The study was published earlier this month in Nature Methods.
Many thanks to Andrea Facheris of Soundtrack4u for granting permission to use the music in the video. The song is called “Symphony 5″ (a reworking of Beethoven’s), by the Robot Symphony Orchestra.
When I want to learn about a certain drug treatment, I typically begin with a search for mentions of the compound in the scientific literature. If I find a lot of studies, or even a handful, that report that it works, I usually come away thinking that it’s at least a promising candidate.
The trouble is, researchers rarely publish accounts of a drug failing. And according to a study published last week in Pediatrics, this publication bias is making antidepressants look like a better option for treating autism than they really are.
Although antidepressants have not been specifically approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat autism spectrum disorders, many physicians prescribe them ‘off-label’ to alleviate the repetitive behaviors that are one of the disorder’s core features. An estimated 15 to 25 percent of children with autism take a popular type known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, such as Prozac or Celexa.
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Several hundred genes are likely involved in autism, according to the latest trio of studies looking at the genomes of children with the disorder. But let’s not forget that one of the most intriguing genetic links has been known for decades. Autism affects four times as many boys as girls. And at the level of DNA, there’s only one difference between the sexes: Girls have two X chromosomes, boys an X and Y.
So why don’t we hear more about that Y?
The male chromosome only carries about 60 genes, of which 2 have been linked to autism. Nevertheless, some new research on children born with extra sex chromosomes suggests that there may be more than meets the Y.
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I’d like to be a mother—someday. Now is not a good time. I’m 28 years old, unmarried, and trying to build a freelance writing business from a small New York apartment.
I grew up in the wake of the feminist movement, and boy am I glad about that. Gender inequalities still exist, of course (ahem). But since grade school, my parents, teachers and favorite after-school-TV-show characters have encouraged me to invest in my education and career, just like any ambitious man. And I have.
Alas, biology still holds a trump card: my closing fertility window. By the time I’m 38, my bank account may be pregnant, but my eggs will be fossils. In last week’s issue of New Scientist, I wrote about a far-out experimental solution: freezing pieces of my ovary. The premise of the story was that if this technology ever gets off the ground, it could fulfill the original promise of the birth control pill, allowing women to make career decisions without the pressure of a ticking clock.
And it’s such a satisfying premise, isn’t it, especially for science-loving feminists like me. But after five months of airing it, triumphantly, to everyone I know, and thinking about their responses, my enthusiasm has waned. The cultural limits on the age of motherhood, I’m afraid, are far stronger than the biological ones.
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This past weekend I spent too many hours on Netflix watching Lie to Me, the Fox television drama that ran from 2009 to 2011. It’s a crime procedural (my favorite genre) about Dr. Cal Lightman, a psychologist who can spot liars by analyzing their body language and super-fast facial ticks, called microexpressions.
On the show, Lightman’s obsession with faces stems from a decades-old film of his mother recorded by her therapist. She had been institutionalized for depression, but on the film, she tells the therapist how good she feels after treatment, and how she longs to see her children. The therapist is convinced, allows her to go home, and she promptly commits suicide. After years of analyzing the footage, Lightman discovers that his mother’s face had shown flashes of agony while she lied about her happiness. He goes on to create a system for coding subtle facial expressions and launches a consulting firm, The Lightman Group, that helps police (and all sorts of other clients) detect when individuals are lying, and why.
It’s one of those shows that sticks with you, or with me, anyway. For the past few days I’ve been surreptitiously scrutinizing the faces of everyone I see—people exchanging small talk at a birthday party, people telling outrageous true stories on stage, my longtime friends, even my fiancé. Could I discover their hidden feelings just by paying closer attention? It’s tricky, of course, when you don’t know if someone is lying. But what about when you do know, like in the sad case of Mike Daisey?
Yesterday I hatched a plan: Learn the basics of the real science behind Lie and Me, then watch a bunch of old Daisey clips on YouTube and root out the signs of his deception.
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It’s been almost a year since I wrote about my genetic testing results from 23andMe. That’s because, despite paying $5 a month for the site’s mandatory Personal Genome Service®, I rarely look at it.
It’s not that I’m scared of the data (been there), and not because I forgot — every six or eight weeks I get an email from the company saying things like, You have 8 new results from 23andMe! New discoveries have been made about your DNA! I hadn’t visited the site because, frankly, I was bored of it. How many times is one expected to look sort-of-interesting, sort-of-meaningless risk calculations and ponder healthier ways to live?
Then at a conference last week, while trying to make small talk with a scientist, I mentioned my 23andMe subscription. Turns out he has one, too. “Isn’t it funny when you get those messages from your distant relatives?” he said. I told him I didn’t know what he meant. “I get them all the time,” he said, shaking his head.
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More and more researchers, it seems to me, are trying to peek into the minds of children with autism by analyzing how they put together a sentence.
Language impairments are one of the most common features of autism. But linguists have long debated the precise nature of the disorder’s language deficit. Do grammatical errors mean there’s something wrong with the language centers of the brain? Or are they instead the indirect result of an individual’s social problems? Two new studies support the latter idea.
Helen Tager-Flusberg‘s work in the 1980s first suggested that social aspects of language are behind all grammar problems in people with autism. One of her experiments, for example, focused on ‘wh-questions’ — such as ‘What did he eat?’ and ‘Who does Mary like?’ — which are interesting because they can indicate a child’s desire to begin a conversation or attract the attention of others. Tager-Flusberg found that children with autism ask fewer wh-questions than do children with Down syndrome, but the questions coming from children with autism are more grammatically correct.
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This worm is born to travel. It begins life in human lymph, only to seep out of the lymphatic vessels into the grimy fluid that bathes our organs. From there, it drifts into the blood stream. During the day, it keeps to deep veins. Once darkness falls, it migrates up to the skinny veins just under the skin.
Then one lucky night, a mosquito will find the sleeping human and feast on its blood. The worm will end up in the insect’s gut and, eventually, in its muscles. It will reach adolescence there, and then travel to the mosquito’s head, stinger and, finally, to the next person the insect bites. From the blood stream, the worm will find its way back to the lymph to mate and, after such a long journey, retire. It will stay there for six to eight years, the rest of its life, and pump out millions of new little worms to embark on the same cross-species adventure.
Unfortunately, the health of these worms, called parasitic filarial nematodes, is in direct conflict with that of their human hosts. The worms slowly accumulate inside of people, eventually clogging lymph nodes and causing the extreme swelling, discoloration and deformity known as elephantiasis. More than 120 million people in 72 countries are infected with the disease, formally called lymphatic filariasis, leaving some 40 million incapacitated.
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You’ve no doubt heard about the myriad effects of rising global temperatures: droughts, drying rivers,lowland floods, plummeting populations of polar bears and Emperor penguins, coastal storms putting Arctic villages in mortal danger. Now there’s a new victim: the future of Canadian ice hockey.
To those of us who don’t follow sports, it might seem like a silly thing to fret over. But ice hockey is actually quite important to the culture and economy of Canada. The first organized game of indoor hockey, in 1875, took place in Montreal. When the country sent its first astronaut into space, he took a hockey stick and puck with him. Every year, according to one report, more than one-fifth of the country’s adult population attends or plays in an ice hockey game.
Because a lot of this hockey fun takes place in outdoor ice rinks, the scientists behind the new study wondered if the sport has been influenced by the changing climate. Since 1950, average winter temperatures in Canada have gone up 2.5 degrees Celsius, while the duration and intensity of cold spells have decreased.
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