With Halloween approaching, people turn their attention to the spooky and the scary, reveling in stories and images of ghosts, ghouls and witches for the holiday. However, while some monstrous characters only come out to play in October; others enjoy attention year round.
For example, in recent years, vampire media has gained popularity, from Stephanie Meyer's "Twilight" series of books and films to HBO's "True Blood," which finished its fifth season this summer. Zombies have recently seen a resurgence in popularity as well, evidenced by new takes on the genre, such as Zach Synder's 2004 remake of "Dawn of the Dead," Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" and Edgar Wright's "Shaun of the Dead." Zombies have even shambled onto the television screen with AMC's "The Walking Dead."
Hollywood is quick to cash in on what's popular, but why do themes gain popularity in the first place? Does the prevalence of a certain monster reflect what's going on in our society today?
"I would argue that monsters in literature, in general, are almost always indicative of things we fear in a sort of collective sense," says Cajsa Baldini, a senior lecturer in the English Department of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Baldini is well-versed in classic monsters and their cultural significance. She teaches a course on 19th century fiction, which covers monstrous tales such as Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and "The Island of Doctor Moreau" by H.G. Wells. Both novels are steeped in themes of technology out of control and the ethical implications of science.
"Jurassic Park" is a great example of the "technology out of control" trope. It's a modern-day Frankenstein story, says principal lecturer Paul Cook, who teaches and writes science fiction in the English Department.
In the original "Frankenstein," after Victor Frankenstein creates his monster, he abandons it to be persecuted and ostracized. Once the monster understands what his creator did to him, he seeks out the doctor.
"I think that's what it's about -- to be confronted with our creations," says Baldini of the novel. "What responsibilities do we have to what we create? It essentially posits the question, do scientists have ethical responsibilities, or is the only responsibility towards further discovery? And I think that's the reason we read that novel today."
Baldini points to Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner," in which one man hunts down rogue human-looking androids, as a more modern interpretation of these ideas.
"The android turns around and says: 'Hey, I know you built in a flaw in me, I'm going to die, I need to know when' -- a question most of us ask, as does Victor Frankenstein in Shelley's novel," says Baldini.
Just as 19th century fiction reflected common fears and anxieties, science fiction in the 1950s served the same purpose. Films such as "The Day the Earth Stood Still" or "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" reflected Americans' fear of communism.
"Science fiction of the 50s not only reflected the culture, but criticized it as well," says Cook.
Cook believes that some monsters in fiction are simply manifestations of the worst parts of us, or a trait that is out of control.
"When ideas get out of control, you get monsters," says Cook. "Monsters, as an archetype, are simply a reflection of some aspect of our human nature greatly magnified to the level of destruction. That is where you get the werewolf, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or the Hulk -- something that's inside of us that comes out."
Baldini thinks that the theme of the embattled force within us points to humanity's desire to rise above the forces of nature.
"I think the werewolf is more of a psychological monster," she says. "Like any monster, it has to be reflective of us to be interesting. I think it's about the animal within, the aspects of us we think we've grown away from or that we don't want to acknowledge we ever had. We're not in control of nature, even if we like to think we are. Just look at an Ebola outbreak, or tsunamis. We think we can control nature, but we don't. We're subject to it like any other species on Earth."
While some monsters are reflections of humanity's struggle with internal, natural forces, others, such as the vampire, express a fear of external influences. Baldini's course explores the first appearance of the modern vampire, in the 1819 novella "The Vampyre" by John Polidori.
"Today, it's almost ridiculous because it's so stereotypical -- it's about a vampire that's aristocratic and evil, but he's also strangely mesmerizing and attractive to people. But of course, everyone who associates with him ends badly," says Baldini of Polidori's story.
Even though not all modern interpretations of vampires pose them as aristocrats, Baldini sees these creatures as always being the elite.
