In a new study, scientists from the U.S., Mexico and China made the most comprehensive before-and-after topographic picture of an earthquake zone, the April 4, 2010 7.2-magnitude El Mayor–Cucapah earthquake in Mexico. That quake tore a 74-mile rupture through multiple faults in northern Baja California. By comparing existing LIDAR maps of the area with new flyovers, the researchers could see the where the Earth moved, and by how much. They even spotted new faults that had not been documented before.

High-resolution light detection and ranging, LIDAR, enables super-precise topographical measurements. In this case, it just so happened that the Mexican government mapped the El Mayor region with LIDAR back in 2006, so there was a recent topographical model to work from. After the 2010 quake, researchers from Arizona State University, who knew about that original map, applied for funds to go map the area again.

Ground teams surveyed the area first, narrowing it down, and then the team made a 140-square-mile LIDAR scan over a three-day period, according to a news release from the University of California-Davis, where some of the other researchers were based. Some of the effects were obvious, including a shocking five-foot-high scarp that sheared away from a hill. But others were far more subtle, and only visible with this type of high-resolution altimetry. The scans revealed new fault lines and ground warping, including a very subtle but important wrinkle in an agricultural plain, as seen in the picture below. The scans helped explain how several small faults came together on that day to form the powerful earthquake.

Geophysicists have been using LIDAR for about a decade, but there are only a couple projects to make pre-earthquake LIDAR maps. Back in 2009, NASA started flying a modified Gulfstream III with a synthetic aperture radar system to map faults in southern California. Detailed topographical maps from these scans could help pinpoint stress along fault lines — and help seismologists determine where the worst damage could occur, before and after the fact.

The Mexican earthquake research was published today in the journal Science.

This is a major breakthrough because it will allow researchers to study brain cells affected by Parkinson’s in real time. Animals that do not have this gene cannot readily develop Parkinson’s-like symptoms, so researchers must use human neurons, but it’s generally difficult if not impossible to get live human brain cells to study.

Instead, Jian Feng and colleagues at the State University of New York-Buffalo took skin cells from four patients, including two healthy patients and two patients carrying the Parkin mutation. They induced the skin cells to become pluripotent stem cells, and then differentiated them into neurons — specifically, mid-brain neurons that create dopamine, called dopaminergic neurons. The loss of these neurons, which are the brain’s primary source of dopamine, causes Parkinson’s symptoms like loss of motor control.

The parkin gene indirectly harms those neurons. Here’s how it works: parkin regulates the production of an enzyme, monamine oxidase, which in turn keeps dopamine at bay. Parkin mutations do not control this MAO, and the MAO essentially runs amok, causing harm to the dopamine-producing neurons.

The Parkin gene mutation was present in the donors’ DNA, so the lab-created brain cells had the same traits that the patients’ real brain cells would have. This allowed the researchers to watch the gene mutation at work.

The neurons showed all the signs of MAO-related stress and a drop in dopamine uptake. But here’s the interesting part — when the researchers injected the normal version of Parkin, they could reverse the defects.

So this research is useful for two reasons — the cells themselves could be used to better study Parkinson’s disease itself, and they could also help screen new drugs or gene therapies that could be used to treat Parkinson’s disease, the researchers say.

The paper was published Tuesday in Nature Communications.

[via BBC]

"Gravity has always been a major part of my life."

PART I: ORIGINS
(1954-1980) A sheep farmer builds an engine to travel upriver–and starts a high-speed revolution.

