Hannah Devlin Science correspondent A landmark trial for Huntington’s disease has announced positive results, suggesting that an experimental drug could become the first to slow the progression of the devastating genetic illness. The results have been hailed as “enormously significant” because it is the first time any drug has been shown to suppress the effects of the Huntington’s mutation that causes irreversible damage to the brain. Current treatments only help with symptoms, rather than slowing the disease’s progression. Prof Sarah Tabrizi, director of University College London’s Huntington’s Disease Centre who led the phase 1 trial, said the results were “beyond what I’d ever hoped ... The results of this trial are of ground-breaking importance for Huntington’s disease patients and families,” she said. The results have also caused ripples of excitement across the scientific world because the drug, which is a synthetic strand of DNA, could potentially be adapted to target other incurable brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche has paid a $45m licence fee to take the drug forward to clinical use. Huntington’s is an incurable degenerative disease caused by a single gene defect that is passed down through families. The first symptoms, which typically appear in middle age, include mood swings, anger and depression. Later patients develop uncontrolled jerky movements, dementia and ultimately paralysis. Some people die within a decade of diagnosis. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Huntingtons; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 24419 - Posted: 12.11.2017

Hannah Devlin Huntington’s has blighted Peter Allen’s family for generations. He watched his mother, Stephanie, slowly die from the disease and before that his grandmother, Olive, fell victim to the same illness. At 51 years old, Peter is the first of his generation to show signs of the illness, but his sister, Sandy, and brother, Frank, know they are also carrying the gene. The onset of Huntington’s is insidious. Psychological changes typically come first – tiredness, mood swings, apathy and anger. Four years ago, Peter was formally diagnosed as symptomatic when he began suffering anxiety and panic attacks so severe he would become convinced that he couldn’t swallow. In retrospect, the depression he suffered in his thirties may have been an earlier manifestation of changes happening his brain. In person, Peter is articulate, funny and exudes affection for his wife and siblings, but there are small signs of the changes that are underway. Every now and then he pauses to search for the right word. A loss of dexterity means he can no longer write or sign his name, his balance is unsteady and, when tired, his speech becomes slurred. “You know that you’re gradually lessening,” he says. A lack of awareness about the disease and its symptoms means people sometimes assume he is drunk. “I’ve been asked to leave pubs before I’ve even had a drink,” he says. “I don’t go to those pubs any more.” Peter took redundancy from his marketing job at Network Rail in 2015 and has not returned to full-time work, although he is retraining to become a garden designer. Anti-depressant drugs have helped bring the psychological symptoms under control. In future, he will be offered other drugs to stiffen his muscles, which helps reduce involuntary movements. But no current treatments can slow the relentless progression of the disease, the loss of memory, motor control and eventually the ability to think. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Huntingtons; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 24418 - Posted: 12.11.2017

/ By Rae Ellen Bichell In mid-October, Dr. David Bennett, a neurologist who directs the Alzheimer’s Disease Center at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, stood in a St. Louis auditorium packed with nuns. His goal: To convince them — particularly the ones without brain disease — to donate their brains to science. “We are beginning to understand how little we actually know about the human brain.” Politicians, Bennett is fond of saying, can walk into a room and separate people from their money. “I can walk into a room and separate people from their brains.” To Bennett, making such acquisitions is, in some ways, more crucial than ever. Demand for brains for scientific research is rising across the board — driven in varying degrees by increased funding for research on brain disorders, rising incidence of age-related brain disease, big technological leaps in scientific tools used to analyze the brain, and a growing sense that sometimes, studying animals just isn’t good enough to understand and fix human disease. But more than this, scientists like Bennett are realizing that the brains they have traditionally studied (Bennett maintains 4,000 square feet of cabinets and freezers full of brain slices in Chicago), are too often riddled with the signs of end stage Alzheimer’s and other maladies that contribute to dementia. Far more rare are comparatively healthy brains that can allow scientists to more accurately identify what causes dementia — and what protects us from it. That deficiency now has Bennett and other scientists working hard to stock their shelves with a particularly precious resource: the brains of people like Sister Carleen Reck, who heard Bennett speak and thought his request for brain donations was a good idea, so she signed an anatomical gift act. Copyright 2017 Undark

