By James Hartzell A hundred dhoti-clad young men sat cross-legged on the floor in facing rows, chatting amongst themselves. At a sign from their teacher the hall went quiet. Then they began the recitation. Without pause or error, entirely from memory, one side of the room intoned one line of the text, then the other side of the room answered with the next line. Bass and baritone voices filled the hall with sonorous prosody, every word distinctly heard, their right arms moving together to mark pitch and accent. The effect was hypnotic, ancient sound reverberating through the room, saturating brain and body. After 20 minutes they halted, in unison. It was just a demonstration. The full recitation of one of India´s most ancient Sanskrit texts, the Shukla Yajurveda, takes six hours. I spent many years studying and translating Sanskrit, and became fascinated by its apparent impact on mind and memory. In India's ancient learning methods textual memorization is standard: traditional scholars, or pandits, master many different types of Sanskrit poetry and prose texts; and the tradition holds that exactly memorizing and reciting the ancient words and phrases, known as mantras, enhances both memory and thinking. I had also noticed that the more Sanskrit I studied and translated, the better my verbal memory seemed to become. Fellow students and teachers often remarked on my ability to exactly repeat lecturers’ own sentences when asking them questions in class. Other translators of Sanskrit told me of similar cognitive shifts. So I was curious: was there actually a language-specific “Sanskrit effect” as claimed by the tradition? © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Language; Attention
Link ID: 24479 - Posted: 01.03.2018

Brian Mann When Bella Doolittle heard her diagnosis last February of early-onset Alzheimer's, she sat in the car outside the doctor's office and cried. "He said, 'Well, we figured out what's going on with you and this is it.' And I'm like, 'No it's not.' " Doolittle's husband, Will Doolittle, sits next to her on the couch, recalling how she grilled the doctor. "You asked, 'How long does this take? How long do I have?' And he said, 'On average, eight years.' That really upset you." "That really pissed me off," Bella says, laughing now at the memory. "Absolutely. I mean, I was pretty devastated. I'm like, eight years? I'm not even wrinkly yet." Researchers say as many as 200,000 Americans experience Alzheimer's younger than the typical age of 65, developing dementia-like symptoms in their 40s and 50s. For people like Bella, the diagnosis can feel overwhelming and bring feelings of shame. They fear losing memories, careers, and parts of their identity. Bella is a young-looking 59, wearing a T-shirt and a mop of red hair. On the day NPR visited her home in Glens Falls in upstate New York, where they raised four kids, Bella was in the kitchen making her signature Christmas gift. "It's homemade Kahlúa, the best you will ever drink," she says. "I have my vanilla beans imported from Madagascar." Bella Doolittle remembers how she first became aware that something was wrong. For a while before the diagnosis, she just felt "off." Her brain would get fuzzy and then it got worse. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 24478 - Posted: 01.02.2018

By Catherine Offord As a physiotherapist at University Hospital Zurich in the mid-2000s, Annina Schmid often encountered people with chronic pain. “My interest in research got sparked while I was seeing my patients,” she says. “It was very difficult to treat them, or to understand why pain persists in some people, while it doesn’t even occur in others.” Schmid, who grew up in Switzerland, had earned her master’s degree in clinical physiotherapy in 2005 at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and she was keen to return down under. In 2008, she secured an Endeavour Europe Scholarship from the Australian Government and moved to the University of Queensland in Brisbane for a PhD in neuroscience. “She’s very motivated,” says Schmid’s colleague and collaborator Brigitte Tampin, a musculoskeletal physiotherapist at Curtin University and at Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences in Germany. Tampin adds that Schmid’s physiotherapy background was an asset for her PhD work and beyond. “She can think as a clinician and as a researcher.” For her PhD, Schmid focused on animal models of mild nerve compression, also called entrapment neuropathy, in which pressure on nerve fibers—from bone, for example—can cause pain and loss of motor function. Using a tube to compress the sciatic nerves of rats, Schmid was able to replicate not only local symptoms seen in humans, but also inflammation at distant sites, a possible explanation for why patients often report pain in other parts of the body.1 © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 24477 - Posted: 01.02.2018

