World to see biggest full moon in two decades

Wednesday, March 9 04:39 pm

Yahoo!UK News

The world is set to experience the biggest full moon for almost two decades when the satellite reaches its closest point to Earth next weekend. On 19 March, the full moon will appear unusually large in the night sky as it reaches a point in its cycle known as 'lunar perigee'.

Stargazers will be treated to a spectacular view when the moon approaches Earth at a distance of 221,567 miles in its elliptical orbit - the closest it will have passed to our planet since 1992. The full moon could appear up to 14% bigger and 30% brighter in the sky, especially when it rises on the eastern horizon at sunset or is provided with the right atmospheric conditions.

This phenomenon has reportedly heightened concerns about 'supermoons' being linked to extreme weather events - such as earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis. The last time the moon passed close to the Earth was on 10 January 2005, around the time of the Indonesian earthquake that measured 9.0 on the Richter scale.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was also associated with an unusually large full moon. Previous supermoons occurred in 1955, 1974 and 1992 - each of these years experienced extreme weather events, killing thousands of people.

However, an expert speaking to Yahoo! News today believes that a larger moon causing weather chaos is a popular misconception. Dr Tim O'Brien, a researcher at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester, said: "The dangers are really overplayed. You do get a bit higher than average tides than usual along coastlines as a result of the moon's gravitational pull, but nothing so significant that will cause a serious climatic disaster or anything for people to worry about."

But according to Dr Victor Gostin, a Planetary and Environmental Geoscientist at Adelaide University, there may be a link between large-scale earthquakes in places around the equator and new and full moon situations. He said: "This is because the Earth-tides (analogous to ocean tides) may be the final trigger that sets off the earthquake."

Written by Gaby Leslie

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/38/20110309/tsc-world-to-see-biggest-full-moon-in-tw-98fda55.html

Earliest humans were not very different from us

Earliest humans were not very different from us

Posted by gp at Wednesday, February 16, 2011

A study from Stony Brook University has suggested that earliest humans were not very different from us. Archaeologist John Shea believes that experts have been focusing on the wrong measurement of early human behaviour - 'behavioural modernity' instead of 'behavioural variability.'

Behavioural modernity is a quality supposedly unique to Homo sapiens, while behavioural variability is a quantitative dimension to the behaviour of all living things. For a long time, the European Upper Paleolithic archaeological record has been the standard against which the behaviour of earlier and non-European humans is compared.

During the Upper Paleolithic (45,000-12,000 years ago), Homo sapiens fossils first appear in Europe together with complex stone tool technology, carved bone tools, complex projectile weapons, advanced techniques for using fire, cave art, beads and other personal adornments.

The same behaviours are either universal or very nearly so among recent humans, leading archaeologists to cite evidence for these behaviours as proof of human behavioural modernity but Shea said that the oldest Homo sapiens fossils occur between 100,000-200,000 years ago in Africa and southern Asia and in contexts lacking clear and consistent evidence for such behavioural modernity.

Archaeologists disagree about the causes, timing, pace, and characteristics of this revolution, but there is a consensus that the behaviour of the earliest Homo sapiens was significantly that of more-recent "modern" humans.

http://www.phenomenica.com/2011/02/earliest-humans-were-not-very-different.html

Social networking under fresh attack as tide of cyber-scepticism sweeps US

Twitter and Facebook don't connect people – they isolate them from reality, say a rising number of academics 

Paul Harris in New York, guardian.co.uk, Saturday 22 January 2011 21.00 GMT

The way in which people frantically communicate online via Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging can be seen as a form of modern madness, according to a leading American sociologist.

"A behaviour that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological," MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes in her new book, Alone Together, which is leading an attack on the information age.

Turkle's book, published in the UK next month, has caused a sensation in America, which is usually more obsessed with the merits of social networking. She appeared last week on Stephen Colbert's late-night comedy show, The Colbert Report. When Turkle said she had been at funerals where people checked their iPhones, Colbert quipped: "We all say goodbye in our own way."

Turkle's thesis is simple: technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.

But Turkle's book is far from the only work of its kind. An intellectual backlash in America is calling for a rejection of some of the values and methods of modern communications. "It is a huge backlash. The different kinds of communication that people are using have become something that scares people," said Professor William Kist, an education expert at Kent State University, Ohio.

