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Friday, March 1, 2013

Nut-cracking monkeys use shapes to strategize their use of tools

Feb. 27, 2013 ? Bearded capuchin monkeys deliberately place palm nuts in a stable position on a surface before trying to crack them open, revealing their capacity to use tactile information to improve tool use. The results are published February 27 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Dorothy Fragaszy and colleagues from the University of Georgia.

The researchers analyzed the monkeys' tool-use skills by videotaping adult monkeys cracking palm nuts on a surface they used frequently for the purpose. They found that monkeys positioned the nuts flat side down more frequently than expected by random chance. When placing the nuts, the monkeys knocked the nuts on the surface a few times before releasing them, after which the nuts very rarely moved.

The researchers suggest that the monkeys may have learned to optimize this tool-use strategy by repeatedly knocking the nut to achieve the stable position prior to cracking it. They conclude that the monkeys' strategic placement of the nut reveals that the monkeys pay attention to the fit between the nut and the surface each time they place the nut, and adjust their actions accordingly.

In a parallel experiment, the scientists asked blindfolded people to perform the same action, positioning palm nuts on an anvil as if to crack them with a stone or hammer. Like the monkeys, the human participants also followed tactile cues to place the nut flat-side down on the anvil.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Public Library of Science.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:

Dorothy M. Fragaszy, Qing Liu, Barth W. Wright, Angellica Allen, Callie Welch Brown, Elisabetta Visalberghi. Wild Bearded Capuchin Monkeys (Sapajus libidinosus) Strategically Place Nuts in a Stable Position during Nut-Cracking. PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (2): e56182 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0056182

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/9aVopA3rbS4/130227183502.htm

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Action video games boost reading skills, study suggests

Feb. 28, 2013 ? Much to the chagrin of parents who think their kids should spend less time playing video games and more time studying, time spent playing action video games can actually make dyslexic children read better. In fact, 12 hours of video game play did more for reading skills than is normally achieved with a year of spontaneous reading development or demanding traditional reading treatments.

The evidence, appearing in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on February 28, follows from earlier work by the same team linking dyslexia to early problems with visual attention rather than language skills.

"Action video games enhance many aspects of visual attention, mainly improving the extraction of information from the environment," said Andrea Facoetti of the University of Padua and the Scientific Institute Medea of Bosisio Parini in Italy. "Dyslexic children learned to orient and focus their attention more efficiently to extract the relevant information of a written word more rapidly."

The findings come as further support for the notion that visual attention deficits are at the root of dyslexia, a condition that makes reading extremely difficult for one out of every ten children, Facoetti added. He emphasized that there is, as of now, no approved treatment for dyslexia that includes video games.

Facoetti's team, including Sandro Franceschini, Simone Gori, Milena Ruffino, Simona Viola, and Massimo Molteni, tested the reading, phonological, and attentional skills of two groups of children with dyslexia before and after they played action or non-action video games for nine 80-minute sessions. The action video gamers were able to read faster without losing accuracy. They also showed gains in other tests of attention.

"These results are very important in order to understand the brain mechanisms underlying dyslexia, but they don't put us in a position to recommend playing video games without any control or supervision," Facoetti said.

Still, there is great hope for early interventions that could be applied in low-resource settings. "Our study paves the way for new remediation programs, based on scientific results, that can reduce the dyslexia symptoms and even prevent dyslexia when applied to children at risk for dyslexia before they learn to read."

And, guess what? Those kids will also be having fun.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Cell Press, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:

Sandro Franceschini, Simone Gori, Milena Ruffino, Simona Viola, Massimo Molteni, Andrea Facoetti. Action Video Games Make Dyslexic Children Read Better. Current Biology, 2013; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.01.044

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/strange_science/~3/v58p555cvgM/130228124132.htm

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Were those the bones of Cleopatra's murdered sister?

Experts doubt that the 2,000-year-old bones, unearthed?in 1904 in what is now Turkey, belonged to?Arsinoe IV, Cleopatra's younger half-sister whom she ordered killed.?

By Stephanie Pappas,?LiveScience / February 26, 2013

The site of the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, where Cleopatra had her sister Arsinoe murdered.

Adam Carr distributed by Wikimedia under a Creative Commons License

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A Viennese archaeologist lecturing in North Carolina this week claims to have identified the bones of Cleopatra's murdered sister or half-sister. But not everyone is convinced.

