By: A. Benjamin Srivastava, M.D., and Mark S. Gold, M.D. T he opioid epidemic is one of the foremost public health crises in the United States. A recent analysis from Stanford University suggested that without any changes in currently available treatment, prevention, and public health approaches, we should expect to have 510,000 deaths from prescription opioids and street heroin from 2016 to 2025 in the US.1 Both the lay press and scientific literature are full of proposals, analyses, and potential solutions. Most focus on expanding access to and dissemination of overdose reversal treatment (naloxone), and the medication-assisted treatment (MAT) drugs methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone. Obviously, expanding the availability of naloxone and MAT drugs are important steps that can be readily implemented, especially using an approach similar to what was done during the HIV epidemic.2,3 But in addition to such efforts, we must invest in research to develop new treatments informed by neuroscientific evidence. A comprehensive discussion of naltrexone should be understood within the context of naloxone, which is considered its short-acting version based on relative half-lives (three hours for naloxone, 13 hours for oral naltrexone). When first synthesized, naloxone was a novel medication as well as a cornerstone of research into the pharmacology of the opioid system. Naloxone successfully competes against opioids to bind to the “Mu” opioid receptor on neurons, completely blocking the opioid’s downstream effects. As a “Mu opioid receptor (MOR) antagonist,” it reverses the potentially deadly effects of opioid overdose. © 2018 The Dana Foundation

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25609 - Posted: 10.24.2018

By Gretchen Reynolds Ten minutes of mild, almost languorous exercise can immediately alter how certain parts of the brain communicate and coordinate with one another and improve memory function, according to an encouraging new neurological study. The findings suggest that exercise does not need to be prolonged or intense to benefit the brain and that the effects can begin far more quickly than many of us might expect. We already know that exercise can change our brains and minds. The evidence is extensive and growing. Multiple studies with mice and rats have found that when the animals run on wheels or treadmills, they develop more new brain cells than if they remain sedentary. Many of the new cells are clustered in the hippocampus, a portion of the brain that is essential for memory creation and storage. The active animals also perform better on tests of learning and memory. Equivalent experiments examining brain tissue are not possible in people. But some past studies have shown that people who exercise regularly tend to have a larger, healthier hippocampus than those who do not, especially as they grow older. Even one bout of exercise, research suggests, can help most of us to focus and learn better than if we sit still. But these studies usually have involved moderate or vigorous exercise, such as jogging or brisk walking and often for weeks or months at a time. Whether a single, brief spurt of very easy exercise will produce desirable changes in the brain has remained unclear. So for the new study, which was published in September in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists from the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Tsukuba in Japan turned to a group of healthy, young college students. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25608 - Posted: 10.24.2018

By Mitch Leslie Male mice that work out spawn healthier offspring than their lethargic counterparts, according to a new study. Whether the results hold true for humans remains uncertain, but they support the notion that some of the benefits of exercise are somehow passed on to the next generation. “The science is solid, and it’s pretty exciting,” says epigeneticist Sarah Kimmins of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who wasn’t connected to the work. Scientists already know that a parent’s bad exercise or dietary habits can affect their offspring. Mothers who are obese during pregnancy, for example, give birth to children who are more likely to be obese as adults and develop metabolic illnesses such as cardiovascular disease. Another study found that male rats that snarfed high-fat chow fathered offspring that didn’t respond normally to glucose, a hallmark of type 2 diabetes. To determine whether the opposite is true, molecular exercise physiologist Kristin Stanford of The Ohio State University College of Medicine in Columbus and colleagues fed male mice a fat-rich diet for 3 weeks. One group of animals had access to running wheels, scampering nearly 6 kilometers per night on average, but the rest were couch potatoes. After dissecting some of the rodents to obtain samples of their sperm, the researchers allowed the remaining mice to mate. Stanford and her colleagues tracked the resulting offspring until they were a year old, about middle age for a mouse. Even though the offspring of exercising and nonexercising dads all ate a high-fat diet their entire lives and didn’t get any physical activity, the offspring of healthy fathers seemed to inherit their dads’ metabolism. The progeny of the runners showed a better response to increases in blood glucose and had lower insulin levels—both hallmarks of a sound metabolism—the researchers report today in Diabetes. “Exercise was completely negating the effect of a high-fat diet” on the offspring, Stanford says. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Scienc

