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Crater of 'extinction meteor' discovered?


The Asian Age
Mon, 05 Aug 2013 21:43 UTC
Impact Crater
© The Asian Age
Researchers claim to have discovered the elusive impact crater of the meteor that triggered the biggest extinction ever, around 252.3 million years ago.

While the idea that an impact caused the Permian extinction has been around for a while, what's been missing is a suitable crater to confirm it, researchers said.

Researcher Eric Tohver from the University of Western Australia believe he has found the impact crater which reveals though the trigger was the same, the details are significantly different.

In 2012, Tohver redated an impact structure that straddles the border of the states of Mato Grosso and Goias in Brazil, called the Araguainha crater, to 254.7m years.

Previous estimates had suggested Araguainha was 10m years younger, but Tohver has put it within geological distance of the extinction date.
The Chicxulub crater in Mexico, is 180km in diameter while the Araguainha is 40 kilometres across and was thought to be too small to have caused the chain reaction which brought about such mass extinction.
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Magic Wand

Study reveals potential role of 'love hormone' oxytocin in brain function

Craig Andrews
New York University School of Medicine
Sun, 04 Aug 2013 15:51 UTC
Findings of NYU Langone researchers may have relevance in autism-spectrum disorder.

In a loud, crowded restaurant, having the ability to focus on the people and conversation at your own table is critical. Nerve cells in the brain face similar challenges in separating wanted messages from background chatter. A key element in this process appears to be oxytocin, typically known as the "love hormone" for its role in promoting social and parental bonding.

In a study appearing online August 4 in Nature, NYU Langone Medical Center researchers decipher how oxytocin, acting as a neurohormone in the brain, not only reduces background noise, but more importantly, increases the strength of desired signals. These findings may be relevant to autism, which affects one in 88 children in the United States.

"Oxytocin has a remarkable effect on the passage of information through the brain," says Richard W. Tsien, DPhil, the Druckenmiller Professor of Neuroscience and director of the Neuroscience Institute at NYU Langone Medical Center. "It not only quiets background activity, but also increases the accuracy of stimulated impulse firing. Our experiments show how the activity of brain circuits can be sharpened, and hint at how this re-tuning of brain circuits might go awry in conditions like autism."

Children and adults with autism-spectrum disorder (ASD) struggle with recognizing the emotions of others and are easily distracted by extraneous features of their environment. Previous studies have shown that children with autism have lower levels of oxytocin, and mutations in the oxytocin receptor gene predispose people to autism. Recent brain recordings from people with ASD show impairments in the transmission of even simple sensory signals.
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Bulb

Centers throughout the brain work together to make reading possible

Robert Perkins
University of Southern California
Mon, 05 Aug 2013 15:40 UTC
Findings could help root out the origins of dyslexia and inform therapies to combat it.

A combination of brain scans and reading tests has revealed that several regions in the brain are responsible for allowing humans to read.

The findings open up the possibility that individuals who have difficulty reading may only need additional training for specific parts of the brain - targeted therapies that could more directly address their individual weaknesses.

"Reading is a complex task. No single part of the brain can do all the work," said Qinghua He, postdoctoral research associate at the USC Brain and Creativity Institute and the first author of a study on this research that was published in the Journal of Neuroscience on July 31.

The study looked at the correlation between reading ability and brain structure revealed by high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of more than 200 participants.

To control for external factors, all of the participants were about the same age and education level (college students); right-handed (lefties use the opposite hemisphere of their brain for reading); and all had about the same language skills (Chinese-speaking, with English as a second language for more than nine years). Their IQ, response speed, and memory were also tested.

