Yamamoto's Elaborate Salt Labyrinths

http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2011/02/15/133678617/yamamotos-elaborate-salt-labyrinths

Want to Understand Mortality? Look to the Chimps.

Pansy was probably in her 50s when she died, which is pretty good for a chimpanzee. She passed in a way most of us would envy — peacefully, with her adult daughter, Rosie, and her best friend, Blossom, by her side. Thirty years earlier, Pansy and Blossom arrived together at the Blair Drummond Safari and Adventure Park near Stirling, Scotland. They raised their children together. Now, as Pansy struggled to breathe, Blossom held her hand and stroked it.

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Illustration by Denise Nestor

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When the scientists at the park realized Pansy’s death was imminent, they turned on video cameras, capturing intimate moments during her last hours as Blossom, Rosie and Blossom’s son, Chippy, groomed her and comforted her as she got weaker. After she passed, the chimps examined the body, inspecting Pansy’s mouth, pulling her arm and leaning their faces close to hers. Blossom sat by Pansy’s body through the night. And when she finally moved away to sleep in a different part of the enclosure, she did so fitfully, waking and repositioning herself dozens more times than was normal. For five days after Pansy’s death, none of the other chimps would sleep on the platform where she died.

This account was published in 2010 in the journal Current Biology, but it’s not the only time scientists have watched chimpanzees, bonobos and other primates deal with death in ways that look strikingly like our own informal rituals of mourning: watching over the dying, cleaning and protecting bodies and displaying outward signs of anxiety. Chimps have been seen to make loud distress calls when a comrade dies. They investigate bodies as if looking for signs of life. There are many cases of mothers refusing to abandon dead infants, carrying and grooming them for days or even weeks. Still, it’s rare to capture primate deaths, especially those of chimpanzees and bonobos, in detail. It happens just often enough that many scientists are starting to think there’s something interesting, maybe protohuman, going on.

But this sort of speculation is laden with epistemological issues: are the scientists guilty of anthropomorphizing their subjects? Are these just isolated events? Are they more likely in captivity? Stories like Pansy’s are mere anecdotes in a world that demands testable hypotheses, and they color the fringes of a continuing scientific debate: Can we find the basis for aspects of our culture in the behavior of other primates?

Earlier this month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued a proposal to put captive chimpanzees on the federal endangered species list. (Wild chimps have officially been endangered since 1990.) The goal is to clear up a bureaucratic catch that treats some chimps different from others, but it has big implications for what we can do with the animals — both as medical-research subjects and comic relief on screen. It’s also part of a shift in how we perceive chimps: Are they just animals, or are they something closer to us? Understanding how chimpanzees cope with death is part of that increasing sense of closeness.

Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, is convinced that an ape death he witnessed gave him a glimpse into something significant, especially because the animals acted so thoroughly against their own interests. “As a person, I can tell you what it feels like to watch,” says Hare, who describes the experience as emotionally intense. “As a scientist, though, you’re supposed to rely on ideas that can be tested and falsified. And how could you possibly do an ethical experiment here?” Hare studies how chimpanzees and bonobos solve problems, and in 2007 he happened to see one of our closest evolutionary relatives die. He was at a bonobo orphanage in the Democratic Republic of Congo when Lipopo, a newcomer to the orphanage, died unexpectedly from pneumonia. Although the other bonobos could have moved away from his body and traveled anywhere in their very large, heavily forested enclosure, they chose to stay and groom Lipopo’s corpse. When their caretakers arrived to remove the body, the vigil morphed into a tense standoff. In the video Hare took, Mimi, the group’s alpha female, stands guard over Lipopo’s body. When the caretakers try to push the corpse out of the enclosure with long poles, Mimi fights them, viciously. She grabs the poles with both hands, wrenching them away from Lipopo. She calls to other bonobos, who help her fend off the humans from two sides. Even when the vet arrives with a tranquilizer gun, Mimi stands her ground, her mouth open wide in a scream that’s inaudible in the silent film. Mimi wasn’t related to Lipopo. In fact, she barely knew him, Hare told me. But Mimi was willing to risk an encounter with a gun to protect the body of a mere acquaintance. “That’s why I started to cry,” Hare said. “I don’t know why she did it.”