Keyword: Epigenetics; Obesity
Link ID: 25607 - Posted: 10.23.2018

By Kristina R. Olson On arrival at a friend's house for dinner one night in the fall of 2008, I joined the evening's youngest guest, five-year-old Noah, who was playing on the couch. Little did I know he would single-handedly change the course of my career. As a professor of developmental psychology, hanging out at the kids' table is not unusual for me. I study how children think about themselves and the people around them, and some of my keenest insights have come from conversations like this one. After some small talk, I saw Noah glance around the room, appear to notice that no one was looking and retrieve something from inside his pocket. The reveal was slow but the result unmistakable: a beloved set of Polly Pocket dolls. Over the next few years I got to know Noah well and learned more about his past (all names of children here are pseudonyms to protect their privacy). Noah's parents had first noticed that he was different from his brother in the preschool years. He preferred female playmates and toys more commonly associated with girls, but his parents were unfazed. As he got older, Noah grew out his previously short hair and replaced his fairly gender-neutral wardrobe with one that prominently featured Twinkle Toes—shoes that lit up in pink as he stepped. Unlike many similar kids, Noah's family, friends and school fully accepted him. They even encouraged him to meet other kids like himself, boys who flouted gender norms. Along with the other adults in Noah's life, I couldn't help but wonder: What did Noah's behavior mean? Was he gay? Could he just be a kid who paid less attention to gender norms than most? At the time I had no idea that these questions would soon guide my scientific research. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25606 - Posted: 10.23.2018

Claire Ainsworth As a clinical geneticist, Paul James is accustomed to discussing some of the most delicate issues with his patients. But in early 2010, he found himself having a particularly awkward conversation about sex. A 46-year-old pregnant woman had visited his clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia to hear the results of an amniocentesis test to screen her baby's chromosomes for abnormalities. The baby was fine — but follow-up tests had revealed something astonishing about the mother. Her body was built of cells from two individuals, probably from twin embryos that had merged in her own mother's womb. And there was more. One set of cells carried two X chromosomes, the complement that typically makes a person female; the other had an X and a Y. Halfway through her fifth decade and pregnant with her third child, the woman learned for the first time that a large part of her body was chromosomally male1. “That's kind of science-fiction material for someone who just came in for an amniocentesis,” says James. Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary — their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions — known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs) — often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD2. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25605 - Posted: 10.23.2018

By Amanda Montañez Humans are socially conditioned to view sex and gender as binary attributes. From the moment we are born—or even before—we are definitively labeled “boy” or “girl.” Yet science points to a much more ambiguous reality. Determination of biological sex is staggeringly complex, involving not only anatomy but an intricate choreography of genetic and chemical factors that unfolds over time. Intersex individuals—those for whom sexual development follows an atypical trajectory—are characterized by a diverse range of conditions, such as 5-alpha reductase deficiency (highlighted in graphic below). A small cross section of these conditions and the pathways they follow is shown here. In an additional layer of complexity, the gender with which a person identifies does not always align with the sex they* are assigned at birth, and they may not be wholly male or female. The more we learn about sex and gender, the more these attributes appear to exist on a spectrum. *The English language has long struggled with the lack of a widely recognized nongendered third-person singular pronoun. A singular form of “they” has grown in widespread acceptance, and many people who do not identify with a binary gender use it. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25604 - Posted: 10.23.2018

By Benedict Carey A generation ago, depression was viewed as an unwanted guest: a gloomy presence that might appear in the wake of a loss or a grave disappointment and was slow to find the door. The people it haunted could acknowledge the poor company — I’ve been a little depressed since my father died — without worrying that they had become chronically ill. Today, the condition has been recast in the medical literature as a darker, more permanent figure, a monster in the basement poised to overtake the psyche. For decades, researchers have debated the various types of depression, from mild to severe to “endogenous,” a rare, near-paralyzing despair. Hundreds of studies have been conducted, looking for markers that might predict the course of depression and identify the best paths to recovery. But treatment largely remains a process of trial and error. A drug that helps one person can make another worse. The same goes for talk therapies: some patients do very well, others don’t respond at all. “If you got a depression diagnosis, one of the most basic things you want to know is, what are the chances of my life returning to normal or becoming optimal afterward?” said Jonathan Rottenberg, a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida. “You’d assume we’d have an answer to that question. I think it’s embarrassing that we don’t.” In a paper in the current issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, Dr. Rottenberg and his colleagues argue that, in effect, the field has been looking for answers in the wrong place. In trying to understand how people with depression might escape their condition, scientists have focused almost entirely on the afflicted, overlooking a potentially informative group: people who once suffered from some form of depression but have more or less recovered. Indeed, while this cohort almost certainly exists — every psychiatrist and psychologist knows someone in it — it is so neglected that virtually nothing is known about its demographics, how well its members are faring and, fundamentally, how many individuals it contains. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25603 - Posted: 10.23.2018

