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c-ocoon: Photograph by Mattias Klum Venom from snakes like the Jameson’s mamba, seen here in Cameroon, may soon combat heart disease.
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neuromorphogenesis: The Power of Touch Touch is the first sense we acquire and the secret weapon in many a successful relationship. Here’s how to regain fluency in your first language. You’re in a crowded subway car on a Tuesday morning, or perhaps on a city bus. Still-sleepy commuters, lulled by vibrations, remain hushed, yet silently broadcast their thoughts. A toddler in his stroller looks warily at his fellow passengers, brows stitched with concern. He turns to Mom for reassurance, reaching out a small hand. She quietly takes it, squeezes, and releases. He relaxes, smiles, turns away—then back to Mom. She takes his hand again: squeeze and release. A twenty-something in a skirt and blazer sits stiffly, a leather-bound portfolio on her lap. She repeatedly pushes a few blonde wisps off her face, then touches her neck, her subconscious movements both revealing and relieving her anxiety about her 9 a.m. interview. A couple propped against a pole shares messages of affection; she rubs his arms with her hands, he nuzzles his face in her hair. A middle-aged woman, squished into a corner, assuredly bumps the young man beside her with some elbow and hip. The message is clear; he instantly adjusts to make room. Probing our ability to communicate nonverbally is hardly a new psychological tack; researchers have long documented the complex emotions and desires that our posture, motions, and expressions reveal. Yet until recently, the idea that people can impart and interpret emotional content via another nonverbal modality—touch—seemed iffy, even to researchers, such as DePauw University psychologist Matthew Hertenstein, who study it. In 2009, he demonstrated that we have an innate ability to decode emotions via touch alone. In a series of studies, Hertenstein had volunteers attempt to communicate a list of emotions to a blindfolded stranger solely through touch. Many participants were apprehensive about the experiment. “This is a touch-phobic society,” he says. “We’re not used to touching strangers, or even our friends, necessarily.” But touch they did—it was, after all, for science. The results suggest that for all our caution about touching, we come equipped with an ability to send and receive emotional signals solely by doing so. Participants communicated eight distinct emotions—anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, sympathy, happiness, and sadness—with accuracy rates as high as 78 percent. “I was surprised,” Hertenstein admits. “I thought the accuracy would be at chance level,” about 25 percent. Previous studies by Hertenstein and others have produced similar findings abroad, including in Spain (where people were better at comminicating via touch than in America) and the U.K. Research has also been conducted in Pakistan and Turkey. “Everywhere we’ve studied this, people seem able to do it,” he says. Indeed, we appear to be wired to interpret the touch of our fellow humans. A study providing evidence of this ability was published in 2012 by a team who used fMRI scans to measure brain activation in people being touched. The subjects, all heterosexual males, were shown a video of a man or a woman who was purportedly touching them on the leg. Unsurprisingly, subjects rated the experience of male touch as less pleasant. Brain scans revealed that a part of the brain called the primary somatosensory cortex responded more sharply to a woman’s touch than to a man’s. But here’s the twist: The videos were fake. It was always a woman touching the subjects. The results were startling, because the primary somatosensory cortex had been thought to encode only basic qualities of touch, such as smoothness or pressure. That its activity varied depending on whom subjects believed was touching them suggests that the emotional and social components of touch are all but inseparable from physical sensations. “When you’re being touched by another person, your brain isn’t set up to give you the objective qualities of that touch,” says study coauthor Michael Spezio, a psychologist at Scripps College. “The entire experience is affected by your social evaluation of the person touching you.” If touch is a language, it seems we instinctively know how to use it. But apparently it’s a skill we take for granted. When asked about it, the subjects in Hertenstein’s studies consistently underestimated their ability to communicate via touch—even while their actions suggested that touch may in fact be more versatile than voice, facial expression, and other modalities for expressing emotion. “With the face and voice, in general we can identify just one or two positive signals that are not confused with each other,” says Hertenstein. For example, joy is the only positive emotion that has been reliably decoded in studies of the face. Meanwhile, his research shows that touch can communicate multiple positive emotions: joy, love, gratitude, and sympathy. Scientists used to believe touching was simply a means of enhancing messages signaled through speech or body language, “but it seems instead that touch is a much more nuanced, sophisticated, and precise way to communicate emotions,” Hertenstein says. It may also increase the speed of communication: “If you’re close enough to touch, it’s often the easiest way to signal something,” says Laura Guerrero, coauthor of Close Encounters: Communication in Relationships, who researches nonverbal and emotional communication at Arizona State University. This immediacy is particularly noteworthy when it comes to bonding. “We feel more connected to someone if they touch us,” Guerrero notes.
