Vanessa Rom When put to the test, bees have proved over and over again that they've got a lot more to offer than pollinating, making honey and being fiercely loyal to a queen. The industrious insects can count and alter their behavior when things seem difficult, and now some scientists say there's proof they also like to play. A study recently published in Animal Behavior suggests that bumblebees, when given the chance, like to fool around with toys. Researchers from Queen Mary University of London conducted an experiment in which they set up a container that allowed bees to travel from their nest to a feeding area. But along the way, the bees could opt to pass through a separate section with a smattering of small wooden balls. Over 18 days, the scientists watched as the bees "went out of their way to roll wooden balls repeatedly, despite no apparent incentive to do so." The finding suggests that like humans, insects also interact with inanimate objects as a form of play. Also similar to people, younger bees seemed to be more playful than adult bees. In this experiment from researchers at Queen Mary University of London, bumblebees, especially young ones, appeared to show they liked to cling to wooden balls twice their size and roll them around just for the fun of it. "This research provides a strong indication that insect minds are far more sophisticated than we might imagine," Lars Chittka, a professor of sensory and behavioral ecology at Queen Mary University of London, who led the study, said in a statement. Earlier studies have shown that the black and yellow bugs are willing to learn new tricks in exchange for food or other rewards, so in this case Chittka and his team set out to create conditions that would eliminate external variables. They made sure that the bees had acclimated to their new home and that their environment was stress free. © 2022 npr

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 28538 - Posted: 11.05.2022

By Veronique Greenwood Anyone who’s had a shady oyster or a mushroom soup that didn’t sit well remembers the ominous queasiness heralding impending bad times. Bacteria release toxins that start the body’s process of speedily evacuating the contents of the stomach. It’s a protective mechanism of sorts — getting rid of the invaders en masse is probably helpful in the long term, even if it’s unpleasant in the short. But it has remained something of a mystery how the brain gets the alarm signal, then sends another one to tell the stomach to initiate a technicolor yawn. Your next bout of food poisoning isn’t the only reason to understand this particular neural pathway. Figuring out how to counter it could be helpful for people who develop nausea caused by chemotherapy medication and other drugs. As if fighting cancer isn’t painful and scary enough, patients are often so turned off by food that keeping their weight up becomes a major struggle. In a new study, researchers report that both bacteria and chemotherapy drugs appear to trigger the same molecular pathways in the gut. The findings, which were based on experiments with mice and published Tuesday in the journal Cell, showed that a bacterial toxin and a chemo medication both set in motion a cascade of similar neural messages that cause queasiness. Choosing mice for the study was unusual. Mice, it turns out, can’t puke — a little foible that typically makes it difficult to use them to study nausea. Researchers have used cats and dogs in the past, but the biology of mice in general is so much better understood, with much better tools available to scientists to do so. Cao Peng, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and his colleagues wondered whether mice might still be capable of feeling ill in the way people do after ingesting a chemo drug or a bad salad — or close enough, anyway, that researchers could use the creatures to understand the origins of the sensation. © 2022 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Stress
Link ID: 28537 - Posted: 11.02.2022

By Elena Renken The brain’s lifeline, its network of blood vessels, is like a tree, says Mathieu Pernot, deputy director of the Physics for Medicine Paris Lab. The trunk begins in the neck with the carotid arteries, a pair of broad channels that then split into branches that climb into the various lobes of the brain. These channels fork endlessly into a web of tiny vessels that form a kind of canopy. The narrowest of these vessels are only wide enough for a single red blood cell to pass through, and in one important sense these vessels are akin to the tree’s leaves. “When you want to look at pathology, usually you don’t see the sickness in the tree, but in the leaves,” Pernot says. (You can identify Dutch Elm Disease when the tree’s leaves yellow and wilt.) Just like leaves, the tiniest blood vessels in the brain often register changes in neuron and synapse activity first, including illness, such as new growth in a cancerous brain tumor.1, 2 But only in the past decade or so have we developed the technology to detect these microscopic changes in blood flow: It’s called ultrafast ultrasound. Standard ultrasound is already popular in clinical imaging given that it is minimally invasive, low-cost, portable, and can generate images in real time.3 But until now, it has rarely been used to image the brain. That’s partly because the skull gets in the way—bone tends to scatter ultrasound waves—and the technology is too slow to detect blood flow in the smaller arteries that support most brain function. Neurologists have mostly used it in niche applications: to examine newborns, whose skulls have gaps between the bone plates, or to guide surgeons in some brain surgeries, where part of the skull is typically removed. Neuroscience researchers have also used it to study functional differences between the two hemispheres of the brain, based on imaging of the major cerebral arteries, by positioning the device over the temporal bone window, the thinnest area of the skull. © 2022 NautilusThink Inc,

