Mark Easton Home editor An attempt by UN officials to get countries to decriminalise the possession and use of all drugs has been foiled, the BBC can reveal. A paper from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has been withdrawn after pressure from at least one country. The document, which was leaked, recommends that UN members consider "decriminalising drug and possession for personal consumption". It argued "arrest and incarceration are disproportionate measures". The document was drawn up by Dr Monica Beg, chief of the HIV/AIDs section of the UNODC in Vienna. It was prepared for an international harm reduction conference currently being held in Kuala Lumpur. The UNODC oversees international drugs conventions and offers guidance on compliance. Sources within the UNODC have told the BBC the document was never sanctioned by the organisation as policy. One senior figure within the agency described Dr Beg as "a middle-ranking official" who was offering a professional viewpoint. The document, on headed agency notepaper, claims it "clarifies the position of UNODC to inform country responses to promote a health and human-rights approach to drug policy". "Treating drug use for non-medical purposes and possession for personal consumption as criminal offences has contributed to public health problems and induced negative consequences for safety, security, and human rights," the document states. © 2015 BBC.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 21535 - Posted: 10.21.2015

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. The middle-aged couple knocked at the door of the townhouse. When no one answered, the woman took her key and let them in. She called her daughter’s name as she hurried through the rooms. They had been trying to reach their 27-year-old daughter by phone all day, and she hadn’t answered. They found her upstairs, lying in bed and mumbling incoherently. The mother rushed over, but her daughter showed no signs of recognition. She and her husband quickly carried her to the car. Four months before, the mother told the emergency-room doctor at SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital in St. Louis, her daughter had a procedure called gastric-sleeve surgery to help her lose weight. She came home after just a couple of days and felt great. She looked bright and eager. Once she started to eat, though, nausea and vomiting set in. After almost every meal, she would throw up. It’s an unusual but well-known complication of this kind of surgery. The cause is not clearly understood, but the phenomenon is sometimes linked to reflux. The surgeon tried different medications to stop the nausea and vomiting and to reduce the acid in her stomach, but they didn’t help. She had the surgery in order to lose weight, but now she was losing weight too quickly. After a month of vomiting, her doctors thought maybe she had developed gallstones — a common problem after rapid weight loss. But even after her gallbladder was removed, the young woman continued to vomit after eating. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Obesity
Link ID: 21534 - Posted: 10.21.2015

Susan Gaidos CHICAGO — Eating a high-fat diet as a youngster can affect learning and memory during adulthood, studies have shown. But new findings suggest such diets may not have long-lasting effects. Rats fed a high-fat diet for nearly a year recovered their ability to navigate their surroundings. University of Texas at Dallas neuroscientist Erica Underwood tested spatial memory for rats fed a high-fat diet for either 12 weeks or 52 weeks, immediately after weaning. After rats placed in a chamber-filled box containing Lego-like toys became familiar with the box, the researchers moved the toys to new chambers. Later, when placed in the box, rats who ate high-fat foods for 12 weeks appeared confused and had difficulty finding the toys. But rats that ate high-fat foods for nearly a year performed as well as those fed a normal diet. Underwood repeated the experiment, posing additional spatial memory tests to new groups of rats. The findings were the same: Over the long-term, rats on high-fat diets recovered their ability to learn and remember. Studies of brain cells revealed that rats on the long-term high-fat diet showed reduced excitability in nerve cells from the hippocampus, the same detrimental effects seen in rats on the short-term high-fat diet. “The physiology that should create a dumber animal is there, but not the behavior,” said Lucien Thompson of UT Dallas, who oversaw the study. Underwood and Thompson speculate that some other part of the brain may be compensating for this reduction in neural response. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2015.

