By Darren Incorvaia Sitting in an exam room, surrounded by doctors and scientists, Heather Rendulic opened her left hand for the first time since suffering a series of strokes nine years earlier when she was in her early 20s. “It was an amazing feeling for me to be able to do that again,” Rendulic says. “It’s not something I ever thought was possible.” But immediately after a surgically implanted device sent electrical pulses into her spinal cord, Rendulic could not only open her hand but also showed other marked improvements in arm mobility, researchers report February 20 in Nature Medicine. “We all started crying,” Marco Capogrosso, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh, said in a February 15 news conference. “We didn’t really expect this could work as fast as that.” The approach is similar to that recently used for patients paralyzed by spinal cord injuries (SN: 08/03/22). It represents a promising new technique for restoring voluntary movement to those left with upper-body paralysis following strokes, the team says. A stroke occurs when blood supply to parts of the brain is cut off, often causing short-term or long-term issues with movement, speech and vision. Stroke is a leading, and often underappreciated, cause of paralysis; in the United States alone, 5 million people are living with some form of motor deficit due to stroke. While physical therapy can provide some improvements, no treatment exists to help these patients regain full control of their limbs — and their lives. Strokes cause paralysis because the connection between the brain and the spinal cord is damaged; the brain tries to tell the spinal cord to move certain muscles, but the message is muddled. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2023.

Keyword: Stroke; Robotics
Link ID: 28678 - Posted: 02.22.2023

By Dani Blum The family of Bruce Willis announced that the actor has frontotemporal dementia, known as FTD, a form of dementia that occurs most commonly when nerve cells in the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain decrease in number. Mr. Willis, 67, was previously diagnosed with aphasia, which prompted him to retire from acting. “FTD is a cruel disease that many of us have never heard of and can strike anyone,” the family wrote in a statement. There are two main variants of FTD: primary progressive aphasia, which hampers a patient’s ability to communicate, and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia, which manifests as personality and behavioral changes. “It hits the parts of the brain that make us the most human,” said Dr. Bruce Miller, a professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco. FTD is the most common cause of dementia for people under the age of 60, said Susan Dickinson, the chief executive of the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration. There are roughly 50,000 people in the United States with a diagnosis of FTD, she added, although many experts consider that number to be a vast undercount, because of how challenging it can be to diagnose. There is no blood test or single biomarker to diagnose the condition — doctors instead identify it based on symptoms and neuroimaging. On average, it takes patients more than three years to get an accurate diagnosis, Ms. Dickinson said. People with primary progressive aphasia may struggle to speak in full sentences or have difficulty comprehending conversations. They may have a hard time writing or reading. Those with the behavioral variant of FTD may act out of character, said Dr. Ian Grant, an assistant professor of neurology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Families will say that patients “seem like they’ve lost a little bit of their filter,” he said. Someone who is typically quiet and reserved may start spewing profanities, for example, or loudly comment on a stranger’s appearance. The person may act apathetic, Dr. Miller said, losing motivation. Some may also display a lack of empathy for those around them. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Language
Link ID: 28675 - Posted: 02.18.2023

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Ellen Barry Lynn Rivers, a Democrat from Michigan, opened up about her diagnosis with bipolar disorder during a radio call-in show when she first ran for Congress. Her opponents had been hinting she had mental health problems. She decided, spur of the moment, to let it out. “Finally, I just said, ‘Are you asking me if I have depression? Yes, and so do thousands and millions of other people,’” she recalled. “I was like, ‘OK, here we go. The ball is thrown at you, just hit it.’ And so I did.” That was 1994. Ms. Rivers was elected, despite a Republican tidal wave, and served four terms. Now another Democrat, Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, has announced that he has entered a hospital to be treated for clinical depression. Politicians of both parties are praising him for his openness. Mental health experts say he is a powerful symbol — especially for men, who are less likely to seek treatment for depression and suffer higher rates of suicide. Yet the stigma around mental illness remains strong — especially in politics, where questions about temperament can determine a candidate’s electability. Mr. Fetterman and others face a continuing challenge: How much do they really want to say? “We’ve come a long way; people are willing to say they have a diagnosis or that they’re going to therapy,” said Patrick J. Kennedy, a scion of the political Kennedy family, who disclosed his treatment for bipolar disorder and drug abuse when he was a congressman from Rhode Island. “But we’re still not in a place where people are comfortable saying any more than that. And really the question with Senator Fetterman is: How much is he going to disclose?” Clinical depression, also called major depression, is a severe form of the disease. Symptoms may include feelings of sadness, hopelessness or guilt; angry outbursts; loss of pleasure in ordinary activities; fatigue; anxiety; reduced appetite; and thoughts of suicide. In recent years, there have been great strides in treatment. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Stroke
Link ID: 28671 - Posted: 02.18.2023

