By Frank Bures Even if there is no sonic weapon, or genitals are not truly shrinking, these conditions are all quite real to the sufferers, just as depression and anxiety are real. One afternoon in May of 2004, a third-grade boy at a local school in Fuhu reported feeling that his genitals were shrinking. He panicked, ran home, and his parents fetched the local healer — an 80-year-old woman who had seen this sort of thing before: In 1963, she said, around the time of the Great Leap Forward, an “evil wind” had blown through the village and many people were struck by this illness known as “suo-yang.” She treated the boy by traditional means and he recovered quickly. Two days later when the school principal learned of the incident, he gathered all 680 students in the school courtyard and, according to a report by Dr. Li Jie of the Guangzhou Psychiatric Hospital, “explained to the students in detail what had happened, and warned them to be cautious, and to take emergency measures if they experienced similar symptoms.” Within two days, 64 other boys were struck with suo-yang, which in its epidemic form, is referred to in the scientific literature as a “mass psychogenic illness” or a “collective stress response.” The Fuhu case was a textbook example of how such an illness can spread through a group of people, and the headmaster did the worst possible thing by explaining the symptoms in detail and assuring students they were in danger. He all but caused epidemic. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Attention; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 25123 - Posted: 06.22.2018

Leslie Henderson Anti-immigrant policies, race-related demonstrations, Title IX disputes, affirmative action court cases, same-sex marriage litigation. These issues are continually in the headlines. But even thoughtful articles on these subjects seem always to devolve to pitting warring factions against each other: black versus white, women versus men, gay versus straight. At the most fundamental level of biology, people recognize the innate advantage of defining differences in species. But even within species, is there something in our neural circuits that leads us to find comfort in those like us and unease with those who may differ? As in all animals, human brains balance two primordial systems. One includes a brain region called the amygdala that can generate fear and distrust of things that pose a danger – think predators or or being lost somewhere unknown. The other, a group of connected structures called the mesolimbic system, can give rise to pleasure and feelings of reward in response to things that make it more likely we’ll flourish and survive – think not only food, but also social pleasure, like trust. But how do these systems interact to influence how we form our concepts of community? Implicit association tests can uncover the strength of unconscious associations. Scientists have shown that many people harbor an implicit preference for their in-group – those like themselves – even when they show no outward or obvious signs of bias. For example, in studies whites perceive blacks as more violent and more apt to do harm, solely because they are black, and this unconscious bias is evident even toward black boys as young as five years old. © 2010–2018, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 25122 - Posted: 06.22.2018

By JoAnna Klein Every spring in Australia, billions of bogong moths migrate from the arid plains of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria to the meadows of the Australian Alps to escape the impending heat. There, they congregate in caves like living shingles, and go dormant over the summer. Autumn arrives, and they return to their birthplaces to mate, lay eggs and die. The eggs hatch into caterpillars that develop underground through winter. The cycle continues. How these animals complete this epic journey to a place they’ve never been and back, traveling hundreds of miles at night, for days to weeks each way, has long been a mystery. But scientists have now discovered that bogong moths have a magnetic sense to help them. In a paper published Thursday in Current Biology, they tested how the moths reacted to moving visual cues and magnetic fields in an outdoor flight simulator and found that the winged insects use magnetic fields like a compass. While other animals like nocturnal songbirds and sea turtles are known to migrate by Earth’s magnetic fields, the researchers say this is the first reliable evidence that insects can, too. Australia’s small, brown, ordinary-looking bogong moths are the only known insect besides the monarch butterfly to manage such a long, directed and specific migration. “They have this sort of amazing ability that belies their appearance,” said Eric Warrant, a biologist at the University of Lund in Sweden and the principal investigator of the study. “It’s as if the bogong moth is the dreary-colored, nocturnal cousin of the monarch butterfly.” But unlike the monarch, which flies during the day by a reliably rising and setting sun, the moth flies at night beneath dim constellations and a darting, shape-shifting moon. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 25121 - Posted: 06.22.2018

