Laurel Hamers A draft of the poppy’s genetic instruction book is providing clues to how the plant evolved to produce molecules such as morphine. Scientists pieced together the genome of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum). Then, they identified a cluster of 15 close-together genes that help the plant synthesize a group of chemically related compounds that includes powerful painkillers like morphine as well as other molecules with potential medical properties (SN: 6/10/17, p. 22). A group of genes that help poppy plants produce some of these molecules, collectively known as benzylisoquinoline alkaloids, have been clustered together for tens of millions of years, researchers report online August 30 in Science. But the plant’s morphine production evolved more recently. Around 7.8 million years ago, the plant copied its entire genome. Some of the resulting surplus genes evolved new roles helping poppies produce morphine, because the plant already had at least one other copy of those genes carrying out their original jobs. It wasn’t a one-step process, though. An even earlier gene duplication event caused two genes to fuse into one. That hybrid gene is responsible for a key shape-shift in alkaloid precursors, directing those molecules down the chemical pathway toward morphinelike compounds instead of other benzylisoquinoline alkaloids (SN Online: 6/25/15). |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25399 - Posted: 08.31.2018

By Jake Buehler Whether it’s avoiding the slap of a flyswatter or shooting a tongue out at just the right moment to capture prey, fast reflexes can mean the difference between life and death in the animal kingdom. But a new study finds that not all reflexes are created equal: Larger animals are slower on the draw than smaller ones and because of that, they can’t move nearly as fast as they should be able to. When it comes to reflexes, there’s no doubt that bigger animals are a little slower. Big animals have longer neurons, and that means more time for a signal to travel from the spine to a leg muscle, for example. But nerve speed isn’t the only thing that slows down reflexes. So in the new study, researchers decided to look at myriad factors, like how fast muscles can generate force. They combed through data from other studies on electrically stimulated nerves and muscles in animals as small as shrews to as large as elephants. They also looked at the gaits of these mammals to calculate how long their stride and foot-down positions were in relation to their body size, which allowed researchers to look at how relatively quick their reflexes are. As size scales up, so does the total time it takes for muscles to respond, the team reported yesterday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Large mammals experience a delay between nerve firing and muscle movement that is more than 15 times longer than small mammals. But, relative to the speed of their body movements, that delay is only twice as long—which means to compensate for slow signals, they’re moving more slowly. If this didn’t happen, a running 250-kilogram elk would be a cartoonish blur of legs, taking steps far faster than its reflexes could ever respond to. Call it a biological speed limit. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 25398 - Posted: 08.31.2018

Jon Hamilton A new study suggests that ketamine, an increasingly popular treatment for depression, has something in common with drugs like fentanyl and oxycodone. The small study found evidence that ketamine's effectiveness with depression, demonstrated in many small studies over the past decade, comes from its interaction with the brain's opioid system. A Stanford University team reported their findings Wednesday in The American Journal of Psychiatry. "We think ketamine is acting as an opioid," says Alan Schatzberg, one of the study's authors and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford. "That's why you're getting these rapid effects." Until now, most researchers have attributed ketamine's success to its effect on the brain's glutamate system, which is involved in learning and memory. The opioid system, in contrast, controls pain, reward, and addictive behaviors. Ketamine is an anesthetic that is frequently given to children in the emergency room. It is also a popular but illicit party drug that can cause an out-of-body experience at high doses. And in the past few years, ketamine has seen increasing use as an off-label treatment that doctors prescribe for patients with severe depression that doesn't respond to other drugs. Unlike conventional antidepressants like Prozac, which can take weeks to work, an infusion or nasal administration of ketamine typically produces results in hours. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25397 - Posted: 08.29.2018

By Ingfei Chen Newtown, Connecticut. Las Vegas. Parkland, Florida. Annapolis, Maryland. And just two days ago, Jacksonville, Florida, where the details are still coming in. With each ghastly mass shooting in a school, workplace, or other public location, journalists scramble to piece together what happened, and speculation runs high as to whether the gunman had mental illness. But critics say the media coverage perpetuates deep-seated, stigmatizing attitudes about diagnoses such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. What can journalists do to cover the mental health connection in these mass murders in a responsible way? “Journalism is far too quick to try to guess at the ‘why’ behind these sorts of things, but speculation can have serious consequences.” Earlier this month, police investigators released a final report on the massacre at a Las Vegas concert last October, the deadliest shooting in modern American history. The motives of the 64-year-old gunman — a wealthy high-stakes gambler — remain unclear, they conceded, but he had burned through much of his fortune and shown potential signs of a troubled mind. While some news outlets made only brief reference to suspicions that the shooter may have had mental illness, others blared it. It’s a familiar theme. In recent years, the national conversation about gun violence has boiled down to a narrative — amplified by the media — that essentially blames mental illness as a prominent cause of these cold-blooded public mass shootings. Mental illness has become highly politicized in the gun-control debate, yet the link between psychiatric problems and violence isn’t so straightforward. And mental health advocates say the over-simplistic narrative unfairly labels millions of Americans who have a psychiatric diagnosis with the false stereotype of being dangerous. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Aggression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 25396 - Posted: 08.29.2018

