Written by SHREEYA SINHA illustrations by ZACH LIEBERMAN and LESLYE DAVIS The opioid epidemic is devastating America. Overdoses have passed car crashes and gun violence to become the leading cause of death for Americans under 55. The epidemic has killed more people than H.I.V. at the peak of that disease, and its death toll exceeds those of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq combined. Funerals for young people have become common. Every 11 minutes, another life is lost. So why do so many people start using these drugs? Why don’t they stop? Some people are more susceptible to addiction than others. But nobody is immune. For many, opioids like heroin entice by bestowing an immediate sense of tranquility, only to trap the user in a vicious cycle that essentially rewires the brain. Getting hooked is nobody’s plan. Some turn to heroin because prescription painkillers are tough to get. Fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than heroin, has snaked its way into other drugs like cocaine, Xanax and MDMA, widening the epidemic. To understand what goes through the minds and bodies of opioid users, The New York Times spent months interviewing users, family members and addiction experts. Using their insights, we created a visual representation of how the strong lure of these powerful drugs can hijack the brain. Dr. Pedro Mateu-Gelabert, one of the nation’s top opioid researchers, said this work brings “an emotional understanding” to the epidemic but “without glamorizing or oversimplifying.” You naturally produce endorphins, the body’s own version of opioids, which act in the reward circuits of the brain to make you feel good after you work out, hug a friend or eat your favorite foods. A drug like heroin creates a tidal wave in the reward circuits of the brain. To an outsider, it looks as though you have passed out. But on the inside you feel like a master of the universe, like you’re being “hugged by Jesus,” as one user said; there’s peace in your skin and not a single feeling of pain. You may remember this exact moment for years to come: where you were, what you wore, what you saw and what you heard. You may chase this feeling for years. As the high wears off, the brain regains its balance – but not for everyone. That’s the opioid trap for many people: In the beginning, no serious ill effects are apparent. But the brain rewires little by little with each use.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25804 - Posted: 12.20.2018

By Jan Hoffman A Harvard addiction medicine specialist is getting calls from distraught parents around the country. A Stanford psychologist is getting calls from rattled school officials around the world. A federal agency has ordered a public hearing on the issue. Alarmed by the addictive nature of nicotine in e-cigarettes and its impact on the developing brain, public health experts are struggling to address a surging new problem: how to help teenagers quit vaping. Until now, the storm over e-cigarettes has largely focused on how to keep the products away from minors. But the pervasiveness of nicotine addiction among teenagers who already use the devices is now sinking in — and there is no clear science or treatment to help them stop. “Nobody is quite sure what to do with those wanting to quit, as this is all so new,” said Ira Sachnoff, president of Peer Resource Training and Consulting in San Francisco, which trains students to educate peers about smoking and vaping. “We are all searching for quit ideas and services for this new nicotine delivery method. It is desperately needed.” A harsh irony underlies the search for solutions: Devices that manufacturers designed to help adults quit smoking have become devices that teenagers who never smoked are themselves fighting to quit. The Food and Drug Administration and the attorney general of Massachusetts are investigating Juul Labs, the maker of the most popular e-cigarettes, to determine whether it deliberately lured teenagers with its sleek packaging and flavors. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25803 - Posted: 12.20.2018

Cheryl Platzman Weinstock Sometimes a psychiatric crisis can be triggered by something small. For Alexia Phillips, 21, it was a heated argument with a close family member in February 2017. She remembers the fight blew up before she left the house to go to classes at Queens College in Flushing, New York. By midday, Phillips, then a sophomore, says she began to cry loudly and uncontrollably. "It really triggered me. I just got really angry really fast...I was crying so much I couldn't breathe and couldn't talk. I didn't know how to handle it," she says. As she would come to understand later, Phillips was experiencing symptoms of her underlying borderline personality disorder, anxiety and depression. But at the time, all she knew was she felt too overwhelmed to go home, or to go to class. She also didn't want anyone to see her like that. Finally, she went to her college counseling center for the first time and asked for help. Minutes later, Phillips' counselor, a college public safety officer and a paramedic trained to deal with psychiatric crises, calmly and unobtrusively escorted her to the back of the college through a quiet hallway door that led out to a parked ambulance sent from Zucker Hillside Hospital. She was ferried — without the lights or sirens — to be assessed at the hospital's special program for college students. This kind of response to a student crisis is unusual. In a lot of colleges, if staff think the student who's having a crisis may be unsafe, they have little choice but to call 911. Many schools lack resources to address serious crises and students are left to navigate the health care system on their own. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 25802 - Posted: 12.20.2018