By Sean Coughlan BBC News education and family correspondent The colour cyan - between green and blue - is a hidden factor in encouraging or preventing sleep, according to biologists. University of Manchester researchers say higher levels of cyan keep people awake, while reducing cyan is associated with helping sleep. The impact was felt even if colour changes were not visible to the eye. The researchers want to produce devices for computer screens and phones that could increase or decrease cyan levels. Sleep researchers have already established links between colours and sleep - with blue light having been identified as more likely to delay sleep. There have been "night mode" settings for phones and laptops which have reduced blue light in an attempt to lessen the damage to sleep. But the research by biologists at the University of Manchester and in Basel in Switzerland, published in the journal Sleep, has shown the particular impact of the colour cyan. When people were exposed to more or less cyan, researchers were able to measure different levels of the sleep hormone melatonin in people's saliva. Prof Rob Lucas said that it was not necessary for someone to be able to see the difference in colours, as the body reacted to the change even if it was not visible to the naked eye. He said this could also affect other colours which were made using cyan. For instance, there are shades of green that can include cyan - which also can be achieved using other colour combinations. The researchers suggest that versions of the colour using cyan could be used on computer screens if the aim was to keep people awake - such as people working and required to stay alert at night. © 2018 BBC.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sleep
Link ID: 25120 - Posted: 06.22.2018

Video by Emma Allen Depression is a multifaceted and insidious disorder, nearly as complex as the brain itself. As research continues to suggest, the onset of depression can be attributed to an interplay of the many elements that make us human—namely, our genetics, the structure and chemistry of our brains, and our lived experience. Second only, perhaps, to the confounding mechanics of anesthesia, depression is the ultimate mind-body problem; understanding how it works could unlock the mysteries of human consciousness. Emma Allen, a visual artist, and Dr. Daisy Thompson-Lake, a clinical neuroscientist, are fascinated by the physical processes that underlie mental health conditions. Together, they created Adam, a stop-motion animation composed of nearly 1,500 photographs. The short film illuminates the neuroscience of depression while also conveying its emotive experience. “It was challenging translating the complicated science into an emotional visual story with scenes that would flow smoothly into each other,” Allen told The Atlantic. “One of the most complex issues we had to deal with,” added Thompson-Lake, “is that there no single neuroscientific explanation for depression…While scientists agree that there are biological and chemical changes within the brain, the actual brain chemistry is very unique to the individual—although, of course, we can see patterns when studying large numbers of patients.” As a result, Allen and Thompson-Lake attempted a visual interpretation of depression that does not rely too heavily on any one explanation.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25119 - Posted: 06.22.2018

By Nicholas Bakalar Obesity is more common in rural areas than in cities in the United States, two new studies have found. The two analyses, one of adults and the other of children, used data on weight, height and where people lived that was gathered in a series of nationally representative surveys from 2001 to 2016. They were published online together in JAMA. The adult study included 10,792 men and women 20 and older. In the 2013-16 survey period, 39 percent were obese — defined as having a body mass index of 30 or above — including 8 percent who were severely obese, with a B.M.I. of 40 or more. Prevalence of obesity was 36.5 percent among men and 40.8 percent among women, including severe obesity of 5.5 percent for men and 9.8 percent for women. In the study of 6,863 children 2 to 19 years old, 17.8 percent were obese, including 5.8 percent who were severely obese. “I want to emphasize that this survey — the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey — is the gold standard” in accuracy for obesity rates, said Cynthia L. Ogden, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an author on both studies. “When people report their own measurements, they exaggerate their height and minimize their weight,” she said. “This survey has measured heights and weights.” About 38 percent of women living in urban areas with a population greater than a million were obese, as were 42.5 percent of those living in urban areas smaller than a million. But in rural areas, the obesity rate for women was 47.2 percent. Rates for men showed a similar, although not identical, pattern — 31.8 percent in large urban areas, 42.4 percent in small metropolitan areas, and 38.9 percent in rural regions. These differences could not be explained by age, education level, race, ethnicity or smoking status. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 25118 - Posted: 06.22.2018

