Think Twice, Speak Once: Bilinguals Process Both Languages Simultaneously

Bilingual speakers can switch languages seamlessly, likely developing a higher level of mental flexibility than monolinguals, according to Penn State linguistic researchers.

"In the past, bilinguals were looked down upon," said Judith F. Kroll, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Linguistics and Women's Studies. "Not only is bilingualism not bad for you, it may be really good. When you're switching languages all the time it strengthens your mental muscle and your executive function becomes enhanced."

Fluent bilinguals seem to have both languages active at all times, whether both languages are consciously being used or not, the researchers report in a recent issue of Frontiers in Psychology. Both languages are active whether either was used only seconds earlier or several days earlier.

Bilinguals rarely say a word in the unintended language, which suggests that they have the ability to control the parallel activity of both languages and ultimately select the intended language without needing to consciously think about it.

The researchers conducted two separate but related experiments. In the first, 27 Spanish-English bilinguals read 512 sentences, written in either Spanish or English -- alternating language every two sentences. Participants read the sentences silently until they came across a word displayed in red, at which point they were instructed to read the red word out loud, as quickly and accurately as possible. About half of the red words were cognates -- words that look and sound similar and have the same meaning in both languages.

"Cognate words were processed more quickly than control words," said Jason W. Gullifer, a graduate student in psychology, suggesting that both languages are active at the same time.

Participants in the second experiment performed the same tasks as those in the first experiment, but this time were presented one language at a time. The second experiment's results were similar to the first, suggesting that context does not influence word recognition.

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Language Change: From London's 'EastEnders' to Glasgow

A recent study provides the first empirical evidence to show that active and engaged television viewing can help to accelerate language change. The study, "Television can also be a factor in language change: Evidence from an urban dialect," to be published in the September 2013 issue of the journal Language, is authored by Jane Stuart-Smith, English Language/Glasgow University Laboratory of Phonetics, Glasgow University; Claire Timmins, Speech & Language Therapy, Strathclyde University; Gwilym Pryce, Urban Studies, Glasgow University, and Barrie Gunter, Department of Media and Communication, Leicester University. A preprint version is available online at: http://www.linguisticsociety.org/document/stuart_smith_Lg_89_3.

This Language study investigated the role of viewing the televised soap opera "East Enders" in the rapid spread of two features of pronunciation typically associated with London English to the dialect of Scotland's largest city, Glasgow. The features are using [f] for /th/ in e.g. think, tooth, and a vowel like that in "good" in place of /l/ in words like milk, and people.

The results show significant correlations between using these features of pronunciation and strong emotional and psychological engagement by the viewers of this TV. "Mere exposure to TV or even this drama is not linked with language change - watching and engaging with the show and its characters is important, not just having the set on, or seeing the show in passing."

The authors caution that television and other forms of popular media constitute only one of many factors that help accelerate language change. "Our study shows that the media can be involved in helping to accelerate changes in relatively subtle aspects of language, which are also well below the level of conscious awareness."

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Bus-Sized Reptile Terrorized Prehistoric Sealife

Mosasaurs, prehistoric marine reptiles that could grow to the size of an 84-seat bus, were much speedier and shark-like than previously thought, an exceptionally well-preserved fossil specimen reveals.

The specimen is in such great shape that it includes soft tissue, according to a paper in the latest Nature Communications. That might open up the possibility of retrieving DNA and cloning the dinosaur-era animal.

For now, scientists are focusing on how surprisingly similar mosasaurs were to sharks both then and now.

“Since both groups occupied similar ecological niches, being top-level carnivores, and lived in similar environments -- i.e., the open sea -- they gradually came to look like each other, so-called convergent evolution,” lead author Johan Lindgren of Lund University’s Department of Geology told Discovery News.

Sharks have existed for hundreds of millions of years, Lindgren said, while mosasaurs lived about 98 to 66 million years ago.

Lindgren and colleagues Hani Kaddumi and Michael Polcyn conducted a detailed analysis of the mosasaur individual, found in what is now central Jordan. The remains include the animal’s crescent-shaped tail and flippers.

