Denis Campbell Health policy editor Eating junk food increases the risk of becoming depressed, a study has found, prompting calls for doctors to routinely give dietary advice to patients as part of their treatment for depression. In contrast, those who follow a traditional Mediterranean diet are much less likely to develop depression because the fish, fruit, nuts and vegetables that diet involves help protect against Britain’s commonest mental health problem, the research suggests. Published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, the findings have come from an analysis by researchers from Britain, Spain and Australia who examined 41 previous studies on the links between diet and depression. “A pro-inflammatory diet can induce systemic inflammation, and this can directly increase the risk for depression,” said Dr Camille Lassale, the study’s lead author. Bad diet heightens the risk of depression to a significant extent, she added. The analysis found that foods containing a lot of fat or sugar, or was processed, lead to inflammation of not just the gut but the whole body, known as “systemic inflammation”. In that respect the impact of poor diet is like that of smoking, pollution, obesity and lack of exercise. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Depression; Obesity
Link ID: 25494 - Posted: 09.26.2018

April Fulton Within three days of starting high school this year, my ninth-grader could not get into bed before 11 p.m. or wake up by 6 a.m. He complained he couldn't fall asleep but felt foggy during the school day and had to reread lessons a few times at night to finish his homework. And forget morning activities on the weekends — he was in bed. We're not the only family struggling to get restful shut-eye. "What parents are sharing with us is that the 'normal life' of a typical American high schooler is interfering with sleep," says Sarah Clark, co-director of C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health at the University of Michigan. In the poll of 2,000 parents from various ethnic groups and backgrounds that Clark and her team published this month, 1 in 6 parents say their teen experiences frequent sleep problems — "having trouble falling asleep or staying asleep 3 or more nights per week." More than half the parents say it's because their teens won't get off their electronic devices, and 43 percent blame irregular schedules with homework and activities. A significant percentage of parents say their kids worry about school (31 percent), and 23 percent say their teens stay up worrying about their social lives. It's likely that the numbers of teens who have trouble sleeping is even higher than the poll of parents suggests, Clark says, because kids can hide their nighttime electronics use and parents may not frequently check in on older children. How can parents help? Start with knowing what kids need. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25493 - Posted: 09.26.2018

Nathaniel Comfort It’s never a good time for another bout of genetic determinism, but it’s hard to imagine a worse one than this. Social inequality gapes, exacerbated by climate change, driving hostility towards immigrants and flares of militant racism. At such a juncture, yet another expression of the discredited, simplistic idea that genes alone control human nature seems particularly insidious. And yet, here we are again with Blueprint, by educational psychologist Robert Plomin. Although Plomin frequently uses more civil, progressive language than did his predecessors, the book’s message is vintage genetic determinism: “DNA isn’t all that matters but it matters more than everything else put together”. “Nice parents have nice children because they are all nice genetically.” And it’s not just any nucleic acid that matters; it is human chromosomal DNA. Sorry, microbiologists, epigeneticists, RNA experts, developmental biologists: you’re not part of Plomin’s picture. Crude hereditarianism often re-emerges after major advances in biological knowledge: Darwinism begat eugenics; Mendelism begat worse eugenics. The flowering of medical genetics in the 1950s led to the notorious, now-debunked idea that men with an extra Y chromosome (XYY genotype) were prone to violence. Hereditarian books such as Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve (1994) and Nicholas Wade’s 2014 A Troublesome Inheritance (see N. Comfort Nature 513, 306–307; 2014) exploited their respective scientific and cultural moments, leveraging the cultural authority of science to advance a discredited, undemocratic agenda. Although Blueprint is cut from different ideological cloth, the consequences could be just as grave. © 2018 Springer Nature Limited.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Intelligence
Link ID: 25492 - Posted: 09.26.2018

