"Handedness" and Asymmetry

What do left-handedness, brain asymmetry, and the gene LRRTM1 have in common?

In England recently, the journal Molecular Psychiatry announced that scientists at Oxford University have discovered the first gene that appears to increase the odds of someone being left-handed! The gene, LRRTM1 seems to play a part in controlling which part of a person’s brain takes control.

Because the brain separates functions into either the left or the right side, asymmetry can cause problems in our ability to control our use of language or emotion. For right-handed people the controls for speech and language are usually found in the left brain and the control for emotion found in the right brain. In left-handed people the opposite is true.

Dr. Clyde Francks of Oxford’s Centre for Human Genetics said that “we hope this study’s finding will help us understand the development of asymmetry in the brain.” Marjorie Wallace of SANE, a mental health charity in England, agrees with Dr. Francks that, even though brain asymmetry found in left-handed people is one possible factor in developing schizophrenia, “the vast majority of left-handers will never develop a problem.” Many factors linked together are most probably the cause of this disease.

Some prominent people who are or were left-handers (and remember to include baseball players such as Babe Ruth and many pitchers) include Prince Charles, Queen Victoria, Pablo Picasso, Charlie Chaplin, Benjamin Franklin, Paul McCartney, and Leonardo da Vinci!

To discover more information on left-handedness you can look for articles in the wonderful databases offered through the State Library of Kansas. http://www.kslc.org/

If you go to Thomson-Gale (InfoTrac’s) multi-database search box simply click the word search without entering anything you will see the Subject Guide Search. Use the Subject of “handedness” and chick the box beside the Limit of documents with full-text. Click Search and choose the Sub-division of “research”. You will locate full-text articles from magazines such as American Music Teacher, Science News, and Personnel Today. If instead you use the Subject search term “laterality” you can find articles from the Washington Post, New Statesman, and People Weekly all dealing with this topic.

In Thomson-Gale’s Kids InfoBits, young researchers can find out about “handedness” and locate articles from the Columbia Encyclopedia, National Geographic Kids, and Sports Illustrated Kids.

In Proquest’s suite of databases you can search “left handedness” and discover full-text articles from New Scientist, Literary Review, Today’s Parent, the Wall Street Journal, and Health and Medicine Week!

SIRS will find even more information for those young researchers. Using the search term “left handedness” they can access articles from many sources such as World Almanac for Kids, Current Health, and the Dallas Morning News.

Enjoy your access as a resident of Kansas! USE and LEARN!

Have You got Rhythm? You Bet You Do!

Mid-summer’s night is here, the shortest night in the year. (That is a rhyme, not to be confused with a rhythm.) Although they have the same Latin and Greek root words they mean very different things. Rhythm is a “nonrandom variation” or “regulated pattern” according to the dictionary.

You may have heard about the cicadas coming out of their 17-year underground nap to pop into the sunlight for a brief dazzling sexual orgy. You also might have noticed that when you travel great distances for meetings or vacations you just aren’t “in sync” with the days and nights for a while. Both of these examples demonstrate how our built-in circadian rhythms affect us.

As it turns out we all have “clock cells” instructing our bodies that it is time to go to bed or get up and get busy. These same cells probably also trigger different behaviors as the seasons and amount of light change. And it isn’t only us! It seems that all animals from dogs to squirrels to birds to insects are subject to this internal clock.

Brandeis University researchers recently published an article in Cell that uses fruit flies to discover how we all adjust to long summer days versus long winter nights. Some of the research on circadian rhythms could explain the varying drives to reproduce (cicadas), migrate (birds, monarch butterflies), and hibernate (turtles, bears, etc.). There is also evidence that these same rhythms might be positively altered to alleviate conditions such as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and various depressions.

“Circadian Rhythms” is the term to use when you search the State Library’s Thomson-Gale databases. Go into the T-G general search box using http://www.kslc.org and you will find many wonderful articles covering various aspects of this phenomenon with titles such as Jet Lag and Internal Clock. If you want to see what Kids InfoBits has for younger researchers just use the same search term and find articles on biorhythms, and “Days of Our Lives”. Also from T-G is the Health and Wellness Resource Center that will yield several Harvard Special Health Reports along with over 1,400 articles from journals such as Diabetic Medicine and Journal of Biological Rhythms.

