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Girls’ fear of spiders may be genetic

August 28, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, Aug 28 (ANI): Even the sight of spiders and snakes makes some people yell and run – and women are more likely to get scared than men. Now, a new study has shown that females are genetically predisposed to fear creepy-crawlies and dangerous animals.

During the study, scientists found that baby girls only 11 months old rapidly start to associate pictures of spiders with fear. However, baby boys remain blithely indifferent to this connection.

In an initial training phase, David Rakison, a developmental psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, showed 10 baby girls and boys a picture of a spider together with a fearful face.

In the following test phase, he let them watch the image of a spider paired with a happy face, and the image of a flower paired with a fearful face.

Despite the spider’s happy companion, the girls looked significantly longer at it than at the flower. The researchers took this to mean that the girls expected spiders to be linked with fear. The boys looked for an equal time at both images.

With a different group of babies, Rakison first showed a spider with a happy face, and a flower with a fearful face. Now the girls too looked at both images for the same length of time – implying that they did not have an inborn fear of spiders.

The results suggest that girls are more inclined than boys to learn to fear dangerous animals.

On the other hand, modern phobias such as fear of flying or injections show no sex difference, Rakison said.

He attributes the difference to behavioral differences between men and women among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. An aversion to spiders may help women avoid dangerous animals, but in men evolution seems to have favoured more risk-taking behaviour for successful hunting.

It makes evolutionary sense to acquire spider fear at a certain age, rather than to be born with it, Rakison said.

“There is little reason for an infant to fear an object unless it can respond to it, for example by crawling away,” New Scientist quoted him as saying.

The study has been published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. (ANI)

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Website that can rank people’s chances of death

August 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Aug 27 (ANI): Want to know the chances of your death in the near future along with its cause? Well, then log on to www.DeathRiskRankings.com.

The new website, developed by researchers and students at Carnegie Mellon University, allows users to query publicly available data from the United States and Europe, and compare mortality risks by gender, age, cause of death and geographic region.

The Web site not only gives the risk of dying within the next year, but it also ranks the probable causes and allows for quick side-by-side comparison between groups.

For example, if a person wanted to know who is more likely to die next year from breast cancer-a 54-year-old Pennsylvania woman or her counterpart in the United Kingdom.

“This is the only place to look. It turns out that the British woman has a 33 percent higher risk of breast cancer death. But for lung/throat cancer, the results are almost reversed, and the Pennsylvania woman has a 29 percent higher risk,” said Paul Fischbeck, site developer and professor of social and decision sciences and engineering and public policy (EPP) at Carnegie Mellon.

“Most Americans don’t have a particularly good understanding of their own mortality risks, let alone ranking of their relevant risks,” said David Gerard, a former EPP professor at Carnegie Mellon.

They found that beyond infancy, the risk of dying increases annually at an exponential rate.

A 20-year-old U.S. woman has a 1 in 2,000 (or 0.05 percent) chance of dying in the next year.

By 40 years of age, the risk is three times greater, by age 60, it is 16 times greater; and by age 80, it is 100 times greater (around 1 in 20 or 5 percent).

“The risks are higher, but still not that bad. At 80, the average U.S. woman still has a 95 percent chance of making it to her 81st birthday,” said Gerard.

The researchers are hoping that the new Web site will help bring focus to some of the discussion now raging over health care policy in the United States.

“It’s much easier to make a persuasive argument when you have the facts to back it up, and this site provides all sides with the facts. We believe that this tool, which allows anyone to assess their own risk of dying and to compare their risks with counterparts in the United States and Europe, could help inform the public and constructively engage them in the debate,” said Fischbeck. (ANI)

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Intelligence agencies developing ‘Terrorist Facebook’ to deal with al-Qa’ida

August 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, Aug.19 (ANI): Intelligence agencies are building up a Facebook-style databank of international terrorists in order to sift through it with complex computer programs aimed at identifying key figures and predicting terrorist attacks before they happen.

According to The Independent, the aim is to amass huge quantities of intelligence data on people – no matter how obscure or irrelevant – and feed it into computers that are programmed to make associations and connections that would otherwise be missed by human agents, scientists said.

The doctrine is already being actively pursued in Iraq and Afghanistan where thousands of people have been arrested and interrogated for information that could be fed into vast computerised databanks for analysis by social network programs.

