Category: Science

A sense of purpose in life—whether it’s a high-minded quest to make a difference or a simple hobby with personal meaning—can offer potent protection against loneliness, according to new research.

“Loneliness is known to be one of the biggest psychological predictors for health problems, cognitive decline, and early mortality,” says Patrick Hill, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. “Studies show that it can be as harmful for health as smoking or having a poor diet.”

The new study, based on surveys of more than 2,300 adults in Switzerland, found that feelings of loneliness were less common in people who reported a purposeful life, regardless of their age.

The researchers asked respondents to score their feelings on a lack of companionship, isolation from other people, and a sense of being “left out or passed over” during a four-week period. Participants also filled out the six-item Life Engagement Test, which asked them to rate statements such as “there is not enough purpose in my life” and “I value my activities a lot.”

“A sense of purpose is this general perception that you have something leading and directing you from one day to the next,” Hill says. “It can be something like gardening, supporting your family, or achieving success at work.”

Many of the activities that can provide a sense of purpose—joining a club, volunteering at a school, playing in a sports league—involve interaction with others, which is one reason why a purpose-filled life tends to be less lonely. In the study, people who says they received or provided social support were especially likely to report feelings of purpose.

But Hill notes that there’s more to fighting loneliness than simply being around others. “We’ve all had time in our lives when we’ve felt lonely even though we weren’t actually alone.” There’s something about having a sense of purpose that seems to fight loneliness regardless of how many other people are involved, he says.

The study found a slight uptick in reports of loneliness for people in their 70s and beyond, an age when a sense of purpose can be especially important.

“We’re trying to dispel the myth from previous generations that this is simply a time for retiring and resting,” Hill says. “There are no downsides to finding something meaningful later in life.”

Still, it’s important to keep in mind that a quest for purpose can be somewhat self-defeating if taken too seriously.

“Feeling like you need to save the world can lead to existential dread and distress,” Hill says.

When it comes to purpose and meaning, even small things can matter. “It’s OK if someone else thinks that your purpose is trivial, as long as it’s meaningful to you,” Hill says.

The research appears in Psychology and Aging.

Additional coauthors are from the University of Zurich in Switzerland and Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

When a person loses a parent or a caregiver at a young age, their immune system suffers later in life, according to new research.

Researchers led by Grace Noppert of the University of Michigan found that if the parents or caregivers of a child under age 16 died, or they were separated for a period longer than six months, the child’s immune function was negatively affected in late life.

Their findings appear in PLOS One.

Cytomegalovirus as immune health indicator

To determine the impact to immune health, the researchers examined a virus called cytomegalovirus. Part of the herpesvirus family, CMV is a virus that afflicts about 80% of those who live in Europe and North America and 100% of those who live in Asia or Africa, according to the National Institutes of Health. It’s also a virus that tells a story about how a person’s immune system is functioning.

“What’s interesting about this virus is how your body deals with it. Your body doesn’t clear it, but it gets reactivated over the life course when you experience stress, or other circumstances that strain the body, like malnutrition. Trauma, you could imagine, likely reactivates it,” says Noppert, a social epidemiologist at the Survey Research Center in the university’s Institute for Social Research. “And so, every time it reactivates, it forces your immune system to expend all of these resources to try to get it to a latent state.

“It’s costly to the immune system in that way. When you see somebody with high levels of antibodies to CMV, that tells us that your immune system is not dealing with that virus well anymore.”

For the study, the researchers used data from nearly 6,000 people, drawn from the Health and Retirement Study. The HRS is an ongoing, nationally representative longitudinal survey of adult Americans which began in 1992 and includes more than 20,000 people over age 50. Cohorts are added to the survey every two years, and follow-up survey waves also occur every two years.

In 2016, the HRS rolled out a new biological substudy, the Venous Blood Study. From the Venous Blood Study, the research team was able to measure four indicators of immune function in late life, past age 65. These include C-reactive Protein, Interleukin-6, soluble Tumor Necrosis Factor, and CMV Immunoglobulin G.

They found consistent associations between participants who experienced parental or caregiver loss and separation and poor immune function across all race and ethnicity subgroups. But racialized minority groups fared more poorly than whites. Specifically, the researchers found that non-Hispanic Black people who experienced caregiver or parental loss before age 16 had a 26% increase in CMV IgG antibodies in late life. Non-Hispanic white people experienced a 3% increase in such antibodies.

