Making Science More Better For You on 11/13/07

A success without educators or drugs? How could that be?

Troubled young pupils may turn out well, too, studies say
By Benedict Carey
Published: November 12, 2007

According to Science.com, educators and psychologists have long feared that kindergartners with behavior problems were doomed to fall behind in the upper grades. But two new studies suggest that many young children who are identified as troubled or given diagnoses of mental disorders settle down in time and do as well in school as their peers.

Experts say the findings, being published Tuesday in two journals, could change the way scientists, teachers and parents understand and manage children who are disruptive or emotionally withdrawn in the early years of school. The studies may even prompt a reassessment of the possible causes of disruptive behavior in some children.

"I think these may become landmark findings, forcing us to ask whether these acting-out kinds of problems are secondary to inappropriate maturity expectations that some educators place on young children as soon as they enter classrooms," said Sharon Landesman Ramey, director of Georgetown University Center on Health and Education, who was not connected to either study.

In one study, an international team of researchers analyzed measures of social and intellectual development from 20,000 children and found that disruptive or antisocial behaviors in kindergarten were not at all correlated with academic success at the end of elementary school.

Kindergartners who interrupted the teacher, defied instructions, even picked fights, were performing just as well in reading and math as well-behaved children of the same abilities by fifth grade, the study found.
Other researchers cautioned that the findings, being reported in Developmental Psychology, did not imply that emotional problems were trivial or could not derail academic success in the years before or after elementary school.

In the other study, government researchers using imaging techniques found that the brains of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder developed normally but more slowly, in some areas, than in children without the disorder.

The disorder, ADHD, is by far the most common psychiatric diagnosis given to disruptive young children - 3 percent to 5 percent of school-age children are thought to struggle with attention problems - and researchers have long debated whether it was due to a brain deficit or a delay in development.

Doctors said the report, being published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, helps explain why so many children grow out of the diagnosis, usually in adolescence.

The findings on behavior and academic success grew out of a collaboration among a dozen leading researchers to reassess data from six large child-development studies performed since 1970.

Each of the studies tracked hundreds of children from an early age through elementary school on a number of measures, from reading and math skills to emotional stability and concentration, or attention.

Most used teacher reports to gauge students' emotional and social progress and their ability to pay attention when asked. The researchers adjusted the findings to eliminate the influence of factors like family income and family structure.

While there was little correlation between behavior problems in kindergarten and academic success later on, the researchers did find that scores on math tests at age 5 or 6 were highly correlated with academic success in fifth grade. Kindergarten reading skills, and scores on attention measures, also predicted later academic success, but less strongly than math scores did. The results were about the same in girls and boys.

The study suggests that preschool programs might consider developing better, or more effective, math training, the authors said.

The findings should also put to rest concerns that boys and girls who are restless, disruptive or withdrawn in kindergarten will suffer academically as a result.

"For kindergarten, it appears teachers are able to work around these behavior problems in a way that enables kids to learn just much as other kids with equal levels of ability," said the lead author, Greg Duncan, a professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University.

This finding in particular, he said, "has been very controversial among developmental psychologists who have seen the paper."

One who is concerned, Ross Thompson, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, said it would be a mistake to conclude from the results that programs to guide preschoolers' emotional development were not helpful.

"That would be a double-whammy for really difficult kids," he said, "to have no help managing their behavior and then - wham! - to get labeled as problem kids as soon as they enter school."
"Welcome to Kindergarten...and may I say that's a wonderful little "Born to Lose" tattoo you have there."


Hipster Headline of the day

Pete Doherty lends support to distraught Amy Winehouse as husband is taken to the cells (the Daily Mail)
Those creative types, they understand one another


He who talks first loses
Men Talk More Than Women Overall, But Not In All Circumstances

ScienceDaily (Nov. 13, 2007) — A Gallup poll recently confirmed that men and women both believe that it is women who are most likely to possess the gift of gab. Some even believe that women are biologically built for conversation. This widespread belief is challenged in new research.
The article* describes a recent set of meta-analyses conducted by Campbell Leaper and Melanie Ayres. These analyses collect all of the available evidence from decades of scientific study and systematically combine the findings into an overall picture of the differences between men and women regarding talkativeness.

