Great apes go through mid-life crisis

They may not take up surfing or start second careers as cupcake-makers, but chimpanzees and orangutans seem to go through a ‘mid-life crisis’, just like humans.

A study of 508 great apes in captivity shows that the animals’ sense of well-being bottoms out in their late 20s to mid-30s, the ape equivalent of middle age, before rebounding in old age.

The finding that mid-life crises may not be uniquely human suggests that the events might have a biological, rather than a sociological, cause.

Men and women worldwide, regardless of their wealth or status, experience a dip in happiness at middle-age, generally defined as from the mid-30s to late 50s. Despite this universality, social scientists have struggled to identify the underlying cause of the dissatisfaction. Social and economic factors, such as financial hardship and the failure to realize unrealistic ambitions, are possible causes.

Alexander Weiss, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and his team set out to see if there might be a biological factor involved in the crises. They sought to assess the well-being of captive chimpanzees and orangutans as judged by their keepers or those who knew them well.

The apes covered all age ranges, and their ‘happiness’ was rated through a survey answered by their keepers. The survey covered four criteria: the animals’ overall mood; how much pleasure they got out of socializing; their success in achieving goals such as obtaining food and objects they desire; and how happy the keeper would be if he or she were that animal for a week.

The survey is admittedly anthropomorphic, says Weiss, but he adds that it is easy for someone who spends a lot of time with an ape to gauge its mood. Moreover, his previous work shows that the measure of well-being is consistent when measured by different caretakers, and is based, in part, on inherited genetic factors.

Among three different groups of chimps and orangutans surveyed, the happiest tended to be the oldest and youngest, and the most dissatisfied tended to be in their 30s. The study, however, is a snapshot — it didn’t follow any of the apes over time — which means there could be confounding factors such as the early death of unhappy apes. Nonetheless, Weiss believes the results offer a true picture.

It Just Smells

If you play sounds of many different frequencies at the same time, they combine to produce neutral “white noise.” Neuroscientists say they have created an analogous generic scent by blending odors. Such “olfactory white” might rarely, if ever, be found in nature, but it could prove useful in research, other scientists say.

Using just a few hundred types of biochemical receptors, each of which respond to just a few odorants, the human nose can distinguish thousands of different odors. Yet humans can’t easily identify the individual components of a mixture, even when they can identify the odors alone, says Noam Sobel, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Now, he and his colleagues suggest, various blends made up of a large number of odors all begin to smell the same—even when the blends share no common components.

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Although many scents—such as coffee, wine, roses, and dirty socks—are complex blends containing hundreds of components, they are very distinctive. At least two factors are responsible, Sobel says: The individual odorants are often chemically related, and often one or more of them is vastly more intense than the rest.

The team’s findings are “a clever piece of work that shows the olfactory system works exactly as we would predict from our current understanding of it,” says Tim Jacob, a neuroscientist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom. “That is, if you stimulate every olfactory ‘channel’ to the same extent, the brain cannot characterize or identify a particular smell,” he notes.

“Olfactory white is a neat idea, and it draws interesting parallels to white light and white noise,” says Jay Gottfried, an olfactory neuroscientist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois. The new study “definitely adds new information about how the brain interprets odors,” he notes.

Even though olfactory white is not likely to be encountered in nature, the concept could be useful, Gottfried says. “Researchers have found that white noise is a useful stimulus in experiments to probe auditory responses,” he notes, and scientists probing the human sense of smell might find similar uses for olfactory white.

The Hazards of Growing Up Painlessly

The girl who feels no pain was in the kitchen, stirring ramen noodles, when the spoon slipped from her hand and dropped into the pot of boiling water. It was a school night; the TV was on in the living room, and her mother was folding clothes on the couch. Without thinking, Ashlyn Blocker reached her right hand in to retrieve the spoon, then took her hand out of the water and stood looking at it under the oven light. She walked a few steps to the sink and ran cold water over all her faded white scars, then called to her mother, “I just put my fingers in!” Her mother, Tara Blocker, dropped the clothes and rushed to her daughter’s side. “Oh, my lord!” she said — after 13 years, that same old fear — and then she got some ice and gently pressed it against her daughter’s hand, relieved that the burn wasn’t worse.

