Science Odds and Ends

...groups have a "collective intelligence" that predicts their performance on a range of collaborative tasks. They also investigated why some groups appear to be smarter than others. Surprisingly, the average intelligence of the individuals in the group was not the best predictor of a group's performance. The degree to which group members were attuned to social cues and their willingness to take turns speaking were more important, as was the proportion of women in the group.

"social sensitivity" is a key ingredient of successful teams, Woolley says. However, the random makeup of the groups may limit the reach of the findings, cautions Linda Gottfredson, a sociologist who studies intelligence at the University of Delaware, Newark. She notes that the groups were composed of strangers. "It is possible that turn taking in conversation was so important for that reason," she says.

Scientists tracked the motion of five pairs of twin fetuses using ultrasonography, an imaging technique that visualizes internal body structures. By the 14 th week of gestation, the fetuses began reaching toward their partners, and just 4 weeks later, they spent more time touching their neighbors than themselves or the walls of the uterus. In all, almost 30% of their movements were directed toward their prenatal companions. These movements, such as stroking the head or back, last longer and are more accurate than self-directed movements, such as touching their own eyes or mouths. The findings suggest that twin fetuses are aware of their counterparts in the womb and prefer to interact with them. Or as the authors put it, they're "wired to be social."

The first approved U.S. clinical trial to use human embryonic stem cells to treat a disease has enrolled its first patient. Geron Corp., which is sponsoring the trial using stem cells for spinal cord injury, announced yesterday that the patient was treated at a hospital in Atlanta. Patients in the study will receive an injection of stem cells at the site of spinal cord damage within 2 weeks after the injury. The small trial is a safety study, but as The Washington Post notes, researchers will also test to see if they benefit from the therapy.

High unemployment is now plaguing many nations' economies, but even in the best of times, about one out of every 25 workers will be out of a job. This year's winners of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel laid out the theory that explains why full employment is impossible. Starting in the 1970s [Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen, and Christopher Pissarides] developed, mostly independently, the theory of markets that suffer "search friction," or costs for consumers and suppliers of a good to find one another. Dubbed the "DMP theory" in the economists' honor, it has become the bedrock for the study of labor markets and explains why people are sure to be out of work even when the number of vacant jobs equals the number of job seekers, so-called equilibrium unemployment. Although the DMP theory started out as a mathematical abstraction, it has become a tool for applied economists and policymakers. That's because it provides a framework for studying in detail the effectiveness of a specific intervention in reducing unemployment or ameliorating its effects.

Water may seem like a dull liquid. But at the molecular scale, there's a party going on. New simulations reveal that water molecules actually form two different types of structures that break apart and recombine at lightning speeds. Within that mix, the hydrogen atoms form connections that function like hooks, onto which carbon or nitrogen atoms can presumably grab to form the beginnings of complex organic molecules. As far as anyone knows, no other liquid demonstrates this property. The finding introduces "a framework to understand how water with its [hidden structure] influences protein function at the fundamental level,...water is more than just a solvent, but actually an integral part of the functional structure of proteins."

It's been 30 years since Congress revised U.S. patent laws to encourage universities to embrace the world of commerce. Critics predicted that the integrity of academic research would be compromised by patent-grubbing and attempts to build companies around the latest laboratory findings. But such fears did not come true, says a new report from the National Academies released Monday. At the same time, however, the Academies' panel warns universities not to go overboard hunting for patents. Instead, the report says, universities should aim to disseminate technology as widely as possible for the public good.

If you want to understand the way prescription drugs are marketed today, have a look at the 1928 book, "Propaganda," by Edward Bernays, the father of public relations in America.

For Bernays, the public relations business was less about selling things than about creating the conditions for things to sell themselves. ...pharmaceutical marketers now sell drugs by selling the diseases that they treat. The buzzword is "disease branding."

To brand a disease is to shape its public perception in order to make it more palatable to potential patients. Once a branded disease has achieved a degree of cultural legitimacy, there is no need to convince anyone that a drug to treat it is necessary. It will come to him as his own idea.

Today marks the 15th birthday of Science's Next Wave (since renamed Science Careers), which I have edited for the past 5 years. "The period from 1950 to 1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D.s could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. But, in retrospect, we can see that the golden age was merely the last 20 years of a long period of exponential growth in science that could not possibly be sustained."

In the mid-1990s, when I was a postdoc, a senior colleague related his own golden-age experience. He had six offers right out of grad school, he told me, and many of his classmates shared a similar, happy fate. Contrast this to my own experience, in the same field, some 30 years later: One rejection letter thanked me for being part of " an outstanding cohort" of more than 1300 applicants.

