500 Years of Women in Art

or for better resolution/loading click here

Deep Religion

Organ music 'instils religious feelings'
By Jonathan Amos
BBC News Online science staff, in Salford

People who experience a sense of spirituality in church may be reacting to the extreme bass sound produced by some organ pipes.

Many churches and cathedrals have organ pipes that are so long they emit infrasound which at a frequency lower than 20 Hertz is largely inaudible to the human ear.

But in a controlled experiment in which infrasound was pumped into a concert hall, UK scientists found they could instil strange feelings in the audience at will.

These included an extreme sense of sorrow, coldness, anxiety and even shivers down the spine.

Sound 'gun'

Infrasound has become the subject of intense study in recent years. Researchers have found that some animals, such as elephants, can communicate with low-frequency calls.

Infrasound can be detected at volcanoes and may provide a way to predict eruptions.


And recent work by some of the scientists involved in this latest study found that hauntings - the feeling that something or someone else unseen is in a room or building - may also be explained by the presence of infrasound.

To test the impact on an audience of extreme bass notes from an organ pipe, researchers constructed a seven-metre-long "infrasonic cannon" which they placed at the back of the Purcell Room, a concert hall in South London.

They then invited 750 people to report their feelings after listening to pieces of contemporary music intermittently laced sound from the cannon, played a 17 Hz at levels of 6-8 decibels.

Feel the bass

The results showed that odd sensations in the audience increased by an average of 22% when the extreme bass was present.

"It has been suggested that because some organ pipes in churches and cathedrals produce infrasound this could lead to people having weird experiences which they attribute to God," said Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist from University of Hertfordshire.

"Some of the experiences in our audience included 'shivering on my wrist', 'an odd feeling in my stomach', 'increased heart rate', 'feeling very anxious', and 'a sudden memory of emotional loss'.

"This was an experiment done under controlled conditions and it shows infrasound does have an impact, and that has implications... in a religious context and some of the unusual experiences people may be having in certain churches."

Sarah Angliss, an engineer and composer in charge of the project, added: "Organ players have been adding infrasound to the mix for 500 years so maybe we're not the first generation to be 'addicted to bass'."

Turn it up/me on

a sunday ride with the ducati boys

The Infrasound Zoo
Each place in the world has a unique and diverse infrasonic ambience. Although many places share common sources, such as volcanoes, meteors, and storms, the local conditions can lend a listening station a distinctive character. In early infrasound literature, the rich ambient sound field was referred to as the infrasonic zoo, alluding to the variety of exotic beasts captured by our listening systems. The specialist spends hours, sometimes days, examining a particular sound specimen in hopes of inferring where it came from and how it was made. Our ears are remarkable signal processing tools that allow us to recognize very small changes in amplitude and frequency, but only within our hearing range (20Hz-20kHz). One of the techniques we use to grasp these inaudible sounds is to make them audible through time compression (speeding up), pitch shifting (frequency transposition), or other methods.
Check out the University of Hawaii Infrasound Lab Here

Mile High Hamster Love

Published online: 21 May 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070521-1

Viagra cures hamster jetlag
Little blue pill might help people shift their body clock forwards.

Heidi Ledford
Hamsters on viagra could deal more easily with the jetlag of going from New York to Paris.
Getty
It's a safe bet that most people who take sildenafil — better known under its commercial name, Viagra — aren't looking for a good night's rest. But it turns out that the 'little blue pill' commonly used to treat erectile dysfunction is also good for relieving some forms of jetlag. Well, at least in hamsters.

Diego Golombek and his colleagues at the National University of Quilmes in Buenos Aires, Argentina, injected hamsters with sildenafil and then pushed the animals' light/dark schedule ahead by six hours, roughly the equivalent of putting them on a plane from New York to Paris. Hamsters who'd had a dose of sildenafil adjusted their busy wheel-running schedules to the new light regime 50% faster, the team reports in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.

Although the results seem to provide relief to jetsetting hamsters, whether sildenafil will have the same effect in humans remains to be seen. If the drug does work in humans, it could be easier to use than melatonin, a hormone used to overcome jetlag that requires several doses to have a significant effect. Golombek's hamsters only needed a single dose of sildenafil to accelerate their adjustment to new time zones. But the drug was administered by injection and it isn't yet known whether taking one of those little blue pills will have the same effect.

And what about the other effects of sildenafil? In hamsters as in humans, sildenafil is, to use the parlance of the field, 'erectogenic'. But Golombek says the hamsters were able to adjust 33% faster to the six-hour time change at what is thought to be suberectogenic doses of the drug. Still, he admits, "We don't know if this will be true in humans."

No drug treatment to reset body clocks works well unless coupled with active exposure to the new light regime. "You still want to get out in the light in the morning and get active," says Martha Gillette, a neurobiologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. "That's still the first stimulus for phase resetting."

Pushed forwards

Sildenafil probably targets both erectile dysfunction and jetlag by boosting levels of a signalling compound known as cGMP. cGMP signals blood-vessel dilation as well as modulation of the body's internal clock in response to changes in light/dark cycles. Sildenafil acts by inhibiting an enzyme that breaks down cGMP, and Golombek found that hamsters treated with the drug accumulated twice as much cGMP in the region of the brain responsible for controlling the body's internal clock.

Previous research has shown that cGMP is involved in setting the internal clock forward, as would be necessary when flying from west to east, but not in moving the clock back. That is supported by this study: hamsters that received the drug showed no improved adaptation when light/dark cycles were delayed by six hours.

Still, many people say it's that west-to-east trip that's particularly tough, says Golombek. "The human internal clock has a period which is slightly longer than 24 hours. When you fly eastward, you're making your day less than 24 hours, which is more difficult for the clock. If you fly westward, you've got a longer day and it's relatively easier for the clock to cope with that."

Out of synch

Jetlag is more than a nuisance; chronic jetlag has been linked to increases in heart disease, obesity, diabetes and even accelerated tumour growth. "When you disrupt the internal clock, you disrupt the synchrony among every process in your body," says Lance Kriegsfeld, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley. "When you're jetlagged, all your different rhythms catch up at a different rate to the new time zone," says Kriegsfeld. "They're out of synch relative to one another."

Kriegsfeld compares the result to a game of volleyball in which one player sets the ball, but no one is there to hit it.

At this point, it isn't clear whether sildenafil can successfully restore synchrony among all body processes, says Kriegsfeld. The fact that the hamsters have adjusted their running schedule suggests that the brain's central timekeeper has reset itself to the new regime. "But does everything else catch up?" Kriegsfeld asks. "Or are you pushing some things further out of phase with other processes?"

etymology, geography, and time

If they were Scousers they’d be “made up”; from the Black Country they’d be “bostin”. But researchers from the University of Leeds are naturally “well chuffed” to receive a £460,000 grant to examine and catalogue the dialects and diversities of the English language. The team will mine a huge volume of material collected by the BBC Voices project, a survey of regional English which amassed 700 hours of sound recordings.

Leeds researchers have been involved in Voices from the start – building on a wealth of expertise stretching back to the 1950s, when the University carried out the UK’s last major survey of English dialects, leading to the publication of the first linguistic atlas of the UK. Perhaps the most remarkable finding in the Voices study is that the English language is as diverse as ever, despite our increased mobility and constant exposure to other accents and dialects through TV and radio.

It reveals an amazing range of words to describe the simplest things. While a Yorkshire youngster would wear his pumps to meet his mate in the snicket, his Scots counterpart might wear gutties to see his pal in the close, while on the south coast he could wear his daps to meet a butty in the twitten.

When the BBC made these findings available online, they provoked a huge response – with more than a million hits on the website and thousands of on-line posts adding to the mass of information already collected.

Now the Leeds researchers, led by Sally Johnson of the Department of Linguistics and Phonetics and Clive Upton of the School of English, have received Arts and Humanities Research Council funding to assess that material, describe and interpret it, and make it available as a catalogue for people to access.

Professor Upton said: “People really opened up for this project. The BBC got more information than they ever expected.

“The website also gave people the opportunity to sound off – to respond to ‘expert’ views of language, accent and dialect and to confront the stereotypes. Some people seem to think it is open season on the big regional dialects. But if I were to say ‘how intelligent are Scousers?’ is that any different to racism?”

Little wonder then that the project grabbed the public imagination. “It’s about their identity,” said Upton. “It’s about who they are and how they express that – and these are things which people feel strongly about. We’ll certainly not be judging whether they are right or wrong.”

The project runs to the end of 2010, looking at accent and dialect and their relation to such issues as gender and ethnicity and how these are represented through the BBC Voices website. And it will build up a detailed lexicon of regional vocabulary, demonstrating how urban, social and geographical factors have influenced the verbal landscape.

The project will also examine how language is reported in the media. The Voices project collected hundreds of news articles, from stories about slang and swearing to pieces about language tuition in schools and the research will catalogue the types of language making the news and where it was reported. It will also assess how the influence of indigenous languages like Manx and Welsh and migratory languages such as Urdu and Polish are reported in the press.

Source: the University of Leeds

Seeing Red

Color vision drove primates to develop red skin and hair, study finds

You might call it a tale of "monkey see, monkey do." Researchers at Ohio University have found that after primates evolved the ability to see red, they began to develop red and orange skin and hair.

