Mom and Baby Beat 1-in-a-Million Odds to Survive the ‘Rarest of Pregnancies’

This photo provided by the family shows, from left, Kaila, Suze, Ryu and Andrew Lopez at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles in August 2025 – family photo

A Los Angeles woman recently celebrated the first Christmas with her baby boy, Ryu, born to truly remarkable circumstances.

Ryu developed outside his mother’s womb, and remained hidden for months behind an ovarian cyst that grew to be the size of a basketball. It was so unbelievable, the surgical/OBGYN team that delivered Ryu documented it for a case study in a medical journal.

The manner in which Ryu came into being represents a circumstance that’s “far, far less than 1 in a million,” said Dr. John Ozimek, medical director of labor and delivery at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, where Ryu was born. “I mean, this is really insane.”

Now 41, Suze Lopez has always had an irregular cycle, so missed periods—even consecutive ones—are a normal occurrence. It was almost 20 years ago that she was diagnoses with a pair of ovarian cysts, one of which was removed immediately, and one of which was not.

So in early 2025 when Lopez noted her abdomen swelling, her first thought was the cyst. She never felt kicking, and never had morning sickness—and indeed her instinct was at least partly correct.

The pressure and pain in her abdomen grew as days passed, and she was certain that, even if it risked her ability to conceive again, it was time to remove the other cyst which unbeknownst to her had grown to weigh a mind-boggling 22 pounds.

She needed a CT scan to prepare for surgery, which required a pregnancy test for the radiation, and to her utter surprise the test came back positive. Lopez was delighted, but the pain and discomfort grew and soon she had to be hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai where her medical team found a near fully-developed fetus in an amniotic sack lodged against her pelvis.

The term for where the fetus develops is “implants” and the term for a fetus that implants outside of the womb is an “ectopic pregnancy.” Almost all of these go on to rupture and hemorrhage. As such, fetal mortality can be as high as 90% in such cases and birth defects are seen in about 1 in 5 surviving babies, SF Gate reports.

However, because fetal Ryu implanted against the pelvic wall and not against the liver, it was far more manageable, and the reason why Lopez didn’t have more pain earlier.

Lopez and her boy beat the odds, despite a mammoth surgical procedure that both delivered Ryu at 8 pounds and removed the ovarian cyst—together weighing as much as an adult bobcat. During the procedure, Lopez lost half her blood, and had to be continually given transfusions.

“The whole time, I might have seemed calm on the outside, but I was doing nothing but praying on the inside,” Andrew Lopez, Suze’s husband, told SF Gate. “It was just something that scared me half to death, knowing that at any point I could lose my wife or my child.”Instead, they both survived without any maleffects. Ryu “completes” their family, said his mother, and recently celebrated his first Christmas alongside his older sister Kaila. Mom and Baby Beat 1-in-a-Million Odds to Survive the ‘Rarest of Pregnancies

Read More........→August 08, 2026

The brain rewires itself for motherhood. We now know more about how

Rosie Brown, University of Otago; Jenny Clarkson, University of Otago, and Michael Perkinson, University of Otago

Some of the strongest parental instincts happen without conscious thought. The urge to check on a sleeping baby. To stay close. To pick them up when they cry.

Becoming a mother also brings about an extraordinary shift in priorities. As the late British psychotherapist and author Naomi Stadlen wrote, “motherhood can be relentless. The dependency, the need, the constant pull of being someone’s entire world…”

For all mammals, raising young demands enormous time, energy and resources, requiring mothers to place their offspring’s needs ahead of almost everything else.

So just how precisely does the brain make that shift? Our newly published research sought to answer that question.

Using studies in mice, we identified part of the brain circuitry that drives a mother’s urge to interact with her newborn. We found an essential pathway linking a hormone-sensing region of the brain to its reward network.

Activated by the pregnancy hormone placental lactogen and the milk-production hormone prolactin, this pathway helps make caring for a newborn rewarding rather than simply necessary. Remarkably, we were even able to switch that drive on and off experimentally.

Observing a mother’s brain

We focused on a brain region called the medial preoptic area, known for decades to be a key controller of parenting behaviours. Many of its neurons carry receptors for placental lactogen and prolactin.

In earlier studies, we showed that mice without these receptors in this region were unable to care for their offspring after birth. What remained unclear was exactly how these neurons helped drive parenting behaviour.

Using specialised neuroscience techniques to observe these neurons in living mice, we found they became highly active when females came into close contact with pups. The response was much stronger in mothers than in females that had never given birth, with the biggest surge occurring at the very first meeting.

We then traced where these neurons send their signals. A subset of these neurons connect directly to the brain’s reward system, triggering the release of dopamine – the neurochemical that helps make experiences feel rewarding. Recent advances in neuroscience allowed us to watch dopamine being released in real time as mice interacted with their pups.

When we artificially activated this pathway, female mice that had never given birth behaved much more like new mothers. Faced with a barrier separating them from newborn pups, they climbed over it more quickly and repeatedly returned to the pups.

Interestingly, when we blocked the pathway, the opposite happened. Mice no longer showed the normal dopamine surge when meeting the pups and were slower to engage with them. Removing prolactin receptors from the pathway also reduced mother–pup interactions, while leaving other aspects of maternal care largely unchanged.

These new insights help explain why caring for a newborn becomes such a powerful priority after birth. Prolactin acts through this pathway to tune the brain’s reward system, making time with offspring rewarding rather than simply another task.

A peripartum puzzle

Although our work was conducted in mice, the same reward pathways are found in human mothers, with prolactin serving as the key milk-production hormone in all mammals.

The human brain undergoes huge and long-lasting changes during pregnancy, yet very little neuroscience research has focused on females – and even less has looked at how pregnancy causes changes in the brain.

The Ministry of Health estimates that 12–18% of New Zealand women experience depression, anxiety or other mental health conditions during pregnancy or after birth.

The World Health Organisation reports that globally, about 10% of pregnant women and 13% of women who have just given birth experience a mental disorder, primarily depression. In developing countries, this rate is even higher.

Yet there are few treatments that target the biological changes driving these disorders.

Our research aims to understand how the brain adapts during pregnancy and early motherhood to support healthy mood, with the goal of developing better ways to prevent and treat poor peripartum mental health.

We also hope this work will help reduce the stigma faced by parents who struggle to bond with their baby. Rather than personal failing, difficulties with bonding may reflect brain pathways that have not adapted as expected.

