By DANIEL T. WILLINGHAM Americans are not good readers. Many blame the ubiquity of digital media. We’re too busy on Snapchat to read, or perhaps internet skimming has made us incapable of reading serious prose. But Americans’ trouble with reading predates digital technologies. The problem is not bad reading habits engendered by smartphones, but bad education habits engendered by a misunderstanding of how the mind reads. Just how bad is our reading problem? The last National Assessment of Adult Literacy from 2003 is a bit dated, but it offers a picture of Americans’ ability to read in everyday situations: using an almanac to find a particular fact, for example, or explaining the meaning of a metaphor used in a story. Of those who finished high school but did not continue their education, 13 percent could not perform simple tasks like these. When things got more complex — in comparing two newspaper editorials with different interpretations of scientific evidence or examining a table to evaluate credit card offers — 95 percent failed. There’s no reason to think things have gotten better. Scores for high school seniors on the National Assessment of Education Progress reading test haven’t improved in 30 years. Many of these poor readers can sound out words from print, so in that sense, they can read. Yet they are functionally illiterate — they comprehend very little of what they can sound out. So what does comprehension require? Broad vocabulary, obviously. Equally important, but more subtle, is the role played by factual knowledge. All prose has factual gaps that must be filled by the reader. Consider “I promised not to play with it, but Mom still wouldn’t let me bring my Rubik’s Cube to the library.” The author has omitted three facts vital to comprehension: you must be quiet in a library; Rubik’s Cubes make noise; kids don’t resist tempting toys very well. If you don’t know these facts, you might understand the literal meaning of the sentence, but you’ll miss why Mom forbade the toy in the library. Knowledge also provides context. For example, the literal meaning of last year’s celebrated fake-news headline, “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President,” is unambiguous — no gap-filling is needed. But the sentence carries a different implication if you know anything about the public (and private) positions of the men involved, or you’re aware that no pope has ever endorsed a presidential candidate. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 24363 - Posted: 11.26.2017

By Nathaniel Morris Depression afflicts an estimated 16 million Americans every year, many of whom go to their doctors in despair, embarking on an often stressful process about what to do next. These visits may entail filling out forms with screening questions about symptoms such as mood changes and difficulty sleeping. Doctors may ask patients to share intimate details about such issues as marital conflicts and suicidal urges. Some patients may be referred to mental-health specialists for further examination. Once diagnosed with depression, patients frequently face the question: “Are you interested in therapy, medications or both?” As a resident physician in psychiatry, I’ve seen many patients grapple with this question; the most frequent answer I’ve heard from patients is “I’m not sure.” Deciding between different types of medical treatment can be challenging, especially amid the fog of depression. Moreover, patients rely on doctors to help guide them, and we’re often not sure ourselves which is the best approach for a specific patient. People commonly associate psychotherapy with Freud and couches, but newer, evidence-based treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy have become prominent in the field. CBT helps patients develop strategies to address harmful thoughts, emotions and behaviors that may contribute to depression. There are many proposed explanations for how specific psychotherapies treat depression. These possibilities include giving patients social support and teaching coping skills, and researchers are using neuroimaging to study how these treatments affect depressed patients’ brains. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 24362 - Posted: 11.26.2017

Sarah Marsh In fields across Switzerland the harvest time for cannabis is coming to an end, and workers are distributing the crop to shops in France and Switzerland. Soon, the plants could be available across much of Europe. The man behind the operation is 31-year-old Jonas Duclos, a former banker, and what he is doing is legal. His business, CBD420, sells BlueDream, a strain of hemp cultivated to ensure the level of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, is low enough (0.2%) to be lawful in most European countries. The UK is one of the exceptions: any trace of THC is outlawed. While low in THC, BlueDream is high in cannabidiol (CBD), another compound found in cannabis, which is non-psychoactive and has been shown to have medicinal qualities, for example, acting as a powerful anti-inflammatory. CBD is not a controlled substance in Europe, and in Britain does not require a licence from the Home Office to be sold if it can be extracted from cannabis. Duclos’s “legal weed” is on sale in more than 1,000 tobacco shops in Switzerland, where THC is allowed up to 1% concentration, and in 15 to 20 shops in France, where the limit is 0.2%. “There is a loophole that lets us bring it on the market,” Duclos explains. The plan is now to take the product elsewhere in Europe, with Italy among his next targets. While the company’s low-THC hemp is illegal in the UK, its CBD oils and balms will be available in some British shops from mid-December. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24361 - Posted: 11.26.2017

