Science News
Eye-tracking cameras show peahens' wandering gaze
Female birds not so riveted by suitors' fancy feathers
By Susan Milius
When a peacock fans out the iridescent splendor of his train, more than half the time the peahen he’s displaying for isn’t even looking at him. That’s the finding of the first eye-tracking study of birds.
In more than 200 short clips recorded by eye-tracking cameras, four peahens spent less than one-third of the time actually looking directly at a displaying peacock, says evolutionary biologist Jessica Yorzinski of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.
When peahens did bother to watch the shimmering male, they mostly looked at the lower zone of his train feathers. The feathers’ upper zone of ornaments may intrigue human observers, but big eyespots there garnered less than 5 percent of the female’s time, Yorzinski and her colleagues report July 24 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
These data come from a system that coauthor Jason Babcock of Positive Science, an eye-tracking company in New York City, engineered to fit peahens. Small plastic helmets hold two cameras that send information to a backpack of equipment, which wirelessly transmits information to a computer. One infrared head camera focuses on an eye, tracking pupil movements. A second camera points ahead, giving the broad bird’s-eye view.
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News in Brief: Neutrinos caught in evasive behavior
First proof of character shift documented at Japanese detector
By Andrew Grant
Neutrinos have been caught switching identities. The indisputable detection is a first, physicists announced July 19 at the European Physical Society meeting in Stockholm.
Neutrinos, wispy neutral particles that barely interact with anything, come in three types, or flavors: tau, muon and electron. In recent years, scientists have fired beams of muon neutrinos and found that many of them disappear before they reach detectors hundreds of kilometers away. Physicists concluded that some of the muon neutrinos must have morphed into electron neutrinos, which are difficult to detect (SN Online 6/1/10).
Now physicists from the T2K experiment in Japan say they have pointed a beam of muon neutrinos at a detector nearly 300 kilometers away and measured the number of arriving electron neutrinos. Over three years they detected 28 electron neutrinos, proving that some of the muon neutrinos had changed flavors during their millisecond-long journeys.
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Technology News
3D Print Your Own Analog Camera
Ann R. Thryft, Senior Technical Editor, Materials & Assembly
3D printers are being used to print a huge variety of objects, including customized personal electronics, a prototype hybrid car, and eventually, tools for astronauts. Now, a recently graduated design student has used a 3D printer to make an open-source working 35 mm analog camera, and so can you -- he's posted all the files and instructions online. You'll have to supply tools and the lens.
Leo Marius designed and built the Open Reflex camera on a MakerBot Replicator 2X 3D printer as part of his graduation project in design at the Saint-Ettiene School of Art and Design in France. Files are available on Thingiverse and a wiki so users can contribute their design tweaks. Instructions and files are both available on Instructables.
Marius has made source files available under the terms of a Creative Commons By-Sa-style license, which allows users to modify the files to add features or make improvements. He's also used tools and items he says are easily available "in the nearest fablab."
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Technology For Cars To Talk To Each Other Urged
by Joan Lowy, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government should set performance standards for new safety technology that allows cars and trucks to talk to each other and then require the technology be installed in all new vehicles, a federal accident investigation board recommended Tuesday.
The National Transportation Safety Board made the recommendation in response to fatal school bus accidents at intersections in New Jersey and Florida last year.
Vehicles equipped with the technology can continuously communicate over wireless networks, exchanging information on location, direction and speed 10 times a second. The vehicle's computer analyzes the information and issues danger warnings to drivers, often before they can see the other vehicle.
The technology, which is being road-tested in Ann Arbor, Mich., is effective up to a range of about 1,000 feet.
"This technology more than anything else holds great promise to protect lives and prevent injuries," NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman said. She added that was particularly true of crashes at intersections like the two school bus accidents.
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Environmental News
Desert Storm: Battle Brews Over Obama Renewable Energy Plan
Sam Pearson
America's deserts are stark, quiet places, where isolation and the elements have long kept development at bay. To outsiders, these arid expanses may not seem like prized land.
But they are poised to play a key role—and perhaps, to serve as a battleground—in President Obama's plan to double U.S. electricity from wind, solar, and geothermal sources by 2020. To help ramp up that amount of clean energy, the White House has urged approval of an additional 10,000 megawatts of renewable energy production on public lands.
Estimates vary on exactly how many households would be served by the expansion, but the Obama Administration says the 25 utility-scale solar facilities, nine wind farms, and 11 geothermal plants it has approved on federal lands so far will provide enough juice to power 4.4 million homes.
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La. Flood Board Sues Oil Industry Over Wetlands
by Elizabeth Shogren
Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost roughly as much land as makes up the state of Delaware.
"If you put the state of Delaware between New Orleans and the ocean, we wouldn't need any levees at all," says John Barry, vice president of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East. "There is this large buffer of land that has disappeared, and that buffer makes New Orleans much more vulnerable to hurricanes."
