Bruce Bower Ancient surgeons may have practiced dangerous skull-opening procedures on cows before operating on people. A previously excavated cow skull from a roughly 5,400- to 5,000-year-old settlement in France contains a surgically created hole on the right side, a new study finds. No signs of bone healing, which start several days after an injury, appear around the opening. One or more people may have rehearsed surgical techniques on a dead cow, or may have tried unsuccessfully to save a sick cow’s life in what would be the oldest known case of veterinary surgery, researchers conclude online April 19 in Scientific Reports. Evidence of skull surgery on humans, whether for medical or ritual reasons, goes back about 11,000 years (SN: 5/28/16, p. 12). Ancient surgeons needed to know how and where to scrape away bone without harming brain tissue and blood vessels. So practicing bone removal on cows or other animals is plausible. The ancient cow’s skull opening, shaped almost in a square and framed by scrape marks, resembles two instances of human skull surgery from around the same time in France, say biological anthropologists Fernando Ramirez Rozzi of CNRS in Montrouge, France, and Alain Froment of IRD-Museum of Man in Paris. Microscopic and X-ray analyses found no fractures or splintered bone that would have resulted from goring by another cow’s horn. No damage typical of someone having struck the cow’s head with a club or other weapon appeared, either. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018. All

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 24883 - Posted: 04.21.2018

Jon Hamilton The words "dog" and "fog" sound pretty similar. Yet even a preschooler knows whether you're talking about a puppy or the weather. Now scientists at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., have identified a two-step process that helps our brains learn to first recognize, then categorize new sounds even when the differences are subtle. And it turns out the process is very similar to the way the human brain categorizes visual information, the Georgetown team reports Wednesday in the journal Neuron. "That's very exciting because it suggests there are general principles at work here of how the brain makes sense of the world," says Maximilian Riesenhuber, an author of the study and a professor in Georgetown University School of Medicine's Department of Neuroscience. The finding also could help explain what goes wrong in disorders like dyslexia, which can impair the brain's ability to make sense of what it sees and hears, Riesenhuber says. The research began as an effort to understand how the brain is able to accomplish feats like recognizing a familiar word, even when it's spoken with an accent or unusual pronunciation. "You hear my voice," says Riesenhuber, who has a slight German accent. "You've probably never heard me before. But you can hopefully recognize what I'm saying." © 2018 npr

Keyword: Animal Communication; Hearing
Link ID: 24882 - Posted: 04.19.2018

Maria Temming There’s a fine line between immersive and unnerving when it comes to touch sensation in virtual reality. More realistic tactile feedback in VR can ruin a user’s feeling of immersion, researchers report online April 18 in Science Robotics. The finding suggests that the “uncanny valley” — a term that describes how humanoid robots that look almost but not quite human are creepier than their more cartoonish counterparts — also applies to virtual touch (SN Online: 11/22/13). Experiment participants wearing VR headsets and gripping a controller in each hand embodied a virtual avatar holding the two ends of a stick. At first, users felt no touch sensation. Then, the hand controllers gave equally strong vibrations every half-second. Finally, the vibrations were finely tuned to create the illusion that the virtual stick was being touched in different spots. For instance, stronger vibrations in the right controller gave the impression that the stick was nudged on that side. Compared with scenarios in which users received either no touch or even buzzing sensations, participants reported feeling far less immersed in the virtual environment when they received the realistic, localized touch. This result demonstrates the existence of a tactile uncanny valley, says study coauthor Mar Gonzalez-Franco, a human-computer interaction researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Emotions
Link ID: 24881 - Posted: 04.19.2018

/ By Madeline Bodin This winter was a little quieter than usual for the folks at Silver Creek Specialty Meats in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. For generations, winter was when hunters would make regular visits to the low-rise white brick facility near the shore of Lake Winnebago, carrying the odds and ends of the deer they had killed the previous fall so it could be turned into venison sausages. This year, though, no hunters came. “It’s not quite black and white. What do we do in the meantime?” In August, Silver Creek Specialty Meats sent out a letter notifying customers that it would no longer accept venison for processing. “As you are probably aware,” the letter said, “chronic wasting disease in the wild deer population of the State of Wisconsin has been steadily spreading. The disease has now been found in wild deer in 19 counties throughout the state. Due to the spread of the disease it has become extremely difficult to screen out any venison coming from CWD infected areas.” Deer with chronic wasting disease, or CWD, tremble and drool. They often cannot hold their heads up. Eventually, they lose so much weight that they are little more than hide and bone. The disease arises from a particular prion — single-protein infectious agents linked to various neurodegenerative diseases in mammals. And prion diseases are always fatal. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 24880 - Posted: 04.19.2018

