Fear, Anger or Pain: Why Do Babies Cry?

Spanish researchers have studied adults' accuracy in the recognition of the emotion causing babies to cry. Eye movement and the dynamic of the cry play a key role in recognition.

It is not easy to know why a newborn cries, especially amongst first-time parents. Although the main reasons are hunger, pain, anger and fear, adults cannot easily recognise which emotion is the cause of the tears.

"Crying is a baby's principal means of communicating its negative emotions and in the majority of cases the only way they have to express them," as explained by Mariano Chóliz, researcher at the University of Valencia.

Chóliz participates in a study along with experts from the University of Murcia and the National University of Distance Education (UNED) which describes the differences in the weeping pattern in a sample of 20 babies between 3 and 18 months caused by the three characteristic emotions: fear, anger and pain.

In addition, the team observed the accuracy of adults in recognising the emotion that causes the babies to cry, analysing the affective reaction of observers before the sobbing.

According to the results published recently in the Spanish Journal of Psychology, the main differences manifest in eye activity and the dynamics of the cry.

"When babies cry because of anger or fear, they keep their eyes open but keep them closed when crying in pain," states the researcher.

As for the dynamic of the cry, both the gestures and the intensity of the cry gradually increase if the baby is angry. On the contrary, the cry is as intense as can be in the case of pain and fear.

The adults do not properly identify which emotion is causing the cry, especially in the case of anger and fear.

Nonetheless, "although the observers cannot recognise the cause properly, when babies cry because they are in pain, this causes a more intense affective reaction than when they cry because of angry or fear," outlines Chóliz.

For the experts, the fact that pain is the most easily recognisable emotion can have an adaptive explanation, since crying is a warning of a potentially serious threat to health or survival and thus requires the carer to respond urgently.

Anger, fear and pain

When a baby cries, facial muscle activity is characterised by lots of tension in the forehead, eyebrows or lips, opening of the mouth and raised cheeks. The researchers observed different patterns between the three negative emotions.

As Chóliz notices, when angry the majority of babies keep their eyes half-closed, either looking in apparently no direction or in a fixed and prominent manner. Their mouth is either open or half-open and the intensity of their cry increases progressively.

In the case of fear, the eyes remain open almost all the time. Furthermore, at times the infants have a penetrating look and move their head backwards. Their cry seems to be explosive after a gradual increase in tension.

Read more at Science Daily

How Seals Sleep With Only Half Their Brain at a Time

A new study led by an international team of biologists has identified some of the brain chemicals that allow seals to sleep with half of their brain at a time.

The study was published this month in the Journal of Neuroscience and was headed by scientists at UCLA and the University of Toronto. It identified the chemical cues that allow the seal brain to remain half awake and asleep. Findings from this study may explain the biological mechanisms that enable the brain to remain alert during waking hours and go off-line during sleep.

"Seals do something biologically amazing -- they sleep with half their brain at a time. The left side of their brain can sleep while the right side stays awake. Seals sleep this way while they're in water, but they sleep like humans while on land. Our research may explain how this unique biological phenomenon happens" said Professor John Peever of the University of Toronto.

The study's first author, University of Toronto PhD student Jennifer Lapierre, made this discovery by measuring how different chemicals change in the sleeping and waking sides of the brain. She found that acetylcholine -- an important brain chemical -- was at low levels on the sleeping side of the brain but at high levels on the waking side. This finding suggests that acetylcholine may drive brain alertness on the side that is awake.

But, the study also showed that another important brain chemical -- serotonin -- was present at the equal levels on both sides of the brain whether the seals were awake or asleep. This was a surprising finding because scientist long thought that serotonin was a chemical that causes brain arousal.

These findings have possible human health implications because "about 40% of North Americans suffer from sleep problems and understanding which brain chemicals function to keep us awake or asleep is a major scientific advance. It could help solve the mystery of how and why we sleep" says the study's senior author Jerome Siegel of UCLA's Brain Research Institute.

