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; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24775 - Posted: 03.21.2018

By KAREN BARROW Narcolepsy is a sleep disorder that causes excessive sleepiness and frequent daytime sleep attacks. What is it like to never feel fully rested? Three women discuss the realities of living with a sleep disorder. Kailey Profeta learned she had narcolepsy at age 9 after her mother noticed she was unusually tired and had inexplicably gained a lot of weight. Kailey was home-schooled for several years while she and her family learned what combinations of medicines and behavioral adjustments worked to keep her on a normal sleep schedule. She now takes a medicine every night that helps her sleep, but leaves her nauseated in the morning. To cope, she eats breakfast in bed and takes other medications to help her stay awake during the day. Kailey goes home from school every day during third period to take a nap, and she rests again after school. Kailey, who wants to be a fashion designer, works at a bridal boutique during the summer and on weekends. She said that most of her friends understand when she has to rest, but that being a teenager with narcolepsy is not always easy. Patricia A. Higgins suffers from narcolepsy with cataplexy – sudden muscle weakness that causes her to fall and feel temporarily paralyzed. She first began falling from cataplexy as a teenager, and the condition reached its worst point when she was 32; she remembers falling 17 times in one weekend. Getting the correct diagnosis was a struggle. Ms. Higgins went from doctor to doctor and was told at various times that she had a seizure disorder and a psychiatric condition. Eventually, a sleep study confirmed that she had narcolepsy. Narcolepsy has disrupted Ms. Higgins’s work and family life. She is married and the mother of three children, but she left her job as a nurse and cannot drive. She volunteers regularly with the Narcolepsy Network, a support and information group for narcoleptics. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Narcolepsy
Link ID: 24774 - Posted: 03.21.2018

By Jim Daley Mice exposed to bisphenol A (BPA) during pregnancy give birth to offspring with atypical brain development and abnormal behavior later in life, according to a study presented yesterday (March 19) at the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in Chicago. Previous studies have linked BPA, which is found in a wide array of consumer products including plastic water bottles, to numerous diseases. In 2015, Deborah Kurrasch, a neuroscientist at the University of Calgary, and her colleagues found that the chemical can also alter brain development and cause hyperactivity at low doses in zebrafish. Kurrasch and her colleagues then decided to investigate whether similar alterations occurred in mammals, Dinu Nesan, a postdoctoral fellow in Kurrasch’s lab, said during a presentation. After feeding pregnant mice meals containing varying doses of BPA, the researchers observed that even when animals were exposed to low levels of the chemical—10 or 20 times below the recommended daily intake for humans—their offspring displayed significantly accelerated early neuron development. BPA exposure increased the number, size, and the rate of proliferation of neurons in the pups’ brains, but also reduced the “stemness,” or self-renewal capability, of cells, pushing them toward a more differentiated state. According to Nesan, the team also discovered that these effects could be “fully abrogated” with a combination of endocrine receptor and androgen receptor antagonists. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 24773 - Posted: 03.21.2018

By James Gallagher Doctors have taken a major step towards curing the most common form of blindness in the UK - age-related macular degeneration. Douglas Waters, 86, could not see out of his right eye, but "I can now read the newspaper" with it, he says. He was one of two patients given pioneering stem cell therapy at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. Cells from a human embryo were grown into a patch that was delicately inserted into the back of the eye. Douglas, who is from London, developed severe age-related macular degeneration in his right eye three years ago. The macula is the part of the eye that allows you to see straight ahead - whether to recognise faces, watch TV or read a book. He says: "In the months before the operation my sight was really poor and I couldn't see anything out of my right eye. "It's brilliant what the team have done and I feel so lucky to have been given my sight back." The macula is made up of rods and cones that sense light and behind those are a layer of nourishing cells called the retinal pigment epithelium. When this support layer fails, it causes macular degeneration and blindness. Doctors have devised a way of building a new retinal pigment epithelium and surgically implanting it into the eye. The technique, published in Nature Biotechnology, starts with embryonic stem cells. These are a special type of cell that can become any other in the human body. © 2018 BBC.

