Science Headlines for February 24, 2009

Why Hair Turns Gray Is No Longer A Gray Area: Our Hair Bleaches Itself As We Grow Older

Wash away your gray? Maybe. Scientists have now solved a mystery that has perplexed humans throughout the ages: why we turn gray. These researchers show that going gray is caused by a massive build up of hydrogen peroxide due to wear and tear of our hair follicles. The peroxide winds up blocking the normal synthesis of melanin, our hair's natural pigment.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Feb 2009 | 1:00 am

Sprightly Explanation For UFO Sightings?

In legend, sprites are trolls, elves and other spirits that dance high above our ozone layer. But scientists have discovered that some very real "sprites" are zipping across the atmosphere as well, providing a possible explanation for those other legendary denizens of the skies, UFOs.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Feb 2009 | 1:00 am

Patience Pays Off With Methanol For Uranium Bioremediation

Uranium contamination is a devastating legacy of nuclear weapon and energy development, but new testing has shown that adding organic molecules can positively affect the bioremediation of this uranium, converting it to a solid mineral and sequestering it within the sediment.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Feb 2009 | 1:00 am

Do Experiences Or Material Goods Make Us Happier?

Should I spend money on a vacation or a new computer? Will an experience or an object make me happier? A new study says it depends on different factors, including how materialistic you are.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Feb 2009 | 1:00 am

Human Stem Cells Provide A New Model For Lou Gehrig's Disease

Human stem cells are used to create motor neurons that carry familial ALS mutations. These human stem cell-derived neurons look and act like normal motor neurons, and, when carrying ALS mutations, the cells undergo changes similar to those seen in ALS. This study presents a new human-derived cell system to use in studying ALS and ALS therapies.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Feb 2009 | 1:00 am

Working On A Vaccine for the Plague

Scientists have proposed brown Norway rats as a new model for plague vaccine development.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Feb 2009 | 1:00 am

Turbulence May Promote Birth Of Massive Stars

When it comes to the theory of how massive stars form, the devil is in the details. We know the basics: a cloud of cosmic gas draws itself together, growing denser and hotter until nuclear fusion ignites. But how does massive star formation begin? What determines how many stars form from a single cloud? New data from the Submillimeter Array is helping to answer these questions.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 24 Feb 2009 | 10:00 pm

Lowering Your Cholesterol May Decrease Your Risk Of Cancer

Current research suggests that lowering cholesterol may block the growth of prostate tumors.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 24 Feb 2009 | 10:00 pm

Healing Arthritis Caused By Traumatic Injury

A strain of laboratory mice that has "superhealing" powers has been found to resist inflammation after a knee injury, and also to avoid developing arthritis at the injury site in the long term, according to researchers. Their findings illuminate the mechanisms of post-traumatic arthritis and could point to therapies for this condition, which commonly afflicts younger people who lose productivity during their prime working years.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 24 Feb 2009 | 10:00 pm

Don't Touch That Dial! Watching Commercials Leads To Greater Enjoyment Of TV Programs

We all complain about commercials, and many people invest in technology to eliminate them. But a surprising new study shows that, contrary to popular belief, commercials improve television viewing in many cases.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 24 Feb 2009 | 10:00 pm

Music-Memory Connection Found in Brain

A brain-scan study shows the music-memory connection.
Source: Livescience.com | 24 Feb 2009 | 3:00 pm

New Search for Cosmic Inflation Mounted

A telescope is being fine tuned to search for gravity waves. If confirmed to exist, they would reveal convincing evidence for a big cosmology theory.
Source: Livescience.com | 24 Feb 2009 | 2:59 pm

Botched launch ends U.S. satellite's mission (Reuters)

Reuters - The U.S. government's first attempt to map carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere from space ended early on Tuesday after a botched satellite launch from California, officials said.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Feb 2009 | 2:57 pm

Beauty is in the sex of the beholder, study finds

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The brains of men and women respond differently to beautiful objects such as paintings, researchers reported on Monday.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 24 Feb 2009 | 2:50 pm

NASA global warming satellite lands in ocean (AP)

