Effective parenting practices provide a protective environment surrounding children and the authors have proposed a framework that draws on positive parenting practices that promote healthy child development.

The goals of parenting following trauma would be to provide structure, security, emotional warmth, and an environment that addresses the traumatic event. Skill encouragement, monitoring, interpersonal problem-solving, and positive involvement would support these goals and enable parents to provide an environment to promote their children's resilience after trauma.

Led by Abigail Gewirtz, PhD, of the University of Minnesota, researchers reviewed the existing literature on trauma and subsequently propose a prevention research framework to inspect the ways in which parents can affect children's recovery in the aftermath of trauma.

Strengthening parenting and a focus on interpersonal relationships would serve as an effective population-based approach to promoting children's recovery and functioning following trauma. "By providing an overview of the evidence to-date, and a proposed prevention research framework, it is our hope that others will see and respond to the need to advance this field," the authors conclude.

The study, "Associations Between Tobacco Marketing and Use Among Urban Youth In India," is published in the May/June issue of the American Journal of Health Behavior.

Findings from an earlier published study by the researchers revealed that in 2004, Indian sixth graders were using three times the amount of tobacco as eighth graders, which the authors found might indicate a new wave of increased tobacco use. The second study sought to discover the reason for the jump.

"As India becomes more westernized, more teens will use tobacco," said the study's principal investigator Cheryl Perry, Ph.D., professor and regional dean of The University of Texas School of Public Health Austin Regional Campus. "The sixth graders as a group are already thinking that smoking is cool while the eighth graders haven't been as exposed to the Western message."

After the major tobacco company settlements of 1998 that included more stringent laws banning pro-smoking advertising, smoking has dropped among American youth. According to The Monitoring the Future study, daily smoking among eighth graders dropped from 8.8 percent in 1998 to 3 percent in 2007.

"The current study is the first in India to demonstrate a strong, dose-response relationship between exposure and receptivity to tobacco advertising and promotions and tobacco use among Indian youth. These associations clearly suggest a need to strengthen policy and program-based interventions to reduce tobacco use among youth in India," said Melissa Stigler, Ph.D., assistant professor at the UT School of Public Health and study co-author, who did much of the ground work in India.

Chewing tobacco and aromatic cigarettes called "bidis" account for the majority of tobacco use in India with cigarettes taking 20 percent of the market.

While tobacco advertising was banned in India in 2004, the year the study began, cigarette companies are coming up with new ways to reach a relatively untapped audience, Stigler said. Event sponsorship and lifestyle stores centered on tobacco products are slipping through the cracks of the law.

As part of the 2004 law, smoking is also banned in public areas such as indoor malls, but tobacco companies have responded with air-conditioned mobile smoking lounges.

"On a visit there shortly after the 2004 law was enacted, I witnessed a long line of college age students lined up for one of the mobile lounges, which was parked outside an upscale shopping mall." Stigler said.

The government is still working through the courts to determine the extent of the ban. For example, Stigler said, actors have started to stop smoking cigarettes in Bollywood movies but they now sing and dance about it instead.

The researchers found the link between advertising and tobacco use among the Indian youth to be alarming.

"I was surprised that they were so strongly influenced," Perry said. "The more exposed the youth were to tobacco advertising, the more likely they were to have ever used or be currently using tobacco."

The study, which included 11,642 sixth and eighth graders, was produced in collaboration with Indian organizations Health Related Information Dissemination Amongst Youth in Delhi and Tamil Nadu Voluntary Health Association in Chennai.

The researchers found that 37 percent of youth in the study had seen tobacco advertising in more than four places while 50 percent had seen advertising in one to four places.

Tobacco use rose with measures of receptivity, including having a favorite tobacco advertisement, believing misleading imagery created by tobacco advertisements and being willing to use a tobacco promotional item (such as wearing a T-shirt that advertises tobacco).

The news comes on the heels of new research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine's Feb. 13 issue, which predicts that in India, by the year 2010, one million deaths per year will be the result of smoking.

Dr. Kaklamani's research, which is published in the May 1 issue of Cancer Research, suggests some women are born with different characteristics in the adiponectin gene which can alter its function and increase the risk of breast cancer. This finding, coupled with previous studies that have found a correlation between low levels of adiponectin in the body and cancer risk, suggest adiponectin may be the third gene linked to breast cancer among women with no previous family history of breast cancer. If confirmed through additional studies, adiponectin could be used along with TGF-beta and CHEK2, genes that have already been linked to breast cancer, to create a genetic testing model that will allow clinicians to more accurately predict breast cancer risk.

