By BENEDICT CAREY Clare True had autism and periodic seizures, but nothing prepared her family for Christmas Eve in 2006, when the 26-year-old went to bed after watching a movie and stopped breathing. “I got home from a party, went to check on her just after midnight, and she was — she was gone,” said her mother, Jane True. Paramedics tried to revive the young woman, then rushed her to the hospital, and somewhere in that firestorm of activity and grief, the Trues, Jane and her husband, Jim, considered donation. “I thought of it as a gift, her brain,” she said. “To my mind, the idea that scientists would be learning from her for years to come — how can you put a price on that?” Clare True’s was one of 150 specimens stored in a Harvard brain bank that was ruined because of a freezer failure, doctors acknowledged this month. The loss, while a setback for scientists studying disorders like Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia, especially mortified those working on autism, for it exposed what is emerging as the largest obstacle to progress: the shortage of high-quality autopsied brains from young people with a well-documented medical history. The malfunction reduced by a third Harvard’s frozen autism collection, the world’s largest. A bank maintained by the University of Maryland has 52, and there are smaller collections elsewhere. Altogether there are precious few, given escalating research demands. The loss at the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center makes donations from parents like the Trues only more urgent. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 16965 - Posted: 06.26.2012

By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online A simple brain trace can identify autism in children as young as two years old, scientists believe. A US team at Boston Children's Hospital say EEG traces, which record electrical brain activity using scalp electrodes, could offer a diagnostic test for this complex condition. EEG clearly distinguished children with autism from other peers in a trial involving nearly 1,000 children. Experts say more work is needed to confirm the BMC Medicine study results. Early detection There are more than 500,000 people with autism in the UK. Autism is a spectrum disorder, which means that it is not a single condition and will affect individuals in different ways. Commonly, people with autism have trouble with social interaction and can appear locked in their own worlds. It can be a difficult condition to diagnose and can go undetected for years. The latest study found 33 specific EEG patterns that appeared to be linked to autism. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 16964 - Posted: 06.26.2012

By Laura Sanders A dreamland ditty played softly during a nap helps people hit the right notes while awake. Soft tones during sleep creep into the napping brain and strengthen playing skills, researchers report online June 24 in Nature Neuroscience. The results don’t mean that after a nighttime Beethoven sonata, a piano novice will wake up with the ability to play it. But the results do suggest that an existing skill can be sharpened during a nap, says study coauthor Ken Paller of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Earlier work by Paller and others has found that sound and odor cues during sleep can improve a person’s memory for the locations of objects. The new study extends those results by showing that a learned skill — in this instance, playing music — can also be influenced during sleep. Although these sorts of experiments are just getting started, “the door is wide open,” Paller says. Musical ability, athletic prowess and other talents that normally require a lot of practice may be amenable to boosts during sleep. Before the easy job of having a nap, 16 right-handed participants in the study had to do some actual work. Volunteers learned two different not-very-catchy tunes, played with their left hands on the a, s, d and f keys of a computer. In an arrangement similar to that of Guitar Hero, circles that floated up the screen told participants which key to hit and when. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Sleep
Link ID: 16963 - Posted: 06.25.2012

By KATIE THOMAS A research director for Pfizer was positively buoyant after reading that an important medical conference had just featured a study claiming that the new arthritis drug Celebrex was safer on the stomach than more established drugs. “They swallowed our story, hook, line and sinker,” he wrote in an e-mail to a colleague. The truth was that Celebrex was no better at protecting the stomach from serious complications than other drugs. It appeared that way only because Pfizer and its partner, Pharmacia, presented the results from the first six months of a yearlong study rather than the whole thing. The companies had a lot riding on the outcome of the study, given that Celebrex’s effect on the stomach was its principal selling point. Earlier studies had shown it was no better at relieving pain than common drugs — like ibuprofen — already on the market. The research chief’s e-mail, sent in 2000, is among thousands of pages of internal documents and depositions unsealed recently by a federal judge in a long-running securities fraud case against Pfizer. While the companies’ handling of the research was revealed a dozen years ago, the documents provide a vivid picture of the calculation made by Pfizer at the time and its efforts ever since to overcome doubts about the drug. The documents suggest that officials made a strategic decision during the early trial to be less than forthcoming about the drug’s safety. They show that executives considered attacking the trial’s design before they even knew the results and disregarded the advice of an employee and an outside consultant who had argued the companies should disclose the fact that they were using incomplete data. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16962 - Posted: 06.25.2012

SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer WASHINGTON (AP) — The more we study animals, the less special we seem. Baboons can distinguish between written words and gibberish. Monkeys seem to be able to do multiplication. Apes can delay instant gratification longer than a human child can. They plan ahead. They make war and peace. They show empathy. They share. "It's not a question of whether they think — it's how they think," says Duke University scientist Brian Hare. Now scientists wonder if apes are capable of thinking about what other apes are thinking. The evidence that animals are more intelligent and more social than we thought seems to grow each year, especially when it comes to primates. It's an increasingly hot scientific field with the number of ape and monkey cognition studies doubling in recent years, often with better technology and neuroscience paving the way to unusual discoveries. This month scientists mapping the DNA of the bonobo ape found that, like the chimp, bonobos are only 1.3 percent different from humans. Says Josep Call, director of the primate research center at the Max Planck Institute in Germany: "Every year we discover things that we thought they could not do." Call says one of his recent more surprising studies showed that apes can set goals and follow through with them. © 2012 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Evolution; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16961 - Posted: 06.25.2012

By Susan Carnell One of the strangest findings to emerge from the world of obesity science lately is that people who sleep less tend to weigh more. But until recently, we have been stifling our yawns and scratching our heads about why: Does lack of sleep alter our biology? Or does it affect our eating behavior? Now two brain-imaging reports suggest the answer is both. The first study, published in March in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, looked at the effects of one night of no sleep. The second, published in April in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, tested the impact of nearly a week of more commonly experienced levels of sleep deprivation (four hours of sleep for six nights). Both studies used functional MRI to measure brain activation as their subjects viewed food pictures—analogous to being bombarded with a stream of McMuffin ads after a long night of working (or partying). Each study discovered that sleep loss caused areas within a key motivation network, including the striatum and anterior cingulate cortex, to go into overdrive at the mere sight of food. The same circuit perks up when addicts view images of their substance of choice. “Calories are energy, and your brain subconsciously knows they will wake you up,” says Marie-Pierre St-Onge of Columbia University, lead investigator of the April study. She likens the superresponsive sleep-poor brain to that of someone who has lost weight on a drastic diet—devouring the first snack you can get your hands on is a “no-brainer.” © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep; Obesity
Link ID: 16960 - Posted: 06.25.2012

By Madeline Haller Prepping for a big presentation but can't seem to remember any of the content? Blame your sweet tooth. A diet high in sugar may hamper your memory and ability to learn, says a study published in the Journal of Physiology. Researchers had two groups of rats drink water mixed with fructose, a type of sugar. One of the groups also received omega-3 fatty acids as a part of their diet. After 6 weeks, the rats who drank only sugar water completed a maze slower than the omega-3-fed mice. (We know you're not a mouse -- but you can still take steps to navigate the maze of life. Check out these 27 Ways to Power Up Your Brain.) Not only were they slower in the maze, the rats who drank only sugar water had higher triglyceride, glucose, and insulin levels. It appears that they entered a state of insulin resistance, which is where the hormone insulin becomes less effective at lowering your blood sugar, says Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, Ph.D., lead study author and a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Here's how it works: Insulin, in addition to controlling blood sugar, also influences the ways in which your brain cells operate. And within the hippocampus -- the part of the brain responsible for short-term and long-term memory -- insulin signaling actually facilitates memory. Therefore, an insulin resistance may be what's causing a disruption in the rats' ability to recall the route they'd learned 6 weeks ago, the researchers hypothesize. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Obesity
Link ID: 16959 - Posted: 06.25.2012

