Use rozmarinen to strengthen memory

      This is the finding of a study conducted by Jemma McCready and Dr Mark Moss from the University of Northumbria. The findings presented today, Tuesday 9 April, at the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society in Harrogate, suggest that this essential oil may enhance the ability to remember events and to remember to complete tasks at particular times in the future.

Dr Mark Moss said: "We wanted to build on our previous research that indicated rosemary aroma improved long-term memory and mental arithmetic. In this study we focused on prospective memory, which involves the ability to remember events that will occur in the future and to remember to complete tasks at particular times this is critical for everyday functioning. For example when someone needs to remember to post a birthday card or to take medication at a particular time."

Rosemary essential oil was diffused in to a testing room by placing four drops on an aroma stream fan diffuser and switching this on five minutes before the participants entered the room. Sixty-six people took part in the study and were randomly allocated to either the rosemary-scented room or another room with no scent.

 In each room participants completed a test designed to assess their prospective memory functions. This included tasks such as hiding objects and asking participants to find them at the end of the test and instructing them to pass a specified object to the researcher at a particular time. All the tasks had to be done with no prompting. If the task was not performed then different degrees of prompting were used. The more prompting that was used the lower the score. Participants also completed questionnaires assessing their mood.

Participants' blood was also analysed to see if performance levels and changes in mood following exposure to the rosemary aroma were related to concentrations of a compound (1,8-cineole) present in the blood. The compound is also found in the essential oil of rosemary and has previously been shown to act on the biochemical systems that underpin memory.

The results showed that participants in the rosemary-scented room performed better on the prospective memory tasks than the participants in the room with no scent. This was the case for remembering events and remembering to complete tasks at particular times.

Jemma McCready explained: "There was no link between the participants' mood and memory. This suggests performance is not influenced as a consequence of changes in alertness or arousal."

The results from the blood analysis found that significantly greater amounts of 1,8-cineole were present in the plasma of those in the rosemary scented room, suggesting that the influence of aroma was mediated pharmacologically.

Jemma McCready said: "These findings may have implications for treating individuals with memory impairments. It supports our previous research indicating that the aroma of rosemary essential oil can enhance cognitive functioning in healthy adults, here extending to the ability to remember events and to complete tasks in the future.

Remembering when and where to go and for what reasons underpins everything we do, and we all suffer minor failings that can be frustrating and sometimes dangerous. Further research is needed to investigate if this treatment is useful for older adults who have experienced memory decline."

Kidney breakthrough: complete lab-grown organ works in rats 

                      Video: Bioengineered kidney makes urine
For the first time, complete lab-grown kidneys have been successfully transplanted into rats, filtering and discharging urine as a normal kidney would.

The breakthrough paves the way for human-scale versions, which could potentially provide an inexhaustible supply of organs, eliminating the need for recipients to wait for a matching donor kidney Movie Camera.

Similar techniques have already been applied successfully in people with simpler tissue, such as windpipes. But the kidney is by far the most complex organ successfully recreated.

"If this technology can be scaled to human-size grafts, patients suffering from renal failure, who are currently waiting for donor kidneys, could theoretically receive an organ grown on demand," says Harald Ott, head of the team that developed the rat kidneys at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

"In an ideal world, such grafts could be produced from patient-derived cells, enabling us to overcome both donor organ shortages and the need for long-term immunosuppression drugs," says Ott. Currently in the US alone, 18,000 transplants are carried out each year, but 100,000 Americans remain on waiting lists.
Strip and coat

To make the rat kidneys, Ott and his colleagues took kidneys from healthy "donor" rats and used a chemical solution to wash away the native cells, leaving behind the organ's scaffold. Because this is made of collagen, a biologically inert material, there is no issue of the recipient's body rejecting it.

Next, the team set about regrowing the "flesh" of the organ by coating the inner surfaces of the scaffold with new cells. In the case of humans, these would likely come from the recipient, so all the flesh would be their own.

The kidney was too complex to use the approach applied to the windpipe – in which its scaffold was coated by simply immersing it in a bath of the recipient's cells.

Instead, the team placed the kidney scaffolds in glass chambers containing oxygen and nutrients, and attached tubes to the protruding ends of the renal artery, vein and ureter – through which urine normally exits the kidney.