Tor Wager Two soldiers receive similar injuries in battle. One recovers in months; the other endures excruciating pain for years. Why this difference? The question is pressing. One in five people suffers from chronic pain, affecting every aspect of their lives. Although significant gains have been made with anaesthetics and anti-inflammatory medications, the roots and relief of long-term pain are proving harder to find. Pain is also fuelling a global epidemic of opioid addiction and related deaths. In Chasing Men on Fire, neurologist Stephen Waxman provides a compelling portrait of scientific discovery in this area. Waxman, who works in basic research and clinical medicine, offers an insider’s account of the global search for a pain gene, beginning in 1966. He intertwines descriptions of cross-disciplinary neuroscience with portraits of scientists, and the struggles of people with conditions such as erythromelalgia, or ‘man-on-fire syndrome’, characterized by burning pain in hands and feet. Structurally, the book is innovative: 11 research papers are interlaced with the stories behind them. It is thus both a boon for researchers and an engrossing read for nonspecialists. Humans love simplicity. We want the intricate systems in our brains and bodies to ‘just work’. But Waxman shows that biology is complex, and genetic clues can be elusive. Detecting them relies on finding regularities across many people, which can make it seem impossible to pinpoint a key gene, and the rare mutations in it that lead to disease. As he reveals, it took considerable sifting and coordinated effort on three continents by scientists including pharmacologists, electrophysiologists, molecular biologists and geneticists before a ‘master gene’ for pain was isolated. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 24879 - Posted: 04.19.2018

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR A traumatic brain injury, even a mild concussion, increases the risk for Parkinson’s disease, a new study reports. Researchers identified all patients diagnosed with T.B.I. in a Veterans Health Administration database — 162,935 men and women — and matched them with the same number of people with similar health and behavioral characteristics but who had not had a brain injury. The study is in Neurology. Of the T.B.I. cases, half were mild, involving a blow to the head with some subsequent symptoms but with little or no unconsciousness. The rest were moderate to severe, involving extended unconsciousness or long-term symptoms. After controlling for age, race, income and many medical and psychiatric diseases, they found that compared with those who had had no T.B.I., those with a mild T.B.I. had a 56 percent increased risk for Parkinson’s disease; those with moderate to severe T.B.I. had an 83 percent increased risk. “We don’t have brain biopsies, so we don’t know what the underlying biology is,” said the lead author, Dr. Raquel C. Gardner, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco. “But in Parkinson’s you see abnormal protein accumulation, and there’s some evidence that T.B.I. is linked to deposits of these abnormal proteins.” In any case, she said, “This study provides the most definitive evidence that there is this association.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Parkinsons
Link ID: 24878 - Posted: 04.19.2018

Lynne Peeples Carole Godain remembers a lot of the little details from the clinical trial she took part in nine years ago. There was the blue button she pushed to get her chemotherapy drugs, and the green light that came on to confirm that the medication was dripping into her veins. Then, of course, there was the hour — 10:00 p.m. without fail, for every treatment. By all accounts, Godain’s own time was running short. The first treatment for her colon cancer had failed, and her last body scan had revealed 27 tumours growing inside her liver. So the psychologist from Tours, France, jumped at the opportunity to take part in a trial at Paul Brousse hospital in Villejuif, which aimed to test whether delivering drugs at a specific time of day might make them more effective or reduce their toxic side effects. Ideally, it would accomplish both. “I was interested in increasing my chances of being cured,” says Godain. Today, at the age of 43, she is cancer-free. And Francis Lévi, the oncologist who treated Godain, says that although such an amazing result is anomalous, emerging evidence should encourage more interest in the concept of chronotherapy — scheduling treatments so that they provide the most help and do the least harm. More than four decades of studies describe how accounting for the body’s cycle of daily rhythms — its circadian clock — can influence responses to medications and procedures for everything from asthma to epileptic seizures. Research suggests that the majority of today’s best-selling drugs, including heartburn medications and treatments for erectile dysfunction, work better when taken at specific times of day. “When you give a medication, you always know the dose,” says Lévi, who also now works at Warwick Medical School in Coventry, UK, where he leads a team associated with INSERM, the French national biomedical research agency. “We have found that the timing is sometimes more important than the dose.” © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 24877 - Posted: 04.18.2018