We’re way at the end of the bloody world. Back then, if you wanted to do something, you had to do it yourself.TREVOR GAMBLE (creator, “thrill” jet boating): Has anyone told you about the number-eight-wire mentality?
HENRY VAN ASCH (co-inventor, bungee): The Europeans who came here 200 years ago were hearty, efficient people. They figured out how to live off the land.
GEORGE DAVISON (engineer, Hamilton Jet): We’re way at the end of the bloody world. Back then, if you wanted to do something, you had to do it yourself.
ANDREW AKERS (inventor, Zorbing): The sheep farmers always had number-eight fencing wire lying around. You could fix anything with that. It was the duct tape of the olden days.
MATT BECKETT (manager, Blokart): It’s the number-eight-wire mentality.
PETER LYNN (inventor, kite buggy): There are two ends to the innovation spectrum. At one end are developments like the Manhattan Project, which require huge state-supported programs and have specific goals. At the other end is the solitary inventor. New Zealand may well have punched above its weight in this category.
STEVE WEIDMANN (inventor, Sky-Jump): Also, you’ve got the rugged landscape here—lots of mountains and rivers.

LYNN: Innovation mirrors lifestyle. We’re closer to the outdoors here.
GAMBLE: We’ve got a bunch of braided rivers that you can’t get up with a regular boat. You can’t have anything sticking beneath the water, like a propeller.
PAUL BECKETT (inventor, Blokart): The guy who created the jet boat was a sheep farmer down south.
DAVISON: He was trying to figure out a way to get upriver to go fishing.
GAMBLE: Really, all he did was create a water pump. It sucked the water up through the boat and shot it out through the transom at the back end. It’s a simple principle: Velocity plus weight equals thrust. This was 1954.
AVISON: Bill was like me, a country boy off the farm. When he was young, he fiddled with machines and boats, bits and pieces around the farm. Someone showed him a photo of the Hanley hydro jet, a centrifugal pump they used on a few fire boats in the U.S. Bill built a copy. It didn’t go well. It had an elbow nozzle just beyond the intake. It spoiled the thrust and had a hell of a lot of drag. So they changed it. They stuck the nozzle straight out the back, so now it sucked up water through the intake and shot it out through the air.
TONY KEAN (author, The Ballad of Bill Hamilton): Lo and behold, the speed doubled! And now there was nothing sticking out the bottom. They did an expedition up the Colorado through the Grand Canyon. The jet boat really took off from there.
DAVISON: By 1960, there were a lot of jet boats around here. People used them for climbing through shallow rapids.
GAMBLE: There was this business giving sightseeing tours on the Shotover River. I paid $11,110 for it. Mind you, I had never driven a boat of any kind in my life. This was 1970. That first year, I ran the river the way it had always been run. After so many trips, I started going faster, tried to get as close as I could to the rocks. But a couple of people complained, so I dialed it back. The third year, this older woman—she had to have been 73, 74—said in the middle of the trip, “This is so disappointing! I went down last year, and it was much more thrilling.” After that, I just started driving straight at the rocks. I did a 180, a 360. I credit that woman with completely turning us around.

PART II: NEW WAYS TO FALL DOWN
The Age of Innovation (1980-1993) Inventors harness wind and water and realize they can get away with almost anything; it's nearly impossible to sue.

