Antidepressants Overprescribed, Linked to Suicide Risk

Cases of depression and anxiety increased by 25 percent in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic alone by some counts, up from 1 in 20 adults worldwide, and the use of antidepressants has become more common. However, studies have found that antidepressants have unexpected risks.

In the 1960s, it was discovered that depression could be due to a lack of serotonin in the brain. Back then, people believed that serotonin was the “happiness factor” in humans. Serotonin is actually a neurotransmitter. The presynaptic neurons release serotonin and can also reuptake it into the brain to maintain homeostasis.

Thus, drugs were designed with the crude understanding that if the “recycling” pathway for serotonin is blocked, serotonin levels in body fluids will increase, and the symptoms will be relieved.

The main mechanism of the most common classes of antidepressant drugs, which include selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), noradrenaline, and serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs), involves the regulation of serotonin and the uptake of other neurotransmitters.

Although there may seem to be many options available, all of these drugs actually work based on similar mechanisms.

The current antidepressants have a large flaw in their mechanisms, but they are still used in large quantities.

Antidepressants Are Being Used Heavily
People suffer from depression for various reasons, and the degree of depression also varies greatly, so there should be a more comprehensive consideration of medication use. However, many doctors may prescribe antidepressants in the same way as painkillers: in increasing dosages after the effectiveness of the drugs diminishes, resulting in drug abuse.

Currently, approximately 13 percent of adults and 18 percent of adult women in the United States have taken antidepressants in the past 30 days. This is an alarming number.

In addition, there has been a rapid increase in the number of young antidepressant users. While it used to be mostly adults taking these drugs, a significant number of adolescents aged 13 to 19 are now taking them as well. Adolescents are prone to emotional instability, and taking medication whenever they have emotional problems will cause them to develop a dependence on medications, instead of figuring out the problems they encounter as they grow up, getting mature emotionally or seeking help from their family, friends, and other sources.

Antidepressants May Raise Suicide Risk

So, is there a risk associated with the use of antidepressants in such a large population?

A study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry looked at the antidepressant prescription rates and suicide rates in Australia since 2012 and found a consistent upward trend in both data.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned in 2004 that children and adolescents taking antidepressants were at increased risk of suicide, including suicidal thoughts and behaviors.

At that time, the FDA used a “black-box warning” label for all classes of antidepressants, which is the highest warning level given by the FDA for an approved drug, and it can be seen on the drug packaging. The warning went into effect in 2005; and in 2006, the warning was expanded to include people 25 years of age.

The “black box warning” is used to warn the public and prescribers about serious, permanent, or fatal side effects—it thus requires evidence of significant risk, meaning that these warnings are generally added after drugs have already been on the market.

Although the warning was once taken seriously by the industry, it did not stop the social environment from encouraging the use of chemicals to control mental problems. As a result, the use of antidepressants declined only briefly and rose again after 2006.

Moreover, antidepressants have brought large profits to pharmaceutical companies worldwide. In 2020, the market for antidepressants reached $15 billion.

A research published in the British Medical Journal further confirms that the risk of suicide attempts is significantly higher in the 28 days after taking antidepressants than before. Moreover, symptoms may rebound severely in the short term after stopping the medication, so suicidal tendencies are also elevated during the withdrawal phase.

If a patient is suffering from severe depression and urgently needs help, it takes a long time to see the effects of the medication.  Under this circumstance, many doctors often prescribe a higher dose of antidepressant drugs for patients.   However, the higher dose of drugs may further worsen the patient’s symptoms.  This is also a major problem like a vicious cycle.

Our Understanding of Serotonin Was Wrong

A more critical issue is that our understanding of depression may have been wrong from the beginning.

Many are raising questions about this.

A review by experts from Canada and the University of Virginia was published in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. This article collected a large number of studies related to serotonin and found that the concept that the amount of serotonin determines changes in people’s mood is wrong.

It was first discovered that the association between the amount of serotonin and mental status is not a single one. When depressed, the amount of serotonin does not necessarily drop, and in many cases, it actually rises. This is because serotonin changes in the brain are difficult to measure, and previous testing techniques had its limitations.

Moreover, serotonin is not just a “happiness factor.” It is a complex system that is closely related to the energy regulation of many organ systems in the body.

In addition to the brain, serotonin also acts on many other organs throughout the body. And it affects the operation of many bodily functions, including mitochondrial energy production, which involves energy storage. Serotonin also directly affects the metabolism of sugar and the distribution and absorption of energy in different organs, as well as the immune system, the body’s growth and development, and fertility. SSRIs can actually disrupt the energy balance of many systems in the body, thus bringing many problems.

The review also pointed out that after some people took antidepressants for a period of time, their depression symptoms were alleviated, but the improvement might not actually be brought about by the medicines. Rather, the drugs disrupted the serotonin and energy balances, prompting the body to make self-protective and compensatory adjustments.

This is equivalent to a complete overturn of the antidepressant mechanism developed in the 1960s.

Unfortunately, this was not widely reported in the media, as it was a rather profound academic paper.

With further advancement in brain science and neuroscience research over the past few decades, scientists have continued to discover that the effects of serotonin on the brain are not as simple as we once thought, and that these concepts were unknown at the early time of antidepressant drug development.

