By Virginia Morell Sex is never simple—even among lizards. Unlike mammals, the sex of central bearded dragons, large lizards found in eastern Australia, is determined by their chromosomes and the environment. If the eggs are incubated in high temperatures, male embryos turn into females. Such sex-reversed lizards still retain the chromosomal makeup of a male, but they develop into functional superfemales, whose output of eggs exceeds that of the regular females. Now, a new study predicts that—in some cases—these superfemales may be able to drive regular ones to extinction. That’s because superfemales not only produce more eggs, but they’re also exceptionally bold. Looking at the shape, physiology, and behavior of 20 sex-reversed females, 55 males, and 40 regular females, scientists found that the sex-reversed dragons were physically similar to regular males: They had a male dragon’s long tail and high body temperature. They were also behaviorally similar, acting like bold, active males—even as they produced viable eggs. Indeed, the scientists report in the current issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B that these sex-reversed females were behaviorally more malelike than the genetic males. Because of these advantages, this third sex could reproductively outcompete normal females, the scientists say, possibly causing some populations to lose the female sex chromosome. (Females are the heterogametic sex, like human males.) In such a population, the dragons’ sex would then be determined solely by temperature instead of genetics—something that’s occurred in the lab within a single generation. Could it happen in the wild? The scientists are still investigating. © 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 22296 - Posted: 06.08.2016

By JAMES GORMAN This summer’s science horror blockbuster is a remake: Return of the Leaping Electric Eel! If you have any kind of phobia of slimy, snakelike creatures that can rise from the water and use their bodies like Tasers, this story — and the accompanying video — may not be for you. The original tale (there was, alas, no video) dates to 1800 when the great explorer Alexander von Humboldt was in South America and enlisted local fishermen to catch some of these eels for the new (at the time) study of electricity. He wrote that the men herded horses and mules into a shallow pond and let the eels attack by pressing themselves against the horses. The horses and mules tried to escape, but the fishermen kept them in the water until the eels used up their power. Two horses died, probably from falling and drowning. Or so Humboldt said. Though the story was widely retold, no other report of this kind of fishing-with-horses phenomenon surfaced for more than 200 years, according to Kenneth Catania, a scientist with a passion for studying the eel species in question, electrophorus electricus. In 2014, he reported on how the eels freeze their prey. They use rapid pulses of more than 600 volts generated by modified muscle cells and sent through the water. These volleys of shocks cause the muscles of prey to tense at once, stopping all movement. The eels’ bodies function like Tasers, Dr. Catania wrote. But they can also project high-voltage pulses in the water in isolated couplets rather than full volleys for a different effect. The pairs of shocks don’t freeze the prey, but cause their bodies to twitch. That movement reveals the prey’s location, and then the eels send out a rapid volley to immobilize then swallow it. Dr. Catania noticed another kind of behavior, however. He was using a metal-handled net — wearing rubber gloves — while working with eels in an aquarium, and the eels would fling themselves up the handle of the net, pressing themselves to the metal and generating rapid electric shocks. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Muscles
Link ID: 22295 - Posted: 06.07.2016

By Sarah DeWeerdt, Spectrum Brains from people with autism show patterns of gene expression similar to those from people with schizophrenia, according to a new analysis. The findings, published May 24 in Translational Psychiatry, deepen the connections between the two conditions, says study leader Dan Arking, associate professor of genetic medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. People who have either autism or schizophrenia share features such as language problems and difficulty understanding other people’s thoughts and feelings. They also have genetic risk factors in common. “And now I think we can show that they share overlap in gene expression,” Arking says. The study builds on previous work, in which Arking’s team characterized gene expression in postmortem brain tissue from 32 individuals with autism and 40 controls. In the new analysis, the researchers made use of that dataset as well as one from the Stanley Medical Research Institute that looked at 31 people with schizophrenia, 25 with bipolar disorder and 26 controls3. They found 106 genes expressed at lower levels in autism and schizophrenia brains than in controls. These genes are involved in the development of neurons, especially the formation of the long projections that carry nerve signals and the development of the junctions, or synapses, between one cell and the next. The results are consistent with those from previous studies indicating a role for genes involved in brain development in both conditions. “On the one hand, it’s exciting because it tells us that there’s a lot of overlap,” says Jeremy Willsey, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the work. “On the other hand, these are fairly general things that are overlapping.” © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 22294 - Posted: 06.07.2016

