THE way parents manage family arguments can seriously damage their children’s mental health later in life. If rows become more frequent as they are growing up, the risk that they will suffer mental health problems as they enter their 30s increases dramatically.

In an experiment that has been running for some 30 years, a team of psychiatrists and sociologists followed 346 boys and girls from

similar socio-economic backgrounds in New England, starting from age 5. At 15, about half reported that the number of arguments with their parents and between their parents had increased, and 15 years later these people were more than three times as likely as the others to suffer from major depression , or indulge in drug or alcohol abuse. They were also nearly three times

Alien world created star’s odd twinkle

DID we miss evidence of an alien world as early as 1981?

The first sighting of another solar system was announced in 1992, but a system found more recently may have shown its presence a decade earlier, when a mysterious blip in a star’s brightness was recorded. So says Alain Lecavelier des Etangs and Alfred Vidal-Madjar of the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, France.

The suspected planet was identified in 2008 around the star Beta Pictoris by a team at Grenoble Observatory in France using images taken by the Very Large Telescope in Chile. The object’s orbit was estimated to be about eight times the diameter of Earth’s.

Its orbit would have placed it in the right spot to explain the dip in Beta Pictoris’s brightness recorded on 10 November 1981 by the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland ( Astronomy & Astrophysics, DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/200811528 ).

Algal blooms kill animals long after they are gone

IT’S a poisoned gift that just keeps on giving.

A powerful neurotoxin produced by some algal blooms

has been found in the deep ocean, where it can stay

for weeks after a bloom has died.

Fish such as sardines and anchovies eat algae,

some species of which contain the toxin domoic acid.

If consumed in sufficient quantities, the toxin can affect

sea lions, birds and humans. Fertilisers leaching into

coastal waters are triggering more and more blooms ,

and beach closures have cost the US economy millions.

In people, the poison can cause symptoms such as

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Deteriorating home life puts kids at risk as likely to engage in antisocial behaviour, and more than twice as likely to be unemployed ( Journal

of the American Academy of Child

and Adolescent Psychiatry , DOI: 10.1097/chi.0b013e3181948fdd).

Team member Helen Reinherz of the Simmons College of Social Work in Boston says the work highlights the need for programmes to teach parents effective ways of communicating with their children and with each other.

headaches and memory loss, and can even be fatal.

The toxin’s effects can be seen in animals long after

a bloom has gone, but why was something of a mystery.

Claudia Benitez-Nelson of the University of South Carolina

in Columbia and colleagues are the first to look for domoic

acid in alga particles and sediment up to 800 metres

down, where they found the toxin at concentrations

more than five times the US federal limit for shellfish sold

as food (Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo472).

The researchers believe dead algae form dense clumps

at the surface that sink rapidly and protect the toxin from

dissolving in seawater. “This is the missing link to explain

why domoic acid also shows up in benthic organisms like

crabs, shellfish and flatfish,” says Raphael Kudela at the

University of Santa Cruz in California.

A PUFF of exhaled air could give an early warning of lung disease by morphing a liquid into gel.

Tuberculosis, lung cancer and influenza all raise levels of nitric oxide (NO) in the breath . At present, sophisticated machinery is needed to test for NO.

Now Anne McNeil , a chemist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and her colleagues are developing a cheaper test. They have shown that NO oxidises a solution of the compound dihydropyridine, changing the shape of its molecules so that they stack together to form a solid gel – a change that can be seen with the naked eye. McNeil will present the result at the American Chemical Society meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, this week.

A breath test for lung cancer?

14 | NewScientist | 28 March 2009