By Steve Connor, Science Editor Scientists believe that the widespread use of antibiotics may be playing a significant role in exacerbating the obesity epidemic. Growing evidence suggests that oral antibiotic medicines may be affecting the growth of beneficial bacteria in the human intestine which is influencing whether some people put on weight when they overeat or take too little exercise, they said. The latest study, which has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, centres on a technique for counting the bacterial genes in the human intestine. It found that lean people are likely to have a more diverse community of gut flora compared to obese individuals. Previous work has already established a difference in the gut bacteria of lean and overweight people, but the latest work is being seen as lending support to the controversial idea that bacteria-killing antibiotics may be playing a role in predisposing some people to being fat. "It is a very real possibility," said Stanislav Dusko Ehrlich, a microbiologist at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research in Jouy-en-Josas, who was part of the Meta-HIT consortium of pan-European scientists who carried out the work. "What we have found is that bacterial communities in the gut appear to be different between lean and obese people. We can't be certain whether that perturbation is the cause, contribution or consequence of being overweight. But these bacteria are candidates for being a cause and that must be investigated," he said. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 15286 - Posted: 05.03.2011

Exposure to secondhand smoke, such as a person can get by riding in an enclosed car while someone else smokes, has a direct, measurable impact on the brain — and the effect is similar to what happens in the brain of the person doing the smoking. In fact, exposure to this secondhand smoke evokes cravings among smokers, according to a study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health. The study, published today in Archives of General Psychiatry, used positron emission tomography (PET) to demonstrate that one hour of secondhand smoke in an enclosed space results in enough nicotine reaching the brain to bind receptors that are normally targeted by direct exposure to tobacco smoke. This happens in the brain of both smokers and non-smokers. Previous research has shown that exposure to secondhand smoke increases the likelihood that children will become teenage smokers and makes it more difficult for adult smokers to quit. Such associations suggest that secondhand smoke acts on the brain to promote smoking behavior. The Surgeon General's Report concluded in 2006 that secondhand smoke causes heart disease and lung cancer in nonsmoking adults and many serious health conditions in children, including sudden infant death syndrome, respiratory infections, and more severe asthma. According to the CDC, almost 50,000 deaths per year can be attributed to secondhand smoke. For more information or for resources to help quit smoking, go to http://www.nida.nih.gov/DrugPages/Nicotine.html. The study can be found online at: http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15285 - Posted: 05.03.2011

By Victoria Gill It is a true picture of contentment, and now a scientist is suggesting that a pig's love of mud is more than just a way to keep cool. A researcher in the Netherlands has looked at wallowing behaviour in pigs' wild relatives to find out more about what motivates the animals to luxuriate in sludge. His conclusions suggest that wallowing is vital for the animals' well-being. The study is published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science. It is already well accepted that pigs use wallows to keep cool. The animals do not have normal sweat glands, so they are unable, otherwise, to regulate their body temperature. The scientist who carried out the study, Marc Bracke from Wageningen University and Research Centre, trawled the scientific literature for evidence of what motivates other animals to carry out similar behaviours. He examined closely related "wallowers", including hippos, which spend their time in water to keep cool. Dr Bracke also looked at other hoofed animals, such as deer. Although these animals do not wallow, they roll on the ground in order to "scent mark", which has an important role in attracting a mate. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 15284 - Posted: 05.02.2011

Analysis by Jennifer Viegas Some animals and plants that reproduce asexually "can in principle achieve essentially eternal life," according to a University of Gothenburg press release. Scientists at the university are studying such species to find out how they avoid aging. So far, one chemical appears to be key: telomerase. This is an enzyme that protects DNA. It is more active in the longest-lived people, so its benefits likely extend throughout the animal kingdom. The animals that can possibly achieve immortality under ideal conditions, such as sea squirts, certain corals, Hydra, and Turritopsis nutricula (the immortal jellyfish), often activate telomerase. Helen Nilsson Sköld of the Department of Marine Ecology, University of Gothenburg, and colleague Matthias Obst are studying sea squirts and starfish to learn more about how these marine creatures seem to ward off aging. Out of the animal immortality A-list, sea squirts and starfish have genes that most closely resemble those of humans. “Animals that clone themselves, in which part of an individual’s body is passed on to the next generations, have particularly interesting conditions related to remaining in good health to persist," Sköld was quoted as saying in the press release. "This makes it useful to study these animals in order to understand mechanisms of aging in humans.” © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15283 - Posted: 05.02.2011

