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The pat-a-cake animation, with color scaled values showing the level of audiovisual synchrony at each point-light. Dark blue values correspond to little or no audiovisual synchrony; red corresponds to the highest level of synchrony.
Most young animals, from newly hatched chicks to 2-day-old humans, are exquisitely sensitive to the movements of other animals. But 2-year-old children with autism don’t pay special attention to this so-called ‘biological motion’, according to a study published today in Nature.
Unlike healthy children of the same age, toddlers with autism show no preference for scenes of a purely social nature — such as the waving arms and cooing noises of an adult playing ‘peek-a-boo’ — compared with the same scenes shown upside down.
Children with autism instead pay more attention to scenes in which large movements are perfectly synchronized with loud noises, such as the pronounced hand claps of a ‘pat-a-cake’ game, the study found.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) yesterday committed $60 million from the stimulus package to fund research goals for autism laid out in the first federal ’strategic plan’ for autism research. That plan, published 5 March, and crafted by a federal advisory panel over the past year, recommends 40 research studies with a projected cost of $800 million over the next decade.
In passing the Combating Autism Act in December 2006, Congress charged the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) — comprising 13 federal and 6 public members — with creating a strategic plan to help the Secretary of Health and Human Services set priorities for autism research. The IACC solicited input for this plan from both scientific experts and parent advocates, whose prerogatives were frequently in conflict.
Researchers from the University of Utah surveyed 41 adults with autism — 38 of whom are Mormons — who had participated in a large prevalence study of the disorder in the 1980s, when they were children. The researchers asked the participants, now about 32 years old, how they fare in their daily life: Do they live with their parents? Are they employed? Do they drive?
The answers are mixed: About half of the 41 participants have part- or full-time jobs, 11 have higher intelligence quotients (IQs) than they did as children, 6 live on their own, and 3 are married with children. At the same time, 25 suffer from anxiety or mood disorders, 8 have lower IQs, and 18 have never dated.
A 2007 Swedish study had found that childhood language ability and IQ are crucial factors in predicting a stable adult life. But the new study finds that those factors are not as important as coping skills — which is good news for families who turn to behavioral therapies.
In the Swedish study, as well as in long-term studies of autism in England and Canada, the participants were not as well integrated into work and social situations, and had a lower quality of life overall. The Utah participants may have fared better because the Mormon culture has strong family ties and does not stigmatize those with autism, the researchers say. Now that’s ‘Big Love’.
(Originally posted on SFARI’s blog)
If you have an extra five minutes, check out this sweet video from SEEDMAGAZINE.COM, in which biologist Carl Bergstrom explains how his eigerfactor website tracks how scientists track other scientists.
Last week, NPR’s Brian Unger recorded a hilarious mock-piece about the uselessness of Twitter — the ‘microblogging’ site on which people can continuously inform their friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and complete strangers of whatever they wish at any given moment, as long as they do it using fewer than 140 characters. (A representative selection from my current Twitter feed: “At the Austin airport”; “Girl scout cookies have arrived!”; “the science minister of canada is a creationist”.)
It’s easy to make fun of Twitter, and difficult to understand why it’s become such a phenomenon. But apparently somebody’s figured out how to do something useful with it! Hooray!
In early February, frustrated with how few journalists were covering the escalating violence in Madagascar, a 31-year-old medical research assistant from Indiana named Lova Rakotomalala began Twittering translated reports about the crisis. Here’s the full story from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (which got me thinking, once again, about how quickly new media is changing journalism):
Back in October, I wrote about why it’s good, these days, to be a freelancer: print media is dying and consequently trimming many of its staff writing jobs (especially those for science writers).
Echoing this is the latest ‘State of the News Media’ report, released yesterday by the Pew Research Center. It’s worth browsing the entire thing, but I’ll just call your attention to one of the ‘major trends’ identified by the report: “Power is shifting to the individual journalist and away, by degrees, from journalistic institutions“:
The trend is still forming and its potential is uncertain but the signs are clear. Through search, e-mail, blogs, social media and more, consumers are gravitating to the work of individual writers and voices, and away somewhat from institutional brand. Journalists who have left legacy news organizations are attracting funding to create their own websites. Experiments like GlobalPost are testing whether individual journalists can become independent contractors offering reporting to various sites, in much the way photographers have operated for years at magazines. It would be a mistake to overstate the movement at this point. But for a few journalists at least, there are signs of a new prospect: individual journalists, funded by a mix of sources, offering expert coverage to many places. The movement offers the possibility of more skilled reporting from the field. Yet it would also require consumers to be discriminating and raises questions about how news organizations would ensure quality and reliability.
Now there’s a new culprit to add to the list: toxoplasmosis.
At least, that’s the hypothesis of one English research team. Glenn McConkey and his colleagues at the University of Leeds say that the tiny Toxoplasma gondii — a microorganism commonly found on unwashed vegetables and undercooked meat — may be able to infect the brain and ultimately cause schizophrenia.
McConkey reported Wednesday that T. gondii can cause the mouse brain to produce excess dopamine, the ubiquitous brain chemical that’s usually brought up in talks of depression, drug addiction and the ‘pleasure sensors’ of the brain. Dopamine’s connection to schizophrenia has been hotly debated, but some common antipsychotics, such as chlorpromazine, seem to alleviate schizophrenia symptoms by effectively decreasing dopamine levels in the brain.
Several other infections during pregnancy, including rubella and influenza, have been linked to schizophrenia and autism.
But as with those studies, the evidence for the toxoplasmosis theory of schizophrenia is limited to a statistical correlation: children born to women exposed to T. gondii during pregnancy are more likely to develop schizophrenia in adulthood. McConkey’s team is looking for a biological mechanism to explain how the bugs may play a role not only in schizophrenia, but in other dopamine-related disorders, including Parkinson’s disease and Tourette’s syndrome.
In the meantime, in this season of peanut, pepper and spinach recalls, best to count this as yet another reason to wash and cook your food.
(Originally posted on SFARI’s blog)
The new approach may be particularly useful for researchers who propose that autism is a consequence of poor temporal coordination among brain regions.
“The which brain areas, the where, has been a powerful focus” of research on autism and other psychiatric diseases, says Scott Kelso, professor of complex systems and brain sciences at Florida Atlantic University. “But if you don’t have a theory of how things are coordinated in time, you’re going to be missing something very essential.”
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about a new method for measuring arsenic toxicity by analyzing not blood or hair, but toenails.
The leader of this research, Mark Button, a PhD student at the University of Leicester, wrote me an email this morning. He’s a bit irked:
