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By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), usually diagnosed in children, may show up for the first time in adulthood, two recent studies suggest. And not only can ADHD appear for the first time after childhood, but the symptoms for adult-onset ADHD may be different from symptoms experienced by kids, the researchers found. “Although the nature of symptoms differs somewhat between children and adults, all age groups show impairments in multiple domains – school, family and friendships for kids and school, occupation, marriage and driving for adults,” said Stephen Faraone, a psychiatry researcher at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York and author of an editorial accompanying the two studies in JAMA Psychiatry....

Despite a trend towards increased transparency in clinical-trial data, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is asking whether there are times when participants and researchers should be kept in the dark. As pharmaceutical companies push for studies that first justify a drug’s approval, then monitor safety once it reaches the market, the agency fears that publicizing the early data could bias the final results. In raising the matter, the FDA could energize the debate about a long-standing clinical conundrum, says Iain Chalmers, coordinator of the James Lind Initiative, a group based in Oxford, UK, that aims to improve clinical trials....

The Obama administration will need a truly diverse set of tools to lead the nation to a low-carbon economy. To date, the U.S. effort has focused largely on technology and policy solutions that would reduce energy consumption and increase renewable energy supplies. But very little attention has been given to how to finance these desirable changes. A major monetary (and psychological) barrier for many people is the high up-front cost of new installations....

In a paper published today in Nature, paleoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged of the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues unveil the remarkable skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis child who lived 3.3 million year ago. Scientific American.com editorial director Kate Wong called Alemseged at his office to talk about the discovery. An edited transcript of their conversation follows. KATE WONG: How did you come to work in this part of Ethiopia?...

Spring did not come for the oaks of Martha’s Vineyard. For three years, the residents here watched a stunning outbreak of caterpillars that stripped an oak tree bare in a week, then wafted on gossamer threads to another. The islanders fought through clouds of drifting filaments with brooms, brushed off the showers of excrement after they walked under trees, and tiptoed through a maze of half-inch worms on the sidewalks. The local newspapers ran pictures of building sides covered with caterpillars, looking like horror-movie outtakes....

In 2012 a team of temperamental donkeys picked their way down the French Pyrenees carrying a payload of voracious protists. Donkeys wouldn’t ordinarily be required to ferry single-celled microbes, but these tiny organisms happened to be inhabitants of the several hundred pounds of lake water that the donkeys were also carrying, whether they liked it or not. “It’s kind of funny,” says Dirk Schmeller, the scientist whose team hired the donkeys, “because it shows donkeys can help save amphibians....

Angel Caputi, senior scientist and head of the department of integrative and computational neuroscience at the Institute for Biological Research “Clement Estable” in Uruguay, explains. The electric eel generates large electric currents by way of a highly specialized nervous system that has the capacity to synchronize the activity of disc-shaped, electricity-producing cells packed into a specialized electric organ. The nervous system does this through a command nucleus that decides when the electric organ will fire....

Think back to your first childhood beach vacation. Can you recall the color of your bathing suit, the softness of the sand, or the excitement of your first swim in the ocean? Early memories such as this often arise as faded snapshots, remarkably distinct from newer memories that can feel as real as the present moment. With time, memories not only lose their rich vividness, but they can also become distorted, as our true experiences tango with a fictional past....

(Credit:Apple)The iPhone and iPad rumor mill continues to heat up.Apple is reportedly prepping the iPhone 5S for a summer release, mostly likely in August, “sources familiar with the plans” told blog site iMore. The next iPhone would sport the same design as its predecessor but with a beefier processor and better camera.People awaiting a new iPad could get some satisfaction as early as next month, according to the sources.An “April-ish” launch for the next-generation iPads, most likely the iPad 5 and the iPad Mini 2, is seriously being considered by Apple....

All those insults and changes resulting from climate disruption add up quickly: $15 billion for Midwest farmers staring at a year of crop loss and rebuilding as the Mississippi River floods; 600 deaths and 1,000 hospitalizations as a heat wave bakes Chicago; and $147 million gone as Alaska’s king crab fishery succumbs to acidification and changing prey/predator structures. The list touches virtually every human endeavor - forestry, health, tourism, energy production, city planning, agriculture, commerce, even culture....

