Yangtze River Runs Mysteriously Red

Yangtze River Runs Mysteriously Red - A stretch of China's longest river has abruptly turned the color of tomato juice, and officials say they don't know why.

Residents of the southwestern city of Chongqing first noticed that the Yangtze River, called the "golden waterway," had a spreading stain on its reputation yesterday (Sept. 6).

Though the bright-red water was concentrated around Chongqing, Southwest China's largest industrial center, it was also reported at several other points along the river, according to ABC News.

Investigators have yet to determine a cause, but the Telegraph reports that environmental officials are considering industrial pollution and silt churned up by recent upstream floods as possible sources for the color.

One natural explanation for red water that can likely be ruled out is color-producing microorganisms, according to Emily Stanley, a professor of limnology (the study of inland waters) at the University of Wisconsin.

"When water turns red, the thing a lot of people think of first is red tide," Stanley told Life's Little Mysteries. "But the algae that causes red tide is a marine group and not a freshwater group, so it's highly, highly unlikely that this is a red-tide-related phenomenon."

Fresh water does occasionally turn blood-red for biological reasons (a lake that turned red during a drought in Texas last summer led to talk of the end times), but Stanley said this is most often due to incursions of color-producing bacteria that arrive when a body of water has less oxygen than normal. Because rivers move constantly, struggling and mixing with the air above them as they go, they rarely ever get the oxygen deficiencies necessary for a life-based red dye job.

After reviewing a few images of Chongqing's shockingly red river, Stanley put her money on a man-made cause.

"It looks like a pollutant phenomenon," she said. "Water bodies that have turned red very fast in the past have happened because people have dumped dyes into them."

An industrial dye dump was in fact the explanation when an urban stretch of another Chinese river, the Jian, turned crimson last December. Investigators traced the color back to a chemical plant that they said had been illegally producing red dye for firework wrappers.

Still, Stanley says she can't rule out the other possibility officials are now reportedly investigating: an upstream influx of silt. Her instinct, though, is that red clay would be more likely.

"China is well known for having areas with a lot of steep hill sides and a lot of land use practices that promote soil erosion and soil going into rivers," she said. "You can get red-colored clays that wouldn't be a whole lot different from having a big dose of dye go in there. But if that's the cause I'd imagine there would have had to be a huge storm or a huge amount of clay go into the system."

Taking another look at the Campbell's-hued Yangtze, she said, "It looks really industrial somehow." ( LiveScience.com )


Blog : Silence Right | Yangtze River Runs Mysteriously Red

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Fiery tornado five times the size of Earth erupts on sun's surface

Fiery tornado five times the size of Earth erupts on sun's surface - and scientists say 2 million degree whirlwind MUST play a role in triggering solar storms - A huge tornado five times the size of Earth erupted on the sun's surface, with superheated gases whirling at more than 100,000 miles per hour.

The tornado is up to two MILLION degrees centigrade.

Dr. Huw Morgan, co-discover of the solar tornado, adds, ‘This unique and spectacular tornado must play a role in triggering global solar storms.’

Superheated gases as hot as 50,000 to 2,000,000 Kelvin were sucked from the root of a dense structure called a prominence, spiralling up into the high atmosphere

‘This is perhaps the first time that such a huge solar tornado is filmed by an imager,’ says Dr. Xing Li, of Aberystwyth University.

Superheated gases as hot as 50,000 to 2,000,000 Kelvin were sucked from the root of a dense structure called a prominence, and spiral up into the high atmosphere and travel about 200,000 kilometres for at least three hours.

The tornadoes were observed on 25 September 2011.

The hot gases in the tornadoes have speeds as high as 300,000 km per hour. Gas speeds of terrestrial tornadoes can reach 150 km per hour.

The tornadoes often occur at the root of huge coronal mass ejections. When heading toward the Earth, these coronal mass ejections can cause significant damage to the Earth’s space environment, satellites, even knock out the electricity grid.

