By Deborah Vankin, Los Angeles Times

Your heart is racing, your arms are tingling and your respiration is shallow. You're having an anxiety attack. And on top of that, you’re in a public place. For example in a crowded restaurant or within the office. Not a spot where you possibly can comfortably lie on the ground and do some respiration exercises to calm yourself down.

What if there was a pill that might offer you this type of calm respiration as an alternative? This scenario could possibly be possible after a brand new scientific breakthrough.

neuroscientist at Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla have identified a brain pathway that immediately reduces anxiety. The recent study, the published Earlier this week within the scientific journal Natural neurosciencelays out how the brain circuit mentioned above regulates voluntary respiration – that’s, conscious respiration, versus automatic respiration, which happens without you having to give it some thought – and allows us to slow our respiration and calm our minds.

The discovery opens up the potential for developing recent drugs that mimic the relaxed state common during respiration exercises, meditation or yoga. Sung Hanlead writer of the study, says he would love to someday bring what he calls a “yoga pill” to market to ease anxiety. It would likely be useful for the greater than 40 million adults within the U.S. who, in response to the National Alliance on Mental Illnesssuffer from an anxiety disorder.

Han says the brand new discovery is an actual scientific breakthrough.

“It's always exciting for a scientist to find something never known before,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “This top-down breathing circuit has long been a question in neuroscience. It is exciting to find the neural mechanism that explains how slowing breathing can control negative emotions such as anxiety and fear.”

We've long known that we are able to control our respiration patterns to vary our way of thinking – after we're stressed, we could try this Breathe deeply and slowly feel calmer. But scientists didn't understand that this works – which parts of the brain actually slow our respiration and why this activity makes us calmer. Now they know that within the cortex, the upper a part of the brain answerable for more conscious, complex considering, there’s a bunch of cells that send messages to the brainstem, which in turn sends information to the lungs. This is the “circuit” mentioned above.

The discovery confirms calming behaviors resembling: yoga, Mindfulness and even “Box breathing” – The latter is a way of repeatedly inhaling after which holding your breath for 4 seconds to alleviate stress – since it scientifically justifies these behavioral practices.

But the sensible applications are what make the Salk discovery so vital, Han says.

“It is possible that a whole new class of drugs could emerge that can have a more targeted effect on anxiety disorders,” he says.

These would differ from traditional anti-anxiety medications in that they more specifically goal specific areas of the brain. Common anti-anxiety medications like Xanax and Lexapro goal multiple areas of the brain that control multiple brain processes and behaviors. For this reason, these medications don’t work the identical for everybody and could cause unwanted negative effects. By targeting a single brain circuit more precisely, a drug becomes more practical and reduces potential negative effects. And in extreme cases, such a pill could possibly be more practical against anxiety than respiration exercises.

“If you're panicking, breathing techniques alone may not be enough to quell the fear,” says Han.

Han's team is now trying to search out the counter-circuit – a rapid respiration circuit – of this fear.

“To target the slow respiratory circuit, we need to understand the opposite circuit so we can avoid targeting it,” says Han. “To ease the fear.”

While Han hopes his findings will result in a “yoga pill,” this is probably going still a good distance off. The research and subsequent clinical trials could take as much as 10 years, he says. And nothing is for certain.

“I can’t say that this discovery is directly related to the discovery of the new drug,” Han says. “But I can say that it is a stepping stone. We now know the way. This is exciting. This is the first step.”

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Originally published: November 29, 2024 at 9:42 am PST

You can probably imagine a vampire: pale, sharp-edged undead bloodsucker deterred only by sunlight, religious paraphernalia, and garlic. They are gnarled creatures, often favorite subjects for movies or books. Luckily, they're just your imagination… or are they?

There are real vampires within the World of bats. Of the over 1,400 bat species currently described, three of them are known feed exclusively on blood.