In addition to information gleaned from interviews with suspects captured in the field, intelligence agencies are also mining the vast amounts of telecommunications data collected from emails and telephone calls with the same surveillance technology. In the US alone, hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on developing the data-mining techniques.

Professor Kathleen Carley of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of the civilian scientists hoping to benefit from the new military funding earmarked for research into social network analysis, said: “Facebook and Google are doing social networking, which is the technology for helping you find out who to talk to and for finding out what your friends know about a person.”

“What social network analysis is about is giving me the whole of the ‘Facebook-style’ data and saying that I’m going to analyse it mathematically to tell you who the critical people are,” she added.

Critics say such a doctrine is time consuming, wasteful and counterproductive. They have also suggested that it has led to gross violations of human rights, with hundreds and possibly thousands of innocent people being detained and interrogated for longer than necessary to provide social network information.

Dr. Ian McCulloh is collaborating with Professor Carley on “metanetwork” analysis, a more sophisticated form of social network analysis. He hopes to be able to monitor terrorist networks in real time and detect any changes to indicate that an attack is imminent. (ANI)

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Changes in the Sun don’t cause global warming

May 12, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 12 (ANI): In a new study, scientists have developed a model which has determined that changes in the sun are not causing global warming.

The study was carried out by Carnegie Mellon University’s Peter Adams, along with Jeff Pierce from Dalhousie University in Halifax, UK.

The hypothesis they tested was that increased solar activity reduces cloudiness by changing cosmic rays.

So, when clouds decrease, more sunlight is let in, causing the earth to warm.

Some climate change skeptics have tried to use this hypothesis to suggest that greenhouse gases may not be the global warming culprits that most scientists agree they are.

In the new research, Adams and Pierce reported the first atmospheric simulations of changes in atmospheric ions and particle formation resulting from variations in the sun and cosmic rays.

They found that changes in the concentration of particles that affect clouds are 100 times too small to affect the climate.

“Until now, proponents of this hypothesis could assert that the sun may be causing global warming because no one had a computer model to really test the claims,” said Adams, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon.

“The basic problem with the hypothesis is that solar variations probably change new particle formation rates by less than 30 percent in the atmosphere. Also, these particles are extremely small and need to grow before they can affect clouds. Most do not survive to do so,” he added.

Adams and Pierce feel confident that this hypothesis should be laid to rest.

“No computer simulation of something as complex as the atmosphere will ever be perfect,” Adams said.

“Proponents of the cosmic ray hypothesis will probably try to question these results, but the effect is so weak in our model that it is hard for us to see this basic result changing,” he added. (ANI)

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Scientists identify promising compound to treat epilepsy

May 5, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 5 (ANI): Scientists have identified a new anticonvulsant compound, called paxilline, which may cease the progression of epilepsy, a neurological disorder marked by abnormal electrical activity in the brain that leads to recurring seizures.

The study by Carnegie Mellon University researchers is based on a previous work in which scientists identified a specific molecular target whose increased activity is linked with seizure disorders- a potassium channel known as the BK channel.
“We have found a new anticonvulsant compound that eliminates seizures in a model of epilepsy,” said Alison Barth, associate professor of biological sciences at Carnegie Mellon’s Mellon College of Science.

She added: “The drug works by inhibiting ion channels whose role in epilepsy was only recently discovered. Understanding how these channels work in seizure disorders, and being able to target them with a simple treatment, represents a significant advance in our ability to understand and treat epilepsy.” he researchers found that after a first seizure, BK channel function was markedly enhanced.

Thus, the neurons became overly excitable and were firing with more speed, intensity and spontaneity, which led the researchers to believe that the abnormal increase in the activity of the channels might play a role in causing subsequent seizures and the emergence of epilepsy. n the current study, the researchers tested this theory by blocking the ion channels using a BK-channel antagonist called paxilline.

Using an experimental model for epilepsy, Barth tested whether paxilline could reduce or prevent experimentally induced seizures, as it could normalize aberrant brain activity induced by previous seizures.

And to their surprise, the researchers discovered that the compound was effective at completely blocking subsequent seizures. The drug is orally available, and works in the low nanomolar range,” said Barth.

As the drug is effective in low concentrations and can be taken as a pill, it could turn out to be an especially promising compound for treatment in epilepsy patients.

