Scientific American

Paralyzed Patient Swills Coffee by Issuing Thought Commands to a Robot

Wed, 16 May 2012 15:12:00 EST

Patient directing robot to bring coffee cannister to her mouth

A stroke in certain parts of the brainstem, the place where brain meets spinal cord, can leave a patient aware of surroundings but able to move few if any voluntary muscles. The most advanced neurotechnologies attempt to get around the disconnection by piping electrical signals directly from a higher-level brain area, the motor cortex that initiates movement, to a robot arm.

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Is Football to Blame for Players' Suicides?

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:49:00 EST

High-profile suicides of professional football players have mounted in the past several years Terry Long (2005), Andre Waters (2006), Dave Duerson (2011) and Ray Easterling (2012) all killed themselves following retirement and bouts with diagnoses likely related to the thousands of hits they fearlessly underwent as players. The conditions vary but have overlapping qualities: post-concussion syndrome, depression, other mood disorders, personality changes, memory problems and dementia. Now with the loss of Pro Bowler Junior Seau, dead at 43 earlier this month by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his chest, a suicide has occurred in a Hall of Fame-bound player who reportedly never exhibited emotional pain. His body will be examined for signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a condition proposed to explain the football suicides and underlying mental illness.

The issue of professional football’s responsibility for these conditions and player suicides is explored in Headstrong , a play running this month at the Ensemble Studio Theater in Manhattan. The theater has a long-standing sponsorship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to produce shows that deal with science. (Last year with this funding, EST mounted Photograph 51 , which explored the role of Rosalind Franklin in the discovery of the structure of DNA .)

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Self-Worth Shattering: A Single Bomb Blast Can Saddle Soldiers with Debilitating Brain Trauma

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:40:00 EST

The stress and suffering of combat are known to leave a lasting impact on military veterans, in some cases triggering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) . Researchers have now found an even more serious and debilitating mental condition, known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) , in veterans, particularly those injured by the concussive force of bomb blasts. [More]

Know Your Neurons: How to Classify Different Types of Neurons in the Brain's Forest

Wed, 16 May 2012 10:40:00 EST

Previously, on Know Your Neurons: Chapter 1: The Discovery and Naming of the Neuron

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Environment Enrichment: making your rat sexy since 2012

Wed, 16 May 2012 08:11:00 EST

DOES environmental enrichment make your rat sexy ? Today, I’m over at Neurotic Physiology examining a paper on whether environmental enrichment drives the lady rats wild, and why that might be the case. I’ve got a few issues with the paper. The data is fine but it’s all in the interpretation. Head over and check it out .

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#SciAmBlogs Tuesday - on that TIME cover..., stem cells, invasive beetles, drowned Cretaceous birds, onset of autism, and more.

Wed, 16 May 2012 01:28:00 EST

- Eric Michael Johnson – Out of the Mouth of Babes

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Whales Adjust Their Hearing Sensitivity

Tue, 15 May 2012 20:05:08 EST

Have you ever wanted to turn down the volume at a deafening concert or noisy bar? Envy the whale: a new study finds that toothed whales can reduce their own auditory sensitivity when they expect a loud sound. The work is presented at this week’s Acoustics 2012 meeting. [Paul E. Nachtigall and Alexander Ya Supin, " Immediate changes in whale hearing sensitivity "]

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The Football Concussion Crisis, Part 1

Tue, 15 May 2012 19:15:08 EST

NFL Hall of Famer Harry Carson joins former NBC anchor Stone Phillips and pathologist Bennet Omalu for a discussion of chronic traumatic encephalopathy among football players. [More]

Searching for the Onset of Autism

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:43:00 EST

Diffusion tensor image shows white matter pathways in infant at risk for autism. Warmer colors represent higher fractional anisotropy, a measure of white-matter organization. (Credit: Image created by Jason Wolff, University of North Carolina.)

Early behavioral intervention has shown some promise as a way to help children with autism. But it s difficult to see the hallmarks of autism before two years of age with today s diagnostic criteria. Could we find other methods?

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Do Psychedelics Expand the Mind by Reducing Brain Activity?

Tue, 15 May 2012 12:50:00 EST

What would you see if you could look inside a hallucinating brain? Despite decades of scientific investigation, we still lack a clear understanding of how hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), mescaline, and psilocybin (the main active ingredient in magic mushrooms) work in the brain. Modern science has demonstrated that hallucinogens activate receptors for serotonin, one of the brain’s key chemical messengers. Specifically, of the 15 different serotonin receptors, the 2A subtype (5-HT2A), seems to be the one that produces profound alterations of thought and perception. It is uncertain, however, why activation of the 5-HT2A receptor by hallucinogens produces psychedelic effects, but many scientists believe that the effects are linked to increases in brain activity. Although it is not known why this activation would lead to profound alterations of consciousness, one speculation is that an increase in the spontaneous firing of certain types of brain cells leads to altered sensory and perceptual processing, uncontrolled memory retrieval, and the projection of mental “noise” into the mind’s eye.