From Science Daily

Our Ancestors Had Much Better Teeth

Mesolithic hunter-gatherers living on a meat-dominated, grain-free diet had much healthier mouths that we have today, with almost no cavities and gum disease-associated bacteria, a genetic study of ancient dental plaque has revealed.

The international team of researchers, led by a group at the Australian Center for Ancient DNA, University of Adelaide, publish their findings in today's Nature Genetics.

The researchers extracted DNA from dental plaque from 34 prehistoric northern European human skeletons, and traced the changes in the nature of oral bacteria from the last hunter-gatherers to Neolithic and medieval farmers and modern individuals.

"Dental plaque represents the only easily accessible source of preserved human bacteria," said lead author Dr. Christina Adler, now associate lecturer in dentistry at the University of Sydney.

The researchers found that the composition of bacteria changed with the introduction of farming and again 150 years ago, during the Industrial Revolution.

In contrast to the hunter-gatherer and early agriculturist diet, a modern diet full of refined carbohydrates and sugars has given us mouths dominated by cavity-causing bacteria.

"What we found was that the early (hunter-gatherer) groups really had a lot lower frequencies of any of the disease-associated bacteria compared to what you see today (and) that the number of species per person's mouth, or the diversity, was much higher in the past," said Adler.

"If they've got more (bacterial) diversity, that means that those people's mouths were more resilient to stresses, and probably less likely to develop disease."

However, while the researchers noted that bacteria associated with dental cavities such as S. mutans became dominant around the time of the Industrial Revolution, the frequency of bacteria associated with periodontal diseases such as gingivitis has not changed much since farming began.

This may have implications for the notion that gum disease and associated bacteria are a significant contributor to the recent increase in conditions such as cardiovascular disease and atherosclerotic plaques, said co-author Professor Alan Cooper, director of the Australian Center for Ancient DNA.

"It has been suggested that the presence of this permanent inflammation state along the gums was promoting an immune inflammatory response, which in turn leads to cardiovascular disease," said Cooper.

"The idea was that a recent increase in the bacteria P. gingivalis (which causes gingivitis), was associated with the recent increases in cardiovascular disease; however, we could show that this particular species has been fairly stable throughout the farming period."

Read more at Discovery News

Higgs Boson Discovery = Cosmic Doomsday?

If calculations of the newly discovered Higgs boson particle are correct, one day, tens of billions of years from now, the universe will disappear at the speed of light, replaced by a strange, alternative dimension, one theoretical physicist calls “boring.”

Scientists last year announced they had discovered what appeared to be the long-sought subatomic particle that accounts for how matter gets its mass.

Analysis is ongoing to fully characterize the particle, known as the Higgs boson, and its related daughter, grand-daughter and cousin particles, all of which are needed to assure scientists that they’ve truly found what was once pure theory.

“It sounds too easy -- a particle with no spin and no charge. Like you made it up and yet there it is,” theoretical physicist Joseph Lykken, with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., told Discovery News.

So far, scientists have found nothing to indicate that the particle discovered last year at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is not the Higgs boson with a mass of about 126 billion electron volts. It turns out that’s a critical number when it comes to the fate of the universe.

“If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it’s bad news,” said Lykken, who also serves on the LHC science team.

“It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out. This has to do with the Higgs energy field itself,” Lykken added, referring to an invisible field of energy that is believed to exist throughout the universe.

The calculation requires knowing the mass of the Higgs to one percent, as well as the precise mass of other related subatomic particles.

"It's right along the critical line,” said physicist Christopher Hill, also with Fermi.

“That could either be a cosmic coincidence, or it could be that there's some physics that's causing that,” Hill said.

Any life forms still around when the universe ends won’t have to worry about what’s coming -- it will unfold at light speed.

“You won’t actually see it because it will come at you at the speed of light and that’s it, so don’t worry. We know the universe is pretty stable because it’s been around for 13.5 billion years, so even before we did this calculation we knew that.

“This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there’ll be a catastrophe,” Lykken said.

Read more at Discovery News

Living Organisms Need Antifreeze to Survive in the Cold

If you thought antifreeze was only something that was necessary to keep your car from freezing up in the winter, think again. Plants and animals living in cold climates have natural antifreeze proteins (AFPs) which prevent ice growth and crystallization of organic fluid matter. Without such antifreeze, living matter would suffer from frost damage and even death.

Production of such antifreeze proteins is one of the major evolutionary routes taken by a variety of organisms, including fish, insects, bacteria, plants and fungi. Understanding how this mechanism works is not only significant in itself, but also has important implications for improving the world's food and medicinal production, believe researchers from Israel, Canada and the US who investigated how the process works.

Working on unraveling the AFP enigma were scientists from the lab of Dr. Ido Braslavsky of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and from Ohio University in the US, in collaboration with Prof. Peter L. Davies from Queens University (Ontario, Canada) and Prof. Alex Groisman from the University of California (San Diego, CA).

Despite half a century of research, the mechanism underlying the activity of the natural antifreeze proteins is still unclear. One of the debates in the academic community regards the chemistry and physics behind the interactions of antifreeze proteins and ice. In particular, there is an ongoing argument over whether the binding of the proteins to ice is reversible and whether continued presence of these proteins in solution is necessary for prevention of ice growth.

The challenge in unraveling these questions stems from a variety of technical problems associated with the growth and tracking of tiny ice crystals in an environment that mimics the surroundings of the antifreeze proteins in nature.

The Hebrew University researchers studied the antifreeze protein of the yellow mealworm. This protein is a hyperactive AFP with a potency to arrest ice growth that is hundreds of times greater than the potency of fish and plant AFPs.

In their study, published in the American journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), the international team of researchers biochemically created a fluorescent marker version of the AFP that allowed for direct observation under a microscope lens. They injected this protein into custom-designed microfluidic devices with minute diameter channels.

The microfluidic devices were placed in cooling units engineered with a temperature control at the level of a few thousandth of a degree, so that ice crystals of 20 to 50 micrometers could be grown and melted controllably, all under microscopic observation.

Using their specialized system, the researchers were able to show that ice grown and incubated in an antifreeze solution remains coated with protein and therefore protected. They further showed that the AFPs bind ice directly and strongly enough so as to prevent the ice from growth even after there is no longer any further presence of protein in the solution.

The significance of the findings published in this study is not only on the scientific level but also practical. For example, fish AFPs are already used in low-fat ice cream to prevent ice recrystallization, thereby maintaining a soft, creamy texture. These proteins could be used in other frozen foods for maintaining the desired texture without additional fats, say the researchers.

In medicine, AFPs can be used to improve the quality of sperm, ovules and embryos stored in a frozen state, and for cold or cyropreservation of organs (freezing at extremely low temperatures) for transplantation. They can also be used in cryosurgery and in agriculture.

Read more at Science Daily

Water On the Moon: It's Been There All Along

Traces of water have been detected within the crystalline structure of mineral samples from the lunar highland upper crust obtained during the Apollo missions, according to a University of Michigan researcher and his colleagues.

The lunar highlands are thought to represent the original crust, crystallized from a magma ocean on a mostly molten early moon. The new findings indicate that the early moon was wet and that water there was not substantially lost during the moon's formation.

The results seem to contradict the predominant lunar formation theory -- that the moon was formed from debris generated during a giant impact between Earth and another planetary body, approximately the size of Mars, according to U-M's Youxue Zhang and his colleagues.

"Because these are some of the oldest rocks from the moon, the water is inferred to have been in the moon when it formed," Zhang said. "That is somewhat difficult to explain with the current popular moon-formation model, in which the moon formed by collecting the hot ejecta as the result of a super-giant impact of a martian-size body with the proto-Earth.

"Under that model, the hot ejecta should have been degassed almost completely, eliminating all water."

A paper titled "Water in lunar anorthosites and evidence for a wet early moon" was published online Feb. 17 in the journal Nature Geoscience. The first author is Hejiu Hui, postdoctoral research associate of civil and environmental engineering and earth sciences at the University of Notre Dame. Hui received a doctorate at U-M under Zhang, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and one of three co-authors of the Nature Geoscience paper.