They recoated the insides of the blood vessels by flowing human stem cells through the tubes attached to the artery and vein. Through the ureter, they fed kidney cells from newborn rats, re-coating the labyrinthine tubules and ducts that make up the kidney's urine filtration system.

It took many attempts to establish the precise pressures at which to feed the cells into the organ, as if it was growing in an embryonic rat. Remarkably, given the complexity of the kidney, the cells differentiated into exactly those required in the different compartments of the organ. "We found the correct cell types homed in to specific regions in the organ matrix," says Ott.

The kidneys, which took about a fortnight to fully recoat, worked both in the lab and when transplanted into rats. They filtered out and discharged urine, although they did not sieve it as well as a natural kidney would. Ott is confident that the function can be improved by refining the technique.
Humans and pigs

The team is now attempting the same procedure using human kidneys, and also pig kidneys, which could be used to make scaffolds if there were a scarcity of human donors. The team has already successfully repopulated pig kidneys with human cells, but Ott says further studies are vital to guarantee that the pig components of the organ do not cause rejection when transplanted into humans.

The fact that heart valves and other "inert" tissues from pigs are already successfully used in humans without rejection suggests that this will not be a big problem.

Other researchers working in the field hailed the team's success at recreating such a complex organ. "The researchers have taken a technique that most in the field thought would be impossible for complex organs such as the kidney, and have painstakingly developed a method to make it work," says Jamie Davies at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who was part of a team that last year made some headway in their attempts to grow kidneys from scratch in the lab.

 "By showing that recellularisation is feasible even for complicated organs, their work will stimulate similar approaches to the engineering of other body systems."

 

Now Just Thinking Of Password Will Open Your Accounts 

 

 


Yes the title of this article will come 100 percent true in near future. As a alternative of typing your password you just have to imagine about it. Yes in near future you will get rid off typing wretched passwords as a result  a new wireless headset device developed by researchers.


It become very difficult to remember passwords of every account unless you note it down. You have accounts in mails, social-networking’s sites, your website c panels  your bank accounts and many more depends on your usage of internet. Remembering passwords for all this sites can get maddening. Every different site has his own requirement for passwords and you have to fulfill them.
 
But now researchers at the University of California Berkeley School of Information developed the device that explores the possibility of brainwave-based computer authentication as a alternative for passwords. Just by measuring brain-waves with bio-sensor technology, researchers are able to replace passwords with "pass thoughts" for computer authentication.
 
A US $ 100 headset wirelessly connects to a computer via Bluetooth, and the device's sensor rests against the user's forehead, providing a electroencephalogram (EEG) signal from the brain. The NeuroSky Mindset looks just like any other Bluetooth set and is more user-friendly, researchers said.

Participants, in a series of tests, completed seven different mental tasks with the device, including imagining their finger moving up and down and choosing a personalized secret, the report said.

Simple actions like focusing on breathing or on a thought for ten seconds resulted in successful authentication.

 

DARPA Building robots with ‘real’ brains

The next frontier for the robotics industry is to build machines that think like humans. Scientists have pursued that elusive goal for decades, and they believe they are now just inches away from the finish line.

A Pentagon-funded team of researchers has constructed a tiny machine that would allow robots to act independently. Unlike traditional artificial intelligence systems that rely on conventional computer programming, this one “looks and ‘thinks’ like a human brain,” said James K. Gimzewski, professor of chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Gimsewski is a member of the team that has been working under sponsorship of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on a program called “physical intelligence.” This technology could be the secret to making robots that are truly autonomous, Gimzewski said during a conference call hosted by Technolink, a Los Angeles-based industry group.

This project does not use standard robot hardware with integrated circuitry, he said. The device that his team constructed is capable, without being programmed like a traditional robot, of performing actions similar to humans, Gimzewski said.

Participants in this project include Malibu-based HRL (formerly Hughes Research Laborary) and the University of California at Berkeley’s Freeman Laboratory for Nonlinear Neurodynamics. The latter is named after Walter J. Freeman, who has been working for 50 years on a mathematical model of the brain that is based on electroencephalography data. EEG is the recording of electrical activity in the brain.

