Why Do We Love Babies? Parental Instinct Region Found In The Brain

Why do we almost instinctively treat babies as special, protecting them and enabling them to survive?
Why do we almost instinctively treat babies as special, protecting them and enabling them to survive? Darwin originally pointed out that there is something about infants which prompts adults to respond to and care for them which allows our species to survive. Nobel-Prize-winning zoologist Konrad Lorenz proposed that it is the specific structure of the infant face, including a relatively large head and forehead, large and low lying eyes and bulging cheek region, that serves to elicit these parental responses. But the biological basis for this has remained elusive.

Now, a possible brain basis for this parental instinct has been reported. This research was led by Morten Kringelbach and Alan Stein from the University of Oxford and was funded by the Wellcome Trust and TrygFonden Charitable Foundation. The authors showed that a region of the human brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex is highly specifically active within a seventh of a second in response to (unfamiliar) infant faces but not to adult faces.

This finding has potentially important clinical application in relation to postnatal depression, which is common, occurring in approximately 13% of mothers after birth and often within six weeks. The present findings could eventually provide opportunities for early identification of families at risk.

The research team used a neuroimaging method called magnetoencephalography (MEG) at Aston University, UK. This is an advanced neuroscientific tool which offers both excellent temporal (in milliseconds) and spatial (in millimetres) resolution of whole brain activity. Because the researchers were primarily interested in the highly automatized processing of faces, they used an implicit task that required participants to monitor the colour of a small red cross and to press a button as soon as the colour changed. This was interspersed by adult and infant faces that were shown for 300 ms, but which were not important to solve the task.

The authors found a key difference in the early brain activity of normal adults when they viewed infant faces compared to adult faces. In addition to the well documented brain activity in the visual areas of the brain in response to faces, early activity was found in the medial orbitofrontal cortex to infant faces but not adult faces. This wave of activity starts around a seventh of a second after presentation of an infant face. These responses are almost certainly too fast to be consciously controlled and are therefore perhaps instinctive.

The medial orbitofrontal cortex is located in the front of the brain, just over the eyeballs. It is a key region of the emotional brain and appears to be related to the ongoing monitoring of salient reward-related stimuli in the environment. In the context of the experiment, the medial orbitofrontal cortex may provide the necessary emotional tagging of infant faces that predisposes us to treat infant faces as special and plays a key role in establishing a parental bond.

Also, there is now evidence from deep brain stimulation linking depression to the nearby subgenual cingulate cortex which is strongly connected with the medial orbitofrontal cortex. This lends support to the possibility that changes to activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex secondary to depression may adversely affect parental responsivity.

Postnatal depression is common and there are some experimental evidence suggesting that mothers with postnatal depression have difficulties in responding to infant cues. Further research could identify whether the present finding of early and specific medial orbitofrontal responses to infant faces (own and others) are affected and even suppressed by depression, thereby helping to explain this lack of maternal responsiveness. The present paradigm could eventually provide opportunities for early identification of families at risk.

Listening For The Cosmic Symphony: Supercomputer Will Help Scientists Listen For Black Holes

Kepler's supernova remnant. Gravitational waves are produced by violent events in the distant universe, such as the collision of black holes or explosions of supernovas. The waves radiate across the universe at the speed of light.

Scientists hope that a new supercomputer being built by Syracuse University's Department of Physics may help them identify the sound of a celestial black hole. The supercomputer, dubbed SUGAR (SU Gravitational and Relativity Cluster), will soon receive massive amounts of data from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) that was collected over a two-year period at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

Duncan Brown, assistant professor of physics and member of SU's Gravitational Wave Group, is assembling SUGAR. The department's Gravitational Wave Group is also part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), a worldwide initiative to detect gravitational waves. Brown worked on the LIGO project at Caltech before coming to SU last August.

