Study Finds Middle-Aged Brains Perform Better at Some Cognitive Tests
Dr. Jennifer Ashton talks about the Seattle Longitudinal Study, a research group that has been testing six thousand people every seven years since 1956. The studies have found that many people perform better on cognitive tests in their forties and fifties than they did when they were in their twenties. The tests found people in there 40s and 50s ranked higher in scores on deductive reasoning, spatial orientation skills, verbal memory and problem solving. However, people with younger brains did better on mental skill tests, such as rapid number computation and how fast you can press a button when prompted. Take a look:
Researchers Create Climbing Robot Inspired by Geckos
Researchers at Stanford Unviersity created Stickybot, a robot with sticky feet that was inspired by geckos. Stickybot is a climbing machine that can climb straight up walls. The feet contain rubber bads made up of microscopic hairs. Each legs is powered by four mini motors and the tail acts as an anchor to balance Stickybot. The research was funded partially by the Department of Defense. You can read more about Stickybot here and here. Take a look:
What looks like a patch of dead moss on a tree is actually a mass of hundreds or thousands of Daddy Long Legs, also known as Harvestmen. The cluster of arachnids, from the order Opiliones, was found in a tree near a stream in Nogales, Arizona. Boing Boing just posted the video, but it appears to have been on the Internet since 2009 or earlier. There are also photos of harvestmen clusters on the Internet, see here and here. Take a look:
Kemp's Ridley Turtle Hatchlings Released Into Gulf of Mexico
Thousands of endangered baby sea turtles are being released into the Gulf of Mexico from the Texas coast. The Kemp's ridley turtle hatchlings are being released from the Padre Island National Seashore. The Houston Chroniclesays scientists say the "risks of holding turtles in captivity at a critical stage in their life cycles could be worse than the dangers of oil more than 400 miles away." The Chronicle says the decision is controversial because there is the possibility a hurricane could push oil towards the Texas coast where the turtle hatchlings are being released.
Here is a video of the turtle hatchlings being released. Sea Turtle, Inc. also has information about the hatchling releases here. Take a look:
Archaeologists in East Timor have unearthed the bones of the biggest rat that ever lived. The rat bones of 13 spieces - 11 new to science - were found in caves. The largest rat had a a body weight around 6 kg (over 13 pounds). The giant rats jaw was about as large as the skull of common rat. The image above compares the upper toothrows of Timor's enormous extinct giant rat (left), with the skull of a common black rat (right).
Carbon dating shows that the biggest rat that ever lived survived until around 1000 to 2000 years ago, along with most of the other Timorese rodents found during the excavation. Only one of the smaller species found is known to survive on Timor today.
"People have lived on the island of Timor for over 40,000 years and hunted and ate rats throughout this period, yet extinctions did not occur until quite recently," CSIRO's Dr Ken Aplin says. "We think this shows people used to live sustainably on Timor until around 1000 to 2000 years ago. This means extinctions aren't inevitable when people arrive on an island. Large scale clearing of forest for agriculture probably caused the extinctions, and this may have only been possible following the introduction of metal tools."
Timor has very few native mammals. Bats and rodents make up the majority of species. Most of Timor today is arid, transformed from the lush rainforests of the past.
"Although less than 15 per cent of Timor's original forest cover remains, parts of the island are still heavily forested, so who knows what might be out there?" Dr Aplin says.
'Quaternary murid rodents of Timor' by Ken Aplin of CSIRO and Kris Helgen of the Smithsonian Institution was published this week in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History.
The image belows shows the skull of a common black rat compared with one of Timor's extinct giant rats. The rat skull shown here is not even the biggest of the extinct rats, which was about 25% bigger than the skull shown below.
A robot slowly learns how to throw and catch a pancake in a pan in this video. The robot is made by Barrett Technology, a company that makes robot arms. An artificial pancake was used in the experiment. The robot learns using complex computer algorithms. After about fifty tries the robot finally figures it out. Take a look:
Rare Corpse Flower Blooming at Houston Museum of Natural Science
A rare "corpse flower", which is billed as the world's stinkiest flower, is blooming at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The smell of the Titan arum or Amorphophallus titanum is said to resemble smell of a decomposing mammal. The huge flowering plants do not bloom very frequently. The flower has been nicknamed Lois. You can read more about Lois here.
Dead Jellyfish Stings Over 100 People at New Hampshire Beach
The Boston Globereports that a large, dead jellyfish stung 100 to 150 people at a New Hampshire beach. The jellyfish broke apart offshore and its tentacles spread out in the water stinging many people. The jellyfish was reportedly a Lion's mane jellyfish, which is one of the largest sized jellyfish. Take a look:
NASA reports that scientists have created a new map using NASA satellite data that details the height of he world's forest. The map is based on data collectoin by NASA's ICESat, Terra, and Aqua satellites. One of the ways scientists will use the map will be to build an inventory of how much carbon the world's forests store and how fast that carbon cycles through ecosystems and back into the atmosphere.
You can see a much larger version of the map here. You can also view a map here that shows the height of forest in the United States.
Image: NASA Earth Observatory/Image by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon/Based on data from Michael Lefsky
Maurizio Porfiri, an Assistant Professor of Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU, believes a robotic fish may one day help lure schools fish out of danger areas like those created by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Porfiri says the most difficult part of building the robotic fish has been determining what makes a fish a leader.
