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

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

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

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

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

Keyword: Epigenetics
Link ID: 26035 - Posted: 03.15.2019

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

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

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

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

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

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 26032 - Posted: 03.14.2019

By JoAnna Novak “U guys I had this awesome thing for dinner,” my little sister texts our family. “ICE CREAM HEHE.” After 20 years of dealing with an eating disorder, recovered-me has a response and sick-me has a response, but neither seems right. My siblings, my mom and I chat all day in our “Fam” text thread. Morning roll call? Check. Terrier on kitchen table? Yep. Food talk? A feast of food talk. Actually, not just talk. And not just food. “Did 74 min on tread,” my sister texts. “Exhausted.” I know. She started 2018 with a goal to lose 20 lingering college pounds, and she’s been in lifestyle-overhaul ever since. Often she calls me post-workout, breathless, gushing endorphins. Other times she sends sports bra selfies. (“Get it,” my mom responds.) She shares meal pics, too, plates of sheet-pan chicken or “healthy” comfort food (turkey hot dogs, cauli-mac and cheese), a latte pink with beet juice, a splurge. (That ice cream she had was Halo Top, which is low in calories and high in protein.) I was buying blue cheese for burgers last week when she said she was 10 pounds from her target. I picked up the Roquefort and blinked off memories of closing in on a number, those hazy promises that, soon, everything might change. “That’s amazing,” I said. “I’m proud of you.” She’d gained so much confidence over the last year; she was already feeling more comfortable in her skin, she said. “You know what I mean.” In a way, I did. It’s a conversation I’d never thought we’d be having, one where my sister trusts me enough to share anxieties about her body and I’m recovered enough to listen. I went on my first diet when she was 5 and I was 12. A few months later she was crying, begging newly anorexic me to eat a canned peach. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 26031 - Posted: 03.14.2019

Text by David Gonzalez When the medical journal The Lancet asked Matthieu Zellweger to photograph any psychiatric condition that intrigued him, he thought of a close friend who has been living with bipolar disorder. He knew how his friend lamented that it was an “invisible handicap” that you couldn’t just snap out of, as some well-meaning but frustrated people would suggest. But Mr. Zellweger also recognized something in his friend that led him to propose a photo essay on bipolar disorder. “I’ve been around him quite a bit,” Mr. Zellweger said. “And the one thing that definitely surprised me is that — let’s face it — very intelligent people are overrepresented among bipolar people. A lot of them are very lucid about their disease. They have thought about how it impacts their lives. It was very stimulating to talk with them.” Mr. Zellweger spent 18 months in Switzerland, where he lives, and in Britain, photographing people with bipolar disorder, as well as their relatives or lovers who accompanied them, as they struggle with manic highs and depressive lows. He sought out subjects through patient advocacy groups and treatment centers who were open to sharing their experiences. “There are so many misconceptions about the disorder that a lot of the patients were happy to dispel that,” he said. “There is such a general stigma around mental disorders. One of the patients told me that when she told her friend about being bipolar, her friend said, ‘Oh, are you going to run after me with an ax?’ People think bipolar patients are uncontrollable or dangerous. But the only aggressive behavior I saw was people being aggressive against themselves.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 26030 - Posted: 03.13.2019

Nicola Davis “Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts,” Marlon Brando once said. But for scientists, working out what is going on in an actor’s head has always been something of a puzzle. Now, researchers have said thespians show different patterns of brain activity depending on whether they are in character or not. Dr Steven Brown, the first author of the research from McMaster University in Canada, said: “It looks like when you are acting, you are suppressing yourself; almost like the character is possessing you.” Character building and what makes a truly great actor Read more Writing in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Brown and colleagues report how 15 method actors, mainly theatre students, were trained to take on a Shakespeare role – either Romeo or Juliet – in a theatre workshop, and were asked various questions, to which they responded in character. They were then invited into the laboratory, where their brains were scanned in a series of experiments. Once inside the MRI scanner, the actors were asked to think about their response to a number of fresh conundrums that flashed up on screen, and which might well have occurred to the star-crossed lovers, such as: would they gatecrash a party? And would they tell their parents that they had fallen in love? Each actor was asked to respond to different questions, based on four different premises assigned in a random order. In one, they were asked for their own perspective; in another, they were asked to say how they thought a particular close friend would react, while in a third, they were asked to respond as though they were either Romeo or Juliet. = © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Attention; Brain imaging
Link ID: 26029 - Posted: 03.13.2019

