Regular insulin and a syringe from ampoules and vials of medicines
Stem cells are being used more and more widely in treatments across the spectrum of medicine, but a recent breakthrough from Shanghai promises the best may still be yet to come.
A senior who had suffered from type-2 diabetes for 25 years hasn’t taken insulin for 33 months after he received a regenerative islet cell transplantation.
Diabetes, particularly type 2—the form that can develop in one’s life because of poor diet and lifestyle choices—is one of the most prevalent non-communicable diseases on Earth.
China in particular is one of the world’s diabetes hotspots, with 140 million people unable to make their own insulin, and so suffer from kidney problems, blindness, amputation, and cardiovascular problems.
But this new breakthrough, coming after 10 years of research and testing, may change this paradigm of sickness forever.
Yin Hao, a leading researcher on the team and director of Shanghai Changzheng Hospital’s Organ Transplant Center, said they took the patient’s own peripheral blood mononuclear cells and used existing methods to reprogram them back into pluripotent stem cells for injection into the pancreas.
“Our technology has matured and it has pushed boundaries in the field of regenerative medicine for the treatment of diabetes,” Yin, told China Daily whose team conducted the research with scientists from the Center for Molecular Cell Science at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Existing transplant treatments for type-2 diabetes are hindered by a lack of donor cells, and the complexity of pancreatic islet cell isolation technology.
Pancreatic islet cells are the major insulin-producing cells in the body, and the patients’ were almost completely inhibited. He relied on multiple insulin injections daily in addition to a kidney transplant.
After receiving the manufactured stem cells in 2021, he was weened off of external insulin over 11 weeks, after which his disease seemed to be largely gone.
“Follow-up examinations showed that the patient’s pancreatic islet function was effectively restored, and his renal function was within normal range,” Yin said. “Such results suggested that the treatment can avoid the progression of diabetic complications.”The paper was published in Cell Discovery on April 30th, and future studies, the authors wrote, should explore the pharmacology of drugs that might provide off-the-shelf equivalents for islet transplantation.59-year-old Man Who Had Type 2 Diabetes for 25 Years is Cured by Stem Cells
Facial wound on adult male orangutan – Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior via SWNS
Even though there is evidence of certain self-medication behaviors in animals, so far it has never been known that animals treat their wounds with healing plants. Now, biologists in Indonesia have observed this in a male Sumatran orangutan.
After sustaining a facial wound, he ate and repeatedly applied sap from a climbing plant with anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving properties commonly used in traditional medicine. He also covered the entire wound with the green plant mesh.
The closest relatives to humans, the great apes, are known to ingest specific plants to treat parasite infection and to rub plant material on their skin to treat sore muscles.
A chimpanzee group in Gabon was recently observed applying insects to wounds, although the efficiency of the behavior is still unknown. Wound treatment with a biologically active substance, however, has never been documented before.
Cognitive and evolutionary biologists from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany—Caroline Schuppli and Isabelle Laumer—conducted the study at the Suaq Balimbing research site in Indonesia, which is a protected rainforest area home to around 150 critically endangered Sumatran orangutans.
“During daily observations of the orangutans, we noticed that a male named Rakus had sustained a facial wound, most likely during a fight with a neighboring male,” says Laumer, the first author of the study.
Three days after the injury Rakus selectively ripped off leaves from a vine with the common name Akar Kuning (Fibraurea tinctoria). He chewed on them, and then repeatedly applied the resulting juice precisely onto the facial wound for several minutes. As a last step, he fully covered the wound with the chewed leaves.
“This and related liana species that can be found in tropical forests of Southeast Asia are known for their analgesic and antipyretic effects and are used in traditional medicine to treat various diseases, such as malaria.
“Analyses of plant chemical compounds show the presence of furanoditerpenoids and protoberberine alkaloids, which are known to have antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, antioxidant, and other biological activities of relevance to wound healing.”
Observations over the following days did not show any signs of the wound becoming infected and after five days the wound was already closed.Rakus, 47 days after first treating the wound using the medicinal plant – Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior via SWNS
“Interestingly, Rakus also rested more than usual when being wounded. Sleep positively affects wound healing as growth hormone release, protein synthesis and cell division are increased during sleep,” she explained.
Like all self-medication behavior in non-human animals, the case reported in this study raises questions about how intentional these behaviors are and how they emerge.
“The behavior of Rakus appeared to be intentional as he selectively treated his facial wound on his right flange, and no other body parts, with the plant juice. The behavior was also repeated several times, not only with the plant juice but also later with more solid plant material until the wound was fully covered. The entire process took a considerable amount of time,” says Laumer.
“It is possible, that wound treatment with Fibraurea tinctoria by the orangutans at Suaq emerges through individual innovation,” said Schuppli, a senior author of the study published in Nature. “Orangutans at the site rarely eat the plant. However, individuals may accidentally touch their wounds while feeding on this plant and thus unintentionally apply the plant’s juice to their wounds. As Fibraurea tinctoria has potent analgesic effects, individuals may feel an immediate pain release, causing them to repeat the behavior several times.”
Since the behavior has not been observed before, it may be that wound treatment with Fibraurea tinctoria has so far been absent in the behavioral repertoire of the Suaq orangutan population. Like all adult males in the area, Rakus was not born in Suaq, and his origin is unknown.
“Orangutan males disperse from their natal area during or after puberty over long distances to either establish a new home range in another area or are moving between other’s home ranges,” explains Schuppli. “Therefore, it is possible that the behavior is shown by more individuals in his natal population outside the Suaq research area.”
This possibly innovative behavior presents the first report of active wound management with a biological active substance in a great ape species and provides new insights into the existence of self-medication in our closest relatives and in the evolutionary origins of wound medication more broadly.
