By Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D Why is it that girls tend to be more anxious than boys? It may start with how they feel about how they look. Some research has shown that in adolescence, girls tend to become more dissatisfied with their bodies, whereas boys tend to become more satisfied with their bodies. Another factor has to do with differences in how girls and boys use social media. A girl is much more likely than a boy to post a photo of herself wearing a swimsuit, while the boy is more likely to post a photo where the emphasis is on something he has done rather than on how he looks. If you don’t like Jake’s selfie showing off his big trophy, he may not care. But if you don’t like Sonya’s photo of herself wearing her bikini, she’s more likely to take it personally. Imagine another girl sitting in her bedroom, alone. She’s scrolling through other girls’ Instagram and Snapchat feeds. She sees Sonya showing off her new bikini; Sonya looks awesome. She sees Madison at a party, having a blast. She sees Vanessa with her adorable new puppy. And she thinks: I’m just sitting here in my bedroom, not doing anything. My life sucks. Boys are at lower risk for the toxic effects of social media than girls are, for at least three reasons. First, boys are less likely to be heavily invested in what you think of their selfies. “Does this swimsuit make me look fat?” is a question asked by girls more often than by boys. Second, boys tend to overestimate how interesting their own life is. Third, the average boy is likely to spend more time playing video games than Photoshopping his selfie for Instagram. And in video games, unlike social media, everybody truly can be a winner, eventually. If you play Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty long enough, you will, sooner or later, complete all the missions, if you just keep at it. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 22136 - Posted: 04.25.2016

By Nicholas Bakalar Eating a high-fat diet may lead to daytime sleepiness, a new study concludes. Australian researchers studied 1,800 men who had filled out food-frequency questionnaires and reported on how sleepy they felt during the day. They were also electronically monitored for obstructive sleep apnea, which causes people to wake up many times during the night. After adjusting for factors that could influence sleep — smoking, alcohol intake, waist circumference, physical activity, medications, depression and others — they found that compared with those in the lowest one-quarter for fat intake, those in the highest one-quarter were 78 percent more likely to suffer daytime sleepiness and almost three times as likely to have sleep apnea. The connection of fat intake to apnea was apparent most clearly in people with a high body mass index, but the positive association of fat intake with daytime sleepiness persisted strongly in all subjects, regardless of B.M.I. Thestudy is in the journal Nutrients. “The possible mechanism could be meal timing, but we didn’t have that information,” said the lead author, Yingting Cao, a doctoral candidate at the University of Adelaide. “But we have reason to believe that circadian rhythm, hormones and diet all work together to create these effects. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Sleep
Link ID: 22135 - Posted: 04.25.2016

Laura Sanders Away from home, people sleep with one ear open. In unfamiliar surroundings, part of the left hemisphere keeps watch while the rest of the brain is deeply asleep, scientists report April 21 in Current Biology. The results help explain why the first night in a hotel isn’t always restful. Some aquatic mammals and birds sleep with half a brain at a time, a trick called unihemispheric sleep. Scientists have believed that humans, however, did not show any such asymmetry in their slumber. Study coauthor Yuka Sasaki of Brown University in Providence, R.I., and colleagues looked for signs of asymmetry on the first night that young, healthy people came into their sleep lab. Usually, scientists toss the data from the inaugural night because the sleep is so disturbed, Sasaki says. But she and her team thought that some interesting sleep patterns might lurk within that fitful sleep. “It was a little bit of a crazy hunch,” she says, “but we did it anyway.” On the first night in a sleep lab, people with more “awake” left hemispheres took longer to fall asleep. This asymmetry was largely gone on the second night, and people fell asleep more quickly. During a deep sleep stage known as slow-wave sleep, a network of nerve cells in the left side of the brain showed less sleep-related activity than the corresponding network on the right side. Those results suggest that the left side of the brain is a lighter sleeper. “It looked like the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere did not show the same degree of sleep,” Sasaki says. This imbalance disappeared on the second night of sleep. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016

