Baby Cries - TBI & Brain Stimulation - Spider Cognition - Obesity & Cardiovascular

[Breedlove, S]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/science/crocodiles-crying-babies.html

Hush Little Baby, Don’t Say a Word — I Think a Crocodile Heard

By Elizabeth Preston

Some things need no translation. No matter what language you speak, you can probably recognize a fellow human who is cheering in triumph or swearing in anger. If you are a crocodile, you may recognize the sound of a young animal crying in distress, even if that animal is a totally different species — like, say, a human baby. That sound means you are close to a meal.

In a study published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers put speakers near crocodiles and played recordings of human, bonobo and chimpanzee infants. The crocodiles were attracted to the cries, especially shrieks that sounded more distressed.

“That means that distress is something that is shared by species that are really, really distant,” said Nicolas Grimault, a bioacoustic research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and one of the paper’s authors. “You have some kind of emotional communication between crocodiles and humans.”

These infant wails most likely drew crocodiles because they signaled an easy meal nearby, the authors say. But in some cases, the opposite may have been true: The crocs were trying to help.

The animals in the study were Nile crocodiles, African predators that can reach up to 18 feet long. Understandably, the researchers kept their distance. They visited the reptiles at a Moroccan zoo and placed remote-controlled loudspeakers on the banks of outdoor ponds.

The researchers played recordings of cries from those speakers while groups of up to 25 crocodiles were nearby. Some cries came from infant chimpanzees or bonobos calling to their mothers. Others were human babies, recorded either at bath time or in the doctor’s office during a vaccination.

Nearly all of the recordings prompted some crocodiles to look or to move toward the speaker. When they heard the sounds of human babies getting shots, for example, almost half the crocodiles in a group responded.

Dr. Grimault said the reptiles seemed most tempted by cries with a harsh quality that other studies have linked to distress in mammals.

    © 2023 The New York Times Company


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https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/08/09/1192273583/when-a-brain-injury-impairs-memory-a-pulse-of-electricity-may-help

When a brain injury impairs memory, a pulse of electricity may help

Jon Hamilton

If you've ever had trouble finding your keys or remembering what you had for breakfast, you know that short-term memory is far from perfect.

For people who've had a traumatic brain injury (TBI), though, recalling recent events or conversations can be a major struggle.

"We have patients whose family cannot leave them alone at home because they will turn on the stove and forget to turn it off," says Dr. Ramon Diaz-Arrastia, who directs the Traumatic Brain Injury Clinical Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

So Arrastia and a team of scientists have been testing a potential treatment. It involves delivering a pulse of electricity to the brain at just the right time.

And it worked in a study of eight people with moderate or severe TBIs, the team reports in the journal Brain Stimulation. A precisely timed pulse to a brain area just behind the ear improved recall by about 20 percent and reduced the person's memory deficit by about half.

If the results pan out in a larger study, the approach might improve the lives of many young people who survive a serious TBI, says Diaz-Arrastia, an author of the study and a professor of neurology at Penn.

"In many cases, the reason they're unable to rejoin and fully participate in society is because of their memory problems," he says. "And they often have this disability that goes on for many, many decades."

But the treatment is not for the timid. It requires patients to have electrodes surgically implanted in their brain. And scientists are still refining the system that delivers the electrical pulses.

More than 1.5 million people in the U.S. sustain a TBI each year. Common causes include falls, motor vehicle accidents, assaults, contact sports, and gunshots.

    © 2023 npr


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https://knowablemagazine.org/article/living-world/2023/rediscovering-legacy-charles-henry-turner

Charles Henry Turner’s insights into animal behavior were a century ahead of their time

By Alla Katsnelson 

Our understanding of animal minds is undergoing a remarkable transformation. Just three decades ago, the idea that a broad array of creatures have individual personalities was highly suspect in the eyes of serious animal scientists — as were such seemingly fanciful notions as fish feeling pain, bees appreciating playtime and cockatoos having culture.

Today, though, scientists are rethinking the very definition of what it means to be sentient and seeing capacity for complex cognition and subjective experience in a great variety of creatures — even if their inner worlds differ greatly from our own.

Such discoveries are thrilling, but they probably wouldn’t have surprised Charles Henry Turner, who died a century ago, in 1923. An American zoologist and comparative psychologist, he was one of the first scientists to systematically probe complex cognition in animals considered least likely to possess it. Turner primarily studied arthropods such as spiders and bees, closely observing them and setting up trailblazing experiments that hinted at cognitive abilities more complex than most scientists at the time suspected. Turner also explored differences in how individuals within a species behaved — a precursor of research today on what some scientists refer to as personality.

Most of Turner’s contemporaries believed that “lowly” critters such as insects and spiders were tiny automatons, preprogrammed to perform well-defined functions. “Turner was one of the first, and you might say should be given the lion’s share of credit, for changing that perception,” says Charles Abramson, a comparative psychologist at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater who has done extensive biographical research on Turner and has been petitioning the US Postal Service for years to issue a stamp commemorating him. Turner also challenged the views that animals lacked the capacity for intelligent problem-solving and that they behaved based on instinct or, at best, learned associations, and that individual differences were just noisy data.

But just as the scientific establishment of the time lacked the imagination to believe that animals other than human beings can have complex intelligence and subjectivity of experience, it also lacked the collective imagination to envision Turner, a Black scientist, as an equal among them. The hundredth anniversary of Turner’s death offers an opportunity to consider what we may have missed out on by their oversight.

© 2023 Annual Reviews
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/08/08/wegovy-drug-weight-loss-heart-attacks-stroke-reduced-risk/

Weight-loss drug Wegovy cuts heart attack risk among obese, study says

By Laurie McGinley and  David Ovalle

The weight-loss drug Wegovy reduced the risk of strokes, heart attacks and other cardiovascular problems by 20 percent among overweight people with a history of heart disease, its manufacturer said Tuesday, results that could increase demand and bolster the case for insurance coverage for the medication.

The better-than-expected result was announced by Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk in a news release. Experts said the results of the trial, called Select, demonstrate that a new crop of drugs commonly used for weight loss, such as Wegovy, can provide important health benefits, not just cosmetic ones. Obesity should be treated as a serious illness given its connection to other problems such as heart disease, specialists said.

Still, private insurers have been slow to cover Wegovy, and Medicare is barred from paying for weight-loss medications. With Wegovy costing more than $1,300 a month, the lack of insurance coverage has put the drug out of reach for many people.

The study is important because it could shift perceptions of Wegovy and similar drugs, said Andres J. Acosta, an assistant professor of medicine and a consultant in gastroenterology and hepatology at the Mayo Clinic. Previously, the medications were highlighted for their cosmetic results.

“It’s a new era,” Acosta said. “It matters because if you lose weight, your risk of dying is reduced.”

The data from the highly anticipated trial have not been published. The results released Tuesday were top-line findings, and the company said it would release detailed results at a conference later this year.

Steven Nissen, a Cleveland Clinic cardiologist, noted that while Tuesday’s announcement is promising, he wants to see the full results.

“We have to be cautious until we actually see the peer-reviewed publication,” said Nissen, who is leading a similar trial involving Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro, a diabetes drug commonly used for weight loss. 
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