The list of attacks on social media is a long one and comes from all corners of academia and popular culture. A recent bestseller in the US, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, suggested that use of the internet was altering the way we think to make us less capable of digesting large and complex amounts of information, such as books and magazine articles. The book was based on an essay that Carr wrote in the Atlantic magazine. It was just as emphatic and was headlined: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Another strand of thought in the field of cyber-scepticism is found in The Net Delusion, by Evgeny Morozov. He argues that social media has bred a generation of "slacktivists". It has made people lazy and enshrined the illusion that clicking a mouse is a form of activism equal to real world donations of money and time.

Other books include The Dumbest Generation by Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein – in which he claims "the intellectual future of the US looks dim"– and We Have Met the Enemy by Daniel Akst, which describes the problems of self-control in the modern world, of which the proliferation of communication tools is a key component.

The backlash has crossed the Atlantic. In Cyburbia, published in Britain last year, James Harkin surveyed the modern technological world and found some dangerous possibilities. While Harkin was no pure cyber-sceptic, he found many reasons to be worried as well as pleased about the new technological era. Elsewhere, hit film The Social Network has been seen as a thinly veiled attack on the social media generation, suggesting that Facebook was created by people who failed to fit in with the real world.

Turkle's book, however, has sparked the most debate so far. It is a cri de coeur for putting down the BlackBerry, ignoring Facebook and shunning Twitter. "We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, yet we have allowed them to diminish us," she writes.

Fellow critics point to numerous incidents to back up their argument. Recently, media coverage of the death in Brighton of Simone Back focused on a suicide note she had posted on Facebook that was seen by many of her 1,048 "friends" on the site. Yet none called for help – instead they traded insults with each other on her Facebook wall.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/22/social-networking-cyber-scepticism-twitter

Expert board game players utilise specific brain areas

BBC NEWS Health

21 January 2011 Last updated at 13:06

Scientists have discovered that expert board game players use a part of their brain that amateurs fail to utilise. The research, published in Science, involved scanning the brains of both professional and amateur Japanese "Shogi" players. Shogi is a Japanese game, similar to chess.

Scientists from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan said that intuitive playing was probably not due to nature, but brain training. Shogi is a very popular game in Japan, played to professional level. Professional players train for up to ten years, three to four hours a day to achieve the level of expertise needed to play professionally.

Intuitive decisions

They are able to make very quick "intuitive" decisions about which move in any combination on the board, would produce the best outcome.

The researchers recruited 30 professional shogi players from the Japanese Shogi Association. They also had a control group of amateur players. The professional players were presented with a game of shogi already in progress and given 2 seconds to choose the next best move - from a choice of four moves. The researchers found that there were significant activations in the caudate nucleus area of the brains of professional players while they were making their quick moves.

Brain activity

In contrast, when amateur players were asked to quickly find the next best move, there was no significant activation in the caudate nucleus. This brain activity was specific to professional players who were making quick decisions about the next best move.

In addition, professionals did not use that area of the brain when they were given a longer time of 8 seconds, to think strategically about further moves they could make. In this scenario, the caudate nucleus area of the brain was not activated.

The caudate nucleus area of the brain was historically thought to be involved with the control of voluntary bodily movements. However more recently it has also been associated with learning and memory.

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12250687

Research reveals the biochemical connection between music and emotion

January 19, 2011 By Joel N. Shurkin

You are in a concert hall, listening to music you love, Ludwig von Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. You are happily awaiting the glorious climax in the fourth movement -- you know it's coming -- when the full orchestra and chorus erupt with the "Ode to Joy." The moment is here and you are exhilarated, awash in a sudden wave of pleasure.

When music sounds this good, there's a reason: dopamine.

In research published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at McGill University in Montreal have established the direct link between the elation stimulated by music and the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is the same substance that puts the joy in sex, the thrill in certain illegal drugs, and the warm feeling within a woman breast-feeding her child. The substance also may explain why the power of music crosses human cultures, the scientists said.

Valorie N. Salimpoor and other researchers in the lab of Robert J. Zatorre took eight subjects and asked them to bring in music they loved. They chose a broad range of instrumental music, from Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings (the most popular) to jazz and punk. The test used only familiar music, Zatorre said, because he wanted to make sure he was getting a "maximal response." What the subjects had in common was that the music they brought in gave them the "chills," which is actually a technical term for a kind of emotional response. A positron emission tomography, or PET scan, measured dopamine release.

Dopamine is synthesized in the brain out of amino acids and transmits signals from one neuron to another through the circuits of the brain. The structure in the brain Zatorre's team looked at is the striatum, deep inside the forebrain. The striatum has two subparts: the upper, or dorsal, and the ventral below. Zatorre said the dorsal part of the striatum is connected to the regions of the brain involved in prediction and action, while the ventral is connected to the limbic system, the most primitive and ancient part of the brain, where emotions come from. "When you are anticipating, you are engaging the prediction part of the brain; when you feel the chills, that's emotion," Zatorre said, whose team found that the dopamine triggered both parts. According to the McGill research, during the anticipation phase dopamine pours into the dorsal striatum when the climax occurs, triggering a reaction in the ventral striatum that results in a release of pure emotion.