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ADHD: behavioral and cognitive therapies

Tue, 15 May 2012 10:35:00 EST

Sci has a piece up over at the main site on recent advances in behavioral and cognitive therapies for ADHD treatment. I got a note that people would like the reference list (and I’m always a fan of a reference list!), and so once you’ve checked out the article , here are the references:

Advokat C, Lane SM, Luo C. “ College students with and without ADHD: comparison of self-report of medication usage, study habits, and academic achievement .” J Atten Disord. 2011 Nov;15(8):656-66. Epub 2010 Aug 2.

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This Is Your Brain on Drugs

Tue, 15 May 2012 07:30:00 EST

In the 1954 foundational text of the Age of Aquarius, The Doors of Perception , Aldous Huxley describes his encounters with mescaline, a psychoactive substance derived from the peyote cactus and traditionally used by Native Americans for religious purposes. Huxley’s experiences include profound changes in the visual world, colors that induce sound, the telescoping of time and space, the loss of the notion of self, and feelings of oneness, peacefulness and bliss more commonly associated with religious visions or an exultant state: “A moment later a clump of Red Hot Pokers, in full bloom, had exploded into my field of vision. So passionately alive that they seemed to be standing on the very brink of utterance, the flowers strained upwards into the blue.... I looked down at the leaves and discovered a cavernous intricacy of the most delicate green lights and shadows, pulsing with undecipherable mystery.” Yet remarkably these enhanced percepts are not grounded in larger but in reduced brain activity, as a recent experiment reports. More on that in a moment.

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Not-So-Quick Fix: ADHD Behavioral Therapy May Be More Effective Than Drugs in Long Run

Tue, 15 May 2012 06:30:00 EST

Before stimulant drugs such as Ritalin, Concerta and Adderall began their rise to popularity in the 1970s, treatment for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) focused on behavioral therapy. But as concerns build over the mounting dosages and extended treatment periods that come with stimulant drugs, clinical researchers are revisiting behavioral therapy techniques. Whereas stimulant medications may help young patients focus and behave in the classroom, research now suggests that behaviorally based changes make more of a difference in the long-term.

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#SciAmBlogs Monday - decaying aluminum, living photography, science movie consultant, octopus on ice, ugliest experiments, and more.

Tue, 15 May 2012 00:03:00 EST

Today we are happy to announce the newest blog at #SciAmBlogs – check out Molecules to Medicine!

And as usual on Mondays, we have the new Image of the Week .

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Living Photography

Mon, 14 May 2012 19:53:00 EST

Image of the Week #42, May 14th, 2012:

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How Neuroscientists and Magicians Are Conjuring Brain Insights

Mon, 14 May 2012 16:41:00 EST

Apollo Robbins (right) in action removing the wristwatch of Mariette DiChristina. (Credit: Flip Phillips.)

I see you have a watch with a buckle. Standing at my side, Apollo Robbins held my wrist lightly as he turned my hand over and back.

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What Are Science's Ugliest Experiments?

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:41:00 EST

When I teach history of science at Stevens Institute of Technology, I devote plenty of time to science’s glories, the kinds of achievements that my buddy George Johnson wrote about in The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). George helps us appreciate what Galileo did with inclined planes, Newton with prisms, Pavlov with dogs, Galvani with frogs, Millikan with oil drops, Faraday with a magnet and coil of wire. (When George demonstrated Faraday’s experiment on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report , Stephen Colbert found the experiment so shocking that he blurted out, “Mother——!”) But I tell my students about science’s missteps, too, to remind them that scientists can be as flawed as the rest of us mortals. In that negative spirit, here are five experiments that I consider to be especially hideous, horrible, immoral in short, ugly.

Walter Freeman and Transorbital Lobotomies

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Know Your Neurons: The Discovery and Naming of the Neuron

Mon, 14 May 2012 13:00:00 EST

Different Types of Neurons (click to enlarge). A. Purkinje cell B. Granule cell C. Motor neuron D. Tripolar neuron E. Pyramidal Cell F. Chandelier cell G. Spindle neuron H. Stellate cell (Credit: Ferris Jabr; based on reconstructions and drawings by Cajal)

Over the years, I have taught my copy of Microsoft Word a lot of neuroscience terminology: amygdala , corpus callosum , dendritic spines , voxel. But it always knew what neuron meant. I thought I did too.

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How barley domesticated its clock

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:48:00 EST

Most organisms that live on or near the surface of the Earth or its oceans have evolved a circadian clock – a daily timer of all biochemical, physiological and behavioral functions.

Daily cycle of light and darkness in the environment is a selective factor – having an internal clock is an adaptation that allows organisms to predict and prepare for instead of passively react to cyclical changes in the environment. The regularity of the light-dark cycle is usually a good predictor for other (perhaps not as precise) cycles of temperature, availability of food, or activity of predators.

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Older Adults Prize Accuracy More Than Speed

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:30:00 EST

Older adults often take longer to make a decision than young adults do. But that does not mean they are any less sharp. According to research at Ohio State University, the slower response time of older adults has more to do with prizing accuracy over speed.

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