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March For Science | 22 April 2017

 

What started as offhand comments on social media have spiraled into the beginnings of a potentially large nationwide protest in support of empirical science. 

Inspired by the success of Women's Marches held worldwide in support of women's rights and other causes, and in light of numerous moves apparently aimed at silencing, minimizing, defunding, or discrediting the work of scientists during President Trump's first week in office, numerous groups and individuals have proposed holding a "March for Science" or "Scientists' March on Washington".  

As reported by the Washington Post, the idea went viral almost immediately after it was conceived:

In short order, the march had a Facebook page (whose membership swelled [overnight] from 200 people to more than 150,000 by ]the following afternoon]), a Twitter handle, a web site, two co-chairs, [postdoc Jonathan] Berman and science writer and public health researcher Caroline Weinberg, and a Google form through which interested researchers could sign up to help.  

In response to our inquiry, organizers told us that things were moving quickly and that they plan on releasing both a date for the event and a platform statement by 30 January. In terms of the group’s ability to handle such a rapidly growing concept proposed by a diffuse group of different individuals, they said in an e-mail:

At present we have around 10 people spending a truly horrifying amount of time working to pull this off and around 30 contributing wherever they can. We also have, at present count, 9000 people who have reached out to volunteer to help.  

Though their platform is not finalized, they told us that their motivation was both non-partisan and straightforward: 

Scientists worldwide have been alarmed by the clear anti-science actions taken by the Trump administration. It has been less than a week and there have already been funding freezes and efforts to restrict scientists from communicating their findings (from tax-funded research!) with the public. These actions are absurd and cannot be allowed to stand as policy. This is not a partisan issue — people from all parts of the political spectrum should be alarmed by these efforts to deny scientific progress. Scientific research moves us forward and we should not allow asinine policies to thwart it. 

According to the Scientists' March on Washington web site, the event will be open to “anyone who believes in empirical science” and not restricted to scientists specifically.

Snopes! Now more than ever! 

Source: snopes.com

28 Jan 2917 - Updated to reflect organizer's choice of title for the march.

Perceptronium | A New Way To Look At Consciousness

YouTube

... MIT’s Max Tegmark is championing a new way of explaining [consciousness]: he believes that [it] is a state of matter.

By “matter,” he doesn’t mean that somewhere in the deep recesses of your brain is a small bundle of liquid, sloshing around and powering your sense of self and your awareness of the world. Instead, Tegmark suggests that consciousness arises out of a particular set of mathematical conditions, and there are varying degrees of consciousness—just as certain conditions are required to create varying states of vapor, water, and ice. In turn, understanding how consciousness functions as a separate state of matter could help us come to a more thorough understanding of why we perceive the world the way we do.

Most neuroscientists agonize over consciousness because it’s so difficult to explain. In recent years, though, they’ve tended to agree that a conscious entity must be able to store information, retrieve it efficiently, process it, and exist as a unified whole—that is, you can’t break consciousness down into smaller parts. These traits are calculable, Tegmark says. A case in point? We put labels on the strength of our current computer processing power. While they’re not human, some of our computers can operate independently, and we can use our knowledge of artificial intelligence to push these machines to new limits.

Tegmark calls his new state of matter “perceptronium.” From the Physics arXiv Blog:

Tegmark discusses perceptronium, defined as the most general substance that feels subjectively self-aware. This substance should not only be able to store and process information but in a way that forms a unified, indivisible whole. That also requires a certain amount of independence in which the information dynamics is determined from within rather than externally.

So if consciousness is a state of matter, he concludes, we might be able to apply what we know about consciousness to what we actually see.

[...] the problem is why we perceive the universe as the semi-classical, three dimensional world that is so familiar. When we look at a glass of iced water, we perceive the liquid and the solid ice cubes as independent things even though they are intimately linked as part of the same system. How does this happen? Out of all possible outcomes, why do we perceive this solution?

