Bird flu: Preening spreads viruses in nature

Scientists discovered that the preen oil gland secretions, by which all aquatic birds make their feathers waterproof, support a natural mechanism that concentrates AIVs from water onto birds' bodies. Since waterbirds use to spread preen oil over their own (self-preening) or other birds' (allo-preening) plumage, it is easily understandable how these preening activities could facilitate the diffusion of the viruses in nature.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Segmentation is the secret behind the extraordinary diversification of animals

Segmentation, the repetition of identical anatomical units, seems to be the secret behind the diversity and longevity of the largest and most common animal groups on Earth. Researchers have shown that this characteristic was inherited from a common segmented ancestor thought to have lived 600 million years ago and whose presence "changed the face of the world."
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Oceanographic linkages indicate an alternative route for eel larval drift to Europe

European eel larvae are generally believed to initially follow a westerly drift route into the Gulf Stream, but new research results on bio-physical linkages in the Sargasso Sea point to a shorter route towards Europe.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Excessive intake of omega 6 and deficiencies in omega 3 induce obesity down the generations

Chronic excess of linoleic acid (omega 6), coupled with a deficiency in alpha-linoleic acid (omega 3), can increase obesity down the generations. Researchers exposed several generations of male and female adult and young mice to a "Western-like" diet of this type, and then assessed the consequences of such a lipid environment in the human diet.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Negative stereotypes shown to affect learning, not just performance, study finds

While the effect of negative performance stereotypes on test-taking and in other domains is well documented, a new study shows that the effects might also be seen further upstream than once thought, when the skills are learned, not just performed.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Weight loss may be associated with improvements in hot flushes in overweight and obese women

Among overweight and obese women with bothersome hot flushes during menopause, an intensive weight loss intervention program may lead to improvements in flushing, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Activists disable some London BP petrol stations (Reuters)

Reuters - Protesters from environmental group Greenpeace disabled some of BP's 50 petrol stations in central London on Tuesday in protest at the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Jul 2010 | 4:09 am

Russia to use space tech to develop energy sector

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia will employ technologies, initially meant for outer space research programs, to develop its vast energy sector, Energy Ministry said on Tuesday in yet another sign of the Kremlin's modernization drive.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 27 Jul 2010 | 3:33 am

2 Russian astronauts start spacewalk (AP)

AP - Two Russian astronauts have exited the international space station for a spacewalk intended to replace a video camera and improve cable connections to the orbiting laboratory's newest module.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Jul 2010 | 3:31 am

BP chief steps down in fallout from Gulf oil spill (AFP)

AFP - BP boss Tony Hayward will step down as head of the troubled oil giant, the company said Tuesday, after his heavily criticised handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill made him a target of US fury.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Jul 2010 | 3:30 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - The main weather producer for Tuesday would be the cold front that was expected to push southeastward across the Northern and Central Plains as well as the Upper Midwest.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Jul 2010 | 3:16 am

New Titanic expedition will create 3D map of wreck (AP)

AP - A team of scientists will launch an expedition to the Titanic next month to assess the deteriorating condition of the world's most famous shipwreck and create a detailed three-dimensional map that will "virtually raise the Titanic" for the public.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Jul 2010 | 3:07 am

Biological rationale for why intensive lupus treatment works

Researchers have uncovered the biological rationale for why large doses of corticosteroids given repeatedly over several weeks may help individuals with lupus, a chronic inflammatory disease that affects more than one million people in the US.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Jul 2010 | 3:00 am

Infectious prions can arise spontaneously in normal brain tissue, study shows

In a startling new discovery, scientists have shown for the first time that abnormal prions, bits of infectious protein devoid of DNA or RNA that can cause fatal neurodegenerative disease, can suddenly erupt from healthy brain tissue.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Jul 2010 | 3:00 am

For platinum catalysts, smaller may be better

Researchers have studied platinum catalysts at the atomic scale under actual industrial reaction conditions and discovered why nanoparticle clusters of platinum potentially can out-perform the single crystals of platinum now used in fuel cells and catalytic converters.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Jul 2010 | 3:00 am

Seeing the forest and the trees reveals heart problems

A statistical analysis of publicly available heart rate data using three classification tools -- Random Forests, Logistic Model Tree and Neural Network -- could lead to a rapid and precise way to diagnose heart problems, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 Jul 2010 | 3:00 am

Instant View: BP's Hayward quits, spill cost put at $32 billion (Reuters)

Reuters - BP on Tuesday confirmed that chief executive Tony Hayward will quit and said it would take a charge as a result of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill amounting to $32.2 billion.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Jul 2010 | 2:57 am

BP taps US executive as it rebuilds reputation (AFP)

AFP - Facing deep financial turmoil and a shredded reputation, BP on Tuesday appointed a non-Briton as chief executive for the first time, the maiden step on an uncertain road to redemption in the United States.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Jul 2010 | 2:56 am

'Giant leap'

We need an Apollo-sized mission to deliver a sustainable future
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 27 Jul 2010 | 2:47 am

Sarkozy shares his enlightenment vision with high-energy physicists

President Nicolas Sarkozy delivered an impressive endorsement of fundamental science at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) yesterday

A lot happened at ICHEP today, but I'll stick to the presidential address and the Higgs.

Quick Higgs recap: we know that something gives particles mass. According to our best theory, known as the Standard Model, it is the Higgs boson. And if the model is true, then the Higgs' own mass has to lie within a certain range.

Ben Kilminster of Fermilab in the US presented the latest results on the search for the Higgs at their Tevatron collider.

If the Standard Model Higgs exists, about a thousand of them have already been created at the Tevatron, but they are incredibly difficult to dig out of the data. The CDF (Collider Detector at Fermilab) and DZero collaborations have been collecting and analysing data as hard as they can, and they have now closed off a section of the possible mass range (158-175 gigaelectronvolts), leaving the Higgs less room to hide.

This raises the stakes, both for our Standard Model of fundamental physics and for supersymmetry, one of the more popular extensions of the theory. Both prefer lower Higgs masses than this, so ruling out high masses
strengthens their case. But both need the Higgs to be there, so ruling out some mass range threatens them.

The expectation is that in about three years, if the Tevatron keeps running and the analyses keep improving, they may be able to rule out the whole mass range for the Higgs at some level, or find a hint of its existence
if it is there.

It will be a close and interesting race over those years between the Tevatron and the LHC. And all the while our understanding of the theory has to keep improving. The great strength of the Standard Model is that it is falsifiable. If there is no Higgs, it's wrong. Lots of theorists are working hard to make definite predictions so that we experimentalists can prove them wrong (or right ... )

Then we had the president of the Republic.

