Researchers mapped out the relationships among a remote group of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania who live as humans did about 10,000 years ago and found that their social networks are very much like ours, even though they don't have Facebook or cell phones.
In other news of the ancient past, a new study suggests that the fossil feather whose discovery gave rise to the name Archaeopteryx more than 150 years ago was actually black.
According to paleontologists, nests for dinosaur eggs found in South Africa are 100 million years older than the former oldest known nest. They found 10 separate nests, each containing up to 34 eggs measuring 6-7cm. The fossils are of the prosauropod Massospondylus, a relative of the long-necked sauropods such as Diplodocus.
Brendan Foley's four-week survey of the waters around Crete last October is part of a long-term effort to catalogue large numbers of ancient shipwrecks in the Aegean Sea. The grand prize would be a wreck from one of the most influential and enigmatic cultures of the ancient world--the Minoans, who ruled these seas more than 3,000 years ago.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Could the United States establish a moon colony and develop a new propulsion system for going to Mars? All within eight years of a Newt Gingrich presidency, as Mr. Gingrich promised this week?
The answers seem to be technologically yes, economically iffy and politically very difficult. In proposing an ambitious vision for space, Mr. Gingrich stepped into the eternal debate over where the nation's and NASA's priorities should lie. Mr. Gingrich spoke little about NASA's unmanned missions, which many think produce better science with less money. Inspiration and economic frontiers, not science, drive his long-standing enthusiasm for space.
"I come at space from a standpoint of a romantic belief that it really is part of our destiny," Mr. Gingrich said in his speech on Wednesday. He joked about a legislative proposal, early in his Congressional career, that a moon colony could apply for statehood once its population reached 13,000.
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from Nature News
Prion diseases such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) are able to jump species much more easily than previously thought. A study published in Science today [January 26] shows that in mice, prions introduced from other species can replicate in the spleen without necessarily affecting the brain.
The study reinforces the concern that thousands of people in the United Kingdom might be silent carriers of prion infection, potentially able to pass a lethal form of the disease to others through surgery or blood transfusions.
Prions are infectious pathogens, primarily composed of the misfolded form of a protein called PrP. Normal PrP molecules that are converted into the misshapen type then aggregate in the brain to form hard, insoluble clumps--with fatal consequences.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Mahahual, Mexico -- Just off a rutted dirt road, a beach as white as flour pops into view from behind a wall of sea grape and rustling palms. Pelicans slice over turquoise waters, and not a single person stirs the quiet. The tableau, along a little-developed segment of Mexico's Caribbean coast, is a beachgoer's fantasy of unspoiled seaside splendor. Until you look down.
For as far as the eye can see, the sand glitters with bits of bright color: fragments of trash, thousands and thousands of them, strung like a vast, foul necklace. Even a quick inventory finds discarded motor-oil cans, hair-gel containers, juice bottles, hub caps, buckets, a soccer ball, flip-flops. Here's a margarine container from the Dominican Republic, there a butter tub from Haiti. The label on a washed-up glue bottle says it's from Central America.
The trashy scene is repeated for miles along this stretch of the southern Yucatan Peninsula, except in spots where the beach is tended by the owners of small hotels and oceanfront houses. Most of the refuse is plastic; many fragments are too small or faded to identify.
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from the Economist
Among the many new gadgets unveiled at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was a pair of smartphones able to exchange data using light. These phones, as yet only prototypes from Casio, a Japanese firm, transmit digital signals by varying the intensity of the light given off from their screens. The flickering is so slight that it is imperceptible to the human eye, but the camera on another phone can detect it at a distance of up to ten metres. In an age of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, flashing lights might seem like going back to sending messages with an Aldis lamp. In fact, they are the beginning of a fast and cheap wireless-communication system that some have labelled Li-Fi.
