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Mosh pit physics could aid disaster planning
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IN BRIEF English language map of the brain
Mosh pit physics could ease emergency evacuations EXUBERANT fans dancing in mosh pits act like atoms in a gas. That curious finding could help in designing buildings to smooth the flow of chaotic crowds in an emergency. Moshing at rock concerts involves people hurling themselves around with abandon. Jesse Silverberg, himself often found moshing when not researching physics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, wondered whether mathematical laws describing group behaviour in flocking animals could apply to this type of dancing. With colleagues, he tracked the motions of
moshers in YouTube videos using software developed for analysing particles in a fluid. The speeds of dancers and particles in a gas both followed the same pattern. They then created a simple computer simulation of moshing. By tweaking a few parameters - increasing the tendency for people to follow each other, for instance – they made the model shift between random-gas-like moshing and a circular vortex called a circle pit – a shift also seen in the videos (arxiv.org/abs/1302.1886). Although the project was mostly for fun, the team says it could affect how we design spaces to cope with crowds. “When you have buildings on fire, people tend to panic when they escape,” Silverberg says. Modelling people’s movement in the mosh pit could help researchers understand how these excited crowds behave.
Night-vision rat has sixth sense NOT many special powers need whiskers. But rats fitted with a prosthesis that allows them to “touch” infrared light are the first animals to acquire a sixth sense. Miguel Nicolelis and colleagues at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, trained rats to run to a source of visible light. A sensor that can detect infrared, which mammals can’t see, was connected to electrodes implanted in their 16 | NewScientist | 23 February 2013
somatosensory cortex, which processes touch sensations from their whiskers. When the prosthesis detects infrared, it sends signals to the electrodes, which grow stronger when the light source is close (Nature Communications, doi.org/kh4). When the rats’ sensor first picked up signals, the animals would stop and rub their whiskers, but they gradually
realised that the sensation was coming from further away. After a month, the rats ran over to the infrared light in the dark, as they had to the visible light; the cortex had adapted to deal with input from both the whiskers and the infrared sensor. “Instead of seeing, the rats learned how to touch the light,” says Nicolelis. The finding could lead to new prostheses for people with damage to their visual cortex, he says.
THE brain has such fine control over the muscles used to speak that every sound produces a different pattern of neural activity. Using electrodes implanted in the brains of three people to treat their epilepsy, Edward Chang and colleagues at the University of California in San Francisco mapped brain activity as the volunteers spoke in English. The sets of neurons that control movement of the tongue, lips and vocal cords fired in different combinations as the volunteers pronounced each sound. This map of language could explain some speech quirks, the team say. The neurons responsible for pronouncing consonants and vowels, for instance, are far from each other in the brain, perhaps explaining why “slips of the tongue” make us mistake vowels for other vowels, but not for consonants (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature11911).
Bigger eye will spy alien oxygen A GIANT telescope now being built could hunt for alien life by detecting oxygen on exoplanets. On Earth, plants and some bacteria are the only sources of large amounts of atmospheric oxygen. Existing telescopes can look at the light that passes through exoplanet atmospheres and tease out their make-up, but observations made from the ground struggle to filter out Earth’s oxygen. And space missions intended to hunt for distant oxygen have been cancelled. A team in the Netherlands has now calculated that the European Extremely Large Telescope, due to be completed in the next decade, will have high enough resolution to spot alien oxygen (Astrophysical Journal, doi.org/kh6).
IN BRIEF English language map of the brain
Mosh pit physics could ease emergency evacuations EXUBERANT fans dancing in mosh pits act like atoms in a gas. That curious finding could help in designing buildings to smooth the flow of chaotic crowds in an emergency. Moshing at rock concerts involves people hurling themselves around with abandon. Jesse Silverberg, himself often found moshing when not researching physics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, wondered whether mathematical laws describing group behaviour in flocking animals could apply to this type of dancing. With colleagues, he tracked the motions of
moshers in YouTube videos using software developed for analysing particles in a fluid. The speeds of dancers and particles in a gas both followed the same pattern. They then created a simple computer simulation of moshing. By tweaking a few parameters - increasing the tendency for people to follow each other, for instance – they made the model shift between random-gas-like moshing and a circular vortex called a circle pit – a shift also seen in the videos (arxiv.org/abs/1302.1886). Although the project was mostly for fun, the team says it could affect how we design spaces to cope with crowds. “When you have buildings on fire, people tend to panic when they escape,” Silverberg says. Modelling people’s movement in the mosh pit could help researchers understand how these excited crowds behave.
Night-vision rat has sixth sense NOT many special powers need whiskers. But rats fitted with a prosthesis that allows them to “touch” infrared light are the first animals to acquire a sixth sense. Miguel Nicolelis and colleagues at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, trained rats to run to a source of visible light. A sensor that can detect infrared, which mammals can’t see, was connected to electrodes implanted in their 16 | NewScientist | 23 February 2013
somatosensory cortex, which processes touch sensations from their whiskers. When the prosthesis detects infrared, it sends signals to the electrodes, which grow stronger when the light source is close (Nature Communications, doi.org/kh4). When the rats’ sensor first picked up signals, the animals would stop and rub their whiskers, but they gradually
realised that the sensation was coming from further away. After a month, the rats ran over to the infrared light in the dark, as they had to the visible light; the cortex had adapted to deal with input from both the whiskers and the infrared sensor. “Instead of seeing, the rats learned how to touch the light,” says Nicolelis. The finding could lead to new prostheses for people with damage to their visual cortex, he says.
THE brain has such fine control over the muscles used to speak that every sound produces a different pattern of neural activity. Using electrodes implanted in the brains of three people to treat their epilepsy, Edward Chang and colleagues at the University of California in San Francisco mapped brain activity as the volunteers spoke in English. The sets of neurons that control movement of the tongue, lips and vocal cords fired in different combinations as the volunteers pronounced each sound. This map of language could explain some speech quirks, the team say. The neurons responsible for pronouncing consonants and vowels, for instance, are far from each other in the brain, perhaps explaining why “slips of the tongue” make us mistake vowels for other vowels, but not for consonants (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature11911).
Bigger eye will spy alien oxygen A GIANT telescope now being built could hunt for alien life by detecting oxygen on exoplanets. On Earth, plants and some bacteria are the only sources of large amounts of atmospheric oxygen. Existing telescopes can look at the light that passes through exoplanet atmospheres and tease out their make-up, but observations made from the ground struggle to filter out Earth’s oxygen. And space missions intended to hunt for distant oxygen have been cancelled. A team in the Netherlands has now calculated that the European Extremely Large Telescope, due to be completed in the next decade, will have high enough resolution to spot alien oxygen (Astrophysical Journal, doi.org/kh6).