Ian Sample Science editor A drug that mimics a zero-carbohydrate diet could help people live longer, healthier lives and have better memories in old age, US researchers claim. Scientists hope to develop a medication after two independent studies showed that mice fed on a diet stripped of all carbohydrate lived longer and performed better on a range of physical and mental tasks than those that had regular meals. Because the diet is hard to stick to, the researchers are working on a compound that aims to deliver the same benefits for humans. If they are successful, it would amount to an extra seven to ten years of life on average, and protection against the weakening muscles and faltering memories that are defining aspects of human ageing. “I’m excited about this, and it’s hard not to be after what we’ve seen that it does. These are pretty profound effects,” said Eric Verdin, a physician who led one of the studies at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in California. The zero carb diet was designed to induce a dramatic change in metabolism, by fooling the mice into thinking they were fasting. When deprived of carbohydrate, the body shifts from using glucose as its main energy source to burning fat and producing chemicals in the liver known as ketone bodies. In 2013, Verdin showed that a ketone body called BHB served as fuel in the body and might also protect animals against the microscopic damage that builds up in cells as part of the natural ageing process. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 24040 - Posted: 09.06.2017

Laurel Hamers Zika’s damaging neurological effects might someday be enlisted for good — to treat brain cancer. In human cells and in mice, the virus infected and killed the stem cells that become a glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor, but left healthy brain cells alone. Jeremy Rich, a regenerative medicine scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues report the findings online September 5 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. Previous studies had shown that Zika kills stem cells that generate nerve cells in developing brains (SN: 4/2/16, p. 26). Because of similarities between those neural precursor cells and stem cells that turn into glioblastomas, Rich’s team suspected the virus might also target the cells that cause the notoriously deadly type of cancer. In the United States, about 12,000 people are expected to be diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2017. (It’s the type of cancer U.S. Senator John McCain was found to have in July.) Even with treatment, most patients live only about a year after diagnosis, and tumors frequently recur. In cultures of human cells, Zika infected glioblastoma stem cells and halted their growth, Rich and colleagues report. The virus also infected full-blown glioblastoma cells but at a lower rate, and didn’t infect normal brain tissues. Zika-infected mice with glioblastoma either saw their tumors shrink or their tumor growth slow compared with uninfected mice. The virus-infected mice lived longer, too. In one trial, almost half of the mice survived more than six weeks after being infected with Zika, while all of the uninfected mice died within two weeks of receiving a placebo. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017. A

Keyword: Glia
Link ID: 24039 - Posted: 09.06.2017

By Michael Le Page We are still evolving – very slowly. In the 20th century, people in the UK evolved to be less likely to smoke heavily, but the effect was tiny. So claims a study of 200,000 genomes. A population can be described as evolving when the frequency of gene variants changes over time. Because most people in rich countries now live well beyond reproductive age, some argue that we have stopped evolving because natural selection has been weakened. But several recent studies claim we are still evolving, albeit slowly. Now Joseph Pickrell at Columbia University in New York and his team have analysed human genome sequences to spot gene variants that are becoming rarer. One variant, of a gene called CHRNA3, is associated with heavier smoking in those that smoke, raising their risk of a smoking-related death. Comparing people over the age of 80 with people over the age of 60, Pickrell estimates that the variant has declined by 1 per cent between generations. However, his team was not able to prove this, as they did not have any genomic data from people under the age of 40. A variant of the ApoE4 gene that is known to increase the risk of late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, as well as cardiovascular disease, may also be getting rarer. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 24038 - Posted: 09.06.2017

