By Roni Jacobson Over the past 10 years the number of overdose deaths from prescription painkillers—also known as opioid analgesics—has tripled, from 4,000 people in 1999 to more than 15,000 people every year in the U.S. today. Prescription pain medication now causes more overdose deaths than heroin and cocaine combined. In 2010 one in 20 Americans older than age 12 reported taking painkillers recreationally; some steal from pharmacies or buy them from a dealer, but most have a doctor's prescription or gain access to pills through friends and relatives. Yet millions of people legitimately rely on these medications to cope with the crippling pain they face every day. How do we make sure prescription opioids are readily available to those who depend on them for medical relief but not so available that they become easily abused? Here we break down the steps taken at various levels—and the experts' recommendations for future interventions—to curb prescription opioid addiction and overdose in the U.S. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 19159 - Posted: 01.22.2014

By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online A magnet device can be used to treat some types of migraine, new UK guidance advises. The watchdog NICE says although there is limited evidence, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) may help ease symptoms in some patients. It says that the procedure is still relatively new and that more data is needed about its long-term safety and efficacy. But it may be useful for patients for whom other treatments have failed. Migraine is common - it affects about one in four women and one in 12 men in the UK. There are several types - with and without aura and with or without headache - and several treatment options, including common painkillers, such as paracetamol. Although there is no cure for migraine, it is often possible to prevent or lessen the severity of attacks. NICE recommends various medications, as well as acupuncture, and now also TMS, under the supervision of a specialist doctor - although it has not assessed whether it would be a cost effective therapy for the NHS. TMS involves using a portable device that is placed on the scalp to deliver a brief magnetic pulse. NICE says doctors and patients might wish to try TMS, but they should be aware about the treatment's uncertainties. Reduction in migraine symptoms may be moderate, it says. Prof Peter Goadsby, chairman of the British Association for the Study of Headache, said many migraine patients stood to benefit from trying TMS. BBC © 2014

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 19158 - Posted: 01.22.2014

By CARL ZIMMER The term “X chromosome” has an air of mystery to it, and rightly so. It got its name in 1891 from a baffled biologist named Hermann Henking. To investigate the nature of chromosomes, Henking examined cells under a simple microscope. All the chromosomes in the cells came in pairs. All except one. Henking labeled this outlier chromosome the “X element.” No one knows for sure what he meant by the letter. Maybe he saw it as an extra chromosome. Or perhaps he thought it was an ex-chromosome. Maybe he used X the way mathematicians do, to refer to something unknown. Today, scientists know the X chromosome much better. It’s part of the system that determines whether we become male or female. If an egg inherits an X chromosome from both parents, it becomes female. If it gets an X from its mother and a Y from its father, it becomes male. But the X chromosome remains mysterious. For one thing, females shut down an X chromosome in every cell, leaving only one active. That’s a drastic step to take, given that the X chromosome has more than 1,000 genes. In some cells, the father’s goes dormant, and in others, the mother’s does. While scientists have known about this so-called X-chromosome inactivation for more than five decades, they still know little about the rules it follows, or even how it evolved. In the journal Neuron, a team of scientists has unveiled an unprecedented view of X-chromosome inactivation in the body. They found a remarkable complexity to the pattern in which the chromosomes were switched on and off. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 19157 - Posted: 01.21.2014

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News Doing the night shift throws the body "into chaos" and could cause long-term damage, warn researchers. Shift work has been linked to higher rates of type 2 diabetes, heart attacks and cancer. Now scientists at the Sleep Research Centre in Surrey have uncovered the disruption shift work causes at the deepest molecular level. Experts said the scale, speed and severity of damage caused by being awake at night was a surprise. The human body has its own natural rhythm or body clock tuned to sleep at night and be active during the day. It has profound effects on the body, altering everything from hormones and body temperature to athletic ability, mood and brain function. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, followed 22 people as their body was shifted from a normal pattern to that of a night-shift worker. Blood tests showed that normally 6% of genes - the instructions contained in DNA - were precisely timed to be more or less active at specific times of the day. Once the volunteers were working through the night, that genetic fine-tuning was lost. "Over 97% of rhythmic genes become out of sync with mistimed sleep and this really explains why we feel so bad during jet lag, or if we have to work irregular shifts," said Dr Simon Archer, one of the researchers at the University of Surrey. BBC © 2014

