NEWS & VIEWS

Brain disease - pollution (15 Aug) - The numbers of sufferers of brain diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and motor neurone disease, have soared across the West in less than 20 years, scientists have discovered. The alarming rise, which includes figures showing rates of dementia have trebled in men, has been linked to rises in levels of pesticides, industrial effluents, domestic waste, car exhausts and other pollutants, says a report in the journal Public Health. [more]

Schizophrenia (15 Aug) - Parents coping with the distress of schizophrenia in their children have been caused further pain, a well-organised campaign would have us believe, by a series of articles in The Observer Magazine which examined the possibility that some parenting methods may actually be the cause of the condition. [more]

Genetics (15 Aug) - Scientists are to launch a £2 million study to uncover the genetic make-up of the British people. The aim is to find tell-tale pieces of DNA that will reveal the influences - including those of the Vikings, Saxons and Celts - which have shaped regional populations. [more]

Politics - biology (13 Aug) - First Lady Laura Bush is defending the current administration against charges of stymieing stem-cell research. How many stem cell lines are actually available to scientists? And how might the issue play in this year's election? [more] NPR's Noah Adams speaks with NPR's Ira Flatow, host of Talk of the Nation Science Friday, about hot-button science-related political issues, such as stem-cell research, that are likely to affect this year's presidential campaign. [more]

Antidepressants (10 Aug) - Six months after the Food and Drug Administration withheld an internal finding that antidepressant medications were associated with an increased risk of suicide among children, a second staff analysis has arrived at the same conclusion. [more]

Mood disorders (10 Aug) - Genes could explain why women are more prone to stress-related anxiety and mood disorders. US researchers have pinpointed a variation in a gene which controls regulation of a key brain chemical linked to mood. Their work, on monkeys, suggests people with this variant may be more likely to react badly to negative experiences. [more]

Language learning (11 Aug) - New research is shedding light on the question of whether babies think before they learn a language. This ScienCentral News video has more. [more]

Psychotherapy (10 Aug) - Good therapists usually work to resolve conflicts, not inflame them. But there is a civil war going on in psychology, and not everyone is in the mood for healing. On one side are experts who argue that what therapists do in their consulting rooms should be backed by scientific studies proving its worth. On the other are those who say that the push for this evidence threatens the very things that make psychotherapy work in the first place. [more]

Animal behavior (9 Aug) - Koko, a 33-year-old gorilla that was taught to communicate using American Sign Language, recently told her caregivers that she desired oral surgery to remove an aching tooth, which was extracted with success on Sunday. [more]

Genocide - Genocide is a key part of forensic anthropologist Clea Koff's profession. She's investigated mass graves in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. NPR's Scott Simon asks her about her experiences as outlined in her new book, The Bone Woman. (Random House). [more]

Aliens (9 Aug) - There are good scientific reasons to believe that extraterrestrial life forms might resemble human beings. [more]

Life skills (3 Aug) - If you've got problems at home, at work, or in your personal life, Graham Easton finds that there's no shortage of experts who will be glad to help... [more]

Prozac (8 Aug) - Traces of the antidepressant Prozac can be found in the nation's drinking water, it has been revealed. An Environment Agency report suggests so many people are taking the drug nowadays it is building up in rivers and groundwater. [more]

RESEARCH & COMMENTARY

Jealousy (13 Aug) - This study tested the prediction derived from the evolutionary psychological analysis of jealousy that men and women selecting the adaptively primary infidelity type (i.e., female sexual and male emotional infidelity, respectively) in a forced-choice response format need to engage in less elaborate decision strategies than men and women selecting the adaptively secondary infidelity type (i.e., male sexual and female emotional infidelity, respectively). Unknown to the participants, decision times were registered as an index of the elaborateness of their decision strategies. The results clearly support the prediction. [more]

Social exchange - evolutionary psychology (13 Aug) - What information is most salient during social exchange? Our studies assess the relative importance of cheaters and cooperators and whether their importance is affected by amount of resources involved in the exchange.  Experiment 1 found cheaters were rated more important to remember than cooperators and more so when a greater amount of resources was involved. Experiment 2 found cheaters were looked at longer and people had better memory for their faces and were more likely to remember their social contract status. This suggests the mind evolved to remember information most pertinent in social contract situations. [more]

Development - addiction (12 Aug) - Boys exposed to persistent levels of cocaine in the womb are more likely to have behavioral problems like hyperactivity in their early school years, new research suggests. [more]

Schizophrenia (11 Aug) - Researchers at the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have identified a relationship between a small section of one gene, the brain chemical messenger glutamate, and a collection of traits known to be associated with schizophrenia. [more]

Cognitive psychology (10 Aug) - If you're a loser in the dating game, your name might be part of the problem. New research has revealed that the vowel sounds in your name could influence how others judge the attractiveness of your face. [more]

Search Now:

Reward circuitry - molecular genetics (10 Aug) - Using a new molecular genetic technique, scientists have turned procrastinating primates into workaholics by temporarily suppressing a gene in a brain circuit involved in reward learning. Without the gene, the monkeys lost their sense of balance between reward and the work required to get it, say researchers at the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). [more]

Evolvability (10 Aug) - Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, because of the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object of Darwinian selection, emphasizing the collective nature of the process. [more]

Sex differences (9 Aug) - Derided for their pathological inability to listen, particularly to words such as "commitment" and "washing-up", men are actually better at hearing and identifying everyday noises than women, according to new research. [more]

Alzheimer's disease (9 Aug) - Researchers at University Hospitals of Cleveland and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have found a new and interesting link between the mental demands of an occupation and later development of Alzheimer's disease. Their study is published in the August 10th issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology. According to the study, people with Alzheimer's are more likely to have had less mentally stimulating careers than their peers who do not have Alzheimer's. [more]

The Baldwin Effect - psychology - Sara Shettleworth reviews Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered edited by Bruce H. Weber and David J. Depew. [more]

Psychology - Ethan Remmel reviews Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human by Paul Bloom. [more]

Animal cognition - Mark Bekoff reviews Do Animals Think? by Clive D. L. Wynne. [more]

Psychology - Valerie Kuhlmeier reviews Primate Psychology edited by Dario Maestripieri. [more]

Sexual selection - sexual behavior - Robert Dorit reviews Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People by Joan Roughgarden. [more]

Co-operation - "Our everyday life is much stranger than we imagine, and rests on fragile foundations." This is the intriguing first sentence of a very unusual new book about economics, and much else besides: "The Company of Strangers", by Paul Seabright, a professor of economics at the University of Toulouse.  Why is everyday life so strange? Because, explains Mr Seabright, it is so much at odds with what would have seemed, as recently as 10,000 years ago, our evolutionary destiny. [more]

Biography - Quentin Cooper is joined by Martin Brookes, author of Extreme Measures the Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton and by Dr Joe Cain, senior lecturer in history and philosophy of biology at University College London to discuss Galton's scientific legacy and the origins of modern human genetics. [more]  [review]