Vegetarian diet a cause of hereditary cancers & heart disease?


Are we what we eat?

In a new evolutionary proof of the old adage, 'we are what we eat', Cornell University scientists have found tantalizing evidence that a vegetarian diet has led to a mutation that -- if they stray from a balanced omega-6 to omega-3 diet -- may make people more susceptible to inflammation, and by association, increased risk of heart disease and colon cancer.

The discovery, led by Drs. Tom Brenna, Kumar Kothapalli, and Alon Keinan provides the first evolutionary detective work that traces a higher frequency of a particular mutation to a primarily vegetarian population from Pune, India (about 70 percent), when compared to a traditional meat-eating American population, made up of mostly Kansans (less than 20 percent). It appears in the early online edition of the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

By using reference data from the 1000 Genomes Project, the research team provided evolutionary evidence that the vegetarian diet, over many generations, may have driven the higher frequency of a mutation in the Indian population. The mutation, called rs66698963 and found in the FADS2 gene, is an insertion or deletion of a sequence of DNA that regulates the expression of two genes, FADS1 and FADS2. These genes are key to making long chain polyunsaturated fats. Among these, arachidonic acid is a key target of the pharmaceutical industry because it is a central culprit for those at risk for heart disease, colon cancer, and many other inflammation-related conditions. Treating individuals according to whether they carry 0, 1, or 2 copies of the insertion, and their influence on fatty acid metabolites, can be an important consideration for precision medicine and nutrition.

The insertion mutation may be favored in populations subsisting primarily on vegetarian diets and possibly populations having limited access to diets rich in polyunsaturated fats, especially fatty fish. Very interestingly, the deletion of the same sequence might have been adaptive in populations which are based on marine diet, such as the Greenlandic Inuit. The authors will follow up the study with additional worldwide populations to better understand the mutations and these genes as a genetic marker for disease risk.

"With little animal food in the diet, the long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids must be made metabolically from plant PUFA precursors. The physiological demand for arachidonic acid, as well as omega-3 EPA and DHA, in vegetarians is likely to have favored genetics that support efficient synthesis of these key metabolites." say Brenna and Kothapalli in a joint comment. "Changes in the dietary omega-6 to omega-3 balance may contribute to the increase in chronic disease seen in some developing countries."

"This is the most unique scenario of local adaptation that I had the pleasure of helping uncover," says Alon Keinan, a population geneticist who led the evolutionary study. "Several previous studies pointed to recent adaptation in this region of the genome. Our analysis points to both previous studies and our results being driven by the same insertion of an additional small piece of DNA, an insertion which has a known function.

"We showed this insertion to be adaptive, hence of high frequency, in Indian and some African populations, which are vegetarian. However, when it reached the Greenlandic Inuit, with their marine diet, it became maladaptive." Kaixiong Ye, a postdoctoral research fellow at Keinan's lab, further notes that "our results show a global frequency pattern of the insertion mutation adaptive to vegetarian diet, with highest frequency in Indians who traditionally relied heavily on a plant-based diet."

Story Source:  Materials provided by Molecular Biology and Evolution (Oxford University Press).  Kumar S.D. Kothapalli, Kaixiong Ye, Maithili S. Gadgil, Susan E. Carlson, Kimberly O. O’Brien, Ji Yao Zhang, Hui Gyu Park, Kinsley Ojukwu, James Zou, Stephanie S. Hyon, Kalpana S. Joshi, Zhenglong Gu, Alon Keinan, J. Thomas Brenna. Positive selection on a regulatory insertion-deletion polymorphism inFADS2influences apparent endogenous synthesis of arachidonic acid. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 2016.
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Science vs. Religion: It's all in our heads

Credit: © IMG_191 / Fotolia  

Clashes between the use of faith vs. scientific evidence
to explain the world around us dates back centuries.


If I understand the research in this report and in other studies posted here, the seeming conflict between faith and science resides in each of us due in part to the structures of our brains combined with how each individual's brain is genetically constructed combined with the fact that of the twenty or so "modes" of our brain, only one can grab the attention of our conscious and aware self at a time.

Recent research (below in related stories) shows differences between conservative and liberal thought processes; conservatives tending to more dominant amygdala reactions and liberals tending to more frontal lobe responses.  (This is my extremely simplistic explanation of our immensely complex brains.)  The importance of this is that political views are as much genetically controlled as based on logical conclusion.

Now we get into the conflict between science and religion.

The latest research seems to say that this, too, is genetic in origin.  Or, perhaps, may be genetically controlled.

As some brain scientists theorize, free will is an illusion; we're all creatures of our genes even on the highest levels.

This research and the debate surrounding it is central to the work we do as writers.  We deal in human action and emotion at all levels.  Understanding the source of behavior and attitude only makes us more adept and realistic in character and story.

Here's the report with a link to the study in the attribution.
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Conflict between science, religion lies in our brains

". . .the more empathetic the person, the more likely he or she is religious.  
[R]eligious belief is associated with greater compassion, greater social
inclusiveness and greater motivation to engage in pro-social actions."

The conflict between science and religion may have its origins in the structure of our brains, researchers at Case Western Reserve University and Babson College have found.  Clashes between the use of faith vs. scientific evidence to explain the world around us dates back centuries and is perhaps most visible today in the arguments between evolution and creationism.
To believe in a supernatural god or universal spirit, people appear to suppress the brain network used for analytical thinking and engage the empathetic network, the scientists say. When thinking analytically about the physical world, people appear to do the opposite.
"When there's a question of faith, from the analytic point of view, it may seem absurd," said Tony Jack, who led the research. "But, from what we understand about the brain, the leap of faith to belief in the supernatural amounts to pushing aside the critical/analytical way of thinking to help us achieve greater social and emotional insight."

