Conversations can 'couple' brain patterns
PRINCETON, N.J., July 27 (UPI) -- Some people in conversation with each other truly have a meeting of the minds as their brain patterns fall into step with each other, researchers say.
Scientists at Princeton University in New Jersey performed MRI brain scans of volunteers as they listened to a woman recounting a story and discovered a "coupling" phenomenon, a study published by the National Academy of Sciences said.
The scans showed that the listeners' brain patterns tracked those of the storyteller almost exactly, though trailing 1 to 3 seconds behind.
"We found that the participants' brains became intimately coupled during the course of the 'conversation,'" Princeton's Uri Hasson said, "with the responses in the listener's brain mirroring those in the speaker's."
Hasson and his colleagues monitored the strength of this "coupling" by measuring the extent of the pattern overlap.
Listeners with the best overlap were judged to be the best at retelling the tale.
"The more similar our brain patterns during a conversation, the better we understand each other," Hasson said.
Researchers making fusion energy steps
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., July 27 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers say they've made a discovery that could bring nuclear fusion reactors and the possibility of clean, almost limitless power one step closer.
Scientists at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., have made discoveries critical to understanding reactions between hot plasma inside a fusion reactor and surfaces facing the plasma, a university release said Tuesday.
Their aim is to eventually create coatings capable of withstanding the extreme conditions where the lining comes into contact with the extreme heat of the plasma, the release said.
Researchers are using nanotechnology to modify tiny features in the coating in an effort to create new "plasma-facing" materials tolerant to radiation damage, Jean Paul Allain, an assistant professor of nuclear engineering at Purdue, said.
A major challenge in finding the right coatings to line fusion reactors is that materials change due to extreme conditions inside, where temperatures can reach millions of degrees.
A fusion power plant would produce 10 times more energy than a conventional nuclear fission reactor, and because its fuel, deuterium, is contained in seawater, a fusion reactor's fuel supply would be virtually inexhaustible, researchers say.
Record snows not a climate-change symptom
NEW YORK, July 27 (UPI) -- Extraordinary but predictable weather patterns, not climate change, brought record snows to eastern U.S. cities this past winter, scientists say.
The extraordinarily cold, snowy weather that hit parts of the U.S. East Coast and Europe was the result of a collision of two periodic weather patterns in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, a study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters says.
Researchers at Columbia University say the anomalous winter was caused by two simultaneous weather events.
El Nino, the cyclic warming of the tropical Pacific, brought wet weather to the southeastern U.S. just as a strong pressure cycle called the North Atlantic Oscillation pushed frigid air from the arctic down the East Coast and across northwest Europe.
The end result, researchers say, was the snowiest winter on record for Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia, bringing 6 feet of snow to the cities.
"Snowy winters will happen regardless of climate change," Columbia climate scientists Richard Seager says.
El Nino can be predicted months in advance by observing evolving conditions in the Pacific Ocean, but the North Atlantic Oscillation -- the difference in air pressure between the Icelandic and Azores regions -- is an atmospheric phenomenon, very chaotic and difficult to anticipate, study co-author Yochanan Kushnir says.
Disabled could use 'sniffing' for control
REHOVOT, Israel, July 27 (UPI) -- Israeli researchers say they've developed a device to allow severely disabled people to communicate and control a wheelchair -- by simply breathing in and out.
Based on sniffing -- inhaling and exhaling through the nose -- the device will allow paraplegics and other disabled persons suffering extreme paralysis to exert control over wheelchairs, computers and other appliances, a release from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel said Monday.
The new system identifies changes in air pressure inside the nostrils and translates these into electrical signals.
Sniffing is a precise motor skill controlled in part by the soft palate directing air in or out through the mouth or nose.
The soft palate is controlled by nerves connecting to it directly through the brain case, and this close link led Professor Noam Sobel and fellow Weizmann researchers to believe the ability to sniff -- to control soft palate movement -- might still be present even in the most acute cases of paralysis.
Sniffs can be in or out, strong or shallow, long or short, and this gives the device's developers the opportunity to create a complex "language" with multiple signals, the Institute release said.
The system is relatively inexpensive to produce, and simple and quick to learn to operate in comparison with other brain-machine interfaces, its developers said.