ByKatherine Kornei In the summer of 2021, a 54-year-old man was brought to a hospital in Northern California after an unexplained seizure. When an MRI revealed a mysterious mass in the left side of his brain, he was transferred to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Medical Center. A brain biopsy and other tests revealed not a tumor, but an incredibly rare infection of the central nervous system caused by the amoeba Balamuthia mandrillaris. One of several “brain-eating” amoebae that occasionally spark headlines, the pathogen kills more than 90% of people who contract it. But despite initial setbacks, the patient survived and has largely recovered after experimental treatment with a decades-old drug. As his UCSF medical team recounted in a paper last month, a desperate hunt for a cure led them to a study published several years ago in which researchers showed a drug originally developed in Europe to quell urinary tract infections was effective against Balamuthia in the laboratory. That discovery sent the medical team rushing to obtain the drug, nitroxoline, from abroad so it could be given for the first time to a Balamuthia patient. Researchers not involved with the case call the man’s recovery a breakthrough in treating a brain infection that’s long been presumed to be a death sentence. “It’s the best that I ever remember seeing with Balamuthia,” says Dennis Kyle, a cell biologist at the University of Georgia, Athens, who studies amoebic diseases. The drug, which is not approved for regular use in the United States, has also been effective against other pathogenic amoebae in laboratory tests, according to the UCSF team. Balamuthia mandrillaris was first identified in 1986—not in a hospital but at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, where staff were eagerly anticipating the birth of a mandrill, the largest species of monkey. But one day, Nyani, the mother-to-be, began dragging her right arm on the ground. Within 48 hours she became lethargic, and she eventually stopped moving and died. A postmortem evaluation of Nyani’s brain tissue revealed hemorrhaging and centimeter-scale lesions. The culprits were plainly visible: Amoebae were eating Nyani’s brain.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 28656 - Posted: 02.04.2023

By McKenzie Prillaman A newfound species of frog doesn’t ribbit. In fact, it doesn’t make any sound at all. Many frogs have unusual characteristics, from turning translucent to being clumsy jumpers (SN: 12/22/22; 6/15/22). The recently discovered amphibian lacks a voice. It joins a group of seven other voiceless frog species called spiny-throated reed frogs that reside in East Africa. Instead of croaking, the spines on male frogs’ throats might help their female counterparts recognize potential mates via touch, sort of like braille, says conservation biologist Lucinda Lawson of the University of Cincinnati. Lawson and colleagues spotted the little frog, only about 25 millimeters long, in 2019 while surveying wildlife in Tanzania’s Ukaguru Mountains. The team immediately recognized the animal, now named Hyperolius ukaguruensis, as a spiny-throated reed frog. But something seemed off. “It [was] the wrong color,” Lawson says. Most frogs from this group are green and silver, but this one was gold and brown. Some quick measurements to check if the peculiar frog simply had trivial color variations or if it could be a new species revealed that its eyes were smaller than other spiny-throated reed frogs. The researchers agreed: “Let’s do some genetics,” Lawson says. They ran DNA tests on two frogs that looked like they belonged to the suspected new species, as well as 10 individuals belonging to known spiny-throated species. Comparing the golden frogs’ genetic makeup with that of the others revealed the oddballs were genetically distinct, Lawson and colleagues report February 2 in PLOS ONE. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2023.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 28655 - Posted: 02.04.2023