VAN ASCH: The original idea for bungee came from a Vanuatu ritual celebrating fertility and the yam harvest—people jumped off platforms with jungle vines tied to their legs. We’d also seen what the Dangerous Sports Club at Oxford University had done with jumps from the Golden Gate Bridge. I grew up on a farm and was always riding bikes downhill. I met [bungee co-creator] A.J. Hackett ski racing, and in 1986 he jumped from the Greenhithe Bridge in Auckland. The next week I did my own jump off another bridge. Gravity has always been a major part of my life.
JON IMHOOF (inventor, river surfing): In 1988 I went to the bungee-jumping bridge and saw “Bungee Jumping, $60” spray-painted on the side of a trailer. A woman was sitting at a card table with a big pile of money on it. They took cash only. There was no phone. They didn’t take bookings. At the end of the day, they’d just divide up all the money. It made an impression.
VAN ASCH: We started jumping all over. A.J. met this beautiful French model and wanted to impress her. That’s why he did the Eiffel Tower jump. Some of our activities weren’t, strictly speaking, legal.You throw them in a river, they’re not efficient at kicking, their heart rate goes way up, you throw a teaspoon of water down their throat, and they think they’re going to die.
GED HAY (inventor, riverboarding): I came to Queenstown in the early ’80s, when adventure tourism was in its infancy. I got into whitewater rafting. That was a fairly new thing. I went down in 1985, on my day off—just jumped in with a guide jacket and a body board.
IMHOOF: The French had invented what they called “hydro-speed.” The thing they used looked like the nose of a kayak cut off. I thought, if they could ride those down a river, I could do it with a board.
HAY: I had no idea what the French were doing. It was just this great idea I had: Get in there and get a wave.
IMHOOF: I came to Queenstown on a snowboarding trip. I’d been living in Hawaii, surfing.
HAY: This guy from Hawaii came by and started chatting with us. He said, “I’d like to go down the river on my body board.” We said, “We do that all the time.”
IMHOOF: The rafting guides suggested the Kawarau River. I found that body boards work well. I called it river surfing, since we could surf waves.
HAY: It’s called riverboarding. I did it well before he did.
IMHOOF: The whole “who was first” argument? Some guy in Africa 100,000 years ago was probably struggling for his life in a flood and he grabbed a tree branch, and he floated down the river and he survived, and maybe he thought, “Wow, that was fun.” So, I mean, who was first? You had that guy in Africa, whoever he was, 100,000 years ago.
HAY: I’ve been involved with rafting, bungee, Jet Ski, you name it, and without a doubt, riverboarding scares people the most. You throw them in a river, they’re not efficient at kicking, their heart rate goes way up, you throw a teaspoon of water down their throat, and they think they’re going to die.

NEIL HARRAP (inventor, Fly by Wire): When you visit New Zealand, you lose the right to sue. It gets rid of a lot of lawyers, I can tell you that.
AKERS: It’s because of the ACC, the Accident Compensation Commission. If you’re injured at work or even while playing, you don’t have to pay anything for treatment. An operator can do anything he likes, but if he's negligent, he will be prosecuted. So it’s more conducive to trying risky things. Having said that, people have done some really crazy and dangerous stuff.
LYNN: I design very large kites. The world’s six largest kites have been designed in my shop. You would think that would be a pretty safe activity, right, flying kites? There was a time I trashed a restaurant in Sardinia. We were flying a It was 6,800 square feet. We were on a narrow beach, with a strip of restaurants. The kite was hovering over this one restaurant, and in one swoop it removed all the neon signs and satellite dishes from the roof, and the tail of the kite lifted a giant umbrella from in front of the restaurant. This umbrella was weighted with a huge chunk of concrete and the thing was dangling above the restaurant, like this Sword of Damocles. They were trying to get everyone out and people were still trying to finish their wine. But they got everyone. Then the concrete fell and destroyed the entire roof.

IMHOOF: These things were initiated by people who probably would have done it regardless of making money. For me on the river, I was just having fun. We'd take out friends, then friends of friends. They’d buy us beers.
LYNN: Since 1987, I’ve built something like 200 different kite-powered things—mainly boats but also kite buggies. Most of them have been failures. My wife says I have persistence beyond reason.

PART III: LOOKING FOR MORE
(1994-2011) Inventors employ increasingly complex devices–fan shafts, plastic orbs and aircraft engines–to create new forms of fun. The specter of safety standards emerges.

