Ian Sample, science correspondent Children born to fathers over the age of 45 are at greater risk of developing psychiatric problems and more likely to struggle at school, according to the findings of a large-scale study. The research found that children with older fathers were more often diagnosed with disorders such as autism, psychosis, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. They also reported more drug abuse and suicide attempts, researchers said. The children's difficulties seemed to affect school performance, leading to worse grades at the age of 15 and fewer years in education overall. "We were shocked when we saw the comparisons," said Brian D'Onofrio, the first author of the study at Indiana University in the US. But he added that it was impossible to be sure that older age was to blame for the problems. Scientists have reported links between fathers' age and children's cognitive performance and health before but this study suggests the risks may be more serious than previously thought. The increased risks might be caused by genetic mutations that build up in sperm as men age. Researchers at Indiana University and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm studied medical and educational records of more than 2.6 million babies born to 1.4 million men. The group amounted to nearly 90% of births in Sweden from 1973 and 2001. Using the records, the scientists added up diagnoses for psychiatric disorders and educational achievements and compared the figures for children born to fathers of different ages. © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Schizophrenia; ADHD
Link ID: 19303 - Posted: 02.27.2014

By MICHAEL HEDRICK I still remember the first group therapy session I went to after I got out of the hospital. I was 20 and had been diagnosed as schizophrenic after a road trip that took me from Colorado to the United Nations building in New York City, my mind riddled with notions of good and evil, demons and angels, and a determination to save the world. Now I was in something of a state of shock, having come to understand that amid the delusions and paranoia that swarmed through my head I was, in reality, insane. A constant need to move felt like ants crawling over my skin, a side effect of the antipsychotic medications I had been prescribed. Every second of every day, I felt like clawing out my eyes and tearing out my hair because I just couldn’t sit still. I held up my front, though. I smiled when I thought I had to and tried to be nice to people. Laughter, however, was not something that was possible, and wouldn’t be for a long time. The group was a dual-functioning therapy technique to address both mental health issues and drug abuse. I had been assigned to it after disclosing that I had a marijuana habit. The doctors had told me that therapy groups were an integral part of my getting better. I agreed to go only to get out of the hospital prison and back home to my warm bed. I sat in a circle with a melting pot of people. There was the construction worker still wearing dusty boots and clothes splattered with mud, and the depressed sorority girl, makeup and hair still impeccable. The two had formed a friendship over their history with methamphetamine. There was the quiet bipolar Hispanic man who spoke only in short staccato sentences, and the rotund marketing guy who introduced himself by saying his drugs of choice were food, cocaine and marijuana. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 19302 - Posted: 02.27.2014

by Helen Thomson People in a vegetative state showed signs of awareness after electric brain stimulation – and minimally conscious people were able to communicate again TALK about an awakening. People who have been in a minimally conscious state for weeks or years have been temporarily roused using mild electrical stimulation. Soon after it was applied to their brains, 15 people with severe brain damage showed signs of consciousness, including moving their hands or following instructions using their eyes. Two people were even able to answer questions for 2 hours before drifting back into their previous uncommunicative state. "I don't want to give people false hope – these people weren't getting up and walking around – but it shows there is potential for the brain to recover functionality, even several years after damage," says Steven Laureys at the University of Liège in Belgium, who led the research. People with severe brain trauma often fall into a coma. If they "awaken", by showing signs of arousal but not awareness, they are said to be in a vegetative state. This can improve to a state of minimal consciousness, where they might show fluctuating signs of awareness, which come and go, but have no ability to communicate. External stimulation of the brain has been shown to increase arousal, awareness and aspects of cognition in healthy people. So Laureys and his colleagues wondered if it would do the same in people with severe brain damage. They used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), which doesn't directly excite the brain, but uses low-level electrical stimulation to make neurons more or less likely to fire. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 19301 - Posted: 02.27.2014

