By Alex Therrien Health reporter, BBC News Smokers need to quit cigarettes rather than cut back on them to significantly lower their risk of heart disease and stroke, a large BMJ study suggests. People who smoked even one cigarette a day were still about 50% more likely to develop heart disease and 30% more likely to have a stroke than people who had never smoked, researchers said. They said it showed there was no safe level of smoking for such diseases. But an expert said people who cut down were more likely to stop. Cardiovascular disease, not cancer, is the greatest mortality risk for smoking, causing about 48% of smoking-related premature deaths. While the percentage of adults in the UK who smoked had been falling, the proportion of people who smoked one to five cigarettes a day had been rising steadily, researchers said. Their analysis of 141 studies, published in the BMJ, indicates a 20-a-day habit would cause seven heart attacks or strokes in a group of 100 middle-aged people. But if they drastically cut back to one a day it would still cause three heart attacks, the research suggests. The researchers said men who smoked one cigarette a day had about a 48% higher risk of developing coronary heart disease and were 25% more likely to have a stroke than those who had never smoked. For women, it was higher - 57% for heart disease and 31% for stroke. Prof Allan Hackshaw at the UCL Cancer Institute at University College London, who led the study, told the BBC: "There's been a trend in quite a few countries for heavy smokers to cut down, thinking that's perfectly fine, which is the case for things like cancer. "But for these two common disorders, which they're probably more likely to get than cancer, it's not the case. They've got to stop completely." © 2018 BBC.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24563 - Posted: 01.25.2018

Ian Sample Science editor In work that could open a new front in the war on Parkinson’s disease, and even ageing itself, scientists have shown that they can stave off some of the effects of the neurodegenerative disease by flushing “zombie cells” from the brain. The research in mice raises hopes for a fresh approach to treating the most common forms of Parkinson’s disease, which typically arise through a complex interplay of genetics, lifestyle and potentially toxic substances in the environment. But the approach may have benefits far beyond Parkinson’s, with other neurodegenerative diseases – and the ageing process more broadly – all being linked to the ill effects of these “senescent” cells, which linger in tissues after entering a state of suspended animation in the body. “It’s a completely new way of looking at neurodegenerative disease and finding potential drugs,” said Marco Demaria, a molecular biologist on the team at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. “For most of these conditions, we don’t have any way to counteract them.” Parkinson’s disease affects about 10 million people worldwide, and usually takes hold when certain types of neurons in the brain become impaired or die off completely. The neurons in question produce a substance called dopamine, which is crucial for enabling the brain to produce smooth and coordinated physical movements. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 24562 - Posted: 01.24.2018

Patti Neighmond Kids who vape and use other forms of e-cigarettes are likely to try more harmful tobacco products like regular cigarettes, but e-cigarettes do hold some promise for helping adults quit. That's according to the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, which published a comprehensive public health review of more than 800 studies on e-cigarettes on Tuesday. "There is conclusive evidence that most products emit a variety of potentially toxic substances. However the number and intensity is highly variable," says David Eaton, who heads the committee that wrote the report. He is also the dean and vice provost of the graduate school of the University of Washington, Seattle. "In some circumstances, such as their use by nonsmoking adolescents and young adults, their adverse effects clearly warrant concern. In other cases, such as when adult smokers use them to quit smoking, they offer an opportunity to reduce smoking-related illness." In fact, 15 of the studies NAS reviewed found that when teens and young adults use e-cigarettes, they are more likely to try regular tobacco within a year. "We found that kids who tried e-cigarettes, hookah, or smokeless tobacco or cigars — any non-cigarette tobacco product — were all twice as likely to try cigarettes a year later, compared to kids who hadn't used any of those other tobacco products," says Shannon Lea Watkins, a public policy researcher at University of California, San Francisco. Watkins and her colleagues also found that the effects of using non-cigarette products compound: "Kids using two or more non-cigarette products were four times as likely to report using cigarettes a year later." © 2018 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24561 - Posted: 01.24.2018

