You might be disappointed to hear that some intriguing underwater structures recently discovered off the Greek island of Zakynthos are not part of the lost city of Atlantis. But the structures, which resemble colonnades of cobble stones and bases of columns, have an equally fascinating origin. They were actually constructed by microbes gathering around natural vents of methane and forming a natural cement in the otherwise soft sediment.
To some degree, these formations are an accident, sculpted by the interaction of the microorganisms with their physical and chemical environments. But they still point to a complex ability not usually associated with simple single-celled organisms less than 0.0002cm in diameter. So if bacteria can grow their own “cities”, could we use them to grow ours as well?
Bacterial building is actually more common than you might think. If you rub your tongue across the back of your teeth and find a rough spot between the base of the tooth and your gum you should probably go and see a dental hygienist. But you might also contemplate the fact that you have a city growing on your teeth. The rough patch, known more commonly as plaque, is a biofilm, a complex structure built by bacteria living in your mouth.
Biofilms are, in effect, buildings for bacteria. They provide the bacteria with physical protection and (unfortunately for us) protection from antibiotics. They also enable a complex communications network between the bacteria that lets them work together, with different groups of cells performing different functions and even helping control the populations.
Researchers are now experimenting with using the building abilities of bacteria in the human world. For example, we can make self-healing concretes that use bacteria to re-mineralise cracks. It is even possible to create bacteria-based bio-cements using a process similar to that which built the structures found in Zakynthos.
Both systems use a process known as biomineralisation, where bacteria cause mineral crystals to form by changing the chemical composition of their environment. In the case of self-healing concretes and bio-cements, they combine calcium found in their immediate environment with carbon from carbon dioxide in the air. The beauty of the process is that, unlike normal cements and concretes that produce a lot of carbon dioxide, this actually takes carbon out of the atmosphere.
Under pressure
Our research takes this idea even further. We want to use the capacity of microorganisms to sense and respond to their environment, as well as add to it with their own structures. For example, imagine if we could lace the ground of a building site with bacteria that react when they feel mechanical pressure by binding the surrounding soil grains. This would mean we could create a self-constructing foundation just by putting the right amount of pressure on the ground, removing the need for costly excavations and reinforced concrete slabs.
Such a system may still be some way into the future but we have started down the path. Through the emerging discipline of synthetic biology we have already been able to identify genes in certain bacteria that activate in response to pressure. We’ve then used genetic engineering to design bacteria that glow when pressurised. Our next step is to begin to use this pressure-sensing capacity in the bacteria to trigger the the process of biomineralisation and the production of new binding materials including polymers.
The site off Zakynthos may have been an archaeological disappointment but it reveals something about the way we might construct buildings in the future. Imagine visiting the ancient remains of our microbial-built future cities. When the archaeologists assess whether they are natural or artificial they may not be able to tell.
A prehistoric skeleton found more than 50 years ago by Chinese farmers is neither the oldest or best-preserved human remains found in that country -- but they are historically significant in another way.
Farmers uncovered the remains in 1958 in a remote Guandong township while digging out limestone caves, and researchers later pieced together the fragments to form much of the skull of an early human who lived in the area more than 130,000 years ago, reported the South China Morning Post.
The skull had features similar to a Neanderthal, a humanoid species that lived in Europe before modern humans arrived from Africa -- and researchers believe the human ancestor might have roamed to China like a prehistoric Marco Polo.
A team of Spanish and Chinese researchers scanned the specimen, which was missing the lower face and some portions of the brain casing, and filled in the gaps with digital technology.
They found the Maba specimen's face looked like a Neanderthal's, but its brain casing seemed to be from a much earlier human ancestor.
Similar combinations have been seen in another hominid, Homo heidelbergensis, a possible ancestor to Neanderthals that lived in Spain about 300,000 years ago.
The researchers decided the Maba specimen was either an early Neanderthal, which meant that species ranged all the way to eastern Asia, or it shared the same ancestor as Neanderthals.
Either theory would point to the possibility of an "unknown Euro-Asian evolutionary process," said Emiliano Bruner, co-author of the study at the National Research Center for Human Evolution in Spain.
That would mean the Maba specimen was an early "Marco Polo" who came from Europe but stayed in south China for generations -- which is more likely than the possibility of a native species developing the same features in parallel evolution.
The real Marco Polo was an Italian merchant who chronicled his travels from Venice to China in the late 1200s, inspiring Christopher Columbus to make his own journey about 200 years later.
“But unlike Marco Polo, who completed his journey in a lifetime, the Maba arrived in south China after many generations of constant migration east, each generation passing their genes and distinct physical traits to the next,” said co-author Professor Wu Xiujie, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing.
