April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Even the most intelligent, complex brains can be taken by a swindler’s story, a new study from Case Western Reserve University shows, even stories that prove false upon a second look.

The new study, published online in the journal NeuroImage, reveals that when the brain fires up the network of neurons that allows a person to empathize, the network used for analysis is suppressed. Our ability to appreciate the human cost of our action is repressed when the analytic network is engaged.

Our brains cycle between the social and analytical networks at rest, when presented with a task, however healthy adults engage the appropriate neural pathway. We have built-in neural constraints on our ability to be both empathetic and analytic at the same time, the study shows.

The findings of this new study suggest that established theories about two competing networks within the brain need to be revised. It also provides insights into how a healthy mind works versus a mentally ill or developmentally disabled brain.

“This is the cognitive structure we’ve evolved,” said Anthony Jack, an assistant professor of cognitive science at Case Western Reserve. “Empathetic and analytic thinking are, at least to some extent, mutually exclusive in the brain.”

Previous studies revealed two large-scale brain networks are in tension in the brain: the default mode network and the task positive network. Other researchers have suggested that different mechanisms drive this tension. For example, one theory says that we have one network for engaging in goal directed tasks, positing that our second network allows the mind to wander.

Jack and his colleagues show that adults presented with social or analytical external stimuli problems consistently engaged the appropriate neural pathway to solve the problem. The other pathway was repressed. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging to record the see-sawing brain activity.

The question which inspired the study was a philosophical query. Jack said, “The most persistent question in the philosophy of mind is the problem of consciousness. Why can we describe the workings of a brain, but that doesn’t tell us what it’s like to be that person?”

“The disconnect between experiential understanding and scientific understanding is known as the explanatory gap,” Jack said. “In 2006, the philosopher Philip Robbins [professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri] and I got together and we came up with a pretty crazy, bold hypothesis: that the explanatory gap is driven by our neural structure. I was genuinely surprised to see how powerfully these findings fit that theory.”

The same neural phenomenon drives the explanatory gap as when we look at a visual illusion such as the duck-rabbit, the study suggests. When you look at the drawing, you can see the duck facing one way or the rabbit facing the other, but not both at once.

“That is called perceptual rivalry, and it occurs because of neural inhibition between the two representations,” Jack said. “What we see in this study is similar, but much more wide-scale. We see neural inhibition between the entire brain network we use to socially, emotionally, and morally engage with others, and the entire network we use for scientific, mathematical and logical reasoning.”

“This shows scientific accounts really do leave something out – the human touch. A major challenge for the science of the mind is how we can better translate between the cold and distant mechanical descriptions that neuroscience produces, and the emotionally engaged intuitive understanding which allows us to relate to one another as people.”

Forty-five healthy college students were recruited, and each was asked to take five 10-minute turns inside a magnetic resonance imager. During these sessions, the researchers presented them with 20 written and 20 video problems that required them to think about how others might feel. They were also presented with an equal number of written and video problems that required physics to solve.

Each video required the students to provide an answer to a yes-no question within 7 seconds. The sessions in the imager included twenty 27-second rest periods, and variable delays of 1,3,or 5 seconds. During each rest period, the students would look at a red cross on the screen in front of them and relax.

The MRI images revealed that social problems deactivated the brain regions associated with analysis and activated the social network, which held true regardless of the media the question was presented in. The physics questions, on the other hand, deactivated the brain regions associated with empathizing and activated the analytical network.

“When subjects are lying in a scanner with nothing to do, which we call the resting state, they naturally cycle between the two networks,” Jack said. “This tells us that it’s the structure of the adult brain that is driving this, that it’s a physiological constraint on cognition.”

The results of this study will have bearing on neuropsychiatric disorders from anxiety and depression to ADHD and schizophrenia, which are all characterized by social dysfunction of some sort.

“Treatment needs to target a balance between these two networks. At present most rehabilitation, and more broadly most educational efforts of any sort, focus on tuning up the analytic network. Yet, we found more cortex dedicated to the social network.”

The findings most clearly impact the study of developmental disabilities such as autism and Williams syndrome. People with autism usually have poor social skills, but a strong ability to solve visuospatial problems, such as mentally manipulating two and three-dimensional figures.  Williams syndrome sufferers are warm and friendly, but perform very poorly on visuospatial tests.

Jack warns that even healthy people can come to rely too heavily on one network or the other.

“You want the CEO of a company to be highly analytical in order to run a company efficiently, otherwise it will go out of business,” he said. “But, you can lose your moral compass if you get stuck in an analytic way of thinking.”

“You’ll never get by without both networks,” Jack continued. “You don’t want to favor one, but cycle efficiently between them, and employ the right network at the right time.”

Further research is needed to test the theory, and the group is currently investigating whether brains will shift from the social to the analytical when shown people depicted in dehumanizing ways — such as an animal or object.  They are also studying how disgust and social stereotyping confound our moral compass by activating the analytical network.

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Overuse of antibiotics in American agriculture and food production has long been a public concern over the potential for engendering more resilient microbes. A new study from Yale University shows that beneficial bacteria living in the gut of honeybees are demonstrating signs of resistance to such antibiotics.

A genetic analysis of the digestive bacteria showed eight different resistance genes for the antibiotic tetracycline in samples taken from U.S. honeybees, according to the research team´s report in mBio, the open-access journal for the American Society for Microbiology.

“It [resistance] seems to be everywhere in the U.S.,” said senior author Nancy Moran, from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale. “There’s a pattern here, where the U.S. has these genes and the others don’t.”

Honeybees have been given doses of the antibiotic oxytetracycline over the past 60 years to guard against “foulbrood,” a bacterial epidemic that can wipe out a hive before beekeepers can take action. Many of the genes that convey the resistance to oxytetracycline also convey resistance for tetracycline, a common broad-spectrum antibiotic that was historically used to treat cholera.

Using a metagenomic analysis, the Yale biologists screened honeybees from several locations across the United States and also from Switzerland, the Czech Republic and New Zealand. The team also took samples from wild bumblebees from the Czech Republic.

They found that American honeybees´ microbiota has a more abundant and diverse set of tetracycline resistance genes than those from other countries, which have banned the use of the drug by beekeepers on their hives. However, the researchers noted that the genes were less prevalent in U.S. colonies that had not been exposed to the antibiotic for 25 years.

Moran said that the bacteria responsible for foulbrood have also been found to be resistant to the antibiotics. Since oxytetracycline is a broad-spectrum antibiotic, it was likely capable of selecting for resistant genes in a wide range of bacteria.

“They carry tetL, which is one of the eight resistance genes we found,” she said. “It’s possible that the gene was transferred either from the gut bacteria to the pathogen or from the pathogen to the gut bacteria.”

The authors of the study point out the irony of fostering resistance and altering the bacteria that live in honeybee guts. In attempting to wipe out or prevent foulbrood, the decades of antibiotic doses may have actually been detrimental to honeybees´ overall health, which includes their microbiota.

Previous studies have suggested that these gut bacteria benefit the bees by neutralizing toxins in their diet, supplementing their nutrition, and defending them against pathogens. Therefore, a strategy designed to protect the bees from harm may actually have weakened their ability to fight off other pathogens.

Moran pointed out that the study could have implications for how honeybee diseases are prevented or treated; the antibiotic-resistance genes in the honeybee gut bacteria doesn’t pose a direct risk to humans. These microbes “don’t actually live in the honey, they live in the bee,” Moran said.