In other words, quantum mechanics dictates that the world we see is just one of an infinite number of possibilities. But why? Tegmark doesn’t have an answer, but his ideas demonstrate that there might be a more dynamic relationship between consciousness and other states of matter—that our ability to perceive the world is both a means to an end and also an end (an “object”) in itself.

Read more here. | Abstract

Glass Brain

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... It’s not possible to know exactly what another person is thinking, but neuroscientists from UCSD and UCSF are on their way. They created a “glass brain” software that shows a person’s brain reacting to stimuli in real time.

The implications for virtual reality and digital communication are tremendous, according to Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life, who has been collaborating with the neuroscientists. “We’re trying to identify which critical factors can most help people feel like they’re face to face,” says Rosedale, whose new company, High Fidelity, is currently working on a next generation virtual world.

The neuroscientists used an MRI to scan the brain of Rosedale’s wife, Yvette. Then, for the recent SXSW demo, they fitted her with a cap covered in electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes, which record brain activity. Sitting beside Yvette, Rosedale donned an Oculus Rift headset, which allowed him to see a 3-D picture of her brain activity. “In the middle of the presentation, somebody said ‘tickle her.’ I wouldn’t dare--she’d kill me. But I put my hand on her side and squeezed, and you could see the motor cortex activity lighting up all of a sudden,” he says.

This moment was particularly powerful for Rosedale, because it neurologically demonstrated the physical intimacy between himself and his wife. For him, that’s exactly why the glass brain software could be so useful. “There’s this theory of the brain that says we’re all kind of dancing together,” he says. “When I talk and you nod, you’re following the rhythm of my voice and guessing when my sentences will end. That’s something that we may be able to see with the EEG.” Rosedale says cell phone communication is “so terrible” because the delay, however small, disrupts this human interplay. “On the phone, you often can’t make a response sound like ‘mm-hm,’ close enough to the end of my sentence for me to feel it,” he says, “so one of the emotional elements of communication is lost.”

The glass brain software can similarly help improve the facial expressions and physical reactions of virtual reality avatars. “It will let us put a number on the quality of virtual communication and then compare that number to what happens face-to-face,” he explains. By hooking more subjects up to the glass brain and have them interact, “we can hopefully find out why video conferencing just doesn’t seem to work.” 

Even if we will never know exactly what other people are thinking, Rosedale believes that watching a brain’s real-time response can lead to greater honesty. Right now, people won’t put on EEG caps for business meetings, but he says that in the future, technology will make brain activity transparent to everyone at the table. As evidence, he points to an iPhone app that can measure heart-rate based on how the skin flushes. “What if I could show, based on what’s happening in your brain, that you wanted to interact with me in a intimate manner?" he asks. "You can lie on a phone call but it will be harder to lie in virtual reality because of how your body and brain will be moving.” 

Fast Company

Dance Your PhD Finalists 2013

Females of the red jungle fowl mate with multiple males, which can create competition between sperm of different males in order to fertilize the egg. In my PhD thesis, I explored the effect of brotherhood on sperm competition and female choice. Interestingly, the brother of the first male that the female has mated with invests more sperm in the female than the non-brother of the first male mate. However, the female ejects a higher proportion of sperm from the brother of the first mate and favours the sperm of the non-brother, facilitating a higher fertility by the non-brother’s sperm ... Inspired by various sports, the dance movements in this video reflect the competitive nature in the sperm world.

Every year, Science's Dance Your PhD competition challenges grad students past and present to convey their dissertations with interpretive dance.

Link to the finalists' videos via io9

Science Class Rap Battle | Rosalind Franklin vs Watson & Crick

YouTube | Science With Tom 

Rosalind Franklin was a British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer who made critical contributions to the understanding of the fine molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite. Her DNA work achieved the most fame because DNA plays an essential role in cell metabolism and genetics, and the discovery of its structure helped her co-workers understand how genetic information is passed from parents to their offspring.

