Health & Science

How urban life can really drive you crazy

The stress of city living can permanently affect your mental health. German researchers came to that conclusion after scanning the brains of volunteers subjected to an intentionally stressful situation: trying to solve math problems while being harangued that they weren’t working quickly enough. The researchers found that the bigger the urban area a volunteer lived in, the more activity the negative comments caused in his or her amygdala, the region that processes anxiety. Growing up in a densely populated area also appeared to have a permanent impact on brain function: The cingulate cortex, a region that helps the amygdala control emotion, was more easily agitated among subjects who had grown up in a city, whether or not they had since moved to the country. “We speculate that stress” from urban life “might cause these abnormalities,” study author Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, tells the London Guardian. Social stress has been long known to be a major factor in precipitating psychotic disorders. “If everyone were born in the country,” Meyer-Lindenberg says, “there would be 30 percent fewer people with schizophrenia.”

Is violent weather here to stay?

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Record-breaking tornadoes, floods, and droughts could become regular weather events as the earth’s surface continues to warm up. “Climate change is a risk factor for extreme weather just as eating salty foods is a risk factor for heart disease,” Jay Gulledge, a research director at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, tells the Associated Press. Warming temperatures add energy to the atmosphere, intensifying both evaporation and precipitation. That can subject areas like the Southwest to extreme droughts and wildfires while causing inundations in other regions, such as the Mississippi Valley. Penn State meteorologist Michael Mann says it won’t take much extra heat to make those once-in-a-lifetime conditions more common. “Even a couple degrees of warming can make a 100-year event a three-year event,” he says. Peter Höppe, a risk analyst at reinsurance giant Munich Re, which maintains a vast database of natural disasters, believes the trend is already underway. The uptick in extreme climate events since 1980, he says, “can only be fully explained by climate change.”

Growing blood vessels

Hospitals may soon be able to stock replacement blood vessels the way they do bandages today. Starting with a single donor’s skin cells, a team of California bioengineers has grown sheets of tissue, rolled them into straw-like shapes to form arteries and veins, and successfully implanted them in three kidney patients to improve their ability to undergo dialysis. Such bio-generated blood vessels could eventually replace the expensive artificial shunts used in heart bypass surgery and to repair the tissue of wounded soldiers. “This is tremendously exciting” because the need for blood vessels is “a huge public health problem,” Duke University’s Robert Harrington tells the Associated Press. The new vessels can be fashioned in different sizes and refrigerated until they’re needed. They also last much longer than grafts or plastic shunts because they have the ability to grow and repair themselves inside the body. “There are literally hundreds of thousands of patients that could use this technology,” says lead researcher Todd McAllister, including children with congenital heart defects who need repeated surgeries to replace the grafts they outgrow. He predicts that the new blood vessels could be mass produced within the next two years.

Syntax for the birds

Humans aren’t the only animals capable of speaking in sentences, Japanese researchers have discovered. Birds also use specific grammar rules to structure their tweets. Scientists played jumbled birdsong to Bengal finches and found that almost all of the birds refused to respond to certain remixes. “It’s as if you were presented with a sentence like ‘we will go to the zoo tomorrow,’” Gisela Kaplan, a professor of animal behavior at Australia’s University of New England, tells ABC Science. Some reordered versions of the sentence, such as “tomorrow we will go to the zoo,” still make sense, but “zoo go we will tomorrow the to” doesn’t. Finch songs, it seems, are no different, and like humans, the birds learn syntax by listening. Their ability to analyze information and reply in kind is “mind boggling,” Kaplan says, and far more advanced than anything a monkey could handle. Since birds process language in a region of the brain similar to the one humans use, scientists hope understanding their grammar could shed light on how our own language structures evolved.