For example, if there is a problem with the serotonin level in the hippocampus, it will cause memory loss and reduces the brain-derived neurotrophic factor signaling; if there is a problem with the serotonin level in the hypothalamus, it will affect the body’s ability to grow, reproduce, and do physical activities.

It can be seen that the brain is a complex system, and the effects of a substance on different parts of the brain are different. The use of drugs to directly disturb the balances of serotonin and other substances will cause greater disruptions in the body.

Side Effects of Antidepressants

The side effects of antidepressants also vary. Examples include severe insomnia, drowsiness, sexual dysfunction, and a higher probability of bleeding death after surgery, among others. In addition, antidepressants and many drugs, including hypertensive drugs, should not be taken together.

A study published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine found that many antidepressant drugs can cause sexual dysfunction, with the prevalence of some being as much as 20 percent to 30 percent.

In addition, the discontinuation of long-term use of antidepressant medications will also lead to numerous side effects, including sensory problems. This is because when people become accustomed to chemical dependency, their level of cognition is lowered, making them prone to numbness, sensory and cognitive disturbances, insomnia, nightmares, and other problems.

The body functions can also become dysfunctional when an antidepressant drug is discontinued. Since more than 90 percent of the serotonin acts on different organs of the body, the effects of the drugs are systemic. Diarrhea, nausea, muscle stiffness, problems with reflexes, hypothermia, and even shock may occur.

Therefore, it is still important to pay attention to the dosage when taking medication at home.

Conventional medicine focuses on using material changes to explain everything and using chemical changes to explain mental illnesses, and then developing drugs based on this “explanation.” However, with further research, it may be found that the initial “explanation” is wrong, and that the drugs developed can do more harm than good.

So, besides chemical drugs, what else can be used to treat depression and other mental illnesses?

Some psychologists will perform cognitive therapies for patients before prescribing medication, and one of them is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Psychologists talk to patients to understand their problems and help them find ways to relieve them. This type of communication is helpful to many people to a certain degree.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/antidepressants-overprescribed-linked-to-suicide-risk_4585634.html

Economic revival in Eastern Germany

 
Once a byword for economic decline, the region is being transformed into the centre of Europe’s electric car industry

Ten years ago, the small east German town of Guben was so desperate for new investors it was prepared to give them land for free. “Now I have no free space,” says mayor Fred Mahro.

The turning point came last year when a Canadian clean tech company selected the town to build Europe’s first lithium converter that makes a key component for electric car batteries. Guben won out over 60 other potential sites across the continent.

Rock Tech Lithium’s €500mn investment will make Guben an important link in the battery supply chain and breathe new life into the town. “Guben was like Sleeping Beauty,” says Mahro. “Rock Tech kissed it awake.”

The arrival of the Canadians is emblematic of a massive influx of investment into the former communist east, which has become the home of Europe’s rapidly expanding electric car sector. A region that was once a byword for economic decline is turning into one of the continent’s hottest pieces of industrial real estate.

In the past couple of years, it has been deluged with new projects and investments. Most eye-catching of all was chipmaker Intel’s announcement in March that it would build at least two semiconductor factories worth €17bn in the eastern city of Magdeburg — the largest-ever foreign direct investment in Germany. It came in the same month that Tesla started production at its first European electric car factory in the eastern town of Grünheide. That comes on top of the two electric vehicle plants converted by Volkswagen in the cities of Zwickau and Dresden.

Eastern Germany is now “one of the most attractive economic regions of Europe”, Chancellor Olaf Scholz told a conference earlier this month. “And internationally, word is getting around.”

The investments could be the harbinger of a profound shift in Germany’s industrial geography. For decades, the country’s economic strength has been concentrated in the south and south-west, home to carmakers such as Mercedes and BMW and engineering giants such as Siemens. But that could change as the east re-industrialises.

“Germany’s economic map is being drawn anew,” says Carsten Schneider, the German government’s commissioner for the east.

Indeed, the new investments come at a time when Germany’s traditional car industry, based on the combustion engine, is coming under unprecedented pressure as governments around the world look to a future free of fossil fuels and the transition to electric cars gathers pace. The pressure was exemplified by the European Parliament’s vote earlier this month to ban the sale of new diesel and petrol cars and vans in the EU from 2035.

Across the south and south-west, traditional suppliers to the automotive industry — Bosch, Continental, Mahle, ZF Friedrichshafen — have announced job cuts amid falling demand and an uncertain outlook.

The reverse is true in the east, where Volkswagen opened its first dedicated EV production line in 2019, converting a plant in Zwickau, Saxony that once manufactured the Soviet-era Trabant car and was taken over by VW after Germany’s reunification. “The region and the people are familiar with upheavals, which was certainly no disadvantage,” says Karen Kutzner, chief financial officer of VW Saxony.

The company’s aim is to manufacture 300,000 electric cars a year at the site, and a few thousand more in nearby Dresden, adding roughly 1,000 jobs in the process. The Zwickau region now has almost full employment, thanks in part to companies such as cablemaker Leoni investing about €130mn in the area to supply the VW plants.

BMW is adding hundreds of roles to its plant in Leipzig, which will build battery modules.

Jörg Steinbach, economy minister of Brandenburg, the state surrounding Berlin that is Tesla’s new European home, says it has seen investments of €7bn since 2018 — “that scale is a far cry from previous years”. The regional authorities in eastern Germany are currently dealing with 28 expressions of interest representing €11.5bn in potential new investment.

