Meet Dreadnoughtus, the herbivore that was seven times more massive than T. rex, and is likely to be the largest land animal to have ever lived.
An artist’s impression of Dreadnoughtus when it was alive.
Described overnight in Scientific Reports, the long-necked dinosaur has been classified as an entirely new genus and species, Dreadnoughtus schrani – a name fitting its impressive size.
The researchers report that Dreadnoughtus weighed almost 60 tonnes, was two storeys tall at the shoulder, and measured a massive 26-metres long long from nose to tail. The fossil was discovered in the southern Patagonia region of Argentina in 2005, and it’s the largest fossil mass of a single organism ever uncovered.
“It weighed as much as a dozen African elephants or more than seven T. rex. Shockingly, skeletal evidence shows that when this [specimen] died, it was not yet full grown. It is by far the best example we have of any of the most giant creatures to ever walk the planet,” Kenneth Lacovara, an associate professor at Drexel University, in California, who discovered the fossil, said in a press release.
Dreadnoughtus appears to have lived in the late Cretaceous Periods (around 77 million years ago) in high-altitude and forested valleys, and is part of a group of large herbivores known as titanosaurs. Despite the size of titanosaurs, scientists still know very little about them, and this is the largest fossil ever found of one of the giant species.
“For the [largest] dinosaurs, which we call titanosaurs, finding anything around 20 percent of the fossil is usually considered a home run,” Lacovara told William Herkewitz, a journalist forPopular Mechanics. “Normally you only find a handful of bones, and the previous record was a 27 percent complete skeleton. With Dreadnoughtus we found 70 percent.”
Dreadnoughtus‘s fossils are so huge that it took four annual trips to get them all out of the ground, and another four years of cleaning and prep before the specimen could be studied.
For scale, here is Lacovara photographed against the right tibia (shin bone) of Dreadnoughtus.
The reason it’s usually so hard to find almost-complete fossils of large dinosaurs is because fossilisation requires an animal to be buried quickly in sediment – something that’s quite tricky for an animal the size of a building.
But Lacovara believes that a rapid pair of floods, caused by broken earthen levees in the valley where Dreadnoughtus was found, resulted in the quick fossilisation of the species. Sedimentary records from the area support this find,Popular Mechanics reports.
It’s likely Dreadnoughtus may be the largest animal to ever lived on land, but it’s a complicated claim as other contenders, such as Argentinosaurus, are only known from a handful of fossils, so scientists have only been able to roughly estimate their size.
But for now, this is the largest land animal we’ve been able to properly calculate the size of. And the researchers are using the incredibly detailed fossil record, which includes evidence of muscle attachment sites, to build computer models to explain how dinosaurs moved.
“As you understand these creatures’ locomotion and ability to move around, you can start answering questions about feeding, their place in the ecosystem, and a whole number of other avenues of research,” co-author Jason C. Poole from Drexel University told Popular Mechanics.
Scans and neuroscience are helping scientists understand what happens to the brain when you learn a second language
Kara Morgan-Short using electrophysiology to examine the inner workings of the brain during language learning.
Learning a foreign language can increase the size of your brain. This is what Swedish scientists discovered when they used brain scans to monitor what happens when someone learns a second language. The study is part of a growing body of research using brain imaging technologies to better understand the cognitive benefits of language learning. Tools like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and electrophysiology, among others, can now tell us not only whether we need knee surgery or have irregularities with our heartbeat, but reveal what is happening in our brains when we hear, understand and produce second languages.
The Swedish MRI study showed that learning a foreign language has a visible effect on the brain. Young adult military recruits with a flair for languages learned Arabic, Russian or Dari intensively, while a control group of medical and cognitive science students also studied hard, but not at languages. MRI scans showed specific parts of the brains of the language students developed in size whereas the brain structures of the control group remained unchanged. Equally interesting was that learners whose brains grew in the hippocampus and areas of the cerebral cortex related to language learning had better language skills than other learners for whom the motor region of the cerebral cortex developed more.
In other words, the areas of the brain that grew were linked to how easy the learners found languages, and brain development varied according to performance. As the researchers noted, while it is not completely clear what changes after three months of intensive language study mean for the long term, brain growth sounds promising.