Keyword: Sleep; Laterality
Link ID: 22134 - Posted: 04.23.2016

By Lisa L. Lewis On Tuesday, U.S. News and World Report released its annual public high-school rankings, with the School for the Talented and Gifted in Dallas earning the top spot for the fifth year in a row. The rankings are based on a wealth of data, including graduation rates and student performance on state proficiency tests and advanced exams, as well as other relevant factors—like the percentage of economically disadvantaged students the schools serve. But there’s one key metric that isn’t tracked despite having a proven impact on academic performance: school start times. First-period classes at the School for the Talented and Gifted start at 9:15 a.m. That’s unusually late compared to other schools but is in keeping with the best practices now recommended by public health experts. Teens require more sleep than adults and are hardwired to want to sleep in. Eight hours a night may be the goal for adults, but teens need between 8.5–9.5 hours, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Unfortunately, few teens meet that minimum: Studies show that two out of three high school students get less than eight hours of sleep, with high school seniors averaging less than seven hours. Sure, kids could go to bed earlier. But their bodies are set against them: Puberty makes it hard for them to fall asleep before 11 p.m. When combined with too-early start times, the result is sleep deprivation.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sleep
Link ID: 22133 - Posted: 04.23.2016

By SABRINA TAVERNISE WASHINGTON — Suicide in the United States has surged to the highest levels in nearly 30 years, a federal data analysis has found, with increases in every age group except older adults. The rise was particularly steep for women. It was also substantial among middle-aged Americans, sending a signal of deep anguish from a group whose suicide rates had been stable or falling since the 1950s. The suicide rate for middle-aged women, ages 45 to 64, jumped by 63 percent over the period of the study, while it rose by 43 percent for men in that age range, the sharpest increase for males of any age. The overall suicide rate rose by 24 percent from 1999 to 2014, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, which released the study on Friday. The increases were so widespread that they lifted the nation’s suicide rate to 13 per 100,000 people, the highest since 1986. The rate rose by 2 percent a year starting in 2006, double the annual rise in the earlier period of the study. In all, 42,773 people died from suicide in 2014, compared with 29,199 in 1999. From 1999 to 2014, suicide rates in the United States rose among most age groups. Men and women from 45 to 64 had a sharp increase. Rates fell among those age 75 and older. “It’s really stunning to see such a large increase in suicide rates affecting virtually every age group,” said Katherine Hempstead, senior adviser for health care at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, who has identified a link between suicides in middle age and rising rates of distress about jobs and personal finances. Researchers also found an alarming increase among girls 10 to 14, whose suicide rate, while still very low, had tripled. The number of girls who killed themselves rose to 150 in 2014 from 50 in 1999. “This one certainly jumped out,” said Sally Curtin, a statistician at the center and an author of the report. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Stress
Link ID: 22132 - Posted: 04.23.2016

Cassie Martin The grunts, moans and wobbles of gelada monkeys, a chatty species residing in Ethiopia’s northern highlands, observe a universal mathematical principle seen until now only in human language. The new research, published online April 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sheds light on the evolution of primate communication and complex human language, the researchers say. “Human language is like an onion,” says Simone Pika, head of the Humboldt Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, who was not involved in the study. “When you peel back the layers, you find that it is based on these underlying mechanisms, many of which were already present in animal communication. This research neatly shows there is another ability already present.” As the number of individual calls in gelada vocal sequences increases, the duration of the calls tends to decrease — a relationship known as Menzerath’s law. One of those mechanisms is known as Menzerath’s law, a mathematical principle that states that the longer a construct, the shorter its components. In human language, for instance, longer sentences tend to comprise shorter words. The gelada study is the first to observe this law in the vocalizations of a nonhuman species. “There are aspects of communication and language that aren’t as unique as we think,” says study coauthor Morgan Gustison of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 22131 - Posted: 04.23.2016