The authors found a small but statistically reliable tendency for men to be more talkative than women overall -- especially in certain contexts, such as when they were conversing with their wives or with strangers. Women talked more to their children and to their college classmates.

The type of speech was also explored in the analyses, which looked at verbal behavior in a wide variety of contexts. The researchers discovered that, with strangers, women were generally more talkative when it came to using speech to affirm her connection to the listener, while men's speech focused more on an attempt to influence the listener. With close friends and family, however, there was very little difference between genders in the amount of speech.


"These findings compellingly debunk simplistic stereotypes about gender differences in language use," conclude Leaper and Ayres.

Boy, that’s great that they have all that debunkin' goin' on. They’re doing valuable work. If you don't believe us, just ask them.


A warped disc? We bet it's Syd Barret’s demo of “Interstellar Overdrive”
Nearby Barred Spiral Galaxy Shows Off Its Warped Disc

ScienceDaily (Nov. 12, 2007) — Known until now as a simple number in a catalogue, NGC 134, the 'Island in the Universe' is replete with remarkable attributes, and the VLT has clapped its eyes on them. Just like our own Galaxy, NGC 134 is a barred spiral with its spiral arms loosely wrapped around a bright, bar-shaped central region.

One feature that stands out is its warped disc. While a galaxy's disc is often pictured as a flat structure of gas and stars surrounding the galaxy's centre, a warped disc is a structure that, when viewed sideways, resembles a bent record album left out too long in the burning Sun.

Warps are actually not atypical. More than half of the spiral galaxies do show warps one way or another, and our own Milky Way also has a small warp.

Many theories exist to explain warps. One possibility is that warps are the aftermath of interactions or collisions between galaxies. These can also produce tails of material being pulled out from the galaxy. The VLT image reveals that NGC 134 also appears to have a tail of gas stripped from the top edge of the disc.

So did NGC 134 have a striking encounter with another galaxy in the past? Or is some other galaxy out there exerting a gravitational pull on it? This is a riddle astronomers need to solve.

The superb VLT image also shows that the galaxy has its fair share of ionised hydrogen regions (HII regions) lounging along its spiral arms. Seen in the image as red features, these are glowing clouds of hot gas in which stars are forming. The galaxy also shows prominent dark lanes of dust across the disc, obscuring part of the galaxy's starlight.

Studying galaxies like NGC 134 is an excellent way to learn more about our own Galaxy.

Yeah, we’ll really see the benefits this in another century or so.


So far we’ve had mashed tubers, tubers au gratin, Belgian fried tubers with mayo, tuber pancakes and tuber salad…this menu is getting old

Digging Chimps Provide Insights Into Early Human Diet

Even when food is plentiful above ground, chimps still choose to dig for roots and tubers, indicating that perhaps our hominid ancestors were not such big meat-eaters after all. Reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of Southern California and the University of Wisconsin-Madison say that their work with chimps raises questions about the relative importance of meat for brain evolution.

The study documents the novel use of tools by chimps to dig for tubers and roots in the savanna woodlands of western Tanzania. Researcher Adriana Hernandez-Aguilar says the chimps' eagerness for buried treats offers new insights in an ongoing debate about the role of meat versus potato-like foods in the diet of our hominid ancestors. The debate centers on the diet followed by early hominids as their brain and body size slowly increased towards a human level. Was it meat-and-potatoes, or potatoes-and-meat? "Some researchers have suggested that what made us human was actually the tubers," Hernandez-Aguilar said.

Until now, anthropologists had believed that roots and tubers were mainly fallback foods for hominids trying to survive the harsh dry season in the savanna 3.5 million years ago. "We look at chimps for the way that we could have behaved when our ancestors were chimp-like," Hernandez-Aguilar said. Co-researcher Travis Pickering, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, added: "Savanna chimps, we would contend, are dealing with environmental constraints and problems - evolutionary pressures - that our earliest relatives would have dealt with as well."

