Laura Sanders

1 month ago | snexplores.org | Laura Sanders

activate: (in biology) To turn on, as with a gene or chemical reaction. acute: An adjective to describe conditions, such as an illness (or its symptoms, including pain), that typically are short in duration but severe. bacteria: (singular: bacterium) Single-celled organisms. These dwell nearly everywhere on Earth, from the bottom of the sea to inside other living organisms (such as plants and animals). Bacteria are one of the three domains of life on Earth.

1 month ago | sciencenews.org | Laura Sanders

People in the United States are in the midst of an ongoing opioid epidemic and a wave of mental health problems. So funding and staff cuts to a federal agency that supports mental health care, suicide prevention, and addiction treatment, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA, has worried people who work on substance use disorders and mental health. “We’ve got some challenges — big ones,” says Keith Humphreys, a psychologist at Stanford University.

2 months ago | sciencenews.org | Laura Sanders

In this bonus episode of The Deep End, listen to an interview with Jon Nelson. He’ll share how he’s doing these days, now that his depression is gone. You’ll hear about the work still ahead of him, which may be lifelong. And you’ll hear about his plans for the future. Laura Sanders: This podcast deals with mental illness, depression and suicide. Please listen with care. Hi listeners, we’re dropping into your feeds this week with a special bonus episode of The Deep End.

2 months ago | sciencenews.org | Laura Sanders

There are countless metaphors for memory. It’s a leaky bucket, a steel trap, a file cabinet, words written in sand. But one of the most evocative — and neuroscientifically descriptive — invokes Lego bricks. A memory is like a Lego tower. It’s built from the ground up, then broken down, put away in bins and rebuilt in a slightly different form each time it’s taken out. This metaphor is beautifully articulated by psychologists Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy in their new book, Memory Lane.

2 months ago | sciencenews.org | Laura Sanders

A baby’s early life has a lot of milestones: first giggle, first tooth, first step. A brain scanning study adds to the list: first memory. Infants can form memories, and they use a memory structure in the brain called the hippocampus to do it, researchers report in the March 21 Science. The results shore up the idea that memories can in fact be made during the earliest years of our lives, though what happens to these memories as the days, weeks and years roll by remains mysterious.