Porfiri says, "If you take a propeller and you put it into the water it may swim as fast as the fish, but the fish may not like it. If you can make something that can swim like a fish, then the fish may perceive it as a mate, even if it looks different."
You can read more about Porfiri's research here. Take a look:
Photo: Dr. Maurizio Porfiri and his Robot Fish/ Polytechnic Institute of New York University
Kory Stamper, an Associate Editor at Merriam-Webster, talks about the plural version of octopus. She says you can use octopuses, octopi or octopodes. Take a look:
Scientists Stunned by 'Alfred Hitchcock' Lutetia Asteroid Photograph
The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft recently beamed back close-up photographs of asteroid Asteroid 21 Lutetia, which Nasa describes as "an ancient, cratered relic from the dawn of the solar system." Scientists were stunned by the images, especially the haunting image above, which has been dubbed the "Alfred Hitchcock" shot. You can see a larger version of the amazing photo here.
"I've never seen anything like it," says Claudia Alexander, project scientist for the U.S. Rosetta Project. "It looked as though it could have been fractured off of a mother asteroid – it was all angles and flat planes, ancient impacts overlaid by newer ones, covered by dust of some kind."
Scientists are trying to determine what caused the large dent in the asteroid. Alexander says, "My first guess would be that it's the remnant of a giant collision that occurred sometime in the distant past. The edges look shallow rather than sharp and deep as might be the case with a fresh crater. I'm sure there will be much more analysis of that feature in the weeks to come."
You can read more about the ancient asteroid here and here.
Tiny fly brains can process visual movements in only fractions of a second. Flies can process a vast amount of information about motion and movement in their environment in real time. This is a feat that no computer, and certainly none the size of a fly's brain, can match. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology are attempting to decode the underlying mechanisms of the fly's rapid motion vision.
Dierk Reiff from the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried says one sixth of a cubic millimetre of fly rain matter contains more than 100,000 nerve cells - each of which has multiple connections to its neighbouring cells. Neurobiologists in Martinsried have managed to single out the reaction of a certain cell to any particular movement stimulus.
"We had to find some way of observing the activity of these tiny nerve cells without electrodes", Dierk Reiff explains one of the challenges that faced the scientists. The scientists used the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and some of the most up-to-date genetic methods available. They succeeded in introducing the indicator molecule TN-XXL into individual nerve cells. By altering its fluorescent properties, TN-XXL indicates the activity of nerve cells.
To examine how the brains of fruit flies process motion, the neurobiologists presented the insects with moving stripe patterns on a light-diode screen. The nerve cells in the flies' brains react to these LED light impulses by becoming active, thus causing the luminance of the indicator molecules to change.
The scientists observed the activity of cells known as L2-cells, which receive information from the photoreceptors of the eye. The photoreceptors react when the light intensity increases or decreases. The reaction of the L2-cells is similar in that part of the cell where the information from the photoreceptor is picked up. However, the neurobiologists discovered that the L2-cell transforms these data and in particular, that it relays information only about the reduction in light intensity to the following nerve cells. The latter then calculate the direction of motion and pass this information on to the flight control system.
Now that the first step has been taken, the scientists intend to examine - cell by cell - the motion detection circuitry in the fly brain to explain how it computes motion information at the cellular level.
Many athletes are very superstitious. Michael Jordan wore his college team shorts underneath his NBA uniform for good luck and Tiger Woods wears a red shirt on tournament Sundays. New research shows that having some kind of lucky charm can actually improve an individual's performance, if the individual truly believes the object will give them luck. The researchers say it works because the object increases the individual's self-confidence.
"I watch a lot of sports, and I read about sports, and I noticed that very often athletes - also famous athletes - hold superstitions," says Lysann Damisch of the University of Cologne and lead author of the study. "And I was wondering, why are they doing so?"
Damisch thought that a belief in superstition might help people do better by improving their confidence. With her colleagues Barbara Stoberock and Thomas Mussweiler, also of the University of Cologne, she designed a set of experiments to see if activating people's superstitious beliefs would improve their performance on a task.
In one of the experiments, volunteers were told to bring a lucky charm with them. Then the researchers took it away to take a picture. People brought in all kinds of items, from old stuffed animals to wedding rings to lucky stones. Some of the objects people brought in are pictured above. Half of the volunteers were given their charm back before the test started. The other half of the volunteers did not get their item back before testing began - they were told there was a problem with the camera equipment and they would get it back later. Volunteers who had their lucky charm performed better on a computer memory game. Other tests showed that this difference was because they felt more confident. The volunteers who were given back their lucky items also set higher goals for themselves.
The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Psychology Today also has an article about the study here.
Kayaker Craig Whalley captured this great footage of a huge basking shark off the Isle of Man. Basking sharks can be as long as 30 to 40 feet. The basking shark is the second largest living shark, after the whale shark, and it is the only member of the family Cetorhinidae. Basking sharks eat zooplankton, small fish and invertebrates by holding their huge mouths wide open near the surface of the water. Take a look:
More information about basking sharks, including another video of a basking shark feeding, can be found here on the Florida Museum of Natural History's website.