The study was based on observation of 11 digging sites in the Ugalla savanna woodland of western Tanzania. Chimpanzees were linked to the excavated tubers and roots through knuckle prints, feces, and spit-out wads of fibers from those underground foods. Seven tools were found at three of the sites, with worn edges and dirt marking implying their use as digging implements.

"Chimpanzees in savannas have not been considered a priority in conservation plans because they live in low densities compared to chimps in forests," Hernandez-Aguilar noted. "We hope that discoveries such as this will show the value of conserving the savanna populations."


Mice remember to erect a statue to scientists in Oklahoma. Worship them as “The Big Cheese.”

An Alzheimer's Vaccine? Promising Results In Mice

ScienceDaily (Nov. 12, 2007) — Could a new vaccine be the key to stopping Alzheimer's disease? A new research study from the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF) shows that immunization could offer a way to blunt or even prevent the deadly, memory-robbing disease.

OMRF scientists immunized Alzheimer's mice with a protein believed to play a key role in the disease-causing process. The mice who received the vaccination showed a significant reduction in the build-up of protein plaques that, when present in the brain for long periods of time, are believed to cause the cell death, memory loss and neurological dysfunction characteristic of Alzheimer's.


The immunized mice also showed better cognitive performance than control mice had not received the vaccine.

"These results are extremely exciting," said Jordan Tang, Ph.D., the OMRF researcher who led the study. "They certainly show that this vaccination approach warrants additional investigation as a therapy for Alzheimer's disease."

Tang and his colleagues at OMRF previously had identified the cutting enzyme (known as memapsin 2) that creates the protein fragments believed to be the culprit behind Alzheimer's. In the current study, researchers used mice that had been genetically engineered to develop symptoms of Alzheimer's, then immunized the animals with memapsin 2.

"What we saw is that the mice immunized with memapsin 2 developed 35 percent fewer plaques than their non-vaccinated counterparts," said Tang. "Those immunized mice also performed better than control mice in tests designed to assess their cognitive function."

Tang's work with memapsin 2 also has led to the creation of an experimental drug to treat Alzheimer's disease. That drug, which works by inhibiting the cutting enzyme, began human clinical trials in the summer of 2007.

Tang emphasized that the vaccine approach should be viewed as a supplement to--rather than substitute for--the experimental inhibitor and other treatments currently in development for the illness.

"Alzheimer's is a complicated, multi-faceted disease," said the OMRF researcher. "As with illnesses like cancer and heart disease, Alzheimer's demands that we develop many different approaches to combat it. We cannot rely on a 'one-size-fits-all' strategy, because what works in one patient will not necessarily have in another."

A vaccination approach--getting the immune system to clean up the plaques--has been considered a promising way to tackle the disease, but its success has been limited. In 2002, for example, the pharmaceutical company Elan halted trials of a different vaccine after 15 patients suffered swelling of the central nervous system.




Wow..and they knew that without cable or nothing.

Ancients knew chocolate was good

WASHINGTON (AP) ---- Residents of Central America were enjoying chocolate drinks more than 3,000 years ago, a half millennium earlier than previously thought, new research shows.
art.chocolate.gi.jpg

People were drinking chocolate in Central America more than 3,000 years ago, scientists say.

Archaeologists led by John Henderson of Cornell University studied the remains of pottery used in the lower Ulua Valley in northern Honduras about 1100 B.C.

Residue from the pots contained theobromine, which occurs only in the cacao plant, the source of chocolate, the researchers said in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The find dates the first use of chocolate to some 500 years earlier than previously known, they said.

The style of the pottery indicates that cacao was served at important ceremonies to mark weddings and births, according to the authors.

Headline of the day

Woman finds boyfriend stuck -- and dead -- in cat door (the obscure store) (News4Jax.com)