Bizarre // Current

Bird Drops Baguette into Large Hadron Collider, Postpones Launch

It is the machine that scientists hope will recreate the conditions present at the... more

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A Sad Giant Awakens in Nantes - DivineCaroline

http://www.divinecaroline.com/22360/76360-sad-giant-awakens-nantes

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Odd Organizations & Movements that only Thrive Online

One of the most celebrated functions of the Internet is an unprecedented ability for... more

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Why is... "there a dead Pakistani on my couch?" Google predicts bizarre searches

Type in "why is" on Google and check out the bizarre list of predicted searches... Can... more

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Dogs Hate Halloween

Want to dress up your favorite dog in Halloween costume to match your Halloween yard... more

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20th Century Warming is Unlike Natural Variation

The possibility that climate change might simply be a natural variation like others that have occurred throughout geologic time is dimming, according to evidence in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper published October 19.

The research reveals that sediments retrieved by University at Buffalo geologists from a remote Arctic lake are unlike those seen during previous warming episodes.

The UB researchers and their international colleagues were able to pinpoint that dramatic changes began occurring in unprecedented ways after the midpoint of the twentieth century.

"The sediments from the mid-20th century were not all that different from previous warming intervals," said Jason P. Briner, PhD, assistant professor of geology in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. "But after that things really changed. And the change is unprecedented."

The sediments are considered unique because they contain rare paleoclimate information about the past 200,000 years, providing a far longer record than most other sediments in the glaciated portion of the Arctic, which only reveals clues to the past 10,000 years.

"Since much of the Arctic was covered by big ice sheets during the Ice Age, with the most recent glaciations ending around 10,000 years ago, the lake sediment cores people get there only cover the past 10,000 years," said Briner.

"What is unique about these sediment cores is that even though glaciers covered this lake, for various reasons they did not erode it," said Briner, who discovered the lake in the Canadian Arctic while working on his doctoral dissertation. "The result is that we have a really long sequence or archive of sediment that has survived arctic glaciations, and the data it contains is exceptional."

Working with Briner and colleagues at UB who retrieved and analyzed the sediments, the paper's co-authors at the University of Colorado and Queens University, experts in analyzing fossils of bugs and algae, have pooled their expertise to develop the most comprehensive picture to date of how warming variations throughout the past 200,000 years have altered the lake's ecology.

"There are periods of time reflected in this sediment core that demonstrate that the climate was as warm as today," said Briner, "but that was due to natural causes, having to do with well-understood patterns of the Earth's orbit around the sun. The whole ecosystem has now shifted and the ecosystem we see during just the last few decades is different from those seen during any of the past warm intervals."

Yarrow Axford, a research associate at the University of Colorado, and the paper's lead author, noted: "The 20th century is the only period during the past 200 millennia in which aquatic indicators reflect increased warming, despite the declining effect of slow changes in the tilt of the Earth's axis which, under natural conditions, would lead to climatic cooling."

Co-authors with Briner and Axford are Colin A. Cooke and Alexander P. Wolfe of the University of Alberta; Donna R. Francis of the University of Massachusetts; John P. Smol, Cheryl R. Wilson and Neal Michelutti at Queens University; Gifford H. Miller of the University of Colorado and Elizabeth K. Thomas, who did this work at UB for her master's degree in geology.The possibility that climate change might simply be a natural variation like others... more

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Was the Speed of Light Faster in the Early Universe?

A brilliant young physicist João Magueijo asks the heretical question: What if the speed of light—now accepted as one of the unchanging foundations of modern physics—were not constant?

Magueijo, a 40-year old native of Portugal, puts forth the heretical idea that in the very early days of the universe light traveled faster—an idea that if proven could dethrone Einstein and forever change our understanding of the universe. He is a pioneer of the varying speed of light (VSL) theory of cosmology -an alternative to the more mainstream theory of cosmic inflation- which proposes that the speed of light in the early universe was of 60 orders of magnitude faster than its present value.

Solving the most intractable problems of cosmology in one brilliant leap, Magueijo’s varying-speed-of-light theory (VSL) would have stunning implications for space travel, black holes, time dilation, and string theory—and could help uncover the grand unified theory that ultimately eluded Einstein.

