agnieszka biskup — writer & editor

Boston can be a confusing place to drive, so thank goodness you’ve got all sorts of different cells in your brain to help you navigate your way. In a study published in the Sept. 11 Nature, Michael J. Kahana of Brandeis University in Waltham and his colleagues had volunteers play a taxi-based computer game in which subjects had to pick up passengers and drop them off at various locations in a virtual city. Continue reading →

In 1066, the Norman invasion; in 1588, the Spanish Armada. Invasion dates: What would history books and trivia games be without them? And now perhaps a new date can be added to the annals: 470,000,000 BC, the date plants invaded land. Charles H. Wellman of the University of Sheffield, UK, and his colleagues report in the Sept. 18 Nature that they have discovered fragments of the earliest land plants. Microscopic spores have previously been found in 470 million-year-old rocks, but the spores were 50 million years older than any known land plant fossils. Also, the spores were similar to those of aquatic algae, and so could not reliably be assumed to come from plants that lived on land. But the researchers have found fossilized fragments of tiny land plants holding identical spores in ancient rocks in Oman, seeming to confirm the 470 million-year date. Analysis of the fragments shows that the ancient plants were probably most similar to today’s liverworts, a moss-like plant.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 9/23/2003.

Just like humans, capuchin monkeys have been found to have a sense of fairness, say researchers from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University in Atlanta. In their study, published in the Sept. 18 Nature, Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal taught brown capuchin monkeys, a social primate, to exchange tokens for food. Cucumber would normally be considered an acceptable treat, and the capuchins were happy to exchange a token for a piece. But if a monkey saw another monkey getting a grape — a more-favored food — in exchange, an interesting thing happened. Some would then refuse to hand over a token at all; others would refuse the cucumber, and some would take the cucumber, but refuse to eat it. The monkeys also appeared to get upset if another monkey received a treat for doing nothing at all. While the researchers acknowledge that their data can’t give the precise motivation for why the capuchins reacted as they did, they think that just like humans, the monkeys may hold “emotionally charged expectations about reward distribution and social exchange.” According to the authors, the capuchins’ reactions also “support an early evolutionary origin of inequity aversion.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 9/23/2003.

NASA has set Galileo, the spacecraft that has been studying Jupiter and its moons since 1995, on a collision course with the planet, the crash to occur this Sunday. The craft, which is running low on fuel, is being directed into the Jovian atmosphere in order to avoid hitting — and possibly contaminating — the moon Europa, a prime candidate for harboring extraterrestrial life. Galileo’s stunning images of Europa a few years back gave evidence that a liquid ocean may exist beneath the moon’s cracked and frozen crust. But, even in its last moments, there will be no rest for the tireless Galileo: The craft will relay a final burst of information and images of Jupiter before impact. NASA will host a panel discussion on the Galileo beginning at 2 p.m. tomorrow and the end of the mission will be webcast live at 3 p.m. Sunday at www.jpl.nasa.gov/webcast/galileo/. More information about the mission and some cool pictures can be found at http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov/.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 9/16/2003.

There’s a major influx of stardust in our solar system and it’s coming in at a rate three times faster than it did six years ago — and could triple again by 2013, according to measurements taken by the spacecraft, Ulysses. The sun normally puts a charge on stardust and then its magnetic field deflects it out of the solar system. But, as Markus Landgraf of the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany, and his colleagues report in the October Journal of Geophysical Research, the sun’s magnetic field is currently flipping its polarity, and with its field in disarray, it can’t eject the particles as it usually does. While the sun finishes the reversal that it began in 2001, the stardust will continue to stream in unchecked. But don’t go running for your Space Hoover just yet; Stardust, as far as we know, is not dangerous to life on Earth.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 9/16/2003.