The researchers believe that targeting the BK channels and the abnormal brain activity that they induce might one day be used as a way to prevent the progression of seizure disorders over time, thus attacking the root cause of epilepsy.

The findings have been published in the current issue of the journal Epilepsia. (ANI)

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Now, gecko-inspired supersticky robots that scale walls, ceilings

May 2, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, Apr 28 (ANI): If you thought it was only Spiderman who could glide on any surface with no apparent gravitational pull, then it’s time to get out of fiction and look closer to reality – scientists have created robots that can scale walls and hang off the ceiling just like geckos.

Metin Sitti and Ozgur Unver of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have claimed that their new robots – a sticky-tracked wall climber and a 16-legged ceiling walker – could tackle many jobs in the home including painting ceilings and clearing cobwebs.

The researchers said that the robots could also play a part in exploration, inspection, repair and even search and rescue.

Moving ahead of using suction for locomotion in previous wall and ceiling climbers, scientists have resorted to a “sticky” elastic polymer, or elastomer, that can adhere to a variety of surfaces, including wood, metal, glass and brick.

By using the elastomers, scientists are hoping to mimic the mechanism, which geckos use to climb walls and walk upside down- the millions of tiny hairs called setae on their toe pads, reports New Scientist.

The researchers showed that the geckos’ setae do this by harnessing van der Waals forces- a weak electrostatic attraction which operates only at an intermolecular level.

Thus, Sitti has been experimenting with squishy elastomers to mimic the forces that geckos’ setae use.

Both robots made by Sitti use sticky elastomers, though not in the form of hairs, to grip surfaces using van der Waals forces.

Their wall-climbing robot, called Tankbot, is a palm-sized, 60-gram machine with a tacky elastomer tank track on either side of it, and its trick is to keep its tracks in close contact with the surface whilst continuously “unpeeling” itself.

Tests showed that Tankbot could deftly scale walls and even carry small payloads. However, Sitti said that its “adhesion falls short for upside-down ceiling climbing.”

So for scampering on ceilings, the researchers are working on another design with stronger adhesion- the FourBar robot- which has a four tough plastic bars that move parallel to one another driven by a motor.

Each bar has four tacky elastomer footpads, mounted in pairs on rockers. When the eight footpads on the interior bars are stuck to a surface, the outer bars unpeel their footpads and move forwards. When they are safely restuck, the inner bars unpeel and move forwards.

Although the robot moved 30 metres upside down in tests, the researchers observed one problem with both robots-their elastomers can clog with dirt and dust and lose their crucial tackiness.

Sitti hopes to overcome this on future bots by using his hairy gecko-like elastomers-ultrafine nanoscale hairs do not provide micro-scale dirt particles with enough contact – so they simply roll off.

The details on the robots will be presented at the annual International Robotics and Automation Conference (ICRA) in Kobe, Japan, in mid-May. (ANI)

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Nikkei dips 0.4 percent as techs fall

April 20, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan’s Nikkei average fell 0.4 percent on Monday, weighed down by Toshiba Corp’s (6502.T) tumble after a report on its plans to raise capital, while a stronger yen hurt shares in exporters.

Consumer lender Promise (8574.T) tumbled 16.2 percent to 1,310 yen after warning it faces an annual net loss of $1.3 billion as it sets aside more money to meet repayment claims from customers.

Despite upbeat results from banks such as Citigroup (C.N), Japanese banking shares fell. A top adviser to President Barack Obama said on Sunday that stress tests of the top 19 U.S. banks would expose some “very serious problems” but the administration has what it needs to confront the challenge.

“Investors can’t cheer U.S. bank earnings without qualms because although their profits from core operations appear to be improving, the issue of bad assets still remains,” said Takahiko Murai, general manager at Nozomi Securities.

“Ahead of U.S. banks’ earnings peak this week, investors are cautious and taking a wait-and-see stance.”

U.S. banks, which began reporting earnings last week, will continue to be in the spotlight, with results including Bank of America (BAC.N), Wells Fargo (WFC.N) and Bank of New York Mellon (BK.N).

The benchmark Nikkei .N225 slipped 37.07 points to 8,870.51. It had climbed 1.7 percent on Friday but lost 0.6 percent on the week, snapping a five-week rising streak.

The broader Topix .TOPIX inched down 0.3 percent to 843.20.

