Taming Satiety - Puppy Dog Eyes - Beethoven's Deafness - ApoE4 Alleles

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Breedlove, S

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May 7, 2024, 8:24:21 AMMay 7

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/07/opinion/ozempic-weight-loss-drugs.html?searchResultPosition=2

A Year on Ozempic Taught Me We’re Thinking About Obesity All Wrong

By Johann Hari

Ever since I was a teenager, I have dreamed of shedding a lot of weight. So when I shrank from 203 pounds to 161 in a year, I was baffled by my feelings. I was taking Ozempic, and I was haunted by the sense that I was cheating and doing something immoral.

I’m not the only one. In the United States (where I now split my time), over 70 percent of people are overweight or obese, and according to one poll, 47 percent of respondents said they were willing to pay to take the new weight-loss drugs. It’s not hard to see why. They cause users to lose an average of 10 to 20 percent of their body weight, and clinical trials suggest that the next generation of drugs (probably available soon) leads to a 24 percent loss, on average. Yet as more and more people take drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro, we get more confused as a culture, bombarding anyone in the public eye who takes them with brutal shaming.

This is happening because we are trapped in a set of old stories about what obesity is and the morally acceptable ways to overcome it. But the fact that so many of us are turning to the new weight-loss drugs can be an opportunity to find a way out of that trap of shame and stigma — and to a more truthful story.

In my lifetime, obesity has exploded, from being rare to almost being the norm. I was born in 1979, and by the time I was 21, obesity rates in the United States had more than doubled. They have skyrocketed since. The obvious question is, why? And how do these new weight-loss drugs work? The answer to both lies in one word: satiety. It’s a concept that we don’t use much in everyday life but that we’ve all experienced at some point. It describes the sensation of having had enough and not wanting any more.

The primary reason we have gained weight at a pace unprecedented in human history is that our diets have radically changed in ways that have deeply undermined our ability to feel sated. My father grew up in a village in the Swiss mountains, where he ate fresh, whole foods that had been cooked from scratch and prepared on the day they were eaten. But in the 30 years between his childhood and mine, in the suburbs of London, the nature of food transformed across the Western world. He was horrified to see that almost everything I ate was reheated and heavily processed. The evidence is clear that the kind of food my father grew up eating quickly makes you feel full. But the kind of food I grew up eating, much of which is made in factories, often with artificial chemicals, left me feeling empty and as if I had a hole in my stomach. In a recent study of what American children eat, ultraprocessed food was found to make up 67 percent of their daily diet. This kind of food makes you want to eat more and more. Satiety comes late, if at all.

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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01315-x

Puppy-dog eyes in wild canines sparks rethink on dog evolution

By Gillian Dohrn

“Puppy-dog eyes didn’t just evolve for us, in domestic dogs,” says comparative anatomist Heather Smith. Her team’s work has thrown a 2019 finding1 that the muscles in dogs’ eyebrows evolved to communicate with humans in the doghouse by showing that African wild dogs also have the muscles to make the infamous pleading expression. The study was published on 10 April in The Anatomical Record2.

Now, one of the researchers who described the evolution of puppy-dog eyebrow muscles is considering what the African dog discovery means for canine evolution. “It opens a door to thinking about where dogs come from, and what they are,” says Anne Burrows, a biological anthropologist at the Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and author of the earlier paper.

The 2019 study garnered headlines around the world when it found that the two muscles responsible for creating the sad–sweet puppy-dog stare are pronounced in several domestic breeds (Canis familiaris), but almost absent in wolves (Canis lupus).

If the social dynamic between humans and dogs drove eyebrow evolution, Smith wondered whether the highly social African wild dog might also have expressive brows.

African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) are native to sub-Saharan Africa. Between 1997 and 2012, their numbers dropped by half in some areas. With only 8,000 or so remaining in the wild, studying them is difficult but crucial for conservation efforts.

Smith, who is based at Midwestern University in Glendale, Arizona, and her colleagues dissected a recently deceased African wild dog from Phoenix Zoo. They found that both the levator anguli oculi medalis (LAOM) and the retractor anguli oculi lateralis (RAOL) muscles, credited with creating the puppy-dog expression, were similar in size to those of domestic dog breeds.