Keyword: Brain imaging; Hearing
Link ID: 28536 - Posted: 11.02.2022

Jon Hamilton Computer games designed to boost self-esteem appear to prolong the antidepressant benefits of the mind-bending anesthetic ketamine. A recent study of 154 people found that those who played games featuring smiling faces and positive messages remained free of depression up to three months after a ketamine infusion, a team reports in the American Journal of Psychiatry. People who got ketamine alone tended to relapse after a week or two. The results are important because "we need new approaches that help people get feeling better faster and help them stay feeling better," says Rebecca Price, an author of the study and an associate professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. Established drugs like Prozac and Zoloft can take weeks to ease depression, and don't work for every patient. Ketamine can offer immediate relief, but the effects often fade after a few days or weeks. "And then returning for infusions over and over to keep that relief going can end up being really burdensome and costly," Price says, "and just isn't accessible to all patients." So Price and a team of researchers wanted to find a way to make ketamine's antidepressant effects last longer. They decided to focus on a common symptom of depression: low self-esteem and self-loathing. The team drew on research suggesting that ketamine temporarily causes certain brain areas to enter a state in which they form lots of new connections. During this period, the brain seems to be more receptive to learning and change. "So we tried to use that window of opportunity just after ketamine to strengthen associations specifically between the idea of me, myself, and positive information and attributes," Price says. © 2022 npr

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 28535 - Posted: 11.02.2022

Jon Hamilton An idea that has propelled Alzheimer's research for more than 30 years is approaching its day of reckoning. Scientists are launching a study designed to make or break the hypothesis that Alzheimer's is caused by a sticky substance called beta-amyloid. The study will give an experimental anti-amyloid drug to people as young as 18 who have gene mutations that often cause Alzheimer's to appear in their 30s or 40s. The study comes after several experimental drugs have failed to prevent declines in memory and thinking even though they succeeded in removing amyloid from the brains of patients in the early stages of Alzheimer's. Those failures have eroded support for the idea that amyloid is responsible for a cascade of events that eventually lead to the death of brain cells. "Many of us think of that as the ultimate test of the amyloid hypothesis," says Dr. Randall Bateman, a professor of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis."If that doesn't work, nothing will work." The new experiment, called the DIAN-TU primary Prevention Trial, is scheduled to begin enrolling patients by the end of the year. The amyloid hypothesis can be traced to Dr. Alois Alzheimer, a pathologist who first described the disease that would bear his name in 1906. Alzheimer was working at a psychiatric clinic in Munich, where he had the chance to conduct an autopsy on a woman who died at 50 after experiencing memory loss, disorientation, and hallucinations. He observed that the woman's brain had an "unusual disease of the cerebral cortex," including "senile plaque" usually seen in much older people. © 2022 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 28534 - Posted: 11.02.2022

