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SYNAPSE – THE SCIENCE PORTAL Posts about synapse written by Neuronicus. Just like in the case of schizophrenia, hundreds of genes have been associated with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs). MIDICHLORIANS, MIDICHLORIA, AND MITOCHONDRIA The genus name Midichloria (mi.di.chlo′ria. N.L. fem. n.) is derived from the midichlorians, organisms within the fictional Star Wars universe. Midichlorians are microscopic symbionts that reside within the cells of living things and ‘‘communicate with the Force’’. Star Wars creator George Lucas stated that the idea of the THE FIRSTS: THE MIRROR NEURONS (1988) There are some neurons in the human brain that fire both when the person is doing some behavior and when watching that behavior performed by someone else. These cells are called mirror neurons and were first discovered in 1988 (see NOTE) by a group of researchers form the University of Parma, Italy, led by Giacomo VIRUSES ARE AS ALIVE AS CRYSTALS Crystal growth can even be looked at as a sort of metabolism. So, if they are willing to characterize crystal growth as somewhere on the continuous scale of life, viruses can be there as well. Using their analogy, the living, metabolically active form for crystals is when they are growing in a saturated solution; and bits breaking off or the THE OLDEST KNOWN ANATOMICALLY MODERN HUMANS IN EUROPE A couple of days ago, on December 1st, was the National Day of Romania, a small country in the South-East of Europe. In its honor, I dug out a paper that shows that some of the earliest known modern humans in Europe were also dug out there. WHO INVENTED OPTOGENETICS? In short, Dr. Pan, an obscure name in an obscure university from an ill-famed city (Detroit), does research for years in an unglamorous field of retina and blindness. He figured, quite reasonably, that restoring the proteins which sense light in the human eye (i.e. photoreceptor proteins) could restore vision in the congenitallyblind.
THE FIRSTS: THEORY OF MIND IN NON-HUMANS (1978) The FIRSTS: Theory of Mind in non-humans (1978) Although any farmer or pet owner throughout the ages would probably agree that animals can understand the intentions of their owners, not until 1978 has this knowledge been scientifically proven. Premack & Woodruff (1978) performed a very simple experiment in which they showed videos to afemale
IS PIRACY THE SAME AS STEALING? Despite what the grieved parties may vociferously advocate, digital piracy is not theft because what is being stolen is a copy of the goodie, not the goodie itself therefore it is an infringement and not an actual theft. That’s from a legal standpoint. Ethically though. For Eres et al. (2016), theft is theft, whether the object of thievery IS RELIGION TURNING PERFECTLY NORMAL CHILDREN INTO SELFISH The main argument that religious people have against atheism or agnosticism is that without a guiding deity and a set of behaving rules, how can one trust a non-religious person to behave morally? In other words, there is no incentive for the non-religious to behave in a societally accepted manner. Or so it seemed. Past AUTISM CURE BY GENE THERAPY Autism cure by gene therapy. Nothing short of an autism cure is promised by this hot new research paper. Among many thousands of proteins that a neuron needs to make in order to function properly there is one called SHANK3 made from the gene shank3. (Note the customary writing: by consensus, a gene’s name is written usingsmall caps and
SYNAPSE – THE SCIENCE PORTAL Posts about synapse written by Neuronicus. Just like in the case of schizophrenia, hundreds of genes have been associated with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs). MIDICHLORIANS, MIDICHLORIA, AND MITOCHONDRIA The genus name Midichloria (mi.di.chlo′ria. N.L. fem. n.) is derived from the midichlorians, organisms within the fictional Star Wars universe. Midichlorians are microscopic symbionts that reside within the cells of living things and ‘‘communicate with the Force’’. Star Wars creator George Lucas stated that the idea of the THE FIRSTS: THE MIRROR NEURONS (1988) There are some neurons in the human brain that fire both when the person is doing some behavior and when watching that behavior performed by someone else. These cells are called mirror neurons and were first discovered in 1988 (see NOTE) by a group of researchers form the University of Parma, Italy, led by Giacomo VIRUSES ARE AS ALIVE AS CRYSTALS Crystal growth can even be looked at as a sort of metabolism. So, if they are willing to characterize crystal growth as somewhere on the continuous scale of life, viruses can be there as well. Using their analogy, the living, metabolically active form for crystals is when they are growing in a saturated solution; and bits breaking off or the THE OLDEST KNOWN ANATOMICALLY MODERN HUMANS IN EUROPE A couple of days ago, on December 1st, was the National Day of Romania, a small country in the South-East of Europe. In its honor, I dug out a paper that shows that some of the earliest known modern humans in Europe were also dug out there. WHO INVENTED OPTOGENETICS? In short, Dr. Pan, an obscure name in an obscure university from an ill-famed city (Detroit), does research for years in an unglamorous field of retina and blindness. He figured, quite reasonably, that restoring the proteins which sense light in the human eye (i.e. photoreceptor proteins) could restore vision in the congenitallyblind.
THE FIRSTS: THEORY OF MIND IN NON-HUMANS (1978) The FIRSTS: Theory of Mind in non-humans (1978) Although any farmer or pet owner throughout the ages would probably agree that animals can understand the intentions of their owners, not until 1978 has this knowledge been scientifically proven. Premack & Woodruff (1978) performed a very simple experiment in which they showed videos to afemale
IS PIRACY THE SAME AS STEALING? Despite what the grieved parties may vociferously advocate, digital piracy is not theft because what is being stolen is a copy of the goodie, not the goodie itself therefore it is an infringement and not an actual theft. That’s from a legal standpoint. Ethically though. For Eres et al. (2016), theft is theft, whether the object of thievery IS RELIGION TURNING PERFECTLY NORMAL CHILDREN INTO SELFISH The main argument that religious people have against atheism or agnosticism is that without a guiding deity and a set of behaving rules, how can one trust a non-religious person to behave morally? In other words, there is no incentive for the non-religious to behave in a societally accepted manner. Or so it seemed. Past THE FIRSTS: THEORY OF MIND IN NON-HUMANS (1978) The FIRSTS: Theory of Mind in non-humans (1978) Although any farmer or pet owner throughout the ages would probably agree that animals can understand the intentions of their owners, not until 1978 has this knowledge been scientifically proven. Premack & Woodruff (1978) performed a very simple experiment in which they showed videos to afemale
THE OLDEST KNOWN ANATOMICALLY MODERN HUMANS IN EUROPE A couple of days ago, on December 1st, was the National Day of Romania, a small country in the South-East of Europe. In its honor, I dug out a paper that shows that some of the earliest known modern humans in Europe were also dug out there. IS RELIGION TURNING PERFECTLY NORMAL CHILDREN INTO SELFISH The main argument that religious people have against atheism or agnosticism is that without a guiding deity and a set of behaving rules, how can one trust a non-religious person to behave morally? In other words, there is no incentive for the non-religious to behave in a societally accepted manner. Or so it seemed. PastTHE THIRD EYE
The pineal gland has held fascination since Descartes’ nefarious claim that it is the seat of the soul. There is no evidence of that; he said it might be where the soul resides because he thought the pineal gland was the only solitaire structure in the brain so it must be special. By ‘solitaire’ I THE SUPERIORITY ILLUSION Following up on my promise to cover a few papers about self-deception, the second in the series is about the superiority illusion, another cognitive bias (the first was about depressive realism). Yamada et al. (2013) sought to uncover the origins of the ubiquitous belief that oneself is "superior to average people along various dimensions, such THE GOOD AND THE BAD OF ABSTINENCE The good and the bad of abstinence. The nucleus accumbens, a key region involved in reward processing and addiction. Credit: Zou et al. (2015) Consumption of addictive drugs changes your brain and these changes underlie the consequent dependence. It is very difficult to quit, and certainly it is not a matter of lack of will power that the INTERVIEW WITH JASON D. SHEPHERD, PHD Interview with Jason D. Shepherd, PhD. During the first week of the publication, a Cell paper that I covered a couple of weeks ago has received a lot of attention from media outlets, like The Atlantic, Scicasts and Neuroscience News/University of Utah Press Release . It is not my intention to duplicate here their wonderfully done summariesand
PRIONS IN URINE
Prions in urine. This is one of the scariest papers I have read. All prion diseases – like the mad cow disease, scrapie, Kuru or Creutzfeldt-Jacob (CJD) – are incurable and fatal. Up to recently, we thought the only way you can get it is by ingesting the meat of the affected animal. Or, as I reported a couple of months ago, byingesting
CAN YOU TICKLE YOURSELF? Blakemore, Wolpert & Frith (2000) review several papers on the subject, including some of their own, and arrive to the conclusion that the reason you can’t tickle yourself is because you expect it. Let me explain: when you do a movement that results in a sensation, you have a pretty accurate expectation of how that’s going to feel. HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ENRICHMENT TO SHOW From funnyvet.. Environmental enrichment is a powerful way to give a boost to neurogenesis and alleviate some anxiety and depression symptoms. For the laboratory rodents, who spend their lives in cages with water and food access, environmental enrichment can refer to as little as a toy or two or as much as large room colonies with different size tubes, different levels to explore, SYNAPSE – THE SCIENCE PORTAL Posts about synapse written by Neuronicus. Just like in the case of schizophrenia, hundreds of genes have been associated with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs). VIRUSES ARE AS ALIVE AS CRYSTALS Crystal growth can even be looked at as a sort of metabolism. So, if they are willing to characterize crystal growth as somewhere on the continuous scale of life, viruses can be there as well. Using their analogy, the living, metabolically active form for crystals is when they are growing in a saturated solution; and bits breaking off or the MIDICHLORIANS, MIDICHLORIA, AND MITOCHONDRIA The genus name Midichloria (mi.di.chlo′ria. N.L. fem. n.) is derived from the midichlorians, organisms within the fictional Star Wars universe. Midichlorians are microscopic symbionts that reside within the cells of living things and ‘‘communicate with the Force’’. Star Wars creator George Lucas stated that the idea of the AUTISM CURE BY GENE THERAPY Autism cure by gene therapy. Nothing short of an autism cure is promised by this hot new research paper. Among many thousands of proteins that a neuron needs to make in order to function properly there is one called SHANK3 made from the gene shank3. (Note the customary writing: by consensus, a gene’s name is written usingsmall caps and
THE FIRSTS: THE MIRROR NEURONS (1988) There are some neurons in the human brain that fire both when the person is doing some behavior and when watching that behavior performed by someone else. These cells are called mirror neurons and were first discovered in 1988 (see NOTE) by a group of researchers form the University of Parma, Italy, led by Giacomo ARC: MRNA & PROTEIN FROM ONE NEURON TO ANOTHER EDIT 1 : I promised four days ago that I will post this, while it was still hot, but my Internet was down, thanks to the only behemoth provider in USA. And rated the worst company in the Nation, too. You definitely know by now about whom I'm talking about. GrrrrAnyway, here
THE FIRSTS: THEORY OF MIND IN NON-HUMANS (1978) The FIRSTS: Theory of Mind in non-humans (1978) Although any farmer or pet owner throughout the ages would probably agree that animals can understand the intentions of their owners, not until 1978 has this knowledge been scientifically proven. Premack & Woodruff (1978) performed a very simple experiment in which they showed videos to afemale
WHO INVENTED OPTOGENETICS? In short, Dr. Pan, an obscure name in an obscure university from an ill-famed city (Detroit), does research for years in an unglamorous field of retina and blindness. He figured, quite reasonably, that restoring the proteins which sense light in the human eye (i.e. photoreceptor proteins) could restore vision in the congenitallyblind.
IS PIRACY THE SAME AS STEALING? Despite what the grieved parties may vociferously advocate, digital piracy is not theft because what is being stolen is a copy of the goodie, not the goodie itself therefore it is an infringement and not an actual theft. That’s from a legal standpoint. Ethically though. For Eres et al. (2016), theft is theft, whether the object of thievery INTERVIEW WITH JASON D. SHEPHERD, PHD Interview with Jason D. Shepherd, PhD. During the first week of the publication, a Cell paper that I covered a couple of weeks ago has received a lot of attention from media outlets, like The Atlantic, Scicasts and Neuroscience News/University of Utah Press Release . It is not my intention to duplicate here their wonderfully done summariesand
SYNAPSE – THE SCIENCE PORTAL Posts about synapse written by Neuronicus. Just like in the case of schizophrenia, hundreds of genes have been associated with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs). VIRUSES ARE AS ALIVE AS CRYSTALS Crystal growth can even be looked at as a sort of metabolism. So, if they are willing to characterize crystal growth as somewhere on the continuous scale of life, viruses can be there as well. Using their analogy, the living, metabolically active form for crystals is when they are growing in a saturated solution; and bits breaking off or the AUTISM CURE BY GENE THERAPY Autism cure by gene therapy. Nothing short of an autism cure is promised by this hot new research paper. Among many thousands of proteins that a neuron needs to make in order to function properly there is one called SHANK3 made from the gene shank3. (Note the customary writing: by consensus, a gene’s name is written usingsmall caps and
MIDICHLORIANS, MIDICHLORIA, AND MITOCHONDRIA The genus name Midichloria (mi.di.chlo′ria. N.L. fem. n.) is derived from the midichlorians, organisms within the fictional Star Wars universe. Midichlorians are microscopic symbionts that reside within the cells of living things and ‘‘communicate with the Force’’. Star Wars creator George Lucas stated that the idea of the THE FIRSTS: THE MIRROR NEURONS (1988) There are some neurons in the human brain that fire both when the person is doing some behavior and when watching that behavior performed by someone else. These cells are called mirror neurons and were first discovered in 1988 (see NOTE) by a group of researchers form the University of Parma, Italy, led by Giacomo ARC: MRNA & PROTEIN FROM ONE NEURON TO ANOTHER EDIT 1 : I promised four days ago that I will post this, while it was still hot, but my Internet was down, thanks to the only behemoth provider in USA. And rated the worst company in the Nation, too. You definitely know by now about whom I'm talking about. GrrrrAnyway, here
THE FIRSTS: THEORY OF MIND IN NON-HUMANS (1978) The FIRSTS: Theory of Mind in non-humans (1978) Although any farmer or pet owner throughout the ages would probably agree that animals can understand the intentions of their owners, not until 1978 has this knowledge been scientifically proven. Premack & Woodruff (1978) performed a very simple experiment in which they showed videos to afemale
WHO INVENTED OPTOGENETICS? In short, Dr. Pan, an obscure name in an obscure university from an ill-famed city (Detroit), does research for years in an unglamorous field of retina and blindness. He figured, quite reasonably, that restoring the proteins which sense light in the human eye (i.e. photoreceptor proteins) could restore vision in the congenitallyblind.