The common vampire bat, occurs most regularly. These bats are native to the tropical forests of Central and South America feed on different animalsincluding tapirs, mountain lions, penguins and today mostly cattle.

Eating a blood weight loss plan is unusual for mammals and has led to many unique adaptations that facilitate their unusual lifestyle. Unlike other bats Vampires are mobile on the bottomThey alternate between two different gaits to circle their sleeping prey. Heat-sensitive receptors on her nose Help them find warm blood beneath their prey's skin. Finally, the mix of a small incision could also be performed self-sharpening fangsAnd an anticoagulant of their saliva allows these bats to feed on unsuspecting prey.

Me, as a behavioral ecologistwho’s eager about how pathogens influence social behavior and vice versa, essentially the most fascinating adaptations to a blood-sucking lifestyle might be observed within the social lives of vampire bats.

Vampire bats form mutualistic relationships

Blood will not be very nutritious and vampire bats starve relatively quickly in the event that they are deprived of food. If a bat returns to the sleeping place hungryothers perhaps vomit a blood meal to get them through the night.

Such food distribution occurs between related bats – comparable to moms and their offspring – but additionally between unrelated individuals. This commentary has been bothering evolutionary biologists for a very long time. Why help someone who will not be closely related to you?

It seems they’re vampire bats Keep a watch on who’s feeding them and return the favor – or not if the opposite bully hasn’t been helpful previously. In doing so, they construct complex social relationships which can be maintained through low-cost social investments comparable to cleansing and grooming one other animal's fur (allogrooming) and dearer social investments comparable to sharing food.

These relationships are much like those seen in primates, and a few people compare them to human friendships. In fact, there are some parallels.

For example, people raise the stakes after they form latest relationships with others. You start with social investments that don't cost much – think sharing a few of your lunch – and wait for the opposite person's response. If they don't reciprocate, the connection could also be doomed. But if the opposite person reciprocates by, say, sharing a few of their dessert, your next investment may very well be larger. In a back-and-forth game, you regularly increase the stakes until the friendship eventually warrants larger social investments, comparable to volunteering to drive them to work when their automobile breaks down.

Vampire bats do the identical thing. When strangers are introduced, they start with small fur-cleaning interactions to check the waters. If each partners proceed to reciprocate and lift the stakes, the The relationship will eventually escalate for sharing food, which is a greater commitment.

relationships, in sickness and in health

My lab studies how infections affect social behaviors and relationships. Because of their diverse social behavior and the complexity of their social relationships, vampire bats are the best study system for me and my colleagues.

How does disease affect the behavior of vampire bats? How do other bats behave towards a sick person? How does illness affect the formation and maintenance of their social relationships?

In our lab, we simulate infections in bats through the use of pathogen-derived molecules to stimulate an immune response. We have repeatedly seen a type of passive social distancing during which sick individuals reduce their interaction with others, be it this Allogrooming, social calling or just Spending time near others.

Importantly, these behavioral changes haven’t necessarily resulted in minimizing the spread of disease to others. Rather, they’re parts of what biologists call the complex immune response Ill behavior. It is comparable to someone infected with the flu, stay at home just because they don't feel like setting off. While such passive social distancing may not have evolved to forestall transmission to others, simply being too sick to interact with others still reduces the spread of germs.

Interestingly, sickness behavior might be suppressed. People do that on a regular basis. So-called Presenteeism involves work despite illness because of various stresses. Likewise, many individuals have suppressed the symptoms of infection with the intention to fulfill a social obligation. If you could have young children, that if something happens to everyone in your household, you may't just sit back and never handle the little ones, even when you yourself are feeling pretty bad.

It's no different with animals. You can Suppress sick behavior when competing needs arise, comparable to caring for young people or defending territory. Despite their tendency to cut back social interactions with others when sick, vampire bats have Sick moms proceed to take care of their offspring and vice versa, probably because mother-daughter relationships are particularly vital. Mothers and daughters are sometimes the first social relationships with one another in groups of vampire bats.

