The full SDK for Android 3.0 or Honeycomb, the branch of Android aimed specifically at tablets, is now available to developers.

The APIs are final, and the developers are now free to create apps targeting Honeycomb and publish them on the Android Market.

You can learn about the new features in Honeycomb over at the Android platform highlights.

Source:  Android Developers

This is the latest post in series profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world, say Mike Cohen, Manager, Speech Technology. Here, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at how one Googler built an entire R&D team around voice technology that has gone on to power products like YouTube transcriptions and Voice Search.

When I first interviewed at Google during the summer of 2004, mobile was just making its way onto the company’s radar. My passion was speech technology, the field in which I’d already worked for 20 years. After 10 years of speech research at SRI, followed by 10 years helping build Nuance Communications, the company I co-founded in 1994, I was ready for a new challenge. I felt that mobile was an area ripe for innovation, with a need for speech technology, and destined to be a key platform for delivery of services.

During my interview, I shared my desire to pursue the mobile space and mentioned that if Google didn’t have any big plans for mobile, then I probably wouldn’t be a good fit for the company. Well, I got the job, and I started soon after, without a team or even a defined role. In classic Google fashion, I was encouraged to explore the company, learn about what various teams were working on and figure out what was needed.

After a few months, I presented an idea to senior management to build a telephone-based spoken interface to local search. Although there was a diversity of opinion at the meeting about what applications made the most sense for Google, all agreed that I should start to build a team focused on speech technology. With help from a couple of Google colleagues who also had speech backgrounds, I began recruiting, and within a few months people were busily building our own speech recognition system.

Six years later, I’m excited by how far we’ve come and, in turn, how our long-term goals have expanded. When I started, I had to sell other teams on the value of speech technology to Google’s mission. Now, I’m constantly approached by other teams with ideas and needs for speech. The biggest challenge is scaling our effort to meet the opportunities. We’ve advanced from GOOG-411, our first speech-driven service, to Voice Search, Voice Input, Voice Actions, a Voice API for Android developers, automatic captioning of YouTube videos, automatic transcription of voicemail for Google Voice and speech-to-speech translation, amongst others. In the past year alone, we’ve ported our technology to more than 20 languages.

Speech technology requires an enormous amount of data to feed our statistical models and lots of computing power to train our systems—and Google is the ideal place to pursue such technical approaches. With large amounts of data, computing power and an infrastructure focused on supporting large-scale services, we’re encouraged to launch quickly and iterate based on real-time feedback.

I’ve been exploring speech technology for nearly three decades, yet I see huge potential for further innovation. We envision a comprehensive interface for voice and text communication that defies all barriers of modality and language and makes information truly universally accessible. And it’s here at Google that I think we have the best chance to make this future a reality.

Source: Official Google Blog

The ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex has been depicted as the top dog of the Cretaceous, ruthlessly stalking herds of duck-billed dinosaurs and claiming the role of apex predator, much as the lion reigns supreme in the African veld.

But a new census of all dinosaur skeletons unearthed over a large area of Eastern Montana shows that Tyrannosaurus was too numerous to have subsisted solely on the dinosaurs it tracked and killed with its scythe-like teeth.

Instead, argue paleontologists John “Jack” Horner from the Museum of the Rockies and Mark B. Goodwin from the University of California, Berkeley, T. rex was probably an opportunistic predator, like the hyena in Africa today, subsisting on both carrion and fresh-killed prey and exploiting a variety of animals, not just large grazers.

“In our census, T. rex came out very high, equivalent in numbers to Edmontosaurus, which many people had thought was its primary prey,” said Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., and Regents Professor at Montana State University. “This says that T. rex is not a cheetah, it’s not a lion. It’s more like a hyena.”

“This putative apex predator is as abundant in the upper layers of the Hell Creek Formation as the herbivores, its reputed primary food source,” added Goodwin, a curator in UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology and assistant director of the museum. “And it’s even more plentiful in the other two-thirds of the formation. This supports the view that T. rex benefited from a much wider variety of food sources than live prey.”

