Science Scanner: NASA Detects Light from Earth-like Planet
It what it calls an historic step in the search for signs of life on other planets, NASA says its astronomers have detected light coming from a “super-Earth” planet 41 light years away.
It marks the first time direct light from a rocky super-Earth planet has been seen, researchers said.
The planet, called 55 Cancri e, is 25 times closer to its star (55 Cancri) as Mercury is to the Sun. New data from the Spitzer Space Telescope indicates the planet is about twice as big and eight times as massive as Earth. The side of it that faces the sun is more than a scorching 2,000 Kelvin (1,727 degrees Celsius), hot enough to melt metal. And, one year on 55 Cancri e lasts a mere 18 Earth minutes.
According to NASA, the Spitzer Space Telescope and others have been able to study this planet in the past by analyzing how the light from it changed as the planet passed in front of the star. With this new discovery, Spitzer was able to actually measure just how much infrared light comes from the planet itself.
New data from the Spitzer shows that 55 Cancri e is a “water world,” with a rocky core that’s surrounded by water which is in a “supercritical state,” meaning the water is in both liquid and gas forms, and is capped with a blanket of steam.
NASA says these new findings are concurrent with prior theories regarding the makeup of the planet
“It could be very similar to Neptune, if you pulled Neptune in toward our sun and watched its atmosphere boil away,” said principal investigator, Michaël Gillon of Université de Liège in Belgium.
Younger users are much more likely to become addicted to Facebook than older people, according to a new worldwide study of people who use the social networking website.
With more than 800 million active members, Facebook has become a worldwide phenomenon. Many Facebook members find themselves checking the website numerous times of day to get the latest info on their friends and their activities.
Dr. Cecilie Schou Andreassen from Norway’s University of Bergen headed the “Facebook Addiction” study. Her team also developed the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale to measure dependency.
The team found Facebook addiction happens much more to younger users than those who are older, and that anxious and socially insecure people tend to use the website more. Andreassen believes this is because those who are anxious or insecure find it easier to communicate with others through Facebook and other social media rather than through face-to-face conversations.
According to the study, organized and more ambitious people aren’t as likely to become as addicted to Facebook, although they often use it as an important professional networking tool.
The study also found women are more at risk of developing Facebook addiction than men probably, according to Andreassen, because of the social nature of Facebook.
Andreassen’s Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale lists six warning signs.
You spend a lot of time thinking about Facebook or planned use of Facebook
You feel an urge to use Facebook more and more
You use Facebook in order to forget about personal problems
You have tried to cut down on the use of Facebook without success
You become restless or troubled if you are prohibited from using Facebook
You use Facebook so much that it has had a negative impact on your job/studies
Each year pharmaceutical companies manufacture and distribute a new flu vaccine to protect people against three different strains of influenza viruses that are expected to be most common during the upcoming flu season.
Rather than having to update a flu vaccine for each year, scientists have been at work to develop what they call a universal vaccine which protects against all types and strains of influenza.
Team leader Dr. John Schrader found that a protein in the flu virus called hemagglutinin (HA) is a lot like a flower with a head and a stem. It’s the head of this protein that binds the flu virus to the healthy human cell, like an electrical plug into a socket.
Most vaccines, according to Schrader, help the body develop antibodies that attack the head of the protein in order to prevent infection. But, since the flu virus tends to mutate quickly, that part of the HA protein changes rapidly so new and different vaccines are needed for each flu season.
But Schrader and his research team found that the 2009 H1N1 vaccine also built up antibodies that attacked the stem of the protein, thereby neutralizing the flu virus.
“The stem plays such an integral role in penetrating the cell that it cannot change between different variants of the flu virus,” said Schrader.
According to Schrader, he has evidence producing vaccines based on a mix of flu viruses circulating in animals, but not humans, should have the same effect, possibly making influenza pandemics and seasonal influenza a relic of the past.
New research pinpoints origin of the domestic horse
A horse is reflected in a pool of water (Photo: AP Photo/David Duprey)
The domesticated horse originated in the steppes of modern-day Ukraine, southwest Russia and west Kazakhstan, mixing with local wild stocks as they spread throughout Europe and Asia, according to a new study.
Scientists from the University of Cambridge (UK) used a genetic database of more than 300 horses from across the Eurasian Steppe to reach their conclusion.
The new study finds the Equus ferus, the extinct wild ancestor of today’s domestic horse, migrated out of East Asia about 160,000 years ago, to be domesticated in the western Eurasian Steppe, their herds constantly replenished with wild horses as they spread across Eurasia.