By JOHN BRANCH Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated blows to the head, has been found posthumously in a 29-year-old former soccer player, the strongest indication yet that the condition is not limited to athletes who played sports known for violent collisions, like football and boxing. Researchers at Boston University and the VA Boston Healthcare System, who have diagnosed scores of cases of C.T.E., said the player, Patrick Grange of Albuquerque, was the first named soccer player found to have C.T.E. On a four-point scale of severity, his disease was considered Stage 2. Soccer is a physical game but rarely a violent one. Players sometimes collide or fall to the ground, but the most repeated blows to the head may come from the act of heading an airborne ball — to redirect it purposely — in games and practices. Grange, who died in April after being found to have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, was especially proud of his ability to head the ball, said his parents, Mike and Michele. They recalled him as a 3-year-old, endlessly tossing a soccer ball into the air and heading it into a net, a skill that he continued to practice and display in college and in top-level amateur and semiprofessional leagues in his quest to play Major League Soccer. Grange sustained a few memorable concussions, his parents said — falling hard as a toddler, being knocked unconscious in a high school game and once receiving 17 stitches in his head after an on-field collision in college. “He had very extensive frontal lobe damage,” said Dr. Ann McKee, the neuropathologist who performed the brain examination on Grange. “We have seen other athletes in their 20s with this level of pathology, but they’ve usually been football players.” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 19300 - Posted: 02.27.2014

by Tom Siegfried If freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, then “free will” is just another phrase for ability to choose. Bad, wasn’t it? But if free will is an illusion, as many scientists and philosophers have argued, then you shouldn’t blame me. On the other hand, I do blame myself. Because like most bloggers, and possibly even the several dozen humans who don’t blog, I think I decided for myself what to write. Besides, as many investigators of this issue have pointed out, it’s not so obvious that free will is illusory now that quantum mechanics has inserted some randomness into nature. Sadly, though, that reasoning doesn’t get you very far. There’s randomness in the quantum world, all right, just like the unpredictable sequence of winning numbers on a roulette wheel. But in the long run all the numbers turn up about equally often. Free will isn’t worth much if you can’t use it to beat a casino. And as MIT physicist Scott Aaronson points out, quantum math is similar: It gives the odds about what various possible things will happen, and those odds are always predicted precisely. The probability distribution of results is always just what the quantum math says it will be. Aaronson doesn’t see any free will there. Still, the free will question has elicited some sophisticated musing from quantum physicists who like to contemplate the interface of mentality and physical reality. It seems reasonable enough to reexamine such an old question in the light of the latest understanding of the universe. It may be that modern physics can offer a perspective giving hope for those who like to make up their own mind. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 19299 - Posted: 02.27.2014

by Emily Sohn Immediately after birth on many dairy farms, baby cows are separated from their mothers and housed in their own pens to protect them from getting sick. Two months later, they join the herd. But early-life isolation may be depriving baby cows of the opportunity to reach their full potential, found a new study. Compared to calves raised in pairs, isolated calves were much slower to learn new things and had a harder time adapting to changes in their environment. Aside from animal welfare concerns, the new findings suggest that dairy farmers have long been overlooking the brain development of their cows by depriving them of social interaction in their early weeks. “Imagine I said that instead of sending your child to kindergarten, I could put him in the classroom one-on-one with the teacher and all the same resources,” said Daniel Weary, a professor of animal welfare and dairy science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “But at the end of the day, if we found that individuals in this system were showing cognitive deficits in relation to other individuals, we would feel bad about that.” For cows, he said, “it means we’re not keeping these animals in an environment that allows them to be what they can be and should be.” © 2014 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 19298 - Posted: 02.27.2014

Sara Reardon Two monkeys sit at computer screens, eyeing one another as they wait for a promised reward: apple juice. Each has a choice — it can either select a symbol that results in juice being shared equally, or pick one that delivers most of the juice to itself. But being selfish is risky. If its partner also chooses not to share, neither gets much juice. This game, the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’, is a classic test of strategy that involves the simultaneous evaluation of an opponent’s thinking. Researchers have now discovered — and manipulated — specific brain circuits in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) that seem to be involved in the animals’ choices, and in their assessments of their partners’ choices. Investigating the connections could shed light on how social context affects decision-making in humans, and how disorders that affect social skills, such as autism spectrum disorder, disrupt brain circuitry. “Once we have identified that there are particular neural signals necessary to drive the processes, we can begin to tinker,” says Michael Platt, a neurobiologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Neurobiologists Keren Haroush and Ziv Williams of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, zoomed in on neural circuits in rhesus macaques by implanting electrode arrays into a brain area called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), which is associated with rewards and decision-making. The arrays recorded the activity of hundreds of individual neurons. When the monkeys played the prisoner’s dilemma (see ‘A juicy experiment’) against a computer program, they rarely chose to cooperate. But when they played with another monkey that they could see, they were several times more likely to choose to share the juice. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 19297 - Posted: 02.26.2014

