Coding cognition: IBM needs apps for its digital brain
IBM wants to see researchers writing programs for the digital equivalent of a human brain. It’s a lofty, almost sci-fi task that’s likely a far way out, but IBM announced on Wednesday that it had made some significant steps toward making it happen: it’s been developing just such a digital brain, and it’s releasing the very first toolkit to let developers start using it.
High Blood Sugar Linked to Dementia
People with diabetes face an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, a connection scientists and physicians have worried about for years. They still can’t explain it.
Now comes a novel observational study of patients at a large health care system in Washington State showing that higher blood glucose levels are associated with a greater risk of dementia — even among people who don’t have diabetes. The results, published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, “may have influence on the way we think about blood sugar and the brain,” said Dr. Paul Crane, the lead author and associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington.
The researchers tracked the blood glucose levels of 2,067 members of Group Health, a nonprofit HMO, for nearly seven years on average. Some patients had Type 2 diabetes when the study began, but most didn’t. None had dementia.
Over the years, as they saw doctors at Group Health, the participants received blood glucose tests. “It’s a common test in routine clinical practice,” Dr. Crane said. “We had an amazing opportunity with all this data. All the lab results since 1988 were available to us.”
The participants (average age at the start: 76) also reported to Group Health every other year for cognitive screening and, if their results were below normal, further testing and evaluation. Over the course of the study, about a quarter developed dementia of some kind, primarily Alzheimer’s disease or vascular dementia.
To measure blood sugar levels, the researchers combined glucose measurements, both fasting and nonfasting, with the HbA1c glycated hemoglobin assay, which provides a more accurate long-term picture. They also adjusted the data for other cardiovascular factors already linked to dementia, like high blood pressure and smoking.
“We found a steadily increasing risk associated with ever-higher blood glucose levels, even in people who didn’t have diabetes,” Dr. Crane said. Of particular interest: “There’s no threshold, no place where the risk doesn’t go up any further or down any further.” The association with dementia kept climbing with higher blood sugar levels and, at the other end of the spectrum, continued to decrease with lower levels.
This held true even at glucose levels considered normal. Among those whose blood sugar averaged 115 milligrams per deciliter, the risk of dementia was 18 percent higher than among those at 100 mg/dL, just slightly lower. The effects were also pronounced among those with diabetes: patients with average glucose levels of 190 mg/dL had a 40 percent higher risk of dementia than those whose levels averaged 160 mg/dL.
Though a longitudinal study like this one provides insight into the differences between people, it can’t explain why higher blood glucose might be connected to dementia, or tell individuals whether lower blood glucose is protective.
“People shouldn’t run for the hills or try crazy diets,” Dr. Crane cautioned. While an epidemiological study like this one can guide further exploration, he said, “This doesn’t show that changes in behavior that lower your individual blood sugar would decrease your individual risk of dementia.”
As for the blood glucose levels the study recorded, “clinically, they’re not big differences,” said Dr. Medha Munshi, a geriatrician and endocrinologist who directs the geriatric diabetes program at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, who was not involved in the study. “I wouldn’t change my goals for diabetes management based on this study.” Nor would she warn someone whose blood glucose hits 115 mg/dL that he or she faces a greater risk of dementia.
But because diabetes itself can pose such a threat to health and quality of life, she still urges patients to adopt healthy practices like exercising regularly and maintaining a normal weight to try to avoid the disease. If by doing so they also lower their dementia risk — and knowing that would require a different study, focused on interventions — that would be a bonus.
This research “offers more evidence that the brain is a target organ for damage by high blood sugar,” said Dr. Munshi. “And everyone is still working on the ‘why’.
Dolphins Have Longest Memories in Animal Kingdom
Marine mammals can remember their friends after 20 years apart, study says.
New experiments show that bottlenose dolphins can remember whistles of other dolphins they’d lived with after 20 years of separation. Each dolphin has a unique whistle that functions like a name, allowing the marine mammals to keep close social bonds.
The new research shows that dolphins have the longest memory yet known in any species other than people. Elephants and chimpanzees are thought to have similar abilities, but they haven’t yet been tested, said study author Jason Bruck, an animal behaviorist at the University of Chicago.
Bruck came up with the idea to study animal memory when his brother’s dog, usually wary of male strangers, remembered and greeted him four years after last seeing him. “That got me thinking: How long do other animals remember each other?”
