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Picking our brains: Why are some people smarter?

David Robson
New Scientist
Sun, 04 Apr 2010 14:09 UTC
At Einstein's autopsy in 1955, his brain was something of a disappointment: it turned out to be a tad smaller than the average Joe's. Indeed, later studies have suggested a minimal link between brain size and intelligence. It seems brain quality rather than quantity is key.

One important factor seems to be how well our neurons can talk to each other. Martijn van den Heuvel, a neuroscientist at Utrecht University Medical Center in the Netherlands, found that smarter brains seem to have more efficient networks between neurons - in other words, it takes fewer steps to relay a message between different regions of the brain. That could explain about a third of the variation in a population's IQ, he says.

Another key factor is the insulating fatty sheath encasing neuron fibres, which affects the speed of electrical signals. Paul Thompson at the University of California, Los Angeles, has found a correlation between IQ and the quality of the sheaths (The Journal of Neuroscience, vol 29, p 2212).
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Eye 1

Synapse on a Chip

Surfdaddy Orca
H+ Magazine
Tue, 30 Mar 2010 09:30 UTC
memristor
© pubs.acs.org
The memristor - the so-called "missing link of electronics" memory technology that can change its resistance in varying levels - has been around on paper for nearly 40 years. However it wasn't until 2010 that a group at the University of Michigan led by Dr. Wei Lu demonstrated that it can be used to build brain-like computers in a paper just published in Nano Letters. New Scientist reports that "memristors can behave uncannily like the junctions between neurons in the brain." Scientific American describes a US military-funded project that is trying to use the memristor "to make neural computing a reality." DARPA's Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics Program (SyNAPSE) is funded to create "electronic neuromorphic machine technology that is scalable to biological levels."
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New Written Language of Ancient Scotland Discovered

Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News
Thu, 01 Apr 2010 22:11 UTC
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© Rob Knell and Rob LeeRiders and horn blowers appear next to hunting dogs on what is called the Hilton of Cadboll stone, pictured here.
Once thought to be rock art, carved depictions of soldiers, horses and other figures are in fact part of a written language dating back to the Iron Age.

The Gist:
  • A new written language, belonging to the early Pict society of Scotland, has just been identified.
  • Stylized rock engravings have been found on hundreds of Pictish Stones.
  • If the writing can be deciphered, it would provide a unique insight into early Scottish history.
The ancestors of modern Scottish people left behind mysterious, carved stones that new research has just determined contain the written language of the Picts, an Iron Age society that existed in Scotland from 300 to 843.
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Andean mummies afflicted with arsenic

Dan Vergano
Science Fair
Thu, 01 Apr 2010 22:01 UTC
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© Elsevier / JASChinchorro mummy showing artificial mummification and long wig from 2000 B.C.
Andean mummies reveal arsenic poisoning afflicted people in northern Chile for thousands of years, a hair analysis shows.

In the current Journal of Archaeological Science, a team led by Bernardo Arriaza of Chile's Universidad de Tarapaca analyzed hair from 45 Andean mummies taken from ten sites some 7,000 to 600 years old. The mummies dried in Chile's Atacama desert region, one of the most parched regions on Earth. They were deliberately mummified with sticks, reeds and clay, given wigs and distinctive caps.
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Cow

Stone Age Scandinavians unable to digest milk

Anders Götherström
Uppsala University
Thu, 01 Apr 2010 21:56 UTC
The hunter-gatherers who inhabited the southern coast of Scandinavia 4,000 years ago were lactose intolerant. This has been shown by a new study carried out by researchers at Uppsala University and Stockholm University. The study, which has been published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology, supports the researchers' earlier conclusion that today's Scandinavians are not descended from the Stone Age people in question but from a group that arrived later.

"This group of hunter-gatherers differed significantly from modern Swedes in terms of the DNA sequence that we generally associate with a capacity to digest lactose into adulthood," says Anna Linderholm, formerly of the Archaeological Research Laboratory, Stockholm University, presently at University College Cork, Ireland.
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Why Earth Wasn't One Big Ball of Ice 4 Billion Years Ago When Sun's Radiation Was Weaker


ScienceDaily
Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00 UTC
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© iStockphotoScientists have solved one of the great mysteries of our geological past: Why the Earth's surface was not one big lump of ice four billion years ago when sun radiation was much weaker than today.
Scientists have solved one of the great mysteries of our geological past: Why Earth's surface was not one big lump of ice four billion years ago when Sun radiation was much weaker than today. Scientists have presumed that Earth's atmosphere back then consisted of 30 percent CO2 trapping heat like a greenhouse. However, new research shows that the reason for Earth not going into a deep freeze at the time was quite different.

In 1972, the late, world famous astronomer Carl Sagan and his colleague George Mullen formulated "The faint early Sun paradox. " The paradox consisted in that Earth's climate has been fairly constant during almost four of the four and a half billion years that the planet has been in existence, and this despite the fact that radiation from the Sun has increased by 25-30 percent.