By Giorgia Guglielmi ENIGMA, the world’s largest brain mapping project, was “born out of frustration,” says neuroscientist Paul Thompson of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. In 2009, he and geneticist Nicholas Martin of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane, Australia, were chafing at the limits of brain imaging studies. The cost of MRI scans limited most efforts to a few dozen subjects—too few to draw robust connections about how brain structure is linked to genetic variations and disease. The answer, they realized over a meal at a Los Angeles shopping mall, was to pool images and genetic data from multiple studies across the world. After a slow start, the consortium has brought together nearly 900 researchers across 39 countries to analyze brain scans and genetic data on more than 30,000 people. In an accelerating series of publications, ENIGMA’s crowdsourcing approach is opening windows on how genes and structure relate in the normal brain—and in disease. This week, for example, an ENIGMA study published in the journal Brain compared scans from nearly 4000 people across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Australia to pinpoint unexpected brain abnormalities associated with common epilepsies. ENIGMA is “an outstanding effort. We should all be doing more of this,” says Mohammed Milad, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois in Chicago who is not a member of the consortium. ENIGMA’s founders crafted the consortium’s name—Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis—so that its acronym would honor U.K. mathematician Alan Turing’s code-breaking effort targeting Germany’s Enigma cipher machines during World War II. Like Turing’s project, ENIGMA aims to crack a mystery. Small brain-scanning studies of twins or close relatives done in the 2000s showed that differences in some cognitive and structural brain measures have a genetic basis. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 24560 - Posted: 01.24.2018

By Benjamin W. Nelson, Heidemarie Laurent, Nick Allen, An estimated 1 in 9 women experience symptoms of postpartum depression. These symptoms—including mood swings, fatigue and reduced interest in activities—can make it difficult for mothers to bond with their newborns. Early relationships between mothers and their infants can influence health across the lifespan, for better or worse. For example, adults who report more household dysfunction and abuse during their childhood are more likely to suffer disease as adults. Those with healthy and supportive relationships during early life are better at handling stress and regulating their emotions. Advertisement However, scientists do not completely understand how these environments get “under the skin” to shape health. Our latest paper, published in November, shows a possible link between increasing depression symptoms in mothers and cellular damage in their infants. How does stress affect our cells? One area of burgeoning research focuses on telomeres. Telomeres are caps at the end of our DNA that protect chromosomes. They’re analogous to the plastic tips at the end of shoelaces that keep laces from unraveling. In essence, these plastic caps keep laces functional. The same can be said of your telomeres. Since the length of telomeres is affected by our genetics and age, they’re sometimes thought of as part of a “biological clock” that reflects the age of our cells. As telomeres shorten over time, people are more likely to experience a host of negative health outcomes, such as cardiovascular disease, dementia, diabetes, cancer, obesity and even death. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24559 - Posted: 01.24.2018

By LIZZ SCHUMER It happens every year, and every year, it’s a shock to the system. Nature throws itself one last party, festooning every tree in a crisp blaze of glory. After we’ve digested the last of the spiced cider, after the pumpkins have gone soft, the long, dark days of winter descend. In much of the Northern Hemisphere, December through March brings blustery cold that makes dreary days feel as if we’ve been banished to Siberia. Sound dramatic? Probably not to the roughly 6 percent of Americans suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder. Dr. Norman E. Rosenthal and his colleagues first put a name to the disorder in 1984. Today, it’s characterized as a seasonal pattern of major depressive episodes, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. SAD ranges widely in severity, from the doldrums Dr. Rosenthal calls the “winter blues” to disabling ennui. Its cyclical nature differentiates SAD from major depressive disorder. “We have a tendency to want to blame everything on psychological causes,” Dr. Rosenthal explained. “We overlook the obvious, which is that it’s dark as pea soup outside. That’s why I think [SAD] goes unrecognized — it’s right in front of our noses.” While SAD should be diagnosed and treated by a licensed medical professional, several treatment options have emerged in the decades since it was first recognized. Here are a few ways for patients and their doctors to address the disorder, ranging from most to least widely used. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 24558 - Posted: 01.24.2018