“Who experiences parental loss and separation, and who has poor immune function is not distributed equitably at all,” Noppert says. “One of our main findings was that racialized minority populations, particularly non-Hispanic Black populations and Hispanics had a much higher prevalence of experiencing parental death or parental loss and had worse immune function.

“Kids in these populations are more likely to experience parental loss in the first place and then they have to have all the long-term consequences associated with it. This is just one of the ways that we continue to perpetuate health inequities.”

These outcomes were controlled for age, gender, and parental education. The association also remained when the researchers controlled for other indicators of health.

“Losing a parent or being separated from a parent could be associated with poorer educational outcomes, poor wealth when you’re an adult, worse health behaviors such as smoking, and other chronic conditions,” Noppert says. “So we put all of those into a model just to see if we could wash away the effects we were seeing. But we still really saw a durable association between the loss or separation of a parent before the age of 16 and this indicator of cytomegalovirus.”

Loss and COVID

Noppert says she has been considering this research in light of the ongoing COVID pandemic. About 148,000 children in the United States have been orphaned or have experienced caregiver loss because of the COVID pandemic. Internationally, about 10.5 million children have experienced COVID-associated orphanhood or caregiver death, according to recent research.

“This current estimate is through fall of 2021, so this is going to be an underestimate,” Noppert says. “And this isn’t even considering all the kids who have lost grandparents, aunts, uncles, and neighbors and people who are actually providing care for them, and whose loss would be traumatic.”

Noppert says the ripple effects of COVID may disrupt population health for decades.

“This work tells us something about what we have in store from COVID. We don’t know what’s coming in terms of population health, and this work starts to paint that picture a bit,” she says. “These losses are not equitable. COVID losses are not equitable either. And I think we need to pay attention to how we’re caring for children and how we’re thinking about the other consequences of COVID other than the number of cases and the number of COVID deaths.”

Study coauthors researchers from the University of California, Columbia University, University of Oxford, and the UM School of Public Health.

Source: University of Michigan

Scientists studying endangered southern resident killer whales have observed a strong increase in the prevalence of skin disease in this population.

In a new study, the researchers document a steady increase in the occurrence of highly correlated gray patches and gray targets on the whales’ skin from 2004 to 2016. Despite not knowing the underlying cause, the study’s authors are concerned.

After ruling out potential environmental factors, such as changes in water temperature or salinity, the authors hypothesize that the most plausible explanation is an infectious agent, and that increased occurrence of lesions may reflect a decrease in the ability of the whales’ immune systems ability to combat disease.

This could pose yet another significant threat to the health of a southern resident killer whale population already facing a litany of challenges.

The research is led by wildlife veterinarian Joseph K. Gaydos, science director for the SeaDoc Society, a program of the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis.

Gaydos and a team of collaborators analyzed a vast collection of digital photographs spanning over a decade. The photographs, obtained by the Center for Whale Research for identification purposes, included nearly 20,000 individual whale sightings in the Salish Sea, providing invaluable data for remotely assessing health in these endangered animals.

Since 1976, the Center for Whale Research has been conducting photographic identification surveys of southern resident killer whales in the Salish Sea, capturing clear images of each individual. During the evaluation of these images, biologists noticed transient and occasionally persistent abnormal skin changes in the whales. However, these skin changes had never been systematically characterized or tracked over time for these purposes.

The photos revealed six different skin disease syndromes. While none were associated with mortality, the steady increase in the two most common lesions was unexpected.

Understanding the occurrence and significance of skin changes in southern resident killer whales is crucial for assessing their overall health and potential impact on population recovery.

This small, endangered population of fish-eating salmon specialists roams coastal and inland waters from southeastern Alaska to California and are structured socially into three pods: J, K, and L.

The population is endangered, with fewer than 75 individuals remaining. Previous studies have focused on causes of mortality and body condition scoring, but little is known about the role of health in the lack of population recovery.

“Before we looked at the data, we had no idea that the prevalence of these skin lesions were increasing so dramatically,” says Gaydos. “It’s worrisome. Now we need to try and isolate the potential infectious agent.”