Franklin is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA which led to the discovery of the DNA double helix. According to Francis Crick, her data was key to determining the structureto formulate Crick and Watson's 1953 model regarding the structure of DNA. Franklin's images of X-ray diffraction confirming the helical structure of DNA were shown to Watson without her approval or knowledge. This image and her accurate interpretation of the data provided valuable insight into the DNA structure, but Franklin's scientific contributions to the discovery of the double helix are often overlooked.

Unpublished drafts of her papers (written just as she was arranging to leave King's College London) show that she had independently determined the overall B-form of the DNA helix and the location of the phosphate groups on the outside of the structure. Moreover, it was a report of Franklin's that convinced Crick and Watson that the backbones had to be on the outside, which was crucial since before this both they and Linus Pauling had independently generated non-illuminating models with the chains inside and the bases pointing outwards. However, her work was published third, in the series of three DNA Nature articles, led by the paper of Watson and Crick which only hinted at her contribution to their hypothesis.

In other words, Franklin should have shared the Nobel Prize but was shafted by Watson and Crick.

Source, source

Science Says | Oreos Are As Addictive As Cocaine

Researchers at Connecticut College have found evidence that proves that Oreo cookies—at least for lab rats—are as addictive as cocaine. Neuroscience senior Jamie Honohan devised the study in order to research the impact of high-fat and high-sugar foods in low-income neighborhoods ... 

To carry out the study, Honohan and two other students devised a maze. On one side of the maze, hungry rats would find an Oreo. On the other side, hungry rats would find (groan) rice cakes. 

Unsurprisingly, all the rats gravitated toward the Oreo, and like all cultured creatures, they would “
break it open and eat the middle first.” 

The researchers compared the results of their study to a similar study in which rats were either given a shot of cocaine or morphine on one side of the maze or a shot of saline on the other. It turns out that the rats conditioned with Oreos spent as much time on the “drug” side of the maze as those who were conditioned with actual drugs. Even more worrisome, the researchers found that the Oreos “activated significantly more neurons than cocaine or morphine.”

Link via Gawker

Cheating Really Does Feel Wonderful

New research suggests that the feeling of guilt associated with cheating on an exam or lying on tax returns is actually just a figment of our imagination; a feeling our memories conjure up after the fact to make us feel better about being unethical. Because in actuality — according to a new study, "The Cheater's High," conducted by researchers from the University of Washington, Harvard, London Business School, and Penn — cheating feels pretty damn good.

The researchers conducted six different experiments offering participants a multitude of opportunities to cheat (both directly and indirectly, sometimes with the lure of financial gain and sometimes not). They found that the cheaters generally felt thrilled, satisfied, and superior about their dishonesty. “We were a little appalled,” University of Washington postdoctoral research associate Nicole E. Ruedy — the lead author of the study — told the New York Times. “The fact that people feel happier after cheating is disturbing, because there is emotional reinforcement of the behavior, meaning they could be more likely to do it again,” Ruedy said.

Journal of Personal and Social Psychology via Gawker

Brain 'Stethoscope' Turns Seizures Into Music

Stanford professors Chris Chafe and Josef Parvizi have transformed brain activity from seizure patients into music. This composition details the three main phases of a seizure. Calmness turns into chaos during the actual seizure, before trailing off into a recovery phase. The work could lead to a powerful biofeedback tool for identifying brain patterns associated with seizures.


YouTube | Stanford

Training Old Brains To Be More Like Young Brains

Joaquin Anguera, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, filmed a demonstration of the NeuroRacer video game. | YouTube

Brain scientists have discovered that swerving around cars while simultaneously picking out road signs in a video game can improve the short-term memory and long-term focus of older adults. Some people as old as 80, the researchers say, begin to show neurological patterns of people in their 20s.

Cognitive scientists say the findings, to be published Thursday in the scientific journal Nature, are a significant development in understanding how to strengthen older brains. That is because the improvements in brain performance did not come just within the game but were shown outside the game in other cognitive tasks.