Just 10 minutes of aerobic exercise can improve executive function by priming parts of the brain used to laser focus on the task at hand, according to a new study. This paper, “Executive-Related Oculomotor Control Is Improved Following a 10-minute Single-Bout of Aerobic Exercise: Evidence from the Antisaccade Task,” was published in the January 2018 issue of Neuropsychologia. This research was conducted by Matthew Heath, who is a kinesiology professor and supervisor in the Graduate Program in Neuroscience at the University of Western Ontario, along with UWO master’s student Ashna Samani. For this study, Samani and Heath asked a cohort of healthy young adults to either sit quietly and read magazines or perform 10 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) on a stationary bicycle. (MVPA aerobic intensity is hard enough that you might break a sweat but easy enough that you can carry on a conversation.) Immediately after the 10-minute reading task or time spent doing aerobic exercise, the researchers used eye-tracking equipment to gauge antisaccades, which is a way to measure varying degrees of executive control. As the authors explain in the study abstract, “Antisaccades are an executive task requiring a goal-directed eye movement (i.e., a saccade) mirror-symmetrical to a visual stimulus. The hands- and language-free nature of antisaccades coupled with the temporal precision of eye-tracking technology make it an ideal tool for identifying executive performance changes.” © 1991-2018 Sussex Publishers, LLC

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 24476 - Posted: 01.02.2018

By C. CLAIBORNE RAY Q. Did cranial deformation as practiced by the ancient Mayans change or impair brain function? A. The famous slanted forehead that was apparently a mark of high rank among pre-Columbian Mayans was achieved by various forms of compression of the head in infancy. It is believed by many researchers to have had no significant effect on cranial capacity and how the brain worked, the conclusion of a 1989 study of skulls in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology. But there is no direct evidence to support this contention, no large study comparing brain development in living populations that do and do not practice head flattening. An extensive review article in the journal Anthropology in 2003 speculated that the practice of compression had the potential to damage the delicate developing frontal lobe, as is seen in certain conditions. The authors speculated that such damage could have impaired vision, object recognition, hearing ability, memory, attentiveness and concentration. These factors in turn might have contributed to behavior disorders and difficulty in learning new information. Still other researchers suggest that the diverging conclusions can be attributed to how the skull measurements are done. The compression may have affected the shape of the face more than the brain itself, they said. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24475 - Posted: 01.02.2018

Linda Bauld Search for the term ‘vaping’ online and you’d be forgiven for thinking that it is an activity fraught with risks. The top stories relate to health problems, explosions and that vaping leads to smoking in teenagers. For the average smoker seeking information on vaping, a quick internet search offers little reassurance. Might as well continue smoking, the headlines imply, if these products are so dangerous. But the reality is that they are not. In the past year, more than any other, the evidence that using an e-cigarette is far safer than smoking has continued to accumulate. 2017 saw the publication of the first longer term study of vaping, comparing toxicant exposure between people who’d stopped smoking and used the products for an average of 16 months, compared with those who continued to smoke. Funded by Cancer Research UK, the study found large reductions in carcinogens and other toxic compounds in vapers compared with smokers, but only if the user had stopped smoking completely. A further recent study compared toxicants in vapour and smoke that can cause cancer, and estimated excess cancer risk over a lifetime from smoking cigarettes or vaping. Most of the available data on e-cigarettes in this study suggested a cancer risk from vaping around 1% of that from smoking. E-cigarettes are less harmful than smoking because they don’t contain tobacco. Inhaling burnt tobacco - but also chewing it - is hugely damaging to human health. Remove the tobacco and the combustion and it is hardly surprising that risk is reduced. That doesn’t mean e-cigarettes are harmless. But it does mean that we can be relatively confident that switching from smoking to vaping will have health benefits. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24474 - Posted: 12.30.2017

By Jessica Hamzelou Did you pile on the pounds this Christmas? At least you can take some comfort in the fact that not all fat is bad. Evidence in mice and monkeys suggests it is important for storing important immune cells and may even make them more effective at fighting infection. Yasmine Belkaid at the US National Institutes of Health and her team have found that a type of immune cell – called a memory T-cell – seems to be stored in the body fat of mice. These cells learn to fight infection. Once exposed to a pathogen, they mount a stronger response the next time they encounter it. When the researchers infected mice with parasites or bacteria, they found that memory T-cells clustered densely in the animals’ body fat. Tests showed that these cells seemed to be more effective than those stored in other organs, being better at replicating and at releasing infection-fighting chemicals, for example. After exposing the mice to the same pathogens again, the memory T-cells stored in their fat were the fastest to respond. Belkaid’s team found that monkeys also have plenty of memory T-cells in their body fat, and that these cells worked better than those from other organs. “It means that fat tissue is not only a reservoir for memory cells, but those memory cells have enhanced function,” says Belkaid. “The tissue is like a magic potion that can optimally activate the T-cells.” © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 24473 - Posted: 12.30.2017

