19 August 2010 by Jessica Hamzelou

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SOME actors go to extreme lengths to prepare against a role: Daniel Day-Lewis spent months in a wheelchair to learn into character for My Left Foot. But if that sounds too much like hard work, actors can now use brain training to prepare in lieu.

John Gruzelier and colleagues at Goldsmiths, University of London, have used neurofeedback drill to improve actors' performance.

In training, each actor watched a personation of a theatre auditorium, as if on stage, while wearing electrodes without interrupti~ their scalp. The lights and sounds of the simulation were programmed to change in response to the wearer's brain activity. Each actor was told to rule their brainwaves to take the lights and crowd noise to a given even. The brain activity needed to achieve this was somewhere between lingering-wave activity, associated with sleep, and fast-wave activity, associated with alert wakefulness.

"It's the natural relaxed state of focused study," says Gruzelier. It's what actors refer to as "listening"; the kind of you need to achieve a Judy Dench-class performance, he adds.

Brain teaching provides the 'focused attention' that you need to achieve a Judy Dench-class performance

The actors gave various stage performances before and after a order of 10 half-hour training sessions over seven weeks. Footage of their performances was judged ~ the agency of acting professors along several criteria, including vocal expression and fluency. In adding, the actors judged their own performances.

Gruzelier's team found that the one and the other the actors and professors' scores were higher after the seven weeks of instruction compared with a group that received no training over the corresponding; of like kind period (Neuroscience Letters, DOI: 10.1016/j.neulet.2010.06.019).

"The teaching is pretty similar to relaxation protocols that actors might well be familiar with already," says John Rothwell of University College London. "It's a nice way to quantify it, though."

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11:04 19 August 2010 through Wendy Zukerman

For similar stories, visit the Death Topic Guide

Want to permission a light footprint on this Earth when you die? Perhaps you should consider "aquamation", a new eco-alternative to burial and cremation.

With ground for burials in short supply and cremation producing around 150 kilograms of carbon dioxide per body – and as much as 200 micrograms of toxic newspaper vender – aquamation is being touted as the greenest method for disposing of your extremely remains.

The corpse is placed into a steel container and potassium is added, followed ~ the agency of water heated to 93 °C. The flesh and organs are completely decomposed in 4 hours, leaving bones at the same time that the only solid remains.

This is similar to what's left behind cremation, where the "ashes" are in fact bones hardened in the furnace and sooner or later crushed.

Low-energy funeral

Aquamation uses only 10 per cent of the activity of a conventional cremation and releases no toxic emissions, says John Humphries, supreme executive of Aquamation Industries in Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, who developed the technology. The decomposition process, called alkaline hydrolysis, "simply speeds up the natural way that kindred decomposes in soil and water", he says.

Similar methods for decomposing corpses hold been developed elsewhere, but they decompose corpses at much higher temperatures. For example, Resomation, based in Glasgow, UK, dissolves bodies in sodium hydroxide at 180 °C.

By decomposing swine-flesh carcasses at different water temperatures, Humphries found that the higher flush was unnecessary and that 93 °C was the most operative temperature for body decomposition.

Life from death

There are recycling possibilities moreover. Humphries says that aquamation, unlike cremation, will not destroy artificial implants in the same state as hip replacements, allowing them to be reused. And after the material part is decomposed, "the water is a fantastic fertiliser", he says.

Since his collection began offering the process last month, 60 people in Australia be the subject of nominated aquamation for the disposal of their own corpse.

"This is a big initiative," says Barry Brook, a climate scientist at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. "It's yielding to dismiss these small-scale technologies as trivial, but if you say further enough small-scale solutions together they can add up to a portion meaningful."

12:20 19 August 2010 ~ means of Michael Marshall

Video: Terror bird

Animals in South America around 6 very great number years ago would have been well advised to steer clear of the Andalgalornis steulleti "terror bird". The flightless bird brought down its prey by stabbing it through its enormous hooked beak.

Andalgalornis, which lived in the area that is at this time Argentina, belonged to a group of enormous flightless birds known while terror birds that appeared around 60 million years ago and stuck about for at least 58 million years. It was 1.4 metres tall – small compared with other terror birds, which could reach 3 metres – and resembled a crabbed between an ostrich and a hawk.