What sets this new device apart from any others is that it has nano-scale interconnected wires that perform billions of connections like a human brain, and is capable of remembering information, Gimzewski said. Each connection is a synthetic synapse. A synapse is what allows a neuron to pass an electric or chemical signal to another cell. Because its structure is so complex, most artificial intelligence projects so far have been unable to replicate it.

A “physical intelligence” device would not require a human controller the way a robot does, said Gimzewski. The applications of this technology for the military would be far reaching, he said. An aircraft, for example, would be able to learn and explore the terrain and work its way through the environment without human intervention, he said. These machines would be able to process information in ways that would be unimaginable with current computers.

Artificial intelligence research over the past five decades has not been able to generate human-like reasoning or cognitive functions, said Gimzewski. DARPA’s program is the most ambitious he has seen to date. “It’s an off-the-wall approach,” he added.

Studies of the brain have shown that one of its key traits is self-organization. “That seems to be a prerequisite for autonomous behavior,” he said. “Rather than move information from memory to processor, like conventional computers, this device processes information in a totally new way.” This could represent a revolutionary breakthrough in robotic systems, said Gimzewski.

It is not clear, however, that the Pentagon is ready to adopt this technology for weapon systems. The Obama administration’s use of drones in “targeted killings” of terrorist suspects has provoked a backlash and prompted the Pentagon to issue new rules for the use of robotic weapons.

 “Autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems shall be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force,” said a Nov. 2012 Defense Department policy statement. Autonomous weapons, the document said, must “complete engagements in a timeframe consistent with commander and operator intentions and, if unable to do so, [must] terminate engagements or seek additional human operator input before continuing the engagement.”

 Map of the internet could make it stronger



The most comprehensive maps yet of the the internet's infrastructure could help shore it up against disasters and sabotage

In many ways the internet is like another country. It has its own communities, cultures and even currency. But its infrastructure – the fibre optic cables that span the globe, and the thousands of buildings housing servers and routers – passes through almost every nation.

Internet cartographers have tried for years to chart its extent in the physical world, in order to manage traffic and assess weaknesses. Such vulnerability was shown on 27 March, when three scuba divers were arrested for trying to cut an undersea cable off the coast of Egypt, where several critical cables come together in one of the internet's "choke points". And last year, superstorm Sandy's impact on internet connectivity in New York rippled all the way to Chile, Sweden and India.

Previous attempts to map the internet have been from within, using "sniffer" software to report the IP addresses of devices visited along a particular route, which, in theory, can then be translated into geographical locations. But this approach doesn't work, says Paul Barford at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "After 15 years nobody can show you a map of the internet," he says.

Such software is often inadvertently blocked by internet service providers (ISPs). Routers also try to find the shortest route between points, so sniffers end up mapping the internet's major highways, but few of the back roads. "It leaves a very large part of the internet effectively invisible," says Matthew Roughan at the University of Adelaide in South Australia.

Barford and Roughan head up two separate projects that are attempting to change that. Instead of relying on sniffers, they are scouring ISP databases to find published information about local networks, and piecing these together into a global map. Roughan's Internet Topology Zoo is a growing collection of maps of individual networks. Barford's Internet Atlas expands on this, adding crucial buildings and links between networks to flesh out the map. So far the Internet Atlas, perhaps the most comprehensive map of the physical internet, maps 10,000 such structures and 13,000 connections. Barford presented the work at the University of Cambridge on 28 March.

Both teams say that a global view of the internet's infrastructure will be invaluable for assessing key vulnerabilities. "You need to be able to see data from multiple networks to be able to judge this type of risk," says Roughan. For example, Honolulu stands out in the Internet Atlas as an important hub because of its mid-Pacific location, used to link countries across the ocean. Damage there would have knock-on effects throughout the Pacific Rim.

The maps can also show where planned backup cables and servers, ready to step in when the front line fails, aren't likely to work. Cables are typically laid beside electricity wires, railways or anywhere there is an existing right of way and easy access. In Australia, for example, both primary and backup cables running from Adelaide to Perth cross 1000 kilometres of desert beside the only road between the cities. "Anything that happens to one will happen to the other," says Roughan.

The maps show which portions of the internet are most at risk, says Barford. "They suggest where proactive disaster planning should be focused."

