Ever wondered how we are able to conduct a conversation at a noisy party? Researchers from Japan, Canada and Germany have found that it is our left brain that picks out the desired sounds from a cacophony of loud, competing sounds.
“In daily life, we are always exposed to several noises at the same time and we have to pick up important signals, for example, speech sounds, from the background noises,“ wrote researcher Ryusuke Kakigi from Japan’s National Institute for Physiological Sciences.
“We found that the left hemisphere is generally dominant for auditory processing in noisy environments,“ he wrote in an email response to questions from Reuters.
It is well known that speech signals are processed in the left brain.
But this study, led by Hidehiko Okamoto and Christo Pantev at the University of Muenster in Germany, furthers our understanding of how the human brain is able to zero in on the specific sounds it wants and process them.
In the latest issue of the online journal BMC Biology, the scientists said they used neuroimaging and observed neural mechanisms in volunteers who were exposed to different combinations of tests and background sounds.
“Test sounds were played either to the left or to the right ear, while the competing noise was presented either to the same or to the opposite ear,“ they wrote.
“By monitoring the brain’s response to these different sound combinations, the team observed that the left hemisphere was the site of most neural activity associated with processing sounds in a noisy environment.“

FIFA executive Viacheslav Koloskov, seen here in 2006, has said that football's governing body may introduce goal-line technology at the 2010 World Cup.

Football governing body FIFA may introduce goal-line technology at the 2010 World Cup if it proves effective at the world club championship in Japan next month, a FIFA executive said.
In the experimental system, a microchip in the ball relays an electronic signal to the referee’s watch when it crosses the goal line, Physorg.com said.
“FIFA is very much interested in the test results,“ FIFA executive Viacheslav Koloskov, head of the Club World Cup organizing committee, told a news conference here.
“If everything is perceived well enough, this goal-line technology will be widely used in the World Cup in 2010,“ he said.
FIFA has decided to use the high-tech system at the 2007 Club World Cup, to be contested by continental club champions in Japan between December 7 and 16. Italian Serie-A side AC Milan and Boca Juniors of Argentina are favorites to win it.
The world body had dropped plans to use the system at the 2006 World Cup in Germany after trials proved inconclusive.
“Players are always concerned about difficult judgements,“ said Nobuhisa Yamada, captain of the J-League side Urawa Reds, who will represent Asia at the club championship.
“So if the technology improves the accuracy of goal-line calls, that will be great for players,“ he said.

Resveratrol, a nutritional supplement derived from grape extract, blocks a cellular signaling pathway known as the Wnt pathway.

Low doses of freeze-dried grape powder inhibit genes linked to the development of sporadic colorectal cancer, University of California, Irvine cancer researchers found.
The study suggests that a diet rich in grapes may help prevent the third most common form of cancer, one that kills more than a half a million people worldwide each year, ScienceDaily reported.
Led by Dr. Randall Holcombe, director of clinical research at the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at UC Irvine, the study followed up on previous in vitro studies showing that resveratrol, a nutritional supplement derived from grape extract, blocks a cellular signaling pathway known as the Wnt pathway. The Wnt pathway has been linked to more than 85 percent of sporadic colon cancers, which is the most common form of colon cancer.
The UC Irvine researchers conducted their study with colon cancer patients. One group was given 20 milligrams daily of resveratrol as a pill; another drank 120 grams daily of grape powder mixed in water; and a third drank 80 grams daily of grape powder.
While the supplements did not have an impact on existing tumors, biopsied colon tissue showed that Wnt signaling in the patients taking 80 grams of grape powder was significantly reduced. Similar changes were not seen in patients taking the higher dose of grape powder or the resveratrol pills.
The researchers aren’t certain why the lower dose of grape powder was more effective than the higher one. However, they believe that the active components in the grapes may have different effects at low dose than they do at high dose, which is a fairly common finding in nutritional studies.
“This is truly exciting, because it suggests that substances in grapes can block a key intracellular signaling pathway involved in the development of colon cancer before a tumor develops,“ said Holcombe.
The resveratrol chemical is found naturally in grape skins and also in peanuts. It is unclear why resveratrol alone was not as effective, but Holcombe believes that other grape chemicals may supplement or boost resveratrol’s efficacy.

Researchers in Britain said they were able to slow and then stop a squirt of light in what they described as a key step towards the future of ultra-fast computing.
The technique, called “trapped rainbow,“ would help optical data storage, with light replacing electrons to store information, according to AFP.
Controlling light would also help engineers control major nodes where billions of optical data “packets“ arrive at the same time.
By slowing some packets to let others through, rather like a traffic congestion scheme, the flow of data can be boosted.
The research, by Ortwin Hess, a professor at the University of Surrey at Guildford, southern England and postgraduate student Kosmas Tsakmakidis, is based on the so-called “negative refractive index“ of metamaterials.
Metamaterials are novel materials with metal components that are smaller than the wavelength of light, while the refractive index measures the slowing of light when it passes through an object.
The innovation exploits a principle called the Goos-Haenchen effect, an optical phenomenon discovered 60 years ago that happens to polarized light traveling in a straight line.
When this light hits an object or an interface between two media, it does not immediately bounce back but travels very slightly along that object. In the case of metamaterials, the light in fact travels very slight backwards along the object.
Hess conjectured creating a prism “sandwich“--a tapered layer of glass, surrounded by two layers of negative refractive index metamaterials.
A packet of white light injected into the glass from the wide end of the prism slows as it travels down the taper and eventually comes to a standstill.
The description of it as a “trapped rainbow“ derives from the fact that the constituent frequencies of white light are the colors of the rainbow--red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
Each individual frequency is stopped at a different point down the taper, until finally the light is stopped.
“It’s like wading through snow, it gets more and more sluggish,“ Hess told AFP in an interview. Eventually, “it just sits there and gets trapped.“
In a press release, the University of Surrey said that by exploiting the different frequencies that comprise the light spectrum and by slowing, stopping and capturing these frequences, the way was open for a massive boost in data handling.
“The technique would allow the use of light rather than electrons to store memory in devices such as computers, enabling an increase in operating capacity of 1,000 percent,“ it claimed.