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The results of primate-behavior studies can be humbling for humans because they often call into question our anthropocentric view of the world. Scientists used to say only humans used tools. Then, in 1960, Jane Goodall watched a chimpanzee catch termites using a blade of grass as a lure. A similar watershed moment happened in 1953, when a Japanese macaque named Imo began washing sweet potatoes that scientists gave her. By the 1970s, most of her descendants had learned to do the same. It was a new idea, not shared by all groups of macaques, spread from one monkey to another by social interaction — exactly how scientists define culture.

Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a primatologist at the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University in Japan, says that variations in tool use provide an easy way to see that chimps are capable of sustaining a culture over multiple generations. The chimpanzees that Goodall observed in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania may use grass to fish for termites, but the group Matzusawa studies in Guinea doesn’t. (They can break open nuts with a pair of rocks, though; Goodall’s didn’t.)

Scientists want to better understand how much of this death behavior is cultural and how much is innate — or if it’s even widespread at all — but that will be rather difficult. Observable deaths don’t happen often, and they don’t happen in quite the same way each time. It’s hard to say definitively what Hare saw: Mimi might have been as protective of anything left in her pen, whether dead body or old sandbag.

Further observation might help us identify the substrate beneath human culture. Take the grooming of the dead, for instance. All human cultures address the cleaning of dead bodies in different ways, Hare says, but all of them do something to cleanse corpses. In fact, compared with most other animals, primates share an inordinate concern for cleanliness, even for those no longer with us. Finding out if this is behavior we share with chimps and bonobos, as it appears to be, could cast a new light on our own funerary rituals and even, perhaps, our notions of purity in the afterlife.

Our understanding of how chimps deal with death may remain limited and speculative, but it hints at the need for a new approach to great-ape conservation. As we’re now poised to end a somewhat arbitrary regulatory distinction between wild and captive chimps, it’s worth considering how we’re protecting actually distinct groups of chimps, some of which may have developed their own cultures. When they die off, they take with them behaviors that we might not find anywhere else and that we don’t yet understand — maybe including, somewhat tragically, the extent to which they comprehend their own demise.


By: Maggie Koerth Baker
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/magazine/want-to-understand-mortality-look-to-the-chimps.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Dragonflies with Backpacks May Advance the Science of Prey Capture

Dragonflies are straight “A”  hunters, capturing fruit flies in mid-air about 95 percent of the time, a grade that puts  a head-of-the-class predator like a lion to shame.
The insect’s efficiency—combined with hackable biology (less moving parts—i.e., neurons) compared to any mammal big or small—makes  the dragonfly an alluring organism to study the neural underpinnings of a basic but still complex behavior like prey capture.
Intrigued by the dragonfly, biologist Anthony Leonardo and colleagues from Intan Technologies and Duke University set about creating the instrumentation that will enable the researchers to monitor the activity of a group of neurons in the species Libellula lydia that appear to be essential for guiding the hunt. This summer, Leonardo’s group at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research campus in Virginia wants to demonstrate what happens in the dragonfly’s nervous system during the course of carrying out a complex  behavior—zooming in for the kill—over the second or so that it unfolds. “The dragonfly catches moving flies in the air,” Leonardo says. “In the process of doing that, it has to think of a moving fly or mosquito and think about where it’s going, where it is now, where it’s going to be in the future how its own body works and that kind of  goal is constantly changing.”
Carrying out these experiments requires both tracking the dragonfly and devising the necessary instrumentation to monitor the 16 neurons hypothesized to steer the insect’s movements as it closes in on a Drosophila. The team was able to successfully outfit dragonflies with a set of small reflective balls on the head and wings to track them as they move through an insect version of the Roman Coliseum where they feast away on fruit flies.
The hard part is yet to come during coming months when the insects will be equipped with backpacks that can record signals from brain cells when going after a fly and then transmit them by a radio signal to a computer for analysis. A dragonfly weighs 400 milligrams, less than half the weight of a paper clip, so building a backpack that would not pin the insect to the ground or radically change its behavior is a major challenge.
The smallest practical battery for the telemetry in the backpack would have totaled about a third the weight of the dragonfly, and might have dampened the insect’s ardor for the hunt. So Leonardo and team designed a 40-milligran backpack that is powered by energy from  radio waves. By doing so, they can record from the insect’s steering neurons that guide it during prey capture—the garb should enable monitoring other  groups of neurons as well. The backpack has tiny wires, miniature sensors, that connect to the ventral nerve cord, the dragonfly equivalent of a spinal cord. The backpack should be able to transmit 5 megabits per second of information about what the insect’s neurons are doing as it descends upon its lunch.
If these tests go as planned, the work will provide new insights into how circuits operate during dynamic neural processes that take in sensory information and process it to make decisions about future actions. “Our hope is that what we learn about the dragonfly will be broadly applicable to how neurons solve problems in general,  Leonardo says. “This is a broad class of computation problems that nervous systems have to solve—and in some what they’ve evolved to solve.”