Keyword: Obesity; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 21533 - Posted: 10.21.2015

By BENEDICT CAREY More than two million people in the United States have a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and the treatment for most of them mainly involves strong doses of antipsychotic drugs that blunt hallucinations and delusions but can come with unbearable side effects, like severe weight gain or debilitating tremors. Stories from Our Advertisers Now, results of a landmark government-funded study call that approach into question. The findings, from by far the most rigorous trial to date conducted in the United States, concluded that schizophrenia patients who received smaller doses of antipsychotic medication and a bigger emphasis on one-on-one talk therapy and family support made greater strides in recovery over the first two years of treatment than patients who got the usual drug-focused care. The report, to be published on Tuesday in The American Journal of Psychiatry and funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, comes as Congress debates mental health reform and as interest in the effectiveness of treatments grows amid a debate over the possible role of mental illness in mass shootings. Its findings have already trickled out to government agencies: On Friday, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services published in its influential guidelines a strong endorsement of the combined-therapy approach. Mental health reform bills now being circulated in Congress “mention the study by name,” said Dr. Robert K. Heinssen, the director of services and intervention research at the centers, who oversaw the research. In 2014, Congress awarded $25 million in block grants to the states to be set aside for early-intervention mental health programs. So far, 32 states have begun using those grants to fund combined-treatment services, Dr. Heinssen said. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 21532 - Posted: 10.20.2015

By Brook Borel and Spectrum In a lab in Sacramento, California, a wall of plastic boxes lined with corncob bedding holds around 800 mice. Even in this clean and bright room, the smell of so many mice concentrated in one place is overpowering — pungent, and familiar to anyone who has spent time with a pet hamster or gerbil. Most of the boxes hold four adult mice, which flit about, noses twitching as they stare out at the humans staring in. But in one of the boxes, a sleek white mouse is tucked in a corner suckling her litter of half a dozen or so squirmy, dark-furred pups. In most research labs, the fate of these pups would be determined by their sex. The males would spend their lives as test subjects. The females would either be kept for breeding or simply euthanized because they’re not ideal for experiments: They’re supposedly more difficult to work with and generate less consistent data than males do, and it costs too much to maintain both males and females, which must be housed separately. Or so the rationale has gone. But these little female pups are different. The lab where they live is run by Jill Silverman and Mu Yang, researchers at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) MIND Institute. The two scientists study the behavior of about 15 autism mouse models, and they have always included both males and females in their work. When the pups get older, they will learn to paddle through water mazes or bury black marbles in their bedding, giving researchers insight into how their memory and behavior compare with that of typical mice. Finding the best animal behavioral models of autism is essential because behavior is at the heart of the disorder. In people, autism is diagnosed based on behavioral criteria: abnormal social interactions, difficulties with communication and repetitive actions. © 2015 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 21531 - Posted: 10.20.2015

Mr Tickle can’t bamboozle a baby. Unlike grown-ups, young infants don’t let the positioning of their bodies confuse their sense of touch. If adults who can see are touched on each hand in quick succession while their hands are crossed, they can find it hard to name which hand was touched first. Adults who have been blind from birth don’t have this difficulty, but people who become blind later in life have the same trouble as those who can still see. “That suggests that early on in life, something to do with visual experience is crucial in setting up a typical way of perceiving touch,” says Andrew Bremner at Goldsmiths, University of London. To investigate how this develops in infancy, Bremner and his colleagues compared how babies reacted to having one foot tickled. With their legs crossed over, babies aged 6 months moved the foot being tickled half of the time. But 4-month-olds did better, moving the tickled foot 70 per cent of the time – as often as they did with their legs uncrossed. The team concludes that at 4 months, babies haven’t yet learned to relate what they touch to the physical space that their body occupies. For many adults, the concept might be difficult to envision. “It’s like imagining that you feel a touch on your body, but not really knowing how that’s related to what you’re looking at,” says Bremner. “It’s almost like you have multiple sensory worlds: a visual world, an auditory world and a tactile world, which are separate and not combined in space.” © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 21530 - Posted: 10.20.2015

Susan Gaidos CHICAGO — Teens like high-tech gadgets so much that they often use them all at once. While doing homework or playing video games, teens may listen to music or watch TV, all the while texting their friends. Some of these multitaskers think they are boosting their ability to attend to multiple activities, but in fact are more likely impairing their ability to focus, psychologist Mona Moisala of the University of Helsinki, reported October 18 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Moisala and colleagues tested 149 adolescents and young adults, ages 13 to 24, who regularly juggle multiple forms of media or play video games daily. Each participant had to focus attention on sentences (some logical, some illogical) under three conditions: without any distractions, while listening to distracting sounds, and while both listening to a sentence and reading another sentence. Using functional MRI to track brain activity, the researchers found that daily gaming had no effect on participants’ ability to focus. Those who juggle multiple forms of electronic media, however, had more trouble paying attention. Multitaskers performed lower overall, even when they weren’t being distracted. Brain images showed that the multitaskers also showed a higher level of activity in the right prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain implicated in problem solving and in processing complex thoughts and emotions. “Participants with the highest reported frequency of multimedia use showed the highest levels of brain activation in this area,” Moisala said. “In addition, these adolescents did worse on the task.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2015

