Laura’s Psychology Blog

This first computer in 1948 could hold a whopping 8kb.

Here is what I am reading today:

• The Russian Meteor heard ten hours later in America

“The human ear cannot hear these infrasound signals. However, by playing the data faster than true speed, Georgia Tech faculty member Zhigang Peng increased the sound waves’ frequency to audible levels. The Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology’s Data Managment Center provided the data.

“The sound started at about 10 hours after the explosion and lasted for another 10 hours in Georgia,” said Peng, an associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. He’s confident that the sound is associated with the meteor impact because a slow propagation of the sound waves can be seen across the entire collection of USArray stations, as well as other stations in Alaska and polar regions.”

• growing brain cells

“”We think this one type of cell may be useful in treating several types of neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders in a targeted way,” said Arnold Kriegstein, MD, PhD, director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCSF and co-lead author on the paper.”

• counting peanuts

“”The human capacity for complex symbolic math is clearly unique to our species,” says co-author Jessica Cantlon, assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. “But where did this numeric prowess come from? In this study we’ve shown that non-human primates also possess basic quantitative abilities. In fact, non-human primates can be as accurate at discriminating between different quantities as a human child.”"

• ADHD crisis – problems with providers

“”It is unclear why so many physicians who specialize in the management of ADHD — child neurologists, psychiatrists and developmental pediatricians — fail to comply with recently published treatment guidelines,” said Andrew Adesman, MD, senior investigator and chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New Hyde Park. “With the AAP now extending its diagnosis and treatment guidelines down to preschoolers, it is likely that more young children will be diagnosed with ADHD even before entering kindergarten. Primary care physicians and pediatric specialists should recommend behavior therapy as the first line treatment.”"

• benefits of sports teams

“”Athletic participation may prevent involvement in violence-related activities among girls but not among boys because aggression and violence generally might be more accepted in boys’ high school sports,” said senior author Tamera Coyne-Beasley, MD, MPH, FSAHM, FAAP, professor of pediatrics and internal medicine at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.”

• texting and driving… its what some kids do

“”Texting while driving has become, in the words of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a ‘national epidemic,’” said principal investigator Alexandra Bailin, a research assistant at Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York.

Motor vehicle accidents are the leading cause of death among teenagers, and using a phone while driving significantly increases the risk of accidents in this age group. The specific act of texting while driving has been found to raise the risk of a crash by 23 times, leading many to conclude that texting while driving is more dangerous than driving while intoxicated.”

Do you know the way to PISMO BEACH?? Some of the family came with us… nephew Scott and daughter Karen! Fun times at the “CRACKED CRAB”!

Here is what we are reading today:

• unhealthy eating can make a bad mood… WORSE!

“In a study, college-age women who were concerned about their eating behaviors reported that moods worsened after bouts of disordered eating, said Kristin Heron, research associate at the Survey Research Center. “There was little in the way of mood changes right before the unhealthy eating behaviors,” said Heron. “However, negative mood was significantly higher after these behaviors.” According to Heron, who worked with Joshua Smyth, professor of biobehavioral health, Stacey Scott, research associate in the Center for Healthy Aging, and Martin Sliwinski, professor of human development and family studies, people who experience disordered eating patterns may exhibit behaviors such as binge eating, loss of control over eating and food intake restriction.”

• a brain on fire

Youtube video

• have we found the so-called “god particle?”

“Scientists at the CERN’s Large Hadron Collider are now certain they have found a Higgs boson particle.

Known as “The God Particle,” the once theoretical Higgs boson is the mechanism that gives mass to elementary objects, meaning that its existence helps explain the existence of virtually everything else. For years, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have been smashing atoms together in the massive collider in hopes of finding that elusive particle. On Thursday, at a conference in Geneva, Switzerland, scientists say that have their proof — or at least part of it.

• cocaine treatment discovery

“Reporting in the Journal of Neuroscience, Michigan State University neuroscientist A.J. Robison and colleagues say cocaine alters the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s pleasure center that responds to stimuli such as food, sex and drugs. “Understanding what happens molecularly to this brain region during long-term exposure to drugs might give us insight into how addiction occurs,” said Robison, assistant professor in the Department of Physiology and the Neuroscience Program.”

• why autistics have difficulty recognizing faces

“”When your brain is processing faces, you want neurons to respond selectively so that each is picking up a different aspect of individual faces. The neurons need to be finely tuned to understand what is dissimilar from one face to another,” says the study’s senior investigator, Maximilian Riesenhuber, PhD., an associate professor of neuroscience at GUMC.”

• how the brain gets rid of useless information

“”The brain doesn’t store all the information it encounters, so there must be a mechanism for discarding what isn’t important,” said senior author R. Douglas Fields, Ph.D., head of the Section on Nervous System Development and Plasticity at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the NIH institute where the research was conducted. “These reverse brain signals appear to be the mechanism by which the brain clears itself of unimportant information.”"

• male and female differences: look at language protein

“In the current study, J. Michael Bowers, PhD, Margaret McCarthy, PhD, and colleagues at the University of Maryland School of Medicine examined whether sex differences in the expression of the Foxp2 protein in the developing brain might underlie communication differences between the sexes.”

• Reward yourself with a trip to Greece!

“This summer, explore modern and ancient Greece, see and experience the beauty of the country and its people with your family while earning CEU credits.”

Don’t be afraid… just a “Dr. Who” fan made this!

Here is what I am reading today:

• a child’s asthma may come from where??

The researchers, John S. Torday, PhD, and Virender K. Rehan, MD, wrote an editorial citing recent studies by Dr. Rehan that found pregnant rats given nicotine produced asthmatic pups that went on to produce their own asthmatic pups, despite the absence of nicotine exposure in the third generation. The findings suggest nicotine can leave heritable epigenetic marks on the genome, which make future offspring more susceptible to respiratory conditions.”