"If you look at Polidori and Stoker's vampires, they are aristocratic and evil," says Baldini. "They are themselves special and set apart -- not everyone can be them. And also whoever they seek out as their victim, even though it's violent and it's deadly, there's a sense of being the elect -- vampires don't just go for anyone. I think this is part of the attraction, the erotic appeal of the vampire."
Baldini cites that attraction to the elite nature of the vampire as part of their popularity in the 1980s, when Anne Rice's novels and films like "The Lost Boys" portrayed vampires as evil but also glamorous and cool.
"That was the time period of glam and the early yuppies and Gordon Gekko saying 'greed is good.' It was okay to be selfish, to prioritize number one, to strive toward an elite status," says Baldini.
Popular vampires today still have that elitism and admiration, but they are also tragic figures.
"It's okay to want to be elite to the point were we start valorizing such characters, such as Edward Cullen," says Baldini. "It's actually a good thing to want to be like them and to be elected by them, and now there's a humility trope in there too."
While vampires represent the upper crust, a monster that is anything but has recently become incredibly popular: the zombie.
"The zombie is the underdog of the monsters, sort of the underachiever of monsters as well," Baldini says of the stumbling, rotting creatures. "You don't have to do much to become a zombie. You're bitten by one and you become one. There's minimal grooming involved. It's the blue-collar monster."
And being a zombie is cool today. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of people turn out for zombie walks, or zombie pub crawls. Hordes of people dress up as the living dead and shuffle through cities across the world, sometimes to promote a cause, give to charity or just for fun. But what does the popularity of zombies say about society today?
"We're looking at a monster that's a collective body that consumes everything," says Baldini. "That's western culture, that's what we are. We have over-consumed throughout the 1990s. We over-borrowed on credit, we took all the equity out of our homes and then some, we consumed indiscriminately, we didn't think, because like zombies, we don't think. We just followed the herd in consumption. I don't think people sit around and think about this, but I think on some level, the zombie is relatable in this particular time in history."
As Baldini points out, the cultural significance of monsters probably isn't something most people consider on a conscious level. But that doesn't make the themes embedded in monster stories any less important.
Read more at Science Daily
Oct 30, 2012
How Silver Turns People Blue
Researchers from Brown University have shown for the first time how ingesting too much silver can cause argyria, a rare condition in which patients' skin turns a striking shade of grayish blue.
"It's the first conceptual model giving the whole picture of how one develops this condition," said Robert Hurt, professor of engineering at Brown and part of the research team. "What's interesting here is that the particles someone ingests aren't the particles that ultimately cause the disorder."
Scientists have known for years argyria had something to do with silver. The condition has been documented in people who (ill advisedly) drink antimicrobial health tonics containing silver nanoparticles and in people who have had extensive medical treatments involving silver. Tissue samples from patients showed silver particles actually lodged deep in the skin, but it wasn't clear how they got there.
As it turns out, argyria is caused by a complex series of chemical reactions, Hurt said. His paper on the subject, authored with Brown colleagues Jingyu Liu, Zhongying Wang, Frances Liu, and Agnes Kane, is published in the journal ACS Nano.
"The particles someone ingests aren't the particles that ultimately cause the disorder."Hurt and his team show that nanosilver is broken down in the stomach, absorbed into the bloodstream as a salt and finally deposited in the skin, where exposure to light turns the salt back into elemental silver and creates the telltale bluish hue. That final stage, oddly, involves the same photochemical reaction used to develop black-and-white photographs.
From silver to salt and back again
Hurt and his team have been studying the environmental impact of silver, specifically silver nanoparticles, for years. They've found that nanosilver tends to corrode in acidic environments, giving off charged ions -- silver salts -- that can be toxic in large amounts. Hurt's graduate student, Jingyu Liu (now a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology), thought those same toxic ions might also be produced when silver enters the body, and could play a role in argyria.
To find out, the researchers mixed a series chemical treatments that could simulate what might happen to silver inside the body. One treatment simulated the acidic environment in the gastrointestinal tract; one mimicked the protein content of the bloodstream; and a collagen gel replicated the base membranes of the skin.
