By Simon Baron-Cohen Five years ago, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) established autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as an umbrella term when it published the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), the primary guide to taxonomy in psychiatry. In creating this single diagnostic category, the APA also removed the subgroup called Asperger syndrome that had been in place since 1994. At the 2018 annual meeting of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR), there will be plenty of discussion about diagnostic terminology: Despite the many advantages of a single diagnostic category, scientists will be discussing whether, to achieve greater scientific or clinical progress, we need subtypes. The APA created a single diagnostic label of ASD to recognize the important concept of the spectrum, since the way autism is manifested is highly variable. All autistic individuals share core features, including social and communication difficulties, unusually narrow interests, a strong need for repetition and, often, sensory issues. Yet these core features vary enormously in how they are manifested, and in how disabling they are. This variability provides one meaning of the term spectrum, and the single diagnostic label ASD makes space for this considerable variability. The term spectrum also refers to the heterogeneity in autism. There are huge disparities in many areas, such as language development or IQ, and in the presence or absence of co-occurring medical conditions and disabilities. This heterogeneity is also part of what is meant by a spectrum. And some autistic people also have very evident talents. This is another sense of the term spectrum, and the single diagnostic label makes room for this source of diversity, too. © 2018 Scientific America

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 24943 - Posted: 05.05.2018

By Andrew Joseph, Researchers have been left empty-handed so far in their quest to uncover some measurable biological signal that could be used to diagnose autism spectrum disorder, leaving clinicians to identify the condition just based on a child’s behavior. But on Wednesday, scientists reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine that a hormone that regulates blood pressure could be one of those signposts. They found that low concentrations of the molecule—called arginine vasopressin, or AVP—in the cerebrospinal fluid corresponded to autism-like social behavior in male monkeys, while a high AVP concentration signaled the most social animals. And they discovered similar results when looking at AVP concentrations in the cerebrospinal fluid, or CSF, of a small group of boys. “It’s really exciting work,” said Dr. Mollie Meffert, a molecular neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, who was not involved in the study. “One of the most interesting things is the finding that the vasopressin in the CSF correlates with sociality in the macaques and in autism with children.” Meffert said if vasopressin concentrations are confirmed to correspond to autism, they could perhaps be used to diagnose the condition and as a gauge to measure the effect of treatment candidates. And Karen Parker, the lead author of the study and associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, said that the hormone could become a drug target if future studies show boosting its levels can assuage the social impairments of autism spectrum disorder. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 24942 - Posted: 05.05.2018

By Emily Underwood Getting old can be a real itch. In addition to having memory and muscle loss, many elderly people develop supersensitive skin that gets itchy at the lightest touch. Scientists don’t know what causes this miserable condition, called alloknesis, or how to treat it. Now, however, a study in mice has revealed a counterintuitive mechanism for the disorder: a loss of pressure-sensing cells in the skin. Although the findings have yet to be replicated in humans, the study raises the possibility that boosting the function of these cells could treat chronic itch in people, both young and old. Chronic itch is different from chemical itch, which occurs when the immune system reacts to a foreign substance, such as oil from a poison oak leaf or saliva in a mosquito bite. Instead, chronic—or mechanical—itch is usually triggered by light pressure, such as the brush of fibers from a sweater. The condition is maddening, and when people repeatedly scratch their fragile, dry skin, it can lead to major health problems, including infections, says study author Hongzhen Hu, an anesthesiology researcher at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri. Like people, mice visibly itch more with age. To find out why, Hu and colleagues used a hair-thin nylon filament to apply a precise amount of pressure to a patch of shaved skin on young and old rodents’ necks. Young mice didn’t respond much to the gentle touch, but the older mice scratched furiously at the spot. Analyzing skin samples from mice of both ages, the team found that older mice had far fewer pressure-sensing Merkel cells than young mice did. The fewer Merkel cells a mouse had, the more their touch-related itch problems increased in response to the filament, the researchers report today in Science. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24941 - Posted: 05.05.2018