Many recent discoveries have suggested that modern humans arrived in China more than 100,000 years ago, which contradicts the popular theory that migrants from Africa wiped out all native human species in East Asia when they arrived there about 60,000 years ago.
The Maba specimen, which shows signs of serious skull injuries, could be evidence of an early conflict between those early humans and their Neanderthal relatives.
But the researchers cautioned against speculating on specific conflicts, saying more fossil specimens would be necessary to draw those types of conclusions.
The team published their research findings earlier this year in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott on Sunday accused the federal government of lagging in providing assistance to combat the spread of the Zika virus in a Miami-area neighborhood, the site of the first U.S. transmission of the virus.
Scott was speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press" about the neighborhood of Wynwood, where crews began aerial spraying on Thursday to kill virus-carrying mosquitoes. Zika can cause microcephaly, a rare but devastating birth defect.
The governor said state health authorities had identified 16 cases of Zika that were spread by local mosquitoes and criticized the federal government for failing to get more involved in battling the virus.
Scott said he asked U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Thomas Frieden earlier this week for 10,000 additional Zika preparedness kits.
"We still need the federal government to show up. The President and Congress have to work together. This is a national, international issue. It's not just a Florida issue," Scott said.
A representative for the CDC could not be immediately reached on Sunday.
President Barack Obama, a Democrat, earlier this week called on Congress to approve more funds to fight Zika's spread in the United States, saying that money to fight the outbreak is rapidly running out.
Scott's comments come a day after Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida stirred controversy by telling political news outlet Politico that pregnant women infected with Zika should not be able to get an abortion, even when there was evidence the baby might be born with severe microcephaly.
"I understand a lot of people disagree with my view – but I believe that all human life is worthy of protection of our laws," Rubio, a former candidate for his party's presidential nomination, told Politico. "But if I'm going to err, I'm going to err on the side of life."
U.S. health regulators said on Friday that they had cleared the way for a trial of genetically modified mosquitoes in Florida that can reduce mosquito populations, potentially offering a new tool to fight the local spread of Zika and other viruses.
U.S. health officials have concluded that Zika infections in pregnant women can cause microcephaly, a birth defect marked by small head size that can lead to severe developmental problems in babies. The World Health Organization has said there is strong scientific consensus that Zika can also cause Guillain-Barre, a rare neurological syndrome that causes temporary paralysis in adults.
The connection between Zika and microcephaly first came to light last fall in Brazil, which has now confirmed more than 1,600 cases of microcephaly that it considers to be related to Zika infections in the mothers.
(Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Frank McGurty and Alan Crosby)
While admitting that 2016's presidential campaign is "unique," the American Psychiatric Association felt it was necessary this week to advise members to avoid analyzing GOP nominee Donald Trump's antics from afar.
In short: don't call the blustery billionaire "mentally ill."
According to the Washington Post, the APA has had a longstanding standard known as the "Goldwater Rule" which states:
On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.
During the 1964 election, GOP presidential nominee Sen. Barry Goldwater ran under the slogan: "In your heart, you know he's right."
Critics of the saber-rattling Republican responded with "In your guts, you know he's nuts," which set off a explosion of speculation over Goldwater's fitness as the commander-in-chief.
Speculation that Trump might suffer from a mental disorder arose back in January when a number of top U.S. psychologists speculated that the candidate was a "textbook" example of Narcissistic Personality Disorder -- normally characterized by an "inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others," according to the Mayo Clinic.
As the campaign has progressed, and after he became the GOP's official presidential nominee, Trump has become more erratic and compulsive than usual leading many to believe that something is amiss.
"Armchair analysts" like MSNBC host Joe Scarborough have speculated that something is wrong with Trump, with the former GOP congressman stating he's hearing from people who are concerned about the candidate's mental health.
"It was all everybody was talking about. Everybody was calling me saying, 'What's happening to him? What is wrong with him?'" Scarborough explained.
Others, including Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson and Brooking Institute analyst Robert Kagan have also openly questioned Trump's mental state, with Kagan writing, "One wonders if Republican leaders have begun to realize that they may have hitched their fate and the fate of their party to a man with a disordered personality."
Kagan added, "We can leave it to the professionals to determine exactly what to call it. Suffice to say that Donald Trump’s response to the assorted speakers at the Democratic National Convention has not been rational.”
Which brings us back to the American Psychiatric Association's warning on Wednesday in the form of a gentle reminder to the professionals.
"This year, the election seems like anything but a normal contest, that has at times devolved into outright vitriol. The unique atmosphere of this year’s election cycle may lead some to want to psychoanalyze the candidates, but to do so would not only be unethical, it would be irresponsible," wrote APA President Maria A. Oquendo.