I Remember You!
Bruck studied dolphins because their social bonds are extremely important and because there are good records for captive dolphins (as opposed to wild ones).
So he collected data from 43 bottlenose dolphins at six facilities in the U.S. and Bermuda, members of a breeding consortium that has swapped dolphins for decades and kept careful records of each animal’s social partners.
He first played recordings of lots of unfamiliar whistles to the dolphins in the study until the subjects got bored and stopped inspecting the underwater speaker making the sounds.
At this point, he played the whistles of the listening dolphins’ old friends.
When the dolphins heard these familiar whistles, they would perk up and approach the speakers, often whistling their own name and listening for a response.
Overall, the dolphins responded more to animals they’d known decades ago than to random animals—suggesting they recognized their former companions, according to the study, published recently in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Cheeky Dolphins
Working with animals as intelligent as dolphins was a challenge, Bruck added. The animals loved participating in the experiment so much that they’d often hover over the speaker, blocking the noise.
Others would begin “whistling directly at me as if I could understand them,” he said.
And one set of cheeky young dolphins swam up to Bruck and started whistling the names of the dominant males in their group in order of rank, perhaps suggesting the names they wanted to hear, Bruck said.
Memory Linked to Smarts?
Why dolphins—which live an average of 20 years in the wild—need long-term memory is still unknown. But it may have to do with maintaining relationships, since over time dolphin groups often break up and reorganize into new alliances.
This sort of social system is called “fission-fusion,” and it’s also seen in elephants and chimpanzees—two other highly intelligent and social beings.
Coincidence? Bruck suspects not: “It seems that maybe complex cognition comes from a place of trying to remember who your buddies are,” he said.
Chocolate may help keep brain healthy, sharp in old age, study says
Older chocoholics may have a new excuse to indulge their cravings: The dark stuff not only soothes the soul, but might also sharpen the mind.
In a study published Wednesday in the journal Neurology, researchers reported that chocolate may help improve brain health and thinking skills in the elderly. The Boston-based team found that older people who initially performed poorly on a memory and reasoning test and also had reduced blood flow to their brains showed improvement after drinking two cups of cocoa every day for a month.
The researchers had set out to test whether chocolate could increase blood flow to the brain during problem solving, boosting performance, after finding in earlier studies that consuming chocolate high in the antioxidant flavanol was associated with better brain and blood vessel functioning. They recruited 60 elderly subjects for the new study. Since they suspected that flavanol would improve the subjects’ thinking skills and blood flow, they randomly assigned subjects to drink either flavanol-rich or flavanol-poor hot chocolate.
The participants drank two cups of hot chocolate every day for 30 days. Before and after the study period, they completed a memory and reasoning test, which assessed their ability to recognize patterns in a series of letters on a computer screen. Additionally, the researchers used ultrasound to indirectly measure the blood flow to subjects’ brains, as well as magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, to examine subjects’ white matter — the nerve fibers that connect different parts of the brain.
People who performed poorly on the initial cognitive test — about a third of the participants — also had reduced blood flow to their brains and widespread white matter damage. Those who scored high on the test had signficantly better blood flow and more intact white matter, indicating that blood flow, cognitive functioning and brain structure were linked.
At the end of the 30 days, the team found that drinking hot chocolate benefited only the subjects who had poor cognitive and neurovascular function to begin with. After the hot cocoa regimen, those individuals showed an 8% improvement in blood flow and a roughly 1 minute faster reaction time on the cognitive task. There was barely any improvement among those who had started out with normal blood flow and cognitive skills.
To the scientists’ surprise, there weren’t significant differences in the neurovascular or cognitive changes between the flavanol-rich and flavanol-poor groups — suggesting that something else in the chocolate was causing the improvements. The researchers plan to identify and test this component in future trials, said study leader Dr. Farzaneh A. Sorond, a neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
After identifying the substance, the researchers may even be able to produce it in pill form, said Dr. Costantino Iadecola, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, who was not involved in the study.
By showing that blood flow to the brain is associated with cognitive function, the study helps explain earlier findings that people with high blood pressure and other cardiovascular conditions were prone to developing dementia. This, in turn, suggests that the cognitive functioning test and other measures used in the trial may one day serve as cheap, noninvasive methods to screen people for risk of dementia.
