Smart Economy

Children’s complex thinking skills begin forming before they go to school

By William Harms

January 23, 2013

New research at the University of Chicago and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows that children begin to show signs of higher-level thinking skills as young as age 4 ½. Researchers have previously attributed higher-order thinking development to knowledge acquisition and better schooling, but the new longitudinal study shows that other skills, not always connected with knowledge, play a role in the ability of children to reason analytically.

The findings, reported in January in the journal Psychological Science, show for the first time that children’s executive function has a role in the development of complicated analytical thinking. Executive function includes such complex skills as planning, monitoring, task switching, and controlling attention. High early executive function skills at school entry are related to higher than average reasoning skills in adolescence.

Growing research suggests that executive function may be trainable through pathways, including preschool curriculum, exercise and impulse control training. Parents and teachers may be able to help encourage development of executive function by having youngsters help plan activities, learn to stop, think, and then take action, or engage in pretend play, said lead author of the study, Lindsey Richland, assistant professor of comparative human development at the University of Chicago.

Although important to a child’s education, “little is known about the cognitive mechanisms underlying children’s development of the capacity to engage in complex forms of reasoning,” Richland said.

The new research is reported in the paper “Early Executive Function Predicts Reasoning Development” and follows the development of complex reasoning in children from before the time they go to school until they are 15. Richland’s co-author is Margaret Burchinal, senior scientist at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The two studied the acquisition of analogical thinking, one form of complex reasoning. “The ability to see relationships and similarities between disparate phenomena is fundamental to analytical and inductive reasoning, and is closely related to measurements of general fluid intelligence,” said Richland. Developing complex reasoning ability is particularly fundamental to the innovation and adaptive thinking skills necessary for a modern workforce, she pointed out.

Richland and Burchinal studied a database of 1,364 children who were part of the Early Child Care and Youth Development study from birth through age 15. The group was fairly evenly divided between boys and girls and included families from a diverse cross-section of ethnic and income backgrounds.

The current study examined tests children took when they were 4 ½, when they were in first grade, third grade, and when they were 15.  Because the study was longitudinal, the same children were tested at each interval. Among the tests they took were ones to measure analytical reasoning, executive function, vocabulary knowledge, short-term memory and sustained attention.

Children were tested at 4 ½ on their ability to monitor and control their automatic responses to stimuli. In first grade they worked on a test that judged their ability to move objects in a “Tower of Hanoi” game, in which they had to move disks between pegs in a specific order.

In third grade and at 15 years old, they were tested on their ability to understand analogies, asked in third grade for instance to complete the question “dog is to puppy as cat is to__?” As 15-year-olds they were asked to complete written tests of analogies.

The study found a strong relationship between high scores among children who as preschoolers had strong vocabularies and were good at monitoring and controlling their responses (executive function) to later ability on tests of understanding analogies.

“Overall, these results show that knowledge is necessary for using thinking skills, as shown by the importance of early vocabulary, but also inhibitory control and executive function skills are important contributors to children’s analytical reasoning development,” Richland said.

The National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation supported the research.

Tags

Early childhood development, Early Executive Function Predicts Reasoning Development, Lindsey Richland, Psychological science

Preventing 'Cyber Pearl Harbor'

Improving cyber attack detection through computer modeling

Cyber attacks that have long caused major work disruption and theft of private information are becoming more sophisticated with prolonged attacks perpetrated by organized groups. In September 2012, Bank of America, Citibank, the New York Stock Exchange, and other financial institutions were targets of attacks for more than five weeks. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta warned that the United States was facing the possibility of a "cyber-Pearl Harbor" and was increasingly vulnerable to foreign computer hackers who could disrupt the government, utility, transportation, and financial networks.