By NATALIE ANGIER A normal human baby, according to psychologists, will cry about two hours over the course of a day. A notorious human crybaby, according to her older siblings, parents and the building superintendent, will cry for two hours every two hours, refusing to acknowledge any distinction between crying and other basic infant activities, like “being awake” or “breathing.” Current and former whine enthusiasts, take heart. It turns out that infant crying is not only as natural and justifiable as breathing: The two acts are physically, neurologically, primally intertwined. Scientists have discovered that the small cluster of brain cells in charge of fast, active respiration also grant a baby animal the power to cry. Reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Carmen Birchmeier and Luis Hernandez-Miranda, of the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, and their colleagues showed that infant mice stripped of this key node — a mere 17,000 neurons, located in the evolutionarily ancient hindbrain — can breathe slowly and passively, but not vigorously or animatedly. When they open their mouths to cry, nothing comes out. As a result, their mothers ignore them, and the poorly breathing pups quickly die. “This was an astonishing finding,” Dr. Birchmeier said. “The mother could see the pups and smell the pups, but if they didn’t vocalize, it was as though they didn’t exist.” The new study is just one in a series of recent reports that reveal the centrality of crying to infant survival, and how a baby’s bawl punches through a cluttered acoustic landscape to demand immediate adult attention. The sound of an infant’s cry arouses a far quicker and stronger response in action-oriented parts of the adult brain than do similarly loud or emotionally laden noises, like a dog barking or a neighbor weeping. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 24037 - Posted: 09.05.2017

By Susan Noakes, CBC News Researchers studying fish from the Niagara River have found that human antidepressants and remnants of these drugs are building up in their brains. The concentration of human drugs was discovered by scientists from University at Buffalo, Buffalo State and two Thai universities, Ramkhamhaeng University and Khon Kaen University. Active ingredients and metabolized remnants of Zoloft, Celexa, Prozac and Sarafem — drugs that have seen a sharp spike in prescriptions in North America — were found in 10 fish species. Diana Aga, professor of chemistry at University at Buffalo, says these drugs are found in human urine and are not stripped out by wastewater treatment. Could affect fish behaviour "It is a threat to biodiversity, and we should be very concerned," Aga said in a release from the university. Fish in the Niagara River show concentrations of antidepressants in their brains higher than levels in the river itself. (David Duprey/The Associated Press) "These drugs could affect fish behaviour. We didn't look at behaviour in our study, but other research teams have shown that antidepressants can affect the feeding behaviour of fish or their survival instincts. Some fish won't acknowledge the presence of predators as much." The Niagara River, which carries water from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, is already under stress, with reports this summer of untreated wastewater released into the river. The research, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, found levels of antidepressants in fish brains that were several times higher than levels in the river itself, indicating that the chemicals are accumulating over time. ©2017 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 24036 - Posted: 09.05.2017

Lauren Silverman In health care, you could say radiologists have typically had a pretty sweet deal. They make, on average, around $400,000 a year — nearly double what a family doctor makes — and often have less grueling hours. But if you talk with radiologists in training at the University of California, San Francisco, it quickly becomes clear that the once-certain golden path is no longer so secure. "The biggest concern is that we could be replaced by machines," says Phelps Kelley, a fourth-year radiology fellow. He's sitting inside a dimly lit reading room, looking at digital images from the CT scan of a patient's chest, trying to figure out why he's short of breath. Because MRI and CT scans are now routine procedures and all the data can be stored digitally, the number of images radiologists have to assess has risen dramatically. These days, a radiologist at UCSF will go through anywhere from 20 to 100 scans a day, and each scan can have thousands of images to review. "Radiology has become commoditized over the years," Kelley says. "People don't want interaction with a radiologist, they just want a piece of paper that says what the CT shows." 'Computers are awfully good at seeing patterns' That basic analysis is something he predicts computers will be able to do. Dr. Bob Wachter, an internist at UCSF and author of The Digital Doctor, says radiology is particularly amenable to takeover by artificial intelligence like machine learning. "Radiology, at its core, is now a human being, based on learning and his or her own experience, looking at a collection of digital dots and a digital pattern and saying 'That pattern looks like cancer or looks like tuberculosis or looks like pneumonia,' " he says. "Computers are awfully good at seeing patterns." © 2017 npr