The study first collected data for seven different reading tests of a sample over 400 participants. These tests were aimed to explore three aspects of their reading ability:
  • phonological decoding ability (the ability to sound out printed words);
  • form-sound association (how well participants could make connections between a new word and sound);
  • and naming speed (how quickly participants were able to read out loud).
Each of these aspects, it turned out, was related to the gray matter volume - the amount of neurons - in different parts of the brain.
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Magic Wand

How 'junk DNA' can control cell development

Tamzin Byrne
Science in Public
Thu, 01 Aug 2013 12:13 UTC
Researchers from the Gene and Stem Cell Therapy Program at Sydney's Centenary Institute have confirmed that, far from being "junk", the 97 per cent of human DNA that does not encode instructions for making proteins can play a significant role in controlling cell development.

And in doing so, the researchers have unravelled a previously unknown mechanism for regulating the activity of genes, increasing our understanding of the way cells develop and opening the way to new possibilities for therapy.

Using the latest gene sequencing techniques and sophisticated computer analysis, a research group led by Professor John Rasko AO and including Centenary's Head of Bioinformatics, Dr William Ritchie, has shown how particular white blood cells use non-coding DNA to regulate the activity of a group of genes that determines their shape and function. The work is published today in the scientific journal Cell.
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Cassiopaea

Hubble sees the fireball from a "kilonova"

Dr. Tony Phillips
Science@NASA
Sat, 03 Aug 2013 17:28 UTC
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has detected a new kind of stellar blast called a kilonova, which happens when a pair of compact objects such as neutron stars crash together. Hubble observed the fading fireball from a kilonova last month, following a short gamma ray burst (GRB) in a galaxy almost 4 billion light-years from Earth.

"This observation finally solves the mystery of short gamma ray bursts," says Nial Tanvir of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, who led a team of researchers conducting this research.
Kilonova_1
© Science@NASAThis sequence illustrates the kilonova model for the formation of a short-duration gamma-ray burst. 1. A pair of neutron stars in a binary system spiral together. 2. In the final milliseconds, as the two objects merge, they kick out highly radioactive material. This material heats up and expands, emitting a burst of light called a kilonova. 3. The fading fireball blocks visible light but radiates in infrared light. 4. A remnant disk of debris surrounds the merged object, which may have collapsed to form a black hole.
Gamma ray bursts are flashes of intense high-energy radiation that appear from random directions in space. They come in two flavors--long and short. "Many astronomers, including our group, have already provided a great deal of evidence that long-duration gamma ray bursts (those lasting more than two seconds) are produced by the collapse of extremely massive stars," explains Tanvir.

The short bursts, however, were more mysterious.
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Comet

Ice core data suggests a cosmic impact killed off Clovis people

Ellie Zolfagharifard
The Daily Mail
Fri, 02 Aug 2013 16:33 UTC
Image
© Mike Agliolo/CorbisA layer of platinum from an ice core taken from Greenland has been dated back to the time of a known abrupt climate transition. According to researchers, this provides evidence that a comet led to the demise of the Clovis people, the prehistoric hunter gatherers who were the first to occupy the North America
A cosmic impact 12,900 years ago could have led to the demise of the 'Clovis' people of North America, researchers claim.

A layer of platinum from an ice core taken in Greenland has been dated back to the time of a known abrupt climate transition, known as the 'Big Freeze'.

The freeze has been previously been linked to the demise of the Clovis people, the prehistoric hunter gatherers who were the first to occupy North America.

According to researchers at Harvard University, this provides evidence that a comet tipped the world into its colder phase, making dozens of species extinct.

Researcher Michail Petaev and Harvard colleagues, writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found a 100-fold increase in platinum concentration in ice that is around 12,890 years old.

This is the same period for which oxygen isotope measurements show rapid cooling of the climate- a period known as the 'Younger Dryas'.
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Fireball 3

'Lazarus' comets may be returning to life in asteroid field

Amina Khan
Los Angeles Times
Fri, 02 Aug 2013 07:56 UTC
Colombian scientists have discovered what may be a graveyard of comets in a very strange spot -- and now, some of the interred are coming back to life.

These so-called "Lazarus" comets, described in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, may represent a long-lost population of the icy space travelers and may alter scientists' understanding of their origins.