Given the profound changes the brain undergoes during pregnancy, it is perhaps unsurprising that this process does not always unfold smoothly. Parents and families deserve better understanding, support and treatment during this critical period.

Rosie Brown, Associate Professor in Physiology, University of Otago; Jenny Clarkson, Research Fellow and Lecturer, Department of Physiology, University of Otago, and Michael Perkinson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Physiology, University of Otago

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More........→July 01, 2026

Curious Kids: if our eyes see upside down, how does the brain flip the picture?

Daniel Joyce, University of Southern Queensland

I heard that we see upside down, but our brain flips the image. How does it do that?

–Jasmine, Mount Evelyn, Victoria

Our eyes work thanks to light. Objects we can see are either sources of light themselves – like a candle or a phone screen – or light bounces off them and makes its way to our eyes.

First, light passes through the optical components of the eyes such as the cornea, pupil and lens.

Together, they help focus the light onto the retina that senses light, while also controlling the intensity of light to help us see well while avoiding damage to the eye.

The function of the lens is to correctly focus light that comes from objects at different distances. This process is known as accommodation.

While performing this important task, light passing through the lens becomes inverted. This means that light from the top of the object falls lower on the retina than light from the bottom, which falls higher on the retina.

So, light exiting the lens to land on the retina is indeed flipped upside down. But that doesn’t mean the brain is actually flipping the picture “back”. Here’s why.

The orientation doesn’t actually matter

While the light being interpreted by the brain is “upside down” compared to the real world, the question is: is that actually a problem for us?

From your own experience you can tell the answer is probably no. We seem to navigate and interact with the world just fine.

So, where in the brain is the image flipped or rotated 180 degrees to be the “right way up” again?

You may be surprised to learn that vision scientists reject the idea a flipping or rotation needs to happen at all. This is because of how our brains process visual information.

The object you perceive is “encoded” by the firing of various neurons – brain cells that process information – in various locations in the brain. This pattern of firing is what encodes the information about the object you’re focusing on. That info takes into account the object’s relation to everything else in the scene, your body in the world, and your movements.

As long as the relative encodings of these are all consistent with one another, as well as stable, there’s no need for a flip to happen at all.

We can function with ‘upside down’ goggles!

Several studies have looked at how we adapt to large changes in visual input by asking people to wear goggles that flip the image coming in.

This means the image lands on the retina the “right way up”, so to speak, but upside down from what the brain has learned it should be.

In the 1930s, two scientists in Austria performed the Innsbruck Goggle Experiments. For weeks or even months at a time, participants in these studies wore goggles that altered the way the world around them looked. This included goggles that turn the incoming image upside down.

 

A person blinks while wearing an ‘invertoscope’ – goggles that turn the incoming image upside down. Dmitry Hoh/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

As you can imagine, people wearing these goggles at first found it really difficult to get by in their day-to-day activities. They would stumble and bump into things.

But this was temporary.

Participants reported seeing the world upside-down for the first few days, with difficulties navigating the environment, including trying to step over ceiling lights that appeared to them as on the floor.

Around the fifth day, however, performance seemed to improve. Things that were at first seen upside down now appeared the right way up, and this tended to improve with more time.

In other words, with continued exposure to the upside-down world, the brain adapted to the changed input.

More recent studies are beginning to identify which areas of the brain are involved in being able to adapt to changes in visual input, and what the limits of our ability to adapt might be.

Adaptation may even allow “colour blind” people to see colour better than is predicted from their condition.

Daniel Joyce, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of Southern Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More........→May 12, 2026

Successful World First: Baby Treated with Personalized CRISPR Gene Therapy for Rare Disease is Now ‘Thriving’

Dr. Kiran Musunru (left) and Dr. Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas (right) led the researchers who developed a personalized treatment for baby KJ – Released CHOP and Penn

CRISPR has been used to create a genetic therapy option for a child born in Pennsylvania with a rare metabolic disorder.

Unable to convert ammonia to urea, newborn KJ was in serious risk of brain or liver damage, and had to be kept on medications and an extremely restrictive diet to avoid protein metabolism.

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) doctors believed they could use CRISPR to develop a treatment to correct a faulty gene in KJ’s genome that would essentially cure him.

KJ’s parents, Nicole and Kyle Muldoon, decided to place their son’s wellbeing in the hands of two pioneering genetic therapists, Dr. Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas and Dr. Kiran Musunru, who crafted a bespoke treatment that has successfully corrected the genetic defect.

“Years and years of progress in gene editing and collaboration between researchers and clinicians made this moment possible, and while KJ is just one patient, we hope he is the first of many to benefit from a methodology that can be scaled to fit an individual patient’s needs,” said Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas, MD, PhD, director of the Gene Therapy for Inherited Metabolic Disorders Frontier Program (GTIMD) at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

She, along with Dr. Musunru, are members of the NIH-funded Somatic Cell Genome Editing Consortium, and have spent years developing the science of using CRISPR to create individual treatment doses for the rarest of diseases.

So far, the only FDA-approved and standardized CRISPR therapies target two diseases found in tens of thousands of patients. CRISPR is an incredibly complex tool and expensive to wield, leaving its magic beyond the reach of millions of children and adults worldwide who collectively suffer from extremely rare genetic disorders.

One such disorder is called severe carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 (CPS1) deficiency, and it creates the inability to properly convert ammonia into urea to be excreted through urine. Ammonia is created in the body through protein metabolism. CPS1 is created in the liver to turn it into urea so as to avoid the toxic effects of the former.

KJ’s body cannot, so excess protein metabolism creates a buildup of ammonia in his liver that could be fatal. Nitrogen scavenging medication and a protein-deficient diet can keep a patient going until a liver transplant can be found, but at just months old, KJ’s body isn’t capable of enduring the procedure.

A news release from CHOP reports that Ahrens-Nicklas and Musunuru targeted KJ’s specific variant of CPS1 after years of work with similar disease-causing variants. Within 6 months, their team designed and manufactured a base editing therapy delivered via lipid nanoparticles to the liver in order to correct KJ’s faulty enzyme.

In late February, 2025, KJ received his first infusion of this experimental therapy, and since then has received follow-up doses in March and April 2025, the release details. In the newly published New England Journal of Medicine paper, the researchers, along with their academic and industry collaborators, describe the customized CRISPR gene editing therapy that was rigorously yet speedily developed for administration to KJ.

