What’s the News: A few years ago scientists learned that American crows can recognize and remember human faces, particularly faces they associate with bad experiences. Now, new research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows that the birds can share that knowledge of dangerous humans with other crows.

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What’s the News: Researchers have simulated the symptoms of schizophrenia using a language-learning computer program, in a recent study published in Biological Psychiatry. The computer started showing schizophrenia-like symptoms when it was set to learn too much and forget too little. This study lends support to the hyperlearning hypothesis, that the brains of people with schizophrenia have trouble forgetting or filtering out irrelevant information.

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Though attempts to teach creationism (or its twin sister, intelligent design) in the classroom have been struck down in court, these anti-science approaches still influence the teaching of evolution in American schools. Barely more than one-quarter of 926 high school science teachers who responded to a survey published in Science this week unabashedly taught evolution in their classrooms.

Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer of Penn State have been watching this story for years, tracking whether courtroom victories like 2005′s Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District truly freed up teachers to teach evolution without fear. In an early 2008 study, a book, and new results published in Science, the answer is a depressing “no”:

Only 28% of the 926 teachers surveyed, “unabashedly introduce evidence that evolution has occurred and craft lesson plans so that evolution is a theme that unifies disparate topics in biology.” … Most biology teachers belong to the “cautious 60%,” who are “neither strong advocates for evolutionary biology nor explicit endorsers of nonscientific alternatives,” the study says. [USA Today]

It’s not that a wave of creationism is overtaking our biology teachers—just 13 percent of respondents said they advocated that viewpoint. What’s more likely, Berkman and Plutzer say, is a crisis of confidence. Says Berkman:

“The survey left space for [the teachers] to share their experiences. That’s where we picked up a lot of a sense about how they play to the test and tell students they can figure it out for themselves. Our general sense is they lack the knowledge and confidence to go in there and teach evolution, which makes them risk-averse.” [LiveScience]

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This evening, according to early reports, President Obama will spend part of his State of the Union Address addressing the United States’ “competitiveness.” But ahead of the national pep talk, the Department of Education brought the mood down a notch. The latest results from a federal test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress were released today, and the “Nation’s Report Card” doles out some depressingly low grades for American students’ understanding of basic science.

A third of the nation’s fourth-graders, 30 percent of eighth-graders and 21 percent of 12th-graders are performing at or above the proficient level in science…. Fourth-graders considered proficient are able to recognize that gravitational force constantly affects an object, while advanced students can design an investigation comparing two types of bird food. Proficient 12th-graders are able to evaluate two methods to control an invasive animal species; advanced students can recognize a nuclear fission reaction. [Bloomberg]

At the other end of the spectrum, 28 percent of the 4th graders failed to show a basic understanding of science, and that number was up to 40 percent for high school seniors. That troubles Alan Friedman, a member of the board that oversees the test:

“I’m at least as concerned, maybe even more, about the large number who fall at the low end,” Friedman said. “Advanced is advanced. But basic is really basic. It doesn’t even mean a complete understanding of the most simple fundamentals.” [AP]

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Parents, of course, love to read too much into the small steps of a child’s development. But could it really be that the self-control kids learn to exert when they are very young is an indicator of the adult lives they will lead?

From DISCOVER blogger Ed Yong:

Right from the start, they are taught to restrain their impulses, focus on their goals, and control their choices. This seems like a wise move, but how could you tell if such instruction actually affects a child’s fate?

Ideally, you would follow a group of children into adulthood, to see how their degree of self-control affects the course of their lives. You’d need to catch up with them at regular intervals to look at their health, mental state, finances and more. You’d need to meticulously plan the study decades before the important results came in, and you’d need to keep in close touch with the volunteers so they stick with the study. In short, you’d need to have set up the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study.

That study began in the mid-1970s, and all these years later, nearly all of the thousand-plus participants (who were born in 1972 or 1973) are still involved. The huge data set Terrie Moffit and Avshalom Caspi have obtained shows that those who scored highest on self-control tests in the first years of their lives were healthier and wealthier than their peers into their 30s.

For all the details, check out the rest of Ed’s post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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DISCOVER: Could an Inner Zombie Be Controlling Your Brain?

Image: iStockphoto

Autism researchers already knew that a variant of gene called CNTNAP2 that appears in about one-third of people is associated with higher risk for developing the condition. A study this week out in Science Translational Medicine puts that genetic marker together with what it appears to do in the brain: cause too many connections inside the frontal lobe of the brain, but too few from there to other brain regions. That could be a key clue in unraveling the learning and language difficulties that frequently appear in autism spectrum disorders.