By Natalia Mesa Most people will learn one or two languages in their lives. But Vaughn Smith, a 47-year-old carpet cleaner from Washington, D.C., speaks 24. Smith is a hyperpolyglot—a rare individual who speaks more than 10 languages. In a new brain imaging study, researchers peered inside the minds of polyglots like Smith to tease out how language-specific regions in their brains respond to hearing different languages. Familiar languages elicited a stronger reaction than unfamiliar ones, they found, with one important exception: native languages, which provoked relatively little brain activity. This, the authors note, suggests there’s something special about the languages we learn early in life. This study “contributes to our understanding of how our brain learns new things,” says Augusto Buchweitz, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, who was not involved in the work. “The earlier you learn something, the more your brain [adapts] and probably uses less resources.” Scientists have largely ignored what’s going on inside the brains of polyglots—people who speak more than five languages—says Ev Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who led the new study. “There’s oodles of work on individuals whose language systems are not functioning properly,” she says, but almost none on people with advanced language skills. That’s partly because they account for only 1% of people globally, making it difficult to find enough participants for research. But studying this group can help linguists understand the human “language network,” a set of specialized brain areas located in the left frontal and temporal lobes. These areas help humans with the most basic aspect of understanding language: connecting sounds with meaning, Fedorenko says.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 28654 - Posted: 02.04.2023

By Jennifer Szalai “‘R’s’ are hard,” John Hendrickson writes in his new memoir, “Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter,” committing to paper a string of words that would have caused him trouble had he tried to say them out loud. In November 2019, Hendrickson, an editor at The Atlantic, published an article about then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, who talked frequently about “beating” his childhood stutter — a bit of hyperbole that the article finally laid to rest. Biden insisted on his redemptive narrative, even though Hendrickson, who has stuttered since he was 4, could tell when Biden repeated (“I-I-I-I-I”) or blocked (“…”) on certain sounds. The article went viral, putting Hendrickson in the position of being invited to go on television — a “nightmare,” he said on MSNBC at the time, though it did lead to a flood of letters from fellow stutterers, a number of whom he interviewed for this book. “Life on Delay” traces an arc from frustration and isolation to acceptance and community, recounting a lifetime of bullying and well-meaning but ineffectual interventions and what Hendrickson calls “hundreds of awful first impressions.” When he depicts scenes from his childhood it’s often in a real-time present tense, putting us in the room with the boy he was, more than two decades before. Hendrickson also interviews people: experts, therapists, stutterers, his own parents. He calls up his kindergarten teacher, his childhood best friend and the actress Emily Blunt. He reaches out to others who have published personal accounts of stuttering, including The New Yorker’s Nathan Heller and Katharine Preston, the author of a memoir titled “Out With It.” We learn that it’s only been since the turn of the millennium or so that stuttering has been understood as a neurological disorder; that for 75 percent of children who stutter, “the issue won’t follow them to adulthood”; that there’s still disagreement over whether “disfluency” is a matter of language or motor control, because “the research is still a bit of a mess.” © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Attention
Link ID: 28643 - Posted: 01.27.2023

By Darren Incorvaia The great apes do not have spoken language, but they share many gestures. Can humans like you understand those gestures too? Watch this short video and test your ability to read chimpanzee body language. What is this chimpanzee (the one scratching its arm) asking the other one to do? © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Communication; Evolution
Link ID: 28640 - Posted: 01.25.2023