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 21529 - Posted: 10.20.2015

An expensive cancer drug may reverse late-stage Parkinson’s disease, enabling participants in a small clinical trial to speak and walk again for the first time in years. While there are several treatments for the symptoms of Parkinson’s, if confirmed this would be the first time a drug has worked on the causes of the disease. “We’ve seen patients at end stages of the disease coming back to life,” says Charbel Moussa of Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington DC, who led the trial. The drug, called nilotinib, works by boosting the brain’s own “garbage disposal system” to clear proteins that accumulate in the brains of people with Parkinson’s disease, says Moussa. These proteins are thought to trigger the death of brain cells that make molecules like dopamine that are needed for movement and other functions. Nilotinib is already approved to treat cancer – it blocks a protein that drives chronic myeloid leukaemia. It also blocks another protein that interferes with lysosomes – cell structures that destroy harmful proteins. Moussa thinks that nilotinib can free up lysosomes to do a better job of clearing out proteins associated with Parkinson’s disease. Tests in animals showed promise, so Moussa, his colleague Fernando Pagan and their team set up a small trial of 12 volunteers with Parkinson’s disease or a similar condition called dementia with Lewy bodies. The trial was designed to test only the safety of the oral drug, which was given as a daily dose for six months. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 21528 - Posted: 10.20.2015

By Hanae Armitage About 70 million people worldwide stutter when they speak, and it turns out humans aren’t the only ones susceptible to verbal hiccups. Scientists at this year’s Society for Neuroscience Conference in Chicago, Illinois, show that mice, too, can stumble in their vocalizations. In humans, stuttering has long been linked to a mutation in the “housekeeping” gene Gnptab, which maintains basic levels of cellular function. To cement this curious genetic link, researchers decided to induce the Gnptab “stutter mutation” in mice. They suspected the change would trigger a mouse version of stammering. But deciphering stuttered squeaks is no easy task, so researchers set up a computerized model to register stutters through a statistical analysis of vocalizations. After applying the model to human speech, researchers boiled the verbal impediment down to two basic characteristics—fewer vocalizations in a given period of time and longer gaps in between each vocalization. For example, in 1 minute, stuttering humans made just 90 vocalizations compared with 125 for non-stutterers. Using these parameters to evaluate mouse vocalizations, researchers were able to identify stuttering mice over a 3.5-minute period. As expected, the mice carrying the mutated gene had far fewer vocalizations, with longer gaps between “speech” compared with their unmodified littermates—Gnptab mutant mice had about 80 vocalizations compared with 190 in the nonmutant mice. The findings not only supply evidence for Gnptab’s role in stuttering, but they also show that its function remains relatively consistent across multiple species. Scientists say the genetic parallel could help reveal the neural mechanisms behind stuttering, be it squeaking or speaking. © 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 21527 - Posted: 10.20.2015

The invaders put on a disguise and infiltrate the nest with dark plans: to kill the queen and enslave the kingdom. Usually when ants take pupae from other colonies as future slaves all hell breaks loose in ensuing battles. The enslaved individuals sometimes even strike back against their overlords. It’s a relatively dramatic affair, usually resulting in the aggressive slave-makers carrying the pupae back to their own colony, says Terrence McGlynn at California State University. But a species of ant found in the eastern US, Temnothorax pilagens, does things differently. It is the first ant species known to waltz into a colony and enslave others without killing, and one of a few that take not only pupae but adult workers, too. “This was extremely surprising as ants are usually able to detect foreign species or even individuals from a different colony through their chemical profile and react aggressively towards them,” says Isabelle Kleeberg at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany, whose team has found how they get away with it. Kleeberg tracked the behaviour of T. pilagens and their preferred slave species, Temnothorax ambiguus, in 43 raiding experiments using colour-marked individuals. In each experiment the colonies of these two ant species, each housed in a plastic box, were placed 12 centimetres apart from each other. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Aggression
Link ID: 21526 - Posted: 10.17.2015

