Serendipitous news reading online is gaining prominence, study shows

ScienceDaily (Dec. 1, 2011) — Traditional media, such as newspapers and television news, require readers and viewers to intentionally seek out news by picking up a newspaper or turning on the television. The Internet and new technologies now are changing the way readers consume online news. New research from the University of Missouri shows that Internet users often do not make the conscious decision to read news online, but they come across news when they are searching for other information or doing non-news related activities online, such as shopping or visiting social networking sites.

Borchuluun Yadamsuren, a post-doctoral fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) in the University of Missouri School of Journalism, found a shift in the way people have begun to perceive online news. She says that while some people still have the perception of news as tied to traditional media, others now hold a much broader perception of news that goes beyond what is reported by professional journalists. Yadamsuren attributes this to the wide array of information available online.

"Incidental exposure to online news is becoming a major way for many people to receive information about news events," Yadamsuren said. "However, many people don't realize how their news reading behavior is shifting to more serendipitous discovery."

Using mixed method approach, Yadamsuren surveyed nearly 150 respondents with further interviews of 20 of those respondents to understand their incidental exposure to online news. She found that respondents experience incidental exposure to online news in three different contexts. The first group of respondents reported that they come across interesting news stories while they visit online news sites. Others report incidental exposure to online news in the context of non-news related activities such as checking email and visiting Facebook and other social networking sites. The third group of respondents reported that they stumble upon "unusual," "weird," "interesting," "bizarre," unexpected," "outrageous," or "off the wall" news stories while they are conducting their normal Internet searches.

Currently, Yadamsuren is studying the relationship between incidental exposure to online news and different demographic and technology-access related factors. Yadamsuren believes it is important for media organizations to place links to their news stories on different sites throughout the Internet to take advantage of serendipitious news consuming behavior to expand their readership.

Yadamsuren's study was presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) 2011 and American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) 2011 Annual Meetings. Her research was also published in Information Research. Her current research at RJI involves developing strategies for news organizations to engage younger generations with online news based on incidental exposure.

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Moral dilemma: Would you kill one person to save five?

ScienceDaily (Dec. 1, 2011) — Imagine a runaway boxcar heading toward five people who can't escape its path. Now imagine you had the power to reroute the boxcar onto different tracks with only one person along that route.

Would you do it?

That's the moral dilemma posed by a team of Michigan State University researchers in a first-of-its-kind study published in the research journal Emotion. Research participants were put in a three dimensional setting and given the power to kill one person (in this case, a realistic digital character) to save five.

The results? About 90 percent of the participants pulled a switch to reroute the boxcar, suggesting people are willing to violate a moral rule if it means minimizing harm.

"What we found is that the rule of 'Thou shalt not kill' can be overcome by considerations of the greater good," said Carlos David Navarrete, lead researcher on the project.

As an evolutionary psychologist, Navarrete explores big-picture topics such as morality -- in other words, how do we come to our moral judgments and does our behavior follow suit?

His latest experiment offers a new twist on the "trolley problem," a moral dilemma that philosophers have contemplated for decades. But this is the first time the dilemma has been posed as a behavioral experiment in a virtual environment, "with the sights, sounds and consequences of our actions thrown into stark relief," the study says.

The research participants were presented with a 3-D simulated version of the classic dilemma though a head-mounted device. Sensors were attached to their fingertips to monitor emotional arousal.

In the virtual world, each participant was stationed at a railroad switch where two sets of tracks veered off. Up ahead and to their right, five people hiked along the tracks in a steep ravine that prevented escape. On the opposite side, a single person hiked along in the same setting.

As the boxcar approached over the horizon, the participants could either do nothing -- letting the coal-filled boxcar go along its route and kill the five hikers -- or pull a switch (in this case a joystick) and reroute it to the tracks occupied by the single hiker.

Of the 147 participants, 133 (or 90.5 percent) pulled the switch to divert the boxcar, resulting in the death of the one hiker. Fourteen participants allowed the boxcar to kill the five hikers (11 participants did not pull the switch, while three pulled the switch but then returned it to its original position).

The findings are consistent with past research that was not virtual-based, Navarrete said.

The study also found that participants who did not pull the switch were more emotionally aroused. The reasons for this are unknown, although it may be because people freeze up during highly anxious moments -- akin to a solider failing to fire his weapon in battle, Navarrete said.

