Only about half of those who self-harm have access to treatment, research suggests.
‘Alarming rise in self-harm – but only half get care’
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Category Archives: Mind Building
Pathogens may have facilitated the evolution of warm-blooded animals
Six hundred million years ago, fever appeared in animals as a response to infections: the higher body temperatures optimized their immune systems. At the time, virtually all animal species were cold-blooded. They had to sit in warm patches of habitat for extended periods of time to achieve fever-range body temperatures. For Michael Logan, a Tupper Fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama (STRI), pathogens may be the reason why warm-blooded creatures first emerged.
At first glance, cold-blooded creatures or ‘ectotherms’ seem to have it easy. Because they cannot regulate their body temperature internally, they spend 30 times less energy than warm-blooded creatures or ‘endotherms’ of the same size. So, while mammals and birds are constantly investing their calories in maintaining a high, stable body temperature, reptiles and amphibians can just search for a warm spot in their surrounding environment if they want to get cozy. But if ectothermy is so great, why did mammals and birds develop a different strategy that is so costly?
Over the years, scientists have proposed three different models for why endotherms evolved high, stable body temperatures. One claims that it aids physiological processes; another, that it helps animals maintain activity over longer periods of time; and the third, that it enables parents to take care of precocial offspring. However, none of these models have found strong support and the evolutionary history of endothermy remains somewhat of a mystery.
Although these various hypotheses may have some truth to them, for Logan, the trigger must have been something that profoundly impacted the ability of animals to survive and reproduce, otherwise endothermy would be too costly a strategy and would not be favored by natural selection. In a recent paper, published in the journal Ideas in Ecology and Evolution, he explains this theory.
“My hypothesis is that by keeping their bodies warm at nearly all times, mammals and birds effectively prime their immune systems to withstand virulent pathogens, and that this may be part of the reason the extremely costly strategy of endothermy evolved in the first place,” Logan said.
In this context, endothermy may offer critical advantages over ectothermy. The ability to mount a rapid fever response to a pathogen means endotherms are not limited by the thermal variation in their habitats. Meanwhile, cold-blooded creatures depend on external sources of heat to reach fever-like temperatures. They are subject to fluctuations in environmental conditions, and in searching for the ideal microclimate required to initiate fever, they may struggle to forage or mate and may be exposed to predators.
“This hypothesis has emerged from recent discoveries in the fields of immunology and animal physiology, but we still need to rigorously test it with data and experiments,” Logan said. “For example, my model predicts that species that maintain the warmest, most stable body temperatures (all else remaining equal) should also experience the highest frequency of disease outbreaks or the most virulent pathogens.”
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Materials provided by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Ear-generated Doppler shifts in bat biosonar
Anybody who has been passed by an ambulance at high speed has experienced a physical effect called the Doppler shift: As the ambulance moves toward the listener, its motion compresses the siren’s sound waves and raises the sound pitch. As the ambulance moves away from the listener, the sound waves get dilated and the pitch is lowered. A listener wearing a blindfold could use this Doppler shift pattern to track the motion of the ambulance.
In a paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the authors, Rolf Mueller, professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering, and his doctoral student, Xiaoyan Yin, demonstrate that the ears of bats come with a “built-in ambulance” that creates the same physical effect. Yin and Mueller think the study of ear-generated Doppler shifts in bat biosonar could give rise to new sensory principles that could enable small, yet powerful sensors. An example of this type of sensor would be for drones that can operate in dense foliage or autonomous underwater vehicles navigating near complex underwater structures.
“The animals move their ears fast enough so that sound waves that impinge on the ears are transformed by the motion of the ear surfaces and shifted to higher or lower frequencies,” said Mueller. “In fact, the bat species studied (horseshoe bats and Old World Roundleaf bats) can move their ears so fast that Doppler shifts of around 350 Hz can be created. This is about seven times larger than the smallest Doppler shift the animals haven been shown to be able to detect.”
Doppler shifts have long been known to play an important role in the biosonar system of bats such as the species studied by Mueller and Yin. The bats have the enviable ability to hunt in very dense vegetation, but to accomplish this, they have to solve the problem of how to distinguish a moth, their preferred prey, from hundreds of leaves that surround it.