They found that nanosilver corrodes in stomach acid in much the same way it does in other acidic environments. Corrosion strips silver atoms of electrons, forming positively charged silver salt ions. Those ions can easily be taken into the bloodstream through channels that absorb other types of salt. That's a crucial step, Hurt said. Silver metal particles themselves aren't terribly likely to make it from the GI tract to the blood, but when they're transformed into a salt, they're ushered right through.
From there, Hurt and his team showed that silver ions bind easily with sulfur present in blood proteins, which would give them a free ride through the bloodstream. Some of those ions would eventually end up in the skin, where they'd be exposed to light.
To re-create this end stage, the researchers shined ultraviolet light on collagen gel containing silver ions. The light caused electrons from the surrounding materials to jump onto the unstable ions, returning them to their original state -- elemental silver. This final reaction is ultimately what turns patients' skin blue. The photoreaction is similar to the way silver is used in black and white photography. When exposed to light, silver salts on a photographic film reduce to elemental silver and darken, creating an image.
Implications for nanosilver
Despite its potential toxicity, silver has been valued for centuries for its ability to kill germs, which is why silver nanoparticles are used today in everything from food packaging to bandages. There are concerns however that this nanoparticle form of silver might pose a unique health threat all its own.
This research, however, "would be one piece of evidence that you could treat nanoparticles in the same way as other forms of silver," Hurt says.
That's because the bioavailable form of silver -- the form that is absorbed into the bloodstream -- is the silver salt that's made in the stomach. Any elemental silver that's ingested is just the raw material to make that bioavailable salt. So ingesting silver in any form, be it nano or not, would have basically the same effect, Hurt said.
Read more at Science Daily
First Direct Detection Sheds Light On Dark Galaxies
Now, an international team of astronomers has detected several dark galaxies by observing the fluorescent glow of their hydrogen gas, illuminated by the ultraviolet light of a nearby quasar. But what exactly are dark galaxies, and what role do they play in the evolution of our universe?
"Dark galaxies are composed of dark matter and gas, but for some reason they have not been able to form stars," said Martin Haehnelt, Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. "Some theoretical models have predicted that dark galaxies were common in the early universe when galaxies had more difficulty forming stars -- partly because their density of gas was not sufficient to form stars -- and only later did galaxies begin to ignite stars, becoming like the galaxies we see today."
Haehnelt is a member of the scientific team that detected these galaxies. According to Haehnelt, one can begin to understand the importance of dark galaxies by looking at our own Milky Way. "We expect the precursor to the Milky Way was a smaller bright galaxy that merged with dark galaxies nearby. They all came together to form our Milky Way that we see today."
Another member of the team, Sebastiano Cantalupo of the University of California, Santa Cruz, agreed that dark galaxies are the building blocks of modern galaxies. "In our current theory of galaxy formation, we believe that big galaxies form from the merger of smaller galaxies. Dark galaxies bring to big galaxies a lot of gas, which then accelerates star formation in the bigger galaxies."
The techniques used for detecting dark galaxies also may provide a new way to learn about other phenomena in the universe, including what some call the "cosmic web" -- unseen filaments of gas and dark matter believed to permeate the universe, feeding and building galaxies and galaxy clusters where the filaments intersect.
Read more at Science Daily
How Animals Deal with Downpours
How animals react can depend on three basic things: the species, the individual's personality and the animal's access to human-made shelter and goods.
Outside of humans, orangutans have come up with some of the primate world's best ways of dealing with rain. Orangutans live in the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra, where dampness is part of the landscape.
In the forest during storms, orangutans will make protective canopies and "hats" out of leaves, but in zoos, they have found a more attractive material.
"Here in Seattle, rain is virtually an everyday occurrence," Gigi Allianic, spokesperson for Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo, told Discovery News. "Our orangutans wrap burlap bags around themselves and often just sit out storms. Like many of our other animals, they also have the option to retreat to an enclosure."
Most terrestrial animals do seek shelter. In nature, that can happen in tree or log holes, under rocks or leaves, or underground. Smaller animals like squirrels and mice will huddle together in such shelters, attempting to stay warm.
Rain seems to annoy most species, however, even aquatic animals. During torrential downpours, animals such as frogs, turtles and fish may retreat to lower levels of lakes and ponds, with some seeking added shelter under things like fallen rocks or driftwood.
Numerous animals, however, often remain out in the open and try to tolerate the wet.
"Grizzly bears at our zoo will often do that, even though they can go into an enclosure," Allianic said, adding that bears are very good swimmers.
Reptiles possess scaly skin composed of a protein called keratin. This allows reptile skin to have waterproof qualities while still remaining properly hydrated.
"Crocodiles are pretty good at dealing with inclement weather," Nick Hanna, assistant curator at Audubon Nature Institute in New Orleans, told Discovery News. "They remain calm and cool and never freak out, even during hard rains."
Some animals do lose their cool, but not necessarily because of rain.
"We've learned that, for certain animals, it's better and safer to leave them out instead of in," Hanna said. "When confined, ostriches tend to run into walls. African antelopes sometimes get so spooked that they will also run into walls."
These species, though, still have access to off exhibit areas and canopies to shield them from sun and rain.
In certain cases, how an animal reacts has more to do with its individual personality. Hanna and Allianic indicated that some primates and elephants fare better than others during rainstorms, particularly when thunder and lightning are involved.
Read more at Discovery News
Oct 29, 2012
Huge Deposit of Jurassic Turtle Remains Found in China
The results of their further work in 2009 and 2011 have just been published in the German journal Naturwissenschaften.
“This site has probably more than doubled the known number of individual turtles from the Jurassic,” says Walter Joyce. “Some of the shells were stacked up on top of one another in the rock.” It is what paleontologists call a “bone bed” – in this case consisting only of turtle remains.
Wings, Joyce and their team have made several expeditions to the arid region since 2007, finding fossil sharks, crocodiles, mammals and several dinosaur skeletons. Today one of the world’s driest regions, 160 million years ago Xinjiang was a green place of lakes and rivers, bursting with life. Yet the scientists have shown that even then, conditions were not always ideal, with climate change leading to seasonal drought – and this remarkable fossil find.
The turtles had gathered in one of the remaining waterholes during a very dry period, awaiting rain. Today’s turtles in Australia for instance do the same thing. But for the Xinjiang turtles, the rain came too late. Many of the turtles were already dead and their bodies rotting. When the water arrived, it came with a vengeance: a river of mud, washing the turtles and sediments along with it and dumping them in one place, as the paleontologists read the site and its layers of stone.
Read more at Science Daily
Mass Extinction Study Provides Lessons for Modern World
The mountain-sized asteroid that left the now-buried Chicxulub impact crater on the coast of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula is almost certainly the ultimate cause of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, which occurred 65 million years ago. Nevertheless, "Our study suggests that the severity of the mass extinction in North America was greater because of the ecological structure of communities at the time," noted lead author Jonathan Mitchell, a Ph.D. student of UChicago's Committee on Evolutionary Biology.
Mitchell and his co-authors, Peter Roopnarine of the California Academy of Sciences and Kenneth Angielczyk of the Field Museum, reconstructed terrestrial food webs for 17 Cretaceous ecological communities. Seven of these food webs existed within two million years of the Chicxulub impact and 10 came from the preceding 13 million years.
The findings are based on a computer model showing how disturbances spread through the food web. Roopnarine developed the simulation to predict how many animal species would become extinct from a plant die-off, a likely consequence of the impact.
"Our analyses show that more species became extinct for a given plant die-off in the youngest communities," Mitchell said. "We can trace this difference in response to changes in a number of key ecological groups such as plant-eating dinosaurs like Triceratops and small mammals."