Clinicians currently rely on epidemiologic models to predict breast cancer risk. The most common is the GAIL model, which looks at a number of factors including a woman's current age, the age she began menstruating, her age at menopause, age of first live birth, previous biopsies and family history.

"All we know is that one in eight women will get breast cancer somehow, for some reason," says Dr. Kaklamani. "One explanation for this is genetic background, and the adiponectin gene is one that may be responsible. By pinpointing which genes are associated with breast cancer risk, we can better predict risk, and ultimately may be able to enhance efforts for breast cancer prevention," adds Kaklamani.

Genetic testing is already being used among women with a strong family history of breast cancer to determine if the BRCA genes are present, which have been linked to hereditary breast cancer. However, the vast majority of women diagnosed with breast cancer each year do not have familial breast cancer, leaving a large number of breast cancers unexplained.

"With further research and testing, our hope is that some day all women may be able to proactively test their genetic risk for breast cancer. By doing so, those found to have a high risk could work with their physician to take preventative measures that may lower their risk and aid in early detection, such as having frequent mammograms and undergoing a breast MRI," said Kaklamani. "This is still in the distant future, however each day researchers take one step closer," adds Kaklamani.

Between 1993 and 1997 there were 1,340 confirmed incidents of illicit trafficking in nuclear material around the world. Much of this material can be traced to the former Soviet Union.

Drawing on 60 years of long-term studies of Russia's Lake Baikal, Stephanie Hampton, an ecologist and deputy director of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in Santa Barbara, Calif., and Marianne Moore, a biologist at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Mass., along with four other scientists, report their results on-line today in the journal Global Change Biology.

"Warming of this isolated but enormous lake is a clear signal that climate change has affected even the most remote corners of our planet," Hampton said.

In their paper, the scientists detail the effects of climate change on Lake Baikal--from warming of its vast waters to reorganization of its microscopic food web.

"The conclusions shown here for this enormous body of freshwater result from careful and repeated sampling over six decades," said Henry Gholz, program director for NCEAS at the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funded the research. "Thanks to the dedication of local scientists, who were also keen observers, coupled with modern synthetic approaches, we can now visualize and appreciate the far-reaching changes occurring in this lake."

Lake Baikal is the grand dame of lakes. In 1996, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared it a World Heritage site because of its biological diversity. It boasts 2500 plant and animal species, with most, including the freshwater seal, found nowhere else in the world.

The lake contains 20 percent of the world's freshwater, and it is large enough to hold all the water in the United States' Great Lakes. It is the world's deepest lake as well as its oldest; at 25 million years old, it predates the emergence of humans.

In more recent times, it was a dedicated group of humans who made this study possible.

"Our research relies on a 60-year data set, collected in Lake Baikal by three generations of a single family of Siberian scientists," Moore said. "In the 1940s, Mikhail Kozhov began collecting and analyzing water samples in anticipation that this lake could reveal much about how lakes in general function.

"Ultimately, his daughter Olga Kozhova continued the program, followed by her daughter, who is also a co-author of today's paper: Lyubov Izmest'eva."

The decades-long research effort survived the reign of Stalin, the fall of the Soviet Union, and other social and financial upheavals in the region.

Data collection continued through every season, in an environment where winter temperatures drop to -50 degrees F.

The data on Lake Baikal reveal "significant warming of surface waters and long-term changes in the food web of the world's largest, most ancient lake," write the researchers in their paper. "Increases in water temperature (1.21°C since 1946), chlorophyll a (300 percent since 1979), and an influential group of zooplankton grazers (335 percent since 1946) have important implications for nutrient cycling and food web dynamics."

The scientists conclude that the lake now joins other large lakes, including Superior, Tanganyika and Tahoe, in showing warming trends.

"But," they note, "temperature changes in Lake Baikal are particularly significant as a signal of long-term regional warming.

"This lake was expected to be among those most resistant to climate change, due to its tremendous volume and unique water circulation."