By Steve Ayan Research on the unconscious mind has shown that the brain makes judgments and decisions quickly and automatically. It continuously makes predictions about future events. According to the theory of the “predictive mind,” consciousness arises only when the brain’s implicit expectations fail to materialize. Higher cognitive processing in the cerebral cortex can occur without consciousness. The regions of the brain responsible for the emotions and motives, not the cortex, direct our conscious attention. In 1909 five men converged on Clark University in Massachusetts to conquer the New World with an idea. At the head of this little troupe was psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Ten years earlier Freud had introduced a new treatment for what was called “hysteria” in his book The Interpretation of Dreams. This work also introduced a scandalous view of the human psyche: underneath the surface of consciousness roils a largely inaccessible cauldron of deeply rooted drives, especially of sexual energy (the libido). These drives, held in check by socially inculcated morality, vent themselves in slips of the tongue, dreams and neuroses. The slips in turn provide evidence of the unconscious mind. At the invitation of psychologist G. Stanley Hall, Freud delivered five lectures at Clark. In the audience was philosopher William James, who had traveled from Harvard University to meet Freud. It is said that, as James departed, he told Freud, “The future of psychology belongs to your work.” And he was right. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness; Attention
Link ID: 25801 - Posted: 12.20.2018

Phil Jaekl Driving a car is a complex task for a brain to coordinate. A driver may drink a cup of coffee and have a conversation with a passenger, all while safely piloting a vehicle through traffic. But all of this activity requires attention—that is, concentrating on the tasks and sources of information that matter and blocking out those that don’t. How the brain manages that orchestration is a long-standing scientific mystery. One prominent view, based on findings from human behavioral studies, is that the brain guides us through a world chock-full of sensory inputs by focusing a metaphorical spotlight on what it deems important, while filtering out relatively trivial details. Unlike some other, functionally well-defined aspects of cognition, this attentional spotlight has eluded scientific understanding. Its neural substrates have been particularly difficult to pin down to specific activities and locations in the brain—although several studies have implicated the frontoparietal network, which spans the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain. Meanwhile, attention studies involving visual tasks that require continuous focus—detecting a small object flashing on a cluttered computer screen, for example—have shown that task performance varies over short time intervals, with episodes of peak performance and of poor performance alternating on millisecond timescales. Such research suggests that the attentional spotlight might not be as constant as once thought. Yet, until now, researchers have not been able to directly connect these changes in performance to fluctuations in brain activity. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 25800 - Posted: 12.20.2018

By Kuheli Dutt When neuroscientist Ben Barres delivered his first seminar, an audience member praised him, commenting that Ben’s work was much better than that of his sister, Barbara Barres. The irony? Ben Barres (now deceased), a transgender scientist was Barbara Barres before he transitioned to male. When New York Times columnist Brent Staples was a graduate student in Chicago’s Hyde Park, he found that white people on the street perceived him, an African American, as a threat to their safety. They were visibly tense around him, clutched their purses and sometimes even crossed the street to avoid him. But when he started whistling tunes from classical music, people suddenly weren’t afraid of him anymore—they relaxed and some even smiled at him. Implicit bias runs far deeper than we realize. A riddle used at implicit bias trainings goes like this: A father and his son are in a terrible car crash. The father dies at the scene. His son, in critical condition, is rushed to the hospital; he’s in the operating room, about to go under the knife. The surgeon says, “I can’t operate on this boy—he’s my son!” The audience is then asked how that’s possible. Responses include several scenarios: two gay fathers; one biological and one adopted father; one father and one priest (religious father); all of which are possible. However, an obvious answer that most people miss: the surgeon is the boy’s mother. Whether we like it or not, we are conditioned to associating surgeons with being male. © 2018 Scientific American,