IS PIRACY THE SAME AS STEALING? Despite what the grieved parties may vociferously advocate, digital piracy is not theft because what is being stolen is a copy of the goodie, not the goodie itself therefore it is an infringement and not an actual theft. That’s from a legal standpoint. Ethically though. For Eres et al. (2016), theft is theft, whether the object of thievery INTERVIEW WITH JASON D. SHEPHERD, PHD Interview with Jason D. Shepherd, PhD. During the first week of the publication, a Cell paper that I covered a couple of weeks ago has received a lot of attention from media outlets, like The Atlantic, Scicasts and Neuroscience News/University of Utah Press Release . It is not my intention to duplicate here their wonderfully done summariesand
THE OLDEST KNOWN ANATOMICALLY MODERN HUMANS IN EUROPE A couple of days ago, on December 1st, was the National Day of Romania, a small country in the South-East of Europe. In its honor, I dug out a paper that shows that some of the earliest known modern humans in Europe were also dug out there. AUTISM CURE BY GENE THERAPY Autism cure by gene therapy. Nothing short of an autism cure is promised by this hot new research paper. Among many thousands of proteins that a neuron needs to make in order to function properly there is one called SHANK3 made from the gene shank3. (Note the customary writing: by consensus, a gene’s name is written usingsmall caps and
CURE – THE SCIENCE PORTAL Posts about cure written by Neuronicus. In the past few days, a new hot subject has gripped the attention of various media and concerned the medical doctors, asMIRROR NEURON
THE FIRSTS: The Mirror Neurons (1988) There are some neurons in the human brain that fire both when the person is doing some behavior and when watching that behavior performed by someone else. These cells are called mirror neurons and were first discovered in 1988 (see NOTE) by a group of researchers form the University of Parma, Italy, led by INTERVIEW WITH JASON D. SHEPHERD, PHD Interview with Jason D. Shepherd, PhD. During the first week of the publication, a Cell paper that I covered a couple of weeks ago has received a lot of attention from media outlets, like The Atlantic, Scicasts and Neuroscience News/University of Utah Press Release . It is not my intention to duplicate here their wonderfully done summariesand
APPARENTLY, SCIENTISTS DON’T KNOW THE RISKS & BENEFITS OF If you want to find out how bleach works or what keeps the airplanes in the air or why is the rainbow the same sequence of colors or if it's dangerous to let your kid play with snails would you ask a scientist or your local priest? The answer is very straightforward formost of
PLAY-BASED OR ACADEMIC-INTENSIVE? The title of today's post wouldn't make any sense for anybody who isn't a preschooler's parent or teacher in the USA. You see, on the west side of the Atlantic there is a debate on whether a play-based curriculum for a preschool is more advantageous THE FIRSTS: THE DUNNING–KRUGER EFFECT (1999) OR THE Much talked about these days in the media, the unskilled-and-unaware phenomenon was mused upon since, as they say, immemorial times, but not actually seriously investigated until the '80s. The phenomenon refers to the observation that incompetents overestimate their competence whereas the competent tend to underestimate their skill (see Bertrand Russell's brilliant summary of it). HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP IS BAD FOR YOU Because I cannot leave controversial things well enough alone – at least not when I know there shouldn’t be any controversy – my ears caught up with my tongue yesterday when the latter sputtered: “There is strong evidence for eliminating sugar from commonly used food products like bread, cereal, cans, drinks, and so on, particularly against that awful high fructose corn syrup”. HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ENRICHMENT TO SHOW From funnyvet.. Environmental enrichment is a powerful way to give a boost to neurogenesis and alleviate some anxiety and depression symptoms. For the laboratory rodents, who spend their lives in cages with water and food access, environmental enrichment can refer to as little as a toy or two or as much as large room colonies with different size tubes, different levels to explore, SYNAPSE – THE SCIENCE PORTAL Posts about synapse written by Neuronicus. Just like in the case of schizophrenia, hundreds of genes have been associated with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs). VIRUSES ARE AS ALIVE AS CRYSTALS Crystal growth can even be looked at as a sort of metabolism. So, if they are willing to characterize crystal growth as somewhere on the continuous scale of life, viruses can be there as well. Using their analogy, the living, metabolically active form for crystals is when they are growing in a saturated solution; and bits breaking off or the MIDICHLORIANS, MIDICHLORIA, AND MITOCHONDRIA The genus name Midichloria (mi.di.chlo′ria. N.L. fem. n.) is derived from the midichlorians, organisms within the fictional Star Wars universe. Midichlorians are microscopic symbionts that reside within the cells of living things and ‘‘communicate with the Force’’. Star Wars creator George Lucas stated that the idea of the AUTISM CURE BY GENE THERAPY Autism cure by gene therapy. Nothing short of an autism cure is promised by this hot new research paper. Among many thousands of proteins that a neuron needs to make in order to function properly there is one called SHANK3 made from the gene shank3. (Note the customary writing: by consensus, a gene’s name is written usingsmall caps and
THE FIRSTS: THE MIRROR NEURONS (1988) There are some neurons in the human brain that fire both when the person is doing some behavior and when watching that behavior performed by someone else. These cells are called mirror neurons and were first discovered in 1988 (see NOTE) by a group of researchers form the University of Parma, Italy, led by Giacomo ARC: MRNA & PROTEIN FROM ONE NEURON TO ANOTHER EDIT 1 : I promised four days ago that I will post this, while it was still hot, but my Internet was down, thanks to the only behemoth provider in USA. And rated the worst company in the Nation, too. You definitely know by now about whom I'm talking about. GrrrrAnyway, here
THE FIRSTS: THEORY OF MIND IN NON-HUMANS (1978) The FIRSTS: Theory of Mind in non-humans (1978) Although any farmer or pet owner throughout the ages would probably agree that animals can understand the intentions of their owners, not until 1978 has this knowledge been scientifically proven. Premack & Woodruff (1978) performed a very simple experiment in which they showed videos to afemale
WHO INVENTED OPTOGENETICS? In short, Dr. Pan, an obscure name in an obscure university from an ill-famed city (Detroit), does research for years in an unglamorous field of retina and blindness. He figured, quite reasonably, that restoring the proteins which sense light in the human eye (i.e. photoreceptor proteins) could restore vision in the congenitallyblind.
IS PIRACY THE SAME AS STEALING? Despite what the grieved parties may vociferously advocate, digital piracy is not theft because what is being stolen is a copy of the goodie, not the goodie itself therefore it is an infringement and not an actual theft. That’s from a legal standpoint. Ethically though. For Eres et al. (2016), theft is theft, whether the object of thievery INTERVIEW WITH JASON D. SHEPHERD, PHD Interview with Jason D. Shepherd, PhD. During the first week of the publication, a Cell paper that I covered a couple of weeks ago has received a lot of attention from media outlets, like The Atlantic, Scicasts and Neuroscience News/University of Utah Press Release . It is not my intention to duplicate here their wonderfully done summariesand
SYNAPSE – THE SCIENCE PORTAL Posts about synapse written by Neuronicus. Just like in the case of schizophrenia, hundreds of genes have been associated with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs). VIRUSES ARE AS ALIVE AS CRYSTALS Crystal growth can even be looked at as a sort of metabolism. So, if they are willing to characterize crystal growth as somewhere on the continuous scale of life, viruses can be there as well. Using their analogy, the living, metabolically active form for crystals is when they are growing in a saturated solution; and bits breaking off or the MIDICHLORIANS, MIDICHLORIA, AND MITOCHONDRIA The genus name Midichloria (mi.di.chlo′ria. N.L. fem. n.) is derived from the midichlorians, organisms within the fictional Star Wars universe. Midichlorians are microscopic symbionts that reside within the cells of living things and ‘‘communicate with the Force’’. Star Wars creator George Lucas stated that the idea of the AUTISM CURE BY GENE THERAPY Autism cure by gene therapy. Nothing short of an autism cure is promised by this hot new research paper. Among many thousands of proteins that a neuron needs to make in order to function properly there is one called SHANK3 made from the gene shank3. (Note the customary writing: by consensus, a gene’s name is written usingsmall caps and
THE FIRSTS: THE MIRROR NEURONS (1988) There are some neurons in the human brain that fire both when the person is doing some behavior and when watching that behavior performed by someone else. These cells are called mirror neurons and were first discovered in 1988 (see NOTE) by a group of researchers form the University of Parma, Italy, led by Giacomo ARC: MRNA & PROTEIN FROM ONE NEURON TO ANOTHER EDIT 1 : I promised four days ago that I will post this, while it was still hot, but my Internet was down, thanks to the only behemoth provider in USA. And rated the worst company in the Nation, too. You definitely know by now about whom I'm talking about. GrrrrAnyway, here
THE FIRSTS: THEORY OF MIND IN NON-HUMANS (1978) The FIRSTS: Theory of Mind in non-humans (1978) Although any farmer or pet owner throughout the ages would probably agree that animals can understand the intentions of their owners, not until 1978 has this knowledge been scientifically proven. Premack & Woodruff (1978) performed a very simple experiment in which they showed videos to afemale
WHO INVENTED OPTOGENETICS? In short, Dr. Pan, an obscure name in an obscure university from an ill-famed city (Detroit), does research for years in an unglamorous field of retina and blindness. He figured, quite reasonably, that restoring the proteins which sense light in the human eye (i.e. photoreceptor proteins) could restore vision in the congenitallyblind.
IS PIRACY THE SAME AS STEALING? Despite what the grieved parties may vociferously advocate, digital piracy is not theft because what is being stolen is a copy of the goodie, not the goodie itself therefore it is an infringement and not an actual theft. That’s from a legal standpoint. Ethically though. For Eres et al. (2016), theft is theft, whether the object of thievery INTERVIEW WITH JASON D. SHEPHERD, PHD Interview with Jason D. Shepherd, PhD. During the first week of the publication, a Cell paper that I covered a couple of weeks ago has received a lot of attention from media outlets, like The Atlantic, Scicasts and Neuroscience News/University of Utah Press Release . It is not my intention to duplicate here their wonderfully done summariesand
THE OLDEST KNOWN ANATOMICALLY MODERN HUMANS IN EUROPE A couple of days ago, on December 1st, was the National Day of Romania, a small country in the South-East of Europe. In its honor, I dug out a paper that shows that some of the earliest known modern humans in Europe were also dug out there. AUTISM CURE BY GENE THERAPY Autism cure by gene therapy. Nothing short of an autism cure is promised by this hot new research paper. Among many thousands of proteins that a neuron needs to make in order to function properly there is one called SHANK3 made from the gene shank3. (Note the customary writing: by consensus, a gene’s name is written usingsmall caps and
CURE – THE SCIENCE PORTAL Posts about cure written by Neuronicus. In the past few days, a new hot subject has gripped the attention of various media and concerned the medical doctors, asMIRROR NEURON
THE FIRSTS: The Mirror Neurons (1988) There are some neurons in the human brain that fire both when the person is doing some behavior and when watching that behavior performed by someone else. These cells are called mirror neurons and were first discovered in 1988 (see NOTE) by a group of researchers form the University of Parma, Italy, led by INTERVIEW WITH JASON D. SHEPHERD, PHD Interview with Jason D. Shepherd, PhD. During the first week of the publication, a Cell paper that I covered a couple of weeks ago has received a lot of attention from media outlets, like The Atlantic, Scicasts and Neuroscience News/University of Utah Press Release . It is not my intention to duplicate here their wonderfully done summariesand
APPARENTLY, SCIENTISTS DON’T KNOW THE RISKS & BENEFITS OF If you want to find out how bleach works or what keeps the airplanes in the air or why is the rainbow the same sequence of colors or if it's dangerous to let your kid play with snails would you ask a scientist or your local priest? The answer is very straightforward formost of
PLAY-BASED OR ACADEMIC-INTENSIVE? The title of today's post wouldn't make any sense for anybody who isn't a preschooler's parent or teacher in the USA. You see, on the west side of the Atlantic there is a debate on whether a play-based curriculum for a preschool is more advantageous THE FIRSTS: THE DUNNING–KRUGER EFFECT (1999) OR THE Much talked about these days in the media, the unskilled-and-unaware phenomenon was mused upon since, as they say, immemorial times, but not actually seriously investigated until the '80s. The phenomenon refers to the observation that incompetents overestimate their competence whereas the competent tend to underestimate their skill (see Bertrand Russell's brilliant summary of it). HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP IS BAD FOR YOU Because I cannot leave controversial things well enough alone – at least not when I know there shouldn’t be any controversy – my ears caught up with my tongue yesterday when the latter sputtered: “There is strong evidence for eliminating sugar from commonly used food products like bread, cereal, cans, drinks, and so on, particularly against that awful high fructose corn syrup”. HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ENRICHMENT TO SHOW From funnyvet.. Environmental enrichment is a powerful way to give a boost to neurogenesis and alleviate some anxiety and depression symptoms. For the laboratory rodents, who spend their lives in cages with water and food access, environmental enrichment can refer to as little as a toy or two or as much as large room colonies with different size tubes, different levels to explore, SYNAPSE – THE SCIENCE PORTAL Posts about synapse written by Neuronicus. Just like in the case of schizophrenia, hundreds of genes have been associated with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs). VIRUSES ARE AS ALIVE AS CRYSTALS Crystal growth can even be looked at as a sort of metabolism. So, if they are willing to characterize crystal growth as somewhere on the continuous scale of life, viruses can be there as well. Using their analogy, the living, metabolically active form for crystals is when they are growing in a saturated solution; and bits breaking off or the MIDICHLORIANS, MIDICHLORIA, AND MITOCHONDRIA The genus name Midichloria (mi.di.chlo′ria. N.L. fem. n.) is derived from the midichlorians, organisms within the fictional Star Wars universe. Midichlorians are microscopic symbionts that reside within the cells of living things and ‘‘communicate with the Force’’. Star Wars creator George Lucas stated that the idea of the AUTISM CURE BY GENE THERAPY Autism cure by gene therapy. Nothing short of an autism cure is promised by this hot new research paper. Among many thousands of proteins that a neuron needs to make in order to function properly there is one called SHANK3 made from the gene shank3. (Note the customary writing: by consensus, a gene’s name is written usingsmall caps and
THE FIRSTS: THE MIRROR NEURONS (1988) There are some neurons in the human brain that fire both when the person is doing some behavior and when watching that behavior performed by someone else. These cells are called mirror neurons and were first discovered in 1988 (see NOTE) by a group of researchers form the University of Parma, Italy, led by Giacomo ARC: MRNA & PROTEIN FROM ONE NEURON TO ANOTHER EDIT 1 : I promised four days ago that I will post this, while it was still hot, but my Internet was down, thanks to the only behemoth provider in USA. And rated the worst company in the Nation, too. You definitely know by now about whom I'm talking about. GrrrrAnyway, here
THE FIRSTS: THEORY OF MIND IN NON-HUMANS (1978) The FIRSTS: Theory of Mind in non-humans (1978) Although any farmer or pet owner throughout the ages would probably agree that animals can understand the intentions of their owners, not until 1978 has this knowledge been scientifically proven. Premack & Woodruff (1978) performed a very simple experiment in which they showed videos to afemale
WHO INVENTED OPTOGENETICS? In short, Dr. Pan, an obscure name in an obscure university from an ill-famed city (Detroit), does research for years in an unglamorous field of retina and blindness. He figured, quite reasonably, that restoring the proteins which sense light in the human eye (i.e. photoreceptor proteins) could restore vision in the congenitallyblind.
