Childhood Maltreatment Can Leave Scars in the Brain
 

[URL]http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/11/04/242945454/childhood-maltreatment-can-leave-scars-in-the-brain[/URL]

This report on the radio caught my ear the other day. I certainly resonate with some of the symptoms described.

EDIT: Transcript follows-
[QUOTE]Researchers have found new evidence that maltreatment during childhood can lead to long-term changes in the brain. NPR's Jon Hamilton reports these changes could explain why abused children are much more likely to develop problems like anxiety and depression.
JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: Maltreatment can be physical or emotional and it ranges from mild to severe. So, researchers at the University of Wisconsin had a pretty typical group of 18-year-olds answer a questionnaire designed to assess childhood trauma. The young adults are part of a larger study of more than 500 families that has been tracking children's social and emotional development since 1994. Ryan Herringa says in this part of the research, adolescents were asked how strongly they agreed or disagreed with statements like these...
RYAN J. HERRINGA: When I was growing up I didn't have enough to eat, my parents were too drunk or high to take care of the family, I had to wear dirty clothes, or I thought my parents wished I had never been born, or somebody in my family hit me so hard that it left me with bruises or marks.
HAMILTON: There were also statements about emotional and sexual abuse. The researchers assessed 64 teenagers. Some had been maltreated, some hadn't. Then the scientists used a special type of MRI to measure connections among three areas of the brain involved in processing fear. One area is the prefrontal cortex, which orchestrates our thoughts and actions. Herringa says when it comes to fear, the prefrontal cortex gets a lot of input from the amygdala.
HERRINGA: The amygdala is really the brain's emotion and fear center.
HAMILTON: And it triggers the so-called fight or flight response when we encounter something scary. Herringa says messages from the amygdala, though, are often balanced by input from the hippocampus, which helps decide whether something is truly dangerous.
HERRINGA: So, for example, if you're at home watching a scary movie at night, the hippocampus can tell the prefrontal cortex that you're at home, this is just a movie, that's no reason to go into a full fight or flight response or freak out.
HAMILTON: At least that's what happens when there's a strong connection between the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, and the fear circuitry is working correctly. But Herringa says brain scans showed that in adolescents who had been maltreated as children, the connection with the hippocampus was relatively weak. He says, in girls who had been maltreated, the connection with the amygdala was weak, too.
HERRINGA: And importantly, we found also that these weaker connections actually mediated or led to the development of anxiety and depressive symptoms by late adolescence.
HAMILTON: Herringa says that seems to explain something he sees in many young patients with anxiety and depression.
HERRINGA: These kids seem to be afraid everywhere. It's like they've lost the ability to put a contextual limit on when they're going to be afraid and when they're not.
HAMILTON: Greg Siegle, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh, says the new study is important for several reasons. For one thing, he says, many young people who have been maltreated don't realize that they are unlike their peers when it comes to fear and anxiety.
GREG SIEGLE: Maltreatment is a disorder where often people are not even aware of the extent of their symptoms.
HAMILTON: Siegle says having a way to measure the effects of maltreatment in the brain also could help doctors know whether therapy for their patients is working. At another level, he says, the study represents progress in a national effort to find objective tests to help diagnose and treat mental disorders.
SIEGLE: In psychiatry, in psychology, we very rarely have those tests because we just don't know the biological and brain mechanisms. This study for maltreatment is starting to get at what mechanisms we should be looking at.
HAMILTON: And Siegle says it's a reminder that even relatively mild maltreatment can do lasting harm. The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Jon Hamilton, NPR News.
Copyright © 2013 NPR[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=LaurV;358709]Hehe, thanks, I checked the word (fabulation) in the dictionary before giving voice to my wonder, I didn't want to look silly. However, he got me with "unuseful", this word seems so common to me, I even didn't see it underlined.[/QUOTE]

Good place to start with fabulation is to look for it elsewhere, e.g. as part of "confabulation". Now not all constructions which appear most commonly in prefixed form need qualify as standalone words but it's usually a good guess; for example "gruntled" rarely appears sans a dis- prefix, but is a perfectly good word on its own.

A lot of genuine words fall into disuse simply because they have awkward "mouth feel", e.g. "coolth", which is an antonym of warmth, but makes the speaker feel like he has a mouthful of novocaine and cotton balls, thus over time the smoother-feeling "coolness" wins the commonness-of-usage stakes.

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[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/world/asia/philippines-typhoon.html?ref=world]Over 1000 feared dead in Philippines due to supertyphoon Haiyan[/url]

My, that's a big one...

Excellent point on "confabulation".

I've heard it repeatedly that the best that can be said of the typhoon is that it moved through quickly, and did not dump as much rain as it might have. It will be a while before the death toll can be fully assessed.