By Sukanya Charuchandra Researchers in China have taken cell therapy for Parkinson’s disease one step further. In research published in Stem Cell Reports on June 14, scientists report improvements in the motor abilities of monkeys with Parkinsonian symptoms after grafting dopamine neurons derived from embryonic stem cells (ESCs) into their brains. The findings will serve as preclinical data for China’s first ESC-based clinical study for the neurological disease. “Since there are a number of therapies being developed, there is no overwhelming theoretical support for a particular cell type, and actually studying them in advanced animal models and then even in patients makes sense to determine what works best,” D. Eugene Redmond Jr., a psychiatrist and neurosurgeon at Yale Stem Cell Center who was not involved in the study, writes in an email to The Scientist. See “Parkinson’s Disease Cell Therapy Relieves Symptoms in Monkeys” Parkinson’s disease is a neurological condition that originates from the death of dopamine-producing cells in the brain. Since the early 1990s, groups around the world have been developing cell-replacement therapies to counteract this depletion, with recent efforts focusing on stem cells. Scientists have conducted rodent and primate research using dopamine-producing neurons derived from adult stem cells, ESCs, and induced pluripotent stem cells to treat Parkinson’s disease. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Parkinsons; Stem Cells
Link ID: 25117 - Posted: 06.22.2018

By Jon Cohen Until now, researchers wanting to understand the Neanderthal brain and how it differed from our own had to study a void. The best insights into the neurology of our mysterious, extinct relatives came from analyzing the shape and volume of the spaces inside their fossilized skulls. But a recent marriage of three hot fields—ancient DNA, the genome editor CRISPR, and "organoids" built from stem cells—offers a provocative, if very preliminary, new option. At least two research teams are engineering stem cells to include Neanderthal genes and growing them into "minibrains" that reflect the influence of that ancient DNA. None of this work has been published, but Alysson Muotri, a geneticist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine, described his group's Neanderthal organoids for the first time this month at a UCSD conference called Imagination and Human Evolution. His team has coaxed stem cells endowed with Neanderthal DNA into pea-size masses that mimic the cortex, the outer layer of real brains. Compared with cortical minibrains made with typical human cells, the Neanderthal organoids have a different shape and differences in their neuronal networks, including some that may have influenced the species's ability to socialize. "We're trying to recreate Neanderthal minds," Muotri says. Muotri focused on one of approximately 200 protein-coding genes that differ between Neanderthals and modern humans. Known as NOVA1, it plays a role in early brain development in modern humans and also is linked to autism and schizophrenia. Because it controls splicing of RNA from other genes, it likely helped produce more than 100 novel brain proteins in Neanderthals. Conveniently, just one DNA base pair differs between the Neanderthal gene and the modern human one. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Evolution
Link ID: 25116 - Posted: 06.21.2018

By Sara Goudarzi The presidents of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued a statement Wednesday advocating for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to stop separating migrant families. The statement cites research that indicates endangerment of those involved. Last week the American Psychological Association released a letter opposing the Trump administration’s policy of taking immigrant children from their parents at the border. Under the zero-tolerance immigration policy, since May more than 2,300 immigrant children—some of them babies—have been forcibly separated from their parents attempting to enter the U.S. from Mexico. Also Wednesday, as the backlash and public outcry continue to grow, Pres. Donald Trump said he would sign an executive order to stop separating families at the order. It was unclear when children already separated might be reunited with their families. But even if reunited soon, medical experts say the effects of separation can potentially last a lifetime. Scientific American spoke with Alan Shapiro, assistant clinical professor in pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, about the effects of separation trauma and other health and mental consequences of breaking up families. Shapiro is also senior medical director for Community Pediatric Programs (CPP), a collaboration between the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in New York City and the Children’s Health Fund, and medical director and co-founder of Terra Firma, a partnership that provides medical and legal services to immigrant children. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25115 - Posted: 06.21.2018

By Meredith Wadman Breaking with a history of reticence, nearly 600 scientists, students, and lab animal workers published a letter in USA Today this morning that calls on U.S. research institutions to “embrace openness” about their animal research. “We should proudly explain how animals are used for the advancement of science and medicine, in the interest of the well-being of humans and animals,” the 592 signatories write in the letter. “From the development of insulin and transplant surgery to modern day advances, including gene therapies and cancer treatments; animals … continue to play a crucial role in both basic and applied research.” The letter was organized by the pro–animal research advocacy group Speaking of Research, which has offices in the both the United States and the United Kingdom. The group notes that four Nobel Prize–winning biologists are among the signatories: William Campbell, Mario Capecchi, Carol Greider, and Torsten Wiesel. It was also signed by students, lab technicians, veterinarians, physicians, and a few public policy experts. “I read the letter and decided within minutes that I would sign it,” says Greider, a biologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 for her discovery of the enzyme telomerase. “Animal research is very important to understanding fundamental biological mechanisms.” © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 25114 - Posted: 06.21.2018

