Earth permanently deformed by big quakes?

A longstanding theory in geology to explain how earthquakes form suggest that rock on either side of a fault slowly deforms over time, until it suddenly snaps back into its original shape, causing the quake. Reid's theory was the first to satisfactorily account for earthquakes, and has been supported by many GPS measurements, among other evidence. Before this theory, it was thought that ruptures of the surface were the result of strong ground shaking rather than the converse suggested by this theory.

Following the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Henry Feilding Reid examined the displacement of the ground surface around the San Andreas Fault.

From his observations he concluded that the earthquake must have been the result of the elastic rebound of previously stored elastic strain energy in the rocks on either side of the fault.

Now a study of major earthquakes in Chile challenges this theory. A team led by Cornell University geologist Richard Allmendinger, who examined temblors of magnitude 7 or greater in Chile's Atacama Desert, found permanent deformations in the Earth's crust.



For more information about earthquakes refer to http://goo.gl/AgS6y

Bird navigation

Most people know that pigeons could choose right directions back home even if they go thousands of miles away. How they realize this has caught scientists’ interest for many years.

At first scientists assumed that pigeons found ways because they recognized major landmarks such as bends in major rivers and curves in coastline as human did. Via radar, which can pick up flocks of migrating birds, scientists found that pigeons ignore geographical features.

In 1950s, the German Gustav Kramer did an experiment with birds and found that birds could determine directions according to the position of the sun. But a scientist did an similar experiment with birds which showed that birds with glued magnet block on their backs fled in confused direction even though in blindfolds.

Now people make it clear that pigeons recognize ways because of magnetic fields and know that there are certain substances in pigeons’ cells which could make pigeons identify directions.

Days ago, the Keays lab at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna announced that they discovered substance-iron balls in neuron cells responsible for detecting sound and gravity. The discovery of iron balls was published in Current Biology. But we're a long way off to understanding how magnetic sensing works -- we still don't know what these mysterious iron balls are doing ,said Dr Keays.

Scientists in Japan Succeed in Deciphering Human Dreams

A research team, whose major investors include some of the biggest telecommunications companies in Japan, has announced that it has successfully deciphered the contents of human dreams with high precision by analyzing the human brain’s activity during sleep.

The group that conducted the research, International Telecommunications Generic Technology Research Center, has financial backing from two of Japan’s biggest telecommunications companies NTT and KDDI.

In order to achieve these results, the research group first placed the three men who participated in the experiment into a state of sleep. They were then woken up after several minutes and asked to recount the content of their dreams. During this time the researchers compared the brain activity patterns recorded during sleep with the men’s accounts. The experiment was conducted over 200 times.

Next, while awake, the participants were shown pictures from 20 different categories, including cars and animals, after which their brain activity was further analyzed. These results were then compared to the brain activity during sleep, where the researchers discovered that they could predict the contents from one part of a dream with an accuracy rate of over 70 percent.

While it is still not possible to decipher the brain activity responsible for the shape or color one sees inside of a dream, the research group remains optimistic that, with further research, this will also one day become a possibility.

Yukiyasu Kamitani who leads the research group commented:

“We’d like to use the method discovered this time around to develop technology whereby one can operate a computer through thought alone.”

sources:rocketnews24

Almost all animals in America can be searched by USGS

A Web-based map with search functionality that contains more than 100 million recorded observations of animal species across the country released by The US Geological Survey (USGS) is a new tool named by Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON) for conservationists and anyone that with a passing interest in America’s animal populations.

Observations of Nearly every living species nationwide are included in the tool by professional scientists and amateur naturalists.

BISON’s search functionality allows users to enter in a particular species by its common name("cat") or scientific name ("felis catus"), and if the animal is in the database, the map will display each recorded observation of that animal as a point in the location where it occurred. There are over 10,000 points in Central Park alone, for instance. Clicking on a point pulls up additional information, Such as who made the sighting and the date. Another tab offers a list view of observations, which come from nearly 300 universities, web portals and scientific surveys going back decades. Users can also select additional data layers, including a heat map of species occurrences by county or by state (with more occurrences indicated by darker colors). And views of ecosystems, temperature and soil composition.)

The goal in creating BISON is to further conservation efforts and eco-friendly land-use by the government and citizens.