Jack is an associate professor of philosophy at Case Western Reserve and research director of the university's Inamori International Center of Ethics and Excellence, which helped sponsor the research.

"A stream of research in cognitive psychology has shown and claims that people who have faith (i.e., are religious or spiritual) are not as smart as others. They actually might claim they are less intelligent.," said Richard Boyatzis, distinguished university professor and professor of organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve, and a member of Jack's team.

"Our studies confirmed that statistical relationship, but at the same time showed that people with faith are more prosocial and empathic," he said.

In a series of eight experiments, the researchers found the more empathetic the person, the more likely he or she is religious.

That finding offers a new explanation for past research showing women tend to hold more religious or spiritual worldviews than men. The gap may be because women have a stronger tendency toward empathetic concern than men.

Atheists, the researchers found, are most closely aligned with psychopaths -- not killers, but the vast majority of psychopaths classified as such due to their lack of empathy for others.

Brain structure
The research is based on the hypothesis that the human brain has two opposing domains in constant tension. In earlier research, Jack 's Brain, Mind & Consciousness lab used functional magnetic resonance imaging to show the brain has an analytical network of neurons that enables us to think critically and a social network that enables us to empathize. When presented with a physics problem or ethical dilemma, a healthy brain fires up the appropriate network while suppressing the other.

"Because of the tension between networks, pushing aside a naturalistic world view enables you to delve deeper into the social/emotional side," Jack explained. "And that may be the key to why beliefs in the supernatural exist throughout the history of cultures. It appeals to an essentially nonmaterial way of understanding the world and our place in it."

Friedman said, "Having empathy doesn't mean you necessarily have anti-scientific beliefs. Instead, our results suggest that if we only emphasize analytic reasoning and scientific beliefs, as the New Atheist movement suggests, then we are compromising our ability to cultivate a different type of thinking, namely social/moral insight."

"These findings," Friedman continued, "are consistent with the philosophical view, espoused by (Immanuel) Kant, according to which there are two distinct types of truth: empirical and moral."

Experiments and results
The researchers examined the relationship between belief in God or a universal spirit with measures of analytic thinking and moral concern in eight different experiments, each involving 159 to 527 adults. Consistently through all eight, the more religious the person, the more moral concern they showed. But no cause and effect was established.

They found that both spiritual belief and empathic concern were positively associated with frequency of prayer, meditations and other spiritual or religious practices, but neither were predicted by church dinners or other social contact associated with religious affiliation.

While others theorize that mentalizing -- interpreting human behavior in terms of intentional mental states such as needs, desires or purposes -- has a positive association with belief, the researchers found none.

". . .analytic thinking discourages acceptance of spiritual or religious beliefs."

Like other studies, these experiments showed that analytic thinking discourages acceptance of spiritual or religious beliefs. But the statistical analysis of data pooled from all eight experiments indicates empathy is more important to religious belief than analytic thinking is for disbelief.

So why can the conflict between science and religion become so strong?

"Because the networks suppress each other, they may create two extremes," Boyatzis said. "Recognizing that this is how the brain operates, maybe we can create more reason and balance in the national conversations involving science and religion."

Using both networks


"Many of history's most famous scientists were spiritual or religious."

The researchers say humans are built to engage and explore using both networks.  "Far from always conflicting with science, under the right circumstances religious belief may positively promote scientific creativity and insight," Jack said. "Many of history's most famous scientists were spiritual or religious. Those noted individuals were intellectually sophisticated enough to see that there is no need for religion and science to come into conflict."

They refer to Baruch Aba Shalev's book 100 years of Nobel Prizes, which found that, from 1901 to 2000,

  • 654 Nobel laureates, or nearly 90 percent, belonged to one of 28 religions. The remaining 
  • 10.5 percent were atheists, agnostics or freethinkers.

"You can be religious and be a very good scientist," Jack said.

The researchers agree with the New Atheists that suspension of analytical thinking -- at the wrong time -- can be dangerous, and point to the historical use of religious differences to persecute or fight wars.

"Although it is simply a distortion of history to pin all conflict on religion," Jack said. "Non-religious political movements, such as fascism and communism, and quasi-scientific movements, such as eugenics, have also done great harm."

The researchers suggest, however, that taking a carefully considered leap of religious faith appears be an effective route to promoting emotional insight. Theirs and other studies find that, overall, religious belief is associated with greater compassion, greater social inclusiveness and greater motivation to engage in pro-social actions.

Jack said the conflict can be avoided by remembering simple rules:

  1. "Religion has no place telling us about the physical structure of the world; that's the business of science. 
  2. Science should inform our ethical reasoning, but it cannot determine what is ethical or tell us how we should construct meaning and purpose in our lives."

To dig deeper into belief, the researchers are planning studies to learn if individuals who increase their empathy then increase their religious or spiritual belief, or vice versa.

Related stories:
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT:
Attitude & Politics
The Brain - Is it Nurture? Or Nature?
Story Source: Materials provided by Case Western Reserve University. Anthony Ian Jack, Jared Parker Friedman, Richard Eleftherios Boyatzis, Scott Nolan Taylor. Why Do You Believe in God? Relationships between Religious Belief, Analytic Thinking, Mentalizing and Moral Concern. PLOS ONE, 2016.

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What's in a name? Longer life & more success if. . .