"I think humans have an aversion to harming others that needs to be overridden by something," Navarrete said. "By rational thinking we can sometimes override it -- by thinking about the people we will save, for example. But for some people, that increase in anxiety may be so overpowering that they don't make the utilitarian choice, the choice for the greater good."

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Navarrete, C.D., McDonald, M., Mott, M., & Asher, B. Virtual Morality: Emotion and Action in a Simulated 3-D Trolley Problem. Emotion, 2011

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MAKS: Drug-free prevention of dementia decline

ScienceDaily (Nov. 30, 2011) — There are many different causes of dementia and, although its progression can be fast or slow, it is always degenerative. Symptoms of dementia include confusion, loss of memory, and problems with speech and understanding. It can be upsetting for both the affected person and their relatives and carers. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Medicine shows that a regime of behavioral and mental exercises was able to halt the progression of dementia.

Researchers led by Prof. Graessel, from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen, included in their study patients with dementia from five nursing homes in Bavaria. After random selection, half the patients were included on the year-long MAKS 'intervention' consisting of two hours of group therapy, six days a week. In addition all patients maintained their normal treatment and regular activities provided by the nursing home.

The MAKS system consists of motor stimulation(M), including games such as bowling, croquet, and balancing exercises; cognitive stimulation (K), in the form of individual and group puzzles; and practicing 'daily living' activities (A), including preparing snacks, gardening and crafts. The therapy session began with a ten minute introduction, which the researchers termed a 'spiritual element' (S), where the participants discussed topics like 'happiness', or sang a song or hymn.

After 12 months of therapy the MAKS group maintained their level on the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale (ADAS) and, even more importantly maintained their ability to carry out activities of daily living, while the control group all showed a decrease in cognitive and functional ability.

Prof. Graessel explained, "While we observed a better result for patients with mild to moderate dementia, the result of MAKS therapy on ADAS (cognitive function) was at least as good as treatment with cholinesterase inhibitors. Additionally we found that the effect on the patients' ability to perform daily living tasks (as measured by the Erlanger Test of Daily Living (E-ADL)) was twice as high as achieved by medication. This means that MAKS therapy is able to extend the quality of, and participation in, life for people with dementia within a nursing home environment. We are currently in the process of extending these preliminary results to see if this prevention of dementia decline can be maintained over a longer time period."

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Elmar Graessel, Renate Stemmer, Birgit Eichenseer, Sabine Pickel, Carolin Donath, Johannes Kornhuber, Katharina Luttenberger. Non-pharmacological, multicomponent group therapy in patients with degenerative dementia: a 12-month randomised, controlled trial. BMC Medicine, 2011; (in press) [link]

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Setting the stage for life: Scientists make key discovery about the atmosphere of early Earth

ScienceDaily (Nov. 30, 2011) — Scientists in the New York Center for Astrobiology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have used the oldest minerals on Earth to reconstruct the atmospheric conditions present on Earth very soon after its birth. The findings, which appear in the Dec. 1 edition of the journal Nature, are the first direct evidence of what the ancient atmosphere of the planet was like soon after its formation and directly challenge years of research on the type of atmosphere out of which life arose on the planet.

The scientists show that the atmosphere of Earth just 500 million years after its creation was not a methane-filled wasteland as previously proposed, but instead was much closer to the conditions of our current atmosphere. The findings, in a paper titled "The oxidation state of Hadean magmas and implications for early Earth's atmosphere," have implications for our understanding of how and when life began on this planet and could begin elsewhere in the universe.

For decades, scientists believed that the atmosphere of early Earth was highly reduced, meaning that oxygen was greatly limited. Such oxygen-poor conditions would have resulted in an atmosphere filled with noxious methane, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and ammonia. To date, there remain widely held theories and studies of how life on Earth may have been built out of this deadly atmosphere cocktail.

Now, scientists at Rensselaer are turning these atmospheric assumptions on their heads with findings that prove the conditions on early Earth were simply not conducive to the formation of this type of atmosphere, but rather to an atmosphere dominated by the more oxygen-rich compounds found within our current atmosphere -- including water, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide.

