Flannel Shirt

My sperm are stressed

When I sucked in little league lo those many years ago, well, that affected my sperm.

Sperm doesn't appear to forget anything. Stress felt by dad -- whether as a preadolescent or adult -- leaves a lasting impression on his sperm that gives sons and daughters a blunted reaction to stress, a response linked to several mental disorders. The findings, published in a new preclinical study in the Journal of Neuroscience by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, point to a never-before-seen epigenetic link to stress-related diseases such as anxiety and depression passed from father to child.

While environmental challenges, like diet, drug abuse, and chronic stress, felt by mothers during pregnancy have been shown to affect offspring neurodevelopment and increase the risk for certain diseases, dad's influence on his children are less well understood. The effects of lifelong exposures to dad on children are even more out of reach.

Now, a team of researchers led by Tracy L. Bale, PhD, associate professor of neuroscience in the Perelman School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry and the School of Veterinary Medicine Department of Animal Biology, have shown that stress on preadolescent and adult male mice induced an epigenetic mark in their sperm that reprogrammed their offspring's hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, a region of the brain that governs responses to stress. Surprisingly, both male and female offspring had abnormally low reactivity to stress.

This stress pathway dysregulation -- when reactivity is either heightened or reduced -- is a sign that an organism doesn't have the ability to respond appropriately to a changing environment. And as a result, their stress response becomes irregular, which can lead to stress-related disorders.

"It didn't matter if dads were going through puberty or in adulthood when stressed before they mated. We've shown here for the first time that stress can produce long-term changes to sperm that reprogram the offspring HPA stress axis regulation," said Bale. "These findings suggest one way in which paternal-stress exposure may be linked to such neuropsychiatric diseases."

Past epidemiological studies suggest that germ cells -- sperm and eggs -- are more susceptible to reprogramming during the slow growth period of preadolescence. Therefore, in this study, in order to examine the effects of paternal stress, male mice were exposed to six weeks of chronic stress, before breeding, either throughout puberty or only in adulthood. Examples of stress include sudden move to another cage, predator oder (fox urine, for example), noise, or a foreign object in the cage.

Male mice are ideal for such an experiment because they do not participate in offspring rearing, meaning any external factors outside of germ-cell formation are essentially eliminated.

Researchers found that offspring from paternal stress groups displayed significantly blunted levels of the stress hormone corticosterone -- in humans, it's cortisol -- in response to stress.

To understand the neural circuitry in the offspring, the group also examined changes in gene expression in certain brain regions involved in stress regulation: the paraventricular nucleus (PVN) and the bed nucleus of stria terminals. They found an increased expression of glucocorticoid-responsive genes in the PVN, a change that supports a possible mechanism whereby increased negative feedback sensitivity may be explained.

The researchers also looked at a series of microRNAs (miRs) in the sperm that uniquely contribute to post-fertilization gene expression to examine the epigenetic mechanisms of transmission to the next generation. In both groups of stressed dads, there was a significant increase in expression of nine miRs. These miRs may be targeting the stored maternal messenger RNAs in the egg at fertilization, so that dad's sperm can regulate some aspect of early development to inform his offspring about the environment, according to the authors.

They also point out that a reduced physiological stress response may reflect some adaptive evolutionary benefit passed on to offspring to ensure survival in what is expected to be a more stressful environment.

"Whether such diminished stress reactivity would be detrimental or beneficial to offspring likely depends on the environment into which they were born, as well as genetic background factors," they state in the paper. However, they conclude, the finding that mild stress experience across a lifespan can change in male germ cells provides an important and novel mechanism contributing to neuropsychiatric disease risk.

"Next, we are examining the mechanism whereby these sperm miRs act at fertilization, and then we can think about using them as biomarkers in human diseases," said Bale. "And then we can begin to predict who has been exposed to what, and to think about prevention or treatment down the road."

 

Household tip

If you've got lots of shrimp (I guess this applies to all seafood) that you are going to throw away, don't put it in the recycle bin four days before it's collected. Especially not during a heatwave.