Joao Magueijo's radical ideas intend to turn that Einsteinian dogma on its head. Marueijo is trying to pick apart one of Einstein’s most impenetrable tenets, the constancy of the speed of light. This idea of a constant speed (about 3×106 meters/second) -is known as the universal speed limit. Nothing can, has, or ever will travel faster than light.

Magueijo -who received his doctorate from Cambridge, has been a faculty member at Princeton and Cambridge, and is currently a professor at Imperial College, London- says: not so. His VSL theory presupposes a speed of light that can be energy or time-space dependent.

In his fist book, Faster than the Speed of Light, Magueijo leads laymen readers into the abstract realm of theoretical physics, based on several well known, as well as obscure, thinkers. The VSL model was first proposed by John Moffat, a Canadian scientist, in 1992. Magueijo carefully builds the foundations for a discussion of Big Bang cosmology, and then segues into the second half of the book, which is devoted to VSL theory.

Like most radical, potentially seminal thinkers, Magueijo shakes the foundations of the physics community, while irritating off many of his fellow scientists. VSL purposes to solve the problems at which all cosmologists are forever scratching: those inscrutable conceptual puzzles that surround the Big Bang. Currently many of these problems have no widely accepted solutions.

Could Einstein be wrong and Magueijo right? Is he a gadfly or a true, seminal genius? Time will tell.A brilliant young physicist João Magueijo asks the heretical question: What if the... more

EmperorThan
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New Study Finds Men Able to Control Sexual Arousal Can Also Control Their Emotions

Is sex a state of mind? A recent study from the University of British Columbia finds that while most men can regulate their physical and mental sexual arousal to some degree, the men most able to do so are able to control their other emotions as well.

“We suspect that if an individual is good at regulating one type of emotional response, he/she is probably good at regulating other emotional responses,” says Jason Winters, the study’s research head. “This has never been shown before.”

The study employed 16 randomly ordered video clips. Eight were erotic, and eight were funny (specifically, the funny video clips featured the least sexy comedian the researchers could find: Mitch Hedberg). Participants were instructed to control their response to certain videos, and simply to watch the others. They then rated their arousal following each clip, and were hooked up to machines that measured their erections.

Researchers wanted to know: Could men control sexual arousal, fooling both themselves and others?

“I’m trained in forensic psychology, and the original plan was to do this study with sexual offenders,” Winters tells LiveScience. “However, I needed to first establish that there is range of sexual arousal regulation abilities in the general male population.”

Indeed, participants were, on average, able to regulate their physiological sexual arousal when told to do so; in fact, they showed a 25 percent reduction in erectile response. “This is consistent with success rates from previous, well-controlled [measuring-device] faking studies in which success rates range from 26 to 38 percent,” Winters writes in his study.

The range of regulation abilities had nothing to do with age, sexual experience, or sexual compulsivity. However, sexual excitation, inhibition, and desire were related to regulation success: Men who were more easily excited were, unsurprisingly, less able to regulate; guys who tended to be sexually inhibited because of performance issues were better able to stave off an erection.

Furthermore, the study found that the men who were best able to control their response to the pornographic videos were also able to control their response to Mitch Hedberg. But for those who had difficulty regulating, reverse psychology could be to blame.

“The finding that was most surprising was that some men became more sexually aroused when they tried to regulate their sexual arousal,” Winters says. “In other words, they responded more strongly (both physiologically and self-reported) during trials in which they attempted to regulate their arousal than trials during which they merely watched the stimuli. We attributed this increased response to anxiety — in this case, demand anxiety. It’s sort of like when you tell someone not to think of a white elephant; those [who] are most anxious during the task have the most trouble not thinking about the white elephant.”

The study’s findings could have significant implications.

“The next step is to do a similar study with sexual offenders,” Winters says. “I suspect that sexual offenders will generally be very poor regulators, and that poor regulation is one of the factors that contributes to their offending.”Is sex a state of mind? A recent study from the University of British Columbia finds... more

EmperorThan
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New Drug Corrects Memory Problems in Sleep-Deprived Mice

Researchers have found a pharmaceutical way to clear some of the cognitive fog that... more

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Farthest Galaxy Cluster Ever Detected, 1 Billion LY's Farther than Previous Record Holder

Captured by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and combined with data from infrared... more

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Lasers Write False, Fearful Memories into Brains of Flies

It sounds like a scene from an insect version of Total Recall: Using genetically engineered fruit flies and laser beams, researchers have found a way to embed false, fearful memories in the flies.