Humans, apes and Old World monkeys, such as macaques and leaf monkeys, all have trichromatic vision, which allows these primates to distinguish between blue, green and red colors. Primatologists have disagreed about whether this type of color vision initially evolved to help early primates forage for ripe fruit and young, red leaves among green foliage or evolved to help them select mates.

Now a new study published online this week in American Naturalist by Ohio University researchers Andre Fernandez and Molly Morris rules out an initial advantage for mating and suggests that red-color vision evolved for non-social purposes, possibly foraging. But once developed, trichromaticism drove the evolution of red skin and hair through sexual selection.

Fernandez, the study's lead author, first began to question the strict correlation of food choice and color vision while studying howler monkeys in Costa Rica. He recently compiled data on the color vision, social and sexual habits and red skin and pelage of 203 different primate species.

The researchers then used a phylogenetic tree representing the evolutionary relationships among all the primate species under study to test hypotheses about the order in which the traits of red color vision, gregariousness (highly social behavior) and red coloring evolved. By comparing the traits of individual species in this evolutionary context, Fernandez and Morris could statistically deduce the probability of their ancestors having the same traits, as well if any of the traits were correlated with one another.

They found that the species that could discern red and orange hues were more likely to develop red and orange skin and hair, as well as highly social habits that make it easier to visually compare mates. In fact, the more social the trichromats are, the more red coloring they show.

"Neuroscience research has found some evidence of a perceptual bias for more brilliant colors," said Fernandez, an Ohio University doctoral student. "So, it is reasonable for primates with trichromatic color vision to respond more when they see bright colors."

So while foraging may have initially sparked red color vision, the new ability was likely "recruited" for social purposes.

"It looks like red skin and hair became a sexual preference," said Morris, a fish biologist who studies how physical traits such as coloring evolve through sexual selection. "So while the benefits in terms of eating may not apply anymore, the (red-color) vision in some groups is now relevant in social terms."

Source: Ohio University

Powered by ScribeFire.

Its' own reward

In the new book, Why Good Things Happen to Good People (Random House), Dr. Post and journalist Jill Neimark weave the growing new science of love and giving with moving real-life stories to show how giving unlocks the doors to health, happiness, and a longer life. The book went on sale nationwide this month.

“This book represents a dream come true for me,” said Post. “It’s dream that began when I was 16 years old. Most of my life has been focused on the science and philosophy of positive emotions and giving behaviors.”
Post has devoted much of his adult life to scientific research that sets out to prove the life-enhancing benefits of giving behavior. He serves as president of the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, which conducts and funds research on altruism, compassion and service. His research shows that when we give of ourselves, especially if we start young, everything from life satisfaction to self-realization and physical health is significantly improved. Mortality is delayed. Depression is reduced. Well-being and good fortune are increased.

In this new book, Post distills academic research into an inspirational message. The research includes a 50-year study showing that people who are giving during their high school years have better physical and mental health throughout their lives. Other studies show that older people who give live longer than those who don't. Helping others has been shown to bring health benefits to those with chronic illness, including HIV, multiple sclerosis, and heart problems. And studies show that people of all ages who help others on a regular basis, even in small ways, feel happiest.
Why Good Things Happen to Good People tells the stories of lives transformed by giving. Its “love and longevity scale” allows readers to test their own habits of giving, and a chapter-by-chapter plan teaches readers how to change their own lives. According to Post, using the lessons and guidelines in each chapter, you can create a personalized plan for a more generous life, finding the style of giving that suits you best.
“This book captures great new science, great stories, practical self help, and even a carefully validated scale so readers can assess themselves in 10 different ways of doing unto others,” he said.

Source: Case Western Reserve University

Can't get no satisfaction

You can't always get what you want, as the song goes, but if a Florida State University researcher's new theory on motivation holds true, you may not want it anymore anyway. Francis Eppes Professor Roy Baumeister, a renowned social psychologist, has conducted several experiments to learn how satisfaction influences motivation. Baumeister will present his theory at the annual convention of the Association for Psychological Science being held May 24-27 in Washington, D.C.

At the heart of Baumeister's theory is the idea that humans adapt to want what they can get. It goes something like this: When we want something and get it, the subsequent feeling of satisfaction reinforces and increases the strength of that desire when it returns. Conversely, chronically unsatisfied desires may diminish the intensity of motivation.
"Obviously, we want much that we cannot get, but gradually we want these things a little less," Baumeister said. "It's the 'getting' that begets wanting."
Standard theories of motivation hold that satisfaction reduces subsequent motivational drive. But three experiments conducted by Baumeister and colleagues indicated otherwise.
In one experiment, participants were asked to work a crossword puzzle or play a hand-held video game, and in another, participants were asked to take 15-minute naps on four out of eight days. In a third experiment, participants were asked to read the top news stories on a popular Web site for two weeks. The follow-up to the experiments showed that getting people to engage in an activity led them to want to perform the activity more over time.
This theory of motivation may even explain certain addictive behavior, Baumeister said.
"Addiction may be typical of many motivations, and, in fact, may be less a special case than a common pattern," Baumeister said. "In addiction, getting leads to more wanting. One example is alcohol: Most people can live without it before they discover it, and getting pleasure from it does increase the wanting. Why this process stops short of all-out addiction for some people and not others we don't know."
The second part of Baumeister's theory holds that social and cultural factors may shape motivation more strongly when the motivation is weak. The best example of this, according to Baumeister, is that female sexuality is more affected than male sexuality by social and cultural factors because the female sex drive is less intense. By contrast, women have a stronger desire to take care of children, most people believe, and the mother role changes far less with social and cultural factors than the father role.
The study of motivation is important because psychology boils down to two things: wanting and thinking. Most research in recent decades has focused on the thinking component, cognition, while little attention has been paid to the wanting component, or motivation, according to Baumeister.
Understanding what motivates people could eventually help psychologists more effectively treat certain patients, Baumeister said.

Source: Florida State University

Lilting voices

The use of 12 tone intervals in the music of many human cultures is rooted in the physics of how our vocal anatomy produces speech, according to researchers at the Duke University Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. The particular notes used in music sound right to our ears because of the way our vocal apparatus makes the sounds used in all human languages, said Dale Purves, the George Barth Geller Professor for Research in Neurobiology. It's not something one can hear directly, but when the sounds of speech are looked at with a spectrum analyzer, the relationships between the various frequencies that a speaker uses to make vowel sounds correspond neatly with the relationships between notes of the 12-tone chromatic scale of music, Purves said.

The work appeared online May 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (Download at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0703140104v1)
Purves and co-authors Deborah Ross and Jonathan Choi tested their idea by recording native English and Mandarin Chinese speakers uttering vowel sounds in both single words and a series of short monologues. They then compared the vocal frequency ratios to the numerical ratios that define notes in music.
Human vocalization begins with the vocal cords in the larynx (the Adam’s apple in the neck), which create a series of resonant power peaks in a stream of air coming up from the lungs. These power peaks are then modified in a spectacular variety of ways by the changing shape of the soft palate, tongue, lips and other parts of the vocal tract. Our vocal anatomy is rather like an organ pipe that can be pinched, stretched and widened on the fly, Purves said. English speakers generate about 50 different speech sounds this way.
Yet despite the wide variation in individual human anatomy, the speech sounds produced by different speakers and languages produce the same variety of vocal tract resonance ratios, Purves said.
The lowest two of these vocal tract resonances, called formants, account for the vowel sounds in speech. "Take away the first two formants and you can't understand what a person is saying," Purves said. The frequency of the first formant is between 200 and 1,000 cycles per second (hertz) and the second formant between 800 and 3,000 hertz.
When the Duke researchers looked at the ratios of the first two formants in speech spectra, they found that the ratios formed musical relationships. For example, the relationship of the first two formants in the English vowel /a/, as in "bod," might correspond with the musical interval between C and A on a piano keyboard.
"In about 70 percent of the speech sounds, these ratios were bang-on musical intervals," Purves said. "This predominance of musical intervals hidden in speech suggests that the chromatic scale notes in music sound right to our ears because they match the formant ratios we are exposed to all the time in speech, even though we are quite unaware of this exposure."
No music, except modern experimental pieces, uses all 12 tones. Most music uses the 7-tone or diatonic scale to divide octaves, and much of folk music uses five tones. These preferences correspond to the most prevalent formant ratios in speech. Purves and his collaborators are now working on whether a given culture's preference for one subset of the tones over another is related to the formant relationships that are especially prevalent in the native language of that group.
Purves and his collaborators also think these findings may help explain a centuries-old debate in music over which tuning scheme for instruments works best. Ten of the 12 harmonic intervals identified in English and Mandarin speech occur in "just intonation" tuning, which sounds best to most trained musicians. They found fewer correspondences in other tuning systems, including the equal temperament tuning commonly used today.
Equal temperament tuning, in which each of the 12 interval distances in the chromatic scale is made exactly the same, is a scheme that enables an ensemble such as an orchestra to play together in different keys and across many octaves. Although equal temperament tuning sounds pretty good, it's a compromise on the more natural, vocally derived just intonation tuning system, Purves said.
The group's next study concerns our intuitive understanding that a musical piece tends to sound happy if it’s in a major key but relatively sad if it's in a minor key. That, too, may come from the characteristics of the human voice, Purves suggests.