By Ashley Yeager Brain organoids, also known as mini-brains, are tiny clumps of brain cells grown from stem cells that researchers are using to investigate the neural underpinnings of autism and other neurological disorders. But the organoids typically grow in culture for only a few months before they die, limiting their usefulness as models of real brains. Transplanting the three-dimensional clumps of human brain tissue into the brains of mice allows the organoids to continue to develop, sprouting life-sustaining blood vessels as well as new neuronal connections, the new study reports. The work takes a step toward using brain organoids to study complexities of human brain development and disease that can’t be investigated with current techniques. Brain organoid transplantation may even one day offer a treatment option for traumatic brain injury or stroke. “Although organoids are a great advance in human neuroscience, they are not perfect. They are missing blood vessels, immune cells and functional connections to other areas of the nervous system,” Jürgen Knoblich, a molecular biologist at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna who was not involved in the study, tells The Scientist by email. “The goal of the transplantation experiments is to show that integration with those other tissues is possible.” Study coauthor Fred “Rusty” Gage, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues first started thinking about the health of brain organoids a few years ago when they began working with the structures. Many cells in the center of the 3-D clump of tissue would die, Gage tells The Scientist. “Those cells weren’t getting the blood and nutrients they needed to survive.” © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24876 - Posted: 04.18.2018

By BENEDICT CAREY In a widely read article on antidepressant withdrawal published on April 8, The New York Times invited readers to describe their experiences coming off the drugs. More than 8,800 people responded — teenagers, college students, new mothers, empty-nesters retirees. Dozens did write in to say the drugs had been lifesaving, literally so. “You fail to acknowledge that mood disorders can be lifelong, debilitating diseases requiring lifelong medical treatment,” wrote Rachel S., of New York. A different kind of reader query would likely have attracted thousands of responses of gratitude for drugs that offered relief to tens of millions of people with chronic mood problems. Some doctors chimed in, too, more than one calling our focus on withdrawal irresponsible and unduly alarming to those who might benefit from antidepressants. The volume and diversity of the other responses painted a different picture, showing how modern antidepressants, beginning with Prozac in 1987, have percolated through our culture and have shaped public understanding of mental health. These stories traced sharp demographic fault lines: Readers of different generations came to antidepressants, and tried to quit them, for different reasons. Readers in my age group and older (I’m 58) often came of age in an era in which depression was considered somehow a lapse in character. These readers typically reported having started on Prozac or one of its early competitors — Paxil, Zoloft — very often after a major setback like divorce, or the loss of a job, spouse or child. “My G.P. put me on Zoloft 28 years ago to deal with my husband’s cancer diagnosis,” wrote Carole Wilson, 74, of Alburnett, Iowa. Her husband has since died. “I have cut down from 200 milligrams to 100, but when I go lower I get horrible side effects, like nausea, jumpiness, crying a lot which I never do. I’m nearly 75; at this point I will continue because I cannot go through the withdrawal.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 24875 - Posted: 04.18.2018

by Lauren Neergaard It’s pretty extraordinary for people in their 80s and 90s to keep the same sharp memory as someone several decades younger, so scientists are peeking into the brains of“superagers” who do to uncover their secret. The work is the flip side of the disappointing hunt for new drugs to fight or prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Instead of tackling that problem, “why don’t we figure out what it is we might need to do to maximize our memory?” said neuro­scientist Emily Rogalski, who leads the SuperAging study at Northwestern University in Chicago. Parts of the brain shrink with age, one of the reasons that most people experience a gradual slowing of at least some types of memory late in life. But it turns out that superagers’ brains aren’t shrinking nearly as fast as their peers’. And autopsies of the first superagers to die during the study show they harbor a lot more of a special kind of nerve cell in a deep-brain region that’s important for attention, Rogalski told a recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. These elite elders are “more than just an oddity or a rarity,” said neuroscientist Molly Wagster of the National Institute on Aging, which helps fund the research. “There’s the potential for learning an enormous amount and applying it to the rest of us, and even to those who may be on a trajectory for some type of neurodegenerative disease.” © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24874 - Posted: 04.17.2018