Oquendo did not specifically reference Trump, it should be noted.
The Australian Olympic team chef de mission, Kitty Chiller, has said she genuinely believes Australia could increase its medal haul from 35 in the London Games to 45 in Rio, including doubling the number of gold medals from eight to 16. But can countries really increase Olympic medal counts at will?
The new field of Olympics forecasting says the answer is a resounding no. Medal counts for individual countries from the Sydney 2000 to London 2012 Olympics have been predicted relatively accurately, using just a small number of demographic and economic characteristics, such as population size and GDP per capita.
Country rankings on those measures don’t vary much over time, meaning Olympic medal rankings are likely to stay much the same as well. Indeed, forecasts of Olympic performances for most major medal-winning countries based on their characteristics have been quite close to actual medal counts.
An early influential set of forecasts used just three variables to predict medal counts. For the 2000 Sydney Olympics, these predicted that Australia would win 52 to 57 medals, compared with an actual tally of 58 medals. The US was predicted to win 97 to 102 medals and won 92. New Zealand was supposed to win five medals against an actual count of four.
What, then, are the three variables that can make such a precise prediction of a country’s Olympic medal count?
Three important factors
The first variable is population size. If natural athletic talent is uniformly distributed over the world’s population, then it follows that larger countries will have more athletes with the greatest natural ability.
The second variable is GDP per capita. In countries with higher GDP per capita, the population is likely to have more leisure time to devote to sports and there will be better infrastructure and more funding for training elite athletes.
The third variable is whether a country is the host of the Olympics. Being the host has been associated with a strong positive effect on a country’s medal count (in the Olympics before and after hosting, as well as at the Games hosted).
Olympic officials prepare for a medal ceremony in London, 2012.
Reuters
Host countries spend more on preparing their athletes for the Olympics. The home crowd, familiarity with competition venues and favouritism by umpires also play a role.
New predictions
Four Olympics on from the 2000 Sydney Games, the approach to forecasting medal counts has been refined – mainly by finding some extra variables that explain a country’s Olympic performance.
Knowing whether a country has a communist government matters because those countries tend to spend more on elite sports. Countries that have higher female participation in elite sports also tend to win more medals.
A study published in early June applied a refined method of forecasting to the Rio Olympics. To test the validity of their method, the researchers began by forecasting medal counts at the London Olympics and comparing their results to actual counts.
They predicted the US should have won 105 medals, compared to its actual count of 103 medals, and the UK 60 medals against its actual tally of 65. For most other countries, the method did a similarly good job of forecasting. One country where the method didn’t do such a good job was Russia, which was forecast to have won 47 medals but actually won 65 medals.
So what of the Rio Olympics? The researchers have predicted the US will be number one on the medal table, with 98 medals. China is forecast to be second with 84 medals, and Russia third with 77 medals. The UK is said to be fourth with 62 medals.
Australia is forecast to come in at equal-seventh place with 33 medals. This suggests that the structural factors that determine Olympic performance will make it difficult to achieve Kitty Chiller’s goal.
Russian gymnasts sing their national anthem at the London 2012 Olympic Games.
Reuters
As the host country, Brazil is predicted to improve the most, increasing from 17 to 33 medals to draw level with Australia on the medal table.
Other variables
There’s one big caveat to these predictions: they were made assuming a full Russian team at the Rio games. With fewer Russian athletes competing, other countries will have the opportunity to snag more medals, potentially throwing off the predicted results.
It’s important to note that there is nothing in Olympic forecasting that refutes the role of the talent, dedication and the effort of individual athletes in explaining their Olympic success.
What the science of medal forecasting shows is that the distribution of talent differs between countries; and that the scope to realise the potential of that talent depends on a particular country’s level of income and culture. These factors will play a strong role in determining who wins the Rio Olympic medal count.
Head lice don’t pose a particularly serious threat to our health but they do cause great anxiety among parents and carers. This anxiety, and associated stress, is made even worse given the perceived social stigma of a family infested with parasites, and the seemingly endless battle to exterminate these pests.
What are head lice?
Head lice are small insects that are highly adapted to one type of environment: hair on a human’s head (especially the hair and head of primary school-aged children).
Infestation with head lice is affectionately known as “pediculosis”, but while the lice will scuttle up and down the strands of hair, feeding on blood at the scalp, they don’t seem to cause anything other than very mild irritation. They’re not involved in the spread of any nasty diseases either.
But head lice are highly contagious. If you or someone in your family has them, you’ll probably want to get rid of them.
Are head lice becoming ‘indestructible’?
