Good Connection Really Does Lead to Mind Meld

When two people experience a deep connection, they’re informally described as being on the same wavelength. There may be neurological truth to that.

Brain scans of a speaker and listener showed their neural activity synchronizing during storytelling. The stronger their reported connection, the closer the coupling.

The experiment was the first to use fMRI, which measures blood flow changes in the brain, on two people as they talked. Different brain regions have been linked to both speaking and listening, but “the ongoing interaction between the two systems during everyday communication remains largely unknown,” wrote Princeton University neuroscientists Greg Stephens and Uri Hasson in the July 27 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They found that speaking and listening used common rather than separate neural subsystems inside each brain. Even more striking was an overlap between the brains of speaker and listener. When post-scan interviews found that stories had resonated, scans showed a complex interplay of neural call and response, as if language were a wire between test subjects’ brains.

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Math Is No Match for Locust Swarms

Mathematicians have now figured out the dynamics that drive locusts across the landscape, devastating everything underfoot — and the math says people will never be able to predict where the little buggers will go.

sciencenewsThe new analysis, reported in an upcoming issue of Physical Review E, suggests that random factors accumulate and influence how swarming locusts collectively decide to change course.

“These swarms are driven by intrinsic dynamics,” says team member Iain Couzin, a biologist at Princeton University. “In all practical terms, predicting when a swarm is going to change direction is going to be impossible.”

Still, others say the information may one day allow researchers to better inform locust-control efforts — for instance, by suggesting the best times and places to apply insecticide ahead of an approaching swarm.

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Gamma-Ray Bursts Could Halt Photosynthesis

Cosmic explosions thousands of light-years away could shut down photosynthesis in the ocean at depths of up to 260 feet, a new study suggests. The calculations add to a growing body of research linking these great blasts, called gamma-ray bursts, with biological damage and even mass extinctions on Earth.

Gamma-ray bursts are tremendous explosions detonated during a massive star’s death throes. When stars eight times the mass of the sun or larger reach the end of their lives, they die in spectacular supernova explosions that can temporarily outshine entire galaxies.

Under certain conditions — astronomers aren’t exactly sure what — all that energy can be concentrated into a tight beam extending like a spotlight away from the star. These bright beams, known as gamma-ray bursts, can last up to 10 seconds, and carry energies equivalent to billions of nuclear bombs going off at once.

And according to the new research, phytoplankton would not enjoy them. In a paper published on the astronomy preprint site arXiv.org, biologist Liuba Penate of the Universidad Central de Las Villas in Cuba and colleagues model the marine food web from plankton up if a gamma-ray burst were to strike.

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Video: Exploding Moss Spores Form Mushroom Clouds

The air resistance to something as small as dust is so great that even if you threw it at mach speeds it would only go a couple inches. That is, unless you create a vortex ring — like a smoke ring or mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion.

Peat moss (Sphagnum moss), one of the most primitive living plants, does just that. By releasing its spores at up to 65 miles per hour in less than a thousandth of a second through a cylindrical opening, it can launch them up about half a foot high.

It might not sound like much, but getting spores to that height is critical for a plant that can grow less than half an inch tall. Half a foot is high enough to intersect normal air currents, which can carry the spores for miles and miles — theoretically indefinitely.

“Vortex rings allow the spores to be carried up very efficiently, because they have very little drag in the air and don’t mix with the air around it,” said physicist Dwight Whitaker of Pomona College, co-author of the study published July 23 in Science. ”The air coming out of the spore capsule is like the a core of a tornado, but if you took the top and the bottom of a tornado and glued them together. The tornado holds the spores in because of its very motion.”

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Help BP Learn How to Use Photoshop

Apparently BP can no longer afford to employ people with even remotely reasonable Photoshop skills. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the company has admitted to (poorly) altering photos of its clean up operations in the Gulf of Mexico that were released to the public.

BP claims these truly pathetic Photoshop jobs are the work of a contract photographer. It’s hard to know what to believe about this, but if there really is a photographer who took it upon himself to mess with these images, then this individual should be ashamed. We just can’t decide which is more shameful, the complete lack of ethics or the complete lack of Photoshop skill.

So let’s lend poor, embattled BP a hand and show them what people who actually know how to use Photoshop can do. Choose any of the three original photos from BP’s Flickr album of altered images, and have at it. Our favorite is the cockpit photo that was altered to look like the helicopter is in the air (above). But almost as charming is the first altered photo discovered of BP’s crisis command center (below). Gizmodo and Americablog do a great job of tearing down these photos and showing just how bad the Photoshopping is.

We’ll choose some of your best, most interesting, funniest and most skilled images you send us and post them early next week. Feel free to take as much creative liberty with the images as you like (as long as the end product isn’t obscene).

Submit your photos and vote for your favorites at the bottom of this post.

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Meteor Crater Discovered With Google Earth

Researchers poring over Google Earth images have discovered one of Earth’s freshest impact craters — a 45-meter-wide pock in southwestern Egypt that probably was excavated by a fast-moving iron meteorite no more than a few thousand years ago.

sciencenewsAlthough the crater was first noticed in autumn 2008, researchers have since spotted the blemish on satellite images taken as far back as 1972, says Luigi Folco, a cosmochemist at the University of Siena in Italy. He and his colleagues report their find online July 22 in Science.