Credit: Michigan State University  

This chart shows the life expectancy of black males and black names, 1802-1970.
Giving characters a name  is one of the pleasures of writing, as is, to be honest, using a person particularly disliked as the model for a villain.
Of course, you can go for it and
name your bad guy Dr. Evil and
have a good laugh while you're
at it  Okay, so Dr. E is a caricature,
but isn't his name fitting?

According to this study of black names, the name you give a character has deeper implications of acceptance and success or ostracization and rejection through life. In our effort to create believable characters and stories, this is a small hint on how to name characters - perhaps a name with neutral connotation to disguise a villain or a name with negative connotation to saddle a protagonist with an additional small burden in life.

Imagine James Bond with a different name, say Ralph Foster.  Doesn't work as well does it?  Pick a character, any character, from literature or history and play with alternate names.  Marvin Prescott instead of Sherlock Holmes.  Irving Watanabe rather than John Wilkes Booth.  Fred instead of Gandalf.  Not that these are particularly good examples of how a name changes image.

Here's the story for your consideration with a link to the full study in the attribution.
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What's in a name? In some cases, longer life

Black men with historically distinctive black names such as Elijah and Moses lived a year longer, on average, than other black men, according to new research examining 3 million death certificates from 1802 to 1970.

The study, co-authored by Michigan State University economist Lisa D. Cook, is one of the first to find benefits of having a racially distinctive name. Other studies that looked at current black names such as Jamal and Lakisha suggest that having these modern-day monikers leads to discrimination.

"A number of studies indicate that modern black names can act as a burden, whereas our findings show that historical black names conveyed a large advantage over a person's lifetime," said Cook, associate professor in MSU's Department of Economics and James Madison College.

Using historical death certificate data from four states -- Alabama, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina -- the researchers previously established the existence of a set of distinctive names given to black men, mainly in the early 20th century. The names range from Abraham to Booker to Isaac.

The current study examined mortality rates among men with those names. It found that having a distinctive black name added more than one year of life relative to other black males. The researchers ruled out socioeconomic and environmental factors such as single-parent households, education and occupation.

"A whole additional year on their lives, in mortality terms, is remarkable," Cook said. "Even a third of a year is significant."

Many of the distinctive names come from the Bible and possibly denote empowerment. Cook, who has five generations of Baptist ministers in her family, said one theory is that men with these Old Testament names may have been held to a higher standard in academic and other activities, even implicitly, and had stronger family, church or community ties. These stronger social networks could help a person weather negative events throughout life.

"I think the teachers in these one-room schoolhouses -- teachers who also taught Sunday school -- probably placed implicit expectations on students with these distinctive names," Cook said. "And I think that gave them a status that they otherwise would not have had."

Name discrimination among job applicants
On the contrary, previous research has found that having distinctive modern names such as Tremayne and Tanisha has led to discrimination among job applicants, college students seeking mentors and researchers seeking federal funding. Researchers in the United States, Britain and elsewhere have studied the issue.

"When people see a name that's foreign or strange to them in their profession, implicitly they shut down, as these studies have shown," Cook said. "Then there is an extra layer of bias suggesting that this is possibly a female, poor or somehow unqualified candidate. Research has found that in the United States it's associated with racial discrimination and in Britain it's associated with class discrimination."

Related stories:

WRITING, READING & TECHNIQUE
Story Source:  Materials provided by Michigan State University. Lisa D. Cook, Trevon D. Logan, John M. Parman. The mortality consequences of distinctively black names. Explorations in Economic History, 2016.
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How science literate are we as a society?






How science literate are we?  How science literate is the population of the U.S?

This is one tough question.

First, how do you quantify science literacy and by what measure?  Is it enough to understand the basic concepts of science as taught in public schools, and to know a little math and biology and chemistry and physics and business? (Yes, business is an exploding field of scientific research - with fascinating results.)

"Science fiction properly defined mean that if there is any real science, it is correct."
~ Ursula Le Guin, NPR interview August 29, 2015

Do we need a functional understanding?  Okay, what is a functional understanding and how do you measure this?

To go a step further, is there a need to stay current with a variety of research outside of professional interest and across an impossibly wide range of subjects?  Is it enough to (attempt to) stay current in one field?

As often pointed out, there are more scientists active today than have lived and worked across the entire 200,000 year history of us - the homo sapien. There is even a variation of Moore's Law applied to scientific endeavor.  As the capacity of semiconductors doubles every X months, it is estimated that our scientific knowledge has a similar doubling rate.  One writer predicts that our scientific knowledge will double every 75 minutes by the year 2020, and continue to grow at an exponential rate for the foreseeable future.

If you measure the knowledge of the public against this growth curve, we're all, even the best educated scientist, is an idiot going in.  As the joke goes, a scientist today learns more and more about less and less until he or she knows everything about nothing.

To me, it would seem much more important that people understand how to access the information they need, whether for work or pleasure, as there is no way any one person can carry even a sliver of all knowledge around in their head - even about their own field of expertise.  The day of the supposed universally-educated Renaissance man or woman was over probably 150 over years ago despite what Conan Doyle wrote.

As writers it seems especially important to at least be aware of the latest advances in the fields about which we write.  Take crime fiction.  Are you aware of some of the latest advances in criminology?  For example, there is technology available that tells a detective how old a fingerprint is.  There are hand-held devices that instantly tell the user whether the blood in a crime scene is human or animal; not in three weeks or a month, but at the scene.  The list of these advances is staggering, and they are changing the work of the detective faster than they can detect.

If you write crime fiction, do you really want to publish a story to have your readers reject it because the techniques you write about are so literally last year?  Ooopsie.

Let's not discuss the abysmal science knowledge of too many science fiction authors.  It makes one want to cry.  Self-help books?  Recently published research shows that the typical self-help book does more harm than good.

