Flirting Can Pay Off for Women, Study Finds

When Madeleine Albright became the first female U.S. Secretary of State, she led high-level negotiations between mostly male foreign government leaders. In 2009, comedian Bill Maher asked Albright if she ever flirted on the job and she replied, "I did, I did." Flirtatiousness, female friendliness, or the more diplomatic description "feminine charm" is an effective way for women to gain negotiating mileage, according to a new study by Haas School of Business Professor Laura Kray.

"Women are uniquely confronted with a tradeoff in terms of being perceived as strong versus warm. Using feminine charm in negotiation is a technique that combines both," says Kray, who holds the Warren E. and Carol Spieker Chair in Leadership at the Haas School.

The study, "Feminine Charm: An Experimental Analysis of its Costs and Benefits in Negotiations," was published in October in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and co-authored by Haas PhD alumna Connson C. Locke of the London School of Economics and Haas PhD candidate Alex B. Van Zant.

Flirtation that generates positive results, says Kray, is not overt sexual advances but authentic, engaging behavior without serious intent. In fact, the study found female flirtation signals attractive qualities such as confidence, which is considered essential to successful negotiators.

To determine whether women who flirt are more effective in negotiating than men who flirt, the researchers asked 100 participants to evaluate to what extent they use social charm in negotiation on a one-to-seven scale.

Earlier that week, the participants evaluated their partners' negotiating effectiveness. Women who said they used more social charm were rated more effective by their partners. However, men who said they used more social charm were not regarded as more effective.

In the second experiment, the researchers asked subjects to imagine they were selling a car worth $1,200 and asked for how much would they sell the car. Next, the subjects read one of two scenarios about a potential buyer named Sue. The first group meets Sue, who shakes hands when she meets the seller, smiles, and says, "It's a pleasure to meet you,." and then "What's your best price?" in a serious tone. The second group reads an alternate scenario in which Sue greets the seller by smiling warmly, looking the seller up and down, touching the seller's arm, and saying, "You're even more charming than over email," followed by a playful wink and asking, "What's your best price?"

The result? Male sellers were willing to give the "playful Sue" more than $100 off the selling price whereas they weren't as willing to negotiate with the "serious Sue." Playful Sue's behavior did not affect female car sellers.

Kray says many of her students who are senior women executives admit they love to flirt and describe themselves as "big flirts." Kray maintains flirting is not unprofessional if it remains playful and friendly.

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Bioenergy: The Broken Promise

Biofuels are going to save us from climate threats and the oil crisis, while at the same time providing an opportunity to the smallholder farmers of the world. Hopes are high, but completely unrealistic. It is like trying to push a square peg into a round hole, according to a current thesis at Linköping University.

Bioenergy could replace fossil fuels and solve the looming energy crisis. Into the bargain, we will benefit from reduced greenhouse gas emissions. A further bonus could be that demand for biofuels gives a lift to smallholder farmers in poor countries, who would be able to diversify their production and sell an attractive product on the international market. In short, a win-win-win situation is being portrayed.

And not by just anyone, but by three highly influential international organisations:

• Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
• International Energy Agency (IEA)

Magdalena Kuchler, recently awarded her Ph.D. at the Centre for Water and Environmental Studies at Linköping University (LiU), investigated the thinking of these three organisations concerning bioenergy during the period 1990 -- 2010.

The question of the future of bioenergy has a bearing on three areas: food, climate and energy; she therefore chose these particular organisations for her investigation.

Her conclusion is that the high hopes for bioenergy will not be realised, at least not under the current economic system that demands that production be as cheap as possible. Here the three organisations end up in contradictions and a dilemma they are not able to resolve.

"The production of biofuels has to fit in with a market economy, which is completely allied to economic growth and the accumulation of capital," she writes.

The result is monocultures with mechanised production. Changed land use leads to increased greenhouse emissions that eat into the reductions that biofuels ought to provide. Highly mechanised production creates an increased dependency on fossil fuels rather than the opposite.

