The I CARE Foundation’s International Travel Child Consent Form Supported By Hague Conference Secretary General As Efforts Increase To Prevent International Child Abduction

As the I CARE Foundation increases their global initiative to prevent world-wide international parental child abduction and trafficking of children, The Hague Conference On Private International Law Secretary General, Mr. Christophe Bernasconi, who oversees The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction has voiced strong support for the utilization of the I CARE Foundation’s International Travel Child Consent Form.  Considered a landmark global parental child abduction prevention tool that may be used by both Hague Convention and non-Hague Convention signatory nations, the travel document focuses on preventing the epidemic problem of wrongful retention (abduction) of children abroad who travel during the Christmas Holiday or Summer Vacation period with a parent.

During the Christmas Holiday Season, international parental child abduction around the world surges as carefully planned abduction schemes are implemented. For the vast majority of targeted parents and children, the planned act of international kidnapping is often undetected until the child is wrongfully detained in a foreign country. Sadly, many of these schemes also focus on causing grave malice to unsuspecting targeted left-behind parents, who are often blind-sided by the actions that unfold. In order to protect against international child abduction schemes revolving around the wrongful detention of a child, the I CARE Foundation has created a groundbreaking international travel consent form steep in Hague Convention language intended to help prevent abduction or assist in the immediate return of a child if abduction occurs. Amongst a growing number of worldwide stakeholders who support use of the form is Hague Conference on Private International Law Secretary General Mr. Christophe Bernasconi, who previously stated, “I have had the possibility to look at the travel form and must say that I am impressed: this is the most comprehensive document of its kind that I have seen so far and there is little doubt in my mind that this is a most valuable and important effort to prevent child abduction.”

Secretary General Bernasconi recently issued the following statement as concern for abduction during Christmas is on the minds of all abduction prevention stakeholders: “While the winter holiday season is often one which presents many opportunities for festive family celebrations, it is also a period in which sadly more parental child abductions occur. As a result, it is more important than ever to take steps to prevent the wrongful removal of children so that abductions which are covered by the Hague Convention of 25 October 1980 on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction do not occur in the first place.

“Prevention can be achieved in several ways. For example, when one parent intends to travel with his or her child without the other parent, the other parent’s consent to the travel should first be obtained. One of the ways a parent can demonstrate that they have the approval of the other non-travelling parent is by having him or her sign a clear, comprehensive travel consent form which includes a statement that the non-travelling parent agrees to the travel but also that the child is to return to his/her place of habitual residence on or before a specific date. A model travel consent form for this purpose has recently been developed by the I CARE Foundation and is, I understand, already widely used by parents in various jurisdictions. Use of the I CARE Foundation's comprehensive Hague-centric travel form that addresses key aspects of the  Hague Child Abduction Convention pertaining to a  child's international travel are central to protecting against a child's wrongful retention abroad.  The I CARE Foundation's International Travel Child Consent form and similar comprehensive models deserve further encouragement so as to prevent child abduction and perhaps even limit instances of child trafficking in general.”

Carolina Marín Pedreño, a partner at the prestigious London-based law firm of Dawson Cornwell and a fellow of the International Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers known for her global work protecting children added, "As an international family practitioner I have seen how the introduction of the I Care Foundation's Travel Consent Form has reduced the anxiety of parents when agreeing to their children travelling abroad for contact with the other parent, but most importantly has prevented wrongful removals or retentions of those children in a country where they are not habitually resident. The Form is a significant safeguard for parents involved in cross borders relationships. The support of the Secretary General of The Hague Conference brings the hope that this tool will become a common instrument to be used by Child Abduction practitioners globally, to prevent child abductions and to continue to protect children reducing the number of these dramatic cases. I urge all parents and law practitioners to utilize this important tool when children intend to travel abroad.”

Peter Thomas Senese, the Founding Director of the I CARE Foundation and creator of the International Travel Child Consent Form added, "It is deeply rewarding to know that, the 'International Travel Child Consent Form' is having a significant impact on preventing international child abductions around the world. The doctrine has been embraced and utilized by a large number of families around the world. Impressively, children who have traveled using the form have come home. The I CARE Foundation believes that as courts around the world continue to uphold the sanctity of this landmark global child abduction prevention instrument unique in it being one of the first true Hague-centric private sector global abduction prevention tools, we will see a radical decline in international parental child abductions associated with the wrongful retention of children abroad. With our eyes set on protecting the lives of children around the world, I urge all parents who have children traveling abroad – with or without them – to use the I CARE Foundation’s travel form.”

Silvia A. Sejas Pardo, Silvia A. Sejas Pardo, a highly respected Argentinean and Spanish international lawyer based in Spain added, "This travel consent is an effective tool that establishes unquestionable determination of what courts are responsible for a minor’s welfare. Often in the case of international abduction a taking parent will attempt to seek to change jurisdiction of a child’s welfare which is safeguarded by the Hague Convention. However, in cases of abduction the taking parent will attempt to use certain provisions and delicate case law related to the treaty that would enable them to remain abroad with their child. The I CARE Foundation’s travel form protects against this while also providing a cost-effective and quick extrajudicial resolution of disputes in a minor’s mobility. Unquestionably, all children who travel internationally should do so under this document.”

Mexico's Carlos Alvarado is a partner at the International Law Group and considered one of the most knowledgeable international family law attorneys in Mexico. Mr. Alvarado was responsible for codifying and translating the I CARE Foundation's travel consent form into Spanish. Mr. Alvarado added, "As a law practitioner deeply familiar with Hague Convention law and the great challenges parents and lawyers have protecting children targeted for international abduction, it is critical that new and creative abduction prevention tools are utilized to protect children. The I CARE Foundation's International Travel Child Consent Form is an important tool that can and should be used to prevent children from being wrongfully detained in a foreign country. We intend to widely implement this new tool to protect children in Mexico and whenever possible, assist parents who have had a child abducted to Mexico who have utilized this agreement. This is a tool all attorneys should use."

To learn more about the 'International Travel Child Consent Form' please visit the I CARE Foundation: http://www.stopchildabduction.org/Child_Travel_Consent_Form.html

Senate Advances LGBT Anti-Discrimination Bill

Seventeen years after failing by one vote to win passage in the Senate, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) passed in the upper chamber Monday with 61 in favor, one vote over the minimum threshold to move the bill to a full floor vote. ENDA now moves to a floor vote in the Senate, where it is expected to pass. In the House, where the climate is much less favorable toward the bill, advocates are exploring all options to advance a federal ban on workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. If ENDA fails there, supporters might even push for an Executive Order to advance the cause.

By Monday morning, ENDA had the support of the entire Democratic caucus, plus four Senate Republicans (Lisa Murkowski, Mark Kirk, Susan Collins and Orrin Hatch). Nevada Republican Senator Dean Heller’s announcement that he would support ENDA pushed the bill to the 60 votes needed to overcome procedural hurdles in the Senate. In the final tally, Ohio Senator Rob Portman became the sixth Republican to support the measure, pushing the total yeas to 61.

“We’re not going to take anything for granted, but things are looking good in the Senate this week,” said Winnie Stachelberg, executive vice president of the Center for American Progress. “If the Employment Non-Discrimination Act were to come up in the House, there’s a path to passage,” she said.