“The solution these two types of bats have come up with has been to tune in on the Doppler shifts that are produced by the wing beat motion of their prey,” Mueller explained. “These ‘good Doppler shifts’ serve as a unique identifying feature that sets prey apart from static distractors, such as leaves in foliage.”
Researchers became aware early on that the bats’ own flight motion also produces Doppler shifts that would interfere with the perception of the prey-induced Doppler shifts. In the late 1960s a solution to this conundrum was discovered when it was found that horseshoe bats decrease their emission frequency by an amount that is carefully controlled to exactly eliminate any of the “bad Doppler shifts” caused by the bats’ flight velocity.
“Since these groundbreaking discoveries, the general belief in the scientific community has been that the role of Doppler shifts in the biosonar systems of these animals has been completely understood,” said Mueller. “Doppler shifts due to prey motions are ‘good Doppler shifts’ that the animals’ entire hearing system is optimized to detect, whereas Doppler shifts due to the bats’ own flight motion are ‘bad Doppler shifts’ that the animals eliminate through feedback control of their emission.”
While Mueller and Yin found speculation in the literature of the early 1960s that bats may be producing Doppler shifts with their own ear motions, the idea was never followed up with experimental work.
The work conducted by Mueller and Yin has measured the motion of the ear surfaces carefully using stereo-vision based on high-speed video cameras, and the authors were able to predict how fast surfaces move in different portions of the ear. They also estimated the angle between the directions of the ear motions and the direction the bat has its biosonar pointed in and found that motion speeds and directions were aligned to maximize the Doppler shifts produced.
To show that Doppler-shifted signals entered the ear canal of the biomimetic pinna and would be accessible to bats, the researchers built a flexible silicone replicate of a bat ear that could be made to execute fast motions by pulling on an attached string.
The final piece in the research has been to find possible uses for the ear-generated Doppler shifts.
“We were able to show that the Doppler shifts produce distinct patterns over time and frequency that can be used to indicate the direction of a target,” said Mueller. “In the context of these bat species’ biosonar systems, they typically concentrate and emit most of their ultrasonic energy in a narrow frequency band. However, for telling the direction of a target, it is usually convenient to look at how multiple frequencies are transmitted by the ear and the ‘spectral color’ that results. The Doppler shift patterns produced by the ear motions could give these bat species the option to concentrate their energy in a narrow frequency band yet be also able to tell target direction.”
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Materials provided by Virginia Tech. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Civility still matters to some in cyberspace
In the online world, where incivility is all too common, new research from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin found that being polite is golden, at least when individuals who pose questions online get to choose the “best answer.”
This “politeness bias” was uncovered by Andrew Whinston, McCombs professor of information, risk and operations management, and his collaborators and former Ph.D. students, the University of Rochester’s Huaxia Rui and the University of Connecticut’s Shun-Yang Lee.
They said in their paper they hoped to raise awareness about “how this type of cognitive bias could affect people’s decision-making processes.”
The researchers looked at how answers are rated on Stack Exchange, a highly popular network of more than 170 Q&A sites covering a broad range of topics. By analyzing more than 400,000 sets of questions and answers, they discovered that askers prefer responses written in respectful forms, even when the content isn’t objectively the most useful.
“If you want to give advice to someone online, you should do it politely,” says Whinston.
On the other hand, politeness doesn’t seem to matter to the platform members who did not ask the original question. Those readers based their votes for best answer on more objective terms, the researchers say.
Stack Exchange rates answers to questions in two ways — the “best answer” chosen by the questioner and the “best answer” chosen by audience votes. The researchers found that audience members were not influenced by whether the responders were polite, probably because they did not take impolite responses personally. The questioners, however, apparently did. The researchers found one notable exception to that rule of thumb. Question askers were willing to excuse an impolite answer when the responder had high ratings on Stack Exchange, based on the number of votes that person’s previous answers had received.
The researchers defined impolite responses by noting the presence of certain terms, such as sentences beginning with second-person pronouns such as “you” and “your,” sentences beginning with a question, and informal references to the questioner such as “dude” and “bud.”