By Simon Makin Around a third of people complain of some sleeplessness, and one in 10 meets diagnostic criteria for clinical insomnia. The costs, in terms of well-being, physical health and productivity, are enormous. From twin studies, researchers know the inability to fall or stay asleep has a genetic component, but the identities of the culprits were mostly unknown. Now, two studies published Monday in Nature Genetics provide first peeks at the biological basis of insomnia, implicating specific brain regions and biological processes, and revealing links with heart disease and psychiatric disorders like depression. Both are genome-wide association studies (GWASs), which examine DNA from many thousands of individuals to determine where genetic markers related to health, disease or a particular trait reside. The first study, from a team led by geneticist Danielle Posthuma of Vrije University Amsterdam, analyzed the genomes of over 1.3 million people, making it the largest GWAS of any complex trait to date. They used data from the UK Biobank, a large, long-term genetics project, and from the direct-to-consumer genetics company 23andMe to identify 202 areas of the genome linked to insomnia, implicating 956 genes, a big advance from the seven found previously. “I’m pretty confident the vast majority of these are real,” says geneticist Stephan Ripke, a GWAS expert at the Berlin Institute of Health who was not involved in either study. “But we need to confirm this in more, separate cohorts from different countries and researchers.” © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 26028 - Posted: 03.13.2019

By Matt Richtel Should you pick your nose? Don’t laugh. Scientifically, it’s an interesting question. Should your children pick their noses? Should your children eat dirt? Maybe: Your body needs to know what immune challenges lurk in the immediate environment. Should you use antibacterial soap or hand sanitizers? No. Are we taking too many antibiotics? Yes. “I tell people, when they drop food on the floor, please pick it up and eat it,” said Dr. Meg Lemon, a dermatologist in Denver who treats people with allergies and autoimmune disorders. Advertisement “Get rid of the antibacterial soap. Immunize! If a new vaccine comes out, run and get it. I immunized the living hell out of my children. And it’s O.K. if they eat dirt.” Dr. Lemon’s prescription for a better immune system doesn’t end there. “You should not only pick your nose, you should eat it,” she said. She’s referring, with a facetious touch, to the fact our immune system can become disrupted if it doesn’t have regular interactions with the natural world. “Our immune system needs a job,” Dr. Lemon said. “We evolved over millions of years to have our immune systems under constant assault. Now they don’t have anything to do.” She isn’t alone. Leading physicians and immunologists are reconsidering the antiseptic, at times hysterical, ways in which we interact with our environment. Sign up for Science Times We’ll bring you stories that capture the wonders of the human body, nature and the cosmos. Why? Let us turn to 19th-century London. The British Journal of Homeopathy, volume 29, published in 1872, included a startlingly prescient observation: “Hay fever is said to be an aristocratic disease, and there can be no doubt that, if it is not almost wholly confined to the upper classes of society, it is rarely, if ever, met with but among the educated.” Hay fever is a catchall term for seasonal allergies to pollen and other airborne irritants. With this idea that hay fever was an aristocratic disease, British scientists were on to something. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 26027 - Posted: 03.13.2019

