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Getting to the Top In the Caucasus - The New York TimesGetting to the Top In the Caucasus
By HOWARD TOMB; HOWARD TOMB lives in New York City. His first two books, ''Wicked French Lessons'' and ''Wicked Italian Lessons,'' will be published this fall by Workman.
THE man in the street, the man in the woods, even the top-notch travel agent have probably never heard of Europe's highest peak. But the obscurity of this Russian volcano is undeserved; any strong hiker with an ice ax and a pair of crampons can reach the summit at 18,481 feet, and look down on 30,000 square miles of mountains, high plains and inland seas.
The ancients knew the peak as Strobilus, the mythical prison of Prometheus. Birthplace of three rivers and 22 glaciers, it is equal to its legends. In the afternoon, as the dormant volcano sheds its blankets of fog, its great mass and symmetry humble the jagged 17,000-foot peaks at its feet.
It is called Mount Elbrus, and no mountain could be better suited to divide the European and Asian Continents. From its slopes, high green plains roll northward into Russia. To the south, the spectacular Caucasus, often compared with the Alps, create a barrier to Soviet Georgia and the Middle East that runs more than 300 miles without being crossed by a road or penetrated by a tunnel. To the west is the Black Sea, and on especially clear days, the Caspian Sea is visible 250 miles to the east.
The Elbrus region is an easy day's travel from Moscow. The flight south to Mineralnye Vody, a town known for its mineral springs, takes two hours. Intourist buses take visitors the last 150 miles to one of three hotels 7,000 feet up in the Baksan Valley.
The three-hour bus trip begins on the high plains and passes through small villages and mile after mile of sunflower farms. The plains give way to foothills once scoured by glaciers and now incised by thundering rivers. Finally, pine and hardwood forests appear, the hills become steeper and thick with wildflowers and above them, the peaks of the Caucasus become visible among the clouds. The landscape is reminiscent of Switzerland, but the mountains are taller.
In the Baksan Valley's hotels, unfortunately, all comparison with Switzerland must come to an end. Soviet hotels do not compete with each other for business; visitors are assigned to them by Intourist. Hot water is usually plentiful, and travelers with hard currency are entitled to private baths and single beds, rather than bunks, but this is where luxuries end in these large, concrete-slab hotels. For a three-week stay in the Baksan Valley, for example, a roomful of four mountain climbers was issued one miniature bar of soap. Repeated requests for resupply were turned down.
There are no restaurants in the area. Everyone is expected to eat three times a day in the hotel dining room, where the waitresses can be surly and the menu is whatever one finds on the plate. Boiled and fried meats are the focus of almost every meal, including breakfast. White bread, yogurt, yellow cheese, sour cream and fresh vegetables are always available, but when a truckload of, say, green peppers arrives, every meal is a green pepper festival until the supply is gone. Travelers may want to take food from home. But no one goes mountain climbing, or to the Soviet Union, for that matter, for luxury.
Climbers spend two days or so hiking in the forests and mountains around the hotels to get used to the air at 7,000 feet and the nine-hour time difference. Ten minutes away by hotel bus, the Chiget resort chairlifts carry tourists to 10,000 feet for walks and views among the peaks and brilliant green glacial lakes. Shepherds on horseback tend their flocks in the high alpine meadows, bringing to mind the Cossacks who rode there until early in this century.
Impromptu ice climbing competitions among Soviet climbers take place in the crevasses of nearby glaciers. Spectators wearing crampons gather carefully at the edges of these cracks in the ice, some over a hundred feet deep, and cheer on the competitors. In the past 20 years, Soviet climbers have developed speed-climbing equipment and techniques that are virtually unknown in the West.
After acclimatizing in the Baksan Valley, climbers take the nearby Elbrus resort gondola and chairlifts to 11,500 feet. From there, it is an easy two-hour hike to the Refuge of Eleven, a hotel perched between two glaciers on an exposed ridge of volcanic rock at 13,650 feet. Built in the 1930's, the building sleeps 200 and looks like a gigantic Airstream mobile home; its sheet metal hide is rounded to cheat the ferocious winds, and antennae sprout from the roof.
Climbers on Elbrus avoid the drudgery of other climbs to similar heights. On Alaska's 20,320-foot Denali, for example, climbers must carry tents, stoves, fuel, ropes, shovels and three or four weeks' worth of food. The typical load of 150 pounds ra person requires two carries of 75 pounds each for every new camp.
Climbing hardware and ropes, standard on other climbs, are unnecessary on Elbrus because the route to the top crosses no crevasses. The hotel and its beds (two, three or four to a room) take the place of tents and sleeping bags.
Climbers carry their own food to the Refuge, but, including time to acclimate and an extra day in case of bad weather, they spend only three or four days there, and can take along heavy items such as canned food, cheese, potatoes and tomatoes.
Cooking is done by climbers in the communal kitchen where fuel and a big stove are provided. Pasta, rice, beans, vegetables, bread, cheese and canned meat and fish are combined according to the imaginations of the cooks. (A meal has almost invariably taken on a stewlike form by the time it reaches the table.) The dining room is the hotel's gathering place. Almost every climbing party has one or two members who speak some English, and there is a natural camaraderie among climbers everywhere. A number of Soviet cities are still closed to foreigners, and many visitors to the hotel have never met an American. Over tea and marmalade, Latvians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Siberians, Georgians and Russians are eager to discuss everything from world events to camping equipment to Stevie Wonder.
One or two days in and around the Refuge allow climbers to get used to the altitude, in preparation for a summit attempt. They spend the time socializing, reading, playing chess, hiking on the surrounding glaciers and enjoying the views.
When the sun is up, water flows from a pipe stuck directly into the glacier above the hotel. Ice can be melted on the stove when the water isn't flowing. The low temperatures make plumbing impossible, and trying to dig a hole in the volcanic rock or glacier ice would be pointless. The outhouse, therefore, must hang over the edge of a cliff, and every visit there is an adventure.
Once climbers become acclimated, they usually begin their summit attempt between 2 A.M. and 4 A.M. while the snow is still hard. Parties try to reach the top before noon, when the snow begins to get too soft for easy walking.
In those hours, the temperature usually ranges between 0 and 30 degrees. Wool or polypropelene underwear is worn under wool pants and sweaters, wind pants, a down parka with a hood and one or two pairs of wool mittens with Gore-Tex shells. Climbers also need double boots, battery-powered headlamps and glacier goggles. Everyone carries a knapsack with sunscreen, extra clothing, fatty snacks such as cookies, chocolate and nuts and a quart or more of water.
The volcano's slopes, although encased in ice, are smooth and gradual. No vertical climbing is necessary. Crampons (spikes strapped to boots) prevent slipping, and an ice ax provides balance.
The unpredictable and sometimes violent weather allows the novice to experience authentic high-altitude mountaineering with a minimum of risk. Foreign climbing parties are accompanied by Soviet guides who speak their language and know the mountain well. Every group travels with a two-way radio and checks in with master guides at the Refuge at least three times a day. Even in an extreme white-out, the hotel is never more than two or three hours away, under accurate compass navigation.
The altitude adds to the challenge of the Elbrus ascent. Most climbers are able to reach the saddle at about 17,500 feet between the twin peaks. The next thousand feet look easy; the summit seems tantalizingly close. But the way becomes steeper, and every step becomes a battle between the body and the will. This is the essence of high-altitude mountaineering.
There was no moon the morning of our party's first attempt, and we began climbing under a thick carpet of stars. Upwind, perhaps 150 miles to the west, a lightning storm illuminated the distant peaks.
Climbing in our party were a retired Alaskan in his early 60's, a fit British policeman, two young businessmen from the New York area, a forest ranger from Idaho, our American leader from the Mountain Madness tour company and our Russian guide, Alexi Kalishnikov.
Just before sunrise, as we passed 16,000 feet, the winds began gusting to about 30 miles an hour. Without trees or any other objects with which to judge scale, the summit seemed close, and we kept hiking. The winds increased steadily, and by the time we reached the saddle at 17,500 feet, we were in a furious hailstorm. The wind-driven hailstones, about the size of BB's, stung our faces and found their way inside our goggles.
Visibility was down to about 15 feet, but Mr. Kalishnikov knew the mountain well enough to find a fumarole, where warm gases escaping from the dormant volcano had bored a hole in the ice. We huddled inside to await a break in the weather.
There was no change after an hour, so we decided to retreat. The trail is marked every 20 to 50 feet with bamboo stakes, but these were hard to find in the storm. With the aid of a compass, we were able to descend a thousand feet or so, out of the storm. Our Alaskan climber was deeply tired and needed frequent rests. In two hours, we were back at the Refuge.
We recuperated for a day, and prepared to make a second assault. The following day we rose again at 2 A.M., this time to find that the weather had closed in. Thinking we had missed our last chance, we went back to bed.