While photographic identification provides a noninvasive approach for studying skin disorders and their epidemiology, it does not enable the identification of specific causes. Nonetheless, it offers valuable insights into the overall health of the animals, particularly when capture-release health assessments are not feasible.

This research represents a significant step forward in understanding the epidemiology of skin changes in southern resident killer whales. The findings emphasize the need for continued monitoring and research to unravel the causes and health implications of these skin changes, with the ultimate goal of contributing to the conservation and recovery of this endangered population.

In addition to the SeaDoc Society, the collaborative effort involved researchers from numerous institutions, including the Center for Whale Research, British Columbia’s Animal Health Center, NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, SeaWorld Parks and Entertainment, the Vancouver Aquarium, Wild Orca, and others.

The study appears in PLOS ONE.

Source: UC Davis

An analysis on the positive effects of exercise on blood sugar levels in people with Type 2 diabetes shows that while all exercise helps, certain activities—and their timing—are extremely good for people’s health.

The study, published in The American Journal of Medicine, provides a comprehensive but straightforward summary of the benefits of exercise on controlling blood glucose levels in people with Type 2 diabetes.

“The challenge with this is that most, if not all, people know exercise is good for them but they don’t know the best approach,” says Steven Malin, an associate professor in the kinesiology and health department at Rutgers University and an author of the study.

“We targeted this issue by focusing on a few key parameters: the utility of aerobics versus weightlifting, the time of day that is optimal for exercise, whether to exercise before or after meals and whether we have to lose weight to get benefits or not.”

As part of the analysis, researchers sifted through dozens of studies and extracted common conclusions. Some of the key findings include:

• Habitual aerobic exercise: Physical activity, such as cycling, swimming, and walking, that increases the heart rate and the body’s use of oxygen helps manage blood glucose.
• Resistance exercise: Working muscles using an opposing force such as dumbbells, resistance bands, or a person’s own body weight benefits insulin sensitivity in those with Type 2 diabetes.
• Movement throughout the day by breaking up sitting time benefits blood glucose control and insulin levels.
• Performing exercise later in the day can result in better control of blood sugar levels as well as improve insulin sensitivity.

“In short, any movement is good and more is generally better,” Malin says. “The combination of aerobic exercise and weightlifting is likely better than either alone. Exercise in the afternoon might work better than exercise in the morning for glucose control, and exercise after a meal may help slightly more than before a meal. And, you don’t have to lose weight to see the benefits of exercise. That is because exercise can lower body fat and increase muscle mass.”

More than 37 million Americans have diabetes, and between 90 and 95% have Type 2 diabetes, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. People with Type 2 diabetes are insulin resistant, meaning that their cells don’t respond normally to insulin, a hormone that controls the level of sugar, or glucose, in the blood. High blood sugar is damaging to the body and can cause serious health issues.

While insulin resistance is harmful, scientists believe increased insulin sensitivity is beneficial. High insulin sensitivity allows the cells of the body to use blood glucose more effectively, reducing blood sugar.

Malin researches insulin sensitivity and teaches kinesiology, the study of human movement. He and several other faculty members at Rutgers support the concept of “exercise as medicine.” The idea, which is supported by the American College of Sports Medicine and is increasingly being borne out by research, is that exercise can be considered a first-line therapy.

“I’m one of those individuals who subscribes to that notion, and in that way, I think of exercise as a drug,” Malin says.

Malin and colleagues authored the study to offer the medical community up-to-date practical advice for their patients.

“Together, this idea of exercise timing and type is important because it helps medical professionals more accurately recommend exercise prescriptions to combat high blood glucose,” Malin says.

Source: Rutgers

While guilt is something that induces sleepless nights and stress-related physical symptoms in individuals, for society at large, the tendency toward guilt might have some benefits, according to new research.

“People who are prone to feeling guilt in their everyday lives are less likely to take bribes,” says Hongbo Yu, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara who specializes in how social emotions give rise to behaviors. He is a senior author of a paper that appears in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

In a study he conducted in collaboration with partners at East China Normal University and Zhejiang Normal University, Yu looked at guilt not as an episodic state—such as how we feel after specific instances in which we hurt someone—but rather as a personality trait, in which people tend to worry about the potential harm their actions cause.