 Making your own phone is easier than you might think








 
Our reporter builds a handcrafted cellphone using widely available parts and online instructions

SUDDENLY, my phone rings. It chirps out a tinny version of what sounds like the Christmas carol Angels We Have Heard on High. I am giddy with amazement.

On the fifth floor of the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, David Mellis has just plugged in the mobile phone I spent all afternoon soldering together. That's right: I just built a cellphone. By hand.

Mellis is a graduate student in the High-Low Tech lab, a group of engineering evangelists trying to bring technology know-how to people who perhaps thought it was out of reach. In 2005, he helped found Arduino, a company that makes easy-to-program microprocessors and sells them on simple circuit boards. The idea is to help people make electronic products without needing a degree in computer science.

They're popular among hobbyists, hackers and the sort of people who end up working at the Media Lab but they're hardly mainstream. Mellis wondered if he could take the idea further.

"The tricky thing is getting it beyond the people who are already doing electronics stuff," he says. So he decided to see if he could design consumer electronics that you can make yourself and actually use. He started with radios, speakers and computer mice before making the leap to the ultimate consumer device: the cellphone.

Mellis shows me how to melt the soft metal solder onto the circuit board he designed and how to use the metal to attach resistors and capacitors about the size of a few grains of salt. I'm nervous at first – I've never soldered anything in my life. That makes me a good test subject, Mellis says.

"I'm interested in trying to open up the process to people who haven't really done this stuff before," he says.

Soldering felt a little like doing a colour-by-numbers painting – I was filling in spaces on the circuit board, but my understanding of how the parts fit together was pretty sparse. And a lot of components were still out of my control. I used Mellis's software, for instance, which gives the phone capabilities similar to that of a 10-year-old Nokia phone: it can make and receive calls and texts, store up to 255 phone numbers, and has a clock.

The whole thing costs about $100 in parts, excluding the SIM card. Nearly all of the components came from online electronics or hobbyist shops, he says, and the instructions and source code are available on his website. However, the GSM module, which connects the phone to the cellular network and translates audio signals to the speaker and microphone, came from a Chinese e-commerce website.

The back of the phone has spaces for working parts: the GSM module; a microcontroller, which brings signals from the GSM module to the buttons and screen; a matchstick-sized antenna; and a SIM card holder.

I bought the SIM card, with its month-to-month data-free plan, from the T Mobile store – connecting to the network is one thing I can't do myself.

When it was time to laser cut the case, I used Mellis's designs. That means my phone is identical to his prototype, which he has been using as his mobile phone for the past three months. The end result is a little coarse and chunky, but ends up about the size and thickness of my Android smartphone. I'm already thinking of ways to make it my own. I could knit it a case. I could paint it. I could design a new cover and have it laser cut myself.

I'm also thinking of ways I could use it. One of Mellis's labmates wants to make a phone with a single button for his grandma to call him. Another says that if she ever has kids, she'll give them a phone that only calls her.

I'm not ready to throw away my smartphone just yet. But I might start taking this phone on holiday, so I can escape Facebook and email but still make calls. And because I built it, I'm starting to grow quite attached to it.

Tuberculosis prevention may speed drug resistance





A study published today in Science Translational Medicine illustrates the perverse choice that public health experts sometimes must make between preventing a disease and preserving the effectiveness of a treatment. When it comes to tuberculosis, the report finds that prophylaxis comes with a higher cost than previously recognized.

The main ingredient in the drug cocktail to cure tuberculosis, isoniazid, can also protect people from contracting the disease in the first place. This second function is particularly important for those with fragile immune systems who frequently acquire and die from tuberculosis. In sub-Saharan Africa, tuberculosis  is the leading cause of death among HIV-infected individuals. To curb this fate, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends isoniazid as a preventative therapy for HIV-positive patients that don’t already show signs of active tuberculosis.

However, according to new study, led by Harriet Mills at the University of Bristol, in communities that implement isoniazid preventative therapy (IPT) the incidence of new isoniazid-resistant cases per year will double in the next 40 years.

The typical TB treatment that includes isoniazid lasts six months. But when isoniazid cannot be used, a patient has to endure a longer treatment, which includes injections and swallowing a dozen tablets daily for two years. These drugs have side effects such as seizures and permanent hearing loss.

