By Piercarlo Valdesolo Earlier this year, a research team led by Dr. Sven Karlsson published the largest scale study on the causes of human intelligence. They found an intriguing pattern of results: Focusing on arithmetic and linguistic tests, genetics predicted over 26% of people’s responses. Namely, individuals with a long allele of the 4-GTTLR gene got more right answers on the arithmetic, mental rotation, and semantic memory tasks than did individuals with the short version of the gene. In contrast, education explained only 4% of people’s responses. Describing the work, Karlsson wrote “We believe this is an interesting result! Our findings indicate that, contrary to certain previous assumptions, basic cognitive capabilities—mental rotation, math and language—really have a strong heritable component. Intelligence in adulthood seems to be predicted by genes early in life… things like education and effort play a small role once you take into account the role of genetics.” How did you react to the description above? Hopefully you haven’t already tweeted about it: it’s completely made up. A genetic basis for intelligence is a politically fraught scientific idea about which you had likely developed an opinion before reading about the fictitious Dr. Karlsson. You might think it obviously so that genes play an important role in shaping all traits, including intelligence. Or you might think that genes play a trivial role in comparison to socialization and learning. The ease with which you accepted the brief synopsis of research above as true likely depends on these existing beliefs. If the findings are consistent with your beliefs, you might have quickly accepted its truth value. If inconsistent, then you might have been tempted to either dismiss the finding out of hand, or perhaps dig deeper into the article to find some disqualifying error in method or analysis. These are reactions that psychologists have known about for decades. Motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, selective attention. We are equipped with a range of psychological processes that inoculate us from the threat of information that pokes up against our worldviews and beliefs, and attract us to information consistent with our beliefs. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Intelligence; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25468 - Posted: 09.20.2018

By: Richard Restak, M.D. Editor’s Note: Unthinkable’s author, a British neuroscientist, tracked down nine people with rare brain disorders to tell their stories. From the man who thinks he's a tiger to the doctor who feels the pain of others just by looking at them to a woman who hears music that’s not there, their experiences illustrate how the brain can shape our lives in unexpected and, in some cases, brilliant and alarming ways. Several years ago, science writer Helen Thomson, consultant to New Scientist and contributor to the Washington Post and Nature, decided to travel around the world to interview people with "the most extraordinary brains." In the process, as described in Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains (Ecco/Harper Collins 2018), Thomas discovered that "by putting their lives side-by-side, I was able to create a picture of how the brain functions in us all. Through their stories, I uncovered the mysterious manner in which the brain can shape our lives in unexpected—and, some cases, brilliant and alarming ways." Thomson wasn't just learning about the most extraordinary brains in the world, but in the process was "uncovering the secrets of my own." During her journey Thomson encounters Bob, who can remember days from 40 years ago with as much clarity and detail as yesterday; Sharon, who has lost her navigational abilities and on occasion becomes lost in her own home; Tommy who, after a ruptured aneurysm that damaged his left temporal lobe, underwent a total personality change; Sylvia, an otherwise normal retired school teacher who experiences near constant musical hallucinations; and Louise, who is afflicted with a permanent sense of detachment from herself and everyone around her. Beyond skillfully portraying each of these and other fascinating individuals, Thomson places them in historical and scientific context: when neuroscientists first encountered similar patients, along with past and current explanations of what has gone amiss in their brains. © 2018 The Dana Foundation

