[Source:  Science Daily]

Goren Gordon, an artificial intelligence researcher from Tel Aviv University who runs the Curiosity Lab there, is no different.

He and his wife spend as much time as they can with their children, but there are still times when their kids are alone or unsupervised. At those times, they'd like their children to have a companion to learn and play with, Gordon says.

That's the case, even if that companion is a robot.

Working in the Personal Robots Group at MIT, led by Cynthia Breazeal, Gordon was part of a team that developed a socially assistive robot called Tega that is designed to serve as a one-on-one peer learner in or outside of the classroom.

[Source:  Medical News Today]
 

An enhanced diet helped reduce hearing loss in mice with the genetic mutation most commonly responsible for childhood deafness, new research suggests.
 

The study found that an antioxidant regimen of beta carotene (precursor to vitamin A), vitamins C and E and magnesium helped slow progression of hereditary deafness in the mice with a connexin 26 gene deletion. Mutations in this gene are a leading cause of genetic hearing loss in many populations.

[Source:  Disability Scoop]
 

More than 1 in 7 American children have a mental, behavioral or developmental disorder, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but prevalence is far from steady across the country.
 

At the high end, 21.5 percent of kids in Arkansas and Kentucky have one of the conditions. By contrast, California logs the lowest rate in the nation at 10.6 percent.

[Source: Care 2.com]
 

A World Health Organization representative has announced that the organization is alarmed by a sharp increase in the number of young people prescribed anti-depressants.
 

How prevalent is anti-depressant use among adolescents, and what can we do about it?

The WHO director of mental health Dr. Shekhar Saxena  explained to the BBC:

"Anti-depressant use amongst young people is and has been a matter of concern because of two reasons," he said. "One, are more people being prescribed anti-depressants without sufficient reason? And second, can anti-depressants do any major harm?"

[Source:  Pediatrics via Your Therapy Source]
 

Pediatrics published a large study on the relationship between delayed walking in children and the severity of intellectual disability in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) versus other non-ASD diagnoses.  The study sample included 1185 individuals (ASD, n = 903; non-ASD, n = 282) who received an evaluation at age 4 to 12 years that included an estimate of nonverbal IQ (NVIQ) and retrospectively reported age of walking from the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised. Delayed walking was defined as occurring at ≥16 months.

[Source:  Your Therapy Source]

Challenge visual spatial and visual discrimination skills with this puzzle.  Can you find the two cards that are exactly the same?