By Viviane Callier A human genetic variant in a gene involved in sensing cold temperatures became more common when early humans migrated out of Africa into colder climates between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago, a study published today (May 3) in PLOS Genetics shows. The advantage conferred by this variant isn’t definitively known, but the researchers suspect that it influences the gene’s expression levels, which in turn affect the degree of cold sensation. The observed pattern of positive selection strongly indicates that the allele was beneficial, but that benefit had a tradeoff—bringing with it a higher risk of getting migraines. “This paper is the latest in a series of papers showing that humans really have adapted to different environments after some of our ancestors migrated out of Africa,” explains evolutionary geneticist Rasmus Nieslen of the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study. “There are a number of adaptations associated with moving into an artic climate, but none with as clear a connection to cold as this one,” he adds. Although studies have demonstrated some striking examples of recent human adaptation, for instance, warding off infectious diseases such as malaria or having the ability to digest milk, relatively little was known about the evolutionary responses to fundamental features of the environment, namely, temperature and climate. “Obviously, humans lived in Africa for a long time, and one of the main environmental factors that changed as humans migrated north was temperature,” explains population geneticist Aida Andres. So she and Felix Key the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig homed in on a gene, TRPM8, that encodes a cation channel in the neurons that innervate the skin. It is activated by cold temperatures and necessary for sensing cold and for thermoregulation. If there was a place to look for human adaptation, this gene looked like a good candidate. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Evolution
Link ID: 24940 - Posted: 05.05.2018

Greg Chapman, research scientist, Boston University Twin Project Humans have succeeded as a species in large part because of our ability to cooperate and coordinate with each other. These skills are driven by a range of “moral emotions” such as guilt and empathy, which help us to navigate the nuance of social interactions appropriately. Those who lack moral emotions are classed as having “callous-unemotional” traits: persistent personality characteristics that make negotiating social situations difficult. The combination of callous-unemotional traits and antisocial behaviour in adolescents and adults is typically diagnosed as psychopathy. Moral emotions can be measured in children as young as three. Persistent personality traits aren’t measured in children this young, but recent research has begun to explore whether repeated callous-unemotional behaviours might be evident even in preschoolers. Such behaviours include parental observations that punishment doesn’t change behaviour, that the child shows little affection toward people and seems unresponsive to affection from others. At least half of children who exhibit callous-unemotional behaviours will naturally grow out of them. Only if they persist into adolescence do they become classified by psychiatrists as persistent personality traits. However, callous-unemotional behaviours in a young child in combination with other risk factors can be a warning sign for later social difficulties and behaviour disorders. For instance, callous-unemotional behaviours in early childhood have been shown to predict aggressive behaviours, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and oppositional defiant disorder and are a risk factor for later psychopathy.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 24939 - Posted: 05.05.2018

By Dana G. Smith The older you get the more difficult it is to learn to speak French like a Parisian. But no one knows exactly what the cutoff point is—at what age it becomes harder, for instance, to pick up noun-verb agreements in a new language. In one of the largest linguistics studies ever conducted—a viral internet survey that drew two thirds of a million respondents—researchers from three Boston-based universities showed children are proficient at learning a second language up until the age of 18, roughly 10 years later than earlier estimates. But the study also showed that it is best to start by age 10 if you want to achieve the grammatical fluency of a native speaker. To parse this problem, the research team, which included psychologist Steven Pinker, collected data on a person’s current age, language proficiency and time studying English. The investigators calculated they needed more than half a million people to make a fair estimate of when the “critical period” for achieving the highest levels of grammatical fluency ends. So they turned to the world’s greatest experimental subject pool: the internet. They created a short online grammar quiz called Which English? that tested noun–verb agreement, pronouns, prepositions and relative clauses, among other linguistic elements. From the responses, an algorithm predicted the tester’s native language and which dialect of English (that is, Canadian, Irish, Australian) they spoke. For example, some of the questions included phrases a Chicagoan would deem grammatically incorrect but a Manitoban would think is perfectly acceptable English. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24938 - Posted: 05.05.2018