By Daniel Victor On posters distributed to medical facilities across Australia, large type over an image of a pregnant woman read: “It’s safest not to drink while pregnant.” Good so far. It was the next line, in smaller type, that alarmed medical professionals: “It’s not known if alcohol is safe to drink when you are pregnant.” Public health groups responded with resounding protests — drinking alcohol while pregnant is very definitively known to be unsafe, they said. Creating doubt around the science could confuse pregnant women and encourage them to ignore warnings, they feared. The organization that made the posters, DrinkWise, describes its focus as promoting “a healthier and safer drinking culture in Australia,” but is funded largely by the alcohol industry. It withdrew the 2,400 posters after hearing complaints and substituted new text. But concerns remained among people working to spread the message that women should stay away from alcohol while pregnant. “It’s more than just erroneous for the alcohol industry to make that statement,” Michael Thorn, chief executive of the Foundation of Alcohol Research and Education, which is based in the Australian capital, Canberra, said in an interview. “The truth is, that’s what they want the public to believe.” In an emailed statement, DrinkWise’s chief executive, Simon Strahan, suggested the flap was more about precise messaging than intent. “It is clear, from the ‘It’s safest not to drink while pregnant’ headline of the posters, that the intent is to encourage abstinence when pregnant, planning a pregnancy or breast-feeding,” he said. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25395 - Posted: 08.29.2018

By Rachel Bluth, Kaiser Health News There has been a steady stream of headlines declaring that life expectancy in the United States is decreasing. And the often-cited reason is the climbing number of opioid-related deaths. Those two facts piqued the interest of a group of researchers who sought to reframe the way these trends can be viewed. “We have a problem that is otherwise being underestimated,” said Ian Rockett, an injury epidemiologist and professor emeritus at West Virginia University. Suicide rates have been steadily climbing, Rockett said, but their numbers are likely even higher. He said too often opioid-related drug overdoses aren’t classified as suicides, and he thinks they should be. These deaths are often deemed by medical examiners as “accidental injury deaths” unless a suicide note is found. This classification doesn’t take into account that suicide and drug overdoses both arise from “purposeful” behaviors. To get at the root of that problem, Rockett and his colleagues developed a model of self-injury mortality that factors together both categories—overdose deaths and suicides. This combined classification “is intended to promote prevention and earlier interventions” by recognizing common, preexisting mental health issues that could have been in play, the researchers wrote. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 25394 - Posted: 08.29.2018

By Mike Ives HONG KONG — A large study in China suggests a link between air pollution and negative effects on people’s language and math skills. The link between pollution and respiratory diseases is well known, and most experts now believe that small particulates may also raise the risk for strokes and heart attacks. Whether this form of air pollution impairs cognition is not yet certain, but several studies have hinted at a connection. The latest study, by researchers based in China and the United States, analyzed how long-term exposure to air pollution affected performance on nationwide math and word-recognition tests by more than 25,000 people across 162 Chinese counties. It was published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors based their findings on models they built that combined weather and pollution data from specific locations in China where people had taken nationwide tests in 2010 and 2014, as well as the test scores themselves. Their analysis tried to document how short- and long-term pollution exposure might have affected the scores — and, by extension, the test-takers’ brains. The authors found that the cognitive impact of cumulative exposure among the test takers was especially pronounced among older men, and that the results were troubling in part because cognitive decline and impairment are risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. The study “further amplifies the need to tackle air pollution now to protect the health of particularly the young and elderly populations,” Heather Adair-Rohani, a technical officer for public health and environment at the World Health Organization in Geneva, which was not involved in the study, said in an email. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Alzheimers
Link ID: 25393 - Posted: 08.29.2018