On 24 February, Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, signed a draconian Anti-Homosexuality Bill into law, after 2 months of declining to do so. Science, he says, changed his mind—in particular, the findings of a special scientific committee his Health Ministry had appointed earlier in the month. “Their unanimous conclusion was that homosexuality, contrary to my earlier thinking, was behavioural and not genetic,” Museveni wrote to President Barack Obama on 18 February, in response to Obama’s pleas that he not sign the bill. “It was learnt and could be unlearnt.” But some scientists on the committee are crying foul, saying that Museveni and his ruling party—Uganda’s National Resistance Movement (NRM)—misrepresented their findings. “They misquoted our report,” says Paul Bangirana, a clinical psychologist at Makerere University in Kampala. “The report does not state anywhere that homosexuality is not genetic, and we did not say that it could be unlearnt.” Two other committee members have now resigned to protest the use of their report to justify the harsh legislation, which mandates life imprisonment for “aggravated homosexuality,” such as sexual acts with a minor, and prison terms of 7 to 14 years for attempted and actual homosexual acts, respectively. The law was first introduced into Uganda’s Parliament in 2009, but withdrawn after widespread objections to provisions that could have included the death penalty. As he signed the new version, passed by Parliament last 20 December, Museveni claimed that “mercenaries” were recruiting young people into gay activities. © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 19296 - Posted: 02.26.2014

|By Lila Stanners Beauty seems mysterious and subjective. Scientists have long attempted to explain why the same object can strike some individuals as breathtaking and others as repulsive. Now a study finds that applying stimulation to a certain brain area enhances people's aesthetic appreciation of visual images. First, participants viewed 70 abstract paintings and sketches and 80 representational (realistic) paintings and photographs and rated how much they liked each one. Then they rated a similar set of images after receiving transcranial direct-current stimulation or sham stimulation. Transcranial direct-current stimulation sends small electrical impulses to the brain through electrodes attached to the head. The technique is noninvasive and cannot be felt, so subjects in the trials were not aware when they received real stimulation. The researchers aimed the impulses at the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area just behind the brow that is known to be a region critical for emotional processing. They found that the stimulation increased participants' appreciation of representational images, according to the study published online in October 2013 inSocial Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. The scientists believe the stimulation facilitated a shift from object recognition to aesthetic appraisal for the figurative images; the abstract art was probably being processed by a different area of the brain. This study is one of many recent successful attempts at subtly altering cognition with noninvasive brain stimulation. Some experiments have found that stimulating certain areas allows people to solve math problems or puzzles that formerly had them stumped. Other work suggests these techniques can enhance motor learning, helping athletes or musicians improve at a new sport or a new instrument more rapidly. Experts are quick to point out, however, that these effects are modest enhancements at best—thought induction remains firmly in the realm of science fiction. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions; Attention
Link ID: 19295 - Posted: 02.26.2014

Daniel Cressey Researchers have called for a common method of killing zebrafish used in laboratories to be abandoned amid growing evidence that it causes unnecessary suffering. The anaesthetic MS-222, which can be added to tanks to cause overdose, seems to distress the fish, two separate studies have shown. The studies’ authors propose that alternative anaesthetics or methods should be used instead. “These two studies — carried out independently — use different methodologies to reach the same conclusion: zebrafish detect and avoid MS-222 in the water,” says Stewart Owen, a senior environmental scientist at AstraZeneca’s Brixham Environmental Laboratory in Brixham, UK, and a co-author of one of the studies. “As this is a clear aversive response, as a humane choice, one would no longer use this agent for routine zebrafish anaesthesia.” The use of zebrafish (Danio rerio) in research has skyrocketed in recent years as scientists have sought alternatives to more controversial animal models, such as mammals. The fish are cheap and easy to keep, and although no firm data on numbers have been collected, millions are known to be housed in laboratories around the world. Nearly all will eventually be killed. MS-222 (ethyl 3-aminobenzoate methane­sulphate, also known as TMS) is one of the agents most frequently used to kill the creatures. It is listed as an acceptable method of euthanasia by many institutions, and also by societies such as the American Veterinary Medical Association. But the study by Owen and his co-authors, published last year (G. D. Readman et al. PLoS ONE 8, e73773; 2013), and the second study, published earlier this month by Daniel Weary and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada (D. Wong et al. PLoS ONE 9, e88030; 2014), show that zebrafish seem to find the chemical distressing. The research should fundamentally change the practice, say the authors of both papers. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 19294 - Posted: 02.26.2014

