A new map of the human brain provides a clearer picture of how different areas of our brain are physically connected and how these connections relate to basic brain function.

The University of Georgia researchers and identified 358 landmarks throughout the brain related to memory, vision, language, arousal regulation and many other fundamental bodily operations. Their findings were published in the April, 2012 issue of Cerebral Cortex.

Diffusion tensor imaging showing fibrous connections in the brain. Image courtesy UGA News Service

The landmarks were discovered using diffusion tensor imaging, a sophisticated neuroimaging technique that allows scientists to visualize nerve fiber connections throughout the brain. Unlike many other neuroimaging studies, their map does not focus only on one section of the brain but rather the whole cerebral cortex.

Tianming Liu, assistant professor of computer science in the University of Georgia Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, and his team examined hundreds of healthy young adults to establish the landmarks, which they call ‘dense individualized and common connectivity-based cortical landmarks,’ or DICCCOL.

After extensive testing and comparison, the team determined that these nodes are present in every normal brain, meaning they can be used as a basis of comparison for those with damaged brain tissue or altered brain function.

Now the researchers plan to test their brain map by comparing healthy brains with those of children whose brains were damaged by exposure to cocaine while in the womb.

Prenatal cocaine exposure, or PCE, can cause serious damage to brain networks. Because of this, analysis of the damage provides the team with an excellent opportunity to evaluate the usefulness of their map.

After comparing the PCE brains to those of healthy individuals, they hope to determine the segments of the brain responsible for physical or mental disabilities observed in children exposed to cocaine. Liu said:

The PCE brain is disrupted in a systematic way; the whole brain is wrongly wired. We want to test our map in one of the worst cases, and then we will know if it will work in other cases.

Once the robustness of their map is established, Liu and his team hope that it may prove useful in the evaluation of many other brain disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease or stroke.

With this map, researchers hope to create a next-generation brain atlas that will be an alternative option to the atlas created by German anatomist Korbinian Brodmann more than 100 years ago, which is still commonly used in clinical and research settings.

Bottom line: University of Georgia researchers have developed a new map that provides a clearer picture of how different areas of the brain are physically connected and how these connections relate to basic brain function. The researchers identified 358 landmarks throughout the brain related to memory, vision, language, arousal regulation and many other fundamental bodily operations.

Read more from the the UGA News Service

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, and a beloved science communicator. In this video, he talks about the power and beauty of science as a human activity. The video is part of BigThink’s Humanizing Technology series. Listen to what Tyson has to say.

Last August, it was announced that Tyson will host a new sequel to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage television series. Wonder how that’s going … that’s something I would like to see.

Bottom line: Neil deGrasse Tyson, video, science. Enough said.

Neil deGrasse Tyson on how the Pluto debate began

Neil deGrasse Tyson selected as EarthSky Science Communicator of the Year

Host: Jorge Salazar
Lead Producer: Mike Brennan

ES 22 Producers: Deborah Byrd, Ryan Britton, Emily Howard

Science news of the week:

Extreme Weather Alerts coming soon to your cell phone

Fructose negatively affects learning and memory

Urban heat islands accelerate tree growth

A robot arm that can find information from a living human brain

A new planet discovered around the sunlike star KOI-872

Artist's concept of the KOI-872 planetary system. Image Credit: Southwest Research Institute

Song of the week:

Shearwater’s “You as You Were” from their new album Animal Joy. Shearwater are out on their US tour now; European tour starts in June. Catch them if you can!

This week’s featured stories:

Global Night Sky: Solar Eclipse, Lunar Eclipse Jorge Salazar and Deborah Byrd talk about the solar eclipse this weekend, and the lunar eclipse coming up on the morning of June 4.

1994 annular or ring eclipse of the sun. Image copyright Fred Espenak. Used with permission.

Chimp Attack! Ryan Britton is back with a Weird Science story about a chimpanzee that can plan ahead. This chimp has a bad reputation for throwing rocks at humans.

Shared Solar Jorge speaks with Dr. Vijay Modi about providing affordable “off-grid” electricity – and how it is changing lives in the developing world.

