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–Anticipation of pain just makes it hurt more
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IN BRIEF Wrinkles are sign of an active moon
Mystery of the Atlantic’s missing plastic flotsam PLASTIC is not piling up in the Atlantic Ocean, even though we are throwing more and more of it away. Kara Lavender and colleagues at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, analysed records of plastic fished out of the Atlantic on plankton-sampling missions from 1986 to 2008. Plastic was most commonly found floating in the north Atlantic subtropical gyre, where it is pushed by currents – but the amount did not increase in 22 years. Lavender thinks that despite a ban on direct dumping, more plastic rubbish must be reaching the sea given a
fivefold increase in global production since 1976. “Where the extra plastic is going is the big mystery,” she says. Plastic resists biodegradation and can last for decades in the ocean. Eventually sunlight and waves break it into smaller pieces, and Law suggests that it might be degrading into pieces small enough to pass through the 0.3-millimetre-mesh nets used in the plankton study – or becoming coated in biofilms and sinking out of range of the nets. But it is unclear why the degradation would have sped up to offset the extra plastic that is presumably going into the ocean. Simon Boxall of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, suggests that plastic could be escaping the gyre via the Gulf Stream and heading north. “We’ve seen high levels of plastic in the Arctic,” he says.
Solar system slips back in time WITHOUT celebrating a birthday, the solar system just got hundreds of thousands of years older. To deduce when its first solid grains formed, researchers analyse structures up to a centimetre across found in meteorites. Such “inclusions” were created when gases cooled to form the sun and planets, and are among the oldest solids in the solar system. 16 | NewScientist | 28 August 2010
Now Audrey Bouvier at Arizona State University in Tempe, and colleagues, have analysed inclusions in a meteorite that fell to Earth in north-west Africa in 2004. Based on the extent to which uranium-238 and uranium-235 isotopes had decayed into their daughter isotopes lead-207 and lead-206, they say the solar system is 4.5682 billion years old. That’s
between 0.3 and 1.9 million years older than previous estimates, which relied on meteorites found in Kazakhstan in 1962 and Mexico in 1969 (Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo941). It may seem like a trivial distinction for something billions of years old, but it could make a difference when pinning down the conditions that led to the solar system’s formation, says Bouvier, and those needed for other lifefriendly planetary systems to form.
THE moon is more active than we thought. Wrinkles on its surface show it shrank in the past billion years and may still be contracting. Apollo astronauts noticed these wrinkles, called “lobate scarps”, near the equator 40 years ago. Now images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal 14 more, all over the moon’s surface. The scarps probably formed as the moon cooled and contracted, says Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. This raisin-like shrinkage occurred no more than 1 billion years ago, based on the age of pre-existing small craters that the scarps run through (Science, DOI: 10.1126/ science.1189590). “The moon may be geologically active and still shrinking today,” says Watters. If so, this might explain the mysterious moonquakes picked up by seismometers in the 1970s.
Negative thoughts prolong the pain YOU’LL hardly feel a thing. If doctors play down the pain of a procedure, patients might avoid the nocebo effect – the placebo effect’s evil twin. Arne May’s team at the University of Hamburg, Germany, applied heat to the arms of 38 volunteers over six days. Half of them were told the heat would get more intense, and they reported constant pain levels. The rest felt less pain as they got used to the sensation. The first group also had increased activity in a brain area involved in pain perception (The Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.2197-10.2010). “I didn’t expect that giving negative information for 5 minutes would have an effect a week later,” May says.
IN BRIEF Wrinkles are sign of an active moon
Mystery of the Atlantic’s missing plastic flotsam PLASTIC is not piling up in the Atlantic Ocean, even though we are throwing more and more of it away. Kara Lavender and colleagues at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, analysed records of plastic fished out of the Atlantic on plankton-sampling missions from 1986 to 2008. Plastic was most commonly found floating in the north Atlantic subtropical gyre, where it is pushed by currents – but the amount did not increase in 22 years. Lavender thinks that despite a ban on direct dumping, more plastic rubbish must be reaching the sea given a
fivefold increase in global production since 1976. “Where the extra plastic is going is the big mystery,” she says. Plastic resists biodegradation and can last for decades in the ocean. Eventually sunlight and waves break it into smaller pieces, and Law suggests that it might be degrading into pieces small enough to pass through the 0.3-millimetre-mesh nets used in the plankton study – or becoming coated in biofilms and sinking out of range of the nets. But it is unclear why the degradation would have sped up to offset the extra plastic that is presumably going into the ocean. Simon Boxall of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, suggests that plastic could be escaping the gyre via the Gulf Stream and heading north. “We’ve seen high levels of plastic in the Arctic,” he says.
Solar system slips back in time WITHOUT celebrating a birthday, the solar system just got hundreds of thousands of years older. To deduce when its first solid grains formed, researchers analyse structures up to a centimetre across found in meteorites. Such “inclusions” were created when gases cooled to form the sun and planets, and are among the oldest solids in the solar system. 16 | NewScientist | 28 August 2010
Now Audrey Bouvier at Arizona State University in Tempe, and colleagues, have analysed inclusions in a meteorite that fell to Earth in north-west Africa in 2004. Based on the extent to which uranium-238 and uranium-235 isotopes had decayed into their daughter isotopes lead-207 and lead-206, they say the solar system is 4.5682 billion years old. That’s
between 0.3 and 1.9 million years older than previous estimates, which relied on meteorites found in Kazakhstan in 1962 and Mexico in 1969 (Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo941). It may seem like a trivial distinction for something billions of years old, but it could make a difference when pinning down the conditions that led to the solar system’s formation, says Bouvier, and those needed for other lifefriendly planetary systems to form.
THE moon is more active than we thought. Wrinkles on its surface show it shrank in the past billion years and may still be contracting. Apollo astronauts noticed these wrinkles, called “lobate scarps”, near the equator 40 years ago. Now images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal 14 more, all over the moon’s surface. The scarps probably formed as the moon cooled and contracted, says Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. This raisin-like shrinkage occurred no more than 1 billion years ago, based on the age of pre-existing small craters that the scarps run through (Science, DOI: 10.1126/ science.1189590). “The moon may be geologically active and still shrinking today,” says Watters. If so, this might explain the mysterious moonquakes picked up by seismometers in the 1970s.
Negative thoughts prolong the pain YOU’LL hardly feel a thing. If doctors play down the pain of a procedure, patients might avoid the nocebo effect – the placebo effect’s evil twin. Arne May’s team at the University of Hamburg, Germany, applied heat to the arms of 38 volunteers over six days. Half of them were told the heat would get more intense, and they reported constant pain levels. The rest felt less pain as they got used to the sensation. The first group also had increased activity in a brain area involved in pain perception (The Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.2197-10.2010). “I didn’t expect that giving negative information for 5 minutes would have an effect a week later,” May says.