Keyword: Brain imaging; Robotics
Link ID: 24035 - Posted: 09.05.2017

By TARA PARKER-POPE It started as a simple conversation about a child’s birthday party. But it quickly escalated into a full-blown marital rift. She accused him of neglecting the family. He said she was yelling. “Whatever,” she said. “Go. Go.” “Go where?” he replied. “I don’t know,” she told him. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” The bickering parents were among 43 couples taking part in an Ohio State University study exploring how marital interactions influence a person’s health. Every couple in the study — just like couples in the real world — had experienced some form of routine marital conflict. Hot-button topics included managing money, spending time together as a family or an in-law intruding on the relationship. But while marital spats were universal among the couples, how they handled them was not. Some couples argued constructively and even with kindness, while others — like the couple fighting about the birthday party — were hostile and negative. What made the difference? The hostile couples were most likely to be those who weren’t getting much sleep. “When people have slept less, it’s a little like looking at the world through dark glasses,” said Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, a longtime relationship scientist and director of the Ohio State Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research. “Their moods are poorer. We’re grumpier. Lack of sleep hurts the relationship.” The men and women in the study had been married from three to 27 years. They reported varying amounts of sleep — anywhere from three and a half to nine hours a night. Each couple made two visits to the lab, where the partners were prodded to talk about the issues that caused the most conflict in their relationship. Then the researchers analyzed videos of their exchanges using well-established scoring techniques to assess positive and negative interactions and hostile and constructive responses. After all the data were parsed, a clear pattern emerged. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Emotions
Link ID: 24034 - Posted: 09.05.2017

Anna VlasitsAnna Vlasits A sheen is starting to appear on Rocky Blumhagen’s forehead, just below his gray hair. He’s marching in place in a starkly lit room decked out with two large flatscreens. On both of the TVs, a volcano lets off steam through wide cracks glowing with lava, their roar muffling the Andean percussion and flutes on the soundtrack. Golden coins slide across the screen. Rocky reaches out his left hand, as if to grasp a coin from midair, and one of them disappears with a brrring. “I don’t know if I can do it,” he says to a guy named Josh sitting nearby in a felt-covered lounge chair. He looks up from his iPad, watching Rocky, age 66, grab, jog, kick, and reach his way through the videogame. “Keep it up,” Josh says as the heart monitor in the corner of the screen reads 129. Rocky and research assistant Josh Volponi are technically in a lab clinic at the University of California, San Francisco, but aside from the mannequin heads studded with electrodes, the room looks more like a man cave. But here, the videogames could halt the mental decay of aging. This is the premise that the university’s new research institute, named Neuroscape, was built to test. This is Rocky’s 18th training session at Neuroscape, founded by neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley. Rocky is fit for his age—he works as a substitute yoga instructor, after retiring from careers producing radio and performing Cole Porter songs—but as he makes it to the end of the level, he looks exhausted. The game cuts to an animation of a jungle, birds chirping and light playing through the canopy as a list of his past scores pops up. This round wasn’t his best. “I haven’t been here for a week,” he says. Volponi asks him to rate his physical exertion level. Rocky gives it a 15 out of 20; Volponi marks it on the iPad. “I feel rusty,” he says, wiping his hands on his orange exercise shorts.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24033 - Posted: 09.04.2017