Thanks for listening in!

This week’s musical contributors:

Shearwater

Maneja Beto

The Black and White Years

One Hundred Flowers

Sleep Good

Scientists from Italy and Germany announced in early May 2012 that they have found the world’s oldest known human blood in a 5,300-year-old mummy. Materials scientist Marek Janko of the Center of Smart Interfaces at Darmstadt Technical University, Germany was on the science team, and he told EarthSky:

Our main finding is that blood cells can be preserved for 5,300 years and even detected after such a long time.

These researchers used cutting-edge nanotechnology including atomic force microscopy and light-based Raman spectroscopy to verify the shape and molecular composition of the blood. The scientists published their results on May 2, 2012 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Oldest known red blood cells, imaged by atomic force microscopy.

The Iceman - nicknamed Oetzi - whose bones were found in 1991 as he might have looked while alive. This reconstruction was displayed at the Archeological Museu of Bolzano during an official presentation of the reconstruction in 2011.

The scientists analyzed what’s called the Iceman, an exquisitely preserved mummy discovered frozen in a glacier. Two hikers in the Ötztal Alps along the border of Austria and Italy came upon the mummy in 1991. Since then, scientists have analyzed the Iceman – who has been nicknamed Oetzi – for clues about how he lived and died. They now believe, for example, that Oetzi died after being shot in the back by an arrow. Despite his icy preservation, no blood had been found in The Iceman – until now. This recent research team examined the areas near two wounds, one on the Iceman’s right hand and one in his back where an arrowhead was lodged. Janko told EarthSky:

By analyzing the red blood cells which we find, either on his hand wound or within the arrowhead wound, we could find the characteristic hemoglobin spectrum. Additionally, in the case of the red blood cells from the arrowhead wound at his back, we could determine another protein, fibrin, characteristic of the coagulation of blood, and the formation of a blood clot.

The Iceman, world's oldest mummy, discovered frozen in glacier near border of Austria and Italy. © South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology

In other words, the fibrin found on the Iceman indicated the arrow wound on his back was relatively fresh and most likely the fatal wound according to Janko. This forms exciting new evidence for the weapon in what is the oldest known crime scene known to science. Janko said there are other good reasons to study mummies like the Iceman:

Those remains can really give us some information about our ancestors, not only telling us what people used to eat in former times but even for example what kind of diseases they had. And those information can even make it possible to create medicines against different kinds of disease by knowing how they evolved.

Scientist examine the remains of the past to develop new medicines, said researcher Marek Janko. © South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology

Bottom line: Scientists have found the world’s oldest known blood in a 5,300-year-old mummy, known as the Iceman. Earlier scientists had determined that the Iceman likely died from an arrow in the back. These scientists, including materials scientist Marek Janko of the Center of Smart Interfaces at Darmstadt Technical University, Germany, were able to isolate blood from the Iceman’s ancient wounds. Janko told EarthSky that analyzing the ancient remains of the Iceman might help scientists today develop new medicines by studying how diseases evolve.

David Stuart on the Mayan calendar and 2012 doomsday predictions

Scientists discover an unusual stone circle in British Columbia

Native red oak seedlings grew as much as eight times faster in New York’s Central Park than in more rural, cooler settings in the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains, in an experiment conducted by Columbia University scientists. The study, published in the journal Tree Physiology in April, 2012. These scientists say the urban heat island – a well-documented phenomenon that makes large cities hotter than surrounding countryside – is the primary reason. A fallout of airborne nitrogen — a fertilizer — from urban pollution might have helped the trees as well.

Red oaks in New York City were found to grow eight times faster than nearby rural oaks. The difference is thought to be due to the urban heat island effect. Image via Inhabit NYC

Tree physiologist Kevin Griffin of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory oversaw the study, which was led by Stephanie Y. Searle, a Washington, D.C., environmental researcher who was a Columbia undergraduate when she started the research.

