Early Language Skills Help Kids Manage Anger

The ability to use words as a toddler may affect the way a child manages anger later in life, a new study suggests.
Children with good language skills at age 2 expressed less anger during frustrating situations at age 4 than did those 4-year-olds with less advanced language skills, according to the study’s findings, LiveScience wrote.
Children whose language skills developed quickly also expressed less anger at age 4.
While previous research suggested a link between language skills and the expression of anger in young children, few studies had followed children over time.
The new study followed 120 children from 18 months old until they were 4. Children periodically underwent tests that assessed their language skills and their ability to cope with frustrating tasks. One task asked children to wait for eight minutes before opening a present while their mother finished work.
Two aspects of language appeared to help children rein in their anger. First, more-developed language skills allowed kids to ask for support from their parents during a frustrating situation (for instance, asking the mother whether she was finished with her work).
Children also used language to occupy or distract themselves from becoming angry. (One child dealt with the waiting task by counting for a full minute.)
“Better language skills may help children verbalize rather than use emotions to convey needs and use their imaginations to occupy themselves while enduring a frustrating wait,” said study researcher Pamela Cole, a professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University.

Hubble Sees Superthin Galaxy

Typical spiral galaxies are usually made up of three principal visible components: the disk where the spiral arms and most of the gas and dust are concentrated; the halo, a rough and sparse sphere around the disk that contains little gas, dust or star formation; and the central bulge at the heart of the disk, which is formed by a large concentration of ancient stars surrounding the Galactic Center.
The galaxy, labeled IC 2233, is far from being typical, Sci-News wrote.
IC 2233, located in the constellation of Lynx some 40 million light-years away, is a prime example of a super-thin galaxy. Its diameter is at least ten times larger than the thickness.
Such galaxies consist of a simple disk of stars when seen edge on. This orientation makes them fascinating to study, giving another perspective on spiral galaxies.
An important characteristic of super-thin galaxies is that they have a low brightness and almost all of them have no bulge at all.
The bluish color that can be seen along the IC 2233’s disk indicates the presence of hot, luminous, young stars, born out of clouds of interstellar gas.
IC 2233 also shows no well-defined dust lane. Only a few small patchy regions can be identified in the inner regions both above and below the galaxy’s mid-plane.

Iranian Helps ReconnectSevered Nerves

Engineers have created a new hybrid tunnel to help severed nerve endings reconnect.
The tunnel, made of both hard and soft materials, may be the first step toward helping patients who have suffered extensive nerve trauma regain feeling and movement, according to the researchers, Futurity reported.
“Nerve injury in both central nervous system and peripheral nervous system is a major health problem,” says Mohammad Reza Abidian, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Penn State.
According to the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center, there are approximately 290,000 individuals in the US who suffer from spinal cord injuries with about 12,000 new injuries occurring each year.
Spontaneous nerve regeneration is limited to small lesions within the injured peripheral nerve system and is actively suppressed within central nervous system.
When a nerve in the peripheral nervous system is cut slightly, nerve endings can regenerate and reconnect. However, if the distance between the two endings is too far, the growth can go off course and fail to connect.

Hybrid Conduit
The researchers, who published their results in the current issue of Advanced Healthcare Materials, developed a novel hybrid conduit that consisted of a soft material, called a hydrogel, as an external wall along with an internal wall made of an electrically-active conducting polymer to serve as a tunnel that guides the regrowth and reconnection of the severed nerve endings.
“Autografts are currently the gold standard for bridging nerve gaps,” says Abidian. “This is an operation that takes the nerve from another portion of the body--for instance--from a tendon, and then it is grafted onto the injured nerve.”
However, the operation can be painful and there are often mismatches in size between the severed nerve endings and the new grafted portion of the nerve.
The researchers used agarose, a hydrogel that is permeable and more likely to be accepted by the body. However, because the hydrogel expands in water and fluids, the expansion would collapse the tunnel and reduce the ability of the nerve endings to regenerate and connect.
So, they created a second design by adding a conducting polymer, poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene)--PEDOT--to the design to form a wall that can mechanically support and reinforce the hydrogel.
PEDOT is a stable material that can conduct electricity to help electrical signals pass through the nerve.