The Dow Jones industrial average .DJI finished up 0.1 percent on Friday, after General Electric (GE.N) and Citigroup (C.N) both posted better-than-expected results, lifting the broader market. .N

The Dow rose 22.7 percent over the past six weeks, making advances each week for the largest six-week gain since July 29, 1938.

Toshiba shares fell 6 percent to 312 yen after a newspaper said it plans to raise about 500 billion yen ($5 billion) in capital as early as June to prop up its finances, battered by loss-making chip operations and tax credit costs.

On Friday it widened its net loss estimate for the year ended March 31 by 25 percent to 350 billion yen after writing down 85 billion yen in deferred tax assets, cutting its shareholders’ equity ratio by more than half from a year ago to 8.2 percent.

Japan’s top lender Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (8306.T) fell 1.8 percent to 503 yen.

Advantest, the world’s biggest maker of semiconductor testers, declined 0.7 percent to 1,585 yen, Tokyo Electron Ltd (8035.T) fell 0.5 percent to 4,270 yen and Nikon Corp (7731.T) slid 2.8 percent to 1,290 yen.

The book-to-bill ratio for Japanese chip-making equipment hit a record low in March, an industry group said on Friday, as chip makers continued to cut spending as demand for electronics goods stayed weak.

Investors fret over a firmer yen as it curbs exporter profits when repatriated. In early Asia trade, the euro struck a three-week trough versus the yen.

(Reporting by Aiko Hayashi; Editing by Michael Watson)

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Nikkei dips 0.4 pct as techs fall, Toshiba sinks

April 20, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Toshiba tumbles on capital raising report

* Chip-related stocks fall after March orders drop

* Investors cautious ahead of U.S. bank results

TOKYO, April 20 (Reuters) – Japan’s Nikkei average fell 0.4 percent on Monday, weighed down by Toshiba Corp’s (6502.T) tumble after a report on its plans to raise capital, while a stronger yen hurt shares in exporters.

Consumer lender Promise (8574.T) tumbled 16.2 percent to 1,310 yen after warning it faces an annual net loss of $1.3 billion as it sets aside more money to meet repayment claims from customers. [ID:nT315789]

“Ahead of U.S. banks’ earnings peak this week, investors are cautious and taking a wait-and-see stance.”

U.S. banks, which began reporting earnings last week, will continue to be in the spotlight, with results including Bank of America (BAC.N), Wells Fargo (WFC.N) and Bank of New York Mellon (BK.N).

The benchmark Nikkei .N225 slipped 37.07 points to 8,870.51. It had climbed 1.7 percent on Friday but lost 0.6 percent on the week, snapping a five-week rising streak.

The broader Topix .TOPIX inched down 0.3 percent to 843.20.

The Dow Jones industrial average .DJI finished up 0.1 percent on Friday, after General Electric (GE.N) and Citigroup (C.N) both posted better-than-expected results, lifting the broader market. [.N]

The Dow rose 22.7 percent over the past six weeks, making advances each week for the largest six-week gain since July 29, 1938.

Japan’s top lender Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (8306.T) fell 1.8 percent to 503 yen.

Investors fret over a firmer yen as it curbs exporter profits when repatriated. In early Asia trade, the euro struck a three-week trough versus the yen. (Reporting by Aiko Hayashi; Editing by Michael Watson)

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Sundance Institute’s executive director resigns

April 12, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – Ken Brecher has resigned as executive director of the Sundance Institute, which oversees the Sundance Film Festival, among other programs. He held the post for 14 years.

His move reflects a further changing of the guard at the Utah-based indie film organization, following Geoff Gilmore’s resignation as the festival’s director in February to become chief creative officer at Tribeca Enterprises, which oversees the Tribeca Film Festival.

Brecher’s resignation was announced Thursday by Wally Weisman, board chair of the Sundance Institute, and will become effective April 30. He will then segue into a new role as strategic adviser for the institute for the next two years.

Recruited by Robert Redford in 1966, Brechner has played a key role in the institute’s core programs. At the Feature Film Program, which encompasses various filmmaker labs, he advocated reaching out to filmmakers in the Middle East; he helped establish the Documentary Fund, which has supported such films as “Born Into Brothels,” “Iraq in Fragments” and “Trouble the Water”; he reconceived the Composers Lab and played a role in the creation of the Film Music Program; he oversaw the Sundance Theater Program, which has supported such plays as “Spring Awakening,” “Passing Strange,” “I Am My Own Wife” and “Grey Gardens”; and, at the festival itself, he encouraged the growth of the documentary and world cinema offerings and the New Frontier program.