The idea that there was some biochemical reaction involved goes back to the work of the late Leonard B. Meyer in the 1950s. Meyer was a musicologist not a scientist, but he connected music theory with psychology and neuroscience, emotional response to music patterns. He did not know the biochemical mechanism. Great composers don't know it either but play on this process. German composer Gustav Mahler is famous for creating tension that needs resolution, building intensity until the orchestra explodes in a wave of sound.

The listener knows there is going to be an emotional resolution even if the piece is unfamiliar. And, if the listener knows it is coming, the reaction can be even more intense. It turns out, said Zatorre, that Mahler -- and conductors performing his music -- play with the emotions of the audience by manipulating dopamine. "What we're finding is that this is the brain mechanism that underlies this phenomenon," Zatorre said.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-reveals-biochemical-music-emotion.html

Why we have to teleport disbelief

• 12 January 2011, New Scientist
• Magazine issue 2795.

AS THE old saying goes, it's good to have an open mind but not so open that your brains fall out. This week we report claims about the way that DNA behaves that are so astonishing that many minds have already snapped shut.

The experiments (see "Scorn over claim of teleported DNA") make three claims that will stretch most people's credulity: under certain conditions, DNA can project copies of itself onto electromagnetic waves; these same waves can be picked up by pure water and, through quantum effects, create a "nanostructure" in the shape of the original DNA; and if enzymes which replicate DNA are present in a "receiving" solution, they can recreate the original DNA from the teleported "nanostructure", as if DNA was really there.

This scenario inevitably conjures up echoes of the "water memory" experiments in 1988 by the late Jacques Benveniste (New Scientist, 14 July 1988, p 39). Back then, Benveniste reported that antibodies could leave a ghostly "memory" in water that made the water behave as if the antibodies were still there, even in solutions so dilute that no antibody molecules were left. Eventually, his findings were dismissed, as was he.

The main researcher behind the new DNA experiments is a recent Nobel prizewinner, Luc Montagnier. But science should be no respecter of persons, and the researchers we contacted for comment rightly said his results should be ignored unless and until they have been repeated by independent groups. Nobel laureates are not immune from eccentric beliefs. Others believe in telepathy, have communed with fluorescent raccoons, and championed vitamin C as a cure for cancer.

There is also, not surprisingly, suspicion that Montagnier has been misled by contamination - a problem that has so far stymied the hunt for Jurassic DNA and for traces of life in Martian meteorites. Many other experiments have been wrecked by contamination with "impostor" cells.

Given such reasons for doubt, and the hard-to-believe explanations being put forward to account for the claimed effects, should we be reporting Montagnier's work at all? We decided to go ahead because any bona fide experimental result is worthy of scrutiny, and the claims are nothing if not interesting. What's more, the latest paper follows earlier work by Montagnier. Given the remarkable implications of the claims and the relative simplicity of the experiments, other groups will almost certainly take a look and attempt to repeat Montagnier's results. As one researcher told us: "Twenty labs could do this within three months, so we'll soon know whether it's real."

Like many of the researchers we contacted for comment, we won't believe it till someone repeats it. But we do think they should try. As with cold fusion in 1989, heretical findings with far-reaching implications are sometimes worth investigating, even if the chances that there is something to it all are remote. Back then it was harnessing the power of the sun in a test tube; in this case, our picture of infection might need a fundamental overhaul.

It shouldn't take long to find out whether DNA teleportation is mad or miraculous. Either way, it's important to find out.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927951.900-why-we-have-to-teleport-disbelief.html

Extra Sensory Perception: a brief history

The concept of Extra Sensory Perception has been around for more than a century but was only popularised in the 1930s.

The Telegraph, Science News, 10:00PM GMT 06 Jan 2011

1870 – Term 'Extra Sensory Perception' allegedly coined by the British explorer Sir Richard Burton.

1882 – 'Telepathy' – mind reading – formally introduced after research undertaken by the Society of Psychical Research in Britain, and in 1884 by similar organisations in the US.

1892 – Dr Paul Joire, a French researcher used the term ESP to describe the ability of a person who had been hypnotised or was in a trance-like state to sense things without using ordinary senses.

