Warming Seas Drive Rapid Acceleration of Melting Antarctic Ice

As warm ocean water rises up to melt them, glaciers around the Amundsen Sea are losing half a Mount Everest a year.

A second study, published Thursday in the journal Science, helps explain the accelerating ice melt: Warm ocean water is melting the floating ice shelves that hold back the glaciers.

The two new pieces of research come as officials of the World Meteorological Organization announced Wednesday that 2014 is on track to be the warmest year on record.

Scientists have long worried that the West Antarctic ice sheet is a place where climate change might tip toward catastrophe. The ice sheet holds enough water to raise sea level by 16 feet (5 meters). The region along the Amundsen Sea is the sheet’s soft underbelly, where the ice is most vulnerable. (See “Rising Seas” in National Geographic magazine.)

Earlier this year, researchers at the University of California, Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported that the glaciers flowing into the Amundsen Sea—notably the Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers—were already doomed to collapse, and at the current rate of melting would be gone in 200 years.

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The influence of fatherhood on the science of Charles Darwin

There are drawings in Charles Darwin’s manuscripts that defy explanation — until we remember that Darwin and his wife Emma had a huge family of ten (rambunctious) children. Scholars believe that a young Francis Darwin —the naturalist’s son— drew this on the back of Darwin’s manuscript for On the Origin of Species.

UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner has noted that Darwin’s family life may have inspired some of his scientific writing. When his daughter Annie died at age 10, Darwin started to have deep insights about the place of suffering and compassion in human experience.

That led him to argue, in The Descent of Man, that sympathy is our strongest instinct, sometimes stronger than self-interest, and he argued that it would spread through natural selection, for “the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.”

This point was totally forgotten by evolutionary science for quite some time. Well, given all the awful things humans do to each other, how could you make the case that sympathy is our strongest instinct?

The answer lies in the dependence and vulnerability of our children. Little baby chimpanzees eat by themselves; human babies can’t. Baby chimpanzees sit up on their own; you sit up a human baby, and they go, “Watch out, man, my head’s really big!” Boom!

Their heads are so big because their brains are so big. To fit their big heads through the human birth canal—which narrowed as we started to walk upright on the African savanna—our babies were born profoundly premature and dependent upon people to take care of them.

In fact, our babies are the most vulnerable offspring on the face of the Earth. And that simple fact changed everything. It rearranged our social structures, building cooperative networks of caretaking, and it rearranged our nervous systems. We became the super caregiving species, to the point where acts of care improve our physical health and lengthen our lives. We are born to be good to each other.

Watch how the vulnerability of our children transformed human relationships and made compassion essential to our survival:

 

 

 

How Power Makes People Selfish

“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely,” said the British historian Lord Acton. Unfortunately, this is not entirely a myth.

A great deal of research—especially from social psychology—lends support to Acton’s claim: Power leads people to act in impulsive fashion, both good and bad, and to fail to understand other people’s feelings and desires.

It is commonly thought that you must be misleading, forceful, and even conniving, to hold a position of power. New research reveals that instead, the most successful leaders are empathetic and receptive to the needs of others. Social intelligence is one of the highest ranking qualities a person in power should have. The Machiavellian type of power loses out much more often.

The strategy and manipulation that are core to the Machiavellian power structure, are not likely to help in obtaining and holding onto power. A successful leader is one who works to advance the goals of others around him/her, and is much more aware of group dynamics. Even in the case of primates, it was discovered that chimpanzees are much less reliant on strength and fighting to establish power. Instead, things like making sure everyone has enough food, working to resolve conflicts, and enforce normative group guidelines, were much more likely to make one chimp more powerful than another.

The irony is that once most people become powerful, they often stop exhibiting the qualities that got them there in the first place. Dacher Keltner, the UC Berkeley psychologist featured in the video above, says “When you give people power, they basically start acting like fools. They flirt inappropriately, tease in a hostile fashion, and become totally impulsive.” They actually begin to exhibit behavior similar to neurology patients with brain damage, which prevents them from relating to others.

This is because they are less able to sympathize with the emotions of their subordinates. They stop making eye contact with those in a less powerful position, and tend to rely on stereotypes when judging others in the workplace. While it takes a lot of empathy and social intelligence in the process of gaining power, it is a very easy thing to lose once the power is obtained.

Caffeine helps your memory

Caffeine is the energy boost of choice for millions who consume it to wake up or stay up. Now, UC Irvine neurobiologist Michael Yassa has found another use for the stimulant: memory enhancer.

Michael Yassa, assistant professor of neurobiology & behavior, and his team of scientists found that caffeine has a positive effect on long-term memory in humans.

“We’ve always known that caffeine has cognitive enhancing effects, but its particular effects on strengthening memories and making them resistant to forgetting has never been examined in detail in humans,” Yassa said. “We report for the first time a specific effect of caffeine on reducing forgetting over 24 hours.”

