A previous estimate had put the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (including Asperger's, which affects the young artist pictured above) at one in 150, but a new telephone survey and a more in-depth CDC estimate indicate the disorders are more common. Some of the rise may be due to improved detection, but Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, says, "The concern here is that buried in these numbers is a true increase. We're going to have to think very hard about what we're going to do for the 1 in 100."

More and more, we are hearing from people who might best be described as anti-birthers. Their claims have nothing to do with long- versus short-form Hawaiian birth certificates. Instead, they advance a simple proposition: that the birth of each additional American child is a kind of calamity for the environment.

The most recent example of anti-birth thinking comes from Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax of Oregon State University. In a study called "Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals," they suggest that if you truly care about the environment, it's not enough to trade your SUV for a Prius, use the right lightbulbs, or limit your lawn to organic fertilizers. To the contrary, you need to start thinking about something way more important: i.e., having one less child.

The "basic premise," the study reports, is that "a person is responsible for emissions of his descendents.""

New research shows that when married people become single again, whether by divorce or a spouse's death, they experience much more than an emotional loss. Often they suffer a decline in physical health from which they never fully recover, even if they remarry.

And in terms of health, it's not better to have married and lost than never to have married at all. Middle-age people who never married have fewer chronic health problems than those who were divorced or widowed.

"For the female half of the population, it may bring a satisfied smile. Scientists have found that evolution is driving women to become ever more beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors.

The researchers have found beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Those daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive and so repeat the pattern.

Over generations, the scientists argue, this has led to women becoming steadily more aesthetically pleasing, a “beauty race” that is still on. The findings have emerged from a series of studies of physical attractiveness and its links to reproductive success in humans.

In a study released last week, Markus Jokela, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, found beautiful women had up to 16% more children than their plainer counterparts. He used data gathered in America, in which 1,244 women and 997 men were followed through four decades of life. Their attractiveness was assessed from photographs taken during the study, which also collected data on the number of children they had."

"Lately, I've been seeing a lot of hubbub in the news over the chemical bisphenol A. They say it's in a lot of baby products, like bottles and sippy cups and hard plastic water bottles, too. But I can't tell if this is really a big deal or just an overblown chemical panic. What's the Green Lantern's take on BPA?

You can be forgiven for being confused: There's a huge mountain of data out there about bisphenol A, and every day it seems as if a new study comes along linking the chemical to a new, scary condition. Parsing through the information is a Sisyphean task.

It's certainly true that we're all regularly exposed to BPA, a synthetic chemical primarily used as an ingredient in the hard plastic called polycarbonate and in the epoxy resins that line most food and soft drink cans. Small amounts of the chemical can leach from containers into our food, which may explain why a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nearly 93 percent of Americans over the age of 6 had detectable amounts of BPA in their urine.

"New research shows babies have a handle on the meaning of different dog barks -- despite little or no previous exposure to dogs.

Infants just 6 months old can match the sounds of an angry snarl and a friendly yap to photos of dogs displaying threatening and welcoming body language.

The new findings come on the heels of a study from the same Brigham Young University lab showing that infants can detect mood swings in Beethoven's music.

Though the mix of dogs and babies sounds silly, experiments of this kind help us understand how babies learn so rapidly. Long before they master speech, babies recognize and respond to the tone of what’s going on around them."

"What makes a man a man? Socially, that is a complicated question. Genetically, however, it is as simple as a single Y chromosome.

But guys, that chromosome is in trouble.

In a new study, researchers say there is a dramatic loss of genes from the human Y chromosome that eventually could lead to its complete disappearance -- in the next few millennia. While the Y chromosome's degeneration has been known to geneticists and evolutionary biologists for decades, the study sheds new light on some of the evolutionary processes that may have contributed to its demise and posits that, as the degeneration continues, the Y chromosome could disappear from our genetic repertoire entirely."

"Pardon the sexism, but a question: Why are girls so girly?

For the better part of the past half-century, feminists, their opponents and armies of academics have debated the differences between men and women. Only in the past few years have scientists been able to use imaging technology to look inside men's and women's heads to investigate whether those stereotypical gender differences have roots in the brain. No concrete results have emerged from these studies yet, but now a new functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of children offers at least one explanation for some common tween social behaviors: girls are hardwired to care about one-on-one relationships, while the brains of boys are more attuned to group dynamics and competition with other boys.

The study, which was conducted by researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Georgia State University, begins with a premise that every parent of a tween already knows: as kids emerge into puberty, their focus changes dramatically. They care less about their families and more about their peers."