By GINA KOLATA THE woman’s hips bulged in unsightly saddlebags. Then she had liposuction and, presto, those saddlebags disappeared. Photo after photo on plastic surgery Web sites make liposuction look easy, its results transformative. It has become the most popular plastic surgery, with more than 450,000 operations a year, each costing a few thousand dollars. But does the fat come back? And if it does, where does it show up? Until now, no one knew for sure. But a new study, led by Drs. Teri L. Hernandez and Robert H. Eckel of the University of Colorado, has answered those questions. And what he found is not good news. In the study, the researchers randomly assigned nonobese women to have liposuction on their protuberant thighs and lower abdomen or to refrain from having the procedure, serving as controls. As compensation, the women who were control subjects were told that when the study was over, after they learned the results, they could get liposuction if they still wanted it. For them, the price would also be reduced from the going rate. The result, published in the latest issue of Obesity, was that fat came back after it was suctioned out. It took a year, but it all returned. But it did not reappear in the women’s thighs. Instead, Dr. Eckel said, “it was redistributed upstairs,” mostly in the upper abdomen, but also around the shoulders and triceps of the arms. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 15282 - Posted: 05.02.2011

By Cari Nierenberg Brides and bashful types aren't the only ones who blush. Most of us have felt our cheeks burn up at least occasionally. But next time a rush of blood and heat give your face and neck a crimson glow, don't feel embarrassed. A new study suggests some unexpected benefits of blushing: It found that people who turn red after making a mistake or social blunder were considered more trustworthy and judged more positively than those who did not. In the research, published in the April issue of the journal Emotion, 196 college students (ages 17 to 44) played a prisoner's dilemma game online. During the game's first round, a virtual opponent cooperated with the participant's playing strategy and each shared the winnings. But after the second round, the opponent defected and earned a bigger payout than the participant. After both rounds, participants were shown photographs of their virtual female opponent bearing one of four expressions: neutral, neutral with a blush, embarrassment, and embarrassment plus blush. When students were asked to do a "trust task" at the end of the game, they judged the defector less harshly when she blushed and thought she was less likely to defect again. Participants even gave a blushing, neutral faced opponent more prize money during the trust task and rated her more honest than someone without rosy cheeks. "After you do something wrong, people like you more when you blush," says Corine Dijk, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and the study's lead author. © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 15281 - Posted: 04.30.2011

By Katherine Harmon Most dog and cat owners will happily describe their pet's disposition down to the smallest, human-like detail. But how much of that is over-reaching anthropomorphizing and how much is an individual animal's actual "personality" shining through? Researchers in the U.K. devised a series of tests to see how individual animals respond—both behaviorally and biologically—to different situations, choosing as their subjects 22 captive greenfinches (Carduelis chloris). Test 1: Who's scared of a cookie cutter? Each hungry greenfinch must face a small brightly colored cookie cutter in their food bowl. Some brave birds disregarded the novel intrusion and dived right into their feed within seconds. Other finches tarried for more than half an hour without working up the courage to eat from the adorned dish. Test 2: What's so interesting about Q-tips? With no food or water in the cage to distract the birds, a bundle of white Q-tips, tied together with string, is placed near one of four perches. Most birds declined to touch the new object, but some curious birds did flit to the nearby perch for a closer look. Test 3: How stressed are you, really? A behavioral reaction to a new situation only tells part of the story. To hunt for the physiologic response during these actions, the researchers screened the birds for their oxidative profiles, a blood-based measure of metabolites that can boost energy but can ultimately hamper cell repair. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 15280 - Posted: 04.30.2011