Looking at functional MRI brain scans can also tell us what parts of the brain are active during a specific learning task. For example, we can see why adult native speakers of a language like Japanese cannot easily hear the difference between the English “r” and “l” sounds (making it difficult for them to distinguish “river” and “liver” for example). Unlike English, Japanese does not distinguish between “r” and “l” as distinct sounds. Instead, a single sound unit (known as a phoneme) represents both sounds.
When presented with English words containing either of these sounds, brain imaging studies show that only a single region of a Japanese speaker’s brain is activated, whereas in English speakers, two different areas of activation show up, one for each unique sound.
For Japanese speakers, learning to hear and produce the differences between the two phonemes in English requires a rewiring of certain elements of the brain’s circuitry. What can be done? How can we learn these distinctions?
Early language studies based on brain research have shown that Japanese speakers can learn to hear and produce the difference in “r” and “l” by using a software program that greatly exaggerates the aspects of each sound that make it different from the other. When the sounds were modified and extended by the software, participants were more easily able to hear the difference between the sounds. In one study, after only three 20-minute sessions (just a single hour’s worth), the volunteers learned to successfully distinguish the sounds, even when the sounds were presented as part of normal speech.
This sort of research might eventually lead to advances in the use of technology for second-language learning. For example, using ultrasound machines like the ones used to show expectant parents the features and movements of their babies in the womb, researchers in articulatory phonetics have been able to explain to language learners how to make sounds by showing them visual images of how their tongue, lips, and jaw should move with their airstream mechanisms and the rise and fall of the soft palate to make these sounds.
Ian Wilson, a researcher working in Japan, has produced some early reports of studies of these technologies that are encouraging. Of course, researchers aren’t suggesting that ultrasound equipment be included as part of regular language learning classrooms, but savvy software engineers are beginning to come up with ways to capitalise on this new knowledge by incorporating imaging into cutting edge language learning apps.
Kara Morgan-Short, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, uses electrophysiology to examine the inner workings of the brain. She and her colleagues taught second-language learners to speak an artificial language – a miniature language constructed by linguists to test claims about language learnability in a controlled way.
In their experiment, one group of volunteers learned through explanations of the rules of the language, while a second group learned by being immersed in the language, similar to how we all learn our native languages. While all of their participants learned, it was the immersed learners whose brain processes were most like those of native speakers. Interestingly, up to six months later, when they could not have received any more exposure to the language at home because the language was artificial, these learners still performed well on tests, and their brain processes had become even more native-like.
In a follow-up study, Morgan-Short and her colleagues showed that the learners who demonstrated particular talents at picking up sequences and patterns learned grammar particularly well through immersion. Morgan-Short said: “This brain-based research tells us not only that some adults can learn through immersion, like children, but might enable us to match individual adult learners with the optimal learning contexts for them.”
Brain imaging research may eventually help us tailor language learning methods to our cognitive abilities, telling us whether we learn best from formal instruction that highlights rules, immersing ourselves in the sounds of a language, or perhaps one followed by the other.
However we learn, this recent brain-based research provides good news. We know that people who speak more than one language fluently have better memories and are more cognitively creative and mentally flexible than monolinguals. Canadian studies suggest that Alzheimer’s disease and the onset of dementia are diagnosed later for bilinguals than for monolinguals, meaning that knowing a second language can help us to stay cognitively healthy well into our later years.
Even more encouraging is that bilingual benefits still hold for those of us who do not learn our second languages as children. Edinburgh University researchers point out that “millions of people across the world acquire their second language later in life: in school, university, or work, or through migration or marriage.” Their results, with 853 participants, clearly show that knowing another language is advantageous, regardless of when you learn it.
If you are struggling with urinary incontinence or your existing incontinence is getting worse, take a look at the medications you are taking. They may contribute to the problem.
There are four groups of medications doctors commonly recommend that can cause or increase incontinence. If you are taking any of these, you should let your doctor know about your incontinence and discuss your medications (both prescription and over-the-counter) to see if there is another approach to control or eliminate the problem.
