Science News

MAY 1960 DEVELOPING INFANTS -- “We expected that the shocked rats would be affected by their experience, and we looked for signs of emotional disorder when they reached adulthood. To our surprise it was the second control group--the rats we had not handled at all--that behaved in a peculiar manner. The behavior of the shocked rats could not be distinguished from that of the control group which had experienced the same handling but no electric shock. Thus the results of our first experiment caused us to reframe our question. Our investigation at the Columbus Psychiatric Institute and Hospital of Ohio State University has since been concerned not so much with the effects of stressful experience--which after all is the more usual experience of infants--as with the effects of the absence of such experience in infancy. --Seymour Levine”

How do you save critically endangered gorillas? One idea, currently being tested by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), is to introduce snails to Nigeria.

More specifically, snail farming . The idea is that snail farming could provide both a revenue stream and a new source of protein for Nigerians, making the poaching of gorillas less attractive.

By Richard A. [More]

The Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill keeps getting worse--now gushing more than 200,000 gallons per day , according to NOAA estimates--five times more than original estimates and more than BP's absolute worst case scenario in disaster plans filed with the government. That may not change any time soon. The last big blowout, at Ixtoc off Mexico in 1979, took almost a year to stop and spilled some 140 million gallons of oil before it was through, making it still the second largest oil spill ever (Saddam Hussein's intentional opening of the Kuwaiti and Iraqi wells during the first Gulf War remains, by far, the largest oil spill at roughly 1 billion gallons .) [More]

Andrée Marion, a 47-year-old accountant from St. Sauveur, Quebec, has mirror movements--involuntary motions on one side of her body that mirror voluntary ones on the other. When she does things that require fine movements, like brushing her hair, reaching for change in her pocket or holding her coffee with her right hand, her left hand strokes, dips or grips in synchrony. She can't help it; it just happens. It also happens to her 19-year-old son. In fact, of Marion's 23 blood relatives spanning four generations, about half have mirror movements. It turns out they also have a rare gene defect, giving scientists new insight into how our bodies are wired.