“We’ve never actually detected them in the honey. When people are eating honey, they’re not eating these bacteria.”

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

A mass extinction, wiping out numerous species including the dinosaurs, marked the end of the Cretaceous Period. A new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), reveals that the structure of North American ecosystems made the extinction worse than it might have been.

Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula is home to the now-buried Chicxulub impact crater, caused by a mountain-sized asteroid. This impact is almost certainly the ultimate cause of the Cretaceous mass extinction, which occurred 65 million years ago.

Jonathan Mitchell, Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Evolutionary Biology, said, “Our study suggests that the severity of the mass extinction in North America was greater because of the ecological structure of communities at the time.”

The research team, which included Peter Roopnarine of the California Academy of Sciences and Kenneth Angielczyk of the Field Museum, reconstructed the terrestrial food webs for 17 Cretaceous ecological communities, seven of which existed within two million years of the Chicxulub impact. The ten remaining food webs came from the preceding 13 million years.

The analysis comes from a computer model, developed by Roopnarine, showing how disturbances spread through the food web. The simulation’s purpose was to predict how many animal species would become extinct from a plant die-off since that was a likely consequence of the impact.

“Our analyses show that more species became extinct for a given plant die-off in the youngest communities,” Mitchell said. “We can trace this difference in response to changes in a number of key ecological groups such as plant-eating dinosaurs like Triceratops and small mammals.”

The study’s results paint a picture of the late Cretaceous period in North America in which pre-extinction changes to food webs were likely driven by a combination of environmental and biological factors. These changes resulted in communities that were more fragile when faced with large disturbances.

“Besides shedding light on this ancient extinction, our findings imply that seemingly innocuous changes to ecosystems caused by humans might reduce the ecosystems’ abilities to withstand unexpected disturbances,” Roopnarine said.

The computer model describes all plausible diets for the animals in the study. For example, one time a Tyrannosaurus rex might only eat Triceratops, a second run might have the T. rex eating only duck-billed dinosaurs, while in a third it might eat a more varied diet. This variability stems from the uncertainty around what exactly Cretaceous animals ate. This uncertainty, however, actually worked to the study’s benefit.

“Using modern food webs as guides, what we have discovered is that this uncertainty is far less important to understanding ecosystem functioning than is our general knowledge of the diets and the number of different species that would have had a particular diet,” Angielczyk said.

Modern food web data helped the simulations account for phenomena such as how specialized animals tend to be, or how body size relates to population size and their probability of extinction.

A large number of specific food webs from all the possible food webs in their general framework were selected. The team then evaluated how this sample of webs respond to a perturbation like the death of plants. The same relationships and assumptions were used to create food webs across all of the different sites. This means that the differences between sites stems only from differences in the data rather than from the simulation itself, making the simulation a fundamentally comparative method.

“We aren’t trying to say that a given ecosystem was fragile, but instead that a given ecosystem was more or less fragile than another,” Roopnarine said.

If the asteroid hit during the 13 million years preceding the latest Cretaceous communities, according to the model there would almost certainly still have been a mass extinction, but one that would have been less severe than what actually happened in North America. The team concluded that it was most likely a combination of changing climate and other environmental factors that caused some types of animals to become more or less diverse in the Cretaceous. They suggest that a shallow sea in North America drying up may have been one of the main factors leading to the observed changes in diversity. However, the study provides no evidence that the latest Cretaceous communities were on the verge of collapse before the asteroid hit.

“The ecosystems collapsed because of the asteroid impact, and nothing in our study suggests that they would not have otherwise continued on successfully,” Mitchell said. “Unusual circumstances, such as the after-effects of the asteroid impact, were needed for the vulnerability of the communities to become important.”

The findings of this study have implications for current day conservation efforts.

“Our study shows that the robustness or fragility of an ecosystem under duress depends very much on both the number of species present, as well as the types of species,” he said, referring to their ecological function. The study also shows that more is not necessarily better, because simply having many species does not insure against ecosystem collapse.

“What you have is also important,” Angelczyk said. “It is therefore critical that conservation efforts pay attention to ecosystem functioning and the roles of species in their communities as we continue to degrade our modern ecosystems.”

Image 2 (below): This illustration depicts the food web for ecological groups in the late Cretaceous Period as reported in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Each ecological group includes a set of species that share the same set of potential predators and prey. Silhouettes show iconic members of each group. Arrows show who eats whom. Credit: Courtesy of Jonathan Mitchell, Peter Roopnarine and Kenneth Angielczyk

Jedidiah Becker for redOrbit.com — Your Universe Online

When it comes to providing an objective account of the world around us, the human brain can be a notoriously inaccurate and biased reporter. Scholarly literature in the fields of psychology and neuroscience are full of studies that demonstrate how the brain ‘fudges’ the picture of reality with which it presents our conscious mind, often favoring a useful or convenient interpretation of our surroundings over a strictly accurate one. And as a number of studies have shown in recent years, our perception of our environment is never more distorted than when we find ourselves in emotionally intense situations.

In the results of a groundbreaking study recently published in the journal Current Biology, two psychologists have shown that a sense of fear and impending danger can actually alter our perception of space and distance when we are being approached by threatening objects. Psychology researcher Dr. Matthew Longo of Birbeck University of London recently talked with redOrbit about he and his colleague´s research into the effects of fear on spatial perception.

Read the original article “How Spatial Perception Is Influenced By Fear” first.

Interview:

RO: Professor Longo, what attracted you and your colleague Dr. Lourenco to this research topic — the ability of fear to affect our spatial perception?

Longo: Stella Lourenco and I started collaborating when we were both doctoral students at the University of Chicago, using some seed funding from our department to start a project investigating how we perceive the ‘near space’ immediately surrounding the body differently from the space farther away. After we both graduated, we continued this research, first in Stella’s lab at Emory University, and now as well in my lab at Birkbeck.

Initially, we focused on the role of near space in guiding action. Our early results showed that altering people’s ability to act produced flexible alterations of how much space around the body the brain codes as ‘near.’ For example, we showed that using a tool expands the size of near space, while putting heavy weights on the arms causes it to contract. More recently, we’ve became interested in the idea that near space might be involved in a quite different function, namely protecting the body against potentially threatening objects. Specifically, we speculated that near space might be involved in feelings of claustrophobia in constrained spaces. We reasoned that if stimuli in near space were coded as potentially threatening, that people with a larger near space would feel more anxious in any given enclosed environment since more things would impinge on their near space. Indeed, we found that people with a larger near space around their body, measured using the methods we developed in our earlier research, reported more claustrophobic fear on a standard questionnaire than people with a smaller near space.

Our recent study emerged from that research. We were interested in how stimuli which many people find intrinsically threatening — like snakes or spiders — alter our perception. We used a phenomenon called ‘looming’ in which objects on a direct collision course with an observer produce a specific pattern of expansion on the retina. Traditionally, looming has been considered a purely optical cue specifying the time until objects will collide with an observer. In contrast to that view, we showed that people underestimate the time-to-collision of threatening stimuli (snakes and spiders) compared to less threatening stimuli (butterflies and rabbits). Further, this bias is larger in people who report more fear of snakes and spiders.

RO: Your colleague Professor Lourenco mentioned that our tendency to underestimate collision time when faced with a potentially threatening object probably had some clear survival advantages for our early ancestors. As anyone even casually interested in science knows, evolution and natural selection have been some of the most powerful tools in the advancement of the biological sciences in the last hundred years — from genetics, biochemistry and cell biology to ecology and physiology. However, we don’t typically hear as much about the role of evolutionary theory in the field of psychology. In your estimation, how important is evolution in the study of modern psychology?

