Category: Science News

{We probably do it every day, but scientists have only just discovered a distinct new way in which we move our eyes.
}
The scientists have discovered a new type of eye movement which they have called blink-associated resetting movement.

We probably do it every day, but scientists have only just discovered a distinct new way in which we move our eyes.

The team from the University of Tübingen in Germany assessed the eye movements of 11 subjects using tiny wires attached to the cornea and with infrared video tracking. In results published in eLife, they discovered a new type of eye movement that is synchronised with blinking.

The movement they discovered helps to reset the eye after it twists when viewing a rotating object. It is like avoiding tiny rotations of a camera to stabilise the image we perceive. We don’t notice the eye resetting in this way because it happens automatically when we blink.

“We were really surprised to discover this new type of eye movement and it was not what we had anticipated from the experiment,” says lead author Mohammad Khazali.

“We had expected to find that another, already well-known type of eye movement is synchronized to blinking.”

Although it is brief, blinking creates an interruption in our visual perception. We spend up to a tenth of our waking hours blinking but hardly notice it. It serves an essential role in lubricating the eye and may even provide the brain with small, frequent mental breaks.

The scientists sought to investigate whether a reflexive, involuntary eye movement called torsional optokinetic nystagmus (tOKN) occurs at the same time as blinking. The theory was that this reflex also creates a break in the visual system so synchronising them minimises downtime.

The subjects’ eye movements were tracked as they viewed a rotating pattern of dots. As their eyes twisted to follow the dots, they frequently reset, via tOKN, to avoid moving beyond the mechanical limits of the eye muscles. However, this resetting was imperfect and the eyes gradually twisted until the muscles couldn’t twist any more. This varied between subjects from three to eight degrees of rotation.

Once they reached their maximum, the eyes reset so they were no longer twisted at all. This happened at the same time as blinking. The scientists have called this newly-discovered movement blink-associated resetting movement (BARM).

“The eye’s sharpest vision is enabled by a spot on the light-sensitive sheet of the retina called the fovea and this needs to stay balanced to ensure objects of interest can be scrutinised in an optimum way,” says Khazali.

The frequency and size of the movement is determined by how far the eyes have deviated from a neutral position. It helps to reduce strain in the eyes as they move to assess the world around us. In further experiments, the scientists discovered that it even occurs when the eye is not tracking a rotating object.

“To discover such a ubiquitous phenomenon in such a well-studied part of the human body was astonishing to us and we’re very grateful to the volunteers who took part in the study,” says Khazali.

{Leaving a child unattended is considered taboo in today’s intensive parenting atmosphere, despite evidence that American children are safer than ever. So why are parents denying their children the same freedom and independence that they themselves enjoyed as children? A new study by University of California, Irvine social scientists suggests that our fears of leaving children alone have become systematically exaggerated in recent decades — not because the practice has become more dangerous, but because it has become socially unacceptable.}

“Without realizing it, we have consistently increased our estimates of the amount of danger facing children left alone in order to better justify or rationalize the moral disapproval we feel toward parents who violate this relatively new social norm,” said Ashley Thomas, cognitive sciences graduate student and lead author of the work, published online this month in the open-access journal Collabra.

The survey-based study found that children whose parents left them alone on purpose — to go to work, help out a charity, relax or meet an illicit lover — were perceived to be in greater danger than those whose parents were involuntarily separated from them.

The researchers presented survey participants with five different scenarios in which a child was left alone for less than an hour. Situations ranged from a 10-month-old who was left asleep for 15 minutes in a cool car parked in a gym’s underground garage to an 8-year-old reading a book alone at a coffee shop a block from home for 45-minutes.

“Within a given scenario, the only thing that varied was the reason for the parent’s absence,” said Kyle Stanford, professor and chair of logic & philosophy of science. “These included an unintentional absence — caused by a fictitious accident in which the mother was hit by a car and briefly knocked unconscious — and four that were planned: leaving for work, volunteering for a charity, relaxing or meeting an illicit lover. After reading each scenario and the reason behind each child being left alone, the participants ranked on a scale of 1 to 10 how much estimated danger the child was in while the parent was gone, 10 being the most risk.”

Overall, survey participants saw all of these situations as quite dangerous for children: The average risk estimate was 6.99, and the most common ranking in all scenarios was 10. Despite identical descriptions of each set of circumstances in which children were alone, those left alone on purpose were estimated to be in greater danger than those whose parents left them alone unintentionally.