Emphasis on “path” over “passage.”

As long as John Boehner holds the Speaker’s gavel, ENDA faces a much harder road in the House. After Heller’s announcement of support Monday, Boehner spokesman Michael Steel reiterated the Speaker’s long-standing opposition to ENDA.

“The Speaker believes this legislation will increase frivolous litigation and cost American jobs, especially small-business jobs,” he told TIME.

ENDA advocates fired back. At a time when “this week alone we may see two additional states, Illinois and Hawaii, join the marriage column, it seems so relatively Fred Flintstone for John Boehner to be saying that gays are not deserving of workplace protections,” Fred Sainz, vice president at Human Rights Campaign, told TIME.

Nonetheless, in Boehner’s House, it’s unlikely ENDA will even reach the floor. The Speaker has shown himself fond of the so-called Hastert Rule, under which legislation is not allowed to come up for a vote in the full House unless such a vote has the support of “a majority of the majority.” With only five House Republicans openly in support of ENDA, it’s difficult to see how it even makes it to the floor.

Facing that reality, Sainz said, advocates are weighing other options.

“While the Speaker is definitely all powerful in terms of bringing things to the floor, there’s also a defense authorization bill where this could also go over to the House,” he said.

If ENDA fails in the House, the President, who took to the Huffington Post on Sunday to urge passage of the bill, could sign an Executive Order banning LGBT discrimination among federal contractors. Such a move could lend momentum that might push it over the threshold in another attempt down the road.

Senate Announces Deal to Avoid Default, House GOP Expected to Bend

Senate leaders announced a bipartisan deal Wednesday to reopen government and raise the debt ceiling, moving the country closer to ending weeks of brinkmanship over Obamacare, federal spending and debt.

“This is not a time for pointing fingers or blame. This is a time for reconciliation,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, in announcing the agreement, which would reopen the government and extend the debt ceiling through early next year. The bill will also appoint Senators to work on a budget agreement over the next two months, in the hopes of avoiding another round of brinkmanship in 2014.

He was followed by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell who said Republicans would continue to fight for a repeal to Obamacare, but there would be no victory this week. ”For today, the relief we hope for is to reopen the government, avoid default and protect the historic cuts we achieved under the budget control act,” McConnell said. He later added that he expected to have a vote Wednesday on the measure.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said President Barack Obama “applauds” the deal, and encouraged both chambers of Congress to expeditiously pass the legislation. But with an agreement that represents an almost total victory for Democrats, Carney asserted, “there are no winners here,” given the negative effects of the shutdown.

As the Senate gaveled to order, House Republicans gathered to discuss their path forward. Several staff sources suggested that Speaker John Boehner would move forward with a vote on the Senate measure, which would likely pass with the help of Democratic votes. “Looks like we’ll eat the Reid-McConnell deal,” one House GOP source told TIME. “It’ll rely on Democratic votes.”

Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, said it was his “understanding” that the House would act on the measure first, thereby avoiding time-consuming procedural hurdles in the Senate hours before Treasury runs out of borrowing authority. But House Republican leadership did not confirm the order of events. “No decision has been made yet,” said Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the House GOP whip before the meeting.

Multiple Republican Senators, including Kentucky’s Rand Paul, said they expect the Senate plan to pass with a strong majority of Republican votes. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, one of the original proponents of the failed plan to shut down the government to defund Obamacare, said he would not vote for the deal, but would also not try to block the Senate from moving forward.

The emerging agreement isn’t sitting well with some Republicans. Sen. Lindsay Graham, who has long argued for a grand bargain to address long-term fiscal issues, called it a “joke. “We took some breadcrumbs and left the whole meal on the table,” he said.

Graham continued to criticize the tactics the House Republicans have behaved over recent weeks. “The way we’re behaving and the path we’ve taken over the past couple of weeks leads to a marginalized party in the eyes of the American people,” he said. “It has been the best two weeks for the Democratic Party in recent times because they were out of the spotlight and didn’t have to showcase their ideas.”

Sen. Kelly Ayotte expressed hope that more conservative colleagues will not repeat their mistakes of the last month. “We’ve been asking from the beginning how does this end, how do you achieve what you’re purporting to achieve on defunding Obamacare,” she said. “And I never got an answer to that. I don’t think there still is an answer to that. So if we have learned nothing else from this whole exercise I hope we learn that we shouldn’t get behind a strategy that cannot succeed.”

According to a Senate Republican leadership aide, under the agreement, the government would be funded through Jan. 15, 2014 unless a budget agreement is reached sooner, while the debt limit would be raised through Feb. 7. The extraordinary accounting measures used to keep the government under the borrowing cap would not be prohibited under the deal. An anti-fraud measure will be added to Obamacare, requiring income verification for those receiving subsidies to purchase insurance under the law.

What’s to Blame For Stock Market Bubbles? Your Brain

If you lost money in the last bubble market there are a lot of things you can blame—a bad tip, a hunch gone wrong. But don’t let your dorsomedial prefrontal cortex off the hook. That bad boy can cost you a bundle.

The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) is located in the forward part of your brain and is usually quite the good citizen. It’s in that spot that you process feelings of altruism. It’s there too that you make the instinctive judgment about the person you meet at a singles bar who instantly—and usually correctly—strikes you as either a rare find or bad news. And, according to a new study in the journal Neuron, by researchers at the California Institute of Technology, it’s there as well that you make the often disastrous decision to jump into or out of a wildly fluctuating market.

One of the reasons people participate at all in market bubbles is their belief that somebody knows something they don’t. If real estate or tech or the health sector is booming, there must be a reason, and if you study the numbers and think hard enough, you can figure out what’s going on in the heads of other investors that’s driving prices up or down. This ability to know what someone else is thinking is not an illusion. It’s called the theory of mind, it lives in the dmPFC and it boots itself up early in life. In an oft-cited study, an experimenter playing with a toddler younger than three will conspire with the child to hide a toy. When another researcher comes into the room, the child will assume that that person too knows where the toy is—the assumption being that all knowledge is universal knowledge. It’s only a little later that kids appreciate that knowledge is particular to the person, and so are feelings. With that comes empathy (even if I’m feeling happy you might be feeling sad) as well as a willingness to learn from other people—and to try to intuit the knowledge they’re not actively sharing.

To test what role this plays in markets, the Caltech investigators placed subjects in a functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI) and had them watch a recorded session of other people participating in a market-trading simulation game. In some of the trials, the game resulted in a bubble market, with the share price of the imaginary asset rising far above its intrinsic worth. In other sessions, the trading proceeded more conservatively and predictably. In all of the sessions, the subjects in the fMRI were periodically asked to imagine they were participating in the game and to invest part of a stake of $60.

Some of the subjects invested only sparingly in the boom and bust trials; others actively participated in them, risking a significant share of their own $60. During all of the trials, all of the subjects showed increased activity in a brain region known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which is sort of our internal bean-counter, making judgments about the value and the cost of things.  In some subjects there was also an uptick in activity in the dmPFC, and the greater that activity, the greater the fluctuation in those subjects’ portfolio values.

