By THE NEW YORK TIMES Dr. Wiesner and Dr. Volkmar respond: Several readers had questions about the range of adult outcomes in autism and how treatments may affect outcomes in individual children. This is a very interesting and complicated — in a happy way – topic, because it seems like things are improving on balance, though not for every child. More and more individuals with autism are now able to function independently as adults. This is a major change over past decades, probably reflecting earlier diagnosis and more effective treatments. There is a very good summary of this in a chapter by Patricia Howlin in the Handbook of Autism (2005, Wiley). Unfortunately not every child gets better. Sometimes the outcome seems to relate to the severity of the autism in childhood. Individuals whose disability is more profound continue, as adults, to need considerable support and help. It is unfortunately the case that for this population, services are often minimal, research is sparse and resources are lacking. The federal government has identified this as a priority area in autism work, and rightly so. But even when we are fairly optimistic about an individual child, he or she may not do well as an adult. This is one of the reasons those of us who have been in the field for a long time are very careful about predicting the future to parents. We can only talk, in general, about what on average are good or bad prognostic factors. For individuals with autism who can go on to college, a number of resources are available on the Yale Child Study Center Web site, including books and links to programs. Options range from small and very supportive programs specific to individuals with autism and related disorders, to traditional colleges and universities. Our book, “A Practical Guide to Autism,” also has a chapter on the topic of adults and discusses college services. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 15250 - Posted: 04.21.2011

by Jon Hamilton Researchers have found evidence that the placenta plays an important role in fetal brain development during the early stages of pregnancy. Experiments in mice show that during a key period, the placenta becomes a source of the chemical serotonin, which helps determine the wiring of key circuits in the brain. The finding, published in the journal Nature, could help explain what leads to brain disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. And it shows that the placenta does a lot more than simply transport nutrients from a mother to her unborn baby. "The placenta is not just a passive bag of cells sitting there just allowing things to flow freely between the mom and the fetus," says Pat Levitt, director of the Zilhka Neurogenetic Institute at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine. "We can think of it as a machine that can produce its own hormones, its own chemicals that can have an effect on the developing fetus itself," Levitt says. Levitt's research team discovered this while studying the role of serotonin in early brain development. The placenta itself is the source of a specific signal at a very particular period in development which is influencing the brain of the new child. And that influence is likely to be long lasting. Copyright 2011 NPR

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15249 - Posted: 04.21.2011

by Dan Jones IT IS the year 2500. Physicists have long had a Grand Unified Theory of Everything and neuroscientists now know precisely how the hardware of the brain runs the software of the mind and dictates behaviour. Lately, reports have begun to emerge that computer engineers at the Institute for Advanced Behavioural Prediction have built a quantum supercomputer that draws on these advances to predict the future, including what people will do and when. Trusted sources say that IABP researchers have secretly run thousands of predictions about citizens' behaviour - and they have never been wrong. Suddenly, deep philosophical questions are making headlines as commentators sound the death knell for free will. On the face of it, the consequences of proving all our actions are predetermined look bleak. Psychological experiments have shown that undermining people's sense of free will leads them to behave more dishonestly, more selfishly and more aggressively. But perhaps there is no need to panic. Some philosophers have found that our sense of free will is less threatened by determinism than the commentators suppose - so even faced with incontrovertible evidence that behaviour is predetermined, we still see ourselves as free and responsible for our own actions. Nothing will change. Who is correct? Will the public buy this reassuring message? Or will the manifest truth of determinism kill off belief in free will, taking down notions of moral culpability and punishment with it? Will nihilism, moral disintegration and anarchy follow? This is not merely an esoteric thought experiment. Neuroscientists increasingly describe our behaviour as the result of a chain of cause-and-effect, in which one physical brain state or pattern of neural activity inexorably leads to the next, culminating in a particular action or decision. With little space for free choice in this chain of causation, the conscious, deliberating self seems to be a fiction. From this perspective, all the real action is occurring at the level of synapses and neurotransmitters - putting us a lot closer to that deterministic world of 2500 than most people think. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 15248 - Posted: 04.21.2011

