Where there's smoke, there's a new eruption
VOLCANIC ACTIVITY
During the first two weeks of the year, at least seven volcanoes in different parts of the world erupted, spewing lava and ash for miles. Between Jan. 7 and 9, eruptions occurred in Hawaii, on the French island of Reunion off the east coast of Africa, in Ecuador, and two spots in Guatemala. A few days later, another one blew, this time on Russia's far eastern Kamachatka Peninsula. And on Wednesday, Mount Aso (left) on the Japanese island of Kyushu, 560 miles southwest of Tokyo, began exhaling sand, ash, and plumes of white smoke. No injuries were reported in any of the events. ``It is a coincidence and in fact is not at all out of the ordinary'' for so many volcanoes to erupt virtually at once, said Tom Murray, scientist-in-charge of the Alaska Volcano Observatory, part of the US Geological Survey. For weekly updates of volcanic eruptions, go to www.volcano.si.edu/gvp/reports/usgs/index.cfm
HEART DISEASE
New stent helps block artery clogs
For patients with clogged arteries, medical devices called stents are like the poles that keep a tent propped open. But over time the artery can become blocked again -- even in the presence of the stent, a wire mesh tube put in place after surgeons clear the congested artery by inflating a tiny balloon. Boston Scientific of Natick developed a stent coated with the cancer drug Taxol that promises to reduce the rate of new blockages. A study in last week's New England Journal of Medicine, underwritten by Boston Scientific, found that only 7.9 percent of 662 heart patients who got coated stents developed new blockages, compared to a rate of 26.6 percent among the 652 patients who received standard, untreated stents. The US Food and Drug Administration last fall issued a warning about a different medicated stent, Cypher, made by Cordis. The federal agency received reports linking the deaths of 60 patients to blood clots that had formed after the coated stent was implanted. The Boston Scientific stent, known as Taxus and available in dozens of nations, is awaiting FDA approval.
STEPHEN SMITH
PSYCHIATRY
Signs of depression found in preschoolers
Preschoolers can get depressed, too, and their physical symptoms mimic those suffered by adults, according to a study from Washington University in St. Louis. "Children this young have really not been studied before," said Dr. Joan Luby, the lead author of the research, which appeared in the December issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry. Luby and her colleagues said they found increased levels of cortisol stress hormones -- a common marker of adolescent and adult depression -- in some of the 174 children ages 3 to 5 that they studied. After being exposed to separation from a parent or attempting "frustrating tasks," depressed preschoolers experienced elevated stress hormone levels. Christine Mrakotsky, a co-author of the study and pediatric neuropsychologist at Children's Hospital in Boston, said she is trying to determine if those hormone levels hurt preschoolers' ability to learn.
DAVID L. HARRIS
PSYCHOLOGY
Monkeys fail hard grammar test
To the dismay of many would-be Dr. Dolittles who'd like nothing more than to talk to the animals, new research suggests that the ensuing conversation might not be particularly sparkling. Marc D. Hauser of Harvard University and W. Tecumseh Fitch of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland report in the Jan. 16 Science that they have found that cotton-top tamarin monkeys cannot understand the complicated rules of grammar that are key to human language. Though previous studies have shown that the monkeys could comprehend very simple grammatical rules, the researchers found once the words are no longer right next to each other, such as an ``If . . . then . . .'' sentence construction, the monkeys became perplexed. Hauser and Fitch first exposed the animals to recordings of both a simple and a more complicated grammatical pattern through a loudspeaker. Then the grammar rule for each example was occasionally broken. If a monkey looked at the loudspeaker when this happened, it was taken as evidence that it recognized the discrepancy. This capability, the authors write, ``is one of the crucial requirements for mastering any human language.''
AGNIESZKA BISKUP
SPORTS SCIENCE
Tennis players use math for net gains
Who knew? Your favorite tennis star may also be a master of Bayesian probability theory, according to a study in the Jan. 15 Nature. Konrad P. Kording and Daniel M. Wolpert of University College London report that the sort of visual and spatial judgments a good tennis player's brain has to make when she or he returns a serve are based on mathematical principles formulated by Thomas Bayes over 200 years ago. (Bayesian theory, which concerns how outcomes are affected by prior knowledge, helped give rise to modern statistics.) The researchers tested people playing a computerized game that required them to point to where they thought a target sphere would land, similar to a tennis player having to judge an opponent's shot. It appears that good players not only used information on what they saw around them, but also used judgments they had made about variations in the speed and trajectory of the ball from previous trials.
AGNIESZKA BISKUP
