By Susana Martinez-Conde The house cricket (Acheta domesticus) walked around the arena comfortably, certain of its surroundings. It looked about, perhaps hoping for food or mates, ignoring the scattered, browning, dead leaves. On previous visits to the arena, the cricket had been wary of the dead leaves, not knowing what to make of them. Then, after a prudent interval, it had ventured to feel them with its segmented antennae—tentatively at first, and later with growing confidence. Once the cricket determined the leaves were neither edible nor harmful, it quickly lost interest in them. Now it rarely bothered to explore the leaves, but took no great pains to avoid them either. The cricket’s conviction about the safety of the leaves was its fatal mistake: on this visit, one seemingly dead leaf lying on the arena was no such, but a masquerading ghost mantis (Phyllocrania paradoxa) waiting in ambush. Unaware of the concealed peril, the cricket drew ever closer to the predator. That’s when the mantis struck forth, grasping the cricket by one of its long jumping legs. As the cricket struggled against the mantis’ clutch, the predator started to feed. Dr John Skelhorn, Lecturer in Animal Cognition, has witnessed dozens of similar life-and-death encounters in his lab at Newcastle University’s Institute of Neuroscience. Skelhorn and his colleagues previously found that some animals masquerade as inanimate, inedible objects, to look less appealing to potential predators. Some examples include the orb web spider (Cyclosa ginnaga) and the larva of the giant swallowtail butterfly (Papilio cresphontes), both of which masquerade as bird droppings, and the larva of the feathered thorn moth (Selenia dentaria), which masquerades as a twig. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 25299 - Posted: 08.06.2018

By Pagan Kennedy Nearly 30 years ago, the author William Styron outed himself in these pages as mentally ill. “My days were pervaded by a gray drizzle of unrelenting horror,” he wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed article, describing the deep depression that had landed him in the psych ward. He compared the agony of mental illness to that of a heart attack. Pain is pain, whether it’s in the mind or the body. So why, he asked, were depressed people treated as pariahs? A confession of mental illness might not seem like a big deal now, but it was back then. In the 1980s, “if you were depressed, it was a terrible dark secret that you hid from the world,” according to Andrew Solomon, a historian of mental illness and author of “The Noonday Demon.” “People with depression were seen as pathetic and even dangerous. You didn’t let them near your kids.” “In the popular mind, suicide is usually the work of a coward or sometimes, paradoxically, a deed of great courage, but it is neither; the torment that precipitates the act makes it often one of blind necessity.” The response to Mr. Styron’s op-ed was immediate. Letters flooded into The New York Times. The readers thanked him, blurted out their stories and begged him for more. “Inadvertently I had helped unlock a closet from which many souls were eager to come out,” Mr. Styron wrote later. “It was like the #MeToo movement,” Alexandra Styron, the author’s daughter, told me. “Somebody comes out and says: ‘This happened. This is real. This is what it feels like.’ And it just unleashed the floodgates.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25298 - Posted: 08.06.2018

By Susan Schneider As you read this, it feels like something to be you. You are seeing these words on the page and hearing the world around you, for instance. And all these thoughts and sensations come together into your conscious “now.” Consciousness is this felt quality of experience. Without consciousness, there would be no enjoyment of a beautiful sunset. Nor would there be suffering. Experience, positive or negative, simply wouldn’t exist. At the heart of current theorizing about consciousness in philosophy is the hard problem of consciousness, a puzzle raised by the philosopher David Chalmers. (See his Scientific American article “The Puzzle of Conscious Experience.”) Cognitive science says that the brain is an information processing engine. The hard problem asks: but why does all this sophisticated information processing need to feel like anything, from the inside? Why do we have experience? One influential approach to the problem, endorsed by Chalmers himself, is panpsychism. Panpsychism holds that even the smallest layers of reality have experience. Fundamental particles have minute levels of consciousness, and in a watered-down sense, they are subjects of experience. When particles are in extremely sophisticated configurations, such as when they are in nervous systems, more sophisticated forms of consciousness arise. Panpsychism aims to locate the building blocks of reality in the most basic layer of reality identified by a completed physics. Indeed, panpsychists claim that it is a virtue of their theory that it meshes with fundamental physics, for experience is the underlying nature of the properties that physics identifies. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 25297 - Posted: 08.06.2018