To determine if this was indeed a sign of the brain trying to mind-read other market players, the investigators had the subjects take another, much simpler test, known as “the mind in the eyes” experiment. As the name suggests, the test involves looking at pictures of people expressing different emotions and identifying what those emotions are; to increase the degree of difficulty,  only the eyes and the region of the face immediately around them are shown. The people who did best on that test turned out to be the same ones who’d had higher activation of the dmPFC in the investment game and the greatest portfolio fluctuation—for better or worse. Said principal investigator Colin Camerer in a statement accompanying the release of the study:

“The way we interpret this is that these people were thinking more about what was going on in the market and wondering why people were behaving the way they were. Normally, in everyday social encounters and in specialized professions, this kind of mind reading is useful to the individual. But in these markets, when prices are going crazy, these people think, ‘Wow, I think I can figure these markets out. Let me buy and sell.’ And that is usually going to contribute to the bubble’s momentum and also cost them money.”

The idea that you can read the minds of the people who know what’s going on is not the only illusion at work. The other is that those knowledgeable people exist in the first place. Paradoxically, it’s the very volatility of the trading that creates that impression. Markets are supposed to be rational things, guided by the endlessly invoked invisible hand. If those markets are going nuts, someone must be steering the hand that way for a reason. Said Peter Bossaerts, another of the paper’s authors:

“When participants see the inconsistency in order flow, they think that there are people who know better in the marketplace and they make a game out of it. In reality, however, there is nothing to be gained because nobody knows better.”

Five years almost to the day after the crash of Lehman Brothers, a phrase like “nothing to be gained because nobody knows better” should perhaps be tattooed on the forehead of every trader on the planet. Theory of mind is a wonderful thing when there’s actually another mind to be read. Markets don’t have minds, however, they only have wealth. Forget that fact and they could have yours.

Hong Kong, World’s Shark Fin Hub, Sees Huge Drop in Infamous Trade

Hong Kong, which received roughly half of the world’s shark fin harvest last year, has seen a 30% drop in imports as a long-running environmental campaign begins to bite.

Hong Kong Marine Productions Association chairman Ricky Leung also cited a slowing economy and a crackdown on lavish entertaining among mainland Chinese officials — who see shark’s fin as a prized banqueting delicacy — as other reasons for the downturn

A campaign by 60 advocacy groups, including Greenpeace, and Humane Society International, led major airlines to introduce a total ban on shark fin haulage last year, with Emirates announcing its support just last week.

Shark fin is a popular Chinese ingredient but environmentalists condemn sales of the product, claiming that it fuels barbaric fishing practices. Hong Kong imported 1,162 tons of shark fins in 2012, according to government figures. In January, the discovery of thousands of shark fins drying on a rooftop in the city sparked outrage.

Mapping 320,000 New Animal Viruses Crucial to Preventing Global Contagions: Report

At least 320,000 previously unknown viruses could be circulating in animals and identifying which might spread to humans is vital to prevent future pandemics, says a new study.

Prof. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the University of Columbia, says that identifying these viral diseases could cost more than $6 billion, but this is still a fraction of the cost of dealing with a major contagion.

“What we’re really talking about is defining the full range of diversity of viruses within mammals, and our intent is that as we get more information we will be able to understand the principles that underlie determinants of risks,” he says.

Nearly 70% of viruses that infect humans — including HIV, Ebola and Swine Flu — originated in wildlife. The new research, published in the journal mBio, is based on data collected from flying foxes in Bangladesh that has been applied to the 5,486 known species of mammal.

Population Plus Climate: Why Coastal Cities Will Face Increased Risks From Floods

Living in New York, it’s easy to forget that the ocean is right on our doorsteps. This isn’t Miami with its beaches or Venice with its canals or New Orleans with its history of storms and floods. New York has always been a supremely self-involved city—this famous magazine cover pretty much sums it up—and though Manhattan is an island, it’s one that has its eyes turned inward, not out toward the water that rings it.

Hurricane Sandy ended that illusion last year. The storm surge flooded tunnels, subway lines and apartment buildings; swamped power lines and transformers caused a blackout over much of Manhattan that lasted for days. Altogether Sandy cost the city of New York some $19 billion in public and private losses, nearly all of it due to the water. Sandy wasn’t even that powerful a storm, its winds barely ranking as a category 1 when it made landfall along the East Coast last October. What it had was something any New Yorker who’s hunted for apartments could appreciate—location, location, location—hitting the biggest city in America and flooding it with all that forgotten coastal water.

For coastal cities like New York, Hurricane Sandy was a coming attraction for what is likely to be a very wet and destructive future. According to leaked drafts of the forthcoming new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists believe that sea level could rise by more than three feet by the end of the century is carbon emissions keep growing at a runaway pace. And a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change laid out the enormous flood losses that major coastal cities could face in the future. Average global flood losses could rise from approximately $6 billion per year in 2005 to $60 to $63 billion per year by 2050, thanks to population and economic growth along the coasts and the multiplying effect of climate change-driven sea level rise. As Robert Nicholls, a professor of coastal engineering at the University of Southampton in Britain and a co-author of the study, put it in a statement: “There is a pressing need to start planning how to manage flood risk now.”

The Nature Climate Change study looked at both present and projected future flood losses in the 136 largest coastal cities in the world, looking at their financial risks both in absolute terms—taking into account protections like sea walls and dikes—and as a percentage of the city’s GDP. The cities ranked as most at risk today range from Guangzhou in southern China to Mumbai in India to, yes, New York City. What those cities tend to have in common is high wealth and population levels and relatively little flooding protection. (By contrast, Dutch cities like Amsterdam or Rotterdam—which are extremely flood-prone geographically—aren’t found on the list because the Netherlands government has invested heavily in coastal protection.) Three American cities—Miami, New York and New Orleans—are responsible for 31% of the total losses across the 136 cities surveyed in 2005. When it comes to losses as a percentage of total city GDP—which gives the very richest cities like New York an advantage—Guangzhou, New Orleans and Guayaquil in Ecuador are most at risk.

The situation changes a bit in 2050. The study assumed that climate change will lead sea levels to rise 0.65 to 1.3 ft. by 2050, with some cities facing additional sea level rise because of local subsidence—literally, the earth sinking. Developing cities like Guangzhou, Mumbai and Shenzhen face the biggest risks, though Miami and New York rank highest among cities in developed nations. If no improvements are made in flood defenses, the study estimates that the world could be facing as much as $1 trillion or more per year in losses. Now, that number is the worst of the worst case, assuming that cities do absolutely nothing to protect themselves from sea level rise, suffer major floods and then pay to immediately rebuild everything they lost. But even assuming improvements in coastal defenses, potential losses will increase significantly, thanks to the risk of bigger floods and more immediately, a huge increase in the number of people and the value of property along the coasts.

That second bit is important. It’s vital for governments to gain a better understanding of flooding risks from global warming—and sea level rises of the sort apparently projected by the IPCC will endanger major world cities. But the most immediate threat is the sheer increase in people—and their property—put in harm’s way in coastal cities. In the U.S. 87 million people now live along the coast, up from 47 million people in 1960, and globally six of the world’s 10 largest cities are on the coast. Of the $60 to $63 billion in flood risk the Nature Climate Change study estimates the world’s cities will face by 2050, $52 billion is due to economic and population growth—the rest is due to sea level rise and land use change.

