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Sorry, blogloves, posting will be scant for awhile. I have Aruban (Arubian?) things to worry about!
I had a fantastic time at the World Science Festival last weekend. I assessed clues from a murder scene, heard a lecture by the maker of the Inner Life of a Cell animation series, watched a dog-training demonstration for kids (“Who’s heard of Pavlov?”), and learned about ‘Generation IV’ nuclear reactors from a dude who designs them.
One thing I didn’t see was a session about Snowball, the famous dancing Cockatoo. After watching this video clip, I really, really wish I had:
But on a less well-known test of general intelligence, people with autism perform surprisingly well — with accuracy equal to and speeds up to 40 percent faster than those of healthy controls, says a study published this week.
Fascinating and somewhat hilarious post from Nieman Journalism Lab showing the top 50 words that Nytimes.com readers clicked on for a definition. Yes, swine really did make the list, as did other scientific/medical words, including pandemic, bonobo, adenoidal, phlogiston, and paroxysm):
If The New York Times ever strikes you as an abstruse glut of antediluvian perorations, if the newspaper’s profligacy of neologisms and shibboleths ever set off apoplectic paroxysms in you, if it all seems a bit recondite, here’s a reason to be sanguine: The Times has great data on the words that send readers in search of a dictionary.
As you may know, highlighting a word or passage on the Times website calls up a question mark that users can click for a definition and other reference material. (Though the feature was recently improved, it remains a mild annoyance for myself and many others who nervously click and highlight text on webpages.) Anyway, it turns out the Times tracks usage of that feature, and yesterday, deputy news editor Philip Corbett, who oversees the Times style manual, offered reporters a fascinating glimpse into the 50 most frequently looked-up words on nytimes.com in 2009. We obtained the memo and accompanying chart, which offer a nice lesson in how news sites can improve their journalism by studying user behavior.
(Hat tip: Dale)
The trouble is, for now these hypotheses leave us with more questions than answers. At what stage of pregnancy does a flu infection confer the most risk? Do these prenatal conditions lead to a range of developmental disorders, or specifically autism? How much does genetic predisposition come into play?
On Tuesday, researchers from four U.S. institutions launched a huge study that sets out to unpack some of this complexity. The Early Autism Risk Longitudinal Investigation (EARLI) will follow 1,200 pregnant women who already have a child with autism.
The researchers are collecting enormous amounts of data. They will gather blood and urine samples during pregnancy, and once the baby’s born, they’ll get tissue from the umbilical cord, placenta, and baby stool. They’ll collect more biological samples from the child, and test for language and developmental abilities, every few months until age 3.
A few other longitudinal studies are also studying infant siblings of children with autism, to discover early behaviors that might be used to diagnose the disorder. But these data won’t reveal much about prenatal risk factors.
Scandinavian medical registries hold loads of information about pregnancy complications and psychiatric diagnoses, and even samples of amniotic fluid. But the data are spotty and old, and weren’t necessarily collected to study autism.
EARLI is measuring changes starting from the first days of pregnancy and looking specifically for measures that may be relevant to understanding autism. I’m eager to see what new associations the data pinpoint, and of course whether they back those previously proposed hypotheses. Preliminary analyses are slated for 2012.
New Scientist pointed me to a contest, run by neuroscientists, of the best new visual illusions. Definitely worth checking out if you have some procrastinating to do today. This one’s my favorite. It was created by Richard Russell, a psychology postdoc at Harvard:
In the Illusion of Sex, two faces are perceived as male and female. However, both faces are actually versions of the same androgynous face. One face was created by increasing the contrast of the androgynous face, while the other face was created by decreasing the contrast. The face with more contrast is perceived as female, while the face with less contrast is perceived as male. The Illusion of Sex demonstrates that contrast is an important cue for perceiving the sex of a face, with greater contrast appearing feminine, and lesser contrast appearing masculine.
The author of the review, Jeffrey Munson, uses the vivid metaphor of an “archipelago of autism” to describe the books’ contrasting approaches.
Munson describes the first, a textbook called Autism: Current Theories and Evidence, as an atlas of the complex geographical features of these islands of autism. In 20 chapters, it presents testable scientific hypotheses of the biological roots of the disorder, such as the idea that the brain chemical serotonin may play a role, or the possibility that excess testosterone in utero could explain why more boys have autism than girls.
He calls the second book a travel guide, which provides a description of life on the archipelago for foreign visitors. In The Ethics of Autism: Among Them, but Not of Them, philosopher Deborah Barnbaum delves into more psychological and cognitive aspects of the autism spectrum, such as the theory that the condition stems from not recognizing what others desire or believe. From this perspective, autism doesn’t boil down to a disease of missing nucleotides and miswired neurons, but rather an alternate way of thinking about and interacting with the world.
It’s incredibly important for scientists (and those of us who write about their work) to consider the full diversity of the condition. For kids who constantly flap their hands, or never acquire language, autism is a disability. They could benefit from drugs that target brain circuits gone awry. But for those on the other side of the spectrum, their autistic identity doesn’t necessarily need to be ‘fixed’, and it could teach us a lot about the mind.
Dan MacArthur is a fantastic genetics reporter. The thing is, he’s not a reporter, he’s a blogger. And that distinction recently got him into a bit of trouble.
In early May, MacArthur live-blogged and Twittered (Tweeted?) findings presented at a scientific conference at Cold Spring Harbor Labs. He was allowed to do so because, unlike the bona fide journalists in the room, Dan had not agreed to get permission from a speaker before writing about their presentations. This (quite understandably) made said journalists a bit crabby: GenomeWeb officially complained, and the Lab responded by changing its media policy to include bloggers:
In July 2006, after suffering from epilepsy for more than 30 years, 41-year-old Sonya Hearn arrived at an unusually comfortable corner room on the eighth floor of Columbia University Medical Center, in New York City. During her 20‑day stay there, she had several epileptic seizures while doctors recorded the electrical activity of her brain through electrodes leading out of an 8‑centimeter hole in her head.
Such observation is standard for epilepsy patients, because it allows doctors to pinpoint the part of a patient’s brain where the seizures originate. But the data that neurologists gleaned from Hearn’s brain was anything but standard. While at Columbia, Hearn was the first to have a new kind of brain-wave recording device implanted, a device that neurologists hope will lead to a way to predict seizures—and someday, a way to prevent them.
Anticonvulsant drugs fail to work for about 25 percent of people with epilepsy, roughly 10 million people worldwide. For this group, a dozen or so research labs are exhaustively mining brain-wave data for patterns that reliably predict an oncoming seizure.
Since the 1970s, neuroscientists have tried—unsuccessfully—to find predictive patterns in the data, which come from a set of standard 4-millimeter-wide electrodes that sit on the surface of the brain. But for Hearn and six others treated at Columbia so far, the measurements also came from an additional array of 96 closely packed 3-micrometer microelectrodes that actually penetrated the cortex.
Researchers can collect more useful information from the smaller electrodes, according to Columbia neurophysiologist Catherine Schevon. “We’re finding that there’s a lot of activity going on at this very tiny resolution area that we had no idea about before,” she says.
…Read the rest of my latest article from IEEE Spectrum