“In fact, children left alone on purpose are almost certainly safer than those left alone by accident, because parents can take steps to make the situation safer, like giving the child a phone or reviewing safety rules,” said Barbara Sarnecka, study co-author and associate professor of cognitive sciences. “The fact that people make the opposite judgment strongly suggests that they morally disapprove of parents who leave their children alone, and that disapproval inflates their estimate of the risk.”

This is also born out in participants’ view of children left alone by a parent meeting an illicit lover as being in significantly more danger than children left alone in precisely the same circumstances by a parent who leaves in order to work, volunteer for charity or just relax.

In scenarios where participants were asked to judge not only how much danger the child was facing, but also whether the mother had done something morally wrong, researchers expected the perceived risk ranking to be lower.

“We thought giving people an alternative way to express their disapproval of the parent’s action would reduce the extent to which moral judgments influenced perceptions of risk,” Thomas said. “But just the opposite happened. When people gave an explicit judgment about the parent’s conduct, estimates of risk to the child were even more inflated by moral disapproval of the parent’s reason for leaving.”

In fact, people’s risk estimates closely followed their judgments of whether mothers in the scenarios had done something morally wrong. Even parents who left children alone involuntarily were not held morally blameless, receiving an average “moral wrongness” judgment of 3.05 on a 10-point scale.

The authors found another interesting pattern when they replaced mothers in the stories with fathers: For fathers — but not mothers — a work-related absence was treated more like an involuntary absence. This difference could stem from the view that work is more obligatory and less of a voluntary choice for men.

“Exaggerating the risks of allowing children some unsupervised time has significant costs besides the loss of children’s independence, freedom and opportunity to learn how to solve problems on their own,” Sarnecka said. “As people have adopted the idea that children must never be alone, parents increasingly face the possibility of arrest, charges of abuse or neglect, and even incarceration for allowing their children to play in parks, walk to school or wait in a car for a few minutes without them.”

“At a minimum,” she continued, “these findings should caution those who make and enforce the law to distinguish evidence-based and rational assessments of risk to children from intuitive moral judgments about parents — and to avoid investing the latter with the force of law.”

The study involved survey responses by 1,328 participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk ranging in age from 18 to 75, with a fairly even split of men and women and those with and without children. Females accounted for 52 percent of respondents, while 48 percent were male; and 56.43 percent had children, while 43.57 percent did not. More than 80 percent of the participants were white, and two-thirds had completed at least some college.

{Study finds preferences follow social groups and language; disgust seen as universal.}

Infants develop expectations about what people prefer to eat, providing early evidence of the social nature through which humans understand food, according to a new study conducted at the University of Chicago.

The study, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found infants expect people to share food preferences unless they belong to different social groups. Their understanding changes when it comes to disgust toward a food, with infants expecting such reactions to transcend the boundaries of social groups.

“Even before infants appear to make smart choices about what substances to ingest, they form nuanced expectations that food preferences are fundamentally linked to social groups and social identity,” said Zoe Liberman, a University of California, Santa Barbara assistant professor who completed the research while a UChicago doctoral student.

In past studies researchers found infants could watch what other people ate in order to learn whether a food was edible. The new study looks beyond learning objective properties about foods to examine the expectations infants hold around who will agree or disagree on food preferences.

The study has important implications for policymakers working on public health, particularly obesity. The findings underscore the need to look beyond just teaching children which foods are healthy when combating obesity to focus on the social nature of decisions surrounding what to eat.

“For humans, food choice is a deeply social and cultural affair. These new findings show that infants are tuning into critical information for understanding the social world, as well as for reasoning about food,” said Amanda L. Woodward, the William S. Gray Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago.

Additional authors of the study were Kathleen R. Sullivan, social science analyst at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; and Katherine Kinzler, associate professor at Cornell University.

In conducting the study, researchers used a method based on the duration infants look to determine their expectations: Infants tend to look longer at events they find relatively more surprising.

For example, monolingual infants in the study consistently looked longer when actors who spoke the same language disagreed on their food choice. The same was true when actors who spoke different languages agreed on their food choice. The reactions suggest monolingual infants expected food preferences to be consistent within a single linguistic group, but not necessarily the same across groups.

Responses were different for infants raised in bilingual environments. Bilingual infants in the study expected food preferences to be consistent even across linguistic groups, suggesting diverse social experiences may make children more flexible in determining which people like the same foods.

