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Dragonfly shows human-like power of concentration

Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience
Thu, 27 Dec 2012 17:49 UTC
Dragonfly
© alslutsky/Shutterstock
The dragonfly Calopteryx syriaca.
Dragonflies lack humans' big brains, but they still get the job done, according to new research that suggests that these insects have brain cells capable of feats previously seen only in primates.

Specifically, the dragonflies can screen out useless visual information to focus on a target, a process called selective attention. The new study, published Dec. 20 in the journal Current Biology, is the first to find brain cells devoted to selective attention in an invertebrate animal.

Selective attention is crucial for responding to one stimulus among the dozens of distractions that clamor for notice at any given time, said Steven Wiederman of the University of Adelaide in Australia.

"Imagine a tennis player having to pick out a small ball from the crowd when it's traveling at almost 200 kilometers an hour," Wiederman said in a statement. "You need selective attention in order to hit that ball back into play."

But little is known about how the brain locks onto its targets and ignores all else. To find out, Wiederman, who is from the university's Center for Neuroscience Research, and his colleague David O'Carroll turned to an unlikely animal. The researchers have long studied insect vision, and the dragonfly turns out to be quite adept in that arena.
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Info

Shedding light on longevity and good health

Courtney Crane
Geelong Advertiser
Fri, 21 Dec 2012 16:05 UTC
Bat
© Geelong Advertiser
Geelong's very own "bat pack" of genetic scientists is at the forefront of groundbreaking research that could one day lead to a cure for cancer, slow the ageing process and prevent deadly diseases.

A 28-member team from the CSIRO Australian Animal Health Laboratory in East Geelong has spent 2 1/2 years working with scientists in China, Denmark, the US and Singapore as part of a world-first study piecing together the genetic make-up of two bat species.

Bat genomes (the genetic material that makes up bat cells) were then compared with those of eight other mammals, including humans, to find similarities and differences. In a breakthrough, the researchers found the evolution of bats learning to fly could hold the key to humans living longer and ageing more slowly, as well as overcoming and even preventing cancer.

Post-doctoral fellow Dr Chris Cowled said the study, initiated and co-ordinated by his CSIRO team, had found links between the bats' evolutionary adaptation and their super-strong immune systems.
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Nebula

Anniversary of a cosmic blast

Phil Platt
Slate
Thu, 27 Dec 2012 11:53 UTC
Magnetar Explosion
© NASA
Artwork depicting the magnetar explosion of 2007.

[This post is a modified, updated version of an article I wrote a few years back. Since today is the anniversary of the event, I thought it could use an update.]

Eight years ago today - on Dec. 27, 2004 - the Earth was rocked by a cosmic blast so epic its scale is nearly impossible to exaggerate.

The flood of gamma and X-rays that washed over the Earth was detected by several satellites designed to observe the high-energy skies. RHESSI, which observes the Sun, saw this blast. INTEGRAL, used to look for gamma rays from monster black holes, saw this blast. The newly-launched Swift satellite, which was designed and built to detect bursts of gamma-ray from across the Universe, not only saw this blast but was so flooded with energy its detectors completely saturated - think of it as trying to fill a drinking glass with a fire hose.

Even more amazingly, Swift wasn't even pointed anywhere near the direction of the burst: In other words, this flood of energy passed right through the body of the spacecraft itself and was still so strong it totally overwhelmed the cameras.

It gets worse. This enormous wave of fierce energy was so powerful it actually partially ionized the Earth's upper atmosphere, and it made the Earth's magnetic field ring like a bell. Several satellites were actually blinded by the event. Whatever this event was, it came from deep space and still was able to physically affect the Earth itself!

So what was this thing? What could do this kind of damage?
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Info

Mysterious itch cells found

Tia Ghose
LiveScience
Thu, 27 Dec 2012 11:58 UTC
Itch
© ampyang/Shutterstock
Scientists have discovered specific nerves responsible for sensing itch. The new discovery could lead to better anti-itch treatments
A mysterious source of itchiness has been found. Certain nerve cells are specialized to detect itchy sensations, and those receptors don't detect painful sensations, according to a new study.

The finding, published Dec. 23 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, helps resolve a long-standing debate over whether itchiness is just a weird form of pain. Additionally, now that they have pinpointed the responsible nerve fibers, researchers could silence those nerves to develop better anti-itch treatments, said Ethan Lerner, a neuroscientist at Harvard University who was not involved in the study.

"This is a very convincing piece of work," Lerner told LiveScience. Scientists "can perhaps target this particular type of nerve as a means of treating itch, but still allow you to experience the protective aspect of pain."

Itchy mystery

For decades, why we itch has been a mystery. While some pain nerves have been found to fire in response to itchy stimulants, nerves that responded solely to itch proved elusive. Some researchers even wondered whether itch and pain were always processed by the same nerve fibers, but interpreted by the brain differently, said study co-author Xinzhong Dong, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University.