By Catherine Matacic Simi Etedgi leans forward as she tells her story for the camera: The year was 1963, and she was just 15 as she left Morocco for Israel, one person among hundreds of thousands leaving for the new state. But her forward lean isn’t a casual gesture. Etedgi, now 68, is one of about 10,000 signers of Israeli Sign Language (ISL), a language that emerged only 80 years ago. Her lean has a precise meaning, signaling that she wants to get in an aside before finishing her tale. Her eyes sparkle as she explains that the signs used in the Morocco of her childhood are very different from those she uses now in Israel. In fact, younger signers of ISL use a different gesture to signal an aside—and they have different ways to express many other meanings as well. A new study presented at the Evolution of Language meeting here last month shows that the new generation has come up with richer, more grammatically complex utterances that use ever more parts of the body for different purposes. Most intriguing for linguists: These changes seem to happen in a predictable order from one generation to the next. That same order has been seen in young sign languages around the world, showing in visible fashion how linguistic complexity unfolds. This leads some linguists to think that they may have found a new model for the evolution of language. “This is a big hypothesis,” says cognitive scientist Ann Senghas of Barnard College in New York City, who has spent her life studying Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). “It makes a lot of predictions and tries to pull a lot of facts together into a single framework.” Although it’s too early to know what the model will reveal, linguists say it already may have implications for understanding how quickly key elements of language, from complex words to grammar, have evolved. © 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 22130 - Posted: 04.23.2016

Anna Nowogrodzki There’s a little too much wishful thinking about mindfulness, and it is skewing how researchers report their studies of the technique. Researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, analysed 124 published trials of mindfulness as a mental-health treatment, and found that scientists reported positive findings 60% more often than is statistically likely. The team also examined another 21 trials that were registered with databases such as ClinicalTrials.gov; of these, 62% were unpublished 30 months after they finished. The findings — reported in PLoS ONE on 8 April1 — hint that negative results are going unpublished. Mindfulness is the practice of being aware of thoughts and feelings without judging them good or bad. Mental-health treatments that focus on this method include mindfulness-based stress reduction — an 8-week group-based programme that includes yoga and daily meditation — and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. A bias toward publishing studies that find the technique to be effective withholds important information from mental-health clinicians and patients, says Christopher Ferguson, a psychologist at Stetson University in Florida, who was not involved in the study. “I think this is a very important finding,” he adds. “We’ll invest a lot of social and financial capital in these issues, and a lot of that can be misplaced unless we have good data.” © 2016 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 22129 - Posted: 04.23.2016

By Clare Wilson People who develop schizophrenia may have been born with brains with a different structure. The finding adds further support to the idea that genetics can play a key role in schizophrenia, which involves delusions and hallucinations and is often a lifelong condition once it develops. Schizophrenia has been the subject of a fierce nature-versus-nurture debate: childhood abuse is linked with a raised risk of the condition, but 108 genes have been implicated, too. Probing the biology of schizophrenia is difficult because brain tissue sampled from people with the condition is rarely available to study. Kristen Brennand of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and her colleagues got around this by taking skin cells from 14 people with schizophrenia, and reprogramming them into stem cells and then nerve cells. They found that on average these nerve cells had lower levels of a signalling molecule called miR-9 than similar cells developed from people who do not have schizophrenia. A small string of nucleic acids, miR-9 can change the activity of certain genes and is known to play a role in how neurons develop in the fetus. In further experiments, Brennand’s team showed that miR-9 might also affect how neurons migrate from where they form, next to the fetal brain’s central cavities, out to their final resting place in the brain’s outer layers. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22128 - Posted: 04.23.2016

By Patrick Monahan You might have seen a video from David Attenborough’s The Life of Birds series where a male superb lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae) attempts to lure a mate by imitating a smorgasbord of bird calls and even chainsaws. As nature’s show-offs, male animals tend to have more elaborate colors and courtship behaviors than their female counterparts, so it’s typical that the male would get the public’s attention. The same is true in science: Plenty of female birds sing songs, but researchers have in the past often dismissed them as simply being evolutionary tag-alongs of the males’ “come hither” calls. Now, by recording the calls of female superb lyrebirds, researchers have found that they can keep up with the boys just fine. According to a study published this week in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, the females collectively imitated 19 other species of birds, and also sang lyrebird-specific songs. And they changed their songs depending on context, using more lyrebird-specific “whistle” calls when out foraging and vying for territory, but more mimicking calls when defending their nests (as in the audio file below). The fact that the females change their type of call depending on the context makes it likely that these songs evolved in their own right—and the males’ calls aren’t so special after all. Plus, that part about the chainsaw? It probably doesn’t even happen in the wild. © 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 22127 - Posted: 04.23.2016