The same arguments can be made about the fiction in most genres.  Would you write something about England's Richard III without knowledge of the recent discovery and analysis of his remains?  Or use the Globe Theatre as a setting without reviewing the current excavation of the site by archaeologists?
Being a writer of fiction or film is daunting hard work.  In the midst of the current scientific revolution, it is certainly not getting any easier to stay current - but the benefit is being able to educate and surprise your reader with new information they may not know.

Here's the current press release.  We'll post the final study when published.
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 Taking stock of U. S. science literacy broadly

What does it mean to be science literate? How science literate is the American public? How do we stack up against other countries? What are the civic implications of a public with limited knowledge of science and how it works? How is science literacy measured? These and other questions are now under the microscope.

These and other questions are under the microscope of a 12-member National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel -- including University of Wisconsin-Madison Life Sciences Communication Professor Dominique Brossard and School of Education Professor Noah Feinstein -- charged with sorting through the existing data on American science and health literacy and exploring the association between knowledge of science and public perception of and support for science.

"The goal is to try and get the big picture," says Brossard, a noted social scientist and expert on science communication. "We're not looking at any single area of science and it is a consensus report, meaning we all have to agree, assuring multiple perspectives will be reflected in the final product."

The committee -- composed of educators, scientists, physicians and social scientists -- will take a hard look at the existing data on the state of U.S. science literacy, the questions asked, and the methods used to measure what Americans know and don't know about science and how that knowledge has changed over time. Critically for science, the panel will explore whether a lack of science literacy is associated with decreased public support for science or research.

Historically, policymakers and leaders in the scientific community have fretted over a perceived lack of knowledge among Americans about science and how it works. A prevailing fear is that an American public unequipped to come to terms with modern science will ultimately have serious economic, security and civic consequences, especially when it comes to addressing complex and nuanced issues like climate change, antibiotic resistance, emerging diseases, environment and energy choices.

While the prevailing wisdom, inspired by past studies, is that Americans don't stack up well in terms of understanding science, Brossard is not so convinced. Much depends on what kinds of questions are asked, how they are asked, and how the data is analyzed.

It is very easy, she argues, to do bad social science and past studies may have measured the wrong things or otherwise created a perception about the state of U.S. science literacy that may or may not be true.

"How do you conceptualize scientific literacy? What do people need to know? Some argue that scientific literacy may be as simple as an understanding of how science works, the nature of science," Brossard explains. "For others it may be a kind of 'civic science literacy,' where people have enough knowledge to be informed and make good decisions in a civics context."

Science literacy, Brossard adds, might also mean having enough knowledge to make good personal decisions. For example, knowing that there is a growing problem with bacteria becoming resistant to available antibiotics might better inform people about when such medicines are helpful and when they might contribute to a growing problem.

"There is such a thing as practical science literacy," says Brossard. "What are the things we need to know to help manage everyday life and make decisions in the best interest of ourselves and our families?"

The committee's report is expected in early- to mid-2017.

Related stories:


Story Source:  Materials provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison, original written by Terry Devitt. "Taking stock of U. S. science literacy broadly." ScienceDaily, 24 March 2016. 
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Why humans invented pottery 16,000 years ago


A reconstructed early pottery vessel from Torihama, Japan,
dating to the end of the Late Pleistocene (ca 12,000 years old). 
Chemical analysis revealed that such vessels were used to 
process fish during the late Glacial period.

Why did ancient humans invent pottery?

What survival advantage did firing lumps of mud give us at the end of the last ice age? Food storage?  Easier transportation of grain or other foodstuff?  Something to dramatically throw against a cave wall in an argument with your significant other?  Brewing beer?  To make ancient Frisbees?  Theories abound.

For me, the question isn't how come.  It's who and why?  Who figured out that heating mud in the depth of a fire would give it a temporary permanence?  Did someone deliberately do it in a moment of bored curiousity.  Was it an accident?  Or and this is my theory, did a six year old make "dinner" for her family by cooking her mud-food over a fire? Who pays attention to what six year old kids do? Obviously, someone did, or we'd be slurping morning coffee out of cupped hands.

If you're a writer of pre-historical fiction, you need an understanding of even these seemingly simple matters of utility and survival of the clan.  No matter how or why, the early development of pottery is an act of genius comparable to the invention of stone tools or domestication of various plants and animals.

From scientific viewpoint of this story, it's interesting that researchers are able to determine how these items were used by reproducible experimentation and not by relying on the opinion of an expert trying to do the logically absurd by concluding a universal "fact" from scant evidence.   (One of the core faults of modern paleo-anthropology and related fields is that entire hominim species and careers are built upon the cusps of one tooth.)  But, I digress. As surely as the Earth's rotation makes the Sun appear to rise in the morning, there are going to argue that these conclusions are wrong despite the chemical analysis.

Ain't science fun?

Here's the story with a link to the full report in the attribution.
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Why did we invent pottery?

Archaeologists at the University of York, leading a large international team, have revealed surprising new insights into why pottery production increased significantly at the end of the last Ice Age – with culture playing a bigger role than expected. Investigating the use and expansion of hunter-gatherer pottery in Japan, home to some of the earliest pottery in the world, researchers analysed 143 ceramic vessels from Torihama, an ancient site in western Japan.

Pottery is thought to have originated in Japan around 16,000 years ago, but the numbers produced vastly increased 11,500 years ago, coinciding with a shift to a warmer climate. As resurgence in forests took place, an increase in vegetation and animals led to new food sources becoming available.