The data being exchanged by Casio's phones were trifles: message balloons to be added to pictures on social-networking sites. But the firm sees bigger applications, such as pointing a smartphone at an illuminated shop sign to read information being transmitted by the light: opening times, for example, or the latest bargains.
Yet that is still only a flicker of what is possible. Last October a number of companies and industry groups formed the Li-Fi Consortium, to promote high-speed optical wireless systems. The idea is that light can help with a looming capacity problem. As radio-based wireless becomes ubiquitous, more and more devices transmitting more and more data are able to connect to the internet, either through the mobile-phone network or through Wi-Fi.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
Yokohama, Japan -- Heonseok Lee has a simple way of describing how public sentiment toward nuclear power has changed in South Korea since the disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant last March 11.
"Before 3/11, I'd post an article criticizing the nuclear power industry, and right away there'd be hundreds of really nasty comments. After 3/11, there'll still be a few dozen. But not hundreds," says Lee, a full-time anti-nuclear activist in one of the world's most pro-nuclear countries.
Though nuclear power still has a strong foothold throughout the region, and public opinion is mixed, activists across Asia have anecdotes like this to show that anti-nuclear sentiment and protest are slowly growing from Mongolia, to South Korea to Taiwan and even--in modest ways--to China.
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from the San Francisco Chronicle
Bangkok, Thailand (Associated Press) -- A new taste for eating elephant meat--everything from trunks to sex organs--has emerged in Thailand and could pose a new threat to the survival of the species. Wildlife officials told The Associated Press that they were alerted to the practice after finding two elephants slaughtered last month in a national park in western Thailand.
"The poachers took away the elephants' sex organs and trunks ... for human consumption," Damrong Phidet, director-general of Thailand's wildlife agency, said in a telephone interview. Some meat was to be consumed without cooking, like "elephant sashimi," he said.
Poachers typically just remove tusks, which are most commonly found on Asian male elephants and fetch thousands of dollars on the black market. A market for elephant meat, however, could lead to killing of the wider elephant population, Damrong said.
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from the New Orleans Times-Picayune
A team of Louisiana scientists is laying the groundwork for creating a new carbon storage industry that could both reduce the effects of global warming and rebuild wetlands along the state's coastline. Sarah Mack, founder of New Orleans-based Tierra Resources, and Louisiana State University wetlands scientists John W. Day and Robert Lane have come up with a method for measuring the molecules of carbon removed from the atmosphere by the soils and plants that are created with coastal restoration projects.
Removing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is a key strategy for mitigating global warming, and thus reducing the effects of climate change. Scientists say rising levels of human-made carbon dioxide help the atmosphere hold in heat, leading to warmer worldwide temperatures. Those temperatures, scientists say, will result in a variety of harmful effects, from rising sea levels to longer periods of drought and more intense storms.
Assuring that restoration projects can store carbon for years could turn the projects into major investment targets for carbon-producing industries nationwide, including electric power generating companies and petrochemical plants that are facing potential federal and state rules aimed at reducing carbon emissions.
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from The Scientist (Registration Required)
Genomics research increasingly depends on access to large pools of individuals' genetic and health data, but there is mounting dissatisfaction with governance approaches that erect barriers between donors and the biomedical research in which they are participating. Typically, participants have little or no opportunity to track how their data are being used, what discoveries result, and what the new knowledge might mean for them, even when findings are of life and death significance for the participant.
Some frustrated communities have built their own scientific enterprises outside of traditional research settings. Disease advocacy organizations have established biobanks, for example, and firms like 23andMe and PatientsLikeMe have used crowdsourcing methods to build up repositories of genomic and health data, each attracting over 100,000 participants in just a few years. Often labeled "citizen science," these projects offer a two-way connection between participants and research--participants contribute their data, while seeing how it is used in research, what findings it generates, and how that new knowledge might impact their own lives.