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https://nautil.us/what-counts-as-consciousness-579734/?_sp=2cf1f786-fbc5-4634-b698-48a6c0c04a09.1715082823497

What Counts as Consciousness

By Dan Falk

Some years ago, when he was still living in southern California, neuroscientist Christof Koch drank a bottle of Barolo wine while watching The Highlander, and then, at midnight, ran up to the summit of Mount Wilson, the 5,710-foot peak that looms over Los Angeles.

After an hour of “stumbling around with my headlamp and becoming nauseated,” as he later described the incident, he realized the nighttime adventure was probably not a smart idea, and climbed back down, though not before shouting into the darkness the last line of William Ernest Henley’s 1875 poem “Invictus”: “I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul.”

Koch, who first rose to prominence for his collaborative work with the late Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, is hardly the only scientist to ponder the nature of the self—but he is perhaps the most adventurous, both in body and mind. He sees consciousness as the central mystery of our universe, and is willing to explore any reasonable idea in the search for an explanation.

Over the years, Koch has toyed with a wide array of ideas, some of them distinctly speculative—like the idea that the Internet might become conscious, for example, or that with sufficient technology, multiple brains could be fused together, linking their accompanying minds along the way. (And yet, he does have his limits: He’s deeply skeptical both of the idea that we can “upload” our minds and of the “simulation hypothesis.”)

In his new book, Then I Am Myself The World, Koch, currently the chief scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, ventures through the challenging landscape of integrated information theory (IIT), a framework that attempts to compute the amount of consciousness in a system based on the degree to which information is networked. Along the way, he struggles with what may be the most difficult question of all: How do our thoughts—seemingly ethereal and without mass or any other physical properties—have real-world consequences?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/06/health/beethoven-deaf-lead-hair.html

Locks of Beethoven’s Hair Offer New Clues to the Mystery of His Deafness

By Gina Kolata

At 7 p.m. on May 7, 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven, then 53, strode onto the stage of the magnificent Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna to help conduct the world premiere of his Ninth Symphony, the last he would ever complete.

That performance, whose 200th anniversary is on Tuesday, was unforgettable in many ways. But it was marked by an incident at the start of the second movement that revealed to the audience of about 1,800 people how deaf the revered composer had become.

Ted Albrecht, a professor emeritus of musicology at Kent State University in Ohio and author of a recent book on the Ninth Symphony, described the scene.

The movement began with loud kettledrums, and the crowd cheered wildly.

But Beethoven was oblivious to the applause and his music. He stood with his back to the audience, beating time. At that moment, a soloist grasped his sleeve and turned him around to see the raucous adulation he could not hear.

It was one more humiliation for a composer who had been mortified by his deafness since he had begun to lose his hearing in his twenties.

But why had he gone deaf? And why was he plagued by unrelenting abdominal cramps, flatulence and diarrhea?

A cottage industry of fans and experts has debated various theories. Was it Paget’s disease of bone, which in the skull can affect hearing? Did irritable bowel syndrome cause his gastrointestinal problems? Or might he have had syphilis, pancreatitis, diabetes or renal papillary necrosis, a kidney disease?

After 200 years, a discovery of toxic substances in locks of the composer’s hair may finally solve the mystery.

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https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/may/06/scientists-genetic-form-of-alzheimers-two-copies-gene-variant

Scientists claim to have found another distinct genetic form of Alzheimer’s

Nicola Davis Science correspondent

Having two copies of a gene variant known to predispose people to Alzheimer’s could in fact represent a distinct genetic form of the disease, researchers have said.

The variant, known as ApoE4, has long been known to increase the risk of developing Alzheimer’s, with two copies conferring greater risk than one.

Now research has revealed almost everyone with two copies of the variant goes on to develop Alzheimer’s disease (AD), suggesting it is not only a risk factor but a cause.

“Over 95% of the individuals [with two copies of ApoE4], have AD pathology either in the brain or in the biomarkers that we analysed,” said Dr Juan Fortea, the co-author of the research from the Sant Pau hospital in Barcelona.
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His team said the predicability of the age at which symptoms began was similar to other genetic forms of the disease such as autosomal-dominant Alzheimer’s disease (ADAD) and Alzheimer’s disease in Down syndrome (DSAD).

Dr Victor Montal, a co-author from Barcelona Supercomputing Center, said the research had catalysed a paradigm shift in the understanding of the disease.

“Whereas previously, the etiology of dementia was known in less than 1% of cases, our work has now enabled the identification of causative factors in over 15% of instances,” he said.

However, the study did not shed light on the risk of developing dementia itself for people with two copies of ApoE4.

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