By Anna Azvolinsky David Julius entered the biochemistry graduate program at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1977. “It was all one foot in front of the other. I wasn’t trying to figure out what I would be doing in 10 years,” says the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) professor of physiology. “When I arrived, I thought, ‘Classes are pretty much over. This is like a real job, and I can just go in the lab and do my thing.’” Julius joined the UC Berkeley lab of Jeremy Thorner, who was studying hormonal signaling and trying to understand how budding yeast cells switch mating type. Randy Schekman, a Berkeley researcher who worked on protein secretion and vesicular transport, served as Julius’s coadvisor. “What was great about Jeremy and Randy was that they were both trained as biochemists and then had decided to take advantage of the yeast genetic system to understand the biochemistry of cellular signaling.” Haploid yeast cells can be either “type a” or “type α,” and mate with cells of the opposite type. Julius worked on the synthesis of alpha factor, one of two mating hormones produced and secreted by yeast. His graduate studies produced three Cell papers. The first, published in 1983, reported that a class of enzymes, the dipeptidyl aminopeptidases, is necessary to cleave a longer precursor of alpha factor into the final 13-amino-acid peptide. To identify the specific dipeptidyl aminopeptidase and elucidate its role, Julius took advantage of yeast mutants, including one called ste13 (for sterile 13), which cannot produce normal alpha factor. It was the first time anyone had characterized the biochemical functioning of one of the yeast sterile mutants. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 24543 - Posted: 01.20.2018

By Kimberly Hickok A rooster’s crow is so loud, it can deafen you if you stand too close. So how do the birds keep their hearing? To find out, researchers attached recorders to the heads of three roosters, just below the base of their skulls. Crows lasted 1 to 2 seconds and averaged more than 130 decibels. That’s about the same intensity as standing 15 meters away from a jet taking off. One rooster’s crows reached more than 143 decibels, which is more like standing in the middle of an active aircraft carrier. The researchers then used a micro–computerized tomography scan to create a 3D x-ray image of the birds’ skulls. When a rooster’s beak is fully open, as it is when crowing, a quarter of the ear canal completely closes and soft tissue covers 50% of the eardrum, the team reports in a paper in press at Zoology. This means roosters aren’t capable of hearing their own crows at full strength. The intensity of a rooster’s crow diminishes greatly with distance, so it probably doesn’t cause significant hearing loss in nearby hens. But if it did, she’d likely be OK. Unlike mammals, birds can quickly regenerate hair cells in the inner ear if they become damaged. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 24542 - Posted: 01.20.2018

Bruce Bower Smell has a reputation as a second-rate human sense. But that assumption stinks once hunter-gatherers enter the picture. Semaq Beri hunter-gatherers, who live in tropical forests on the eastern side of the Malay Peninsula in Southeast Asia, name various odors as easily as they name colors, say psycholinguist Asifa Majid and linguist Nicole Kruspe. Yet Semelai rice farmers, who live in forest outposts near the Semaq Beri and speak a closely related language, find odors much more difficult to name than colors, the researchers report online January 18 in Current Biology. By including members of a farming community that inhabit a common forest environment and speak a similar language, the new study indicates for the first time that the cultural practices of hunter-gatherers help enhance their odor-naming ability — and possibly their smell-detection skills — relative to settled peoples. Neuroscientist and odor researcher John McGann of Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., calls these results “unexpected and deeply interesting.” Genetics apparently interact with personal experiences of different smells and one’s cultural background to produce odor-naming abilities, McGann says. Previous research has found that like Semelai farmers, Westerners describe colors far more easily than smells. People in Western societies often talk about odors by resorting to analogies, such as “It smells like banana.” Semaq Beri hunter-gatherers usually used specific terms for a range of odors as well as colors, say Majid of Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and Kruspe of Lund University in Sweden. These forest dwellers are attuned to odors by virtue of their lifestyle and culture, the investigators propose. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 24541 - Posted: 01.19.2018