Such citizen science efforts have also begun to achieve something that is crucial to the future of personalized, or "precision," medicine. A cornerstone of such medicine, according to a 2011 National Research Council (NRC) report, is a dense "knowledge network" (i.e., biobank), built by "mining" genomic, phenotypic, health, behavioral, and environmental data from many people. Indeed, former National Cancer Institute director John Neiderhuber has predicted a near future in which "every citizen" will contribute biosamples to biobanks and funnel health data into a centralized databank via biosensors linked to smartphones.
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from Reuters
A U.S. appeals court threw out an injunction that Chevron Corp had won to block enforcement of an $18 billion judgment in Ecuador for polluting the Amazon jungle and damaging the health of residents.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said Chevron acted prematurely in seeking to block enforcement of the judgment worldwide, given that the residents of Ecuador's Lago Agrio region had not yet sought to enforce it. Chevron says the Ecuadorean judgment is fraudulent and is appealing it separately.
Thursday's decision overturned a March 2011 injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan to block enforcement of the judgment, imposed by an Ecuadorean court in February 2011. The appellate court also directed Kaplan to dismiss Chevron's complaint.
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from Science News
A new method for rating the attractiveness of a compound could help chemists discern potential new drugs from duds. Researchers have come up with a way to quantify a compound's drug potential that moves beyond simply "hot or not," instead providing a measure that allows compounds to be ranked as well.
The approach "takes things a step further, looking at multiple factors instead of yes/no," says chemical informaticist David Wild, of the Indiana University Bloomington, who was not involved with the research.
The new technique uses eight molecular properties--such as the number of rotatable bonds a molecule has--that influence things like a compound's toxic effects or its likelihood of being absorbed in the body. With some clever math, those probabilities are turned into a number between zero and one. When researchers tested their method against existing techniques for screening compounds, it outperformed the standard approaches at distinguishing known drugs from other molecules, the team reports in the February issue of Nature Chemistry.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Long before Facebook made it possible to share photos of your breakfast with hundreds of
friends and let them know just how you feel about your latest parking ticket, humans were forming
social networks with essentially the same structure people use today.
A team of researchers has mapped out the relationships among a remote group of 205
hunter-gatherers in Tanzania who live as humans did about 10,000 years ago and found that their
social networks are very much like ours, even in the absence of the complicating factors of
megacities, cellphones and the Internet.
The researchers found that individuals who are willing to cooperate prefer the company of
other cooperative people and that free riders tend to stick to their own kind as well. The
results appear in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
BEIJING -- Not long after I moved to China, I learned I had a case of blocked qi. A
practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine squeezed the top of my ear and informed me that the
obstruction of my qi, or life force, was caused in part by my tendency to overthink. She also
said I had some liver stagnation and a weak heart. Until that moment, I had thought I was just
fine.
The practitioner suggested I try a remedy called cupping. I'd never heard of it before I moved
to Beijing, though I had seen markings of it on others here: bright red circles across bare
shoulders and backs that look like painful tattoos or hickeys. (Several years ago Gwyneth Paltrow
caused a stir when the cut of her evening gown revealed a row of cupping marks all across her
back.)
Though cupping, a form of acupuncture, has become something of a fad in Hollywood, it is only
slowly catching on among the general public in the West. The aversion is understandable: Cupping
involves the suctioning of flesh using warm cups that typically have been heated using a flaming
stick. The heat inside the cup creates a vacuum that pulls the skin up a good inch or so in an
effort to stimulate circulation, draw out toxins and stimulate the lymphatic system. The
procedure is generally done on the back but can also be performed on the neck, legs and hips.
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from USA Today
The Hubble space telescope's first photo of a planet, Fomalhaut b, orbiting a nearby star, may
actually be "scattered dust" and not a planet, reports an astronomy team.
The original observation scientists, led by Paul Kalas of the University of California,
Berkeley, however, say the new critical report relies on observations unable to resolve the
Saturn-sized ringed planet they argue orbits the star Fomalhaut.