An artist's rendering of what the environment around Pleiades star HD 23514 might look like as two planets collide.

Small, rocky planets that could resemble the Earth or Mars may be forming around a star in the Pleiades star cluster, astronomers said.
One of the stars in the cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters, is surrounded by an extraordinary number of hot dust particles that could be the “building blocks of planets“ said Inseok Song, a staff scientist at NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, according to Reuters.
“This is the first clear evidence for planet formation in the Pleiades, and the results we are presenting may well be the first observational evidence that terrestrial planets like those in our solar system are quite common,“ said Joseph Rhee of the University of California Los Angeles, who led the study.
There is “hundreds of thousands of times as much dust as around our sun,“ said Benjamin Zuckerman, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy. “The dust must be the debris from a monster collision, a cosmic catastrophe.“
The team used two telescopes to spot the dust, and report their findings in Astrophysical Journal.
Located about 400 light years away in the constellation of Taurus, the Pleiades is one of the best known star clusters and among the closest to Earth. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 5.8 trillion miles.
“The cluster actually contains some 1,400 stars,“ said Song.
Song said the dust can accumulate into comets and small asteroid-size bodies, and then clump together to form planetary embryos, and finally full-fledged planets.
“In the process of creating rocky, terrestrial planets, some objects collide and grow into planets, while others shatter into dust; we are seeing that dust,“ Song said.
“Our observations indicate that terrestrial planets similar to those in our solar system are probably quite common,“ Zuckerman added.
Researchers have observed about 200 planets around stars outside our solar system but none are as small as Earth and just one, spotted earlier this year, appears potentially capable of supporting life.

Xenoposeidon lived about 140 million years ago, was about the size of an elephant and weighed 7.5 tons.

A fossilized bone dug up near Hastings, southeast Britain, 113 years ago has been recognized as a completely new family of dinosaur.
The animal belongs to a general type of dinosaur called a sauropod--which was characterized by a large body, a long neck and a small head, BBC reported.
A PhD student from the University of Portsmouth stumbled upon the specimen while browsing through the shelves of London’s Natural History Museum.
The work is to appear in the academic journal Palaeontology.
The fossil represents the dorsal vertebra (back bone) of a new family, genus and species of dinosaur now named Xenoposeidon proneneukus.
It lived about 140 million years ago, was about the size of an elephant and weighed 7.5 tons.
“It leapt out at me as being different,“ said Mike Taylor, a computer programmer who is studying sauropod vertebrae as part of his PhD at Portsmouth.
“It was unmistakably a dorsal vertebra from a sauropod, but it didn’t look like any dorsal I’d ever seen before.“
The bone has lain in the Natural History Museum since its discovery in the early 1890s in Ecclesbourne Glen, near Hastings, by fossil collector Philip James Rufford.
It was briefly described by the British palaeontologist Richard Lydekker but was then left untouched for the next 113 years.
Dr Paul Barrett, a researcher in palaeontology at the museum, said: “Dinosaur bones are being constantly reassessed and our collections still offer us lots of surprises.“
Mr Taylor and fellow palaeontologist Dr Darren Naish know the preserved bone came from near the hip area of the dinosaur.
From this they made an informed guess about the size and shape of the animal and were able to establish why Xenoposeidon is not only a new genus and species, but probably a new family of dinosaur.
“The difference between this specimen and other sauropod vertebrae is sufficiently great that I concluded that it could not be placed in any existing species or genus,“ said Taylor.
“In fact it can’t be placed in any existing sauropod family.“

A portable device that could scan fingerprints in microseconds has been developed by scientists in India. The system, which works using a technique called optical coherence tomography, promises to be better than existing fingerprint detection methods since it does not require any chemical processing.
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is like an optical version of ultrasound imaging, NewScientist.com reported.
The technique provides a transparent 3D structural picture by sending light though the pattern of natural secretions left on a surface by a finger and combining the reflected beam with a “reference beam“ produced by bouncing light from a laser off a mirror.
This produces an interference pattern at a photodetector--the same as those found in a digital camera--which can then be used to reconstruct an image of the original fingerprint.
The new device, developed by Satish Kumar Dubey and Dalip Singh Mehta of the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, is a “swept-source“ OCT, which employs a rapidly scanning laser.
A key advantage of the design is that undesired reflections can be filtered out using a mathematical approach called selective Fourier filtering. This, in turn, helps the system detect fingerprints from surfaces that do not reflect light well, such as paper. Conventional techniques require chemical processing to enhance the contrast of fingerprint impressions.
The device currently uses a low frame-rate digital camera as its photodetector, so its response time is limited. “This can be improved using a high speed camera with smaller pixel size, which means the device will have the speed of a few microseconds,“ Mehta told New Scientist.