BALTIMORE — Some infants headed for a diagnosis of autism, or autism spectrum disorder as it’s officially known, can be reliably identified at 14 months old based on the presence of five key behavior problems, according to an ongoing long-term study described March 11 at the International Conference on Infant Studies.

These social, communication and motor difficulties broadly align with psychiatric criteria for diagnosing autism spectrum disorder in children at around age 3, said psychologist Rebecca Landa of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore. In her investigation, the presence of all five behaviors at 14 months predicted an eventual diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder in 15 of 16 children.

“That’s much better than clinical judgment at predicting autism,” Landa noted.

Her five predictors of autism spectrum disorders among 14-month-olds at high risk for developing this condition include a lack of response to others’ attempts to engage them in play, infrequent attempts to initiate joint activities, few types of consonants produced when trying to communicate vocally, problems in responding to vocal requests and a keen interest in repetitive acts, such as staring at a toy while twirling it.

Accurate identification of infants likely to develop autism spectrum disorder by age 3 is particularly important because studies at Landa’s facility and several others indicate that intensive interventions with youngsters who display early warning signs and their parents often yield marked behavioral improvements. Interventions focus on teaching kids basic interaction and communication skills.

Landa’s study consists of 250 children who were first assessed at either age 6 months or 14 months. Comprehensive measures of social, communication and motor abilities were obtained at each child’s home and repeated at 18, 24, 30 and 36 months of age. The sample included 110 children considered to be at high risk for developing autism because they had older siblings already diagnosed with the same condition.

Preliminary evidence suggests that high-risk 14-month-olds who later develop autism display signs of delayed motor development as early as 6 to 7 months of age, Landa noted. In particular, these youngsters had difficulty keeping their heads stable when slowly raised from a prone position.

A fundamental derailment of postural development may accompany social difficulties typical of children with autism spectrum disorders, remarked psychologist Jana Iverson of the University of Pittsburgh. “The motor system is another place to probe for common underlying features of autism spectrum disorder,” Iverson said.

Psychologist Sally Rogers of the University of California, Davis, cautioned that much remains unknown about the early identification and treatment of autism. Infant siblings of older children with autism represent a special group that’s especially likely to show early signs of the same disorder, she suggested.

“I’m not sure the majority of children with autism spectrum disorder have predictive symptoms by 12 or 14 months,” Rogers said. In her own long-term studies, some children without autistic siblings show a gradual slowing of social and language development over several years that leads to autism, while others show no autism symptoms at all until being diagnosed with the disorder at age 4 or 5.

Image: flickr/Sarahnaut

See Also:

• An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All
• The Truth About Autism: Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know

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A new study of a 2005 earthquake in Chile supports the surprising hypothesis that pregnant women who experience earthquakes during the first trimester of their pregnancies have increased risk of premature birth and slightly smaller babies.

While the drops in birth weight and gestation time are relatively small, they are big enough to suggest that earthquakes experienced more than six months before birth can negatively impact a pregnancy.

“It’s statistically significant, way above the margin of error,” said Florencia Torche, the NYU sociologist who crunched the number, which has been submitted to a demographic journal. “It’s not due to chance.”

Torche’s new study has not yet been through peer review, but it is consistent with an emerging line of research on the impacts of earthquakes on mothers and their unborn. Maternal stress has long been linked to premature birth and low birth weights, but it was a landmark 2001 study of the 1994 Northridge earthquake (.pdf) that pointed out that major seismic activity made a measurable impact on the expectant mothers who felt it.

But counter-intuitively, it wasn’t the mothers closest to labor who were affected the most, but the women who’d just gotten pregnant. The women who were in their first three months of pregnancy had their babies more than a week earlier than similar women who did not experience the quake.

While the researchers in 2001 (led by University of California, Irvine pregnancy researcher Laura Glynn) admitted that the “precise mechanism through which stress affects length of gestation is not known,” they hypothesized that perhaps the earthquake activated some kind of “placental clock.” Perhaps a burst of corticotropin-releasing hormone, a known stress response, serves as a signal to the pregnant woman’s body that she should have the baby sooner than normal.

Premature birth, and the low birth weight that’s associated with it, has been linked to long-term negative consequences.

“Low birth weight is associated with a bunch of poor outcomes throughout your life cycle,” Torche said.

