Gizmorama - December 31, 2014

Good Morning,

Are we becoming more touch sensitive? According to new research has shown that the use of smartphones is making our thumbs extra sensitive. Touchy subject!

Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Smartphone use makes the brain more sensitive to touch --*
ZURICH, Switzerland (UPI) - New research suggests the incessant touching of our smartphones is making our thumbs extra sensitive.

The human sciences are only just starting to catch up to technology, only scratching the surface on the ways smartphone use and Internet addiction affect our relationships -- how we interact, behave, raise our children. Those findings are mostly in their infancy.

A new neuroscience study, on the other hand, seems to offer a more definitive conclusion -- our smartphone use is changing our brain -- specifically the connection between our thumb tips and brain.

Researchers the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, monitored the brains of study participants mechanically touching their thumb, index and middle fingertips. Those who regularly used smartphones (compared to those who still use older mobile phones) showed greater brain activity in areas connected to touch when their fingers were stimulated.

Because smartphones have battery usage logs that suggest how much and when a phone has been used, researchers were able to tell which participants were most active on their smartphones over time. The more active smartphone-users showed a heightened neurological response to the three-finger touching.

"I was really surprised by the scale of the changes introduced by the use of smartphones," lead researcher Arko Ghosh said in a press release. "I was also struck by how much of the inter-individual variations in the fingertip-associated brain signals could be simply explained by evaluating the smartphone logs."

The study was published this week in the journal Current Biology.

"What this means for us neuroscientists," Ghosh said of the way technology affects research, "is that the digital history we carry in our pockets has an enormous amount of information on how we use our fingertips -- and more."


*--- Scientists create human primordial cells in the lab ---*
CAMBRIDGE, England (UPI) - The first time in history, researchers have successfully used human embryonic stem cells to create primordial germ cells, cells that divide and mature into egg and sperm. Previously, the feat had been accomplished using rodent stem cells -- not those from a human embryo.

"Researchers have been attempting to create human primordial germ cells (PGCs) in the petri dish for years," leader author Jacob Hanna, a researcher in the Institute's Molecular Genetics Department, said in a released statement.

Stem cells are undifferentiated biological cells capable of dividing and transforming into specialized cells. They are the most basic of biological building blocks.

"The creation of primordial germ cells is one of the earliest events during early mammalian development," study co-author Naoko Irie, researcher at the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge, said in a press release.

"It's a stage we've managed to recreate using stem cells from mice and rats, but until now few researches have done this systematically using human stem cells," Irie added.

Researchers say the newly realized feat has revealed differences between embryo development in humans and rodents -- discrepancies that could undermine studies that extrapolate mice and rat-based evidence to human-related conclusions.

"Having the ability to create human PGCs in the petri dish will enable us to investigate the process of differentiation on the molecular level," Hanna said.

The research was published this week in the journal Cell.

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