Help Wanted: The Philippines Needs More Exorcists

Alfredo Dagli Orti/The Art Archive/Corbis

By Simone Orendain

Alvin Bailon and his wife were at their wits’ end last September. Their 12-year-old son, an honors student, had begun having anxiety attacks, mostly about school. “And then all of a sudden he would slowly lose consciousness,” Bailon recalls. “We term it as doze off. He would doze off and he would fall down slowly.”

They brought him to three doctors, had his brain scanned (no irregularities were found), tried all sorts of anxiety pills prescribed by doctors. They even went to healers who use crystals for therapy.

Then they tried a beach retreat that the healers had recommended. Their son did well, but Bailon says on the car ride home the child “dozed off” and whispered in a totally unfamiliar voice, “Shhh, you might wake him up.”

That’s when the Bailons did what many in the overwhelmingly Catholic country do when facing a family crisis: They turned to the church — and its Office of Exorcism, opened in 2006 to address a growing number of cases and run by Father Jose Francisco Syquia.

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Mum’s the word: Maternal language has strong effect on children’s social skills

Photo credit: © Monkey Business / Fotolia

By the University of York

Psychologists at the University of York have revealed new evidence showing how specific language used by parents to talk to their babies can help their child to understand the thoughts of others when they get older.

Studying the effects of maternal mind-mindedness (the ability to ‘tune in’ to their young child’s thoughts and feelings), lead author Dr Elizabeth Kirk observed 40 mothers and their babies when they were 10, 12, 16, and 20 months old.

Keeping a record of parental language while a mother and her child played for 10 minutes, psychologists logged every time the mother made ‘mind related comments’ — inferences about their child’s thought processes through their behaviour (for example, if an infant had difficulty with opening a door on a toy car, they could be labelled as ‘frustrated’).

Revisiting 15 mother-child pairs when children reached 5 — 6 years old, the child’s Theory of Mind (ToM) or socio-cognitive ability was assessed. Using the ‘strange stories’ method, the level at which the child was able relate to others and understand another person’s thoughts was recorded.

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Wheaton Drops Student Health Care Over Contraception Rule

Photo courtesy of the Christian College Consortium

More than 700 students at Wheaton College of Illinois will need to find a new health care plan on Friday, as the college will cease providing health care to students to avoid complying with a federal requirement that employers include emergency contraceptives in its coverage.

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Effects of spinach extract on satiety: Feel full, curb cravings

Photo courtesy of Human Health

By Taylor & Francis

A new study found in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition examines how consuming the concentrated extract of thylakoids found in spinach can reduce hunger and cravings. Thylakoids encourage the release of satiety hormones, which is very beneficial in slowing down fat digestion. The article “Acute Effects of a Spinach Extract Rich in Thylakoids on Satiety: A Randomized Controlled Crossover Trial” is an Open Access article available from the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, the official publication of the American College of Nutrition.

The study examines the effect of consuming a single dose of concentrated extract of thylakoids from spinach on satiety, food intake, lipids, and glucose compared to a placebo. Sixty people (30 males and 30 females) classified as overweight or obese took part in a double-blind randomized crossover study. They consumed either the spinach extract or a placebo in random order at least a week apart. Using blood samples, their lipid and glucose levels were measured before a normal breakfast, followed by a dose of the extract and standard lunch four hours later. After another four hours, pizza was served, and throughout the interval, various blood tests and responses were gathered.

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Neanderthals had outsize effect on human biology

Photograph by Xin Lu/Getty

By Ewen Callaway

Our ancestors were not a picky bunch. Overwhelming genetic evidence shows that Homo sapiens had sex with Neander­thals, Denisovans and other archaic relatives. Now researchers are using large genomics studies to unravel the decidedly mixed contributions that these ancient romps made to human biology — from the ability of H. sapiens to cope with environments outside Africa, to the tendency of modern humans to get asthma, skin diseases and maybe even depression.

The proportion of the human genome that comes from archaic relatives is small. The genomes of most Europeans and Asians are 2–4% Neanderthal1, with Denisovan DNA making up about 5% of the genomes of Mela­nesians2 and Aboriginal Australians3. DNA slivers from other distant relatives probably pepper a variety of human genomes4.

But these sequences may have had an outsize effect on human biology. In some cases, they are very different from the corresponding H. sapiens DNA, notes population geneticist David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts — which makes it more likely that they could introduce useful traits. “Even though it’s only a couple or a few per cent of ancestry, that ancestry was sufficiently distant that it punched above its weight,” he says.

Last year, Reich co-led one of two teams that catalogued the Neanderthal DNA living on in modern-day humans5, 6. The studies hinted that Neanderthal versions of some genes may have helped Eurasians to reduce heat loss or grow thicker hair. But the evidence that these genes were beneficial was fairly weak.

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Pesticides: Just How Bad Are They?

By Harriet Hall

I think everyone would agree that it would not be a good idea to put pesticides in a saltshaker and add them to our food at the table. But there is little agreement when it comes to their use in agriculture. How much gets into our food? What are the effects on our health or in the environment? Is there a safer alternative?

Where should we look to find science-based answers to those questions? One place we should not look is books written by biased nonscientists to advance their personal agendas. A friend recently sent me a prime example of such a book: Myths of Safe Pesticides by André Leu, an organic farmer whose opinions preceded his research and whose bias is revealed in the very title.

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Here’s A Colossally Bad Idea From Congress About How To Fund Science

Photograph courtesy of Mashable

By Steven Salzberg

When was the last time anyone in Congress passed a truly good idea? I can’t remember.

But they do manage to come up with bad ideas, and sometimes these ideas make their way into laws, causing no end of harm.

This month, two U.S. Congressmen have come up with the idea to offer prizes rather than grants for scientific research. They were inspired, according to a story in Science magazine, by DARPA’s prize competitions for robotic vehicle design, as well as the private XPRIZE competition.

Now Congress wants the National Institutes of Health to give out prizes for biomedical research. They’ve tucked this idea into the 21st Century Cures Act, a bill funding the NIH and FDA that was passed by the House of Representatives on July 10. Congressman Todd Young of Indiana and Andy Harris of Maryland amended the bill to require NIH to create a new prize competition.

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