The most common incontinence problems arise from medications in the following four categories:
1. Diuretics to reduce excess fluid
Diuretics, also known as “water pills,” stimulate the kidneys to expel unneeded water and salt from your tissues and bloodstream into the urine. Getting rid of excess fluid makes it easier for your heart to pump. There are a number of diuretic drugs, but one of the most common is furosemide (Lasix®).
According to urologist Raymond Rackley, MD, approximately 20 percent of the U.S. population suffers from overactive bladder symptoms.
“Many of those patients also have high blood pressure or vascular conditions, such as swelling of the feet or ankles,” he says. “These conditions are often treated with diuretic therapies that make their bladder condition worse in terms of urgency and frequency.”
A first step is to make sure you are following your doctor’s prescription instructions exactly. As an alternative to water pills, Dr. Rackley recommends restricting salt in your diet and exercising for weight loss. Both of these can reduce salt retention and hypertension naturally.
2. Alpha blockers for hypertension
Another class of drugs used to reduce high blood pressure or hypertension by dilating your blood vessels can also cause problems. These medicines are known as alpha blockers. Some of the most common are Cardura®, Minipress® and Hytrin®.
These are usually more of an issue for women. Again, discuss this with your physician, because there are alternative drugs you may be able to take.
Men typically take these to treat an enlarged prostate (benign prostatic hyperplasia or BPH) which can restrict urination by putting pressure on the urethra. By relaxing the muscles in the bladder neck, they allow smoother urine flow for those patients.
3. Antidepressants and narcotic pain relievers
Some antidepressants and pain medications can prevent the bladder from contracting completely so that it does not empty. That gives rise to urgency or frequency or voiding dysfunction. They can also decrease your awareness of the need to void.
“Some of these drugs can also cause constipation,” Dr. Rackley says. “Constipation, in turn, can cause indirect bladder incontinence because being constipated takes up more room in the pelvis that the bladder needs to expand.”
4. Sedatives and sleeping pills
Using sedatives and sleeping pills can present a problem, especially if you already have incontinence. They can decrease your awareness of the need to void while you are sleeping.
The best way to address this situation, Dr. Rackley says, is to take other steps to relax and improve your sleep. Getting more exercise to make you tired, for example, can help. It’s also important to maintain a regular bedtime and wake-up schedule. Dr. Rackley says finding other ways to relax before bed — meditation, reading a book or listening to soothing music or sound effects (e.g., rain or waves) — can also help you sleep better.
After successfully text messaging “O Canada” using evaporated vodka, two York University researchers and their U.K.-based counterpart say their simple system can be used where conventional wireless technology fails.
“Chemical signals can offer a more efficient way of transmitting data inside tunnels, pipelines or deep underground structures. For example, the recent massive clog in the London sewer system could have been detected earlier on, and without all the mess workers had to deal with by sending robots equipped with a molecular communication system,” says Professor Andrew Eckford. The experiment was conducted in his lab in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science located in Lassonde School of Engineering at York University.
The chemical signal, using the alcohol found in vodka, was sent four metres across the lab with the aid of a tabletop fan. It was then demodulated by a receiver that measured the rate of change in concentration of the alcohol molecules, picking up whether the concentration was increasing or decreasing.
“We believe we have sent the world’s first text message to be transmitted entirely with molecular communication, controlling concentration levels of the alcohol molecules to encode the alphabet, with single spray representing bits and no spray representing the bit zero,” says York University doctoral candidate Nariman Farsad, who led the experiment.
Though use of chemical signals is a new method in human communication technology, the bio-compatible method is very common in the animal kingdom. Bees, for example, use chemicals in pheromones when there is a threat to the hive, and so does the Canadian lnyx when marking its territory.
In the article “Tabletop Molecular Communication: Text Messages Through Chemical Signals” in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE, the researchers say their system also fills a major gap in the molecular communication literature by providing an inexpensive platform for testing theoretical models. This allows researchers to gain real-world experience with molecular communication cheaply and easily.
“Our system shows that reliable communication is possible and our work motivates future studies on more realistic modelling, analysis and design of theoretical models and algorithms for molecular communication systems,” says engineering Professor Weisi Guo from the University of Warwick, who initiated the research during a meeting with Eckford last year.“They [molecular communication] can also be used to communicate on the nanoscale, for example in medicine where recent advances mean it’s possible to embed sensors into the organs of the body or create miniature robots to carry out a specific task such as targeting drugs to cancer cells,” adds Guo.