Researchers first tested normal flies in a chamber where a jets of air on either side brought two different odors into the container. The researchers delivered an electric shock each time a fly strayed into a particular odour stream, which taught the flies to prefer the other one: the flies learned to move in the direction of the shock-related odour 30 per cent less often [New Scientist].

Next, the researchers created a strain of genetically engineered flies with certain neurons that would be activated by a laser blast. Lead researcher Gero Miesenböck explains that with this technique, called optogenetics, researchers can use light to activate particular cell types that have been genetically engineered to express a light-responsive protein. When laser pulses hit the brain, cells expressing the light-sensitive protein activate. “It’s like sending a radio signal to a city but only those houses with a radios set to the right frequency will get the signal,” says Miesenböck [Nature News].

The flies were then put back in the chamber with the two jets of air, and every time they wandered into one of the odor streams, the laser was fired. Many of the flies were unaffected, but a select group quickly learned to avoid the odor stream associated with the laser pulse. Miesenböck says these flies feared that smell as if they had been conditioned to associate an electric shock with it. “Stimulating just these neurons gives the flies a memory of an unpleasant event that never happened,” he says [New Scientist].

In the genetic engineering process, the scientists had tweaked different neurons in different groups of flies. The contingent that did react to the laser all had 12 particular light-sensitive neurons, according to the study published in the journal Cell. Those 12 brain cells may be the root of associative learning, researchers say–at least in flies.It sounds like a scene from an insect version of Total Recall: Using genetically... more

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Electromagnetic "Black Hole" the Size of a Salad Plate Created in Lab

Two researchers say they have built a cylinder that acts as an ersatz electromagnetic black hole, soaking up radiation in the microwave regime like the astrophysical version sucks up matter and light.

Qiang Cheng and Tie Jun Cui of the State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, detailed their creation in a paper posted to the online physics preprint Web site arXiv.org last week. Cheng and Cui report engineering a thin cylinder 21.6 centimeters in diameter comprising 60 concentric rings of so-called metamaterials—composite structures specifically crafted to possess unique light-bending capabilities.

Unlike ordinary magnifying glasses, lenses made from metamaterials can have a negative index of refraction, meaning that refracted light bends to the same side of the "normal," the imaginary line perpendicular to the surface of the lens, as does the incident light. In the past few years, research groups around the world have harnessed metamaterials to create "superlenses" as well as for so-called invisibility cloaking, in which light is bent around an object as if it were not there.

The laboratory black hole is based on a similar approach—establishing a graded index of refraction to bend electromagnetic radiation inward to the cylinder's core. The core, in turn, is an efficient absorber of electromagnetic radiation. In one possible application, the core would be replaced with a "payload" such as a solar cell, with the outer layers funneling light inward. But Cui cautions that such an implementation is a long way off, requiring both that the device be modified to work at visible wavelengths and that the two-dimensional ring be extended to three dimensions.

Cheng and Cui's work represents the preliminary realization of a theoretical proposal put forth just this year by Evgenii Narimanov and Alex Kildishev of Purdue University for a metamaterial structure that could absorb incident light from all directions.

Narimanov, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, says that in the wake of his work with Kildishev, as well as the many studies into extreme light manipulation with metamaterials, he is not surprised to see the theoretical made real. "It's impressive, though, how quickly they have done it," he says.

John Pendry, a physicist at Imperial College London who was among the first to harness the unusual properties of metamaterials, says the new research "constitutes an entirely novel way of constructing an absorber, but at the same time keeping control of the absorbed radiation."

Nevertheless, Pendry notes, the analogy to black holes is imperfect. "Black holes absorb incident radiation and other objects, but the key point about real black holes is the prediction of Hawking radiation emitted by the black hole," he says, referring to physicist Stephen Hawking's hypothesis that is rooted both in general relativity and quantum mechanics. Were it observed, Hawking radiation would provide critical insight into the complicated boundary of the two theories. "A real black hole powers the radiation through its gravitational energy," Pendry says, "but the device reported in this paper has no internal source of energy and therefore cannot emit Hawking radiation."