For many years we’ve known that commonly used insecticides (particularly permethrins and pyrethroids) aren’t working as well as they once did against head lice. Similar types of insecticides are currently being employed to battle outbreaks of mosquito-borne Zika virus in South America.
In much the same way that mosquitoes, bed bugs and many agricultural insect pests are becoming resistant to commonly used insecticides, so are head lice.
A recent study published in the Journal of Medical Entomology provides some insight into just how prevalent insecticide resistance in head lice may be.
Thanks to school nurses and “professional lice combers”, scientists from the University of Massachusetts were able to analyse more than 14,000 head lice from almost 140 locations across 48 US states. They were looking for the genetic markers that indicate potential resistance to insecticides such as pyrethrins or pyrethroids.
The researchers found a very high prevalence of “knockdown resistance”, a mutation in the insect that make it less susceptible to insecticides. The results suggest that more than 98% of head lice analysed may not be susceptible to many head lice treatment products currently available.
The result isn’t surprising. With so much use of insecticides against head lice, the development of resistance should almost be expected.
Before everyone panics, it is important to note that while the mutations that confer insecticide resistance were found to be widespread, that doesn’t necessarily mean that all head lice will be resistant to commonly used insecticides. They may be, but we just don’t know to what extent.
There are also likely to be differences between head louse populations across the world.
Any local product marketed as a head lice treatment must be registered with the Therapeutic Goods Administration. While the evidence seems to be mounting that some of these insecticides aren’t working well against some head lice, there are also other products available.
Australian plant extracts may be useful in beating insecticide-resistant head lice. Tea tree oil products are commonly available and have been shown to be effective.
Here is the really good news. We don’t have to rely on insecticides to control head lice.
The “conditioner and comb” method works well enough. By applying conditioner to the hair, any adult lice present will be “paralysed” and can then be removed with specially designed “lice combs”. (Interestingly, the earliest known “lice combs” date back to 1500 BC).
Repeat the process a week later to catch any lice that hatch from eggs remaining in the hair and you should be done – at least until next time.
The biggest barrier to success is getting the children to sit still long enough to methodically work through their hair. Wrangling the kids is probably more difficult than wrangling the lice!
In 2002’s “The Bourne Identity,” our protagonist wakes up having been shot and plucked, unconscious, from the Mediterranean on to a fishing boat with no memory of who he is or how he got there. From there, the movie franchise follows Jason Bourne as he recovers memories of past events and rediscovers his identity.
But, although Bourne’s amnesia at the start of the first film in the series is profound (and profoundly important to the unfolding story), we quickly learn that there are some things Bourne does remember from his past. For example, how to speak multiple languages, how to drive and how to fight. All of these are complex motor tasks that he learned before he was shot and fell in to the water.
This aspect of Bourne’s amnesia is actually quite accurate. For people with “organic” amnesia (where neurological memory loss is typically due to damage to the medial temporal lobes in the brain), memory for skills and habits is intact, even though other memories are lost. There is truth to the cliché that you never forget how to ride a bicycle.
Different memories are affected in different ways
Memory investigators make a distinction between declarative memory and procedural memory. Amnesia affects these types of memories in different ways.
Procedural memories, like how to ride a bike, can endure when someone has amnesia.
Woman on bike via www.shutterstock.com.
Declarative memory includes anything you can “declare” or talk about. For instance, remembering that Paris is the capital of France, or that you had cereal for breakfast today, or that you have to take your allergy medicine tomorrow morning. While these types of memories are different in other, important ways, you are able to think or talk about the content of the memory and have an explicit awareness that you are remembering in each example. It is these declarative memories that are most affected by amnesia.
Procedural memory, on the other hand, are motor “procedures” or skills that you demonstrate through behavior. For instance, remembering how to fry an egg, or how to type a word on a keyboard, or how to hit a golf ball, or how to brush your teeth. These are tasks that are learned over time, but that are difficult to describe in words or to articulate when or how mastery was achieved.
Real-world amnesiacs not only remember how to do things that they had learned prior to their injury or illness, but they are also able to learn new skills. Procedural memory isn’t affected in the same way that declarative memory is.
The case of Henry Molaison
In the 1960s, neuropsychologist Brenda Milner first demonstrated how patients who lose the ability to form declarative memories are still able to learn new skills with the famous amnesiac patient, Henry Molaison (H.M.).
H.M. lost his memory after surgeons removed his hippocampus, a brain structure associated with memory, in an attempt to treat his severe epilepsy. Of course, this sort of surgery would not happen today. Typically, amnesia is the result of brain injury or illness.
H.M. was able to improve his performance on the difficult motor task of tracing a shape while being able to see only his hand and the shape reflected in a mirror.