Nell Greenfieldboyce Sarah Anne, a 59-year-old chimpanzee, is famous enough to have her own Wikipedia page. That's because she was captured from the wild as an infant and raised in the home of a language researcher who taught her to use symbols for words. These days, she lives at Chimp Haven, a wooded sanctuary for former research chimps in Louisiana, along with a new pal named Marie. "And Marie loves to groom with Sarah, and follows her around and gives her lots of attention. And we're seeing Sarah play with her and just being much more sociable," says Amy Fultz, who studies animal behavior and co-founded Chimp Haven in 1995. "At 59, that's a really cool thing to be able to see and watch." Their friendship shows that even very old chimps can grow and change. But it's more than just a big deal for Sarah Anne. The arrival of Marie, along with some other chimps from a research facility in New Mexico, tipped the scales in terms of where most chimps live in this country. "There are more chimps in accredited sanctuaries than there are in research facilities now," says Rana Smith, the president of Chimp Haven. That means the retirement of research chimps has reached its endgame — and this final stage is proving to be unexpectedly challenging. In 2015, the National Institutes of Health announced that the era of chimp biomedical research was over, and that all of its chimps remaining in research labs — nearly 400 at the time — would gradually be transferred to Chimp Haven. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 25392 - Posted: 08.29.2018

Megan MolteniMegan Molteni It’s been more than a century since Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal won the Nobel Prize for illustrating the way neurons allow you to walk, talk, think, and be. In the intervening hundred years, modern neuroscience hasn’t progressed that much in how it distinguishes one kind of neuron from another. Sure, the microscopes are better, but brain cells are still primarily defined by two labor-intensive characteristics: how they look and how they fire. Which is why neuroscientists around the world are rushing to adopt new, more nuanced ways to characterize neurons. Sequencing technologies, for one, can reveal how cells with the same exact DNA turn their genes on or off in unique ways—and these methods are beginning to reveal that the brain is a more diverse forest of bristling nodes and branching energies than even Ramón y Cajal could have imagined. On Monday, an international team of researchers introduced the world to a new kind of neuron, which, at this point, is believed to exist only in the human brain. The long nerve fibers known as axons of these densely bundled cells bulge in a way that reminded their discoverers of a rose without its petals—so much that they named them “rose hip cells.” Described in the latest issue of Nature Neuroscience, these new neurons might use their specialized shape to control the flow of information from one region of the brain to another. “They can really act as a sort of brake on the system,” says Ed Lein, an investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science—home to several ambitious brain mapping projects—and one of the lead authors on the study. Neurons come in two basic flavors: Excitatory cells send information to the cells next to them, while inhibitory cells slow down or stop excitatory cells from firing. Rose hip cells belong to this latter type, and based on their physiology, seem to be a particularly potent current-curber. © 2018 Condé Nast

Keyword: Attention; Consciousness
Link ID: 25391 - Posted: 08.28.2018

By Susana Martinez-Conde Research has shown that the experience of pain is highly subjective: people feel more or less pain, in identical physical situations, as a function of their mood and attention. This flexibility showcases the potential for cognitive manipulations to decrease the pain associated with a variety of pathologies. As an example, the virtual-reality game “Snow World” (in which game in which players shoot snowballs to defeat snowman Frosty and his penguins) reportedly works better than morphine at counteracting the pain of patients in burn units. Other studies have indicated that virtual reality manipulations of the patient’s own body can also help ameliorate pain: an experiment conducted by neuroscientist Maria Victoria Sanchez-Vives and her team at the University of Barcelona in Spain showed that heat applied to experimental participants’ wrists felt more painful when their virtual arms turned red than when they turned blue or green. Following on this tradition, a study published PeerJ last month showed that visuotactile illusions can help the pain experienced by patients suffering from knee osteoarthritis. According to lead author Tasha Stanton, from the University of South Australia, the idea for the study originated from her observation that “people with knee osteoarthritis have an altered perception of their own body. [Their affected knee] often feels too big, and they also have changes to the way that touch and movement information is represented in the brain.” She hypothesized that patients may “respond to illusions that change the way their knee looks.” © 2018 Scientific American,

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Attention
Link ID: 25390 - Posted: 08.28.2018