Holly Else An artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot can write such convincing fake research-paper abstracts that scientists are often unable to spot them, according to a preprint posted on the bioRxiv server in late December1. Researchers are divided over the implications for science. “I am very worried,” says Sandra Wachter, who studies technology and regulation at the University of Oxford, UK, and was not involved in the research. “If we’re now in a situation where the experts are not able to determine what’s true or not, we lose the middleman that we desperately need to guide us through complicated topics,” she adds. The chatbot, ChatGPT, creates realistic and intelligent-sounding text in response to user prompts. It is a ‘large language model’, a system based on neural networks that learn to perform a task by digesting huge amounts of existing human-generated text. Software company OpenAI, based in San Francisco, California, released the tool on 30 November, and it is free to use. Since its release, researchers have been grappling with the ethical issues surrounding its use, because much of its output can be difficult to distinguish from human-written text. Scientists have published a preprint2 and an editorial3 written by ChatGPT. Now, a group led by Catherine Gao at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, has used ChatGPT to generate artificial research-paper abstracts to test whether scientists can spot them. The researchers asked the chatbot to write 50 medical-research abstracts based on a selection published in JAMA, The New England Journal of Medicine, The BMJ, The Lancet and Nature Medicine. They then compared these with the original abstracts by running them through a plagiarism detector and an AI-output detector, and they asked a group of medical researchers to spot the fabricated abstracts. © 2023 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Language; Intelligence
Link ID: 28629 - Posted: 01.14.2023

By Carolyn Wilke Mammals in the ocean swim through a world of sound. But in recent decades, humans have been cranking up the volume, blasting waters with noise from shipping, oil and gas exploration and military operations. New research suggests that such anthropogenic noise may make it harder for dolphins to communicate and work together. When dolphins cooperated on a task in a noisy environment, the animals were not so different from city dwellers on land trying to be heard over a din of jackhammers and ambulance sirens. They yelled, calling louder and longer, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Current Biology. “Even then, there’s a dramatic increase in how often they fail to coordinate,” said Shane Gero, a whale biologist at Carleton University in Ottawa who wasn’t part of the work. The effect of increasing noise was “remarkably clear.” Scientists worked with a dolphin duo, males named Delta and Reese, at an experimental lagoon at the Dolphin Research Center in the Florida Keys. The pair were trained to swim to different spots in their enclosure and push a button within one second of each other. “They’ve always been the most motivated animals. They were really excited about doing the task,” said Pernille Sørensen, a biologist and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bristol in England. The dolphins talked to each other using whistles and often whistled right before pressing the button, she said. Ms. Sørensen’s team piped in sounds using underwater speakers. Tags, stuck behind the animals’ blowholes, captured what the dolphins heard and called to each other as well as their movements. Through 200 trials with five different sound environments, the team observed how the dolphins changed their behavior to compensate for loud noise. The cetaceans turned their bodies toward each other and paid greater attention to each other’s location. At times, they nearly doubled the length of their calls and amplified their whistles, in a sense shouting, to be heard above cacophonies of white noise or a recording of a pressure washer. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Communication; Hearing
Link ID: 28628 - Posted: 01.14.2023

Xiaofan Lei What comes to mind when you think of someone who stutters? Is that person male or female? Are they weak and nervous, or powerful and heroic? If you have a choice, would you like to marry them, introduce them to your friends or recommend them for a job? Your attitudes toward people who stutter may depend partly on what you think causes stuttering. If you think that stuttering is due to psychological causes, such as being nervous, research suggests that you are more likely to distance yourself from those who stutter and view them more negatively. I am a person who stutters and a doctoral candidate in speech, language and hearing sciences. Growing up, I tried my best to hide my stuttering and to pass as fluent. I avoided sounds and words that I might stutter on. I avoided ordering the dishes I wanted to eat at the school cafeteria to avoid stuttering. I asked my teacher to not call on me in class because I didn’t want to deal with the laughter from my classmates when they heard my stutter. Those experiences motivated me to investigate stuttering so that I can help people who stutter, including myself, to better cope with the condition. Get facts about the coronavirus pandemic and the latest research In writing about what the scientific field has to say about stuttering and its biological causes, I hope I can reduce the stigma and misunderstanding surrounding the disorder. The most recognizable characteristics of developmental stuttering are the repetitions, prolongations and blocks in people’s speech. People who stutter may also experience muscle tension during speech and exhibit secondary behaviors, such as tics and grimaces. © 2010–2023, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 28626 - Posted: 01.12.2023

