All land mammals have tear glands in their eyes, but the human tearing experience was until recently considered unique. After all, we are the only animal to shed a tear while watching Beaches. Now a new Weizmann Institute of Science study reveals that human tears have much more in common with those of other animals than previously thought: They contain chemicals that reduce aggression in others, as do the tears of, for example, mice and blind mole rats. The study, published today in PLOS Biology, showed that sniffing women’s tears lowered brain activity related to aggression in men, reducing aggressive behavior.

The study addressed the long-standing mystery of why we cry. Charles Darwin was puzzled by emotional tearing, which appeared to have no useful function – beyond the role that tears play in lubricating the eye – so he concluded that such tearing must have evolved in humans by chance. Since then, however, numerous studies, particularly in rodents, have shown that mammalian tears contain chemicals serving as social signals that can be emitted on demand. One of their most common purposes is to reduce aggression. The tear liquid of female mice, for example, contains chemicals that affect aggression networks in the brain, thereby reducing fighting among male mice. Subordinate males of blind mole rats smear themselves in tears to reduce the dominant male’s aggressive behavior toward them.

Prof. Noam Sobel and Shani Agron

Prof. Noam Sobel, whose lab in Weizmann’s Brain Sciences Department studies olfaction, the sense of smell, has hypothesized that human tears also contain chemicals that serve as social signals. Back in 2011, in research published in Science, his team had shown that sniffing women’s emotional tears reduced testosterone levels in men, resulting in somewhat diminished levels of sexual arousal.

In the new study, researchers led by PhD student Shani Agron from Sobel’s lab wanted to determine whether tears have the same aggression-blocking affect in people as they do in rodents. In a series of experiments, men were exposed to either women’s emotional tears or saline, without knowing what they were sniffing and without being able to distinguish between the two, since both are odorless. Next, they played a two-person game. The game was designed to elicit aggressive behavior in one player toward the other player, who the men were led to believe was cheating. When given the opportunity, the men could get revenge on the other players by causing them to lose money, though they themselves gained nothing.

“We’ve shown that tears activate olfactory receptors and that they alter aggression-related brain circuits, significantly reducing aggressive behavior”

After the men sniffed women’s emotional tears, their revenge-seeking aggressive behavior during the game dropped by about 44 percent – that is, nearly in half.

This seemed equivalent to the effect observed in rodents, but rodents have a structure in their noses called the vomeronasal organ, which picks up the social chemical signals. Humans don’t have this organ, so how do they sense the social chemicals? To find an answer, the researchers applied the tears to 62 human olfactory receptors in a laboratory dish and found that four of these receptors were activated by the tears, even though tears are odorless.

Furthermore, the researchers repeated the experiments while examining the men’s brains in an MRI scanner. Functional imaging showed that two aggression-related brain regions – the prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula – were less active when the men were sniffing the tears. The greater the difference in this brain activity between saline and tears, the less often the player took revenge during the game.

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Maybe King David’s palace was a temporary shelter in nature? Finding kingly cloth from the time sheds light on traditions and state of mind of Jewish king. 

A rare bit of royal robe dyed in ancient purple was unearthed in a mine in southern Israel recently. Thousands of years ago Jews wore threads of this blueish purple on shawls to remind them to pray, a tradition carried on until today. The blue-purple cloth was used in the day in the robes of kings and priests. And the rare bit just found is monumental to archeologists, historians, and religious observers. 

The cloth was found in Timna, an ancient copper mine from the time of King Solomon where it was mentioned. 

“The color immediately attracted our attention, but we found it hard to believe,” one of the archeologists from the dig reported.  

If you look to the Song of Songs, love poems to God written by King Solomon, you will see mention of the cloth: “King Solomon made for himself the carriage; he made it of wood from Lebanon. Its posts he made of silver, its base of gold. Its seat was upholstered with purple, its interior inlaid with love.” 

Remnants of this mythical cloth has been sought after for generations. What is this secret blue – purple dye called tehelet? 

Direct radiocarbon dating confirms that the finds date from approximately 1000 BCE, corresponding to the biblical monarchies of David and Solomon in Jerusalem.

The dye was produced from species of mollusks found in the Mediterranean, over 200 miles from the Timna site and it is often mentioned in the Bible and appears in various Jewish and Christian contexts.

