Laurel Hamers Scientists have traced the sensation of itch to a place you can’t scratch. The discomfort of a mosquito bite or an allergic reaction activates itch-sensitive nerve cells in the spinal cord. Those neurons talk to a structure near the base of the brain called the parabrachial nucleus, researchers report in the Aug. 18 Science. It’s a region that’s known to receive information about other sensations, such as pain and taste. The discovery gets researchers one step closer to finding out where itch signals ultimately end up. “The parabrachial nucleus is just the first relay center for [itch signals] going into the brain,” says study coauthor Yan-Gang Sun, a neuroscientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai. Understanding the way these signals are processed by the brain could someday provide relief for people with chronic itch, Sun says. While the temporary itchiness of a bug bite is annoying, longer term, “uncontrollable scratching behavior can cause serious skin damage.” Previous studies have looked at the way an itch registers on the skin or how neurons convey those sensations to the spinal cord. But how those signals travel to the brain has been a trickier question, and this research is a “major step” toward answering it, says Zhou-Feng Chen, director of the Center for the Study of Itch at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 23972 - Posted: 08.18.2017

By Aggie Mika | In a report published today (August 16) in Nature, researchers uncover the mechanisms by which the psychoactive and addictive drug fenethylline, trade name Captagon, exerts its potent stimulating effects. Essentially, one component of the drug, theophylline, boosts the effects of another, amphetamine. “This combination greatly enhances amphetamine’s properties,” says coauthor and Scripps Research Institute researcher Kim Janda in a press conference this week, Reuters reports. “So this now makes sense why it’s being so heavily abused.” In exploring fenethylline’s mode of action, the researchers came upon a method to vaccinate against the drug in mice using small, antibody-eliciting molecules called haptens that target the drug’s chemical components. Once antibodies for a specific chemical are prompted by a vaccine, they bind to and prevent it from interacting with its receptors in the body, thus preventing the effects of the drug driven by that chemical. Fenethylline’s use is mostly confined to the Middle East, where approximately 40 percent of young adult drug users in Saudi Arabia are addicted to the drug, the authors write in their report. According to Reuters, the drug initially sparked Janda’s interest because of its use by Islamic State jihadists. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, “Syrian civil war combatants and Islamic State terrorists have reportedly used the drug to boost their fighting ability and to lessen fear.” © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 23971 - Posted: 08.18.2017

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health have identified a class of sensory neurons (nerve cells that electrically send and receive messages between the body and brain) that can be activated by stimuli as precise as the pulling of a single hair. Understanding basic mechanisms underlying these different types of responses will be an important step toward the rational design of new approaches to pain therapy. The findings were published in the journal Neuron. “Scientists know that distinct types of neurons detect different types of sensations, such as touch, heat, cold, pain, pressure, and vibration,” noted Alexander Chesler, Ph.D., lead author of the study and principal investigator with the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health’s (NCCIH) Division of Intramural Research (DIR). “But they know more about neurons involved with temperature and touch than those underlying mechanical pain, like anatomical pain related to specific postures or activities.” In this study, Chesler and his colleagues used a novel strategy that combined functional imaging (which measures neuronal activity), recordings of electrical activity in the brain, and genetics to see how neurons respond to various stimuli. The scientists focused on a class of sensory neurons that express a gene called Calca, as these neurons have a long history in pain research. The scientists applied various stimuli to the hairy skin of mice cheeks, including gentle mechanical stimuli (air puff, stroking, and brushing), “high-threshold” mechanical stimuli (hair pulling and skin pinching), and temperature stimulation. They found that the target neurons belong to two broad categories, both of which were insensitive to gentle stimulation. The first was a well-known type of pain fiber—a polymodal nociceptor—that responds to a host of high intensity stimuli such as heat and pinching. The second was a unique and previously unknown type of neuron that responded robustly to hair pulling. They called this previously undescribed class of high-threshold mechanoreceptors (HTMRs) “circ-HTMRs,” due to the unusual nerve terminals these neurons made in skin. They observed that the endings of the fibers made lasso-like structures around the base of each hair follicle.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 23970 - Posted: 08.17.2017

