(Something a little special for my birthday last month!)
Here is what we are reading today:
“The work was led by Dr Caroline Goujon and Professor Mike Malim at the Department of Infectious Diseases, King’s College London. Professor Malim said: “This is an extremely exciting finding which advances our understanding of how HIV virus interacts with the immune system and opens up opportunities to develop new therapies to treat the disease. Until now we knew very little about the MX2 gene, but now we recognise both its potent anti-viral function and a key point of vulnerability in the life cycle of HIV.”
“Beluga whales at an aquarium near Tokyo are learning how to paint pictures as part of an autumn art programme for visitors, an official said Wednesday.
The sea creatures at the Hakkeijima Sea Paradise aquarium in Yokohama will be showing off their skills with specially adapted paintbrushes that they can hold in their mouths, a spokeswoman for the aquarium said.”
“Simon said that the team also noted that the children’s social deficits might be more a function of their developmental delay and intellectual disability than autism.
“If you put them with their younger siblings’ friends they function very well in a social setting,” Simon continued, “and they interact well with an adult who accommodates their expectations for social interaction.”
Angkustsiri said that further study is needed to assess more appropriate treatments for children with 22q, such as improving their communication skills, treating their anxiety, helping them to remain focused and on task.”
“Social behaviours in species as diverse as honey bees and humans promote group survival but often come at some cost to the individual. Although reinforcement of adaptive social interactions is ostensibly required for the evolutionary persistence of these behaviours, the neural mechanisms by which social reward is encoded by the brain are largely unknown.”
“Women at peak fertility tend to have a stronger preference for sexually desirable men, many past studies have shown. An open question, however, is whether these variations affect women’s long-term relationships. Psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, gave 65 women in committed relationships a questionnaire to assess their feelings about their partnerships at different times of the month. Results indicate that on high-fertility days, women who considered their partners less sexually desirable felt less close to them and were more critical of their faults.”
“The study—the first to provide biological evidence linking the ability to keep a beat to the neural encoding of speech sounds—has significant implications for reading, according to Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory.”
“”We may have found an anatomical marker for chronic pain in the brain,” said Vania Apkarian, Ph.D., a senior author of the study and professor of physiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
Chronic pain affects nearly 100 million Americans and costs the United States up to $635 billion per year to treat. According to the Institute of Medicine, an independent research organization, chronic pain affects a growing number of people.”
“”Our genes, and our telomeres, are not necessarily our fate,” said lead author Dean Ornish, MD, UCSF clinical professor of medicine, and founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute.
“So often people think ‘Oh, I have bad genes, there’s nothing I can do about it,'” Ornish said. “But these findings indicate that telomeres may lengthen to the degree that people change how they live. Research indicates that longer telomeres are associated with fewer illnesses and longer life.””
Megan E. Patrick, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and colleagues examined the prevalence and predictors of binge drinking (five or more drinks) and extreme binge drinking (10 or more and 15 or more drinks in a row) in nationally representative sample of 16,332 high school seniors (52.3 percent female, 64.5 percent white, 11 percent black, 13.1 percent Hispanic and 11.5 percent of other race/ethnicity). A drink was defined as 12 ounces of beer, four ounces of wine, a 12-ounce wine cooler, a mixed drink or a shot glass of liquor.
“Now, in a just-published paper, they have shown, in a series of four studies, that individuals behave more selfishly when interacting with men with wider faces and this selfish behavior elicits selfish behavior in others.
“This clearly shows that this behavior is also socially driven, not just biologically driven,” said Michael P. Haselhuhn, an assistant professor of management at UC Riverside’s School of Business Administration, who is the lead author of the paper.
He co-authored the paper with Elaine M. Wong, also an assistant professor of management at UC Riverside, and Margaret E. Ormiston, an assistant professor of organisational behavior at London Business School. The paper, “Self-Fulfilling Prophecies as a Link between Men’s Facial Width-to-Height Ratio and Behavior,” was published in the journal PLOS ONE.”
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