Longo: Discussion of evolution is perhaps less conspicuous in many areas of psychology than in other areas of the biological sciences, but forms the essential background against which almost all research in psychology is conducted. One of the central questions of psychology over the past century has been what changes in the evolution of human cognition led to the tremendous complexity and sophistication of human social organization, which appeared unprecedented elsewhere in the animal kingdom. This remains a major topic of research, with proposed answers including such things as language, the opposable thumb, and (more recently) ‘theory of mind.’ The past two decades have seen increasing prominence of more explicit discussion of evolutionary issues in psychology, notably in the fields of comparative psychology and what´s become known as evolutionary psychology.

The study of looming visual stimuli is a good example of the importance of evolutionary considerations in shaping psychological research. Research on looming emerged from the tradition of ‘ecological optics’ developed by Professor James Gibson of Cornell University in the 1960s. Gibson argued forcefully that perception could only be understood by considering how animals actually use their senses in their actual environments. Thus, rather than present his participants with abstract shapes or other meaningless stimuli, Gibson gave detailed consideration to what cues in complex sensory environments provided information about aspects of the world critical for an organism´s survival.

Gibson’s work on looming was motivated by his analysis of the optics of objects on a collision course with an observer. He and his colleagues showed that monkeys made repeated defensive responses when shown a shadow on a projection screen which increased in size in a specific pattern mimicking what happens to light projected on the eyes when an object moves directly towards us. Subsequent research showed similar responses in human infants and even in human adults whose attention was distracted.

In parallel, research in neurophysiology documented nerve cells in the eyes of species such as mice and wasps which appear specialized for detecting looming visual stimuli. Thus, converging evidence from studies of animal behavior and from physiology suggested that the nervous systems of a wide range of animals have been shaped by evolution to rapidly detect and respond to rapidly approaching stimuli. Our recent findings are consistent with this interpretation, but show further that perception of looming stimuli is also modulated by our emotional reactions to the specific type of stimulus which is approaching.

RO: The study mentions that we don’t yet understand exactly how fear is affecting our spatial perception. You explained that it may be causing the brain to perceive an approaching danger as moving faster than it actually is, or that it may simply be causing the individual to experience an enlargement of their personal sphere — their ‘safety zone,’ if you will. Have you got any professional ‘hunches’ about which of these two mechanisms it might be, and what would an experiment to test this look like?

Longo: I suspect that both types of explanation may be true to some extent. For example, there is evidence that stressful situations can cause time to seem to slow down, which could lead to underestimation of when an object would collide with us. On the other hand, there is also evidence from neurophysiological studies suggesting that rapidly approaching objects can expand the size of the ‘near space’ immediately surrounding the body. There are well established methods in the literature for measuring both the speed of the mental ‘clock’ and the extent of near space. We are currently planning experiments using these methods to try to assess these two interpretations.

RO: You and Professor Lourenco mentioned that you see your research as having implications for how we understand clinical phobias. Could you elaborate a bit on this?

Longo: Our research, both on claustrophobic fear and on fear of snakes and spiders, has measured individual differences in fear using an unselected sample of the general population, rather than people with clinical-level phobias. Of course, these are things that almost all of us experience some level of anxiety about, though to different degrees. What our results show is that the person-to-person differences in how intensely we experience these fears relate to the magnitude of the perceptual distortions we measure: People who report more fear show larger perceptual effects. Our suspicion is that the perceptual biases we have described would be even larger in people with clinical phobias.

An important question about clinical phobias is whether they arise from the top-down as a result of mistaken beliefs or attitudes about the feared object, or from the bottom-up as a result of biases in low-level aspects of perception. By showing that person-to-person differences in fear relate systematically to differences in basic aspects of vision, our results provide some support for the ‘bottom-up’ perspective, suggesting that pathological fears might reflect differences in the basic organization of sensory processing. Of course, this interpretation remains speculative, but it could have important implications for understanding where phobias come from and how they might be effectively treated.

RO: In recent years, researchers like the neuroscientist David Eagleman have been drawing popular attention to just how much of our brain’s activity is completely outside of our conscious control as well as to the fact that our brains often present us with an ‘edited’ picture of reality that is not always objective or entirely accurate. Your specialty field of research focuses on how the brain creates and maintains distorted “body representations.” Could you tell us a bit more about this as well as where this recent study fits into your broader research interests?

Longo: My research has focused on understanding how the brain constructs representations of what our body is like and how these representations shape how we perceive the world. There is no mystery why the brain has distorted representations of the body at some level. Consider touch: it is obvious that some parts of the body have exquisite tactile sensitivity (such as the fingertips and lips), while other parts have much poorer sensitivity (such as the back).

It has long been known that maps in the brain which process tactile information devote many more resources to highly sensitive than to less sensitive skin regions. Every introductory psychology textbook shows a picture of the little man whose body is in the proportions of tactile maps with enormous hands and lips, commonly known as the ‘Penfield homunculus‘ (after the eminent Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield who described this map in his patients). So it’s not surprising that there are distorted representations of the body underlying basic processing of touch, as it is clearly advantageous to have a few body parts with exquisite sensitivity rather than having homogenously mediocre sensitivity all over the body.

What has been surprising in my recent research is that these distortions appear to be preserved (though in reduced form) in higher-level representations of the body underlying more complex aspects of perception. For example, when we cover up a participant’s hand and ask them to indicate where they perceive the tip and knuckle of each finger as being, they place the knuckles much too far apart, as if the hand were represented as much wider and fatter than it actually is. Similarly, people overestimate how far apart two points touching the skin are when they are oriented across the width of the hand, compared to when they are oriented along the length of the hand.

Our recent research on looming emerges from a longstanding collaboration with Stella Lourenco, who I mentioned earlier. The main focus of our research has been on understanding how the brain represents the space immediately surrounding the body differently from the space farther away. As I described previously, our initial research on this issue was centered on how the body shapes space perception, both by comparing people with longer and shorter arms or by manipulating the body’s ability to act, such as with tool use or putting heavy weights on the arms. We have gradually become increasingly interested, though, in how emotion affects our perception of space, and vice versa, which was the focus of our present study on looming.

RO: Judging from your list of publications, you’ve been a very busy researcher. Do you already have your eyes on your next research project, and would you care to give us a sneak peek?

Longo: As I described before, our recent work on space perception has shown intimate links between space perception and emotions, such as fear. One of the things I’m most excited about is extending this line of research to understand the relationship between emotion and how we represent our body.

One of the key aspects of clinical conditions such as body dysmorphia and some eating disorders is the abnormal emotions and attitudes that patients have towards their own body. I suspect that the various distortions of body representations that I’ve described may have implications for understanding emotional attitudes about the body and the factors that might alter them. This line of research remains at an early stage, but I’m optimistic that it will provide important insights into the relation between emotion and body representation.

RO: Dr. Longo, thanks very much for taking the time have a chat with us. On behalf of the redOrbit team and our readership, we wish you the best of luck on your future research and look forward to reading about your next research project.

Biography

Matthew Longo is a Lecturer in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck, University of London where he directs the Body Representation Laboratory. He received his B.A. in Cognitive Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 2000 before completing his PhD in Psychology at the University of Chicago in 2006. After his PhD he moved to London to conduct Postdoctoral Research at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. He has been at Birkbeck since 2010.