Jeannine Stamatakis, There is no denying the high you feel after a run in the park or a swim at the beach. Exercise not only boosts your physical health--as one can easily see by watching a marathon or a boxing match--but it also improves mental health. According to a recent study, every little bit helps. People who engaged in even a small amount of exercise reported better mental health than others who did none. Another study, from the American College of Sports Medicine, indicated that six weeks of bicycle riding or weight training eased stress and irritability in women who had received an anxiety disorder diagnosis. To see how much exercise is required to relieve stress, researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health observed how prior exercise changed the interactions between aggressive and reserved mice. When placed in the same cage, stronger mice tend to bully the meeker ones. In this study, the small mice that did not have access to running wheels and other exercise equipment before cohabitating with the aggressive mice were extremely stressed and nervous, cowering in dark corners or freezing when placed in an unfamiliar territory. Yet meek rodents that had a chance to exercise before encountering their bullies exhibited resistance to stress. They were submissive while living with the aggressive mice but bounced back when they were alone. The researchers concluded that even a small amount of exercise gave the meeker mice emotional resilience. The scientists looked at the brain cells of these so-called stress-resistant mice and found that the rodents exhibited more activity in their medial prefrontal cortex and their amygdala, both of which are involved in processing emotions. The mice that did not exercise before moving in with the aggressive mice showed less activity in these parts of the brain. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 16958 - Posted: 06.25.2012

By Daisy Yuhas At right is a picture of someone’s brain as seen through functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI. This particular subject is taxing his neurons with a working memory task—those sunny orange specks represent brain activity related to the task. fMRI images show the brain according to changes in blood oxygen level, a proxy for degree of mental activity. It’s a pretty amazing tool; it has validated a lot of assumptions about brain regions and helped us make comparisons between groups of people, shedding light on addiction, development and disease. Some scientists believe it can help us read minds (more on that later) or even predict the future. But fMRI doesn’t actually provide detail at the level of a cell. The 3-dimensionsal image it provides is built up in units called voxels. Each one represents a tidy cube of brain tissue—a 3-D image building block analogous to the 2-D pixel of computers screens, televisions or digital cameras. Each voxel can represent a million or so brain cells. Those orange blobs in the image above are actually clusters of voxels—perhaps tens or hundreds of them. fMRI is also too slow to capture all of the changes in the brain. Each scan requires a second or two, enough time for a neuron to fire more than a hundred times. That means it can’t provide a clear sense of precisely when things happen. Trying to explain whether activity in one spot causes activity in another is not possible through fMRI alone. Furthermore, you have to be careful with your conclusions. Just because voxels corresponding to one region ‘light up’ when your subject sees a terrifying tiger doesn’t mean that every time this region appears active, your subject is frightened. Many of the brain’s regions are quite complex and involved in multiple processes. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 16957 - Posted: 06.23.2012

An intervention in which adults actively engaged the attention of preschool children with autism by pointing to toys and using other gestures to focus their attention results in a long term increase in language skills, according to researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health. At age 8, children with autism who received therapy centered on sharing attention and play when they were 3 or 4 years old had stronger vocabularies and more advanced language skills than did children who received standard therapy. All of the children in the study attended preschool for 30 hours each week. “Some studies have indicated that such pre-verbal interactions provide the foundation for building later language skills,” said Alice Kau, Ph.D., of the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Branch of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver NICHD.“This study confirms that intensive therapy to engage the attention of young children with autism helps them acquire language faster and build lasting language skills.” The study findings appear in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. The 40 children who participated in the study were 8 and 9 years old. Five years earlier, they had been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder and received the intensive therapy program or standard intervention, as part of a separate study.