By Jack Tamisiea An elephant’s trunk has 40,000 muscles and weighs more than a Burmese python. The appendage is strong enough to uproot a tree, yet sensitive enough to suction up fragile tortilla chips. But how does an elephant’s brain help accomplish these feats of dexterity? That has been difficult to study, according to Michael Brecht, a neuroscientist at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Weighing in excess of 10 pounds, the elephant’s brain degrades quickly after death and is a hassle to store. “I tend to think that the big animals are a bit neglected because we don’t do enough work on big brains,” Dr. Brecht said. Dr. Brecht and his colleagues were fortunate enough to gain access to a trove of elephant brains from animals that had died of natural causes or were euthanized for health reasons and ended up either frozen or in a fixative substance at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin. In a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, Dr. Brecht and his colleagues reported that elephants had more facial neurons than any other land mammal, which might contribute to trunk dexterity and other anatomical abilities. The study also helped to pinpoint major differences between the neural wirings of African savanna elephants and Asian elephants. Using the brains of four Asian elephants and four African savanna elephants, the researchers homed in on the facial nucleus, a bundle of neurons concentrated in the brainstem and hooked up to facial nerves. In mammals, these neurons serve as the control center for facial muscles. They’re in command whenever you wrinkle your nose, purse your lips or raise your eyebrows. They also help elephants employ their trunks. The researchers divided the facial nucleus into regions of neurons that controlled the elephant’s ears, lips and trunk. African elephants sported 63,000 facial neurons, while their Asian cousins had 54,000. The only mammals with more are dolphins, which pack nearly 90,000 facial neurons into their sensitive snouts. While his team expected both African savanna and Asian elephants to possess massive stores of facial neurons, Dr. Brecht said the discrepancy between the two species was noteworthy. © 2022 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 28533 - Posted: 10.28.2022

By Jackie Rocheleau For people haunted by recurring nightmares, untroubled sleep would be a dream come true. Now in a small experiment, neuroscientists have demonstrated a technique that, for some, may chase the bad dreams away. Enhancing the standard treatment for nightmare disorder with a memory-boosting technique cut down average weekly nightmares among a few dozen people from three to near zero, researchers report online October 27 in Current Biology. “The fact that they could actually make a big difference in the frequency of those nightmares is huge,” says Gina Poe, a neuroscientist at UCLA who wasn’t involved in the study. People with nightmare disorder fear the night not for the monsters under the bed, but the monsters in their dreams. Frequent, terrifying dreams disturb sleep and even affect well-being in waking life. The go-to nightmare disorder treatment is imagery rehearsal therapy, or IRT. In this treatment, patients reimagine nightmares with a positive spin, mentally rehearsing the new story line while awake. It reduces nightmares for most but fails for nearly a third of people. To boost IRT’s power, neuroscientist Sophie Schwartz of the University of Geneva and her colleagues leveraged a learning technique called targeted memory reactivation, or TMR. In this technique, a person focuses on learning something while a sound plays, and that same cue plays again during sleep. Experiencing the cue during sleep, which is important for memory storage, may reactivate and strengthen the associated memory (SN: 10/3/19). In the new study, the researchers gave 36 people with nightmare disorder training in IRT, randomly assigning half of them to rehearse their revised nightmares in silence. The other half rehearsed while a short piano chord, the TMR cue, played every 10 seconds for five minutes. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2022.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 28532 - Posted: 10.28.2022

By Nicola Jones What color is a tree, or the sky, or a sunset? At first glance, the answers seem obvious. But it turns out there is plenty of variation in how people see the world — both between individuals and between different cultural groups. A lot of factors feed into how people perceive and talk about color, from the biology of our eyes to how our brains process that information, to the words our languages use to talk about color categories. There’s plenty of room for differences, all along the way. For example, most people have three types of cones — light receptors in the eye that are optimized to detect different wavelengths or colors of light. But sometimes, a genetic variation can cause one type of cone to be different, or absent altogether, leading to altered color vision. Some people are color-blind. Others may have color superpowers. Our sex can also play a role in how we perceive color, as well as our age and even the color of our irises. Our perception can change depending on where we live, when we were born and what season it is. To learn more about individual differences in color vision, Knowable Magazine spoke with visual neuroscientist Jenny Bosten of the University of Sussex in England, who wrote about the topic in the 2022 Annual Review of Vision Science. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. How many colors are there in the rainbow? Physically, the rainbow is a continuous spectrum. The wavelengths of light vary smoothly between two ends within the visible range. There are no lines, no sharp discontinuities. The human eye can discriminate far more than seven colors within that range. But in our culture, we would say that we see seven color categories in the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. That’s historical and cultural. © 2022 Annual Reviews