Further supporting the findings, the researchers were able to measure and show changes in brain wave activity, suggesting that this research could help understand what neurological mechanisms should and could be tinkered with to improve memory and attention. The research “shows you can take older people who aren’t functioning well and make them cognitively younger through this training,” said Earl K. Miller, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not affiliated with the research. “It’s a very big deal.”

The study highlights an emerging field in which researchers are trying to better define and even expand the limits of attention, which is seen as crucial to performance, memory and intelligence. Previous studies, done at the University of Rochester and focused more on young people, show that heavy use of certain off-the-shelf, intense shooting games can lead to improvements in a user’s ability to ignore distractions, and even learn. Daphne Bavelier, who led that research, cautioned that the field was young, and that brain training could have side effects, like changing how the brain functions for the worse. “We know we can rewire the brain, but the challenge is how to do it properly,” she said. “We’re in the primitive age of brain training.”

Read more at NYT

Thanks, Steve

Researchers Grow Mini-Brain 'Cerebral Organoids'

A cross-section of an entire organoid showing development of different brain regions is seen is this
photo provided by the Institute for Molecular Biology on August 29, 2013.
 Credit: Reuters/Madeline Lancaster

Scientists have grown the first mini human brains in a laboratory and say their success could lead to new levels of understanding about the way brains develop and what goes wrong in disorders like schizophrenia and autism.

Researchers based in Austria started with human stem cells and created a culture in the lab that allowed them to grow into so-called "cerebral organoids" - or mini brains - that consisted of several distinct brain regions. It is the first time that scientists have managed to replicate the development of brain tissue in three dimensions.

Using the organoids, the scientists were then able to produce a biological model of how a rare brain condition called microcephaly develops - suggesting the same technique could in future be used to model disorders like autism or schizophrenia that affect millions of people around the world. "This study offers the promise of a major new tool for understanding the causes of major developmental disorders of the brain ... as well as testing possible treatments," said Paul Matthews, a professor of clinical neuroscience at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the research but was impressed with its results. Zameel Cader, a consultant neurologist at Britain's John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, described the work as "fascinating and exciting". He said it extended the possibility of stem cell technologies for understanding brain development and disease mechanisms - and for discovering new drugs.

Although it starts as relatively simple tissue, the human brain swiftly develops into the most complex known natural structure, and scientists are largely in the dark about how that happens. This makes it extremely difficult for researchers to gain an understanding of what might be going wrong in - and therefore how to treat - many common disorders of the brain such as depression, schizophrenia and autism.

To create their brain tissue, Juergen Knoblich and Madeline Lancaster at Austria's Institute of Molecular Biotechnology and fellow researchers at Britain's Edinburgh University Human Genetics Unit began with human stem cells and grew them with a special combination of nutrients designed to capitalize on the cells' innate ability to organize into complex organ structures. They grew tissue called neuroectoderm - the layer of cells in the embryo from which all components of the brain and nervous system develop. Fragments of this tissue were then embedded in a scaffold and put into a spinning bioreactor - a system that circulates oxygen and nutrients to allow them to grow into cerebral organoids. After a month, the fragments had organized themselves into primitive structures that could be recognized as developing brain regions such as retina, choroid plexus and cerebral cortex, the researchers explained in a telephone briefing. At two months, the organoids reached a maximum size of around 4 millimeters (0.16 inches), they said in a report of their study published in the journal Nature.

Although they were very small and still a long way from resembling anything like the detailed structure of a fully developed human brain, they did contain firing neurons and distinct types of neural tissue. "This is one of the cases where size doesn't really matter," Knoblich told reporters. "Our system is not optimized for generation of an entire brain and that was not at all our goal. Our major goal was to analyze the development of human brain (tissue) and generate a model system we can use to transfer knowledge from animal models to a human setting."

In an early sign of how such mini brains may be useful for studying disease in the future, Knoblich's team were able to use their organoids to model the development of microcephaly, a rare neurological condition in which patients develop an abnormally small head, and identify what causes it.

