Bruce Bower England’s King George III descended into mental chaos, or what at the time was called madness, in 1789. Physicians could not say whether he would recover or if a replacement should assume the throne. That political crisis jump-started the study of human heredity. Using archival records, science historian Theodore M. Porter describes how the king’s deteriorating condition invigorated research at England’s insane asylums into the inheritance of madness. Well before DNA’s discovery, heredity started out as a science of record keeping and statistical calculations. In the 1800s, largely forgotten doctors in both Europe and North America meticulously collected family histories of madness, intellectual disability and crime among the growing numbers of people consigned to asylums, schools for “feebleminded” children and prisons. Some physicians who specialized in madness, known as alienists, saw severe mental deficits as a disease caused by modern life’s pressures. But most alienists regarded heredity, the transmission of a presumed biological factor among family members, as the true culprit. Asylum directors launched efforts to track down all sick relatives of patients. The increasing number of people institutionalized for mental deficits fueled the view that individuals from susceptible families should be discouraged from reproducing. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25163 - Posted: 07.02.2018

By Denise Gellene Dr. Arvid Carlsson, a Swedish scientist whose discoveries about the brain led to the development of drugs for Parkinson’s disease and earned him a Nobel Prize, died on Friday. He was 95. His death was announced by the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, where he had been a professor of pharmacology. It did not say where he died. When Dr. Carlsson started his research in the 1950s, dopamine, a chemical in the brain, was thought to have little significance. Dr. Carlsson discovered that it was, in fact, an important neurotransmitter — a brain chemical that passes signals from one neuron to the next. He then found that dopamine was concentrated in the basal ganglia, the portion of the brain that controls movement. He showed that rabbits lost their ability to move after they were given a drug that lowered their dopamine stores; their mobility was restored after they received L-dopa, a drug that is converted into dopamine in the brain. Noting that the movement difficulties of his rabbits were similar to those of people with Parkinson’s disease, Dr. Carlsson proposed that the illness was related to a loss of dopamine. Other scientists confirmed that dopamine is depleted in people with Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative condition that causes tremors and rigidity, and L-dopa soon became the standard treatment for the illness. Dr. Carlsson shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with two American researchers, Dr. Eric Kandel and Paul Greengard, who made their own discoveries about the transmission of chemical signals in the brain. In awarding the Nobel, the Karolinska Institute of Sweden said the contributions of the three scientists were “crucial for an understanding of the normal function of the brain” and for how signal disturbances could “give rise to neurological and psychiatric disorders.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 25162 - Posted: 07.02.2018

By Karen Weintraub New Caledonian crows are known for their toolmaking, but Alex Taylor and his colleagues wanted to understand just how advanced they could be. Crows from New Caledonia, an island in the South Pacific, can break off pieces of a branch to form a hook, using it to pull a grub out of a log, for instance. Once, in captivity, when a New Caledonian male crow had taken all the available hooks, its mate Betty took a straight piece of wire and bent it to make one. “They are head and shoulders above almost every other avian subjects” at toolmaking, said Irene Pepperberg, an avian cognition expert and research associate in Harvard University’s department of psychology. “These crows are just amazing.” Dr. Taylor, a researcher at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and several European colleagues wondered how the crows, without an ability to talk and showing no evidence of mimicry, might learn such sophisticated toolmaking. Perhaps, the scientists hypothesized in a new paper published Thursday in Scientific Reports, they used “mental template matching,” where they formed an image in their heads of tools they’d seen used by others and then copied it. “Could they look at a tool and just based on mental image of the tool — can they recreate that tool design?” Dr. Taylor said. “That’s what we set out to test, and that’s what our results show.” In a series of steps, the researchers taught the birds to feed pieces of paper into a mock vending machine to earn food rewards. The scientists chose a task that was similar enough to something the animals do in the wild — while also brand new. The birds had never seen card stock before, but learned how to rip it into big or little shapes after being shown they would get a reward for the appropriate size. The template used to show the birds the right size of paper was not available to them when they made their “tools,” yet the crows were able to use their beaks to tear off bits of paper, which they sometimes held between their feet for leverage. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 25161 - Posted: 06.29.2018