KJ has received 3 doses, and suffered no side effects. He’s been able to halt medication and work some protein back into his diet, though he will need careful monitoring the rest of his life.“We thought it was our responsibility to help our child, so when the doctors came to us with their idea, we put our trust in them in the hopes that it could help not just KJ but other families in our position,” his mother, Nicole, told CHOP. Successful World First: Baby Treated with Personalized CRISPR Gene Therapy for Rare Disease is Now ‘Thriving’

Read More........→February 06, 2026

Boy with Rare Genetic Disorder Amazes Doctors After World-First Gene Therapy

Courtesy of Oliver Chu family

The first child in history has successfully been treated with a new genetic therapy for an ultra-rare developmental defect called Hunter syndrome.

Several years in the making, Oliver Chu became the first in the world to receive the stem cell-based treatment in February, and 3 months later seemed to be a normal child again, meeting important milestones and playing without supervision.

Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital, which oversaw the trial of Oliver and 4 other patients, says that children with severe Hunter syndrome cannot properly break down complex sugar molecules and have widespread symptoms including rapid and progressive learning and memory problems, heart and lung dysfunction, hyperactivity and behavioral problems, bone and joint malformations and hearing impairment.

They cannot break down the sugars because their genetic code was formed with a defect: the gene that codes for the production of an enzyme called iduronate-2-sulfatase (IDS) doesn’t work properly.

Professor Brian Pigger, professor of cell and gene therapy at the University of Manchester, developed a method of replacing the faulty gene with a functioning copy, called autologous hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) gene therapy.

In December, Oliver Chu, from California, arrived at Royal Manchester for the first stage of the procedure. The 3-year-old had his blood cycled in a machine to extract the hematopoietic stem cells he produces naturally. These were then sent off to a laboratory at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, where a functioning copy of the defective gene is inserted into a virus and placed inside the stem cells.

In February, mother Jingru cradled Oliver in his hospital bed as he received an injection of 125 million modified cells twice in the space of 2 hours. It was a momentous day that the young boy was completely oblivious to.

After a few days, Oliver flew back to California to reunite with his older brother Skyler, who also has the disease, and his father Ricky.

Hunter syndrome affects almost exclusively boys, and then only 1 in 100,000 live births. A major challenge in the disease that can often be fatal is that treatment methods can’t cross the blood-brain barrier, as the major manifestation of the inability to break down sugars occurs in the brain.

One commercially available drug called Elaprase can slow the effects, but can’t cross the blood brain barrier. It costs as much as a house for a year’s prescription. Another treatment has been to give regular infusions of the missing enzyme, just like a diabetic would take infusions of insulin.

In May of this year, BBC reports that Oliver’s development has become remarkably normal. He’s talking all the time, and been able to stop the enzyme infusions. He runs around like any other 3-year-old, utilizing a newly-exploded vocabulary, and demonstrates genuine inquisitiveness.

“Every time we talk about it I want to cry because it’s just so amazing,” his mother Jingru told the BBC.

“We can see he’s improving, he’s learning, he’s got new words and new skills and he’s moving around much more easily,” said Professor Simon Jones, who ran the trial that saw Oliver and four other boys receive the gene therapy. “We need to be careful and not get carried away in the excitement of all this, but things are as good as they could be at this point in time.”

Unfortunately for Skyler, who also has Hunter syndrome, he’s too old to receive his younger brother’s treatment. The 5-year-old receives infusions like Oliver used to, it allows him to regain some physical development normalcy, but the infusions can’t cross the blood-brain barrier.The treatment window in the trial was 3 months to 1 year of age. It was originally believed that Oliver was too old, but a battery of tests concluded there was still a window where the therapy might reverse the genetic defect in the brain as well as the body. Ricky is hopeful the treatment will prove successful, prompting further innovation into how it might help treat older children like Skyler. Boy with Rare Genetic Disorder Amazes Doctors After World-First Gene Therapy

Read More........→December 01, 2025

Counting on Fingers Really Helps Kids Improve Their Math Skills–By 40% New Study Shows

By Yan Krukau via Public Domain on Pexels

Some teachers consider finger counting a signal that youngsters are struggling with math, while others associate its use as advanced numerical knowledge.

Now, new research is the first to show that children’s performance in arithmetic can show a “huge” improvement through the teaching of a finger-counting method.

Swiss and French teams explored whether finger counting can help primary-school-aged children to solve math problems. They said adults rarely use their fingers to calculate a small sum, because such behavior could be attributed to cognitive impairments or “pathological difficulties” in math.

But young children under age 8 who use their fingers to solve such problems may be seen as intelligent, probably because they have already reached a level that allows them to understand that a quantity can be represented by different means.

The research aimed to determine whether children who don’t count on their fingers can be trained to do so, and whether such training would result in enhanced arithmetic performance.

The study, published in the journal Child Development, focused on 328 five- and six-year-old children at kindergarten, mainly living in France, and tested their abilities to solve simple addition problems.

The kindergarteners were recruited through their teachers, who voluntarily took part in the experiment, which included a pre-test, training held over two weeks, a post-test closely after the training’s end, and a delayed post-test.

The results showed an “important increase” in performance between pre- and post-test for the trained children who did not count on their fingers originally—from 37% to 77% of correct responses—compared to non-finger users in the control group.

Whether children who use finger counting are using it as an arithmetic procedure or understand something deeper about numbers will still need to be determined with future research.

“Our findings are highly valuable because, for the first time, we provide a concrete answer to the long-standing question of whether teachers should explicitly teach children to use their fingers for solving addition problems,” said study leader Dr. Catherine Thevenot.

“Finger calculation training is effective for over 75% of kindergartners,” she added. “The next step is to explore how we can support the remaining 25% of children who didn’t respond as well to the intervention.”

Dr. Thevenot, of the Institute of Psychology at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, says the study came about as a result of conversations with primary school teachers.

“They often asked me whether they should encourage or discourage children from using their fingers to solve calculations.

“Surprisingly, the existing research didn’t offer a clear answer, which left teachers understandably frustrated with my frequent response of ‘I don’t know.’

“This recurring question, coupled with the lack of concrete evidence, inspired me to investigate the issue myself.

“When I first saw the results, I was amazed by the huge improvement in performance among children who didn’t initially use their fingers to solve the problems.

“Before our intervention, these children were only able to solve about one-third of the addition problems during a pre-test. After training, however, they were solving over three-quarters of them.

“This improvement truly exceeded my expectations,” said Dr. Thevenot. “The difference was striking, especially compared to the control groups, where gains were insignificant.

“An important question now is to determine whether what we taught to children goes beyond a mere procedure to solve the problems.

