stanfordbusiness:

In developing countries, power outages during surgery operations are common and disastrous. Stephen Rudy (MBA ’84) of Gradian Health Systems is tackling this problem by providing anesthesia machines that do not require electricity to function at cost - $12,000 - to hospitals in need. The only metric he cares about: how many patients they’re helping. Read more: http://stnfd.biz/k8faI

neurosciencestuff:

Musicians who learn a new melody demonstrate enhanced skill after a night’s sleep

A new study that examined how the brain learns and retains motor skills provides insight into musical skill.

Performance of a musical task improved among pianists whose practice of a new melody was followed by a night of sleep, says researcher Sarah E. Allen, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

The study is among the first to look at whether sleep enhances the learning process for musicians practicing a new piano melody.

The study found, however, that when two similar melodies were practiced one after the other, followed by sleep, any gains in speed and accuracy achieved during practice diminished overnight, said Allen, an assistant professor of music education in SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts.

“The goal is to understand how the brain decides what to keep, what to discard, what to enhance, because our brains are receiving such a rich data stream and we don’t have room for everything,” Allen said. “I was fascinated to study this because as musicians we practice melodies in juxtaposition with one another all the time.”

Surprisingly, in a third result the study found that when two similar musical pieces were practiced one after the other, followed by practice of the first melody again, a night’s sleep enhanced pianists’ skills on the first melody, she said.

“The really unexpected result that I found was that for those subjects who learned the two melodies, if before they left practice they played the first melody again, it seemed to reactivate that memory so that they did improve overnight. Replaying it seemed to counteract the interference of learning a second melody.”

The study adds to a body of research in recent decades that has found the brain keeps processing the learning of a new motor skill even after active training has stopped. That’s also the case during sleep.

The findings may in the future guide the teaching of music, Allen said.

“In any task we want to maximize our time and our effort. This research can ultimately help us practice in an advantageous way and teach in an advantageous way,” Allen said. “There could be pedagogical benefits for the order in which you practice things, but it’s really too early to say. We want to research this further.”

The study, “Memory stabilization and enhancement following music practice,” will be published in the journal Psychology of Music.

New study builds on earlier brain research in rats and humans
Researchers in the field of procedural memory consolidation have systematically examined the process in both rats and humans.

Studies have found that after practice of a motor skill, such as running a maze or completing a handwriting task, the areas of the brain activated during practice continue to be active for about four to six hours afterward. Activation occurs whether a subject is, for example, eating, resting, shopping or watching TV, Allen said.

Also, researchers have found that the area of the brain activated during practice of the skill is activated again during sleep, she said, essentially recalling the skill and enhancing and reinforcing it. For motor skills such as finger-tapping a sequence, research found that performance tends to be 10 percent to 13 percent more efficient after sleep, with fewer errors.

“There are two phases of memory consolidation. We refer to the four to six hours after training as stabilization. We refer to the phase during sleep as enhancement,” Allen said. “We know that sleep seems to play a very important role. It makes memories a more permanent, less fragile part of the brain.”

Allen’s finding with musicians that practicing a second melody interfered with retaining the first melody is consistent with a growing number of similar research studies that have found learning a second motor skill task interferes with enhancement of the first task.

Impact of sleep on learning for musicians
For Allen’s study, 60 undergraduate and graduate music majors participated in the research.

Divided into four groups, each musician practiced either one or both melodies during evening sessions, then returned the next day after sleep to be tested on their performance of the target melody.

The subjects learned the melodies on a Roland digital piano, practicing with their left hand during 12 30-second practice blocks separated by 30-second rest intervals. Software written for the experiment made it possible to digitally recorde musical instrument data from the performances. The number of correct key presses per 30-second block reflected speed and accuracy.

Musicians who learned a single melody showed performance gains on the test the next day.

Those who learned a second melody immediately after learning the target melody didn’t get any overnight enhancement in the first melody.

Those who learned two melodies, but practiced the first one again before going home to sleep, showed overnight enhancement when tested on the first melody.

“This was the most surprising finding, and perhaps the most important,” Allen reported in the Psychology of Music. “The brief test of melody A following the learning of melody B at the end of the evening training session seems to have reactivated the memory of melody A in a way that inhibited the interfering effects of learning melody B that were observed in the AB-sleep-A group.”— Margaret Allen

neurosciencestuff:

A Sleep Aid Without the Side Effects

Insomniacs desperate for some zzzs may one day have a safer way to get them. Scientists have developed a new sleep medication that has induced sleep in rodents and monkeys without apparently impairing cognition, a potentially dangerous side effect of common sleep aids. The discovery, which originated in work explaining narcolepsy, could lead to a new class of drugs that help people who don’t respond to other treatments.

Between 10% and 15% of Americans chronically struggle with getting to or staying asleep. Many of them turn to sleeping pills for relief, and most are prescribed drugs, such as zolpidem (Ambien) and eszopiclone (Lunesta), that slow down the brain by binding to receptors for GABA, a neurotransmitter that’s involved in mood, cognition, and muscle tone. But because the drugs target GABA indiscriminately, they can also impair cognition, causing amnesia, confusion, and other problems with learning and memory, along with a number of strange sleepwalking behaviors, including wandering, eating, and driving while asleep. This has led many researchers to seek out alternative mechanisms for inducing sleep.

Neuroscientist Jason Uslaner of Merck Research Laboratories in West Point, Pennsylvania, and colleagues decided to tap into the brain’s orexin system. Orexin (also known as hypocretin) is a protein that controls wakefulness and is missing in people with narcolepsy. Past studies successfully induced sleep by inhibiting orexin, but had not looked into its effects on cognition. The researchers developed a new orexin-inhibiting compound called DORA-22 and confirmed that it could induce sleep in rats and rhesus monkeys as effectively as the GABA-modulating drugs.