By Catherine Offord | On August 21, the moon will pass between the Earth and the sun, resulting in a total solar eclipse visible across a large strip of the United States. Self-proclaimed eclipse-chaser Ralph Chou, an emeritus professor of optometry at the University of Waterloo, has been working to spread awareness about eye-safety during eclipses for around 30 years. Last year, he put together the American Astronomical Society’s technical guide to eye safety, aimed at everyone from astronomers to educators to medical professionals. The Scientist spoke to Chou to find out what happens to the eye when exposed to too much sunlight, and how to watch next week’s solar eclipse safely. Ralph Chou: Light comes into the eye and goes through all the various layers of cells until it reaches the photoreceptors—essentially, the bottom of a stack of cells. The photoreceptors themselves guide the light towards a specialized structure [of the cells] called the outer segment, where there is a stack of discs that contain the visual pigment. Under normal circumstances, the light would interact with the pigment, which generates an electrical signal that then starts the process of sending an impulse through the optic nerve to the brain. In looking at the sun, you have a very large volume of photons—light energy—coming in and hitting these pigment discs, and it’s more than they can really handle. In addition to generating the electrical signal, [the cell] also starts generating photo-oxidative compounds. So you’re getting oxidative species like hydroxyl radicals and peroxides that will go on to attack the cell’s organelles. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 23969 - Posted: 08.17.2017

Marci O'Connor, a mother of two teenagers, struggles with her confident, independent self and recurring loneliness — feelings that psychologists say are increasingly posing public health challenges. O'Connor, 46, of Mont-Saint-Hilaire, 30 kilometres east of Montreal, said loneliness snuck up on her after she moved away from her family to a predominantly French-speaking area. She now works from home. O'Connor lost the camaraderie of her community of stay-at-home moms as her children, now 15 and 17, grew and families' circumstances changed. "I found that I constantly check in with myself and my motives for doing things," O'Connor said. "If I go hiking alone, is it to avoid other people or is that the day I really want to be on my own?" Taken too far, a sense of independence and self-sufficiency can be a detriment. Psychologists say it's important to recognize loneliness and prioritize the meaningful relationships we all need. Demographics are another challenge. Earlier this month, Statistics Canada released new information from the 2016 census suggesting a record number of households, 28.2 per cent, have only one person living in them. In an upcoming issue of American Psychologist, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, says social connection should be a public health priority. Holt-Lunstad says social connection is associated with a 50 per cent reduced risk of early death, and loneliness exacts a grave toll. ©2017 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 23968 - Posted: 08.17.2017

By Katie Moritz If you’re like a lot of people all over the world, you have a hard time sleeping. Maybe you’ve tried apps that promote sleep, or going without electronics for the hours leading up to bedtime, or supplements like melatonin or magnesium. But have you tried thinking differently about your waking life? Research suggests that having a purpose in life leads to a better night’s sleep. Picture in your mind your biggest interests and your loftiest goals. Pursuing those could help you get better shut-eye. A research team at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine looked at the sleep habits of more than 800 older adults—though they said the results are likely applicable to everyone—and found that the ones who reported having a purpose in life have fewer sleep disturbances like sleep apnea and restless leg syndrome and sleep better over a long period. Purpose pbs rewire“Helping people cultivate a purpose in life could be an effective drug-free strategy to improve sleep quality, particularly for a population that is facing more insomnia,” said Jason Ong, one of the study’s authors and an associate professor of neurology at the Feinberg School of Medicine, to the university. “Purpose in life is something that can be cultivated and enhanced through mindfulness therapies.” In the Northwestern study, the people who felt their lives had meaning were 63 percent less likely to have sleep apnea, 52 percent less likely to have restless leg syndrome and had better sleep quality. Poor sleep quality is defined by having trouble falling and staying asleep and feeling tired during the day.

