By JAMES GORMAN The question of how moles move all that dirt when they tunnel just under the surface of lawns has never attracted the extensive study that other forms of locomotion — like the flight of birds and insects, or even the jet-propulsion of jellyfish — have. But scientists at the University of Massachusetts and Brown University have recently been asking exactly how, and how hard, moles dig. Yi-Fen Lin, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, reported at a recent meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology that moles seem to swim through the earth, and that the stroke they use allows them to pack a lot of power behind their shovel-like paws. Ms. Lin measured the power of hairy-tailed moles that she captured in Massachusetts and found they could exert a force up to 40 times their body weight. She also analyzed and presented X-ray videos taken of moles in a laboratory enclosure tunneling their way through a material chosen for its consistency and uniform particle size: cous cous. Angela M. Horner recorded the videos while studying the movement of Eastern moles in the lab of Thomas Roberts, a professor at Brown. One reason moles have not been studied as much as some other animals may be that they are not easy to capture or keep in a laboratory. “People said, ‘You won’t be able to catch them and you won’t be able to keep them alive,’ ” said Elizabeth R. Dumont, an evolutionary biologist who is Ms. Lin’s dissertation adviser. Ms. Lin solved the first problem by camping out in mole territory, on golf courses and farms, and marking their tunnels with sticks that she would watch for hours until movement indicated a mole on the move. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 19179 - Posted: 01.29.2014

by Kat Arney Next time you struggle to resist an itchy rash or insect bite, you could find relief in the mirror. Perception of our own bodies can be easily manipulated using tricks such as the rubber hand illusion, which fools people into thinking a rubber hand is their own. Reflecting someone's limb in a mirror has also been used to treat phantom limb pain. Now Christoph Helmchen and his colleagues at the University of Lübeck in Germany have shown that a similar mirror illusion can fool people into feeling relief from an itch, even when they scratch the wrong place. The team injected the right forearms of 26 male volunteers with itch-inducing chemical histamine. Because the injection creates a red spot, they painted a corresponding dot on the opposite arm so both looked identical. One of the researchers then scratched each arm in turn. Unsurprisingly, scratching the itchy arm produced relief, while scratching the other one did not. Next, they placed a large vertical mirror in front of the itchy arm, blocking off the subject's view of their right arm and reflecting back the non-itchy one in its place . They asked the volunteers to look only at the reflected limb in the mirror, whilst a member of the team again scratched each arm. This time the participants felt relief when the unaffected, reflected arm was scratched. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Attention
Link ID: 19178 - Posted: 01.28.2014

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News Exposure to a once widely used pesticide, DDT, may increase the chances of developing Alzheimer's disease, suggest US researchers. A study, published in JAMA Neurology, showed patients with Alzheimer's had four times the levels of DDT lingering in the body than healthy people. Some countries still use the pesticide to control malaria. Alzheimer's Research UK said more evidence was needed to prove DDT had a role in dementia. DDT was a massively successful pesticide, initially used to control malaria at the end of World War Two and then to protect crops in commercial agriculture. However, there were questions about its impact on human health and wider environmental concerns, particularly for predators. It was banned in the US in 1972 and in many other countries. But the World Health Organization still recommends using DDT to keep malaria in check. Not clear DDT also lingers in the human body where it is broken down into DDE. The team at Rutgers University and Emory University tested levels of DDE in the blood of 86 people with Alzheimer's disease and compared the results with 79 healthy people of a similar age and background. The results showed those with Alzheimer's had 3.8 times the level of DDE. However, the picture is not clear-cut. Some healthy people had high levels of DDE while some with Alzheimer's had low levels. Alzheimer's also predates the use of DDT. The researchers believe the chemical is increasing the chance of Alzheimer's and may be involved in the development of amyloid plaques in the brain, a hallmark of the disease, which contribute to the death of brain cells. BBC © 2014

Keyword: Alzheimers; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 19177 - Posted: 01.28.2014