Lesley Mcclurg The first prescription medication extracted from the marijuana plant is poised to land on pharmacists' shelves this fall. Epidiolex, made from purified cannabidiol, or CBD, a compound found in the cannabis plant, is approved for two rare types of epilepsy. Its journey to market was driven forward by one family's quest to find a treatment for their son's epilepsy. Scientific and public interest in CBD had been percolating for several years before the Food and Drug Administration finally approved Epidiolex in June. But CBD — which doesn't cause the mind-altering high that comes from THC, the primary psychoactive component of marijuana — was hard to study, because of tight restrictions on using cannabis in research. Sam Vogelstein's family and his doctors found ways to work around those restrictions in their fight to control his seizures. Sam's seizures started in 2005 when he was four years old. It's a moment his mother, Evelyn Nussenbaum, will never forget. The family was saying goodbye to a dinner guest when Sam's face suddenly slackened and he fell forward at the waist. Article continues after sponsorship "He did something that looked like a judo bow after a match," says Nussenbaum. Two months passed before Sam had another seizure, but then he started having them every week. Eventually he was suffering through 100 seizures a day. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Epilepsy; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25296 - Posted: 08.06.2018

Frances Perraudin Deaths caused by the drug fentanyl rose by nearly 30% last year, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. While statistics show that the rate of deaths from drug poisoning in England and Wales has remained steady – 66.1 deaths per 1 million people (3,756 deaths) – fatalities involving the synthetic opioid fentanyl were up 29%. There were 75 deaths in 2017, up from 58 deaths in 2016. Fentanyl has been found mixed with street heroin, causing accidental overdose in users. The drug can up to 100 times stronger than heroin and is sometimes prescribed as a painkiller for the terminally ill. One type of fentanyl, carfentanyl, is 10,000 times stronger and is used as an elephant tranquilliser. It was first seen mentioned in death certificates in 2017 and accounted for 27 deaths, 87% of the 31 deaths related to types of fentanyl in 2017. In April 2017, after a spate of deaths linked to fentanyl in northern England, Public Health England issued a warning to heroin users to be extra careful when using the drug, urging them to test a small amount first and not to take it alone. The ONS statistics also show that deaths from cocaine were up for the sixth year in a row. There were 432 deaths related to the drug in 2017, compared with 371 deaths in 2016. In June a report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) found that purity of street cocaine across Europe was at its highest level in a decade and the number of people seeking treatment for use of the drug was on the rise. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25295 - Posted: 08.06.2018

By Elizabeth Gamillo Conservationists trying to restore the United States’s grasslands kept running into a problem: As soon as they planted the seeds meant to bring back native flora, hungry mice would gobble them up. In an effort to deter the rodents, biologists tried coating the seeds with capsaicin, the active ingredient that gives chili peppers their signature fiery taste. It worked: Dusting the seeds with chili powder reduced the number of seeds consumed by deer mice by 86%, researchers report in Restoration Ecology. The hot discovery required some trial and error. One big challenge was finding a chili powder that would deter the mice but not prevent the seeds from germinating. Another was finding a coating that wouldn’t weather away after a few months outdoors. After 4 years of laboratory and field experiments in Montana’s Missoula Valley, researchers found a workable recipe. A powder made from the Bhut jolokia, or ghost pepper, from India—considered to be one of the world’s hottest chilis—did the trick. The scientists suggest their findings demonstrate how nontoxic, natural plant defense compounds—such as capsaicin—can be used to aid restoration efforts. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25294 - Posted: 08.06.2018

Tina Hesman Saey Humans’ gift of gab probably wasn’t the evolutionary boon that scientists once thought. There’s no evidence that FOXP2, sometimes called “the language gene,” gave humans such a big evolutionary advantage that it was quickly adopted across the species, what scientists call a selective sweep. That finding, reported online August 2 in Cell, follows years of debate about the role of FOXP2 in human evolution. In 2002, the gene became famous when researchers thought they had found evidence that a tweak in FOXP2 spread quickly to all humans — and only humans — about 200,000 years ago. That tweak swapped two amino acids in the human version of the gene for ones different than in other animals’ versions of the gene. FOXP2 is involved in vocal learning in songbirds, and people with mutations in the gene have speech and language problems. Many researchers initially thought that the amino acid swap was what enabled humans to speak. Speech would have given humans a leg up on competition from Neandertals and other ancient hominids. That view helped make FOXP2 a textbook example of selective sweeps. Some researchers even suggested that FOXP2 was the gene that defines humans, until it became clear that the gene did not allow humans to settle the world and replace other hominids, says archeaogeneticist Johannes Krause at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, who was not involved in the study. “It was not the one gene to rule them all.” |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Language; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25293 - Posted: 08.04.2018