Four ways to increase academic freedom by Open Access

Here are four ways in which open access publishing beat traditional model of publishing on academic freedom:

1) Copyright In open access journals, authors retain copyrights or they contract with publisher that the copy of their work can be copied, used , distributed in non-profit use while in the traditional system, they must sign over the copyright to the publisher. Stuart Shieber at Harvard University elaborates: "Traditional publishing infringes academic freedom. Authors assign copyright to publishers as part of the publication process. With this control, publishers can and do limit access to the scholar's writing. Scholars are therefore not free to disseminate their academic work in the broadest way."

2) Interference Open access journals can be cheaper to run, which can increase editorial independence, according to Stanford's John Willinsky and his colleagues in Doing Medical Journals Differently: Open Medicine, Open Access and Academic Freedom: "Open access enables a new journal to become part of the larger academic community immediately, without first having to convince a major corporation or organisation to sponsor it or having to assemble sufficient resources to sell initial subscriptions through some combination of advertising and agents. (One estimate sets the price of securing 500 subscribers at roughly US $50,000)." Open access journals reduce much cost compared with traditional journals.

3) Citations There is a growing literature suggesting that open access articles are read and cited more. This enhances academic freedom by allowing you to better fulfill the responsibilities that go with it. Increased citation also enhances your academic freedom through its quality control function – the use and evaluation of your work by others will give you a sturdier basis for determining what questions to ask next. (I leave aside here the challenges traditional publishing models are facing as they lose their grip on quality control.)

4) Archiving A bizarre consequences of for-profit digital publishing is that the responsibility for archiving scientific articles has been transferred from libraries to publishers. A library that subscribes to an electronically published traditional journal cannot simply keep an archive of what it subscribes to. The publisher does that. At least until it decides not to. Or goes out of business.

Open Access Library(www.oalib.com) is a tool to search for open access articles. Now it has increased up to 560,000 articles to its archive.

Explaination why people throw off bombs while people risks it all for strangers

Nature would be the cause why people behaves good and evil. Blasts in Boston should indicate that nature is not the source for such behaviours.

If our genes have told us once, they’ve told us a thousand times: stay out of harm’s way. When a madman’s raging, when a bomb goes off, when a 110-story building is pancaking down and another one right next to it is about to do the same, run the hell away.

Humans, instead, are guided by a sort of moral grammar—a primal ethical armature on which decency is built, just the way our language is built on syntax and tenses and conditional clauses. You know when a sentence is right and when it isn’t even if you can’t quite explain why, and you know the same thing about goodness too. Psychologist Michael Schulman of Columbia University likes to pose the thought experiment of the kindergarteners who are taught two rules: it’s not OK to eat in the classroom and it’s not OK to hit other children. Tell the kids that the teacher has lifted the no-eating rule and they’ll happily eat. Tell them that the teacher has lifted the no-hitting rule and they’ll uniformly balk. “They’ll say, ‘Teacher shouldn’t say that,’” says Schulman. “That starts at a very young age.” 

What starts young stays with us. Yes, we’re savage; yes, we’re brutal. It was a member of the home-team species, a homo sapiens like anyone else, who set the Boston bombs, and like it or not, that person is very close kin to you. But you’re close kin to the first-responders too, you’re close kin to the people who cried for the eight year old who died, not even knowing the child’s gender or name, because an eight year old simply shouldn’t die, and surely not the way this one did.

Read more: http://science.time.com/2013/04/16/first-responders/#ixzz2QtRzDyZb

Making fruit easier to eat could encourage students to eat it

Previous studies indicated that kids love to eat fruit in ready-to-eat bite-sized pieces. Most people believe that children avoid fruit because of the taste and allure of alternative packaged snacks. However, new study veil the secret why children were avoiding their fruit.

To address this question, researchers conducted a pilot study in eight elementary schools within the same district. Each school was given a commercial fruit slicer and instructed to use it when students requested apples. The fruit slicer cut the fruit into six pieces and the process took three to four seconds. Results from interviews conducted with students during this pilot indicated they dislike eating fruit for two main reasons: for younger students, who might have braces or missing teeth, a large fruit is too inconvenient to eat; for older girls, it is unattractive-looking to eat such a fruit in front of others.

Consecutive study was added. Three of the six middle schools in the same district were given fruit slicers, while the other three continued normal cafeteria operations to act as a control.

Results shows apple sales in schools with fruit slicers increased by 71% compared to control schools.This study shows that making fruit easy to eat encourage students to select it and eat more of it .

Do Anti-Drug Ads Keep Kids Off Drugs?

Carson Wagner, now an assistant professor of journalism at Ohio University, wrote his 1998 Penn State master's thesis in media studies on the counter-intuitive effects of anti-drug ads. He demonstrated that for some kids, seeing anti-drug ads made them curious about what doing drugs would be like, even if they had never had that curiosity before.

