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Superconductor hits record temperature
Perry Mastrovito/Corbis
in Brief Whistle language uses whole brain
Moon’s gravity could pull plants to and fro IT’S a drag. The movement of plant leaves may be partially governed by the gravitational pull of the moon, just like ocean tides. Some plants’ leaves rise and fall during the day-night cycle, mostly in reaction to light in their environment. But plants grown in the dark have similar cycles, which hints that something else may be at work as well. Peter Barlow of the University of Bristol, UK, looked at data recorded since the 1920s on the leaf movement of beans and other plants. He matched these with estimates of the gravitational influence of the moon at
the time and location of these experiments. The two data sets don’t match exactly, says Barlow, but generally, when the lunar tide turns, so do the leaves. “If you look at enough of these correlations, they all seem to be strong enough to make you believe they might be causal,” he says. It’s not clear exactly how the moon could influence this change, but it may be associated with the movement of water in a part of the plant called the pulvinus, the “joint” where leaf meets stem (Annals of Botany, doi.org/6tp). “Scientific work on lunisolar impact on biological systems has sometimes been almost ridiculed,” says Catarina Rydin of Stockholm University in Sweden, who discovered a plant whose pollination is governed by the full moon. “Papers like this are very important.”
Superconductor hits record temperature SUPERCONDUCTORS have just reached a new high. A material has been shown to transmit electricity with no resistance at the highest temperatures ever: the chilly conditions you might experience in Antarctica. Mikhail Eremets at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, and his colleagues used a diamond anvil to squeeze a tiny quantity of 18 | NewScientist | 22 August 2015
hydrogen sulphide to almost 1.6 million times atmospheric pressure. They found that it transformed into a material that superconducted at temperatures as high as -70 °C, breaking the previous record of around -110 °C (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/ nature14964). They’re not sure why it works, but it could have to do with the material’s light hydrogen ions,
which help electrons form pairs – a configuration that lets current travel more swiftly. Eremets hopes the new record will be beaten. There are a lot of materials to try which could have even higher thresholds, he says. Superconductors can sustain a current indefinitely without an energy top-up, and finding ones that work at room temperature would spell a revolution in electronics. “Theoretically they are not forbidden,” says Eremets.
YOU could call it tweeting. An ancient form of “whistled” Turkish, which sounds like birdsong and is used to communicate across valleys, uses both sides of the brain. Until recently, it was thought that language was mainly understood using the brain’s left hemisphere. However, by testing 31 fluent whistlers, Onur Güntürkün of Ruhr University Bochum in Germany and his team have shown that this language also uses the right hemisphere – known to be involved in understanding music (Current Biology, doi.org/6vd). “In all languages, tonal or atonal, click or sign language, written or spoken, it’s so far been the left hemisphere that appears to do most of the interpretation,” says Güntürkün. “Now, we have shown for the first time equal contributions from both hemispheres.”
Star somersaults keep planets in line MAGNETIC harnesses may keep planets in line with their stars. Some exoplanets orbit at weird angles – instead of circling in the same direction in which their star spins, their paths are tilted, and sometimes even backwards. The mismatch seems to defy our understanding of how planets are born. Oddly, these misalignments only seem to happen to stars more than 1.2 times the sun’s mass. Now Christopher Spalding of Caltech argues that smaller stars’ planets line up with their spins because those stars have stronger magnetic fields. As its solar system forms, the star’s fields grab charged particles in the planet-forming disc and pull the star into the disc’s plane (arxiv. org/abs/1508.02365).
in Brief Whistle language uses whole brain
Moon’s gravity could pull plants to and fro IT’S a drag. The movement of plant leaves may be partially governed by the gravitational pull of the moon, just like ocean tides. Some plants’ leaves rise and fall during the day-night cycle, mostly in reaction to light in their environment. But plants grown in the dark have similar cycles, which hints that something else may be at work as well. Peter Barlow of the University of Bristol, UK, looked at data recorded since the 1920s on the leaf movement of beans and other plants. He matched these with estimates of the gravitational influence of the moon at
the time and location of these experiments. The two data sets don’t match exactly, says Barlow, but generally, when the lunar tide turns, so do the leaves. “If you look at enough of these correlations, they all seem to be strong enough to make you believe they might be causal,” he says. It’s not clear exactly how the moon could influence this change, but it may be associated with the movement of water in a part of the plant called the pulvinus, the “joint” where leaf meets stem (Annals of Botany, doi.org/6tp). “Scientific work on lunisolar impact on biological systems has sometimes been almost ridiculed,” says Catarina Rydin of Stockholm University in Sweden, who discovered a plant whose pollination is governed by the full moon. “Papers like this are very important.”
Superconductor hits record temperature SUPERCONDUCTORS have just reached a new high. A material has been shown to transmit electricity with no resistance at the highest temperatures ever: the chilly conditions you might experience in Antarctica. Mikhail Eremets at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, and his colleagues used a diamond anvil to squeeze a tiny quantity of 18 | NewScientist | 22 August 2015
hydrogen sulphide to almost 1.6 million times atmospheric pressure. They found that it transformed into a material that superconducted at temperatures as high as -70 °C, breaking the previous record of around -110 °C (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/ nature14964). They’re not sure why it works, but it could have to do with the material’s light hydrogen ions,
which help electrons form pairs – a configuration that lets current travel more swiftly. Eremets hopes the new record will be beaten. There are a lot of materials to try which could have even higher thresholds, he says. Superconductors can sustain a current indefinitely without an energy top-up, and finding ones that work at room temperature would spell a revolution in electronics. “Theoretically they are not forbidden,” says Eremets.
YOU could call it tweeting. An ancient form of “whistled” Turkish, which sounds like birdsong and is used to communicate across valleys, uses both sides of the brain. Until recently, it was thought that language was mainly understood using the brain’s left hemisphere. However, by testing 31 fluent whistlers, Onur Güntürkün of Ruhr University Bochum in Germany and his team have shown that this language also uses the right hemisphere – known to be involved in understanding music (Current Biology, doi.org/6vd). “In all languages, tonal or atonal, click or sign language, written or spoken, it’s so far been the left hemisphere that appears to do most of the interpretation,” says Güntürkün. “Now, we have shown for the first time equal contributions from both hemispheres.”
Star somersaults keep planets in line MAGNETIC harnesses may keep planets in line with their stars. Some exoplanets orbit at weird angles – instead of circling in the same direction in which their star spins, their paths are tilted, and sometimes even backwards. The mismatch seems to defy our understanding of how planets are born. Oddly, these misalignments only seem to happen to stars more than 1.2 times the sun’s mass. Now Christopher Spalding of Caltech argues that smaller stars’ planets line up with their spins because those stars have stronger magnetic fields. As its solar system forms, the star’s fields grab charged particles in the planet-forming disc and pull the star into the disc’s plane (arxiv. org/abs/1508.02365).