Keyword: Sleep; Depression
Link ID: 23967 - Posted: 08.17.2017

By WILLIAM GRIMES Marian C. Diamond, a neuroscientist who overturned long-held beliefs by showing that environmental factors can change the structure of the brain and that the brain continues to develop throughout one’s life, died on July 25 at her home in Oakland, Calif. She was 90. Her son Richard Diamond confirmed the death. Dr. Diamond’s most celebrated study was of the preserved brain of Albert Einstein, in the 1980s, but it was her work two decades earlier, at the University of California, Berkeley, that had the most lasting impact. Dr. Diamond was an instructor at Cornell University in the late 1950s when she read a paper in Science magazine showing that rats who navigated mazes quickly had a different brain chemistry than slower rats. They showed much higher levels of acetylcholinesterase, an enzyme that accelerates the transmission of neural signals. “What a thrill I had when my mind jumped immediately to the question, ‘I wonder if the anatomy of these brains would also show a difference in learning ability?’ ” Dr. Diamond wrote in an autobiographical essay for the Society for Neuroscience. She was able to test her theory after joining a team at Berkeley led by Mark R. Rosenzweig, one of the authors of the Science paper. To gauge the effects of environment on performance, Dr. Rosenzweig and his colleagues had begun raising rats in so-called enriched cages, outfitted with ladders and wheels, in the company of other rats. The rats in a control group were raised alone in bare cages. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23966 - Posted: 08.17.2017

David Cyranoski Neuroscientists who painstakingly map the twists and turns of neural circuitry through the brain are about to see their field expand to an industrial scale. A huge facility set to open in Suzhou, China, next month should transform high-resolution brain mapping, its developers say. Where typical laboratories might use one or two brain-imaging systems, the new facility boasts 50 automated machines that can rapidly slice up a mouse brain, snap high-definition pictures of each slice and reconstruct those into a 3D picture. This factory-like scale will “dramatically accelerate progress”, says Hongkui Zeng, a molecular biologist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, which is partnering with the centre. “Large-scale, standardized data generation in an industrial manner will change the way neuroscience is done,” she says. The institute, which will also image human brains, aims to be an international hub that will help researchers to map neural connectivity for everything from studies of Alzheimer’s disease to brain-inspired artificial-intelligence projects, says Qingming Luo, a researcher in biomedical imaging at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) in Wuhan, China. Luo leads the new facility, called the HUST-Suzhou Institute for Brainsmatics, which has a 5-year budget of 450 million yuan (US$67 million) and will employ some 120 scientists and technicians. Luo, who calls himself a “brainsmatician”, also built the institute’s high-speed brain-imaging systems. “There will be large demand, for sure,” says Josh Huang, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, which is also partnering with the Chinese institute. Access to high-throughput, rapid brain mapping could transform neuro-scientists’ understanding of how neurons are connected in the brain, he says — just as high-throughput sequencing helped geneticists to untangle the human genome in the 2000s. “This will have a major impact on building cell-resolution brain atlases in multiple species,” he says. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 23965 - Posted: 08.16.2017

By Jenna Gallegos Pathogens are real jerks. As if infecting and killing plants and animals isn’t bad enough, they can also turn their hosts into zombies that spread the pathogens to their next victim. Now scientists report that bacteria make some victims summon other victims as their dying act. The bacteria hijack the chemical signaling pathway of insects, making them release a burst of hormones that serve as a beacon to attract friends and potential mates right before the bacteria kill off the host. Like malware marauding as an enticing link, the bacteria attract and then infect. Fruit flies are generally pretty good at avoiding hazards. They can detect when food is infected with a dangerous mold or when a parasitic wasp is nearby, said Markus Knaden, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, who was involved in the study. In both cases, the flies won’t lay their eggs near the infectious agent. That’s why Knaden and colleagues at Cornell University were so surprised when they found that flies were actually attracted to other insects with a certain bacterial infection. “If you’re sitting in a theater and someone next to you is coughing, you move to another chair,” said Bill Hansson, one of the Max Planck authors of the study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications. They expected flies to behave the same way, but instead, healthy flies found their sick friends to be extremely attractive. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 23964 - Posted: 08.16.2017

Alice H. Eagly It’s no secret that Silicon Valley employs many more men than women in tech jobs. What’s much harder to agree on is why. The recent anti-diversity memo by a now former Google engineer has pushed this topic into the spotlight. The writer argued there are ways to explain the gender gap in tech that don’t rely on bias and discrimination – specifically, biological sex differences. Setting aside how this assertion would affect questions about how to move toward greater equity in tech fields, how well does his wrap-up represent what researchers know about the science of sex and gender? As a social scientist who’s been conducting psychological research about sex and gender for almost 50 years, I agree that biological differences between the sexes likely are part of the reason we see fewer women than men in the ranks of Silicon Valley’s tech workers. But the road between biology and employment is long and bumpy, and any causal connection does not rule out the relevance of nonbiological causes. Here’s what the research actually says. There is no direct causal evidence that biology causes the lack of women in tech jobs. But many, if not most, psychologists do give credence to the general idea that prenatal and early postnatal exposure to hormones such as testosterone and other androgens affect human psychology. In humans, testosterone is ordinarily elevated in males from about weeks eight to 24 of gestation and also during early postnatal development. © 2010–2017, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23963 - Posted: 08.16.2017