Key to protecting online operations is a high degree of "cyber security awareness," according to human factors/ergonomics researchers Varun Dutt, Young-Suk Ahn, and Cleotilde Gonzalez. In their Human Factors article, "Cyber Situation Awareness: Modeling Detection of Cyber Attacks With Instance-Based Learning Theory (http://bit.ly/VjVs7M)," they developed a computer model that presented 500 simulated cyber attack scenarios to gauge simulated network security analysts' ability to detect attacks characterized as either "impatient" (the threat occurs early in the attack) or "patient" (the threat comes later in the attack and is not detected promptly). Their model was able to predict the detection rates of security analysts by varying the analysts' degree of experience and risk tolerance as well as an attacker's strategy (impatient or patient attack).

The authors found that experienced, risk-averse analysts were less accurate at detecting threats in patient than in impatient attacks. "In a patient attack, when the attacker waits until the end to generate threats, the experiences in the analyst's memory that indicate an attack" are not as readily retrieved, says Dutt, which "makes it difficult to correctly detect patient attacks."

"Application of our results include the design of training tools that increase competency and the development of decision-support tools that improve defenders' on-the-job performance in detecting cyber attacks." The authors suggest that employers evaluate an analysts' risk tolerance before employment and/or manipulate tolerance levels during training to better identify threats.

As cyber warfare strategies and tactics evolve, the authors plan to further investigate the trend of drawn-out attacks and new intrusion detection software.

###

For more information on this article or to obtain a copy for reporting purposes, contact HFES Communications Director Lois Smith (lois@hfes.org; 310/394-1811).

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society is the world's largest nonprofit individual-member, multidisciplinary scientific association for human factors/ergonomics professionals, with more than 4,500 members globally. HFES members include psychologists and other scientists, designers, and engineers, all of whom have a common interest in designing systems and equipment to be safe and effective for the people who operate and maintain them. "Human Factors and Ergonomics: People-Friendly Design Through Science and Engineering"

Plan to attend the HFES 2013 International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care: Advancing the Cause, to be held March 11-13, 2013 at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel, http://bit.ly/TBn4AF.

Zbigniew Brzezinski: National Strategy and US Education

By Leonard Liggio

Foreign Policy magazine (January-February 2012) lists Zbigniew Brzezinski among the five most important living influences on US foreign policy. In the weekend Financial Times (January 14-15, 2012), Edward Luce (FT’s chief US commentator) describes his recent luncheon interview with the former National Security Advisor under President Jimmy Carter and current trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. After 1981, he continued in Washington as a professor at Georgetown University. Over his Dubonnet, he begins with his disappointment with President Barak Obama: “I’m all in favor of grand important speeches but the president then has to link his sermons to a strategy.” Although he has voted for Republican presidential candidates (such as George H. W. Bush in 1988) he is highly doubtful of the current Republican candidates. Compared to how well informed about the world he considers Chinese leaders: “And then you watch one of our Republican presidential debates …. The GOP field is just embarrassing.”

Brzezinski is 83 years old and was born in Warsaw. His father was a diplomat and Brzezinski spent his first three years in Paris and the next three in Berlin. His father was assigned to the embassy in Canada, so the family remained there when World War II began. He attributes his skills to attending Loyola High School in Montreal. (My graduate professor at Fordham University, Oskar Halecki (who had been secretary of the Polish delegation at the Versailles conference and then dean of Warsaw University) was a visiting professor at Grenoble University when the war began and was fortunate to move to Laval University in Quebec before the invasion of France.)

I first became aware of Brzezinski when I was working for the William Volker Fund assigned to read journal articles or books that might relate to its scholarly program. I extensively reviewed a book of Brzezinski written (c. 1961) (when he was at Harvard University) on the economic system of the Soviet Bloc. I recommended the book as knowledgeable and insightful.

He was appointed a professor of international relations at Columbia University. He became an advisor to Hubert Humphrey’s vice-presidential campaign and defended Lyndon B. Johnson’s war in Vietnam on the basis of the ‘Falling Dominos’ theory (if South Vietnam came under the Viet Cong, then Thailand, Malaya, Indonesia would become Communist.) (That theory arose in the 1950s: that Japan would want to trade with Red China if communists blocked Japan’s markets in Southeast Asia. Japan was trading with China through third countries, so the theory was questionable.)