“For a long time, the east German states were in the bottom half of the economic performance league,” says Steinbach. “I think that league is going to become a lot more skewed towards the east in the next five years.”

Lots of empty space

Take a trip to the Brandenburg countryside and it’s immediately obvious what makes it attractive to investors — the space. It has a lot more freely available land than other parts of Germany, especially the densely populated, highly industrialised south-west. Tesla’s Grünheide factory sits on 300 hectares of land and Intel’s in Magdeburg will take up 450 — the equivalent of 620 football pitches.

“Such space is a rarity in the heart of Europe and highly sought after,” Scholz said at the conference earlier this month. “And in east Germany it exists.”

The east has another key competitive advantage — a plentiful supply of renewable energy. Brandenburg generates more electricity from wind, solar and biomass per head of population than any other German state. Renewables cover 94 per cent of the state’s electricity demand, compared to Germany’s national average of 46 per cent.

“[Investors] say our business is producing batteries for environmentally friendly mobility,” economy minister Robert Habeck told the same conference Scholz spoke at this month. “And we want to produce our batteries in a sustainable way . . . [so] the availability of renewable energy is a crucial factor for energy-intensive companies setting up here.”

Eastern Germany is also benefiting massively from the move to greater European “sovereignty” — the EU’s strategy to boost its self-reliance in critical sectors such as batteries and semiconductors, the data cloud and pharmaceuticals.

Shocked by the disruptions to global trade seen during the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, countries are increasingly focused on ramping up domestic production of crucial components and shortening supply chains to make them less vulnerable to external shocks.

Those trends are particularly marked in the region around Berlin. “The [EV] industry will have everything it needs here, from our lithium processing to battery and cell production to the manufacturing of electric cars,” says Markus Brügmann, Rock Tech Lithium’s chief executive. “And our company is sitting right at the heart of this new value chain.”

State subsidies have played a key role in attracting investors. Berlin is providing €6.8bn in financial support to the Intel project by 2024, €2.7bn of it this year alone. It is also releasing €40bn in funds over the next few years to cushion the economic effects of its plan to phase out coal, and much of that will flow to east Germany, home to a clutch of lignite mines and coal-fired power stations that must be shut down. Roads, railways and research institutions could see a substantial windfall.

However, it is not just the promise of subsidies that is luring big tech companies to the east, it is the region’s long history as a centre of industry. Some of the recent revival is built on foundations laid during the communist GDR: the semiconductor cluster near Dresden in Saxony — Europe’s largest — sprung up on the site of Robotron, the former state-run GDR electronics manufacturer, after the likes of Bosch, Infineon and AMD realised that highly qualified personnel and production facilities could be snapped up at low cost.

That so-called semiconductor “ecosystem” continues to attract cutting-edge companies that are banking on becoming the new auto suppliers, such as Estonian supercapacitor start-up Skeleton Tech, which is investing €36mn in a Dresden site.

“We liked the industrial infrastructure but also the academia,” says co-founder Taavi Madiberk, whose company works closely with technical universities in Dresden and a network of sites run by Germany’s state-sponsored applied research organisation, Fraunhofer. Saxony has the highest concentration of such institutes, many of which were converted from GDR-era science academies.

“When you scale up normal manufacturing, you need competency in a really wide variety of areas, which for a tech company does not make sense to build in-house,” says Madiberk.

Reversing decades of decline

The arrival of companies like Tesla and Intel marks a big turnround for a region whose communist-era industrial base was virtually wiped out after reunification in 1990. Hundreds of factories closed in the ensuing decade, unemployment soared and young people headed westwards in search of work. “Some 70 per cent of East German industry disappeared,” says Steinbach.

The lack of economic prospects spawned frustration and anger that fuelled the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany and the anti-Muslim movement Pegida, whose mass protests during the 2015-16 refugee crisis made headlines.

Guben typifies the region’s highs and lows. The town gained fame in the 19th century as a centre of German hat production — one local notable, Carl Gottlob Wilke, is still remembered for inventing the weatherproof wool-felt hat, made from sheep’s wool rather than the traditional rabbit fur.

Under communism, the town became a big industrial centre, home to a synthetic fibre plant that employed hundreds. But after reunification much of the former GDR’s chemicals industry collapsed and took Guben with it.

“The cloth mill, the hat factory, the carpet yarn works — they all shut down,” recalls Mahro. “It was a wholesale bloodletting.” The town’s population more than halved, from 36,000 to 16,700 and by the end of the 1990s, unemployment stood at 27 per cent.

In the previous 30 years Guben had been able to attract just one new investor — a mattress maker called Megaflex. More trouble lay on the horizon — a nearby coal-fired power plant employing hundreds of people is among those due to be closed by 2038 under the planned coal phaseout.

It was not much better in other parts of eastern Germany. Though the prosperity gap with the west has narrowed in recent years, GDP per capita in the east was still just 77.9 per cent of the western level in 2020. Wages lag those in the west by 23 per cent.

But Guben fought hard to arrest the decline in its fortunes. The authorities upgraded the town’s now almost empty industrial zone and commissioned a €300,000 development plan that was finalised last year. Fred Mahro said he told Jörg Steinbach, the minister, “if an investor comes he can make a planning application straight away — we’re ready.” Six weeks later, Steinbach sent Rock Tech Lithium to Guben and talks began.

