Giving Bad Drivers a Break

You can point to genetics for height, hair color, and a predisposition to certain health concerns, so why not also cite DNA to explain a propensity for bad driving? As reported recently in the journal Cerebral Cortex, people with a certain gene variant performed more than 30 percent worse on a driving test than people without it. And since nearly 30 percent of Americans test positive for the variant—which limits the secretion of a protein that helps facilitate communication among brain cells—that might explain why there are so many bad drivers on U.S. highways and byways.

Sound Sleep

When it comes time to catch some Z’s, silence may be golden—but a little noise may go a long way. Scientists at Northwestern University are studying whether sound cues associated with newly learned information help the brain retain the new memories, and have found that sound during slumber can in fact help trigger learning by elevating the brain’s ability to retain new memories. In the study, participants were asked to view 50 images (appearing one at a time at different locations on a computer screen), each with a corresponding sound cue—a “meow” with a picture of cat, for example—and take a nap. Those who were exposed to sound cues while they slept were better able to recall the pictures’ locations, even though they did not remember hearing the sounds upon waking.

New Prescriptions for Penicillin

If you’ve spent years answering “Penicillin!” when a doctor or pharmacist asks if you have an allergy to any medication, take heed: A study in the Annals of Emergency Medicine reports that more than 90 percent of adults who believed they were allergic to the drug failed to test positive for such an allergy. Why such a disparity in fact versus fiction? Researchers believe that patients taking penicillin sometimes experience symptoms due to the sickness the antibiotic is treating—not to the medication itself—and these complaints often are misdiagnosed as reactions to the drug.