The Dyson 360 Eye is due for release 14 years after the company first revealed plans for a robot vacuum
British engineering company Dyson has announced its first robot vacuum cleaner at an event in Tokyo.
The Dyson 360 Eye joins a crowded market – Hoover, iRobot, Samsung, Neato and Vileda are among other manufacturers to sell such products.
But the Cotswolds-based company says its machine has more powerful suction and should be better at spotting dirt thanks to a “unique” camera system.
One expert said the claims sounded “quite compelling”.
Sir James Dyson has opted to offer the machine to Japan first
“If it works as well as Dyson says it does, then this could be the robot vacuum cleaner to get mainstream market penetration, and not just be a niche product,” said Will Findlater, who covers technology for Stuff magazine.
“Up until this point robot vacuums have been objects of geek affection.
“Certainly our experience of the competitors has been that they may do more on the robotics side of things than they do on the rather important business of cleaning your floors.”
The machine is due to go on sale in Japan in the first three months of 2015, and then elsewhere later in the year.
Dyson previously showed off another robot vacuum cleaner – the DC06 – in 2001, but cancelled the project a few years later, in part because it would have cost consumers $3,000 (£1,820) or more.
It has yet to announce the price of the new model.
App-controlled cleaner
According to Dyson, most other robot vacuums use “weak, inefficient motors” in order to conserve battery life.
By contrast, it uses the same V2 digital motor found in its other handheld vacuum cleaners, and combines it with a brush bar that covers the full width of the machine, rather than relying on side sweepers.
“We’ve been developing for a number of years some of the smallest and most powerful digital motors available, and getting that right has enabled us to give the machine very powerful suction, so it can have a very high performance clean,” Nick Schneider, a design engineer at the company, told the BBC.
Dyson claims its full-width brush bar is more efficient than side sweeping brushes found on rival models
“In addition we’ve developed a vision system that enables the machine to be very methodical in its clean and not miss sections of floor space.”
The vacuum is fitted with a panoramic lens, which sits on top of a camera that captures 360-degree views at 30 frames a second. This is combined with data from infrared sensors to let the machine’s internal computer make sense of its position and surroundings.
Another innovation is the ability to schedule a clean remotely via an Android or iOS app.
Although other robot vacuums tend to have less suction power than human-directed vacuums, they make up for this by taking several passes at each room. So, it remains to be seen if Dyson’s model actually leaves owners with cleaner homes.
Mr Schneider also acknowledged that the new machine remained less powerful than his company’s plug-in-and-push models, meaning it would take longer to do a big clean. But he said it might still be the preferable option for families with a house layout that suited the automated tech.
“We’re a way off in terms of comparing it to our corded machines,” he said.
“But the benefit that it has is that you don’t have to be there to use it.
“So, perhaps even if the performance isn’t quite what you’d expect from a DC41 [full-size upright vacuum], the benefit of the convenience of just being able to set it whenever, and not having to worry about it, I think, is its real appeal.”
Toshiba’s Torneo Robo empties its contents into its dock
Dyson’s robot vacuum competitors are not resting on their laurels.
American firm Moneual has a new model that adds a wet mop to help clean hard floors.
Samsung’s latest release allows owners to steer it to dirty spots by shining a laser pointer on the ground, which it then trundles towards.
LG’s newest machine can send photos of its surroundings to its owner’s smartphone, allowing them to check if its done its job properly and order another pass if not.
And Toshiba’s Torneo Robo empties the dirt its gathers into its dock, allowing it to keep working without human intervention for extended periods of time.
Somebody dies by taking their own life every 40 seconds, according to a significant report by the World Health Organization (WHO).
It said suicide was a “major public health problem” that was too often shrouded in taboo.
The WHO wants to reduce the rate of suicide by 10% by 2020, but warned that just 28 countries have a national suicide prevention strategy.
Campaigners said there needed to be more education in schools.
The WHO analysed 10 years of research and data on suicide from around the world.