"We can now say with some certainty that many scientists studying the origins of life on Earth simply picked the wrong atmosphere," said Bruce Watson, Institute Professor of Science at Rensselaer.

The findings rest on the widely held theory that Earth's atmosphere was formed by gases released from volcanic activity on its surface. Today, as during the earliest days of the Earth, magma flowing from deep in the Earth contains dissolved gases. When that magma nears the surface, those gases are released into the surrounding air.

"Most scientists would argue that this outgassing from magma was the main input to the atmosphere," Watson said. "To understand the nature of the atmosphere 'in the beginning,' we needed to determine what gas species were in the magmas supplying the atmosphere."

As magma approaches Earth's surface, it either erupts or stalls in the crust, where it interacts with surrounding rocks, cools, and crystallizes into solid rock. These frozen magmas and the elements they contain can be literal milestones in the history of Earth.

One important milestone is zircon. Unlike other materials that are destroyed over time by erosion and subduction, certain zircons are nearly as old as Earth itself. As such, zircons can literally tell the entire history of the planet -- if you know the right questions to ask.

The scientists sought to determine the oxidation levels of the magmas that formed these ancient zircons to quantify, for the first time ever, how oxidized were the gases being released early in Earth's history. Understanding the level of oxidation could spell the difference between nasty swamp gas and the mixture of water vapor and carbon dioxide we are currently so accustomed to, according to study lead author Dustin Trail, a postdoctoral researcher in the Center for Astrobiology.

"By determining the oxidation state of the magmas that created zircon, we could then determine the types of gases that would eventually make their way into the atmosphere," said Trail.

To do this Trail, Watson, and their colleague, postdoctoral researcher Nicholas Tailby, recreated the formation of zircons in the laboratory at different oxidation levels. They literally created lava in the lab. This procedure led to the creation of an oxidation gauge that could then be compared with the natural zircons.

During this process they looked for concentrations of a rare Earth metal called cerium in the zircons. Cerium is an important oxidation gauge because it can be found in two oxidation states, with one more oxidized than the other. The higher the concentrations of the more oxidized type cerium in zircon, the more oxidized the atmosphere likely was after their formation.

The calibrations reveal an atmosphere with an oxidation state closer to present-day conditions. The findings provide an important starting point for future research on the origins of life on Earth.

"Our planet is the stage on which all of life has played out," Watson said. "We can't even begin to talk about life on Earth until we know what that stage is. And oxygen conditions were vitally important because of how they affect the types of organic molecules that can be formed."

Despite being the atmosphere that life currently breathes, lives, and thrives on, our current oxidized atmosphere is not currently understood to be a great starting point for life. Methane and its oxygen-poor counterparts have much more biologic potential to jump from inorganic compounds to life-supporting amino acids and DNA. As such, Watson thinks the discovery of his group may reinvigorate theories that perhaps those building blocks for life were not created on Earth, but delivered from elsewhere in the galaxy.

The results do not, however, run contrary to existing theories on life's journey from anaerobic to aerobic organisms. The results quantify the nature of gas molecules containing carbon, hydrogen, and sulfur in the earliest atmosphere, but they shed no light on the much later rise of free oxygen in the air. There was still a significant amount of time for oxygen to build up in the atmosphere through biologic mechanisms, according to Trail.

The research was funded by NASA.

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Journal Reference:

Dustin Trail, E. Bruce Watson, Nicholas D. Tailby. The oxidation state of Hadean magmas and implications for early Earth’s atmosphere. Nature, 2011; 480 (7375): 79 DOI: 10.1038/nature10655

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Astronomers look to neighboring galaxy for star formation insight

ScienceDaily (Nov. 30, 2011) — An international team of astronomers has mapped in detail the star-birthing regions of the nearest star-forming galaxy to our own, a step toward understanding the conditions surrounding star creation.

Led by University of Illinois astronomy professor Tony Wong, the researchers published their findings in the December issue of the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a popular galaxy among astronomers both for its nearness to our Milky Way and for the spectacular view it provides, a big-picture vista impossible to capture of our own galaxy.

"If you imagine a galaxy being a disc, the LMC is tilted almost face-on so we can look down on it, which gives us a very clear view of what's going on inside," Wong said.