Laura Sanders With the help of a spine stimulator and intensive training, a formerly paralyzed man can command his legs to step again. This achievement, described online September 24 in Nature Medicine, inches researchers closer to restoring movement to paraplegic people. The therapy allows 29-year-old Jered Chinnock to control his leg movements with his thoughts. “This is highly significant,” study coauthor Kendall Lee, a neurosurgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said in a news briefing on September 20. A snowmobile wreck left Chinnock paralyzed, unable to move or feel sensations below the chest. His initial rehabilitation focused on acclimating to life in a wheelchair. But three years after the accident, he enrolled in an aggressive study designed to get him moving. Surgeons implanted a stimulator that zaps nerve cells on the spinal cord below the site of Chinnock’s injury. With the stimulator on, therapists led Chinnock through exercises to reactivate muscles and nerves. Over two weeks of training with the stimulator, he could stand and, while lying on his side, make voluntary steplike movements. Those results were published last year in Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Now, after 43 weeks of intense rehabilitation, Chinnock has made even greater strides. He can step on a treadmill on his own, and, with assistance and a walker, can step across the ground. Over the course of one training session, he was able to travel 102 meters, about the length of an American football field, the researchers report. Because he required assistance, researchers describe Chinnock’s motion as “independent stepping” rather than walking. That’s because, in clinical terms, walking describes “a highly coordinated activity in terms of balance, strength and adaptation to the environment,” said Lee’s coauthor Kristin Zhao, also of the Mayo Clinic. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Robotics
Link ID: 25491 - Posted: 09.25.2018

Jacek Debiec Most of what you experience leaves no trace in your memory. Learning new information often requires a lot of effort and repetition – picture studying for a tough exam or mastering the tasks of a new job. It’s easy to forget what you’ve learned, and recalling details of the past can sometimes be challenging. But some past experiences can keep haunting you for years. Life-threatening events – things like getting mugged or escaping from a fire – can be impossible to forget, even if you make every possible effort. Recent developments in the Supreme Court nomination hearings and the associated #WhyIDidntReport action on social media have rattled the public and raised questions about the nature, role and impact of these kinds of traumatic memories. Leaving politics aside, what do psychiatrists and neuroscientists like me understand about how past traumas can remain present and persistent in our lives through memories? Imagine facing extreme danger, such as being held at gunpoint. Right away, your heart rate increases. Your arteries constrict, directing more blood to your muscles, which tense up in preparation for a possible life-or-death struggle. Perspiration increases, to cool you down and improve gripping capability on palms and feet for added traction for escape. In some situations, when the threat is overwhelming, you may freeze and be unable to move. Threat responses are often accompanied by a range of sensations and feelings. Senses may sharpen, contributing to amplified detection and response to threat. You may experience tingling or numbness in your limbs, as well as shortness of breath, chest pain, feelings of weakness, fainting or dizziness. Your thoughts may be racing or, conversely, you may experience a lack of thoughts and feel detached from reality. Terror, panic, helplessness, lack of control or chaos may take over. Copyright © 2010–2018

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Stress
Link ID: 25490 - Posted: 09.25.2018

By Jean Rhodes, Mary Waters In the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, news coverage has shifted to focus on the storm’s destructive toll and the survivors’ efforts to restore their shattered lives and communities. But there is another side to the story that will go mostly unnoticed: disasters can set the stage for profound personal and societal growth. In August 2005, just before Hurricane Katrina struck, we were part of a team of researchers collecting data in 10 U.S. cities for a study of community college students. The New Orleans site consisted of mostly young black women, many living in the 9th ward, where some of the worst destruction and trauma would occur. In the midst of the post-Katrina mayhem we realized that we had a rare opportunity. We had pre-disaster data and could control for how survivors were functioning prior to the storm, so we were uniquely positioned to explore the long-term effects of the disaster. Over the course of more than a decade of research we have uncovered surprising findings about recovery and resilience—including that over 60 percent of the survivors have bounced back to pre-disaster levels of mental health.But perhaps most surprising has been the deep psychological growth that has emerged from the depths of despair. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 25489 - Posted: 09.25.2018

Anthea Lacchia Just 10 minutes of light physical activity is enough to boost brain connectivity and help the brain to distinguish between similar memories, a new study suggests. Scientists at the University of California studying brain activity found connectivity between parts of the brain responsible for memory formation and storage increased after a brief interval of light exercise – such as 10 minutes of slow walking, yoga or tai chi. The findings could provide a simple and effective means of slowing down or staving off memory loss and cognitive decline in people who are elderly or have low levels of physical ability. The scientists asked 36 healthy volunteers in their early 20s to do 10 minutes of light exercise – at 30% of their peak oxygen intake – before assessing their memory ability. The memory test was then repeated on the same volunteers without exercising. The same experiment was repeated on 16 of the volunteers who had either undertaken the same kind of exercise or rested, with researchers scanning their brain to monitor activity. In the brains of those who had exercised they discovered enhanced communication between the hippocampus – a region important in memory storage – and the cortical brain regions, which are involved in vivid recollection of memories. “The memory task really was quite challenging,” said Michael Yassa, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, and project co-leader. The participants were first shown pictures of objects from everyday life – ranging from broccoli to picnic baskets – and later tested on how well they remembered the images. “We used very tricky similar items to to see if they would remember whether it was this exact picnic basket versus that picnic basket,” he said. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25488 - Posted: 09.25.2018

