine C. Kaczorowski, Ph.D. (link is external), an associate professor and Evnin Family Chair in Alzheimer’s Research at the Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Maine, and her graduate student, first author Sarah Neuner, noted that mouse models with Alzheimer’s mutations are important for defining high-risk as well as protective genes and disease mechanisms, and to efficiently test new potential interventions and therapeutics.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25826 - Posted: 12.28.2018

By Consumer Reports s has no financial relationship with any advertisers on this site. All medications have the potential to cause unwanted side effects, and depression is among them. One-third of Americans are now taking meds that can cause this mood disorder, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in June. Other research has had similar findings, but this is the largest review on the topic to date. The study authors found that about 200 prescription drugs, including some often used by older adults — such as proton-pump inhibitors (PPIs) to treat acid reflux and beta blockers for hypertension — can lead to depression. But doctors may not know this. “Many physicians may not be aware that several commonly prescribed medications are associated with an increased risk of this disorder,” says study author Mark Olfson, professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York. In the study, the more drugs people took, the higher their depression risk. About 7 percent of those taking one such drug were depressed compared with 15.3 percent of those taking at least three. This is concerning for older adults, who may take multiple medications and are more vulnerable to drug side effects, says Michael Hochman, an associate professor of clinical medicine at Keck Medicine at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25825 - Posted: 12.26.2018

Jon Hamilton It was a question about soccer that got Philip Bayly interested in brain injuries. Bayly, a mechanical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis, was approached by several doctors who wanted advice about some young soccer players they were treating. "They said, 'Well, we've got some kids who have concussions and they want to know if they can go back to play. And we don't know what's happening to their head when they're heading a soccer ball,' " Bayly recalls. Does a header have a big effect or a small one? The doctors thought Bayly might have the answer. "I said, 'That's really interesting. I play soccer and my kids play soccer, and I don't know what's happening when you head a soccer ball either,' " Bayly told them. "But I know how we can find out." So in the early 2000s, Bayly brought soccer players into his lab to figure out precisely how much acceleration their heads experienced when they headed balls hurled at them by a machine. The answer was 15 to 20 times the force of gravity, a relatively minor impact. "Jump up and down you're feeling maybe 4 or 5 G's when you hit the ground," Bayly says. "When you play football, you have a hard collision with someone else, it's maybe 50 to 100 G's." © 2018 npr

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 25824 - Posted: 12.26.2018

By Christina Karns ’Tis the season when the conversation shifts to what you’re thankful for. Gathered with family and friends around a holiday feast, for instance, people may recount some of the biggies — such as their health or their children — or smaller things that enhance everyday life — such as happening upon a great movie while channel surfing or enjoying a favorite seasonal food. Psychology researchers recognize that taking time to be thankful has benefits for well-being. Gratitude not only goes along with more optimism, less anxiety and depression, and greater goal attainment, but also is associated with fewer symptoms of illness and other physical benefits. In recent years, researchers have been making connections between the internal experience of gratitude and the external practice of altruism. How does being thankful about things in your own life relate to any selfless concern you may have about the well-being of others? As a neuroscientist, I’m particularly interested in the brain regions and connections that support gratitude and altruism. I’ve been exploring how changes in one might lead to changes in the other. To study the relationship between gratitude and altruism in the brain, my colleagues and I first asked volunteers questions meant to tease out how frequently they feel thankful and the degree to which they tend to care about the well-being of others. Then we used statistics to determine the extent to which someone’s gratitude could predict their altruism. As others have found, the more grateful people in this group tended to be more altruistic. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 25823 - Posted: 12.26.2018

By Emily Laber-Warren A few years ago, scientists conducted a real-world experiment at a ThyssenKrupp steel factory in Germany. They assigned the day shift to early risers and the late shift to night owls. Soon the steel workers, many of whom had been skeptical at the outset, were getting an extra hour of sleep on work nights. By simply aligning work schedules with people’s internal clocks, the researchers had helped people get more and better rest. “They got 16 percent more sleep, almost a full night’s length over the course of the week,” said Till Roenneberg, a chronobiologist at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, who headed the study. “That is enormous.” In recent years, American educators have been paying increased attention to their students’ sleep needs, with growing debate about delaying school start times. Now a number of businesses are following suit, encouraging their employees to work when their bodies are most awake. “It’s a huge financial burden not to sleep properly,” Dr. Roenneberg said. “The estimates go toward 1 percent of gross national product,” both in the United States and Germany. Emerging science reveals that each of us has an optimal time to fall asleep and wake up, a personalized biological rhythm known as a “chronotype.” When you don’t sleep at the time your body wants to sleep — your so-called biological night — you don’t sleep as well or as long, setting the stage not only for fatigue, poor work performance and errors but also health problems ranging from heart disease and obesity to anxiety and depression. A full 80 percent of people have work schedules that clash with their internal clocks, said Céline Vetter, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and director of the university’s circadian and sleep epidemiology lab. “The problem is huge,” Dr. Vetter said. “If we consider your individual chronotype and your work hours, the chances are very high that there’s quite a bit of misalignment.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Attention
Link ID: 25822 - Posted: 12.26.2018