Mr. Kalishnikov surely had our best interests at heart when he woke us again at 4:30, but we found it hard to abandon our warm beds. The weather had cleared, and we were running late.
OUR oldest team member had opted out. The rest of us were fully acclimated and we made good time back to the saddle, arriving there by 10:30 that morning. It was especially cold, about 10 below with a stiff wind, and we passed some Polish climbers who had turned back before reaching the summit; their thin parkas and flimsy mittens were no match for the elements.
We were better prepared and felt ready to push for the summit after a rest at the carcass of a cabin at 17,500 feet. The Soviet people seem to have a mania for building structures in improbable locations, the Refuge being a case in point. The pine cabin in the saddle had lost not only its roof but the walls, too, had been blown apart by the relentless winds.
We had to take a breath or two for each step of the last pitch, but after another hour, we were on top. Below us, the peaks of the Caucasus poked through the clouds and marched into the distance for hundreds of miles. The Black Sea appeared in the east for a moment and then vanished again in the mist.
For 10 minutes, we sat in a silence of awe and exhaustion. As we made our descent back to the Refuge, the snow achieved a perfect slipperiness. Launching ourselves down the slopes in sitting positions, we used our ice axes as rudders and hollered into the enormous afternoon. Staging an ascent of Elbrus Arranging Trips
Trips to Elbrus are usually made in summer, but are possible any time of year. In the winter, when the snow is more powdery, the climb is done on cross-country skis. Trips should be planned well in advance.
The following companies lead trips to Mount Elbrus. Prices cover all expenses within the Soviet Union.
Mountain Travel (6420 Fairmount Avenue, El Cerrito, Calif. 94530; 800-227-2384) offers 13-day trips to Elbrus. The cost is $2,120 a person.
Mountain Madness (7103 California Avenue SW, Seattle, Wash. 98136; 206-937-8389) leads 23-day trips to Elbrus for $2,400 that include a five- to seven-day trek from Elbrus across the Caucasus into a pristine and especially remote region of Soviet Georgia.
R.E.I. Adventures (Post Office Box 8090, Berkeley, Calif. 94707; 800-622-2236, in California 800-624-2236) runs 16-day trips for 10 to 15 people for $1,500 for members of the R.E.I. co-op (a one-time $10 fee). The company will arrange custom-designed trips as well. Purchasing Equipment
Double boots cost between $180 and $480. A comfortable fleece-lined inner boot goes inside a rigid, impermeable plastic outer boot. Expect to pay between $50 and $110 for crampons, and from $50 to $70 for an ice ax. The following outfitters can supply all three items: Eastern Mountain Sports, 20 West 61st Street, New York; 212 397-4860.
International Mountain Equipment, Post Office Box 494, Main Street, North Conway, N.H. 03869; 603 356-7064.
R.E.I. has three stores: 1525 112th Avenue, Seattle, Wash. 98122 (206-323-8333); 279 Salem Street, Reading, Mass. 01867 (617-944-5103); 500 Main Street, New Rochelle, N.Y. 10801 (914-632-9222). H. T.
photos of Mount Elbrus (Howard Tomb)
New clues in search for elixir of youth - life - 09 July 2009 - New ScientistThe march of old age may be unstoppable, but two new studies in mice and monkeys suggest we can at least tinker with the ageing process – and offer a glimpse at how anti-ageing medications could work.
"You want something that's going to give you 10 more years of relatively good health and not 10 more years of frailty," says Matt Kaeberlein, a biochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle, who studies ageing, but was not involved in either study.
Scientists probably haven't stumbled on that drug yet, but a drug called rapamycin, already used to suppress the immune systems of organ transplant recipients, comes close. In tests conducted at three researcher centres, mice that began taking the drug at a relatively old age lived substantially longer than other rodents.
Fungus find
The researchers, led by David Harrison at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, had initially planned to begin feeding the mice rapamycin around middle age. But due to difficulties in manufacturing food that contained adequate amounts of the drug, the hundreds of mice didn't start taking the drug until they were 600 days old – about the equivalent of a 60-year-old human.
Mice on rapamycin, which was first discovered in soil fungus from Easter Island, lived about 10 per cent longer than other mice.
Kaeberlein says that the drug's ability to extend lifespan when taken late in life is "exactly what you'd want from an 'anti-ageing drug'".
"It's set a high bar for the field," agrees David Sinclair, a molecular biologist at Harvard University Medical School in Boston. "It's also the first time that a drug has worked so late in life"
Rapamycin is not perfect, however. It makes a good transplant drug because it slows the expansion of immune cells and stops rejection of the implanted tissue. So scientists will need to determine whether lower doses of the drug can offer humans anti-ageing effects without compromising their immune systems, Kaeberlein says.
Diet clue
Pharmaceutical companies would also be wise to hunt for drugs that act on the same biological pathway as rapamycin. Called TOR, this pathway is involved in a cell's response to nutrients.
Researchers had previously implicated TOR in some of the anti-ageing effects of a sparser diet that have been seen in some animals. Now, in a second study on ageing, there is the first evidence that "caloric restriction" has the same effect in primates.
For up to 20 years, a team led by Richard Weindruch, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, followed 76 rhesus macaques, half of which consumed 30 per cent fewer calories, beginning around adulthood. Today, 37 per cent of the animals on the restricted diet are still alive, compared to just 13 per cent of monkeys who ate a normal amount of food.
"It suggests to me that the fundamental biology of caloric restriction being studied in mice, flies, worms, blah, blah, blah seems to apply nicely to primates," says Weindruch.
"It's to the point now where, if caloric restriction does not extend human lifespan, we're an exception on the planet," Sinclair agrees.
Healthy ageing
Not only did the calorie-restricted animals live longer than other macaques, they also led healthier lives. They were less likely to suffer from heart disease, cancer, neurodegeneration, and diabetes. The monkeys appeared healthier too, says team member Ricki Colman. "Their coats are shinier; they have a younger-looking posture."
The breadth of these improvements is an important sign that calorie restriction slowed the process of ageing and did not simply prevent diseases related to food intake such as diabetes, Weindruch says.
Healthy ageing will also be the metric by which medicines like rapamycin are tested against in humans, says Kaeberlein. "You're never going to do a clinical trial for an anti-ageing drug. You're going to do a clinical study for Alzheimer's or diabetes."
Role of mirror neurons may need a rethink - life - 26 May 2009 - New ScientistDoubt is being cast on the true role of brain neurons that are said to explain empathy, autism and even morality.
Mirror neurons fire both when we perform an action and when we see someone else doing it. The theory is that by simulating action even when watching an act, the neurons allow us to recognise and understand other people's actions and intentions.
However, Alfonso Caramazza at Harvard University and colleagues say their research suggests this theory is flawed.
Neurons that encounter repeated stimulus reduce their successive response, a process called adaptation. If mirror neurons existed in the activated part of the brain, reasoned Caramazza, adaptation should be triggered by both observation and performance.
Theory 'overturned'
To test the theory, his team asked 12 volunteers to watch videos of hand gestures and, when instructed, to mimic the action. However, fMRI scans of the participants' brains showed that the neurons only adapted when gestures were observed then enacted, but not the other way around.
Caramazza says the finding overturns the core theory of mirror neurons that activation is a precursor to recognition and understanding of an action. If after executing an act, "you need to activate the same neurons to recognise the act, then those neurons should have adapted," he says.
Caramazza's results support similar findings by Ilan Dinstein at New York University and his team in 2007.
However, mirror neuron researcher Marco Iacoboni, at the University of California, Los Angeles, thinks the study's basic assumption is flawed. "There is no evidence that mirror neurons adapt," he says.
Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academics of Science (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0902262106)
Edge: EDGE MASTER CLASS 2008—CLASS 4There's new technology emerging from behavioral economics and we are just starting to make use of that. I thought the input of psychology into economics was finished but clearly it's not!
TWO BIG THINGS HAPPENING IN PSYCHOLOGY TODAY (Class 4)
A Talk By Daniel Kahneman
DANIEL KAHNEMAN, a psychologist at Princeton University, is the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. Daniel Kahneman's Edge Bio page.
Brain Music: Putting The Brain's Soundtracks To WorkScienceDaily (Apr. 28, 2009) — Every brain has a soundtrack. Its tempo and tone will vary, depending on mood, frame of mind, and other features of the brain itself. When that soundtrack is recorded and played back -- to an emergency responder, or a firefighter -- it may sharpen their reflexes during a crisis, and calm their nerves afterward.
Over the past decade, the influence of music on cognitive development, learning, and emotional well-being has emerged as a hot field of scientific study. To explore music's potential relevance to emergency response, the Dept of Homeland Security's Science & Technology Directorate (S&T) has begun a study into a form of neurotraining called "Brain Music" that uses music created in advance from listeners' own brain waves to help them deal with common ailments like insomnia, fatigue, and headaches stemming from stressful environments. The concept of Brain Music is to use the frequency, amplitude, and duration of musical sounds to move the brain from an anxious state to a more relaxed state.