WEIDMANN: We offer the experience of standing on a building in the middle of a city and jumping off. People are absolutely terrified. I mean, tears and everything.
VAN ASCH: Yes, I have tried it. The step-off is similar to bungee.
WEIDMANN: Bungee jumping wasn’t happening in cities—building owners are reluctant to allow it. On the a fan is tied to a shaft that’s wrapped with wire rope. The fan slows down the unspooling rope. You jump, reach a speed of 50 mph—it’s a 630-foot jump—and fall fast all the way until you’ve gone 560 feet. Just when you think you’re going to die, the wire shifts to a shaft that turns the fan faster, and your speed decreases.
VAN ASCH: You don’t have the acceleration and subsequent bounce. The physical and emotional sequence is different.Rolling down a hill inside a padded ball? I’ve always wondered why someone would want to do that.
WEIDMANN: Who made the first jump from the tower? You’re talking to him. We wanted to keep it secret, so we did the jump at 2 a.m. It was not a nice night—drizzly, and there were clouds pouring into the jump zone. I took a leap. I was told that I needed to be quiet because there are all these accommodation buildings nearby, apartments and condominiums. With the clouds, I couldn’t see the ground. I just yahooed all the way down.
AKERS: We were throwing around ideas of crazy things to try. One was walking on water. We thought about inflatable shoes, then we thought about a big plastic ball with a single skin. Then we wondered if a double skin wouldn’t be better. It took three or four months to develop. We took it to the beach to see what we could do with it. But once the wind picks up, it’s like a big sail with a person in it. You’d start getting blown out to sea and there was nothing you could do. But people noticed. It’s clear and plastic and beautiful. So we began to think about how we could make money off it. As a total fluke, we thought about rolling it down a hill. My parents had a farm, so we took it there. It was scary, standing on top of that hill, wondering what would happen.
HARRAP: Rolling down a hill inside a padded ball? I’ve always wondered why someone would want to do that.
AKERS: The whole thing, rotates only once every 33 feet, so there’s not a problem with throwing up. We started developing a harness system. With that, there’s no problem at all; you’re completely pinned in. We also put water inside it. The water acts as a lubricant—it keeps you on the bottom the whole time, and the ball moves around you. It’s like going down a huge waterslide.
WEIDMANN: There was also a thing called Fly by Wire and an incident where some gear went wrong.
HARRAP: I thought, imagine if you had a swing, but instead of just going backwards and forwards, you could move in a figure-8 pattern. Think of it as a thread that you simply thumbtack to the ceiling. The thread hangs straight down, and then you tie a matchstick to the thread. That’s it, basically. But the matchstick has a motor on it. A “powered steerable swinging device,” that’s the patent name.
AKERS: I’m not sure if it’s even operating anymore. It sounds fantastic, but it’s the kind of idea where, if something goes wrong, it goes really wrong.

HARRAP: I experimented in my garage, hanging things from the ceiling. Then I hung ropes from trees. I tried to figure out the basic physics of it: I needed a plane thing, with a tail and a propeller, maybe. I brought in an aeronautical engineer. He said, “Don’t put the propeller in the front, put it in the back! If the prop blows up, it wouldn’t be good.” When you’re traveling 60 mph, when you get really close to the ground, when you really think you might hit it—that’s a real rush. The top of the arc is 300 feet off the ground. We winch them back, you release the plane, and then you’re falling. And not only are you falling, you’re being driven down by the engine. If a person flies it just once, the only thing they’re interested in doing is going fast. Of course, we encourage that.
AKERS: A woman got injured in a crash
WEIDMANN: She nearly lost her arm.
HARRAP: I wasn’t able to defend myself against the charges.
WEIDMANN: It’s not the concepts that are dangerous, it’s the operators. I won’t name names, but you’ve had instances where ankle harnesses didn’t work on a bungee jump.
HARRAP: They tried to push helmets on me—inspectors, safety people. What did we need helmets for? The odds of a bird strike are zero. Birds are terrified of the thing.
HAY: The focus on safety today is stifling
IMHOOF: A lot of time the law is an ass.
AKERS: What’s next? A few people have mentioned the idea of a commercial catapult operation where people are flung across an area into a giant net, or water.
HARRAP: Korea, Turkey, these are the places that really want Fly by Wire now. The people in Korea want to take it clear across Asia.
HAY: You could put people in a Zorb and throw them in a river. That would be pretty cool. People would do it. I’ve done it with friends. I’ve also toyed with the idea of dropping people in the middle of nowhere and letting them find their way out.
LYNN: I’ve broken many bones. I broke my nose twice in one day. I have an excess of determination and an insufficiency of skill. That’s the key.
HAY: Are there some activities that are too risky? No. I say go for it. Bungee cords fail. Carabiners fail. That’s how it goes. Then the gear gets better because of it. That’s how the planet evolved, didn’t it?

