Does sleep increase creativity?

“Sleep is making memories stronger,” says Jessica D. Payne of the University of Notre Dame, who co-wrote the review with Elizabeth A. Kensinger of Boston College. “It also seems to be doing something which I think is so much more interesting, and that is reorganizing and restructuring memories.”

Payne and Kensinger study what happens to memories during sleep, and they have found that a person tends to hang on to the most emotional part of a memory. For example, if someone is shown a scene with an emotional object, such as a wrecked car, in the foreground, they’re more likely to remember the emotional object than, say, the palm trees in the background — particularly if they’re tested after a night of sleep. They have also measured brain activity during sleep and found that regions of the brain involved with emotion and memory consolidation are active.

“In our fast-paced society, one of the first things to go is our sleep,” Payne says. “I think that’s based on a profound misunderstanding that the sleeping brain isn’t doing anything.” The brain is busy. It’s not just consolidating memories, it’s organizing them and picking out the most salient information. She thinks this is what makes it possible for people to come up with creative, new ideas.

Full article at Science Daily

Cold Plasma Kills Bacteria Better Than Antibiotics

Russian and German scientists may have found a better way to treat infections than using antibiotics. The solution is not another drug, but a feat of physics: cold plasma.

Before you ask whether that is an oxymoron, let me explain. Cold here is not cold in the Arctic sense; rather the opposite of scalding hot. Plasma -- an ionized gas sometimes called the fourth state of matter -- typically exists at thousands of degrees Celsius, and hot plasmas are regularly used to sterilizing surgical equipment.

And only recently have researchers been able to make plasmas at a steady 35 to 40 degrees Celsius and at atmospheric pressure. This is cold enough to touch safely -- watch this woman on YouTube run her finger beneath a cold plasma flame.


Cold plasmas are closer to room temperatures. Svetlana Ermolaeva and her research team at the Gamaleya Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow wanted to see how well cold plasma could work against nasty microbes that lead to infections.They used a cold plasma torch in the lab to combat two common bacteria, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus, which show up frequently in wound infections, but are resistant to antibiotics because they have a protective layer called a biofilm.

After five minutes, the plasma torch killed 99 percent of bacteria grown in a Petri dish, and after ten minutes, it killed 90 percent of bacteria present in the wounds of a rat wounds. And because the torch can be directed at a specific, small area of infection, surrounding tissue is left unharmed.

Read more at Discovery News

Meet the woman who literally has no fear of anything

A 44-year-old woman who doesn’t experience fear has led to the discovery of where that fright factor lives in the human brain.

Researchers put out their best foot to try to scare the patient, who they refer to as “SM” in their write-up in the most recent issue of the journal Current Biology. Haunted houses, where monsters tried to evoke an avoidance reaction, instead evoked curiosity; spiders and snakes didn’t do the trick; and a battery of scary film clips entertained SM.

The patient has a rare condition called Urbach–Wiethe disease that has destroyed her amygdala, the almond-shaped structure located deep in the brain. Over the past 50 years studies have shown the amygdala plays a central role in generating fear responses in various animals from rats to monkeys.

Full article at LiveScience

Bulgarian TV reports of 8000 year old sun temple

The oldest temple of the Sun has been discovered in northwest Bulgaria, near the town of Vratsa, aged at more then 8000 years, the Bulgarian National Television (BNT) reported on December 15 2010.

The Bulgarian ‘Stonehenge’ is hence about 3000 years older than its illustrious English counterpart. But unlike its more renowned English cousin, the Bulgarian sun temple was not on the surface, rather it was dug out from under tons of earth and is shaped in the form of a horse shoe, the report said.

The temple was found near the village of Ohoden. According to archaeologists, the prehistoric people used the celestial facility to calculate the seasons and to determine the best times for sowing and harvest. The site was also used for rituals, offering gifts to the Sun for fertility as BNT reported.

This area of Bulgaria was previously made famous because remnants of the oldest people who lived in this part of Europe were found. Archaeologists also found dozens of clay and stone disks in the area of the temple.

“The semantics of the disks symbolise the disk of the Sun itself, which means that this is the earliest ever temple dedicated to the worship of the Sun God, discovered on our lands,” archaeologist Georgi Ganetsovski told the BNT.

Discoveryonline

Child regains sight after stem cell treatment in China

Izabelle Evans, who was born with septo-optic dysplasia, a condition that affects five in one million babies, can now see objects that are up to 3 feet away after the £50,000 treatment.

Her parents James Evans and Hollie McHugh raised the money in just over a year after finding out about the procedure online.

The family spent over a month in the Chinese city of Tsingtao where Izabelle frequently became upset as she endured the gruelling five-days-a-week treatment.

However, since returning to Hayling Island, Hants, Izabelle's parents have been delighted with the results.

Miss McHugh said: "We thought that if it did work it may be a bit of light perception but for her to be able to tell the difference between faces and objects has been amazing."

