Brain 'Hears' Sound Of Silence

Although more research needs to be done, the work carried out by Wehr and his team could lead to new treatments for impaired hearing. Getty Images

From Discovery News:

While we think of silence as the absence of sound, the brain detects it nonetheless.

THE GIST:

* The brain responds not only to sound but also to silence, according to a new study.
* Different pathways in the brain respond to the onset and the offset of sounds.
* Better knowing how the brain organizes and groups sounds could lead to more effective hearing therapies and devices.

While we characterize silence as the absence of sound, the brain hears it as loud and clear as any other noise.

In fact, according to a recent study from the University of Oregon, some areas of the brain respond solely to sound termination. Rather than sound stimuli traveling through the same brain pathways from start to finish as previously thought, neuron activity in rats has shown that onset and offset of sounds take separate routes.

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Grizzly Bears Move Into Polar Bear Habitat In Manitoba, Canada

This is a grizzly Bear (Ursus arctos), photographed in Wapusk National Park, Manitoba, Canada, on August 9, 2008. (Credit: Linda Gormezano)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 23, 2010) — Biologists affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History and City College of the City University of New York have found that grizzly bears are roaming into what was traditionally thought of as polar bear habitat -- and into the Canadian province of Manitoba, where they are officially listed as extirpated. The preliminary data was recently published in Canadian Field Naturalist and shows that sightings of Ursus arctos horribilis in Canada's Wapusk National Park are recent and appear to be increasing in frequency.

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Gulp! Long-Necked Dinosaurs Didn't Bother Chewing

Sauropod dinosaurs like this newly discovered Abydosaurus had heads that were just one two-hundredth of the total body volume. That small size might explain why they didn't chew their food, the researchers say. Credit: Michael Skrepnick.

From Live Science:

A mom's wise words about chewing your food likely got lost on a giant, long-necked dinosaur that lived about 105 million years ago in North America. That's according to analyses of four skulls from a newly identified dinosaur species.

"They didn't chew their food; they just grabbed it and swallowed it," said study team member Brooks Britt, a paleontologist at Brigham Young University.

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Plastic Rubbish Blights Atlantic Ocean

From The BBC:

Scientists have discovered an area of the North Atlantic Ocean where plastic debris accumulates.

The region is said to compare with the well-documented "great Pacific garbage patch".

Karen Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association told the BBC that the issue of plastics had been "largely ignored" in the Atlantic.

She announced the findings of a two-decade-long study at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, US.

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More About Cheney's Heart Attack. How Many Can One Person Have?

From The L.A. Times:

The news that former Vice President Dick Cheney suffered his fifth heart attack Monday and was admitted to a hospital, where apparently he is recovering nicely, naturally raises the question of how many heart attacks one person can have.

Five heart attacks may seem like a lot, but it really isn't, experts said. Physicians have become better at diagnosing very small heart attacks that might have passed by unobserved in the past, and improvements in therapy have made large, killer heart attacks less common.

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Experts Warn Of Catastrophy From Cyberattacks

Photo: Vice Admiral Michael McConnell, who works for Booz Allen Hamilton and used to be director of national security and intelligence for the U.S. government. (Credit: U.S. Senate)

Experts Warn Of Catastrophy From Cyberattacks -- CNET

Computer-based network attacks are slowly bleeding U.S. businesses of revenue and market advantage, while the government faces the prospect of losing in an all-out cyberwar, experts told Senators in a hearing on Tuesday.

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Can Twitter Make Money?

Twitter and the Real-Time Web: On the real-time Web, information is created and consumed instantly, often through blogs and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. The phenomenon exploded last year, as the surging use of URL-shortening services indicates; Web addresses must be shrunk in order for links to fit inside 140-character tweets. Twitter attracted new users and expanded its reach, but it still carries a lot of babble. Twitter has experienced exponential user growth in three years. But the rate slowed at the end of 2009. Credit: Tommy McCall

From Technology Review:

Twitter plans to become the leader in instant news--and make itself into a sustainable business in the process.