A small-molecule drug is one of the first to preserve hearing in a mouse model of an inherited form of progressive human deafness, report investigators at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). The study, which appears online in Cell (link is external), sheds light on the molecular mechanism that underlies a form of deafness (DFNA27), and suggests a new treatment strategy. “We were able to partially restore hearing, especially at lower frequencies, and save some sensory hair cells,” said Thomas B. Friedman, Ph.D., chief of the Laboratory of Human Molecular Genetics at the NIDCD, and a coauthor of the study. “If additional studies show that small-molecule-based drugs are effective in treating DFNA27 deafness in people, it’s possible that using similar approaches might work for other inherited forms of progressive hearing loss.” The seed for the advance was planted a decade ago, when NIDCD researchers led by Friedman and Robert J. Morell, Ph.D., another coauthor of the current study, analyzed the genomes of members of an extended family, dubbed LMG2. Deafness is genetically dominant in the LMG2 family, meaning that a child needs to inherit only one copy of the defective gene from a parent to have progressive hearing loss. The investigators localized the deafness-causing mutation to a region on chromosome four called DFNA27, which includes a dozen or so genes. The precise location of the mutation eluded the NIDCD team, however.

Keyword: Hearing; Regeneration
Link ID: 25160 - Posted: 06.29.2018

By Simon Makin The electrical oscillations we call brain waves have intrigued scientists and the public for more than a century. But their function—and even whether they have one, rather than just reflecting brain activity like an engine’s hum—is still debated. Many neuroscientists have assumed that if brain waves do anything, it is by oscillating in synchrony in different locations. Yet a growing body of research suggests many brain waves are actually “traveling waves” that physically move through the brain like waves on the sea. Now a new study from a team at Columbia University led by neuroscientist Joshua Jacobs suggests traveling waves are widespread in the human cortex—the seat of higher cognitive functions—and that they become more organized depending on how well the brain is performing a task. This shows the waves are relevant to behavior, bolstering previous research suggesting they are an important but overlooked brain mechanism that contributes to memory, perception, attention and even consciousness. Brain waves were first discovered using electroencephalogram (EEG) techniques, which involve placing electrodes on the scalp. Researchers have noted activity over a range of different frequencies, from delta (0.5 to 4 hertz) through to gamma (25 to 140 Hz) waves. The slowest occur during deep sleep, with increasing frequency associated with increasing levels of consciousness and concentration. Interpreting EEG data is difficult due to its poor ability to pinpoint the location of activity, and the fact that passage through the head blurs the signals. The new study, published earlier this month in Neuron, used a more recent technique called electrocorticography (ECoG). This involves placing electrode arrays directly on the brain’s surface, minimizing distortions and vastly improving spatial resolution. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 25159 - Posted: 06.29.2018

David Levari Why do many problems in life seem to stubbornly stick around, no matter how hard people work to fix them? It turns out that a quirk in the way human brains process information means that when something becomes rare, we sometimes see it in more places than ever. Think of a “neighborhood watch” made up of volunteers who call the police when they see anything suspicious. Imagine a new volunteer who joins the watch to help lower crime in the area. When they first start volunteering, they raise the alarm when they see signs of serious crimes, like assault or burglary. Let’s assume these efforts help and, over time, assaults and burglaries become rarer in the neighborhood. What would the volunteer do next? One possibility is that they would relax and stop calling the police. After all, the serious crimes they used to worry about are a thing of the past. But you may share the intuition my research group had – that many volunteers in this situation wouldn’t relax just because crime went down. Instead, they’d start calling things “suspicious” that they would never have cared about back when crime was high, like jaywalking or loitering at night. You can probably think of many similar situations in which problems never seem to go away, because people keep changing how they define them. This is sometimes called “concept creep,” or “moving the goalposts,” and it can be a frustrating experience. How can you know if you’re making progress solving a problem, when you keep redefining what it means to solve it? My colleagues and I wanted to understand when this kind of behavior happens, why, and if it can be prevented. © 2010–2018, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 25158 - Posted: 06.29.2018

Ruth Williams If youngsters told their elders to be quiet, stress levels would surely rise. But, when it comes to brain cells, it seems the opposite is true—silencing of old neurons by young ones appears to make an animal more stress resilient. A report today (June 27) in Nature shows that mice whose production of new hippocampal neurons was ramped up suffered less anxiety in a stressful social situation than their control counterparts, and this was thanks to an increased inhibition of mature hippocampal cells. “It’s a very elegant paper showing how adult neurogenesis protects against chronic stress,” says neuroscientist Sandrine Thuret of King’s College London in the U.K. who was not involved in the research. It was known that the birth of new neurons in the hippocampus could prevent stress, “but we didn’t really know how,” she explains. “[The authors] show that the new neurons modulate the activity of mature neurons and that this has a behavioral effect.” In the adult brains of most mammals, neurogenesis occurs in two regions: the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus—an area implicated in memory formation, exploration, stress, and depression—and the striatum—implicated in, among other things, reward and reinforcement. While humans appear to have little if any striatal neurogenesis, evidence suggests they continue to produce new neurons in the dentate gyrus throughout life, though there has been some recent debate regarding this. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Neurogenesis; Emotions
Link ID: 25157 - Posted: 06.29.2018