Source: Duke University

Girls, Math, and education

Stereotype-induced math anxiety undermines girls' ability to perform in other academic areas May 24, 2007 - Study suggests impact for standardized tests A popular stereotype that boys are better at mathematics than girls undermines girls' math performance because it causes worrying that erodes the mental resources needed for problem solving, new research at the University of Chicago shows. The scholars found that the worrying undermines women's working memory. Working memory is a short-term memory system involved in the control, regulation and active maintenance of limited information needed immediately to deal with problems at hand. They also showed for the first time that this threat to performance caused by stereotyping can also hinder success in other academic areas because mental abilities do not immediately rebound after being compromised by mathematics anxiety. "This may mean that if a girl takes a verbal portion of a standardized test after taking the mathematics portion, she may not do as well on the verbal portion as she might do if she had not been recently struggling with math-related worries and anxiety," said Sian Beilock, Assistant Professor in Psychology and lead investigator in the study. "Likewise, our work suggests that if a girl has a mathematics class first thing in the morning and experiences math-related worries in this class, these worries may carry implications for her performance in the class she attends next," she added. The results of the study appear in the paper "Stereotype Threat and Working Memory: Mechanisms, Alleviation, and Spill Over," published in the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Co-authors are Robert Rydell, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Allen McConnell, University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Miami University. Researchers have been aware that stereotypes can undermine achievement in schools in many ways, but little research has focused on the specific mental processes that prompt this response. In order to examine those mental processes, the team selected a group of college women who performed well in mathematics. They were then randomly assigned to two groups, with one set of women being told that they were being tested to see why men generally do better on math than women, and the other group being told simply that they were part of an experiment on mathematics performance. The information that men do better in mathematics than women undercut performance drastically. The accuracy of women exposed to the stereotype was reduced from nearly 90 percent in a pretest to about 80 percent after being told men do better in mathematics. Among women not receiving that message, performance actually improved slightly. The researchers asked the women exposed to the stereotyping message what they were thinking during the tests and many of them reported being distracted by thoughts such as "I thought about how boys are usually better than girls at math so I was trying harder not to make mistakes" and "I was nervous in the last set because I found out that the study is to compare mathematical abilities of guys and girls." Women not exposed to stereotyping had fewer such thoughts of inferiority. Further tests showed that the verbal portion of the working memory was the portion of the women's mental resources that was most strongly undermined by the anxiety. The researchers showed that women experiencing mathematics anxiety found it more difficult to do problems when they were written out horizontally than when they appeared vertically. Previous findings show that solving horizontal problems relies heavily on verbal resources. In order to see if mathematics anxiety had any lasting impact on performance in the short term, the researchers again had women solve math problems, with half being told they were part of a test to determine why men generally do better in mathematics than women and the other half being told only that they were being tested for mathematics performance. They then gave the women a standard memory test involving verbal information and found that the women did less well on that test if they were exposed to the mathematics stereotyping. "We demonstrated that worries about confirming a negative group stereotype may not only impact performance in the stereotyped domain, but that this impact can spill over onto subsequent, unrelated tasks that depend on the same processing resource the stereotype-related worries consume," Beilock and her colleagues wrote.
University of Chicago

More holographic universe

Plasma astrophysicists at the University of Warwick have found that key information about the Sun’s 'storm season’ is being broadcast across the solar system in a fractal snapshot imprinted in the solar wind. This research opens up new ways of looking at both space weather and the unstable behaviour that affects the operation of fusion powered power plants.

Fractals, mathematical shapes that retain a complex but similar patterns at different magnifications, are frequently found in nature from snowflakes to trees and coastlines. Now Plasma Astrophysicists in the University of Warwick’s Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics have devised a new method to detect the same patterns in the solar wind.
The researchers, led by Professor Sandra Chapman, have also been able to directly tie these fractal patterns to the Sun’s ‘storm season’. The Sun goes through a solar cycle roughly 11 years long. The researchers found the fractal patterns in the solar wind occur when the Sun was at the peak of this cycle when the solar corona was at its most active, stormy and complex – sunspot activity, solar flares etc. When the corona was quieter no fractal patterns were found in the solar wind only general turbulence.
This means that fractal signature is coming from the complex magnetic field of the sun.
This new information will help astrophysicists understand how the solar corona heats the solar wind and the nature of the turbulence of the Solar Wind with its implications for cosmic ray flux and space weather.
These techniques used to find and understand the fractal patterns in the Solar Wind are also being used to assist the quest for fusion power. Researchers in the University of Warwick’s Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics (CFSA) are collaborating with scientists from the EURATOM/UKAEA fusion research programme to measure and understand fluctuations in the world leading fusion experiment MAST (the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak) at Culham. Controlling plasma fluctuations in tokamaks is important for getting the best performance out of future fusion power plants.
The research by K.Kiyani, S. C. Chapman, B. Hnat, R. M. Nicol, is entitled "Self- similar signature of the active solar corona within the inertial range of solar wind turbulence" and was published on May 18th 2007 in Phys. Rev. Lett.
The researchers received support and data from STFC (previously PPARC), EPSRC, and the NASA WIND, ACE and ULYSSES teams.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of Warwick.

Powered by ScribeFire.

First Date

Treating Longtime Partner Like A First Date Can Boost Morale And Well-being

Science Daily — The quickest way for longtime couples to rekindle romance may be to pretend they’re strangers, according to a University of British Columbia psychology study.

By acting as if they’re on a first date, they’ll likely put their best face forward and end up having a better time, says investigator Elizabeth Dunn, an assistant professor at the UBC Dept. of Psychology.

“We make an extra effort when meeting strangers because we want them to like us,” says Dunn. “And by trying to be more pleasant, we end up actually feeling better – but we tend to overlook this benefit.”

The researchers asked 31 couples to interact with either their romantic partner or a stranger of the opposite sex and asked them how they felt about this. They found that the volunteers significantly underestimated how good they would feel after meeting a stranger, compared to interacting with their romantic partner.

In a subsequent study, the researchers asked long-term couples to interact with their partners as though they had never met, and found that the participants’ sense of well-being rose significantly.

Dunn says when people interact with close friends, family or romantic partners, they know they can get away with acting unpleasant, blasé or bored. But by making an effort to seem pleasant -- as people typically do when interacting with strangers or acquaintances -- their mood will naturally elevate.

The study also recommends meeting new people to elevate mood.

Dunn’s co-investigators are UBC Psychology Asst. Prof. Jeremy Biesanz and former University of Virginia students Stephanie Finn and Lauren Human. Human is now a graduate student at UBC.

Last month, their research won second prize and $4,000 at the largest international contest for pioneering psychology research, sponsored by the London-based Mind Gym, a consulting and publishing company that uses psychological research to help corporations and individuals function better.

The study, Misunderstanding the Affective Consequences of Everyday Social Interactions: The Hidden Benefits of Putting One’s Best Face Forward, will be published in the June 4, 2007 issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University Of British Columbia.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Math and Motion

Circles, slaloms, figure eights, and loop-the-loops – biologists studying the motion of Listeria monocytogenes sensed that these paths were related, but they didn’t have a good way to define what fit in and what didn’t. A remarkably simple new mathematical description, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reproduces all these shapes with just one pair of equations and only two key variables. Besides helping to identify bacterial mutants, the equations suggest which mechanisms could be driving the motion.

Last winter, Vivek Shenoy, an associate professor of engineering at Brown University, was matched with Julie Theriot, an associate professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, at a biophysics "boot camp" run by Rob Phillips at the California Institute of Technology. Theriot studies Listeria, a disease-causing bacterium that hijacks the actin network of an infected cell to propel itself. Embedded in a network of actin fibers, the bacterium keeps adding actin molecules at its back end, pushing itself forward and leaving behind an actin tail tracing its path.

Those paths intrigued Shenoy as soon as he saw Theriot’s movies of Listeria traveling in the two-dimensional world of a microscope slide. Some bacteria spun in circles, others followed a sine curve, some followed a path like the cloverleaf exchange on a highway. The circles, he thought, were easy to explain. If an actin filament pushed just a bit off center, the bacterium would go in circles, like a swimmer who paddles harder on one side.

With a bit more thought, he cracked the sine curve. What if that off-center point rotated around the axis of motion" When it pushed harder on the right, the bacterium would move to the left; when it pushed to the left of center, the cell would move to the right. If the bacterium moved forward faster than it curved around, a swerving pattern would result.
The clincher came as Shenoy worked out the mathematics to describe this kind of motion. The exact same equation, it turned out, also described the figure-eights, cloverleaves and other looping patterns they had observed. In fact, nearly every time they recorded a new pattern, they found it fit the equation. An equation that can predict observations clearly has a lot going for it, but a mathematical description is not the same thing as a biological mechanism.

"If we can understand things is a simpler setting, such as this one," said Shenoy, "then we can use those insights to study more complex phenomena."
As the team works to fully explain the motion they observe, Shenoy’s equations can narrow the possibilities, ruling out mechanisms that cannot generate both the circular and the spinning component of the motion.
With just two variables – an offset distance and an angle relative to the forward motion – they could reproduce every track they saw, except those produced by mutant microbes that Theriot introduced. The mutants stood out as different. They produced a skidding kind of pattern instead of the graceful curves that most of the bacteria traced.