The Neuroscience of the Gut By Robert Martone People may advise you to listen to your gut instincts: now research suggests that your gut may have more impact on your thoughts than you ever realized. Scientists from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the Genome Institute of Singapore led by Sven Pettersson recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that normal gut flora, the bacteria that inhabit our intestines, have a significant impact on brain development and subsequent adult behavior. We human beings may think of ourselves as a highly evolved species of conscious individuals, but we are all far less human than most of us appreciate. Scientists have long recognized that the bacterial cells inhabiting our skin and gut outnumber human cells by ten-to-one. Indeed, Princeton University scientist Bonnie Bassler compared the approximately 30,000 human genes found in the average human to the more than 3 million bacterial genes inhabiting us, concluding that we are at most one percent human. We are only beginning to understand the sort of impact our bacterial passengers have on our daily lives. Moreover, these bacteria have been implicated in the development of neurological and behavioral disorders. For example, gut bacteria may have an influence on the body’s use of vitamin B6, which in turn has profound effects on the health of nerve and muscle cells. They modulate immune tolerance and, because of this, they may have an influence on autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis. They have been shown to influence anxiety-related behavior, although there is controversy regarding whether gut bacteria exacerbate or ameliorate stress related anxiety responses. In autism and other pervasive developmental disorders, there are reports that the specific bacterial species present in the gut are altered and that gastrointestinal problems exacerbate behavioral symptoms. A newly developed biochemical test for autism is based, in part, upon the end products of bacterial metabolism. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Obesity
Link ID: 15247 - Posted: 04.21.2011

The longer a man's fourth or ring finger is compared to his index finger, the more likely he is to be judged attractive by women, according to a study released Wednesday. The results, published in the British Royal Society's journal Biological Sciences, unveil intricate links between foetal exposure of males to hormones, the development of certain physical traits, and what turns on the opposite sex. It also adds to a growing body of research -- conducted under the banner of evolutionary psychology -- suggesting that the drivers of human behavior are found, more than previously suspected, in "nature" rather than "nurture." Earlier studies had already shown that the size ratio between the fourth and second fingers, especially of the right hand, is a reliable indicator of the extent a man was exposed to testosterone while still in the womb. The bigger the gap between a longer ring finger and a shorter index, the greater the likely impact of the hormone. For the new study, scientists led by Camille Ferdenzi of the University of Geneva designed an experiment to find out if women are drawn to the telltale signs of high testosterone levels in men -- a symmetrical face, a deeper voice, a particular body odor -- who have this more "masculine" finger configuration. More than 80 women university students between 18 and 34 looked at pictures of 49 similarly aged men, and were asked to evaluate them for masculinity and attractiveness. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15246 - Posted: 04.21.2011

By Janet Raloff Children exposed in the womb to substantial levels of neurotoxic pesticides have somewhat lower IQs by the time they enter school than do kids with virtually no exposure. A trio of studies screened women for compounds in blood or urine that mark exposure to organophosphate pesticides such as chlorpyrifos, diazinon and malathion. These bug killers, which can cross the human placenta, work by inhibiting brain-signaling compounds. Although the pesticides’ residential use was phased out in 2000, spraying on farm fields remains legal. The three new studies began in the late 1990s and followed children through age 7. Pesticide exposures stem from farm work in more than 300 low-income Mexican-American families in California, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and their colleagues report. In two comparably sized New York City populations, exposures likely trace to bug spraying of homes or eating treated produce. Among the California families, the average IQ for the 20 percent of children with the highest prenatal organophosphate exposure was 7 points lower compared with the least-exposed group. A Columbia University study followed low-income black and Hispanic families. Here, each additional 4.6 picrograms of chlorpyrifos per gram of blood in a woman during pregnancy correlated with a drop of 1.4 percent in her youngster’s IQ and 2.8 percent in a measure of the child’s working memory. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 15245 - Posted: 04.21.2011