Scientists from the University of Western Australia administered the study on the seagrass, which grows in massive clumps and is continuously growing new branches and expanding. Also known as Neptune Grass or Mediterranean tapeweed, the seagrass reproduces asexually by cloning, and spreads far and wide so that it can survive even if one particular area becomes depleted of natural resources.

This particular patch consists of some 40 undersea meadows stretching from Spain to Cyprus--over 2,000 miles long. Neptune Grass has also spread to the Caribbean, but it's still most common in the Mediterranean, even though rising sea temperatures and development may put the species's future in jeopardy.

[via The Telegraph]

The winners of the Nikon Small World microvideography contest

Behold award-winning videos of the microscopic world, from the vasculature of a chicken egg to a water flea playing with algae. Like the still version of the competition, the movies were judged on whether they were visually outstanding as well as their ability to depict the intersection of science and art, according to Nikon. Some of the videos are scientific breakthroughs in their own right — we told you about one of the honorable mentions, a live-action video of a monkey cell, when it was first published last spring.

The videos feature Small World perennial favorites like zebrafish brains, fruit fly larvae and Arabidopsis thaliana plants, but seeing these things in motion lends them a whole different perspective. You can actually see the movement of tiny cell factories inside nerve cells in a fish brain, and watch the bulbous growth of a new root emerging from a plant’s primary root. Here is a collection of honorable mentions and the top three winners.

First Place
This video was the first time Oxford-based pathologist Anna Franz used this technique for injecting ink into a chick embryo. She cut a window into an egg to expose the 72-hour-old embryo and injected ink into its artery under a 3-D microscope to visualize the vascular system. “This movie not only demonstrates the power of the heart and the complexity of vasculature of the chick embryo, but also reflects the beauty of nature’s design,” Franz said.
Technique: Reflected light microscopy
Magnification: 10x

Second Place
Dr. Dominic Paquet of the German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases captured this time-lapse movie of mitochondria transport in the nerve cells of transgenic zebrafish. The cell membranes are green and the mitochondria are labeled in blue.
Technique: Widefield fluorescence
Magnification: 40x objective

Third Place
Dr. Ralf Wagner, a chemist in Germany, captured this video of a Daphnia, or water flea, playing with a volvox, a type of green algae. He found the specimen in his garden pond, according to Nikon. It doesn’t really reflect deep science so much as an extraordinary view of nature — the daphnia is interacting with its environment, not something you can see up close very often. Wagner said he hopes by reminding viewers how much fun science can be, he might inspire others to take up its study.
Technique: Darkfield
Magnification: 50x

Click on to see the Honorable Mentions

Honorable Mentions
Another 11 videos were awarded honorable mentions, from a bustling ant colony to plant root growth in action.

Ants Marching
Mexican artist Raul Gonzalez captured this time lapse video of individuals in his ant colony at feeding time.
Technique: Time Lapse, Reflected Illumination, Stereomicroscopy
Magnification: 1x

The Maw
James Nicholson of the Coral Collaborative Research Facility in Charleston, S.C., recorded this stony coral. Visible inside the mouth are the mesenteries, structures involved in digestion and reproduction; the unique color pattern about the oral area is the result of tissue pigmentation, a response to an unidentified stressor. Maybe the stress of being under the microscope.
Technique: Epifluorescence with 430 nanometer excitation showing natural fluorescence in live specimen
Magnification: 5x

Hydra viridis
By Charles Krebs, Charles Krebs Photography, Issaquah, Wa.
Technique: Darkfield and DIC
Magnification: From 40X to 600X

