Tuesday, February 2, 2010

“Researchers sail to study, not kill, whales (The Japan Times)” plus 1 more

“Researchers sail to study, not kill, whales (The Japan Times)” plus 1 more

Researchers sail to study, not kill, whales (The Japan Times)

Posted: 02 Feb 2010 01:02 PM PST

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it.

WELLINGTON (AP) Researchers set sail Tuesday from New Zealand to study whales off Antarctica without killing them — an open challenge to Japan's killing of up to 1,000 whales a year in the name of science.

Japan has a six-boat whaling fleet in Antarctic waters as part of its scientific whaling program, a permissible exception to the International Whaling Commission's 1986 ban on commercial whaling. Opponents claim Japan's program is commercial whaling in disguise because the whale meat is sold for food.

Some 18 scientists from Australia, France and New Zealand are taking part in the initial six-week voyage from Wellington to research whales, their food and their interaction with the environment.

Andrew Leachman, captain of the research vessel Tangaroa, said he expects to take about 7 1/2 days to reach the edge of the Antarctic pack ice near Cape Colbeck on the Ross Sea, where the team will begin tracking whales in temperatures of about minus 2.

Australian Conservation Minister Peter Garrett said the research project, named the Southern Ocean Research Partnership, seeks to reform the management of science within the IWC, end scientific whaling and develop internationally agreed, cooperative whale conservation management plans.

"It is the largest (project) of its kind in the world that places a premium on scientific knowledge and says that we don't have to kill whales to learn about them," Garrett said.

The techniques they use will include biopsy sampling using retrievable darts, photography, satellite tag tracking, whale feces recovery and acoustic surveys.

"We remain absolutely and completely opposed to killing whales in the name of science," Garrett told reporters as he extended an invitation to Japan and others to participate in the research.

Despite protests by antiwhaling groups like the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the number of whales targeted by the Japanese in their program has more than doubled, Garrett said.

He said the research program is not intended to collect evidence for possible legal action to try to halt Japan's annual whale kill. Australia sent a government vessel to watch Japan's whale fleet during the 2007-2008 season and collect evidence for a possible lawsuit in an international court, but the threat of legal action has yet to be followed up.

Japan's Institute of Cetacean Research has no intention at this stage of taking part in the nonlethal research program, said Glenn Inwood, the New Zealand-based spokesman for the institute.

"If you want to hunt whales . . . to eat them, then you are going to need data that can only be obtained through lethal research," he said.

Nonlethal whale research can't provide age-related data or accurate data on individual whale birthrates, he said.

Preliminary results of the expedition will be presented at the IWC annual meeting in Morocco in June. Inwood said Japan will respond to the research once it is published.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Imaging techniques reveal new picture of sound processing (New Kerala)

Posted: 02 Feb 2010 01:09 AM PST

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it.

London, Feb 2 : Researchers from the University of Maryland have come up with a surprising picture of neuronal activity after using advanced imaging techniques to see how the brain processes sound.

The study was conducted by Patrick Kanold, Assistant Professor of Biology, Shihab Shamma, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Institute for Systems Research (ISR), and Sharba Bandyopadhyay, Assistant Research Scientist (ISR).

Dr. Kanold said all our knowledge of the brain''s functioning has been based on taking a small sampling of all available neurons and making inferences about how the other neurons respond.

He explained: "This is like showing someone who wants to know how America looks, ''Here is one person from New York City and one person from California.'' You don''t get a very good picture of what the country looks like from that sampling."

However, Kanold and his team were able to look at the activity of all the neurons in a large region of the auditory cortex simultaneously.

To get the highest resolution picture ever taken of how auditory cortex neurons are organized, the scientists used a technique to fill neurons in living mice with a dye that glows brightly when calcium levels rise, a key signal that neurons are firing.

Thereafter, they selectively illuminated specific regions of the cortex with a laser and measured the neuronal activity of hundreds of neurons in response to stimulation by simple tones of different frequencies. Kanold''s research is the first to apply this technique to the auditory cortex and reveals an unprecedented amount of detail about how hearing happens.

Dr. Kanold said: "We discovered that the organization of the cortex does not look as pretty as it does in the textbooks, which surprised us.

"Things are a lot messier than expected." And we don''t see evidence of the maps previously proposed using less precise techniques."

Dr. Shihab Shamma said: "These results may rewrite our classical views of how cortical circuits are organized and what functions they serve."

The study used different dyes to measure differences in how the neurons receive sound information (the inputs), and how they process that sound (the outputs).

Earlier it was believed that neighbouring neurons receiving the same inputs would also produce the same outputs, but Kanold''s study discovered something very different

Dr. Kanold said: "Neighboring neurons do their own thing by creating different outputs...You can imagine that you and your neighbor both receive water to your houses from the same pipe, but you do different things with it - you might cook with it while your neighbor waters the lawn. You can''t assume that they are doing the same thing just because they are neighbors."

He added: "Each individual neuron is getting inputs from a wide range of frequencies, and by selecting which frequencies they are strongly responding to, they might be very easily able to shift their function."

The findings of the study have appeared in the January 31 online edition of Nature Neuroscience.

--ANI

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)