1,217 news posts in Mind and body

Health

11 Jul 2016

Is the Agile Wallaby man’s new best friend?

Scientists name top five animals that are suitable to be kept as pets by Samantha Bradey, Frontiersin.org Looking for a new pet? If so, consider the Agile Wallaby or the Asian Palm Civet. Responding to the growing trend in keeping exotic animals as pets a team, led by Dr. Paul Koene, has developed a methodology to assess the suitability of mammals to be kept domestically in a new study published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science. The top five animals were: the Sika Deer, Agile Wallaby, Tamar Wallaby, Llama, and Asian Palm Civet, which were all judged to be suitable pets by the scientists from the Wageningen University and Research Centre, in the Netherlands. So, will the Sika Deer challenge the common canine for the title of man’s best friend? “The main influence of this work is methodological. In the Netherlands many mammal species are kept and for a long time the government wanted to guarantee the welfare of animals;” Dr. Koene explained; “Therefore the Dutch Animal Act was made stating that mammals should not be kept unless they are production animals, or are species that are suitable to be kept by anyone without special knowledge or skills.” In order to determine […]

Health

07 Jul 2016

Mixing cannabis with tobacco increases dependence risk, suggests study

People who mix tobacco with cannabis are less motivated to seek help to quit Tobacco and cannabis are two of the world’s most popular drugs, used respectively by 1 billion and 182 million people worldwide (World Health Organization; United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime). The adverse health effects of tobacco are well known. Short-term effects of cannabis are transient impairments in motor function and working memory, planning, and decision-making, while possible long-term health effects of heavy cannabis use include physical and psychological dependence, permanent reductions in cognitive performance, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, and some cancers (WHO). Many users mix cannabis with tobacco, not only to save money but also because tobacco can increase the efficiency of cannabis inhalation. But such mixing can increase the risk of dependence, suggests a new study in Frontiers in Psychiatry. “Cannabis dependence and tobacco dependence manifest in similar ways, so it is often difficult to separate these out in people who use both drugs,” says lead author Chandni Hindocha, a doctoral student at the Clinical Psychopharmacology Unit of University College London. “Cannabis is less addictive than tobacco, but we show here that mixing tobacco with cannabis lowers the motivation to quit using these drugs.” […]

Health

05 Jul 2016

Frontiers in Immunology: New Field Chief Editor takes the Helm

Frontiers announces the appointment of Professor Luigi Notarangelo, Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, as the new Field Chief Editor for Frontiers in Immunology, effective on July 13, 2016. Professor Luigi Notarangelo, a world renowned expert in primary immunodeficiencies, has agreed to expand his role in the Journal from his current function as Specialty Chief Editor of the Primary Immunodeficiency section of Frontiers in Immunology. His numerous scientific achievements include the identification of gene defects that contribute to severe combined immune deficiencies (SCID) and the development of novel treatment for children severely affected by congenital immunodeficiencies. In addition to his scientific research, Professor Notarangelo plays an active role in many professional societies, including being the President of the European Society for Immune Deficiencies from 2002-2006 and of the Clinical Immunology Society in 2015-2016, and co-chairing the Committee on Primary Immunodeficiencies of the International Union of Immunological Societies (IUIS). We also thank our outgoing and founding Field Chief Editor for the Journal, Professor Kendall Smith from Weill Medical College of Cornell University for his years of service to the community. Publishing across 18 specialty sections, including such multidisciplinary subject areas as Cancer Immunity and Immunotherapy, Frontiers in Immunology now has over 2500 editors from top institutions all over […]