The dinosaur census in the Hell Creek Formation of Montana, which dates from 65-95 million years ago, was begun in 1999 by Horner and Goodwin with the financial and occasional field support of Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer for Microsoft Corp. and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures of Bellevue, Wash. The results, authored by Horner, Goodwin and Myhrvold, were published Feb. 9 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

Normally, Goodwin said, top predators are one-third or one-fourth as abundant as their prey, because of the larger energy needs of carnivores. Opportunistic hunters like the hyena, however, can be twice as abundant as the top predators.

“If you count the lions and the leopards and the cheetahs in the Serengeti, the number still does not equal the number of hyenas, because hyenas have a much wider food source,” Horner said. “Cheetahs, for example, only go after things that are really fast. They don’t eat turtles. But a hyena will eat a turtle, or anything else that it can catch or is dead.”

Similarly, T. rex was eating anything it could, he said. “There’s no evidence that T. rex could run very fast, so it wasn’t out there being a cheetah. If it could get a sick animal, it would.”

Horner suggests that juvenile and young adult T. rex may have been primarily flesh eaters, while the older adults, which developed proportionally larger, bone-crushing teeth as they aged, also consumed the bones and marrow of their prey.

Hell Creek Formation

Horner and Goodwin, together and separately, have been digging for dinosaurs in Eastern Montana for decades. The fossils date from a time when the area bordered an inland sea, which periodically advanced and withdrew over coastal plains, depositing sediment that was later exposed and heavily eroded. When Horner started his census of dinosaurs in the Hell Creek Formation around Fort Peck Lake in 1999, he teamed up with Goodwin to re-examine some of the dinosaurs discovered in the area.

Since then, through lab analysis and annual summer digs, they have shown that one named species, Torosaurus, was just a big, aged Triceratops; two dome-headed dinosaurs, Dracorex and Stygimoloch, were merely younger members of the genus Pachycephalosaurus; and the so-called Nanotyrannus was just a juvenile T. rex.

Once these fossils had been properly identified, Homer and Goodwin were able to catalog the species and relative ages of known dinosaurs in the formation, which is about 100 meters thick at exposed areas covering some 1,000 square kilometers. The census included only skeletal remains, not teeth, because the paleontologists wanted a record of the maturity of each specimen, and teeth tell little about the age of a dinosaur at death, Goodwin said.

Collating only skeletons containing three or more bones, the researchers counted 23 Triceratops, five Tyrannosaurus and five Edmontosaurus within the Upper Hell Creek Formation. The youngest or “upper” formation dates from between 65 and 70 million years ago, just before the purported mass extinction of the dinosaurs that was attributed to a comet or asteroid impact.

A census of older sediments – the lower Hell Creek formation – turned up 11 Triceratops, 11 T. rex and six Edmontosaurus partial skeletons, along with fossil bones of three other dinosaurs: Thescelosaurus and Ornithomimus, two bird-like, bipedal meat-eaters reaching some 12 feet in length at maturity; and Ankylosaurus, an armored, four-legged plant-eater with a club tail.

“Small juveniles and older adults were relatively rare compared to large juveniles and subadults for all the dinosaurs,” Goodwin said. This could be explained if juveniles lived in other locations, which is not uncommon in some species. The largest adults may simply have been relatively rare.

“This adds to an emerging picture of what the dinosaur fauna looked like during the late Cretaceous,” he said.

Horner noted the greater variety of dinosaurs in the older sediments, the Lower Hell Creek Formation, compared to the younger “Upper” formation.

“Definitely there was a change in population leading up to the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, so something was happening to the faunas prior to the impact,” he said. “During the 10 million years after dinosaur diversity peaked 75 million years ago, the dinosaurs dwindled pretty fast, and there weren’t many left at the end.”

The work was supported by individual donations from James Kinsey, Catherine B. Reynolds and Homer Hickam, as well as Intellectual Ventures, the Windway Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution and the University of California Museum of Paleontology.