Gravitational waves are produced by violent events in the distant universe, such as the collision of black holes or explosions of supernovas. The waves radiate across the universe at the speed of light. While Albert Einstein predicted the existence of these waves in 1916 in his general theory of relativity, it has taken decades to develop the technology to detect them. Construction of the LIGO detectors in Hanford, Wash., and Livingston, La., was completed in 2005. Scientists recently concluded a two-year "science run" of the detectors and are now searching the data for these waves. LSC scientists will be analyzing this data while the sensitivity of the detectors is being improved. Detectors have also been built in France, Germany, Italy and Japan.

Before they can isolate the sound of a black hole from the LIGO data, the scientists must figure out what a black hole sounds like. That's where Einstein's theories come in. Working with colleagues from the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) project, Brown will use SUGAR and Einstein's equations to create models of gravitational wave patterns from the collision of two black holes. SXS is a collaborative project with Caltech and Cornell University.

Black holes are massive gravitational fields in the universe that result from the collapse of giant stars. Because black holes absorb light, they cannot be studied using telescopes or other instruments that rely on light waves. However, scientists believe they can learn more about black holes by listening for their gravitational waves.

"Looking for gravitational waves is like listening to the universe," Brown says. "Different kinds of events produce different wave patterns. We want to try to extract a wave pattern -- a special sound -- that matches our model from all of the noise in the LIGO data."

It takes massive amounts of computer power and data storage capacity to analyze the data against the gravitational wave models Duncan and his colleagues built. SUGAR is a collection of 80 computers, packing 320 CPUs of power and 640 Gigabytes of random access memory. SUGAR also has 96 terabytes of disk space on which to store the LIGO data.

It also takes a dedicated, high-speed fiber-optic network to transfer the data between Caltech and SU. To accomplish that, SU's Information Technology and Services (ITS) collaborated with NYSERNet to build a special pathway for the LIGO data on the high-speed fiber optic network that crisscrosses the United States. The one-gigabit pathway begins in the Physics Building and traverses SU's fiber-optic network to Machinery Hall and then to a network facility in downtown Syracuse, which the University shares with NYSERNet. From there, the pathway connects to NYSERNet's fiber-optic network and goes to New York City. In New York City, the pathway switches to the Internet2 high-speed network and traverses the country, ending in a computer room in Caltech.

Both the supercomputer and the high-speed network are expected to be up and running by the end of February. Once the data is transferred to SU from Caltech, Brown and his LSC colleagues will begin to listen to the "cosmic symphony." "Gravitational waves can teach us much about what is out there in the universe," Brown says. "We've never looked at Einstein's theory in this way."

LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation and operated by Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Oldest Horseshoe Crab Fossil Found, 100 Million Years Old

Lunataspis aurora - fossil paratype specimen (about 25 mm wide) beside the dried carapace of a young modern horseshoe crab.

Few modern animals are as deserving of the title “living fossil” as the lowly horseshoe crab. Seemingly unchanged since before the Age of Dinosaurs, these venerable sea creatures can now claim a history that reaches back almost half-a billion years.

In a collaborative research article published recently in the British journal Palaeontology, a team of Canadian scientists revealed rare new horseshoe crab fossils from 445 million year-old Ordovician age rocks in central and northern Manitoba, which are about 100 million years older than any previously known forms.

Palaeontologist Dave Rudkin from the Royal Ontario Museum, with colleagues Dr. Graham Young of The Manitoba Museum (Winnipeg) and Dr. Godfrey Nowlan at the Geological Survey of Canada (Calgary), gave their remarkable new fossils the scientific name Lunataspis aurora, meaning literally “crescent moon shield of the dawn” in reference to their shape, geological age and northerly discovery sites. Although they are more “primitive” in several aspects than other known horseshoe crabs, their resemblance to living forms is unmistakable.

The fossil horseshoe crabs were recovered in the course of fieldwork studies on ancient tropical seashore deposits, providing yet another important link to their modern descendants that are today found along warmer seashores of the eastern United States and the Indian Ocean.