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Dead Stars Could Be the Future of Spacecraft Navigation

Scientists at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and the University of Leicester have been commissioned by the European Space Agency (ESA) to investigate the feasibility of using dead stars to navigate spacecraft in deep space. The findings of the research will advise ESA strategy and if feasible this technique may in future revolutionise the way spacecraft navigate in the outer Solar System and beyond.

Spacecraft navigation currently relies on radio transmissions between a distant craft and a network of ground-stations on Earth. This means that the craft has to wait for an instruction from Earth to guide it through space and with the large distances involved this could take hours, days or even longer. This time delay affects a spacecraft's ability to react rapidly according to its location. Furthermore, the ground infrastructure is increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain due to the size of the radio antennas.

Scientists at NPL and the University of Leicester are exploring the use of X-rays from dead stars, called pulsars, to allow spacecraft to navigate autonomously. Pulsars are highly compact and rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit intense electromagnetic radiation observed as pulses, similar to the rotating beam of light seen from a light house. In some cases these pulses can be highly regular, making them suitable sources for navigation using a technique similar to GPS.

"Using on-board X-ray detectors, spacecraft could measure the times of pulses received from pulsars to determine the position and motion of the craft. The University of Leicester will use their experience in X-ray astronomy to come-up with potential designs of the device and NPL will develop timing and navigation algorithms to determine the potential accuracy of this technique. Funding received from ESA will allow us to investigate the feasibility of using these dead stars and the potential navigation performance that could be derived," says Setnam Shemar, leading the project on behalf of NPL's Time and Frequency Team.

The traditional form of ground-based space navigation can only support a limited number of spacecraft as only one set of measurements can be processed at any one time. If feasible, this new technique could allow a greater number of complex space missions to take place simultaneously in deep space as craft become capable of navigating themselves.

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In Einstein's Math: Faster-Than-Light Travel?

Although Einstein's theories suggest nothing can move faster than the speed of light, two scientists have extended his equations to show what would happen if faster-than-light travel were possible.

Despite an apparent prohibition on such travel by Einstein's theory of special relativity, the scientists said the theory actually lends itself easily to a description of velocities that exceed the speed of light.

"We started thinking about it, and we think this is a very natural extension of Einstein's equations," said applied mathematician James Hill, who co-authored the new paper with his University of Adelaide, Australia, colleague Barry Cox. The paper was published Oct. 3 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

Special relativity, proposed by Albert Einstein in 1905, showed how concepts like speed are all relative: A moving observer will measure the speed of an object to be different than a stationary observer will. Furthermore, relativity revealed the concept of time dilation, which says that the faster you go, the more time seems to slow down. Thus, the crew of a speeding spaceship might perceive their trip to another planet to take two weeks, while people left behind on Earth would observe their passage taking 20 years.

Yet special relativity breaks down if two people's relative velocity, the difference between their respective speeds, approaches the speed of light. Now, Hill and Cox have extended the theory to accommodate an infinite relative velocity. (Top 10 Implications of Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos)

Interestingly, neither the original Einstein equations, nor the new, extended theory can describe massive objects moving at the speed of light itself. Here, both sets of equations break down into mathematical singularities, where physical properties can't be defined.

"The actual business of going through the speed of light is not defined," Hill told LiveScience. "The theory we've come up with is simply for velocities greater than the speed of light."

In effect, the singularity divides the universe into two: a world where everything moves slower than the speed of light, and a world where everything moves faster. The laws of physics in these two realms could turn out to be quite different.

In some ways, the hidden world beyond the speed of light looks to be a strange one indeed. Hill and Cox's equations suggest, for example, that as a spaceship traveling at super-light speeds accelerated faster and faster, it would lose more and more mass, until at infinite velocity, its mass became zero.

"It's very suggestive that the whole game is different once you go faster than light," Hill said.

Read more at Discovery News

Language Learning Makes the Brain Grow, Swedish Study Suggests

At the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy, young recruits learn a new language at a very fast pace. By measuring their brains before and after the language training, a group of researchers has had an almost unique opportunity to observe what happens to the brain when we learn a new language in a short period of time.