By Abby Olena Studying scorpions comes with its share of danger, as biologist Bryan Fry of the University of Queensland knows all too well. On a 2009 trip to the Brazilian Amazon, Fry was stung while trying to collect the lethal Brazilian yellow scorpion (Tityus serrulatus), and for eight hours he says it felt as though his finger was in a candle flame. Meanwhile, his heart flipped between racing and stopping for up to five seconds at a time. “At least the insane levels of pain helped keep my mind off my failing heart,” Fry writes in an email to The Scientist. His symptoms were caused by an arsenal of toxins in the animal’s sting, which contribute to one of the most painful attacks in the animal kingdom. But at least one mammal—the southern grasshopper mouse (Onychomys torridus)—regularly chows down on Arizona bark scorpions (Centruroides sculpturatus) and doesn’t seem to experience pain, despite receiving plenty of stings. In 2013, Ashlee Rowe, now of Michigan State University, and colleagues showed that bark scorpion venom interacts with the NaV1.8 voltage-gated sodium channel in grasshopper mice, in addition to activating the NaV1.7 channel as it does in other mammals (Science, 342:441-46). Rowe’s team showed that grasshopper mice have evolved amino acid changes in NaV1.8 that allow it to bind scorpion venom components, and in turn prevent the channel’s activation. Because NaV1.8 is responsible for transmitting pain signals to the central nervous system following NaV1.7 binding, blocking its activation prevents the sensation of pain. In other mammals, scorpion venom has no effect on NaV1.8. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 24557 - Posted: 01.24.2018

By Jocelyn Kaiser Scientists who conduct basic behavioral research are bracing for a policy kicking in this week that will impose new rules on their federally funded studies, many of which the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, will now consider clinical trials. Although many researchers maintain that the policy makes no sense and will hinder their work, recent revisions by NIH officials have eased some fears. “There’s still a problem, but the problem is less dire than the original set of concerns that we had,” says cognitive psychologist Jeremy Wolfe of the Harvard University–affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who is also the immediate past president of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences (FABBS) in Washington, D.C. The changes, which take effect for proposals with due dates of 25 January or later, are part of a new clinical trials definition that NIH released in 2014 but only began implementing last year. That was when scientists who use tools such as MRI scans to explore how the normal brain works realized that their studies, which they never thought of as clinical trials because they don’t test drugs or other treatments, fell under the new definition. The change imposed several new requirements on researchers, such as submitting proposals in response to a formal funding opportunity for clinical trials and registering the studies in clinicaltrials.gov, the federal trials database. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 24556 - Posted: 01.24.2018

By Ann Gibbons Humans are the ultimate social animals, with the ability to bond with mates, communicate through language, and make small talk with strangers on a packed bus. (Put chimpanzees in the same situation and most wouldn’t make it off the bus alive.) A new study suggests that the evolution of our unique social intelligence may have initially begun as a simple matter of brain chemistry. Neuroanatomists have been trying for decades to find major differences between the brains of humans and other primates, aside from the obvious brain size. The human brain must have reorganized its chemistry and wiring as early human ancestors began to walk upright, use tools, and develop more complex social networks 6 million to 2 million years ago—well before the brain began to enlarge 1.8 million years ago, according to a hypothesis proposed in the 1960s by physical anthropologist Ralph Holloway of Columbia University. But neurotransmitters aren’t preserved in ancient skulls, so how to spot those changes? One way is to search for key differences in neurochemistry between humans and other primates living today. Mary Ann Raghanti, a biological anthropologist at Kent State University in Ohio, and colleagues got tissue samples from brain banks and zoos of 38 individuals from six species who had died of natural causes: humans, tufted capuchins, pig-tailed macaques, olive baboons, gorillas, and chimpanzees. They sliced sections of basal ganglia—clusters of nerve cells and fibers in a region at the base of the brain known as the striatum, which is a sort of clearinghouse that relays signals from different parts of the brain for movement, learning, and social behavior. They stained these slices with chemicals that react to different types of neurotransmitters, including dopamine, serotonin, and neuropeptide Y—which are associated with sensitivity to social cues and cooperative behavior. Then, they analyzed the slices to measure different levels of neurotransmitters that had been released when the primates were alive. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Aggression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24555 - Posted: 01.23.2018