Keyword: Vision; Stem Cells
Link ID: 24772 - Posted: 03.20.2018

Michelle Andrews Federal officials have recommended a vaccine against shingles that is more effective than an earlier version at protecting older adults from the painful rash. But persuading many adults to get this and other recommended shots continues to be an uphill battle, health providers say. " 'I'm healthy; I'll get that when I'm older,' " is what adult patients often tell Dr. Michael Munger when he brings up an annual flu shot or a tetanus-diphtheria booster or the new shingles vaccine. Sometimes, he says, they put him off by questioning a vaccine's effectiveness. Munger, a family physician in Overland Park, Kan., who is president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, says he gets more pushback from adults about getting their own vaccines than about immunizing their children. "As parents, we want to make sure our kids are protected. But as adults, we act as if we're invincible." The new schedule for adult vaccines for people age 19 and older has been updated in the last several months by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The most significant change was to recommend Shingrix, the shingles vaccine that was approved by the Food and Drug Administration last fall, over an older version of the vaccine. Shingrix should be given in two doses between two and six months apart to adults who are at least 50 years old, the CDC says. The older vaccine, Zostavax, can still be given to adults who are 60 or older, but Shingrix is preferred, according to the agency. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 24771 - Posted: 03.20.2018

Ian Sample Science editor Apart from the wide-eyed bike ride home from the lab, his neighbour turning into a witch, the threatening behaviour of his furniture and the futile battle to save his ego from collapse, Dr Albert Hofmann appeared to enjoy his first trip on LSD. Now, 75 years after the Swiss chemist witnessed the full effects of his psychedelic invention, scientists have discovered fresh details of how the drug affects the brain. Scans of healthy volunteers show that less than half the dose that left Hofmann cowering on his sofa makes a person’s sense of self disintegrate. Researchers at the University of Zurich gave willing participants 100 micrograms of LSD – compared with the 250 micrograms Hofmann took on what is now known as “bicycle day” in 1943 – and found that in social interactions with computer avatars, the drug dampened down brain activity that helps people distinguish themselves from others. “Our interpretation is that LSD reduces your sense of integrated self,” said Katrin Preller, a psychologist who worked on the study. “In this particular case, the drug blurs the boundary between what is you and what is another person.” The dissolution of the ego, or self, that destroys the normally concrete sense of where one person ends and another begins, underpins the experience that some LSD users report of feeling at one with the cosmos. Preller and her colleagues studied LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide, or plain “acid”, to learn how the brain creates a sense of self. By shedding light on the mystery, they hope to find new treatments for symptoms of psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia, where the sense of self can become heavily distorted. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24770 - Posted: 03.20.2018

By Kas Roussy, Robert Van Herpt was 53 when he decided to overhaul his life. A heavy drinker and smoker, he quit both at once cold turkey. He started a new antidepressant. It was, in many ways, a new beginning. But it didn't go according to plan. Before long, Van Herpt stopped sleeping. And that's when he started seeing things. The fruit flies came first. "I'd be sitting and here's a swarm," he said. "I honestly put my arm out and said I could feel them up against my arm. It was that true." Then in the nighttime, from his upstairs bedroom window, in Kingston, Ont., he thought he could see someone damaging his wife's car. He also thought people were partying downstairs in his home. "He was definitely seeing things that weren't there," said his wife, Joanne. "The hallucinations were very drastic in the evening. Really vivid hallucinations." To emphasize the point, Robert repeated: "Really vivid." The couple left home for Kingston General Hospital's emergency department, where the hallucinations continued. At one point, while Joanne was talking to one of the attending doctors, Robert thought he saw another doctor spitting on him. Eventually, the Van Herpts learned that Robert was in the throes of delirium tremens, a condition that can be caused by abruptly stopping a long period of drinking. "Basically when you quit cold turkey, the brain goes through a chemical reaction," Joanne was told. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24769 - Posted: 03.20.2018

Amy Fleming Charles Ryan has a clinic in San Francisco at which he regularly relieves men of their testosterone. This “chemical castration”, as it is sometimes known, is not a punishment, but a common treatment for prostate cancer. Testosterone doesn’t cause the disease (currently the third most deadly cancer in the UK), but it fuels it, so oncologists use drugs to reduce the amount produced by the testicles. Ryan gets to know his patients well over the years, listening to their concerns and observing changes in them as their testosterone levels fall. Because it involves the so-called “male hormone”, the therapy poses existential challenges to many of those he treats. They know that every day, millions of people – from bodybuilders and cheating athletes to menopausal women – enhance their natural levels of testosterone with the aim of boosting their libido, muscle mass, confidence and energy. So what happens when production is suppressed? Might they lose their sex drive? Their strength? Their will to win? The fears are not always groundless. Side-effects can also include fatigue and weight gain. But Ryan has witnessed positives, too. As professor of medicine and urology at the University of California, he has noticed that the medical students who have passed through his clinic in the 18 years that he has been treating prostate cancer invariably comment: “Dr Ryan, your patients are so nice.” He replies, jokingly: “It’s because they don’t have any testosterone. They can’t be mean.” © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Aggression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 24768 - Posted: 03.20.2018