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That's because the evidence linking the bones, discovered in an ancient Greek city, to?Cleopatra's sibling Arsinoe IV is largely circumstantial. A DNA test was attempted, said Hilke Thur, an archaeologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a former director of excavations at the site where the bones were found. However, the 2,000-year-old bones had been moved and handled too many times to get uncontaminated results.

"It didn't bring the results we hoped to find," Thur?told the Charlotte News-Observer. She will lecture on her research March 1 at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh.

The Ptolemy's bloody history

Arsinoe IV was Cleopatra's younger half-sister or sister, both of them fathered by Ptolemy XII Auletes, though whether they shared a mother is not clear. Ptolemic family politics were tough: When Ptolemy XII died, he made Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy XIII joint rulers, but Ptolemy soon ousted Cleopatra. Julius Caesar took Cleopatra's side in the family fight for power, while Arsinoe joined the Egyptian army resisting Caesar and the Roman forces. [Cleopatra & Olympias: Top 12 Warrior Moms in History]

Rome won out, however, and Arsinoe was taken captive. She was allowed to live in exile in Ephesus, an ancient Greek city in what is now Turkey. However, Cleopatra saw her half-sister as a threat and had her murdered in 41 B.C.

Fast forward to 1904. That year, archaeologists began excavating a ruined structure in Ephesus known as the Octagon for its shape. In 1926, they revealed a burial chamber in the Octagon, holding the bones of a young woman.

Thur argues that the date of the tomb (sometime in the second half of the first century B.C.) and the illustrious within-city location of the grave, points to the occupant being Arsinoe IV herself. Thur also believes the octagonal shape may echo that of the great Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the?Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. That would make the tomb an homage to Arsinoe's hometown, Egypt's ancient capital, Alexandria. ?

Controversial claim

The skull of the possible murdered princess disappeared in Germany during World War II, but Thur found the rest of the bones in two niches in the burial chamber in 1985. The remains have been debated every step of the way. Forensic analysis revealed them to belong to a girl of 15 or 16, which would make Arsinoe surprisingly young for someone who was supposed to have played a major leadership role in a war against Rome years before her death. Thur dismisses those criticisms.

"This academic questioning is normal," she told the News-Observer. "It happens. It's a kind of jealousy."

In 2009, a BBC documentary, "Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer," trumpeted the claim that the bones are Arsinoe's. At the time, the most controversial findings centered on the body's lost skull. Measurements and photographs of the incomplete skull remain in historical records and were used to?reconstruct the dead woman's face.

From the reconstruction, Thur and her colleagues concluded that Arsinoe had an African mother (the Ptolemies were an ethnically Greek dynasty). That conclusion led to splashy headlines suggesting that Cleopatra, too, was African.

But classicists say the conclusions are shaky.

"We get this skull business and having Arsinoe's ethnicity actually being determined from a reconstructed skull based on measurements taken in the 1920s?" wrote David Meadows, a Canadian classicist and teacher, on his blog?rogueclassicism.

Not only that, but Cleopatra and Arsinoe may not have shared a mother.

"In that case, the ethnic argument goes largely out of the window," Cambridge classics professor Mary Beard wrote in the?Times Literary Supplement?in 2009.

Without more testing, the bones remain in identification limbo.

"One of my colleagues on the project told me two years ago there is currently no other method to really determine more," Thur told the News-Observer. "But he thinks there may be new methods developing. There is hope."

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter?@sipappas?or LiveScience?@livescience. We're also on?Facebook?&?Google+.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/M6-C1QiGsb0/Were-those-the-bones-of-Cleopatra-s-murdered-sister

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China says US-based hackers target its websites

Staff , The Associated Press ? ? ? 4 hrs.

BEIJING ? China's military said Thursday that overseas computer hackers targeted two of its websites an average of 144,000 times per month last year, with almost two-thirds of the attacks originating in the United States.

The claim from Defense Ministry spokesman Geng Yansheng follows accusations last week by American cybersecurity company Mandiant that Chinese military-backed cyberspies infiltrated overseas networks and stole massive amounts of data from U.S. companies and other entities. China denied the allegations, and its military said it has never supported any hacking activity.

Geng told reporters at a monthly news conference that an average of 62.9 percent of the attacks on the Defense Ministry's official website and that of its newspaper, the People's Liberation Army Daily, came from the U.S.