By Philippa Roxby Health reporter, BBC News Every year, there are always more baby boys than girls born in England and Wales. Fact. Why? Since records began in 1838, the cries of babies born every year have been predominately male. In not one year, stretching back to the start of Queen Victoria's reign, have girls outnumbered boys at birth. In 2017, in England and Wales, for example, there were 348,071 live male births and 331,035 live female births - a difference of roughly 17,000. And that higher tally of males compared to females born each year is a pattern that has repeated itself for nearly 180 years. In fact, a ratio of roughly 105 male births for every 100 female ones is generally seen as natural and normal. It is fairly consistent around the world, although in some countries like China and India the gap is wider because male offspring are more desirable. More surprisingly, it is a ratio that has been known about since the 17th Century. But why this ratio exists is not yet completely understood - although there are several theories. The first theory is an evolutionary one which says that in order to have an equal number of males and female in adulthood, there have to be slightly more males born. That is because being a male is a dangerous thing. Males are more likely than females to die in childhood and at all stages of life - from accidents, taking risks, suicide and from health problems. © 2018 BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25821 - Posted: 12.26.2018

Alison Abbott A court in Germany has dismissed a high-profile case of alleged animal cruelty brought against neuroscientist Nikos Logothetis, less than three weeks before hearings were scheduled to begin. The administrative court in Tübingen announced the decision on 19 December, citing new information in an expert report commissioned by the defence to review the evidence. The report was provided to prosecutors and the court at the beginning of this month. The charge against Logothetis — who is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (MPI-Biocyb) in Tübingen — was related to an alleged delay in euthanizing three sick research monkeys. Two other staff members, who have not been publicly named, were also accused of the same charge and have had their cases dismissed. The three people must now pay a small settlement, which is not associated with guilt, by mid-January. The case has roots in 2014, when an undercover animal-welfare activist infiltrated the facilities at the MPI-Biocyb and filmed the handling of some of the monkeys used in research in Logothetis’s lab. The German Animal Welfare Federation, a non-profit animal-rights organization in Bonn, used the footage to make multiple allegations of violations of animal-protection laws to police. In August 2017 a Tübingen judge dismissed all but one of the allegations, which related to the three sick monkeys. Two of the monkeys recovered after treatment, and the third was humanely killed after staff decided that it would not recover. © 2018 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 25820 - Posted: 12.23.2018

By Scott Barry Kaufman In his classic 1923 essay, "Intelligence as the Tests Test It", Edwin Boring wrote "Intelligence is what the tests test." Almost a century of research later, we know that this definition is far too narrow. As long as a test is sufficiently cognitively complex and taps into enough diverse content, you can get a rough snapshot of a person's general cognitive ability-- and general cognitive ability predicts a wide range of important outcomes in life, including academic achievement, occupational performance, health, and longevity. But what about happiness? Prior studies have been mixed about this, with some studies showing no relationship between individual IQ and happiness, and other studies showing that those in the lowest IQ range report the lowest levels of happiness compared to those in the highest IQ group. In one study, however, the unhappiness of the lowest IQ range was reduced by 50% once income and mental health issues were taken into account. The authors concluded that "interventions that target modifiable variables such as income (e.g., through enhancing education and employment opportunities) and neurotic symptoms (e.g., through better detection of mental health problems) may improve levels of happiness in the lower IQ groups." One major limitations of these prior studies, however, is that they all rely on a single measure of happiness, notably life satisfaction. Modern day researchers now have measures to assess a much wider array of indicators of well-being, including autonomy, personal growth, positive relationships, self-acceptance, mastery, and purpose and meaning in life.