Psychology

30 Jun 2016

Thinking ‘I can do better’ really can improve performance

by Susan Haas, Frontiersin.org Online training really can help to improve performance, a study published in Frontiers in Psychology has found. Over 44,000 people took part in an experiment to discover what motivational techniques really worked. In conjunction with BBC Lab UK, Professor Andrew Lane and his colleagues tested which physiological skills would help people improve their scores in an online game. This complex study examined if one motivational method would be more effective for any specific aspect of a task. The methods tested were self-talk, imagery, and if-then planning. Each of these psychological skills was applied to one of four parts of a competitive task: process, outcome, arousal-control, and instruction. People using self-talk, for example telling yourself “I can do better next time” – performed better than the control group in every portion of the task. The greatest improvements were seen in self-talk-outcome (telling yourself, “I can beat my best score”), self-talk-process (telling yourself, “I can react quicker this time”), imagery-outcome (imagining yourself playing the game and beating your best score), and imagery-process (imagining yourself playing and reacting quicker than last time). They also found a short motivational video could improve performance. Participants watched a short video before playing the […]

Health

24 Jun 2016

Should we treat aging as a disease?

Academic, pharmaceutical, healthcare policy and pension fund perspectives. — By Elliott Williams “The fundamental questions of whether aging can and should be classified as a disease are not new, but today they are more pressing than ever for many reasons,” says Dr Alex Zhavoronkov, CEO of Insilico Medicine and Chief Science Officer at the Biogerontology Research Foundation. Gerontology, the study of old age, spans multiple academic fields from economics to social sciences. Biogerontology specifically focuses on those biological process that contribute to aging, as well as the ultimate effects of aging on our health. Insights from biogerontology studies will contribute to public and private medical research, influencing our societal values, and guide policy makers in their decisions. “The main problems in biogerontology are similar to those in drug discovery for most human diseases — but with fewer resources, less visibility and less of a sense of urgency,” says Dr Alex Zhavoronkov. To bring into focus aging as a disease, Dr Zhavoronkov is looking to the future, and the 2018 release of the WHO-curated ICD-11. The ICD (International Classification of Diseases) is an extensive piece of work used at all levels of healthcare management: from physicians to patient organizations, from insurers to policy […]

Life sciences

17 Jun 2016

Mother mongooses may risk death to protect unborn children

By K.E.D. Coan, Frontiersin.org Mothers will do anything to protect their children, but mongooses go a step further. Mongooses risk their own survival to protect their unborn children through a remarkable ability to adapt their own bodies, says new research published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. Pregnancy can takes a physical toll that, according to some theories, may increase the mother’s levels of toxic metabolites that cause oxidative damage. Increased oxidative damage can cause complications during pregnancy, but these results show how some mammals have evolved to specifically minimize such damage, albeit only temporarily. “We think mother mongooses shield their offspring by reducing their own levels of oxidative damage during breeding;” explained Dr. Emma Vitikainen of the Centre of Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter, and lead author of the study, “However, she could be trading her own long term well being for the short term benefit of protecting the growing pups.” Vitikainen and her colleagues followed groups of wild banded mongooses over five years, measuring oxidative damage markers, as well as the animals’ health and survival. Oxidative damage is a normal byproduct of metabolism throughout an animal’s lifespan, but they found that pregnant mongooses showed lower […]

Health

14 Jun 2016

Overcome strength-training plateau with accentuated eccentric loading

Learning to train smart with accentuated eccentric loading training can lead to greater strength gains compared to traditional isoinertial loads, shows study by Fernando Bolaños, Frontiersin.org Hitting a plateau in strength training? The answer to overcoming it might lie in accentuated eccentric loading (AEL). Many experienced strength trainers try to overcome a plateau by trying to adapt their strength programme, however this is sometimes ineffective. In just five weeks accentuated eccentric loading training considerably improved results for experienced strength-trainers, a study recently published in Frontiers in Physiology found. This method is based on the principle of repetitive muscle contractions applying a greater external load during the muscle’s lengthening, the eccentric phase of the lift, than in the shortening, the concentric phase. The eccentric phase, for example, is the action of lowering the dumbbell back down from the lift during a biceps curl, as long as the dumbbell is lowered slowly rather than letting it drop. This is different to the very popular isoinertial training where the same weight is used in both stages of the movement. “It is important to train using actions that are highly specific to normal actions. I have always been interested in trying to optimize training because […]