What if belief in God and prejudice against immigrants could be altered by magnetic energy? That’s the question researchers sought to explore in a study published Wednesday in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. The “magnetic energy” comes in the form of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a noninvasive procedure that uses a metal coil to send pulses to the brain. By activating certain regions of the brain, doctors have used it for things like measuring the damage of a stroke or—increasingly—treating depression. These researchers sought to do the opposite—to temporarily disable one part of the brain (the part that responds to threats) and measure its effect on beliefs and prejudices connected to them. To do this, researchers from Britain’s University of York teamed up with UCLA to find 39 politically moderate college undergraduates who were divided into two groups. The first was given a “love-level sham” dose of TMS that had no effect on their brains. The second got a hit of magnetic energy strong enough to temporarily shut down their posterior medial frontal cortex. The pMFC, as this area near the forehead is known, is the part of the brain that identifies problems and—after measuring the level of threat—generates a response to them. Testing the effect of shutting down the part of the brain that forms judgments based on threats required first presenting threats. After receiving their respective doses of TMS, participants were asked to respond to questions about their own death. Previous studies have shown the threat of death is capable of directly affecting a person’s belief in religion. Therefore, shutting down the part of the brain that registers this threat—they theorized—would reduce the need to believe in God.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 21525 - Posted: 10.17.2015

Three teams of scientists supported by the National Institutes of Health showed that a genetic mutation linked to some forms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal degeneration (FTD) may destroy neurons by disrupting the movement of materials in and out of the cell’s nucleus, or command center where most of its DNA is stored. The results, published in the journals Nature and NatureNeuroscience, provide a possible strategy for treating the two diseases. “This research shines a spotlight on the role of nuclear transport in the health of neurons,” said Amelie Gubitz, Ph.D., program director at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). “The results provide new insights into how this mutation derails an essential process in neurons and opens new avenues for therapy development.” Both ALS and FTD are caused by the death of specific neurons. In ALS, this leads to movement difficulties and eventually paralysis, while in FTD, patients experience problems with language and decision making. Past research has connected a specific mutation in the C9orf72 gene to 40 percent of inherited ALS cases and 25 percent of inherited FTD cases, as well as nearly 10 percent of non-inherited cases of each disorder. The recent experiments, conducted in yeast, fruit flies, and neurons from patients, found that the mutation prevents proteins and genetic material called RNA from moving between the nucleus and the cytoplasm that surrounds it. “At the end of the day, this culminates in a defect in the flow of genetic information, which leads to problems expressing genes in the right place at the right time,” said J. Paul Taylor, M.D., Ph.D., a researcher at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and the senior author of one of the papers.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 21524 - Posted: 10.17.2015

By Anahad O'Connor For years, public health authorities have warned that smartphones, television screens and the hectic pace of modern life are disrupting natural sleep patterns, fueling an epidemic of sleep deprivation. By some estimates, Americans sleep two to three hours fewer today than they did before the industrial revolution. But now a new study is challenging that notion. It found that Americans on average sleep as much as people in three different hunter-gatherer societies where there is no electricity and the lifestyles have remained largely the same for thousands of years. If anything, the hunter-gatherer communities included in the new study — the Hadza and San tribes in Africa, and the Tsimané people in South America — tend to sleep even less than many Americans. The findings are striking because health authorities have long suggested that poor sleep is rampant in America, and that getting a minimum of seven hours on a consistent basis is a necessity for good health. Many studies suggest that lack of sleep, independent of other factors like physical activity, is associated with obesity and chronic disease. Yet the hunter-gatherers included in the new study, which was published in Current Biology, were relatively fit and healthy despite regularly sleeping amounts that are near the low end of those in industrialized societies. Previous research shows that their daily energy expenditure is about the same as most Americans, suggesting physical activity is not the reason for their relative good health. The prevailing notion in sleep medicine is that humans evolved to go to bed when the sun goes down, and that by and large we stay up much later than we should because we are flooded with artificial light, said Jerome Siegel, the lead author of the new study and a professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior at U.C.L.A. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 21523 - Posted: 10.17.2015