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 28531 - Posted: 10.28.2022

Elizabeth Pennisi Think of the chattiest creatures in the animal kingdom and songbirds, dolphins, and—yes—humans probably come to mind. Turtles probably don’t register. But these charismatic reptiles also communicate using a large repertoire of clicks, snorts, and chortles. Now, by recording the “voices” of turtles and other supposedly quiet animals, scientists have concluded that all land vertebrate vocalizations—from the canary’s song to the lion’s roar—have a common root that dates back more than 400 million years. The findings imply animals began to vocalize very early in their evolutionary history—even before they possessed well-developed ears, says W. Tecumseh Fitch, a bioacoustician at the University of Vienna who was not involved with the work. “It suggests our ears evolved to hear these vocalizations.” Several years ago, University of Arizona evolutionary ecologist John Wiens and his graduate student Zhuo Chen started looking into the evolutionary roots of acoustic communication—basically defined as the sounds animals make with their mouths using their lungs. Combing the scientific literature, the duo compiled a family tree of all the acoustic animals known at the time, eventually concluding such soundmaking abilities arose multiple times in vertebrates between 100 million and 200 million years ago. But Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Zürich, noticed an oversight: turtles. Though Wiens and Chen had found that only two of 14 families of turtles made sounds, he was finding a lot more. He spent 2 years recording 50 turtle species in the act of “speaking.”

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 28530 - Posted: 10.28.2022

By Erika Check Hayden Weeks after Valeria Schenkel took an experimental drug named after her, the daily seizures that had afflicted her from birth became less frequent. But the drug caused fluid to build up in her brain, and a year later, she died at age 3. The drug was given to only one other child, and she experienced the same side effect and nearly died last year. The drug contained snippets of genetic material tailor-made to turn off the mutated gene causing the extremely rare form of epilepsy that these children were born with. A handful of researchers and nonprofit organizations have raised millions of dollars to make these treatments, known as antisense drugs, for at least 19 children and adults with severe diseases that are too rare to garner interest from pharmaceutical companies. The treatments have helped some of these patients, raising hopes that the personalized approach might one day save thousands of lives. But the brain side effect, known as hydrocephalus, reported on Sunday at the American Neurological Association meeting in Chicago, is a blow for the niche medical field that has made rapid progress over the past five years. Hydrocephalus happens when too much fluid fills cavities in the brain, increasing pressure on brain tissue and risking lethal damage if untreated. “I think it’s worth saying: No question that encountering hydrocephalus has been a setback, sobering and important,” said Dr. Timothy Yu, the neurologist and genetics researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital who developed the drug, known as valeriasen. But traditional drug companies, he added, are not helping patients with thousands of rare, untreatable and rapidly progressing diseases that cause death and severe disabilities. Personalized genetic treatments may be their only hope. “We have to learn as much as we can from each and every one, because they’re just so incredibly valuable in every sense,” Dr. Yu said. Scientists first imagined creating “antisense oligonucleotide” drugs — pieces of custom-made DNA or RNA designed to correct for genetic errors in cells — in the 1960s. But it took decades to make stable and effective versions of such drugs. © 2022 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epilepsy; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 28529 - Posted: 10.28.2022