By Yasemin Saplakoglu In Harry Potter, the young wizard is given a piece of parchment called the Marauder’s map on which is a detailed layout of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The magical map reveals the movements of people (and ghosts) through the school with evanescing ink footsteps. In the hippocampus—a small horseshoe-shaped area of mammalian brains—there is a kind of Marauder’s map, which keeps track of other individuals’ movements. Two new studies published last week in Science show the hippocampus is not only responsible for figuring out an animal’s own position in space—something previously known—but also that of others. This finding explains why soccer games do not always end up with a pile of humans in the middle of the field—players are really good at not bumping into one another. In 1971 John O’Keefe, a neuroscientist at University College London (U.C.L.), and his student Jonathan Dostrovsky discovered “place cells”—neurons in the hippocampus that fire when an animal goes to a specific spot in space. This finding earned O’Keefe a Nobel Prize in 2014. But until recently research had only looked at how the brain maps an animal’s own position. Being able to map where others are in space, “is important for any kind of social interactions [such as] courtship, coordinated hunting [and] monitoring the position of predators or prey,” says Nachum Ulanovsky, a neurobiologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and senior author of one of the studies. “Here, in one bang, we had two studies in two different species of mammals showing [how the brain does this] for the first time.” © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24540 - Posted: 01.19.2018

Hanneke Meijer Even though I am better with dead birds than with living ones, I do enjoy watching them. Their behaviour is fascinating, and as Jennifer Ackerman points out in her book, birds are a lot more intelligent than we often give them credit for. But what do we know about the evolution of bird intelligence? How did the bird brain evolve, and when did it take on its “birdiness”? The fossil record isn’t particularly well-suited for the preservation of soft tissue such as brains – and behaviour doesn’t fossilise at all. However, some inferences regarding behaviour can be made based on anatomy, something the fossil record is rife with. When we look at the anatomical evidence of bird behaviour in the fossil record (Naish, 2014), it becomes clear that certain types of behaviour we see in modern birds – such as colonial nesting, parental care and plumage display – evolved a long time ago, and are likely dinosaurian in origin. The avian brain itself is a modified version of the basic archosaur brain (archosaurs are the group of reptiles that gave rise to crocodiles and dinosaurs). The archosaur brain, as seen in living crocodiles, is a relatively simple, tube-like structure consisting of the hindbrain, mid-brain and forebrain along a central axis. The bird brain has undergone significant enlargement of the forebrain and has folded along its main axis, resulting in a distinctive shape. Unfortunately, no fossilised bird brain has yet been found, but the shape and size of the inner brain cavity in fossilised skulls provides some information about brain shape and maximal brain dimensions. It should be noted here that the brain cavity is never an exact representation of the brain itself, as a significant portion of the endocranial space can be taken up by blood vessels, other soft tissues and fluid. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 24539 - Posted: 01.19.2018

By JAN HOFFMAN The California case in which 13 siblings were found imprisoned at home earlier this week is shocking, but not without precedent. Lurid cases have come to light over the years of children locked in closets and basements, held captive by parents who have crumbled under the weight of drugs, extreme religious conviction, personality disorders or their own abusive backgrounds. The good news, trauma experts say, is that recovery is indeed possible. Victims can reclaim their lives. “The clinical data is encouraging,” said John A. Fairbank, co-director of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress. “There are good treatments available for children seriously abused and traumatized.” In particular, said Dr. Fairbank, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke, good results have been shown with a relatively short-term cognitive behavioral therapy tailored for trauma patients, an approach developed in the early 1990s but widely disseminated in the last 15 years. A significant hurdle to recovery for the California siblings and children in analogous situations, said psychologists, is that their captors were not stranger-kidnappers but their parents. “In doing the healing work, you look at what the patient’s support systems are, “ said Priscilla Dass-Brailsford, a trauma psychologist and an adjunct professor in the department of psychiatry at Georgetown University. “The biggest supports are parents and family. These kids don’t have that. The parents were the aggressors.” Experts interviewed for this article, who underscored that they had no direct knowledge of the California case, said that because the siblings’ primal assurance of unconditional love and safety had been ripped away, they would almost certainly struggle to trust and attach to future supportive figures. “The notion that this was done by parents increases a child’s helplessness and hopelessness,” said Nora J. Baladerian, a Los Angeles psychologist who often treats traumatized individuals. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24538 - Posted: 01.19.2018

