It’s no secret that people are judgmental, and young children are no exception. When children witness “good” or “bad” behavior, their brains show an immediate emotional response. But, according to a study appearing in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on December 18, it takes more than that kind of automatic moral evaluation for kids to act with generosity and…
In the United States, almost no one can trace their ancestry back to just one place. And for many, the past may hold some surprises, according to a new study. Researchers have found that a significant percentage of African-Americans, European Americans, and Latinos carry ancestry from outside their self-identified ethnicity. The average African-American genome, for example, is nearly a quarter…
Ever since the concept of altruism was proposed in the 19th century, psychologists have debated whether or not people are born into the world preprogrammed to be nice to others. Now, a pair of Stanford psychologists has conducted experiments that indicate altruism has environmental triggers, and is not something we are simply born with. “Kids are always on the lookout…
Consider the relationship between an air traffic controller and a pilot. The pilot gets the passengers to their destination, but the air traffic controller decides when the plane can take off and when it must wait. The same relationship plays out at the cellular level in animals, including humans. A region of an animal’s genome – the controller – directs…
His office is filled with all sorts of bird books, but Duke neuroscientist Erich Jarvis didn’t become an expert on the avian family tree because of any particular interest in our feathered friends. Rather, it was his fascination with how the human brain understands and reproduces speech that brought him to the birds. “We’ve known for many years that the…
A study published this week in Genetics in Medicine is the first to explore new parents’ attitudes toward newborn genomic testing. The findings suggest that if newborn genomic testing becomes available, there would be robust interest among new parents, regardless of their demographic background. “Several other studies have measured parents’ interest in newborn genomic screening, but none focused on new…