In a macabre twist, the hominid evolutionary tree’s most famous fossil star, Lucy, tumbled to her death from high up in a tree, a controversial new study suggests.

Some of the damage to Lucy’s 3.2-million-year-old partial skeleton most likely occurred when she fell from a height of 13 meters or more, say paleoanthropologist John Kappelman of the University of Texas at Austin and his colleagues. Lucy, an ancient ambassador of a prehuman species called Australopithecus afarensis, must have accidentally plunged from a tree while climbing or sleeping, the scientists propose online August 29 in Nature.
Bone breaks from head to ankle fit a scenario in which Lucy dropped the equivalent of least four to five stories, landing feet first before thrusting her arms out in an attempt to break her fall, Kappelman says. Tellingly, the ancient female’s right shoulder blade slammed into the top of her upper arm bone, Kappelman says. The shoulder end of Lucy’s arm bone displays sharp breaks, as well as bone fragments and slivers forcibly driven into the shaft.
Such damage frequently appears in present-day people who fall from great heights or are in serious car accidents, Kappelman says. Massive internal bleeding typically follows a body slam as hard as Lucy’s, he adds.

“Lucy probably bled out pretty fast after falling,” Kappelman says.
Nonsense, responds paleoanthropologist Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley. He calls the new paper “a classic example of paleoanthropological storytelling being used as clickbait for a commercial journal eager for media coverage.”

Cracks and breaks throughout Lucy’s skeleton occurred after her death, White asserts. Bone cracking was caused by fossilization and by pressure on fossils embedded in eroding sandstone. Fossilization-related breakage much like Lucy’s — including extensive shoulder-joint damage — appears on the bones of a variety of nonclimbing animals, including gazelles, hippos and rhinos, White says.
When people accidentally fall from heights between two and 21 meters, he adds, physicians have documented frequent fractures of the spine, head, elbows, wrists, ankles and feet — but not the shoulders.

Scientists have been unable to decipher how Lucy died since her 1974 discovery in Ethiopia by anthropologist Donald Johanson of Arizona State University in Tempe and his graduate student at that time, Tom Gray. A Johanson-led team, which included White, attributed Lucy’s bone damage primarily to fossilization in a 1982 report.

Intrigued by extensive crushing and breakage at Lucy’s right shoulder joint, Kappelman consulted orthopedic surgeon and study coauthor Stephen Pearce of the Austin Bone and Joint Clinic. When shown a 3-D printed model of Lucy’s skeleton enlarged to the size of a modern human adult (Lucy stood only about 107 centimeters tall, or 3 feet, 6 inches), Pearce said the arm damage looked like that caused by an individual extending an arm to break a steep fall.

Kappelman and colleagues then scoured high-resolution CT scans of Lucy’s bones obtained in 2008, when the ancient skeleton was brought to the University of Texas during a U.S. museum tour.

Along with the upper right arm bone and shoulder blade, damage consistent with hitting the ground after a long fall appeared in bones from an ankle, legs, pelvis, lower back, ribs, jaw and braincase, the researchers say. Fossilization and geological forces caused additional cracking and breaks on Lucy’s remains, as described in the 1982 report, they add.
Although initially skeptical that cause of death could be discerned in a fossil individual as old as Lucy, paleoanthropologist William Jungers of the Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York says the evidence indeed points to a fatal fall. No other explanation can account for Lucy’s pattern of bone damage, he says.

If Lucy toppled out of a tree while climbing or snoozing in a nest, her kind must have split time between life on the ground and in trees, Kappelman says. Some researchers have long argued that A. afarensis was built mainly for walking (SN: 12/1/12, p. 16).

Even today, Jungers says, deaths from accidental falls out of trees occur among some African hunter-gatherers, especially when raiding bee’s nests for honey (SN: 8/20/16, p. 10), and in wild chimps, animals more adept at tree climbing than Lucy was.

Lucy’s species could climb trees, White says, but “we do not know how often, or whether for shelter or food.”

As chief scientist for a voyage of the research vessel Endeavor, oceanographer Melissa Omand oversaw everything from the deployment of robotic submarines to crew-member bunk assignments. The November 2015 expedition 150 kilometers off Rhode Island’s coast was collecting data for Omand’s ongoing investigations of the fate of carbon dioxide soaked up by the ocean.