By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online Doctors have devised a new way to treat amputees with phantom limb pain. Using computer-generated augmented reality, the patient can see and move a virtual arm controlled by their stump. Electric signals from the muscles in the amputated limb "talk" to the computer, allowing real-time movement. Amputee Ture Johanson says his pain has reduced dramatically thanks to the new computer program, which he now uses regularly in his home. He now has periods when he is free of pain and he is no longer woken at night by intense periods of pain. Mr Johanson, who is 73 and lives in Sweden, lost half of his right arm in a car accident 48 years ago. After a below-elbow amputation he faced daily pain and discomfort emanating from his now missing arm and hand. Over the decades he has tried numerous therapies, including hypnosis, to no avail. Within weeks of starting on the augmented reality treatment in Max Ortiz Catalan's clinic at Chalmers University of Technology, his pain has now eased. "The pain is much less now. I still have it often but it is shorter, for only a few seconds where before it was for minutes. BBC © 2014

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Attention
Link ID: 19293 - Posted: 02.26.2014

By Deborah Kotz / Globe Staff Obesity rates plummeted among preschool children in the past decade, from nearly 14 percent to just over 8 percent in 2011-12, according to a new federal government analysis that was hailed by one researcher as a “glimmer of hope.” But the campaign to combat the nation’s obesity epidemic has had no success with adults and older children: Americans remain just as overweight as ever, with two out of three adults at an unhealthy weight and more than one out of three obese in 2011-12, the latest years for which statistics were available. The study, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, examined annual government health and nutrition surveys that sampled more than 9,000 Americans of all ages. Despite the gains for toddlers, the study found that overall among children under age 20, 17 percent were at the extreme obese end of the weight spectrum. Nearly one-third of kids remain either overweight or obese—nearly triple the rate of 50 years ago—which pediatricians blame for the sharp rise in type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol levels in children. Rates actually increased in one group: Women over age 60 experienced a rise in obesity from just under 32 percent 10 years ago to over 38 percent in 2011-2012. “Obesity rates haven’t changed for most Americans, but there was a glimmer of hope in preschoolers,” said study leader Cynthia Ogden, an epidemiologist at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. © 2014 Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 19292 - Posted: 02.26.2014

By JAMES GORMAN SEATTLE — When Clay Reid decided to leave his job as a professor at Harvard Medical School to become a senior investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle in 2012, some of his colleagues congratulated him warmly and understood right away why he was making the move. Others shook their heads. He was, after all, leaving one of the world’s great universities to go to the academic equivalent of an Internet start-up, albeit an extremely well- financed, very ambitious one, created in 2003 by Paul Allen, a founder of Microsoft. Still, “it wasn’t a remotely hard decision,” Dr. Reid said. He wanted to mount an all-out investigation of a part of the mouse brain. And although he was happy at Harvard, the Allen Institute offered not only great colleagues and deep pockets, but also an approach to science different from the classic university environment. The institute was already mapping the mouse brain in fantastic detail, and specialized in the large-scale accumulation of information in atlases and databases available to all of science. Now, it was expanding, and trying to merge its semi-industrial approach to data gathering with more traditional science driven by individual investigators, by hiring scientists like Christof Koch from the California Institute of Technology as chief scientific officer in 2011 and Dr. Reid. As a senior investigator, he would lead a group of about 100, and work with scientists, engineers and technicians in other groups. Without the need to apply regularly for federal grants, Dr. Reid could concentrate on one piece of the puzzle of how the brain works. He would try to decode the workings of one part of the mouse brain, the million neurons in the visual cortex, from, as he puts it, “molecules to behavior.” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 19291 - Posted: 02.25.2014

|By Beth Skwarecki Prions, the protein family notorious for causing "mad cow" and neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's, can play an important role in healthy cells. "Do you think God created prions just to kill?" mused Nobel laureate Eric Kandel. "These things must have evolved initially to have a physiological function." His work on memory helped reveal that animals make and use prions in their nervous systems as part of an essential function: stabilizing the synapses that constitute long-term memories. These natural prions aren't infectious but on a molecular level they chain up exactly the same way as their disease-causing brethren. (Some researchers call them "prionlike" to avoid confusion.) This week, work from neuroscientist Kausik Si of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, one of Kandel's former students, shows that the prion's action is tightly controlled by the cell, and can be turned on when a new long-term memory needs to be formed. Prions are proteins with two unusual properties: First, they can switch between two possible shapes, one that is stable on its own and an alternate conformation that can form chains. Second, the chain-forming version has to be able to trigger others to change shape and join the chain. Say that in the normal version the protein is folded so that one portion of the protein structure—call it "tab A"—fits into its own "slot B." In the alternate form, though, tab A is available to fit into its neighbor's slot B. That means the neighbor can do the same thing to the next protein to come along, forming a chain or clump that can grow indefinitely. © 2014 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Prions
Link ID: 19290 - Posted: 02.25.2014