By Sandra G. Boodman Richard McGhee and his family believed the worst was behind them. McGhee, a retired case officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency who lives near Annapolis, had spent six months battling leukemia as part of a clinical trial at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The experimental chemotherapy regimen he was given had worked spectacularly, driving his blood cancer into a complete remission. But less than nine months after his treatment ended, McGhee abruptly fell apart. He became moody, confused and delusional — even childish — a jarring contrast with the even-keeled, highly competent person he had been. He developed tremors in his arms, had trouble walking and became incontinent. “I was really a mess,” he recalled. Doctors suspected he had developed a rapidly progressive and fatal dementia, possibly a particularly aggressive form of Alzheimer’s disease. If that was the case, his family was told, his life span would be measured in months. Luckily, the cause of McGhee’s precipitous decline proved to be much more treatable — and prosaic — than doctors initially feared. “It’s really a pleasure to see somebody get better so rapidly,” said Michael A. Williams, a professor of neurology and neurosurgery at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. Until recently, Williams was affiliated with Baltimore’s Sinai Hospital, where he treated McGhee in 2010. “This was a diagnosis waiting to be found.”

Keyword: Alzheimers; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 22293 - Posted: 06.07.2016

By Clare Wilson We’ve all been there: after a tough mental slog your brain feels as knackered as your body does after a hard workout. Now we may have pinpointed one of the brain regions worn out by a mentally taxing day – and it seems to also affect our willpower, so perhaps we should avoid making important decisions when mentally fatigued. Several previous studies have suggested that our willpower is a finite resource, and if it gets depleted in one way – like finishing a difficult task – we find it harder to make other good choices, like resisting a slice of cake. In a small trial, Bastien Blain at INSERM in Paris and his colleagues asked volunteers to spend six hours doing tricky memory tasks, while periodically choosing either a small sum of cash now, or a larger amount after a delay. .. As the day progressed, people became more likely to act on impulse and to pick an immediate reward. This didn’t happen in the groups that spent time doing easier memory tasks, reading or gaming. For those engaged in difficult work, fMRI brain scans showed a decrease in activity in the middle frontal gyrus, a brain area involved in decision-making. “That suggests this region is becoming less excitable, which could be impairing people’s ability to resist temptation,” says Blain. It’s involved in decisions like ‘Shall I have a beer with my friends tonight, or shall I save money to buy a bike next month,’ he says. Previous research has shown that children with more willpower in a similar type of choice test involving marshmallows end up as more successful adults, by some measures. “Better impulse control predicts your eventual wealth and health,” says Blain. The idea that willpower can be depleted is contentious as some researchers have failed to replicate others’ findings. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 22292 - Posted: 06.07.2016

By Jordana Cepelewicz Colors exist on a seamless spectrum, yet we assign hues to discrete categories such as “red” and “orange.” Past studies have found that a person's native language can influence the way colors are categorized and even perceived. In Russian, for example, light blue and dark blue are named as different colors, and studies find that Russian speakers can more readily distinguish between the shades. Yet scientists have wondered about the extent of such verbal influence. Are color categories purely a construct of language, or is there a physiological basis for the distinction between green and blue? A new study in infants suggests that even before acquiring language, our brain already sorts colors into the familiar groups. A team of researchers in Japan tracked neural activity in 12 prelinguistic infants as they looked at a series of geometric figures. When the shapes' color switched between green and blue, activity increased in the occipitotemporal region of the brain, an area known to process visual stimuli. When the color changed within a category, such as between two shades of green, brain activity remained steady. The team found the same pattern in six adult participants. The infants used both brain hemispheres to process color changes. Language areas are usually in the left hemisphere, so the finding provides further evidence that color categorization is not entirely dependent on language. At some point as a child grows, language must start playing a role—just ask a Russian whether a cloudless sky is the same color as the deep sea. The researchers hope to study that developmental process next. “Our results imply that the categorical color distinctions arise before the development of linguistic abilities,” says Jiale Yang, a psychologist at Chuo University and lead author of the study, published in February in PNAS. “But maybe they are later shaped by language learning.” © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22291 - Posted: 06.07.2016

