All Stories by Bruce Bower
- Anthropology
The Pirahã Challenge
A linguist has sparked controversy with his proposal that a tribe of about 200 people living in Brazil's Amazon rain forest speaks a language devoid of counting and color terms, clauses, and other elements of grammar often considered to be universal.
- Anthropology
Waves of Grain: New data lift old model of agriculture’s origins
A new analysis of the locations and ages of ancient farming sites reinforces the controversial idea that the groups that started raising crops in the Middle East gradually grew in number and colonized much of Europe.
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DNA Clues to Our Kind: Regulatory gene linked to human evolution
A gene that exerts wide-ranging effects on the brain works harder in people than it does in chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates.
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Mental Meeting of the Sexes: Boys’ spatial advantage fades in poor families
The frequently observed superiority of boys to girls on tests of spatial skill disappears in children of poor families, indicating that this mental ability responds more sensitively to environmental influences than has been assumed.
- Anthropology
Gone with the Flow: Ancient Andes canals irrigated farmland
Excavations in the Andes mountains have unearthed the earliest known irrigation canals in South America.
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Bad Readout from DNA: Genes that act on brain may promote dyslexia
Studies conducted in the United States, Germany, and England indicate that two genes, both located on chromosome 6 and involved in orchestrating neural migration in developing brains, contribute to the severe learning disorder known as dyslexia.
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Dopamine gene ups schizophrenia risk
A long-term study of children with a rare chromosome deletion indicates that those who have a single copy of a gene that promotes a dopamine overload in the brain have an above-average risk of developing schizophrenia later in life.
- Anthropology
Chimps indifferent to others’ welfare
New laboratory experiments suggest that chimpanzees, unlike people, don't care about the welfare of unrelated members of their social groups.
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Questions on the Couch
A new policy statement on evidence-based practice from the American Psychological Association illustrates the intense struggle among researchers and clinicians over how best to study the effectiveness of psychotherapy in its many forms.
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Left Out by a Stroke: Right-brain injury may upset attention balance
People who suddenly ignore everything to their left after suffering a right-brain stroke display disturbed activity in uninjured parts of a widespread neural network associated with attention.
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Early Stress in Rats Bites Memory Later On: Inadequate care to young animals delivers delayed hit to the brain
The stress of receiving poor maternal care for a short period after birth comes back to haunt rats by stimulating memory losses and related brain disturbances in middle age.
- Anthropology
Encore for Evolutionary Small-Timers: Tiny human cousins get younger with new finds
Excavations in an Indonesian cave have yielded more fossils of short, upright creatures that lived as recently as 12,000 years ago.