Mutations in a single gene are the cause of a rare genetic disorder that leaves children with a brain one-tenth the normal size, two international teams of researchers report April 28 in the American Journal of Human Genetics. To identify the mutations, researchers analyzed DNA from Turkish, Pakistani and Saudi Arabian families with children who had extremely underdeveloped brains. Affected children had mutations in a gene called NDE1, both groups found. Cells without a working copy of the gene don’t correctly divide to form new cells, a defect that probably prevents the brain from growing normally in early development. Further studies of the gene might reveal clues to how humans evolved large brains, the researchers speculate. —Laura Sanders © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15279 - Posted: 04.30.2011

By THE NEW YORK TIMES If a young child suddenly stops speaking, is autism to blame? That is among the questions recently posed by readers of the Consults blog. Here, Dr. Fred Volkmar, director of the Yale Child Study Center, explores the issue of regression in children and the diagnosis of autism. For more information on autism, see the additional responses in “Ask the Experts About Autism,” and The Times Health Guide: Autism. The issue of loss of skills, or regression, in children with autism is an interesting and complicated area. Dr. Leo Kanner, a pioneer of child psychiatry, had first described autism as a congenital condition that children are born with. Fairly shortly thereafter, though, some clinicians noted that about 20 percent of the time, parents said that a child would seem to develop normally but then lose skills. Subsequent work has generally confirmed this figure, more or less, but for several reasons, we still don’t understand the phenomenon or its significance. For one thing, the earliest signs of autism can be somewhat subtle. These signs become more numerous as children get past their first birthday. That’s one reason that screening tests for autism focus on children ages 18 to 24 months, when there are more things to look for. In addition, parents can vary tremendously in how sophisticated they are as observers. Studies suggest that if you use parents’ reports about their children as the primary way to classify regression, results can be unreliable. A few years ago, a medical student worked with me and went over hundreds of cases of children with autism and other problems, looking for parents’ reports of regression, but also looking at reports of early milestones and other possible early warning signs. The number of cases of regression were about what we expected, but there were several interesting findings. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 15278 - Posted: 04.30.2011

By Rob Stein, Pediatricians could diagnose children with autism earlier by asking parents to fill out a simple, five-minute checklist when they take their babies in for their first-year checkups, according to research released Thursday. The federally funded study involving more than 10,000 infants found that the questionnaire appeared to identify about half of children who eventually would be diagnosed with the brain disorder. Early diagnosis would allow doctors to treat children with autism sooner, when therapy appears to be much more effective. By allowing scientists to study children with autism when they are younger, it could also provide crucial new insights into the disease’s causes, further dispelling discredited theories about vaccines and other supposed risk factors, as well as leading to better ways to diagnose and treat the disorder. “This study is enormously important from the practical standpoint of helping families out,” said Karen Pierce of the University of California at San Diego, who led the research. “And from a scientific standpoint, it is undeniably important because for the first time you can study autism before the full-blown symptoms come on line.” More than 36,000 children are diagnosed each year in the United States with autism spectrum disorder, a condition marked by social, communication and behavioral problems. Most are not identified until about age 5. Researchers have been trying to find the signs in younger children in order to start intensive therapy sooner and try to minimize abnormal behaviors.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 15277 - Posted: 04.30.2011