Tom Goldman We live in an age of heightened awareness about concussions. From battlefields around the world to football fields in the U.S., we've heard about the dangers caused when the brain rattles around inside the skull and the possible link between concussions and the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy. A number of high-profile NFL stars have developed CTE, and parents are increasingly worried about how concussions may affect their children who play sports. The injury even has become part of popular culture, thanks to the 2015 film Concussion. But now a high-powered team of researchers says all that focus on concussions may be missing the mark. It's really about hits A study published online Thursday in Brain, a journal of neurology, presents the strongest case yet that repetitive hits to the head that don't lead to concussions —meaning no loss of consciousness or other symptoms that can include headaches, dizziness, vision problems or confusion — cause CTE. "We've had an inkling that subconcussive hits — the ones that don't [show] neurological signs and symptoms — may be associated with CTE," says Dr. Lee Goldstein, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine and the lead investigator on the study. "We now have solid scientific evidence to say that is so." And this evidence, he says, leaves researchers "terrifically concerned." © 2018 npr

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 24537 - Posted: 01.19.2018

By Esther Landhuis As the sun went down on a recent Friday, the hospital clinic buzzed with activity. “Loads of patients turned up without appointments,” says Sarah Tabrizi, a neurologist at University College London. It wasn’t just the typical post-holiday rush. Many rushed in, Tabrizi suspects, after hearing news last month about a potential new therapy for Huntington’s disease, a brain disorder that cripples the body and blurs speech and thinking, sometimes not too long after a person’s 30th birthday. Like other neurodegenerative disorders such as Lou Gehrig’s, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s has no cure. Over decades biotech companies have poured billions of dollars into developing and testing pharmaceuticals for these devastating conditions, only to unleash storms of disappointment. Yet in December a ray of something approximating hope poked through when a California company released preliminary findings from its small Huntington’s study. Results from this early-stage clinical trial have not yet been published or reported at medical meetings. But some researchers have growing confidence that the drug should work for Huntington’s and perhaps other diseases with clear genetic roots. The initial data showed enough promise to convince Roche to license the drug from California-based Ionis Pharmaceuticals, which sponsored the recent Huntington’s trial. The pharma giant paid Ionis $45 million for the right to conduct further studies and work with regulatory agencies to bring the experimental therapy to market. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 24536 - Posted: 01.17.2018

Two independent teams of scientists from the University of Utah and the University of Massachusetts Medical School have discovered that a gene crucial for learning, called Arc, can send its genetic material from one neuron to another by employing a strategy commonly used by viruses. The studies, both published in Cell, unveil a new way that nervous system cells interact. “This work is a great example of the importance of basic neuroscience research,” said Edmund Talley, Ph.D., a program director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health. “What began as an effort to examine the behavior of a gene involved in memory and implicated in neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease has unexpectedly led to the discovery of an entirely new process, which neurons may use to send genetic information to one another.” While Arc is known to play a vital role in the brain’s ability to store new information, little is known about precisely how it works. In addition, previous studies had detailed similarities between the Arc protein and proteins found in certain viruses like HIV, but it was unclear how those commonalities influenced the behavior of the Arc protein. The University of Utah researchers began their examination of the Arc gene by introducing it into bacterial cells. To their surprise, when the cells made the Arc protein, it clumped together into a form that resembled a viral capsid, the shell that contains a virus’ genetic information. The Arc “capsids” appeared to mirror viral capsids in their physical structure as well as their behavior and other properties.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24535 - Posted: 01.17.2018