The hot gases in the tornadoes have speeds as high as 300,000 km per hour. Gas speeds of terrestrial tornadoes can reach 150 km per hour

The hot tornadoes might cause solar storms on our planet, the scientists believe

The hot gases in the tornadoes have speeds as high as 300,000 km per hour. Gas speeds of terrestrial tornadoes can reach 150 km per hour

The solar tornadoes drag winding magnetic field and electric currents into the high atmosphere. It is possible that the magnetic field and currents play a key role in driving the coronal mass ejections.

SDO was launched in February 2010. The satellite is orbiting the Earth in a circular, geosynchronous orbit at an altitude of 36,000 kilometres.

It monitors constantly solar variations so scientists can understand the cause of the change and eventually have a capability to predict the space weather. ( dailymail.co.uk )

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Wake up with a bang... with the battle-ready coffee mug that you can add a laser sight too

Wake up with a bang... with the battle-ready coffee mug that you can add a laser sight too - Staying awake during commando surveillance operations has never been easier – thanks to a mug that comes with three military-spec scope rails.

The Battle Mug, made by U.S firm OpticsPlanet, is clearly the meanest looking mug on the planet, especially when it’s carrying its full complement of hardware.

Made from a block of aluminium, the Battle Mug can hold over a pint of your favourite frothy beverage.

SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO

There's a cup in there somewhere: Battle Mug can be outfitted with a range of scopes

Tough: The Battle Mug is made from aluminium and can hold over a pint of coffee

OpticsPlanet’s Steve Ledin demonstrates in a YouTube video the mug’s capabilities.

He attaches a night vision unit to it, three different laser dots, a bottle opener, two carry handles with night sights – and a bipod for standing it up on.

Each $250 (£160) mug is custom-engraved with its own unique serial number, includes a removable AR15 carry handle – and can be carried safely through customs, because it’s not actually capable of firing bullets.

MailOnline has contacted OpticsPlanet to find out if it can be converted to a gun. ( dailymail.co.uk )

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Why Yuor Barin Can Raed Tihs

Why Yuor Barin Can Raed Tihs - You might not realize it, but your brain is a code-cracking machine.

For emaxlpe, it deson't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod aepapr, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pcale. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit pobelrm.

S1M1L4RLY, Y0UR M1ND 15 R34D1NG 7H15 4U70M471C4LLY W17H0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17.

Passages like these have been bouncing around the Internet for years. But how do we read them? And what do our incredibly low standards for what's legible say about the way our brains work?

According to Marta Kutas, a cognitive neuroscientist and the director of the Center for Research in Language at the University of California, San Diego, the short answer is that no one knows why we're so good at reading garbled nonsense. But they've got strong suspicions.

"My guess is that context is very, very, very important," Kutas told Life's Little Mysteries.

We use context to pre-activate the areas of our brains that correspond to what we expect next, she explained. For example, brain scans reveal that if we hear a sound that leads us to strongly suspect another sound is on the way, the brain acts as if we're already hearing the second sound. Similarly, if we see a certain collection of letters or words, our brains jump to conclusions about what comes next. "We use context to help us perceive," Kutas said.

[Related: More Cool Optical Illusions]

It's not a perfect system, however. In the above passages, Kutas suspects that you probably didn't get every single word right just from knowing what came before it. You onlythought you were reading the passage perfectly, because you automatically (and subconsciously) went back and filled in any gaps in your knowledge based on subsequent context — the words that came later.

Additionally, in the case of the first example (the words with jumbled middle letters), it helps that your brain processes all the letters of a word at once, rather than one at a time. Thus, the letters "serve as contexts for each other," Kutas said.

In the case of the second passage (with the numbers in place of some letters), a 2007 study by cognitive scientists in Spain found that reading such passages barely activates the brain areas that correspond to digits. This suggests that the letter-like appearance of the digits, as well as their context, has a stronger influence on our brains than their actual status as digits. The researchers think some sort of top-down feedback mechanism (our consciences telling our sensory processors what to do, sort of) normalizes the visual input, allowing us to ignore the funny bits and read the passage with ease.( LiveScience.com )

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Russian Scientists Reach Vast Underground Antarctic Lake

Russian Scientists Reach Vast Underground Antarctic Lake - Some believe the body of water might hold secrets to both our past and our solar system.

