Children living with a dog are significantly healthier than those living without it. The researchers followed up 397 Finnish children, asking their parents to fill in weekly questionnaires about their health until they were 1 year old. Scientists believe that this is so because dog contact helps the babies build up their immune system.
 Children with a dog at home were healthy for about 73% of the time, while the percentage on children without a dog was of 65%. According to the study, the former ‘had fewer respiratory tract symptoms or infections’, as well as ‘less frequent otitis and tended to need fewer courses of antibiotics’ than those without dog contacts. Moreover, when dogs spent most of their time outside the home, the babies were healthier.  The study emphasizes the benefits of exposure to animals, at least when it comes to the so-called ‘man’s best friend’. The researchers also analyzed cat contacts, but it seems that the influence of cats on the baby’s health was weaker.
#Gosh

How Bees Avoid Difficult Choices

Today our Class was discussing on bees, Our Biology teacher tell us very useful information... I decided to post it on my blog Hope you like my posts;

Humans who are faced with difficult choices are often tempted to simply opt out of making a choice, especially when they realize that they cannot easily resolve their uncertainty as to which choice is the better choice. Some researchers consider this ability to opt out as an indicator of “meta-cognition”, a term used to describe “thinking about thinking”. Instead of plowing ahead with a random choice, humans can recognize that they lack adequate information and choose not to make a decision. Humans are not the only animals who engage in meta-cognition. Recent studies have shown that dolphins or non-human primates also have the capacity for meta-cognition and when faced with difficult decisions may also choose to opt out of the decision-making process.

The new study “Honey bees selectively avoid difficult choices” published on November 4, 2013 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that honey bees can exhibit complex decision making skills and opt out of making difficult choices. The researchers Clint Berry and Andrew Barron studied the behavior of honey bees in containers who were given two choices: flying towards targets containing either a reward (sweet sucrose solution) or a punishment (bitter quinine solution), as well as an opt-out choice in which they could exit the container. In the first stage of the experiment, the bees were trained to recognize the targets by using horizontally drawn reference lines and placing the reward and punishment targets clearly above or below the reference lines. The bees gradually learned to distinguish between reward and punishment by using the reference lines. In subsequent experiments, the researchers challenged the trained bees by making it more difficult for them to distinguish between reward targets and punishment targets. They placed the targets closer and closer to the reference line, to the point where it even became impossible for the bee to "guess" which target would contain the sweet sucrose solution and which one was the bitter quinine solution. As this distinction became more difficult, an increasing number of bees simply chose to not make a decision at all and instead opted out of the test by flying into another container via an "exit hole".

This study shows that bees have some degree of adaptive or complex decision making capacity. Bees can learn and remember different stimuli, and that the difficulty of the decision influences their behavior. It also has some strengths such as the straightforward experimental design and the inclusion of control experiments, such as the fact that the researchers alternated the positions of rewards and punishments to make sure this was not a confounding factor.

 However, it would be premature to call this study evidence of meta-cognitive thinking, as suggested in the press release by the university. There are important limitations to this research, such as the fact that the study conclusions regarding the decision-making of bees is based on merely ten individual bees, some of whom responded very differently from each other. This is rather surprising since the experimental set-up appears fairly simple and a higher sample size could have bolstered the marginally significant results.  Furthermore, it is not possible to interrogate bees to ascertain their motivations or rationale. Merely opting out of a difficult choice by flying into a different container is not really sufficient to invoke “meta-cognition”, a complex process that should only be used when one can investigate the cognitive process itself and understand how decisions are made. The discussion section of the paper even goes into speculations about neuronal pathways that bees may use, but at no point were neuronal pathways even assessed in the study. 

In summary, this is an interesting study that informs us about the complex learning capacity of bees and reminds us that non-mammals may have learning, memory and decision making skills that need to be investigated. Its major limitations make it difficult to draw definitive conclusions about “meta-cognition” in bees, but hopefully, this study will inspire future research that investigates non-mammalian decision-making in more depth.
@Gosh

Do brain differences really explain gender behaviour?

Gender Differences in the Brain Explain Behaviour, Truth or Delusion?

An over-hyped study claims brain differences underlie gender-specific behaviors.

You have most likely already heard of this study if you keep up to date with the science news. Published in PNAS, the authors report “hardwired” differences between the connections in male and female brains and claim these correlate with certain behaviours. Society is gender-obsessed and the science of gender differences is riddled with controversy. Is this just another example of the mass media and scientists over-interpreting these differences to fit in with the popular notion of gender stereotypes?

Nature versus nurture

Is gender predominantly defined by nature or nurture? There are subtle gender differences in the brain, and hormones that regulate reproduction are also important for gender-specific brain development and function. Although biology is an important influence, when it comes down to gender roles it may be upbringing that plays the most powerful role. It is, nonetheless, still unclear what the consequences of gender differences in the brain are.


The study in question
The study, published in PNAS last week, comprised 949 youths ranging from 8 to 22 years old. The authors used a technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to map the structural connections within and between the left and right hemispheres. Male brains reportedly showed more connections within hemispheres and female brains displayed more between the two hemispheres. The authors went on to conclude “male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and co-ordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes”. Professor Verma, who led the study, later added in an interview that such intuitive behaviours in females are linked with good mothering skills. Such conclusions are, nonetheless, just assumptions as the authors did not measure behaviours in the present study.


What other experts in the field think..
Since the publication of the study, experts in the field have shared their thoughts on the study’s claims.

1. Correlating wiring with behaviour
The authors correlate these apparent differences in connectivity with cognition, but no effort was made to measure cognition. Professor Dorothy Bishop, based at University of Oxford, stated, “it is going well beyond the data to draw conclusions about the functional significance of these effects.”
Dr Adam Hampshire, a Senior Lecturer in Restorative Neurosciences at Imperial College London, said that such a conclusion “would require that correlations were examined between cognitive measures (e.g. working memory capacity) and connection strengths within [each] group”.

2. Brain size as a confounding factor
The technique used in the present study, DTI, is sensitive to the physical distance between connections and yet brain size was not considered here. Dr Adam Hampshire rightly points out “males tend to have slightly larger brains, which would certainly drive illusory differences in connectivity”.

3) Experience-dependent brain plasticity
The authors claim “hardwired” differences in connections exist between the genders, but this is completely misleading. Professor Heidi Johansen-Berg from the University of Oxford stated, “we know that there is no such thing as ‘hard wiring’ when it comes to brain connections. Connections can change throughout life, in response to experience and learning”. Indeed, brain connections are constantly forming, strengthening, weakening and degrading.
So perhaps these subtle gender differences in brain structure are due to differences in upbringing; an individual’s gender has a large impact on their experiences such as education, hobbies, and sport activities.
Evidently, it is easy to draw the wrong conclusions. The majority of the news articles covering the study content further exaggerated the far-fetched conclusions to help explain the popular notion that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Whether that notion holds any truth or is entirely delusional is something we are yet to find out.#Gosh

My First Post Regarding My Biology Researches

Dear All its my first post regarding my Research activities ,from now onwards i will make sure to post my daily activities in my collage class and others.