by Ben Cipollini Thanks to Ms. Amazing, it’s now cliche to say, but hey… I really love SfN. For the uninitiated SfN is a thirty thousand person international conference for neuroscience–a conference so large, only a few cities in the US can handle it. Yes, that’s a giant C-SPAN2 bus that's dwarfed by this small section of the “Great Room”. For many, SfN evokes fear and dread; it’s truly overwhelming in its size, breadth, and depth. For me, it was love at first “OM*G!!!”. Don’t believe me, scientists? Let’s review the data: I loathe running, but I actually do it at SfN. One needs wheels to get from talks to posters to talks again. We filled the New Orleans convention center in 2012; it’s so long you you can actually get directions from one end of it to the other on Google Maps. Yes, that map does say “1.0 kilometers”. I hate crowds, but I will fight through the poster session crowds like a salmon heading upstream to spawn, just to get to one more poster before the end of the session. SfN may have more human traffic jams than China has vehicle jams during Golden week… but that won’t stop me from finding out how callosal connections have properties similar to those of long-range lateral connections, or to understand how hemispherectomy affects functional organization. You’d better too; you never know when one of your research heroes might be presenting the poster, or you’ll find yourself standing in front of a poster that winds up in Science just a few months later.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 21522 - Posted: 10.17.2015

Peter Andrey Smith Nearly a year has passed since Rebecca Knickmeyer first met the participants in her latest study on brain development. Knickmeyer, a neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill, expects to see how 30 newborns have grown into crawling, inquisitive one-year-olds, using a battery of behavioural and temperament tests. In one test, a child's mother might disappear from the testing suite and then reappear with a stranger. Another ratchets up the weirdness with some Halloween masks. Then, if all goes well, the kids should nap peacefully as a noisy magnetic resonance imaging machine scans their brains. “We try to be prepared for everything,” Knickmeyer says. “We know exactly what to do if kids make a break for the door.” Knickmeyer is excited to see something else from the children — their faecal microbiota, the array of bacteria, viruses and other microbes that inhabit their guts. Her project (affectionately known as 'the poop study') is part of a small but growing effort by neuroscientists to see whether the microbes that colonize the gut in infancy can alter brain development. The project comes at a crucial juncture. A growing body of data, mostly from animals raised in sterile, germ-free conditions, shows that microbes in the gut influence behaviour and can alter brain physiology and neurochemistry. © 2015 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 21521 - Posted: 10.16.2015

Chris Samoray People in the postindustrial world don’t always get a sound night sleep. But they appear to spend a similar amount of time sleeping as do people in hunter-gatherer communities in Africa and South America, a new study finds. “It’s absolutely clear that they don’t sleep more than we do,” says Jerome Siegel, a UCLA sleep scientist. In fact, on average, hunter-gatherers may sleep a little less. Recommended nightly sleep for adults is typically seven to nine hours; a 2013 Gallup poll showed that most Americans get around 6.8 hours. On most nights, members of three hunter-gatherer groups — the Hadza of Tanzania, the Ju/’hoansi San of Namibia and the Tsimane of Bolivia — sleep 5.7 to 7.1 hours, Siegel and colleagues report online October 15 in Current Biology. That’s on the lower end of the sleep spectrum in postindustrial societies, the researchers say. Evidence from the new study also suggests that these groups experience less insomnia than sleepers in postindustrial societies. (The three hunter-gatherer languages even lack a word for insomnia.) Hunter-gatherer sleep patterns are closely tied to temperature, a new study shows. Among the Hadza of Tanzania, for instance, people fell asleep about three hours after sunset, on average, as ambient temperatures decreased. People then woke up about an hour before sunrise, when temperatures reached their lowest point. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2015.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 21520 - Posted: 10.16.2015

By Robert F. Service Prosthetic limbs may work wonders for restoring lost function in some amputees, but one thing they can’t do is restore an accurate sense of touch. Now, researchers report that one day in the not too distant future, those artificial arms and legs may have a sense of touch closely resembling the real thing. Using a two-ply of flexible, thin plastic, scientists have created novel electronic sensors that send signals to the brain tissue of mice that closely mimic the nerve messages of touch sensors in human skin. Multiple research teams have long worked on restoring touch to people with prosthetic limbs. 2 years ago, for example, a group at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, reported giving people with prosthetic hands a sense of touch by wiring pressure sensors on the hands to peripheral nerves in their arms. Yet although these advances have restored a rudimentary sense of touch, the sensors and signals are very different from those sent by mechanoreceptors, natural touch sensors in the skin. For starters, natural mechanoreceptors put out what amounts to a digital signal. When they sense pressure, they fire a stream of nerve impulses; the more pressure, the higher the frequency of pulses. But previous tactile sensors have been analogue devices, where more pressure produces a stronger electrical signal, rather than a more frequent stream of pulses. The electrical signals must then be sent to another processing chip that converts the strength of the signals to a digital stream of pulses that is only then sent on to peripheral nerves or brain tissue. © 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Robotics
Link ID: 21519 - Posted: 10.16.2015