These features, plus the mosasaur’s sleek overall body plan, reveal that the toothy predator was built for speed. Until this discovery, researchers thought the animals were not nearly as fast.

“Given that mosasaurs are lizards, they have traditionally been assumed to be lizard-like animals with long, serpentine bodies and paddle-shaped tails, which were capable only of short bursts of speed during brief ambush pursuits,” Lindgren said.

“However, our results clearly demonstrate that mosasaurs underwent the same kind of evolution as did the earlier ichthyosaurs and later whales -- that is, they gradually attained a streamlined body powered by a semiluminate tail fluke. This, in turn, suggests that at least the derived forms were pursuit predators and capable of high-speed swimming over long distances.”

Textbook illustrations of mosasaurs will likely change as a result of this latest research, since earlier drawings made them look more like eels or underwater snakes.

Students might also pay more attention to them in future, since researchers now have such a good fossil record for mosasaur evolution, with nearly every step documented. It’s a bit like looking at a hefty 1920s touring car and then seeing it gradually evolve into a streamlined speed machine.

Being at the top of the food chain, large mosasaurs “were capable of handling virtually anything that came in their way.”

Whales emerged later, so they weren’t a threat. Evidence suggests mosasaurs did battle with sharks, however.

Frank O’Keefe, a Marshall University biologist, has also studied prehistoric marine life.

O’Keefe told Discovery News that the mosasaur ecosystem, aside from sharks, included plesiosaurs (another large now-extinct marine reptile), fish, squid, ammonites and other invertebrates. Mosasaurs might have also encountered toothed birds and pterodactyls, which often hung out near water, hoping for vulnerable prey.

Read more at Discovery News

California Meteorite Carried Rare Life Ingredient

Scientists have discovered unexpected ingredients for life — organic molecules never seen before in meteorites — inside a chunk of space rock that fell to Earth over California last year.

The discovery comes from an analysis of the so-called Sutter's Mill meteorite, which lit up the California night sky with a dazzling fireball in April 2012. Meteorite fragments from the event may shed light on the primordial ooze that helped give rise to life on Earth, researchers said.

Meteors that streak across Earth's sky mostly are fragments of the asteroids that lie between Mars and Jupiter. Meteorites can be rich in organic compounds, including some found among life on Earth.

"Their composition therefore has always been seen as an indication that the precursors to the evolution that led to the origins of life could have come from the extraterrestrial material of meteorites," study lead author Sandra Pizzarello, a biochemist at Arizona State University in Tempe, told SPACE.com. "Since the origins of life are utterly unknown, the idea has its merits."

Pizzarello and her colleagues analyzed two fragments of the Sutter's Mill meteorite, which streaked through the skies on April 22, 2012, crashing in California. Fragments of this meteorite were given to researchers who have worked on similar rocks before, including Pizzarello.

The organic chemicals in meteorites can get extracted with the aid of solvents. Speculation regarding the origin of life is based on the notion that it arose from a "prebiotic" soup of organic molecules, perhaps delivered in part by meteorites. Initially, fragments of the Sutter's Mill meteorite apparently possessed fewer dissolvable organic compounds left after solvent extraction compared to other similar meteorites.

"You may say that it was a disappointment," Pizzarello said.

However, the researchers tried dissolving the fragments in conditions mimicking hydrothermal vents on Earth, the environment often seen in the early Earth that life might have arisen within. Upon such treatment, the rocks released organic molecules not previously detected in similar meteorites. The findings that suggest there are far more organic materials available via meteorite for planetary environments than scientists assumed.

Read more at Discovery News

Hubble Bubble May Explain Different Measurements of Expansion Rate of the Universe

The existence of the "Hubble Bubble" may explain, at least in part, the differing measurements for the expansion and therefore the age of the universe. That is the assumption of a team of physicists headed by Prof. Dr. Luca Amendola from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Heidelberg University. In collaboration with colleagues from the Netherlands, the Heidelberg physicists developed a theoretical model that places the Milky Way inside of this type of cosmic bubble. The researchers believe the bubble can explain some of the deviations between previous measurements and the latest ones from the Planck satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA).