By Erin Blakemore Jennifer Brea wasn’t supposed to break down. But in 2011, her body did just that. The 28-year-old was on the verge of a Harvard PhD and a wedding, but a series of viral infections transformed her from an energetic young woman to a bedridden patient with a mystery illness. Desperate to escape the pain, exhaustion and loss of muscle control that bound her to her bed, Brea visited a long list of medical specialists — many of whom questioned whether she was sick at all. In reality, Brea has myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME. Also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, the condition can mystify health-care providers and disable patients. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, up to 2.5 million Americans suffer from the illness, 90 percent of them undiagnosed. “Unrest,” Brea’s intensely personal documentary about her journey through ME, asks why physicians still know so little about the disease. The film delves into Brea’s ordeal, her marriage and the lives of others whose health was stolen by a condition that can strip a person of dignity, mobility and hope for the future. More women have ME than men, and Brea’s experience fighting for recognition from her doctors is central to the film’s narrative. Her documentary is a testimony not just to the terrors of ME but also to the struggles that women often face when relaying information about their own bodies to medical providers. ME can keep patients painfully separate from their everyday lives and loved ones. “Unrest” breaks through a bit of that isolation and offers a sometimes heartbreaking look at what it takes to survive a poorly understood disease. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 24360 - Posted: 11.26.2017

By Daniel J. Levitin One evening in April, driving home from a university function, I was stopped in freeway traffic caused by roadworks somewhere up ahead when I felt a massive jolt. The back of my head hit the headrest, then my head lurched forward and I felt something hit the inside of my forehead with a squishy blow. Then my head snapped back and slammed into the headrest a second time. I didn’t feel any pain at first, just a stunned sense of disruption. As a neuroscientist, I know a bit about traumatic brain injury and concussions. Sitting on the freeway, I went through a quick checklist in my mind: I hadn’t blacked out. I wasn’t dizzy or nauseated. This meant that it was unlikely I’d slip into a coma or lose consciousness in the critical next few hours. But I could feel a dull ache in the cerebellum, where my head had hit the headrest. If the impact had been any higher up, I thought, in the occipital lobe, I might have lost my sight or experienced hallucinations. The squishy sensation, I suspected, was likely my prefrontal cortex pushing against the viscous fluid that keeps it from the bone of my skull. I did not want to move yet. I wanted to just sit. The young woman who hit me walked up to my window and asked if I was all right. She was clutching her cell phone. I wondered if she had been texting while driving. I knew that going to the E.R. would likely be pointless: concussions don’t leave any evidence that can be seen in CT scans and MRIs, and newer markers—cerebral spinal fluid and blood draws—are still being evaluated. © 2017 Condé Nast

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Language
Link ID: 24359 - Posted: 11.25.2017

By Diana Kwon, Amanda Montañez Killer whales have group-specific dialects, sperm whales babysit one another’s young and bottlenose dolphins cooperate with other species. These social skills are all closely linked with the aquatic mammals’ brain sizes, according to a recent study in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Scientists first proposed a relation between social living and brain expansion, or encephalization, nearly three decades ago, when they observed that primate species with larger brains typically lived in bigger groups. This theory was later broadened to associate brain size with other social characteristics, such as resolving conflicts and allocating food. Michael Muthukrishna, an economic psychologist at the London School of Economics, and his colleagues went searching for a similar link between big brains and sociality in cetaceans—the mammalian order that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises. They compiled a comprehensive data set of cetacean brain and body mass, group size and social characteristics. The team’s analyses, which covered 90 species, revealed that brain size was best predicted by a score based on various social behaviors such as cooperation with other species, group hunting and complex vocalizations. Bigger brains were also linked to other factors, including dietary richness and geographical range. The authors say these results are consistent with theories that cetaceans developed large brains to deal with the challenges of living in information-rich social environments. Yet Robert Barton, an evolutionary biologist at Durham University in England, who did not take part in the work, cautions against drawing conclusions about causation from correlation. He also asserts that it is important to ex­­amine specific regions of the brain because they might evolve differently. For example, his own research team has found that nocturnal primates’ brains develop larger olfactory structures—regions associated with smell—than those found in species active during the day. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Evolution; Language
Link ID: 24358 - Posted: 11.25.2017