How long does it take to drill two miles under Antarctica to a reach a lake that has been virtually untouched for the past 20 million years and might just hold insight into both our distant past and to interplanetary life? Twenty years, it turns out, in some of the worst working conditions on the planet.

Russian scientists completed the decades-long project, an inverted space race deep underground, just before the team had to leave at the end of the Antarctic summer. As the Associated Press explains, the long-anticipated reaching of Lake Vostok, as it's called, opens up the possibility of exploring a part of our planet that's been, essentially, untouched for 20 million years.

Scientists believe the undergroup lake will provide a chance to explore an area that's been virtually untouched in 20 million years Photo by Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images.

Scientists are relatively confident that life exists in the lake, as they've previously found bacteria on ice removed from the borehole, Discover Magazine notes. If it does, the discovery could have significant implications for research and exploration of our solar system: The lake exists in conditions believed to be similar to those under ice crusts on Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa, and Saturn's moon Enceladus.

Lake Vostok is part of a chain of about 200 underground lakes under Antarctica. Some of them were formed while Antarctica and Australia were still connected. The Washington Post''s feature on the lake explains that the site is the "crown jewel" of Antarctic exploration as far as scientists are concerned. In addition to providing research opportunities applicable to our solar system, the lake might also provide an unprecedented glimpse into bacterial life forms on Earth from before the Ice Age.

The methods used to drill the borehole have come under fire from some, however. The team used over 66 tons of lubricants and antifreeze in the process which might contaminate the lake and compromising any possible research there. Russian scientists responded to the criticism by saying that the pressure built up in the lake had, as they anticipated, pushed water up into the hole immediately upon the drill breaking through, freezing and blocking out the chemicals.

Assuming that the lake is still pristine, scientists (and science lovers) worldwide are excited about the discovery. NASA's chief scientist Waleed Abdalati told the AP that the significance of the lake, apparently, can't be understated: "In the simplest sense, it can transform the way we think about life," he said. ( slate.com )

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The Art of Science

The Art of Science - It was while listening to Professor Brian Cox on Desert Island Discs that it came to me.

Cox, megabrain, poster boy for the sexing up of science and once a member of synth band D:Ream, said that whenever he saw the prime minister he would ask: "how can we ensure that Britain is the best place to do science?"

It's a pertinent question, and one that mirrors the question I'm continually asking government ministers: "how can we ensure Britain is the best place to do the arts?"

Essentially we are both asking how we can make Britain more innovative and creative, which led me to question how science and the arts could work together to bring this about.

The big scientific questions of our time are already occupying artists, from choreographer Wayne MacGregor, whose work frequently emerges from his study of neuroscience by exploring connections between the brain, body, perception and movement; to Simon McBurney and Complicite's A Disappearing Number, an absorbing and brilliant drama about string theory or Constellations, a play about quantum multiverse theory currently being performed at the Royal Court.

But what links scientific and artistic practice goes beyond artists adopting scientific themes.

Both art and science require a great deal of work to acquire the skills required to be good at them. Both depend on challenging accepted ideas, on pushing back the boundaries of truth and uncertainty and exploring the unknown. Both involve changing the world around us and presenting the public with something they couldn't have imagined.

The cutting edge of the arts, like the cutting edge of science, may seem obscure and abstruse. But out of this research and development come remarkable discoveries that can have an impact on artistic practice and how those who encounter the work see and experience the world. The kind of art the Arts Council funds, developed in, say, the Battersea Arts Centre or the studios of the National Theatre, will have an impact on standard artistic practice for years to come.

Overall, what connects art and science is that they are - or should be - about realising something marvellous, possibly beautiful, that was previously unknown. They are both about challenging orthodoxy and furthering human endeavour and understanding. With a leap of imagination and the coming together of great scientific and creative minds I believe the potential is there to unlock and expand our understanding of maths, music, physics, dance, perception, and the explanation of who we are in the universe.