That doesn’t mean that climate change-amplified floods and storms don’t present a danger to coastal cities—or that we don’t need to worry about reducing carbon emissions. But the numbers don’t lie—the single biggest increase in the risk from flooding comes from putting people and property in places where floods have always been likely to happen. As Sandy showed, coastal cities are at risk from major flooding right now if a storm should hit at the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s location, location, location—which is why it’s so important to spend money now to improve coastal defenses. We don’t have to wait for climate change to come.

Hello, My Name Is Dolphin: The Mammal That Never Forgets

In his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, the late, great British satirist Douglas Adams wrote that dolphins are the second most intelligent creatures on earth — before humans and after mice, which spend their time running complex lab experiments on scientists. The mice might not quite live up to their No. 1 billing, but the more we learn about the cognitive abilities of dolphins, the more they indeed seem to have the No. 2 spot locked up. Not only do dolphins have impressive memories for tasks, the ability to use tools and elaborate social structures, but they also have their own names, distinctive identifying whistles that they develop themselves. Now a study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B reports that dolphins can recognize the whistles of others they shared a tank with as long as 20 years ago, the most enduring social memories ever observed outside of humans.

The study, undertaken by Jason Bruck, then a graduate student at the University of Chicago, used 43 dolphins ranging from 4 months to 47 years old that are cycled among various institutions as part of a captive breeding program. Some of them had lived together for only three months; others had shared a tank for more than 18 years before being separated. Bruck first obtained recordings of each dolphin’s name whistle. Then he set up an underwater speaker in the dolphins’ tanks that played whistles from strangers and from former tankmates. The difference in the dolphins’ reactions was unmistakable.

“When they hear a dolphin they know, they often quickly approach the speaker playing the recording,” Bruck said in a prepared statement. “At times they will hover around, whistle at it, try to get it to whistle back.” They paid far less attention to a stranger’s whistle-name.

Moreover, it didn’t matter how long the animals had been separated — a dolphin could recognize the call of a companion it had last seen decades ago just as easily as one it last saw six months ago. Nor did it matter how short or long the animals had been housed together; they responded with the same recognition to a long-term friend or a more fleeting acquaintance. In the most impressive case, a dolphin named Bailey recognized the whistle of Allie, her tankmate 20 years and six months ago. “This shows us an animal operating cognitively at a level that’s very consistent with human social memory,” Bruck said.

Wild dolphins have a life expectancy that ranges from 20 to 50 years (though such superannuated adults are rare), and they live in ever shifting pods, with individuals constantly splitting off and reuniting with the group. Bruck suggests that animals with such a social structure may benefit from a long memory for one another, perhaps supporting a connection between complex social behavior and the evolution of memory. But it may also be that a prodigious memory for names is just part of the larger, fascinating package of dolphin intelligence, included for no particular evolutionary reason — another element of the hidden depths of a mammalian cousin that we continue to explore.

The Great, Belching Black Hole — Eats Gas, Burps X-rays

Was Einstein smarter than a sixth-grader? When it came to black holes, maybe not. For much of the 20^th century, astronomers and physicists were unsure about whether black holes — which were predicted by Einstein’s General Relativity Theory — even existed.  That was a fair enough doubt, since the idea of a superdense star remnant with a gravity field so powerful not even light could escape it did defy credibility. Even Einstein himself thought they were just a mathematical curiosity that couldn’t possibly exist in the real universe.

Today, every schoolchild knows better. Astronomers have found giant black holes lurking at the cores of galaxies, the Milky Way among them, and more modest black holes all over the place, including up to 60 in our home galaxy. Now, that cosmic census has expanded dramatically: using the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory, astronomers have spotted 26 of the more modest variety of black hole in the Andromeda galaxy, which is not only the Milky Way’s closest neighbor, but also its near twin.

Along with nine black holes detected previously, that brings Andromeda’s total to 35. If that many are detectable, says Harvard astronomer Robin Barnard, lead author of a report on the new objects in The Astrophysical Journal, “we know there must be lots we can’t detect — maybe tens of thousands, maybe more.”

The reason: a star-size black hole like the ones Barnard and his colleagues found can be detected only if it’s gulping down gas, and that’s relatively rare. It only happens, in fact, when the black hole orbits an ordinary star and dines on its outer atmosphere. As it does, the gas heats up to millions of degrees as it tries to cram its way down the black hole’s voracious gravitational throat, and in so doing emits bursts of X-rays—sort of giant, electromagnetic burps.

In the handful of cases in which that’s happening, Chandra can easily spot a star’s digestive blast. “If you look at the central region of Andromeda in visible light,” says Barnard, “you see a huge mass of stars — billions upon billions of them.” If you look with Chandra, though you see just a few hundred bright dots — the ones emitting x-rays.

Some of those emissions are actually not produced in Andromeda, but rather, come from the giant, gas-sucking black holes at the cores of other galaxies which just happen to lie in the background, but much, much farther away. “These background galaxies are incredibly bright,” says Barnard, but they’re easy to identify because their X-ray light varies up and down relatively slowly as their gas supply waxes and wanes, a pattern different from that produced by the smaller black holes in Andromeda itself.

Other dots of X-ray brightness come from stars in Andromeda that orbit neutron stars, the dense remnants of dead stars that aren’t quite massive enough to collapse into black holes. These pull gas from companion stars as well, and while the gas merely collides with their surfaces, that impact heats it up enough to produce X-rays too. The difference, says Barnard, is that the mix of X-ray “colors,” or wavelengths, is quite different from those generated by black holes.

Once you weed out the X-rays from background galaxies and from neutron stars, says Barnard, what’s left is black holes, ranging from five to ten times the mass of the Sun. Getting a perfectly clear picture might, in theory, require the astronomers to weed out emissions from the giant black hole at Andromeda’s core too. Unlike those in the background galaxies Chandra sees, however, Andromeda’s black hole, says, Barnard, is “wimpy. It’s ten to a hundred times fainter than the small black holes we can see, even though it’s a million times more massive.” That’s because there doesn’t happen to be a lot of gas available for swallowing these days — which is the case for the Milky Way and most nearby galaxies as well, although that could change before too long, thanks to an interstellar gas cloud spotted in 2011 that’s hurtling toward our galactic center and could arrive in September or October. (Astronomers expect some x-ray fireworks, but little more.)

There’s actually one more class of black holes that physicists have speculated about: teeny tiny ones, smaller than an atom, which might have formed in the intense turbulence of the first moments of the Big Bang. These probably would long since have vanished, although there was some speculation that new ones mightemerge from the Large Hadron Collider atom-smasher in Europe.

That would have been a triumph for science — but since it could in theory have destroyed the Earth, it’s just as well that it didn’t happen.

We Still Need Information Stored in Our Heads Not “in the Cloud”

Is technology making us stupid—or smarter than we’ve ever been? Author Nicholas Carr memorably made the case for the former in his 2010 book The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. This fall we’ll have a rejoinder of sorts from writer Clive Thompson, with his book Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds For The Better.