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Our skeletons may help to keep our weight stable, according to a fascinating new study with animals. The study suggests that bones could be much more intimately involved in tracking weight and controlling appetite than scientists realized. It also raises interesting questions about whether a sedentary lifestyle could cause us to pack on pounds in part by discombobulating our sensitive bones. There is no question that our bodies like to maintain whatever weight they have sustained for any period of time. This is in large part because of our biological predilection for homeostasis, or physiological stability, which prompts our bodies to regain any weight that we lose and, in theory, lose any weight that we gain. To achieve this stability, however, our bodies have to be able to sense how much we weigh, note when that weight changes, and respond accordingly, as if we contained an internal bathroom scale. It has not been clear how our bodies manage this trick. Some years ago, scientists did discover one of the likely mechanisms, which involves leptin, a hormone released by fat cells. In broad terms, when people add fat, they produce more leptin, which then jump-starts processes in the brain that reduce appetite and should cause their bodies to drop that new weight. But obviously this system is not perfect or no one would hold on to added pounds. So for the new study, which was published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international group of researchers began to wonder whether there might be other processes at work. To find out, they first gathered groups of mice and rats. They chose both species, hoping that, if any results were common to each, this might indicate that they also could occur in other mammals, including, potentially, us. Then the scientists implanted tiny capsules into each rodent’s abdomen. Some contained weights equaling about 15 percent of each animal’s body mass. Others were empty. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 24534 - Posted: 01.17.2018

Nicola Davis Obese patients undergoing stomach-shrinking surgery have half the risk of death in the years that follow compared with those tackling their weight through diet and behaviour alone, new research suggests. Experts say obesity surgery is cost-effective, leads to substantial weight loss and can help tackle type 2 diabetes. But surgeons say not enough of the stomach-shrinking surgeries are carried out in the UK, with figures currently lagging behind other European countries, including France and Belgium – despite the latter having a smaller population. “We don’t think this [new study] alone is sufficient to conclude that obese patients should push for bariatric surgery, but this additional information certainly seems to provide additional support,” said Philip Greenland, co-author of the latest study from Northwestern University. In the new study, one of several on obesity surgery published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers sought to explore whether stomach-shrinking operations, known as bariatric surgery, had a long-term impact on the risk of death among obese individuals, compared with non-surgical approaches to weight loss. In total, more than 33,500 participants were involved in the study – 8,385 of whom had one of three types of bariatric surgery between 2005 and 2014. The majority of participants had a BMI greater than 35; obesity is defined as a BMI of 30 or higher. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 24533 - Posted: 01.17.2018

By Catherine Offord When Floris Klumpers zapped people with electricity while working toward his PhD in the late 2000s, he expected his volunteers’ amygdalae—key emotion centers in the brain—to light up in anticipation of a shock. “There was this idea that the amygdala is the most important structure in emotion processing—especially in fear processing,” says Klumpers, then at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “We were quite surprised, using fMRI studies, to not find amygdala activity when people were anticipating an adverse event.” Klumpers assumed he’d made a mistake, but after replicating the finding in further experimental work, he began thinking about the different stages of animals’ fear responses. First, there’s anticipation, during which an individual becomes alert and plans reactions to possible danger. Then there’s confrontation, when it has to act to avoid imminent danger. Perhaps, Klumpers reasoned, the brain’s fear-processing regions treat these two phases differently. To investigate, Klumpers, now a neuroscientist at Radboud University Medical Center, and colleagues recently collected data from more than 150 volunteers, who received mild electrical shocks to their fingers as they viewed a computer. “We have a simple cue on the screen that can predict the occurrence of an electrical stimulation,” Klumpers says. In one set of experiments, for example, a yellow square meant a shock was likely, while a blue square signaled no shock for the time being. Meanwhile, the researchers monitored participants’ heart rates and imaged their brains using fMRI. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 24532 - Posted: 01.16.2018

Ian Sample Science editor Donatella Versace finds it in the conflict of ideas, Jack White under pressure of deadlines. For William S Burroughs, an old Dadaist trick helped: cutting pages into pieces and rearranging the words. Every artist has their own way of generating original ideas, but what is happening inside the brain might not be so individual. In new research, scientists report signature patterns of neural activity that mark out those who are most creative. “We have identified a pattern of brain connectivity that varies across people, but is associated with the ability to come up with creative ideas,” said Roger Beaty, a psychologist at Harvard University. “It’s not like we can predict with perfect accuracy who’s going to be the next Einstein, but we can get a pretty good sense of how flexible a given person’s thinking is.” Creative thinking is one of the primary drivers of cultural and technological change, but the brain activity that underpins original thought has been hard to pin down. In an effort to shed light on the creative process, Beaty teamed up with colleagues in Austria and China to scan people’s brains as they came up with original ideas. The scientists asked the volunteers to perform a creative thinking task as they lay inside a brain scanner. While the machine recorded their white matter at work, the participants had 12 seconds to come up with the most imaginative use for an object that flashed up on a screen. Three independent scorers then rated their answers. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Attention; Brain imaging
Link ID: 24531 - Posted: 01.16.2018