Keyword: Alzheimers; Brain imaging
Link ID: 24417 - Posted: 12.11.2017

By PERRI KLASS, M.D. What does the child who can’t say goodbye to a parent without breaking down have in common with the child who is cripplingly terrified of dogs and the one who gets a bad stomach ache reliably on Monday morning? Anxieties and worries of all kinds are common in children, necessarily part of healthy development, but also, when they interfere with the child’s functioning, the most common pediatric mental health problems. From separation anxiety to social anxiety to school avoidance to phobias to generalized anxiety disorder, many children’s lives are at some point touched by anxiety that gets out of hand. “I often tell parents, anxiety and fears are totally a normal and healthy part of growing up,” said Dr. Sabrina Fernandez, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, who has written about strategies for primary care doctors to use in dealing with anxiety disorders. “I worry that it’s becoming something more when it interferes with the child’s ability to do their two jobs: to learn in school and to make friends.” Children whose lives are being seriously derailed by their anxieties often get psychotherapy or medication, or both. And a meta-analysis published in November in JAMA looked at the two best-studied treatments for anxiety disorders, cognitive behavioral therapy and psychotropic medication. The technique of a meta-analysis allows scientists to pull in a whole range of different studies, weight the results according to the size and rigor of the research, and then consider the wider array of data gleaned from multiple investigations. “We included panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, specific phobias, generalized anxiety disorder and separation anxiety,” said the lead author, Zhen Wang, an associate professor of health services research at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science (they did not include children with post-traumatic stress disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder). The study looked at the effectiveness of treatments in reducing the symptoms of anxiety, and at ending the anxiety disorder state. And they also looked at any reports of adverse events associated with the treatments, from sleep disturbances to suicide. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Stress
Link ID: 24416 - Posted: 12.11.2017

By Ferris Jabr Chickens are loquacious creatures, and Kevin Mitchell would know. He oversees the care of about a million of them on Wilcox Farms properties in Washington State and Oregon. Mitchell says the birds have “patterns of speech” that reveal a lot about their well-being. They are usually noisiest in the morning—a robust concert of clucks, chortles and caws. “When I hear that, I know they are pretty healthy and happy,” Mitchell says. In the evenings when they’re preparing to roost, the chickens are much more mellow, cooing softly. When a hen lays an egg she celebrates with a series of staccato clucks, like drumbeats, culminating in a loud “buck-caw!” If chickens detect an aerial predator—say, by spotting the shadow of a hawk or eagle—they produce a short, high-pitched shriek. And they have a distinct warning for terrestrial threats: The repetitive clucking most people associate with chickens is in fact a ground predator alarm call. One morning many years ago Mitchell entered a chicken house and found it oddly calm and quiet. Instead of making the usual ruckus, the birds were murmuring and shuffling lethargically. He soon discovered that an automated lighting system had failed and the lights had not switched off the night before; the chickens were sleep-deprived. If he had only been able to eavesdrop on the flock, he might have known much sooner that something was amiss. Over the past five years, engineers and poultry scientists at The University of Georgia and Georgia Institute of Technology have been collaborating to help farmers like Mitchell make better use of the information latent in chicken chatter. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 24415 - Posted: 12.11.2017