The results of Mitchell and his colleagues paint a picture of late Cretaceous North America in which pre-extinction changes to food webs -- likely driven by a combination of environmental and biological factors -- results in communities that were more fragile when faced with large disturbances.
"Besides shedding light on this ancient extinction, our findings imply that seemingly innocuous changes to ecosystems caused by humans might reduce the ecosystems' abilities to withstand unexpected disturbances," Roopnarine said.
The team's computer model describes all plausible diets for the animals under study. In one run, Tyrannosaurus might eat only Triceratops, while in another it eats only duck-billed dinosaurs, and in a third it might eat a more varied diet. This stems from the uncertainty regarding exactly what Cretaceous animals ate, but this uncertainty actually worked to the study's benefit.
"Using modern food webs as guides, what we have discovered is that this uncertainty is far less important to understanding ecosystem functioning than is our general knowledge of the diets and the number of different species that would have had a particular diet," Angielczyk said.
Data derived from modern food webs helped the simulations account for such phenomena as how specialized animals tend to be, or how body size relates to population size and thus their probability of extinction.
The researchers also selected for their study a large number of specific food webs from all the specific webs possible in their general framework and evaluated how this sample of webs respond to a perturbation, such as the death of plants. They used the same relationships and assumptions to create food webs across all of the different sites, which means the differences between sites just stem from differences in the data rather than from the simulation itself. This makes the simulation a fundamentally comparative method, Roopnarine noted.
"We aren't trying to say that a given ecosystem was fragile, but instead that a given ecosystem was more or less fragile than another," he said.
The computer models showed that if the asteroid hit during the 13 million years preceding the latest Cretaceous communities, there almost certainly would still have been a mass extinction, but one that likely would have been less severe in North America.
Most likely a combination of changing climate and other environmental factors caused some types of animals to become more or less diverse in the Cretaceous, the researchers concluded. In their paper they suggest that the drying up of a shallow sea that covered part of North America may have been one of the main factors leading to the observed changes in diversity.
The study provides no evidence that the latest Cretaceous communities were on the verge of collapse before the asteroid hit. "The ecosystems collapsed because of the asteroid impact, and nothing in our study suggests that they would not have otherwise continued on successfully," Mitchell said. "Unusual circumstances, such as the after-effects of the asteroid impact, were needed for the vulnerability of the communities to become important."
The study has implications for modern conservation efforts, Angielczyk observed.
"Our study shows that the robustness or fragility of an ecosystem under duress depends very much on both the number of species present, as well as the types of species," he said, referring to their ecological function. The study also shows that more is not necessarily better, because simply having many species does not insure against ecosystem collapse.
Read more at Science Daily
Mummy Unwrapping Brought Egyptology to the Public
Mummies have been objects of horror in popular culture since the early 1800s -- more than a century before Boris Karloff portrayed an ancient Egyptian searching for his lost love in the 1932 film "The Mummy." Public "unwrappings" of real mummified human remains performed by both showmen and scientists heightened the fascination, but also helped develop the growing science of Egyptology, says a Missouri University of Science and Technology historian.
Dr. Kathleen Sheppard, an expert in the history of science, particularly archaeology and Egyptology, and an assistant professor of history and political science at Missouri S&T, says that while mummy unwrappings served as public spectacles that objectified exotic artifacts, they were also scientific investigations that sought to reveal medical and historical information about ancient life.
Sheppard wrote about this intersection between science and showmanship in an article titled "Between Spectacle and Science: Margaret Murray and the Tomb of the Two Brothers." It will be published in the December issue of the journal Science in Context.
Sheppard says 20th century Egyptologist Margaret Murray, the first woman to publicly unwrap a mummy, sought to unravel the mysteries of ancient Egypt by exposing mummified human remains. She says Murray's work is culturally significant because it is "poised between spectacle and science, drawing morbid public interest while also producing ground-breaking scientific work that continues to this day."