His research investigates how the brain constructs representations of the body and how these affect how we perceive the world around us. By combining a range of methods from cognitive neuroscience and perceptual psychology, he has shown that the brain maintains a diverse set of models of the body which have pervasive influences on perceptual abilities including the perception of touch, proprioception, pain, and visual space perception. He is an author of more than 50 scientific papers. His research has been supported by awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Royal Society of London.

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Two different competing climatic effects — increasing temperatures and changes in atmospheric water transport — will determine how much (or how little) rainfall the South Pacific islands will receive in the future, claims a new study published in Sunday’s online issue of the journal Nature Climate Change.

According to the study, which was written by Matthew Widlansky and Axel Timmermann of the International Pacific Research Center and the University of Hawaii at Manoa and an international team of colleagues, those two phenomenons occasionally counteract each other, meaning that future rainfall projections will be extremely difficult to predict.

The island nations in the South Pacific rely upon the 8,000km long South Pacific Convergence Zone (SPCZ), the biggest rainband in the Southern Hemisphere, for the bulk of their precipitation, the researchers said. Any changes that occur in that cloud and precipitation formation would have “severe consequences” for the “vulnerable island nations already having to adapt to accelerating sea level rise.”

However, researchers know little about how the SPCZ will react to climate change created as a result of increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

The reason for that, according to Widlansky, a postdoctoral fellow at the International Pacific Research Center, is that many existing climate models are “notoriously poor” when it comes to simulating the band.

In order to try and make South Pacific climate simulations more accurate, he and his colleagues removed some deviations in observed sea surface temperature. In doing so, they were able to pinpoint a pair of competing climatic mechanisms which impacted precipitation trends in the region.

“We have known for some time that rising tropical temperatures will lead to more water vapor in the atmosphere,” Timmermann, the professor of oceanography at University of Hawaii at Manoa, explained. “Abundant moisture tends to bring about heavier rainfall in regions of converging winds such as the SPCZ.”

“Nearly all climate change model simulations, however, suggest the equatorial Pacific will warm faster than the SPCZ region. This uneven warming is likely to pull the rainband away from its normal position, causing drying in the Southwest Pacific and more equatorial rainfall,” he added.

The two competing mechanisms are dubbed the “wet gets wetter” and the “warmest gets wetter” climate change mechanisms, respectively, the scientists said, and they are said to be the cause of the uncertainty in SPCZ rainfall predictions.

“The scientists found that depending upon the degree of tropical warming expected this century, one or the other mechanism is more likely to win out,” the university said. “With moderate warming, weaker sea surface temperature gradients are likely to shift the rainband towards the equator, potentially causing drying during summer for most Southwest Pacific island nations. For much higher warming possible by the end of this century, the net effect of the opposing mechanisms is likely a shift towards more rainfall for the South Pacific islands.”

“To be more definite in our projections, however, we need more extensive observations in the South Pacific of how clouds and rainfall form and how they respond to such climate phenomena as El Niño,” Timmerman added. “Before we have more confidence in our calculations of the delicate balance between the two climate change mechanisms, we need to be able to simulate cloud formations more realistically.”

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

A magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck the Canadian province of British Columbia late Saturday night, leading to short-lived tsunami warnings and mass evacuations as far away as Hawaii, according to various media reports.

The earthquake was centered in the Queen Charlotte Islands area (also known as Haida Gwaii) of British Columbia, US Geological Survey (USGS) officials told Mark Thiessen and Oskar Garcia of the Associated Press (AP), and was followed by a 5.8-magnitiude aftershock shortly thereafter. There were no immediate reports of damage, although the seismic event was felt as far away as southeastern Alaska.

“Residents near the center of the quake said the violent jolting lasted for up to a minute, but no injuries or major damage had been reported,” the Canadian Press confirmed early Sunday morning. One resident in the vicinity told the news agency that the quake lasted approximately 40 seconds, and Simon Fraser University earth scientists Brent Ward called it the second largest to hit Canada since 1949.

The earthquake, which CBC News reported hit at approximately 8pm PT, caused at least three tsunami waves spotted off the coast of the province, and led to evacuations and tsunami warnings in Haida Gwaii and Port Edward, near Prince Rupert. The Canadian Press also reports that similar warnings had been issued in Alaska and Hawaii.

Shortly before 6am ET Sunday morning, NBC News confirmed that Hawaii had been hit by a tsunami, and that at least 100,000 people had been evacuated and directed to higher elevations. According to their reports, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said that the first wave was “three feet high and less forceful than expected. Some forecasts had predicted a wave of up to six feet high.”

“The tsunami hit with little warning and an alert, issued at short notice due to initial confusion among scientists about the quake’s undersea epicenter, caused massive traffic congestion as motorists made a mass exodus from low-lying areas,” NBC News reported.

Tsunami waves were spotted in other areas as well, according to the CBC.

“Dennis Sinnott of the Canadian Institute of Ocean Science said a 69-centimeterre wave was recorded off Langara Island on the northeast tip of Haida Gwaii, formerly called the Queen Charlotte Islands,” they said. “Another 55-centimeter wave hit Winter Harbour on the northeast coast of Vancouver Island, while a 12-centimeter wave was recorded in Tofino, on Vancouver Island’s west coast.”

Additional tsunami waves were believed possible in Hawaii. However, in southern Alaska and British Columbia, the warning was downgraded to an advisory shortly after 5am ET Sunday morning, Thiessen and Garcia said. They also noted that new advisories had been issued for parts of northern California and southern Oregon.

Ward told the Canadian Press that he was not surprised that the tsunami warning was shortlived in most areas, adding that tsunamis are not typically triggered by strike-slip movements along faults. He said that “a vertical movement of the sea floor” is required to displace water and create the massive waves. “Because it’s sliding across each other” in a strike-slip movement, “you’re not generally moving the water,” he added.

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online
Can’t remember what you dreamt about last night? Never fear, because a team of Japanese researchers has reportedly discovered a way to determine what thoughts are going through a person’s mind about while they sleep.
Yukiyasu Kamitani, a member of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, and colleagues recruited three male volunteers and monitored them while they slept, using electroencephalography to record their brain waves and studying the results in search of “changes in activity which could be related to the content of their dreams,” explained Telegraph Science Correspondent Nick Collins.
When the researchers detected changes in the brain waves of the subjects — a sign that they had started dreaming — they woke up the subject and asked him what he had been dreaming about. The subject was then allowed to return to sleep. The process was repeated between seven to 10 times per day, in three-hour blocks, for each participant, Mo Costandi of Nature added.
The researchers compiled approximately 200 dream-related reports from their volunteers, he added.
“Researchers reported that while some of the dreams were out of the ordinary — for example a discussion with a famous actor — most involved more mundane experiences from everyday life,” Collins said. “From the dream accounts they picked out 20 of the most commonly occurring themes, such as ‘car’, ‘man’, ‘woman’ and ‘computer’, and gathered pictures which represented each category.”
“The participants were then asked to view the images while their brains were scanned a second time,” he added. “By comparing the second set of brain activity data with the recordings made just before the volunteers had been woken up, the researchers were able to identify distinctive patterns in three key brain regions which help us process what our eyes see. They also found that activity in a number of other brain regions with more specialized roles in visual processing, for example in helping us recognize objects, varied depending on the content of the dreams.”
Those three brain areas — V1, V2, and V3 — are involved in the primary stages of visual processing, Costandi explained. They encode contrast, edge orientation, and other essential features of visual scenes.
Four years ago, Kamitani and his associates reported that they had figured out a way to decode the brain activity linked to the earliest stages of visual processing, and used that information to recreate images that they then showed to volunteers, the Nature writer said. Now, they’ve built upon those findings and adapted them to dreams.
Their work was presented earlier this month at the Society for Neuroscience‘s annual meeting, held this year in New Orleans.
“We built a model to predict whether each category of content was present in the dreams,” Kamitani told Costandi. “By analyzing the brain activity during the nine seconds before we woke the subjects, we could predict whether a man is in the dream or not, for instance, with an accuracy of 75-80%.”
“This is an interesting and exciting piece of work. It suggests that dreaming involves some of the same higher level visual brain areas that are involved in visual imagery,” added University of California, Berkeley, neuroscientist Jack Gallant, who was not involved in the study. “It also seems to suggest that our recall of dreams is based on short-term memory, because dream decoding was most accurate in the tens of seconds before waking.” he adds.