Fergus Walsh Doctors say a stem cell transplant could be a "game changer" for many patients with multiple sclerosis. Results from an international trial show that it was able to stop the disease and improve symptoms. It involves wiping out a patient's immune system using cancer drugs and then rebooting it with a stem cell transplant. Louise Willetts, 36, from Rotherham, is now symptom-free and told me: "It feels like a miracle." A total of 100,000 people in the UK have MS, which attacks nerves in the brain and spinal cord. Just over 100 patients took part in the trial, in hospitals in Chicago, Sheffield, Uppsala in Sweden and Sao Paolo in Brazil. They all had relapsing remitting MS - where attacks or relapses are followed by periods of remission. The interim results were released at the annual meeting of the European Society for Bone and Marrow Transplantation in Lisbon. The patients received either haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) or drug treatment. After one year, only one relapse occurred among the stem cell group compared with 39 in the drug group. After an average follow-up of three years, the transplants had failed in three out of 52 patients (6%), compared with 30 of 50 (60%) in the control group. Those in the transplant group experienced a reduction in disability, whereas symptoms worsened in the drug group. Prof Richard Burt, lead investigator, Northwestern University Chicago, told me: "The data is stunningly in favour of transplant against the best available drugs - the neurological community has been sceptical about this treatment, but these results will change that. Prof John Snowden, director of blood and bone marrow transplantation at Sheffield's Royal Hallamshire Hospital, told me: "We are thrilled with the results - they are a game changer for patients with drug resistant and disabling multiple sclerosis". © 2018 BBC

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 24767 - Posted: 03.19.2018

By LEONARD MLODINOW Ten years ago, when my son Nicolai was 11, his doctor wanted to put him on medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “It would make him less wild,” I explained to my mother, who was then 85. “It would slow him down a bit.” My mother grumbled. “Look around you,” she said in Yiddish. “Look how fast the world is changing. He doesn’t need to slow down. You need to speed up.” It was a surprising recommendation from someone who had never learned to use a microwave. But recent research suggests she had a point: Some people with A.D.H.D. may be naturally suited to our turbocharged world. Today the word “hyperactive” doesn’t just describe certain individuals; it also is a quality of our society. We are bombarded each day by four times the number of words we encountered daily when my mother was raising me. Even vacations are complicated — people today use, on average, 26 websites to plan one. Attitudes and habits are changing so fast that you can identify “generational” differences in people just a few years apart: Simply by analyzing daily cellphone communication patterns, researchers have been able to guess the age of someone under 60 to within about five years either way with 80 percent accuracy. To thrive in this frenetic world, certain cognitive tendencies are useful: to embrace novelty, to absorb a wide variety of information, to generate new ideas. The possibility that such characteristics might be associated with A.D.H.D. was first examined in the 1990s. The educational psychologist Bonnie Cramond, for example, tested a group of children in Louisiana who had been determined to have A.D.H.D. and found that an astonishingly high number — 32 percent — did well enough to qualify for an elite creative scholars program in the Louisiana schools. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 24766 - Posted: 03.19.2018

By Daniel S. Barron It was midday when an ambulance brought Rose to the Emergency Department. The triage nurses, with their characteristic knack for brevity, had written “50 year old schizophrenic woman hearing/seeing dead boyfriend.” The medical team had done the standard workup—temperature, blood pressure, EKG, labs to screen for an electrolyte imbalance, drug or toxin that might explain Rose’s condition. Everything seemed normal, making Rose (whose name and narrative details have been changed to protect her privacy) a psychiatry patient. So I made my way to the B wing of the E.D., which serves as a Limbo of sorts between the medical and psychiatric services. The B wing invariably bustles with activity. A long concierge-style counter with three computers faces the center of the room, which is essentially a large rectangle. When seated at one of these computers, you can see into each of the nine patient rooms that wrap around the three outer walls. From this vantage, the B wing becomes an amphitheater, with patients in gurney-sized niches showcasing some emergent medical concern: B7, chest pain; B9, acute shortness of breath. Rose was medically cleared, so her gurney had been downgraded to stage right, to the end of the counter. I entered at stage left and noticed her across the room, feet at the head of the gurney propped on a pillow; her head was at the foot, neck slightly bent over the edge. Her hands were neatly resting on her belly while her thick hair formed a graying river that reached towards the linoleum. In a firm yet conversational tone, Rose said towards the ceiling, “Why would Steven say he isn’t dead? How could anyone be so cruel?” Her mouth moved widely like a Claymation character as she slowly enunciated every syllable, chopping cruel into CRU-EL. She was smiling. I stood quietly, observing the scene as Rose stared intensely upwards. A few seconds later, it occurred to me that she was waiting for the ceiling to reply. “I see,” I muttered, recalling the triage nurses’ note, and went in search of a stool for my interview. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 24765 - Posted: 03.19.2018