Besides, the metamaterial black hole is not as ruthlessly voracious as the gravitational kind. Cui estimates that the demonstration black hole only absorbs 80 percent of the microwaves that hit it but that increasing the frequency of the incident light—to visible wavelengths, for instance—will increase absorption. Such an artificial black hole for optical light is in the works and might even be developed by the end of the year, Cui says—a prediction that may raise a few eyebrows in the field. "I think that the authors are rather optimistic in projecting into the visible region," Pendry says. "But I would be very happy to be proved wrong."Two researchers say they have built a cylinder that acts as an ersatz electromagnetic... more

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Genetically Engineering the "Smart Rat"

Dubbed Hobbie-J after a smart rat that stars in a Chinese cartoon book, the transgenic rat was able to remember novel objects, such as a toy she played with, three times longer than the average Long Evans female rat, which is considered the smartest rat strain. Hobbie-J was much better at more complex tasks as well, such as remembering which path she last traveled to find a chocolate treat.

The report comes about a decade after the scientists first reported in the journal Nature that they had developed "Doogie," a smart mouse that over-expresses the NR2B gene in the hippocampus, a learning and memory center affected in diseases such as Alzheimer's. Memory improvements they found in the new genetically modified Long Evans rat were very similar to Doogie's. Subsequent testing has shown that Doogie maintained superior memory as he aged.

"This adds to the notion that NR2B is a universal switch for memory formation," says Dr. Joe Z. Tsien, co-director of the MCG Brain & Behavior Discovery Institute and co-corresponding author on the paper published Oct. 19 in PLoS One.

The finding also further validates NR2B as a drug target for improving memory in healthy individuals as well as those struggling with Alzheimer's or mild dementia, the scientists says.

NR2B is a subunit of NMBA receptors, which are like small pores on brain cells that let in electrically-charged ions that increase the activity and communication of neurons. Dr. Tsien refers to NR2B as the "juvenile" form of the receptor because its levels decline after puberty and the adult counterpart, NR2A, becomes more prevalent.

While the juvenile form keeps communication between brain cells open maybe just a hundred milliseconds longer, that's enough to significantly enhance learning and memory and why young people tend to do both better, says Dr. Tsien, the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Cognitive and Systems Neurobiology. This trap door configuration that determines not just how much but how fast information flows is unique to NMBA receptors.

Scientists found that Hobbie-J consistently outperformed the normal Long Evans rat even in more complex situations that require association, such as working their way through a water maze after most of the designated directional cues and the landing point were removed. "It's like taking Michael Jordan and making him a super Michael Jordan," Deheng Wang, MCG graduate student and the paper's first author, says of the large black and white rats already recognized for their superior intellect.

But even a super rat has its limits. For example with one test, the rats had to learn to alternate between right and left paths to get a chocolate reward. Both did well when they only had to wait a minute to repeat the task, after three minutes only Hobbie-J could remember and after five minutes, they both forgot. "We can never turn it into a mathematician. They are rats, after all," Dr. Tsien says, noting that when it comes to truly complex thinking and memory, the size of the brain really does matter.

That's one of the reasons scientists pursue this type of research: to see if increased production of NR2B in more complex creatures, such as dogs and perhaps eventually humans, gets the same results. He also is beginning studies to explore whether magnesium – a mineral found in nuts, legumes and green vegetables such as spinach – can more naturally replicate the results researchers have obtained through genetic manipulation. Magnesium ion blocks entry to the NMDA receptor so more magnesium forces the brain cell to increase expression levels of the more efficient NR2B to compensate. This is similar to how statin drugs help reduce cholesterol levels in the blood by inhibiting its synthesis in the liver.

Scientists created Hobbie-J and Doogie by making them over-express CaMKII, an abundant protein that works as a promoter and signaling molecule for the NMDA receptor, something that likely could not be replicated in humans.Dubbed Hobbie-J after a smart rat that stars in a Chinese cartoon book, the transgenic... more