Has Evolution Given Humans Unique Brain Structures?

Humans have at least two functional networks in their cerebral cortex not found in rhesus monkeys. This means that new brain networks were likely added in the course of evolution from primate ancestor to human.

These findings, based on an analysis of functional brain scans, were published in a study by neurophysiologist Wim Vanduffel (KU Leuven and Harvard Medical School) in collaboration with a team of Italian and American researchers.

Our ancestors evolutionarily split from those of rhesus monkeys about 25 million years ago. Since then, brain areas have been added, have disappeared or have changed in function. This raises the question, 'Has evolution given humans unique brain structures?'. Scientists have entertained the idea before but conclusive evidence was lacking. By combining different research methods, we now have a first piece of evidence that could prove that humans have unique cortical brain networks.

Professor Vanduffel explains: "We did functional brain scans in humans and rhesus monkeys at rest and while watching a movie to compare both the place and the function of cortical brain networks. Even at rest, the brain is very active. Different brain areas that are active simultaneously during rest form so-called 'resting state' networks. For the most part, these resting state networks in humans and monkeys are surprisingly similar, but we found two networks unique to humans and one unique network in the monkey."

"When watching a movie, the cortex processes an enormous amount of visual and auditory information. The human-specific resting state networks react to this stimulation in a totally different way than any part of the monkey brain. This means that they also have a different function than any of the resting state networks found in the monkey. In other words, brain structures that are unique in humans are anatomically absent in the monkey and there no other brain structures in the monkey that have an analogous function. Our unique brain areas are primarily located high at the back and at the front of the cortex and are probably related to specific human cognitive abilities, such as human-specific intelligence."

Read more at Science Daily

Newly Found Dino Had Chicken-Sized Young

A newly discovered dinosaur, Yulong mini, was appropriately named, as the remains of its chicken-sized offspring are now among the smallest dinosaurs ever found, according to a new study.

The tiny baby dinosaurs, described in the journal Naturwissenschaften, were oviraptorids, a.k.a. "egg thieves." These non-flying dinosaurs resembled modern birds, except adults of some species could grow to over 26 feet long.

"Yulong looks like chicken with a tail," lead author Junchang Lü told Discovery News. "Its behavior was similar to living birds too. Based on the primitive oviraptors such as Caudipteryx, Yulong should be feathered, although we could not find feathers due to the poor preservation condition."

Lü, of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, and his colleagues analyzed the dinosaur remains, which were unearthed at Henan Province in central China. In addition to Lü, the team included researchers from the Henan Geological Museum as well as Philip Currie from the University of Alberta.

While adult dinosaurs were found in the general region of the excavation, they were not directly with the babies, suggesting that members of this species did not require parental care when young.

It has been widely accepted that oviraptors were carnivores. One earlier specimen, for example, was found with the preserved remains of a lizard in its stomach. The new study, however, challenges that theory.

In terms of the new oviraptor fossils, "based on their hind limb proportions, the pattern is more commonly seen in herbivores than in carnivores, thus indicating that they were herbivores," Lü said.

He did, however, add that the jaw structure of this dinosaur could have handled a few meaty edibles.

"It provided strong bite force when (the dinosaur) ate hard foods such as nuts, mollusks and even eggs," he explained.

Currie, though, described Yulong mini as having a "sedentary lifestyle that did not involve the pursuit of similar-sized prey."

The dinosaur might then have rather passively poked around for food, similar to how some birds today forage.

Yulong mini itself was good eats.

Just as many humans today love chicken, it seems that other dinosaurs enjoyed chowing down on Yulong. Remains of several large carnivorous dinosaurs, including T. rex, were found in the area and likely preyed on the more sedentary dinosaurs, the researchers believe.

Read more at Discovery News

'Genesis Death Sandwich' Discovered in Bible

Researchers using text-analysis software say they've discovered a new literary device in the first book of the Bible: the "Genesis death sandwich."

The name refers to a familiar rhetorical structure -- sandwiching bad news in between the good. In the case of Genesis, the slices of white bread are themes of life, and the slimy cold cuts in between are mentions of death.

"The structuring of life and death in Genesis appears to be something that hasn't been noticed before," researcher Gordon Rugg, a senior lecturer in Computing and Mathematics at Keele University in the United Kingdom, wrote in a Feb. 21 blog post. "We think it's a standard literary device being used on a larger scale than had been previously realized. No aliens, no secret codes, no conspiracies, but some striking images, and a great name for a band."