By Meredith Wadman Roughly once a day in the United States, a child is born with a fatal genetic disorder that destroys motor neurons in the brain stem and spinal cord. In its worst and most common form, spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) kills children when they are still toddlers, as their respiratory muscles fail. But 18 months ago, the Food and Drug Administration approved a first, promising treatment: a drug that restores production of a key protein missing in SMA. Now, SMA advocacy groups and members of Congress are urging Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Alex Azar to recommend that all 4 million infants born in the United States each year be tested for SMA. They argue that affected children should be identified and treated when the new drug likely helps the most—before neurons die. By law, Azar faces an 8 July deadline, but such deadlines have been missed in the past. And although an advisory panel voted in February in favor of screening all newborns, some of its experts dissented. They noted that key studies of the new treatment—a drug called nusinersen (marketed as Spinraza by Biogen of Cambridge, Massachusetts)—are still ongoing, involve small numbers of children, and are unpublished. But delay "would be a tragedy for children born in the interim who may benefit from screening because they will miss the window for receiving treatment when it is most effective," 14 members of the House of Representatives wrote to Azar last month, urging speedy approval. An HHS spokesperson says Azar is "still reviewing this important issue." © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 25156 - Posted: 06.29.2018

Geoffrey Pullum One area outshines all others in provoking crazy talk about language in the media, and that is the idea of language acquisition in nonhuman species. On June 19 came the sad news of the death of Koko, the western lowland gorilla cared for by Francine “Penny” Patterson at a sanctuary in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Many obituaries appeared, and the press indulged as never before in sentimental nonsense about talking with the animals. Credulous repetition of Koko’s mythical prowess in sign language was everywhere. Jeffrey Kluger’s essay in Time was unusually extreme in its blend of emotion, illogicality, wishful thinking, and outright falsehood. Koko, he tells us, once made a sequence of hand signs that Patterson interpreted as “you key there me cookie“; and Kluger calls it “impressive … for the clarity of its meaning.” Would you call it clear and meaningful if it were uttered by an adult human? As always with the most salient cases of purported ape signing, Koko was flailing around producing signs at random in a purely situation-bound bid to obtain food from her trainer, who was in control of a locked treat cabinet. The fragmentary and anecdotal evidence about Koko’s much-prompted and much-rewarded sign usage was never sufficient to show that the gorilla even understood the meanings of individual signs — that key denotes a device intended to open locks, that the word cookie is not appropriately applied to muffins, and so on. © 2018 The Chronicle of Higher Education

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 25155 - Posted: 06.29.2018

By Matt Warren Every day, humans make dozens of judgements, from deciding whether our clothes match to determining whether a shady character in the street is a threat. Such decisions aren’t based on hard-and-fast rules, a new study reveals. Instead, our concept of “threat”—and even of the color “blue”—is all relative. To make the find, researchers showed non–color-blind participants a series of 1000 dots ranging from very blue to very purple, and asked them to judge whether each dot was blue. For the first 200 trials, participants saw an equal number of dots from the blue and purple parts of the spectrum, but then the prevalence of blue dots gradually decreased to just a fraction of what it was before. By the end of the study, participants’ interpretation of the colors had changed: Dots that they had thought were purple in the first set of trials they now classified as blue, the authors report today in Science. That is, their concept of the color blue had expanded to also include shades of purple. Even when the researchers forewarned participants that blue dots would become rarer and promised them money if they kept their judgments consistent, the same shift occurred. And the team found similar results in more complex versions of the task, where participants had to judge whether a face was threatening or whether a research proposal was ethical. When threatening faces or unethical research proposals became less common, people started to consider previously benign examples as posing a threat or being unethical. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 25154 - Posted: 06.29.2018