Now, a team at Ohio University in Athens has revealed in what way the bird would have used this beak to fell prey. For this, they used CT scans to create a 3D model of a fossilised Andalgalornis skull, then used a technique borrowed from structural engineering to pretend the effects of different forces on the skull.

This revealed that Andalgalornis be under the necessity of have killed with a violent jabbing motion worthy of a hanger-wielding gladiator.

Beastly beak

The team found that unlike most birds, Andalgalornis had a well-buttressed and stubborn skull. Vigorous front-to-back pecking would not have harmed it, but the skull could not have withstood side-to-side forces.

"It could not clutch prey in its beak and shake it from side to margin like a dog," says team member Lawrence Witmer.

Witmer suggests that the fowl would nimbly step in and deliver targeted blows with its neb. "These animals also had wickedly nasty feet and talons," says Casey Holliday of the University of Missouri in Columbia. The birds could obtain used these to hold prey animals down and rip into them by their beaks.

Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0011856

15 August 2010

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Video: Parrot unlocks box

Kea parrots are renowned thieves in their natural New Zealand, and with good reason - even a complicated sequence of locks be possible to't foil them.

Hiromitsu Miyata of Kyoto University in Japan foremost presented keas with boxes of food secured with up to three bolts. The parrots managed to liberalize all of them, so he made the tasks harder. The greatest in quantity challenging set-up involved two bolts blocking each other such that person needed to be slid open before the second would release.

Miyata ground that the keas cracked this problem faster if they were allowed to study the rest-up for a while before attempting to break it (Animal Cognition, DOI: 10.1007/s10071-010-0342-9). This suggests they are expert to plan their moves, he says. Until now, the birds were cogitation to tackle problems in a haphazard fashion.

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15:31 18 August 2010 by Jessica Hamzelou

Looking to beef up? As research sheds new light on how our muscles act, it may be time to scrap old bodybuilding advice. New Scientist brings you head tips for the budding Mr Universe.

What is the best opportunity to pass to pump iron?

Standard advice for gym bunnies is to rise as much weight as you can in a training session. But Stuart Phillips and his team at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, value this might not be the best way to build muscle. Instead, they recommend that slow and steady wins the race.

In Phillips's study, men in their betimes 20s lifted weights with their legs over various periods at 30 and 90 by cent of the maximum weight they could lift. Phillips analysed biopsies from the leg muscles in the sight of and after each training session.

He found that the production of of recent origin muscle proteins was greatest when the men were lifting the with reference to something else light weights – at 30 per cent of their maximum – until they were fatigued, and couldn't lift any greater degree of.

The idea that you should lift progressively heavier weights to greater part up is "completely false", says Phillips. Instead, the best way to fabricate muscle is to lift more manageable weights until you tire through, he says.

Is it easier to rebuild lost muscle than beginning from scratch?

The phenomenon of "muscle memory" is a handy human being for muscle buffs who take extended breaks between workouts. The form is that once a person has acquired a certain level of animation for the first time, they will find it easier to touch in extent that point again, even if they allow their muscles to dreary away in the meantime.

Kristian Gundersen and his colleagues at the University of Oslo in Norway cast the explanation lies in the fact that muscle undergoes permanent changes for the time of training.

To investigate, Gundersen's team cut the synergist, or "assistant", leg muscles in one leg in mice, thereby increasing the amount of work for the remaining muscle. After two weeks, the cluster found that the number of nuclei in the fibres of the remaining muscle had increased through 37 per cent.

This bulked-up muscle was then left to rubbish by cutting off its nerve supply. However, three months later – interchangeable to around 10 human years – the increased number of nuclei remained not beyond the muscle fibres.

Because the nuclei of muscle fibres are key to the work of new muscle protein, Gundersen thinks that after a bout of discipline, the potential to grow muscle sticks with you for life. So ~t any matter how much time has passed since you were in the summit of muscular fitness, it should be easier to achieve the encourage time around.

What about steroids?     

Anabolic steroids are notion to work by increasing the number of muscle cell nuclei. "If those goods are also permanent, the effects of one-time doping could hindmost forever," says Gundersen. "We may need to reconsider how long the preclusion period should be for an athlete caught taking steroids."

What's that powerful feeling a day or two after a workout?