Over a week of testing, H.M. made fewer and fewer mistakes on this mirror-tracing task, even though he never remembered ever having done the task before and had to have the goal explained to him each day. In other words, his declarative memory for the rules of the game and for experiencing it in the past was impaired, but his procedural memory for performing the task was spared.
H.M.’s inability to form new memories is characteristic of what is called anterograde amnesia. This form of amnesia is defined by the inability to form new declarative memories of facts, personal experiences or plans for the future subsequent to the injury or illness. This hallmark aspect of true memory loss is frequently absent from fictional amnesiacs, including Jason Bourne.
Retrograde amnesia
H.M. not only lost the ability to form new declarative memories, but also struggled with memory recall. This is called retrograde amnesia, and it is defined by the inability to retrieve memories from before the injury or illness. Real-life retrograde amnesia is different from how it is portrayed by the Bourne character (or other common fictional representations of amnesia).
Real-life retrograde amnesia more recent memories are more likely to be forgotten, while memories from long ago are more likely to be spared.
For example, if a 40-year-old woman suffers from a brain injury resulting in amnesia, she will remember who she is, her childhood and most of her teenage years, then have fewer memories from her 20’s and even fewer from her 30’s, and few to no memories from the year or so before her injury. The first memory Bourne retrieves, in contrast, is the mission that immediately preceded his memory loss, and not older memories of his childhood, for instance.
Remembering the past
In the subsequent films, Bourne is shown recalling his past experiences in a fragmentary, near-random way. It is also more strongly suggested in the later films that Bourne is likely suffering something called psychogenic amnesia. Unlike amnesia that stems from an illness or injury that causes brain damage, psychogenic amnesia has no known biological cause and is instead of psychological origin.
Real-life victims of trauma are more likely to have intrusive memories than memory loss. Intrusive memories are suddenly and unexpectedly brought to mind by cues in the environment. Having spontaneous memories is common, even for healthy individuals.
Because he is driven to discover his identity by recovering memories, Bourne seeks these types of environmental cues, for example, in “The Bourne Supremacy,” the second film in the series, by revisiting the Berlin hotel where he committed his first assassination. In the third film, “The Bourne Ultimatum,” Bourne returns to the facility where he was trained, and says he “remembers everything.”
More realistically, individuals who have experienced trauma tend to avoid circumstances that remind them of those tragic events. Their memories of the traumatic event (and events surrounding it) are typically accompanied by strong physiological and emotional reactions. Survivors often struggle with managing the flood of emotions that come with those memories.
A common therapeutic goal is to reduce emotional reactivity to the memory through pharmacological or behavioral interventions.
Putting the pieces together.
Puzzle pieces via www.shutterstock.com.
Putting the pieces together
Throughout the films, Bourne tries to piece together the events from his life to form a coherent story. This process is common to all of us as we develop and reconstruct autobiographical memory.
Those individuals for whom the trauma defines their life story and their sense of self often suffer the most from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Those people who are better able to contextualize and compartmentalize the trauma as a part of their life, but not the most important or central part of their life, seem to have better psychological, social and behavioral outcomes.
Jason Bourne’s memory-related issues are grounded in real-life experiences of both organic amnesiacs and trauma victims. However, his overall pattern of forgetting and then complete retrieval of all of his lost memories is a better plot device than representation of real-world memory loss and recovery.
In a recent study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, researchers compared the effects that alcohol and marijuana have on sexual encounters, as self-reported by study participants. Some of the “findings” are head-smackingly obvious, gussied up in fancy words.
This article was originally published by The Influence, a news site that covers the full spectrum of human relationships with drugs. Follow The Influence on Facebook or Twitter.
For example, can you believe that “alcohol was commonly associated with social outgoingness,” or that its “use facilitated connections with potential sexual partners”?
Some of the results, though, are interesting—like the finding that drunk sex is more likely than high sex to be associated with post-coital regret.
The researchers, affiliated with NYU’s Center for Drug Use and HIV Research (CDUHR), say that both male and female participants often reported positive sexual effects of the two substances. However, in addition to post-sex regret, there were other negative effects reported too. Marijuana use was linked to vaginal dryness among women, while alcohol use was linked to impotence in men.
Part of the reason alcohol may lead to more regrets than marijuana, researchers speculated, is that subjects—both male and female—were more likely to experience “beer goggles” than “weed goggles.” They felt that their standards for choosing a sexual partner were lowered under the influence of alcohol. In contrast, participants who had smoked marijuana tended to report increased feelings of anxiety or wariness in unfamiliar situations.