By SANDY SMOLAN I’ve long been interested in the capacity of storytelling and journalism to transport an audience. Shooting my first documentary in North Africa 35 years ago, I used multiple projectors and screens to create an immersive experience. The approach at the time was experimental and while I moved on to more traditional storytelling in features, television and documentaries, I always held on to the idea of using immersive environments to transport viewers and allow them to experience an expanded vision of the world. They surrounded the divers and started clicking — they seemed to be saying hello. Then last year I visited the virtual reality lab at Stanford, which is at the fore of contemporary immersive journalism. I realized that V.R. had the potential to become a powerful new form of storytelling, and the medium has been evolving faster than anyone had ever expected. After I read James Nestor’s book “Deep,” about free diving and the human connection to the ocean, I realized that the combination of stunning imagery and the way in which a team of researchers were studying the language of whales and dolphins by free diving with them would translate perfectly to V.R. I had never forgotten my first open water dive in the Caribbean with my father when I was 17 and the transcendent experience of being suspended 30 feet beneath the surface, midway between the boat above us and the white sand of the ocean floor below. Now my son has become a free diver and as I recently watched him dive silently, on a single breath, his body elongated with outsize fins, unencumbered by tanks, regulators and the noise of escaping bubbles, I saw what James so eloquently described in his book — a human being interacting with the ocean and marine life in a manner few people can ever experience. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Communication; Hearing
Link ID: 24032 - Posted: 09.04.2017

Robin McKie Science Editor People who use genetic tests to trace their ancestry only to discover that they are at risk of succumbing to an incurable illness are being left to suffer serious psychological problems. Dementia researchers say the problem is particularly acute for those found to be at risk of Alzheimer’s disease, which has no cure or effective treatment. Yet these people are stumbling upon their status inadvertently after trying to find their Viking, Asian or ancient Greek roots. “These tests have the potential to cause great distress,” said Anna Middleton, head of society and ethics research at the Wellcome Genome Campus in Cambridge. “Companies should make counselling available, before and after people take tests.” The issue is raised in a paper by Middleton and others in the journal Future Medicine. A similar warning was sounded by Louise Walker, research officer at the Alzheimer’s Society. “Everyone has a right to know about their risk if they want to, but these companies have a moral responsibility to make sure people understand the meaning and consequences of this information. Anyone considering getting genetic test results should do so with their eyes open.” Alzheimer’s is linked to the build-up in the brain of clumps of a protein called amyloid. This triggers severe memory loss, confusion and disorientation. One gene, known as ApoE, affects this process and exists in three variants: E2, E3 and E4. Those possessing the last of these face an increased chance of getting the disease in late life. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 24031 - Posted: 09.04.2017

Marsha Lederman Santiago Ramon y Cajal wanted to be an artist, but his father, a physician and anatomy teacher, wanted his son to follow in his medical footsteps. It's a familiar story of family dynamics, but what wound up happening in this case was revolutionary. Cajal, who was born in 1852 in northeastern Spain, did ultimately go into medicine, as his father wished. He became a pathologist, histologist and neuroscientist. But he also applied his artistic skills to his area of interest. His hand-drawn illustrations of the brain, based on what he saw through the microscope using stained brain tissue (thanks to a technique developed by his contemporary, the Italian histologist Camillo Golgi) were pioneering. Cajal, who won the Nobel Prize in 1906 (along with Golgi), is known as the father of modern neuroscience. More than a century after he made them, his drawings are still used to illustrate principles of neuroscience. "When I was a student … everybody would start their talk, 'as first shown by Cajal,'" says Brian MacVicar, co-director at Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health and Canada Research Chair in Neuroscience at the University of British Columbia. When MacVicar learned that an exhibition of Cajal's drawings was being planned by neuroscience colleagues in Minnesota along with the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, he was immediately on a mission: to bring the drawings to Vancouver. He finally extracted a yes from the show organizers, but not operating in the art world, MacVicar wasn't sure who might want to exhibit them in Vancouver. The answer turned out to be right in his backyard – or at least, a few blocks away on campus. Scott Watson, director/curator of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia, had seen Cajal's work at the Istanbul Biennial in 2015 – and understood their appeal and value.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 24030 - Posted: 09.04.2017