Even without a clear-cut mechanism, it may be possible to mitigate some of the negative outcomes of the earthquake stress.

“We can certainly work to try and compensate and provide services for these moms that are affected,” Torche said. “For instance, mental health services might be really relevant. Something we don’t usually consider. You can think of programs that would do with early childhood development. If these kids are at higher risk, and you provide support stimulation, that can thoroughly compensate for this very early disadvantage.”

The monster magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile on Feb. 27 may also focus renewed effort on figuring out whether the size of the quake is proportional to the prematurity of the birth. To do that, researchers will need more studies on more earthquakes, Torche said.

Image: flickr/UNphoto

Citations: 1) “The Effect of Maternal Stress on Birth Outcomes: Exploiting a Natural Experiment” by Florencia Torche. In review. Available via the author.

2) “When stress happens matters:Effects of earthquake timing on stress responsivity in pregnancy” by Laura M. Glynn, Pathik D. Wadhwa, Christine Dunkel-Schetter, Aleksandra Chicz-DeMet,and Curt A. Sandman. Am J Obstet Gynecol 2001;184:637-42.

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

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A small, newly discovered comet will not get a chance to enjoy its fame for long.

As you can see in this image sequence obtained by the Solar and Heliosopheric Observatory, the comet is on a collision course with the sun. Things will not end well for the comet, which will burn.

The comet is believed to be a Kreutz Sungrazer, a class of objects that are fragments of a supercomet that broke up long ago. Many of them are discovered by amateur astronomer internet users (like you) staring at NASA data.

The solar images also show a coronal mass ejection at the upper left of the frame. These expulsions of energetic particles from the sun cause solar storms here on Earth and tend to create beautiful auroral displays in the Earth’s polar regions. The other bright object in the video is the planet Mercury.

Via Spaceweather.com

Image: SOHO, a joint mission of NASA and the European Space Administration

See Also:

• Comet’s 10 Million-Mile Tail Lights Up in Infrared
• Rare Comet Close-Up Coming to a Sky Near You

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

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Newly reported observations of gas flows on the solar surface may explain why the sun recently had such an extended case of the doldrums.

From 2008 through the first half of 2009, the sun had a puzzling dearth of sunspots, flares and other storms, extending the usual lull at the end of the 11-year solar activity cycle for an extra 15 months. Findings from the study, which relied on the orbiting Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, may also suggest a better way to forecast the intensity and duration of future solar cycles.

Better predictions could be critical because some solar outbursts can blast Earth with massive, magnetized clouds of charged particles capable of knocking out electrical power grids and harming communications satellites.

In the March 12 Science, David Hathaway of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and Lisa Rightmire of the University of Memphis in Tennessee analyzed 13 years of SOHO measurements that tracked the movement of ionized gas from the solar equator to the poles. The researchers found that the relatively slow gas movement, known as the meridional flow, sped up a few years before the last solar minimum began in 2008. What’s more, the flow was substantially faster than the speed at the previous solar minimum, a more typical and less extended downturn in solar activity some 11 years earlier.

Hathaway and Rightmire suggest that the faster meridional flow produced weaker magnetic fields at the sun’s poles, which extended the solar minimum.

Magnetic fields carried by the meridional flow typically oppose much stronger flows of magnetized material on the surface, Hathaway says. The faster the meridional flow is, the greater the opposition is to those other flows. As a result, the sun’s polar magnetic field can’t become as strong, the researchers propose.

“It is possible that the delayed start of the present cycle, 2009 to 2010, was caused by the relatively weak polar field in 2007 to 2009,” comments Neil Sheeley of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.

The strength of the magnetic polar fields plays a critical role in determining the onset of the next solar cycle, Hathaway notes. These fields dive beneath the solar surface, building up the deep sunspot-generating magnetic fields that signal the beginning of the next solar cycle. Weaker polar fields take more time to reach the strength required to produce sunspots, prolonging the lull in activity from the previous cycle. In addition, weaker-than-usual polar fields are likely to produce less activity during the subsequent solar cycle, Hathaway and Rightmire predict.

“The fact that the meridional flow plays a key role in setting up the sun’s polar fields for the next cycle suggests that future observations will help us predict [the duration and intensity of] future cycles,” Hathaway says.