Building on substantial evidence of crow consciousness, a German university has proven some crows can learn to recognize ‘zero’ as a counting unit. While that sounds ridiculous, zero is not nothing, rather it’s one of the most complex mathematical concepts devised—that something can and should represent nothing, not only as the base value, but as a placeholder. The work comes from the University of Tübingen in Germany, where professor Andreas Nieder works with carrion crows to perform intelligence tests. “The conception of “nothing” as number “zero” is celebrated as one of the greatest achievements in mathematics,” wrote Nieder in his paper. “We show that crows can grasp the empty set as a null numerical quantity that is mentally represented next to number one.” Exactly how this breakthrough was made is straightforward and did not involve birds watching Sesame Street. The crows were shown two sets of dots on a screen and were taught to indicate if the two screens had the same values. There could be between zero and four dots. Exactly as with 1, 2, 3, and 4—when the screens showed no dots, neurons in the crow’s brain demonstrated it was understanding this was a numeric value, but that it was a numeric value that contained nothing. Sometimes the crows made mistakes, often by thinking zero was in fact one, but it was rare they thought zero represented more than two. Counting Crows: It took human civilization at least until the 20th century BCE to firmly establish the empty or base value. At some point between the Akkadians and Old Babylonians, there was a symbol to represent a number was missing from a column, for example the 0 in 1,025 doesn’t mean the number is 26, it just means there are no hundreds in this number. As early as 1,770 the Egyptians were making hieroglyphs with the base value “nfr” from which began counting and distances. The ponderous Greeks never managed to capture the concept into their counting, language, or philosophy, meaning that as well as occasionally being smarter than a first grader, these “Counting Crows” were smarter in some ways than the Classical Greeks. Nieder contributed greatly to the current theory of animal consciousness, which is that it’s possible this highest level of thought isn’t necessarily bound to the presence of the cerebral cortex, a cranial region found only in primates, apes, and hominids. In an older experiment he trained two crows to peck at panels following a flash of blue light or red light, but Nieder made the task more difficult by changing the rules constantly, which required the crows to zoom out and look at the task as a whole, rather than simply assigning physical motions to a reward. He would change which light was assigned to which panel, and he would sometimes change the rules before the flash, and sometimes after the flash, constantly interrupting the birds’ base instructions. “These results suggest that the neural foundations that allow sensory consciousness arose either before the emergence of mammals or independently in at least the avian lineage and do not necessarily require a cerebral cortex,” wrote Nieder and the other authors in their corresponding paper published in Science.Scientists Studying Crows Get Big Surprise –They’re So Smart They Understand the Concept of Zero
Life as a cricket is rough: cannibalism, exhausting procreation and the world’s largest testicles. Tom Zegler
Susan Lawler, La Trobe University: If you had to guess what creature in the world had the largest testes, I doubt you would guess that the prize belonged to a cricket.
The testes of the tuberous bush cricket (Platycleis affinis) are an internal affair, taking up most of the cricket’s abdomen. At nearly 14% of their body weight, they are disproportionately large when compared to other species. Just think, a 100kg human would be walking around with 14kg of testicles, which would be mighty uncomfortable.
Why do these crickets need all that sperm power? It is because their females are highly promiscuous. The male bush crickets do not release more sperm than normal in any given sexual act, but they can be called upon to do it so often they apparently need the reserves. In the world of insects, it is not worth missing an opportunity, and if the females are going to be all available like that, then a cricket needs some world-class balls.
But this is not the only sexual record held by crickets. An Australian species known as scaly crickets (Ornebius aperta) have the most frequent sex of any species in the world. These little guys can do it more than 50 times in a few hours, often with the same female!
Why do they have to keep this up? Because she eats it.
That’s right, cricket sex provides more than the spark for the next generation. Males actually produce a package called a spermatophore, which is sperm wrapped up in a nutritious protein package. When the males insert it into a special opening in the females, sometimes she just bends down to gobble up her yummy post-coital snack.
Australian spiny cricket males respond to this sabotage by releasing only a few sperm per package, between 5 and 225 sperm per copulation, an astonishingly low amount compared to the average (100,000). Yet when researchers measured sperm loads in females, they had up to 20,000 sperm stored away. This means that they had sex up to 200 times to collect that amount.
Of course the females were storing up more than sperm. They also gathered nutrients that will help them develop eggs for the next generation. Other species of crickets manage the situation by offering a courtship gift in the form of food from the dorsal glands that distract the female and give her something to eat during sex.
Some female crickets seek out males in order to get these tasty gifts. A study of 32 different species of bushcrickets showed that the larger the spermatophore, the more likely the females were to actively seek out males. These gifts are costly to produce, so species that produce small spermatophores may mate twice a night, while those with large spermatophores may mate only once or twice in a lifetime.
The final cricket sex record goes to the Mormon cricket, which produces a spermatophore that is 27% of its body weight. That’s a huge investment in wild oats, which is a good description, since most of the package is food. The Mormon crickets are flightless and form swarms similar to locusts. These great walking hordes are often so hungry that cannibalism is common.
Female Mormon crickets will compete for males just so they can get a feed, and the benefit for the male is that some of his sperm may make it to the next generation.
Crickets are not likely to be overly loyal to each other, because research on Spanish field crickets shows that individuals with more mating partners leave more offspring. This applies to both male and female crickets, so it is surprising that males will nevertheless protect a female that they have mated with.
Male crickets will linger near a female they have recently given their sperm to, not to scare away other suitors, but to protect the female from predators. He does this at his own peril, because males that hang about after sex are four times more likely to be eaten. On the other hand, the females are six times less likely to be eaten if he is there to protect her.
Male crickets are not confused about the goal of spermatophore transfer. But female crickets want more than just sperm from their partner. A meal (or several dozen meals) increases the male cricket’s chance of getting lucky.
Maybe they are not so different from people, after all.
