For Science! A Science News Blog

The Poisoner’s Handbook , written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Deborah Blum and published in 2010, constructs a comprehensive history of forensics and toxicology in New York during the Jazz Age, a period spanning the years of 1915 to 1936. In this work of science writing, Blum explains the complicated chemistry of the most widely used poisons at the time in a way that is simple to understand yet still engaging to read, while also detailing the criminal cases that led to the advancement of forensics. She simultaneously contextualizes the time with vivid and captivating tales of New York City, ranging from the local politics to underground dealings of corrupt coroners and the questionable and grotesque experiments conducted for the sake of progress. The book is structured like a collection of short stories with each chapter consisting of intriguing cases featuring different poisons being investigated by Dr. Charles Norris, the first chief medical examiner of New York City, and Alexander Ge...

     Neuroscientists researching addiction have found that dynorphin, an opioid hormone produced in the brain, may help facilitate the early stages of the learning process by activating specific neural receptors. These findings may seem small at first, but they hold promising implications for the development of future advancements in the treatment of alcohol use disorder (AUD) as these receptors partially influence the brain’s response to alcohol and have many other clinical applications.           Cody Siciliano and investigators of the Siciliano Lab at Vanderbilt University have been researching the role of neurotransmitters in the development of AUD. This disorder, also commonly known as alcoholism or alcohol dependency, affects approximately 29% of adults who drink alcohol in their lifetime. While most people drink to feel that associated buzz, consistently drinking too much can develop into a dependency driven by the need to get rid of t...

Neuroscientists at the Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy Research have found that music can have positive effects on mood, motivation, concentration, and other cognitive processes. Alexander Street and Jufen Zhang included 201 patients in their 2020 study to assess the effectiveness of a growing treatment option called Neurologic Music Therapy (NMT). This system of clinical techniques is aimed at improving sensorimotor skills, speech and language, and cognition in patients with neurological diseases. During the study, researchers looked for changes in patients’ motivation and mood, concentration, arm and hand functioning, speech and communication, and walking. Of the 201 patients referred to rehab, 177 received this new treatment for two days per week over the course of 24 months, totaling in 675 sessions. As part of the sessions, patients would play drums and percussive instruments to test attention and executive function and sing songs to practice speech, word retrieval and p...

PSYCHOLOGY & MEN'S HEALTH Men experiencing social pressure about their masculinity may behave aggressively to protect their manhood. Social psychologists found that some men, when encountered with threats on their masculinity, resort to aggression because of social and cultural expectations ingrained in them during youth. Masculinity has been explicitly defined throughout the history of the United States to have a specific association with traits such as aggression, physicality, and physical and mental fortitude. Younger men may be more likely to resort to aggression when they perceive attacks on their manhood. Adam Stanaland and Sarah Gaither from Duke University found that this aggression was associated with low reported self-esteem found more commonly in young men whose identities have not yet been cemented by experience. These findings provide nuance to the social phenomenon of insecure manhood to highlight a common experience of growing up in the United States. Stana...

NEUROSCIENCE This emerging technology allows for the decoding of activity in parts of the brain responsible for vision. Utilizing high-density optical tomography (HD-DOT), neuroscientists decoded activity from areas of the brain responsible for visual processing to determine what research participants were seeing. HD-DOT is a newly developing neuroimaging technology which uses an array of light sources and detectors to measure brain activity to conclude about the occurring visual processes. Kalyan Tripathy and researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO evaluated the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of HD-DOT in patients by beaming light towards the head from a wearable apparatus. The light illuminates blood rushing to the parts of the brain corresponding with neural activity, which detectors located on the apparatus then use to infer what the person is seeing. This advancement may have significant implications toward restoring communi...

In this 7 minute podcast, I explain how music is processed by the brain to show how listening to  instrumental music such as jazz and classical can lead to beneficial improvements. You should definitely consider adding them to your studying or working routine.  You can find the podcast at this link.