This is the first time that purple-dyed Iron Age textiles have been found in Israel, or anywhere in the Levant. Ancient blue isn’t just an Israel thing. See how scientists in Spain tried to recreate their ancient blue. 

The research was carried out by Naama Sukenik from the Israel Antiquities Authority and Erez Ben-Yosef, from Tel Aviv University. The unexpected finds were published in the PLOS ONE journal.

“This is a very exciting and important discovery,” explains Sukenik, curator of organic finds at the Israel Antiquities Authority. “This is the first piece of textile ever found from the time of David and Solomon that is dyed with the prestigious purple dye,” she says.

The cloth of ancient nobility

“In antiquity, purple attire was associated with the nobility, with priests, and of course with royalty. The gorgeous shade of the purple, the fact that it does not fade, and the difficulty in producing the dye, which is found in minute quantities in the body of mollusks, all made it the most highly valued of the dyes, which often cost more than gold.

“Until the current discovery, we had only encountered mollusk-shell waste and potsherds with patches of dye, which provided evidence of the purple industry in the Iron Age. Now, for the first time, we have direct evidence of the dyed fabrics themselves, preserved for some 3000 years.”

Ben-Yosef from Tel Aviv University’s Archaeology Department says it’s the dryness of the region that helped preserve the fabric. “If we excavated for another hundred years in Jerusalem, we would not discover textiles from 3000 years ago. The state of preservation at Timna is exceptional and it is paralleled only by that at much later sites such as Masada and the Judean Desert Caves.

“We found it hard to believe that we had found true purple from such an ancient period”.

According to the researchers, true purple [argaman] was produced from three species of mollusk indigenous to the Mediterranean Sea: The Banded Dye-Murex (Hexaplex trunculus), the Spiny Dye-Murex (Bolinus brandaris) and the Red-Mouthed Rock-Shell (Stramonita haemastoma).

The dye was produced from a gland located within the body of the mollusk by means of a complex chemical process that lasted several days. Today, most scholars agree that the two precious dyes, purple [argaman] and light blue, or azure [tekhelet] were produced from the purple dye mollusk under different conditions of exposure to light.

When exposed to light, azure is obtained whereas without light exposure, a purple hue is obtained. These colors are often mentioned together in the ancient sources, and both have symbolic and religious significance to this day. The Temple priests, David and Solomon, and Jesus are all described as having worn clothing colored with purple.

In order to reconstruct the mollusk dyeing process, one researcher traveled to Italy where he cracked thousands of mollusks (which the Italians eat) and produced raw material from their dye glands that was used in hundreds of attempts to reconstruct ancient dyeing. 

The dye was identified with an advanced analytical tool (HPLC) that indicated the presence of unique dye molecules, originating only in certain species of mollusk. According to Sukenik, “Most of the colored textiles found at Timna, and in archaeological research in general, were dyed using various plant-based dyes that were readily available and easier to dye with.

Described by Pliny The Elder

“The use of animal-based dyes is regarded as much more prestigious, and served as an important indicator for the wearer’s high economic and social status. The remnants of the purple-dyed cloth that we found are not only the most ancient in Israel, but in the Southern Levant in general.

“We also believe that we have succeeded in identifying the double-dyeing method in one of the fragments, in which two species of mollusk were used in a sophisticated way, to enrich the dye. This technology is described by the Roman historian Pliny the Elder, from the first century CE, and the dye it produced was considered the most prestigious.”

Ben-Yosef identifies the copper-production center at Timna as part of the biblical Kingdom of Edom, which bordered the kingdom of Israel to the south. According to him, the dramatic finds should revolutionize our concepts of nomadic societies in the Iron Age.

Was David a king without a palace?

“The new finds reinforce our assumption that there was an elite at Timna, attesting to a stratified society,” he says.

“In addition, since the mollusks are indigenous to the Mediterranean, this society obviously maintained trade relations with other peoples who lived on the coastal plain.

“However, we do not have evidence of any permanent settlements in the Edomite territory. The Edomite Kingdom was a kingdom of nomads. When we think of nomads, it is difficult for us to free ourselves from comparisons with contemporary Bedouins, and we therefore find it hard to imagine kings without magnificent stone palaces and walled cities.

“Yet in certain circumstances, nomads can also create a complex socio-political structure, one that the biblical writers could identify as a kingdom. Of course, this whole debate has repercussions for our understanding of Jerusalem. We know that the Tribes of Israel were originally nomadic and that the process of settlement was gradual and prolonged. Archaeologists are looking for King David’s palace.