A new study explored the causal role that music engagement has on student achievement in mathematics—and they found a significant benefit. Researchers believe that music can make math more enjoyable, keep students engaged, and help ease their fear or anxiety about topics like fractions. The addition of music may even motivate kids to appreciate math and want to learn more. A typical technique for integrating music into math lessons for young children involves clapping to songs with different rhythms learning numbers, and equating fractions to musical notes. The new meta-analysis published in the journal Educational Studies analyzed 55 studies from around the world, involving almost 78,000 students, from kindergarten to university age. Three types of musical interventions were included: typical music lessons in which children sing, listen to, and learn about composing music; learning how to play instruments alone or as part of a band; and music-math integrated interventions, where music was integrated into math lessons. Students took math tests before and after taking part in the intervention, and the change in their scores was compared with those who didn’t take part in any intervention. The use of music—whether in separate lessons or as part of math classes—caused a greater improvement in math over time. Combining both in the same lessons had the most significant effect, with around 73 percent of students who had integrated lessons doing significantly better than children who didn’t have any type of musical intervention. Also, 69 percent of students who learned how to play instruments and 58 percent of students who had normal music lessons improved more than pupils with no musical intervention. The results also revealed that music helps more with learning arithmetic than other types of math and has a bigger impact on younger pupils and those learning basic mathematical concepts. Math and music have much in common, such as the use of symbols and symmetry. Both subjects also require abstract thought and quantitative reasoning. Arithmetic may lend itself particularly well to being taught through music because core concepts, such as fractions and ratios, are also fundamental to music. Musical notes of different lengths can be represented as fractions and added together to create several bars of music. Integrated lessons may be especially effective because they allow pupils to build connections between the math and music and provide extra opportunities to explore, interpret and understand math. “Encouraging mathematics and music teachers to plan lessons together could help ease students’ anxiety about mathematics, while also boosting achievement,” said Dr. Ayça Akın, from the department of software engineering at Antalya Belek University, Turkey. However, she said there were limitations to the study. The relatively small number of studies done meant it wasn’t possible to look at the effect of variables such as gender, socio-economic status, and duration of musical instruction upon the results. Children Do Much Better in Math When Music is Added to the Lesson: New Study
HIV-1 virus particles under electron micrograph with H9 T-cells (in blue) – Credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
A new study has unveiled a likely future cure for HIV which uses molecular scissors to ‘cut out’ HIV DNA from infected cells. To cut out this virus, the team used CRISPR-Cas gene editing technology—a groundbreaking method that allows for precise alterations to a patient’s genome, for which its inventors won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. One of the significant challenges in HIV treatment is the virus’s ability to integrate its genome into the host’s DNA, making it extremely difficult to eliminate—but the CRISPR-Cas tool provides a new means to isolate and target HIV DNA. Because HIV can infect different types of cells and tissues in the body, each with its own unique environment and characteristics, the researchers are searching for a way to target HIV in all of these situations. In this study, which is to be presented ahead of this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, the authors used CRISPR-Cas and two guide RNAs against “conserved” HIV sequences. They focused on parts of the virus genome that stay the same across all known HIV strains and infected T cells. Their experiments showed outstanding antiviral performance, managing to completely inactivate HIV with a single guide RNA and cut out the viral DNA with two guide RNAs. “We have developed an efficient combinatorial CRISPR-attack on the HIV virus in various cells and the locations where it can be hidden in reservoirs, and demonstrated that therapeutics can be specifically delivered to the cells of interest,” said Associate professor Elena Herrera Carrillo from the University of Amsterdam AMC. “These findings
HIV AIDS virus (in yellow) infecting a human cell – Credit: National Cancer Institute
represent a pivotal advancement towards designing a cure strategy.” The team has a long way to go before their cure will be available to patients, but said, “These preliminary findings are very encouraging’. Currently, HIV can be kept in check with anti-retroviral medication, but no one has actually been cured—although three patients receiving stem cell transplants for blood cancer were subsequently declared free of the disease when their HIV became undetectable. “We hope to achieve the right balance between efficacy and safety of this CURE strategy,” said Dr. Carrillo. “Only then can we consider clinical trials of ‘cure’ in humans to disable the HIV reservoir.“Our aim is to develop a robust and safe combinatorial CRISPR-Cas regimen, striving for an inclusive ‘HIV cure for all’ that can inactivate diverse HIV strains across various cellular contexts. Scientists Discover Potential HIV Cure that Eliminates Disease from Cells Using CRISPR-Cas Gene Editing
3D scanned creatures by oVert – Released by Florida Museum of Natural History / SWNS
An incredible new project has scanned thousands of creatures to advance scientific research and provide colorful images to the world. Natural history museums have entered a new stage of scientific discovery and accessibility with the completion of openVertebrate (oVert), a five-year collaborative project among 18 institutions to create 3D reconstructions of vertebrate specimens and make them freely available online. Now, researchers have published a summary of the project in the journal BioScience reviewing the specimens they’ve scanned to date, offering a glimpse of how the data might be used to ask newquestions and spur the development of innovative technology. “When people first collected these specimens, they had no idea what the future would hold for them,” said Edward Stanley, co-principal investigator of the oVert project and associate scientist at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Such museums got their start in the 16th century as cabinets of curiosity, in which a few wealthy individuals amassed rare and exotic specimens, which they kept mostly to themselves. Since then, museums have become a resource for the public to learn about biodiversity. But, the majority of museum collections remain behind closed doors—accessible only to scientists who must either travel to see them or ask that a small number of specimens be mailed on loan—and oVert wants to change that. “Now we have scientists, teachers, students and artists around the world using these data remotely,” said David Blackburn, lead principal investigator of the oVert project and curator of herpetology at the Florida Museum. Beginning in 2017, the oVert team members took CT scans of more than 13,000 specimens, with vertebrate species across the tree of life, including over half the genera of all amphibians, reptiles, fishes, and mammals.
A collage of scanned fish from oVert – Released by Florida Museum of Natural History / SWNS
CT scanners use high-energy X-rays to peer past an organism’s exterior and view the dense bone structure beneath. Some specimens were also stained with a contrast-enhancing solution for visualizing soft tissues, like skin, muscle, and other organs. The models give an intimate look at internal portions of a specimen that could previously only be observed through destructive dissection and tissue sampling. “You want to protect specimens, but you also want to have people use them,” Blackburn said. “oVert is a way of reducing the wear and tear on samples while also increasing access, and it’s the next logical step in the
Hedgehog CT scan from oVert – Florida Museum of Natural History / SWNS
