All games are good for kids whereas television isn't. And many touchscreen games are more like TV than board games, at least when it comes to verbal development.

A recent study by pediatricians from the Cohen Children's Medical Center of New York concluded that infants 0-3 years old who used touch-screen devices to play non-educational games using touch-screen devices had lower verbal scores on tests.

The results also showed that although the majority of parents cited in the study believed their children received educational benefits by using smart phones, readers and tablets, there was no statistical difference in developmental scores in children who played educational games versus non-educational games.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder defined by impairments in social interaction and communication and the presence of restrictive and repetitive behaviors. The exact causes are unknown and so a range of genetic and environmental risk factors are associated with it. 

A new study  using Swedish national health registers found that children with a brother or sister with autism are 10 times more likely to develop autism; 3 times if they have a half-brother or sister; and 2 if they have a cousin with autism, providing much needed information for parents and clinicians for assessing individual risk.

Stanford, CA—Plants spend their entire lifetime rooted to one spot. When faced with a bad situation, such as a swarm of hungry herbivores or a viral outbreak, they have no option to flee but instead must fight to survive. What is the key to their defense? Chemistry.

Thanks to this ongoing conflict, plants have evolved into amazing chemists, capable of synthesizing tens of thousands of compounds from thousands of genes. These chemicals, known as specialized metabolites, allow plants to withstand transient threats from their environment. What's more, some of the same compounds benefit humans, with more than a third of medicinal drugs derived from plant specialized metabolites.

ATLANTA--Inhibiting enzymes that cause changes in gene expression could decrease chemotherapy resistance in ovarian cancer patients, researchers at Georgia State University and the University of Georgia say.

Dr. Susanna Greer, associate professor of biology, and research partners at the University of Georgia have identified two enzymes that suppress proteins that are important for regulating cell survival and chemoresistance in ovarian cancer. Their findings are published in the journal, PLOS ONE.

I was delighted today, as I checked the page of public ATLAS results, to find a very beautiful new result. The signal ATLAS found and just published on the arxiv is not one anybody could doubt to be there: no surprise whatsoever. And yet, it is a difficult one to extract, and one on which I myself have spent several years of my research work on the CDF experiment.

In the 1960s, "speed freaks", people hooked on amphetamines, still avoided Ritalin. It was too dangerous. In the 1990s, Ritalin suddenly became a medication. For kids diagnosed with ADD, it sped them up so much it basically slowed them down.

But for people who don't need it, ADD medication is just a stimulant, and nearly 20 percent of students at an Ivy League college reported misusing a prescription stimulant while studying, and one-third of students did not view such misuse as cheating according results presented today at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Vancouver.

Researchers have identified a section of the anthrax toxin Lethal Factor that could help produce a more effective vaccine.

Anthrax is a potentially lethal disease caused by a bacterium called Bacillus anthracis. The bacteria produce spores that when inhaled, ingested or absorbed into the skin release toxins. When anthrax affects the lungs or intestines it can cause death within a few days whilst infection of the skin (cutaneous anthrax) is less dangerous.

Case Western Reserve researchers have discovered that a protein previously implicated in disease plays such a positive role in learning and memory that it may someday contribute to cures of cognitive impairments. The findings regarding the potential virtues of fatty acid binding protein 5 (FABP5) — usually associated with cancer and psoriasis — appear in the May 2 edition of The Journal of Biological Chemistry.

With the bursting of spring, pollen is in the air. Most of the pollen that is likely tickling your nose and making your eyes water is being dispersed in a sexually immature state consisting of only two cells (a body cell and a reproductive cell) and is not yet fertile. While the majority of angiosperm species disperse their pollen in this early, bicellular, stage of sexual maturity, about 30% of flowering plants disperse their pollen in a more mature fertile stage, consisting of three cells (a body and two sperm cells). And then there are plants that do both.