Children get their sense of humour from their parents as a study has found babies as young as six months learn to laugh at the same thing as their mothers and fathers.

Previously existing ideas on how advanced maternal age affects adult health of children have to be reconsidered. It had been thought that mothers delivering later in life have children that are less healthy as adults, because the body of the mother had already degenerated due to physiological effects like decreasing oocyte quality or a weakened placenta. In fact, what affects the health of the grown-up children is not the age of their mother but her education and the number of years she survives after giving birth and thus spends with her offspring. This is the conclusion of a new study by Mikko Myrskylä from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany carried out with data from 18,000 US children and their mothers.

Researchers use characteristic differences in eye movements to identify patients with deficits in neurological function.

Observing patients’ eye movements may hold clues about neurological functioning. In a study published last month (August 25) in the Journal of Neurology, scientists show that subtle differences in eye movement patterns can be utilized to identify patients with Parkinson’s, fetal alcohol syndrome, or attention deficit disorder, providing hope for a quick and noninvasive strategy to aid in diagnosing these, and possibly other, neurological diseases.

“I am very impressed with the use of this eye tracking as a potential behavioral biomarker,” said Edward Riley, who studies fetal alcohol syndrome at San Diego State University, but did not participate in the research. The strategy could one day be used to rapidly screen children at risk for behavioral problems, he added, but whose mild symptoms may cause their issues to be overlooked.

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Every activity in the brain involves the transfer of signals between neurons. Frequently, as many as one thousand signals rain down on a single neuron simultaneously. To ensure that precise signals are delivered, the brain possesses a sophisticated inhibitory system. Stefan Remy and colleagues at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases and the University Bonn have illuminated how this system works.

“The system acts like a filter, only letting the most important impulses pass,” explains Remy. “This produces the targeted neuronal patterns that are indispensible for long-term memory storage.”

A new study led by MIT neuroscientists has found that brain scans of patients with social anxiety disorder can help predict whether they will benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy.

Social anxiety is usually treated with either cognitive behavioral therapy or medications. However, it is currently impossible to predict which treatment will work best for a particular patient. The team of researchers from MIT, Boston University (BU) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) found that the effectiveness of therapy could be predicted by measuring patients’ brain activity as they looked at photos of faces, before the therapy sessions began.

The findings, published this week in the Archives of General Psychiatry, may help doctors choose more effective treatments for social anxiety disorder, which is estimated to affect around 15 million people in the United States.

According to ENCODE’s analysis, 80 percent of the genome has a “biochemical function”. More on exactly what this means later, but the key point is: It’s not “junk”.

Scientists have long recognised that some non-coding DNA has a function, and more and more solid examples have come to light [edited for clarity - Ed]. But, many maintained that much of these sequences were, indeed, junk. ENCODE says otherwise. “Almost every nucleotide is associated with a function of some sort or another, and we now know where they are, what binds to them, what their associations are, and more,” says Tom Gingeras, one of the study’s many senior scientists.

And what’s in the remaining 20 percent? Possibly not junk either, according to Ewan Birney, the project’s Lead Analysis Coordinator and self-described “cat-herder-in-chief”. He explains that ENCODE only (!) looked at 147 types of cells, and the human body has a few thousand. A given part of the genome might control a gene in one cell type, but not others. If every cell is included, functions may emerge for the phantom proportion. “It’s likely that 80 percent will go to 100 percent,” says Birney. “We don’t really have any large chunks of redundant DNA. This metaphor of junk isn’t that useful.”

That the genome is complex will come as no surprise to scientists, but ENCODE does two fresh things: it catalogues the DNA elements for scientists to pore over; and it reveals just how many there are. “The genome is no longer an empty vastness – it is densely packed with peaks and wiggles of biochemical activity,” says Shyam Prabhakar from the Genome Institute of Singapore. “There are nuggets for everyone here. No matter which piece of the genome we happen to be studying in any particular project, we will benefit from looking up the corresponding ENCODE tracks.”

Can Videogaming Benefit Young People with Autism Spectrum Disorder?

Individuals with ASD have difficulty with communication and social interaction, but they often have particularly good visual perceptual skills and respond well to visual stimuli. Videogames offer opportunities for successful learning, motivation to improve skills such as planning, organization, and self-monitoring, and reinforcement of desired behaviors without the need for direct human-to-human interaction.

Autism is a growing area of interest for the gamification community, and Games for Health Journal continues to explore various aspects of how videogame technology can be beneficial in treating this complex spectrum of disorders.

When psychology trumps anti-obesity drugs

Patients who fail to lose weight while taking anti-obesity drugs do so because of their beliefs about themselves and about the difficulty of losing weight.

That is the conclusion of research presented by Dr Amelia Hollywood from the University of Surrey at the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Health Psychology. The conference is being held at the Holiday Inn in Liverpool from 5-7 September 2012.

Dr Hollywood interviewed 10 people, who had put on weight over the 18 months after they were prescribed the weight-loss medication Orlistat, about their experiences.

Dr Hollywood and her colleague Dr Jane Ogden found that the women attributed their failure to lose weight to the mechanics of the drug. They highlighted the barriers to weight loss and talked about other weight-loss methods that had not worked for them.

Overall, the researchers found, these people saw their failure to lose weight as an inevitable part of their identity. They felt that it reflected their self-fulfilling belief that they would be perpetual dieters.