mission of museum collections.” Skeletons too large to fit into a CT scanner, like a humpback whale, were painstakingly taken apart so that 3D models of each individual bone could be scanned and reassembled. “These are not things you put in boxes and loan,” Blackburn pointed out. A set of iconic Galapagos tortoises at the California Academy of Sciences were each photographed in a 360-degree rotation. Photographing their undersides was problematic, as their curved shells made it impossible to keep them upright. After a few trial-and-error runs, they settled on placing the specimens on top of inflatable swimming tubes. Scientists have already used data from the project to gain astonishing insights into the natural world. Watch the incredible video below, and learn more at the bottom…In 2023, Edward Stanley was conducting routine CT scans of spiny mice and was surprised to find their tails were covered with an internal coat of bony plates, called osteoderms. Before this discovery, armadillos were considered to be the only living mammals with these structures. “All kinds of things jump out at you when you’re when you’re scanning,” Stanley said. “I study osteoderms, and through kismet or fate, I happened to be the one scanning those particular specimens on that particular day and noticed something strange about their tails on the X-ray. “That happens all the time. We’ve found all sorts of strange, unexpected things.”oVert scans were used to determine what killed a rim rock crown snake, considered to be the rarest snake species in North America. Another study showed that a group of frogs called pumpkin toadlets had become so small that the fluid-filled canals in their ears that confer balance no longer functioned properly, causing them to crash-land when jumping. One study of 500 oVert specimens revealed that frogs have lost and regained teeth more than 20 times throughout their evolutionary history. Other researchers concluded that Spinosaurus, a massive dinosaur that was larger than Tyrannosaurus rex and thought to be aquatic, would have actually been a poor swimmer, and thus likely stayed on land. And the list goes on, full of insights and ideas that would have been impossible or impractical before the project’s outset. “Now that we’ve been working on this for so long, we have a broad scaffold that allows us to take a broader view of
Fish CT scan from oVert – Florida Museum of Natural History / SWNS
evolutionary questions,” Stanley said. Artists and teachers are benefitting too Funded in part by the National Science Foundation, the value of the oVert project extends beyond science. Artists have used the 3D models to create realistic animal replicas, photographs of oVert specimens have been displayed as museum exhibits, and specimens have been incorporated into virtual reality headsets that give users the chance to interact with and manipulate them. A high school teacher in Cincinnati says it’s been a game-changer for her studies on evolution. “I teach juniors and seniors, and I absolutely love them, but they can be a tough audience,” said Jennifer Broo. “They know when things are fake, which makes them less engaged. Using the oVert models, my class has gotten so much better because I have had the opportunities to work with and expose my students to real data.”Visit Sketchfab to view a sample of 3D interactive models. At MorphoSource you can access the full openVertebrate repository.Scientists Have 3D-Scanned Thousands of Creatures Creating Incredibly Intricate Images Anyone Can Access for Free
Zebra finches are highly social birds and will press a lever in order to hear a recording of another Zebra finch singing. (Photo by Carlos RodrÃguez-Saltos)
By Carol Clark: Oxytocin, the so-called “love hormone,” plays a key role in the process of how a young zebra finch learns to sing by imitating its elders, suggests a new study by neuroscientists at Emory University. Scientific Reports published the findings, which add to the understanding of the neurochemistry of social learning. “We found that the oxytocin system is involved from an early age in male zebra finches learning song,” says Natalie Pilgeram, first author of the study and an Emory PhD candidate in psychology. “It’s basic science that may lead to insights into the process of vocal learning across the animal kingdom, including humans.” “Our results suggest that the neurochemistry of early social bonds, particularly during language learning, may be relevant in studies of autism,” adds Donna Maney, a professor of neuroscience in Emory’s Department of Psychology and senior author of the study. Young male zebra finches learn to sing by listening to an adult male tutor that they choose to pay close attention to, normally their biological father or a “foster” father who nurtures them. This social process holds some similarities for how children learn to speak, making the birds a laboratory model for the neural underpinnings of social vocal learning. In the current paper, the researchers show how oxytocin, a hormone essential to social bonding, influences young finches exposed only to the songs of unfamiliar males. In experiments, blocking the young birds’ oxytocin receptors while they listened to a male biased the birds against that male’s song. Instead they preferred to listen to and eventually learn the song of a male they heard when their oxytocin receptors were allowed to function normally. The paper builds on previous work by the Maney lab regarding the hormonal and genetic influences on social behavior. Her lab is working with researchers at the Marcus Autism Center in Atlanta to maximize any potential translational impact of its research findings. Finding their voice: Zebra finches are highly social birds. In the wild they nest together in large colonies. Only adult males sing, primarily to court females. From the time they hatch, the males begin listening for song, and memorizing particular songs, even before they can actually sing one. “Up until around day 50, they are making little cheeps and warbles, what we call ‘subsong,’” Pilgeram explains. “It’s similar to human infants who begin to babble at around six months without actually talking.” During this sensitive listening phase, a male zebra finch pays closest attention to the song of its father, even though it can hear other adult males nearby. In a laboratory environment, research shows that if a biological father is removed from a cage before a male hatches and then substituted with a “foster father” that they can interact with, the young male will prefer the song of the foster father over other males it can hear. The young males demonstrate this preference by pressing levers that allow them to hear playback of different songs. Learning from their environment: “The young birds have got to learn all that they can from their environment,” Pilgeram says. “Just as during human development, the birds pay the closest attention to their immediate caregivers, on whom they rely for everything.” Around day 50, the young male finches enter puberty and what is called the “plastic song phase.” During this time, they practice their song motor skills and actively try to produce song. Although they begin to shift their attention away from their fathers and show a preference for hearing songs of other males, each young male still practices dad’s tune. By day 100, most male zebra finches are fully singing their father’s song. They have reached adulthood and their tune has “crystalized” into the song that they will sing for the rest of their lives. In previous research, the Maney lab found that the stronger the preference a male zebra finch shows for its father’s song during the early listening phase, the more closely its crystalized adult song will mimic that of the father. The role of oxytocin: For the current paper, the researchers wanted to test whether the oxytocin system played a role in that preference. The research centered on male juvenile zebra finches hatched in the lab. At day four, the fathers were removed from each of the youngsters’ cages so they were raised only by their mothers. The cages were enclosed in chambers that prevented the young birds from hearing song from other birds housed nearby. Beginning at day 27 in a young bird’s life, it was exposed to a series of tutoring sessions by two different adult male tutors that it had never heard. The tutor’s cage was placed next to the cage of the young bird, or pupil. When it was exposed to one of the tutors, the pupil was given a substance that blocked its oxytocin receptors from activating. When the young bird was exposed to the other tutor it received a control substance that allowed its oxytocin receptors to function normally. After completing a series of tutoring sessions, the pupils were presented with two different levers they could press in their cages. Pressing one lever was more likely to play the song they heard when their oxytocin receptors were blocked. The other lever was more likely to play the song they heard with normally functioning oxytocin. The results showed that early in their development, the juveniles favored the song that they heard when their oxytocin was not blocked. Building on past findings: “We also found that when their oxytocin was not blocked, the birds’ developmental milestones fit the same data curve as in our previous research,” Maney says. “They showed an early preference for the song of one tutor, then switched to preferring the other song during puberty.” The preference flattened out as they began singing the song of their chosen tutor, she adds. And the stronger the preference that they showed for the chosen tutor’s song during the early listening phase, the more closely their own adult song resembled that of the chosen tutor. The researchers also noted behavioral differences in the way the pupils and tutors interacted. With normally functioning oxytocin, a pupil pecked more often at the wall of its cage facing the tutor and more often preened in a fashion known to be associated with focused listening in the birds, compared to when its oxytocin was blocked. “Our results suggest that the oxytocin system is involved in how an animal decides where to focus its attention very early in its life,” Pilgeram says. Co-authors of the study include Carlos RodrÃguez-Saltos, who received his doctorate from Emory and is now at Illinois State University; postdoctoral fellow Nicole Baran; research technicians Matthew Davis and Erik Iverson; and Emory undergraduates Sumin Lee, Emily Kim and Aditya Bhise. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Silvio O. Conte Center for Oxytocin and Social Cognition. eScienceCommons: 'Love hormone' guides young songbirds in choice of.
