By Mitch Leslie After years of fasting, the Buddha’s “legs were like bamboo sticks, his backbone was like a rope, his chest was like an incomplete roof of a house, his eyes sank right inside, like stones in a deep well,” according to one account. The Buddha didn’t get what he wanted from this extreme fasting—enlightenment—but a new study suggests that a diet that replicates some effects of milder deprivation may not only lower your weight but also confer other benefits. Researchers report that following the diet for just 5 days a month improves several measures of health, including reducing the risk of developing cardiovascular disease. Eating shortens life, and not just because overindulgence can lead to diseases such as diabetes. A diet that cuts food intake by up to 40%, known as calorie restriction, increases longevity in a variety of organisms and forestalls cancer, heart disease, and other late-life illnesses. Although some short-term studies suggest that calorie restriction provides metabolic benefits to people, nobody has confirmed that it also increases human life span. The closest researchers have come are two large, long-term studies of monkeys, and they conflict about whether meager rations increase longevity. Even if calorie restriction could add years to our lives, almost no one can muster the willpower to eat so little day after day, year after year. An alternative that might be more, er, palatable is fasting, the temporary abstinence from food. Gerontological researcher Valter Longo of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and colleagues have shown that fasting eases side effects of chemotherapy such as fatigue and weakness, and animal studies suggest that it produces health advantages similar to calorie restriction. © 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 21077 - Posted: 06.20.2015

By Tina Rosenberg Elle is a mess. She’s actually talented, attractive and good at her job, but she feels like a fraud — convinced that today’s the day she’ll flunk a test, lose a job, mess up a relationship. Her colleague Moody also sabotages himself. He’s a hardworking, nice person, but loses friends because he’s grumpy, oversensitive and gets angry for no reason. If you suffer from depression or anxiety as Elle and Moody do, spending time with them could help. They are characters in a free online program of cognitive behavioral therapy called MoodGYM, which leads users through quizzes and exercises — therapy without the therapist. Cognitive behavioral therapy is a commonly used treatment for depression, anxiety and other conditions. With it, the therapist doesn’t ask you about your mother — or look at the past at all. Instead, a cognitive behavioral therapist aims to give patients the skills to manage their moods by helping them identify unhelpful thoughts like “I’m worthless,” “I’ll always fail” or “people will always let me down.” Patients learn to analyze them and replace them with constructive thoughts that are more accurate or precise. For example, a patient could replace “I fail at everything” with “I succeed at things when I’m motivated and I try hard.” That new thought in turn changes feelings and behaviors. The success of cognitive behavioral therapy is well known; many people consider it the most effective therapy for depression. What is not widely known, at least in the United States, is that you don’t need a therapist to do it. Scores of studies have found that online C.B.T. works as well as conventional face-to-face cognitive behavioral therapy – as long a there is occasional human support or coaching. “For common mental disorders like anxiety and depression, there is no evidence Internet-based treatment is less effective than face-to-face therapy,” said Pim Cuijpers, professor of clinical psychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and a leading researcher on computer C.B.T. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 21076 - Posted: 06.20.2015

by Sarah Zielinski Last year in Australia, I visited Featherdale Wildlife Park where, in a couple of areas, kangaroos and wallabies hop amongst the tourists. For a dollar, you can buy an ice cream cone full of grass for the marsupials to eat. But if you’re not careful, an animal will quickly grab the cone out of your hand and feed itself. Now I’m wishing that I had paid more attention to that grabbing motion. Kangaroos are lefties, scientists report June 18 in Current Biology. And the preference for one hand over the other may be linked to the ability to walk on two legs. Humans show a definite preference for one hand over the other, usually the right. This handedness had been considered a distinctly human trait. But scientists have found more and more evidence that other species have such preferences as well. Female domestic cats, for instance, tend to use their right paws and males their left. Andrey Giljov of Saint Petersburg State University in Russia and colleagues were curious about the evolution of handedness and looked to marsupials, since these animals are an early offshoot of the mammal lineage. They observed four species in the wild — red kangaroos, eastern gray kangaroos, red-necked wallabies and Goodfellow’s tree kangaroos — performing tasks such as grooming and feeding. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2015.