By Catherine Offord Mantis shrimps are not the easiest animals to work with, as neuroanatomist Nicholas Strausfeld knows firsthand. Not least, there’s the challenge of capturing the crustaceans in the wild. Also known as stomatopods, mantis shrimps live in burrows in shallow seawater and have earned the descriptive nickname “thumb splitters,” thanks to their tendency to use their sharp, powerful claws to slash at prey and pursuers. “At low tide, you wade around and you try and catch these things,” says Strausfeld, who has plenty of experience chasing after the purple-spotted mantis shrimp (Gonodactylus smithii) with a small handheld net in the tropical waters around Lizard Island, Australia. “They’re incredibly fast—it’s very difficult.” For Strausfeld and other neurobiologists, however, all the trouble is well worth it, as these feisty little marine predators are yielding unique insight into the evolution of the arthropods—the most species-rich animal phylum on the planet, containing around 85 percent of all described animal species. “We knew [these shrimps] were very interesting,” says neuroanatomist Gabriella Wolff, previously a PhD student in Strausfeld’s lab at the University of Arizona and now a research associate at the University of Washington in Seattle. In addition to a complex visual system that receives inputs from independently moving eyes, “mantis shrimps have very advanced behaviors that we haven’t necessarily seen in other crustaceans so far.” Research has also suggested they are sophisticated navigators, regularly finding their way home from distant feeding sites. Plus, they recognize other individual mantis shrimps, and remember whether their interactions were confrontational or not. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 24414 - Posted: 12.11.2017

By Andy Coghlan Two gene variants have been found to be more common in gay men, adding to mounting evidence that sexual orientation is at least partly biologically determined. How does this change what we already knew? Didn’t we already know there were “gay genes”? We have known for decades that sexual orientation is partly heritable in men, thanks to studies of families in which some people are straight and some people are gay. In 1993, genetic variations in a region on the X chromosome in men were linked to whether they were heterosexual or homosexual, and in 1995, a region on chromosome 8 was identified. Both findings were confirmed in a study of gay and straight brothers in 2014. However, these studies didn’t home in on any specific genes on this chromosome. What’s new about the latest study? For the first time, individual genes have been identified that may influence how sexual orientation develops in boys and men, both in the womb and during life. Alan Sanders at North Shore University, Illinois, and his team pinpointed these genes by comparing DNA from 1077 gay and 1231 straight men. They scanned the men’s entire genomes, looking for single-letter differences in their DNA sequences. This enabled them to home in on two genes whose variants seem to be linked to sexual orientation. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 24413 - Posted: 12.09.2017

By Ruth Williams Two studies in Science today—one that focuses on prenatal development in humans, the other on infancy to old age—provide insights into the extent of DNA sequence errors that the average human brain cell accumulates over a lifetime. Together, they reveal that mutations become more common as fetuses develop, and over a lifetime a person may rack up more than 2,000 mutations per cell. “I think these are both very powerful technical papers, and they demonstrate how single-cell sequencing . . . can reliably detect somatic changes in the genomes of human neurons,” says neuroscientist Fred Gage of the Salk Institute in La Jolla who was not involved in either study. “What’s cool about [the papers] is that they show two different ways that one can look at somatic mutations in single human neurons . . . and yet they get consistent results,” says neuroscientist Michael McConnell of the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Cells of the human body acquire mutations over time, whether because of errors introduced during DNA replication or damage incurred during transcription and other cellular processes. But, until recent technological developments enabled whole genome sequencing from the miniscule quantities of DNA found inside single cells or small clones of the same cell, investigating the nature and extent of such somatic mutations—and the resulting tissue mosaicism—was practically impossible. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Epigenetics
Link ID: 24412 - Posted: 12.09.2017