Scientists have focused more on treating than on preventing age-related cognitive decline, Sorond said.
“By the time people develop these problems, it’s too late to initiate the drugs we have,” she said. “If we could diagnose them earlier, before they have clinical symptoms, using physiological markers … maybe we could prevent the disease or lessen its impact.”
The study has its limitations. The ultrasound technique the researchers used offered only an estimate of blood flow to the brain – a precise measurement would require a more invasive method. “This was an easy way to get this information, but not the most accurate way,” Iadecola said.
He added that the study was small, and that it was unclear how long the chocolate’s effects would last.
“Will these changes persist after a month of cocoa or go back to where they were before? Would you take the cocoa forever?” Iadecola said. “We don’t know.”
Although the study results may tempt some to add chocolate to their diet, Sorond noted that the participants’ food intake was strictly regulated to offset the excess fat and sugar in hot chocolate. For people seeking to keep their brains healthy, she recommends an intervention already known to improve cognitive function: exercise.
Religious Factors and Hippocampal Atrophy in Late Life
Despite a growing interest in the ways spiritual beliefs and practices are reflected in brain activity, there have been relatively few studies using neuroimaging data to assess potential relationships between religious factors and structural neuroanatomy. This study examined prospective relationships between religious factors and hippocampal volume change using high-resolution MRI data of a sample of 268 older adults. Religious factors assessed included life-changing religious experiences, spiritual practices, and religious group membership. Hippocampal volumes were analyzed using the GRID program, which is based on a manual point-counting method and allows for semi-automated determination of region of interest volumes. Significantly greater hippocampal atrophy was observed for participants reporting a life-changing religious experience. Significantly greater hippocampal atrophy was also observed from baseline to final assessment among born-again Protestants, Catholics, and those with no religious affiliation, compared with Protestants not identifying as born-again. These associations were not explained by psychosocial or demographic factors, or baseline cerebral volume. Hippocampal volume has been linked to clinical outcomes, such as depression, dementia, and Alzheimer’s Disease. The findings of this study indicate that hippocampal atrophy in late life may be uniquely influenced by certain types of religious factors.
Autism affects different parts of the brain in women and men
Autism affects different parts of the brain in females with autism than males with autism, a new study reveals. The research is published today in the journal Brain as an open-access article.
Scientists at the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge used magnetic resonance imaging to examine whether autism affects the brain of males and females in a similar or different way. They found that the anatomy of the brain of someone with autism substantially depends on whether an individual is male or female, with brain areas that were atypical in adult females with autism being similar to areas that differ between typically developing males and females. This was not seen in men with autism.
“One of our new findings is that females with autism show neuroanatomical ‘masculinization’,” said Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, senior author of the paper. “This may implicate physiological mechanisms that drive sexual dimorphism, such as prenatal sex hormones and sex-linked genetic mechanisms.”
Autism affects 1% of the general population and is more prevalent in males. Most studies have therefore focused on male-dominant samples. As a result, our understanding of the neurobiology of autism is male-biased.
“This is one of the largest brain imaging studies of sex/gender differences yet conducted in autism. Females with autism have long been under-recognized and probably misunderstood,” said Dr Meng-Chuan Lai, who led the research project. “The findings suggest that we should not blindly assume that everything found in males with autism applies to females. This is an important example of the diversity within the ‘spectrum’.”
Dr Michael Lombardo, who co-led the study, added that although autism manifests itself in many different ways, grouping by gender may help provide a better understanding of this condition.
He said: “Autism as a whole is complex and vastly diverse, or heterogeneous, and this new study indicates that there are ways to subgroup the autism spectrum, such as whether an individual is male or female. Reducing heterogeneity via subgrouping will allow research to make significant progress towards understanding the mechanisms that cause autism.”
Self-perceived social status predicts hippocampal function and stress hormones
A mother’s perceived social status predicts her child’s brain development and stress indicators, finds a study at Boston Children’s Hospital. While previous studies going back to the 1950s have linked objective socioeconomic factors — such as parental income or education — to child health, achievement and brain function, the new study is the first to link brain function to maternal self-perception.
In the study, children whose mothers saw themselves as having a low social status were more likely to have increased cortisol levels, an indicator of stress, and less activation of their hippocampus, a structure in the brain responsible for long-term memory formation (required for learning) and reducing stress responses.
