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Weekly Update: New mineral found on the moon
WASHINGTON: A new mineral formed by repeated bombardments from meteorites and other space debris has been found in a meteorite that fell to Earth from the moon in 2000, researchers reported on Monday.
The finding shows that “space weather” can help create materials not seen on Earth, they reported in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The new mineral is named hapkeite, after Bruce Hapke, an emeritus professor of geology and planetary sciences at Cornell University in New York, who predicted its discovery.
Airless bodies such as the moon, Mercury, and asteroids have an inorganic soil made of crushed rocks called regolith.
Hapkeite is made when iron and silicon are deposited with two parts iron and one part silicon, Mahesh Anand of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and colleagues reported.— Reuters
Your mistake, my mistake —all the same to the brain
WASHINGTON: Why is it so annoying to watch someone else make a mistake? Maybe because it affects the same areas of the brain as when a person makes his or her own mistake, Dutch researchers said on Monday.
Experiments in which volunteers tried a computer task and then watched each other do the same thing showed the brain reacted in a similar way whether the observer made the mistake, or watched someone else make it.
Writing in the May issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, the team at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands said their findings help shed light on how human beings learn by watching one another.
For their experiment Hein van Schie and colleagues hooked up 16 men and women to electrodes to measure brain activity and then sat them in front of a display screen with a joystick. The task was simple — to move the joystick in the same direction as certain arrows appearing on the screen.
After each trial, the volunteers were told whether they were correct.
When people realized they had made an error, a distinctive electrical signal arose from a brain region called the anterior cingulate cortex.
The same thing happened when the volunteers watched other volunteers try the experiment and make the occasional mistake, the researchers found.
“These data suggest that similar neural mechanisms are involved in monitoring one’s own actions and the actions of others,” they concluded. — Reuters
Kangaroo wins bravery award
CANBERRA: A kangaroo named Lulu is to receive a national bravery award after raising the alarm to save an Australian farmer.
Hobby farmer Leonard Richards was checking for storm damage on his property at Tanjil South, 150 km east of Melbourne, last September when he was hit by a falling branch.
As in the Australian TV series Skippy, in which a kangaroo rescued people in distress, Lulu began barking until Richards’ wife came to investigate, said the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). She found her husband lying unconscious under a tree about 200 metres from the house, guarded by the kangaroo.
The RSPCA has given Lulu its animal valour award to recognize the kangaroo’s heroic act with a certificate to be presented to Richards at a ceremony next month.
Lulu was reared by the Richards family. — Reuters
Royal wedding mania
COPENHAGEN: Danes are so eager to watch the wedding of Crown Prince Frederik to Australian commoner Mary Donaldson on May 14 that many of them have cancelled pre-surgery appointments in Copen-hagen’s hospitals scheduled for that day, hospital officials complained on Monday.
The Danish royal family — the world’s oldest monarchy — is hugely popular and many Danes see the upcoming wedding as a major event in their history.
Prince Frederik, Queen Margrethe II’s oldest son, is to tie the knot with Donaldson in Copenhagen’s Lutheran cathedral. —AFP
Jet condensation trails may cause climate change
WASHINGTON: Condensation trails from the engine exhausts of jet aircraft may have provoked the warming trend in the climate seen from 1975 to 1994, a NASA researcher said.
“This result shows the increased cirrus (cloud) coverage, attributable to air traffic, could account for nearly all the warming observed over the US for nearly 20 years starting in 1975,” said Patrick Minnis, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Centre in Hampton, Virginia.
Such “contrails”, which are believed to actually cause the increase in cirrus cloud according to the study’s findings, would “add to, and not replace, any greenhouse gas effect,” he said.
The study indicates that contrails should be included in climate change scenarios,” the National Aeronautics and Space Administration researcher added. — AFP
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