Sukanya Charuchandra Previous research has shown that the gut-brain connection, which refers to signaling between the digestive and the central nervous systems, is based on the transport of hormones, but a study published today (September 21) in Science suggests there may be a more direct link—the vagus nerve. This research presents “a new set of pathways that use gut cells to rapidly communicate with . . . the brain stem,” Daniel Drucker, who studies gut disorders at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute in Toronto, Canada, and was not involved with the project, tells Science. Building on an earlier study in which the team found that gut cells had synapses, the researchers injected a rabies virus, expressing green fluorescence, into the stomachs of mice and watched it travel speedily from the intestines to the rodents’ brainstems. When they grew sensory gut cells together with neurons from the vagus nerve, the neurons moved across the dish to form synapses with the gut cells and began electrically coupling with them. Adding sugar to the dish sped up the rate of signaling between the gut and brain cells, a finding that suggests glutamate, a neurotransmitter involved in sensing taste, may be key to the process. Blocking glutamate secretion in gut cells brought these signals to a grinding halt. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 25487 - Posted: 09.25.2018

by Marvin M. Lipman, ‘I thought I had Parkinson’s disease!” the 65-year-old stock analyst exclaimed. Over the past six months, her handwriting had deteriorated to the point that she was having difficulty signing checks. Because a good friend of hers had recently received a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, she feared the worst. I began to suspect that her concern was groundless when I noticed that both of her hands shook and that she had a barely noticeable to-and-fro motion of her head — two signs that are uncommon in Parkinson’s disease. And as she walked toward the examining room, her gait was normal and her arms swung freely — hardly the stiff, hesitant shuffle so often seen with Parkinson’s. The exam turned up none of the other cardinal manifestations of Parkinson’s: the typical masklike facial expression; the slowed, monotonous speech pattern; and the ratchet-like sensation the examiner feels when alternately flexing and extending the patient’s arm. Moreover, her hand tremors seemed to improve at rest and worsen when asked to do the “finger to nose” test. The diagnosis was unmistakable: She had essential tremor, a nervous-system problem that causes unintentional shaking, most often starting in the hands. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 25486 - Posted: 09.25.2018

Roland S. Liblau The events that lead to the sleep disorder narcolepsy are a long-standing mystery. Writing in Nature, Latorre et al.1 reveal that people with narcolepsy have unusually high levels of a type of immune cell called a T cell, which targets proteins normally present in neurons in the brain. This finding raises the question of whether narcolepsy arises because T cells unleash an autoimmune response against neurons that are important for sleep regulation. Narcolepsy affects around 1 in 2,000 people2. The symptoms usually begin in adolescence or early adulthood, and include daytime sleepiness and, in some cases, cataplexy — sudden muscle weakness during wakefulness that causes falls. A small population of neurons in the brain produces a protein called hypocretin, which controls sleep–wake cycles3, and narcolepsy-like symptoms occur in animals that have defects in genes required for the production of or response to hypocretin4. Narcolepsy type 2 is associated with daytime sleepiness, and this can progress to narcolepsy type 1, which is characterized by sleepiness and cataplexy. People with narcolepsy type 1 have abnormally low numbers of hypocretin-producing neurons5. Hypocretin levels in the cerebrospinal fluid that bathes the brain and spinal cord can be measured to help diagnose6 narcolepsy type 1, and such tests provide a way of indirectly monitoring the loss of hypocretin-producing neurons over time. The trajectory of this neuronal loss remains to be fully understood, but can take months or years. © 2018 Springer Nature Limited.

