New research has found that people with high levels of autistic traits are more likely to produce unusually creative ideas. Psychologists from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and University of Stirling examined the relationship between autistic-like traits and creativity. While they found that people with high autistic traits produced fewer responses when generating alternative solutions to a problem - known as 'divergent thinking' - the responses they did produce were more original and creative. It is the first study to find a link between autistic traits and the ...

Every hospital should have access to regional multidisciplinary teams that can provide expert advice for children and adolescents with concerns about sex development, and provide them and their parents with psychological support, according to a revised Society for Endocrinology guideline on disorders of sex development (DSD) published today in Clinical Endocrinology. Recommendations include: Expert input should be provided in all cases where sex assignment is delayed at birth In adolescents, DSD should be considered in boys and girls with abnormal pubertal progress ...

The death rate among pre-school children in the UK is almost double that of Sweden, with prematurity, congenital abnormalities, and infections all taking a significant toll, finds research published online in Archives of Disease in Childhood. The findings prompt the researchers to call for a stronger focus on prevention to improve the UK's position on the European child mortality league table. The researchers compared causes of death among children under the age of 5 in the UK and Sweden, using nationally collated data spanning the period 2006-2008 to tease out the ...

Rings made of titanium--an increasingly popular alternative to gold and silver--are giving emergency doctors a headache because they are so difficult to prize off swollen fingers, reveals a case study published online in Emergency Medicine Journal. But now help is at hand, thanks to the ingenuity of plastic surgeons. The popularity of titanium rings is growing because the metal is light yet strong, extremely durable, and doesn't cause skin allergies. But a swollen finger caused by ring constriction is a relatively common problem in emergency care. And if not dealt ...

Highlights Most donors and recipients support swapping health information before kidney transplantation, but there was low interest in sharing social information. Both donors and recipients wanted the transplant team involved in information disclosure. Most donors and recipients did not think the recipient had a right to know why a donor was excluded from donating. Approximately 6,000 living donor kidney transplants are performed annually in the United States. Washington, DC (August 13, 2015) -- Both donors and recipients want more information about each ...

Camden and Newark, New Jersey, are perceived as two of the most violent cities in the nation, yet New Jersey's police officers are among the least likely to get shot on the job. Montana, with its serene landscapes and national parks, has among the highest homicide rates for law enforcement officers. Why? Across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, homicides of police officers are linked to the statewide level of gun ownership, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health. The study found that police officers serving in states with ...

DALLAS, August 13, 2015 -- Smartphone applications and wearable sensors have the potential to help people make healthier lifestyle choices, but scientific evidence of mobile health technologies' effectiveness for reducing risk factors for heart disease and stroke is limited, according to a scientific statement from the American Heart Association, published in the association's journal Circulation. The new statement reviewed the small body of published, peer-reviewed studies about the effectiveness of mobile health technologies (mHealth) for managing weight, increasing ...

At home on the sofa, in a hospital bed, or in a care home: where a death takes place is always recorded on the death certificate. Until now, however, this information has never been collated and evaluated. In an Original Article in the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztbl Int 112:496-504), Burkhard Dasch and his co-authors analyze for the first time the place of death records for Germany. What they found was that every second person died in a hospital; only one in four died at home. The study evaluated more than 24 000 death certificates ...

Marks on two 3.4 million-year-old animal bones found at the site of Dikika, Ethiopia, were not caused by trampling, an extensive statistical analysis confirms. The Journal of Human Evolution is publishing the results of the study, which developed new methods of fieldwork and analysis for researchers exploring the origins of tool making and meat eating in our ancestors. "Our analysis clearly shows that the marks on these bones are not characteristic of trampling," says Jessica Thompson, an assistant professor of anthropology at Emory University and lead author of the study. ...

MADISON, Wis. -- Koko the gorilla is best known for a lifelong study to teach her a silent form of communication, American Sign Language. But some of the simple sounds she has learned may change the perception that humans are the only primates with the capacity for speech. In 2010, Marcus Perlman started research work at The Gorilla Foundation, where Koko has spent more than 40 years living immersed with humans -- interacting for many hours each day with psychologist Penny Patterson and biologist Ron Cohn. "I went there with the idea of studying Koko's gestures, but ...

MADISON, Wis. -- The crucial genetic mashup that spawned the yeast that brews the vast majority of beer occurred at least twice -- and both times without human help -- according to a University of Wisconsin-Madison study published Aug. 11 in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution. Lager yeast, a hybrid that thrives in cold temperatures, is used in lager beer production, which accounts for about 94 percent of the world's beer. And while 15th century Bavarian monks invented lager beer, they probably did not deliberately cause the hybridizations detailed by a team ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., August 13, 2015--A team of researchers has discovered a Jupiter-like planet within a young system that could provide a new understanding of how planets formed around our sun. The new planet, called 51 Eridani b, is the first exoplanet discovered by the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), a new instrument operated by an international collaboration headed by Bruce Macintosh, a professor of physics in the Kavli Institute at Stanford University. It is a million times fainter than its star and shows the strongest methane signature ever detected on an alien planet, ...

WASHINGTON - Violent video game play is linked to increased aggression in players but insufficient evidence exists about whether the link extends to criminal violence or delinquency, according to a new American Psychological Association task force report. "The research demonstrates a consistent relation between violent video game use and increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive cognitions and aggressive affect, and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy and sensitivity to aggression," says the report of the APA Task Force on Violent Media. The task force's review ...