By RONI CARYN RABIN It was going to be a study that could change the American diet, a huge clinical trial that might well deliver all the medical evidence needed to recommend a daily alcoholic drink as part of a healthy lifestyle. That was how two prominent scientists and a senior federal health official pitched the project during a presentation at the luxurious Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Fla., in 2014. And the audience members who were being asked to help pay for the $100 million study seemed receptive: They were all liquor company executives. The 10-year government trial is now underway, and Anheuser Busch InBev, Heineken and other alcohol companies are picking up most of the tab, through donations to a private foundation that raises money for the National Institutes of Health. The N.I.H., a federal agency, is considered one of the world’s foremost medical research centers, investing over $30 billion of taxpayer money in biomedical research each year. The vast majority of the funding goes to scientists outside the N.I.H., which manages the grants and provides oversight. The alcohol study is overseen by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, one of 27 centers under the N.I.H. The lead investigator and N.I.H. officials have said repeatedly that they never discussed the planning of the study with the industry. But a different picture emerges from emails and travel vouchers obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, as well as from interviews with former federal officials. The documents and interviews show that the institute waged a vigorous campaign to court the alcohol industry, paying for scientists to travel to meetings with executives, where they gave talks strongly suggesting that the study’s results would endorse moderate drinking as healthy. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24764 - Posted: 03.19.2018

/ By Venkat Srinivasan It started as a tremor in his left hand and arm. It seemed harmless, but it surprised him. He was a gardener in his 50s and had no history of rheumatism or seizures or any other significant pain. He brushed it off at first, chalking it up to the exhausting daily work. But it wouldn’t go away. Writing and reading became difficult. He could not direct his fork to his mouth, and had to be fed. “It’s like a Russian doll. Within each molecule, there are so many functions.” It was the early 1800s, and a surgeon in London had started to collect notes — not just on the gardener but on a number of patients with similar symptoms. Their hands simply failed “to answer with exactness to the dictates of the will.” The years dragged on; the disease spread to the gardener’s legs, and his trunk started to bow significantly. People couldn’t understand him when he spoke. He passed urine without knowing. The tremors became more and more violent, waking him at night. Nobody understood what he was suffering from. Finally, in 1817, Dr. James Parkinson published an essay on this shaking palsy. He apologized for his speculative approach, writing that “analogy is the substitute for anatomical examination, the only sure foundation for pathological knowledge.” Two centuries later, the disease named for Parkinson is still a puzzle. It is now known that the telltale external symptoms — rigidity, slow movement, a resting tremor — result from a loss of dopamine-rich neurons in a region of the brain called the substantia nigra. But the complete network of steps leading to this cell death is still vague, and the underlying causes remain one of medicine’s great mysteries. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 24763 - Posted: 03.16.2018

by Laurie McGinley The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday took the first concrete action to reduce nicotine in cigarettes to make them much less addictive, opening a regulatory process described as a “historic first step” by the agency's top official. Commissioner Scott Gottlieb unveiled an “advance notice of proposed rulemaking,” the earliest step in what promises to be a long, complicated regulatory effort to lower nicotine levels to be minimally addictive or nonaddictive. The notice, to be published Friday in the Federal Register, includes new data published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday based on a possible policy scenario. That FDA-funded analysis found that slashing nicotine levels could push the smoking rate down to 1.4 percent from the current 15 percent of adults. That in turn would result in 8 million fewer tobacco-related deaths through the end of the century — which Gottlieb termed “an undeniable public health benefit.” The evaluation was based on reducing nicotine levels to 0.4 milligrams per gram of tobacco filler, FDA officials told reporters during a teleconference. Many adults try to quit smoking each year but fail because nicotine is such an addictive substance, said Mitch Zeller, director of the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products. Cutting the nicotine level would not only help them succeed, but it also could keep young people who may be experimenting with cigarettes from becoming addicted, he said. The nicotine notice will be open for public comment for 90 days. FDA officials are seeking input on what the maximum nicotine level in cigarettes should be and whether such a limit should be implemented all at once or gradually. Nicotine levels can be manipulated by leaf blending, chemical extraction and genetic engineering. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24762 - Posted: 03.16.2018

