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Just tried this spatial memory game sponsored by SciAm and a company called “HAPPYneuron” that’s part of the “Brain Fitness” movement. (They call the game a “workout.”) My score on the hardest level was slightly below average, which pisses me off to no end. So I’m going to go practice…..who knows, maybe it will fend off Alzheimer’s.
In the summer of 2005, amidst the region’s worst drought in six decades, wildfires sparked across the forests of northern Portugal. By August 6, more than 2,000 firefighters were tackling two dozen fires across the country. Over the next three weeks, increasing temperatures—up to 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius)—and strong winds further fueled the blazes, the largest of which spanned 13 miles.
With its modest firefighting resources tapped out, the Portuguese government called on its European neighbors for help. France and Spain sent in firefighting planes, while Germany and Holland each sent several helicopters. At the peak of burning, close to 800 firetrucks and 31 airplanes and helicopters were in use.
By the end of August, the air humidity rose, temperatures fell and the major fires were put to rest. But the damage had been done. All told, fires had scorched more than 741,000 acres of forest land, destroying more than 100 homes and 500 farm buildings. A total of 13 Portuguese civilians and 10 firefighters died.
Photo Credit: Tony Zador, CSHL
In the past year, researchers have debuted a growing number of mouse models that they say exhibit the subtle behaviors of autism. In the midst of controversy over whether these mouse models represent autism, one team of scientists is looking for quirks in the animals’ neural circuits.
In October 2007, a high-profile report unveiled mice that carry a mutation in neuroligin-3, which has been associated with autism in people. Since then, about a dozen other models have been proposed, showcasing a grab bag of genetic mutations: some are pivotal players in the development of nerve cell axons, others in synapse formation. One mutation, PTEN, has a strong role in cancer.
As the list of candidate genes for autism grows, experts estimate that at least 30 mouse models of autism will surface within the next couple of years.
“With all of these models, the question now becomes: What do you do once you have the mouse?” asks neurophysiologist Tony Zador of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL).
Under cover: Too little sunlight — leading to vitamin D deficiency — may be to blame for higher rates of autism among Somali children.
Researchers in Minneapolis and Sweden are investigating reports of so-called autism clusters among children from immigrant Somali populations. Some scientists say the clusters may be the result of a vitamin D deficiency — a largely untested hypothesis.
A report from Swedish neurologists, published on 1 August, says the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders in Somali children aged 7 to 17 years in Stockholm is nearly four times higher than in non-Somali children.
In Minneapolis, Somalis account for 6 percent of the city’s public school population, but make up 17 percent of early childhood special education students who have been labeled autistic, according to data aggregated by the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Epidemiologists are generally skeptical of disease clusters, and this one is no exception.
In the fall of 2006, Liz and Peter Bell started to notice behavioral and neurological regression in their 13-year-old son, Tyler.
His symptoms quickly progressed from what his parents thought was typical teenage sluggishness to full-blown catatonia. One morning, his mother started the shower for him and then went to help the other children get ready. “When I came back ten minutes later he was still standing there, shivering, hadn’t even reached for the towel,” she recalls.
Tyler had been diagnosed with autism ten years earlier, but till then, he had still had strong motor abilities, even going on 20-mile bicycle rides with his family. Those skills disappeared over the course of a few months.
With all of the fuss over Sarah Palin’s convention speech, I’ve been thinking a lot about effective speech-writing. (Which one of the Republican Convention masterminds, by the way, thought it was a good idea for Joe Lieberman to repeat basically the same idea—”country matters more than party” or “what matters is certainly not whether we are Democrats or Republicans”—at least 10 times in 10 minutes?)
A new piece in Slate points out that throughout this long presidential campaign season, both parties have taken advantage of the same rhetorical trick: antimetabole, or repeating words in a reverse order. This “reversible raincoat,” as those in the ‘biz call it, was most famously executed in 1961, when JFK said in his inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”
Here, courtesy of Slate, are instances of antimetabole in this election season:
Young waits for the high-dose chemo that would cure his MS
Chris Young, a former computer help-desk technician living in Denver, woke up one morning in June 2004 barely able to move the right side of his body. He felt spasms in the muscles between his ribs and a painful squeezing in his torso. When he tried to walk, he had trouble lifting his right foot. “I was scared out of my mind,” he recalls.
A few days later, an MRI scan confirmed what Young already suspected from looking up his symptoms on the Internet: He had multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic disease in which the body attacks its own nerve fibers. The day of the diagnosis was his 29th birthday.
Who doesn’t love meaty science blogging? You know, stuff that’s a tad more, ahem, analytical than what you see from yours truly?
For anyone who values the science blogosphere’s review of peer-reviewed papers, check out the latest version of ResearchBlogging.org. The brain child of ScienceBlogger Dave Munger, ResearchBlogging smartly aggregates posts about peer-reviewed research into one location. The new version (powered by Seed Media Group Technology) offers tons of new features, including topic-specific RSS feeds.