AP - A rocket carrying a NASA global warming satellite splashed into the ocean near Antarctica early Tuesday after a failed launch.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Feb 2009 | 2:50 pm

NASA Launch Fails, Lands in Ocean

A rocket carrying a NASA global warming satellite lands in the ocean after a failed launch.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 24 Feb 2009 | 2:45 pm

The Ethical and Legal Implications of Octuplets

Having eight children at once is not healthy for the children.
Source: Livescience.com | 24 Feb 2009 | 2:26 pm

Household Chemicals Linked to Infertility

Exposure to common chemicals may contribute to infertility, suggests a new study.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 24 Feb 2009 | 2:09 pm

Weather around the U.S.A. (AP)

AP - Weather around the U.S.A.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Feb 2009 | 1:57 pm

Mental Fatigue Causes Perceived Physical Exhaustion

Tough mental tasks can cause people to tire more quickly at physical exercise
Source: Livescience.com | 24 Feb 2009 | 1:56 pm

NASA says climate satellite fails to launch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A mission carrying a climate satellite into orbit failed on Tuesday when the satellite was not able to separate from the rocket, NASA said.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 24 Feb 2009 | 1:49 pm

Climate Change Can Supercharge Plant Growth

For plants in temperate regions, global warming brings good news and bad.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 24 Feb 2009 | 1:20 pm

Iraq marshes face grave new threat

Iraq's famed southern marches are shrinking again because of record low rainfall and dam and irrigation systems upstream.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 24 Feb 2009 | 1:02 pm

Lost world

Getting to know the inhabitants of extinct volcano
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 24 Feb 2009 | 11:44 am

North Korea says it is preparing satellite launch (AP)

AP - North Korea said Tuesday it is preparing to shoot a satellite into orbit, its clearest reference yet to an impending launch that neighbors and the U.S. suspect will be a provocative test of a long-range missile.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Feb 2009 | 11:14 am

Failure hits Nasa's 'CO2 hunter'

A fault after launch has scuppered an unmanned $280m Nasa mission to map global sources of carbon dioxide.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 24 Feb 2009 | 11:02 am

North Korea 'plans rocket launch'

North Korea says it is planning to launch a rocket carrying a satellite, fuelling speculation about a possible missile test.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 24 Feb 2009 | 9:59 am

Could lab-grown teeth spell an end to fillings?

Scientists discover a gene that may enable them to grow replacement teeth in the laboratory.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 24 Feb 2009 | 9:57 am

Women are better than men at appreciating beauty

Brain scans of people looking at paintings and photographs have revealed that beauty is not only in the eye of the beholder. When men and women see something they think is beautiful, their brains react differently, with the female brain showing more activity than the male, according to new research.

Men's brains became more active only on the right hand side when they saw a beautiful picture, while women's brains showed greater activity on both sides, scientists at San Carlos Clinical hospital in Madrid found.

The researchers believe the different responses are linked to the ways in which men and women process spatial information, but suggest that men may tend to look only at the picture as a whole, while women also pay attention to the smaller details.

The researchers used magnetic imaging to monitor brain activity as they showed 10 women and 10 men images of varying beauty, including a landscape of Capri by the 19th century painter Francisco Pradilla Ortiz, and a photo of an urban sidestreet.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they describe how both sexes took at least 3000 milliseconds to react, and showed most activity in part of the brain called the parietal lobe. In men, this activity was focused only on the brain's righthand side.

Because the parietal lobe evolved rapidly after the split between chimps and humans, the researchers led by Francisco Ayala, at the University of California, Irvine, believe the difference arose among our early human ancestors.

"The different strategies used by men and women in assessing aesthetic preference may reflect differences in the strategies associated with the division of labour between our male and female hunter-gatherer hominin ancestors," the authors claim.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 24 Feb 2009 | 7:37 am

Men and women appreciate art in different ways

Men and women appreciate art in different ways
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 24 Feb 2009 | 1:43 am

Cooperation Beats Selfishness, at Least in Theory

In these dark days, science brings a glimmer of hope: even in a world that rewards selfishness, cooperation can emerge and ultimately prevail.