IS PIRACY THE SAME AS STEALING? Despite what the grieved parties may vociferously advocate, digital piracy is not theft because what is being stolen is a copy of the goodie, not the goodie itself therefore it is an infringement and not an actual theft. That’s from a legal standpoint. Ethically though. For Eres et al. (2016), theft is theft, whether the object of thievery INTERVIEW WITH JASON D. SHEPHERD, PHD Interview with Jason D. Shepherd, PhD. During the first week of the publication, a Cell paper that I covered a couple of weeks ago has received a lot of attention from media outlets, like The Atlantic, Scicasts and Neuroscience News/University of Utah Press Release . It is not my intention to duplicate here their wonderfully done summariesand
SYNAPSE – THE SCIENCE PORTAL Posts about synapse written by Neuronicus. Just like in the case of schizophrenia, hundreds of genes have been associated with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs). VIRUSES ARE AS ALIVE AS CRYSTALS Crystal growth can even be looked at as a sort of metabolism. So, if they are willing to characterize crystal growth as somewhere on the continuous scale of life, viruses can be there as well. Using their analogy, the living, metabolically active form for crystals is when they are growing in a saturated solution; and bits breaking off or the MIDICHLORIANS, MIDICHLORIA, AND MITOCHONDRIA The genus name Midichloria (mi.di.chlo′ria. N.L. fem. n.) is derived from the midichlorians, organisms within the fictional Star Wars universe. Midichlorians are microscopic symbionts that reside within the cells of living things and ‘‘communicate with the Force’’. Star Wars creator George Lucas stated that the idea of the AUTISM CURE BY GENE THERAPY Autism cure by gene therapy. Nothing short of an autism cure is promised by this hot new research paper. Among many thousands of proteins that a neuron needs to make in order to function properly there is one called SHANK3 made from the gene shank3. (Note the customary writing: by consensus, a gene’s name is written usingsmall caps and
THE FIRSTS: THE MIRROR NEURONS (1988) There are some neurons in the human brain that fire both when the person is doing some behavior and when watching that behavior performed by someone else. These cells are called mirror neurons and were first discovered in 1988 (see NOTE) by a group of researchers form the University of Parma, Italy, led by Giacomo ARC: MRNA & PROTEIN FROM ONE NEURON TO ANOTHER EDIT 1 : I promised four days ago that I will post this, while it was still hot, but my Internet was down, thanks to the only behemoth provider in USA. And rated the worst company in the Nation, too. You definitely know by now about whom I'm talking about. GrrrrAnyway, here
THE FIRSTS: THEORY OF MIND IN NON-HUMANS (1978) The FIRSTS: Theory of Mind in non-humans (1978) Although any farmer or pet owner throughout the ages would probably agree that animals can understand the intentions of their owners, not until 1978 has this knowledge been scientifically proven. Premack & Woodruff (1978) performed a very simple experiment in which they showed videos to afemale
WHO INVENTED OPTOGENETICS? In short, Dr. Pan, an obscure name in an obscure university from an ill-famed city (Detroit), does research for years in an unglamorous field of retina and blindness. He figured, quite reasonably, that restoring the proteins which sense light in the human eye (i.e. photoreceptor proteins) could restore vision in the congenitallyblind.
IS PIRACY THE SAME AS STEALING? Despite what the grieved parties may vociferously advocate, digital piracy is not theft because what is being stolen is a copy of the goodie, not the goodie itself therefore it is an infringement and not an actual theft. That’s from a legal standpoint. Ethically though. For Eres et al. (2016), theft is theft, whether the object of thievery INTERVIEW WITH JASON D. SHEPHERD, PHD Interview with Jason D. Shepherd, PhD. During the first week of the publication, a Cell paper that I covered a couple of weeks ago has received a lot of attention from media outlets, like The Atlantic, Scicasts and Neuroscience News/University of Utah Press Release . It is not my intention to duplicate here their wonderfully done summariesand
THE OLDEST KNOWN ANATOMICALLY MODERN HUMANS IN EUROPE A couple of days ago, on December 1st, was the National Day of Romania, a small country in the South-East of Europe. In its honor, I dug out a paper that shows that some of the earliest known modern humans in Europe were also dug out there. AUTISM CURE BY GENE THERAPY Autism cure by gene therapy. Nothing short of an autism cure is promised by this hot new research paper. Among many thousands of proteins that a neuron needs to make in order to function properly there is one called SHANK3 made from the gene shank3. (Note the customary writing: by consensus, a gene’s name is written usingsmall caps and
CURE – THE SCIENCE PORTAL Posts about cure written by Neuronicus. In the past few days, a new hot subject has gripped the attention of various media and concerned the medical doctors, asMIRROR NEURON
THE FIRSTS: The Mirror Neurons (1988) There are some neurons in the human brain that fire both when the person is doing some behavior and when watching that behavior performed by someone else. These cells are called mirror neurons and were first discovered in 1988 (see NOTE) by a group of researchers form the University of Parma, Italy, led by INTERVIEW WITH JASON D. SHEPHERD, PHD Interview with Jason D. Shepherd, PhD. During the first week of the publication, a Cell paper that I covered a couple of weeks ago has received a lot of attention from media outlets, like The Atlantic, Scicasts and Neuroscience News/University of Utah Press Release . It is not my intention to duplicate here their wonderfully done summariesand
APPARENTLY, SCIENTISTS DON’T KNOW THE RISKS & BENEFITS OF If you want to find out how bleach works or what keeps the airplanes in the air or why is the rainbow the same sequence of colors or if it's dangerous to let your kid play with snails would you ask a scientist or your local priest? The answer is very straightforward formost of
PLAY-BASED OR ACADEMIC-INTENSIVE? The title of today's post wouldn't make any sense for anybody who isn't a preschooler's parent or teacher in the USA. You see, on the west side of the Atlantic there is a debate on whether a play-based curriculum for a preschool is more advantageous THE FIRSTS: THE DUNNING–KRUGER EFFECT (1999) OR THE Much talked about these days in the media, the unskilled-and-unaware phenomenon was mused upon since, as they say, immemorial times, but not actually seriously investigated until the '80s. The phenomenon refers to the observation that incompetents overestimate their competence whereas the competent tend to underestimate their skill (see Bertrand Russell's brilliant summary of it). HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP IS BAD FOR YOU Because I cannot leave controversial things well enough alone – at least not when I know there shouldn’t be any controversy – my ears caught up with my tongue yesterday when the latter sputtered: “There is strong evidence for eliminating sugar from commonly used food products like bread, cereal, cans, drinks, and so on, particularly against that awful high fructose corn syrup”. HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ENRICHMENT TO SHOW From funnyvet.. Environmental enrichment is a powerful way to give a boost to neurogenesis and alleviate some anxiety and depression symptoms. For the laboratory rodents, who spend their lives in cages with water and food access, environmental enrichment can refer to as little as a toy or two or as much as large room colonies with different size tubes, different levels to explore,Skip to content
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Bringing science to you, one article at a time HOW LONG DOES THE CORONAVIRUS LAST ON SURFACES? REFERENCE: Moriarty LF, Plucinski MM, Marston BJ, et al. (ePub: 23 March 2020). Public Health Responses to COVID-19 Outbreaks on Cruise Ships — Worldwide, February–March 2020. _MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report_. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6912e3external icon. ARTICLE
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CHLOROQUINE-INDUCED PSYCHOSIS In the past few days, a new hot subject has gripped the attention of various media and concerned the medical doctors, as if they don’t have enough to deal with: chloroquine. That is because the President of the U.S.A., Donald Trump, endorsed chloroquine as treatment of COVID-19, a “game changer”, despite his very own director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci, very emphatically and vehemently denying that the promise of (hydroxy)chloroquine is beyond anecdotal (see the White House briefing transcript here).
Many medical doctors spoke out urging caution against the drug, but particularly against the combination the President endorses: hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin. As I understand it, this combo can be lethal as it can lead to fatal arrhythmia. As for the (hydroxy)cloroquine’s possibility to help treat COVID-19, the jury is still out. Far out. Meaning that there have been a few interesting observations of the drugs working in a Petri dish (Liu et al. 2020, Wang et al., 2020), but as any pharma company knows, there is a long and perilous way from Petri dishes to pharmacies. To be precise, _only 1 in 5000_ drugs get from pre-clinical trials to approval and it takes about 12 years for this process to be completed (Kaljevic et al., 2004). The time is so long not because red tape, as some would deplore, but because it takes time to see what it does in humans (Phase 0), what doses are safe and don’t kill you (Phase 1), does it work at all for the intended disease (Phase 2), compare it with other drugs and evaluate the long-term side effects (Phase 3) and, finally, to see the risks and benefits of this drug (Phase 4). While we could probably get rid of Phase 0 and 4 when there is such a pandemic, there is no way I would submit my family to anything that hasn’t passed phases 1, 2, and 3. And those take years. With all the money that a nation-state has, it would still take 18 months to do itsemi-properly.
Luckily for all of us, chloroquine is a very old and established anti-malarial medicine, and as such we can safely dispense of Phases 0, 1, and 4, which is fine. So we can start Phase 2 with (hydroxy)chloroquine. And that is exactly what WHO and several others are doing right now. But we don’t have enough data. We haven’t done it _yet_. So one can hope as much as they want, but that doesn’t make it faster. Unfortunately – and here we go to the crux of the post -, following the President’s endorsement, many started to hoard chloroquine. Particularly the rich who can afford to “convince” an MD to write them a script for it. In countries where chloroquine is sold without prescription, like Nigeria, where it is used for arthritis, people rushed to clear the pharmacies and some didn’t just stockpiled it, but they took it without reason and without knowing the dosage. Andthey died
.
.
In addition, the chloroquine hoarding in US by those who can afford it (is about $200 for 50 pills) lead to lack of supply for those who really need it, like lupus or rheumatology patients. For those who blindly hoard or take chloroquine without prescription, I have a little morsel of knowledge to impart. Remember I am not an MD; I hold a PhD in neuroscience. So I’ll tell you what my field knows about chloroquine. > BOTH CHLOROQUINE AND HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE CAN CAUSE SEVERE PSYCHOSIS. That’s right. More than 7.1 % of people who took chloroquine as prophylaxis or for treatment of malaria developed “mental and neurological manifestations” (Bitta et al., 2017). “Hydroxychloroquine was associated with the highest prevalence of mental neurological manifestations” (p. 12). The phenomenon is well-reported, actually having its own syndrome name: “chloroquine-induced psychosis”. It was observed more than 50 years ago, in 1962 (Mustakallio et al., 1962). The mechanisms are unclear, with several hypotheses being put forward, like the drugs disrupting the NMDA transmission, calcium homeostasis, vacuole exocytosis or some other mysterious immune or transport-related mechanism. Because the symptoms are so acute, so persistent and so diverse than more than one brain neurotransmitter system must beaffected.
Chloroquine-induced psychosis has sudden onset, within 1-2 days of ingestion. The syndrome presents with paranoid ideation, persecutory delusions, hallucinations, fear, confusion, delirium, altered mood, personality changes, irritability, insomnia, suicidal ideation, and violence (Biswas et al., 2014, Mascolo et al., 2018). All these at moderately low or therapeutically recommended doses (Good et al., 1982). One or two pills can be lethal in toddlers (Smith & Klein-Schwartz, 2005). The symptoms persist long after the drug ingestion has stopped (Maxwell et al., 2015). Still want to take it “just in case”? P.S. A clarification: the chemical difference between hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine is only one hydroxyl group (OH). Both are antimalarial and both have been tested _in vitro_ for COVID-19. There are slight differences between them in terms of toxicity, safety and even mechanisms, but for the intents of this post I have treated them as one drug, since both produce psychosis.REFERENCES:
1) Biswas PS, Sen D, & Majumdar R. (2014, Epub 28 Nov 2013). Psychosis following chloroquine ingestion: a 10-year comparative study from a malaria-hyperendemic district of India. _General Hospital Psychiatry, _36(2): 181–186. doi: 10.1016/j.genhosppsych.2013.07.012, PMID:24290896 ARTICLE
2) Bitta MA, Kariuki SM, Mwita C, Gwer S, Mwai L, & Newton CRJC (2 Jun 2017). Antimalarial drugs and the prevalence of mental and neurological manifestations: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Version 2. _Wellcome Open Research,_ 2(13): 1-20. PMCID: PMC5473418, PMID: 28630942, doi: 10.12688/wellcomeopenres.10658.2 ARTICLE|FREE FULLTEXT
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6) Mustakallio KK, Putkonen T, & Pihkanen TA (1962 Dec 29). Chloroquine psychosis? _Lancet_, 2(7270): 1387-1388. doi: 10.1016/s0140-6736(62)91067-x, PMID: 13936884. ARTICLE 7) Smith ER & Klein-Schwartz WJ (May 2005). Are 1-2 dangerous? Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine exposure in toddlers. _The Journal of Emergency Medicine_, 28(4): 437-443. doi: 10.1016/j.jemermed.2004.12.011, PMID: 15837026. ARTICLE Studies about chloroquine and hydoxychloroquine on SARS-Cov2 _invitro_:
* Liu, J., Cao, R., Xu, M., Wang, X., Zhang, H., Li, Y., Hu, Z., Zhong, W., & Wang, M. (18 March 2020). Hydroxychloroquine, a less toxic derivative of chloroquine, is effective in inhibiting SARS-CoV-2 infection in vitro. _Cell Discovery,_ 6 (16), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41421-020-0156-0 ARTICLE| FREE FULLTEXT
ARTICLE
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here
and here,
which
I am sure will be corrected once the peer-reviewers will take a closer look at it. But in the interest of speed, here it is in its raw form: * Gautret P, Lagier J-C, Parola P, Hoang VT, Meddeb L, Mailhe M, Doudier B, Courjon J, Giordanengo V, Esteves Vieira V, Tissot Dupont H,Colson SEP, Chabriere E, La Scola B, Rolain J-M, Brouqui P, Raoult D. (20 March 2020). Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19: results of an open-label non-randomized clinical trial._ International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents_, PII:S0924-8579(20)30099-6, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijantimicag.2020.105949. ARTICLE|
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These studies are also not peer reviewed. I say that so as to take them with a grain of salt. _Not_ to criticize in the slightest. Because I do commend the speed with which these were done and published given the pandemic. Bravo to all the authors involved. And also a thumbs up to the journals which made the data freely available in record time. Unfortunately, from these papers to a treatment we still have a long way to go. By _Neuronicus_, 22 March 2020SHARE THIS:
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CORONAVIRUS KILLED BY SOAP AND UV I was looking for what kills coronaviruses and I found this little gem in a paper by Walker & Ko (2007): > “MHV coronavirus was easily inactivated in PBS with 0.01% Tween > but was relatively stable when suspended in MEM with 10% FBS”. Tween is a relatively inexpensive standard molecular biology reagent for cell culture. Is otherwise known as POE (20) sorbitan monooleate, Polyethylene glycol sorbitan monooleate, Polyoxyethylenesorbitan monooleate, Polysorbate 80, Sigma says. It costs about $30 for 100 ml, but you could probably get it cheaper if bought in bulk, like I did afew months ago.