My own take: technology can make us smarter or stupider, and we need to develop a set of principles to guide our everyday behavior and make sure that tech is improving and not impeding our mental processes. One of the big questions being debated today is, What kind of information do we need to have stored in our heads, and what kind can we leave “in the cloud,” to be accessed as necessary?

In 2005, researchers at the University of Connecticut asked a group of seventh graders to read a website full of information about the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, or Octopus paxarbolis. The Web page described the creature’s mating rituals, preferred diet, and leafy habitat in precise detail. Applying an analytical model they’d learned, the students evaluated the trustworthiness of the site and the information it offered.

Their judgment? The tree octopus was legit. All but one of the pupils rated the website as “very credible.” The headline of the university’s press release read, “Researchers Find Kids Need Better Online Academic Skills,” and it quoted Don Leu, professor of education at UConn and co-director of its New Literacies Research Lab, lamenting that classroom instruction in online reading is “woefully lacking.”

There’s something wrong with this picture, and it’s not just that the arboreal octopus is, of course, a fiction, presented by Leu and his colleagues to probe their subjects’ Internet savvy. The other fable here is the notion that the main thing these kids need—what all our kids really need—is to learn online skills in school. It would seem clear that what Leu’s seventh graders really require is knowledge: some basic familiarity with the biology of sea-dwelling creatures that would have tipped them off that the website was a whopper (say, when it explained that the tree octopus’s natural predator is the sasquatch).

But that’s not how an increasingly powerful faction within education sees the matter. They are the champions of “new literacies”—or “21st century skills” or “digital literacy” or a number of other faddish-sounding concepts. In their view, skills trump knowledge, developing “literacies” is more important than learning mere content, and all facts are now Google-able and therefore unworthy of committing to memory. But even the most sophisticated digital literacy skills won’t help students and workers navigate the world if they don’t have a broad base of knowledge about how the world actually operates. “When we fill our classrooms with technology and emphasize these new ‘literacies,’ we feel like we’re reinventing schools to be more relevant,” says Robert Pondiscio, executive director of the nonprofit organization CitizenshipFirst (and a former fifth-grade teacher.) “But if you focus on the delivery mechanism and not the content, you’re doing kids a disservice.”

Indeed, evidence from cognitive science challenges the notion that skills can exist independent of factual knowledge. Dan Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, is a leading expert on how students learn. “Data from the last thirty years leads to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable: thinking well requires knowing facts, and that’s true not only because you need something to think about,” Willingham has written. “The very processes that teachers care about most—critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving—are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment).”

In other words, just because you can Google the date of Black Tuesday doesn’t mean you understand why the Great Depression happened or how it compares to our recent economic slump. There is no doubt that the students of today, and the workers of tomorrow, will need to innovate, collaborate and evaluate, to name three of the “21st century skills” so dear to digital literacy enthusiasts. But such skills can’t be separated from the knowledge that gives rise to them. To innovate, you have to know what came before. To collaborate, you have to contribute knowledge to the joint venture. And to evaluate, you have to compare new information against knowledge you’ve already mastered.

So here’s a principle for thinking in a digital world, in two parts: First, acquire a base of fact knowledge in any domain in which you want to perform well. This base supplies the essential foundation for building skills, and it can’t be outsourced to a search engine.

Second: Take advantage of computers’ invariant memory, but also the brain’s elaborative memory. Computers are great when you want to store information that shouldn’t change—say, the date and time of that appointment next week. A computer (unlike your brain, or mine) won’t misremember the time of the appointment as 3 PM instead of 2 PM. But brains are the superior choice when you want information to change, in interesting and useful ways: to connect up with other facts and ideas, to acquire successive layers of meaning, to steep for a while in your accumulated knowledge and experience and so produce a richer mental brew.

The Space Sorority: Fifty Years of Women in Orbit

The first man on the moon was a character in popular culture decades—even centuries, perhaps—before Neil Armstrong actually filled the role. The assumption was that humanity would reach the moon someday, and it was simply  a given that the first historic step would indeed be taken by a man. “This country should commit itself, before this decade is out,” President Kennedy declared in 1961, “to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” There was no need for the gender-neutral “landing a person on the moon,” no clumsy “and returning him or her safely to the Earth.” Astronauts were supposed to be men and they jolly well would be.

But only until they weren’t. The boys-only rule ended fast, just two years later, when the Soviet Union sent Valentina Tereshkova into orbit for a flight that lasted just minutes shy of three full days. The 50th anniversary of that journey is June 16th, and in the half century since Tereshkova’s flight, 57 other women have strapped in and blasted off, representing nine different countries—most recently China. The U.S. did not join the space sorority until 1983, when Sally Ride flew, but America made up for that dallying, sending a total of 45 women into space since then. They have faced the same challenges as the men, experienced the same thrills as the men and, on occasion, paid the same price as the men. Four women—Christa McAulliffe, Judith Resnik, Laurel Clark, and Kalpana Chawla—died in the Challenger and Columbia disasters.

The U.S. space program is now in a state of drift, with no American vehicle currently capable of carrying human beings to space, and NASA thus dependent on the Russians to ferry our crews up to the International Space Station—at a cost of $70 million per seat. But China—as in so many other things—is a rising power in space and on June 11, sent its second female astronaut, Wang Yaping, into orbit on what is just the country’s fifth crewed mission. She was preceded last year by Liu Yang.

There was less global hoopla when Yang flew than when Rice did, and much less than when Tereshkova did. The fact that human beings travel in space continues to be—and should be—something that delights and even surprises us. The fact that women are among those explorers is, at last, becoming routine.

What It’s Like to Go to Mars

A trip to Mars would be the adventure of a lifetime. Just ask the 78,000-plus people who signed up to move there, as part of Mars One’s hypothetical colonization project.

But it would also be really, really unpleasant. And we’re not just talking about the general annoyance of spending a year-long voyage huddled in a tiny capsule with all kinds of strangers whose every irritating habit would play out thousands upon thousands of times.

Rocket scientists have long known that voyagers to Mars — or any space destination, really — would be bombarded to some degree with interplanetary radiation. Now, however, we know exactly how much: 1.8 millisieverts per day, which is roughly the equivalent to 100 full-body CT scans per round trip — enough to increase an astronaut’s lifetime risk of dying from cancer by at least 3%. “Even the best available shielding wouldn’t help much,” says Cary Zeitlin, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who authored a paper on the subject in the latest issue of Science.

How can Zeitlin be so sure? Because he’s got an expert source: the radiation detector that tagged along on Curiosity’s mission to Mars, whose job was to sniff out potential dangers to humans that might someday make the same journey.

The detector noted two kinds of dangerous particles slamming through the walls: solar energetic particles, or SEPs, flung away from the sun by solar flares and coronal mass ejections, and galactic cosmic rays, or bits of matter blasted across the Milky Way by exploding stars. It’s the latter, which was by far the most prominent, that “punch through any reasonable shielding,” says Zeitlin.

You could always go with unreasonable shielding, of course — lead or concrete walls a few feet thick, or a giant water-filled bubble (materials rich in hydrogen, like H2O, are excellent at keeping out space particles). But those would be impossibly heavy. And even something as seemingly impervious as a foot-thick hull of aluminum, says Zeitlin, “wouldn’t reduce the dose by much.”

