Jenny Rood In 1999, a paper in Nature Medicine reported that mouse models of the fatal neurodegenerative disorder amyotrophic lateral sclerosis fared better with a simple treatment: a diet supplemented with creatine, a compound that helps regulate energy levels in the brain and muscles (5:347–50). That promising, albeit preliminary, result soon launched not one but three clinical trials, with a total of 386 patients in the US and Europe. Disappointingly, the trials revealed that creatine had no effect in people. It was a familiar outcome: more than 50 other clinical trials of potential amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) drugs, ranging from lithium to celecoxib (Celebrex), have failed. Also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS results from the degeneration and death of motor neurons, and affects approximately two to five of every 100,000 people worldwide. ALS’s devastating symptoms—including progressively worsening muscle weakness and spasming, and difficulties with speech, swallowing, and breathing, leading ultimately to paralysis and death—have led to an intense hunt for treatments to halt its progression. Unfortunately, the desire to give patients hope has often outstripped good scientific sense. “Many drugs that have gone into ALS clinical trials shouldn’t have, because the preclinical data package didn’t support it,” says Steve Perrin, CEO and CSO of the nonprofit ALS Therapy Development Institute (TDI) based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Only five of the 420 ALS therapy candidates that his center has retested in mouse and cellular models have shown a therapeutic effect. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 25469 - Posted: 09.20.2018

By Piercarlo Valdesolo Earlier this year, a research team led by Dr. Sven Karlsson published the largest scale study on the causes of human intelligence. They found an intriguing pattern of results: Focusing on arithmetic and linguistic tests, genetics predicted over 26% of people’s responses. Namely, individuals with a long allele of the 4-GTTLR gene got more right answers on the arithmetic, mental rotation, and semantic memory tasks than did individuals with the short version of the gene. In contrast, education explained only 4% of people’s responses. Describing the work, Karlsson wrote “We believe this is an interesting result! Our findings indicate that, contrary to certain previous assumptions, basic cognitive capabilities—mental rotation, math and language—really have a strong heritable component. Intelligence in adulthood seems to be predicted by genes early in life… things like education and effort play a small role once you take into account the role of genetics.” How did you react to the description above? Hopefully you haven’t already tweeted about it: it’s completely made up. A genetic basis for intelligence is a politically fraught scientific idea about which you had likely developed an opinion before reading about the fictitious Dr. Karlsson. You might think it obviously so that genes play an important role in shaping all traits, including intelligence. Or you might think that genes play a trivial role in comparison to socialization and learning. The ease with which you accepted the brief synopsis of research above as true likely depends on these existing beliefs. If the findings are consistent with your beliefs, you might have quickly accepted its truth value. If inconsistent, then you might have been tempted to either dismiss the finding out of hand, or perhaps dig deeper into the article to find some disqualifying error in method or analysis. These are reactions that psychologists have known about for decades. Motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, selective attention. We are equipped with a range of psychological processes that inoculate us from the threat of information that pokes up against our worldviews and beliefs, and attract us to information consistent with our beliefs. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Intelligence; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25468 - Posted: 09.20.2018

By Jason Arment She was a cat lover with cotton-candy-colored hair and obnoxious tastes in music but similar politics to mine. While texting on Tinder, she suggested I might get to play with her kitty. We agreed that we would take her cat out to the park some time but that we would start with dinner and a drink. There were no other hints to me that anything thrilling might happen beyond my riding my motorcycle from Denver to Boulder for the meeting. Sitting together at an Italian restaurant, we got past the cat conversation and progressed to politics and music, jokes and laughter. We were communicating freely and enjoying each other’s company — pretty much everything I wanted out of a first date. As the waitress picked up the check, my date invited me back to her place. I went. I still didn’t think anything was going to happen until we were going to settle in to watch a movie and she changed her clothes right in front of me. So many veterans’ stories begin with them coming back home to find it’s a place with which they no longer identify. I don’t want to overstate my problems, but as a man who went to Iraq as a proud Marine only to realize what was happening there was nothing short of catastrophic, I started to rethink where exactly my heart aligned with my nation and where it fractured and split. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Stress
Link ID: 25467 - Posted: 09.20.2018