By Edith Sheffer Millions of people are identified with Asperger’s syndrome, as a diagnosis, an identity and even an adjective. Asperger’s name has permeated our culture—yet I believe we should no longer invoke it. Naming medical diagnoses after individuals is an honor, meant to recognize those who discover conditions and to commend their work. While there is a move toward descriptive diagnostic labels in medicine, certain eponyms have entered our everyday language and will likely endure. Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, for example. Hans Asperger, however, neither described Asperger syndrome as we understand it today nor merits commendation. I have spent seven years researching his past in Nazi Vienna, uncovering his complicity in the Nazi regime and its “euthanasia” program that murdered children considered to be disabled. Contrary to Asperger’s reputation as a resister in the Third Reich, he approved the transfer of dozens of children to Vienna's killing center, Spiegelgrund, where they perished. He publicly spoke—and published—about the need to send the most “difficult cases” to Spiegelgrund. He was also close colleagues with top euthanasia figures in Vienna, including Erwin Jekelius, the director of Spiegelgrund, who was engaged to Hitler’s sister. Nazi ideology shaped Asperger’s research. Children in the Third Reich were to display community spirit, being enthusiastic participants in collective activities such as the Hitler youth. In Germany in the 1930s, Nazi psychiatrists identified children whom they believed lacked social feeling, unable to join the national community. Asperger, in his early 30s, warned against classifying children, arguing that they should be regarded as individuals. But right after the Third Reich annexed Austria in 1938—and the purge of his Jewish and liberal associates from the University of Vienna—Asperger followed his senior colleagues in Nazi child psychiatry and introduced his own diagnosis of social detachment: “autistic psychopathy.” © 2018 Scientific American,

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 24937 - Posted: 05.03.2018

By JANE E. BRODY I had hoped that by now most adults in this country would have completed an advance directive for medical care and assigned someone they trusted to represent their wishes if and when they are unable to speak for themselves. Alas, at last count, barely more than one-third have done so, with the rest of Americans leaving it up to the medical profession and ill-prepared family members to decide when and how to provide life-prolonging treatments. But even the many who, like me, have done due diligence — completed the appropriate forms, selected a health care agent and expressed their wishes to whoever may have to make medical decisions for them — may not realize that the documents typically do not cover a likely scenario for one of the leading causes of death in this country: dementia. Missing in standard documents, for example, are specific instructions about providing food and drink by hand as opposed to through a tube. Advanced dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, is the sixth leading cause of death overall in the United States. It is the fifth leading cause for people over 65, and the third for those over 85. Yet once the disease approaches its terminal stages, patients are unable to communicate their desires for or against life-prolonging therapies, some of which can actually make their last days more painful and hasten their demise. End of Life Choices New York is trying to change that and has created an advance directive that it hopes will become a prototype for the rest of the country. (Washington State has already developed its own, though somewhat different, document.) © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 24936 - Posted: 05.03.2018

Beth Darnall Last month, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) formally launched a multi-agency effort to combat the country’s opioid-addiction crisis. Funds for research into controlling opioid misuse and treating pain will nearly double in 2018, to US$1.1 billion. The forces behind this epidemic extend beyond overprescription: most of the tens of thousands of deaths caused by opioid overdose in the United States each year result from illicit use. Still, an inadequate understanding about how to treat pain has certainly contributed. We need to characterize patients better, and we need more studies that incorporate non-drug treatments alongside any form of medication. Consider this crucial question: what is the first treatment you should give a person for chronic pain, or even many acute injuries? Most clinicians now agree that the answer should not be opioids. Fewer recognize that the question is not which pill to use instead, but what system of interventions — including medication — and monitoring to implement. Too often, pain is treated as a purely biomedical problem. It is a biopsychosocial condition. Psychological treatment can be combined with medication to equip people with the tools to better control their pain experience. Psychological therapies can also lower risks such as addiction, because the emphasis is on engaging patients in managing their daily actions to help themselves to feel better in the long run, rather than relying solely on passive medications. Yet a common clinical practice is to recommend such psychosocial strategies for pain only after all medications have failed. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 24935 - Posted: 05.03.2018

