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

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

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

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

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

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 25794 - Posted: 12.17.2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25790 - Posted: 12.17.2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It started when Andi Dreher was only three years old. Her head slumped over, her face went blank. It was the first of many epileptic seizures that the Ontario child would endure. At the beginning, Andi would have a couple of seizures a year, but the condition slowly progressed. By the time she turned seven, she was having up to 150 seizures a day. Her family has come to call them "glitches." "The other day at school, she had 27 glitches in less than an hour," said her mom, Lori Dreher. The seizures make it difficult for Andi to do even the simplest tasks, such as walking, talking and eating. "She knows she used to play soccer and she used to do cheerleading — that she used to do these things and now she can't. That's hard." her mom said. 'We're guinea pigs': Canada's oversight process for implanted medical devices stuns suffering patients Among serious neurological conditions in children, epilepsy is the most common. For most, the condition can be controlled by medications. "But about one-third of children who have epilepsy don't respond to medication. A subset of them can potentially be helped by a variety of surgical treatment," said Dr. George Ibrahim, the pediatric neurosurgeon at the Hospital for Sick Children who operated on Andi. Dr. George Ibrahim, pediatric neurosurgeon at the Hospital for Sick Children, examines an image of Andi's brain. (Kelda Yuen/ CBC) When Andi and her family came from Kitchener to meet him last year, Ibrahim said he was struck by the severity of her case. "Her brain is developed in a very unique way," he said. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 25784 - Posted: 12.13.2018

Aimee Cunningham Babies born dependent on opioids have smaller heads than babies not exposed to the drugs in the womb. The finding, published online December 10 in Pediatrics, raises concerns that the drugs are impairing brain growth during development. And it highlights questions about the safest approach to managing opioid addiction during pregnancy, researchers say. Pregnant women who use opioids — or the drugs methadone or buprenorphine, opioids taken to treat addiction — pass the drugs through the bloodstream to babies. Infants can become dependent on the drugs in the womb, and experience withdrawal symptoms after birth. The disorder, marked by excessive crying, tremors or difficulty sleeping or feeding, is called neonatal abstinence syndrome, or NAS (SN: 6/10/17, p. 16). In the new study, researchers compared the head sizes of close to 860 babies born from 2014 to 2016, half with NAS and half from mothers who had not taken opioids while pregnant. Newborns with NAS had a head circumference nearly 1 centimeter smaller, on average, than babies not exposed to the drugs, the team found. And of the NAS babies, 30 percent had especially small heads. That was true for only 12 percent of babies without the condition. A smaller head is a possible sign of a smaller brain. The new work suggests that for those NAS babies who later have learning and behavioral problems, a contributing factor may be the effect of opioids on brain growth and development, says neonatologist Jonathan Davis. But it will be essential to determine “the actual impact of the smaller heads on how these children are developing,” says Davis, of Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25783 - Posted: 12.13.2018

By Ryan Dalton You might be forgiven for having never heard of the NotPetya cyberattack. It didn’t clear out your bank account, or share your social media passwords, or influence an election. But it was one of the most costly and damaging cyberattacks in history, for what it did target: shipping through ports. By the time the engineers at Maersk realized that their computers were infected with a virus, it was too late: worldwide shipping would grind to a halt for days. Imagine a similar situation, in which the target was another port: the synapse, the specialized port of communication between neurons. Much of our ability to learn and remember comes down to the behavior of synapses. What would happen then, if one neuron infected another with malware? Ports and synapses both run on rules, meant to ensure that their cargo can be exchanged not only quickly and reliably, but also adaptably, so that they can quickly adjust to current conditions and demands. This ‘synaptic plasticity’, is fundamental to the ability of animals to learn, and without it we would no more be able to tie our shoes than to remember our own names. Just as shipping rules are determined by treaties and laws, the rules of synaptic plasticity are written into a multitude of genes in our DNA. For example, one gene might be involved in turning up the volume on one side of the synapse, while another gene might ask the other side of the synapse to turn up the gain. Studying the function of these genes has been one of the core approaches to understanding what it is, at the microscopic level, to learn and to remember. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Intelligence
Link ID: 25782 - Posted: 12.12.2018

Diana Kwon The effects of antidepressant exposure during early development can pass down through three generations of offspring—at least in zebrafish. A new study, published today (December 10) in PNAS, reveals that fluoxetine, a commonly used antidepressant that goes by the brand name Prozac, can alter hormone levels and blunt stress responses in an exposed embryo and its descendants. “The paper is very intriguing,” says Tim Oberlander, a developmental pediatrician at the British Columbia Children’s Hospital who was not involved in this work. The question of whether these medications have a transgenerational effect is “a really important one that requires further study in other animal models, and ultimately, when we have the data, we need to figure out whether it’s also true in humans.” Fluoxetine is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), a class of drugs widely used to treat depression as well as other conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety disorders. Recent data from the US National Health and Nutrition Survey show increasing antidepressant use, from approximately 7.7 percent of the population in 1999–2002 to 12.7 percent from 2011–2014. SSRIs are often prescribed as the first-line treatment for pregnant women with depression, and prior studies in humans suggest infants exposed to SSRIs while in the womb may experience developmental disturbances such as delayed motor development and increased levels of anxiety later in childhood. Oberlander, whose research is focused on the influence of prenatal exposure to these medications, notes that it has been unclear whether those correlations represent a direct result of the drugs or if other factors, such as a genetic propensity for those outcomes or growing up with a parent with a mood disorder, may also play a part. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Epigenetics; Depression
Link ID: 25781 - Posted: 12.12.2018