So I'd like to see scientists and artists get together more, not only to explore new ideas but to make a joint case to the government and the public about how together we contribute to the sum of human knowledge. How together we could turn the UK into the home for new ideas and in turn change the world. Would eminent scientists join with eminent artists to make the case for science and the arts? Perhaps it's worth a try. ( huffingtonpost.co.uk )

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Australian fossil find that has scientists rewriting the history of dinosaurs

Australian fossil find that has scientists rewriting the history of dinosaurs - Scientists are rewriting the history of dinosaurs after a fossil from a species previously believed to live only in the northern hemisphere was found in Australia.

A neck vertebrae discovered in Victoria is identical to that of a Baryonyx, a fish-eating dinosaur from the Spinosaurid family that was larger than a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The find threatens to destroy the notion that dinosaurs from the spinosaurid family lived only in the northern hemisphere.

Huge: The neck vertebrae found in Australia is thought to come from the Baryonyx, which was previously though to live only on northern continents

Spinosaurid dinosaurs such as the Baryonyx had a small skull with a crocodile-like snout, walked on two legs and and preyed on fish and small animals.

They were believed to live mainly in the northern hemisphere, a theory confirmed by the discovery of a Baryonyx fossil near Dorking in Surrey in 1983.

But the discovery that the neck vertebrae found on the Australian coast is identical to the 1983 Surrey fossil means that scientists are starting to believe the meat-eating dinosaurs lived all over the planet.

Find: A baryonyx fossil was found in Dorking, Surrey in 1983

Paul Barrett Natural History Museum dinosaur expert who led the study said: ‘The new fossil is the first example of a spinosaurid dinosaur from Australia.

'It is almost identical to the Natural History Museum’s own Baryonyx specimen from England.’

He said the find and other discoveries including that of a Tyrannosaurus Rex in Australia mean that the classification of dinosaurs according to which species lived on northern and southern continents looks incorrect.

'They [ the finds] are showing that many of the dinosaurs that we used to think of as distinctively "northern" or "southern" in character were much more widespread during this particular period of Earth history.

'Although the vertebra is clearly a spinosaurid, there is not enough of the animal preserved to make the detailed comparisons necessary to work out how similar or different it was to the other known members of the group,' he says.

'For this reason we decided not to name it, nor did we try to shoe-horn it into any existing genus. We hope that future discoveries will tell us much more about the anatomy and relationships of this animal.' ( dailymail.co.uk )

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Shuttle Endeavour Launches for Last Time, Headed to Space Station

Shuttle Endeavour Launches for Last Time, Headed to Space Station - The space shuttle Endeavour successfully completed its final launch Monday, rocketing away from the Kennedy Space Center launchpad en route to the International Space Station.

Endeavour launched from Launch Pad 39A at 8:56am Eastern.

"I can't thank the teams that got this vehicle ready to fly and for all the work they've done," Associate Administrator for Space Operations Bill Gerstenmaier said in a statement, referring to a power problem that delayed the original launch time. "The teams worked really hard to get through that, get it behind and to understand what the problem was—and it was no problem to us at all during the count."

The six STS-134 crew members woke up around midnight to prep for today's launch. They boarded the shuttle at 5:41am Eastern time, and the hatch was closed about 6:56am.

Just after 7am, the close-out crew had to repair a small area of tile around Endeavour's crew hatch. It was apparently a previously repaired area, but team members filled it with slurry, and it did not affect today's flight.

Endeavour's commander is Mark Kelly, husband of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in an Arizona shopping mall in January. She has been recuperating in a Houston rehab center, but made the trip to Florida to see the launch. She traveled with astronaut Greg Johnson's family and landed yesterday afternoon.

"Gabrielle & Mark said goodbye during afternoon visit before launch. Beach House made for a picturesque setting," her staff tweeted last night.

In a press conference after the launch, Giffords' staff said she watched the launch seated in a wheelchair for her comfort. It has not yet been decided if she will return for the shuttle landing, given that it will occur in the middle of the night.

