Researchers from the National Institutes of Health have discovered the first genes linked to stuttering — a complex of three mutated genes that may be responsible for one in every 11 stuttering cases, especially in people of Asian descent [Los Angeles Times]. Scientists have long suspected that stuttering has genetic roots, as it’s often seen in families and twins, but this is the first time they’ve identified genes linked to the problem.

Dennis Drayna, the geneticist who led the study, said he was shocked that two of the implicated genes were linked to rare, fatal metabolic disorders [USA Today], but noted that must stutterers don’t suffer from those disorders. Surprisingly, the genes that were altered in the stutterers are involved in removing metabolic waste from brain cells.

The researchers analyzed a section of chromosome 12 in a large Pakistani family and found that there were several mutations in three particular genes. “We think a special group of cells in the brain are particularly sensitive to these subtle mutations in these genes,” Drayna said [BusinessWeek]. He suspects that the mutated genes still partially function, but likened the system to a car that needs a tune-up: “It still runs but not quite right. Some cells in the body need this to run like a Ferrari in order to function properly and those cells are involved in the production of speech in the brain,” he continued [BusinessWeek].

Drayna said that this finding, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, would be instrumental in identifying children who might develop a speech impediment later on in life. This could help parents preclude future problems by getting the child into speech therapy early on. The National Institutes of Health estimates that there are 3 million people in the United States afflicted with this speech impediment–many of them children. About 60 percent of these people have at least one family member who stutters. Researchers believe that other genes will be found that also play a role in stuttering.

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Image: iStockphoto

For those of you waiting with bated breath…

I’m happy to announce that, following last week’s news about the Lancet’s retraction of the 1998 paper that started the modern vaccine-autism scare, I decided to focus my first Point of Inquiry episode on this topic–and secured a guest who’s probably the best in the business for that purpose. I’m referring to Dr. Paul Offit, Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, life-saving inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, and most important for our purposes, the author of the single best book on the whole autism-vaccine fiasco, 2008’s Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure.

I’ve now read Offit’s fantastic book twice, and greatly enjoyed the conversation we had about it for the show. (Minus the gazillion technical hoops I had to jump through to learn how to record the program, which will hopefully get a lot easier.) I won’t tip my hand about the show any further–it airs tomorrow, please listen then–but I’m confident that listeners will enjoy and learn much from it (even though, given that this is my first show as a radio host, utter perfection is hardly to be expected).

I’ll have a post tomorrow as soon as the show is up and available for download.

What are we going to do with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?

The panel got itself in major trouble a few weeks ago when it admitted a major goof, that it included a detail in its 2007 report saying the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035, which is a huge exaggeration. Chief Rajendra Pachauri stood by the report as a whole as a sound piece of research, and indeed the first section of the four-part series, which is about physics of anthropogenic climate change, has seen no errors surface. That section laid out the evidence that human activities are boosting carbon dioxide levels in the air and are therefore warming the planet. But four mistakes have been discovered in the second report, which attempts to explain how global warming might affect daily life around the world [Christian Science Monitor].

The IPCC’s errors have given ammunition to deniers of global warming, especially U.S. politicians who have spent the recent batch of snowstorms beating their chests over how wrong climate scientists must be for there to be a blizzard in February. (Though to be fair, and in recognition of the fact that all politicians are opportunists, people on the other side have blamed single storms like Hurricane Katrina on climate change, which is just as silly.) So, to save some face for climate science, several scientists have proposed ways to fix the IPCC in this week’s issue of the journal Nature:

1. Split Into Three Panels

The University of East Anglia’s Mike Hulme proposed breaking up the IPCC into three: one group for science, one to evaluate how climate change could alter various regions of the globe, and one to debate policy options. Says Hulme: “This restructuring would allow clearer distinctions to be made in areas that have been troublesome for the IPCC: assessments of published knowledge versus policy analysis and evaluation; the globalized physical sciences versus more geographically and culturally nuanced knowledge; a one-size, top-down model of ownership and governance versus more inclusive, representative and regionally varying forms of governance.”

2. Make it Independent

For German researcher Eduardo Zorita, it’s not just the IPCC’s mistakes that make it lose public trust, it’s the fact that it’s full of government nominees that occupy “a blurred space between science and politics,” and work under unmanageable stress and deadlines. Zorita says the a climate body ought to be more like the US Congressional Budget Office—accountable, but independent.

3. Don’t Throw Out the Baby With the Bathwater

Thomas F. Stocker has worked with the IPCC, and defends it as an “honest broker,” but not a perfect one. Rather than throwing away something that he argues has served the world well for two decades, he recommends against swift overhaul because of a spat of bad news. That includes resisting calls to speed up the process: “The panel concluded that the production of comprehensive reports roughly every six years is preferable because it ensures the robustness required for a thorough and rigorous assessment. Faster turnover would jeopardize the multi-stage review and thus compromise authority and comprehensiveness.”

4. Hurry Up Already

Jeff Price of the World Wildlife Federation takes the opposite stance: “The current period between assessments is too long. One option would be for the IPCC, or another body, to produce an annual review, assessment and synthesis of the literature for policy-makers (for example, three annual review volumes with a synthesis chapter in each volume) prepared by experts in the field.” He also recommends shorter, quickly produced papers in the interim between the longer tomes.