"Strain comes with an emergency response job, so we are interested in finding ways to help these workers remain at the top of their game when working and get quality rest when they go off a shift," said S&T Program Manager Robert Burns. "Our goal is to find new ways to help first responders perform at the highest level possible, without increasing tasks, training, or stress levels."
If the brain "composes" the music, the first job of scientists is to take down the notes, and that is exactly what Human Bionics LLC of Purcellville, VA does. Each recording is converted into two unique musical compositions designed to trigger the body's natural responses, for example, by improving productivity while at work, or helping adjust to constantly changing work hours.
The compositions are clinically shown to promote one of two mental states in each individual: relaxation – for reduced stress and improved sleep; and alertness – for improved concentration and decision-making. Each 2-6 minute track is a composition performed on a single instrument, usually a piano. The relaxation track may sound like a "melodic, subdued Chopin sonata," while the alertness track may have "more of a Mozart sound," says Burns. (It seems there's a classical genius—or maybe two genii—in all of us.
Listen to an instrumental alert track at http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/multimedia/snapshots/st_brain_music_active.mp3.
After their brain waves are set to music, each person is given a specific listening schedule, personalized to their work environment and needs. If used properly, the music can boost productivity and energy levels, or trigger a body's natural responses to stress.
The music created by Human Bionics LLC is being tested as part of the S&T Readiness Optimization Program (ROP), a wellness program that combines nutrition education and neurotraining to evaluate a cross population of first responders, including federal agents, police, and firefighters. A selected group of local area firefighters will be the first emergency responders taking part in the project.
The Brain Music component of the ROP is derived from patented technology developed at Moscow University to use brain waves as a feedback mechanism to correct physiological conditions.
In British philosopher John Locke's terms, Brain Music brings new meaning to his famous phrase: "A sound mind in a sound body, is a short, but full description of a happy state in this World."
And then there's always Cervantes, who coined, "He who sings scares away his woes."
Brain quirk could help explain financial crisis - life - 24 March 2009 - New ScientistWith hindsight, the causes of the current global financial meltdown seem obvious, even predictable. Now, brain imaging offers one explanation for why so few investors challenged foolhardy fiscal advice.
Our brains raise few objections when presented with seemingly expert guidance, new research suggests.
"Most average people have this tendency to turn off their own capacity for making judgments when an expert comes into the picture," says Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist at Emory University in Atlanta.
Risk circuits
Berns' team presented 24 young volunteers with a simple choice: accept a sure payment or bet on a riskier, yet higher-paying lottery.
When weighing this decision, volunteers activated brain circuits known to calculate risk and reward. In line with previous research, the team noticed more brain activation in these dopamine-delivering areas when the expected reward was higher.
"When advice is not there, when people are making these judgments on their own, you can make clear correlations with expected value in the lottery and areas associated with the dopamine system," he says.
To see how subjects respond to financial advice, the team told volunteers that Charles Noussair, an economics professor at Emory who advises the US Federal Reserve, would offer his opinion on whether they should accept the easy money or take a chance.
Acting blindly
In reality, a computer program told volunteers to accept the sure thing if it added up to about 20% or more of the lottery sweepstake.
Volunteers usually took this advice blindly, brain scans suggest. Correlations between increased potential reward and brain activity disappeared when volunteers received the advice.
"That suggests that the normal mechanisms people use to evaluate risk and reward are not being used when you have an expert telling you what to do," Berns says.
"I think this explains a lot, if not everything, about the current market situation," he adds, urging people to take expert advice – fiscal, medical or otherwise – more shrewdly. "In my opinion, decision-making shouldn't be handed over to anyone, expert or otherwise."
Stimulus Psych 101: Economics vs. PoliticsPolitically Right and Economically Wrong: A Numbers Game Reveals the Psychology Behind the Stimulus
Commentary
By JOHN ALLEN PAULOS
March. 1, 2009 —
An intriguing mathematical-psychological game sheds a little light on the size of the stimulus package recently passed by Congress. In particular it illustrates the truism that passing legislation calls for an understanding of the interplay between politics and economics.
First, note that most economists believe that the $800 billion ($0.8 trillion) stimulus is too small to do the job. They say the package needs to be much greater to close the $2.9 trillion gap between what the Congressional Budget Office forecasts the economy is capable of producing over the next three years and what it's likely to produce without the stimulus.
Further argument and arm-twisting might reduce the gap further, but several iterations probably would be required to get something sufficiently effective. Recognizing political realities is essential, however. If the stimulus package presented had been significantly bigger, it likely would have failed.
The 80 Percent Game
Now for the game which I sometimes present to my classes.
Consider a situation in which people in a large group are each asked to independently choose a number (not necessarily a whole number) between 0 and 100. They are further directed to pick the number that they think will be closest to 80 percent of the average number chosen by the group.
The one who comes closest will receive $10,000 for his efforts. (This latter offer I don't make to my students.) Stop for a bit and think what number you would pick.
Some in the group might reason that if people choose numbers at random, the average number chosen is likely to be 50 and so these people would guess 40, which is 80 percent of 50. Others, looking around at the thoughtful looks on people's faces, might anticipate that many of them will reason in the same way and guess 40 too, and so they would guess 32 (or perhaps a bit higher), which is 80 percent of 40.
Still others, seeing the intense concentration of other smart people in the group, might anticipate that they will guess 32 (or so) for the same reason and so they would guess 25.6 (or a bit higher), which is 80 percent of 32.
If the group continues to play this game, they will gradually learn to engage in ever more iterations of this meta-reasoning about others' reasoning until eventually they all reach the optimal response, which is 0. Since they all want to choose a number equal to 80 percent of the average, the only way they can all do this is by choosing 0, the only number equal to 80 percent of itself.
Choosing 0 leads to the so-called Nash equilibrium of this game. It results when individuals modify their actions until they can no longer benefit from changing them given what the others' actions are.
Being Right Mathematically vs. Being Right Politically
What makes this problem interesting is that anyone bright enough to cut to the heart of the problem and guess 0 right away is almost certain to be wrong (that is, almost certain not to win the $10,000 prize), since different individuals will engage in different degrees of meta-reasoning about others' reasoning.
Some, to increase their chances, will choose numbers a little above or a little below the natural guesses of 40 or 32 or 25.6 or 20.48. There will be some random guesses as well and some guesses of 50 or more. Unless the group is very unusual, few will guess 0 initially. Not everyone reasons so trenchantly.
If someone plays this game only once or twice, guessing the average of all the guesses is as much a matter of reading the others' intelligence and psychology as it is of following an idea to its logical conclusion.
By the same token and to return to the stimulus, understanding the constraints on legislators is often as important as assessing the legislation under consideration. And it's likely to be more difficult as well.
Economics is nowhere near as clear-cut as mathematics and the above analogy is no doubt a bit strained, but it is nevertheless suggestive. Insisting on being right mathematically (that is, choosing 0 as your number) or right economically (enacting a much larger stimulus bill) is not always a smart thing to do.
It's certainly not the same thing as being right psychologically (gauging others' number choices) or being right politically (assessing others' partisan commitments).
Some variant of this idea also helps answer the question perennially asked of academics and others: If you're so smart, why aren't you rich? The inverse question posed to financiers and Wall Street types remains unanswered: If you're so dumb, why are you rich?
The Day The Sun Brought DarknessTwenty years later, the March 1989 'Quebec Blackout' has reached legendary stature, at least among electrical engineers and space scientists. It is a dramatic example of how solar storms can affect us even here on the ground. Fortunately, storms as powerful as this are rather rare. It takes quite a solar wallop to cause anything like the conditions leading up to a Quebec-style blackout. Typical solar activity 'sunspot' cycles can produce least two or three large storms, so it really is just a matter of chance whether one will cause a blackout or not. As it is for hurricanes and tornadoes, the more we can learn about the sun's 'space weather,' the better we can prepare for the next storm when it arrives.
Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe - space - 23 March 2009 - New ScientistIt is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma - charged high-energy particles - some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection (see "When hell comes to Earth"). If one should hit the Earth's magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.
The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth's magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer's magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer's copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.
Bowel gene linked to a type of autism - health - 11 March 2009 - New ScientistON TOP of dealing with social and learning difficulties, people with autism also run an unusually high risk of bowel disorders. Now a gene variant has been found that may explain this link.
A large proportion of people with autism also have problems such as chronic diarrhoea, constipation or food intolerance. The MET gene, which has been linked to autism, is known to play a role in the repair of damaged gut tissue, so Daniel Campbell of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, thought this gene might be involved.
