Where Does Suspicion Reside in the Brain?

Neuroscience News has a piece about a new study that used fMRI to identify which areas of the brain are responsible for our feelings of suspicion.  From the piece:

The scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to study the neural basis of suspicion. Seventy-six pairs of players, each with a buyer and a seller, competed in 60 rounds of a simple bargaining game while having their brains scanned. At the beginning of each round, the buyer would learn the value of a hypothetical widget and suggest a price to the seller. The seller would then set the price. If the seller’s price fell below the widget’s given value, the trade would go through, with the seller receiving the selling price and the buyer receiving any difference between the selling price and the actual value. If the seller’s price exceeded the value, though, the trade would not execute, and neither party would receive cash.

The authors found, as detailed in a previous paper, that buyers fell into three strategic categories: 42 percent were incrementalists, who were relatively honest about the widget’s value; 37 percent were conservatives, who adopted the strategy of withholding information; and 21 percent were strategists, who were actively deceptive, mimicking incrementalist behavior by sending high suggestions during low-value trials and then reaping greater benefits by sending low suggestions during high-value trials.

Read the entire piece at Neuroscience News. 

Can You Distract the Pain Away?

Science Daily reports on a recent study that suggests using distraction to lessen pain -- and that the outcome is more than a mere psychological contortion.  From the article:

The research group asked participants to complete either a hard or an easy memory task, both requiring them to remember letters, while they simultaneously applied a painful level of heat to their arms.

When study participants were more distracted by the harder of the two memory tasks, they did indeed perceive less pain. What's more, their less painful experience was reflected by lower activity in the spinal cord as observed by fMRI scans. (fMRI is often used to measure changes in brain activity, Sprenger explained, and recent advances have made it possible to extend this tool for use in the spinal cord.)

Read the entire article at Science Daily. 

Humans Add Millions of Microbes to the Air Every Hour

Maybe you are sitting alone in your office as you read this.  That is, you think you're alone. You're not. About 37 million friends are joining you every hour.

That's the conclusion of new research from Yale University focused on determining how much bacteria we add to a room simply by being in it. Turns out, the number is hard to fathom.

"We live in this microbial soup, and a big ingredient is our own microorganisms," said Jordan Peccia, associate professor of environmental engineering at Yale and the principal investigator of a study. "Mostly people are re-suspending what's been deposited before. The floor dust turns out to be the major source of the bacteria that we breathe."

The researchers measured and analyzed biological particles in a single, ground-floor university classroom over a period of eight days — four days when the room was periodically occupied, and four days when the room was continuously vacant. At all times the windows and doors were kept closed and the HVAC system was operated at normal levels. Researchers sorted the particles by size -- what they describe as "the master variable" because size affects the degree to which particles are likely to be filtered from the air or linger and recirculate.

They found that "human occupancy was associated with substantially increased airborne concentrations" of bacteria and fungi of various sizes. Occupancy resulted in particularly large spikes for bigger fungal particles and medium-sized bacterial particles.

Researchers found that about 18 percent of all bacterial emissions in the room — including both fresh and previously deposited bacteria — came from humans, as opposed to plants and other sources. Of the 15 most abundant varieties of bacteria identified in the room studied, four are directly associated with humans, including the most abundant, Propionibacterineae, common on human skin.

Fortunately for us, only 0.1% of the bacteria is infectious to humans. But since we spend most of our time indoors, that smidgen of infection-inducing organisms has full access to our bodies (just in case you needed another reason to spend more time outdoors).

The study was published in the online journal, Indoor Air.

Coffee Linked to Lower Mortality Rates in New Study

The Los Angeles Times is running a story about a recent study that links drinking four or five cups of java a day with lower mortality rates among older adults.  From the story:

A new study that tracked the health and coffee consumption of more than 400,000 older adults for nearly 14 years found that java drinkers were less likely to die during the study than their counterparts who eschewed the brew. In fact, men and women who averaged four or five cups of coffee per day had the lowest risk of death, according to a report in Thursday's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The research doesn't prove that coffee deserves the credit for helping people live longer. But it is the largest analysis to date to suggest that the beverage's reputation for being a liquid vice may be undeserved.

Read the whole story at The Los Angeles Times. 

Video: Paralyzed Woman Controls Robotic Arm with Her Mind

The Scientist is reporting on a breakthrough technology called "BrainGate" that allows a woman who is paralyzed to control a robotic arm with her mind. From the article:

Two patients who lost the use of their limbs (and the ability to speak) following brainstem strokes successfully reached out and touched a foam ball, thanks to a small array of electrodes implanted on their motor cortexes and a robotic arm that followed the command of their neurons, according to a Nature paper published today (May 16).

“These results are the first peer-reviewed demonstrations of 3 dimensional reaching and grabbing tasks using direct brain control of a robotic device,” study coauthor  Leigh R. Hochberg, who has appointments at Brown University, Harvard Medical School, and  Providence VA Medical Center, said at a press conference yesterday. “I believe that these are milestones in brain-computer interface research with exciting implications for neuroscience and neural rehabilitation.”

The device that made these advances possible, called BrainGate, made headlines in 2006 when patients successfully controlled a computer cursor. Since then, the system has been refined and connected to a robotic arm that can actually carry out the commands of the motor cortex.

Read the entire piece at The Scentist.  Video below.