One caveat is that physicists have only an incomplete understanding of the solar cycle and the transport of magnetic material below the solar surface, Sheeley says.

“This is certainly an interesting result and may help discriminate between different classes of models of solar magnetism,” notes Natchimuthuk Gopalswamy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Other models, says Hathaway, which also embrace the importance of the meridional flow but rely on the complicated magnetic dynamics that happen below the surface, come to just the opposite conclusion: A fast meridional flow leads to strong polar field and a shorter solar minimum. Those models may now need to be revised, he says.

Image: NASA/ESA

See Also:

• 2009’s Sleepy Sun Finally Woke Up in December
• Audio: DIY Recordings of Awakening Sun
• 3-D Solar Tsunami Video Shows the Extreme Waves Are Real
• Photo: The Sun Gets Its Spots (Back)
• Psychedelic Sunspot Video Useful for Science, Too
• Photo: Docked Space Shuttle and Station Cross the Sun
• NASA Brings the Dark Side of the Sun to Your iPhone

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A fierce attempt to keep endangered Virginia big-eared bats alive in captivity has shown just how difficult that noble task may be.

The effort was prompted by the discovery of white nose syndrome, an extremely virulent disease that has killed more than a million bats since 2007, in one of the handful of caves where Virginia big-eared bats live. Of 40 bats moved to the Smithsonian National Zoo last November, only 11 have survived.

“We were not under the illusion that it was going to be easy. It’s certainly not a surprise to us that the bats died. But the number of bats that died is greater than we had hoped,” said Jeremy Coleman, white nose syndrome coordinator at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The captive colony project was controversial from the start. With only 15,000 Virginia big-eared bats in existence — up from 3,500 in 1979, but far below historic levels — risking even a few is no small matter. The project also cost $300,000, a big chunk of the $1.9 million allotted by Congress for research on white nose syndrome, or WNS.

In the three years since its original detection in an upstate New York cave, WNS has spread south as far as Tennessee, exterminating bat colony after colony with almost total efficiency. The disease appears to be caused by a fungal infection that rouses bats from hibernation, leaving them weak and unable to find food.

There is no known cure, and scientists say that many cave-dwelling bat species — including the little brown bat, the most common bat in North America — could be extinct in a decade. They call the bat die-off “the most precipitous decline of North American wildlife in recorded history” (.pdf).

Early in 2009, WNS was found in a West Virginia cave where Virginia big-eared bats lived. Though infected bats belonged to other species, the discovery was frightening. The Fish and Wildlife Service decided to found a captive colony.

“There were many scientists who didn’t think it would work at all, and are philosophically opposed to captive bat populations anyway. The other school of thought is that desperate times call for desperate measures,” said Peter Youngbaer, WNS liaison for the National Speleological Society. “If this species was going to get WNS, and if you didn’t start an intervention now, you’d never have a chance.”

Unlike fruit-eating bats, insect-eating bats like the Virginia big-eared are notoriously difficult to raise in captivity. Accustomed to catching insects on the wing, many of the bats refused to eat worms from pans. Stressed from relocation and habituated to cave-specific temperatures and humidity, others developed runaway bacterial infections. Despite constant attention from researchers, 29 of the bats died.

The Fish and Wildlife Service is now preparing a report on lessons from the experience, though these may be uncertain. “I think they have more unanswered questions than lessons now,” said Youngbaer.

And trouble for the remaining wild bats keeps coming. In February, the first cases of WNS were found in West Virginia’s Hellhole Cave, home to populations of Indiana bats, little brown bats and almost half of all Virginia big-eared bats.

There are no plans to add more bats to the colony, but Coleman said captive breeding remains an option for other species threatened by WNS. In the meantime, it remains to be seen whether the 11 captive bats will survive and even breed.

“There are so few members of that species left. With the captive colony, the thought was, let’s see see if we can get this to work. And then we’ll have done what we can to save them,” said Youngbaer. “At least we won’t have regrets for not having tried.”

Image: Healthy Virginia big-eared bat. /USFWS

See Also:

• Video: Moth Blocks Bat Attack by Jamming Sonar
• Video: How Bats Land Upside Down
• Infrared Video: 500000 Bats Emerge From Cave

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecological tipping points.

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Two years after Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, the new institution sent out 100 photographers to document the nation’s environment writ large.

