Science News

Of lice and men: An itchy history By Emily Willingham Ponder the louse. Consider its plural, lice. Try now not to scratch the multiple itches that have just populated your head at the very thought of these near-microscopic insects crawling around in that forest of hair follicles, laying eggs, sucking blood, and generally creeping you out. The thing is, your head may not be the likeliest place to feel the itch. After all, we’re home not only to the louse, but to lice, plural. As in two genera of lice, and three different kinds. One of those, the pubic louse, appears to trace back to contact between the Homo lineage and the gorilla, but more on that in a bit. …

LINK: http://www.plosbiolo...al.pbio.1000570 Abstract Inappropriate recollections and responses in stressful conditions are hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder and other anxiety and mood disorders, but how stress contributes to the disorders is unclear. Here we show that stress itself reactivates memories even if the memory is unrelated to the stressful experience. Forced-swim stress one day after learning enhanced memory recall. One-day post-learning amnestic treatments were ineffective unless administered soon after the swim, indicating that a stressful experience itself can reactivate unrelated consolidated memories. The swim also triggered inter-hemisp…

Research Predicts Future Evolution of Flu Viruses ScienceDaily (Feb. 19, 2011) — New research from the University of Pennsylvania is beginning to crack the code of which strain of flu will be prevalent in a given year, with major implications for global public health preparedness. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110217171336.htm

Oldest Fossils of Large Seaweeds, Possible Animals Tell Story About Oxygen in an Ancient Ocean These images are part and counterpart of a macroscopic Lantian fossil, probably a seaweed, with differentiated morphologies including a distinct root-like holdfast to secure the organism on sea bottom, a conical stem, and a crown of ribbon-like structures. Scale bar is 1 centimeter. (Credit: Photo by Zhe Chen) ScienceDaily (Feb. 19, 2011) — Almost 600 million years ago, before the rampant evolution of diverse life forms known as the Cambrian explosion, a community of seaweeds and worm-like animals lived in a quiet deep-water niche under the sea near what is now Lantian…

A study by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) has carried out the first Spanish study into the emotional differences between the sexes and generations in terms of forgiveness. According to the study, parents forgive more than children, while women are better at forgiving than men. "This study has great application for teaching values, because it shows us what reasons people have for forgiving men and women, and the popular conception of forgiveness", Maite Garaigordobil, co-author of the study and a senior professor at the Psychology Faculty of the UPV, tells SINC. This study, which has been published in the Revista Latinoamericana de Psicología, is the …

Understanding and managing how humans and nature sustainably coexist is now so sweeping and lightning fast that it's spawned a concept to be unveiled at a major scientific conference today. Meet "telecoupling." Joining its popular cousins telecommuting and television, telecoupling is the way Jack Liu, director of the Human-Nature Lab/Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability at Michigan State University, is describing how distance is shrinking and connections are strengthening between nature and humans. The "Telecoupling" of Human and Natural Systems" symposium will be 1:30-4:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 18, at the American Association for the Advancement of Sc…

Professor Marshall Stoneham passed away on the morning of the 18th. He was president of the Institute of Physics. Due to his illness the immediate past President Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell will continue to act as President of the Institute. Professor Stoneham had been very active within the IOP for a number of years. I am sure he will be greatly missed. The IOP news report can be found here.

LINK: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/02/04/1011876108 Abstract Sexual selection in natural populations acts on highly heritable traits and tends to be relatively strong, implicating sexual selection as a causal agent in many phenotypic radiations. Sexual selection appears to be ineffectual in promoting phenotypic divergence among contemporary natural populations, however, and there is little evidence from artificial selection experiments that sexual fitness can evolve. Here, we demonstrate that a multivariate male trait preferred by Drosophila serrata females can respond to selection and results in the maintenance of male mating success. The response to…

...but I still didn't make a perpetual motion device. Damnit.

Is speculation in multiverses as immoral as speculation in subprime mortgages? By John Horgan | Jan 28, 2011 05:50 PM I'm becoming a moralistic prig in my dotage. Someone dear to me just proudly told me that her son, a freshly minted Harvard grad, is training to be an investment banker. This privileged young man, I grumbled, should try to make the world a better place rather than playing in a rigged, high-stakes gambling racket. I apologized later—and vowed privately to be less self-righteous in my judgments of others' career choices. After all, I ain't exactly Gandhi. But then I read Brian Greene's new book, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep L…

An ancient snake shows some leg Snakes are classified by scientists as limbless squamates (an order that also includes lizards). But nearly 100 million years ago relatives of modern snakes undulated through Cretaceous period waters aided by a paddlelike tail and dragging a pair of short, footless hind legs. http://www.scientificamerican.com/gallery_directory.cfm?photo_id=11CD480D-E7A6-7DCF-73A60B9B04557531&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_TECH_20110215

A new dimension for mathematics – the Periodic Table of shapes Mathematicians are creating their own version of the periodic table that will provide a vast directory of all the possible shapes in the universe across three, four and five dimensions, linking shapes together in the same way as the periodic table links groups of chemical elements. The three-year project, announced today, should provide a resource that mathematicians, physicists and other scientists can use for calculations and research in a range of areas, including computer vision, number theory, and theoretical physics. For some mental exercise, check out these animations that have already been ana…