Both the research team and other experts acknowledged, however, that the work was a very long way from growing a fully-functioning human brain in a laboratory. "The human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe and has a frighteningly elaborate number of connections and interactions, both between its numerous subdivisions and the body in general," said Dean Burnett, lecturer in psychiatry at Cardiff University. "Saying you can replicate the workings of the brain with some tissue in a dish in the lab is like inventing the first abacus and saying you can use it to run the latest version of Microsoft Windows - there is a connection there, but we're a long way from that sort of application yet."

Reuters

Probiotics As An Adjuvant Therapy For Major Depressive Disorder

Lactobacillus | Source

Abstract:

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is an extremely complex and heterogeneous condition. Emerging research suggests that nutritional influences on MDD are currently underestimated. MDD patients have been shown to have elevated levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, increased oxidative stress, altered gastrointestinal (GI) function, and lowered micronutrient and omega-3 fatty acid status. Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) is likely contributing to the limited nutrient absorption in MDD. Stress, a significant factor in MDD, is known to alter GI microflora, lowering levels of lactobacilli and bifidobacterium. Research suggests that bacteria in the GI tract can communicate with the central nervous system, even in the absence of an immune response. Probiotics have the potential to lower systemic inflammatory cytokines, decrease oxidative stress, improve nutritional status, and correct SIBO. The effect of probiotics on systemic inflammatory cytokines and oxidative stress may ultimately lead to increased brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). It is our contention that probiotics may be an adjuvant to standard care in MDD.

NCBI | PubMed | Link to full article

Andres Lozano | Using Deep Brain Stimulation To Treat Dysfunctional Circuitry

Link

... Because of new imaging techniques and advances in our understanding of neurophysiology, neurological and psychiatric disorders are increasingly being recognized as disorders of circuit functions in the brain. Using techniques such as DBS [deep brain stimulation], neurosurgeons are able to pinpoint malfunctioning circuits and to recalibrate them. DBS is very precise—the electrode is inserted through the skull and into any area of the brain to deliver electricity.

Dr Andres Lozano is chief of neurosurgery at the University of Toronto, where he and his team are studying the use of DBS to turn brain circuits on and off, depending on the circuits’ role in certain disorders (e.g., movement, mood, memory). In his presentation on Ted Talks, Lozano describes the case of a little boy with dystonia who is no longer able to stand or walk and whose prognosis is dismal—he will be progressively more disabled and his chances of survival are nil. Dr Lozano and his team used DBS to suppress the circuits in his brain responsible for movement. Three months later the boy is walking. As a young adult he is living a normal life and going to university.

Both pharmacological and psychotherapeutic modalities are used to treat MDD, yet 10% to 20% of patients with depression do not respond to treatment. PET scans have shown that areas of the brain responsible for motivation, drive, and decision making are impaired in patients with severe depression, and the sadness center is overactive. After six months of continuous DBS, the sadness center is turned off, and the circuits responsible for motivation, drive, and decision making have made a comeback.

Similar positive results were seen when DBS was used in patients with early Alzheimer disease. Healthy brains use 20% of the body’s supply of glucose—as Alzheimer disease progresses, glucose utilization shuts down. Dr Lozano and his team wanted to know if this “power failure” could be reversed. They placed DBS electrodes in the Fornix area of the brain and looked at what happened to glucose consumption. After one month, areas of the brain that had stopped using glucose had resumed consumption. The implications seem to be that not only can DBS modify symptoms but that the technique can help repair damaged areas of the brain as well.

Psychiatric Times

Anatomy In 3D | BigBrain

The protuberances on this 3-D model of a neuron
are “pre-synaptic terminals” – points where the
cell will form connections with other neurons.

A new resource will allow scientists to explore the anatomy of a single brain in three dimensions at far greater detail than before, a possibility its creators hope will guide the quest to map brain activity in humans. The resource, dubbed the BigBrain, was created as part of the European Human Brain Project and is freely available online for scientists to use.