But it isn’t just the journey that’s a problem — it’s the destination. On earth, our planet’s strong magnetic field keeps most dangerous particles at bay, and even the International Space Station orbits low enough to stay relatively safe. Mars doesn’t have much of a magnetic blanket, though, so astronauts would be bombarded with radiation on its surface, as well.

The dose would only be half as much: “In space, radiation comes from all directions,” Zeitlin explains. “When you’re on a planet, it only comes from above.” (The radiation detector is now on the surface with Curiosity, putting actual numbers to that general rule of thumb.)

Still, it all adds up — and there’s no protective solution in sight. Which means that if we were sending astronauts to Mars today, the only thing NASA could do is inform them of risks and hope for the best, which is ethically dubious.

“Fortunately,” says Zeitlin, evidently discounting the Mars One fanatics, “nobody’s going to Mars anytime soon.”

Albert Einstein Discovers New Planet. Really.

Albert Einstein didn’t care much about planets, and you can hardly blame him. After all, when you’re busy transforming physics with such revolutionary discoveries as the four-dimensional curvature of spacetime and the equivalence of matter and energy, you don’t have time to worry about trivia.

Yet one of Einstein’s weirder ideas has led to the identification of a new planet, about twice as massive as Jupiter, orbiting a star some 2,000 light-years from Earth — a discovery Einstein never even envisioned but one that may never have happened without him. Indeed, David Latham, a Harvard astronomer who collaborated on the discovery, originally doubted it was even possible to do what he (under Einstein’s guiding hand)  recently succeeded in doing. “I thought it was silly,” he says. “I thought the effect was so small we’d never detect it.”

The effect in question is “relativistic beaming,” and it dictates that when a bright object is coming right at you, the warping of spacetime caused by that motion will force its light into a narrower, more focused beam that looks brighter than it really is. While Einstein never suggested using that phenomenon to look for planets, Latham’s Harvard colleague Avi Loeb and Ohio State’s Scott Gaudi did, in a theoretical paper published in 2003.

Their reasoning: as a planet orbits its star, its gravity pulls on the star, first one way, then the other. If the planet is lined up more or less edge-on from the perspective of Earth, that pulling will yank the star toward Earth, then away. When it’s coming toward Earth, relativistic beaming will make the star look brighter, and when it’s moving away, it should get dimmer.

In fact, the very first exoplanets were found in a similar sort of way, back in the 1990’s, except that those first planet-hunters were looking for a shift in color, not brightness. That’s because motion toward the observer makes starlight look a little bluer than it really is, while motion away stretches the light wave and makes it look redder (this so-called redshifting applies to entire galaxies, not just stars; it’s how astronomers discovered, back in the 1920’s, that the universe is expanding).

Finding planets by shifts in color is hard enough: first-generation planet hunters like Berkeley’s Geoff Marcy faced a lot of skepticism from  colleagues for even bothering. But this new technique is even tougher, requiring measurements of changes in brightness  as small as a few parts per million. Back in 2003, when Loeb and Gaudi proposed the idea, it was indeed silly to try.

But once the Kepler spacecraft went into orbit in 2009, it wasn’t quite so ridiculous, so Latham, along with Israeli astronomers Simchon Faigler and Tsevi Mazeh, plus several others set out to see if it could be done. They weren’t looking just for the beaming effect: the star-planet system, they figured, should brighten and dim for two other reasons. First, a close-in orbiting planet should raise tides on the star, making it bulge into a very slightly oval shape that follows the planet as it orbits, just as tides in Earth’s oceans follow the Moon in its orbit. When the bulge is pointed right at Earth, the star looks just a little smaller than normal, and thus a bit dimmer. When the bulge points off to the side, the star looks bigger and brighter.

Finally, the star heats up the planet, which glows with its own light — but that light isn’t visible when the planet is in front of the star, just as the Moon is dark when it’s between the Earth and the Sun. When the planet swings around to the other side of the star, it’s like seeing the full Moon. There’s just a bit more light, and Kepler can measure the extra.

Each of these effects — extra light from the planet, extra light from the bulging star and extra light from relativistic beaming — is incredibly subtle. “It’s very dim,” says Latham, “so we had to observe through hundreds of orbits to be sure we were seeing it.”

Clearly, they were, and they may be seeing it in other places as well. “We have several other candidates,” says Mazeh, “and we’re learning how to do this better all the time.”

That’s important enough in the planet-hunting game, but it’s also a reminder of Einstein’s brilliance: even the ideas he never had himself turn out to be some of his most ingenious ones.

Peter Senese: Hero To Children, Best-Selling Author. Courageous Child Advocate. Friend

Peter Senese and the I CARE Foundation prevented the international abduction of my niece a year ago. I would like to express deep thanks to Mr. Senese for creating a miracle for our family by stopping her kidnapping to Croatia and then to Tunisia. I would also like to share an important message that during the summer, parents involved in strained relationships with a partner born in a foreign country need to be aware of the possibility of international parental child abduction.

With school out, this is the time of year I love most because we get to spend several weeks during the school summer vacation with my darling niece.

I am eager for 11:00 a.m. to arrive tomorrow because that's the time my princess arrives. And what a day do I have planned!

Tonight, as I reflect on events that took place a year ago, when my niece's father attempted to abduct her to Croatia, and then probably onto Tunisia (it was only discovered at a court hearing that my sister's ex, Mahmud, was also a citizen of Tunisia: something he had carefully concealed from her during their time together), and then God knows where else without my sister knowing, I nostalgically recall how a perfect stranger came to help my family.

Due to the incredible assistance this once-stranger, now dear friend provided, not only was abduction prevented, but as I said, at 11:00 a.m tomorrow morning, my princess arrives.

If  Mr. Peter Senese of the I CARE Foundation did not come into our lives, I am certain I would not be expecting my niece's arrival, but instead I would be helping my sister try to find her daughter. But that's not the case: Sophia arrives tomorrow!

And that is why I consider my friend Peter Senese a hero: he created a miracle by protecting my niece from abduction.  In fact, Peter Senese is a hero because he created miracles for many children and their families.

During the time that the abduction was planned, my niece's father was in and out of her life since birth. He would travel around the world supposedly on business, including Croatia, Tunisia, and the UAE. He tried to be some Mr. Big-shot.

In reality, the international importer was not trading goods but instead, and unknown to us for all this time, he was taking care of his Croatian wife and his other family living in a lavish home in Tunisia.

My sister never knew that he was married until recently! And she never knew that he was a Tunisian citizen until recently!

According to the U.S. Department of State, "Tunisia is not a signatory to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (Hague Abduction Convention), nor are there any bilateral agreements in force between Tunisia and the United States concerning international parental child abduction. And though Croatia is a signatory of the international child abduction treaty, return of abducted children is limited.

Now you may ask yourself how or why did my sister become concerned that her daughter may be abducted?

Because he told her that if she doesn't start towing the line when he's around, then she will never see her daughter again.

What a great statement.

Shortly after that statement, I contacted Mr. Senese via his author website, having read about him and his volunteer work helping stop children from being wrongfully removed from the country.  To my surprise, Mr. Senese returned my email message, and explained to me some immediate issues my sister needed to deal with.

