While the government spends billions of dollars on educational and prevention programs to persuade teens not to do things like smoke, drink or do drugs, a Temple University psychologist suggests that competing systems within the brain make adolescents more susceptible to engaging in risky or dangerous behavior, and that educational interventions alone are unlikely to be effective.

Laurence Steinberg, Distinguished University Professor and the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology at Temple, outlines his argument in, "Risk Taking in Adolescence: New Perspectives from Brain and Behavioral Science," in the April issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science.

The results of a new study suggest that bacteria that cause diseases like bubonic plague and serious gastric illness can turn the genes that make them infectious on or off.

Knowing how disease-causing bacteria, like Yersinia pestis and E. coli, do this may one day help scientists create drugs that control the expression of these genes, thereby making the bacteria harmless, said Vladimir Svetlov, a study co-author and a research associate in microbiology at Ohio State University. The findings appear in the April 13 issue of the journal Molecular Cell.

Remnants from a cave embedded in a limestone quarry southwest of Chicago have yielded a fossil trove that may influence the known history of north central Illinois some 310 million years ago.

"What's really valuable about the cave is the level of preservation of the material," said Fabien Kenig, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at UIC. "We see charcoal that preserves biological features at the cellular level. Charcoal is an indication of fire burning ancient trees. The cave also beautifully preserved molecular indicators of these fires."

American college students today are civically and politically more engaged than they are commonly given credit for, and more likely to know the name of their elected representatives than the winners of "American Idol", according to the "National Survey of Civic and Political Engagement of Young People" conducted by Tufts University.

"Young people seem to know more about politics than they know about popular culture," said project director and Professor of Political Science Kent E. Portney. "This level of political knowledge stands in stark contrast to the image of young people as uninterested in and ignorant about politics and government."

Experience hearing a person's voice allows us to more easily hear what they are saying. Now research by UC Riverside psychology Professor Lawrence D. Rosenblum and graduate students Rachel M. Miller and Kauyumari Sanchez has shown that experience seeing a person's face also makes it easier to hear them.

Rosenblum’s paper, “Lip-Read Me Now, Hear Me Better Later: Crossmodal Transfer of Talker Familiarity Effects,” will appear in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science.

People who inherit two mutant copies of any one of about 12 genes that make the proteins of the Fanconi Anemia (FA) pathway develop FA, which is characterized by increased incidence of cancer and bone marrow failure, among other things.

However, individuals with just a single mutant copy of one of these genes are also at increased risk of developing cancer. This occurs when the remaining "good" copy of the gene becomes mutated in a specific cell type, allowing that cell type to form a tumor.