Keyword: Autism; Attention
Link ID: 16956 - Posted: 06.23.2012

By ALEX STONE PINCH a coin at its edge between the thumb and first fingers of your right hand and begin to place it in your left palm, without letting go. Begin to close the fingers of the left hand. The instant the coin is out of sight, extend the last three digits of your right hand and secretly retract the coin. Make a fist with your left — as if holding the coin — as your right hand palms the coin and drops to the side. You’ve just performed what magicians call a retention vanish: a false transfer that exploits a lag in the brain’s perception of motion, called persistence of vision. When done right, the spectator will actually see the coin in the left palm for a split second after the hands separate. This bizarre afterimage results from the fact that visual neurons don’t stop firing once a given stimulus (here, the coin) is no longer present. As a result, our perception of reality lags behind reality by about one one-hundredth of a second. Magicians have long used such cognitive biases to their advantage, and in recent years scientists have been following in their footsteps, borrowing techniques from the conjurer’s playbook in an effort not to mystify people but to study them. Magic may seem an unlikely tool, but it’s already yielded several widely cited results. Consider the work on choice blindness — people’s lack of awareness when evaluating the results of their decisions. In one study, shoppers in a blind taste test of two types of jam were asked to choose the one they preferred. They were then given a second taste from the jar they picked. Unbeknown to them, the researchers swapped the flavors before the second spoonful. The containers were two-way jars, lidded at both ends and rigged with a secret compartment that held the other jam on the opposite side — a principle that’s been used to bisect countless showgirls. This seems like the sort of thing that wouldn’t scan, yet most people failed to notice that they were tasting the wrong jam, even when the two flavors were fairly dissimilar, like grapefruit and cinnamon-apple. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16955 - Posted: 06.23.2012

By ARIEL KAMINER YOU could drive past the hulking warehouse on the rough patch of waterfront in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, several times without ever figuring it for the latest frontier of neurological thrill-seeking. But that’s where Yehuda Duenyas, 38, who calls himself “a creator of innovative experiences,” was camped out last week, along with his team of scrappy young technical wizards and a quarter-million dollars’ worth of circuitry, theatrical lighting and optimism called “The Ascent.” Part art installation, part adventure ride, part spiritual journey, “The Ascent” claims to let users harness their brain’s own electrical impulses, measured through EEG readings, to levitate themselves. During its brief stay in New York, it welcomed representatives from cultural organizations like PS 122 and Lincoln Center, event promoters and friends of the team. In the shadowy vastness of the warehouse, “The Ascent” looked spare and heroic, like the setting for the final showdown between good and evil. Up high, a large circular track of lights and equipment hung from the ceiling. Down on the floor, another circle mirrored the one above, with incandescent bulbs illuminating transient puffs of smoke and casting the apparatus in a ghostly light. In the 30 feet between the lights above and the lights below, the air seemed heavy with magic and danger. An assistant outfitted me with a harness around my middle and a couple of EEG sensors across my forehead. Another assistant led me to the center of the circle and snapped me into the two hanging cables. For one long and mysterious moment, I stood alone in silence. Then the fun began. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16954 - Posted: 06.23.2012

By Deborah Kotz, Globe Staff I get occasional migraines, and the only good thing about the throbbing pain, nausea, and depressed mood is the sense of euphoria that comes when the pain finally lifts. For some headache sufferers, however, the pain never goes away -- for months, years, or even decades. I received a call recently from a relative whose teenage son developed a headache one day that’s lasted two months and counting, causing him to miss his final months of high school. His diagnosis: new daily persistent headache, a wastebasket term given when everything else has been ruled out. Dr. Elizabeth Loder, chief of the division of headache and pain at Brigham and Women’s/Faulkner Hospital, estimated that about 5 percent of the patients she sees at her clinic have new daily persistent headache. More commonly, patients come in with chronic migraines that result from medication overuse or because a particular drug isn’t working for them or has been prescribed at too low a dose. With new daily persistent headache, or NDPH, however, none of the array of migraine medications seems to work, even when prescribed at optimal doses. There’s no known cause such as a head injury, tumor, or seizure condition. And, unlike the typical headache sufferer, those with NDPH can name the exact day when their headache began -- even what they were doing when it started -- because they’ve never before had a problem with headaches and suddenly they’re in pain all the time with no relief in sight. © 2012 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16953 - Posted: 06.23.2012