By John Horgan Years ago I was surfcasting on an ocean beach and caught a big, beautiful striped bass. My daughter and son, who were 8 and 10, respectively, were nearby. I held the fish up and yelled, Look kids, I caught dinner! Skye, my daughter, burst into tears and pleaded with me to let the fish go. I tried to josh her out of her mood, in vain. I assured her that I’d been catching fish like this since I was a boy, fish don’t really feel pain, they’re just fish, they’re like swimming machines. Skye was unconvinced. I said I would stick a knife into the fish’s brain now to put it out of its misery. Dumb move! Skye shrieked in horror and begged me not to kill the fish. By now, other people on the beach, attracted by the commotion, had gathered around the weeping girl and mean man. This traumatic—for me!—scene came back to me when I attended “Animal Consciousness” at New York University last weekend. I’m trying to wrap up a book on the mind-body problem, so I really didn’t have the time to attend the meeting. But I couldn’t resist going, and now I can’t resist firing off a quick report. Advertisement Philosopher David Chalmers, one of the conference organizers, kicked the meeting off by noting that many researchers are investigating whether non-human animals are conscious. If animals are capable of consciousness, he said, they can suffer, and that should matter to us. © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 24357 - Posted: 11.25.2017

By DENISE GRADY Scientists have found prions — abnormal proteins widely believed to cause a rare, brain-destroying disease — in the skin of 23 patients who had died from it, according to a study published on Wednesday. The discovery suggests that skin samples might be used to improve detection of the disorder, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which now is usually diagnosed with much more difficult procedures, like brain biopsies or autopsies. But the presence of prions in the skin also raises unsettling questions about whether medical instruments could become contaminated even during surgery that does not involve the brain and then spread the disease to other patients. The prions stick to stainless steel and are notoriously hard to destroy. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease affects one person in a million worldwide, with about 300 cases a year in the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health. People are typically about age 60 when it starts. It is cruel and rapidly fatal: Most patients die within a year of becoming ill. They deteriorate mentally, weaken, move uncontrollably, and may become blind and unable to speak. The disease belongs to the same class of brain disorders as mad-cow disease. The findings do not mean that Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease can be transmitted by touch or casual contact, said the senior author of the study, Dr. Wen-Quan Zou, at Case Western University School of Medicine. Patients are not dangerous, he emphasized. The researchers also said that although the disease had been transmitted decades ago by corneal transplants and certain neurosurgical procedures, there was no definitive evidence that other types of surgery had ever spread it. And the levels found in skin are far lower than those in the brain. Despite the new findings, there is no reason to change the medical care given to patients with the disease or to people known to have genetic mutations that may predispose them to Creutzfeldt-Jakob or related illnesses, the researchers said. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 24356 - Posted: 11.24.2017