At the microblogging company Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, in the sixth-floor conference room, founder Evan Williams was declining to tell me anything about the company's strategies to earn revenues when, suddenly, his cofounder Biz Stone blurted, "Whoa!" It was 10:10 a.m. on January 7, and it would prove to be the latest Twitter Moment, showing how far the service has moved beyond its early status as an amplifier of personal minutiae and confession. A minor earthquake had just struck: a magnitude 4.1 temblor centered 45 miles to the southeast. Throughout the Bay Area, thousands of Twitter users seized their smart phones or PCs to peck out 140-character-or-less tweets--updates in the form of text messages, Web-based instant messages, or posts on Twitter's website. Quake-related tidbits coursed through the company's servers at the rate of 296 per minute, according to tracking done by the U.S. Geological Survey.

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Sight Savers: New Weapons Trained On Blindness

From New Scientist:

It starts with a barely perceptible blurring of vision from time to time - the sort of thing you might chalk up to getting older. But when you get it checked out, there is disturbing news: you have a disease called age-related macular degeneration, or AMD.

It can progress slowly or quickly, but there is no cure. Your hopes for an idyllic retirement - reading all those books, driving to new places, or just enjoying a carefree independence - are now clouded by uncertainty.

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DARPA Orders Smart Robotic Terminator Hands For A Better Tomorrow

Terminator's Arm My CPU is a neural net processor; a learning computer.

From Popular Science:

Pentagon mad scientists at DARPA have continued on their quest to create killer robots by announcing a new plan for "robotic autonomous manipulators" that can emulate human hands. And by killer, we of course mean awesome. National Defense reports that the DARPA program aims to create inexpensive robotic hands that can perhaps also replace existing prosthetics for amputees.

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Life-Like Evolution In A Test Tube

With colleague Tracey Lincoln, Gerald Joyce (picured) has created an artificial genetic system that can undergo self-sustained replication and evolution. Credit: Scripps Research Institute

From Cosmos:

SAN DIEGO: Can life arise from nothing but a chaotic assortment of basic molecules? The answer is a lot closer following a series of ingenious experiments that have shown evolution at work in non-living molecules.

For the first time, scientists have synthesized RNA enzymes – ribonucleic acid enzymes also known as ribozymes - that can replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components.

What’s more, these simple nucleic acids can act as catalysts and continue the process indefinitely.

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Small Dogs Originated In The Middle East

A single gene is responsible for the size of dogs -- big and small. Getty Images

From Discovery News:

These miniature mutts were the descendants of gray wolves, which also happen to be smaller than many other wolves.

* Small dogs originated in the Middle East 12,000 years ago, according to a new study.
* These dogs are related to the Middle Eastern gray wolf, which shares a particular version of the size gene.
* Reduction in body size is a common feature of domestication and has been observed in other animals.

Small dogs the world over can all trace their ancestry back to the Middle East, where the first diminutive canines emerged more than 12,000 years ago.

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Technology That Makes The Heart Grow Fonder

If you can't be with the one you love, log onto Facebook. Or Skype. Or Second Life.

From MSNBC:

Today's faraway lovers prefer e-mail, text to an old-fashioned phone call

My college roommate hung on to her hometown boyfriend longer than most. I remember creeping in to the apartment late at night and tripping painfully over the phone cord that snaked from the living room into her bedroom. And if I listened hard, I could hear the inane murmurings that only a long-distance relationship can produce:

“You hang up first … you didn’t hang up! I’m not going to hang up. Are you still there? I love you too!”

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Geologists Look For Answers In Antarctica: Did Ice Exist At Equator Some 300 Million Years Ago?

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 24, 2010) — Focusing on a controversial hypothesis that ice existed at the equator some 300 million years ago during the late Paleozoic Period, two University of Oklahoma researchers originated a project in search of clues to Earth's climate system.

"The Paleozoic Period was a rare time in history," says Gerilyn Soreghan, OU professor of geology. "Broadly speaking, it was the last time our planet experienced the type of climate system we have today and in the recent past." Soreghan believes comparing more modern systems in a range of different climates might help support her hypothesis.