1930s – Duke University psychology JB Rhine popularises the term to denote psychic abilities such as telepathy and clairvoyance. Rhine and his wife Louisa tried to develop research into "parapsychology". They used a set of cards, originally called Zener Cards, now called ESP cards, which bear the symbols of a circle, square, wavy lines, cross and a star. There are five cards of each in a pack of 25. In an experiment, the "sender" looks at a series of cards while the "receiver" guesses the symbols.

Rhine argued that when his subjects scored highly, it could only be expect by chance once in a thousand.

The experiments faced several criticisms, namely that the statistics were not reliable, that only favourable results were published and that "fraud" was possible. Computers are now being used to determine ESP.

1940 – Rhine, JG Pratt and others at Duke author a review of card-guessing experiments conducted since 1882 – 'Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years', which becomes recognised as the first meta-analysis in science. More than 60 per cent of the results indicate the presence of ESP ability.

1953 – Report by Rhine on the ability of dogs to detect landmines through ESP. After a training period of more than three months, two dogs in California successfully found mines six out of seven times without any sensory cues.

1964 – Scientists demonstrate that through use of hypnosis, there is a success rate of 64 per cent.

1971 – Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Dean Mitchell allegedly conducted secret ESP experiments during the mission with collaborators on Earth. Following 'sleep time' on the ship, he concentrated on a series of symbols and shapes on a clipboard. Four men on Earth tried to 'receive' them.

1974 – Ganzfeld test findings published by Charles Honorton and Sharon harper in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. The 30-minute procedure involves two subjects, one the sender and the other the receiver. Both persons lie on chairs, eyes covered with halved ping pong balls so the visual field was solid white. White noise was played in the background. Subjects were asked to free-associate out loud while their responses were put on to a magnetic tape. In another room, the telepathic sender chose at random a set of slides to look at and try to send the subject. After the experiment, the subject was asked to guess which of the reels, of a group of four, had been the target.

1984 – Test results from 10 different laboratories find superior results. Hypnosis proved to enhance ESP ability more than anything else.

1988 – Psychologist Gertrude Schmeidler finds that higher scores are obtained when the experimenter was warmer and friendly to the subject than a cold, formal one. Dr Schmeidler, in her research, also divided subjects into "sheep", who believed ESP might work, and "goats", who did not. Her studies found that "sheep" scores were generally above expectation and "goats" scored below.

2011 – Academic paper argues that people may be able to see into the future to be published by the respected Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.


Prof Daryl Bem of Cornell University, said the results of nine experiments he carried on students over the past decade suggested humans could accurately predict random events.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8244695/Extra-Sensory-Perception-a-brief-history.html 

ESP Study Gets Published in Scientific Journal

Cornell University Psychologist Daryl Bem Writes Paper on Precognition

By NED POTTER

Jan. 6, 2011

Daryl Bem is a Cornell University psychologist who says he's been doing magic as a hobby since he was 17. Now he has managed what some scientists may call his greatest trick: he's written a paper attempting to prove the power of ESP -- extrasensory perception -- and had it accepted for publication in a major scientific journal. "From seeing my own data, and from looking at other research on ESP, I think I could be classified as someone who now believes there's something there," Bem said in an interview with ABCNews.com.

But the scientific community is filled with grumbles over Bem's work. Many researchers question the wisdom of writing, much less publishing, research on humans' ability to see the future.

Now retired from a long career of mainstream psychological research, Bem says he started looking at ESP for fun, then began to take it more seriously. Over an eight-year period, he says he conducted experiments with more than 1,000 volunteers on "precognition" -- the ability to perceive things before they actually happen -- and submitted it to The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Psychological Association. The reviewers went over it and accepted it for an upcoming issue, despite some initial skepticism.

"It is not my job to decide what hypotheses are good or bad," said Charles Judd, a professor at the University of Colorado who has been serving as the journal's editor. "It's our responsibility to look at papers and give them a fair hearing, even if they fly in the face of conventional wisdom."

Judd provided ABC News with the text of an editorial that will run along with Bem's paper: "We openly admit that the reported findings conflict with our own beliefs about causality and that we find them extremely puzzling," it says in part. "Yet, as editors we were guided by the conviction that this paper — as strange as the findings may be — should be evaluated just as any other manuscript on the basis of rigorous peer review."

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/extrasensory-perception-scientific-journal-esp-paper-published-cornell/story?id=12556754 

Brain biology may dictate social networks

January 4, 2011

(PhysOrg.com) -- A new study by a Northeastern University researcher and her colleagues indicates that the size of a certain part of the human brain plays a significant role in determining the breadth of social relationships. Scientists found that the amygdala, a small structure in the temporal lobe of the brain, appears to be important to a rich and varied social life among adult humans. Their finding, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, provides insight into how abnormalities in regions of the brain may affect social behavior in neurologic and psychiatric disorders.