The paper in itself is on a different subject: comparing survival rate of the infectious agents after exposure to UV light. The one sentence about Tween was put in to emphasize differences between the infectious agents. The actual point of the paper is that while the bacteriophage MS2 and the respiratory adenovirus serotype 2 were not affected too much by UV, the murine hepatitis coronavirus was. Namely, after exposure to a dose of 599 microW s/cm2 of 254 nm UV, the coronavirus survival was only 12.2 % +/- 7.2, but to reduce the MS2 and adenovirus survival rate to around 32%, a much higher dose of UV of 2608 microW s/cm2 was needed (see Table). From Walker & Ko (2007). The infectious agents were aerosolized. This is important because the “UV susceptibility is higher in viral aerosols than in viral liquid suspensions” (p. 5464). Of extreme importance: DO NOT SHINE UV ON SKIN! It will harm you more than it will harm the virus: The only thing I’m a bit unclear is the duration of UV exposure. In the _Methods_ it says: “16.2 s at 12.5 L/min airflow was considered the UV exposure time” (p. 5461), but elsewhere in the paper we find: “The duration of sample collection was 15 min, with the UV on (UV dose = 2608 or 599 _micro_Ws/cm2) or off” (p. 5462). So weren’t the aerosols exposed for 15 minutes then? Or they passed away since there was an airflow in the experimental chamber and then they were only exposed for 16 sec? I dunno, it’s not my field. Nor is cell culture my field, so I’m definitely not an expert though I have learned how to do it as a matter of principle because it keeps happening around me and in the papers I read. So perhaps the fact that Tween kills coronaviruses might be common knowledge for a good portion of the molecular biologists and immunologists, but maybe not for everybody. So here you go: P.S. As soon as I published, I have been thoroughly (and repeatedly!) informed that every scientist that works with viruses knows that Tween kills coronaviruses. Because… drum roll… Tween is a soap. Duh! And we know how soap kills viruses, by dissolving their protective cover. Oh well :). I’d rather be chided for repeating well-known facts than for spreading disinformation. REFERENCE: Walker, C. M., & Ko, G. (1 Aug 2007). EFFECT OF ULTRAVIOLET GERMICIDAL IRRADIATION ON VIRAL AEROSOLS. _Environmental Science & Technology_, 41(15), 5460–5465. PMID: 17822117, DOI: 10.1021/ES070056U ARTICLE By _Neuronicus_, 3 March 2020SHARE THIS:
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POLITE VERSUS COMPASSIONATE After reading these two words, my first thought was that you can have a whole range of people, some compassionate but not polite (ahem, here, I hope), polite but not compassionate (we all know somebody like that, usually a family member or coworker), or compassionate and polite (I wish I was one of those) or neither (some Twitter and Facebook comments and profiles come to mind…). It turns out that it is not the case. As in: usually, people are either one or another. Of course there are exceptions, but the majority of people that seem to score high on one trait, they tend to score low on the other. Hirsh _et al._ (2010) gave a few questionnaires to over 600 mostly White Canadians of varying ages. The questionnaires measured personality, morality, and political preferences. After regression analyses followed by factor analyses, which are statistical tools fancier than your run-of-the-mill correlation, the authors found out that the polite people tend to be politically conservatives, affirming support for the Canadian or U.S. Republican Parties, whereas the compassionate people more readily identified as liberals, i.e. Democrats. Previous research has shown that political conservatives value order and traditionalism, in-group loyalty, purity, are resistant to change, and that they readily accept inequality. In contrast, political liberals value fairness, equality, compassion, justice, and are open to change. The findings of this study go well with the previous research because compassion relies on the perception of other’s distress, for which we have a better term called empathy. “Politeness, by contrast, appears to reflect the components of Agreeableness that are more closely linked to norm compliance and traditionalism” (p. 656). So it makes sense that people who are Polite value norm compliance and traditionalism and as such they end up being conservatives whereas people who are Compassionate value empathy and equality more than conformity, so they end up being liberals. Importantly, empathy is a strong predictor for prosocial behavior (see Damon W. & Eisenberg N (Eds.) (2006). _Prosocial development__, in __Handbook of Child Psychology: Social, Emotional, and Personality Development_, New York, NY, Wiley Pub.). I want to stress that this paper was published in 2010, so the research was probably conducted a year or two prior to publication date, just in case you were wondering.REFERENCE: HIRSH JB
,
DEYOUNG CG
,
XU X
,
& PETERSON JB
.
(May 2010, Epub 6 Apr 2010). COMPASSIONATE LIBERALS AND POLITE CONSERVATIVES: ASSOCIATIONS OF AGREEABLENESS WITH POLITICAL IDEOLOGY AND MORAL VALUES. _Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin_,
36(5):655-64. doi: 10.1177/0146167210366854, PMID: 20371797, DOI: 10.1177/0146167210366854 .ABSTRACT
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HOW MANY PEOPLE DO DOCTORS KILL? The authors define medical error as “death due to > 1) an error in judgment, skill, or coordination of care,>
> 2) a diagnostic error,>
> 3) a system defect resulting in death or a failure to rescue a > patient from death, or>
> 4) a preventable adverse event.” (Letter to CDC by Makary et al.,> 2016)
I reproduced the authors’ definition because there is a hot debate in the medicine field as to what constitutes a medical error and what is preventable vs. unpreventable. It might seem clear cut to you and me, but after I perused a few papers from both sides I must admit that things seem (a bit) more complicated than I thought. Personally, I’m all onboard with the above definition. Also, there is an ongoing fight about the actual number of deaths attributable to medical errors. I don’t have the time to read or get into that fight. So I’ll ask only one question: does it matter if the number is in the hundreds of thousands or merely tens of thousands? No, it doesn’t; medical errors need to be tackled head on, no matter how many people they kill. There will always be victims because doctors are humans and they make mistakes, like everybody else. But that doesn’t mean that they and their hospitals shouldn’t be held accountable. We, as patients, children and parents of patients, want that number to be as small as possible, is as simple as that. If the processes and methods of counting, assessing, and judging medical errors are kept hidden or worse, buried through misleading or downright false paperwork, then how can we trust the judgment of medical professionals? The authors’ letter to CDC attempts to do just that: by getting the hospitals to acknowledge medical errors on death certificates, the issue is becoming more visible. Where there is visibility and transparency, programs can then be implemented to reduce those numbers, whatever they may be. Actually, the fact that the number of deaths attributable to medical error is disputable _is a case in point_; if there was a clear definition of what medical error is and a clear way of tracking it, then we would have a starting point on how to reduce its occurrence. And that’s why I will leave my picture where it is: to support the conversation around the need to better track medical error. P.S.1 A newer paper, Stockwell et al. (2018) found that 10 % of the pediatric admissions in US hospitals end up with preventable adverse effects, most frequently as a result of hospital-acquired infections, followed by intravenous line complications, gastrointestinal harms, respiratory-related harms, and other causes (p. 4). The more worrisome fact is that this percentage is unchanged, at least between 2007 and 2012. P.S.2 Just to make it clear, I will always go to doctors with an MD after their name, even if they make mistakes, because they give me and my loved ones the best chance of healing and survival. Calling out that there is more work to be done to improve our safety, particularity in the washing hands department (can’t believe this is still a thing!), doesn’t mean that I will go in the cuckoo land ofhomeopathy
,
chiropracty, and other “alternative” medicine.REFERENCES:
* MAKARY MA
,
& DANIEL M
.
(3 May 2016). MEDICAL ERROR – THE THIRD LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH INTHE US. _BMJ, _
353:i2139. doi: 10.1136/bmj.i2139, PMID: 27143499. ARTICLE| NPR COVER
* Joo S, Daniel M, Xu T, & Makary, MA (1 May 2016). RE: METHODOLOGY USED FOR COLLECTING NATIONAL HEALTH STATISTICS, _Open Letter to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention_ FREE FULLTEXT PDF*
Stockwell DC
,
Landrigan CP
,
Toomey SL
,
Loren SS
,
Jang J
,
Quinn JA
,
Ashrafzadeh S
,
Wang MJ
,
Wu M
,
Sharek PJ
,
Classen DC
,
Srivastava R
,
Parry G
,
Schuster MA
;
GAPPS Study Group
.
(Aug 2018, Epub 13
July 2018). ADVERSE EVENTS IN HOSPITALIZED PEDIATRIC PATIENTS._Pediatrics, _
2;142(2). pii: e20173360. PMID: 30006445,PMCID: PMC6317760,DOI:
10.1542/peds.2017-3360 .ARTICLE
|
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Like Loading... Posted on October 13, 2019October 19, 2019by Neuronicus
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Tagged CDC
, death
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, Medical error
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. Leave a
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TEACH HANDWRITING IN SCHOOLS! I have begun this blogpost many times. I have erased it many times. That is because the subject of today – handwriting – is very sensitive for me. Most of what I wrote and subsequently erased was a rant: angry at rimes, full of profanity at other times. The rest were paragraphs that can be easily categorized as pleading, bargaining, imploring to teach handwriting in American schools. Or, if they already do, to do it less chaotically, more seriously, more consistently, with a LOT more practice and hopefully before the childhits puberty.
Because, contrary to most educators’ beliefs, handwriting is not the same as typing. Nor is printing / manuscript writing the same as cursive writing, but that’s another kettle. Somehow, sometime, a huge disjointment happened between scholarly researchers and educators. In medicine, the findings of researchers tend to take 10-15 years until they start to be believed and implemented in medical practice. In education… it seems that even findings cemented by Nobel prizes 100 years ago are alien to the ranks of educators. It didn’t used to be like that. I don’t know when educators became distrustful of data and science. When exactly did they start to substitute evidence with “feels right” and “it’s our school’s philosophy”. When did they start using “research shows… ” every other sentence without being able to produce a single item, name, citation, paper, anything of said research. When did the educators become so… uneducated. I could write (and rant!) a lot about the subject of handwriting or about what exactly a Masters in Education teaches the educators. But I’m so tired of it before I even begun because I’m doing it for a while now and it’s exhausting. It takes an incredible amount of effort, at least for me, to bring the matter of writing so genteelly, tactfully, and non-threateningly to the attention of the fragile ego of the powers that be in charge of the education of the next generation. Yes, yes, there must be _rarae aves_ among the educators who actually teach and do listen to or read papers on education from peer-reviewed journals; but I didn’t find them. I wonder who the research in education is for, if neither the educators nor policy makers have any clue aboutit…
Here is another piece of education research which will probably go unremarked by the ones it is intended for, i.e. educators and policy makers. Mueller & Oppenheimer (2014) took a closer look at the note-taking habits of 65 Princeton and 260 UCLA students. The students were instructed to take notes in their usual classroom style from 5 x >15 min long TED talks, which were “interesting but not common knowledge” (p. 1160). Afterwards, the subjects completed a hard working-memory task and answered factual and conceptual questions about the content of the “lectures”. The students who took notes in writing (I’ll call them longhanders) performed significantly better at conceptual questions about the lecture content that the ones who typed on laptops (typers). The researchers noticed that the typers tend to write verbatim what it’s being said, whereas the longhanders don’t do that, which corresponds directly with their performance. In their words, > “laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim > rather than processing information and reframing it in their own > words is detrimental to learning.” (Abstract). Because typing is faster than writing, the typers can afford to not think of what they type and be in a full scribe mode with the brain elsewhere and not listening to a single word of the lecture (believe me, I know, both as a student and as a University professor). Contrary to that, the longhanders cannot write verbatim and must process the information to extract what’s relevant. In the words of cognitive psychologists everywhere and present in every cognitive psychology textbook written over the last 70 years: _depth of processing facilitates learning_. Maybe that could be taught in a Masters ofEducation…
Pet peeves aside, the next step in the today’s paper was to see if you force the typers to forgo the verbatim note-taking and do some information processing might improve learning. It did not, presumably because “the instruction to not take verbatim notes was completely ineffective at reducing verbatim content (_p _= .97)” (p. 1163). The laptop typers did take more notes though, by word count. So in the next study, the researchers asked the question “If allowed to study their notes, will the typers benefit from their more voluminous notes and show better performance?” This time the researchers made 4 x 7-min long lectures on bats, bread, vaccines, and respiration and tested them 1 week alter. The results? The longhanders who studied performed the best. The verbatim typers performed the worst, particularly on conceptual versus factual questions, despite havingmore notes.
For the sake of truth and in the spirit of the overall objectivity of this blog, I should note that the paper is not very well done. It has many errors, some of which were statistical and corrected in aCorrigendum
, some
of which are methodological and can be addressed by a bigger study with more carefully parsed out controls and more controlled conditions, or at least using the same stimuli across studies. Nevertheless, at least one finding is robust as it was replicated across all their studies: > “In three studies, we found that students who took notes on > laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who > took notes longhand” (Abstract) Teachers, teach handwriting! No more “Of course we teach writing, just…, just not now, not today, not this year, not so soon, perhaps not until the child is a teenager, not this grade, not my responsibility, not required, not me…”. REFERENCE: Mueller, PA & Oppenheimer, DM (2014). THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE KEYBOARD: ADVANTAGES OF LONGHAND OVER LAPTOP NOTE TAKING. _Psychological Science_, 25(6): 1159–1168. DOI: 10.1177/0956797614524581. ARTICLE|
FULLTEXT PDF
| NPR COVER
By _Neuronicus_, 1 Sept. 2019 P. S. Some of my followers pointed me to a new preregistered study that failed to replicate this paper (thanks, followers!). Urry et al.(2019)
found that the typers have more words and take notes verbatim, just as Mueller & Oppenheimer (2014) found, but this did not benefit the typers, as there wasn’t any difference between conditions when it came to learning without study. The authors did not address the notion that “depth of processing facilitates learning” though, a notion which is now theory because it has been replicated _ad nauseam_ in hundreds of thousands of papers. Perhaps both papers can be reconciled if a third study were to parse out the attention component of the experiments by, perhaps, introspection questionnaires. What I mean is that the typers can do mindless transcription and there is no depth of processing, resulting in the Mueller & Oppenheimer (2014) observation or they can actually pay attention to what they type and then there is depth of processing, in which case we have Urry et al. (2019) findings. But the longhanders _have no choice_ but to pay attention because they cannot write verbatim, so we’re back to square one, in my mind, that longhanders will do better overall. Handwriting your notes is the safer bet for retention then, because your attention component is not voluntary, but required for the task, as it were, at hand. REFERENCE: Urry, H. L. (2019, February 9). DON’T DITCH THE LAPTOP JUST YET: A DIRECT REPLICATION OF MUELLER AND OPPENHEIMER’S (2014) STUDY 1 PLUS MINI-META-ANALYSES ACROSS SIMILAR STUDIES. _PsyArXiv._ doi:10.31234/osf.io/vqyw6. FREE FULLTEXT PDF By _Neuronicus_, 2 Sept. 2019SHARE THIS:
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Like Loading... Posted on September 2, 2019October 19, 2019by Neuronicus
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, Learning &
Memory
,
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Psychology
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Tagged depth of
processing
, early
education ,
education ,
handwriting ,
laptop , learning
, longhand
, manuscript
, memory
, performance
, printing
, retention
, typing
, verbatim
, writing
. Leave a comment
PIC OF THE DAY: AFRICAN DOGS SNEEZE TO VOTE Excerpt from Walker et al. (2017), p. 5: > “We also find an interaction between total sneezes and initiator > POA in rallies (TABLE 1> )
> indicating that the number of sneezes required to initiate a > collective movement differed according to the dominance of > individuals involved in the rally. Specifically, we found that the > likelihood of rally success increases with the dominance of the > initiator (i.e. for lower POA categories) with lower-ranking > initiators requiring more sneezes in the rally for it to be > successful (FIGURE 2> _d_).