At the guts of the human-bat conflict is livestock farming

Despite their many desirable adaptations and complicated social lives, vampire bats will not be universally admired. In fact, they’re considered pests in lots of areas of South and Central America because they will transmit the deadly rabies virus to livestock, which can lead to significant economic losses.

Before humans introduced livestock into their habitat, vampire bats likely had more difficulty finding food in the shape of native prey comparable to tapirs. Livestock has now turn into their most important source of food. Because why not subsist on something that’s reliably in the identical place every night and is fairly plentiful? Increase in livestock population are related to a rise in vampire bat populationswhich likely perpetuates the issue of rabies transmission.

Farmers' arguments with vampires make sense, especially in smaller cattle herds where the lack of even one cow can significantly impact a farmer's livelihood. Locally applied poisons were utilized in culling campaigns called vampiricide, mainly a mix of petroleum jelly and rat poison. Bats are captured, the paste is applied to the fur, and so they carry it back to the roost where others ingest the poison during social interactions. Interestingly, on a big scale Culling is probably not very effective in reducing rabies overflow.

The focus is now shifting to large-scale livestock vaccinations or vaccinating the vampire bats themselves. Researchers are balanced Consider transmissible vaccines: You could Herpes viruses genetically modifythat are quite common in vampire bats, to hold rabies genes and to vaccinate large portions of vampire bat populations.

Whatever method is used to defuse conflict between vampire bats and humans, more empathy for these misunderstood animals could only help. Because while you stick your head right into a hole tree filled with vampire bats — assuming you may brave the smell of digested blood — remember: You're coping with a posh network of individual friendships between animals who care deeply for one another.

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©2024 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Visit ajc.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Over the last yr, readers have flown, boated and hiked world wide, sharing their adventures with us as they followed mythical Kelpies in Scotland, the temples of Thailand and took a road trip through Tuscany.

Now a pair from San Rafael is sharing their adventures in Curacao. Read on for details and find more travel inspiration at www.mercurynews.com/tag/wish-you-were-here/.

Wish you were here

CURACAO: San Rafael residents Peggy and Glenn Koorhan have visited many Caribbean islands, but their “new favorite” is the Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao. “It's less traveled than the typical Caribbean islands, but very worth seeing. We were there in January, fantastic weather!” says Peggy. “The friendly people of Curacao (and neighboring Aruba) speak Dutch, English, and Papiamentu, a creole mix of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch (and other influences). I speak Spanish and a little Portuguese, and have picked up so many expressions – bon bini (welcome), bon dia (good morning), dushi (sweet, good, delicious!).

The capital of Cuacao is Willemstad (see picture). “You almost feel like you’re in Amsterdam. A walk through the streets is a must.”

TRAVEL TIPS: “We learned all about the Blue Curaçao liqueur during a tour of the distillery in a 19th century country house. Country House Chobolobo. Be sure to visit the Mikve Israel Emanuel Synagogue. It was dedicated in 1732 and is the oldest operating Jewish place of worship in America! It is beautiful. Be sure to visit Serena's Art Factorywhere you can see colorful sculptures and learn about this fascinating artist.”

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About a trillion tiny particles called neutrinos go through us every second. These “relic” neutrinos, created through the Big Bang, exist throughout the universe but cannot harm you. In fact, only one among them is prone to frivolously touch an atom in your body over the course of your life.

Most neutrinos produced by objects similar to black holes have rather more energy than the relic neutrinos floating through space. Although these high-energy neutrinos are much rarer, they usually tend to crash into something and produce a signal Physicists like me can recognize. But to detect them, neutrino physicists had to establish very large experiments.

Ice cubesone such experiment documented a very rare form of particularly high-energy astrophysical neutrinos in a study published in April 2024. These high-energy neutrinos often disguise themselves as other, more common forms of neutrinos. But for the primary time, my colleagues and I managed to find them, pulling some from nearly a decade of knowledge.