By NEIL GENZLINGER Ben Barres, a neuroscientist who did groundbreaking work on brain cells known as glia and their possible relation to diseases like Parkinson’s, and who was an outspoken advocate of equal opportunity for women in the sciences, died on Wednesday at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 63. In announcing the death, Stanford University, where Dr. Barres was a professor, said he had had pancreatic cancer. Dr. Barres was transgender, having transitioned from female to male in 1997, when he was in his 40s and well into his career. That gave him a distinctive outlook on the difficulties that women and members of minorities face in academia. and especially in the sciences. An article he wrote for the journal Nature in 2006 titled “Does Gender Matter?” took on some prominent scholars who had argued that women were not advancing in the sciences because of innate differences in their aptitude. “I am suspicious when those who are at an advantage proclaim that a disadvantaged group of people is innately less able,” he wrote. “Historically, claims that disadvantaged groups are innately inferior have been based on junk science and intolerance.” The article cited studies documenting obstacles facing women, but it also drew on Dr. Barres’s personal experiences. He recounted dismissive treatment he had received when he was a woman and how that had changed when he became a man. “By far,” he wrote, “the main difference that I have noticed is that people who don’t know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect: I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man.” Dr. Barres (pronounced BARE-ess) was born on Sept. 13, 1954, in West Orange, N.J., with the given name Barbara. “I knew from a very young age — 5 or 6 — that I wanted to be a scientist, that there was something fun about it and I would enjoy doing it,” he told The New York Times in 2006. “I decided I would go to M.I.T. when I was 12 or 13.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Glia; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24472 - Posted: 12.30.2017

By Daniel Barron Earlier this year, I wrote about my patient, Andrew, an engineer who developed a heroin habit. An unfortunate series of joint replacements had left Andrew with terrible pain and, when his medication ran out, he turned to heroin. Months after his surgeries—after his tissue and scars had healed—Andrew remained disabled by a deep, biting pain. I recall puzzling over his pain, how it had spread throughout his body and how previous clinical teams had prescribed progressively higher doses of opioids to tame it. Andrew had transitioned from acute pain (i.e., pain from his surgical wounds) to chronic pain (i.e., pain in the absence of an obvious cause), but it was unclear to me whether this reflected a drug tolerance or a different pain process. The difference between drug tolerance and chronic pain is a difficult concept to get hold of. In the hospital workroom one morning, I realized how confused I was by the topic and paged the hospital’s on-call pain specialist. Fortune smiled and Donna-Ann M Thomas, Yale University’s Pain Medicine Division Chief, picked up the phone and patiently explained how tolerance and chronic pain are quite different. Andrew became tolerant to opioids when his body required progressively larger doses to have the same effect. Opioids activate the Mu opioid receptor, which blocks pain signals in the spinal cord. To find a way around the opioid blockade, Andrew’s body had made more Mu receptors to compensate for the drug, meaning more drug had to be present to stifle the pain signal, hence the escalating doses. © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Attention
Link ID: 24471 - Posted: 12.30.2017

By Abigail Zuger, M.D. All human beings contain a frightening tangle of primal impulses struggling for dominance, and that’s true not only for the chaotic psyche, but also the sober, dependable, symmetric old hands. Even the ordinary act of reaching for a fork or throwing a ball is the product of immensely complex genetic and neurologic negotiation. In some ways we are not that much further along than we were when our ancestors linked left-handedness to the sinister and the gauche. For all its sophistication, modern science is still unable to explain exactly why some of us prefer to do these tasks with the left hand and some with the right. Many theories are proposed and debated; studies yield data invariably suggestive but never conclusive. Moreover, as Howard Kushner systematically outlines in his short but meaty survey of the science and sociology of handedness, in some ways we are not that much further along than we were back in the days when our ancestors linked left-handedness to the sinister and the gauche, among many other undesirable traits, and just left it at that. An emeritus professor at Emory University and San Diego State, as well as a visiting scholar at the University of California – San Diego, Kushner brings academic credentials in both neuroscience and the history of science to his overview. In addition, he himself is left-handed, as was his mother (who like many left-handed children of her era was forcibly retrained to use her right), and the residua of personal experience echo through the book. Copyright 2017 Undark