I'm not au fait with the domestic French implications of President Sarkozy's speech to ICHEP, but as an international observer I was hugely impressed.

He gave a strong endorsement of the place of fundamental science in our society and economy, and powerful statements on the need to make sure that current economic "urgencies and emergencies" do not harm its long-term future. (He even used the candle and light bulb analogy I used to make the same point about failing to invest in fundamental science.)

What he articulated to me, accustomed as I am to UK politics, was a wonderful enlightenment vision. This was impressive and perhaps not so surprising given the strong role intellectualism seems to play in French public life. But I wish we heard more of that in the UK.

Perhaps more surprising in this context, and just as impressive, was his urging academia and scientists to engage with the public and politicians. This we do hear in the UK, and I believe it. My blogging is intended as a contribution to this, bringing some more science to the conversation in the
Guardian. I appreciate it's not for everyone, but I hope it's been interesting and readable for enough of you to make it worthwhile.

This is my last blog here for now. Thanks for reading and thanks to the Guardian science team for the opportunity. My apologies for the sometimes narrow focus on LHC and Higgs physics - it's what I do. There were many exciting results here that I didn't describe, though I did attend the talks.

There has been a lot to think about from ICHEP and I will likely write about some of it on my Life and Physics blog.

And of course particle physics is only one of the areas where we are pushing the boundaries and learning about the wonderful universe in which we live. The story of the LHC, of physics and of science, continues.

It's one of the best.

Jon Butterworth is a member of the High Energy Physics Group at University College London

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 27 Jul 2010 | 2:10 am

BP puts oil spill cost at $32.2bn

BP says it is setting aside $32.2bn (£20.8bn) to cover the oil spill clean-up costs, as it posts record losses of $17bn.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 27 Jul 2010 | 1:31 am

Russian Cosmonauts Lose Tool During Spacewalk (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - Two Russian cosmonauts have accidentally a tool and a small item in space while spacewalking outside the International Space Station early Tuesday.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Jul 2010 | 1:15 am

Paul Romer is a brilliant economist – but his idea for charter cities is bad

His wheeze that poor countries swap sovereignty for prosperity smacks of colonialism

Some professors hold on to their careers for dear tenure, eking out threadbare research material and desperately placing articles in whichever journal will take them. When retirement comes, the waters of academia swallow them up so that they become barely a footnote on a conference paper. And then there are men like Paul Romer.

Romer is bulge-bracket academia, a departure-lounge economist: the kind of intellectual as likely to be found turning left on a plane as in seminar rooms. Forever mentioned as a future Nobel prizewinner, this Californian is a world expert on how and why economies grow. When Gordon Brown made that infamous speech about post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory, it wasn't Balls – as Heseltine jibed – but Romer he was quoting.

He's one of Time's "25 most influential Americans" (true, Time was the magazine that ran a joint profile of Cyndi Lauper and Madonna in 1985, and firmly declared that Cyndi was the bigger star, but that neither came "within a mile of Tina Turner's splendid album of racked soul, Private Dancer", but accolades such as these are still to be taken with due gravity of expression) . And then there are the adoring journalistic profiles, one of which began with the reporter turning up cap in hand to meet the academic lounging "poolside at his house, which overlooks a huge expanse of rolling ranchland". That, it perhaps won't surprise you to learn, was the hardest-hitting moment.

So Romer is a brilliant economist, and he has a new and big idea. And because he is The Great Romer, he gets to present this wheeze to national leaders, high-profile conferences and invitation-only gatherings of policy-makers. And because he has some spare cash (views over rolling ranchland don't come cheap, you know), Romer can afford to jack in his formal position at Stanford and start up his own think tank to make his case.

Trouble is, the idea stinks. With little track record in dealing with poor countries, Romer has come up a grand scheme for lifting Africa and Asia out of poverty. What they need to do, he argues, is give up a big chunk of their land to a rich country. Policy experts from Washington can take over a patch of Rwanda, and invite along GM and Microsoft and Gap to come and set up factories. Poor countries give up their sovereignty in return for the promise of greater prosperity.

His big example is Hong Kong. At the end of the first opium war in 1842, the Chinese were marched on board a British warship anchored off Nanjing and forced to sign Hong Kong away to Queen Victoria. Over the next 150 years, the little island turned into Asia's number one capitalist success story. It was an example that Deng Xiaoping ended up copying on the mainland, in coastal provinces such as Guangdong – to explosive economic effect.

China's loss of Hong Kong should not be seen as a national humiliation or great international injustice, Romer has written, but "an intervention" which has "done more to reduce world poverty than all the world's official aid programmes of the 20th century combined — and at a fraction of the cost". What the world needs, the economist argues, is not one but 100 Hong Kongs.

You think this is colonialism? For Romer, that "kind of emotion . . . can get in the way" (see what he did there? You have emotions; the elite economist has evidence). Sure, the poor people living and working in these new charter cities wouldn't necessarily have any democratic privileges such as the right to vote, but they could vote with their feet. And in the meantime, the Africans or the Asians would get the undoubted benefit of all this huge western expertise.

Romer's right, in a way. This idea isn't prompted by dreams of a new imperialism – because this California economist doesn't know enough imperial history. If he did, he'd realise that the English Whig Thomas Macaulay said it all before, when he said of India in 1833: "It is scarcely possible to calculate the benefits which we might derive from the diffusion of European civilisation among the vast population of the East . . . To trade with civilised men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages." That was a view of the Empire as the white man's burden: then it came with Orientalists, now it is accompanied by corporate logos. In both cases it comes with great lashes of condescension and a lack of knowledge about the countries one is imposing on.

With a bit more history, Romer might acknowledge that mainland China had other areas that were so dominated by foreigners they too might be described as Charter Cities. Shanghai in the early 20th century had signs reading: No Dogs, No Chinese – and yet it didn't boom like Hong Kong did. He might also agree that there remains a big debate about how China has got so rich, with World Bank economists recently arguing that it is farming that has done most to reduce poverty, rather than industry.

One result of the great economic crisis is that academic practitioners are finally acknowledging that economic policy is not just a series of equations applied to the real world, but questions that ultimately have a political answer. Yet the old pseudo- scientific blank slate-ism still survives, as Paul Romer's latest project demonstrates.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 27 Jul 2010 | 12:00 am

Warning over £106bn bill for old-age care

Insurance and annuities – not taxes – must pay for rising over-65 population, advises rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange

Caring for Britain's growing elderly population could cost up to £106bn a year, equivalent to paying for a second NHS, according to research from the Policy Exchange thinktank.