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 19156 - Posted: 01.21.2014

by Laura Sanders Growing up, I loved it when my parents read aloud the stories of the Berenstain Bears living in their treehouse. So while I was pregnant with my daughter, I imagined lots of cuddly quiet time with her in a comfy chair, reading about the latest adventures of Brother and Sister. Of course, reality soon let me know just how ridiculous that idea was. My newborn couldn’t see more than a foot away, cried robustly and frequently for mysterious reasons, and didn’t really understand words yet. Baby V was simply not interested in the latest dispatch from Bear County. When I started reading child development expert Elaine Reese’s new book Tell Me a Story, I realized that I was not the only one with idyllic story time dreams. Babies and toddlers are squirmy, active people with short attention spans. “Why, then, do we cling to this soft-focus view of storytelling when we know it is unrealistic?” she writes. These days, as Baby V closes in on the 1-year mark, she has turned into a most definite book lover. But it’s not the stories that enchant her. It’s holding the book, turning its pages back to front to back again, flipping it over and generally showing it who’s in charge. Every so often I can entice Baby V to sit on my lap with a book, but we never read through a full story. Instead, we linger on the page with all the junk food that the Hungry Caterpillar chomps through, sticking our fingers in the little holes in the pages. And we make Froggy pop in and out of the bucket. And we study the little goats as they climb up and up and up on the hay bales. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2014

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 19155 - Posted: 01.21.2014

by Bethany Brookshire There are some scientific topics that are bound to generate excitement. A launch to the moon, a potential cure for cancer or any study involving chocolate will always make the news. And then of course there’s caffeine. More than half of Americans have a daily coffee habit, not to mention the boost offered by tea, soda, chocolate and energy drinks. We’d all love to believe that it has more benefit than just papering over a poor night’s sleep. This week, scientists reported that caffeine could give a jolt to memory consolidation, the step right after your brain acquires a memory. During memory consolidation, activity patterns laid down in your brain become more permanent. The study suggested that caffeine might perk up this stage of memory formation. But while it’s an interesting finding, the scientific brew may not be strong enough to justify your coffee habit. Caffeine is a great way to wake you up. It blocks the action of adenosine, a chemical messenger that promotes sleep. Caffeine also has indirect effects on other chemical messengers such as norepinephrine, the neurotransmitter that gives us our famous “fight or flight” response. The net result is increased attention, wakefulness and faster responses. But attention, focus and response time are not memory. And previous studies of memory, says neuroscientist Michael Yassa, the lead author on the new study, were “all over the place.” So Yassa, then at Johns Hopkins University (he’s now at the University of California, Irvine), and undergraduate student Daniel Borota decided to study the effects of caffeine on memory “in a rigorous way.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2014

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19154 - Posted: 01.20.2014

US President Barack Obama has said smoking marijuana is no more dangerous than alcohol, but still called it a "bad idea". Speaking to The New Yorker magazine, he said it was wrong to think legalising the drug would be "a panacea" that could solve many social problems. Mr Obama was referring to recent legalisation of marijuana in the states of Colorado and Washington. He has previously admitted using the drug when he was young. "As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life," Mr Obama said. But he added that in terms of its impact on the individual consumer "I don't think it is more dangerous than alcohol". He also said that poor people - many of them African Americans and Latinos - were disproportionately punished for marijuana use, whereas middle-class users mostly escaped harsh penalties. "It's important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished." Mr Obama described the legalisation of marijuana in Colorado and Washington as a challenging "experiment". BBC © 2014