By Hannah Thomasy Ned and Sunny stretch out together on the warm sand. He rests his head on her back, and every so often he might give her an affectionate nudge with his nose. The pair is quiet and, like many long-term couples, they seem perfectly content just to be in each other’s presence. The couple are monogamous, which is quite rare in the animal kingdom. But Sunny and Ned are a bit scalier that your typical lifelong mates — they are shingleback lizards that live at Melbourne Museum in Australia. In the wild, shinglebacks regularly form long-term bonds, returning to the same partner during mating season year after year. One lizard couple in a long-term study had been pairing up for 27 years and were still going strong when the study ended. In this way, the reptiles are more like some of the animal kingdom’s most famous long-term couplers, such as albatrosses, prairie voles and owl monkeys, and they confound expectations many people have about the personalities of lizards. “There’s more socially going on with reptiles than we give them credit for,” said Sean Doody, a conservation biologist at the University of South Florida. Social behavior in reptiles has been largely overlooked for decades, but a handful of dedicated scientists have begun unraveling reptiles’ cryptic social structures. With the help of camera traps and genetic testing, scientists have discovered reptiles living in family groups, caring for their young and communicating with each other in covert ways. And they aren’t only doing this because they love lizards. Currently, one in five reptile species are threatened with extinction; researchers say learning more about reptile sociality could be crucial for conservation. Humans have a long history of animosity toward reptiles, and influential twentieth century scientists added to the idea of reptiles as cold, unintelligent beasts. In the mid-1900s, Paul MacLean, a neuroscientist at Yale and then the National Institute of Mental Health, began developing the triune brain hypothesis. He theorized that the human brain contained three parts: the reptilian R-complex, which governed survival and basic instinctual behaviors; the paleomammalian complex, which controlled emotional behavior; and the neomammalian cortex, which was responsible for higher functions like problem-solving and language. © 2022 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 28528 - Posted: 10.26.2022

By Jan Claassen, Brian L. Edlow A medical team surrounded Maria Mazurkevich’s hospital bed, all eyes on her as she did … nothing. Mazurkevich was 30 years old and had been admitted to New York–Presbyterian Hospital at Columbia University on a blisteringly hot July day in New York City. A few days earlier, at home, she had suddenly fallen unconscious. She had suffered a ruptured blood vessel in her brain, and the bleeding area was putting tremendous pressure on critical brain regions. The team of nurses and physicians at the hospital’s neurological intensive care unit was looking for any sign that Mazurkevich could hear them. She was on a mechanical ventilator to help her breathe, and her vital signs were stable. But she showed no signs of consciousness. Mazurkevich’s parents, also at her bed, asked, “Can we talk to our daughter? Does she hear us?” She didn’t appear to be aware of anything. One of us (Claassen) was on her medical team, and when he asked Mazurkevich to open her eyes, hold up two fingers or wiggle her toes, she remained motionless. Her eyes did not follow visual cues. Yet her loved ones still thought she was “in there.” She was. The medical team gave her an EEG—placing sensors on her head to monitor her brain’s electrical activity—while they asked her to “keep opening and closing your right hand.” Then they asked her to “stop opening and closing your right hand.” Even though her hands themselves didn’t move, her brain’s activity patterns differed between the two commands. These brain reactions clearly indicated that she was aware of the requests and that those requests were different. And after about a week, her body began to follow her brain. Slowly, with minuscule responses, Mazurkevich started to wake up. Within a year she recovered fully without major limitations to her physical or cognitive abilities. She is now working as a pharmacist. © 2022 Scientific American,

Keyword: Consciousness; Brain imaging
Link ID: 28527 - Posted: 10.26.2022

Nina Lakhani The mystery behind the astronomical rise in neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s could be caused by exposure to environmental toxins that are omnipresent yet poorly understood, leading doctors warn. At a conference on Sunday, the country’s leading neurologists and neuroscientists will highlight recent research efforts to fill the gaping scientific hole in understanding of the role environmental toxins – air pollution, pesticides, microplastics, forever chemicals and more – play in increasingly common diseases like dementias and childhood developmental disorders. Humans may encounter a staggering 80,000 or more toxic chemicals as they work, play, sleep and learn – so many that it is almost impossible to determine their individual effects on a person, let alone how they may interact or the cumulative impacts on the nervous system over a lifespan. Some contact with environmental toxins is inevitable given the proliferation of plastics and chemical pollutants, as well as America’s hands off regulatory approach, but exposure is unequal. In the US, communities of color, Indigenous people and low income families are far more likely to be exposed to a myriad of pollutants through unsafe housing and water, manufacturing and agricultural jobs, and proximity to roads and polluting industrial plants, among other hazards. It’s likely genetic makeup plays a role in how susceptible people are to the pathological effects of different chemicals, but research has shown higher rates of cancers and respiratory disease in environmentally burdened communities. © 2022 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Alzheimers; Parkinsons
Link ID: 28526 - Posted: 10.26.2022