Michael Ruffolo When we talk about female representation in science, we’re rarely talking about test subjects. We tend to want more women behind the microscope, not under it. Neuroscience is one of the most skewed fields when it comes to testing on female physiology. One review found single-sex brain studies using male animals outnumbered those using females 6.7 to one. Aarthi Gobinath, a neuroscientist at the University of British Columbia, calls this a “hidden gap” in her field. She says there’s reason to question the assumption that the brains of males and females are identical, particularly in unique states like pregnancy. This is particularly true for early animal testing, where new drugs for depression and anxiety are first developed. “This leads to the ultimate outcome of our research not even benefiting males and females equally,” Gobinath said. Gobinath wanted to tackle the issue of sex bias by trying to understand what depression looks like in female rat brains, specifically looking at postpartum depression. Her research suggests our standard depression treatments don’t apply to new moms. VICE caught up with Gobinath to ask about her new study, which could have wide-ranging implications for humans of all sexes and genders. VICE: What do you mean when you say there’s “sex bias” in brain research? Aarthi Gobinath: So when I say "sex," what I mean is genetic sex, meaning XX or XY chromosomes. [Sex bias] is a bias toward using male subjects in research and then concluding from that research that what was true in that experiment will be true for both sexes without necessarily addressing that maybe it won’t be true for the female physiology.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24411 - Posted: 12.09.2017

By SHEILA KAPLAN Chris Beekman, whose company sells the dietary supplement Opiate Detox Pro, does not understand what all the fuss is about. “If it works, it works,” Mr. Beekman, the owner of NutraCore Health Products, said in an interview. “If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.” His customers, addicts trying to shake a dependence on opioids, can always get their money back, he said. Opiate Detox Pro’s label says, “Opioid addiction ease,” and the company’s website claims, “Our ingredients are the most effective on the market for treating withdrawal symptoms.” Mr. Beekman said he did not have scientific evidence to prove that the product worked, and would not be conducting research to buttress the company’s claims. “It’s just not going to happen,” he said, citing what he called the prohibitive cost of scientific studies and clinical trials. Peter Lurie thinks that is an unacceptable position from someone who sells supplements that purport to treat addiction. Dr. Lurie, a former Food and Drug Administration official, runs the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest, which on Friday urged the F.D.A. and the Federal Trade Commission to crack down on businesses that target addicts with products that make unproven health claims. The F.D.A. has already zeroed in on another supplement, kratom, a botanical substance that has been promoted as a safe substitute for opioids and an adjunct to opioid use. Last month, the agency issued a public health advisory for kratom, warning that the product carried “deadly risks,” and linked about three dozen deaths to it. Earlier, the agency had ordered that kratom imports be seized and told companies to take it out of supplements. In general, the agency can fine companies that make and distribute them, or take other enforcement actions. In the past few weeks, reacting to other agency warnings, Amazon has stopped making available some products claiming to assist in opioid withdrawal. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24410 - Posted: 12.09.2017

Paula Span Jeannie Cox currently enjoys a flavor called Coffee & Cream when she vapes. She’s also fond of White Lotus, which tastes “kind of fruity.” She buys those nicotine-containing liquids, along with her other e-cigarette supplies, at Mountain Oak Vapors in Chattanooga, Tenn., where she lives. A retired secretary in her 70s, she’s often the oldest customer in the shop. Not that she cares. What matters is that after ignoring decades of doctors’ warnings and smoking two packs a day, she hasn’t lit up a conventional cigarette in four years and four months. “Not one cigarette,” she said. “Vaping took its place.” Like Ms. Cox, some smokers have been able to stop smoking by switching to e-cigarettes, and many are trying. A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that more smokers now attempt to quit by using e-cigarettes as a partial or total substitute for cigarettes than by using nicotine gum or lozenges, prescription medications or several other more established methods. Her success is what researchers disdainfully call “anecdotal evidence,” however. There’s “no conclusive evidence” that e-cigarettes help people stop smoking long-term, said Brian King, deputy director of the C.D.C.’s Office of Smoking and Health. At the moment, therefore, neither the C.D.C., the Food and Drug Administration nor the United States Preventive Services Task Force has approved or recommended e-cigarettes for smoking cessation. In fact, the rise of e-cigarettes has generated contentious debate among public health officials and advocates. But while the proportion of Americans who smoke continues to decrease — down to 15.1 percent in 2015 — the decline has stalled among older adults. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24409 - Posted: 12.09.2017

