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...fascinating study published in the current issue of Science helps fill in a bit of the picture, drawing evidence from that research-friendly fellow mammal, the mouse. The authors, a team from State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, wanted to look at whether the ability to learn is affected by changes in brain chemistry that occur at puberty. They devised a task that was relatively complex (at least for a mouse) and required learning how to avoid a moving platform that delivered a very mild shock. (See the top 10 animal stories...
...this abundance of receptors, which recede later in adolescence, interferes with learning. And just as fascinating, a dose of THP reverses the learning deficit. "We are suggesting that mild stress is advantageous to learning in adolescence," she says. (Smith's current study involved only female mice; she plans to look next at males and females to see if there are gender differences on the learning task...
...said he thought an apparent drop-off in the ability to learn new things at puberty might merely reflect the fact that teenagers are becoming more attuned to social issues than dull learning tasks: "It may be a shift in what we pay attention to and are motivated to look at that's driving this." But that would not explain Smith's mice or similar biochemical changes she has observed in tissue samples related to learning. (There's no question of motivation in a petri dish...
Merkel has mostly tried to steer clear of confrontation by adopting a presidential style of leadership. To stop the infighting over health care she appointed a government commission to look into the matter. But her approval ratings are slipping. A poll by the TNS Emnid Institute on Feb. 17 found 51% of Germans were satisfied with her work, down from 61% the month before. With the new government "arguing more than the old coalition government," says Manfred Güllner, head of the Forsa Polling Institute, "Angela Merkel has to be careful that she doesn't lose her voters...
...Mexico's absence has left a critical leadership hole in the hemisphere's midsection. But as Calderón gets set to host U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on March 23, he looks determined to fill that void again. Last month he convened a summit in Cancún to create a multilateral organization promoting regional unity - a body that includes all 32 Latin American and Caribbean nations but pointedly excludes the U.S. and Canada. The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) "makes possible an old desire that [we] have [our] own space for dialogue and political...