Keyword: Laterality
Link ID: 24470 - Posted: 12.30.2017

By Keith Doucette, In what her mother calls a "Christmas miracle," a Nova Scotia woman who suffered a catastrophic brain injury in a 1996 car accident communicated one-on-one with her mother for the first time in 21 years. Louise Misner said her 37-year-old daughter Joellan Huntley used eye-motion cameras and software on an iPad to respond to a comment from Misner about her clothes. Huntley has been severely disabled since she was 15, unable to walk or talk and is fed through a tube. She has always responded to family members' presence by making sounds, but was unable to communicate any thoughts. The breakthrough occurred during a Christmas Day visit at the Kings Regional Rehabilitation Centre in Waterville, N.S. "I said, 'Joellan, I like your new Christmas outfit you got on,"' Misner said in a telephone interview on Friday. Misner said her daughter then used the technology to find an icon for a short-sleeved shirt. "And then she said no, and went to a long-sleeve shirt because she was trying to tell me what she had on." Misner said her reaction to the long-hoped-for communication was immediate. "Christmas miracle," she said. "It was God's way of telling me that she's finally achieved what she needed to since the accident." Settlement helped buy technology Huntley was thrown from a car that had swerved to avoid a dog running loose along a road in Centreville, N.S., on April 18, 1996. The accident claimed the life of her boyfriend and a young girl who was the sister of the driver. ©2017 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Robotics
Link ID: 24469 - Posted: 12.30.2017

By Sharon Begley Technologies to detect brain activity — fine, we’ll come right out and call it mind reading — as well as to change it are moving along so quickly that “a bit of a gold rush is happening, both on the academic side and the corporate side,” Michel Maharbiz of the University of California, Berkeley, told a recent conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here are three fast-moving areas of neuroscience we’ll be watching in 2018: Neural dust/neurograins Whatever you call these electronics, they’re really, really tiny. We’re eagerly awaiting results from DARPA’s $65 million neural engineering program, which aims to develop a brain implant that can communicate digitally with the outside world. The first step is detecting neurons’ electrochemical signaling (DARPA, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, says 1 million neurons at a time would be nice). To do that, scientists at Brown University are developing salt-grain-sized “neurograins” containing an electrode to detect neural firing as well as to zap neurons to fire, all via a radio frequency antenna. Advertisement Maharbiz’s “neural dust” is already able to do the first part. The tiny wireless devices can detect what neurons are doing, he and his colleagues reported in a 2016 rat study. (The study’s lead scientist recently moved to Elon Musk’s startup Neuralink, one of a growing number of brain-tech companies.) Now Maharbiz and team are also working on making neural dust receive outside signals and cause neurons to fire in certain ways. Such “stimdust” would be “the smallest [nerve] stimulator ever built,” Maharbiz said. Eventually, scientists hope, they’ll know the neural code for, say, walking, letting them transmit the precise code needed to let a paralyzed patient walk. They’re also deciphering the neural code for understanding spoken language, which raises the specter of outside signals making people hear voices — raising ethical issues that, experts said, neurotech will generate in abundance. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging; Robotics
Link ID: 24468 - Posted: 12.29.2017

Shankar Vedantam Decades ago, Randy Gardner stayed awake for 11 days. He broke a record in the process, but the teenage stunt has come back to haunt him. At 71, he offers wisdom about staying up past your bedtime. NOEL KING, HOST: And this next story is about something we think about a lot at MORNING EDITION. It's about sleep. It's actually about the lack of sleep. Decades ago, a teenage boy named Randy Gardner stopped sleeping for 11 nights. And because of that, scientists were able to learn something about the price we pay when we don't get enough rest. NPR's Shankar Vedantam has the story. SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Our story begins in 1963, when Randy Gardner moved to San Diego. He was 17. It was the last in a long line of childhood moves. RANDY GARDNER: I'm the oldest of four siblings in a military family. VEDANTAM: In every town he lived in, Randy entered the science fair. GARDNER: I was a kind of a science nerd when I was young. When we came to this town, San Diego, I thought, boy, this is a big city. VEDANTAM: If he wanted to win the science fair here, he'd have to pull out all the stops. The idea he came up with? Going without sleep for 264 hours, exactly 11 days - long enough to break a world record. He recruited two of his friends... GARDNER: Bruce McAllister, and Joe Marciano. VEDANTAM: ...And asked them to stay awake on rotations around the clock to help him stay awake. GARDNER: If you're on your own, you're going to succumb. You're going to fall asleep. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 24467 - Posted: 12.29.2017

