What began as an informal presentation by a clinical linguist to a group of philosophers, has led to some surprising discoveries about the communicative language abilities of people with autism.

Several years back, Robert Stainton, now a philosophy professor at The University of Western Ontario, attended a presentation by his long-time friend Jessica de Villiers, a clinical linguist now at the University of British Columbia. The topic was Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). De Villiers explained that many individuals with ASD have significant difficulties with what linguists call "pragmatics." That is, people with ASD often have difficulty using language appropriately in social situations. They do not make appropriate use of context or knowledge of what it would be "reasonable to say." Most glaringly, many speakers with ASD have immense trouble understanding metaphor, irony, sarcasm, and what might be intimated or presumed, but not stated.

Drawing on his philosophical training, however, Stainton noticed less-than-obvious pragmatic abilities at work in de Villiers' examples, which were drawn from transcripts of conversations with 42 speakers with ASD - abilities that had been missed by clinicians.

Thus began research to more clearly understand and define the conversational abilities and challenges of people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Stainton and de Villiers' research, in collaboration with Peter Szatmari, a clinical psychiatrist at McMaster University, has shown that indeed, many individuals with ASD do have "a rich array of pragmatic abilities."

These researchers do not contest the well-established claim that people with ASD have difficulty with non-literal pragmatics, such as metaphors ("Juliet is the sun") or irony/sarcasm ("Boy, is that a good idea"). They have, however, found that many speakers with ASD do not show the same difficulty with literal pragmatics. An example is the phrase, "I took the subway north" from a transcript of a conversation with a research participant with ASD. The use of the word "the" could indicate there is only one subway in existence going north. "The subway" could also be referring to a subway car, a subway system or a subway tunnel. Taking account of the context and the listener's expectations, however, the individual using the phrase was able to convey the specific meaning he intended. That is, he used pragmatics effectively.

In short, Stainton and his colleagues produced surprising evidence to show that speakers with ASD use and understand pragmatics in cases of literal talk, as in the subway example.

Stainton, who is also Acting Associate Dean of Research in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Western, says, "It is especially gratifying and encouraging, because this is an Arts and Humanities contribution to clinical research. Without a philosophical perspective, this discovery might not have been made."

Related research allowed de Villiers and Szatmari to develop a rating scale of pragmatic abilities that can be used in the clinical assessment of people with ASD. Stainton says, "In the short term, their new tool will help identify where an individual fits on that spectrum. In the longer term, however, by making use of recent results in philosophy of language, it may contribute to our theoretical understanding of the boundary between knowledge of the meanings of words, and non-linguistic abilities - specifically pragmatics."

Stainton believes that both clinicians who work with people with ASD, and language theorists who are interested in pragmatics for philosophical reasons, will find these results striking.

Carnegie Mellon University's Constantine Samaras and Kyle Meisterling report that plug-in hybrid electric vehicles could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions that fuel global warming, but the benefits are highly dependent on how the electricity system changes in the coming decades.

In a recent article in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, the authors urge federal legislators and the electricity industry to increase the deployment of low-carbon electricity technology to power plug-in hybrid vehicles.

"Plug-in hybrids represent an opportunity to reduce oil consumption, leverage next-generation biofuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The types of power plants installed in the next two decades will not only affect how much we can reduce emissions from electricity, but also from vehicles if we plan on plug-in hybrids playing a substantial role," said Samaras, a Ph.D. candidate in Carnegie Mellon's departments of Engineering and Public Policy (EPP) and Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE).

"We are finding that even when the impacts from producing batteries are included, plug-in hybrids still produce slightly less greenhouse gases than hybrids that run only on gasoline. But plug-in hybrids could cut emissions in half if they are charged with electricity from low-carbon sources," said Meisterling, a Ph.D. candidate in EPP.

Already, automakers have discussed plans to develop plug-in hybrids and California recently ruled that the auto industry must sell nearly 60,000 plug-ins statewide by 2014. With the price of gas heading beyond $4 per gallon, interest in alternative vehicles continues to grow. Samaras and Meisterling also say plug-ins may allow greater use of the limited supply of biofuels because they use a lot less gasoline than regular cars.

The researchers found that life cycle greenhouse gas emissions from plug-in hybrids are about one-third less than a traditional gasoline-powered car. They also argue that with coal-fired electricity, emissions from plug-in hybrids are still lower than traditional cars, but are higher than ordinary hybrids. The call for increased low-carbon electricity supplies comes at a time when the U.S. electricity industry plans to build 154 new coal plants in the next 24 years to replace older plants being phased out.

"The type of power plants we build today will be around for a long time. We need to begin developing policies that allow us to make big dents in oil dependence and greenhouse gas emissions," said Samaras, the recipient of a prestigious Teresa Heinz Fellowship for Environmental Research, which she is using to analyze public policies involving plug-in hybrids and low-carbon electricity.