This is particularly significant, explains Rudkin. “Understanding how horseshoe crabs adapted to this ecological niche very early on, and then remained there through thick and thin, can give us insights into how ocean and shoreline ecosystems have developed through deep time.”

Today, marine shorelines worldwide are being threatened by human activity, and although some horseshoe crab populations are endangered, their enviably long record on Earth indicates that they have successfully weathered many previous crises, including the mass extinction that saw the demise of the dinosaurs and many other life forms 65 million years ago.

“We do need to be concerned about horseshoe crabs and many of the other unusual life forms found on marine shores,” said Dr. Young. “Nevertheless, we can also be mildly optimistic that some of these things have demonstrated a toughness that may allow them to survive our abuse of these environments.”

Living horseshoe crabs are extensively studied, especially in the fields of ecology and medical research. The exciting discovery of these unusual early fossil relatives adds a new introductory chapter to their remarkable story.

David Rudkin is Assistant Curator in the Department of Natural History (Palaeobiology) at the Royal Ontario Museum, and holds an appointment to the Department of Geology, University of Toronto, as a Lecturer in palaeontology. Rudkin joined the former Department of Invertebrate Palaeontology at the ROM in 1975 and began working on fossils from the Burgess Shale in British Columbia.

Dramatic Wind Action Detailed On Mars

Dust-devils are vortices of wind that form when air rising from a warm surface encounters shear in the above atmosphere.

Mars has an ethereal, tenuous atmosphere with less than one-percent the surface pressure of Earth, which challenges scientists to explain complex, wind-sculpted landforms seen with unprecedented detail in images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

One of the main questions has been if winds on present-day Mars are strong enough to form and change geological features, or if wind-constructed formations were made in the past, perhaps when winds speeds and atmospheric pressures were higher.

The eye-opening new views of wind-driven Mars geology come from the University of Arizona's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera (HiRISE). As the orbiter flies at about 3,400 meters per second (7,500 mph) between 250 and 315 kilometers (155 to 196 miles) above the Martian surface, this camera can see features as small as half a meter (20 inches).

"We're seeing what look like smaller sand bedforms on the tops of larger dunes, and, when we zoom in more, a third set of bedforms topping those," said HiRISE co-investigator Nathan Bridges of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "On Earth, small bedforms can form and change on time scales as short as a day."

There are two kinds of "bedforms," or wind-deposited landforms. They can be sand dunes, which are typically larger and have distinct shapes. Or they can be ripples, in which sand is mixed with coarser particles. Ripples are typically smaller and more linear.

HiRISE also shows detail in sediments deposited by winds on the downwind side of rocks. Such "windtails" show which way the most current winds have blown, Bridges said. They have been seen before, but only by rovers and landers, never by an orbiter. Researchers can now use HiRISE images to infer wind directions over the entire planet.

Scientists discovered miles-long, wind-scoured ridges called "yardangs" with the first Mars orbiter, Mariner 9, in the early 1970s. New HiRISE images reveal surface texture and fine-scale features that are giving scientists insight into how yardangs form. "HiRISE is showing us just how interesting layers in yardangs are," Bridges said. "For example, we see one layer that appears to have rocks in it. You can actually see rocks in the layer, and if you look downslope, you can see rocks that we think have eroded out from that rocky layer above."

New images show that some layers in the yardangs are made of softer materials that have been modified by wind, he added. The soft material could be volcanic ash deposits, or the dried-up remnants of what once were mixtures of ice and dust, or something else. "The fact that we see layers that appear to be rocky and layers that are obviously soft says that the process that formed yardangs is no simple process but a complicated sequence of processes," Bridges said.

"HiRISE keeps showing interesting things about terrains that I expected to be uninteresting," said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, HiRISE principal investigator. "I was surprised by the diversity of morphology of the thick dust mantles. Instead of a uniform blanket of smooth dust, there are often intricate patterns due to the action of the wind and perhaps light cementation from atmospheric volatiles."