Findings were published online August 6th by the journal Developmental Science, and will be part of a special issue devoted to the effects of socioeconomic status on brain development.
"We know that there are big disparities among people in income and education," says Margaret Sheridan, PhD, of the Labs of Cognitive Neuroscience at Boston Children’s Hospital, the study’s first author. "Our results indicate that a mother’s perception of her social status ‘lives’ biologically in her children."
Sheridan, senior investigator Charles Nelson, PhD, of Boston Children’s Hospital and colleagues studied 38 children aged 8.3 to 11.8 years. The children gave saliva samples to measure levels of cortisol, and 19 also underwent functional MRI of the brain, focusing on the hippocampus.
Mothers, meanwhile, rated their social standing on a ladder on a scale of 1 to 10, comparing themselves with others in the United States. Findings were as follows:
The findings suggest that while actual socioeconomic status varies, how people perceive and adapt to their situation is an important factor in child development. Some of this may be culturally determined, Sheridan notes. She is currently participating in a much larger international study of childhood poverty, the Young Lives Project, that is looking at objective and subjective measures of social status along with health measures and cognitive function. The study will capture much wider extremes of socioeconomic status than would a U.S.-based study.
What the current study didn’t find was evidence that stress itself alters hippocampal function; no relationship was found between cortisol and hippocampal function, as has been seen in animals, perhaps because of the small number children having brain fMRIs. “This needs further exploration,” says Sheridan. “There may be more than one pathway leading to differences in long-term memory, or there may be an effect of stress on the hippocampus that comes out only in adulthood.”
(Source: eurekalert.org)
Researchers find caffeine during pregnancy negatively impacts mice brains
A team of European researchers has found that mice who consume caffeine while pregnant give birth to pups with negative changes to their brains. In their paper published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the team reports on their findings after examining the brains of mice pups whose mothers were given caffeine during pregnancy.
Medical researchers have shown that drugs such as cocaine, heroin or even marijuana can have a negative impact on fetal development—in contrast most believe that moderate amounts of caffeine consumption during pregnancy is “safe” meaning it has little or no adverse impact on fetal development. This new study doesn’t change that view, but it does suggest that perhaps more research needs to be done.
In their study, the researchers administered the equivalent of 4 or 5 cups of coffee a day to pregnant mice—afterwards they studied the brains of the pups that were born. In so doing, they found that GABA neurons didn’t migrate during brain development to their proper location in the Hippocampus at the same rate as untreated mice. GABA neurons are responsible for controlling the flow of information in the brain. Subsequent tests found the treated pups to be more susceptible to seizures.
The team also found that if they allowed the treated pups to grow to adulthood, they tended to demonstrate problems with memory—instead of playing with new objects placed in their cages, for example, they were satisfied with playing with objects they already knew—a trait that is uncommon for mice. Autopsies of adult brains also showed fewer neurons in the Hippocampus.
The researchers point out that their results in mice are not necessarily applicable to humans and to reinforce that point another team of researchers also published a Focus piece in the same journal pointing out that there are significant differences in the developmental process of humans and mice fetuses and thus the study with mice has no real bearing on whether caffeine may or may not cause developmental problems with human babies.
Still, the results do indicate that perhaps more research should be done to find out if caffeine does indeed have an unknown negative impact on human fetal development.
Wiring diagram of retinal neurons is first step toward mapping the human brain.
The human brain has 100 billion neurons, connected to each other in networks that allow us to interpret the world around us, plan for the future, and control our actions and movements. MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung wants to map those networks, creating a wiring diagram of the brain that could help scientists learn how we each become our unique selves.
In a paper appearing in the Aug. 7 online edition of Nature, Seung and collaborators at MIT and the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Germany have reported their first step toward this goal: Using a combination of human and artificial intelligence, they have mapped all the wiring among 950 neurons within a tiny patch of the mouse retina.
Composed of neurons that process visual information, the retina is technically part of the brain and is a more approachable starting point, Seung says. By mapping all of the neurons in this 117-micrometer-by-80-micrometer patch of tissue, the researchers were able to classify most of the neurons they found, based on their patterns of wiring. They also identified a new type of retinal cell that had not been seen before.
“It’s the complete reconstruction of all the neurons inside this patch. No one’s ever done that before in the mammalian nervous system,” says Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience at MIT.
