Gizmorama - October 31st, 2012

Good Morning,

Since it's Halloween, I selected a story about... FEAR! Sorry, it's hard to write scary. Apparently, there's a study that claims fear can alter spatial perception. Interesting and very scary, especially if you suffer from claustrophobia. Have a Happy Halloween!

Learn about this great study and other interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Manslaughter verdict in earthquake trial --*
L'AQUILA, Italy - Six Italian scientists have been sentenced to prison over a deadly 2009 earthquake, with prosecutors arguing they made falsely reassuring statements. The six scientists and an ex-government official were convicted of manslaughter by a regional Italian court and sentenced to six years for providing "inexact, incomplete and contradictory" information about the danger of the tremors felt ahead of the quake, the BBC reported Monday. The 6.3 magnitude quake devastated the city of L'Aquila and killed 309 people. The seven defendants, all members of the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks, maintained there was no way to predict major earthquakes. Judge Marco Billi also ordered the defendants to pay court costs and damages. More than 5,000 scientists signed an open letter to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano in support of the defendants, expressing concern in the scientific community that science itself was being put on trial.


*-- European mission to search for moon water --*
LONDON - A European mission to the moon will search for signs of water that could allow future astronauts to set up habitats on its surface, scientists say. Planned for 2018, the $800 million mission by the European Space Agency will land a robot probe on the Moon's surface to search for ice that measurements from orbiting spacecraft have suggested may exist at the poles and in the shadows of meteor craters. If the Lunar Lander mission successfully detects ice or water it could set the stage for manned settlements on the moon, scientists said. Water is heavy and expensive to transport from the Earth, so finding a source on the moon could sustain astronauts spending extended periods there, they said. "We want to see if the resources are there to let astronauts live off the land," Simon Sheridan, a researcher at Britain's Open University who is part of the team designing instruments for the spacecraft, told The Daily Telegraph. "There is evidence of vast deposits of volatile chemicals like water from orbiting missions, but this will be the first ground-based mission to look in a polar region." At its landing spot the Lunar Lander will drill into the ground, analyze the soil and radio the data back to Earth, researchers said.


*-- Study: Fear can alter spatial perception --*
ATLANTA - Fear can alter our spatial perception of approaching objects, causing us to underestimate the distance of a threatening one, U.S. and British psychologists say. An approaching snake or venomous spider may be farther away than our minds tell us, they said. "Our results show that emotion and perception are not fully dissociable in the mind," psychologist Stella Lourenco of Emory University reported. "Fear can alter even basic aspects of how we perceive the world around us. This has clear implications for understanding clinical phobias." People generally have a well-developed sense for when objects heading towards them will make contact, but an experiment showed the effect of fear could lessen the accuracy of that skill, the researchers said. Study participants making time-to-collision judgments of images shown approaching on a computer screen tended to underestimate the collision time for images of threatening objects, such as a snake or spider, as compared to non-threatening images, such as a rabbit or butterfly. "We're showing that what the object is affects how we perceive looming. If we're afraid of something, we perceive it as making contact sooner," co-researcher Matthew Longo of the University of London said.


*-- Whale recorded mimicking human speech --*
SAN DIEGO - A beluga whale whose vocalizations sounded remarkably close to human speech surprised U.S. researchers, they reported in a scientific journal. While there have been anecdotal reports of the whales, known as "canaries of the sea" for their high-pitched chirps, mimicking human-like speech, none had ever been recorded. Researchers say Noc, a beluga whale who lived at the National Marine Mammal Foundation in San Diego following his capture as a juvenile in 1977, had been making unusual sounds since 1984. When a diver at the foundation surfaced in Noc's tank saying, "Who told me to get out?" the researchers identified Noc as the culprit and made the first-ever recordings of the behavior, NewScientist.com reported Monday. "We were skeptical at first," Sam Ridgway of the foundation said, so he and his colleagues analyzed Noc's sound waves. "They were definitely unlike usual sounds for a [beluga], and similar to human voices in rhythm and acoustic spectrum." The vocal bursts averaged about three per second, with pauses reminiscent of human speech, the researchers said. The frequencies were spread out into "harmonics" in a manner very unlike whales' normal vocalizations and more like those of humans, they said. "Our observations suggest that the whale had to modify its vocal mechanics in order to make the speech-like sounds," Ridgway said. About four years after Noc started talking like a human, he stopped. The whale continued to vocalize, but those sounds were just the typical beluga whistles and squawks. In 1999, Noc died. "We never got his best speech imitation" on tape, Ridgway said. "We do not claim that our whale was a good mimic compared to such well-known mimics as parrots or mynah birds," the researchers wrote in the journal Current Biology. "However, the sonic behavior we observed is an example of vocal learning by the white whale. It seems likely that Noc's close association with humans played a role in how often he employed his human voice, as well as in its quality."

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