In its latest report, released today, the influential rightwing group says that introducing free personal care for the elderly through taxation, as happened in Scotland in 2002, would see friends and family withdraw their informal care.

The cost to the state of providing this support, combined with the growing ageing population, would land the NHS with unsustainable costs.

Instead, the report says, the public should pay a substantial proportion of their long-term care costs through insurance or annuity-backed products.

Henry Featherstone, author of the report and head of Policy Exchange's health and social care unit, said: "As state-funded, long-term care services have tightened, the burden has resulted in a rise in NHS spending on elderly care."

The report says that there was a 67% increase in NHS spending on long-term care between 2007-08 and 2008-09.

Last year, the NHS spent about 4% (£4.23bn) of its annual budget on elderly social care. Local authorities paid £7.21bn a year.

The report warns that about 1.5 million over-65s will need support by 2025. It could mean state spending on elderly care rising by 50% over the next 15 years, from £16.17bn to £24.26bn at 2008-09 prices.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 27 Jul 2010 | 12:00 am

China Gorges flooding set to peak

Officials in China say floodwaters which have left some 1,250 people dead or missing are expected to peak within the next day.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 26 Jul 2010 | 11:59 pm

China landslide leaves 21 missing amid floods (AP)

AP - A landslide caused by rains in southern China left 21 people missing Tuesday, adding to a growing death toll from China's worst flood season in a decade, which is expected to worsen with heavy rains forecast across the country.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 26 Jul 2010 | 11:23 pm

Anatomy of a Fad: Aboard the Silly Bandz Wagon

All Aboard the Latest Superfad: The Silly Bandz Wagon
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Jul 2010 | 10:31 pm

Warming 'to draw Mexico migrants'

Climate change may drive millions of Mexicans into the US as rising temperatures reduce crop yields, a study suggests.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 26 Jul 2010 | 8:20 pm

Motherly love 'breeds confidence'

Babies whose mothers shower them with affection are better at coping with stress when they get older, researchers say.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 26 Jul 2010 | 5:34 pm

Mexican 'climate migrants' predicted to flood US

A tenth of Mexico's population could surge north to escape climate-triggered crop failures, study claims.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 26 Jul 2010 | 5:00 pm

'Spontaneous generation' of prions observed

Metal wires 'catalyse' appearance of rogue proteins from healthy brain tissue.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/yhnnNdnk4YE" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 26 Jul 2010 | 5:00 pm

Scientists Narrow Search for the 'God Particle' (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Scientists are inching closer to a glimpse of the theorized 'God particle' - the mother of all particles - researchers from Fermilab announced today at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Paris.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 26 Jul 2010 | 4:40 pm

Personality types affect women's approach to childbirth - study

Institute of Social and Economic Research cross-referenced five personality traits with the ages of 16,000 mothers

Conventional wisdom says that the better educated a woman is, the more likely she is to delay motherhood. But a new study suggests personality type could be a more powerful determinant.

The research found that high levels of "extroversion", "agreeableness" and "neuroticism" accelerated the desire of a woman to have a child. Conversely, high "conscientiousness" and "openness" were associated with delaying childbirth.

In the report, by the Institute of Social and Economic Research, the five personality traits were cross-referenced with the age at which more than 16,000 women had their first child.

Lara Tavares, author of the study – Who Delays Childbearing? The Relationships Between Fertility, Education and Personality Traits – used data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) collected over the past five years.

There is on average a two-year gap between the mean age at first birth of women with and without higher educational qualifications.

But, said Tavares, personality traits could help to explain the maternity timing gap between women with differing levels of education. "Most studies do find evidence of a positive relationship between education and age at first birth," she said. "However, the nature of this relationship is far less clear. The difficulty in studying the relationship between education and fertility is that it might be spurious.

"First, personality traits influence both education and fertility decisions. Secondly, some highly educated women – the more 'open-minded' – severely postpone childbearing, and therefore they push up the average age at first birth within the group of more educated women, thereby creating a fertility timing gap between more and less educated women."

Childbearing age has increased all over Europe over recent years. In England and Wales, the mean age at first birth has jumped from 25.2 in 1980 to 30.2 in 2006, among the highest in Europe.

According to the BHPS categorisations, extroversion is mainly characterised by sociability, with extroverts tending to be talkative and assertive. Agreeableness relates to the subject's willingness to help others – to be caring, co-operative and kind.

Neuroticism indicates the subject's emotional stability, with high scorers tending to be anxious, depressed and insecure. Those who scored highly on conscientiousness tended to follow the rules, to be reliable, well-organised and self-disciplined.

"Openness" reflected an individual's tendency to unconventionality and intellect. Open-minded women tend to enjoy being unattached, free, not tied to people, places, or obligations – and may be rebellious.

"More 'open-minded' people might be less vulnerable to the social pressure for having children," said Tavares. "Because people who score high on openness usually have wide interests, they are less likely to be exclusively family-oriented. Consequently, they might value their careers more and therefore face higher psychological childbearing costs.

"Declining fertility rates are associated with a transition to an individualistic family model, characterised by self-development, individual autonomy and gender equality. In other words, the change in values that resulted in a greater weight being given to individual preferences. Or, to put it another way, to openness."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 26 Jul 2010 | 4:07 pm

Presenting...The Grizzly Bear

Naturalist Mark Fraser today shares a breathtaking video on the grizzly bear.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Jul 2010 | 4:07 pm

Scientists Narrow Search for the 'God Particle'

Scientists inch closer to finding the Higgs boson particle.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Jul 2010 | 3:50 pm

Tropical Cyclone Birth Predicted

This new animation, developed with the help of NASA's Pleiades supercomputer, illustrates how tropical cyclone Nargis formed in the Indian Ocean's Bay of Bengal over several days in late April 2008.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Jul 2010 | 3:29 pm

Kepler Scientist: 'Galaxy is Rich in Earth-Like Planets'

A Kepler co-investigator has preempted the official announcement and leaked that the exoplanet-hunting space telescope has discovered about 140 Earth-like candidate worlds orbiting other stars.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Jul 2010 | 2:09 pm

Scientists inch towards finding "God particle"

PARIS (Reuters) - Scientists working with particle accelerators in Europe and the United States said on Monday they may be closing in on the elusive Higgs Boson, the "God particle" believed crucial to forming the cosmos after the Big Bang.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 26 Jul 2010 | 2:02 pm

Post-Katrina Study Shows Strength of Salt Marshes

Saline marshes can take a beating, freshwater marshes are weaklings.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Jul 2010 | 1:22 pm

Successful Conversations Involve Mind Melds, Study Reveals

Our brains are coupled in conversation when we understand each other.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Jul 2010 | 1:01 pm

Good Connection Really Does Lead to Mind Meld

When two people experience a deep connection, they’re informally described as being on the same wavelength. There may be neurological truth to that.