The researchers behind the BigBrain, led by Katrin Amunts at the Research Centre Jülich and the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in Germany, imaged the brain of a healthy deceased 65-year-old woman using MRI and then embedded the brain in paraffin wax and cut it into 7,400 slices, each just 20 micrometers thick. Each slice was mounted on a slide and digitally imaged using a flatbed scanner.

Alan Evans, a professor at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and senior author of a paper that reports the results in the journal Science, says his team then took on “the technical challenge of trying to stitch together 7,500 sheets of Saran wrap” into a three-dimensional object using digital image processing. Many slices had small rips, tears, and distortions, so the team manually edited the images to fix major signs of damage and then used an automated program for minor fixes. Guided by previously taken MRI images and relationships between neighboring sections, they then aligned the sections to create a continuous 3-D object representing about a terabyte of data.

Researchers used a tool called a microtome to cut a brain into slices 20 micrometers thick.

Evans says that existing three-dimensional atlases of human brain anatomy are usually limited by the resolution of MRI images—about a millimeter. The BigBrain atlas, in contrast, makes it possible to zoom in to about 20 micrometers in each dimension. That’s not enough to analyze individual brain cells, but it makes it possible to distinguish how layers of cells are organized in the brain. 
Joshua Sanes, a neuroscientist at Harvard University, says the project represents one step toward realizing neuroscientists’ aspiration of looking at the human brain “with the sort of cellular resolution [with which] we can look at mouse or fly brains.” But while the atlas is a technical achievement that gives an unprecedented view of an entire brain’s anatomy, it can’t answer questions about brain activity or function, or about the connections between brain cells. The atlas also represents only a single brain, so it doesn’t capture variability between brains.

But Evans says it can be an important resource for future research. One of the larger goals of several brain initiatives worldwide—including the European project and the nascent BRAIN Initiative in the U.S. (see “The Brain Activity Map”)—is to integrate different kinds of data about brain structure and function, he says, and to create computational models of the brain to study processes such as childhood development or neurological diseases. Evans says such work depends on having a clear picture of the brain’s anatomy as a reference, and the BigBrain can serve as a platform on which other information can be mapped. “It’s the mother ship,” he says.

The researchers plan to lead studies integrating the BigBrain with other kinds of data, examining questions such as how genes are expressed and how neurotransmitters are distributed across the brain. They hope to repeat this work in other brains to start to look at how their structures vary.

MIT Technology Review

NOVA | Becoming Human, Episode One

YouTube

Where did we come from? What makes us human? This three-part series investigates dramatic new discoveries that are transforming the picture of how we became human. The first program explores fresh clues about our earliest ancestors in Africa, including the stunningly complete fossil nicknamed 'Lucy's Child'. These three million-year-old bones from Ethiopia reveal humanity's oldest and most telltale trait: upright walking rather than a big brain.

Cuddly Killers

In a report that scaled up local surveys and pilot studies to national dimensions, scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the United States — both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it — kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, most of them native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat.

The estimated kill rates are two to four times higher than mortality figures previously bandied about, and position the domestic cat as one of the single greatest human-linked threats to wildlife in the nation. More birds and mammals die at the mouths of cats, the report said, than from automobile strikes, pesticides and poisons, collisions with skyscrapers and windmills and other so-called anthropogenic causes. Peter Marra of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and an author of the report, said the mortality figures that emerge from the new model “are shockingly high ... When we ran the model, we didn’t know what to expect.” Marra, who performed the analysis with his colleague, Scott R. Loss, and Tom Will of the Fish and Wildlife Service [added] “We were absolutely stunned by the results.” 

New York Times via Jezebel

Monkey Monday | Oxytocin May Be The Secret To Strong Societies

In the first study that non-invasively measures oxytocin levels in wild animals, researchers have found that in chimpanzees this hormone likely plays a key role in maintaining social relations among both related and non-related animals. The bond goes beyond genetic ties – it could be the very glue that holds societies together.

Published Jan. 23, 2013, in Proceedings of the Royal Society, "Urinary oxytocin and social bonding in related and unrelated wild chimpanzees” reported findings resulting from an international collaboration of researchers from the United Kingdom, Uganda, Germany, the United States of America, and Switzerland.