Aimee Cunningham How active a person’s immune system is soon after a stroke may be tied to later mental declines, a new study finds. Researchers took blood samples from 24 stroke patients up to nine times over the course of a year. Twelve of the patients also completed a mental-skills test at four points during that time. Patients who had highly active immune cells on the second day after a stroke were more likely to see their test scores decline a year later, researchers report online March 12 in Brain. “The people who either got better on the task or stayed the same had less of an immune response at day 2 [after the stroke], and the people who had more of an immune response at day 2 were more likely to decline and do worse later,” says study coauthor Marion Buckwalter, a neuroscientist at Stanford University School of Medicine. A stroke occurs when the brain loses oxygen, due to a blocked or burst blood vessel. Buckwalter and her colleagues used a technique called mass cytometry that analyzes thousands of immune cells and their signaling molecules — which indicate how active a cell is — from blood samples of patients who had suffered a stroke. The researchers also tested patients’ memory, concentration, language skills and other thinking skills using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. It’s unclear why some patients have a more active immune response than others in the days after a stroke. But with more research, it’s possible that the response may be a way to predict which patients will fare worse after a stroke, the researchers say. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019

Keyword: Stroke; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 26026 - Posted: 03.13.2019

By Frank Bruni How many studies do you have to throw at the vaccine hysterics before they quit? How much of a scientific consensus, how many unimpeachable experts and how exquisitely rational an argument must you present? That’s a trick question, of course. There’s no magic number. There’s no number, period. And that’s because the anti-vaccine crowd (or anti-vaxxers) aren’t trafficking in anything as concrete, mundane and quaint as facts. They’re not really engaged in a debate about medicine. They’re immersed in a world of conspiracies, in the dark shadows where no data can be trusted, nothing is what it seems and those who buy the party line are pitiable sheep. And, boy, are they living at the right time, when so much information and misinformation swirl by so quickly that it’s easy to confuse the two and even easier to grab hold and convince yourself of whatever it is you prefer to believe. With Google searches, you find the ostensible proof you seek. On social media, you bask in all the affirmation you could possibly want. The parents who are worried or sure about grave risks from vaccines reflect a broader horror that has flickered or flared in everything from the birther movement to “Pizzagate,” that nonsense about children as Democratic sex slaves in the imagined basement of a Washington pizza joint. Their recklessness and the attendant re-emergence of measles aren’t just a public health crisis. They’re a public sanity one, emblematic of too many people’s willful disregard of evidence, proud suspicion of expertise and estrangement from reason. Again and again, until blue in the face, medical authorities have debunked the renegade assertion that there’s a link between the M.M.R. vaccine, so named because it inoculates against measles, mumps and rubella, and autism. On Tuesday, a group of Danish researchers who looked at more than 650,000 children over 10 years announced that they had found no such association. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 26025 - Posted: 03.11.2019

Alix Spiegel There's a before, and there's an after. In the before, it was a relatively normal night. The kind of night any 14-year-old girl might have. Devyn ate dinner, watched TV and had small, unremarkable interactions with her family. Then, around 10 o'clock, she decided to turn in. "I went to bed as I normally would, and then all of a sudden ... my hips... they just hurt unimaginably!" Devyn says. "I started crying, and I started shaking." It was around midnight, but the pain was so intense she couldn't stop herself — she cried out so loudly she woke her mother, Sheila. Together, they did everything they could to neutralize the pain — stand up, lie down, hot bath, pain medication. But there was no escape, not for Devyn, and so not for Sheila. "You go to cancer first, right? It's like, 'OK, maybe you have cancer, maybe it's a tumor?' " Sheila says. When she was calm enough to reason with herself, Sheila decided cancer was improbable but wondered what was going on? The only thing they could think of was that the hip pain was somehow related to the minor knee surgery Devyn had gotten a few months before — she had broken the tip of her distal femur one day during dance practice. So as usual, Sheila snapped to attention to solve the problem. It was 2016 — surely modern medicine could fix this. (NPR is not using Devyn's or Sheila's last name to protect Devyn's privacy as a minor discussing her medical treatment.) They started by calling Devyn's surgeon, but the surgeon had no explanation for the pain. He renewed Devyn's prescription for Percocet and wrote a new prescription for tramadol. But the pain only got worse, so they lined up more appointments: their pediatrician, a naturopath, a pain specialist, a sports medicine doctor. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 26024 - Posted: 03.11.2019

