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| This is a pretty crazy-cool study. Women who were abused as children (perhaps in part because they displayed autistic traits) were more likely to select mates with autistic traits. Which might be why autism risk has been associated with maternal child victimization. |
"Academics often talk about between 30 and 60 million “missing girls” in China, apparently killed in the womb or just after birth, thanks to a combination of preference for sons and the country’s decades under a repressive one-child policy.
Now researchers in the United States and China think they might have found many — or even most — of them, and argue they might not have been killed after all.
John Kennedy of the University of Kansas and Shi Yaojiang of Shaanxi Normal University have released a study claiming that the births of many of the girls may, in fact, simply not have been registered.
“People think 30 million girls are missing from the population. That's the population of California, and they think they're just gone,” said Kennedy, an associate professor of political science, according to the university website.
“Most people are using a demographic explanation to say that abortion or infanticide are the reasons they don't show up in the census and that they don't exist. But we find there is a political explanation.”
Local officials, they argue, were complicit in the concealment to retain support from villagers, and maintain social stability.
“There is no coordination between cadres saying 'we're all in agreement,'” Kennedy said. “Actually it's just very local. The people who are implementing these policies work for the government in a sense. They are officials, but they are also villagers, and they have to live in the village where they are implementing policies.”
China finally abandoned the one-child policy this year after more than three decades, allowing everyone to have two children. But there is still widespread concern about the lagged effects of a seriously skewed gender ratio on society, with young males said to vastly outnumber women. These findings could also allay some of these concerns.
“If 30 million women are truly missing, then there's going to be more males than females of marriageable age as they start looking for wives,” Kennedy said. “There is nothing more socially unstable than a bunch of testosterone with nowhere to go.”"
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| Don't worry kid, it's not your fault that school is so boring. |
"You may wonder what accounts for the recent explosive increase in the rates of A.D.H.D. diagnosis and its treatment through medication. The lifetime prevalence in children has increased to 11 percent in 2011 from 7.8 percent in 2003 — a whopping 41 percent increase — according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And 6.1 percent of young people were taking some A.D.H.D. medication in 2011, a 28 percent increase since 2007. Most alarmingly, more than 10,000 toddlers at ages 2 and 3 were found to be taking these drugs, far outside any established pediatric guidelines.
Some of the rising prevalence of A.D.H.D. is doubtless driven by the pharmaceutical industry, whose profitable drugs are the mainstay of treatment. Others blame burdensome levels of homework, but the data show otherwise. Studies consistently show that the number of hours of homework for high school students has remained steady for the past 30 years.
I think another social factor that, in part, may be driving the “epidemic” of A.D.H.D. has gone unnoticed: the increasingly stark contrast between the regimented and demanding school environment and the highly stimulating digital world, where young people spend their time outside school. Digital life, with its vivid gaming and exciting social media, is a world of immediate gratification where practically any desire or fantasy can be realized in the blink of an eye. By comparison, school would seem even duller to a novelty-seeking kid living in the early 21st century than in previous decades, and the comparatively boring school environment might accentuate students’ inattentive behavior, making their teachers more likely to see it and driving up the number of diagnoses."
"In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the pro-choice side of the abortion debate frequently predicted that legal abortion would reduce single parenthood and make marriages more stable, while the pro-life side made the allegedly-counterintuitive claim that it would have roughly the opposite effect; overall, it’s fair to say that post-Roe trends were considerably kinder to Roe’s critics than to the “every child a wanted child” conceit. Conservatives (and not only conservatives) also made various “dystopian” predictions about eugenics and the commodification of human life as reproductive science advanced in the ’70s, while many liberals argued that these fears were overblown; today, from “selective reduction” to the culling of Down’s Syndrome fetuses to worldwide trends in sex-selective abortion, from our fertility industry’s “embryo glut” to the global market in paid surrogacy, the dystopian predictions are basically just the status quo. No-fault divorce was pitched as an escape hatch for the miserable and desperate that wouldn’t affect the average marriage, but of course divorce turned out to have social-contagion effects as well. Religious fears that population control would turn coercive and tyrannical were scoffed at and then vindicated. Dan Quayle was laughed at until the data suggested that basically he had it right. The fairly-ancient conservative premise that social permissiveness is better for the rich than for the poor persistently bemuses the left; it also persistently describes reality. And if you dropped some of the documentation from today’s college rape crisis through a wormhole into the 1960s-era debates over shifting to coed living arrangements on campuses, I’m pretty sure that even many of the conservatives in that era would assume that someone was pranking them, that even in their worst fears it couldn’t possibly end up like this.
