Evolving Notions of Schizophrenia as a Developmental Neurocognitive Disorder.

We review the changing conceptions of schizophrenia over the past 50 years as it became understood as a disorder of brain function and structure in which neurocognitive dysfunction was identified at different illness phases. The centrality of neurocognition has been recognized, especially because neurocognitive deficits are strongly related to social and role functioning in the illness, and as a result neurocognitive measures are used routinely in clinical assessment of individuals with schizophrenia. From the original definitions of the syndrome of schizophrenia in the early 20th century, impaired cognition, especially attention, was considered to be important.

Bimanual grasping does not adhere to Weber's law.

According to Weber's law, a fundamental principle of perception, visual resolution decreases in a linear fashion with an increase in object size. Previous studies have shown, however, that unlike for perception, grasping does not adhere to Weber's law. Yet, this research was limited by the fact that perception and grasping were examined for a restricted range of stimulus sizes bounded by the maximum fingers span.

Antibody-specific model of amino acid substitution for immunological inferences from alignments of antibody sequences.

Antibodies are glycoproteins produced by the immune system as a dynamically adaptive line of defense against invading pathogens. Very elegant and specific mutational mechanisms allow B lymphocytes to produce a large and diversified repertoire of antibodies, which is modified and enhanced throughout all adulthood. One of these mechanisms is somatic hypermutation, which stochastically mutates nucleotides in the antibody genes, forming new sequences with different properties and, eventually, higher affinity and selectivity to the pathogenic target.

Quantitative social science. A network framework of cultural history.

The emergent processes driving cultural history are a product of complex interactions among large numbers of individuals, determined by difficult-to-quantify historical conditions. To characterize these processes, we have reconstructed aggregate intellectual mobility over two millennia through the birth and death locations of more than 150,000 notable individuals. The tools of network and complexity theory were then used to identify characteristic statistical patterns and determine the cultural and historical relevance of deviations.

Evaluation of traumatic brain injury: brain potentials in diagnosis, function, and prognosis.

The focus of this review is an analysis of the use of event-related brain potential (ERP) abnormalities as indices of functional pathophysiology in survivors of traumatic brain injury (TBI). TBI may be the most prevalent but least understood neurological disorder in both civilian and military populations. In the military, thousands of new brain injuries occur yearly; this lends considerable urgency to the use of highly sensitive ERP tools to illuminate brain changes and to address remediation issues.