Sure enough, in 118 families in which at least one child had both autism and gut disorders, his team found that a particular variant of the MET gene was more common in the child with autism than in its parents, suggesting the gene played a role in their autism. By contrast this was not the case in 96 families where the children with autism did not have gut problems, suggesting their autism had a different cause (Pediatrics, DOI: 10.1542/peds.2008-0819).
Knowing the underlying genetic cause of an individual's autism could eventually lead to better ways of treating the condition.
Record-breaking algorithm really packs them in - tech - 06 March 2009 - New ScientistGeeky holidaymakers wanting to take more on a trip, as well as delivery firms trying to maximise loads and storage, could benefit from a new algorithm that packs collections of differently sized 2D shapes into the smallest available space with unprecedented efficiency.
This may seem like a more academic version of the video game Tetris, but the techniques developed can be applied to 3D problems in the real world. Increasing packing efficiency this way would lower the cost and also the environmental impact of shipping.
Fitting a set of objects into the smallest amount of space is such a complex scientific problem that researchers have yet to calculate the single best solution if more than around 20 objects are involved.
To get closer to that optimum fit, researchers pit their algorithms against each other in competitions to solve particular packing problems, such as fitting a collection of differently sized discs inside the smallest circle possible without overlaps. Johannes Schneider's team at the University of Mainz has just smashed all previous records in that disc-packing problem.
New direction
Their new algorithm matched all the records for packing up to 23 different sized discs in the smallest possible circle and broke all those for packing between 26 and 50 discs - challenges set in a previous competition contested by 155 groups from 32 countries.
The secret to the team's success is their algorithm's ability to take backward, as well as forward steps. Packing algorithms usually shuffle the discs again and again, aiming to reduce the space they occupy each time.
But that's rather like asking a mountaineer to find the highest point on Earth by always walking uphill, says Schneider. "Using this approach the mountaineer would climb to the top of a nearby hill, but there he would be stuck."
So Schneider and colleagues' algorithm allows for occasional reverse steps that can unlock better solutions - disc arrangements that take up more space than the previous one, but lead to even more compact packs. The algorithm uses backward moves often at the start of a packing process but they become less frequent as it closes in on the final solution, he says.
Although the new algorithm hasn't solved the packing problem for good, it provides the best solutions to date.
Three dimensions
"Making the use of backtracking moves more explicit is certainly a merit, and one of the main reasons for the successful approach," says Marco Locatelli at the University of Turin, a member of the team that previously held most of those records. However, he points out that packing algorithms improve fast and records rarely stand for long.
Locatelli would like to see how the new algorithm performs in other packing problem scenarios, including in three dimensions, something that Schneider's team plans to explore.
"We now have an algorithm which is able to solve packing problems with [3D] goods of different sizes in general," he says, making it applicable to real-world problems. "Shipping companies face the problem of packing trucks or ships in a way that as many goods as possible can be placed inside."
Schneider also plans to take the order in which objects are packed into account. "For example, the driver of a parcel delivery service must not unload half of his truck in order to get to the parcel which he should deliver to the next customer," he says.
Musicians are fine-tuned to others' emotions - life - 05 March 2009 - New ScientistMusical training might help autistic children to interpret other people's emotions. A study has revealed brain changes involved in playing a musical instrument that seem to enhance your ability to pick up subtle emotional cues in conversation.
"It seems that playing music can help you do all kinds of things better," says Nina Kraus from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. "Musical experience sharpens your hearing not just for music, but for other sounds too."
Earlier studies suggested that musicians are especially good at identifying emotions expressed in speech, such as anger or sadness. But it wasn't clear what kind of brain activity makes the difference.
Trained brain
To find out, Kraus and her colleagues recruited 30 musicians and non-musicians, aged 19 to 35. Entertained by watching a subtitled nature film, they repeatedly heard a baby crying through earphones (hear an example). Using scalp electrodes, the team measured the electrical response to the sounds in each volunteer's brainstem, which links the auditory nerve to the cerebral cortex.
In the musicians, the response to complex parts of the sound, in which the frequency rapidly changes, was especially high. But the musicians had lower responses than non-musicians to simpler sections of the baby's sound.
"It's as though the musicians are saving their neural resources for the complex portions, which the non-musicians didn't respond to particularly well," Kraus told New Scientist.
Both more years of musical experience and learning to play an instrument at a young age increased a musician's response to the complex sounds. That suggests music practice makes the difference, rather than simply having a natural talent for music in the first place.
Therapeutic tool?
"It used to be we thought sensory systems were pretty passive – they took the sound and just passed the information to the cerebral cortex where all the hard work and thinking was done," says Kraus. "But now we're understanding that as we use our sensory systems in an active way, this feeds back and shapes the sensory system all the way down through the brainstem to the ear."
The results suggest musical training might be useful for kids with dyslexia, some of whom have trouble processing sounds.
Often, these children have trouble processing the complex sounds for which musicians develop an especially good ear. Autistic children might also benefit, if improving their responses to complex sounds helps them interpret emotional speech.
It may also be possible that measurements of brainstem responses to sound could help diagnose autism and language disorders in an objective and reliable way.
Bad Marriages Strain Women's Hearts, But Not Men's | LiveScienceAn unhappy marriage can weigh heavily on anyone's heart, but apparently women may suffer the most ill health effects related to heart disease, stroke and diabetes.
Women who felt depressed in strained marriages faced a boosted risk of hypertension, waistline obesity, high blood sugar, high triglycerides and low levels of "good cholesterol" HDL – five factors of metabolic syndrome. Male spouses who felt similarly down in the dumps did not see similar risks.
"The gender difference is important because heart disease is the number-one killer of women as well as men, and we are still learning a lot about how relationship factors and emotional distress are related to heart disease," said Nancy Henry, a psychologist at the University of Utah. She conducted her research as part of a broader university study.
The larger study's data suggests that a history of divorce is linked to heart disease. Psychologists recruited 276 couples who had been married for an average of 20 years and did not already have some cardiovascular disease. The husbands and wives filled out several questionnaires and visited a university clinic to get their health checked.
"The immediate implication is that if you are interested in your cardiovascular risk – and we all should be because it is the leading killer for both genders – we should be concerned about not just traditional risk factors [such as blood pressure and cholesterol] but the quality of our emotional and family lives," said Tim Smith, another University of Utah psychologist heading the larger study.
Smith hypothesized that the hormonal effects of stress could lead to married women's growing waistlines, rising insulin resistance, and unhealthy blood pressure levels.
Medical researchers still debate both the concept and clinical usefulness of lumping such factors together as metabolic syndrome – also known as syndrome X or insulin resistance syndrome.
"It is defined as a syndrome, but there still is controversy in the medical community – what should be included, how the different factors should be measured, whether all the factors hang together as a distinct syndrome or are they just separate things," Henry said.
But she still chose to study metabolic syndrome because there is no question its components are risk factors for cardiovascular disease, and because the syndrome was a possible explanation for how "psychosocial risk factors" in marriage are related to cardiovascular disease.
The study findings are scheduled for presentation at the American Psychosomatic Society's annual meeting on Thursday.
"There is good evidence they [women] should modify some of the things that affect metabolic syndrome – like diet and exercise – but it's a little premature to say they would lower their risk of heart disease if they improved the tone and quality of their marriages – or dumped their husbands," Smith said.
After all, stable marriages have possible health benefits as well – especially if spouses watch out for each other.
Power And The Illusion Of ControlPower And The Illusion Of Control
ScienceDaily (Mar. 4, 2009) — Power holders often seem misguided in their actions. Leaders and commanders of warring nations regularly underestimate the costs in time, money, and human lives required for bringing home a victory.
CEOs of Fortune 500 companies routinely overestimate their capacity to turn mergers and acquisitions into huge profits, leading to financial losses for themselves, their companies, and their stockholders. Even ordinary people seem to take on an air of invincibility after being promoted to a more powerful position. The consequences of these tendencies, especially when present in the world's most powerful leaders, can be devastating.
In a new study, Nathanael Fast and Deborah Gruenfeld at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Niro Sivanathan at the London Business School and Adam Galinsky at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, show that power can literally "go to one's head," causing individuals to think they have more personal control over outcomes than they, in fact, do.
"We conducted four experiments exploring the relationship between power and illusory control - the belief that one has the ability to influence outcomes that are largely determined by chance," said Galinksy, "In each experiment, whether the participant recalled power by an experience of holding power or it was manipulated by randomly assigning participants to Manager-Subordinate roles, it led to perceived control over outcomes that were beyond the reach of the individual. Furthermore, the notion of being able to control a 'chance' result led to unrealistic optimism and inflated self-esteem."