Jacob Stegenga Your grief and guilt overwhelm you. You are so tired you cannot think straight. Your simple joys are lost in an invisible agony. You have pain in your head and back and stomach, real pain. The swamp of your soul suffocates you with despair. All this is your fault, you are worthless, and you might as well die. This is how depression can feel, though people’s experiences of it, including the severity of symptoms, can vary widely. This terrible disease affects about one person in 10 at some point in life and, to treat it, many millions of people have taken antidepressants. Unfortunately, we now have good reasons to think that antidepressants are not effective. To know if antidepressants work we must, of course, pay close attention to the best evidence about these drugs. There have been many empirical trials of antidepressants, and in the past 10 years or so there have been some good meta-analyses of these trials (a meta-analysis pools data from multiple trials into a single analysis). However, there is a problem: experts disagree about the merits and problems of these empirical studies, and about what we should conclude based on them. Philosophy can help. Philosophy of science is the discipline that studies the concepts and methods of science, and offers a lens through which we can understand what scientific evidence shows us about the world. After witnessing the darkness of depression and the struggle by some of my dearest friends and family to treat this disease with drugs, I began to use my training as a philosopher to understand the evidence about antidepressants. Diving into the details of how antidepressant data are generated, analysed and reported tells us that these drugs are barely effective, if at all. © Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2012-2019.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 26023 - Posted: 03.11.2019

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent Patients with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder have shown remarkable improvements after undergoing an experimental procedure in which electrodes are placed inside the brain. The first UK trial of deep brain stimulation for OCD involved six people who were extremely severely affected by the condition. The patients each had four electrodes surgically inserted through the skull into the brain. These are used to electrically stimulate brain circuits with the aim of bringing the illness under control. One of the patients, a woman who is now in her 40s, described how her life was entirely dominated by her illness for a decade before taking part in the trial. Her OCD rituals meant it took up to 14 hours to go to the toilet, several hours to get out of bed and she lived in a psychiatric unit. She was terrified of poisons and contamination and would sob in frustration for hours each day because her situation felt so unbearable. “It was paralysing,” said the woman, who wants to remain anonymous. She said her life had been transformed beyond recognition by the procedure. Six years after having the electrodes permanently placed inside her brain, she lives independently in a flat, is in a relationship and does regular voluntary work. “For me it’s just been a miracle,” she said. “Every day when I wake up, I can’t believe my luck, I can’t get used to it.” © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 26022 - Posted: 03.09.2019

John D. Loike, Martin Grumet On February 18, 2019, The Asahi Shimbun reported, “Ministry [of Health, Labor and Welfare in Japan] OKs 1st iPS [induced pluripotent stem] cell therapy for spinal cord injuries.” This announcement disseminated at a press conference has been viewed as an exciting clinical trial on the use of stem cells to treat spinal cord injury. However, caution is warranted here, for at least three reasons: the uncertainty of the stem cell type to be used in their clinical trial, the safety of transplanting stem cells into humans, and the responsibility of scientists and the press to communicate clearly the benefits and risks of the stem cell treatments, especially to desperate patients who would seek such unproven treatments. First, reports of the announcement by the lead scientist Hideyuki Okano of Keio University School of Medicine provide no indication where this trial is described or registered. It is of concern that it is not listed at clinicaltrials.gov or Japanese registries including UMIN Clinical Trials Registry (UMIN-CTR) and the Japan Medical Association Center for Clinical Trials (JMACCT). Second, Okano’s group reported in a study on mice that transplanted human iPSC-derived neural stem/progenitor cells (NSPC) retain unwanted proliferative characteristics, which they attributed to karyotype abnormalities. To protect against these abnormalities, Okano and colleagues have developed a “Fail-Safe System against Potential Tumorigenicity after Transplantation of iPSC Derivatives,” to quote the title of their report. Based on their results, they stated in the study that their technique “may serve as an important countermeasure against post-transplantation adverse events in stem cell transplant therapies.” However, they also caution that “a number of problems . . . need to be resolved, and at present [the Fail-Safe System] is still not suitable for clinical application.” © 1986 - 2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Stem Cells; Regeneration
Link ID: 26021 - Posted: 03.09.2019