Read my exclusive interview with Dr. Matthew Longo about his research.

Jedidiah Becker for redOrbit.com — Your Universe Online

One of the many mind-bending lessons that neuroscience has taught us in recent years is that our brain often ℠fudges´ the picture of reality that it gives us. For a very simple at-home demonstration of this cognitive trickery, stand in front of a mirror and alternate back and forth between looking at your left eye, then your right eye. No matter how hard you try, you won´t be able to see your eyes actually moving.

And it gets even weirder: Not only can you not see your eyes move, but there doesn´t appear to be any gap in your perception during the time it takes for your eyes to change their focus from point A (your left eye) to point B (your right eye). One second you´re staring at your left eye and the next moment at your left, and that half second in between seems to simply vanish.

What has essentially happened is that your brain has taken a rather complex little scene and ℠edited´ it in order to present you with a more simplified picture of reality. In essence, your brain is not presenting you with the ℠whole truth´ but rather with a version of it that is somehow more useful or easier to manage. And modern neuroscience and psychology continue to expose more and more of the human brain´s little white lies.

In the results of a recent study published in the journal Current Biology, two psychologists have shown that a sense of fear and impending danger can actually change our spatial perception of an approaching object.

In general, the human brain is amazingly accurate in its ability to estimate the distance of approaching objects and predict the moment of impact with them. That is, amazingly accurate so long as that approaching object does not appear to pose a threat.

Psychologists Stella Lourenco of Emory University’s Department of Psychology and Matthew Longo of Birbeck University of London’s Department of Psychological Sciences teamed up to devise an experiment that would test the effect of fear on a person´s ability to accurately predict the moment of impact with approaching objects.

Participants in the study were placed in front of a computer screen and shown images of different objects that expanded in size over a period of one second before they disappeared. The images increased in size in order to simulate a phenomenon known as “looming,” an optical pattern that the brain uses to predict the amount of time until a collision with an approaching object. Study participants were asked to press a button to predict the moment of impact with each of the objects on the screen.

And the experiment had one more twist: Some of the images displayed on the screen were harmless objects such as butterflies or rabbits, while other images were of ℠threatening´ creatures like snakes and spiders.

The results showed that the individuals consistently underestimated the collision time for threatening images — that is, people who were afraid of snakes or spiders repeatedly believed that they would come into contact with those objects sooner than with non-threatening objects, even when both types of images were “looming” at the same speed.

The team´s results call into question the traditional understanding of “looming” as being a mere optical phenomenon that is more or less detached from other brain processes.

“We´re showing that what the object is affects how we perceive looming. If we´re afraid of something, we perceive it as making contact sooner,” explained Longo.

At the crux of the study, Lourenco highlighted, is the idea that perception and emotion may be more entangled in the human mind than we currently understand.

“Fear can alter even basic aspects of how we perceive the world around us,” said Lourenco.

What´s more, says Lourenco, is that they were able to gauge how much a participant would underestimate the collision time with an object based how afraid they were of it: “The more fearful someone reported feeling of spiders, for example, the more they underestimated time-to-collision for a looming spider.”

Viewed from an evolutionary perspective, it´s easy to see how this kind of automatic brain response to dangerous objects could have offered a survival advantage to our early ancestors living in the wild. As Lourenco noted: “If an [approaching] object is dangerous, it´s better to swerve a half-second too soon than a half-second too late.” When a primitive man on the Sahara plains looked up in time to see a lion barreling towards him, it wasn´t necessarily a bad thing for his brain to ℠trick´ him into believing that the approaching danger was a bit more imminent than it really was.

What the researchers do not yet understand is the exact mechanism behind this underestimation of collision time with dangerous objects. For instance, it could be that the fear of a dangerous object causes the brain to perceive the object as moving faster than it actually is. On the other hand, it could also be that a sense of fear causes the threatened individual to experience an enlargement of their personal space, or the sphere in which they feel safe.

“We´d like to distinguish between these two possibilities in future research,” says Lourenco. “Doing so will allow us to shed insight on the mechanics of basic aspects of spatial perception and the mechanisms underlying particular phobias.”

The team believes that the results of their study will have a number of implications for the research and understanding of clinical phobias.

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports — Your Universe Online

The shark with the most powerful bite isn’t the Great White or the Hammerhead, scientists have discovered — rather, it is the Bull shark that bites with the most force relative to its size, according to a new study.

Marine biologists, including Philip Motta and Maria Habegger of the University of South Florida (USF), measured the bite strength from 13 different shark species, according to Dan Vergano of USA Today.

They discovered that a nine-foot-long Bull shark (Carcharhinus leucas) had a bite force of 478 pounds, while a Great White of similar size had a bite force of only 360 pounds.

“An 18-foot-long great white will still have a more powerful bite than an 11-foot bull shark, just by virtue of its size. But pound-for-pound, a bull shark of the same size would have a stronger bite,” Motta told Vergano on Friday. “It’s all about the width of the jaws, and bull sharks have very wide heads. We’ve seen sea turtles bitten in half, and that takes quite a lot of force.”

“We expect strong bite force values in the larger sharks that occupy top positions in the food chain, for example, the great hammerhead, great white shark, tigers and bull sharks,” Habegger added in an interview with BBC Nature Editor Matt Walker. “[But] sometimes size is misleading. Although larger size sharks will exert higher values of bite force, the relative value of bite force is what matters, pound per pound, how strong is the bite?”

Habegger, Motta, and colleagues from the U.S. and Germany tested a variety of sharks and shark-like creatures, including the one-meter-long ratfish and the Great White, Walker explained.

They dissected specimens of the 13 creatures studied to analyze their jaws and jaw muscles, then calculated the amount of force that those muscles put forth when the jaws of each creature closed. The effect that the size of each shark’s body had on bite strength was then mathematically removed from the equation, in order to ensure a level playing field for the smaller specimens, he added.

So why do Bull sharks possess such ferocious jaw strength? The researchers admit they aren’t sure.

“From our knowledge there is no need of such massive values to break fish skin or even to puncture bone,” Habegger, a doctoral student at USF, said.

“One idea is that this ability gives young bull sharks an advantage over other competing species; allowing them to eat more diverse prey earlier in their lives,” Walker added. “But overall, bull sharks, which the research shows can bite with a force of almost 6,000N at the back of the jaw and more than 2,000N at the front, seem to have bites that are too powerful.”

Their findings have been published in the journal Zoology.