By Robert Sanders, Media Relations
Source: University of California – Berkeley

The Western fence lizard’s reputation for helping to reduce the threat of Lyme disease is in jeopardy. A new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that areas where the lizard had been removed saw a subsequent drop in the population of the ticks that transmit Lyme disease.

A Western fence lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis) can often be found with dozens of ticks attached to it. However, they have a unique influence on the ecology of Lyme disease. The lizard's immune system clears the Lyme disease bacteria from ticks after the ticks feed on the lizard. (Anand Varma photo)

“Our expectation going into this study was that removing the lizards would increase the risk of Lyme disease, so we were surprised by these findings,” said study lead author Andrea Swei, who conducted the study while she was a Ph.D. student in integrative biology at UC Berkeley. “Our experiment found that the net result of lizard removal was a decrease in the density of infected ticks, and therefore decreased Lyme disease risk to humans.”

The study, to be published online Tuesday, Feb. 15, in the journal Proceedings of The Royal Society B, illustrates the complex role the Western fence lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis) plays in the abundance of disease-spreading ticks.

Lyme disease – characterized by fever, headache, fatigue and a bullseye rash – is spread through the bite of ticks infected with spirochete bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi. In the Western region of the United States, the Western black legged tick (Ixodes pacificus) is the primary vector for Lyme disease bacteria.

In 1998, a pioneering study led by UC Berkeley entomologist Robert Lane found that a protein in the Western fence lizard’s blood killed Borrelia bacteria, and as a result, Lyme-infected ticks that feed on the lizard’s blood are cleansed of the disease-causing pathogen. Moreover, research has found that up to 90 percent of the juvenile ticks in this species feed on the Western fence lizard, which is prevalent throughout California and neighboring states.

The lizard is thus often credited for the relatively low incidence of Lyme disease in the Western United States. The new UC Berkeley-led study put that assumption to the test experimentally.

“When you have an animal like the Western fence lizard that supports such a huge population of ticks, you can’t assume that all those juvenile ticks will go to another host if the lizard population drops,” said Lane, UC Berkeley Professor of the Graduate School and co-author of this study.

For their field test, the researchers selected 14 plots, each measuring 10,000 square meters and spread out over two sites in Marin County, Calif. Half the plots were located at China Camp State Park, and the other half were at the Marin Municipal Water District Sky Oaks headquarters. The researchers had already been extensively surveying tick density in those plots over the course of two years, so they had detailed data on tick and vertebrate populations before this experimental field trial.

From March to April 2008, before tick season went into full swing, the researchers captured and removed 447 lizards from six plots – three at each site – and left the remaining plots unaltered as controls. The lizards that had been captured were marked before being relocated so the researchers could determine whether any wandered back into their old haunts.

After the lizards were removed, the researchers spent the following month trapping other mammals known to harbor ticks – particularly woodrats (Neotoma fuscipes) and deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) – to determine whether they bore an uptick in ticks as a result of the lizards’ absence. The researchers also checked for differences between control and experimental plots in the abundance of host-seeking ticks by systematically dragging a large white flannel cloth over the ground.

The researchers found that in plots where the lizards had been removed, ticks turned to the female woodrat as their next favorite host. On average, each female woodrat got an extra five ticks for company when the lizards disappeared.

However, the researchers found that 95 percent of the ticks that no longer had lizard blood to feast on failed to latch on to another host.

“One of the goals of our study is to tease apart the role these lizards play in Lyme disease ecology,” said Swei, who is now a post-doctoral associate at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York. “It was assumed that these lizards played an important role in reducing Lyme disease risk. Our study shows that it’s more complicated than that.”

Notwithstanding the results in this new study, Lane pointed out that the Western fence lizard are key to keeping infection rates down among adult ticks. “This study focused only on the risk from juvenile ticks, specifically those in the nymphal stage,” he said. “The earlier finding that adult ticks have lower infection rates because they feed predominantly on the Western fence lizard at the nymphal stage still holds.”