Sara Reardon Scientists studying human behaviour and cognitive brain function are up in arms over a plan by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to classify most studies involving human participants as clinical trials. An open letter sent on 31 August to NIH director Francis Collins says that the policy could “unnecessarily increase the administrative burden on investigators,” slowing the pace of discovery in basic research. It asked the NIH to delay implementation of the policy until it consulted with the behavioural science community. As this article went to press, the letter had garnered 2,070 signatures. “Every scientist I have talked to who is doing basic research on the human mind and brain has been shocked by this policy, which makes no sense,” says Nancy Kanwisher, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who co-wrote the letter with four other researchers. The policy is part of an NIH clinical trial reform effort started in 2014 to ensure that all clinical results were publicly reported. The policy is scheduled to go into effect in January 2018. Its definition of a clinical trial included anything involving behavioural ‘interventions’, such as having participants perform a memory task or monitor their food intake. Such studies would need special evaluation by NIH review committees and institutional ethics review boards; and the experiments would need to be registered online in the clinicaltrials.gov database. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 24029 - Posted: 09.02.2017

By Meghana Keshavan, Inflammation has become one of the hottest buzzwords in medical science, pointed to as a culprit in causing or aggravating conditions ranging from allergy to autism to Alzheimer’s disease. But it’s far from clear that standard anti-inflammatory drugs, which have been around for decades, will help patients with those conditions, especially since they often come with dangerous side effects. So in labs across the country, scientists are trying to puzzle through the basic biology, understanding how inflammation leads to disease — and whether it’s possible to develop drugs that could interrupt that process. The latest evidence of inflammation’s broad role in disease came this past week, when a global clinical trial of 10,000 patients who had previous heart attacks showed that an anti-inflammatory drug from Novartis reduced their risk of further heart attacks or strokes. A surprise side effect: The drug also sharply cut the risk of lung cancer. That finding still needs to be confirmed with more research. But lead investigator Dr. Paul Ridker, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said he saw the trial as a clear indication of inflammation’s role in spurring cancer growth. The results, he said, turn “the way people look at oncology upside down.” Although inflammation has been studied for decades, there’s still a lot left to learn about this complex physiological condition. It’s basically an unnecessary state of hyperactivity in the body, in which the immune system’s reserve capacity is thrown into overdrive. This excess immune activation sends the wrong cellular signals to various parts of the body — and can wind up worsening conditions like diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and potentially even cancer. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 24028 - Posted: 09.02.2017

By JOSH KATZ The first governmental account of nationwide drug deaths in 2016 shows overdose deaths growing even faster than previously thought. Drug overdoses killed roughly 64,000 people in the United States last year, according to the first governmental account of nationwide drug deaths to cover all of 2016. It’s a staggering rise of more than 22 percent over the 52,404 drug deaths recorded the previous year — and even higher than The New York Times’s estimate in June, which was based on earlier preliminary data. Drug overdoses are expected to remain the leading cause of death for Americans under 50, as synthetic opioids — primarily fentanyl and its analogues — continue to push the death count higher. Drug deaths involving fentanyl more than doubled from 2015 to 2016, accompanied by an upturn in deaths involving cocaine and methamphetamines. Together they add up to an epidemic of drug overdoses that is killing people at a faster rate than the H.I.V. epidemic at its peak. This is the first national data to break down the growth by drug and by state. We’ve known for a while that fentanyls were behind the growing count of drug deaths in some states and counties. But now we can see the extent to which this is true nationally, as deaths involving synthetic opioids, mostly fentanyls, have risen to more than 20,000 from 3,000 in just three years. Deaths involving prescription opioids continue to rise, but many of those deaths also involved heroin, fentanyl or a fentanyl analogue. There is a downward trend in deaths from prescription opioids alone. At the same time, there has been a resurgence in cocaine and methamphetamine deaths. Many of these also involve opioids, but a significant portion of drug deaths — roughly one-third in 2015 — do not. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24027 - Posted: 09.02.2017