"The human visual cortex is really good at seeing patterns," said Theriot, "but this gives us a quantitative framework for asking questions that before we could only ask qualitatively."
Being able to pinpoint just how different the mutants are is valuable, said Theriot, because they often are less infectious than normal Listeria. Once Listeria invades a host cell, it uses the actin mechanism to move from cell to cell, never again exposing itself to the organism’s extracellular immune system. A microbe with a deficient movement mechanism is a microbe with less ability to invade neighboring cells.

Link: Abstract

Source: Brown University

Baptism

Oculus, the Californian firm which developed the water - made by filtering it through a salt membrane - says it kills viruses, bacteria and fungi.It is also effective against MRSA and UK trials are being carried out on patients with diabetic foot ulcers, New Scientist magazine reported.Experts said wound healing was a major problem for people with diabetes.

The key ingredient of the water, called Microcyn, are oxychlorine ions - electrically charged molecules which pierce the cell walls of free-living microbes.
The water can only kill cells it can completely surround so human cells are spared because they are tightly bound together in a matrix.
We would welcome any safe effective treatment which could help people with diabetes make a swift recovery
Tracey Kelly, Diabetes UK
It is made by taking purified water and passing it through a semi-permeable sodium chloride membrane, which produces the oxychlorine ions.
One study showed that patients with advanced foot ulcers who were treated with the water, alongside an antibiotic had an average healing time of 43 days compared with 55 days in those who received standard treatmentRead on...
Bleach-resistant bacteria

The results were presented at a Global Healthcare biomedical conference in Monte Carlo.
Bleach also contains a number of electrically charged molecules such as hypochlorite but in much higher concentrations than in the water.
However, US studies have shown the water kills 10 strains of bleach-resistant bacteria.
Professor Andrew Boulton, from Manchester Royal Infirmary, who is conducting one of the early UK trials, said the treatment seemed promising.
"Hopefully it will confirm our initial good experience."
About 15% of diabetic foot ulcers result in amputation.
Diabetes UK care adviser Tracey Kelly said: "The healing of wounds is a major problem for people with diabetes who do not have good blood glucose control or have circulatory problems.
"We would welcome any safe effective treatment which could help people with diabetes make a swift recovery.
"This research is very interesting and we look forward to the trial results."
Help the Aged spokesman Mike Foster said: "The team involved is a credible one and wound healing is a major area in the health of older people.
"There is an urgent need to understand the biology of our repair systems so that we can improve treatments that will help to restore more people's health and independence."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/6684701.stm

More Hive Mind

May. 22, 2007 at 12:00am Eastern by Barry Schwartz
The Google Trends home page now has a section named "Hot Trends," which shows the hottest queries for the day. You can also look back historically and see the hottest queries for that day. Plus, Google Trends upgraded the trends history to show not only country data in the regions box but also state and even city detail - worldwide.
What defines a "hot trend"? Google told me they use a very sophisticated algorithm to determine what is "hot." I was told to think of it as Google noticing a "sudden rise" in a query phrase that is not in the norm for that query. The higher the rise, the hotter the query is. Google has a "hotness level" score for these queries, the hottest is "volcanic", followed by "on fire," "spicy," "medium" and "mild."
The Google Trends home page has been enhanced to include these Hot Trends. It will show the top ten hot trends for the day, for the United States (that's the only country currently being supported). Read on...

Pharming in Kansas

Emma Marris

Rice modified to express proteins often found in breast milk will be planted in Kansas.
Getty
Rice modified to express proteins often found in breast milk will be planted in Kansas. The go-ahead for the planting came on 16 May from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

It's certainly not the first crop designed to produce pharmaceutical proteins given the go-ahead in the United States or elsewhere (see 'Turning plants into protein factories'). But this is among the first food crops containing genes that produce human proteins to gain approval for large-scale planting. Many other pharmaceutical genetically-modified (GM) crops are grown indoors or in inedible plants such as tobacco.

The rice strains, made by Ventria Bioscience in Sacramento, California, produce lysozyme, lactoferrin and human serum albumin in their seeds. All three are commonly found in breast milk. Lysozyme and lactoferrin are proteins with antibacterial, viral and fungal properties, according to the company.

Ventria says that they aim to use the rice to create drinks that can combat diarrhoea, and dietary supplements to help reverse anaemia1. Diarrhoea, which often stems from gastrointestinal infection, is a major killer of children worldwide.

Many further regulatory hurdles involving other agencies would need to be passed before products made from this rice could be sold to consumers. Read on.....

magic mushroms

Do Fungi Feast on Radiation?Apparently, but only if they contain melanin, the chemical that serves as skin pigment in humans
Like plants that grow toward the sun, dark fungi, blackened by the skin pigment melanin, gravitate toward radiation in contaminated soil. Scientists have observed the organisms—somewhere between plants and animals—blackening the land around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine in the years since its 1986 meltdown. "Organisms that make melanin have a growth advantage in this soil," says microbiologist Arturo Casadevall of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. "In many commercial nuclear reactors, the radioactive water becomes contaminated with melanotic organisms. Nobody really knows what the hell they are doing there."Casadevall and his colleagues, however, have a theory. Based on experiments with three different types of fungi, they believe the melanin-containing breeds absorb the high levels of energy in ionizing radiation and somehow turn it into a biologically useful (and benign) form, akin to a dark and dangerous version of photosynthesis. "We were able to see significant growth of the black ones relative to the white ones in a radiation field," he says. "That is the observation. How you interpret it … is where the interesting speculations come in."

In a paper published online in PLoS One, Casadevall and his colleagues report that ionizing radiation changes the electron structure of the melanin molecule and that fungi with a natural melanin shell (the soil-dwelling Cladosporium sphaerospermum and yeastlike Wangiella dermatitidis varieties), which were deprived of other nutrients, grew better in the presence of radiation. They also report that fungi induced to produce a melanin shell (the human pathogen Cryptococcocus neoformans) grew well in such levels of radiation, unlike those sans pigment. Further, an albino mutant strain of W. dermatitidis failed to thrive as well as its black cousin when exposed to 500 times the normal amount of ionizing radiation (still well below the level of radiation necessary to kill tough fungal forms).

"The presumption has always been that we don't know why truffles and other fungi are black," Casadevall says. "If they have some primitive capacity to harvest sunlight or to harvest some kind of background radiation a lot of them would be using it."

Melanin drinks in ultraviolet rays, acting as a natural sunblock for human skin. "Melanin is very good at absorbing energy and then dissipating it as quickly as possible," says Jennifer Riesz, a biophysicist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. "It does this by very efficiently changing the energy into heat."

But Casadevall and his colleague Ekaterina Dadachova, a nuclear chemist at Einstein, speculate that the melanin in this case acts like a step-down electric transformer, weakening the energy until it is useable by the fungi. "The energy becomes … low [at] a certain point where it can already be used by a fungus as chemical energy," Dadachova argues. "Protection doesn't play a role here. It is real energy conversion."

Mycologists and biophysicists find the notion both intriguing and potentially plausible. "Since melanin is used commonly by fungi—and other organisms—to protect themselves against UV radiation, it is perhaps not surprising that melanin would be affected by ionizing radiation,'' says Albert Torzilli, a mycologist at George Mason University in Virginia, adding that "the subsequent enhancement of growth, if true, is a novel response."

Riesz, for one, is skeptical. "It does not surprise me that fungi protected with higher levels of melanin might grow better when exposed to [ionizing radiation], since the nonprotected fungi are more likely to be harmed by the radiation," she says. "However, I find the claim that melanin is involved in energy capture and utilization to be unlikely."

More study is needed to confirm whether fungi will be able to add the ability to grow by harvesting radiation to their list of seeming superpowers, but it does raise the question of whether edible fungi—like mushrooms—have been harboring this function undiscovered for years. If true, melanin could be genetically engineered into photosynthetic plants to boost their productivity or melanin-bearing fungi could be used in clothing to shield workers from radiation or even farmed in space as astronaut food. The group plans further tests to see if fungi with melanin are converting other wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum into energy, as well.

.

Finger length helps predict elementary exam results

Finger length helps predict elementary exam results, study shows
May 23, 2007 - The results of numeracy and literacy tests for seven-year-old children can be predicted by measuring the length of their fingers, shows new research.

In a study to be published in the British Journal of Psychology, scientists compared the finger lengths of 75 children with their Standardised Assessment Test (SAT) scores.

They found a clear link between a child's performance in numeracy and literacy tests and the relative lengths of their index (pointing) and ring fingers.

Scientists believe that the link is caused by different levels of the hormones testosterone and oestrogen in the womb - and the effect they have on both brain development and finger length.

"Testosterone has been argued to promote development of the areas of the brain which are often associated with spatial and mathematical skills," said Dr Mark Brosnan, Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Bath, who led the study.

"Oestrogen is thought to do the same in the areas of the brain which are often associated with verbal ability.

"Interestingly, these hormones are also thought have a say in the relative lengths of our index and ring fingers.

"We can use measurements of these fingers as a way of gauging the relative exposure to these two hormones in the womb and as we have shown through this study, we can also use them to predict ability in the key areas of numeracy and literacy."