“In attempting to decrease infectious disease risk, we need to remember the law of unexpected consequences,” said Sam Scheiner, program director in the National Science Foundation Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research through the joint NSF-NIH (National Institutes of Health) Ecology of Infectious Diseases Program. “This study demonstrates the complexity of infectious diseases.”

Other authors on this study are Cheryl Briggs, a professor at UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology; and Richard Ostfeld, a senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies.

By Sarah Yang, Media Relations
Source: University of California – Berkeley

The Stripe of Gennari (right: subjects with normal vision, left: blind subjects) shows up as a thin dark line in the sulcus calcinarus (white) which surrounds the primary visual cortex. (Credite photo: Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences )

The Stripe of Gennari develops even in those who are blind from birth and does not degenerate, despite a lack of visual input. This was discovered by Robert Trampel and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences using magnetic resonance imaging. This bundle of nerve fibers, which is approximately 0.3 mm thick, is not exclusively responsible for optic information. In the blind, it might play a greater role in processing tactile stimuli. This could contribute to an enhanced sense of touch and support fast reading of Braille.

The Stripe of Gennari – also known as the ‘Stria of Gennari’ – transverses the gray matter of the primary visual cortex as a distinct white line. “Although the visual cortex is one of the best-studied parts of the brain, and the Stripe of Gennari is a rather obvious structure, why it develops and what its function is has not previously been studied in detail”, explains Robert Trampel from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. “An obvious connection with sight was assumed.”

However, as is now clear, this cannot be the only function of the stripe of Gennari: In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, the researchers found the stripe of Gennari in the brains of congenitally blind subjects. “This brain structure therefore can’t exclusively be involved in vision and must be capable of carrying out other tasks”, says Trampel. In the blind, the Stripe of Gennari could play a role in supporting the sense of touch, the scientists speculate. “This faculty is essential in reading Braille and the region carrying the Gennari-Stripe is known to show an increased activity in the blind when performing this task.” All participants in the present study were highly proficient in reading Braille, having responded to an advertisement written in Braille in a newspaper for the visually impaired.

However, since the stripe of Gennari is already present in the first years of life and does not degenerate, it is likely to have an important role already in early infancy. In blind people, the brain uses tactile and acoustic stimuli to construct a rough spatial representation of the surroundings in the absence of visual information. The stripe of Gennari might play a role in this process and could later support highly demanding tactile tasks, like Braille-reading. In future studies with fMRI, the researchers aim to learn more about the work of this versatile nerve bundle in the human brain.

Source: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

It’s an incendiary topic in academia – the pervasive belief that women are underrepresented in science, math and engineering fields because they face sex discrimination in the interviewing, hiring, and grant and manuscript review processes.

In a study, “Understanding Current Causes of Women’s Underrepresentation in Science” published Feb. 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cornell University social scientists say it’s just not true.

It’s not discrimination in these areas, but rather differences in resources attributable to career and family-related choices that set women back in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, say Stephen J. Ceci, professor of developmental psychology, and Wendy M. Williams, professor of human development and director of the Cornell Institute for Women in Science, both in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology.

The “substantial resources” universities expend to sponsor gender-sensitivity training and interviewing workshops would be better spent on addressing the real causes of women’s underrepresentation, Ceci and Williams say, through creative problem-solving and policy changes that respond to differing “biological and social realities” of the sexes.

The researchers analyzed the scientific literature in which women and men competed for publications, grants or jobs in these fields. They found no systematic evidence of sex discrimination in interviewing, hiring, reviewing or funding when men and women with similar resources – such as teaching loads and research support – were compared.

“We hear often that men have a better chance of getting their work accepted or funded, or of getting jobs, because they’re men,” Williams said. “Universities expend money and time trying to combat this rampant alleged discrimination against women in the hope that by doing so universities will see the numbers of women STEM scientists increase dramatically over coming years.”