On a clear night, a broad band of stars sweeps across the sky, backed by the faint, milky glow of even more stars. This is the Milky Way and on a midsummer eve the very center of it can be picked out within the Sagittarius constellation. But even on the clearest night, the earth’s atmosphere obscures the true brilliance of our galaxy and astronomers have long struggled with images blurred by its mix of gases and turbulence....

The heartwarming images of children—smiling, laughing out loud and snuggling—that fill the pages of parenting magazines actually hold a less-than-obvious problem: Many of these ads show kids doing things that are not safe. In fact, about one in six advertisements in two of the top-selling parenting magazines in the United States contains images or promotes products that could be considered unsafe for a child’s health, a new study reveals. The ads show photographs or describe products that conflict with the health and safety recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the nation’s largest pediatricians group, according to the researchers....

The label “dark matter” encapsulates our ignorance regarding the nature of most of the matter in the universe. It contributes five times more than ordinary matter to the cosmic mass budget. But we cannot see it. We infer its existence only indirectly through its gravitational influence on visible matter. The standard model of cosmology successfully explains the gravitational growth of present-day galaxies and their clustering as driven by primordial fluctuations in an ocean of invisible particles with initially small random motions....

Toxic clumps of two proteins, beta-amyloid and tau, are the well-known hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of dementia. But another protein, TDP-43, has gained increasing recognition in recent years as another bad actor on this list. It contributes to a form of cognitive impairment that is surprisingly common among older people and has even received its own designation as a separate condition from other dementias such as Alzheimer’s....

Huge ripples in Earth’s atmosphere called Rossby waves help to steer the planet’s jet streams and weather patterns. Now, a study in Nature Astronomy offers the best evidence yet that similar large-scale features also exist on the Sun. Rossby waves were discovered in Earth’s atmosphere in the late 1930s. Driven by a planet’s rotation, they’ve been seen in the atmospheres of other planets, as well as in Earth’s oceans. In theory, these waves can form in any rotating fluid, says Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado and lead study author....

Key concepts Animals Environments Crustaceans Adaptations Introduction Have you ever wondered how an animal chooses where to live? With the arrival of spring animals in many areas will be emerging from their winter hiding places to search for a place to live until next winter. One group of critters that can usually be found just about anywhere on land includes the familiar sow bugs and pill bugs. As they come out to enjoy the warmer weather, what type of environment do you think they’ll seek?...

A bus company in China has launched a new “safe driving” campaign by suspending bowls of water over their drivers. To avoid getting wet, drivers must drive gently. In today’s technology-obsessed world, this solution is elegantly primitive. You might imagine that this simple yet ingenious idea was conjured by someone functioning at their very best, that such “aha insights” come when innovators are at their peak. Not so. A recent study by Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks suggests that innovation and creativity are greatest when we are not at our best, at least with respect to our circadian rhythms....

We all make stupid mistakes from time to time. History is replete with examples. Legend has it that the Trojans accepted the Greek’s “gift” of a huge wooden horse, which turned out to be hollow and filled with a crack team of Greek commandos. The Tower of Pisa started to lean even before construction was finished—and is not even the world’s farthest leaning tower. NASA taped over the original recordings of the moon landing, and operatives for Richard Nixon’s re-election committee were caught breaking into a Watergate office, setting in motion the greatest political scandal in U....

The Trump administration wants to loosen protections for endangered species while scientists brace for mass die-offs to accelerate globally. New research from the Zoological Society of London suggests climate change is driving more species toward extinction, especially birds. Meanwhile, scientists are trying to design the best way to pick which species get scarce conservation resources—and which will be allowed to disappear. “We are in the middle of a mass extinction,” said Will Pearse, a Utah State University professor and member of the international team of scientists who analyzed how to maintain biodiversity as rare species die faster than biologists can study them....

From Mystic Chemist: The Life of Albert Hofmann and His Discovery of LSD, by Dieter Hagenbach and Lucius Werthmüller. Copyright © Synergetic Press, May 15, 2013. Ergot is the name given to the spore, the sclerotium, of the parasitic filamentous fungus Claviceps purpurea, which attacks various cereal grains and wild grasses, especially rye. The sclerotium is a black-violet, slightly curved, conical body, a few millimeters to up to six centimeters in length that can develop in place of a pollen grain....