It really stank. You could get whiffs of it throughout the house and up and down the block. We have jasmine blooming, but instead of covering the smell it just kind of sweetened the shrimp stink, sort of like a hobo wearing cologne. 

When I put the can out to the curb I noticed the smell had abated somewhat. I looked inside. Everything was wiggling. Apparently, I had accidentally created a whole generation of maggots that don't smell as bad as what they eat. 

This morning the garbage man left the top off after dumping the can, and the birds were having a great time eating the wigglies. 

So that's my household tip for the day.

Ghoulish reminders

Not everyone makes it back down. Mount Everest. Follow the link for pictures and article.

Chompy

 

Maybe you haven't meditated enough

This is perhaps the reason why this song of mine has never caught on.

When De’Anthony Thomas returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown in the 2013 Fiesta Bowl, says University of Oregon researcher Frank Diaz, Thomas put Ducks fans into a heightened zone of engagement for watching the game, not unlike what was experienced by music students who were first exposed to a brief session of mindfulness meditation before hearing an opera passage.

As a high school orchestra and band educator in Florida, Diaz had flirted with yoga and light meditation in a quest to heighten music engagement. He noticed, anecdotally, a connection to improved attention by his students. Now a professor in the UO School of Music and Dance, Diaz is exploring how mindfulness meditation may enhance both music engagement and performance. He began the research while a doctoral student at Florida State University.

In a study appearing online ahead of publication in the journal Psychology of Music, he reports a rise of focused engagement for student participants who listened to a 10-minute excerpt of Giacomo Puccini’s opera “La Boheme” after listening to a 15-minute recording of a segment produced by the Duke University Center for Mindfulness Research. Mindfulness is an ancient technique that helps direct a person’s consciousness into the present. In this case, listeners were reminded to focus on physical sensations or their breathing if their attention drifted.

The 132 student participants were divided into four groups. Those undergoing mindfulness preparation were then additionally divided into subgroups that were tested for two types of peak experiences, a highly emotional experience known as aesthetic response, and flow — the listeners’ effortless engagement or how much “in the zone” they were as they listened to the music.

Control groups, which did not hear the mindfulness recording, were tested either for aesthetic or flow responses. Subjects were tested for real time responses using a Continuous Response Digital Interface developed in the late 1980s at Florida State University. The device allows subjects to turn a dial, rather than speaking, in response to how music moves them as they listen. The dial’s movement was recorded.

Overall, 97 percent of the participants had either one or several moments of flow or aesthetic response. Of the 69 subjects who engaged in mindfulness, 64 percent thought the technique had enhanced their listening experience.

There was a discrepancy between the subjects’ responses gathered in real time and summative data — how they reacted by turning the dial while listening vs. how they recalled their experience at the end of the experiments. Diaz said that the real time responses more accurately captured the attention being devoted to the music, and that the mindfulness technique helped drive participants into the zone of readiness to listen to music they’ve heard many times before.

“It tends to take habituated responses and renews them. It’s almost like a reset button,” Diaz said. “For musicians, if you’re a symphony player, you’ve probably played ‘Beethoven’s No. 9′ 10,000 times. Your response is so habituated that you don’t get any pleasure out of it anymore. The cool thing about La Boheme is that it has been used in music-related studies for years, and we have these patterns documented over time by people studying responses to music. That lets you compare past and present with a new group.”

The study, he said, has potential ramifications for music education. “Attention can be modified,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be done chemically or by changing the environment. Human beings have the capacity to learn to self-regulate their attention, and when you do that it increases the quality of typical, everyday experiences. Listening to music mindfully can be a powerful way of increasing your quality of life. We really found significant increases in the participants’ aesthetic and flow experience. Some were intense. They were really in the zone.”

The paper by Diaz is among a growing number of research projects devoted to understanding how meditative techniques such as mindfulness affect the brain and improves health and behavior.