Mission specialists Michael Fincke, Greg Chamitoff, Andrew Feustel and the European Space Agency's Roberto Vittori will also travel to the ISS via Endeavour for the 16-day mission.

NASA said the shuttle makes orbit 8.5 minutes after liftoff and travels 17,500 miles per hour when in space. Endeavour is scheduled to arrive at the ISS on Wednesday. Once docked, there are four planned spacewalks, which will take care of various projects on the ISS. The shuttle will return to Earth on June 1 around 2:30am.

Endeavour was initially scheduled to launch on Friday, April 29, but just prior to the scheduled 3:47pm launch, NASA discovered that Endeavour's auxiliary power unit had failed. It was so late in the game that the mission's astronauts were already en route to the shuttle. NASA quickly shut things down, and upon further inspection, discovered a problem with a box of switches that controls power feeds, known as a load control assembly-2 (LCA-2). NASA removed the malfunctioning box last week and replaced it with a new one.

Among the items Endeavour will carry to the ISS is the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 (AMS). It will be used to measure cosmic rays to gain a better understanding of cosmic radiation; a challenge for long-duration spaceflight. It might also help uncover the mysteries involved in dark matter or missing antimatter, NASA said. The 15,000-pound AMS is expected to be operational for the rest of the station's life; at least 10 years.

This will be Endeavour's 134th and final mission. NASA is scheduled to launch the space shuttle Atlantis at some point next month, after which it will retire its shuttle program. The shuttles, including Discovery and Enterprise, will then be sent to museums in New York, Florida, California, and Virginia. ( pcmag.com)

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Google to offer websites to Canada small business

Google to offer websites to Canada small business – Google aims to give away thousands of websites to small Canadian businesses to encourage them to establish an online presence, the search engine's Canadian head said on Tuesday.

Despite boasting the most plugged-in population in the world, Canada struggles when it comes to small businesses using the Internet to flag their products and increase sales, Chris O'Neill said in an interview on Tuesday.

People walk past logo next to main entrance - People walk past a logo next to the main entrance of the Google building in Zurich March 9, 2011

"The numbers jump off the page," he said. "Two-plus million small businesses in this country and less than a million have a website."

Canadians spent an average of 43.5 hours a month online in the last months of 2010, far ahead of second-place South Koreans and almost double the global average, according to data from comScore, an online data measurement company.

The most likely reasons a Canadian business might ignore the Web are fears it is too costly or complicated, or is unnecessary. Yet one in five Google searches are for local content, O'Neill said.

"It starts with us seeing an untapped opportunity for small businesses and entrepreneurs in Canada," he said, adding that Google hopes to give out 100,000 websites in Canada this year.

He declined to put a dollar figure on the offer, which includes a year of free hosting for websites with the country-specific .ca top-level domain.

"It's not about managing the pennies on this one. It's about investing and seeing where it goes," he said.

Google makes most of its money by selling targeted advertising on its search portal.

Canadians interested in taking up the offer can visit www.gybo.ca to choose a domain name, upload information and photos and then publish. (Reuters)

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Body language to power your career

Body language to power your career -- Successful business leaders are well aware of the power of body language, but new research is suggesting that "powerful" body language could be more important than your rank in an organization.

A recent study by researchers at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management and Stanford Graduate School of Business found that a powerful posture "activates a sense of power that produces behavioral changes in a person," regardless of their job title.

Participants in the study were assigned a high or low-ranking role and asked to adopt either an "expansive" -- legs apart and one arm spread out over an adjacent chair -- or "constricted" -- legs together, shoulders slouched and hands under thighs -- body posture.

How people hold themselves plays a key role in determining whether they act as if they're in charge

Three separate experiments were conducted which all showed that individuals in the open body position took more action than those who were constricted.

"Going into the research, we figured role would make a big difference. But shockingly, the effect of posture dominated the effect of role in each and every study," Li Huang, a doctoral student at Kellogg and co-author of the study, said.

But others weren't so surprised by the results of the study.

Dennis Kravetz, a psychologist and author of "Relating Effectively," says that how you present yourself, both in terms of communication style and body language, will always have a greater impact than a job title or rank.