Carl Zimmer When you drive toward an intersection, the sight of the light turning red will (or should) make you step on the brake. This action happens thanks to a chain of events inside your head. Your eyes relay signals to the visual centers in the back of your brain. After those signals get processed, they travel along a pathway to another region, the premotor cortex, where the brain plans movements. Now, imagine that you had a device implanted in your brain that could shortcut the pathway and “inject” information straight into your premotor cortex. That may sound like an outtake from “The Matrix.” But now two neuroscientists at the University of Rochester say they have managed to introduce information directly into the premotor cortex of monkeys. The researchers published the results of the experiment on Thursday in the journal Neuron. Although the research is preliminary, carried out in just two monkeys, the researchers speculated that further research might lead to brain implants for people with strokes. “You could potentially bypass the damaged areas and deliver stimulation to the premotor cortex,” said Kevin A. Mazurek, a co-author of the study. “That could be a way to bridge parts of the brain that can no longer communicate.” In order to study the premotor cortex, Dr. Mazurek and his co-author, Dr. Marc H. Schieber, trained two rhesus monkeys to play a game. The monkeys sat in front of a panel equipped with a button, a sphere-shaped knob, a cylindrical knob, and a T-shaped handle. Each object was ringed by LED lights. If the lights around an object switched on, the monkeys had to reach out their hand to it to get a reward — in this case, a refreshing squirt of water. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 24408 - Posted: 12.08.2017

By Mitch Leslie Scientists once had high hopes that inhibiting a hormone named ghrelin would be the key to preventing obesity. Ghrelin didn’t turn out to be a weight loss panacea. But now, the discovery of the first molecule naturally made by the body that blocks ghrelin’s effects may open up new avenues for treating other conditions, including diabetes and anorexia. The finding may also explain some of the benefits of bariatric surgery, which shrinks or reroutes the stomach to control weight. “It’s a very impressive piece of research,” says bariatric physician Carel le Roux of University College Dublin, who wasn’t connected to the study. “I think it will have significant clinical impact.” When researchers discovered ghrelin about 20 years ago, they dubbed it the “hunger hormone” because early results suggested it ramped up our appetite. But studies soon found that thwarting the molecule didn’t curtail food consumption or promote weight loss in mice. Still, the hormone induces a variety of other positive changes in our metabolism. For example, ghrelin may bolster muscle strength, spurring scientists to test whether drugs that mimic the hormone can counteract the muscle deterioration and weakness often suffered by cancer patients. The new study didn’t start as a hunt for ghrelin-blocking compounds. Instead, a team headed by researchers at NGM Biopharmaceuticals in South San Francisco, California, was investigating how bariatric surgery overhauls metabolism. The scientists operated on obese mice, performing a type of bariatric surgery called vertical sleeve gastrectomy that involves removing most of the stomach. They then examined which genes became more or less active after the procedure. As they report online today in Cell Metabolism, the rodents’ downsized stomachs produced 52 times more of a protein named LEAP2 than normal. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Obesity; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 24407 - Posted: 12.08.2017

By KAREN WEINTRAUB Q. For working parents, it’s difficult to find time to exercise during the week, and early morning is often the only time slot available. Is it better for my overall health to get eight hours of sleep per night during the week but not have time to exercise, or to get six and a half to seven hours of sleep per night and fit in a morning workout? A. “That’s a terrible choice,” said Dr. Charles Czeisler, a sleep expert at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. Both sleep and exercise are key components of a healthy lifestyle and shouldn’t be pitted against each other, Dr. Czeisler said. Sleep is important for workouts, he noted, reducing the risk of injury and allowing muscles to recover from exercise. Lack of sleep weakens the immune system, making people more likely to become sick — which means missing workouts. Sacrificing sleep has also been tied to weight gain, cardiovascular disease and diabetes, among other health problems. Of course, regular exercise provides a lot of benefits, too, including sounder sleep. Dr. Czeisler also noted that going to bed late, particularly if you’re using electronic devices and sitting under bright lights before bedtime, shifts the body’s circadian rhythms later. But people still need around eight hours of sleep per night. So if you get up after six and a half hours to work out, “you’re essentially exercising during your biological night,” he said. Research from Northwestern University suggests that muscle cells also have circadian rhythms, and that they perform and recover much better during the biological daytime than the biological night. “So, getting up during your biological night to exercise is counterproductive,” Dr. Czeisler said. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 24406 - Posted: 12.08.2017