By James Gorman It’s not easy to help ducks. Ask Kate McGrew, a masters student in wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware. Over two seasons, 2016 and 2017, she spent months raising and working with more than two dozen hatchlings from three different species, all to determine what they hear underwater. This was no frivolous inquiry. Sea ducks, like the ones she trained, dive to catch their prey in oceans around the world and are often caught unintentionally in fish nets and killed. Christopher Williams, a professor at the university who is Ms. McGrew’s adviser, said one estimate puts the number of ducks killed at sea at 400,000 a year, although he said the numbers are hard to pin down. A similar problem plagues marine mammals, like whales, and acoustic devices have been developed to send out pings that warn them away from danger. A similar tactic might work with diving ducks, but first, as Dr. Williams said, it would make sense to answer a question that science hasn’t even asked about diving ducks: “What do they hear?” “There actually is little to no research done on duck hearing in general,” Ms. McGrew said, “and on the underwater aspect of it, there’s even less.” That’s the recipe for a perfect, although demanding research project. Her goal was to use three common species of sea ducks to study a good range of underwater hearing ability. But while you can lead a duck to water and it will paddle around naturally, teaching it to take a hearing test is another matter entirely. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 25389 - Posted: 08.28.2018

Bone marrow, the spongy tissue inside most of our bones, produces red blood cells as well as immune cells that help fight off infections and heal injuries. According to a new study of mice and humans, tiny tunnels run from skull bone marrow to the lining of the brain and may provide a direct route for immune cells responding to injuries caused by stroke and other brain disorders. The study was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health and published in Nature Neuroscience. “We always thought that immune cells from our arms and legs traveled via blood to damaged brain tissue. These findings suggest that immune cells may instead be taking a shortcut to rapidly arrive at areas of inflammation,” said Francesca Bosetti, Ph.D., program director at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), which provided funding for the study. “Inflammation plays a critical role in many brain disorders and it is possible that the newly described channels may be important in a number of conditions. The discovery of these channels opens up many new avenues of research.” Using state-of-the-art tools and cell-specific dyes in mice, Matthias Nahrendorf, M.D., Ph.D., professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and his colleagues were able to distinguish whether immune cells traveling to brain tissue damaged by stroke or meningitis, came from bone marrow in the skull or the tibia, a large legbone. In this study, the researchers focused on neutrophils, a particular type of immune cell, which are among the first to arrive at an injury site.

Keyword: Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 25388 - Posted: 08.28.2018

By Matt Richtel and Sheila Kaplan SAN FRANCISCO — The leaders of a small start-up, PAX Labs, gathered at a board meeting in early 2015 to review the marketing strategy for its sleek new electronic cigarette, called Juul. They watched video clips of hip young people, posed flirtatiously holding Juuls. And they talked about the name of the gadget, meant to suggest an object of beauty and to catch on as a verb — as in “to Juul.” While the campaign wasn’t targeted specifically at teenagers, a former senior manager said that he and others in the company were well aware it could appeal to them. After Juuls went on sale in June 2015, he said, the company quickly realized that teenagers were, in fact, using them because they posted images of themselves vaping Juuls on social media. The former manager said the company was careful to make sure the models in its original campaign were at least 21, but it wasn’t until late 2016 or January 2017 that the company said it decided the models in all Juul ads should be over age 35 — to be “better aligned” with a mission of focusing on adult smokers. Only in June of this year did the company again change its policy, this time to using only real people who had switched from cigarettes to Juul. The company recently modified the names of its flavors — using creme instead of crème brûlée and cucumber instead of cool cucumber. Juul said it “heard the criticism” that teenagers might be attracted to the flavors and “responded by simplifying the names and losing the descriptors.” The sales campaigns for Juuls — now hugely popular with teenagers across the nation — are at the heart of a federal investigation into whether the company intentionally marketed its devices to youth. The attorney general of Massachusetts, also investigating the company, contends that Juul has been luring teenagers to try the product and has introduced many to nicotine. Her investigation will examine Juul’s efforts to audit its own website and other online retailers that sell its products to see how effective they are at preventing minors from accessing Juul or Juul-compatible products. (Federal law prohibits sales of e-cigarettes to anyone under 18.) © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25387 - Posted: 08.28.2018