The results of their research were published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The observable universe has been expanding since the Big Bang. It still is, causing galaxies beyond our Local Group to appear to be receding from us. The actual speed of this expansion is known as the Hubble constant. Due to its importance in calculating basic properties of the universe, such as its age, modern cosmology is tasked with determining the value of the constant. There are two conventional methods used, although their results are not congruent, according to Dr. Valerio Marra from Heidelberg University's Institute for Theoretical Physics. "This has been the source of intense, long-standing debate in the scientific community."

One way to determine the Hubble constant, and hence the universe's rate of expansion, is based on measuring the cosmic microwave background radiation in space. It was released approximately 400,000 years after the Big Bang and pervades the entire universe. Several months ago the Planck satellite from the ESA delivered measurements of this ancient radiation. The Hubble constant, however, can also be derived from the movement of galaxies near the Milky Way, movement largely due to the expansion of the universe. "When you compare the results from the two methods, there is a deviation of about 9 percent," explains Dr. Marra.

In their search to explain the difference in data, the Heidelberg team thought that the reason was not some previously unrecognized error in measurement, but based on a physical effect. According to Dr. Marra, the existence of the Hubble Bubble could be the cause. The bubble describes regions of the universe where the density of matter falls below the cosmic average. "Until now knowledge of our cosmic neighbourhood has been too imprecise to determine whether or not we are in such a bubble," continues Dr. Marra. "But let's just assume for a moment that our Milky Way is located in a Hubble Bubble. Matter outside the bubble would then attract nearby galaxies so strongly that they would move more quickly than average. In this case we would measure a higher Hubble constant that would apply to our cosmic neighbourhood, but not to the universe as a whole."

Dr. Marra believes that this could partly explain the conflicting measurement results. The Hubble constant measured by the Planck satellite would represent a spatial average applicable to the entire universe. The Hubble constant determined through the movement of galaxies, however, would be valid only in the vicinity of the Milky Way. "Anyone expecting the measurements from our cosmic environs to match those of the microwave radiation implicitly assumes that we live in a typical region of the cosmos. But that isn't necessarily true," continues Prof. Amendola, whose working group has been studying the expansion of the universe for many years.

Using their research approach, the scientists have thus far been able to account for approximately one-fourth of the deviation between the two Hubble constants. Dr. Marra and his colleagues expect a detailed analysis will reduce the discrepancy even more. "Until now we have been working with a spherical Hubble Bubble. But it's far more likely that the bubble is asymmetrical, which would explain the deviating measurements even better," observes Dr. Ignacy Sawicki, also a researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Physics. "If the difference in data should manifest itself instead, this would be a major indicator that our former natural scientific view of the cosmos is still missing an ingredient," stresses Dr. Sawicki.

Read more at Science Daily

Ancient Golden Treasure Found at Foot of Temple Mount

In summer excavations at the foot of the Temple Mount, Hebrew University of Jerusalem archaeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar made a stunning discovery: two bundles of treasure containing thirty-six gold coins, gold and silver jewelry, and a gold medallion with the menorah (Temple candelabrum) symbol etched into it. Also etched into the 10-cm medallion are a shofar (ram's horn) and a Torah scroll.

A third-generation archaeologist working at the Hebrew University's Institute of Archaeology, Dr. Mazar directs excavations on the City of David's summit and at the Temple Mount's southern wall. Calling the find "a breathtaking, once-in-a-lifetime discovery," Dr. Mazar said: "We have been making significant finds from the First Temple Period in this area, a much earlier time in Jerusalem's history, so discovering a golden seven-branched Menorah from the seventh century CE at the foot of the Temple Mount was a complete surprise."

The discovery was unearthed just five days into Mazar's latest phase of the Ophel excavations, and can be dated to the late Byzantine period (early seventh century CE). The gold treasure was discovered in a ruined Byzantine public structure a mere 50 meters from the Temple Mount's southern wall.