By BENEDICT CAREY People of a certain age (and we know who we are) don’t spend much leisure time reviewing the research into cognitive performance and aging. The story is grim, for one thing: Memory’s speed and accuracy begin to slip around age 25 and keep on slipping. The story is familiar, too, for anyone who is over 50 and, having finally learned to live fully in the moment, discovers it’s a senior moment. The finding that the brain slows with age is one of the strongest in all of psychology. Lisa Haney Over the years, some scientists have questioned this dotage curve. But these challenges have had an ornery-old-person slant: that the tests were biased toward the young, for example. Or that older people have learned not to care about clearly trivial things, like memory tests. Or that an older mind must organize information differently from one attached to some 22-year-old who records his every Ultimate Frisbee move on Instagram. Now comes a new kind of challenge to the evidence of a cognitive decline, from a decidedly digital quarter: data mining, based on theories of information processing. In a paper published in Topics in Cognitive Science, a team of linguistic researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany used advanced learning models to search enormous databases of words and phrases. Since educated older people generally know more words than younger people, simply by virtue of having been around longer, the experiment simulates what an older brain has to do to retrieve a word. And when the researchers incorporated that difference into the models, the aging “deficits” largely disappeared. “What shocked me, to be honest, is that for the first half of the time we were doing this project, I totally bought into the idea of age-related cognitive decline in healthy adults,” the lead author, Michael Ramscar, said by email. But the simulations, he added, “fit so well to human data that it slowly forced me to entertain this idea that I didn’t need to invoke decline at all.” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Intelligence
Link ID: 19176 - Posted: 01.28.2014

Christie Nicholson reports. Advocates claim numerous health benefits for meditation, many of which are supported by studies on the practice. Still, meditation has not become part of mainstream medicine. So researchers at Johns Hopkins University analyzed 47 previously published clinical trials to narrow down the most effective use for meditation as medical therapy. The studies involved more than 3,500 patients suffering from various issues including stress, addiction, depression, anxiety, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and chronic pain. The meta-analysis is in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. [Madhav Goyal et al, Meditation Programs for Psychological Stress and Well-being: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis] Apparently practicing just 30 minutes of meditation per day significantly decreases the symptoms of anxiety and depression. An 8-week training program in mindfulness meditation – where participants have to focus on the current moment – led to optimal improvement in lowering anxiety, depression and pain. And the improvements continued over the six months following the training. For depression and anxiety, the effects of meditation were as strong as for those achieved by taking antidepressant medication. However, meditation failed to significantly affect any of the other conditions, such as heart disease or cancer. Nevertheless, while some might view meditation as sitting and doing nothing, doing nothing does something. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Stress; Depression
Link ID: 19175 - Posted: 01.28.2014

by Helen Thomson When the criteria for diagnosing autism were changed last year, concerns were raised that people already diagnosed might be re-evaluated and end up losing access to treatments and services. The American Psychiatric Association (APA), which publishes the diagnostic guidelines, recommends that children who are receiving appropriate treatment as the result of the old criteria should not be required to undergo a re-examination with the new criteria by insurance companies. But a small survey revealed to New Scientist suggests that not everyone is following the party line. In May, the APA published the DSM-5, the latest edition of what has come to be known as psychiatry's diagnostic bible. One controversial change was to the criteria used to diagnose different kinds of autism, which are now combined under the umbrella term of "Autism Spectrum Disorder" (ASD). Under the previous criteria of DSM-4, a person would be diagnosed with ASD by exhibiting at least six of 12 behaviours, which include problems with communication, interaction and repetition. Now, that same person would need to exhibit three deficits in social communication and interaction and at least two repetitive behaviours – the latter, say critics, makes the new criteria more restrictive. To see how the change in criteria was affecting people, Autism Speaks, a US science and advocacy organisation, asked users of its website to complete an online survey about their experiences. "We wanted to ensure that people are still maintaining access to the services they need," says Michael Rosanoff, Autism Speaks' associate director for public health research and scientific review. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 19174 - Posted: 01.27.2014

By SARAH MASLIN NIR The day after the funeral of Avonte Oquendo, the boy with autism whose remains were found this month after he disappeared at age 14 from his school in October, his mother and grandmother stood with Senator Charles E. Schumer as he announced a proposal for a new law. Called “Avonte’s law,” it would finance a program to provide optional electronic tracking devices to be worn by children with autism. “Avonte’s running away was not an isolated incident,” Mr. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said at a news conference on Sunday morning in his office on the East Side of Manhattan. “This is a high-tech solution to an age-old problem.” Citing research that suggests nearly 50 percent of children with autism wander off, often to escape the overstimulation of sounds and noise, Mr. Schumer said the new legislation would expand an existing Department of Justice program that grants money to law enforcement agencies and other groups to provide trackers for people who have Alzheimer’s disease. Mr. Schumer said he had contacted the department months ago about including children with autism in the program. There was receptiveness, he said, but money was needed to provide children with the devices, which cost $80 to $90 and a few dollars a month to operate. The legislation would allocate $10 million for the program, giving interested parents free access to the equipment, which can be worn like a watch or even sewn into clothing. Whether to use such a monitor would be up to the parents, and the exact system of employing the devices would be up to individual municipalities, Mr. Schumer said. There are different variants that could be selected, including one that alerts authorities automatically when a child has stepped across a given perimeter — for example, outside school grounds — and another that becomes activated only after authorities are called. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 19173 - Posted: 01.27.2014

