The cellular cause of birth defects like cleft palates, missing teeth and problems with fingers and toes has been a tricky puzzle for scientists.

Professor Emily Bates and her biochemistry students at Brigham Young University studied an ion channel that regulates the electrical charge of a cell. In a new study published by the journal Development, they show that blocking this channel disrupts the work of a protein that is supposed to carry marching orders to the nucleus.

Without those instructions, cells don’t become what they were supposed to become – be that part of a palate, a tooth or a finger. Though there are various disorders that lead to birth defects, this newly discovered mechanism may be what some syndromes have in common.

Bates and her graduate student, Giri Dahal, now want to apply the findings toward the prevention of birth defects – particularly those caused by fetal alcohol syndrome and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.

"What we think might be the case is that this is the target for a few similar disorders," Bates said. "The big thing that we have right now is that this ion channel is required for protein signaling, which means that developmental signaling pathways can sense the charge of a cell. And that’s exciting for a lot of different reasons."

For example, the new study might also have implications for the battle against cancer. With cancer, the problem is that cells are receiving a bad set of instructions that tells them to multiply and spread. If they can devise a way to block the ion channel, it may stop those cancerous instructions from getting through.

"This protein signaling pathway is the same one that tells cancer cells to metastasize," Bates said. "We’re planning to test a therapy to specifically block this channel in just the cells that we want to stop."

How non-verbal cues can predict a person’s (and a robot’s) trustworthiness

People face this predicament all the time—can you determine a person’s character in a single interaction? Can you judge whether someone you just met can be trusted when you have only a few minutes together? And if you can, how do you do it? Using a robot named Nexi, Northeastern University psychology professor David DeSteno and collaborators Cynthia Breazeal from MIT’s Media Lab and Robert Frank and David Pizarro from Cornell University have figured out the answer. The findings were recently published in the journal Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

It’s What You’re Not Saying…

In the absence of reliable information about a person’s reputation, nonverbal cues can offer a look into a person’s likely actions. This concept has been known for years, but the cues that convey trustworthiness or untrustworthiness have remained a mystery. Collecting data from face-to-face conversations with research participants where money was on the line, DeSteno and his team realized that it’s not one single non-verbal movement or cue that determines a person’s trustworthiness, but rather sets of cues. When participants expressed these cues, they cheated their partners more, and, at a gut level, their partners expected it. “Scientists haven’t been able to unlock the cues to trust because they’ve been going about it the wrong way,” DeSteno said. “There’s no one golden-cue. Context and coordination of movements is what matters.”

Robots Have Feelings, Too

People are fidgety – they’re moving all the time. So how could the team truly zero-in on the cues that mattered? This is where Nexi comes in. Nexi is a humanoid social robot that afforded the team an important benefit – they could control all its movements perfectly. In a second experiment, the team had research participants converse with Nexi for 10 minutes, much like they did with another person in the first experiment. While conversing with the participants, Nexi — operated remotely by researchers — either expressed cues that were considered less than trustworthy or expressed similar, but non-trust-related cues. Confirming their theory, the team found that participants exposed to Nexi’s untrustworthy cues intuited that Nexi was likely to cheat them and adjusted their financial decisions accordingly. “Certain nonverbal gestures trigger emotional reactions we’re not consciously aware of, and these reactions are enormously important for understanding how interpersonal relationships develop,” said Frank. “The fact that a robot can trigger the same reactions confirms the mechanistic nature of many of the forces that influence human interaction.”

Real-Life Application

This discovery has led the research team to not only answer enduring questions about if and how people are able to assess the trustworthiness of an unknown person, but also to show the human mind’s willingness to ascribe trust-related intentions to technological entities based on the same movements. “This is a very exciting result that showcases how social robots can be used to gain important insights about human behavior,” said Cynthia Breazeal of MIT’s Media Lab. “This also has fascinating implications for the design of future robots that interact and work alongside people as partners.” Accordingly, these findings hold important insights not only for security and financial endeavors and for the evolving design of robots and computer-based agents. The subconscious mind is ready to see these entities as social beings.