“In other words, we want to know whether our intervention led to a deeper conceptual understanding of numbers, specifically whether children better grasp how to manipulate the quantities represented by their fingers.

In fact, we have already started addressing this question and the initial results are very promising. However, we still need to carry out additional experiments to confirm that these improvements are indeed a direct result of our training program.”, Counting on Fingers Really Helps Kids Improve Their Math Skills–By 40% New Study Shows

Read More........→September 23, 2024

Dads show gender biases, in both brain responses and behaviors, toward toddlers

“Our study provides one of the richest datasets for fathers now available,” says Emory neuroscientist Jennifer Mascaro. (Stock image)

By Carol Clark: A toddler’s gender influences the brain responses as well as the behavior of fathers — from how attentive they are to their child, to the types of language that they use and the play that they engage in, a new study by Emory University finds.

The journal Behavioral Neuroscience published the study, the first to combine brain scans of fathers with behavioral data collected as fathers interacted with their children in a real-world setting.

One of the more striking behavioral differences was the level of attention given a child.

“When a child cried out or asked for Dad, fathers of daughters responded to that more than did fathers of sons,” says Jennifer Mascaro, who led the research as a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of Emory anthropologist James Rilling, senior author of the study. “We should be aware of how unconscious notions of gender can play into the way we treat even very young children.”

Mascaro is now an assistant professor in Family and Preventive Medicine at the Emory School of Medicine.

In addition to being more attentive, fathers of daughters sang more often to their child and were more likely to use words associated with sad emotions, such as “cry,” “tears” and “lonely.” Fathers of daughters also used more words associated with the body, such as “belly,” “cheek,” “face,” “fat” and “feet.”

Fathers of sons engaged in more rough-and-tumble play with their child and used more language related to power and achievement — words such as “best,” “win,” “super” and “top.” In contrast, fathers of daughters used more analytical language — words such as “all,” “below” and “much” — which has been linked to future academic success.

“It’s important to note,” Rilling says, “that gender-biased paternal behavior need not imply ill intentions on the part of fathers. These biases may be unconscious, or may actually reflect deliberate and altruistically motivated efforts to shape children’s behavior in line with social expectations of adult gender roles that fathers feel may benefit their children.”

The study showed that fathers of sons engaged in more rough-and-tumble play with their child, a finding consistent with previous research by others. (Stock image)

Most parental studies draw from data gathered in a lab, where parents answer questions about their behavior and where they may be observed briefly as they interact with their children. This study collected behavioral data in a real-world setting through an electronic activated recorder (EAR), which was developed in the lab of co-author Matthias Mehl at the University of Arizona.

The participants included 52 fathers of toddlers (30 girls and 22 boys) in the Atlanta area who agreed to clip a small personal digital assistant equipped with the EAR software onto their belts and wear it for one weekday and one weekend day. The fathers were also told to leave the device charging in their child’s room at night so any nighttime interactions with their children could be recorded. The device randomly turned on for 50 seconds every nine minutes to record any ambient sound during the 48-hour period.

“People act shockingly normal when they are wearing the device,” Mascaro says. “They kind of forget they are wearing it or they say to themselves, what are the odds it’s on right now. The EAR technology is a naturalistic observation method that helped us verify things about parental behavior that we suspected based on previous research. It also uncovered subtle biases that we didn’t necessarily hypothesize in advance.”

In addition, fathers underwent functional MRI brain scans while viewing photos of an unknown adult, an unknown child and their own child with happy, sad or neutral facial expressions. Fathers of daughters had stronger responses to their daughters’ happy expressions in areas of the brain important for processing emotions, reward and value. In contrast, the brains of fathers of sons responded more robustly to their child’s neutral facial expressions.

“Most parents really are trying to do the best they can for their children,” Mascaro says. “A take-home point is that it’s good to pay attention to how your interactions with your sons and daughters may be biased." (Stock image)

The study focused on fathers because there is less research about their roles in rearing young children than mothers. “Our study provides one of the richest datasets for fathers now available, because it combines real-world assessments of behavior with brain responses,” Mascaro says. “It appears that men’s brain responses to their children may be related to their behaving differently with sons compared to daughters.”

The findings are consistent with other studies indicating that parents — both fathers and mothers — use more emotion language with girls and engage in more rough-and-tumble play with boys. It is unclear whether these differences are due to biological and evolutionary underpinnings, cultural understandings of the way one should act, or some combination of the two.

“We also don’t know the long-term child outcomes,” Mascaro says. “But future research can test the hypothesis that these differences have demonstrable impacts on things like empathy, emotional regulation and social competence.”

The use of more emotion language with girls by fathers, for example, may help girls develop more empathy than boys. “The fact that fathers may actually be less attentive to the emotional needs of boys, perhaps despite their best intentions, is important to recognize,” Mascaro says. “Validating emotions is good for everyone — not just daughters.”

Restricted emotions in adult men is linked to depression, decreased social intimacy, marital dissatisfaction and a lower likelihood of seeking mental health treatment.

Research also shows that many adolescent girls have negative body images. “We found that fathers are using more language about the body with girls than with boys, and the differences appear with children who are just one-to-three years old,” Mascaro says.

And while they use more words about the body with girls, fathers engage in more physical rough-and-tumble play with boys, an activity that research has shown is important to help young children develop social acuity and emotional regulation.

“Most parents really are trying to do the best they can for their children,” Mascaro says. “A take-home point is that it’s good to pay attention to how your interactions with your sons and daughters may be biased. We need to do more research to try to understand if these subtle differences may have important effects in the long term.”

The American Psychological Association contributed to this story.eScienceCommons: Dads show gender biases, in both brain responses a...:

Read More........→July 16, 2024

No activity for hours during childhood may cause heart damage in later life: Study

London, (IANS): No activity for hours during childhood could be setting the stage for heart attacks and strokes later in life, a new study said on Wednesday.

According to the study presented at the European Society of Cardiology, sedentary time accumulated from childhood to young adulthood was associated with heart damage -- even in those with normal weight and blood pressure.

"All those hours of screen time in young people add up to a heavier heart, which we know from studies in adults raises the likelihood of heart attack and stroke," said study author Andrew Agbaje of the University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland.

"Children and teenagers need to move more to protect their long-term health," he added.

To investigate, researchers let children wear a smartwatch with an activity tracker for seven days at 11 years of age.

This was repeated at 15 years of age and again at 24 years of age.

The weight of the heart’s left ventricle was assessed by echocardiography, a type of ultrasound scan, at 17 and 24 years of age and reported in grams relative to height (g/m2.7).