More broadly, over the last few decades social conservatives have frequently offered “both/and” cultural analyses that liberals have found strange or incredible — arguing (as noted above) that a sexually-permissive society can easily end up with a high abortion rate and a high out-of-wedlock birthrate; or that permissive societies can end up with more births to single parents and fewer births (not only fewer than replacement, but fewer than women actually desire) overall; or that expressive individualism could lead to fewer marriages and greater unhappiness for people who do get hitched. Social liberals, on the other hand, have tended to take a view of human nature that’s a little more positivist and consumerist, in which the assumption is that some kind of “perfectly-liberated decision making” is possible and that such liberation leads to optimal outcomes overall. Hence that 1970s-era assumption that unrestricted abortion would be good for children’s family situations, hence the persistent assumption that marriages must be happier when there’s more sexual experimentation beforehand, etc.
I’m not going to tell you that either side has a monopoly on the truth; human nature is much too complicated for that. But I will say, again, that if you look at the post-1960s trend data — whether it’s on family structure and social capital, fertility and marriage rates, patterns of sexual behavior and their links to flourishing relationships, or just trends in marital contentment and personal happiness more generally — the basic social conservative analysis has turned out to have more predictive power than my rigorously empirical liberal friends are inclined to admit."
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| If Calvin took Ritalin. |
"The number of stimulant misusers who become addicted is unclear. But supply has risen sharply: About 2.6 million American adults received A.D.H.D. medication in 2012, a rise of 53 percent in only four years, according to Express Scripts, the nation’s largest prescription-drug manager. Use among adults 26 to 34 almost doubled.
Most experts say a proper evaluation for the disorder typically requires an extensive inquiry into a patient’s history of impulsivity and inattention. Yet misusers routinely described brief chats with doctors to get a prescription. Two lawyers in Houston said wearing a suit to their appointments guaranteed no scrutiny.
Those lawyers said they and dozens of young colleagues at their firms had casually traded pills to work into the night and billed hundreds of extra hours a year in the race for partnerships.
One said he had originally taken 20 milligrams of Adderall a day, moving up to 100 milligrams — almost double the highest dose recommended by the Food and Drug Administration — by getting prescriptions from multiple doctors, a felony in Texas. His productivity, he said, thrilled his unquestioning bosses and clients.
Then came the downside: rapid heartbeat, profuse sweating and acute anxiety due to sleep loss. These overwhelmed any positive effects on his work performance, he said, and transformed his personality to the point that his wife divorced him. After he lost his job, he spent six weeks at a drug treatment center."
"In the 1970s, one in ten women reached menopause without giving birth to a child. But by 2010, it was one in five, according to data gathered by the Pew Research Center, and one in four for women with a bachelor’s degree. A quarter of educated American women are getting through life without ever having children.
...
That critical thinking plays a role in falling birthrates is backed up by a study conducted at Kansas State University, in which researchers found that “people’s desire to have children is most influenced by the positive and negative interactions, and the trade-offs.” These are detailed elegantly in an essay by Lionel Shriver, the author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, a book in which a mother’s life is ruined by her psychopathic son. “I could have afforded children, financially,” Shriver writes. “I just didn’t want them. They are untidy, they would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned away too much time from my precious books.”