The data show that women scientists are confronted with choices, beginning at or before adolescence, that influence their career trajectories and success. Women who prioritize families and have children sometimes make “lifestyle choices” that lead to them to take positions, such as adjunct or part-time appointments or jobs at two-year colleges, offering fewer resources and chances to move up in the ranks. These women, however, are not held back by sex discrimination in hiring or in how their scholarly work is evaluated. Men with comparably low levels of research resources fare equivalently to their female peers. Although women disproportionately hold such low-resource positions, this is not because they had their grants and manuscripts rejected or were denied positions at research-intensive universities due to their gender.

Also, females beginning before adolescence often prefer careers focusing on people, rather than things, aspiring to be physicians, biologists and veterinarians rather than physicists, engineers and computer scientists. Efforts to interest young girls in these math-heavy fields are intended to ensure girls do not opt out of inorganic fields because of misinformation or stereotypes.

Also, fertility decisions are key because the tenure system has strong disincentives for women to have children – a factor in why more women in academia are childless than men. Implementation of “flexible options” to enhance work-family balance may help to increase the numbers of women in STEM fields, the researchers say.

As long as women make the choice and “are satisfied with the outcomes, then we have no problem,” they write in the paper. “However, to the extent that these choices are constrained by biology and/or society, and women are dissatisfied with the outcomes, or women’s talent is not actualized, then we most emphatically have a problem.”

The solution will only be possible if society focuses on changing the women’s non-optimal choices and addressing unique challenges faced by female STEM scientists with children, the researchers say.

Ceci and Williams, a married couple with three daughters, co-authored “The Mathematics of Sex: How Biology and Society Conspire to Limit Talented Women and Girls” in 2010.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Source: Cornell University

Misfolded proteins can get into cells and form large aggregates by recruiting normal proteins. These aggregates are associated with neurodegenerative diseases.

An image of U2OS cells infected with Q91 polygluytamine aggregates (in green) colocalized with intracelluluar expressed (red) Q25. ( Photos courtesy of Ron Kopito)

Stanford biology Professor Ron Kopito has found that the protein linked to Huntington’s can spread from one cell to another.

His research may explain how these diseases spread through our brains, an understanding that might lead to the development of drugs to target the misfolded proteins.

Source: Stanford News Service

Scientists have pinpointed a key cancer-causing gene that, when overactive, triggers a particularly aggressive type of breast cancer to develop.

This is the first time in over five years that scientists have discovered a new breast cancer ‘oncogene’ – cancer-causing genes that when overactive upset the normal checks and balances that control when and how often a cell divides.

The researchers, based at Cancer Research UK’s Cambridge Research Institute at the University of Cambridge and at the British Columbia Cancer Agency in Vancouver, Canada, believe testing patients tumours to see if the gene – called ‘ZNF703′ – is overactive could help identify patients with more aggressive tumours, so their treatment can be tailored accordingly.

The research is published in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine today (Friday, 18 February) alongside a study from an independent research group identifying the same gene, providing definitive evidence that ZNF703 is a genuine breast cancer oncogene.

It’s thought that up to a third of more aggressive oestrogen positive breast cancers could have multiple copies of the ZNF703 gene.

If this is confirmed in larger studies it could pave the way for the development of cancer treatments specifically targeting ZNF703.

Testing for ZNF703 activity in the tumour could help reveal if patients are likely to respond to such drugs, in the same way that testing for Her2 activity is used to reveal if a patient may benefit from Herceptin.

To make the discovery the researchers used ‘microarray technology’, which allows large numbers of tissue samples to be tested simultaneously, picking up subtle differences in gene activity between normal cells and cancer cells.

Lead author Professor Carlos Caldas, from the Cancer Research UK’s Cambridge Research Institute and the Department of Oncology where he is Professor of Cancer Medicine, said: “Using this state-of-the-art technology we’ve been able to pinpoint the precise gene behind this more aggressive type of breast cancer.

“Scientists first discovered this region of DNA may be harbouring genes linked to the development of breast cancer twenty years ago. But it’s only with the technology we have today that we’ve been able to narrow down the search sufficiently to pinpoint the gene responsible.