Previous thinking suggested that pottery use and production increased to accommodate different cooking and storage techniques for the wider variety of foodstuffs available at this time. However, new analysis reveals this not to be the case.

Performing molecular and isotopic analysis of lipids extracted from vessels spanning a 9000 year period, the researchers found that pottery was used largely for cooking marine and freshwater animal species – a routine that remained constant despite climate warming and new resources becoming available.

Finding surprisingly little evidence of plant processing in pottery, or cooking of animals such as deer, researchers found the only significant change to be the different types of fish consumed, such as an increase in freshwater fish.

This functional resilience in pottery use, in the face of climatic changes, suggests that cultural influences rather than environmental factors are more important in the widespread uptake of pottery.

Dr Oliver Craig, Director of BioArCh in York’s Department of Archaeology, said: “Here, we are starting to acquire some idea of why pottery was invented and became such a successful technology. Interestingly, the reason seems to be little to do with subsistence and more to do with the adoption of a cultural tradition, linked to celebratory occasions and competitive feasting, especially involving the preparation of fish and shellfish.

“The endurance of this transition means it was embedded in East Asian foragers’ social memory for hundreds of generations, perhaps reflecting the need for a dependable method to exploit a sustainable food in an uncertain and changing world.”

Dr Alexandre Lucquin, Research Associate in BioArCh and first author of the article, said: “The preservation of lipids on ceramic material of this antiquity is remarkable. The analysis provides the first insights into how pottery use changed during massive climate change at the end of the last Ice Age.”

Dr Shinya Shoda, a visiting research fellow from Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties who participated in the study, said: “The findings prompt a new phase of ceramic research in East Asia, highlighting the need for widespread organic analysis of our long, rich and varied pottery records.”

Related stories:

HISTORY & PREHISTORY
Story Source:  Materials provided by University of York. Alexandre Lucquin, Kevin Gibbs, Junzo Uchiyama, Hayley Saul, Mayumi Ajimoto, Yvette Eley, Anita Radini, Carl P. Heron, Shinya Shoda, Yastami Nishida, Jasmine Lundy, Peter Jordan, Sven Isaksson, and Oliver E. Craig. Ancient lipids document continuity in the use of early hunter–gatherer pottery through 9,000 years of Japanese prehistory. PNAS, March 21, 2016.
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Sunbathers live longer. No one knows why.

Image result for Sunbathers

Sunbathing season is near, so the report of this research conclusion is particularly good (?) news for worshipers of Sol and the healthy tan.  Yes, there's still a risk of skin cancer, yadda yadda, but. . . longer life?  Awesome.  Break out the sun screen and loll on the beach.  Can't come soon enough for those of us in the Northwest.  Summer is usually three or four days in August and I can't wait.

Why do sunbathers live longer than those who avoid the sun?

New research looks into the paradox that women who sunbathe are likely to live longer than those who avoid the sun, even though sunbathers are at an increased risk of developing skin cancer. An analysis of information on 29,518 Swedish women who were followed for 20 years revealed that longer life expectancy among women with active sun exposure habits was related to a decrease in heart disease and noncancer/non–heart disease deaths, causing the relative contribution of death due to cancer to increase. Whether the positive effect of sun exposure demonstrated in this observational study is mediated by vitamin D, another mechanism related to UV radiation, or by unmeasured bias cannot be determined.

New research looks into the paradox that women who sunbathe are likely to live longer than those who avoid the sun, even though sunbathers are at an increased risk of developing skin cancer.

An analysis of information on 29,518 Swedish women who were followed for 20 years revealed that longer life expectancy among women with active sun exposure habits was related to a decrease in heart disease and noncancer/non-heart disease deaths, causing the relative contribution of death due to cancer to increase.

Whether the positive effect of sun exposure demonstrated in this observational study is mediated by vitamin D, another mechanism related to UV radiation, or by unmeasured bias cannot be determined. Therefore, additional research is warranted.

"We found smokers in the highest sun exposure group were at a similar risk as non-smokers avoiding sun exposure, indicating avoidance of sun exposure to be a risk factor of the same magnitude as smoking," said Dr. Pelle Lindqvist, lead author of the Journal of Internal Medicine study. "Guidelines being too restrictive regarding sun exposure may do more harm than good for health."

Related stories:

Story Source:  Materials provided by Wiley.  P. G. Lindqvist, E. Epstein, K. Nielsen, M. Landin-Olsson, C. Ingvar, H. Olsson. Avoidance of sun exposure as a risk factor for major causes of death: a competing risk analysis of the Melanoma in Southern Sweden cohort. Journal of Internal Medicine, 2016.
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How much blood could Dracula drink before killing you?



Dracula (1931), directed by Tod Browning starring Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, 
and David Manners, story by Bram Stoker, adapted for the screen from the Garrett 
Fort stage play by Hamilton Deane & John L. Balderston.
A joy of reading science releases is coming across apparently meaningless research that explains things we never knew we need, but do.

Such as how much blood could Dracula suck out of someone's neck without killing them?  And, of course, how long would it take?

I never knew that I need this information, but here it is.

The full student paper including some mind boggling equations is linked in the attribution line.  I suggest wearing a garlic garland before reading it.
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Out for blood: 
Fluid dynamics explain how quickly a vampire could drain your blood

To coincide with the 85th anniversary of Tod Browning’s ‘Dracula’ (1931) starring Bela Lugosi, should you (unfortunately) be assailed by a vampire, students from the University of Leicester’s Department of Physics and Astronomy have used fluid dynamics to examine how long it would take for the undead fiend to drain an average human’s blood – and have calculated that it would take only 6.4 minutes to drain 15 per cent of the blood from the external carotid artery in a human’s neck.