ikenbot: NASA Deforestation Image Debunked Thousands of you guys have probably seen this image floating round the intertubes which shows the supposed deforestation from a 1978 Earth to a 2012 one. While It is a reality that things like pollution, overconsumption, overproduction, poor use of resources and technologies and lack of corporate liability all lend a helping hand to the deforestation of lands but the image provided to illustrate the effects of that carelessness is a false claim. Here’s Facts from Fiction to explain this in details: Claim - “NASA recently released imagery showing the deforestation of America …in just 34 years” with a picture showing two earths, one from 1978 and the other from 2012. Verdict - False, Misleading I am not trying to argue about the effects our industrial civilization has had on our planet, or the damage we may or not be causing to it., but when people, if even for the best intentions, make and spread misinformation to further the causes they believe in, it tends to damage the credibility of that cause. Recently circulating around social media sites and blogs is an image that claims “NASA recently released imagery showing the deforestation of America …in just 34 years.” Earth. Going bald, or just a bad case of fleas? Maybe it looked too exaggerated, or maybe it was the lack of information behind it, but something didn’t seem quite right about the image. A Google search turned up a lot of results, but little explanation or information behind it. Searching Nasa’s site didn’t turn anything recent about deforestation, but i did find the separate images while going through the picture galleries. It wasn’t long and all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. It turns out, our planet has an interesting phenomena that some of you may have heard about before called “seasons.” As a result, a picture of the earth is only going to be as green as the season it was taken in. An image taken in July for instance will naturally look greener than one taken in January after the majority of trees have shed its leaves, The picture on the left is claimed to be from 1978, but in reality was taken by a multiple picture process by Nasa from June through September 2001, and was slightly edited to look slightly greener than the original. (Source) The second image on the right was taken by Nasa on January 4th, 2012 (Hi Res). According to Wikipedia, Most of the Deforestation in North America happened prior to 1910. Since then, forest resources have remained about the same, largely due to planting new trees to replace the ones that were removed. While there may be no truth to the picture, it may still for a worthy enough cause. Old growth Forests around the world are still getting steamrolled by progress. In North America alone around 10,000 square kilometers (6213 miles) of old growth forests are harvested every year spelling disaster for countless species of plants, animals, and the people that rely on them to survive. Loggers go in and clean out the forests, and tree planters come in behind them and reseed the areas so they can be logged again in the future. In the meantime, all the plants and animals that used to depend on the forest no longer have a home, and many end up being crowded out , or simply dying off. (Fact from Fiction)
neuromorphogenesis: Concussions: Even one can change the brain Even a single concussion appears to cause changes in the structure of the brain that may make cognitive problems and depression a higher likelihood, a new study has found. The study, which used magnetic resonance imaging to compare healthy subjects’ brains with those of patients a year after a mild traumatic brain injury, indicated that those with such injuries had shrinkage in brain regions that are key to memory, executive function and mood regulation. The study, published online in the journal Radiology on Tuesday, is the first to show that even a single concussion can leave measurable scars on the brain. It used three-dimensional MRI scanning to measure the brain volume of 28 recent concussion victims and 22 matched controls. A year later, researchers conducted the same scans of 19 patients with mild traumatic brain injuries and 12 of a healthy control group. Although the atrophy in the brains of the concussion victims was “global” — it affected the brain’s overall volume — it was particularly pronounced in the anterior cingulate and the precuneal region. The anterior cingulate appears to serve as a switchboard for connecting the areas of the brain that are crucial to memory, attention, judgment and higher-order reasoning. Altered activity in the precuneus has been linked to depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. “This study confirms what we have long suspected,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Yvonne W. Lui, neuroradiology chief at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. After a mild traumatic brain injury, “there is true structural injury to the brain, even though we don’t see much on routine clinical imaging,” she said. That finding could help those who have enduring symptoms after a concussion understand that there are likely “biological underpinnings” that explain their problems, she added. For all of the increased focus the injury is getting, concussions remain mysterious to physicians: Patients who never lose consciousness may suffer a life-threatening crisis of bleeding in the brain, or have lasting cognitive problems. Others whose traumatic brain injury seems severe recover without lingering effect. CT scans, which are most widely used in emergency departments to evaluate concussions, are often poor indicators of the severity of brain injury with head trauma. A second study, presented Tuesday at the American Academy of Neurology’s annual meeting, suggests that MRI might be used to detect differences in the post-concussive brain that would lead to better diagnosis and treatment. The study found that, among concussion patients whose early brain scans suggesting a bleed — about 40% of the 256 patients researchers enrolled — about one-third had signs of tearing and shearing within the brain’s white matter — the dense network of fat-covered cables that carry electrical signals between the brain’s hemispheres and among regions. These injuries appeared as “tube-shaped” on MRI images, and where they were present, injury was more likely to extend into adjacent areas, including the brain’s gray matter, the study said. The researchers who presented the new work — led by Dr. Gunjan Parikh of the National Institutes of Health’s Neurological Disorders and Stroke Institute — surmised that these tube-shaped lesions might be the red flag that helps identify concussion patients whose injury is more severe.