The menorah, a candelabrum with seven branches that was used in the Temple, is the national symbol of the state of Israel and reflects the historical presence of Jews in the area. The position of the items as they were discovered indicates that one bundle was carefully hidden underground while the second bundle was apparently abandoned in haste and scattered across the floor.

Given the date of the items and the manner in which they were found, Mazar estimates they were abandoned in the context of the Persian conquest of Jerusalem in 614 CE. After the Persians conquered Jerusalem, many Jews returned to the city and formed the majority of its population, hoping for political and religious freedom. But as Persian power waned, instead of forming an alliance with the Jews, the Persians sought the support of Christians and ultimately allowed them to expel the Jews from Jerusalem.

Hanging from a gold chain, the menorah medallion is most likely an ornament for a Torah scroll. In that case it is the earliest Torah scroll ornament found in archaeological excavations to date. It was buried in a small depression in the floor, along with a smaller gold medallion, two pendants, a gold coil and a silver clasp, all of which are believed to be Torah scroll ornamentations.

"It would appear that the most likely explanation is that the Ophel cache was earmarked as a contribution toward the building of a new synagogue, at a location that is near the Temple Mount," said Dr. Mazar. "What is certain is that their mission, whatever it was, was unsuccessful. The treasure was abandoned, and its owners could never return to collect it."

The Ophel cache is only the third collection of gold coins to be found in archaeological excavations in Jerusalem, said Lior Sandberg, numismatics specialist at the Institute of Archaeology. "The thirty-six gold coins can be dated to the reigns of different Byzantine emperors, ranging from the middle of the fourth century CE to the early seventh century CE," said Sandberg.

Found with the coins were a pair of large gold earrings, a gold-plated silver hexagonal prism and a silver ingot. Remnants of fabric indicated that these items were once packaged in a cloth purse similar to the bundle that contained the menorah medallion.

Mazar's Ophel excavation made headlines earlier this year when she announced the 2012 discovery of an ancient Canaanite inscription (recently identified as Hebrew), the earliest alphabetical written text ever uncovered in Jerusalem.

The 2013 excavation season at the Ophel ran from the middle of April to the end of July, on behalf of the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University. The Israel Antiquities Authority is carrying out the preservation works, and is preparing the site for the public. The excavation site is situated within the Jerusalem National Park around the walls of Jerusalem of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, and is administered by the East Jerusalem Development Company.

Read more at Science Daily

NASA's Black-Hole-Hunter Catches Its First 10 Supermassive Black Holes

NASA's black-hole-hunter spacecraft, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has "bagged" its first 10 supermassive black holes. The mission, which has a mast the length of a school bus, is the first telescope capable of focusing the highest-energy X-ray light into detailed pictures.

The new black-hole finds are the first of hundreds expected from the mission over the next two years. These gargantuan structures -- black holes surrounded by thick disks of gas -- lie at the hearts of distant galaxies between 0.3 and 11.4 billion light-years from Earth.

"We found the black holes serendipitously," explained David Alexander, a NuSTAR team member based in the Department of Physics at Durham University in England and lead author of a new study appearing Aug. 20 in The Astrophysical Journal. "We were looking at known targets and spotted the black holes in the background of the images."

Additional serendipitous finds such as these are expected for the mission. Along with the mission's more targeted surveys of selected patches of sky, the NuSTAR team plans to comb through hundreds of images taken by the telescope with the goal of finding black holes caught in the background.

Once the 10 black holes were identified, the researchers went through previous data taken by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite, two complementary space telescopes that see lower-energy X-ray light. The scientists found that the objects had been detected before. It wasn't until the NuSTAR observations, however, that they stood out as exceptional, warranting closer inspection.

By combining observations taken across the range of the X-ray spectrum, the astronomers hope to crack unsolved mysteries of black holes. For example, how many of them populate the universe?

"We are getting closer to solving a mystery that began in 1962," said Alexander. "Back then, astronomers had noted a diffuse X-ray glow in the background of our sky but were unsure of its origin. Now, we know that distant supermassive black holes are sources of this light, but we need NuSTAR to help further detect and understand the black hole populations."