In his enthralling 2009 collection of parables, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, the neuroscientist David Eagleman describes a world in which a person only truly dies when they are forgotten. After their bodies have crumbled and they leave Earth, all deceased must wait in a lobby and are allowed to pass on only after someone says their name for the last time. “The whole place looks like an infinite airport waiting area,” Eagleman writes. “But the company is terrific.” Most people leave just as their loved ones arrive — for it was only the loved ones who were still remembering. But the truly famous have to hang around for centuries; some, keen to be off, are with an “aching heart waiting for statues to fall”. Eagleman’s tale is an interpretation of what psychologists and social scientists call collective memory. Continued and shared attention to people and events is important because it can help to shape identity — how individuals see themselves as part of a group — and because the choice of what to commemorate, and so remember, influences the structures and priorities of society. This week in Nature Human Behaviour, researchers report a surprising discovery about collective memory: the pattern of its decay follows a mathematical law (C. Candia et al. Nature Hum. Behav. http://doi.org/cxq2; 2018). The attention we pay to academic papers, films, pop songs and tennis players decays in two distinct stages. In theory, the findings could help those who compete for society’s continued attention — from politicians and companies to environmental campaigners — to find ways to stay in the public eye, or at least in the public’s head. © 2018 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25780 - Posted: 12.12.2018

By Joshua Tan Recently, a blog by Tam Hunt was published at Scientific American which provocatively declared that “The Hippies Were Right: It’s All About Vibrations, Man.” Hunt’s claim is that consciousness emerges from resonant effects found in nature at a wide range of scales. This is reminiscent of arguments that have been made since the development of the science of thermodynamics more than two hundred years ago. In brief, very intriguing and surprising characteristics of complex systems have been discovered and rigorously defined with such tantalizing terms as “emergence,” “resonance” and “self-organization.” These kinds of features of the natural world are so amazing—even uncanny—that they have inspired wild speculation as to their possible implications. Are there deep connections between these phenomena and the more mysterious aspects of our existence such as life, consciousness, and intelligence? Might they even provide us with insight into possible answers to expansively fundamental questions like why there is something rather than nothing? Speculating on such mysteries is an understandable pastime. Diverse thinkers from physicists to philosophers, psychologists to theologians have written libraries worth of treatises attempting to shed light on the possible answers to these deep questions. Along the way, ideas inspired by scientific results have had varying degrees of success. Concepts such as animal magnetism, vitalism, synchronicity, and quantum mysticism all had their day in the Sun, only to end up debunked or dismissed by skeptics and scientists who either pointed out a lack of empirical data supporting the claims or showed that the ideas were incompatible with what we have discovered about the natural world. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 25779 - Posted: 12.12.2018

Bruce Bower A nearly complete hominid skeleton known as Little Foot has finally been largely freed from the stony shell in which it was discovered in a South African cave more than 20 years ago. And in the first formal analyses of the fossils, researchers say the 3.67-million-year-old Little Foot belonged to its own species. In four papers posted online at bioRxiv.org between November 29 and December 5, paleoanthropologist Ronald Clarke of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and colleagues assign Little Foot to a previously proposed species, Australopithecus prometheus, that has failed to gain traction among many researchers. Clarke has held that controversial view for more than a decade (SN: 5/2/15, p. 8). He found the first of Little Foot’s remains in a storage box of fossils from a site called Sterkfontein in 1994. Excavations of the rest of the skeleton began in 1997. Many other researchers, however, regard Little Foot as an early member of a hominid species called Australopithecus africanus. Anthropologist Raymond Dart first identified A. africanus in 1924 from an ancient youngster’s skull called the Taung Child. Hundreds of A. africanus fossils have since been found in South African caves, including Sterkfontein. One of those caves, Makapansgat, produced a partial braincase that Dart assigned to A. prometheus in 1948. But Dart dropped that label after 1955, assigning the braincase and another Makapansgat fossil to A. africanus. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 25778 - Posted: 12.12.2018

Jef Akst Alan McElligott, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Roehampton in the UK, continues to be impressed by goats. Since he started studying the charismatic ungulates a decade ago, he’s found that mothers remember the calls of their kids several months after they’ve been separated, and that goats can solve a two-step puzzle box akin to those typically used in primate research—and remember how to do it a year later. Now his team has found that goats at the Buttercups Sanctuary in Kent, UK, can distinguish between happy and angry human expressions. “Given some of the other things that we’ve found out about goats, I guess we shouldn’t really be that surprised,” says McElligott, who’s hoping to improve welfare guidelines for the animals by revealing their smart and social nature. McElligott’s experiment was simple. Working with 20 goats at the sanctuary, he and his colleagues presented each with two black-and-white images—one of a person smiling, and the other of the same person making an angry expression—then sat back and watched what the animal did. “If the goats ignored the photographs, for example, or walked up to the photographs and ripped them off metal panels and chewed on them, would I have been shocked? Possibly not,” says McElligott. “But . . . the goats did seem to take the time to have a look at these photographs and actually study them, believe it or not.” And based on the time they spent interacting with each image, the goats seemed to prefer the happy snapshot (R Soc Open Sci, 5:180491, 2018). © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Emotions; Attention
Link ID: 25777 - Posted: 12.12.2018