By LAURA BEIL Millions of American children have been exposed to a parasite that could interfere with their breathing, liver function, eyesight and even intelligence. Yet few scientists have studied the infection in the United States, and most doctors are unaware of it. The parasites, roundworms of the genus Toxocara, live in the intestines of cats and dogs, especially strays. Microscopic eggs from Toxocara are shed in the animals’ feces, contaminating yards, playgrounds and sandboxes. These infectious particles cling to the hands of children playing outside. Once swallowed, the eggs soon hatch, releasing larvae that wriggle through the body and, evidence suggests, may even reach the brain, compromising learning and cognition. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention periodically tracks positive tests for Toxocara through the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The latest report, published in September in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, estimated that about 5 percent of the United States population — or about 16 million people — carry Toxocara antibodies in their blood, a sign they have ingested the eggs. But the risk is not evenly shared: Poor and minority populations are more often exposed. The rate among African Americans was almost 7 percent, according to the C.D.C. Among people living below the poverty line, the infection rate was 10 percent. The odds of a positive test rise with age, but it’s unknown whether this reflects recent infections or simply an accumulation of antibodies from past encounters. Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, calls Toxocara both one of the most common parasites in the country and arguably the most neglected. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24530 - Posted: 01.16.2018

By Katarina Zimmer Scientists can trace the evolutionary histories of bats and humans back to a common ancestor that lived some tens of millions of years ago. And on the surface, those years of evolutionary divergence have separated us from the winged mammals in every way possible. But look on a sociobehavioral level, as some bat researchers are doing, and the two animal groups share much more than meets the eye. Like humans, bats form huge congregations of up to millions of individuals at a time. On a smaller scale, they form intimate social bonds with one another. And recently, scientists have suggested that bats are capable of vocal learning—the ability to modify vocalizations after hearing sounds. Researchers long considered this skill to be practiced only by humans, songbirds, and cetaceans, but have more recently identified examples of vocal learning in seals, sea lions, elephants—and now, bats. In humans, vocal learning can take the form of adopting styles of speech—for example, if a Brit were to pick up an Australian accent after moving down under. Yossi Yovel, a physicist turned bat biologist at Tel Aviv University who has long been fascinated by animal behavior, recently demonstrated that bat pups can acquire “dialects” in a similar way. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 24529 - Posted: 01.16.2018

By PATRICK SHARKEY Over the past few years, the discussion of crime and violence in the United States has focused on police brutality, mass incarceration and the sharp rise in violence in cities like Baltimore, St. Louis and Chicago. This is entirely appropriate: Any spike in violence should garner attention, and redressing the injustices of our criminal justice system is a matter of moral urgency. But it is also worth reflecting on how much the level of violence has fallen in this country over the past 25 years and how widespread the benefits of that decline have been. From the 1970s through the early part of the 1990s, the murder rate in some cities in the United States rose to levels seen only in the most violent, war-torn nations of the developing world. In the years since, violent crime has decreased in almost every city, in many cases by more than 75 percent. For well-off urbanites, the decline of crime is most visible in sanitized, closely guarded city spaces where tourists and others can now comfortably wander about. But far more consequential have been the changes in low-income, highly segregated urban communities. Indeed, my research has shown that the most disadvantaged people have gained the most from the reduction in violent crime. Start with the lives saved. Though homicide is not a common cause of death for most of the United States population, for African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34 it is the leading cause, which means that any change in the homicide rate has a disproportionate impact on them. The sociologist Michael Friedson and I calculated what the life expectancy would be today for blacks and whites had the homicide rate never shifted from its level in 1991. We found that the national decline in the homicide rate since then has increased the life expectancy of black men by roughly nine months. That figure may not seem like much, but it is exceedingly rare for any change in society to generate such a degree of change in life expectancy. For example, researchers have estimated that if the obesity epidemic in the United States was eliminated, life expectancy would increase by a similar amount. The drop in homicides is probably the most important development in the health of black men in the past several decades. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Attention
Link ID: 24528 - Posted: 01.15.2018