By David Grimm “Whooo’s a good boy?” “Whooo’s a pretty kitty?” When it comes to communicating with our pets, most of us can’t help but talk to them like babies. We pitch our voices high, extend our vowels, and ask short, repetitive questions. Dogs seem to like this. They’re far more likely to pay attention to us when we use this “caregiver speech,” research has shown. Now, scientists have found the same is true for cats, though only when their owner is talking. The work adds evidence that cats—like dogs—may bond with us in some of the same ways infants do. “It’s a fascinating study,” says Kristyn Vitale, an animal behaviorist and expert on cat cognition at Unity College, who was not involved with the work. “It further supports the idea that our cats are always listening to us.” Charlotte de Mouzon had a practical reason for getting into this line of research. An ethologist at Paris Nanterre University, she had previously been a cat behaviorist, consulting with owners on how to solve everything from litter box problems to aggressive behavior. “Sometimes people would ask me, ‘What’s the scientific evidence behind your approaches?’” she says. “I was frustrated that there were no studies being done on cat behavior in France.” So, she began a Ph.D. and was soon studying cat-human communication. As a first step, de Mouzon confirmed what most cat owners already know: We dip into “baby talk” when we address our feline friends–a habit de Mouzon is guilty of herself. “What’s up, my little ones?” she finds herself asking in a high-pitched voice when greeting her two kitties, Mila and Shere Khan. But do cats, like dogs, actually respond more to this “cat-directed speech”? To find out, de Mouzon recruited 16 cats and their owners—students at the Alfort National Veterinary School just outside of Paris. Because cats can be challenging to work with, de Mouzon studied them on feline-friendly turf, converting a common room in the students’ dormitory into a makeshift animal behavior lab filled with toys, a litter box, and places to hide.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 28525 - Posted: 10.26.2022

By Elisabeth Egan BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — When I pictured Matthew Perry, the actor frequently known as Chandler Bing, I saw him on the tangerine couch at Central Perk or seated on one of the twin recliners in the apartment he shared with Joey Tribbiani. In September, after arriving at his 6,300-square-foot rental house and being ushered through a driveway gate by his sober companion, I sat across from Perry, who perched on a white couch in a white living room, a world away from “Friends,” the NBC sitcom that aired for 10 seasons and catapulted all six of its stars into fame, fortune and infinite memes. Instead of the foosball table where Chandler, Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Rachel and Ross gathered, nudging each other through the first chapters of adulthood, Perry, 53, had a red felt pool table that looked untouched. There was plenty of light in the house, but not a lot of warmth. I have watched every episode of “Friends” three times — in prime time, on VHS and on Netflix — but I’m not sure I would have recognized Perry if I’d seen him on the street. If he was an ebullient terrier in those 1990s-era Must See TV days — as memorable for his full-body comedy as he was for the inflection that made “Can you BE any more [insert adjective]” the new “Gag me with a spoon” — he now seemed more like an apprehensive bulldog, with the forehead furrows to match. As his former co-star Lisa Kudrow confesses in the foreword to his memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” the first question people ask about “Friends” is often “How’s Matthew Perry doing?” Perry answers that question in the book, which Flatiron will publish on Nov. 1, by starkly chronicling his decades-long cage match with drinking and drug use. His addiction led to a medical odyssey in 2018 that included pneumonia, an exploded colon, a brief stint on life support, two weeks in a coma, nine months with a colostomy bag, more than a dozen stomach surgeries, and the realization that, by the time he was 49, he had spent more than half of his life in treatment centers or sober living facilities. © 2022 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 28524 - Posted: 10.26.2022