"What a person is saying and how they say it is ultimately how you get your message across," Kravetz said.

And powerful posturing isn't necessarily something that can be universally employed. Kravetz says women and some Asian cultures could be turned off by the "expansive" poses used in the Kellogg/Stanford study.

But there are other, safer strategies you can employ which demonstrate confidence and leadership, he says.

Maintain eye contact

"Maintaining strong eye contact is interpreted as being confident, honest and direct. It is important for leaders and those who want to be influential to demonstrate this, Kravetz said.

If you don't, you can come across as evasive, unsure or worse still, a liar.

But be careful because this isn't the case in all cultures, Kravetz says. For example, in many Asian and some Hispanic cultures, unerring eye contact may be deemed offensive. Quick glances rather than holding eye contact are safer here, he says.

"Leaders and managers in general spend about 60% of their time listening, so doing this effectively is important, and eye contact is a very important part of both speaking and listening," Kravetz said.

Stand up straight and lean forward when seated

"People who are speaking react favorably to listeners who demonstrate that they are interested in what the speaker is saying," Kravetz said.

"Being closer and leaning toward a person is a very positive element, as long as it is not too close. So if a person wants to be seen as influential, powerful and a leader their body language must demonstrate this as well."

Use gestures and facial expressions

Gestures and facial expressions convey "a very good amount of the message and will always make the understanding of the message more effective than if the person does not use gestures and vary facial expressions," Kravetz says.

Also, vary your facial gestures when both speaking and listening in a way that reflects what someone has just said to you.

Again, be careful how and where you employ gestures.

Waving your arms around while delivering a speech won't wow an Asian audience and will simply raise suspicions about your temperament.

Say what you feel and feel what you say

Effective communicators are more direct in saying what they feel and feeling what they say, Kravetz says. So try to avoid indirect responses, cut out the ums and ahs and don't ramble on.

"Sometimes individuals will agree with the person because of how they said what they said more so than the actual content of the words. Your overall presentation can be very compelling if done well," Kravetz said.

Add this to effective gesturing and the right amount of eye contact and you've got quite a convincing package. ( cnn.com )

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How to take the plunge, without peeps

How to take the plunge, without peeps - Worn the right way, a low-neck dress can be a weapon of mass distraction. But, even as a plunging neckline makes you an instant headturner, it puts you at the risk of great fashion faux pas. Take, for instance, these ladies, who knowingly went down that road.

While pop star Katy Perry, as famous for her songs as she is for her cleavage, took the plunge with a navel baring V-neck at a recent public appearance, closer home, former model Mehr Rampal had a horrible spill at an recent awards do — all because both of them got the innerwear wrong.

“Before opting for a cleavage-baring neckline, first sort the innerwear out. If like Perry, it’s such a low neck that no bra can be worn, go for body tape, but never a nude piece of cloth placed so strangely,” says fashion stylist and critic Umesh Jivnani.

And going bra-less isn’t a wise thing to do, feel fashion experts. “If the neckline is so deep that nothing can be worn underneath, that still isn’t your last option. Wear paste-ons or bosom pads which are easily available, to avoid peek-a-boos,” says fashion editor Ekta Rajani.

“What looks sexy on one woman can end up looking vulgar on another. The right undergarment, especially with a deep neck, is very necessary. It will add the much-needed curves you want to show off, while also making the cleavage look taut, taking care of any sagging or such issues,” says designer Anupama Dayal.

The end result? While a little skin show might make heads turn, when you’re literally putting it all out there, the right undergarment is a must. “When you’re spending anywhere between R30,000 and upwards for a dress, then why skip on spending R1,000 on good, well-fitted inner-wear when it makes you look good?” adds Jivnani. So, don’t let the V neckline intimidate you, all you need is a quick shopping trip to the mall before flaunting it the right way.