When anti-drug ads say "don't do drugs," they inherently bring up the implicit question "should I do drugs?" The ads can draw attention to a gap in what the viewer knows about drugs, making them more curious. It's like when you miss a call from an unknown number -- the phone ringing prompts you to wonder "who was it?"

In a 2008 study, participants who were primed with anti-drug PSAs were more curious about using drugs than those that hadn't seen the PSAs. Wagner and his co-author, S. Shyam Sundar, found that because anti-drug ads made the viewer think more about drugs, it could also lead them to believe drug use is more prevalent than it really is. "These results should be seriously considered, as it has been consistently recognized in psychological research that curiosity is one of the most potent motivational forces for human behavior," the paper warned.

Advertising is normally all about grabbing your attention, but Wagner says that's a bad way to reduce drug use. The "drugs fuel terrorism" ads that ran during the 2002 Superbowl certainly garnered more ridicule than anything else:

From: popsci

Brain is fine enough to make right decisions

People base making decision on facts or information that support one choice or another. But if faulty decision is made, Researchers have found that it might be the information rather than the brain’s decision-making process that is to blame. The findings published in the journal Science that erroneous decisions tend to arise from errors or “noise” in the information coming into the brain rather than errors in how the brain accumulates information. These findings clear a fundamental question among neuroscientists about whether bad decisions result from noise in the external information –or sensory input- or because the brain made mistakes when tally that information.

Previous measurements of brain neurons have indicated that brain functions are born noisy. The Princeton research, however, separated sensory inputs from the internal mental process to show that the former can be noisy while the latter is remarkably reliable, said senior investigator Carlos Brody, a Princeton associate professor of molecular biology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI), and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

"To our great surprise, the internal mental process was perfectly noiseless. All of the imperfections came from noise in the sensory processes," Brody said. Brody worked with first author Bingni Brunton, now a postdoctoral research associate in the departments of biology and applied mathematics at the University of Washington; and Matthew Botvinick, a Princeton associate professor of psychology and PNI.

a reversed biological evoluation

Natural selection has widely been accepted to explain how human evolved what we are now. But as to some complex organs such as eyes, it is hard to explain. Biologists have proposed various ways that these biological structures could develop over time bit by bit to be more intricate. However, a new study comes up with an alternative path backed up by computer models. 

Researchers open the study published this week in the journal Evolutionary Biology. According to the study, some structures could have evolved from complex beginnings that gradually grew simple, instead of starting from simpler precursors and becoming more intricate.

Some biological structures are dizzyingly complex and it becomes impossible to have evolved incrementally over time from simple to complexity.Taking the human eye for example, it need all their parts in order to function. If taking away any one piece, and the whole system stops working. Consider three eyes in the head.

A computer model used by co-author Wim Hordijk supports the idea. In the model, complex structures are represented by an array of cells, some white and some black, like the squares of a checkerboard. In this class of models known as cellular automata, the cells can change between black and white according to a set of rules.

How important is spring cleaning in brain

Scientists believe that there is a self-repair function that a legion of stem cells stays to turn into new brain and nerve cells whenever and whatever in need. Before they are aroused they keep themselves in a state of perpetual readiness-waiting to become any type of nerve cell body might need as cells age or get damaged.

However, new research from scientists at the University of Michigan Medical School show how they produce this. There is a type of internal ”sprint cleaning”, which is able to clear out garbage within cells, and keeps them in their stem-cell state.

Scientists recently discover a particular protein, called FIP200, is responsible to the cleaning process in neural stem cells in mice. Without such protein, these crucial stem cells suffer damage from their own waste products and their ability to turn into other types of cells dips.

This information may suggest that aging brain and nervous systems are more prone to disease or permanent damage because the body’s ability to produce new cells to replace damaged or diseased cells. If the findings are the same in human, the research could open up new avenues to prevention or treatment of neurological conditions.

Playing games on smart phone makes people smarter

Research suggests that gaming on smart phone can make people smarter. A new study published by PLoS ONE, reveals that spending an hour a day on phone-based games, people can significantly improve their working memory, focus, spatial memory, or multitasking ability. 

Here are some tips for gamers to improve brain power.