Over the last five years, spacecraft observations and new lab measurements of Apollo lunar samples have overturned the long-held belief that the moon is bone-dry.

In 2008, laboratory measurement of Apollo lunar samples by ion microprobe detected indigenous hydrogen, inferred to be the water-related chemical species hydroxyl, in lunar volcanic glasses. In 2009, NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing satellite, known as LCROSS, slammed into a permanently shadowed lunar crater and ejected a plume of material that was surprisingly rich in water ice.

Hydroxyls have also been detected in other volcanic rocks and in the lunar regolith, the layer of fine powder and rock fragments that coats the lunar surface. Hydroxyls, which consist of one atom of hydrogen and one of oxygen, were also detected in the lunar anorthosite study reported in Nature Geoscience.

In the latest work, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy was used to analyze the water content in grains of plagioclase feldspar from lunar anorthosites, highland rocks composed of more than 90 percent plagioclase. The bright-colored highlands rocks are thought to have formed early in the moon's history when plagioclase crystallized from a magma ocean and floated to the surface.

The infrared spectroscopy work, which was conducted at Zhang's U-M lab and co-author Anne Peslier's lab, detected about 6 parts per million of water in the lunar anorthosites.

"The surprise discovery of this work is that in lunar rocks, even in nominally water-free minerals such as plagioclase feldspar, the water content can be detected," said Zhang, the James R. O'Neil Collegiate Professor of Geological Sciences.

"It's not 'liquid' water that was measured during these studies but hydroxyl groups distributed within the mineral grain," said Notre Dame's Hui. "We are able to detect those hydroxyl groups in the crystalline structure of the Apollo samples."

The hydroxyl groups the team detected are evidence that the lunar interior contained significant water during the moon's early molten state, before the crust solidified, and may have played a key role in the development of lunar basalts.

"The presence of water," said Hui, "could imply a more prolonged solidification of the lunar magma ocean than the once-popular anhydrous moon scenario suggests."

The researchers analyzed grains from ferroan anorthosites 15415 and 60015, as well as troctolite 76535. Ferroan anorthosite 15415 is one the best known rocks of the Apollo collection and is popularly called the Genesis Rock because the astronauts thought they had a piece of the moon's primordial crust. It was collected on the rim of Apur Crater during the Apollo 15 mission.

Rock 60015 is highly shocked ferroan anorthosite collected near the lunar module during the Apollo 16 mission. Troctolite 76535 is a coarse-grained plutonic rock collected during the Apollo 17 mission.

Read more at Science Daily

New Whale Species Unearthed in California Highway Dig

Chalk yet another fossil find up to roadcut science. Thanks to a highway-widening project in California’s Laguna Canyon, scientists have identified several new species of early toothed baleen whales. Paleontologist Meredith Rivin of the John D. Cooper Archaeological and Paleontological Center in Fullerton, California, presented the finds Feb. 17 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“In California, you need a paleontologist and an archaeologist on-site” during such projects, Rivin says. That was fortuitous: The Laguna Canyon outcrop, excavated between 2000 and 2005, turned out to be a treasure trove containing hundreds of marine mammals that lived 17 million to 19 million years ago. It included 30 cetacean skulls as well as an abundance of other ocean dwellers such as sharks, says Rivin, who studies the fossil record of toothed baleen whales. Among those finds, she says, were four newly identified species of toothed baleen whale—a type of whale that scientists thought had gone extinct 5 million years earlier.

Whales, the general term for the order Cetacea, comprise two suborders: Odontoceti, or toothed whales, which includes echolocators like dolphins, porpoises, and killer whales; and Mysticeti, or baleen whales, the filter-feeding giants of the deep such as blue whales and humpback whales.The two suborders share a common ancestor.

Mysticeti comes from the Greek for mustache, a reference to the baleen that hangs down from their jaw. But the earliest baleen whales actually had teeth (although they’re still called mysticetes). Those toothy remnants still appear in modern fin whale fetuses, which start to develop teeth in the womb that are later reabsorbed before the enamel actually forms.