The ache you be wrought up a couple of days after particularly intensive exercise is known being of the kind which "delayed onset muscle soreness". It is thought to be caused ~ dint of. the lengthening and subsequent damage of muscle fibres during strenuous stretches. Damaged muscle cells be possible to die off, causing inflammation and pain. Muscle builders take note: overly beset with difficulties workouts could work your muscles into oblivion.

What's the fancied diet for a bodybuilder?

It is important to get enough protein in your diet, from foods so as red meat and eggs, as amino acids are essential ~ the sake of making new muscle proteins. In a 2004 paper, Charles Lambert, on that account at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, and colleagues recommended that protein prepare up 25 to 30 per cent of a bodybuilder's diet.

During use, most of the energy for muscle work comes from carbohydrates that desire been broken down into glucose and converted to glycogen. Lambert's team reckoned carbs should versify up around 55 to 60 per cent of a bodybuilder's spiritedness intake.

Before a photo shoot, some male models are known to be reckoned to drastic lengths to look their most buff. A pre-fire drinking binge dehydrates the skin, so it is pulled taut throughout the muscles to accentuate them. A healthier way to look your in the highest degree would be to cut fat intake, says Phillips.

But cutting ~right too much fat could be a mistake. Lambert thinks fat should do up around 15 to 20 per cent of total animation intake. Reducing fat in the diet is known to reduce circulating levels of testosterone, which is thought to boost muscle mass and limb strength.

Journal references: Phillips, PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/diary.pone.0012033; Gundersen, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0913935107; Lambert, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, DOI: 10.1111/j.1532-5415.2008.01927.x

13:59 09 August 2010 by Caitlin Stier

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Do you be heedless like a baby? You may have your thalamus to thank, according to examination that suggests this brain region helps people sleep through bumps in the darkness.

To discover why some people can sleep through noise while others on the alert at the faintest disruption, Jeffrey Ellenbogen and colleagues at Harvard Medical School used electrodes to monitor the brain activity of 12 people while they slept in a rest-black, soundproof room. They then repeated the experiment, this time playing 14 sounds, so as a toilet flushing and street traffic, at 30-second intervals, increasing the solid contents until the volunteers' brainwaves showed signs of arousal.

Sleepers who tolerated louder sounds before waking showed a higher frequency of "sleep spindles" – short bursts of activity of specific wavelength – for the time of non-REM sleep than those who woke more easily.

The spindles arise in the brain's sensory recruitment centre in the thalamus. The team suspects the thalamus acts similar to a sort of insulator, sending out spindle activity to stop areas of the brain from perceiving and responding to sounds.

Ellenbogen hopes this be in action will contribute to future solutions to promote these bursts and prepare people with a sounder night's sleep.

Journal reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.whelp.2010.06.032

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15:37 17 August 2010 by Wendy Zukerman

Macaques who proof conflict often seek out the company of other bystanders – perhaps since a way to relieve tension within the group as a sum.

Arianna De Marco at the University of Florence, Italy, and colleagues saw this behaviour among Tonkean macaques as they observed two captive groups extremely seven months.

When a macaque behaved aggressively – by chasing, grabbing or blighting, for instance – De Marco chose a bystander at random and recorded whether it would "take" with another macaque within 5 minutes of the conflict ending. The primates were considered to be affiliating if they sat near, groomed or played with another looker-on.

For comparison, De Marco observed the same macaque for 5 minutes the nearest day at approximately the same time.

She found that bystanders were further likely to affiliate with another bystander after conflicts than at undisturbed times. In one group, the macaques were almost three times in the manner that likely to do so, and in the other group almost seven seasons as likely.

Upsetting sights

After witnessing a conflict, bystander macaques note carefully to appear unusually agitated, scratching themselves more than normal, for instance. Once the macaques affiliated with each other, however, they seemed to wind-lull down.

Previous research has found that after fighting, primates rarely essay a reconciliation, which means that social groups of these animals extremity to either defuse violence in advance or find other ways to contract tension. De Marco thinks that bystanders come together to prevent escalating assault within the group.

Journal reference: Animal Behaviour, DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2010.04.016

12:40 04 August 2010 by Michael Marshall

For like stories, visit the Zoologger and Mysteries of the Deep Sea Topic Guides

Zoologger is our hebdomadal column highlighting extraordinary animals – and occasionally other organisms – from about the world.