Sara Reardon Brain implants that deliver electrical pulses tuned to a person’s feelings and behaviour are being tested in people for the first time. Two teams funded by the US military’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), have begun preliminary trials of ‘closed-loop’ brain implants that use algorithms to detect patterns associated with mood disorders. These devices can shock the brain back to a healthy state without input from a physician. The work, presented last week at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting in Washington DC, could eventually provide a way to treat severe mental illnesses that resist current therapies. It also raises thorny ethical concerns, not least because the technique could give researchers a degree of access to a person’s inner feelings in real time. The general approach — using a brain implant to deliver electric pulses that alter neural activity — is known as deep-brain stimulation. It is used to treat movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, but has been less successful when tested against mood disorders. Early evidence suggested that constant stimulation of certain brain regions could ease chronic depression, but a major study involving 90 people with depression found no improvement after a year of treatment.1 The scientists behind the DARPA-funded projects say that their work might succeed where earlier attempts failed, because they have designed their brain implants specifically to treat mental illness — and to switch on only when needed. “We’ve learned a lot about the limitations of our current technology,” says Edward Chang, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), who is leading one of the projects. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Depression; Robotics
Link ID: 24354 - Posted: 11.24.2017

Jon Hamilton A brain system involved in everything from addiction to autism appears to have evolved differently in people than in great apes, a team reports Thursday in the journal Science. The system controls the production of dopamine, a chemical messenger that plays a major role in pleasure and rewards. "Humans have evolved a dopamine system that is different than the one in chimpanzees," says Nenad Sestan, an author of the study and a professor of neuroscience at Yale. That could help explain why human behavior is so different from our nearest relatives even though our brains are remarkably similar, he says. It might also shed light on why people are vulnerable to mental disorders such as autism. The finding came from a massive, multicenter effort to compare the brains of several species. Researchers looked at 247 samples of brain tissue from five macaque monkeys, five chimpanzees and six people. They looked at which genes were turned on or off in 16 regions of the brain. And in most places, the differences among species were subtle. But there was a striking difference in the neocortex, an area of the brain that is much more developed in people than in chimpanzees. The team found that a gene called TH, which is involved in the production of dopamine, was expressed in the neocortex of people, but not chimpanzees. "That caught our attention," says Andre Miguel Sousa, another author of the study who works in Sestan's lab at Yale. Dopamine is best known for its role in the brain's reward system, which responds to everything from sex and food to addictive drugs. But dopamine also helps regulate emotional responses, memory and movement. And abnormal dopamine levels have been linked to disorders including Parkinson's, schizophrenia and autism. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Evolution
Link ID: 24353 - Posted: 11.24.2017

By Diana Kwon | Most of us are familiar with the role of smell in our dining habits—that basket of freshly baked cookies is usually much harder to resist than a plate of odorless carrot sticks, and the taste of food is strongly tied to its aroma. But animals’ sense of smell is even more intricately linked with eating and metabolism. Prior studies have shown that, in humans, fasting enhances olfactory sensitivity, while satiety reduces it. And a new study, published today (July 5) in Cell Metabolism, suggests that, at least in mice, this link may go even further—animals engineered to lack a sense of smell gained less weight and burned more fat than their unaltered counterparts. This difference in weight gain was almost entirely due to alterations in body fat composition. “The major thing was that [the mice lacking smell] weren’t gaining fat,” coauthor Andrew Dillin, a biology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, tells The Scientist. “Somehow, the olfactory system is engaging the major control circuit in the brain that controls peripheral metabolism . . . and that is turning on a program to burn fat.” Dillin says his team was interested in knowing whether simply eating fattening food led to weight gain, or if it was how the olfactory system “perceived” those calories that matters. To assess this link between olfaction and metabolism, scientists genetically engineered mice that expressed a gene for a diphtheria toxin receptor on olfactory sensory neurons. Once the animals were around seven weeks old, the researchers injected the toxin to kill off these nerve cells and found that these animals had lost their sense of smell. Control animals generated without this receptor retained all their smell neurons after receiving the toxin. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Obesity; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 24352 - Posted: 11.24.2017

