New and Exciting in PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology

Are Animals Autistic Savants:

Do animals have privileged access to lower level sensory information before it is packaged into concepts, as Temple Grandin has argued for autistic savants? Giorgio Vallortigara and colleagues critique this perspective, and Grandin responds.

see also.

Maternal Death, Autopsy Studies, and Lessons from Pathology:

Clara Menendez and colleagues analyze 139 complete autopsies following maternal deaths in Maputo, Mozambique and find a predominance of infectious and preventable causes. Sebastian Lucas discusses the study in a related perspective.

More like this

Do Animals Think Like Autistic Savants?: When Temple Grandin argued that animals and autistic savants share cognitive similarities in her best-selling book Animals in Translation (2005), the idea gained steam outside the community of cognitive neuroscientists. Grandin, a professor of animal science…
Worldwide, the numbers of children who die before their fifth birthdays is on the decline. Still, millions of children are being lost to diseases and complications that are completely preventable. In a study published earlier this week in the Lancet, researchers examined the reasons behind the 6.3…
I've been meaning to read Temple Grandin ever sense reading about her in Oliver Sacks' 1995 book, An Anthropologist on Mars. But for some reason, her books continually ended up on the bottom of the pile on my nightstand. What a shame. Having just finished Grandin's Animals in Translation, I regret…
This was originally posted on the old blog on 1/5/05. I'm reposting it here, with a few editorial ommissions (contextual; references to things from back then that won't make sense here), because of our recent discussion of religion. Hopefully I'll be able to post about some of the empirical work…

Off-topic. But speaking of maternal deaths. A statistic from WHO via Newsweek about a year ago has stuck in my mind because of the horror of it. Sweden was best with one maternal death per 30000 births. Afghanistan was at the bottom of the list with one maternal death per estimated SEVEN births. We have to know that there are many fatherless children in that country. This info makes me think there must be even more motherless ones.