For their study, Rugg and his colleagues ran the King James version of the text through software known as the Search Visualizer, which plotted mentions of life in red and death in green on a single gridded page representing the whole book. Their results showed frequent mentions of life in the opening and closing verses of Genesis, while themes of death were clustered in the middle. They say the device is an example of a literary convention known as inclusio, also called bracketing, where one theme frames another.

Rugg acknowledged that it is uncertain whether or not this "death sandwich" convention was applied to the text intentionally. Nonetheless, he says it might have been used to cushion the negative messages of death, or perhaps to put life and death in stark contrast.

"Whether it was a deliberate use of inclusio or a subconscious use is an open question," Rugg wrote. "We don't think that this structure is likely to be a coincidence, given the number of times the two words occur within Genesis, and given that these are themes that have long been recognized as significant within it."

Rugg and his colleagues ran other searches using the software for words not considered significant by scholars, finding no specific patterns in the book of Genesis. However, they did find the word "woman" appears overwhelmingly in the first part of Genesis, while it rarely pops up in the second half, Rugg wrote. Another term, "begat," illustrates something scholars have long recognized -- that the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John mirror the themes and structures of the Old Testament (which includes Genesis); sure enough, "begat" showed a striking cluster in the first part of Genesis, mirroring what was found in the first part of the gospel of Matthew, Rugg said.

Read more at Discovery News

Hunting Fertilizer to Find Hints of Early Life

In Brazil, a search for fertilizer fodder is also turning into a hunt for ancient life.

Scientists at Nova Scotia-based Acadia University are working with MbAC Fertilizer Corp. to help the Brazilian company find and analyze phosphate deposits — the basis for fertilizer — in a small mining town in central Brazil.

At the same time, the project researchers seek to understand how the tiny plants that deposited the phosphorous helped drive ocean evolution, particularly in the period from 700 million to 740 million years ago — just as multicellular life began evolving on Earth.

"It's kind of like turning a book on its side so you've got the pages horizontal. What we do, and what I train my students to do, is to learn the language. To interpret the rocks," said Peir Pufahl, a chemical and economic sedimentologist at Acadia.

"Mind you, 80 percent of our pages are ripped out and missing," he told OurAmazingPlanet. "We get to piece together the story using the layers of sediment we see accumulated in these ancient oceans."

MbAC and the Acadia researchers together examine aerial maps of the Campos Belos region, looking for rock outcrops, then travel to the sites to perform their work. Many of these sites have never been probed with modern tools, providing a bit of frontier research for the Acadia scientists.

Tidal environments

In a typical day, Pufahl and his students visit the site and examine the layers of rocks in the field. By day's end, they leave the area — often with a long cylinder of rock that they extracted using a special tool. They then perform chemical analyses on how the so-called phosphorous cycle changed over time. [Images: Mining for Signs of Early Life]

Phosphorous typically washes into the water from land deposits, then is eaten by algae. In turn, bigger animals eat the algae.

When those bigger animals die, their bodies sink to the seafloor, and the phosphorous is released into the sand as the animals decay, leaving deposits behind. Over eons, some of these once-underwater areas become dry land.

The scientists have completed only one field season of research, so their investigations have not yet produced any journal papers. But so far, the researchers have figured out the phosphate deposits arose in some sort of tidal flat.

"That's the first step to understand these deposits and the environments in which the phosphate is recycling," Pufahl said.

Pufahl aims to examine the global glaciations and melts that were occurring just before multicellular organisms arose, to see how these sudden climate changes affected the evolution of life.

Finding fodder

Pufahl's working relationship with MbAC arose through serendipity. Four years ago, at the request of the Society of Economic Geologists, he gave a talk on phosphorous in Brazil, where he met company representatives.

Brazil is seeking "mineral independence" in the next 20 years, meaning the country would no longer need to import these life essentials from other nations, Pufahl said. With a population of 200 million people to feed, phosphorous is important because it will let Brazil increase its fertilizer production, leading to more food for its residents.

Read more at Discovery News

Acupuncture for Allergies? Jury's Still Out

Though acupuncture is often used to treat seasonal allergies, there has been limited scientific evidence that it actually works. A new study finds that it does — kind of, maybe, but not really.

The study, led by Dr. Benno Brinkhaus of the Charité-University Medical Center in Berlin, examined the outcomes of 422 patients with seasonal allergic rhinitis (pollen allergies) over an eight-week period. They were randomly assigned to different conditions to evaluate whether acupuncture helps alleviate symptoms compared to the drug cetrizine and fake acupuncture.

Though the study has been widely reported as showing that acupuncture likely works, there are important red flags suggesting that the results may not be all they are cracked up to be.