April Flowers for redOrbit.com — Your Universe Online
It’s probably a safe bet that you have never been in a big electronics retailer like Best Buy or Comp USA and seen a sign boasting the percentage of recycled electronic components that a laptop or smart TV uses. This suits the electronics industry, as many of the leading companies make their money selling more and more new components.
A new technology from Oxford University, however, may just change this paradigm forever.
“It is a technology that is going to fundamentally change the way we build computers,” says Dr. Mark Gostock, a technology transfer manager at the University of Oxford’s ISIS Innovation. “And there are going to be a lot of people who make a whole lot of money from the way we do it now who aren’t going to be happy when they hear what we have got.”
“The PCB [printed circuit board] industry in particular has already made a big investment in manufacturing infrastructure and they are not going to want to change,” said Chris Stevens, engineering lecturer and successful academic-entrepreneur.
The team started with the technology behind the Pentagon’s cloaking device and came up with a new technology to replace the solder, pins and wiring from conventional computers with LEGO-like blocks of silicon. The blocks are stuck to a Velcro-like metamaterial board capable of wirelessly transmitting or conducting both data and power. This is science fiction transformed into reality, with wallpaper that can connect the components of your entertainment system and computers designed as wristbands.
“We saw the potential first of this technology because most people have been looking at metamaterials from a physics perspective, in terms of cloaking devices or optics, and other potential applications like this use of radio frequencies were seen to be niche, with little research excitement,” says Stevens in a statement.
Stevens tried to convince Microsoft to use the metamaterial for the new Surface tablet, saying that “you could put your mobile on the screen of the tablet and all the apps on the phone would seamlessly appear on the larger screen.” Microsoft took a pass because the technology is too unproven.
The copper-wire and balsa-wood test beds look more like something created during WWI by British scientists, making it easy to miss the potential of the technology if you are watching the demonstration videos. Watching, it is difficult to imagine this is the future of computing.
However, as you watch the LEDs light up as they are waved over the wire and data from a USB stick is flashed up on a screen with only a simple tap of the stick on the metaboard, the enormous potential becomes apparent.
“Right now we can achieve 3.5 gigabit-per-second data transfer rate and hundreds of watts of power — enough to recharge any number of mobile devices without loss of efficiency — but the circuits have the capacity for increased performance and the limits aren’t really known,” says Stevens.
The team embedded copper coils in a conductive layer of material to form a sealed circuit board.
Stevens says, “You can then produce an individual chip that has no legs, no pins and can in no way be damaged and which is simply stuck — even glued — on to the metaboard.”
The result is that instead of “throwing on the tip PCBs which could last for 25 years if it weren’t for the six-months-to-a-year built-in obsolescence embedded in the product life cycle,” these metamaterial chips can be peeled off and reused several times. For example, it could be moved into a lower-end computer, then again into a smart TV, and perhaps a washing machine at the end of its lifetime.
Stevens admits, however, that although he’s done the theoretical work and is satisfied with his progress, it is going to take some hard work to convince people of the potential of his product until he finishes building a carbon demo model, which depends on finding funding.
“If Samsung funded it, they could do all the hard work of silicon integration (which is what they know about) within a year. If I have to fund it out of academic research grants it could take three to four years.”
Darren Cadman, research coordinator at the Innovative Electronics Manufacturing Centre at Loughborough University, says that Stevens’ work “displays significant potential to alter the current design, manufacture and use of electronic circuits in a wide number of applications.”
“By removing solder it offers a novel solution to the problems of reliability. The removal of the need for cables and wires is obviously a huge benefit with the increasing costs of copper and the multitude of electronic devices found in every home. Additionally the simple and cost-effective manufacture of the circuits means they have an excellent chance of finding widespread adoption and use,” Cadman says.
Cadman agrees with Stevens that further investment, probably corporate in nature, will be necessary to ensure the product is robust enough — in terms of data rates, accuracy of data, range and proximity of devices – for the intended applications.
Warren East, chief executive of Cambridge-based ARM, which designs the architecture used in the chips powering almost every mobile phone in the world, agrees that this technology has enormous potential. East warns, however, “sometimes being truly groundbreaking is just not enough”.
“We have had a number of on-going discussions with Chris about a range of different technologies he has been working on to improve the reliability of packaging materials,” East says, and in particular “the use of such conductive materials”.
“After all, while we can do amazing things with chips now, it doesn’t make much sense making chips smaller and smaller if the connections using wires and pins are actually larger than the chips themselves and also unreliable.”
A lot of ideas in research laboratories appear to be groundbreaking, but the real challenge is to get them from the laboratory to economic production, cautions Cadman. Hundreds of good ideas die at the proof-of-concept stage for every one that makes it to commercial reality. This is because the need to produce chips in quantities of billions reliably and economically is a very high hurdle to jump.
Sometimes, Cadman adds, it is simply inertia that holds an idea back for a time. An example of this is 3D transistors, which have recently launched with a great deal of fanfare although the technology has been around for at least 10 years.
“Similarly, people in the industry should be interested in recycling”, East says, but at the moment “there are the commercial disincentives not to do so”. Silicon companies make their money by supplying chips and “they want to supply more of them. If a quarter were recycled then it would mean less profit.”
The goal of truly flexible electronics, for example where the whole computer is flexible and can be worn like a wristwatch, is only possible if all physical connections can be done away with and everything can be made wireless. East believes that the people who are currently making money will not want to be displaced, which will make it harder to bring this technology to the public.
For Cadman, this technology “is the sort of clever creative technology that Britain is so good at, and serves as an example of the strength of work in electronics design and electronics manufacturing currently going on in the UK.”
Stevens is aware, however, that the success of this technology depends on manufacturers desire to improve recycling, and the cost of the initial manufacturing.
“The problem is that nobody is making anything in the UK anymore. If we had our own research institute just down the road where I could pop in for tea then I believe the road ahead would be different.”
Gostock sees this as a case of Oxford University versus the rest of the world once again. Some of the biggest names in electronics and chemicals from the USA, Korea, and India have been showing interest in the metamaterial technology, so Oxford just might win again.

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

A research team from Oxford University‘s Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit has found a more accurate benchmark for dating materials, especially for older objects, from a series of radiocarbon measurements from Japan’s Lake Suigetsu.

As far back as 1993, researchers realized sediment cores from Lake Suigetsu would be useful for radiocarbon dating. However, the initial efforts encountered technical problems.

The current team extracted cores of preserved layers of sediment from where they had lain on the bottom of Lake Suigetsu for tens of thousands of years. The cores contained organic material such as tree leaf and twig fossils.

The findings of this study, published in Science, are significant because they provide a more precise way to determine the radiocarbon ages of organic material for the entire 11,000 — 53,000-year time range. Using this process, for example, archaeologists should now be able to pinpoint the timing of the extinction of Neanderthals or the spread of modern humans into Europe with much more accuracy.

“The new results offer an important refinement of the atmospheric radiocarbon record and place the radiocarbon timescale on a firmer foundation,” said Jesse Smith, Senior Editor at Science.

Professor Christopher Ramsey of the Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, along with his colleagues, worked with scientists from two other radiocarbon laboratories — NERC in Scotland and in Groningen, the Netherlands — on the radiocarbon record from Lake Suigetsu as part of a large, international team studying the cores for clues about past climate and environmental change.