For example, in one experiment, power holders were presented with a pair of dice, offered a reward for predicting the outcome of a roll, and then asked if they would like to roll the dice or have someone else do it for them. Each and every participant in the high power group chose to roll the dice themselves compared to less than 70% of low power and neutral participants, supporting the notion that simply experiencing power can lead an individual to grossly overestimate their abilities, in this case, influencing the outcome of the roll by personally rolling the dice.
These results, reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, have implications for how power, once attained, is maintained or lost. The authors note that positive illusions can be adaptive, helping power holders make the seemingly impossible possible. But the relationship between power and illusory control might also contribute directly to losses in power, by causing leaders to make poor choices. They conclude that "the illusion of personal control might be one of the ways in which power often leads to its own demise."
Youthful infertility balanced by late-blooming ovaries - health - 04 March 2009 - New ScientistYOUNG women with fertility problems caused by polycystic ovary syndrome may have reason to take heart. Over a lifetime their chances of having children appear just as good as other women's, perhaps because egg production increases as they grow older.
About 7 per cent of reproductive-age women have PCOS, which features irregular periods, high levels of male hormones and greater numbers of developing follicles, or cysts, on the surface of their ovaries. In a normal ovary, a few follicles appear each month, one or two of which mature and release an egg; the rest die off. Women with PCOS ovulate less often because their extra follicles interfere with normal hormonal activity and stop follicles maturing past a certain stage. This is how PCOS lowers fertility.
Now it looks like that is not the end of the story. Miriam Hudecova and colleagues at Uppsala University in Sweden interviewed 91 women who were 35 or older and had been diagnosed with PCOS when younger. They found the women had undergone just as many pregnancies and borne as many babies, on average, as PCOS-free women of the same age. Some of the women with PCOS had been treated for infertility, but more than two-thirds had become pregnant without such help.
Hudecova also examined most of the women and found that the ovaries of the older women with PCOS showed signs of being more active, with better hormone levels and more eggs available, than those of control women of the same age (Human Reproduction, DOI: 10.1093/humrep/den482). "As they get older, the chance of getting pregnant may actually be higher," says Hudecova.
As women with polycystic ovarian syndrome get older the chance of getting pregnant may be higher
There may be an explanation for this. As women age, fewer follicles are produced each month, and in most this reduces fertility. With PCOS, however, fewer follicles may have the opposite effect: it may stop the hormonal interference and cause follicles to release eggs normally.
The hypothesis is backed up by other studies that have shown that the menstrual cycles of women with PCOS tend to become more regular as they age (Human Reproduction, vol 15, p 24). Marcelle Cedars, a reproductive endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, points out that it also chimes with a recent finding that hormone treatments can coax immature follicles to produce eggs.
"They might hit their reproductive peak a little bit later than other women," says Richard Legro, a gynaecologist at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania. "When we see more data to that effect we'll revise what we tell them."
BBC NEWS | Technology | 'Carbon cost' of Google revealedTwo search requests on the internet website Google produce "as much carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle", according to a Harvard University academic.
US physicist Alex Wissner-Gross claims that a typical Google search on a desktop computer produces about 7g CO2.
However, these figures were disputed by Google, who say a typical search produced only 0.2g of carbon dioxide.
A recent study by American research firm Gartner suggested that IT now causes two percent of global emissions.
Dr Wissner-Gross's study claims that two Google searches on a desktop computer produces 14g of CO2, which is the roughly the equivalent of boiling an electric kettle.
Carbon emissions
The Harvard academic argues that these carbon emissions stem from the electricity used by the computer terminal and by the power consumed by the large data centres operated by Google around the world.
If you want to supply really great and fast result, then that's going to take extra energy
Dr Alex Wissner-Gross
Although the American search engine is renowned for returning fast results, Dr Wissner-Gross says it can only do so because it uses several data banks at the same time.
Speaking to the BBC, he said a combination of clients, networks, servers and people's home computers all added up to a lot of energy usage.
"Google isn't any worse than any other data centre operator. If you want to supply really great and fast result, then that's going to take extra energy to do so," he said.
Dr Wissner-Gross said he was working on a website called co2stats.com which helps companies identify "energy inefficient" aspects of their websites.
In a statement on its official blog, Google said that Dr Wissner-Gross' figures were "many times too high."
The firm said that a typical search returned a result in less than 0.2 seconds and that the search itself only used its servers for a few thousandths of a second. This, said Google, amounted to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search - equivalent to 0.2g of CO2.
"We've made great strides to reduce the energy used by our data centres, but we still want clean and affordable sources of electricity for the power that we do use," said Google in its statement.
"In 2007, we co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. This non-profit consortium is committed to cutting the energy consumed by computers in half by 2010 and so reducing global CO2 emissions by 54 million tons per year. That's a lot of kettles."
INFO-PRIM-NEO2009-02-27/15:56 A representation of the Voievod International Federation of fighting in a Moldovan style was founded in Iran. A seminar on familiarizing Iranians with the traditions and princes of the Moldavian history unfolded in Tehran, on February, from 20 to 22, Nicolae Pascaru, the president on the Voievod National Federation of Moldova, stated on Friday, February 27, at a news conference.
The International Federation of fighting in Moldovan style was founded five years ago by businessman Gabriel Stati and has representations in 19 countries of the world, Info-Prim Neo reports.
39 owners of the black belt from different regions of Iran participated in the seminar. Nicolae Pascaru conducted a demonstration of the Moldovan fighting style. “Iranians are ready to practice this fight that seemed to them very interesting. We were surprised to find out from our Iranian friends that the first relationships of our peoples were made in the period of Stefan the Great,” Nicolae Pascaru said.
According to “The modern voievod’s doctrine,” each country prepares its voievods in conformity with the International Federation's Regulation, admitting the practice of the fighting elements in a local style.
Iran became the 19th country, where opening the Moldovan fighting representation “Voievod” took place. Representations are to be opened in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
The Voievod National Federation has 3, 500 members, including from the left bank of the Nistru. At the end of March, the Voievod International Federation will hold its first edition of the European and Asian Championship of martial fights in Moldova, with the participation of about 600 young people from 10 countries.
How to survive the coming century - environment - 25 February 2009 - New ScientistExplore an interactive map of the world warmed by 4 °C
ALLIGATORS basking off the English coast; a vast Brazilian desert; the mythical lost cities of Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai; and 90 per cent of humanity vanished. Welcome to the world warmed by 4 °C.
Clearly this is a vision of the future that no one wants, but it might happen. Fearing that the best efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions may fail, or that planetary climate feedback mechanisms will accelerate warming, some scientists and economists are considering not only what this world of the future might be like, but how it could sustain a growing human population. They argue that surviving in the kinds of numbers that exist today, or even more, will be possible, but only if we use our uniquely human ingenuity to cooperate as a species to radically reorganise our world.
The good news is that the survival of humankind itself is not at stake: the species could continue if only a couple of hundred individuals remained. But maintaining the current global population of nearly 7 billion, or more, is going to require serious planning.
Four degrees may not sound like much - after all, it is less than a typical temperature change between night and day. It might sound quite pleasant, like moving to Florida from Boston, say, or retiring from the UK to southern Spain. An average warming of the entire globe by 4 °C is a very different matter, however, and would render the planet unrecognisable from anything humans have ever experienced. Indeed, human activity has and will have such a great impact that some have proposed describing the time from the 18th century onward as a new geological era, marked by human activity. "It can be considered the Anthropocene," says Nobel prizewinning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.
A 4 °C rise could easily occur. The 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose conclusions are generally accepted as conservative, predicted a rise of anywhere between 2 °C and 6.4 °C this century. And in August 2008, Bob Watson, former chair of the IPCC, warned that the world should work on mitigation and adaptation strategies to "prepare for 4 °C of warming".
A key factor in how well we deal with a warmer world is how much time we have to adapt. When, and if, we get this hot depends not only on how much greenhouse gas we pump into the atmosphere and how quickly, but how sensitive the world's climate is to these gases. It also depends whether "tipping points" are reached, in which climate feedback mechanisms rapidly speed warming. According to models, we could cook the planet by 4 °C by 2100. Some scientists fear that we may get there as soon as 2050.
If this happens, the ramifications for life on Earth are so terrifying that many scientists contacted for this article preferred not to contemplate them, saying only that we should concentrate on reducing emissions to a level where such a rise is known only in nightmares.
"Climatologists tend to fall into two camps: there are the cautious ones who say we need to cut emissions and won't even think about high global temperatures; and there are the ones who tell us to run for the hills because we're all doomed," says Peter Cox, who studies the dynamics of climate systems at the University of Exeter, UK. "I prefer a middle ground. We have to accept that changes are inevitable and start to adapt now."
Bearing in mind that a generation alive today might experience the scary side of these climate predictions, let us head bravely into this hotter world and consider whether and how we could survive it with most of our population intact. What might this future hold?