> In fact, our raw data and the resultant model showed that rallies > never failed when a dominant (POA1) individual initiated and there > were at least three sneezes, whereas rallies initiated by lower > ranking individuals required a minimum of 10 sneezes to achieve the > same level of success. Together these data suggest that wild dogs > use a specific vocalization (the sneeze) along with a variable > quorum response mechanism in the decision-making process. . We > found that sneezes, a previously undocumented unvoiced sound in the > species, are positively correlated with the likelihood of rally > success preceding group movements and may function as a voting > mechanism to establish group consensus in an otherwise despotically > driven social system.” REFERENCE: WALKER RH,
KING AJ
,
MCNUTT JW
,
& JORDAN NR
(6 Sept. 2017). Sneeze to leave: African wild dogs (_Lycaon pictus_) use variable quorum thresholds facilitated by sneezes in collective decisions. _PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B. BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES_,
284(1862). pii: 20170347. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2017.0347. PMID: 28878054,PMCID: PMC5597819
, DOI:
10.1098/RSPB.2017.0347ARTICLE
| FREE FULLTEXT PDF
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Like Loading... Posted on August 1, 2019August 1, 2019by Neuronicus
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, Neuronicus
images
,
Social Neuroscience
,
Year Tagged
African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus),
communication
,
decision-making
, ethology
, quorum threshold
, sneeze
, Social
, vote
. Leave a comment
EDUCATION RAISES INTELLIGENCE Intelligence is a dubious concept in psychology and biology because it is difficult to define. In any science, something has a workable definition when it is described by unique testable operations or observations. But “intelligence” had eluded that workable definition, having gone through multiple transformations in the past hundred years or so, perhaps more than any other psychological construct (except “mind”). Despite Binet’s first claim more than a century ago that there is such a thing as IQ and he has a way to test for it, many psychologists and, to a lesser extent, neuroscientists are still trying to figure out what it is. Neuroscientists to a lesser extent because once the field as a whole could not agree upon a good definition, it moved on to the things that they can agree upon, i.e. executive functions. Of course, I generalize trends to entire disciplines and I shouldn’t; not _all_ psychology has a problem with operationalizations and replicability,
just as not _all_ neuroscientists are paragons of clarity and good science. In fact, the intelligence research seems to be rather vibrant, judging by the publications number. Who knows, maybe the psychologists have reached a consensus about what the thing is. I haven’t truly kept up with the IQ research, partly because I think the tests used for assessing it are flawed (therefore you don’t know what exactly you are measuring) and tailored for a small segment of the population (Western society, culturally embedded, English language conceptualizations etc.) and partly because the circularity of definitions (e.g. How do I know you are highly intelligent? You scored well at IQ tests. What is IQ? What the IQ tests measure). But the final nail in the coffin of intelligence research for me was a very popular definition of Legg & Hutter in 2007: intelligence is “the ability to achieve goals”. So the poor, sick, and unlucky are just dumb? I find this definition incredibly insulting to the sheer diversity within the human species. Also, this definition is blatantly discriminatory, particularly towards the poor, whose lack of options, access to good education or to a plain healthy meal puts a serious brake on goal achievement. Alternately, there are people who want for nothing, having been born in opulence and fame but whose intellectual prowess seems to be lacking, to put it mildly, and owe their “goal achievement” to an accident of birth or circumstance. The fact that this definition is so accepted for human research soured me on the entire field. But I’m hopeful that the researchers will abandon this definition more suited for computer programs than for human beings; after all, paradigmatic shifts happen all the time. In contrast, executive functions are more clearly defined. The one I like the most is that given by Banich (2009): “the set of abilities required to _EFFORTFULLY_ guide behavior toward a goal”. Not to achieve a goal, but to work toward a goal. With effort. Bigdifference.
So what are those abilities? As I said in the previous post,
there are three core executive functions: inhibition/control (both behavioral and cognitive), working memory (the ability to temporarily hold information active), and cognitive flexibility (the ability to think about and switch between two different concepts simultaneously). From these three core executive functions, higher-order executive functions are built, such as reasoning (critical thinking), problem solving (decision-making) and planning. Now I might have left you with the impression that intelligence = executive functioning and that wouldn’t be true. There is a clear correspondence between executive functioning and intelligence, but it is not a perfect correspondence and many a paper (and a book or two) have been written to parse out what is which. For me, the most compelling argument that executive functions and whatever it is that the IQ tests measure are at least partly distinct is that brain lesions that affect one may not affect the other. It is beyond the scope of this blogpost to analyze the differences and similarities between intelligence and executive functions. But to clear up just a bit of the confusion I will say this broad statement: executive functions are the foundation of intelligence. There is another qualm I have with the psychological research into intelligence: a big number of psychologists believe intelligence is a fixed value. In other words, you are born with a certain amount of it and that’s it. It may vary a bit, depending on your life experiences, either increasing or decreasing the IQ, but by and large you’re in the same ball-park number. In contrast, most neuroscientists believe all executive functions can be drastically improved with training. All of them. After this much semi-coherent rambling, here is the actual crux of the post: _INTELLIGENCE CAN BE TRAINED TOO_. Or I should say the IQ can be raised with training. Ritchie & Tucker-Drob (2018) performed a meta-analysis looking at over 600,000 healthy participants’ IQ and their education. They confirmed a previously known observation that people who score higher at IQ tests complete more years of education. But why? Is it because highly intelligent people like to learn or because longer education increases IQ? After carefully and statistically analyzing 42 studies on the subject, the authors conclude that _the more educated you are, the more intelligent you become_. How much more? About 1 to 5 IQ points per 1 additional year of education, to be precise. Moreover, this effect persists for a lifetime; the gain in intelligence does not diminish with the passage of time or after exiting school. This is a good paper, its conclusions are statistically robust and consistent. Anybody can check it out as this article is an open access paper, meaning that not only the text but its entire raw data, methods, everything about it is free for everybody. For me, the conclusion is inescapable: if you think that we, as a society, or you, as an individual, would benefit from having more intelligent people around you, then you should support free access to good education. Not exactly where you thought I was going with this,eh ;)?
REFERENCE: Ritchie SJ& TUCKER-DROB EM
.
(Aug, 2018, Epub 18 Jun 2018). How Much Does Education Improve Intelligence? A Meta-Analysis. _Psychological Science, _ 29(8):1358-1369. PMID: 29911926, PMCID: PMC6088505, DOI:
10.1177/0956797618774253 .ARTICLE
| FREE FULLTEXT PDF
| SUPPLEMENTAL DATA
| DATA, CODEBOOKS, SCRIPTS (MPLUS AND R), OUTPUTS _Nota bene_: I’d been asked what that “1 additional year” of education means. Is it with every year of education you gain up to 5 IQ points? No, not quite. Assuming I started as normal IQ, then I’d be… 26 years of education (not counting postdoc) multiplied by let’s say 3 IQ points, makes me 178. Not bad, not bad at all. :))). No, what the authors mean is that they had access to, among other datasets, a huge cohort dataset from Norway from the moment when they increased the compulsory education by 2 years. So the researchers could look at the IQ tests of the people before and after the policy change, which were administered to all males at the same age when they entered compulsory military service. They saw the increase in 1 to 5 IQ points per each extra 1 year of education. By _Neuronicus_, 14 July 2019SHARE THIS:
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Like Loading... Posted on July 14, 2019July 28, 2019by Neuronicus
Posted in
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,
Anthropology
,
Behavior ,
Cognition ,
Humans ,
Neuroethics
,
Psychology
, Year
Tagged education
, executive
function
,
intelligence ,
IQ . Leave a comment GAMING CAN IMPROVE COGNITIVE FLEXIBILITY It occurred to me that my blog is becoming more sanctimonious than I’d like. I have many posts about stuff that’s bad for you: stress,
high fructose corn syrup,snow,
playing soccer
,
cats
,
pesticides ,
religion
,
climate change
,
even licorice
.
So I thought to balance it a bit with stuff that is good for you. To wit, computer games; albeit not all, of course. An avid gamer myself, those who know me would hardly be surprised that I found a paper cheering StarCraft. A bit of an old game, but still a solid representative of the real-time strategy (RTS) genre. About a decade ago, a series of papers emerged which showed that first-person shooters and action games in general improve various aspects of perceptual processing. It makes sense because in these games split second decisions and actions make the difference between win or lose, so the games act as training experience for increased sensitivity to cues that facilitate said decisions. But what about games where the overall strategy and micromanagement skills are a bit more important than the perceptual skills, a.k.a. RTS? Would these games improve the processes underlying strategical thinking in a changing environment? Glass, Maddox, & Love (2013) sought to answer this question by asking a few dozen undergraduates with little gaming experience to play a slightly modified StarCraft game for 40 hours (1 hour per day). “StarCraft (published by Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. in 1998) (…) involves the creation, organization, and command of an army against an enemy army in a real-time map-based setting (…) while managing funds, resources, and information regarding the opponent ” (p. 2). The participants were all female because they couldn’t find enough male undergraduates that played computer games less than 2 hours per day. The control group had to play The Sims 2 for the same amount of time, a game where “participants controlled and developed a single ‘‘family household’’ in a virtual neighborhood” (p.3.). The researchers cleverly modified the StarCraft game in such a way that they replaced a perceptual component with a memory component (disabled some maps) and created two versions: one more complex (full-map, two friendly, two enemy bases) and one less so (half-map, one friendly, one enemy bases). The difficulty for all games was set at a win rateof 50%.
Before and after the game-playing, the subjects were asked to complete a huge battery of tests destined to test their memory and various other cognitive processes. By carefully parsing these out, the authors conclude that “forty hours of training within an RTS game that stresses rapid and simultaneous maintenance, assessment, and coordination between multiple information and action sources was sufficient” to improve cognitive flexibility. Moreover, authors point out that playing on a full-map with multiple allies and enemies is conducive to such improvement, whereas playing a less cognitive resources demanding game, despite similar difficulty levels, was not. Basically, the more stuff you have to juggle, the better your flexibility will be. Makes sense. My favorite take from this paper though is not only that StarCraft is awesome, obviously, but that “_cognitive flexibility is a trainable skill_” (p. 5). Let me tell you why that is so grand. Cognitive flexibility is an important concept in the neuroscience of executive functioning. The same year that this paper was published, Diamond was publishing an excellent review paper in which she neatly identified three core executive functions: inhibition/control (both behavioral and cognitive), working memory (the ability to temporarily hold information active), and cognitive flexibility (the ability to think about and switch between two different concepts simultaneously). From these three core executive functions, higher-order executive functions are built, such as reasoning (critical thinking), problem solving (decision-making) and planning. Unlike some old views on the immutability of the inborn IQ, each one of the core and higher-order executive functions can be improved upon with training at any point in life and can suffer if something is not right in your life (stress, loneliness, sleep-deprived or sick). This paper adds to the growing body of evidence showing that _executive functions can be trainable_. Intelligence, however you want to define it, relies upon executive functions, at least some of them, and perhaps boosting cognitive flexibility might result in a slight increase in the IQ, methinks. Bottom line: real-time strategy games with huge maps and tons of stuff to do are good for you. Here you go. The StarCraft images, both foreground and background, are copyrighted to © 1998 Blizzard Entertainment.REFERENCES:
* Glass BD
,
Maddox WT
,
Love BC
.
(7 Aug 2013). REAL-TIME STRATEGY GAME TRAINING: EMERGENCE OF A COGNITIVE FLEXIBILITY TRAIT. _PLoS One,_ 2;8(8):e70350.
eCollection 2013. PMID: 23950921, PMCID: PMC3737212, DOI:
10.1371/journal.pone.0070350. ARTICLE
| FREE FULLTEXT PDF
*
Diamond A
(2013, Epub 27 Sept. 2012). EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS. _Annual Review ofPsychology_,
64:135-68. PMID: 23020641, PMCID: PMC4084861,DOI:
10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143750. ARTICLE
| FREE FULLTEXT PDF
By _Neuronicus_, 15 June 2019SHARE THIS:
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Like Loading... Posted on June 15, 2019June 25, 2019by Neuronicus
Posted in
2013 , 2019
, Cognition
, Humans
, Neuronicus
images
,
Psychology
, Year
Tagged cognitive
flexibility
,
computer games
, executive
function
, gaming
, real-time strategy(RTS)
,
Sims 2 , StarCraft
, trainability
, training
. Leave a comment
THE FIRSTS: GUANINE COMES FROM GUANO (1846) This is about naming things in science. You have been warned! The DNA is made of four nucleobases: adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C) and guanine (G). The “letters” of the code. Each of them has been named from where they were originally obtained by the scientists who first identified and/or isolated them. ADENINE was named thus because it was extracted from the pancreas of an ox, which is _aden_ in Greek (the pancreas, not the ox), by the Nobel laureate Albrecht Kossel in 1885. THYMINE comes from thymic acid, which was extracted from the thymus gland of calves by the same Albrecht Kossel and Albert Neumann in1893.
A year later, the duo named CYTOSINE, another base obtained from the same thymus tissue. _Cyto-_ pertains to cells in Greek. Fifty years before that, Julion Bodo Unger, a German chemist, extracted the GUANINE from the guano of sea birds. Why was he looking at bird poop, curious minds inquire? Because he was studying it for its uses as fertilizer. The year of discovery was 1844 and the year of the naming was 1846.And now you know…
REFERENCE: Unger, JB (1846). BEMERKUNGEN ZU OBIGER NOTIZ (Comments on the above notice), _Annalen der Chemie und Pharmacie_, 58: 18-20. From page 20: _“_ … desshalb möchte ich den Namen Guanin vorschlagen, welcher an seine Herkunft erinnert.” ( “… therefore I would like to suggest the name _guanine_, which is reminiscent of its origin”.) (Wikipedia translation). GOOGLE BOOKS| GOOGLE BOOK PDF
By _Neuronicus_, 3 June 2019SHARE THIS:
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Like Loading... Posted on June 3, 2019June 5, 2019by Neuronicus
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, 1885
, 1893
, 1894
, 2019
, Biology
, Chemistry
, Firsts
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Tagged adenine
, cytosine
, DNA
, Firsts
, guanine
, guano
, Kossel
, Neumann
, nucleobase
, nucleobases
, thymine
, Unger
. Leave a comment
THE FIRSTS: LACK OF HAPPY EVENTS IN DEPRESSION (2003)My last post
focused on depression and it reminded me of something that I keep telling my students and they all react with disbelief. Well, I tell them a lot of things to which they react with disbelief, to be sure, but this one I keep thinking it should not generate such incredulity. The thing is: depressed people perceive the same amount of negative events happening to them as healthy people, but far fewer positive ones. This seems to be counter-intuitive to non-professionals, who believe depressed people are just generally sadder than average and that’s why they see the half-empty side of the glass of life. So I dug out the original paper who found this… finding. It’s not as old as you might think. Peeters et al. (2003) paid $30/capita to 86 people, 46 of which were diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder and seeking treatment in a community mental health center or outpatient clinic (this is in Netherlands). None were taking antidepressants or any other drugs, except low-level anxiolytics. Each participant was given a wristwatch that beeped 10 times a day at semi-random intervals of approximately 90 min. When the watch beeped, the subjects had to complete a form within maximum 25 min answering questions about their mood, currents events, and their appraisal of those events. The experiment took 6 days, including weekend. The results? Contrary to popular belief, people with depression “did not report more frequent negative events, although they did report fewer positive events and appraised both types of events as more stressful” (p. 208). In other words, depressed people are not seeing half-empty glasses all the time; instead, they don’t see the half-full glasses. Note that they regarded _both_ negative and positive events as stressful. We circle back to the ‘stress is theroot of all evil
‘
thing.
I would have liked to see if the decrease in positive affect and perceived happy events correlates with increased sadness. The authors say that “negative events were appraised as more unpleasant, more important, and more stressful by the depressed than by the healthy participants ” (p. 206), but, curiously, the mood was assessed with ratings on the feeling _anxious_, _irritated_, _restless_, _tense_, _guilty_, _irritable_, _easily distracted_, and _agitate, _and not a single item on depression-iconic feelings_: sad, empty, hopeless, worthless._ Nevertheless, it’s a good psychological study with in depth statistical analyses. I also found thought-provoking this paragraph: “The literature on mood changes in daily life is dominated by studies of daily hassles. The current results indicate that daily uplifts are also important determinants of mood, in both depressed and healthy people” (p. 209). REFERENCE: PEETERS F,
NICOLSON NA
,
BERKHOF J
,
DELESPAUL P
,
& DEVRIES M
.