Here’s how you can get the V-neck right

With a deep v-neck a plunge bra comes in handy. Similar to the design of a v-neck blouse, a plunge bra has a very deep separation between the cups, allowing for visible cleavage. They also provide a little more lift and separation, which can give the illusion of larger breasts, making them a good choice for any woman looking to enhance her assets,” says Deeksha J Dadu, of online lingerie portal, www.strapsandstrings.com. But what to do when you try to pull of a Perry or Mehr? “Self-adhesive cups will give minimal support without the centre band . You can also try a low-plunge U-shaped bra, designed specifically for such necklines. Balconette bras are also appropriate for low-cut blouses and shirts since they are often very low-cut and generally have underwire in them in order to support the chest,” adds Dadu.

The difference clever styling can go on to make

Former model Mehr Rampal wore this Monisha Jaising outfit to a recent awards, while actor Deepika Padukone wore a dress with the same cuts on a popular TV show. How the ladies carried the tricky dress with a cut just below the bosom made all the difference. While Mehr ended up making a faux pas by putting too much on view through the cutout in the dress, Deepika carried off the look with ease. It was surely a tricky dress to pick the right innerwear for, but the little extra effort surely paid off for Deepika.

“Spending the extra 20 minutes planning the look is well worth it. Always pick innerwear that will compliment the neckline. For a deep scooped neckline, opt for a nude, strapless bra with underwire for the right support,” says Rajani. ( hindustantimes.com )

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How to Win Friends: Have a Big Amygdala?

How to Win Friends: Have a Big Amygdala? - Got a big social network? Then you probably have a large amygdala, according to a new study that found a connection between the size of this brain region and the number of social relationships a person has. The complexity of those relationships — as measured by the number of people who occupied multiple roles in a social network such as being simultaneously a friend and a co-worker — was also linked with amygdala size.

The findings are in line with past animal studies that have shown that species with larger social groups have relatively larger amygdalas, when brain and body size are taken into account, compared with less social animals. "Our question was, could we see this variation within a single species?" says lead author Lisa Barrett, director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University.

Understanding the relationship between the size of an individual's amygdala and his or her social relationships could help lead to treatments for a variety of conditions that involve difficulties with social connections, such as depression or autism.

So what does the amygdala actually do? "[It's] strongly connected with almost every other structure in brain. In the past, people assumed it was really important for fear. Then they discovered it was actually important for all emotions. And it's also important for social interaction and face recognition," Barrett says. "The amygdala's job in general is to signal to the rest of brain when something that you're faced with is uncertain. For example, if you don't know who someone is, and you are trying to identify them, whether it is a friend or a foe, the amygdala is probably playing a role in helping you to perform all of those tasks."

Barrett says it is commonly assumed that the size of a structure reflects its computational capacity, noting that if your larger amygdala easily allows you to identify people you've met before at a cocktail party, you will have a much easier time connecting and socializing. "You can imagine that might be one thing someone with big amygdala might be better at and that might lay the foundation for easier formation of social bonds," she says.

The research, which was published in Nature Neuroscience, found a moderate correlation between amygdala size and the number and complexity of social relationships in 58 healthy adults aged 19 to 83.

Interestingly, however, amygdala size was not related to the quality of those relationships or to whether or not people enjoyed socializing. "We looked at measures of 'How much do you enjoy social interaction?' and 'Are you satisfied with your social support?' and that was not related to amygdala volume," says Barrett.

Prior research has shown that people with autistic spectrum disorders have smaller amygdalas, which could help explain their social problems. But these studies cannot determine cause or effect — whether having a small amygdala makes socializing difficult, or whether lack of social interaction shrinks the amygdala — or whether both factors interact and result in a smaller brain region. For example, it may be that the amygdala requires a certain amount of social experience in order to develop properly; not receiving that, it may remain small but capable of further growth given the right social exposure.

"This study represents an important initial study in human neurosociology — the study of the neurobiology of human living groups. The findings, while preliminary, suggest that the structure and functional capacity of our brain is influenced by the nature, quality and quantity of relational connections we — and our extended relational community — have," says Dr. Bruce Perry, senior fellow at the ChildTrauma Academy who was not associated with the research.

While this study did not look at the size of people's online social networks, the researchers plan to include those measures in future research to determine their influence. ( time.com )

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