Virginia Gewin The closed eyes, the unresponsiveness, the drool — sleep is an easily recognizable, all-encompassing state. But the divide between sleep and wakefulness may not be as clearcut as we thought. Research published today in Nature demonstrates that in visibly awake rats, neurons in some areas of the brain's cortex briefly go 'offline'. In these pockets, neuronal patterns resemble those associated with non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep1. "The rats were awake, but awake with a nice sprinkling of localized sleep in the cortex," says Guilio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and lead author of the study. The team used different techniques to measure both the local and global electric field potentials in the brain. Localized neural activity was measured using microwire arrays implanted deep in the frontal and parietal cortex field, whereas electroencephalography (EEG) detects global neuronal activity such as slow waves seen in NREM sleep. During slow-wave activity, neurons oscillate between ON and OFF states, but are typically OFF. By recording the activity of many small populations of neurons, Tononi and his colleagues showed that OFF states occur randomly throughout the cortex when a rat has been awake for a long time. "If we could watch the whole brain, it would be like watching boiling water - when you are awake, just before boiling, all the neurons are ON. As the animal gets tired, the OFF periods would then be the bubbles; where they appear is impossible to predict," he says. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 15276 - Posted: 04.28.2011

by Helen Fields The battle of the sexes has just heated up—in dogs. A new study finds that when a ball appears to magically change size in front of their eyes, female dogs notice but males don't. The researchers aren't sure what's behind the disparity, but experts say the finding supports the idea that—in some situations—male dogs trust their noses, whereas females trust their eyes. The study, published online today in Biology Letters, didn't set out to find sex differences. Cognitive biologist Corsin Müller and his colleagues at the University of Vienna and its Clever Dog Lab wanted to find out how good dogs are at size constancy—the ability to recognize that an object shouldn't change size if it disappears for a moment. But they recruited 25 female and 25 male dogs for the study, just to be safe. When a dog came to the lab for the test, first it got to play with two balls: one the size of a tennis ball and one that looked identical but was about the size of a cantaloupe. Then the dog and owner left the room while a researcher set up the experiment. When the dog came back, it sat in front of its owner, who was blindfolded so that his or her reactions wouldn't influence the pet. One of the balls sat to the left of a screen in front of the dog, and an experimenter, hiding behind another screen, slowly pulled the ball with transparent string. As the dog watched, the ball went behind the screen. Then the ball reappeared on the other side. But in some cases, it was replaced by the other ball, so the ball seemed to have magically shrunk or grown (see video). © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Attention
Link ID: 15275 - Posted: 04.28.2011

Babies born in spring are slightly more likely to develop anorexia nervosa, while those born in the autumn have a lower risk, say researchers. A report published in the British Journal of Psychiatry suggests temperature, sunlight, infection or the mother's diet could be responsible. Other academics said the effect was small and the disorder had many causes. The researchers analysed data from four previous studies including 1,293 people with anorexia. The researchers found an "excess of anorexia nervosa births" between March and June - for every seven anorexia cases expected, there were in fact eight. There were also fewer than expected cases in September and October. Dr Lahiru Handunnetthi, one of the report's authors, at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, said: "A number of previous studies have found that mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression are more common among those born in the spring - so this finding in anorexia is perhaps not surprising. "However, our study only provides evidence of an association. Now we need more research to identify which factors are putting people at particular risk." The report suggests seasonal changes in temperature, sunlight exposure and vitamin D levels, maternal nutrition and infections as "strong candidate factors". BBC © 2011

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 15274 - Posted: 04.28.2011

By Bruce Bower Right-handedness reaches back a half million years in the human evolutionary family, at least if scratched-up fossil teeth have anything to say about it. Stone-tool scratches on the front teeth of Neandertals and their presumed European ancestors occur at angles denoting right-handedness in most of these Stone Age hominids, just as in human populations today, say anthropologist David Frayer of the University of Kansas in Lawrence and his colleagues. Scientists have linked prevalent right-handedness in human populations to a left brain hemisphere that controls right-sided body movements and enables critical language functions. Given the new tooth evidence, populations of largely right-handed Neandertals and their predecessors must have possessed a gift for gab, Frayer’s team proposes in a paper published online April 14 in Laterality. “Findings so far suggest that most European hominids were right-handed by at least 500,000 years ago,” Frayer says. “A capacity for language appears to have ancient, not recent, roots.” Along with widespread right-handedness indicating that these ancient hominids possessed language-ready brains, humanlike inner-ear fossils show that Neandertals’ ancestors could hear all the sounds employed in modern tongues, Frayer asserts. Other researchers contend that, based on vocal-tract reconstructions informed by skull and upper-body fossils, Neandertals were physically incapable of articulating some modern speech sounds. In these scientists’ view, language as spoken today originated in Homo sapiens sometime after 200,000 years ago. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Laterality; Evolution
Link ID: 15273 - Posted: 04.28.2011