The researchers analysed the association between sedentary time between 11 and 24 years of age and heart measurements between 17 and 24 years of age after adjusting for factors that could influence the relationship, including age, sex, blood pressure, body fat, smoking, physical activity and socioeconomic status.

The study included 766 children, of which 55 per cent were girls and 45 per cent were boys.

At 11 years of age, children were sedentary for an average of 362 minutes a day, rising to 474 minutes a day in adolescence (15 years of age), and 531 minutes a day in young adulthood (24 years of age), meaning sedentary time raised by an average of 169 minutes (2.8 hours) a day between childhood and young adulthood, the study showed. "Our study indicates that the accumulation of inactive time is related to heart damage regardless of body weight and blood pressure. Parents should encourage children and teenagers to move more by taking them out for a walk and limiting time spent on social media and video games," Agbaje said. No activity for hours during childhood may cause heart damage in later life: Study | MorungExpress | morungexpress.com

Read More........→July 09, 2024

Hey dad, your health affects your baby’s well-being too

David Gardner, The University of Melbourne; Natalie Binder, The University of Melbourne, and Natalie Hannan, The University of Melbourne

As a society, we put a significant emphasis on women’s healthF both immediately prior to and during pregnancy – and rightly so. A woman needs to prepare her body for the arduous nine months of gestation ahead to give the growing baby the best possible start to life.

A pregnant woman is likely to take supplements and maintain a healthy diet free of alcohol and cigarettes while protecting herself from unnecessary environmental toxin exposure. In comparison, men’s health prior to conception is relatively insignificant right? Wrong!

Enter father

Our research shows that male diet prior to conception – particularly a fast-food-based diet – can be significantly detrimental to pregnancy success. Using an animal model of diet-induced obesity, we compared pregnancy outcomes when fathers were either normal weight or obese.

We found that rates of pregnancy were significantly lower when the father was obese because embryos generated with sperm from obese males weren’t very good and failed to implant into the mother’s uterus.

When obese fathers were able to achieve a pregnancy, the resulting foetus and placenta were both smaller than normal and the foetus was developmentally delayed. As the theory of the developmental origins of health and disease suggests, these small-for-gestational-age foetuses are at a higher risk of disease in later life, including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure.

Indeed, our data indicate that being an obese male could significantly compromise the health of the resultant offspring. Initial studies in humans have also shown that the time taken to become pregnant is significantly longer if the father is obese, and IVF embryos are of poorer quality.

This is of particular concern given the rising rates of global obesity.

Smoking fathers

And bad diet isn’t the only vice of modern man that can affect not only his fertility but also the health of his offspring. Almost 20% of Australian adult males smoke despite its well-publicised health risks. Studies from China, Australia and Europe have identified an approximately 30% increase in the rate of childhood cancers when fathers smoke prior to conception.

In particular, the rate of leukaemia, lymphoma and brain tumours were up to 80% higher in children under the age of five when fathers had smoked prior to conception, even though mothers were non-smokers. And the rate of childhood cancer was highest when fathers smoked more cigarettes per day, had been smoking for a longer time, and started smoking before the age of 20.

What’s more, passive smoke exposure of mothers around the time of conception – likely due to fathers’ smoking – is associated with a significantly higher incidence of serious congenital heart defects in infants.

Alcohol harms

The effect of fathers’ alcohol consumption on offspring health is harder to define because of conflicting reports. It’s been suggested that a father’s alcohol consumption prior to conception results in a significant reduction in foetal birth weight, but this is yet to be conclusively proven and is subject to a number of confounding factors.

Animal models have shown fathers’ alcohol consumption to be associated with increased malformations, growth retardation, and behavioural anomalies in offspring, although alcohol exposure in these cases is reasonably high. So any adverse effects of paternal preconception alcohol exposure may be more subtle than this.

The dangers of work

While the effects of paternal diet, smoking, and alcohol consumption on offspring health can be mitigated with appropriate lifestyle changes before starting a family, occupational toxin exposure is harder to avoid.

A recent study involving almost 10,000 children with birth defects was able to relate the rate of foetal malformation to job types their fathers did. Overwhelmingly, fathers exposed to solvents and chemicals in the workplace, such as artists, cleaners, hairdressers, scientists, welders, metal and food processing workers have significantly higher rates of a variety of birth defects among their offspring.

And several paternal occupations such as office jobs and law enforcement were associated with significantly reduced rates of foetal birth defects. But avoiding occupational exposure to reproductive toxicants when planning to start a family is another question altogether. As a society, we really need to know what is bad for sperm.

Passing it on

Damage or changes to the male germ line, the sperm, is how paternal lifestyle and occupation end up having a detrimental effect on foetal development and offspring health. Sperm are particularly vulnerable to oxidative stress, which can damage DNA. And both a high-fat diet and smoking have been associated with increasing levels of oxidative stress.

Fathers’ health prior to conception is clearly just as important as mothers’, and when thinking of starting a family both mum and dad need to be as healthy as possible.

David Gardner, Head of the Department of Zoology, The University of Melbourne; Natalie Binder, PhD student, The University of Melbourne, and Natalie Hannan, NHMRC Early Career Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More........→July 08, 2024

Avoiding long exposure to severe temperatures vital to save kids' developing brain: Experts

New Delhi, As exposure to extreme temperatures during early developmental stages can significantly impact neurodevelopment, specifically the integrity of white matter, experts on Sunday suggested that proper insulation, avoiding prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures, and educating parents and caregivers on recognising signs of heat and cold stress are essential measures to protect the developing brain of children.

According to Sreenivas U.M., Consultant -- Neurology, MGM Hospital Chennai, heat exposure can lead to hyperthermia, disrupting normal cellular processes and causing neuronal injury, particularly in the developing brain, which has a high metabolic rate and is susceptible to heat-induced oxidative stress.

"Exposure to extreme temperatures during early developmental stages can significantly impact neurodevelopment, specifically the integrity of white matter. In the critical early years of life, the brain undergoes rapid growth, making it vulnerable to environmental stressors like extreme heat or cold, which can impair cognitive functions by damaging myelin," Sreenivas U.M. told IANS.

As per experts, young children are especially at risk due to their underdeveloped thermoregulatory mechanisms, which can lead to white matter injury.

"Temperature extremes can disrupt myelination, trigger inflammatory responses damaging myelin, and induce structural brain changes," said Shivananda Pai, Consultant Neurology, KMC Hospital, B.R. Ambedkar Circle, Mangalore.