By Matt Reynolds Putting on a brave face won’t fool this algorithm. A new system that rates how much pain someone is in just by looking at their face could help doctors decide how to treat patients. By examining tiny facial expressions and calibrating the system to each person, it provides a level of objectivity in an area where that’s normally hard to come by. “These metrics might be useful in determining real pain from faked pain,” says Jeffrey Cohn at the University of Pittsburgh in the US. The system could make the difference between prescribing potentially addictive painkillers and catching out a faker. Objectively measuring pain levels is a tricky task, says Dianbo Liu, who created the system with his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. People experience and express pain differently, so a doctor’s estimate of a patient’s pain can often differ from a self-reported pain score. In an attempt to introduce some objectivity, Liu and his team trained an algorithm on videos of people wincing and grimacing in pain. Each video consisted of a person with shoulder pain, who had been asked to perform a different movement and then rate their pain levels. The result was an algorithm that can use subtle differences in facial expressions to inform a guess about how a given person is feeling. Certain parts of the face are particularly revealing, says Liu. Large amounts of movement around the nose and mouth tended to suggest higher self-reported pain scores. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Emotions
Link ID: 24026 - Posted: 09.02.2017

By Brian Levine, Carrie Esopenko There are two ways to go about studying a disease. Let’s call them the retrospective and prospective methods. In the retrospective method, scientists identify individuals with the disease and ask about the circumstances that led to the illness. In the prospective method, they start with a representative sample of people and track them over time to see who develops the disease. Both methods have yielded important discoveries, but the retrospective method is much more prone to distortion than the prospective method. Consider the following example. Using the retrospective method, 100 percent of alcoholics drink alcohol. Yet drinking alcohol does not necessarily lead to alcoholism, as can be determined by the prospective method in which it can be seen that the proportion of those who enjoy alcoholic drinks and become alcoholics is less than 100 percent. Boston University’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) Center recently reported that 99 percent of NFL alumni who made brain donations at the time of death have CTE (a similar finding was reported in 2013). While researchers acknowledge that those who make brain donations are not representative of retired NFL players (much less those with sports-related concussions in general) it is remarkably easy to make the same mistake as in the alcoholism example—that is, making the assumption that this finding generalizes to the broader population of athletes exposed to concussion. © 2017 Scientific America

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 24025 - Posted: 09.02.2017

By Aggie Mika A drawing based on one of Ramón y Cajal’s “selfies,” with his pyramidal neuron illustrations around him. According to Hunter, Ramón y Cajal obsessively took photos of himself throughout his life. DAWN HUNTER, WITH PERMISSIONIt was in the spring of 2015 when Dawn Hunter saw Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s century-old elaborate drawings of the nervous system in person for the first time, at the late scientist’s exhibit within the National Institutes of Health. She was instantly compelled to recreate his ornate illustrations herself. “I just immediately started drawing [them] because they were so beautiful,” says Hunter, a visual art and design professor at the University of South Carolina. “His drawings in person were even more amazing than I thought they were going to be.” Ramón y Cajal’s drawings first caught Hunter’s eye while doing research for a neuroanatomy textbook she was asked to illustrate in 2012. Ramón y Cajal, hailed by many as the father of modern neuroscience, depicted the inner workings of the brain through thousands of intricate illustrations before his death in 1934. He first posited that unique, inter-connected entities called neurons were the central nervous system’s fundamental unit of function. A recreation of Ramón y Cajal Cajal’s retina depiction. “His retina drawing is particularly interesting because he combines both of his main drawing techniques. . . . Part of the drawing is designed and drawn out preliminarily and part of it is drawn from observation,” says Hunter.DAWN HUNTER, WITH PERMISSIONWhile recreating his work, Hunter was able to shed unprecedented light on how he went about his craft. “Some neuroscientists erroneously think that he traced all of his drawings from a projection, which he did not,” she says. This involves expanding a magnified image of the specimen being viewed under the microscope onto the table using a drawing tube or camera lucida. While he did use this tool in certain instances, she says, he drew some of his drawings, like his famous pyramidal neurons, “through his observation with his eye,” a technique known as perceptual drawing. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 24024 - Posted: 09.02.2017