By Emily Underwood Earlier this month, György Buzsáki of New York University (NYU) in New York City showed a slide that sent a murmur through an audience in the Grand Ballroom of New York’s Midtown Hilton during the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. It wasn’t just the grisly image of a human cadaver with more than 200 electrodes inserted into its brain that set people whispering; it was what those electrodes detected—or rather, what they failed to detect. When Buzsáki and his colleague, Antal Berényi, of the University of Szeged in Hungary, mimicked an increasingly popular form of brain stimulation by applying alternating electrical current to the outside of the cadaver’s skull, the electrodes inside registered little. Hardly any current entered the brain. On closer study, the pair discovered that up to 90% of the current had been redirected by the skin covering the skull, which acted as a “shunt,” Buzsáki said. For many meeting attendees, the unusual study heightened serious doubts about the mechanism and effectiveness of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), an experimental, noninvasive treatment that uses electrodes to deliver weak current to a person’s forehead, and the related tACS, which uses alternating current. Little is known about how these techniques might influence the brain. Yet many scientific papers have claimed that the techniques can boost mood, alleviate chronic pain, and even make people better at math by directly affecting neuronal activity. This has spawned a cottage industry of do-it-yourself gadgets promising to make people smarter and happier. © 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 22126 - Posted: 04.21.2016

Medical research and new drugs to treat human illness usually start with studies on mice and rats. But that type of research has been traditionally sexist — using far more male than female rodents. Scientists warn that has already led to drugs and treatments that are potentially dangerous for women and say the approach slows down the development of treatments and drugs that are safe and effective for everyone. Cara Tannenbaum, scientific director of the Institute of Gender and Health at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, cited a couple of examples on CBC's The Current of cases where drug side-effects turned out to be far more harmful in women: A stomach drug called cisapride that was sold in the 1990s under the name Prepulsid was withdrawn by Health Canada in 2000 because it sometimes caused irregular heartbeat and sudden death "in women only," Tannenbaum said. Among the victims was the 15-year-old daughter of former Ontario MP Terence Young. "It's not clear that the drug was ever tested in female animals or minors," Tannenbaum added. Health Canada has issued a warning about sleeping pills containing the drug zolpiclone, also known as Ambien, Tannenbaum said. Women are recommended to take half the dose that is prescribed to men. "It was recently discovered that the level of the drug was 45 per cent higher in women the next day, which can lead to car accidents," Tannenbaum said. Jeffrey Mogil, a neuroscientist and pain specialist at McGill University, said there are lots of reasons to suspect men and women respond differently to many different kinds of drugs, but very little actual data. "We actually don't know the scope of the problem," he told The Current. ©2016 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 22125 - Posted: 04.21.2016

By Esther Landhuis Peer inside the brain of someone with Alzheimer’s disease, and you’ll see some striking features: shriveled nerve cells and strange protein clumps. According to a leading theory, proteins called amyloid beta and tau build up in the brain and choke nerve cell communication, setting the disease in motion years before people suspect anything is wrong with their recall. Yet the Alzheimer’s brain has another curious aspect. Some of the clusters of toxic amyloid proteins are entangled with octopus-like immune cells called microglia, cells that live in the brain to clear unwanted clutter. By munching on amyloid plaques, microglia are thought to help keep the disease at bay. But these housekeeping cells have an additional role—they switch on inflammatory pathways. Inflammation is critically important when the immune system encounters infection or needs to repair tissue. If left unchecked, however, the inflammatory process churns out toxic substances that can kill surrounding cells, whose death triggers more inflammation and creates a vicious cycle. For years scientists have probed how neuroinflammation contributes to Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative ailments. Researchers face a number of immediate questions: Is neuroinflammation a driving force? Does it kick in when the disease is already underway and worsen the process? Could it be harnessed for good in the early stages? Those questions are far from settled, but research is starting to reveal a clearer picture. “It may not be the amyloid plaques themselves that directly damage neurons and the connections between them. Rather, it may be the immune reaction to the plaques that does the damage,” says Cynthia Lemere, a neuroscientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Still, it is hard to say if microglia are good guys or bad, making it challenging to create therapeutics that target these cells. © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers; Glia
Link ID: 22124 - Posted: 04.21.2016