Mariarosaria Taddeo and Luciano Floridi. Cyberattacks are becoming more frequent, sophisticated and destructive. Each day in 2017, the United States suffered, on average, more than 4,000 ransomware attacks, which encrypt computer files until the owner pays to release them1. In 2015, the daily average was just 1,000. In May last year, when the WannaCry virus crippled hundreds of IT systems across the UK National Health Service, more than 19,000 appointments were cancelled. A month later, the NotPetya ransomware cost pharmaceutical giant Merck, shipping firm Maersk and logistics company FedEx around US$300 million each. Global damages from cyberattacks totalled $5 billion in 2017 and may reach $6 trillion a year by 2021 (see go.nature.com/2gncsyg). Countries are partly behind this rise. They use cyberattacks both offensively and defensively. For example, North Korea has been linked to WannaCry, and Russia to NotPetya. As the threats escalate, so do defence tactics. Since 2012, the United States has used ‘active’ cyberdefence strategies, in which computer experts neutralize or distract viruses with decoy targets, or break into a hacker’s computer to delete data or destroy the system. In 2016, the United Kingdom announced a 5-year, £1.9-billion (US$2.7-billion) plan to combat cyber threats. NATO also began drafting principles for active cyberdefence, to be agreed by 2019. The United States and the United Kingdom are leading this initiative. Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Spain are also involved (see go.nature.com/2hebxnt). © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Intelligence; Robotics
Link ID: 24873 - Posted: 04.17.2018

/ By Joshua Brockman In May of last year, Dr. Chad Brummett spent part of a weekend in an Ann Arbor high school parking lot ensuring that the no-questions-asked drug take-back program he co-directs — called the Michigan Opioid Prescribing Engagement Network (Michigan OPEN) — went off without a hitch. The program is designed to give consumers in the area a convenient place to drop off unused or excess medications — ostensibly so they don’t end up being dumped or flushed into the environment, or land in the streets as part of the nation’s unchecked opioid epidemic. “We believe these programs may be an effective part of an all-of-the-above strategy.” Among the people stopping by that day, Brummett recalled: his own local pharmacist. “I thought that was really an eye-opening moment when I had my pharmacist attend the event to dispose of his pills,” said Brummett, who is also an associate professor of anesthesiology and the director of the Division of Pain Research at the University of Michigan. “I mean the irony is pretty deep, right?” According to a new analysis from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), some 4 million Americans reported misusing prescriptions in the prior month, and deaths related to opioid abuse are skyrocketing. Most people, the GAO suggests, get these drugs from friends or relatives, so providing a safe and convenient way for consumers to return unused medications, the thinking goes, could help. Currently, there are three approaches to disposing of unused prescription drugs that are sanctioned by the Drug Enforcement Administration. These include special disposal bins installed at pharmacies or other registered entities, mail-back programs, and take-back events like Brummett’s. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Depression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 24872 - Posted: 04.17.2018

By NATALIE ANGIER A friend will help you move, goes an old saying, while a good friend will help you move a body. And why not? Moral qualms aside, that good friend would likely agree the victim was an intolerable jerk who had it coming and, jeez, you shouldn’t have done this but where do you keep the shovel? Researchers have long known that people choose friends who are much like themselves in a wide array of characteristics: of a similar age, race, religion, socioeconomic status, educational level, political leaning, pulchritude rating, even handgrip strength. The impulse toward homophily, toward bonding with others who are the least other possible, is found among traditional hunter-gatherer groups and advanced capitalist societies alike. New research suggests the roots of friendship roots extend even deeper than previously suspected. Scientists have found that the brains of close friends respond in remarkably similar ways as they view a series of short videos: the same ebbs and swells of attention and distraction, the same peaking of reward processing here, boredom alerts there. The neural response patterns evoked by the videos — on subjects as diverse as the dangers of college football, the behavior of water in outer space, and Liam Neeson trying his hand at improv comedy — proved so congruent among friends, compared to patterns seen among people who were not friends, that the researchers could predict the strength of two people’s social bond based on their brain scans alone. “I was struck by the exceptional magnitude of similarity among friends,” said Carolyn Parkinson, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. The results “were more persuasive than I would have thought.” Dr. Parkinson and her colleagues, Thalia Wheatley and Adam M. Kleinbaum of Dartmouth College, reported their results in Nature Communications. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 24871 - Posted: 04.16.2018