Spiral PEDOT
To make sure nutrients and oxygen would reach the regenerating nerve endings, the team created a spiral PEDOT design that maintained the structural integrity of the wall, but allowed some nutrients and air to reach the nerve.
The researchers tested the three designs--plain hydrogel, hydrogel with fully coated PEDOT wall, and hydrogel with a partially coated PEDOT wall--by implanting the device in 10 mm nerve gaps in rats and measuring the muscle mass and strength of muscle contractions at the end of the nerves. These measurements can indicate whether the separated nerve has reconnected.
They also looked at optical images of cross sections of the nerve to assess its relative health.
According to Abidian, the spiral PEDOT design generated significantly more muscle mass than the other designs, although it did not generate as much muscle mass as the autograft, which was used as the control design in the study.
The pictures of the spiral PEDOT design showed that the health of the nerve itself was nearly indistinguishable from a nerve photographed after an autograft operation.
The next step will be to secure funding to test the design when the gaps between severed nerves are so large that even autograft operations are ineffective. He also says that he hopes the design can be used to create other types of medical implants, such as neural interfaces.
“This design shows that, yes, it can work,” Abidian says. “But now we have to see if electrical signals and chemicals can also pass through much longer gaps to guide and modulate axonal regeneration.”
Researchers from the University of Michigan contributed to the study, which was supported by the Army Research Office.

Simple Eye Scan Reveals MS Damage

A simple eye test may offer a fast and easy way to monitor patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), medical experts say in the journal Neurology.
Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is a scan that measures the thickness of the lining at the back of the eye--the retina, BBC said.
It takes a few minutes per eye and can be performed in a doctor’s surgery.
In a trial involving 164 people with MS, those with thinning of their retina had earlier and more active MS.
The team of researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine say larger trials with a long follow-up are needed to judge how useful the test might be in everyday practice.
The latest study tracked the patients’ disease progression over a two-year period.
Multiple sclerosis is an illness that affects the nerves in the brain and spinal cord causing problems with muscle movement, balance and vision. In MS, the protective sheath or layer around nerves, called myelin, comes under attack which, in turn, leaves the nerves open to damage.

Different Types of MS
There are different types of MS--most people with the condition have the relapsing remitting type where the symptoms come and go over days, weeks or months.
Usually after a decade or so, half of patients with this type of MS will develop secondary progressive disease where the symptoms get gradually worse and there are no or very few periods of remission.
Another type of MS is primary progressive disease where symptoms get worse from the outset.
There is no cure but treatments can help slow disease progression.
It can be difficult for doctors to monitor MS because it has a varied course and can be unpredictable.
Brain scans can reveal inflammation and scarring, but it is not clear how early these changes might occur in the disease and whether they accurately reflect ongoing damage.
Scientists have been looking for additional ways to track MS, and believe OCT may be a contender.

Retinal Nerves
OCT measures the thickness of nerve fibers housed in the retina at the back of the eye.
Unlike nerve cells in the rest of the brain which are covered with protective myelin, the nerve cells in the retina are bare with no myelin coat.
Experts suspect that this means the nerves here will show the earliest signs of MS damage.
The study at Johns Hopkins found that people with MS relapses had much faster thinning of their retina than people with MS who had no relapses. So too did those whose level of disability worsened.
Similarly, people with MS who had inflammatory lesions that were visible on brain scans also had faster retinal thinning than those without visible brain lesions.
Study author Dr. Peter Calabresi said OCT may show how fast MS is progressing.
“As more therapies are developed to slow the progression of MS, testing retinal thinning in the eyes may be helpful in evaluating how effective those therapies are,” he added.
In an accompanying editorial in the same medical journal that the research is published in, MS experts Drs Robert Bermel and Matilde Inglese say OCT “holds promise” as an MS test.

