Why elephants never forget

It’s a common saying that elephants never forget. But the more we learn about elephants, the more it appears that their impressive memory is only one aspect of an incredible intelligence that makes them some of the most social, creative, and benevolent creatures on Earth. Alex Gendler takes us into the incredible, unforgettable mind of an elephant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSXNqsOoURg

The secret of fast runners: symmetry

Scientists can predict the best sprinters among elite runners just by looking at their knees.

 

To be a swift runner you need strong muscles, a powerful heart, determination and — symmetrical knees? That’s what scientists learned when they studied some of the world’s top sprinters.

Science has shown that animals and people with more symmetrical bodies tend to be stronger and healthier than those who are a bit lopsided. But this is the first time researchers have been able to predict who will be the fastest runners just by measuring their knees.

“Among the very best sprinters in the world, knee symmetry predicts who’s going to be the best of the best,” says Robert Trivers of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N. J. As an evolutionary biologist, he studies how organisms have adapted over generations to their environments.

His team published its new findings online November 17 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Trivers knew symmetrical knees could aid runners. In an earlier study, he showed that children who at age 8 had more symmetrical knees developed into the fastest runners by the time they were 22. Now he wanted to know why symmetry made such a difference in top athletes.

To find out, he brought a team of researchers to the island nation of Jamaica in the Caribbean. They measured the knees, ankles, and feet of 73 elite sprinters at the MVP Track and Field Club in Kingston. Jamaican Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce was among the athletes studied. She won Olympic gold medals in the 100-meter (328-foot) sprint in both 2008 and 2012.

 

The researchers then took the same measurements from 116 local non-runners who were about the same ages and sizes as the elite athletes.

“Elite sprinters had more symmetrical knees than normal people,” Trivers says. “Their ankles were also slightly more symmetrical.” But their feet were not special. “It seems the feet are completely irrelevant,” he concludes.

What is Ebola?

An unusual type of virus has periodically led to outbreaks of a devastating infection where people may bleed to death.

 

It’s got a long name: Ebola hemorrhagic fever. As infections go, this is a scary one. It kills anywhere from 25 to 88 percent of everyone it infects. And people who do come down with the disease suffer mightily. From 2 to 21 days after exposure, they can develop a fever, headaches, muscle pain, diarrhea, vomiting and loss of appetite. As the disease progresses, it can cause the body to start bleeding internally — and seemingly uncontrollably.

The good news: This disease is not easy to spread. For instance, people do not appear to become infected through the air, as occurs with influenza and many other germs. The virus lives in blood. And that’s the primary means by which people become infected — by getting tainted blood or other bodily fluids into a cut, an eye or the mouth.

The disease takes its name from the region where it was first identified: communities near the Ebola River in what was known as Zaire. (That country is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.) As of 2014, there appear to have been 21 major outbreaks of the disease, mostly in central or East Africa. The first was reported in 1976. At that time, 318 people in Zaire contracted the disease — and 280 died.

The germ responsible is called a filovirus. It’s a threadlike germ that causes only two known diseases: Ebola and a related infection known as Marburg. No one knows where the virus hides between outbreaks in humans. The suspicion is that bats, deerlike creatures, or some other wild animals carry the virus — perhaps without becoming ill themselves. Then, when people pick up an infected animal, or butcher it to eat it, they may encounter the virus.

Early school starts can turn teens into ‘zombies’

Doctors' orders: Start schools later to make teens happier — and healthier.

Teens and their teachers know well that early-morning classes can be grueling. Doctors now have a prescription: For better teen health, push the snooze button on school start times.
Janet Croft studies teens and sleep at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Ga. U.S. high schools, she says, “start at such an early time that most teens are essentially brain dead when they go to these early classes.” As a result, she says, too many students start their day as “walking zombies.” Too little sleep has become so common among teens that the CDC calls it an epidemic, or a widespread public-health problem.

But zombies, take heart! There’s a cure, says the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). This professional group includes more than 60,000 doctors who treat or study children. And this group has just issued a pair of papers calling for change.

One of the reports emphasizes the importance of sleep for teens and outlined the dangers from not getting enough zzzz’s. Studies in the past have shown over and over that sleep-deprived teens face higher risks of obesity and depression — and even car accidents.

