Tool Use Is Just a Trick of the Mind
By Michael Balter
ScienceNOW Daily News
28 January 2008

Don't take that hammer for granted. Using tools may seem like second
nature, but only a few animals can master the coordination and mental
sophistication required. So how did primates learn to use tools...

Children As Young As Three Can Navigate Successfully Outdoors, Study
Shows
ScienceDaily (Feb. 1, 2008) — Ever come out of a London Underground
station and not known where you were? Then you spot a familiar
landmark like the Tower of London and suddenly you have your bearings?

New research from the University of Bristol shows for the first time
that global positioning systems technology (GPS) can be used to show
how children as young as three find their way around. GPS, the
technology used in sat-navs, is a navigation system based on
satellites that allows a user with a receiver to determine precise
coordinates for their location on the earth's surface.

Using things around us to regain our bearings is known as
reorientation and the process has been widely studied in non-human
animal species. More recent research, looking at the development of
this ability in children, suggests that we do not accurately use
landmarks to orient ourselves until about the age of six. However, all
studies to date have taken place in artificial laboratory environments
rather than the real world.

Is the obesity epidemic exaggerated?

Last week, the UK health secretary declared that we are in a grip of
an obesity epidemic, but does the evidence stack up? Researchers in
this week’s BMJ debate the issue.

Claims about an obesity epidemic often exceed the scientific evidence
and mistakenly suggest an unjustified degree of certainty, argue
Patrick Basham and John Luik.

For example, the average population weight gain in the United States
in the past 42 years is 10.9kg or 0.26kg a year. Yet, between
1999-2000 and 2001-2002, there were no significant changes in the
prevalence of overweight or obesity among US adults or in the
prevalence of overweight among children.

Furthermore, they say, the categories of normal, overweight, and obese
is entirely arbitrary and at odds with the underlying evidence about
the association between body mass index and mortality.

New study finds systematic change in dreams after Sept. 11, 2001

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, changed our lives in a
number of different ways, not only socially and politically, but also
in the way in which we dream, according to a study published in the
February 1 issue of the journal SLEEP.

The study, authored by Ernest Hartmann, MD, of Tufts University and
Newton Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Boston, Mass., focused on 44
people (11 men and 33 women) living in the United States, all between
the ages of 22-70 years, and who had been recording all their dreams
for at least two years. Each of the subjects provided 20 consecutive
dreams from their records, with the last 10 recorded before 9/11/01
and the first 10 after 9/11/01.

According to the results, dreams after 9/11 showed more intense
images, but were not longer, more dreamlike or more bizarre. In
addition, they did not contain more images of airplanes or tall
buildings. In fact, not a single dream involved planes flying into
towers, or anything close to that, even though all participants had
seen those images many times on TV.

Suicide risk factors consistent across nations

Risk factors for suicidal thoughts, plans and attempts are consistent
across countries, and include having a mental disorder and being
female, younger, less educated, and unmarried. So says new research
from a Harvard University professor and the World Health Organization
(WHO) World Mental Health Survey Initiative. The study examined both
the prevalence and the risk factors for suicide across 17 countries,
and is the largest, most representative examination of suicidal
behavior ever conducted.

Published in the February issue of the “British Journal of
Psychiatry,” the study was led by Matthew Nock, associate professor of
psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, with data
collected by the WHO World Mental Health Survey Initiative.

“Our research suggests that suicidal thoughts and behaviors are more
common than one might think, and also that key risk factors for these
behaviors are quite consistent across many different countries around
the world,” says Nock.