Matthew Warren The evolution of human language was once thought to have hinged on changes to a single gene that were so beneficial that they raced through ancient human populations. But an analysis now suggests that this gene, FOXP2, did not undergo changes in Homo sapiens’ recent history after all — and that previous findings might simply have been false signals. “The situation’s a lot more complicated than the very clean story that has been making it into textbooks all this time,” says Elizabeth Atkinson, a population geneticist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a co-author of the paper, which was published on 2 August in Cell1. Originally discovered in a family who had a history of profound speech and language disorders, FOXP2 was the first gene found to be involved in language production2. Later research touted its importance to the evolution of human language. A key 2002 paper found that humans carry two mutations to FOXP2 not found in any other primates3. When the researchers looked at genetic variation surrounding these mutations, they found the signature of a ‘selective sweep’ — in which a beneficial mutation quickly becomes common across a population. This change to FOXP2 seemed to have happened in the past 200,000 years, the team reported in Nature. The paper has been cited hundreds of times in the scientific literature. © 2018 Springer Nature Limited.

Keyword: Language; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25292 - Posted: 08.04.2018

By Emily Baumgaertner WASHINGTON — A fast-acting class of fentanyl drugs approved only for cancer patients with high opioid tolerance has been prescribed frequently to patients with back pain and migraines, putting them at high risk of accidental overdose and death, according to documents collected by the Food and Drug Administration. The F.D.A. established a distribution oversight program in 2011 to curb inappropriate use of the dangerous medications, but entrusted enforcement to a group of pharmaceutical companies that make and sell the drugs. Some of the companies have been sued for illegally promoting other uses for the medications and in one case even bribing doctors to prescribe higher doses. About 5,000 pages of documents, obtained by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health through the Freedom of Information Act and provided to The New York Times, show that the F.D.A. had data showing that so-called off-label prescribing was widespread. But officials did little to intervene. “If any opioids were going to be tightly regulated, it would be these,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, an opioid policy researcher at Brandeis University, who was not involved in the investigation. “They had the fox guarding the henhouse, people were getting hurt — and the F.D.A. sat by and watched this happen.” Officials at the F.D.A. said they had reviewed evidence indicating that many patients without cancer were given the drugs. But they said that piecemeal data from various stakeholders — prescriber surveys, insurance claims and industry reports — made it difficult for the agency to measure potential harm to patients. “The information we have isn’t very good, but it seems to indicate people who aren’t cancer patients are getting this and people who aren’t opioid tolerant are getting this,” Dr. Janet Woodcock, the director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the F.D.A., said in an interview. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25291 - Posted: 08.04.2018

Illegal, underground and said to be brimming with health benefits — the practice of microdosing psychedelic drugs is growing increasingly popular, yet it remains relatively unstudied and its reported benefits unproven. A group of Canadian researchers is hoping to change that with new data that begins to shed light on how and why people microdose, and what they say are its effects and drawbacks. Microdosing is the practice of taking minute doses of hallucinogens like LSD or psilocybin (the active compound in so-called magic mushrooms) for therapeutic purposes. The amounts are too small to produce a high but large enough to quell anxiety or improve mood, according to users. Researchers at the University of Toronto, York University and Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health collaborated on the study, which they say is the first of its kind. The team targeted microdosing communities on Reddit and other social media channels with an anonymous online survey last year. They received 909 completed responses from current and former microdosers as well as others who had no experience with the practice. The survey yielded information about how much and how often people microdosed: typically 10 to 20 micrograms of LSD (about one- or two-tenths of a tab) or 0.2 to 0.5 grams of dried magic mushrooms, about once every three days or once per week. Thomas Anderson presented the findings at the Beyond Psychedelics conference in Prague in June. Those who microdosed reported a number of benefits, including improved mood, increased focus and productivity, and better connection with others. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 25290 - Posted: 08.04.2018