“Crucially, testing whether this gene is overactive in a patient’s tumour could help highlight those more likely to be resistant to standard hormone therapies, such as tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors, helping to make sure the right drugs are matched to the right patient.”

Dr Samuel Aparicio, who co-led the study and is based at the University of British Columbia and British Columbia Cancer Agency in Vancouver, Canada, said: “The discovery of ZNF703, as a new ‘driver gene’ in oestrogen receptor positive breast cancer, is another product of the very fruitful and long standing collaboration with our colleagues in the UK, emphasising that the fight against breast cancer takes place at the international level, with all partners bringing their unique skills and resources.”

The researchers had already identified a region on human chromosome eight likely to harbour genes linked to the development of a more aggressive form of oestrogen positive breast cancer, because multiple copies of it are commonly found in tumours but not in healthy tissue.

Focusing on this region, they studied the patterns of gene activity in 1172 breast tumours, as well as breast cancer cells grown in the lab. This allowed them to eliminate one gene at a time until there was only one gene left within that region that was overactive in all the samples tested.

Crucially there were two patients in which ZNF703 was the only gene shown to be overactive, providing further evidence that it was the driving force in the development of the cancer.

Dr Lesley Walker, director of cancer information at Cancer Research UK, said: “This is the first gene of its kind to be discovered in breast cancer for five years. This is exciting because it’s a prime candidate for the development of new breast cancer drugs designed specifically to target tumours in which this gene is overactive. Hopefully this will lead to more effective cancer treatments in the future.”

Flickr: NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Source: University of Cambridge

Warm and fuzzy, they are not. Even their names evoke dread: Dead Rising, Resident Evil 5, Mortal Kombat, Thrill Kill. Mature-rated video games may captivate players with their stunning, lifelike graphics and sophisticated depictions of place and story, but they also provide less attractive features such as violent, gory scenes and wanton killing.

Violent video games have been considered as possible spurs to school shootings, bullying behaviors, and violence toward women. Critics say these games desensitize players to violence. Advocates, by contrast, argue that no causal relationships have been found between video games and violence.

Do violent video games cause players, especially adolescents and young children, to exhibit aggressive behavior? Or do the benefits ascribed to these games, including sharpened coordination and cognitive skills, outweigh any harm? As research on the subject continues, the answer seems to be “yes” to both.

“There’s no reason to think that video games can’t teach both violence and cognitive skills, ” says David Bickham, PhD, an HMS instructor in pediatrics and a staff scientist at the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital Boston. “We know that they can do both, but much more research is needed to answer definitively.”

Controversy escalates as violence increases
As a genre, video games date back to the late 1940s, when missile defense systems were “played” on early cathode-ray–tube monitors. The first documented computer game, Noughts and Crosses, did not become commercially available until 1952. More than two decades would pass before controversy over the violence of such games began. The release in 1976 of Death Race, a game in which players try to hit zombie pedestrians with cars, is now considered a catalyst to that debate. Four years later, game violence reached a new intensity with the release of Mortal Kombat, which featured digitized images of real actors as characters bent on ripping out their opponents’ hearts. The more recent, and popular, Grand Theft Auto series has incited a new round of discussion of the possible link between violence and video games. In this game series, participants play big-city criminals who kill people, pick up prostitutes, steal cars, and join gangs.

As research into links between video-game violence and behavior ramps up, so too do the revenues of the video game industry. According to the Electronic Software Association, in 2009 the U.S. industry took in $19.6 billion. While mature-rated games accounted for only 17 percent of those sales, six of the ten best sellers had violent themes, according to CNBC.

Cause and effect
What do past studies tell us about how the brain processes video-game violence? A 2006 study by scientists at Indiana University found that certain areas of teens’ brains become active while violent video games are viewed and that regions that govern self-control remain less engaged. A 2010 review of 130 video game studies, conducted by researchers at Iowa State University, suggested that playing violent video games increases aggressive thoughts and decreases empathy.