When it came to disgust for a food, infants looked longer when actors disagreed over a food being disgusting, even when the actors came from different social groups. The finding suggests infants might be vigilant toward potentially dangerous foods, and expect all people to avoid foods that are disgusting, regardless of their social group.

{Geologists are using new direct methods to measure the Earth’s oxygenation. They identified, for the first time, exactly how much oxygen was in Earth’s atmosphere 813 million years ago — 10.9 percent. This finding, they say, demonstrates that oxygenation on Earth occurred 300 million years earlier than previously concluded from indirect measurements.}

Ancient air trapped in rock salt for 813 million years is changing the timeline of atmospheric changes and life on Earth.

Defining past atmospheric compositions is an important yet daunting task for geologists. Most methods for determining past Earth surface conditions rely on indirect proxies gleaned from ancient sedimentary rocks. Further complicating matters, sedimentary rocks are notoriously difficult to date because they contain remnants of other rocks formed at various times.

As a result, oxygenation, or the rise of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere, has been presumed to occur about 550 million years ago near the boundary between the Precambrian and Paleozoic geologic periods.

West Virginia University geologist Kathleen Benison is part of a research team using new direct methods to measure the Earth’s oxygenation.

The team’s study identifies, for the first time, exactly how much oxygen was in Earth’s atmosphere 813 million years ago — 10.9 percent. This finding, they say, demonstrates that oxygenation on Earth occurred 300 million years earlier than previously concluded from indirect measurements.

“Diversity of life emerges right around this time period,” Benison said. “We used to think that to have diversity of life we needed specific things, including a certain amount of oxygen. (The findings) show that not as much oxygen is required for organisms to develop.”

Fluid inclusions, the microscopic bubbles of liquids and gases in rock salt, can contain trapped air. Analysis of this trapped air allows researchers to understand past surface conditions and how oxygen has changed over the course of geologic history.

The team used a quadruple mass spectrometer to study the air pockets. Carefully crushing minute rock salt crystals released water and gases into the mass spectrometer, which then analyzed for various compounds of oxygen and other gases.

“There are a lot of different environmental conditions specific from the past that we can find occurring in modern samples,” Benison said. “This tells us about the range of conditions on Earth and also has implications for Mars.”

{The very first cry of neonates is marked by their maternal language. This seems to be especially apparent in tonal languages, where pitch and pitch fluctuation determine the meaning of words. Chinese and German scientists have demonstrated this phenomenon for the first time by with newborn babies from China and Cameroon.}

The very first cry of neonates is marked by their maternal language. This seems to be especially apparent in tonal languages, where pitch and pitch fluctuation determine the meaning of words. Chinese and German scientists under leadership of the University of Würzburg have demonstrated this phenomenon for the first time by with newborn babies from China and Cameroon.

Tonal languages sound rather strange to European ears: in contrast to German, French or English, their meaning is also determined by the pitch at which syllables or words are pronounced. A seemingly identical sound can mean completely different things — depending on whether it is pronounced with high pitch, low pitch or a specific pitch fluctuation.

Tonal languages in China and Africa

One example of such a tonal language is Mandarin. It is China’s official language that is spoken predominantly in China, Taiwan and Singapore — by just over one billion people as of now. Four characteristic sounds must be mastered to speak this language. Things are much more complicated with Lamnso, the language of the Nso — a people estimated at 280,000 living mostly in high-altitude villages in the grasslands of Northwest Cameroon, where they practice agriculture. This complex tonal language possesses eight tones, some of which furthermore vary in their contour. This means that whoever wants to speak Lamnso perfectly should not only be able to hit the perfect tone but also to integrate specific pitch fluctuations in certain words.

Now if pregnant women speak such complex tonal languages: does it show in the crying of their newborn infants? This question has now been examined by scientists from different countries in a joint project. The results of their studies have been published in the latest issues of the journals Speech, Language and Hearing and Journal of Voice.

Like tonal languages, crying sounds like chanting

The result: “The crying of neonates whose mothers speak a tonal language is characterized by a significantly higher melodic variation as compared to — for example — German neonates,” says Professor Kathleen Wermke, Head of the Center for Pre-speech Development and Developmental Disorders at the University of Würzburg (Department of Orthodontics) and lead author of the two studies. The infants of the Nso in Cameroon exhibited not only a significantly higher “intra-utterance overall pitch variation” (the interval between the highest and the lowest tone); also, the short-term rise and fall of tones during a cry utterance was more intensive in comparison with the neonates of German-speaking mothers. “Their crying sounds more like chanting,” says Professor Wermke to describe this effect. The results were similar for neonates from Peking — but to a somewhat lesser degree.