Harriet Dempsey-Jones Nobody really believes that the shape of our heads are a window into our personalities anymore. This idea, known as “phrenonolgy”, was developed by the German physician Franz Joseph Gall in 1796 and was hugely popular in the 19th century. Today it is often remembered for its dark history – being misused in its later days to back racist and sexist stereoptypes, and its links with Nazi “eugenics”. But despite the fact that it has fallen into disrepute, phrenology as a science has never really been subjected to rigorous, neuroscientific testing. That is, until now. Researchers at the University of Oxford have hacked their own brain scanning software to explore – for the first time – whether there truly is any correspondence between the bumps and contours of your head and aspects of your personality. The results have recently been published in an open science archive, but have also been submitted to the journal Cortex. But why did phrenologists think that bumps on your head might be so informative? Their enigmatic claims were based around a few general principles. Phrenologists believed the brain was comprised of separate “organs” responsible for different aspects of the mind, such as for self-esteem, cautiousness and benevolence. They also thought of the brain like a muscle – the more you used a particular organ the more it would grow in size (hypertrophy), and less used faculties would shrink. The skull would then mould to accommodate these peaks and troughs in the brain’s surface – providing an indirect reflection of the brain, and thus, the dominant features of an person’s character. © 2010–2018, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 24554 - Posted: 01.23.2018

Nicola Davis Whether stalking down the stairs or tiptoeing into the litter box, cats have a preference for which paw they put forward, according to new research, with females favouring their right paw and males their left. Scientists say that while such preferences are a matter of individual inclination, males generally prefer stepping out with their left foot, while females typically favour their right. The team say understanding paw preference could offer insights into an animal’s vulnerability to stress. “Left-limbed animals, which rely more heavily on their right hemisphere for processing information, tend to show stronger fear responses, aggressive outbursts, and cope more poorly with stressful situations than animals that are right-limbed and rely more heavily on their left hemisphere for processing,” said Dr Deborah Wells, co-author of the research from Queen’s University, Belfast, adding that the right hemisphere is more responsible for processing of negative emotions. The study was conducted in owners’ homes and focused on spontaneous behaviour. In total, the team analysed data from 44 cats, 20 of which were female, collected by owners tracking which paw their cat used for taking the first step down stairs and stepping into the litter box, and which side their feline preferred to recline on. Over the course of three months owners recorded 50 instances of each behaviour. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Laterality; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24553 - Posted: 01.23.2018

Michael Seto Mr. Smith was a 27-year-old man referred for psychological treatment after sexually offending against a 13-year-old boy. He initially denied the charge, but eventually admitted to sexually abusing multiple youth. He later admitted he’d been attracted to boys since his own adolescence. Mr. Smith is actually a case composite from my first book on pedophilia. But the description is representative of stories I’ve heard from the hundreds of individuals I’ve talked with as a psychologist and researcher over the past 25 years. Most men are sexually attracted to sexually mature young adults. But a small minority of men are sexually attracted to other age groups, from infants to the elderly. These age-based attractions are called chronophilias. My research focuses on chronophilias and sexual offending against children. Recently, I’ve started to think about these age-specific attractions as sexual orientations for age, similar to how we understand sexual orientation for gender. This is quite different from the traditional way that psychologists view chronophilias, as sexual preferences that are distinct from someone’s identity. This idea – that chronophilias can be understood as sexual orientations for age – is provocative, because it raises ethical, legal and scientific questions about how we think about sexual orientation, the etiology of sexual preferences and how we respond to sexual offenses against minors. © 2010–2018, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24552 - Posted: 01.23.2018