But the the urge to scratch seemed different in key ways from the experience of pain. For instance, when a mosquito bites, most people feel a powerful desire to scratch the bite, while the pain of touching a hot stove causes people to recoil, Dong told LiveScience.
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Eye 1

Virtual body technology uses 5 senses

Aki Tsukioka and Takuya Nakajima
DigInfoTV
Thu, 20 Dec 2012 11:55 UTC

The Ikei Laboratory of Tokyo Metropolitan University Graduate School of System Design is developing virtual body technology that utilizes the five senses. In addition to using conventional audio and video footage , this technology can recreate smells as well as the feel of the wind and of stepping on the ground.
"This exhibition of a virtual body is for the purpose of having a vicarious experience. This technology aims to enable various experiences as if having assumed a different person's body. This exhibition gives people the opportunity to vicariously experience traveling in Milan and running the world record 100-meter dash of famous athlete Usain Bolt."
The exhibition is made up of a 3D monitor,, headphones, a fan to create a breeze and spread scents, a chair that leans back and forth and vibrates partially, and foot pedals. These work together to stimulate the five senses of the subject fixed in his or her seat, creating a virtual vicarious experience.
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2 + 2 = 4

Mathematician's century-old secrets unlocked


LiveScience
Thu, 27 Dec 2012 10:30 UTC
Srinivasa Ramanujan
© Emory University
Srinivasa Ramanujan

While on his death bed, the brilliant Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan cryptically wrote down functions he said came to him in dreams, with a hunch about how they behaved. Now 100 years later, researchers say they've proved he was right.

"We've solved the problems from his last mysterious letters. For people who work in this area of math, the problem has been open for 90 years," Emory University mathematician Ken Ono said.

Ramanujan, a self-taught mathematician born in a rural village in South India, spent so much time thinking about math that he flunked out of college in India twice, Ono said.

But he sent mathematicians letters describing his work, and one of the most preeminent ones, English mathematician G. H. Hardy, recognized the Indian boy's genius and invited him to Cambridge University in England to study. While there, Ramanujan published more than 30 papers and was inducted into the Royal Society.

"For a brief window of time, five years, he lit the world of math on fire," Ono told LiveScience.

But the cold weather eventually weakened Ramanujan's health, and when he was dying, he went home to India.
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Fish

Massive whale beached in NYC


DiscoveryNews.com
Thu, 27 Dec 2012 09:16 UTC
Image
© Credit: Twitter/jillapallooza
The whale on a beach in Breezy Point, Queens
A massive whale, some 60 feet long, beached itself on Wednesday morning in New York City, where, despite rescue efforts, it seemed to have little chance of survival.

Experts said the ailing whale was a finback, the second biggest animal species in the world after blue whales, and came ashore in the Breezy Point neighborhood of Queens.

Police and firefighters immediately began carefully spraying it with water to keep it alive until experts could take over.

But Mendy Garron, a regional specialist for the federal NOAA Fisheries service, said the sea mammal was "really emaciated, not a good body condition at all."

It was "not moving a lot," she added, saying that this assessment meant the whale was unlikely to get back to sea.
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Hourglass

Mayan Match! Scientist Mike Baillie discovers correlation between ice core chemistry spikes and Mayan Long Count Calendar


Cosmic Tusk
Thu, 27 Dec 2012 04:22 UTC
Image
A Mike Baillie fan passed along this fascinating discovery last week and I hoisted the paper to Scribd and the Tusk immediately. Mike is on to something mighty interesting. Nowhere has anyone noted the corellation between the two early Mayan "Baktun" transitions and spikes in ice core chemistry from Greenland. Calendrical genius that he is, Mike even reverse engineers the data and finds the Mayan calendar - baring incredible coincidence - serves to memorialize the two events as well as perpetuate a useful chime for the future.

It is hard to grasp given his sparse abstract, but if I understand Mike correctly he infers that the Maya calendar writer long after the two extraordinary events divided his calendar so that the first event would mark the end of an inaugural cycle representing a number of days which - if repeated four more times - would coincide with the 2nd event. These five cycles were then followed in the calendar by an additional eight cycles of equal periods reaching to our own time.

It would be as if you were amazed at the appearance of Santa Claus, began counting the days since you saw him, was startled by his return, and later decided these visits were so significant that your calendar itself should be divided so as to determine good times to look out for the jolly old fellow. He may or may not come - but it is the right time to look.
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Nebula

Biggest in the universe: Scientists discover black holes weighing 40 billion suns


RT
Wed, 26 Dec 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© Agence France-Presse/NASA
This NASA image shows a new image of a ring - not of jewels - but of black holes. This composite image of Arp 147, a pair of interacting galaxies located about 430 million light years from Earth, shows X-rays from the NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (pink) and optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, blue) produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute, or STSc
It turns out that the largest black holes may be even bigger than scientists previously thought. New research from NASA shows there are some real monsters out there, weighing the equivalent masses of 10 to 40 billion suns.

­Scientists refer to them as 'ultramassive' black holes, not to confuse them with 'supermassive' holes, with only a few confirmed examples.

These giants, all located in far-off galaxies about 1.3 billion light years from Earth, are more common than scientists originally thought.

A survey, conducted by author Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo of Stanford University and her team, showed that at least ten out of 18 galaxies they studied had black holes that may weigh up to 40 billion times the mass of the sun.

"Ultramassive black holes - that is, black holes with masses exceeding 10 billion solar masses - are probably not rare; several and even dozens of these colossal black holes may exist," said Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo, the study's lead author.

The largest supermassive black hole in the heart of Milky Way, the galaxy that contains our Solar System, is estimated to weigh about 6.4 billion solar masses.
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Satellite

China satellite navigation starts services to Asia


NBC News
Thu, 27 Dec 2012 01:00 UTC
A Chinese satellite navigation network created to eventually compete with America's Global Positioning System has started offering services to Asian users outside the country.

The network's spokesman, Ran Chengqi, said in a press briefing that the Beidou system is offering from Thursday services including positioning, navigation, time and text messaging to users in the Asia-Pacific region.

China expects Beidou to generate a 400 billion yuan ($63 billion) annual market for services to the transport, meteorology and telecommunications sectors.

China, and especially its military, have long been wary of relying on the United States' dominant GPS network, fearing that Washington might take the system offline in a conflict or an emergency.
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