James Gorman Fruit flies are far from human, but not as far as you might think. They do many of the same things people do, like seek food, fight and woo mates. And their brains, although tiny and not set up like those of humans or other mammals, do many of the same things that all brains do — make and use memories, integrate information from the senses, and allow the creature to navigate both the physical and the social world. Consequently, scientists who study how all brains work like to use flies because it’s easier for them to do invasive research that isn’t allowed on humans. The technology of neuroscience is sophisticated enough to genetically engineer fly brains, and to then use fluorescent chemicals to indicate which neurons are active. But there are some remaining problems, like how to watch the brain of a fly that is moving around freely. It is one thing to record what is going on in a fly’s brain if the insect’s movement is restricted, but quite another to try to catch the light flash of brain cells from a fly that is walking around. Takeo Katsuki, an assistant project scientist at the Kavli Institute at the University of California, San Diego, is interested in courtship. And, he said, fruit flies simply won’t engage in courtship when they are tethered. So he and Dhruv Grover, another assistant project scientist, and Ralph J. Greenspan, in whose lab they both work, set out to develop a method for recording the brain activity of a walking fly. One challenge was to track the fly as it moved. They solved that problem with three cameras to follow the fly and a laser to activate the fluorescent chemicals in the brain. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 22290 - Posted: 06.06.2016

By Julia Shaw A cure for almost every memory ailment seems to be just around the corner. Alzheimer’s affected brains can have their memories restored, we can create hippocampal implants to give us better memory, and we can effectively implant false memories with light. Except that we can’t really do any of these things, at least not in humans. We sometimes forget that developments in memory science need to go through a series of stages in order to come to fruition, each of which requires tremendous knowledge and skill. From coming up with a new idea, to designing an appropriate methodology, obtaining ethical approval, getting research funding, recruiting research assistants and test subjects, conducting the experiment(s), completing complex statistical analysis for which computer code is often required, writing a manuscript, surviving the peer review process, and finally effectively distributing the findings, each part of the process is incredibly complex and takes a long time. On top of it all, this process, which can take decades to complete, typically results in incremental rather than monumental change. Rather than creating massive leaps in technology, in the vast majority of instances, studies add a teeny tiny bit of insight to the greater body of knowledge. These incremental achievements in science are often blown out of proportion by the media. As John Oliver recently said “…[Science] deserves better than to be twisted out of proportion and be turned into morning show gossip.” Moving from science fiction to science fact is harder than the media makes it seem. © 2016 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Robotics
Link ID: 22289 - Posted: 06.06.2016