The researchers made photocopies of the palm of the children's hands and then measured the length of their index finger and ring finger on both hands using callipers, accurate to 0.01mm.

They then divided the length of the index finger by that of the ring finger - to calculate the child's digit ratio.

When they compared this ratio to the children's SAT scores, they found that a smaller ratio (i.e. a longer ring finger and therefore greater prenatal exposure to testosterone) meant a larger difference between ability in maths and literacy, favouring numeracy relative to literacy.

When they looked at boy's and girl's performance separately, the researchers found a clear link between high prenatal testosterone exposure, as measured by digit ratio, and higher numeracy SAT scores in males.

They also found a link between low prenatal testosterone exposure, which resulted in a shorter ring finger compared with the index finger, and higher literacy SAT scores for girls.

This, says the scientists behind the study, suggests that measurements of finger length could help predict how well children will do in maths and literacy.

"We're not suggesting that finger length measurements could replace SAT tests," said Dr Brosnan.

"Finger ratio provides us with an interesting insight into our innate abilities in key cognitive areas.

"We are also looking at how digit ratio relates to other behavioural issues, such as technophobia, and career paths.

"There is also interest in using digit ratio to identify developmental disorders, such as dyslexia, which can be defined in terms of literacy deficiencies."

University of Bath

Novel sugar-to-hydrogen technology promises transportation fuel independence

Novel sugar-to-hydrogen technology promises transportation fuel independence
May 23, 2007 - The hydrogen economy is not a futuristic concept. The U.S. Department of Energy's 2006 Advance Energy Initiative calls for competitive ethanol from plant sources by 2012 and a good selection of hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles by 2020.

Researchers at Virginia Tech, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the University of Georgia propose using polysaccharides, or sugary carbohydrates, from biomass to directly produce low-cost hydrogen for the new hydrogen economy.

According to the DOE, advances are needed in four areas to make hydrogen fuel an economical reality for transportation - production, storage, distribution, and fuel cells. Most industrial hydrogen currently comes from natural gas, which has become expensive. Storing and moving the gas, whatever its source, is costly and cumbersome, and even dangerous. And there is little infrastructure for refueling a vehicle.

"We need a simple way to store and carry hydrogen energy and a simple process to produce hydrogen, said Y.-H. Percival Zhang, assistant professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech.

Using synthetic biology approaches, Zhang and colleagues Barbara R. Evans and Jonathan R. Mielenz of ORNL and Robert C. Hopkins and Michael W.W. Adams of the University of Georgia are using a combination of 13 enzymes never found together in nature to completely convert polysaccharides (C6H10O5) and water into hydrogen when and where that form of energy is needed. This "synthetic enzymatic pathway"research appears in the May 23 issue of PLoS ONE, the online, open-access journal from the Public Library of Science (www.plosone.org).Read on...

Polysaccharides like starch and cellulose are used by plants for energy storage and building blocks and are very stable until exposed to enzymes. Just add enzymes to a mixture of starch and water and "the enzymes use the energy in the starch to break up water into only carbon dioxide and hydrogen,"Zhang said.

A membrane bleeds off the carbon dioxide and the hydrogen is used by the fuel cell to create electricity. Water, a product of that fuel cell process, will be recycled for the starch-water reactor. Laboratory tests confirm that it all takes place at low temperature -- about 86 degrees F -- and atmospheric pressure.

The vision is for the ingredients to be mixed in the fuel tank of your car, for instance. A car with an approximately 12-gallon tank could hold 27 kilograms (kg) of starch, which is the equivalent of 4 kg of hydrogen. The range would be more than 300 miles, Zhang estimates. One kg of starch will produce the same energy output as 1.12 kg (0.38 gallons) of gasoline.

Since hydrogen is gaseous, hydrogen storage is the largest obstacle to large-scale use of hydrogen fuel. The Department of Energy's long-term goal for hydrogen storage was 12 mass percent, or 0.12 kg of hydrogen per one kg of container or storage material, but such technology is not available, said Zhang. Using polysaccharides as the hydrogen storage carrier, the research team achieved hydrogen storage capacity as high as 14.8 mass percent, they report in the PLOS article.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Podcast language class

Web site Open Culture has put together a huge collection of foreign language podcasts to help you pick up that long-elusive second (or third, etc.) language.

We've discussed how to find language podcasts in iTunes, but this collection provides links for both iTunes subscriptions (if available) as well as the direct podcast feed. The podcasts are nicely organized by language, so it's very easy to find one or several foreign language podcasts designed to help you learn. There's a surprising number of podcasts out there covering anything from Arabic to Thai, so take advantage language lovers! — Adam Pash


Foreign Language Lesson Podcast Collection

Powered by ScribeFire.

Happiness wins science book prize

A scientific exploration of the various ways people attempt to make themselves happy has won the annual Royal Society Prize for Science Books.Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness had been tipped as the favourite to win the prestigious £10,000 award. It beat five other titles including Henry Nicholl's Lonesome George, an account of the last known individual of a subspecies of Galapagos tortoise.Each runner up received £1,000 at a ceremony at the Society's headquarters.

Professor Colin Pillinger, from the Open University in Milton Keynes, chaired the judging panel. He said that all of the books had been "excellent" and deciding on first prize had been "extremely difficult".
Discussing the winner he said: "Daniel Gilbert's voice provides a witty companion throughout this exploration of the science behind the pursuit of happiness.
"He uses cognitive science and psychology to provide intriguing insights into human nature, helping us to understand why we make the decisions we do."
Perhaps all children need is the confidence to approach a subject with enthusiasm and an open mind
Richard Hammond, junior prize winner
Gilbert himself was thrilled to take the book prize. "I'm absolutely delighted to receive this tremendous honour from the world's oldest learned society," said the Harvard University psychology professor.
"There are very few countries (including my own - the US) where a somewhat cheeky book about happiness could win a science prize - but the British invented intellectual humour and have always understood that enlightenment and entertainment are natural friends. So God bless the empire!"
Read on...

Tour de force

Now in its 19th year, the award was known as the Rhone-Poulenc Prize from 1990 to 1999. Until this year, it went by the name of the Aventis Prize but now bears the name of the Royal Society.

There are two categories: the junior prize, which is given to the best book written for under-14s, and the general prize, for the best book written for a more general readership.

This year's junior prize was won by BBC Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond for his book Can You Feel the Force? published by Dorling Kindersley (DK). It explores the world of physics.

Eleanor Updale, children's writer and chair of the junior judging panel, said it was an "instantly appealing book".

"With clear illustrations, practical experiments, and well-paced text, it makes an interest in science look like fun," she said.

Reacting to his win, Richard Hammond, who also presents the science series Brainiac on UK TV, said: "I was immediately captivated when the team at Dorling Kindersley approached me about making a book to try to bring physics to life.

"Perhaps all children need is the confidence to approach a subject with enthusiasm and an open mind. The DK team gave them just that and winning this award is recognition for a group of very talented people."

The general prize is often referred to as the "Booker prize for science writing", although the science prize winner often outsells its better-known counterpart.

Past winners have included Bill Bryson, Stephen Hawking and Chris McManus.

Powered by ScribeFire.

With simplified code, programming becomes child's play

With simplified code, programming becomes child's play

Boston Globe, May 15, 2007

Scratch, a new programming language released Tuesday by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab, gives novices the ability to create dynamic programs without wading through a manual, teaching computer programming concepts while encouraging students to play.

The program is named after the technique hip-hop DJs use to mix music.


Read Original Article>>

Powered by ScribeFire.

Vote for Your Favorite String Theory Video

Discover Magazine has posted the finalists from the String Theory in Two Minutes or Less contest on its website. Columbia Physicist and string theory expert Brian Greene will pick the winning video, but you can watch the videos and select the Voter's Choice video by going here. Videos were submitted by scientists, students, and science enthusiasts from all over the U.S. and even the Canary Islands. We think the ducky video owes props to Ze Frank.
Read More: Brian Greene, Discover, string theory, video

Powered by ScribeFire.

Maybe we have more time than we thought

For a long time, Itzhak Bars has been studying time. More than a decade ago, the USC College physicist began pondering the role time plays in the basic laws of physics — the equations describing matter, gravity and the other forces of nature.

Those laws are exquisitely accurate. Einstein mastered gravity with his theory of general relativity, and the equations of quantum theory capture every nuance of matter and other forces, from the attractive power of magnets to the subatomic glue that holds an atom’s nucleus together.

But the laws can’t be complete. Einstein’s theory of gravity and quantum theory don’t fit together. Some piece is missing in the picture puzzle of physical reality.

Bars thinks one of the missing pieces is a hidden dimension of time.

Bizarre is not a powerful enough word to describe this idea, but it is a powerful idea nevertheless. With two times, Bars believes, many of the mysteries of today’s laws of physics may disappear.

Of course, it’s not as simple as that. An extra dimension of time is not enough. You also need an additional dimension of space.

It sounds like a new episode of “The Twilight Zone,” but it’s a familiar idea to most physicists. In fact, extra dimensions of space have become a popular way of making gravity and quantum theory more compatible.

Extra space dimensions aren’t easy to imagine — in everyday life, nobody ever notices more than three. Any move you make can be described as the sum of movements in three directions — up-down, back and forth, or sideways. Similarly, any location can be described by three numbers (on Earth, latitude, longitude and altitude), corresponding to space’s three dimensions.

