Science News Digest 23rd May 2011
In the science news this week, we take a look at look at growing concerns over child health in the UK, new superfast data transfer methods unveiled, how gossip makes you stand out in the crowd and finally… a tribe with no concept of time is investigated.
Child fitness levels cause fresh concerns.
Modern life has seen children become physically weaker than previous generations according to the Guardian this week.
Research published in the child health journal Acta Paediatrica suggests that they are weaker, less muscular and unable to perform tasks considered simple by children in the past.
Primarily associated with the rise in the virtual existences children have today, a test group of 10 year olds are able to perform fewer sit ups and lees able to hang from wall bars in the gym, indicating a decrease in arm strength and grip.
Acadmics at Essex University looked at a sample of around 310 pupils in 1998 and 2008, pitting the two groups against each other.
They found that the number of sit ups the average child could do has decreased by 27.1%, arm strength has dropped 26% and grip is down 7%.
The study has also found that despite BMI remaining constant between the two groups, the likelihood is that their bodies are containing less muscle and more fat.
The findings have refreshed concerns over the declining number of outdoor activities available to children today.
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See you laser!
Want the entire Library of Congress collection downloaded in 10 seconds? Well this is not an unreasonable request anymore thanks to the development of a laser that can transfer data at a gobsmacking 26 terabits per second.
Research published in the journal Nature Photonics describes a process called ‘fast Fourier transform’ that unravels 300 separate colours of light in a laser beam, which were each encoded with their won string of information according to the BBC.
The demand for ever faster information transfer has seen new process involving strings of light being sent with their own encoded data attached. At the other end a set of laser oscillators decode the signals.
Apparently larger data transfers are already a reality, but at a cost.
Wolfgang Freude, a co-author of the current paper from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany said; "Already a 100 terabits per second experiment has been demonstrated,"
"The problem was they didn't have just one laser, they had something like 370 lasers, which is an incredibly expensive thing. If you can imagine 370 lasers, they fill racks and consume several kilowatts of power."
The current experiment saw signals sent down 50km of optical fibre and then used an optical fast Fourier transform to unpick the data streams.
Professor Freude said that it is a technology that could be integrated onto a silicon chip - making it a better candidate for scaling up to commercial use.
"Think of all the tremendous progress in silicon photonics," he said. "Nobody could have imagined 10 years ago that nowadays it would be so common to integrate relatively complicated optical circuits on to a silicon chip."
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One thing worse than being talked about…
They say any publicity is good publicity, so when it comes to raising your profile in the subconscious of your colleagues, being the subject of office gossip seems to be the way forward.
According to a study of visual perception, hearing nasty rumours about people makes their faces stand out. A team led by Lisa Barrett, a psychologist at Northeastern University in Boston, used a technique called binocular rivalry to test who their subjects registered in a room full of people.
To test this, the researchers created a contest between the subjects’ left and right eyes by showing different images to each eye at the same time, resulting in one image being favoured over another.
According to ScienceNOW this week, the study was structured by presenting photographs of faces to 66 college students and giving them some gossip about each. For some of the photographs, the students were told that the person “threw a chair at a classmate.”
Others came with either positive or neutral information, such as “helped an elderly woman with her groceries” or “passed a man on the street.”
These faces were shown to one eye while the other eye saw a picture of a house. As a control, the team also used some faces that the students had never seen. The students then pressed one button when they could see a face and another when they saw a house.
The results published in the journal Science, found that subjects didn’t respond any faster to the faces with neutral information attached to them than they did to the control faces, however, those who had some salacious gossip attached the them were registered around 0.5 seconds faster that the others.
“It is not very often that people will have two completely different images presented to each eye simultaneously,” says Olivia Carter, a psychologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia. However, she adds that “these results do suggest that you might be more likely to notice someone in a crowd if you recently heard negative gossip about them. This in itself is quite remarkable.”
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And finally...
All the time in the world…
If you’re one of those people who's in trouble for being late all the time, you may wish to consider moving to Brazil.
According to the Telegraph, a tribe of people living in the Amazon have 'no concept of time', or even a calendar.
If this already sounds appealing, dreading your milestone birthdays could be a thing of the past as another bonus, as the Amondawa tribe only mark the transition from childhood to adulthood by changing their name.
The tribe have no watches or calendars and live their lives to the patterns of day and night and the rainy and dry seasons, demonstrating that time is not a deeply entrenched universal human concept, as previously thought.
Professor Chris Sinha from the University of Portsmouth said: 'We can now say without doubt that there is at least one language and culture which does not have a concept of time as something that can be measured, counted or talked about in the abstract.
"This doesn't mean that the Amondawa are "people outside time", but they live in a world governed by events rather than the passing of time."
Prof Sinha and his team, including a linguist and anthropologist, spent eight weeks with the Amondawa researching how their language conveys concepts like "next week" or "last year".