Now, those photos have made it out of the root cellar of the National Archive and onto Flickr Commons, where they are getting a wider viewing than they’ve ever received. The first group of what will become a 15,000-photo set from the Documerica project are now available online to the public.

The photographers were charged with three broad goals: “to photograph America’s environmental problems, to document America’s natural and man-made beauty and to photograph the human condition.”

The original director of the EPA project, Gifford Hampshire, hoped to recreate the success the Depression-era Farm Security Administration had in calling attention to the plight of the nation’s rural poor. The new target was the environment. The visual evidence of the nation’s various pollution problems would help justify the existence of the EPA.

But as it happened, the photographers interpreted their task in different ways. What they captured was not simply a portrait of “nature,” but the environment as people knew it and lived in it.

“Documerica’s official mission effectively focused on popular but valid environmental concerns of the early 1970s: water, air and noise pollution; unchecked urbanization; poverty; environmental impact on public health; and youth culture of the day,” wrote archivist C. Jerry Simmons, in a 2009 article on the collection. “But in reaction to the varied pollution, health and social crises, Documerica succeeded also in affirming America’s commitment to solving these problems by capturing positive images of human life and Americans’ reactions, responses and resourcefulness.”

Traffic jams, noise pollution from jackhammers and 747s, and graffiti appear alongside photos of caribou and western landscapes. Coal mining and mudslides mingle with swimming, movie theaters and greased-pig chases.

It’s a remarkable portrait of the early 1970s, when manufacturing still ruled the economy and environmental laws had just begun to regulate the air and water. The photographs show people, technology and biosphere colliding, producing both devastating consequences and innovative solutions.

Holmes Road Incinerator

The Holmes Road Incinerator burned all kinds of trash, including, photographer Marc St. Gil claims, automobile batteries and plastic. It was closed by the Houston mayor’s executive order in January 1974, two years after this photo was taken. It is now the site of a prospective brownfield 10-megawatt solar farm (.pdf).

Photo: Marc St. Gil/National Archives and Records Administration

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In the mid 1990s, a craze swept Japan and crested its way onto American shores: Kids were going crazy for the Tamagotchi, an egg-shaped digital pet. Every few hours, users would press a couple buttons to feed their Tamagotchi, play with it, or clean it up. The game was simple, but intensely rewarding. Users cried when their Tamagotchis got sick or died; they were elated when they were able to raise a healthy, happy pet. More than 70 million have been sold.

Thomas Goetz is the executive editor of Wired magazine and author of the new book The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine. As part of the reporting for the book, he had his genome scanned, was screened for more than a dozen diseases, and has tracked his sleep, blood pressure, weight, calories and oodles of other metrics. He holds a masters of public health from UC Berkeley.

The genius of the device was that it was both simple and rewarding: It took just a few clicks a few times a day to keep your TamagotchisTamagotchi in good health. In other words, it rewarded vigilance over neglect, maintenance over obsessiveness (you could overfeed your Tamagotchi or smother it with too much love).

A decade later, there’s a new kind of Tamagotchi out there. And it’s us.

New health-monitoring tools let us pay close attention to our state of being, how much exercise we’re getting, how much sleep we’re getting — and they make it easy to set a goal and improve ourselves. In other words, they turn our health into something of a game. And the reward is better health and a better life.

These devices are popping up everywhere: The FitBit is a paper-clip sized device that you can clip onto your belt to monitor cadence, calories and sleep. A genius little display shows a flower that grows the more you move, offering a brilliant bit of feedback. The Zeo sleep system uses a rigorous biometric brain analysis to measure overall sleep quality; you can also drill down into the numbers to ascertain how much time you’re spending in light sleep versus deep sleep (the deeper the better). The BodyMedia Fit uses a combination of sensor technology to track cadence and calories, as well as respiration and heartrate. And the Philips DirectLife gizmo turns your data into a personal coaching kit that helps you adjust targets and meet goals.

In the best of these devices, the hardware is simple and unobtrusive, and the software is clean, engaging and easy to navigate through.

The key here is the feedback loop — making it possible for users to collect their own data, making it easy to understand, and then building that data into better decision making. Feedback has been recognized as an effective tool for behavior change since the 1960s. But the challenge is that collecting and organizing data has typically taken a lot of effort, making it something that works for only the most diligent of us.

