death by asteroid a little less likely

Posted on July 22, 2003 by agnieszka

Take a deep breath and relax, doom-from-the-sky watchers. Researchers from the United Kingdom and Russia report that stony asteroids slamming into Earth are less of a threat than previously thought. The researchers say that, based on their computer simulations, the asteroids are much more likely to break up in the atmosphere than directly hit the planet. Philip Bland of Imperial College in London, and Natalia Artemieva of the Institute for Dynamics of Geospheres in Moscow write in the July 17 Nature that objects approximately 220 meters wide (about 720 feet) or larger are likely to strike Earth only once every 170,000 years or so, rather than every 3,000 to 4,000 years as previously forecast. But don’t relax too much: If an asteroid broke up before hitting Earth, it would still be a threat to human life, the atmospheric explosion likely causing major damage at ground level.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 7/22/2003.
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building a tastier mousetrap

Posted on July 22, 2003 by agnieszka

Forget cheese. It’s chocolate that drives mice wild, and now, it seems, to their deaths. Researchers from the University of Warwick in England, in collaboration with Sorex Ltd., a manufacturer of pest control products in Cheshire, have developed a chocolate-scented mousetrap. But, before they could give the phrase death by chocolate a literal meaning, they had to figure out what scents mice like best: The researchers tested cheese, vanilla, and chocolate, and found that most mice prefer chocolate. The researchers also helped Sorex develop the technology that would allow the company to inject chocolate essence into the plastic during the production process so that no bait is required for the trap. In a press release, Sorex rodent control product manager Martina Flynn stated: “New developments are key to the future of rodent control both in the UK and overseas, and the project shows the importance of research in rodenticide technology to provide forward thinking solutions.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 7/22/2003.
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finding nemo’s secret

Posted on July 15, 2003 by agnieszka

Don’t tell the children, but Nemo may be a potential transsexual. To ensure harmony in its tight-knit fishy community, it appears that the colorful clownfish can adjust its sex, size, and growth rate, Peter Buston reports in the July 10 Nature. (This is in contrast to most other animals living in social groups, who keep the peace by simply adjusting their behavior.) While at Cornell University, Buston studied almost 100 groups of aquarium-dwelling clownfish. Each group is made up of a breeding pair and up to four non-breeders, and its social hierarchy is rigidly defined by size. At the top of the heap is the largest fish, the breeding female. Fish number two is the breeding male, who is second largest. Then the nonbreeders follow, their size determining their rank. Buston found that if the top-ranking female was removed from the tank, the breeding male changes sex and gets bigger to assume the vacancy, the largest nonbreeder becomes a bigger breeding male, and so on down the line, all the fish changing size to assume their new ranks. Buston wrote that he believes the strategy evolved to prevent violent conflict within the group, so that “subordinates do not become a threat to their dominants.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 7/15/2003.
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a tip for wait staff who want better tips

Posted on July 15, 2003 by agnieszka

Wait staff who mimic their customers get bigger tips, Dutch researchers report in the July issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. No, the waitress who imitates her customer’s stutter won’t be raking in the dough, but if she literally repeats a diner’s order to his face, she’ll significantly increase the size of her tip. Rick Van Baaren of the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands and his colleagues first established what an average tip at a specific restaurant was. They then had a waitress at the same restaurant do one of two things: she either repeated a customer’s order verbatim or, instead, just said something else positive like, “Coming right up!” By repeating the customer’s order, her average tip almost doubled. The authors write, “These results demonstrate that mimicry can be advantageous to the imitator because it can make people more generous.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 7/15/2003.
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pluto puzzles astronomers again

Posted on July 15, 2003 by agnieszka

It’s bad enough that some scientists are still debating whether Pluto is a planet at all, but now there’s another Plutonian mystery. Completely unexpectedly, Pluto’s thin nitrogen atmosphere has been found to be expanding, researchers report in the July 10 Nature. Why is the finding surprising? Currently, Pluto is moving rapidly away from the sun, so astronomers expected that as the planet’s temperature dropped, its atmosphere would contract. Instead, MIT’s James Elliot and his colleagues have found that the atmosphere is getting larger, and in another study published in the same issue, Bruno Sicardy of the Observatoire de Paris and his colleagues estimate that Pluto’s atmospheric pressure has doubled over the past 14 years. A commentary by William Hubbard of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona suggests that the unexpected expansion of the atmosphere could be due to a time-lag: it may take many years for a change in solar heat to affect Pluto’s surface layers.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 7/15/2003.
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monkeys match mien and meaning