Laurel Hamers Using opioids gives some brain cells a call to action. Opioid addicts’ brains, examined after death, contain about 50 percent more nerve cells that release a molecule called hypocretin, compared with people who didn’t use the drugs, a new study finds. Giving the opiate morphine to mice also induced similar changes in their brains. But the increase didn’t come from new nerve cells, or neurons, being born. Instead, once-dormant neurons appear to rev up their hypocretin machinery in response to the addictive drugs, researchers report June 27 in Science Translational Medicine. The findings fit with a growing body of research that suggests that hypocretin, a brain chemical that regulates wakefulness and arousal, may also be involved in addiction. “I think there is extensive evidence now that shows that the hypocretin neurons are supporting motivated behavior in general,” and addiction falls under that umbrella, says Rodrigo España, a neurobiologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia who wasn’t involved in the new study. For example, his lab recently showed that rats with a less sensitive hypocretin receptor (and therefore a weaker response to the brain chemical) showed less motivation to seek out cocaine rewards. The new study comes from the opposite angle, showing changes in hypocretin neurons in response to drug use, rather than the other way around. “It does suggest the possibility that part of the reason it’s so hard to get off drugs is there’s this massive change in the brain,” says study coauthor and neuroscientist Jerome Siegel of UCLA. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Narcolepsy; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25153 - Posted: 06.28.2018

The musician Tom Petty last year joined a long line of high-profile stars to hit the headlines for dying from an accidental overdose of prescription painkillers and tranquillizers. The risks of opioid painkillers dominate the news. But the other half of the deadly mixture in such overdose cases deserves attention, too. It’s typically a medicine from a class of drugs called benzodiazepines or — more colloquially — benzos. These drugs — Valium (diazepam), Xanax (alprazolam) and the like — have been prescribed as tranquillizers for decades, mainly for anxiety. And the health risks they pose, such as addiction, are well known. Yet a study published last week spells out the specific danger of mixing them with an opioid painkiller: the risk of an overdose is five times higher when people taking opioids are also prescribed a benzodiazepine (I. Hernandez et al. JAMA Network Open 1, e180919; 2018). According to the US National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Drug Abuse, almost one-third of overdoses involving opioids also involve benzos. The problems come because both opioids and benzos function as depressants on the central nervous system. Acting together, they can make it difficult to breathe — so difficult, in fact, that many overdose deaths are caused by suffocation. As a result, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), among other regulatory bodies, has repeatedly tried to highlight the risks of prescriptions for both types of drug. In a perspective article published last month, the FDA called for “proactive pharmacovigilance” — better tracking of the drugs that different (and sometimes the same) doctors prescribe to patients (D. C. Throckmorton et al. N. Engl. J. Med. http://doi.org/gdj5t4; 2018). © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited, p

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25152 - Posted: 06.28.2018

By Erica L. Green A “brain-performance” business backed by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has agreed to stop advertising success rates for children and adults suffering from maladies such as attention deficit disorder, depression and autism after a review found the company could not support the outcomes it was promoting. The company, Neurocore, which has received more than $5 million from Ms. DeVos and her husband, Richard DeVos Jr., to run “brain performance centers” in Michigan and Florida, lost an appeal before an advertising-industry review board, which found that the company’s claims of curbing and curing a range of afflictions without medication were based on mixed research and unscientific internal studies. The National Advertising Review Board, an oversight arm of the advertising industry’s self-regulatory body, announced its decision last week. Neurocore came under scrutiny during Ms. DeVos’s confirmation process, when she valued her stake in it at $5 million to $25 million. Ms. DeVos and her husband were chief investors, and she served on the company’s board of directors for seven years, until her nomination. The New York Times found that the company’s claims of treating disorders for more than 10,000 adults through “proven neurofeedback therapy” had been challenged by medical experts and insurance companies. After being nominated for education secretary, Ms. DeVos resigned from the board, but in an agreement with the Office of Government Ethics, retained her financial interest in Neurocore. The investment raised ethical concerns for Ms. DeVos after the company expressed hope that it could expand and help improve performance for students in schools. Ms. DeVos said she would “not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter” concerning the company. But her family has continued to invest. Among the representatives of the company before the National Advertising Review Board was Jason Mahar, the in-house counsel for Windquest Group, the investment management firm of Ms. DeVos’s husband. Windquest also continues to promote the company on its website as part of its “corporate family.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25151 - Posted: 06.28.2018