Shriver acknowledges that this attitude could be interpreted as selfish. But, it seems, her feelings are indicative of “a larger transformation in Western culture no less profound than our collective consensus on what life is for.” In other words, she's saying, an existential shift in the way educated humans approach living—a switch from living for the (possibly celestial) future to enjoying the present—has led humans to think much more carefully about having children, since the drawbacks tend to outweigh the benefits. “As we age,” she writes, “we are apt to look back on our pasts and question, not, did I serve family, God, and country, but did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat? We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but whether they were interesting and fun.”
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| Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007 |
"Freud said he didn't know what women wanted. I know what women want: a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.
What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn't get so mad at them.
Why are so many people getting divorced today?
It's because most of us don't have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.
A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.
But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it's a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it's a man.
When a couple has an argument nowadays, they may think it's about money or power or sex or how to raise the kids or whatever. What they're really saying to each other, though without realizing it, is this: "You're not enough people!"
A husband, a wife and some kids is not a family. It's a terribly vulnerable survival unit."
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| I'm pretty sure that there are plenty of folks in Indonesia or the Philippines who would gladly carry elderly Japanese from their beds to their wheelchairs. |
The "Robear" has a cub-like face with big doey eyes, but packs enough power to transfer frail patients from a wheelchair to a bed or a bath, Japan's Riken institute said Tuesday. "The polar cub-like look is aimed at radiating an atmosphere of strength, geniality and cleanliness at the same time," research leader Toshiharu Mukai told AFP. "We voted for this design among options presented by our designer. We hope to commercialise the robot in the not-too distant future," he added. A historically low birth rate and ever-increasing life expectancy means Japan's population of elderly people is growing, while the pool of youngsters to look after them is shrinking. A reluctance to accept large-scale immigration means an increasing reliance on robots, especially to perform physically difficult work. This frequently combines with the country's love of all things cute, to produce machines with disarming faces and child-like voices. "As Japan is ageing with fewer children, the problem of a shortage in caregivers for the elderly is getting serious," Riken said in a statement. "Expectations are high that robotics will help resolve this problem," it said. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-02-japan-robear-strength-robot.html#jCp |
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| Well, maybe not, internet quote graphic. |
"The surge of emotion that makes memories of embarrassment, triumph and disappointment so vivid can also reach back in time, strengthening recall of seemingly mundane things that happened just beforehand and that, in retrospect, are relevant, a new study has found.
The report, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests that the television detective’s standard query — “Do you remember any unusual behavior in the days before the murder?” — is based on solid brain science, at least in some circumstances.
The findings fit into the predominant theory of memory: that it is an adaptive process, continually updating itself according to what knowledge may be important in the future.
The new study suggests that human memory has, in effect, a just-in-case file, keeping seemingly trivial sights, sounds and observations in cold storage for a time in case they become useful later on."
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| All of the following could be avoided, if we just told young women the truth about fertility. Plan your life so that all your children are conceived before age 35. If you want 3 kids, spaced 2 years apart, a year of wedded bliss prior to the first pregnancy, and a year to plan the wedding, then you have to be engaged by age 28. Tick tock. |
"At a time when Apple and Facebook are picking up $20,000 tabs for employees to freeze their eggs as well as offering other generous high-tech fertility benefits, it's clear that professional women have more and more options with assisted reproduction technology. Many of them will need it: At least one in eight couples overall suffer from infertility, and much of that is due to delayed childbearing. Even as the U.S. birth rate is at an all-time low, multiple births have skyrocketed from fertility drugs and in vitro fertilization treatments involving multiple embryos. In 1980, there were 70,000 twins born in the U.S.; in 2012, there were 131,269, along with 4,598 triplets and 276 quadruplets.
Credit goes to the 450 high-tech fertility clinics in the U.S., 75 of them in California....