Paul Geissler of the U.S. Geological Survey, Flagstaff, Ariz., has discovered from HiRISE images that dark streaks coming from Victoria Crater probably consist of streaks of dark sand blown out from the crater onto the surface. Scientists had wondered if wind might have blown away lighter-colored surface material, exposing a darker underlying surface. Geissler is comparing HiRISE images to images taken by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity rover at Victoria Crater.

Bridges is lead author and McEwen is a co-author on the paper titled "Windy Mars: A dynamic planet as seen by the HiRISE camera" in Geophysical Research Letters in December.

Stardust Comet Dust Resembles Asteroid Materials

Contrary to expectations for a small icy body, much of the comet dust returned by the Stardust mission formed very close to the young sun and was altered from the solar system’s early materials.

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When the Stardust mission returned to Earth with samples from the comet Wild 2 in 2006, scientists knew the material would provide new clues about the formation of our solar system, but they didn’t know exactly how.

New research by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and collaborators reveals that, in addition to containing material that formed very close to the young sun, the dust from Wild 2 also is missing ingredients that would be expected in comet dust. Surprisingly, the Wild 2 comet sample better resembles a meteorite from the asteroid belt rather than an ancient, unaltered comet.

Comets are expected to contain large amounts of the most primitive material in the solar system, a treasure trove of stardust from other stars and other ancient materials. But in the case of Wild 2, that simply is not the case.

By comparing the Stardust samples to cometary interplanetary dust particles (CP IDPs), the team found that two silicate materials normally found in cometary IDPs, together with other primitive materials including presolar stardust grains from other stars, have not been found in the abundances that might be expected in a Kuiper Belt comet like Wild 2. The high-speed capture of the Stardust particles may be partly responsible; but extra refractory components that formed in the inner solar nebula within a few astronomical units of the sun, indicate that the Stardust material resembles chondritic meteorites from the asteroid belt.

“The material is a lot less primitive and more altered than materials we have gathered through high altitude capture in our own stratosphere from a variety of comets,” said LLNL’s Hope Ishii, lead author of the research that appears in the Jan. 25 edition of the journal, Science. “As a whole, the samples look more asteroidal than cometary.”

Because of its tail formed by vaporizing ices, Wild 2 is, by definition, a comet. “It’s a reminder that we can’t make black and white distinctions between asteroids and comets,” Ishii said. “There is a continuum between them.”

The surprising findings contradict researchers’ initial expectations for a comet that spent most of its life orbiting in the Kuiper Belt, beyond Neptune. In 1974, Wild 2 had a close encounter with Jupiter that placed it into its current orbit much closer to Earth.

Comets formed beyond the so-called frost line where water and other volatiles existed as ices. Because of their setting far from the sun, they have been viewed as a virtual freezer, preserving the original preliminary ingredients of the solar system’s formation 4.6 billion years ago. The Stardust spacecraft traveled a total of seven years to reach Wild 2 and returned to Earth in January 2006 with a cargo of tiny particles for scientist to analyze.

This is one of the first studies to closely compare Stardust particles to CP IDPs. This class of IDPs is believed to contain the most primitive and unaltered fraction of the primordial material from which our planets and other solar system objects formed. They are highly enriched in isotopically anomalous organic and inorganic outer solar nebula materials inherited – through the presolar molecular cloud – from dust produced around other stars. IDPs are gathered in the stratosphere by high altitude airplanes (ER-2s and WB-57s) that are typically more than 50 years old.

The Livermore team specifically searched for two silicate materials in Stardust that are believed to be unique to cometary IDPs: amorphous silicates known as GEMS (glass with embedded metal and sulfides); and sliver-like whiskers of the crystalline silicate enstatite (a rock-forming mineral). Surprisingly, the team found only a single enstatite whisker in the Stardust samples, and it had the wrong crystallographic orientation – a form typical of terrestrial and asteroidal enstatite.