“However, David may not have expressed his wealth in splendid buildings, but with objects more suited to a nomadic heritage such as textiles and artifacts.”

According to Ben-Yosef, “It is wrong to assume that if no grand buildings and fortresses have been found, then biblical descriptions of the United Kingdom in Jerusalem must be literary fiction.

“Our new research at Timna has showed us that even without such buildings, there were kings in our region who ruled over complex societies, formed alliances and trade relations, and waged war on each other.

“The wealth of a nomadic society was not measured in palaces and monuments made of stone, but in things that were no less valued in the ancient world – such as the copper produced at Timna and the purple dye that was traded with its copper smelters.”

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Research by Jessica Gall Myrick, an assistant professor at Indiana University Media School, has found that viewing cat videos boosts people’s energy and positive emotions and decreases negative feelings. Her project involved surveying nearly 7,000 people via social media about their cat video viewing habits and related moods. 

The post Researchers say we can’t ignore Internet cats anymore! appeared first on Green Prophet.

There seems to be a tremendous struggle happening in the Middle East – a fight between the good guys, like this 10-year-old Emirati wunderkid, and psychotic fundamentalists (along with a host of other corrupt elements.) The good maybe overwhelmed by the very worst bad guys there could be. And then there is the boy who already has seven scientific patents to his name.

Before I go any further, I want to point out that I came across this story over at The National, an Emirati publication. Major shoutout to Ben Flanagan, who should be in the running for a Pulitzer with this story! He really captures the essence of a boy who is just a boy, and yet he has accomplished the feats of a grown man.

It felt like Flanagan was looking for evidence that young Adeeb Al Blooshi had missed out on his childhood, but came away with the most subtle yet complex unveiling of a young person with the wisdom and knowledge of a sage – for example, the “inventor,” as Flanagan calls him, recognizes somehow that he has to separate his accomplishments from his friendships with peers his own age.

“I don’t really like to combine the inventions with my personal life. [My school friends do] ask me, and when they do I answer them,” he told The National. “But then again, we’re all busy playing football.”

Al Blooshi is an inventor, and the recipient of 100 awards and certifications. Did I mention that he is just 10 years old? Or that he is currently on a tour of seven countries under the patronage and watchful eye of Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed – the Crown Prince of Dubai?

“The young scientist is on a world tour to help him build on his previous inventions, which include a prosthetic limb for his father and a housework robot for his mother,” writes Flanagan.

“Because of his work he was named by CNN as among the world’s most impressive young medical pioneers.”

For more about his work and tour, and the chance to read one of the most enjoyable pieces of journalism I’ve encountered in a long while, please head over to The National.

Lead image via Naija

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The original ‘iPad’ measures roughly seven inches, except it’s thicker and made of wood, and comprises five overlaid carved rectangular panels coated with wax, Discovery reports.

“Yenikapı is a phenomenon with its 37 sunken ships and organic products,” Ufuk Kocabaş, director of Istanbul University’s department of marine archeology and the Yenikapi Shipwrecks Project, told Hurriyet Daily News. Scientists have been excavating the site for 10 years.

“I think these organic products are the most important feature of the excavations,” says Kocabaş.

Thought to have belonged to the ship’s captain for use as a tool, the wooden box has a sliding lid underneath that hides a carved plate.

“When you draw the sliding part, there are small weights used as an assay balance,” Kocabaş said. 

Related: Turkey’s Yalın Mimarlık Wins Ancient Troy Archaeological Museum Design Competition

An assay balance is a super-sensitive tool used to assess gold, silver and other precious metals in order to determine their value. This is an important tool for a merchant ship.

The ‘tablet’ had other uses as well.

Greek writing found carved in the wax suggests that it was used to take notes, and leather straps that hold the layers together made the box relatively portable as well. Nothing compared to modern iPads of course, but portable for 9th century Turkey.

Discovery writes that a “research team from Istanbul University is now restoring the ship, 60 percent of which has survived in good condition, with the aim of having her set sail again by 2015.”

Only this time, it is likely to have more “advanced” tools on board.

