NASA Confirms Evidence That Liquid Water Flows On Today’s Mars

Critical moment American History PAY ATTENTION President Trump’s Dizzying Series Of Interviews https://youtu.be/jSDj9E2dgWs

Question: What effect does sleep deprivation have on learning, such as memorizing facts for a test? asked by anonymous Answer: The amount of sleep you get actually has a tremendous effect on your learning abilities. Sleep deprivation causes an inability to concentrate or pay...

Link Between High Childhood IQ and Bipolar Disorder Discovered

Individuals who scored in the top 10% of manic features had a mean childhood IQ which was almost 10 points higher than those scoring in the lowest 10% of manic features. The association between IQ and manic features appeared to be strongest for verbal IQ (VIQ).

The research will appear in British Journal of Psychiatry.

Image: The researchers examined data from ALSPAC to look for an association between measures of childhood IQ at age eight and lifetime manic features assessed at 22-23 years. Image is for illustrative purposes only.

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Motor Skills Affected by Alcohol in E-Cigarettes

Some commercially available e-cigarettes contain enough alcohol to impact motor skills, a new Yale University School of Medicine study shows.

The research is in Drug and Alcohol Dependence. (full open access)

(Image caption: The prefrontal cortex connects to a very specific region of the brainstem (the PAG) through prefrontal cortical neurons: those labeled in purple directly project to the PAG and control our instinctive behaviours. Credit: EMBL/Livia Marrone)

Neural connection keeps instincts in check

From fighting the urge to hit someone to resisting the temptation to run off stage instead of giving that public speech, we are often confronted with situations where we have to curb our instincts. Scientists at EMBL have traced exactly which neuronal projections prevent social animals like us from acting out such impulses. The study, published online in Nature Neuroscience, could have implications for schizophrenia and mood disorders like depression.

“Instincts like fear and sex are important, but you don’t want to be acting on them all the time,” says Cornelius Gross, who led the work at EMBL. “We need to be able to dynamically control our instinctive behaviours, depending on the situation.”

The driver of our instincts is the brainstem – the region at the very base of your brain, just above the spinal cord. Scientists have known for some time that another brain region, the prefrontal cortex, plays a role in keeping those instincts in check (see background information down below). But exactly how the prefrontal cortex puts a break on the brainstem has remained unclear.

Now, Gross and colleagues have literally found the connection between prefrontal cortex and brainstem. The EMBL scientists teamed up with Tiago Branco’s lab at MRC LMB, and traced connections between neurons in a mouse brain. They discovered that the prefrontal cortex makes prominent connections directly to the brainstem.

Gross and colleagues went on to confirm that this physical connection was the brake that inhibits instinctive behaviour. They found that in mice that have been repeatedly defeated by another mouse – the murine equivalent to being bullied – this connection weakens, and the mice act more scared. The scientists found that they could elicit those same fearful behaviours in mice that had never been bullied, simply by using drugs to block the connection between prefrontal cortex and brainstem.

These findings provide an anatomical explanation for why it’s much easier to stop yourself from hitting someone than it is to stop yourself from feeling aggressive. The scientists found that the connection from the prefrontal cortex is to a very specific region of the brainstem, called the PAG, which is responsible for the acting out of our instincts. However, it doesn’t affect the hypothalamus, the region that controls feelings and emotions. So the prefrontal cortex keeps behaviour in check, but doesn’t affect the underlying instinctive feeling: it stops you from running off-stage, but doesn’t abate the butterflies in your stomach.

The work has implications for schizophrenia and mood disorders such as depression, which have been linked to problems with prefrontal cortex function and maturation.

“One fascinating implication we’re looking at now is that we know the pre-frontal cortex matures during adolescence. Kids are really bad at inhibiting their instincts; they don’t have this control,” says Gross, “so we’re trying to figure out how this inhibition comes about, especially as many mental illnesses like mood disorders are typically adult-onset.”

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Could we truly be blind to race?

Professor Osagie K. Obasogie’s research on how blind people perceive race reveals that understanding race is not simply based on visual cues, but based how we’re socialized and what we’re taught.

When asked what race a person was, the respondents who were all blind at birth, largely defined race by visually observable indicators, such as skin color, facial features and other physical characteristics.

And contrary to what many might think, the UC Hastings professor found that blind people don’t rely on audible cues as a way to identify a person’s race, because many of them have learned that speech is an unreliable marker of someone’s race.

Instead, Obasogie’s subjects understood race visually based on the physical traits that they were taught to be markers for racial differences.

In the study, subjects recalled childhood experiences where they were told what people of certain color look like or even smell like.

And people around them often reinforced racial biases by patrolling racial boundaries, such as telling them they can’t date outside their race, or implying that the person next to them could be potentially dangerous. Obasogie told NPR:

“Blind people aren’t any more or less racist than anyone else. Indeed, part of the point of this project is that vision has very little to do with it. What matters are the social practices that train us to see and experience race in certain ways, regardless of whether we are sighted or not.”

Read more about Obasogie’s study at Boston Globe

And thank you to Julia Wilde at “That’s So Science” for hosting the DNews episode!

A world of languages - and how many speak them

by Alberto Lucas López, SCMP Graphic

Each language represented within black borders and then provide the numbers of native speakers (in millions) by country. The colour of these countries shows how languages have taken root in many different regions.

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