Other new topics in the 2007 OSDUHS showed that approximately three percent (or 35,000 students) reported a suicide attempt in the past year. About one in ten students rate their mental health as poor, with females more likely to do so than males (16 percent versus 7 percent). About nine percent of students may have a video gaming problem (indicated by symptoms such as loss of control, withdrawal, and disruption to family or school), with males significantly more likely than females to indicate this problem (16 percent versus 3 percent).

As Dr. Jürgen Rehm, senior scientist at CAMH and study spokesperson, explains, "We included questions on the choking game and video gaming to reflect the ever changing behavioural patterns of young Ontarians. Overall, the results are not alarming, but indicate that Ontario youth overall show a relatively high degree of distress and potentially self-harming behavior."

Dr. David Wolfe, director of CAMH's Centre for Prevention Science notes that adolescents have always had a fascination with altered states. "Activities such as the choking game are not new, but it is important that parents are aware of these behaviours and are prepared to speak with their children about the dangers of these and other risky activities."

This year's report also shows a stable but high rate of elevated psychological distress, with 31 percent of students reporting symptoms of depression, anxiety or social dysfunction. In addition, about 21 percent of students visited a mental health professional a least once during the past year. This is a significant increase from 2005, when only 12 percent of students reported visits.

"This is an encouraging sign," commented Dr. Rehm, "as it shows, that psychological and mental health problems are less stigmatized, and students and their families become increasingly aware that professional services can help overcome these problems."

Bullying continues to be a problem with Ontario youth, with stable but elevated rates of approximately 30 percent of students reporting being bullied at school since September. The most prevalent form of being bullied is verbal attacks (23 percent), while four percent are bullied physically, and three percent are usually victims of theft or vandalism.

The report points to the key role parents and teachers play in the development of adolescents. "Bullying continues to be a problem in our schools and can have significant effects on the mental health and well-being of adolescents," says Dr. Wolfe. "It is crucial that schools find ways to address these forms of abuse and violence, so that students feel safe. Young people need to know that the lines of communication are open and they can speak to school administrators and parents about their problems. And similarly, parents need to be open and honest with kids and arm them with the necessary tools to make healthy decisions."

Shinichi Nagata of the Environmental Biochemistry Group, at Kobe University, Japan, working with colleagues at Shimane University and at Nankai University, China, explain that as marine pollution is on the increase novel approaches to removing toxic contaminants is becoming an increasingly pressing issue. They point out that various species of seaweed are able to extract toxic compounds from seawater and point to the brown seaweed, Undaria pinnatifida, known as wakame in Japan as having been the focus of research in this area for almost a decade.

Wakame can thrive evening the presence of carbon, ammonium, nitrate and phosphate in sea water that would otherwise be lifeless. However, there remains the problem of how to dispose of planted wakame, once it has feasted on organic and inorganic pollutants in seawater.

Organic pollutants are absorbed by cultured wakame and so cultivated wakame must be treated as a kind of toxic waste rather than a useful byproduct of marine bioremediation. The researchers point out that there may be a simple solution to the disposal problem. Natural wakame has been used as a fertilizer since ancient times, they explain, so the composting process could be an effective means of degrading wakame into a useful form and so recycling organic substances containing C, N and P from coastal waters.

The team has now found a highly efficient way to accelerate the composting process in the form of a novel marine bacterium, identified as a Halomonas species and given the label AW4.

Partial DNA analysis helped identify the active species isolated from the seaweeds in Awaji Island, Japan. The researchers explain that strain AW4 grows well even at high salt (sodium chloride) concentrations and can reduce the total organic components, including pollutant content, of the seaweed significantly within a week.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, also known as ALMA, is one of the world's largest ground-based astronomy projects and a major new facility for world astronomy. Built in the Atacama desert in Chile, the project will include 80 high-precision telescopes. The ALMA project is an international collaboration between Europe, Japan and North America in cooperation with the Republic of Chile.

The researchers showed that a courting "song and dance" routine that only male flies naturally perform -- one wing is lifted and wiggled to make a humming "song" -- can also be triggered in female flies by artificially stimulating particular brain cells that are present in both sexes. It isn't what you've got -- it's how you use it, the authors say.

"It appears there is a largely bisexual or 'unisex brain.' Anatomically, the differences are subtle and a few critical switches make the difference between male and female behavior," said senior author Gero Miesenboeck, formerly of Yale University and now at the University of Oxford.