SIRS will show you encyclopedia articles and magazine articles from Teen Newsweek, Current Health, and Odyssey plus many others.

ProQuest actually uses the singular for its best search term. Type in “Circadian Rhythm” (no “s”) in the general search box and ask for Full Text Only (upper middle of main page). You will find over 800 fantastic articles from magazine titles such as Flying Safety, Science Letters, International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, Genetics, and Pediatrics for Parents!

There are so many things that you can find when you use the databases offered through your State Library of Kansas! http://www.kslc.org

The Scoop on Crop Circles

It is June and all the state is covered with crops! Kansas is beautiful in June with many shades of green, gold, and tan that can be seen from hilltops and from the sky. Wheat is filling out, corn is on the rise and sorghum and beans are about to be planted. But, it is also the time of year when most crop circles seem to appear. Even if you haven’t seen one, you have probably heard of them.

Looking out of an airplane on your way over Kansas the usual circles you see are provided by our central-pivot irrigation systems. There are small ones, medium sized ones, and huge ones. They seem to cover the whole of western Kansas. But they are not the Only circles in our crops. Though crop circles seem to appear most often in certain areas of England, they have popped up in Kansas, Ohio, and other parts of the United States’ bread basket.

What ARE these strange and sometimes intricate designs? Could they really be messages from outer space? What, besides space aliens could create them? Some say that the sheer complexity of the patterns argues for exactly that. However, doubters are always ready to prove otherwise.

“Most tend to think of crop circles as having been created by bored, drunk folk trekking out to a field just after last orders with ropes and boards upsetting the local arable growers for a laugh and grinning like a Cheshire Cat the next morning as they drive by their night's work. This may be true in a few instances” comments Hugh Bloom last December in an article in Farmer Weekly (England).

Anyone with thoughts of imitating the aliens should think again. The destruction of crops by other than their owner could land someone in jail and cost them whatever the losses might be. In one incident not so long ago teens confessed to flattening a circle into a field. They apparently confessed to authorities even before they said hello! The newspaper article said that they would be charged and would compensate the farmer.

So, leave the crop circles and other designs to the aliens. That way we can all enjoy our summers AND our crops and you won’t anger anyone from outer space!

Learn more about this topic by using "crop circles" in any of the search boxes for the databases mentioned below.

• Here are the articles that were gleaned from the wonderful databases offered through the State Library ( http://www.kslc.org/ ) and used to form this article. The databases included Thomson-Gale, Sirs Discoverer, and ProQuest. There is something for Everybody at the State Library!

Anderson, Alun. "Britain's crop circles: reaping by whirlwind? Scientists are finally offering down-to-earth explanations for a phenomenon that had been the province of mystics." Science 253.n5023 (August 30, 1991): 961(2). Thomson Gale. State Library of Kansas.

Broom, Hugh. “Open mind on crop circles.” Farmers Weekly. Sutton. 145.22 (Dec 1, 2006): 40. ProQuest. State Library of Kansas.

Carol Biliczky. “ Four teens confess to crop circle: Geometric design in soybean field creates buzz south of Stark County; curious spectators visit.” Knight Ridder Tribune Business News, Washington. (July 25, 2006): 1. ProQuest. State Library of Kansas.

Crop circles: do pranksters make them?" Know Your World Extra 39.3 (Oct 14, 2005): 8(2). Thomson Gale. State Library of Kansas.

Crop circles: Human hoax or megamystery? Read. March 5, 1999. 16(6). Sirs Discoverer. State Library of Kansas.

"Crop Circles In Kansas." Space Daily (August 26, 2005): NA. Thomson Gale. State Library of Kansas

Martin, Noelene. “Mystery of the Circles.” Touchdown. (Ryde, Australia) May 1997. 134(5). Sirs Discoverer. State Library of Kansas.

Nickell, Joe. “Crop circle mania wanes: an investigative update." Skeptical Inquirer 19.n3 (May-June 1995): 41(3). Thomson Gale. State Library of Kansas.