Barry's board has the job of maintaining and improving the levee system that the federal government fortified after Hurricane Katrina pummeled the city in 2005. He says it will be so expensive to keep the city safe that his board decided to try to get money from the oil and gas industry to help do that.
On Wednesday, the board sued the industry, arguing that it is responsible for a big part of the problem, and hasn't paid its fair share to protect the city.
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Medical News
Full moon may mean less sleep
Slumber waxes and wanes along with lunar rhythm
By Cristy Gelling
A full moon deprives people of sleep even when they are shielded from moonlight in a windowless lab, a new study suggests.
People snoozed less deeply within four nights of a full moon than during other parts of the lunar cycle, researchers report July 25 in Current Biology. The authors suggest that humans may have internal clocks that track the lunar cycle, much like circadian clocks that sync up with the rise and fall of the sun.
Christian Cajochen of the University of Basel in Switzerland and his colleagues reanalyzed sleep data they had collected over several years from 33 people who had each spent several days half-reclining in bed under constant dim light. Looking at only the second night of each participant’s stay, the researchers found that around the full moon, participants took about five extra minutes to nod off, slept for about 20 minutes less each night and slept less deeply.
The team was surprised to uncover the lunar rhythm, and Cajochen was initially reluctant to share the findings. “If you publish lunar stuff, you are going to be put in the ‘lunatic’ corner and not be considered a serious sleep researcher anymore,” he says.
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A flash of light implants false memories in mice
Researchers alter rodents' recollections by exciting just a few neurons
By Jessica Shugart
Just a tiny fraction of the brain’s neurons firing at the wrong time can change a real memory into a figment of the imagination. Scientists have come to that conclusion after implanting false memories into the brains of mice.
“It’s fairly astounding,” says neurobiologist Mark Mayford of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif, who was not involved in the research. “Stimulating a small amount of cells can put a thought into an animal’s head.”
Neurobiologists have known for years that the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped region deep in the brain, plays a role in learning and memory. And countless studies have shown that when it comes to recalling events, humans tend to make mistakes. (Of the first 250 prisoners exonerated in the United States based on DNA evidence, some three-quarters were originally convicted at least in part because of faulty eyewitness testimony.)
But exactly how neurons in the hippocampus harbor and retrieve memories — and where they go wrong — has been difficult to understand without observing an example in animals, says Susumu Tonegawa, a neuroscientist at MIT.
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Space News
Sharp-Eyed Solar Telescope Snaps First Photos
by Irene Klotz
Last month, a new telescope was launched into orbit to help scientists solve a long-standing mystery about why the sun’s atmosphere, called the corona, is nearly 1,000 times hotter than its surface.
There is no answer yet, but the first images from the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, observatory show the sun is more complicated than scientists imagined.
IRIS has 10 times the resolving power as previous solar telescopes, so the team, headed by Lockheed Martin’s Alan Title, knew they would be getting more detailed images and data. But they didn’t expect to see so many dynamic regions especially in what appeared to be relatively quiescent sections of the sun. And they don’t yet know what it means.
“We’ve seen this data only for less than a week and most of that time we’ve been trying to understand just how we ought to run this instrument,” Title, with Lockheed’s Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, Calif., told reporters on a conference call Thursday.
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Saturn's Pandora Flirts with 'Death Star' Moon
by Ian O'Neill
Saturn's moon Mimas looms ominously in this photo from NASA's Cassini mission with the smaller moon Pandora passing behind. Nicknamed the "Death Star moon," Mimas sports a huge 86 mile (139 kilometer) wide circular crater called Herschel resembling the Star Wars sci-fi superweapon. Fortunately for Pandora, this Death Star isn't fully operational.
Cassini imaged this stunning view on May 14 through the spacecraft's narrow angle camera in blue light when the probe was 690,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) from Mimas. Pandora was 731,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) from Cassini at the time. Mimas and Pandora were therefore separated by approximately 41,000 miles (66,000 kilometers).
Mimas and Pandora are radically different shapes and provide a wonderful example as to how gravity affects planetary bodies of different masses.
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Odd News
7 of the World's Longest-Running Experiments
These scientific research projects certainly didn't happen overnight
Melody Kramer
When physicists at Trinity College, Dublin, started a viscosity experiment in 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt was president of the United States, World War II was well underway, and Meet Me in St. Louis was tearing up the box office.
Seventy years later, one of the longest-running lab experiments in the world has finally paid off: A camera has captured one drop of tar pitch falling from a funnel into a jar—for the very first time.
The tar pitch had been placed in the funnel by physicists in 1944 to illustrate that pitch—a black, carbon-containing material that you might know as asphalt or bitumen—was actually not a solid, but a very, very slow-moving liquid at room temperature. (Related: "Fossil Amber Challenges Theories About Glass.")
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