Japanese and New Zealand scientists discover more marine critters at 1200+ feet deep off NZ using the Skinkai submersible. (video)
Scientists have discovered rare marine creatures living hundreds of metres below the ocean surface.

Scientists discover rare new marine creatures

By Tony Field

Japanese and New Zealand scientists have discovered rare marine creatures living hundreds of metres below the ocean surface.

The research vessel Yokosuka has docked in Auckland, after exploring underwater mountains and volcanoes, about 1000 kilometres northeast of New Zealand.

Images recorded by the scientists show creatures they encountered 400 to 500 metres beneath the surface, some in areas containing active marine volcanoes along the Kermadec Trench.



http://www.3news.co.nz/Scientists-discover-rare-new-marine-creatures/tabid/1160/articleID/319926/Default.aspx#!

More jellyfish blooms? The jury is still out but one researcher writes that it's possible due to loss of predators, pollutants, and global warming.

Are Ocean Conditions Ripe for a Jellyfish Takeover?

By Elizabeth Howell on Livescience.com

Data on jellyfish populations is making it hard to figure out if they are on the rise, and – if that rise is indeed happening – why it is so.

In 2000, a bloom of sea tomato jellyfish in Australia was so enormous — it stretched for more than 1,000 miles from north to south — that it was even visible from space. It was certainly a bloom that Australian jellyfish researcher Lisa-ann Gershwin won't forget.

http://www.livescience.com/40951-oceans-ripe-for-jellyfish-takover.html#!

News tips:

please read this interesting article on co2science.org

Ocean Acidification Database

Our Ocean Acidification Database consists of an ever-expanding archive on the response of marine organisms to ocean acidification as reported in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.  Results are tabulated by response, including calcification, fertility, growth, metabolism and survival. To begin, click on one of the links below.

http://www.co2science.org/data/acidification/acidification.php

Scaring away sharks in AU using recorded sounds of orcas - a theory to be tested but there's concern that it could chase away other animals, upsetting the marine balance.

'Screams' could chase away other marine life
by: Mitchell Nadin
From: The Australian
November 05, 2013 12:00AM

RECORDINGS of killer whale "screams" intended to scare sharks from popular West Australian beaches could end up chasing away other marine life, including dolphins.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/screams-could-chase-away-other-marine-life/story-e6frg8y6-1226753085502#!

News tips:

please read this interesting article by Asma Mostafa, Laila Anjuman Banu, Fashiur Rahman and Sudip Paul on Journal of Anthropology

Craniofacial Anthropometric Profile of Adult Bangladeshi Buddhist Chakma Females

The present descriptive, observational, and cross-sectional study was designed to establish the baseline measurements of the craniofacial anthropometrical parameters and indices of 100 adult Bangladeshi Buddhist Chakma females aged between 25 and 45 years, residing at different locations of Chittagong and Rangamati cities. A total of ten craniofacial variables were measured using physical and photographic procedures. Craniofacial indices were calculated from those craniofacial variables. The craniofacial indices showed that Chakma females are mostly hyperbrachycephalic, hypereuryprosopic, and mesorrhine, with intermediate eyes and long narrow ears.

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/janthro/2013/676924/

Inaugurato oggi a Catania presso i laboratori Imm-Cnr, ospitati nel sito di StMicroelectronics, un innovativo strumento elettronico, unico in Italia. Sarà in grado di variare le proprietà dei materiali, offrendo la possibilità  di realizzare una vastissima gamma di dispositivi applicativi dalla nanoelettronica  alla sensoristica

Il microscopio elettronico analitico 'sub-angstrom' più potente d’Europa è stato acquisito dall’Istituto per la microelettronica e i microsistemi del Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche (Imm-Cnr) e inaugurato questa mattina a Catania, presso i laboratori dell’Istituto ospitati nel sito di STMicroelectronics (ST).