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 25799 - Posted: 12.20.2018

By Elizabeth Pennisi A 9-year study has uncovered some unusual behavior by common bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) living off the coast of Slovenia. Within one population of this species, the animals have divided into two groups that avoid contact by hunting at different times of day—a social strategy not known in marine mammals. Researchers used photographs of the dolphins’ dorsal fins to individually identify them. They made many observations of 38 of the animals, carefully recording the time, date, and location of each sighting. The marine mammals divided into two major groups of 19 and 13 animals each, with six animals loosely making up a third group, the team reports today in Marine Biology. The 19 members of the larger group tended to hang out—and likely hunt—while following fishing trawlers in the Bay of Trieste, which is located at the eastern top of Italy’s “boot.” The second group’s cadre of 13 never associated with boats when in the Bay of Trieste. Although the dolphins hunted in the same area, they rarely saw each other, the researchers discovered, because the larger group was in that area only between 7 a.m. and 1 p.m. local time, whereas the smaller group showed up between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Other studies have documented groups of dolphins that divide up the waters where they hunt, but this is the first time these marine mammals have been shown to timeshare the sea, the researchers note. Although they don’t know why—or how—the dolphins set these schedules, the fact that the animals are never in the same place likely diminishes unfriendly encounters and reduces direct competition for food. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 25798 - Posted: 12.20.2018

Nicola Davis Having even one night without sleep leads people to view junk food more favourably, research suggests. Scientists attribute the effect to the way food rewards are processed by the brain. Previous studies have found that a lack of shuteye is linked to expanding waistlines, with some suggesting disrupted sleep might affect hormone levels, resulting in changes in how hungry or full people feel. But the latest study suggests that with hormones may have little to do with the phenomenon, and that the cause could be changes in the activity within and between regions of the brain involved in reward and regulation. . “Our data brings us a little closer to understanding the mechanism behind how sleep deprivation changes food valuation,” said Prof Jan Peters, a co-author of the research from the University of Cologne. Writing in the Journal of Neuroscience, Peters and colleagues describe how they recruited 32 healthy men aged between 19 and 33 and gave all of them the same dinner of pasta and veal, an apple and a strawberry yoghurt. Participants were then either sent home to bed wearing a sleep-tracking device, or kept awake in the laboratory all night with activities including parlour games. All returned the next morning to have their hunger and appetite rated, while 29 of the men had their levels of blood sugar measured, as well as levels of certain hormones linked to stress and appetite. Participants also took part in a game in which they were presented with pictures of 24 snack food items, such as chocolate bars, and 24 inedible items, including hats or mugs, and were first asked to rate how much they would be willing to pay for them on a scale of €0-€3. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Sleep; Obesity
Link ID: 25797 - Posted: 12.18.2018

America’s teens report a dramatic increase in their use of vaping devices in just a single year, with 37.3 percent of 12th graders reporting “any vaping” in the past 12 months, compared to just 27.8 percent in 2017. These findings come from the 2018 Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey of a nationally representative sample of eighth, 10th and 12th graders in schools nationwide, funded by a government grant to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The annual results were announced today by the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health, along with the scientists who lead the research team. Reported use of vaping nicotine specifically in the 30 days prior to the survey nearly doubled among high school seniors from 11 percent in 2017 to 20.9 percent in 2018. More than 1 in 10 eighth graders (10.9 percent) say they vaped nicotine in the past year, and use is up significantly in virtually all vaping measures among eighth, 10th and 12th graders. Reports of past year marijuana vaping also increased this year, at 13.1 percent for 12th graders, up from 9.5 percent last year. “Teens are clearly attracted to the marketable technology and flavorings seen in vaping devices; however, it is urgent that teens understand the possible effects of vaping on overall health; the development of the teen brain; and the potential for addiction,” said Nora D. Volkow, M.D., director of NIDA. “Research tells us that teens who vape may be at risk for transitioning to regular cigarettes, so while we have celebrated our success in lowering their rates of tobacco use in recent years, we must continue aggressive educational efforts on all products containing nicotine.”