(May 2003). EFFECTS OF DAILY EVENTS ON MOOD STATES IN MAJOR DEPRESSIVE DISORDER. _JOURNAL OF ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY_,
112(2):203-11. PMID: 12784829, DOI: 10.1037/0021-843X.112.2.203.ARTICLE
By _Neuronicus_, 4 May 2019SHARE THIS:
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Like Loading... Posted on May 4, 2019July 30, 2019by Neuronicus
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Stress
,
Depression
, Firsts
, Humans
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Tagged appraisal
, daily events
, daily
hassles ,
daily uplifts
, Depression
, Firsts
, half-empty glass
,
half-full glass
, happy
, major depressive
disorder (MDD)
,
mood , negative affect, optimism
, pessimism
, positive affect
,
psychological experiment,
Psychology ,
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, wristwatch
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EPIGENETICS OF BDNF IN DEPRESSION Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, says the World Health Organization. The. _The_. I knew it was bad, but… ‘the’? More than 300 million people suffer from it worldwide and in many places fewer than 10% of these receive treatment. Lack of treatment is due to many things, from lack of access to healthcare to lack of proper diagnosis; and not in the least due to social stigma. To complicate matters, the etiology of depression is still not fully elucidated, despite hundreds of thousand of experimental articles published out-there. Perhaps millions. But, _because_ hundreds of thousands of experimental articles perhaps millions have been published, we know a helluva a lot about it than, say, 50 years ago. The enormous puzzle is being painstakingly assembled as we speak by scientists all over the world. I daresay we have a lot of pieces already, if not all at least 3 out of 4 corners, so we managed to build a not so foggy view of the general picture on the box lid. Here is one of the hottest pieces of the puzzle, one of those central pieces that bring the rabbit into focus. Before I get to the rabbit, let me tell you about the corners. In the fifties people thought that depression is due to having too little neurotransmitters from the monoamine class in the brain. This thought did not arise willy-nilly, but from the observation that drugs that increase monoamine levels in the brain alleviate depression symptoms, and, correspondingly, drugs which deplete monoamines induce depression symptoms. A bit later on, the monoamine most culpable was found to be serotonin. All well and good, plenty of evidence, observational, correlational, causational, and mechanistic supporting the monoamine hypothesis of depression. But two more pieces of evidence kept nagging the researchers. The first one was that the monoamine enhancing drugs take days to weeks to start working. So, if low on serotonin is the case, then a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) should elevate serotonin levels within maximum an hour of ingestion and lower symptom severity, so how come it takes weeks? The second was even more eyebrow raising: these monoamine-enhancing drugs work in about 50 % of the cases. Why not all? Or, more pragmatically put, why not most of all if the underlying cause is the same? It took decades to address these problems. The problem of having to wait weeks until some beneficial effects of antidepressants show up has been explained away, at least partly, by issues in the serotonin regulation in the brain (e.g. autoreceptors senzitization, serotonin transporter abnormalities). As for the second problem, the most parsimonious answer is that that archeological site called DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), which psychologists, psychiatrists, and scientists all over the world have to use to make a diagnosis is nothing but a garbage bag of last century relics with little to no resemblance of this century’s understanding of the brain and its disorders. In other words, what DSM calls major depressive disorder (MDD) may as well be more than one disorder and then no wonder the antidepressants work only in half of the people diagnosed with it. As Goldberg put it in 2011, “the DSM diagnosis of major depression is made when a patient has any 5 out of 9 symptoms, _several of which are opposites _”! He was referring to DSM-4, not that the 5 is much different. I mean, paraphrasing Goldberg, you really don’t need much of a degree other than some basic intro class in the physiology of whatever, anything really, to suspect that someone who’s sleeping a lot, gains weight, has increased appetite, appears tired or slow to others, and feels worthless might have a different cause for these symptoms than someone who has daily insomnias, lost weight recently, has decreased appetite, is hyperagitated, irritable, and feels excessive guilt. Imagine how much more understanding we would have about depression if scientists didn’t use the DSM for research. No wonder that there’s a lot of head scratching when your hypothesis, which is logically correct, paradigmatically coherent, internally consistent, flawlessly tested, turns out to be true only sometimes because your ‘depressed’ subjects are as a homogeneous group as a pack of Trail Mix. I got sidetracked again. This time ranting against DSM. No matter, I’m back on track. So. The good thing about the work done trying to figure out how antidepressants work and psychiatrists’ minds work (DSM is written overwhelmingly by psychiatrists), scientists uncovered other things about depression. Some of the findings became clumped under the name ‘the neurotrophic hypothesis of depression’ in the early naughts. It stems from the finding that some chemicals needed by neurons for their cellular happiness are in low amount in depression. Almost two decades later, the hypothesis became mainstream theory as it explains away some other findings in depression, and is not incompatible with the monoamines’ behavior. Another piece of thepuzzle found.
One of these neurotrophins is called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which promotes cell survival and growth. Crucially, it also regulates synaptic plasticity, without which there would be no learning and no memory. The idea is that exposure to adverse events generates stress. Stress is differently managed by different people, largely due to genetic factors. In those not so lucky at the genetic lottery (how hard they take a stressor, how they deal with it), and in those lucky enough at genetics but not so lucky in life (intense and/or many stressors hit the organism hard regardless how well you take it or how good you are at it), stress kills a lot of neurons, literally, prevents new ones from being born, and prevents the remaining ones from learning well. Including learning on how to deal with the stressors, present and future, so the next time an adverse event happens, _even if it is a minor stressor, the person is way more drastically affected_. in other words, stress makes you more vulnerable to stressors. _One_ of the ways stress is doing all these is by suppressing BDNF synthesis. Without BDNF, the individual exposed to stress that is exacerbated either by genes or environment ends up unable to self-regulate mood successfully. The more that mood is not regulated, the worse the brain becomes at self-regulating because the elements required for self-regulation, _which include learning from experience_, are busted. And so the vicious circle continues. Maintaining this vicious circle is the ability of stressors to change the patterns of DNA expression and, not surprisingly, one of the most common findings is that the BDNF gene is hypermethylated in depression. Hypermethylation is an epigenetic change (a change _around_ the DNA, not _in_ the DNA itself), meaning that the gene in question is less expressed. This means lower amounts of BDNF are produced in depression. After this long introduction, the today’s paper is a systematic review of one of epigenetic changes in depression: methylation. The 67 articles that investigated the role of methylation in depression were too heterogeneous to make a meta-analysis out of them, so Li et al. (2019) made a systematic review. The main finding was that, overall, depression is associated with DNA methylation modifications. Two genes stood out as being hypermethylated: our friend BDNF and SLC6A4, a gene involved in the serotonin cycle. Now the question is who causes who: is stress methylating your DNA or does your methylated DNA make you more vulnerable to stress? There’s evidence both ways. Vicious circle, as I said. I doubt that for the sufferer it matters who started it first, but for the researchers it does. A little disclaimer: the picture I painted above offers a non-exclusive view on the causes of depression(s). There’s more. There’s always more. Gut microbes are in the picture too. And circulatory problems. And more. But the picture is more than half done, I daresay. Continuing my puzzle metaphor, we got the rabbit by the ears. Now what to do with it… Well, one thing we can do with it, even with only half-rabbit done, is shout loud and clear that depression is a physical disease. And those who claim it can be cured by a positive attitude and blame the sufferers for not ‘trying hard enough’ or not ‘smiling more’ or not ‘being more positive’ can bloody well shut up and crawl back in the medieval cave they came from.REFERENCES:
1. Li M
,
D’Arcy C, Li X
,
Zhang T
,
Joober R
,
& Meng X
(4 Feb 2019). WHAT DO DNA METHYLATION STUDIES TELL US ABOUT DEPRESSION? A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW. _Translational Psychiatry_, 9(1):68. PMID:
30718449, PMCID: PMC6362194, DOI:
10.1038/s41398-019-0412-y .ARTICLE | FREE
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2. Goldberg D (Oct 2011). THE HETEROGENEITY OF “MAJOR DEPRESSION”._World Psychiatry
_,
10(3):226-8. PMID: 21991283, PMCID: PMC3188778. ARTICLE
|
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3. WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION DEPRESSION FACT SHEET By _Neuronicus, _23 April 2019__
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HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP IS BAD FOR YOU Because I cannot leave controversial things well enough alone – at least not when I know there _shouldn’t_ be any controversy – my ears caught up with my tongue yesterday when the latter sputtered: “There is strong evidence for eliminating sugar from commonly used food products like bread, cereal, cans, drinks, and so on, particularly against that awful high fructose corn syrup”. “Yeah? You “researched” that up, haven’t you? Google is your bosom friend, ain’t it?” was the swift reply. Well, if you get rid of the ultra-emphatic air-quotes flanking the word ‘researched’ and replace ‘Google’ with ‘Pubmed’, then, yes, I _did_ researched it and yes, Pubmed _is_ my bosom friend. Initially, I wanted to just give you all a list with peer-reviewed papers that found causal and/or correlational links between high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and weight gain, obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, fatty liver disease, metabolic and endocrine anomalies and so on. But there are way too many of them; there are over 500 papers on the subject in Pubmed only. And most of them _did_ find that HFCS does nasty stuff to you, look for yourselves here.
Then I thought to feature a paper showing that HFCS is differently metabolized than the fructose from fruits, because I keep hearing that lie perpetrated by the sugar and corn industries that “sugar is sugar” (no, it’s not! Demonstrably so!), but I doubt my yesterday’s interlocutor would care about liver’s enzymatic activity and other chemical processes with lots of acronyms. So, finally, I decided to feature a straight forward, no-nonsense paper, published recently, done at a top tier university, with human subjects, so I won’t hear any squabbles. Price et al. (2018) studied 49 healthy subjects aged age 18–40 yr, of normal and stable body weight, and free from confounding medications or drugs, whose physical activity and energy-balanced meals were closely monitored. During the study, the subjects’ food and drink intake as well as their timing were rigorously controlled. The researchers varied only the beverages between groups, in such a way that one group received a drink sweetened with HFCS-55 (55% fructose, 45% glucose, as the one used in commercially available drinks) with every controlled meal, whereas the other group received an identical drink in size (adjusted for their energy requirements in such a way that it provided the same 25% of it), but sweetened with aspartame. The study lasted two weeks. No other beverage was allowed, including fruit juice. Urine samples were collected daily and blood samples 4 times per day. THERE WAS A BODY WEIGHT INCREASE OF 810 GRAMS (1.8 LB) IN SUBJECTS CONSUMING HFCS-SWEETENED BEVERAGES FOR 2 WEEKS WHEN COMPARED WITH ASPARTAME CONTROLS. The researches also found differences in the levels of a whole host of acronyms (ppTG, ApoCIII, ApoE, OEA, DHEA, DHG, if you must know) involved in a variety of nasty things, like obesity, fatty liver disease, atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, even Alzheimer’s. This study is the third part of a larger NIH-funded study which investigates the metabolic effects of consuming sugar-sweetened beverages in about 200 participants over 5 years, registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT01103921. The first part (Stanhope et al., 2009) reported that consuming fructose-sweetened, not glucose-sweetened, beverages increases visceral adiposity and lipids and decreases insulin sensitivity in overweight/obese humans” (title), and the second part (Stanhope et al., 2015) found that “consuming beverages containing 10%, 17.5%, or 25% of energy requirements from HFCS produced dose-dependent increases in circulating lipid/lipoprotein risk factors for cardiovascular disease and uric acid within 2 weeks” (Abstract). They also found a dose-dependant increase in body weight, but in those subjects the results were not statistically significant (p = 0.09) after correcting for multiple comparisons. But I’ll bet that if/when the authors will publish all the data in one paper at the end of clinical trials they will have more statistical power and the trend in weight gain more obvious, as in the present paper. Besides, it looks like there may be more than three parts to this study anyway. The adverse effects of a high sugar diet, particularly in HFCS, are known to so many researchers in the field that they have been actually compiled in a name: the “American Lifestyle-Induced Obesity Syndrome model, which included consumption of a high-fructose corn syrup in amounts relevant to that consumed by some Americans” (Basaranoglu et al., 2013). It doesn’t refer only to increases in body weight, but also type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertriglyceridemia, fatty liver disease, atherosclerosis, gout, etc. The truly sad part is that avoiding added sugars in diets in USA is impossible unless you do all – and I mean _all_ – your cooking home, including canning, jamming, bread-making, condiment-making and so on, not just “Oh, I’ll cook some chicken or ham tonight” because in that case you end up using canned tomato sauce (which has added sugar), bread crumbs (which have added sugar), or ham (which has added sugar), salad dressing (which has sugar) and so on. Go on, check your kitchen and see how many ingredients have sugar in them, including any meat products short of raw meat. If you never read the backs of the bottles, cans, or packages, oh my, are you in for a big surprise if you live in USA… There are lot more studies out there on the subject, as I said, of various levels of reading difficulty. This paper is not easy to read for someone outside the field, that’s for sure. But the main gist of it is in the abstract, for all to see. P.S. 1. Please don’t get me wrong: I am not against sugar in desserts, let it be clear. Nobody makes a more mean sweetalicious chocolate cake or carbolicious blueberry muffin than me, as I have been reassured many times. But I am against sugar in _everything_. You know I haven’t found in any store, including high-end and _really_ high-end stores a single box of cereal of any kind without sugar? Just for fun, I’d like to be a daredevil and try it once. But there ain’t. Not in USA, anyway. I did find them in EU though. But I cannot keep flying over the Atlantic in the already crammed at premium luggage space unsweetened corn flakes from Europe which are probably made locally, incidentally and ironically, with good old Americancorn.
P.S. 2 I am not so naive, blind, or zealous to overlook the studies that did not find any deleterious effects of HFCS consumption. Actually, I was on the fence about HFCS until about 10 years ago when the majority of papers (now overwhelming majority) was showing that HFCS consumption not only increases weight gain, but it can also lead to more serious problems like the ones mentioned above. Or the few papers that say all added sugar is bad, but HFCS doesn’t stand out from the other sugars when it comes to disease or weight gain. But, like with most scientific things, the majority has it its way and I bow to it democratically until the new paradigm shift. Besides, the exposés of Kearns et al. (2016a, b, 2017) showing in detail and with serious documentation how the sugar industry paid prominent researchers for the past 50 years to hide the deleterious effects of added sugar (including cancer!) further cemented my opinion about added sugar in foods, particularly HFCS.REFERENCES:
* Price CA
,
Argueta DA
,
Medici V
,
Bremer AA
,
Lee V
,
Nunez MV
,
Chen GX
,
Keim NL
,
Havel PJ
,
Stanhope KL
,
& DiPatrizio NV
(1 Aug 2018, Epub 10 Apr 2018). PLASMA FATTY ACID ETHANOLAMIDES ARE ASSOCIATED WITH POSTPRANDIAL TRIGLYCERIDES, APOCIII, AND APOE IN HUMANS CONSUMING A HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP-SWEETENED BEVERAGE. _American Journal of Physiology. Endocrinology and Metabolism__,_
315(2): E141-E149. PMID: 29634315, PMCID: PMC6335011 , DOI: 10.1152/ajpendo.00406.2017. ARTICLE
| FREE
FULTEXT PDF
* Stanhope KL
1,
Medici V
2,
Bremer AA
2,
Lee V
2,
Lam HD
2,
Nunez MV
2,
Chen GX
2,
Keim NL
2,
Havel PJ
(Jun 2015, Epub 22 Apr 2015). A dose-response study of consuming high-fructose corn syrup-sweetened beverages on lipid/lipoprotein risk factors for cardiovascular disease in young adults. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,101(6):1144-54.