The urban heat island effect is what sends city-dwellers on extended vacations to the cooler beaches or the mountains in the summertime. The effect makes nighttime temperatures, in particular, significantly hotter than they would be otherwise. According to a press release from Columbia:

Griffin said that the city’s hot summer nights, while a misery for humans, are a boon to trees, allowing them to perform more of the chemical reactions needed for photosynthesis when the sun comes back up.

Central Park in NYC. In 2007 and 2008, researchers planted red oak seedlings here, as well as in two rural locations, and watched how quickly the trees grew. Image via Columbia University Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.

In spring 2007 and 2008, these scientists planted seedlings in northeastern Central Park, in two forest plots in the suburban Hudson Valley, and near NYC’s Ashokan Reservoir, in the Catskill foothills some 100 miles north of Manhattan. They cared for all the trees with fertilizer and weekly watering. Maximum daily temperatures around the city seedlings averaged more than 4 degrees F higher. Mininum temperature averages – that is, nighttime temps – were more than 8 degrees higher in contrast to the more rural locations. By August, the city seedlings had developed eight times more biomass than the country ones. Most of the increase was in the form of leaves, the researchers said.

The researchers largely ruled out other factors that might drive tree growth, in part by growing similar seedlings in the lab under identically varying temperatures, and showing much the same result. Due to air pollution, the city also has higher fallout of airborne nitrogen — a fertilizer — which could have helped the trees as well. But the scientists said they believe higher temperature from the urban heat island effect were the main factor.

Red oaks and their close relatives dominate areas ranging from northern Virginia to southern New England, so the study may have implications for changing climate and forest composition over a wide region. The researchers said in their press release:

With half the human population now living in cities, understanding how nature will interact with urban trees is important … Some things about the city are bad for trees. This shows there are at least certain attributes that are beneficial.

Bottom line: Red oak seedings planted in New York’s Central Park grew eight times faster than the same trees planted in more rural locations, in an experiment conducted in 2007 and 2008. Tree physiologist Kevin Griffin of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory oversaw the study, which was led by Stephanie Y. Searle, a Washington, D.C., environmental researcher who was a Columbia undergraduate when she started the research. The results were published in April, 2012 in the journal Tree Physiology.

Read more at the Earth Institute of Columbia University

The 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic was one month ago – on April 14, 1912. Astronomers at Texas State University announced in March of this year that the pull of the moon – its creation of tides in Earth’s oceans – might have played a role in the sinking of the Titanic nearly 100 years ago, causing death by ice water for approximately 1,500 people in the North Atlantic Ocean.

Titanic sinking. Painting by Willy Stöwer, 1912, via Wikimedia Commons

Texas State has a nice write-up about the moon’s possible role, which includes a cool Titanic image gallery apparently owned by one of the astronomers. The story is that an unusually close approach by the moon on January 4, 1912, would have caused abnormally high tides that might have pushed the fateful iceberg into the Titantic’s path. According to a press release from Texas State:

What they found was that a once-in-many-lifetimes event occurred on that Jan. 4 [1912]. The moon and sun had lined up in such a way their gravitational pulls enhanced each other, an effect well-known as a “spring tide.” The moon’s perigee—closest approach to Earth—proved to be its closest in 1,400 years, and came within six minutes of a full moon. On top of that, the Earth’s perihelion—closest approach to the sun—happened the day before. In astronomical terms, the odds of all these variables lining up in just the way they did were, well, astronomical …

Initially, the researchers looked to see if the enhanced tides caused increased glacial calving in Greenland, where most icebergs in that part of the Atlantic originated. They quickly realized that to reach the shipping lanes by April when the Titanic sank, any icebergs breaking off the Greenland glaciers in Jan. 1912 would have to move unusually fast and against prevailing currents.

According to the Texas State group, the answer lies in grounded and stranded icebergs. As Greenland icebergs travel southward, many become stuck in the shallow waters off the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. Normally, icebergs remain in place and cannot resume moving southward until they’ve melted enough to refloat or a high enough tide frees them. A single iceberg can become stuck multiple times on its journey southward, a process that can take several years.

But the unusually high tide in Jan. 1912 would have been enough to dislodge many of those icebergs and move them back into the southbound ocean currents, where they would have just enough time to reach the shipping lanes for that fateful encounter with the Titanic.