It concluded:
Around 800,000 people kill themselves every year
It was the second leading cause of death in young people, aged 15 to 29
Those over 70 were the most likely to take their own lives
Three-quarters of these deaths were in low and middle income countries
In richer countries, three times as many men as women die by suicide
It said limiting access to firearms and toxic chemicals was shown to reduce rates of suicide.
And that introducing a national strategy for reducing suicides was effective, yet had been developed in only a minority of countries.
Taboo
Dr Margaret Chan, the director general of the World Health Organization, said: “This report is a call for action to address a large public health problem, which has been shrouded in taboo for far too long.”
Social stigma attached to mental health disorders is known to stop people seeking help and can ultimately lead to suicide.
The WHO also attacked the reporting of suicide in the media, such as the details revealed about the death of Hollywood actor Robin Williams.
There was also a call for countries to provide more support for people who had previously made a suicide attempt as they were the most at-risk group.
Dr Alexandra Fleischmann, a scientist in the department of mental health and substance abuse at WHO, said: “No matter where a country currently stands in suicide prevention, effective measures can be taken, even just starting at local level and on a small-scale.”
Jonny Benjamin, a suicide campaigner in the UK, told the BBC: “I think there needs to be much more public awareness around suicide and how to approach people that may be experiencing suicidal thoughts and feelings, too few of us know how to react when they see someone who may be at risk of taking their life or experiencing those thoughts and feelings.
“I think there needs to be much more public awareness, much more education in schools as well because, as statistics today have shown young people are especially at risk of taking their own lives.”
For the first time, an international team of neuroscientists has transmitted a message from the brain of one person in India to the brains of three people in France.
The team, which includes researchers from Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the Starlab Barcelona in Spain, and Axilum Robotics in France, has announced today the successful transmission of a brain-to-brain message over a distance of 8,000 kilometres.
“We wanted to find out if one could communicate directly between two people by reading out the brain activity from one person and injecting brain activity into the second person, and do so across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication pathways,” said one of the team, Harvard’s Alvaro Pascual-Leone in a press release. “One such pathway is, of course, the Internet, so our question became, ‘Could we develop an experiment that would bypass the talking or typing part of internet and establish direct brain-to-brain communication between subjects located far away from each other in India and France?'”
The team achieved this world-first feat by fitting out one of their participants – known as the emitter – with a device called an electrode-based brain-computer (BCI). This device, which sits over the participant’s head, can interpret the electrical currents in the participant’s brain and translate them into a binary code called Bacon’s cipher. This type of code is similar to what computers use, but more compact.
“The emitter now has to enter that binary string into the laptop using her thoughts,” says Francie Diep at Popular Science. “She does this by using her thoughts to move the white circle on-screen to different corners of the screen. (Upper right corner for “1,” bottom right corner for “0.”) This part of the process takes advantage of technology that several labs have developed, to allow people with paralysis to control computer cursors or robot arms.”
Once uploaded, this code is then transmitted via the Internet to another participant – called the receiver – who was also fitted with a device, this time a computer-brain interface (CBI). This device emits electrical pulses, directed by a robotic arm, through the receiver’s head, which make them ‘see’ flashes of light called phosphenes that don’t actually exist.
“As soon as the receivers’ machine gets the emitter’s binary message over the Internet, the machine gets to work,” says Diep. “It moves its robotic arm around, sending phosphenes to the receivers at different positions on their skulls. Flashes appearing in one position correspond to 1s in the emitter’s message, while flashes appearing in another position correspond to 0s.
Exactly how the receivers are recording the flashes so they can translate all those 0s and 1s isn’t clear, but it could be as simple and writing them down with an actual pen and paper.
While it’s not clear at this stage what the applications for this technology could be, it’s a pretty incredible achievement. Oh, and the messages they transmitted? The conveniently brief and friendly, “Hola” and “Ciao”.
Scientists in Switzerland have developed a new pacemaker that doesn’t need batteries – it’s powered entirely by the motion of the patient’s own heart.
Image: ESC
What’s better than a cardiac pacemaker? A cardiac pacemaker that never runs out of batteries. Because when that happens, the patient is going to have to go through surgery to get a replacement.
So to alleviate the stress and cost of having to constantly physically replace a pacemaker, researchers from the University of Bern in Switzerland have developed a pacemaker that works like a mechanical wristwatch and draws all its power from the beating of the patient’s heart.