Che le donne siano per natura più ansiose non è solo un preconcetto culturale: la dimostrazione scientifica arriva dall’Isn-Cnr di Catanzaro, in collaborazione con l’Irccs Fondazione Santa Lucia di Roma. Alla base di questa predisposizione sembrerebbe esserci una variante del gene 5-Httlpr implicato nella regolazione della serotonina. La ricerca è stata pubblicata su Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

L’ansia è una normale emozione, che tutti gli esseri umani provano, e ha la funzione fondamentale di segnalare situazioni pericolose o spiacevoli, mediante le modificazioni fisiologiche prodotte dall’adrenalina che entra in circolo nel sangue. Entro certi livelli, dunque, l’ansia è necessaria in quanto ci consente di affrontare situazioni temute e stressanti. Se però supera certi limiti, può diventare anche la base per lo sviluppo di disturbi quali attacchi di panico e fobie. Negli ultimi anni le moderne neuroscienze hanno dimostrato che esiste una certa predisposizione nell’essere ansiosi: in particolare, una variante del gene 5-Httlpr, che regola l’espressione della serotonina, causa al soggetto portatore un aumento della quantità di questo neurotrasmettitore, capace di modulare i comportamenti emotivi.

Ageing: Participation and Health for the Old) has developed an ICT tool in prototype phase that will help seniors to monitor their health and the security of their home and avoid social exclusion by means of digital technologies. The final aim of the project is to improve seniors’ quality of life and boost their autonomy. Starting this week, the prototype will be tested by more than 40 people at the Ageing Institute in Barcelona (Spain) and at the Union of Senior Organisations in Slovenia.

The platform developed as part of the project consists of a tablet to access services and simplified tools for seniors that are adapted to their needs. For example, to help people in the third age to prevent health problems, the platform allows users to follow critical indicators such as artery pressure, monitor physical activity and check patients’ historical health data, among other services.

Furthermore, the platform boosts seniors’ home security because it is connected to their house with sensors that control factors like gas, fire, CO2, temperature, movement detection, etc. Thus, via the tablet, users can receive warnings and assistance in case of emergency.

Finally, the platform has social participation tools to promote more senior interaction with friends and family members through social networks and simplified email systems with more user-friendly design that will allow them to share photos, messages and emails, among other things, intuitively and simply.

Thus, the project adheres to the three main points of the World Health Organisation’s Active Ageing policy: health, security and participation.

The human brain keeps changing throughout a person’s lifetime. New connections are continually created while synapses that are no longer in use degenerate. To date, little is known about the mechanisms behind these processes. Jülich neuroinformatician Dr. Markus Butz has now been able to ascribe the formation of new neural networks in the visual cortex to a simple homeostatic rule that is also the basis of many other self-regulating processes in nature. With this explanation, he and his colleague Dr. Arjen van Ooyen from Amsterdam also provide a new theory on the plasticity of the brain – and a novel approach to understanding learning processes and treating brain injuries and diseases.

The brains of adult humans are by no means hard wired. Scientists have repeatedly established this fact over the last few years using different imaging techniques. This so-called neuroplasticity not only plays a key role in learning processes, it also enables the brain to recover from injuries and compensate for the loss of functions. Researchers only recently found out that even in the adult brain, not only do existing synapses adapt to new circumstances, but new connections are constantly formed and reorganized. However, it was not yet known how these natural rearrangement processes are controlled in the brain. In the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology, Butz and van Ooyen now present a simple rule that explains how these new networks of neurons are formed (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003259).

“It’s very likely that the structural plasticity of the brain is the basis for long-term memory formation,” says Markus Butz, who has been working at the recently established Simulation Laboratory Neuroscience at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre for the past few months. “And it’s not just about learning. Following the amputation of extremities, brain injury, the onset of neurodegenerative diseases, and strokes, huge numbers of new synapses are formed in order to adapt the brain to the lasting changes in the patterns of incoming stimuli.”