The email was followed by a series of phone calls, including several with attorneys associated with the I CARE Foundation.

Together with the assistance of the I CARE Foundation's lawyers working under Mr. Senese's instructions, and with the help of my cousin, who is a litigator, court papers were filed to prevent the abduction of our niece. 

We were able to create a wall of protection around Sophia.

Literally, that wall was Peter Senese (Last year I wrote about the incredible work of Mr. Senese helping children).

For example, we did not realize the extent of danger and reality of abduction associated with Sophia possessing what we initially believed to be dual citizenship by birth to Croatia. As it turned out, we eventually found out she also had a birth right to citizenship to Tunisia, which is where my sister's ex had actually been traveling to during all those extended business trips, not Croatia.

In addition, even though my sister never knew that her daughter was naturalized as a Croatian citizen, Mr. Senese found out she was during court proceedings. And as he shared with the court, my niece could have traveled out of the U.S. on a Croatian passport without anyone knowing. In addition, it was Mr. Senese who accompanied my sister to the Croatian Consulate to determine if a passport had been issued for my niece. According to my sister, the consulate was very cooperative with Mr. Senese because of his capacity as a director with the I CARE Foundation.

Armed with evidence that my niece had been issued a Croatian passport without my sister knowing, a plan unfolded that we hoped would work.

In court, my sister's ex was asked under oath if he had naturalized his daughter with the Croatian government. He said no. He was also asked if he had a passport from Croatia for her? Rather belligerently, he said to the judge, how could he if she is not a citizen? No!

Well, you had to see the liars face when my cousin Andrea put Mr. Senese on the stand. Under oath he produced a notarized document from the Croatian government clearly demonstrating that not only was my niece a naturalized citizen of Croatia, but she was also issued a passport.

As expected, the judge was not very pleased with any of it. And that includes the forged signature of my sister on my niece's Croatian passport application.

Interestingly, the Croatian passport had been issued only a few months earlier. Which means he was planning on using it to get her out of the country.

Well, that didn't happen, as the court granted all the requests my sister included in her motion at the suggestion of Mr. Senese.  This included placing the would-be abductor on the Prevent Departure Program.

Another interesting aspect of what took place at the hearing is that though we were not aware of my sister's ex, Mahmud's Tunisian citizenship, Mr. Senese hammered that notion in court, and very specifically questioned whether Mahmud was a citizen of Tunisia.  The way this was done clearly caused Mahmud great concern, especially since Mr. Senese stated that Mahmud, who was a legal U.S. resident, was required to answer to the court his citizenship affiliations, and that misrepresentation of his naturalization constituted a federal crime.

I'll never forget how Mahmud starred with contempt at Mr. Senese.

Eventually as the hearing proceeded, and Andrea made a fuss over Mahmud's Tunisian citizenship and then further questioned if Sophia had been issued a passport from that country, Mahmud stated he was also a Tunisia citizen, but Sophia was never issued a passport (something that we cannot prove till this day).

Which makes my niece's likely disappearance to non Hague country of Tunisia even that much more probable. More than likely she would have been forced into an Islamic subservient life as most women in Tunisia do not know equality.  And as for my sister ever getting her daughter back? That probably would not have occurred.

Till this day, I am sure that Tunisia issued a passport on behalf of my niece. The Tunisian consulate, unlike the Croatian consulate, is not very forthcoming with information.

And as for Mahmud, the court ordered him to have supervised rights with Sophia. He has not bothered to see her for over a year. Instead, opting to leave the United States all together.  He has not had any contact with her (though he didn't have that much contact with her in the past anyway: now we know why: he had another family), and he does not pay child support, but you know what? My niece is safe. She is happy. And from all I have seen and know, not much has changed in her life.

Today, I am proud to call Peter my good friend. What he did to help Peter did without ever asking for anything. And that is a hero.

When I think about what is it that could make a man become such a fierce child advocate, willing to give of his time and use his own resources to help families like my own, I realize that the events Peter has seen as conveyed in Chasing The Cyclone give him the inspiration and courage to help others.

Tonight, with my niece's summer visit beginning in only a few hours, I must say I am excited to see her and so thankful to Peter that tomorrow will arrive the way it will.

For information on Peter Senese and his fantastic work with the I CARE Foundation, please visit www.stopchildabduciton.org or visit http://internationalparentalchildabduciton.blogspot.com/

You may also want to visti the U.S. Department of State's Office of Children's Issues, as they are the government agency who attempts to help abducted children.

Finally, to my adorable niece, here is a simple message: I love you! Let the fun begin!

 

How Single or Dual Parenting Affects Early Brain Development

So many of the bad things we see in the news today stems from a person's upbringing during childhood. I have always believed that we are a product of our upbringing and thus a dual parenting approach really does make a big difference in one's development - for the better. 

It’s a study in mice, but results from an intriguing experiment suggests that having one or two parents can affect new nerve growth in the brain, and that male and females respond differently to these influences.

Extensive studies involving mice and rats showed that early life experiences could have profound effects on intellectual, emotional and social development. Negative parenting environments can affect the stress response in young pups, and make them hypervigilant to threats, while nurturing and supporting upbringing can instill resilience and novelty-seeking behaviors. Studies of how new nerves developed in the brains of young pups also hinted at the importance of parental care; positive parental environments tended to promote the growth of neurons in the dentate gyrus, a region of the brain responsible for learning, storing memories and spatial coordination. So researchers from the University of Calgary’s Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI) decided to take a closer look at different parenting models to figure out how they affected nerve growth and the behavioral consequences of that neural development.

They started with eight-week old mice and placed them in three separate rearing environments. In the first group, impregnated females were left to birth their litters and raise their pups alone until the offspring were weaned; in the second group, impregnated females were placed in cages with a virgin female who helped the mother raise the pups until they were weaned; and in the third group, females were placed with the male fathers of their litters. Once the young animals were weaned, the researchers put them through a series of tests to measure their cognitive, memory and social skills, as well as their fear response. They also injected the animals with a dye that could track the growth of new neurons wherever they sprouted in the brain.

To their surprise, they discovered that being raised in either of the two-parent situations boosted nerve growth in the dentate gyrus, but especially for the male mice. Female mice showed the same amount of neural growth regardless of whether they were raised by one or two parents, but they still developed more new nerves in the memory-processing area of the brain than male mice raised just by their mothers.

Because the dentate gyrus involves learning, the male mice raised by two parents were also more likely to freeze when conditioned with contextual cues to recognize a threat. Such a heightened sensitive could reflect their denser population of nerves in the part of the brain responsible for such learning and recall.

Female mice, on the other hand, tended to show differences in another type of nerve development when raised by two parents compared to one. Females with two parents developed twice the number of neurons in the corpus callosum, a thick band of nerve fibers that facilitates communication between the two sides of the brain and coordinates balance, attention and arousal. Previous studies showed that nurturing or enriched environments can promote connectivity in this region, and enhance social behavior and spatial coordination. Indeed, in the study, female mice raised in two-parent cages were more adept at navigating a ladder made of uneven rungs than female mice raised by their mothers only. All females, however, were better at the task than males, since the rearing environment appeared to affect corpus callosum development in the females more than the males.

