science & technology

A decrease in airborne dust and volcanic emissions has contributed to warming the North Atlantic Ocean in the past three decades, a study showed Thursday.

About 70 percent of the Atlantic’s warming since 1980, at an average per-decade rate of a half-degree Fahrenheit (a quarter-degree Celsius), was due to less dust blown from African dust storms or to volcanic eruptions, scientists wrote in the journal Science.

“Volcanoes and dust storms are really important if you want to understand (climatic) changes over long periods of time,” said the study’s lead author Amato Evan, a researcher with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He said airborne particles producing warmer temperatures can also help cause hurricanes, which thrive on warm water.

Evan and his colleagues had previously shown that African dust and other airborne particles can reduce hurricane activity by allowing less sunlight to reach the water and thus cool the sea surface.

Years with low dust activity, such as 2004 and 2005 — a record-breaking storm year — have been associated with more frequent storms, the researchers noted.

During their study, the researchers used satellite data of dust and other particles along with existing climate models to calculate how much of the Atlantic warming of the past 26 years was due to changes in tropical volcanic activity.

Major such volcanic eruptions that dimmed sunlight were Mexico’s El Chichon in 1982 and Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991.

Although volcanoes are unpredictable by nature, Evan said newer climate models should at least include dust storms as a factor to predict ocean temperature changes accurately.

“We don’t really understand how dust is going to change in these climate projections, and changes in dust could have a really good effect or a really bad effect,” he said.

The researchers attributed a quarter of the warming to the dust storms themselves and said that only about 30 percent of the temperature increases were due to other factors, such as global warming.

“This makes sense, because we don’t really expect global warming to make the ocean [temperature] increase that fast,” said Evan.

Evan wrote the study with other experts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A new kind of brain-imaging scanner has shown that intelligence is strongly influenced by the quality of the brain’s axons, or wiring that sends signals throughout the brain.

The faster the signalling, the faster the brain processes information. And since the integrity of the brain’s wiring is influenced by genes, the genes we inherit play a far greater role in intelligence than was previously thought.

Genes appear to influence intelligence by determining how well nerve axons are encased in myelin the fatty sheath of ‘insulation’ that coats our axons and allows for fast signalling bursts in our brains.

The thicker the myelin, the faster the nerve impulses. University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) neurology professor Paul Thompson and colleagues scanned the brains of 23 sets of identical twins and 23 sets of fraternal twins.

Since identical twins share the same genes while fraternal twins share about half their genes, the researchers were able to compare each group to show that myelin integrity was determined genetically in many parts of the brain that are key for intelligence.

These include the parietal lobes, which are responsible for spatial reasoning, visual processing and logic, and the corpus callosum, which pulls together information from both sides of the body.

The researchers used a faster version of a type of scanner called a HARDI (high-angular resolution diffusion imaging) that takes scans of the brain at a much higher resolution than a standard MRI.

While an MRI scan shows the volume of different tissues in the brain by measuring the amount of water present, HARDI tracks how water diffuses through the brain’s white matter – a way to measure the quality of its myelin.

‘HARDI measures water diffusion,’ said Thompson, who is also a member of the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro-Imaging. ‘If the water diffuses rapidly in a specific direction, it tells us that the brain has very fast connections. If it diffuses more broadly, that’s an indication of slower signalling, and lower intelligence.’

‘So it gives us a picture of one’s mental speed,’ he said. ‘The whole point of this research,’ Thompson said, ‘is to give us insight into brain diseases.’

And could this someday lead to a therapy that could make us smarter, enhancing our intelligence? ‘It’s a long way off but within the realm of the possible,’ Thompson said, according to an UCLA release.

Japanese researchers on Monday showed off a robot that will soon strut her stuff down a Tokyo catwalk.

The girlie-faced humanoid with slightly oversized eyes, a tiny nose and a shoulder length hair-do boasts 42 motion motors programmed to mimic the movements of flesh-and-blood fashion models.

“Hello everybody, I am cybernetic human HRP-4C,” said the futuristic fashionista, opening her media premiere at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology outside Tokyo.