...Even so, media coverage of glowing older celebu-moms — from Halle Berry, who just had her second child at age 47, to Laura Linney, who gave birth to her first child in 2014 at 49 — can mislead. "My concern is when celebrities in their mid- to late-40s announce they're pregnant," says Guy Ringler of California Fertility Partners, one of Southern California's most in-demand clinics. "It gives many people false hope that you can get pregnant at any age. It's not realistic."
L.A. women in particular have misguided expectations, adds Ringler: "Many of our patients eat well, exercise, are very health-conscious." Then they realize physical health and appearance largely are irrelevant to the viability of their eggs. ... "They've done studies that found going through infertility is equivalent in stress to cancer or HIV."
...IVF is a more complicated process in which sperm and harvested eggs are joined in a petri dish to become 100-cell blastocysts. The best one or two embryos are implanted; the rest are frozen for later use. A round of IVF costs from $15,000 to $18,000; most women in their late 30s or 40s require more than one round.
...Genetically testing the embryos, known as preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, is one way to stack the odds in favor of a pregnancy. Nearly every embryo that Steinberg transfers has been tested to confirm that it has the correct number of chromosomes; other tests confirm the lack of certain inheritable-disease genes such as BRCA, the breast cancer gene that Angelina Jolie carries. Steinberg says PGD reduces miscarriages: "What that's done is eliminate Down syndrome. We can't guarantee a perfect baby, but we can guarantee that anything you're concerned about isn't there." (Including the wrong eye color: In 2009, after admonishment from the Vatican and the medical community, Steinberg stopped allowing parents to choose their babies' blues — the most popular color — but quietly started up again with 15 infants last year: "There's a huge interest. Even when we retracted, the emails just kept coming in.")
Despite genetic testing, IVF still has significant limitations. "A woman in her 40s has a less than 5 percent pregnancy rate per treatment cycle," say Ringler, while a woman in her early 30s has up to a 70 percent rate. One proven way to conquer fertility decline from aging eggs is using a donor egg. (A woman's eggs start to decline in fertility in the late 20s. "At 40, most women drop off the cliff," says Steinberg.) "For a woman in her mid-40s who uses a donor egg, her pregnancy rate jumps up to 75 percent per treatment cycle," says Ringler, who thinks donor eggs are the best option for "all women 44 and older, an age when 95 percent of eggs are chromosomally abnormal." Adds Steinberg, "Nature won't let abnormal embryos make babies."
...Most donor eggs come from women in their 20s, paid $5,000 to $10,000 to undergo egg retrieval. "Bloating was the biggest downside," says an egg donor named Sara, who first donated eggs in 2007 when she was a 22-year-old acting student. (Sperm donors are paid $75 to $150 a go for a vial of sperm that might sell for $700 or more.)...
Disclosure is one of the stickiest issues with egg-donor use, which one L.A. mom, who suffered three miscarriages on the way to a biological son at 42, calls the "last bastion of shame" in fertility medicine. It's common for couples to seek out a donor who resembles them to "pass" — letting family, friends and the kids themselves believe they are the genetic parents. Several Westside fertility doctors say that about half their patients plan to keep their offspring's origins under wraps; Steinberg estimates 70 percent of his patients do.
...Oddly perhaps, hiring a stranger to carry a child for you has become less taboo than buying an egg. Nicole Kidman used a surrogate for her youngest child, born when she was 43. Sarah Jessica Parker used a surrogate to carry her twin daughters, who went home to a 44-year-old mom. Both actresses were effusive in their thanks to their carriers but avoid discussing the genesis of the eggs.
"Just two months after a group of neuroscientists criticized commercially available brain games, a different group of scientists released an open letter on Wednesday saying the products do show promise.
In October the Stanford Center on Longevity and nearly 70 scientists issued a statement objecting to claims that such games “offer consumers a scientifically grounded avenue to reduce or reverse cognitive decline.”