Language right from the start

From the scientists’ point of view, these findings support a theory that they had already considered to be corroborated by comparisons between German and French neonates: “Building blocks for the development of the future language are acquired from the moment of birth, and not only when infants begin to babble, or to produce their first words,” says the scientist. Having had ample opportunity to become acquainted with their “mother language” in their mother’s womb during the last third of pregnancy, neonates exhibit in their crying characteristic melodic patterns influenced by their environment — precisely by the language spoken by their mother -, and that even before they coo their first sounds or try out speech-like “syllabic babbling.”

Same results across cultural boundaries

At the same time, these findings highlight that neonates exhibit a high degree of cross-cultural universality in their crying. “We have examined in this case neonates from very different cultures,” says Kathleen Wermke. On the one hand, there are neonates from Peking, who developed surrounded by all influences of modern civilization — radio, television, smart phone. On the other hand, there are the children of the Nso, who were born in a rural environment where none of the technical achievements of modern times are to be found. “The fact that despite these cultural differences both tonal language groups exhibited similar effects in comparison with the non-tonal German group indicates that our interpretation of data points in the right direction,” explains the scientist.

With all due caution, these results could even suggest that genetic factors are involved in the process in addition to external factors. “Of course, it remains undisputed that neonates are able to learn any language spoken in the world, no matter how complex it is,” says Kathleen Wermke.

A basis for the early diagnosis of disorders

55 neonates from Peking and 21 from Cameroon have been examined by scientists in the course of their studies, and their cry utterances recorded during their first days of life. Of course, no baby was made to cry for the purpose of research. “We only recorded spontaneous utterances, normally when a baby started to fuss because it was hungry,” says Kathleen Wermke.

From the scientists’ point of view, the results of these studies contribute to a better understanding of essential influencing factors on the earliest phases of speech development than we have now. At the same time, they improve the possibility to identify early indicators that provide reliable information about any developmental disorders in this field at a very early stage. However, many questions remain to be clarified before these findings can be used in clinical practice.

{Analysis of almost 3,000 pairs of Danish twins shows that they live longer than the general population. The authors believe it reflects the benefits of lifelong social support.}

Twins not only have a bestie from birth — they also live longer than singletons. And those two factors may be related, according to new University of Washington research.

While twins have been subjects in countless studies that try to separate the effects of nature from nurture, a recent study in PLOS ONE is the first to actually look at what being a twin means for life expectancy. Analysis shows that twins have lower mortality rates for both sexes throughout their lifetimes.

“We find that at nearly every age, identical twins survive at higher proportions than fraternal twins, and fraternal twins are a little higher than the general population,” said lead author David Sharrow, a UW postdoctoral researcher in aquatic and fishery sciences.

The results suggest a significant health benefit for close social connections.

The data comes from the Danish Twin Registry, one of the oldest repositories of information about twins. The authors looked at 2,932 pairs of same-sex twins who survived past the age of 10 who were born in Denmark between 1870 and 1900, so all had a complete lifespan. They then compared their ages at death with data for the overall Danish population.

For men, they found that the peak benefit of having a twin came in the subjects’ mid-40s. That difference is about 6 percentage points, meaning that if out of 100 boys in the general population, 84 were still alive at age 45, then for twins that number was 90. For women, the peak mortality advantage came in their early 60s, and the difference was about 10 percentage points.

The authors believe their results reflect the benefits of social support, similar to the marriage protection effect. Many studies have suggested that being married acts as a social safety net that provides psychological and health perks.

But one question surrounding the so-called marriage protection hypothesis, Sharrow said, is whether marriage really makes you healthier, or whether healthier people are just more likely to get married (or join a community group or have a large circle of friends, which also are tied to better health).

“Looking at twins removes that effect, because people can’t choose to be a twin,” Sharrow said. “Our results lend support to a big body of literature that shows that social relationships are beneficial to health outcomes.”

A social network can boost health in many ways, he said. Friends can provide healthy outlets and activities, and encourage you to give up bad habits. Just having a shoulder to cry on, a caregiver during an illness, or a friend to vent with can be healthy over the long term. “There is benefit to having someone who is socially close to you who is looking out for you,” Sharrow said. “They may provide material or emotional support that lead to better longevity outcomes.”