But Omand, an assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island’s campus in Narragansett, wasn’t on the ship. Instead of riding the waves with her crew, she was working, sometimes 16-hour days, inside a dark room at the university’s Inner Space Center — staring at computer monitors in a sort of NASA mission control for oceanographers. When she submitted the trip proposal a year earlier, she hadn’t foreseen that she’d be eight months pregnant with her first child when the ship set sail.
Still, missing the trip was unthinkable, she says. The Inner Space Center, she realized, offered a way to direct the mission from shore via satellite. After proposing the solution to her higher-ups, and a lot of meetings that followed, she got permission to be the first chief scientist to remotely lead an Endeavor cruise.

“She doesn’t let many obstacles get in her way,” says Colleen Durkin, an oceanographer at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California, who participated in the cruise. “That’s one of the fun things about working with her. She’s willing to try new things.”
Her commitment to her science and her drive to find creative solutions are helping Omand tackle a big problem in oceanography. For a decade, she has been studying the mechanisms — such as currents and the dining and dying of microorganisms — that move carbon and nutrients through the ocean. In a breakout paper, published last year in Science, she reported the discovery that eddies can pull carbon from phytoplankton deep into the ocean, a previously undescribed phenomenon. Studying the fate of that carbon isn’t just interesting, she says, it’s vital to predicting the fate of our climate. “The ocean has a huge capacity to absorb excess carbon dioxide in our atmosphere,” Omand says. But as the planet warms, atmosphere and ocean might interact differently. Scientists need all the information they can get to figure out how to adapt to those changing conditions and mitigate the effects of climate change.

Omand, 36, first got her feet wet on the rivers and lakes surrounding her hometown of Toronto. In her teens, she worked as a canoe guide, exploring the region’s waterways. “That was absolutely the root of my interest in earth science and environmental issues,” she says. “I’m essentially doing the same thing now, just on a much bigger boat.”

After starting off as a premed student at the University of Guelph in Canada, she was ultimately drawn to the university’s physics program. “I found it very satisfying that all these problems boiled down to a few underlying rules and equations,” she says. During her undergraduate studies, her focus was millions and millions of kilometers away from Earth’s oceans. She coded software used to help calibrate X-ray instruments on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers, which identified the makeup of Martian rocks.
While considering areas of physics for her graduate studies, Omand received an email that altered her heading. Chris Garrett, a professor (now emeritus) at Canada’s University of Victoria, introduced her to physical oceanography. “He showed me demonstrations of what happens to dye in a rotating water tank,” she recalls. “I was hooked by that.” The churning of water appealed to Omand for the same reason the field of physics did: Whether in tanks or oceans, the water’s movements can be expressed by a set of specific equations, called the Navier-Stokes equations.

Omand has applied these equations in much of her work. During a Ph.D. at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., she and colleagues studied the origins of a red tide off California’s coast. The team found that the red tide, fertilized by a layer of nutrients, had been festering under the ocean surface for a week before being drawn upward. Omand and her colleagues used a Jet Ski modified with a GPS system and scientific instruments to collect data. Later, as a postdoctoral researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, she and mentor Amala Mahadevan investigated mechanisms to explain how nitrogen, an important nutrient for phytoplankton, moves around below the sunlit layer of the sea.

During her time at Woods Hole, Omand also started tracking the journey of CO2 taken in by springtime algae blooms in the North Atlantic.
When the phytoplankton in these colossal blooms, which can stretch hundreds of kilometers across, die or are digested by other marine life, particles containing organic carbon are released into the water. The heavier of these particles sink, quarantining the carbon from the atmosphere. About 30 percent of all CO2 emitted by human activities has ended up in the oceans, thanks in part to these sinking particles.

Scientists had believed that smaller particles would remain near the surface. But with robotic submarines called gliders that cruised up and down the water column sensing light scattered by the particles, Omand and colleagues found a surprisingly large amount of small carbon particles. These particles were around 100 to 350 meters deep, in the ocean’s “twilight zone,” where phytoplankton rarely live.
Omand combined measurements such as temperature and salinity from several gliders to explain how the particles got pulled so far down. By analyzing those measurements alongside computer simulations and satellite data — an innovative mix of sources that provided finer details and the bigger picture — she showed that the carbon-rich particles were carried down by spiraling ocean currents called eddies. Water escaping these bowl-shaped depressions can become sandwiched between deeper ocean layers, remaining trapped along with any particles even once an eddy subsides.

The accompanying carbon drain cools the Earth, says Eric D’Asaro, an oceanographer at the University of Washington in Seattle who collaborated with Omand on the research. Though the finding doesn’t change the total amount of carbon known to be taken in, the study identifies a new mechanism that could account for as much as half of all carbon known to be pulled into the deep North Atlantic during spring. The mechanism could also play a role elsewhere in the world’s oceans, D’Asaro, Omand and colleagues reported in April 2015 in Science.

