Scientists in Virginia used light-sheet microscopy to video the goings-on of the larva’s nervous system
ASHBURN, Va. – Scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have imaged motor neuron activity in a millimetre-long larva.
Their paper was published today in the open-access journal Nature Communications. Photographs were taken of the neurons of the larva, Drosophila melanogaster, five times per second, using penetrative lasers as part of a cutting edge technique called light-sheet microscopy.
The footage has been made available on YouTube l, and provides a fascinating insight into one of nature’s great miracles. Only the larva’s nervous system is shown, and areas of activity glow orange-red. The nerves are being artificially stimulated, as if the larva were crawling around.
Philipp Keller, a participating scientist, said: “By imaging different parts of the nervous system at the same time, we can see how behaviours are controlled and then build models of how it all works.”
The study builds on research which involved even smaller organisms like nematode worms. By imaging not just the brain, but also the nerve cord, scientists can better see how the two work together. The team has now moved on to adult flies, zebrafish, and mouse embryos.
According to new research, selfies are linked to narcissism in men, but not in women. The research, undertaken by Polish psychologist, went further, providing an understanding about which aspects of narcissism were associated with selfie-taking for each gender.
Research, though still scant, is emerging about who posts selfies and why.
According to the new Polish study, which examined three types of selfies — solo selfies, selfies with a romantic partner, and group selfies — and examined almost 1300 Polish men and women — not just American men, the subject of the recent popular news report on selfies and narcissism — men and women vary in exhibiting selfie behavior.
The researchers tried two things: they asked one group of men and women to self-report how many selfies of each of the three types they posted to Facebook and other social media. Then they obtained access to the social media accounts of a second group to count the selfies.
Women post more selfies than men do on social media, the researchers found.
But the researchers also wanted to get an understanding of the relationship between selfie posting and narcissism. They tested participants for narcissistic traits — four separate traits: Exhibitionism, Admiration Demand, Leadership and Self-Sufficiency.
When they compared their narcissism test results with the selfie posting numbers, they found that selfie posting by males was positively correlated with Exhibitionism, Admiration Demand and Leadership, but not Self-Sufficiency. For men, these relationships existed for all types of selfie pictures.
For women, only a correlation between selfie posting and Admiration Demand was found, and only for solo selfies in the first study and romantic partners in the second.
However, the researchers concluded that narcissism only explains a small part of self-posting, because the correlations were all quite modest.
The study, “Selfie posting behaviors are associated with narcissism among men,” was completed by Sorokowski, P., Sorokowska, A., Oleszkiewicz, A., Frackowiak, T., Huk, A., & Pisanski, K. and was published in Personality and Individual Differences.
The RBQ-2A Online test, the first self-assessment test for autism spectrum disorder, has been developed by psychologists from the University of Cardiff. The test can also be used to help in diagnosing other diseases that involve behaviors similar to those associated with autism, such as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Parkinson’s disease, and Tourette syndrome.
The test measures adults’ response to one of the primary criteria used in the diagnosis of autism — repetitive behaviors.
The psychologists behind the test say that it is a reliable method for measuring whether a person has frequent or severe autism-related behaviors. However, a diagnosis of autism requires more than just one test. The researchers believe the RBQ-2A can be combined with other tests to fully diagnose autism.
The RBQ-2A was tested out on 311 British and Australian adults — some of which had been diagnosed with autism, some of which had not. The researchers found that those with autism scored higher on the test for repetitive behaviors.
“Many measures used for research and diagnoses of autism rely on parents, teachers or caregivers to report the behaviours of individuals with the condition,” said Professor Sue Leekam, Cardiff University’s Chair of Autism and Director of the Wales Autism Research Centre.
“What our research has done is develop a test where individuals can report on their own behaviours, for both research and clinical purposes, ensuring we get a fuller picture of the way that these behaviours affect people,” she added.
The next step for the researchers is to expand the test to apply to all people, not just adults, and from there, they hope the test will be implemented in clinics across the UK.
Who doesn’t still vaguely remember the first time they saw a water strider standing on top of a lake?