v0q: by tigric (Ana Stefanović)
neuromorphogenesis: Scans that prove Leonardo da Vinci was right all along: New show reveals ‘startling accuracy’ of anatomical sketches which lay undiscovered for hundreds of years The startling accuracy of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings will be highlighted by a new exhibition that compares the artist’s work with modern medical scans. Long praised as one of the finest artists of the Renaissance era and a visionary inventor, da Vinci’s work as an anatomist was also well ahead of its time. Da Vinci first began researching the human body to help him keep his paintings as ‘true to nature’ as possible, but the project soon took on a life of its own and he had ambitions to write an illustrated treatise on anatomy. In the course of his investigations he dissected more than 30 corpses in hospitals and medical schools, filling hundreds of pages of his notebooks with detailed sketches. Many of them date from the winter of 1510-11, when he dissected some 20 corpses at the medical school of the University of Pavia in collaboration with professor of anatomy Marcantonio della Torre. On the 18 sheets of what is now known as Leonardo’s Anatomical Manuscript A, the artist crammed more than 240 individual drawings and notes running to more than 13,000 words in his distinctive mirror-writing. The work, which has never before been shown in its entirety in the UK, covers almost every bone in the body and many major muscle groups. Comparison with modern day medical scans shows how, despite his limited knowledge of medicine and the limited technology to hand, Da Vinci’s work was nevertheless incredibly accurate. The artist’s insights could have revolutionised European knowledge of anatomy.  However, on his death in 1519 they remained among his personal papers and did not see the light of day for hundreds of years. A spokesman for the Royal Collection Trust said: ‘Had they been published at the time, they would undoubtedly have been the most influential work on the human body ever produced.’ Much of the work anticipates 21st-century medical thinking, using the same sequences of images now used to train medics. He also recorded the muscles of the shoulder and arm in eight different views, rotating the body through 180 degrees.  These drawings will be juxtaposed with a modern animation capturing the same sequence.  Similarly, a 3D film of a dissected shoulder will demonstrate the incredible accuracy of da Vinci’s many drawings of the bones, muscles, nerves and tendons of the shoulder joint, seen from every angle and in every position. ‘This area of the body has a complex range of motion, and Leonardo’s attempts to capture it in two-dimensional drawings are shown to be centuries ahead of his time,’ the spokesman said. Other exhibition highlights include the first accurate depiction of the spine in history (1510); Leonardo’s notes from his post-mortem dissection of a 100-year-old man (conducted c.1508), in which he gives the first accurate descriptions of cirrhosis of the liver and narrowing of the arteries in the history of medicine; and the iconic and beautiful study of a child in the womb (c.1511), displayed alongside a 3D ultrasound scan of a foetus.