By Kelly Servick PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA—While artificial intelligence (AI) has been busy trouncing humans at Go and spawning eerily personable Alexas, some neuroscientists have harbored a different hope: that the types of algorithms driving those technologies can also yield some insight into the squishy, wet computers in our skulls. At the Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience here this month, researchers presented new tools for comparing data from living brains with readouts from computational models known as deep neural networks. Such comparisons might offer up new hypotheses about how humans process sights and sounds, understand language, or navigate the world. “People have fantasized about that since the 1980s,” says Josh McDermott, a computational neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. Until recently, AI couldn’t come close to human performance on tasks such as recognizing sounds or classifying images. But deep neural networks, loosely inspired by the brain, have logged increasingly impressive performances, especially on visual tasks. That “brings the question back to mind,” says neuroscientist Chris Baker of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Deep neural networks work by passing information between computational “nodes” that are arranged in successive layers. The systems hone skills on huge sets of data; for networks that classify images, that usually means collections of labeled photos. Performance improves with feedback as the systems repeatedly adjust the strengths of the connections between nodes. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 25466 - Posted: 09.18.2018

Ryan Kellman When a relationship ends but love remains, it can be both frustrating and embarrassing. Dessa, a well-known rapper, singer and writer from Minneapolis, knows the feeling well. She'd spent years trying to get over an ex-boyfriend, but she was still stuck on him. "You're not only suffering," she says, "You're just sort of ridiculous. Discipline and dedication are my strong suits — it really bothered me that, no matter how much effort I tried to expend in trying to solve this problem, I was stuck." But things changed when Dessa turned to the frontiers of neuroscience for help. She came across a TED Talk by Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist and visiting research associate at Rutgers University. Using a type of brain scan called fMRI, Fisher had looked into the brains of lovestruck people and noticed that certain parts of their brains were unusually active. "That you could objectively measure and observe 'love' — that had never occurred to me before," Dessa says. She wondered: If science could map the sources of love in her brain, could it somehow make that love go away? The question led her to a controversial therapy technique called neurofeedback. The idea is simple: If you want to learn to lower your heart rate, it helps to be able to hear your pulse. And if you want to change patterns of brain activity, it might be helpful to be able to see what your brain is up to. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25465 - Posted: 09.18.2018

Ian Sample Science editor A radical gene therapy for drug addiction has been shown to dampen down cravings for cocaine and protect against overdoses of the substance that would normally be lethal. The therapy uses implants of stem cells which have been genetically engineered to release a powerful enzyme that removes the class A drug from the bloodstream. Tests in the lab showed that mice fitted with the implants lost their appetite for cocaine and survived massive overdoses of the drug that killed 100% of untreated animals. The work has raised hopes for a long term treatment for addiction that works by clearing drugs from the body as soon as they are injected, inhaled or ingested. The therapy would effectively make addicts immune to the substances. Lead researcher Ming Xu, a professor of anaesthesia and critical care at the University of Chicago, said the approach was “highly efficient and specific for eliminating cocaine.” “Compared to other gene therapies, our approach is minimally invasive, long term, low maintenance and affordable. It’s very promising,” he told the Guardian. Scientists have known for decades that an enzyme found in blood plasma called butyrylcholinesterase, or BChE, destroys cocaine by breaking it down into harmless byproducts. But the enzyme is not particularly fast-acting and does not linger in the bloodstream long enough to help those addicted to the drug. To create their new therapy, the Chicago researchers rewrote the DNA in mouse skin stem cells to make them churn out a modified form of BChE that is 4,400 times more potent than the natural enzyme. The scientists reasoned that clumps of these engineered cells, called organoids, could be implanted under the skin, where they would release the cocaine-busting enzyme into the blood. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited o

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25464 - Posted: 09.18.2018

Aimee Cunningham More than 2 million U.S. middle and high school students — or nearly 1 in 11 — have vaped marijuana, a new study suggests. Based on reports of teens’ e-cigarette use in 2016, researchers estimate that nearly 1 in 3 high school students, or roughly 1.7 million, have used pot in the devices. Nearly 1 in 4 middle school students, or 425,000, have done the same, the team reports online September 17 in JAMA Pediatrics. The numbers are the first nationwide estimates of teens’ and preteens’ use of marijuana in e-cigs, based on data from 20,675 sixth- to 12th-graders who participated in the 2016 National Youth Tobacco Survey. The most widely used tobacco products among U.S. youth, e-cigarettes are battery-powered devices that heat and vaporize liquids that usually contain nicotine (SN: 5/28/16, p. 4). But the devices can also vaporize dried marijuana leaves or buds as well as oils or waxes made from the plant’s primary active ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. The number of youth using marijuana in e-cigarettes isn’t surprising, says Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, a developmental psychologist at Stanford University School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. “It’s easy; it’s accessible; they can be stealthy in using it.” Vaping marijuana can be done more discretely than smoking a joint because there isn’t as much of the telltale odor, if any. And legalization of marijuana in some states has led to increased access to the drug, she says, and a change in social norms regarding the drug’s use. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25463 - Posted: 09.18.2018