By ALAN BURDICK In his first year in office President Trump gave himself credit for numerous accomplishments that he had little or nothing to do with: the passage of the Republican tax bill; Walmart’s creating 10,000 jobs in the United States; the invention of the phrase “prime the pump”; and the fact that in his brief tenure, nobody died in a commercial aviation accident. (The last fatal crash on a domestic commercial airline in the United States was in 2009.) But one thing that Mr. Trump almost certainly managed to do, without effort or notice, is alter our perception of time. We’re all aware that our experience of time is fungible: Days fly by, conversations drag on, that weeklong vacation seems to last forever until suddenly it doesn’t. As long ago as 1890 the psychologist William James noted that our feelings of time “harmonize with different mental moods.” There now exists a large body of scientific literature demonstrating that emotions play a large part in generating these temporal flexions. For instance, when viewing faces on a computer monitor, lab subjects report that happy faces seem to last longer onscreen than nonexpressive ones, and angry faces seem to last longer still. Fear, alarm and stress are factors too. Forty-five seconds with a live spider seems to last far longer to people who are afraid of spiders. Watching three minutes of video clips of the Sept. 11 attacks feels longer than watching a three-minute clip from “The Wizard of Oz.” Now consider that Mr. Trump’s first year in office must rank as the most chaotic and tumultuous in modern presidential history. Virtually every week served up a new drama: the firing of the national security adviser Michael Flynn; the firing of the F.B.I. director James Comey; the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel; Mr. Trump’s announcement, via Twitter, banning transgender people from the military; his bungled phone call to the widow of a soldier killed in Niger; his support of the Senate candidacy of Roy Moore; his pardon of the former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio; his mockery of the television host Mika Brzezinski; his failure to immediately denounce the white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Va.; his rants about the peaceful protests of professional football players; his taunting of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with his bigger “nuclear button.” It has been a 12-month-long emotional roller coaster, even for Mr. Trump’s supporters. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 24551 - Posted: 01.22.2018

By Jenny Rood Opioid drugs are well-established double-edged swords. Extremely effective at analgesia, they cause an array of harmful side effects throughout the body, including itching, constipation, and respiratory depression—the slowed breathing that ultimately causes death in overdose cases. What’s more, the body’s interaction with opioids is dynamic: our receptors for these compounds become desensitized to the drugs’ activity over time, requiring ever larger doses to suppress pain and eventually provoking severe dependence and protracted withdrawal. In the past few years, these side effects have plagued growing numbers of US citizens, plunging the country into the throes of a devastating opioid crisis in which nearly 100 people die from overdoses every day. Even so, opioids are still among the most effective pain-relief options available. “Over hundreds of years, [opioid receptors] have remained a target,” says Laura Bohn, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida. “Therapeutically, it works.” Since the early 2000s, intriguing evidence has emerged suggesting that opioids’ useful properties could be separated from their harmful attributes. (See “Pain and Progress,” The Scientist, February 2014.) In 2005, Bohn, then at the Ohio State University College of Medicine, and colleagues showed that shutting down one of the signaling pathways downstream of the opioid receptor targeted by morphine not only amped up the drug’s painkilling effects in mice, but also reduced constipation and respiratory depression (J Pharmacol Exp Ther, 314:1195-201). © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24550 - Posted: 01.22.2018