According to the authors, most male animals have to perform elaborate courtship displays to try to convince the female that they are worthy mates. Their study was designed to see what neurons were responsible for behavior in the courtship dance of flies, and how the neural circuits in males and females differed. To do this, they genetically engineered specific neurons in the fly to respond to light. This optical trick allowed them to activate the neural circuits that control the behavior pattern directly.

Using a flash of laser light as a "remote control" for the brain cells, the researchers first identified which nerve cells control the courting behavior in males. Next, they showed that the cells were present and functional in both males and females, even though only males do the song and dance.

"Surprisingly, when the brain cells of female flies were flashed with the laser cue we found that even the female flies that never normally behaved this way, began to sing," said Dylan Clyne, a Yale post-doctoral associate and primary investigator of the study. "Our work shows that the brains not only look similar but are functionally similar. The females have all the equipment to sing, but normally don't use it because their song circuit doesn't get the appropriate activating signals."

Asked about the relevance of this study to humans, Clyne said, "You have to be careful about how much you can extrapolate from studying flies. But, the basic principle should hold up -- that is, the idea that we don't need big sex-differences in the brain to explain why it seems that men are from Mars and women from Venus."

The authors' next goal is finding the controls that set the flies' brains to the male or female mode. They hope that by studying examples like sex-specific behaviors, they can clarify the still poorly understood relationships between genes, which are the targets of natural selection, and behavior, which is the product of evolution. Ultimately, this line of research could also shed light on how genes underlie behavioral variation and perhaps even specific mental illnesses.

Writing in the American Chemical Society's journal Nano Letters, Dr Kostya Novoselov and colleagues from The School of Physics and Astronomy and The School of Computer Science, report on the use of graphene as a transparent conductive coating for electro-optical devices - and show that its high transparency and low resistivity make it ideal for electrodes in liquid crystal devices.

Graphene was discovered at The University of Manchester back in 2004, by Professor Andre Geim FRS and Royal Society Research Fellow Dr Kostya Novoselov. This incredible one-atom-thick gauze of carbon atoms, which resembles chicken wire, has quickly become one of the hottest topics in physics and materials science.

"Graphene is only one atom thick, optically transparent, chemically inert, and an excellent conductor," says Dr Novoselov, from the Manchester research team.

"These properties seem to make this material an excellent candidate for applications in various electro-optical devices that require conducting but transparent thin films. We believe graphene should improve the durability and simplify the technology of potential electronic devices that interact with light."

Prof Geim said: "Transparent conducting films are an essential part of many gadgets including common liquid crystal displays (LCDs) for computers, TVs and mobile phones.

"The underlying technology uses thin metal-oxide films based on indium. But indium is becoming an increasingly expensive commodity and, moreover, its supply is expected to be exhausted within just 10 years.

"Forget about oil - our civilisation will first run out of indium. Scientists have an urgent task on their hands to find new types of conductive transparent films."

The Manchester research team has now demonstrated highly transparent and highly conductive ultra-thin films that can be produced cheaply by 'dissolving' chunks of graphite - an abundant natural resource - into graphene and then spraying the suspension onto a glass surface.

The resulting graphene-based films can be used in LCDs and, to prove the concept, the research team have demonstrated the first liquid crystal devices with graphene electrodes.

Dr Novoselov believes that there are only a few small, incremental steps remain for this technology to reach a mass production stage. "Graphene-based LCD products could appear in shops as soon as in a few years", he adds.

A research team from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Germany recently reported in Nano Letters how they had used graphene-based films to create transparent electrodes for solar cells.

But the German team used a different technology for obtaining graphene films, which involved several extra steps.

The Manchester team says the films they have developed are much simpler to produce, and they can be used not only in LCDs but also in solar cells.

Using high-powered microscopes, researchers looked at rough geometric shapes on the teeth of several Nutcracker Man specimens and determined that their structure alone was not enough to predict diet.

Peter Ungar, professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, contends the finding shows evolutionary adaptation for eating may have been based on scarcity rather than on an animal's regular diet.

"These findings totally run counter to what people have been saying for the last half a century," says Ungar. "We have to sit back and re-evaluate what we once thought."

Ungar and his colleagues, Frederick E. Grine of State University of New York at Stony Brook and Mark F. Teaford of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md., reported their findings last week in the Public Library of Science One, a peer-reviewed, international, online journal. The research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

The researchers examined the teeth of Paranthropus boisei, an ancient hominin that lived between 2.3 and 1.2 million years ago and is known popularly as the "Nutcracker Man" because it has the biggest, flattest cheek teeth and the thickest enamel of any known human ancestor.