By Adam Bear, Rebecca Fortgang and Michael Bronstein Have you ever felt as though you predicted exactly when the light was going to turn green or sensed that the doorbell was about to ring? Imagine the possibility that these moments of clairvoyance occur simply because of a glitch in your mind’s time logs. What happened first — your thought about the doorbell or its actual ringing? It may have felt as if the thought came first, but when two events (ringing of doorbell, thought about doorbell) occur close together, we can mistake their order. This leads to the sense that we accurately predicted the future when, in fact, all we did is notice the past. In a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we found that this tendency to mix up the timing of thoughts and events may be more than a simple mental hiccup. We supposed that if some people are prone to mixing up the order of their thoughts and perceptions in this way, they could develop a host of odd beliefs. Most obviously, they might come to believe they are clairvoyant or psychic — having abilities to predict such things as whether it is going to rain. Further, these individuals might confabulate — unconsciously make up — explanations for why they have these special abilities, inferring that they are particularly important (even godlike) or are tapping into magical forces that transcend the physical world. Such beliefs are hallmarks of psychosis, seen in mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but they are not uncommon in less-extreme forms in the general population. Would even ordinary people who mistime their thoughts and perceptions be more likely to hold ­delusion-like ideas? © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Attention; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 24527 - Posted: 01.15.2018

By Kelly Crowe, "Scientists identify a sixth taste sense." It's a claim that has made headlines several times over the last few years — first for fat, then for starch and even for water. Now the new candidate for the sixth taste is calcium, after scientists identified the first calcium taste receptors in fruit flies. Researchers at the University of California studied fruit fly behaviour and discovered the flies could taste toxic levels of calcium and didn't like it. Then they used genetics to show that the calcium taste sense is hardwired into the fruit fly brain. University of California professor Craig Montell believes humans might share the fruit fly's taste sensor for calcium. (UC Santa Barbara) And because fruit flies and humans share the other main taste senses — sweet, sour, bitter, salty and savoury (called "umami") — the study's lead author, Craig Montell, thinks there's a good chance that humans also have specific calcium taste receptors. "I would say there is very good reason that, given that all the other tastes have been well conserved between flies and humans, that there probably is," said Montell. But the science of taste is surprisingly complicated. Even the idea that there might be additional taste receptors is controversial. As far back as Aristotle's time, scientists have been puzzling over the question. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 24526 - Posted: 01.15.2018

By Linda Searing That’s the number of babies in the United States who die each year as the result of a sleep-related issue, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The causes vary, but child health experts believe many of the deaths would be preventable if more parents adhered to safe-sleep practices. For instance, babies should be placed on their backs to sleep, but the CDC found that 22 percent of moms placed babies on their side or stomach. Soft bedding — blankets, pillows, bumper pads — should be kept out of the sleep area, but 39 percent of moms said they used soft bedding. And it’s a good idea to share a room with an infant but not a bed with a baby. Still, 61 percent of moms told the CDC they had slept with their babies. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 24525 - Posted: 01.15.2018

By Katarina Zimmer Human mothers will usually cradle their infants on their left sides, such that they can gaze into each other’s left eyes, a position thought to favor processing in the brain’s right hemisphere. A new study in Biology Letters today (January 10) shows that walruses and flying foxes are no different, having such lateralized cuddling biases during maternal care, too. “Several decades ago, it was a popular belief that [this] brain asymmetry is only a human thing,” says the lead author of the study, Andrey Giljov, a zoologist at St. Petersburg University. But recent research has shown that in addition to humans, primate mothers tend to hold their infants to the left, and some of Giljov’s previous work demonstrated that several species of mammal infants like to keep their mothers in their left visual fields when approaching their parents from behind. A bias towards keeping a social partner on a certain side, the new study explains, reflects specialization of the brain’s right hemisphere for processing social information, as visual information is handled by an animal’s contralateral brain hemisphere. The work reveals that flying foxes and walruses not only have a left-biased cuddling preference, but also tend to rest face-to-face in the position that allows mother and young to keep each other within their left visual fields. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Laterality; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24524 - Posted: 01.12.2018