In response, more than 120 scientists have now signed an open letter to the Stanford center rebutting some parts of its criticism and asserting that a “substantial and growing body of evidence shows that certain cognitive-training regimens can significantly improve cognitive function, including in ways that generalize to everyday life.” The letter includes a list of 132 studies that its signatories say “directly demonstrate that computerized cognitive training can improve cognition.”
“The authors of the longevity-center statement properly concluded that a large body of work has shown there is plasticity throughout the brain and throughout life,” said Michael M. Merzenich, who led the effort to compose the new open letter, in a news release. Mr. Merzenich is a professor emeritus of neuroscience, physiology, and otolaryngology at the University of California at San Francisco and the co-founder and chief scientific officer of Posit Science, the cognitive-training company behind a program called BrainHQ. “It was rather astounding, then, that this same group failed to notice that we proved that through hundreds of studies showing we can drive positive change in the brain through directed, intensive computer-guided training. It’s silly that anyone would think that we can make cognitive training that works in labs, but not in people’s homes.”"
"I do not break my head very much about good and evil, but I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think, though your experiences of life can hardly have been different from mine. If we are to talk of ethics, I subscribe to a high ideal from which most of the human beings I have come across depart most lamentably."
-- Letter to Oskar Pfister, a Christian minister, c. 1922
"A Spanish woman has been forced to confess to cheating on her husband-to-be on her hen night with a dwarf stripper after she gave birth to a baby with dwarfism.
Her husband believed the baby was his and that it had been conceived during the honeymoon but his wife confessed to the infidelity after he repeatedly questioned doctors as to how the baby could have been born with dwarfism.
The woman has not been named, but according to local reports she felt compelled to tell her husband after questions were raised by friends who had accompanied her on the hen night, which took place at the beginning of the year."
It seems appropriate to link now to the excellent blogpost by Gene Expression that deflates the urban myth that 30% of all births are cases of "misattributed paternity." In the United States, the actual rate of men raising children whom they believe are their biological offspring but are not, is less than 1% (.08). [Which, of course, means that it happens.]
[O]ver the past 50 years, health care hasn’t slowed the aging process so much as it has slowed the dying process. And, as my father demonstrates, the contemporary dying process has been elongated. Death usually results from the complications of chronic illness—heart disease, cancer, emphysema, stroke, Alzheimer’s, diabetes.
Take the example of stroke. The good news is that we have made major strides in reducing mortality from strokes. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of deaths from stroke declined by more than 20 percent. The bad news is that many of the roughly 6.8 million Americans who have survived a stroke suffer from paralysis or an inability to speak. And many of the estimated 13 million more Americans who have survived a “silent” stroke suffer from more-subtle brain dysfunction such as aberrations in thought processes, mood regulation, and cognitive functioning. Worse, it is projected that over the next 15 years there will be a 50 percent increase in the number of Americans suffering from stroke-induced disabilities. Unfortunately, the same phenomenon is repeated with many other diseases.
So American immortals may live longer than their parents, but they are likely to be more incapacitated. Does that sound very desirable? Not to me.
The situation becomes of even greater concern when we confront the most dreadful of all possibilities: living with dementia and other acquired mental disabilities. Right now approximately 5 million Americans over 65 have Alzheimer’s; one in three Americans 85 and older has Alzheimer’s. And the prospect of that changing in the next few decades is not good. Numerous recent trials of drugs that were supposed to stall Alzheimer’s—much less reverse or prevent it—have failed so miserably that researchers are rethinking the whole disease paradigm that informed much of the research over the past few decades. Instead of predicting a cure in the foreseeable future, many are warning of a tsunami of dementia—a nearly 300 percent increase in the number of older Americans with dementia by 2050.I think that a 50% prevalence rate of dementia in those aged 85 or older is more accurate.
[D]ementia creates what should not be: mindless persons. Mindless, selfless, unreasonable creatures, somehow still looking like human beings. We see a metaphysical incompatibility in them, and it is deeply unsettling. They might as well be headless bodies, up and shambling around.