Psychology

13 Jun 2016

Children less likely to trust ugly people

A new study shows that children judge us on our looks – and beauty wins out on trustworthiness ratings by Abigail Pattenden, Frontiersin.org Is beauty only skin deep? Children don’t seem to think so, like adults and babies, children think the uglier you are, the less trustworthy you are. In a study recently published in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers have found that as children, how we perceive someone’s trustworthiness is linked to how attractive we find them. Our ability to make this trustworthiness judgement develops as we grow, becoming more consistent as we approach adulthood, and, girls are better at it than boys. Many psychology studies have proven the existence of the so-called “beauty stereotype”. This describes the phenomenon whereby more attractive people are also considered to be smarter, more sociable and more successful. To be attractive is to be treated better by your peers, and preferred by new-born babies, than uglier people. People use facial cues to make judgements on a person’s character – and this ability to infer social traits is a crucial part of social functioning and development. Although well researched in babies and adults, the development of this ability in children was not previously known. Understanding […]

Psychology

09 Jun 2016

Witnesses can identify criminals by smell

Human nose-witnesses identify criminals in a lineup of body odor By Alice Rolandini Jensen, Frontiers science writer Move over sniffer dogs, people who witnessed a crime are able to identify criminals by their smell. Police lineups normally rely on sight, but nose-witnesses can be just as reliable as eye-witnesses, new research published in Frontiers in Psychology has found. “Police often use human eye-witnesses, and even ear-witnesses, in lineups but, to date, there have not been any human nose-witnesses;” explained Professor Mats Olsson, experimental psychologist at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden; “We wanted to see if humans can identify criminals by their body odor.” Dogs have been used to identify criminals through body odor identification in court, but it is commonly thought that the human sense of smell is inferior to that of other mammals. However, research shows that humans have the ability to distinguish individuals by their unique body odor. Our olfactory sense is often associated with emotional processing and is directly linked to the areas of the brain associated with emotion and memory; the hippocampus and the amygdala. To find out more about human odor memory following stressful events, Olsson and his team investigated how well we identify body odor […]

Life sciences

05 Jun 2016

West African genes lower the risk of obesity in men, suggests study

By Michiel Dijkstra, science writer The obesity epidemic affects women and men of every ethnic group in the United States, but strong gender and racial disparities in the risk of overweight and obesity exist. African American women are currently more at risk than any other group in the United States: 82.1% of African American women are overweight or obese (defined as having a BMI of 25 or higher), compared to 76.2% of Hispanic women and 64.6% of Caucasian women, according to the 2011-2012 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Socioeconomic factors, such as inequalities in access to healthcare, healthy food, and safe places to exercise, are known to be important causes of these and other racial disparities in health characteristics. In contrast, “only” 69.1% of African American men are overweight or obese – a percentage that is still alarmingly high in absolute terms, but lower than the percentages for Caucasian men (73.2%), and Hispanic men (77.9%), according to the NHANES data. A similar pattern has been reported for type-2 diabetes, a disease strongly associated with overweight and obesity: according to a 2007 study in The American Journal of Public Health, the incidence of diabetes is higher among African American […]

Life sciences

05 Jun 2016

New interest sparked in the transportation of fluids in porous media

by Michelle Ponto, science writer With the oil situation stealing news headlines and the need for clean energy a growing concern, a group of scientists have rekindled interest in developing new solutions in the transport of fluids in porous media. Oil effects the economy, the environment, and in some cases, political situations within a region. One of the problems is that approximately half of the oil remains in the ground when a reservoir has yielded all it can with today’s technology. This has led to the evolution of dirty methods such as fracking and tar sand exploitation. “Transport in porous media is, perhaps surprisingly, at the core of fuel cell technology,” said Professor Alex Hansen. “Simply put…the world needs energy, and that energy needs to be clean.” Hansen, the Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Physics, is professor of physics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Norway. He is also a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Royal Norwegian Society of Science and Letters and the Norwegian Academy of Technical Sciences. He is Dr. h. c. at the University of Rennes 1, and over the years has researched the transport and breakdown […]

