University of London
The discovery of a large number of slow-growing Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria, which cause tuberculosis (TB), in the lungs of TB patients could be an important step forward in the design of new anti-TB drugs.
Scientists from Queen Mary, University of London have discovered how changes to a frog's immune system may be the key to beating a viral infection which is devastating frog populations across the UK.
Individual and family attributes may make some adolescents more 'resilient' to the effects of living in a disadvantaged community, according to new research sponsored by the ESRC. How inner city young people feel about their own psychological and social health and the area where they live is influenced by differences in home and social life as well as the physical environment, says a study led by Professor Sarah Curtis, of Queen Mary, University of London.
A paper showing a strong genetic contribution to social responsibility was published in the December 22 issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 271, 2583-2585, entitled "Genetic and environmental contributions to pro-social attitudes: a twin study of social responsibility." The study compared identical twins with non-identical twins to see how much they agreed on 22 questions, such as "I am a person people can count on," "It is important to finish anything you have started," and "Cheating on income tax is as bad as stealing," using a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Answers are known to predict real-life behavior such as whether a person votes in elections or volunteers to help others.
It may not matter whether there is a mountain high enough or a river wide enough to keep members of a species apart. New species may diverge and form because of something as fundamental as a call to dine. According to new research by Tigga Kingston, a research associate in the Department of Geography at Boston University, and Stephen Rossiter, a National Environment Research Council research fellow in the School of Biological Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London, geographical barriers may not be necessary for speciation. In their study of one species of bat in Southeast Asia, the scientists found that the bats were diverging into exclusive groups primarily because of acoustic differences in the calls they make to locate the insects they eat.
Specialist individual music lessons could hugely benefit children with autism, according to researchers Dr Pamela Heaton and Dr Francesca Happe at the University of London. The study, which was funded by ESRC, suggests that many children with this disorder have outstanding abilities in tone recognition. ''A lot of work has been done on musical savants with exceptional musical memory and rarely found absolute pitch ability'' says Dr Pamela Heaton who led the research. ''But our research shows that even children without these special talents and no musical training can have highly developed musical 'splinter skills'. If we could develop effective non-verbal music teaching methods, we might be able to understand more about the way these children learn and process other information.''
Sure Santa Claus asks boys and girls what toys they want, but why they want them is a better question. The answer may have to do with a biological pre-wiring that influences boys' and girls' preferences based on the early roles of males and females. It's commonly believed that boys and girls learn what types of toys they should like based solely on society's expectations, but psychologist Gerianne Alexander's work with vervet monkeys is challenging that notion. Alexander examined the monkeys as they interacted with toys. She and her collaborator, Melissa Hines of the University of London, found that the monkeys' toy preferences were consistent along gender lines with those of human children. Though the monkeys had no concept of a "boy" toy and a "girl" toy, they still showed the same gender preferences in playing with the toys, Alexander says. That is, compared to female monkeys, male monkeys spent more time with "boy" toys, and the female monkeys, compared to their male counterparts, spent more time with "girl" toys.
