brain uu7y5544.1 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Successful problem solving depends on a brain that efficiently lessens its workload rather than laboring harder, a new study finds. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com

Individuals may thus prefer less effortful problem-solving strategies not only for their simplicity but for their superior results, contend neuroscientist Erik D. Reichle of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and his colleagues.

Reichle's group administered tests of visual-spatial ability and verbal ability to five men and seven women. Next, functional magnetic resonance imaging scans assessed volunteers' brain activity—as indicated by the blood flow rising and falling—as they determined whether a series of sentences that they read corresponded to images that followed each sentence. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com

On some trials, participants were told to form a mental image of each sentence to compare with the pictures; on other trials, they were told to focus on verbal meanings of sentences.

Volunteers made few errors on this task. The imagery strategy yielded more activation in brain regions linked to visual and spatial skills. However, individuals who scored highest on visual-spatial ability exhibited markedly lower blood-flow boosts in those areas, the scientists report in the June Cognitive Psychology. The verbal strategy produced activity hikes in language-related locations. Those increases were lowest for volunteers with the best verbal skills, Reichle's group says. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

iron 0000190.239 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

OCTOBER 1958
FUSION WORK— “Last month, at the second Geneva conference on atomic power, the fusion reactions were at the center of the stage. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info The knotty and often profound questions encountered in the research engaged a substantial portion of the formal and informal discussions. The elaborate experimental gear exhibited by the United Kingdom, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. testified to the huge scale of the programs the major nuclear powers have been conducting, until recently in secret. Among the several approaches of the U.S. program publicly disclosed in detail for the first time at Geneva is the ‘stellarator.’ It is the work of Project Matterhorn at Princeton University and embodies some of the things we have learned from theoretical and experimental investigations conducted since 1951. —Lyman Spitzer, Jr.”

OCTOBER 1908
HORSELESS CARRIAGE Thievery— “A motor-car lock which will be simple and thief-proof would be an invention which would appeal to motorists just now, and the wonder is that some such device has not already been included in the regular equipment of some make of car. It may be true that in some cities the removal of the starting crank or a spark plug is a guard against theft, but thieves are too often graduates of factories and several instances have occurred of late in which the thief has supplied the spark plug himself.”

BOTANICAL READERS— “A Javanese subscriber of this journal, Mr. Bruysman of Nongho Djadjar, near Lawang, Java, sends us an interesting communication on an experimental botanical garden which he established at an altitude of 4,000 feet. The climate, he writes, is ideal. Even the wet season lasting from November to April is not too unpleasant despite the daily rains. Mr. Bruysman is growing hundreds of tropical, European, Asiatic, American, and Australian plants, his purpose being to collect medicinal, ornamental, and useful plants from all quarters of the globe. He has been assisted by many botanists, and asks that the readers of this journal help him in his work by sending seeds and specimens.”

EGYPTIAN FOSSILS— “Prof. Henry F. Osborn, who directed the expedition of the American Museum of Natural History to the Fayum Desert of Egypt, is just now placing on exhibition one of the most important and significant finds there, the skull of the giant Arsinoitherium, one of the most extraordinary land mammals of ancient Africa. The dominating and all-powerful feature of the Arsinoitherium was the long pair of sharp-pointed horns protruding upward and outward for nearly two feet, an appendage both dangerous and fantastic. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info The spirited and realistic restoration of this giant is seen in the accompanying drawing by Mr. Charles R. Knight.”

OCTOBER 1858
ACID AIR— “Housekeepers will, without doubt, thank us for informing them that the black sulphide of silver, which forms on plated and silver wares, door plates and knobs, may at once be removed by wiping the surface with a rag wet with aqua ammonia (the ammonia should be very weak). This black film is no evidence that the silver is impure, for it forms as quickly on fine silver as on that which is alloyed with copper. After rain, much sulphide of hydrogen is disengaged from the soil of our streets.”

CHEAP FUEL FARMING— “The ‘iron horse’ seems to be gradually claiming the attention of farmers, for the purpose of tilling the soil. The Royal Agricultural Society of England has recently awarded a prize of $2,500 to Mr. H. Fowler, for the most efficient steam plow. It has a stationary engine, using warping ropes to drag the shares through the furrows. Mr. John Joseph Mechi, the celebrated English farmer, uses one of these plows; and its cultivation of the soil is very superior—the yield of wheat having been increased eight bushels per acre by its use. The saving is about one-fourth of the cost, in comparison with horses. Where fuel is abundant and cheap, we have no doubt that in twenty years hence, steam plows will be in common use in our great Western prairies.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

boost 0000126 Louis J. Sheehan

Louis J. Sheehan

Researchers have debunked the much-publicized idea, known as the Mozart effect, that listening to classical music improves children's ability to reason about spatial relations and other nonverbal tasks. Learning to play a musical instrument or to sing, however, may indeed give youngsters an intellectual edge over their peers, a new study suggests. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire

Six-year-olds who took weekly piano or singing lessons throughout the school year exhibited an average IQ increase of 7.0 points, says psychologist E. Glenn Schellenberg of the University of Toronto at Mississauga. Other 6-year-olds who either took weekly drama lessons or received no extracurricular lessons displayed an average IQ rise of 4.3 points, Schellenberg reports in the August Psychological Science.

