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…was spent skipping around the Salk Institute, in beautiful La Jolla, California:
I was immediately struck by the contrasting elements of the campus: cold, looming cement architecture set against manicured green lemon trees and that beautiful blue Pacific Ocean. A brochure in the lobby explained it a bit. In 1965, founder Jonas Salk commissioned world-famous architect Louis Kahn to build a structure:
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And yet, mechanical engineers at Vanderbilt University are developing technology that allows a robot to monitor the emotional state of a human with which it interacts. They say the technology may help the robots teach social behaviors to children with autism, who often shy from people but are fascinated by objects.
In experiments published in August, Nilanjan Sarkar — whose nephew has autism — monitored the heart rate, skin conductance, temperature and muscle response of six teenagers with autism while they played computer skill games and a a basketball game in which the hoop was controlled by a robotic arm.
While the children played the computer games, the robot learned how their emotions changed with the difficulty and speed of the game. Then, when the children switched to the basketball game, the robot used what it had learned to adjust the game’s difficulty to the child’s individual preferences. With this tailored game, the kids were more engaged in the task.
The researchers say that their robot can judge a child’s emotional state as well as an experienced behavioral therapist can. Ideally, the robot could use emotional feedback to help a child with autism learn to cope with anxiety-causing social stimuli, such as loud sounds, physical closeness or eye contact.
To which we can only say: Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.
(Originally posted at SFARI)
In 1802, Scottish doctor Sir Charles Bell published a book called The Anatomy of the Brain, Explained in a Series of Engravings. Thanks to the Wellcome Images for bringing the gorgeous plates to us!
(Hat tip: Mo)
Last Wednesday, at an annual meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Wales, psychiatrist Michael Fitzgerald gave a lecture with a novel thesis: Charles Darwin, father of evolution, had Asperger’s syndrome—a form of high-functioning, verbal autism. My skeptical hat is definitely on here, but that’s intriguing, right?
According to the Daily Telegraph, Fitzgerald pointed out that Darwin, among other things:
-hoarded and catalogued insects and shells as a child;
-was obsessed with chemistry and gadgets in college;
-had an extraordinary attention to detail (eight years studying barnacles, remember);
-had extensive collections (I’ll say);
-had difficulties with social interaction;
-was emotionally immature and had a fear of intimacy;
-wrote letters compulsively, but they rarely included social elements;
-and took long, solitary walks, following same route every day.
I think it’s a bit preposterous to diagnose a historical figure with an extremely complex spectrum behavioral disorder 127 years after his death. Nevertheless, with dozens of daily news items about autism as a disability (including many written by me), it’s nice to see someone focusing on how people with autism might contribute to society.
Money quote from Fitzgerald:
“It is suggested that the same genes that produce autism and Asperger’s syndrome are also responsible for great creativity and originality…
Asperger’s syndrome gave Darwin the capacity to hyperfocus, the extra capacity for persistence, the enormous ability to see detail that other people missed, the endless energy for a lifetime dedication to a narrow task, and the independence of mind so critical to original research.”
From last Sunday’s Boston Globe, a must-read for hard-core puzzlers:
The vocabulary of crosswords is like the dialect of an alternate and highly specific universe, populated by Ednas and Enids and Ians; where the food is Oreos and oleo and the drinks ales and tea. It embraces particular bits of French (ami, ete), Latin (esse, ave), Spanish (este, oro), and even a little Hindi (Sri). It wields an epee with elan; is on familiar terms with tsars and emirs; enjoys music, especially the oboe and altos, and likes to travel: Iran, Oslo, Reno, Etna. And it’s interested in science, exploring ions and the atom, as well as the erne and the orca.
Sorry, peoples, I can’t help it, the following disgusting story is just too good not to post. You’ve been warned.
When scientists want to measure how much arsenic—a toxin floating around in air and water that can lead to various cancers and skin growths—someone has been exposed to, they usually look at hair or blood samples.
But now, geologists from the University of Leicester have devised a way to measure arsenic levels in, yes, toenail clippings.
The scientists, after collecting toenail clippings, irradiating them, and finally running them through plasma-mass spectrometry, found that people living near a former arsenic mine had elevated levels of arsenic in their toenails (shocking, I know). None of the participants have arsenic-related health problems.
“There is definitely more research needed to look at – amongst other things – a larger sample of volunteers, to see if the values change with time (it is quite possible the high values recorded are a one-off for that person, or due to slow toenail growth concentrating harmless quantities of arsenic), and to look at the possible pathways by which the arsenic is ingested. Coupling our analyses with regular blood measurements would be very revealing,” said head researcher Gawen Jenkin in a statement.
