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As Social Network Grows, so Does the Brain

Jennifer Welsh
Live Science
Thu, 03 Nov 2011 13:49 UTC
Monkeys
© Live Science

Monkey brains grow bigger with every cagemate they acquire, according to a new study showing that certain parts of the brain associated with processing social information expand in response to more complex social information.

"Interestingly, there are a couple of studies in humans by different research groups that show some correlation between brain size and the size of the social network, and we found some similarities in our studies," study researcher Jerome Sallet, of Oxford University in the U.K., told LiveScience.

"[Our study] reinforces the idea that the human social network was built on something that was already there in the rhesus macaques."

Monkey studies

The researchers studied 23 rhesus macaques living in different size groups in a research facility; they had been in these groups for at least two months (the average length of time spent in their present group was more than one year).

These different groups each had a dominance-based hierarchy (except the one monkey that was caged alone). One's rank among male cagemates is dependent upon social interactions, including the ability to make friends and form coalitions, which grants the monkey access to valued resources.

The researchers scanned the brains of the monkeys using magnetic resonance imaging to gauge the sizes of different brain regions. They saw enlargements in gray matter in several areas of the brain associated with social interactions. On average, they saw more than a 5 percent increase in gray matter mass per extra cagemate.
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Bad Guys

Climate Clues Found In Ancient Underwater Caves

Brett Israel
OurAmazingPlanet
Thu, 03 Nov 2011 12:35 UTC
Underwater Caves
© NASA Earth ObservatoryDown inside the Great Blue Hole lies clues to the climate's past.
Ice cores drilled from polar glaciers aren't the only place where scientists find clues about the Earth's past climate and by extension its potential future climate. Deep divers in the Bahamas are retrieving stalagmites from underwater caves to learn about the impact that ancient dust storms had on the planet's climate.

Scientists at the University of Miami collected samples of stalagmites that formed in underwater caves tens of thousands of years ago to study their chemical composition, an important indicator of the Earth's past climate.

Stalagmites are a type of cave formation created as water drips down from a cave's ceiling and onto its floor where it deposits minerals, particularly calcium carbonate, in cone-shaped spikes. Stalagmites are the formations that point up, while stalactites are the formations that hang from a cave's ceiling.
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Nuke

Aussie scientists develop radioactivity-trapping nanofibers

Iain Thomson
The Register
Thu, 03 Nov 2011 03:11 UTC
One gram of fiber cleans a ton of water

Scientists from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have developed a new material for cleaning up contaminated water from radioactive leaks and medical processes.

The team mixed titanate nanofiber and nanotubes into a powder that, it says, will clean the radioactive particles in a ton of water with a single gram, provided it's properly distributed or filtered. The outsides of the nanotubes are coated with silver oxide nanocrystals to hold and fix radioactive iodine ions, even if the material becomes wet again.

"One gram of the nanofibers can effectively purify at least one ton of polluted water," Professor Zhu said in a statement. "This saves large amounts of dangerous water needing to be stored somewhere and also prevents the risk of contaminated products leaking into the soil."

japscientist
© The RegisterProfessor Zhu makes exceedingly good nuke cleaners
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Nuke

India uncloaks new thorium nuke plants

Andrew Orlowski
The Register
Wed, 02 Nov 2011 03:14 UTC
Won't have to look far for fuel, either

The Advanced Heavy Water design differs from China's molten salt or liquid fluoride designs. But Indian scientists expect the AHW reactor to be operational before China's, certainly by 2020, and are confident enough to seek buyers for their existing PHWRs, or pressurised heavy water reactors, the Guardian reports.

It's not so surprising, given India's long history of nuclear boffinry. The country's research programme was started by Homi Bhabha in 1944, with the nation's first reactor sparking into life in 1960. India also sits on the world's most abundant deposits of thorium.
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Robot

One Step Closer to the Borg

Trace Dominguez
Discovery News
Wed, 02 Nov 2011 13:15 UTC
Cyborg
© Discovery News
This week, a research breakthrough at the University of Washington brings us one step closer to living as cyborgs. Chao Zhong and his colleagues have built a biocompatible solid state device made from the shells of crustaceans that's able to monitor and control the flow of protons. Unlike electronic machines that transfer information via electrons, our bodies and brains do it via ions and protons. And that difference between machines and bodies -- we're incompatible technology -- has been one challenge to advancing cybernetics.

That's not the only challenge. Several technologies allow people to control machines with their minds. Take the video embedded in this blog, where a man is controlling his prosthetic hand with his mind. But it involves extensive electrode implants to monitor electrical activity in the brain. Other methods may use brain caps studded with electrodes that analyze brainwaves and convert them into some kind of action controlled by a computer.

Instead of complex electrode array or brainwave monitoring rigs, Zhong and his team's solution involves a very small transistor roughly one twentieth the width of a human hair. The decrease in size will allow for direct implantation, as well as the construction of more complex pieces of equipment as the technology continues to advance.
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Blackbox

Our galaxy's gas hides a mystery substance that's soaking up light

John Timmer
ars technica
Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:28 UTC
One of the fun things about covering so many different areas of science is that you often come across things you had no idea existed. This week's discovery goes by the name of "diffuse interstellar bands," a phenomenon first discovered back in the 1920s. Since then, dozens of these DIBs, which represent areas of the spectrum that are absorbed by the interstellar medium, have been discovered. Despite these discoveries - and this week's Nature describes a few more of the bands - we really don't know what's causing them.