In 2008, Kalas and colleagues reported the Fomalhaut b image, "the first visible-light
snapshot of a planet circling another star," according to a space agency statement. In the
Science journal study, they reported that Hubble used a "coronograph" technique,
removing direct light from Fomalhaut, some 25 light years away (one light-year is about 5.9
trillion miles), to reveal an apparent planet in the dust disk swirling around the star.
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from ABC News
On a "lucky" day at her job at a well-known apparel company, Arielle Smith worked a 10-hour
shift with only 20 minutes for lunch--and many weekends, she worked without overtime pay.
"I never slept because I was so stressed about what would happen the next day," said the
27-year-old fashion designer from New York City. "I wasn't supposed to leave the office at all,
except to run work errands. I thought about switching jobs every single day." Her workload
eventually took its toll: She was medicated for anxiety and depression.
Work can be depressing, that much most people know. But now, a European study suggests that
those who work long hours are twice as likely to experience a major depressive episode.
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from NPR
The "Blue Marble" image of Earth snapped by the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972 is one of the most
famous photos ever taken. When it appeared, we all suddenly saw the world in a much different
way. In the years since, NASA has added other "Blue Marble" photos to its collection, and has
used technology to enhance and sharpen the images.
On Wednesday the space agency unveiled what it's calling the "most amazing high definition
image of Earth--Blue Marble 2012." This one was taken "from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA's
most recently launched Earth-observing satellite--Suomi NPP," NASA says, and is a "composite
image [that] uses a number of swaths of the Earth's surface taken on January 4, 2012."
So how does this new composite image compare to some of the others? Check them out.
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from the Boston Herald
ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- The aurora borealis streaking across Alaska skies this week captivated
sky watchers who camped out in sub-zero temperatures to photograph the lights, billed as the most
active in years.
At the same time, scientists say the light show is a sign of a new solar cycle that heralds
many geomagnetic storms. That means more visible auroras--and potentially disruption to the
satellites humans rely on for everything from spy surveillance to GPS tracking.
Alaskans will be witnessing much more aurora activity in the near future, said University of
California, Los Angeles geophysicist Yuri Shprits, who studies the potential impacts of solar
storms on satellite systems.
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from BBC News Online
Researchers have "cloaked" a three-dimensional object, making it invisible from all angles,
for the first time. However, the demonstration works only for waves in the microwave region of
the electromagnetic spectrum. It uses a shell of what are known as plasmonic materials; they
present a "photo negative" of the object being cloaked, effectively cancelling it out.
The idea, outlined in New Journal of Physics, could find first application in
high-resolution microscopes. Most of the high-profile invisibility cloaking efforts have focused
on the engineering of "metamaterials"--modifying materials to have properties that cannot be
found in nature.
The modifications allow metamaterials to guide and channel light in unusual
ways--specifically, to make the light rays arrive as if they had not passed over or been
reflected by a cloaked object.
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from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Tiny substances called nanomaterials have moved into the marketplace over the last decade, in
products as varied as cosmetics, clothing and paint. But not enough is known about their
potential health and environmental risks, which should be studied further, an expert panel of the
National Academy of Sciences said on Wednesday.
Nanoscale forms of substances like silver, carbon, zinc and aluminum have many useful
properties. Nano zinc oxide sunscreen goes on smoothly, for example, and nano carbon is lighter
and stronger than its everyday or "bulk" form. But researchers say these products and others can
also be ingested, inhaled or possibly absorbed through the skin. And they can seep into the
environment during manufacturing or disposal.
Nanomaterials are engineered on the scale of a billionth of a meter, perhaps one
ten-thousandth the width of a human hair, or less. Not enough is known about the effects, if any,
that nanomaterials have on human health and the environment, according to a report issued by the
academy's expert panel. The report says that "critical gaps" in understanding have been
identified but "have not been addressed with needed research."
