The brain’s ability to function can start to deteriorate as early as 45, suggests a study in the British Medical Journal.
University College London researchers found a 3.6% decline in mental reasoning in women and men aged 45-49.
Previous research had suggested that cognitive decline does not begin much before the age of 60.
photo { Larry Sultan }
Brooke Greenberg (born January 8, 1993), is an American from Reisterstown, Maryland, who has remained physically and cognitively similar to a toddler, despite her increasing age. She is about 30 inches (76 cm) tall, weighs about 16 pounds (7.3 kg), and has an estimated mental age of nine months to one year. Brooke’s doctors have termed her condition Syndrome X.
Say “placebo effect” and most people think of the boost they may get from a sugar pill simply because they believe it will work. But more and more research suggests there is more than a fleeting boost to be gained from placebos.
A particular mind-set or belief about one’s body or health may lead to improvements in disease symptoms as well as changes in appetite, brain chemicals and even vision, several recent studies have found, highlighting how fundamentally the mind and body are connected.
It doesn’t seem to matter whether people know they are getting a placebo and not a “real” treatment. One study demonstrated a strong placebo effect in subjects who were told they were getting a sugar pill with no active ingredient.
The inside of the human body is a bacteria-free zone. Bacteria are certainly within you, but they exist only in areas that have a direct channel to the outside world, such as the mouth, intestines and the surface of the skin. These areas are well protected by a layer of cells (epithilial cells) which form a protective barrier to keep away the nasties of the outside world. That’s why there are healthy stomach bacteria, but no healthy liver bacteria. From a certain point of view your lungs and digestive tract still are the outside world, which is why bacteria can get in and live there, sometimes perfectly happily without causing any trouble at all.
Major problems start to happen, however, once bacteria get through that epithelial barrier and into the tissues of your body. Which is why the first bacteria of the new year is the oral bacteria Fusobacterium nucleatum, which has a trick to open up little doors in blood vessels. These aren’t massive holes, not big enough to cause bleeding but large enough to let it and other bacteria into the bloodstream.
This is a big issue, because once the bacteria get into the blood-stream they can travel around anywhere within the body. It’s not just the blood-vessels in the mouth that the F. nucleatum can get into, it can also bypass a lot of other cellular barriers such as the blood-brain barrier that keeps bacteria out of your brain, and the placental barrier that guards the passage of substances between a pregnant mother and the foetus.
photo { Heike Aumüller }
The present-day fate of New England goes back to an argument at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the ’50s about that material from which semiconductors, well understood locally from wartime work on radar, were to be manufactured in the years ahead. Dogma held that it would be germanium; silicon crystals would be too difficult to purify to the required degree. Robert Noyce, an MIT-trained physicist, thought otherwise.
When MIT declined to tenure him, Noyce decamped, first to Philadelphia, then to the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, in Mountain View, California. Silicon leadership went with him – to Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, each of which he co-founded, and eventually to Silicon Valley, centered around San Jose, which the two firms spawned. New England never developed a vigorous industry in silicon chips. By the end of the ’70s, savvy venture capitalists had begun migrating to Palo Alto’s Sand Hill Road.
Similarly, when Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard College, in 1975, to found a little software company called Microsoft, he repaired first to Albuquerque, N.M., then to his native Seattle. Plenty of entrepreneurial software development was going on in Cambridge, including the first spreadsheets, but proximity to microprocessor developers in California, Intel in particular, gave Microsoft a decisive edge. Microsoft networking software eventually swallowed whole Massachusetts’ minicomputer industry.
{ Todd McLellan }
A low-pitched voice in a man is associated with a litany of masculine traits: dominance, strength, greater physical size, more attractiveness to women, and so on. But new research strikes one trait off that list: virility.
An Australian study looked at male voice pitch, women’s perceptions of it, and semen quality. Their first finding was no surprise: Women like deep voices and consider them masculine.