Keyword: Narcolepsy; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 25485 - Posted: 09.24.2018

By Henry Nicholls A fresh-faced batch of teenagers just began a new school year, but will they get the most out of it? In the mornings, many are forced to get to school much too early. And at night, ubiquitous screens are a lure that’s hard to resist. This double whammy is a perfect lesson in sleep deprivation. Three out of every four students in grades 9 to 12 fail to sleep the minimum of eight hours that the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends for their age group. And sleep deprivation is unremittingly bad news. Anyone who talks about sleep as if it’s some kind of inconvenience and getting less of it is a virtue should be challenged. These people are dangerous. At its most basic, insufficient sleep results in reduced attention and impaired memory, hindering student progress and lowering grades. More alarmingly, sleep deprivation is likely to lead to mood and emotional problems, increasing the risk of mental illness. Chronic sleep deprivation is also a major risk factor for obesity, Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and cancer. As if this weren’t enough, it also makes falling asleep at the wheel much more likely. It is important to understand why teenagers have a particularly hard time getting enough sleep, and what adults need to do to help. First, a reminder of the basic biology: After puberty, adolescents are no longer the morning larks of their younger years. They become rewired as night owls, staying awake later and then sleeping in. This is not part of a feckless project to frustrate parents, but is driven by changes in the way the brain responds to light. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25484 - Posted: 09.24.2018

by Angie Seech When I first started doing research into the changes that occur in a woman’s brain during pregnancy and the postpartum, I continued to come across the name of Jodi Pawluski, Ph.D., a researcher in the field of perinatal mental health. After reading this amazing review paper, I reached out to Jodi and her colleagues to thank her for her important work. Since that one email, I’ve had the opportunity to thank her in person and spend some time talking with her about perinatal mental health. Besides being a wonderful person, she is truly passionate about what she does and about helping women. Just read some of her answers to my questions about her research and views on the present and future status of maternal mental health and I’m sure you’ll agree! What is your ultimate goal as a researcher in this field? This is such a great, but broad, question! My ultimate goal is to have policies change to incorporate the importance of maternal mental and physical health for the mother. I also want these policies to value, promote, and support research on the neurobiology of motherhood and maternal mental illness. There is so much more that we need to know, but without support and interest we, as scientists, clinicians, parents, can’t find answers to our many questions. What is your most important question? Or the question that you really want to find the answer to in your career? At the moment I am doing some really interesting work on how maternal antidepressant medication use, such as SSRIs, can affect the neurobiology of the mother and developing offspring, using rodent models. One of my goals is to find out why some women respond well to SSRIs, such as Prozac, during the perinatal period and why others don’t. This is an important question and ultimately will allow for more precise and effective treatments. During my career I hope that my research significantly contributes to understanding how maternal mental illness affects the maternal brain and contributes to find ways in which we can safely and effectively treat these diseases. 2018 © MOMMY BRAIN EDU |

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Depression
Link ID: 25483 - Posted: 09.24.2018

By — Linda Searing More than 1 of every 3 college freshmen across the globe — 35 percent — show symptoms of one of the common mental-health disorders, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. The research was based on World Health Organization data on 13,984 full-time freshman students from 19 colleges in eight countries — Australia, Belgium, Germany, Mexico, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Spain and the United States. The two most common disorders found were major depression (affecting 21 percent of the students) and generalized anxiety disorder (19 percent). The students were also screened for panic disorder, mania, drug abuse and alcohol abuse or dependence. Although the study, published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, found that symptoms started years before college — generally at about age 14 — in most cases, the life changes and stresses that may occur as students enter their college years could exacerbate symptoms. The study’s authors, and other experts, say that to help manage their mental-health condition, students should check whether their campus counseling centers, or local psychologists, offer group or individual cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. But the lead author said that because the number of students needing mental-health treatment “far exceeds the resources of most [campus] counseling centers,” students and colleges should consider supplementing services with “Internet-based interventions” that studies have shown to be effective, including online CBT. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25482 - Posted: 09.24.2018

By Bret Stetka More often than not a trip to Las Vegas is not a financially sound decision. And yet every year over 40 million people hand over their cash to the city’s many towering casinos, hoping the roulette ball rattles to a stop on black. Gambling and other forms of risk-taking appear to be hardwired into our psyche. Humans at least as far back as Mesopotamia have rolled the dice, laying their barley, bronze and silver on the line, often against miserable odds. According to gambling industry consulting company H2 Gambling Capital, Americans alone lose nearly $120 billion a year to games of chance. Now a set of neuroscience findings is closer than ever to figuring out why. Ongoing research is helping illuminate the biology of risky behaviors—studies that may one day lead to interventions for vices like compulsive gambling. The recent results show an explanation is more complex than looking at dysfunctional reward circuitry, the network of brain regions that fire in response to pleasing stimuli like sex and drugs. Risking loss on a slim chance of thrill or reward involves a complex dance of decision-making and emotion. A new study by a team from Johns Hopkins University appears to have identified a region of the brain that plays a critical role in risky decisions. Published September 20 in Current Biology, the authors analyzed the behavior of rhesus monkeys, who share similar brain structure and function to our own. And like us, they are risk-takers, too. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Attention
Link ID: 25481 - Posted: 09.22.2018