By John de Dios Derek, left, and Zachary Francis spends most of their together. However, this fall the twins will be attending separate universities Ğ the first time for them to be separated for an extended period of time. Derek, left, and Zachary Francis spends most of their together. However, this fall the twins will be attending separate universities - the first time for them to be separated for an extended period of time. Twins Derek and Zachary Francis sit across from each other in Caffe Luce, a popular coffee shop near the University of Arizona campus. Their faces, still showing signs of youthful hormones, are nearly identical. Their hairstyles, their fashion styles and even their mannerisms are almost mirror images. Derek, the older brother, has a wider jaw and short hair. A red string adorns his left wrist as he writes left-handed. Zachary, with his short hair coifed similar to his brother’s and a small birthmark behind his neck, is more reserved, listening to headphones while he scrolls through his computer with his right hand. The brothers have spent 99 percent of their 19 years of life at each other’s side. They also share an even rarer bond than your typical identical twin: The Francis twins are also mirror-image twins. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16952 - Posted: 06.23.2012

by Elizabeth Preston It's 20 million years ago in the forests of Argentina, and Homunculus patagonicus is on the move. The monkey travels quickly, swinging between tree branches as it goes. Scientists have a good idea of how Homunculus got around thanks to a new fossil analysis of its ear canals and those of 15 other ancient primates. These previously hidden passages reveal some surprises about the locomotion of extinct primates—including hints that our own ancestors spent their lives moving at a higher velocity than today's apes. Wherever skeletons of ancient primates exist, anthropologists have minutely analyzed arm, leg, and foot bones to learn about the animals' locomotion. Some of these primates seem to have bodies built for leaping. Others look like they moved more deliberately. But in species such as H. patagonicus, there's hardly anything to go on aside from skulls. That's where the inner ear canals come in. "The semicircular canals function essentially as angular accelerometers for the head," helping an animal keep its balance while its head jerks around, says Timothy Ryan, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. In the new study, he and colleagues used computed tomography scans to peer inside the skulls of 16 extinct primates, spanning 35 million years of evolution, and reconstruct the architecture of their inner ears. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 16951 - Posted: 06.23.2012

By Jesse Bering Once, while in a drowsy, altitude-induced delirium 35,000 feet somewhere over iceland, I groped mindlessly for the cozy blue blanket poking out beneath my seat, only to realize—to my unutterable horror—that I was in fact tugging soundly on a wriggling, sock-covered big toe. Now, with a temperament such as mine, life tends to be one awkward conversation after the next, so when I turned around, smiling, to apologize to the owner of this toe, my gaze was met by a very large man whose grunt suggested that he was having some difficulty in finding the humor in this incident. Unpleasant, sure, but I now call this event serendipitous. As I rested my head back against that sanitation-paper-covered airline pillow, my midflight mind lit away to a much happier memory, one involving another big toe, yet this one belonging to a noticeably more good-humored animal than the one sitting behind me. This other toe—which felt every bit as much as its overstuffed human equivalent did, I should add—was attached to a 450-pound western lowland gorilla, with calcified gums, named King. When I was 20 and he was 27, I spent much of the summer of 1996 with my toothless friend King, listening to Frank Sinatra and the Three Tenors, playing chase from one side of his exhibit to the other, and tickling his toes. He'd lean back in his night house, stick out one huge ashen-gray foot through the bars of his cage and leave it dangling there in anticipation, erupting in shoulder-heaving guttural laughter as I'd grab hold of one of his toes and gently give it a palpable squeeze. He almost couldn't control himself when, one day, I leaned down to act as though I were going to bite on that plump digit. If you've never seen a gorilla in a fit of laughter, I'd recommend searching out such a sight before you pass from this world. It's something that would stir up cognitive dissonance in even the heartiest of creationists. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 16950 - Posted: 06.23.2012

By Jason G. Goldman Yogi Bear always claimed that he was smarter than the average bear, but the average bear appears to be smarter than once thought. Psychologists Jennifer Vonk of Oakland University and Michael J. Beran of Georgia State University have taken a testing methodology commonly used for primates and shown not only that the methodology can be more widely used, but also that bears can distinguish among differing numerosities. Numerical cognition is perhaps the best understood of the core building blocks of the mind. Decades of research have provided evidence for the numerical abilities of gorillas, chimpanzees, rhesus, capuchin, and squirrel monkeys, lemurs, dolphins, elephants, birds, and fish. Pre-linguistic human infants share the same mental modules for representing and understanding numbers as those non-human animal species. Each of these species is able to precisely count sets of objects up to three, but after that, they can only approximate the number of items in a set. Even human adults living in cultures whose languages have not developed an explicit count list must rely on approximation rather than precision for quantities larger than three. For this reason, it is easier for infants and animals to distinguish thirty from sixty than it is to distinguish thirty from forty, since the 1:2 ratio (30:60) is smaller than the 3:4 ratio (30:40). As the ratios increase, the difference between the two sets becomes smaller, making it more difficult to discriminate between them without explicit counting. Given that species as divergent as humans and mosquitofish represent number in the same ways, subject to the same (quantity-based and ratio-based) limits and constraints, it stands to reason that the ability to distinguish among two quantities is evolutionarily-ancient. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 16949 - Posted: 06.21.2012