By Abby Olena Two people with a rare genetic disorder have helped shed light on the fundamental neuroscience of appetite and, scientists say, opened up a new target for potential obesity treatments. Neonatal progeroid syndrome (NPS) affects only a handful of people worldwide. The most telling features of the condition are an aged appearance due to an absence of the fat layer under the skin and extreme thinness. Researchers report in in Nature Medicine today (November 6) that a glucose-releasing hormone involved in the disease crosses the blood-brain barrier and homes in on neurons that regulate appetite in mice. The study suggests it might be possible to target the hormone, asprosin, in the treatment of diabetes and obesity. “Rare diseases with extreme phenotypes like this are very valuable to learn important things that then apply to more common diseases,” says coauthor and medical geneticist Atul Chopra of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Chopra and colleagues showed in a previous study that patients with NPS have mutations near the end of a gene called FBN1, which encodes profibrillin. It was already known that profibrillin is processed to form fibrillin 1, an extracellular matrix protein. The 140-amino-acid chunk cleaved from the end of profibrillin, which Chopra’s group named asprosin, is secreted by adipose tissue and functions as a hormone that causes the liver to make glucose. They determined that two individuals with NPS are heterozygous for FBN1 mutations and have greatly reduced levels of circulating asprosin. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 24351 - Posted: 11.24.2017

By Bob Grant In 1971, a 27-year-old, 456-pound man went to the University of Dundee’s department of medicine in Scotland looking for help. Patient A.B., as doctors referred to him, needed to lose weight. His physicians recommended a short but drastic course of action: stop eating altogether. The patient responded so well to a brief stint without food that he decided to prolong the deprivation—for more than a year. “[H]is fast was continued into what is presently the longest recorded fast (Guinness Book of Records, 1971),” the clinicians wrote in a 1973 case report, claiming A.B. suffered little or no untoward effects on his health.1 And at the end of his 382-day dietary abstinence, during which he had ingested only vitamin supplements, yeast, and noncaloric fluids, A.B. had lost a remarkable 276 pounds. When doctors checked back in on A.B. five years later, their patient reported gaining back only about 15 pounds. Although aspects of this published report seem almost unbelievable, and the period of fasting is obviously extreme, the case highlights some of the metabolic dynamics that result when bodies are deprived of food. For example, when external calories stop fueling an animal’s metabolism, stores of triglycerides in fat cells are mobilized, and levels of ketones—chemicals that result from the burning of fat for fuel—rise. Decreases in body weight follow. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 24350 - Posted: 11.24.2017

By Philippa Roxby Confronting an avatar on a computer screen helped patients hearing voices to cope better with hallucinations, a UK trial has found. Patients who received this therapy became less distressed and heard voices less often compared with those who had counselling instead. Experts said the therapy could add an important new approach to treating schizophrenia hallucinations. The trial, on 150 people, is published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal. It follows a much smaller pilot study in 2013. Hallucinations are common in people with schizophrenia and can be threatening and insulting. One in four patients continues to experience voices despite being treated with drugs and cognitive behavioural therapy. In this study, run by King's College London and University College London, 75 patients who had continued to hear voices for more than a year, were given six sessions of avatar therapy while another 75 received the same amount of counselling. In the avatar sessions, patients created a computer simulation to represent the voice they heard and wanted to control, including how it sounded and how it might look. Image copyright King's College London Image caption Three avatars created by people taking part in the therapy The therapist then voiced the avatar while also speaking as themselves in a three-way conversation to help the patient gain the upper hand. Prof Tom Craig, study author from King's College London, said getting patients to learn to stand up to the avatar was found to be safe, easy to deliver and twice as effective as counselling at reducing how often voices were heard. "After 12 weeks there was dramatic improvement compared to the other therapy," he said. "With a talking head, patients are learning to confront and get replies from it. "This shifts the idea that the voice is all-controlling," he said. © 2017 BBC.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 24349 - Posted: 11.24.2017

By Mary Beth Aberlin Like the entomologist in search of colorful butterflies, my attention has chased in the gardens of the grey matter cells with delicate and elegant shapes, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind. —Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Recollections of My Life Based on this quote, I am pretty certain that Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a founding father of modern neuroscience, would approve of this month’s cover. The Spaniard had wanted to become an artist, but, goaded by his domineering father into the study of medicine, Ramón y Cajal concentrated on brain anatomy, using his artistic talent to render stunningly beautiful and detailed maps of neuron placement throughout the brain. Based on his meticulous anatomical studies of individual neurons, he proposed that nerve cells did not form a mesh—the going theory at the time—but were separated from each other by microscopic gaps now called synapses. Fast-forward from the early 20th century to the present day, when technical advances in imaging have revealed any number of the brain’s secrets. Ramón y Cajal would no doubt have marveled at the technicolor neuron maps revealed by the Brainbow labeling technique. (Compare Ramón y Cajal’s drawings of black-stained Purkinje neurons to a Brainbow micrograph of the type of neuron.) But the technical marvels have gotten even more revelatory. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Brain imaging; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24348 - Posted: 11.24.2017