In all, they examined 770,414 answers to 422,980 questions.
Question-answering platforms should take politeness bias into account to benefit themselves and their users, the researchers write. Whinston and his co-authors recommend that Q&A platforms more prominently display the number of votes compared with the question asker’s “best answer.” They also recommend that websites change the name “best answer” to “asker-accepted answer” or some other neutral term to reduce the bias of labeling it the “best.”
“Overall, the easier it is for users to locate high-quality content, the more valuable the (website) would be to users,” the study says. Further, “it is imperative that (these websites) understand the politeness bias and its consequence to ensure effective knowledge exchange and successful commercialization. A careful design of quality assessment methods can be highly beneficial to the growth of these platforms.”
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Materials provided by University of Texas at Austin. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Sex diseases on the rise in England
Cases of sexually transmitted infections, such as gonorrhoea, are going up.
Taking a Trip With Your Girlfriends Is Good For Your Health, According to Science
Clear your schedule and pack your bags, because you’re going on a girls’ trip. If your boss balks or your family whines or your dog gives you sad little puppy eyes, tell them that you’re doing it for your health—and it won’t even be a lie. Science says an occasional minibreak with your friends is good for you.
While we all love our families, it has been proven that friendship can extend life expectancy, lower chances of heart disease, and even help us better tolerate pain. Really! Psychologists were able to predict the size of someone’s social network based on how much pain they were able to withstand. Friendships also make us feel good. In 2016, researchers found researchers found evidence that hanging out with friends can increase production of oxytocin, the feel good cuddle hormone that our bodies make when we’re happy. Science has shown that oxytocin can make people more trusting, more generous, and friendlier, all the things you look for in friends.
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Conversely, according to the clever folks at Harvard, people who don’t have strong friendships tend to be more depressed, have later-life cognitive decline, and, frighteningly enough, were more likely to die at a younger age. One study, which looked at the lives of 309,000 people, found that a lack of strong social ties increased the risk of premature death from all causes by 50%, which was about the same effect as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. A 2012 study found that the risk of dementia increased depending on how lonely people felt.
Having friends is scientifically good for your health, but it can be hard to maintain those friendships. People move, jobs change, kids graduate, and maintaining friendships can be difficult and the annual Christmas letter or occasional Facebook update doesn’t always suffice.
RELATED: Traveling Alone Is a Bold Move—But You Will Never Regret It
While there is some research showing that distance doesn't have to dampen a friendship, it can be hard to balance busy lives with keeping up with long-distance friendships. Plus, in a series of studies, psychologist William Chopik from Michigan State University, found that in older adults, friendships are a stronger predictor of health and happiness than relationships with family members. "Keeping a few really good friends around can make a world of difference for our health and well-being,” he said. “So, it's smart to invest in the friendships that make you happiest." He also noted that friendships may be more influential on our happiness and health than other relationships, so it’s worth taking the time to make plans to be just with friends. Hence the girls’ weekend.
So clear your schedule and start planning your weekend away—for your health.
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I Started Using CBD Oil Every Day—and This Is How It Changed My Life
Better sleep, energy for workouts, and a compliment from my husband make it all worthwhile.
I’m not well-schooled in the ways of cannabis—figuring out what is CBD took some time. I don’t know my hemp from my weed; THC, CBD … IDK. For me, it’s like trying to get the square root of a number: If I concentrate for a minute, I can figure it all out, but mostly, I just don’t care to.
But then my friend started selling CBD oil. She’s a SAHM-turned-yoga instructor and a total straight-laced health nut. I thought that if she was into it, maybe I should learn more. So I learned that CBD oil is made up of cannabidiol, a natural extract from the flowers and leaves of the cannabis plant. Unlike marijuana, CBD does not get you high (that’s where THC comes in—it’s another naturally occurring chemical that does bring the high).