Brain scans of a speaker and listener showed their neural activity synchronizing during storytelling. The stronger their reported connection, the closer the coupling.

The experiment was the first to use fMRI, which measures blood flow changes in the brain, on two people as they talked. Different brain regions have been linked to both speaking and listening, but “the ongoing interaction between the two systems during everyday communication remains largely unknown,” wrote Princeton University neuroscientists Greg Stephens and Uri Hasson in the July 27 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They found that speaking and listening used common rather than separate neural subsystems inside each brain. Even more striking was an overlap between the brains of speaker and listener. When post-scan interviews found that stories had resonated, scans showed a complex interplay of neural call and response, as if language were a wire between test subjects’ brains.

The findings don’t explain why any two people “click,” as synchronization is a result of that connection, not its cause. And while the brain regions involved are linked to language, their precise functions are not clear. But even if the findings are general, they support what psychologists call the “theory of interactive linguistic alignment” — a fancy way of saying that talking brings people closer by making them share a common conceptual ground.

“If I say, ‘Do you want a coffee?’ you say, ‘Yes please, two sugars.’ You don’t say, ‘Yes, please put two sugars in the cup of coffee that is between us,’” said Hasson. “You’re sharing the same lexical items, grammatical constructs and contextual framework. And this is happening not just abstractly, but literally in the brain.”

The researchers didn’t test brain synchronization during phone calls or video conferencing, but Hasson speculates that “coupling would be stronger face-to-face.” He also thinks dialogue will produce especially strong forms of synchronization, and plans to run scans of people engaged in deep conversation, rather than telling or listening to long stories.

“But first, we’ll look at cases where there’s a failure to communicate,” said Hasson.

Image: Overlap between neural activation in speaker and listener./PNAS.

See Also:

• Your Computer Really Is a Part of You
• Brain Scan Lie-Detection Deemed Far From Ready for Courtroom
• Twitter Telepathy: Researchers Turn Thoughts Into Tweets
• Nun Brains Show Language Skills Predict Future Alzheimer’s Risk
• Roots of Language Run Deeper Than Speech

Citation: “Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication.” By Greg J. Stephens, Lauren J. Silbert, Uri Hasson. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107 No. 29, July 27, 2010.

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecological tipping points.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 26 Jul 2010 | 1:00 pm

Sniffing device allows paralysed woman to communicate

The woman used the revolutionary device, which is controlled by sniffing, to write a letter to her children

A 51-year-old woman who was left paralysed and unable to communicate following a massive stroke has written for the first time in seven years, scientists say.

The Israeli patient, who was diagnosed with "locked-in syndrome", typed an emotional email to her six children using a revolutionary device that is controlled by sniffing.

The woman was so badly brain-damaged by the stroke that she cannot move any of her limbs or even blink in response to simple questions. She wrote the letter within a few days of being taught how to use the device.

The technology, developed by scientists at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, is now being used by other severely disabled people to surf the internet and even control a wheelchair. One, a 63-year-old quadriplegic woman who can barely speak, wrote her first letter in 10 years with the device and has started using it to send emails.

"The most moving thing has been witnessing this technology give people a means of communication when they haven't had it," said Noam Sobel, a neurobiologist at the institute, who helped develop the technology.

The device works by detecting slight changes in pressure that are produced when a person opens or closes their soft palate, the tissue at the roof of the mouth that controls air flow through the nose. Many patients with serious disabilities are still able to move their palate voluntarily, and so can use the device, said Sobel.

When the sensor is connected to a computer, a person wearing the device can use sniffs alone to select letters on the screen and build up words, phrases and sentences.

One patient, a 42-year-old man who was diagnosed with locked-in syndrome after a car crash 18 years ago, used the sniff-controlled device to say he preferred it to a previous disability aid that performed a similar function by tracking his eye movement, writing that it was "more comfortable and more easy to use".

The speed at which patients can write with the new device varies between around 20 seconds and a minute for a single letter of the alphabet. The 1997 book, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, was written by Jean-Dominique Bauby at a rate of roughly one word every two minutes. Bauby, who became locked-in after suffering a stroke, selected letters by blinking his left eye.

In another test of the device, a 30-year-old man who was paralysed from the neck down in a car accident six years ago, used the device to steer a motorised wheelchair along a winding path 30 metres long. After one trial attempt, the patient completed the course as fast as healthy volunteers.

Sobel said he was anxious what locked-in patients might write after being unable to move or communicate for so long, but he said none wrote about wanting to end their own lives. "I was afraid that the minute we could communicate, all that might come out," he said. "What's important is giving the person the ability to express themselves."

The findings are published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 26 Jul 2010 | 12:59 pm

World's First Full Face Transplant Patient Meets the Press

During the 24-hour-long operation, he received new facial muscles, skin, nose, lips, a jaw, teeth, a palate and cheekbones.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Jul 2010 | 11:55 am

Hyman Frankel obituary

Hyman Frankel, my friend and comrade for 40 years, who has died aged 91, will probably be best remembered for Out of This World: An Examination of Modern Physics and Cosmology, published in 2003. In this book, Hyman applied the philosophy and methodology of dialectical materialism, derived from Marx, to explore crises in physics, the economy and society as a whole. Although it was intended to be read by professional physicists, cosmologists and philosophers, Hyman made the book accessible to general readers.

By the time I met him, Hyman had already had an amazingly diverse career. In the early 1940s, he was a research technician in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, where pioneering work on nuclear physics was undertaken. When the rest of the team migrated to the US, Hyman decided to stay in the UK and went to work as a coalminer in the South Yorkshire Coalfield, until ill health forced him to quit.

He then trained as a teacher of mathematics, took a degree in sociology from Birkbeck College and became a trade union official. In 1970, he published Capitalist Society and Modern Sociology, in which he challenged the orthodox sociology being taught in universities.

Hyman was born into a Jewish community in the East End of London; his father was the beadle of a local synagogue. By the age of 18, he had rejected the Zionist ideology with which he had grown up. His experience of seeing Oswald Mosley's Blackshirt marches through east London prompted him to join the Young Communist league.