By Stephani Sutherland When we experience something painful, our brain produces natural painkillers that are chemically similar to potent drugs such as morphine. Now research suggests these endogenous opioids also play another role: helping regulate the body's energy balance. Lauri Nummenmaa, a brain-imaging scientist at the University of Turku in Finland, and his colleagues measured endogenous opioid release in the brains of 10 healthy men. The subjects were injected with a radioactive substance that binds to opioid receptors, making it possible to visualize the receptors' activity using positron-emission tomography. The study found evidence of natural painkillers in the men's brains after they ate a palatable meal of pizza. Surprisingly, their brains released even more of the endogenous opioids after they ate a far less enticing—but nutritionally similar—liquid meal of what Nummenmaa called “nutritional goo.” Although the subjects rated the pizza as tastier than the goo, opioid release did not appear to relate to their enjoyment of the meal, the researchers reported earlier this year in the Journal of Neuroscience. Advertisement “I would've expected the opposite result,” says Paul Burghardt, an investigator at Wayne State University, who was not involved in the work. After all, previous human and animal studies led researchers to believe that endogenous opioids helped to convey the pleasure of eating. Nummenmaa, too, was surprised. His group's earlier research showed that obese people's brains had fewer opioid receptors—but that receptor levels recover with weight loss. “Maybe when people overeat, endogenous opioids released in the brain constantly bombard the receptors, so they [decrease in number],” he says. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Obesity; Attention
Link ID: 24347 - Posted: 11.22.2017

By STEPH YIN Violins, cameras, school desks, computer mouses, can openers — these are just a few items that demonstrate how routinely disadvantaged left-handers are in this world. One notable exception may be sports. Whether it’s Lou Gehrig in baseball, Wayne Gretzky in ice hockey, Martina Navratilova in tennis or Oscar De La Hoya in boxing, some of the best athletes in history have been portsiders. But even in this realm, the southpaw advantage may vary, being more pronounced in sports where a player has less time to react to an opponent, like table tennis, according to Florian Loffing, a sports scientist at the University of Oldenburg in Germany and author of a study published Wednesday in Biology Letters. In such games, he found a higher proportion of lefties than in those with longer intervals between players’ actions. Including an analysis of the pressures of time shows “that there is an additional effect” in left-sider sports dynamics, said Kirsten Legerlotz, a professor of sport sciences at the Humboldt University of Berlin who was not involved in the research. Dr. Loffing’s “conclusion appears convincing,” she added, although it would need to be examined in other sports and verified with lab experiments. Dr. Loffing chose to analyze baseball, cricket, table tennis, badminton, tennis and squash, because they lent themselves to a standardized measure of time pressure, he said. For baseball and cricket, this involved the average time that elapsed between ball release and bat-ball contact in professional games. For the racket sports, he considered the intervals between racket-ball contact made by players in professional matches. He then tallied the number of lefties among each sport’s top 100 players, or pitchers and bowlers in the case of baseball and cricket, from 2009 to 2014. Comparing all six sports against one another, he found the proportion of southpaws increased as the time available for players to act decreased. Nine percent of the top players were left-dominant in the slowest contest, squash, while 30 percent of the best pitchers were lefties in the fastest, baseball. Over all, left-handedness was 2.6 times more likely in the sports with higher time constraints (baseball, cricket and table tennis) than in ones with lower time pressure (badminton, tennis and squash). © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Laterality
Link ID: 24346 - Posted: 11.22.2017