The last time the world experienced temperature rises of this magnitude was 55 million years ago, after the so-called Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event. Then, the culprits were clathrates - large areas of frozen, chemically caged methane - which were released from the deep ocean in explosive belches that filled the atmosphere with around 5 gigatonnes of carbon. The already warm planet rocketed by 5 or 6 °C, tropical forests sprang up in ice-free polar regions, and the oceans turned so acidic from dissolved carbon dioxide that there was a vast die-off of sea life. Sea levels rose to 100 metres higher than today's and desert stretched from southern Africa into Europe.
While the exact changes would depend on how quickly the temperature rose and how much polar ice melted, we can expect similar scenarios to unfold this time around. The first problem would be that many of the places where people live and grow food would no longer be suitable for either. Rising sea levels - from thermal expansion of the oceans, melting glaciers and storm surges - would drown today's coastal regions in up to 2 metres of water initially, and possibly much more if the Greenland ice sheet and parts of Antarctica were to melt. "It's hard to see west Antarctica's ice sheets surviving the century, meaning a sea-level rise of at least 1 or 2 metres," says climatologist James Hansen, who heads NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "CO2 concentrations of 550 parts per million [compared with about 385 ppm now] would be disastrous," he adds, "certainly leading to an ice-free planet, with sea level about 80 metres higher... and the trip getting there would be horrendous."
Association for Psychological ScienceHow We Think Before We Speak: Making Sense of Sentences
We engage in numerous discussions throughout the day, about a variety of topics, from work assignments to the Super Bowl to what we are having for dinner that evening. We effortlessly move from conversation to conversation, probably not thinking twice about our brain's ability to understand everything that is being said to us. How does the brain turn seemingly random sounds and letters into sentences with clear meaning? In a new report in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologist Jos J.A. Van Berkum from the Max Planck Institute in The Netherlands describes recent experiments using brain waves to understand how we are able to make sense of sentences.
In these experiments, Van Berkum and his colleagues examined Event Related Potentials (or ERPs) as people read or heard critical sentences as part of a longer text, or placed in some other type of context. ERPs are changes in brain activity that occur when we hear a certain stimulus, such as a tone or a word. Due to their speed, ERPs are useful for detecting the incredibly fast processes involved in understanding language.
Analysis of the ERPs has consistently indicated just how quickly the brain is able to relate unfolding sentences to earlier ones. For example, Van Berkum and colleagues have shown that listeners only need a fraction of a second to determine that a word is out of place, given what the wider story is about. As soon as listeners hear an unexpected word, their brain generates a specific ERP, the N400 effect (so named because it is a negative deflection peaking around 400 milliseconds). And even more interesting, this ERP will usually occur before the word is even finished being spoken.
In addition to the words themselves, the person speaking them is a crucial component in understanding what is being said. Van Berkum also saw an N400 effect occurring very rapidly when the content of a statement being spoken did not match with the voice of the speaker (e.g. "I have a large tattoo on my back" in an upper-class accent or "I like olives" in a young child's voice). These findings suggest that the brain very quickly classifies someone based on what their voice sounds like and also makes use of social stereotypes to interpret the meaning of what is being said. Van Berkum speculates that "the linguistic brain seems much more 'messy' and opportunistic than originally believed, taking any partial cue that seems to bear on interpretation into account as soon as it can."
But how does the language brain act so fast? Recent findings suggest that, as we read or have a conversation, our brains are continuously trying to predict upcoming information. Van Berkum suggests that this anticipation is a combination of a detailed analysis about what has been said before with taking 'quick-and-dirty' shortcuts to figure out what, most likely, the next bit of information will be.
One important element in keeping up with a conversation is knowing what or whom speakers are actually referring to. For example, when we hear the statement, "David praised Linda because. . .," we expect to find out more about Linda, not David. Van Berkum and colleagues showed that when listeners heard "David praised Linda because he. . .," there was a very strong ERP effect occurring with the word "he," of the type that is also elicited by grammatical errors. Although the pronoun is grammatically correct in this statement, the ERP occurred because the brain was just not expecting it. This suggests that the brain will sometimes ignore the rules of grammar when trying to comprehend sentences.
These findings reveal that, as we make sense of an unfolding sentence, our brains very rapidly draw upon a wide range of information, including what was stated previously and who the speaker is, in helping us understand what is being said to us. Sentence understanding is not just about diligently combining stored word meanings. The brain rapidly throws in everything it knows, and it is always looking ahead.
The Atlantic Online | March 2009 | How the Crash Will Reshape America | Richard Florida“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” The United States, whatever its flaws, has seldom wasted its crises in the past. On the contrary, it has used them, time and again, to reinvent itself, clearing away the old and making way for the new. Throughout U.S. history, adaptability has been perhaps the best and most quintessential of American attributes. Over the course of the 19th century’s Long Depression, the country remade itself from an agricultural power into an industrial one. After the Great Depression, it discovered a new way of living, working, and producing, which contributed to an unprecedented period of mass prosperity. At critical moments, Americans have always looked forward, not back, and surprised the world with our resilience. Can we do it again?
Honeybees under attack on all fronts - environment - 16 February 2009 - New ScientistTHE world's honeybees appear to be dying off in horrifying numbers, and now consensus is starting to emerge on the reason why: it seems there is no one cause. Infections, lack of food, pesticides and breeding - none catastrophic on their own - are having a synergistic effect, pushing bee survival to a lethal tipping point. A somewhat anti-climactic conclusion it may be, but appreciating this complexity - and realising there will be no magic bullet - may be the key to saving the insects.
A third of our food relies on bees for pollination. Both the US and UK report losing a third of their bees last year. Other European countries have seen major die-offs too: Italy, for example, said it lost nearly half its bees last year. The deaths are now spreading to Asia, with reports in India and suspected cases in China.
But while individual "sub-lethal stresses" such as infections are implicated, we know little about how they add together. The situation should become clearer in the next few years as the US government, the EU and others are pouring money into bee research. The UK, for example, has doubled its annual research budget, allocating £400,000 a year for the next five years.
On top of that, the UK National Bee Unit will get £2.3 million to map the problem. This money is urgently needed, says Peter Neumann of the Swiss Bee Research Centre in Berne, who runs COLLOSS, a network of researchers studying colony loss in 36 countries. "We don't have the data to assess the situation in Europe, never mind the world," he says.
The main stress facing bees is the varroa mite, a parasite from Siberia that has now spread everywhere but Australia. Mite infestations steeply reduce bees' resistance to viral infection. Worryingly, the mites are developing resistance to the pesticides used to control them, forcing beekeepers to use methods that are often less effective.
French and German beekeepers blame their losses on insecticides called neonicotinoids - but France banned them 10 years ago and its bees are still dying. Neumann suspects a wider problem, citing experiments showing that agricultural chemicals that are safe for bees when used alone are lethal in combination. "Farmers increasingly combine sprays," he says. They also leave few flowering weeds, depriving bees of essential nutrients from different kinds of pollen, he adds.
Meanwhile viruses may cause a syndrome dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) in the US, in which adult bees abandon their hive, leaving the healthy queen and young bees to die. Diana Cox-Foster of Penn State University in University Park, where the syndrome was first identified, says viruses, including one called IAPV, duplicate the symptoms of CCD in her greenhouse studies. There is no IAPV or CCD in the UK, says Mike Brown of the National Bee Unit, yet bees are still dying.
At the root of the vulnerability to these stresses could be the way breeding has affected the bees' genetic make-up. By being highly selected for calmness and honey production, honeybees have lost other useful characteristics, says Francis Ratnieks of the University of Sussex, UK. In research to be published in the journal Heredity, he describes a way to breed for "hygienic" bees that, unlike most commercial bees, clear out infected young and can resist varroa mites.
Perception of Being “In Control” Explored | Psych Central NewsThe underlying sense of being in control of our own actions is challenged by new research which demonstrates that the choices we make internally are weak and easily overridden compared to when we are told which choice to make.
The research, which is published in Cerebral Cortex, is one of the first neuroscientific studies to look at changing one’s mind in situations where the initial decision was one’s own ‘free choice.’
Free choices can be defined as actions occurring when external cues are largely absent — for example, deciding which dish to choose from a restaurant menu.
The researchers asked study participants to choose which of two buttons they would press in response to a subsequent signal, while their brain activity was recorded using EEG (electroencephalogram).
Some choices were made freely by the volunteers and other choices were instructed by arrows on a screen in front of them. The volunteers’ choices were occasionally interrupted by a symbol asking them to change their mind, after they had made their choice, but before they had actually pressed the button.
First author Stephen Fleming of University College London Institute of Neurology, said: “When people had chosen for themselves which action to make, we found that the brain activity involved in changing one’s mind, or reprogramming these ‘free’ choices was weak, relative to reprogramming of choices that were dictated by an external stimulus.