By Nicholas Bakalar Night owls may be at greater risk for depression than early birds. Previous studies have found a link between a person’s unique circadian rhythm, or chronotype, and depression, but none were able to tell whether sleep habits were a cause or an effect of the disease. This new prospective study, in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, is a step closer to establishing causality. Researchers gathered health and behavioral data on 32,740 women whose average age was 55. Each categorized herself as a definite evening or morning type, a somewhat morning or evening type, or neither. All were free of depression at the start of the study, and over the following four years 2,581 of them developed depression, defined by antidepressant use or a clinical diagnosis. After adjusting for marital status, living alone, being retired, alcohol consumption and other variables, the researchers found that compared to the intermediate types, morning people were 12 percent less likely to develop depression, and night owls 6 percent more likely to develop it. The relationship was linear: the more a woman tended toward the night-owl type, the more likely she was to develop depression. “The effect is modest, a modest association for chronotype and incident depression,” said the lead author, Céline Vetter, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado. “But the overall pattern remains constant. We need to get much deeper into what the genetic and environmental contributions are between mood and chronotype.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Depression
Link ID: 25113 - Posted: 06.21.2018

By Victoria Davis Some people can trace their traditions back decades; the swamp sparrow has passed its songs down for more than 1500 years. The findings, published today in Nature Communications, suggest humans are not alone in keeping practices alive for long periods of time. To conduct the study, researchers recorded a collection of songs from 615 adult male swamp sparrows from six densely populated areas across the northeastern United States. They dissected each bird’s song repertoire, identifying only 160 different syllable types within all the recorded sample. Most swamp swallows sang the same tunes, using the same common syllables, but there were a few rare types in each population, just as there are variations in human oral histories over time. Using a statistical method of calculation called approximate Bayesian computation and models that measure the diversity of syllable types present in each population, the scientists were able to calculate how the songs of each male would have changed over time. They also found that all but two of the most common syllables used during their sampling in 2009 were also the most common during an earlier study of the species when recordings were made in the 1970s. Overall, the analysis indicated that the average age of the oldest tune dated back about 1537 years. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 25112 - Posted: 06.21.2018

Maria Temming Getting robots to do what we want would be a lot easier if they could read our minds. That sci-fi dream might not be so far off. With a new robot control system, a human can stop a bot from making a mistake and get the machine back on track using brain waves and simple hand gestures. People who oversee robots in factories, homes or hospitals could use this setup, to be presented at the Robotics: Science and Systems conference on June 28, to ensure bots operate safely and efficiently. Electrodes worn on the head and forearm allow a person to control the robot. The head-worn electrodes detect electrical signals called error-related potentials — which people’s brains unconsciously generate when they see someone goof up — and send an alert to the robot. When the robot receives an error signal, it stops what it is doing. The person can then make hand gestures — detected by arm-worn electrodes that monitor electrical muscle signals — to show the bot what it should do instead. MIT roboticist Daniela Rus and colleagues tested the system with seven volunteers. Each user supervised a robot that moved a drill toward one of three possible targets, each marked by an LED bulb, on a mock airplane fuselage. Whenever the robot zeroed in on the wrong target, the user’s mental error-alert halted the bot. And when the user flicked his or her wrist left or right to redirect the robot, the machine moved toward the proper target. In more than 1,000 trials, the robot initially aimed for the correct target about 70 percent of the time, and with human intervention chose the right target more than 97 percent of the time. The team plans to build a system version that recognizes a wider variety of user movements. That way, “you can gesture how the robot should move, and your motion can be more fluidly interpreted,” says study coauthor Joseph DelPreto, also a roboticist at MIT. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Brain imaging; Robotics
Link ID: 25111 - Posted: 06.20.2018

By Virginia Morell When an adult striped dolphin emerged from the Mediterranean Sea in 2016 pushing, nudging, and circling the carcass of its dead female companion for more than an hour, a nearby boat of scientists fell silent. Afterward, the students aboard said they were certain the dolphin was grieving. But was this grief or some other response? In a new study, researchers are attempting to get to the bottom of a mystery that has plagued behavioral biologists for 50 years. Grief, in humans at least, is a reaction to the permanent severing of a strong social or family bond. Although chimpanzees, baboons, and elephants are thought to experience the complex emotion, scientists don’t yet know enough about it in other animals. There are dozens of photos and YouTube videos of grieflike behavior in dolphins: Some mothers have been seen carrying their dead infants in their mouths or on their backs for a week or longer, even as the body decomposes; a couple adult males have also been seen holding dead calves in their mouths. In the new study, cetacean biologist Giovanni Bearzi of Dolphin Biology and Conservation in Pordenone, Italy, and his colleagues at other institutions analyzed 78 scientific reports from 1970 to 2016 of these kinds of displays—which they labeled “postmortem-attentive behavior.” They found that just 20 of 88 cetacean (dolphin and whale) species engage in them. Of those, most were dolphins from the Sousa and Tursiops genera. Just one was a baleen whale—a humpback. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 25110 - Posted: 06.20.2018

