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Thursday, December 5, 2013
Different brain waves
Scientists have again found stark contrasts in the wiring of male and female brains, according to a report of The Guardian.
They confirmed what had been indicated earlier, drawing on nearly 1,000 brain scans.Details of the study were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Maps of neural circuitry showed that on average women's brains were highly connected across the left and right hemispheres in contrast to men's brains, where the connections were typically stronger between the front and back regions.
Ragini Verma, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, said the greatest surprise was how much the findings supported old stereotypes, with men's brains apparently wired more for perception and co-ordinated actions, and women's for social skills and memory, making them better equipped for multitasking.
"If you look at functional studies, the left of the brain is more for logical thinking, the right of the brain is for more intuitive thinking. So if there's a task that involves doing both of those things, it would seem that women are hardwired to do those better," Verma said.
"Women are better at intuitive thinking. Women are better at remembering things. When you talk, women are more emotionally involved – they will listen more."
She added: "I was surprised that it matched a lot of the stereotypes that we think we have in our heads. If I wanted to go to a chef or a hairstylist, they are mainly men."
Monday, December 2, 2013
Sunday, December 1, 2013
‘Zombie’ live again
A smaller, paler version of Comet ISON may have survived incineration in the sun's corona and may be brightening, scientists said on Friday.
Since its discovery in September
2012, Comet ISON has been full of surprises. It started off extremely bright,
considering its great distance from the sun at the time, beyond Jupiter's
orbit.
As it drew closer, it did not brighten as much as expected,
raising doubts about its size and the amount of water it contained. Ice in a
comet's body vaporizes from solar heating, causing a bright stream of particles
to trail the body in a distinctive tail.
Conflicting pictures of the
comet's future continued until Thursday when ISON apparently flew too close to
the sun. Its long tail and nucleus seemingly vaporized in the solar furnace,
dashing hopes of a naked-eye comet visible in Earth's skies in
December.
But late on Thursday, ISON surprised again.
"A bright
streak of material streaming away from the sun appeared in the European Space
Agency and NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory later in the evening," NASA
wrote on its website on Friday.
"The question remains whether it is
merely debris from the comet, or if some portion of the comet's nucleus
survived," the U.S. space agency said.
Preliminary analysis suggests that
at least a small nucleus is intact.
"One could almost be forgiven for
thinking that there's a comet in the images," astrophysicist Karl Battams, with
the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, wrote in a blog posted Thursday
night.
"Right now it does appear that a least some small fraction of ISON
has remained in one piece and is actively releasing material," Battams
wrote.
"If there is a nucleus, it is still too soon to tell how long it
will survive. If it does survive for more than a few days, it is too soon to
tell if the comet will be visible in the night sky. If it is visible in the
night sky, it is too soon to say how bright it will be ... I think you get the
picture, yes?" he added.
The comet was discovered last year by two
amateur astronomers using Russia's International Scientific Optical Network, or
ISON.
Comets are believed to be frozen remains left over from the
formation of the solar system some 4.5 billion years ago.
The family of
comets that ISON is from resides in the Oort Cloud, which is about 10,000 times
farther away from the sun than Earth, halfway to the next star.
Computer
models show it left the outer edge of the solar system about 5.5 million years
ago and began journeying toward the sun.
At its closest approach on
Thursday, it passed just 730,000 miles (1.2 million km) from the sun's surface
and experienced temperatures reaching 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees
Celsius.)
"This has unquestionably been the most extraordinary comet that
... I, and many other astronomers, have ever witnessed," Battams wrote. "This
story isn't over yet."
Rare diplodocus dinosaur sells for $650,000
The skeleton of a diplodocus dinosaur that roamed what is now the United States some 160 million years ago was sold for 400,000 pounds ($651,100) to an unidentified public institution at an auction in Britain on Wednesday.
Misty, as the dinosaur was nicknamed,
will later be put on public display, the auctioneers said.
It was found
by the teenage sons of German dinosaur hunter Raimund Albersdoerfer in Dana
quarry in Wyoming, in the western United States.
The auctioneers, Summers
Place Auction, declined to disclose any details about the buyer, who wished to
remain anonymous.
"Finding a reasonably complete diplodocus of this size
is extremely rare," Errol Fuller, a natural history expert and curator of the
sale, told Reuters by telephone from West Sussex in England. "They are only ever
really found by luck."
The remains of the 17-metre (56 ft) female are
among the few more or less complete skeletons of diplodocus longus ever found.
The sons of the German paleontologist came across Misty's fossilised bones after
their father sent them to hunt another area because they were distracting him
from his own search.
"The children wanted to find their own bits and
pieces, so he sent them where he thought they might find a few fragments but
nothing really important, and they came back saying that they had found this
enormous bone," Fuller said.
Since the discovery was made on private
rather than Federal land, it was possible for the German paleontologist to
remove the fossils from the United States. They were sent to Holland, where they
were cleaned and assembled, and then to the UK, where Misty was sold to the
owner who is about to take her to her new home.
$1 = 77.80 Bangladeshi taka
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