Paula Span At first, the pills helped her feel so much better. Jessica Falstein, an artist living in the East Village in Manhattan, learned she had an anxiety disorder in 1992. It led to panic attacks, a racing pulse, sleeplessness. “Whenever there was too much stress, the anxiety would become almost intolerable, like acid in the veins,” she recalled. When a psychopharmacologist prescribed the drug Klonopin, everything brightened. “It just leveled me out,” Ms. Falstein said. “I had more energy. And it helped me sleep, which I was desperate for.” After several months, however, the horrible symptoms returned. “My body became accustomed to half a milligram, and the drug stopped working,” she said. “So then I was up to one milligram. And then two.” Her doctor kept increasing the dosage and added Ativan to the mix. Now 67, with her health and stamina in decline, Ms. Falstein has been diligently working to wean herself from both medications, part of the class called benzodiazepines that is widely prescribed for insomnia and anxiety. “They turn on you,” she said. For years, geriatricians and researchers have sounded the alarm about the use of benzodiazepines among older adults. Often called “benzos,” the problem drugs include Valium (diazepam), Klonopin (clonazepam), Xanax (alprazolam) and Ativan (lorazepam). The cautions have had scant effect: Use of the drugs has risen among older people, even though they are particularly vulnerable to the drugs’ ill effects. Like Ms. Falstein, many patients take them for years, though they’re recommended only for short periods. The chemically related “z-drugs” — Ambien, Sonata and Lunesta — present similar risks. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24761 - Posted: 03.16.2018

By Anna Azvolinsky Researchers have tried to dissect the effects of an older father on kids’ longevity. One study found that kids with older dads had longer telomeres, which may indicate better health and longer lifespan, while another observed that kids with older dads have an increased risk of psychiatric disorders. So far, there have been very few experimental studies in animals that directly test whether paternal age has an affect on offspring telomere length and lifespan. Now, a team of researchers shows that bird embryos sired from old zebra finch fathers have shorter telomeres compared to those with the same moms and younger fathers. The study, published today (March 14) in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is among the first to address whether paternal age affects telomere length of offspring using an experimental approach. “The experimental design of this study looking at the effect of paternal age on telomere length of [zebra finch] embryos is particularly strong, allowing for confidence in these results,” writes Dan Eisenberg, an anthropologist at the University of Washington who studies the effects of paternal age on telomere length in humans and chimpanzees, in an email to The Scientist. Jose Noguera, now at the University of Vigo, along with colleagues at the University of Glasgow, bred 32 middle-aged, female zebra finches first with both 16 four-month-old males and later with 16 four-year-old male birds. The team harvested the eggs, 139 in total, artificially incubated them for several days, then analyzed the telomere lengths of the embryos. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24760 - Posted: 03.16.2018

Jeff Tollefson Early humans in eastern Africa crafted advanced tools and displayed other complex behaviours tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought, according to a trio of papers published on 15 March in Science1,2,3. Those advances coincided with — and may have been driven by — major climate and landscape changes. The latest evidence comes from the Olorgesailie Basin in Southern Kenya, where researchers have previously found traces of ancient relatives of modern human as far back as 1.2 million years ago. Evidence collected at sites in the basin suggests that early humans underwent a series of profound changes at some point before roughly 320,000 years ago. They abandoned simple hand axes in favour of smaller and more advanced blades made from obsidian and other materials obtained from distant sources. That shift suggests the early people living there had developed a trade network — evidence of growing sophistication in behaviour. The researchers also found gouges on black and red rocks and minerals, which indicate that early Olorgesailie residents used those materials to create pigments and possibly communicate ideas. All of these changes in human behaviour occurred during an extended period of environmental upheaval, punctuated by strong earthquakes and a shift towards a more variable and arid climate. These changes occurred at the same time as larger animals disappeared from the site and were replaced by smaller creatures. “It’s a one-two punch combining tectonic shifts and climate shifts,” says Rick Potts, who led the work as director of the human origins programme at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. “That’s the kind of stuff out of which evolution arises.” Researchers from the Smithsonian Institution digging in the Olorgesailie Basin in Kenya. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 24759 - Posted: 03.16.2018