By Elizabeth Bauer Ask a roomful of neuroscientists to define the term “emotion” and you will trigger a lively discussion. Some will argue that emotions involve conscious experiences that can be studied only in humans. Others might counter that insects and other invertebrates exhibit some of the emotion building blocks seen in mammals. Some will contend that different emotions correspond to anatomically distinct areas of the brain, whereas others argue that emotions are produced in a highly distributed manner. Still others will bring up the 19th-century psychologist William James’s argument that emotions are a consequence, not a cause, of behavior. In The Neuroscience of Emotion, Ralph Adolphs and David J. Anderson argue that before we can study it, we must first define what we mean by “emotion.” Only then, they maintain, can we form appropriate and testable hypotheses. Colleagues at Caltech, the authors bring different experimental backgrounds to the topic of emotion. Adolphs studies the neural basis of human social behavior. Anderson uses rodents and fruitflies as model organisms to investigate how internal states elicit emotional behaviors. Their book is less a catalog of recent neuroscientific discoveries and more a conceptual framework for investigating emotional behaviors both in humans and in other animals. Adolphs and Anderson begin by contending that emotions are biological phenomena that cause behavioral and physiological changes in the brain and body and—in some species—subjective feelings. If emotions are a class of internal brain states expressed in measurable ways, they argue, we can study the neurobiological implementation of these states separately from subjective conscious feelings, meaning both humans and other animals are potential subjects. They go on to define, in detail, the basic properties of an emotion, including valence, scalability, persistence, automaticity, and generalization. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions; Aggression
Link ID: 25109 - Posted: 06.20.2018

Siobhan Roberts In May 2013, the mathematician Carina Curto attended a workshop in Arlington, Virginia, on “Physical and Mathematical Principles of Brain Structure and Function” — a brainstorming session about the brain, essentially. The month before, President Obama had issued one of his “Grand Challenges” to the scientific community in announcing the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), aimed at spurring a long-overdue revolution in understanding our three-pound organ upstairs. In advance of the workshop, the hundred or so attendees each contributed to a white paper addressing the question of what they felt was the most significant obstacle to progress in brain science. Answers ran the gamut — some probed more generally, citing the brain’s “utter complexity,” while others delved into details about the experimental technology. Curto, an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University, took a different approach in her entry, offering an overview of the mathematical and theoretical technology: A major obstacle impeding progress in brain science is the lack of beautiful models. Let me explain. … Many will agree that the existing (and impending) deluge of data in neuroscience needs to be accompanied by advances in computational and theoretical approaches — for how else are we to “make sense” of these data? What such advances should look like, however, is very much up to debate. … How much detail should we be including in our models? … How well can we defend the biological realism of our theories? All Rights Reserved © 2018

Keyword: Robotics; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25108 - Posted: 06.20.2018

A National Institutes of Health-funded study found that treatment of opioid use disorder with either methadone or buprenorphine following a nonfatal opioid overdose is associated with significant reductions in opioid related mortality. The research, published today (link is external) in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was co-funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, both parts of NIH. Study authors analyzed data from 17,568 adults in Massachusetts who survived an opioid overdose between 2012 and 2014. Compared to those not receiving medication assisted treatment, opioid overdose deaths decreased by 59 percent for those receiving methadone and 38 percent for those receiving buprenorphine over the 12 month follow-up period. The authors were unable to draw conclusions about the impact of naltrexone due to small sample size, noting that further work is needed with larger samples. Buprenorphine, methadone, and naltrexone are three FDA-approved medications used to treat opioid use disorder (OUD). The study, the first to look at the association between using medication to treat OUD and mortality among patients experiencing a nonfatal opioid overdose, confirms previous research on the role methadone and buprenorphine can play to effectively treat OUD and prevent future deaths from overdose. Despite compelling evidence that medication assisted treatment can help many people recover from opioid addiction, these proven medications remain greatly underutilized. The study also found that in the first year following an overdose, less than one third of patients were provided any medication for OUD, including methadone (11 percent); buprenorphine (17 percent); and naltrexone (6 percent), with 5 percent receiving more than one medication.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25107 - Posted: 06.20.2018