Activity regulates synapse formation

These results show that the formation of new synapses is driven by the tendency of neurons to maintain a ‘pre-set’ electrical activity level. If the average electric activity falls below a certain threshold, the neurons begin to actively build new contact points. These are the basis for new synapses that deliver additional input – the neuron firing rate increases. This also works the other way round: as soon as the activity level exceeds an upper limit, the number of synaptic connections is reduced to prevent any overexcitation – the neuron firing rate falls. Similar forms of homeostasis frequently occur in nature, for example in the regulation of body temperature and blood sugar levels.

However, Markus Butz stresses that this does not work without a certain minimal excitation of the neurons: “A neuron that no longer receives any stimuli loses even more synapses and will die off after some time. We must take this restriction into account if we want the results of our simulations to agree with observations.” Using the visual cortex as an example, the neuroscientists have studied the principles according to which neurons form new connections and abandon existing synapses. In this region of the brain, about 10 % of the synapses are continuously regenerated. When the retina is damaged, this percentage increases even further. Using computer simulations, the authors succeeded in reconstructing the reorganization of the neurons in a way that conforms to experimental results from the visual cortex of mice and monkeys with damaged retinas.

The visual cortex is particularly suitable for demonstrating the new growth rule, because it has a property referred to as retinotopy: This means that points projected beside each other onto the retina are also arranged beside each other when they are projected onto the visual cortex, just like on a map. If areas of the retina are damaged, the cells onto which the associated images are projected receive different inputs. “In our simulations, you can see that areas which no longer receive any input from the retina start to build crosslinks, which allow them to receive more signals from their neighbouring cells,” says Markus Butz. These crosslinks are formed slowly from the edge of the damaged area towards the centre, in a process resembling the healing of a wound, until the original activity level is more or less restored.

Synaptic and structural plasticity

“The new growth rule provides structural plasticity with a principle that is almost as simple as that of synaptic plasticity,” says co-author Arjen van Ooyen, who has been working on models for the development of neural networks for decades. As early as 1949, psychology professor Donald Olding Hebb discovered that connections between neurons that are frequently activated will become stronger. Those that exchange little information will become weaker. Today, many scientists believe that this Hebbian principle plays a central role in learning and memory processes. While synaptic plasticity in involved primarily in short-term processes that take from a few milliseconds to several hours, structural plasticity extends over longer time scales, from several days to months.


Structural plasticity therefore plays a particularly important part during the (early) rehabilitation phase of patients affected by neurological diseases, which also lasts for weeks and months. The vision driving the project is that valuable ideas for the treatment of stroke patients could result from accurate predictions of synapse formation. If doctors knew how the brain structure of a patient will change and reorganize during treatment, they could determine the ideal times for phases of stimulation and rest, thus improving treatment efficiency.

New approach for numerous applications

“It was previously assumed that structural plasticity also follows the principle of Hebbian plasticity. The findings suggest that structural plasticity is governed by the homeostatic principle instead, which was not taken into consideration before,” says Prof. Abigail Morrison, head of the Simulation Laboratory Neuroscience at Jülich. Her team is already integrating the new rule into the freely accessible simulation software NEST, which is used by numerous scientists worldwide.

These findings are also of relevance for the Human Brain Project. Neuroscientists, medical scientists, computer scientists, physicists, and mathematicians in Europe are working hand in hand to simulate the entire human brain on high-performance computers of the next generation in order to better understand how it functions. “Due to the complex synaptic circuitry in the human brain, it’s not plausible that its fault tolerance and flexibility are achieved based on static connection rules. Models are therefore required for a self-organization process,” says Prof. Markus Diesmann from Jülich’s Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, who is involved in the project. He heads Computational and Systems Neuroscience (INM-6), a subinstitute working at the interface between neuroscientific research and simulation technology.

What does it mean to be a civilized person? A civilized nation? How are these notions changing over time? And from one country to another? In the recently concluded project Civility, Virtue and Emotions in Europe and Asia, researchers from several different countries and disciplines have studied these questions. One of the initiators is Professor Helge Jordheim, Academic Director for the inter-faculty research programme KULTRANS.