WASHINGTON — A massive recall of millions of sleep apnea machines has stoked anger and frustration among patients, and U.S. officials are weighing unprecedented legal action to speed a replacement effort that is set to drag into next year. Sound-dampening foam in the pressurized breathing machines can break down over time, leading users to potentially inhale tiny black particles or hazardous chemicals while they sleep, manufacturer Philips warned in June 2021. Philips initially estimated it could repair or replace the units within a year. But with the recall expanding to more than 5 million devices worldwide, the Dutch company now says the effort will stretch into 2023. That's left many patients to choose between using a potentially harmful device or trying risky remedies, including removing the foam themselves, buying second-hand machines online or simply going without the therapy. The devices are called continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, machines. They force air through a mask to keep passageways open during sleep. Untreated sleep apnea can cause people to stop breathing hundreds of times per night, leading to dangerous drowsiness and increased heart attack risk. The problem is more common in men than women, with estimates ranging from 10% to 30% of adults affected. Most patients are better off using a recalled device because the risks of untreated sleep apnea still outweigh the potential harms of the disintegrating foam, physicians say. But doctors have been hard pressed to help patients find new machines, which generally cost between $500 and $1,000, and were already in short supply due to supply chain problems. © 2022 npr

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 28523 - Posted: 10.26.2022

by Carey Gillam and Aliya Uteuova For decades, Swiss chemical giant Syngenta has manufactured and marketed a widely used weed-killing chemical called paraquat, and for much of that time the company has been dealing with external concerns that long-term exposure to the chemical may be a cause of the incurable brain ailment known as Parkinson’s disease. Syngenta has repeatedly told customers and regulators that scientific research does not prove a connection between its weedkiller and the disease, insisting that the chemical does not readily cross the blood-brain barrier, and does not affect brain cells in ways that cause Parkinson’s. But a cache of internal corporate documents dating back to the 1950s reviewed by the Guardian suggests that the public narrative put forward by Syngenta and the corporate entities that preceded it has at times contradicted the company’s own research and knowledge. And though the documents reviewed do not show that Syngenta’s scientists and executives accepted and believed that paraquat can cause Parkinson’s, they do show a corporate focus on strategies to protect product sales, refute external scientific research and influence regulators. In one defensive tactic, the documents indicate that the company worked behind the scenes to try to keep a highly regarded scientist from sitting on an advisory panel for the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The agency is the chief US regulator for paraquat and other pesticides. Company officials wanted to make sure the efforts could not be traced back to Syngenta, the documents show. And the documents show that insiders feared they could face legal liability for long-term, chronic effects of paraquat as long ago as 1975. One company scientist called the situation “a quite terrible problem” for which “some plan could be made … ”

Keyword: Parkinsons; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 28522 - Posted: 10.22.2022

Ewen Callaway Set on a rocky outcrop in southern Siberia, Chagyrskaya Cave might not look like much. But for one family of Neanderthals, it was home. For the first time, researchers have identified a set of closely related Neanderthals: a father and his teenage daughter and two other, more-distant relatives. The discovery of the family — reported on 19 October in Nature1 — and seven other individuals (including a pair of possible cousins from another clan) in the same cave, along with two more from a nearby site, represents the largest ever cache of Neanderthal genomes. The findings also suggest that Neanderthal communities were small, and that females routinely left their families to join new groups. Gleaning insights into kinship and social structure is new territory for ancient-genome studies, which have typically focused on broader population history, says Krishna Veeramah, a population geneticist at Stonybrook University in New York. “The fact that we can do this with Neanderthals is incredible.” Buried treasure Set on the banks of the Charysh River in the foothills of the Altai mountains, Chagyrskaya is 100 kilometres west of Denisova Cave, an archaeological treasure trove in which humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans (and at least one Neanderthal–Denisovan hybrid) all lived intermittently over some 300,000 years2,3. Excavations of Chagyrskaya, however, have so far revealed only Neanderthal remains, dated to between 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, and characteristic stone tools. In 2020, a genome sequence from a female Neanderthal from Chagyrskaya suggested she belonged to population distinct from those that occupied Denisova Cave much earlier4. To study the cave’s inhabitants in greater depth, a team of researchers led by palaeogeneticist Laurits Skov and population geneticist Benjamin Peter at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, extracted DNA from 17 other ancient-human remains from Chagyrskaya, as well as several from a nearby cave, called Okladnikov. © 2022 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 28521 - Posted: 10.22.2022

