Perceiving Colors - Crying Babies - Mitochondria & Sleep - THC & Fertility

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Sep 10, 2025, 7:42:44 AMSep 10

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/science/colors-brain-perception-vision.html

Do You See the Same Colors That I Do?

By Kenneth Chang

After decades of brain research, scientists still aren’t sure whether most people see the same way, more or less — especially with colors.

Is what I call red also red for you? Or could my red be your blue? Or maybe neon pink? If it were possible to project what I see directly into your mind, would the view be the same, or would it instead resemble a crazy-hued Andy Warhol painting?

“That’s an age-old question, isn’t it?” said Andreas Bartels, a professor of visual neuroscience at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

But scientists do have a good understanding of which parts of the brain handle vision. They have even figured out where various vision-processing tasks are performed, like recognizing what is moving, identifying colors and adjusting to different lighting conditions.

Amazingly, it is even possible to deduce what you’re seeing by looking at an M.R.I. scan showing which parts of your brain are lighting up.

“That comes out of the world of science fiction, or one would think, right?” Dr. Bartels said. “It’s amazing that this is possible, but this always has happened in individual brains.”

That is, researchers pulled off this sleight of science with individuals. They would first show a subject lying in the M.R.I. machine a series of images, mapping out how that person’s brain responded. After that initial training, the researchers could randomly show one of the images and, based on just the brain activity, make a good guess at what the image was.

In new research, Dr. Bartels and Michael Bannert, a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Bartels’ laboratory, used that technique to provide a partial answer to the question of whether most of us have a shared sense of colors. They put 15 people, all with standard color vision, in an M.R.I. machine. The volunteers viewed expanding concentric rings that were red, green or yellow.

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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/sep/10/babies-cries-can-make-humans-physically-hotter-research-finds

Babies’ cries can make humans physically hotter

Ian Sample Science editor

The cry of a distressed baby triggers a rapid emotional response in both men and women that is enough to make them physically hotter, researchers say.

Thermal imaging revealed that people experienced a rush of blood to the face that raised the temperature of their skin when they were played recordings of babies wailing.

The effect was stronger and more synchronised when babies were more distressed, leading them to produce more chaotic and disharmonious cries. The work suggests that humans respond automatically to specific features in cries that ramp up when babies are in pain.

“The emotional response to cries depends on their ‘acoustic roughness’,” said Prof Nicolas Mathevon at the University of Saint-Etienne in France. “We are emotionally sensitive to the acoustic parameters that encode the level of pain in a baby’s cry.”

Evolution equipped baby humans with a hard-to-ignore wail to boost their odds of getting the care they need. But not all infant cries are the same. When a baby is in real distress, they forcefully contract their rib cage, producing higher pressure air that causes chaotic vibrations in the vocal cords. This produces “acoustic roughness”, or more technically, disharmonious sounds called nonlinear phenomena (NLP).

To see how men and women responded to infants’ cries, scientists played recordings to volunteers with little or no experience with babies. While listening, the participants were filmed with a thermal camera that captured subtle changes in their facial temperature.

https://www.thetransmitter.org/sleep/mitochondria-set-ancient-metabolic-thermostat-for-sleep-in-flies-separate-from-circadian-rhythms/

Mitochondria set ‘ancient’ metabolic thermostat for sleep in flies

By Viviane Callier

All animals, from jellyfish to humans, need sleep. But how these wide-ranging organisms control that need has remained a mystery.

It turns out that—in fruit flies, at least—sleep might be an “inescapable consequence” of aerobic metabolism, according to a new study. Mitochondria in Drosophila’s sleep-regulating neurons sense metabolic damage that accumulates during waking hours and trigger the pressure to sleep.

“It’s a really beautiful contribution,” says Keith Hengen, associate professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the work. The study explains how the brain integrates information from a metabolic thermostat to regulate sleep pressure, Hengen says. “That’s a really hard problem, and I think they’ve nailed it.”

The regulators of sleep are distinct from the function of sleep, Hengen and other sleep researchers note. Just as fullness regulates food intake, but food intake doesn’t so much serve to fill the stomach as to get calories and nutrients, “we need to make this distinction between sensing of sleep pressure and the function of sleep,” says Giorgio Gilestro, associate professor of systems neurobiology at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the new study.

And with respect to sleep pressure, he adds, there are two processes at play: a well-studied circadian clock mechanism that links sleep to daylight cycles, and a less-understood homeostatic process that fine-tunes the need for sleep based on other factors.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/marijuana-womens-fertility-thc

Chemicals in marijuana may affect women’s fertility

By Sofia Caetano Avritzer

When Canada legalized cannabis in 2018, its effects on human health were all over the news. Cyntia Duval, a women’s health researcher at the University of Toronto at the time, wondered how its consumption might affect female fertility. To her surprise, there was almost no information on the subject — though there was plenty of data on marijuana’s effects on pregnancy and male fertility.

Chemicals in cannabis may push eggs to become ready for fertilization. But this may come at a cost: more eggs with the wrong number of chromosomes, Duval and colleagues now report in a study published September 9 in Nature Communications.

Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, is the main psychoactive chemical in marijuana. It binds to cannabinoid receptors in the brain. But these receptors are all over our bodies, including in our reproductive organs.

The receptors usually bind endocannabinoids, molecules naturally produced by the body and essential for normal bodily functions like the production of eggs and sperm. Consuming THC can affect cannabinoid receptors in the reproductive system. Many studies report that using cannabis decreases sperm count and motility. Men are usually told to avoid cannabis for at least three months before trying to conceive, Duval says. But what about women?

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