Many teens get too little sleep because they attend middle and high schools that start earlier than 8:30 a.m., according to the AAP. Those early start times throw off a student’s internal body rhythm, called the circadian clock. Too little sleep disrupts that clock and causes problems.

The other report offers a simple way to help teens stay healthy: Start the school day later. In its formal statement, the AAP “urges high schools and middle schools to aim for start times that allow students the opportunity to achieve optimal levels of sleep.” Students, parents, doctors and school officials all need to heed this public-health problem, the group says.

Sunlight makes pleasure chemical in the body

Mice made feel-good chemical after exposure to ultraviolet light — and missed that light when the treatments ended.

 

 

The sun’s ultraviolet rays can cause more than a tan or burn. Indeed, their influence goes more than skin deep — to the brain, a new study finds. It showed that exposure to ultraviolet (UV) light causes mice to make a feel-good chemical. And that chemical may explain why so many people feel compelled to get a tan.

The study also may help explain why people flock to beaches and coasts for relaxation, Steven Feldman told Science News. He studies public health and skin diseases at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C.

“Do you know why people go to the beach on vacation? Why they put [Disney World] in Florida and not in Minnesota, where it’s cooler? Why caves are not more popular as a tourist destination? It’s all because of what these guys studied” in their new research, Feldman says. He did not work on the new study.

High-energy, UV rays come from the sun and the special lights used in tanning booths. Even though people know UV radiation can be dangerous, they continue to risk sunburns for a tan. Rates of skin cancer have been going up. David Fisher wanted to know why. He's an oncologist — a doctor who treats people with cancer — at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

“We know [UV light is] dangerous,” Fisher says, but many people choose not to protect themselves.

This Is Your Brain on Silence

Contrary to popular belief, peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head.

 
 
One icy night in March 2010, 100 marketing experts piled into the Sea Horse Restaurant in Helsinki, with the modest goal of making a remote and medium-sized country a world-famous tourist destination. The problem was that Finland was known as a rather quiet country, and since 2008, the Country Brand Delegation had been looking for a national brand that would make some noise.

Over drinks at the Sea Horse, the experts puzzled over the various strengths of their nation. Here was a country with exceptional teachers, an abundance of wild berries and mushrooms, and a vibrant cultural capital the size of Nashville, Tennessee. These things fell a bit short of a compelling national identity. Someone jokingly suggested that nudity could be named a national theme—it would emphasize the honesty of Finns. Someone else, less jokingly, proposed that perhaps quiet wasn’t such a bad thing. That got them thinking.

A few months later, the delegation issued a slick “Country Brand Report.” It highlighted a host of marketable themes, including Finland’s renowned educational system and school of functional design. One key theme was brand new: silence. As the report explained, modern society often seems intolerably loud and busy. “Silence is a resource,” it said. It could be marketed just like clean water or wild mushrooms. “In the future, people will be prepared to pay for the experience of silence.”

People already do. In a loud world, silence sells. Noise-canceling headphones retail for hundreds of dollars; the cost of some weeklong silent meditation courses can run into the thousands. Finland saw that it was possible to quite literally make something out of nothing.

There’s a method to the madness of the teenage brain.

Dude, Where’s My Frontal Cortex?

In the foothills of the Sierra Mountains, a few hours east of San Francisco, are the Moaning Caverns, a cave system that begins, after a narrow, twisting descent of 30-some feet, with an abrupt 180-foot drop. The Park Service has found ancient human skeletons at the bottom of the drop. Native Americans living there at the time didn’t make human sacrifices. Instead, these explorers took one step too far in the gloom. The skeletons belonged to adolescents.

No surprises there. After all, adolescence is the time of life when someone is most likely to join a cult, kill, be killed, invent an art form, help overthrow a dictator, ethnically cleanse a village, care for the needy, transform physics, adopt a hideous fashion style, commit to God, and be convinced that all the forces of history have converged to make this moment the most consequential ever, fraught with peril and promise.