By Michael Erard , Catherine Matacic If you want a no-fuss, no-muss pet, consider the Bengalese finch. Dubbed the society finch for its friendliness, breeders often use it to foster unrelated chicks. But put the piebald songbird next to its wild ancestor, the white-rumped munia, and you can both see and hear the differences: The aggressive munia tends to be darker and whistles a scratchy, off-kilter tune, whereas the pet finch warbles a melody so complex that even nonmusicians may wonder how this caged bird learned to sing. All this makes the domesticated and wild birds a perfect natural experiment to help explore an upstart proposal about human evolution: that the building blocks of language are a byproduct of brain alterations that arose when natural selection favored cooperation among early humans. According to this hypothesis, skills such as learning complex calls, combining vocalizations, and simply knowing when another creature wants to communicate all came about as a consequence of pro-social traits like kindness. If so, domesticated animals, which are bred to be good-natured, might exhibit such communication skills too. The idea is rooted in a much older one: that humans tamed themselves. This self-domestication hypothesis, which got its start with Charles Darwin, says that when early humans started to prefer cooperative friends and mates to aggressive ones, they essentially domesticated themselves. Along with tameness came evolutionary changes seen in other domesticated mammals—smoother brows, shorter faces, and more feminized features—thanks in part to lower levels of circulating androgens (such as testosterone) that tend to promote aggression. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 25289 - Posted: 08.03.2018

By Carl Zimmer In 2003, researchers digging in a mountain cave on the Indonesian island of Flores discovered astonishing fossils of a tiny, humanlike individual with a small, chimp-sized brain. They called the species Homo floresiensis. These relatives of modern humans stood just over three feet tall. Several villages in the area, scientists noted, are inhabited by people whose average height is 4 feet 9 inches. Was this the result of interbreeding long ago between taller modern humans and shorter Homo floresiensis? Fifteen years after the bones’ discovery, a study of the DNA of living people on Flores has delivered a verdict. “It’s rare in science that you set about to answer a question and you get something of a definitive answer and it’s the end,” said Richard E. Green, a geneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a co-author of the study, published on Thursday in Science. “The answer is a clear enough ‘no’ that I’m done with it.” But as often happens in science, the answer to one question raises new ones. The study shows that at least twice in ancient history, humans and their relatives (known as hominins) arrived on Flores and then grew shorter. And not just humans: Other research has shown that elephants also arrived on Flores twice, and both times the species evolved into dwarves. So what mysterious power does this island have to shrink the body? When the fossils of Homo floresiensis first came to light, many researchers hoped they might still hold fragments of DNA. They were encouraged by the initial dating of the fossils — an estimated age of perhaps just 13,000 years. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 25288 - Posted: 08.03.2018

by Lindsey Bever It was a solution no parent wants to hear: To get rid of a brain tumor and stop their young son's seizures, surgeons would need to cut out one-sixth of his brain. But for Tanner Collins, it was the best option. A slow-growing tumor was causing sometimes-daily seizures, and medications commonly used to treat them did not seem to be working, his father said. But removing a portion of his brain was no doubt risky. That region — the right occipital and posterior temporal lobes — is important for facial recognition, and, without it, Tanner's parents wondered if he would recognize them. Tanner, who was 6 at the time, underwent surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Children's Hospital. Although his brain has had to work to adapt since then, he's had no major problems. Other than some visual impairment, Tanner, now 12, said he's “perfectly fine.” “As far as I’m concerned, I’m a perfectly normal 12-year-old boy,” Tanner said. Tanner's case was published Tuesday in the scientific journal Cell Reports, explaining how the 12-year-old's brain learned to adapt after a part largely responsible for visual processing was taken out. Marlene Behrmann, a cognitive neuroscientist and lead author of the paper, said Tanner was one of the first pediatric patients studied over the past several years in her laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University to determine the extent to which a child's brain can reorganize itself after certain sections are surgically removed. In Tanner's case, she said, surgeons took out his right occipital and posterior temporal lobes, which made up about one-third of the right hemisphere of his brain. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Epilepsy
Link ID: 25287 - Posted: 08.03.2018

Sara Reardon A consumer-advocacy group is filing a complaint with the US government about two clinical trials in Minnesota that allegedly gave agitated patients ketamine and other sedatives without their consent, despite evidence that doing so could harm their health. The trials were conducted by researchers at Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC) in Minneapolis, Minnesota, between 2014 and June 2018. In its complaint, the advocacy group Public Citizen in Washington DC alleges that the studies’ organizers and the HCMC’s ethics-review board allowed the trials to proceed without obtaining consent from patients. In both studies, paramedics responding to medical emergencies injected agitated people with either ketamine or another sedative to determine which drug worked fastest. Patients were only notified afterwards that they had received a sedative. Sixty-four doctors, bioethicists and academic researchers have co-signed Public Citizen’s complaint, which the group plans to submit to the US Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on 25 July. “This isn’t even a close call,” says Michael Carome, director of Public Citizen’s health-research group. “This is clearly a prospective, high-risk experiment. This is really just a colossal failure of their programme to protect human subjects.” A spokesperson for Hennepin Healthcare, which operates Hennepin County Medical Center, told Nature that the hospital will not comment on the studies until after ongoing internal and external investigations are complete. © 2018 Springer Nature Limited.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25286 - Posted: 08.03.2018