The plant they will build converts spodumene, a mineral containing lithium from its own mine in Canada, into pure lithium hydroxide — a crucial ingredient in electric car batteries. Rock Tech hopes to produce 24,000 tonnes a year, enough for 500,000 cars.

Even that is not nearly enough to meet the expected demand in Europe, says Brügmann. “It’s going to be like this,” he says, etching a hockey stick in the air. Driving the boom are climate policies that will vastly increase demand for electric cars. “The European market for electric mobility is years ahead of all others,” he says.

Meanwhile, other parts of the supply chain in the east are also taking shape. BASF is building a factory in Schwarzheide to make cathode active materials used in lithium-ion batteries, Australia’s Altech will produce anode materials in Schwarze Pumpe in Brandenburg and Microvast and CATL of China are also building factories to make actual batteries, one in Ludwigsfelde south of Berlin and one in Erfurt.

Last year, of the more than 323,000 electric vehicles produced in Germany, 57 per cent were manufactured in VW’s Zwickau and Dresden plants, according to autos analyst Matthias Schmidt. The opening of Tesla’s Brandenburg factory earlier this year has cemented the east of the country’s dominance in the battery vehicle world.

The buzz in eastern Germany contrasts with a much bleaker picture in the traditional carmaking regions, where more than 100,000 job cuts have been announced in the past three years. The lobby group that represents European auto suppliers, Clepa, has suggested that hundreds of thousands of roles will go thanks to the EU’s 2035 mandate.

Return to the past

Economic historians draw parallels between the east’s current revival and earlier phases of prosperity and progress. The area around Leuna in eastern Germany — now the site of a big oil refinery — was one of the “economically strongest regions in Germany before the second world war”, says Oliver Holtemöller, of the Halle Institute for Economic Research.

Meanwhile, Bavaria was then largely an agricultural state that only much later earned its reputation for “laptops and lederhosen”.

Yet there are some who argue that talk of a resurgence in the east can be overstated: most of Germany’s higher-paying jobs will remain in the south, after all. “The investments we’re seeing are in production, but research and development are what matters when it comes to innovation,” says Holtemöller.

The share of R&D spending by private companies, measured as a share of GDP, is two-to-three times higher in southern Germany than it is in the east. “That’s where the innovation is happening, and that’s where the highest salaries are,” he says.

And while the pace of the renewable energy buildout in the east is impressive, Russia’s weaponising of gas supplies could trigger a short-term energy squeeze that will affect new companies and established consumers alike. One semiconductor manufacturer in Dresden told the Financial Times it had already been informed that gas supplies to its plant could be rationed in the event of acute shortages this winter.

While the east is currently not more vulnerable to gas shortages than much of the rest of the country, the mere threat of rationing could dissuade some potential investors.

Politics is also an issue. The AfD remains strong in the east, particularly Saxony, which executives worry will deter foreign nationals from seeking jobs in the region’s new factories. “We are reliant on immigration, and we need to be open to it,” says Holtemöller. “But, particularly in rural areas of the east, xenophobia is a problem.”

Yet in the coming years, the east’s population is due to shrink, even more quickly than that of western Germany, making it increasingly dependent on imported labour. Of the 100 German districts with the worst predicted demographic decline, 55 are in the east, according to the latest government report on the region’s progress since reunification.

The report said that in the next 15 years, 42 per cent of working-age east Germans will retire, much more than the national average. “That will have significant effects on the labour market, companies’ ability to hire enough skilled workers, the pension system and healthcare,” the report said. “By 2032 there will be one person of pensionable age for every two of working age.”

“New jobs can only arise when there are enough people to take them up,” says Holtemöller. “But the east’s population is shrinking.”

It’s an issue that the people of Guben are also acutely aware of. A few days ago, executives from Rock Tech Lithium came to the town to inform locals about their project. The reception was warm, but scepticism was rife.

“I can’t imagine how they’re going to find the workers they need here — this is an ageing town,” says Gaby Hartmann, a pensioner. “My generation dominates and our ship has sailed.”

Lothar Hüfner, who worked for 40 years at Guben’s synthetic fibre plant, is pleased about Rock Tech Lithium’s investment. “If something will happen here again, then that’s great,” he says with a smile.

But he remains cautious — a prudence born of experience. The 87-year-old helped lay the first bricks of the Guben fibre plant in 1960 and then, more than 30 years later, watched as it was torn down. Since then, “We’ve seen plenty of investors come and go”, he says. “But their projects pop like soap bubbles.”

Mayor Fred Mahro, however, is much more optimistic. “We rolled out the red carpet for so many people in the past and suffered so many defeats,” he says. But things are different now. “This is the most wonderful time I’ve ever had in Guben.”

https://www.ft.com/content/f1d0e732-d523-40db-b753-ae404498dc7a

Oh dear! Migraine sufferers have smaller brains

 
This is both explanatory and embarrassing.  Like most high functioning autistics  I have a slightly larger head originating in a larger cerebral cortex. So it fits that I rarely have headaches of any kind, let alone migraines.

The embarrassing bit is that brain size has some relationship with IQ.  There is a negative correlation of about .30 between brain size and IQ.  So migraine sufferers would seem on average to be less bright.

The flaw in that deduction is that I know well several people who have suffered badly from migraines and yet ALL of them are clearly of above average IQ.  