"Like other countries, China faces a serious threat from hacking and is one of the primary victims of hacking in the world," Geng said. "Numbers of attacks have been on the rise in recent years."

Related story: Red Tape: His firm accused China of hacking the US; now he awaits the consequences

Geng attacked the Mandiant report, which blamed hacking on the People's Liberation Army's Shanghai-based Unit 61398, as "unprofessional and not in accordance with the facts." He also criticized the U.S. military's cyber command for impeding international efforts at controlling hacking.

The Mandiant report was widely praised by cybersecurity professionals interviewed by The Associated Press, who said it provided the most detailed picture yet of China's state-sponsored hacking efforts.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/china-says-us-based-hackers-target-its-websites-1C8628546

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Genetic tricks put a date on Homer's 'Iliad'

Biblioteca Ambrosiana via LGPN

This codex of Homer's "Iliad" was produced in the late fifth century or early sixth century.

By Joel N. Shurkin
Inside Science News Service

Scientists who decode the genetic history of humans by tracking how genes mutate have applied the same technique to one of the Western world's most ancient and celebrated texts to uncover the date it was first written.

The text is Homer's "Iliad," and Homer ? if there was such a person ? probably wrote it in 762 B.C., give or take 50 years, the researchers found. The "Iliad" tells the story of the Trojan War ? if there was such a war ? with Greeks battling Trojans.

The researchers accept the received orthodoxy that a war happened and someone named Homer wrote about it, said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary theorist at the University of Reading in England. His collaborators include Eric Altschuler, a geneticist at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, in Newark, and Andreea S. Calude, a linguist also at Reading and the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. They worked from the standard text of the epic poem.

The date they came up with fits the time most scholars think the "Iliad" was compiled, so the paper,?published in the journal Bioessays,?won't have classicists in a snit. The study mostly affirms what they have been saying, that it was written around the eighth century B.C.

That geneticists got into such a project should be no surprise, Pagel said.

"Languages behave just extraordinarily like genes," Pagel said. "It is directly analogous. We tried to document the regularities in linguistic evolution and study Homer's vocabulary as a way of seeing if language evolves the way we think it does. If so, then we should be able to find a date for Homer."

Who was Homer?
It is unlikely there ever was one individual man named Homer who wrote the "Iliad." Brian Rose, professor of classical studies and curator of the Mediterranean section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, said it is clear the "Iliad" is a compilation of oral tradition going back to the 13th century B.C.

"It's an amalgam of lots of stories that seemed focused on conflicts in one particular area of northwestern Turkey," Rose said.

The story of the "Iliad" is well-known, full of characters such as Helen of Troy, Achilles, Paris, Agamemnon and a slew of gods and goddesses behaving badly. It recounts how a gigantic fleet of Greek ships sailed across the "wine dark sea" to besiege Troy and regain a stolen wife. Its sequel is Homer's "Odyssey."

Classicists and archaeologists are fairly certain Troy existed and generally know where it is. In the 19th century, the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and the Englishman Frank Calvert excavated what is known as the Citadel of Troy and found evidence of a military conflict in the 12th century B.C., including arrows and a thick layer of burned debris around a buried fortress. Rose said it's not known whether the conflict was a civil war or a struggle between Troy and a foreign foe.

The compilation we know as the "Iliad" was written centuries later, around the date Pagel is proposing.

Decoding the words
The scientists tracked the words in the "Iliad" the way they would track genes in a genome.

The researchers employed a linguistic tool called the Swadesh word list, put together in the 1940s and 1950s by American linguist Morris Swadesh. The list contains approximately 200 concepts that have words apparently in every language and every culture, Pagel said. These are usually words for body parts, colors, necessary relationships like "father" and "mother."

They looked for Swadesh words in the "Iliad" and found 173 of them. Then they measured how they changed.

They took the language of the Hittites, a people that existed during the time the war may have been fought, and modern Greek, and traced the changes in the words from Hittite to Homeric to modern. It is precisely how they measure the genetic history of humans, by going back and seeing how and when genes alter over time.

For example, they looked at cognates, words derived from ancestral words. There is "water" in English, "wasser" in German, "vatten" in Swedish, all cognates emanating from "wator" in proto-German. There are occasionally different types of linguistic mutations: For example, the Old English "hund" later became "hound," but eventually was replaced by "dog," which is not a cognate.