By Daniel Strain A famous antidrug ad compares the brain on drugs to a frying egg. Now, a new study gives a broad look at how methamphetamine might scramble the entire body. In one of the broadest surveys yet, U.S. researchers have illustrated the many genetic and cellular impacts of meth exposure in fruit flies. In addition to likely wreaking havoc on muscles and sperm, the drug seems to kick fly sugar metabolism into overdrive, the group reports online April 20 in PLoS ONE. “One tends to think of methamphetamine as being a drug of abuse largely for fairly advanced organisms,” says Desmond Smith, a geneticist at UCLA who was not involved in this study. “It was quite nifty to try and look at what’s happening in the humble fly.” Though flies and people are very different beasts, meth appears to tweak some of the same basic biochemical networks in both, says Barry Pittendrigh, a coauthor of the new report. And while the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster may be humble, it’s also one of the best explored organisms in science. Using fruit flies, scientists can probe meth’s toll not just on genes but also on big molecules such as proteins and on little molecules like sugars with ease. That makes this iconic bug a good window on a uniquely human addiction. Meth batters cells throughout the fly’s body. “It’s a really horrible compound,” says Pittendrigh, a molecular entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The drug seems to kick off muscle degradation, disrupt sperm production and even speed up the aging process in a host of cells. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15244 - Posted: 04.21.2011

* By Brandon Keim It’s widely thought that human language evolved in universally similar ways, following trajectories common across place and culture, and possibly reflecting common linguistic structures in our brains. But a massive, millennium-spanning analysis of humanity’s major language families suggests otherwise. Instead, language seems to have evolved along varied, complicated paths, guided less by neurological settings than cultural circumstance. If our minds do shape the evolution of language, it’s likely at levels deeper and more nuanced than many researchers anticipated. “It’s terribly important to understand human cognition, and how the human mind is put together,” said Michael Dunn, an evolutionary linguist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute and co-author of the new study, published April 14 in Nature. The findings “do not support simple ideas of the mind as a computer, with a language processor plugged in. They support much-more complex ideas of how language arises.” How languages have emerged and changed through human history is a subject of ongoing fascination. Language is, after all, the greatest of all social tools: It’s what lets people share and cooperate, divide labor, make plans, preserve knowledge, tell stories. In short, it lets humans be sophisticated social creatures. One school of thought, pioneered by linguist Noam Chomsky, holds that language is a product of dedicated mechanisms in the human brain. These can be imagined as a series of switches, each corresponding to particular forms of grammar and syntax and structure. Wired.com © 2010 Condé Nast Digital.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 15243 - Posted: 04.19.2011

MacGregor Campbell, consultant Does free will actually exist? Or are we all just biological robots? In this video, see why modern neuroscience claims free will is an illusion and why psychology experiments suggest we may be better off believing the lie. Controlling our own destiny is so ingrained in modern society that its non-existence is constantly being challenged. You can read more about free will in our full-length feature: "Grand delusions: Why we're determined to be free" If you missed our other animated explainers, take a look at our videos about the meaning of dreams and how our lives are becoming more like video games. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 15242 - Posted: 04.19.2011

by Jessica Griggs Psychologist Daniel Gilbert knows exactly how happy 5000 people around the world are right now. What has he learned about our ups and downs? What's so tough about studying happiness? One problem is that researchers often measure different things and then talk about them as though they were interchangeable measures of the same thing. We can measure how happy someone is in the moment or how satisfied they are with their lives, and while both are interesting, they are not the same. For instance, we now know that once you earn about $75,000 per year, your happiness won't increase with more income but your satisfaction will. So the public policies that will lead citizens to say "I'm satisfied" are not necessarily the same as those that will lead them to say "I'm happy," and so when we make policy we must first decide which of these we want to maximise. Can we trust what people say about happiness? There is a widespread belief that it is "objective" to measure muscle contractions and cerebral blood flow but "subjective" to measure happiness by asking people how they feel. That's rubbish. People's reports of their emotions are incredibly reliable and they wouldn't correlate with all the other indicators of emotion if they weren't. The issue isn't what you ask, but when. Asking people to report how they felt yesterday when watching TV is not particularly useful because retrospective reports are notoriously biased. Ideally, you want to ask this question when people are in the middle of watching TV. Unfortunately, until recently, collecting data this way has been wildly impractical. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 15241 - Posted: 04.19.2011