This research comes from Texas State physics faculty members Donald Olson and Russell Doescher, along with Roger Sinnott, senior contributing editor at Sky & Telescope magazine. They published their findings in the April 2012 edition of Sky & Telescope, on newsstands now.

Bottom line: An especially close full moon might have caused high tides that ultimately sent an iceberg into the path of the Titantic, on April 14, 1912. That’s according to Texas State physics faculty members Donald Olson and Russell Doescher, along with Roger Sinnott, senior contributing editor at Sky & Telescope magazine, who published their findings in the April 2012 edition of Sky & Telescope.

In a part of the ocean known as the North Pacific Gyre, human-produced plastic has increased 100-fold over the past 40 years, according to a new study. This is the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is not an actual floating island of garbage, but which is filled with floating bits of plastic, often fingernail-sized, mostly from the U.S. west coast and from the east coast of Asia. The new study led by graduate student researcher Miriam Goldstein at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego indicates that the plastic in this part of the ocean has provided new habitats for some marine creatures, which in turn can be expected to create a subtle shift in the ocean food web. The study was published May 9, 2012 in an online issue of the journal Biology Letters.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is located within the North Pacific Gyre, one of five major ocean gyres on Earth. In the video at the bottom of this post, Miriam Goldstein talks about why these ocean gyres exist, and how plastic gets into them. Image Credit: Fangz via Wikimedia Commons

Scripps Institution of Oceanography research ship New Horizon. Miriam Goldstein and colleagues sailed aboard this ship to study plastics in the North Pacific Gyre. Image Credit: Scripps

Which sea creatures are being affected? One is the marine insect Halobates sericeus, which are sea skaters or water striders. They are related to the water skaters you might have seen on the surfaces of fresh-water ponds.

Miriam Goldstein of Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Image credit: Chang Shu

Marine sea skaters live on the ocean surface. They lay their eggs on floating objects such as seashells, seabird feathers, tar lumps and pumice … and now plastic garbage, according to Goldstein’s study.

The result is that the North Pacific Gyre now has sea skater eggs in greater density than before. It’s the first increase known among marine invertebrates (animal without backbones) in the open ocean. More sea skaters might have consequences for animals across the marine food web, such as crabs that prey on sea skaters and their eggs, and such as the animals that eat the crabs, and so on.

That’s because, here on Earth, everything is connected to everything else. We captured some video with Miriam Goldstein a couple of years ago, which you can see here:

Goldstein said in a press statement released May 9, 2012:

Plastic only became widespread in late ’40s and early ’50s, but now everyone uses it and over a 40-year range we’ve seen a dramatic increase in ocean plastic. Historically we have not been very good at stopping plastic from getting into the ocean so hopefully in the future we can do better.

Bottom line: Plastic in the part of the ocean known as the North Pacific Gyre has increased 100-fold over the past 40 years and is providing a new habitat for sea creatures, according to a study led by Miriam Goldstein and published in Biology Letters on May 9. This change can be expected to affect the ocean food web.

Read more from Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Miriam Goldstein on the North Pacific Garbage Patch

Researchers have developed a way to use robotics to find and record information from neurons in the living brain. They began their studies with a living mouse brain. The labs of Ed Boyden, associate professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, and Craig Forest, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, collaborated to develop the technique, which they call in vivo robotics. They published their first paper about the technique in the journal Nature Methods on May 6, 2012.

The method could be particularly useful in studying brain disorders such as schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, autism and epilepsy, Boyden said.

Researchers at MIT and Georgia Tech are using robotics to probe the living brain. Image via Shutterstock

They have created a robotic arm that can find and record information from the brain's neurons. Credit: Sputnik Animation and MIT McGovern Institute

They developed a robot arm – guided by a cell-detecting computer algorithm – to identify and record information from the brain’s neurons. These scientists say their technique acquires this information with better accuracy and speed than a human experimenter, who would have to be trained for months in order to accomplish the same work.