One cannot draw much in the way of inferences from that.  It may simply reflect severe selectivity in my friendship circle and countervailing factors may be influential.

So, all things considered, I am putting these inferences up on a blog that is little visited and will circulate the link privately


Queensland researchers have made a world-first breakthrough that will help bring more effective treatments for people who suffer from debilitating migraine headaches.

A study led by QIMR Berghofer researcher Dr Brittany Mitchell has shown for the first time the genetic links between brain size and migraine risk.

Around one in four Australians are affected by migraine experiencing symptoms such as severe and prolonged headaches, nausea and vomiting, sensitivity to light and sound, and brain fog.

Symptoms can last anywhere from a few hours to weeks and even months and women are twice as likely to be affected.

Aside from the distressing impact on patients, migraine costs the Australian economy more than $35 billion every year, but there are still many unknowns about the biological causes of  the complex condition with around half of all patients failing to respond to treatment.

“Our research found that a smaller brain size and smaller structures within the brain, such as the hippocampus and the amygdala, cause an increased risk of migraine, and that this might be due to shared biological pathways that affect neuronal signalling or the regulation of blood flow,” Dr Mitchell said.

“Migraine is a difficult disorder to treat so it’s very exciting that our research has delivered a better understanding of the biology of migraine which we hope will lead to more effective treatments,” she said.

“I know personally how debilitating migraines are because I suffer from them myself. Any step towards bringing relief to patients is always very exciting and positive.”

The research, which has been published in the journal Brain, was made possible thanks to genetic data resulting from hundreds of thousands of participants from two multinational research collaborations - the Enhancing Neuroimaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) Consortium and the International Headache Genetics Consortium (IHGC).

Co-author of the study, Professor Dale Nyholt from the QUT Centre for Genomics and Personalised Health is a world authority on the genetics of migraine and a leader of the  IHGC. He said identifying these new findings about the causal genetic links of migraine leads to new avenues for research.

QIMR Berghofer genetic epidemiologist and study co-author, Dr Miguel Rentería, said the next step would be to further investigate the uncovered genes that are shared between brain  structure and migraine risk and to also investigate if these genes are responsible for the differences in migraine risk between women and men.

“For the first time we can see that some of the genes that influence brain size can also increase migraine risk, and that this is in turn likely due to vascular regulation. We now want  to study these shared genetic pathways to work out whether increasing blood flow, for example, could reduce migraine risk thereby opening up new possibilities for treatments,” Dr  Rentería said.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/genetic-links-between-brain-size-and-migraine-risks-queensland-study/news-story/718743869aa0e4aa81fbe7ec75d459e4

Are humans born with a moral compass? Study reveals infants as young as 8 months old can 'punish' antisocial behaviour in others

There is other evidence showing that there are some moral instincts

For millennia, philosophers have pondered the question of whether humans are inherently good.

Now, researchers at Osaka University have found that eight-month-olds can make moral judgments and punish antisocial behaviour - suggesting the moral compass exists at birth.

Punishment of antisocial behaviour is found in only humans, and is universal across cultures.  However, the development of moral behaviour is not well understood.

Further, it can be very difficult to examine decision-making and agency in infants, which the researchers aimed to address.

'Morality is an important but mysterious part of what makes us human,' said lead author Yasuhiro Kanakogi at Osaka University.

'We wanted to know whether third-party punishment of antisocial others is present at a very young age, because this would help to signal whether morality is learned.'

For the study, researchers recruited 124 eight-month-olds, who sat on a parent's lap as they watched animations on a computer screen.

A particularly clever gaze-tracking system was used so that where exactly a baby looked controlled aspects of the animation.

Initially, the babies were presented with two different-coloured anthropomorphic blobs with eyes – one green and one orange.

If a baby looked at the orange blob on the left, a stone would fall down and squash it. Likewise, if the baby looked at the green blob on the right, the stone would fall on the green blob and squash it.

Next, each baby was shown an animation featuring the two blobs that they weren't able to control with their eyes.

This animation, played three times, showed the green blob chasing the orange blob around the screen and striking it to squash it, as an act of aggression.

Each infant was then shown the original screen, where they could drop the stone on one of the blobs just by looking at it.

Overall, the babies chose to drop the stone on the green blob more than on the orange blob after they had seen the green blob be aggressive, researchers found.

Before they'd seen the green blob being aggressive, the babies chose to drop the stone on the orange blob and the green blob equally.

According to the academics, this is a sign that the babies wanted to punish the green blob, because it was aggressive to the orange blob.

'The results were surprising,' said Kanakogi. 'We found that preverbal infants chose to punish the antisocial aggressor by increasing their gaze towards the aggressor.

'The observation of this behaviour in very young children indicates that humans may have acquired behavioural tendencies toward moral behaviour during the course of evolution.

'Specifically, the punishment of antisocial behaviour may have evolved as an important element of human cooperation.'

The team acknowledged the possibility that the babies might have been looking at the green blob more for other reasons – for example, they were expecting it to move around the screen and start chasing the orange blob again.

So to verify their findings, they conducted three control experiments to exclude alternative interpretations of the infants' gazing behaviours.

For example, in one of the control experiments, a soft object that didn't squash the blobs was used instead of a stone for the gaze-tracking phases.

In this case, researchers found that the babies didn't look at the green blob more after its aggressive display, which they said was because the babies were unable to punish it.