Brzezinski opposed Republican senators critical of Johnson’s war. Senators Sterling Morton of Kentucky and Mark Hatfield of Oregon led the revival of the Republican party with over forty new Republican congressmen in 1966.

To him, today’s America appears to lack education in world politics. He sees a US failure in history and geography (French education always twined geography and history). “Americans don’t learn about the world, they don’t study world history, other than American history in a very one-sided fashion, and they don’t study geography. In that context of widespread ignorance, the ongoing and deliberately fanned fear about the outside world, which is connected with this grandiose war on jihadi terrorism, makes the American public extremely susceptible to extremist appeals.”

Fifty years ago when I began as a college instructor, there was a textbook which combined European and American history. However, as I was teaching fifteen hours a week the course in World Civilizations there was a dilemma. The chairman of the history and government department was a Viennese who had studied Japanese in the US army. He selected a textbook which went beyond European civilization to include: Hindu, Chinese, Japanese , etc. I had no background in those areas and told my five classes to ignore those chapters. American students have a hard enough time with European names, trying to have them or myself master exotic names was not education but chaos. I am reminded of one of my colleagues, a Chinese refugee from Red China, who upset his students of Chinese history when he later explained that the first seven dynasties they had struggled to learn were mythical.

Brzezinski considers America’s greatest national security threat to be the weak US economic situation, especially the political failure to address the government’s economic problems. His strategic advice: “the US should prod Europe to bring both Russia and Turkey into an enlarged west. America should hedge against China’s rise, without explicitly attempting to contain it. Most importantly, the US should revitalize its domestic economy if it wants to stave off further decline. On all counts, Brzezinski seems pessimistic about the likelihood that Washington’s elites will start to act strategically again.”

Important step in the next generation of computing-spintronics

Research reveals vital insight into spintronics

Scientists have taken one step closer to the next generation of computers. Research from the Cavendish Laboratory, the University of Cambridge's Department of Physics, provides new insight into spintronics, which has been hailed as the successor to the transistor.

Spintronics, which exploits the electron's tiny magnetic moment, or 'spin', could radically change computing due to its potential of high-speed, high-density and low-power consumption. The new research sheds light on how to make 'spin' more efficient.

For the past fifty years, progress in electronics has relied heavily on the downsizing of the transistor through the semiconductor industry in order to provide the technology for the small, powerful computers that are the basis of our modern information society. In a 1965 paper, Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore described how the number of transistors that could be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit had doubled every year between 1958 and 1965, predicting that the trend would continue for at least ten more years.

That prediction, now known as Moore's Law, effectively described a trend that has continued ever since, but the end of that trend—the moment when transistors are as small as atoms, and cannot be shrunk any further—is expected as early as 2015. At the moment, researchers are seeking new concepts of electronics that sustain the growth of computing power.

Spintronics research attempts to develop a spin-based electronic technology that will replace the charge-based technology of semiconductors. Scientists have already begun to develop new spin-based electronics, beginning with the discovery in 1988 of giant magnetoresistance (GMR) effect. The discovery of GMR effect brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disk drives and was also key in the development of portable electronic devices such as the iPod.

While conventional technology relies on harnessing the charge of electrons, the field of spintronics depends instead on the manipulation of electrons' spin. One of the unique properties in spintronics is that spins can be transferred without the flow of electric charge currents. This is called "spin current" and unlike other concepts of harnessing electrons, the spin current can transfer information without generating heat in electric devices. The major remaining obstacle to a viable spin current technology is the difficulty of creating a volume of spin current large enough to support current and future electronic devices.

However, the new Cambridge researchers in close collaboration with Professor Sergej Demokritov group at the University of Muenster, Germany, have, in part, addressed this issue. In order to create enhanced spin currents, the researchers used the collective motion of spins called spin waves (the wave property of spins). By bringing spin waves into interaction, they have demonstrated a new, more efficient way of generating spin current.