By Perri Klass, M.D. When girls come in for their physical exams, one of the questions I routinely ask is “Do you get your period?” I try to ask before I expect the answer to be yes, so that if a girl doesn’t seem to know about the changes of puberty that lie ahead, I can encourage her to talk about them with her mother, and offer to help answer questions. And I often point out that even those who have not yet embarked on puberty themselves are likely to have classmates who are going through these changes, so, again, it’s important to let kids know that their questions are welcome, and will be answered accurately. But like everybody else who deals with girls, I’m aware that this means bringing up the topic when girls are pretty young. Puberty is now coming earlier for many girls, with bodies changing in the third and fourth grade, and there is a complicated discussion about the reasons, from obesity and family stress to chemicals in the environment that may disrupt the normal effects of hormones. I’m not going to try to delineate that discussion here — though it’s an important one — because I want to concentrate on the effect, rather than the cause, of reaching puberty early. A large study published in May in the journal Pediatrics looked at a group of 8,327 children born in Hong Kong in April and May of 1997, for whom a great deal of health data has been collected. The researchers had access to the children’s health records, showing how their doctors had documented their physical maturity, according to what are known as the Tanner stages, for the standardized pediatric index of sexual maturation. Before children enter puberty, we call it Tanner I; for girls, Tanner II is the beginning of breast development, while for boys, it’s the enlargement of the scrotum and testes and the reddening and changing of the scrotum skin. Boys and girls then progress through the intermediate changes to stage V, full physical maturity. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 22288 - Posted: 06.06.2016

By ANNA FELS ONE of the most painful experiences of being a psychiatrist is having a patient for whom none of the available therapies or medications work. A while back, I was asked to do a consultation on just such a patient. This person had been a heroin addict in her early 20s. She had quit the opioid five years earlier, but her life was plagued with anxiety, apathy and self-doubt that prior treatments had not helped. At the end of the session, almost as an afterthought, she noted with irony that the only time in her adult life when she had been able to socialize easily and function at work was when she had been hooked on heroin. We are in the midst of a devastating and often lethal opioid epidemic, one of whose victims, we learned last week, was the pop star Prince. At such a time, it is hard to remember that there are multiple opioids naturally produced in our brains and required for our well-being. The neural circuitry utilizing these substances controls some of our most fundamental feelings of pain, stress and hopelessness, as well as pleasure and even euphoria. There is obviously a need for extreme caution, but research suggests that certain opioids may actually be useful in treating psychiatric diseases that have proved frustratingly unresponsive to current medications. It is the potentially addictive subset of opioids, whose natural ancestors were originally derived from poppies, that we associate with the word. These substances have been with us for most, if not all, of human civilization. Poppy seeds have been found at archaeological sites of Neolithic man. The Sumerians wrote about “the joy plant”; an Egyptian papyrus from the second millennium B.C. described the use of a product of poppies to stop the crying of children. Hippocrates suggested its use for female ailments, and a ninth-century Persian physician advocated the use of opium for melancholia. Millenniums later, during the American Civil War, the Union Army used 10 million opium pills to treat wounded soldiers. And then there were the two Opium Wars fought between China and Britain. Unquestionably, no other psychoactive substance has played such a central role in human affairs. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 22287 - Posted: 06.06.2016

By Karin Brulliard Think about how most people talk to babies: Slowly, simply, repetitively, and with an exaggerated tone. It’s one way children learn the uses and meanings of language. Now scientists have found that some adult birds do that when singing to chicks — and it helps the baby birds better learn their song. The subjects of the new study, published last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were zebra finches. They’re good for this because they breed well in a lab environment, and “they’re just really great singers. They sing all the time,” said McGill University biologist and co-author Jon Sakata. The males, he means — they’re the singers, and they do it for fun and when courting ladies, as well as around baby birds. Never mind that their melody is more “tinny,” according to Sakata, than pretty. Birds in general are helpful for vocal acquisition studies because they, like humans, are among the few species that actually have to learn how to make their sounds, Sakata said. Cats, for example, are born knowing how to meow. But just as people pick up speech and bats learn their calls, birds also have to figure out how to sing their special songs. Sakata and his colleagues were interested in how social interactions between adult zebra finches and chicks influences that learning process. Is face-to-face — or, as it may be, beak-to-beak — learning better? Does simply hearing an adult sing work as well as watching it do so? Do daydreaming baby birds learn as well as their more focused peers? © 1996-2016 The Washington Post