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 25420 - Posted: 09.07.2018

Nell Greenfieldboyce Sarah Anne, a 59-year-old chimpanzee, is famous enough to have her own Wikipedia page. That's because she was captured from the wild as an infant and raised in the home of a language researcher who taught her to use symbols for words. These days, she lives at Chimp Haven, a wooded sanctuary for former research chimps in Louisiana, along with a new pal named Marie. "And Marie loves to groom with Sarah, and follows her around and gives her lots of attention. And we're seeing Sarah play with her and just being much more sociable," says Amy Fultz, who studies animal behavior and co-founded Chimp Haven in 1995. "At 59, that's a really cool thing to be able to see and watch." Their friendship shows that even very old chimps can grow and change. But it's more than just a big deal for Sarah Anne. The arrival of Marie, along with some other chimps from a research facility in New Mexico, tipped the scales in terms of where most chimps live in this country. "There are more chimps in accredited sanctuaries than there are in research facilities now," says Rana Smith, the president of Chimp Haven. That means the retirement of research chimps has reached its endgame — and this final stage is proving to be unexpectedly challenging. In 2015, the National Institutes of Health announced that the era of chimp biomedical research was over, and that all of its chimps remaining in research labs — nearly 400 at the time — would gradually be transferred to Chimp Haven. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 25392 - Posted: 08.29.2018

By Neuroskeptic On this blog I usually focus on academic, scientific neuroscience. However, there is a big world outside the laboratory and, in the real world, the concepts of neuroscience are being used (and abused) in ways that would make any honest neuroscientist blush. In this post I’m going to focus on three recent examples of neuro-products: commercial products that are promoted as having some kind of neuroscience-based benefit. 1) Neuro Connect Golf Bands We’ll start out with a silly one. This product, full name Neuro Connect™ INFUSED Shaft Bands, costs $150 for a pack of ten bands. You’re supposed to place one of these bands just below the grip on your golf clubs. This will improve your golf swing by providing a ‘subtle energy connection’ between your club and your brain. Here’s how it works: “A field emitted by the shaft bands intersects with the central nervous system when the club is swung around the body. Swinging with an INFUSED shaft band immediately enhances the function of nerve receptors in muscles and joints.” Now, generally speaking, when an “energy field” interacts with your nerves, the result is rather painful, but Neuro Connect uses a special “subtle energy pattern” which has no known negative effects. I suspect the field has no positive effects either, and that it doesn’t exist. On their FAQ, under the heading of “Do you have any scientific proof the devices work?”, Neuro Connect admit that “credible peer-reviewed studies take years to complete” which I take as a roundabout way of saying “no”.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 25336 - Posted: 08.16.2018

Laura Sanders To understand the human brain, take note of the rare, the strange and the downright spooky. That’s the premise of two new books, Unthinkable by science writer Helen Thomson and The Disordered Mind by neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel. Both books describe people with minds that don’t work the same way as everyone else’s. These are people who are convinced that they are dead, for instance; people whose mental illnesses lead to incredible art; people whose memories have been stolen by dementia; people who don’t forget anything. By scrutinizing these cases, the stories offer extreme examples of how the brain creates our realities. In the tradition of the late neurologist Oliver Sacks (SN: 10/14/17, p. 28), Thomson explores the experiences of nine people with unusual minds. She travels around the world to interview her subjects with compassion and curiosity. In England, she meets a man who, following a bathtub electrocution, became convinced that he was dead. (Every so often, he still feels “a little bit dead,” he tells Thomson.) In Los Angeles, she spends time with a 64-year-old man who can remember almost every day of his life in extreme detail. And in a frightening encounter in a hospital in the United Arab Emirates, she interviews a man with schizophrenia who transmogrifies into a growling tiger. By visiting them in their element, Thomson presents these people not as parlor tricks, but as fully rendered human beings. Kandel chooses the brain disorders themselves as his subjects. He explains the current neuroscientific understanding of autism, depression and schizophrenia, for example, by weaving together the history of the research and human examples. His chapter on dementia and memory is particularly compelling, given his own Nobel Prize–winning role in revealing how brains form memories (SN: 10/14/00, p. 247). |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 25326 - Posted: 08.14.2018