By Saswato R. Das One of the items high on the big science project to-do list is to devise a wiring diagram for the human brain. Its 100 billion neurons and the hundreds of trillions of connections among these cells consign this goal and the specifics of achieving it to the long-term bin. A first step, though, is a complete diagram of the mouse brain. Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in Long Island, N.Y., have started making public detailed images of mouse brain circuitry, releasing on June 1 the first installment of about 500 terabytes. The goal of the effort, called the Mouse Brain Architecture Project (MBA), is an entire rodent brain wiring plan that would represent the first such mapping of the circuits of a vertebrate brain. "Current knowledge of brain circuitry is incomplete," says Jonathan Pollock, chief of genetics and molecular neurobiology research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. "The lack of knowledge about neural circuitry has led to recognition by the scientific community of the need map the brain at the macro-, meso- and microscopic scale." The MBA complements other efforts, such as the National Institutes of Health's Human Connectome Project and the ALLEN Brain Connectivity Atlas. Pollock says that because the mouse serves as a general model for mammal genetics, the knowledge gleaned could help in the study of diseases such as Alzheimer's, autism, schizophrenia, depression and addiction. In recent years researchers focusing on mammalian brains have placed much attention on individual synapses, connection points between neurons, using electron microscopy. This approach is too complex and currently impractical for application to the whole mouse brain © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16948 - Posted: 06.21.2012

Children exposed to HIV in the womb may be more likely to experience hearing loss by age 16 than are their unexposed peers, according to scientists in a National Institutes of Health research network. The researchers estimated that hearing loss affects 9 to 15 percent of HIV-infected children and 5 to 8 percent of children who did not have HIV at birth but whose mothers had HIV infection during pregnancy. Study participants ranged from 7 to 16 years old. The researchers defined hearing loss as the level at which sounds could be detected, when averaged over four frequencies important for speech understanding (500, 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hertz), that was 20 decibels or higher than the normal hearing level for adolescents or young adults in either ear. “Children exposed to HIV before birth are at higher risk for hearing difficulty, and it's important for them—and the health providers who care for them—to be aware of this,” said George K. Siberry, M.D., of the Pediatric, Adolescent, and Maternal AIDS Branch of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the NIH institute that leads the research network. Compared to national averages for other children their age, children with HIV infection were about 200 to 300 percent more likely to have a hearing loss. Children whose mothers had HIV during pregnancy but who themselves were born without HIV were 20 percent more likely than to have hearing loss. The study was published online in The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal.

Keyword: Hearing; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16947 - Posted: 06.21.2012

by Andy Coghlan Newborn babies have revealed to the world when they start seeing in three dimensions. Babies were thought to begin seeing in stereo at about four months after their due date. They actually learn to do it four months after they are exposed to light, even if they are born early. Ilona Kovács at Budapest University of Technology and Economics in Hungary and her colleagues gave 15 premature and 15 full-term babies goggles that filtered out red or green light. Once a month for eight months, the team sat the babies in a dark room and got them to stare at patterns of dots on a screen. The goggles made the dots invisible unless viewed in 3D. Sensors placed on each baby's head picked up electrical signals that revealed whether they could see the dots. If they could, the sensor registered pulses of 1.875 hertz; if not, there was only a background signal. The babies began to see stereo images about four months after they were born, whether they were premature or full term, showing that the environment, not an internal clock, is the likely trigger for the development of this ability in the brain Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1203096109 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16946 - Posted: 06.21.2012