Neuroscience

01 Jun 2016

Understanding how humans make decisions

By Damaris Critchlow, Frontiers Science writer Using human neuro-imaging techniques to observe the brain when making decisions, Hauke Heekeren’s research is concerned with perceptual decision making, the roles of motivation and affect in decision making, as well as cognitive and affective components in normal and disturbed social cognition. “When I was in med school in Munich in about 1994, I learned of a psychiatrist, Christoph Hoch and a neurologist, Arno Villringer who were using new methods to look at the intact human brain while it was at work. I was fascinated because these technologies actually allowed us to observe the human brain in action while people were speaking or perceiving things or thinking,” Professor Heekeren explains. “I saw all the wonderful techniques that were just about to be developed and that got me into it. I was hooked basically from that time on.” Heekeren is Professor of Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Freie Universität Berlin and the Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. From those decisions taken in everyday social situations, to economic situations and those taken when we are stressed, Professor Heekeren’s research watches the brain in action. “My lab mainly investigates the neuroscience of […]

Life sciences

01 Jun 2016

Conquering the great divide between physics complexity and real-world complexity

By Michelle Ponto, science writer The divide between “physics complexity” and real-world complexity is wide, but understanding characterization of real-world complexity is growing in importance. While phase transitions and associated phenomena in physical systems has been one defining subject in the field, how they connect and create parallels within real-life systems is still underexplored. This is one of the reasons Professor Zbigniew R. Struzik from the University of Tokyo launched a Frontiers Research Topic entitled “Critical Phenomena in Complex Systems.” Struzik specializes in biophysics and medical physics as well as complex system’s physics and condensed matter physics. With the launch of the research topic he’s hoping physicists from around the world will submit their manuscripts dealing with criticality and phase transitions in real-world complex systems towards the topic to help advance it forward and focus the attention of the community around it. Struzik says this problem has been around for some time already, but only in recent years has the tool of ‘research topics’ become available to help him explore it. And the timing could not be more perfect. “Modern physics is rapidly expanding from the domains which are traditionally considered to be the matter of physics. At the same […]

Neuroscience

01 Jun 2016

De-coding the character of a hacker

By K.E.D Coan, Frontiersin.org Malicious hacking online costs the private and corporate sectors up to $575 billion annually, according to internet security firm McAfee. While security agencies seek out “ethical” hackers to help combat such attacks, little is known about the personality traits that lead people to pursue and excel at hacking. A recent study published on Frontiers in Human Neuroscience now shows that a characteristic called systemizing provides insight into what makes and motivates a hacker. “We found a positive association between an individual’s drive to build and understand systems—called ‘systemizing’—and hacking skills and expertise,” says Dr. Elena Rusconi of the Division of Psychology at Abertay University in Dundee, UK, “In particular, we found that this drive is positively and specifically correlated with code-breaking performance.” In this study, Dr. Rusconi’s group found that volunteer “ethical” hackers performed far above average on a series of code-breaking challenges designed to assess their systemizing skills. According to a cognitive and behavioral survey, these hackers also self-reported characteristics that indicated a strong tendency towards systemizing. Systemizing is also frequently associated with autism and so Rusconi additionally profiled participants for other autistic-like behaviors and skills. Although none were actually autistic, hackers self-reported higher scores […]

Health

31 May 2016

Raising awareness of brain research

By Damaris Critchlow, Frontiers Science Writer Since January 2014 the European Brain Council found the cost of brain disorders across Europe was just short of €800 billion, which is more than is spent on cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases put together. Dr. Mary Baker is the current President of the Year of the Brain and former President of the European Brain Council. She explains that the idea of the Year of the Brain is to raise awareness of the importance of the brain. Baker says she wants to change the discrepancy between the implications of brain disorders and the modest resources offered to brain research. The unsustainable cost to society needs to be balanced with its importance. Dr. Baker explains the brain is at the core of society and “an organ of great resilience, so we want to inspire and also encourage the younger generation to nurture, to develop and above all to protect their brain.” A three-fold mission to brain health Baker’s husband suffered a stroke, and this firsthand experience has sharpened her awareness of the multi-faceted ways health and social care systems respond to illnesses across all aspects of life. All of these, she explains: “mount and there […]