Alison Abbott The two major neuroscience societies in the United States and Europe have joined forces to criticize the prestigious Max Planck Society (MPS) in Germany for its treatment of a world-renowned neuroscientist targeted by animal-rights activists. Nikos Logothetis, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (MPI-Biocyb) in Tübingen who used to run a primate laboratory, has been charged with mistreatment of animals after allegations made by animal-rights groups. When Logothetis was indicted in February, the MPS removed many of his responsibilities relating to animal research — despite the fact that a court has not yet ruled on those charges. Logothetis, who studies how the brain makes sense of the world, denies the allegations. In a strongly worded statement posted online on 3 August, the US Society for Neuroscience (SfN) and the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS), which together represent more than 60,000 scientists, add to an outcry that has been gathering momentum since scientists at MPI-Biocyb made their concerns public in May. “FENS and SfN are extremely dismayed by the treatment of Professor Nikos Logothetis and his colleagues,” reads the joint statement. The MPS's actions set "an alarming precedent whereby institutions neglect to support affiliated scientists facing similar unproven accusations and disregard the presumption of innocence”, adds the statement. © 2018 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 25309 - Posted: 08.08.2018

By David Grimm —As soon as the big yellow school bus pulls into the parking lot of the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) here, it’s clear that many of the high school students on board don’t know what they’ve signed up for. They know that science happens somewhere on this wooded, 70-hectare campus west of Portland—and that they may get to see monkeys—but everything else is a mystery. “Are we going to go into some giant underground lair?” asks a lanky sophomore in a hoodie, imagining that the center is set up like a video game or Jurassic Park. Diana Gordon is here to disabuse him of both notions. As the education and outreach coordinator of the country’s largest primate research center, she spends her days guiding students, Rotary clubs, and even wedding parties through the facility. Here, visitors see monkeys in their habitats and meet scientists—all while learning, Gordon hopes, that the animals are well-treated and the research is critical for human health. “If we don’t speak up, there’s only one side being heard,” she says. “The side that wants to shut us down.” That side has been racking up victories recently. In the past 6 months, animal activist groups have won bipartisan support in Congress to scuttle monkey and dog studies at top U.S. research facilities; they have also helped pass two state bills that compel researchers to adopt out lab animals at the end of experiments. The public itself seems to be turning against animal research: A Gallup poll released last year revealed that only 51% of U.S. adults find such studies morally acceptable, down from 65% in 2001. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Scienc

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 25147 - Posted: 06.27.2018

By Lisa Feldman Barrett Jasanoff’s big message in “The Biological Mind” is you are not your brain. Or rather, you are not merely your brain — your body and the broader circumstances of your life also make you who you are. Jasanoff reminds us that the brain is not some mystical machine — it’s a gooey, bloody tangle of cells, dripping with chemicals. But we mythologize brains, creating false boundaries that divorce them from bodies and the outside world, blinding us to the biological nature of the mind. These divisions, Jasanoff contends, are why neuroscience has failed to make a real difference in anyone’s life. Unfortunately, the book’s own divisions between body versus brain, and nature versus nurture, reinforce the very dualisms that Jasanoff indicts. He gives examples of the ways our bodies and the world around us affect our thoughts, feelings and actions, but not how body and world become biologically embedded to constitute a mind. Missing is a discussion of how the workings of your body necessarily and irrevocably shape your brain’s structure and function, and vice versa. The artificial boundary between brain and world also goes largely unmentioned. In real life, the experiences we have from infancy onward impact the brain’s wiring. For example, childhood poverty and adversity fundamentally alter brain development, leaving an indelible mark that increases people’s risk of illness in adulthood. This is fascinating and profound stuff, but it mostly goes unexamined in Jasanoff’s book. Still, “The Biological Mind” is chock-full of fun facts that entertain. And best of all, it makes you think. I found myself debating with Jasanoff in my head as I read — surely a sign of a worthy book. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25143 - Posted: 06.26.2018