“The spread of horse domestication differed from that of many other domestic animal species, in that spreading herds were augmented with local wild horses on an unprecedented scale,” said Dr. Vera Warmuth of the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.
A smart door knob does more than just open or close doors. (Photo: Disney Research, Pittsburgh/Carnegie Mellon University)
Imagine having a doorknob that knows whether it should lock or unlock itself, based on how a user grips it; or a smartphone that silences itself if its user puts a finger to his or her lips; or a chair which automatically adjusts the lighting in a room by sensing whether the user is leaning forward or reclining in the chair.
The Touché system uses something its developers call Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing (SFCS), a more advanced form of capacitive touch-sensing technology, which is currently used in the touchscreens of most smartphones.
But, unlike today’s touchscreens which only sense electrical signals at one frequency, Touché’s SFCS technology can monitor signals across a broad range of signals, which would make it possible for the object to not only sense the touch itself, but also to recognize a wide range of complex motions and configurations of the person touching it.
Since different body tissues can produce a wide range of capacitive properties, the SFCS device can take advantage of these differences and produce multiple results, according to its developers. And while today’s touchscreen technology senses signals from a person’s fingertips, the new Touché system can do so from different parts of the finger or hand as well as other parts of the human body.
“Signal frequency sweeps have been used for decades in wireless communication, but as far as we know, nobody previously has attempted to apply this technique to touch interaction,” said Ivan Poupyrev, senior research scientist at Disney Research, Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University. “Yet, in our laboratory experiments, we were able to enhance a broad variety of objects with high-fidelity touch sensitivity. When combined with gesture recognition techniques, Touché demonstrated recognition rates approaching 100 percent. That suggests it could immediately be used to create new and exciting ways for people to interact with objects and the world at large.”
To demonstrate Touché’s technology, the researchers came up with what they called a smart doorknob. Their smart door knob, depending on whether it was grasped, touched with one or two fingers or if were perhaps pinched, provides appropriate signals that program a door to lock or unlock itself, permit an authorized guest to enter while preventing an unauthorized guest, or possible intruder, from entering the premises. The developers said they could also program the door knob to leave a vocal message when touched, such as “We’re away right now,” or “We’ll be back soon.”
Search for ET Centers Around Newly-discovered Earth-like Planets
The recent discovery of Earth-like planets has changed the way scientists look for life on other planets, according to the scientist who inspired Jodie Foster’s character in “Contact,” a 1997 film about the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.
There’s always been a fascination with the possibility intelligent life exists beyond our planet. Last year’s discovery of a super-Earth planet some 600 light years away, which might support human-like life, added to that excitement.
Modern efforts in the search for extra-intelligence beyond Earth (SETI) can be traced back to the brilliant inventor Nikola Tesla who, in 1896, suggested that radio could be used to contact extraterrestrial life.
Today, several scientific organizations, including the SETI institute, use sophisticated technology, such as powerful radio-telescopes, to search for intelligent forms of life somewhere out in the cosmos.
Dr. Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Institute’s Center for SETI Research (Photo: SETI Institute)
So, are we alone in the universe?
“Actually, I don’t know,” she says. “That’s what we’re trying to do at the SETI Institute, to look for evidence of someone else’s technology and thereby, perhaps, answer this old, old question.”
According to Tarter, the discovery of the exoplanets has “profoundly changed the way we do our business.”
In the past, Tarter and her colleagues just pointed their telescopes at stars they thought might be suitable hosts for planets that could support life.
But the discovery of the exoplanets and the data being sent back to Earth by the Kepler mission have changed that.
“It’s a whole new ballgame because we know where those planets are, so we now know where to point our telescopes” she says, “and we know we’re pointing at a planetary system. And since life, as we know it, is a planetary phenomena, we think this is a good place to look, and so we think it has improved the odds that someday we might be successful, because we’re now looking in the right places.”
So far, the Kepler mission has found about 2,000 exoplanet candidates, while Earth-based telescopes have found nearly 1,000 more.
Although a recent Princeton study found little supporting scientific evidence that life could exist beyond our own planet, Tarter says there’s also very little evidence that extraterrestrial life doesn’t exist.
“We are out of evidence from either side of the argument,” she says.
SETI research, she believes, is worth at least a small investment to try answer the old question of whether there is life beyond our planet.
“Everything we’ve learned over the past few decades tells us that life, in fact, could be more prevalent than we once might have thought,” Tarter says.
She points to past and current research that shows planets are abundant.
“We’re not quite there yet, but we can almost taste it,” Tarter says. “It seems that, from what we now know, [it’s] quite inevitable that there will be Earth analogs out there.”