In a recent study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, which included 2,681 children, the researchers found that exposure to cold during pregnancy and the first year of life, and exposure to heat from birth until three years of age were associated with higher mean diffusivity at preadolescence, pointing to slower white matter maturation.

'Cold' and 'heat', in this case, was defined as those temperatures that are at the lower and upper end, respectively, of the temperature distribution in the study region.

According to the experts, brain development involves stages such as neurogenesis, migration, maturation, synaptogenesis, pruning, and myelination, with myelination being crucial for efficient nerve signal transmission."This process, starting in the third trimester and continuing into middle age, can be disrupted by extreme temperatures, leading to physiological stress, neuro-inflammation, oxidative stress, cell death, and delayed myelination, all of which underscore the importance of maintaining an optimal thermal environment for healthy brain maturation and function," said Amrut S.D., Associate Consultant – Neurology, Manipal Hospital, Goa. Avoiding long exposure to severe temperatures vital to save kids' developing brain: Experts | MorungExpress | morungexpress.com

Read More........→July 02, 2024

Dogs Placed in Elementary Schools Making a Big Difference in Academics and Mental Health for Michigan Students

Priority Pups

To help reduce anxiety—and open the way for learning—several elementary schools in Michigan have enrolled service dogs as full-time happiness ambassadors—and it is paw-sitively working.

Students are “already seeing a big difference in their academics,” according to a news report from WXMI-TV 17.

Priority Health, a Michigan health insurance provider, launched Priority Pups in September when goldendoodles were placed in two of the state’s school districts, “with more to come”.

“I love you, Meeka,” said Shelby, a student at North Godwin Elementary School who was snuggled up with the pup, which serves in a different classroom every day.

Research shows the presence of a trained dog lowers children’s stress, fosters a positive attitude toward learning, and smooths interactions between classmates.

A 2023 report from Mental Health America found that many youth in Michigan with clinical depression did not receive any mental health treatment.

Shelby’s mom, Laurie Uhl, described the difference Meeka is making in her daughter’s life.

“Shelby was diagnosed with a genetic disorder called Fragile X Syndrome, along with autism and ADHD. Here at school, she really struggles with a range of emotions.

“She gets angry and will cry or scream uncontrollably.”

But since Meeka the goldendoodle arrived at school, there is a guaranteed way to bring calm to the situation.

Meeka inside a Michigan classroom – Priority Pups

“I’ve seen Shelby having a meltdown and when Meeka is brought into the room, I can see a breath of fresh air wash over her and she finds comfort.”

It’s not only the stressed-out students that benefit from sitting with the pup during the day.

Research shows that literacy scores went up for children after they read to dogs.

“My math was super hard,” one fifth-grader told WXMI-TV. “But then Meeka came in and when I take a break with her for a few minutes. Then math became really easy.”

The program was made possible by Canines for Change, founded in 2005 by Dr. Nikki Brown, a school psychologist for the Lansing School District in Michigan.

Priority Pups

Dr. Brown began taking her Corgi to school, to work with special education students, and noticed a drastic improvement in their skills and behavior with the addition of a dog. So she teamed up with another trainer to be able to offer service dogs for children with special needs.Three years ago, Canines for Change was approached by their local Grand Ledge School District to place a Facility Dog in each of their nine school

buildings. When Priority Health heard about it, they began funding their own program for schools, Priority Pups.Dogs Placed in Elementary Schools Making a Big Difference in Academics and Mental Health for Michigan Students

Read More........→May 21, 2024

Curious Kids: What happens when you flush a toilet on a plane?

Doug Drury, CQUniversity Australia

What happens when you flush a toilet on a plane? –Lily, aged 6, Harcourt

Lily this is a great question! It doesn’t work like your toilet at home, which uses gravity to remove waste from our toilets into the sewer system. An aeroplane toilet uses a vacuum system along with a blue chemical that cleans and removes odours every time you flush.

A smelly tank

The waste and blue cleaning fluid ends up in a storage tank under the floor, in the very back of the cargo hold of the aeroplane. With so many people on the plane using the toilets, you can imagine how big the storage tank is!

The system is designed very much like the vacuum cleaners we use around the house to remove dirt and dust from our floors. This dirt and dust ends up in a container that we empty into a garbage bin. Similarly, the aeroplane’s toilets need the vacuum pressure system to move all the waste from the toilet into the plumbing pipe that connects the toilet to the storage tank, and finally into the tank.

There is a valve on the storage tank that opens when a toilet is flushed and closes when the toilet is not in use – to prevent odours from leaving the tank. This helps to keep the smell down from so many people using the toilet during a flight. The blue chemical helps to keep the smell down as well.

Where does it go once the plane lands?

A special truck comes to the aircraft after it lands and connects a hose to remove the waste and blue cleaning chemical into a storage tank on the truck. The truck plugs a hose into the airplane’s waste tank valve and removes all of the waste into the tank on the back of the truck.

The truck then takes the waste to a special area at the airport reserved for the waste from all aeroplanes, and the toilet waste is emptied into the sewer system for that airport. The training to operate the truck takes three days.

Watch out for blue ice

It has also been reported that sometimes, particularly on older planes, the valve where the waste truck connects to the aeroplane can leak a small amount of the waste and blue chemical. This turns to ice as the temperature at normal cruising altitude of 30,000 feet is normally around -56°C and the chemical turns to “blue ice”. This blue ice remains attached to the plane as long as the temperature remains below freezing.

Once the aeroplane begins to descend to land at the destination airport, the blue ice begins to thaw and may even fall off. There have been several occasions reported in the news where people have witnessed this flying poo!

In case you were wondering, the captain of the plane doesn’t have a button to release the waste from the storage tank while the plane is flying. Any waste that might leak out of the plane would be totally accidental.

Some people do think aeroplane contrails (the white lines planes sometimes leave in the sky) are either a special mind-control chemical or toilet waste. This is not true! What you are actually seeing are water vapours coming from the engine becoming ice crystals – like a thin cloud in the sky.

Doug Drury, Professor/Head of Aviation, CQUniversity Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More........→May 08, 2024

Curious Kids: what came first, the chicken or the egg?

Ellen K. Mather, Flinders University

What came first, the chicken or the egg? — Grace, age 12, Melbourne

Hi Grace!

Thanks for this great question. It’s an age-old dilemma that has left many people scratching their heads.

From an evolutionary perspective, both answers could be considered true! It all depends on how you interpret the question.

The case for the egg

When the first vertebrates – that is, the first animals with backbones – came out of the sea to live on land, they faced a challenge.