The fashion-bot is 158 centimetres (five foot two inches) tall, the average height of Japanese women aged 19 to 29, but weighs in at a waif-like 43 kilograms (95 pounds) — including batteries.

She has a manga-inspired human face but a silver metallic body.

“If we had made the robot too similar to a real human, it would have been uncanny,” said one of the inventors, humanoid research leader Shuji Kajita.

“We have deliberately leaned toward an anime style.”

The institute said the robot “has been developed mainly for use in the entertainment industry” but is not for sale at the moment.

Hamming it up before photographers and television crews, the seductive cyborg struck poses, flashed bright smiles and pouted sulkily according to commands transmitted wirelessly from journalists via bluetooth devices.

The performance fell short of flawless when she occasionally mixed up her facial expressions — a mistake the inventors put down to a case of the nerves as a hail of camera shutters confused her sound recognition sensors.

The preview was a warm-up for her appearance at a Tokyo fashion show on March 23.

Like her real-life counterparts, robot model HRP-5C commands a hefty price — the institute said developing her cost more than 200 million yen (two million dollars).

The United States late Friday launched a space telescope whose three-year mission is to find Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy.

The Kepler telescope blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, atop a Delta II rocket 10:49 pm (0349 GMT Saturday), according to the US space agency Nasa.

“This mission attempts to answer a question that is as old as time itself — are other planets like ours out there?” said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for Nasa ‘s Science Mission Directorate.

“It’s not just a science mission, it’s an historical mission.”

Kepler will stare at the same spot in space for three and a half years, taking in about 100,000 stars around the Cygnus and Lyra constellations of the Milky Way.

At a cost of nearly 600 million dollars, it will be the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s first mission in search of Earth-like planets orbiting suns similar to ours, at just the right distance and temperature for life-sustaining water to exist.

The telescope will be hunting for relatively small planets that are neither too hot nor too cold, are rocky and have liquid water — essential life-sustaining conditions — explained William Borucki, Kepler’s principal investigator based at Nasa ‘s Ames Research Center in California.

“If we find that many, it certainly will mean that life may well be common throughout our galaxy, that there is an opportunity for life to have a place to evolve,” Borucki said.

Equipped with the largest camera ever launched into space — a 95-megapixel array of charge-coupled devices (CCDs) — the Kepler telescope is able to detect the faint, periodic dimming of stars that planets cause as they pass by.

“If Kepler were to look down at a small town on Earth at night from space, it would be able to detect the dimming of a porch light as somebody passed in front,” according to Kepler project manager James Fanson.

This is no small feat.

“Trying to detect Jupiter-size planets crossing in front of their stars is like trying to measure the effect of a mosquito flying by a car’s headlight,” Fanson said.

“Finding Earth-sized planets is like trying to detect a very tiny flea in that same headlight.”

Kepler’s discoveries “may fundamentally alter humanity’s view of itself,” Jon Morse, astrophysics division director at the Nasa ‘s Washington headquarters, told a press conference last month.

“The planetary census Kepler takes will be very important for understanding the frequency of Earth-size planets in our galaxy and planning future missions that directly detect and characterize such worlds around nearby stars.”

Ever since astronomers first turned their telescopes to the sky, humans have been searching for other planets. But the small size of planets compared to stars has complicated the task. Only eight planets have been found in our solar system — Pluto is now considered a mere planetoid.

Since 1995, some 337 planets have been found orbiting around stars outside our solar system, but they are all bigger than Earth and do not have Earth-like conditions that make life possible.

The French-led COROT satellite, which has been in orbit since 2006, has already discovered the smallest extraterrestrial planet so far. At a little over twice the Earth’s diameter, the planet is very close to its star and very hot, astronomers reported earlier this month.

Astronomer Debra Fischer at San Francisco State University said that Nasa’s mission is a cornerstone in understanding what types of planets are formed around other stars.

Information that Kepler will help compile, she said, “will help us chart a course toward one day imaging a pale blue dot like our planet, orbiting another star in our galaxy.”