Jordheim and his colleagues have studied what was considered to be civilized behaviour in Europe and Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

– Western identity and mores were formed by the encounter with non-Western cultures, Jordheim states.

The period studied by the researchers was one characterized by imperialism. In light of this, the relationship between “the West and the rest” is particularly interesting, Jordheim claims.

– In Western Europe, the prevailing notion was “civilization, that’s us”. Even in Asia, the idea that standards were defined by the West tended to prevail. Implicitly, the objective was: how can we catch up with the West?

A boost in self-confidence

At the same time, there was a clear perception in Asia about not just mimicking the West, Jordheim emphasizes. The Asian countries were concerned with “finding their own path”.

– A challenge for the entire project has consisted in avoiding the pitfall of thinking that all influence emanated from Western Europe. It’s not as simple as that. For example, we can see that there was a widespread exchange of ideas between the Ottoman Empire and the Arabic and Persian cultures, which also had an impact on the Urdu-speaking population of India. Thus, the influence appears to be far less homogenous than we have previously assumed, Jordheim says.

He believes that the Russo-Japanese War in the early 20th century was a key event for the Asian civilizing process.

– This was the first time that Asia defeated the West. It resulted in a real boost in self-confidence, and had an impact on the kinds of ideas that were nurtured, Jordheim says.

Similarly, the researchers have been interested in how the civilizing influence to some extent also ran in the opposite direction – from East to West.

The written word shapes our thoughts

Jordheim and his colleagues have mainly studied different types of texts from the countries included in the project.

– We have looked at a lot of self-help literature, such as “how to become a better person” and literature on “etiquette”. We have also studied political documents that present ideas of how the nation should be formed. In addition, we have studied texts from encyclopaedias, which help explain concepts.

Jordheim points out that such texts help mould the views of the population in a particular manner.

– They help inculcate and foster certain emotions, while suppressing others. To render a population more civilized, changes must occur at the level of the individual, he says.

Scandinavia: A natural paradox

Jordheim’s own research has focused on the concept of civilization in Scandinavia – a region which is rarely included when processes of civilization are being studied.

– Scandinavia stands apart because civilization is relatively unimportant as a notion. Here, the concept of dannelse (formation) is used to refer to the same, Jordheim states.

Scandinavia is different also in other respects, mainly due to the population’s relationship to nature.

– The entire idea of civilization involves abandoning nature and the natural state. This is problematic in Scandinavia, and especially in Norway, since so much of our identity is associated with nature, he says.

Jordheim argues that much of what is traditionally regarded as a development in the right direction in other countries will not be perceived in the same way in Scandinavia.

For example, migration to the cities will not necessarily be regarded as a sign of progress. The Scandinavian discourse fosters ideas and notions of nature as the ideal – not civilization as such. Viewed thus, the idea of civilization is paradoxical, he says.

Fertile ground for Social Darwinism

Jordheim believes that this notion of nature is also reflected in the kinds of emotions that are regarded as “civilized” in Scandinavia.

– In many other countries, the civilizing process entails that emotions must be curbed. This is not necessarily so in Scandinavia. Emotions that are presumed to be natural, such as courage, anger and maternal instincts, are also regarded as desirable, he says.

In his research, Jordheim has been concerned with how these notions of civilization, nature and emotions helped Social Darwinism gain a firm foothold in Scandinavia, especially in Norway.

– Ideas that were explained on the basis of nature had already gained widespread acceptance. With Social Darwinism, “civilized” ideas could be integrated while nature maintained its position, Jordheim claims.

Private and global

Jordheim says that what makes the project particularly interesting is its wide scope – from the private realm, to global matters.

– On the one hand, this is about how you behave within your own home. How do you behave towards your wife and children? What is the ideal? At the same time, this is about the nation and the world order.

– It is important for all countries to appear civilized. How civilized a country is considered to be determines its position in the “global pecking order”, he says.

http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/research/news-and-events/news/2013/civilization-is-defined-by-the-others.html