Although astronomers have a working theory of how individual stars form, they know very little about what triggers the process or the environmental conditions that are optimal for star birth. Wong's team focused on areas called molecular clouds, which are dense patches of gas -- primarily molecular hydrogen -- where stars are born. By studying these molecular clouds and their relationship to new stars in the galaxy, the team hopes to learn more about the metamorphosis of gas clouds into stars.

"When we study star formation, an important question is, what is the environment doing? How does the location of star formation reflect the conditions of that environment? There's no better place to study the wider environment than the LMC."

Using a 22-meter-diameter radio telescope in Australia, the astronomers mapped more than 100 molecular clouds in the LMC and estimated their sizes and masses, identifying regions with ample material for making stars. This seemingly simple task engendered a surprising find.

Conventional wisdom states that most of the molecular gas mass in a galaxy is apportioned to a few large clouds. However, Wong's team found many more low-mass clouds than they expected -- so many, in fact, that a majority of the dense gas may be sprinkled across the galaxy in these small molecular clouds, rather than clumped together in a few large blobs.

"We thought that the big clouds hog most of the mass," Wong said, "but we found that in this galaxy, it appears that the playing field is more level. The low-mass clouds are quite numerous and they actually contribute a significant amount of the mass. This provides the first evidence that the common wisdom about molecular clouds may not apply here."

The large numbers of these relatively low-mass clouds means that star-forming conditions in the LMC may be relatively widespread and easy to achieve. The findings raise some interesting questions about why some galaxies stopped their star formation while others have continued it.

To better understand the connection between molecular clouds and star formation, the team compared their molecular cloud maps to maps of infrared radiation, which reveal where young stars are heating cosmic dust.

For the comparison, they exploited a carefully selected sample of newborn heavy stars compiled by U. of I. astronomy professor You-Hua Chu and resident scientist Robert Gruendl, who also were co-authors of the paper. These stars are so young that they are still deeply embedded in cocoons of gas and dust.

"It turns out that there's actually very nice correspondence between these young massive stars and molecular clouds," Wong said. "That's not entirely surprising, but it's reassuring. We assume that these stars have to form in molecular clouds, and it tells us that the molecular clouds do hang around long enough for us to see them associated with these massive young stars."

Wong hopes to continue to study the relationship between molecular clouds and star formation in greater detail. If researchers can determine the relative ages of young stars, they can correlate these against molecular clouds to figure out which clouds have star formation, how long the clouds live and what eventually leads to their destruction. They also plan to use a newly constructed array of telescopes in Chile to see the cloud environment in higher resolution, pinpointing exactly where inside the molecular cloud star formation will occur.

"This study provides us with our most detailed view of an entire population of clouds in another galaxy," Wong said. "We can say with great confidence that these clouds are where the stars form, but we are still trying to figure out why they have the properties they do."

The National Science Foundation and NASA supported this work.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Journal Reference:

Tony Wong, Annie Hughes, Jürgen Ott, Erik Muller, Jorge L. Pineda, Jean-Philippe Bernard, You-Hua Chu, Yasuo Fukui, Robert A. Gruendl, Christian Henkel, Akiko Kawamura, Ulrich Klein, Leslie W. Looney, Sarah Maddison, Yoji Mizuno, Deborah Paradis, Jonathan Seale. The Magellanic Mopra Assessment (MAGMA). I. The Molecular Cloud Population of the Large Magellanic Cloud. The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 2011; 197 (2): 16 DOI: 10.1088/0067-0049/197/2/16

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Aggression prevents the better part of valor ... in fig wasps

ScienceDaily (Dec. 1, 2011) — Researchers have confirmed a unique behaviour within the male population of tiny fig wasps that pollinate fig trees -- they team up to help pregnant females, even if they have not mated themselves.

Published online in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, the study confirms that placid male pollinator fig wasps work together to chew an escape tunnel for their females, before crawling back into the fig to die -- the non-pollinating variety are too busy fighting each other to help.

"Male insects can cooperate to attract the attention of females or to ensure that they are successful in mating, but I don't know of any other male insects which exhibit post-mating teamwork like this," says Dr Steve Compton from the Faculty of Biological Sciences.

Fig trees are vital for rainforest ecosystems. Producing fruit all year, more birds and animals feed on them than on any other plant in the rainforest. There are more than 850 types of fig tree, each pollinated by a single uniquely adapted type of fig wasp.