By Ken Belson SHICKLEY, Neb. — Chris Eitzmann seemed to excel at everything until he didn’t. He parlayed a Harvard football captaincy into an invite in 2000 to Patriots training camp. After bouncing around the N.F.L., Eitzmann retired from pro football in 2002, got an M.B.A. from Dartmouth and worked at several big financial firms in Boston, where he and his wife, Mikaela, had four children. By 2015, however, Chris began a descent that has become familiar to former football players afflicted with C.T.E., or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease associated with repeated blows to the head. Chris had loved mountain biking, running and lifting weights, but he quit exercising and drank to excess. After a move to Mikaela’s family farm back in their home state of Nebraska two years later, Chris’s behavior became more alarming. He would disappear for long stretches of the day and neglect his work. His drinking got worse, and she said he would sometimes drive drunk. In December 2021, Chris Eitzmann was found dead in his Boston apartment of alcohol poisoning at 44. Almost a year later, doctors at Boston University found that he had C.T.E., a disease that can still only be diagnosed posthumously. Mikaela said that knowing whether her husband had the disease while he was alive would have markedly changed the final years of his life. “If he had known that it really was something, and not just this endless vacuum of not knowing, if he had an idea that he could have grabbed on to, that clarity and understanding would have been so valuable,” she said. Without treatment options, a C.T.E. diagnosis could provide only clarity for former players such as Eitzmann who have reason to believe they may be affected. But it could eventually help current players make risk assessments about when to give up tackle football and help former players seek treatment. © 2022 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 28561 - Posted: 11.19.2022

By Laura Sanders SAN DIEGO — Scientists have devised ways to “read” words directly from brains. Brain implants can translate internal speech into external signals, permitting communication from people with paralysis or other diseases that steal their ability to talk or type. New results from two studies, presented November 13 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, “provide additional evidence of the extraordinary potential” that brain implants have for restoring lost communication, says neuroscientist and neurocritical care physician Leigh Hochberg. Some people who need help communicating can currently use devices that require small movements, such as eye gaze changes. Those tasks aren’t possible for everyone. So the new studies targeted internal speech, which requires a person to do nothing more than think. “Our device predicts internal speech directly, allowing the patient to just focus on saying a word inside their head and transform it into text,” says Sarah Wandelt, a neuroscientist at Caltech. Internal speech “could be much simpler and more intuitive than requiring the patient to spell out words or mouth them.” Neural signals associated with words are detected by electrodes implanted in the brain. The signals can then be translated into text, which can be made audible by computer programs that generate speech. That approach is “really exciting, and reinforces the power of bringing together fundamental neuroscience, neuroengineering and machine learning approaches for the restoration of communication and mobility,” says Hochberg, of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, and Brown University in Providence, R.I. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2022.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Language
Link ID: 28556 - Posted: 11.16.2022

By Alejandro Portilla Navarro Dawn breaks in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica. The city is still asleep, but the early risers are greeted by a beautiful symphony: Hummingbirds, corn-eaters, yigüirros (clay-colored thrushes), yellow-breasted grosbeaks, blue tanagers, house wrens, warblers and other birds announce that a new day has arrived. Soon the incessant noise of vehicles and their horns, construction, street vendors and more take over, shaping the soundscape of the frenetic routine of hundreds of thousands of people who travel and live in this city. Then, the birds’ songs will slip into the background. “The act of birdsong has two main functions in males: It is to attract females and also to defend their territory from other males,” says Luis Andrés Sandoval Vargas, an ornithologist at the University of Costa Rica. For females in the tropics, he adds, the primary role of their song is to defend territory. Thus, in order to communicate in cities, to keep their territory safe and find mates, birds must find ways to counteract the effects of anthropogenic noise — that is, the noise produced by humans. “The main effect of urban development on song is that many birds sing at higher frequencies,” says Sandoval Vargas. Studies over the past 15 years have found, for example, that blackbirds (Turdus merula), great tits (Parus major) and rufous-collared sparrows (Zonotrichia capensis) sing at higher pitches, with higher minimum frequencies, in urban environments than in rural ones. But the birds’ response to anthropogenic noise may be more complex than that, as Sandoval Vargas found when studying house wrens (Troglodytes aedon). House wrens are small, brown birds — about 10 centimeters tall and weighing 12 grams — that feed on insects and tend to live near humans. In Costa Rica, they are found almost everywhere, but are especially abundant in the cities. “Males sing almost year-round and sing for many hours during the day, and much of their behavior is mediated by vocalizations,” explains Sandoval Vargas. But what makes them ideal for studying adaptations to urban environments is that most of the components of their song are within the same frequency range as the noise that we humans produce. © 2022 Annual Reviews