Luke Watkin was in year eight at school and alone in a corridor when he first heard a strange noise. "I heard what sounded like a train brake, followed by a metal on metal noise. "It was just something completely out of the ordinary. It was a bit of a shock to the system, something I just couldn't understand or really process. "My experience at the time was quite terrifying." It was his first experience of the mental health condition, psychosis. Luke was 12 years old. He said it went on from noises to hearing words, hearing his name, to eventually hearing whole sentences "of it almost trying to talk to me". The main symptoms of psychosis are hallucinations and delusions and it can be caused by a specific mental health condition, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or severe depression. It can also be triggered by traumatic experiences, stress, drugs, alcohol, as a side-effect of prescribed mediation or a physical condition such as a brain tumour. While it is not as common as depression - affecting fewer than one in every hundred - experts say it is important to recognise symptoms of psychosis early because early treatment can be more effective. People with psychosis have a higher than average risk of self-harm and suicide. The charity Rethink Mental Illness has surveyed 4,000 people and found more than half believe they wouldn't be able to identify the early symptoms. They are concerned that a general lack of awareness leads to young people not getting help early on - especially as the first episode of psychosis is most likely to happen between the ages of 18 and 24. More subtle early warning signs include withdrawing from friends, expressing strange beliefs, sudden changes in mood and confused thoughts. © 2018 BBC

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 25462 - Posted: 09.18.2018

By Alan Jasanoff Disorders of the mind have meant different things to different people at different times. In Plato’s “Phaedrus,” Socrates extols divinely inspired madness in mystics, lovers, poets and prophets; he describes these disturbances as gifts of the gods, rather than maladies. Premodern Europeans more commonly despised the insane, but barely distinguished them from others their society rejected; madmen were imprisoned alongside beggars, blasphemers and prostitutes. Some modern cultures have notions of mental disorder that seem almost as strange to us; syndromes with names like latah, amok and zar defy traditional classifications of Western psychiatry and often call for spiritual rather than medical responses. Our own culture’s conception of the varieties of mental illness took shape first from a deck of cards curated by the pioneering German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin over a century ago. Each of the cards contained an abstract of a patient’s medical history, and by grouping them according to similarities he observed among the cases, Kraepelin delineated for the first time some of the major categories physicians now use to diagnose psychiatric diseases. Since the 1980s, Kraepelin’s characterizations of psychosis, mania and depression have been virtually codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the clinician’s bible for evaluating patients. Kraepelin was a staunch critic of psychoanalysis and passionate advocate for understanding mental phenomena in strictly biological terms — attitudes now also ascendant in psychiatric biomedicine. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 25461 - Posted: 09.18.2018

By Meredith Wadman During decades of lab experiments and dozens of clinical trials, scientists have searched in vain for drugs to defeat obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), the risky and increasingly prevalent condition in which a person’s upper airway repeatedly collapses during sleep, causing them to briefly stop breathing, dozens or hundreds of times each night. Now a new drug combination has reawakened hopes. A team led by researchers in Boston has identified a pair of medications--approved for other uses and with solid safety records--that appear to work in concert during sleep to activate the muscles that dilate the upper airway. In a study of 20 patients, the scientists found that a combination of atomoxetine and oxybutynin, taken as two pills at bedtime, reduced patients’ frequency of airway obstruction – called the apnea-hypopnea index, or AHI -- from a median of 28.5 hourly obstructions on placebo to 7.5 on the pills. In the 15 patients with the highest AHI’s, the median reduction was 74% -- and every patient experienced at least a 50% reduction, Andrew Wellman and Luigi Taranto-Montemurro at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, reported this week today at the International Congress of the European Respiratory Society in Paris, France. Patients’ blood oxygenation also improved strikingly, the group found. “We’ve never had a drug combination, or any sort of a drug, that consistently improved everybody’s AHI. That’s actually unbelievably exciting,” says Sigrid Veasey of the University of Pennsylvania, a physician-researcher who studies sleep. It’s “a great first step,” adds Martina Mason, a sleep physician at the Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, United Kingdom, who coauthored a 2013 review of 30 previous, underwhelming drug trials. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 25460 - Posted: 09.17.2018