“This suggests that the brain is very flexible when changing a free choice – rather like a spinning coin, a small nudge can push it one way or the other very easily.
“The implication is that, despite our feelings of being in control, our own internal choices are flexible compared to those driven by external stimuli, such as braking in response to a traffic light. This flexibility might be important - in a dynamic world, we need to be able to change our plans when necessary.”
Professor Patrick Haggard, UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, added: “Our study has two implications for our understanding of human volition. First, our brains contain a mechanism to go back and change our mind about our choices, after a choice is made but before the action itself.
“Our internal decisions are not set in stone, but can be re-evaluated right up to the last moment. Second, changing an internal choice in this way seems to be easier than changing a choice guided by external instructions.
“We often think about our own internal decisions as having the strength of conviction, but our results suggest that the brain is smart enough to make us flexible about what we want. The ability to flexibly adjust our decisions about what we do in the current situation is a major component of intelligence, and has a clear survival value.”
Economist.comDICTATORS and authoritarians will disagree, but democracies work better. It has long been held that decisions made collectively by large groups of people are more likely to turn out to be accurate than decisions made by individuals. The idea goes back to the “jury theorem” of Nicolas de Condorcet, an 18th-century French philosopher who was one of the first to apply mathematics to the social sciences. Now it is becoming clear that group decisions are also extremely valuable for the success of social animals, such as ants, bees, birds and dolphins. And those animals may have a thing or two to teach people about collective decision-making.
Animals that live in groups make two sorts of choices: consensus decisions in which the group makes a single collective choice, as when house-hunting rock ants decide where to settle; and combined decisions, such as the allocation of jobs among worker bees.
Condorcet’s theory describes consensus decisions, outlining how democratic decisions tend to outperform dictatorial ones. If each member of a jury has only partial information, the majority decision is more likely to be correct than a decision arrived at by an individual juror. Moreover, the probability of a correct decision increases with the size of the jury. But things become more complicated when information is shared before a vote is taken. People then have to evaluate the information before making a collective decision. This is what bees do, and they do it rather well, according to Christian List of the London School of Economics, who has studied group decision-making in humans and animals along with Larissa Conradt of the University of Sussex, in England.
The runaway queen
In a study reported in a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, researchers led by Dr List looked at colonies of honeybees (Apis mellifera), which in late spring or early summer divide once they reach a certain size. The queen goes off with about two-thirds of the worker bees to live in a new home leaving a daughter queen in the nest with the remaining worker bees. Among the bees that depart are scouts that search for the new nest site and report back using a waggle dance to advertise suitable locations. The longer the dance, the better the site. After a while, other scouts start to visit the sites advertised by their compatriots and, on their return, also perform more waggle dances. The process eventually leads to a consensus on the best site and the swarm migrates. The decision is remarkably reliable, with the bees choosing the best site even when there are only small differences between two alternatives.
But exactly how do bees reach such a robust consensus? To find out, Dr List and his colleagues made a computer model of the decision-making process. By tinkering around with it they found that computerised bees that were very good at finding nesting sites but did not share their information dramatically slowed down the migration, leaving the swarm homeless and vulnerable. Conversely, computerised bees that blindly followed the waggle dances of others without first checking whether the site was, in fact, as advertised, led to a swift but mistaken decision. The researchers concluded that the ability of bees to identify quickly the best site depends on the interplay of bees’ interdependence in communicating the whereabouts of the best site and their independence in confirming this information.
This is something members of the European Parliament should think about. In the same journal, Simon Hix, also of the London School of Economics, and his colleagues examined their voting and concluded that, as might be expected, it was along party-political lines even though the incentives to do so were far less than at national parliaments. Dr Hix and his colleagues reckon that European parliamentarians share the collection of information but, unlike the honeybees, they do not necessarily progress to investigating the issues for themselves before taking a vote.
There is danger in blindly following the party line, a danger that the honeybees seem to avoid. Condorcet’s theory fails to consider whether there is an inbuilt bias among a group that comes together to consider a problem. This “groupthink” occurs when people copy one another. According to Dr List: “The swarm manages to block and prevent the kind of groupthink that can bedevil good decision making.” Dr List adds that people demonstrate this kind of bad decision-making when investors pile into a stock and others follow, creating a bubble for which there is no good reason.
Another form of groupthink occurs when people are either isolated from crucial sources of information or dominated by other members of the group, some of whom may have malevolent intent. This too has now been demonstrated in animals. José Halloy of the Free University of Brussels used robotic cockroaches to subvert the behaviour of living cockroaches and control their decision-making process. In his experiment, reported in an earlier issue of Science, the artificial bugs were introduced to the real ones and soon became sufficiently socially integrated that they were perceived as equals. By manipulating the robots, which were in the minority, he was able to persuade the cockroaches to choose an inappropriate shelter—even one which they had rejected before being infiltrated by machines. Could this form the basis of a new way of catching them?
The way animals make collective decisions can be complex. Nigel Franks of the University of Bristol, in England, and his colleagues studied how a species of ants called Temnothorax albipennis establish a new nest. In the Royal Society journal they report how the insects mitigate the disadvantages of making a swift choice. If the ants’ existing nest becomes threatened, the insects send out scouts to seek a new one. How quickly they accomplish this transfer depends not only on how soon the ants agree on the best available site but also on how quickly they can migrate there. When a suitable place is identified, the scouts begin to lead other scouts, which had remained behind to guard the old nest, to the new site. The problem is that if the decision is reached rapidly, as it might have to be in an emergency, then relatively few scouts know the route. It would then take much longer to train all the scouts needed to achieve the transfer, which involves carrying the queen, the workers and the brood to the new nest.
Dr Franks and his colleagues identified a type of behaviour called “reverse tandem runs” that makes the process more efficient. During the carrying phase of migration, the scouts lead other scouts back along the quickest route to the old nest so that more scouts become familiar with the route. Thus the dynamics of collective decision-making are closely entwined with the implementation of these decisions. How this might pertain to choices that people might make is, as yet, unclear. But it does indicate the importance of recruiting active leaders to a cause because, as the ants and bees have discovered, the most important thing about collective decision-making is to get others to follow.
Study: Babies Who Gesture Learn Words Sooner -- Printout -- TIMEChild psychologists — and kindergarten teachers — have long known that when children first show up for school, some of them speak a lot more fluently than others. Psychologists also know that children's socioeconomic status tends to correlate with their language facility. The better off and more educated a child's parents are, the more verbal that child tends to be by school age — and vocabulary skill is a key predictor for success in school. Children from low-income families, who may often start school knowing significantly fewer words than their better-off peers, will struggle for years to make up that ground. (Read about childhood obesity.)
Previous studies have shown that wealthier, educated parents talk to their young children more, using more complex vocabulary and syntax, than parents of lesser means. And these differences may help explain why richer kids start school with richer vocabularies. But what goes on before children can talk, during that phase — familiar to any parent — when communication takes the form of pointing, waving, grabbing and other kinds of baby sign language? Do well-off parents also gesture more to their kids?
Indeed they do, say psychologists Susan Goldin-Meadow and Meredith Rowe of the University of Chicago, who published a study in the Feb. 13 issue of Science. The researchers found that at 14 months of age, babies already showed a wide range of "speaking" ability through gestures, and that those differences were correlated with their socioeconomic background and how frequently their parents used gestures to communicate. High-income, better-educated parents gestured more frequently to their children to convey meaning and new concepts, and in turn, their kids gestured more to them. When researchers tested the same children at 54 months of age, those early gesturers turned out to have better vocabulary ability than other students. (See the top 10 children's books of 2008.)
"At 14 months, you can't see a difference with their speech, but you can already see a difference with their gestures," says Goldin-Meadow, a leading expert on gesture. "And children's gestures can be traced back to parents' gestures."
Goldin-Meadow and Rowe's study involved children from 50 Chicago-area families of various ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Annual incomes ranged from less than $15,000 to more than $100,000, and parents' educational level ranged from high school dropout to advanced degree. The researchers videotaped each child at 14 months with his or her primary caregiver (the mother, in 49 out of 50 kids) for 90 minutes while the pair engaged in everyday activities. Those tapes were then transcribed — all speech and gestures seen during the 90 minutes were noted and recorded in code. (See pictures of U.S. Presidents and their children.)
Researchers were interested less in the number of gestures a child or parent made than in their variety — for example, pointing at a doll 10 times would count as only one gesture, but pointing at a doll and then a bed might count as two. During the 90-minute session, 14-month-olds from well-off families used an average of 24 meaningfully different gestures, researchers found, while children from lower-income families used an average of just 13.
"As early as 14 months of age, children in different socioeconomic-status groups may be socialized to communicate more or fewer meanings via gesture," the authors wrote. And those early differences in gestures may help predict the later disparities in vocabulary ability when children show up for school. The current study found that at 54 months old, children from higher-income families understood about 117 words on a comprehension test, compared with 93 for children from lower-income families.