This X-ray glow, called the cosmic X-ray background, peaks at the high-energy frequencies that NuSTAR is designed to see, so the mission is key to identifying what's producing the light. NuSTAR can also find the most hidden supermassive black holes, buried by thick walls of gas.

"The highest-energy X-rays can pass right through even significant amounts of dust and gas surrounding the active supermassive black holes," said Fiona Harrison, a study co-author and the mission's principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.

Data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, and Spitzer missions also provide missing pieces in the puzzle of black holes by weighing the mass of their host galaxies.

"Our early results show that the more distant supermassive black holes are encased in bigger galaxies," said Daniel Stern, a co-author of the study and the project scientist for NuSTAR at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "This is to be expected. Back when the universe was younger, there was a lot more action with bigger galaxies colliding, merging and growing."

Future observations will reveal more about the beastly happenings of black holes, near and far. In addition to hunting remote black holes, NuSTAR is also searching for other exotic objects within our Milky Way galaxy.

NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, Dulles, Va. Its instrument was built by a consortium including Caltech; JPL; the University of California, Berkeley; Columbia University, New York; NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; the Danish Technical University in Denmark; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif.; ATK Aerospace Systems, Goleta, Calif., and with support from the Italian Space Agency (ASI) Science Data Center.

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Rescued Kitten Infected Girl With Rare Virus

A teenager in the Netherlands who rescued a drowning kitten from a ditch developed a large, blackened open wound on her wrist, which took multiple doctors several weeks to find its rare cause, researchers say.

The kitten that the girl rescued was sick and died the following day, and the 17-year-old went on a trip to Italy and Switzerland, during which time she developed a red wound on her wrist that blistered before turning black. She also developed painful red bumps on her arm, spanning from the wound on her wrist up to her armpit.

Suspecting the wound was a bacterial infection, doctors prescribed antibiotics, but the medicine didn't work. Once back in her home country, the feverish girl went to the hospital again.

"When I saw the wound, I expected it to be a normal wound, so I was quite surprised when I saw the big ulcer," said Dr. Jojanneke Heidema, a specialist in pediatric infectious disease at St. Antonius Ziekenhuis Hospital in Nieuwegein, Netherlands, who reported the case.

"It did not look like a normal bacterial infection, so I went looking for other causes of a necrotic ulcer," Heidema said. Necrotic ulcers are wounds with dead tissue.

The doctors began to suspect that the wound was caused by the cowpox virus. The cowpox infection is so rare that physicians sometimes have never even seen one, or simply don't think of it.

The doctors got in touch with a virologist whose lab was equipped to run tests for cowpox. A few days later, lab results proved the cowpox virus was, indeed, the culprit. "The girl had been treated by different doctors for about 13 days by then," Heidema said.

After another week, the girl got better on her own, and the wound healed within two months, leaving a scar. Cowpox is a self-limiting disease, meaning it usually doesn't need medical treatment.

"In cowpox disease, your own immune system will deal with the infection," Heidema said.

The cowpox virus was involved in the invention of the first vaccine, against the related virus that causes smallpox, the deadly but now eradicated disease. At the end of the 18th century, Edward Jenner, an English physician, observed that milkmaids who had contact with the cattle-carrying cowpox virus rarely contracted smallpox -- they seemed protected. Based on this observation, Jenner used the cowpox virus to produce the first smallpox vaccine, in 1796.

Other than cowpox, some possible causes of a necrotic wound like the one the girl had were drug-resistant bacteria, abscess and anthrax, the researchers said.

Read more at Discovery News

Quantum chip connected to internet is yours to command

Quantum computing is in the cloud, and you don't need a degree in advanced physics to run your own programs. For the first time, anyone with a web browser will soon be able to log in and run basic algorithms on a quantum chip hooked up to the internet.

A quantum chip processes information in qubits, or quantum bits, which, unlike the digital bits in a regular computer, can be both 0 and 1 at the same time. In theory, this ability should allow quantum computers to offer far speedier computation than current PCs – although devices that can definitely outperform standard machines don't yet exist.