Public spectacles that displayed mummified remains as objects of curiosity date back to the 16th century, Sheppard says. "These types of spectacles were highly engaging shows in which people were, to a certain degree, educated about different aspects of science both by showmen and scientists."
Many Egyptologists drew a distinction between "Egyptomania," the fascination with all things Egypt, and "Egyptology," the scientific study of Egyptian life, Sheppard says, but Murray had a different goal -- involving the public in scientific inquiry with a goal of correcting popular misconceptions.
Read more at Science Daily
Dr. Kathleen Sheppard, an expert in the history of science, particularly archaeology and Egyptology, and an assistant professor of history and political science at Missouri S&T, says that while mummy unwrappings served as public spectacles that objectified exotic artifacts, they were also scientific investigations that sought to reveal medical and historical information about ancient life.
Sheppard wrote about this intersection between science and showmanship in an article titled "Between Spectacle and Science: Margaret Murray and the Tomb of the Two Brothers." It will be published in the December issue of the journal Science in Context.
Sheppard says 20th century Egyptologist Margaret Murray, the first woman to publicly unwrap a mummy, sought to unravel the mysteries of ancient Egypt by exposing mummified human remains. She says Murray's work is culturally significant because it is "poised between spectacle and science, drawing morbid public interest while also producing ground-breaking scientific work that continues to this day."
Public spectacles that displayed mummified remains as objects of curiosity date back to the 16th century, Sheppard says. "These types of spectacles were highly engaging shows in which people were, to a certain degree, educated about different aspects of science both by showmen and scientists."
Many Egyptologists drew a distinction between "Egyptomania," the fascination with all things Egypt, and "Egyptology," the scientific study of Egyptian life, Sheppard says, but Murray had a different goal -- involving the public in scientific inquiry with a goal of correcting popular misconceptions.
Read more at Science Daily
New Study Sheds Light On How and When Vision Evolved
The study, which used computer modelling to provide a detailed picture of how and when opsins evolved, sheds light on the origin of sight in animals, including humans. The evolutionary origins of vision remain hotly debated, partly due to inconsistent reports of phylogenetic relationships among the earliest opsin-possessing animals.
Dr Davide Pisani of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences and colleagues at NUI Maynooth performed a computational analysis to test every hypothesis of opsin evolution proposed to date. The analysis incorporated all available genomic information from all relevant animal lineages, including a newly sequenced group of sponges (Oscarella carmela) and the Cnidarians, a group of animals thought to have possessed the world's earliest eyes.
Using this information, the researchers developed a timeline with an opsin ancestor common to all groups appearing some 700 million years ago. This opsin was considered 'blind' yet underwent key genetic changes over the span of 11 million years that conveyed the ability to detect light.
Read more at Science Daily
Oct 28, 2012
Primates' Brains Make Visual Maps Using Triangular Grids
Scientists at Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have identified grid cells, neurons that fire in repeating triangular patterns as the eyes explore visual scenes, in the brains of rhesus monkeys.
The finding has implications for understanding how humans form and remember mental maps of the world, as well as how neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's erode those abilities. This is the first time grid cells have been detected directly in primates. Grid cells were identified in rats in 2005, and their existence in humans has been indirectly inferred through magnetic resonance imaging.
Grid cells' electrical activities were recorded by introducing electrodes into monkeys' entorhinal cortex, a region of the brain in the medial temporal lobe. At the same time, the monkeys viewed a variety of images on a computer screen and explored those images with their eyes. Infrared eye-tracking allowed the scientists to follow which part of the image the monkey's eyes were focusing on. A single grid cell fires when the eyes focus on multiple discrete locations forming a grid pattern.
"The entorhinal cortex is one of the first brain regions to degenerate in Alzheimer's disease, so our results may help to explain why disorientation is one of the first behavioral signs of Alzheimer's," says senior author Elizabeth Buffalo, PhD, associate professor of neurology at Emory University School of Medicine and Yerkes National Primate Research Center. "We think these neurons help provide a context or structure for visual experiences to be stored in memory."
