Are Our Genes Important for Cooperation?

Social cooperation is a state in which people work together on a shared activity from which they both benefit, and the success of each person is dependent on everyone doing their part. Imagine, for example, a basketball game in which all team members make a shared effort and cooperate to win the game. To study this kind of social cooperation in the lab, we used rats. We created a special maze in which two rats must coordinate their behavior as a pair, moving together through the sections of the maze. Using this maze, we found that a rat’s genes are more important than its environment in determining its level of social cooperation.

How Mind-Body Skills Can Reduce Pain and Improve Comfort

Chronic pain is pain that lasts for more than 3 months. About one quarter of kids and teens have this type of pain. Chronic pain includes problems like frequent headaches, stomachaches, or ongoing joint or muscle pain and it often interferes with kids’ sleep, school, activities, and friendships. Even though chronic pain can have a big impact on kids’ lives, “chronic” does not mean “permanent.” Most kids recover from chronic pain. However, many kids are surprised to hear that a part of getting better involves learning a group of skills that are based in psychology. These skills include a combination of mind-body relaxation techniques and strategies for breaking the cycles of pain focused thoughts and avoidance behaviors. Learning these skills helps to boost feelings of comfort, lowers pain, and gets kids back to doing the things they love!

Speech Prosody: The Musical, Magical Quality of Speech

When we speak, we can vary how we use our voices. Our speech can be high or low (pitch), loud or soft (loudness), and fast or slow (duration). This variation in pitch, loudness, and duration is called speech prosody. It is a bit like making music. Varying our voices when we speak can express sarcasm or emotion and can even change the meaning of what we are saying. So, speech prosody is a crucial part of spoken language. But how do speakers produce prosody? How do listeners hear and understand these variations? Is it possible to hear and interpret prosody in other languages? And what about people whose hearing is not so good? Can they hear and understand prosodic patterns at all? Let’s find out!

Deafness And Music: Can Vibration Be Used When Playing Music Together?

Performing music or singing together provides people with great pleasure. But if you are deaf (or hard of hearing) it is not always possible to listen to other musicians while trying to sing or play an instrument. It can be particularly difficult to perceive different musical pitches with a hearing aid or other hearing-assistance device. However, the human body can transmit musical sounds to the brain when vibrations are applied to the skin. In other words, we can feel music. Our research has identified a safe way for deaf people to hear musical notes through the skin of their hands and feet. We have shown that vibration allows people to safely feel music on the skin. This approach allows people to identify a musical note as being higher or lower in pitch than other notes, and it helps musicians to play music together.

Can Music Training Improve Listening Skills For Children With Hearing Loss?

Hearing aids and cochlear [ko-clear] implants are very useful devices for children with hearing loss. But they do not completely restore hearing. Many children with hearing loss find it difficult to listen in noisy places like the playground. This is important because many social interactions create noise or occur in noisy places. While most people think we listen through our ears, it is the brain that does most of the hard work! We thought that music training might be a good way to improve listening skills. Why? Because music is a fun activity that involves not only sounds, but also sights, movement, memory, and more! This means a lot of activity and learning, which is good for the brain. What did we find? After 12 weeks of music training, children with hearing loss were better at listening, particularly in noisy environments.

How a Star’s Death Can Reveal a Black Hole

Studying invisible objects in space that are hundreds of millions of light years away may sound impossible. But, in recent years, astronomers have developed a new way to investigate a type of invisible and distant objects—super-massive black holes. Black holes are the most densely packed objects in the Universe. When stars get close to super-massive black holes they can be torn apart, which produces a relatively brief but informative flash of light. These star-destroying events can help us to discover the locations of the most massive black holes in the Universe, but only if we know how to find and interpret them. In this article, we will discuss different ways we can “see” black holes, and particularly what we do and do not yet understand about stars getting “tidally disrupted” by them. Light YearThe distance light travels in a year, which is 5,878,625,370,000 miles.

Parrots, Cockroaches, Octopuses: Are They Conscious?

Which living organisms are conscious, feeling creatures, and which are more like sophisticated robots that can only respond to stimuli and solve simple problems? There are many different and hotly debated answers to this question. We used biology to come up with a new approach for determining which organisms are conscious. We propose that organisms that can learn in a specific, flexible manner are conscious. Using this criterion, it is likely that consciousness first appeared about 540 million years ago and can now be found in many animal species. If our ideas are accepted, this means that we must change our attitude toward non-human animals and do a better job of protecting them from pain and suffering.

Hyperfocus: The ADHD Superpower

Imagine playing a video game that is so fun you do not realize someone is calling your name. Everyone can probably think of a time like that—when you were so focused that you did not notice things happening around you. For some people, this feeling of deep attention, called hyperfocus, happens really often. In our research, we first developed a way to measure hyperfocus. Next, we tested whether people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) hyperfocus more often. ADHD is a condition that can make it harder to pay attention to things. Despite this, many people with ADHD say that they often hyperfocus. We found that people with ADHD do have higher hyperfocus levels. In this article, we talk about our hyperfocus research, how hyperfocus can be an ADHD superpower, and our next steps toward better understanding hyperfocus and how to harness it.

How Can Dogs and Cats Help to Cure Human Cancers?

Like their owners, dogs and cats can be affected by several types of cancer, and some types are very similar to those seen in people. Unfortunately, there is still no cure for several types of cancer. How can humans’ best friends help? If a new therapy to fight cancer works well in pets, it is likely to also be effective in people with the same type of cancer. Scientists, medical doctors, and animal doctors are working together to develop new therapies that destroy cancer cells and save patients. Since the characteristics of certain types of cancer are very similar between humans and pets, new medicines that work in pet dogs or cats may also benefit human patients. Studying these “human-like” cancers in pets may speed up the development of effective anti-cancer drugs and will help to cure not only more dogs and cats, but also people with cancer.

Discovery Of A Bone In Chimpanzee Hearts

The os cordis (heart bone) is a rare bone found only in a few animals in the world. We discovered an os cordis in some chimpanzees. The os cordis was found in males and females, and in young and old animals. It was not present in chimps with healthy hearts, only in those with severe heart disease. We also discovered that a tissue called cartilage was present around the bone. The presence of cartilage gives us clues about how and why these rare bones develop.