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 22286 - Posted: 06.06.2016

By LISA FELDMAN BARRETT WHEN the world gets you down, do you feel just generally “bad”? Or do you have more precise emotional experiences, such as grief or despair or gloom? In psychology, people with finely tuned feelings are said to exhibit “emotional granularity.” When reading about the abuses of the Islamic State, for example, you might experience creeping horror or fury, rather than general awfulness. When learning about climate change, you could feel alarm tinged with sorrow and regret for species facing extinction. Confronted with this year’s presidential campaign, you might feel astonished, exasperated or even embarrassed on behalf of the candidates — an emotion known in Mexico as “pena ajena.” Emotional granularity isn’t just about having a rich vocabulary; it’s about experiencing the world, and yourself, more precisely. This can make a difference in your life. In fact, there is growing scientific evidence that precisely tailored emotional experiences are good for you, even if those experiences are negative. According to a collection of studies, finely grained, unpleasant feelings allow people to be more agile at regulating their emotions, less likely to drink excessively when stressed and less likely to retaliate aggressively against someone who has hurt them. Perhaps surprisingly, the benefits of high emotional granularity are not only psychological. People who achieve it are also likely to have longer, healthier lives. They go to the doctor and use medication less frequently, and spend fewer days hospitalized for illness. Cancer patients, for example, have lower levels of harmful inflammation when they more frequently categorize, label and understand their emotions. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 22285 - Posted: 06.06.2016

By DENISE GRADY Muhammad Ali, who died on Friday after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease, was given the diagnosis in 1984 when he was 42. The world witnessed his gradual decline over the decades as tremors and stiffness set in, replacing his athletic stride with a shuffle, silencing his exuberant voice and freezing his face into an expressionless mask. What is Parkinson’s disease? It is a progressive, incurable deterioration of the part of the brain that produces a chemical needed to carry signals to the regions that control movement. How common is Parkinson’s? About one million people in the United States, and between seven million and 10 million worldwide, are thought to have Parkinson’s, according to the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation. What causes it? Was boxing a factor for Ali? The exact cause is not known. As with many disorders, experts suspect a combination of genes and environment, meaning that people with a particular genetic makeup may be predisposed to the disease if they are exposed to certain environmental factors. Head injuries, such as those sustained repeatedly in boxing, are among the possible risk factors listed by the National Parkinson Foundation. So is exposure to certain pesticides. These factors have both been suggested as possible contributors in Muhammad Ali’s case. Can Parkinson’s disease be treated? Medication can ease the symptoms for a time, but the disease continues to progress. In some cases, implanted devices called deep-brain stimulators can also help with symptoms. But Parkinson’s is not curable. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 22284 - Posted: 06.06.2016

By JOHN ELIGON and SERGE F. KOVALESKI Prince, the music icon who struggled with debilitating hip pain during his career, died from an accidental overdose of self-administered fentanyl, a type of synthetic opiate, officials in Minnesota said Thursday. The news ended weeks of speculation about the sudden death of the musician, who had a reputation for clean living but who appears to have developed a dependency on medications to treat his pain. Authorities have yet to discuss how he came to be in possession of the fentanyl and whether it had been prescribed by a doctor. Officials had waited several weeks for the results of a toxicology test undertaken as part of an autopsy performed after he was found dead April 21 in an elevator at his estate. He was preparing to enroll in an opioid treatment program when he died at 57, according to the lawyer for a doctor who was planning to treat him. The Midwest Medical Examiner’s Office, which conducted the autopsy, declined to comment beyond releasing a copy of its findings. The Carver County Sheriff’s Office is continuing to investigate the death with help from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. The sheriff’s office had said it was looking into whether opioid abuse was a factor, and a law enforcement official had said that painkillers were found on Prince when investigators arrived. “The M.E. report is one piece of the whole thing,” said Jason Kamerud, the county’s chief deputy sheriff. Fentanyl is a potent but dangerous painkiller, estimated to be more than 50 times more powerful than heroin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The report did not list how much fentanyl was found in Prince’s blood. Last year, federal officials issued an alert that said incidents and overdoses with fentanyl were “occurring at an alarming rate throughout the United States.” © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 22283 - Posted: 06.04.2016