By JoNel Aleccia The first of 18,000 University of California, Santa Barbara, students lined up for shots Monday as the school began offering an imported vaccine to halt an outbreak of dangerous meningitis that sickened four, including one young man who lost his feet. "My dad's a pediatrician and he's been sending me emails over and over to go get it," said Carly Chianese, 20, a junior from Bayville, N.Y., who showed up a half-hour before the UCSB clinic opened. It’s the second time in three months that government health officials have inoculated U.S. college students with an emergency vaccine, Bexsero, to protect against the B strain of meningitis. More than 5,400 students at Princeton University in New Jersey received the vaccine in December after an outbreak sickened eight there. Another 4,400 got booster shots last week. No new cases have been detected at UCSB since November, but health officials said the vaccine licensed in Europe, Australia and Canada but not in the U.S. would stop future spread of the infection. Current vaccines available in the U.S. protect against four strains of meningitis, but not the B strain. Bacterial meningitis is a serious infection that kills 1 in 10 affected and leaves 20 percent with severe disabilities. Shots will be offered at UCSB from Monday through March 7, with a second series planned for later this spring. “During the last couple of outbreaks on college campuses, there have been additional cases over a year or two years,” said Dr. Amanda Cohn, a medical epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “There is certainly that possibility. We strongly recommend that students get vaccinated.”

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 19289 - Posted: 02.25.2014

|By Jenni Laidman People born with Down syndrome have always been considered to be incurably developmentally delayed—until now. In the past few years a number of laboratories have uncovered critical drug targets within disabled chemical pathways in the brain that might be restored with medication. At least two clinical trials are currently studying the effects of such treatments on people with Down syndrome. Now geneticist Roger Reeves of Johns Hopkins University may have stumbled on another drug target—this one with the potential to correct the learning and memory deficits so central to the condition. Down syndrome occurs in about one in 1,000 births annually worldwide. It arises from an extra copy of chromosome 21 and the overexpression of each of the 300 to 500 genes the chromosome carries. “If you go back even as recently as 2004, researchers didn't have much of a clue about the mechanisms involved in this developmental disability,” says Michael Harpold, chief scientific officer with the Down Syndrome Research and Treatment Foundation. But all that has changed. “In the past six or seven years there have been several breakthroughs—and ‘breakthroughs’ is not by any means too big a word—in understanding the neurochemistry in Down syndrome,” Reeves says. This improved knowledge base has led to a series of discoveries with therapeutic promise, including the latest by Reeves. He and his team were attempting to restore the size of the cerebellum in mice engineered to show the hallmarks of Down syndrome. The cerebellum lies at the base of the brain and controls motor functions, motor learning and balance. In people with Down syndrome and in the Down mouse model the cerebellum is about 40 percent smaller than normal. By restoring its size, Reeves hoped to gain a clearer picture of the developmental processes that lead to anomalies in a brain with Down syndrome. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 19288 - Posted: 02.25.2014

by Nathan Seppa Women who take acetaminophen during pregnancy are more likely to have a child with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder than are women who don’t, according to an analysis of nearly 41,000 pairs of mothers and children in a Danish birth registry. Researchers found that more than half of the women, who gave birth between 1996 and 2002, had used the pain reliever during pregnancy. Calls to the women when the children were 7 years old revealed that children whose moms used any acetaminophen during pregnancy were 37 percent more apt to be diagnosed with ADHD or a related disorder than children whose moms didn’t use the drug. If the women used it in all three trimesters, the apparent risk for offspring was 61 percent higher than for children whose mothers didn’t use the drug. Out of nearly 41,000 children, fewer than 1,000 were diagnosed with ADHD and related disorders. The data establish an association and not cause and effect. But the researchers note that acetaminophen, also sold as Tylenol or Panadol, can cross the placental barrier and may affect hormones in a fetus. Citations Z. Liew et al. Acetaminophen use during pregnancy, behavioral problems, and hyperkinetic disorders. JAMA Pediatrics. Online February 24, 2014. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2013.4914. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013.