Sharrow is a statistician who specializes in demographics and mortality. He and co-author James Anderson, a UW research professor in aquatic and fishery sciences and an affiliate of the UW Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, were looking to tune a mortality model using the data from twins. But when they ran the numbers they stumbled upon an unexpected discovery.

Their model separates acute causes of death, such as accidents or behavior-related causes, from natural causes in old age. Female twins only had lower mortality for the earlier, acute causes. Male twins got a bigger overall longevity boost than women because they had lower mortality rates both for acute causes during their early years and from so-called natural causes past the age of 65. Sharrow believes these reflect the immediate and cumulative effects of male twins making healthier choices.

“Males may partake in more risky behaviors, so men may have more room to benefit from having a protective other — in this case a twin — who can pull them away for those behaviors,” Sharrow said.

The lifespan was also extended more for identical rather than fraternal twins, which may reflect the strength of the social bond.

“There is some evidence that identical twins are actually closer than fraternal twins,” Sharrow said. “If they’re even more similar, they may be better able to predict the needs of their twin and care for them.”

The authors would like to make sure that the findings are replicated in other datasets, to ensure that it’s not just that Danish twins who survived past the age of 10 in the 19th century had other advantages that had the effect of extending their lifespan.

If the findings hold up, they have implications far beyond twins.

“Research shows that these kinds of social interactions, or social bonds, are important in lots of settings,” Sharrow said. “Most people may not have a twin, but as a society we may choose to invest in social bonds as a way to promote health and longevity.”

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging.

{A new photosynthesis discovery may help breed faster-growing wheat crops that are better adapted to hotter, drier climates. A research team has published a paper showing that photosynthesis occurs in wheat seeds as well as in plant leaves.}

A new photosynthesis discovery at The University of Queensland may help breed faster-growing wheat crops that are better adapted to hotter, drier climates.

A research team led by Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation researcher Professor Robert Henry has published a paper in Scientific Reports, showing that photosynthesis occurs in wheat seeds as well as in plant leaves.

“This discovery turns half a century of plant biology on its head,” Professor Henry said.

“Wheat covers more of Earth than any other crop, so the ramifications of this discovery could be huge. It may lead to better, faster-growing, better-yielding wheat crops in geographical areas where wheat currently cannot be grown.”

Professor Henry said the work built on a biological discovery in the 1960s at the old Colonial Sugar Refining Company in Brisbane.

“Many said that discovery should have won a Nobel Prize,” he said.

“The Brisbane researchers at that time demonstrated that sugarcane and some other tropically adapted plants had evolved a different photosynthesis pathway than that seen in around 85 per cent of plants.”

The classic photosynthesis pathway was known as C3, and plants with the alternative photosynthesising chemistry came to be known as C4 plants, Professor Henry said.

“C4 plants capture carbon faster and have higher growth rates, particularly in subtropical and tropical environments,” he said.

“Our research characterised a previously unknown photosynthetic C4 pathway in the seeds of wheat — which is not a C4 plant.

“Like most plants, wheat photosynthesises through its leaves, but we’ve discovered there is also photosynthesis in the seed.

“This has never been known before, yet the wheat seed is quite green when you peel it off and it is the last part of the plant to die.”

Professor Henry said photosynthesis — the process by which plants converted sunlight into energy for growth and produce oxygen — was arguably the most important biological process on earth.

“Wheat has the classic C3 photosynthetic pathway in its leaves, however C3 plants, which include rice, are less efficient in hotter, drier climates,” Professor Henry said.

“The holy grail of plant science has long been to bioengineer the photosynthetic pathways in C3 and C4 plants to grow larger, more productive crops that are better adapted to climate change and boost food security.

“The population of the world’s tropical regions will soon exceed that of the rest of the world, and this discovery may be important in growing food to meet future demand.”

Professor Henry said the discovery was quite unexpected.

“We were looking at the genes in wheat seeds and all the computer systems kept coming back with these C4 genes, which we thought must be wrong because wheat is not a C4 plant,” he said.

“Eventually we discovered wheat does have all these C4 genes in different places, on different chromosomes. It’s never been known in wheat.”

Wheat had been cultivated for 10,000 years and it had always been a C3 plant, Professor Henry said.

“Wheat’s photosynthetic pathway evolved 100 million years ago when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were up to 10 times higher than they are today,” he said.