But contrary to expectations, they also found that these men aren’t better off in the semen department. In fact, by one measure of sperm quality — sperm concentration in ejaculate — men with the attractive voices appeared to have a disadvantage.
related { Breakthrough in male fertility: scientist grow sperm in laboratory }
There are two different types of alcohol-induced blackout: en bloc, a complete loss of memory for the affected time period; and fragmentary, where bits and pieces of memories remain. The en bloc blackout is more likely to occur when a large quantity of alcohol is ingested within a small time period.
(…)
Alcohol primarily interferes with the ability to form new long–term memories, leaving intact previously established long–term memories and the ability to keep new information active in memory for brief periods. … Blackouts are much more common among social drinkers—including college drinkers—than was previously assumed, and have been found to encompass events ranging from conversations to intercourse. Mechanisms underlying alcohol–induced memory impairments include disruption of activity in the hippocampus, a brain region that plays a central role in the formation of new autobiographical memories.
(…)
Women are more susceptible to alcohol blackouts than men (and recover more slowly) because of their generally less muscular body composition, and gender differences in pharmacokinetics.
We put a lot of energy into improving our memory, intelligence, and attention. There are even drugs that make us sharper, such as Ritalin and caffeine. But maybe smarter isn’t really all that better. A new paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, warns that there are limits on how smart humans can get, and any increases in thinking ability are likely to come with problems. (…)
Drugs like Ritalin and amphetamines help people pay better attention. But they often only help people with lower baseline abilities; people who don’t have trouble paying attention in the first place can actually perform worse when they take attention-enhancing drugs. That suggests there is some kind of upper limit to how much people can or should pay attention. (…)
It may seem like a good thing to have a better memory, but people with excessively vivid memories have a difficult life. “Memory is a double-edged sword,” Hills says. In post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, a person can’t stop remembering some awful episode. “If something bad happens, you want to be able to forget it, to move on.”
Even increasing general intelligence can cause problems. Hills and Hertwig cite a study of Ashkenazi Jews, who have an average IQ much higher than the general European population. This is apparently because of evolutionary selection for intelligence in the last 2,000 years. But, at the same time, Ashkenazi Jews have been plagued by inherited diseases like Tay-Sachs disease that affect the nervous system. It may be that the increase in brain power has caused an increase in disease.
related { Are You Smart Enough to Know You’re Stupid? }
Many simple mistakes are obvious once you see them — and almost impossible to detect before you do.
Writing in The New York Times recently, Joseph Hallinan noted our tendency to infer what we see rather than actually look closely. (…) One of his best examples is a wrong note in the score of a Brahms sonata that countless musicians never noticed because, for years, they silently “corrected” it in performance. A naïve piano student kept getting it “wrong” until he looked and saw that she was actually playing what was on the page.
It’s the same problem all of us run up against when we try to proof-read a text, especially if we were the ones who wrote it. We see what we know the text means, rather than what is actually printed on the page.
artwork { John J. O’Connor }
One of the most notable examples of an assemblage of highly mutilated human remains from the Southwest being attributed to witchcraft execution rather than cannibalism, is Ram Mesa, southwest of Chaco Canyon near Gallup, New Mexico. This site was excavated by the University of New Mexico as a salvage project, and the relevant assemblage was reported by Marsha Ogilvie and Charles Hilton in 2000.
The Ram Mesa assemblage, consisting of 13 individuals, is pretty similar to many other assemblages in the Southwest attributed to cannibalism, but Ogilvie and Hilton make a plausible case that while the remains are clearly highly “processed” there isn’t a whole lot tying this dismemberment and mutilation to actual consumption of the remains. Few of the bones showed any evidence of burning, a condition which applies to several other cases of alleged cannibalism as well. The few cut marks, which were mostly found on children’s skulls and lower jaws, weren’t particularly indicative of the removal of large muscles that might be expected if consumption were the object.
photo { Zhe Chen }
According to research funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, nearly 25 percent of older adults had small pockets of dead brain cells that may have been caused by unnoticed “silent strokes.” (…)
Another study also published by the journal Neurology this week suggested that certain vitamins and a low-trans-fat diet may help preserve memory loss.
The researchers found that trans fat (found in fried and many processed foods) contributed to “more shrinkage of the brain” in addition to less cognitive recognition.
