New Brunswick - Underwater Sound - Dream Rules - Shrieking Cicadas
Breedlove, S
Top Canadian scientist alleges in leaked emails he was barred from studying mystery brain illness
Leyland Cecco in Toronto
A leading federal scientist in Canada has alleged he was barred from investigating a mystery brain illness in the province of New Brunswick and said he fears more than 200 people affected by the condition are experiencing unexplained neurological decline.
The allegations, made in leaked emails to a colleague seen by the Guardian, have emerged two years after the eastern province closed its investigation into a possible “cluster” of cases.
“All I will say is that my scientific opinion is that there is something real going on in [New Brunswick] that absolutely cannot be explained by the bias or personal agenda of an individual neurologist,” wrote Michael Coulthart, a prominent microbiologist. “A few cases might be best explained by the latter, but there are just too many (now over 200).”
New Brunswick health officials warned in 2021 that more than 40 residents were suffering from a possible unknown neurological syndrome, with symptoms similar to those of the degenerative brain disorder Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Those symptoms were varied and dramatic: some patients started drooling and others felt as though bugs were crawling on their skin.
A year later, however, an independent oversight committee created by the province determined that the group of patients had most likely been misdiagnosed and were suffering from known illnesses such as cancer and dementia.
The committee and the New Brunswick government also cast doubt on the work of neurologist Alier Marrero, who was initially referred dozens of cases by baffled doctors in the region, and subsequently identified more cases. The doctor has since become a fierce advocate for patients he feels have been neglected by the province.
© 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited
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How Sound Rules Life Underwater
By Amorina Kingdon
Like most humans, I assumed that sound didn’t work well in water. After all, Jacques Cousteau himself called the ocean the “silent world.” I thought, beyond whales, aquatic animals must not use sound much.
How wonderfully wrong I was.
In water a sound wave travels four and a half times faster, and loses less energy, than in air. It moves farther and faster and carries information better.
In the ocean, water exists in layers and swirling masses of slightly different densities, depending on depth, temperature, and saltiness. The physics-astute reader will know that the density of the medium in which sound travels influences its speed. So, as sound waves spread through the sea, their speed changes, causing complex reflection or refraction and bending of the sound waves into “ducts” and “channels.” Under the right circumstances, these ducts and channels can carry sound waves hundreds and even thousands of kilometers.
What about other sensory phenomena? Touch and taste work about the same in water as in air. But the chemicals that tend to carry scent move slower in water than in air. And water absorbs light very easily, greatly diminishing visibility. Even away from murky coastal waters, in the clearest seas, light vanishes below several hundred meters and visibility below several dozen.
So sound is often the best, if not only, way for ocean and freshwater creatures to signal friends, detect enemies, and monitor the world underwater. And there is much to monitor: Earthquakes, mudslides, and volcanic activity rumble through the oceans, beyond a human’s hearing range. Ice cracks, booms, and scrapes the seafloor. Waves hiss and roar. Raindrops plink. If you listen carefully, you can tell wind speed, rainfall, even drop size, by listening to the ocean as a storm passes. Even snowfall makes a sound.
© 2024 NautilusNext Inc.,
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https://www.npr.org/2024/06/02/nx-s1-4987258/dreams-dreaming-interpretation-meaning-anxiety
7 surprising facts about dreams — why we have them and what they mean
By Andrea Muraski
I had a nightmare last night.
It began like many of my dreams do – I was on vacation with my extended family. This time, we were in Australia, visiting family friends in a big house. Things took a turn when — in some way that I can’t quite explain — I got mixed up in this Australian family’s jewelry theft and smuggling operation. And I lied about it in front of my relatives, to protect myself and my co-conspirators. Before I woke up, I was terrified I’d be sent to prison.
The dream seems bizarre, but when I pick the narrative apart, there are clear connections to my waking life. For instance, I recently listened to a podcast where a pair of fancy hairpins suspiciously go missing during a family gathering. Moreover, I’m moving tomorrow and still have packing to do. When the movers arrive in the morning, if I haven't finished packing, I'll face the consequences of my lack of preparedness – a crime, at least to my subconscious.
Dr. Rahul Jandial, neurosurgeon, neuroscientist and author of This is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life, says the major themes and images of vivid dreams like these are worth paying attention to, and trying to derive meaning from. (For me, I decided that the next time I have to move, I’m taking the day before off!)
