News Articles

Infants from the U.S. and China looked at the same dynamic scenes

Adults from the U.S. focus primarily on objects; those from China focus relatively more on events

Infants' attention in the two cultures showed strong overlap: also reliable differences

Researchers: Results underscore value of conducting cross-cultural research with infants
EVANSTON, Ill. --- Do the cultures in which we live shape how we view the objects and events in the world that surrounds us? Research with adults has suggested that it does. But how early might any such culturally inflected differences emerge in development?

Mothers of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often experience stress and suffer from sleep deprivation. Sacrifices almost always follow as they abandon professional careers and personal ambitions, believing that care for their children "comes first."
But is maternal abandonment of aspirations and interests really beneficial for the ASD child? A new Tel Aviv University study finds that a mother's positive attitude to involvement in everyday activities and a sense of competency in the performance of parental tasks accounts for a significant proportion of her children's successful participation in day-to-day activities.

Though wealthy elites and fad-chasing food activists have promoted the idea that salt is a killer, the science doesn't show that. Instead, links are correlational. Asia has always been held up as a standard for health but as their incidence of hypertension has risen, as many have blamed salt as they have a diet beyond what peasants could afford in the past.

On February 15th, 2013, as the approach of asteroid (367943) Duende was being closely monitored,  something far more alarming happened. Duende approached the Earth was expected to pass nearly 27,700 km above the Earth's surface, well inside the boundaries of the ring of geosynchronous satellites but nearly perpendicular to it, but then the Chelyabinsk superbolide entry occurred, followed by the explosion and the fall of the large meteorite in the Russian Lake Chebarkul. 
It caused damage to hundreds of buildings and injuries to nearly 1,500 people. 

Researchers have identified a gene which can be used to predict how susceptible a young person is to the mind-altering effects of smoking marijuana, an increasing concern as the cultural movement shifts toward legalization.  Around one percent of cannabis users develop psychosis. It is known that smoking cannabis daily doubles an individual's risk of developing a psychotic disorder, but it has been difficult to establish who is most vulnerable.  

In 2012, a group of UCLA researchers set out to mine thousands of electronic health records for a more accurate and less expensive way to identify people who have undiagnosed Type 2 diabetes. The researchers got much more than they bargained for.
Not only did they develop a screening algorithm with the potential to vastly increase the number of correct diagnoses of the disease by refining the pool of candidates who are put forward for screening; they also uncovered several previously unknown risk factors for diabetes, including a history of sexual and gender identity disorders, intestinal infections and a category of illnesses that includes such sexually transmitted diseases as chlamydia.
The findings appear February 16 in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics.

Diagnosis of mood and psychotic disorders depend solely on relatively subjective assessment of symptoms and psychometric evaluations, upon which a decision is made to prescribe one or more standardised treatment regimen. Treatment response in turn is evaluated on the same principles. All this in spite of decades' worth of research efforts aimed at understanding the neurobiological underpinnings of these disorders.

The oldest and longest record of nematodes revived after dried storage was for 39 years, which was reported in 1946. Another record reported on the revival and subsequent reproduction of nematodes from moss after having been frozen for 25 years. In regard to tardigrades, the previous longest records of revival after the long-term storage were 9 years for eggs in dried storage at room temperature and 8 years for animals in dried storage under a frozen condition. These animals have the ability to temporarily shut down their metabolic activities induced by certain physiological stimuli including desiccation and freezing, which is called "cryptobiosis."

Do you feel good about getting that National Institutes of Health (NIH)? You should. As government has spent billions on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) outreach promoting the idea that only government-funded science is real science, the rolls of those wanting to stay in academia have ballooned. Grants are more competitive than ever so if you got one, you beat out up to nine other people.
Does that mean that taxpayers are getting the best value for their money? Perhaps not. A new study finds that the NIH is no better at picking beneficial projects than if researchers were just picked in a lottery. 

Analysis of artifacts found on the shores of Rapa Nui, Chile (Easter Island) declares that the spear points were likely general purpose tools and not weapons of war, disputing one popular belief as to why people left or died off.

A new Northwestern Medicine study has found an adolescent male's attitude toward risky sex, pregnancy and birth control can predict whether or not he will stick around after the baby is born.
The longitudinal study -- one of the first reproductive health studies to focus on young men and fatherhood -- also found it was possible to predict whether some young men would become teen fathers. In addition, the research was able to predict fatherhood patterns over 14 years as young men transitioned from being teenagers into young adulthood.

The team of Bruno Giros, a researcher at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute and professor of psychiatry at McGill University, reports the first-ever connection between noradrenergic neurons and vulnerability to depression. Published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, this breakthrough paves the way for new depression treatments that target the adrenergic system.
Stressful life events--job loss, accident, death of a loved one--can trigger major depression in one person, but not in another. A deciding factor is resilience, a biological mechanism that determines an individual's capacity to rebound from stressful or traumatic events. Researchers are still learning how resilience works.