Venezuela: popular TV channel replaced !

According to Venezuela’s President, Hugo Chavez, “(RCTV) became a threat to the country, so I decided not to renew the license . . .” The license ran through May 27^th this year. Radio Caracas TV had been the country's oldest and most popular private channel serving over 28,000,000 citizens.

Chavez has had a stormy relationship with the press and media during his turbulent presidency. He was popularly elected in 1999, but was removed from office in 2002 because he had alienated the business community, news media, labor leaders, and the Roman Catholic Church. He was returned to office two days later! For another two years there were petitions to allow a referendum to decide whether he should stay in office. He is still in office and is considered a major player in the oil producing world. He has placed many once-private businesses under public control effectively moving the country into the socialist arena.

The World Book, offered through the Kansas Library Card (http://www.kslc.org ), has loads of information on Venezuela and Chavez. This beautiful country has waterfalls, mountains, the ocean,and abundant oil and natural gas in just over 350,000 square miles. There is also information for your youngest researchers in the World Book Kids area found in the upper right area of the homepage. An audio version of the national athem is available there along with the Venezuelan flag and general information for youngsters.

To find in-depth information on the elimination of RCTV this last weekend use the ProQuest databases search box and type in “RADIO CRACAS TV”. You will locate articles from the Global Information Network, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and much more!

Using the Thomson-Gale (InfoTrac) databases search box type in “RCTV” and notice that the first 70-something magazine articles returned are from a Spanish language magazine “Politica.” Most of these are very recent and offer a great deal of information for those fluent in Spanish. You will also find articles from Variety, the Nation, and the National Catholic Reporter in English. If you click the tab for News (instead of Magazines) for these results, you will find many more articles. Most are from Spanish newspapers. However, you will find articles from the London Times, the International Herald Tribune, and Miami Herald among others.

You might want to look up “U.S.-Venezuela relations” or “Hugo Chavez and socialism” or “Venezuela and tourism.” Do your own search using the powerful databases from your State Library and see what else you can find out about Venezuela, Chavez, and Radio Caracas T.V.!

Gestures with Social Context – in Primates!

Remember sign language? American Indians sometimes communicated with this way with conquistadors, trappers, adventurers, and settlers. If we are in a foreign country and don’t know the words for what we want to convey we will often try to use gestures to help the native speaker to understand us.

It turns out that chimpanzees and bonobos (who are even more intelligent) do the same thing! We know they don’t speak words in their natural environment, but Emory University has been studying groups of primates and have observed 31 manual gestures and 18 facial/vocal signals that are regularly used. The researchers, Frans de Waal and Amy Pollick of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center have noticed that the different groups don’t all use the same gestures. Sometimes one chimp or bonobo will start a gesture and teach it to the others in their group.

All four groups exhibit the same facial and vocal expressions, but each group develops its own set of gestures. According to Dr. de Waal "a good example of a shared gesture is the open-hand begging gesture, used by both apes and humans. This gesture can be used for food, if there is food around, but it also can be used to beg for help, for support, for money and so on. It's meaning is context-dependent."

These findings were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and were discussed on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition on May 1^st. The Woodruff health Sciences Center at Emory University issued a news release on April 30 to the US Fed News Service. You can find this notice AND the transcript of the NPR Morning Edition interview through ProQuest using the search terms: gesture and communication and apes for the news service and gestures and “morning edition” for the National Public Radio transcript.

If this is a subject that interests you (or a friend or student) there are many great articles within the databases offered through the State Library of Kansas. The young researchers can use SIRS Discoverer and click the Animal icon. The right side of the screen will show a list. Click on Mammals, and then on Chimpanzee. Notice that bonobos are also listed in the “descriptors” area at the end of the article summary. If you don’t know what a bonobo looks like, go to the World Book Encyclopedia and look it up! You can also look there with the search term “chimpanzee gestures” for articles.

The more advanced searcher can use Thomson-Gale (InfoTrac) to locate some great articles using the basic search term chimpanzees communication. The search term chimpanzees and gesture will return pertinent articles in the ProQuest database. Play with the search terms and databases to see what works best for your search!