I spoke with Dr. Jandial about what else we can learn from our dreams, including some of modern science’s most remarkable findings, and theories, about the dreaming brain.
1. Dreams are not random
From dream diaries recorded in ancient Egypt and China to reports from anthropologists in the Amazon, to surveys of modern Americans, evidence shows our dreams have a lot in common. For example, being chased and falling are pretty consistent.
“Reports of nightmares and erotic dreams are nearly universal,” Jandial says, while people rarely report dreaming about math. Jandial says the lack of math makes sense because the part of your brain primarily responsible for logic — the prefrontal cortex — is typically not involved in dreaming.
© 2024 npr
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01621-4
Why cicadas shriek so loudly and more: your questions answered
By Sumeet Kulkarni
As spring turns to summer in the United States, warming conditions have started to summon enormous numbers of red-eyed periodical cicadas out of their holes in the soil across the east of the country. This year sees an exceptionally rare joint emergence of two cicada broods: one that surfaces every 13 years and another with a 17-year cycle. They last emerged together in 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was US president. This year, billions or even trillions of cicadas from these two broods — each including multiple species of the genus Magicicada — are expected to swarm forests, fields and urban neighbourhoods.
To answer readers’ cicada questions, Nature sought help from three researchers. Katie Dana is an entomologist affiliated with the Illinois Natural History Survey at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. John Lill is an insect ecologist at George Washington University in Washington DC. Fatima Husain is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Why do periodical cicadas have red eyes?
JL: We’re not really sure. We do know that cicadas’ eyes turn red in the winter before the insects come out. The whole coloration pattern in periodical cicadas is very bright: red eyes, black and orange wings. They’re quite different from the annual cicadas, which are green and black, and more camouflaged. It’s a bit of an enigma why the periodical ones are so brightly coloured, given that it just makes them more obvious to predators. There are no associated defences with being brightly coloured — it kind of flies in the face of what we know about bright coloration in a lot of other animals, where usually it’s some kind of signal for toxicity. There also exist mutants with brown, orange, golden or even blue eyes. People hunt for blue-eyed ones; it’s like trying to find a four-leaf clover.
© 2024 Springer Nature Limited
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https://www.thetransmitter.org/art-in-science/redrawing-santiago-ramon-y-cajal-qa-with-dawn-hunter/
Redrawing Santiago Ramón y Cajal: Q&A with Dawn Hunter
By Rebecca Horne
The drawings and photographs of Santiago Ramón y Cajal are familiar to any neuroscientist—and probably anyone even remotely interested in the field. Most people who take a cursory look at his iconic images might assume that he created them using only direct observation.
But that’s not the case, according to a paper published in March 2024 by Dawn Hunter, visual artist and associate professor of art at the University of South Carolina, and her colleagues. For instance, the Golgi-stained tissue Ramón y Cajal drew contained neurons that were cut in half—so he painstakingly reconstructed the cells by drawing from elements in multiple slides. And he also fleshed out his illustrations using educated guesses and classical drawing principles, such as contrast and occlusion.
In this way, Ramón y Cajal’s art training was essential to his research, Hunter says. She came across Ramón y Cajal’s drawings while creating illustrations for a neuroscience textbook. “The first time I saw his work, out of pure inspiration, I decided to draw it,” she says. “It was in those moments of drawing that I realized his process was more profound and conceptually layered than merely retracing pencil lines with ink. Examining Ramón y Cajal’s work through the act of drawing is a more active experience than viewing his work as a gallery visitor or in a textbook.”
In 2015, Hunter installed her drawings and paintings alongside original Ramón y Cajal works in an ongoing exhibition at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). That effort led to a Fulbright fellowship to Spain in 2017, providing her access to the Legado Cajal archives at the Instituto Cajal National Archives, which contain thousands of Ramón y Cajal artifacts.
Hunter spoke to The Transmitter about her research in Spain and her realizations about how Ramón y Cajal worked as an artist and as a scientist.
The Transmitter: What do you think your work contributes that is new?
Dawn Hunter: It spells out the connection to [Ramón y Cajal’s] art training. There are some things that to me as a painter are obvious to zero in on that nobody’s really talked about. For example, Ramón y Cajal’s copying of the Renaissance painter Rafael’s entire portfolio. That in itself is a profound thing.
© 2024 Simons Foundation
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