by Helen Thomson The brain that made the greatest contribution to neuroscience and to our understanding of memory has become a gift that keeps on giving. A 3D reconstruction of the brain of Henry Molaison, whose surgery to cure him of epilepsy left him with no short-term memory, will allow scientists to continue to garner insights into the brain for years to come. "Patient HM" became arguably the most famous person in neuroscience after he had several areas of his brain removed in 1953. His resulting amnesia and willingness to be tested have given us unprecedented insights into where memories are formed and stored in the brain. On his death in 2008, HM was revealed to the world as Henry Molaison. Now, a post-mortem examination of his brain, and a new kind of virtual 3D reconstruction, have been published. As a child, Molaison had major epileptic seizures. Anti-epileptic drugs failed, so he sought help from neurosurgeon William Scoville at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut. When Molaison was 27 years old, Scoville removed portions of his medial temporal lobes, which included an area called the hippocampus on both sides of his brain. As a result, Molaison's epilepsy became manageable, but he could not form any new memories, a condition known as anterograde amnesia. He also had difficulty recollecting his long-term past – partial retrograde amnesia.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 19172 - Posted: 01.27.2014

By JULIET MACUR WILLOW PARK, Tex. — The Hall of Famer Rayfield Wright’s increasingly imperfect memory retains an indelible image of his first N.F.L. start. It was November 1969. The Dallas Cowboys against the Los Angeles Rams. Wright, a Cowboys offensive tackle, lined up opposite Deacon Jones, the Rams’ feared defensive end. “Hey, boy,” Jones growled. “Do your mama know you’re out here?” “What does my mama have anything to do with this?” Wright recalled thinking, losing his concentration just long enough for the ball to be snapped and for Jones to slap his dinner-plate-size right hand violently against Wright’s helmet. He hit him so hard that it sent Wright tumbling backward. Wright remembers being knocked out, then waking to see a galaxy of stars as he lay on the turf, unable to move. “It was as if I’d just been hit in the head by a baseball bat,” he said. He turned toward his sideline, looking to Coach Tom Landry for help. Landry just glanced at him, and then turned away. “Lord,” Wright thought. “I’m in this by myself.” For the longest time, he was sure that was true. It took Wright nearly 40 years to recognize that he probably sustained a concussion in his first N.F.L. start, one of many head injuries he says he had in 13 seasons with the Cowboys. Only recently — albeit through the fog of his worsening dementia, which he acknowledged publicly for the first time last week in an interview at his Texas home — has he realized that he is not in this by himself after all. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 19171 - Posted: 01.27.2014

By JANE E. BRODY “Even 50 years after the first surgeon general’s report on smoking and health, we’re still finding out new ways that tobacco kills and maims people,” Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recently told me. “It’s astonishing how bad it is.” Dr. Frieden and public health specialists everywhere are seeking better ways to help the 44 million Americans who still smoke to quit and to keep young people from getting hooked on cigarettes. “Fewer than 2 percent of doctors smoke. Why can’t we get to that rate in society as a whole?” he wondered. One reason: Smoking rates are highest among the poor, poorly educated and people with mental illness, populations hard to reach with educational messages and quit-smoking aids. But when I mentioned to Dr. Frieden, a former New York City health commissioner, that the city’s streets are filled with young adult smokers who appear to be well educated and well dressed, he said television seems to have had an outsize influence. Focus groups of white girls in New York private schools have suggested a “Sex in the City” effect, he said: Girls think smoking makes them look sexy. In the last two years, middle-aged men, too, have begun smoking in increasing numbers after a half-century decline. Dr. Frieden cited “Mad Men,” the popular TV series featuring admen in the early 1960s, when well over half of American men smoked. Dr. Frieden said that an antismoking effort begun in 2008 by the World Health Organization “can make a huge difference in curbing smoking, and we should fully implement what we know works.” The program is called Mpower: © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19170 - Posted: 01.27.2014