By: Gary Stix
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/talking-back/2013/06/17/dragonflies-with-backpacks-may-advance-the-science-of-prey-capture/

Vitamins: Too much of a not-so-good thing?

Editor's note: To see Offit's interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, check out "Sanjay Gupta, M.D." Saturday at 4:30 p.m. and Sunday at 7:30 a.m.

(CNN) -- Dr. Paul Offit doesn't take any vitamins.

In fact, while you might think that vitamins are great in any quantity, Offit urges you to take a step back and think before swallowing the equivalent of eight cantaloupes in a single dose.

"I think that alternative medicine is often given a free pass," he told CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. "I think we should hold alternative medicine to the same standard that we hold conventional medicine. It lives under this sort of untouchable halo. I think we should be a little more skeptical."

Offit, chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, is no stranger to controversy -- previously he has taken on the anti-vaccine movement. His book "Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine," came out Tuesday.

Vitamins and supplements, representing about a $27 billion industry, are necessary to convert food into energy, but it's possible to take them in excess, Offit said. For instance, it's not uncommon to hear of someone taking 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C, but that's about the same amount in 14 oranges.

"Vitamins live under this notion that you can't possibly hurt yourself," he said. "But you can, by challenging Mother Nature and taking these vitamins and concentrating them to these exceptionally large quantities that you would never normally eat."

Opinion: Alternative healing or quackery?

You may have heard the term "antioxidant" as a buzzword that applies to some vitamins. Antioxidants combat free radicals -- molecules produced when your body breaks down food, or by environmental exposures like tobacco smoke and radiation, according to the National Institutes of Health. Free radicals damage cell membranes and DNA.

Doctors recommend a healthy intake of fruits and vegetables containing antioxidants to prevent this from happening and apparently decreasing the risk of conditions such as cancer and heart disease.

However, oxidation is necessary for life, and preventing too much of this process can be a bad thing because cells that need to be destroyed, such as cancer cells, won't be.

There have been several important studies showing the harmful effects of vitamins.

As Offit wrote in an op-ed the New York Times, a 1994 New England Journal of Medicine study on 29,000 Finnish smokers found beta carotene was associated with lung and heart disease death. Beta carotene and vitamin A in combination were shown in another New England Journal of Medicine study to be linked to a 46% greater risk of death from lung cancer than placebo.

A 2012 Cochrane review of multiple randomized clinical trials showed an increase in risk of death may be linked to beta carotene and vitamin E, as well as higher doses of vitamin A.

The likely explanation, Offit said, is that supplemental antioxidant vitamins, taken in large quantities, cause unnatural behavior in the body, counteracting oxidation too much and leaving the immune system weaker in its defenses against invaders.

In response to Offit's op-ed, the nonprofit Consumer Healthcare Products Association countered that there is research underscoring the benefits of multivitamins, and that these supplements are prominent in the health care regime of many consumers.

"Consumers should always use caution when considering 'megadoses' of any supplements, carefully research these choices, and consult a healthcare professional with questions," the CHPA said. "While Dr. Offit shares his own hypothesis on supplemental antioxidants in this piece, it has yet to be substantiated. Until that time, we look forward to future research that would provide guidance for public health."

The Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade association representing the dietary supplement industry, reacted strongly to Offit's book, saying he "weaves together a series of tired old arguments."

"Dr. Offit's credentials as a respected medical physician are well-established, making his dismissal of the value of dietary supplements all the more unfortunate," council president Steve Mister said in a statement.

"With more than 150 million Americans taking dietary supplements each year, it would be a shame if consumers reading this book mistake the opinion of one doctor for the opinion of the medical community as a whole. It is important for consumers to have an open dialogue with their health care practitioners about their dietary supplement regimens, and hopefully this book won't deter them from doing so."

The abundance of strong studies on the harmful effects of megavitamins suggests to Offit that these supplements are worse than Vioxx. That was an anti-inflammatory drug that its manufacturer, Merck, voluntarily withdrew from the market in 2004 after evidence emerged of its harm to the heart in some people.

"I think if vitamins were a regulated industry, you could argue that megavitamins would have a black box warning on them," he told CNN.

Because the industry is not regulated, no one knows if alternative remedies are actually the same, or have a standard concentration, from batch to batch. No safety or efficacy data is available, either, the way there is with pharmaceuticals regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

"I think people have the misconception that these products -- dietary supplements and vitamins -- are made by elves and old hippies that have meadows and flowers," he said.

The 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act had the effect of defeating the FDA's attempt to regulate the supplements industry, so consumers don't know what they are buying, Offit said.

"We are the victims of enormous marketing campaign regarding some of these vitamins and supplements," he said.

Despite the widespread popularity of vitamins and supplements, doctors shouldn't encourage patients to take these substances just because they want them, he said. "I think the message is this: That patients are not customers, and we're not waiters."

By: Elizabeth Landau

Using your 'inner bat' to help navigate

Bats are famous for using sound to navigate successfully, and new research suggests we could all use our "inner bat" to get around.

Blind people are aware of this technique. Some click their tongue or tap their cane on the floor and use the resulting echoes to help them move around safely.
Researchers in Southampton have found that we could all make use of the soundscapes that surround us, whether we can see or not.
The new study, which involved both sighted people wearing blindfolds and blind people, looked at the types of sound that were best to locate an object.
Lead researcher Dr Daniel Rowan, a lecturer in audiology at the University of Southampton, said in one test the longer sounds, lasting around half a second, made things easier.

"What the experiment showed is that as the duration of the sound got shorter and shorter, people's ability to tell whether an object was to the left or right got worse. Having a longer duration signal appears better than a short one."

But if you want to know something different about an object - like how close it is - it may be that a shorter duration, of just 10 milliseconds, could be better.
"Some bats that use echolocation. If they're hunting prey, they change their call as they get closer to the prey to reveal different sorts of information."
Never crash Claire Randall, who has been virtually blind from birth, uses echolocation.
"I think the first time I was aware of it was when I was about five. I used to ride a bike and I developed the ability to swerve past a lamp post and miss it by millimetres, too regularly for it to be a coincidence."

Her mother marvelled at her ability to miss obstacles.

"One day my mum asked me how I always managed to miss the lamp post, and the only way I could explain it was, 'It goes dark past my ears.' "
The history of echolocation is fascinating. Back in the 1940s and 50s there was an idea that we had a separate sense on the face specially for detecting echoes.
Now we know it's the hearing system that does it and, although blind people seem to have honed their skills, we are all capable of navigating using sound.
One reason sighted people may not exploit this ability so much is that their world is dominated by vision.
This is seen in the "ventriloquism effect", where sounds are attributed to a dummy because its mouth is moving, overriding where the sound is really coming from, the poker-faced ventriloquist.
Previous research has involved real-life locations. But this study used "virtual obstacles", represented by sounds mimicking echoes from those imaginary objects in headphones worn by the study participants.
Extraordinary feats Dr Rowan said: "In using virtual objects there were no other clues that someone might use: for instance, the creaking as you move an object around or the wafting of air across their face as you move something around."
He has heard the reports of extraordinary feats.
"There are some expert echolocators who are able to do some fairly amazing things, such as ride a bike or play basketball, and World Access for the Blind trains people to do this.
"But we know less about how blind people in general use echoes."
The findings have just been published in the journal Hearing Research. Dr Rowan hopes that they will help to improve echolocation skills.
He said: "One of the things we wanted to try to contribute to with our research is to provide some underpinning science that may help the development of training programmes, to help blind people use echoes that arrive at their ears more effectively.
Hugh Huddy, from the charity VISION2020UK, said: "This research study is important because not enough is known about the way blind people utilise sound to get around, or indeed how people in general are able to hear the world.
"The link with bats is not helpful though. If this study leads to a better understanding of the amazing yet ordinary hearing abilities within everyone, this may help blind people to make the most of their hearing.
"If scientists can provide answers to big questions like does hearing improve when eyesight becomes impaired, how do blind people develop their hearing skills, and are streets safer for everyone when they are designed for hearing as well as seeing, then there are exciting possibilities for the future."