Their eggs, similar to those of modern fish, were covered only in a thin layer called a membrane. The eggs would quickly dry up and die when exposed to air. Some animals such as amphibians (the group that includes frogs and axolotls) solved this problem by simply laying their eggs in water – but this limited how far inland they could travel.

It was the early reptiles that evolved a key solution to this problem: an egg with a protective outer shell. The first egg shells would have been soft and leathery like the eggs of a snake or a sea turtle. Hard-shelled eggs, such as those of birds, likely appeared much later.

Some of the oldest known hard-shelled eggs appear in the fossil record during the Early Jurassic period, roughly 195 million years ago. Dinosaurs laid these eggs, although reptiles such as crocodiles were also producing hard-shelled eggs during the Jurassic.

As we know now, it was a line of dinosaurs that eventually gave rise to the many species of birds we see today, including the chicken.

Chickens belong to an order of birds known as the Galliformes, which includes other ground-dwelling birds such as turkeys, pheasants, peafowl and quails.

Specifically, chickens are part of a galliform genus called Gallus, which is thought to have started changing into its modern species between 6 million and 4 million years ago in South-East Asia. Domestic chickens only began appearing some time within the past 10,000 years.

This means hard-shelled eggs like the ones chickens lay are older than chickens themselves by almost 200 million years. So problem solved, right?

Well, it’s a matter of perspective.

The case for the chicken

If we interpret the question as referring specifically to chicken eggs – and not all eggs – the answer is very different. Unlike most species of animals, the modern chicken didn’t evolve naturally through evolution. Rather, it’s the result of domestication: a process where humans selectively breed animals to create individuals that are more tame and have more desirable traits.

The most famous example is the domestication of wolves into dogs by humans. Wolves and dogs have almost entirely the same DNA, but are very different in how they look and behave. Dogs came from wolves, and so scientists consider dogs to be a subspecies of wolf.

Similarly, chickens came from a species called the red junglefowl, which is found across Southern and South-East Asia. Researchers think red junglefowl were first drawn to humans thousands of years ago, when people started farming rice and other cereal grains.

This closeness then allowed domestication to take place. Over many generations the descendants of these tamed birds became their own subspecies.

Technically, the first chicken would have hatched from the egg of a selectively bred junglefowl. It was only when this chicken matured and started reproducing that the first true chicken eggs were laid.

So which answer is the better one?

That’s completely up to you to decide. As is the case with many dilemmas, the whole point of the question is to make you think – not necessarily to come up with the perfect answer.

In this case, evolutionary biology allows us to make an argument for both sides – and that is one of the wonderful things about science.

Ellen K. Mather, Adjunct Associate Lecturer in Palaeontology, Flinders University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More........→April 29, 2024

Children Do Much Better in Math When Music is Added to the Lesson: New Study

Photos by Crissy Jarvis (left) and Ben Mullins

A new study explored the causal role that music engagement has on student achievement in mathematics—and they found a significant benefit. Researchers believe that music can make math more enjoyable, keep students engaged, and help ease their fear or anxiety about topics like fractions. The addition of music may even motivate kids to appreciate math and want to learn more. A typical technique for integrating music into math lessons for young children involves clapping to songs with different rhythms learning numbers, and equating fractions to musical notes. The new meta-analysis published in the journal Educational Studies analyzed 55 studies from around the world, involving almost 78,000 students, from kindergarten to university age. Three types of musical interventions were included: typical music lessons in which children sing, listen to, and learn about composing music; learning how to play instruments alone or as part of a band; and music-math integrated interventions, where music was integrated into math lessons. Students took math tests before and after taking part in the intervention, and the change in their scores was compared with those who didn’t take part in any intervention. The use of music—whether in separate lessons or as part of math classes—caused a greater improvement in math over time. Combining both in the same lessons had the most significant effect, with around 73 percent of students who had integrated lessons doing significantly better than children who didn’t have any type of musical intervention. Also, 69 percent of students who learned how to play instruments and 58 percent of students who had normal music lessons improved more than pupils with no musical intervention. The results also revealed that music helps more with learning arithmetic than other types of math and has a bigger impact on younger pupils and those learning basic mathematical concepts. Math and music have much in common, such as the use of symbols and symmetry. Both subjects also require abstract thought and quantitative reasoning. Arithmetic may lend itself particularly well to being taught through music because core concepts, such as fractions and ratios, are also fundamental to music. Musical notes of different lengths can be represented as fractions and added together to create several bars of music. Integrated lessons may be especially effective because they allow pupils to build connections between the math and music and provide extra opportunities to explore, interpret and understand math. “Encouraging mathematics and music teachers to plan lessons together could help ease students’ anxiety about mathematics, while also boosting achievement,” said Dr. Ayça Akın, from the department of software engineering at Antalya Belek University, Turkey. However, she said there were limitations to the study. The relatively small number of studies done meant it wasn’t possible to look at the effect of variables such as gender, socio-economic status, and duration of musical instruction upon the results. Children Do Much Better in Math When Music is Added to the Lesson: New Study

Read More........→April 16, 2024

Why Should You Breastfeed Your Baby?

(Photo courtesy of Flushing Hospital Medical Center)

Flushing Hospital Medical Center’s New Beginnings unit provides the women and their families with the ultimate birthing experience. Each month, we cover a new topic exploring an important aspect of health and well-being for expectant mothers. This month, we’ll cover the health benefits of exclusive breastfeeding for both mothers and their babies. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, exclusive breastfeeding involves only feeding breast milk to your baby and no other foods or liquids. It is the best source of nutrition for your infant’s first six months of life. 

Some of the benefits to babies and mothers include: 

• Providing all necessary nutrients for the baby’s healthy physical development, including vitamin D, iron, and zinc
• Preventing infections and serious health conditions, both during infancy and later in life
• Reducing a mother’s risk of conditions such as cancer, type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure

Breastfeeding may become less frequent as your baby starts eating solid foods around six to 12 months of age. For guidance on how you should breastfeed your baby, talk to a lactation consultant or your baby’s doctor or nurse.Flushing Hospital’s New Beginnings unit offers spacious, modern delivery suites and advanced postpartum care, providing you with a safe environment to give birth and comprehensive follow-up medical support for you and your baby. To learn more about the unit, including accommodations and services provided, please call us at Source: https://www.newsindiatimes.com/

Read More........→August 23, 2023

Mothers with depression take longer to respond to their child

Credit: University of Missouri

Newswise — COLUMBIA, Mo. – A recent study at the University of Missouri found mothers who are struggling with depression tend to take longer to respond to their child during back-and-forth dialogue. The findings provide the basis for further research to determine if the slower response time has any long-term impacts on the children’s language development, vocabulary or academic outcomes.