A member of staff works inside ‘Rudy’s Vegan Butcher’ shop, amid the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, in London, Britain, October 30, 2020. Picture taken October 30, 2020. REUTERS/Henry Nicholls
Aleksandra Shai Chai needed a moment to process the idea that she would be stuck eating a vegan diet for eight weeks.
Shai Chai, who typically eats meat, was participating in a study to examine the effects of different diets on twins’ health. When Stanford University researchers randomly distributed slips of papers to the twins last year to indicate which diet they would follow, Shai Chai hoped hers would say “omnivore.”
Instead, it said “vegan.” Her twin sister, Mariya Foster, would eat a diet of meat and vegetables.
Shai Chai replaced her favorite foods – bacon, sushi and steak – with tofu, beans and vegetables. She didn’t love the diet, but when Shai Chai recently learned the study’s results, she felt thankful that she had briefly changed her eating habits.
After examining 22 pairs of identical twins, researchers found that vegan eaters had lower cholesterol, insulin and body weight than participants who followed a meat diet, according to the results published last week in the JAMA Network Open journal.
Vegan eaters’ low-density lipoprotein – bad cholesterol – dropped on average by 15.2 milligrams over eight weeks; omnivore dieters’ fell by 2.4. Vegan eaters on average shed 4.2 more pounds than omnivores, and their insulin – which regulates blood sugar – dropped by roughly 20 percent more.
“That made it all worth it, for sure,” Shai Chai, 43, told The Washington Post. “I was like, ‘All right, at least I have a little bit of payback; a little benefit for the trouble.”
Christopher Gardner, a Stanford University professor of medicine, said participants’ genetics have sometimes muddied researchers’ understanding of how different diets affect people’s health. He wanted to find a clear answer on the effects of eating or avoiding meat and animal products on cardiovascular health, and he thought the best subjects would be people with nearly identical genes and upbringings.
Near the start of 2022, Gardner found participants through Stanford’s twin research registry. Shai Chai and Foster had signed up a few years earlier, thinking the studies would be a fun way to contribute to scientific discoveries. They were exactly the type of twins Gardner was looking for.
Foster was born about five minutes before Shai Chai in December of 1979 in Kyiv before they immigrated to San Francisco in 1995. They like the same food (fish and chicken), the same music (pop and techno) and sometimes unknowingly buy the same clothes. The sisters, who are 5-foot-5 and live a few blocks from each other, said they often finish each other’s sentences and know what the other is thinking.
In May of 2022, participants in the study received 21 weekly prepackaged meals from Trifecta, a meal-delivery service, featuring food from their assigned diets. The vegan meals consisted of oatmeal, tofu, broccoli, spinach, beans, lentils and brown rice. The omnivore meals were still healthy, but featured eggs, chicken, turkey bacon, vegetables and jasmine rice. Participants logged their meals on Cronometer, an app that tracks diet and health data.
Shai Chai said the vegan meals were tastier than she had expected, though she disliked some dishes. Foster sacrificed her favorite snacks – M&Ms and granola bars – for healthy meats and fruits. After seeing examples of meals following their diets, participants purchased their own groceries during the second half of the eight-week study.
Dietitians called participants a few times to discuss how they were faring. Participants also gave blood and stool samples and underwent physical and cognitive tests to assess how the diets affected their balance and memories.
Shai Chai said that after four weeks of a vegan diet, she had more energy and slept better. Still, she missed her favorite foods. Once, she went out to a sushi restaurant with friends but forced herself to eat vegan sushi.
While some participants continued to follow a vegan diet after the study concluded in July 2022, Shai Chai said she immediately started eating sushi again – which she said tasted better than ever. Foster said she has become more mindful of eating healthy and has developed meal ideas from Trifecta.
Gardner, who’s a vegetarian, hopes nutritionists use the study’s results to persuade clients to eat more vegan products. He said that vegan food contributes to the three most crucial ways to improve cardiovascular health: by increasing fiber and decreasing saturated fat and body weight.
He added that eating a vegan diet offers health benefits that could prolong someone’s life – a discovery that Foster said has prompted sibling teasing.“I was already five minutes older,” Foster said, “and now I’m [figuratively] even older because she got the vegan diet.” Scientists studied twins’ diets. Those who ate vegan saw fast results.
The world is rapidly moving towards a renewable energy future. To support the transition, we must prepare back-up energy supplies for times when solar panels and wind turbines are not producing enough electricity.
Our new research identified more than 900 suitable locations around the world: at former and existing mining sites. Some 37 sites are in Australia.
Huge open-cut mining pits would be turned into reservoirs to hold water for renewable energy storage. It would give the sites a new lease on life and help shore up the world’s low-emissions future.
The benefits of pumped hydro storage
Pumped hydro energy storage has been demonstrated at scale for more than a century. Over the past few years, we have been identifying the best sites for “closed-loop” pumped hydro systems around the world.
Unlike conventional hydropower systems operating on rivers, closed-loop systems are located away from rivers. They require only two reservoirs, one higher than the other, between which water flows down a tunnel and through a turbine, producing electricity.
The water can be released – and power produced – to cover gaps in electricity supply when output from solar and wind is low (for example on cloudy or windless days). And when wind and solar are producing more electricity than is needed – such as on sunny or windy days – this cheap surplus power is used to pump the water back up the hill to the top reservoir, ready to be released again.
Off-river sites have very small environmental footprints and require very little water to operate. Pumped hydro energy storage is also generally cheaper than battery storage at large scales.
Batteries are the preferred method for energy storage over seconds to hours, while pumped hydro is preferred for overnight and longer storage.
Pumped-hydro storage technology has been demonstrated at scale for over a century. Shutterstock
Why mining sites?
There are big benefits to converting mining areas into pumped hydro plants.
For a start, the hole has already been dug, reducing construction costs. What’s more, mining sites are typically already serviced by roads and transmission infrastructure. The site usually has access to a water source for which the mine operators may have pumping rights. And the development takes place on land that is already cleared of vegetation, avoiding the need to disturb new areas.
Finally, community support may have already been obtained for the mining operations, which could easily be rolled over into a pumped hydro site.
In Australia, one pumped hydro energy storage project is already being built at a former gold mine site at Kidston in Far North Queensland.
The feasibility of two others is being assessed at Mount Rawdon near Bundaberg in Queensland, and at Muswellbrook in New South Wales. Both would repurpose old mining pits.