The insects do it by taking advantage of water’s surface tension, which their thin water-repellent legs and light bodies can rest upon without puncturing through.
Now, a Harvard University and Seoul National University joint team have built robots inspired by water striders. The small bots can hop on water, taking advantage of surface tension in the same way.
The robots are simply built from hair thin rods, and their 2 cm-long bodies and 5 cm-long legs weigh only 68 milligrams.
To leap into the air, the legs of the bots are rotated inward, boosting them upward.
Setting out to access why men physicians make more than women, according to statistics, a joint-research team has published Thursday the results of their study, based on an analysis of data for 776 male and female physicians.
“In addition to implicit bias and differences in negotiations and social networks, women’s tendency to prioritize substantial pay less than men may account for some of the gender pay inequities that exist in our society. However, substantial pay is different from equal pay. I bet most women still want fair pay,” said Dr. A. Charlotta Weaver, lead author of the Journal of Hospital Medicine study.
Recent studies have determined that American female physicians make $50,000 less per year than male physicians — an average $165,278 compared with $221,297.
The new research, however, found that after accounting for age, geography, specialty, amount and type of work, women made around $15,000 less than men in the field.
The breakdown of the reasons women make less than men goes like this, according to the study: working women are younger, less likely to be leaders, and more often work part-time.
Women physicians more frequently prioritize other work interests over financial compensation, the researchers found. Women considered pay the fourth most important priority, while men ranked it the second. Both ranked optimal work load first.
Women more frequently were employed as pediatricians and staff in university settings.
It was also found that women work more nights, report fewer daily billable encounters than their male peers, and are more often divorced than male physicians.
“The gender earnings gap persists among hospitalists,” concluded the researchers. “A portion of the disparity is explained by the fewer women hospitalists compared to men who prioritize pay.”
Nature and nurture in music has now been mapped by McGill neurologists who have recorded the activity and changes in the brains of young adults over the course of a six-week piano training session. Among the results of the research is a greater understanding of how natural disposition factors into skills like music.
“What we try to do in our experiments is to isolate specific components of these changes so that we can characterize them accurately.”
In their recent work, the Neuro team sought to display and map the brain’s response to learning music. They also sought for differences in how individuals learn and respond to musical training.
The team provided six weeks of piano training for 15 young adults who had little or no background in music.
Dr. Robert Zatorre
“We measured the entire brain simultaneously using functional MRI,” Zatorre told us, “and then searched the whole brain to find the areas that changed after training, and to distinguish them from those areas which were predictive of learning success.”
The brains of all of the young adults changed as they learned the motor skills involved with playing simple piano pieces, but the team found that the brain activity of some students predicted how quickly they would become skilled.
“The areas that changed most after training were in the premotor cortex and in the parietal cortex, regions concerned with coordinating movements and mapping actions to sounds; the areas that were predictive of subsequent learning were totally different from these and involved the auditory cortex and the hippocampus, the latter of course a structure involved in the formation of memories.”
Zatorre commented on the important role of individual predisposition in learning a skill like music.
“We think that those people who are better at initially encoding sound properties will subsequently have an edge when it comes to learning how to move their fingers to produce that same sound pattern,” Zatorre said.
And the findings do not apply only to music, but are an example of how the brain responds to any skill, according to the neurologists.
“We see it in the context of other research looking at skills such as learning the sounds of a foreign language, or skilled sports activities. In each of these cases there are distinct neural circuits that have to be “trained up” so the specific brain regions involved might differ. But we think the same principle may apply, that is, that some brain circuits are changed by training, but others may be indicative of the predisposition to learn a specific skill.”
Dieting leaving you with that empty feeling? The FDA Tuesday approved a new device to fill in for food in the stomachs of weight loss practitioners with a device that requires no surgery: a dual balloon system.
Although medical professionals do not fully understand how filling the stomach triggers feelings of fullness — even in the absence of actual food — they understand that it works.
The ReShape Dual Balloon device is placed in the stomach through the mouth. The typical procedure is a 30 minute minimally invasive endoscopic one, according the the FDA.