Other MIT authors of the paper are former postdoc Srinivas Turaga and former graduate student Viren Jain. The Max Planck team was led by Winfried Denk, a physicist and the Max Planck Institute’s director. Moritz Helmstaedter, a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute, is the lead author of the paper, and Kevin Briggman, a former postdoc at Max Planck, is also an author.
Tracing connections
Neurons in the retina are classified into five classes: photoreceptors, horizontal cells, bipolar cells, amacrine cells and ganglion cells. Within each class are many types, classified by shape and by the connections they make with other neurons.
“Neurons come in many types, and the retina is estimated to contain 50 to 100 types, but they’ve never been exhaustively characterized. And their connections are even less well known,” Seung says.
In this study, the research team focused on a section of the retina known as the inner plexiform layer, which is one of several layers sandwiched between the photoreceptors, which receive visual input, and the ganglion cells, which relay visual information to the brain via the optic nerve. The neurons of the inner plexiform layer help to process visual information as it passes from the surface of the eye to the optic nerve.
To map all of the connections in this small patch of retina, the researchers first took electron micrographs of the targeted section. The Max Planck researchers obtained these images using a technique called serial block face scanning electron microscopy, which they invented to generate high-resolution three-dimensional images of biological samples.
Developing a wiring diagram from these images required both human and artificial intelligence. First, the researchers hired about 225 German undergraduates to trace the “skeleton” of each neuron, which took more than 20,000 hours of work (a little more than two years).
To flesh out the bodies of the neurons, the researchers fed these traced skeletons into a computer algorithm developed in Seung’s lab, which expands the skeletons into full neuron shapes. The researchers used machine learning to train the algorithm, known as a convolutional network, to detect the boundaries between neurons. Using those as reference points, the algorithm can fill in the entire body of each neuron.
“Tracing neurons in these images is probably one of the world’s most challenging computer vision problems. Our convolutional networks are actually deep artificial neural networks designed with inspiration from how our own visual system processes visual information to solve these difficult problems,” Turaga says.
If human workers were to fill in the entire neuron body, it would take 10 to 100 times longer than just drawing the skeleton. “This speeds up the whole process,” Seung says. “It’s a way of combining human and machine intelligence.”
The only previous complete wiring diagram, which mapped all of the connections between the 302 neurons found in the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, was reported in 1986 and required more than a dozen years of tedious labor.
“I think this is going to be a really significant paper in the history of how we study complex systems,” says Richard Masland, a professor of ophthalmology at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, who was not part of the research team. “This paper identifies circuit motifs that are interesting but really are just symbolic of the many types of questions that could be answered using these techniques.”
Classifying neurons
Wiring diagrams allow scientists to see where neurons connect with each other to form synapses — the junctions that allow neurons to relay messages. By analyzing how neurons are connected to each other, researchers can classify different types of neurons.
The researchers were able to identify most of the 950 neurons included in the new retinal-wiring diagram based on their connections with other neurons, as well as the shape of the neuron. A handful of neurons could not be classified because there was only one of their type, or because only a fragment of the neuron was included in the imaged sample.
“We haven’t completed the project of classifying types but this shows that it should be possible. This method should be able to do it, in principle, if it’s scaled up to a larger piece of tissue,” Seung says.
In this study, the researchers identified a new class of bipolar cells, which relay information from photoreceptors to ganglion cells. However, further study is needed to determine this cell type’s exact function.
Seung’s lab is now working on a wiring diagram of a larger piece of the retina — 0.3 millimeter by 0.3 millimeter — using a slightly different approach. In that study, the researchers first feed their electron micrographs into the computer algorithm, then ask human volunteers to check over the computer’s work and correct mistakes through a crowd-sourcing project known as EyeWire.
Fish do not feel pain the way humans do. That is the conclusion drawn by an international team of researchers consisting of neurobiologists, behavioural ecologists and fishery scientists. One contributor to the landmark study was Prof. Dr. Robert Arlinghaus of the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries and of the Humboldt University in Berlin.