“So I could be a person for whom it is really easy to feel guilt in my everyday life,” he explains, “while others might be less likely to feel guilt, or have a higher bar for feeling that emotion.”

We all can probably intuit that anticipatory guilt might make us think twice before undertaking an action with potentially bad consequences for others. But what has been less clear is how this crucial morality-related personality trait affects decision makers in situations involving temptation and incentives, balanced against potential harm to others.

“The question was whether the trait of guilt is associated with a lower probability of engaging in corrupt behavior,” Yu says.

In their study, the researchers concentrated on bribery, an act in which a person that typically has some level of power and influence is tempted to act illegally or unethically in exchange for favors or gifts from someone who wishes to use that influence unfairly for their gain.

In one of the researchers’ online experiments, participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire to record both demographic and personality information, and also their fairness concerns. They also participated in one of two scenarios. The first one put them into the role of an arbitrator with the power to assign students grades. They were each paired with a “co-player,” who, unbeknown to them, was fictitious. The co-players (in this case the fictitious students who had been graded) would attempt to bribe the participants to change their grades in exchange for a portion of the reward the co-players would receive for passing the test above a certain threshold.

The second scenario gave each participant 100 tokens, ostensibly to donate to a children’s charity, such as UNICEF. Then co-players attempted to bribe the participants to give them the money, in exchange for keeping a certain portion for themselves.

“So the structure of the two scenarios is similar, but the critical difference is that in the charitable donation scenario, the victim is obvious,” Yu says. “The first scenario is more of just a violation of moral principle.”

As would be expected, participants who scored high in guilt-proneness (from the questionnaire) were less likely to accept a bribe in either of the two scenarios. The effect was more pronounced in the charitable donation scenario.

“You know someone’s going to get hurt,” Yu says. “In the paper we argue that when the victim is more salient, the association between the guilt trait and corrupt behavior becomes stronger.” Concern for others’ suffering, they says, might play a significant role in how guilt-proneness influences bribe-taking behaviors.

This study joins a growing body of work that associates guilt-proneness with fewer unethical decisions, such as cheating for personal gain and counterproductive work behaviors. But it’s important to note that this study is correlational, Yu says. “We can’t make a causal claim that if we make people more guilt-prone, we will necessarily see less corruption. That needs more research.”

Indeed, the researchers say, guilt proneness is not the only trait that might predict corrupt behaviors (or lack of them), and it’s worth studying how this trait, along with other personality traits, might “serve as a reliable anti-corruption predictor in personnel selection,” such as when choosing people for leadership positions or for high-stakes jobs.

“We can’t claim causality, but we can leverage the association between the guilt trait and the lower likelihood of corruption to make us more confident about their integrity,” Yu says. “Maybe that’s something we can apply to the real world.”

Source: UC Santa Barbara

Dogs who slow down physically also slow down mentally, according to a new study.

Measuring gait speed in senior dogs could be a simple way to monitor their health and to document decline in their neurological function as they age.

“Walking speed in people is strongly associated with cognitive decline,” says Natasha Olby, chair in gerontology at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of the study. “We hypothesized that the same might be true in dogs.”

Olby and her colleagues measured gait speed off leash in 46 adult and 49 senior dogs. The adult dogs, who served as a control group, only had their gait speed measured. The senior dogs did some additional cognitive testing and their owners filled out a cognitive assessment questionnaire, called the CADES questionnaire. A higher CADES score indicates more severe cognitive decline.

The senior dogs were grouped together based on their CADES and cognitive testing scores. Individual gait speed was measured first by walking them over a five meter distance on a leash with a handler, then by offering a treat the same distance away from the dogs, and calling them to retrieve it off leash.

“The challenge with measuring gait speed is that dogs tend to match the speed of their handler when on leash, so we measured both on and off leash to see which was the most useful measure,” Olby says.

“Additionally, we are always concerned that body size and limb length will affect gait speed—but if you see a chihuahua and a great dane walking together off leash, the shorter one isn’t always behind the other,” Olby continues. “We found that on leash, size does correlate with gait speed, but off leash it doesn’t make a difference. Capturing gait speed off leash lets us see the effects of both physical ability and food motivation.”

The researchers found that in the senior dogs, size didn’t matter when it came to speed; in other words, dogs in the last 25% of their expected life span moved more slowly than adult dogs, regardless of relative size.