At the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy in the city of Uppsala, young people with a flair for languages go from having no knowledge of a language such as Arabic, Russian or Dari to speaking it fluently in the space of 13 months. From morning to evening, weekdays and weekends, the recruits study at a pace unlike on any other language course.

As a control group, the researchers used medicine and cognitive science students at Umeå University -- students who also study hard, but not languages. Both groups were given MRI scans before and after a three-month period of intensive study. While the brain structure of the control group remained unchanged, specific parts of the brain of the language students grew. The parts that developed in size were the hippocampus, a deep-lying brain structure that is involved in learning new material and spatial navigation, and three areas in the cerebral cortex.

"We were surprised that different parts of the brain developed to different degrees depending on how well the students performed and how much effort they had had to put in to keep up with the course," says Johan Mårtensson, a researcher in psychology at Lund University, Sweden.

Students with greater growth in the hippocampus and areas of the cerebral cortex related to language learning (superior temporal gyrus) had better language skills than the other students. In students who had to put more effort into their learning, greater growth was seen in an area of the motor region of the cerebral cortex (middle frontal gyrus). The areas of the brain in which the changes take place are thus linked to how easy one finds it to learn a language and development varies according to performance.

Previous research from other groups has indicated that Alzheimer's disease has a later onset in bilingual or multilingual groups.

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Skulls From Sacrificial Rituals Found in Temple

Archaeologists have unearthed gruesome evidence of brutal Aztec rituals by uncovering 50 skulls and over 250 jaw bones at the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan (modern Mexico City).

Found at one sacrificial stone below a ceremonial platform called the "cuauhxicalco," the human remains date back more than 500 years and represent the largest number of skulls ever found in one offering.

Used in rituals associated with the worship of Mictlantecuhtli, god of death, the skulls were unearthed in different locations: 45 appeared to have just been dumped on top of the stone, while the remaining five were buried under it.

Each of the five skulls had holes on both sides, suggesting they belonged to a tzompantli. This was a skull rack on which the crania of sacrificed people were hung and displayed near temples or at other locations.

"Some of the 45 skulls found on the sacrificial stone were manipulated with the intention of preparing skull-masks that were never finished," archaeologist Raul Barrera of Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) said.

According to the archaeologist, the skulls belonged to women and men between 20 and 35 years old. Some could have been dug up from other sites and reburied.

Looking like a gray headstone, the 18-inch-high, 14 to 17-inch-long and 3-inch-thick sacrificial rock revealed new ways that the Aztecs used skulls in their rituals.

Read more at Discovery News

100-Million-Year-Old Spider Attack Found in Amber

Researchers have found trapped in amber a rare dinosaur-age scene of a spider attacking a wasp caught in its web.

The piece of amber, which contains 15 intact strands of spider silk, provides the first fossil evidence of such an assault, the researchers said. It was excavated in a Burmese mine and dates back to the Early Cretaceous, between 97 million and 110 million years ago.

"This juvenile spider was going to make a meal out of a tiny parasitic wasp, but never quite got to it," George Poinar, Jr., a zoology professor at Oregon State University, said in a statement.

"This was a male wasp that suddenly found itself trapped in a spider web. This was the wasp's worst nightmare, and it never ended. The wasp was watching the spider just as it was about to be attacked, when tree resin flowed over and captured both of them."

Poinar and Ron Buckley, an amber collector from Kentucky, described the find in a paper published in the October issue of the journal Historical Biology. They wrote that while there are examples of amber-trapped insects caught in webs, "there is no previous fossil record of a spider attacking its ensnared prey."

The amber chunk also contains the body of another male spider in the same web, which might make the fossil the oldest known evidence of social behavior in spiders, according to the authors.

Read more at Discovery News

Odd Maar Volcano Explosions Explained

The eruption of a so-called maar-diatreme volcano is short-lived but violent. Magma creeps up through a crack in the Earth's crust and mixes with water, setting off a series of explosions — as many as a few each hour for several weeks. When the action stops, a crater-topped, rock-filled fracture called a diatreme is left behind.

