///////////////////A University of Adelaide researcher will lead an Australian project to help address the world's biggest nutritional deficiency – lack of iron.
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Dr Alex Johnson has been awarded nearly $300,000 to work with the Bill Gates-funded HarvestPlus Challenge Program to increase iron content in rice and other cereal grains. More than two billion people – or 30% of the world's population – suffer from iron deficiency, which can cause anaemia, poor mental development, fertility problems and a depressed immune system.
////////////////////LIVING FOR PLSR NOT PAIN
///////////////////sbc=Working Memory "Arrays" in Parietal Cortex? [Developing Intelligence]
Posted: 09 Jun 2008 12:43 PM CDT
Working memory - the ability to hold information "in mind" in the face of environmental interference - has traditionally been associated with the prefrontal cortices (PFC), based primarily on data from monkeys. High resolution functional imaging (such as fMRI) have revealed that PFC is just one part of a larger working memory network, notably including the parietal cortex, which has long been the focus of research in the visual domain, and is primarily thought to carry out spatial computations.
What role might such spatial computations have in working memory? Wendelken, Bunge & Carter describe (in their new Neuropsychologia article) how a region of the posterior parietal cortex may be involved in "working memory for organized content - by virtue of its rich representation of space and spatial relationships." Specifically Wendelken et al argue that information is organized in a short-term state according to a spatial code in the superior parietal lobe (SPL). The authors note similarities between their theory and that of Marshuetz and colleagues, who proposed something similar based on the SPL's apparent involvement in number and magnitude representations (with yet others arguing that space, number and magnitude are all enabled by the same underlying representation).
/////////////////////For the first time, scientists have found fossilized burrows of tetrapods (four legged vertebrates) in Antarctica dating from the Early Triassic epoch, about 245 million years ago. They’ve been conducted research there since early 2006, and it’s the first time they’ve actually found something of this calibre.
The fossils are created in a relatively simple process: fine sand from an overflowing river pours into the animals’ burrows and hardens into casts. The good thing is the fact that there are some quite big burrows (14 inches long, 6 inches wide and 3 inches deep), but no animal remains can be found there.
According to Christian Sidor, an assistant professor of biology at University of Washington and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the UW, there are some scratch marks from the animals’ initial excavation.
“We’ve got good evidence that these burrows were made by land-dwelling animals rather than crayfish”
“We have documented that tetrapods were burrowing, making dens in Antarctica, back in the Triassic,” Sidor said. “There are lots of good reasons for burrowing at high latitudes, not the least of which is protection from the elements.”
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