“One theory is that as carbon dioxide began to decline, the plant’s seeds evolved a C4 pathway to capture more sunlight to convert to energy.”

{Although strollers and carriers are typically used to safely transport children, injuries do occur while using these products. A study conducted by the Center for Injury Research and Policy of the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital found that, over a 21-year period from 1990 through 2010, almost 361,000 children aged 5 years and younger were treated in U.S. hospital emergency departments for stroller- or carrier-related injuries — that’s about two children every hour.}

The study, published online today in Academic Pediatrics, found that most children were injured when they fell from the stroller (67%) or carrier (63%) or when the stroller (16%) or carrier (29%) tipped over. The head (43% stroller, 62% carrier) and face (31% stroller, 25% carrier) were the most commonly injured parts of the body.

While many of the injuries were soft tissue injuries like bumps and bruises (39% for strollers, 48% for carriers), traumatic brain injuries (TBIs)/concussions accounted for one-quarter (25%) of stroller-related injuries and one-third (35%) of carrier-related injuries. In fact, the proportion of stroller-related TBIs/concussions doubled during the study period going from 19% of injuries in 1990 to 42% of injuries in 2010 and the proportion of carrier-related TBI/concussions tripled going from 18% of injuries in 1990 to 53% of injuries in 2010.

“While these products are used safely by families every day, when injuries do occur they can be quite serious,” said Kristi Roberts, MS, MPH, study author and research associate in the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s. “The majority of injuries we saw were head injuries which is scary considering the fact that traumatic brain injuries and concussions in young children may have long term consequences on cognitive development.”

While most of the children were sent home after receiving treatment in the emergency department, 7% of children with a carrier-related injury and 2% with a stroller-related injury were hospitalized. This means that every day in the U.S. a child is hospitalized for a stroller or carrier-related injury. TBIs/concussions accounted for 65% of stroller-related hospitalizations and 79% of carrier-related hospitalizations.

“As parents, we place our most precious cargo in strollers and carriers every day,” said Roberts. “By taking a few simple steps like making sure your child is buckled up every time he is in his stroller or carrier and being aware of things that can cause these products to tip over can help prevent many of these injuries.”

Safety experts recommend the following to help prevent injuries from strollers and carriers:

Always buckle up. Follow all manufacturer’s instructions for properly securing children in strollers or carriers. Make sure your child is seated and buckled in at all times.
Keep handles clear. Hanging heavy items like purses and bags on the handle of strollers can cause them to tip over. Store these items under the stroller or on your shoulder. If getting a new stroller, look for one with a wide wheel base that will be harder to tip over.

Get a model that fits your child. Strollers and carriers are not one-size fits all. Both strollers and carriers have age and weight limits. Make sure to get one that is the right size for your child and follow all manufacturer’s guidelines for use.
Lock it. Lock stroller wheels when you “park” to prevent it from rolling away unexpectedly. Be careful using a stroller near a curb and in high traffic areas where sidewalks are not available.

Keep it low. Keep carriers low to the ground so the child has a shorter fall if the carrier tips over.

Check for recalls. Both strollers and carriers have had recalls in recent years. Check http://www.recalls.gov to see if the model you plan to use has been recalled.

“While the number of overall injuries from strollers and carriers did go down during the 21 years we looked at in our study, it is still unacceptably high,” said Roberts. “The updates to voluntary manufacturer standards and frequent product recalls in recent years have been a good first step but the large number of injuries we are still seeing shows we need to do more.”

Data for this study were obtained from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS), which is operated by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. The NEISS database provides information on consumer product-related and sports- and recreation-related injuries treated in hospital emergency departments across the country.

{Longitudinal study follows infants to age four.}

Spatial reasoning measured in infancy predicts how children do at math at four years of age, finds a new study. It provides the earliest documented evidence for a relationship between spatial reasoning and math ability.

Spatial reasoning measured in infancy predicts how children do at math at four years of age, finds a new study published in Psychological Science.

“We’ve provided the earliest documented evidence for a relationship between spatial reasoning and math ability,” says Emory University psychologist Stella Lourenco, whose lab conducted the research. “We’ve shown that spatial reasoning beginning early in life, as young as six months of age, predicts both the continuity of this ability and mathematical development.”

Emory graduate student Jillian Lauer is co-author of the study.

The researchers controlled the longitudinal study for general cognitive abilities of the children, including measures such as vocabulary, working memory, short-term spatial memory and processing speed.