“I showed her how to get another utensil and fish the spoon out,” Tara said with a weary laugh when she recounted the story to me two months later. “Another thing,” she said, “she’s starting to use flat irons for her hair, and those things get superhot.”

Tara was sitting on the couch in a T-shirt printed with the words “Camp Painless But Hopeful.” Ashlyn was curled on the living-room carpet crocheting a purse from one of the skeins of yarn she keeps piled in her room. Her 10-year-old sister, Tristen, was in the leather recliner, asleep on top of their father, John Blocker, who stretched out there after work and was slowly falling asleep, too. The house smelled of the homemade macaroni and cheese they were going to have for dinner. A South Georgia rainstorm drummed the gutters, and lightning illuminated the batting cage and the pool in the backyard.

Without lifting her eyes from the crochet hooks in her hands, Ashlyn spoke up to add one detail to her mother’s story. “I was just thinking, What did I just do?” she said.

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A 3-D Light Switch for the Brain

A new tool for neuroscientists delivers a thousand pinpricks of light to a chunk of gray matter smaller than a sugar cube. The new fiber-optic device, created by biologists and engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, is the first tool that can deliver precise points of light to a 3-D section of living brain tissue. The work is a step forward for a relatively new but promising technique that uses gene therapy to turn individual brain cells on and off with light.

Scientists can use the new 3-D “light switch” to better understand how the brain works. It might also be used one day to create neural prostheses that could treat conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy. The researchers describe their device in a paper published today in the Optical Society’s (OSA) journal Optics Letters.

The technique of manipulating neurons with light is only a few years old, but the authors estimate that thousands of scientists are already using this technology, called optogenetics, to study the brain. In optogenetics, researchers first sensitize select cells in the brain to a particular color of light. Then, by illuminating precise areas of the brain, they are able to selectively activate or deactivate the individual neurons that have been sensitized.

Ed Boyden, a synthetic biologist at MIT and co-lead researcher on the paper, is a pioneer of this emerging field, which he says offers the ability to probe connections in the brain.

"You can see neural activity in the brain that is associated with specific behaviors," Boyden says, “but is it important? Or is it a passive copy of important activity located elsewhere in the brain? There’s no way to know for sure if you just watch.” Optogenetics allows scientists to play a more active role in probing the brain’s connections, to fire up one type of cell or deactivate another and then observe the effect on a behavior, such as quieting a seizure.

Unlike the previous, 1-D versions of this light-emitting device, the new tool delivers light to the brain in three dimensions, opening the potential to explore entire circuits within the brain. So far, the 3-D version has been tested in mice, although Boyden and colleagues have used earlier optogenetic technologies with non-human primates as well.

HEARBO Robot Has Superhearing

We live in a world of sounds, full of beautiful music, birds chirping, and the voices of our friends. It’s a rich cacophony, with blaring beeps, accented alarms, and knock-knock jokes. The sound of a door opening can alert us to a friend’s arrival, and a door slamming can alert us to an impending argument.

HEARBO (HEAR-ing roBOt) is a robot developed at Honda Research Institute–Japan (HRI-JP), and its job is to understand this world of sound, in a field called Computational Auditory Scene Analysis.

IBM Research And LLNL Claim 10¹⁴ Synapse Simulation

Inspired by the function, power, and volume of the organic brain, IBMis reportedly developing TrueNorth, a novel modular, scalable, non-von Neumann, ultra-low power, cognitive computing architecture. The TrueNorth system consists of a scalable network of neurosynaptic cores, with each core containing neurons, dendrites, synapses, and axons. Also, to help the computation of TrueNorth, IBM has developed Compass, a multi-threaded, massively parallel functional simulator and a parallel compiler that maps a network of long-distance pathways in the macaque monkey brain to TrueNorth.

The research was recently presented at the Super Computing 2012 (SC12) conference in Salt Lake City.  The paper, “Compass: A scalable simulator for an architecture for Cognitive Computing" is available online.

IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LBNL) demonstrated near-perfect weak scaling on a 16 rack IBM Blue Gene/Q (262,144 processor cores, 256 TB memory), achieving an unprecedented scale of 256 million neurosynaptic cores containing 65 billion neurons and 16 trillion synapses running only 388× slower than real time with an average spiking rate of 8.1 Hz. By using emerging PGAS communication primitives, IBM also demonstrated 2× better real-time performance over MPI primitives on a 4 rack Blue Gene/P (16384 processor cores, 16 TB memory).

Also, since submitting the original paper, the work has continued using 96 Blue Gene/Q racks of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab Sequoia supercomputer (1,572,864 processor cores, 1.5 PB memory, 98,304 MPI processes, and 6,291,456 threads), IBM and LBNL achieved an unprecedented scale of 2.084 billion neurosynaptic cores containing 53x1010 neurons and 1.37x1014 synapses running only 1542× slower than real time. Here is PDF of IBM Research Report, RJ 10502.

As in the image above, A Network of Neurosynaptic Cores Derived from Long-distance Wiring in the Monkey Brain -Neuro-synaptic cores are locally clustered into brain-inspired regions, and each core is represented as an individual point along the ring. Arcs are drawn from a source core to a destination core with an edge color defined by the color assigned to the source core.

Nose cell transplant enables paralysed dogs to walk

Scientists have reversed paralysis in dogs after injecting them with cells grown from the lining of their nose.

The pets had all suffered spinal injuries which prevented them from using their back legs. The Cambridge University team is cautiously optimistic the technique could eventually have a role in the treatment of human patients. The study is the first to test the transplant in “real-life” injuries rather than laboratory animals.

In the study, funded by the Medical Research Council and published in the neurology journal Brain, the dogs had olfactory ensheathing cells from the lining of their nose removed. These were grown and expanded for several weeks in the laboratory.

Virtual Reality Could Spot Real-World Impairments

A virtual reality test being developed at UTSC might do a better job than pencil-and-paper tests of predicting whether a cognitive impairment will have real-world consequences.

The test developed by Konstantine Zakzanis, associate professor of psychology, and colleagues, uses a computer-game-like virtual world and asks volunteers to navigate their ways through tasks such as delivering packages or running errands around town.

“If we’re being asked to tell if people could do things like work, houseclean, and take care of their kids, we need to show that our tests predict performance in the real world,” says Zakzanis.

But standard tests don’t do that very well, he says. Although tests that ask people to do things like solve math problems, sort cards, remember names, or judge the relative positions of lines in visual two dimensional space, can detect cognitive impairments caused by circumscribed lesions following a stroke or head injury, they’re not very good at predicting who will be able to function in the real world and who won’t.

That’s a problem for cognitively impaired people who might be denied insurance benefits or workers compensation based on tests that are insensitive to demonstrating their impairment. It is akin to having a broken arm with no x-ray to prove it.

Stanford/Yale study gives insight into subtle genomic differences among our own cells

Stanford University School of Medicine scientists have demonstrated, in a study conducted jointly with researchers at Yale University, that induced-pluripotent stem cells — the embryonic-stem-cell lookalikes whose discovery a few years ago won this year’s Nobel Prize in medicine — are not as genetically unstable as was thought.

The new study, published online Nov. 18 in Nature, showed that what seemed to be changes in iPS cells’ genetic makeup — presumed to be inflicted either in the course of their generation from adult cells or during their propagation and maintenance in laboratory culture dishes — instead are often accurate reflections of existing but previously undetected genetic variations among the cells comprising our bodies.

That’s good news for researchers hoping to use the cells to study disease or, someday, for regenerative medicine. But it raises the question of whether and to what extent we humans are really walking mosaics whose constituent cells differ genetically from one to the next in possibly significant respects, said Alexander Urban, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. Urban shared senior authorship of the study with bioinformatics professor Mark Gerstein, PhD, and neurobiology professor Flora Vaccarino, MD, both of Yale.

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