Children with autism show increased positive social behaviors when animals are present. The presence of an animal can significantly increase positive social behaviors in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), according to research published February 20 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Marguerite E O'Haire and colleagues from the University of Queensland, Australia. The authors compared how 5-13 year old children with ASD interacted with adults and typically-developing peers in the presence of two guinea pigs compared to toys. They found that in the presence of animals, children with ASD demonstrated more social behaviors like talking, looking at faces and making physical contact.
They were also more receptive to social advances from their peers in the presence of the animals than they were when playing with toys. The presence of animals also increased instances of smiling and laughing, and reduced frowning, whining and crying behaviors in children with ASD more than having toys did. Songbirds’ brains coordinate singing with intricate timing. As a bird sings, some neurons in its brain prepare to make the next sounds while others are synchronized with the current notes—a coordination of physical actions and brain activity that is needed to produce complex movements, new research at the University of Chicago shows. In an article in the current issue of Nature, neuroscientist Daniel Margoliash and colleagues show, for the first time, how the brain is organized to govern skilled performance—a finding that may lead to new ways of understanding human speech production.
The new study shows that birds’ physical movements actually are made up of a multitude of smaller actions. “It is amazing that such small units of movements are encoded, and so precisely, at the level of the forebrain,” said Margoliash, a professor of organismal biology and anatomy and psychology at UChicago. “A big question in muscle control is how the motor system organizes the dynamics of movement,” said Margoliash. Viruses can have immune systems: A pirate phage commandeers the immune system of bacteria. A study published today in the journal Nature reports that a viral predator of the cholera bacteria has stolen the functional immune system of bacteria and is using it against its bacterial host. The study provides the first evidence that this type of virus, the bacteriophage ("phage" for short), can acquire a wholly functional and adaptive immune system.
The phage used the stolen immune system to disable -- and thus overcome -- the cholera bacteria's defense system against phages. Therefore, the phage can kill the cholera bacteria and multiply to produce more phage offspring, which can then kill more cholera bacteria. The study has dramatic implications for phage therapy, which is the use of phages to treat bacterial diseases. Developing phage therapy is particularly important because some bacteria, called superbugs, are resistant to most or all current antibiotics. First author Kimberley D. "Virtually all bacteria can be infected by phages. Additional authors are David W. Contaminated diet contributes to exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals: Phthalates and BPA.
While water bottles may tout BPA-free labels and personal care products declare phthalates not among their ingredients, these assurances may not be enough. According to a study published February 27 in the Nature Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, we may be exposed to these chemicals in our diet, even if our diet is organic and we prepare, cook, and store foods in non-plastic containers.
Children may be most vulnerable. "Current information we give families may not be enough to reduce exposures," said Dr. Sheela Sathyanarayana, lead author on the study and an environmental health pediatrician in the UW School of Public Health and at Seattle Children's Research Institute. Phthalates and bisphenol A, better known as BPA, are synthetic endocrine-disrupting chemicals. The researchers compared the chemical exposures of 10 families, half of whom were given written instructions on how to reduce phthalate and BPA exposures.
Instead, the opposite happened. 2012 in science. 2012 marked Alan Turing Year, a celebration of the life and work of the English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist Alan Turing.[2] In addition, 2012 was declared the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All by the United Nations.[3] Events, discoveries and inventions[edit] January[edit] 1 January 2012: NASA's twin GRAIL satellites (artist's impression shown) begin studying the Moon's gravitational field. 1 January – NASA's GRAIL-B satellite successfully enters lunar orbit, joining its twin spacecraft GRAIL-A. 9 January Human emissions of carbon dioxide will defer the next Ice Age, according to a new study.[21]Researchers in California develop a cheap plastic capable of removing large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air. Neanderthal. The exact date of their extinction is disputed. Fossils found in the Vindija Cave in Croatia have been dated to between 33,000 and 32,000 years old, and Neanderthal artifacts from Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar are believed to be less than 30,000 years old, but a recent study has redated fossils at two Spanish sites as 45,000 years old, 10,000 years older than previously thought, and may cast doubt on recent datings of other sites.
Cro-Magnon (Eurasian Early Modern Human) skeletal remains showing some "Neanderthal traits" have been found in Lagar Velho in Portugal and dated to 24,500 years ago, and in Cioclovina in Romania dated to 35,000 years ago, suggesting that there may have been an extensive admixture of the Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal populations throughout Europe.[10][11][12][13][14][15] With an average cranial capacity of 1600 cc,[20] Neanderthal's cranial capacity is notably larger than the 1400 cc average for modern humans, indicating that their brain size was larger. Name[edit] Denisova hominin. Discovery[edit] Tourists in front of the Denisova Cave, where "X woman" was found In 2008, Russian archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of Novosibirsk, working at the site of Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, uncovered a small bone fragment from the fifth finger of a juvenile hominin, dubbed the "X woman" (referring to the maternal descent of mitochondrial DNA,[11]) or the Denisova hominin.
Artifacts, including a bracelet, excavated in the cave at the same level were carbon dated to around 40,000 BP. A team of scientists led by Johannes Krause and Swedish biologist Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sequenced mtDNA extracted from the fragment. In 2011, a toe bone was discovered in layer 11 of the cave, and hence was contemporary with the finger bone. Anatomy[edit] Mitochondrial DNA analysis[edit] Nuclear genome analysis[edit] Interbreeding[edit] References[edit] Further reading[edit]