In the current issue of SCAN (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience), UO psychologist Michael Posner and Yi-Yuan Tang of Texas Tech University noted in an editorial that the numbers of research papers published on mindfulness have grown from 28 in 2001 to 397 in 2011.

Posner and Tang have collaborated on a series of projects that look at brain changes involved in a mindfulness technique called integrative body-mind training that is practiced in parts of China. Tang, who had served as a visiting professor at the UO, remains affiliated with the UO psychology department as a research professor. The pair’s editorial provides an overview of research findings in recent years and how mindfulness may apply in the mental health and medical fields.

Also in SCAN, a four-member research team that includes UO psychologist Elliot T. Berkman studied mindfulness meditation using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In a study of 31 participants, Berkman showed that the focused-breathing aspect of mindfulness meditation activated an attention network that includes the brain’s parietal and prefrontal structures.

“This research is contributing to our overall understanding of how the brain works,” said Kimberly Andrews Espy, UO vice president for research and innovation, and dean of the graduate school. “Examining these alternative means of enhancing brain activity has the potential to benefit society in a number of ways, and may lead to new treatments for mental illness, brain injuries and other disorders.”

Or perhaps not.

 

Wake up! Don't want to sleep through the Super Bowl!

He's a Dolphins fan

Just hangin' out on the corner, waitin' for the Big Game.

The March To The Super Bowl, 2/1/13

Just another marketing ploy.

In the run-up to Super Bowl Sunday, millions of American football fans can rest assured: there is no looming shortage of their beloved chicken wings.

The National Chicken Council estimat

es that the nation will wolf down 1.23 billion chicken wings over Super Bowl weekend, or nearly four wings for each and every American.

But fears that restaurants, bars, fast food outlets and supermarkets will run out of the savory snack — served baked, fried or grilled, most often with ranch or barbecue sauce — are unfounded, the industry group said Thursday.

“There is sufficient frozen poultry in storage,” council spokesman Tom Super told AFP in an email, citing the latest data from the US Department of Agriculture.

“So no, there will be no wing shortage,” he said. “They might be a little more expensive, but there is and will be plenty to go around.”

Unprepared wings are retailing in Washington supermarkets this week for about $2.49 per pound.

Contributing to a rise in prices, there has been a one percent dip in chicken production in the past year, and corn and feed prices are at record highs.

“The Super Bowl is the second biggest eating holiday of the year, after Thanksgiving,” noted Charlie Morrison, president of Wingstop, a nationwide chain of more than 550 wings-dedicated franchise restaurants.

“With the growing demand for wings, we are gearing up for this to be our biggest year yet,” with more than six million wings sold, up 15 percent on last year, he said in a statement.

Considering recent bouts of digestive difficulties in our household, Joanie and I have scaled back on the more challenging foods, but we will make an exception for wings on Super Bowl Sunday. We found plenty on stock at Gross Out (Grocery Outlet). 

So one less hurdle until the Big Game. I've been trying to get Joan in front of the chalkboard so I can give her a good Xs and Os before kickoff but she seems strangely disinterested. 

I didn't know about this place

I thought it was just someplace where cars raced around in circles. But there's this. Or maybe I'm thinking of Talladega.

The Spiritualist Camp in Cassadaga was founded in the late 1800s by one George P. Colby. Colby, a New York native and medium had been instructed by his spirit guide—a Native American named Seneca—to go to Florida and start a spiritual center. He trekked into the Central Florida wilderness in 1875 and homesteaded the land, in accordance with Seneca’s prophecy. A charter to form the Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Meeting Association was granted in 1894, and Colby acquired 35 acres. This spirit guide apparently had quite the knowledge of property rights. Over the decades, the Spiritualist Camp has grown to 57 acres. Cassadaga started as a place for snowbirds to practice their Spiritualism—a secular-minded, turn-of-the-century mish-mash of science, philosophy and religion.

Fast forward to 2013 – things have changed. 

Read it all.

Amphibians On Ice!

It was a unique idea for an ice show, but somehow it never caught on.