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from Science News
It may be time to hatch a new crop of those colorful illustrations of early feathered
creatures spreading their wings amid the branches of Late Jurassic trees. In life, a new study
suggests, the fossil feather whose discovery gave rise to the name Archaeopteryx more than 150
years ago was actually black.
Longtime celebrities among fossils, Archaeopteryx lithographica specimens have until
last year been largely accepted as the most ancient bird species known. Whether or not they end
up retaining their claim as early birds, their feathers had small pigment-bearing structures that
closely matched those found in today's birds, Ryan Carney of Brown University in Providence,
R.I., and his colleagues report January 24 in Nature Communications.
Archaeopteryx got its name in 1861 based on a lone fossil feather. Modern articles
about the creature often show one of the daintily preserved fossils of a spread-out skeleton, but
not until 2011 was any skeletal fossil designated as an official example of the species.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) today announced the 28 winners of a new $20 million
program to jump-start the labs of young biomedical scientists in countries outside of the United
States.
The giant biomedical research charity in Chevy Chase, Maryland, created the International
Early Career Scientist awards after recognizing that starting a career in science is "even more
difficult in other countries" than in the United States, says HHMI President Robert Tjian. The
institute invited applications from scientists in 18 countries with an infrastructure to support
strong science but inadequate research funding. Applicants must have done graduate or
postdoctoral work in the United States and started a lab within the last 7 years. That's because
HHMI wants to not only support science globally but also to replenish the "influx of really
talented students" who come to the United States, Tjian says.
HHMI received 760 applications and invited 55 to give a 15-minute talk at HHMI's Janelia Farm
campus in Virginia last fall. The 28 winners are in fields ranging from virology to plant
science. The largest contingent--seven--is from China, followed by Portugal and Spain, each with
five winners. One-third of the winners are women.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
A medication for people with advanced colorectal cancer who have exhausted all other treatment options appears to slow tumor growth and extend life, according to new data.
Bayer HealthCare, the makers of regorafenib, said it would seek Food and Drug Administration approval of the medication this year. If approved, regorafenib would be the first new treatment for colorectal cancer in more than five years.
Although chemotherapy and other medications can extend life in people with metastatic cancer (cancer that has spread throughout the body), alternatives are needed when those drugs stop working, said Dr. Heinz-Josef Lenz, a professor at USC Keck School of Medicine and an investigator in the regorafenib trial.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
"Global warming" and "climate change" succinctly describe a complicated phenomenon, and in just a few decades they have become common descriptors. But while global warming would be bad for the Earth as a whole, the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would affect different areas in different ways, and local climate change is what matters to many people. So let's look at the relative winners and losers.
Two factors will likely determine whether a particular region will prosper or suffer as climate change progresses: starting temperature and adaptability.
You don't hear much talk about it, but countries that are cold right now could see very real benefits from a few extra degrees. Consider the Northern Sea shipping route, which runs through the Arctic waters north of Europe and Asia. It's a faster and cheaper way to ship oil from Russia and Norway to markets around the world, but it's currently too icy to navigate for much of the year. Climate change could open the route earlier and keep it clear later. It may also allow companies to extract new oil and mineral wealth from beneath the sea.
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from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Basketball free throws are simple, right? Form matters. So does ritual. But to William E. Cullinan, Marquette University neuroscientist and basketball fan, there is something else at play, hidden, internal. It's called a motor program, in which signals are transmitted from a player's brain through pathways of the central nervous system.
"There is a very big difference between standing in your driveway and shooting 50 free throws and standing on the foul line in front of 18,000 screaming maniacs with the game on the line," Cullinan says. And as he continues to talk, Cullinan's world, so complex to a casual sports fan, comes to life, the free throw as neurological event.
"What we can describe in neurological terms is the idea of optimal length of a motor program," he says. "If a motor program is too short, you are not allowing the brain to be engaged fully to do what it does so well. On the other hand if it's too long, if it's too elaborate, you're engaging the brain but you're allowing more chances for error to be introduced in that program and it predicts a lack of success."