The Placebo Effect

First, there is strong evidence that much of the improvement in allergy symptoms may simply have been caused by the placebo effect. When a patient is given a treatment and told that it will help them, often it will — even if there’s no active ingredient. A person’s expectation that they will feel better often actually makes them feel better subjectively.

One problem with trying to test acupuncture’s effectiveness apart from the placebo effect lies with the treatment itself. If doctors are testing a drug, they can make pills that look and taste identical, both with and without active ingredients. Because the patient doesn’t know if they are taking a placebo or not, the difference in outcomes can be attributed to the medicine. But in the case of acupuncture, it’s very difficult to fool someone into thinking they’re not being poked with needles.

Statistical Versus Clinical Significance

There’s another, more serious issue. The researchers noted, “We found that acupuncture led to statistically significant improvements in disease-specific quality of life and antihistamine use after eight weeks of treatment compared with sham acupuncture and with alone, but the clinical significance of the findings remains uncertain.”

To see why is this a problem it’s important to understand the difference between statistical and clinical (or practical) significance; they are very different things. Let’s say that in a clinical trial Cold remedy A has been shown statistically to work better on some measure than Cold remedy B. Does that mean that Cold remedy A is better than Cold remedy B?

Not necessarily, because outside of the laboratory and in the real world, people look for practical, not just theoretical or statistical significance. Maybe the average person sneezes 20 times per hour using Cold remedy A but only 18 times per hour using Cold remedy B. So what? If Cold remedy A shortens the duration of a cold by half a day that might be a good reason to choose it — unless it costs twice as much as its competitor, or has significantly more side effects, or any number of other reasons.

Or, to use an example outside of the medical field, let’s say that research is done on the price of food in a certain metropolitan area, and, on average, Supermarket A tends to be about 2 percent cheaper than Supermarket B after prices are compared and calculated. Does that mean that Supermarket A is better or worth shopping at more often? Not necessarily. For example that 2 percent difference is only a statistical average across many products that not every household uses, and may not necessarily reflect the products you regularly buy. Even if it does, the savings may not be worth the effort to save $1 on a $50 purchase. This is especially true if Supermarket A is out of the way: there’s little point in spending $3 in gasoline to drive across town to save $1.50 on groceries — not to mention the extra time and hassle.

Read more at Discovery News

Marvelous Mercury -- In Color

To the human eye, tiny Mercury, the innermost planet of the solar system, may look like Earth’s moon, but appearances can be deceiving.

Instruments aboard NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, currently orbiting Mercury, reveal a rich variety of chemicals, minerals and physical features, a new image of the planet shows.

The false-color view depicts variations in the composition of Mercury’s rocks.

"It’s an oddball planet," David Blewett, with the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, told reporters at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston last week.

Mercury is the smallest of the solar system’s eight planets (the dwarf planet Pluto is no longer is considered a full-fledged planet), but its most dense. It also sports a global magnetic field like Earth’s, a feature Venus and Mars lack.

In the image, released by NASA on Friday, the giant Caloris impact basin appears near the top, filled with orange-toned volcanic plains. The small orange and tan spots are places where materials have been deposited by volcanic eruptions.

Read more at Discovery News

Treasure-Filled Warrior's Grave Found in Russia

Hidden in a necropolis situated high in the mountains of the Caucasus in Russia, researchers have discovered the grave of a male warrior laid to rest with gold jewelry, iron chain mail and numerous weapons, including a 36-inch iron sword set between his legs.

That is just one amazing find among a wealth of ancient treasures dating back more than 2,000 years that scientists have uncovered there.

Among their finds are two bronze helmets, discovered on the surface of the necropolis. One helmet (found in fragments and restored) has relief carvings of curled sheep horns while the other has ridges, zigzags and other odd shapes.

Although looters had been through the necropolis before, the warrior's grave appears to have been untouched. The tip of the sword he was buried with points toward his pelvis, and researchers found "a round gold plaque with a polychrome inlay" near the tip, they write in a paper published in the most recent edition of the journal Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia.

The remains of three horses, a cow and the skull of a wild boar were also found buried near the warrior.

Diagram of Grave

"These animals were particularly valuable among barbarian peoples of the ancient world. It was sign of great importance of the buried person, which was shown by his relatives and his tribe," wrote team member Valentina Mordvintseva, a researcher at the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences Institute of Archaeology, in an email to LiveScience. The animal bones and pottery remains suggest that a funeral feast was held in his honor.

Without written records it is difficult to say exactly who the warrior was, but rather than ruling a city or town, "he was rather a chief of a people," Mordvintseva said.