Advance directives, or living wills, may not effectively honor end-of-life wishes because life-sustaining treatment preferences often change over time without people being aware of the changes, according to a new study co-authored by UC Irvine researchers Peter Ditto and Elizabeth Loftus.

False memories can play a significant role in the discrepancy between an individual's true preferences for end-of-life treatment and what is instructed in their living will. Life-sustaining treatment preferences often change as people age or experience new health problems, and advance directive forms typically remind people of their right to update their directives if their wishes change. This assumes that people recognize when their wishes about end-of-life treatment have changed, and remember that their current wishes are different from those documented in their living will.

"Living wills are a noble idea and can often be very helpful in decisions that must be made near the end of life. But the notion that you can just fill out a document and all your troubles will be solved, a notion that is frequently reinforced in the popular media, is seriously misguided," said Peter Ditto, professor of psychology and social behavior at UCI.

In research reported in the current issue of the American Psychological Association journal Health Psychology, a sample of 401 adults older than 65 were interviewed about which life-sustaining treatments they would want if they were seriously ill. They were interviewed again 12 months later to test their recall of earlier decisions. About one-third of participants changed their wishes regarding medical treatment such as CPR and "tube feeding" over the course of the year, and in 75 percent of these cases, participants falsely remembered that their original views on the issues matched their new ones.

Interviewers also talked to individuals empowered to make medical decisions if the study subjects were no longer able. These potential surrogate decision makers were even less sensitive to changes in their loved one's wishes, showing false memories in 86 percent of cases.

"On a policy level, these results suggest that living wills should have an 'expiration date.' People can't be counted upon to update their directives as their wishes change because they often have no awareness that their wishes have changed," Ditto said. "On a more personal level, our research stresses the importance of maintaining an ongoing dialogue among individuals, their families and their physicians about end-of-life treatment options," he continued.

The work suggests a provocative general principle at work: Signals from reproductive tissue directly control lifespan and metabolism in the whole organism. The work, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also offers a first glimpse of how this control in the fly might occur at the molecular level.

"For more than 50 years, scientists have known that there is a link between reproduction and lifespan," said Thomas Flatt, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown and the lead author of the research article. "When reproduction is delayed, animals live longer. Why? Our research suggests that signals from the reproductive system can regulate aging in animals - including, possibly, humans."

The Brown findings follow a seminal discovery made 10 years ago by acclaimed aging biologist Cynthia Kenyon at the University of California, San Francisco. Kenyon found that eliminating germline stem cells in roundworms extended their lifespan.

"We wanted to see if Kenyon's findings could be duplicated in the fly," said Marc Tatar, the senior scientist on the project and a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. "If so, we'd know that reproductive control of lifespan was a general principle in biology."

In their experiments, Flatt and Tatar over-activated a gene that controls germline stem cells in flies, a move that eliminated the cells' production. These sterile flies lived 20 to 50 percent longer than typical flies - results that matched Kenyon's finding in worms.

Flatt and Tatar speculated that these flies might live longer because they are insensitive to the effects of insulin. Past research at Brown and other universities shows that animals such as flies, worms and mice live longer when they produce or receive less insulin.

Yet, to their surprise, Flatt and Tatar found that when germline cells were eliminated, and flies lived longer, insulin-producing cells in the fly brain actually make more - not less - insulin. These results posed a paradox: How can flies be longer-lived when they're making more of a life-shortening hormone? When the researchers studied the flies' tissues, they discovered something intriguing: Even though the brains were making more insulin, the bodies were responding as if there was less insulin present.

Tatar said the team found a possible explanation for the paradox. In reaction to the flies' brains boosting insulin production, the insects' gonads - their ovaries or testes - produce a protein that acts like a sponge. This protein binds to the insulin and blocks its signals throughout the body. So the flies respond as if there is low, not high, insulin circulation inside their bodies.

"This suggests that the gonad and the brain are in a synchronized hormonal feedback loop," Tatar said. "It's not just the brain affecting the gonad, but also the other way around."

"We think that in mammals, a similar communication occurs between the brain and the gonad, communication which controls insulin signaling," Flatt said. "And when insulin signaling is reduced, the body goes into a state of high repair. The body becomes more stress resistant. Tissues protect themselves really well - and that increases longevity."

"Most people believe the human mind is incredibly complex," said Jeff Rouder, associate professor of psychology in the MU College of Arts and Science. "We were able to use a relatively simple experiment and look at how many objects can be in maintained in the human conscious mind at any one time. We found that every person has the capacity to hold a certain number of objects in his or her mind. Working memory is like the number of memory registers in a computer. Every object takes one register and each individual has a fixed number of registers. Limits in working memory are important because working memory is the mental process of holding information in a short-term, readily accessible, easily manipulated form where it can be combined, rearranged and stored more productively."