"Ungar and colleagues' work on Paranthropus boisei diet is extremely important," says Joanna Lambert, physical anthropology program director at NSF. "Understanding what and how early hominins ate sheds light not only onto the feeding biology of our fossil ancestors, but also onto the very evolution of our own species."

Scientists long have believed that P. boisei fed on nuts and seeds or roots and tubers found in the savannas throughout eastern Africa because the teeth, cranium and mandible appear to be built for chewing and crunching hard objects.

But Ungar points out that the teeth only suggest "what P. boisei could eat, but not necessarily what it did eat."

Anthropologists have traditionally inferred the diet of ancient human ancestors by looking at the size and shape of the teeth and jaws. However, by using powerful microscopes to look at the patterns of wear on a tooth, scientists can get direct evidence of what the species actually ate.

Since food interacts with teeth, it leaves behind telltale signs that can be measured. Hard foods like nuts and seeds, for instance, lead to more complex tooth profiles, while tough foods like leaves lead to more parallel scratches.

Researchers compared dental microwear profiles of P. boisei to modern-day primates that eat different types of foods. P. boisei teeth were compared to those of the Old World Monkey species grey-cheeked mangabeys, and the New World Monkey species brown capuchin monkeys--both of these species consume mostly soft items but fall back on hard nuts or palm fronds.

Old World monkeys are found today in South and East Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Gibraltar at the southern tip of Spain. New World monkeys are found in tropical forest environments in southern Mexico, Central and South America.

P. boisei dental profiles also were compared to the New World mantled howling monkey and Old World silvered leaf monkey, which eat mostly leaves. Researchers also compared them to some of P. boisei's more contemporary counterparts--Australopithecus africanus, which lived between 3.3 million and 2.3 million years ago, and Paranthropus robustus, which lived between 2 million and 1.5 million years ago.

The findings showed that P. boisei teeth had light wear, suggesting that none of the individuals ate extremely hard or tough foods in the days leading up to death. The pattern was more consistent with modern-day fruit-eating animals than with most modern-day primates.

"It looks more like they were eating Jell-O," Ungar said.

This finding, while contradictory to previous speculation on the diet of P. boisei, is in line with a paradox documented in fish. Liem's Paradox states that animals may actively avoid eating the very foods they have developed adaptations for when they can find other food sources.

It appears the paradox may hold true for P. boisei and for some modern-day primates as well.

"If you give a gorilla a choice of eating fruit or a leaf, it will take the fruit every time," Ungar says. "But if you look at a gorilla's skull, its sharp teeth are adapted to consuming tough leaves. They don't eat the leaves unless they have to."

Accordingly, the finding represents a fundamental shift in the way researchers look at the diets of early human ancestors.

"For many years, the perspective has been that the very large teeth and thick dental enamel of P. boisei were adaptations to consuming very hard food types year-round," says Lambert. "Such specialization has historically been viewed as a potential cause for this fossil species' extinction. The research team demonstrated that such generalizations require careful re-thinking, and that P. boisei was a more flexible feeder than has classically been viewed."

"This challenges the fundamental assumptions of why such specializations occur in nature," Ungar says. "It shows that animals can develop an extreme degree of specialization without the specialized object becoming a preferred resource."

Gamma-ray bursts are short-lived events, lasting between a few milliseconds to a few minutes. The brightest of them emit more energy in a few seconds than our Sun will emit in its whole 10 billion-year lifetime. Gamma ray bursts occur several times daily somewhere in the universe. These fleeting explosions are precursors to the births of black holes.

Gamma-ray bursts are detected by orbiting satellites about two to three times per week. Since its launch in 2004, the Swift satellite has discovered over 292 gamma-ray bursts, and pin-pointed a further 320 bursts detected by other satellites. Swift's rapid response - it was named after the bird, which catches its prey "on the fly" - has been critical to understanding these titanic events.

In a study conducted by the University's Child Language Study Centre, children aged between six and nine were given sentences containing made-up verbs such as 'the duck likes to spling' and were asked to judge the acceptability of possible past tense forms. The study focused on the process the children used to come to their conclusions rather than whether their answers were right or wrong.