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19153 - Posted: 01.20.2014

by Susan Milius For springtails, sex can be an Easter egg hunt. Many males of the tiny soil organisms sustain their species by leaving drops of sperm glistening here and there in the landscape in case a female chooses to pick one up. “The male never meets the female,” says Zaira Valentina Zizzari of VU University Amsterdam, who studies a species of these extreme loners called Orchesella cincta. Just about every degree of mating intimacy, from unseen sperm donors to elaborate courtship and internal insemination, shows up in springtails. That makes the ancient group — which may not belong to the insects but to another set of six-legged arthropods on its own evolutionary trajectory — a treasure trove for biologists studying sex. In O. cincta, little brown-and-white males roam the leaf litter making no apparent effort to find a female. Instead, males pause here and there for a few seconds to leave behind white stalks topped by a shiny-coated globes, each holding more than 1,000 sperm. Sperm on a stalk is still viable after sitting two days in the lab. Outdoors it may not last so long. “You have a lot of rivals searching for sperm just to destroy it,” Zizzari says. Males eat rivals’ sperm. Given the rivalry, it wouldn’t be surprising if males engaged in an arms race to produce more sperm stalks than their competitors. But Zizzari was surprised to discover that male O. cincta make fewer sperm packages when a competitor is sperm-dotting the neighborhood. Maybe he’s enhancing the few he makes with extra sex appeal, Zizzari mused. To test the idea, she offered lab females a choice of globes from males with rivals or those made by an uncrowded guy. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2014

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 19152 - Posted: 01.20.2014

Things are heating up in the world of genetics. The hot pepper (Capsicum annuum) is one of the most widely grown spice crops globally, playing an important role in many medicines, makeups, and meals worldwide. Although the plant’s so-called capsaicin chemical is well known for spicing things up, until now the genetic spark responsible for the pepper’s pungency was unknown. A team of scientists recently completed the first high-quality reference genome for the hot pepper. Comparing the pepper’s genome with that of its tame cousin, the tomato, the scientists discovered the gene responsible for fiery capsaicin production appeared in both plants. While the tomato carried four nonfunctioning copies of the gene, the hot pepper carried seven nonfunctioning copies and one functioning copy, the team reports online today in Nature Genetics. The researchers believe the pepper’s capsaicin-creating gene appeared after five mutations occurred during DNA replication, with the final mutation creating a functional copy. The mouth-burning chemicals likely protected the mutant pepper’s seeds from grazing land animals millions of years ago, giving the mutant a reproductive advantage and helping the mutant gene spread. The team says the finding could help breeders boost the pepper’s heat, nutrition, and medicinal properties. One researcher even suggests that geneticists could activate one of the tomato’s dormant genes, enabling capsaicinoid production and creating a plant that makes ready-made salsa. © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Evolution
Link ID: 19151 - Posted: 01.20.2014

A clean slate—that’s what people suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) crave most with their memories. Psychotherapy is more effective at muting more recent traumatic events than those from long ago, but a new study in mice shows that modifying the molecules that attach to our DNA may offer a route to quashing painful memories in both cases. One of the most effective treatments for PTSD is exposure psychotherapy. A behavioral psychologist asks a patient to recall and confront a traumatic event; each time the traumatic memory is revisited, it becomes susceptible to editing through a phenomenon known as memory reconsolidation. As the person relives, for example, a car crash, the details of the event—such as the color and make of the vehicle—gradually uncouple from the anxiety, reducing the likelihood of a panic attack the next time the patient sees, say, a red Mazda. Repeated therapy sessions can also lead to memory extinction, in which the fears tied to an event fade away as old memories are replaced with new ones. Yet this therapy works only for recent memories. If too much time passes before intervention, the haunting visions become stalwart, refusing to budge from the crevices of the mind. This persistence raises the question of how the brain tells the age of a memory in the first place. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led by neurobiologist Li-Huei Tsai, have now uncovered a chemical modification of DNA that regulates gene activity and dictates whether a memory is too old for reconsolidation in mice. A drug that tweaks these “memory wrinkles” gives old memories a face-lift, allowing them to be edited by reconsolidation and resulting in fear extinction during behavior therapy. © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Stress
Link ID: 19150 - Posted: 01.18.2014