Cassandra Willyard One of the earliest attempts to estimate the number of genes in the human genome involved tipsy geneticists, a bar in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, and pure guesswork. That was in 2000, when a draft human genome sequence was still in the works; geneticists were running a sweepstake on how many genes humans have, and wagers ranged from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Almost two decades later, scientists armed with real data still can’t agree on the number — a knowledge gap that they say hampers efforts to spot disease-related mutations. The latest attempt to plug that gap uses data from hundreds of human tissue samples and was posted on the BioRxiv preprint server on 29 May1. It includes almost 5,000 genes that haven’t previously been spotted — among them nearly 1,200 that carry instructions for making proteins. And the overall tally of more than 21,000 protein-coding genes is a substantial jump from previous estimates, which put the figure at around 20,000. But many geneticists aren’t yet convinced that all the newly proposed genes will stand up to close scrutiny. Their criticisms underscore just how difficult it is to identify new genes, or even define what a gene is. “People have been working hard at this for 20 years, and we still don’t have the answer,” says Steven Salzberg, a computational biologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, whose team produced the latest count. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25106 - Posted: 06.20.2018

By James Gorman In the world of noses, the elephant’s trunk clearly stands out for its size, flexibility, strength and slightly creepy gripping ability. Go ahead, try to pluck a leaf with your nostrils and see how you fare.So perhaps it should come as no surprise that the elephant’s sense of smell is also outstanding. Past studies have shown that elephants have more scent receptors than any other mammal. And in other experiments, researchers following up reports that elephants in Angola were avoiding minefields found that they could detect TNT. Another report concluded that elephants could use scent clues to tell the difference between two Kenyan tribes, the Maasai, who traditionally speared them, and the Kamba, who did not. The elephants apparently used these clues to help them avoid the Maasai. The latest bit of research adds to the evidence by showing how they use their great sense of smell in choosing food. Elephants often must find vegetation and water at a distance, and they also distinguish between fairly similar plants once they reach a clump of likely vegetation. It seemed that they probably used their sense of smell, but Melissa Schmitt, a researcher at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, and her colleagues wanted to see how good they were. So she tested them at close range, using two buckets with two different hidden foods. They easily picked out the bucket with leaves from plants they enjoyed, say wild pear, and avoided ones they didn’t like, wild olive, for instance. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 25105 - Posted: 06.19.2018

Chris Benderev Stephanie and Natalie enrolled their older son in sessions at a Brain Balance Achievement Center in the hope that it would help him make friends. Hokyoung Kim for NPR Some parents see it coming. Natalie was not that kind of parent. Even after the director and a teacher at her older son's day care sat her down one afternoon in 2011 to detail the 3-year-old's difficulty socializing and his tendency to chatter endlessly about topics his peers showed no interest in, she still didn't get the message. Her son, the two educators eventually spelled out, might be on the autism spectrum. "I was in tears at the end," she says. "When I got home, I was just devastated." Natalie broke the news to her wife, Stephanie, whose mind fast-forwarded to a distressing future. Would her son — a squat, cheerful boy who, despite his affectionate nature, didn't have any playmates — ever be able to make friends? When a doctor eventually confirmed he had an autism spectrum disorder, the diagnosis came with a suggestion: Perhaps the boy would benefit from Prozac when he turned 7. "That was when both of us fell apart in that meeting," Natalie says. For both parents, medication wasn't an option. Article continues after sponsorship "Prozac is a very powerful drug for adults. Why would you give it to a 7-year-old?" Stephanie wondered after the doctor's visit. "I welled up with all of this emotion. And I said I will not let that happen." (To protect their privacy, we are only using Natalie's and Stephanie's first names. We are not naming their children.) The fear of psychotropic drugs led the family to pursue alternative treatments for autism. To start, they dropped gluten. © 2018 npr

Keyword: ADHD; Autism
Link ID: 25104 - Posted: 06.19.2018