What we found
Our previous research identified suitable locations in undeveloped areas (excluding protected land) and using existing reservoirs. Now, we have turned our attention to mine sites.
Our study used a computer algorithm to search the Earth’s surface for suitable sites. It looked for mining pits, pit lakes and tailings ponds in mining sites which were located near suitable land for a new upper reservoir. The idea is that the reservoir and mining site are “paired” and water pumped between them.
Globally, we identified 904 suitable mining sites across 77 countries.
Some 37 suitable sites are located in Australia. They include the Mount Rawdon and Muswellbrook mining pits already under investigation.
There are a number of potential options in Western Australia: in the iron-ore region of the Pilbara, south of Perth and around Kalgoorlie.
Options in Queensland and New South Wales are mostly located down the east coast, including the Coppabella Mine and the coal mining pits near the old Liddell Power Station. Possible sites also exist inland at Mount Isa in Queensland and at the Cadia Hill gold mine near Orange in NSW.
Potential sites in South Australia include the old Leigh Creek coal mine in the Flinders Ranges and the operating Prominent Hill mine northwest of Adelaide. Tasmania and Victoria also offer possible locations, although many other non-mining options exist in these states for pumped hydro storage.
We are not suggesting that operating mines be closed – rather, that pumped hydro storage be considered as part of site rehabilitation at the end of the mine’s life.
If old mining sites are to be converted into pumped hydro, several challenges must be addressed. For example, mine pits may contain contaminants that, if filled with water, could seep into groundwater. However, this could be overcome by lining reservoirs.
The Australian Energy Market Operator suggests by 2050, this nation needs about 640 gigawatt-hours of dispatchable or “on demand” storage to support solar and wind capacity. We currently have about 17 gigawatt-hours of electricity storage, with more committed by Snowy 2.0 and other projects.
The 37 possible pumped hydro sites we’ve identified could deliver 540 gigawatt-hours of storage potential. Combined with other non-mining sites we’ve identified previously, the options are far more numerous than our needs.
This means we can afford to be picky, and develop only the very best sites. So what are we waiting for?
Arlington Research/UnsplashPeter Wilson, Australian Catholic UniversityWe’re all time-poor, so multi-tasking is seen as a necessity of modern living. We answer work emails while watching TV, make shopping lists in meetings and listen to podcasts when doing the dishes. We attempt to split our attention countless times a day when juggling both mundane and important tasks.
But doing two things at the same time isn’t always as productive or safe as focusing on one thing at a time.
The dilemma with multi-tasking is that when tasks become complex or energy-demanding, like driving a car while talking on the phone, our performance often drops on one or both.
Here’s why – and how our ability to multi-task changes as we age.
Doing more things, but less effectively
The issue with multi-tasking at a brain level, is that two tasks performed at the same time often compete for common neural pathways – like two intersecting streams of traffic on a road.
In particular, the brain’s planning centres in the frontal cortex (and connections to parieto-cerebellar system, among others) are needed for both motor and cognitive tasks. The more tasks rely on the same sensory system, like vision, the greater the interference.
The brain’s action planning centres are in the frontal cortex (blue), with reciprocal connections to parietal cortex (yellow) and the cerebellum (grey), among others. grayjay/Shutterstock
This is why multi-tasking, such as talking on the phone, while driving can be risky. It takes longer to react to critical events, such as a car braking suddenly, and you have a higher risk of missing critical signals, such as a red light.
The more involved the phone conversation, the higher the accident risk, even when talking “hands-free”.
Generally, the more skilled you are on a primary motor task, the better able you are to juggle another task at the same time. Skilled surgeons, for example, can multitask more effectively than residents, which is reassuring in a busy operating suite.
Highly automated skills and efficient brain processes mean greater flexibility when multi-tasking.
Adults are better at multi-tasking than kids
Both brain capacity and experience endow adults with a greater capacity for multi-tasking compared with children.
You may have noticed that when you start thinking about a problem, you walk more slowly, and sometimes to a standstill if deep in thought. The ability to walk and think at the same time gets better over childhood and adolescence, as do other types of multi-tasking.
When children do these two things at once, their walking speed and smoothness both wane, particularly when also doing a memory task (like recalling a sequence of numbers), verbal fluency task (like naming animals) or a fine-motor task (like buttoning up a shirt). Alternately, outside the lab, the cognitive task might fall by wayside as the motor goal takes precedence.
Brain maturation has a lot to do with these age differences. A larger prefrontal cortex helps share cognitive resources between tasks, thereby reducing the costs. This means better capacity to maintain performance at or near single-task levels.
The white matter tract that connects our two hemispheres (the corpus callosum) also takes a long time to fully mature, placing limits on how well children can walk around and do manual tasks (like texting on a phone) together.
For a child or adult with motor skill difficulties, or developmental coordination disorder, multi-tastking errors are more common. Simply standing still while solving a visual task (like judging which of two lines is longer) is hard. When walking, it takes much longer to complete a path if it also involves cognitive effort along the way. So you can imagine how difficult walking to school could be.
What about as we approach older age?
Older adults are more prone to multi-tasking errors. When walking, for example, adding another task generally means older adults walk much slower and with less fluid movement than younger adults.
These age differences are even more pronounced when obstacles must be avoided or the path is winding or uneven.
Older adults tend to enlist more of their prefrontal cortex when walking and, especially, when multi-tasking. This creates more interference when the same brain networks are also enlisted to perform a cognitive task.
These age differences in performance of multi-tasking might be more “compensatory” than anything else, allowing older adults more time and safety when negotiating events around them.
Older people can practise and improve
Testing multi-tasking capabilities can tell clinicians about an older patient’s risk of future falls better than an assessment of walking alone, even for healthy people living in the community.
Testing can be as simple as asking someone to walk a path while either mentally subtracting by sevens, carrying a cup and saucer, or balancing a ball on a tray.
Patients can then practise and improve these abilities by, for example, pedalling an exercise bike or walking on a treadmill while composing a poem, making a shopping list, or playing a word game.
The goal is for patients to be able to divide their attention more efficiently across two tasks and to ignore distractions, improving speed and balance.
There are times when we do think better when moving
Let’s not forget that a good walk can help unclutter our mind and promote creative thought. And, some research shows walking can improve our ability to search and respond to visual events in the environment.
But often, it’s better to focus on one thing at a time
We often overlook the emotional and energy costs of multi-tasking when time-pressured. In many areas of life – home, work and school – we think it will save us time and energy. But the reality can be different.