For all this we can thank the teenage brain. Some have argued adolescence is a cultural construct. In traditional cultures, there is typically a single qualitative transition to puberty. After that, the individual is a young adult. Yet the progression from birth to adulthood is not smoothly linear. The teenage brain is unique. It’s not merely an adult brain that is half-cooked or a child’s brain left unrefrigerated for too long. Its distinctiveness arises from a key region, the frontal cortex, not being fully developed. This largely explains the turbulence of adolescence. It also reflects an important evolutionary pressure.

The frontal cortex is the most recently evolved part of the human brain. It’s where the sensible mature stuff happens: long-term planning, executive function, impulse control, and emotional regulation. It’s what makes you do the right thing when it’s the harder thing to do. But its neurons are not fully wired up until your mid-20s. Why?

Biggest bird nests in the world are kept together by family ties

How can animals, from ants to people, form social groups with individuals working successfully together for a common good?

So Charles Darwin asked in 1859, perceiving the existence of cooperative behaviour as a threat to his theory of evolution. Such behaviour remains one of the biggest unanswered questions in science – one that our study, published in Ecology Letters, set out to answer with the help of a highly social bird, the sociable weaver.

It’s easy to see why animals should behave selfishly: if you are to pass on your genes to the next generation you should aim to look after yourself, protect your resources, find a mate and reproduce – why would you care about others? As a result of such selfish interests conflict is rife in nature. But what is less well known is that cooperation is also widespread and can be observed at almost any level of biological organisation.

There has been much progress since Darwin, and we now understand a great deal more about how animals may benefit from working together. Although several important theories have been developed and tested over the past decades, kin selection theory has perhaps caused the greatest advance in our understanding of cooperation in animals. Introduced by Bill Hamilton in the 1960s it states that if an individual cooperates with its relatives, this individual may indirectly pass on its genes to the next generation. This is now generally accepted as the main explanation behind cooperation at the family level.

Owww! The science of pain

Scientists are homing in on how and why people experience this vital sensation.

 

Imagine a life without pain. No throbbing headaches. No stinging sunburns. No aching joints. If you think that sounds great, think again.

Some people can’t feel pain. They’re born that way. They also tend to die young — unlike, say, people who cannot see or hear, notes Luda Diatchenko. “Pain is much more important for survival,” explains the pain researcher at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Pain protects us. When you touch a hot stove, you recoil in pain. That sensation helps you avoid getting a burn that could be dangerous — even deadly. The throbbing of a broken foot tells you to stay off it until it heals, so you don’t do more damage. Without those signals, we’d all be in trouble. Big trouble.

Pain from an injury — such as a broken hand — serves an important purpose. That pain warns us to protect the injured tissue from further damage.

Some pain is straightforward. Burn your skin, pull a muscle or break a bone, and you feel discomfort. This short-term effect is called acute pain. Other pain can last months or years. Called chronic pain, its cause often remains a mystery. In fact, “sometimes the nervous system can get it wrong,” says Steve Prescott. “You have pain that shouldn’t be there,” explains this pain researcher at the University of Toronto, Canada, and the local Hospital for Sick Children.

Scientists are still working out the different causes of pain, and the best treatment for each type. The biology of pain is complex. But the good news: Researchers are learning more about it every day.

Half Male, Half Female, Total Animal

Mixed-sex animals teach us about our own multifarious nature.

As they often do after a rainstorm, butterflies had gathered around puddles on Pigeon Mountain in northwest Georgia. Nets in hand, James Adams and his friend Irving Finkelstein watched the insects lapping up salts and proteins dissolved in the muddy water, their folded wings yawning apart now and then. There were silvery-blue Celastrinas and Skippers the color of cinnamon and ash. Largest of all were the Tiger Swallowtails—pastel lemon males with black dagger-like stripes and midnight-dark females with a dusting of evening cerulean.

Suddenly a very odd creature flitted past Adams and Finkelstein—a swallowtail unlike any they had ever seen. Its left half was yellow; its right, black. It was as though someone had sliced up two different insects and seamlessly sewn them back together. Finkelstein yelped and took a swipe at the bizarre beauty, missing by quite a bit. Suppressing his excitement, lest it misguide his hand, Adams chased the butterfly a few steps, swung, and netted it. He could see immediately that he had caught a gynandromorph—an animal that was half-male and half-female.