Radiocarbon, or C-14, is produced in the upper atmosphere continuously and is incorporated into all living organisms. The radioactive isotope of carbon decays at a known rate when the organisms die. By measuring the radiocarbon levels remaining in samples of ancient organic materials, scientists can work out how old things are. One element that complicates this calculation is the variability of the amount of environmental radiocarbon from year to year and location to location.

The radiocarbon in leaf fossils, such as those found in Lake Suigetsu, comes directly from the atmosphere. This means the processes that can slightly change the levels found in marine sediments or cave formations do not affect it. Previous to this study, the most important radiocarbon dating records came from such marine sediments or cave formations, which needed corrections. The samples from Lake Suigetsu provide a more complete, direct record from the atmosphere without the need for correction.

The cores display layers of light diatoms and darker sediments and in the sediment record for each year, making them unique and giving scientists the means of counting back the years. These counts are then compared to over 800 radiocarbon dates from the preserved fossil leaves. Tree rings provide the only other direct record of atmospheric carbon, but they only go back 12,593 years. The new record from Lake Suigetsu extends backwards 52,800 years, dramatically increasing the direct radiocarbon record by more than 40,000 years.

“In most cases the radiocarbon levels deduced from marine and other records have not been too far wrong. However, having a truly terrestrial record gives us better resolution and confidence in radiocarbon dating,’ said Professor Ramsey in a press release. “It also allows us to look at the differences between the atmosphere and oceans, and study the implications for our understanding of the marine environment as part of the global carbon cycle.”

The team measured radiocarbon from terrestrial plant fragments spaced throughout the core to construct a radiocarbon record. To place the radiocarbon measurements in time, they also counted the dark and light layers throughout the glacial period. They used microscopes and a method called X-ray fluorescence that identifies chemical changes along the core because many of the layers were too fine to be distinguished by the naked eye.

Some part of the record must be “anchored” in time by assigning some part of it an absolute age. The team managed this by matching the first 12,200 years of their record with the tree ring data, a well-established record that begins in the present. They also used other records from the same period and found that they generally aligned.

“Because of the unique combination of a complete radiocarbon record and terrestrial paleo-climate data, Suigetsu can be a benchmark against which other records can be compared,” said Professor Takeshi Nakagawa of Newcastle University.

“From a palaeoclimate perspective, this radiocarbon dataset will also allow very high precision direct correlation between Suigetsu and other terrestrial climate records,” said Nakagawa in a press release. “This allows us to see how changes in climate in different parts of the world relate to one another — and particularly where there are leads and lags. Information like this is very useful for studying climate mechanisms.”

“This record will not result in major revisions of dates. But, for example in prehistoric archaeology, there will be small shifts in chronology in the order of hundreds of years,” said Professor Ramsey. “Such changes can be very significant when you are trying to examine human responses to climate that are often dated by other methods, such as through layer counting from the Greenland ice cores. For the first time we have a more accurate calibrated time-scale, which will allow us to answer questions in archaeology that we have not had the resolution to address before.”

To determine the age of objects based on their radiocarbon measurements, scientists generally use a composite record called IntCal. IntCal uses marine records, stalagmites and stalactites, tree rings and multiple other records. The team expects the Suigetsu data will be incorporated into the latest version of IntCal, due to be released in the next few months.

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com — Your Universe Online

In the midst of an earthquake, buildings sway back and forth, terrain pops and locks, and the ground seems to shuffle underfoot.

Acoustic scientists have shown in a new study that the Earth´s surface and atmosphere act as a giant loudspeaker. This “loudspeaker” soundtracks these geologic raves in both the audible range of hearing and in infrasound, or frequencies below the range human hearing can detect.

According to the computer modeling, sound recordings and seismic data used in the study, an earthquake “pumps” the surface and the atmosphere above it, sending sound waves radiating from the epicenter.

“It’s basically like a loudspeaker,” said Stephen Arrowsmith, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Santa Fe, N.M., who will present his team’s findings at the 164th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) next week. “In much the same way that a subwoofer vibrates air to create deep and thunderous base notes, earthquakes pump and vibrate the atmosphere producing sounds below the threshold of human hearing.”

The infrasound made by an earthquake can provide detailed information about the event, according to the researchers. In particular, it can reveal the amount of shaking that is occurring directly above the source of the quake. Accurate analysis of these sound waves could provide information that is typically gathered using an array of seismometers. This could make infrasound detection a key tool for assessing the damage and studying the mechanism behind a seismic event.

In creating their computer models, the acoustics team assumed the surface and atmosphere would pump like a piston and, during a seismic event, act in the same way as a loudspeaker or subwoofer. Subwoofer technology was first introduced in the 1960s as a way to convey audio signals in the 20 to 200 Hz range, and it uses a small-volume box to generate the desired sound and pressure levels.

To test this model, the research team collected acoustic and seismic data during a 4.6-magnitude earthquake that occurred on January 3, 2011 near Circleville, Utah. The data was recorded at the University of Utah that maintains seismograph stations equipped with infrasound recording devices.

After analyzing the data, they found it closely matched the results produced by their loudspeaker-based computer models.

“This was very exciting because it is the first such clear agreement in infrasound predictions from an earthquake,” said Arrowsmith in a statement. “Predicting infrasound is complex because winds can distort the signal and our results also suggest we are getting better at correcting for wind effects.”

The researchers were able to demonstrate the significance of “pumping” the ground and how it generates infrasound during a seismic event.

Infrasound is typically described as sound with a frequency less than 20 Hz, the lowest frequency for human hearing. Other natural events can produce infrasound, including avalanches, lightning, and waterfalls. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), infrasonic arrays can be used to detect deadly avalanches in the Rocky Mountains as they happen and tornadoes as they form in the upper atmosphere before they touch down.

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Researchers from University of Delaware are in the midst of a multiyear study with Delaware State University researchers to better understand the behavior and migration patterns of sand tiger sharks. In the latest phase of the study, an underwater robot is being unleashed to hunt down and follow these seemingly placid predators.

The Oceanographic Telemetry Identification Sensor (OTIS) is a remote-controlled underwater device that looks very much like a yellow torpedo. Normally used for testing water conditions, the researchers have outfitted OTIS with acoustic receivers that can recognize signals given off by transmitters. OTIS will track sharks that have been previously tagged with these transmitters as they travel through their coastal habitat.

Matthew Oliver, assistant professor of oceanography in UD´s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, said OTIS has, “in the past week“¦detected multiple sand tiger sharks off the coast of Maryland that were tagged over the past several years.”

“This is the first time that a glider has found tagged sharks and reported their location in real time,” he said in a news release, reported by Teresa Messmore, a Communications Specialist for UD´s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment.

The technology implemented allows the course of OTIS to be changed, enabling it to follow the sharks and test the water around them. Using OTIS to track these sharks will allow scientists to follow where the sharks are going more efficiently than using conventional tracking methods.

OTIS will be tracking sharks with three different types of tags.

One is an acoustic transmitter that “pings” receivers while passing by a set of 70 devices situated around Delaware Bay. DSU´s Dewayne Fox maintains these receivers, and has tagged more than 500 sharks since 2006.

Another tracking mechanism implemented is the pop-off satellite archival tag. The team is using 34 of these tags, which store data on the sharks´ journeys for up to a year then automatically release from the animal to dispatch a location signal for retrieval.

A third type of tag, also the newest, is called a VEMCO mobile transceiver (VMT). This tag is larger than the others, but also transmits and receives information to communicate its location and listen for the pings of other marine animals outfitted with acoustic tags.

The VMT tag “will tell us not only where it is, but who it´s with,” said Oliver. “It´s like a social network for sharks.”