Treatments for drug-resistant tuberculosis cost more too. “South Africa spends half of their tuberculosis budget on multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, even though just 3% of tuberculosis cases are” resistant to drugs, says Ramanan Laxminarayan, the director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy based in Washington DC.

“From a policy standpoint, this is an extremely important paper,” says Laxminarayan, who is not an author on the report. When deciding whether to follow the WHO’s recommendations, he says the many countries that have not yet implemented IPT should keep this caution in mind.

However, Karin Weyer, a coordinator in the WHO’s Stop TB Department, says, “We do not need to panic.” She says that the study is “interesting” but points out that it is based on mathematical modeling as opposed to observations on real people. “From the WHO’s perspective, we look to field evidence when we write policies.”

Resistance was known to arise when people with active tuberculosis took only isoniazid without the other chemicals present in first-line tuberculosis therapy. This study adds that the preventative treatments may also help resistant strains spread among people on IPT and those in their community. According to mathematical models, drug-resistant strains would rise relative to normal ones because they would have more human hosts to reside in when some community members are given IPT.

Within a decade, an increase in isoniazid-resistant cases might not be catastrophic if new first-line drug cocktails currently in the pipeline make it to the clinic. At least two regimens now in clinical trials do not include isoniazid. And despite fears of resistance, the authors of the study remain in favor of IPT as long as doctors monitor drug resistance.

But few countries burdened with tuberculosis have the funds to diagnose resistance efficiently. For that reason, Laxminarayan says that for the moment, IPT might make sense in South Africa, which has the necessary resources, but not in India. He warns, “You always want to be careful to not cause more damage than you prevent.”

 Brain imaging spots our abstract choices before we do







When it comes to making decisions, it seems that the conscious mind is the last to know.


We already had evidence that it is possible to detect brain activity associated with movement before someone is aware of making a decision to move. Work presented this week at the British Neuroscience Association (BNA) conference in London not only extends it to abstract decisions, but suggests that it might even be possible to pre-emptively reverse a decision before a person realises they've made it.


In 2011, Gabriel Kreiman of Harvard University measured the activity of individual neurons in 12 people with epilepsy, using electrodes already implanted into their brain to help identify the source of their seizures. The volunteers took part in the "Libet" experiment, in which they press a button whenever they like and remember the position of a second hand on a clock at the moment of decision.


Kreiman discovered that electrical activity in the supplementary motor area, involved in initiating movement, and in the anterior cingulate cortex, which controls attention and motivation, appeared up to 5 seconds before a volunteer was aware of deciding to press the button (Neuron, doi.org/btkcpz). This backed up earlier fMRI studies by John-Dylan Haynes of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany, that had traced the origins of decisions to the prefrontal cortex a whopping 10 seconds before awareness (Nature Neuroscience, doi.org/cs3rzv).


"It's always nice when two lines of research converge and to know that what we see with fMRI is actually there in the neurons," says Haynes.


STOP sign for the brain


Kreiman told the BNA conference that he is now working on predicting decisions in real time, and to see if it is possible to reverse a decision before it hits consciousness – by flashing up the word "stop" on a screen as soon as telltale activity shows up in the brain.

There are no firm results yet, but Kreiman suspects there may be a measureable "point of no return" in the brain. "So far all we have is people saying, 'that was weird, you read my mind'," he says.


If this kind of "mind-reading" is possible, a new study by Haynes, published this week and also presented at the meeting, suggests that it may not be restricted to decisions about moving a finger. Using fMRI, Haynes has found that the very brain areas involved in deciding to move are also active several seconds before a more abstract decision, like whether to add or subtract a series of numbers.


He suggests that the prefrontal and parietal cortex may be general decision-making circuitry, passing activity on to different parts of the brain depending on the task at hand (PNAS, doi.org/k6b). "Perhaps decisions arise from a similar set of areas, then either flow into motor systems, for pressing buttons, or the parietal cortex for doing calculations," he says.


Not hijacking the mind


Unless you happen to have electrodes inserted into your brain, there is no chance of decisions being hijacked by unscrupulous scientists, and Kreiman is keen to point out that he is not bent on world domination. "We're not trying to do mind control; we are trying to find out the mechanisms of volition," he says. "It might help people with Parkinson's disease, where people lose voluntary movement."