“Our results suggest that it’s not just a matter of smarter infants becoming smarter four-year-olds,” Lourenco says. “Instead, we believe that we’ve honed in on something specific about early spatial reasoning and math ability.”

The findings may help explain why some people embrace math while others feel they are bad at it and avoid it. “We know that spatial reasoning is a malleable skill that can be improved with training,” Lourenco says. “One possibility is that more focus should be put on spatial reasoning in early math education.”

Previous research has shown that superior spatial aptitude at 13 years of age predicts professional and creative accomplishments in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math more than 30 years later.

To explore whether individual differences in spatial aptitude are present earlier, Lourenco’s lab tested 63 infants, ages six months to 13 months, for a visual-spatial skill known as mental transformation, or the ability to transform and rotate objects in “mental space.” Mental transformation is considered a hallmark of spatial intelligence.

The researchers showed the babies a series of paired video streams. Both streams presented a series of two matching shapes, similar to Tetris tile pieces, which changed orientation in each presentation. In one of the video streams, the two shapes in every third presentation rotated to become mirror images. In the other video stream, the shapes only appeared in non-mirror orientations. Eye tracking technology recorded which video stream the infants looked at, and for how long.

This type of experiment is called a change-detection paradigm. “Babies have been shown to prefer novelty,” Lourenco explains. “If they can engage in mental transformation and detect that the pieces occasionally rotate into a mirror position, that’s interesting to them because of the novelty.”

Eye-tracking technology allowed the researchers to measure where the babies looked, and for how long. As a group, the infants looked significantly longer at the video stream with mirror images, but there were individual differences in the amount of time they looked at it.

Fifty-three of the children, or 84 percent of the original sample, returned at age four to complete the longitudinal study. The participants were again tested for mental transformation ability, along with mastery of simple symbolic math concepts. The results showed that the children who spent more time looking at the mirror stream of images as infants maintained these higher mental transformation abilities at age four, and also performed better on the math problems.

High-level symbolic math came relatively late in human evolution. Previous research has suggested that symbolic math may have co-opted circuits of the brain involved in spatial reasoning as a foundation to build on.

“Our work may contribute to our understanding of the nature of mathematics,” Lourenco says. “By showing that spatial reasoning is related to individual differences in math ability, we’ve added to a growing literature suggesting a potential contribution for spatial reasoning in mathematics. We can now test the causal role that spatial reasoning may play early in life.”

In addition to helping improve regular early math education, the finding could help in the design of interventions for children with math disabilities. Dyscalculia, for example, is a developmental disorder that interferes with doing even simple arithmetic.

“Dyscalculia has an estimated prevalence of five to seven percent, which is roughly the same as dyslexia,” Lourenco says. “Dyscalculia, however, has generally received less attention, despite math’s importance to our technological world.”

{Student-athletes were found to have similar rates of obesity and high blood pressure readings as the general adolescent population.}

Researchers at Thomas Jefferson University found similar rates of obesity and high blood pressure readings in student-athletes as would be expected in the general adolescent population, which may suggest that participation in athletics does not protect against these conditions. They published their findings in The Journal of Pediatrics.

The study stems from the Athlete Health Organization, a non-profit that provides free pre-participation evaluations to student-athletes in Philadelphia each year before the start of the season to identify students who might be at risk for injury, illness or death. Volunteer physicians gather biometric information and provide a physical exam including an electrocardiogram. Over four years, the organization provided physicals to over 2,700 athletes and caught life-threatening conditions in a handful of students.

“We founded the Athlete Health Organization to promote safe sports activity but we can also use these events to evaluate the overall health of this population,” said David Shipon, M.D., CEO of Athlete Health Organization and cardiologist at Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals. “This is our first research study and we found alarmingly high rates of obesity and high blood pressure readings among adolescent student-athletes.”

The team found that 20 percent of participants were overweight, 24 percent obese and 14.8 percent had higher than normal blood pressure readings. Furthermore, body mass index correlated strongly with high blood pressure readings. These numbers are comparable to the general adolescent population.

“Although the general presumption is that athletics and activity should help with weight and blood pressure control, our study suggests that student-athletes in Philadelphia are suffering from these conditions at the same alarming rate as their peers who do not sign up for school sports,” said Jill Kropa, M.D., first author and sports medicine fellow at Thomas Jefferson University at the time of the study.

The study authors hope that their research results will raise awareness of health issues affecting the student-athlete population.