Keyword: Animal Communication; Evolution
Link ID: 28553 - Posted: 11.16.2022

By Ken Belson AMSTERDAM — For the first time since 2016, one of the most influential groups guiding doctors, trainers and sports leagues on concussions met last month to decide, among other things, if it was time to recognize the causal relationship between repeated head hits and the degenerative brain disease known as C.T.E. Despite mounting evidence and a highly regarded U.S. government agency recently acknowledging the link, the group all but decided it was not. Leaders of the International Consensus Conference on Concussion in Sport, meeting in Amsterdam, signaled that it would continue its long practice of casting doubt on the connection between the ravages of head trauma and sports. C.T.E., or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, was first identified in boxers in 1928 and burst into prominence in 2005, when scientists published their posthumous diagnosis of the disease in the N.F.L. Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, creating an existential crisis for sports such as football and rugby that involve players hitting their heads thousands of times a year. Scientists have spent the past decade analyzing hundreds of brains from athletes and military veterans, and the variable evident in nearly every case of C.T.E. has been their exposure to repeated head trauma. Researchers have also established what they call a dose response between the severity of the C.T.E. and the number of years playing collision sports. After playing down an association between head injuries and brain damage for years, the N.F.L. in 2016 acknowledged that there was a link between football and degenerative brain disorders such as C.T.E. Just days before the conference in Amsterdam, the National Institutes of Health, the biggest funder of brain research in the United States, said that C.T.E. “is caused in part by repeated traumatic brain injuries.” But in one of the final sessions of the three-day conference, one of the leaders of the conference, a neuropsychologist who has received $1.5 million in research funding from the N.F.L., dismissed the work of scientists who have documented C.T.E. in hundreds of athletes and soldiers because he said their studies thus far did not account for other health variables, including heart disease, diabetes and substance abuse. © 2022 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 28543 - Posted: 11.09.2022

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 Lisa Sanders, M.D. “What just happened?” The 16-year-old girl’s voice was flat and tired. “I think you had a seizure,” her mother answered. Her daughter had asked to be taken to the pediatrician’s office because she hadn’t felt right for the past several weeks — not since she had what looked like a seizure at school. And now she’d had another. “You’re OK now,” the mother continued. “It’s good news because it means that maybe we finally figured out what’s going on.” To most people, that might have been a stretch — to call having a seizure good news. But for the past several years, the young woman had been plagued by headaches, episodes of dizziness and odd bouts of profound fatigue, and her mother embraced the possibility of a treatable disorder. The specialists she had taken her daughter to see attributed her collection of symptoms to the lingering effect of the many concussions she suffered playing sports. She had at least one concussion every year since she was in the fourth grade. Because of her frequent head injuries, her parents made her drop all her sports. Even when not on the playing field, the young woman continued to fall and hit her head. The headaches and other symptoms persisted long after each injury. She saw several specialists who agreed that she had what was called persistent post-concussive syndrome — symptoms caused either by a severe brain injury or, in her case, repeated mild injuries. She should get better with time and patience, the girl and her mother were told. And yet her head pounded and she retreated to her darkened room several times a week. She did everything her doctors suggested: She got plenty of sleep, rested when she was tired and tried to be patient. But she still got headaches, still got dizzy. She found it harder and harder to pay attention. For the past couple of years, it had even started to affect her grades. © 2022 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epilepsy; Attention
Link ID: 28514 - Posted: 10.15.2022

