Forming fear
A molecule that makes you scared has been found by Dr. Gleb Shumyatsky, at Rutgers University. Shumyatsky examined the amygdala in mice, the region of the brain involved in producing fear. Shumyatsky found that genes that produce a molecule called stathmin were especially active in the amygdala. When Shumyatsky turned off stathmin production in mice they became bold and ventured into open spaces where normal mice feared to tread. Shumyatsky also found that mice without stathmin failed to develop any fear of sounds associated with electric shocks. The find promises to change the way we understand and treat irrational fears and phobias.
-Chris Damdar
Source: Cell
“Brewmistresses” manned Peruvian breweries
Archaeologists digging around Cerro Baul-a thousand-year-old abandoned settlement in southern Peru built by an Andean tribe known as the Wari-uncovered ten women’s shawl pins in a burned-down brewery on the site. Some of the pins were found in the ash on the brewery boiling room floor. The researchers posit that the pins were lost while being worn. Moreover, such elegant pins were found nowhere else on the site. Their findings support the theory that it was elite brewmistresses-attractive women hailing from the highest social class-who manned the Andean breweries.
-Mike Ghenu
Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Birth of a star
Astrophysicists have long quibbled over the fine details of star formation. Two theories were in the running. While they agreed that protostars, the cores of young stars, formed through the collapse of great clouds of gas under the force of gravity, they clashed over what happens next. The “gravitational collapse” school of thought argued that stellar cores acquire nearly all their mass during the phase when gas coalesces under the pull of gravity; “competitive accretion,” on the other hand, held that star cores actively compete for star matter with their neighbours, and that their success in doing so determines their final size.
Theorists, led by Dr. Mark Krumholz of Princeton University, have now spoiled the fun with supercomputers, reporting their results in Nature last week. Their work showed that the amount of mass that a protostar could gain through accretion would in most cases be tiny compared to its mass. Their simulations also showed that competitive accretion could only occur under conditions rarely found in the cosmos. “Competitive accretion is the big theory of star formation in Europe, and we now think it’s a dead theory,” Dr. Richard Klein, one of the report’s authors, taunted.
-M.G.
Source: Nature, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories news service