By SABRINA TAVERNISE WASHINGTON — In a broad review of scientific literature, the nation’s top doctor has concluded that cigarette smoking — long known to cause lung cancer and heart disease — also causes diabetes, colorectal and liver cancers, erectile dysfunction and ectopic pregnancy. In a report to the nation to be released on Friday, the acting surgeon general, Dr. Boris D. Lushniak, significantly expanded the list of illnesses that cigarette smoking has been scientifically proved to cause. The other health problems the report names are vision loss, tuberculosis, rheumatoid arthritis, impaired immune function and cleft palates in children of women who smoke. Smoking has been known to be associated with these illnesses, but the report was the first time the federal government concluded that smoking causes them. The finding does not mean that smoking causes all cases of the health problems and diseases listed in the report, but that some of the cases would not have happened without smoking. The surgeon general has added to the list of smoking-related diseases before. Bladder cancer was added in 1990 and cervical cancer in 2004. When President Nixon signed the National Cancer Act many expected quick results, comparing the effort to the one that put man on the moon. After 42 years, what progress have we made? The report is not legally binding, but is broadly held as a standard for scientific evidence among researchers and policy makers. Experts not involved in writing the report said the findings were a comprehensive summary of the most current scientific evidence, and while they might not be surprising to researchers, they were intended to inform the public as well as doctors and other medical professionals about the newest proven risks of smoking. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19149 - Posted: 01.18.2014

Overweight and obese adults who drink diet pop also tend to eat more calories each day from food, a finding that hints at how relying on diet beverages for weight loss could be a mistake. In this week’s issue of the American Journal of Public Health, researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore analyzed U.S. survey data for 24,000 people from 1999 to 2010. They looked for patterns in beverage consumption and calories. The sweet taste of beverages, whether from sugar or artificial sweeteners, seems to enhance our appetite and encourage cravings for sugar. (Rob Carr/Associated Press) Overweight consumers of diet beverages took in 1,965 in food calories a day compared with 1,874 calories among those in the same weight class who drank beverages sweetened with sugar, such as non-diet soda, sports drinks, fruit drinks and sweetened tea. As people increasingly switch to diet beverages, the focus on reducing sugar from drinks might not be enough to lose weight in the long term, the researchers concluded. "The switch from a sugary beverage to a diet beverage should be coupled with other changes in the diet, particularly reducing snacks," suggested lead author Sara Bleich. In the study, snacking patterns were generally the same between diet and sugary beverage drinkers. The researchers said the finding is consistent with evidence that the sweet taste of beverages, whether from sugar or artificial sweeteners, enhances our appetite and encourage cravings for sugar. © CBC 2014

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 19148 - Posted: 01.18.2014

-- Bats and other animals use ultrasound to their advantage. Now a new study of humans suggests ultrasound can alter brain activity to boost people's sensory perception. First, researchers placed an electrode on the wrist of volunteers to stimulate the nerve that runs down the arm and into the hand. Before stimulating the radial nerve, they delivered ultrasound to the head -- to an area of the cerebral cortex that processes sensory information received from the hand. The participants' brain responses were recorded using electroencephalography (EEG). The ultrasound decreased the EEG signal and weakened the brain waves responsible for processing sensory input from the hands, according to the study published online Jan. 12 in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The Virginia Tech researchers then conducted two common neurological tests. One measures a person's ability to distinguish whether two pins placed close together and touching the skin are actually two distinct contact points. The other test measures sensitivity to the frequency of a series of air puffs. The scientists were surprised to discover that when they received ultrasound, the participants showed significant improvements in their ability to distinguish pins at closer distances and to identify small differences in the frequency of successive air puffs. The ultrasound may have changed the balance of inhibition and excitation between neighboring neurons within the cerebral cortex, resulting in a boost in sensory perception, explained study leader William Tyler, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech's Carilion Research Institute. © 2014 HealthDay

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 19147 - Posted: 01.18.2014

By Melissa Healy Adolescents treated with the antidepressant fluoxetine -- better known by its commercial name, Prozac -- appear to undergo changes in brain signaling that result in changed behavior well into adulthood, says a new study. Adult mice and rats who were administered Prozac for a stretch of mid-adolescence responded to daunting social and physical challenges with less despair than animals who passed their teen years unmedicated, a team of researchers found. But, even as adults long separated from their antidepressant days, the Prozac veterans reacted to stressful situations with greater anxiety than did the adult Prozac virgins. The latest research, published Wednesday in the Journal of Neuroscience, offers evidence that treatment with a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor -- an SSRI antidepressant -- has long-lived effects on the developing brain. It also zeroes in on how and where fluoxetine effects those lasting changes: by modifying the cascade of chemical signals issued by the brain's ventral tegmentum -- a region active in mood regulation -- in stressful situations. Yet, the new research raises more questions than it answers, since the changes in adults who were treated with Prozac as adolescents seem contradictory. Sensitivity to stress appears to predispose one to developing depression. So how does a medication that treats depression in children and teens -- and that continues to protect them from depression as adults -- also heighten their sensitivity to stress?