As for what it means for one of the longest-running debates in science – the question of whether we do or do not have free will – Haynes is pretty clear. "What we need now is 20 years of serious neuroscience, not more speculation about the handful of studies that have been done so far," he says.


Kreiman agrees, but says that these early results at least bring the question of free will out of the realms of magic and mystery. "There is no magic. There are neurons, and there are ions that flow through membranes, and that it what is orchestrating our decisions," he says. "We don't need to invoke freedom."

H7N9, the new bird flu discovered in China 

 

 

 


Health suit to work to clean the poultry market of Huhuai in Shanghai, China, where it has been detected for the first time the H7N9 virus. Eight people have died so far and another 20 were infected dall'H7N9, all are located in eastern China, reports ABC News.

 Nancy Cox, chief of the division for the influences of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention U.S., said that for the first time the CDC are working on a vaccine that uses the genetic code of the virus rather than the virus itself.

 

 It is not yet clear whether the new strain of influenza will change or not in a lethal pandemic, writes David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. "Nobody knows, and at this point no one knows, because the virus inflenzali are by nature unpredictable. They change all the time. The eight gene segments major tear and reconnect with segments of other influenza viruses." >>>

Higgs: 'stop calling it the god particle'

 

Prof Peter Higgs: Atheist scientist admits he doesn't believe in 'god particle'
The scientist behind the Higgs boson, Prof Peter Higgs, has urged people to stop calling it the God particle because he's an atheist.

The 83-year-old scientist, who lives in Edinburgh, insisted the reference was not funny and was actually misleading.

He came up with the theory of a subatomic particle, since dubbed the Higgs boson, which would explain the mystery of how things have mass.

But the professor wants people to stop referring to it as the "God particle" because he does not believe the particle holding the physical fabric of the universe together is the work of one almighty creator.

According to Prof Higgs, the nickname actually started as a joke, adding that it was "not a very good one".

 

The phrase was created for a popular science book from 1993 by Leon Lederman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and Dick Teresi, a science writer.
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Lederman wrote in the book "God particle": "This boson is so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive, that I have given it a nickname: the God particle.

"Why God particle? The publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing."

But Prof Higgs, explained his distaste for the term in a BBC Scotland interview. He said: "First of all, I'm an atheist.

"The second thing is I know that name was a kind of joke and not a very good one. I think he shouldn't have done that as it's so misleading."

Prof Higgs has become a global celebrity over the past year since the discovery of an elementary particle consistent with the Higgs boson, which he predicted in 1964. Last year he was recognised in the New Year Honours.

In the 1960s, Prof Higgs and other physicists proposed a mechanism to explain why the most basic building blocks of the Universe have mass.

The mechanism predicts the existence of a Higgs particle, the discovery of which was claimed last year at the Large Hadron Collider.

According to one popular version of the story, Prof Higgs came up with the concept during a walk in the Cairngorms.

Edited by Andrew Hough

Truth Behind Gospel of Judas Revealed in Ancient Inks





A long-lost gospel that casts Judas as a co-conspirator of Jesus, rather than a betrayer, was ruled most likely authentic in 2006. Now, scientists reveal they couldn't have made the call without a series of far more mundane documents, including Ancient Egyptian marriage licenses and property contracts.

The Gospel of Judas is a fragmented Coptic (Egyptian)-language text that portrays Judas in a far more sympathetic light than did the gospels that made it into the Bible. In this version of the story, Judas turns Jesus over to the authorities for execution upon Jesus' request, as part of a plan to release his spirit from his body. In the accepted biblical version of the tale, Judas betrays Jesus for 30 pieces of silver.

As part of a 2006 National Geographic Society (the Society) investigation of the document, microscopist Joseph Barabe of McCrone Associates in Illinois and a team of researchers analyzed the ink on the tattered gospel to find out if it was real or forged. Some of the chemicals in the ink raised red flags — until Barabe and his colleagues found, at the Louvre Museum, a study of Egyptian documents from the third century A.D., the same time period of the Gospal of Judas.