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from National Geographic News
Mysterious, unseen structures on the outskirts of creation most likely aren't tugging on our universe, according to a new study. The paper reexamines "dark flow"--an unusual, one-way motion of matter--using measurements of supernovae and the existing laws of physics.
In 2008, a team of scientists took measurements of hundreds of galaxy clusters and calculated that everything in the visible universe--and likely beyond--is flowing at 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour in the same direction. The data couldn't be explained by the distribution of matter in the known universe, so the scientists suggested that chunks of matter had been pushed out shortly after the big bang, and their gravity is now pulling on everything around us.
In 2010 the same team released a second study with data on twice as many galaxy clusters as their 2008 work. That research found that dark flow extends even deeper into the universe than previously reported: out to at least 2.5 billion light-years from Earth.
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from Science News
Take a grainy, blurred image of a formless face or an illegible license plate, and with a few keystrokes the picture sharpens and the killer is caught--if you're a crime-scene tech on TV. From Harrison Ford in Blade Runner to CSI, Criminal Minds and NCIS, the zoom-and-enhance maneuver has become such a staple of Hollywood dramas that it's mocked with video montages on YouTube.
In real life, of course, no amount of high-techery can disclose data not captured by a camera in the first place. But scientific advances are now gaining ground on fictional forensics. The field known as computational photography has exploded in the last decade, yielding powerful new cameras capable of tricks once seen only in the labs of make-believe.
For a long time camera makers and operators focused mostly on getting more pixels. But the "pixel war" is over, says Marc Levoy, a pioneer in computational photography at Stanford University. Today's manufacturers are looking beyond good resolution.
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from Time
Researchers report that exposure to ubiquitous household chemicals may lower children's responses to vaccines.
The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that perfluorinated compounds (PFCs), which are commonly used in Teflon coatings in pots and pans as well as in furniture, stain-resistant carpeting, rain gear and microwave popcorn bags, may hinder children's ability to mount proper immune responses after they are vaccinated. The findings suggest that important gains made by immunization programs in the past century may be eroded by the emergence of these environmental chemicals.
In the report, Dr. Philippe Grandjean, chair of environmental medicine at the University of Southern Denmark, and his colleagues studied a group of 587 children born between 1999 to 2001 in the Faroe Islands. The researchers chose that population, located in the north Atlantic, since most residents rely on the sea to survive, and recent studies have recorded increasing amounts of PFCs in the drinking water and fish there.
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from the Wall Street Journal
Researchers for the first time are documenting the basic wiring of the brain, the complex relationships among billions of neurons that are responsible for reason, memory and emotion. The work eventually could lead to better understanding of schizophrenia, autism, multiple sclerosis and other disorders.
"It may be the first new perspective on neuroanatomy in 100 years," said Bruce Rosen, director of the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital. "There may be some real surprises."
For years, researchers have probed the brain with imaging techniques that can pick up simple changes in neural activity, but the fundamental anatomy of thought has eluded detection. No one knows yet exactly how the brain stores information or shapes human nature. Researchers do believe, however, that all cognition emerges from the interplay of electrochemical impulses along the brain's circuitry, which can call a word to mind, apply the rules of grammar and voice it aloud in 600 milliseconds.
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from BBC News Online
Frenetic star-forming activity in the early Universe is linked to the most massive galaxies in today's cosmos, new research suggests. This "starbursting" activity when the Universe was just a few billion years old appears to have been clamped off by the growth of supermassive black holes.
An international team gathered hints of the mysterious "dark matter" in early galaxies to confirm the link. The findings appear in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Being able to see objects at great distances in the cosmos allows astronomers to look into the past, at light that departed when the Universe was young. Using the 12-metre Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope in Chile, an international team led by Ryan Hickox of Dartmouth College studied the way distant galaxies from the early Universe grouped together.
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