The researchers conducted a double-blind trial in which participants who did not regularly eat or drink caffeinated products received either a placebo or a 200 milligrams caffeine tablet five minutes after studying a series of images. Saliva samples were taken from the participants before ingesting caffeine, and one, three and 24 hours afterwards to check for increased caffeine levels.

The next day, both groups were tested on their ability to recognize images from the previous day’s study session. On the test, some of the visuals were the same as from the day before, some were new additions and some were similar but not the same as the items previously viewed. Researchers say more participants in the caffeine group were able to correctly identify the new images as “similar” to previously viewed images versus erroneously citing them as the same.

The brain’s ability to recognize the difference between two similar but not identical items, called pattern separation, reflects a deeper level of memory retention, the researchers said.

“If we used a standard recognition memory task without these tricky similar items, we would have found no effect of caffeine,” Yassa said. “However, using these items requires the brain to make a more difficult discrimination – what we call pattern separation, which seems to be the process that is enhanced by caffeine in our case.”

[Image via yourcoffeeguru]

Read the rest of the most discussed UC research of 2014 →

How songbirds may help build a better hearing aid

Untreated hearing loss can have devastating and alienating repercussions on a person’s life: isolation, depression, sapped cognition, even dementia.

Yet only one in five Americans who could benefit from a hearing aid actually wears one. Some don’t seek help because their loss has been so gradual that they do not feel impaired. Others cannot afford the device. Many own hearing aids but leave them in a drawer. Wearing them is just too unpleasant.

“In a crowded place, it can be very difficult to follow a conversation even if you don’t have hearing deficits,” says UC Berkeley neuroscientist Frederic Theunissen. “That situation can be terrible for a person wearing a hearing aid, which amplifies everything.”

Imagine the chaotic din in which everything is equally amplified: your friend’s voice, the loud people a few tables over, and the baby crying across the room.

In that scenario, the friend’s voice is the signal, or sound that the listener is trying to hear. Tuning in to signal sounds, even with background noise, is something that healthy human brains and ears do remarkably well. The question for Theunissen — a professor who focuses on auditory perception — was how to make a hearing aid that processes sound the way the brain does.

“We were inspired by the biology of hearing,” Theunissen said. “How does the brain do it?”

Songbirds excel at listening in crowded, noisy environments

Humans aren’t the only ones able to hone in on specific sounds in noisy environments. For the past two years, Theunissen and the graduate students in his lab have studied songbirds, which are especially adept at listening in crowded, noisy environments.

By looking at songbird brain imagery, the researchers now understand how chatty, social animals distinguish the chirp of a mate from the din of dozens of other birds.

They were able to identify the exact neurons that tune into a signal and remain tuned there no matter how noisy the environment becomes. These neurons shine what Theunissen calls an “auditory spotlight” by focusing in on certain features or “edges” of a sound. Imagine you are looking for your cellphone on a table covered with objects. In the same way that your eye can find for a specific rectangular shape and color, your ear searches for and finds certain pitches and frequencies: the sound of a friend’s voice in a restaurant.

“Our brain does all this work, suppressing echoes and background noise, conducting auditory scene analysis,” Theunissen says.

A Proof of Concept Commercialization Gap grant from UC Research Initiatives in the Office of the President provided the critical funding the lab needed to take the discovery one giant step farther.

Read How songbirds may help build a better hearing aid →

How ancient Rome may help reduce our carbon footprint

A key discovery to understanding the longevity and endurance of Roman architectural concrete has been made by researchers using beams of X-rays at the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Ancient Roman concrete consists of coarse chunks of volcanic tuff and brick bound together by a volcanic ash-lime mortar that resists microcracking, a key to its longevity and endurance for nearly 2,000 years.

The mortars that bind the concrete composites used to construct the structures of Imperial Rome are of keen scientific interest not just because of their durability, but also for the environmental advantages they offer. Manufacturing modern cement requires heating a mix of limestone and clay to 1,450 degrees Celsius, a process that releases enough carbon to account for about 7 percent of the total amount emitted into the atmosphere each year.

Roman architectural mortar, by contrast, is a mixture of about 85 percent volcanic ash, fresh water and lime, which is calcined at much lower temperature than today’s cement. Coarse chunks of volcanic tuff and brick compose about 45 to 55 percent of the concrete. The result is a significant reduction in carbon emissions.

UC Berkeley volcanologist Marie Jackson explains:

If we can find ways to incorporate a substantial volumetric component of volcanic rock in the production of specialty concretes, we could greatly reduce the carbon emissions associated with their production while also improving their durability and mechanical resistance over time.

Read more about the discovery →

Where do heavy elements like gold come from?

During the formation of the solar system Earth underwent an event known as the late bombardment. This was a time of a high amount of asteroid collisions hitting the Earth’s surface. These objects painted the surface of our planet with heavy elements such as gold, silver and titanium.

But how did these asteroids form and where do they come from? Scientists still don’t know the full answer to this question. The issue here is that even our Sun can only produce up to a certain level of heavy materials. Star power works because atoms of hydrogen combine to form helium, but the size and density of most stars can only produce Iron until they lose power and collapse.