Recent Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigations into the neurobiology underlying the effects of general anesthesia have begun to reveal the ways different anesthetic agents alter specific aspects of the brain's electrical signals, reflected by EEG (electroencephalogram) signatures. While those studies have provided information that may lead to improved techniques for monitoring the consciousness of patients receiving general anesthesia, until now they have been conducted in relatively young adult patients. Now a series of papers from MGH researchers is detailing ...

You've heard that romance starts in the kitchen and not in the bedroom. Well, researchers at Drexel University finally have the science to support that saying - but not the way you might think. In a new study published online in the journal Appetite, researchers found that women's brains respond more to romantic cues on a full stomach than an empty one. The study explored brain circuitry in hungry versus satiated states among women who were past-dieters and those who had never dieted. The study's first author Alice Ely, PhD, completed the research while pursuing a ...

For the first time, Lawrence Livermore scientists as part of an international team, have discovered the most Jupiter-like planet ever seen in a young star system, lending clues to understanding how planets formed around our sun. Using a new advanced adaptive optics (AO) device on the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) on the Gemini South Telescope in Chile, the team took an image of the planet, which is about twice the size of Jupiter. Called 51 Eridani b, the planet is the first in a wave of discoveries by a new generation of planet-hunting instruments, and could help scientists ...

Scientists at The Field Museum have identified a new species of pre-mammal in what is now Zambia. Thanks to a unique groove on the animal's upper jaw, it was dubbed Ichibengops (Itchy-BEN-gops), which combines the local Bemba word for scar (ichibenga), and the common Greek suffix for face (ops). Put simply: Scarface. Believed to be roughly the size of a dachshund, Ichibengops lived around 255 million years ago, and was a member of Therocephalia, a group of ancient mammal relatives that survived the largest mass extinction in history (the Permian-Triassic extinction). ...

Scientists have been fascinated by a series of unusual exploding stars -- outcasts beyond the typical cozy confines of their galaxies. A new analysis of 13 supernovae -- including archived data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope -- is helping astronomers explain how some young stars exploded sooner than expected, hurling them to a lonely place far from their host galaxies. It's a complicated mystery of double-star systems, merging galaxies, and twin black holes that began in 2000 when the first such supernova was discovered, according to study leader Ryan Foley, University ...

New research from North Carolina State University and Reed College shows that when fruit flies are attacked by parasites or bacteria they respond by producing offspring with greater genetic variability. This extra genetic variability may give the offspring an increased chance of survival when faced with the same pathogens. These findings demonstrate that parents may purposefully alter the genotypes of their offspring. Fruit flies' reproductive cells are usually haploid, meaning that there is only one copy of each chromosome in the cell's nucleus instead of two. During ...

This news release is available in Japanese. As nonhuman primates mature, their vocalizations are thought to be minimally or not at all influenced by caregivers - but a new study reveals that infant marmosets use cues from adults as they develop vocalizations. In a surprise twist then, humans may not be the only primates whose vocal development benefits from early communication. To monitor and measure the vocal development in marmosets, Daniel Takahashi et al. recorded vocalizations between the first day of birth and two months of age, using four well-established ...

This news release is available in Japanese. Amid climate change debates revolving around limited increases in recent global mean surface temperature (GMST) rates, Kevin Trenberth argues that natural climate fluxes - larger than commonly appreciated - can overwhelm background warming, making plateaued rates, or hiatuses, deceiving in significance. After many years of monitoring, it's clear that the GMST can vary from year to year, even decade to decade; these differences, Trenberth argues, are largely a result of internal natural variability. For example, the Pacific ...

This news release is available in Japanese. The recently commissioned Gemini Planet Imager has made its first exoplanet discovery: what may be the lowest-mass exoplanet ever directly imaged with a space telescope instrument. Based on available data, the researchers project the planet weighs twice as much as Jupiter - far less than exoplanets directly imaged before, which weighed at least five times Jupiter's mass. The findings from the next-generation Gemini imaging tool pave the way toward a better understanding of how our solar system was formed. In ...

The Gemini Planet Imager has discovered and photographed its first planet, a methane-enshrouded gas giant much like Jupiter that may hold the key to understanding how large planets form in the swirling accretion disks around stars. The GPI instrument, which is mounted on the 8-meter Gemini South telescope in Chile, is the size of a small car and was designed, built and optimized for imaging and analyzing the atmospheres of faint Jupiter-like planets next to bright stars, thanks to a device that masks the star's glare. In December 2104, GPI began searching hundreds of ...

A Jupiter-like planet within a young system that could serve as a decoder ring for understanding how planets formed around our Sun has been discovered by a team of astronomers from the University of Montreal's Institute of Research on Exoplanets (iREx) in collaboration with an international team of astronomers led by professor Bruce MacInstosh from Stanford University. One of the best ways to learn how our solar system evolved is in fact to look to younger star systems in the early stages of development. The new planet, called 51 Eridani b, is the first exoplanet discovered ...

While it may not shock you to learn that children born with disorders of sex development (DSD) face challenges, Concordia University researchers have confirmed that these go far beyond the physical. In a paper published in the journal Hormone and Metabolic Research, psychology professor William M. Bukowski and his co-authors Elizabeth McCauley and Thomas Mazur examine the potential effects that these disorders can have on children's and adolescents' peer relationships. The term "disorders of sex development" covers a range of conditions, from physical malformations ...