Paul Biegler explains. Mind-reading machines are now real, prising open yet another Pandora’s box for ethicists. As usual, there are promises of benefit and warnings of grave peril. The bright side was front and centre at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington DC in November 2017. It was part of a research presentation led by Omid Sani from the University of Southern California. Sani and his colleagues studied six people with epilepsy who had electrodes inserted into their brains to measure detailed electrical patterns. It is a common technique to help neurosurgeons find where seizures start. The study asked patients, who can be alert during the procedure, to report their mood during scanning. That allowed the researchers to link the patients’ moods with their brainwave readings. Using sophisticated algorithms, the team claimed to predict patients’ feelings from their brainwaves alone. That could drive a big shift in the treatment of mental illness, say researchers. Deep brain stimulation (DBS), where electrodes implanted in the brain give circuits a regular zap, has been successful in Parkinson’s disease. It is also being trialled in depression; but the results, according to a 2017 report in Lancet Psychiatry, are patchy. Sani and colleagues suggest their discovery could bump up that success rate. A portable brain decoder may be available within a generation.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 25136 - Posted: 06.25.2018

By Neuroskeptic Do scientists have a responsibility to make their work accessible to the public? “Public Engagement”, broadly speaking, means scientists communicating about science to non-scientists. Blogs are a form of public engagement, as are (non-academic) books. Holding public talks or giving interviews would also count as such. Recently, it has become fashionable to say that it is important for scientists to engage the public, and that this engagement should be encouraged. I agree completely: we do need to encourage it, and we need to overcome the old-fashioned view that it is somehow discreditable or unprofessional for scientists to fraternize with laypeople. However, some advocates of engagement go further than I’d like. It is sometimes said that every researcher actually has a responsibility to engage the public about the work that they do. Speaking about my own experience in neuroscience in the UK, this view is certainly in the air if not explicitly stated, and I think most researchers would agree. Public engagement and ‘broader impact’ sections now appear as mandatory sections of many grant applications, for instance. In my view, making public engagement a duty for all scientists is wrong. Quite simply, scientists are not trained to do public engagement, and it isn’t what they signed up to do when they chose that career. Some scientists (like me) want to do it anyway, and they should be encouraged (if I say so myself), but many don’t want to. Cajoling the latter into doing engagement is futile. A half-baked public engagement exercise helps no-one.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 25133 - Posted: 06.25.2018

By David Grimm The environment a laboratory animal lives in can have a dramatic impact on whether it’s a good model for human disease. A mouse that lives in a shoebox-size cage, for example, gets less exercise than its wild relatives, and thus may not be the best model for studying obesity. Enriched environments with bigger cages and more toys can help, says Garet Lahvis, but the best way to make animals good models is to take them out of the lab—and, in some cases, study them outside in the great wide world. This could be accomplished with cutting-edge electronics and remote sensors, says the behavioral neuroscientist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. He’s presenting his proposal today at the Behavior Genetics Association’s annual conference in Boston. Lahvis chatted with Science about what studying lab animals in the wild could look like, and why some researchers think it won’t happen. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Required fields are indicated by an asterisk (*) Q: Why did you become interested in this idea? A: Our lab studies social behavior in mice. We’ve shown that mice have the capacity for empathy when they hear other mice getting an electrical shock, and that mice are gregarious—they like to hang out with each other. But we were studying them in these small, relatively sterile cages—not anything like they’d encounter in the wild. About 6 or 7 years ago, I started thinking, “How could it be normal for you to spend your entire life with only three other individuals in a small room? Are the mice we’re looking at really normal?” Once that door opened, I started to think about everything else that could go wrong with lab animal research. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 25128 - Posted: 06.22.2018

By Meredith Wadman Breaking with a history of reticence, nearly 600 scientists, students, and lab animal workers published a letter in USA Today this morning that calls on U.S. research institutions to “embrace openness” about their animal research. “We should proudly explain how animals are used for the advancement of science and medicine, in the interest of the well-being of humans and animals,” the 592 signatories write in the letter. “From the development of insulin and transplant surgery to modern day advances, including gene therapies and cancer treatments; animals … continue to play a crucial role in both basic and applied research.” The letter was organized by the pro–animal research advocacy group Speaking of Research, which has offices in the both the United States and the United Kingdom. The group notes that four Nobel Prize–winning biologists are among the signatories: William Campbell, Mario Capecchi, Carol Greider, and Torsten Wiesel. It was also signed by students, lab technicians, veterinarians, physicians, and a few public policy experts. “I read the letter and decided within minutes that I would sign it,” says Greider, a biologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 for her discovery of the enzyme telomerase. “Animal research is very important to understanding fundamental biological mechanisms.” © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 25114 - Posted: 06.21.2018