By Liam Creedon Swearing after injury may be good for your health, new research suggests. Scientists from Keele University found that letting forth a volley of foul language can have a "pain-lessening effect". To test the theory, students put their hands in ice-cold water while swearing. They then did the exercise again while repeating a harmless phrase. Researchers found that volunteers were able to keep their hands in the water for longer when repeating the swear word, establishing a link between swearing and an increase in pain tolerance. The team believes the pain-lessening effect occurs because swearing triggers the "fight or flight" response. The accelerated heart rates of the students repeating the swear word may indicate an increase in aggression, in a classic fight or flight response of "downplaying feebleness in favour of a more pain-tolerant machismo". The research proves that swearing triggers not only an emotional response, but a physical one too, which may explain why the centuries-old practice of cursing developed and why it still persists today. Dr Richard Stephens, who worked on the project, said: "Swearing has been around for centuries and is an almost universal human linguistic phenomenon. "It taps into emotional brain centres and appears to arise in the right brain, whereas most language production occurs in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Emotions
Link ID: 15240 - Posted: 04.19.2011

By Rob Stein, U.S. health authorities recommended Tuesday that doctors diagnose the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease before people develop full-blown dementia. The National Institutes of Health and the Alzheimer’s Association made the recommendation, which could at least double the number of Americans receiving a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and its early phases. It is the first revision of the guidelines for diagnosing the brain disease in 27 years. In addition to updating the criteria for diagnosing full Alz­heimer’s, the health authorities created two new categories of the illness: a “preclinical” phase that occurs before patients show any memory loss or other thinking problems, and “mild cognitive impairment,” in which symptoms are subtle. The recommendations are based on the growing realization that Alzheimer’s is the result of a gradual destruction of brain cells that control memory and other cognitive abilities, a process that begins years before clear-cut dementia becomes apparent. “The new guidelines reflect today’s understanding of how key changes in the brain lead to Alz­heimer’s disease,” Creighton Phelps of the NIH’s National Institute on Aging told reporters during a briefing held Monday before the guidelines were released. The recommendations are aimed at helping patients and their families prepare financially, logistically and emotionally for the disease, which can require years of intensive, expensive care.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15239 - Posted: 04.19.2011

By PAM BELLUCK The other day, Paul Simon was rehearsing a favorite song: his own “Darling Lorraine,” about a love that starts hot but turns very cold. He found himself thinking about a three-note rhythmic pattern near the end, where Lorraine (spoiler alert) gets sick and dies. “The song has that triplet going on underneath that pushes it along, and at a certain point I wanted it to stop because the story suddenly turns very serious,” Mr. Simon said in an interview. “The stopping of sounds and rhythms,” he added, “it’s really important, because, you know, how can I miss you unless you’re gone? If you just keep the thing going like a loop, eventually it loses its power.” An insight like this may seem purely subjective, far removed from anything a scientist could measure. But now some scientists are aiming to do just that, trying to understand and quantify what makes music expressive — what specific aspects make one version of, say, a Beethoven sonata convey more emotion than another. The results are contributing to a greater understanding of how the brain works and of the importance of music in human development, communication and cognition, and even as a potential therapeutic tool. Research is showing, for example, that our brains understand music not only as emotional diversion, but also as a form of motion and activity. The same areas of the brain that activate when we swing a golf club or sign our name also engage when we hear expressive moments in music. Brain regions associated with empathy are activated, too, even for listeners who are not musicians. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Emotions
Link ID: 15238 - Posted: 04.19.2011