15 per cent was used as the benchmark as any more blood loss causes the heart rate to change, while less can be taken without affecting the circulatory system of a human.

The aorta, the main artery of the body, splits into five other arteries. For the purpose of the study the team was concerned with the velocity of blood flowing into only the common carotid artery.

They also assumed the five arteries are of even thickness, enabling them to calculate the velocity of blood flowing into the common carotid artery.

By examining the average human blood pressure in arteries measured relative to the air pressure, this gave the students the pressure difference.

They then worked out average density of blood at room temperature and were able to deduce how much blood would come out of a puncture in a human’s neck (with vampire fangs assumed to leave puncture holes with a width of 0.5mm each).

Considering the human body has an average of 5 litres of blood and that a vampire might feasibly take 15%, in the study a vampire would drain 0.75 litres of blood, and by their calculations it would take 6.4 minutes to do so.

The students presented their findings in a paper for the Journal of Physics Special Topics, a peer-reviewed student journal run by the University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. The student-run journal is designed to give students practical experience of writing, editing, publishing and reviewing scientific papers.

Course tutor, Dr Mervyn Roy, a lecturer in the University of Leicester’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, said: “Every year we ask each student to write around 10 short papers for the Journal of Physics Special Topics. It lets the students show off their creative side and apply some of physics they know to the weird, the wonderful, or the everyday.”

(I love science. Ed.)

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Story Source: Materials provided by University of Leicester. "Out for blood: Fluid dynamics explain how quickly a vampire could drain your blood." ScienceDaily, 18 March 2016.
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,

Conservatives and liberals do think differently

Credit: © igor / Fotolia
  
When solving short (non-political) verbal problems in an experiment, liberals were
more likely than conservatives to achieve solutions with a sudden insight or "Aha!"


Conservatives and liberals do think differently
Research shows different ways of solving everyday problems linked to political ideology.
Big differences in the ways conservatives and liberals think about solving the nation's most pressing problems couldn't be more apparent during this presidential election cycle. But political ideas aside, people who hold conservative versus liberal perspectives appear to differ in everyday thinking processes and problem solving, according to new research.

When solving short (non-political) verbal problems in an experiment, liberals were more likely than conservatives to achieve solutions with a sudden insight or "Aha!" In contrast, both groups achieved roughly an equal number of solutions through gradual, analytical processing.

Different from instinctive or gut reactions, insight problem solving occurs when after working on a problem for awhile and maybe feeling stuck, a solution unexpectedly emerges into consciousness in an 'Aha!' moment. The problem is suddenly seen in a new light, often surprising the solvers who are typically unaware of how the reorganization of their thought processes occurred.

Insight solutions contrast with methodical and analytical problem solving, which involve a gradual approach toward the solution and awareness of the steps involved.

"This view is consistent with similar results from other labs across behavioral, neuroscientific and genetic studies, which converge in showing that conservatives have more structured and persistent cognitive styles," said Carola Salvi, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow in cognitive psychology at Northwestern and RIC.

"Liberals have a less structured and more flexible cognitive style, according to those studies. Our research indicates that cognitive differences in people with different political orientations also are apparent in a task that some consider to be convergent thinking: finding a single solution to a problem," Salvi said.

Given previous findings relating political orientation with cognitive styles, the researchers hypothesized that liberals and conservatives would preferentially employ different processes when tackling problems that could be solved using either an analytical or insight approach.

"It's not that there's a different capacity to solve problems," stressed Mark Beeman, senior author of the study and professor and chair of psychology at Northwestern. "It's more about which processes people end up engaging in to solve the problem."

And it's not about preferences, said Jordan Grafman, co-author of the study and professor in physical medicine and rehabilitation at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine and director of brain injury research at RIC.

"People may default automatically to a particular approach out of habit or predisposition, but they are not consciously choosing to solve a problem one way or the other," Grafman said.

Approximately 130 Northwestern students were randomly assigned to the study. Those whose survey responses demonstrated a particular political ideology were ultimately divided into either a liberal or conservative group and balanced for age and ethnicity. A third group of students who scored "neutral" were excluded from the analysis.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers used a well-known task in the problem-solving literature -- the Compound Remote Associate (CRA) problems. These problems can be solved through either insight or analytic processes with participants reporting how they solved each problem. Each problem consisted of the simultaneous presentation of three words, each of which could form a compound word or phrase with the solution word. For example: pine/crab/sauce -- the solution word is APPLE.

Past research has demonstrated that different mental processes and distinct brain regions are involved when people report solving these problems with insight, versus when solving analytically.

"Liberals tended more than conservatives to use insight to solve verbal problems in which you have to 'think outside the box,'" Salvi said.

In life you often use both approaches, Salvi noted.

"Everyday life presents us with a variety of scenarios where we are asked to solve problems analytically, others only with a spark of insight, most of them can be solved either way," Salvi said. "In this last case, liberals are more likely to achieve the solution with an 'Aha!' moment, whereas conservatives' problem solving approach does not prefer one style or the other."

"The Politics of Insight" is published online in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. In addition to Salvi, Grafman and Beeman, Irene Cristofori of RIC and the department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Feinberg School of Medicine, also is a co-author of the study.

Related stories:
Attitude & Politics
Story Source:  Materials provided by Northwestern University, original written by Hilary Hurd Anyaso.  Florian Hintz, Antje S. Meyer, Falk Huettig. Encouraging prediction during production facilitates subsequent comprehension: Evidence from interleaved object naming in sentence context and sentence reading. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2016.
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Human habitat 1.8 million years was no picnic - despite park-like setting





Credit: M.Lopez-Herrera via The Olduvai Paleoanthropology and Paleoecology Project and Enrique Baquedano.