Mantis shrimp's super colour vision debunked Jessica Morrison Mantis shrimp don’t see colour like we do. Although the crustaceans have many more types of light-detecting cell than humans, their ability to discriminate between colours is limited, says a report published today in Science1. Researchers found that the mantis shrimp’s colour vision relies on a simple, efficient and previously unknown mechanism that operates at the level of individual photoreceptors. The results upend scientists' suspicions that the shrimp, with 12 different types of colour photoreceptors, could see hues that humans, with just 3, could not, says study co-author Justin Marshall, a marine neuroscientist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. When the human eye sees a yellow leaf, photoreceptors send signals to the brain announcing relative levels of stimuli: receptors sensitive to red and green light report a lot of activity, whereas receptors sensitive to blue light report little. The brain compares the information from each type of receptor to come up with yellow. Using this system, the human eye can distinguish between millions of different colours. To test whether the mantis shrimp, with its 12 receptors, can distinguish many more, Marshall's team trained shrimp of the species Haptosquilla trispinosa to recognize one of ten specific colour wavelengths, ranging from 400 to 650 nanometres, by showing them two colours and giving them a frozen prawn or mussel when they picked the right one. In subsequent testing, the shrimp could discriminate between their trained wavelengths and another colour 50–100 nanometres up or down the spectrum. But when the difference between the trained and test wavelengths was reduced to 12–25 nanometres, the shrimp could no longer tell them apart. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 19169 - Posted: 01.25.2014

By SINDYA N. BHANOO In pursuit of a mate, male fruit flies often engage in combat, battling one another with their front legs. But when the flies are brothers, they are more likely to cooperate, researchers are reporting. In a new study in the journal Nature, Tommaso Pizzari, a zoologist at the University of Oxford, and colleagues write that brother flies live longer as a result. And there are clear benefits for females who live among brothers: They have a longer reproductive life span, a faster rate of egg production and a greater chance of laying eggs that mature to adulthood. The researchers exposed female flies in a laboratory to several different sets of males — three brothers; two brothers and an unrelated male; and three unrelated males. The most peaceful groups were the ones with three brothers, perhaps because supporting one’s kin is an alternative way to pass on common genes. “You can improve your reproductive success yourself or help individuals who also share your genes,” Dr. Pizzari said. Although fruit flies have been extensively studied in labs, the structure of their natural societies remain a bit of a mystery. © 2014 The New York Times Compan

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 19168 - Posted: 01.25.2014

by Erika Engelhaupt Twerking is so 50 million years ago. In fact, it’s probably much older than that. Today, the provocative, butt-shaking dance move is enough of a social phenomenon to merit a word in the dictionary (with twerking defined about as tastefully as possible here by actor Morgan Freeman), but animals have been shaking their hindquarters for ages, for a variety of purposes (more on that below). Black widow spiders are the latest documented twerkers. In their case, it’s the males that shake their rears. Black widow females are aggressive predators and will immediately kill any prey detected in their webs. This presents a problem for males approaching a female to mate; in this case a literal misstep means becoming the female’s dinner. To figure out how the males avoid being eaten (at least before mating), researchers at Simon Fraser University in Canada measured vibrations created by males and by prey in webs of western black widows (Latrodectus hesperus). They compared the vibrations, and the females’ responses, to those of the hobo spider (Tegenaria agrestis), a species in which females rarely attack courting males. To capture the details of small vibrations, they used a fun tool called a laser Doppler vibrometer, which measures small changes in a laser beam aimed at a surface. Sure enough, black widow males appeared to have a death-avoidance strategy. They produced vibrations different from thrashing prey by means of “lengthy andrepeated bouts of abdominal tremulations” averaging 43 wiggles per second, the researchers report January 17 in Frontiers in Zoology. You can see a male's moves in this video: © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2014