By Fenit Nirappil A national shortage of Adderall has left patients who rely on the pills for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder scrambling to find alternative treatments and uncertain whether they will be able to refill their medication. The Food and Drug Administration announced the shortage last week, saying that one of the largest producers is experiencing “intermittent manufacturing delays” and that other makers cannot keep up with demand. Some patients say the announcement was a belated acknowledgment of a reality they have faced for months — pharmacies unable to fill their orders and anxiety about whether they will run out of a medication needed to manage their daily lives. Experts say it is often difficult for patients to access Adderall, a stimulant that is tightly regulated as a controlled substance because of high potential for abuse. Medication management generally requires monthly doctor visits. There have been other shortages in recent years. “This one is more sustained,” said Timothy Wilens, an ADHD expert and chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital who said access issues stretch back to spring. “It’s putting pressure on patients, and it’s putting pressure on institutions that support the patients.” Erik Gude, a 28-year-old chef who lives in Atlanta, experiences regular challenges filling his Adderall prescription, whether it’s pharmacies not carrying generic versions or disputes with insurers. He has been off the medication for a month after his local pharmacy ran out.

Keyword: ADHD; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 28520 - Posted: 10.22.2022

Kate Siber Sharon Maxwell spent much of her life trying to make herself small. Her family put her on her first diet when she was 10. Early on Saturday mornings, she and her mother would drive through the empty suburban streets of Hammond, Ind., to attend Weight Watchers meetings. Maxwell did her best at that age to track her meals and log her points, but the scale wasn’t going down fast enough. So she decided to barely eat anything on Fridays and take laxatives that she found in the medicine cabinet. Food had long been a fraught subject in the Maxwell household. Her parents were also bigger-bodied and dieted frequently. They belonged to a fundamentalist Baptist megachurch where gluttony was seen as a sin. To eat at home was to navigate a labyrinth of rules and restrictions. Maxwell watched one time as her mother lost 74 pounds in six months by consuming little more than carrot juice (her skin temporarily turned orange). Sometimes her father, seized with a new diet idea, abruptly ransacked shelves in the kitchen, sweeping newly forbidden foods into the trash. Maxwell was constantly worried about eating too much. She started to eat alone and in secret. She took to chewing morsels and spitting them out. She hid food behind books, in her pockets, under mattresses and between clothes folded neatly in drawers. Through Maxwell’s teenage years and early 20s, eating became even more stressful. Her thoughts constantly orbited around food: what she was eating or not eating, the calories she was burning or not burning, the size of her body and, especially, what people thought of it. Her appearance was often a topic of public interest. When she went grocery shopping for her family, other customers commented on the items in her cart. “Honey, are you sure you want to eat that?” one person said. Other shoppers offered unsolicited advice about diets. Strangers congratulated her when her cart was filled with vegetables. As she grew older, people at the gym clapped and cheered for her while she worked out. “People would say: ‘Go! You can lose the weight!’” she says. While eating in public, other diners offered feedback — and still do to this day — on her choices, a few even asking if she wanted to join their gym. Some would call her names: Pig, Fatty. Sometimes people told her she was brave for wearing shorts, while others said she should cover up. She was always aware, whether she wanted to be or not, of how others viewed her body. © 2022 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 28519 - Posted: 10.19.2022