Species: Adipicola crypta

Habitat: on the buried bones of whale carcasses that require sunk to the sea floor

In the darkness and extreme influence at the bottom of the sea lies the broken corpse of a whale. It has been in that place for decades, and a host of busy creatures have stripped away the flesh.

Things have quietened down since the initial feeding madness, but for the hordes of molluscs clamped to the exposed bones there is still be food to be had.

Life is relatively gentle for them but others, like Adipicola crypta, have a tougher lifestyle: they live up~ bones buried in the sediment of the sea floor. Here in that place is hardly any oxygen, and no currents to bring fragments of feed their way.

So these intrepid shellfish must live solely off the whalebone. Fortunately, they accept a trick up their sleeves to help them do so: sulphur-powered bacteria living in their cells.

Microbes in da house

Most animals require microorganisms like bacteria living in and on them. But some be on the point a bit further, and allow these bacteria to enter their recognize cells rather than just roam free in their intestinal tract or ~ward their skin.

For instance, spotted salamanders have whole algae living inside their cells, providing the animal with an extra source of bottom. The Elysia chlorotica sea slug eats green algae and breaks them from a high to a low position to steal their chloroplasts and incorporate them into its own cells.

Adipicola is likewise a member of this select group. It cannot eat the whalebone, if it were not that some microorganisms can: they enter the bones and feed on the sluggish stored inside. As a by-product, they release chemicals called sulphides. Adipicola be possible to't feed on these either – in fact they are poisonous to ~ly animals – but its in-house bacteria can.

Yoshihiro Fujiwara of the Japan Marine Science and Technology Center and colleagues collected Adipicola specimens from a whale dead body in the north-west Pacific to investigate how they work in concert with the bacteria living in them.

Bone digester

The bacteria, which have not yet been named, oxidise the sulphide to release mechanical value that they use to make essential cellular components. They live in the cells of Adipicola's gills, what one. are covered with an array of thin strands, rather like a card .

The cells house them in cosy bubbles of liquid called vacuoles – until they eventually kill and digest them. Fujiwara's team found that they were Adipicola's sole food source.

The team also found a closely related species, Adipicola pacifica, manner of life on the exposed bones of the whale. It has different bacteria, what one. live on the surface of the gill cells rather than within them, and is less reliant on them because it is consideration to also have other sources of food.

Fujiwara's team suggests that A. crypta has evolved more distant than A. pacifica to become better able to cope with its contrary environment. Both probably evolved from species that lived in shallow waters and therefore took to the deep oceans by attaching themselves to pieces of thicket.

It seems a long way to go just to wind up corrosive whalebone by way of sulphur, but it evidently works for them.

Journal intimation: PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0011808

Read previous Zoologger columns: Horror lizard squirts tears of relations, Secret to long life found… in a baby dragon, Eggs through an 'eat me' sign, How did the giraffe get its in extent neck?, The toughest fish on Earth… and in space, Vultures use twigs to gather wool for nests, The biggest living thing with teeth, Globetrotters of the animal kingdom, Judge Dredd worm traps pillage with riot foam, Flashmobbing locusts have redesigned brains, Smart camo lets warmth-in-the-dark shark hide.

11 August 2010 by Nick Lane

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Oxygen is supposed to obtain driven the evolution of complex life – but the discovery of animals that advance without it tells a different story

GO WEST, young man! More specifically, avail about 200 kilometres west of Crete, then straight down to the sediments of the Mediterranean Sea 3.5 kilometres below. There you decree find a lake with some extraordinary inhabitants.

Around 6 million years past when the Mediterranean nearly dried up, vast amounts of salt were deposited put ~ the sea floor. Some of these deposits were exposed about 30,000 years past. As this salt dissolves, extra-salty, dense water is sinking to the depths, forming a main lake up to 60 metres deep. Even more surprising than the thing of this lake beneath the sea, however, is what lives in it.

The get ~ in the brine lake does not mix with the water superior to and so ran out of oxygen long ago. Instead, the toxic elastic fluid hydrogen sulphide oozes from the black mud. It's the final place you would expect to find animals. But that's exactly the sort of has been discovered: the first animals, as far as we know, that can grow and reproduce without a whiff of oxygen.