Objects similar to GEMS were found, but Ishii and the team showed they were actually created during the high speed 6-kilometer per second impact of Wild 2 comet dust with the Stardust spacecraft’s collector by making similar material in the laboratory.

In analyzing the Stardust material, Ishii’s team used Livermore’s SuperSTEM (scanning transmission electron microscope). Ishii said future analyses should focus on larger-grained materials, so-called micro-rocks, which suffered less alteration.

“The material found in primitive objects just wasn’t there in the samples,” said John Bradley, another LLNL author. “I think this is science in action. It’s really exciting because it’s just not what we expected.”

“Wild 2 doesn’t look like what we thought all comets should look like,” Ishii said. “The Stardust mission was a real success because without it, we would never have learned these things about our solar system. The sample return was vital for us to continue to unravel how our solar system formed and evolved.”

In addition to Ishii and Bradley, other LLNL researchers include Zu Rong Dai, Miaofang Chi and Nigel Browning. Other institutions involved include UC Davis, the Natural History Museum of London, the University of Kent and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

Stardust is a part of NASA’s series of Discovery missions and is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Stardust launched in February 1999 and set off on three giant loops around the sun. It began collecting interstellar dust in 2000 and met Wild 2 in January 2004, when the spacecraft was slammed by thousands of comet particles including some the size of BBs that could have compromised the mission. It is the first spacecraft to safely make it back to Earth with cometary dust particles in tow.

Stardust impact tracks created by comet dust entering silica aerogel at 6 km/s.

Mars Rover Investigates Signs Of Steamy Martian Past

Researchers using NASA's twin Mars rovers are sorting out two possible origins for one of Spirit's most important discoveries, while also getting Spirit to a favorable spot for surviving the next Martian winter.

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The puzzle is what produced a patch of nearly pure silica -- the main ingredient of window glass -- that Spirit found last May. It could have come from either a hot-spring environment or an environment called a fumarole, in which acidic steam rises through cracks. On Earth, both of these types of settings teem with microbial life.

"Whichever of those conditions produced it, this concentration of silica is probably the most significant discovery by Spirit for revealing a habitable niche that existed on Mars in the past," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the rovers' science payload. "The evidence is pointing most strongly toward fumarolic conditions, like you might see in Hawaii and in Iceland. Compared with deposits formed at hot springs, we know less about how well fumarolic deposits can preserve microbial fossils. That's something needing more study here on Earth."

Halfway around Mars from Spirit, Opportunity continues adding information about types of wet environments on ancient Mars other than hot springs or fumaroles. It is examining layers exposed inside a crater, but still near the top of a stack of sulfate-rich layers hundreds of meters (yards) thick. Scientists read a history of conditions that evolved from wetter to drier, based on findings by Opportunity and observations of the region by Mars orbiters.

The solar-powered rovers have been active on Mars since January 2004, more than 15 times longer than originally planned. Their third Martian winter will not reach minimum sunshine until June, but Spirit already needs two days of power output to drive for an hour.

"Spirit is going into the winter with much more dust on its solar panels than in previous years," said John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., project manager for the rovers. "The last Martian winter, we didn't move Spirit for about seven months. This time, the rover is likely to be stationary longer and with significantly lower available energy each Martian day."

Dust storms that darkened Martian skies this past June dropped dust onto both rovers. However, gusts cleaned Opportunity's panels, and Opportunity is closer to the equator than Spirit is, so concerns for winter survival focus on Spirit. The team has selected a sun-facing slope of about 25 degrees on the northern edge of a low plateau, "Home Plate," as a safe winter haven for Spirit.

Both rovers resumed productive field work after the June dust storms. Spirit explored the top of Home Plate, in the vicinity of silica-rich soil it discovered before the dust storms hit.