Keyword: Laterality
Link ID: 21075 - Posted: 06.20.2015

by Bob Holmes Lions might be one of the biggest threats to hyenas, but that doesn't stop the smaller animals teaming up to steal from the big cats. Nora Lewin from Michigan State University in East Lansing and her colleagues observed the mobbing behaviour at the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. Hyenas were also spotted banding together to keep lions away from their dens. The mobbing involves a surprising degree of cooperation and communication. Male lions, which actively pursue and kill hyenas, are much more of a danger than females, who usually just make threats. This could be why the hyenas in the video above are confronting females. The team suggests the hyenas can identify their opponent's age and sex before deciding as a group whether or not to mob it. Levin and her colleagues are now investigating how the hyenas communicate to make a group decision. The findings were reported on 13 June at the annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society in Anchorage, Alaska. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention; Evolution
Link ID: 21074 - Posted: 06.20.2015

Helen Shen Boosting activity in neurons that have stored happy memories might help to treat depression — at least according to results in mice. In a study published today (17 June) in Nature, neuroscientist Susumu Tonegawa and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge report how they reversed a depression-like state in rodents by using light to stimulate clusters of brain cells believed to have stored memories of a positive experience1. The findings are preliminary, but they hint that areas of the brain involved in storing memories could one day be a target to treat mental disorders in humans, says Tonegawa. “I want to be very careful not to give false expectations to patients. We are doing very basic science,” he adds. “This is exactly the type of work that psychiatry needs right now,” says Robert Malenka, a behavioural scientist at Stanford University in California. “This is an elegant paper.” The work has grown out of studies by Tonegawa’s lab and others that aimed to locate the memory ‘engram’ — the physical trace of a memory, thought to be encoded in an ensemble of neurons2–6. In 2012, Tonegawa and his team provided one of the clearest demonstrations of an engram. They engineered mice with light-sensitive proteins that were expressed when neurons fired. As a result, they could track any neurons that activated while the mice were given a fearful memory by being trained with repeated electric shocks to be scared of a cage3. The researchers later used blue flashes of light to make the same neurons fire again — a technique known as optogenetics — and found that they could make the animals freeze up, presumably because the fearful memory had been reawoken. © 2015 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Depression
Link ID: 21073 - Posted: 06.18.2015

Bill Chappell In what researchers say is a first, they've discovered the neuron in worms that detects Earth's magnetic field. Animals have been known to sense the magnetic field; a new study identifies the microscopic, antenna-shaped sensor that helps worms orient themselves underground. The sensory neuron that the worm C. elegans uses to migrate up or down through the soil could be similar to what many other animals use, according to the team of scientists and engineers at The University of Texas at Austin. The team's work was published Wednesday by eLife. In contrast to previous breakthroughs — such as a 2012 study on how pigeons' brains use information about magnetic fields, and another from the same year on olfactory cells in trout — the new work identifies the sensory neuron that detects magnetic fields. "We also found the first hint at a novel sensory mechanism for detecting the magnetic field," says Jon Pierce-Shimomura, an assistant professor of neuroscience who worked on the study. "Now researchers can check to see if this is used in other animals too." The list of animals that could be studied for their use of magnetic fields is long — and it seems to grow each year. In early 2014, for instance, a study found that dogs who need to relieve themselves of waste prefer to align themselves on a north-south axis when the magnetic conditions are right. Pierce-Shimomura says his team was surprised to make a new breakthrough in magnetism by looking at worms, which aren't known for their sophisticated migrations. © 2015 NPR

