Science News Headlines . Want to learn more ? Go to sleep ! . Sulphur helps in combat against global warming . Treasures in ocean sediments . The earth looks like a potato ! . The mirror in the brain is more than a mirror Read more details in the articles below. Want to learn more ? Go to sleep ! Sounds like good advice ? Sorry, this is true only for small babies. Most children are bored by one-month old babies, since babies sleep through much of the first month after birth. Now please don't call them lazy. Apparently they are learning while sleeping, especially getting new social insights, according to a new study. In a recent paper in the journal Developmental Science, American psychologist Reeb-Sutherland and her colleagues report that snoozing infants do learn. During their study they learned to distinguish three types of sounds. They blinked more readily upon hearing a spoken voice than a tone or a recorded voice played backward, signalling an early aptitude for absorbing social information. These findings help to explain how infants come to recognize speech sounds within several months of birth. From birth through at least 1 month of age, infants learn while they sleep -- an ability that adults lack. Sleep bolsters memories and decision making in adults but no evidence suggests that slumbering grown-ups can learn new information. Sleeping 1- to 2-day-olds learn to blink in response to a tone played before the delivery of a blink-inducing air puff. In the study, 64 sleeping 1-month-olds were exposed to either of two tones, to a woman's voice saying "Hi baby," or to the same salutation played backward. In 12 out of 15 trials, infants blinked in response to the greeting alone. Emotional cues in speech may hold special appeal for babies, perhaps explaining superior conditioning to a greeting It is also possible that, already having heard a lot of talking adults, dozing 1-month-olds perceive words with particular ease. Eyeblink training during sleep shows promise as a way to probe for social and sensory problems in infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorders, say psychologists. ----------------------------------------------- Sulphur helps in combat against global warming ----------------------------------------------- Ecological scientists have been puzzled as to why global surface temperatures did not rise between 1998 and 2008, since they had been increasing for several decades. In fact this decade had been cited as evidence to deny global warming by some people. Now there may be a solution at hand: this may have been because large power plants in Asia, while emitting warming greenhouse gases, simultaneously sent cooling sulphur particles into the atmosphere. These Asian emissions mostly balanced one another and dampened the effects of natural cooling cycles associated with the sun and ocean temperatures. A recent study by Robert Kaufman and his team reached this conclusion by analyzing factors contributing to global surface temperature, including human-caused emissions, the 11-year solar cycle and a shift from warming El Nino to cooling La Nina climate patterns. Without human input, temperatures would have been expected to cool, based on the La Nina shift and decreasing solar radiation. After simulating temperature change over the decade based on these factors, the researchers identified the reason for steady surface temperatures: sulphur particles spit into the atmosphere by coal-burning power plants. Sulphur aerosols reflect light back into space and counteract the warming effects of greenhouse gases. >From 1998 to 2008, these human-generated emissions effectively cancelled each other out. This does not mean that sending sulphur into the air is a good idea. In addition to causing respiratory problems, sulphur aerosols may combine with water vapor to form acid rain, which harms ecosystems and damages buildings. ---------------------------- Treasures in ocean sediments ---------------------------- Heard of rare earth elements ? 17 chemicals with exotic names like neodymium and europium, they are critical to technologies ranging from cell phones and televisions to fluorescent light bulbs and wind turbines. Finding sources for mining these elements is a big challenge for geologists. Recently, in the journal Geoscience, Japanese scientists have reported that mud at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean contains surprising concentrations of these rare earth elements. Hot plumes from hydrothermal vents pulled these materials out of seawater and deposited them on the seafloor, bit by bit, over tens of millions of years. One square patch of metal-rich mud 2.3 kilometers wide might contain enough rare earths to meet most of the global demand for a year, report these Japanese geologists. More than 97 percent of the world's rare earth elements come from mines in China, which has restricted exports in recent years. With prices skyrocketing, shortages are feared -- especially in Japan, which lacks minable deposits of these elements. This team analysed seafloor cores taken from 78 sites throughout the Pacific Ocean. Near Hawaii and in the southeast Pacific, concentrations of rare earths were comparable to those found in clays mined in China. Some deposits contained twice as much heavy rare earths such as dysprosium, a component of magnets in hybrid car motors. Deep-sea mining is an old idea, but one that has yet to prove itself in the face of high costs and environmental concerns. Discovered decades ago, chunks of manganese on the ocean floor and deposits of metals such as zinc and copper in the Red Sea have proven impractical to mine. So while there is promise of finding rare earth elements under the ocean for our increasing needs (especially of cell phones), we have some way to go before we can be sure. ------------------------------- The earth looks like a potato ! ------------------------------- As seen by a supersensitive gravity-detecting satellite, the Earth isn't a pale blue dot. It is a colourful, irregular lump. Almost like a rotating potato. Yes, a rainbow potato is how it looks. This image represents a sort of theoretical sea level known as the "geoid" -- a surface where the ocean would rest if not pushed around by internal currents, tides and the weather. This is a new map of the Earth's gravity field unveiled by Roland Pail and his German team of geoscientists. Gravity varies from place to place because of many factors, such as the presence of mountain ranges, the bulge around Earth's equator, and the moon's gravitational influence. The new snapshot comes from the European Space Agency's GOCE satellite, launched in 2009 to map the geoid. GOCE dances along at the top of the atmosphere, using six special accelerometers to measure, many times a second, how the Earth's gravity tugs on the spacecraft. A highly accurate gravity map will allow researchers to fine-tune their understanding of ocean currents, sea level height, ice caps and other changing parts of the planet. --------------------------------------------- The mirror in the brain is more than a mirror --------------------------------------------- Think of watching a gymnast at the Olympics, or a robot in a film like Wall-E. There are many such situations where you see actions that you cannot do with your own body. How does your brain make sense of such actions ? Surprisingly, scientists have found that this is done by a part of your brain called ``mirror system'' which they thought was reserved for making sense only of those actions by others that you too are able to perform. So this "mirror system" is not just a copycat, but is able to respond to a much wider range of actions than what an observer can perform himself. This broadened capacity of the brain system may help explain how humans are able to quickly and effortlessly understand other people's (and a robot's) actions, according to Emily Cross and her team of Dutch scientists. This is an area of study known as Cognitive Neuroscience. To see just how the mirror systems responded to unnatural movements, Cross and her colleagues scanned the brains of 22 people as they watched a video of a man performing a natural, fluid dance or a machinelike robot dance. Researchers thought that parts of the mirror system, which includes parts of the parietal lobe at the top back of the head and the premotor cortex just in front of that, would show higher activation in an fMRI scan when the subjects watched the natural dance. Instead, parts of the mirror system showed a very strong signal when subjects watched the robot dance, a result that was quite a surprise to them. She and her team next tested whether the identity of the dancer made a difference by recording a video of a Lego figurine named Gresh, who performed the same dances as the original human dancer. Again, contrary to what the researchers expected, the mirror system regions in 23 new participants were more strongly activated by the robotic dance moves regardless of who was dancing. These results suggest that the mirror system is flexible, helping us understand the actions of things that are very unlike us. --Compiled from several sources