/ By Rod McCullom Eight years ago, New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey published a paper whose conclusions shook the worlds of criminology and adolescent psychology. Researchers had long known that children exposed to violence and crime had poorer measures of memory, attention, planning, and focus — the cognitive processes collectively known as executive function — than peers whose lives were violence-free. But what Sharkey found, using data on 6,000 Chicago homicides from 1994 to 2002, was that a killing in a child’s neighborhood could significantly lower his or her scores on standardized tests — even if the child did not witness the killing or know the victim. He proposed that post-traumatic stress caused by exposure to violence could explain about half of the “achievement gap” between black and white students — a disparity that leads to persistent inequalities in education, income, careers, housing, and more. Similar findings have been documented in more recent studies, but one question has continued to vex researchers: Why? How does even indirect violence get under a child’s skin and into the brain? Now some intriguing interdisciplinary research — by psychologists, economists, and sociologists — suggests that a large part of the answer may lie in two biological pathways: sleep and the stress hormone cortisol. Researchers at Northwestern University, DePaul University, and NYU (including Sharkey) looked at 82 adolescents aged 11 to 18 who attended public schools in a “large Midwestern city.” (The school system asked for anonymity to participate in the study.) At least half the students had at least one violent crime in their neighborhood during the participation period, according to geocoded police report data collected by the researchers. The students wore activity-tracking watches that measured sleep-wake patterns, and most of them delivered three saliva samples daily for measuring cortisol levels. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Aggression; Stress
Link ID: 25285 - Posted: 08.02.2018

Ashley Yeager Neuroscientist Gavin Clowry didn’t intend to grow a miniature human brain in a rat pup. But a few months ago, that’s essentially what happened. “We were astonished when we saw it,” recalls the faculty member at Newcastle University in the UK. Clowry and his colleagues had derived human neural stem cells from induced pluripotent stem cells, diffused them into a 3-D gel, and transplanted the gel into the young rats’ brains to test the cells’ ability to survive. A month later, much to the team’s surprise, the human cells had formed columns of tightly packed progenitor cells surrounded by immature neurons. “They looked like organoids,” says Clowry, who published the results in May. Organoids are tiny collections of tissue made from cells that self-organize into 3-D structures that mimic the anatomy of fully formed organs. Clowry attributes the unexpected development of the human brain organoids to the complex environment of the rat’s brain, where diverse cell types interact to keep neurons operating. That’s not to say cerebral organoids can’t also be grown in a dish. Scientists published the first description of lab-grown, human brain organoids in 2013. But even cultured mini-brains appear to benefit from an in vivo environment. Clowry’s study appeared in the literature just three weeks after a paper from Fred “Rusty” Gage and his colleagues at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, described how they had transplanted lab-grown human brain organoids into the brains of mice and watched as the animals’ native blood vessels and immune cells infiltrated the organoids. Gage’s team also noted that the cells in the implanted organoids were sending and receiving signals to and from the mice’s native nerve cells. As Clowry and his colleagues would later observe in rat brains, the organoids were being integrated into the animals’ brains. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Stem Cells
Link ID: 25284 - Posted: 08.02.2018

Maria Temming Google Glass may have failed as a high-tech fashion trend, but it’s showing promise as a tool to help children with autism better navigate social situations. A new smartphone app that pairs with a Google Glass headset uses facial recognition software to give the wearer real-time updates on which emotions people are expressing. In a pilot trial, described online August 2 in npj Digital Medicine, 14 children with autism spectrum disorder used this program at home for an average of just over 10 weeks. After treatment, the kids showed improved social skills, including increased eye contact and ability to decode facial expressions. After her 9-year-old son, Alex, participated in the study, Donji Cullenbine described the Google Glass therapy as “remarkable.” She noticed within a few weeks that Alex was meeting her eyes more often — a behavior change that’s stuck since treatment ended, she says. And Alex enjoyed using the Google Glass app. Cullenbine recalls her son telling her excitedly, “Mommy, I can read minds.” Unlike most children, who naturally learn to read facial expressions by interacting with family and friends, children with autism often have to hone these skills through behavioral therapy. That typically involves a therapist leading the child through structured activities, like exercises with flash cards that depict faces wearing different expressions. But therapists are so few and far between that a child diagnosed with autism can spend 18 months on a waiting list before starting treatment. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Autism; Emotions
Link ID: 25283 - Posted: 08.02.2018