"I'm an evolutionary theorist," Pagel said. "I study language because it's such a remarkable culturally transmitted replicator. It replicates with a fidelity that's just astonishing."

By documenting the regularity of the linguistic mutations, Pagel and the others have given a timeline to the story of Helen and the men who died for her ? genetics meets the classics.

More Homeric history:

Joel Shurkin is a freelance writer based in Baltimore. He is the author of nine books on science and the history of science, and has taught science journalism at Stanford University, the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

Source: http://science.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/27/17124075-genetic-techniques-used-on-ancient-texts-to-estimate-age-of-homers-iliad?lite

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Chris Brown, Rihanna-Inspired 'Law & Order: SVU' Takes An Unexpected Twist

Star-studded 'Funny Valentine' episode serves as a cautionary tale for abusive relationships.
By Jocelyn Vena

Tiffany Robinson on "Law and Order: SVU"
Photo: NBC

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1702783/chris-brown-rihanna-svu-episode.jhtml

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Afghans worry about international aid vacuum

In this Thursday, Feb. 21, 2013 photo, Fatema, 10, takes notes during a math class at the Afghanistan's Children - A New Approach (ASCHIANA) center in Kabul, Afghanistan. The impending withdrawal of U.S. and other foreign combat forces from Afghanistan means more than a loss of firepower. International aid is also on the decline because of donor fatigue and fears of deteriorating security after nearly 12 years of war. Worried about losing hard-won gains, aid organizations are racing to finish projects or find new sources of funding to provide basic services that the weak central government has been unable to deliver. (AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq)

In this Thursday, Feb. 21, 2013 photo, Afghan street children take their lunch meal at the Afghanistan's Children-A New Approach (ASCHIANA) center in Kabul, Afghanistan. The impending withdrawal of U.S. and other foreign combat forces from Afghanistan means more than a loss of firepower. International aid is also on the decline because of donor fatigue and fears of deteriorating security after nearly 12 years of war. Worried about losing hard-won gains, aid organizations are racing to finish projects or find new sources of funding to provide basic services that the weak central government has been unable to deliver.(AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq)

In this Thursday, Feb. 21, 2013 photo, Afghan street children leave Afghanistan's Children- A New Approach (ASCHIANA) center after finishing their school hours in Kabul, Afghanistan. The impending withdrawal of U.S. and other foreign combat forces from Afghanistan means more than a loss of firepower. International aid is also on the decline because of donor fatigue and fears of deteriorating security after nearly 12 years of war. Worried about losing hard-won gains, aid organizations are racing to finish projects or find new sources of funding to provide basic services that the weak central government has been unable to deliver.(AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq)

In this Thursday, Feb. 21, 2013, photo an Afghan teacher, right, explains how to solve a math question at the Afghanistan's Children- A New Approach (ASCHIANA) center in Kabul, Afghanistan. The impending withdrawal of U.S. and other foreign combat forces from Afghanistan means more than a loss of firepower. International aid is also on the decline because of donor fatigue and fears of deteriorating security after nearly 12 years of war. Worried about losing hard-won gains, aid organizations are racing to finish projects or find new sources of funding to provide basic services that the weak central government has been unable to deliver.(AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq)

In this Monday, Feb. 25, 2013 photo, Afghan Economy Minister Abdul Hadi Arghandiwal speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Kabul, Afghanistan. The impending withdrawal of U.S. and other foreign combat forces from Afghanistan means more than a loss of firepower. International aid is also on the decline because of donor fatigue and fears of deteriorating security after nearly 12 years of war. Worried about losing hard-won gains, aid organizations are racing to finish projects or find new sources of funding to provide basic services that the weak central government has been unable to deliver.(AP Photo/Ahmad Nazar)

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) ? Afghan street children are packed into classrooms, raising their hands to answer math questions and bending their heads over art projects as part of a program funded by the European Union.

But the money is about to disappear after a four-year grant expires next month, and the Afghan government isn't ready to fill the gap. That leaves thousands of poor children who spend most of their days hawking goods on the street poised to lose their only access to an education.

The impending withdrawal of U.S. and other foreign combat forces means more than a loss of firepower. International aid is also on the decline because of donor fatigue and fears of deteriorating security after nearly 12 years of war.