The research team examined some 60,000 individual fig flowers in the laboratory, each containing either pollinating fig wasps or parasitic fig wasps. All figs contained many females but alongside these, some contained a single male and others contained several males.

The hatched young of both types mate with each other before the females attempt to escape, leaving the males to die inside the fig. "Neither type of fig wasp female is strong enough to make their own way out, so they need help from the males to do this," says Dr Compton.

Escape rates for pollinator wasps were consistently high and increased when more males were present. When only one parasitic fig wasp was present, it was just as successful as the pollinators in chewing an escape route after mating, but when several males were present, the success rates plummeted.

The study also suggests that the ability of males to cooperate is hampered by innate aggression. Of the two groups of fig wasps -- those that pollinate fig trees and non-pollinators, which are parasites of the tree -- only the parasitic wasps fight more for the right to mate with females, and this group were far less able to work together.

"It would seem that male parasitic fig wasps are unable to switch off the hard-wired aggression needed to successfully mate to cooperate with each other, even when their genetic investment is at stake," says Dr Compton. "Pollinators' teamwork may be prompted because of the likelihood of genetic connection to the mated females, but the parasitic fig wasps were in the same situation."

Dr Compton believes the successful collaboration between the pollinating male fig wasps studied is likely to be normal for all pollinator fig wasps. He hopes to study a highly aggressive species of pollinators, where males fight intensely, often to death. "This will shed light on whether the cooperation is present in all pollinators, or if aggressive behaviour is too difficult to switch off after mating," he says.

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Journal Reference:

Nazia Suleman, Shazia Raja, and Stephen G. Compton. Only pollinator fig wasps have males that collaborate to release their females from figs of an Asian fig tree. Biol. Lett., November 30, 2011 DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.1016

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Danish HIV patients can live as long as the general population when treated optimally

ScienceDaily (Dec. 1, 2011) — Researchers who have been following Danish HIV patients for more than fifteen years now see that the patients may live as long as other Danes if they take their medicine.

"It is my impression that patients often ask themselves a range of questions: 'What are my long-term prospects? Will I be dead in five years' time? Will the disease cause brain damage? Will I have heart trouble'?" says Professor Niels Obel, the University of Copenhagen and Rigshospitalet. He continues:

"Fortunately we are well-equipped to answer such questions in Denmark because we record an exceptional amount of data which we can use to shed light on the long-term effects of disease. This also goes for Danish HIV patients, and it is marvellous to be able to tell them that actually their prospects are quite bright."

Professor Nobel heads up the Danish Cohort Study that has provided the basis for the new results published in PLoS One.

HIV patients enter therapy pathway sooner

Via such thorough data collection, the Danish national health board provides researchers with a unique opportunity to follow particular groups of patients over an extended period. The Danish HIOV cohort study is following every HIV positive patient in Denmark and Greenland, for example, including children and adults who have only been in contact with a treatment centre once since 1995.

PHD students Marie Helleberg, Casper Ried and Frederik Engsig analyse data from the Danish HIV Cohort.

Professor Obel and his colleagues publish an annual report on the condition of the HIV Cohort. The 2011 edition shows that far more men are still being infected by HIV than women (76 per cent to 24 per cent), that the most frequent path of infection is heterosexual contact (46 per cent) and homosexual contact (44 per cent), and that patients are not as ill on diagnosis (they have higher CD 4 cell counts).

"This is probably because newly infected patients visit their GPs sooner and are diagnosed earlier than they used to be," Professor Obel says.

HIV infections are chronic. Almost thirty years on since the first documented cases, we still do not have a vaccine or a cure, because HIV continually mutates and enters our DNA, where drugs cannot reach it.

So an HIV diagnosis means that patients will require treatment for the rest of their lives. However, the latest figures show that the life expectancy of optimally-treated patients is not adversely affected by taking the drugs or by the disease itself.

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Niels Obel, Lars Haukali Omland, Gitte Kronborg, Carsten S. Larsen, Court Pedersen, Gitte Pedersen, Henrik Toft Sørensen, Jan Gerstoft. Impact of Non-HIV and HIV Risk Factors on Survival in HIV-Infected Patients on HAART: A Population-Based Nationwide Cohort Study. PLoS ONE, 2011; 6 (7): e22698 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0022698

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