Despite such findings, we still don’t have a lot of information about cause and effect, says Cheryl Olson, ScD, an HMS assistant clinical professor in psychiatry and co-author of the 2008 book Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do, which centers on middle-school children. “Violent video games are not causing mass violence in society,” Olson says, “which suggests that these games may have little effect on violent crimes. On the other hand, playing mature-rated games statistically predicts a greater risk for bullying and fighting.”

Individual risk for violent behavior, therefore, may be a separate concern. Researchers have found that children go through a variety of physical and mental changes when they play video games with violent content. In testimony before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary in 2006, Bickham described these effects: “They begin to think aggressively and to solve problems with violence. In this heightened and primed state, children are more likely to perceive other people’s behaviors as aggressive, and they are more likely to respond aggressively.”

Over time, he continued, exposure to this violent media can lead children to “adopt aggressive skills, beliefs, and attitudes; desensitize them to violence; and take aggressive approaches to interactions with other people. Using violent media as a child predicts aggressive behavior in adulthood.”

Parent, beware
That doesn’t mean that playing violent video games would be the sole catalyst for such behavior. Biology and environmental factors each play a role too.

“We each have a lifetime of experience to draw on, ” says Bickham. “The brain reaches for a solution and some of these solutions originate in different spheres of neurological influence. That’s why some kids who play violent video games become violent, while others don’t.”

Bickham says children act on their beliefs and attitudes about violence based on the strength of competing beliefs, such as those from family and classmates, and the environment in which they live.

One issue that has not yet been thoroughly assessed, says Olson, is whether children understand the difference between real violence and fantasy. Children do report that TV news bothers them more than violent movies or video games; they know video games are “fake,” while news is real. Children do not, however, understand satire until about age 12, she says, adding that satire underlies the Grand Theft Auto games. Nor do children realize that the casual racism in many such games can be intended to suggest that racism is hurtful.

While much more attention has been paid to how violent video games hurt rather than help, both Olson and Bickham say that these and other video games can have real-life benefits, including improving planning and problem-solving skills. Studies show that video-game playing can also help develop visual skills, spatial reasoning, higher-level thinking, and strategizing. Other research suggests that playing video games may have mental health benefits, including easing the symptoms of depression. This area, however, has not been studied extensively.

While Olson and Bickham have slightly different takes on the controversy, both agree that much needs to be sorted out through research and that parental involvement in this type of child’s play is key. Parents need to be engaged in decisions on which video games to purchase. Olson notes that the Electronic Software Rating Board (www.esrb.org) has expanded its descriptions of games to include plot summaries and specific details on objectionable content. And Bickham, who suggests www.commonsensemedia.org as a prepurchase resource for information about games, says parents also need to watch for patterns in their children’s behavior that can hint at problems. Playing mostly mature-rated games for more than 15 hours per week, for example, has been shown to be a risk factor for aggression.

“All media, including video games, should be on the parental radar,” Bickham says. “It’s when we don’t pay attention that kids get in trouble.”

Written by Scott Edwards

This article appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of On The Brain.

For the curious nonscientist, On The Brain deciphers how the human brain works by highlighting the leading-edge research of neuroscientists at Harvard Medical School and its affiliated teaching hospitals. The thrice-annual newsletter, produced through the Office of Communications and External Relations, is sponsored by the Harvard Mahoney Neuroscience Institute.

Harvard Medical School has more than 7,500 full-time faculty working in 11 academic departments located at the School’s Boston campus or in one of 47 hospital-based clinical departments at 17 Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals and research institutes. Those affiliates include Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Cambridge Health Alliance, Children’s Hospital Boston, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Forsyth Institute, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Hebrew SeniorLife, Joslin Diabetes Center, Judge Baker Children’s Center, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Massachusetts General Hospital, McLean Hospital, Mount Auburn Hospital, Schepens Eye Research Institute, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, and VA Boston Healthcare System.

A new University of Georgia study that is the first to examine comprehensively the magnitude of hydrocarbon gases released during the Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil discharge has found that up to 500,000 tons of gaseous hydrocarbons were emitted into the deep ocean. The authors conclude that such a large gas discharge—which generated concentrations 75,000 times the norm—could result in small-scale zones of “extensive and persistent depletion of oxygen” as microbial processes degrade the gaseous hydrocarbons.