Posted on July 8, 2003 by agnieszka

In yet another example of how monkeylike humans are (or how humanlike monkeys are), monkeys can link sounds to specific facial expressions, report researchers in the June 26 Nature. Rhesus monkeys communicate using their faces and voices. Among their most common sounds are friendly “coo” and antagonistic “threat” calls, and each call is accompanied by a distinct facial expression. In their experiment, Asif A. Ghazanfar and Nikos K. Logothetis of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics showed adult rhesus monkeys two side-by-side silent videos of threat and coo facial expressions. When they played the sound of the call, more than 65 percent of the monkeys looked at the correct matching face without any training. The scientists believe this ability is an evolutionary precursor to our own capacity to match spoken words with particular facial expressions, necessary for speech perception.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 7/08/2003.
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like likes like

Posted on July 8, 2003 by agnieszka

Opposites don’t attract, at least in regard to choosing a long-term mate, say researchers at Cornell University in a study published online last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Peter M. Buston and Stephen T. Emlen asked 978 volunteers to rank 10 attributes they valued most in a potential mate, including wealth, physical attractiveness, and commitment to family. They then had the respondents rate themselves on the same characteristics. The researchers found that people who rated an attribute important in a partner also rated themselves highly on the same attribute. Previous mate-choice studies have concentrated on reproductive potential: the theory goes that men want young, healthy, attractive women who’ll bear many children, and women want older, wealthy men who can support their offspring. But the authors say otherwise: “Our results suggest that individuals seeking stable long-term relationships should not seek the highest-quality partner available, but should simply look for partners who are similar to themselves.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 7/08/2003.
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five quarks for muster mark

Posted on July 8, 2003 by agnieszka

Here’s some great news for particle-physics enthusiasts: A new type of subatomic particle has been discovered! And for you non-particle-physics enthusiasts, here’s a primer: Quarks are the elementary particles that make up the subatomic particles that make up atoms that make up everything in the universe. The word quark supposedly derives from a line in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”: “Three quarks for Muster Mark.” And it does take three quarks to make up a neutron or a proton, the building blocks of atomic nuclei. (Two-quark combinations called mesons also exist.) But theory never ruled out the existence of particles consisting of more than three quarks; it’s just that they were never found – until now. A five-quark particle, or “pentaquark,” has been discovered by physicists working at the SPring-8 physics lab in Japan, and confirmed by researchers at the Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in the United States. According to a paper in the July 4 issue of Physical Review Letters, the physicists found the particle (which decays almost immediately) by analyzing the debris of particle-smashing experiments. Ken Hicks, a member of both the US and Japanese teams, attributes the new discovery to more powerful experimental techniques — including more efficient detectors — that allowed the collisions to be better observed.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 7/08/2003.
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all for love

Posted on July 1, 2003 by agnieszka

Sex among the arachnids isn’t particularly romantic to the human eye: female spiders routinely attempt to munch on their mates during or after copulation. And it makes sense: The females need the extra nutrition for their offspring-to-be. Most males try to escape this dire fate, but not the male of the species Argiope aurantia. This orb-weaving spider invariably dies spontaneously during copulation, according to a study published last week in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters. Experiments by Matthias Foellmer and Daphne Fairbairn at the University of California at Riverside show that death is triggered immediately upon insertion of the second of the male spider’s two sex organs, resulting in a seizure that stops his heart within minutes. The researchers speculate that the male’s dead body acts as a temporary chastity belt, preventing the female from mating again and giving his sperm time to fertilize her eggs. The female is completely innocent in her Romeo’s death and she still gets to eat his dead body, with no guilt involved.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 7/01/2003.
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the pain, the pain

Posted on July 1, 2003 by agnieszka

People feel pain differently, and brain scans prove it, Robert Coghill of Wake Forest University and his colleagues reported last week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In their experiment, the researchers put a heating pad on volunteers’ legs to heat their skin to an uncomfortable 120 degrees Fahrenheit as they scanned the subjects’ brains. They then asked them to rate the pain on a scale from one to 10. The least-sensitive subject rated the pain a “one,” and the most sensitive, “almost nine.” The people who reported higher levels of pain showed increased activation in the primary somatosensory cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex, regions of the brain involved in the perception and processing of pain, whereas those who said the pain was minimal showed little activation of those areas. Coghill, in a press release, stated: “These findings confirm that self-reports of pain intensity are highly correlated to brain activation and that self-reports should guide treatment of pain.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 7/01/2003.
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