Other dimensions could exist, however, if they were curled up in little balls, too tiny to notice. If you moved through one of those dimensions, you’d get back to where you started so fast you’d never realize that you had moved.

“An extra dimension of space could really be there, it’s just so small that we don’t see it,” said Bars, a professor of physics and astronomy.

Something as tiny as a subatomic particle, though, might detect the presence of extra dimensions. In fact, Bars said, certain properties of matter’s basic particles, such as electric charge, may have something to do with how those particles interact with tiny invisible dimensions of space.

In this view, the Big Bang that started the baby universe growing 14 billion years ago blew up only three of space’s dimensions, leaving the rest tiny. Many theorists today believe that 6 or 7 such unseen dimensions await discovery.

Only a few, though, believe that more than one dimension of time exists. Bars pioneered efforts to discern how a second dimension of time could help physicists better explain nature.

“Itzhak Bars has a long history of finding new mathematical symmetries that might be useful in physics,” said Joe Polchinski, a physicist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara. “This two-time idea seems to have some interesting mathematical properties.”

If Bars is on the right track, some of the most basic processes in physics will need re-examination. Something as simple as how particles move, for example, could be viewed in a new way. In classical physics (before the days of quantum theory), a moving particle was completely described by its momentum (its mass times its velocity) and its position. But quantum physics says you can never know those two properties precisely at the same time.

Bars alters the laws describing motion even more, postulating that position and momentum are not distinguishable at a given instant of time. Technically, they can be related by a mathematical symmetry, meaning that swapping position for momentum leaves the underlying physics unchanged (just as a mirror switching left and right doesn’t change the appearance of a symmetrical face).

In ordinary physics, position and momentum differ because the equation for momentum involves velocity. Since velocity is distance divided by time, it requires the notion of a time dimension. If swapping the equations for position and momentum really doesn’t change anything, then position needs a time dimension too.

“If I make position and momentum indistinguishable from one another, then something is changing about the notion of time,” said Bars. “If I demand a symmetry like that, I must have an extra time dimension.”

Simply adding an extra dimension of time doesn’t solve everything, however. To produce equations that describe the world accurately, an additional dimension of space is needed as well, giving a total of four space dimensions. Then, the math with four space and two time dimensions reproduces the standard equations describing the basic particles and forces, a finding Bars described partially last year in the journal Physical Review D and has expanded upon in his more recent work.

Bars’ math suggests that the familiar world of four dimensions — three of space, one of time — is merely a shadow of a richer six-dimensional reality. In this view the ordinary world is like a two-dimensional wall displaying shadows of the objects in a three-dimensional room.

In a similar way, the observable universe of ordinary space and time may reflect the physics of a bigger space with an extra dimension of time. In ordinary life nobody notices the second time dimension, just as nobody sees the third dimension of an object’s two-dimensional shadow on a wall.

This viewpoint has implications for understanding many problems in physics. For one thing, current theory suggests the existence of a lightweight particle called the axion, needed to explain an anomaly in the equations of the standard model of particles and forces. If it exists, the axion could make up the mysterious “dark matter” that astronomers say affects the motions of galaxies. But two decades of searching has failed to find proof that axions exist. Two-time physics removes the original anomaly without the need for an axion, Bars has shown, possibly explaining why it has not been found.

On a grander level, two-time physics may assist in the quest to merge quantum theory with Einstein’s relativity in a single unified theory. The most popular approach to that problem today, superstring theory, also invokes extra dimensions of space, but only a single dimension of time. Many believe that a variant on string theory, known as M theory, will be the ultimate winner in the quantum-relativity unification game, and M theory requires 10 dimensions of space and one of time.

Efforts to formulate a clear and complete version of M theory have so far failed. “Nobody has yet told us what the fundamental form of M theory is,” Bars said. “We just have clues — we don’t know what it is.”

Adopting the more symmetric two-time approach may help. Describing the 11 dimensions of M theory in the language of two-time physics would require adding one time dimension plus one space dimension, giving nature 11 space and two time dimensions. “The two-time version of M theory would have a total of 13 dimensions,” Bars said.

For some people, that might be considered unlucky. But for Bars, it’s a reason for optimism.

“My hope,” he says, “is that this path that I am following will actually bring me to the right place.”

Source: USC College

Powered by ScribeFire.

Glowing

CT scan radiation can equal nuclear bomb exposure - health - 11 May 2007 - Print - New Scientist

CT scan radiation can equal nuclear bomb exposure

* 12:03 11 May 2007
* NewScientist.com news service
* Roxanne Khamsi

Overzealous doctors who order unnecessary body scans that use X-ray technology are placing their patients at risk of cancer, radiologists warn.

Radiation from such scans is in some cases equivalent to that received by some survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, they say. In response, hospitals and professional associations, such as the American College of Radiologists, are taking new steps to promote more careful use of scanning technologies.

Radiologists are particularly concerned about the use of computed tomography, also known as CT or CAT scans. This technology involves the use of an X-ray generating device that rotates around the patient's body. These powerful beams are picked up by an array of detectors and used by a computer to generate a three-dimensional view of a body region.

Experts agree that when used correctly, such scans can save lives. However, according to some estimates, the radiation exposure a patient receives from a full-body CT scan is often 500 times that of a conventional X-ray and about the same as that received by people living 2.4 kilometres away from the centres of the World War II atomic blasts in Japan.

A CT scan might increase a person's risk of cancer by about 0.05%, although experts stress that on average a person's lifetime risk of cancer is about 20%.
Unnecessary scans

Radiologist Steven Birnbaum, who works in Nashua, New Hampshire, US, says he became acutely aware of the problem after his 23-year-old daughter suffered a head injury, including severe concussion and skull fracture.

Over the ensuing week, Birnbaum's daughter received a total of nine scans – including multiple scans to assess the bladder – until he ordered doctors to stop. Some of the scans she received were medically unnecessary, he says.

"I was horrified. I asked the surgical chief resident if any thought had been given to radiation exposure in patients when doctors ordered CT studies," says Birnbaum, who is a paid consultant for Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, a major healthcare provider.
Short cuts

Magellan Health's National Imaging Associates, a leading US company that helps hospitals and healthcare providers manage their use of medical screening technologies, has initiated a new system to flag up patients that have received too many scans.

Radiologist Thomas Dehn, the company's chief medical officer, says that there are numerous reasons why CT scans are ordered unnecessarily. Doctors are often pressed for time and use the technology as a shortcut, he says. And patients sometimes demand the extra reassurance that a scan can give – a scan can help confirm they are healthy.

A task force within the American College of Radiologists (ACR) published a report earlier in May outlining ways to address the problem of excessive CT scanning.

One recommendation in the report suggests that medical students should receive mandatory training on this issue. It also says that the risks of these scans need to be better conveyed to the public. "We're concerned and we're aware of it," says Arl Van Moore, chair of the ACR.

Journal reference: BMJ (vol 334, p 1006)

Powered by ScribeFire.

Inhaling

Study shows vaporizer delivers marijuana 'safely and effectively'.









Arran Frood



Vaporizing cannabis leaves instead of burning them can release the drug's active ingredient just as effectively — while avoiding the harmful toxins inhaled through smoking the drug, according to a pilot study.



The result could be good news for those who choose to use marijuana medicinally.



The potential benefits of marijuana include pain relief for multiple-sclerosis sufferers, a treatment for glaucoma, as an appetite stimulant for AIDS patients and an anti-nausea agent for people on chemotherapy. But smoking isn't a good method of drug delivery because the harmful effects — such as lung cancer and heart disease — outweigh the likely merits of marijuana for all but terminal cases.



Rather than smoking, some use the leaves to make tea or cakes for consumption. But this means that the active agents are metabolized by the liver rather than entering the bloodstream unaltered. Others have focused on extracting active ingredients such as tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and delivering them alone in a pill or oral spray. However, many think that the isolated ingredients are not as effective as the whole plant, and it is more difficult to customize the dose for each individual with a pill.



Hot stuff



Donald Abrams of the University of California, San Francisco, and his team decided to investigate the benefits of the 'Volcano', a commercially available vaporizer. The device heats marijuana leaves to a temperature between 180 and 200 °C so that THC is released from oils on the surface of the leaf but no actual combustion takes place.



Previous studies have shown that harmful toxins released through smoking cannabis such as carbon monoxide, benzene and a host of compounds known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (many of which are known carcinogens) are not produced by such devices.



Abrams' study is the first to compare the effects of smoking and vaporizing cannabis on human subjects. "We were able to deliver more-or-less equivalent amounts of THC into the bloodstream," he says. The main difference between the two delivery methods was that THC seemed to be absorbed into the bloodstream faster when using the vaporizer1. "The pharmacological and physiological effects were comparable," he says, although a larger study would be needed to prove that they are biologically equivalent.



Slow burn



The first studies to highlight the advantages of using vaporizers for cannabis were published more than five years ago, but the pace of research has been slow, partly because there is only one source of research-approved marijuana in the United States — the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) — which critics accuse of dictating research along a political agenda. A legal ruling this February recommended that the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) end NIDA's monopoly on the production of marijuana for research approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and by the DEA.