“Her work sets the table for the next decade in terms of understanding the interaction between the turbulence of the ocean and how carbon is injected down to depth,” says David Siegel, an oceanographer from the University of California, Santa Barbara. “She’s going to be one of the new leaders of this field.”

Now a mother — her daughter was born a few weeks after the cruise — and an assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island, Omand continues her creative problem-solving, often by calling on unexpected technology. On a research trip in June (she was on the ship this time), Omand used an iPhone in a waterproof case to automatically snap pictures every half hour of particles raining down from the ocean’s top layer. Scientists previously measured the rates of sinking particles with traps that provided no information about how the rates changed throughout the day. Omand got the idea to affix her old iPhone to the traps after being offered only $40 for the used phone. “There’s got to be something really amazing I can do with this,” she thought.

Next spring, Omand will harness the same telepresence software she used for the 2015 Endeavor trip to virtually take undergraduate students on board. Omand’s ability to harness technology to solve tricky scientific challenges is a big reason why she can identify new truths about our oceans, says Mahadevan. “Every problem she touches,” Mahadevan says, “something beautiful comes out.”

Mercury has gotten some new wrinkles in its old age. The innermost planet shows signs of relatively recent tectonic activity, a new study suggests.

Tiny cliffs on the surface — just tens of meters high and a few kilometers long — resemble breaks in the planet’s crust, researchers report online September 26 in Nature Geoscience. The diminutive sizes of the cliffs, their sharp edges and lack of large overlapping craters imply that the faults are geologically young — less than 50 million years old. That’s much younger than Mercury’s larger, eroded scarps seen elsewhere, which probably arose more than 3.5 billion years ago. The small scarps indicate that the surface still fractures as Mercury cools and contracts, the researchers suggest, though other explanations are possible.
Thomas Watters, a geologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and colleagues discovered the young escarpments in images taken by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, which orbited Mercury from 2011 to 2015. During the last 18 months of the mission, the spacecraft inched closer to the surface of Mercury, revealing new details such as these small scarps. The mission ended with an intentional crash landing on April 30, 2015 (SN Online: 4/30/15).

Mercury’s continued contraction isn’t surprising, says Sean Solomon, a planetary scientist at Columbia University. “It’s demanded by physics,” he says. Mercury has gradually cooled over its 4.6-billion-year history. As it cools, it shrinks. Sometimes that shrinkage cracks the surface. All of the other rocky planets shrivel over time as well, but their atmospheres have erased much of the evidence. Only on Mercury and the moon — both airless — is the history of contraction preserved because of limited erosion.

It’s not clear, though, if these new faults are related to that shrinking. “In and of themselves, they don’t tell us very much,” says Paul Byrne, a planetary geologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Without an analysis of how the small, young scarps relate to the large, old scarps, he says, it’s hard to draw conclusions. The new arrivals could just as well be produced by shifting rubble or shock waves from run-ins with asteroids, and if so would not be a sign of continuing tectonic activity.

A closer inspection of Mercury will have to wait until the European spacecraft BepiColombo, scheduled to launch in 2018, arrives in late 2024. While its altitude will be similar to MESSENGER’s, BepiColombo will get a better look at Mercury’s southern hemisphere, which should allow researchers to get a more global view of how all these wrinkles in the surface tie together.

Maps have long been used to show the animal kingdom’s range, regional mix, populations at risk and more. Now a new set of maps reveals the global distribution of genetic diversity.

“Without genetic diversity, species can’t evolve into new species,” says Andreia Miraldo, a population geneticist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. “It also plays a fundamental role in allowing species populations to adapt to changes in their environment.”
Miraldo and her colleagues gathered geographical coordinates for more than 92,000 records of mitochondrial DNA from 4,675 species of land mammals and amphibians. The researchers compared changes in cytochrome b, a gene often used to measure genetic diversity within a species, and then mapped the average genetic diversity for all species within roughly 150,000 square-kilometer areas.
For both mammals and amphibians, the tropical Andes and the Amazon have high genetic diversity, shown in dark blue. The same is true for mammal species in subtropical regions of South Africa and amphibian species in eastern North America, Miraldo and colleagues report in the Sept. 30 Science.
Areas affected by people, such as cities and croplands, show lower genetic diversity. The maps are a snapshot and so can’t quantify humans’ impact on this key marker, Miraldo notes. But she hopes the work provides a baseline to monitor how human activity and changes in climate affect the distribution of genetic diversity around the globe.