Unlike some surgical measures undertaken to lose weight, the balloon does not alter the stomach’s anatomy.
The balloon is meant to be used for around six months while the person also exercises and follows a medically supervised diet.
“For those with obesity, significant weight loss and maintenance of that weight loss often requires a combination of solutions including efforts to improve diet and exercise habits,” said William Maisel, M.D., M.P.H., acting director of the Office of Device Evaluation at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health. “This new balloon device provides doctors and patients with a new non-surgical option that can be quickly implanted, is non-permanent, and can be easily removed.”
The balloon is not meant for all dieters. Only obese adults with a body mass index of 30 to 40 kg/m and who have one or more obesity-related conditions, such as diabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure, are recommended to try it.
The FDA made their decision on the balloon after the successful results of a clinical trial in which 187 obese participants ranging in age from 22 to 60 lost an average of 14.3 pounds (or 6.8 percent of total body weight) in six months, and who kept off around 10 pounds after six more months. This was contrasted against a control group of roughly the same size who lost only 7.2 pounds in the first six months.
The device is not recommended for those who have had previous gastrointestinal or bariatric surgery or who have been diagnosed with inflammatory intestinal or bowel disease, large hiatal hernia, symptoms of delayed gastric emptying or active H. Pylori infection, nor is it for those who use aspirin daily or who are pregnant.
Potential side effects for the procedure, the FDA warned, include headache, muscle pain, and nausea from the sedation and procedure; in rare cases, severe allergic reaction, heart attack, esophageal tear, infection, and breathing difficulties can occur. Once the device is placed in the stomach, patients may experience vomiting, nausea, abdominal pain, gastric ulcers, and feelings of indigestion.
In the US, 72 people were sentenced to death last year, and according to new research the faces of those tried in court may have had something to do with their sentence. An “alarming bias” in the criminal justice system, U of T researchers found, results from the prejudice attached to people’s appearance.
The researchers conducted two studies based on real world sentences, unlike past hypothetical experiments.
In the first study, they found that the trustworthiness of a person predicted whether they received death sentences. Two-hundred and eight American adults judged photos of the faces of 226 murder convicts on a trustworthiness scale of 1 to 8. The photos didn’t show that the faces were those of prison inmates. Of the faces of people convicted of first degree murder, some were sentenced to death and some were sentenced to life in prison — a less severe penalty. The faces of those who had received the lesser sentence were also the faces people perceived to be more trustworthy. The less trustworthy a face, the more likely the person behind it was to receive the death sentence.
Then in the second study, the researchers found that even for innocent people who had been exonerated after being falsely sentenced to death, the link of perceived trustworthiness and death sentence remained, demonstrating, the researchers concluded, that it wasn’t just that real criminals had meaner faces, but that anyone who had an untrustworthy-seeming face faced stiffer penalties.
The researchers surmised that the results show that people want to punish those who appear less trustworthy.
The researcher pointed to a lesson that could be learned from their study: since we know we are biased, we can police our thoughts to some degree.
The report, “Facial Trustworthiness Predicts Extreme Criminal-Sentencing Outcomes,” was completed by Drs. John Paul Wilson and Nicholas Rule of the University of Toronto and was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It was published in Psychological Science.
Emory University researchers have discovered cells that contain records the body’s response to infections during early life in bone marrow. The cells, dubbed “historical record” cells by the researchers, are a rare type of highly diverse plasma cell.
Using proteomics and RNA sequencing techniques, the team proved that one of the subsets of the infection-recording cells under their lenses was exclusively responsible for producing the measles-and-mumps-specific antibodies in the blood of one of their study participants.
Like other plasma cells, these “historical record” cells undergo changes in their DNA, but the subset D cells are much more diverse than other plasma cells. The researchers think this is the case because their genes do not devote too much space to any single infection.
The cells are unusual among bone marrow cells. They have a rare “fried egg” appearance, containing bubble-like vacuoles or lipid droplets. They also have more condensed nuclei than other white blood cells.