Astronomers reported last week that black holes can sing bass — in a manner of speaking. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, they have detected the deepest note in the universe, a B-flat being emitted by a massive black hole in the Perseus galaxy cluster, 250 million light-years away. Though the researchers could identify it, they couldn’t hear it: The note is 57 octaves below middle-C, at a frequency more than a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing. Using observations from Chandra, the astronomers found ripples in the gas filling the galaxy cluster. It is the ripples that are evidence for the sound waves that have traveled from the black hole in the cluster’s center. The study’s team leader, Andrew Fabian of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, England, stated in a press release: “We have observed the prodigious amounts of light and heat created by a black hole; now we have detected the sound.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 9/16/2003.

Canadian researchers report in the September issue of the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society that senior citizens can still enjoy a good joke — as long as it’s not too complicated. Prathiba Shammi and Donald Stuss, psychologists at the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto, explored how aging affects humor comprehension. In their small study, they tested 20 older adults (average age 73) and 17 younger adults (average age 28), all healthy and fluent in English, in three humor categories — appreciation of humorous verbal statements, joke and story completion, and nonverbal cartoon appreciation. Continue reading →

Using bees to explain the sexual behavior of humans has been found to be even more off the mark than you’d think. An international team of researchers report in the Aug. 22 issue of Cell that they have discovered the gene responsible for making a honeybee male or female, and, by so doing, have also solved the 150-year-old mystery of how male bees can be fatherless. The gene is called csd, or complementary sex determiner. Female bees have two sets of genes, including two copies of csd, one from each parent. Males, on the other hand, develop from unfertilized eggs laid by their mother, which have only one set of genes and so only one copy of csd. To become female, an offspring must have two different copies of csd, which work together to trigger female development. Gender being determined by one sex having half as many genes as the other isn’t exactly unusual; that’s the way it is with about one-fifth of animal species, including all ants, bees, and wasps, but not, to the dismay of would-be sex educators, humans.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 9/09/2003.

In yet another example of how Mother Nature got there first, a small deep-sea “glass” sponge has been shown to have “remarkable fiber-optical properties, which are surprisingly similar to those of commercial telecommunication fibers,” report researchers from Bell Laboratories/Lucent Technologies in the Aug. 21 Nature. Fiber-optic cables are long, thin strands of glass that can carry telephone and computer data as light, and it appears that the sponge Euplectella makes structures that can do the same. Its skeleton, made of silica, is composed of a lattice of tiny projections called spicules that provide support for its body. It appears that these skeletal structures can conduct light just like fiber-optic cables, and appear to be stronger as well. Not only that, but they are made at normal temperatures in the deep, dark sea, not the high heat now required for their manufacture by industry. But why would a sponge need this kind of high-tech, fiber-optic skeleton to begin with? The researchers think that beyond structural support, the spicules “may be useful in distributing light in its deep-sea environment.” They conclude, “This illuminating sponge should also shed light on low-temperature, biologically inspired processes that could give rise to better fiber-optical materials and networks.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 9/02/2003.

Not unlike Pavlov teaching dogs to associate food with the sound of a bell, Jay Gottfried and colleagues from London’s Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience have taught humans to associate pictures with peanut butter or vanilla. As reported in the Aug. 22 Science, 13 hungry human volunteers’ brains were scanned during and after a training session where abstract computer images were paired with the smell of peanut butter or vanilla. The researchers found that activity in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex — part of the brain’s reward center — went up for images associated with food scents. Then the volunteers ate as much vanilla ice cream or peanut butter sandwiches as they wanted, and their brains were scanned again to gauge their response to the same images: brain activity in the reward center decreased for the food just consumed, but stayed the same for the other. The study shows that not only can we mentally connect food to abstract images, but that our brains can dampen that connection when sated, a type of “brake system” to stop people from eating when full. The researchers speculate that a faulty brake system may be behind Kluver-Bucy syndrome, a brain disorder that makes people eat huge amounts, including even non-foods. Stated Gottfried in a press release, “You could conjecture that a similar thing may be going on in certain eating disorders, where the routine brakes on the whole system are tweaked somehow, so they’re no longer responding to normal cues.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 9/02/2003.