I have no idea what problems arise in hair or blood analyses, nor why toenail clippings would solve said problems, because the press release was rather sparse. The full study, however, will be available in the Journal of Environmental Monitoring‘s website sometime tonight.
Happily, the press release did answer some of my other probing questions:
However the researchers are definitely NOT requiring people to send in their toenail clippings. Neither can you assess arsenic contamination simply by looking at your toenails.
LOLZ! Thanks for clearing that up!
Before he became a scientist, Geschwind (right) made and starred in ski movies.
In the fall of 1979, after three months of living with a French family in the Loire Valley, 19-year-old Daniel Geschwind decided not to return to his undergraduate studies in chemistry at Dartmouth College. Instead, he stayed in France for a year, filming, producing, editing and starring in a series of professional ski movies. “I was curious about filmmaking at the time,” he recalls matter-of-factly. “And it was really a lot of fun.”
Over the following 25 years, Geschwind continued to follow his bliss, building an unconventional, but thoroughly successful, career. When, at age 23, he finally finished his chemistry degree, he took a detour into business consulting before beginning an M.D./Ph.D. program focused on neurobiology. In the late 1990s, after he had established himself as an expert on the genetics of neurological diseases, a personal connection abruptly pulled him into autism research.
In the 30 years since Louise Brown, the first ‘test-tube baby’, was born, fertility techniques have grown into a major industry, accounting for more than 1 percent of births in the U.S.
The general assumption has been that these babies are perfectly normal — but are they?
Scientists are apparently finding evidence that babies born using in vitro fertilization (IVF) are at a higher risk of genetic disorders, including the rare autism-related disorder Angelman syndrome.
This month scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked at 9,584 babies with common birth defects and 4,792 healthy babies, and found that that 2.4 percent of babies with birth defects had been conceived via IVF, compared with 1.1 percent of the controls.
If the increased risk is real, then what could be causing it? Some scientists pin it to the nutrient broth that the embryos are bathed in before they are transplanted into the womb. Chemicals in the broth may make epigenetic changes — which change gene expression without altering the underlying DNA code — to the fetus’s genome. Unfortunately, testing this theory is easier said than done. IVF clinics use different kinds of broths, and researchers don’t know what specific epigenetic changes to look for.
A few studies have linked epigenetic changes to autism. But that’s a far, far cry from saying IVF might cause autism. So far, no epidemiological study has tracked IVF babies for years after birth to look for increased risk of any kind of disorder.
(Originally posted at SFARI‘s blog)
In November, after receiving a legal threat from Israel-based Nemesysco Limited company, the journal International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law removed a 2007 paper damning the company’s technologies from its website.
The censored paper, titled ‘Charlatanry in forensic speech science: a problem to be taken seriously’, was written by two Swedish speech scientists who argued that, contrary to Namesysco’s claims, its voice-analysis technologies cannot help in “truth-detection investigation activities”. The news now isn’t so much the legitimacy of the claim, but the tension of academic freedom vs. slander in scientific journals.
Four out of seven key leaders on the Swedish Research Council (a government agency) have now “signed a statement expressing concern over the retraction of the article from the journal’s website,” reports Nature News:
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Happy Valentine’s Day!
I just heard a fun piece on NPR (well, ok, I heard it on my NPR podcast; the piece aired on Wednesday) about six-word memoirs. Three years ago, the online magazine Smith called for submissions of these ultra-short life stories. Thousands poured in, from obscure and famous writers alike. A year ago, the editors published the collection — which includes submissions from Dave Eggers (Fifteen years since last professional haircut), Mario Batali (Brought it to a boil, often), and even Stephen Colbert (Well, I thought it was funny) — Not Quite What I Was Planning. (See a great slide show of memoirs from the book here.)
Now the same team has published a second edition, on love: Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak. “Whether love, heartbreak, any area of your life, people love to tell their story in six words,” Smith‘s editor told NPR on Wednesday. Interestingly, the editors said that technology played a huge role in the love book, with many references to Craigslist, blogging, texting, etc. (As in, Found my ex-husband on Craigslist, twice; or Years of pillow talk; Blackberry break-up.)
The show read many funny and tragic memoirs from the book, as well as new submissions from NPR listeners. Some of my favorites:
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” -the sentence that spurred this movement, by Ernest Hemingway
“I still make coffee for two.” -Zak Nelson
“Don’t trust a man who waxes.”
“Hired me, fired me, married me.” -Julie Clan
“She got back on the Vespa.” -John
“Tried men, tried women, liked cats.” -Donna Bonjorner
“My friend left her; his loss.” -Patrick from Lansing, MI
“He sees the me I don’t.”