In what sport could you not use a 20 percent boost in performance? Scientists have found a food that does just that — the beet. And the why? It’s a root that naturally contains high levels on nitrates.
“This is one of the sports nutrition stories of the decade,” Dr. Andy Jones of England’s University of Exeter said of his teams work. “I think this is one of these discoveries, for want of a better word, that transcends — it’s not just performance, but it has a health application and implication as well.”
Part of the energy cost of athletic performance is in oxygen — the body burns through oxygen as it works. If performance consumes less oxygen, the body can work for longer before fatiguing. One way to do this is to increase blood flow to transport oxygen. Nitrates do just that: they increase blood flow plus dilate blood vessels, so the workload of the heart is reduced so it can better deliver oxygen to the muscles that burn it.
Other research has found that drinking a glass (about half a liter) of beetroot juice every day lowers blood pressure by about seven percent.
The team had study participants drink beetroot juice for two weeks. Then these participants hit the gym with their lowered blood pressure and dilated blood vessels to exercise, hooked up to performance-measuring equipment. When they did, their blood vessels dilated more easily and their hearts consumed less oxygen.
“We found a significant reduction in the oxygen cost of exercise, which implies that energy demand of exercising at a particular work rate is significantly lower.”
The benefits for athletes fully exerting themselves was even more profound.
“When we extended our studies to ask our subjects to exercise to exhaustion, we found that they were able to go significantly longer at the same high intensity work rate, so there seemed to be a performance benefit as well.
“The reduction in the oxygen cost of exercise during sub-maximal work was or the order of five to 10 percent, which is really quite meaningful, and then the improvement in the times to exhaustion — at a high intensity rate — were of the order of 15 to 20 percent.”
Beet root juice may also help to reduce blood pressure because of the same naturally high level of nitrates, the research has found.
Old age, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other metabolic diseases — these are some of the populations Jones would like to explore his findings in.
“We and others are at the beginning, really, of this story, so there are dialogues going on with NHS and with various charities, the elderly and others, who want to deal with medical conditions — to really try and use this in a more practical way.”
Beetroot juice is not the only way to get nitrates, although it was the souce studied by the Exeter team. Celery, cabbage, spinach, and some lettuces and other green vegetables also contain high concentrations of nitrates.
The drugs, bisphosphonates, are commonly used to prevent osteoporosis bone loss, and the scientists behind the new study believe bisphosphonates starve cancer cells in the bone.
According to their research, women may benefit most from taking the drugs early in their treatment.
The research team looked at data from 26 separate trials of the drug, and found a 28% reduction in cancers for post-menopausal women, as well as an 18 percent reduction in death within 10 years of first diagnosis.
In the US, 1 in 8 women will develop breast cancer in their lifetime, it is predicted, and this year around 230,000 new cases are expected, while 42,000 women are expected to die this year from the disease.
Bone is a frequent second host to the breast. Even when a tumor is removed from the breast, tiny cancer fragments can remain and spread, usually settling in bone where it can lie dormant for years.
Although the drug costs less than 10 cents per day, the scientists expressed concern that this low drug value will keep pharmaceutical companies from producing it. The drug is not in patent. This has caused cancer research advocates to call for new guidelines on the production of bisphosphonates.
The report, “Adjuvant bisphosphonate treatment in early breast cancer: meta-analyses of individual patient data from randomised trials,” was completed by the staff of the Early Breast Cancer Trialists’ Collaborative Group (EBCTCG)
Warmer waters in the north mean less overwinter death and increased growth for cold-blooded fish, so they will benefit from global warming… or so the theory went. New research says that these species may actually suffer more than they benefit, and global warming will end up reducing their populations.
“Even if summer conditions are better for growth under a warmer climate, this may mean little if the number of offspring produced has already been limited by short, warm winters,” Auburn University’s Dr. Troy Farmer told The Speaker.
The research team studied a particular species of northern fish, yellow perch, in Lake Erie, one of North America’s Great Lakes shared between the United States and Canada.
