Babies are smarter than they are generally given credit for, and humans may be unwittingly destroying nature`s drugstore. Reports on these and other subjects were made at the recent Chicago meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science:
By age 5 months, babies have an adult-like grasp of the physical world, said psychologist Renee Baillargeon of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Among the things they understand are that objects continue to exist even when out of sight; objects cannot move through space occupied by other objects; objects move along a spatially continuous path; objects require support to remain stable; and objects are displaced when hit by other objects.
Baillargeon`s studies challenge older beliefs that babies know little about how objects behave.
By the time babies are 6 months old, they are acclimated to the language used by adults around them, Patricia Kuhl, a University of Washington researcher, reported to the science group.
In tests of 32 American infants and 32 Swedish infants, Kuhl found that babies in each group reacted differently to hearing their mothers` native language spoken than they did to hearing other languages. Kuhl measured such responses as turning of the head upon hearing a vowel.
She said it was surprising to see ”that as early as 6 months old, babies have laid down a memory track of the sounds used in their native language.”
Because many plants are becoming extinct, especially in the rapidly disappearing rain forests, extra efforts are needed to test all plants for beneficial chemicals, said Norman Farnsworth of the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Of the 250,000 known species of flowering plants, only 40,000 have been studied for their chemical uses, he said. There are 120 drugs on the market that are derived from 60 species of plants.
One promising new plant drug is taxol, derived from the Pacific yew, which may be used to treat ovarian cancer.
The use of herbs and plants to heal can probably be traced back more than 5 million years when wild apes and monkeys first learned to use nature`s drugs when they got sick, according to cell biologist Eloy Rodriguez of the University of California at Irvine.
Studying how animals use these natural chemicals may help identify new sources of natural chemicals that can be used to fight cancer and treat infections, viruses and parasites, Rodriguez said at the Chicago meeting.
Evidence indicates that even domestic animals such as dogs and cats use plants to treat themselves for such disorders as upset stomach, he said.
Typically these animals eat plants to help regurgitate food, he explained.
Not only do monkeys use plants when they are sick, but they may use some to regulate their reproductive cycle, said primatologist Karen Strier of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Strier said that during the rainy season, Brazil`s threatened muriqui monkeys venture into the fields to eat leaves from a specific legume plant. The plants contain chemicals called isoflavonoids, similar to estrogens, which may trigger the animals` reproductive cycle.
In another report to the association, a Duke University scientist said two decades of studying howler monkeys in Costa Rica led him to wonder if females somehow influence the sex of their offspring by diet.
Reporting at the meeting, Duke`s Kenneth Glander described decades of detective work trying to determine why female howlers give birth to more males than females.
Because male howlers fight and die competing to become an alpha with many females for mates, this sexual imbalance appears to be a good evolutionary strategy, but Glander wonders how the animals achieve it.
He has taken howler body measurements from hair, teeth, blood, fingerprints and sexual organs in his quest to solve this problem, and his collection of data has yielded an interesting item: a high rate of
electropositive voltage readings within howler vaginas.
Glander is now trying to test his theory that female howlers select foods to alter the electrical environment in their reproductive organs to favor survival of sperm carrying male genes over those carrying female genes.
He stumbled upon the electrical data because the equipment he used to measure acidity of reproductive organs also measured electrical potential.
Phyllis Moen, a Cornell University sociologist, said the typical pattern of school, work and then retirement may become outmoded as lifestyles continue to change.
Wives and mothers traditionally have been expected to stay home so fathers and husbands could leave the home to work, Moen said. But almost half the work force is now women and they are working at jobs that essentially were designed for people without child-care responsibilities.
Among changes that Moen said may be in the cards are returning to school at various ages; working before finishing high school and beyond typical retirement age; reduced working hours and sabbaticals, for both mothers and fathers, while their children are young; and second, third and fourth careers after retirement.