On July 13th a revised animal protection act has come into effect in Germany. But anyone who expects it to contain concrete statements regarding the handling of fish will be disappointed. The legislator seemingly had already found its answer to the fish issue. Accordingly, fish are sentient vertebrates who must be protected against cruel acts performed by humans against animals. Anyone in Germany who, without due cause, kills vertebrates or inflicts severe pain or suffering on them has to face penal consequences as well as severe fines or even prison sentences. Now, the question of whether or not fish are really able to feel pain or suffer in human terms is once again on the agenda. A final decision would have far-reaching consequences for millions of anglers, fishers, aquarists, fish farmers and fish scientists. To this end, a research team consisting of seven people has examined all significant studies on the subject of fish pain. During their research the scientists from Europe, Canada, Australia and the USA have discovered many deficiencies. These are the authors’ main points of criticism: Fish do not have the neuro-physiological capacity for a conscious awareness of pain. In addition, behavioural reactions by fish to seemingly painful impulses were evaluated according to human criteria and were thus misinterpreted. There is still no final proof that fish can feel pain.
This is how it works for humans
To be able to understand the researchers’ criticism you first have to comprehend how pain perception works for humans. Injuries stimulate what is known as nociceptors. These receptors send electrical signals through nerve-lines and the spinal cord to the cerebral cortex (neocortex). With full awareness, this is where they are processed into a sensation of pain. However, even severe injuries do not necessarily have to result in an experience of pain. As an emotional state, pain can for example be intensified through engendering fear and it can also be mentally constructed without any tissue damage. Conversely, any stimulation of the nociceptors can be unconsciously processed without the organism having an experience of pain. This principle is used in cases such as anaesthesia. It is for this reason that pain research distinguishes between a conscious awareness of pain and an unconscious processing of impulses through nociception, the latter of which can also lead to complex hormonal reactions, behavioural responses as well as to learning avoidance reactions. Therefore, nociceptive reactions can never be equated with pain, and are thus, strictly speaking, no prerequisite for pain.
Fish are not comparable to humans in terms of anatomy and physiology
Unlike humans fish do not possess a neocortex, which is the first indicator of doubt regarding the pain awareness of fish. Furthermore, certain nerve fibres in mammals (known as c-nociceptors) have been shown to be involved in the sensation of intense experiences of pain. All primitive cartilaginous fish subject to the study, such as sharks and rays, show a complete lack of these fibres and all bony fish – which includes all common types of fish such as carp and trout – very rarely have them. In this respect, the physiological prerequisites for a conscious experience of pain are hardly developed in fish. However, bony fish certainly possess simple nociceptors and they do of course show reactions to injuries and other interventions. But it is not known whether this is perceived as pain.
There is often a lack of distinction between conscious pain and unconscious nociception
The current overview-study raises the complaint that a great majority of all published studies evaluate a fish’s reaction to a seemingly painful impulse - such as rubbing the injured body part against an object or the discontinuation of the feed intake - as an indication of pain. However, this methodology does not prove verifiably whether the reaction was due to a conscious sensation of pain or an unconscious impulse perception by means of nociception, or a combination of the two. Basically, it is very difficult to deduct underlying emotional states based on behavioural responses. Moreover, fish often show only minor or no reactions at all to interventions which would be extremely painful to us and to other mammals. Pain killers such as morphine that are effective for humans were either ineffective in fish or were only effective in astronomically high doses that, for small mammals, would have meant immediate death from shock. These findings suggest that fish either have absolutely no awareness of pain in human terms or they react completely different to pain. By and large, it is absolutely not advisable to interpret the behaviour of fish from a human perspective.
What does all this mean for those who use fish?
In legal terms it is forbidden to inflict pain, suffering or harm on animals without due cause according to §1 of the German Animal Protection Act. However, the criteria for when such acts are punishable is exclusive tied to the animal’s ability to feel pain and suffering in accordance with §17 of the very same Act. The new study severely doubts that fish are aware of pain as defined by human terms. Therefore, it should actually no longer constitute a criminal offence if, for example, an angler releases a harvestable fish at his own discretion instead of eating it. However, at a legal and moral level, the recently published doubts regarding the awareness of pain in fish do not release anybody from their responsibility of having to justify all uses of fishes in a socially acceptable way and to minimise any form of stress and damage to the fish when interacting with it.
Source
Rose, J.D., Arlinghaus, R., Cooke, S.J., Diggles, B.K., Sawynok, W., Stevens, E.D. & Wynne, C.D.L (in print) Can fish really feel pain? Fish and Fisheries