By Hiroko Tabuchi If a sparrow sings his heart out on an oil field, but his would-be sweetheart can’t hear him above the oil pumps, what’s a bird to do? In Alberta, Canada, researchers analyzed hundreds of hours of Savannah sparrow love songs and discovered something extraordinary: To be heard above the din, the birds are changing their tune in complex ways that scientists are only starting to understand. “They’re tailoring their songs depending on which part of their message is the most affected,” said Miyako Warrington, a University of Manitoba biologist who led a recent study on how sparrows cope with noise from the oil and gas infrastructure that dots Canada’s landscape. “This seems to show a complex level of adaptation. It’s not just everybody talking louder.” Dr. Warrington is one of a growing number of scholars who study the noise generated by human activity — drills, turbines, roaring jet engines — and how that affects the natural world around us. Mining on the fringes of the Brazilian rain forest, for instance, is disrupting the calls of local black-fronted titi monkeys, a study found last year. Whales and dolphins are known to be particularly vulnerable to the groans of ship engines or offshore drilling, which can disrupt the complex ways they communicate. Research has shown that noise pollution has doubled the background sound levels in more than 60 percent of protected areas in the United States. And humans are not immune to the din. Epidemiologists have linked traffic noise to cardiovascular and other diseases. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24758 - Posted: 03.15.2018

by Ben Guarino Only male birds sing. For years that was the assumption among amateur birdwatchers and ornithologists alike. After all, male birds are “the obvious ones,” says Lauryn Benedict, a biologist at the University of Northern Colorado. “They're out there showing off, strutting their stuff.” But Benedict and fellow birdsong expert Karan Odom, a biologist at Cornell University, want you to look closer if you hear a chirp or warble. Female birds are not, on the whole, silent. In a call-to-ears published Wednesday in the journal the Auk, the two scientists say that “birders and researchers need to be aware that female birds regularly sing, and they need to take the time to evaluate the sex of singing birds.” The tipping point for Odom came in 2014, when she concluded that birdsong is an ancestral trait shared by both sexes. Female birds sang in 71 percent of 323 species surveyed, she and her colleagues reported then in a Nature Communications paper. They traced this behavior through the bird family tree, winding back the generations to a common singing ancestor. At that point in history, they wrote, both male and female birds sang. Benedict, who was not involved with that work, described it like this: Instead of males evolving to be loud, “females have evolved to be quiet.” © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24757 - Posted: 03.15.2018

By RICH MONAHAN “You must really love that song,” my mother says, and for a moment my heart stops. Both of us are plainly aware she need not be more specific than that. I attempt to read her body language out of the corner of my eye. Does she know? There’s no way, right? “Yeah, it’s a favorite.” I nod, smiling, before turning back toward the television with what I hope is all the nonchalance of a typical 14-year-old boy. What I definitely do not do is glance back and say, “Funny story about that song, while you’ve clearly noticed I’ve listened to it every single weeknight this entire school year, would you believe I only ever press play at exactly 8:38 p.m.? “And check this out, once that cable box hits 9:52 p.m., I will casually retire to my bedroom to initiate the final sequence of what has recently ballooned into a nearly 90-minute nightly routine of humiliating compulsions: I’ll touch the same four CDs laid out on my dresser in ‘order’; turn the stereo on and off; move to the entertainment center; touch the ‘Twisted Metal’ video game case; turn on the TV; boot up the PlayStation; shut it off once the load screen finishes; press ‘channel up’ on the cable box until I hit channel 20, then 22, then 40; turn off the cable box, then touch nothing else until it’s lights out at 9:58 p.m. “And that’s not even the craziest part; the craziest part is that I do these things because I believe they will somehow increase my social standing among other ninth graders. Anywho, Mom, the song’s called ‘Daysleeper,’ and I’m pretty sure I’ve lost my mind.” It started in seventh grade, when two childhood friends aged out of hanging out with me. Already depressed and on the verge of friendlessness, I was desperate to preserve life as it had been. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 24756 - Posted: 03.15.2018