/ By Michael Schulson Late last month, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer took a break from the tax bill debate to talk with reporters about genetics. It takes just a few minutes to put some spit into a vial, but that little bit of spit can yield volumes of deeply intimate data. In a press conference, the New York senator criticized how direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies — outfits like 23andMe and AncestryDNA — discuss and handle users’ genetic information. “What those companies can do with all that data — your most sensitive and deepest info, your genetics — is not clear, and in some cases not fair and not right,” said Schumer. Schumer called on the Federal Trade Commission to launch an investigation into genetic testing companies’ privacy and disclosure practices, though the commercial and regulatory tides seem — at least for now — to be going in the other direction. Discounted prices for 23andMe dropped below $50 earlier this year, and sales of AncestryDNA kits are breaking records: In the weekend after Thanksgiving, the company said it had sold around 1.5 million genetic tests. That’s more units than 23andMe sold in its first eight years on the market. Last spring, for the first time, the Food and Drug Administration approved an over-the-counter test that tells consumers their genetic risk for a variety of conditions, from Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s to Celiac disease and numerous blood diseases. And a new FDA policy announced at the beginning of November is likely to allow a wave of new, health-oriented genetic screening products to enter the market. Copyright 2017 Undark

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 24466 - Posted: 12.29.2017

John Daley Seven years ago, Robert Kerley, who makes his living as a truck driver, was loading drywall onto his trailer when a gust of wind knocked him off. He fell 14 feet and hurt his back. For pain, a series of doctors prescribed him a variety of opioids: Vicodin, Percocet and Oxycontin. In less than a year, the 45-year-old from Federal Heights, Colo., says he was hooked. "I spent most of my time high, laying on the couch, not doing nothing, sleeping, dozing off, falling asleep everywhere," he says. Kerley lost weight. He lost his job. His relationships with his wife and kids suffered. He remembers when he hit rock bottom. One night hanging out in a friend's basement, he drank three beers and the alcohol reacted with an opioid in his system. "I was taking so much morphine that I respiratory arrested because of it," Kerley says. "I stopped breathing." An ambulance arrived, and EMTs administered the overdose reversal drug naloxone. Kerley was later hospitalized. As the father of a 12-year-old son, he knew he needed to turn things around. That's when he signed up for Kaiser Permanente's Integrated Pain Service. "After seven years of being on narcotics and in a spiral downhill, the only thing that pulled me out of it was going to this class," he says. "The only thing that pulled me out of it was doing and working the program that they ask you to work." © 2017 npr

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24465 - Posted: 12.29.2017

By JOANNA KLEIN Most rodents are just rodents. And the ones with exceptional abilities are usually cartoon rats or mice. But here in the real world of flesh, bones, brains and nerves that we mammals use each second to survive, some woodland rodents really do have a superpower that helps them tolerate cold and endure harsh winters. In grasslands from central Canada to Texas, a species known as thirteen-lined ground squirrels can adjust their body temperature to match the air around them. This is especially important during hibernation: They don’t have to fatten up like bears or find warm hide-outs like conventional mice and rats. They slumber, surviving in bodies just above freezing. Another species, the Syrian hamster, does it too. “They combine warm and cold blooded animals in one,” said Elena Gracheva, a neurophysiologist at Yale University. This uncanny ability to withstand prolonged cold (and even hypothermia) results in part from an adaptation these rodents have developed in molecules they share with other mammals, including us, Dr. Gracheva and her colleagues found in a study published last week in the journal Cell Reports. Unique properties of TRPM8, a cold-sensing protein found in their peripheral nervous systems, shields these rodents from harsh weather. It’s really important because if they’re too cold, they can’t hibernate — just like if you’re too cold, you might have trouble sleeping. The new research brings scientists closer to understanding enigmas of hibernation and solving a mystery of how this molecular sensor works. The work also may lead to therapies for allodynia, a nerve condition that causes some people to misperceive something normally not-so-cold as painful. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 24464 - Posted: 12.28.2017

Girls who go through puberty early could be more likely to experience depression and behaviour problems that last into their 20s compared to peers who start menstruation later, a U.S. study suggests. Researchers studied data on nearly 7,800 women who had their first menstrual cycle at an average age of 12. The women were interviewed four times, starting around age 16 and continuing until about age 28. Girls who went through puberty earlier than most were more likely to become depressed, and their symptoms were also more severe in adolescence, the study found. The younger the age at the first period, the stronger the association between early puberty and mental health problems; It was stronger for girls who started menstruation at age 8 than at age 10, for example. With earlier puberty, girls were also more likely to have behaviour issues that led to things like stealing, lying, breaking into buildings and selling drugs. The link lasted into young adulthood. Interestingly, the magnitude of the association between puberty and these psychological difficulties remains stable, meaning that puberty is as strongly associated with depressive symptoms and antisocial behaviour during adulthood as it is during adolescence, said lead study author Jane Mendle, a researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. ©2017 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Depression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 24463 - Posted: 12.28.2017