(Reuters) - Cytokinetics Inc will stop developing one of its treatments for ALS, which afflicts Stephen Hawking, after the drug failed in a late-stage trial, the company said on Tuesday, sending its shares tumbling about 35 percent. The drugmaker said two of the three doses it was testing failed to show a statistically significant difference compared to a placebo when measured by their ability to lower the lungs’ ‘slow vital capacity’, a measure of respiratory function. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a fatal neuro-degenerative condition that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. Deaths and disability in ALS patients are strongly related to respiratory failure, according to Cytokinetics. More than 6,000 people are diagnosed with the disease in the United States every year, according to the ALS Association. ALS garnered international attention in 2014 with the “Ice Bucket Challenge”, which involved people pouring ice-cold water on themselves, posting a video on social media, and donating funds for research on the disease. After the failure of its drug tirasemtiv, Cytokinetics said it will focus on its other ALS treatment, CK-2127107, that it is developing in collaboration with Japan’s Astellas Pharma Inc. Cytokinetics’ chief executive, Robert Blum, said he believes that the limitations of tirasemtiv will be addressed in the development of CK-2127107. © 2017 Business Insider Inc.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 24345 - Posted: 11.22.2017

By JAMES GORMAN and CHRISTOPHER WHITWORTH Cockatoos are smart birds, and the Goffin’s cockatoos in a Vienna lab are among the smartest. In an experiment reported about a year ago, they turned out to be real stars at making tools from a variety of materials in order to get a treat. In a new study, researchers tested the birds’ ability to match shapes using an apparatus reminiscent of a child’s toy. The birds had to put a square tile into a square hole and more complicated, asymmetrical shapes into matching holes. If they were successful, they got a treat. Cornelia Habl, a master’s student at the University of Vienna, and Alice M. I. Auersperg, a researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, ran several experiments. They reported in the journal PLOS One that the cockatoos were not only able to match the shapes to the holes, but did much better than monkeys or chimpanzees. “It was thought to be an exclusively human ability for a long time,” Ms. Habl said. Tests of matching shapes are used to mark milestones in child development. Babies can put a sphere into the right hole at age 1, but they can’t place a cube until age 2. From there, they continue to improve. Some primates can do similar tasks, although they need a lot of basic training to get up to speed before they can use the experimental apparatus, called a key box. The birds jumped right in without any training and excelled. “Compared to primates, the cockatoos performed very well,” Ms. Habl said. Why are they so good? In the wild, they haven’t been observed using tools. But they are generalists, foragers who take whatever food they can find. They are adaptable enough to do well in some urban areas in Australia, Ms. Habl said. To succeed in a variety of environments eating a variety of foods, “they have to be very, very flexible.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Intelligence
Link ID: 24344 - Posted: 11.21.2017

Laura Sanders Around the six-month mark, babies start to get really fun. They’re not walking or talking, but they are probably babbling, grabbing and gumming, and teaching us about their likes and dislikes. I remember this as the time when my girls’ personalities really started making themselves known, which, really, is one of the best parts of raising a kid. After months of staring at those beautiful, bald heads, you start to get a glimpse of what’s going on inside them. When it comes to learning language, it turns out that a lot has already happened inside those baby domes by age 6 months. A new study finds that babies this age understand quite a bit about words — in particular, the relationships between nouns. Work in toddlers, and even adults, reveals that people can struggle with word meanings under difficult circumstances. We might briefly falter with “shoe” when an image of a shoe is shown next to a boot, for instance, but not when the shoe appears next to a hat. But researchers wanted to know how early these sorts of word relationships form. Psychologists Elika Bergelson of Duke University and Richard Aslin, formerly of the University of Rochester in New York and now at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Conn., put 51 6-month-olds to a similar test. Outfitted with eye-tracking gear, the babies sat on a parent’s lap and looked at a video screen that showed pairs of common objects. Sometimes the images were closely related: mouth and nose, for instance, or bottle and spoon. Other pairs were unrelated: blanket and dog, or juice and car. © Society for Science and the Public

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24343 - Posted: 11.21.2017