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What CBD does do, as far as science knows (and there are still plenty more studies to be done), is act like neurotransmitters in your body called endocannabinoids (think of them as cousins, of a sort). In doing so, CBD has the potential to reduce inflammation, improve sleep, bring a sense of calm, boost energy, help those coping with anxiety, and more. (Scientists are still figuring out exactly how much of an impact CBD can have.)
I wanted all of those things. Inflammation can cause everything from acne to aches and pains, and I’m happy to get rid of both. Since my husband and son have nicknamed me Yelly Melly, I figured I could do with a better sense of calm, too. And hey, I’m a busy working mom, so sure, I’ll take more energy!
There are a lot of CBD oils on the market right now, but I gravitated toward Beam for a few reasons: It’s organic, it’s 100 percent CBD (I’ve learned that some other companies don’t filter out traces of THC—and I’m not here to get high, people), and it’s full-spectrum, which means that other beneficial natural plant compounds are left in the extract (I’m all for more bennies).
RELATED: This Woman Went From Fashion Editor to Trendsetting CBD Entrepreneur
After all my research, I started taking a dropperful of the CBD oil morning and night. I held it under my tongue for a minute or so, in order for the cannabidiol to seep straight into my bloodstream instead of being digested (which is also a good delivery system—just not as direct). It tasted fine—sort of neutral, with a hint of plant life.
A few days later, I took my first barre class. I haven’t worked out in a year, thanks to a shoulder injury, and I was definitely nervous that I’d be in serious pain after (especially in my shoulder). But it wasn’t too bad. So then the next day I took a yoga class (all hail Groupon), and that didn’t leave me extra sore or strained either—and I like to think my inflammation was kept in check by my new CBD oil regimen.
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I also stopped having nightmares. Weirdly, I get them a lot—bizarre ones, like I’m driving down the road and suddenly I’m in the ocean. But since I’ve started taking CBD oil, the nightmares are gone—and since my daily stressors remain the same but my stress symptoms have lessened, I’m totally giving Beam the credit.
Inspired by my lack of chronic pain and newly stress-free slumber, I also started getting up at 5:50 a.m. for a brisk 2-mile walk with my neighbor every morning. And yeah, I’m still taking barre class and yoga. I’ve got energy for everything!
The most concrete proof that the CBD oil is doing good things for me came the other night, though. I hadn’t mentioned my new CBD routine to my husband, in part because I wanted to assess for myself whether it had an impact. But out of the blue one night, while watching TV, he turned to me and said, “Hey, I’d like to thank you for not getting so frustrated lately with me and the boy. I appreciate it.” Thanks to CBD oil, Yelly Melly has left the building.
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What Is Face Yoga? Here’s Everything to Know About the Wrinkle-Reducing Exercise Craze
The latest workout trend is giving Botox a run for its money: Face yoga is the way to up your asana game, no mat or block involved.
The practice, which originated in Japan, involves making a series of faces to help relax and tone muscles to create a slimmer, younger complexion. Koko Hayashi, founder of Face Yoga With Koko, explained that face yoga includes two different types of exercises: Poses that wake up “sleeping muscles” to lift the face, and poses that relax overworked muscles to help reduce the appearance of wrinkles. Sleeping muscles are located in areas like the lower eyelid and cheeks, whereas overworked muscles are located in the forehead, between the eyebrows, and around the mouth.
RELATED: This Calming Yoga Flow Is the Ultimate Confidence Booster
“When we keep doing the same face over and over, the muscle becomes tense, which shows us wrinkles,” Hayashi says. “I teach how to relax and tone the right muscles to help get rid of the appearance of wrinkles.”
Unlike a facial, face yoga doesn’t involve the instructor touching a student’s face. Occasionally during a one-on-one, Hayashi will massage a certain part of her client’s face at their request, but for the most part, face yoga involves the person working the face on their own. Hayashi says that a typical class “flows” through the movements like a full-body yoga class, which includes a warm-up and stretching.
There are dozens of movements that Hayashi uses in a typical class, including raising the eyebrows, puckering the lips, sticking out the tongue and puffing up the cheeks. Hayashi designs different routines based on the areas of the face her clients want to fix.