They found that the children's judgements followed a virtually identical pattern to those of linguistics students who took part in a similar study at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the US.

University of Liverpool psychologist, Ben Ambridge, said: "Previous studies have concentrated on getting children to produce past tense forms for made-up words. This study is unique in that the children were asked to judge the acceptability of different forms that we gave them.

"One of the main questions raised when looking at children's ability to pick up their native language is whether abstract symbolic rules or the use of memory and comparison affect how a child attributes past tenses to words.

"The study was designed to investigate whether we coin novel past-tense forms like 'emailed' by applying the default rule of adding 'ed' to the present-tense form or by making an analogy with similar-sounding words stored in the memory, for example in the way we know to form 'sailed' from 'sail' by linking it to like-sounding words such as 'tail' or 'fail'. The study found evidence for the latter, supporting the view that we solve problems by making analogies with similar events stored in our memory rather than by applying abstract mental rules."

He added: Grammaticality judgements are generally used by adult linguists so it's impressive that children have been able to make them. They can't tell you how they do it, but even six-year-olds know when a made-up word just doesn't sound right."

It turns out it can be tested. Texas Tech University psychologist Jeff Larsen and Amie McKibban of Wichita State University asked undergraduates to indicate whether they possessed 52 different material items, such as a car, a stereo or a bed.

Their results, which appear in the April issue of the Association for Psychological Science's journal, Psychological Science, suggest that people can grow accustomed to their possessions and thereby derive less happiness from them.

They also suggest, however, that people can continue to want the things they have and that those who do so can achieve greater happiness.

"Simply having a bunch of things is not the key to happiness," Larsen said. "Our data show that you also need to appreciate those things you have. It's also important to keep your desire for things you don't own in check."

If the students owned a car, the researchers asked them to rate how much they wanted the car they had. If they didn't have a car, they were asked to rate how much they wanted one.

Larsen and McKibban then calculated the extent to which people want what they have and have what they want. Their findings show that wanting what you have is not the same as having what you want. While people who have what they want tend to desire those items, the correlation between the two was far from perfect.

The researchers found that people who want more of what they have tend to be happier than those who want less of what they have. However, people who have more of what they want tend to be happier than those who have less of what they want.

Understanding the concept of a "living thing" is a late developmental achievement. Early research by Jean Piaget, showed that kids attribute "life status" to things that move on their own (e.g. clouds or bikes) and even 10-year-olds have difficulty understanding the scope of a living thing.

New research, supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, proposes that the way in which "alive" and other biological concepts are named within a given language shapes their understanding and acquisition in children. Northwestern University psychologist Florencia Anggoro, with colleagues Sandra Waxman and Doug Medin, compared 4-9-year-old children speaking English and Indonesian, a pair of languages with an intriguing difference. In English, but not Indonesian, the name "animal" is polysemous, or has more than one meaning: one sense includes all animate objects (as in, the animal kingdom); the other excludes humans (as in, 'don't eat like an animal!').

This polysemy, the researchers say, can make it difficult for children to identify with any precision the scope of the names and their underlying concepts. If this is the case, then children learning a language without this polysemy should have less difficulty. Indonesian provides an ideal test: the word "animal" is not ambiguous; it refers exclusively to non-human animals.

To test this theory in the laboratory, Anggoro, who is now at the University of Chicago, and colleagues asked both Indonesian-speaking children and English-speaking children to identify entities that are "alive" in a simple sorting task. Indonesian-speaking children, tested in Jakarta, exhibited little trouble; they selected both plants and animals. But, English-speaking children, tested in Chicago, had trouble settling on the scope of the concept, and even at 9 years of age tended to exclude plants. Thus, the term "alive" poses unique interpretive challenges, especially for English-speaking children.

These results, which appear in the April issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, offer insights into how knowledge is shaped by language. The results also have strong implications for education, "understanding the conceptual consequences of language differences will serve as an effective tool in our efforts to advance the educational needs of children, including (but not limited to) those from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds who are now enrolled in U.S. schools" says Anggoro.

Sniffing out the identities of mice

New research shows how mammals use their sense of smell to detect complex signals in urine that convey information about gender, strain, and the social and reproductive status of individual animals. In mice, an organ in the nose called the vomeronasal organ detects chemicals that trigger behavioral responses and transmits the corresponding signals to the brain.