“It wasn’t surprising that alcohol use reportedly led to less post-sex satisfaction than marijuana,” said Joseph J. Palamar, PhD, MPH, the lead author. “Sexual encounters on marijuana tended to be with someone the individual knew. Sex on alcohol was often with a stranger.”
That seems to be assuming that sex with someone you know is more satisfying than sex with a stranger, which not everyone may agree with. And even though alcohol was more likely than weed to be associated with social outgoingness, marijuana’s continuing illicit status in many places actually facilitated sex in some cases.
“Since smoking marijuana recreationally is illegal in most states and smoking it tends to produce a strong odor,” noted Dr. Palamar, “it usually has to be used in a private setting. Some individuals utilize such private or intimate situations to facilitate sexual encounters.”
It’s important to note the extremely small sample size of this qualitative study—24 adults (12 male and 12 female, all heterosexual and HIV-negative) who reported recent use of marijuana before sex.
But it opens up interesting questions—for example in relation to another new study (splashedacrossnewsheadlines this week) indicating that young people have less sex than previous generations did at their age. Could there be a link between decreased stigma around marijuana and a decrease in young people’s sexual activity?
Regardless, as marijuana becomes legal, it will be important to examine the way it affects sexual activity and risk.
“Research is needed continue to study sexual effects of recreational drugs to inform prevention to ensure that users and potential users of these drugs are aware of sexual effects associated with use,” said Dr. Palamar. “Our results can inform prevention and harm reduction education especially with regard to marijuana, since people who smoke marijuana generally don’t receive any harm reduction information at all. They’re pretty much just told not to use it.”
This article was originally published by The Influence, a news site that covers the full spectrum of human relationships with drugs. Follow The Influence on Facebook or Twitter.
To lucid dream is to be aware you're traipsing through your subconscious. In some cases, lucid dreamers even report calling the shots in their REM-sleep narratives. And while the practice hasn't gone fully mainstream, it has earned props from scientists as an objectively verifiable altered state of consciousness. But, knowing that people can have lucid dreams doesn't translate to knowing who and how many of us are.
To get a handle on the incidence of lucid dreaming, UK researchers at the University of Northampton looked at any and all research on the subject published between 1966 and 2016. Their meta-analysis of 34 studies revealed fairly consistent findings across time and geographic borders. In most countries, roughly the same percentage of people say they know what it's like to participate in their dreams: About 55 percent can check lucid dreaming off their bucket lists. And almost a quarter are frequent lucid dreamers, meaning they report at least one lucid dream per month.
Study authors noted some issues in comparing results from different investigations. For one thing, researchers vary in how they distinguish lucid dreaming from other journeys in REM-mentation. In the '90s, one group of researchers said lucid dreaming requires only awareness of dreaming. But earlier notions of lucidity were more detailed. In 1913, for example, one scientist held that lucid dreamers must have complete memory of their waking life and be able to control elements of their dream activity. The control requirement might affect prevalence estimates, as recent studies suggest somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of lucid dreamers either can't manipulate their dreams or only can once in a while. Given that sitting in the director's chair isn't the norm, study authors wrote, then it would make sense to use control over dreams as a way to measure depth of lucidity, rather than as a necessary feature of the experience.
Taken together, studies suggest most people can have lucid dreams, and that pursuit of the practice — motivated by cultural norms or individual beliefs — sparks adventures in the snoozing fantasy-land. Most nationalities boast somewhere near the 55-percent rate average. And, rates haven't materially changed over time.
Compared to middle-aged and older adults, youngs appear more susceptible to frequent lucid dreaming. Efforts to explain this trend yielded the brain maturation hypothesis, which explains lucid dreaming as a "disassociated, hybrid neurological state." As a result, the idea goes, frequency should peak during the teen years and level off during early adulthood, at which point rapid neural growth seen during adolescence draws to a close.
Differences in interpreting and assigning meanings to dreams seems to influence the breadth of getting lucid. Perhaps unsurprisingly, prevalence is higher — about 70 percent — in cultures and communities with an interest in lucid dreaming. Pasttimes associated with lucidity include meditation and video games. Apparently, there are "significant parallels" between losing the day to World of Warcraft, assuming lotus flower position and lucid dreaming. Both lucid dreaming and gaming, it's been argued, "are grounded in similar spatial skills, require resilience to motion sensitivity and focused attention." Hardcore gamers, defined as those who play a few times a week for stretches of two hours or more, or who started playing before the third grade and have at least 50 games under their belts, "have a familiarity with waking immersion in virtual worlds," that may leave them prone to similarly immersive dreaming.
This article originally published by Van Winkle’s, vanwinkles.com, the editorial division of Casper Sleep
A recent post on TripSit, a harm reduction website that aims to “help you stay as safe as possible if you choose to use substances,” provides a comprehensive visual safety guide to different drug combinations, ranking them from lowest to highest risk.