Mariah Quintanilla When escaping from humans, narwhals don’t just freeze or flee. They do both. These deep-diving marine mammals have similar physiological responses to those of an animal frozen in fear: Their heart rate, breathing and metabolism slow, mimicking a “deer in the headlights” reaction. But narwhals (Monodon monoceros) take this freeze response to extremes. The animals decrease their heart rate to as slow as three beats per minute for more than 10 minutes, while pumping their tails as much as 25 strokes per minute during an escape dive, an international team of researchers reports in the Dec. 8 Science. “That was astounding to us because there are other marine mammals that can have heart rates that low but not typically for that long a period of time, and especially not while they’re swimming as hard as they can,” says Terrie Williams, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. So far, this costly escape has been observed only after a prolonged interaction with humans. Usually, narwhals will escape natural predators such as killer whales by stealthily slipping under ice sheets or huddling in spots too shallow for their pursuers, Williams says. But interactions with humans — something that will happen increasingly as melting sea ice opens up the Arctic — may be changing that calculus. Monitoring a female narwhal showed that her heart rate dropped precipitously low at times as she performed a series of dives after escaping a net (top graph). The red box shows periods of “cardiac freeze,” when her heart only beat a few times per minute. About two days later, the same narwhal was back to performing regular deep dives (bottom graph), in which her heart rate dropped to 10 to 20 beats per minute, an adaption that allows the sea mammals to conserve energy during stretches underwater. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 24405 - Posted: 12.08.2017

Nell Greenfieldboyce At least one young woman suffered eye damage as a result of unsafe viewing of the recent total solar eclipse, according to a report published Thursday, but it doesn't appear that many such injuries occurred. Doctors in New York say a woman in her 20s came in three days after looking at the Aug. 21 eclipse without protective glasses. She had peeked several times, for about six seconds, when the sun was only partially covered by the moon. The area between the yellow brackets in the top photo shows the damage to the center part of the retina. The middle image is a type of visual field test and the bottom image uses optical coherence tomography. Courtesy of New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai Four hours later, she started experiencing blurred and distorted vision and saw a central black spot in her left eye. The doctors studied her eyes with several different imaging technologies, described in the journal JAMA Ophthalmology, and were able to observe the damage at the cellular level. "We were very surprised at how precisely concordant the imaged damage was with the crescent shape of the eclipse itself," noted Dr. Avnish Deobhakta, a retina surgeon at New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai in New York, in an email to NPR. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 24404 - Posted: 12.08.2017

By Bret Stetka Every day our brains grapple with various last-minute decisions. We adjust our gait to avoid a patch of ice; we exit to hit the rest stop; we switch to our backhand before thwacking a tennis ball. Scientists have long accepted that our ability to abruptly stop or modify a planned behavior is controlled via a single region within the brain’s prefrontal cortex, an area involved in planning and other higher mental functions. By studying other parts of the brain in both humans and monkeys, however, a team from Johns Hopkins University has now concluded that last-minute decision-making is a lot more complicated than previously known, involving complex neural coordination among multiple brain areas. The revelations may help scientists unravel certain aspects of addictive behaviors and understand why accidents like falls grow increasingly common as we age, according to the Johns Hopkins team. The findings, published Thursday in Neuron, reveal reneging on an intended behavior involves coordinated cross talk between several brain regions. As a result, changing our minds even mere milliseconds after making a decision is often too late to alter a movement or behavior. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging—a technique that monitors brain activity in real time—the Johns Hopkins group found reversing a decision requires ultrafast communication between two specific zones within the prefrontal cortex and another nearby structure called the frontal eye field, an area involved in controlling eye movements and visual awareness. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 24403 - Posted: 12.08.2017