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 19167 - Posted: 01.25.2014

Want to read someone’s mind? Look at their pupils. A person about to answer “yes” to a question, especially if they are more used to answering “no,” will have more enlarged pupils than someone about to answer “no,” according to a new study. Normally, pupils dilate when a person is in a darkened environment to let more light into the eye and allow better vision. But pupil size can also be altered by levels of signaling chemicals naturally produced by the brain. In the study, published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists observed the pupils of 29 people as they pressed a “yes” or “no” button to indicate whether they’d seen a difficult-to-detect visual cue on a screen in front of them. When a person was deciding how to answer—in the seconds before pressing a button—their pupils grew larger. And if a person was normally biased toward answering “no” when they weren’t sure on the visual cue, then the pupil change was even more profound in the decision-making seconds before a “yes” answer. The finding could lead to new ways to detect people’s intrinsic biases and how confident they are in an answer given, important variables in many sociological and psychological studies. © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 19166 - Posted: 01.25.2014

|By Stephanie Pappas The justices of the Supreme Court may be among the best legal minds in the country, but they have no eye for distances — and new research may help explain why. During oral arguments Wednesday (Jan. 15) in a case about the constitutionality of laws prohibiting protestors from gathering close to abortion clinic entrances, the justices were stumped at the size of the 35-foot-long (10.6 meters) buffer zone in question. "It's pretty much this courtroom, kind of," ABC News quoted Associate Justice Elena Kagan as saying. In fact, the courtroom is more than 90 feet (30 m) long. After a back-and-forth discussion, the deputy solicitor arguing the case clarified that the no-go zone is the size of the 3-point zone on an NBA basketball court. But judging distances and depth may be trickier than it seems. A recent study, published Oct. 23 in the Journal of Neuroscience, finds that people's depth perception depends on their perception of their arm's length. Trick someone into thinking their arm is shorter or longer, and you can influence how they perceive distances between two objects. Depth perception, the ability to judge the distances of objects from one another, is an important ability; without it, one would have no way of knowing that a marble in their hand and a basketball 6 feet away were actually two different sizes. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 19165 - Posted: 01.25.2014

"Everybody has won and all must have prizes," declared the dodo in Alice in Wonderland when asked to judge the winner of a race around a lake. As judgements go, it is admirably even-handed and optimistic. But in the world of mental health the dodo's decision has come to symbolise a bitter dispute that strikes at the very heart of psychotherapy. The "Dodo Bird Verdict", first suggested in the 1930s by the American psychologist Saul Rosenzweig, proposes that the many and various forms of psychological therapy are all equally effective. It makes no difference whether, for example, a person is being treated with techniques drawn from psychoanalysis, neurolinguistic programming, or cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). What really helps a patient to recover are straightforward factors such as the opportunity to discuss their worries with a skilled and sympathetic therapist or the degree to which they are prepared to engage with the treatment. Understandably, the Dodo Bird Verdict has ruffled many feathers within the profession, and provoked a slew of studies aiming to corroborate or disprove the idea. Are some types of psychotherapy really more effective than others for particular conditions? There is plentiful data to suggest that the answer to that question – contrary to Rosenzweig's theory – is "yes". But that data tends to come from research conducted by proponents of the ostensibly superior therapy, leaving sceptics to conclude that their conclusions are not impartial. This makes the results of a study of treatments for the eating disorder bulimia nervosa, published this month in the American Journal of Psychiatry, all the more convincing. Bulimia is characterised by binge eating, followed by attempts to compensate by making oneself vomit, taking laxatives or diuretics (water tablets), fasting, and/or exercising frantically. Underlying this behaviour is an intense concern – an obsession, even – with body shape and weight. © 2014 Guardian News

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 19164 - Posted: 01.25.2014

|By Stephanie Pappas and LiveScience Even water tastes sweeter when you're in love, new research finds. But not every emotion heightens the senses. Jealousy fails to bring out bitter or sour tastes, despite metaphors that suggest it might, researchers report in the December 2013 issue of the journal Emotion. That love alters one's sensory perceptions and jealousy does not is important to psychologists who study what are called "embodied" metaphors, or linguistic flourishes people quite literally feel in their bones. For example, studies have shown that people induced to feel lonely rate the temperature of the room as colder than do their unprimed counterparts. And the idea that important things have heft plays out physically, too: When someone believes a book is important, it feels heavier. But "just because there is a metaphor does not necessarily imply that we will get these kind of sensations and perception effects," said study researcher Kai Qin Chan, a doctoral candidate at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. After seeing previous research on emotional metaphors, like the studies linking loneliness to coldness and heaviness to importance, Chan and his colleagues wanted to expand the question. "We always say, 'love is sweet,' 'honey baby,' this kind of thing," Chan told LiveScience. "We thought, let's see whether this applies to love." © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 19163 - Posted: 01.25.2014