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 21072 - Posted: 06.18.2015

by Curtis Abraham A step forward for equal LGBT rights in Africa. Last week, the influential Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) published a study on the science of human sexual diversity. A comprehensive review of recent scientific papers on the subject, it concluded that sexual behaviour is naturally varied, and discrimination unjustified. It stated that there is no evidence that orientation can be altered by therapy or that being gay is contagious. The report also sets straight the idea that homosexuality is a Western malaise: "There is no basis for the view that homosexuality is 'un-African' either in the sense of it being a 'colonial import', or on the basis that prevalence of people with same-sex or bisexual orientations is any different in African countries compared to countries on any other continent." Going further, the report asserted not only that tolerance of sexual diversity benefits communities but it positively affects public health, civil society and long-term economic growth. Zero tolerance Launched at the Seventh South African AIDS Conference in Durban, the study comes a year after the Ugandan government passed a law imposing a life sentence on anyone who has sexual relations with someone of the same sex. Other countries, including Burundi, Cameroon and Nigeria, then passed similar anti-gay laws. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 21071 - Posted: 06.18.2015

Maanvi Singh Teenagers aren't exactly known for their responsible decision making. But some young people are especially prone to making rash, risky decisions about sex, drugs and alcohol. Individual differences in the brain's working memory — which allows people to draw on and use information to make decisions — could help explain why some adolescents are especially impulsive when it comes to sex, according to a study published Wednesday in Child Development. "Working memory is the ability to keep different things in mind when you're making decisions or problem solving," explains Atika Khurana, an assistant professor of counseling psychology at the University of Oregon who led the study. Khurana and her colleagues rounded up 360 adolescents, ages 12 to 15, and assessed their working memory using a series of tests. For example, the researchers told the participants a string of random numbers and asked them to repeat what they heard in reverse order. "We basically tested their ability to keep information in mind while making decisions," Khurana says. The researchers then tracked all the participants for two years, and asked about the teens' sexual activity. And through another series of tests and surveys, the researcher tried to gauge how likely each teen was to act without thinking, to make rash decisions and take risks. There was a correlation between weaker working memory and the likelihood that a teen would have sex — including unprotected sex — at a younger age. And they were more likely to act without much deliberation. That trend held true even after the researchers accounted for the teenagers' age, socioeconomic status and gender. © 2015 NPR

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 21070 - Posted: 06.18.2015

By Nicholas Bakalar A new study has found a simple way to significantly reduce teenage smoking: raise the tobacco sales age to 21. In 2005, Needham, Mass., did just that, while surrounding communities kept their age limit at 18. Researchers surveyed 16,000 high school students in Needham and 16 surrounding communities four times between 2006 and 2012, gathering data on their smoking habits. The study is in Tobacco Control. Over the seven years, the number of children under 18 buying cigarettes in Needham decreased to 11.6 percent from 18.4 percent, while in the surrounding communities it hardly changed — down to 19 percent from 19.4. In 2006, 12.9 percent of students in Needham and 14.8 percent of students in surrounding communities reported having smoked in the past 30 days. By 2010, 6.7 percent of Needham students reported smoking, compared with 12 percent in other towns. At the end of the study in 2012, smoking had declined to 5.5 percent in Needham and 8.5 percent outside. “More than 80 percent of smokers begin before 18,” said the lead author, Shari Kessel Schneider, project director at the Education Development Center in Waltham, Mass. “Our findings provide strong support for initiatives going on all across the country to increase the sales age as a means for decreasing youth access to cigarettes, initiation of smoking, and ultimately addiction.” © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 21069 - Posted: 06.18.2015

By Greg Toppo On the morning of August 12, 2013, nearly eight months after 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and killed 26 people, Michael Mudry, an investigator with the Connecticut State Police, drove to nearby Danbury to try to solve a little mystery. Police had found a Garmin GPS unit in Lanza's house, and its records showed that the gunman had driven to the same spot nine times in April, May and June 2012, arriving around midnight each time and staying for hours. The GPS readout took Mudry to the vast parking lot of a suburban shopping center, about 14 miles west of Lanza's home. Workers at a movie theater there immediately recognized Lanza from a photograph. He was at the theater constantly, they told Mudry, but never to see movies. He came to the lobby to play an arcade game, the same one, over and over again, sometimes for eight to 10 hours a night. Witnesses said he would whip himself into a frenzy, and on occasion the theater manager had to unplug the game to get him to leave. Police had been scouring Lanza's home since the shootings, and on his computer hard drive they found information on weapons magazine capacities, images of Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, copies of the violent movies Bloody Wednesday and Rampage, and a list of ingredients for TNT. And like many teenaged boys, Lanza owned the typical first-person shooter, fighting and action games: Call of Duty, Dead or Alive, Grand Theft Auto. © 2015 Scientific American,

