ADHD
oracknows | October 31, 2016As hard as it is to believe, it’s been nearly two years since the infamous Disneyland measles outbreak, which occurred after the holidays in 2014. It was an outbreak whose spread was facilitated by unvaccinated children and that had far-reaching implications. For one thing, in its wake, California passed SB 277, a law eliminating nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates. Opposition to the bill was fierce, and opposition to the law remains fierce, among motley coalition of antivaccine nuts, the vaccine averse, and conservative-leaning anti-government types, with rhetoric routinely…
milhayser | March 2, 2014Solar cells made with bismuth vanadate achieve a surface area of 32 square meters per gram. This compound can be paired with cheap oxides to split water molecules (and make hydrogen) with record efficiency.
Short-term geoengineering could postpone global warming, only to have it happen more quickly in the future.
Carotenoids tinge blackbird bills a deep orange, signalling fitness; birds with oranger bills are "are heavier and larger, have less blood parasites and pair with females in better condition than males with yellow bills."
Fibroblasts can extrude a tidy biological scaffold for stem-…
edyong | November 30, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder is the most common developmental disorder in children, affecting anywhere between 3-5% of the world's school-going population. As the name suggests, kids with ADHD are hyperactive and easily distracted; they are also forgetful and find it difficult to control their own impulses.
While some evidence has suggested that ADHD brains develop in fundamentally different ways to typical ones, other results have argued that they are just the result of a delay in the…
ddobbs | July 7, 2009Scientific American has a good story by Edmund S. Higgins suggesting that might be the case. As the story notes, the evidence for such a toll is still preliminary. But the story's opening, which tells of a parent seemingly overeager to medicate a child who didn't need it, gives an idea of why the question is more important than we might like.:
At the time of this visit, the boy was off the medication, and I conducted a series of cognitive and behavioral tests on him. He performed wonderfully. I also noticed that off the medication he was friendly and playful. On a previous casual encounter,…
ddobbs | June 30, 2009
[note: addition/corrections at bottom added an hour after orig post. additions underlined. deletions struckthrough. See *]
Meet the meta-placebo: A new study suggests that ADHD meds do much of their work by producing placebo effects -- and more constructive behavior -- among the parents, teachers, and other caretakers of the kids actually taking the meds. Via ScienceDaily:
A recent review of research by University at Buffalo pediatric psychologists suggests that [ADHD] medication, or the assumption of medication, may produce a placebo effect -- not in the children, but in their teachers,…