My Big Fat Lemon

  • Increase font size
  • Default font size
  • Decrease font size
Home The News Their back and neck muscles less frequently

Their back and neck muscles less frequently

Saturday, 07 July 2007 09:54 administrator
E-mail Print PDF
In most trials, subjects quickly became experts at causing neurons to fire with their thoughts alone, even when faced with a “distractor” image, says Cerf, who conducted the research while at Caltech but is now at New York University. In the midst of a losing neuron duel, subjects could often turn the tide by focusing hard on the fainter image, Cerf says. Other subjects boosted particular neuron activity by chanting the name of the person out loud.
Researchers are eager to develop brain-controlled machines, but Cerf points out that the particular neurons in this study wouldn’t be good directors for such a device. “We would want something that’s stable,” he says. “And that’s not our neurons.” Neurons can be so finicky, Cerf says, that a few days into the experiments some of the ones he and his colleagues were measuring started responding to pictures of him.
More precise estimates of the energy carried by gamma-ray bursts and their afterglows will ultimately determine whether a black hole or a magnetar powers most bursts, said astrophysicist Edo Berger of Harvard University. Those estimates may come as soon as early next year, when Berger begins using an upgraded version of the Very Large Array radio telescope in Socorro, N.M., to study the radio-wavelength afterglow of bursts. Radio afterglows have a particularly simple spherical shape that makes it easy to calculate the energy they contain.
Other species where scientists have documented grooming-for-cooing trades include chacma baboons and long-tailed macaques. In spider monkeys the currency is not grooming but hugging moms. A marmoset system goes in the opposite direction. Moms groom other females that handle infants, but as Fruteau explains, marmosets frequently have twins. The idea of a market has proved fruitful for studying a wide range of biological exchanges, says study coauthor Ronald Noë of University of Strasbourg in France. Fish eating parasites off other fish in reefs, ants living in specialized plant crannies and chasing away other insects and primates building coalitions all display marketlike qualities.
Comparisons with markets can certainly be useful, says primatologist Rebecca E. Frank of Los Angeles Valley College in Valley Glen, Calif., “but it just leaves some aspects of female exchange unexplained.” In her study of grooming arrangements in olive baboons, about two-thirds of grooming encounters, with or without babies involved, don’t get promptly or obviously reciprocated. These partners appear to have long-term relationships that don’t require immediate settling of accounts.
None of this settles why monkey babies stir up such widespread urges to fondle, Fruteau says. Among the vervets and mangabeys that’s largely a female urge. Males don’t interact much with youngsters until the kids get older. The human analogs to a whisker are the lips and fingers, so perhaps sensory input to those regions might confer benefits to someone having a stroke. Lips and fingers are represented very broadly in humans’ brains. pain-free. Highly skilled pianists suffering from playing-related pain use their back and neck muscles less frequently than do players without pain, a new study shows. The result, presented November 14 at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting, suggests a way for pianists to prevent injury by beefing up their backs.
People with mild heart failure symptoms may benefit from a drug previously reserved for patients with more severe forms of the condition or high blood pressure. The drug, called eplerenone, reduces the risk of hospitalization and death in patients with a milder, chronic form of heart failure, a new study finds. Physician Faiez Zannad of the Nancy University Hospital Center in Nancy, France, presented the findings November 14 at a meeting of the American Heart Association.
Zannad and his colleagues randomly assigned 2,737 patients, average age 69, to get either eplerenone or a placebo. After the groups had been followed for 21 months on average, the trial was stopped when it became clear the drug benefited those taking it. During follow-up 26 percent of people getting the placebo were hospitalized for heart failure or died from cardiovascular causes compared with only 18 percent of those getting the drug. Heart failure occurs when the heart struggles to serve the needs of the body. These study participants had systolic heart failure, in which the force of blood flow from the heart was impaired, leaving them short of breath and easily fatigued from exercise.
Last Updated on Saturday, 27 November 2010 21:54  

Newsflash

During the project, the number of scientists involved grew to 2,700, and they came from 80 different countries. These scientists studied historical documents closely and, all together, went on 540 expeditions. They published thousands of scientific papers, spent $650 million and collected millions of specimens from various aquatic environments.

These creatures look like they belong on another planet. There are fish with tongues, crabs with hairy pincers and a transparent sea cucumber that appears to have intestines. (See the slideshow featuring some of these oddities.) When the Census of Marine Life is added to work done before it, scientists have, the Census researchers report, identified more than 190,000 different species that live underwater. Census An official, usually periodic enumeration of a population, often including the collection of related demographic information invertebrate Lacking a backbone or spinal column; not vertebrate marine Of or relating to the sea

Sometimes, scientists use coffee to come up with new ideas — though not necessarily by drinking the caffeinated beverage. In the case of one new invention, scientists used coffee grounds to build a new tool that can help robots lift, hold and move objects. We human beings use our hands to hold things, so it’s not surprising that many human-looking robots have human-looking hands with fingers and thumbs. These robots might be programmed to use their hands as humans do: to lift and hold objects.

But the new tool, called the “universal gripper,” suggests robots don’t need fingers to move things around. It’s a simple device made of a small balloon filled with coffee grounds and attached to a vacuum. This strange but smart design means the robot gripper can pick up all kinds of objects, including fragile things. There are still gaps even in 20th century weather data, notably around World War I. But scientists are using crowdsourcing to take advantage of the meticulous record-keeping of the British navy at that time.

This study was led by Andrew Dickerson, a graduate student in Hu's lab. His team calls this get-dry shake “nature’s analogy to the spin cycle of a washing machine.” Both the washing machine and shaking animals can get rid of water quickly — but animals are much more efficient than washing machines. For animals, this process helps them control heat in their bodies. Climate scientists need your help — not by sending up weather balloons or drilling ice cores in Antarctica, but by turning on your computer.

Researchers are using crowdsourcing to digitize reams of historical weather data, filling gaps in existing 20th century records and extending their coverage back in time to the period before the Industrial Revolution. Anyone with an Internet connection can help scientists read the century-old logbooks where ship hands on British naval vessels scrawled weather observations. Currently, not much is known about weather over the ocean.