By Katie Hafner NEW HAVEN, Conn. — By now, Sally and Bennett Shaywitz might have retired to a life of grandchild-doting and Mediterranean-cruising. Instead, the Shaywitzes — experts in dyslexia at Yale who have been married to each other for 55 years — remain as focused as ever on a research endeavor they began 35 years ago. Sally, 76, and Bennett, 79, both academic physicians, run the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity. Their goal is not just to widen understanding of the scientific underpinnings of dyslexia, the most common learning disorder in the United States, but to push for public policies aligned with that knowledge. For years, dyslexia was largely misunderstood as a reading problem that caused children to reverse letters, and often was seen as a sign of laziness, stupidity or bad vision. The Shaywitzes’ work has shown there is no link between dyslexia and intelligence, and that dyslexia is not something one outgrows. Their research has found that it affects one in five people, yet even now many never receive a formal diagnosis. “There is an epidemic of reading failure that we have the scientific evidence to treat effectively and yet we are not acknowledging,” Sally said. Working from unprepossessing offices on the Yale School of Medicine campus, the Shaywitzes are now updating one of their signal achievements, a study they started in 1983 following 445 five-year-olds in Connecticut. It was the first study to examine reading continually from childhood through adulthood. The Connecticut Longitudinal Study, or C.L.S., has not only established the prevalence of dyslexia but also has demonstrated that it affects boys and girls in roughly equal numbers. The couple recently began a new phase of the study, administering reading tests to 375 of the participants, who are now in their 40s. They have no planned completion date. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Dyslexia; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25480 - Posted: 09.22.2018

Nicola Davis Alcohol is responsible for more than 5% of all deaths worldwide, or around 3 million a year, new figures have revealed. The data, part of a report from the World Health Organization, shows that about 2.3 million of those deaths in 2016 were of men, and that almost 29% of all alcohol-caused deaths were down to injuries – including traffic accidents and suicide. The report, which comes out every four years, reveals the continued impact of alcohol on public health around the world, and highlights that the young bear the brunt: 13.5% of deaths among people in their 20s are linked to booze, with alcohol responsible for 7.2% of premature deaths overall. It also stresses that harm from drinking is greater among poorer consumers than wealthier ones. While the proportion of deaths worldwide that have been linked to alcohol has fallen to 5.3% since 2012, when the figure was at 5.9%, experts say the findings make for sobering reading. A WHO alcohol-control expert, Dr Vladimir Poznyak, who was involved in the report, said the health burden of alcohol was “unacceptably large”. “Unfortunately, the implementation of the most effective policy options is lagging behind the magnitude of the problems,” he said, adding that projections suggested both worldwide alcohol consumption and the related harms were set to rise in the coming years. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25479 - Posted: 09.22.2018

Giorgia Guglielmi Biophysicist Adam Cohen was strolling around San Francisco, California, in 2010, when a telephone call caught him by surprise. “We have a signal,” said the caller. Nearly 5,000 kilometres away, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his collaborators had struck gold. After months of failed experiments, the researchers had found a fluorescent protein that allowed them to watch signals as they passed between neurons. But there was something weird going on. When Cohen got back to his lab at Harvard University, he learned that all the recordings of the experiment showed a strange progression. At first, neurons decorated with the protein flashed nicely as electric impulses whizzed through them. But then the cells turned into bright blobs. “Halfway through each recording, the signal would go all wild,” Cohen says. So he decided to join his team during an experiment. “When they started the recording, they would sit there holding their breath,” Cohen says. But as soon as they realized it was working, they would celebrate, “dancing and running around the room”. In their exuberance, they were letting the light from a desk lamp shine right onto the microscope. “We were actually recording our excitement,” says Daniel Hochbaum, then a graduate student in Cohen’s group. They toned down their celebrations, and a year later, the team published its study1 — one of the first to show that a fluorescent protein engineered into specific mammalian neurons could be used to track individual electric impulses in real time. © 2018 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 25478 - Posted: 09.21.2018