By Helen Shen Brain-controlled prosthetic devices have the potential to dramatically improve the lives of people with limited mobility resulting from injury or disease. To drive such brain-computer interfaces, neuroscientists have developed a variety of algorithms to decode movement-related thoughts with increasing accuracy and precision. Now researchers are expanding their tool chest by borrowing from the world of cryptography to decode neural signals into movements. During World War II, codebreakers cracked the German Enigma cipher by exploiting known language patterns in the encrypted messages. These included the typical frequencies and distributions of certain letters and words. Knowing something about what they expected to read helped British computer scientist Alan Turing and his colleagues find the key to translate gibberish into plain language. Many human movements, such as walking or reaching, follow predictable patterns, too. Limb position, speed and several other movement features tend to play out in an orderly way. With this regularity in mind, Eva Dyer, a neuroscientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, decided to try a cryptography-inspired strategy for neural decoding. She and her colleagues published their results in a recent study in Nature Biomedical Engineering. “I’ve heard of this approach before, but this is one of the first studies that’s come out and been published,” says Nicholas Hatsopoulos, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the work. “It’s pretty novel.” © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Robotics
Link ID: 24462 - Posted: 12.28.2017

Acclaimed Stanford neuroscientist Ben Barres, MD, PhD, died on Dec. 27, 20 months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He was 63. Barres’ path-breaking discoveries of the crucial roles played by glial cells — the unsung majority of brain cells, which aren’t nerve cells — revolutionized the field of neuroscience. Barres was incontestably visionary yet, ironically, face-blind — he suffered from prosopagnosia, an inability to distinguish faces, and relied on voices or visual cues such as hats and hairstyles to identify even people he knew well. And there were many of them. A professor of neurobiology, of developmental biology and of neurology, Barres was widely praised as a stellar and passionate scientist whose methodologic rigor was matched only by his energy and enthusiasm. He was devoted to his scholarly pursuits and to his trainees, advocating unrelentingly on their behalf. He especially championed the cause of women in academia, with whom he empathized; he was transgender. “Ben was a remarkable person. He will be remembered as a brilliant scientist who transformed our understanding of glial cells and as a tireless advocate who promoted equity and diversity at every turn,” said Marc Tessier-Lavigne, PhD, president of Stanford University. “He was also a beloved mentor to students and trainees, a dear friend to many in our community and a champion for the fundamental dignity of us all.”

Keyword: Glia
Link ID: 24461 - Posted: 12.28.2017

By Katherine Sellgren BBC News Kids seem to spend endless hours on smartphones, games consoles, computers and tablets these days. Playing on electronic devices certainly doesn't help their waistlines, but do you ever wonder what regular device use is doing to their eyesight? While there isn't much research out there yet about the impact of screens on eyesight - after all the iPhone was first unveiled by Apple in only 2007 - experts are concerned about growing levels of short-sightedness in children. And they suggest the best thing parents can do to prevent it is to encourage youngsters to spend more time outdoors in the sunlight. How short-sightedness is on the rise There has been a massive rise around the globe in short-sightedness - or myopia as it's officially known - over recent decades. "We know that myopia or short-sightedness is becoming more common," says Chris Hammond, professor of ophthalmology at King's College London and consultant ophthalmic surgeon at St Thomas' Hospital. "It has reached epidemic levels in East Asia, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, where approaching 90% of 18-year-olds are now short-sighted. "In Europe, it's potentially getting up to 40% to 50% of young adults in their mid-20s who are short-sighted now in Western Europe. It's been gradually rising over the decades of the 20th Century from around 20-30%." Why has it become so much more common? Annegret Dahlmann-Noor, consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London says lack of natural light seems to be the key issue. "The main factor seems to be a lack of exposure to direct sunlight, because children who study a lot and who use computers or smartphones or tablet computers a lot have less opportunity to run around outside and are less exposed to sunshine and because of that seem to be at more risk of developing short-sightedness." Prof Hammond says: "It may be that there's no coincidence that in East Asian countries, the most myopic ones all correlate with the maths league tables. "These kids are being pushed with very intensive education from a very young age and spend a lot of time indoors studying everything close up and very little time outdoors. © 2017 BBC.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 24460 - Posted: 12.28.2017