By Aaron E. Carroll The medical research grant system in the United States, run through the National Institutes of Health, is intended to fund work that spurs innovation and fosters research careers. In many ways, it may be failing. It has been getting harder for researchers to obtain grant support. A study published in 2015 in JAMA showed that from 2004 to 2012, research funding in the United States increased only 0.8 percent year to year. It hasn’t kept up with the rate of inflation; officials say the N.I.H. has lost about 23 percent of its purchasing power in a recent 12-year span. Because the money available for research doesn’t go as far as it used to, it now takes longer for scientists to get funding. The average researcher with an M.D. is 45 years old (for a Ph.D. it’s 42 years old) before she or he obtains that first R01 (think “big” grant). Given that R01-level funding is necessary to obtain promotion and tenure (not to mention its role in the science itself), this means that more promising researchers are washing out than ever before. Only about 20 percent of postdoctoral candidates who aim to earn a tenured position in a university achieve that goal. This new reality can be justified only if those who are weeded out really aren’t as good as those who remain. Are we sure that those who make it are better than those who don’t? A recent study suggests the grant-making system may be unreliable in distinguishing between grants that are funded versus those that get nothing — its very purpose. When a health researcher (like me) believes he has a good idea for a research study, he most often submits a proposal to the N.I.H. It’s not easy to do so. Grants are hard to write, take a lot of time, and require a lot of experience to obtain. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 25097 - Posted: 06.18.2018

by William Wan and Lenny Bernstein The National Institutes of Health on Friday canceled a mammoth study of moderate drinking after determining that officials had irrevocably compromised the research by soliciting over $60 million from beer and liquor companies to underwrite the effort. NIH Director Francis S. Collins said the results of the 10-year, $100 million study would not be trusted because of the secretive way in which staff at an institute under NIH met with major liquor companies, talked to them about the trial’s design and convinced them to pick up most of the tab for it. “Many people who have seen this working-group report were frankly shocked to see so many lines crossed,” he said, calling the staff interaction with the alcohol industry “far out of bounds.” Collins ordered the examination of what was originally planned as a study of more than 7,800 people around the globe after the New York Times reported in March that officials had aggressively sought the industry funding and routed their donations through the institutes’ nongovernmental foundation. In May, NIH suspended enrollment of participants in the research, which was already underway when the newspaper published its story. The findings released Friday address the scientific merit of the study. The review found that the staff who met with five liquor companies did not follow existing rules that required them to report such contacts. In a statement, NIH said that “a small number” of employees at the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) violated policies and that “appropriate personnel actions” would be taken, without specifying what that would entail. The report includes a lengthy appendix with emails between staff and industry representatives. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25096 - Posted: 06.16.2018

Susan Milius A little brain can be surprisingly good at nothing. Honeybees are the first invertebrates to pass a test of recognizing where zero goes in numerical order, a new study finds. Even small children struggle with recognizing “nothing” as being less than one, says cognitive behavioral scientist Scarlett Howard of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. But honeybees trained to fly to images of greater or fewer dots or whazzits tended to rank a blank image as less than one, Howard and colleagues report in the June 8 Science. Despite decades of discoveries, nonhuman animals still don’t get due credit outside specialist circles for intelligence, laments Lars Chittka of Queen Mary University of London, who has explored various mental capacities of bees. For the world at large, he emphasizes that the abilities described in the new paper are “remarkable.” Researchers recognize several levels of complexity in grasping zero. Most animals, or maybe all, can understand the simplest level — just recognizing that the absence of something differs from its presence, Howard says. Grasping the notion that absence could fit into a sequence of quantities, though, seems harder. Previously, only some primates such as chimps and vervet monkeys, plus an African gray parrot named Alex, have demonstrated this level of understanding of the concept of zero (SN: 12/10/16, p. 22). |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 25069 - Posted: 06.08.2018