Dr Hidekazu Kurebayashi, from the Microelectronics Group at the Cavendish Laboratory, said: "You can find lots of different waves in nature, and one of the fascinating things is that waves often interact with each other. Likewise, there are a number of different interactions in spin waves. Our idea was to use such spin wave interactions for generating efficient spin currents."

According to their findings, one of the spin wave interactions (called three-magnon splitting) generates spin current ten times more efficiently than using pre-interacting spin-waves. Additionally, the findings link the two major research fields in spintronics, namely the spin current and the spin wave interaction.

Using computer models, systems biologists can predict complicated behavior of cells in living animals

In vivo systems biology

Using computer models, systems biologists can predict complicated behavior of cells in living animals

Source: Anne Trafton, MIT News Office

Shown here are mouse intestinal epithelial cells. MIT and MGH researchers have modeled how such cells respond to tumor necrosis factor
Image: The Journal of Cell Biology

March 23, 2011

Biological systems, including cells, tissues and organs, can function properly only when their parts are working in harmony. These systems are often dauntingly complex: Inside a single cell, thousands of proteins interact with each other to determine how the cell will develop and respond to its environment.
To understand this great complexity, a growing number of biologists and bioengineers are turning to computational models. This approach, known as systems biology, has been used successfully to model the behavior of cells grown in laboratory dishes. However, until now, no one has used it to model the behavior of cells inside a living animal.

In the March 22 online edition of the journal Science Signaling, researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital report that they have created a new computational model that describes how intestinal cells in mice respond to a natural chemical called tumor necrosis factor (TNF).

The work demonstrates that systems biology offers a way to get a handle on the complexity of living systems and raises the possibility that it could be used to model cancer and other complex diseases, says Douglas Lauffenburger, head of MIT's Department of Biological Engineering and a senior author of the paper.

"You're not likely to explain most diseases in terms of one genetic deficit or one molecular impairment," Lauffenburger says. "You need to understand how many molecular components, working in concert, give rise to how cells and tissues are formed — either properly or improperly."

Biological complexity

Systems biology, a field that has grown dramatically in the past 10 years, focuses on analyzing how the components of a biological system interact to produce the behavior of that system — for example, the many proteins that interact with each other inside a cell to respond to hormones or other external stimuli.

"The beauty of systems biology is that it doesn't ignore the biological complexity of what's going on," says Kevin Haigis, an assistant professor of pathology at MGH and Harvard Medical School and a senior author of the Science Signaling paper.

"Biologists are trained to be reductionists," adds Haigis, who was a postdoctoral associate at MIT before moving to MGH. "I don't think people have failed to realize the complexity of how biology works, but people are accustomed to trying to reduce complexity to make things more understandable."

In contrast, the systems biology approach tries to capture that complexity through computer modeling of many variables. Inputs to the model might be the amounts of certain proteins found inside cells, and outputs would be the cells' resulting behaviors — for example, growing, committing suicide or secreting hormones.

While at MIT, Haigis worked in the lab of Tyler Jacks, director of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, studying the role of the cancer-causing gene Ras in the mouse colon. He teamed up with Lauffenburger and others to computationally model Ras' behavior in cell culture.

After Haigis moved to MGH, he and Lauffenburger decided to bring this computational approach to studying living animals because they believed that studies done in cultured cells could miss some of the critical factors that come into play in living systems, such as the location of a cell within a living tissue and the influence of cells that surround it.

Inflammation

In the new paper, the researchers tackled the complex interactions that produce inflammation in the mouse intestine. The intestine contains many types of cells, but they focused on epithelial cells (which line the intestinal tube) and their response to TNF.

Previous work has shown that TNF plays a central role in intestinal inflammation, and provokes one of two possible responses in the intestinal epithelial cells: cell death or cell proliferation. Chronic inflammation can lead to inflammatory bowel disease and potentially cancer.

In this study, the researchers got the data they needed to develop their computational model by treating normal mice with TNF, then determining whether the cells proliferated or died. They found that cell fate depended on the cells' location in the intestine — cells in the ileum proliferated, while those in the duodenum died.