• consciousness – how the brain gains and loses

“”When anesthesiologists are taking care of someone in the operating room, they can use the information in this article to make sure that someone is unconscious, and they can have a specific idea of when the person may be regaining consciousness,” says senior author Emery Brown, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and health sciences and technology and an anesthesiologist at MGH. Lead author of the paper is Patrick Purdon, an instructor of anesthesia at MGH and Harvard Medical School.”

• mean girls … we all know them

“”In real life and in academic studies, we tend to focus on the harm done to victims in cases of social aggression,” says co-author Richard Ryan, professor of clinical and social psychology at the University of Rochester. “This study shows that when people bend to pressure to exclude others, they also pay a steep personal cost. Their distress is different from the person excluded, but no less intense.”"

• Alzheimer and green tea

“The specific molecule in green tea, (—)-epigallocatechin-3-gallate, also known as EGCG, prevented aggregate formation and broke down existing aggregate structures in the proteins that contained metals—specifically copper, iron and zinc. “A lot of people are very excited about this molecule,” said Lim, noting that the EGCG and other flavonoids in natural products have long been established as powerful antioxidants. “We used a multidisciplinary approach. This is the first example of structure-centric, multidisciplinary investigations by three principal investigators with three different areas of expertise.”"

• phantom pain and the brain

“The Oxford University researchers, along with Dr David Henderson-Slater of the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, report their findings in the journal Nature Communications. They were funded by the Royal Society, Marie Curie Actions, the Wellcome Trust, National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre, and the Medical Research Council. ‘Almost all people who have lost a limb have some sensation that it is still there, and it’s thought that around 80% of amputees experience some level of pain associated with the missing limb. For some the pain is so great it is hugely debilitating,’ says first author Dr Tamar Makin of the Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain (FMRIB) at Oxford University.”

• monkeys and mean people

““Humans can build up an impression about somebody just based on what we see,” says author James Anderson, a comparative psychologist at the University of Stirling, UK. The capuchin results suggest that this skill “probably extends to other species”, he says.”

• the brain and the prosthesis

“The human brain can learn to treat relevant prosthetics as a substitute for a non-working body part, according to research published March 6 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Mariella Pazzaglia and colleagues from Sapienza University and IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia of Rome in Italy, supported by the International Foundation for Research in Paraplegie.”

• the happiness peptide??

“”The current findings explain the sleepiness of narcolepsy, as well as the depression that frequently accompanies this disorder,” said senior author Jerome Siegel, a professor of psychiatry and director of the Center for Sleep Research at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. “The findings also suggest that hypocretin deficiency may underlie depression from other causes.”"

Some friends of ours are up in Alaska working the sled dog races. “Someone” photo shopped this picture to ask if he was disqualified because of an unorthodox sled?

Here is what I am reading today:

• three syllables 3 months prior to birth?

“A team of French researchers has discovered that the human brain is capable of distinguishing between different types of syllables as early as three months prior to full term birth. As they describe in their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team found via brain scans that babies born up to three months premature are capable of some language processing.”

• why is critical thinking only taught outside the classroom??

“A democracy relies on an electorate of critical thinkers. Yet formal education, which is driven by test taking, is increasingly failing to require students to ask the kind of questions that lead to informed decisions.

More than a decade ago cognitive scientists John D. Bransford and Daniel L. Schwartz, both then at Vanderbilt University, found that what distinguished young adults from children was not the ability to retain facts or apply prior knowledge to a new situation but a quality they called “preparation for future learning.””

• the Vulcan moon is found… live long and prosper

“With a major boost from the hit sci-fi series “Star Trek,” one of Pluto’s newly-discovered moons may be named “Vulcan” —that is, if it keeps its lead over some 30,000 other entries. Vulcan is the Roman god of lava and smoke and the nephew of Pluto, but many people know it as the homeworld of Spock, the pointy-eared sidekick of USS Enterprise captain James Kirk. The two new moons were discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2011 and 2012. NBC News said the voting is to conclude at noon Eastern Time on Monday.”

• why not everyone learns from their mistakes

“The research, led by Professor Joydeep Bhattacharya in the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths, examined what it is about the brain that defines someone as a ‘good learner’ from those who do not learn from their mistakes. Professor Bhattacharya said: “We are always told how important it is to learn from our errors, our experiences, but is this true? If so, then why do we all not learn from our experiences in the same way? It seems some people rarely do, even when they were informed of their errors in repeated attempts. “This study presents a first tantalising insight into how our brain processes the performance feedback and what it does with this information, whether to learn from it or to brush it aside. “”

• lack of sleep may mess with your genes!

“It’s not clear how your health may be affected by the genetic disruption if you don’t get enough sleep. Still, the research raises the possibility that the effects of too little sleep could have long-lasting effects on your body. “If people regularly restrict their sleep, it is possible that the disruption that we see … could have an impact over time that ultimately determines their health outcomes as they age in later life,” said study co-author Simon Archer, who studies sleep at the University of Surrey, in England.”

• Rolling Stones Got satisfaction and an ap!

“The OFFICIAL app from THE ROLLING STONES! Unlock EXCLUSIVE video content, VOTE for songs to be played LIVE, connect with Stones fans around the world, and much, much more…”

• BPA and gene regulation

“”Our study found that BPA may impair the development of the central nervous system, and raises the question as to whether exposure could predispose animals and humans to neurodevelopmental disorders,” said lead author Wolfgang Liedtke, M.D., PhD, associate professor of medicine/neurology and neurobiology at Duke.”