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Diagnosed cases of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in California rose by 600 percent from 1990 to 2003. Irva Hertz-Picciotto, Ph.D., director of the Environmental Health Sciences Core Center at the University of California-Davis, published this statistic in the journal Epidemiology a decade ago.

The esteemed epidemiologist told the audience during the Jan. 8 NIEHS Distinguished Lecture that she and her colleagues have only been able to explain a third of the increase.

“No single factor accounts for all autism cases, nor is there one event or exposure that can be responsible for the rapid increase in diagnoses,” said Hertz-Picciotto. “Each child’s path to altered brain development may be different.” Her talk was hosted by NIEHS and National Toxicology Program (NTP) Director Linda Birnbaum, Ph.D.

Continue reading “Autism spectrum disorders may stem from multiple factors” »

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The crime scene was straight out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. One hundred and fifty dead birds lay sprawled on the ground, fallen out of trees in a park in The Hague, The Netherlands.

The second such occurrence last autumn made Dutch citizens look up and wonder. With robust starlings turned upside-down at their feet, the usual suspects of disease, pollution, and foul play were dismissed.

Continue reading “The Threat 5G Poses to Human Health” »

CRISPR And Human Embryo Experiments Underway In The U.S. : Shots — Health News Despite outrage over gene editing in China that affected the birth of twins, research is underway in the U.S. to assess the safety and effectiveness of CRISPR tools to edit genes in human embryos.

As important as sleep is for health, happiness, and performance, it really is a time suck. Those eight or so hours when we lose consciousness may be restorative, but just think of what we could accomplish if we could actually put them to productive use. Scientists believe that we can use these unconscious hours to begin to learn new facts or languages in our sleep, as long the information is presented in the right way.

In his paper published Thursday in Current Biology, University of Bern neuropsychologist Marc Züst, Ph.D., presents evidence that it’s actually possible to form new “semantic connections” at specific moments during the sleep cycle. These, he explains, are associations between two words that we use to help encode new information and give words context. For instance, when we hear the word “winter,” we think of cold temperatures, skiing, or, most recently, polar vortices. In his study, Züst found that the brain can actually learn to make these associations if we hear two words paired together at certain times within the sleep cycle.

“Humans are capable of sophisticated information processing without consciousness,” Züst tells Inverse. “Sleep-formed memory traces endure into the following wakefulness and can influence how you react to foreign words, even though you think you’ve never seen that word before. It’s an implicit, unconscious form of memory — like a gut feeling.”

Continue reading “Learning Language in Deep Sleep Isn’t Just Science Fiction Anymore” »

The bacteria that live in our bodies have a pivotal role in the maintenance of our health, and can influence a range of conditions, such as obesity and cancer. Perhaps the most important role for the community of microorganisms that live in our gut — termed the microbiota, which include bacteria, fungi and archaea — is to aid immune-system development. Writing in Nature, Tanoue et al. report the identification of 11 strains of bacteria that reside in the guts of some healthy humans and that can boost immune responses that fight infection and cancer.

Microorganisms in the human gut can affect immune-system cells. Gut bacterial strains have been discovered that boost immune cells that have cell-killing capacity and that can target cancer and protect against infection. Human gut bacteria boost immune cells that have cell-killing capacity.

Genetic errors can lead to serious health problems, but repairing the genome can be dangerous and challenging. RNA offers another option. | Videos.

For a long time, biohackers have been playing with magnets by embedding then under their skin as a novelty extra-sensation. I, personally, don’t see the point, but morphological, taxonomic, and cladic freedom are at work so I celebrate their actions.

Our skin’s ability to perceive pressure, heat, cold, and vibration is a critical safety function that most people take for granted. But burn victims, those with prosthetic limbs, and others who have lost skin sensitivity for one reason or another, can’t take it for granted, and often injure themselves unintentionally.

Chemists Islam Mosa from UConn, and James Rusling from UConn and UConn Health, along with University of Toronto engineer Abdelsalam Ahmed, wanted to create a sensor that can mimic the sensing properties of skin. Such a sensor would need to be able to detect pressure, temperature, and vibration. But perhaps it could do other things too, the researchers thought.

“It would be very cool if it had abilities human skin does not; for example, the ability to detect magnetic fields, sound waves, and abnormal behaviors,” said Mosa.

The gut microbiome is made up of billions of bacteria, and scientists have been trying to understand exactly how they affect our health, contribute to our risk of contacting diseases and how they interact with the vital organs and systems in the body, including the brain. It is quite a lot to unpick.

As countries industrialise, their air becomes dirtier – and this could have some far-reaching effects on the beneficial bacteria inside us.

Almost everything you hear about artificial intelligence today is thanks to deep learning. This category of algorithms works by using statistics to find patterns in data, and it has proved immensely powerful in mimicking human skills such as our ability to see and hear. To a very narrow extent, it can even emulate our ability to reason. These capabilities power Google’s search, Facebook’s news feed, and Netflix’s recommendation engine—and are transforming industries like health care and education.

Our study of 25 years of artificial-intelligence research suggests the era of deep learning is coming to an end.