In Brief ----------------------------------------------------------------- Grad of part-time writing program publishes novel Elly Summers, a recent graduate of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Part-time Graduate Program in Writing, sold her first novel, This Never Happened, to Random House for $100,000. And that's only the North American hard-cover rights. Summers started the book the year she enrolled in the part-time writing program--which meets in Washington--in 1992. It took her two years to complete. "I knew I knew how to write," she said, "but I needed intelligent readers as I went along, and I had them [in this program]." Summers is a schoolteacher who has been writing for about 10 years. "I always wrote as a kid. Then I got married young, I had kids, and I had to work. But when I was 30 or so, a story about five siblings growing up came to me, and I wrote it," she said. That book was never published. It was good enough, though, to interest one agent in Summers' follow-up effort, drawing upon the same five siblings grown up. Her agent thought the book was "an extraordinary novel," Summers said. "She went to England, and when she was there she sold the British rights. Then she got back on a Monday to New York and had sold it by Thursday to Random House," Summers said. For now she keeps writing, hard at work on her next novel, which she will complete next year while on sabbatical from her teaching responsibilities. And while she says "there's tremendous satisfaction in being validated" by a contract, she doesn't feel that much different. "I still do dishes and take care of my kids and go to school." Perhaps that all will change when the book comes out next spring. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Medical news ----------------------------------------------------------------- Imaging shows cortex difference in sexes Hopkins researchers have found that differences in two specific areas of the brains of men and women may explain why women tend to have better verbal ability than men. The Hopkins team found that the percentage of gray matter in two areas of the brain involved in speaking is larger in women than in men. Specifically, researchers discovered that the amount of gray matter in the side of the brain at the level of the eye (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) is 23.2 percent larger in women than in men, while the amount of gray matter in the lower side of the brain (superior temporal gyrus) is 12.8 percent larger. Previous imaging studies comparing the brains of men and women focused on parts of the brain involved in sexual behavior and sex drive, the authors said. This is the first imaging study to show differences in the cortex between men and women. The cortex is the outermost part of the brain, responsible for complex mental processes. "This is a big difference in gray matter, which is the substance of the brain we use to think with," said Thomas Schlaepfer, assistant professor of psychiatry. "It helps to explain why, on average, women have greater verbal ability than men," said Schlaepfer, first author of a paper describing the study, published in the fall 1995 issue of the quarterly journal Psychiatry Research and Neuroimaging. The results challenge a belief widely held that all such differences are caused by education and other environmental, rather than biological, factors, the authors said. The Hopkins team studied 60 healthy individuals (17 women and 43 men) of similar ages. The average age of women was 33.7, and the average age of the men was 30.7. The researchers created brain maps that let them compute the amount of gray matter as a percentage of total brain volume, and account for differences in the overall size of each individual's brain. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Marriage biggest risk for HIV among Thai women Despite the AIDS epidemic in Thailand and a huge government condom campaign, men of all ages and marital and socioeconomic status still visit prostitutes and have unprotected sex with their wives, according to a School of Public Health study published in a recent issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association. Because the majority of Thai men still have sex with prostitutes, marriage is the No. 1 risk factor among Thai women for becoming infected with HIV. "The AIDS epidemic has made prostitution less popular, but business is still thriving," said David Celentano, professor of health policy and management and the study's lead author. "Eighty-five percent of all men over the age of 16 have visited prostitutes, down from 96 percent in 1993." Because men rarely use condoms with their wives, the next wave of the epidemic is going to be heterosexual monogamous women. Thailand's AIDS epidemic is the second fastest-growing epidemic in the world, overshadowed only by India's, with an expected 2 million cases by the year 2000, Celentano said. "Programs that increase effective condom use in brothels are essential to slow the epidemic," Celentano said. In 1989, the Ministry of Public Health in Thailand instituted a "100% Condom Campaign" that supplied condoms to brothels and persuaded brothel owners to enforce their use, he said. The government tests women for sexually transmitted diseases every two weeks and HIV every three months, Celentano said. "If the prostitute is HIV positive, the brothel is notified but generally the women remain working until they develop symptoms." -----------------------------------------------------------------