“Just as in humans, our walking speed is pretty stable through most of our lives, then it declines as we enter the last quarter or so of our lifespan,” Olby says.

Senior dogs who moved more slowly had more severe levels of cognitive decline based on the owner-completed questionnaires and also did worse on the cognitive testing.

The researchers also found that joint pain did not seem to correlate with walking speed, although they note that there were no dogs with severe osteoarthritis in the program. They hope to address this issue in future work.

“When you look at functional aging, the two most important predictors of morbidity are mobility and cognition,” Olby says. “Mobility relies heavily on sensory input, central processing, and motor output—in other words, the nervous system—as a result, mobility and cognition are super interconnected. When you have less mobility, the amount of input your nervous system gets is also reduced. It’s not surprising that walking speed and dementia are correlated.

“For me, the exciting part of the study is not only that we show gait speed correlates with dementia in dogs as in people, but also that the method of testing we used is easy to replicate, since it’s food motivated and over a short distance. It could become a simple screening test for any veterinarian to perform on aging patients.”

The work appears in Frontiers in Veterinary Science. Support came from the Kady M. Gjessing and Rahna M. Davidson Distinguished Chair in Gerontology.

Source: NC State

On this episode of the Big Brains podcast, a scholar explains the neuroscience of how listening to and playing music builds our mind.

Music plays an important role in all of our lives. But listening to music or playing an instrument is more than just a creative outlet or hobby—it’s also scientifically good for us. Research shows that music can stimulate new connections in our brains; keeping our cognitive abilities sharp and our memories alive.

In a new book, Every Brain Needs Music: The Neuroscience of Making and Listening to Music (Columbia University Press, 2023), Larry Sherman explores why we all need music for our mental well-being—and how it can even help us later in life.

Sherman is a professor of neuroscience at Oregon Health & Science University.

Listen to the episode below:

Read the transcript to the episode. Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.

Source: University of Chicago

SPACEPORT AMERICA, N.M. — Virgin Galactic is set to conduct its first commercial SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceflight June 29, one that will demonstrate the readiness of the vehicle for commercial operations as well as its role as a research platform.

The company made final preparations June 28 for the Galactic 01 mission, the second suborbital flight of the company’s SpaceShipTwo spaceplane in as many months. Virgin has billed the flight as the company’s long-delayed transition to commercial operations after an extended test campaign.

Virgin Galactic is planning for a takeoff of its VMS Eve mothership aircraft with the VSS Unity spaceplane attached at about 10:30 a.m. Eastern June 29. Unity will separate from Eve nearly an hour later, igniting its hybrid rocket motor for its suborbital flight, then landing back at the spaceport.

The Galactic 01 mission, Virgin Galactic’s first fully commercial flight, will carry three Italian payload specialists to perform a set of experiments. Walter Villadei and Angelo Landolfi of the Italian Air Force and Pantaleone Carlucci of Italy’s National Research Council plan to conduct 13 experiments ranging from biomedical data collection to studies of combustion in microgravity during the flight.

Accompanying them in the cabin will be Colin Bennett, a Virgin Galactic astronaut instructor who was on the July 2021 flight of Unity that carried company founder Richard Branson. He will assess the research flight experience during this flight.

While the bulk of Virgin Galactic’s business will be flying private astronauts — the company has about 800 people who have signed up for suborbital flights — it argues that research flights like Galactic 01 will be an important part of its business.

“It’s perfect that this first commercial mission is a research mission. That shows that this is another lab environment that is producing science and technologies that we can invest into the people back on Earth,” said Sirisha Bandla, vice president of government affairs and research operations at Virgin Galactic, in a June 28 interview.

The company has flown research payloads on prior test flights, like those provided through NASA’s Flight Opportunities program. That included work by Bandla herself on the July 2021 flight. This mission, though, is devoted to research with a test program developed by the Italian team. “It is a combination of everything that we have tested on our spaceflights to date,” she said.

Bennett will be on board to monitor how the Italian payload specialists carry out their work. “He will look at how everyone’s moving around the cabin, conducting their research, and do a holistic evaluation of the research mission so that we can continually improve on the experience,” she said.