EDIT: It was a stunningly powerful storm by Atlantic/Gulf standards. The structure in satellite photos was so tight and regular, but the eye seemed really small in proportion to the huge extent of the rest of the storm. I saw the aftermath of a lesser storm (Ike) on a popular beach house community on the Gulf Coast. It mostly wiped out all but the newest, and highest off the ground beach houses. See below, especially scrolled a page or so down to aerial photos of different parts of the Bolivar Peninsula, east of Galveston. This storm was huge, but came in a Cat 2. Sustained winds ~110 mph, max surge 22 ft.

[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_Hurricane_Ike_in_Texas#Bolivar_Peninsula_and_southern_Chambers_County[/url]

Hurricane Ike was a piker compared to Haiyan, and there is much more extreme terrain in the Philippines. 190 mph sustained is hard to grasp, especially given the construction style of much of the housing outside the high rise districts of Greater Manila. Many of the beach houses wiped out by Ike on Bolivar would have been among the stronger structures in the Philippine countryside.

[URL="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131106122025.htm"]Educational Video Games Can Boost Motivation to Learn[/URL]

[URL="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/11/06/body-part-discovered-ligament/3451887/"]New body part discovered[/URL]

[URL="http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/music-make-rocket-scientist/story?id=20692544"]How Music Could Make You a Rocket Scientist[/URL]

[URL="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/kepler-space-telescope-finds-earth-size-potentially-habitable-planets-are-common/2013/11/04/49d782b4-4555-11e3-bf0c-cebf37c6f484_story.html"]Kepler space telescope finds Earth-size, potentially habitable planets are common[/URL]

[URL="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=neuroelectronics-make-smarter-computer-chips"]Neuroelectronics Make Smarter Computer Chips[/URL]

[URL="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131104152600.htm"]Brain Aging Is Conclusively Linked to Genes[/URL]

[URL="http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/psychology/article01130-eye-blood-iq.html"]Eye Blood Vessels Linked to Cognitive Function, IQ[/URL]

[URL="http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/10/30/241906619/seeing-in-the-pitch-dark-is-all-in-your-head"]Seeing In The Pitch-Dark Is All In Your Head[/URL]

[URL="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24934786"]Qubit stable for 39 minutes at room temperature.
[/URL]

[QUOTE=rogue;359322][URL="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/11/06/body-part-discovered-ligament/3451887/"]New body part discovered[/URL][/QUOTE]

"It's ligamentary, my dear Watson!"

What with many thousands of knee surgeries being doneevery year, surprised that it took so long to confirm.

[URL="http://www.futurity.org/brain-may-key-factor-onset-diabetes/"]Brain may be key factor in onset of diabetes[/URL]

[URL="http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/11/this-fossil-skull-unearthed-in-tibet-is-the-oldest-big-cat-ever-found/"]This Fossil Skull Unearthed in Tibet Is the Oldest Big Cat Ever Found[/URL]

[URL="http://www.fastcodesign.com/3021522/innovation-by-design/mit-invents-a-shapeshifting-display-you-can-reach-through-and-touch"]MIT Invents A Shapeshifting Display You Can Reach Through And Touch[/URL]

[URL="http://www.livescience.com/41185-what-a-dinosaur-brain-looked-like.html"]What a Dinosaur Brain May Have Looked Like[/URL]

[URL="http://www.rdmag.com/news/2013/11/study-your-brain-sees-things-you-don’t"]Your brain sees things you don’t[/URL]

In [i]Annals of the Completely Unsurprising Stuff Someone Actually Got Paid to "Discover"[/i]-worthy news:

[url=www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2510003/Mens-noses-10-larger-womens-need-oxygen-feed-muscles.html]Men's noses are 10% larger than women's because they need more oxygen to feed their muscles[/url]

Silly me - and here I'd thought this was entirely predictable based on related [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism#Humans]sexually-dimorphic aspects of human physiology[/url] such as:
[quote]Males typically have larger tracheae and branching bronchi, with about 30 percent greater lung volume per body mass. They have larger hearts, 10 percent higher red blood cell count, higher hemoglobin, hence greater oxygen-carrying capacity.[/quote]
C'mon, people - I would've at least expected some juicily titillating speculative "pheromone-sniffing" angle to make the above story newsworthy.

Ever the optimist, I nonetheless breathlessly await the thrilling followup study, [i]Men's scrotal pouches much larger than women's because they have testicles they lug around in there[/i].

Which will forever after be referred by suitably awed researchers in the field simply as the "lugnuts paper".

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[URL="http://www.nature.com/news/photons-detected-without-being-destroyed-1.14179"]Photons detected without being destroyed[/URL]

re: the second article above.

If the presence of a photon can be determined definitively,
without any loss of information, perhaps the uncertainty
principle is questionable. Measurement of the properties
of the smallest particles may just be a technological issue
and not a fundamental scientific limitation. Perhaps Planck's
"constant" may be based on the limits of current technology,
not on an absolute value determined theoretiically.

[QUOTE=davar55;360449]If the presence of a photon can be determined definitively, without any loss of information, perhaps the uncertainty principle is questionable.[/QUOTE]

Presence != exact location. Nor vector.