Brecher also attracted major grants from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Annenberg Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, among others, to support the institute’s $26 million annual operating budget.

“Brecher’s efforts,” Weisman said, “will stand the institute in good stead in the years ahead.”

Said Brechner: “I have completed my work in building an outstanding leadership team. I could not be more confident that the institute is now poised for the next phase of its innovative work in supporting independent artists.”

The Sundance Institute said a search for Brecher’s successor will begin shortly.

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Dreams affect people’s judgment, behaviour

February 18, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Feb 18 (ANI): Dreams may not mean anything but they shape humans’ judgment and behaviour, that’s the conclusion of a new research.

The findings are based on six different studies, in which researchers surveyed nearly 1,100 people about their dreams.

“Psychologists’ interpretations of the meaning of dreams vary widely. But our research shows that people believe their dreams provide meaningful insight into themselves and their world, “said Carey Morewedge, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the study’s lead author.

In one study that surveyed general beliefs about dreams, Morewedge and colleagues surveyed 149 university students in the United States, India and South Korea.

The researchers asked the students to rate different theories about dreams. Across all three cultures, an overwhelming majority of the students endorsed the theory that dreams reveal hidden truths about themselves and the world.

In another study, the researchers wanted to explore how dreams might influence people’s waking behaviour.

They surveyed 182 commuters at a Boston train station, asking them to imagine that one of four possible scenarios had happened the night before a scheduled airline trip: The national threat level was raised to orange, indicating a high risk of terrorist attack; they consciously thought about their plane crashing; they dreamed about a plane crash; or a real plane crash occurred on the route they planned to take.

A dream of a plane crash was more likely to affect travel plans than either thinking about a crash or a government warning, and the dream of a plane crash produced a similar level of anxiety as did an actual crash.

Finally, the researchers wanted to find out whether people perceive all dreams as equally meaningful, or whether their interpretations were influenced by their waking beliefs and desires.

In another study, 270 men and women from across the United States took a short online survey in which they were asked to remember a dream they had had about a person they knew.

People gave more importance to pleasant dreams about a person they liked as compared to a person they did not like, while they were more likely to consider an unpleasant dream more meaningful if it was about a person they disliked.

“In other words, people attribute meaning to dreams when it corresponds with their pre-existing beliefs and desires,” said Morewedge.

The article appears in the February issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. (ANI)

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Hind wings help butterflies make swift turns to evade predators

January 9, 2009 By Rajiv Gupta Leave a Comment

Washington, Jan 9 (ANI): A new study has proposed that a butterfly’s hind wings help it to make swift turns to evade predators, just like new tires allow race cars to take tight turns at high speeds.

According to a report in Cornell Chronicle Online, the study was undertaken by Tom Eisner, a world authority on animal behavior, ecology and evolution and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Chemical Ecology at Cornell University.

“To escape a predator, you don’t have to be fast, you just have to be more erratic,” said Eisner.

The study proposes that in the course of evolution, the ability of butterflies to evade predators became linked with bright coloring, as an added protection.

In evolutionary terms, gaudy colors are usually a sign to such predators as birds that a prey species has a protective quality, such as a bad taste or great agility, and that chasing them isn”t worth the energy.

Anyone who has tried to net a colorful butterfly knows they are hard to catch, but this is the first study to show that a butterfly’s hind wings are responsible for making them evasive.

Eisner and the research paper’s lead author, Benjamin Jantzen, a doctoral student in philosophy of science at Carnegie Mellon University, clipped off the hind wings of butterflies and then filmed their flight using two cameras to get three-dimensional views of their flight trajectories.

Then, they analyzed and plotted on a computer the insects’ flight velocity, acceleration, how fast they changed direction, the curvature of their path and more.

They found that clipping the back wings did not affect basic flight, but “we were able to show that removing the hind wings cut their turning acceleration in half,” said Jantzen.

It was found that the butterfly’s hind wings scoop air and provide extra force to quickly turn when chased.

“The wings are also colorful advertising for the whole group,” said Jantzen. “The colors say, we are butterflies, don’t bother to chase us, because you won’t catch us,” he added. (ANI)

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