The study, led by UGA Professor of Marine Sciences Samantha Joye, appears in the early online edition of the journal Nature Geoscience. Her co-authors are Ian MacDonald of Florida State University, Ira Leifer of the University of California-Santa Barbara and Vernon Asper of the University of Southern Mississippi.

The Macondo Well blowout discharged not only liquid oil, but also hydrocarbon gases, such as methane and pentane, which were deposited in the water column. Gases are normally not quantified for oil spills, but the researchers note that in this instance, documenting the amount of hydrocarbon gases released by the blowout is critical to understanding the discharge’s true extent, the fate of the released hydrocarbons, and potential impacts on the deep oceanic systems. The researchers explained that the 1,480-meter depth of the blowout (nearly one mile) is highly significant because deep sea processes (high pressure, low temperature) entrapped the released gaseous hydrocarbons in a deep (1,000-1,300m) layer of the water column. In the supplementary online materials, the researchers provide high-definition photographic evidence of the oil and ice-like gas hydrate flakes in the plume waters.

Joye said the methane and other gases likely will remain deep in the water column and be consumed by microbes in a process known as oxidation, which en masse can lead to low-oxygen waters.

“We’re not talking about extensive hypoxic areas offshore in the Gulf of Mexico,” Joye explained. “But the microbial oxidation of the methane and other alkanes will remove oxygen from the system for quite a while because the time-scale for the replenishment of oxygen at that depth is many decades.”

Leifer added that some of the larger gaseous hydrocarbons documented, such as pentane, have significant health implications for humans and potentially for marine life.

The study concludes that separating the gas-induced oxygen depletion from that due to liquid hydrocarbons is difficult, absent further research, because all hydrocarbons contribute to oxygen depletion. Therefore, documenting the total mass of hydrocarbons discharged is critical for understanding the long-term implications for the Gulf’s microbial communities, food chain and overall system.

Joye’s team examined samples from 70 sites around the leaking wellhead during a research cruise aboard the R/V Walton Smith during late May and early June of 2010. They combined their data with estimates of the volume of oil released to arrive at a figure that allows scientists to quantify, for the first time, the gas discharge in terms of equivalent barrels of oil. They calculated a gas discharge that’s the equivalent of either 1.6 to 1.9 or 2.2 to 3.1 million barrels of oil, depending on the method used. Although the estimate reflects the uncertainty still surrounding the discharge, even the lowest magnitude represents a significant increase in the total hydrocarbon discharge.

“These calculations increase the accepted government estimates by about one third,” MacDonald said.

The ever-shifting small-scale currents in the Gulf likely have dissipated the plumes and the low oxygen zones associated with them, Joye said, making them difficult if not impossible to find at this point in time. Although gliders are a new platform being used, scientists typically search for subsurface features by dropping instruments from research vessels, a process that’s analogous to looking for a feature on the Earth’s surface by randomly dropping instruments from a height of 1,500 meters (about 5,000 feet) in the atmosphere.

“It’s like searching for a needle in the haystack,” Joye said. “We may never know what happened to all of that gas.”

Joye cautioned against assuming that microbes will rapidly consume the gases released from the well. Undoubtedly, the methane is a feast for them, Joye said, but she also noted that the microbes need nutrients, such as nitrogen, copper and iron. These nutrients are in scarce supply in the Gulf’s deep waters, Joye said, and once they are depleted the microbes will cease to grow—regardless of how much methane is available.

“This study highlights the value of knowledge gained from deep sea hydrate seepage research but also how poorly deep sea processes are understood, such as the role methane hydrates played in forming the deep methane plumes documented by this study,” Leifer said. “Deepwater Horizon underscored how ill-prepared the nation is to respond to future accidents. As a nation, we need to hear this deep sea Sputnik wake-up call.”

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Institute for Undersea Technology.

Source: University of Georgia