Their presence brings researchers like me one step closer to solving the mystery of how high-energy particles like astrophysical neutrinos are formed in the primary place.

IceCube Observatory

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is the 800-pound gorilla of the massive neutrino experiments. It has around 5,000 sensors who’ve been looking intently at a gigaton of ice beneath the South Pole for over a decade. When a neutrino collides with an atom within the ice, it creates a ball of sunshine that the sensors record.

IceCube has discovered neutrinos that were created in several places, for instance on Earth's atmospherethe middle of the Milky Way and black holes in other galaxies many light years away.

But the tau neutrino, a form of particularly high-energy neutrino, has to this point eluded IceCube.

Neutrino flavors

Neutrinos are available in three differing kinds, which physicists call aromas. Each flavor leaves a singular impression on a detector like IceCube.

Typically, when a neutrino collides with one other particle, it produces a charged particle that matches its flavor. A muon neutrino creates a muon, an electron neutrino creates an electron, and a tau neutrino creates a tau.

Muon-flavored neutrinos have essentially the most distinctive signature, so naturally my colleagues and I within the IceCube collaboration searched for these first. The muon emitted in a muon-neutrino collision travels through a whole bunch of meters of ice, leaving a protracted trail of detectable light before decaying. This track allows researchers to trace the origin of the neutrino.

Next, the team examined electron neutrinos, whose interactions produce a roughly spherical ball of sunshine. The electron created by an electron-neutrino collision never decays and strikes any particle within the ice that it comes near. This interaction leaves an expanding ball of sunshine in its wake before the electron finally involves rest.

Since the direction of the electron neutrino could be very difficult to see with the naked eye, the IceCube physicists made the choice Machine learning techniques to indicate where the electron neutrinos may need originated. These techniques use sophisticated computational resources and tune tens of millions of parameters to separate neutrino signals from all known backgrounds.

The third form of neutrino, the tau neutrino, is the chameleon of the trio. One tau neutrino can appear as a trail of sunshine, while the subsequent can appear as a sphere. The tau particle created within the collision moves for a tiny fraction of a second before decaying, and when it decays it normally creates a ball of sunshine.

These tau neutrinos Create two balls of sunshine, one where they first bump into something and create a rope, and one where the rope itself disintegrates. The tau particle normally decays after a really short distance, causing the 2 balls of sunshine to overlap a lot that they’ll not be distinguished from a single ball.

But at higher energies, the emitted tau particle can travel tens of meters, leading to two separate spheres of sunshine. Physicists armed with these machine learning techniques can see through this and find the needle within the haystack.

Energetic tau neutrinos

Using these computational tools, the team managed to extract seven strong tau neutrino candidates from about ten years of knowledge. These Taus had higher energies than even essentially the most powerful particle accelerators on Earth, meaning they should have come from astrophysical sources similar to black holes.

These data confirm IceCube's earlier discovery of astrophysical neutrinos. and so they confirm a clue that IceCube previously detected astrophysical tau neutrinos.

These results also suggest that even at the very best energies and over long distances Neutrinos behave similarly as they do at lower energies.

In particular, the detection of astrophysical tau neutrinos confirms that energetic neutrinos come from distant sources Change or oscillate flavor. Much lower energy neutrinos that travel much shorter distances also oscillate in the identical way.

As IceCube and other neutrino experiments collect more data and scientists improve at distinguishing the three neutrino variants, researchers will eventually find a way to guess how neutrinos are created from black holes. We also want to seek out out whether the space between Earth and these distant astrophysical neutrino accelerators treats particles in another way depending on their mass.

Compared to the more abundant neutrinos originating from the Big Bang, there will likely be fewer and fewer high-energy tau neutrinos and their muon and electron cousins. But there are enough of them to assist scientists like me seek for essentially the most powerful neutrino emitters within the universe and explore the limitless space in between.