Much of the training for research flights is the same as private astronaut flights. The key difference, Bandla said, is practicing the “choreography” of activities by the researchers during their brief flight, as well as working through the payload safety reviews for the experiments.

As the company moves into regular operations, it plans to conduct research flights on a set schedule, mixed in among the private astronaut missions. “The goal is to have it at the same time each year so that researchers can time their grants and their proposals through whatever agency funds their research and have predictable and reliable access for their science,” she said.

The emphasis, she added, is on having a steady cadence of flights, both for researchers looking to test experiments before flying them into orbit and for those for whom suborbital flights are sufficient. “The number one thing that we hear is we want repeatable and regular access to space,” she said of feedback from the research community.

Related

Researchers have developed a new method to deliver drugs into the inner ear.

The discovery was possible by harnessing the natural flow of fluids in the brain and employing a little understood backdoor into the cochlea. When combined to deliver a gene therapy that repairs inner ear hair cells, the researchers were able to restore hearing in deaf mice.

“These findings demonstrate that cerebrospinal fluid transport comprises an accessible route for gene delivery to the adult inner ear and may represent an important step towards using gene therapy to restore hearing in humans,” says Maiken Nedergaard, senior author of the new study, which appears in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Nedergaard is co-director of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at University of Rochester and the University of Copenhagen. The study was the product of a collaboration between researchers at the two universities and a group led by Barbara Canlon, PhD in the Laboratory of Experimental Audiology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

The number of people worldwide predicted to have mild to complete hearing loss is expected to grow to around 2.5 billion by mid-century. The primarily cause is the death or loss of function of hair cells found in the cochlea—which are responsible for relaying sounds to the brain—due to mutations of critical genes, aging, noise exposure, and other factors.

While hair cells do not naturally regenerated in humans and other mammals, gene therapies have shown promise and in separate studies have successfully repaired the function of hair cells in neonatal and very young mice. However, as both mice and humans age, the cochlea, already a delicate structure, becomes enclosed in temporal bone. At this point, any effort to reach the cochlea and deliver a gene therapy via surgery risks damaging this sensitive area and altering hearing.

In the new study, the researchers describe a little understood passage into the cochlea called the cochlear aqueduct. While the name conjures images of monumental stone architecture, the cochlear aqueduct is thin boney channel no larger than a single strand of hair. Suspected to play a role in balancing pressure in the ear, the new study shows that that the cochlear aqueduct also acts as a conduit between the cerebrospinal fluid found in the inner ear and the rest of the brain.

Scientists are developing clearer picture of the mechanics of glymphatic system, the brain’s unique process of removing waste first described by the Nedergaard lab in 2012. Because the glymphatic system pumps cerebrospinal fluid deep into brain tissue to wash away toxic proteins, researchers have been eyeing it as a potentially new way to deliver drugs into the brain, a major challenge in developing drugs for neurological disorders.

Researchers have also discovered that the complex movement of fluids driven by the glymphatic system extend to the eyes and the peripheral nervous system, including the ear. The new study represents an opportunity to put the drug delivery potential of the glymphatic system to the test, while at the same time targeting a previously unreachable part of the auditory system.

Employing a number of imaging and modeling technologies, the researchers were able to develop a detailed portrait of how fluid from other parts of the brain flows through cochlear aqueduct and into the inner ear. The team then injected an adeno-associated virus into the cisterna magna, a large reservoir of cerebrospinal fluid found at the base of the skull. The virus found its way into the inner ear via the cochlear aqueduct and delivered a gene therapy that expresses a protein called vesicular glutamate transporter-3, which enable the hair cells to transmit signal and rescued hearing in adult deaf mice.

“This new delivery route into the ear may not only serve the advancement of auditory research, but also prove useful when translated to humans with progressive genetic-mediated hearing loss,” says Nedergaard.

Additional coauthors are from the University of Copenhagen, the Karolinska Institute, and Harvard University.

Funding for the research came from the Lundbeck Foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Karolinska Institute, the Tysta Skolan Foundation, Hörselforskningsfonden, the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, the Danish Society for Neuroscience, the US Army Research Office, the Human Frontier Science Program, the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Medical Research Foundation, Simons Foundation, the Jeff and Kimberly Barber Fund, and Foundation Pour L’Audition.

Source: University of Rochester