By Paula McGrath
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22805748

Eye-Tracking Seen As Way To Detect Autism, Other Brain Disorders

Eye-tracking has become the tech trend du jour. Advertisers use data on where you look and when to better capture your attention. Designers employ it to improve products. Game and phone developers utilize it to offer the latest in hands-free interaction.
But eye-tracking can do more than help sell products or give your finger a rest while playing Fruit Ninja. Years of research have found that our tiny, rapid eye movements called saccades serve as a window into the brain for psychologists just as for advertisers—but instead of giving clues about our preferred cookie brands (pdf), they elucidate our inner mental functioning. The question is, can capturing such movements help clinicians make diagnoses of mental and neurological disorders, such as autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, Parkinson’s disease and more? For many researchers in this growing field, the outlook so far looks positive.
“Visual scanning reflects a model of the world that exists inside the brain of each individual,” explains Moshe Eizenman, a leading eye-tracking researcher at the University of Toronto. “People with mental disorders have a model of the world that is slightly different than that of normal people—and by moving their eyes, they provide information about this different model.” Autistic children, for example, tend to avoid social images in favor of abstract ones, and they also more rarely and fleetingly make eye contact when looking at faces in an image or video in comparison with nonautistic kids. Similarly distinct, abnormal eye-movement patterns occur in a number of mental disorders, scientists have found.
Until recently, such insights have remained relegated to the lab setting, where researchers traditionally rely on special tools (like mounted headgear) and instructed tasks (like following a moving target across a computer screen). Now, as the cost of the technology drops and accuracy of more common—and practical—tools improves, eye tracking may find wider use in the clinical setting. “There is going to be a huge growth in the accessibility of eye-tracking devices to clinicians and others,” Eizenman predicts. “It won’t remain the domain of experts.” But technological advancements themselves are not enough to make eye-tracking for mental health monitoring go mainstream. The big challenge ahead, he says, is meaningful analysis of eye movement information.
Laurent Itti of the University of Southern California’s iLab is a part of a team working on this very challenge. Along with a group of researchers from U.S.C. and Queen’s University in Ontario, last year Itti devised a data-heavy, low-cost method of identifying brain disorders via eye-tracking. Subjects in this “free viewing” test sit and naturally watch a video on TV for 15 minutes while their eye-movements are recorded. The result is a deluge of data (the average person makes three to five saccadic eye movements per second), so Itti’s team uses advanced machine learning—algorithms that enable a computer to recognize patterns without explicit human instruction—to parse the results and distinguish deviant eye-movements from normal patterns.
In a small, proof-of-concept study (pdf) Itti’s team found that their algorithm could classify mental disorders through eye-movement patterns: They identified elderly Parkinson’s patients with nearly 90 percent accuracy as well as children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or fetal alcohol spectrum disorder with 77 percent accuracy. “This is very different from what people have done before. We’re trying to have completely automated interpretation of the eye movement data,” Itti says. “So you don’t need to have a scientist look at the data to figure out what’s going on; we’re using algorithms and machines to [identify] the linkage between eye-movement and cognition.”

By Nadia Popovich
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/18/eye-tracking-autism-brain-disorders_n_3460303.html?utm_hp_ref=science

A Rose

http://teenink.com/nonfiction/all/article/373859/A-Rose/