5. Open It Up

Citing the black eye that climate scientists got from the University of East Anglia emails controversy, IPCC contributor John R. Christy says that the IPCC needs to be as open as it can be, even at the risk of a little craziness: “An idea we pitched a few years ago that is now worth reviving was to establish a living, ‘Wikipedia-IPCC’. Groups of four to eight lead authors, chosen by learned societies, would serve in rotating, overlapping three-year terms to manage sections organized by science and policy questions (similar to the Fourth Assessment Report).… Controversies would be refereed by the lead authors, but with input from all sides in the text, with links to original documents and data. The result would be more useful than occasional big books and would be a more honest representation of what our fledgling science can offer. Defining and following rules for this idea would be agonizing, but would provide greater openness.”

If you want to read the full text of the recommendations, they’re currently available for free at Nature.

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Image: flickr / bsabarnowl

If you play right-wing radio-host Rush Limbaugh to a bunch of bark beetles, could the sound kill them? Or could rock music make make insects so annoyed that they’ll stop whatever they’re doing? In one of the goofier experiments we’ve heard of lately, scientists decided to find out.

The researchers had a serious goal: to find a way to combat invasive beetles and to stop their destructive, tree-destroying, bark-eating behavior. The answer: loud, nasty, and offensive noises.

Changing ecosystems and climate change have allowed destructive bark beetles to spread out through new territories, where they’re wreaking havoc on the ponderosa, pinyon, and lodgepole pines. So scientists took infested trees back to the lab and played the “nastiest, most offensive sounds” they could think of to the beetles in the bark. Enter, Limbaugh, Queen, and Guns n’ Roses.

The beetles were not amused.

Discovery News reports:

The sounds disrupted tunneling, mating and reproduction for the beetles, making it harder for the insects to eat through the trees. The project, dubbed “Beetle Mania,” concluded that acoustic stress may disrupt the tenacious insects’ feeding and even cause the beetles to kill each other, according to a presentation recently at the National Meeting of the Entomological Society of America.

But after a while, the beetles grew accustomed to the noxious noises, researchers found. What ticked off the beetles even more than Limbaugh was the manipulated call of the insect itself. The scientists took the aggression call made by males of the “tree killer” Dendroctonus species and altered the call, making it longer and louder than usual. This drove the beetles nuts. When they heard this sound right before mating they turned on each other, with the male beetles tearing apart the females.

So, what might the beetles have appreciated, if not loud, clangy, obnoxious music? The scientists suspect they might quite like their Liverpool-born namesakes.

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Image: The Rush Limbaugh Show

Does the human brain have a “God spot”–a particular region that regulates feelings of spirituality and connection to the universe? One year ago, DISCOVER reported on a scientific study of spiritual people that couldn’t pinpoint one location in the brain as key to controlling religious feelings. But now a new study proposes that there is a link between the physical make-up of the brain and attitudes towards religion and spirituality.

By observing brain cancer patients before and after brain surgery, researchers in Italy have found that damage to the posterior part of the brain, specifically in an area called the parietal cortex, can increase patients’ feelings of “self transcendence,” or feeling at one with the universe. The parietal cortex is the region that is is usually involved in maintaining a sense of self, for example by helping you keep track of your body parts. It has also been linked to prayer and meditation [New Scientist].

The study, led by psychologist Cosimo Urgesi of the University of Udine in Italy, surveyed 88 brain cancer patients before and after surgery to remove their tumors. They were made to fill out a questionnaire regarding their beliefs, including a section to check their measure of “self-transcendence.” People score highly for this trait if they answer “yes” to questions such as: “I often feel so connected to the people around me that I feel like there is no separation”; “I feel so connected to nature that everything feels like one single organism”; and “I got lost in the moment and detached from time”. The same people also tend to believe in miracles, extrasensory perception and other non-material phenomena [New Scientist].

The scientists found that before the surgery, patients with parietal cortex tumors reported higher levels of self-transcendence than patients with tumors in the frontal cortex. After the tumors were removed, the parietal cortex patients had even higher self-transcendence scores, while the frontal cortex patients showed no change.

The researchers say these findings, published in the journal Neuron, suggest that selective damage to the parietal cortex caused a specific increase in religiosity and spirituality. Patients who had parietal cortex tumors removed also dealt better with bad news regarding their mortality and health; while the ones with problems in the frontal cortex were more bitter about health problems. Urgesi hypothesized that naturally low activity in parietal regions in people without either brain damage or cancer could predispose them to self-transcendent feelings, and perhaps even to religions that emphasize such experiences such as Buddhism [New Scientist].

Critics point out that the study left a lot of unanswered questions, and note that directly equating spirituality to the self-transcendence scale is somewhat controversial. But other researchers see this study as an important step in understanding the religious brain. Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania said, “Sometimes people are quite skeptical about combining spirituality and religion with neuroscience,” he says. “This is one of the few things I’ve read that gives the hope that some of these questions might be tractable” [ScienceNow Daily News].

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Image: Cosimo Urgesi