The four new toothed baleen whale species were also four huge surprises, Rivin says. The new fossils date to 17 to 19 million years ago, or the early-mid Miocene epoch, making them the youngest known toothed whales. Three of the fossils belong to the genus Morawanocetus, which is familiar to paleontologists studying whale fossils from Japan, but hadn’t been seen before in California. These three, along with the fourth new species, which is of a different genus, represent the last known occurrence of aetiocetes, a family of mysticetes that coexisted with early baleen whales. Thus, they aren’t ancestral to any of the living whales, but they could represent transitional steps on the way tothe toothless mysticetes.

The fourth new species—dubbed “Willy”—has its own surprises, Rivin says. Although modern baleen whales are giants, that’s a fairly recent development (in the last 10 million years). But Willy was considerably bigger than the three Morawanocetus fossils. Its teeth were also surprisingly worn—and based on the pattern of wear as well as the other fossils found in the Laguna Canyon deposit, Rivin says, that may be because Willy’s favorite diet may have been sharks. Modern offshore killer whales, who also enjoy a meal of sharks, tend to have similar patterns of wear in their teeth due to the sharks’ rough skin.

The new fossils are a potentially exciting find, says paleobiologist Nick Pyenson of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. Although it’s not yet clear what Rivin’s team has got and what the fossils will reveal about early baleen whale evolution, he says, “I’ll be excited to see what they come up with.” Pyenson himself is no stranger to roadcut science and the rush to preserve fossils on the brink of destruction: In 2011, he managed, within a week, to collect three-dimensional images of numerous whale fossils found by workers widening a highway running through Chile’s Atacama Desert.

Read more at Wired Science

Dark Matter Hunter Results Coming in March

Scientists are preparing to release the first round of results from a key experiment aboard the International Space Station that has been sampling a soup of high-energy particles in space.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer particle detector was installed on the station during the next-to-last space shuttle mission in May 2011. Since then, the $2 billion instrument, a collaboration of  60 research institutes in 16 countries, has been amassing a proverbial mountain of data, including a headcount of 7.7 billion electrons and positrons (the antimatter counterpart to electrons).

In the overall numbers of particles interests scientists less than the ratio between the two. The idea is to determine if there are more antimatter particles than matter, and, if so, at exactly what energy level the disparity occurs.

“The smoking gun that we’re looking for in the positron-to-electron ratio is a rise and then a dramatic fall. That’s  the key signature that would come from the dark matter annihilating the halo,” said Michael Turner, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago.

The halo Turner is referring to is the halo of the Milky Way galaxy, the region beyond the central disk of stars and dust. If current theoretical models are correct, there’s a massively massive pool of dark matter — perhaps as big as 1 million light-years across — that envelopes the visible galaxy, which is about 100,000 light-years in diameter.

Behind the AMS numbers is an 80-year-old mystery about why our galaxy — and the universe for that matter — hangs together because despite the apparent plethora of stars, galaxies and gas, there is simply far too little of it to gravitationally bind it together.

Physicists estimate that visible (i.e. detectable) matter accounts for a mere 4 percent of the universe’s contents. Dark matter, which is not dark as in “black” but dark as in undetectable with electromagnetic radiation, comprises about another 24 percent. The rest is an even more exotic and less-known force called dark energy.

One idea about dark matter is that even though we can’t, by definition, detect it directly, we can scout for its footprints.

“It’s really not interacting a lot. The hope is it interacts a little bit,” Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University, said at the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences meeting in Boston.

Read more at Discovery News

Evolution Helped Turn Hairless Skin Into a Canvas for Self-Expression

Hairless skin first evolved in humans as a way to keep cool -- and then turned into a canvas to help them look cool, according to a Penn State anthropologist.