They also found nobody in the community had an age.
The findings were reported in the journal Language And Cognition.
Child fitness levels cause fresh concerns.
Modern life has seen children become physically weaker than previous generations according to the Guardian this week.
Research published in the child health journal Acta Paediatrica suggests that they are weaker, less muscular and unable to perform tasks considered simple by children in the past.
Primarily associated with the rise in the virtual existences children have today, a test group of 10 year olds are able to perform fewer sit ups and lees able to hang from wall bars in the gym, indicating a decrease in arm strength and grip.
Acadmics at Essex University looked at a sample of around 310 pupils in 1998 and 2008, pitting the two groups against each other.
They found that the number of sit ups the average child could do has decreased by 27.1%, arm strength has dropped 26% and grip is down 7%.
The study has also found that despite BMI remaining constant between the two groups, the likelihood is that their bodies are containing less muscle and more fat.
The findings have refreshed concerns over the declining number of outdoor activities available to children today.
----------------------------------
See you laser!
Want the entire Library of Congress collection downloaded in 10 seconds? Well this is not an unreasonable request anymore thanks to the development of a laser that can transfer data at a gobsmacking 26 terabits per second.
Research published in the journal Nature Photonics describes a process called ‘fast Fourier transform’ that unravels 300 separate colours of light in a laser beam, which were each encoded with their won string of information according to the BBC.
The demand for ever faster information transfer has seen new process involving strings of light being sent with their own encoded data attached. At the other end a set of laser oscillators decode the signals.
Apparently larger data transfers are already a reality, but at a cost.
Wolfgang Freude, a co-author of the current paper from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany said; "Already a 100 terabits per second experiment has been demonstrated,"
"The problem was they didn't have just one laser, they had something like 370 lasers, which is an incredibly expensive thing. If you can imagine 370 lasers, they fill racks and consume several kilowatts of power."
The current experiment saw signals sent down 50km of optical fibre and then used an optical fast Fourier transform to unpick the data streams.
Professor Freude said that it is a technology that could be integrated onto a silicon chip - making it a better candidate for scaling up to commercial use.
"Think of all the tremendous progress in silicon photonics," he said. "Nobody could have imagined 10 years ago that nowadays it would be so common to integrate relatively complicated optical circuits on to a silicon chip."
----------------------------------------
One thing worse than being talked about…
They say any publicity is good publicity, so when it comes to raising your profile in the subconscious of your colleagues, being the subject of office gossip seems to be the way forward.
According to a study of visual perception, hearing nasty rumours about people makes their faces stand out. A team led by Lisa Barrett, a psychologist at Northeastern University in Boston, used a technique called binocular rivalry to test who their subjects registered in a room full of people.
To test this, the researchers created a contest between the subjects’ left and right eyes by showing different images to each eye at the same time, resulting in one image being favoured over another.
According to ScienceNOW this week, the study was structured by presenting photographs of faces to 66 college students and giving them some gossip about each. For some of the photographs, the students were told that the person “threw a chair at a classmate.”
Others came with either positive or neutral information, such as “helped an elderly woman with her groceries” or “passed a man on the street.”
These faces were shown to one eye while the other eye saw a picture of a house. As a control, the team also used some faces that the students had never seen. The students then pressed one button when they could see a face and another when they saw a house.
The results published in the journal Science, found that subjects didn’t respond any faster to the faces with neutral information attached to them than they did to the control faces, however, those who had some salacious gossip attached the them were registered around 0.5 seconds faster that the others.
“It is not very often that people will have two completely different images presented to each eye simultaneously,” says Olivia Carter, a psychologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia. However, she adds that “these results do suggest that you might be more likely to notice someone in a crowd if you recently heard negative gossip about them. This in itself is quite remarkable.”
------------------------------------
And finally...
All the time in the world…
If you’re one of those people who's in trouble for being late all the time, you may wish to consider moving to Brazil.
According to the Telegraph, a tribe of people living in the Amazon have 'no concept of time', or even a calendar.
If this already sounds appealing, dreading your milestone birthdays could be a thing of the past as another bonus, as the Amondawa tribe only mark the transition from childhood to adulthood by changing their name.
The tribe have no watches or calendars and live their lives to the patterns of day and night and the rainy and dry seasons, demonstrating that time is not a deeply entrenched universal human concept, as previously thought.
Professor Chris Sinha from the University of Portsmouth said: 'We can now say without doubt that there is at least one language and culture which does not have a concept of time as something that can be measured, counted or talked about in the abstract.
"This doesn't mean that the Amondawa are "people outside time", but they live in a world governed by events rather than the passing of time."
Prof Sinha and his team, including a linguist and anthropologist, spent eight weeks with the Amondawa researching how their language conveys concepts like "next week" or "last year".
They also found nobody in the community had an age.
The findings were reported in the journal Language And Cognition.
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