Richard Harris Powerful drugs that have been used for decades to treat delirium are ineffective for that purpose, according to a study published online Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine. Antipsychotic medications, such as haloperidol (brand name, Haldol), are widely used in intensive care units, emergency rooms, hospital wards and nursing homes. "In some surveys up to 70 percent of patients [in the ICU] get these antipsychotics," says Dr. E. Wesley "Wes" Ely, an intensive care specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. They're prescribed by "very good doctors at extremely good medical centers," he says. "Millions of people worldwide are getting these drugs to treat their delirium." But the drugs can have serious side effects. And Ely says there is no solid research showing that they are effective at treating delirium. Patients with delirium are often confused and incoherent and sometimes can suffer hallucinations. This condition can lead to long-term cognitive problems, including a form of dementia. Ely and colleagues at 16 U.S. medical centers decided to put antipsychotic drugs to a rigorous test. They divided nearly 600 patients who were suffering from delirium into three groups. One group got the powerful antipsychotic haloperidol. A second group got ziprasidone, which is a related medication from a class of drugs called "atypical antipsychotics." A third group got a placebo. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 25602 - Posted: 10.23.2018

Tina Hesman Saey SAN DIEGO — For some people, choosing a same-sex partner may be in their DNA. In a large study of more than 490,000 men and women in the United States, United Kingdom and Sweden, researchers discovered four genetic variants that occur more often in people who indicated on questionnaires that they had had same-sex sexual partners. Andrea Ganna, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard reported the results October 19 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics. Two of the variants were specific to men’s sexual partner choice. The other two influence sex partner choice for both men and women. Collectively, the DNA differences explained only 8 to 12 percent of the heritability of having same-sex partners. “There is no gay gene,” Ganna said, “but rather non-heterosexuality is influenced by many tiny-effect genetic factors.” The new study is an advance over previous attempts to find “gay genes,” says J. Michael Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who was not involved in the new work. The study’s size is its main advantage, Bailey says. “It’s huge. Huge.” Researchers examined DNA data from more than 400,000 participants in the U.K. Biobank and more than 69,000 people who had their DNA tested by the consumer testing company 23andMe. People who have given their DNA data to those research projects also answered a battery of questions, including ones about whether they had ever had a partner of the same sex and how many sexual partners they have had. The findings were replicated with data from three other studies, including one from Sweden. Findings from such large studies are more likely to be replicated than the small studies in the past, Bailey says. Researchers have “really gotten these studies down now and if they find things, it’s pretty sure that they’re true.” |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25601 - Posted: 10.22.2018

By Michael Price SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA—How genes influence sexual orientation has sparked debate for at least a quarter century. But geneticists have had only a handful of underpowered studies to address a complex, fraught, and often stigmatized area of human behavior. Now, the largest-ever study of the genetics of sexual orientation has revealed four genetic variants strongly associated with what the researchers call nonheterosexual behavior. Some geneticists are hailing the findings as a cautious but significant step in understanding the role of genes in sexuality. Others question the wisdom of asking the question in the first place. Andrea Ganna, a research fellow with the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Harvard Medical School in Boston, and colleagues examined data from hundreds of thousands of people who provided both DNA and behavioral information to two large genetic surveys, the UK Biobank study and the private genetics firm 23andMe. They analyzed DNA markers from people who answered either “yes” or “no” to the question, “Have you ever had sex with someone of the same sex?” In total, they identified 450,939 people who said their sexual relationships had been exclusively heterosexual and 26,890 people who reported at least one homosexual experience. In Ganna’s talk yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics here, he emphasized that the researchers were cautious about exploring sexual behavior that is still illegal in many countries, and that they tried to frame their questions carefully “to avoid a fishing expedition.” The team, which includes behavioral scientists, preregistered their research design and also met regularly with members of the LGBTQ community to discuss and share results. Ganna acknowledged that what they call “nonheterosexual behavior” includes “a large spectrum of sexual experiences, that go from people who engage exclusively in same-sex behavior to those who might have experimented once or twice.” © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25600 - Posted: 10.22.2018