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Parents Choosing More Unusual Baby Names Now

From Live Science:

Celebrities aren't the only ones giving their babies unusual names. Compared with decades ago, parents are choosing less common names for kids, which could suggest an emphasis on uniqueness and individualism, according to new research.

Essentially, today's kids (and later adults) will stand out from classmates. For instance, in the 1950s, the average first-grade class of 30 children would have had at least one boy named James (top name in 1950), while in 2013, six classes will be necessary to find only one Jacob, even though that was the most common boys' name in 2007.

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Shuttle Sparks Panic In Central America

From Information Week:

Endeavour's sonic boom over El Salvador sent residents into the streets and put local authorities on high alert.

The shuttle Endeavour made an unexpected course change during its landing approach to Florida's Kennedy Space Center on Sunday.

The maneuver allowed the craft to circumvent bad weather plaguing its normal route across the southern U.S., but it also sent unwary residents of Central America into the streets in panic.

Endeavour's sonic boom over El Salvador caused a stir not unlike what occurred in the wake of Orson Welles' infamous War Of The Worlds radio broadcast.

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Sat-Nav Systems Under Growing Threat From 'Jammers'

Photo: Society will only get ever more dependent on sat-nav systems

From The BBC:

Technology that depends on satellite-navigation signals is increasingly threatened by attack from widely available equipment, experts say.

While "jamming" sat-nav equipment with noise signals is on the rise, more sophisticated methods allow hackers even to program what receivers display.

At risk are not only sat-nav users, but also critical national infrastructure.

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How Rest Helps Memory: Sleepy Heads

From The Economist:

Researchers say a nap prepares the brain to learn.

MAD dogs and Englishmen, so the song has it, go out in the midday sun. And the business practices of England’s lineal descendant, America, will have you in the office from nine in the morning to five in the evening, if not longer. Much of the world, though, prefers to take a siesta. And research presented to the AAAS meeting in San Diego suggests it may be right to do so. It has already been established that those who siesta are less likely to die of heart disease. Now, Matthew Walker and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that they probably have better memory, too. An afternoon nap, Dr Walker has discovered, sets the brain up for learning.

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Yahoo Turns On The Twitter Firehose

From CNET:

Yahoo has agreed to purchase access to the Twitter firehose, adding real-time Twitter content to both search results and Yahoo profiles. The company has been featuring Twitter content in search results for some time but plans to augment those results now that it will receive content directly from Twitter rather than having to pull it from the service through public APIs, said Jim Stoneham, vice president of communities at Yahoo.

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Primitive Humans Conquered Sea, Surprising Finds Suggest

Surprisingly old hand axes have been found on the Greek island of Crete, at center in this composite of satellite images. Blue Marble image courtesy NASA

From National Geographic:

Prehistoric axes found on a Greek island suggest that seafaring existed in the Mediterranean more than a hundred thousand years earlier than thought.

Two years ago a team of U.S. and Greek archaeologists were combing a gorge on the island of Crete (map) in Greece, hoping to find tiny stone tools employed by seafaring people who had plied nearby waters some 11,000 years ago.

Instead, in the midst of the search, Providence College archaeologist Thomas Strasser and his team came across a whopping surprise—a sturdy 5-inch-long (13-centimeter-long) hand ax.

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The Present And Future Of Unmanned Drone Aircraft: An Illustrated Field Guide

The Avenger: General Atomics Aeronautical Systems

From Popular Science:

Inside the wild kingdom of the world’s newest and most spectacular species of unmanned aircraft, from swarming insect ’bots that can storm a burning building to a seven-ton weaponized spyplane invisible to radar

New breeds of winged beasts are lurking in the skies. Bearing names like Reaper, Vulture and Demon, they look nothing like their feathered brethren. Better known as unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, these strange and wily birds are quietly infiltrating vast swaths of airspace, from battlefields to backyards.

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