Chernobyl Incident Had Fewer Long-Term Health Impacts Than Expected ScienceDaily (Apr. 9, 2007) — A new study has found that risks from radiation exposure to people involved in the Chernobyl incident may be much less significant than most of us think. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070407172204.htm

Animal Connection: New Hypothesis for Human Evolution and Human Nature These carvings are from ivory and have been dated to between 30,000 - 36,000 years old, making them the oldest artworks in Europe. (Credit: Photo by H. Jensen. Copyright University of Tubingen) ScienceDaily (July 20, 2010) — It's no secret to any dog-lover or cat-lover that humans have a special connection with animals. But in a new journal article and forthcoming book, paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman of Penn State University argues that this human-animal connection goes well beyond simple affection. Shipman proposes that the interdependency of ancestral humans with other animal species -- "t…

Sail E-way: Spacecraft Riding the Solar Wind on Electric-Field Sails Could Cruise at 180,000 Kph VIRTUAL SAIL: The electric solar wind sail, or e-sail, concept offers the opportunity to field truly enormous virtual sails as much as 40 kilometers across, possibly enabling the development of the fastest man-made objects ever flownperhaps at speeds around 50 kilometers per second, Janhunen says. Image: COURTESY OF ALEXANDRE SZAMES, ANTIGRAVITE, PARIS A sail formed not of material, but by electric fields reaching a diameter of 40 kilometers could tap the solar wind and propel the fastest man-made object ever It takes large quantities of rocket fuel to power spa…

According to a case report in the New Zealand Medical Journal, announced in August, yet another person has swallowed whole a standard-size toothbrush. (A 15-year-old girl, running with the toothbrush in her mouth, tripped and fell, and her gag reflex did the rest.) This article is courtesy of NewsodtheWeird.com

Science News Forum Participants, A new book has just been releasedby Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.], entitled -- A Dialectical "Theory ofEverything" -- Meta-Genealogies of the Universe and of Its Sub-Universes:A Graphical Manifesto. -- see: http://www.adventure...ctics-entry.htm Texts preparatory to this book areavailable for free download via -- http://www.dialectic...ics/Primer.html Here's the text from the front andback "flaps" of the "dust cover" jacket [modified for thislist's typography] -- "A Dialectical Theory ofEverything — Meta-Genealogies of the Universe and of Its Sub-…

Opening a Can of Worms A father’s determination to help his son resulted in an experimental treatment for autism that uses roundworms to modulate inflammatory immune responses. Can the worms be used to treat other diseases? Read more: Opening a Can of Worms - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/57941/#ixzz1DaDzYDR1

I went to a talk about it yesterday (where a bunch of us scientists, multiple professors and students, were sitting around and someone presented it). It seemed pretty cool. It came out last month, though. A critical role for IGF-II in memory consolidation and enhancement http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v469/n7331/full/nature09667.html From what I gather, injections of TGF-II help create a positive feedback loop that allows particular cells, those of which are involved in the retention and recall of memory, stay alive and generate even more TGF-II for themselves so they stick around. I could see some Flowers for Algernon (link) stuff being possible with…

http://urbantitan.co...tural-crystals/ Here, I originally saw this article on polish forum, and I thought that is a hopeful news. The scientist can make small thing invisible by put it in on the right side of calcite crystal. For now it's not enough big to see it with naked eye, but scientists are optymistic and said that it will be possible to enlarge it in near future.

I thought if you got a large flat donut shaped electromagnet and loaded it full of amps and voltage to where its super charged then run ionized plasma through ceramic tubes up to it and sprayed it into the hole of that magnet to where it was suspended by the field and kept building up the amount of plasma then suddenly reversed the polarity of the magnet that it would shoot a supercharged plasma ball. But then I realized that the charge wouldn't stay together through the air any suggestions on how to improve this idea.

New Reactor Paves the Way for Efficiently Producing Fuel from Sunlight Sossina Haile and William Chueh stand next to the benchtop thermochemical reactor used to screen materials for implementation on the solar reactor. (Credit: Courtesy of Caltech) ScienceDaily (Jan. 19, 2011) — Using a common metal most famously found in self-cleaning ovens, Sossina Haile hopes to change our energy future. The metal is cerium oxide -- or ceria -- and it is the centerpiece of a promising new technology developed by Haile and her colleagues that concentrates solar energy and uses it to efficiently convert carbon dioxide and water into fuels. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releas…

More Asteroids Could Have Made Life's Ingredients This artist's concept uses hands to illustrate the left and right-handed versions of the amino acid isovaline. (Credit: NASA/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith) ScienceDaily (Jan. 19, 2011) — A wider range of asteroids were capable of creating the kind of amino acids used by life on Earth, according to new NASA research. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110119100204.htm

Unlikely There Will Ever Be a Pure 'Cyber War,' Study Suggests Sailors on the watch-floor of the US Navy Cyber Defence Operations Command monitor. (Credit: US Navy) ScienceDaily (Jan. 23, 2011) — Heavy lobbying, lurid language and poor analysis are inhibiting government planning for cyber protection, according to a new report on Systemic Cyber Security published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on 17 January 2011. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110122111747.htm

Light Touch Transforms Material Into a Superconductor Professor Andrea Cavalleri used laser light to transform a material into a superconductor. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Oxford) ScienceDaily (Jan. 24, 2011) — A non-superconducting material has been transformed into a superconductor using light, Oxford University researchers report. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110122112044.htm