Butterfly collectors love gynandromorphs for their rarity as much as their peculiarity. They are unpredictable hiccups in nature’s symphony of symmetry. The creatures tantalize scientists, too, because they offer a unique opportunity: the chance to study typically male and female genes and anatomy in the same body.

Masters of Disguise—Amazing Insect Camouflage

To avoid becoming prey, insects use mimicry to blend into their surroundings.

When it comes to biology, mimicry is everywhere. Lions use camouflage to blend in with the savanna. Frogs use mimicry to match their green environment. Most famously, chameleons will even change color to blend in with their backgrounds. (See "Find the Mimic" in National Geographic magazine.)

For their part, researchers have long been fascinated with mimicry, and for some contemporaries of Darwin like naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, it was mimicry and camouflage that helped convince them of the power of natural selection. Nature selects for successful traits: Insects that can blend in with their environments are less likely to be eaten and are able to pass on their genes-and their natural disguises-to future generations. (Related: "Photo Gallery: Masters of Undersea Camouflage.")

But according to a study released yesterday, it turns out that a certain type of leaf mimicry dates back much further than experts believed, to the time of the dinosaurs. (See "Stick Insects Have Mimicked Plants Since the Age of Dinosaurs.")

Autism and intellectual disability incidents linked with environmental factors

An analysis of 100 million U.S. medical records reveals that autism and intellectual disability (ID) rates are correlated at the county level with incidence of genital malformations in newborn males, an indicator of possible congenital exposure to harmful environmental factors such as pesticides.

Autism rates—after adjustment for gender, ethnic, socioeconomic and geopolitical factors—jump by 283 percent for every one-percent increase in frequency of malformations in a county. Intellectual disability rates increase 94 percent. Slight increases in autism and ID rates are also seen in wealthier and more urban counties.

The study, published by University of Chicago scientists in the March 13 issue of PLOS Computational Biology, confirms the dramatic effect of diagnostic standards. Incidence rates for autism and ID on a per-person basis decrease by roughly 99 percent in states with stronger regulations on diagnosis of these disorders.

“Autism appears to be strongly correlated with rate of congenital malformations of the genitals in males across the country,” said study author Andrey Rzhetsky, professor of genetic medicine and human genetics. “This gives an indicator of environmental load and the effect is surprisingly strong.”

Obesity Researchers Have Been Looking At The Wrong Gene

If you were investigating a crime scene, you wouldn’t just accuse the nearest bystander. The real culprit could be miles away.

In 2007, a team of British researchers announced that genetic variants within the FTO gene could predispose people to being fat. On average, people with one set of these variants weighed 1.6 kilograms more than people with none, and those with two sets—including one in six Europeans—weighed 3 kilograms more.

It was an important discovery. By studying twins, scientists had already shown that obesity runs in families, to an extent that can’t be explained by a shared environment. It was clear that some genes can influence how much we weigh (though, obviously, not exclusively*), but no one had identified any of them. FTO was the first. The media, as is their unfortunate wont, labelled it a “fat gene”.

Many later studies corroborated FTO’s connection to body weight. When scientists deleted the gene in mice, the rodents grew up thinner. When they switched the gene on, over and above its usual activity, mice ate more and put on weight. The pieces seemed to fit.

But right from the start, FTO was shrouded in mystery. No one really knew what the gene did, nor how it could influence our weight. And some parts of the FTO story just didn’t make sense.

Autism: Why it’s not “Rain Woman”

Women have fewer cognitive disorders than men do because their bodies are better at ignoring the mutations which cause them

 

AUTISM is a strange condition. Sometimes its symptoms of “social blindness” (an inability to read or comprehend the emotions of others) occur alone. This is dubbed high-functioning autism, or Asperger’s syndrome. Though their fellow men and women may regard them as a bit odd, high-functioning autists are often successful (sometimes very successful) members of society. On other occasions, though, autism manifests as part of a range of cognitive problems. Then, the condition is debilitating. What is common to those on all parts of the so-called autistic spectrum is that they are more often men than women—so much more often that one school of thought suggests autism is an extreme manifestation of what it means, mentally, to be male. Boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed with autism than girls are. For high-functioning autism, the ratio is seven to one.

Is it a wasp or a parasite?