Katie Nicholson · CBC News · It was early evening at a popular downtown Toronto jazz bar, the band playing for an older crowd more into Ella Fitzgerald than Rihanna's Umbrella-ella-ella. Part way through the set, a man in his late 50s stood and then promptly collapsed, face-first, onto the floor. The Rex's supervisor, Neil MacIntosh, watched in horror from behind the bar. "You see this scene and you're like, 'Oh God. OK, instantly 911,'" he said. MacIntosh assumed it was a stroke or a heart attack, but as paramedics arrived, he learned it was something quite different. "He had eaten a [cannabis] edible and just couldn't handle it," MacIntosh said. Cannabis overdoses are something he said he's personally witnessed at the bar three times in the past year. That mirrors a trend happening across the country — as the Oct. 17 date for legalization of recreational pot looms, CBC News has learned that cannabis-related emergency room visits have spiked. Data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) shows that over the past three years the number of emergency room visits because of cannabis overdoses in Ontario has almost tripled — from 449 in 2013-14, to nearly 1,500 in 2017-18. In Alberta, the number has nearly doubled over the same timeframe, from 431 to 832. Symptoms of cannabis overdose — or more precisely, THC poisoning, THC being the main psychoactive chemical in pot — include elevated heart rate and blood pressure, anxiety, vomiting and in some cases psychosis, possibly necessitating hospitalization. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25386 - Posted: 08.28.2018

By Jenny Gold, More and more people consider smoking marijuana harmless or even beneficial, but mounting research suggests women who are pregnant or breastfeeding should avoid it altogether. That’s according to new recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which cites growing evidence of marijuana’s potential harm to children’s long-term development. The strong direction to women and pediatricians comes as more than half of states, including California, have legalized marijuana for medical or recreational use, and studies show that a growing number of babies are being exposed to the drug. The march toward marijuana legalization has outpaced scientific research about its effects. Because marijuana is a Schedule 1 drug—by definition, one with potential for abuse and no approved medical use—federal law has limited research on it. But in a detailed review of the existing safety data published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, researchers concluded that enough concerns exist about both short-term growth and long-term neurological consequences for children to recommend against it. “Women should definitely be counseled that it’s not a good idea to use marijuana while pregnant. If you’re breastfeeding, we would encourage you to cut back or quit,” said Seth Ammerman, a co-author of the report and professor of pediatrics at Stanford. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25385 - Posted: 08.28.2018

By Aaron E. Carroll Last week a paper was published in The Lancet that claimed to be the definitive study on the benefits and dangers of drinking. The news was apparently not good for those who enjoy alcoholic beverages. It was covered in the news media with headlines like “There’s No Safe Amount of Alcohol.” The truth is much less newsy and much more measured. Limitations of Study Design It’s important to note that this study, like most major studies of alcohol, wasn’t a new trial. It was a meta-analysis, or a merging of data, from many observational studies. It was probably the largest meta-analysis ever done to estimate the risks from drinking for 23 different alcohol-related health problems. The researchers also combined almost 700 sources to estimate the most accurate levels of alcohol consumption worldwide, even trying to find drinking that might otherwise be missed (from tourism, for instance). They then combined all this data into mathematical models to predict the harm from alcohol worldwide. They found that, over all, harms increased with each additional drink per day, and that the overall harms were lowest at zero. That’s how you get the headlines. But, and this is a big but, there are limitations here that warrant consideration. Observational data can be very confounded, meaning that unmeasured factors might be the actual cause of the harm. Perhaps people who drink also smoke tobacco. Perhaps people who drink are also poorer. Perhaps there are genetic differences, health differences or other factors that might be the real cause. There are techniques to analyze observational data in a more causal fashion, but none of them could be used here, because this analysis aggregated past studies — and those studies didn’t use them. We don’t know if confounders are coming into play because this meta-analysis could only really control, over all, for age, sex and location. That’s not the researchers’ fault. That’s probably all they could do with the data they had, and they could still model population-level effects without them.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25384 - Posted: 08.28.2018

Laurel Hamers Dealing with poop is an unavoidable hazard of raising children, regardless of species. But for naked mole rats, that wisdom is especially salient. During pregnancy, the scat of a naked mole rat queen — the only female in the colony that reproduces, giving birth to a few dozen pups each year — contains high levels of the sex hormone estradiol. When subordinate female naked mole rats eat that poop, the estradiol they pick up cues them to snap into parenting mode and care for the queen’s offspring, researchers report the week of August 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In colonies of naked mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber), lower-ranking females don’t have developed ovaries and don’t reproduce. They also don’t experience the pregnancy-induced hormonal shifts that usually cue parenting behaviors, yet they still care for the queen’s babies. Researchers gave poop pellets from nonpregnant queens to subordinates for nine days. One group got pellets with added estradiol, to mimic pregnancy poop. Levels of estradiol increased in the dung of subordinate females that ate the hormone-packed pellets, suggesting that scat snacks could induce measurable hormonal changes. And those mole rats were more responsive to the cries of pups than those that didn’t get the hormone boost, the team found. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 25383 - Posted: 08.28.2018