"Our discovery of grid cells in primates is a big step toward understanding how our brains form memories of visual information," says first author Nathan Killian, a graduate student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. "This is an exciting way of thinking about memory that may lead to novel treatments for neurodegenerative diseases."
In the experiments in which rats' grid cells were identified, the cells fired whenever the rats crossed lines on an invisible triangular grid.
"The surprising thing was that we could identify cells that behaved in the same way when the monkeys were simply moving their eyes," Buffalo says. "It suggests that primates don't have to actually visit a place to construct the same kind of mental map."
Another aspect of grid cells not previously seen with rodents is that the cells' responses change when monkeys are seeing an image for the second time. Specifically, the grid cells reduce their firing rate when a repeat image is seen. Moving from the posterior (rear) toward the anterior (front) of the entorhinal cortex, more neurons show memory responses.
"These results demonstrate that grid cells are involved in memory, not just mapping the visual field," Killian says.
Consistent with previous reports on grid cells in rats, Killian and Buffalo observed "theta-band" oscillations, where grid cells fire in a rhythmic way, from 3 to 12 times per second. Some scientists have proposed that theta oscillations are important for grid cell networks to be generated in development, and also for the brain to put together information from the grid cells. In the monkeys, populations of neurons exhibited theta oscillations that occurred in intermittent bouts, but these bouts did not appear to be critical for formation of the spatial representation.
Vision is thought to be a more prominent sense for primates (monkeys and humans) compared with rodents, for whom touch and smell are more important. While grid cells in rodents and primates were detected in different types of experiments, Buffalo says that it doesn't mean grid cells necessarily have a different nature in primates.
"We are now training a monkey to move through a virtual 3-D space. My guess is that we'll find grid cells that fire in similar patterns as the monkey navigates through that space," she says.
Read more at Science Daily
Mayans Pissed Off Over Doomsday 'Deceit'
But this time, the anger isn't directed at the West's "messianic thinking," Maya leaders have accused the Guatemalan government of perpetuating the myth that the Mayan Long Count calendar predicts the end of the world for financial gain.
"We are speaking out against deceit, lies and twisting of the truth, and turning us into folklore-for-profit. They are not telling the truth about time cycles," Felipe Gomez, leader of the Maya alliance Oxlaljuj Ajpop, told the AFP news agency.
The entire "Mayan doomsday" nonsense centers around the mistaken belief that the ancient civilization had some magical ability to foretell the Apocalypse. But they didn't. In actuality, it focuses on a calendar cycle that runs out this year. This calendar, the Long Count, is a wonderfully complex system that spans around 5,200 years and is of huge spiritual significance to the Maya people. The final cycle of the calendar -- the 13th b'aktun -- will complete on Dec. 21.
Obviously this means the world will come to an end... Right?
Wrong.
In a statement released by Oxlaljuj Ajpop, the end of the cycle simply "means there will be big changes on the personal, family and community level, so that there is harmony and balance between mankind and nature."
To some crazed doomsayers desperately trying to make money from selling their nonsensical books of doom, this "harmony and balance" means the Universe it going to char broil the planet, killing everyone who isn't 'prepared' (i.e. those poor unfortunate souls who ignored their warnings).
The Mayan descendents don't quite see "harmony and balance" in the same way.
But when seeing an opportunity to profit from the West's insatiable desire to watch second-rate doomsday flicks and Indiana Jones version of archaeology, the Guatemalan government has embraced the inevitable surge of tourism December will bring. But the way in which it is being handled has frustrated groups like Oxlaljuj Ajpop.
The Culture Ministry is hosting a massive "doomsday" event in Guatemala City and many tourism groups have seen the opportunity to create "doomsday tours." Gomez has criticized this "show", pointing out that it is disrespectful to the Mayan culture.
Read more at Discovery News
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