interesting headlines...

[LiLiaN]

scientists are trying to encourage laymen to be interested in latest findings etc...
one method is to use attention grabing headlines..

here are a couple of the recent headlines...
- Cold turkeys have fewer female chicks
- Dunes are live with the sound of music

catchy and sounds great, isn't it..?

[yee keong]

and what is supposed to be done here? post attention grabbing headlines?? well, how's this??

no Spiderman in Malaysia due to new Fumakilla spray?

ok, ok, it sounds lame

[jeongyik]

and what is supposed to be done here? post attention grabbing headlines?? well, how's this??

no Spiderman in Malaysia due to new Fumakilla spray?

ok, ok, it sounds lame
Then how do you explain how come no Wonder Woman and Superman in Malaysia :D

[athena]

Then how do you explain how come no Wonder Woman and Superman in Malaysia :D
haha....pakaian menunjuk aurat...so they change their dressing when they came to malaysia*....hehe...so mah dun recognise lor


*applicable only in kelantan :D!!

[LiLiaN]

and what is supposed to be done here? post attention grabbing headlines?? well, how's this??

no Spiderman in Malaysia due to new Fumakilla spray?

ok, ok, it sounds lame
just post any headlines that really grab your attention... but real one, not make shift lar...

[LiLiaN]

Swordfish heat up their eyes to improve their tracking of fast-moving prey in deep, cold water, suggests a new study.

It is common to find swordfish in the Pacific Ocean at a depth of 300 metres. At this depth, the ambient temperature could be as cold as 3°C. A swordfish retina kept at 20°C at this depth would be seven times better at resolving moving images. The greatest benefit of having warm eyes would be when the water is cold but brightly lit.

In swordfish, a part of one of the muscles that moves its eyes has adapted to produce heat instead. It warms up the blood, which is then moved towards the eye and the brain. Other fish, such as tuna, keep their whole bodies warm. And similar light experiments by the team with retinas from freshly caught tuna suggest that warming also confers a visual advantage in these species.

[LiLiaN]

maybe should change this to a science thread...
i know, a bit nerdy, but lots of interesting stuffs too... :)

[LiLiaN]

A sperm-sorting machine could soon allow fertility clinics to filter out sperm that have a type of DNA damage associated with infertility and a heightened risk of childhood cancers in offspring. It was developed in Australia by John Aitken and Chris Ainsworth at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, alongside commercial partner Life Therapeutics of Sydney.

Mechanised sorting should be particularly useful when a would-be father is older, or is a heavy smoker or has been exposed to pollution in the workplace - all factors that increase this type of DNA damage.

The sorter is based on the principle that sperm with the most negatively charged membranes have the least DNA damage. Aitken is not sure why this is the case, but he speculates that it may simply be that these sperm are more likely to have matured normally. Maturing sperm make a 20-day voyage through the epididymis, the 6-metre long, tightly coiled duct between the testes and vas deferens. As they progress, they acquire more and more negatively charged CD52 proteins on their membranes.

Tests suggest that the sorter is efficient at pulling sperm with less DNA damage from the semen of men with fertility problems. Interestingly, the sperm that were selected also looked healthier, with the same physical characteristics sought by technicians making a visual selection.

"It is so simple. I've never seen anything like it before. You turn it on, the sperm move across and there you go," says Moira O'Bryan of the Monash Institute of Reproduction and Development in Melbourne, Australia. "Only time will tell, but it might take some of the subjective nature out of picking good sperm."

The sorter's ability to select "good" sperm will be tested in two clinical trials of women undergoing IVF at a fertility clinic in Australia later this year.

[LiLiaN]

IF homosexuality is an inherited trait, why do genes for it survive? Because these genes may make women more likely to reproduce.

Andrea Camperio-Ciani's team at the University of Padua, Italy, asked 98 gay and 100 straight men to fill in questionnaires about their families. They found mothers and aunts had more children if related to a gay rather than a straight man. Mothers of gay men averaged 2.7 babies, compared with 2.3 born to mothers of straight men. Aunts on the mother's side had 2 babies compared with 1.5 for maternal aunts of straight men. “We think of a gene for male homosexuality, but it may be a gene for attraction to men”

The team suggests that gene variations on the X chromosome make women more likely to have more children, and men more likely to be gay. "We think of a gene for male homosexuality, but it might really be a gene for sexual attraction to men," says Simon LeVay, a neuroscientist at Stanford University and a writer on sexuality.

But the "maternal effect" could at most account for only 14 per cent of the prevalence of male homosexuality, the Italian team cautions. "Our findings, if confirmed, are only one piece in a much larger puzzle on the nature of human sexuality."

[yee keong]

i find it much easier to post in the jokes thread.