Until now only a few labs around the world have had access to even basic quantum computers. Google recently purchased a D-Wave quantum computer and shares access with NASA and other select researchers, but not with the general public. Questions also remain over just how quantum D-Wave's machine really is, because it operates using a non-mainstream technique called adiabatic quantum computing.

Scientists at the University of Bristol, UK, were concerned that limited availability to any type of quantum computer would mean a dearth of skilled coders when the expected quantum revolution finally arrives.

"A quantum computer can do things faster for you, but someone has to program it, and at the moment there are only a handful of people around the world who would be qualified," says Bristol's Jeremy O'Brien, who led the development of the quantum chip being used in the cloud project.

Quantum sim

The more traditionally quantum chip made at the University of Bristol works by guiding two photons through a series of optical channels. As the photons pass through the chip they become entangled, meaning that a measurement on one influences the outcome when measuring the other. Programming the computer involves tweaking the extent of this entanglement to produce different computations.

Would-be quantum coders will first use an online simulator that lets them practise programming. A tutorial explains the key quantum-mechanical ideas that are central to the device, then guides users through the steps required to adjust the chip and change its output. Once experienced enough, users can ask for permission to connect to the real chip, which is sitting in a lab in Bristol. It will run programs and return results via the internet.

"You can sit on the bus with your mobile phone and do a quantum optics experiment which might never have been seen before," says team member Peter Shadbolt. The simulator is already online, but the ability to directly access the chip won't launch until 20 September.

Cloudy future

Exactly what a member of the public might want to use the quantum chip for is unclear. And the version being used online only has two qubits, so its processing power is a very limited.

"It's not going to calculate something that your PC couldn't calculate, because it's not at that scale by a long way," says O'Brien. His team has made 6-qubit and 8-qubit computers, but those projects are still in development. In the meantime, they are happy to let others use their older technology for free as a way to encourage engagement.

Read more at New Scientist

Climate Change Will Upset Vital Ocean Chemical Cycles

New research from the University of East Anglia shows that rising ocean temperatures will upset natural cycles of carbon dioxide, nitrogen and phosphorus.

Plankton plays an important role in the ocean's carbon cycle by removing half of all CO2 from the atmosphere during photosynthesis and storing it deep under the sea -- isolated from the atmosphere for centuries.

Findings published today in the journal Nature Climate Change reveal that water temperature has a direct impact on maintaining the delicate plankton ecosystem of our oceans.

The new research means that ocean warming will impact plankton, and in turn drive a vicious cycle of climate change.

Researchers from UEA's School of Environmental Sciences and the School of Computing Sciences investigated phytoplankton -- microscopic plant-like organisms that rely on photosynthesis to reproduce and grow.

Lead researcher Dr Thomas Mock, said: "Phytoplankton, including micro-algae, are responsible for half of the carbon dioxide that is naturally removed from the atmosphere. As well as being vital to climate control, it also creates enough oxygen for every other breath we take, and forms the base of the food chain for fisheries so it is incredibly important for food security.

"Previous studies have shown that phytoplankton communities respond to global warming by changes in diversity and productivity. But with our study we show that warmer temperatures directly impact the chemical cycles in plankton, which has not been shown before."

Collaborators from the University of Exeter, who are co-authors of this study, developed computer generated models to create a global ecosystem model that took into account world ocean temperatures, 1.5 million plankton DNA sequences taken from samples, and biochemical data.

"We found that temperature plays a critical role in driving the cycling of chemicals in marine micro-algae. It affects these reactions as much as nutrients and light, which was not known before," said Dr Mock.

"Under warmer temperatures, marine micro-algae do not seem to produce as many ribosomes as under lower temperatures. Ribosomes join up the building blocks of proteins in cells. They are rich in phosphorus and if they are being reduced, this will produce higher ratios of nitrogen compared to phosphorus, increasing the demand for nitrogen in the oceans.

Read more at Science Daily