He was a member of the Communist party of Great Britain until it was disbanded in 1991. After that, he joined the Alliance for Green Socialism. He chaired his local branch of the trade union Amicus, which became Unite, until two years ago. Hyman's mind remained active to the last. He is survived by a son and two daughters. His wife, Nan, died in 2000.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 26 Jul 2010 | 11:31 am

Giant Rat Fossil Discovered

The largest species of rat ever discovered was about 50 percent larger than the common black rat.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Jul 2010 | 11:16 am

Top 10 Reasons to Ditch Your Dumb Phone for a Smartphone

To supercharge your cellular ride through our increasingly wired world, you're going to need an aptly named smartphone.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Jul 2010 | 11:13 am

Math Is No Match for Locust Swarms

Mathematicians have now figured out the dynamics that drive locusts across the landscape, devastating everything underfoot — and the math says people will never be able to predict where the little buggers will go.

The new analysis, reported in an upcoming issue of Physical Review E, suggests that random factors accumulate and influence how swarming locusts collectively decide to change course.

“These swarms are driven by intrinsic dynamics,” says team member Iain Couzin, a biologist at Princeton University. “In all practical terms, predicting when a swarm is going to change direction is going to be impossible.”

Still, others say the information may one day allow researchers to better inform locust-control efforts — for instance, by suggesting the best times and places to apply insecticide ahead of an approaching swarm.

Desert locusts, Schistocerca gregaria, normally live in arid parts of Africa and Asia but can explode over millions of square kilometers during plagues, as happened during the late 1980s. Researchers understand much of the basic biology behind locust swarms — even how the insects change color as they mass together — but the physics describing their collective behavior has been something of a mystery.

That began to change a few years ago, when an interdisciplinary group of mathematicians, biologists and others were inspired to look at the basic physics of locust swarming. By putting more and more locusts into a ring-shaped arena 80 centimeters in diameter, the team watched as, at a critical density, the locusts switched from wandering around on their own to behaving as a group.

In new work, Carlos Escudero of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid looked further at the mathematics underlying this change in behavior. From watching locusts in the arena he and his colleagues came up with an equation, called a Fokker-Planck equation, that describes how the density of particles (or in this case, insects) changes over time.

Further analysis showed that a number of random factors influence when the insects decide to change direction. Mathematically, the change in the locusts’ direction is similar to switches in magnetic properties that occur among clumps of magnetic particles at high temperatures, Escudero says. In both cases, random influences accumulate until suddenly the whole system changes its behavior.

“It’s impossible to know when the next switch will happen,” Escudero says. “Still, we have a little bit more understanding on how these perturbations are produced, and we hope that in the long run we can apply this practically.”

Jerome Buhl, a biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia, notes that swarming locusts typically start their morning in a dense clump and spread out over the course of the day. The best time to target spraying, he says, might therefore be right after the insects start marching, because over time their behavior will become less predictable.

“What we need to do now is to work out the maths behind this,” Buhl says, “and we’ll be able to determine which way to lay the barriers ahead of a band to more likely be optimal, potentially saving on the amount of insecticide used and minimizing the impact of control.”

Buhl and other researchers are gearing up for an imminent expected plague of a different locust species in Australia. The team plans to glue tiny reflectors to locusts, then fly unmanned aerial vehicles over the swarms to track the behavior of individuals within the group.

Images: A locust swarm in Eilat, Israel./Flickr/antichrist.

See Also:

• High-Speed Video of Locusts Could Help Make Better Flying Robots
• High-Speed Video Shows How Flies Change Direction So Quickly
• Pigeon Flocks Let the Best Bird Lead
• Amazing Starling Flocks Are Flying Avalanches
• Jellyfish Are the Dark Energy of the Oceans

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 26 Jul 2010 | 11:06 am

Emotional Effects of Bullying Written in Genes

Study results could lead to better interventions to reduce bullying.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Jul 2010 | 10:42 am

Acrobatic Robots

Visit Dennis Hong's lab and you'll see robots climbing walls, negotiating bumpy uneven terrain, even typing a letter. Robots are being developed to perform a wide variety of tasks and to eventually be able to move and think on their own.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Jul 2010 | 10:29 am

Students, CubeSats and the Importance of a Space Education

During a flight on June 22, Melissa Jun Rowley joined a team of space engineering students from the University of Michigan aboard NASA's famous Weightless Wonder aircraft to document the group's participation in NASA's Reduced Gravity Flight Education Program.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Jul 2010 | 10:23 am

Laser Powers Tiny, Golden 'Light Mills'

The miniature mills could power a whole new generation of nano-sized devices.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Jul 2010 | 10:15 am

The Neuroscience of Inception

This entire post is a spoiler. Stop reading if you have not seen Inception, because 1) I will reveal major plot points and 2) It will make no sense.

The literary critic Frank Kermode famously argued that all successful works of art have the ability to inspire multiple interpretations. We read the classics, he said, because we believe they say more than the author meant. In other words, it is the ambiguity of art  - this ability to inspire arguments and blog posts – that makes it so interesting.

Inception, of course, is all about the ambiguity. (Those who parse the wobbles of the spinning top in the final scene have missed the entire point of the scene.) This doesn’t mean the movie is a masterpiece – I personally thought it was a smart summer blockbuster but no Dark Knight. That said, I found this interpretation, by Devin Farci, to be mostly convincing:

Every single moment of Inception is a dream. I think that in a couple of years this will become the accepted reading of the film, and differing interpretations will have to be skillfully argued to be even remotely considered. The film makes this clear, and it never holds back the truth from audiences. Some find this idea to be narratively repugnant, since they think that a movie where everything is a dream is a movie without stakes, a movie where the audience is wasting their time.

Except that this is exactly what Nolan is arguing against. The film is a metaphor for the way that Nolan as a director works, and what he’s ultimately saying is that the catharsis found in a dream is as real as the catharsis found in a movie is as real as the catharsis found in life. Inception is about making movies, and cinema is the shared dream that truly interests the director.

I believe that Inception is a dream to the point where even the dream-sharing stuff is a dream. Dom Cobb isn’t an extractor. He can’t go into other people’s dreams. He isn’t on the run from the Cobol Corporation. At one point he tells himself this, through the voice of Mal, who is a projection of his own subconscious. She asks him how real he thinks his world is, where he’s being chased across the globe by faceless corporate goons.

What I like about this interpretation of Inception is that it also makes neurological sense. From the perspective of your brain, dreaming and movie-watching are strangely parallel experiences. In fact, one could argue that sitting in a darkened theater and staring at a thriller is the closest one can get to REM sleep with open eyes. Consider this study, led by Uri Hasson and Rafael Malach at Hebrew University. The experiment was simple: they showed subjects a vintage Clint Eastwood movie (“The Good, The Bad and the Ugly”) and watched what happened to the cortex in a scanner. The scientists found that when adults were watching the film their brains showed a peculiar pattern of activity, which was virtually universal. (The title of the study is “Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision”.) In particular, people showed a remarkable level of similarity when it came to the activation of areas including the visual cortex (no surprise there), fusiform gyrus (it was turned on when the camera zoomed in on a face), areas related to the processing of touch (they were activated during scenes involving physical contact) and so on. Here’s the nut graf from the paper:

This strong intersubject correlation shows that, despite the completely free viewing of dynamical, complex scenes, individual brains “tick together” in synchronized spatiotemporal patterns when exposed to the same visual environment.