The reason for the yellow perch population reduction, the team found, had to do in large part with reproduction and early development.
Dr. Troy Famer
“Our results suggest that climate warming during winter may negatively affect yellow perch populations by reducing reproductive success,” Farmer told us.
A shorter winter, the researchers found, results in a spawn that takes place within warm waters. A warm water spawn is different from a cold water spawn for yellow perch: smaller eggs are produced that hatch at lower rates and produce smaller larvae.
“Our research also offers an explanation for observed trends in Lake Erie yellow perch populations. Specifically, it indicates that reduced reproductive success may be responsible for lower juvenile abundance following short, warm winters. Ultimately, we also found that years of low juvenile abundance led to lower adult abundances in future years.”
This makes for a new picture of the future cold water fish species, according to Farmer:
Yellow Perch
“Climate change will likely affect northern fish species in many different ways. As winters get shorter, longer summer growing seasons may benefit some fishes. However, shorter winters may also have negative effects on reproduction, as our study indicates. Understanding which species thrive and which species decline in a warmer climate will require a more complete understanding of how warmer temperatures during both summer and winter influence all aspects of survival, growth, and reproduction. For some fishes, such as our study species, yellow perch, the negative effects of short winters on reproduction may outweigh any positive benefits from a longer growing season.”
“Prior to our research, scientists speculated that cool-water fish species like yellow perch would benefit from warmer temperatures associated with climate change. Warmer temperatures would equate to a longer growing season, which could lead to larger fish that survive the winter better or that could produce more eggs or better quality larvae. But, few studies have speculated on how reproduction might be affected by a change in winter severity or temperature.
“When we looked at long-term monitoring data for yellow perch in Lake Erie, however, we saw just the opposite: short, warm winters were followed by fewer juveniles the following year. The largest cohorts of juvenile fish came after long, cold winters.
Lake Erie in winter
“Yellow perch females spawn (or lay their eggs) during the spring, which means any effect of winter temperatures on juvenile production were likely the result of temperature effects on adults during the egg development phase. This phase occurs during winter.
“One potential explanation for this pattern was suggested by previous laboratory research, conducted in the 1970s, which suggested that yellow perch require a certain number of cold days to successfully develop their eggs – but the reasons for this were unknown.”
The teams research involved a simple comparison; they studied yellow perch in both warm and cold water conditions and recorded how the two groups fared.
“We conducted a laboratory experiment in which we exposed half of a group of adult female yellow perch to a short winter and the other half to a long winter. Females exposed to the short winter produced smaller eggs that hatched at lower rates and produced smaller larvae than females exposed to a long winter. This is important because large larvae grow and survive better than small larvae during their first months of life in Lake Erie. These results help explain why short winters were associated with poor years of yellow perch production in Lake Erie.
Farmer also touched upon the complexity of the cold water ecosystem of Lake Erie, and how the diet of fish species like yellow perch might also be affected by warmer waters.
Yellow Perch eggs
“We also observed another negative effect of warm winters on yellow perch reproduction. When spring arrival was extraordinarily early, yellow perch did not shift their spawning time. Instead, females spawned at the normal time when temperatures were already too warm. Unfortunately, zooplankton (the prey of the yellow perch larvae) might grow in response to warming temperatures, appearing earlier in years with an early spring. Thus, short winters may cause a mismatch in timing between yellow perch larvae and their prey.”
What can we expect then, for ectotherms if their environments continue to suddenly heat up?
“Most temperate ectotherms have highly evolved lifecycles that are tightly coupled to seasonal temperature cycles,” Farmer told us. “As summers grow longer and the duration of cold winter temperatures shrink, this may disrupt the highly evolved lifecycles of ectotherms. In our study species, yellow perch (a cool-water fish), we saw that shorter winters negatively affected egg development and altered the timing of spawning, leading to lower reproductive success.”
The report, “Short winters threaten temperate fish populations,” was completed by Troy M. Farmer, Elizabeth A. Marschall, Konrad Dabrowski & Stuart A. Ludsin, and was published on Nature Communications.