The multi-faceted result would likely not have been seen in a lab dish. "In cell culture, you would have gotten one or the other," Lauffenburger says.

They also correlated the diverse outcomes with the activities of more than a dozen proteins found in the cells, allowing them to determine how the outcomes depended on quantitative combination of key signaling pathways, and furthermore, to predict how the outcomes would be affected by drug treatment. The researchers then tested the model's predictions in an additional cohort of mice, and found that they were accurate.

Modeling disease

Jason Papin, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia, says that the team's biggest accomplishment is demonstrating that systems biology modeling can be done in living animals (in vivo). "You always want to move to an in vivo setting, if possible, but it's technically more difficult," says Papin, who was not involved with this research.

The researchers are now trying to figure out in more detail what factors in the intestinal cells' environment influence the cells to behave the way they do. They are also studying how genetic mutations might alter the cells' responses.

They also plan to begin a study of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. Cancer is another disease that lends itself to this kind of modeling, says Jacks, who was not part of this study. Cancer is an extremely complicated disease that usually involves derangement of many cell signaling pathways involved in cell division, DNA repair and stress response.

"We expect that our ability to predict which targets, which drugs and which patients to bring together in the context of cancer treatment will require a deeper understanding of the complex signaling pathways that exist in cancer," says Jacks. "This approach will help us get there."

When will the Recession End? Part 139 Russia admits it's dead and falling apart

A member of the Russian Advisory Council in the State Duma Committee for Regional Policy, Natalia Zubarevich, admitted that four large reasons will lead to the inevitable and inexorable death of the Russian Federation, as a result of which this country will cease to exist as a single entity and will be divided into independent states:
 
"First, the quality of life is deteriorating in the Moscow metropolitan agglomeration due to growing infrastructure and environmental problems, while the population increases. 
 

Second, economic development of large cities which are regional centers is sharply slowing because of lack of investments and deterioration of the institutional environment, which also leads to an even greater concentration of manpower in the federal city. 

Third, marginalization of vast peripheral areas is increasing, and a depopulation takes place.  Unemployment, social benefits, etc. And there is less and less money in the budget.
 
Fourth, growth of tensions, ethnic conflicts and cronyism in the North Caucasus republics stimulate migration outflow of educated and more "modernized" urban residents of the republics to other regions", complained Natalya Zubarevich.

Source:  http://www.kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2011/01/30/13423.shtml

This supports an old 2004 CIA prediction of Russian collapse:

Version 1

 
Version 2

 

CIA predicts by 2015, the disintegration of Russia by six to eight states.  

 CIA predicts by 2015, the disintegration of Russia by six to eight states. This is reported on an open site in the CIA report, the leading think tanks, which contains a forecast of the world until 2015. Specialists regard Russia as a country that is in extreme geographical and geo-economic conditions. Another factor affecting us negatively, is that two-thirds of Russian territory lies in the permafrost zone, and the average cost of a barrel of oil is $ 14-15 versus $ 4 in Saudi Arabia

http://www.ural.ru/news/life/news-39253.html  and http://www.ng.ru/regions/2011-01-24/6_we.html

see  previous related posts

1)     Thirty Seven (37) early warning signals of the collapse and decay of the Russian Federation (Putinism) and Ukraine (Yanukowych Regime)  

Similar conditions and circumstances existed just before the collapse of the Soviet Union 20 years ago.  

2)    Is Ukraine Hitching Its Economic Cart to Collapsing Horse? Russia?  

3)   When will the Recession End? Part 133 Why Russia doesn't fit into BRIC

4)  When will the recession end ? Part 134 What could trigger a Global Double Dip Recession in 2011? Russia

5)   When will the Recession End? Part 139 Russia admits it's dead and falling apart

6)  When will the Recession End? Part 140 Who's next after Egypt? Russian editorial says Russia, Kazakhstan may be hit by "Tunisian syndrome"

7) When will the Recession End? Part 141 Growth of world hydrocarbon prices can no longer help Russia - Editorial expects budget deficits to continue despite rising oil prices

Walter Derzko

What Makes Us Unique? Not our Genes but in the sequences of DNA between them

What makes you different from every other human being? The best place to look for an answer may not be in your genes, but in the sequences of DNA between them, according to a team of researchers reporting in the journals Science Express and Nature.

