LIFE
Signs that baby is in pain
Babies aren’t able to communicate verbally, but they can let you know when they’re in pain. The University of Michigan Health System says parents should be on the lookout for these warning signs of infant pain: • Facial expressions, including grimacing, furrowing the brow, squeezing eyes shut, opening the mouth or having deep lines form around the nose. • A high-pitched, insistent cry that lasts longer than usual, although some very sick babies may be too weak to cry at all. • Stiffness throughout the body, or flailing and squirming. Some very sick or premature babies may appear limp. •Behaving irritably and not responding to comforting or feeding. •Not eating or sleeping.
friDAY, may 25, 2012
Sneezing monkey, Spongebob mushroom top new species list NEW YORK: The realm of living things known to science gained some fascinating new members in the past year. These include a monkey that sneezes when it rains; a tiny worm discovered nearly a mile below ground; a mushroom that looks more like a sponge and the first night-blooming orchid ever recorded. These strange organisms and others made the top 10 list of species described in 2011. The International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University and an international committee of scientists issued this list for the fifth year, a date coinciding with the birthday of Carolus Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who created the modern system for naming and classifying living things. The list is intended to honor the work of explorers and museum scientists who continue to discover new plants, animals, fungi and microbes. Its other purpose is not a celebratory one. The list is also intended to highlight the diversity of life on the planet, which is declining due to extinctions. In fact, scientists have said we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event triggered by human activities. More than 200 species were nominated, and committee members selected those that could best capture attention. “Some of the new species have interesting names; some highlight what little we really know about our planet,” Mary Liz Jameson, an associate professor at Wichita State University who chaired the international selection committee, said in a statement. Since 2000, an average of 36 new mammals have been discovered each year. This year’s mammal tally includes top-10 awardee Rhinopithecusstrykeri, a snub-nosed monkey with mostly black fur, a white beard and a penchant for sneezing in the rain. The committee also named tiny worms discovered 0.8 miles (1.3 kilometers) underground in a South African gold mine to the list. It became the deepest-living terrestrial multicellular organism known. The species was named Halicephalobus
FILE - A previously unknown type of snub-nosed monkey, discovered in northern Myanmar and dubbed Rhinopithecus strykeri, has a nose so upturned that the animals sneeze audibly when it rains. (Agencies)
mephisto in reference to the Faust legend of the devil. A giant millipede about the size of a sausage takes the title of largest millipede found in one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains. The only night-blooming orchid ever described, which opens its flowers around 10 p.m., also made the list, as did a species of fungus that produces a mushroom that smells fruity and resembles a sponge. It was named Spongiforma squarepantsii for the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants.
Not all members of the list are currently alive. The “walking cactus” is a 520-million-year-old animal dubbed Dianiacactiformis that appears to link an extinct group of wormlike creatures called lobopodians to modern arthropods, including insects, crustaceans and spiders. “The more species we discover, the more amazing the biosphere proves to be, and the better prepared we are to face whatever environmental challenges lie ahead,” Quentin Wheeler, an entomologist who directs the International Institute for Species Exploration at ASU, said in a release.
Device may let humans communicate with dolphins NEW YORK: A new dolphin speaker device could one day help us talk with these remarkably intelligent life forms, scientists say according to LiveScience. Dolphins live in a world of sound far beyond our own. They can distinguish very small differences in the frequency or pitch of sound waves, and can hear and generate low-frequency sounds below 20 kilohertz that lie within human capabilities, as well as high-frequency sounds of up to more than 150 kilohertz, well beyond the range of our hearing. In addition, dolphins not only can produce tones just as humans do, but they can also communicate at a variety of frequencies simultaneously. With whistles, burst-pulse sounds and clicks, dolphins use sound not only to communicate and to scan their surroundings and prey in the dark sea (called echolocation). Acoustic research of dolphins to date has mostly focused on recording their sounds and measuring their hearing abilities. Relatively few audio playback experiments have been attempted,