The small, but statistically significant IQ advantage for music students became apparent from standardized intelligence tests administered at the start and end of first grade. The apparent benefit of the musical training showed up on the test's verbal and nonverbal sections.

For his study, Schellenberg tracked 132 first graders, who were randomly assigned to one of the four groups. Teachers at Toronto's Royal Conservatory of Music provided the free piano, singing, or drama lessons. Extracurricular activities such as chess lessons or science programs, in which none of the 132 students was involved, may also nudge IQ upward, Schellenberg theorizes. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire

The children's scores on a standard academic achievement test further reflected a musically inspired advantage.

"Music lessons involve experiences that could have a positive effect on cognition, particularly during childhood, when brain development is . . . sensitive to environmental influence," Schellenberg says. For instance, musical training requires kids to pay attention for long periods, to read notation, to memorize extended passages, and to master fine-motor skills.

A different benefit emerged for the kids given drama lessons. According to parents' ratings, those children improved their social skills by the end of first grade, whereas the rest showed no such changes.

The additional IQ boost reported for children who took music lessons is so small that it probably wouldn't yield any dramatic upgrades in their school performance, remarks psychologist Ellen Winner of Boston College.

"We cannot say from this study what aspects of music education led to this modest improvement in IQ," she adds. Further investigations will be required to explore the influence on intelligence of specific facets of music training. Winner also notes that the IQ disparities Schellenberg measured could derive from differences in how well the music teachers and drama teachers inspired their students to learn.

Winner and neurologist Gottfried Schlaug of Harvard Medical School in Boston are looking to resolve some of these issues in an ongoing long-term study that's tracking the brains and intellectual development of children as they learn to play musical instruments.

diamond

Ancient Chinese people may have used diamonds to polish their stone axes to mirrorlike finishes, according to a new analysis. Other than pushing back by several thousand years the date for the first known use of diamonds, the findings also suggest that Neolithic Chinese societies were more technologically advanced than previous studies had shown.

Some sections of the ax surfaces are almost as smooth as some silicon wafers used to make computer chips, says Peter Lu, a physicist at Harvard University. "Somehow, Stone Age people . . . were able to make something smooth enough that you could pattern a circuit on it," he says. In an attempt to discover how the polishing was done, Lu obtained four ceremonial burial axes from the tombs of two Neolithic Chinese societies—the Liangzhu culture and the Sanxingcun culture—that once inhabited parts of southern China near what is now Shanghai. The stone axes had been dated by others to between 4000 and 2500 B.C.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

To determine what kind of stone the axes were made of, Lu used X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, and electron microprobe analysis. These techniques enabled him to determine the axes' chemical composition as well as the crystal structure of the stones' minerals. He found that all four axes were composed primarily of three minerals, the most abundant one being the aluminum oxide called corundum, which is the stuff of rubies and sapphires. Corundum's presence was a surprise, says Lu.

It's the second-hardest mineral on Earth; only diamond is harder. Lu reasoned therefore that the only mineral strong enough to polish a corundum-rich ax would have been diamond. "Everyone thought the ancient Chinese were using quartz" for their polishing, he says. Quartz, however, is too soft to buff corundum into a shine.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

To test his theory, Lu conducted a series of polishing experiments on one of the burial axes. Using a diamond saw, he sliced the ax parallel to the polished surface and then buffed the new surfaces with commercial polishing equipment using three abrasives: diamond, corundum, and quartz.

Lu quantified the smoothness achieved with each abrasive by using an atomic force microscope to measure nanoscale features on all the samples' surfaces. Only the diamond-polished sample closely matched the smoothness of the ancient surface, he reports in the February Archaeometry.

There are two known diamond deposits within 300 kilometers of the burial sites, a distance that could have been traversed by Neolithic people, Lu notes.

"Lu and his colleagues are the first to seriously address the question of what abrasives were used [in Neolithic China]," says Janet Douglas, a conservation scientist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The new work also indicates that ancient Chinese artisans could have used diamond to work jade into thousands of smooth, gleaming objects, she says.

Lu also wonders whether Neolithic societies polished jade with diamond, since it would have been a more efficient abrasive than quartz.

report

When it comes to pain control, a dose of positive thinking goes a long way, according to researchers who have found that many of the same brain areas that respond to severe pain also respond to mere expectations of pain. This commonality provides a neural route for the mind to quell pain and could explain the pain-fighting power of placebos, the scientists say.