Drosophila Blood Circulation
By Dr. Robert Markus, Biological Research Center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Szeged, Hungary
This video captures circulating blood cells in a fruit fly larva (Drosophila melanogaster.
Technique: Fluorescence
Magnification: 50x

Arabidopsis Root Growth
By Daniel von Wangenheim, Goethe Universität Frankfurt
Video of the well-studied plant model Arabidopsis thaliana shows a lateral root growing out of the primary root.
Technique: light sheet-based fluorescence microscopy
Magnification: 20x/0.5 W N-ACHROPLAN

The Rotifer and the Worm
Craig Smith, a photographer in Fresno, Calif., captured two videos that received honorable mentions. The first shows a microscopic aquatic rotifer, with its corona extending and retracting during feeding. The second shows asexual budding in a worm, Aeolosoma Hemprichi, with the new worm attached to the posterior end of the parent.
Technique (both videos): Darkfield
Magnification: 400x

Monkey Cells in Real Time
We told you about this video, a major breakthrough in cellular imaging, when it was first published last spring. Researchers led by Liang Gao at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute used a new technique to capture this image of an African green monkey kidney cell. The video shows the cell membrane ruffling and internal vacuoles inside the living cell.
Technique: Two photon Bessel beam plane illumination microscopy
Magnification: 56x

Desmid dividing
By Dr. Jeremy Pickett-Heaps of the University of Melbourne.
Technique: Time lapse video microscopy
Magnification: Non-dividing cells measure about 170 microns across, Pickett-Heaps notes.

How Do Ellipsoid Eggs Form?
Saori Haigo of the University of California - San Francisco wanted to investigate how ellipsoid eggs, like the types laid by birds and some insects, form during development. Haigo dissected developing eggs out of the ovaries of fruit flies and watched how they behaved outside the body. It turns out that developing eggs spin around the long axis. The green fluorescence highlights the surface of the cells, and the red marks the cell nuclei.
Technique: Live cell imaging; a 3-hour time lapse at five minute intervals
Magnification: 400X

Budded Yeast Under Attack
This video captures amoebas ingesting brewer’s yeast. They are expressing a red fluorescent protein to label actin filaments, and a green protein to label what’s called the phagocytic cup — the method by which the amoeba ingests the yeast cell. We will let author Margaret Clarke of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation explain further: A phagocytic cup often pauses at or returns to the concave curvature at the neck of a budded yeast, and actin [a protein] accumulates there in an attempt to seal the cup. An unsuccessful attempt may end in retraction of the cup and release of the particle, or the cell may eventually resume extension of the cup and engulf the entire particle. Those two outcomes are shown here.
Technique: Laser scanning confocal microscopy. A time series was collected in a single focal plane, with images acquired at 4-second intervals.
Magnification: 33 microns x 26 microns

Aaronson works with quantum computing theory all day; sounds like he's sick of the constant chatter that quantum computing is not scalable, that the theory is purely theoretical. (Check out our interview with Seth Lloyd for a great beginner's guide to quantum computing.) There are as many skeptics as believers out there, so Aaronson is asking them to step up and prove that quantum computers will never be able to do useful work.

"Useful work" is a key phrase in the contest; so-called "toy" quantum computers, using only a few electrons, are already proven to exist, so the challenge is more about larger, scalable quantum computers. Here's Aaronson addressing the problem of disproving a theory, and responding to the accusation that his challenge is the equivalent of proving Bigfoot doesn't exist:

Whether Bigfoot exists is a question about the contingent history of evolution on Earth. By contrast, whether scalable quantum computing is possible is a question about the laws of physics. It’s perfectly conceivable that future developments in physics would conflict with scalable quantum computing, in the same way that relativity conflicts with faster-than-light communication, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics conflicts with perpetuum mobiles. It’s for such a development in physics that I’m offering this prize.

