Tracy Bale, associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, studies how maternal stress during pregnancy might lead to neuropsychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia or autism.
After a Saturday morning session at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Chicago, she talked about what she calls her “big soapbox issue”: the fallacious idea of a true animal model for a human psychiatric disease — and the pitfalls of over-interpreting rodent behavior.
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Computer software that maps the three dimensions of the brain has found that people with schizophrenia have deep grooves and small volumes in brain areas associated with planning and executive control.
The volume measurements of some areas seem to depend on the depth of nearby grooves. This unexpected finding could help explain the mixed results of previous studies measuring structural brain differences in people with schizophrenia and other psychiatric diseases, according to unpublished data presented today at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago.
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Some of the most profound mysteries of human nature relate to how we communicate and interact with each other. Matthew Belmonte, assistant professor of human development at Cornell University, talks about how studying people with autism — from their problems in joint attention to their remarkable attention to detail — can help understand these aspects in healthy people.
Belmonte is part of a collaboration that’s using a video game, called Astropolis, to test the perceptual, attentional, social and cognitive abilities of people with autism all at once, rather than the piecemeal studies typically done. He discussed this project at a Sunday afternoon session at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago.
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One afternoon last November, Joe Lucia and the 11 other students in the Islamic Art and Architecture course met in a drab corner of the ground floor of the Walsh Library, the inconspicuous home of the University Archives at Seton Hall University.
A few months earlier, rare books historian Todor Petev had discovered two boxes there, each holding about 20 loose pages from old Islamic manuscripts. Petev selected half that he found particularly interesting — for their age, place of origin, or religious significance — and it was these that his students had come to see. For the ever-curious Lucia, now a junior, the ancient leaves would lead to some remarkable discoveries, and a taste for life as an art historian.
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Sometimes, the best way to stop fires is to start them. Since the 1970s, fire managers have used so-called prescribed fires to burn up dry, flammable fuel before it accumulates into something that could start a much more dangerous conflagration.
Determining when and how to set a prescribed fire is a complicated science. “A lot of the grassland areas have lots of acreage that’s got to be burned by a certain deadline. You can’t just do it any old day,” says smoke jumper Brandyn Harvey, who worked for several years on a “hotshot” crew that set prescribed fires throughout the western United States .
A quick way to spread intentional fires is with a power torch that’s mounted on an all-terrain vehicle (ATV). “When you have to cover a lot of ground in a short period of time, the power torch is definitely the way to go,” Harvey says. “Otherwise you have to walk around with a little hand torch.”
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