Don’t count on TV as a lullaby
It may seem like a good idea: Use a bit of TV viewing to help a young child get to sleep.
But a growing body of research is finding that infants and children under age 3 who watch TV struggle with interrupted sleep and irregular bed and nap schedules.
“We know that many, many parents rely on TV and video as part of their child’s sleep routine,” said Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician at the University of Washington and co-author of “The Elephant in the Living Room: Make TV Work for Your Kids.”
“Watching television before bed makes it more difficult for children to fall asleep,” he added. “Scientific data support that.”
A regular sleep schedule influences the quality and quantity of sleep that children get. And healthy sleep habits can prevent problems such as bedtime resistance or nighttime awakenings.
The bottom line, according to Christakis: “If your kid is having a sleep problem, look at TV [habits] and see if it is playing a role. There is no need to modify TV if your kid is not having sleep problems.”
Blame teen brains for feuds
For parents of emotionally combative teens, new research offers a powerful biological reason for all the family feuding: adolescent brain size.
A team of Australian scientists has found that when key regions of the brain known for controlling emotions are bigger, boys and girls tend to be more aggressive and more persistent during their fights with Mom and Dad.
“This is a bit of a unique study,” said study author Nicholas Allen, an associate professor with the Orygen Research Centre at the University of Melbourne. “Because we’ve shown for the first time that in terms of aggression — not physical but being argumentative and unfriendly — some of the differences in the way teen kids interact with parents are biologically based. The adolescent is developing, their brain is developing, and there’s a link between the two.”
Water’s ‘fingerprint’ stays in hair
The water you drink stays in your hair, and it may reveal details about where you’ve been, new research suggests.
By analyzing the makeup of water molecules from human hair, University of Utah scientists were able to roughly determine the regions where people recently lived. The approach is accurate 85 percent of the time.
Although the discovery has some implications for medical research, its more immediate use might be in tracking the history of unidentified bodies and perhaps testing the alibis of criminal suspects. “The big picture is for us to provide a tool for law environment,” said study author James Ehleringer, a University of Utah biology professor. “This is an attempt to really try to help.”
And what about people who drink only bottled water that may come from far away? Unless they boil their potatoes and make their coffee and bottle their beer in the water, local water will still show up in their bodies, Ehleringer said.