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Taking saunas may reduce the risk for stroke. Researchers studied 1,628 men and women aged 53 to 74, free of stroke at the start. They had data on body mass index, alcohol consumption, smoking, blood pressure, blood lipid levels, and other health and behavioral characteristics that affect cardiovascular health. The participants reported how often they took traditional Finnish saunas and how long they stayed in the sauna, and the researchers followed them for an average of 15 years. There were 155 strokes over the period. The study is in the journal Neurology. After adjusting for other variables, they found that compared with people who took saunas once a week, those who took them two to three times weekly were 12 percent less likely to have a stroke. People who took saunas four to seven times a week reduced their risk for stroke by 62 percent. Although the researchers found a strong effect independent of other variables, the study was observational and cannot prove causality. Still, there are plausible reasons saunas might be protective. “Temperature increases, even of 1 or 2 degrees Celsius, can limit inflammatory processes in the body and reduce arterial stiffness,” said the senior author, Dr. Jari A. Laukkanen, a professor of medicine at the University of Eastern Finland. “It’s possible that steam rooms or hot tubs could produce similar results.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 24934 - Posted: 05.03.2018

Jake Harper To the untrained, the evidence looks promising for a new medical device to ease opioid withdrawal. A small study shows that people feel better when the device, an electronic nerve stimulator called the Bridge, is placed behind their ear. The company that markets the Bridge is using the study results to promote its use to anyone who will listen: policymakers, criminal justice officials and health care providers. The message is working. In the face of a nationwide crisis of opioid addiction, people are eager for new solutions. Criminal justice officials in multiple states have started Bridge pilot programs. At least one such program in Indiana received state funds. Providers with a major hospital chain in Indiana began prescribing the Bridge. And politicians in Indiana, Utah and Ohio publicly touted the device. Innovative Health Solutions, the device maker, has marketed the Bridge for opioid withdrawal for more than a year, even before it had clearance for that use from the Food and Drug Administration. Then, last November, the Versailles, Ind.-based company got that, too. Citing the study, the FDA allowed the Bridge to be promoted for opioid withdrawal. Indiana State Sen. Jim Merritt, a Republican who is known for sponsoring legislation addressing the opioid crisis, held an effusive press conference after the FDA gave its OK to the Bridge. "People will detox," he told reporters. "They will withdraw from drugs if it's a simpler process, and this is it." © 2018 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24933 - Posted: 05.02.2018

By Dana G. Smith You don’t remember it, but you woke up at least 100 times last night. These spontaneous arousals, lasting less than 15 seconds each, occur roughly every five minutes and don’t seem to affect how well-rested you feel. They are unrelated to waking up from a bad dream or your partner tossing and turning. Instead, they seem to be linked to some internal biological mechanism. Frequently waking up throughout the night may have protected early humans from predators by increasing their awareness of their surroundings during sleep. “The likelihood someone would notice an animal is higher [if they] wake up more often,” says Ronny Bartsch, a senior lecturer in the Department of Physics at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. “When you wake up, you’re more prone to hear things. In deep sleep, you’re completely isolated.” Sleep scientists, however, have been stumped as to what triggers these nocturnal disruptions. In a new Science Advances paper Bartsch proposes an innovative hypothesis that spontaneous arousals are due to random electrical activity in a specific set of neurons in the brain—aptly named the wake-promoting neurons. Even when you are asleep your brain cells continuously buzz with a low level of electrical activity akin to white noise on the radio. Occasionally, this electrical clamor reaches a threshold that triggers the firing of neurons. The new paper suggests that when random firing occurs in the wake-promoting neurons, a person briefly jerks awake. But this is countered by a suite of sleep-promoting neurons that helps one quickly fall back to sleep. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 24932 - Posted: 05.02.2018

Nicola Davis MDMA, the main ingredient of the party drug ecstasy, could help reduce symptoms among those living with post-traumatic stress disorder, research suggests. Post-traumatic stress disorder is commonly treated with drugs, psychotherapies or both. However, some find little benefit, with certain talking therapies linked to high dropout rates. Now scientists have released the latest of several small studies showing that MDMA, when combined with talking therapies, could prove effective in reducing symptoms. “It is thought that the MDMA is catalysing the therapy, [rather than] just being effective on its own,” said Dr Allison Feduccia, co-author of the research by the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation, a US-based charity focused on research into MDMA and psychotherapy, which funded the study. Feduccia added that MDMA affected levels of certain chemicals in the brain and helped individuals become more emotionally engaged in the therapy. The study is one of six that has led the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to designate MDMA as a “breakthrough therapy” for PTSD and approve the next stage of clinical trials – so called “phase three”– which must be passed before the approach can be made available to patients. “We’re starting the first phase three trial [this month],” said Feduccia. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Stress; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24931 - Posted: 05.02.2018