Laura Bell of the Multiple Sclerosis Society in the UK says that her society supports cannabinoid research for people with multiple sclerosis. "Smoking cannabis results in exposure to many toxic chemicals," she says. "We welcome research into better and safer delivery methods."



Cannabis leaf is not the only substrate suited to a vaporizer. Other herbal preparations, such as eucalyptus and chamomile can also be used, or any plant with medicinal properties in the volatile compounds of its leaves.

Overgrow.com/norcan.org

Powered by ScribeFire.

50 snails shot into space

An unmanned spacecraft carrying 2.5 tons of supplies and 50 snails headed to the International Space Station Saturday after being launched from Kazakhstan.

The Russian-built Progress 25 spacecraft was fired into space Friday night atop a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome, the space.com Web site reported. It will reach the space station Tuesday with its cargo of more than 5,000 pounds of food, fuel, air, water and other vital supplies and equipment.

The spacecraft's cargo also includes 50 snails to be studied in experiments on tissue regeneration in zero gravity, the Russian news agency Interfax reported.

The Institute for Medical and Biological Problems said the spacecraft carried a selection of movies on DVD -- mainly comedies -- requested by crewmembers and recommended by experts.

"The psychological support team is also sending several magazines and books requested by crewmembers," an institute spokesman said.

NASA said the Expedition 15 crew trained Friday with the telerobotically operated rendezvous system that would manually guide in the cargo craft for docking in the event its automated system encountered a problem.

The crew -- Russian cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov and NASA astronaut Sunita Williams -- has been onboard the ISS since December

Powered by ScribeFire.

The shape of life

Scientists find clues to the formation of Fibonacci spirals in nature

Conical shapes with irregularities produce parastichous spiral X patterns such as on the scientists microstructure at left and a strawberry at right. Credit: Li et al. 2007 Applied Physics Letters.
Conical shapes with irregularities produce parastichous spiral ‘X’ patterns, such as on the scientists’ microstructure at left, and a strawberry at right. Credit: Li, et al. ©2007 Applied Physics Letters.

While the aesthetics and symmetry of Fibonacci spiral patterns has often attracted scientists, a mathematical or physical explanation for their common occurrence in nature is yet to be discovered. Recently, scientists have successfully produced Fibonacci spiral patterns in the lab, and found that an elastically mismatched bi-layer structure may cause stress patterns that give rise to Fibonacci spirals. The discovery may explain the widespread existence of the pattern in plants.

Chaorong Li, of the Zhejiang Sci-Tech University and the Institute of Physics in Beijing, along with Ailing Ji and Zexian Cao, both of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, produced their Fibonacci spiral pattern by manipulating the stress on inorganic microstructures made of a silver core and a silicon dioxide shell. The spontaneous assembly of Fibonacci patterns has rarely been realized in the laboratory, and the scientists’ results suggest that plant patterns might be modeled by mutually repulsive entities for both spherical and conical surfaces.

[Scientists find clues to the formation of Fibonacci spirals in nature]
“Patterns that evolve naturally are generally an optimized configuration for an assembly of elements under an interaction,” Cao explained to PhysOrg.com. “We conjecture that the Fibonacci spirals are the configuration of least elastic energy. Our experimental results provide a vivid demonstration of this energy principle. This is the best support for this energy principle of phyllotaxis (or “leaf arrangement,” often credited to D'Arcy Thompson) before a rigorous mathematical proof is available.”

Fibonacci spiral patterns appear in many plants, such as pinecones, pineapples, and sunflowers. The patterns consist of spirals that curve around a surface in both the “sinister” form (clockwise) and the “dexter” form (counterclockwise). The numbers of spirals on a surface are two consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc.). For example, Li, Ji, and Cao produced a series of spirals of 3x5, 5x8, 8x13, and 13x21. Because their microstructures were very small, the next series (21x34) would have required more than 700 “spherules,” creating so much stress that the structure would break.

In their experiment, the scientists used a technique from stress engineering, which is often used for the mass fabrication of micro- and nanostructures. On an elastically mismatched structure, which consists of a stiff layer on a compliant surface, a variety of buckling occurs. In this example, the scientists heated a mixture of SiO and Ag2O to prepare the silver-cored, silicon-dioxide-shelled microstructures onto substrates at 1270 K, a temperature above the melting point of silver but below that of silicon dioxide, in order to achieve the proper elasticity difference in the subsequent cooling process.

The thermal stress caused the shell to become unstable, and when the conical-shaped structures were cooled, spherules grew on the most stressed sites. The spherules revealed Fibonacci spiral patterns, sometimes growing in the sinister form and sometimes in the dexter form. The scientists couldn’t determine why one form rather than the other would emerge. While the chirality is considered random in plants, Li, Ji and Cao suggested that a geometrical factor may tip the balance.

“Modeled as the least energy configuration on a confining conical support, one element more or less may reverse the chirality,” said Cao. “We are seeking help on this question from simulations.”

The scientists experimented with different shaped structures, and found that only conical shapes produced Fibonacci spirals with definite chirality. On the other hand, spheres produced triangular patterns, while conical shapes with irregularities (such as the shape of a strawberry) produced an ‘X-pattern’. Still, the scientists noted that conical surfaces do not have to be perfect to produce Fibonacci spirals, which may explain the common occurrence in nature.

“The least energy configuration for particles is dependent on the geometry of the space in which the particles are confined—just look at the thorn bundles of various cacti,” Cao explained. “I only know that the Fibonacci spiral patterns are not the least energy pattern for a sphere (try to imagine a football) or flat plane (we can make Fibonacci spirals on street pavement, but it is not self-assembled). However, Fibonacci spirals do appear on conical receptacles in nature. I conjecture that Fibonacci spirals are the least energy configuration on conical supports, but I cannot prove it.”

For plants, Cao’s conjecture is supported even in very old literature, although scientists have yet to discover a mathematical proof. Cao explained why this proof is so difficult.

“The patterns on a sphere are now referred to as the Thomson problem, which has been generalized as the Generalized Riesz Problem,” Cao said. “There is no general method to find the least energy configuration for a given confining geometry, and the numerical solution costs enormous time of both the computers and the scientists. Even worse, it is difficult to make oneself believe that the least energy solution he finds is really the global minimum. And numerical solutions would never be accepted as proof.”

Cao added that there are many similar “embarrassments” in physics. He explained how physicists know that the body-centered cubic lattice is the least energy configuration of atoms for many metals, which is also currently unproven.

“We do wish that one day this will be proven,” he said. ”You know, as David Hilbert once said, ‘Physics is too difficult for physicists.’ In my opinion, a proof of problems of this kind needs new mathematics.”

Citations: Li, Chaorong, Ji, Ailing, and Cao, Zexian. “Stressed Fibonacci spiral patterns of definite chirality.” Applied Physics Letters 90, 164102 (2007).

Li, Chaorong, Zhang, Xiaona, and Cao, Zexian. “Triangular and Fibonacci number patterns driven by stress on core/shell microstructures.” Science 309, 909 (2005).

Powered by ScribeFire.

Slow Wave Sleep

Chronic fatigue syndrome impairs a person's slow wave activity during sleep

May 01, 2007 - WESTCHESTER, Ill. -- Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) has been associated with altered amounts of slow wave sleep, which could reflect reduced electroencephalograph (EEG) activity and impaired sleep regulation. A study published in the May 1st issue of the journal SLEEP finds that CFS is also associated with a blunted slow wave activity (SWA) response to sleep challenge, suggesting an impairment of the basic sleep drive and homeostatic response.

The study, authored by Roseanna Armitage, PhD, and colleagues at the University of Michigan, focused on 13 pairs of identical twins discordant for CFS. Analyses, which were restricted to the first four non-REM periods each night in order to show comparability, revealed that SWA, or other sleep EEG measures, did not differ between the CFS and healthy twins during a regular night's sleep. According to Armitage, it was only after a "challenge" to sleep regulation was introduced (keeping them awake an extra four hours) that the CFS twins exhibited significantly less SWA power in the first non-REM period of recovery sleep and accumulated a smaller percentage of SWA in the first non-REM period than their twin counterparts.

"CFS shares symptoms with depression, and some experts have suggested that it is not a distinctly different disorder," said Armitage. "We have also conducted studies of SWA response to sleep challenge in depression, and the results are very different. Depressed women did not show a blunted SWA response to sleep challenge. The present CFS study included only women, and none had current depression. Therefore, our results cannot be explained on the basis of depression."

Experts recommend that adults get between seven and eight hours of sleep each night to maintain good health and optimum performance.

Persons who think they might have a sleep disorder are urged to consult with their primary care physician, who will refer them to a sleep specialist.

American Academy of Sleep Medicine

Powered by ScribeFire.

Slow wave sleep

Deep Sleep: Researchers Discovery How To Simulate Slow Wave Activity

Science Daily — Sleep remains one of the big mysteries in biology. All animals sleep, and people who are deprived of sleep suffer physically, emotionally and intellectually. But nobody knows how sleep restores the brain.  (Credit: iStockphoto/Viktor Kitaykin)

Now, Giulio Tononi, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, has discovered how to stimulate brain waves that characterize the deepest stage of sleep. The discovery could open a new window into the role of sleep in keeping humans healthy, happy and able to learn. The brain function in question, called slow wave activity, is critical to the restoration of mood and the ability to learn, think and remember, Tononi says.