That world happens to be a computer simulation, but I'll take good news anywhere I can get it.

"We report the sudden outbreak of predominant cooperation in a noisy world dominated by selfishness and defection," write Swiss Federal Institute of Technology sociologists Dirk Helbing and Wenjian Yu in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Helbing specializes in complex simulations of crowd behavior, from fans in a soccer stadium to traffic jams. But like other crowd modelers, he's been stuck on a basic conundrum, known best from the Prisoner's Dilemma: if cooperative behavior potentially provides the highest rewards, but selfishness is the safest and most sensible course of action, how can cooperation emerge?

The key, suggests Helbing's simulation, is mobility and imitation. When individuals are free to choose their associates and smart enough to imitate their success, cooperation emerges, then flourishes — and it doesn't take much to start the process. At each iteration in the simulation, just one in 20 units had a chance of abandoning selfishness, and the choice was usually punished.

"After a very long time, there will be two or three or four individuals in the same neighborhood who just happen to cooperate, just by chance," said Helbing. "It's a happy coincidence — and once there's a sufficiently large cluster, cooperators do quite well. Defectors start to copy the behavior of cooperative clusters. And cooperation can persist and spread."

In many ways, the Prisoner's Dilemma simulation is for game theorists what fruit flies are to biologists: a simple system in which basic principles can be uncovered, examined and hopefully extrapolated to people. It's just a model; a bit of mobility and imitation won't magically fix humanity's problems. But they might be important.

"The sheer fact of moving from one place to another might have been an important precondition for the emergence and spreading of cooperation" in human cultural evolution, said Helbing.

There might also be a lesson in Helbing's shifting red-and-blue dots for the cities of the future, where migratory populations often are often stuck in immigrant neighborhoods and denied social opportunities.

"We face a huge amount of migration worldwide, and it's expected on an even larger scale in decades to come," he said. "According to experience, it takes one or two generations for newcomers and their families to integrate fully. That's a very long time. We have to have more efficient integration."

Citation: "The outbreak of cooperation among success-driven individuals under noisy conditions." By Dirk Helbing and Wenjian Yu. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106, No. 8, Feb. 23, 2009.

Video: Dirk Helbing

See Also:

Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 24 Feb 2009 | 1:30 am

Rare cheetah captured on camera

The first camera-trap photographs of the endangered Northwest African, or Saharan cheetah, are obtained in Algeria.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 24 Feb 2009 | 12:52 am

Mini Plasma Thruster Way Better Than Rockets

Is gravity getting your satellite down? Too bad it doesn’t have a Mini-Helicon Plasma Thruster on board.

The aeronautics minds at MIT have developed this new propulsion system as a lighter, more fuel-efficient way to give satellites the boost they need.

Powered by electrically charged nitrogen gas, the Mini-Helicon is an alternative to the rockets maneuvering most satellites today, which get their kick from chemical reactions. About 10 times more efficient, this new, shoebox-sized technology would also have the advantage of being significantly cheaper, Oleg Batishchev, a principal research scientist in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, said in a press release.

Mini-Helicon follows in the footsteps of plasma and ion thrusters tested on a handful of earlier satellites, including Deep Space 1, Japan’s Hayabusa and the Dawn mission to asteroids Ceres and Vesta.

It is based on a more powerful and heftier version of the technology, the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket, or VASIMR, developed by former astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz. VASIMR is intended as a propulsion system for space cargo and long-distance space flight, and is planned for NASA testing aboard the International Space Station in 2012.

The Mini-Helicon Plasma Thruster is the first of these non-chemical technologies to use nitrogen as its fuel source. The nitrogen is pumped through a quartz tube wrapped in a coiled antenna and surrounded by magnets. Radio frequency power, transmitted to the nitrogen from the antenna, turns the gas into plasma, or electrically charged gas. The magnets help produce the plasma, and guide and accelerate it through the system.

"The plasma beam exhausted from the tube is what gives us the thrust to propel the rocket," Batishchev said.

Last summer, for fun, Batishchev’s students successfully assembled a version of the plasma rocket using a recycled glass bottle and aluminum can, instead of the quartz tube and radio-frequency antenna (see video). "This shows that this is a robust, simple design. So in principal, an even simpler design could be developed," he said.

Still, the technology is very young, and it will likely many years before it can be used commercially.

— Elise Kleeman for Wired.com

Image: A prototype of the Mini-Helicon Plasma Thruster. Donna Coveney/MIT

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Source: Wired: Wired Science | 24 Feb 2009 | 12:40 am

Federal officials debate placement of power grid (AP)

AP - Democratic congressional leaders and the Obama administration indicated Monday that they will push for greater federal authority to locate electric transmission lines, saying the current power grid stands in the way of developing alternative energy sources.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Feb 2009 | 12:32 am

Obituary: Len Goodwin

Len Goodwin's great contribution was in tropical medicine, especially in the pharmacology of parasitic diseases. His commitment to his work was typified by his approach to drug development. When all the toxicology of a new drug had been completed, he and another willing volunteer would themselves take increasing doses of the drug and monitor the results. During the development of pyrimethamine (used to treat malaria), for instance, Len took a dose that rose to 100mg a day but this had to be stopped as the production of red blood cells in his bone marrow was adversely affected. As a result of these studies, the recommended and effective dose of the drug was established as 25mg, once a week.

Len, who has died aged 93, was an intuitive researcher. Once, after reading a report in a French medical journal from the early part of the 20th century, he was interested to note that when patients were treated with piperazine to relieve the symptoms of gout, they contracted worms of the genus Ascaris. Len postulated that rather than causing the infection itself, the treatment with piperazine was having a chemotherapeutic effect on existing infections with Ascaris. The difficulty was to demonstrate the effect of the drug on the worms in vitro. A breakthrough came when one of the female technicians in his lab complained that, because of the rain, her stockings were sticking to her legs. Len realised that if the worms could be fitted into a "tailored" stocking, it would be possible to record their movements: this technique was used to demonstrate that the action of piperazine on Ascaris was not to kill them, but to narcotise them and allow them to be evacuated without causing any damage to the host. Treatment of Ascaris with piperazine is now used worldwide.

Len travelled widely in the tropics, mainly for clinical trials of drugs, but used these opportunities for experimental studies on schistosomiasis, filariasis and amoebiasis. One of his journeys in 1951 will never be done again in the same way. It was in the early days of the malaria prophylactic pyrimethamine.

Len gave himself large doses for a year and, while on a trip in Africa, he had no other protection from malaria. While passing through Kenya, he allowed mosquitoes infected with the deadliest malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, to feed on his arm. This would never be authorised by an ethical committee.

Goodwin was born in Wood Green, north London, but soon after the first world war his family moved to Hampstead, where he spent a happy childhood. He did well at school and, on the advice of his uncle Percy, a pharmacist, went to University College London and qualified BPharm in 1935. He was then offered a post at UCL as a demonstrator, with a salary of £165. After four years, during which time he took a BSc, MB, BS (Hons), he looked for a post with better pay.

He wrote to CM Wenyon, director of research at the Wellcome Laboratories of Tropical Medicine in the Euston Road, central London, asking if there were any job opportunities. A few days after a brief interview, he was called back to see Wenyon, who told him: "I think I can find you something to do." The "something" was to measure the activity of a series of new antimony compounds which seemed to have promise for the treatment of kala-azar, a virulent tropical disease that devastated vast areas of India. Len's career was well and truly launched and he stayed at the Wellcome Laboratories for 24 years.

When the laboratories closed in 1963, Len was recruited by Sir Solly Zuckerman, the secretary of London Zoo, to the post of director of the Nuffield Institute of Comparative Medicine at London Zoo and, later, director of science to the Zoological Society.

Len was not only a great scientist: he was also an accomplished artist. On his travels, he always carried a box of paints and dashed off watercolours to record the places he had seen. At home, one of his favourite pastimes was pottery. When he was not working, travelling or "pottering", Len was gardening and he grew his own vegetables. Sadly, all his creative activities had to be abandoned in old age as he gradually lost his sight.

While he was at the zoo, there had been some difficulty in breeding wallabies. So Len took a pair home and kept them in a paddock in his garden where they reproduced so successfully that Len was able to supply Windsor Safari Park. The last survivor, aged over 20 years, outlasted Len and he left instructions that, if Nellie survived him, she would have to be put down, as she was too old to resettle.

Len was a warm, gentle man who helped the career of dozens of younger people. His wife Marie died three years before Len and they had no children. He is survived by his nephew, Alistair.

• Leonard George Goodwin, pharmacologist and parasitologist, born 11 July 1915; died 25 November 2008

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 24 Feb 2009 | 12:01 am

Gene that could give you perfect gnashers without seeing a dentist's chair

The days of whining drills and shrieking patients that can make a trip to the dentist an experience to dread may be numbered, according to scientists who claim that they may have found a way to regrow rotting teeth.

Researchers studying tooth development have singled out a gene that controls the growth of enamel, the hard outer layer of teeth, which cannot grow back naturally once it is damaged by tooth decay. The discovery sheds fresh light on the way teeth form and could pave the way for new dental treatments that heal decayed teeth by regenerating a layer of enamel, making traditional drilling and filling obsolete.

Scientists at Oregon State University found the gene after noticing that mice born without it grew teeth with no enamel covering.

Tooth enamel is the hardest tissue in the body and begins to form when humans are still embryos. Specialised cells called ameloblasts in the tooth bud make enamel by releasing calcium phosphate minerals into a protein "scaffold" that shapes them into tightly packed rods of enamel.

When our teeth are fully formed, they erupt from the gums and the enamel-forming cells die off, making it impossible for our teeth to regrow new enamel later. For most animals this is not a problem, but in humans, the large amount of sugar and starch in our diet is turned into acid by bacteria living on our teeth, which slowly dissolve the enamel to make a hole in the tooth. If untreated, cavities can cause life-threatening infections in the body.

If scientists can perfect a way of regrowing teeth and replacing the drill in the dentist's surgery, it could have important knock-on effects for patients.

In 2005, a survey by researchers at the University of Toronto found that 5% of patients were extremely anxious about visiting the dentist, and half were so afraid that they either cancelled their appointment or failed to show up. By missing appointments, patients risk turning a fairly minor dental problem into a serious risk to their health.

Last year, a poll by the Irish Dental Association found that parents passed on their fear of dentists to their children by telling them they were being brave or had nothing to fear from a visit.

Despite rates of dental cavities falling for the past 30 years, almost half of children and adolescents and more than 55% of adults in the UK are still affected by holes in their teeth.

Paul Sharpe, an expert on tooth development at the Dental Institute at King's College London, said: "If you could find some way of growing ameloblasts that make enamel, you could find a way to repair teeth.

"Any gene like this is worth understanding. The more we learn about it the more we can use the information to make biological models of tooth repair."

Prof Sharpe's own work focuses on using stem cells to regenerate teeth, but he said the introduction of the Human Tissue Act had made it difficult to obtain teeth from patients to do the work.

"We've probably lost a year because we've not been able to get hold of the right cells, and often these are from wisdom teeth that people are choosing to have removed," he said.

In the latest research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by Chrissa Kioussi and Mark Leid bred mice that lacked a gene known as Ctip2. They found that the gene was crucial for the enamel-producing cells to form and work properly.

By understanding the genetics of tooth development, Kioussi said it may be possible to repair damaged enamel and even produce new teeth in the laboratory.

Some groups have already succeeded in growing the soft tissues inside teeth, but they do not have the hard enamel covering needed to withstand chewing and biting.

"Enamel is one of the hardest coatings found in nature. It evolved to give carnivores the tough and long-lasting teeth they needed to survive," said Kioussi. "A lot of work would still be needed to bring this to human applications, but it should work. It could be really cool; a whole new approach to dental health," she said.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 24 Feb 2009 | 12:01 am

Strange Fish Has See-Through Head (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - A bizarre deep-water fish called the barreleye has a transparent head and tubular eyes. Since the fish's discovery in 1939, biologists have known the eyes were very good at collecting light. But their shape seemed to leave the fish with tunnel vision.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 23 Feb 2009 | 11:05 pm

Fish Sees Through Its Own Head

The barreleye (Macropinna microstoma) is a small fish that lives in the pitch-black of the deep sea. Its eyes can look forward or rotate up to see through its transparent head. Narrated by Bruce Robison.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Feb 2009 | 10:48 pm

Antibodies protect against bird flu and more

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers have discovered human antibodies that neutralize not only H5N1 bird flu but other strains of influenza as well and say they hope to develop them into lifesaving treatments.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 23 Feb 2009 | 10:46 pm

Brain injury raises epilepsy risk for years: study

LONDON (Reuters) - A severe brain injury puts people at high risk of epilepsy for more than a decade after they are first hurt, a finding that suggests there may be a window to prevent the condition, researchers said on Monday.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 23 Feb 2009 | 10:25 pm

Genentech board rejects Roche offer (AFP)

AFP - US biotech firm Genentech said Monday its board urged shareholders to reject a takeover offer from Swiss pharmaceutical group Roche as "inadequate and not in the best interests of stockholders."

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 23 Feb 2009 | 10:13 pm

Global warming danger threat increased (AP)

AP - The Earth won't have to warm up as much as had been thought to cause serious consequences of global warming, including more extreme weather and increasing threats to plants and animals, says an international team of climate experts.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 23 Feb 2009 | 10:05 pm

Beauty and the brain, women use more than men (AP)

AP - Beauty is in the brain of the beholder. Go to any museum and there will be men and women admiring paintings and sculpture. But it turns out they are thinking about the sight differently. Men process beauty on the right side of their brains, while women use their whole brain to do the job, researchers report in Tuesday's electronic edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 23 Feb 2009 | 10:05 pm

Famous Scottish King's Palace Possibly Unearthed

Stone foundations thought to be remains of Robert the Bruce's palace unearthed in Scotland.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Feb 2009 | 10:04 pm

Beauty Affects Men's and Women's Brains Differently

Beauty is famously in the eye of the beholder; but it's also in the beholder's brain, and may work differently in the brains of men and women.

In men, images they consider to be beautiful appear to activate brain regions responsible for locating objects in absolute terms — x- and y-coordinates on a grid. Images considered beautiful by women do the same, but they also activate regions associated with relative location: above and behind, over and under. The difference could be the result of evolutionary pressures on our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

The findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are preliminary and based on a small number of people, but intriguing nonetheless.

"This the first study about neural activation in aesthetic tasks to include sex as a variable," said study co-author Camilo Cela-Conde, an evolutionary anthropologist at Spain's Universitat de les Illes Balears.

Earlier studies on sex-based cognitive differences have found that men seem to have a heightened sense of absolute location. Women, by contrast, are quicker to process relative values.

How these brain systems became tied to the perception of beauty, widely considered a defining human trait, is an evolutionary mystery. According to Cela-Conde, aesthetics may simply be a byproduct of other cognitive tasks.

Differences in cognitive tasks, however, may be less mysterious: For much of human history, men and women had different jobs. Their brains may thus have developed in subtly different ways.

"In current hunter-gatherer groups, men are in charge of hunting; meanwhile women collect," said Cela-Conde. "If this is a scheme that can be extended to ancestors’ behavior, then we can think about a selective pressure to increase the capacity of spatial orientation in men, and the capacity to identify edible plants and tubers in women."

In the study, 10 men and 10 women looked at images of modern and classic paintings, as well as photographs of landscapes, artifacts and urban scenes. The researchers recorded their reactions with a magnetoencephalograph, which monitors real-time neural activity by measuring magnetic fields generated by electrical currents in the brain.

(To avoid confounding by romantic regions of the brain, close-up images of people were not included.)

The subjects varied as to what they considered beautiful, but brain patterns were consistent: coordinate-processing activation in both men and women, and category-processing in only women.

These differences do not seem to translate into differences in the actual experience of beauty. In earlier research, said Cela-Conde, both men and women describe beauty as being "original, interesting and pleasant."

However, as the differences were expressed only in response to images the subjects found to be beautiful, they do not seem to reflect a general sex-based difference in perception.

As the brain regions involved are far more developed in humans than chimpanzees — our closest living relative — Cela-Conde's team suspects that the differences are rooted in early hominid divisions between men and women.

Another possible explanation is language-based: Coordinate-reading brain systems are less activated by linguistic communication than categorical systems.

The differences observed in the study would then originate in another sex-based difference, albeit an arguable one: Women are especially talkative.

Citation: "Sex-related similarities and differences in the neural correlates of beauty." Camilo J. Cela-Conde, Francisco J. Ayala, Enric Munar, Fernando Maestu, Marcos Nadal, Miguel A. Capo, David del Río, Juan J. Lopez-Ibor, Tomas Ortiz, Claudio Mirasso, and Gisele Marty. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106, No.8, Feb. 23, 2009.

Images: 1. Flickr/Mark Kobayashi-Hillary 2. Average brain activation, by hemisphere, while observing images identified as beautiful/PNAS

See Also:

Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 23 Feb 2009 | 10:00 pm

Strange Fish Has See-Through Head

The barreleye can see directly forward or look upward through its transparent head.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Feb 2009 | 8:01 pm

GM Crop Genes Contaminate Mexican Corn

Genetically engineered corn genes are found to have spread to crops in Mexico.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 23 Feb 2009 | 8:00 pm

Balkan Lynx Poached to Brink of Extinction

With no natural enemy but man, the Balkan lynx could soon disappear from the wild.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 23 Feb 2009 | 7:35 pm

Natural Explanation Found for UFOs

A thunderstorm-related phenomenon may explain some UFO sightings.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Feb 2009 | 7:24 pm

Antibodies Neutralize Bird Flu, Other Strains

Antibodies could protect against various strains of influenza, including the deadly H5N1.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 23 Feb 2009 | 6:45 pm

India to launch its first astronauts into space by 2015

India has endorsed an ambitious £1.7bn plan to launch its first astronauts into space by 2015, a move seen by many as an attempt to catch up with its bigger neighbour, China, in an emerging Asian space race.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) proposes to put two people into orbit 171 miles above the Earth for seven days – a plan that has been endorsed by the country's top economic policymaking body, the Planning Commission.

"Isro has done an expert job and it needs to be supported," said Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission. The Human Space Flight project is to have two phases: an unmanned flight launched in 2013-2014 and a manned mission the following year.

The Indian cabinet still has to approve the plan but S Satish, a spokesman for Isro, said the support of the Planning Commission "was a major step forward".

If the country succeeded, it would become only the fourth – after the US, Russia and China – to send a man into space. But India is not the only Asian country in the new space race – Iran recently announced that it will attempt a manned space flight by 2021.

There is little doubt about India's sense of purpose. Earlier this month, Isro's chairman, Madhavan Nair, unveiled blueprints at an international aeronautical show in Bangalore for the three-tonne space capsule, which would have enough room for a three-person crew.

India is also setting up a training centre for astronauts in the south of the country – and demonstrated it could launch and recover a space capsule that splashed down in the Bay of Bengal in January 2007.

The new mission will not be entirely homegrown. Moscow will help to build the astronaut capsule and select and train the astronauts. An Indian astronaut will also get a "trial run" abroad a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2013. They will be the second Indian in space after Rakesh Sharma, who was part of a joint space programme between India and Russia in 1984.

Analysts have also warned India that it would need to initiate a review of its space programmes, which are primarily civilian in nature, given "the military character and military functions" of China's space programme. Richard Fischer Jr, a senior fellow at Washington's International Assessment and Strategy Centre, told an audience last week in Delhi that India needed to develop new technologies to counter China's growing space power.

The decision to send astronauts into space follows the successful launch last October of India's first unmanned lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, which signalled entry into an elite club of nations that have reached the moon. However, some experts have criticised the move, saying space agencies in wealthier parts of the world have eschewed putting man into space.

Gopal Raj, author of Reach for the Stars, a book about the country's rocket programme, said: "This smacks of Isro looking to keep up with China. It's becoming a national prestige issue. I am not sure what you get from astronauts in space. Even the Europeans, who are much richer, have not got manned space flight programmes."

However, Isro says such talk underestimates India's final goals. "We are not doing this because of China [which launched astronauts into space in 2003]. We want to get beyond the moon, which we see as just an intermediate base in the future. For this, you need humans; robots will not be enough."

Others have warned that Isro's budget is expanding at a time when the country faces both an economic slowdown and widespread poverty. An estimated 40% of the world's severely malnourished children live in India, and more than 800 million people live on half a dollar a day in the country.

Isro's budget last week was boosted by 27% to 44.6bn rupees (£611m) – excluding the £1.7bn cost of the manned spacecraft programme.

"India has major issues regarding education, health [and] rural sanitation, and these struggle to get funds," said the columnist Praful Bidwai. "Yet here we are, funding a giant national ego trip when people do not have latrines. It's monstrous ... If the aim is to promote science, why not invest in climate change technologies?"

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Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 23 Feb 2009 | 5:52 pm

Climate change melts Spain's glaciers

The Pyrenees mountains have lost almost 90% of their glacier ice over the past century, according to scientists who warn that global warning means they will disappear completely within a few decades.

While glaciers covered 3,300 hectares of land on the mountain range that divides Spain and France at the turn of the last century, only 390 hectares remain, according to Spain's environment ministry.

The most southerly glaciers in Europe are losing the battle against warming and look set to be among the first to disappear from the continent over the coming decades. Their loss will have a severe impact on summer water supplies in the foothills and southern plains south of the Pyrenees.

"This century could see (perhaps within a few decades) the total, or almost total, disappearance of the last reserves of ice in the Spanish Pyrenees and, as a result, a major change in the current nature of upper reaches of the mountains," the authors of the report on Spain's glaciers said.

Scientists have ruled out the idea that the progressive deterioration of glaciers around the globe are part of normal, long-term fluctuations in their size. Europe's glaciers are thought to have lost a quarter of their mass in the last 8 years.

Prof Wilfried Haeberli, director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service, said that the rate of glacier loss is particularly quick. "Small glaciers disappear faster so the relative loss is much larger."

"They are the best indicators of climate change," he said . "I would even say these figures (for Spain) are optimistic. If the loss of ice goes on at the speed of the past 10 years they may disappear within ten to 20 years."

Scientists warn of potentially dramatic effects to agriculture as glaciers that feed rivers disappear, taking away a major source of summer water.

The glaciers under threat in Spain feed rivers such as the Gállego, the Cinca and the Garona which water the foothills and plains south of the Pyrenees.

"During the dry season, especially in Spain, they are nourished by glacier and snow melt," said Prof Haeberli.

He said that smaller glaciers, such as those in Spain and some in tropical countries such as Colombia and Kenya, would soon disappear as the planet heats up.

Even the Alps, though, stand to lose up to 75% of its glacial area by mid-century.

Glaciers provide a unique record of global climate change as scientists have been tracking their development since the International Glacier Commission was founded in Switzerland in 1894. Spanish glaciers were among those measured at the end of the 19th century.

The World Glacier Monitoring Service last year reported that glaciers around the planet were melting at a rate unseen for 5,000 years.

"It has become obvious that the ongoing trend of worldwide and fast, if not accelerating, glacier shrinkage … is of a non-cyclic nature," the service's report for the decade up to 2005 said.

The rate of melting more than doubled over that period when compared to the previous decade.

Changes were "without precedent in history" and would produce "dramatic scenarios", including the complete loss of glaciers in some mountains systems, according to the report.

"Glacier shrinkage … is not a periodic change and may lead to the deglaciation of large parts of many mountain regions by the end of the 21st century," the monitoring service report warned.

Early figures for 2006 and 2007 indicate that the speed of glacier melt around the world continues to increase.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 23 Feb 2009 | 5:28 pm

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