As a birthday gift, I offer a handful of proposals (which do not represent the views of AAAS or Science) on ways to address the storm that, the authors of the new report argue, is now approaching category 5.
--Improve K–12 education: Let's make teaching math and science in the schools a good job for scientists with advanced degrees, as it is in some other countries. Unless you have very good educators, you cannot have good education, and bad jobs do not attract good people.
--Fund far more science: The new Gathering Storm report says that 2004 federal R&D spending was 60% lower than 1964 federal R&D spending as a proportion of the gross domestic product.
--Create more good midlevel jobs in academic research
--Seed endowed chairs for early-career faculty members
--Incentivize scientific investment

The annual meeting http://www.ipcc.ch/meeting_documentatio ... ession.htm of the nations that make up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ended yesterday in Busan, South Korea, and a few details have trickled out.

Going into the meeting, documents show ( http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session32/i ... edures.pdf ), nations wanted IPCC to reform itself along the lines of the recommendations in a report by the InterAcademy Council (IAC). That group, which represents several national science academies, called for a wide range of reforms ( http://reviewipcc.interacademycouncil.n ... lease.html ), including an executive council to handle day-to-day business, rules on how to correct errors, and better procedures for dealing with scientific uncertainties.

A new study indicates that subtle changes in sentence structure can make the difference between whether voters view a politician as promising or unelectable.

In both cases, the perfect aspect—"had an affair" or "removed homes"—conveys a sense that the bad deed is in the past, says Matlock. That may make voters more likely to forgive these actions. On the other hand, imperfect phrases such as "was having an affair" and "was removing homes" suggest that the bad deeds may still be happening and, hence, that the politician is less electable.

Matlock and Fausey saw the disparity only with negative behaviors. When an additional 166 students read perfect and imperfect aspect phrasing about Johnson supporting cancer research, for example, there was no difference in how confident the students were in their judgments of electability. Past research shows that people pay more attention to negative events, Fausey says, so voters may treat them as more important when forming impressions of a politician.

WUHAN, CHINA—If anyone is under the impression that the Chinese public is ready to embrace genetically modified (GM) crops, they are mistaken. At a hastily arranged session at a symposium here earlier this week, members of the general public berated and quizzed scientists on concerns ranging from the legitimate to the bizarre.

The Chinese government is pushing hard on GM...But the Chinese public is pushing back.

Experts sought to reassure the audience that consumption of GM crops has been linked neither to growth of human wings nor to suppressed sperm levels. But they also acknowledged that there are legitimate questions about the long-term safety of GM foods, both to human health and the environment, that are the subject of ongoing research. "I cannot say that GM food is totally safe," says Zhu Zhen of the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

Yesterday, four high-ranking congressional Republicans charged that the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is playing politics with a technical study of the site, pre-empting legislation enacted by Congress.

One key document in dispute is volume three of an NRC staff member safety evaluation report on the nuclear waste project. It's part of an independent review of a license application filed by the U.S. Department of Energy back in 2008, when DOE still wanted to use Yucca Mountain. Volume three deals with whether the repository could meet long term "post-closure" standards established by NRC to protect the public from radioactive waste. The analysis is complete and rumor has it that it concludes that the Yucca Mountain design meets safety standards. But NRC staff members aren't discussing the contents.

The flap has prompted others, including former NRC Commissioner Kenneth Rogers, to object. Rogers thinks that NRC is being pressured by the Administration to quash the safety review. On 8 October, Rogers wrote to Jaczko and other NRC commissioners saying that he is "deeply concerned that the independence of the Commission and therefore its integrity are under external attack … ."

Harold Varmus has made a start on one of his first priorities as chief of the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI): coming up with a set of key unanswered questions. Last Saturday, Varmus brought together about 25 top researchers and NCI leaders for a brainstorming session on the Bethesda, Maryland, campus.

For example, Varmus says, he'd like to know why testicular cancer can be cured with conventional chemotherapy and why obese people are more prone to certain cancers such as colon and breast cancer. He also wants to upend the conventional wisdom that it's impossible to find drugs that block so-called transcription factors, which are proteins that control the expression of genes.

Next, he wants to set up a Web site where other researchers can add their ideas. And there will likely be more meetings with other disciplines--in particular, behavioral scientists and clinicians were underrepresented last week, Varmus says.

No two words fill schoolchildren with more dread than "pop quiz." But mounting evidence suggests that quizzes can help students learn. Now researchers think they know one reason why: Students who take quizzes seem to think up better ways of remembering information than students who simply study.

Rinderpest, an infectious disease that has wiped out cattle and devastated their keepers for millennia, is gone. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) announced today in Rome that an eradication effort launched in 1994 has achieved its goal and that fieldwork has ended.

"It is probably the most remarkable achievement in the history of veterinary science," says Peter Roeder, a British veterinarian involved with FAO's Global Rinderpest Eradication Programme (GREP) from its launch in 1994 until he retired in 2007.

