Science & TechnologyS


Blackbox

Rats play odds in gambling task

Victoria Gill
BBC News
Thu, 18 Jun 2009 05:26 UTC
gambling rat
© SPLHumans bet for money, whereas rats gamble for food
Rats are able to play the odds in a "gambling task" designed by scientists to test the biology of addiction.

In the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, researchers describe how the rodents developed a "strategy" in a timed task where they make choices to earn treats.

The rodents avoided high-reward options because these carried high risks of punishment - their sugar pellet supply being cut off for a period.

This decision-making task provides an animal model to study neuropsychiatry.

During the task, which lasted for 30 minutes, rats were given four choices - in the form of holes to investigate.

Nosing each of these holes triggered either the delivery of tasty sugar pellets or a "punishing time-out period" during which rewards could not be earned.

But high-reward holes - those that delivered more pellets at once - also carried the bigger risk of triggering longer periods of punishment.

And rats quickly learned an "optimal strategy" - earning more pellets over the duration of the task by choosing the holes with smaller gains and smaller penalties.
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People

Study supports validity of test that indicates widespread unconscious bias

Joel Schwarz
University of Washington
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:00 UTC
In the decade since the Implicit Association Test was introduced, its most surprising and controversial finding is its indication that about 70 percent of those who took a version of the test that measures racial attitudes have an unconscious, or implicit, preference for white people compared to blacks. This contrasts with figures generally under 20 percent for self report, or survey, measures of race bias.

A new study published this week validates those findings, showing that the Implicit Association Test, a psychological tool, has validity in predicting behavior and, in particular, that it has significantly greater validity than self-reports in the socially sensitive topics of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and age.
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Info

New discovery suggests mammoths survived in Britain until 14,000 years ago

Ben Norman
Geological Journal
Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00 UTC
Research which finally proves that bones found in Shropshire, England provide the most geologically recent evidence of woolly mammoths in North Western Europe publishes today in the Geological Journal. Analysis of both the bones and the surrounding environment suggests that some mammoths remained part of British wildlife long after they are conventionally believed to have become extinct.

The mammoth bones, consisting of one largely complete adult male and at least four juveniles, were first excavated in 1986, but the carbon dating which took place at the time has since been considered inaccurate. Technological advances during the past two decades now allow a more exact reading, which complements the geological data needed to place the bones into their environmental context. This included a study of the bones' decay, analysis of fossilised insects which were also found on the site, and a geological analysis of the surrounding sediment.
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Saturn

Ancient lake on Mars


University of Colorado at Boulder
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:46 UTC
Image
First unambiguous evidence for shorelines on the surface of Mars, say researchers.

A University of Colorado at Boulder research team has discovered the first definitive evidence of shorelines on Mars, an indication of a deep, ancient lake there and a finding with implications for the discovery of past life on the Red Planet.
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Meteor

US: Ever heard of the Kentland crater?


fwdailynews.com
Sun, 14 Jun 2009 19:14 UTC
Geological map of Benton County
© Earl ConnGeological map in the Benton County Stone office which shows the focal point of where a meteorite struck millions of years ago.
Several years ago-well, about 65 to 97 million years ago-a gigantic meteorite struck the earth just east of present-day Kentland in northwestern Indiana's Benton County.

How big was the meteorite? The best guess is that it or perhaps it was a comet ice mass left a circular crater dome measuring about 4 ½ miles in diameter. The entire "disturbed area" is about eight miles in diameter.

The meteorite hit with such force and velocity that, as it plunged into the earth, it lifted Shakopee dolomite (rock resembling limestone from the Ordovician period) up to the planet's surface from some 2,000 feet below. Much of this rock then stood vertically rather than horizontally. Eventually, over the eons, glaciers and water eroded away much of the crater, but still leaving numerous stone outcroppings.
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Blackbox

Like a hole in the head: The return of trepanation

Arran Frood
New Scientist
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:45 UTC
Image
© Zephyr / SPLA hole in the skull could increase blood flow to the brain
In the early 1960s, a young Russian neurophysiologist called Yuri Moskalenko travelled from the Soviet Union to the UK on a Royal Society exchange programme. During his stay, he co-authored a paper published in Nature. "Variation in blood volume and oxygen availability in the human brain" may not sound subversive, but it was the start of a radical idea.

Decades later, having worked in Soviet Russia and become president of the Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, Moskalenko is back in the UK. Now collaborating with researchers at the Beckley Foundation in Oxford, his work is bearing fruit.

And strange fruit it is. With funding from the foundation, he is exploring the idea that people with Alzheimer's disease could be treated by drilling a hole in their skull. In fact, he is so convinced of the benefits of trepanation that he claims it may help anyone from their mid-40s onwards to slow or even reverse the process of age-related cognitive decline. Can he be serious?

For thousands of years, trepanation has been performed for quasi-medical reasons such as releasing evil spirits that were believed to cause schizophrenia or migraine. Today it is used to prevent brain injury by relieving intracranial pressure, particularly after accidents involving head trauma.
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Telescope

Palomar Unique Sky Survey Brings New Objects Into Focus


Sky Nightly
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 04:09 UTC
Image
© UnknownThe PTF is designed to search for a wide variety of transient sources with characteristic timescales ranging from minutes to months, giving astronomers one of their deepest and most comprehensive explorations of the universe in the time domain.
An innovative sky survey has begun returning images that will be used to detect unprecedented numbers of powerful cosmic explosions - called supernovae - in distant galaxies, and variable brightness stars in our own Milky Way. The survey also may soon reveal new classes of astronomical objects.

All of these discoveries will stem from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) survey, which combines, in a new way, the power of a wide-field telescope, a high-resolution camera, and high-performance networking and computing, with rapid follow-up by telescopes around the globe, to open windows of discovery for astronomers.

The survey has already found 40 supernovae and is gearing up to switch to a robotic mode of operation that will allow objects to be discovered nightly without the need for human intervention.
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Info

Geologists demonstrate extent of ancient ice age


PhysOrg.com
Tue, 16 Jun 2009 02:25 UTC
Geologists at the University of Leicester have shown that an ancient Ice Age, once regarded as a brief 'blip', in fact lasted for 30 million years.

Their research suggests that during this ancient Ice Age, global warming was curbed through the burial of organic carbon that eventually lead to the formation of oil - including the 'hot shales' of north Africa and Arabia which constitute the world's most productive oil source rock.

This ice age has been named 'the Early Palaeozoic Icehouse' by Dr Alex Page and his colleagues in a paper published as part of a collaborative Deep Time Climate project between the University of Leicester and British Geological Survey.
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Info

Calcium: The Secret To Honeybees' Memory


ScienceDaily
Mon, 15 Jun 2009 02:10 UTC
Long-term memory formation in honeybees is instigated by a calcium ion cascade. Researchers have shown that calcium acts as a switch between short- and long-term storage of learned information.
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Magnify

Charge on single atoms measured

Jason Palmer
British Broadcasting Corporation
Tue, 16 Jun 2009 23:58 UTC
Image
The microscope is under high vacuum and kept exceptionally cold.
The amount of electric charge on single atoms has been measured by researchers reporting in Science.

While individual atoms' charges have been measured before, the prior method required that the atoms be on the surface of a conducting material.

The new approach used a tiny tuning fork-like device that was deflected minuscule amounts by the attraction or repulsion of the atoms.

The approach will aid in the design of devices such as solar cells.
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