A weight-loss pill has been hailed as a potential “holy grail” in the fight against obesity after a major study showed it did not increase the risk of serious heart problems. Researchers say lorcaserin is the first weight-loss drug to be deemed safe for heart health with long-term use. Taken twice a day, the drug is an appetite suppressant which works by stimulating brain chemicals to induce a feeling of fullness. A US study saw 12,000 people who were either obese or overweight given the pills or a placebo – with those who took the drug shedding an average of 4kg (9lbs) in 40 months. Further analysis showed no big differences in tests for heart valve damage. Tam Fry, of Britain’s National Obesity Forum, said the drug is potentially the “holy grail” of weight-loss medicine. “I think it is the thing everybody has been looking for,” he said. “I think there will be several holy grails, but this is a holy grail and one which has been certainly at the back of the mind of a lot of specialists for a long time. “But all of the other things apply – lifestyle change has got to be root and branch part of this.” Prof Jason Halford, an obesity expert at the University of Liverpool, told the Daily Telegraph newspaper that the drug’s availability in the UK would depend on whether it is approved by National Health Service regulators. “We don’t have any appetite suppressants available on the NHS. We have a massive great gap between lifestyle modification and surgery,” he said. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 25382 - Posted: 08.27.2018

By Sheila Kaplan It’s been years since the tobacco industry promised to stop luring young people to smoke cigarettes. Philip Morris International says it is “designing a smoke-free future.” British American Tobacco, likewise, claims to be “transforming tobacco” into a safer product. But while the Food and Drug Administration weighs plans to cut nicotine in cigarettes, making them less addictive, Big Tobacco has been making the most of the time it still has using social networks to promote its brands around the world. Most countries, like the United States, imposed rules back in the 1970s against marketing tobacco to youths; many have banned cigarette commercials on television and radio. So the industry that brought the world the Marlboro Man, Joe Camel and slogans like “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet” has latched onto the selfie generation’s screens in a highly adaptive way that skirts the advertising rules of old. “What they are doing is a really effective way to get around existing laws to restrict advertising to young people,” said Robert V. Kozinets, a public relations professor at the University of Southern California, who led an international team of researchers examining the tobacco industry’s use of social media. “The most surprising thing to me was the level of sophistication of these different global networks. You get incredible campaigns, the likes of which I’ve never seen before.” International public health organizations are pushing back against tobacco companies around the world. Earlier this month, Bloomberg Philanthropies chose three international research centers to lead a new $20 million global tobacco watchdog group called Stop (Stopping Tobacco Organizations and Products), with partners in the United Kingdom, Thailand and France, that will partly focus on social marketing. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25381 - Posted: 08.27.2018

By Adam Grant If you want to be great at something, learn from the best. What could be better than studying physics under Albert Einstein? A lot, it turns out. Three years after publishing his first landmark paper on relativity, Einstein taught his debut course at the University of Bern. He wasn’t able to attract much interest in the esoteric subject of thermodynamics: Just three students signed up, and they were all friends of his. The next semester he had to cancel the class after only one student enrolled. A few years later, when Einstein pursued a position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, the president raised concerns about his lackluster teaching skills. Einstein eventually got the job after a friend vouched for him, but the friend admitted, “He is not a fine talker.” As his biographer Walter Isaacson summarized, “Einstein was never an inspired teacher, and his lectures tended to be regarded as disorganized.” Although it’s often said that those who can’t do teach, the reality is that the best doers are often the worst teachers. Two decades ago, I arrived at Harvard as an undergraduate excited to soak up the brilliance of professors who had won Nobels and Pulitzers. But by the end of the first month of my freshman year, it was clear that these world-class experts were my worst teachers. My distinguished art history professor raved about Michelangelo’s pietra serena molding but didn’t articulate why it was significant. My renowned astrophysics professor taught us how the universe seemed to be expanding, but never bothered to explain what it was expanding into (still waiting for someone to demystify that one). It wasn’t that they didn’t care about teaching. It was that they knew too much about their subject, and had mastered it too long ago, to relate to my ignorance about it. Social scientists call it the curse of knowledge. As the psychologist Sian Beilock, now the president of Barnard College, writes, “As you get better and better at what you do, your ability to communicate your understanding or to help others learn that skill often gets worse and worse.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25380 - Posted: 08.27.2018