This article was originally published by The Influence, a news site that covers the full spectrum of human relationships with drugs. Follow The Influence on Facebook or Twitter.
Drug-mixing is often wrongly overlooked in discussions about “overdose” deaths—yet most opioid-related fatalities, for example, do not involve opioids alone but opioids combined with other drugs, typically sedatives such as benzodiazepines or alcohol.
Interestingly, no combinations involving LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, DMT or cannabis make it to Tripsit’s highest level of danger. It’s also important to point out that no drug is entirely without risk—even if risks can be hugely mitigated by safer use practices. It should be noted, too, that people buying illegal drugs often have no way of knowing which substances they’ve actually purchased.
Here are 20 drug combinations that fall into Tripsit’s most dangerous category—though this is by no means an exhaustive list. Check out the original guide to get a fuller picture.
1. Alcohol + Ketamine
2. Alcohol + Dextromethorphan (DXM), the active ingredient in most OTC cough medicines
3. Alcohol + Opioids
4. Alcohol + Tramadol (a painkiller sold under the brandname Ultram, among others)
5. Alcohol + Benzos
6. SSRIs (which include many anti-depressants like Lexapro, Prozac, Zoloft) + Dextromethorphan (DXM)
7. SSRIs + Tramadol
8. SSRIs + MAOIs (an older type of anti-depressant, that are dangerous in combination with many other substances too)
This article was originally published by The Influence, a news site that covers the full spectrum of human relationships with drugs. Follow The Influence on Facebook or Twitter.
As a young adult in college, I decided to learn Japanese. My father’s family is from Japan, and I wanted to travel there someday.
However, many of my classmates and I found it difficult to learn a language in adulthood. We struggled to connect new sounds and a dramatically different writing system to the familiar objects around us.
It wasn’t so for everyone. There were some students in our class who were able to acquire the new language much more easily than others.
So, what makes some individuals “good language learners?” And do such individuals have a “second language aptitude?"
What we know about second language aptitude
Past research on second language aptitude has focused on how people perceive sounds in a particular language and on more general cognitive processes such as memory and learning abilities. Most of this work has used paper-and-pencil and computerized tests to determine language-learning abilities and predict future learning.
Researchers have also studied brain activity as a way of measuring linguistic and cognitive abilities. However, much less is known about how brain activity predicts second language learning.
Is there a way to predict the aptitude of second language learning?
In a recently published study, Chantel Prat, associate professor of psychology at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, and I explored how brain activity recorded at rest – while a person is relaxed with their eyes closed – could predict the rate at which a second language is learned among adults who spoke only one language.
Studying the resting brain
Resting brain activity is thought to reflect the organization of the brain and it has been linked to intelligence, or the general ability used to reason and problem-solve.
We measured brain activity obtained from a “resting state” to predict individual differences in the ability to learn a second language in adulthood.
To do that, we recorded five minutes of eyes-closed resting-state electroencephalography, a method that detects electrical activity in the brain, in young adults. We also collected two hours of paper-and-pencil and computerized tasks.
We then had 19 participants complete eight weeks of French language training using a computer program. This software was developed by the U.S. armed forces with the goal of getting military personnel functionally proficient in a language as quickly as possible.
The software combined reading, listening and speaking practice with game-like virtual reality scenarios. Participants moved through the content in levels organized around different goals, such as being able to communicate with a virtual cab driver by finding out if the driver was available, telling the driver where their bags were and thanking the driver.
Nineteen adult participants (18-31 years of age) completed two 30-minute training sessions per week for a total of 16 sessions. After each training session, we recorded the level that each participant had reached. At the end of the experiment, we used that level information to calculate each individual’s learning rate across the eight-week training.
As expected, there was large variability in the learning rate, with the best learner moving through the program more than twice as quickly as the slowest learner. Our goal was to figure out which (if any) of the measures recorded initially predicted those differences.
A new brain measure for language aptitude
When we correlated our measures with learning rate, we found that patterns of brain activity that have been linked to linguistic processes predicted how easily people could learn a second language.
Patterns of activity over the right side of the brain predicted upwards of 60 percent of the differences in second language learning across individuals. This finding is consistent with previous research showing that the right half of the brain is more frequently used with a second language.
Our results suggest that the majority of the language learning differences between participants could be explained by the way their brain was organized before they even started learning.
Implications for learning a new language
Does this mean that if you, like me, don’t have a “quick second language learning” brain you should forget about learning a second language?
Not quite.
First, it is important to remember that 40 percent of the difference in language learning rate still remains unexplained. Some of this is certainly related to factors like attention and motivation, which are known to be reliable predictors of learning in general, and of second language learning in particular.