The researchers claim their study is the first in the world to directly measure the moral decision-making of infants.

Further experiments that use this unique gaze-tracking method could 'reveal undiscovered cognitive abilities in preverbal infants', they say.

The new study has been published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10900047/Eight-month-old-infants-punish-antisocial-behaviour-study-says.html

Lasers reveal 'lost' pre-Hispanic civilization deep in the Amazon

Millions of lasers shot from a helicopter flying over the Amazon basin have revealed evidence of unknown settlements built by a "lost" pre-Hispanic civilization, resolving a long-standing scientific debate about whether the region could sustain a large population, a new study finds.

The findings indicate the mysterious Casarabe people — who lived in the Llanos de Mojos region of the Amazon basin between A.D. 500 and 1400 — were much more numerous than previously thought, and that they had developed an extensive civilization that was finely adapted to the unique environment they lived in, according to the study, published online Wednesday (May 25) in the journal Nature(opens in new tab).

The study researchers used airborne lidar — "light detection and ranging," in which thousands of infrared laser pulses are bounced every second off the terrain to reveal archaeological structures beneath dense vegetation — and discovered several unknown settlements within a network of roads, causeways, reservoirs and canals that was centered on two very large Casarabe settlements, now called Cotoca and Landívar.

"In one hour of walking, you can get to another settlement," study lead author Heiko Prümers, an archaeologist at the German Archaeological Institute in Bonn, told Live Science. "That's a sign that this region was very densely populated in pre-Hispanic times." Prümers and his colleagues have studied the Casarabe ruins in the region, now part of Bolivia, for more than 20 years.

The Llanos de Mojos region is a lowland tropical savanna in the southwest of the Amazon basin. It has distinct wet and dry seasons each year — the driest months have no rain, but during the rainy season between November and April much of the area is flooded for months at a time.

Spanish missionaries in the 16th century found only isolated communities living there, and scientists had supposed that the area's pre-Hispanic population was the same, Prümers said. Earthworks were found in the 1960s, but many scientists disputed whether they were ruins or natural features.

But the latest discoveries finally refute the idea that the region was sparsely populated, and show that the Casarabe people had instead instituted a "low-density tropical urbanism" across a vast area, he said.

Smaller Casarabe settlements could have been home to thousands of people, and 24 are now known — nine of them were found for the first time in the recent lidar study, Prümers said.

The settlements were joined by roads and causeways, and had been built in roughly concentric circles around the two major Casarabe sites at Cotoca and Landívar; both were known of before, but their true extent has only now been revealed by lidar, he said.

Cotoca and Landívar were each centered on ceremonial sites that had huge raised platforms of earth, topped by enormous pyramids. The religious beliefs of the Casarabe people are unknown, but the study reveals the platforms and pyramids were orientated to the north-northwest — the same direction as the Casarabe burials that have been found. "So there must've been a 'world view' but nothing is known about that," Prümers said.

An unusual feature of the settlements is that the Casarabe built them within a massive infrastructure of canals and reservoirs for the management of water.

Along with roads and causeways, these waterways radiated out in all directions from the major settlements like Cotoca and represented a major investment in landscape management and labor mobilization, the researchers wrote in the study.

Prümers said the system may have been used to control the seasonal flooding of the region, to allow the farming of maize and other crops in raised areas; and it's possible some reservoirs were used to farm fish, which would have been an important source of protein for the Casarabe people.

And he speculates that water scarcity may have played a role in the demise of the Casarabe civilization in about A.D. 1400, more than 100 years before the arrival of the Spanish. It's possible that because the water management system relied so heavily on the floods or other sources of water that it — and the civilization that relied on it — fell apart during a prolonged dry period due to a changing climate, he said.

https://www.livescience.com/lidar-reveals-pre-hispanic-amazon-settlements

The secret signs that betray your true class:

Pin-sharp book by DETLEV PILTZ, who fell in love with England while staying with Theresa May's family, explains what the sound of your doorbell, the colour of your car and how you eat peas reveals about you

My first visit to England, in the summer of 1961, was as a 16-year-old German schoolboy taken in as a paying guest by a vicar and his wife.

Their daughter, then a little girl of about five, was called Theresa and later became Prime Minister.

Her father, the Reverend Hubert Brasier, was the rector in an idyllic Cotswolds village and the four weeks I spent with them enriched my life.

Not only did I improve my English but the family also took me with them on shopping trips in their plush Morris Minor, for picnics in the country, to the motor racing at Silverstone and to Oxford University where the vicar explained about its colleges.

On my last Sunday with the Brasiers, my host parents gave me some lessons in good manners before the bishop came for tea.

One was the two-cup rule of tea-drinking: a single cup was deemed impolite as not enough; three cups were considered too many.

When the tea came, I found it very weak. I did not enjoy it at all and once their guest had left I asked about its strange taste.  'It was China tea,' Mrs Brasier explained, and we were drinking it 'because of the bishop'.

Clearly it was thought the Indian tea they normally drank was wrong for someone of the bishop's social standing and so I gained my first insight into that most prominent feature of Englishness — the class system.

Those summer holidays were the beginning of a life-long fascination and affection for England that has led to many visits and finally to owning my own place not far from the spot where my English 'career' began.

Whenever I am here, I am vividly reminded that the class system still exists, as demonstrated by the public reaction to the BBC's Great British Class Survey in 2013.