But the key to these new tools is they make the gathering of personal data — what’s called “data exhaust” — an automatic process that requires very little effort on our part. With cheaper sensors and better UI, personal data is becoming ubiquitous and malleable, turning this once academic notion of feedback into a business plan. What’s more, sharing this data in social networks increases the utility of the data; it makes it easier for us to turn data into insight into action.

This is the premise behind the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Project HealthDesign, which has hit on the idea of “observations of daily life” — or ODLs — as a powerful catalyst for managing our health. And not just preventive health — Project HealthDesign is funding several projects that let people track ODLs to manage diseases from Crohn’s to depression to underweight babies.

Another important element is play, the fact that tracking can be rewarding in and of itself, even fun. Clive Thompson has written about how Weight Watchers — which asks its members to turn their diets into a Points system for easier tracking — is in effect a big game. And HopeLab, an innovative medical research group, has used the principle to create Re-Mission, a videogame for teens with cancer where the kids play by engaging with their disease. A 2008 study in Pediatrics showed that Re-Mission significantly improved outcomes in kids who played the game.

There are, of course, pioneers in this sort of thing — first and foremost diabetics, who’ve been compelled to rigorously self-monitor their blood glucose and insulin levels for decades. In the past, though, self-monitoring has been seen as a burden for people with diabetes — the tools have been bulky, the interfaces stodgy and medicalized, and the result is lack of engagement.

With millions more people being diagnosed with diabetes each year though, there’s a great incentive to create better, smarter and easier tools for self-monitoring — as well as find ways to make diabetics more at ease with the idea of constant self-monitoring. Bayer Healthcare recently worked with Nintendo to develop the Didget meter, a game for children with diabetes that rewards them with points for keeping their blood glucose levels within a personalized target range. The game is designed for kids as young as 5 years old.

The key here seems to be the notion of control (or to use the academic term, self-efficacy) — self-monitoring can give us a way to participate in our health. And turning it into something fun, something that we can play with and improve upon — that can give us not only a role but an authority. We can take control of our health. And we can play to win.

Image: _jennieMarie/flickr, Alexis Madrigal/Wired.com

See Also:

• Baby-by-Number: Parents’ New Obsession With Data
• DIY Home Sleep Research With Cameras, Accelerometers, EEGs
• Know Thyself: Tracking Every Facet of Life, from Sleep to Mood to Pain
• Fitbit Fitness and Sleep Tracker

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The sharpest images yet taken by the Mars Express spacecraft of Mars’ tiny moon Phobos reveal features as small as 14.5 feet across, the European Space Agency announced March 15.

Some of the new images taken March 7 during one of several recent close flybys of the moon home in on the proposed landing site for a Russian mission, Phobos-Grunt (meaning Phobos soil), that is expected to touch down on the moon next year.

During the three flybys on March 7, 10 and 13, researchers measured the moon’s tug on Mars Express by examining changes in the frequency of radio signals beamed by the spacecraft to Earth. The frequency shifts indicate that the craft has sped up or slowed down by a few millimeters per second due to the moon’s gravity.

When combined with images, the gravity data may provide new clues about Phobos’ composition and origin. According to one theory, Mars captured the moon from the nearby asteroid belt. Alternatively, Phobos may have formed where it now resides and could be a direct leftover from the planet-making era. With dimensions of 17 by 14 by 12 miles, the moon is the larger of Mars’ two moons.

The Mars Express flybys, which happen every five months, may also determine if Phobos is a fragile pile of rocky fragments stuck together — what planetary scientists refer to as a rubble pile — or solid through and through, says Mars Express scientist Gerhard Neukum of the Free University of Berlin. He notes that due to orbital maneuvers that had to be performed on relatively short notice, scientists missed the opportunity to take even higher-resolution images with another camera on Mars Express, which would have revealed features on Phobos as small as a meter across.

The craft will make two more passes by Phobos before the end of March, but they will not come as close as the March 7 flyby.

Image: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

See Also:

• Orbiter Captures High-Res Color Pics of Martian Moon
• Can Life Survive Deep Space? Let's Send It There!
• Strange Places on Mars: What Do You Want to See Next?
• New Animations Take You Flying Over Mars
• Best View of Mars From Earth in 6 Years on Wednesday

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