PMID: 25904601, PMCID: PMC4441807, DOI:
10.3945/ajcn.114.100461 .ARTICLE |
FREE FULTEXT PDF
* Stanhope KL
1,
Schwarz JM
,
Keim NL
,
Griffen SC
,
Bremer AA
,
Graham JL
,
Hatcher B
,
Cox CL
,
Dyachenko A
,
Zhang W
,
McGahan JP
,
Seibert A
,
Krauss RM
,
Chiu S
,
Schaefer EJ
,
Ai M
,
Otokozawa S
,
Nakajima K
,
Nakano T
,
Beysen C
,
Hellerstein MK
,
Berglund L
,
Havel PJ
(May 2009, Epub 20 Apr 2009). CONSUMING FRUCTOSE-SWEETENED, NOT GLUCOSE-SWEETENED, BEVERAGES INCREASES VISCERAL ADIPOSITY AND LIPIDS AND DECREASES INSULIN SENSITIVITY IN OVERWEIGHT/OBESE HUMANS. _The Journal of Clinical Investigation__,_119(5):1322-34.
PMID: 19381015, PMCID: PMC2673878,
DOI:10.1172/JCI37385 . ARTICLE| FREE FULTEXT PDF
(VERY) SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY:BOCARSLY ME
,
POWELL ES
,
AVENA NM
,
HOEBEL BG
.
(Nov 2010, Epub 26 Feb 2010). HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP CAUSES CHARACTERISTICS OF OBESITY IN RATS: INCREASED BODY WEIGHT, BODY FAT AND TRIGLYCERIDE LEVELS. _PHARMACOLOGY, BIOCHEMISTRY, AND BEHAVIOR,_97(1):101-6. PMID:
20219526, PMCID: PMC3522469, DOI:
10.1016/J.PBB.2010.02.012.ARTICLE
|
FREE FULLTEXT PDF
KEARNS CE
,
APOLLONIO D
,
GLANTZ SA
(21 NOV 2017). SUGAR INDUSTRY SPONSORSHIP OF GERM-FREE RODENT STUDIES LINKING SUCROSE TO HYPERLIPIDEMIA AND CANCER: AN HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF INTERNAL DOCUMENTS. _PLOS BIOLOGY_,
15(11):e2003460. PMID: 29161267, PMCID: PMC5697802, DOI:
10.1371/journal.pbio.2003460. ARTICLE
| FREE FULTEXT PDF
KEARNS CE
,
SCHMIDT LA
,
GLANTZ SA
(1 Nov 2016). SUGAR INDUSTRY AND CORONARY HEART DISEASE RESEARCH: A HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF INTERNAL INDUSTRY DOCUMENTS. _JAMA INTERNALMEDICINE,
176(11):1680-1685.
_PMID: 27617709, PMCID: PMC5099084, DOI:
10.1001/JAMAINTERNMED.2016.5394. ARTICLE
| FREE FULTEXT
MANDRIOLI D
,
KEARNS CE
,
BERO LA
(8 Sep 2016). RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RESEARCH OUTCOMES AND RISK OF BIAS, STUDY SPONSORSHIP, AND AUTHOR FINANCIAL CONFLICTS OF INTEREST IN REVIEWS OF THE EFFECTS OF ARTIFICIALLY SWEETENED BEVERAGES ON WEIGHT OUTCOMES: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF REVIEWS. _PLOS ONE _, 11(9):e0162198.PMID: 27606602, PMCID: PMC5015869,DOI:
10.1371/journal.pone.0162198.ARTICLE
| FREE FULTEXT PDF
By _Neuronicus_, 22 March 2019SHARE THIS:
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Like Loading... Posted on March 22, 2019July 30, 2019by Neuronicus
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YET ANOTHER EXPERIMENT SHOWING THAT CONSCIOUS “DECISIONS” ARE MADE UNCONSCIOUSLY, AND IN ADVANCE > It’s a well done summary of a newer paper on the lines of > Libet’s 1983 that I covered in “The FIRSTS: brain active before > conscious intent (1983)> “
Why Evolution Is True In the last few years, neuroscience experiments have shown that some “conscious decisions” are actually made in the brain _before_ the actor is conscious of them: brain-scanning techniques can predict not only _when_ a binary decision will be made, but _what_ it will be (with accuracy between 55-70%)—several seconds before the actor reports being conscious of having made a decision. The implications of this research are obvious: by the time we’re conscious of having made a “choice”, that choice has already been made for us—by our genes and our environments—and the consciousness is merely reporting something determined beforehand in the brain. And that, in turn, suggests (as I’ve mentioned many times here) that all of our “choices” are really determined in advance, though some choices (e.g., whether to duck when a baseball is thrown at your head) can’t be made very far in advance! Most readers here accept that our…View original post
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Like Loading... Posted on February 24, 2019February 24, 2019by Neuronicus
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LOVE AND THE IMMUNE SYSTEM Valentine’s day is a day when we celebrate romantic love (well, some of us tend to) long before the famous greeting card company Hallmark was established. Fittingly, I found the perfect paper to cover forthis occasion.
In the past couple of decades it became clear to scientists that there is no such thing as a mental experience that doesn’t have corresponding physical changes. Why should falling in love be any different? Several groups have already found that levels of some chemicals (oxytocin, cortisol, testosterone, nerve growth factor, etc.) change when we fall in love. There might be other changes as well. So Murray _et al. _(2019) decided to dive right into it and check how the immune system responds to love, if at all. For two years, the researchers looked at certain markers in the immune system of 47 women aged 20 or so. They drew blood when the women reported to be “not in love (but in a new romantic relationship), newly in love, and out-of-love” (p. 6). Then they sent their samples to their university’s Core to toil over microarrays. Microarray techniques can be quickly summarized thusly: get a bunch of molecules of interest, in this case bits of single-stranded DNA, and stick them on a silicon plate or a glass slide in a specific order. Then you run your sample over it and what sticks, sticks, what not, not. Remember that DNA loves to be double stranded, so any single strand will stick to their counterpart, called complementary DNA. You put some fluorescent dye on your genes of interest and voilà, here you have an array of genes expressed in a certain type of tissue in a certaincondition.
Talking about microarrays got me a bit on memory lane. When fMRI started to be a “must” in neuroscience, there followed a period when the science “market” was flooded by “salad” papers. We called them that because there were so many parts of the brain reported as “lit up” in a certain task that it made a veritable “salad of brain parts” out of which it was very difficult to figure out what’s going on. I swear that now that the fMRI field matured a bit and learned how to correct for multiple comparisonsas well as to
use some other fancy stats, the place of honor in the vegetable mix analogy has been relinquished to the ‘-omics’ studies. In other words, a big portion of the whole-genome or transcriptome studies became “salad” studies: too many things show up as statistically significant to make head or tail of it. However, Murray _et al. _(2019) made a valiant – and successful – effort to figure out what those up- or down- regulated 61 gene transcripts in the immune system cells of 17 women falling in love actually mean. There’s quite a bit I am leaving out but, in a nutshell, love upregulated (that is “increased”) the expressions of genes involved in the innate immunity to viruses, presumably to facilitate sexual reproduction, the authors say. The paper is well written and the authors graciously remind us that there are some limitations to the study. Nevertheless, this is another fine addition to the unbelievably fast growing body of knowledge regarding human body and behavior. Pitty that this research was done only with women. I would have loved to see how men’s immune systems respond to falling in love. REFERENCE: Murray DR,
Haselton MG
,
Fales M
,
& Cole SW
.
(Feb 2019, Epub 2 Oct 2018). FALLING IN LOVE IS ASSOCIATED WITH IMMUNE SYSTEM GENE REGULATION. _Psychoneuroendocrinology_ , Vol. 100, Pg. 120-126. doi: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2018.09.043. PMID: 30299259, PMCID: PMC6333523 , DOI: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2018.09.043ARTICLE
FYI: PMC6333523
means that the fulltext will be available for free to the public one year after the publication on the US governmental website PubMed (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/), no matter how much Elsevier will charge for it. Always, _always_, check the PMC library (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/) on PubMed to see if a paper you saw in Nature or Elsevier is for free there because more often than you’d think it is. PubMed = the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM), comprising of “more than 29 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites” . PMC = “PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free fulltext archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM)” with a whooping fulltext library of over 5 million papers and growing rapidly. Love PubMed! By _Neuronicus_, 14 February 2019SHARE THIS:
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MILK-PRODUCING SPIDER In biology, organizing living things in categories is called taxonomy. Such categories are established based on shared characteristics of the members. These characteristics were usually visual attributes. For example, a red-footed booby (it’s a bird, silly!) is obviously different than a blue-footed booby, so we put them in different categories, which Aristotle called in Greek something like species. Biological taxonomy is very useful, not only to provide countless hours of fight (both verbal and physical!) for biologists, but to inform us of all sorts of unexpected relationships between living things. These relationships, in turn, can give us insights into our own evolution, but also the evolution of things inimical to us, like diseases, and, perhaps, their cure. Also extremely important, it allows scientists from all over the world to have a common language, thus maximizing information sharing and minimizing misunderstandings. All well and good. And it _was_ all well and good since Carl Linnaeus introduced his famous taxonomy system in the 18th Century, the one we still use today with species, genus, family, order, and kingdom. Then we figured out how to map the DNAs of things around us and this information threw out the window a lot of Linnean classifications. Because it turns out that some things that look similar are not genetically similar; likewise, some living things that we thought are very different from one another, turned out that, genetically speaking, they are not so different. You will say, then, alright, out with visual taxonomy, in with phylogenetic taxonomy. This would be absolutely peachy for a minority of organisms of the planet, like animals and plants, but a nightmare in the more promiscuous organisms who have no problem swapping bits of DNA back and forth, like some bacteria, so you don’t know anymore who’s who. And don’t even get me started on the VIRUSES WHICH WE ARE STILL TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHETHER OR NOT THEY ARE ALIVE IN THEFIRST PLACE
.
When I grew up there were 5 regna or kingdoms in our tree of life – Monera, Protista, Fungi, Plantae, Animalia – each with very distinctive characteristics. Likewise, the class Mammalia from the Animal Kingdom was characterized by the females feeding their offspring with milk from mammary glands. Period. No confusion. But now I have no idea – nor do many other biologists, rest assured – how many domains or kingdoms or empires we have, nor even what the definition of a species is anymore! As if that’s not enough, even those Linnean characteristics that we thought set in stone are amenable to change. Which is good, shows the progress of science. But I didn’t think that something like the definition of mammal would change. Mammals are organisms whose females feed their offspring with milk from mammary glands, as I vouchsafed above. Pretty straightforward. And not spiders. Let me be clear on this: spiders did not feature in my – or anyone’s! – definitionof mammals.
Until Chen _et al._ (2018) published their weird article a couple of weeks ago. The abstract is free for all to see and states that the females of a jumping spider species feed their young with milk secreted by their body until the age of subadulthood. Mothers continue to offer parental care past the maturity threshold. The milk is necessary for the spiderlings because without it they die. That’sall.
I read the whole paper since it was only 4 pages of it and here are some more details about their discovery. The species of spider they looked at is _Toxeus magnus_, a jumping spider that looks like an ant. The mother produces milk from her epigastric furrow and deposits it on the nest floor and walls from where the spiderlings ingest it (0-7 days). After the first week of this, the spiderlings suck the milk direct from the mother’s body and continue to do so for the next two weeks (7-20 days) when they start leaving the nest and forage for themselves. But they return and for the next period (20-40 days) they get their food both from the mother’s milk and from independent foraging. Spiderlings get weaned by day 40, but they still come home to sleep at night. At day 52 they are officially considered adults. Interestingly, “although the mother apparently treated all juveniles the same, only daughters were allowed to return to the breeding nest after sexual maturity. Adult sons were attacked if they tried to return. This may reduce inbreeding depression, which is considered to be a major selective agent for the evolution of mating systems (p.1053).”
During all this time, including during the emergence into adulthood of the offsprings, the mother also supplied house maintenance, carrying out her children’s exuviae (shed exoskeletons) and repairing thenest.
The authors then did a series of experiments to see what role does the nursing and other maternal care at different stages play in the fitness and survival of the offsprings. Blocking the mother’s milk production with correction fluid immediately after hatching killed all the spiderlings, showing that they are completely dependent on the mother’s milk. Removing the mother after the spiderlings start foraging (day 20) drastically reduces survivorship and body size, showing that mother’s care is essential for her offsprings’ success. Moreover, the mother taking care of the nest and keeping it clean reduced the occurrence of parasite infections on the juveniles. The authors analyzed the milk and it’s highly nutritious: “spider milk total sugar content was 2.0 mg/ml, total fat 5.3 mg/ml, and total protein 123.9 mg/ml, with the protein content around four times that of cow’s milk (p. 1053)”. Speechless I am. Good for the spider, I guess. Spider milk will have exorbitant costs (Apparently, a slight finger pressure on the milk-secreting region makes the mother spider secret the milk, not at all unlike the human mother). Spiderlings _die _without the mother’s milk. Responsible farming? Spider milker qualifications? I’m gonna lay down, I got a headache.REFERENCE: Chen Z
,
Corlett RT
,
Jiao X
,
Liu SJ
,
Charles-Dominique T
,
Zhang S
,
Li H
,
Lai R
,
Long C
,
& Quan RC
(30 Nov. 2018). PROLONGED MILK PROVISIONING IN A JUMPING SPIDER._Science
_,
362(6418):1052-1055. PMID: 30498127, DOI: 10.1126/science.aat3692. ARTICLE
| SUPPLEMENTAL
INFO (CHECK OUT THE VIDEOS) By _Neuronicus_, 13 December 2018SHARE THIS:
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Like Loading... Posted on December 13, 2018October 14, 2019by Neuronicus
Posted in
2018 ,
Anthropology
,
Behavior ,
Evolution
, Firsts
, Humans
, Insects
, Neuronicus
images
,
Year Tagged
evolution ,
lactation ,
mammal , maternal
care , milk
, Neuronicus images
,
phylogeny ,
picture of the day
, spider
, taxonomy
.
PIC OF THE DAY: DOPAMINE FROM A NON-DOPAMINE PLACEREFERENCE: Beas BS
,
Wright BJ
,
Skirzewski M
,
Leng Y
,
Hyun JH
,
Koita O
,
Ringelberg N
,
Kwon HB
,
Buonanno A
,
& Penzo MA
(Jul 2018, Epub 18 Jun 2018). THE LOCUS COERULEUS DRIVES DISINHIBITION IN THE MIDLINE THALAMUS VIA A DOPAMINERGIC MECHANISM. _NatureNeuroscience
_,21(7):963-973. PMID: 29915192, PMCID: PMC6035776 , DOI:10.1038/s41593-018-0167-4. ARTICLE
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Like Loading... Posted on December 2, 2018December 5, 2018by Neuronicus
Posted in
2018 ,
Anxiety & Stress
,
Behavior ,
Molecular Neuroscience,
Neuronicus images
,
Optogenetics
,
Rodents ,
Systems Neuroscience,
Year Tagged
dopamine , GABA
, locus coeruleus (LC),
neurons ,
paraventricular nucleus (PVN),
picture of the day
, stress
, thalamus
.