Toni Ziegler, Ph.D., senior scientist and head of Assay Services at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, conducted the team’s hormonal analyses for the past three years after researchers collected urine samples from a troop of chimpanzees in Uganda’s Budongo Forest. Urine was collected from plastic sheets or leaves following episodes of grooming among the animals, and then transferred with sterile pipettes into sample vials before shipping to the WNPRC for measuring and analysis.

Lead authors Catherine Crockford, Roman Wittig and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, interpreted the data. They reported that oxytocin levels spiked after grooming among cooperating partners in contrast to non-cooperating partners or after no grooming, regardless of genetic relatedness or sexual interest. This suggests that, in chimpanzees, oxytocin plays a key role in maintaining social relations beyond genetic ties and in keeping track of social interactions with multiple individuals over time. Furthermore, the researchers found that when a chimp engages in grooming with another chimp, if there is no previously established friendship, oxytocin levels do not increase in either animal.

“We developed the assay methods used in this study for measuring urinary oxytocin in human children and nonhuman primates,” Ziegler said. “This is our first report of its role in social bonding in a totally wild primate. This technique will allow field researchers and human researchers alike the opportunity to learn about the importance of social bonding in primates.”

Wisconsin National Primate Research Center

Monkey Monday | Bonobos Share With Strangers

Baby bonobos share papayas. Photo from Jingzhi Tan.

... primatologists know that great apes help and voluntarily share food with other group mates (acts that indirectly benefit themselves). But strangers? Such a behavior is unheard of amidst species that often compete aggressively with other groups and even murder foreign individuals.

Researchers from Duke University decided to challenge the great ape’s bad sharing rep, seeking to discover whether or not our furry relatives may also have a propensity for partitioning goods with animals they do not know. The scientists chose bonobos–a type of great ape sometimes referred to as a pygmy chimpanzee–for their study. Compared to chimpanzees, bonobos possess a relatively high tolerance for strangers, so they seemed like a logical candidate for investigations into the nature of sharing.

At a bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, they enrolled 15 wild-born bonobos orphaned and rescued from the illegal wildlife trade in four experiments. In the first experiment, the researchers led a bonobo into a room piled high with delicious banana slices. Behind two sliding doors, they placed either a friend of the main bonobo or a stranger (a bonobo unrelated and unknown to their main research subject). The bonobo with the bananas could chose to eat the food all on its own, or open the sliding door and invite both or either the friend or stranger to join in. In the second experiment, they placed only one bonobo–either the friend or stranger–behind a door and left the second room empty.

The results, which they describe this week in the journal PLoS One, confounded the researchers. In more than 70 percent of the trials, the bonobos shared their food at least once. They preferred to release the stranger over their group mate, and the stranger in turn often released the other bonobo, even though that meant splitting the food three ways and being outnumbered by two bonobos that already knew each other. They ignored the door leading to the empty room, showing that the novelty of opening the door was not motivating their behavior.

So, were the bonobos willing to share their food with strangers because of an overwhelming desire to interact with the unknown apes, or were they motivated by a sense of altruism? The researchers set up two more experiments to find out.

Read more at Smithsonian | Surprising Science 

Geneticists Will Study Killer's DNA

Illustration by Liam Derbyshire

In a move likely to renew a longstanding ethical controversy, geneticists are quietly making plans to study the DNA of Adam Lanza, 20, who killed 20 children and seven adults in Newtown, Conn. Their work will be an effort to discover biological clues to extreme violence. The researchers, at the University of Connecticut, confirmed their plans through a spokeswoman but declined to provide details. But other experts speculated that the geneticists might look for mutations that might be associated with mental illnesses and ones that might also increase the risk for violence.

They could look at all of Mr. Lanza’s genes, searching for something unusual like gene duplications or deletions or unexpected mutations, or they might determine the sequence of his entire genome, the genes and the vast regions of DNA that are not genes, in an extended search for aberrations that could determine which genes are active and how active they are. But whatever they do, this apparently is the first time researchers will attempt a detailed study of the DNA of a mass killer. 