The rim of the Egyptian crater stands about 3 meters above the surrounding plain, which is partially covered with distinct swaths of light-colored material blasted from the crater by the impact. These rays, which emanate from the impact site like spokes from the hub of a wheel, are what drew researchers’ attention to the crater, says Folco. While such “rayed craters” are common on the moon and other airless bodies of the solar system, they are exceedingly rare on Earth because erosion and other geological processes quickly erase such evidence.

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Fossil Jaw Could Be From World’s Oldest Known Dog

Every dog has its day, but that day took more than 14,000 years to dawn for one canine. A jaw fragment found in a Swiss cave comes from the earliest known dog, according to scientists who analyzed and radiocarbon-dated the fossil.

sciencenewsDog origins remain poorly understood, however, and some researchers say that dog fossils much older than the Swiss find have already been excavated.

An upper-right jaw unearthed in 1873 in Kesslerloch Cave, located near Switzerland’s northern border with Germany, shows that domestic dogs lived there between 14,100 and 14,600 years ago, say archaeology graduate student Hannes Napierala and archaeozoologist Hans-Peter Uerpmann, study coauthors at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

“The Kesslerloch find clearly supports the idea that the dog was an established domestic animal at that time in central Europe,” Napierala says.

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Hyperfast Star Kicked Out of Milky Way

New Hubble observations suggest a dramatic origin story for one of the fastest stars ever detected, involving a tragic encounter with a black hole, a lost companion and swift exile from the galaxy.

The star, HE 0437-5439, is one of just 16 so-called hypervelocity stars, all of which were thought to come from the center of the Milky Way. The Hubble observations allowed astronomers to definitively trace the star’s origin to the heart of the galaxy for the first time.

Based on observations taken three and a half years apart, astronomers calculated that the star is zooming away from the Milky Way’s center at a speed of 16 million miles per hour — three times faster than the sun.

“The star is traveling at an absurd velocity, twice as much as it needs to escape the galaxy’s gravitational field,” said hypervelocity star hunter Warren Brown of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who found the first unbound star in 2005, in a press release. “There is no star that travels that quickly under normal circumstances — something exotic has to happen.”

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Longest Eclipse Ever: Airplane Chases the Moon’s Shadow

Eclipse hunters set a new record on July 11 for the longest eclipse ever observed by civilians chasing the moon in an airplane. While hundreds of eclipse enthusiasts flocked to islands in the South Pacific to watch the moon blot out the sun, astronomer Glenn Schneider and colleagues climbed to 39,000 feet to spend 9 minutes, 23 seconds in the moon’s shadow.

“We cheated Mother Nature by two minutes beyond what she could normally produce,” Schneider said.

Theoretically, the longest total solar eclipse that can be viewed from the ground is 7 minutes, 32 seconds long, a limit set by the geometry of celestial mechanics. Total solar eclipses happen when the new moon passes in front of the sun, casting a round shadow on the Earth that turns day to night. During the few minutes when the moon is directly in front of the sun, called totality, viewers get a rare glimpse of the solar corona, tendrils of gas that dance around the sun’s outer atmosphere. Although a solar eclipse is visible from somewhere on Earth every 16 months or so, totality is only ever visible from a narrow swatch of the planet.

The geometry of the July 11 eclipse worked out such that, by chasing the moon’s shadow at Mach 0.8, Schneider and his colleagues could stretch totality to from about 5 minutes to nearly 9 and a half minutes.

“It’s something we’re never going to be able to do again,” Schneider said. “It was an opportunity we just couldn’t pass up.”

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The Future of Robot Scientists

Future science historians will mark the beginning of the 21st century as a time when robots took their place beside human scientists.

Programmers have turned computers from extraordinarily powerful but fundamentally dumb tools, into tools with smarts. Artificially intelligent programs make sense of data so complex that it defies human analysis. They even come up with hypotheses, the testable questions that drive science, on their own.

At the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, Ross King’s program “Adam” designs and runs genetics experiments. At Cornell, Hod Lipson’s Eureqa finds equations to fit data, attaining Newton’s insights in a single afternoon. University of Chicago mathematical biologist Andrey Rzhetsky designs programs less glamorous but equally powerful, able to analyze millions of papers at once.

In the future, the human scientist’s job may be “to do the programming, and make sure the robot has enough reagents,” said Rzhetsky, only partly tongue-in-cheek.

Wired.com talked to Rzhetsky about the intersection of artificial intelligence and science.

Wired.com: Why do scientists need artificially intelligent computer assistance?

Andrey Rzhetsky: During Newton’s time, a scientist could read everything that was published, at least in English. That’s just not an option anymore. We can’t deal with all this information.

Wired.com: How have you used AI in your own work?

Rzhetsky: In our paper on brain malformations in mice and humans, the program analyzed 368,000 full-text articles and 8,000,000 article abstracts in the PubMed database. That’s something no human curator, or even a group of human curators, could ever do. In a program, it’s possible.

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