If it was already remarkable that more than 161,000 people took the trouble to spend 20 minutes of their time answering questions about their economic situation, cultural tastes and leisure interests, the biggest surprise was yet to follow.

Within a week of the results being published, seven million people — roughly one in five of the British adult population — clicked on the Class Calculator to find out where they stood socially.

What's more, sales of theatre tickets in London that week doubled, the reason apparently being that the Class Calculator had identified theatre-going as an indicator of belonging to a higher class.

As this suggests, there's far more to class than such 'hard' markers as occupation and money.

However impoverished, the child of an earl with all the class markers of their elevated station is upper class and not working class.

And the National Lottery winner who buys himself a country house in Buckinghamshire, a flat in London's Eaton Square and a Rolls-Royce in no way qualifies as upper class.

What matters just as much are the 'soft' markers.

Having hair does not reveal which class you belong to, but how you wear it most definitely does.

Being a dog-owner does not indicate your class, but the breed you choose speaks volumes.

Owning a car is not a class statement, but how often you wash it is.

Going on holiday has nothing to do with class, but what you do when you get there certainly does.

Naturally, no Englishman would admit to this kind of snobbery and there is an unspoken ban on all overt differentiation on class grounds.

The infamous remark about Michael Heseltine attributed to Alan Clark in the House of Commons as the kind of person who 'had to buy his own furniture' would today be regarded as old-fashioned and morally repugnant.

In interviews conducted for the Great British Class Survey, people tended to preface their remarks with disclaimers such as, 'I don't mean this in a snobby way, but...' or, 'I know this might sound snobby, but...'

Such statements, however, are usually followed by exactly the kind of snobbery that the speaker claims to eschew, such as: 'Given her background, it's hard for her to really get pleasure from opera.'

Usefully, in much the same way as modern cars have a Global Positioning System that tells them their location on the Earth at any time, the English have a Class Positioning System that helps them identify their place.

Research suggests that around 70 per cent count themselves as middle-class and around 30 per cent as working-class, while next to no one identifies as the upper-class 'U' described by Nancy Mitford in her classic book Noblesse Oblige, first published in 1956.

Yet the English still fully relate to the dichotomy between 'upper' and 'lower'.

Crucially, what really matters is usually left unsaid. It comes across in small signs, a gesture, tiny give-aways, the odd phrase.

When you join a group of people or you meet an individual, you recognise the markers at once: the clothes, the style, the voice, the mannerisms.

Nobody who knows the code believes otherwise. Class rules, although hazy, most definitely exist.

Everyone is measured by them and either passes or fails. Except that they will never be told.

U AND NON-U

Some soft class markers have survived for decades.

Much of the behaviour, language and pronunciation Nancy Mitford categorised as 'U' and 'non-U' ('U' being upper class) back in 1956 had the same connotations when anthropologist Kate Fox published her book Watching The English in 2014.

Language markers considered lower class include 'Pardon?' (instead of 'What?' or 'Sorry?'), 'toilet' ('loo' or 'lavatory'), 'serviette' ('napkin') and 'lounge' ('sitting room' or 'drawing room'): terms whose utterance Fox describes as 'deadly sins' if you want to pass for upper class.

As for pronunciation, the upper classes typically pronounce unstressed vowels even less clearly than is otherwise the norm, and sometimes omit them entirely.

During a course in Oxford it took me several repetitions to realise phlosphy meant philosophy.

HOME SWEET HOME

Your address is a hard class marker par excellence and certain counties are classier than others, in particular Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Norfolk, Berkshire, Dorset, Herefordshire, East Sussex and Northumberland.

The most exclusive addresses in England are the shortest: no need for house number, street name, town or county.

The house name is sufficient, Buckingham Palace being a prime example.

In rural England, the country house holds sway. While 1,100 such dwellings disappeared between 1875 and 1975, having been demolished, fallen into ruin or burnt down, these monuments to a bygone era still abound.

Being the owner of a country house remains an unambiguous sign of being upper class — buying a stately pile is a priority for those aspiring to join the smart set.

The loss of such a house, for whatever reason, deals the owners a heavy blow, as described by one now impoverished former resident of a stately pile: 'The decline of our family began the first time we moved into a house with a number.'

CLOTHING/APPEARANCE

One delight of the English class system is the fascination with the colour of men's shoes.

A 2016 study by the Social Mobility Commission found 'some investment bank managers still judge candidates on whether they wear brown shoes with a suit rather than on their skills and potential'.

Brown shoes are acceptable only in the country, best kept for tramping the hills and fields or for gardening, fishing and shooting.

THE NAME GAME

Across all classes, calling someone by their first name is more frequent than it used to be.

This is not to everyone's liking. When Princess Anne addressed the former Prime Minister Tony Blair's wife as Mrs Blair, the response was, 'Oh, please call me Cherie.'

The princess replied: 'I'd rather not. It's not the way I've been brought up.'

The first names of the lower classes tend to follow fashion much more than those favoured by the upper.

In the same way the rings on a tree indicate when it was planted, some names can reveal the exact year in which someone was born.

A stand-out example is Kayleigh and its many iterations that emerged in the years from 2010 onwards, including Demi-Leigh, Chelsea-Leigh, Tia-Leigh, Honey-Leigh, Kaydie-Leigh, Everleigh and Lilleigh: there are no fewer than 128 in total.

The philosophy of names is not just imagined.