By Perri Klass, M.D. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a major new guideline on diagnosing and managing head injuries in children on Sept. 4, the product of years of work and extensive evidence review by a large working group of specialists in fields ranging from emergency medicine and epidemiology to sports injuries to neurology and neurosurgery. The guideline, which is the first from the C.D.C. that is specific to mild brain injury in children, advises against the long recovery period, isolated in a dark, quiet room, that has sometimes been used in treatment. “The brain is a somewhat gelatinous, even trembling organ which houses our consciousness,” said Dr. Angela Lumba-Brown, a pediatric emergency medicine specialist who is the co-director of the Stanford Concussion and Brain Performance Center, and the first author of the guideline. “It does have resilience, but there are periods in life when it is particularly vulnerable.” Having a truly evidence-based guideline should help clinicians personalize the care that children receive and the ways they gradually reintegrate into activities and sports, she said, rather than applying rigid rules — and should generally encourage an earlier return to non-risky activity. The guideline focuses specifically on what is called mTBI, for “mild traumatic brain injury,” which might otherwise be called concussion. There are studies which show that the way that people think about these head injuries — the kids, the parents, the coaches, the doctors — can actually be affected by which term is used, so that what is called a concussion may not be taken as seriously as what is called a mild traumatic brain injury. Some of these injuries are related to sports, but many involve falls from playground equipment, or in the home, as young children explore their developing physical abilities. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25459 - Posted: 09.17.2018

Stephanie O'Neill Shirley Avedon, 90,­­ had never been a cannabis user. But carpal tunnel syndrome that sends shooting pains into both of her hands and an aversion to conventional steroid and surgical treatments is prompting her to consider some new options. "It's very painful, sometimes I can't even open my hand," Avedon says. So for the second time in two months, she's climbed on board a bus that provides seniors at the Laguna Woods Village retirement community in Orange County, Calif., with a free shuttle to a nearby marijuana dispensary. The retired manager of an oncology office says she's seeking the same relief she saw cancer patients get from smoking marijuana 25 years ago. "At that time (marijuana) wasn't legal, so they used to get it off their children," she says with a laugh. "It was fantastic what it did for them." Avedon, who doesn't want to get high from anything she uses, picked up a topical cream on her first trip that was sold as a pain reliever. It contained cannabidiol or CBD, but was formulated without THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, marijuana's psychoactive ingredient. "It helped a little," she says. "Now I'm going back for the second time hoping they have something better." As more states legalize marijuana for medical or recreational use — 30 states plus the District of Columbia to date — the cannabis industry is booming. Among the fastest growing group of users: people over 50, with especially steep increases among those 65 and older. And some dispensaries are tailoring their pitches to seniors like Avedon who are seeking alternatives treatments for their aches, pains and other medical conditions. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25458 - Posted: 09.17.2018

By John Horgan It is the central mystery of existence, the one toward which all other mysteries converge. Schopenhauer called it the world knot (hence the image above). Descartes often gets credit for posing it first, but Socrates pondered it millennia earlier, as did Buddha and other Eastern sages. I’m talking about the mind-body problem, which encompasses the riddles of consciousness, the self, free will, morality, the meaning of life. Modern scientists and philosophers often make the mind-body problem seem hopelessly esoteric, a topic only for experts. Hard-core materialists insist it is a pseudo-problem, which vanishes once you jettison archaic concepts like “the self” and “free will.” Actually, the mind-body problem is quite real, simple and urgent. You face it whenever you wonder who you really are. Long before I heard of it, I was obsessed with the mind-body problem. I touch on it, directly or indirectly, in my previous four books, even The End of War, the epilogue of which is called “In Defense of Free Will.” Writing hasn’t been cathartic. The more I write about the mind-body problem, the more it grips me. In 2015, after attending a workshop on a weird new theory of consciousness, I started looking at the mind-problem in a new way. Our responses to the mind-body problem will always be emotional as well as rational, a matter of taste as much as truth. We can’t escape our subjectivity when we try to solve the riddle of ourselves. So I conjectured. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 25457 - Posted: 09.17.2018