"What the French study told us is that ink technology was undergoing a transition," Barabe told LiveScience. The Gospel of Judas' odd ink suddenly fit into place. [Religious Mysteries: 8 Alleged Relics of Jesus]

CSI: Ancient Egypt

Barabe and his colleagues specialize in thorough investigations of old — or supposedly old — documents and artwork. The chemical composition of inks used can reveal the difference between something authentically ancient and a forgery. In 2009, Barabe helped expose a gospel called the "Archaic Mark," which some claimed was a 14th-century manuscript, as a modern forgery. He's also worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to detect forged paintings.

A call from National Geographic, however, was a "big deal," Barabe said. "It was both thrilling and an honor," he added.

The Society wanted to find out if the Gospel of Judas, discovered in the 1970s, really dated back to early days of Christianity or whether it was, like Archaic Mark, a fake. Barabe brought together a team of scientists with a variety of specialties, and they ran the Gospel through an intensive analysis of microscopy and spectroscopy.


 

At first, their findings offered little hope that the Gospel of Judas was real. The document was written in two inks — black and brown — mixed together. The black was an ink called "lamp black," which was consistent with the inks used in Egyptian writings from ancient times and into the third century, Barabe said.

But the brown ink was more mysterious. It was an iron-rich ink called iron gall, but it lacked the sulfur usually found in inks of this sort. The pressure was on to explain the difference.

"One thing that made this a little bit more dramatic than we would have liked is, we did the sampling in the third week of January of 2006, and the press conference was already scheduled for the third week in April of that same year," Barabe said. "So we had three months to turn this critter around with a conclusion, and it really put an enormous amount of pressure on us, because we were faced with what was essentially a three-month rush project."

Authenticating the gospel

Some facets of the document did suggest authenticity. The most promising of these characteristics, Barabe said, was that the ink wasn't piled up in the warped papyrus, suggesting the document was written before the warping happened. Had someone tried to write on a pre-warped papyrus, the ink would have gathered in crevices and dips —  a sure sign someone had intentionally tried to make new papyrus look old. Instead, the Gospel seems to have been written on flat papyrus and aged naturally. National Geographic also commissioned other analyses of the Gospel, including radiocarbon dating, script analysis and linguistic style.

Barabe hit the books, looking for other studies on early Egyptian inks. The study of Egyptian marriage certificates and land documents from the Louvre proved to be the clincher.

That study found that contracts in Egypt in the mid-third century were written in lamp black ink, in the traditional Egyptian style. But they were officially registered in the traditional Greek style, using brown iron gall ink.

The Louvre study findings suggested to the teamthat the presence of both inks was consistent with an early date for the Gospel of Judas, Barabe said.

What's more, the Louvre study found that the metal-based inks from this time period contained little sulfur, just like the ink on the Gospel of Judas.

The discovery gave the researchers the confidence to declare the document consistent with a date of approximately A.D. 280. (Barabe and his colleagues caution that this finding doesn't prove beyond doubt that the document is authentic, but rather that there are no red flags proving it's a forgery.)

"There was definitely a point where, all of the sudden, I just kind of relaxed and said, 'This is probably just fine,'" Barabe said. 

Barabe presented the behind-the-scenes story of the Gospel of Judas investigation today (April 8) at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans. After the National Geographic investigation of the Gospel of Judas, the document was returned to the Coptic Museum in Cairo.

Internal compass points cells towards injury

CELLS can't see or hear, but some of them have a sense we lack: they can detect the electric fields generated by a wound. Identifying how they do this could help efforts to boost wound healing.

The flow of ions across a cell membrane creates tiny electric fields. Tissue damage changes that field, and cells involved in tissue repair seem to sense this change.

To work out what might cause these cells to respond to electric fields, Min Zhao and Alex Mogilner at Stanford University in California and their team looked at fish skin cells, which are often used to study cell motion. When placed in an electric field to mimic the field formed around a wound, whole cells moved towards the positive electrode, as if moving towards an injury. Curiously, though, smaller fragments of cellular material in the fish skin cell sample headed in the opposite direction.

The cells and fragments have one thing in common – both possess bundles of proteins that help them move. The team realised that these proteins act as tiny electromagnetic compasses: they propel cells towards a wound, but send cell fragments away (Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.02.026).