Paul Martin Sir Patrick Bateson, who has died aged 79, was a scientist whose work advanced the understanding of the biological origins of behaviour. He will also be remembered as a man of immense warmth and kindness, whose success as a leader, teacher and administrator of science owed much to his collaborative spirit, generosity and good humour. He was a key figure in ethology – the biological study of animal behaviour. As well as being a conceptual thinker who revelled in painting the big theoretical picture, he was an accomplished experimental scientist. He published extensively, with more than 300 journal papers and several books to his name. His early research was on imprinting – a specialised form of early learning in which young animals rapidly learn about key features of their environment, such as the distinguishing characteristics of their parent or a desirable mate. He later worked with Gabriel Horn on unravelling the neurobiological mechanisms that underpin this learning. A related interest was the biology of mate choice, where he revealed how young animals could strike an optimal balance between outbreeding and inbreeding. His research achievements led to his election as fellow of the Royal Society in 1983. Another scientific focus was the role of play behaviour in the development of the individual. Studies with monkeys, cats and other species showed how experiences that are actively acquired through playing in early life help to build the physical, cognitive and social skills that are vital in later life. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23962 - Posted: 08.16.2017

Allison Aubrey What we eat can influence more than our waistlines. It turns out, our diets also help determine what we smell like. A recent study found that women preferred the body odor of men who ate a lot of fruits and vegetables, whereas men who ate a lot of refined carbohydrates (think bread, pasta) gave off a smell that was less appealing. Skeptical? At first, I was, too. I thought this line of inquiry must have been dreamed up by the produce industry. (Makes a good marketing campaign, right?) But it's legit. "We've known for a while that odor is an important component of attractiveness, especially for women," says Ian Stephen of Macquarie University in Australia. He studies evolution, genetics and psychology and is an author of the study. From an evolutionary perspective, scientists say our sweat can help signal our health status and could possibly play a role in helping to attract a mate. How did scientists evaluate the link between diet and the attractiveness of body odor? They began by recruiting a bunch of healthy, young men. They assessed the men's skin using an instrument called a spectrophotometer. When people eat a lot of colorful veggies, their skin takes on the hue of carotenoids, the plant pigments that are responsible for bright red, yellow and orange foods. "The carotenoids get deposited in our skin," explains Stephen. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 23961 - Posted: 08.15.2017

By Kerry Grens The rare, severe effects of Zika infection in adults may go beyond Guillain-Barre syndrome. Doctors in Brazil report today in JAMA Neurology that among a group of hospitalized patients, those with the virus sometimes presented with other neurological problems—namely, an inflamed nervous system. The physicians tracked 40 patients who came to a hospital in Rio de Janeiro between December 2015 and May 2016 for acute neuroinflammation. Among them, 35 turned out to have been infected with Zika, and within this group, 27 had Guillain-Barre syndrome, which causes debilitating paralysis. Five patients had encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain, two had inflamed spinal cords, and one had nerve inflammation. Such symptoms are thought to indicate “post-infectious syndromes, where you have a viral infection, you clear the infection by mounting an antibody response, and the antibodies actually attack parts of the central and peripheral nervous system, causing these neurological symptoms,” Richard Temes, director of the Center for Neurocritical Care at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, New York, tells HealthDay. He was not involved in this study. Zika infection in adults is typically not dangerous, and many people won’t develop symptoms at all. Doctors have noticed an uptick in Guillain-Barre syndrome among those who have caught the virus. The authors note in their study that admissions to their hospital for both Guillain-Barre syndrome and encephalitis rose after May 2014, when the Zika outbreak hit Brazil.