Some researchers, like Dr. Arthur Beaudet, a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and the chairman of its department of molecular and human genetics, applaud the effort. He believes that the acts committed by men like Mr. Lanza and the gunmen in other rampages in recent years — at Columbine High School and in Aurora, Colo., in Norway, in Tucson and at Virginia Tech — are so far off the charts of normal behavior that there must be genetic changes driving them. “We can’t afford not to do this research,” Dr. Beaudet said. 

Other scientists are not so sure. They worry that this research could eventually stigmatize people who have never committed a crime but who turn out to have a genetic aberration also found in a mass murder. Everything known about mental illness, these skeptics say, argues that there are likely to be hundreds of genes involved in extreme violent behavior, not to mention a variety of environmental influences, and that all of these factors can interact in complex and unpredictable ways. “It is almost inconceivable that there is a common genetic factor” to be found in mass murders, said Dr. Robert C. Green, a geneticist and neurologist at Harvard Medical School. “I think it says more about us that we wish there was something like this. We wish there was an explanation.”

More at The New York Times

Study Of Spirit Mediums Produces Unexpected Results

Illustration of automatic writing, 1863.
Source

... a new brain study of Brazilian mediums shows that something decidedly strange is occurring during the famous "trance state," and no one has a ready answer to explain exactly what's going on. 

Ten mediums -- five less expert and five experienced -- were injected with a radioactive tracer to capture their brain activity during normal writing and during the practice of psychography, which involves allegedly channeling written communication from the "other side" while in a trance-like state.

The subjects were scanned using SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) to highlight the areas of the brain that are active and inactive during the practice. The mediums ranged from 15 to 47 years of automatic writing experience, performing up to 18 psychographies per month. All were right-handed, in good mental health, and not currently using any psychiatric drugs. All reported that during the study they were able to reach their usual trance-like state during the psychography task and were in their regular state of consciousness during the control task.

 ... The experienced psychographers showed lower levels of activity in the left hippocampus (limbic system), right superior temporal gyrus, and the frontal lobe regions of the brain during psychography compared to their normal (non-trance) writing. The frontal lobe areas are associated with reasoning, planning, generating language, movement, and problem solving, which means that the mediums were experiencing reduced focus, lessened self-awareness and fuzzy consciousness during psychography. For the less experienced mediums, exactly the opposite was observed -- increased levels of activity in the same frontal areas during psychography compared to normal writing, and the difference was significant compared to the experienced mediums.

What this probably means is that the less experienced mediums were trying really hard. The force is not yet strong with them. But here's the interesting part: the writing samples produced were analyzed and it was found that the complexity scores for the psychographed content were higher than those for the control writing across the board. In particular, the more experienced mediums showed higher complexity scores, which typically would require more activity in the frontal and temporal lobes -- but that's precisely the opposite of what was observed. To put this another way, the low level of activity in the experienced mediums' frontal lobes should have resulted in vague, unfocused, obtuse garble. Instead, it resulted in more complex writing samples than they were able to produce while not entranced.

The researchers speculate that maybe as frontal lobe activity decreases, "the areas of the brain that support mediumistic writing are further disinhibited (similar to alcohol or drug use) so that the overall complexity can increase." In a similar manner, they say, improvisational music performance is associated with lower levels of frontal lobe activity which allows for more creative activity. The big problem with that explanation is that improvisational music performance and alcohol/drug consumption states are, in the researchers' words, "quite peculiar and distinct from psychography."

"While the exact reason is at this point elusive, our study suggests there are neurophysiological correlates of this state," says study co-author Andrew Newberg, MD, director of Research at the Jefferson-Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine.

Neurophysiological correlates indeed, but to what?

Psychology Today. Research article: Neuroimaging during Trance State: A Contribution to the Study of Dissociation at online journal PLOS ONE.