By Wendy Jones In Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Elinor Dashwood is talking to a new acquaintance, Lucy Steele. Based on their previous encounters, Elinor doesn’t think much of Lucy’s character. But Lucy seems determined to befriend Elinor and to make her a confidante. Elinor discovers Lucy’s true motives when the latter reveals that she is secretly engaged to Edward Ferrars, the man Elinor loves. Elinor is speechless: “Her astonishment at what she heard was at first too great for words.” Elinor isn’t the only one to experience this kind of shutdown and its accompanying frustration. When we’re angry, or upset, or fearful—in the grip of any strong emotion—most of us find it difficult to think clearly. This has to do with the inverse relationship between our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, which manage (respectively) the degree to which we’re excited or calm. Neuroscientist Stephen Porges has suggested that the thermostat for adjusting sympathetic and parasympathetic input can be found within these systems themselves. He has highlighted the operations involved from a “polyvagal perspective,” which considers our neurophysiological functioning in the context of safety, whether our environments are threatening or benign. I explore these and other neurosocial phenomena through the lens of the immensely popular novels of Jane Austen in my new book, Jane on the Brain: Exploring the Science of Social Intelligence. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 24402 - Posted: 12.08.2017

Can you hear this gif? Remember the white and gold dress that some internet users were certain was actually blue and black? Well, this time the dilemma being discussed online is whether you can hear anything in a silent animation of skipping pylons. The gif was created in 2008 by @IamHappyToast as part of a photoshop challenge on the boards of b3ta.com and has been circulating online since then - such as on Reddit's r/noisygifs subreddit in 2013. Many social media users have discussed the noisy-gif phenomenon, as on Imgur in 2011, for example, where it was titled an "optical illusion for the ears". It resurfaced again last weekend when Dr Lisa DeBruine from the Institute of Neuroscience & Psychology at the University of Glasgow posted it on Twitter, asking her followers to describe whether they experienced any auditory sensations while watching it. One person who suffers from ringing ears replied: "I hear a vibrating thudding sound, and it also cuts out my tinnitus during the camera shake." Others offered explanations as to why. While another suggested it may have something to do with correlated neuronal activity: "The brain is 'expecting/predicting' what is coming visually and then fires a version of what it expects across the relevant senses. Also explains why some might 'feel' a physical shake." "My gut says the camera shake is responsible for the entire effect. Anything that shook the camera like that, would probably make the 'thud' sound," posted another Twitter user.

Keyword: Hearing; Attention
Link ID: 24401 - Posted: 12.07.2017

Aimee Cunningham To halt the misuse of opioids, it may help to slash the number of pills prescribed, a new study suggests. Five months after the implementation of new opioid prescription guidelines at a University of Michigan hospital, roughly 7,000 fewer pills went home with patients — a drop that might reduce the risk of accessible pills leading to substance abuse. But the opioid reduction didn’t leave patients who had undergone a routine surgery with more pain, the team reports online December 6 in JAMA Surgery. “The decline in opioid volume after the intervention was dramatic,” says physician Mark Bicket of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. Around 50 percent of people who misuse opioids get the drugs from a friend or relative for free, while 22 percent obtain them from a doctor, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Michael Englesbe, a surgeon at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, says that part of doing a better job of managing patients’ pain “will be preventing chronic opioid use after surgical care and making sure fewer pills get into the community.” Englesbe and colleagues looked at 170 people who had a minimally invasive surgery to remove their gall bladders at the University of Michigan hospital from 2015 to 2016. All had received a prescription for opioids. Of those patients, 100 completed a survey detailing how much of the prescription they took, whether they also used a common painkiller such as ibuprofen or acetaminophen, and how they rated their pain during the first week after surgery. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 24400 - Posted: 12.07.2017