According to Ben Coxworth at Gizmag, lead researcher and cardiologist, Rolf Vogel, first came up with the idea for a new pacemaker four years ago, and has since produced a prototype that’s based on the mechanism of an auto-winding wristwatch. Also known as a self-winding wristwatch, these nifty little devices are powered by the natural motion of the wearer’s arm, which winds the mainspring right up to capacity, and then allows it to unwind slowly, powering the rest of the watch like a tiny generator.
“In the case of the Bern device, it’s sutured onto the heart’s myocardial muscle instead of being worn on the wrist, and its spring is wound by heart contractions instead of arm movements,”says Coxworth. “When that spring unwinds, the resulting energy is buffered in a capacitor. That capacitor then powers a pacemaker, to which it is electrically wired.”
Presenting their device at the 2014 European Society of Cardiology Congress last week,the team said the system can so far produce 52 microwatts of power when attached to the heart of a live 60-kilogram pig, which is well above the requirements for a human pacemaker – about 10 microwatts.
Before they send it out to market, the team are now working on making their device smaller and more efficient in both its energy-harvesting and heart-motion-detecting capacities.
Musical training tunes the developing brain, scientists report in the Sept. 3 Journal of Neuroscience. After two years in a music enrichment program, children in Los Angeles had more sophisticated brain responses to spoken syllables than kids who had only a year of training.
Researchers led by neuroscientist Nina Kraus of Northwestern University studied 44 children enrolled with the Harmony Project, an organization that brings music training to kids in low-income communities. The children began music lessons when they were on average 8 years old. After two years of lessons, but not one, kids’ brains showed distinct responses to the rapidly spoken sounds “ba” and “ga.”
Electrodes placed on the kids’ scalps revealed millisecond-scale differences in brain activity in response to the syllables, suggesting that the more musically trained brains were better at distinguishing between the sounds. This neural distinction has been linked to real-life skills such as reading and the ability to pick out speech from a noisy din, says Kraus.
She and her colleagues hope to expand their research and bring musical training to more children. “We’ve opened the window a crack, but I’m hoping it can be thrown wide open,” she says.
Scientists have made an important breakthrough in the fight against debilitating autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis by revealing how to stop cells attacking healthy body tissue.
Rather than the body’s immune systemdestroying its own tissue by mistake, researchers at the University of Bristol have discovered how cells convert from being aggressive to actually protecting against disease.
The study, funded by the Wellcome Trust, is published today [03 September] in Nature Communications.
MS alone affects around 100,000 people in the UK and 2.5 million people worldwide.
Scientists were able to selectively target the cells that cause autoimmune disease by dampening down their aggression against the body’s own tissues while converting them into cells capable of protecting against disease.
This type of conversion has been previously applied to allergies, known as ‘allergic desensitisation’, but its application to autoimmune diseases has only been appreciated recently.
The Bristol group has now revealed how the administration of fragments of the proteins that are normally the target for attack leads to correction of the autoimmune response.
Most importantly, their work reveals that effective treatment is achieved by gradually increasing the dose of antigenic fragment injected.
In order to figure out how this type of immunotherapy works, the scientists delved inside the immune cells themselves to see which genes and proteins were turned on or off by the treatment.
They found changes in gene expression that help explain how effective treatment leads to conversion of aggressor into protector cells. The outcome is to reinstate self-tolerance whereby an individual’s immune system ignores its own tissues while remaining fully armed to protect against infection.
By specifically targeting the cells at fault, this immunotherapeutic approach avoids the need for the immune suppressive drugs associated with unacceptable side effects such as infections, development of tumours and disruption of natural regulatory mechanisms.
Professor David Wraith, who led the research, said: “Insight into the molecular basis of antigen-specific immunotherapy opens up exciting new opportunities to enhance the selectivity of the approach while providing valuable markers with which to measureeffective treatment. These findings have important implications for the many patients suffering from autoimmune conditions that are currently difficult to treat.”
This treatment approach, which could improve the lives of millions of people worldwide, is currently undergoing clinical development through biotechnology company Apitope, a spin-out from the University of Bristol.
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