Sun sensitivity identified
Researchers have identified a genomic variant strongly associated with sensitivity to the sun, brown hair, blue eyes and freckles. In the study of Icelanders the researchers uncovered an intricate pathway involving the interspersed DNA sequence, or non-coding region, of a gene that is among a few dozen that are associated with human pigmentation traits. The study by an international team including researchers from the National Institutes of Health was reported in the online edition of the journal Cell. It is more common to find people with ancestors from geographic locations farther from the equator, such as Iceland, who have less pigment in their skin, hair and eyes.
babies are not ignorant
The ability to differentiate your own body from others is a fundamental skill, critical for humans' ability to interact with their environments and the people in them. Now, researchers reporting in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, on November 21 provide some of the first evidence that newborn babies enter the world with the essential mechanisms for this kind of body awareness already in place. In addition to this insight into normal human development, the researchers stress the importance of the new findings for understanding atypical development, too. “The identification of these mechanisms at birth in the current study sheds light on the typical trajectory of body awareness across development,” says Maria laura Filippetti of Birkbeck College, University of london.
beware! women below 50
Researchers have found that women younger than 50 with a recent heart attack are more likely to experience restricted blood flow to the heart (myocardial ischemia) in response to psychological stress. The finding may partly explain why younger women who are hospitalized after a heart attack face a greater risk of complications and dying, compared to men of the same age. The results are scheduled to be presented at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions meeting in Dallas.
sleep to learn
As any indignant teacher would scold, students must be awake to learn. But what science is showing with increasing sophistication is how the brain uses sleep for learning as well. Brown University researchers recently discussed new research describing the neural mechanism by which the sleeping brain locks in learning of a visual task. The mounting evidence is that during sleep the brain employs neural oscillations — brainwaves — of particular frequencies to consolidate learning in specific brain regions. In August, Brown scientists reported that two specific frequencies, fast-sigma and delta, that operated in the supplementary motor area of the brain were directly associated with learning a finger-tapping task akin to typing or playing the piano.
computer games make you think
Scientists have discovered that playing computer games can bring players' emotional responses and brain activity into unison. By measuring the activity of facial muscles and imaging the brain while gaming, the group found out that people go through similar emotions and display matching brainwaves. The study of Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT researchers is now published in Plos One. “It's well known that people who communicate face-to-face will start to imitate each other. People adopt each other's poses and gestures, much like infectious yawning. What is less known is that the very physiology of interacting people shows a type of mimicry — which we call synchrony or linkage,” explains Michiel Sovijärvi-Spapé.