Science & Technology
Studies of the brains of blind persons whose sight was partially restored later in life have produced a compelling example of the brain's ability to adapt to new circumstances and rewire and reconfigure itself.
Palaeontologists have discovered fossil remains in Scandinavia of parrots dating back 55 million years. Reported May 14 in the journal Palaeontology, the fossils indicate that parrots once flew wild over what is now Norway and Denmark.
Parrots today live only in the tropics and southern hemisphere, but this new research suggests that they first evolved in the North, much earlier than had been thought.
The fossil parrot was discovered on the Isle of Mors in the northwest of Denmark - far from where you'd normally expect to find a parrot. It's a new species, officially named 'Mopsitta tanta'. However, already its nick-name is the 'Danish Blue Parrot', a term derived from a famous comedy sketch about a 'Norwegian Blue Parrot' in the 1970s BBC television programme 'Monty Python'.
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| ©Dr David Waterhouse |
| Artists impression of the parrot-like bird 'Mopsitta tanta' dating back 55 million years. The fossils indicate that parrots once flew wild over what is now Norway and Denmark. |
Parrots today live only in the tropics and southern hemisphere, but this new research suggests that they first evolved in the North, much earlier than had been thought.
The fossil parrot was discovered on the Isle of Mors in the northwest of Denmark - far from where you'd normally expect to find a parrot. It's a new species, officially named 'Mopsitta tanta'. However, already its nick-name is the 'Danish Blue Parrot', a term derived from a famous comedy sketch about a 'Norwegian Blue Parrot' in the 1970s BBC television programme 'Monty Python'.
New research shows the surprising paths taken by forwarded messages through the Internet.
Everyone who has an e-mail account has probably received a forwarded chain letter promising good luck if the message is forwarded on to others--or terrible misfortune if it isn't. The sheer volume of forwarded messages such as chain letters, online petitions, jokes and other materials leads to a simple question--how do these messages reach so many people so quickly?
New research into these forwarded missives by Jon Kleinberg of Cornell University and David Liben-Nowell of Carleton College suggests a surprising explanation.
In the past three decades, as more and more individuals have come online and begun using e-mail, the number of these mass-forwarded messages has grown substantially, reaching more and more people each year. It had been assumed that the messages traveled to e-mail users in much the same way that a disease spreads in an epidemic--people received the messages and passed them on to those they came in contact with, who, in turn, spread them to people they encountered, and so on. In recent years, some scientists, as well as marketers, have used the term, "viral," to describe this pattern.
Everyone who has an e-mail account has probably received a forwarded chain letter promising good luck if the message is forwarded on to others--or terrible misfortune if it isn't. The sheer volume of forwarded messages such as chain letters, online petitions, jokes and other materials leads to a simple question--how do these messages reach so many people so quickly?
New research into these forwarded missives by Jon Kleinberg of Cornell University and David Liben-Nowell of Carleton College suggests a surprising explanation.
In the past three decades, as more and more individuals have come online and begun using e-mail, the number of these mass-forwarded messages has grown substantially, reaching more and more people each year. It had been assumed that the messages traveled to e-mail users in much the same way that a disease spreads in an epidemic--people received the messages and passed them on to those they came in contact with, who, in turn, spread them to people they encountered, and so on. In recent years, some scientists, as well as marketers, have used the term, "viral," to describe this pattern.
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| ©Jason Koski/Cornell University Photography |
| Jon Kleinberg of Cornell University and David Liben-Nowell of Carleton College used a tree diagram to analyze the paths that forwarded e-mail petitions took through the Internet and into people's inboxes. The diagram allowed them to see how the messages got to people, and how many steps it took to get to them. |
Only last summer research published by earth scientists in the international journal Tectonics concluded that geological faults in the Sichuan Basin, China "are sufficiently long to sustain a strong ground-shaking earthquake, making them potentially serious sources of regional seismic hazard."
An international team of scientists including Dr. Alexander Densmore (Institute of Hazard and Risk Research, Durham University), Dr. Mike Ellis (Head of Science for Climate Change at the British Geological Survey) and colleagues from research institutes in Chengdu, carefully mapped and analysed a series of geologically young faults that cross Sichuan Province like recently healed scars.
The team mapped the densely populated Sichuan Basin and adjacent mountains using what is known as 'tectonic geomorphology'. This technique can demonstrate significant changes in ground movement over time, such as observations of offset river channels, disrupted floodplains, abnormally shaped valleys and uplifted landscape features. These subtle signals of deformation, when combined with the ability to measure the age of the disfigured landscapes (using cosmogenic nuclides that bombard the Earth from all corners of the universe), produced surprising results.
An international team of scientists including Dr. Alexander Densmore (Institute of Hazard and Risk Research, Durham University), Dr. Mike Ellis (Head of Science for Climate Change at the British Geological Survey) and colleagues from research institutes in Chengdu, carefully mapped and analysed a series of geologically young faults that cross Sichuan Province like recently healed scars.