The gene produces a protein called CASPR1 and is active during brain development — mostly during frontal-lobe development. “During early development, it is localized to parts of brain that are ‘more evolved’ — areas where learning and language happen, the frontal lobes where really complex thinking takes place,” says Ashlee Scott-van Zeeland, a postdoctoral fellow at the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and lead author of the study. “[It is] thought to help structure the brain.” [TIME]

To study its effects, Scott-Van Zeeland and company studied 32 kids between 11 and 13 in age. Some were autistic, some not, and many of the non-autistic kids carried the CNTNAP2 gene variant. The scientists examined the children’s brains through fMRI while the kids played a game intended to stimulate brain regions that the gene affects.

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New neuroscience research is not only adding to our understanding of math and number processing in the brain, it’s also suggesting a way to improve learning in the math-deficient.

A small new study published in Current Biology involved electrical stimulation of the parietal lobe, a part of the brain involved in math learning and understanding. When this area was stimulated, students performed better on a math problem test. Said study leader Cohen Kadosh:

“We’ve shown before that we can induce discalculia [an inability to do math], and now it seems we might be able to make someone better at maths, so we really want to see if we can help people with dyscalculia…. Electrical stimulation is unlikely to turn you into the next Einstein, but if we’re lucky it might be able to help some people to cope better with maths.” [BBC News]

Dyscalculia is a learning disability similar to dyslexia, in which a person has an innate difficulty with learning or understanding math. People with this condition can have trouble with daily arithmetic, telling left from right, and telling time on analog clocks. Some studies estimate up to five percent of the population suffers from dyscalculia, and about 20 percent have less severe troubles with math.

For the experiment, 15 students were hooked up to a transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) machine, which stimulates the brain through the skull with 1 milliamp of electricity, and were given either a positive (right to left) zap to their parietal lobe for 20 minutes, a positive zap for 30 seconds, or a negative (left to right) zap for 20 minutes (five students per group). The current produced a tingling sensation in the scalp, but it didn’t hurt. Then the students were trained to learn the assigned number values of made-up symbols.

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There may be no game simpler than tag. To play, you need nothing but a few friends and some energy. In fact, tag is so easy to play that it reaches other primate species: Gorillas like to play, too.

Marina Davila Ross and colleagues spent three years watching and filming gorilla colonies at Germany and Swiss zoos for a study now out in Biology Letters. They shot footage of 21 different young gorillas goofing around in a game that resembles human children playing tag.

Like human tag, one gorilla runs up to another and taps, hits, or outright punches the second. The hitter then usually runs away, attempting to avoid being hit back. Davila Ross and her colleagues also noticed that, like kids, the gorillas would reverse roles, so sometimes the first hitter would be the tagger, and vice versa. All African great apes appear to play tag, and younger apes play it much more often than their elders. Tree-dwelling orangutans likely also play a similar game, but not on the ground, according to Davila Ross [Discovery News].

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Poke a snail with a stick and it remembers for a day. Poke a snail with a stick after you’ve given it methamphetamine and it remembers for much longer.

Getting gastropods hooked on meth perhaps sounds cruel, but Barbara Sorg and her team are among those scientists trying to figure out how the drug works in the brain to produce intense connections that feed the addiction cycle. In a study forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Biology, the scientists show that, in snails at least, meth makes it hard to forget things that happened while on the drug.

Here’s the test: The snails Sorg studied can breathe two ways, through their skin underwater and also through a breathing tube they can deploy when they surface. The team kept two groups of snails—one on meth, one not—in separate tanks of shallow water. And if the snails tried to surface and breathe that way, the scientists would poke them.

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This is not an “eat dirt for your health and happiness” study. You don’t need to shovel soil in your mouth. Just go outside.

Biologist Dorothy Matthews and company wanted to test a particular bacteria, Mycobacterium vaccae. It’s found commonly in the soil and carried widely through the air, so if you take a walk in the park you’ll probably breathe it in. Previous studies have shown that the bacterium increases serotonin in the brain, and have even suggested that the bacterium has antidepressant qualities. Since the neurotransmitter serotonin is also involved in cognition, the team wanted to see if the bacterium could have a direct effect on learning. Indeed it did, Matthews’ team announced at the General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego.

In a classic test of learning ability, Matthews gave mice a treat – white bread with peanut butter – as a reward to encourage them to learn to run through a maze. When she laced the treat with a tiny bit of Mycobacterium vaccae, she found that the mice ran through the maze twice as fast as mice that were given plain peanut butter [New Scientist].