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 21068 - Posted: 06.18.2015

Tom Bawden The mystery behind the nightingale’s beautiful song has been revealed, with scientists finding that male birds sing complex notes to prove to females that they would be a good father to their children. Nightingales use their songs to advertise their family values, according to new research which discovers that the better the singer, the more support they are likely to offer their young family by feeding and defending them from predators. But while the beauty comes from the complexity of the song, the effect it has on the females is based on something far more mundane – the amount of effort the singer has put into his performance. Researchers at the Freie Universitat Berlin found that complicated choral arrangements are much harder to sing, especially when they include frequent appearances of long buzzing sounds and require the bird to be in good physical condition. “We don’t think the female is concerned with the beauty of the song but rather the information encoded in the song that tells her about the singer’s characteristics – his age, where he was raised, the strength of his immune system and how motivated he is to contribute to bringing up the young,” Professor Silke Kipper, one of the report’s authors, told The Independent. “The songs can also be a good indication of the bird’s ability to learn, which is another important characteristic of a good parent.” © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hearing
Link ID: 21067 - Posted: 06.18.2015

By Andrea Alfano There are many types of touch. A cold splash of water, the tug of a strong breeze or the heat and heft of your coffee mug will each play on your skin in a different way. Within your skin is an array of touch sensors, each associated with nerve fibers that connect to the central nervous system. These sensors comprise specialized nerve endings and skin cells. Along with the fibers, they translate our physical interactions with the world into electrical signals that our brain can process. They help to bridge the gap between the physical act of touching and the cognitive awareness of tactile sensation. Even a simple stroke across the forearm engages several distinct nerve fibers. Three types—A-beta, A-delta and C fibers—have subtypes that are specialized for sensing particular types of touch; other subtypes carry information related to pain. The integration of information from these fibers is what allows us to gain such rich sensory experiences through our skin, but it has also made it more challenging for researchers to understand the fibers’ individual roles. Although these fibers do not act in isolation, the examples that follow highlight the primary nerve fibers engaged by different types of touch. © 2015 Scientific American

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 21066 - Posted: 06.18.2015

The structure of the living cell is defined by the difference between what’s inside and what’s not. Biologists have taken great pains over the years to document the minute workings of the openings in cell membranes that allow hydrogen, sodium, calcium and other ions to make their way inside across the barrier that envelops the cell and its contents. Five scholars of the brain have built upon these observations to suggest that these activities may provide a foundation for a badly needed theory to understand consciousness and some of the cognitive processes that underlie it. They contend that when animal cells open and close themselves to the outside world, these actions can be construed as more than just responses to external stimuli. In fact, they constitute the basis for perception, cognition and movement in the animal kingdom—and may underlie consciousness itself. Read about what the five have to say and then continue to Koch’s reply. The five authors and NYU neurology professor Oliver Sacks; Antonio Damasio and Gil B. Carvalho from the University of Southern California, Norman D. Cook from the faculty of Kansai University in Osaka, Japan and Harry T. Hunt from Brock University in Ontario. They have framed their ideas in the form of an open letter to Christof Koch, president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and a Scientific American MIND columnist (Consciousness Redux) and member of Scientific American’s board of advisers.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 21065 - Posted: 06.17.2015