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 23960 - Posted: 08.15.2017

By Andy Coghlan Can exercise during childhood protect you against memory loss many decades later? Exercise early in life seems to have lifelong benefits for the brain, in rats at least. “This is an animal study, but it indicates that physical activity at a young age is very important – not just for development, but for the whole lifelong trajectory of cognitive development during ageing,” says Martin Wojtowicz of the University of Toronto, Canada. “In humans, it may compensate for and delay the appearance of Alzheimer’s symptoms, possibly to the point of preventing them.” Wojtowicz’s team spilt 80 young male rats into two equal groups, and placed running wheels in the cages of one group for a period of six weeks. Around four months later – when the rats had reached middle age – the team taught all the rats to associate an electric shock with being in a specific box. When placed in the box, they froze with fear. Two weeks later, the team tested the rats in three scenarios: exactly the same box in the same room, the same box with the room arranged and lit differently, and a completely different box in a different room. The rats without access to a running wheel when they were young now froze the same proportion of times in each of these situations, suggesting they couldn’t remember which one was hazardous. But those that had been able to run in their youth froze 40 to 50 per cent less in both altered box settings. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd

Keyword: Alzheimers; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23959 - Posted: 08.15.2017

By Kate Kyle, CBC News Widespread, prolonged hunger that existed in residential schools is a contributing factor in the disproportionate health issues facing many Indigenous people, such as diabetes and obesity, according to an article published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. "Hunger is really central to the experiences of residential school survivors," says Ian Mosby who co-authored the article with Tracy Galloway, both with the University of Toronto. They say childhood malnutrition experienced in many government-funded schools is contributing to the higher risk for obesity, diabetes and heart disease among Indigenous people in adulthood. "While this wasn't every single residential school," says Mosby, "it's common enough through survivor testimony that we need to start looking at hunger in residential schools as a real predictor of long-term health problems." Residential school kitchen 1920s Residential schools across Canada faced significant underfunding, along with inadequate cooking facilities and untrained staff. Historians and former students have described children getting "one or two pieces of stale bread for lunch. Rarely getting meat, rarely getting milk and butter, and few fruits and vegetables," says Mosby. ©2017 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23958 - Posted: 08.15.2017

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Children who sleep less may be at increased risk for Type 2 diabetes, researchers report. Earlier studies found a link between shorter sleep and diabetes in adults, but the connection has been little studied in children. British researchers studied 4,525 9- and 10-year olds from varying ethnic backgrounds. On average, their parents reported they slept 10 hours a night, with 95 percent sleeping between eight and 12 hours. The study, in Pediatrics, found that the less sleep, the more likely the children were to have higher body mass indexes, higher insulin resistance and higher glucose readings. All three are risk factors for Type 2 diabetes. Over all, increasing weekday sleep duration by an hour was associated with a 0.2 lower B.M.I. and a 3 percent reduction in insulin resistance. The reasons for the link remain unclear, but the researchers suggest that poor sleep may affect appetite regulation, leading to overeating and obesity. This observational study could not establish cause and effect. Still, the senior author, Christopher G. Owen, a professor of epidemiology at St. George’s University of London, said that for children, the more sleep the better — there is no threshold. “Increasing sleep is a very simple, low-cost intervention,” he said. “We should be doing our utmost to make sure that children sleep for an adequate amount of time.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Obesity
Link ID: 23957 - Posted: 08.15.2017

By M. GREGG BLOCHE Was the Central Intelligence Agency’s post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” program an instance of human experimentation? Recently declassified documents raise this explosive question. The documents were obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union in connection with a federal lawsuit scheduled for trial next month. The case was brought on behalf of three former detainees against two psychologists who developed the C.I.A.’s program. I reviewed some of the documents in a recent article in The Texas Law Review. Internal C.I.A. records indicate that the psychologists, James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen, anticipated objections that critics would later level against the program, such as that coercion might generate unreliable information, and contracted with the agency to design research tools that addressed some of these concerns. Redactions in the released documents (and the C.I.A.’s withholding of others) make it impossible to know the full extent, if any, of the agency’s data collection efforts or the findings they yielded. At their depositions for the A.C.L.U. lawsuit, each of the psychologists denied having evaluated the program’s effectiveness. But the C.I.A. paid the psychologists to develop a research methodology and instructed physicians and other medical staff members at clandestine detention sites to monitor and chart the health conditions of detainees. In response, the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights has charged that the program was an unlawful experiment on human beings. It calls the program “one of the gravest breaches of medical ethics by United States health professionals since the Nuremberg Code,” the ethical principles written to protect people from human experimentation after World War II. In its lawsuit, the A.C.L.U. is pressing a similar claim. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 23956 - Posted: 08.14.2017