Now researchers are proposing a new way to think about how these structures are formed, which could help geologists predict eruptions and find new sources of diamonds.

"Previously it was thought that those explosions started at very shallow levels and got progressively deeper," geologist Greg Valentine, a professor at the University at Buffalo in New York, told LiveScience.

 This old model seemed to explain the shape of a diatreme, which sits like an inverted cone beneath a shallow maar, or crater. But that model didn't match with what geologists were finding at volcanic sites, Valentine said.

If the explosions started at shallow levels and moved deeper, shallow rocks would be spewed from the mouth of the volcano first and the deeper rock deposits would pile up on top. At maar sites, however, scientists were finding deep rock fragments mixed mostly with shallow fragments, indicating that explosions occur at essentially every depth throughout the episode. (50 Amazing Volcano Facts)

Valentine and James White, an associate professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand, created a new model to account for the apparently more jumbled order of explosions. Their model, published online Sept. 18 by the journal Geology, also shows that individual explosions are relatively small, and shallow explosions are more likely than deep explosions to cause eruptions.

Revised model for diatreme growth, with explosive molten fuel– coolant interactions (MFCI) taking place over a range of depths, breaking up rock where the explosions take place, but being most effective at shallow depths. After the initial blasts, explosions continue to occur throughout the depth range, but widen the upper part much more rapidly to produce the typical flared diatreme structure.

The last known maar-diatreme eruption occurred in 1977 in Alaska's remote Aleutian Range, forming two vents known as the Ukinrek Maars. The threats associated with these volcanoes tend to be localized, but they can still be significant, Valentine said.

"These volcanoes can send ash deposits into populated areas. They could easily produce the same effects that the one in Iceland did when it disrupted air travel, so what we're trying to do is understand the way they behave," he explained in a statement.

Read more at Discovery News

Whether We Like Someone Affects How Our Brain Processes Movement

Hate the Lakers? Do the Celtics make you want to hurl? Whether you like someone can affect how your brain processes their actions, according to new research from the Brain and Creativity Institute at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Most of the time, watching someone else move causes a "mirroring" effect -- that is, the parts of our brains responsible for motor skills are activated by watching someone else in action.

But a study by USC researchers appearing October 5 in PLOS ONE shows that whether you like the person you're watching can actually have an effect on brain activity related to motor actions and lead to "differential processing" -- for example, thinking the person you dislike is moving more slowly than they actually are.

"We address the basic question of whether social factors influence our perception of simple actions," said Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, assistant professor with the Brain and Creativity Institute and the Division of Occupational Science. "These results indicate that an abstract sense of group membership, and not only differences in physical appearance, can affect basic sensory-motor processing."

Past research has shown that race or physical similarity can influence brain processes, and we tend to have more empathy for people who look more like us.

In this study, the researchers controlled for race, age and gender, but they introduced a backstory that primed participants to dislike some of the people they were observing: Half were presented as neo-Nazis, and half were presented as likable and open-minded. All study participants recruited for the study were Jewish males.

The researchers found that when people viewed someone they disliked, a part of their brain that was otherwise activated in "mirroring" -- the right ventral premotor cortex -- had a different pattern of activity for the disliked individuals as compared to the liked individuals.

Importantly, the effect was specific to watching the other person move. There was no difference in brain activity in the motor region when participants simply watched still videos of the people they liked or disliked.

Read more at Science Daily

Sleeping Brain Behaves as If It's Remembering Something

UCLA researchers have for the first time measured the activity of a brain region known to be involved in learning, memory and Alzheimer's disease during sleep. They discovered that this part of the brain behaves as if it's remembering something, even under anesthesia, a finding that counters conventional theories about memory consolidation during sleep.

The research team simultaneously measured the activity of single neurons from multiple parts of the brain involved in memory formation. The technique allowed them to determine which brain region was activating other areas of the brain and how that activation was spreading, said study senior author Mayank R. Mehta, a professor of neurophysics in UCLA's departments of neurology, neurobiology, physics and astronomy.