Recognize Hayashi? Keeping Up With The Kardashians fans may remember the May 26 episode during which Hayashi visits one of the Kardashian sisters’ homes to teach Kim, Kourtney, Khloe, and Scott Disick how to do face yoga. However, the moves you see your favorite reality stars doing aren’t the typical positions in a normal face yoga routine.
“When I was teaching the Kardashians, I showed some of the more dramatic positions for TV purposes,” Hayashi says. “Typically, in one-on-one sessions, I don’t have people make sounds while they’re moving through the positions, but in bigger classes or group settings, it’s more enjoyable for people to add noises to create bigger movements.”
RELATED: Jessamyn Stanley's 5-Minute Yoga for Beginners
“It takes time to see results; it’s not like Botox,” says Hayashi. “But if you do it on a regular basis, you should be able to see some results in a couple of weeks to months, depending on how often you do it.”
Hayashi said that the best practice for face yoga is to do it daily in small, three-minute sessions multiple times throughout the day.
“The best part about face yoga is that you can take it anywhere,” Hayashi adds. “You can do it at work or while walking your dog, which makes it easy to work into your daily routine.”
The best part? You don’t need a gym membership to get started. Hayashi offers dozens of tutorial videos on her YouTube channel, so you can try flowing through poses ASAP.
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‘Pumping heart patch’ ready for human use
It is packed with millions of living cells to mend damage after a heart attack, say researchers.
For many, friends and family, not doctors, serve as a gateway to opioid misuse
In a common narrative of the path to opioid misuse, people become addicted to painkillers after a doctor prescribed them pills to treat an injury and then, later, switch to harder drugs, such as heroin. However, nonmedical opioid users were more likely to say they began abusing opioids after friends and family members offered them the drugs, according to researchers.
In a series of in-depth interviews with 30 opioid users from southwestern Pennsylvania, about 56 percent of the interviewees said they began using the painkillers recreationally first, said Ashton Verdery, assistant professor of sociology, demography and social data analytics, and an affiliate of the Institute for CyberScience, Penn State.
According to Verdery, the national narrative often portrayed in the media is that heroin abuse occurred after people were prescribed opioid pills by their doctors and became addicted to them. This narrative holds that when the government cracked down on prescription opioids and drug manufacturers began making pills more difficult to abuse in the late 2000s, these people then transitioned to heroin because of its lower price and higher relative availability.
“There’s a lot about that narrative that I think is an overly simplistic way of thinking about this,” said Verdery. “What emerged from our study — and really emerged because we decided to do these qualitative interviews in addition to a survey component — was a pretty different narrative than the national one. We found that most people initiated through a pattern of recreational use because of people around them. They got them from either siblings, friends or romantic partners.”
He added that some study participants did say that they later engaged in “doctor shopping” to locate new sources of prescription pills when acquiring pills from those initial sources became more difficult.
The researchers, who report their findings in a recent issue of the Journal of Addictive Studies, said that understanding this pathway may help improve interventions and treatment options.
“It’s not just that people were prescribed painkillers from a doctor for a legitimate reason and, if we just crack down on the doctors who are prescribing in these borderline cases we can reduce the epidemic,” said Verdery. “Our results really don’t speak to that framework. They speak more to the need of educating people how dangerous these pills are and warning them about getting the pills from friends and family, because that’s the way a lot of people are getting addicted.”
The researchers first recruited 125 participants to complete a survey that sought information on their demographics, substance use, social networks and risk factors. A total of 30 survey participants accepted an invitation to then take part in semi-structured, in-depth interviews that lasted about an hour.
The researchers conducted interviews with nonmedical opioid users from southwestern Pennsylvania because the region has been hit particularly hard by the opioid epidemic and features both rural and urban users.
Verdery suggests that the researchers would find similar results in other areas hit by the epidemic, but future research may explore addiction pathways in other communities and consider how other substance use may play a role in opioid addiction.
“We think that understanding this mechanism as a potential pathway is worth further consideration,” said Verdery. “At the same time, friends and family are critical resources that people who use opioids can draw on for support and help in seeking treatment, which is all the more reason to pay attention to how drug use affects and is affected by social relationships.”
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Materials provided by Penn State. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