Scientists find new sensory organ in whales PARIS: Biologists on Wednesday reported they had discovered a new sensory organ on blue, humpback, minke and fin whales that helps explain why these mammals are so huge. In a study appearing in the journal Nature, researchers in the United States and Canada said the organ is located at the tip of the whale’s chin, in a niche of fibrous tissue that connects the lower jaw bones. Comprising a node of nerves, the organ orchestrates dramatic changes in jaw position that are essential for “lunge” feeding by the rorqual family of whales, Earth’s biggest vertebrates. These whales plunge into banks of krill, gulping up tons of water at one go and filtering it in seconds to get the tiny crustaceans needed for food. A 50-ton fin whale, the second-longest whale on the planet, can swoosh through 80 tons of water in one operation, netting 10 kilos (22 pounds) of krill in the process. The lunge requires “hyperexpandable” throat pleats, a Y-shaped cartilage structure connecting the chin and a lower jaw, made of two separate bones that move independently. “In terms of evolution, the innovation of this sensory organ has a fundamental role in one of the most extreme feeding methods of aquatic creatures,” said Bob Shadwick of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. “Because the physical features required to carry to carry out lunge-feeding evolved before the extremely large body sizes observed in today’s rorquals, it’s likely that this sensory organ -- and its role in coordinating successful lunging -- is responsible for rorquals claiming the largest-animals-on-Earth status.” -AFP
since it is difficult to find speakers that can project from a wide range of low to high frequencies like dolphins do, said Heidi Harley, a comparative cognitive psychologist at New College of Florida in Sarasota, who wasn’t involved in developing the dolphin speaker. Now scientists have developed a prototype dolphin speaker that can project the full range of all of the sounds dolphins make - from those used in communication to echolocation clicks. The researchers employed piezoelectric components that convert electricity into physical movement and vice versa. These components were capable of broadcasting both high-frequency and low-frequency sounds. The researchers precisely tailored the sizes of these components and the acrylic disk to create an extremely broad range of sounds. “I am happy if we can communicate with dolphins using the dolphin speaker,” researcher Yuka Mishima at the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology told LiveScience.
The dolphin speaker was developed just a few weeks ago, so dolphin scientists have not had a chance to try it out yet. Mishima and colleagues plan to work with such scientists using the new speaker. The idea is to broadcast specific series of vocalizations and then record the responses; over time, this back and forth could someday both reveal what dolphins are “saying” and allow possible human-dolphin communication. “We know very little about how dolphins classify their own sounds - we need more perceptual studies to find out, and this equipment may help us do that,” Harley told LiveScience. As to whether or not this invention could one day result in a human-dolphin translator device, “I think we have a lot to learn about dolphin vocalizations - their productions are complex,” Harley said. “There is still a lot of basic perceptual and acoustic analysis that needs to be done before we can make strong claims about how dolphins are using their vocalizations.”
Climate scientists say warming could exceed 3.5 C
PARIS: Climate researchers said Thursday the planet could warm by more than 3.5 degrees Celsius (6.3 degrees Fahrenheit), boosting the risk of drought, flood and rising seas. The UN’s target is a 2 C (3.6 degree Fahrenheit) limit on warming from preindustrial levels for manageable climate change. In a report issued on the penultimate day of new UN talks in Bonn, scientists said Earth’s average global temperature rise could exceed the dangerous 3.5 C (6.3 F) warming they had flagged only six months ago. Marion Vieweg, a policy researcher with German firm Climate Analytics, told AFP the 3.5 C (6.3 F) estimate had been based on the assumption that all countries will meet their pledges, in themselves inadequate, to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. New research has found this is not “a realistic assumption,” she said, adding that right now “we can’t quantify yet how much above” 3.5 C (6.3 F) Earth will warm. The monitoring tool is called Climate Action Tracker (CAT), a joint project of Climate Analytics, Ecofys and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Her colleague, Bill Hare, said the gap between countries’ promised interventions and the reality was “getting bigger.” Projections are for greenhouse-gas overshoot of between nine and 11 billion tons per year beyond the annual 44-billion-tonne ceiling needed by 2020 to achieve the 2 C (3.6 F) target. At the moment, the world emits about 48 billion tons of these gases, including CO2 and methane. The United States accounts for six billion tons, China seven and the European Union (EU) five, the CAT said. The 195 parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are meeting in the former German capital of Bonn for the first time since they agreed in Durban, South Africa, last December to forge a new global pact. The accord would be completed by 2015 and take effect in 2020. -AFP
Italy doctors save baby with smallest artificial heart
ROME: Italian doctors have saved the life of a 16-month-old boy by implanting the world’s smallest artificial heart to keep the infant alive until a donor was found for a transplant. The doctors at Rome’s Bambino Gesu hospital said the operation was carried out last month and made public this week. The baby, whose identity has not been disclosed, was kept alive for 13 days before the transplant and is now doing well. The baby was suffering from dilated myocardiopathy, a heart muscle disease which normally causes stretched or enlarged fibers of the heart. The disease gradually makes the heart weaker, stopping its ability to pump blood effectively. “This is a milestone,” surgeon Antonio Amodeo told Reuters television, adding that while the device was now used as bridge leading to a transplant, in the future it could be permanent. Before the implant, the child also had a serious infection around a mechanical pump that had been fitted earlier to support the function of his natural heart. “From a surgical point of view, this was not really difficult. The only difficulty that we met is that the child was operated on several times before,” he said. The tiny titanium pump weighs only 11 grams and can handle a blood flow of 1.5 liters a minute. An artificial heart for adults weighs 900 grams. Amodeo said the baby had become family and his team wanted to do everything to help him. “The patient was in our intensive care unit since one month of age. So he was a mascot for us, he was one of us,” the doctor said. “Every day, every hour, for more than one year he was with us. So when we had a problem we couldn’t do anything more than our best,” he said. Doctors said the device, invented by American Doctor Robert Jarvik, had been previously tested only on animals. The hospital needed special permission from Jarvik and the Italian health ministry before going ahead with the procedure. -Reuters