Allison Aubrey By age 40, about one in 10 adults will experience some hearing loss. It happens so slowly and gradually, says audiologist Dina Rollins, "you don't realize what you're missing." And even as it worsens, many people are in denial. By the time someone is convinced they have a hearing problem, age-related memory loss may have already set in. But, here's the good news: Restoring hearing with hearing aids can help slow down cognitive decline. Consider these findings: Researchers tracked about 2,000 older adults in the U.S. both before and after they started using hearing aids. The adults were participants in a big, national study, the Health and Retirement Study. "We found the rate of cognitive decline was slowed by 75 percent following the adoption of hearing aids," says Asri Maharani, a researcher at the University of Manchester in the division of neuroscience and experimental psychology and an author of the paper. "It is a surprising result," Maharani says. The study was published this spring in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. To assess cognition over time, researchers performed a battery of tests face-to-face with participants. This was done every two years from 1996 to 2014. One test to assess memory required participants to recall a list of 10 words, both immediately after the words were read aloud, and then again after the participants had been distracted by other tasks. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25599 - Posted: 10.22.2018

By Sandra G. Boodman Ever since he was a toddler, Michael had been beset by an array of medical problems that doctors couldn’t explain. Severe leg pain came first. That was followed a few years later by recurrent, sometimes severe, stomachaches. Later, the little boy developed a wracking cough, followed by trouble breathing. In fifth grade, after he fell and smacked his tailbone, he was in so much pain he wound up in a wheelchair. His worried parents took him to four emergency rooms and an array of Washington-area specialists, among them orthopedists, neurologists, pediatricians and a gastroenterologist. Yet virtually every test failed to uncover a problem. It would take a seasoned pediatrician to pull together the disparate elements of the 10-year-old’s medical history and make an unexpected diagnosis that would prove to be a turning point for the boy and his family. Three years later, Michael, now 14 and a freshman in high school, seems to have moved beyond the disorder that dominated his first decade. His father said he believes his son’s illness resulted from “a perfect storm” of factors. He would have preferred that the doctors who saw Michael had spoken “a little more freely about their guesses” and had provided more guidance. To protect Michael’s privacy, his parents requested that he and they be identified by their middle names. When he was nearly 2, Michael, who had been previously healthy, began limping and then stopped walking. His pediatrician found no obvious explanation and sent him to a pediatric neurologist, who ordered an extensive work-up, including scans and blood tests. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Emotions
Link ID: 25598 - Posted: 10.22.2018

Sasa Woodruff Ryan "China" McCarney has played sports his entire life, but sometimes he has to force himself to show up on the field to play pick-up soccer with his friends. "I'm dreading and I'm anticipating the worst. But I do it anyway. And then, it's a euphoric sensation when you're done with it because you end up having a great time," says McCarney. McCarney was just 22 when he had his first panic attack. As a college and professional baseball player, he says getting help was stigmatized. It took him six years to get professional support. He still struggles with depression and social anxiety, but says exercising helps him — especially when it's with his teammates. Research shows exercise can ease things like panic attacks or mood and sleep disorders, and a recent study in the journal, Lancet Psychiatry, found that popular team sports may have a slight edge over the other forms of physical activity. The researchers analyzed CDC survey data from 1.2 million adults and found — across age, gender, education status and income — people who exercised reported fewer days of bad mental health than those who didn't. And those who played team sports reported the fewest. One of the study's authors, Adam Chekroud, an assistant adjunct professor at Yale's School of Medicine, thinks team activity could add another layer of relief for sufferers of mental illness. He says there are biological, cognitive and social aspects to mental illness. "Some sports might just be hitting on more of those elements than other sports," he says. "If you just run on a treadmill for example, it's clear that you're getting that biological stimulation. But perhaps there are other elements of depression that you're not going to be tapping into." © 2018 npr