About 1.5 to 2 million years ago, early humans, who were regularly on the move as hunters and scavengers, evolved into nearly hairless creatures to more efficiently sweat away excess body heat, said Nina Jablonski, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology. Later, humans began to decorate skin to increase attractiveness to the opposite sex and to express, among other things, group identity.

"We can make a visual impact and present a completely different impression than we can with regular, undecorated skin," said Jablonski, who reports on her research  on Feb. 16 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston.

Over the millennia, people turned their skin into canvases of self-expression in different ways, including permanent methods, such as tattooing and branding, as well as temporary ones, including cosmetics and body painting, according to the researcher.

Jablonski said both males and females use forms of skin decoration to become more attractive to the opposite sex. Women, for example, may use makeup to increase the size of their eyes, a cue that is considered attractive in most cultures. Males in some cultures also use skin decoration as a way to bring out facial features to appeal to women, or to look more menacing and warrior-like.

"We can paint a great design on our bodies and use those designs to send all sorts of messages or express group memberships," said Jablonski.

While parents may still fret that their children are choosing tattoo designs frivolously, Jablonski said people have traditionally put considerable time and thought into the tattoos.

"Usually it is something with deep meaning," Jablonski said. "When I talk to people about their tattoos they, tell me they've spent months or years choosing a design that is incredibly meaningful and salient to them."

Prior to the evolution of mostly naked skin, humans were furry creatures, not unlike chimpanzees are now, Jablonski said. Skin decoration would not be possible if humans were still covered with fur.

Studying skin is difficult because it can be preserved only for a few thousand years, unlike bones and fossils, which last millions of years.

Jablonski said that she and other researchers based their estimate on when humans evolved hairless skin on the study of the fossil record and an examination of the molecular history of genes that code proteins that help produce skin pigmentation.

"We find a lot of evidence of when humans began to lose hair based on molecular genetics," said Jablonski.

Humans are the only primates that are essentially hairless, although aquatic mammals, like whales and dolphins, have no hair. Prior to the idea that humans evolved hairlessness as a mechanism to cope with body heat, some researchers believed that hairlessness resulted from evolution from a common aquatic ancestor, Jablonski said. However, the theory, often referred to as the aquatic ape theory, does not match the genetic, fossil and environmental evidence, she said.

Read more at Science Daily

Cotton Candy Cloud Hides Baby Black Hole

What looks like the explosion of a cotton candy Death Star (run by evil space clowns, perhaps?) is actually the remains of a star’s death. This colorful cloud is a supernova remnant, seen in infrared, radio and X-ray light and at its center may hide one of the galaxy’s youngest black holes.

Located 26,000 light-years away in the northern constellation Aquila, W49B is a snapshot of the shock waves from a star that went supernova an estimated 1,000 years ago (not including the time it took for its light to reach us). Several observation methods and instruments were used to create the technicolor image above – X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shown in blue and green, radio data from the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array in pink, and infrared and optical data from the Palomar Observatory in orange and yellow — but put all together, one feature becomes glaringly obvious.

This thing is a mess.

Typically, supernova remnants have a roughly circular or shell-like shape, generally seen as a ring of bright material surrounding the dense burnt-out core of a star. The ring is bright because it’s composed of interstellar gas and dust that’s being violently ionized by the spreading force of the supernova. Ionized material gives off many forms of radiation, detectable in various wavelengths by observatories on the ground, as well as in space.

W49B isn’t a ring, though. It’s a sloppy barrel shape that indicates an uneven, asymmetrical eruption, hinting that the original star didn’t go peacefully into this good night.

And as for the star? It’s nowhere to be found — which is in itself strange. Supernova remnants usually have some form of neutron star at their centers, the wildly-spinning, ultra-dense cores of dead massive stars. But even after searching for one, scientists have found no such object at the center of W49B. This could mean that there’s a very different sort of stellar corpse lurking there — a black hole.

If that is indeed the case, then this would be the galaxy’s newest black hole — at least as far as what’s been discovered so far. A mere thousand years old, an alleged black hole at the heart of W49B would have just been born in the night sky around the same time that Vikings were first setting foot on North American shores.

Read more at Discovery News