But it’s also worth pointing out which brain areas didn’t “tick together” in the movie theater. The most notable of these “non-synchronous” regions is the prefrontal cortex, an area associated with logic, deliberative analysis, and self-awareness. Subsequent work by Malach and colleagues has found that, when we’re engaged in intense “sensorimotor processing” – and nothing is more intense for the senses than a big moving image and Dolby surround sound – we actually inhibit these prefrontal areas. The scientists argue that such “inactivation” allows us to lose ourself in the movie:

Our results show a clear segregation between regions engaged during self-related introspective processes and cortical regions involved in sensorimotor processing. Furthermore, self-related regions were inhibited during sensorimotor processing. Thus, the common idiom ”losing yourself in the act” receives here a clear neurophysiological underpinnings.

What these experiments reveal is the essential mental process of movie-watching. It’s a process in which your senses are hyperactive and yet your self-awareness is strangely diminished. Now here’s where things get interesting, at least for this interpretation of Inception. When we fall asleep, the brain undergoes a similar pattern of global activity, as the prefrontal cortex goes quiet and the visual cortex becomes even more active than usual. But this isn’t the usual excitement of reality: this activity is semirandom and unpredictable, unbound by the constraints of sensation. (This is usually blamed on those squirts of acetylcholine, an excitatory neurotransmitter, percolating upwards from the brain stem.) It’s as if our cortex is entertaining us with surreal cinema, filling our strange nighttime narratives with whatever spare details happen to be lying around. Furthermore, the dreaming state is accompanied by an increase in activation in a wide range of “limbic” areas, those chunks of the cortex associated with the production of emotion. This is why even the most absurd nightmares cause us to wake up in a cold sweat. We care about what happens in our dreams, even when what happens makes no sense.

I’d argue that Inception tries to collapse the already thin distinction between dreaming and movie-watching. It gives us a movie in which most of the major plot points are simultaneously nonsensical – Why are we suddenly watching a thriller set in the arctic? Why are all the subconscious mercenaries such bad shots? Why don’t Cobb’s kids ever age? – and strangely compelling, just like a dream. And so we bite our fingernails even though we “know” it’s just a silly movie. Thanks to the subdued activity of the frontal lobes and the excited visual cortex, we sit in our plush chairs munching on popcorn and confuse the fake with the real. We don’t question the non-sequiturs or complain about the imperfect special effects or the shallow characters. Instead, we just sit back and watch and lose track of the time together. It’s almost as if we’re being manipulated by Dom Cobb himself, as he effortlessly travels deep into our brain to plant an idea. But this Dom Cobb – we’ll call him Christopher Nolan – doesn’t need a specially formulated sedative. He just needs a big screen.

Image: Screengrab from the movie trailer.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 26 Jul 2010 | 10:14 am

No need for manned spaceflight, says astronomer royal Martin Rees

Martin Rees believes sending people into space is pointless and a waste of money

Forget manned moon bases, forget a Mars colony – most future space travellers will be robots, according to astronomer royal Martin Rees.

Rees, professor of cosmology and astrophysics at Cambridge University, thinks sending people into space is a waste of money, given recent advances in unmanned space technology. He said European space scientists should focus on miniaturisation and robotics to remain competitive in a space sector dominated by Russia and the US.

Rees, who is coming to the end of his five-year term as president of the Royal Society, made the comments during an interview for Cambridge Ideas – a series of videos, podcasts and slideshows from Cambridge University.

He said largescale manned space missions like the moon landings are probably a thing of the past.

"The moon landings were an important impetus to technology but you have to ask the question, what is the case for sending people back into space?" said Rees. "I think that the practical case gets weaker and weaker with every advance in robotics and miniaturisation. It's hard to see any particular reason or purpose in going back to the moon or indeed sending people into space at all."

No one has been to the moon since Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Cernan stepped back into his lunar lander in 1972. In his speech on space policy at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on 15 April, US President Barack Obama cancelled Constellation – the Bush administration's plans to return to the moon – saying bluntly "We've been there before."

"In the last 30 years people have gone no further than low Earth orbit, but what has happened is greater practical use of space," said Rees. He cited GPS as well as climate and telecommunications satellites as everyday benefits of space technology.

"Probes have been to the other planets and sent back wonderful pictures," he said, citing Nasa's Kepler space observatory, and the European Space Agency's Herschel and Planck satellites, as a glimpse of things to come.

"Kepler will tell us whether other stars are orbited by planets like the Earth and that's going to be important," said Rees. He said the most obvious place to look for life elsewhere in the universe would be a planet like the Earth. "I'm sure that in two or three years we'll know from the Kepler observations that there are many other planets like the Earth orbiting other stars. But I think it may be 20 years before we get an image of a planet," he said.

"As to whether they will have life on them, I would not take any bets at all. Biology is a much harder subject than astronomy and we don't know how life began on earth. I would hope in 20 years we might understand that. Once we understand how life got started here, we'll have a better idea for how likely it was to start in other environments and where the best places in the cosmos to look are."

Esa's Planck satellite will look at radiation from just after the big bang to give scientists a clearer understanding of the early universe. Meanwhile Herschel – the largest space telescope ever launched – is investigating how stars and galaxies have formed by looking at wavelengths never observed before.

Rees has long been an advocate of unmanned space exploration. In a BBC interview in 2008 he argued that routine shuttle launches and low-orbit flights didn't make headlines. "What actually makes the newspaper headlines are the marvellous pictures from the Hubble telescope and those of the surface of Mars and Jupiter and Titan, all obtained robotically," he said.

In the third of his recent series of Reith lectures, Rees said he hoped that during this century, "the entire solar system will be explored by flotillas of robotic craft" and expressed scepticism as to whether people would follow.

Speaking to Cambridge Ideas, Rees remained enthusiastic about manned space travel, but thought it would be rather different in style from what we have seen before.

"I hope indeed that some people now living will walk on Mars, but I think they will do this with the same motive as those who climb Everest or the pioneer explorers," he said.

"I think the future for manned space exploration will be a cut-price, high-risk programme – perhaps even partly privately funded – which would be an adventure, more than anything practical," he said.

