TRAUMA MIMICS ADHD … I read with interest Katherine Sharpe’s brief article, “Hyper One Day, Calm the Next” [Head Lines], regarding children who “lose” the diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). I am a therapist who works with children with a history of severe childhood trauma. I have learned in my seven years with this population that indeed what looks or tests like ADHD or ADD may not be at all....
Several temperature records were broken along the East Coast on Tuesday, with the mercury reaching into the high 90s at all three New York City airports and parts further north, such as Burlington, Vt., where residents and businesses are ill-prepared for such heat. The heat wave is expected to continue through the end of the work week along the Eastern Seaboard, and severe storms are parked over the Midwest, causing floods in Duluth, Minn....
“Follow the water” has been NASA’s mantra as it has explored Mars for signs of present or past life. It will be no different later this month when the Phoenix Mars Lander touches down on the Red Planet for what researchers hope will be their closest encounter yet with extraterrestrial water. Powered by solar panels, Phoenix is set to take a three-month tour of the plains near the north pole of Mars, enduring surface temperatures from –100 to –28 degrees Fahrenheit (–73 to –33 degrees Celsius)....
If current theories prove correct, ordinary matter—all that we can see, smell and touch—makes up just a fraction, maybe 4 percent, of the universe. The rest comes from the so-called dark sector: dark matter and dark energy, a mysterious and pervasive energy that is suspected of speeding the universe’s expansion. Dark matter, so known because it refuses to emit or interact with light in a way that we can see, is nearly six times as prevalent as ordinary matter....
The world’s coastal wetlands may be more vulnerable to rising seas than scientists had suspected, a new study suggests. The research, published yesterday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, examined how sea level rise driven by climate change will affect wetlands during this century. “The results suggest that most coastal wetlands in the United States will disappear under a rapid rate of sea level rise,” said Glenn Guntenspergen, a landscape ecologist with the U....
An American born a century ago would have been expected to live, on average, just 54 years. Many children died young, and giving birth was one of the most dangerous things a woman would do. But thanks to vaccinations, antibiotics, sanitation and better maternal care, we are now much more likely to die in old age than in our youth. An infant born today should live to see a 78th birthday....
A young child can look at whatever is in front of them, and describe what they see—but for artificial intelligence systems, that’s a daunting task. That’s because it combines two separate skills: the ability to recognize objects as well as generate sentences describing the scene. Scientists at the University of Toronto and the University of Montreal have developed software, modeled on brain cell networks, that they claim can take any image and generate a caption and get it right—most of the time....
Science and art have converged again this year at the microscopic level for the annual Nikon Small World 2010 photomicrography competition. Participants submitted images of luminous specimens taken using some form of light microscopy—including phase contrast, polarized light, fluorescence, interference contrast, dark-field, confocal, deconvolution and mixed techniques. That we can see such tiny things in brilliant detail is a triumph of science and engineering. But to have a chance at taking home the prize of $3,000 toward the purchase of Nikon equipment, Small World contestants must produce triumphant pieces of artwork as well....
Scientists have never fully understood how mosquitoes distinguish the smell of human breath and sweat from other odors in nature. To learn more, molecular biologist John Carlson at Yale University and colleagues relied on a mutant strain of fruit fly. Each of a series of mosquito genes that code for smell receptors was transplanted, individually, into the fruit flies, which have an “empty” smell-detecting neuron lacking smell receptors. Each gene caused the neuron to produce a single kind of mosquito receptor, which binds to odor molecules that have a particular shape....
The human nose finds it simple to distinguish the aroma of fresh coffee from the stink of rotten eggs, but the underlying biochemistry is complicated. Researchers have now created an olfactory “map”—a geometric model of how molecules combine to produce various scents. This map could inspire a way to predict how people might perceive certain odor combinations and help to drive the development of new fragrances, scientists say. Researchers have been trying for years to tame the elaborate landscape of odor molecules....