By Hanoch Ben-Yami Adam Bear opens his article, What Neuroscience Says about Free Will by mentioning a few cases such as pressing snooze on the alarm clock or picking a shirt out of the closet. He continues with an assertion about these cases, and with a question: In each case, we conceive of ourselves as free agents, consciously guiding our bodies in purposeful ways. But what does science have to say about the true source of this experience? This is a bad start. To be aware of ourselves as free agents is not to have an experience. There’s no special tickle which tells you you’re free, no "freedom itch." Rather, to be aware of the fact that you acted freely is, among other things, to know that had you preferred to do something else in those circumstances, you would have done it. And in many circumstances we clearly know that this is the case, so in many circumstances we are aware that we act freely. No experience is involved, and so far there’s no question in Bear’s article for science to answer. Continuing with his alleged experience, Bear writes: …the psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley made a revolutionary proposal: The experience of intentionally willing an action, they suggested, is often nothing more than a post hoc causal inference that our thoughts caused some behavior. More than a revolutionary proposal, this is an additional confusion. What might "intentionally willing an action" mean? Is it to be contrasted with non-intentionally willing an action? But what could this stand for? © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 22282 - Posted: 06.04.2016

By Andy Coghlan People once dependent on wheelchairs after having a stroke are walking again since receiving injections of stem cells into their brains. Participants in the small trial also saw improvements in their speech and arm movements. “One 71-year-old woman could only move her left thumb at the start of the trial,” says Gary Steinberg, a neurosurgeon at Stanford University who performed the procedure on some of the 18 participants. “She can now walk and lift her arm above her head.” Run by SanBio of Mountain View, California, this trial is the second to test whether stem cell injections into patients’ brains can help ease disabilities resulting from stroke. Patients in the first, carried out by UK company ReNeuron, also showed measurable reductions in disability a year after receiving their injections and beyond. All patients in the latest trial showed improvements. Their scores on a 100-point scale for evaluating mobility – with 100 being completely mobile – improved on average by 11.4 points, a margin considered to be clinically meaningful for patients. “The most dramatic improvements were in strength, coordination, ability to walk, the ability to use hands and the ability to communicate, especially in those whose speech had been damaged by the stroke,” says Steinberg. In both trials, improvements in patients’ mobility had plateaued since having had strokes between six months and three years previously. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Stroke; Stem Cells
Link ID: 22281 - Posted: 06.04.2016

Meghan Rosen SALT LAKE CITY — In the Indian Ocean off the coast of Sri Lanka, pygmy blue whales are changing their tune — and they might be doing it on purpose. From 2002 to 2012, the frequency of one part of the whales’ calls steadily fell, marine bioacoustician Jennifer Miksis-Olds reported May 25 at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. But unexpectedly, another part of the whales’ call stayed the same, she found. “I’ve never seen results like this before,” says marine bioacoustician Leanna Matthews of Syracuse University in New York, who was not involved with the work. Miksis-Olds’ findings add a new twist to current theories about blue whale vocalizations and spark all sorts of questions about what the animals are doing, Matthews said. “It’s a huge mystery.” Over the last 40 to 50 years, the calls of blue whales around the world have been getting deeper. Researchers have reported frequency drops in blue whale populations from the Arctic Ocean to the North Pacific. Some researchers think that blue whales are just getting bigger, said Miksis-Olds, of the University of New Hampshire in Durham. Whaling isn’t as common as it used to be, so whales have been able to grow larger — and larger whales have deeper calls. Another theory blames whales’ changing calls on an increasingly noisy ocean. Whales could be automatically adjusting their calls to be heard better, kind of like a person raising their voice to speak at a party, she said. If the whales were just getting bigger, you’d expect all components of the calls to be deeper, said acoustics researcher Pasquale Bottalico at Michigan State University in East Lansing. But the new data don’t support that, he said. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016. A