Passwords are a pain to remember. What if a quick wiggle of five fingers on a screen could log you in instead? Or speaking a simple phrase? (…)
Computer scientists in Brooklyn are training their iPads to recognize their owners by the touch of their fingers as they make a caressing gesture. Banks are already using software that recognizes your voice, supplementing the standard PIN.
And after years of predicting its demise, security researchers are renewing their efforts to supplement and perhaps one day obliterate the old-fashioned password. (…)
The research arm of the Defense Department is looking for ways to use cues like a person’s typing quirks to continuously verify identity — in case, say, a soldier’s laptop ends up in enemy hands on the battlefield. In a more ordinary example, Google recently began nudging users to consider a two-step log-in system, combining a password with a code sent to their phones. Google’s latest Android software can unlock a phone when it recognizes the owner’s face or — not so safe — when it is tricked by someone holding up a photograph of the owner’s face.
Still, despite these recent advances, it may be premature to announce the end of passwords, as Bill Gates famously did in 2004, when he said “the password is dead.”
{ NY Times | Continue reading }
“After 10 years of studies, we find that the strengths as well as the consequences of technology are more profound than ever,” said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future. “At one extreme, we see users with the ability to have constant social connection, unlimited access to information, and unprecedented buying power. At the other extreme, we find extraordinary demands on our time, major concerns about privacy and vital questions about the proliferation of technology – including a range of issues that didn’t exist 10 years ago.
“We believe that America is at a major digital turning point,” said Cole. “Simply, we find tremendous benefits in online technology, but we also pay a personal price for those benefits. The question is: how high a price are we willing to pay?”
Even though chili fruits are popular amongst humans for being hot, they didn’t evolve this character to keep foodies and so-called “chili-heads” happy. Previous research indicates that chilis, Capsicum spp., evolved their characteristic “heat” or pungency as a chemical defence to protect their fruits from fungal infections and from being eaten by herbivores. Chili pungency is created by capsaicinoids, a group of molecules that are produced by the plant and sequestered in its fruits. Capsaicinoids trigger that familiar burning sensation by interacting with a receptor located in pain- and heat-sensing neurons in mammals (including humans).
In contrast, birds lack this specific receptor protein, so their pain- and heat-sensing neurons remain undisturbed by capsaicinoids, which is the reason they eat chili fruits with impunity. Additionally, because birds lack teeth, they don’t damage chili seeds, which pass unharmed through their digestive tracts. For these reasons, wild chili fruits are bright red, a colour that attracts birds, so the plants effectively employ birds to disperse their seeds far and wide.
One particular process in communication is to send and receive wordless messages. This kind of information transmission is commonly referred to as “nonverbal communication” (NVC). Nonverbal signals include facial expressions, bodily orientation, movements, posture, vocal cues (other than words), eye gaze, physical appearance, interpersonal spacing, and touching. As such, they support and moderate speech, facilitate the expression of emotions, help communicating people’s attitudes, convey information about personality, and thus negotiate interpersonal relationships, even in the form of rituals. (…) There seems to be some kernel of truth in the proverb that “actions speak louder than words.” (…)
Some support on the significance of NVC in social life comes from studies that have investigated non-verbal cues in human courtship situations. In these studies, first encounters of opposite-sex strangers were covertly filmed in “unstaged interaction” to investigate flirting behavior. When opposite sex strangers meet for the first time, they both face the risk of being deceived. Neither opponent is aware of the other’s intention, thus both have to rely heavily on non-verbal cues. Grammer (1990) reported that, in such a situation, there is a remarkable consistency in the repertoire of female solicitation behaviors in the presence of a male stranger, including eye- contact, followed by looking away, special postures, ways of walking, and so on. Interestingly, men were found to approach women who expressed high rates of signaling these behaviors more frequently.
In later study, Grammer et al. (1999) found that some information about female interest is not only inherent in the number of certain non-verbal signals, but is also encoded in the quality of body movements, such as their amplitude and speed. For example, women moved more frequently, but also displayed smaller and slower movements when they were interested in a man. Men in turn reacted to the quality of these movements positively and judged the situation to be more pleasant.