Multi-tasking can sometimes sap our reserves and create stress, raising our cortisol levels, especially when we’re time-pressured. If such performance is sustained over long periods, it can leave you feeling fatigued or just plain empty.
Deep thinking is energy demanding by itself and so caution is sometimes warranted when acting at the same time – such as being immersed in deep thought while crossing a busy road, descending steep stairs, using power tools, or climbing a ladder.
So, pick a good time to ask someone a vexed question – perhaps not while they’re cutting vegetables with a sharp knife. Sometimes, it’s better to focus on one thing at a time.
During their time onshore, polar bear mothers may risk their survival by continuing to nurse when food is not available. (Shutterstock)
Louise Archer, University of Toronto
When sea ice melts, polar bears must move onto land for several months without access to food. This fasting period is challenging for all bears, but particularly for polar bear mothers who are nursing cubs.
Impaired lactation has likely played a role in the recent decline of several polar bear populations. This research also indicates how polar bear families might be impacted in the future by continued sea-ice loss caused by climate warming.
Challenges of rearing cubs
While sea ice might appear as a vast and perhaps vacant ecosystem, the frozen Arctic waters provide an essential platform for polar bears to hunt energy-rich seals — the bread and butter of their diet.
Sea ice is a dynamic environment that can vary through time and in different regions of the Arctic. Polar bears in Canada’s western Hudson Bay area experience seasonal sea ice, which melts in the warmer summer months, forcing the polar bears to move onto land until cooler winter temperatures cause the sea ice to refreeze.
On shore, polar bears often remain in a fasting state, using their body stores of fat for fuel. (Shutterstock)
While on shore, hunting opportunities are rare and polar bears generally spend their time in a fasting state. Polar bears rely on their immense body fat stores to fuel them during these leaner months, with some individuals measuring almost 50 per cent body fat when they come onshore in early summer.
While on land, polar bears can lose around a kilogram of body mass per day, so making it to the end of the ice-free season requires them to carefully manage their energy. For most polar bears, this means reducing activity levels and conserving energy until the sea ice returns and seal hunting can resume.
Females with cubs must also factor in the additional burden of lactation. Polar bears produce high-energy milk, which — at up to 35 per cent fat — is like whipping cream. This high-fat milk allows cubs to grow quickly, increasing from just 600 grams at birth to well over 100 kilograms by the time they are around two-and-a-half years old and leave their mothers to become independent.
During the onshore fasting period, polar bear mothers face a difficult trade-off: Stop lactating and risk the health of her growing cubs or continue nursing and risk her own survival as her energy reserves are depleted.
Polar bear cubs remain with their mothers for up to two-and-a-half years. (Shutterstock)
Moderating lactation
Although lactation is important to both mothers and cubs, studies on polar bear lactation are relatively rare.
To better understand how females manage their lactation investment, our research team revisited a data set of polar bear milk samples collected in the late 1980s and early 1990s from polar bears on land during the ice-free period.
We estimated how long each polar bear mom had been fasting based on annual sea-ice breakup dates and found that the energy content of their milk declined the more days spent onshore. Some bears had stopped producing milk entirely. Both milk energy content and lactation probability were negatively related to the mother’s body condition, meaning females in poor body condition had to prioritize their own energetic needs over their cubs.
The bears who reduced their investment in lactation benefited by using up less of their body reserves, meaning they could fast for longer. Yet the cubs who received lower energy milk grew more slowly than offspring of females that maintained their lactation effort. In the long term, this may reduce cub survival and, ultimately, negatively affect population dynamics.
Climate change and population declines
After around three months on land, the probability of a female with cubs lactating was 53 per cent. This dropped to 35 per cent for a female with yearlings (older cubs from the previous year).
The data in our study were collected around three decades ago. Since then, climate warming has meant that the ice-free season in western Hudson Bay has been extending by around seven days per decade. Polar bears are now regularly forced to spend more than four months on land.
As the ice-free season has increased and polar bears must go for longer without food, their average body condition has declined. The ability of female polar bears to nurse their cubs has probably also become increasingly impaired.
This research adds another piece to our understanding of polar bear resilience to climate change. Without action to halt climate warming and sea-ice loss, survival of cubs will be at risk across the Arctic.
Why does this universal problem among speakers happen?
And when can word-finding difficulties indicate something serious?
Everyone will experience an occasional word-finding difficulty, but if they happen very often with a broad range of words, names and numbers, this could be a sign of a neurological disorder.
selecting the right word from the “mental lexicon” (a mental dictionary of the speaker’s vocabulary)
retrieving its sound pattern (called its “form”)
executing the movements of the speech organs for articulating it.
Word-finding difficulties can potentially arise at each of these stages of processing.
When a healthy speaker can’t retrieve a word from their lexicon despite the feeling of knowing it, this is called a “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon by language scientists.
Often, the frustrated speaker will try to give a bit of information about their intended word’s meaning, “you know, that thing you hit a nail with”, or its spelling, “it starts with an H!”.
Tip-of-the-tongue states are relatively common and are a type of speech error that occurs primarily during retrieval of the sound pattern of a word (step three above).
What can affect word finding?
Word-finding difficulties occur at all ages but they do happen more often as we get older. In older adults, they can cause frustration and anxiety about the possibility of developing dementia. But they’re not always a cause for concern.
One way researchers investigate word-finding difficulties is to ask people to keep a diary to record how often and in what context they occur. Diary studies have shown that some word types, such as names of people and places, concrete nouns (things, such as “dog” or “building”) and abstract nouns (concepts, such as “beauty” or “truth”), are more likely to result in tip-of-the-tongue states compared with verbs and adjectives.
Less frequently used words are also more likely to result in tip-of-the-tongue states. It’s thought this is because they have weaker connections between their meanings and their sound patterns than more frequently used words.
Laboratory studies have also shown tip-of-the-tongue states are more likely to occur under socially stressful conditions when speakers are told they are being evaluated, regardless of their age. Many people report having experienced tip-of-the-tongue problems during job interviews.
When could it spell more serious issues?
More frequent failures with a broader range of words, names and numbers are likely to indicate more serious issues.
When this happens, language scientists use the terms “anomia” or “anomic aphasia” to describe the condition, which can be associated with brain damage due to stroke, tumours, head injury or dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Recently, the actor Bruce Willis’s family revealed he has been diagnosed with a degenerative disorder known as primary progressive aphasia, for which one of the earliest symptoms is word-finding difficulties rather than memory loss.
Primary progressive aphasia is typically associated with frontotemporal or Alzheimer’s dementias, although it can be associated with other pathologies.