Keyword: Hearing; Animal Communication
Link ID: 22280 - Posted: 06.04.2016

By NICHOLAS ST. FLEUR Nine scientists have won this year’s Kavli Prizes for work that detected the echoes of colliding black holes, revealed how adaptable the nervous system is, and created a technique for sculpting structures on the nanoscale. The announcement was made on Thursday by the Norwegian Academy of Science Letters in Oslo, and was live-streamed to a watching party in New York as a part of the World Science Festival. The three prizes, each worth $1 million and split among the recipients, are awarded in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience every two years. They are named for Fred Kavli, a Norwegian-American inventor, businessman and philanthropist who started the awards in 2008 and died in 2013. Eve Marder of Brandeis University, Michael M. Merzenich of the University of California, San Francisco, and Carla J. Shatz of Stanford won the neuroscience prize. Dr. Marder illuminated the flexibility and stability of the nervous system through her work studying crabs and lobsters and the neurons that control their digestion. Dr. Merzenich was a pioneer in the study of neural plasticity, demonstrating that parts of the adult brain, like those of children, can be reorganized by experience. Dr. Shatz showed that “neurons that fire together wire together,” by investigating how patterns of activity sculpt the synapses in the developing brain. The winners will receive their prizes in September at a ceremony in Oslo. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22279 - Posted: 06.04.2016

Scientists say they have found a gene that causes a rare but inherited form of multiple sclerosis. It affects about one in every thousand MS patients and, according to the Canadian researchers, is proof that the disease is passed down generations. Experts have long suspected there's a genetic element to MS, but had thought there would be lots of genes involved, as well as environmental factors. The finding offers hope of targeted screening and therapy, Neuron reports. The University of British Columbia studied the DNA of hundreds of families affected by MS to hunt for a culprit gene. They found it in two sets of families containing several members with a rapidly progressive type of MS. In these families, 70% of the people with the mutation developed the disease. Although other factors may still be important and necessary to trigger the disease process, the gene itself is a substantial causative risk factor that is passed down from parents to their children, say the researchers. The mutation is in a gene called NR1H3, which makes a protein that acts as a switch controlling inflammation. In MS the body's immune system mistakenly attacks the protective layer of myelin that surrounds nerve fibres in the brain and spinal cord, leading to muscle weakness and other symptoms. Studies in mice show that knocking out the function of the same gene leads to neurological problems and decreased myelin production. © 2016 BBC.

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 22278 - Posted: 06.02.2016

By Simon Makin Other species are capable of displaying dazzling feats of intelligence. Crows can solve multistep problems. Apes display numerical skills and empathy. Yet, neither species has the capacity to conduct scientific investigations into other species' cognitive abilities. This type of behavior provides solid evidence that humans are by far the smartest species on the planet. Besides just elevated IQs, however, humans set themselves apart in another way: Their offspring are among the most helpless of any species. A new study, published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), draws a link between human smarts and an infant’s dependency, suggesting one thing led to the other in a spiraling evolutionary feedback loop. The study, from psychologists Celeste Kidd and Steven Piantadosi at the University of Rochester, represents a new theory about how humans came to possess such extraordinary smarts. Like a lot of evolutionary theories, this one can be couched in the form of a story—and like a lot of evolutionary stories, this one is contested by some scientists. Kidd and Piantadosi note that, according to a previous theory, early humans faced selection pressures for both large brains and the capacity to walk upright as they moved from forest to grassland. Larger brains require a wider pelvis to give birth whereas being bipedal limits the size of the pelvis. These opposing pressures—biological anthropologists call them the “obstetric dilemma”—could have led to giving birth earlier when infants’ skulls were still small. Thus, newborns arrive more immature and helpless than those of most other species. Kidd and Piantadosi propose that, as a consequence, the cognitive demands of child care increased and created evolutionary pressure to develop higher intelligence. © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Evolution
Link ID: 22277 - Posted: 06.02.2016