The pullout of most international troops by the end of 2014 will leave many areas without the protection required for foreign aid workers. Even those workers who have more freedom of movement are concerned violence will increase as Afghan troops take over and the Taliban push to regain control.

Worried about losing hard-won gains, many Afghan and international aid organizations are racing to finish projects or find new sources of funding to provide basic services such as health care, education and electricity that the weak central government has been unable to deliver.

"The situation in Afghanistan is day by day becoming critical, but the international community is less interested," said Mohammad Yousef, founder of the children's program Aschiana.

Afghanistan has received $60 billion in international civilian assistance since 2002. In a bid to defuse concerns about a mass exodus, international donors last year pledged $16 billion in development aid for Afghanistan through 2015, but they also promised to channel half of that through the Afghan government despite concerns about corruption and mismanagement.

The money that has flowed into Afghanistan since the 2001 U.S. invasion that ousted the Taliban and their al-Qaida allies has led to drastic improvements, with nearly 8 million children, some 40 percent of them girls, enrolled in school ? up from just over 1 million when girls were banned from school under the Taliban.

The U.S. Agency for International Development in Afghanistan also has built or refurbished more than 680 schools, and child mortality has been halved with improved health facilities and other services.

But Afghan and international activists are worried projects could be abandoned and progress reversed.

"There is the prospect of a lot of white elephants being left behind. That's a really sad prospect," said Louise Hancock, head of policy and advocacy for Oxfam in Afghanistan.

"People are fed up with Afghanistan," she said. "A lot of people are worried they haven't got value for what's been put in."

With its own development budget for Afghanistan slashed nearly in half, the U.S. has shifted its priorities from quick-fix projects showing immediate results such as building schools, clinics and other infrastructure to trying to help the Afghan government operate and maintain the facilities and develop programs.

The European Union is maintaining its development aid levels at about 250 million euros ($330 million) a year, but it too is increasingly channeling that money through the Afghan government.

Afghan officials insist the shift may mean more money but that it will be used more efficiently after years of uncoordinated spending.

"The government of Afghanistan has been working hard to face the challenge," Economics Minister Abdul Hadi Arghandiwal said. "Sooner or later the government has to be able to provide these services."

Jonathan Crickx, the EU's media adviser in Afghanistan, said the Aschiana grant had been scheduled to end in 2012 but already was extended once.

"The reason why this project is not going to be renewed is that the Afghan government asked the European Union to concentrate its funding on specific sectors, increase alignment with national priorities and deliver more aid on budget, through relevant Afghan ministries," Crickx said.

In line with that request, the 27-nation EU is "phasing out its social protection projects and strengthening its action in the health sector," he added.

The Aschiana program, founded in 1995 by Yousef, an Afghan engineer who was touched by the story of a boy shining his shoes, provides educational and vocational programs as well as an emergency shelter and assistance for displaced children. Those activities, along with programs in the cities of Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif, will stop on March 31, when the EU funding comes to an end, the organization said.

"Kids don't get enough focus even though they ... face danger of falling prey to drug dealers, prostitution and international trafficking," Yousef said during an interview in his second-floor office, heated with a wood stove in a Dickensian complex on the edge of Kabul.

Abdul Qadir, a 14-year-old who makes about 150 Afghanis (about $3) per day selling plastic bags to drivers and people buying fruit and vegetables at outdoor markets in the afternoons, spends his mornings practicing carpentry at Aschiana.

He said he dropped out of school to help earn money for his family.

"When I'm working on the street, I don't feel comfortable because of the dust and pollution," he said. "I'm doing this now because my father needs my help. In the future, I want to be a good carpenter."

While the bulk of international financial assistance goes to military costs, more than $6 billion a year, or nearly 40 percent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product, has been spent on civilian aid, the World Bank said in a report last May.

"Such aid dependency is almost unique," the World Bank said, adding that only a few smaller entities such as Liberia and the Palestinian territories have on occasion received more aid per capita.

The World Bank and activists have urged international donors to pull back gradually.

"The economic system we have created is not a real economy. It's a fake economy," said Mohammad Zafar Salehi of the Afghan women's rights group Young Women for Change. "If the international community withdraws too suddenly, all this hard work that they did over the last 10 years will vanish."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-02-27-AS-Afghan-Dwindling-Aid/id-8abedcb4fede496297b61f22853b2e83

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