neuromorphogenesis: Video game ‘exercise’ for an hour a day may enhance certain cognitive skills Regular game play improves performance on tasks that use similar mental processes as video game Playing video games for an hour each day can improve subsequent performance on cognitive tasks that use similar mental processes to those involved in the game, according to research published March 13 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Adam Chie-Ming Oei and Michael Donald Patterson of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Non-gamer participants played five different games on their smartphones for an hour a day, five days of the week for one month. Each participant was assigned one game. Some played games like Bejeweled where participants matched three identical objects or an agent-based virtual life simulation like The Sims, while others played action games or had to find hidden objects, as in Hidden Expedition. After this month of ‘training’, the researchers found that people who had played the action game had improved their capacity to track multiple objects in a short span of time, while hidden object, match three objects and spatial memory game players improved their performance on visual search tasks. Though previous studies have reported that action games can improve cognitive skills, the authors state that this is the first study that compared multiple video games in a single study and show that different skills can be improved by playing different games. They add that video games don’t appear to cause a general improvement in mental abilities. Rather like muscles that can be trained with repetitive actions, repeated use of certain cognitive processes in video games can improve performance on other tasks as well.
mothernaturenetwork: How does light pollution affect you? Do you even know what the night sky looks like sans human interference?
neurosciencestuff: New Hope for Reversing the Effects of Spinal Cord Injury Walking is the obvious goal for individuals who have a chronic spinal cord injury, but it is not the only one. Regaining sensation and continence control also are important goals that can positively impact an individual’s quality of life. New hope for reversing the effects of spinal cord injury may be found in a combination of stem cell therapy and physical therapy as reported in Cell Transplantation by scientists at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. “Our phase one/two clinical trial had one goal: to give patients who have no other treatment options some hope,” said Hatem E. Sabaawy, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of medicine in the molecular and regenerative medicine program at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. “Early findings have concluded that we have met our goal and can improve the quality of life for individuals with spinal cord injuries by providing a safe treatment that restores some neurological function.” Dr. Sabaawy led a clinical trial that included 70 patients who had cervical or thoracic spinal cord injuries and were previously treated for at least six months without response. The patients were randomized into two groups, both of which were given physical therapy treatment. One of the groups also received stem cells derived from their own bone marrow injected near the injury site. Using the American Spinal Injury Association Impairment (AIS) Scale, patients received neurological and physical evaluations monthly for 18 months to determine if sensory and motor functions improved. “Of primary importance, there was a notable absence of side effects in patients treated with stem cells during the course of our investigation,” added Dr. Sabaawy, who also is a resident member of The Cancer Institute of New Jersey at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. None of the patients in the control group who received only physical therapy showed any improvement in sensory or motor function during the same time frame. Although the scale of injuries differed, all patients who were treated with a combination of bone-marrow derived stem cells and physical therapy responded to tactile and sensory stimuli as early as 4 weeks into the study. After 12 weeks, they experienced improvements in sensation and muscle strength, which was associated with enhanced potency and improved bladder and bowel control that eventually allowed patients to live catheter-free. Patients who showed improvement based on the AIS scale also were able to sit up and turn in their beds. “Since the emergence of stem cells as a potential therapy for spinal cord injury, scientists have diligently sought the best application for using their regenerating properties to improve a patient’s mobility,” said Joseph R. Bertino, MD, University Professor of medicine and pharmacology, interim director, Stem Cell Institute of New Jersey and chief scientific officer at The Cancer Institute of New Jersey. “Dr. Sabaawy’s discovery that treatment is more successful when stem cell therapy is combined with physical therapy could provide a remarkable, and hopefully sustainable, improvement in the overall quality of life for patients with spinal cord injury.” At the end of 18 months, 23 of the 50 patients who received both physical therapy and stem cell therapy showed a significant improvement of at least 10 points on the AIS scale. Several were able to walk with assistance. In addition, more gains were made in motor skill control by patients with thoracic spinal cord injuries, suggesting that patients with thoracic spinal cord injuries may respond better to the combined treatment. Dr. Sabaawy however cautioned that more studies are needed with a larger number of patients to test different cell dose levels and intervals at which stem cell therapy should be delivered. “Although a cure for spinal cord injury does not yet exist, it is clear that the regenerative and secretory properties of bone-marrow derived stem cells can improve symptoms of paralysis in some patients when coupled with the current standard of care that physical therapy provides,” said Dr. Sabaawy. “We will continue monitoring our patients for long-term safety effects of stem cell therapy and work to expand our research through a phase two clinical trial that can be conducted at multiple centers nationwide and internationally.” (Image courtesy: University of Alberta, Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine)
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