To sleep, perchance to forget fears

Traumatic memories can be manipulated in sleeping mice to reduce their fearful responses during waking hours reveals Helen Shen in the News Blog:

Traumatic memories can be manipulated in sleeping mice to reduce their fearful responses during waking hours.  The finding, announced by  Stanford University researchers at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, suggests that sleep-based therapies could provide new options for treating conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“We have an ethical obligation to study this because PTSD is so hard to treat,” says Daniela Schiller of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, who studies the human neurobiology of fear and was not involved in the study. “It’s definitely promising,” she says.

Learn more about this research in Helen’s report.

Could a moon of Uranus harbour an underground ocean?

Ron Cowen reveals in the News Blog, planetary scientists Elizabeth Turtle of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, and Julie Castillo-Rogez of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are turning their eyes to a distant Solar System locale: Ariel, a moon of Uranus that they think could also harbour an underground ocean:

In a presentation at a meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences in Reno, Nevada, Turtle and Castillo-Rogez calculate that tidal heating — the flexing of Ariel owing to the gravitational tug of other moons — is five times greater on Ariel than Enceladus. In addition, both moons contain a relatively large amount of rock, which generates heat through the decay of radioactive elements within it. Heat from the rock would increase the internal temperature of Ariel to the point where ice would be soft enough to respond to tidal flexing, Castillo-Rogez says. Although the Uranian system is colder than of Saturn system, the Uranian moons are more likely to have captured impurities that would decrease the melting temperature of ice, Castillo-Rogez notes.

More about this research in Ron’s post. 

Finding Ada

Tuesday was Ada Lovelace Day, and if you don’t know who Ada is, you can check out Suzi Gage’s post over at SciLogs:

 …if you don’t know who Ada is, now’s the day to do some digging and find out (I’d recommend starting here and here). A website called ‘Finding Ada’ is asking people to share their stories of the women who inspired them, after psychologist Penelope Lockwood’s research suggested that role models can be gender specific. Ada Lovelace Day is an attempt to collect together stories of inspiring unsung women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM subjects) and share them.

Continue to Suzi’s post to hear about the women who have inspired her.

A tool to quantify consciousness?

Helen Shen explains in the News Blog, assessing consciousness may seem like the ultimate exercise in subjectivity, but some researchers are moving closer to what they call an objective measure:

To derive a numerical measure of consciousness, Boly and her colleagues pulsed subjects’ heads with a brief electromagnetic wave, then measured neural responses using electrodes stuck to the scalp.

In 32 healthy, awake people, the electromagnetic impulse sent complex patterns of electrical activity reverberating throughout the brain. In healthy sleeping people, or people under general anaesthesia, the brain displayed shorter, simpler responses that stayed closer to the site of the initial stimulation. The researchers quantified these differences in a measure of response complexity.

In six patients diagnosed as vegetative, the electromagnetic pulse elicited responses with complexity indices similar to those in sleeping or anaesthetized healthy subjects. Twelve minimally conscious patients showed slightly more complex responses. And two ‘locked-in’ patients — people who are fully conscious but unable to move or communicate — showed complexity indices similar to healthy, awake subjects.

What does the future hold for this type of research? Find out more in Helen’s post. 

Fukushima Dogs Had Symptoms Comparable To Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Over at Scitable, Khalil A. Cassimally talks about the after effects of the Fukushima meltdown on local dogs:

On 11 March 2011, a major earthquake and the subsequent 15-m tsunami it spurred, caused the meltdown of three nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan. The trident of disasters resulted in the evacuation of 160,000 people within a 50-km radius of the site, leaving the villages as apocalyptic deserts. While the cries and tears of men receded, the howls of nearly 6000 abandonned pet dogs lingered on, unheard by their evacuated families.

A new study published in Scientific Reports, now reveals, for the first time, the extent of suffering endured by those Fukushima dogs. Researchers at Azabu University in Japan compared the behavior of dogs rescued from disaster-hit Fukushima to dogs from the non-affected Kanagawa district. They showed that dogs rescued from Fukushima were seemingly repressed. They were less aggressive toward unfamiliar people and dogs, were more difficult to train and showed less attachment to people.

Challenging the integrity of research

Stories of scientific misconduct, from plagiarism to falsification and fabrication of results are on the rise, reports Catherine de Lange in the Nature Jobs blog: 

What leads scientists to make such poor judgements when it comes to their work? And how can you make sure you carry out your research with integrity? For instance, you might not make up your results – but what if you fail to record your data properly making your research hard to replicate? And how bad is it to plagiarise your own work, seeing as you wrote it in the first place?

These are questions tackled by a new report on responsible research conduct, published today by theInterAcademy Council and the IAP – the global network of science academies. The  report examines how scientists can uphold values vital for  science in an increasingly pressurised research environment.

Continue to Catherine’s report to hear more on the subject.

SpotOn NYC, Open Access and Cakes

On Thursday evening, we hosted the fifteenth installment of the monthly SpotOn (formerly Science Online) NYC discussion series. This month’s event was extra special as it was our first outing under our new name and there were cupcakes  on offer to celebrate! (For more details on the renaming, check out the info here. The hashtag for these events remains #sonyc.)

This month’s topic for discussion was, “What’s holding up open access?” In preparation, we ran a series of guest posts on the SpotOn blog,  hearing from scientists, publishers and communicators, about whether opening up the publishing process at an earlier stage could be good for science and how open access may be of benefit to those working in developing countries. The conversations were also shared online using the #OAontheway hashtag. You can now find the livestream archive on the event’s page here. Make sure you check out the Storify too, collating the online talk.