Inducing electric currents at sites of injury could improve wound healing therapies, says Zhao.

Near-Death Experiences More Vivid Than Real Life

1. 

Long after a near-death experience, people recall the incident more vividly and emotionally than real and false memories, new research suggests.

"It's really something that stays in the mind of people as a clear trace, and it's even more clear than a real memory," said Vanessa Charland-Verville, a neuropsychologist in the Coma Science Group at the University of Liege in Belgium. She, along with colleagues, detailed the study online March 27 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Mysterious phenomenon

Roughly 5 percent of the general population and 10 percent of cardiac-arrest victims report near-death experiences, yet no one really knows what they are, Charland-Verville told

Across cultures and religions, people describe similar themes: being out of body; passing through a tunnel, river or door toward warm, glowing light; seeing dead loved ones greet them; and being called back to their bodies or told it's not time to go yet.

Some think near-death experiences show the spirit and body can be separated. Others say oxygen deprivation or a cascade of chemicals in the failing brain are to blame. Some believe near-death experiences reveal the existence of God or heaven.

But what makes finding an explanation even more complicated is that healthy people in meditative trances and those taking hallucinogens, such as ketamine, describe very similar experiences, Charland-Verville told .  [Trippy Tales: The History of 8 Hallucinogens]

Life-changing events

Because it's impossible to monitor these events in real time, Charland-Verville and her colleagues spoke with those who had gone through these trancelike states, sometimes years earlier.

"People are transformed forever by the experience," she said. "People say they're more empathic, they changed jobs, they're giving, they want to help the planet."

The team gave memory questionnaires to eight coma survivors who had near-death experiences, six who had coma memories but no memory of near-death experiences, seven who had no memories of their coma, and 18 people who had not had any of these experiences.

The questions assessed people's memories of imagined events as well as memories of near-death events, comas and emotional events from real life.

Even years later, the near-death experiences seemed hyperreal. In fact, they were remembered more clearly and emotionally than all other types of memories.

Charland-Verville speculates that these experiences have shaped religious symbols across cultures since the dawn of time. Now, the researchers want to study the brain activity of these individuals.

"If it changed people's lives, there must be something different in their brain functioning," she said.

Unanswered questions

The findings, though fascinating, can't answer whether the mind and body can be separated, said Christian Agrillo, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Padova in Italy who was not involved in the study.

"But it seems to suggest that what people recall in that moment is particularly genuine," Agrillo told. "It's not a false memory that occurs after the event."

In addition, the study was small and asked people after the fact, making it tricky to draw firm conclusions, Zalika Klemenc-Ketiš, a physician at the University of Maribor in Slovenia, wrote in an email.

In addition, "the study does not answer the question of whether [near-death experiences] really happened to patients or are only hallucinations, (which can be also perceived as real)," Zalika Klemenc-Ketiš wrote.

Spiders as big as your face discovered in Sri Lanka

Huge: The female spider (Picture: Ranil Nanayakkara/British Tarantula Society)

Scared of spiders? Then read on if you dare… Metro takes no responsibility for any bad dreams you may have tonight.
A new species of venomous tarantula has been discovered – and it’s as big as your face.
It was tracked down in war-ravaged northern Sri Lanka after villagers took a spider to experts after they had killed it in 2009.

The male spider (Picture: Ranil Nanayakkara/British Tarantula Society)

The scientists suspected the dead arachnid was a previously unknown type and confirmed the theory after setting off to find its living relatives.
‘Days of extensive searching in every tree hole and bark peel were rewarded with a female and, to our satisfaction, several juveniles too,’ said researcher Ranil Nanayakkara.
The tarantulas – part of the tiger spider genus – have distinctive markings including daffodil-yellow colouring on their legs and a pink band around their stomachs.

The distinctive markings on the underside of the female male tarantula spider (Picture: Ranil Nanayakkara/British Tarantula Society)

They were found living in the old doctor’s quarters of a hospital in Mankulam, by the researchers from Sri Lanka’s Biodiversity Education and Research organisation.
They have been named Poecilotheria rajaei in honour of police inspector Michael Rajakumar Purajah, who led the research team through countryside still recovering from Sri Lanka’s civil war.