Keyword: Intelligence; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25819 - Posted: 12.23.2018

By Katharine Q. Seelye Eleanor Emmons Maccoby, a distinguished psychologist and a pioneer in the field of gender studies who was the first woman to head the Stanford University psychology department, died on Dec. 11 in Palo Alto, Calif. She was 101. Her death, at a retirement community, was confirmed by her son, Mark, who said the cause was pneumonia. Dr. Maccoby, whom the American Psychological Association listed among the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century, conducted pathbreaking research in child development and gender studies. She explored a wide range of topics, including interactions between parent and child and the effect of divorce on children. But the overarching themes of her long career were the differences between the sexes and how they develop. These were the subjects of two of her most significant books: “The Psychology of Sex Differences” (1974) and “The Two Sexes: Growing Up Apart, Coming Together” (1998). “She advanced our understanding of how girls and boys develop the characteristics that we think of as boy things and girl things,” Dr. John H. Flavell, a psychology professor emeritus at Stanford, said in a telephone interview. The answer involved a complex combination of biological, cognitive and social factors, including the dynamic in which children learn from other children. Dr. Maccoby did not initially consider herself a feminist. But she was gradually awakened by slights along the way, like being not allowed to enter the Faculty Club at Harvard through its front entrance, which was reserved for men, even though she was a member. Asked in a video interview in 2013 how she became interested in gender issues, she replied, “We lived it.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25817 - Posted: 12.23.2018

By: Arthur Robin Williams, M.D., and Frances R. Levin, M.D. There's no shortage of statistics about the depth of America's opioid epidemic: 72,000 overdose deaths just last year, more than 2 million with problems, and so on. But numbers only begin to tell the whole story. Beth Macy, who has spent three decades reporting on central Appalachia—which she claims is the birthplace of the modern opioid epidemic—focuses her book on social and economic trends and how they affect ordinary people. Our reviewers, colleagues at the Columbia University Division on Substance Use Disorders, are well qualified to comment. A new volume can be added to the panoply of books detailing the tragedies of the 21st century opioid epidemic. Beth Macy’s Dopesick (Little Brown & Co., 2018) is anchored in a handful of increasingly vocal and public Appalachia families afflicted by the expansion of opioid dealing into small towns and suburbs formerly thought immune to inner-city plagues of addiction. Dopesick largely reads as a human interest story, a series of intertwined portrayals of grief and terror as young family members descend into OxyContin (one quarter of the local high school students had reported trying the drug within two years of its 1996 market launch), then heroin, then synthetic opioids, reflecting the epidemic’ s tragic course. These painful and personal stories form the heart of Macy’s book and make it perhaps the most empathic of the volumes regarding the epidemic. That she can represent a major drug dealer with as much compassion as the grieving families of teenagers and young adults who died because of his trade speaks to her Southern warmth. Her shrewd tirelessness as a journalist enables her to discern the fault lines of the stories that matter most. © 2018 The Dana Foundation

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25816 - Posted: 12.23.2018

By Kimon de Greef CAPE TOWN — A musician from South Africa had a tumor in his brain, so doctors opened a hole in his skull to remove it. But they had a crucial request: He must play his acoustic guitar during the surgery. The musician, Musa Manzini, a jazz bassist, was awake when the doctors performed the surgery last week, and video footage from the local media site News24 shows him strumming an acoustic guitar slowly as they operated. The technique, known as “awake craniotomy,” allows doctors to operate on delicate areas of the brain — like the right frontal lobe, the site of Mr. Manzini’s tumor — without causing damage. Presumably, had he hit a wrong note, it would have been an immediate signal for the surgeons to probe elsewhere. “It can be very difficult to tell the difference between the tumor and normal brain tissue,” said Dr. Basil Enicker, a specialist neurosurgeon who led the operation at Inkosi Albert Luthuli Central Hospital, in the coastal city of Durban. “Once you’re near a critical area, you can pick it up early, because he will tell you.” The surgery is not unusual. The first craniotomies date to prehistoric times, with fossil records showing that patients had holes drilled in their skulls — and survived — as early as 8,000 years ago. In the 1930s, the Canadian-American neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield pioneered modern craniotomies, which he used to treat epilepsy. The procedure has become fairly common globally since then, posing no greater technical challenge than regular brain surgery, Dr. Enicker said. But choosing patients is very important: People who cough, for example, or who cannot lie still for extended periods, are far more dangerous to operate on. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging; Epilepsy
Link ID: 25815 - Posted: 12.22.2018