In the US, Obama has pledged to land a man on an asteroid by 2025, and said he believed manned spacecraft will be orbiting Mars by the 2030s. In Europe, Esa is running the Mars500 project, a full-length simulation of a manned flight to Mars. China has already put men in space, and India hopes to send two men into low Earth orbit by 2016.

As Rees steps down as president of the Royal Society this year, convincing the world that manned space flight is impractical may well become a full-time job.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 26 Jul 2010 | 9:32 am

Animal Warfare: Could the Taliban Train Monkeys to Shoot?

A report of Taliban insurgents training monkeys and baboons to fire guns at U.S. and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan seems unrealistic, an expert says.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Jul 2010 | 9:01 am

King Tut's Chariot Heads To New York

A chariot that may have witnessed King Tutankhamun’s final moments is traveling outside Egypt for the first time in three millennia to join the "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" exhibit at the Discovery Times Square Exposition, Egypt's ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Jul 2010 | 8:55 am

Laser Shoots Down Drones at Sea

Lasers have a natural advantage over conventional weapons -- their ammunition doesn't easily run out.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Jul 2010 | 8:42 am

Science Nation

Science for the People: Surprising discoveries and fascinating researchers.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Jul 2010 | 8:29 am

Higgs boson still eludes capture – but now we know where it isn't

Scientists at the Tevatron collider in the US have scotched a rumour that they have seen the Higgs boson, but they have ruled out a range of energies that it might have

Scientists are a step closer to discovering an elusive particle that is thought to give mass to the basic building blocks of nature.

Physicists hunting the Higgs boson at the Tevatron particle collider near Chicago said their latest results will help researchers close in on the long-sought prize.

The Tevatron, which is the main rival to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, near Geneva, has ruled out a quarter of the energy range where the Higgs particle is expected to be lurking, scientists told the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Paris today.

The announcement follows weeks of speculation that physicists had seen glimpses of the Higgs particle at the US collider. The rumours were denied by staff at Fermilab, where the Tevatron is based.

"We've updated and upgraded all of our analyses and right now, we just need the Tevatron to keep running the way it is," said Robert Roser, co-spokesman for a collaboration of 550 physicists who work on the Tevatron's CDF detector.

The Tevatron collides beams of protons with beams of antiprotons (their antimatter counterparts) at close to the speed of light inside a four-mile underground ring. The machine is less powerful than the LHC, but has been running for longer and has a head start in the hunt for the Higgs particle.

Previous experiments suggest the Higgs particle has a mass somewhere between 114 and 185 GeV (gigaelectronvolts), where one GeV is roughly equivalent to the mass of a proton, a subatomic particle found in atomic nuclei.

The latest results from the Tevatron, which combine the efforts to find the Higgs particle from its two detectors, CDF and DZero, rule out the possibility that its mass is between 158 and 175 GeV.

"Our goal first of all is to find the particle if we can, not to exclude where it might be, but we'll take what we can get," said Roser.

The Tevatron collider is scheduled to be switched off at the end of 2011, around the same time that the LHC is due to shut down for a 15-month programme of upgrades before running non-stop until November 2015. A proposal drawn up by Tevatron physicists to keep their machine running until 2014 is under consideration.

"The LHC won't be able to say anything about the Higgs particle until well into 2013. If we can run until 2014, we should be able to see the Higgs boson whatever mass it has," said Roser.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 26 Jul 2010 | 8:17 am

Bug Outbreaks Mostly Not Due to Warming

From a ship overrun with spiders to bed bug infestations at major clothing stores, is this the time of plagues?
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 26 Jul 2010 | 8:15 am

Gamma-Ray Bursts Could Halt Photosynthesis

Cosmic explosions thousands of light-years away could shut down photosynthesis in the ocean at depths of up to 260 feet, a new study suggests. The calculations add to a growing body of research linking these great blasts, called gamma-ray bursts, with biological damage and even mass extinctions on Earth.

Gamma-ray bursts are tremendous explosions detonated during a massive star’s death throes. When stars eight times the mass of the sun or larger reach the end of their lives, they die in spectacular supernova explosions that can temporarily outshine entire galaxies.

Under certain conditions — astronomers aren’t exactly sure what — all that energy can be concentrated into a tight beam extending like a spotlight away from the star. These bright beams, known as gamma-ray bursts, can last up to 10 seconds, and carry energies equivalent to billions of nuclear bombs going off at once.

And according to the new research, phytoplankton would not enjoy them. In a paper published on the astronomy preprint site arXiv.org, biologist Liuba Penate of the Universidad Central de Las Villas in Cuba and colleagues model the marine food web from plankton up if a gamma-ray burst were to strike.

Earlier research showed that the burst would trigger an ultraviolet flash at the Earth’s surface. Incoming gamma rays would smack electrons off of atoms in the atmosphere, which would knock secondary electrons off nearby atoms and trigger a cascade of bright light.

“You’d actually see a pretty bright flash,” said astronomer Brian Thomas of Washburn University in Kansas, who was involved in the earlier work. “If you’re standing outside looking up at the sky, you might well be blinded by this.”

Phytoplankton don’t have to worry about going blind, but they would feel the flash on a molecular level, Penate’s team argues. The radiation could damage simple organisms’ DNA, and even shut off photosynthesis entirely for at least the 10 second duration of the flash.

The team calculated how deeply the radiation would penetrate the ocean if a gamma-ray burst went off 6,000 light-years from Earth. In clear waters, photosynthesis would be totally suppressed down to about 260 feet in the ocean. In more turbid waters, photosynthesis would still suffer in the first 65 feet of water.

As the first level of the oceanic food chain, phytoplankton support a variety of more complicated organisms. These tiny plants are also responsible for releasing oxygen into the atmosphere. One species, Prochlorococcus marinus, is responsible for 20 percent of the total oxygen released by the biosphere all by itself, the researchers write. Whatever messes with phytoplankton messes with the whole biosphere.

On the other hand, photosynthesis could turn back on after the burst calms down.

“If you turn off photosynthesis for 10 seconds, that’s no big deal,” Thomas said — plants are used to not being able to produce for hours at a time at night. The real worry is if plankton DNA ends up too severely damaged to be repaired quickly.

The study is “definitely something new, and it’s worth doing,” Thomas said. But he was worried that the authors didn’t include enough detail on how they made their calculations. “It throws into question somewhat the accuracy of the results,” he said. The qualitative results are reasonable, he said, “but I wouldn’t necessarily take seriously the exact numbers.”