People taking a widely used class of antidepressants known as SSRIs may find the benefits of the medication cancelled out when they also take painkillers such as ibuprofen, scientists say. The findings from experiments in mice can't prove that drugs such as ibuprofen and Aspirin — known as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs — stop antidepressants from working, the researchers said. But the possible effect is worth considering, since a similar effect was found analyzing data from a human study, the researchers say in this week's online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS. NSAID painkillers may prevent a class of antidepressants from working effectively.NSAID painkillers may prevent a class of antidepressants from working effectively. iStock "Analysis of our clinical data strongly suggests that remission rates among depressed individuals may be improved by avoiding certain common over-the-counter medications," Paul Greengard of Rockefeller University in New York and his co-authors wrote. Mice treated with an SSRI antidepressant behaved differently when they were also given the anti-inflammatory painkillers, scientists found. The animals performed worse on tests measuring their stress and depression than those that took just the antidepressant. Tests showed mice treated with the antidepressant citalopram and an NSAID also had lower levels of the antidepressant in their blood than those taking the antidepressant alone. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Depression; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15272 - Posted: 04.28.2011

By Jennifer Viegas The brainier a bird is, the better its chances are of thriving in a city, according to a new study that found many big-brained birds can succeed in urban environments. "Big" in this case refers to brain size relative to body size. In other words, the larger the ratio of brain to body, the more likely the bird will thrive in an urban environment. "Species with relatively larger brains tend to have broader diets, live in diverse habitats and have a higher propensity for behavioral innovations in foraging," lead author Alexei Maklakov told Discovery News. "They are better able to establish viable populations when introduced to new habitats by humans." Maklakov, a researcher in the Department of Animal Ecology at Uppsala University, and his colleagues studied how well -- or not -- 82 species of passerine birds belonging to 22 avian families did in and around a dozen cities in France and Switzerland. Bird species that were able to breed in city centers were considered successful colonizers. Birds that bred around the cities, but not in the urban regions themselves, were considered to be urban avoiders. For the study, which is published in the latest issue of Royal Society Biology Letters, the scientists also looked at the brain size and body mass of each bird. The researchers determined that the following are brainy birds that do well in cities: the great tit, the blue tit, the carrion crow, the jackdaw, the magpie, the nuthatch, the wren, the long-tailed tit and more. Pigeons are not passerines, so these ubiquitous urban dwellers were not included in the study. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 15271 - Posted: 04.28.2011

By Nina Bai Recovering addicts are often told to avoid the people, places, and things connected with their addiction—tried-and-true advice that may be gaining support from neuroscience. A view widely accepted among addiction researchers is that drug abuse can cause the brain to form persistent, enduring associations between a drug and the environment in which it is purchased and consumed. These mental ties represent a subconscious form of learning and contribute to the tenacious grip of addictions. "There's a growing consensus in the addiction field that addiction is a learning and memory disorder. We learn behavior associated with these drugs too well." says Hitoshi Morikawa, a neurobiologist at the University of Texas at Austin. New research from Morikawa's lab, published April 6 in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that repeated use of alcohol can make the brain more susceptible to forming reward-based associations. Mice given a weeklong binge of alcohol were more likely to remember the environment in which they later received cocaine. In human addicts similar associations could explain why certain environments are apt to trigger relapse. Addictive drugs cause dopamine neurons, which synthesize and store the neurotransmitter dopamine, to release it, signaling to other brain areas to take note of the context surrounding the drug—the better to replicate the experience in the future. "We can think of those neurons that release dopamine as 'teachers' that tell other brain areas, the 'students,' to learn the associations surrounding rewards such as food, sex and addictive drugs," Morikawa explains. In essence, alcohol and other addictive drugs help the "teachers" teach better. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15270 - Posted: 04.28.2011