Then the researchers went about testing the drugs’ effects on the animals’ cognition. They measured the rats’ cognition and memory by assessing the rodents’ ability to recognize objects. They presented the rats with a new object—say, a cone or a sphere—that the rats then sniffed and explored. Then they took the object away for an hour. After that hour, the rats were exposed to a new object and the one they’d already gotten to know; if the rats remembered, they spent less time checking out the familiar object. With the primates, Uslaner’s team tested their ability to match colors on a touchscreen and to pay attention to and identify the origin of a flashing light. In all the cases, the researchers found the GABA-modulating sleeping pills caused both the rats and the primates to respond more slowly and less accurately. Monkeys taking the memory and attention tests, for example, were 20% less accurate on the highest dose of each of the GABA-modulating drugs. But DORA-22 had no such effect on cognition, the team reports today in Science Translational Medicine.

“We were very excited,” Uslaner says. “Folks who take sleep medications need to be able to perform cognitive tasks when they awake, and this [compound] could help them do so without impairment.”

Although DORA-22 has not yet been tested in humans, it holds tremendous promise for helping people suffering from sleep disorders, says Emmanuel Mignot, a sleep researcher with the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California. “This study is encouraging and exciting, because there’s good reason to believe it would work differently from what we’ve used in the past,” says Mignot, who helped discover the link between orexin (or its absence) and narcolepsy. “Not every drug works for everyone, so it’s really, really good news to have a potential new drug on the horizon.”

breakingnews:

Ikea stops elk lasagna sales after pork discovery

The Local: Swedish furniture giant Ikea has stopped sales of elk lasagna across all its European stores after a batch tested positive for pork.

An estimated 10,000 tons of lasagna stored in the furniture giant’s central warehouse and at its department stores have been blocked for sale after Belgian authorities discovered that the elk mince, produced by Swedish food manufacturer Familjen Dafgård and sold at Ikea stores, contained a bit over one percent pork, which is the limit for contamination of meat products.

Photo: (File / Lorenzo Blangiardi)

neurosciencestuff:

Breakthrough in neuroscience could help re-wire appetite control

Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have made a discovery in neuroscience that could offer a long-lasting solution to eating disorders such as obesity.

It was previously thought that the nerve cells in the brain associated with appetite regulation were generated entirely during an embryo’s development in the womb and therefore their numbers were fixed for life.

But research published today in the Journal of Neuroscience has identified a population of stem cells capable of generating new appetite-regulating neurons in the brains of young and adult rodents.

Obesity has reached epidemic proportions globally. More than 1.4 billion adults worldwide are overweight and more than half a billion are obese. Associated health problems include type 2 diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and cancer. And at least 2.8 million people die each year as a result of being overweight or obese.

The economic burden on the NHS in the UK is estimated to be more than £5 billion annually. In the US, the healthcare cost tops $60 billion.

Scientists at UEA investigated the hypothalamus section of the brain – which regulates sleep and wake cycles, energy expenditure, appetite, thirst, hormone release and many other critical biological functions. The study looked specifically at the nerve cells that regulate appetite.

The researchers used ‘genetic fate mapping’ techniques to make their discovery – a method that tracks the development of stem cells and cells derived from them, at desired time points during the life of an animal.

They established that a population of brain cells called ‘tanycytes’ behave like stem cells and add new neurons to the appetite-regulating circuitry of the mouse brain after birth and into adulthood.

Lead researcher Dr Mohammad K. Hajihosseini, from UEA’s school of Biological Sciences, said: “Unlike dieting, translation of this discovery could eventually offer a permanent solution for tackling obesity.

“Loss or malfunctioning of neurons in the hypothalamus is the prime cause of eating disorders such as obesity.

“Until recently we thought that all of these nerve cells were generated during the embryonic period and so the circuitry that controls appetite was fixed.

“But this study has shown that the neural circuitry that controls appetite is not fixed in number and could possibly be manipulated numerically to tackle eating disorders.

“The next step is to define the group of genes and cellular processes that regulate the behaviour and activity of tanycytes. This information will further our understanding of brain stem cells and could be exploited to develop drugs that can modulate the number or functioning of appetite-regulating neurons.

“Our long-term goal of course is to translate this work to humans, which could take up to five or 10 years. It could lead to a permanent intervention in infancy for those predisposed to obesity, or later in life as the disease becomes apparent.”

fastcodesign:

5 Weird Habits That Make People Successful And Awesome

Argue: to steel your team’s beliefs.

Confront:You need to be ready to call someone out.

Be ruthless: It’s healthy to have high standards.

Seek out rejection: Some people live their lives afraid of rejection. Getting told “no” isn’t the end of everything you hold dear.

Isolate yourself: If you ever want to grow internally rather than court external validation, you need to get away from all the people. Reflect. Care for your inner introvert.

Read the full story here.

(via fastcompany)

theatlantic:

2,000 Years of Partying: The Brief History and Economics of Spring Break

Called “Anthestreria” by the local teens, and their parents, it was a festival dedicated to Dionysus, the god of wine and whoopee and just about every excuse to party. For three days, people would dance, singers would perform, women would deck themselves with flowers, and Greek men would compete to see who could be the fastest to drain a cup of red wine.

Two thousand years later, practically nothing has changed except our taste in chugging alcohol.

Read more. [Image: Reuters]

ecocides:

Harbin, China: Tigers eat meat in the Siberian tiger park, the world’s largest breeding base for the species. Also known as Amur or Manchurian tigers, they mainly live in east Russia, north-east China and northern parts of the Korean peninsula | image by Wang Jianwei