Could brain inflammation be to blame for schizophrenia? People with the disorder seem to have more active immune cells inside their brains, and now this activity has been spotted even before the disorder develops. This link could be a breakthrough in developing new treatments that better target the causes of the disorder. The idea that the immune system might play a part in schizophrenia was first floated 10 years ago. Since then, a couple of studies have found that people with schizophrenia seem to have more active microglia – the immune cells of the brain. Peter Bloomfield at Imperial College London wondered if this increased immune system activity might be detectable before a person is diagnosed with schizophrenia. His team examined 14 people who had been identified as being at “ultra-high risk” of developing the disorder – they had already seen a doctor about symptoms like paranoia or hallucinations, but hadn’t yet had a psychotic episode. Typically, between 20 and 35 per cent of such individuals will go on to be diagnosed with schizophrenia. By injecting a dye that labels active cells and using a PET scanner, Bloomfield’s team compared the activity of these people’s microglial cells with those of people with schizophrenia, as well as healthy people. They found increased microglial activity in both those who had schizophrenia, and those who had been classified as ultra-high risk. “What’s interesting is that the level of activity correlated with the severity of symptoms,” says Bloomfield. During the study, two of the 14 at ultra-high risk went on to develop schizophrenia and schizotypal disorder – these people had the highest levels of microglial activity, says Bloomfield. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 21518 - Posted: 10.16.2015

By Christopher Intagliata "Babies come prepared to learn any of the world's languages." Alison Bruderer, a cognitive scientist at the University of British Columbia. "Which means no matter where they're growing up in the world, their brains are prepared to pick up the language they're listening to around them." And listen they do. But another key factor to discerning a language’s particular sounds may be for babies to move their tongues as they listen. Bruderer and her colleagues tested that notion by sitting 24 sixth-month-olds in front of a video screen and displaying a checkerboard pattern, while they played one of two tracks: a single, repeated "D" sound in Hindi, <> or two slightly different, alternating "D" sounds. <> The idea here is that babies have a short attention span, so novel things hold their gaze. And indeed, the babies did stare at the screen longer while the alternating "D"s played than for the single “D”—indicating they could detect the novelty. Until, that is, the researchers blocked the babies' tongue movements by having them suck on a teething device. Then the effect disappeared, with the babies unable to differentiate [single D sound] from [alternating D sounds]. And when the babies used a different teether that did not block tongue movement, they once again appeared to comprehend the difference between the Ds. The study is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. © 2015 Scientific American

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 21517 - Posted: 10.16.2015

Using a sensitive new technology called single-cell RNA-seq on cells from mice, scientists have created the first high-resolution gene expression map of the newborn mouse inner ear. The findings provide new insight into how epithelial cells in the inner ear develop and differentiate into specialized cells that serve critical functions for hearing and maintaining balance. Understanding how these important cells form may provide a foundation for the potential development of cell-based therapies for treating hearing loss and balance disorders. The research was conducted by scientists at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), part of the National Institutes of Health. In a companion study led by NIDCD-supported scientists at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and scientists at the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University, researchers used a similar technique to identify a family of proteins critical for the development of inner ear cells. Both studies were published online on October 15 in the journal Nature Communications. “Age-related hearing loss occurs gradually in most of us as we grow older. It is one of the most common conditions among older adults, affecting half of people over age 75,” said James F. Battey, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., director of the NIDCD. “These new findings may lead to new regenerative treatments for this critical public health issue.” Specialized sensory epithelial cells in the inner ear include hair cells and supporting cells, which provide the hair cells with crucial structural and functional support. Hair cells and supporting cells located in the cochlea — the snail-shaped structure in the inner ear — work together to detect sound, thus enabling us to hear. In contrast, hair cells and supporting cells in the utricle, a fluid-filled pouch near the cochlea, play a critical role in helping us maintain our balance.

Keyword: Hearing; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 21516 - Posted: 10.16.2015