• First-person shooters and action games like Modern Combat: Sandstorm ($4.99, iOS and Android) enhance your brain’s ability to quickly assess and disregard irrelevant information or distractions, according to the study. Referred to as “cognitive control,” this skill will help you ignore all the time-wasters in your inbox—or the 95 percent of that quarterly report that isn’t relevant to your job. 
• To improve attention and multi-tasking ability, try shape-manipulation puzzlers like Bejeweled ($.99, iOS and Android). These games involve complex tasks that hone your brain’s ability to store and retrieve short-term memories, and also switch quickly between challenges without losing focus, the study authors say. 
• Hidden-object games like Everest: Hidden Expedition (Free, iOS) improve visual search ability, the study finds. This will help your eyes more quickly locate and recognize what they’re searching for, whether you’re playing outfield and trying to hit your cut-off man or hunting for lost keys. 
• Memory games like Matrix Brain (Free, iOS), boost spatial working memory. You use that brain function to remember your way around a new neighborhood or city—or to break down complex diagrams or visual data, the study explains.

Couch potatoes may root being lazy in gene factor

More and more people grow obese and the trend to children is more and more apparent.

Studies show 97 percent of American adults get less than 30 minutes of exercise a day, which is the minimum recommended amount based on federal guidelines.

However a professor says that certain genetic traits may predispose people to being more or less motivated to exercise and remain active.

                                

A new study published in the American Journal of Physiology: Regulatory, integrative and Comparative Physiology on April 3, 2013, illustrated their experience that they created cages with running wheels and put rats in them. The tested how much rats willingly run on the wheels. Top 26 rats that were willing to run were reared together and top 26 rats that were laziest were bred with each other. In the eleventh generation of the bred rats, researchers found that the line of running rats chose to run 10 times than that of “lazy” rats.

They then examine physical differences and differences in level of gene and it turned out that there were minor differences in physical composition, but genetic differences in one part of brain may cause rats to have motivation to run.

This research indicate that genetics could play a role in exercise motivation, even in humans.

Have enough sleep to keep good memory

I learned a study researched by the University of California-Berkeley found connection between a decline in cognitive function and lack of sleep among seniors. According the UC Berkeley research, though, it is the deterioration in the quality that keeps memories from being saved by the brain at night. This supports experience that quality of sleep prior to quantity of sleep. We should clear that getting enough rest so that we could have a good state of mind.


While a suitable recommendation for what counts as a perfect night’s sleep is eight hours for as long as one anyone can remember. Sometimes pressure, emotion problems, continence activities, or illness cause people sleep less than that target.

According to a study published in Sleep Medicine, sleep deprivation was associated with lowered self-regard, assertiveness, self-actualization and positive thinking -- all of which, of course, are directly fear-related.

Two study lasting for four years at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Walter Reed Research Institute, tested dozens of sleepers and found that sleeping even seven hours a night will slowly add up to a costly sleep debt.

Here is a link to interesting scientific studies that offer you information to move you from consideration to action.

A paper making synthetic biology known published in an online journal

Synthetic Biology is a rapidly growing field of bioscience, which is hoped to be a solution to save extinct species. The field of synthetic biology is a discipline that utilizes chemically synthesized DNA to create organisms that address human needs. Some also see in synthetic biology tools for combating climate change and water deficits. Scientist have noticed the virtues of synthetic biology as providing potential solutions to human health problems, food security, and energy needs and think it may be productive to save wildlife. However Some lay their worries that genetically modified organisms could pose a danger to native species and natural ecosystems. Many scientists and conservationists are rarely familiar with synthetic biology. What effects synthetic biology will have on the conservation of nature should be discussed between biologists and conservation communities.

A paper making synthetic biology initiated for the benefit of the world's societies and decision makers, is published in the online journal PLOS Biology. The authors of the paper include Kent Redford of the Wildlife Conservation Society and Archipelago Consulting, Bill Adams of the University of Cambridge and Georgina M. Mace of University College London (UCL).

“An open discussion between the two communities is needed to help identify areas of collaboration on a topic that will likely change the relationship of humans with the natural world." Kent Redford said. The scientists to discuss the topic will create opportunities to know about the important and burgeoning field.

Warming climate is real or misunderstood?

Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to speed up. It is estimated that the world produced about 100 billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. And yet “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade”.

Climate scientists consider it is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models. If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.

The puzzle that greenhouse-gas emissions and temperatures did not match does not mean global warming is presentational. Temperatures in the first dicade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th.

An increasing body of research is suggesting that it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before.

If this is possible, the climate may be heating up less in response to greenhouse-gas emissions than was once thought. But that does not mean global warming is not real. （From The Economist）