Read more and see video at The Telegraph

Brain only fully 'matures' in middle age, claims neuroscientist

Scientists used to believe that your brain stopped physically evolving in early childhood but new research has shown that keeps changing well into middle age.

Brain scans have shown that prefrontal cortex – the area just behind your forehead – continues to change shape in your 30s and 40s.

The discovery is particularly significant as the prefrontal cortex is a key area of the brain and is often thought said to be key to what makes us human.

It is said to be involved with decision making, social interaction and many other personality traits.

Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a neuroscientist at University College London, revealed the new thinking at the British Neuroscience Christmas symposium in London.

She said: "Until about 10 years ago we pretty much assumed that the human brain stopped developing in early childhood.

"But we now understand from brain imaging that that is far from the truth and that many human brains keep on developing for many decades.

"The area of the brain that goes through the most protracted development is the prefrontal cortex right at the front of the brain.

"It is the part of the brain that is involved in high cognitive function such as decision making, planning and social behaviour. It is also to do with understanding other people.

Read more at The Telegraph

The size of your brain’s visual cortex determines whether optical illusions fool you

“How we perceive the world is determined by the visual cortex, but not everybody’s cortex is created equal. One person’s visual cortex can be up to three times bigger than someone else’s, and size matters when it comes to perception.

The primary visual cortex has a far more active role in shaping how we see the world than anyone had suspected. Researchers at University College London discovered this when they were testing a pair of optical illusions on some test subjects. Here’s the first one, known as the Ebbinghaus illusion:

Which of the two circles at the center of the other circles is smaller? Most people will say the circle on the left is smaller than the circle on the right, but they’re actually the exact same size.”

Read more at io9

Murdered French King's Remains Identified

A mummified head has been confirmed to belong to Henri IV, the French king who was stabbed to death by a Catholic fundamentalist 400 years ago.

The head has been identified using a combination of anthropological, paleopathological, radiological and forensic strategies by a multi-disciplinary team of 20 experts, who report their findings in Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal.

One of France's most popular monarchs, also known as the "Green Gallant" for his allure on women, Henry IV is credited with ending the wars between Catholics and Protestants.

Following the St Bartholomew's Day massacre of Protestants, he was forced to convert to Catholicism, allegedly declaring, "Paris is worth a Mass," before becoming “good King Henry”.

Despite his popularity, he was assassinated on May 14, 1610, at age 57, by Catholic fanatic Francois Ravaillac, who slashed him twice in the throat while the royal coach was stopped in traffic congestion.

Henry IV’s embalmed body was solemnly buried with the other kings of France in the basilica of Saint-Denis, north of Paris.

Read more at Discovery News

Can't learn a foreign language? Not true, say scientists

All one needs to do is listen to a word 160 times over that period, found Cambridge neuroscientists.

After that the brain will have formed a whole new network of neurons specifically tasked with remembering that word.

The process happens far quicker than previously thought, they found.

Dr Yury Shtyrov and his team made the discovery after placing electrodes on the heads of 16 healthy volunteers to monitor their brain activity.

First they recorded the pulses generated when they listened to a familiar word. Then the volunteers were made to listen to a made-up word, over and over again.

Initially the brain had to work hard to recognise the new word. But after 160 repetitions over 14 minutes, the new memory traces were "virtually indistinguishable" from those of the already familiar word, said Dr Shtyrov.
He said: "What this suggests is that practising language is important. Every little helps.

"Just perception - listening - is helpful. Our volunteers didn't repeat the words."

Getting them to repeat the words would "probably extend the new neural networks" to the part of the brain tasked with speech, he said.

However, he and colleagues at the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit developed the approach, called constraint-induced aphasia therapy (CIAT), not to help tourists learn French, but to help stroke patients regain their speech.

He said: "This research suggests that faster rehabilitation may be possible if treatments for people with brain damage, such as stroke patients, target the brain’s ability to rapidly create these memory traces."

The next step was to test the theory in stroke patients, he added.

The research is published today (WED) in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Read more at The Telegraph

Massive Volcanism May Have Caused Biggest Extinction Ever

SAN FRANCISCO — The greatest extinction in the history of life may have been caused, in part, by ozone-depleting gases spewed in a massive volcanic eruption, a new study suggests. Geologists have found surprisingly high amounts of the elements fluorine and chlorine in Siberian lavas dating back 250 million years — when about 90 percent of marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial species went extinct.

Benjamin Black, a graduate student at MIT, and his colleagues described their theory Dec. 13 in a poster presentation at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Researchers have long struggled to explain the “Great Dying” that occurred at the end of the Permian period. Some think that the extinction was a long, drawn-out affair caused by multiple factors — perhaps gradual changes in oceanic or atmospheric chemistry (SN: 5/28/05, p. 339). Others have blamed a single catastrophic event such as a belch of methane from the seafloor or an asteroid impact (SN: 2/24/01, p. 116) like the one thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs and other species 65 million years ago.

Full Story at Wired Science