One theory is that the biggest stars in our universe live these short lifespans. When they die they explode and produce these very dense stars known as neutron stars. The explosion itself is known as a supernovae and in this event it is thought that there is enough heat to produce heavy elements.

However even with this scenario, the computer models are not completely conclusive and so Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz at UC Santa Cruz has been developing alternative theories.

For note-taking, pens beat laptops hands down

Taking notes

Writer’s cramp aside, a study by Daniel Oppenheimer of UCLA and Pam Mueller found that those who took notes by hand retained information and demonstrated better conceptual grasp of lecture material than those who took notes on laptops or tablets.

Because students can type significantly faster than they can write, those who use laptops in the classroom tend to take more notes than those who write out their notes by hand.  Moreover, when students take notes using laptops they tend to take notes verbatim, writing down every last word uttered by their professor. Obviously it is advantageous to draft more complete notes that precisely capture the course content and allow for a verbatim review of the material at a later date. Only it isn’t.

What drives this paradoxical finding?  Mueller and Oppenheimer postulate that taking notes by hand requires different types of cognitive processing than taking notes on a laptop, and these different processes have consequences for learning.  Writing by hand is slower and more cumbersome than typing, and students cannot possibly write down every word in a lecture.  Instead, they listen, digest, and summarize so that they can succinctly capture the essence of the information.  Thus, taking notes by hand forces the brain to engage in some heavy “mental lifting,” and these efforts foster comprehension and retention.  By contrast, when typing students can easily produce a written record of the lecture without processing its meaning, as faster typing speeds allow students to transcribe a lecture word for word without devoting much thought to the content.

Read the rest of the most discussed UC research of 2014

Is Sugar in Fruit Different Than Sugar in Soda?

Sugar. Everyone loves a sweet treat, but sugar has found its way into savory foods like pasta sauce and bread. On average, Americans eat nearly 66 pounds of added sugar per person per year. It’s easy to exceed the daily recommended sugar intake when a 12 oz soda has about 11 teaspoons of added sugar.  But what about the sugar in fruit?  Should people be worried about how much fruit they’re eating? Kimber Stanhope, a Nutritional biologist at UC Davis, walks us through the science.

Sugar doesn’t just add to our waistlines, it is linked to chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes. There is also growing scientific consensus that one of the most common types of sugar, fructose (found in high-fructose corn syrup and table sugar) can be toxic to the liver, just like alcohol.

Is fruit juice better for you than soda?   

Dr. Stanhope gets asked this a lot. The short answer is that no one really knows for sure.

“…it drives me crazy that I don’t know the answer for sure. I have not found any studies in the scientific literature that have actually compared the consumption of a sugar-sweetened beverage to a fruit juice-sweetened beverage for more than one day. So we’re going to do a 2-week study…one group will be getting fruit juice (orange juice), the other group will get a sucrose-sweetened beverage. And I think it’s very important that this study gets done because there are many scientists out there that have made the assumption that fruit juice is just as bad as sucrose [because they’ve taken out the fiber in fruit], and they might be right, but I don’t know. There is evidence in the literature, epidemiological studies, that suggest that fruit juice is protective compared to a sugar-sweetened beverage, and there is also a couple of studies that suggest they’re just as bad. We need to know.”

Stanhope points out that the answer may even differ for each type of fruit juice (grapefruit juice, apple juice, orange juice, etc.).  She hopes to study the question in more detail once the preliminary results come in.

More information at sugarscience.org

Make The Best Pie Ever Using Science

One of the staples of the holiday season is pie and while you may have Grandma’s recipe for the perfect crust, do you really know what goes on at a molecular level? UCLA biophysicist Amy Rowat shares some of the scientific aspects of apple pie and explains how you can apply these insights in the kitchen.

1.    Think of butter as a gas.

Butter is really just a bunch of teeny tiny water droplets dispersed in a matrix of fat. In the oven, these water droplets convert from liquid to gas. This means that the chunks of butter you can see in your dough are really just big pockets of air waiting to happen. More air = flakier crust! While butters with the highest butterfat content are generally synonymous with the highest quality butter, when it comes to baking pie a slightly lower fat content, and higher water content, may be a good thing.

2.    Experiment with the liquids you add to your pie dough
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Gluten gives structure and stability to pie dough, but can also make pie dough dense and tough when over-developed. Typically water is added to create pie dough, but you can experiment with different liquids —like vodka, rum or even carbonated water— that impede the formation of gluten protein networks.

 3.    Sometimes the best pie is a day-old pie.
Temperature is important for pie texture. Because molecules flow more quickly past each other at higher temperatures, hot pie filling straight from the oven will be more runny; as the pie filling cools, starchy molecules like cornstarch and flour spend more time interacting with each other. As the pie cools, the pectin molecules of your fruit also spend more time interacting with each other. This results in a more solid, gel-like filling that will take longer to seep out of the pie when it is cut and served on a plate.

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