Ketamine has "shown promise" in the rapid treatment of major depression and suicidal thoughts, a US study says. Ketamine has a reputation as a party drug but is licensed as an anaesthetic. The study found use of the drug via a nasal spray led to "significant" improvements in depressive symptoms in the first 24 hours. The Royal College of Psychiatrists said it was a "significant" study that brought the drug "a step closer to being prescribed on the NHS". The report by researchers from Janssen Research and Development, a Johnson and Johnson company, and Yale School of Medicine, is the first study into ketamine as a treatment for depression that has been done by a drug company. It is being published in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The trial looked at 68 people at imminent risk of suicide. All patients were treated with a stay in hospital and anti-depressants. In addition, half were given ketamine in the form of esketamine (part of the ketamine molecule) in a nasal spray and half were given a placebo. The study found those using esketamine had a much greater improvement in depression symptoms at all points over the first four weeks of treatment. However, at 25 days the effects had levelled out. The study's authors suggest it could offer an effective rapid treatment for people severely depressed and at imminent risk of suicide and could help in the initial stages of treatment, as most anti-depressants take four to six weeks to become fully effective. The nasal spray is now undergoing phase three trials before it can be licensed for treatment. © 2018 BBC.

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24870 - Posted: 04.16.2018

By CLYDE HABERMAN Scrambling for ways to contain America’s out-of-control opioid crisis, some experts in the field are convinced that one bit of good advice is to just say no to the enduring “just say no” antidrug message. Addiction, they say, is not a question of free will or a correctable character flaw, as a lot of people would like to believe. Rather, it is an affliction of the brain that needs to be treated as one would any chronic illness. One possible approach, an experimental vaccine, draws attention in this offering from Retro Report, a series of short video documentaries exploring major news stories of the past and their lasting impact. This vaccine would be intended principally for men and women already hooked on heroin or related opioids like Oxycodone and fentanyl — people who would be at risk of death should they detoxify and then relapse, as all too many do. If it works, the vaccine would stop opioids by effectively blocking them from reaching the brain by way of the circulatory system. At the same time, it would not interfere with other treatments for addicts, like methadone and buprenorphine, or with a compound like naloxone that reverses overdoses. The vaccine is designed to create high levels of antibodies, said Dr. Gary Matyas, an immunologist who has been developing it at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, in Silver Springs, Md. “You inject heroin, the antibodies basically grab all the heroin, bind it all up, and the heroin can’t cross the blood-brain barrier,” he told Retro Report. “And so there’s no high.” Presumably, in time, the heroin would be expelled from the body like any waste product. “It would be part of their therapy for recovering,” Dr. Matyas said of addicts. “If they mess up and take a dose of heroin, the heroin won’t work.” But will the vaccine itself work? It still must be tested on humans, and that is not a speedy process; it could take a decade or more, Dr. Matyas said, for there to be “a licensed product.” Among the questions are how large the dosages would have to be and how often they would need to be administered. Nonetheless, he is encouraged by the success he has had with lab mice and rats. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24869 - Posted: 04.16.2018

Omega-3 fatty acid supplements taken orally proved no better than placebo at relieving symptoms or signs of dry eye, according to the findings of a well-controlled trial funded by the National Eye Institute (NEI), part of the National Institutes of Health. Dry eye disease occurs when the film that coats the eye no longer maintains a healthy ocular surface, which can lead to discomfort and visual impairment. The condition affects an estimated 14 percent of adults in the United States. The paper was published online April 13 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Annual sales of fish- and animal-derived supplements amount to more than a $1-billion market in the United States, according to the Nutrition Business Journal. Many formulations are sold over-the-counter, while others require a prescription or are available for purchase from a health care provider. “The trial provides the most reliable and generalizable evidence thus far on omega-3 supplementation for dry eye disease,” said Maryann Redford, D.D.S., M.P.H., program officer for clinical research at NEI. Despite insufficient evidence establishing the effectiveness of omega-3s, clinicians and their patients have been inclined to try the supplements for a variety of conditions with inflammatory components, including dry eye. “This well-controlled investigation conducted by the independently-led Dry Eye Assessment and Management (DREAM) Research Group shows that omega-3 supplements are no better than placebo for typical patients who suffer from dry eye.” The 27-center trial enrolled 535 participants with at least a six-month history of moderate to severe dry eye. Among them, 349 people were randomly assigned to receive 3 grams daily of fish-derived omega-3 fatty acids in five capsules.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 24868 - Posted: 04.16.2018