Artist's rendition of an early human habitat in East Africa 1.8 million years ago.
Whether you write pre-historical fiction a la'  best-selling author Jean Auel or are interested in how we became who are today, this study has something for you.  For the first time researchers have constructed an accurate picture of how our ancestors lived some 1.8 million years ago, revealing what they ate, how they found food and what animals we had to compete with (and flee from as well.)

Here's the report with a link to the full study in the attribution.
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Early human habitat,
recreated for first time, 
shows life was no picnic
Scientists have pieced together an early human habitat for the first time, and life was no picnic 1.8 million years ago.  Our human ancestors, who looked like a cross between apes and modern humans, had access to food, water and shady shelter at a site in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. They even had lots of stone tools with sharp edges, said Gail M. Ashley, a professor in the Rutgers Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences.

But "it was tough living," she said. "It was a very stressful life because they were in continual competition with carnivores for their food."

During years of work, Ashley and other researchers carefully reconstructed an early human landscape on a fine scale, using plant and other evidence collected at the sprawling site. Their pioneering work was published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The landscape reconstruction will help paleoanthropologists develop ideas and models on what early humans were like, how they lived, how they got their food (especially protein), what they ate and drank and their behavior, Ashley said.

Famous paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey discovered the site in 1959 and uncovered thousands of animal bones and stone tools. Through exhaustive excavations in the last decade, Ashley, other scientists and students collected numerous soil samples and studied them via carbon isotope analysis.

The landscape, it turned out, had a freshwater spring, wetlands and woodland as well as grasslands.

"We were able to map out what the plants were on the landscape with respect to where the humans and their stone tools were found," Ashley said. "That's never been done before. Mapping was done by analyzing the soils in one geological bed, and in that bed there were bones of two different hominin species."


The two species of hominins, or early humans, are Paranthropus boisei (left) -- robust and pretty small-brained -- and Homo habilis, (right) a lighter-boned species. Homo habilis had a bigger brain and was more in sync with our human evolutionary tree, according to Ashley.

Both species were about 4.5 to 5.5 feet tall, and their lifespan was likely about 30 to 40 years.

Through their research, the scientists learned that the shady woodland had palm and acacia trees. They don't think the hominins camped there. But based on the high concentration of bones, the primates probably obtained carcasses elsewhere and ate the meat in the woods for safety, Ashley said.

In a surprising twist, a layer of volcanic ash covered the site's surface, nicely preserving the bones and organic matter, said Ashley, who has conducted research in the area since 1994.

"Think about it as a Pompeii-like event where you had a volcanic eruption," she said, noting that a volcano is about 10 miles from the site. The eruption "spewed out a lot of ash that completely blanketed the landscape."

On the site, scientists found thousands of bones from animals such as giraffes, elephants and wildebeests, swift runners in the antelope family. The hominins may have killed the animals for their meat or scavenged leftover meat. Competing carnivores included lions, leopards and hyenas, which also posed a threat to hominin safety, according to Ashley.

Paleoanthropologists "have started to have some ideas about whether hominins were actively hunting animals for meat sources or whether they were perhaps scavenging leftover meat sources that had been killed by say a lion or a hyena," she said.

"The subject of eating meat is an important question defining current research on hominins," she said. "We know that the increase in the size of the brain, just the evolution of humans, is probably tied to more protein."

The hominins' food also may have included wetland ferns for protein and crustaceans, snails and slugs.

Scientists think the hominins likely used the site for a long time, perhaps tens or hundreds of years, Ashley said.

"We don't think they were living there," she said. "We think they were taking advantage of the freshwater source that was nearby."

Related stories:
Human Development & Genetics
Story Source:  Materials provided by Rutgers University. Clayton R. Magill, Gail M. Ashley, Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, Katherine H. Freeman. Dietary options and behavior suggested by plant biomarker evidence in an early human habitat. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2016
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Writing a "Bromance"? Here's a report on the health benefits

Credit: © jagodka / Fotolia  
A new study looked at male rats housed in the same cage, and demonstrated 
that mild stress can actually make male rats more social and cooperative than
they are in an unstressed environment, much as humans come together after
non-life-threatening events such as a national tragedy. After a mild stress, the
rats showed increased brain levels of oxytocin and its receptor and huddled
and touched more. (stock photo)

As writers, we all know that men build friendships and bonds very differently than women.

From Fight Club to Dumb & Dumber and The Little Rascals to the Big Bang Theory and the Red Green Show, male friendship movies and television are a part of popular culture.  While women don't get it, men don't either.  They just do it without a lot of thought.

Part culture and part biology, male relationships are what they are based for a great part on beer, broads, and bragadacio.

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The Man's Prayer
I'm a man.
But I can change.
If I have to.
. . . I guess.
                                       -- Red Green
*  *  *  *  *

Have you ever wondered what men get out of bromances?  There's not a ton of research on this, but the report below does explore what's in male-male relationships for men.

Here's the report with a link to the full study in the attribution.
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Bromances may be good for men's health
Moderate stress encourages male bonding, and 
prosocial behavior makes them more resilient to stress

A new study of the effects of stress on social behavior in male rats finds that moderate stress makes them more prosocial, raising oxytocin levels that are known to encourage bonding, which in turn leads to resilience in the face of stress and better health. Life-threatening stress, however, makes male rats avoid socializing and lowers oxytocin levels, akin to the effects of PTSD, leading to a spiraling decrease in bonding and resilience to stress.