By Alex Barasch Before “Love is love” became the rallying cry gracing protest signs and storefronts for Pride Month, the go-to gay slogan, by way of Lady Gaga, was “Born this way.” It was a succinct articulation of an argument some saw as essential to acceptance: Same-gender attraction was neither a choice nor a contagion, but rather an innate aspect of identity. This idea is not the straightforward civil rights argument its purveyors seem to believe. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people have long been the victims of bad science, and President Trump’s military ban is just the latest example. The American Medical Association promptly debunked claims that trans people are unfit to serve and that gender dysphoria — the distress that arises from a perceived mismatch between a person’s natal sex and gender identity — cannot be alleviated with access to transition-related care. But more insidious invocations of medical objectivity have continued to undermine trans rights: The so-called American College of Pediatricians, an anti-LGBTQ hate group that attempts to pass itself off as the (gender-affirmative) American Academy of Pediatrics, for instance, has been cited by GOP lawmakers to justify justify anti-trans “bathroom bills.” In this climate, the rush to fight pseudoscience with real scientific results is understandable. A study published in Nature in January and a presentation at the European Congress of Endocrinology in May each pointed toward potential anatomical markers of transness. They sparked a flurry of articles trumpeting a definitive “born this way” narrative and anticipating brain scans that “can tell kids if they’re transgender.” But this impulse to validate marginalized identities through medicine oversimplifies the science, overestimates its role in effecting social change and willfully ignores its more sinister applications. Even if a precise biological origin for same-gender attraction or trans identities could be found, it would be far from an assurance of equality — and opponents of LGBTQ rights could just as readily construe it as a defect in need of correction.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25150 - Posted: 06.28.2018

Lindsay Grace The World Health Organization’s description of “gaming disorder” as an “addictive behavior disorder” includes a vague description of how much digital gaming is too much. The WHO warns that “people who partake in gaming should be alert to the amount of time they spend on gaming activities.” At what point does a leisure activity turn into an addiction? Games researchers are no strangers to complaints about the dangers of too much game playing. Video games have been blamed for causing aggression, unemployment and even the vitamin D deficiency called rickets. Games have also, of course, been championed for improving surgical skills, encouraging pro-social behavior, aiding in cancer treatment and helping develop new AIDS medications. New forms of popular media are often targets of public concern, going back to dime-store novels, comic books and jazz, all the way through rock ’n’ roll and rap. But those fears eventually wane, and society embraces work like “Maus,” the first graphic novel to be a National Book Award finalist and rapper Kendrick Lamar, who won a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year. Digital video games can be exceptionally enticing and engaging. Regarding the risk of addiction, it is interesting to analyze the WHO’s warnings about excessive gaming in the wider context of leisure. As part of the Games for Change conference, I and others who study psychology, serious games and youth advocacy will be talking about the myths of games, media and technology addiction. © 2010–2018, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25149 - Posted: 06.28.2018

Shawna Williams The US Food and Drug Administration today (June 25) approved for the first time a marijuana-derived drug, Epidiolex, for the treatment of two rare forms of epilepsy. The drug contains cannabidiol, or CBD, and does not make users high while reducing the rate of seizures in patients with Dravet or Lennox-Gastaut syndromes, clinical trials show. “In my practice, I often see patients with these highly treatment-resistant epilepsies who have tried and failed existing therapies and are asking about CBD,” says Orrin Devinsky of NYU Langone Health, a lead investigator in the trials, in a statement released by the company that makes Epidiolex. “I am delighted that my physician colleagues and I will now have the option of a prescription cannabidiol that has undergone the rigor of controlled trials and been approved by the FDA to treat both children and adults.” Both Dravet and Lennox-Gastaut are relatively severe forms of epilepsy that can be fatal, STAT News notes. While there are other drugs approved to treat Lennox-Gastaut, there had previously been none for Dravet. Some parents have used unapproved CBD oils to treat their children. In a statement released today, FDA notes that it “has taken recent actions against companies distributing unapproved CBD products. . . . We’ll continue to take action when we see the illegal marketing of CBD-containing products with unproven medical claims.” © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist Magazine®

Keyword: Epilepsy; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25148 - Posted: 06.27.2018

By David Grimm —As soon as the big yellow school bus pulls into the parking lot of the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) here, it’s clear that many of the high school students on board don’t know what they’ve signed up for. They know that science happens somewhere on this wooded, 70-hectare campus west of Portland—and that they may get to see monkeys—but everything else is a mystery. “Are we going to go into some giant underground lair?” asks a lanky sophomore in a hoodie, imagining that the center is set up like a video game or Jurassic Park. Diana Gordon is here to disabuse him of both notions. As the education and outreach coordinator of the country’s largest primate research center, she spends her days guiding students, Rotary clubs, and even wedding parties through the facility. Here, visitors see monkeys in their habitats and meet scientists—all while learning, Gordon hopes, that the animals are well-treated and the research is critical for human health. “If we don’t speak up, there’s only one side being heard,” she says. “The side that wants to shut us down.” That side has been racking up victories recently. In the past 6 months, animal activist groups have won bipartisan support in Congress to scuttle monkey and dog studies at top U.S. research facilities; they have also helped pass two state bills that compel researchers to adopt out lab animals at the end of experiments. The public itself seems to be turning against animal research: A Gallup poll released last year revealed that only 51% of U.S. adults find such studies morally acceptable, down from 65% in 2001. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Scienc