Oliver, Fox and students from both universities, spent the summer catching sand tiger sharks, carefully pulling them into stretchers alongside their boat, and inserted transmitters through a quick surgery.

Sand tiger sharks are the largest commonly occurring shark in Delaware´s bay and coastal region. Although these marine animals are generally slow-moving and seem relatively placid, they are apex predators in their habitat and play a key role in the ecological balance of the region.

“Sand tigers have suffered from a number of threats that ultimately led to population declines,” said DSU´s Fox. “In 1997 sand tigers were listed as a ℠species of concern´ by the National Marine Fisheries Service, although very little is known of their migrations and habitat requirements.”

Scientists have suspected that these sharks migrate widely along the Eastern Seaboard, and using newly collected information, the university teams plan to map these habitats, cross-referencing shark data with satellite and remotely sensed environmental conditions to create a comprehensive picture of the animals´ habitats.

Oliver told Messmore the teams are integrating two areas of biotelemetry to get a better understanding of the behaviors of migration patterns of these apex predators.

Fox is part of the Atlantic Cooperative Telemetry Network (ACT), which tracks thousands of animals up and down the coast; Oliver participates in the Mid-Atlantic Regional Association Coastal Ocean Observing System (MARACOOS), which uses satellites, underwater robots and models to study the coastal ocean.

By combining the two unique data sets, Oliver and Fox hope they will assist natural resource managers in predicting where sand tiger sharks live and how best to handle conservation efforts.

OTIS will be a big part of this, helping researchers find out which water conditions sharks prefer to swim in during their migrations. OTIS is capable of traveling much further out than what the static receivers´ can pick up, and can also collect information on a wide array of conditions, including water temperature, quality, clarity and oxygen levels.

The team hopes the data will give scientists a little more understanding as to why these sharks head to certain places, explained Oliver.

Oliver said the team took an educated guess as to where these sharks were currently hanging out last week when it launched OTIS for the first time. They launched it off the coast of Delaware´s Indian River Inlet and heading south. After five days, they began receiving transmissions from sharks about 4 to 9 miles off the coast of Assateague Island, Maryland.

Their next goal is to direct the glider to stay near the sharks, unless they move south of the lower Delmarva Peninsula. OTIS can last up to four weeks without recharging.

“We have at least another two weeks of battery,” Oliver said. “We´ll see how it develops.”

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com — Your Universe Online

In a plot that could have been yanked from the script of the upcoming James Bond film, American entrepreneur Russ George has released over 100 tons of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to foster a massive plankton bloom that would capture carbon dioxide and sink to the bottom of the ocean, thereby effecting climate change–U.K. news organization The Guardian has reported.

Besides having a potential impact on global warming, the supposed ℠experiment´ could net George valuable carbon credits that he could then sell on the open market for a hefty ransom.

Environmentalist groups are calling the dump a “blatant” violation of two international moratoria and warn that a massive plankton bloom could have unforeseen and irreversible effects.

George remained defiant and even optimistic about the project as he asserted that an unnamed team of scientists is closely monitoring his geoengineering experiment with equipment loaned from NASA and the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration.

“We’ve gathered data targeting all the possible fears that have been raised (about ocean fertilization),” he said. “And the news is good news, all around, for the planet.”

George is the former chief executive of Planktos Inc, a geoengineering firm dedicated to “removing CO2 from our oceans and atmosphere by healing the seas, growing new climate forests, and erasing carbon footprints,” according to a statement online.

The defiant businessman had previously attempted similar large-scale commercial dumps near the Galapagos and Canary Islands, but those efforts led to his vessels being banned from ports by the Spanish and Ecuadorean governments.

Scientists are currently debating the value of the types of ℠experiments´ George is conducting, but have warned that the long-term effects of uncontrolled dumping could produce toxic tides and acidify the ocean.

“It is difficult if not impossible to detect and describe important effects that we know might occur months or years later,” John Cullen, an oceanographer at Dalhousie University told The Guardian. “Some possible effects, such as deep-water oxygen depletion and alteration of distant food webs, should rule out ocean manipulation. History is full of examples of ecological manipulations that backfired.”

The iron sulphate dump allegedly took place near the islands of Haida Gwaii off the coast of British Columbia. George convinced the local council to allow him to perform his experiment after telling them that it would benefit the ocean. The council also agreed to spend $1 million of its own funds on the project.

The potential abuse of both the environment and a small local government has many observers sounding the alarm on what could be a disastrous recipe for future geoengineers.

Back in 2009, an article in Foreign Affairs magazine predicted just such a scenario, warning that smaller developing nations could act unilaterally.

“A single country could deploy geoengineering systems from its own territory without consulting the rest of the planet,” the authors wrote.

The article also warns against using geoengineering as a quick fix for what could be increasing effects of global warming.

“At some point in the near future, it is conceivable that a nation that has not done enough to confront climate change will conclude that global warming has become so harmful to its interests that it should unilaterally engage in geoengineering,” says the Foreign Affairs article.

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Evolutionary biologists have long envisioned creating a diagram, or tree of life, that would detail how different species have evolved from a common ancestry, but the task has been a daunting one for taxonomists who would need multiple reams of paper or computer screens to clearly show the evolutionary descent of each species.

A research associate at the Imperial College London, however, has risen to the challenge and created OneZoom, an interactive website that allows users to navigate different branches of evolution by clicking and zooming in on different aspects of a virtual tree of life.

James Rosindell, from the Imperial College´s Department of Life Sciences, and his partner Luke Harmon, a biologist at the University of Idaho, created the fractal-based tree in order to escape what they call the “paper paradigm,” a way of displaying data that is optimized for the printed page.

Inspired in part by Google Earth, users can zoom in on any point along the tree and see incrementally smaller groups of species. As the users attempt to single out one particular species, say humans, they pass though the various classes, orders and genera that the species belongs to at different points along the way.

“OneZoom gives you a natural way to explore large amounts of complex information like the tree of life,” explained Rosindell. “It’s intuitive because it’s similar to the way we explore the real world by moving towards interesting objects to see them in more detail.”

Traditionally, the tree of life is depicted as starting with a thick trunk that represents the first life on earth. The trunk then diverges into large branches for the many different categories of life, such as plants and animals. These large branches then split into smaller branches to represent groups such as reptiles, birds and mammals.

OneZoom replicates this traditional illustration with each branch leading to smaller branches and eventually to individual leafs that denote one particular species.

Rosindell has also decided to include other functionality within the OneZoom website. Color and animations reveal the different dates and timescales associated with each branch. Search functionality provides users the ability to quickly find the branch or species they are looking for and metadata allows additional information to be displayed at certain points on the tree.

Currently, OneZoom depicts only the tree of mammals, however, Rosindell says the project will be expanded in scale over the next few years, which should coincide with the work currently being performed by other researchers.

“After decades of study, scientists are probably only a year away from having a first draft of the complete tree of life. It would be a great shame if having built it we had no way to visualize it,” Rosindell added.

According to an article written by Rosindell and Harmon that appeared in the journal PLoS ONE, they also plan to increase the amount of detail that will be included in the OneZoom tree.

“We envisage putting ℠microdots´ on the branches of the tree, that when zoomed into, show fossil images and other evidence backing up the hypothesized evolutionary path of that branch,” they wrote.

“A richly annotated IFIG may help make the evidence, logic, and beauty of evolution easy to explore and understand in a way that is compelling and fun. “