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25597 - Posted: 10.22.2018

Amanda B. Keener If Leonardo da Vinci had a good eye doctor, he might not have become such a great artist. At least that’s what an analysis of paintings and sculptures believed to be modeled after da Vinci suggests. Visual neuroscientist Christopher Tyler of the City University of London examined six pieces of art, including Salvator Mundi and Vitruvian Man. Five of the pieces depict an eye misalignment consistent with a disorder called exotropia that can interfere with three-dimensional vision, Tyler reports online October 18 in JAMA Ophthalmology. Exotropia, in which one eye turns slightly outward, is one of several eye disorders collectively called strabismus. Today, strabismus, which affects 4 percent of people in the United States, is treated with special glasses, eye patches or surgery. Tyler calculated the differences in eye alignment using the same sorts of measurements that an optometrist does when tailoring a pair of glasses. Most of the portraits showed the eyes misaligned, but Vitruvian Man by da Vinci himself did not. As a result, da Vinci may have had intermittent exotropia, present only some of the time and perhaps controllable, Tyler suspects. “The person [with intermittent exotropia] can align their eyes and see in 3-D, but if they’re inattentive or tired, the eye may droop,” he says. If da Vinci could control his exotropia, Tyler speculates that it would have been an artistic advantage. “The artist’s job is to paint on a 2-D surface,” he says. “This can be difficult when you view the world three-dimensionally.” Both eyes need to focus on the same subject for 3-D vision. Many artists shut one eye when viewing their subjects to more easily translate details into two dimensions. But with intermittent exotropia, da Vinci could have switched from 3-D to 2-D and back again with ease. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 201

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 25596 - Posted: 10.22.2018

By Jocelyn KaiserO For years, a Colorado couple searched for an explanation for why their bright, active little girl was having increasing trouble walking, speaking, and seeing. In December 2016, Julia Vitarello and Alek Makovec learned that 6-year-old Mila Makovec almost certainly had Batten disease, an inherited and fatal neurodegenerative disorder. Now, in a stunning illustration of personalized genomic medicine, Mila is receiving a drug tailored to her particular disease-causing DNA mutation—and it appears to have halted the condition’s progression. Today at the annual meeting of The American Society of Human Genetics in San Diego, California, researchers told the story of how in less than a year, they went from sequencing Mila’s genome to giving her a synthetic RNA molecule that helps her cells ignore her genetic flaw and make a needed protein. The same steps could help some other patients with diseases caused by unique mutations in a single gene, they said. “It’s very exciting,” says gene therapy researcher Steven Gray of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Houston, who wasn’t involved in the research. “There couldn’t be a stronger example of how personalized medicine might work in practice.” Batten disease afflicts an estimated two to four in 100,000 births in the United States. Patients have problems with lysosomes, enzyme-filled sacs within cells that clear waste molecules. Without properly working lysosomes, waste builds up and kills neural cells, causing brain damage and death by adolescence. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25595 - Posted: 10.20.2018

By Diana Kwon Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal revolutionized the study of the brain when he observed neurons for the first time. His investigations, now more than 100 years old, revealed intricate details of nerve cells in many different animals, including humans—rootlike dendrites attached to bulbous cell bodies, from which extend long, slender axons. Cajal’s examinations also revealed dendrites (via which nerve cells receive signals from other neurons) were much longer in humans than in rodents and other animals, even other non-human primates. A new study, published this week in Cell, shows that in people these antennalike projections also have distinct electrical properties that may help explain how the brain processes arriving information. Scientists have been meticulously studying dendrites in the decades since Cajal’s initial observations. Still, “the only thing we really knew about human dendrites was their anatomy,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientist Mark Harnett says. “There was a lot of potential for human dendrites to be doing something different because of their length, but there was no published work, as far as I know, on their actual electrical properties.” So Harnett and his colleagues set out to investigate whether the length of dendrites affected electrical signals transmitted through them. With the help of a neurologist, Sydney Cash of Massachusetts General Hospital, they were able to obtain brain tissue that had been removed from epilepsy patients undergoing routine surgery to help allay seizures—a procedure in which physicians routinely remove part of the temporal cortex to get to the hippocampus, a structure deep inside the brain where seizures typically originate. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging; Evolution
Link ID: 25594 - Posted: 10.20.2018

Ashley P. Taylor The activity in a cortical area involved in self-regulation was the best correlate of weight loss in a study published today (October 18) in Cell Metabolism. Previously, scientists thought that challenges to losing weight stemmed from imbalances between the hormones leptin, which produces a feeling of satiety, and ghrelin, which stimulates hunger. When people go on a diet, ghrelin levels go up and leptin levels go down. To see how brain activity fits into dieting physiology, Alain Dagher, a neurologist at McGill University, worked with 24 overweight and obese people who were starting a 1,200-calories-per-day diet at a weight-loss clinic. Before starting the regimen, participants had fMRIs—imaging scans that show brain activity—while looking at pictures of either appetizing, sometimes high-calorie food, or of scenery. The researchers repeated the scans one month and three months into the diet. Typically, food pictures activate the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, linked to desire, motivation, and value, Dagher says in a press release. Further, this region stimulates hunger when the body is burning more calories than it’s taking in, Dagher tells HealthDay. Over the course of the study, the ventral medial prefrontal cortex responded less and less to the pictures of food, but the decline in activity was greatest in people who lost the most weight, Dagher says in the release. On the other hand, activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex, involved in self-regulation, increased over the course of the diet, and the more it was active, the more weight people lost. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Obesity; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25593 - Posted: 10.20.2018