Although Goldin-Meadow is quick to point out that the study shows only an association, not a causation, among socioeconomic status, gestures and vocabulary ability, "we do think there is something going on here," she says. "When parents gesture around their children, the kids might be picking up the gestures and doing it themselves."
Here's how: at 14 months of age, pointing toward an object is the way most kids use gestures. If a parent responds to that gesture by verbally identifying the object — by saying, "That's a doll," for example — children get a head start on growing their nascent vocabularies. "That's a teachable moment, and mothers are teaching the kids the word for an object," says Goldin-Meadow. She also believes that lively gesturing (like clapping) could allow kids to better understand new concepts (like happiness) simply by giving them a visceral way to express them.
That last theory offers the possibility that teachers may be able to use gesture to help school-age kids solidify old ideas and learn new ones. In separate research, Goldin-Meadow found that when children were asked to solve and explain a series of math problems, those who were asked to gesture while they did so were more likely to learn new problem-solving strategies and perform better on future math problems than were kids who did not use gestures. Goldin-Meadow believes that prompting children to gesture gives them the ability to express ideas they had never been able to express before. "I'd recommend teachers encourage their kids to gesture, because it makes them more receptive to teaching," she says. "It allows teachers to have a better understanding of what their kids are understanding."
Visual Decline As We Age: Genetics Or Environment?ScienceDaily (Feb. 11, 2009) — Which has a larger impact on the "normal" decline of visual function as we age, genetic or environmental factors? This question is explored in the February issue of Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
Vision worsens for most of us as we age, even in the absence of eye diseases such as glaucoma or AMD. Elders who have good visual acuity (20/25 vision or better) may have trouble driving at night or adjusting when they move between indoor and outdoor light. Some declines are optic, such as presbyopia, reduced flexibility of the eye's lens, which causes poorer near vision for many people after age 40. Other declines are neuronal, related to the eye's ability to send images to the brain. Since crucial functions like reading and memory depend on vision, it is important to understand how "normal" aging occurs and discover what can be done to delay or prevent reduced function. In the first investigation of heredity's impact on neuronal visual decline, Ruth E. Hogg, PhD, of the University of Melbourne, Australia, and her colleagues used a classic twin study to explore genetic and environmental factors.
Study participants were a cohort of the AMD twin study by the University of Melbourne Centre for Eye Research, comprised of eighty-four twins (42 pairs, 21 identical and 21fraternal) between the ages of 57 and 75 who met study criteria for visual acuity and absence of eye disease. In each person the eye with the best visual acuity (or the right eye if acuity was equal in both eyes) was tested for adaptation to light level changes, for color detection, and for detection of gray tone gradations between image and background, termed contrast sensitivity. Taken together, these tests assess key visual functions needed in daily life. When test results showed that a visual ability declined at about the same age in identical twins, the trait was assumed to be under genetic control, and when the decline occurred at different ages, environmental factors were considered dominant. Results for identical twins and fraternal (non-identical) were compared, and when concordance between scores was higher for identical than for fraternal pairs, genetics was assumed to be the controlling factor.
Genetic factors appear to be strong determinants of sharp visual acuity and color discrimination, functions performed by cone cells pathways in the eye's retina, the tissue at the back of the eye that converts light into electronic images for relay to the brain. Genetic factors were not strongly correlated with night vision and the ability to adapt to light level changes, which are performed by retinal rod cells, implying that environmental influences are important to those functions. Autopsies and other studies have found that substantially more rod than cone cells are lost as eyes age. The flow of nutrients across the retinal membrane appears to be more important for rod cell than for cone cell function, and it is here that environmental factors—such as smoking, deficient nutrition, excessive sunlight exposure, and inflammation---may influence visual decline. Rod cell deterioration is accepted as a component of both general visual decline and age-related diseases like AMD, the most common cause of visual disability in elders.
"Our results support clinical and research efforts now underway to slow or stop age-related vision decline by modifying lifestyle factors and/or using specific medications," says Dr. Hogg.
Love Makes Kids Smarter | LiveScienceFor some odd reason, it takes constant reminders that we primates need nurturing.
In a recent study of 46 baby chimpanzee orphans, Kim Bard of the University of Portsmouth in England and her colleagues demonstrated that primate babies that have tight relationships with mother figures do much better on cognitive tests than babies who receive only the basics of food, shelter, and friendship with peers.
But this is not breaking news. In fact, it's old news.
In the 1950s, Harry Harlow conducted a series of experiments with baby rhesus monkeys that showed, without a doubt, that lack of love and comfort makes for a crazy monkey.
Harlow constructed a cage that included a wire monkey "mother" topped with a plastic face. In this wire Mom he inserted a bottle. The cages also held an alternative to the wire mother, the same wire and plastic contraption but covered with terry cloth. The baby monkeys spent all their time clinging to the cloth mother and only went to the wire mother to feed, demonstrating that a soft touch beats something to eat any day.
But even more interesting, Harlow's experiments produced really nutty adult monkeys, females who were unable to mother themselves because they had no idea what mother love might be.
Further, Harlow and pals put little monkeys into contraptions that isolated them from others, visually, physically, and even out of hearing, and the babies became despondent. The good news was that the researchers were also pretty successful at reversing the psychological damage done to these animals by slowing introducing happy little touchy-feely peer monkeys into their cages as therapists.
Harlow's monkey work was important because, at the time, pediatricians, child care "experts," and everybody's grandmother had a "no touch, no comfort" policy toward children. They adamantly advised parents not to respond to crying babies, felt infants should sleep alone to grow up independent, and for God's sake put that kid down.
But Harlow's work changed all that. Mothers were soon permitted to have their newborns next to them in the hospital, and these days no one looks askance at a baby in a sling.
The current chimp research builds on Harlow's work by showing that mother love doesn't just make for a psychologically well-adjusted child, it also makes for a smart kid. Bard and colleagues evaluated the cognitive abilities of the chimps when they were 12 months old with standard human tests for children of that age, tests that ask little kids to imitate squiggles on paper and pick up a cup to find a rock.
The highly nurtured chimps did better than the ones without a history of attachment, and what do you know, the well-nurtured chimps did even better than human kids on this pint-sized IQ test.
And so we hear it once again. We are primates, social animals which need attachment and love. We need to be held and talked to and made to feel that at least one person wants to be with us all the time. And if we get that kind of connection, we are bound to be fine, even better than fine.
Can experiences be passed on to offspring? - life - 06 February 2009 - New ScientistWHAT was your mother up to before you were even a twinkle in her eye? You might not think it matters, but it seems that in mice at least, mothers that receive mental training before they become pregnant can pass on its cognitive benefits to their young.
Previous studies in both people and animals have shown that a mother's experiences while pregnant can affect her offspring's gene expression and health, even years later. However, it was not known if experiences prior to pregnancy had an effect.
Larry Feig at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston and his colleagues bred "knockout" mice that lacked a gene called Ras-GRF-2, causing them to have a memory defect. Normally, if mice in a cage receive a shock to their feet, they freeze in fear if they are then placed back into the same cage. In contrast, Ras-GRF2 knockout mice did not associate the cage with fear.
Before they reached adolescence, the team kept these knockout mice in a cage filled with toys for two weeks. Such "enriched environments" are known to enhance learning and memory. In the knockout mice, the enriched cage was enough to compensate for their memory defect: when tested on the fear task, they associated the shock with the cage, like normal mice.
To see if this compensation could be passed on to young, the researchers waited for these enriched knockout mice to reach sexual maturity, bred them and tested their offspring on the fear task. Despite being reared by an "unenriched" knockout foster mother - to rule out the effects of spending time with a mouse they could learn directly from - the offspring associated the electric shock with the cage, just like their enriched mothers and those without the genetic defect.
In contrast, the offspring of knockout mice who did not receive the enrichment did not associate the shock with the cage (Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.5057-08.2009).
This effect was only seen in offspring whose knockout mothers had an enriched cage: having an enriched knockout father but a normal knockout mother was not enough to remedy the defect in the offspring.
As the offspring had the same genetic defect as their mothers, the researchers attribute the enhanced cognition in these mice to the time their mothers spent in the enriched cage prior to becoming pregnant.
The effect was not passed on to a third generation and was only inherited if the offspring were conceived within three months of enrichment. So the researchers suspect that the mother passes on this cognitive effect during gestation, perhaps by releasing hormones that prompt "epigenetic" chemical markers to appear on her unborn child's genes, regulating their expression after birth.
Moshe Szyf at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, calls the work "remarkable". "The mother can modulate the intellectual capacity of her young," he says. "If it happens in humans it has immense implications." But he wishes Feig had pinned down exactly how the cognitive effects are inherited. "It smells like epigenetics, but there's no proof."