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25796 - Posted: 12.18.2018

Gently stroking a baby reduces activity in their brain associated with painful experiences, a study has found. The study, by University of Oxford and Liverpool John Moores University, monitored the brain activity of 32 babies while they had blood tests. Half were stroked with a soft brush beforehand and they showed 40% less pain activity in their brain. Author Rebeccah Slater said: "Touch seems to have analgesic potential without the risk of side-effects." The study found that the optimal pain-reducing stroking speed was about 3cm (1in) per second. "Parents intuitively stroke their babies at this optimal velocity," said Prof Slater. "If we can better understand the neurobiological underpinnings of techniques like infant massage, we can improve the advice we give to parents on how to comfort their babies." That speed of stroking activates a class of sensory neurons in the skin called C-tactile afferents, which have been previously been shown to reduce pain in adults. But it had been unclear whether babies had the same response or whether it developed over time. "There was evidence to suggest that C-tactile afferents can be activated in babies and that slow, gentle touch can evoke changes in brain activity in infants," said Prof Slater. Prof Slater said the study, published in Current Biology, could explain anecdotal evidence of the soothing power of touch-based practices such as infant massage and kangaroo care, where premature babies are held against the skin to encourage parent-infant bonding and possibly reduce pain. © 2018 BBC.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25795 - Posted: 12.18.2018

By John Horgan In 1994 I sat in an auditorium in Tucson, Arizona, as a young man with long brown hair began talking about consciousness. I remember being dimly conscious at first, perhaps because I was hung over, but gradually the sounds he was making woke me up. “There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience,” he said, “but there is nothing that is harder to explain.” Explaining what he meant by conscious experience, the long-haired man said: “When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought.”* Consciousness is harder than other problems posed by the mind, the long-haired man argued, such as vision and memory. We have inklings how the brain accomplishes these functions, and we can build machines that replicate them, but we have no idea how the brain generates subjective experiences, or how to give them to machines. That long-haired young man was David Chalmers, speaking at a scientific conference on consciousness that I was covering for Scientific American. In part because of that lecture, Chalmers went on to become a leading philosopher, and many scientists and philosophers now refer to consciousness as “the hard problem.” It has become a pop-culture meme.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 25794 - Posted: 12.17.2018

By Jane E. Brody Dr. Gayatri Devi’s patient, a 55-year-old former headmistress, had good reason to be distraught. The woman had a yearlong history of progressive memory loss and behavioral problems and was referred to Dr. Devi, a neurologist, with a possible diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia. As Dr. Devi recounted in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, the woman’s once prodigious memory had seriously deteriorated and she’d become increasingly irritable. She had difficulty organizing tasks, keeping track of belongings, setting goals, making plans and seeing them through. Yet the results of medical and neurological tests and brain scans were normal. Noting that the woman had gone through menopause a year earlier, Dr. Devi traced her symptoms to the decline in estrogen stimulation of the brain that occurs in all women at menopause with varying effects. Some are more sensitive to falling estrogen levels than others. With a likely diagnosis of menopause-related cognitive impairment, the doctor prescribed hormone-replacement therapy. Within 15 months, the woman’s behavioral symptoms had disappeared and her learning ability and memory were back to normal. She was able to complete a demanding graduate program and assume a new leadership position in education. This woman’s case was admittedly extreme, but Dr. Devi told me that “60 percent of women go through menopause-related cognitive impairment” that, when serious enough to be brought to medical attention, is too often misdiagnosed as “mild cognitive impairment,” a precursor to dementia. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25793 - Posted: 12.17.2018

Nicola Davis An overactive immune response appears to be a trigger for persistent fatigue, say researchers in a study that could shed light on the causes of chronic fatigue syndrome. Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a debilitating long-term condition in which individuals experience exhaustion that is not helped by rest, as well as pain, mental fogginess and trouble with memory and sleep. It is also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). Some studies into the condition have suggested the immune system could be involved, with viral infections one potential trigger for CFS. “The evidence is largely inconclusive – there are studies which have shown elevated levels of the inflammatory markers, but such abnormalities are quite inconsistent across studies,” said Alice Russell, first author of the research from King’s College London. Because it is not possible to predict who will get a virus, it is impossible to look at levels of biological molecules before, during and after a potential CFS “trigger” infection. Experts say they have used a group of people with a different condition as a model to explore how immune response might be linked to persistent fatigue. Writing in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, Russell and colleagues describe how they recruited 55 patients with a chronic hepatitis C infection. To treat the condition, all were given a six- to 12-month course of injections of interferon alpha, a protein that is produced naturally by the body and stimulates the white blood cells to provoke an immune response. The treatment has previously been linked to a side effect of ongoing fatigue in some patients. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Depression
Link ID: 25792 - Posted: 12.17.2018