The paradoxical question that arose for scientists in this connection was why Earth's surface at its fragile beginning was not covered by ice, seeing that the Sun's rays were much fainter than they are today. Science found one probable answer in 1993, which was proffered by the American atmospheric scientist, Jim Kasting. He performed theoretical calculations that showed that 30% of Earth's atmosphere four billion years ago consisted of CO2. This in turn entailed that the large amount of greenhouse gases layered themselves as a protective greenhouse around the planet, thereby preventing the oceans from freezing over.
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Meteor

Was a Giant Comet Responsible for a North American Catastrophe in 11,000 BC?


ScienceDaily
Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00 UTC
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© NASA05 Hubble Space Telescope image of the breakup of a comet (73/P Schwassmann-Wachmann 3).
Some 13,000 years ago the Earth was struck by thousands of Tunguska-sized cometary fragments over the course of an hour, leading to a dramatic cooling of the planet, according to astronomer Professor Bill Napier of the Cardiff University Astrobiology Centre.

He presents his new model in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The cooling, by as much as 8°C, interrupted the warming which was occurring at the end of the last ice age and caused glaciers to re-advance. Evidence has been found that this catastrophic change was associated with some extraordinary extraterrestrial event. The boundary is marked by the occurrence of a "black mat" layer a few centimetres thick found at many sites throughout the United States containing high levels of soot indicative of continental-scale wildfires, as well as microscopic hexagonal diamonds (nanodiamonds) which are produced by shocks and are only found in meteorites or impact craters. These findings led to the suggestion that the catastrophic changes of that time were caused by the impact of an asteroid or comet 4 km across on the Laurentide ice sheet, which at that time covered what would become Canada and the northern part of the United States.
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Control Panel

Geneva Atom Smasher Sets Collision Record

Alexander G. Higgins
The Associated Press
Tue, 30 Mar 2010 01:53 UTC
CERN event display
© AP Photo/Anja NiedringhausAn event display shows the activity during a high-energy collision at the CMS control room of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, at their headquarter outside Geneva, Switzerland, Tuesday, March 30, 2010. The $10 billion Large Hadron Collider directed two proton beams into each other at three times more force than ever before, Tuesday, as part of its ambitious bid to reveal details about theoretical particles and microforces.
The world's largest atom smasher conducted its first experiments at conditions nearing those after the Big Bang, breaking its own record for high-energy collisions with proton beams crashing into each other Tuesday at three times more force than ever before.

In a milestone for the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider's ambitious bid to reveal details about theoretical particles and microforces, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, took high-tech photographs so they could study the disintegrating protons after they collided at a combined energy level of 7 trillion electron volts.

The collisions herald a new era for researchers working on the machine in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel below the Swiss-French border at Geneva.

"That's it! They've had a collision," said Oliver Buchmueller from Imperial College in London as people closely watched monitors.
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Laptop

US: Ohio University researchers create the world's smallest electrical wire

Spencer Hunt
The Columbus Dispatch
Wed, 31 Mar 2010 02:51 UTC
World's smallest superconductor
© UnknownThe world's smallest electrical wire, called a superconductor, is four pairs of organic salt molecules.
Ohio University researchers have created the world's smallest electrical wire.

This wire, called a superconductor, actually is four pairs of organic salt molecules and is less than 1 nanometer wide.

That's so small that even electron microscopes can't see it. The newsprint this story is on is about 100,000 nanometers thick.

The discovery could help pave the way toward a new generation of miniature wiring that would further shrink the size and boost the power of cell phones, computers and other devices.

"You could have a laptop that's as powerful as a supercomputer," said Saw-Wai Hla, an associate professor of physics who helped create the supersmall wire. "From that point of view, it's really exciting."
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Star

Astronomers See Historical Supernova From a New Angle

David A. Aguilar
Harvard-Smithsonia Center For Astrophysics
Wed, 31 Mar 2010 19:27 UTC
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© NASA/CXC/MIT/UMass Amherst/M.D.Stage et al.Cassiopeia A
Chandra X-ray Observatory image of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A). The red, green, and blue regions in this X-ray image of Cas A show where the intensity of low, medium, and high-energy X-rays, respectively, is greatest. While this photo shows the remains of the exploded star, light echoes show us reflected light from the explosion itself.
Cambridge, Massachusetts -Since Galileo first pointed a telescope at the sky 400 years ago, a myriad of technological advances have allowed astronomers to look at very faint objects, very distant objects, and even light that's invisible to the human eye. Yet, one aspect usually remains out of reach - the benefit of a 3-D perspective.

Our telescopes show the Milky Way galaxy only as it appears from one vantage point: our solar system. Now, using a simple but powerful technique, a group of astronomers led by Armin Rest of Harvard University has seen an exploding star or supernova from several angles.
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