Merrit Kennedy What makes a group of animals genetically similar to each other? Traditionally, scientists have thought that animals living near each other are more likely to have things in common genetically. Another explanation is that animals living in similar environments — like high altitudes or hot temperatures — might evolve in similar ways. But loggerhead sea turtles appear to have broken that common wisdom. Their genetic similarities are closely linked to the magnetic field of the nesting area where they were born, according to new research from scientists at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, published in Current Biology. And that magnetic imprinting is a better indicator of genetic similarity than that of groups of turtles that live near each other or in similar environments, says J. Roger Brothers, the lead author of the study. "A lot of different animals including sea turtles detect Earth's magnetic field and then derive navigational information from it and use it to find their way across or throughout long-distance migrations," Brothers says. Turtles likely "imprint" to the magnetic field of their nesting area at a very young age or even before they hatch. This acts like a kind of compass for them, he says, even as they leave the East Coast of the U.S. and travel hugely long distances, in some cases all the way to Africa. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 24867 - Posted: 04.14.2018

Jason Bittel In most North American hummingbirds, males court females by diving at them head on — but Costa’s hummingbirds (Calypte costae) perform their courtship dives off to the side. Researchers now find that this strategy allows the males to aim sounds at potential mates as if they were using a megaphone. During high-speed courtship dives, males fan their tails at the last second to create a high-pitched chirp. The faster the dive, the more those tail feathers vibrate and the higher the pitch created by the would-be Romeos. Researchers suspect that females prefer higher-pitched dives, which results in various strategies to boost the frequency of the noise a male makes. A study1 published on 12 April in Current Biology finds that male Costa’s hummingbirds can twist half of their tail feathers in the direction of the female, manipulating the volume and pitch of their chirps (see video). The researchers suspect that the targeted noise also masks audio cues that the females can use to judge how fast the males are diving. “You can think of the feather as being like a flashlight,” says Chris Clark, an ornithologist at the University of California, Riverside. “If you point the flashlight straight at something, the light is much brighter. And if you look at it from the side, at a 90-degree angle, there’s still some light but not nearly as much.” © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 24866 - Posted: 04.14.2018

By Robert F. Service Powerful chemical countermeasures could one day enter the battle against opioid addiction, which killed more than 42,000 people in the United States in 2016. Doctors and first responders already use medications to combat the effects of opioids, including the high and the slowed breathing of an overdose. But the new candidate drugs target the neural circuitry of addiction itself. A compound known as OV329 is the latest addition. In animal studies it quiets the brain's reward system, sharply reducing cravings and halting addicted animals' tendency to self-administer cocaine and other habit-forming drugs. Other drugs in the pipeline also target the reward system, albeit through a different mechanism. All raise hopes that doctors could soon have a new way to treat addiction, and not just to drugs and alcohol. The medicines could potentially also be used to fight food and gambling addictions. "It's a great unmet medical need," says Richard Silverman, a chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who developed OV329. OV329 has now been picked up by Ovid Therapeutics in New York City, which is continuing animal studies and hopes to launch human trials of the would-be drug. "It's a very interesting compound and clearly very promising," says Andrea Hohmann, a neuroscientist at Indiana University in Bloomington who is not involved in the work. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24865 - Posted: 04.13.2018

By Simon Makin Everyone has unwelcome thoughts from time to time. But such intrusions can signal serious psychiatric conditions—from “flashbacks” in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to obsessive negative thinking in depression to hallucinations in schizophrenia. “These are some of the most debilitating symptoms,” says neuroscientist Michael Anderson of the University of Cambridge. New research led by Anderson and neuroscientist Taylor Schmitz, now at McGill University, suggests these symptoms may all stem from a faulty brain mechanism responsible for blocking thoughts. Researchers studying this faculty usually focus on the prefrontal cortex (PFC), a control center that directs the activity of other brain regions. But Anderson and his colleagues noticed that conditions featuring intrusive thoughts—such as schizophrenia—often involve increased activity in the hippocampus, an important memory region. The severity of symptoms such as hallucinations also increases with this elevated activity. In the new study, Anderson and his team had healthy participants learn a series of word pairs. The subjects were presented with one word and had to either recall or suppress the associated one. When participants suppressed thoughts, brain scans detected increased activity in part of the PFC and reduced activity in the hippocampus. The findings, which were published last November in Nature Communications, are consistent with a brain circuit in which a “stop” command from the PFC suppresses hippocampus activity. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 24864 - Posted: 04.13.2018