…but has yet to reach Base Camp 1 By Gary Stix LONG ISLAND, N.Y.—Brains & Behavior,* a conference at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) held from May 30 to June 4—furnished a captivating look at the work of neuroscientists toiling to isolate the multitude of missing links that bind B&B. Of course, everyone knows about the close ties between the two, but generation after generation of researchers will be needed toto figure out the how of it all. At the end of the conference, Adam Kepecs, a CSHL researcher who had given a talk about his lab’s work on how the brain computes confidence in its own decision-making, summarized several emerging themes to be derived from the conference—novel technologies driving progress in the field and the conversion of some basic research into treatments—not just pharmaceuticals but technologies such as electrical stimulation of the brain. The still relatively slow pace toward clinical trials follows from the size of the challenge. “Understanding the brain functionally—and its dysfunctions—is arguably one of the greatest challenges of humanity,” Kepecs said. CSHL asked me to interview three of the presenters for the lab’s YouTube channel, CSHL Leading Strand. The videos, just a few of those from the conference on the lab’s channel, provide more detail about what the scientists there are up to—and the halting steps toward that initial base camp. There was Li-Huei Tsai of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory who talked to me about using noninvasive, flickering light that alters brain rhythms to potentially aid Alzheimer’s patients. Ricardo Dolmetsch, global head of neuroscience with the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, recounted the development of a gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy. And Robert Malenka, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University Medical School continues to investigate a brain pathway that promotes social interactions—as well as the street drug, MDMA (aka ecstasy), which enhances prosocial behavior, also through its actions on the neurotransmitter serotonin. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 25063 - Posted: 06.07.2018

By Ingfei Chen Each year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, roughly 820,800 guinea pigs, dogs, cats, and other animals covered by the Animal Welfare Act are used in research in the U.S.; of those, about 71,370 are subjected to unalleviated pain. These stats don’t track the millions of mice and rats that are used in lab experiments and excluded from the animal protection law (although the rodents are covered by other federal regulations). Scientists and their institutions say they’re committed to keeping pain or distress to a minimum in lab animals where they can. But how do you know how much pain a mouse or a zebrafish feels? And who decides how much pain is too much? “We know if they’re in really bad pain, as much as they want a nice nest, they’re not gonna put the work into doing that.” The issue of animal suffering was in the headlines earlier this year, when landlocked Switzerland banned the culinary practice of boiling lobsters alive. No one knows for sure whether these big-clawed crustaceans, equipped with only a rudimentary nervous system, experience pain. Nonetheless, Swiss authorities now require stunning lobsters in a humane way before tossing them into the pot. I read of this milestone in crustacean rights with bemused fascination and anthropomorphic cringing, as I imagined the lobster’s hypothetical plight. But the Swiss move also made me wonder how scientists measure and deal with animal pain in research studies. Experiments that use critters to simulate human illness or injury are stepping stones to the medical treatments we all use. Yet, the benefits we reap must outweigh the costs to animal welfare for those sacrifices to be justified, ethicists and animal advocates say. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Animal Rights; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25061 - Posted: 06.06.2018