The necropolis is located near the town of Mezmay. Grave robbers discovered the site in 2004 and rescue excavations began in 2005.

Iron Axe

Based on the artifacts, researchers believe the warrior's burial dates back around 2,200 years, to a time when Greek culture was popular in west Asia, while the necropolis itself appears to have been in use between the third century B.C. and the beginning of the second century A.D.

Researchers were careful to note that the artifacts cannot be linked to a specific archaeological culture. Mordvintseva points out that "this region is very big, and not sufficiently excavated," particularly in the area where the necropolis is located. "t is situated high in mountains. Perhaps the population of this area trade routes/passes with Caucasian countries -- Georgia, Armenia etc.," Mordvintseva writes in the email.

While the people who used the necropolis were clearly influenced by Greek culture, they maintained their own way of life, said Mordvintseva. "Their material culture shows that they were rather very proud of themselves and kept their culture for centuries."

Read more at Discovery News

Secret Sex Scandal Report Behind Pope Resignation?

Pope Benedict XVI’s abrupt resignation was prompted by a secret report revealing sex and graft scandals inside the Vatican, according to the Italian daily La Repubblica.

“The Pope decided to step down the week before Christmas,” the newspaper wrote.

Relying on an unnamed Vatican source, La Repubblica revealed that on December 17 three cardinals presented the pontiff with the “Relationem,” a 300-page report which investigated allegations brought up last year by the so-called Vatileaks scandal.

Last autumn Benedict’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, was found guilty of having stolen confidential documents from the papal apartment.

Commissioned by Benedict himself, the report was prepared by Cardinals Julian Herranz, Salvatore De Giorgi and Josef Tomko, the former chief of the Vatican’s secret services.

The Relationem, consisting of two red, leatherbound volumes, contained the “exact map of the mischief and the bad fish” inside the Holy See, according to La Repubblica.

“It all revolves around the breach of the sixth and seventh commandments,” the newspaper quoted its source, a man described as being very close to the three authors of the report.

The seventh commandment — “thou shalt not steal” — would refer to the affairs of the Vatican Bank, IOR, which is under investigation for money laundering.

The Relationem would also contain plenty of details on the breaking of the sixth commandment — “thou shall not commit adultery” or “impure actions.”

According to La Repubblica, some high-ranking members of the clergy were blackmailed by laymen with whom they entertain relationships of “worldly nature.”

The Italian newspaper mentioned a gay network which organized sexual encounters in villas and saunas in Rome as well as in the Vatican rooms.

Benedict, who in the past called gay people a “defect of human nature” and gay marriages a “threat to world peace,” admitted last week in his last public Mass that “the face of the church is, at times, disfigured.”

Read more at Discovery News

Flowers Communicate With Electricity

Flowers may be silent, but scientists have just discovered that electric fields allow them to communicate with bumblebees and possibly other species, including humans.

It’s well known that color, shape, pattern and fragrances allow flowers to connect with pollinators, but the new study, published in the journal Science, adds electricity to this already impressive lineup.

“We just now have discovered that electrical potentials, an unavoidable by-product of flying in air for bumblebees and being grounded for the flower, is being exploited to benefit both parties,” co-author Daniel Robert told Discovery News. It’s “another example of the beauty of evolution,” added Robert, a professor in the University of Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences.

He explained that bees have a positive electrical charge because they fly in air, which is full of all kinds of tiny particles, such as dust and charged molecules. Friction from these particles causes bees to lose electrons, leaving bumblebees positively charged.

Flowers, on the other hand, “are electrically connected to ground,” he said. Unlike copper wire, which transfers charges very quickly, plants conduct electricity very slowly and tend to possess a negative charge.

For the study, Robert and his team placed petunia flowers in an area with free-flying foraging bees. The researchers then studied how interactions between the two changed the electric fields and the bees’ behavior.

They determined that when a bee lands on a flower, this generates its own electrical field, and therefore a force. It’s as though a mini spark results when the two connect.

Robert and his colleagues believe “that the bee can sense this electrically induced force.” It appears to improve the bee’s memory of flower rewards, such as pollen and nectar, affecting later foraging.

The flower, in turn, is electrically changed for a short period after the interaction.

“Bees have what has been observed to be flower constancy, (meaning that) once they forage, they tend to keep going to one type of flower, and they keep going until they feel that the rewards are not worth it anymore,” Robert said.

“We think that flowers have their say in that strategy, and inform the bees that the supply will be back soon,” he added. This is “a dynamic interaction.”

This process of flower informing brings together all of the plant’s communication tools. It appears that electricity boosts the power of the other tools, such as color.