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Don’t be deceived by the peaceful look of a newborn baby asleep in a crib–that little tyke may actually be hard at work, soaking up information about the world. A new study has found that newborns are capable of a rudimentary form of learning while they’re asleep, which may be an important process, considering that infants spend between 16 to 18 hours a day in the land of Nod.

Researchers recruited one- and two-day-old infants for the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. With each sleeping baby, the researchers played a musical tone and followed that by a puff of air to the eyes, a mild annoyance that caused the infant to automatically scrunch up its eyes. As this sequence of events was repeated, the sleeping babies learned to associate the air puff with the tone, and soon began to to tighten their eyelids as soon as they heard the musical note, even if the air puff didn’t follow. Electrodes stuck to their scalps also showed activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in memory.
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A team of French scientists have proposed that when it comes to multi-tasking, our brains can handle only so much. In a new study, published in Science, scientists Sylvain Charron and Etienne Koechlin found that while the brain can easily divide its attention between two tasks, a third task will begin to slow it down–suggesting there is an upper limit to our multi-tasking abilities.

The scientists asked volunteers to do two complicated matching tasks simultaneously. With two tasks to deal with, the brain’s frontal lobes swung into action, working together to get the job done. The left side of the brain picked up one assignment while the right managed the other. But when scientists threw a third task into the mix, the brain began to fumble, with the volunteers making mistakes and slowing down, leading Koechlin to suggest that our frontal lobes “can’t maintain more than two tasks.”

To find out more about how the brain maxes out on multi-tasking and what this means for people who drink coffee and text while driving, head to Not Exactly Rocket Science’s for Ed Yong’s post: When multi-tasking, each half of the brain focuses on different goals.

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Image: Etienne Koechlin

Are the racial stereotypes that each of us holds rooted in social fear? That’s the question behind a study out in Current Biology in which researchers investigated children with Williams’ syndrome. This genetic disorder comes from the loss of 26 genes and is marked by, among other things, a lack of social fear in patients: Meeting strangers for the first time, they’ll treat them like old friends.

According to research by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg and colleagues, those children seemed less given to racial stereotyping than the children without the condition they studied, and the researchers attribute that to the lack of social fear in the kids with Williams’. This result may jibe with previous brain-scanning studies of people with Williams’ syndrome which found unusual activity in their amygdalas, a brain center associated with fear. Interestingly, the children with Williams’ syndrome showed a similar gender bias as the other children, suggesting a different neurological cause for gender and race bias.

However, some scientists point to problems with the study. The sample size is quite small, which is difficult to avoid when studying a rare condition, but still casts doubt on the findings. For instance, 64 percent of the time the children with Williams’ syndrome gave answers that could indicate racial stereotyping, but the margin for error was so large that the researchers concluded 64 percent was not significantly different from 50 percent, a set of perfectly color-blind answers.

For deeper analysis, check out Ed Yong’s post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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Image: Current Biology

When it comes to picking up clever tricks and learning to do something the way everybody else does it, social animals like humans, birds, and monkeys excel. One individual looks at what others in the group are doing and quickly learns to follow suit—an invaluable skill that scientists previously thought evolved in step with communal living.

But what about an individual that doesn’t live in a group and spends most of its life in solitude–would it still have that ability to watch and learn? Cognitive biologist Anna Wilkinson set out to answer that question by studying the red-footed tortoise, one of the loneliest beasts on the planet. These South American tortoises grow up without parents or siblings, and adults rarely cross paths. If a head-bobbing display determines that a stranger is of the opposite sex, the two will mate perfunctorily–otherwise they just ignore each other [ScienceNOW]. Yet in a new study published in Biology Letters, Wilkinson showed that even these hermits possess the ability to learn by watching others.

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It’s not that teenagers aren’t trying to learn. (Well, OK, some of them definitely aren’t trying.) But the distractions that come with being a teenager are exacerbated by the fact that teens just don’t learn as quickly as either young kids or adults, and a new study of mice that appears in Science points to specific brain changes that might help explain why.

Seeking to study spatial learning during puberty, the team devised a relatively complex task (at least for a mouse) that requires learning how to avoid a moving platform that delivers a very mild shock [TIME]. While the prepubescent mice picked up on what to avoid pretty quickly, as did adult mice, pubescent mice took considerably longer to figure it out. The key to these differences was what study leader Sheryl Smith saw in the brains of these mice.

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