By Laura Sanders In a football game on September 25, Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa got the pass off but he got knocked down. Fans watched him shake his head and stumble to the ground as he tried to jog it off. After a medical check, he went back into the game against the Buffalo Bills with what his coach later said was a back injury. Four days later, in a game against the Cincinnati Bengals, Tagovailoa, 24, got hit again. This time, he left the field on a stretcher with what was later diagnosed as a concussion. Many observers suspect that the first hit — given Tagovailoa’s subsequent headshaking and wobbliness — left the athlete with a concussion, also called a mild traumatic brain injury. If those were indeed signs of a head injury, that first hit may have lined him up for an even worse brain injury just days later. “The science tells us that yes, a person who is still recovering from a concussion is at an elevated risk for sustaining another concussion,” says Kristen Dams-O’Connor, a neuropsychologist and director of the Brain Injury Research Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. As one example, a concussion roughly doubled the chance of a second one among young Swedish men, researchers reported in 2013 in the British Medical Journal. “This, I think, was avoidable,” Dams-O’Connor says of Tagovailoa’s brain injury in the game against the Bengals. After a hit to the head, when the soft brain hits the unyielding skull, the injury kicks off a cascade of changes. Some nerve cells become overactive, inflammation sets in, and blood flow is altered. These downstream events in the brain — and how they relate to concussion symptoms — can happen over hours and days, and are not easy to quickly measure, Dams-O’Connor says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2022.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 28506 - Posted: 10.08.2022

By Dan Diamond A high-profile NFL injury has put the spotlight back on football’s persistent concussions, which are linked to head trauma and a variety of long-lasting symptoms, and can be worsened by rushing back to physical activity. Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, who appeared to suffer head trauma in a game Sunday afternoon that was later described as a back injury, was diagnosed with a concussion Thursday night following a tackle. After Tagovailoa’s head hit the turf, he remained on the ground and held his arms and fingers splayed in front of his face — which experts said evoked conditions known as “decorticate posturing” or “fencing response,” where brain damage triggers the involuntary reaction. “It’s a potentially life-threatening brain injury,” said Chris Nowinski, a neuroscientist and co-founder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit group focused on concussion research and prevention, adding that he worried about Tagovailoa’s long-term prognosis, given that it can take months or years for an athlete to fully recover from repeated concussions. Nowinski said he was particularly concerned about situations where people suffer two concussions within a short period — a condition sometimes known as second impact syndrome — which can lead to brain swelling and other persistent problems. “That’s why we should at least be cautious with the easy stuff, like withholding players with a concussion from the game and letting their brain recover,” Nowinski said. The Dolphins said Tagovailoa had movement in all of his extremities and had been discharged Thursday night from University of Cincinnati Medical Center. The NFL’s top health official said in an interview on Friday that he was worried about Tagovailoa’s health, and pointed to a joint review the league and its players association was conducting into the Dolphins’ handling of the quarterback’s initial injury on Sunday.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 28501 - Posted: 10.05.2022

By Darren Incorvaia Songbirds get a lot of love for their dulcet tones, but drummers may start to steal some of that spotlight. Woodpeckers, which don’t sing but do drum on trees, have brain regions that are similar to those of songbirds, researchers report September 20 in PLOS Biology. The finding is surprising because songbirds use these regions to learn their songs at an early age, yet it’s not clear if woodpeckers learn their drum beats (SN: 9/16/21). Whether woodpeckers do or not, the result suggests a shared evolutionary origin for both singing and drumming. The ability to learn vocalizations by listening to them, just like humans do when learning to speak, is a rare trait in the animal kingdom. Vocal learners, such as songbirds, hummingbirds and parrots, have independently evolved certain clusters of nerve cells called nuclei in their forebrains that control the ability. Animals that don’t learn vocally are thought to lack these brain features. While it’s commonly assumed that other birds don’t have these nuclei, “there’s thousands of birds in the world,” says Matthew Fuxjager, a biologist at Brown University in Providence, R.I. “While we say these brain regions only exist in these small groups of species, nobody’s really looked in a lot of these other taxa.” Fuxjager and his colleagues examined the noggins of several birds that don’t learn vocally to check if they really did lack these brain nuclei. Using molecular probes, the team checked the bird brains for activity of a gene called parvalbumin, a known marker of the vocal learning nuclei. Many of the birds, including penguins and flamingos, came up short, but there was one exception — male and female woodpeckers, which had three spots in their brains with high parvalbumin activity. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2022.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 28486 - Posted: 09.21.2022