By James Gallagher Health editor, BBC News website Scientists have discovered a chemical in blood that indicates whether people will have declining brain function. Looking for the earliest signs of Alzheimer's disease, they analysed levels of 1,129 proteins circulating in the blood of more than 200 twins. These were compared with data from cognitive-function tests over the next decade, in Translational Psychiatry. And levels of one protein, MAPKAPK5, tended to be lower in those people whose brains declined. MAPKAPK5 is involved in relaying chemical messages within the body, although its connection with cognitive decline is unclear. Dementia cases are expected to treble globally by 2050, but there is no cure or treatment. It can take more than a decade from the first changes in the brain to culminate in symptoms such as memory loss, confusion and personality change. And drug companies believe they need to treat patients years before symptoms appear in order to protect the brain. Dr Steven Kiddle, a Medical Research Council scientist at King's College London, told the BBC News website: "People think it may be hard to reverse 20 years of potential damage to your brain. "But if you could start much earlier in that process, then you might be able to find something that works." He said a blood test could help identify people for clinical trials. But he added: "A test you could go in to your doctor to say, 'Do I have Alzheimer's disease or not?' I think that's a long way off." © 2015 BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 21064 - Posted: 06.17.2015

By Tori Rodriguez Joint flexibility is an oft-coveted trait that provides a special advantage to dancers and athletes, but there can be too much of this good thing. A growing body of research suggests a surprising link between high levels of flexibility and anxiety. A study published last year in the journal Frontiers in Psychology is among the most recent to confirm the association, finding that people with hypermobile joints have heightened brain activity in anxiety regions. Joint hypermobility, which affects approximately 20 percent of the population, confers an unusually large range of motion. Hypermobile people can often, for instance, touch their thumb to their inner forearm or place their hands flat on the floor without bending their knees. The trait appears to be genetic and is a result of variation in collagen, the main structural protein of connective tissue. Being double-jointed has long been linked with an increased risk for asthma and irritable bowel syndrome, among other physical disorders. “Joint hypermobility has an impact on the whole body and not just joints,” says Jessica Eccles, a psychiatrist and researcher at the University of Sussex in England. It was only a matter of time before scientists also looked at whether joint hypermobility was linked to mental disorders. The investigation began in 1993 and heated up in 1998 when researcher Rocío Martín-Santos, now at the Hospital Clinic of the University of Barcelona, and her colleagues discovered that patients with anxiety were 16 times more likely to have lax joints. Their findings have since been replicated numerous times in large populations. © 2015 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 21063 - Posted: 06.17.2015

By Rachel Feltman Here's why you hate the sound of your own voice(1:07) If you've ever listened to your voice recorded, chances are you probably didn't like what you heard. So, why do most people hate the sound of their own voice? The answer: It's all in how sound travel to your ears. (Pamela Kirkland/The Washington Post) Whether you've heard yourself talking on the radio or just gabbing in a friend's Instagram video, you probably know the sound of your own voice -- and chances are pretty good that you hate it. As the video above explains, your voice as you hear it when you speak out loud is very different from the voice the rest of the world perceives. That's because it comes to you via a different channel than everyone else. When sound waves from the outside world -- someone else's voice, for example -- hit the outer ear, they're siphoned straight through the ear canal to hit the ear drum, creating vibrations that the brain will translate into sound. When we talk, our ear drums and inner ears vibrate from the sound waves we're putting out into the air. But they also have a another source of vibration -- the movements caused by the production of the sound. Our vocal cords and airways are trembling, too, and those vibrations make their way over to auditory processing as well. Your body is better at carrying low, rich tones than the air is. So when those two sources of sound get combined into one perception of your own voice, it sounds lower and richer. That's why hearing the way your voice sounds without all the body vibes can be off-putting -- it's unfamiliar -- or even unpleasant, because of the relative tinniness.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 21062 - Posted: 06.17.2015