Plastic smells like supper for some seabirds. When the ubiquitous material ends up in the ocean, it gives off a chemical that petrels, prions and shearwaters often use to locate food, researchers report November 9 in Science Advances. That might lead the birds to ingest harmful junk instead of a real meal.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis let small beads of three common plastics linger off the coast of California. After a few weeks, the once-clean plastic accumulated grit, grime and bacteria that gave off an odiferous gas called dimethyl sulfide (SN: 2/20/16, p. 20). Phytoplankton give off the same gas, and certain seabirds use the odor as a cue that dinner is nearby. Birds that rely more heavily on dimethyl sulfide as a beacon for a nearby meal are more likely to ingest plastic than birds that don’t, the team found. Other marine animals that use the cue could also be fooled.

NEW ORLEANS — Chronic sleep problems are associated with atrial fibrillation — a temporary but dangerous disruption of heart rhythm — even among people who don’t suffer from sleep apnea. An analysis of almost 14 million patient records has found that people suffering from insomnia, frequent waking and other sleep issues are more likely than sound sleepers to experience a condition in which the upper chambers of the heart quiver instead of rhythmically beating, allowing blood to briefly stagnate.

“Even if you don’t have sleep apnea, is there something about sleep disruption that puts you at a higher risk of fibrillation,” said Gregory Marcus, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. “We should put a higher priority on studying sleep itself.” Marcus and Matthew Christensen, from the University of Michigan, presented their results November 14 at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association.
People with atrial fibrillation have double the risk of having a heart attack, and up to five times the risk of stroke. Although the heart condition can be a consequence of aging, its prevalence is rising at about 4 percent per year for reasons that aren’t totally explained. In the United States, about 5 million people currently have the condition, and that number is expected to rise to 12 million by 2030.

A large body of studies has found that sleep apnea, which occurs when a person stops breathing during the night, can lead to atrial fibrillation and a host of other health concerns. Identifying a risk of atrial fibrillation among people with no sleep apnea is unexpected, says Richard Becker, director of the University of Cincinnati Heart, Lung & Vascular Institute, who was not part of the study.

Marcus, Christensen and colleagues analyzed data from three different sources, including the California Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project, a database of almost 14 million patients. They also drew on records from more than 4,600 participants of Health eHeart Study who had filled out a sleep survey, and from the Cardiovascular Health Study, which has tracked more than 5,700 people for more than a decade. Those data allowed the researchers to follow patients over time, tracking which came first — the fibrillation or the sleep issues. The researchers included a variety of sleep disorders, such as insomnia, nighttime waking and shortened periods of rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep.

Among the results: People who frequently woke had a 33 percent greater chance of developing atrial fibrillation in one analysis, and a 47 percent higher chance in another. For the eHeart group, insomnia increased the odds by 17 percent. And among more than 14 million California records studied, insomnia increased the odds of future atrial fibrillation by 36 percent. Analysis of a subgroup undergoing sleep studies showed that less REM sleep also was associated with a higher probability of developing atrial fibrillation.

The study can’t explain why a lack of sleep even with normal breathing might hurt the heart, but the authors hypothesize that the mechanism could be tied to the body’s stress response.

Becker believes that cardiologists should emphasize sleep just as they do diet and exercise for lifestyle management. To workaholic, screen-fixated Americans, “this study sends a powerful message about wellness as a continuum throughout the day and night,” he says. “It offers clinicians and the public a 360-degree view of what is important for good health.”

Bedbugs give me nightmares. Really. I have dreamt of them crawling up my legs while I lie in bed. These are common bedbugs, Cimex lectularius, and after largely disappearing from our beds in the 1950s, they have reemerged in the last few decades to cause havoc in our homes, offices, hotels and even public transportation.

Now there’s a new nightmare. Or rather, another old one. It’s the tropical bedbug, C. hemipterus. Its presence has been confirmed in Florida, and the critters could spread to other southern states, says Brittany Campbell, a graduate student at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who led a new study that tracked down the pests.

Tropical bedbugs can be found in a geographic band of land running between 30° N latitude and 30° S. In the last 20 years or so, they’ve been collected from Tanzania, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Australia, Rwanda and more. Back in 1938, some were collected in Florida. There were more reports of the species in the following years, but none since the 1940s.

