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Research led by led by psychological scientist Emily Cogsdill of Harvard University, reported by The Association for Psychological Sciences  shows that judging others based on their physical features begins at a very early age.

As many of us know and as past research has shown,  adults regularly use faces to make judgments about the character traits of others, even with only a brief glance. But it’s unclear whether this tendency is one that slowly builds as a result of life experiences or is instead a more fundamental impulse that emerges early in life.

These findings link the predisposition to judge others based on physical features to toddlers in early childhood and notes that this skill does not require years of social experience.  Children as young as 3 years tend to judge an individual’s character traits, such as trustworthiness and competence and make a consensus in judgments based on a person’s face.

Cogsill and her research partners note, “If adult-child agreement in face-to-trait inferences emerges gradually across development, one might infer that these inferences require prolonged social experience to reach an adultlike state.  If instead young children’s inferences are like those of adults, this would indicate that face-to-trait character inferences are a fundamental social cognitive capacity that emerges early in life.”

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Know why your newborn’s dark eyes resemble your wife’s or his/her charming smile reminds you of your teenage days?

This resemblance is not pre-determined but happens randomly between two copies of every gene for a given trait – one from mom, the other from dad.  Business Standard reports that both copies of a gene are switched on or off as an embryo develops into an adult.

The ‘switching on’ of a gene begins the process of gene expression that ultimately results in the production of a protein.  New research shows that this random phenomenon is far more likely to be found in mature, developed cell types than in their stem cell precursors.  This, in turn, offers an unexpected glimpse of randomness and variability in gene expression.

“This significant amount of flexibility and randomness in gene expression is important for adaptation as a species evolves, but it is unclear how it functions in organisms today,” said professor David Spector at New York-based Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL).

Occasionally, a cell will arbitrarily begin to use of one copy of a gene over the other.  The activation of only one member of a gene pair is called ‘monoallelic gene expression’.  To better understand when ‘monoallelic gene expression’ is established, Spector and his team collaborated with researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory.

The team used advanced sequencing technology and analysis tools to globally assess allele usage in two different cell types.  They compared embryonic stem cells which can change or ‘differentiate’ into nearly any type of tissue with cells that had already differentiated into the precursors of neurons.

The team was surprised to find that 8 percent of the monoallelically expressed genes were able to boost their level of expression to compensate for what would otherwise be a shortfall.

“This work raises many important questions like how does the cell know how much of each protein to produce? How much flexibility is there? What is the tipping point toward disease?“ noted Spector.