You remember your first kiss. You remember your childhood phone number, where you parked your car, and the last time you got really drunk. You probably remember the digits of pi, or at least the first three of them (slacker). Each day you accumulate fresh memories—kissing new people, acquiring different phone numbers and (possibly) competing in pi-memorizing championships (we would root for you). With all those new adventures stacking up, you might start worrying that your brain is growing full. But, wait—is that how it works? Can your brain run out of space, like a hard drive? It depends on what kind of memory you’re talking about. “It’s not like each memory takes a cell and then that cell is used up,” says Nelson Cowan, cognitive psychologist at the University of Missouri. Over the long term, memories are encoded in neural patterns—circuits of connected neurons. And your brain’s ability to knit together new patterns is limitless, so theoretically the number of memories stored in those patterns is limitless as well. Memories don’t always keep to themselves, though. They can crossbreed, like similar but distinct species, creating the recollection equivalent of a mule. If you can’t remember it, a memory is pretty much worthless—and similar memories can interfere with each other, getting in the way of surfacing the right one. Though memory interference is well documented, researchers like Cowan are still guessing at the phenomenon’s neural mechanics.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 21061 - Posted: 06.17.2015

by Laura Sanders The motor homunculus is a funny-looking fellow with a hulking thumb, delicate toes and a tongue that wags below his head. His body parts and proportions stem from decades-old experiments that mapped brain areas to the body parts they control. Now, a new study suggests that the motor homunculus’ neck was in the wrong place. Hyder Jinnah of Emory University in Atlanta and colleagues used fMRI to scan the brains of volunteers as they activated their head-turning neck muscles. (Pads held participants’ heads still, so the muscles fired but heads didn’t move.) This head turn was accompanied by activity in part of the brain that controls movement. The exact spot seems to be between the brain areas that control the shoulder and the trunk — not between the areas responsible for moving the thumb and the top of the head as earlier motor homunculi had suggested, the team reports in the June 17 Journal of Neuroscience. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2015.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 21060 - Posted: 06.17.2015

By David Shultz Not usually lauded for their cuddly appearance, opossums were long thought to have a social inclination to match their looks; the marsupials have mostly been observed lurking alone and hissing at others who encroach on their personal space. However, a new study published online today in Biology Letters suggests that opossums sometimes live in groups and may form pair bonds with mates before the mating season starts. Based on 17,127 observations of 312 artificial nests over 8 years, scientists at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil, discovered 10 instances of multiple opossums sharing the same den with no signs of hostility or ongoing reproductive activity. An additional observation made on the university campus revealed a group of 13 opossums from three separate age groups all sharing a single den. The researchers speculate that this type of “gregarious denning” may be relatively common in the wild and that males and females may work cooperatively to build a nest—a ritual that could trigger the onset of an estrous cycle in females. Furthermore, the group of 13 animals was discovered in a large concrete box housing electrical equipment, much bigger than the typical artificial dens used by scientists studying opossums. The team suspects that building larger artificial dens may promote more social interactions like the ones they observed. © 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 21059 - Posted: 06.17.2015

by Michael Le Page It is perhaps the most extraordinary eye in the living world – so extraordinary that no one believed the biologist who first described it more than a century ago. Now it appears that the tiny owner of this eye uses it to catch invisible prey by detecting polarised light. This suggestion is also likely to be greeted with disbelief, for the eye belongs to a single-celled organism called Erythropsidinium. It has no nerves, let alone a brain. So how could it "see" its prey? Fernando Gómez of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, thinks it can. "Erythropsidinium is a sniper," he told New Scientist. "It is waiting to see the prey, and it shoots in that direction." Erythropsidinium belongs to a group of single-celled planktonic organisms known as dinoflagellates. They can swim using a tail, or flagellum, and many possess chloroplasts, allowing them to get their food by photosynthesis just as plants do. Others hunt by shooting out stinging darts similar to the nematocysts of jellyfishMovie Camera. They sense vibrations when prey comes near, but they often have to fire off several darts before they manage to hit it, Gómez says. Erythropsidinium and its close relatives can do better, Gómez thinks, because they spot prey with their unique and sophisticated eye, called the ocelloid, which juts out from the cell. "It knows where the prey is," he says. At the front of the ocelloid is a clear sphere rather like an eyeball. At the back is a dark, hemispherical structure where light is detected. The ocelloid is strikingly reminiscent of the camera-like eyes of vertebrates, but it is actually a modified chloroplast. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 21058 - Posted: 06.16.2015