By BENEDICT CAREY The answer is neither. Font size has no effect on memory, even though most people assume that bigger is better. But font style does. New research finds that people retain significantly more material — whether science, history or language — when they study it in a font that is not only unfamiliar but also hard to read. Psychologists have long known that people’s instincts about how well they’ve learned a subject are often way off. The feel of a study session can be a poor reflection of its nutritional value: Concepts that seem perfectly clear become fuzzy at exam time, and those that are hard to grasp somehow click into place when it counts. In recent years, researchers have begun to clarify why this is so, and in some cases how to correct for it. The findings are especially relevant nowadays, experts say. “So much of the learning that we do now is unsupervised, on our own,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, “that it’s crucial to be able to monitor that learning accurately; that is, to know how well we know what we know, so that we avoid fooling ourselves.” Mistakes in judging what we know — in metacognition, as it’s known — are partly rooted in simple biases. For instance, most people assume when studying that newly learned facts will long be remembered and that further practice won’t make much difference. These beliefs are subconscious and automatic, studies find, even though people know better when they stop to think about it. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15237 - Posted: 04.19.2011

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR Chronic snoring can be more than a noisy nuisance. Up to three-quarters of nightly snorers also have sleep apnea, which causes breathing interruptions throughout the night. Sleep apnea raises the risk of heart disease, stroke and high blood pressure. Snorers looking for a cure are often told to sleep on their sides, not on their backs, so that the base of the tongue will not collapse into the back of the throat, narrowing the airway and obstructing breathing. But for some snorers, changing sleep position may not make much of a difference. Scientists say there are two types of snorers: those who snore only when they sleep on their backs, and those who do it regardless of their position. After sleep researchers in Israel examined more than 2,000 sleep apnea patients, for example, they found that 54 percent were “positional,” meaning they snored only when asleep on their backs. The rest were “nonpositional.” Other studies have shown that weight plays a major role. In one large study, published in 1997, patients who snored or had breathing abnormalities only while sleeping on their backs were typically thinner, while their nonpositional counterparts usually were heavier. The latter group, wrote the authors, consequently suffered worse sleep and more daytime fatigue. But that study also found that patients who were overweight saw reductions in the severity of their apnea when they lost weight. According to the National Sleep Foundation, in people who are overweight, slimming down is generally the best way to cure sleep apnea and end snoring for good. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 15236 - Posted: 04.19.2011

By KATHERINE BOUTON After reading “The Longevity Project,” I took an unscientific survey of friends and relatives asking them what personality characteristic they thought was most associated with long life. Several said “optimism,” followed by “equanimity,” “happiness,” “a good marriage,” “the ability to handle stress.” One offered, jokingly, “good table manners.” In fact, “good table manners” is closest to the correct answer. Cheerfulness, optimism, extroversion and sociability may make life more enjoyable, but they won’t necessarily extend it, Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin found in a study that covered eight decades. The key traits are prudence and persistence. “The findings clearly revealed that the best childhood personality predictor of longevity was conscientiousness,” they write, “the qualities of a prudent, persistent, well-organized person, like a scientist-professor — somewhat obsessive and not at all carefree.” “Howard, that sounds like you!” Dr. Friedman’s graduate students joked when they saw the statistical findings. On a recent visit to New York, Dr. Friedman and Dr. Martin did both seem statistically inclined to longevity. Conscientiousness abounded. They had persisted in a 20-year study — following up on documentation that had been collected over the previous 60 years by Lewis Terman and his successors — despite scoffing from students: Get a life! The hotel room (Dr. Martin’s) was meticulously neat, and they had prudently ordered tea and fruit from room service. Both were trim and tanned, measured in their answers, trading off responses like the longtime collaborators they are. Despite a busy schedule they were organized enough for a relaxed talk. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 15235 - Posted: 04.19.2011