By Leslie Nemo If you came across California mice in the wild, you wouldn’t hear a thing. Their jabber is ultrasonic—humans hear it only when it's slowed to five percent its original speed. But that’s when the imperceptible squeaks morph into a vocal range that’d put Mariah Carey to shame. Mice, you see, regularly vocalize to communicate in many different situations—which researchers did not know until recently. “It’s an under-appreciated part of biology of one of most diverse groups of mammals,” says Matina Kalcounis-Rueppell, a professor of biology at University of North Carolina, Greensboro who discovered about a decade ago that these mice vocalize. These sounds range from coos to startling barks. New research published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution shows that when these monogamous mice are separated from their mate and then reunited, the animals sometimes don’t handle it well—revealing a new side to their social lives and behavior. Here are some of the mouse calls recorded by Josh Pultorak, who recently earned his PhD with principal investigator Catherine Marler at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the course of this research. The first sounds, short tweets, are considered friendly, and the most common. The second, slightly longer calls appear when the mice are getting “lovey-dovey”, says Pultorak. The third whale-like yelps are also friendly and connote a strengthening relationship.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 25791 - Posted: 12.17.2018

Robin McKie Scientists have found an unexpected use for virtual reality headsets: to help pinpoint people who may later develop Alzheimer’s disease. The devices, widely used by computer gamers, display images that can be used to test the navigational skills of people thought to be at risk of dementia. Those who do worse in the tests will be the ones most likely to succumb to Alzheimer’s later in life, scientists now believe. By identifying potential patients far earlier than is possible at present, researchers hope it should then become easier in the long term to develop treatments aimed at halting or slowing their condition. “It is usually thought memory is the first attribute affected in Alzheimer’s,” said project leader Dennis Chan, a neuroscientist based at Cambridge University. “But difficulty with navigation is increasingly recognised as one of the very earliest symptoms. This may predate the onset of other symptoms. “By pinpointing those who are beginning to lose their navigational skills, we hope to show that we can target people at a much earlier stage of the condition and one day become far more effective in treating them.” The discovery that loss of navigational skills was associated with Alzheimer’s disease was made several years ago by Chan and colleagues based at several centres in the UK. These studies used tablet computers to test navigational tasks. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25790 - Posted: 12.17.2018

By Benedict Carey For the past two decades, scientists have been exploring the genetics of schizophrenia, autism and other brain disorders, looking for a path toward causation. If the biological roots of such ailments could be identified, treatments might follow, or at least tests that could reveal a person’s risk level. In the 1990s, researchers focused on genes that might possibly be responsible for mental distress, but then hit a wall. Choosing so-called candidate genes up front proved to be fruitless. In the 2000s, using new techniques to sample the entire genome, scientists hit many walls: Hundreds of common gene variants seemed to contribute some risk, but no subset stood out. Even considered together, all of those potential contributing genes — some 360 have been identified for schizophrenia — offered nothing close to a test for added risk. The inherited predisposition was real; but the intricate mechanisms by which all those genes somehow led to symptoms such as psychosis or mania were a complete mystery. Now, using more advanced tools, brain scientists have begun to fill out the picture. In a series of 11 papers, published in Science and related journals, a consortium of researchers has produced the most richly detailed model of the brain’s genetic landscape to date, one that incorporates not only genes but also gene regulators, cellular data and developmental information across the human life span. The work is a testament to how far brain biology has come, and how much further it has to go, toward producing anything of practical value to doctors or patients, experts said. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25789 - Posted: 12.15.2018

Laura Sanders An Alzheimer’s protein found in contaminated vials of human growth hormone can spread in the brains of mice. That finding, published online December 13 in Nature, adds heft to the idea that, in very rare cases, amyloid-beta can travel from one person’s brain to another’s. Decades ago, over a thousand young people in the United Kingdom received injections of growth hormone derived from cadavers’ brains as treatment for growth deficiencies. Four of these people died with unusually high levels of A-beta in their brains, a sign of Alzheimer’s disease (SN: 10/17/15, p. 12). The results hinted that A-beta may have been delivered along with the growth hormone. Now researchers have confirmed not only that A-beta was in some of those old vials, but also that it can spark A-beta accumulation in mice’s brains. Neurologist John Collinge of University College London and colleagues found that brain injections of the contaminated growth hormone led to clumps of A-beta in the brains of mice genetically engineered to produce the protein, while brain injections with synthetic growth hormone did not. The results suggest that A-beta can “seed” the protein in people’s brains, under the right circumstances. Still, that doesn’t mean that Alzheimer’s disease is transmissible in day-to-day life. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Alzheimers; Prions
Link ID: 25788 - Posted: 12.15.2018

