Wagtail battles itself in award-winning photo - life - 03 September 2013. (Image: Robin Orrow/BWPA) You talking to me? This grey wagtail is squaring up to itself in a car's wing mirror, demonstrating how highly territorial its species can be. The photograph, taken by Robin Orrow, won the Animal Behaviour category in this year's British Wildlife Photography Awards.
The image shows a momentary flurry of activity, but took much effort to capture after Orrow noticed the bird attacking his car's wing mirror in front of his house. "He was clearly defending his territory against what he thought was a rival," Orrow says. Orrow, an amateur wildlife photographer, didn't let the bird's filthy finishing touch put him off the opportunity to capture a stunning image. The grey wagtail's efforts were equally fruitful, Orrow says – the bird went on to successfully rear a clutch of little ones. The Under-12 category was won by this image of a shocked hare by 8-year-old Liam Constantine (Image: Liam Constantine/BWPA) More From New Scientist Is full-fat milk best? More from the web. Catalans join hands to demand independence. Hundreds of thousands of supporters of an independent Catalan state have held hands in a 400km human chain across the region to press the Madrid government to let them form their own country.
Demonstrators in yellow T-shirts and draped in blue, red and yellow separatist banners raised joined hands through cities and along rural roads, jumping and shouting in celebration when the chain was completed on Wednesday. "Today is a historic day.The Catalan people have reaffirmed their determination to be a free state," said Carme Forcadell, the president of the Catalan National Assembly, which organised the human chain. The human chain was planned on a traditional regional holiday. Last year, more than one million people rallied in Barcelona, the largest show of separatist sentiment since the 1970s. The chain, named the Catalan Way, linked 86 towns and villages along the coast to push for a referendum on political self-determination for Catalonia. Promised referendum.
Researchers discover how inhibitory neurons behave during critical periods of learning. We've all heard the saying "you can't teach an old dog new tricks. " Now neuroscientists are beginning to explain the science behind the adage. For years, neuroscientists have struggled to understand how the microcircuitry of the brain makes learning easier for the young, and more difficult for the old. New findings published in the journal Nature by Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, Irvine show how one component of the brain's circuitry—inhibitory neurons—behave during critical periods of learning. The paper is available online as an Advance Online Publication. The brain is made up of two types of cells—inhibitory and excitatory neurons.
Networks of these two kinds of neurons are responsible for processing sensory information like images, sounds and smells, and for cognitive functioning. About 80 percent of neurons are excitatory. "We knew from previous studies that excitatory cells propagate information. Babies learn words before birth | Humans. Parents-to-be better watch their language.
Babies can hear specific words in the womb and remember them in the days after birth, a new study reports. The results add to the understanding of how the early acoustical environment shapes the developing brain. Earlier studies have found that fetuses can hear and learn certain sounds. Nursery rhymes, vowel sounds and mothers’ voices can all influence a developing baby. But the new study, published August 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that a fetus can detect and remember discrete words, says study coauthor Eino Partanen of the University of Helsinki. Partanen and colleagues used a fake word, tatata, to test whether a particular word can worm its way into the fetal brain. EARLY LEARNING Electrodes test whether a newborn learned a fake word during gestation. Courtesy of Veikko Somerpuro/Univ. of Helsinki An average of five days after their birth, babies once again heard the recordings.
Time To Redraw The Periodic Table? The periodic table of the elements has grown ever since the first version was published by Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869. And now scientists in Sweden suggest it's time to add yet another element to the table. New research confirms the existence of a super-heavy, radioactive element with atomic number 115. Its temporary name is ununpentium (Uup), as the element has yet to be named formally. The research was conducted at the GSI accelerator facility near Darmstadt, Germany, where scientists are known for having discovered six other elements since the early 1980s.
"This was a very successful experiment and is one of the most important in the field in recent years," lead researcher Dr. Dirk Rudolph, physics professor at the University of Lund in Sweden, said in a written statement. Evidence for element 115 was first discovered by Russian scientists in 2004. Dr. The new evidence for element 115 will be presented in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters on August 27, 2013. 'Zero knowledge' may answer computer security question. (Phys.org) —In the age of the Internet, it's getting harder and harder to keep secrets.
When you type in your password, there's no telling who might be watching it go by. New research at Cornell may offer a pathway to more secure communications. The answer is to not send sensitive information at all. Rafael Pass, associate professor of computer science, has developed a new protocol, or set of rules, to create what computer scientists call a "zero knowledge proof. " "I think zero knowledge proofs are one of the most amazing notions in computer science," Pass said. "What we have done is to combine it with another notion – that it's easier to prove that a computation can be done correctly than it is to actually compute it.
" The result is a way to prove that you know something without saying out loud what it is you know. Applications include password authentication, cryptography, auctions, financial transactions and online voting. Four Centuries of Change in Northeastern United States Forests. The northeastern United States is a predominately-forested region that, like most of the eastern U.S., has undergone a 400-year history of intense logging, land clearance for agriculture, and natural reforestation.
This setting affords the opportunity to address a major ecological question: How similar are today's forests to those existing prior to European colonization? Working throughout a nine-state region spanning Maine to Pennsylvania, we assembled a comprehensive database of archival land-survey records describing the forests at the time of European colonization. We compared these records to modern forest inventory data and described: (1) the magnitude and attributes of forest compositional change, (2) the geography of change, and (3) the relationships between change and environmental factors and historical land use.
Figures Citation: Thompson JR, Carpenter DN, Cogbill CV, Foster DR (2013) Four Centuries of Change in Northeastern United States Forests. Introduction Methods Table 1. Space Pictures This Week: Birth of a Star, Moon Lineup. Photograph by H. Arce, Getty Images Kaleidoscope jets of super-fast gas mark the violent birth of a star 1400 light-years from Earth. Thanks to the high-resolution imaging capability of a new giant radio telescope array called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the high desert of Chile, astronomers have been able to reveal a large energetic jet moving away from us, seen in orange and green in the lower right of this image.
Meanwhile another jet, visible in pink and purple toward the left of the baby star, is beaming toward Earth. The speeds at which the jets are spewing out material have been clocked at nearly a million kilometers (620,000 miles) an hour. —Andrew Fazekas.
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