Lauren Gravitz When Kate Sieloff's husband, Karl, began acting strange, she didn't know where to turn. Her hard-working, affectionate spouse was suddenly having fits of anger and aggression. He stopped paying the bills. Karl, 56 at the time, was an engineer at General Motors, where he'd worked for more than 40 years. But some days he didn't even show up for work, finding it too hard to get out of bed. Because the problems were sporadic, most people in her life couldn't see what was going on. They told Kate, of Romeo, Mich., that she was imagining things. Doctors suggested that Karl was depressed and tried him on a variety of medications. When he began depleting their savings on impulsive purchases, and grew even more aggressive and violent, her son—a neurologist at the University of Michigan's medical center in Ann Arbor—insisted she bring Karl to his hospital for evaluation. Doctors there quickly diagnosed him with frontotemporal dementia. For Kate, the diagnosis was a relief, but she still felt overwhelmed and needed help coping with her husband's illness. Getting his diabetes medications under control, and starting him on a mood stabilizer and a new antidepressant helped control his mood swings while restoring some of his loving personality. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25456 - Posted: 09.17.2018

By Erin Blakemore Janet Jay is a cyborg. No, she’s not RoboCop or Darth Vader. But she shares a similarity with those characters: Her all-too-human body has been upgraded with a machine. A next-generation implant deep in Jay’s back stimulates her spinal cord, overriding her body’s pain signals to give her some relief from the back pain that has plagued her for years. In an article on Popular Science’s website, Jay writes about her experience with pain and the next-generation way she’s finding relief. She is hardly alone in her suffering. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, an estimated 25.3 million Americans, or 11.2 percent of U.S. adults, experience chronic pain. It can interfere with work and home life and leave patients debilitated, disabled and depressed. So it makes sense that Jay jumped at the chance to experience long-term pain relief with the help of a spinal-cord stimulator. Jay lays out the hows and whys of spinal stimulation, and she paints a vivid picture of a life in agony, a journey that has included skeptical doctors, plenty of painkillers and unanswered questions about the future. She also describes her path to spinal stimulation, how the device works with the body to short-circuit pain, and the many roadblocks to relief that patients face. “Even for me, the battle is not over,” Jay writes. “Since this surgery I’ve actually had another disc herniate, complicating everything. My spine isn’t cured, and I still hurt all the time. But the pain is far more controlled, and I can function much better at my current level of discomfort.” © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25455 - Posted: 09.17.2018

By Ingrid Wickelgren It’s 7 p.m. on a Friday and Rebecca "Becky" Audette is already in bed, tucked under a polka-dotted lavender comforter. Dark purple velour curtains with butterfly ties hang over the lavender walls of her bedroom. Purple has been Becky’s favorite color since she was a toddler, before she was diagnosed with autism at age 7. Now, the young woman functions at about the level of a 4-year-old. “Am I going to bed? I want to go to bed,” she insists. Becky lives with her mother, Pamela Peirce; brother, Jason Audette; and Jason’s wife in a gray-and-white colonial-style house that was Peirce’s childhood home in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. When Peirce was a child, her extended family owned five houses along this quarter-mile stretch of road, dirt back then. Peirce and her grown children are the last of the clan to occupy the street. It’s paved now, but the house still sports features of an earlier time: two-pronged electrical outlets, a VCR, inherited furniture. It also offers a hopeful vision of the future. Becky bears the markings of an invasive, high-tech treatment under her purple plaid pajamas: two linear scars, each about 3 inches long, over her clavicle, and two circular bulges protruding ever so slightly from her chest. Beneath these marks lies the power source for an implant that stimulates key parts of her brain. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 25454 - Posted: 09.15.2018

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent Hundreds of thousands of girls and women with autism are going undiagnosed due to it being viewed as a “male condition”, according to one of the UK’s leading neuroscientists. Prof Francesca Happé, director of the Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London, warned that the failure to recognise autism in girls and women was taking a stark toll on their mental health. “We’ve overlooked autism in women and girls and I think there’s a real gender equality issue here,” she said. “I think we are missing large numbers and misdiagnosing them too.” Until recently, autism without intellectual impairments, sometimes called Asperger syndrome, was thought to predominantly affect boys and men, at a ratio of 10 to every one woman. However, there is growing evidence that the number of girls and women with the condition may have been vastly underestimated. Recent research, based on active screening rather than clinical or school records, found a ratio of 3:1. Happé and others believe this could fall further – potentially to as low as 2:1 – as diagnostic processes become better tailored to identifying autism in girls and women. Due to early assumptions about autism mostly affecting men, studies have often recruited male-only cohorts. Male participants in brain imaging studies on autism outnumber females by eight to one, and in earlier research the bias was even more pronounced. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Autism; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25453 - Posted: 09.15.2018