Keyword: ADHD; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 19287 - Posted: 02.25.2014

By Meeri Kim, How often, and how well, do you remember your dreams? Some people seem to be super-dreamers, able to recall effortlessly their dreams in vivid detail almost every day. Others struggle to remember even a vague fragment or two. A new study has discovered that heightened blood flow activity within certain regions of the brain could help explain the great dreamer divide. In general, dream recall is thought to require some amount of wakefulness during the night for the vision to be encoded in longer-term memory. But it is not known what causes some people to wake up more than others. A team of French researchers looked at brain activation maps of sleeping subjects and homed in on areas that could be responsible for nighttime wakefulness. When comparing two groups of dreamers on the opposite ends of the recall spectrum, the maps revealed that the temporoparietal junction — an area responsible for collecting and processing information from the external world — was more highly activated in high-recallers. The researchers speculate that this allows these people to sense environmental noises in the night and wake up momentarily — and, in the process, store dream memories for later recall. In support of this hypothesis, previous medical cases have found that when these same portions of the brain are damaged by stroke, patients lose the ability to remember their dreams, even though they can still achieve the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep in which dreaming usually occurs. © 1996-2014 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sleep; Brain imaging
Link ID: 19286 - Posted: 02.24.2014

Sara Reardon Freddie Lee Hall loved to gamble, although he usually lost. Winning was better: then he gladly gave the money back to the friends he'd won it from, along with all the wages he earned picking fruit in rural Florida. His friends praised him for this. It made him feel good. And Hall needed to feel good — as court documents make abundantly clear. As a child growing up in the impoverished town of Webster, Florida, he had struggled to keep up with 16 brothers and sisters, who were much smarter than he was. If he failed to understand something, his mother beat him, once while he was tied up in a bag strung over a fire. He stuttered, never learned to read and feared the dark. He was unable to live alone. “Even though he was full grown, mentally he was a child,” his sister Diana told the court. “I had hoped to protect Freddie Lee from the outside world.” But the outside world found him. In 1978, Hall and his friend Mack Ruffin decided to rob a convenience store. They needed a car, so they forced 21-year-old Karol Hurst, who was pregnant, to drive into the woods, where they raped and killed her. Later, one of the pair also shot and killed a sheriff's deputy. When the two men were caught, tried and convicted of murder, the court decided that Hall was the likely ringleader. Ruffin was eventually sentenced to life in prison; Hall was sentenced to death. Next month, after 35 years of failed appeals to have that death sentence commuted to life imprisonment, Hall will have his case heard before the US Supreme Court. His guilt is not in question: the issue is Florida's use of IQ test scores in sentencing him to death. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Intelligence; Attention
Link ID: 19285 - Posted: 02.24.2014

By SABRINA TAVERNISE Dr. Michael Siegel, a hard-charging public health researcher at Boston University, argues that e-cigarettes could be the beginning of the end of smoking in America. He sees them as a disruptive innovation that could make cigarettes obsolete, like the computer did to the typewriter. But his former teacher and mentor, Stanton A. Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, is convinced that e-cigarettes may erase the hard-won progress achieved over the last half-century in reducing smoking. He predicts that the modern gadgetry will be a glittering gateway to the deadly, old-fashioned habit for children, and that adult smokers will stay hooked longer now that they can get a nicotine fix at their desks. These experts represent the two camps now at war over the public health implications of e-cigarettes. The devices, intended to feed nicotine addiction without the toxic tar of conventional cigarettes, have divided a normally sedate public health community that had long been united in the fight against smoking and Big Tobacco. The essence of their disagreement comes down to a simple question: Will e-cigarettes cause more or fewer people to smoke? The answer matters. Cigarette smoking is still the single largest cause of preventable death in the United States, killing about 480,000 people a year. Dr. Siegel, whose graduate school manuscripts Dr. Glantz used to read, says e-cigarette pessimists are stuck on the idea that anything that looks like smoking is bad. “They are so blinded by this ideology that they are not able to see e-cigarettes objectively,” he said. Dr. Glantz disagrees. “E-cigarettes seem like a good idea,” he said, “but they aren’t.” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19284 - Posted: 02.24.2014