Image: The Byzantine notebook. Credit: Ufuk Kocabaş

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Researchers from the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Agriculture and Environment sought to find a gene that can stand up to the Ug99 stem rust pathogen, which has decimated wheat crops in a curl of countries spreading east from Uganda and up into Yemen.

Today it threatens approximately 90 percent of the globe’s wheat farms.

“Wheat crops worldwide are vulnerable to this fungal disease and it has ruined entire harvests in Africa and the Middle East. The promise of creating wheat with greater resistance to stem rust is of major importance to the agricultural industry,” Professor Harbans Bariana told Physorg.

Dr. Bariana and his team cloned the Sr33 gene from goat grass, a prohibited weed in present day Australia that was widely cultivated during the Bronze age, and then plugged it into a modern wheat gene to test its efficacy against Ug99.

It is resistant, quite like the Sr35 gene detected by American researchers Eduard Akhunov, associate professor of plant pathology at Kansas State University, and his colleague, Jorge Dubcovsky from the University of California-Davis.

That gene was discovered in einkorn wheat grown in Turkey, Physorg reported in an earlier story, a country whose culture has grown up alongside bread.

The results of both studies were first printed in the journal Science, and their potential contribution to humanity can’t be stressed enough.

:: Physorg

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Meet Elif Bilgin, the latest in a string of wunderkids from the Middle East and North Africa, who invented a bioplastic made from banana peels. Azza Abdel Hamid Faiad from Egypt made biofuel from plastic, and Arab and Jewish kids are working together on an algae project, but none have been as well rewarded as this 16-year-old from Istanbul.

Bilgin spent two years working on her bioplastic invention after becoming convinced that the starch and cellulose present in banana peels could be used for similar applications as other plastics made from organic materials such as mangoes and potatoes.

It took ten failed experiments before the teen, who told Scientific American that “science is her calling,” created a cohesive plastic material that did not degrade.

Throughout the process, she took heart in words uttered by Thomas Edison years before: “I have not failed,” he said. “I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

The girl’s perseverance paid off, and she won Scientific American’s coveted Science in Action prize, which comes with a $50,000 cash prize, one year of mentoring so that she can further develop her project, and she is an automatic finalist in the Google Science Fair.

In September, Bilgin will fly to the Mountain View Campus in California to compete with 14 other exceptional young scientists in this prestigious competition.

The Science in Action prize is designed to reward students who address environmental, health or resource challenges.

Bilgin said she is happy that her banana peel bioplastic, which will be used to insulate electrical cables or for cosmetic prostheses, will help to divert some of the pollution caused by the production of petroleum-based plastics.

:: Scientific American

Read about other cool teens from the Middle East:

Arab and Jewish Teenagers Grow Algae for a Greener Future

Biofuel from Plastic for this Young Teenager from Alexandria

Egyptian Youth Launch an Environmental Coalition

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Could woman’s best friend be the missing link in the diagnoses of aggressive breast cancer types?

Researchers at Ben Gurion University in Israel have conducted research proving that specially trained dogs can differentiate the smell of breast cancer cells from non-cancerous cells in cell cultures. The concept of using the sniffing ability of dogs to detect cancerous cells first emerged a decade ago in an article in a medical journal about a woman who discovered she had melanoma when her dog repeatedly barked at her tumor. Other individuals have reported similar experiences.

“Our research proves that dogs can smell cancer cells in vitro, and that different types of cancer share the same smell print,” said Dr. Uri Yoel, a specialist in internal medicine and professor at BGU.

“In the case of lung cancer or melanoma, this did not come as a great surprise, as it made sense that the cancer could be smelled on the patient’s breath or skin. Regarding other forms of the disease, like breast cancer, it was less evident.

“All smells leave a molecular footprint, but with something like breast cancer it was hard to understand how this worked,” Yoel added.

In this initial research project, the dogs were taught to smell breast cancer cell cultures, but were also tested for their ability to recognize lung cancer and melanoma. They scored a perfect 100 percent in all cases.

The experiment consisted of two canine participants who were taught to smell and detect cell cultures originating from malignant breast cancer and to differentiate them from non-cancerous cell cultures. When the dogs were ready, they were tested for their ability to find one malignant cell culture plate located between four other noncancerous cell culture plates.

The next step is to check the dogs’ reaction to people with cancer. Dr. Yoel will begin by training the dogs to identify lung cancer. To do this, he will expose them to hundreds of smokers to look for those with early stage disease.