Anomic aphasia can arise due to problems occurring at different stages of speech production. An assessment by a clinical neuropsychologist or speech pathologist can help clarify which processing stage is affected and how serious the problem might be.
For example, if a person is unable to name a picture of a common object such as a hammer, a clinical neuropsychologist or speech pathologist will ask them to describe what the object is used for (the individual might then say “it’s something you hit things with” or “it’s a tool”).
If they can’t, they will be asked to gesture or mime how it’s used. They might also be provided with a cue or prompt, such as the first letter (h) or syllable (ham).
Most people with anomic aphasia benefit greatly from being prompted, indicating they are mostly experiencing problems with later stages of retrieving word forms and motor aspects of speech.
But if they’re unable to describe or mime the object’s use, and cueing does not help, this is likely to indicate an actual loss of word knowledge or meaning. This is typically a sign of a more serious issue such as primary progressive aphasia.
Imaging studies in healthy adults and people with anomic aphasia have shown different areas of the brain are responsible for their word-finding difficulties.
In healthy adults, occasional failures to name a picture of a common object are linked with changes in activity in brain regions that control motor aspects of speech, suggesting a spontaneous problem with articulation rather than a loss of word knowledge.
In anomia due to primary progressive aphasia, brain regions that process word meanings show a loss of nerve cells and connections or atrophy.
Although anomic aphasia is common after strokes to the left hemisphere of the brain, the associated word-finding difficulties do not appear to be distinguishable by specific areas.
There are treatments available for anomic aphasia. These will often involve speech pathologists training the individual on naming tasks using different kinds of cues or prompts to help retrieve words. The cues can be various meaningful features of objects and ideas, or sound features of words, or a combination of both. Smart tablet and phone apps also show promise when used to complement therapy with home-based practice.
The type of cue used for treatment is determined by the nature of the person’s impairment. Successful treatment is associated with changes in activity in brain regions known to support speech production. Unfortunately, there is no effective treatment for primary progressive aphasia, although some studies have suggested speech therapy can produce temporary benefits.
If you’re concerned about your word-finding difficulties or those of a loved one, you can consult your GP for a referral to a clinical neuropsychologist or a speech pathologist.
Psychedelics are known for inducing altered states of consciousness in humans by fundamentally changing our normal pattern of sensory perception, thought and emotion. Research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelics has increased significantly in the last decade. While this research is important, I have always been more intrigued by the idea that psychedelics can be used as a tool to study the neural basis of human consciousness in laboratory animals. We ultimately share the same basic neural hardware with other mammals, and possibly some basic aspects of consciousness, too. So by examining what happens in the brain when there’s a psychedelically induced change in conscious experience, we can perhaps glean insights into what consciousness is in the first place.We still don’t know a lot about how the networks of cells in the brain enable conscious experience. The dominating view is that consciousness somehow emerges as a collective phenomenon when the dispersed information processing of individual neurons (brain cells) is integrated as the cells interact.But the mechanism by which this is supposed to happen remains unclear. Now our study on rats, published in Communications Biology, suggests that psychedelics radically change the way that neurons interact and behave collectively.Our study compared two different classes of psychedelics in rats: the classic LSD type and the less-typical ketamine type (ketamine is an anaesthetic in larger doses). Both classes are known to induce psychedelic experiences in humans, despite acting on different receptors in the brain. Exploring brain waves: We used electrodes to simultaneously measure electrical activity from 128 separate areas of the brain of nine awake rats while they were given psychedelics. The electrodes could pick up two kinds of signals: electrical brain waves caused by the cumulative activity in thousands of neurons, and smaller transient electrical pulses, called action potentials, from individual neurons. The classic psychedelics, such as LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), activates a receptor in the brain (5-HT2A) which normally binds to serotonin, a neurotransmitter that regulates mood and many other things. Ketamine, on the other hand, works by inhibiting another receptor (NMDA), which normally is activated by glutamate, the primary neurotransmitter in the brain for making neurons fire. We speculated that, despite these differences, the two classes of psychedelics might have similar effects on the activity of brain cells. Indeed, it turned out that both drug classes induced a very similar and distinctive pattern of brain waves in multiple brain regions. The brain waves were unusually fast, oscillating about 150 times per second. They were also surprisingly synchronised between different brain regions. Short bursts of oscillations at a similar frequency are known to occur occasionally under normal conditions in some brain
regions. But in this case, it occurred for prolonged durations. First, we assumed that a single brain structure was generating the wave and that it then spread to other locations. But the data was not consistent with that scenario. Instead, we saw that the waves went up and down almost simultaneously in all parts of the brain where we could detect them – a phenomenon called phase synchronisation. Such tight phase synchronisation over such long distances has to our knowledge never been observed before. We were also able to measure action potentials from individual neurons during the psychedelic state. Action potentials are electrical pulses, no longer than a thousandth of a second, that are generated by the opening and closing of ion channels in the cell membrane. The action potentials are the primary way that neurons influence each other. Consequently, they are considered to be the main carrier of information in the brain. However, the action potential activity caused by LSD and ketamine differed significantly. As such, they could not be directly linked to the general psychedelic state. For LSD, neurons were inhibited – meaning they fired fewer action potentials – in all parts of the brain. For ketamine, the effect depended on cell type – certain large neurons were inhibited, while a type of smaller, locally connecting neurons, fired more. Therefore, it is probably the synchronised wave phenomenon – how the neurons behave collectively – that is most strongly linked to the psychedelic state. Mechanistically, this makes some sense. It is likely that this type of increased synchrony has large effects on the integration of information across neural systems that normal perception and cognition rely on. I think that this possible link between neuron-level system dynamics and consciousness is fascinating. It suggests that consciousness relies on a coupled collective state rather than the activity of individual neurons – it is greater than the sum of its parts. That said, this link is still highly speculative at this point. That’s because the phenomenon has not yet been observed in human brains. Also, one should be cautious when extrapolating human experiences to other animals – it is of course impossible to know exactly what aspects of a trip we share with our rodent relatives. But when it comes to cracking the deep mystery of consciousness, every bit of information is valuable.Pär Halje, Associate Research Fellow of Neurophysiology, Lund University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Shutterstock
Pumped-hydro storage technology has been demonstrated at scale for over a century. Shutterstock
The brain’s action planning centres are in the frontal cortex (blue), with reciprocal connections to parietal cortex (yellow) and the cerebellum (grey), among others. 
Having a conversation while driving slows your reaction time. 
Our ability to multi-task reduces with age. 
During their time onshore, polar bear mothers may risk their survival by continuing to nurse when food is not available. (Shutterstock)
mimi thian/unsplash 