By Bonnie Berkowitz, Black coffee. Hot peppers. Truffles. Oysters. The world is full of polarizing flavors and foods, beloved by many, despised by just as many. Why is that? Scientists have untangled some — but not nearly all — of the mysteries behind our love and hatred of certain foods. While we might say, “That tastes like strawberry,” scientists who study these things would disagree. Our tongues actually perceive only five basic tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, salty and “umami,” the Japanese word for savory. To go from merely sweet to “Mmm, strawberry!” the nose has to get involved. The taste and olfactory senses, along with any chemical irritation a food creates in the throat (think mint, hot pepper or olive oil), all send the brain the information it needs to distinguish flavors. “We as primates are born liking sweet and disliking bitter,” said Marcia Pelchat, who studies food preferences at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. The theory is that we’re hard-wired to like and dislike certain basic tastes so that the mouth can act as the body’s gatekeeper. Sweet means energy; sour means not ripe yet. Savory means food may contain protein. Bitter means caution, as many poisons are bitter. Salty means sodium, a necessary ingredient for several functions in our bodies. (By the way, those tongue maps that show taste buds clumped into zones that detect sweet, bitter, etc.? Very misleading. Taste receptors of all types blanket our tongues — except for the center line — and some reside elsewhere in our mouths and throats.)

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 15269 - Posted: 04.28.2011

by Michael Balter Kids who score higher on IQ tests will, on average, go on to do better in conventional measures of success in life: academic achievement, economic success, even greater health, and longevity. Is that because they are more intelligent? Not necessarily. New research concludes that IQ scores are partly a measure of how motivated a child is to do well on the test. And harnessing that motivation might be as important to later success as so-called native intelligence. Researchers have long debated what IQ tests actually measure, and whether average differences in IQ scores--such as those between different ethnic groups--reflect differences in intelligence, social and economic factors, or both. The debate moved heavily into the public arena with the 1994 publication of The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which suggested that the lower average IQ scores of some ethnic groups, such as African-Americans and Hispanics, were due in large part to genetic differences between them and Caucasian groups. That view has been challenged by many scientists. For example, in his 2009 book "Intelligence and How to Get It," Richard Nisbett, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, argued that differences in IQ scores largely disappear when researchers control for social and economic factors. New work, led by Angela Lee Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and reported online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explores the effect of motivation on how well people perform on IQ tests. While subjects taking such tests are usually instructed to try as hard as they can, previous research has shown that not everyone makes the maximum effort. A number of studies have found that subjects who are promised monetary rewards for doing well on IQ and other cognitive tests score significantly higher. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Intelligence; Emotions
Link ID: 15268 - Posted: 04.26.2011

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR If a blind person were suddenly able to see, would he be able to recognize by sight the shape of an object he previously knew only by touch? Presented with a cube and a globe, could he tell which was which just by looking? The question goes to the heart of a problem in the philosophy of mind: Is there an innate conception of space common to both sight and touch, or do we learn that relationship only through experience? Research published online April 10 in the journal Nature Neuroscience may have finally answered the question, which has vexed philosophers and scientists for more than 300 years. William Molyneux, an Irish politician and scientist, first raised the issue in a letter to John Locke in 1688. Locke took up what came to be known as Molyneux’s problem in “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” published a few years later. Locke’s answer was no. “He would not be able with certainty to say which was the globe, which the cube, whilst he only saw them,” he wrote, “though he could unerringly name them by his touch.” For Locke, the connection between the senses was learned. Dozens of philosophers have since considered the problem, among them George Berkeley, Gottfried Leibniz, Voltaire, Diderot, Adam Smith and William James. And some efforts have been made to answer the question experimentally, beginning in the early 18th century with studies of patients whose congenital cataracts had been removed in adulthood and continuing recently in observations of newborns. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Vision
Link ID: 15267 - Posted: 04.26.2011