It's pretty unlikely it'll ever happen; like Aaronson notes, if anybody actually managed to prove this, the world would hear about it and his $100,000 would end up supplementing some Nobel money or something. Still though, we like the gumption of offering cash money to your harshest critics.

[Scott Aaronson via SlashDot]

“Yesterday, our scientists stopped drilling at the depth of 3,768 meters and reached the surface of the sub-glacial lake,” the source reportedly said in a story posted Monday, Feb. 6.

If true, this is a feat several decades in the making. Russian scientists have been attempting to drill into Antarctic ice since the 1970s, and they discovered Lake Vostok in 1996. In 1998, the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, which protects the frozen continent, forced them to stop drilling until environmental concerns could be addressed. They started up again last winter (the austral summer) but had to cut and run just 30 meters from the lake source, as the Antarctic winter bore down.

Last week we thought that might happen again — if anyone could even hail the scientists — because conditions are getting worse, but no one heard from the team in several days. Then on Monday, the Russian news agency announced the team's success.

Lake Vostok has been buried for 14 million years and contains high oxygen and nitrogen levels, which could cause the lake water to fizz like a shaken soda can when breached. But scientists want to reach it because it could hold weird forms of life that survive in deep cold and with no sun, which could have implications for alien life on Europa, Enceladus or other icy celestial bodies.

[via Slashdot]

The goal was to monitor how both creatures’ brains responded to the same stimulus, tracking correlated activity even if it was centered in different brain areas. The idea is that seeing hands and faces should spark similar activity patterns in both species, even if the neurons fire in anatomically different locations.

Dante Mantini and colleagues devised a method called interspecies activity correlation to contrast brain activity in four rhesus macaques and 24 human volunteers. First they compared brain activity in areas that are known to match up pretty well between the species, and then tried it in areas that are still unknown. Then they set out to monitor activity in the visual cortex.

All the study participants watched 30 minutes of the Clint Eastwood spaghetti western, listening to the dialogue through headphones. The humans watched it once and the monkeys saw it six times, during which the participants’ eye movements were scanned and their neural activity monitored via functional magnetic resonance imaging.

The researchers found some similarities in brain activity locations among the species, but several differences, too. Monkey brain areas that fired up during movements on screen were quiescent in the humans, yet both species shared activity in other areas. This is a function of the species‘ separate evolutions — brain regions that may once have been very similar have adapted to focus on different tasks.

“The method may clarify whether specific functions are preserved in areas that anatomically correspond, are absent in one of the two species, or are shifted to other cortical locations,” Mantini and colleagues wrote. This, in turn, could shed light on how human cognitive function evolved, as compared to cognitive function in our closest cousins.

As University of Colorado neuroscientist Tor Wager points out in a review of this paper, the ISAC method does have a few kinks to be smoothed out — namely the effect of a visual stimulus’ narrative aspects. The human participants saw much more than cinematography and moving figures as they watched the film; there was a whole storyline, too, which can influence eye movements and fMRI activity throughout the whole brain. When Eastwood spoke, the humans reacted to much more than his facial movements, and so there may have been some false correlations (or the lack thereof) when comparing species.

But it could still be a valuable way to compare and contrast physiological activity in the brains of different species, Wager notes.

“This wealth of parallel information must be integrated to bring insights from animal models to bear on the human condition in increasingly precise ways,” Wager wrote. The research was published online Sunday in Nature Methods.

Click to launch this week's Images of the Week gallery.

Abominable snowmen, sea serpents and dragons, oh my!

Click here to launch the gallery

In this week's archive gallery, you'll see blurry photographs of the Loch Ness monster, examine various contraptions used to look for or catch sea serpents, read an offer for a free dragon egg that seems almost too good to be true, learn how to make silver bullets and hear all about Sir Edmund Hillary's expedition to find the Abominable Snowman (spoiler: his plan involves using compressed carbon dioxide to shoot a hypodermic needle at it).