Then, in 2015, researchers at the Insect Identification Laboratory at the University of Florida identified bedbugs sent to the lab from a home in Brevard County, Florida, as tropical bedbugs. To confirm the analysis, researchers went to the home and collected more samples. They were indeed tropical bedbugs, the team reports in the September Florida Entomologist.

The family thought that the bedbugs must have been transported unknowingly into the house by one of the people who lived there. But no one living in the home had traveled outside the state recently, let alone outside the country. This suggests that tropical bedbugs can be found elsewhere in Florida, the team concludes.

Additional evidence comes from the Florida State Collection of Arthropods, which holds two female tropical bedbugs that, according to their label, were collected in Orange County, Florida, on June 11, 1989, from bedding. “Whether this species has been present in Florida and never disappeared, or has been reintroduced and remains in small populations, is not currently known,” the researchers write.

Why hasn’t anyone noticed? Well, people don’t usually send bedbugs to entomologists when they have an infestation, and your average victim isn’t going to notice the difference between the two species. “Both species are very similar,” Campbell says. Not only do they look alike, but they also both “feed on blood, hide in cracks and crevices and have similar lifestyles.” Plus, there’s been little research directly comparing the two species, she notes, so scientists don’t know how infestations might differ.

Just to give us all a few more nightmares, Campbell points out something else: While there’s probably no reason to worry that the creepy critters will spread as climate change warms the globe, she says that there is a potential for the species to move north “because humans provide nice conditions for bedbugs to develop.”

Fewer teenagers in the United States used drugs in 2016 than in previous decades. The positive news comes from an annual survey of almost 45,500 U.S. students in grades eight, 10 and 12.

“There’s a lot of good news here,” says pediatrician Sharon Levy of Boston Children’s Hospital. Public health messages from pediatricians, educators and others seem to be sinking in, she says. “I think that’s fabulous. Substance use is one of the most important — yet modifiable — behavioral health issues of adolescents.”
Adolescents’ use of many of the substances, including alcohol and cigarettes, hit an all-time low since the survey, known as the Monitoring the Future study, began collecting data 42 years ago. Heroin, methamphetamines, inhalants and stimulants also hit lows this year.

E-cigarettes have been particularly concerning as more adolescents gave the new devices a try, reaching a high in 2015 (SN: 5/28/16, p. 4). For the first time, the number of students who vape is declining, the survey found. In 2015, 16.3 percent of 12th-graders reported vaping in the last 30 days. In 2016, that fell to 12.5. Similar declines were evident among eighth- and 10th-graders.
In a happy surprise, misuse of prescription opioid use decreased in the last five years among 12th–graders. The drop was “a big surprise,” particularly against a backdrop of a much wider opioid epidemic in the general population (SN: 9/3/16, p. 14), Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Md., said December 13 at a news briefing.
The news isn’t all good, though. Marijuana bucked the declining trends, at least for 12th-graders. In 2016, about 6 percent of 12th-graders said they use marijuana daily — a number that hasn’t changed much in the last five years.

Researchers don’t yet know why the rates for many drugs are down, but one idea is that the drop in illegal drugs may stem in part from reductions in alcohol and tobacco use. “There is a connection there,” Lloyd Johnston, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who led the survey, said in the news briefing.

The survey and the information it produces is “extremely important,” Levy says, “but it’s not everything.” Other measures of kids’ drug use, such as rates of substance use disorders, will offer a fuller view of how adolescents interact with drugs, she says.

Macaque monkeys would be quite talkative if only their brains cooperated with their airways, a new study suggests.

These primates possess the vocal equipment to speak much as people do, say evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist W. Tecumseh Fitch of the University of Vienna and colleagues. But macaques lack brains capable of transforming that vocal potential into human talk. As a result, the monkeys communicate with grunts, coos and other similar sounds, the scientists conclude December 9 in Science Advances.

“Macaques have a speech-ready vocal tract but lack a speech-ready brain to control it,” Fitch says.

His team took X-ray videos of an adult macaque’s vocal tract while the animal cooed, grunted, made threatening sounds, smacked its lips, yawned and ate various foods. Measures of shifting shapes during these vocalizations allowed the researchers to estimate what types of speech sounds the monkey could potentially utter.
Monkeys, and presumably apes, have mouths, vocal cords and other vocal tract elements capable of articulating at least five vowel sounds, the researchers say. These consist of vowel pronunciations heard in the words bit, bet, bat, but and bought.
Consonant sounds within monkeys’ reach include those corresponding to the letters p, b, k, g, h, m and w, the scientists add.