Jon Hamilton Experiments with two gambling monkeys have revealed a small area in the brain that plays a big role in risky decisions. When researchers inactivated this region in the prefrontal cortex, the rhesus monkeys became less inclined to choose a long shot over a sure thing, the team reported Thursday in the journal Current Biology. "They did not like the gambles anymore," says Veit Stuphorn, an author of the study and an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University. The finding in our fellow primates adds to the evidence that human brains are capable of constantly adjusting our willingness to take risks, depending on factors such as what's at stake. "For a long time, people thought that this is like a personality trait, that some people are risk-takers and others are not," Stuphorn says. But recent research has shown that the same person who is very cautious about personal investments may be an avid bungee jumper. This study involved two monkeys that learned to play a computer game that gave them drops of juice when they won. The monkeys played voluntarily because they liked to gamble, Stuphorn says. The game offered two options. The first was a juice reward that was guaranteed, but usually small. The second was a gamble: It might bring a lot of juice, or none. The monkeys moved their eyes to indicate their choice in each round. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25477 - Posted: 09.21.2018

By Emily Underwood The human gut is lined with more than 100 million nerve cells—it’s practically a brain unto itself. And indeed, the gut actually talks to the brain, releasing hormones into the bloodstream that, over the course of about 10 minutes, tell us how hungry it is, or that we shouldn’t have eaten an entire pizza. But a new study reveals the gut has a much more direct connection to the brain through a neural circuit that allows it to transmit signals in mere seconds. The findings could lead to new treatments for obesity, eating disorders, and even depression and autism—all of which have been linked to a malfunctioning gut. The study reveals “a new set of pathways that use gut cells to rapidly communicate with … the brain stem,” says Daniel Drucker, a clinician-scientist who studies gut disorders at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute in Toronto, Canada, who was not involved with the work. Although many questions remain before the clinical implications become clear, he says, “This is a cool new piece of the puzzle.” In 2010, neuroscientist Diego Bohórquez of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, made a startling discovery while looking through his electron microscope. Enteroendocrine cells, which stud the lining of the gut and produce hormones that spur digestion and suppress hunger, had footlike protrusions that resemble the synapses neurons use to communicate with each other. Bohórquez knew the enteroendocrine cells could send hormonal messages to the central nervous system, but he also wondered whether they could “talk” to the brain using electrical signals, the way that neurons do. If so, they would have to send the signals through the vagus nerve, which travels from the gut to the brain stem. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Obesity; Brain imaging
Link ID: 25476 - Posted: 09.21.2018

By Douglas Quenqua For solitary animals, giant pandas have an awful lot to say to one another. Their vocal repertoire comprises more than a dozen distinct grunts, barks and squeaks, most of which amount to some version of “leave me alone.” But when mating season rolls around, both male and female giant pandas turn to their preferred come-hither call: a husky, rapid vibrato that’s commonly known as the bleat. The bleat not only alerts other pandas to the presence of an available mate, it contains important information about the vocalist’s size and identity. Given the dense bamboo thicket that limits visual contact in most panda habitats and the brevity of panda mating season — females ovulate just once a year and can conceive for only a few days — the pandas’ ability to perceive the bleat is critical to reproduction among this once-endangered species. Now, researchers have determined that the bleat works best as a local call. A panda can discern aspects of a caller’s identity. like its size, from a bleat within about 65 feet, but the caller’s gender is only perceptible within about 33 feet, according to a study published Thursday in Scientific Reports. Megan Owen, a conservation ecologist at the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research and an author of the study, offered a human analogy for how this ability works. “If you’re walking into a crowded room and someone calls out your name, there’s a certain point where you can identify who that is, or maybe you can identify that it’s a male or female that is calling your name,” she said. “There’s information that’s encoded in that call, but that information degrades over distance.” To conduct the study, Dr. Owen and her colleagues — including Ben Charlton, another San Diego institute researcher who has studied panda bleats — obtained recordings of giant pandas from Chengdu, China, during breeding season. They then played those recordings through a speaker in a section of the San Diego Zoo Safari Park that contains bamboo similar in type and density to a typical panda habitat. By placing recording devices throughout the bamboo, the researchers were able to capture and analyze the bleats from various distances. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 25475 - Posted: 09.21.2018