Reconstructing Face Of Ancient Iranians

Dr. Maziar Ashrafian Bonab at University of Portsmouth has recreated the face of two ancient Iranians from the skulls of a 14-year-old girl and a 45-year-old man.
The girl lived 4,850 years ago in Burnt City, Sistan-Baluchestan province, and the man lived in Khuzestam province, Mehr News Agency reported.
Forensic facial reconstruction (or forensic facial approximation) is the process of recreating the face of an individual (whose identity is often not known) from their skeletal remains through an amalgamation of artistry, forensic science, anthropology, osteology and anatomy.
Dr. Ashrafian is an Iranian forensic geneticist (who uses the DNA markers in the investigation of crimes and ancestry) and a specialist in forensic facial reconstruction. His groundbreaking research uses human DNA markers (mainly mtDNA and the Y chromosome markers) to identify the ancestral history of humans/human populations in both anthropological and forensic cases. His main area of research is the population history of the Middle East, specifically Iran.
Born in Tehran, Ashrafian, 46, graduated as a medical doctor from Tehran University of Medical Sciences (1984-91) and worked as a medical practitioner in Iran. He then went on to complete his PhD in Cambridge.
Since 2006, Dr. Ashrafian has been working as a senior lecturer at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Portsmouth.

Biological Concrete Promotes Vertical Gardens

An ivy-covered building is a lovely thing, but ivy roots can rip into brickwork and the vines are a highway for vermin looking for a way inside.
According to Gizmag, modern vertical gardens try for the same aesthetic effect with some added environmental advantages, but they’re often complicated things full of hydroponics gear and difficult to maintain.
An alternative is being developed at the Structural Technology Group, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, where a team led by Antonio Aguado has come up with a “biological concrete” designed to act as a substrate for vertical gardens that is simple, low maintenance and requires little or no attention.
The key to biological concrete is that it replaces the Portland cement normally used with magnesium phosphate cement--a quick-setting cement often used for repair work.
In biological concrete, the magnesium phosphate makes the concrete slightly acidic. This makes it an excellent environment for microalgae, fungi, lichens and mosses in Mediterranean climates. The parameters used in making the biological concrete are adjusted for the desired level of porosity and surface roughness to encourage colonization.

Holiday FoodsWith Health Benefits

Fortunately, our favorite foods have some hidden health perks.
1. Hot apple cider
Apples contain flavonoids, which can protect you from heart disease, cancer and other chronic diseases; and cinnamon boosts brain function, Shine.yahoo said.
2. Herbal Stuffing
The herbs help reduce inflammation.
3. Cocoa
Studies have linked the flavanols in chocolate to reduced risks of heart disease and stroke.
4. Gingerbread
Ginger has long been used to fight colds and flu, and is also a handy cure for nausea.

Christmas on Mars

With frost-tipped craters and a winter-like feel, it seems Christmas has come to the Red Planet.
According to Daily Mail, these amazing images, taken from the high-resolution stereo camera on ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, show the Charitum Montes region of the Red Planet.
The area, close to the Gale crater where NASA’s Curiosity rover is headed, show seasonal carbon dioxide frost across the planet’s surface.
Charitum Montes are a large group of rugged mountains extending over almost 1,000 km and bounding the southernmost rim of the Argyre impact basin.
They can be seen from Earth through larger telescope and were named by Eugène Michel Antoniadi (1870–1944) in his 1929 work La Planete Mars.
The images show the region’s old and highly-sculpted terrain, pockmarked with many large craters, all of which have been substantially filled in.

Blood Protein

People suffering from depression or psychological distress appear to have higher than normal blood levels of C-reactive protein, an indicator of inflammatory disease, according to new research from Denmark.