These dwarfish mud-dwellers are far more than a curiosity. They could have ~ing the best pointer yet to the origin of complex cells: the groundwork of most life on Earth, from amoebae to oak trees.

Radical divination

"The ecology is interesting, but the real significance of these critters is the sort of they say about evolution," says Bill Martin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Dusseldorf in Germany. For Martin, the revelation is a beautiful affirmation of a radical prediction he made greater quantity than a decade ago - that oxygen had nothing to do through the evolution of complex life.

The first kinds of life attached Earth, the bacteria and archaea, were simple cells - not much besides than bags of chemicals. Eventually, they gave rise to complex cells, or eukaryotes, by sophisticated internal structures, the kind of cells found inside all plants and animals. And single in kind of the most important events in the evolution of complex cells was the disposition of a symbiotic union between a host cell and a bacterium - the forefather of the cellular powerhouses known as mitochondria, which extract energy from viands using oxygen.

"Burning" food provides 10 times as much energy being of the kind which alternative ways of extracting energy from food without oxygen. When webwork cells gained this ability, it changed the course of life attached Earth: without mitochondria, large active animals might never have evolved (beware "Living without breathing"). It is not surprising, then, that most biologists cherish a thought of that the original symbiotic union revolved around oxygen. According to Martin, admitting, they are utterly wrong.

Mass extinction

The narrative in the textbooks seems compelling. In the inception, so the story goes, there was no oxygen. The evolution of photosynthesis changed entirely that. By releasing their waste - oxygen - into the air, cyanobacteria transformed the terraqueous ~ around 2.3 billion years ago. As oxygen levels rose, the toxic aeriform fluid caused the first mass extinction, wiping out nearly all existing organisms and paving the room for passing for a new lifestyle: extracting energy from food using oxygen.

The bacteria that evolved this energy were preyed on by other cells. At some point, one small room failed to digest its dinner and instead let the bacteria live up~ the body inside it. This host cell, so the story goes, got couple huge benefits: protection against oxygen, which was guzzled up by the ancestral mitochondria, and a share of the extra energy its guests could select from food using oxygen.

It was not until oxygen levels rose flat higher, around half a billion years ago, that the oceans could maintain large multicellular organisms that got their energy by burning food. That led to the Cambrian pop, when all kinds of animals appeared. The main point about this recital is that it sweeps forward with a magisterial inevitability, waiting solitary on a rising tide of oxygen.

The broad outlines are honest. Oxygen levels did rise in two steps; most eukaryotes do beget energy using oxygen, and are normally tolerant of its toxicity; and the earliest fossil animals did appear soon after a big rise in oxygen levels in the oceans. Yet in that place are grounds to suspect that oxygen was not the puppet master from all.

One is that the initial rise in oxygen did not purify the oceans, but converted them into a stinking mess, full of inflammable air sulphide. Far from having few refuges, anaerobes had whole oceans to themselves. What's greater quantity, these conditions lasted for more than a billion years, right end the period when the eukaryotes are thought to have evolved.

No not parsimonious lunch

Another issue is that oxygen is not particularly toxic ~ dint of. itself - it needs to be converted into free radicals before it command react with and destroy proteins and DNA. Mitochondria generate lots of unconstrained radicals so, far from protecting their hosts from oxygen, their ancestors would require increased the damage it does. In any case, consuming oxygen simply steepens the diffusion gradient; it's like trying to save yourself from drowning through drinking the surrounding ocean.

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03 August 2010 by Kate Ravilious

Magazine number printed 2771. Subscribe and save

Why do industrialised nations suffer fewer limit larger terrorist attacks? Mathematics can help us understand how asymmetric the last argument of kings is being waged

IN 2003, US soldiers in Iraq were given a bale of playing cards showing Iraq's "most-wanted". In the summit position - the ace of spades - was Saddam Hussein. His sons Qusay and Uday were the whit of clubs and the ace of hearts. The message was bare: capture the entire pack, and regime change would be achieved and the war in Iraq won.

It hasn't worked out to be that light. Part of the reason is that in this age of terrorist attacks, insurgencies and "asymmetric" wars between parties of vastly differing firepower, the dynamics of conflicts have shifted irrevocably. Now mathematicians are starting to construction models of how such present-day warfare plays out. As they perform so, they are coming to the conclusion that it ...

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