During slow wave activity, which occupies about 80 percent of sleeping hours, waves of electrical activity wash across the brain, roughly once a second, 1,000 times a night. In a new paper being published in the scientific journal PNAS, Tononi and colleagues, including Marcello Massimini, also of the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, described the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to initiate slow waves in sleeping volunteers. The researchers recorded brain electrical activity with an electroencephalograph (EEG).

A TMS instrument sends a harmless magnetic signal through the scalp and skull and into the brain, where it activates electrical impulses. In response to each burst of magnetism, the subjects' brains immediately produced slow waves typical of deep sleep, Tononi says. "With a single pulse, we were able to induce a wave that looks identical to the waves the brain makes normally during sleep."

The researchers have learned to locate the TMS device above a specific part of the brain, where it causes slow waves that travel throughout the brain. "We don't know why, but this is a very good place to evoke big waves that clearly travel through every part of the brain," Tononi says.

Scientists' interest in slow waves stems from a growing appreciation of their role in sleep, Tononi says. "We have reasons to think the slow waves are not just something that happens, but that they may be important" in sleep's restorative powers. For example, a sleep-deprived person has larger and more numerous slow waves once asleep. And as sleep proceeds, Tononi adds, the slow waves weaken, which may signal that the need for sleep is partially satisfied.

Creating slow waves on demand could someday lead to treatments for insomnia, where slow waves may be reduced. Theoretically, it could also lead to a magnetically stimulated "power nap," which might confer the benefit of eight hours sleep in just a few hours.

Before that happens, however, Tononi must go further and prove that artificial slow waves have restorative benefits to the brain. Such an experiment would ask whether sleep with TMS leads to greater brain restoration than an equal amount of sleep without TMS.

Although an electronic power-napper sounds like a product whose time has come, Tononi is chasing a larger quarry: learning why sleep is necessary in the first place. If all animals sleep, he says, it must play a critical role in survival, but that role remains elusive.

Based on the fact that sleep seems to "consolidate" memories, many neuroscientists believe that sleeping lets us rehearse the day's events.

Tononi agrees that sleep improves memory, but he thinks this happens through a different process, one that involves a reduction in brain overload. During sleep, he suggests, the synapses (connections between nerve cells) that were formed by the day's learning can relax a little.

While awake, we "observe and learn much more than you think," he observes. "Tons of things are leaving traces, changing the synapses, mainly by making them stronger. It is wonderful that you can have all these synaptic traces in the brain, but they come at a price. Synapses require proteins, fats, space and energy. At the end of a waking day, you have all these traces of memories left behind.

"During the slow waves, all the connections, step by step, are becoming a little weaker," Tononi adds. "By morning, the total connection strength is back to the way it was the morning before. The trick is to downscale all the connections by the same percentage, so the ones that were stronger are still stronger. That way you don't lose the memory."

Without this type of weakening, he says, we "would not be able to learn new things" because our brains would lack sufficient available energy, space and nutrients.

Although the explanation is still a hypothesis, Tononi hopes that the ability to artificially stimulate slow waves will allow him and other researchers to test the notion that sleep restores the brain by damping connectivity between neurons.

Slow waves, he suspects, "Clear out the noise to make sure your brain does not become too much of an energy hog, a space hog. By morning, you have a brain that is energy efficient, space efficient and ready to learn again."

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Quantum secrets of photosynthesis

Through photosynthesis, green plants and cyanobacteria are able to transfer sunlight energy to molecular reaction centers for conversion into chemical energy with nearly 100-percent efficiency. Speed is the key - the transfer of the solar energy takes place almost instantaneously so little energy is wasted as heat. How photosynthesis achieves this near instantaneous energy transfer is a long-standing mystery that may have finally been solved.
A study led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) at Berkeley reports that the answer lies in quantum mechanical effects. Results of the study are presented in the April 12, 2007 issue of the journal Nature.

"We have obtained the first direct evidence that remarkably long-lived wavelike electronic quantum coherence plays an important part in energy transfer processes during photosynthesis," said Graham Fleming, the principal investigator for the study. “This wavelike characteristic can explain the extreme efficiency of the energy transfer because it enables the system to simultaneously sample all the potential energy pathways and choose the most efficient one.

Fleming is the Deputy Director of Berkeley Lab, a professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley, and an internationally acclaimed leader in spectroscopic studies of the photosynthetic process. In a paper entitled, Evidence for wavelike energy transfer through quantum coherence in photosynthetic systems, he and his collaborators report the detection of “quantum beating” signals, coherent electronic oscillations in both donor and acceptor molecules, generated by light-induced energy excitations, like the ripples formed when stones are tossed into a pond.

Electronic spectroscopy measurements made on a femtosecond (millionths of a billionth of a second) time-scale showed these oscillations meeting and interfering constructively, forming wavelike motions of energy (superposition states) that can explore all potential energy pathways simultaneously and reversibly, meaning they can retreat from wrong pathways with no penalty. This finding contradicts the classical description of the photosynthetic energy transfer process as one in which excitation energy hops from light-capturing pigment molecules to reaction center molecules step-by-step down the molecular energy ladder.

"The classical hopping description of the energy transfer process is both inadequate and inaccurate," said Fleming. "It gives the wrong picture of how the process actually works, and misses a crucial aspect of the reason for the wonderful efficiency."

Co-authoring the Nature paper with Fleming were Gregory Engel, who was first author, Tessa Calhoun, Elizabeth Read, Tae-Kyu Ahn, Tomas Mancal and Yuan-Chung Cheng, all of whom held joint appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Physical Biosciences Division and the UC Berkeley Chemistry Department at the time of the study, plus Robert Blankenship, from the Washington University in St. Louis.

The photosynthetic technique for transferring energy from one molecular system to another should make any short-list of Mother Nature’s spectacular accomplishments. If we can learn enough to emulate this process, we might be able to create artificial versions of photosynthesis that would help us effectively tap into the sun as a clean, efficient, sustainable and carbon-neutral source of energy.

Towards this end, Fleming and his research group have developed a technique called two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy that enables them to follow the flow of light-induced excitation energy through molecular complexes with femtosecond temporal resolution. The technique involves sequentially flashing a sample with femtosecond pulses of light from three laser beams. A fourth beam is used as a local oscillator to amplify and detect the resulting spectroscopic signals as the excitation energy from the laser lights is transferred from one molecule to the next. (The excitation energy changes the way each molecule absorbs and emits light.)

Fleming has compared 2-D electronic spectroscopy to the technique used in the early super-heterodyne radios, where an incoming high frequency radio signal was converted by an oscillator to a lower frequency for more controllable amplification and better reception. In the case of 2-D electronic spectroscopy, scientists can track the transfer of energy between molecules that are coupled (connected) through their electronic and vibrational states in any photoactive system, macromolecular assembly or nanostructure.Read on...

Fleming and his group first described 2-D electronic spectroscopy in a 2005 Nature paper, when they used the technique to observe electronic couplings in the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) photosynthetic light-harvesting protein, a molecular complex in green sulphur bacteria.

Said Engel, "The 2005 paper was the first biological application of this technique, now we have used 2-D electronic spectroscopy to discover a new phenomenon in photosynthetic systems. While the possibility that photosynthetic energy transfer might involve quantum oscillations was first suggested more than 70 years ago, the wavelike motion of excitation energy had never been observed until now."

As in the 2005 paper, the FMO protein was again the target. FMO is considered a model system for studying photosynthetic energy transfer because it consists of only seven pigment molecules and its chemistry has been well characterized.

"To observe the quantum beats, 2-D spectra were taken at 33 population times, ranging from 0 to 660 femtoseconds," said Engel. "In these spectra, the lowest-energy exciton (a bound electron-hole pair formed when an incoming photon boosts an electron out of the valence energy band into the conduction band) gives rise to a diagonal peak near 825 nanometers that clearly oscillates. The associated cross-peak amplitude also appears to oscillate. Surprisingly, this quantum beating lasted the entire 660 femtoseconds."

Engel said the duration of the quantum beating signals was unexpected because the general scientific assumption had been that the electronic coherences responsible for such oscillations are rapidly destroyed.

"For this reason, the transfer of electronic coherence between excitons during relaxation has usually been ignored," Engel said. "By demonstrating that the energy transfer process does involve electronic coherence and that this coherence is much stronger than we would ever have expected, we have shown that the process can be much more efficient than the classical view could explain. However, we still don’t know to what degree photosynthesis benefits from these quantum effects."

Engel said one of the next steps for the Fleming group in this line of research will be to look at the effects of temperature changes on the photosynthetic energy transfer process. The results for this latest paper in Nature were obtained from FMO complexes kept at 77 Kelvin. The group will also be looking at broader bandwidths of energy using different colors of light pulses to map out everything that is going on, not just energy transfer. Ultimately, the idea is to gain a much better understanding how Nature not only transfers energy from one molecular system to another, but is also able to convert it into useful forms.

"Nature has had about 2.7 billion years to perfect photosynthesis, so there are huge lessons that remain for us to learn,” Engel said. “The results we’re reporting in this latest paper, however, at least give us a new way to think about the design of future artificial photosynthesis systems."

Source: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory