Health & Science

Dark matter, detected at last?

For decades, physicists around the world have been hot on the trail of dark matter, an elusive substance believed to constitute more than 80 percent of the mass of the universe. Its existence has been inferred, rather than witnessed, and would explain much of what would be otherwise inexplicable—how galaxies formed, and why the universe is still expanding, not contracting. Dark matter is thought to be made up of weakly interacting massive particles, heavy subatomic particles that rarely interact with normal matter—making the dark stuff virtually impossible to detect. Yet a team of U.S. scientists may have found evidence that WIMPs exist. The discovery was made by the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment, a stack of super-cold detectors located in Minnesota, a half-mile underground to screen out background noise from solar and cosmic rays. The experiment recently registered two potential blips of energy that could well be the signature—and the first ever detection—of the ghostly WIMPs streaming in from space. The news set off “a high level of serious hysteria” among scientists, physicist Gordon Kane tells The New York Times. But many are skeptical; the experiment’s operators concede that there’s a 25 percent chance that the results are false positives caused by more mundane particles that leaked into the chamber. “It seems likely it is dark matter detection, but no proof,” Kane says.

Keeping the cave tidy

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Modern homes have separate rooms dedicated to different activities, including the kitchen, home office, and living room. But the impulse to organize one’s living space into categories isn’t at all new. Archaeologists have unearthed evidence at an 800,000-year-old campsite in Israel that its residents, a hominid predecessor of humans called Homo heidelbergensis, segregated the space into discrete “activity areas” for sleeping, food preparation, toolmaking, and hearths. Homo heidelbergensis was clearly “a very tidy species,” archaeologist Clive Gamble, who was not involved with the find, tells ScienceNow. Organizing living spaces at this level of sophistication connotes a level of cognition once thought to be exclusive to humans, or Homo sapiens, who migrated into Europe some 40,000 years ago. The new finding shows that even our primitive hominid ancestors were capable of spatial neatness.

The secret of sensitive hands

Most women have a more acute sense of touch than the average man. But the reason has nothing to do with gender, it turns out. Canadian researchers measured the fingertips of 100 volunteers, male and female, and gave them the tactile equivalent of an eye exam. The subjects were asked to touch surfaces containing parallel grooves; if they could feel the grooves, they were given progressively finer grooves to touch until the surfaces felt smooth. The scientists found that the subjects who could feel the narrowest grooves were those with the smallest fingertips. In most cases, those small fingertips belonged to women, but when men had small fingertips, their hands were just as sensitive. “We now understand that this sex difference is not actually a ‘sex effect’ but rather an effect of finger size,” neuroscientist Daniel Goldreich tells New Scientist. Small fingertips, researchers found, have more densely packed touch receptors, rendering them more sensitive.

Talking your way through problems

If you find yourself struggling to solve a complex math problem, try working through it out loud, says Scientific American. Psychologists in Spain found that college-level math students who detailed their thinking processes aloud were able to solve problems faster and with greater accuracy than their silent counterparts. In the study, quiet and nonquiet students were placed in separate rooms, given problems to solve, and monitored on videotape. The test results confirmed that students who talked aloud, or who drew pictures to map out the problems, scored higher and finished faster. The researchers aren’t quite sure why this approach works, says psychologist Jose Luis Villegas Castellanos, only that representing a problem verbally or visually clearly offers “more possibilities of finding the right solution.”

The octopus’ portable armor

Add the octopus to the growing list of animals seemingly capable of using tools. During several dives in Indonesia, Australian biologists documented the remarkable efforts of the local veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, to procure empty coconut shells for refuge. The animal first digs up the shell, which has fallen to the sea floor, and squirts it clean of mud. It then straddles the shell, empty-side up, stiffens its tentacles, and gallops off across the sea bottom with the shell—as far as 65 feet—like an eight-legged horse. “I almost drowned laughing when I saw this the first time,” researcher Julian Finn tells BBCnews.com. The octopuses use the shells as portable shelters from predators as they move from place to place. It’s unclear whether the octopuses learn to use shells as armor by watching other octopuses, or whether the behavior is somehow wired into their neurological system.