Why access the inner workings of a neuron inside the living brain? Such access offers useful information about the brain’s patterns of electrical activity, its shape, even a profile of which genes are turned on at a given moment, these scientists say.

They say that their technique will ultimately enable researchers to classify the thousands of different types of cells in the brain, map the ways they connect to each other, and figure out how diseased cells differ from normal cells.

MIT researcher Ed Boyden (left) and Georgia Tech researchers Suhasa Kodandaramaia (seated) and Craig Forest. They say the training of humans to do this type of work is so difficult that only a few labs do it at present. Image Credit: MIT

Bottom line: Researchers at MIT and Georgia Tech have created a robotic arm that can find and record information from neurons in the living brain. They published their first paper about the technique in the journal Nature Methods on May 6, 2012.

Read more about this story from MIT

Globaïa has released a short film titled Welcome to the Anthropocene, that is, the age of large-scale human influence on Earth. This 3-minute film takes you through the last 250 years of human history, from the start of the Industrial Revolution in England around 1750 to the Rio+20 Summit – commonly known as the first Earth Summit – held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. The Planet Under Pressure conference, held in London in March 2012, commissioned the film.

Final issues statement from Planet Under Pressure conference, London 2012

Globaïa says of the film that it:

… charts the growth of humanity into a global force on an equivalent scale to major geological processes.

And watching it powerfully conveys that idea. It was the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen who popularized the term Anthropocene (Eugene F. Stoermer of University of Michigan coined it) beginning around the turn of the 21st century. These scientists used this term to describe the influence of human behavior on the Earth’s atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Our geological era is currently officially called the Holocene by scientists, and it’s defined as having begun around 12,000 years ago, as the last major ice age was ending. The word Holocene stems from a Greek words meaning whole or entire and recent. Crutzen and Stoermer suggested Anthropocene instead to convey the idea that our human influence is now so significant as to warrant the start of a new geological era. Read Crutzen and Stoermer’s original proposal to re-name our geological era the Anthropocene.

It’s what we at EarthSky call the Human World. What is a human world?

Many scientists are now using the term Anthropocene to describe our era. For example, the Geological Society of America titled its 2011 annual meeting: Archean to Anthropocene. But many people in the U.S., in particular, still resist the idea that humanity can exert a major influence on Earth. For example, the media debate in the U.S. (it is not a scientific debate, and it is not as heated in other countries as here) over climate change hinges for some on the disbelief that we humans could affect Earth so profoundly as to change its climate. As centuries pass, as humanity moves forward from our time and as our ancestors look back, they might accept the notion of our powerful human influence more readily.

Bottom line: Globaïa’s new short film is titled Welcome to the Anthropocene. It takes you through the last 250 years of human history, from the start of the Industrial Revolution in England to the first Earth Summit in June 1992. The Planet Under Pressure conference, held in London in March 2012, commissioned the film.

More on the Welcome to the Anthropocene project here

X-Ray vision might become a reality on your cell phone in the not-too-distant future. Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas have designed an imager chip that could turn mobile phones into devices that can see through walls, wood, plastics, paper and other objects.

The team’s research linked two scientific advances. One involves tapping into an unused range in the electromagnetic spectrum called the terahertz range. The other is a microchip technology called CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor). Dr. Kenneth O, a professor of electrical engineering at UT Dallas led the research. He said:

CMOS is affordable and can be used to make lots of chips. The combination of CMOS and terahertz means you could put this chip and receiver on the back of a cellphone, turning it into a device carried in your pocket that can see through objects.

Due to privacy concerns, Dr. O and his team are focused on uses in the distance range of less than four inches.

Photo credit:

Consumer applications of such technology could range from finding studs in walls to authentication of important documents. Businesses could use it to detect counterfeit money.

Terahertz can also be used for imaging to detect cancer tumors, diagnosing disease through breath analysis, and monitoring air toxicity. Dr. O said:

There are all kinds of things you could be able to do that we just haven’t yet thought about.

The research was presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in February, 2012.

Bottom line: Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas have designed an imager chip that could turn mobile phones into devices that can see through walls, wood, plastics, paper and other objects.

Read more from Science Daily