Stunning: Elephants ‘understand human gesture’

Most everyone has heard the notion of a memory like an elephant’s. Now you maybe be able to add smarts to that, thanks to a study published Thursday in the journal Current Biology. The idea to take away from this story is that elephants definitely get the point.

The finger point that is. Richard Byrne, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, studied the behavior of 11 African elephants at a wildlife research and rehabilitation center in Zimbabwe. In this specific study, an experimenter would stand between two buckets—one with a treat and one without a treat—and point at the bucket with the treats. The researchers found that that the elephants would investigate inside a container 68 percent of the time if a human points to it. A 1-year-old human will look at the indicated container about 78 percent of the time.

What makes this study unique is that unlike most other experiments where the animals are first trained to expect a treat for guessing correctly, based on Pavlov’s theory, these elephants were not. “Our results show that elephants spontaneously attend to and correctly interpret human … gestures without extensive prior learning opportunities — the only nonhuman species so far to show this ability,” wrote Byrne and his graduate student coauthor, Anna Smet.

Elephants now enter the realm of domesticated animals such as cats and dogs that have shown to pick up on human cues like pointing. This trait has been a topic of debate as to why it happens. Some have argued that the trait has evolved over time from close interactions with humans, and others believe it may be an innate ability of group-living animals.

The latter view is supported by the theory that animals in herds or groups would need to be able to pick up on cues from others in their group in order to effectively hunt or evade predators. The results from this study seem to support this theory.

“We suggest that the most plausible account of our elephant’s ability to interpret even subtle human pointing gestures as communicative is that human pointing … taps into elephants’ natural communication system,” the authors wrote.

That said, other social animals have been shown not to have this same ability (we’ll ignore the human joke here). “Surprisingly, Asian elephants have been found not to respond to human-given gestural cues,” authors wrote.

Source:http://natmonitor.com

Astronomers: Dying solar system once harbored vast amounts of water

Approximately 150 light years away lies the star GD 61, a white dwarf nearing the end of its life. GD 61 was once three times more massive than our Sun. Once the star had used up its supply of hydrogen, it began fusing helium into carbon and swelled into a red giant. However, GD 61 lacked sufficient mass to begin fusing carbon, allowing carbon and oxygen to build up in its center. Eventually, the dying star shed its outer layers, leaving an exceptionally dense stellar remnant with a mass comparable to our Sun but with a volume comparable to that of Earth.

A new study led by Jay Farihi of the University of Cambridge has discovered a fragmented dwarf planet around GD 61. Unlike the more than 900 exoplanets discovered around younger stars, the broken dwarf planet orbiting GD 61 has been shattered by the intense gravity of the white dwarf, allowing scientists to study its composition. Debris from the planet has been drawn close to GD 61, and so the team used ultraviolet measurements from the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope to determine the amount of oxygen present in the atmosphere of the white dwarf star.

The ultraviolet measurements allowed the researchers to detect the abundances of magnesium, silicon, iron, and other elements in the contaminated atmosphere of the star. This allowed them to predict how much oxygen should be present in the atmosphere of the star. Farihi and team found significantly more oxygen than they expected. The team ruled out comets as a source of the oxygen because comets, in addition to carrying oxygen in water molecules, also bear large amounts of carbon, and the atmosphere of GD 61 is devoid of carbon. This means that the excess oxygen was probably delivered in water molecules contained within the shattered dwarf planet.

So rich in water was the fragmented dwarf planet that water accounted for 26% of its mass, similar to Ceres, a dwarf planet and the largest object in our solar system’s asteroid belt. By comparison, the blue planet Earth is only 0.02% water mass; indeed, most of the water on Earth was probably delivered by water-rich asteroids early in the planet’s history.

The discovery of a water-rich body in the GD 61 star system provides a glimpse ahead at what our solar system will be like in six billion years, as our own Sun nears the end of its life. It also suggests that habitable planets might have once existed around GD 61. “The finding of water in a large asteroid means the building blocks of habitable planets existed – and maybe still exist – in the GD 61 system, and likely also around a substantial number of similar parent stars,” Farihi explained in a University of Cambridge press release.

The existence of a shattered dwarf planet in the GD 61 system also suggests the presence of one or more gas giants, the gravity of which would have pushed the dwarf planet and other water-rich bodies closer to the white dwarf star. As they moved closer to GD 61, the star’s gravity tore them apart, giving Farihi and colleagues their unique look inside an object in another solar system.

The new study was published in the October 11 issue of the journal Science.

Source:http://thespacereporter.com

Hubble Captures Water-Rich Asteroid Eaten by Dead Star

The NASA Hubble Telescope was able to capture a cosmic event where a dead star has eaten an asteroid proven rich with water.

The dead star, called the GD 61, is 150 light years away from our planet but it provides an interesting insight to how things work in the cosmic system. According to the team of astronomers from the University of Cambridge, University of Warwick (U.K.) and University of Kiel (Germany), the dead star could explain how Earth has acquired masses of water on its surface. It may also give an idea of the future plight of the sun, Earth’s own bright star.

The research team found signs that show potential water abundance in the asteroid. They were also able to detect chemical elements such as magnesium, oxygen, silicon, and iron that are normally present in rock minerals. However, the most interesting element they found is oxygen.

The Hubble Telescope and Hawaiian Keck observatories found very high inflow of oxygen in the dead star. This could only be explained by the large asteroid carrying abundant water.

The researchers were able to see that the star has already burnt and spent its nuclear fuel leaving its surface glow weaker than before. Its gravity however is still forceful with the surrounding rocks crumbled and its fragments pulled into its surface.

It is possible that the GD 61 also had similar rocky planets like Earth before it died. "The reason that we can say that is that the planet-formation process starts with things as small as dust grains. They grow into things as big as pebbles and boulders and then as large as asteroids. Once you get to things as big as asteroids, planets are essentially inevitable - it's a runaway process; you simply cannot stop it," said lead researcher Dr Jay Farihi to BBC.

"So, we know there were rocky planets [in GD 61] because we can see the rocky building blocks; and we know there was the potential to deliver water to their surfaces because we've seen at least one very water-rich and large asteroid."

The dead star has 26 percent water while Earth only has 0.02 percent, both of which potentially came from fallen asteroids and comets.

The dead star’s water composition is comparable to Ceres, a huge asteroid found in the Solar System. It will soon be the subject of NASA’s space investigation in 2014.

Source:http://www.hngn.com

President Obama announces plan to map the human brain

President Obama announces plan to map the human brain by CBS News

President Obama has proposed a $100 million mission to map the human brain in a partnership between government, private industry, and universities. Bill Plante reports.