Ewen Callaway "The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail," Charles Darwin wrote in 1860, "makes me sick." The seemingly useless, even cumbersome, gaudy plumage did not fit with his theory of natural selection, in which traits that help to secure survival are passed on. But Darwin eventually made peace with the peacock's train, and its plumage has become the poster child for his theory of sexual selection, in which ostensibly useless traits can evolve when they are preferred by choosy females. In recent years, however, a furious debate has emerged among behavioural ecologists over whether the train of the male peafowl, Pavo cristatus, still woos peahens. Research in which peacocks' tails were experimentally plucked, published online this month in Animal Behaviour1, now suggests that the answer is yes — but only sometimes. "There are other things that we think are going into that decision," says Roslyn Dakin, a PhD student in behavioural ecology at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada. Dakin and a colleague, Robert Montgomerie, tracked three populations of feral peacocks and peahens during the spring breeding season, when hopeful males stage elaborately choreographed routines for picky females. They found that males with very few eyespots in their tail feathers — a measure of the size of the tail — were unattractive to females, but males with more spots than average had no advantage. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 15234 - Posted: 04.19.2011

By RONI CARYN RABIN Older people suffering from mild memory and cognition problems may be less likely to progress to full-blown Alzheimer’s disease if they receive treatment for medical conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure and cholesterol, a new study has found. In 2004, researchers at Daping Hospital in Chongqing, China, began following 837 residents ages 55 and older who had mild cognitive impairment but not dementia. Of these, 414 had at least one medical condition that can damage blood vessels and impair blood flow to the brain. After five years, 298 of the study participants had developed Alzheimer’s. Subjects who had had high blood pressure or other vascular problems at the beginning of the study were twice as likely to develop the dementia, compared with those without these risks, the researchers found. Half of those with vascular risks progressed to Alzheimer’s, compared with only 36 percent of those without. Among those participants with vascular problems, those who received treatment were almost 40 percent less likely to develop Alzheimer’s than those who did not, the study also reported. The researchers suggested that vascular risk factors may affect the metabolism of beta-amyloid plaque, which accumulates in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and seems to play a pivotal role in the disease. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15233 - Posted: 04.18.2011

By NICHOLAS WADE A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated. The finding fits well with the evidence from fossil skulls and DNA that modern humans originated in Africa. It also implies, though does not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of considerable controversy among linguists. The detection of such an ancient signal in language is surprising. Because words change so rapidly, many linguists think that languages cannot be traced very far back in time. The oldest language tree so far reconstructed, that of the Indo-European family, which includes English, goes back 9,000 years at most. Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language. Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it. Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has about 45 phonemes. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 15232 - Posted: 04.18.2011

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID WASHINGTON — Reports of sleeping air traffic controllers highlight a long-known and often ignored hazard: Workers on night shifts can have trouble concentrating and even staying awake. "Government officials haven't recognized that people routinely fall asleep at night when they're doing shift work," said Dr. Charles Czeisler, chief of sleep medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Czeisler said studies show that 30 percent to 50 percent of night-shift workers report falling asleep at least once a week while on the job. So the notion that this has happened only a few times among the thousands of controllers "is preposterous," he said in a telephone interview. In a sign of growing awareness of the problem, the Federal Aviation Administration said Saturday it was changing air traffic controllers' work schedules most likely to cause fatigue. The announcement comes after the agency disclosed another incident in which a controller fell asleep while on duty early Saturday morning at a busy Miami regional facility. According to a preliminary review, there was no impact to flight operations, the FAA said. Czeisler said the potential danger isn't limited to air traffic controllers, but can apply to truck and bus drivers, airline pilots and those in the maritime industry. Who else? Factory workers, police, firefighters, emergency workers, nurses and doctors, cooks, hotel employees, people in the media and others on night or changing shifts. Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sleep
Link ID: 15231 - Posted: 04.18.2011