By Maggie Koerth-Baker If an animal is smart enough, should we treat it like a human? An abstract question, but one that found its way into a courtroom recently. A case bidding for consideration by the New York State Court of Appeals sought to extend the legal concept of habeas corpus — which allows a person to petition a court for freedom from unlawful imprisonment — to cover two privately-owned chimpanzees. The case for giving the chimps a human right like freedom from unlawful incarceration is based on their similarity to humans — they can think, feel and plan, argue the people bringing the case on behalf of the chimpanzees, so shouldn’t they have some guarantees of liberty? The court declined to hear the case, but one judge did say that some highly intelligent animals probably should be treated more like people and less like property. It’s just one judge, but you hear this kind of thing a lot from animal rights activists. The Nonhuman Rights Project, the nonprofit behind the habeas corpus lawsuit, has a stated goal of securing increased, human-like rights for great apes, elephants, dolphins and whales — highly intelligent, charismatic mammals. So, does a chimpanzee deserve more rights than, say, a pigeon? The logic that leads to “yes” is clear enough, but putting it into practice would be tough, scientists say. Because when it comes to measuring intelligence, we’re actually a little dumb. One of the problems: Animals don’t stack up the way you’d expect. “[Pigeons have] knocked our socks off in our own lab and other people’s labs in terms of what they can do,” said Edward Wasserman, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Iowa. “Pigeons can blow the doors off monkeys in some tasks.” Experts who study animal intelligence across species say we can’t rank animals by their smarts — scientists don’t even try anymore — which means there’s no objective way to determine which animals would deserve more human-like rights.

Keyword: Evolution; Animal Rights
Link ID: 25047 - Posted: 06.01.2018

Alison Abbott Scientists at one of Germany’s leading neuroscience institutes say that their employer, the Max Planck Society (MPS), is failing in its responsibility to defend the institute’s scientists against efforts by animal-rights activists to disrupt research. The criticisms are outlined in two letters to MPS leadership seen by Nature, and in interviews with scientists. They relate to the MPS’s handling of a struggle between animal-rights activists and Nikos Logothetis, a world-renowned neuroscientist who has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (MPI-Biocyb) in Tübingen since 1996. An expert in visual reception, Logothetis studies how the brain makes sense of the world, and used to run a primate laboratory at MPI-Biocyb. The MPS, which has an annual public budget of €1.8 billion (US$2.1 billion), is Germany’s most prestigious research organization, and runs 84 research institutes and facilities. The struggle began in September 2014, when a German television channel aired footage taken by an undercover animal-welfare activist who had infiltrated Logothetis’s lab, purporting to show mistreatment of research monkeys. Death threats and insults to Logothetis and his family followed — and in 2015, Logothetis decided to wind down his primate lab and replace it with a rodent facility. Events came to a head on 20 February this year, when Logothetis was indicted for allegedly violating animal-protection laws, after an animal-welfare group made complaints to police on the basis of the 2014 footage. Logothetis denies the charges. A trial date has not yet been set. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 25039 - Posted: 05.31.2018

By Victoria Gill Science correspondent, BBC News Scientists working with dolphins at a marine park near Paris have attempted to measure how the animals feel about aspects of their lives in captivity. In what researchers say is the first project to examine captivity "from the animals' perspective", the team assessed what activities dolphins looked forward to most. They found that the marine mammals most keenly anticipated interacting with a familiar human. The results, they say, show that "better human-animal bonds equals better welfare". The study, published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, was part of a three-year project to measure dolphin welfare in a captive setting. Lead researcher Dr Isabella Clegg worked at Parc Astérix, a theme park with one of France's largest dolphinariums. With colleagues at the University of Paris animal behaviour lab, she designed experiments to decode dolphin behaviour - essentially looking for physical postures that indicate how the animals were feeling. "We wanted to find out what activities in captivity they like most," Dr Clegg told the BBC. To work this out, she tested three activities: a trainer coming and playing with dolphins; adding toys to the pool; and a control, which meant leaving the dolphins to their own devices. "We found a really interesting result - all dolphins look forward most to interacting with a familiar human," Dr Clegg said. The animals showed this anticipation by "spy hopping", the action of peering above the surface and looking in the direction that trainers usually approached from. The dolphins would also increase their level of activity in the pool and spend more time at the edge. "We've seen this same thing in other zoo animals and in farm animals," said Dr Clegg, adding: "Better human-animal bonds equals better welfare." © 2018 BBC.

Keyword: Animal Rights; Emotions
Link ID: 25028 - Posted: 05.29.2018