While genes provide instructions for making the proteins that do specific tasks inside a cell, the sequences surrounding them help regulate how those instructions are carried out. These non-coding sequences make up about 98% of our genome. They vary from 1% to 4% among all humans, in contrast to genes, which vary only about .025%. According to the new studies, such slight variations among individuals are enough to affect how well specialized proteins, called transcription factors, bind to the non-coding DNA sequences. By comparing variations in protein binding among ten people and one chimpanzee, researchers found that differences in binding can change the way neighboring genes are expressed. The results suggest that much more of our DNA than just our genes determine how we look, who we become, and the kinds of diseases for which we’re at risk.

Sources:
Kasowski, Maya et al. 'Variation in Transcription Factor Binding Among Humans.' Science Express. March 18, 2010.
Zheng,Wei et al. 'Genetic analysis of variation in transcription factor binding in yeast.' Nature. March 17, 2010.

 

Scientists suggest that cancer is purely man-made

 

 

Cancer is a modern, man-made disease caused by environmental factors such as pollution and diet, a study by University of Manchester scientists has strongly suggested. 

The study of remains and literature from ancient Egypt and Greece and earlier periods – carried out at Manchester’s KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology and published in Nature Reviews Cancer – includes the first histological diagnosis of cancer in an Egyptian mummy.

Finding only one case of the disease in the investigation of hundreds of Egyptian mummies, with few references to cancer in literary evidence, proves that cancer was extremely rare in antiquity. The disease rate has risen massively since the Industrial Revolution, in particular childhood cancer – proving that the rise is not simply due to people living longer.

Professor Rosalie David, at the Faculty of Life Sciences, said: “In industrialised societies, cancer is second only to cardiovascular disease as a cause of death. But in ancient times, it was extremely rare. There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer. So it has to be a man-made disease, down to pollution and changes to our diet and lifestyle.”

She added: “The important thing about our study is that it gives a historical perspective to this disease. We can make very clear statements on the cancer rates in societies because we have a full overview. We have looked at millennia, not one hundred years, and have masses of data.”

The data includes the first ever histological diagnosis of cancer in an Egyptian mummy by Professor Michael Zimmerman, a visiting Professor at the KNH Centre, who is based at the Villanova University in the US. He diagnosed rectal cancer in an unnamed mummy, an ‘ordinary’ person who had lived in the Dakhleh Oasis during the Ptolemaic period (200-400 CE).

Professor Zimmerman said: “In an ancient society lacking surgical intervention, evidence of cancer should remain in all cases. The virtual absence of malignancies in mummies must be interpreted as indicating their rarity in antiquity, indicating that cancer causing factors are limited to societies affected by modern industrialization”.

Ads by GoogleWatch Now: "Facing Death" - When the Time Comes, What Will You Do To Keep Family Alive? Airs 11/23 - www.PBS.org/FRONTLINE

 

The team studied both mummified remains and literary evidence for ancient Egypt but only literary evidence for ancient Greece as there are no remains for this period, as well as medical studies of human and animal remains from earlier periods, going back to the age of the dinosaurs.

Evidence of cancer in animal fossils, non-human primates and early humans is scarce – a few dozen, mostly disputed, examples in animal fossils, although a metastatic cancer of unknown primary origin has been reported in an Edmontosaurus fossil while another study lists a number of possible neoplasms in fossil remains. Various malignancies have been reported in non-human primates but do not include many of the cancers most commonly identified in modern adult humans.