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Small amounts of exercise could have an outsize effect on happiness. According to a new review of research about good moods and physical activity, people who work out even once a week or for as little as 10 minutes a day tend to be more cheerful than those who never exercise. And any type of exercise may be helpful. The idea that moving can affect our moods is not new. Many of us would probably say that we feel less cranky or more relaxed after a jog or visit to the gym. Science would generally agree with us. A number of past studies have noted that physically active people have much lower risks of developing depression and anxiety than people who rarely move. But that research centered on the relationships between exercise and psychological problems like depression and anxiety. Fewer past studies explored links between physical activity and upbeat emotions, especially in people who already were psychologically healthy, and those studies often looked at a single age group or type of exercise. On their own, they do not tell us much about the amounts or types of exercise that might best lift our moods, or whether most of us might expect to find greater happiness with regular exercise or only certain groups of people. So for the new review, which was published last month in The Journal of Happiness Studies, researchers at the University of Michigan decided to aggregate and analyze multiple past studies of working out and happiness. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 24930 - Posted: 05.02.2018

Nicola Davis Brain tumour research is to get an £18 million injection of funding to aid projects ranging from exploring how such cancers begin to developing new ways to treat them. More than 250,000 people worldwide, including 11,400 people in the UK alone, are diagnosed with a brain tumour every year and often the prognosis is bleak. According to Cancer Research UK figures, just 14% of those diagnosed survive for 10 years or more, while less than 1% of brain tumours are preventable. The disease was recently thrown into the spotlight after Tessa Jowell, the former Labour minister, revealed she has terminal brain cancer. Among the reasons why treatments have proved elusive, experts say, are that brain tumours show a lot of variation from person to person, are often diagnosed at an advanced stage, and are often resistant to treatments used for other cancers, with the blood-brain barrier also preventing some drugs from reaching the cancer. Also, as the cancer is in the brain, it is not possible to remove large amounts of tissue during surgery. “The human brain has about 100bn neurons and each of those neurons connects to tens of thousands of other neurons – it is incredibly complex,” said Dr Iain Foulkes, CRUK’s executive director of research and innovation. “What we are trying to do here is understand one of the most complex diseases known to humankind, which is cancer, in the most complex of organs. So it is a big challenge.” © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 24929 - Posted: 05.02.2018

By Roni Dengler Hoary bats are habitual squawkers. Sporting frosted brown fur á la Guy Fieri, the water balloon–size bats bark high-pitched yips to navigate the dark night sky by echolocation. But a new study reveals that as they fly, those cries often drop to a whisper, or even silence, suggesting the bats may steer themselves through the darkness with some of the quietest sonar on record. To find out how hoary bats navigate, researchers used infrared cameras and ultrasonic microphones to record scores of them flying through a riverside corridor in California on five autumn nights. In about half of the nearly 80 flights, scientists captured a novel type of call. Shorter, faster, and quieter than their usual calls, the new “micro” calls use three orders of magnitude less sound energy than other bats’ yaps did, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. As bats approached objects, they would often quickly increase the volume of their calls. But in close to half the flights, researchers did not pick up any calls at all. This stealth flying mode may explain one sad fact of hoary bat life: They suffer more fatal run-ins with wind turbines than other bat species in North America. The microcalls are so quiet that they reduce the distance over which bats can detect large and small objects by more than three times. That also cuts bats’ reaction time by two-thirds, making them too slow to catch their insect prey. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 24928 - Posted: 05.02.2018

Helen Thompson In the pitch-black waters beneath the Arctic ice, bowhead whales get funky. A small population of endangered bowheads belt an unusually varied repertoire of songs, which grows more diverse during mating season. Hunted to near extinction in the 1600s, these fire truck–sized mammals now number in the 300s in the frigid waters around the Svalbard archipelago in Norway. Underwater audio recorders captured the whales singing 184 acoustically distinct songs from October to April in 2010 through 2014. On the bowhead charts, a song's popularity is fleeting. Most recorded songs were heard for less than 100 hours total, although one song registered over 730 hours total. Some songs appeared in more than one month, but none repeated annually. December and January, likely the height of breeding season, saw a wider array of new bowhead songs than other months, researchers report in the April Biology Letters. Hearing a more distinct mixtape may play a role in enticing a female to mate. A hot cetacean band The Spitzbergen bowhead whale songbook contains a wide variety of tunes, and some stick around on the charts longer than others. Here each bubble corresponds to one of the 184 songs recorded by researchers from 2010 to 2014. The size of the bubble corresponds to the number of hours it was sung. Click on any of the dark green bubbles to hear that whale’s song. Groups of humpback whales don't change their tunes much in a given year, compared with bowheads. Only a few songbird species boast similar diversity. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24927 - Posted: 05.01.2018