An animal that can voice those vowels and consonants is capable of making understandable statements in English and many other languages, they conclude.

The new findings expand monkeys’ gab potential beyond that described in a pioneering 1969 study led by anthropologist and cognitive scientist Philip Lieberman, Fitch claims. Lieberman, now at Brown University in Providence, R.I., devised a computer model of a macaque’s speech potential based on measures of a cadaver monkey’s vocal tract.
Lieberman regards the new study as a replication of his 1969 report. Both investigations find that monkeys can emit a partial range of vowel sounds, Lieberman says. Each paper also determines that two especially distinctive vowel sounds, found in the words beet and boot, lie outside macaques’ vocal realm.

Hearing those sounds is another issue. Acoustic properties of the vowel sounds monkeys can produce make them relatively difficult for people to identify while listening to someone talk, Lieberman emphasizes. “If monkeys had humanlike brains, they could talk, but their speech would sound indistinct,” he says.

Fitch disagrees. By studying a living monkey’s vocal tract in action, the new study finds that these animals can make a broader range of sounds related to each of the five key vowels than reported by Lieberman, he argues. A talking monkey “would be distinct enough to understand, no worse than a foreign accent,” Fitch says. A computer-generated version of the spoken phrase “Will you marry me?” — based on newly calculated properties of the macaque’s vocal tract — is easily grasped by a listener, although less clear than the same phrase spoken by a human female, Fitch says.

Fitch and colleagues confirm a growing body of evidence that monkeys have speech-ready vocal tracts, says biological anthropologist Adriano Lameira of Durham University in England. It’s too soon, though, to say that monkeys’ brains aren’t at least partially speech-ready, he argues. Recent studies of apes, some conducted by Lameira, find that these close relatives of humans exert considerable control over their vocal tracts, allowing them to learn novel calls containing sounds similar to vowels and consonants. Neural control of various parts of the vocal tract is needed to master these sounds, Lameira says. Little is known about whether monkeys can do the same.

An aptitude for incorporating new sounds into vocal communication possibly originated in ancient primates, laying the evolutionary groundwork for human speech, Lameira proposes.

A part of the brain that’s responsible for recognizing faces seems to grow new tissue throughout childhood. That’s surprising, because brain development during childhood usually involves pruning back neural connections rather than growing new ones, researchers report in the Jan. 6 Science.

The research shows that “pruning isn’t the only game in town,” says Brad Duchaine, a psychologist at Dartmouth College who wasn’t part of the study. “I’m really excited about it.”

Researchers used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, to identify regions of the brain’s visual cortex that showed more activity when processing faces versus regions that lit up when processing photos of places like cityscapes or hallways. Then the scientists compared the structures of those regions in 22 kids’ brains (ages 5 to 12) with those of 25 young adults (ages 22 to 28).
The place-sensitive area — the collateral sulcus — didn’t change dramatically between childhood and adulthood. But face-sensitive areas in a region called the fusiform gyrus did.

Adults had denser fusiform gyrus brain tissue than kids and that tissue contained a different composition of cells and proteins, the researchers found.

MRI scans alone can’t reveal exactly what types of cells and structures are behind the increased tissue seen in adults’ fusiform gyrus. But evidence from previous studies suggests that the effect might come in part from increases in dendrites — the fingerlike projections of nerve cells that receive messages from other nerve cells. Dendrites might branch out more, making more connections. Another culprit might be the oligodendrocytes, brain cells that produce nerve cells’ insulating myelin coating. The actual number of nerve cells isn’t increasing, though, says Jesse Gomez, a neuroscientist at the Stanford University School of Medicine who led the study.

The visual cortex contains regions specific to processing many different types of visual stimuli — faces and places but also movement and colors. Since this study compared only facial processing and location processing, it’s not clear yet whether the increase in brain tissue is really limited to facial recognition areas, Duchaine says. But the finding does show that the brain circuits behind different types of visual processing don’t all develop in the same way.

Humans take longer to develop facial recognition skills than other types of visual processing, which could help explain the effect, the researchers propose.
“Throughout development, our social circle grows,” Gomez says. “That might be one reason why the region continues to grow — that piece of hardware in the brain itself just takes time to develop.” The current data can’t pin down the age cutoff for tissue growth, but Gomez and his colleagues are following their subjects over time to try to figure that out.

The team thinks similar tissue growth might occur in other parts of the visual cortex, too. In future studies, they hope to investigate the development of these other specialized regions.