By DAN LEVIN VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Dave Napio started doing heroin over four decades ago, at 11 years old. Like many addicts these days, he heads to Vancouver’s gritty Downtown Eastside neighborhood when he needs a fix. But instead of seeking out a dealer in a dark alley, Mr. Napio, 55, gets his three daily doses from a nurse at the Crosstown Clinic, the only medical facility in North America permitted to prescribe the narcotic at the center of an epidemic raging across the continent. And instead of robbing banks and jewelry stores to support his habit, Mr. Napio is spending time making gold and silver jewelry, hoping to soon turn his hobby into a profession. “My whole life is straightening out,” Mr. Napio, who spent 22 of his 55 years in prison, said during a recent interview in the clinic’s mirror-lined injection room. “I’m becoming the guy next door.” Mr. Napio is one of 110 chronic addicts with prescriptions for diacetylmorphine hydrochloride, the active ingredient in heroin, which he injects three times a day at Crosstown as part of a treatment known as heroin maintenance. The program has been so successful at keeping addicts out of jail and away from emergency rooms that its supporters are seeking to expand it across Canada. But they have been hindered by a tangle of red tape and a yearslong court battle reflecting a conflict between medicine and politics on how to address drug addiction. The clinic’s prescription program began as a clinical trial more than a decade ago. But it has garnered more interest recently as a plague of illicit heroin use and fatal overdoses of legal painkillers has swept across the United States, fueling frustration over ideological and legal obstacles to forms of treatment that studies show halt the spread of disease through needles and prevent deaths. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 22123 - Posted: 04.21.2016

Nicola Davis The proportion of older people suffering from dementia has fallen by a fifth over the past two decades with the most likely explanation being because men are smoking less and living healthier lives, according to new scientific research. A team from three British universities concluded that as a result the number of new cases of dementia is lower than had been predicted in the 1990s, estimated at around 210,000 a year in the UK as opposed to 250,000. The findings are potentially significant because they suggest that it is possible to take preventative action, such as stopping smoking and reducing cholesterol, that could help avoid the condition. “Physical health and brain health are clearly highly linked,” said Carol Brayne of Cambridge University, who co-authored the study. Nick Fox, professor of neurology at University College, London, who was not involved in the study, agrees: “This does suggest that our risk, in any particular age in later life, can be reduced probably by what we do 10, 20 or 30 years before.” The scientists found that new cases of dementia had dropped from 20.1 in every 1,000 people per year in the first study conducted in the early 1990s to 17.7 in the second, which looked at new cases between 2008 and 2013. When sex and age differences were taken into account, the dementia rates were found to have dropped by 20%. The trend emerges from a dramatic drop in new cases for men across all age groups. In the 1990s study, for every 1,000 men aged 70-74, 12.9 went on to develop dementia within a year. In the second study, 20 years later, that figure had dropped to only 8.7 men. For men aged 65-69 the rate of new cases had more than halved between the two studies. © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 22122 - Posted: 04.20.2016

By Mitch Leslie The worst part of being sick isn’t always the muscle aches and coughing. It’s the foggy head, the crankiness, the apathy, and the fatigue—in short, what researchers call sickness behavior. A new study uncovers a molecular mechanism that explains why we feel so crummy when we’re under the weather. “It’s a nice study that’s covered a lot of ground,” says neuroimmunologist Colm Cunningham of Trinity College in Dublin who wasn’t connected to the research. “What they’ve found is very plausible.” Although sickness behavior is unpleasant, researchers think the symptoms we suffer during a viral or bacterial infection are beneficial, enabling us to divert our energy to fighting the pathogens that have invaded our bodies. For cancer patients and people with autoimmune diseases, however, sickness behavior can be an unwanted side effect of treatment with immune molecules known as interferons, which our cells naturally release when we have an infection. The condition has posed a puzzle for researchers because they assumed the blood-brain barrier, a protective system that excludes most pathogens and immune molecules from the brain, would block signals from the immune system. Although scientists have identified several mechanisms that allow such messages to cross the barrier and influence behavior, the question of how the immune system and brain communicate “has been only partially answered,” says immunophysiologist Keith Kelley of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who wasn’t connected to the new study. © 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 22121 - Posted: 04.20.2016