“We have demonstrated that when there is an electric field present, even a mild one, bees can learn the difference between two colors faster,” Robert said. “So, like in a commercial advertisement, the main and obvious message can be supported by co-lateral cues that do not necessarily convey information about the product, but are easily associated with it.”

Thomas Seeley, chairman of the Cornell University Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, is intrigued by the possibility that electric fields may facilitate rapid and dynamic communication between flowers and pollinators.

Seeley told DNews that the study "opens a window on a sensory system of the bees that we had no idea existed and no idea was used by bees during foraging."

Read more at Discovery News

Dark Matter Matters -- When You Can't Find It

There is a phantom in the machinery of the universe, and it evades even the best “ghost hunting” physicists.

Known for nearly 80 years, and for lack of a better terminology simply called “dark matter,” it still eludes detection to this day. Even our biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), apparently hasn’t been able to manufacture it.

Researchers at this week’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) reported that their Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) on the International Space Station may yield new clues as to what dark matter is. This $1.5 billion “bug trap” experiment collects all kinds of exotic high-energy particles from deep space. Any unusual peaks in the count of particles monitored by the AMS might be the result of dark matter behavior. The AMS team are expected to release their results next month.

What’s frustrating is, that whatever it is, dark matter is a lynchpin in modern astrophysics. It is the ghostly link between the infinitely small and infinitely large: particle physics and cosmology.

But unlike ghosts, dark matter is unequivocally real — like the character Griffin in The Invisible Man written in the 1897 by H.G. Wells. People see Griffin’s actions as he actually moves things around but never the body (at least until his death).

Dark matter’s gravitational pull is the glue of the universe, holding together galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Dark matter warps space like a funhouse mirror, stretching images of far-flung galaxies. Dark matter is also imprinted on the acoustic waves frozen in our snapshot of the 380,000 year-old universe, cosmic microwave background radiation.

Therefore, dark matter is not an illusion based on some lack of understanding of gravity, as some have suggested. “If solving dark matter calls for a modified theory of gravity I’ll eat my PowerPoint slides — and my laptop computer!” said astrophysicist Mike Turner, of the University of Chicago.

In fact, “dark” is a misnomer says Harvard University theoretical physicist Lisa Randall because it does not interact with radiation. A dark object still absorbs or reflects a little light. A black cat eating licorice in a coal bin is dark matter.

So, let’s call the glue of the universe invisible matter, with a tip of the hat to 19th century poet Hughes Mearns:

“Yesterday, upon the stair; I met a man who wasn’t there; He wasn’t there again today; I wish, I wish he’d go away…”

Invisible matter particles were presumably cooked up when the newborn universe was a “quark soup,” 1/100,000th of a second after the Big Bang. The seething hot universe was essentially a nuclear reactor for making particles more massive than quarks.

One idea is that invisible matter was born out of a phase transition — like water vapor turning into droplets. It may have decoupled from normal matter to make such hypothetical particles as axions or WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). Normal matter and invisible matter may have transferred properties between each other in the primeval cauldron. Both forms of matter store the same amount of energy in the same volume, so they must have a kinship.

Today there is an ongoing do-loop between theories and experiments for invisible matter. One theory is that invisible matter particles occasionally collide with each other to make specific flavors of cosmic rays, anti-protons or gamma rays. And, all of this must be sorted out from the cacophony of high-energy radiation saturating the universe.

Rather than waiting for Mother Nature, physicists are eagerly trying to home cook their own invisible matter in the LHC. This allows for the invisible matter egg-hunt to be done under controlled conditions.

But, like our Invisible Man, invisible matter particles can only be inferred from the behavior of observable particles created deep in the bowels of the LHC’s building-sized detector arrays.

Head-on collisions of clusters of protons accelerated to near the speed of light yield cascades of subatomic particles meticulously recorded by concentric rings of detectors. The subatomic shrapnel from the collision is inventoried by massive data processing. A deficit in the tally could mean that an invisible matter particle was created and promptly zipped through all the layered detectors without a trace.

But is evidence of absence really absence of something tangible? The same effect could be caused by an escaping neutrino (which in fact may account for some fraction of invisible matter) or simply bad data. Or maybe there is an unintended observer bias when looking at the data.

What’s more, only a fraction of the collision data deemed “most interesting” can be stored and the rest is thrown away. “I stay awake every night worrying we might be throwing out the baby with the bathwater,” said U.C. Santa Barbra physicist Claudio Campagnari.

And, can some conclusions be gleaned about invisible matter from a null result?

Read more at Discovery News