With global population expected to reach 9.2 billion by 2050, food production will need to double worldwide. Meeting this challenge without causing more environmental damage—cutting down rain forest, for example, or using more groundwater—will be even harder. Farmers do tend to become more productive over time, but a new report http://www.globalharvestinitiative.org/GAP.htm released today finds that they will need to make much more progress—boosting their rate of efficiency gains by 25%.

The report comes from the Global Harvest Initiative, a consortium of large agribusiness companies and global conservation groups, which contracted with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Farm Foundation, a non-profit. Fuglie calculated the "total factor productivity" for every country, comparing the amount of food produced with all the inputs needed, such as land, labor, fuel, and chemicals. He found that on average between 2000 and 2007, farm productivity worldwide has been increasing by 1.4% per year.

Maybe love is a drug after all. Researchers rounded up fifteen students still in the throes of passionate romance (dating for 9 months or less) to determine if thinking about a loved one could lessen physical pain. The lovers placed their hands on a small square block, which heated up to cause zero, moderate, or severe pain. Each time, the students were given one of three tasks: look at a photo of their partner, look at a photo of an equally attractive acquaintance, or perform a meaningless distraction task, such as thinking about sports. Seeing the lover's face and distracting themselves decreased pain to roughly the same degree (12% to 13% for severe pain, 36% to 45% for moderate), but they activated different parts of the brain, fMRI scans later revealed. Unlike distraction, looking at the lover's photo activated the reward sections of the brain, such as the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens (red), the researchers report today in PLoS ONE.

BASEL, Switzerland — Long-lasting marriages may thrive on love, compromise and increasing ignorance about one another. Couples married for an average of 40 years know less about one another’s food, movie and kitchen-design preferences than do partners who have been married or in committed relationships for a year or two, a new study finds.

Two University of Basel psychologists, Benjamin Scheibehenne and Jutta Mata, working with psychologist Peter Todd of Indiana University in Bloomington, observed this counterintuitive pattern in 38 young couples aged 19 to 32, and 20 older couples aged 62 to 78. The greatest gap in partner knowledge was in predicting food preferences, an area with particular relevance to daily life, the scientists report in a paper scheduled to appear in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

Despite their relative disadvantage in predicting partners’ preferences, long-term couples reported more satisfaction with their relationships than did younger couples.

Of all the body’s organs, the brain is the most like Area 51: Entry to the region is severely restricted, thanks to a barricade of cells and molecules known collectively as the blood-brain barrier. Increased surveillance by scientists has now pinpointed the barrier’s senior operatives, cells that are tasked with monitoring the razor wire–like barricade that keeps all but a select few from entering the brain.

In two papers published online October 13 in Nature, scientists report that specialized cells called perictyes are crucial in the blood-brain barrier’s development and its maintenance in adulthood. A better understanding of how these pericytes function could help elucidate why some people fare especially poorly after traumatic brain injury or get particular neurological diseases such as cerebral palsy, scientists say. And new research could also lead to tricks for selectively opening or closing the blood-brain barrier, letting in medications that might combat diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

Even if global average temperatures increase by only 1.1 degrees Celsius by 2100, a level of warming considered virtually inevitable by climate scientists, 11 species of rattlesnakes across North America will have to cope with their ranges dislocating by 430 meters per year on average, paleobiogeographer Michelle Lawing of Indiana University in Bloomington said October 10 at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual meeting.

She and Polly calculate that during the past 230,000 years, a period that includes three ice ages, rattlesnake ranges have shifted an average of only 2.3 meters annually.

Lawing and Polly estimated how snake ranges varied during past climate dramas by characterizing the temperatures and precipitation patterns that prevail in the species’ ranges today and then figuring out where those conditions would have existed in the past. Rattlesnakes made a good case study, Lawing said, because reptiles depend on their environment for heating and cooling and may be especially sensitive to climate disruptions. Finding relevant snake fossils to study is difficult, Lawing said, but those found so far do fit within the ranges predicted for their time.
Checking the fossil record is important for verifying ideas about past niches, because modeling them rests on assumptions that can go awry, says paleoecologist Rebecca Terry of Stanford University.

Harvard University neurobiologists have created mice that can "smell" light, providing a potent new tool that could help researchers better understand the neural basis of olfaction.

The first research from the Breakthrough Generations Study could lead to a test to predict a woman's reproductive lifespan. The study from scientists at the University of Exeter Peninsula Medical School and The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), funded by The Wellcome Trust, tested four genes associated with the menopause. They compared 2,000 women from the Breakthrough Generations Study who had experienced early menopause with a matched group of the same number. The four genes each affected risk of early menopause. In combination, they had a larger impact, which goes towards explaining why some women experience early menopause.

The Breakthrough Generations Study is a large and comprehensive study into the causes of breast cancer and a partnership between Breakthrough Breast Cancer and the ICR. The study will follow the 100,000 UK women participants for the next 40 years to unravel the lifestyle, environmental and genetic factors that cause the disease.