POOPING LEGOS
Yeah, alright… uhm… how exactly should I approach this paper? I’d better just dive into it (oh boy! I shouldn’t have said that). The authors of this paper were adult health-care professionals in the pediatric field. These three males and three females were also the participants in the study. They kept a poop-diary noting the frequency and volume of bowel movements (Did they poop directly on a scale or did they have to scoop it out in a bag?). The researchers/subjects developed a Stool Hardness and Transit (SHAT) metric to… um.. “standardize bowel habit between participants” (p. 1). In other words, to put the participants’ bowel movements on the same level (please, no need to visualize, I am still stuck at the poop-on-a-scale phase), the authors looked – quite literally – at the consistency of the poop and gave it a rating. I wonder if they checked for inter-rater reliability… meaning did they check each other’spoops?…
Then the researchers/subjects ingested a Lego figurine head, on purpose, somewhere between 7 and 9 a.m. Then they timed how much time it took to exit. The FART score (Found and Retrieved Time) was 1.71 days. “There was some evidence that females may be more accomplished at searching through their stools than males, but this could not be statistically validated” due to the small sample size, if not the poops’. It took 1 to 3 stools for the object to be found, although poor subject B had to search through his 13 stools over a period of 2 weeks to no avail. I suppose that’s what you get if you miss the target, even if you have a PhD. The pre-SHAT and SHAT score of the participants did not differ, suggesting that the Lego head did not alter the poop consistency (I got nothin’ here; the authors’ acronyms are sufficient scatological allusion). From a statistical standpoint, the one who couldn’t find his head in his poop (!) should not have been included in the pre-SHAT score group. Serves him right. I wonder how they searched through the poop… A knife? A sieve? A squashing spatula? Gloved hands? Were they floaters or did the poop sink at the base of the toilet? Then how was it retrieved? Did the researchers have to poop in a bucket so no loss of data should occur? Upon direct experimentation 1 minute ago, I vouchsafe that a Lego head is completely buoyant. Would that affect the floatability of the stool in question? That’s what I’d like to know. Although, to be fair, no, that’s not what I want to know; what I desire the most is a far larger sample size so some serious stats can be conducted. With different Lego parts. So they can poop bricks. Or, as suggested by the authors, “one study arm including swallowing a Lego figurine holding a coin” (p. 3) so one can draw parallels between Lego ingestion and coin ingestion research, the latter being, apparently, far more prevalent. So many questions that still need to be answered! More research is needed, if only grants would be so… regular as the rawdata.
The paper, albeit short and to the point, fills a gap in our scatological knowledge database (Oh dear Lord, stop me!). The aim of the paper was to show that ingested objects by children tend to pass without a problem. Also of value, the paper asks pediatricians to counsel the parents to not search for the object in the faeces to prove object retrieval because “if an experienced clinician with a PhD is unable to adequately find objects in their own stool, it seems clear that we should not be expecting parents to do so” (p. 3).Seems fair.
REFERENCE: Tagg, A., Roland, D., Leo, G. S., Knight, K., Goldstein, H., Davis, T. and Don’t Forget The Bubbles (22 November 2018). EVERYTHING IS AWESOME: DON’T FORGET THE LEGO. _Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health_, doi: 10.1111/JPC.14309. ARTICLE
By _Neuronicus_, 27 November 2017SHARE THIS:
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Like Loading... Posted on November 27, 2018November 28, 2018by
Neuronicus
Posted in
2018 ,
Anthropology
,
Behavior ,
Humans ,
Neuronicus images
,
Pathology ,
Year Tagged
faeces , Found and
Retrieved Time (FART),
ingest , Lego
, pediatric
, poop
, stool
, Stool Hardness andTransit (SHAT)
.
APATHY
Le Heron_ et al. _(2018) defines apathy as a marked reduction in goal-directed behavior. But in order to move, one must be motivated to do so. Therefore, a generalized form of impaired motivation alsohallmarks apathy.
The authors compiled for us a nice mini-review combing through the literature of motivation in order to identify, if possible, the neurobiological mechanism(s) of apathy. First, they go very succinctly though the neuroscience of motivated behavior. _Very_ succinctly, because there are literally hundreds of thousands of worthwhile pages out there on this subject. Although there are several other models proposed out-there, the authors’ new model on motivation includes the usual suspects (dopamine, striatum, prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex) and you can see it in the Fig. 1. Fig. 1 from Le Heron _et al._ (2018). The red underlining is mine because I really liked how well and succinctly the authors put a universal truth about the brain: _“A SINGLE BRAIN REGION LIKELY CONTRIBUTES TO MORE THAN ONE PROCESS, BUT WITH SPECIALISATION”._ © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2018. After this intro, the authors go on to showcasing findings from the effort-based decision-making field, which suggest that the dopamine-producing neurons from ventral tegmental area (VTA) are fundamental in choosing an action that requires high-effort for high-reward versus a low-effort for low-reward. Contrary to what Wikipedia tells you, a reduction, not an increase, in mesolimbic dopamine is associated with apathy, i.e. preferring a low-effort for low-reward activity. Next, the authors focus on why are the apathetic… apathetic? Basically, they asked the question: “For the apathetic, is the reward too little or is the effort too high?” By looking at some cleverly designed experiments destined to parse out sensitivity to reward versus sensitivity to effort costs, the authors conclude that the apathetics are indeed sensitive to the reward, meaning they don’t find the rewards good enough for them to move. Therefore, the answer is the reward is too little. In a nutshell, apathetic people think “It’s not worth it, so I’m not willing to put in the effort to get it”. But if somehow they are made to judge the reward as good enough, to think “it’s worth it”, they are willing to work their darndest to get it, likeeverybody else.
The application of this is that in order to get people off the couch and do stuff you have to present them a reward that they consider worth moving for, in other words to motivate them. To which any practicing psychologist or counselor would say: “Duh! We’ve been saying that for _ages_. Glad that neuroscience finally caught up”. Because it’s easy to say people need to get motivated, but much _much_ harder to figure out how. This was a difficult write for me and even I recognize the quality of this blogpost as crappy. That’s because, more or less, this paper is within my narrow specialization field. There are points where I disagree with the authors (some definitions of terms), there are points where things are way more nuanced than presented (dopamine findings in reward), and finally there are personal preferences (the interpretation of data from Parkinson’s disease studies). Plus, Salamone (the second-to-last author) is a big name in dopamine research, meaning I’m familiar with his past 20 years or so worth of publications, so I can infer certain salient implications (one dopamine hypothesis is about saliency, get it?). It’s an interesting paper, but it’s definitely written for the specialist. Hurray (or boo, whatever would be your preference) for another model of dopamine function(s). REFERENCE: LE HERON C,
HOLROYD CB
,
SALAMONE J
,
& HUSAIN M
(26 Oct 2018, Epub ahead of print). BRAIN MECHANISMS UNDERLYING APATHY. _JOURNAL OF NEUROLOGY, NEUROSURGERY & PSYCHIATRY. _pii: jnnp-2018-318265. doi: 10.1136/jnnp-2018-318265. PMID: 30366958 ARTICLE|
FREE FULLTEXT PDF
By _Neuronicus_, 24 November 2018SHARE THIS:
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Like Loading... Posted on November 24, 2018November 25, 2018by
Neuronicus
Posted in
2018 ,
Addiction ,
Behavior ,
Depression
, Emotion
, Humans
, Psychology
, Systems
Neuroscience
,
Year Tagged
anterior cingulate cortex (aCC),
apathy , dopamine
, effort
, effort-based
decision making
,
goal-directed behavior,
mesolimbic ,
motivation ,
prefrontal cortex (PFC),
reward , striatum
, supplementary
motor area (SMA)
,
ventral tegmental area (VTA).
NO LICORICE FOR YOU I never liked licorice. And that turns out to be a good thing. Given that Halloween just happened yesterday and licorice candy is still sold in USA, I remembered the FDA’s warning against consumption oflicorice
from
a year ago.
So I dug out the data supporting this recommendation. It’s a review paper published 6 years ago by Omar _et al._ (2012) meant to raise awareness of the risks of licorice consumption and to urge FDA to takeregulatory steps.
The active ingredient in licorice is glycyrrhizic acid. This is hydrolyzed to glycyrrhetic acid by intestinal bacteria possessing a specialized ß-glucuronidase. Glycyrrhetic acid, in turn, inhibits 11-ß-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase (11-ß-HSD) which results in cortisol activity increase, which binds to the mineralcorticoid receptors in the kidneys, leading to low potassium levels (called hypokalemia). Additionally, licorice components can also bind directly to the mineralcorticoid receptors. Eating 2 ounces of black licorice a day for at least two weeks (which is roughly equivalent to 2 mg/kg/day of pure glycyrrhizinic acid) is enough to produce disturbances in the following systems: * cardiovascular (hypertension, arrhythmias, heart failure, edemas) * neurological (stroke, myoclonia, ocular deficits, Carpal tunnel,muscle weakness)
* renal (low potassium, myoglobinuria, alkalosis)* and others
Although everybody is affected by licorice consumption, the most vulnerable populations are those over 40 years old, those who don’t poop every day, or are hypertensive, anorexic or of the femalepersuasion.
Unfortunately, even if one doesn’t enjoy licorice candy, they still can consume it as it is used as a sweetener or flavoring agent in many foods, like sodas and snacks. It is also used in naturopathic crap, herbal remedies, and other dangerous scams of that ilk. So beware of licorice and read the label, assuming the makers label it. Licorice products (Images: PD, Collage:
Neuronicus)
REFERENCE: Omar HR
,
Komarova I
,
El-Ghonemi M
,
Fathy A
,
Rashad R
,
Abdelmalak HD
,
Yerramadha MR
,
Ali Y
,
Helal E
,
& Camporesi EM
.
(Aug 2012). LICORICE ABUSE: TIME TO SEND A WARNING MESSAGE. _Therapeutic Advances in Endocrinology and Metabolism,_ 3(4):125-38. PMID: 23185686, PMCID: PMC3498851, DOI:
10.1177/2042018812454322 .ARTICLE | FREE
FULLTEXT PDF
By _Neuronicus_, 1 November 2018SHARE THIS:
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Like Loading... Posted on November 1, 2018by Neuronicus
Posted in
2012 , 2017
, 2018
, Behavior
, Humans
, Pathology
, Year
Tagged congestive
heart failure (CHF)
,
glycyrrhizin ,
hyperaldosteronism
,
hypokalemia ,
licorice , muscle
weakness ,
myopathy .
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* No licorice for you * Raising a child costs 13 million calories * Locus Coeruleus in mania * The Global Warming IPCC 2018 Report* The Mom Brain
* Pic of the day: Total amount of DNA on Earth * The FIRSTS: The cause(s) of dinosaur extinction * The Benefits of Vacation * Is piracy the same as stealing? * How to wash SOME pesticides off produce * Treatment for lupus * NASA, not media, is to blame for the Twin Study 7% DNA changemisunderstanding
* In Memoriam: Stephen Hawking * Naked Man orchid (Orchis Italica) * No Link Between Mass Shootings & Mental Illness * Tomato transcriptome * Interview with Jason D. Shepherd, PhD * Arc: mRNA & protein from one neuron to another * The FIRSTS: mRNA from one cell can travel to another cell and be translated there (2006) * The FIRSTS: the Dunning–Kruger effect (1999) or the unskilled-and-unaware phenomenon * The superiority illusion * The FIRSTS: The roots of depressive realism (1979) * The FIRSTS: Dinosaurs and reputation (1842) * Play-based or academic-intensive? * Pic of the day: the biggest machine * Old chimpanzees get Alzheimer’s pathology * Midichlorians, midichloria, and mitochondria * Pic of the day: Skunky beer * The FIRSTS: Increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere results in global warming (1896) * Arnica and a scientist’s frustrations * Pic of the day: Call me Ponder * The FIRSTS: Magnolia (1703)* The third eye
* The FIRSTS: Melatonin (1958) * Vanity and passion fruit * Aging and its 11 hippocampal genes * 100% Effective Vaccine* Don’t eat snow
* Soccer and brain jiggling * Pic of the day: Mitosis * Apparently, scientists don’t know the risks & benefitsof science
* The oldest known anatomically modern humans in Europe* Earliest memories
* Amusia and stroke
* Pic of the Day: Russell on stupid * Pic of the Day: Neil on teaching creationism * The FIRSTS: The Name of Myelin (1854)* Happy Mole Day
* Video games and depression * Drink before sleep * Pic of the day: NMR * Pic of the day: Sick chemist * The FIRSTS: the von Economo neurons (1881, 1904, 1926) * How do you remember? * Pic of the day: Cortex * Who invented optogenetics? * Another puzzle piece in the autism mystery * Painful Pain Paper * The FIRSTS: Theory of Mind in non-humans (1978) * THE FIRSTS: The word ‘scientist’ (1834) * Can you tickle yourself? * Transcranial direct current stimulation & cognitive enhancement * One parent’s gene better than the other’s * Pic of the Day: First and Last Man on the Moon * The FIRSTS: The rise and fall of Pokemon (2001-2005?) * THE FIRSTS: The Mirror Neurons (1988) * My fellow Americans… * Mu suppression and the mirror neurons* Vacation
* Fructose bad effects reversed by DHA, an omega-3 fatty acid * Stress can kill you and that’s no metaphor * Eating high-fat dairy may lower your risk of being overweight * The Firsts: the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole * Cats and uncontrollable bursts of rage in humans * Intracranial recordings in human orbitofrontal cortex * Pic of the day: The most prevalent infection * Now, isn’t that sweet? * Younger children in a grade are more likely to be diagnosedwith ADHD
* Inhaling a bitter tasting solution may help with asthma (don’t try this at home, yet) * Pic of the day: Lungs’ taste receptors * All mammals bigger than 3 Kg pee in 21 seconds * Pic of the day: House Quote * Not all children diagnosed with ADHD have attention deficits * Pic of the day: Abundant vertebrate * Autism cure by gene therapy * Astronomers discover new planet in OUR solar system * Pic of the day: Chemist vs Plumber * Pic of the day: Pressure joke * Pic of the day: Gravity tunnel * A third way of neuronal communication * Learning chess can improve math skills * Mechanisms of stress resilience * The Firsts: Anandamide (1992) * No CPU required for integrating data from different senses * Ebola survivors can still transmit the disease * CCL11 found in aged but not young blood inhibitsadult neurogenesis
* Your blood is better than my blood * Pic of the day: Snowmen and stem cells * Yeast can make morphine * Beer spoiling bacteria, oh no! But we know now how you’remade, suckers!
* Pic of the day: Galileo Galilei * Pic of the day: Taxonomy * Prostaglandins in the sickness syndrome * Pic of the day: What’s in a name * The FIRSTS: Betz pyramidal neurons (1874) * Pic of the day: Evidence doesn’t speak for itself * Pic of the day: Polar bear * Pic of the day: Scientist humor * Vagus nerve stimulation improves recovery after stroke * Pic of the day: Quantum car * Herpes viruses infect neurons * Pic of the day: All truths are partial * Tryptophan-rich foods and happiness * I am blind, but my other personality can see * The runner’s euphoria and opioids * The FIRSTS: the isolation of tryptophan (1901) * Lucy’s 9 vertebrae are actually 8 * Dead salmon engaged in human perspective-taking, uncorrected fMRIstudy reports
* Pesticides reduce pollination * Will you trust a pigeon pathologist? That’s right, he’s a bird. Stop being such an avesophobe!* Prions in urine
* The werewolf and his low fibroblast growth factor 13 levels * Pic of the day: Evolution * Terrorist attacks increase the male fetal loss * Kinesin in axon regeneration * Putative mechanism for decreased spermatogenesis following SSRI * The FIRSTS: the pons (1572) * The culprit in methamphetamine-induced psychosis is verylikely BDNF
* Hope for a new migraine medication * The FIRSTS: discovery of the polymerase (1956) * Is religion turning perfectly normal children into selfish, punitive misanthropes? Seems like it.ARCHIVES
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