Second, we know that people can change their resting-state brain activity. So training may help to shape the brain into a state in which it is more ready to learn. This could be an exciting future research direction.
Second language learning in adulthood is difficult, but the benefits are large for those who, like myself, are motivated by the desire to communicate with others who do not speak their native tongue.
But in steamier parts of the world, scientists are warily eyeing a sleeping giant: the Amazon.
Reduced rainfall in the region earlier this year (seriously, good riddance, El Niño) has dried out the rainforest, setting it up for epic burning this summer, researchers from NASA and UC Irvine report.
“It’s the driest we’ve seen it at the onset of a fire season,” said Jim Randerson, one of UC Irvine’s researchers. The rainforest is much more parched today than in 2005 and 2010, when previous droughts led to raging fires.
The Amazon is a huge carbon sink — it stores 120 billion tons of the stuff — and is crucial in regulating much of South America’s rainfall cycle. Apart from potentially releasing untold amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and smothering the region in noxious fumes, a massive Amazonian wildfire could potentially tip the region into a new state — one where the forest can never recover its carbon-sucking, rain-producing superpowers. (The official term for this, bandied about for a few years now by scientists, is the “Amazon dieback.”)
As the Washington Post reports, we have something to do with it, as usual. Human activity such as chopping trees leads to weakened, fragmented forests that are more likely to dry out and burn. Other research shows that post-drought forest regrowth is less dense and more flammable, leading to a potentially dangerous feedback cycle.
But it’s always important to note that these are projections. The apocalypse hasn’t descended (yet). Hopefully, the study will light a fire under authorities’ derrieres in the Amazon region to prevent foolhardy fire-causing behaviors. El Smokey Bear, anyone?
Geologists have found the first evidence for China's Great Flood, a 4,000-year-old disaster on the Yellow River that led to birth of the Xia dynasty and modern Chinese civilization, researchers said Thursday.
The findings in the journal Science may help rewrite history because they not only show that a massive flood did occur, but that it was in 1920 BC, several centuries later than traditionally thought.
This would mean the Xia dynasty, led by Emperor Yu, may also have started later than Chinese historians have thought.
Yu gained fame as the man who was able to gain control over the flood by orchestrating the dredging work needed to guide the waters back into their channels.
Restoring order after chaos earned "him the divine mandate to establish the Xia dynasty, the first in Chinese history," said the study, led by Wu Qinglong, professor in the department of geography at Nanjing Normal University.
Stories about Emperor Yu laid the ideological foundation for the Confucian rulership system, but in recent generations, some scholars have questioned whether it ever happened at all. Perhaps, they say, it was all a myth designed to justify imperial rule.
So geologists investigated along the Yellow River in Qinghai Province, examining the remains of a landslide dam and sediments from a dammed lake and outburst flood.
- Catastrophic flood -
What they found suggests a catastrophic flood that is one of the largest known floods on Earth in the last 10,000 years, said co-author Darryl Granger, professor in the department of Earth atmospheric planetary sciences at Purdue University.
The floodwaters surged to 38 meters (yards) above the modern river level, making the disaster "roughly equivalent to the largest Amazon flood ever measured," he told reporters on a conference call to discuss the findings.
The flood would have been "more than 500 times larger than a flood on the Yellow River from a rainfall event," he added.
"This cataclysmic flood would have been a truly devastating event for anyone living on the Yellow River downstream."
Since such floods toss debris and sediment all over, mixing old soil with new, the scientific team used human remains to pin down the timing of the disaster.
Three children's skeletons were found in the rubble of an earthquake, which is believed to have triggered a landslide, researchers said.
That landslide created a dam. Water built up around the dam and eventually burst through, unleashing the flood.
Radiocarbon dating on the children's bones showed that they died in 1920 BC, coinciding with a major cultural transition in China.
"This is the first time a flood of this scale -- large enough to account for it -- has been found," said David Cohen, assistant professor in the department of anthropology at National Taiwan University.
"The outburst flood... provides us with a tantalizing hint that the Xia dynasty might really have existed," he told reporters.
"If the Great Flood really happened, perhaps it is also likely that the Xia dynasty really existed, too. The two are directly tied to each other."
Now that researchers have evidence to back up the tales in ancient texts, the Xia dynasty could be considered as starting around 1900 BC, instead of 2200 BC as previously thought, they argue.
"Great floods occupy a central place in some of the world's oldest stories," wrote David Thompson of the University of Washington, Seattle in an accompanying commentary in Science.
"And Emperor Yu's flood now stands as another such story potentially rooted in geological events."