"This stuff is more than 90 percent silica," Squyres said. "There aren't many ways to explain a concentration so high." One way is to selectively remove silica from the native volcanic rocks and concentrate it in the deposits Spirit found. Hot springs can do that, dissolving silica at high heat and then dropping it out of solution as the water cools. Another way is to selectively remove almost everything else and leave the silica behind. Acidic steam at fumaroles can do that. Scientists are still assessing both possible origins. One reason Squyres favors the fumarole story is that the silica-rich soil on Mars has an enhanced level of titanium. On Earth, titanium levels are relatively high in some fumarolic deposits.

Mineral mapping and high-resolution imagery from Mars orbiters are helping scientists put the findings of Spirit and Opportunity into broader geological context. Opportunity's exploration of the Meridiani region has taken advantage of the natural excavations at impact craters to inspect layers extending several meters below the surface of the regional plain. These sulfate-rich layers bear extensive evidence for a wet, acidic past environment. They are a small upper fraction of the sulfate-rich layering exposed elsewhere in Meridiani and examined from orbit.

"We see evidence from orbit for clay minerals under the layered sulfate materials," said Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, deputy principal investigator for the rovers' science payload. "They indicate less acidic conditions. The big picture appears to be a change from a more open hydrological system, with rainfall, to more arid conditions with groundwater rising to the surface and evaporating, leaving sulfate salts behind."

Saturn's Rings May Be As Old As Solar System

New observations by NASA's Cassini spacecraft indicate the rings of Saturn, once thought to have formed during the age of the dinosaurs, instead may have been created roughly 4.5 billion years ago when the solar system was still under construction.

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Professor Larry Esposito, principal investigator for Cassini's Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph at CU-Boulder, said data from NASA's Voyager spacecraft in the 1970s and later NASA's Hubble Space Telescope had led scientists to believe Saturn's rings were relatively youthful and likely created by a comet that shattered a large moon, perhaps 100 million years ago.

But ring features seen by instruments on Cassini -- which arrived at Saturn in 2004 -- indicate the rings were not formed by a single cataclysmic event, he said. The ages of the different rings appear to vary significantly and the ring material is continually being recycled, Esposito said.

"The evidence is consistent with the picture that Saturn has had rings all through its history," said Esposito of CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. "We see extensive, rapid recycling of ring material, in which moons are continually shattered into ring particles, which then gather together and re-form moons."

"We have discovered that the rings were probably not created just yesterday in cosmic time, and in this scenario it is not just luck that we are seeing planetary rings now," said Esposito. "They probably were always around but continually changing, and they will be around for many billions of years."

Scientists had previously believed rings as old as Saturn itself should be darker due to ongoing pollution by the "infall" of meteoric dust, leaving telltale spectral signatures, Esposito said. But the new Cassini observations indicate the churning mass of ice and rock within Saturn's gigantic ring system is likely much larger than previously estimated, helping to explain why the rings appear relatively bright to ground-based telescopes and spacecraft.

"The more mass there is in the rings, the more raw material there is for recycling, which essentially spreads this cosmic pollution around," he said. "If this pollution is being shared by a much larger volume of ring material, it becomes diluted and helps explain why the rings appear brighter and more pristine than we would have expected."

Esposito, who discovered Saturn's faint F ring in 1979 using data from NASA's Pioneer 11 spacecraft, said an upcoming paper by him and colleagues in the journal Icarus supports the theory that Saturn's ring material is being continually recycled. Observing the flickering of starlight passing through the rings in a process known as stellar occultation, the researchers discovered 13 objects in the F ring ranging in size from 30 yards to six miles across.

Since most of the objects were translucent -- indicating at least some starlight was passing through them -- the researchers concluded they probably are temporary clumps of icy boulders that are continually collecting and disbanding due to the competing processes of shattering and coming together again. The team tagged the clumpy moonlets with cat names like "Mittens" and "Fluffy" because they appear to come and go unexpectedly over time and have multiple lives, said Esposito.

Esposito stressed that in the future Saturn's rings won't be the same we see today, likening them to great cities around the world like San Francisco, Berlin or Beijing. "While the cities themselves will go on for centuries or millennia, the faces of people on the streets will always be changing due to continual birth and aging of new citizens."