These chunks of ice and rock, typically a few kilometers across, have long held human imaginations as "falling stars." As a comet travels around the sun, the heat and light vaporize some of the water ice trapped inside, causing the signature tail of glowing gas and dust to form behind it.

They're thought to have started out near the fringes of the planetary system, with stretched, elliptical orbits that are so extreme that some of comets circle the sun only once in several thousand years. Others have quicker round-trips of a couple centuries or so; these so-called short-period comets are the source of such famous sightings as Halley's Comet.
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Fireball 2

Russian meteor may have gangmates in tow

Maggie McKee
Nature
Fri, 02 Aug 2013 23:24 UTC
Russian Meteor
© RIA NOVOSTI/SPLThe Chelyabinsk meteor caused a fireball in the sky over Russia in February.

The house-sized rock that exploded spectacularly in the skies near Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February may have been a member of a gang of asteroids that still poses a threat to Earth, a new study says. The evidence is circumstantial, but future observations could help to settle the question.

On 15 February, an 11,000-tonne space rock slammed into the atmosphere above Russia, producing the most powerful impact since the Tunguska explosion in 1908 - which may also have been caused by an asteroid - and generating a shock wave that damaged buildings and injured more than 1,000 people. The 18-metre-wide object could not be seen as it approached the planet because it was obscured by the Sun's glare, but observations made while it was in the atmosphere have enabled several groups of researchers to estimate its orbit2.

However, the estimates varied so much that there was no clear orbit that researchers could use to hunt for sibling asteroids on a similar path, say Carlos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos, orbital dynamicist brothers at the Complutense University of Madrid.

They decided to tackle the problem with brute computational force, running simulations of billions of possible orbits to find the ones most likely to have led to a collision. They then used the average of the ten best orbits to search a NASA asteroid catalogue for known objects on similar paths. They found about 20, ranging in size from 5 to 200 metres across, they report in an article to be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters1.
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Display

Your TV might be watching You!

Erica Fink and Laurie Segall
CNN Money
Thu, 01 Aug 2013 10:32 UTC
Image
Today's high-end televisions are almost all equipped with "smart" PC-like features, including Internet connectivity, apps, microphones and cameras. But a recently discovered security hole in some Samsung Smart TVs shows that many of those bells and whistles aren't ready for prime time.

The flaws in Samsung Smart TVs, which have now been patched, enabled hackers to remotely turn on the TVs' built-in cameras without leaving any trace of it on the screen. While you're watching TV, a hacker anywhere around the world could have been watching you. Hackers also could have easily rerouted an unsuspecting user to a malicious website to steal bank account information.

Samsung quickly fixed the problem after security researchers at iSEC Partners informed the company about the bugs. Samsung sent a software update to all affected TVs.

But the glitches speak to a larger problem of gadgets that connect to the Internet but have virtually no security to speak of.

Security cameras, lights, heating control systems and even door locks and windows are now increasingly coming with features that allow users to control them remotely. Without proper security controls, there's little to stop hackers from invading users' privacy, stealing personal information or spying on people.
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Display

Real-time speech translation ahead


connexionfrance.com
Tue, 30 Jul 2013 15:22 UTC
Google has announced its prototype real-time speech translation systems are performing with "close to 100% accuracy" in laboratory conditions.

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However the web giant has given no indication as to when a finished product will become a reality.

Google Translate, the web and mobile tool for converting text from one language to another, is already indispensable for most business travelers, expats and holidaymakers.

The company is developing a real-time translation tool that can do for voice what its current systems can do for text.

In an interview with The Times, Android product management vice president Hugo Barra revealed that the current prototypes are achieving "close to 100% accuracy," and that with some language pairings, the results are "near perfect," meaning that in laboratory conditions at least (ie. without background noises and over a perfect internet connection), two people speaking two completely different languages can communicate via the system.

Earlier this month, Microsoft Asia researchers demonstrated a system that uses the Kinect sensor that can translate sign language in real time and also turn text into visual sign language via an avatar.
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