|By Meredith Knight When most of us imagine someone in pain, we feel uncomfortable and want to help. Psychopaths do not: a callousness toward others' suffering is the central feature of a psychopathic personality. Now an imaging study finds that psychopathic inmates have deficits in a key empathy circuit in the brain, pointing to a potential therapeutic target. Jean Decety, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, and his colleagues used functional MRI to scan the brains of 121 male prison inmates while they looked at photos of a painful moment, such as a foot stepping on a nail or a finger being smashed in a drawer. The inmates were instructed to imagine the scenario happening to themselves or to another person, a perspective-switching technique that easily elicits empathy in most people. Inmates who scored the highest on a standard psychopathy test showed a normal response in pain perception and brain centers for emotion when imagining the pain for themselves. Yet when asked to imagine the scenario happening to others, their brains did not show typical connectivity between the amygdala, an area important for fear and emotional processing, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region vital for emotion regulation, empathy and morality. Some results even indicated that pleasure regions might have become active instead. The brain areas that are undercommunicating in psychopathy “are key for experiencing empathetic concern and caring for one another, which is what empathy is all about and what individuals who score high on psychopathy do not have,” Decety says. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Aggression; Emotions
Link ID: 19162 - Posted: 01.25.2014

|By Ajai Raj As the climate heats up, tempers may follow suit, according to a study published in August 2013 in Nature. Analyzing 60 quantitative studies across fields as disparate as archaeology, criminology, economics, geography, history, political science and psychology, University of California researchers found that throughout history and across the world, higher temperatures, less rainfall and more drought were consistently linked to increased violence. The correlation held true for aggression between individuals, such as domestic abuse and assault, but was even more pronounced for conflict between groups [see timeline]. “We didn't expect for there to be nearly so many convergent findings among so many different researchers,” says economist Solomon Hsiang, now at U.C. Berkeley, who led the study. “We were actually really stunned by the level of consistency in the findings that were out there and by the size of the effects we were observing.” The researchers used statistical modeling to show that aggression scales with a combination of temperature, place and time—for example, if one U.S. county is three degrees Celsius warmer for three months or one African country is 0.6 degree C warmer for a year, statistics reveal an uptick in crime, violence and revolutionary fervor. The reasons behind the climate-violence link are complex and not fully understood, although anyone who has lived through a heat wave can attest to one simple fact: “When people are hot, it makes them cranky,” says Brian Lickel, a social psychologist who is on the faculty of the Psychology of Peace and Violence program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and who was not involved in the study. “It makes people more prone to anger, it makes people more frustrated, and it makes decision making more impulsive. And that can lead to altercations that escalate to more extreme levels of aggression.” © 2014 Scientific American,

Keyword: Emotions; Aggression
Link ID: 19161 - Posted: 01.25.2014

By Eric Niiler, It may come as a surprise that Finland — one of the least polluted, wealthiest countries, where average life expectancy is among the world’s highest — has the highest rate of Type 1 diabetes. Each year, there are about 58 cases diagnosed per 100,000 children; in the United States there are 24 cases per 100,000, according to the International Diabetes Federation. Some researchers suspect there may be a connection between Finland’s cleanliness and the incidence of the disease there. They are investigating whether the lack of exposure to a specific group of bacteria found in the intestine may be causing weaker immune systems in Finnish children, making them more susceptible to Type 1 diabetes. This so-called hygiene hypothesis — that cleaner living can result in a weaker immune system — has also been linked to ailments such as asthma, allergies and other autoimmune diseases. “We are working along the idea that we have a trigger which most likely is an infectious agent,” said Mikael Knip, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Helsinki who has been studying diabetes for 30 years. “There is an association between such infections and appearance of antibodies.” Just as there are microbes that trigger the disease, Knip says there are also some bacterial or viral infections that, if they occur at an early age, can protect a young child from developing Type 1 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes, which affects approximately 37 million people worldwide, is an autoimmune disease in which the body does not produce sufficient insulin, a hormone needed to break down sugars. Typically diagnosed in children, teens and young adults, the disease can eventually damage the eyes and organs such as the kidneys, and it increases the likelihood of stroke and heart failure. © 1996-2014 The Washington Post

Keyword: Obesity; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 19160 - Posted: 01.22.2014