In particular, Mehta and his team looked at three connected brain regions in mice -- the new brain or the neocortex, the old brain or the hippocampus, and the entorhinal cortex, an intermediate brain that connects the new and the old brains. While previous studies have suggested that the dialogue between the old and the new brain during sleep was critical for memory formation, researchers had not investigated the contribution of the entorhinal cortex to this conversation, which turned out to be a game changer, Mehta said. His team found that the entorhinal cortex showed what is called persistent activity, which is thought to mediate working memory during waking life, for example when people pay close attention to remember things temporarily, such as recalling a phone number or following directions.

"The big surprise here is that this kind of persistent activity is happening during sleep, pretty much all the time." Mehta said. "These results are entirely novel and surprising. In fact, this working memory-like persistent activity occurred in the entorhinal cortex even under anesthesia."

The study appears Oct. 7, 2012 in the early online edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The findings are important, Mehta said, because humans spend one-third of their lives sleeping and a lack of sleep results in adverse effects on health, including learning and memory problems.

It had been shown previously that the neocortex and the hippocampus "talk" to each other during sleep, and it is believed that this conversation plays a critical role in establishing memories, or memory consolidation. However, no one was able to interpret the conversation.

"When you go to sleep, you can make the room dark and quiet and although there is no sensory input, the brain is still very active," Mehta said. "We wanted to know why this was happening and what different parts of the brain were saying to each other."

Mehta and his team developed an extremely sensitive monitoring system that allowed them to follow the activities of neurons from each of three targeted portions of the brain simultaneously, including the activity of a single neuron. This allowed them to decipher the precise communications, even when the neurons were seemingly quiet. They then developed a sophisticated mathematical analysis to decipher the complex conversation.

During sleep, the neocortex goes into a slow wave pattern for about 90 percent of that time. During this period, its activity slowly fluctuates between active and inactive states about once every second. Mehta and his team focused on the entorhinal cortex, which has many parts.

The outer part of the entorhinal cortex mirrored the neocortical activity. However, the inner part behaved differently. When the neocortex became inactive, the neurons in the inner entorhinal cortex persisted in the active state, as if they were remembering something the neocortex had recently "said," a phenomenon called spontaneous persistent activity. Further, they found that when the inner part of the entorhinal cortex became spontaneously persistent, it prompted the hippocampus neurons to become very active. On the other hand, when the neocortex was active, the hippocampus became quieter. This data provided a clear interpretation of the conversation.

"During sleep the three parts of the brain are talking to each other in a very complex way," he said. "The entorhinal neurons showed persistent activity, behaving as if they were remembering something even under anesthesia when the mice could not feel or smell or hear anything. Remarkably, this persistent activity sometimes lasted for more than a minute, a huge timescale in brain activity, which generally changes on a scale of one thousandth of a second."

The findings challenge theories of brain communication during sleep, in which the hippocampus is expected to talk to, or drive, the neocortex. Mehta's findings instead indicate that there is a third key actor in this complex dialogue, the entorhinal cortex, and that the neocortex is driving the entorhinal cortex, which in turn behaves as if it is remembering something. That, in turn, drives the hippocampus, while other activity patterns shut it down.

"This is a whole new way of thinking about memory consolidation theory. We found there is a new player involved in this process and it's having an enormous impact," Mehta said. "And what that third player is doing is being driven by the neocortex, not the hippocampus. This suggests that whatever is happening during sleep is not happening the way we thought it was. There are more players involved so the dialogue is far more complex, and the direction of the communication is the opposite of what was thought."

Mehta theorizes that this process occurs during sleep as a way to unclutter memories and delete information that was processed during the day but is irrelevant. This results in the important memories becoming more salient and readily accessible. Notably, Alzheimer's disease starts in the entorhinal cortex and patients have impaired sleep, so Mehta's findings may have implications in that arena.

For this study, Mehta teamed with Thomas Hahn and Sven Berberich of Heidelberg University in Germany and the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research and James McFarland of Brown University and the UCLA Department of Physics. Going forward, the team will further study this brain activity to uncover the mechanisms behind it and determine if it influences subsequent behavioral performance.

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