Nicholas Smith, an assistant professor in the MU School of Health Professions, and his team listened to audio recordings of more than 100 families who were involved in the Early Head Start program, a federal child development program for children whose family’s income is at or below the federal poverty line. Some of the moms involved were struggling with depression, and Smith’s team documented how much time passed in between responses for a mother and her child during back-and-forth dialogue.

“We found that the time gap in between responses, in general, gets shorter between mother and child as the child ages, and we also found the mom’s timing tended to predict the child’s timing and vice versa,” Smith said. “Mothers and children are in sync. Children who were slower to respond to their mom often had moms who were slower to respond to the child, and children who were faster to respond to their mom had moms who were faster to respond to the child. The significant new finding was that the moms who were more depressed took longer to respond to their child compared to moms who were less depressed.”

In the longitudinal study, using audio recordings, they compared the response time of back-and-forth dialogue between mothers and their children when the children were 14 months old and 36 months old. Going forward, Smith plans to further study the dialogue response timing for the same individuals that were recorded in this study when the children were in pre-kindergarten and also when they were in fifth grade to examine how these effects play out later on in the children’s development.

“The overall objective we are hoping to accomplish is to better understand how mother-child interaction works as well as the underlying mechanisms and potential factors at play,” Smith said. “Once we identify what factors drive successful development outcomes and what factors potentially impair development, we can better identify at-risk children and then tailor potential interventions toward those that can benefit from them the most.”

“Maternal depression and the timing of mother-child dialogue” was recently published in Infant and Child Development. Funding was provided by the Mizzou Alumni Association. Source: https://www.newswise.com/

Read More........→February 20, 2023

Kids develop self-esteem even before age five

New York: Children may develop a sense of self-esteem even before they begin kindergarten, reveals an interesting research. "We found that by as young as five years of age, self-esteem is established strongly enough to be measured using sensitive techniques," said lead study author Dario Cvencek, research scientist at University of Washington. The study conducted in January 2016 used a newly developed test to assess implicit self-esteem in more than 200 children up to five-year-old. "Some scientists consider preschoolers too young to have developed a positive or negative sense about themselves," study co-author Andrew Meltzoff from University of Washington noted. Until now, no measurement tool has been able to detect self-esteem in preschool-aged children as the existing self-esteem tests require the cognitive or verbal talk. Researchers created a Preschool Implicit Association Test (PSIAT), to measure how strongly children feel positively about themselves. To make the task appropriate for preschoolers, a mix of 234 boys and girls of five-year-old from the Seattle area, replaced words related to the self ("me," "not me") with objects. They used small unfamiliar flags, and where told about "yours" and "not yours". Using buttons on a computer, children responded to a series of "me" and "not me" flags, using words and pressing the buttons. The results showed that the five-year-old associated themselves more with "good" than with "bad", and this was equally pronounced in both girls and boys. A gender identity task assessed the children's sense of whether they are a boy or a girl, called a "gender in-group preference". Children with high self-esteem and strong sense of gender identity showed preferences for members of their own gender. "Self-esteem appears to play a critical role in how children form various social identities. Our findings underscore the importance of the first five years as a foundation for life," Cvencek said. The study was published in the journal Experimental Social Psychology. —IANS. Source: Article

Read More........→November 17, 2015

Shhh! Your baby learning in sleep too

© Flickr.com/ robscomputer/cc-by-2.0

London: While infants sleep, they are reprocessing what they have learnt during the day, a study has found. Working with researchers from the University of Tubingen, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany discovered that babies of the age from nine to 16 months remember the names of objects better if they had a short nap. And only after sleeping can they transfer the learnt names to similar new objects. The infant brain thus forms general categories during sleep, converting experience into knowledge. The results show that sleep significantly affects memory organisation even in the infant brain - and at a time when memory is growing on a massive scale. "The waking infant brain quickly forgets newly-learnt names, but during sleep, words are more durably linked to objects and imprinted," said Angela Friederici, director at Max Planck Institute. The researchers also showed that the formation of categories is closely related to a typical rhythmic activity of the sleeping brain called "sleep spindles". Infants with high "sleep spindle" activity are particularly good at generalising their experiences and developing new knowledge while sleeping. In order to study the impact of sleep on infant memory, the team invited parents to attend a study with their nine to 16-month-old children. During the training session, the infants were repeatedly shown images of certain objects while hearing the fictitious names assigned to the objects. One group of infants spent the next one to two hours sleeping in their prams while the others remained awake. While the group who had stayed awake had forgotten the names of the individual objects, the children in the sleep group remembered the object-word mappings. "The infants who slept after the training session assigned new objects to the names of similar-looking objects," said Manuela Friedrich of the Max Planck Institute. They were not able to do that before their nap, and nor were the ones who stayed awake able to do it. "This means that the categories must have been formed during sleep," Friedrich noted. Source: ummid.com

Read More........→August 12, 2015

Chinese toddler first in the world to have 3D printed skull

Beijing: A three-year-old girl in China has become the first person in the world to have her skull reconstructed with the help of 3D printing technology, after a 17-hour-long ground-breaking surgery. The girl was suffering from a medical condition called hydrocephalus, which causes a buildup of excess cerebrospinal fluid in the brain. The condition left her with a head weighing about 20 kg, while she herself weighs only 32 kg. Doctors said she is recovering steadily after the 3D-printed titanium alloy skull was implanted, becoming the first person to have her cranium successfully reconstructed by by 3D printers. Han Han underwent the 17-hour surgery on Wednesday at the Second People's Hospital of central China's Hunan Province and is under observation, said neurosurgeon Kuang Weiping, who is in charge of her treatment. Han was admitted to the hospital two months ago. Since September last year, she has become bedridden as her head grew four times the normal size, taking up more than half of her total weight, Xinhua news agency reported. Due to the heavy weight, parts of her brain suffered serious infections and she lost sight because her optic nerve was affected. Kuang said they believed her skull was likely to rupture as infected parts became thinner and only the "brain-shrinking" operation could save her life. During the process, neurosurgeons peeled her scalp and skull, then drained the fluid in her head. After the swollen structures in her brain returned to the normal size, they implanted the donated artificial skull and covered it with her scalp. — PTI. Source: Article 

Read More........→July 18, 2015