Patricia Janak Drugs of abuse have complex pharmacological effects that trigger many changes in brain function. One of these effects, the direct or indirect activation of neurons that release the neurotransmitter dopamine, is common to all drugs of abuse and has long been assumed to contribute to the development of addiction. Writing in Nature, Pascoli et al.1 report on the neurobiological mechanisms induced by the repeated activation of dopamine neurons that might explain why some drug users seek reward despite facing negative consequences — a type of compulsive behaviour that is a defining feature of human addiction2. The authors took an optogenetics approach to mimic the activation of the brain’s dopamine systems by drugs of abuse: they used laser light delivered through an optical fibre to activate dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the brains of genetically engineered mice. The mice could directly stimulate these neurons themselves by pressing a lever, and performed this action avidly during a test period of 40 minutes a day for almost 2 weeks. On subsequent days, the mice received a brief electric shock to their feet on one-third of the lever-pressing occasions, at random. Their behaviour under this condition revealed an intriguing variability: 40% of the mice (termed renouncers) greatly reduced the frequency of lever-pressing when given foot shocks (Fig. 1a), whereas the remaining 60% (perseverers) were willing to receive painful punishment for the opportunity to self-stimulate their dopamine neurons (Fig. 1b). As some of these authors have previously shown3, the persevering mice provide a model for persistent drug use despite negative consequences, and parallel the subset of human drug users whose drug use becomes compulsive. © 2018 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25814 - Posted: 12.22.2018

Micaela Martinez, Kevin M. Bakker Does it ever seem like you’re invited to an awful lot of summer birthday gatherings? For good reason. In the United States, most births occur between June and early November. Count back nine months, and you’ll see that places most conceptions in the fall and winter. What’s going on? Is the crisp autumn air, or the joy (or anxiety) of the holiday season, triggering more unprotected sexual intercourse? Or is it something else entirely? It turns out reproduction is seasonal across all living organisms, from plants, to insects, to reptiles, to birds and mammals – including human beings. The ultimate explanation for this phenomenon is an evolutionary one. Earth’s environment is seasonal. Above or below the equator, the year is structured by the winter, spring, summer and fall. In equatorial regions, the wet and dry seasons punctuate the year. Organisms have evolved strategies to reproduce at the time of year that will maximize their lifetime reproductive success. Humans are no exception and maintain this evolutionary outcome: birth seasonality. Researchers, including us, have recently been working to understand more about why births are seasonal because these patterns can have a big impact on childhood disease outbreaks. The first studies demonstrating human birth seasonality date back to the early 1800s. © 2010–2018, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25813 - Posted: 12.22.2018

Rodrigo Pérez Ortega Nearly one-third of American adults sleep less than six hours each night, a broad new survey shows. Among nearly 400,000 respondents to the annual National Health Interview Survey, 32.9 percent reported this short sleep in 2017 — up from 28.6 percent in 2004 when researchers began noticing a slight drop in sleep time. That’s a 15 percent increase representing “more than 9 million people, which is about the population of New York City,” says coauthor Connor Sheehan, a sociologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. Analysis of the annual survey results — accounting for the U.S. population’s age distribution as well as respondents' marital status, income, employment and lifestyle — suggests people have been sleeping significantly less from 2013 onward, especially black adults, the researchers report online November 17 in Sleep. In 2017, 40.9 percent of black Americans were likely to report short sleep, as were 30.9 percent of whites and 32.9 percent of Hispanics, the researchers calculate. Zzz force Americans were more likely in 2017 to report sleeping less than six hours a night than in 2004, but the trend increased most among black and Hispanic people than among white respondents. This is the first study showing self-reported sleep declining among minorities over time, says Mercedes Carnethon, an epidemiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago who was not involved in the study. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 25812 - Posted: 12.22.2018

Researchers at Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) have mapped the neuroanatomical regions of the brain of a female mosquito (Aedes aegypti). The researchers constructed the map of groups of neurons by immunostaining the mosquito’s brain for Brp, a synaptic protein, and imaged the brain with confocal microscopy. The atlas was made freely available online on January 31st. “We are trying to build the field of mosquito neurobiology,” says HHMI neurobiologist Leslie Vosshall, who led the work, in a press release. She says she hopes that the new atlas will let mosquito researchers from around the world share data and better understand which parts of the mosquito brain direct different behaviors. “Somewhere in that female brain is the drive to sense humans, fly toward humans, land on humans, and bite and drink the blood of humans,” she says. “Somewhere in that brain is where decision making, motivation, and hunger reside.” © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 25811 - Posted: 12.22.2018