This month, NYU researchers found that girls as young as 6 years old were less likely than boys to associate brilliance with their own gender. They were also less likely to show interest in a game described as being for "children who are very, very smart."
Classroom-based play in kindergarten among children living in poverty was shown to predict later involvement in 8th-grade extracurricular activities—and to foreshadow the skills and behaviors of a civically engaged adolescent or adult. In another study, low-income fathers who read to their kids boosted both their own parenting skills and the children's school readiness and behavior.
NYU Langone's David Schoppik concluded that zebrafish learn to balance by darting forward when they feel wobbly—a finding that could one day help therapists better treat balance problems among aging Americans. Like zebrafish, humans have relatively heavy heads which require constant corrections to keep them from pitching forward. (Humans literally fall forward as they walk and then compensate with bursts of forward leg motion.) Meanwhile, at Tandon, Maurizio Porfiri developed a data-driven modeling framework to simulate zebrafish swimming in three dimensions, which could replace animals in some types of research.
Wagner professor Victor Rodwin and colleagues showed that rates of premature death in Delhi increased by 25% between 2004 and 2013, despite rapid economic growth and investments in public health during that period. A team led by the College of Nursing's Bei Wu found that Asian immigrants who had been in the U.S. longer and who had higher levels of English proficiency were more likely to have visited a dentist in the past 12 months.
In medicine, researchers designed an antibody to target leukemia cells while sparing normal blood stem cells, shed light on how streptococcus—the bacteria that causes most cases of pneumonia—spreads, and traced a set of related diseases to the deletion of DNA found in 37 genes in mitochondria—the "powerhouses" of cells.
And an international team of anthropologists led by NYU's Randall White uncovered a 38,000-year-old engraved image of extinct wild cows in a southwestern French rockshelter.