Aimee Cunningham Certain brain and personality characteristics may help predict whether a sugar pill can provide relief to someone suffering from chronic pain. In a small study, patients with persistent back pain who responded to a placebo treatment benefitted from up to a 33 percent reduction in their pain intensity. These people had distinctive features in their brains and certain personality traits, researchers report online September 12 in Nature Communications. About 20 percent of U.S. adults, or about 50 million people, had chronic pain in 2016, according to new data released September 13 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Chronic pain was defined as feeling pain on most days, if not every day, over the previous six months. Being able to identify people who respond to a placebo might mean doctors could give these individuals the option of a pain reliever that’s cheap, free of side effects and — unlike opioids, which are often prescribed to treat persistent pain — not addictive. “We need to seriously think about placebo as a treatment option, especially in chronic pain patients,” says neuroscientist and study coauthor A. Vania Apkarian of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25452 - Posted: 09.15.2018

Hannah Thomasy Transferring memories from one mind to another seems like something out of science fiction. But biologists from UCLA have recently found that memory transfer is in fact possible—at least in sea slugs. In the study, researchers in Professor David Glanzman’s lab examined memory in sea slugs using something called the siphon withdrawal reflex. The siphon is a sort of fleshy tube that sea slugs and other mollusks use to propel water in and out of their bodies. When the siphon is touched, the sea slug ordinarily withdraws it into its body as a protective reflex. The scientists “trained” the sea slugs, giving them a series of light shocks which caused them to become more sensitive to future stimuli. Then the researchers tested the slugs’ siphon withdrawal reflex 48 hours later. Sea slugs that had been shocked kept their siphons withdrawn for a significantly longer period of time than untrained sea slugs. This suggests that the conditioned sea slugs had formed a memory of their shocks. So far, nothing unusual. But then researchers removed RNA from the neurons of these trained sea slugs, and injected it into a new group—into sea slugs that hadn’t ever been shocked. Weirdly, even these otherwise naive sea slugs withdrew their siphons for much longer than normal when they were poked. In other words, they acted like they remembered being shocked, even though the shocks didn’t actually happen to them. These findings have been extremely controversial in the neuroscience community because they challenge the way that most researchers understand memory. For decades, scientists have believed that memories are stored in the brain’s synaptic connections. In other words, changing the connections between neurons (or groups of neurons) is what allows us to form and store memories. © 2017 Massive Science Inc.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25451 - Posted: 09.15.2018

By JoAnna Klein Plants have no eyes, no ears, no mouth and no hands. They do not have a brain or a nervous system. Muscles? Forget them. They’re stuck where they started, soaking up the sun and sucking up nutrients from the soil. And yet, when something comes around to eat them, they sense it. And they fight back. How is this possible? “You’ve got to think like a vegetable now,” says Simon Gilroy, a botanist who studies how plants sense and respond to their environments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Plants are not green animals,” Dr. Gilroy says. “Plants are different, but sometimes they’re remarkably similar to how animals operate.” To reveal the secret workings of a plant’s threat communication system for a study published Thursday in Science, Masatsugu Toyota (now a professor at Saitama University in Japan) and other researchers in Dr. Gilroy’s lab sent in munching caterpillars like in the video above. They also slashed leaves with scissors. They applied glutamate, an important neurotransmitter that helps neurons communicate in animals. In these and about a dozen other videos, they used a glowing, green protein to trace calcium and accompanying chemical and electrical messages in the plant. And they watched beneath a microscope as warnings transited through the leafy green appendages, revealing that plants aren’t as passive as they seem. The messages start at the point of attack, where glutamate initiates a wave of calcium that propagates through the plant’s veins, or plumbing system. The deluge turns on stress hormones and genetic switches that open plant arsenals and prepare the plant to ward off attackers — with no thought or movement. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 25450 - Posted: 09.14.2018