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 19146 - Posted: 01.18.2014

By Evelyn Boychuk, Caleb is a 14-year-old who enjoys playing video games and reading any book he can get his hands on – and in his spare time, he edits neuroscience papers for a scientific journal. Frontiers for Young Minds is the first journal to bring kids into the middle of the scientific process by making them editors – and it’s free for everyone. The idea came “from the depths of my mind, in a moment when I was bored at a scientific meeting,” says Bob Knight, editor in chief of Frontiers for Young Minds and a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley. This is one of many science outreach efforts that are trying to get youth excited about science, technology, engineering and math courses. A preview version with 15 articles was released at the Society for Neuroscience conference on Nov. 11. The official launch of the monthly journal is planned for the U.S.A. Science and Engineering Festival in Washington D.C. in April. “The kids have been great,” says Knight. “Their reviews are not filtered, they just tell you what they think.” In an e-mail, one of the young editors said, “'Hey Bob, I have to tell you, I didn’t understand anything in this article. The words are too big and it’s too confusing,'” Knight recounted. When Caleb was asked if he would edit an article for this preview, "it seemed like an interesting opportunity," he said, so he gave it a try. © CBC 2014

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 19145 - Posted: 01.18.2014

By TRICIA ROMANO Like many men of his generation, Larry Faust, 61, of Seattle, went to a lot of rock concerts in his youth. And like many men of his generation, his hearing isn’t what it used to be. “My wife has been bugging me for several years to do something about my hearing,” said Mr. Faust. “I spent part of the summer of 1969 at Woodstock. So that probably didn’t help.” Instead of going the traditional route — buying hearing aids through an audiologist or licensed hearing aid dispenser — Mr. Faust purchased a device that is classified as a personal sound amplifier product, or P.S.A.P., which is designed to amplify sounds in a recreational environment. Unlike hearing aids, P.S.A.P.’s are exempt from Food and Drug Administration oversight and can be sold as electronic devices directly to consumers, with no need to see a physician before buying one. They come with a range of features and vary widely in price. And while some hearing professionals have long cautioned against the devices, citing their unreliability and poor quality, many also say that a new generation of P.S.A.P.s that utilize the latest wireless technology are offering promising alternatives for some people with hearing loss. The device Mr. Faust bought, the CS10 from a Chicago-based company called Sound World Solutions, cost $299.99, thousands of dollars cheaper than most digital hearing aids. While it has many of the same features that high-end hearing aids have, including 16 channels to process sound, directional microphones, feedback insulation and noise reduction, it has one capability that hearing aids and other devices on the market currently don’t have. It comes with software that enables consumers to program it themselves, a feature made possible in part by the adoption of the widely available Bluetooth wireless technology, rather than the proprietary platforms used by most wireless hearing aids. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 19144 - Posted: 01.16.2014

Ian Sample, science correspondent Two men with progressive blindness have regained some of their vision after taking part in the first clinical trial of a gene therapy for the condition. The men were among six patients to have experimental treatment for a rare, inherited, disorder called choroideremia, which steadily destroys eyesight and leaves people blind in middle age. After therapy to correct a faulty gene, the men could read two to four more lines on an optician's sight chart, a dramatic improvement that has held since the doctors treated them. One man was treated more than two years ago. The other four patients, who had less advanced disease and good eyesight before the trial, had better night vision after the therapy. Poor sight in dim light is one of the first signs of the condition. Writing in The Lancet , doctors describe the progress of the patients six months after the therapy. If further trials are as effective, the team could apply for approval for the therapy in the next five years. Some other forms of blindness could be treated in a similar way. Toby Stroh, 56, a solicitor from London, was in his early 20s when a consultant told him he would be blind by the age of 50. "I said 'what do you mean?' and he said, 'you won't be able to see me'. It was a long way away, but still a bit of a shock." Stroh was told later that his vision had deteriorated so much he would have to stop driving. Then, when he joined a solicitors' firm he told a partner his eyesight was not expected to last. The response was: "We'll be sorry to see you go." © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 19143 - Posted: 01.16.2014