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 25147 - Posted: 06.27.2018

Sukanya Charuchandra At times a predominant layer of the developing brain, the subplate disappears in the adult human brain—or so researchers believed. In findings published in Cell Stem Cell on June 21, scientists propose that neurons from the human subplate, which underlies the tissue that will become the cortex, relocate into the cortex. The researchers found high levels of a protein, known to help cells migrate into the cortex, in stem cell–derived subplate neurons. These relocated subplate cells may be associated with neurological diseases. “A lot of the genes associated with autism are first expressed in the subplate,” M. Zeeshan Ozair, a coauthor on the paper, says in a statement. “And if subplate neurons don’t die but instead become part of the cortex, they will carry those mutations with them.” M.Z. Ozair et al., “hPSC modeling reveals that fate selection of cortical deep projection neurons occurs in the subplate,” Cell Stem Cell, doi:10.1016/j.stem.2018.05.024, 2018. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist Magazine

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25146 - Posted: 06.27.2018

By Nicola Twilley On a foggy February morning in Oxford, England, I arrived at the John Radcliffe Hospital, a shiplike nineteen-seventies complex moored on a hill east of the city center, for the express purpose of being hurt. I had an appointment with a scientist named Irene Tracey, a brisk woman in her early fifties who directs Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences and has become known as the Queen of Pain. “We might have a problem with you being a ginger,” she warned when we met. Redheads typically perceive pain differently from those with other hair colors; many also flinch at the use of the G-word. “I’m sorry, a lovely auburn,” she quickly said, while a doctoral student used a ruler and a purple Sharpie to draw the outline of a one-inch square on my right shin. Wearing thick rubber gloves, the student squeezed a dollop of pale-orange cream into the center of the square and delicately spread it to the edges, as if frosting a cake. The cream contained capsaicin, the chemical responsible for the burn of chili peppers. “We love capsaicin,” Tracey said. “It does two really nice things: it ramps up gradually to become quite intense, and it activates receptors in your skin that we know a lot about.” Thus anointed, I signed my disclaimer forms and was strapped into the scanning bed of a magnetic-resonance-imaging (MRI) machine. The machine was a 7-Tesla MRI, of which there are fewer than a hundred in the world. The magnetic field it generates (teslas are a unit of magnetic strength) is more than four times as powerful as that of the average hospital MRI machine, resulting in images of much greater detail. As the cryogenic units responsible for cooling the machine’s superconducting magnet clicked on and off in a syncopated rhythm, the imaging technician warned me that, once he slid me inside, I might feel dizzy, see flashing lights, or experience a metallic taste in my mouth. “I always feel like I’m turning a corner,” Tracey said. She explained that the magnetic field would instantly pull the proton in each of the octillions of hydrogen atoms in my body into alignment. Then she vanished into a control room, where a bank of screens would allow her to watch my brain as it experienced pain. © 2018 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Brain imaging
Link ID: 25145 - Posted: 06.26.2018

By Ann Gibbons Being smart is a double-edged sword. Intelligent people appear to live longer, but many of the genes behind brilliance can also lead to autism, anxiety, and depression, according to two new massive genetic studies. The work also is one of the first to identify the specific cell types and genetic pathways tied to intelligence and mental health, potentially paving the way for new ways to improve education, or therapies to treat neurotic behavior. The studies provide some of the first “hard evidence of the many genes and pathways” that work together in complex ways to build smart brains and keep them in balance, says geneticist Peter Visscher of the Queensland Brain Institute at The University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, who was not involved in the work. Researchers have long known that people often inherit intelligence and some personality disorders from their parents. (Environmental factors such as education and stress also profoundly shape intelligence and mental health.) But geneticists have had trouble identifying more than a handful of genes associated with intelligence. Last year, researchers used new statistical methods that can detect strong associations between genes and specific traits to analyze health and genetic records in huge data sets. This led to the discovery of 52 genes linked to intelligence in 80,000 people. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 25144 - Posted: 06.26.2018