By observing how the parents cared for their offspring in the different situations, the scientists say that pups raised by two parents experienced more licking and grooming overall compared to those being cared for by just their mothers; the sex differences could have risen from the fact that mothers tend to preferentially lick male pups more than female offspring, and in two-parent environments, the other parent may simply follow the mother’s lead, leading to differences in the nerve growth between the genders.

So how are these results important for understanding how parental environments affect brain development in young children? Understanding the potential influence that different rearing situations can have on nerve growth could help researchers gain better insight into the cognitive, emotional and behavioral abnormalities that affect people, the study authors say.

For example, the study also showed that the effects of rearing appeared to last throughout the animals’ lifetime, and were passed on to the next generation. The pups raised in two-parent cages also had offspring that fared better on cognitive and social skills tests than the pups of animals raised in the single-parent cages. “We found that parental attention can directly impact long term brain health into adulthood. It shows there is a mechanism that increases brain cells as adults. The fact that they carried on to the next generation is astounding, which means it is almost imprinted or encoded in the offspring,” says senior author Samuel Weiss, the director of HBI.

Weiss says anecdotal evidence suggests similar mechanisms may occur in humans. “We are not at a point yet–although we will be shortly–where we can actually measure brain cell turn over in the adult human brain. [But] there will be an opportunity down the line to see if the same mechanism will apply in the human population where there is increased parental attention and long term brain health,” he says.

There is some preliminary evidence that Weiss’ findings in mice may have some validity in the human setting; previous studies in humans have found that children raised in a positive, nurturing environment tend to have a much healthier trajectory and are less likely to encounter problems with violent and aggressive behavior, for example, or engage in drug or alcohol abuse. Taken together, that data adds more weight to the importance of early childhood experiences in shaping the brain and, ultimately, who we are.

Happy Birthday, Mom.

Today was the day my mother was born: May 22nd, 1921.  She would have been 92 if she was physically with us today.  But five years ago, it was her time to join my father in heaven.

So mom, if you're looking down this way today, know that I love you and know that you are always a part of me.

Happy Birthday, my amazing mother Betty.

You are missed, and you are always loved, which makes the missing part a little easier.

Love,
Ray

Oklahoma Tornado Aftermath Leaves Trail Of Destruction In Moore

Cannot believe the devastation ... my heart and prayers goes out to everyone in Oklahoma.  Tornados are deadly, and appear to be more frequent and larger in size than ever before. 

Pre-dawn emergency workers searched feverishly for survivors in the rubble of homes, primary schools and an hospital in an Oklahoma City suburb ravaged by a massive Monday afternoon tornado feared to have killed up to 91 people and injured well over 200 residents.

The 2-mile(3-km) wide tornado tore through town of Moore outside Oklahoma City, trapping victims beneath the rubble as one elementary school took a direct hit and another was destroyed.

Reporters were cleared back from Plaza Towers Elementary School, which sustained a direct hit Oklahoma Lieutenant Governor Todd Lamb told CNN. But television pictures showed firefighters from more than a dozen fire departments working under bright spotlights to find survivors.

President Barack Obama declared a major disaster area in Oklahoma, ordering federal aid to supplement state and local efforts in Moore after the deadliest U.S. tornado since one killed 161 people in Joplin, Missouri, two years ago.

There was an outpouring of grief on Plaza Towers' Facebook page, with messages from around the country including one pleading simply: "Please find those little children."

A separate Facebook page set up to reunite people in the area hit by a tornado on Sunday with their belongings and pets also showed entries for Moore residents overnight.

Another elementary school, homes and a hospital were among the buildings leveled in Moore, leaving residents of the town of about 50,000 people stunned at the devastation and loss of life. Many residents were left without power and water.

The Oklahoma medical examiner said 20 of the 91 expected to have been killed were children. The office had already confirmed 51 dead and had been told during the night by emergency services to expect 40 more bodies found in the debris, but had not yet received them.

At least 60 of the 240 people injured were children, area hospitals said.

The National Weather Service assigned the twister a preliminary ranking of EF4 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, meaning the second most powerful category of tornado with winds up to 200 mph (320 kph).

Witnesses said Monday's tornado appeared more fierce than the giant twister that was among the dozens that tore up the area on May 3, 1999, killing more than 40 people and destroying thousands of homes. That tornado ranked as an EF5, meaning it had winds over 200 mph.

The 1999 event in Oklahoma ranks as the third-costliest tornado in U.S. history, having caused more than $1 billion in damage at the time, or more than $1.3 billion in today's dollars. Only the devastating Joplin and Tuscaloosa tornadoes in 2011 were more costly. Jeff Alger, 34, who works in the Kansas oil fields on a fracking crew, said his wife Sophia took their children out of school when she heard a tornado was coming and then fled Moore and watched it flatten the town from a few miles away.

"They didn't even have time to grab their shoes," said Alger, who has five children aged four to 11. The storm tore part of the roof off of his home. He was with his wife at Norman Regional Hospital to have glass and other debris removed from his wife's bare feet.

Moore was devastated with debris everywhere, street signs gone, lights out, houses destroyed and vehicles tossed about as if they were toys.

The dangerous storm system threatened several southern Plains states with more twisters. The area around Moore faces the risk of severe thunderstorms on Tuesday, which could hamper rescue efforts.


STORM ALERTS

Speaking outside Norman Regional Hospital Ninia Lay, 48, said she huddled in a closet through two storm alerts and the tornado hit on the third.

"I was hiding in the closet and I heard something like a train coming," she said under skies still flashing with lightning. The house was flattened and Lay was buried in the rubble for two hours until her husband Kevin, 50, and rescuers dug her out.

"I thank God for my cell phone, I called me husband for help."

Her daughter Catherine, seven, a first-grader at Plaza Towers Elementary School, took shelter with classmates and teachers in a bathroom when the tornado hit and destroyed the school. She escaped with scrapes and cuts.


SCHOOL DESTROYED

The National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center provided the town with a warning 16 minutes before the tornado touched down at 3:01 p.m. (2001 GMT), which is greater than the average eight to 10 minutes of warning, said Keli Pirtle, a spokeswoman for the center in Norman, Oklahoma.

The notice was upgraded to emergency warning with "heightened language" at 2:56 p.m., or five minutes before the tornado touched down, Pirtle said.

Television media measured the tornado at more than 2 miles (3 km) wide, with images showing entire neighborhoods flattened.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposed a temporary flight restriction that allowed only relief aircraft in the area, saying it was at the request of police who needed quiet to search for buried survivors.

Oklahoma activated the National Guard, and the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency activated teams to support recovery operations and coordinate responses for multiple agencies.

Briarwood Elementary School, which also stood in the storm's path, was all but destroyed. On the first floor, sections of walls had been peeled away, giving clear views into the building; while in other areas, cars hurled by the storm winds were lodged in the walls.

The number of injured as reported by several hospitals rose rapidly throughout the afternoon.

"The whole city looks like a debris field," Glenn Lewis, the mayor of Moore, told NBC.

"It looks like we have lost our hospital. I drove by there a while ago and it's pretty much destroyed," Lewis said.

The massive twister struck at the height of tornado season, and more were forecast. On Sunday, tornadoes killed two people and injured 39 in Oklahoma.