By Mitch Leslie When people with asthma have trouble breathing, they may reach for an inhaler containing salbutamol, a drug that expands the airways. Salbutamol may have another beneficial effect—protecting against Parkinson’s disease. Individuals who inhaled the highest doses of salbutamol were about half as likely to develop the devastating neurological condition as those who didn’t take the drug, a study reveals. “I’m sure it’s going to be a landmark paper,” says neurologist Joseph Jankovic of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, who wasn’t involved in the research. In Parkinson’s disease, gobs of the protein α-synuclein accumulate in certain brain cells and may kill them. Scientists have tried to craft drugs that speed the elimination of the protein or prevent it from clumping. Neurologist and genomicist Clemens Scherzer of Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues decided to try a different strategy. “We wanted to find a drug that could turn down the production of α-synuclein,” he says. To identify promising compounds, the team grew human nerve cells in the lab and tested whether more than 1100 medications, vitamins, dietary supplements, and other molecules altered their output of α-synuclein. Three of the drugs that cut the protein’s production, including salbutamol, work by stimulating the b2-adrenoreceptor—a molecule on some body cells that triggers a variety of effects, including relaxing the airways. The researchers found that these drugs appear to alter how tightly the DNA containing the α-synuclein gene coils, and thus whether the gene is active. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 24023 - Posted: 09.01.2017

You may well be yawning just reading this - it's contagious. Now researchers have looked at what happens in our brains to trigger that response. A University of Nottingham team found it occurs in a part of the brain responsible for motor function. The primary motor cortex also plays a part in conditions such as Tourette's syndrome. So the scientists say understanding contagious yawning could also help understand those disorders too. Contagious yawning is a common form of echophenomena - the automatic imitation of someone else's words or actions. Echophenomena is also seen in Tourette's, as well as in other conditions, including epilepsy and autism. To test what's happening in the brain during the phenomenon, scientists monitored 36 volunteers while they watched others yawning. In the study, published in the journal Current Biology, some were told it was fine to yawn while others were told to stifle the urge. The urge to yawn was down to how each person's primary motor cortex worked - its "excitability". And, using external transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), it was also possible to increase "excitability" in the motor cortex and therefore people's propensity for contagious yawns. Georgina Jackson, professor of cognitive neuropsychology who worked on the study, said the finding could have wider uses: "In Tourette's, if we could reduce the excitability we might reduce the ticks, and that's what we are working on." Prof Stephen Jackson, who also worked on the research, added: "If we can understand how alterations in cortical excitability give rise to neural disorders we can potentially reverse them. "We are looking for potential non-drug, personalised treatments, using TMS that might be effective in modulating imbalances in the brain networks." © 2017 BBC

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 24022 - Posted: 09.01.2017

By Clare Wilson Some people who are blind can echolocate like bats, making clicks with their mouths that help them understand the environment around them. Now researchers are beginning to understand how this works, so non-sighted people may one day be able to learn the technique. While many people who are blind get information from ambient echoes, only a few make noises themselves to echolocate. Some, such as Daniel Kish (pictured), are so proficient they can draw a sketch of a room after clicking their way around it, or even go mountain biking along unfamiliar routes. Daniel Kish: Blind children should be allowed to echolocate like me Previous research revealed that this human echolocation involves some brain areas that are used for vision in sighted people. Kish, who was blind almost from birth, thinks he experiences the sensations as something akin to images. “It’s not computational. There’s a real palpable experience of the image as a spatial representation – here are walls, here are the corners, here is the presence of objects.” In the latest study, Lore Thaler of Durham University, UK, and her team carried out the first in-depth acoustic analysis of the mouth clicks. They worked with Kish and two other blind echolocators from the Netherlands and Austria. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 24021 - Posted: 09.01.2017