It has been suggested that the short life span of individuals in antiquity precluded the development of cancer. Although this statistical construct is true, individuals in ancient Egypt and Greece did live long enough to develop such diseases as atherosclerosis, Paget's disease of bone, and osteoporosis, and, in modern populations, bone tumours primarily affect the young.

Another explanation for the lack of tumours in ancient remains is that tumours might not be well preserved. Dr. Zimmerman has performed experimental studies indicating that mummification preserves the features of malignancy and that tumours should actually be better preserved than normal tissues. In spite of this finding, hundreds of mummies from all areas of the world have been examined and there are still only two publications showing microscopic confirmation of cancer. Radiological surveys of mummies from the Cairo Museum and museums in Europe have also failed to reveal evidence of cancer.

As the team moved through the ages, it was not until the 17th century that they found descriptions of operations for breast and other cancers and the first reports in scientific literature of distinctive tumours have only occurred in the past 200 years, such as scrotal cancer in chimney sweeps in 1775, nasal cancer in snuff users in 1761 and Hodgkin’s disease in 1832.

Professor David – who was invited to present her paper to UK Cancer Czar Professor Mike Richards and other oncologists at this year’s UK Association of Cancer Registries and National Cancer Intelligence Network conference – said: “Where there are cases of cancer in ancient Egyptian remains, we are not sure what caused them. They did heat their homes with fires, which gave off smoke, and temples burned incense, but sometimes illnesses are just thrown up.”

She added: “The ancient Egyptian data offers both physical and literary evidence, giving a unique opportunity to look at the diseases they had and the treatments they tried. They were the fathers of pharmacology so some treatments did work

“They were very inventive and some treatments thought of as magical were genuine therapeutic remedies. For example, celery was used to treat rheumatism back then and is being investigated today. Their surgery and the binding of fractures were excellent because they knew their anatomy: there was no taboo on working with human bodies because of mummification. They were very hands on and it gave them a different mindset to working with bodies than the Greeks, who had to come to Alexandria to study medicine.”

She concluded: “Yet again extensive ancient Egyptian data, along with other data from across the millennia, has given modern society a clear message – cancer is man-made and something that we can and should address.”

More information: A copy of the paper ‘Cancer: an old disease, a new disease or something in between?’ is available at http://www.nature. … nrc2914.html

Provided by University of Manchester

http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-10-scientists-cancer-purely-man-made.html

Atmospheric dynamics, not ocean, could drive El Niño features

 

Scientists generally believe that ocean dynamics are the primary factor controlling El Niño sea surface temperature variability. However, new simulations show that atmospheric dynamics can account for many of the features of El Niño that were previously thought to be controlled by ocean dynamics. Dommenget uses a series of atmospheric model simulations coupled to a simple ocean model that contained no ocean dynamics. He finds that El Niño–like variations in sea surface temperature were produced in the simulations. Although ocean dynamics are a factor influencing El Niño events, the study suggests that atmospheric dynamics may be more important than previously thought in controlling El Niño. The study could change scientists' understanding of the mechanisms driving El Niño.

Title: The slab ocean El Niño

Author: Dietmar Dommenget: School of Mathematical Sciences, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia.

Source:  Geophysical Research Letters, doi:10.1029/2010GL044888, 2010
http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2010GL044888

 

Why complex life probably evolved only once

The universe may be teeming with simple cells like bacteria, but more complex life – including intelligent life – is probably very rare. That is the conclusion of a radical rethink of what it took for complex life to evolve here on Earth.

It suggests that complex alien life-forms could only evolve if an event that happened just once in Earth's history was repeated somewhere else.

All animals, plants and fungi evolved from one ancestor, the first ever complex, or "eukaryotic", cell. This common ancestor had itself evolved from simple bacteria, but it has long been a mystery why this seems to have happened only once: bacteria, after all, have been around for billions of years.

The answer, say Nick Lane of University College London and Bill Martin of the University of Dusseldorf in Germany, is that whenever simple cells start to become more complex, they run into problems generating enough energy.

See  Nature, vol 467, p 929 and   http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18734-why-complex-life-probably-evolved-only-once.html