by Eli Rosenberg At least a dozen and a half people have been diagnosed with a rare form of eye cancer in two locations in North Carolina and Alabama, leaving medical experts mystified about the cause. Ocular melanoma occurs in about 6 out of every 1 million people, according to CBS News, and at least 18 people who have been diagnosed with the eye cancer have connections to Huntersville, N.C., Auburn, Ala., or both locations. Marlana Orloff, an oncologist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, is studying the cases with her colleagues, according to CBS. “Most people don’t know anyone with this disease,” Orloff said. “We said, 'Okay, these girls were in this location, they were all definitively diagnosed with this very rare cancer — what’s going on?’ ” Alabama health officials have declined to call the outbreak a cluster yet. Three friends, Juleigh Green, Allison Allred and Ashley McCrary, are among those who have been treated for the cancer, and two of them, Green and Allred, had to get an eye removed. “What’s crazy is literally standing there, I was like, ‘Well, I know two people who’ve had this cancer,’ ” McCrary said. Many of the patients are now traveling to Philadelphia for treatment. The cancer has presented complications for some of the patients, CBS reported. Lori Lee, an Auburn University graduate, had the cancer metastasize in her liver. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 24926 - Posted: 05.01.2018

By Kerry Grens Neena Schwartz, a reproductive biologist at Northwestern University who discovered the hormone inhibin and its role in the regulation of reproductive cycles, died this month (April 15). She was 91. “She was a tremendous scientist, a pioneer for women in the sciences, and a leader in our discipline of endocrinology,” Teresa Woodruff and Kelly Mayo, both of Northwestern University, write in a memorial in Endocrine News. Among numerous leadership roles throughout her career, Schwartz founded the American Women in Science (AWIS) in 1971 and was a president of the Endocrine Society in the early 1980s. Schwartz was born in Baltimore, earned her undergraduate degree from Goucher College, and received her doctorate from Northwestern University in 1953. After a faculty position at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, she joined Northwestern in 1973 and remained as a professor there until her retirement in 1999. Her early work focused on rats’ hormonal cycles, and the insight she derived from her studies contributed to a basic understanding of the so-called HPG axis, the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal crosstalk of hormones that controls reproduction. Schwartz later discovered a peptide-based feedback system controlling hormone levels in the ovaries, and described the hormone inhibin, which blocks follicle stimulating hormone (FSH). The presence of inhibin had been proposed decades earlier, but nobody had searched for it in the follicle fluid of ovaries—until Schwartz and her colleague at the University of Maryland, Cornelia Channing took up the cause. Channing had sent Schwartz the fluid, and Schwartz found that it made FSH levels drop. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 24925 - Posted: 05.01.2018

Jon Hamilton Military personnel may be endangering their own brains when they operate certain shoulder-fired weapons, according to an Army-commissioned report released Monday. The report, from the Center for a New American Security, says these bazooka-like weapons pose a hazard because they are powered by an explosion just inches from the operator's head. "When you fire it, the pressure wave feels like getting hit in the face," says Paul Scharre, a former Army Ranger who directs the technology and national security program at the Center. Scharre is a co-author of the center's report: Protecting Warfighters from Blast Injury. The report looks at a range of injuries caused by blast waves — pulses of high pressure air that emanate from an explosion and travel faster than the speed of sound. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, military officials recognized that the blast wave from a roadside bomb could damage a person's brain without leaving any visible sign of injury. And in 2010, the Pentagon issued a memo outlining steps to improve care of troops exposed to these explosions. Since then, there's been growing evidence that blasts from weapons like the Carl Gustav recoilless rifle and the AT4 anti-tank weapon can also affect the brain. S © 2018 npr

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 24924 - Posted: 04.30.2018