The interdisciplinary study, led by Distinguished Professor of Psychology Lisa Feldman Barrett, advances Northeastern’s research mission to solve societal issues with a focus on global challenges in health, security, and sustainability. "We know that primates who live in larger social groups have a larger amygdala, even when controlling for overall brain size and body size," said Barrett. "We considered a single primate species, humans, and found that the amygdala volume positively correlated with the size and complexity of social networks in adult humans."

The researchers asked 58 participants to complete standard questionnaires that reported on the size and the intricacies of their social networks. They measured the number of regular contacts each participant maintained, as well the number of social groups to which these contacts belonged. Participants also had a magnetic resonance imaging brain scan to gather information about various brain structures, including the volume of the amygdala. The authors found that individuals with larger amygdala reported larger and more complex social networks. This link was observed for both older and younger individuals, and for both men and women.

Barrett noted that the study findings are consistent with the "social brain hypothesis," which suggests that the human amygdala might have evolved partially to deal with an increasingly complex social life. Exploratory analysis of other structures deep within the brain indicates that the amygdala is the only area with compelling evidence of affecting social life in humans.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-brain-biology-dictate-social-networks.html

A gene that could explain why the red mist descends

 

A "red mist" gene that could be responsible for ordinarily peaceful people becoming violent and aggressive while drunk has been identified by scientists.

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent 7:00PM GMT 22 Dec 2010, The Telegraph

The team of researchers have found a genetic mutation in the brain that may contribute to violently impulsive behaviour under the influence of alcohol.

The researchers sequenced the DNA of a number of impulsive volunteers and compared those sequences with DNA from an equal number of non-impulsive people. They found that a single DNA change that blocks a gene known as HTR2B was predictive of highly impulsive behaviour.

The gene affects serotonin production and detection in the brain.Serotonin is a neurotransmitter known to influence many behaviours, including impulsivity.

"Interestingly, we found that the genetic variant alone was insufficient to cause people to act in such ways," said Dr David Goldman at National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Maryland, USA. "Carriers of the HTR2B variant who had committed impulsive crimes were male, and all had become violent only while drunk from alcohol, which itself leads to behavioural disinhibition."

In collaboration with researchers in Finland and France, Dr Goldman and colleagues studied a sample of violent criminal offenders in Finland. The hallmark of the violent crimes committed by individuals in the study sample was that they were spontaneous and purposeless.

They found the association with HTR2B gene and then conducted studies in mice and found that when the equivalent gene is knocked out or turned off, mice also become more impulsive. A report of the findings is published in Nature.

"Impulsivity, or action without foresight, is a factor in many pathological behaviours including suicide, aggression, and addiction," said Dr Goldman. "But it is also a trait that can be of value if a quick decision must be made or in situations where risk-taking is favoured."

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• Forget Mars and Venus: men and woman are on the same planet

• Sir Tim Hunt: I am interested in how cells know what they are and how they should behave

• Babies' DNA profiled in the womb

• Gene that makes you good at taking risky decisions

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8219521/A-gene-that-could-explain-why-the-red-mist-descends.html 

Brain is not fully mature until 30s and 40s

December 22, 2010 by Lin Edwards

(PhysOrg.com) -- New research from the UK shows the brain continues to develop after childhood and puberty, and is not fully developed until people are well into their 30s and 40s. The findings contradict current theories that the brain matures much earlier.

Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a neuroscientist with the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, said until around a decade ago many scientists had "pretty much assumed that the human brain stopped developing in early childhood," but recent research has found that many regions of the brain continue to develop for a long time afterwards.

The prefrontal cortex is the region at the front of the brain just behind the forehead, and is an area of the brain that undergoes the longest period of development. It is an important area of the brain for high cognitive functions such as planning and decision-making, and it is also a key area for social behavior, social awareness, for empathy and understanding and interacting with other people, and various personality traits. Prof. Blakemore said the prefrontal cortex “is the part of the brain that makes us human,” since there is such a strong link between this area of the brain and a person’s personality.

Prof. Blakemore said brain scans show the prefrontal cortex continues to change shape as people reach their 30s and up to their late 40s. She said the region begins to change in early childhood and then is reorganized in late adolescence but continues to change after that. The research could explain why adults sometimes act like teenagers, sulking or having tantrums if they do not get their own way, and why some people remain socially uncomfortable until they are well out of their teens.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-brain-fully-mature-30s-40s.html