In 2005 it was reported children with middle-class names were eight times more likely to pass their GCSEs than those with names like Wayne and Dwayne.

According to Acorn, the data company that segments the UK population into 62 different types of consumer, being named Crispian, Greville, Lysbeth or Penelope means you are about 200 times more likely to be in the 'wealthy executive' top class than in the 'inner-city adversity' bottom one.

Seaneen, Terriann, Sammy-Jo, Jamielee, Kayleigh and Codie are the six names most disproportionately skewed towards the 'struggling families' category.

When it comes to nicknames, just about anything goes, including among the highest social orders. For example, the Duke of Edinburgh's pet name for the Queen was said to be 'Cabbage'.

THE 'M&S TEST'

If you want to know an Englishwoman's class, don't enquire about her background, income or education; instead, ask her what she buys at M&S.

Kate Fox, anthropologist and author of the book Watching The English, calls it the 'M&S test'.

The upper-middles purchase things that are not instantly identifiable as from M&S: underwear, towels, bed linen and food.

They do not buy sofas, curtains or cushions, party dresses or shoes or anything bearing a trademark M&S pattern.

The middle-middles buy M&S food (but get their cornflakes and loo paper at Sainsbury's or Tesco), as well as sofas, cushions and certain 'unseen' garments.

Lower-middle and upper-working-class customers like M&S clothes, feeling they represent value for money, but not food, cushions, duvets and towels, because of the price.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10677879/The-signs-betray-true-class-DETLEV-PILTZ-explains-sound-doorbell-reveals.html

'Informational simplicity' may explain why nature favors symmetry

Life favors simple structures over complex ones.

In biology, symmetry is typically the rule rather than the exception. Our bodies have left and right halves, starfish radiate from a central point and even trees, though not largely symmetrical, still produce symmetrical flowers. In fact, asymmetry in biology seems quite rare by comparison.

Does this mean that evolution has a preference for symmetry? In a new study, an international group of researchers, led by Iain Johnston, a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Bergen in Norway, says it does.

Although symmetrical structures represent only a small fraction of possible forms — in geometry, at least — symmetry pops up everywhere in living organisms. It's not just a body-plan phenomenon, either. Proteins, the molecular machinery within a body, are largely symmetrical as well, often being composed of a series of repeating, modular parts. Repeating structures are often seen in animals, too; think of centipedes, with their repeating body segments. The reason for this apparent "preference" is not driven by aesthetics. Instead, according to the researchers, it comes down to simplicity.

"It can be tempting to assume that symmetry and modularity arise from natural selection," Johnston and his co-authors wrote in the new study. Natural selection can cause beneficial traits to become more common because those traits help survival. However, natural selection can only make a beneficial trait more common or do away with a harmful one; it can't force brand-new ones to appear.

Instead, it can only reinforce the effects of mutations that occur randomly. For example, moths with dark-colored wings might be harder for birds to see than moths with light-colored wings. Predators might therefore be more likely to overlook dark-winged moths, enabling more of those insects to survive, reproduce, and pass that trait along to their offspring. But this doesn’t force black wings into existence; a gene has to mutate in order for that to happen. And if a mutation provides an advantage, it’s more likely to be perpetuated among a population for generations, until it becomes a common trait for the species.

In the same way, natural selection might only seem to favor symmetry because it is mostly given symmetrical forms to work with. The most likely explanation for why proteins and bodies are symmetrical is not because symmetry gives a survival advantage, but because more symmetrical, repeating forms appear in the first place.

So what makes that happen? Symmetrical forms have likely evolved more frequently and then persisted over evolutionary time because they often require less information to produce than asymmetrical forms do.

"Imagine having to tell a friend how to tile a floor using as few words as possible," Johnston said in a statement. "You wouldn't say, 'Put diamonds here, long rectangles here, wide rectangles here.' You'd say something like, 'Put square tiles everywhere.' And that simple, easy recipe gives a highly symmetric outcome."

Johnston and his colleagues tested this simplicity hypothesis by using computational modeling. By running a simulation of protein evolution, the researchers found that random mutations are much more likely to produce simple genetic sequences than complex ones. If those simple structures are good enough to do their jobs, natural selection can then take over and make use of those structures. In the researchers' simulations, as well as in life, high-symmetry structures with low complexity far outnumbered complex structures with low symmetry.

The study puts a new spin on the so-called infinite monkey theorem, an old thought experiment in the field of evolutionary biology. If, as the theorem predicts, a monkey types randomly for an infinite amount of time, it will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare (or perhaps the script for "Die Hard"). Essentially, random mutations in DNA are like typing monkeys. Given enough time (and enough monkeys), it is a certainty that some pretty ingenious mutations will appear.

But by the time a hypothetical monkey produces Shakespeare’s entire catalog of work, the industrious creature will have likely already typed a large number of short poems. Similarly, if biology is entirely reliant on genetic instructions generated at random (much like the work of a randomly typing monkey), it is going to generate a very large number of simple instructions, because those will appear much more frequently than complex directions do. As far as natural selection is concerned, complexity is unnecessary when a simple solution is available, study authors concluded.

So, the next time you stop to admire a flower’s radial symmetry, you can also admire the efficiency of the shorter, simpler gene sequences that encoded for that trait.

This study was published March 11 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

https://www.livescience.com/why-symmetry-common-in-biology