"We know that this kind of memory is really important in daily life," said co-author Nelson Cowan, psychology professor at Mizzou and an expert in working memory theory. "If a person is trying to do a math problem, there are partial results to keep in mind as that person solves the problem. When people are going to do any tasks in the house-like remembering the location of keys, turning off the stove, combining ingredients for a cake or recalling a phone number-they use working memory to keep in mind all the different aspects of the tasks."

Rouder said that to remember a series of items, people will use "chunking," or grouping, to put together different items. It can be difficult for someone to remember nine random letters. But if that same person is asked to remember nine letters organized in acronyms, IBM-CIA-FBI, for example, the person only has to use three slots in working memory. The difficulty in measuring working memory capacity is assuring that each item presented cannot be grouped together with others to form a larger chunk.

The researchers conducted a simple experiment involving an array of small, scattered, different-colored squares, to test their theory of working memory. The participant saw two, five or eight squares in the array, depending on the trial. The array was then "wiped out" by another display consisting of the same squares, minus the colors. Finally, the participant was shown a single color in one location and was asked to indicate whether the color in that spot had changed from the original array.

"How an individual does this test depends on working memory," Cowan said. "The results indicating that people have a fixed capacity provide evidence of simplicity in the mind. Many other theorists have suggested that the amount of working memory is circumstance-dependent, depends on a particular test, that there is nothing general we can get out of it, and that it's complex. We found the mind to be less complex in this case and that should be of great use in the future."

Working memory is closely related to attention because it requires attention to hold a number of items in mind at once. People with high working memory capacity have more focus. Those with a lower attention span are more easily distracted. This fact may help researchers help people with attention deficit disorders.

The researchers emphasized that the unique result of their study was that "the data were explained to surprising accuracy by a very simple mental model in which participants either used a register of working memory or, if all registers were full, guessed randomly."

Scientists using a bionic boot found that during walking, the ankle does about three times the work for the same amount of energy compared to isolated muscles---in other words, the spring in your step is very real and helps us move efficiently.

While much has been done measuring the efficiency of individual muscles, this is the first known study to measure the energy efficiency of a body part such as the ankle, said Daniel Ferris, associate professor with the University of Michigan Division of Kinesiology and lead researcher on the project.

The results suggest manufacturers should rethink prosthesis design so the ankle part can do more of the work, said Ferris, who also holds an appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. It also sheds light on why rehabilitation and mobility is so exhausting for people with unhealthy ankles or neurologic problems.

Greg Sawicki, a graduate student working with Ferris and now at Brown University, built a bionic ankle equipped with fake muscles that mimic real muscle activity in the ankle, Ferris said.

Healthy subjects wore two of the boots, which were attached to the nervous system by electrodes. Sawicki measured the amount of oxygen consumed when walking with or without the boot and compared the two. Muscles use oxygen when they burn fuel, which means the more oxygen used the more energy expended, Ferris said.

"The ankle is incredibly efficient at working so the amount of energy you burn with the ankle is much lower than what would be predicted with just isolated muscle studies," Ferris said.

Researchers suspect this is largely because the Achilles tendon is so long and compliant, and is able to store and return energy during the stride cycle.

Amputees and people with neurologic disorders don't have the "bounce" of the stored energy in the ankle, Ferris said.

"For amputees, we need to come up with a better way for them to have a powered push off at the ankle," Ferris said.

An example of this for running is the prosthetic used by controversial Olympic hopeful Oscar Pistorius, a double-amputee who wears a special curved blade called a Cheetah. As the blade compresses on strides it stores energy, which is released during push off, similar to a human ankle.

However, the Cheetah is great for sprinting but would not work for walking. The foot is on the ground too long to take advantage of the energy return during walking. The muscle and tendon act more like a catapult during walking, storing energy slowly and releasing it at just the right moment.

The next step, Ferris said, is to build a bionic hip and measure the efficiency of the hip during walking.

Bycatch refers to species caught in a fishery which intended to target another species. According to the Worldwide Fund for Nature, in the Gulf of Thailand, 14 pounds of bycatch are caught for every pound of shrimp harvested. Bycatch is often discarded dead or dying by the time it is returned to the sea.

Liquid Mercury

Mercury contamination in rivers can spread to nearby birds, even ones that don't eat fish or other food from the water, according to a new study. Researchers found high levels of mercury in the blood of land-feeding songbirds living near the South River, a tributary of the Shenandoah. The source of the mercury was spiders, the study found.

Seasonal flu epidemics are seeded by viruses that originate in East and Southeast Asia and then migrate around the world, research shows. By focusing on new flu strains emerging in Asia, scientists may be able to improve their forecast of seasonal flu strains and develop better vaccines, researchers say.