The emerald jewel wasp (Ampulex compressa) is definitely a wasp - as its name suggests - but it lives the first stage of its life as a parasite, growing literally, inside the body of a living cockroach!

Read more: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/02/27/crawling-through-the-brain-without-getting-lost/

The experience of mathematical beauty and its neural correlates

Semir Zeki^1*, John Paul Romaya¹, Dionigi M. T. Benincasa² and Michael F. Atiyah³

• ¹Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology, University College London, London, UK
• ²Department of Physics, Imperial College London, London, UK
• ³School of Mathematics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Many have written of the experience of mathematical beauty as being comparable to that derived from the greatest art. 

This makes it interesting to learn whether the experience of beauty derived from such a highly intellectual and abstract source as mathematics correlates with activity in the same part of the emotional brain as that derived from more sensory, perceptually based, sources.

How Do Spiders Walk Upside Down? Mystery Solved

Spiders can crawl pretty much anywhere: Glass, walls, and even ceilings are all equally accessible to the arachnids.

Now scientists have solved the long-standing mystery of their sticky success: Their secret is small hairs at the end of their legs. (See pictures of spiders up close.)

A female banana spider on her web. Photograph by Michael Hare/Alamy

 

These thousands of tiny hairs create multiple contact points between the spider and the surface that increase the spider’s ability to hang on, scientists have found.

The hairs are both small and flexible. At the molecular level, even the smoothest surfaces are rough, so if the spider’s hairs were rigid, the arachnid could make contact only with certain parts of the surface. But because the hairs are malleable, they can make contact with more of the surface, which provides additional stickiness, said Jonas Wolff, a biologist at the University of Kiel in Germany. (Also see “Watery Gecko Grip Could Lead to Stickier Tape.”)

Brain function 'boosted for days after reading a novel'

Reading a gripping novel causes biological changes in the brain which last for days as the mind is transported into the body of the protagonist

Being pulled into the world of a gripping novel can trigger actual, measurable changes in the brain that linger for at least five days after reading, scientists have said.

The new research, carried out at Emory University in the US, found that reading a good book may cause heightened connectivity in the brain and neurological changes that persist in a similar way to muscle memory.

The changes were registered in the left temporal cortex, an area of the brain associated with receptivity for language, as well as the the primary sensory motor region of the brain.

Neurons of this region have been associated with tricking the mind into thinking it is doing something it is not, a phenomenon known as grounded cognition - for example, just thinking about running, can activate the neurons associated with the physical act of running.

Forgetful snails could tell us about how our memories work

I hate cramming for exams. Tilwe

Snails, like all animals, need to remember – what is good or bad to eat, what might be trying to eat them, and who they recently mated with. All of these things can prove extremely important in the fight to survive and reproduce.

The basic way a snail’s brain works is very similar at the level of individual neurons to that of vertebrates, but when it comes to understanding exactly what is going on in their brains, they have some distinct advantages.

There are far fewer neurons in a snail than in vertebrates, for example – a snail has fewer than 20,000, whereas a mouse has around 75m and a human around 85 billion. Snail neurons are also much larger. This means we can accurately locate the same neuron in different snails and work out which behaviour a neuron controls.

In a study we published in PLOS ONE, we looked at the effects of stress on a pond snails' memory. We found snails respond to stress and the effects can be detrimental to their memory, much like in mammals – including humans.

Neonicotinoid ban won’t fix all bees' problems

Bees still in a sticky situation, despite the neonicotinoid ban. P7r7

The controversial ban on neonicotinoid insecticides comes into effect across the EU this weekend. Neonicotinoids, or neonics, are powerful neurotoxins, killing insects with minute doses and impairing their behaviour at much lower doses still. This is desirable when the insect is a pest, not so good when…

 

The controversial ban on neonicotinoid insecticides comes into effect across the EU this weekend. Neonicotinoids, or neonics, are powerful neurotoxins, killing insects with minute doses and impairing their behaviour at much lower doses still. This is desirable when the insect is a pest, not so good when it is a useful bee. 

The origins of the ban lie in a series of scientific papers showing the doses bees are likely to receive in the field are enough to cause them significant harm, either killing them outright or interfering with their otherwise phenomenally impressive navigation and learning skills.