Melissa Davey Researchers have developed the world’s first blood test that can detect the abnormal metabolism of blood cells in people with Parkinson’s disease, which means the blood test could be used to diagnose the disorder. At present the only way to diagnose Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative neurological condition, is through ordering a range of tests and scans to rule out other disorders, combined with examining symptoms. Patients are often diagnosed only after they have developed symptoms and brain cells have already been destroyed. While there is no cure for Parkinson’s, early detection allows treatment with medication and physiotherapy to begin, which may slow the deterioration of motor functions in patients. Because diagnosing the disease is a process of elimination, and the symptoms mimic those of other neurological disorders, patients are also at risk being diagnosed and treated for the wrong disease. The group of Australian researchers from La Trobe University believe their blood test will enable doctors to detect Parkinson’s disease with unprecedented reliability and lead to earlier treatment. Their findings are under review by an international medical journal. © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 22120 - Posted: 04.20.2016

By Sarah Kaplan We know where the human story started: In Africa, millions of years ago, with diminutive people whose brains were just a third of the size of ours. And we know where it ended: with us. Yet a lot of what happened in between is still debated, including the question of how humans' bodies and noggins got so much bigger than our ancestors'. The traditional thinking is that the growth of both was spurred by the process of natural selection. The evolutionary advantages of a big body and a big brain are plentiful, so it seems reasonable to think that each developed independent of the other in response to the demands of survival in a hostile world. But a new study in the journal Current Anthropology suggests that, while our brains are certainly an advantageous adaptation, our imposing physiques (such as they are) are more of an evolutionary fluke. That's because the genes that determine brain and body size are the same, argues Mark Grabowski, a fellow at the American Museum of Natural History. So as humans evolved bigger and bigger brains, our bodies "just got pulled along." Grabowski acknowledges that it may seem like a counterintuitive conclusion — most of us learned in high school biology that evolution is about adapting to circumstances and that only the fittest survive. We're not used to thinking of traits as a product of happenstance. But evolutionary scientists know that lots of traits — even ultimately beneficial ones — are just the luck of the draw.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 22119 - Posted: 04.20.2016

By JAMES GORMAN Bees find nectar and tell their hive-mates; flies evade the swatter; and cockroaches seem to do whatever they like wherever they like. But who would believe that insects are conscious, that they are aware of what’s going on, not just little biobots? Neuroscientists and philosophers apparently. As scientists lean increasingly toward recognizing that nonhuman animals are conscious in one way or another, the question becomes: Where does consciousness end? Andrew B. Barron, a cognitive scientist, and Colin Klein, a philosopher, at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, propose in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that insects have the capacity for consciousness. This does not mean that a honeybee thinks, “Why am I not the queen?” or even, “Oh, I like that nectar.” But, Dr. Barron and Dr. Klein wrote in a scientific essay, the honeybee has the capacity to feel something. Their claim stops short of some others. Christof Koch, the president and chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, and Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin, have proposed that consciousness is nearly ubiquitous in different degrees, and can be present even in nonliving arrangements of matter, to varying degrees. They say that rather than wonder how consciousness arises, one should look at where we know it exists and go from there to where else it might exist. They conclude that it is an inherent property of physical systems in which information moves around in a certain way — and that could include some kinds of artificial intelligence and even naturally occurring nonliving matter. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 22118 - Posted: 04.19.2016

Rachel Becker A highly contagious and deadly animal brain disorder has been detected in Europe for the first time. Scientists are now warning that the single case found in a wild reindeer might represent an unrecognized, widespread infection. Chronic wasting disease (CWD) was thought to be restricted to deer, elk (Cervus canadensis) and moose (Alces alces) in North America and South Korea, but on 4 April researchers announced that the disease had been discovered in a free-ranging reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus) in Norway. This is both the first time that CWD has been found in Europe and the first time that it has been found in this species in the wild anywhere in the world. “It’s worrying — of course, especially for animals. It’s a nasty disease,” says Sylvie Benestad, an animal-disease researcher at the Norwegian Veterinary Institute in Oslo who, along with colleague Turid Vikøren, diagnosed the diseased reindeer. A key question now is whether this is a rare — even unique — case, or if the disease is widespread but so far undetected in Europe. “If it’s similar to our prion disease in the United States and Canada, the disease is subtle and it would be easy to miss,” says Christina Sigurdson, a pathologist at the University of California, San Diego, who has shown that reindeer can contract CWD in a laboratory environment1. © 2016 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 22117 - Posted: 04.19.2016