By Kristine Phillips The Food and Drug Administration is investigating the sudden deaths of five people who had undergone an obesity treatment that places an inflated silicone balloon in their stomach. All deaths happened within a month of the procedure, the FDA said in a letter earlier this week to health-care providers. Three people died just one to three days later. The agency, however, cautioned that it has yet to determine whether the devices or the way in which they were placed in the stomachs directly caused those deaths. “At this time, we do not know the root cause or incidence per rate of patient death,” the FDA said, adding that it is working with the companies that manufacture the devices. The devices are manufactured by two California companies. Four of the cases involved the Orbera Intragastric Balloon System by Apollo Endosurgery. One involved the ReShape Integrated Dual Balloon System by ReShape Medical. The deaths happened from 2016 to present, according to the FDA. The agency said two more death reports it received happened within the same time frame and are potentially related to complications from the balloon treatment. The procedure lasts for up to 30 minutes. One or two balloons are placed inside the stomach through the mouth using an endoscope while a patient is mildly sedated. Once inside, it's inflated with liquid, usually with saline solution. The idea is for the balloon, which is about the size of a grapefruit once inflated, to leave less room for food. It stays in the stomach for up to six months, while the patient also follows a diet and exercises regularly. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 23955 - Posted: 08.14.2017

By Megan Scudellari Neuropharmacology postdoc Nick DiPatrizio was stumped. His advisor, University of California, Irvine, researcher Daniele Piomelli, had discovered eight years earlier that hungry rats have high levels of endocannabinoids, endogenous molecules that bind to the same receptors as the active ingredient in marijuana. Now, in 2009, DiPatrizio was trying to identify exactly where and how those molecules were controlling food intake in rats. But under specific feeding conditions, he couldn’t locate any changes in endocannabinoid levels in the brain, which is flush with endocannabinoid receptors and the obvious place to look for behavioral signals. Piomelli gently chastised his mentee. “He said, ‘You’re being neurocentric. Remember, there’s a body attached to the head. Look in the other organs of the body,’ ” recalls DiPatrizio. So the young scientist persisted, and eventually discovered that hunger—and the taste of fat—leads to increased endocannabinoid levels in the jejunum, a part of the small intestine. Endocannabinoid signaling in the gut, not the brain, was controlling food intake in the rodents in response to tasting fats.1 The evolution of endocannabinoid research has mirrored DiPatrizio’s early thinking: ever since the first endocannabinoid receptor was identified in the late 1980s, the field has been overwhelmingly focused on the central nervous system. The main endocannabinoid receptor, CB1, was first discovered in a rat brain and is now known to be among the most abundant G protein–coupled receptors in neurons there. Plus, cannabis is well-known for its psychotropic effects. “That has led the research field to be very CNS-oriented,” says Saoirse O’Sullivan, who studies endocannabinoids at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23954 - Posted: 08.14.2017

Eric Deggans Like a lot of kids in high school, Sam worries that he doesn't fit in. "I'm a weirdo. That's what everyone says," declares the 18-year-old character at the center of Netflix's new dramatic comedy series Atypical. One reason Sam struggles to fit in: He has autism. As his character explains at the start of the first episode, sometimes he doesn't understand what people mean when they say things. And that makes him feel alone, even when he's not. Sam's family in Atypical is thrown in all sorts of new directions by his quest to date and find a girlfriend. Creator Robia Rashid says she wanted to tell a different kind of coming-of-age story, inspired by recent increases in autism diagnoses. "There are all these young people now who are on the spectrum, who know ... they're on the spectrum," she says. "And [they] are interested in things that every young person is interested in ... independence and finding connections and finding love." On-screen depictions of autism have come a long way since Dustin Hoffman's portrayal of Raymond Babbitt in the 1988 Oscar-winning film Rain Man. Hoffman's Babbitt focused obsessively on watching The People's Court and getting served maple syrup before his pancakes. He could also memorize half the names in a phone book in one reading and count the number of toothpicks on the floor, moments after they spilled out of the box. For Atypical, Rashid says she researched accounts of adults with autism, has several parents of autistic children working in her crew and hired an actor with autism to play a minor role. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 23953 - Posted: 08.12.2017