By DAN HURLEY Two and a half millenniums ago, a prince named Siddhartha Gautama traveled to Bodh Gaya, India, and began to meditate beneath a tree. Forty-nine days of continuous meditation later, tradition tells us, he became the Buddha — the enlightened one. More recently, a psychologist named Amishi Jha traveled to Hawaii to train United States Marines to use the same technique for shorter sessions to achieve a much different purpose: mental resilience in a war zone. “We found that getting as little as 12 minutes of meditation practice a day helped the Marines to keep their attention and working memory — that is, the added ability to pay attention over time — stable,” said Jha, director of the University of Miami’s Contemplative Neuroscience, Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative. “If they practiced less than 12 minutes or not at all, they degraded in their functioning.” Jha, whose program has received a $1.7 million, four-year grant from the Department of Defense, described her results at a bastion of scientific conservatism, the New York Academy of Sciences, during a meeting on “The Science of Mindfulness.” Yet mindfulness hasn’t long been part of serious scientific discourse. She first heard another scientist mention the word “meditation” during a lecture in 2005. “I thought, I can’t believe he just used that word in this audience, because it wasn’t something I had ever heard someone utter in a scientific context,” Jha said. Although pioneers like Jon Kabat-Zinn, now emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, began teaching mindfulness meditation as a means of reducing stress as far back as the 1970s, all but a dozen or so of the nearly 100 randomized clinical trials have been published since 2005. And the most recent studies of mindfulness — the simple, nonjudgmental observation of a person’s breath, body or just about anything else — are taking the practice in directions that might have shocked the Buddha. In addition to military fitness, scientists are now testing brief stints of mindfulness training as a means to improve scores on standardized tests and lay down new connections between brain cells. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Consciousness
Link ID: 19142 - Posted: 01.16.2014

By Meeri Kim, Rats, like humans, will show kindness to strangers, but only if the rats in distress are of a familiar type, a new study has found. Neurobiologists from the University of Chicago have discovered that rats display empathy-like behavior toward other rats, but the basis of that empathy is environmental, rather than genetic. The creatures aren’t born with an innate motivation to help rats of their own kind, but instead those with whom they are socially familiar. “Rats choose to help according to which rats they’ve had a positive social experience with in the past,” said study author and postdoctoral researcher Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal. As part of what Bartal calls the “Mowgli experiment” — a reference to the boy raised by wolves in Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” — researchers plucked albino pups from their mothers on the day they were born and transferred them to a group of black-patched rats. As adults, the albinos refused to help other albinos but readily freed black-patched rats. “There’s no mirror in nature,” said study author and neurobiologist Peggy Mason. “They are not born with an idea of who they are, and therefore, who they should help.” The study was published online Tuesday in the journal eLife. © 1996-2014 The Washington Post

Keyword: Emotions; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 19141 - Posted: 01.16.2014

Dan Hurley Forget mindfulness meditation, computerized working-memory training, and learning a musical instrument; all methods recently shown by scientists to increase intelligence. There could be an easier answer. It turns out that sex might actually make you smarter. Researchers in Maryland and South Korea recently found that sexual activity in mice and rats improves mental performance and increases neurogenesis (the production of new neurons) in the hippocampus, where long-term memories are formed. In April, a team from the University of Maryland reported that middle-aged rats permitted to engage in sex showed signs of improved cognitive function and hippocampal function. In November, a group from Konkuk University in Seoul concluded that sexual activity counteracts the memory-robbing effects of chronic stress in mice. “Sexual interaction could be helpful,” they wrote, “for buffering adult hippocampal neurogenesis and recognition memory function against the suppressive actions of chronic stress.” So growing brain cells through sex does appear to have some basis in scientific fact. But there’s some debate over whether fake sex—pornography—could be harmful. Neuroscientists from the University of Texas recently argued that excessive porn viewing, like other addictions, can result in permanent “anatomical and pathological” changes to the brain. That view, however, was quickly challenged in a rebuttal from researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, who said that the Texans "offered little, if any, convincing evidence to support their perspectives. Instead, excessive liberties and misleading interpretations of neuroscience research are used to assert that excessive pornography consumption causes brain damage." © 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 19140 - Posted: 01.16.2014