Ewen Callaway No human has the brain of a Neanderthal — but some have hints of its shape. The brain shape of some people with European ancestry is influenced by Neanderthal DNA acquired through interbreeding tens of thousands of years ago, researchers report on 13 December in Current Biology1. These DNA variants seem to affect the expression of two genes in such a way as to make the brains of some humans slightly less round, and more like the Neanderthals’ elongated brains. “It’s a really subtle shift in the overall roundedness,” says team member Philipp Gunz, a palaeoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “I don’t think you would see it with your naked eye. These are not people that would look Neanderthal-like.” The Neanderthal DNA variants alter gene expression in brain regions involved in planning, coordination and learning of movements. These faculties are used in speech and language, but there is no indication that the Neanderthal DNA affects cognition in modern humans. Instead, the researchers say, their discovery points to biological changes that might have endowed the human brain with its distinct shape. Earlier this year, Gunz and two colleagues determined that the rounded brain shape of modern humans evolved gradually, reaching its current appearance between 35,000 and 100,000 years ago2. The earliest human fossils from across Africa, dating to around 200,000–300,000 years ago, have large yet elongated brains. “There really is something going on in the brain that changes over time in the Homo sapiens lineage,” says Gunz. © 2018 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Keyword: Evolution; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25787 - Posted: 12.15.2018

By Robert F. Service BOSTON—Implanted electronics can steady hearts, calm tremors, and heal wounds—but at a cost. These machines are often large, obtrusive contraptions with batteries and wires, which require surgery to implant and sometimes need replacement. That's changing. At a meeting of the Materials Research Society here last month, biomedical engineers unveiled bioelectronics that can do more in less space, require no batteries, and can even dissolve when no longer needed. "Huge leaps in technology [are] being made in this field," says Shervanthi Homer-Vanniasinkam, a biomedical engineer at University College London. By making bioelectronics easier to live with, these advances could expand their use. "If you can tap into this, you can bring a new approach to medicine beyond pharmaceuticals," says Bernhard Wolfrum, a neuroelectronics expert at the Technical University of Munich in Germany. "There are a lot of people moving in this direction." One is John Rogers, a materials scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who is trying to improve on an existing device that surgeons use to stimulate healing of damaged peripheral nerves in trauma patients. During surgery, doctors suture severed nerves back together and then provide gentle electrical stimulation by placing electrodes on either side of the repair. But because surgeons close wounds as soon as possible to prevent infection, they typically provide this stimulation for an hour or less. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Obesity; Robotics
Link ID: 25786 - Posted: 12.13.2018

Tom Goldman Tim Green first noticed the symptoms about five years ago. The former NFL player, whose strength was a job requirement, suddenly found his hands weren't strong enough to use a nail clipper. His words didn't come out as fast as he was thinking them. "I'm a strange guy," Tim says. "I get something in my head and I can just run with it. I was really afraid I had ALS. But there was enough doubt that I said, 'Alright, I don't. Let's not talk about it. Let's not do anything.' " Denying pain and injury had been a survival strategy in football. "I was well trained in that verse," he says. But a diagnosis in 2016 made denial impossible. Doctors confirmed that Tim, also a former NPR commentator, had ALS, known as Lou Gehrig's disease. The degenerative illness attacks the body's motor nerve cells, weakening muscles in the arms and legs as well as the muscles that control speech, swallowing and breathing. Tim tried to keep it private — he didn't want people feeling sorry for him. But he says, "I got to a point where I couldn't hide it anymore." So Tim went on 60 Minutes and revealed his illness. "What we said is, you either write your own history or someone's going to write it for you," says his 24-year-old son, Troy Green. When one isn't enough I was one of Tim Green's producers for his Morning Edition commentaries back in the 1990s. We went to dinner once when he was in Washington, D.C., for a game — his Atlanta Falcons were playing Washington. Tim had a huge plate of pasta. When we finished, the waiter came over and asked, "Anything else?" Tim pointed to his clean plate and said, "Yeah. Let's do it again." © 2018 npr

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 25785 - Posted: 12.13.2018