With caregivers’ faces covered, infants and young children will miss out on all the visual cues they’d normally get during stages of rapid developmental growth.
The original Dikika child skull (left), a 3D model produced with synchrotron scanning (middle), and a model corrected for distortion during fossilisation (right).
Gunz et al. (2020) / Science Advances.
Brain organoids are tiny models that neuroscientists use to learn more about how the brain grows and works. But new research finds important differences between the model and the real thing.
The teenage brain has a voracious drive for reward, diminished behavioural control and a susceptibility to be shaped by experience. This often manifests as a reduced ability to resist high-calorie junk foods.
(Shutterstock)
Excessively eating junk foods during adolescence could alter brain development, leading to lasting poor diet habits. But, like a muscle, the brain can be exercised to improve willpower.
Experts have voiced concerns about the uptake of a recent Canadian study, in which water fluoridation was associated with slightly lower IQs in children.
(Shutterstock)
Community water fluoridation is a cost-effective public health measure that can reduce cavities by approximately 25 per cent. Yet some communities are worried about it.
The living coelacanth in its natural environment off the South African coast.
Laurent Ballesta, Gombessa expeditions, Andromede Oceanology Ltd (from the book Gombessa, meeting with the coelacanth)
The discovery of a living coelacanth fish rocked the world in 1939, as scientists thought they had died out with the dinosaurs. A new study illuminates how its skull and tiny brain develop.
Harnessing adolescents’ readiness to help can be good for them and their communities.
YAKOBCHUK VIACHESLAV/Shutterstock.com
Teens get a bad rap as selfish, dangerous risk-takers. But neuroscience and psychology research is revising that image: Adolescents are primed to help those around them, with positive benefits for all.
Researchers have grown groups of brain cells in the lab – known as ‘organoids’ – that produce brain waves resembling those found in premature infants.
from www.shutterstock.com
Science is creating new living matter – like stem cells grown to create brain tissues in the lab. With power comes responsibility and what matters is an ethical question, not a scientific one.
The character of Kayla in ‘Eighth Grade’ is a true-to-life representation of an anxious teen.
A24
Almost a third of American adolescents have anxiety disorders. Researchers in developmental neuroscience are figuring out that how the brain matures over time may be part of the reason why.
The Joint Occupational Health and Safety Committee (JOHSC) of Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia unanimously voted on March 5, 2018 to ban all smoking of marijuana products on campus — for health and safety reasons.
(Flickr/Chuck Grimmett)
In advance of marijuana legalization in Canada, one university in British Columbia has taken a firm stance, banning all smoking of cannabis products on campus.
A boy stares out of a heavily tinted bus window leaving a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, Tuesday, June 19, 2018, in McAllen, Texas.
AP Photo/Eric Gay
The traumatic separations of children and parents initiated at the border can cause permanent changes in the structure of the infants’ and children’s brains and the activity of their genes.
Violence in communities may have an additional unseen victim: young peoples’ developing brains.
Zoran Karapancev/Shutterstock.com
Darby Saxbe, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Experiencing and witnessing violence in their communities can lead to emotional, social and cognitive problems for kids. A new study shows it affects how their developing brains grow, as well.
A lone new neuron (green) in a 13-year-old’s hippocampus.
Sorrells et al
The scientists behind a controversial new study were surprised by their own results. But they carefully did all they could to ‘prove a negative,’ and their neurogenesis study is shaking up the field.
Vietnam War protests led to a lower voting age. The Parkland shooting could push similar reevaluations.
AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
Teens’ brains develop different skills along a predictable timeline. These milestones should influence the legal age boundaries for voting, buying guns and being put to death.
When parents and teachers adapt their own behaviours based on what a child is thinking, they help stimulate that child’s brain development.
(Shutterstock)
Using simple strategies, parents and teachers can help stimulate linguistic and other cognitive development in children.
A teen looking out of a window. Research shows that traumatic events in childhood can affect children as they mature and limit their education, which in turn can harm their health.
Jan Andersen/Shutterstock.com
Adverse childhood events can not only cause lasting psychological effects but also learning problems. That, in turn, worsens health outcomes, as literacy is an integral part of health care.
A 2015 study from the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse describes youth perceiving marijuana as “relatively harmless” and “not as dangerous as drinking and driving.”
(Unsplash/Conor Limkbocker)
Provincial policies to implement the legal consumption of marijuana are unlikely to protect children and youth. High school teachers and parents will be on the front line.