Ashley Yeager European health officials have approved the sale of the migraine-prevention drug Aimovig (erenumab), The Guardian reports today (July 31). In May, the US Food and Drug Administration gave the green light for the same drug, considered a first of its kind because it blocks a receptor that plays a role in transmitting signals of migraine pain. “Migraine is incredibly painful, and has symptoms that include vomiting and visual disturbance, so getting it frequently can literally ruin lives,” Wendy Thomas, chief executive of the Migraine Trust, tells The Guardian. “That is why it is important that [the drug] becomes available to patients as soon as possible.” Aimovig targets the calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) receptor, and in clinical trials the compound was shown to reduce the number of days individuals suffered migraines each month. One in four patients with chronic migraines—those experiencing symptoms 15 days or more a month—were migraine-free for more than 15 months. “A treatment specifically designed for migraine prevention is a much welcomed innovation and could transform lives of patients for whom current therapies do not work or are not well tolerated,” Patrick Little, president of the European Migraine and Headache Alliance, said in a June 30 statement from Novartis, the company that manufactures Aimovig. In the trials, the drug was tested on migraine sufferers who did not get relief from two to four other commonly used migraine treatments. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientis

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25282 - Posted: 08.02.2018

Laura Sanders Among amateur players who headed a similar number of balls, women had more signs of microscopic damage in their brains’ white matter than men, scientists report July 31 in Radiology. Female athletes are known to have worse symptoms after brain injuries than male athletes, but a clear head-to-head comparison of post-heading brains hadn’t been done until now. From 2013 to 2016, study coauthor Michael Lipton of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, N.Y., and colleagues recruited 98 soccer players from amateur teams, including from colleges. The researchers then compared male and female players who headed the ball a similar number of times over the past year. For men, that median estimate was 487 headers. Women had an estimated median of 469 headers. Despite those similar numbers of head knocks, women’s brains had more spots that showed signs of microscopic damage. A type of magnetic resonance imaging scan called diffusion tensor imaging identified brain regions with changes in white matter, bundles of message-sending fibers. In some cases, those altered spots indicated possible damage to nerve cell axons and myelin, a protective coating that speeds neural signals along. In men, only three brain regions showed potential damage associated with heading frequency. In women, eight regions showed signs of damage with frequent heading. These brain changes weren’t enough to cause symptoms in the amateur soccer players. But repeated blows to the brain can contribute to memory loss and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a disorder found in professional football players, soldiers and others whose brains suffer repetitive trauma (SN: 7/13/13, p. 18). |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25281 - Posted: 08.01.2018

By Matthew Hutson For millions who can’t hear, lip reading offers a window into conversations that would be lost without it. But the practice is hard—and the results are often inaccurate (as you can see in these Bad Lip Reading videos). Now, researchers are reporting a new artificial intelligence (AI) program that outperformed professional lip readers and the best AI to date, with just half the error rate of the previous best algorithm. If perfected and integrated into smart devices, the approach could put lip reading in the palm of everyone’s hands. “It’s a fantastic piece of work,” says Helen Bear, a computer scientist at Queen Mary University of London who was not involved with the project. Writing computer code that can read lips is maddeningly difficult. So in the new study scientists turned to a form of AI called machine learning, in which computers learn from data. They fed their system thousands of hours of videos along with transcripts, and had the computer solve the task for itself. The researchers started with 140,000 hours of YouTube videos of people talking in diverse situations. Then, they designed a program that created clips a few seconds long with the mouth movement for each phoneme, or word sound, annotated. The program filtered out non-English speech, nonspeaking faces, low-quality video, and video that wasn’t shot straight ahead. Then, they cropped the videos around the mouth. That yielded nearly 4000 hours of footage, including more than 127,000 English words. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Hearing; Robotics
Link ID: 25280 - Posted: 08.01.2018