"Pain emerges from the interaction between signals coming from an injured body region and cognitive information unique to each individual, such as expectations about what that pain will feel like," says neuroscientist Robert C. Coghill of Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C. He and his coworkers report their results in the Sept. 6 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For their study, Coghill and his colleagues recruited 10 volunteers, ages 24 to 46, and fitted each with a device that delivered heat pulses to the lower right leg. In a training session, the researchers taught participants to expect one of three intensities of painful heat, depending on the delay between a tone and the jolt. A 7-second interval signaled heat that caused mild pain, a 15-second wait heralded heat that produced moderate pain, and a 30-second gap indicated heat resulting in pronounced pain. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis_J_Sheehan_Esquire_1

Each heat pulse lasted for 20 seconds, and none burned or damaged the skin.

A day or two after training, each participant completed 30 heat-pulse trials while a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner measured blood flow throughout the brain. On about one-third of the trials, the researchers switched the timing signals for upcoming pain amounts so that volunteers received heat pulses that were either of higher or lower intensity than they expected.

As the magnitude of expected pain increased, brain regions associated with learning, memory, emotion, and tactile sensation became more active. Areas of neural activation measured while volunteers actually experienced pain largely corresponded to areas activated by the expectation.

When participants received the most-painful heat after expecting only moderately painful jolts, the intensity of their self-reported pain fell by 28 percent compared with trials in which they both expected and experienced the severe pain.

These expectations of less pain yielded about as much relief from physical pain as researchers had previously reported for morphine, Coghill says. The new study adds to a growing body of evidence that placebos work via the brain mechanisms underlying pain (SN: 9/3/05, p. 157: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050903/note13.asp).

In contrast, expectations of harsher heat pulses than were actually delivered didn't magnify volunteers' self-reported pain. The researchers plan to examine potential effects of negative expectations more closely in pessimists, whose personalities may predispose them to pain sensitivity. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis_J_Sheehan_Esquire_1

The new report "underscores the biological fact that pain is not merely a passive response to tissue damage or potential tissue damage," remarks neuroscientist Donald D. Price of the University of Florida's College of Dentistry in Gainesville. "Its magnitude is partly determined by ongoing expectations."

The work opens the door to exploring purely psychological interventions to prepare patients for painful medical treatments by recasting their expectations of what's in store, Coghill notes.

pheromones

Two male mice often fight when put in a cage, but if one is neutered they get along fine. Decades ago, scientists found out that dabbing urine from an intact male mouse on the back of a neutered mouse gave the latter the chemical signature of an unaltered male. The neutered mouse soon found himself brawling with the guys. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

Combining this behavioral test with modern biochemical analyses, molecular biologist Lisa Stowers and her colleagues at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., now reveal some of the chemistry behind the aggression.

In male mouse urine, proteins in a cluster called the major urinary protein (MUP) complex function as pheromones that literally strike a nerve in other males, the scientists report in the Dec. 6 Nature. An individual mouse has only a few of the 20 or so proteins that can show up in an MUP cluster. In the study, those few were enough to act as a fight pheromone when researchers dabbed them on neutered males.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

Because neutered mice don't make significant amounts of testosterone, they lack MUP proteins, Stowers notes.

http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de Pheromones are chemical cues given off by animals that trigger others' behavior by binding to sensory receptors in the vomeronasal organ in mice.

To substantiate the behavioral findings, Stowers and colleagues placed the urine proteins in contact with live neurons obtained from male mouse vomeronasal organs in a lab dish. Using imaging techniques, the researchers detected when 1 of the roughly 250 receptors on the neurons was activated. The tests verified that the MUC proteins were pheromones and revealed that two neuron receptors, called Gnao and V2Rs, act as docking ports for them.

sea

The earth’s average temperature rose steadily throughout the 20th century, with only a few short blasts of cooling recorded in the climate data. But if a team of scientists led by David Thompson at Colorado State University is correct, one of the largest recorded cool-downs ever documented might have never happened. http://louis1j1sheehan.us How did the mistake occur? According to Thompson, through a bucket blunder.

Scientists had always struggled to find a physical cause of the 0.3 °C drop in global temperature around 1945, right at the end of World War II. But according to Thompson, the measured cooling happened because of cross-cultural confusion. http://louis1j1sheehan.us During the war, Americans sailors measured the sea surface temperatures by testing water their ship took in to cool its engines. But when the British retook most of the recording responsibility in 1945, they simply drew buckets of ocean water and tested them outside. The difference between the warm engine room where the Americans tested and the non-insulated British buckets accounts for temperature drop in the record, Thompson says.

Neither navy wrote down their methods in the logbook, so Thompson had to venture deep into shipping records and consult foreign sea experts to figure out the flub. In addition, Americans preoccupied with fighting also took fewer measurements during the war, says Phil Jones from the University of East Anglia in the U.K., a colleague of Thompson. That reduction in measurements makes the American data and its link to a post-war cooling even sketchier, he says.

The team’s finding could be a blow to those who claim the mid-century cooling proved that the earth wasn’t heating up as quickly or consistently as most scientists have said, or that carbon dioxide doesn’t cause global warming. But while the discovery of the Great Bucket Error could let climate modelers off the hook for never explaining the post-war drop in temperature , it also could mean our global climate data was biased in other places, too. And Thompson and his team say they don’t know exactly what the temperature charts will look like once researchers try to correct for buckets’ bias toward cold.