Yoel is in the process of publishing a paper on his findings.

Meanwhile in other breast cancer news on Green Prophet: tea might help stave off breast cancer, also turmeric has been found to be a possible preventative to breast malignancies.

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From 11,000 to 5,000 years ago, the 3.5 million square miles of sand and dunes had pockets of water, where hippos cheerfully went about their business. But then, quite drastically, the climate changed, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Columbia University scientists want to know why.

The research team used groundbreaking techniques to glean the rate at which dust settled in the area we now think of as the Sahara desert during the greener era known as the African Humid Period.

Using data collected by Columbia University and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the team studied how quickly sand from the nearby region settled into an area on the northwest coast of Africa, where they took samples of deposits that settled as far back as 30,000 years ago.

First they employed thorium-230 normalization, a method that measures the presence of decayed uranium also known as thorium 230, in a specific sediment sample.

RD Mag describes the method thusly:

Over time, uranium decays to thorium-230, an insoluble chemical that sticks to any falling sediment as it sinks to the seafloor. The amount of uranium—and by extension, the production rate of thorium-230—in the world’s oceans is relatively constant. McGee [David McGee, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences] measured the concentration of thorium-230 in each core sample to determine the accumulation rates of sediments through time.

Higher concentrations of thorium-230 indicate slow sedimentation rates.

Next it was necessary to determine how much of the deposits was carried by the wind – because eventually this will help to determine to what extent dust impacts/drives/changes/slows down climate change – knowledge that could inform us in the rapidly changing Holocene era.

Again, from RD Mag via MIT:

The researchers subtracted biological sediment from the samples by measuring calcium carbonate, opal and organic carbon, the primary remnants of living organisms. After subtracting this measurement from each sample layer, the researchers tackled the task of separating the remaining sediment into windblown dust and marine sediments—particles that circulate through the ocean, deposited on the seafloor by currents. McGee employed a second technique called grain-size endmember modeling, charting a distribution of grain sizes ranging from coarse grains of dust to fine grains of marine soil.

“We define these endmembers: A pure dust signal would look like this, and a pure marine sediment would look like this,” McGee says. “And then we see, OK, what combination of those extremes would give us this mixture that we see here?”

Based on this, they discovered that the Sahara today is five times dustier than it was 6,000 years ago. But the team needs to go further to understand the genesis of Sahara’s wetter days.

Image of camels and people in the Sahara desert, Shutterstock

The post A Greener Sahara for Elephants and Hippos – 5,000 Years Ago appeared first on Green Prophet.

The largest simulated space mission stemming from Europe, Mars2013 took place near Erfoud in the northern Sahara throughout February this year. During that time, scientists experimented with a simulated spacesuit called Aouda.X, a temporary emergency shelter, some rovers, and a slew of communication technologies, in addition to exploring other issues that might come up on a real Mars mission.

The Northern Sahara desert’s geology and topography sufficiently resembles that of Mars, according to Gizmag, that the OEWF could get a realistic sense of how both the astronauts and their tools would perform on the fourth planet from the sun – at least a 150 day journey to its closest point using existing technology.

Tests examined issues related to “engineering, planetary surface operations, astrobiology, geophysics, geology, life sciences and other fields,” according to Gizmag.

Albeit considerably lighter (and cheaper) than a genuine spacesuit, the Aouda.X helped astronauts understand how they would manage wearing a cumbersome, heavy (99lb) suit that restricts movement and puts stress on joints and fingers.

Mars2013 also tested a temporary emergency shelter designed by Vienna University of Technology students, which offers 48 hour protection in the event of a suit failure.

OEWF tested three rovers during their simulated mars mission, including the Cliff Reconnaissance Vehicle (CRV) or Cliffbot, the Magma White rover and “Puli” – an unmanned rover with whegs that optimize its mobility.

Establishing some kind of communication link between the base station and astronaut crew is essential to any interplanetary mission, and also deeply challenging.

Gizmag reports:

The purpose isn’t just to maintain a link with mission control, but also to use the new technology to better manage multiple data and communication links between astronauts, machines and base.

More than just an Austrian mission, Mars2013 was made possible by input from 23 nations, including University College London, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Budapest.

For a more detailed analysis of the Mars2013 mission, please head over to Gizmag, from where this post is adapted.

All images via Katja Zanella-Kux from OeWF

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