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. “Have you been to see your doctor?” the woman asked her 72-year-old mother anxiously. Her mother had come from Miami to visit her in New York. They hadn’t seen each other for a couple of months, and her daughter hardly recognized her. Her mother had been slender; now, she looked emaciated. Her usually bright eyes peered dully above her newly prominent cheekbones. But it was more than that — the unrelentingly cheerful, energetic, outgoing woman she had known her entire life had disappeared. Now her mother spoke of nothing but how awful she felt and spent most of her day in bed. It started a couple of months earlier when the mother and her partner were traveling in Italy for a month. While there, she began to feel irritable. She had fallen in love with this man eight years earlier — two years after the sudden death of her husband. And their years together had been happy ones. But on this trip, everything about him, about their relationship, began to grate on her. Suddenly she didn’t want to travel with him; she didn’t even want to see him. Indeed, she didn’t want to see anyone. When she got home, she felt no better. She was a psychologist and recognized the symptoms of anxiety. She had never felt this before, but she had seen it in her patients. She went back to the psychiatrist she saw a few times after her husband died. Yes, the therapist agreed, she did seem anxious. She was also depressed. The woman accepted the psychiatric diagnoses, but told her therapist that it wasn’t just her mind; her body felt like it was too fatigued to do the work of living. But of course, the therapist told her, your mind is part of your body. People, especially older people, often feel symptoms of depression in their bodies — feeling sick and tired rather than sad. The woman started taking an antidepressant and saw the psychiatrist once a week. When that didn’t help, the psychiatrist tried another drug. When she was still no better, she saw another psychiatrist, who added an antipsychotic. By the time the mother went to visit her daughter, she was on four medications: one for anxiety, two for depression and one for her insomnia. Yet she remained anxious, depressed and unable to sleep. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 24549 - Posted: 01.22.2018

By Kate Baggaley The pain came without warning. It was February of last year, and the man was eating dinner. He’d just reached for a glass of wine. “It really burned my mouth when I started to drink,” says Greg (the healthcare worker in Toronto asked for his name to be changed). The odd and disquieting sensation had no apparent cause—no burns or cuts or other injuries. Yet the burning and tingling Greg felt on his tongue and the roof of his mouth persisted. “It was very intense during the middle of the day and then subsided at nighttime,” he says. Perhaps, he was told when finally visiting the family doctor months later, the pain was related to a yeast infection on the tongue. But the prescribed anti-fungal medication made no difference. Next Greg saw a dentist, who found no abnormalities in his mouth and recommended he get a blood test to rule out an autoimmune disorder. Eventually, though, one of Greg’s doctors referred him to Miriam Grushka, an oral medicine specialist in Toronto. Grushka has spent decades studying and treating Greg's condition, which is called burning mouth syndrome. “People say they feel like they burnt their tongue on a cup of coffee, but the burning never went away,” says Grushka. “In the vast majority of cases it’s benign, but it’s very uncomfortable.” Each week, she sees around 15 patients who have burning mouth syndrome or similar conditions. These hallucinations, or phantoms, are characterized by a taste or feeling in the mouth that will not go away. Oral phantoms are often treatable, and are rooted not in the mouth but the brain. But much else about these phantom feelings is still a mystery. Grushka and other researchers are still unraveling why they happen and how to banish them. © 2018 Popular Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 24548 - Posted: 01.22.2018

Amy Maxmen A puzzle posed by segments of 'dark matter' in genomes — long, winding strands of DNA with no obvious functions — has teased scientists for more than a decade. Now, a team has finally solved the riddle. The conundrum has centred on DNA sequences that do not encode proteins, and yet remain identical across a broad range of animals. By deleting some of these ‘ultraconserved elements’, researchers have found that these sequences guide brain development by fine-tuning the expression of protein-coding genes. The results1, published on 18 January in Cell, might help researchers to better understand neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s. They also validate the hypotheses of scientists who have speculated that all ultraconserved elements are vital to life — despite the fact that researchers knew very little about their functions. “People told us we should have waited to publish until we knew what they did. Now I’m like, dude, it took 14 years to figure this out,” says Gill Bejerano, a genomicist at Stanford University in California, who described ultraconserved elements in 20042. Bejerano and his colleagues originally noticed ultraconserved elements when they compared the human genome to those of mice, rats and chickens, and found 481 stretches of DNA that were incredibly similar across the species. That was surprising, because DNA mutates from generation to generation — and these animal lineages have been evolving independently for up to 200 million years. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Epigenetics
Link ID: 24547 - Posted: 01.20.2018