The team mapped the densely populated Sichuan Basin and adjacent mountains using what is known as 'tectonic geomorphology'. This technique can demonstrate significant changes in ground movement over time, such as observations of offset river channels, disrupted floodplains, abnormally shaped valleys and uplifted landscape features. These subtle signals of deformation, when combined with the ability to measure the age of the disfigured landscapes (using cosmogenic nuclides that bombard the Earth from all corners of the universe), produced surprising results.
Now you see it, now you don't. A giant hole in the cosmos that shocked astrophysicists last year may not exist after all. A re-examination of the area has found that the 'void', which supposedly contained far fewer stars and galaxies than expected, could be a statistical artefact.
The apparent void was spotted by Lawrence Rudnick and colleagues at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Rudnick had become intrigued by another puzzling finding: a cold spot in the cosmic microwave background measured by the WMAP spacecraft. He used data from the Very Large Array telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory near Socorro, New Mexico, to study the area and concluded that the cold spot coincided with a void almost 1 billion light years across, the largest anyone had ever seen.
The apparent void was spotted by Lawrence Rudnick and colleagues at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Rudnick had become intrigued by another puzzling finding: a cold spot in the cosmic microwave background measured by the WMAP spacecraft. He used data from the Very Large Array telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory near Socorro, New Mexico, to study the area and concluded that the cold spot coincided with a void almost 1 billion light years across, the largest anyone had ever seen.
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| ©Innovations |
| EECS and statistics professor Yun Song studies computing problems related to the human genome. |
There are about six billion base pairs in the human genome, and our family tree includes about six billion living humans. For other species, these numbers are also enormous. So, although DNA sequencing begins in a laboratory, it requires research-level computer science and statistics to crunch the resulting mass of data and make sense of the results, which have applications ranging from medicine and biology to anthropology and history. As EECS and statistics professor Yun Song remarks, "Just 15 years ago, it was very difficult for population genetics researchers to run their computationally intensive analyses on desktop computers. It's thanks to relatively recent improvements in computers and algorithms that these problems have become tractable."
A little over a year ago, the Fermilab Office of Public Affairs received a curious letter in code (see the image below). It has been sitting in our files all that time and we haven't had much of a chance to look into breaking the code, nor are we particularly expert at this!
If you have a cryptological bent, perhaps you'd take a crack at this code and email us anything you find at letters@symmetrymagazine.org.
Note that this scan is from a fax of the original. The holes punched in it were not in the original and a tiny sliver has been cut off the top of the page where the fax information was printed. I'm hoping that the precise positioning on the page isn't relevant!
If you have a cryptological bent, perhaps you'd take a crack at this code and email us anything you find at letters@symmetrymagazine.org.
Note that this scan is from a fax of the original. The holes punched in it were not in the original and a tiny sliver has been cut off the top of the page where the fax information was printed. I'm hoping that the precise positioning on the page isn't relevant!
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| ©Fermilab |
Asteroid and comet impacts on Earth can cause catastrophic extinction events. They can also bring life back, new research shows.
Many scientists believe that a massive rock from space came crashing down 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period. The resulting blast set forests ablaze. The skies of Earth were filled with ash that blocked out the sun and the planet went cold. Vegetation died in the absence of sunlight. Shortly thereafter, the dinosaurs and many other life forms on Earth went extinct. Millions of years of evolution were wiped clean in an instant.
Many scientists believe that a massive rock from space came crashing down 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period. The resulting blast set forests ablaze. The skies of Earth were filled with ash that blocked out the sun and the planet went cold. Vegetation died in the absence of sunlight. Shortly thereafter, the dinosaurs and many other life forms on Earth went extinct. Millions of years of evolution were wiped clean in an instant.
New observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter indicate that the crust and upper mantle of Mars are stiffer and colder than previously thought.The findings suggest any liquid water that might exist below the planet's surface and any possible organisms living in that water, would be located deeper than scientists had suspected.
"We found that the rocky surface of Mars is not bending under the load of the north polar ice cap," said Roger Phillips of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. Phillips is the lead author of a new report appearing in the online version of Science. "This implies that the planet's interior is more rigid, and thus colder, than we thought before."
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| ©NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems |
| New observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter indicate that the crust and upper mantle of Mars are stiffer and colder than previously thought. |
"We found that the rocky surface of Mars is not bending under the load of the north polar ice cap," said Roger Phillips of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. Phillips is the lead author of a new report appearing in the online version of Science. "This implies that the planet's interior is more rigid, and thus colder, than we thought before."
Catching a football. Maneuvering through a room full of people. Jumping out of the way when a golfer yells "fore." Most would agree these seemingly simple actions require us to perceive and quickly respond to a situation. Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Mark Changizi argues they require something more - our ability to foresee the future.
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| ©Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute |
| The Hering illusion is exemplified by the perceived curvature of the straight lines near the vanishing point in the center of the drawing. The optical illusion occurs because our brains are predicting the way the underlying scene would project in the next moment if we were moving in the direction of the vanishing point. |