[Alkapocino]

^^bump^^

[yee keong]

ok ok, check this out. This is amazing....read this...



Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in
waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht
frist
and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you
can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey
lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

[Alkapocino]

Swordfish heat up their eyes to improve their tracking of fast-moving prey in deep, cold water, suggests a new study.

It is common to find swordfish in the Pacific Ocean at a depth of 300 metres. At this depth, the ambient temperature could be as cold as 3°C. A swordfish retina kept at 20°C at this depth would be seven times better at resolving moving images. The greatest benefit of having warm eyes would be when the water is cold but brightly lit.

In swordfish, a part of one of the muscles that moves its eyes has adapted to produce heat instead. It warms up the blood, which is then moved towards the eye and the brain. Other fish, such as tuna, keep their whole bodies warm. And similar light experiments by the team with retinas from freshly caught tuna suggest that warming also confers a visual advantage in these species.
LiLian, can you please include the source of where the News and Headlines come from? This is to respect the writer and also we know it's genuine and reliable. Thank you very much. :)

[daBoss]

ok ok, check this out. This is amazing....read this...
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in
waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht
frist
and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you
can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey
lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
this was posted in one of the very first posts in the forum by mr jcwong... :)

[yee keong]

oh ok, didn't know that. i'm newbie ----> points below his name

[LiLiaN]

LiLian, can you please include the source of where the News and Headlines come from? This is to respect the writer and also we know it's genuine and reliable. Thank you very much. :)
i picked all these up from New Scientist... they language they use not too jargon-ish like other scientific publication e.g. Nature, Science, JME, MBE etc...

just thought i'd share some interesting science with everyone... :)

[Alkapocino]

i picked all these up from New Scientist... they language they use not too jargon-ish like other scientific publication e.g. Nature, Science, JME, MBE etc...

just thought i'd share some interesting science with everyone... :)
Keep it coming. I know there are some science experts in the forum.

dtchieng is one of them. :D

[LiLiaN]

Terror shows only in the eyes by Roxanne Khamsi (in Nature News)

Knowing where to look is key to recognizing others' emotions. Focusing on a person's eyes is crucial for detecting their fear.

A woman who cannot recognize fear in people's faces is causing neuroscientists to rethink theories of how our brains read emotions.

Scientists have been testing the 38-year-old woman for more than a decade. She has a rare disease that has damaged both sides of her amygdala, the almond-shaped part of the brain that is known from imaging studies to be involved in recognizing facial expressions.

The woman, known as SM, finds it very difficult to tell from facial expressions when another person is afraid, although she has no problem recognizing other emotions, such as happiness, sadness and anger.

Originally, researchers thought this meant that different emotions are processed by distinct neural circuits in the brain. But new studies with SM, published in this week's Nature, suggest quite a different explanation.

Neuroscientist Ralph Adolphs of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and his colleagues showed SM photographs of various different facial expressions and asked her what emotion she thought the people were feeling.

Researchers have done this many times before. But this time, to find the part of the faces on which SM was focusing, the team used a 'bubble test' in which only part of the face is revealed at a time.

The researchers were intrigued to find that SM totally avoided looking at people's eyes. She discerned her information simply from looking around the nose and mouth.

This was generally enough for her to identify emotions such as happiness or anger, where features such as a smile, or bared teeth, are important.

But wide eyes are a particularly important component of a fearful expression. Because SM was only looking at the nose and mouth, she did not notice the eyes and concluded that the person was feeling neutral.

"First you have to look at the eyes, and then the brain has to make use of that information to figure out it's fear," explains Adolphs.

When the researchers simply told SM to look at people's eyes, she did, and her ability to distinguish fear dramatically improved.

She needed constant reminding, as otherwise she stopped looking at the eyes. But this ability to regain lost function simply through receiving the correct instructions is extremely unusual in patients with brain damage. It suggests that SM doesn't have a problem processing the visual cues at all.

Instead, says Adolphs, the area she has damaged may tell us where and how to look. "It's a radical rethink of amygdala function," he says.

If our brains simply took in all the information around us, we would be completely overwhelmed, he points out. "What's needed is selectivity of some kind, to decide what's important," he says. Adolphs believes that the amygdala is a critical component of such a mechanism.

The team suggests that this new understanding could be used to help develop treatments for people with disorders such as autism, who find it difficult to read emotions.

Autism sufferers are known to focus abnormally on certain facial features. Giving them direct reminders of how to look at other people's faces could help them to improve their perception of social cues.

[LiLiaN]

Who needs drugs when nursing can be such a great high? New research shows that brain scans of suckling moms are indistinguishable from those of virgin rats on cocaine, supporting the idea that nature rewards mothers for nurturing their pups. The work, described in 5 January issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, also sets the stage to better understand the mother-child bond in humans.

When given the choice, rats with babies under 8 days of age will choose suckling their pups over cocaine. Researchers believe this strong motivation to nurse has evolved to help mothers bond with their offspring. Previous work involving damaging parts of the brain or blocking neurotransmitters has shown that the reward system of the brain is involved both in suckling and in drug stimulation. But no one had imaged the brain of a conscious rat for these studies.

To address this, Craig Ferris of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester and colleagues monitored the effect of suckling and cocaine use in wide-awake mother rats using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the entire brain. When the team compared the MRIs of suckling mother rats to virgin rats given cocaine, it found that the same areas of the brain lit up in both groups. If the mother rats received injections of cocaine, the reward system in their brains dipped in activity below the lactation high, suggesting that lactation somehow interferes with the rewarding effects of cocaine.

This work will allow scientists to bridge what we know about rats to humans, says neuroscientist Joan Morrell at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. "And it's a good overview of the systems that get turned on during suckling and drug use."

--MARY BECKMAN (Science, News)

[LiLiaN]

Something trivial and non-relevant but the headline caught my attention.... ;)

The American Chemical Society says Google's new academic and scientific search engine, Google Scholar, is infringing on its established search product, Scifinder Scholar. The ACS filed a statement of claim in US District Court in the District of Columbia, part of which seeks a permanent injunction against Google from using the word 'Scholar' for its beta search product.

Google launched Google Scholar in November 2004. The ACS action, filed in December, claims the society holds a common-law trademark on the word 'Scholar,' because its search engine is often shortened to that one word. "We have had a well-respected search service, Scifinder Scholar, since 1998," says Flint Lewis, the secretary and general counsel of the ACS. "It services nearly a thousand university subscribers."

"Hundreds of thousands of scientists have used it to explore research topics and to locate and browse journal and patent references, substance information, regulated chemicals, chemical reactions, and chemical supplier information through world-leading databases, created by the ACS's Chemical Abstracts Service over the past 97 years," says Lewis. "Our action is not in any way focused on functionality; we are focusing simply on the use of the name."

Steve Langton, a spokesman for Google, says: "We are confident in our use of the name Google Scholar. This lawsuit is without merit."

[KoChun]

Haiyah, I thought ACS referring to our school. Anyway, thanks for the headlines, Lilian. Keep them coming. :)

[LiLiaN]

Haiyah, I thought ACS referring to our school. Anyway, thanks for the headlines, Lilian. Keep them coming. :)
hehe... it was a real attention grabbing headline, wasn't it...? :D

[LiLiaN]

Cuttlefish win mates with transvestite antics by Jessica Ebert (Nature News)
Sneaky male mimics don a female disguise in an instant.

Cuttlefish may be the most talented quick-change artists in the animal kingdom. Single males can adopt a sophisticated feminine disguise to help them get near females that are guarded by large males.

Now researchers have proved that the mimics, who can change their appearance instantaneously, are successfully mating with such females.

Each year, during the winter, thousands of giant Australian cuttlefish (Sepia apama) gather on the southern coast of the continent to mate. The competition between males for the females is intense. On average, four males fight over each female, but the ratio can be as high as eleven to one.

The winner of each challenge, usually a large male, guards his mate closely. But smaller males still manage to secure about a third of all matings. There is a range of tactics from which a 'sneaker' male can choose. The options include waiting until the consort male is busy fending off a challenge; meeting his mate under a rock as she prepares to lay an egg; and disguising oneself as an female.

The latter approach is an "elaborate trickery", according to Roger Hanlon, a marine biologist with the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory. To be convincing, the mimic has to take on a mottled colouring, hide some of his arms and alter the shape of the visible ones.

Although the practice has been seen before, until now no one had proved that it works, that is, that the sneaker males actually manage to fertilize the target females.

So Hanlon and his colleagues watched the behaviour of five female mimics off a rocky reef in northern Spencer Gulf, South Australia. They found that in 30 out of 62 attempts, the mimics deceived the guard male and got close to females. The researchers used DNA fingerprinting to show that two of the mimics succeeded in making a female pregnant, they report in Nature this week.

"We're providing genetic proof that sexual mimicry leads to immediate fertilization success," says Hanlon.

The team also found that the mimics could change their appearance as fast as 10 times in 15 minutes. "The level of sophistication of mimicry is amazing," says Bryan Neff, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, "and the rate at which they are able to change is incredible."

Sexual mimicry is not new to the animal world. Both bluegill sunfish (Lepomis macrochirus) and red-sided garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis) are known to make use of it, for example. But male cuttlefish are the only animals known that can turn the change in physical appearance on and off so quickly.