Image
© UnknownThe Galactic Center
Most stars emit radiation over a very broad spectrum, from the ultraviolet well down past the infrared. However, if there's some material between us and the star - say, for example, a cloud of hydrogen - then it can absorb some of that radiation. But it won't absorb it evenly. Instead, each element or compound absorbs a specific set of wavelengths that correspond to the energy gaps between its ground state electrons and their excited states. So a cloud of hydrogen that sits between us and a star will cause some very narrow gaps in the spectrum of the star when we observe it.
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Laptop

Web Security Expert Warns Of Cyber World War

Sam Kiley
Sky.com
Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:07 UTC
Eugene Kaspersky
Internet security expert Eugene Kaspersky has told Sky a catastrophic cyber terrorist attack is likely
A leading internet security expert has warned that a cyber terrorist attack with "catastrophic consequences" looked increasingly likely in a world already in a state of near cyber war.

Eugene Kaspersky is not given to easy hyperbole. But the Russian maths genius who founded an internet security empire with a global reach, clutched at his thick mop of hair with both hands.

"I don't want to speak about it. I don't even want to think about it," he said.

"But we are close, very close, to cyber terrorism. Perhaps already the criminals have sold their skills to the terrorists - and then...oh, God."

Speaking privately at the London Cyber Conference, Kaspersky told Sky that he believed that cyber terrorism was the biggest immediate threat to have emerged to confront nations as diverse as China and the US.

"There is already cyber espionage, cyber crime, hacktivisim (when activists attack networks for political ends) soon we will be facing cyber terrorism," he said.
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Magnify

Best of the Web: Psychopaths in Academia: Report finds massive research fraud at Dutch universities

Ewen Callaway
Nature News
Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:25 UTC
Investigation claims dozens of social-psychology papers contain faked data.

When colleagues called the work of Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel too good to be true, they meant it as a compliment. But a preliminary investigative report released on 31 October gives literal meaning to the phrase, detailing years of data manipulation and blatant fabrication by the prominent Tilburg University researcher.

"We have some 30 papers in peer-reviewed journals where we are actually sure that they are fake, and there are more to come," says Pim Levelt, chair of the committee that investigated Stapel's work at the university.

Stapel's eye-catching studies on aspects of social behaviour such as power and stereo­typing garnered wide press coverage. For example, in a recent Science paper (which the investigation has not identified as fraudulent), Stapel reported that untidy environments encouraged discrimination (Science 332, 251 - 253; 2011).
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Info

Rare Date: Today Is Once-in-10,000-Years Palindrome

Bjorn Carey
Live Science
Wed, 02 Nov 2011 12:57 UTC
Palindrome
© Live Science

Today might not seem any more special than yesterday or the day before, but it is a once-in-10,000-years event. Nov. 2, 2011, written out numerically, is 11/02/2011, which on its own makes it a very rare eight-digit palindrome date, meaning that it can be read the same way frontward and backward.

But, as one scientist has found, there's much more to this date that makes it truly one of a kind.

This century features a relative wealth of eight-digit palindrome dates; today is the third date so far, and there will be nine more. In fact, we live in a relative golden age of palindrome dates: Before 10/02/2001, the last eight-digit palindrome date was Aug. 31, 1380 (08/31/1380).

"Eight-digit palindrome dates are very rare, and are clustered in the first three or so centuries at the beginning of a millennial, and then don't show up for 600 to 700 years, until they appear as a cluster in the next millennium," said Aziz Inan, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Portland who crunches palindrome dates in his spare time.
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Not All Brain Regions Are Created Equal


redOrbit
Wed, 02 Nov 2011 10:46 UTC
Areas of The Brain
© Van den Heuvel, et al. The Journal of Neuroscience 2011This image shows the group connectome, with the nodes and connections colored according to their rich-club participation. Green represents few connections. Red represents the most.

Just as the Occupy Wall Street movement has brought more attention to financial disparities between the haves and have-nots in American society, researchers from Indiana University and the University Medical Center Utrecht in The Netherlands are highlighting the disproportionate influence of so called "Rich Clubs" within the human brain.

Not all regions of the brain, they say, are created equal.

"We've known for a while that the brain has some regions that are 'rich' in the sense of being highly connected to many other parts of the brain," said Olaf Sporns, professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences in IU's College of Arts and Sciences. "It now turns out that these regions are not only individually rich, they are forming a 'rich club.' They are strongly linked to each other, exchanging information and collaborating."

The study, "Rich-Club Organization of the Human Connectome," is published in the Nov. 2 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. The research is part of an ongoing intensive effort to map the intricate networks of the human brain, casting the brain as an integrated dynamic system rather than a set of individual regions.

Using diffusion imaging, which is a form of MRI, Martijn van den Heuvel, a professor at the Rudolf Magnus Institute of Neuroscience at University Medical Center Utrecht, and Sporns examined the brains of 21 healthy men and women and mapped their large-scale network connectivity. They found a group of 12 strongly interconnected bihemispheric hub regions, comprising the precuneus, superior frontal and superior parietal cortex, as well as the subcortical hippocampus, putamen and thalamus. Together, these regions form the brain's "rich club".
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