By Elizabeth Pennisi One of biology’s enduring mysteries is how some animals—from humans to honey bees—became so social. Now, a study suggests that, in the inconspicuous sweat bee, changes to the expression of a single gene could determine which bees are solitary and which are social. The gene, which has previously been linked to autism in humans, has also been connected to social behavior in animals like mice and locusts. The new discovery puts scientists one step closer toward demonstrating a common evolutionary basis for social behavior. “People have been taking about the genetics of sociality for years,” says Bernard Crespi, an evolutionary biologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, who was not involved with the work. “Finding this gene is a real watershed for the field.” Sweat bees don’t have the same massive colonies as honey bees, whose hundreds of workers care for and protect a single egg-laying queen. But the tiny, gentle bees have some interesting social arrangements: In some groups and species, workers help a reproducing queen, as honey bees do; in other groups, sweat bee females tend their own broods. This difference has led scientists to think sweat bees may hold the key to understanding how more complex insect societies began to evolve. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25592 - Posted: 10.18.2018

Women whose left index and ring fingers are different lengths are more likely to be lesbians, a study suggests. Scientists measured the fingers of 18 pairs of female identical twins, where one was straight and the other gay. On average, the lesbians, but not the straight twins, had different sized index and ring fingers, typically a male trait, but only on the left hand. This may be the result of exposure to more testosterone in the womb, the University of Essex researchers said. The scientists also measured the fingers of 14 pairs of male identical twins, where one was straight and the other gay, but found no link. Both men and women were exposed to the "male" hormone, testosterone, in the womb - but some may be exposed more than others, the scientists said. Study author Dr Tuesday Watts, from the psychology department at Essex University, said: "Because identical twins, who share 100% of their genes, can differ in their sexual orientations, factors other than genetics must account for the differences. "Research suggests that our sexuality is determined in the womb and is dependent on the amount of male hormone we are exposed to or the way our individual bodies react to that hormone, with those exposed to higher levels of testosterone being more likely to be bisexual or homosexual. © 2018 BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25591 - Posted: 10.18.2018

By Concepción de León I hear some people have trouble with therapy, that it can take years for them to open up to their doctors, let alone cry or break down. Not me. Day one, I told my therapist, Amy Bernstein, “I’ll just tell you everything, and we’ll go from there.” I was assigned to her after revealing, during an initial interview to determine the appropriate therapist for my needs, that I’d been touched as a child. I hadn’t planned to bring it up at all, but I was asked directly, so I said, yes, you could say that. (At the time, I avoided the word “molested.”) And yes, it still crossed my mind. To be honest, what happened had always felt like such a small thing. Many others have had it much worse; I counted myself lucky for only having been touched in subtle ways — a male relative digging his hands in my tiny skirt pockets to “feel around for change”; another bringing his hand to my crotch when he thought I was asleep. These were two of a handful of men who violated me. Amy recommended books to help me understand what had happened, but I put them down after just a few pages, thinking, “This isn’t for me! My thing is too small.” But then, as tends to be the case with therapy, things got harder before they got better. I returned to one of the books Amy had recommended, “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma,” by Bessel van der Kolk, to try to understand my visceral response to remembering. Dr. van der Kolk is a Boston-based psychiatrist who specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder and has worked with a broad range of clients, from veterans to sexual assault survivors. “The Body Keeps the Score” hinges on his idea that trauma is stored in the body and that, for therapy to be effective, it needs to take the physiological changes that occur into account. Trauma produces “a re-calibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity” and, also, “compromises the brain area that communicates the physical, embodied feeling of being alive,” Mr. van der Kolk writes. For survivors of sexual assault and other traumas, the amygdala, which initiates the body’s fight or flight response system whenever it perceives danger, can remain activated long after the threat has subsided. In the present, survivors relive their traumas in the form of fragmented images, sounds and emotion that the brain can’t register as belonging to the past. Many people also experience dissociation, which can manifest as literal desensitization in parts of the body or the inability to describe physical sensations. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 25590 - Posted: 10.18.2018