The effects of a gamma-ray burst itself could linger well after the 10-second flash dies down, he added. Thomas and his colleagues’ earlier research found that a nearby gamma-ray burst would deplete the ozone layer, which would increase the amount of ultraviolet radiation reaching Earth from the sun and ultimately do catastrophic damage to the DNA of organisms on Earth. A study in the International Journal of Astrobiology in 2004 suggests the Ordovician mass extinction 440 million years ago could have been at least partially caused by a nearby gamma-ray burst.

But gamma-ray bursts are so rare, astronomers expect one to detonate within 6,000 light-years of Earth only once every 15 billion years — longer than the age of the universe. That means we are probably safe from gamma-ray bursts, says astronomer Ethan Siegel.

“That may not be as exciting as ‘We’re all gonna die!’” Siegel said. “But the statistics definitely work in favor of our survival.”

Image: NASA/Swift/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith and John Jones

See Also:

• Mysterious Gamma-Ray Bursts May Have Ties to Failed Black Holes
• New Explanation for Bright Supernovas: Multiple Explosions
• Death Star Off the Hook for Mass Extinctions
• A New Explanation for Ancient Mass Extinction
• Latest Extinction is the Greatest
• Dinosaurs Rode Volcanic Armageddon to Victory

Follow us on Twitter @astrolisa and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 26 Jul 2010 | 8:14 am

Blueberry thrill

Now more popular than raspberries, but why?
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 26 Jul 2010 | 7:39 am

China considers big rocket power

Chinese engineers are considering a new super-powerful engine for the next generation of space rockets, say officials.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 26 Jul 2010 | 7:02 am

My boyfriend thinks I talk too much

Carole Jahme shines the cold light of evolutionary psychology on readers' problems. This week: Incessant chatter

From Sarah, by email
Dear Carole, Please can you help me with an embarrassing problem which I can't seem to control that annoys my boyfriend (and my previous one too).

I'm in love with him, and he with me; we've been together for four
years. But I talk more than him and can't seem to stop myself, especially when I'm excited or happy, when he's just trying to quietly enjoy the moment.

It doesn't help that he's Hungarian. I have learned a few basics of his native language, but am nowhere near fluent and can't hold a conversation in Hungarian.

Do you have any advice to help me control my talking when I'm excited or
happy?

Carole replies:
Evolutionary theorists have argued that the evolution of female sociability is linked to the development of the primate neocortex.¹ This is the part of the brain responsible for language, sensory perception and self-awareness, among other cognitive abilities. (Neocortical abnormality is associated with autism and impaired communication skills.) The neocortex is proportionally larger in primates than in other mammals, larger in the apes than in monkeys and significantly bigger in humans.²

In addition, information transfer points between the brain's two hemispheres are larger in human females, thus facilitating rapid inter-hemispheric processing of linguistic and empathic information.³

It is thought that social evolution in primates has been female-driven and that females are selected for group co-operation.⁴ The idea is that those of our female primate ancestors who were communicative and co-operative breeders left behind higher numbers of descendants than those who did not communicate and co-operate.⁵

By around six months human infants start to babble and, depending on the sociability of the individual, this spontaneous chattiness may continue into adulthood. This is more likely to happen in females than males. Innate sex differences in brain architecture may give females the edge in social communication, though the difference is unrelated to measures of general social intelligence.

All of this research indicates that you, Sarah, and your ancestors have evolved to be chatty, babbling females. When primates become excited their vocalisations increase and you are no different. When you are in the company of like-minded female friends that isn't a problem. You can talk as much as you want, jump backwards and forwards between themes and sub-themes, and concurrently narrate multiple storylines. Your friends will happily reciprocate and no one will lose the plot.

But your hard-wired chattiness annoys the men in your life – men not hard-wired for empathic chattiness. You have reached a point now where you want to please your partner by controlling your spontaneous vocalisations. You are willing and perhaps able to adapt to his requirement for silence.

But here's your dilemma.

Many female primates only commune with males during sex, the rest of the time being spent in the company of females and infants. Males are often found sitting alone. By contrast, humans have developed a monogamous culture in which males and females spend social time together. Frequently men wish the females in their lives behaved more like males and women wish the men in their lives could get in touch with their feminine side.

Your personality type is most probably more socially flexible than your partner's, so it may be easier for you to quieten down than for your partner to reciprocate your need for constant chatter.

But at what cost? For an evolved, advanced social animal to deny this large part of herrself and metaphorically gag herself could lead to depression. Empathic humans have an innate requirement for companionship, shared experience and to listen and explore all points of view.⁶ It is a therapeutic necessity for babbling humans to be able to exchange chatter, and to analyse the crucial information held therein, rather than to experience emotional highs and lows in isolation.

As you are in love with your current boyfriend, however, you will not want to find a new, chattier male. Perhaps, instead, when you cannot be in the physical company of girlfriends you could simply phone or message them? That way you could continue to live out your excited, babbling happiness and your desire to share that happiness with others without irritating your partner.

You might also try purging your excited thoughts by writing them down.

Just don't forget that you have a duty to know your evolved self and keep yourself happy.

References
1. Lindenfors et al (2007) Primate brain architecture and selection in relation to sex. BioMed Central Biology; 5: 20.
2. Dunbar, R I M (2007) Male and female brain evolution is subject to contrasting selection pressures in primates. BMC Biology; 5: 21.
3. Baron-Cohen, S (2003) The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain. Penguin Press.
4. Lindenfors, P et al (2004) Females drive primate social evolution. Proceedings of the Royal Society B; 271(Suppl 3): S101–S103.
5. Hrdy, S (2009) Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Belknap Press.
6. Decety, J, Sommerville, J A (2003) Shared representations between self and other: a social cognitive neuroscience view. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 7; 12: 527-533.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 26 Jul 2010 | 6:52 am

Orgasm-Seeking Women Find Little Help From Science

One out of four women has trouble orgasming during sex
Source: Livescience.com | 26 Jul 2010 | 6:31 am

Fog from peat fires covers Moscow

An acrid fog from forest and peat fires blankets Moscow, as the Russian capital swelters in a record heat wave.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 26 Jul 2010 | 6:12 am

Deep science

Mini-sub crew get to the bottom of oil spill's risk to marine life
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 26 Jul 2010 | 5:28 am

Space age sub explores slick

David Shukman takes a dive in a research sub as it investigates the effects of the oil spill on the Gulf of Mexico's coral reefs.
Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 26 Jul 2010 | 5:22 am

Educated people cope better with dementia

LONDON (Reuters) - Educated people are better able to cope with the physical effects of dementia, and even one extra year of education can significantly cut the risk of developing the brain-wasting disease, scientists said on Monday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 26 Jul 2010 | 5:06 am