Hadley Freeman Like everyone else at this point, I have many questions about Brexit, starting with “why” and going from there. For example: are concerns about how Britain is going to cope merely “project fear”, as some Brexity folk still have it? Is it going to be like the blitz, as other Brexity people have promised enthusiastically? Such people include someone called Ant Middleton from Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins, who said last year in a tweet (since deleted): “A ‘no deal’ for our country would actually be a blessing in disguise. It would force us into hardship and suffering which would unite & bring us together, bringing back British values of loyalty and a sense of community!” Truly, there are few things as touching as a grown man playing soldiers by waxing nostalgic for a time he didn’t live through. And by “touching” I mean “nauseating”. I try to avoid writing about Brexit for the same reason I avoid eating my hair: you just end up choking on the pointlessness of it all. But one question has become too pressing to ignore: just how self-centred do you have to be to think the risk of making it harder for people to get necessary medications is an irrelevant niggle while you achieve your masturbatory fantasy of “sovereignty”? Sure, talk of insulin supplies, say, is a bummer when you are entertaining dreams of sailing victoriously back from Brussels beneath a St George’s flag, like George Washington crossing the Delaware in Emanuel Leutze’s painting, only less American (although, given that our supermarkets may soon be stuffed with chlorinated chicken from the US, maybe not). But for those who have long been dependent on certain drugs, these niggly questions make a no-deal Brexit less of a blessing in disguise. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 26020 - Posted: 03.09.2019

Catherine Offord One of the functions of sleep may be to repair DNA damage that has built up in the brain during waking hours, according to a study published yesterday (March 5) in Nature Communications. By using time-lapse imaging to observe the brains of zebrafish, researchers in Israel found that chromosome dynamics associated with DNA repair increased in neurons during sleep, and that sleep deprivation prevented this repair from happening efficiently. Study coauthor Lior Appelbaum of Bar-Ilan University notes in a statement that sleep is found across the animal kingdom and that this repair role might be one of the reasons “sleep has evolved and is so conserved.” To study what is going on in individual neurons during sleep, Appelbaum and colleagues genetically engineered zebrafish larvae to have fluorescent chromosomes in their neurons. They then used a high-resolution microscope to monitor the movements of those chromosomes when the transparent fish were awake and asleep. The researchers found that when the fish were awake, chromosomes were relatively static and accumulated double-strand breaks. But once the zebrafish went to sleep, the chromosomes became more dynamic, and the DNA damage began dissipating. Further experiments showed that manipulating zebrafish sleep could influence the repair process. For example, keeping the fish awake by tapping on their tank promoted the accumulation of more double-strand breaks, while inducing sleep with a drug pumped through the tank allowed the cells to repair their DNA. © 1986 - 2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 26019 - Posted: 03.09.2019

By Nicholas Bakalar Eating a heart-healthy diet beginning in your 20s may provide brain benefits in middle age, new research suggests. The study, in Neurology, ranked 2,621 people on their degree of adherence to three different diets considered to be good for the heart. All emphasize vegetables, fruits and whole grains and minimize saturated fat consumption: the Mediterranean diet, which involves mainly plant-based foods and moderate alcohol intake; a research-based diet plan that rates food groups as favorable or not; and the DASH diet, which stresses low-sodium foods. Researchers tracked their diet compliance at ages 25, 32 and 45, and tested mental acuity at 50 and then again at 55. Those who adhered most strictly to the Mediterranean or the food group diet scored higher than those who did not, especially on tests of executive function, which involves organizing and planning. After adjusting for many health and behavioral factors, people with the strictest adherence to these diets had a 46 to 52 percent lower risk of poor cognitive function. But adherence to the DASH diet, which does not consider alcohol consumption, was not associated with cognitive test scores. Which diet is best? “We can say at this point that a heart-healthy diet like the Mediterranean diet is a good option,” said the lead author, Claire T. McEvoy, a dietitian and epidemiologist at Queen’s University Belfast. “It’s palatable and adaptable, and in that respect it’s a pretty good dietary pattern.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 26018 - Posted: 03.09.2019