Babies know what’s boring, study finds
NEW YORK: Babies may be sponges for learning new information, but they are indeed active sponges, with new research showing that babies as young as 7 months are able to parse out the too-complex and downright boring, homing in on situations with just the right amount of “wow, how interesting” learning potential according to LiveScience. The study results, detailed this week online in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, provide evidence for an idea about baby cognition that makes intuitive sense, said lead study author Celeste Kidd, a doctoral candidate in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. The thinking goes that babies organize their search for information in the world in a way that makes the most sense for efficient learning. If a baby looks at something and it seems too simple, suggesting there’s not much learning value, he or she won’t pay attention to that situation or object, Kidd told LiveScience during a phone interview. The same seems to play out for stuff that’s too complex, which would seemingly hold a trove of learning potential, but which is actually not an efficient use of their brain time. Baby’s gaze
In the study, Kidd and her colleagues tracked the attention patterns of 72 babies, ages 7 to 8 months, using an eye-tracking device just below a computer screen. As long as the babies stared at the screen, the events being played out continued; but as soon as they looked away, suggesting no more interest, the trial ended. The nonverbal participants quickly realized they were in charge, so if they wanted to continue watching, they just needed to keep their gaze on the screen. In one of the experiments, the infants watched video animations of items, such as
a pacifier or ball, being revealed from behind three colorful boxes. In dozens of trials, the researchers varied when and where the objects would appear on the screen, with the more complex sequences being the least predictable. (For instance, a shoe may pop out of a pink box 10 times and then a blue box opens and a plane pops out, or the plane might pop up 100 times.) Inside a baby brain
The researchers used a computer model to figure out which patterns would be too predictable and those that would be way too complex. Essentially, the model acted like the researchers would expect an infant’s brain to behave, going into a new situation not knowing a thing, meaning equally expecting an object to pop up behind any of the three boxes; over time, these expectations get updated based on prior observations. Across two similar experiments, babies consistently lost interest when the video became too predictable, which meant the probability of a subsequent event happening was very high. For instance, if the shoe had popped up 20 times prior, it would be highly likely to pop up again, a subsequent event. “You would think that the more complex something is, the more interesting it would be. That’s not the case with babies,” study researcher Richard Aslin of the University of Rochester said in a statement. The infants’ attention and eye gaze, also drifted away when the sequence of events become too surprising, when the pattern seemed unpredictable due to the probability of something happening becoming very low. So if your little one is getting fussy by the little dance you’re doing, change it up and add another move or sound to boost the learning potential.
A telescope in Hawaii has captured a spectacular new view on a distant nebula, revealing a glowing swirl of gas that is at the center of an unsolved mystery surrounding the nebula’s birth. The photo from the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii shows the complex planetary nebula Sharpless 2-71, which is located about 3,260 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquila (The Eagle). Planetary nebulas form when a star like our sun exhausts its hydrogen fuel. The star’s outer layers expand and cool, creating a huge envelope of dust and gas. Radiation flowing from the dying star ionizes this envelope, causing it to glow. Rather, the term refers to their superficial resemblance to giant planets, when observed through early telescopes. For decades, astronomers assumed that Sharpless 2-71 (Sh2-71 for short) formed from the death throes of an obvious bright star near the planetary nebula’s center, which is prominent in the new photo. But now some researchers aren’t so sure. New observations have suggested that a dimmer, bluer star - visible just to the right and down from the bright central star - might actually be the nebula’s “birth parent,” researchers said. The brighter central star - which is actually part of a binary system - doesn’t appear to radiate enough high-energy ultraviolet light to account for the nebula’s intense glow, the reasoning goes, whereas the bluer star likely does. The strange and beautiful Sh2-71 has already attracted a fair bit of scientific attention, but more work needs to be done before researchers get a good handle on the mysterious object’s history. (AFP)