...[E]ach dementia story comes across as an individual tragedy. You read it or watch it or hear about it, and you might fear something similar happening to you, but you can’t really imagine such a thing ever happening to you. Literally—dementia is unimaginable. We can’t put ourselves in the place of the demented; we can’t wrap our minds around what it must be like to lose your mind. Instead, you and me, storytelling animals that we are—we invent confident memories of our future.
And then, of course, it happens to us.
There is no cure, preventive regimen, or way to halt the damage of Alzheimer’s. Right now, the only means for change lie within us: how we conceive of the illness, how we think of the afflicted. So many people are going to have to live with this dehumanizing disease! How do we make sure that they are able to do so with dignity, compassion? The importance of this question cannot be overstated. How are we going to accommodate the least of us—and those tasked with their care—once they become so many?
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| Yes, that Harry Harlow. |
A little education goes a long way toward ensuring you'll recover from a serious traumatic brain injury. In fact, people with lots of education are seven times more likely than high school dropouts to have no measurable disability a year later.
"It's a very dramatic difference," says Eric Schneider, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins and the lead author of a new study. The finding suggests that people with more education have brains that are better able to "find ways around the damage" caused by an injury, he says.
The study looked at the medical records of 769 adults who suffered traumatic brain injuries serious enough to require an inpatient hospital stay and rehabilitation. A year after the injury, just 10 percent of people who didn't finish high school had no disability, compared with 39 percent of people with enough years of education to have received a college degree. People with advanced degrees did even better.
One reason for the difference may be something known as "cognitive reserve" in the brain, Schneider says. The concept is a bit like physical fitness, he says, which can help a person recover from a physical injury. Similarly, a person with a lot of cognitive reserve may be better equipped to recover from a brain injury.
The results were reported Tuesday in the journal Neurology.
Scientists don't fully understand what specific brain changes are responsible for cognitive reserve. But research on educational training suggests that it involves strengthening the networks of brain cells involved in learning and memory, according to a commentary by Erin Bigler that accompanies the study. A stronger network may be better at repairing itself or adapting to damage, Bigler says.
For several decades, studies have shown that people with more education, and presumably more cognitive reserve, are less likely to develop the memory and thinking problems of Alzheimer's disease. The new study suggests the benefits of education and cognitive reserve extend to brain damage caused by injury rather than disease.
There's no guaranteed way to increase your cognitive reserve, Schneider says. But there are hints that staying physically and socially active helps, and that "pursuing lifelong learning may be beneficial," he says.
Laurin and colleagues wanted to see how our relationship with God changes as our other relationships change. So the researchers designed a series of studies, published today in Social Psychological and Personality Science, that experimentally induced people to believe their romantic relationship was under threat and then tested their feelings of closeness to God.
...
In one of the studies, they recruited 187 participants who were primarily Christian and Hindu but also Muslim, nonreligious, or unaffiliated. To manipulate relationship threat, the researchers told some of the participants that everyone hides certain aspects of themselves from their partners. "Then we hit them with the idea that these 'secret selves' always end up coming out, and ruining relationships," Laurin says. "And just in case that's not enough to make them nervous that their relationship could be in danger, we force them to think more specifically about things that they themselves might be hiding from their partners."
They then asked the participants to rate their closeness to God. Another group of participants simply rated their closeness with God without first reading the threat scenario. The researchers also assessed the participants' self-esteem.
Laurin's team found that participants sought to enhance their relationship with God when under threat of romantic rejection – but only if they had high self-esteem. This fits with past work showing that people high in self-esteem seek social connection when their relationships are threatened.
It's a sobering finding, Laurin says: "We find that high self-esteem people, who already are the ones who take constructive steps to repair their relationships when they are under threat, have yet another resource they can turn to: their relationship with God," she explains. "Low self-esteem people, who are the ones who retreat and protect themselves at the expense of the relationship when the relationship is under threat, don't seem to be able to use this new resource either."