Slow-wave sleep, or ‘deep sleep’, is intimately involved in the complex control of the onset of puberty, according to a recent study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism (JCEM).

The many changes that occur in boys and girls during puberty are triggered by changes in the brain. Previous studies have shown that the parts of the brain that control puberty first become active during sleep, but the present study shows that it is deep sleep, rather than sleep in general, that is associated with this activity.

"If the parts of the brain that activate the reproductive system depend on deep sleep, then we need to be concerned that inadequate or disturbed sleep in children and young adolescents may interfere with normal pubertal maturation," said Harvard researcher, Natalie Shaw, MD, of Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital who led the study. "This is particularly true for children who have been diagnosed with sleep disorders, but may also have more widespread implications as recent studies have found that most adolescents get less sleep than they require."

In the study, researchers examined pulses of luteinizing hormone (LH) secretion in relation to specific sleep stages in children ages 9-15. LH is essential for reproduction and triggers ovulation in females and stimulates the production of testosterone in males. Researchers found that the majority of LH pulses that occur after sleep are preceded by deep sleep suggesting that deep sleep is intimately involved in pubertal onset.

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The world continues to be a noisy place, and Purdue University researchers have found that all that background chatter causes the ears of those with hearing impairments to work differently.

"When immersed in the noise, the neurons of the inner ear must work harder because they are spread too thin," said Kenneth S. Henry, a postdoctoral researcher in Purdue’s Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences. "It’s comparable to turning on a dozen television screens and asking someone to focus on one program. The result can be fuzzy because these neurons get distracted by other information."

The findings, by Henry and Michael G. Heinz, an associate professor of speech, language and hearing sciences, are published as a Brief Communication in Nature Neuroscience. The work was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

Have you ever wondered why some people find it so much easier to stop smoking than others?

New research shows that vulnerability to smoking addiction is shaped by our genes. A study from the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital - The Neuro, McGill University shows that people with genetically fast nicotine metabolism have a significantly greater brain response to smoking cues than those with slow nicotine metabolism. Previous research shows that greater reactivity to smoking cues predicts decreased success at smoking cessation and that environmental cues promote increased nicotine intake in animals and humans. This new finding that nicotine metabolism rates affect the brain’s response to smoking may lead the way for tailoring smoking cessation programs based on individual genetics.

Turn your dreams into music

Computer scientists in Finland have developed a method that automatically composes music out of sleep measurements. The composition service works live on the Web at sleepmusicalization.net

Developed under Hannu Toivonen, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki, Finland, the software automatically composes synthetic music using data related to a person’s own sleep as input. The composition program is the work of Aurora Tulilaulu, a student of Professor Toivonen.

"The software composes a unique piece based on the stages of sleep, movement, heart rate and breathing. It compresses a night’s sleep into a couple of minutes," she describes.

With the exception of low-level body-hacking, transhumanism is an expensive business. From genetic modification and cryonics to robo-prosthetics and smart drugs, it’s the playground of the privileged. But if a wealthy pioneer chooses to genetically engineer their perfect sproglet, who picks up the bill when it all goes wrong? And at what point does a perceived enhancement become so popular that it becomes the norm?

Steve Fuller believes that as people experiment with more enhancements, there is an impact on human identity as a whole, since the notion of enhancement relies on our understanding of what it means to be physically or mentally “normal”. This understanding, in turn, informs discussions about discrimination and justice. For example, according to the Equality Act 2010, businesses that provide a service to the public must make reasonable adjustments to their premises to give disabled access. What happens if bionic retinas with night vision or augmented reality becomes the norm? Should there be NHS provisions for the minority that don’t have access to the technology?

Furthermore, what happens if technological advances in prosthetics and exoskeletons mean that we no longer see what we currently perceive as disability in the same way? “At the moment construction issues around disability [disability parking spaces etc] presuppose that it’s an unfortunate thing.”

Fuller points out that it’s misguided to see transhumanism as a simple matter of individual choice since it has the potential to have a major impact on public policy and welfare provision. “We need to keep track of the kind of choices people are making. And if we are going to encourage it, we need to make it possible for everyone to have the opportunity to be involved.”