The combination of research into microbial life living in extreme conditions here on Earth, along with the existence of exoplanets, “make the universe appear more bio-friendly than we once might have guessed.”
Dr. Tarter appears this week on the radio edition of “Science World.” She’ll discuss how ordinary people can help search for extraterrestrial intelligence by trying out SETILive the SETI Institute’s new citizen science project, see right column for scheduled times, or check out the full interview with Dr. Tarter below.
[audio://blogs.voanews.com/science-world/files/2012/05/One-On-One-Dr.-Jill-Tarter-SETI-Web-Edition.mp3|titles=One On One – Dr. Jill Tarter – SETI – Web Edition]
Other stories we cover on the “Science World” radio program this week include:
First US commercial resupply mission to the ISS postponed again
Use of midwives improves maternal healthcare in rural Nigeria
Warmer ocean speeds melting of Antarctic ice-shelves
Science Scanner: Study Finds Non-Believers More Driven by Compassion Than Believers
(Images: Jossifresco via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons)
People who consider themselves highly religious are less motivated by compassion than non-believers, according to a new study from the University of California at Berkeley
After conducting three experiments, social scientists found that people who considered themselves to be “less religious” were consistently driven by compassion to be more generous to those in need.
As far as those described as being “highly religious”, researchers found that their measure of generosity was largely unrelated to how generous they were.
Compassion is defined by the study “as an emotion felt when people see the suffering of others which then motivates them to help, often at a personal risk or cost.”
“Overall, we find that for less religious people, the strength of their emotional connection to another person is critical to whether they will help that person or not,” said UC Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer, a co-author of the study. “The more religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in emotion, and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns.”
Although the Berkeley study, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, examined the connection between religion, compassion and generosity, it did not directly study the reasons for why highly religious people are less compelled by compassion to help others.
Researchers involved with the study do theorize however, that a sense of moral obligation, rather than compassion, drive religious people more strongly than those who are more non-religious.
Size matters to female crickets
(Image: Open Clip Art Library)
It turns out the size of a male cricket matters to female crickets, and the male crickets aren’t above faking it to attract a mate, according to a new study from England’s University of Bristol.
To attract females, male crickets sing loud and repetitive songs at night by rubbing their wings together. This sets the wings into a resonant vibration, which produces a loud and intense sound, allowing the female crickets to find them. The lady crickets also listen for this sound in order to find the hottest guys.
The male cricket mating song contains many cues females can use to assess their desirability. However, most have thought the one attribute that couldn’t be faked or augmented was the sound which indicates the cricket’s size.
Males communicate their size through their mating song. Lower pitched sounds are usually produced by larger males, while the sounds the smaller guys produce have a higher pitch. So, the females – who prefer larger male crickets – simply listen for those lower-pitched sounds to find the guy cricket of their dreams.
Experts have always thought the smaller males were stuck with making the high pitched, squeaky sounds. But the study found that tiny and nearly transparent tree crickets, said to be highly unusual creatures, use temperature to change the pitch of their song making them sound much bigger than they really are.
Warmer temperatures made the tree crickets livelier and they called faster, producing sounds in a higher frequency mode. However, when it was cooler, the crickets behaved in the opposite manner, producing lower-pitched sounds making them sound much bigger than they really were, allowing the little guys to attract females.
Speaking more than one language fine-tunes hearing and enhances attention
The study’s research, led by Northwestern University’s bilingualism expert Viorica Marian and auditory neuroscientist Nina Kraus, found that speaking more than one language changes how the nervous system responds to sound.
“People do crossword puzzles and other activities to keep their minds sharp,” Marian said. “But the advantages we’ve discovered in dual language speakers come automatically simply from knowing and using two languages. It seems that the benefits of bilingualism are particularly powerful and broad, and include attention, inhibition and encoding of sound.”
The researchers, working with 23 bilingual (English and Spanish speaking) teenagers along with 25 teens who only spoke English, recorded their subjects brain-stem responses to complex speech sounds under loud and quiet conditions.
Both groups had the same response when the listening conditions were quiet. But, when it wasn’t so quiet, and there was a bit of background noise, the researchers found that the brains of the bilingual teens were much better a picking up and detecting speech sounds.
“Bilinguals are natural jugglers,” said Marian. “The bilingual juggles linguistic input and, it appears, automatically pays greater attention to relevant versus irrelevant sounds. Rather than promoting linguistic confusion, bilingualism promotes improved ‘inhibitory control,’ or the ability to pick out relevant speech sounds and ignore others.”