Laura Sanders Nerve cells in the brain make elaborate connections and exchange lightning-quick messages that captivate scientists. But these cells also sport simpler, hairlike protrusions called cilia. Long overlooked, the little stubs may actually have big jobs in the brain. Researchers are turning up roles for nerve cell cilia in a variety of brain functions. In a region of the brain linked to appetite, for example, cilia appear to play a role in preventing obesity, researchers report January 8 in three studies in Nature Genetics. Cilia perched on nerve cells may also contribute to brain development, nerve cell communication and possibly even learning and memory, other research suggests. “Perhaps every neuron in the brain possesses cilia, and most neuroscientists don’t know they’re there,” says Kirk Mykytyn, a cell biologist at Ohio State University College of Medicine in Columbus. “There’s a big disconnect there.” Most cells in the body — including those in the brain — possess what’s called a primary cilium, made up of lipid molecules and proteins. The functions these appendages perform in parts of the body are starting to come into focus (SN: 11/3/12, p. 16). Cilia in the nose, for example, detect smell molecules, and cilia on rod and cone cells in the eye help with vision. But cilia in the brain are more mysterious. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 24546 - Posted: 01.20.2018

Paula Span When Ann Vandervelde visited her primary care doctor in August, he had something new to show her. Dr. Barak Gaster, an internist at the University of Washington School of Medicine, had spent three years working with specialists in geriatrics, neurology, palliative care and psychiatry to come up with a five-page document that he calls a dementia-specific advance directive. In simple language, it maps out the effects of mild, moderate and severe dementia, and asks patients to specify which medical interventions they would want — and not want — at each phase of the illness. “Patients stumble into the advanced stage of dementia before anyone identifies it and talks to them about what’s happening,” Dr. Gaster told me. “At what point, if ever, would they not want medical interventions to keep them alive longer? A lot of people have strong opinions about this, but it’s hard to figure out how to let them express them as the disease progresses.” One of those with strong opinions, it happens, was Ms. Vandervelde, 71, an abstract painter in Seattle. Her father had died of dementia years before, in a nursing home after her mother could no longer care for him at home. Ms. Vandervelde had also spent time with dementia patients as a hospice volunteer. Further, caring for her mother in her final year, Ms. Vandervelde had seen how family conflicts could flare over medical decisions. “I was not going to leave that choice to my children if I could spare them that,” she said. So when Dr. Gaster explained his directive, “it just made so much sense,” Ms. Vandervelde said. “While I could make these decisions, why not make them? I filled it out right there.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 24545 - Posted: 01.20.2018

Lions, elephants, and baboons are matriarchies that are female-centric in different ways, for different reasons. Lion mothers form ‘daycare centres’ to nurse their young and sisters band together to hunt for their families. It’s not the male who’s the bread-winner — it’s the female. Elephants are led by the eldest female who knows all the watering holes and strategies for survival. Her age and memory of how to survive the long dry season is key in a climate plagued by drought. Baboons have a female royal family where, surprisingly, it’s the youngest female who ascends to the throne. Mommy Wildest is an intimate story – the ”days of our lives” of these families, with individual characters whose challenges we follow: the Ol Dikidiki pride of lionesses raising their 11 cubs; Donatella, the elephant grandmother who leads her family to safety from gunshots shielding them from danger, and bay Rijeka, the baboon princess surrounded by her sisters. Mommy Wildest also follows the leading scientists in their field who’ve been asking: Why did these three societies evolve into matriarchies? What can humans learn from them? Dr. Craig Packer IS the lion king. He’s the foremost lion expert in the world and has been studying lions for more than 40 years. In this film, he travels to Maasai Mara to visit one of the richest concentrations of lions left in the world, and to meet the Ol Dikidiki pride. It was Dr. Packer who determined why lionesses bond together in sisterhoods –it’s to defend against roving males who would kill their cubs and take over the pride. By working together, the sisters can defend against the much stronger male. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 24544 - Posted: 01.20.2018