The World Health Organization is now advising health care professionals to start patients with HIV on antiretroviral drugs earlier in the course of their infection, as part of new agency guidelines announced Monday. The new recommendations will likely result in more patients worldwide obtaining treatment, based on their CD4 immune cells counts. Instead of a CD4 cell count of 200, the threshold which the WHO recommended in its 2006 guidelines for HIV treatment, a CD4 cell count at or below 350 should be the cutoff, the agency now advises....
When a person loses his sense of smell, does he also lose any memory associated with a smell? —Ana Artega, via e-mail David Smith, a professor of psychology and a researcher at the Center for Smell and Taste at the University of Florida, replies: NORMALL PEOPLE CAN DETECT A CACOPHONY of odors using the 40 million olfactory receptor neurons that reside in the nasal cavity. When we encounter a new odor, these neurons send information about the whiff to a brain area called the olfactory cortex, leaving an imprint of the smell there....
After studying video footage and radar images from Saturday’s deadly stage collapse at the Indiana State Fair, AccuWeather.com Senior Meteorologist Henry Margusity suspects that a gustnado was a cause of the collapse. “In the video, it appears that a possible gustnado traveled from left to right across the stage area,” Margusity said. “The video shows a swirl of dust coming across the stage, and it’s only when the swirl hits the stage that the stage actually collapses....
JULY 1958 SECRECY— “A House of Representatives report concluded that ‘the Federal Government has mired the American scientist in a swamp of secrecy’ and that the classification of scientific information played a part in ‘the nation’s loss of the first lap in the race into space.’ A central problem was the persistent tendency to overclassify documents. Witnesses ascribed this partly to ‘the neurosis of the times’ and partly to the fact that ‘there is no penalty for stamping something secret which shouldn’t be kept secret....
In the early 2000s Al Gore emerged from a devastating presidential election defeat with a new quest: to warn the world about global warming. Although some may think his climate work peaked with his 2005 film, An Inconvenient Truth, he has taken his mission far beyond the silver screen. Over the past decade the former vice president has trained thousands of climate leaders who are now spreading awareness about global warming in communities around the planet....
NOVEMBER 1955 FOUNDERING THEORY–“The size and peculiar shape of the Pacific trenches stir our sense of wonder. What implacable forces could have caused such large-scale distortions of the sea floor? And what is the significance of the fact that they lie along the Pacific ‘ring of fire’–the zone of active volcanoes that encircles the vast ocean? Speculating from what we know, we may imagine that forces deep within the earth cause a foundering of the sea floor, forming a V-shaped trench....
Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court has set off a political firestorm over his replacement, opening the door to new debate about the most volatile social issues—from abortion and guns to voting rights and same-sex marriage. Add at least one more lightning rod issue to the list: the environment. Pres. Donald Trump has already said he will pick Kennedy’s replacement from the same list of conservative judges circulated before the 2017 nomination of Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch....
Imagine yourself dead. What picture comes to mind? Your funeral with a casket surrounded by family and friends? Complete darkness and void? In either case, you are still conscious and observing the scene. In reality, you can no more envision what it is like to be dead than you can visualize yourself before you were born. Death is cognitively nonexistent, and yet we know it is real because every one of the 100 billion people who lived before us is gone....
When it rains, it pours. When it’s dry, it’s parched. When it’s hot, it lasts. These are some of the impacts climate change is already bringing to the United States, with more extremes to come in the future, according to the National Climate Assessment report released yesterday. With 30 chapters, multiple appendices and a user-friendly website, the report comprehensively documents climate change impacts across the United States. It even includes a frequently asked questions section—a sort of “everything you always wanted to know about climate change but were afraid to ask....
The Fourth of July last year had some extra fireworks. NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft sent a hefty projectile–more than 800 pounds–into the body of the comet known as Tempel 1. The collision delivered 19 gigajoules of energy–the equivalent of nearly five tons of explosive TNT–into the wandering comet and ejected a plume of its innermost secrets. Roughly 10 million kilograms of comet stuff (more than 22 million pounds) spread out into space, giving scientists a rare glimpse of the ingredients that go into making a comet....