Male friendships, portrayed and often winked at in bromance movies, could have healthful effects similar to those seen in romantic relationships, especially when dealing with stress, according to a new study of male rats by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

Human studies show that social interactions increase the level of the hormone oxytocin in the brain, and that oxytocin helps people bond and socialize more, increasing their resilience in the face of stress and leading to longer, healthier lives. Studies of male-female rat pairs and other rodents, such as monogamous prairie voles, confirm these findings.

The new study extends these studies to male rats housed in the same cage, and demonstrates that mild stress can actually make male rats more social and cooperative than they are in an unstressed environment, much as humans come together after non-life-threatening events such as a national tragedy. After a mild stress, the rats showed increased brain levels of oxytocin and its receptor and huddled and touched more.

"A bromance can be a good thing," said lead author Elizabeth Kirby, who started work on the study while a doctoral student at UC Berkeley and continued it after assuming a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford. "Males are getting a bad rap when you look at animal models of social interactions, because they are assumed to be instinctively aggressive. But even rats can have a good cuddle -- essentially a male-male bromance -- to help recover from a bad day."

"Having friends is not un-masculine," she added. "These rats are using their rat friendships to recover from what would otherwise be a negative experience. If rats can do it, men can do it too. And they definitely are, they just don't get as much credit in the research for that."

Normal vs. traumatic stress
The research also has implications for post-traumatic stress disorder, said senior author Daniela Kaufer, a UC Berkeley associate professor of integrative biology and member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute.

After severe, potentially life-threatening stress, the male rat cage-mates became withdrawn and antisocial, often sitting alone in a corner, and more aggressive, not unlike people who suffer from PTSD or illnesses such as depression or severe anxiety. The researchers found that oxytocin receptor levels in the brain actually decreased after severe stress, which would make the brain less responsive to whatever hormone is there.

"Social interactions can buffer you against stress, but if a trauma is just too much and there is PTSD, you actually withdraw from social interactions that can be supportive for you," Kaufer said. "This research suggests that this might be happening through changes in oxytocin; that in the context of life-threatening stress, you lose its effect and you see less prosocial behavior. This really aligns well with what you see with pathological effects of stress on humans."

The work supports attempts to treat PTSD with oxytocin nasal sprays as a way to encourage social interactions that could lead to recovery. Oxytocin may also help those suffering from PTSD replace traumatic memories with less traumatic memories, so-called fear extinction.

"We think oxytocin, which is released after stress, is a way of bringing people closer in times of acute stress, which leads to more sharing, bonding and potentially better fear extinction and an increase in cognitive health," said first author Sandra Muroy, a UC Berkeley graduate student who launched the research while an undergraduate.

Kaufer and Kirby study the impact of stress on the brain, and previously showed that moderate stress primes the brain to better deal with subsequent stress, even stimulating the growth of new neurons to remember the stressful situation.

This research led them to study the effect of stress on social behavior, and how brain hormones and neural circuits are changed by stress to alter social dynamics. Kirby and Muroy focused over the past two years on male rats after noticing the effects of mild stress on cage-mate interactions. They correlated these with oxytocin levels in the brain's hypothalamus, because of oxytocin's known role in social bonding, including male-female pair bonding and a mother's bonding with a child.

Males huddle more after moderate stress
Male rats housed together, Kirby said, sometimes display aggression toward one another, such as fighting over water and food. But after a mild stress -- in this experiment, restraining them for a few hours -- they tended to cooperate more, despite or because of an even stronger dominance hierarchy between the rats.

"If you repeatedly take away and return their water, normal rats become very aggressive, pushing and shoving at the water fountain like a bunch of thirsty 7-year-olds who don't know how to stand in line yet," Kirby said. "The cage-mates who had the mild stressor did not show this behavior at all. After taking away their water and bringing it back, they shared it very evenly and without any pushing and shoving. It was very civil."

The researchers found that this was accompanied by increased hypothalamic oxytocin levels.

On the other hand, a severe stressor -- in this case, adding the smell of fox urine while they were restrained -- had the opposite effect.

"If you are a rat and you smell a predator, the likelihood that you are going to get eaten soon is pretty high," Kirby said. "In that case, the oxytocin bump that would come with a less threatening stressor is suppressed, and oxytocin receptor levels decrease Then, you don't see social bonding anymore. You don't see the rodent cuddling, you don't see them showing increased prosocial behaviors."

This is akin to PTSD after a battle experience or a car accident, she said. "People stop talking to their friends, they stop engaging in their social networks the way they used to."

"A tiny little difference in the reality of the experiment -- the switch from a neutral odor to a predator odor -- caused a major change in these animals' behavior: they don't have any of the prosocial bonding, they don't share resources in a nice way, they don't have a pronounced hierarchy, they don't huddle or bond, and you start seeing aggression," Kaufer added. "And when you look in the brain, they don't have an increase in oxytocin gene expression or the hormone itself, and they have a decrease in the oxytocin receptor."

These and other experiments, she said, demonstrate that stress should be seen less as a trial to survive than as a stimulus for greater social bonding and, by changing our day-to-day lives, a long-term benefit to mental health and increased stress resilience.
The work was supported by a BRAINS innovator award from the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health. Current UC Berkeley graduate student Kimberly Long is also an author of the paper.
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Related stories:
About Men
Story Source: Materials provided by University of California - Berkeley, original written by Robert Sanders.  Sandra E Muroy, Kimberly LP Long, Daniela Kaufer, Elizabeth D Kirby. Moderate Stress-Induced Social Bonding and Oxytocin Signaling are Disrupted by Predator Odor in Male Rats. Neuropsychopharmacology, 2016
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