New Primate Fossil Poses Further Challenge to Ida

Pour more rain on Ida's parade. Last May, a team of researchers announced that the 47-million-year-old lemurlike fossil represented a missing link between primitive primates and humans. Many paleoanthropologists were skeptical, however, and shortly thereafter a new find challenged Ida's status. Now, another skeleton has come out of Ida's closet: a younger relative from Egypt that shows Ida's resemblance to apes and humans is only superficial.Researchers have named the new primateAfradapis longicristatus, a name that pegs it as an African member of an extinct group of primitive primates known as Adapiformes, to which Ida also belongs. Some researchers have long argued that Adapiformes might be primitive relatives of anthropoids--the higher primates including monkeys, apes, and humans--rather than ancestors of lorises and lemurs. But new fossils found over the past 20 years in Asia and Africa proved to be better candidates for the earliest anthropoids. Thediscovery of anthropoid-like features in the remarkably complete skeleton of Ida (Darwinius masillae), however, led the researchers who analyzed her remains to resurrect the view that Ida and, hence, adapids, were direct ancestors of anthropoids.If Ida were truly a missing link between early primates and us, then Afradapis, which appeared 10 million years after Ida, should also share the same traits with the earliest undisputed anthropoids that were alive at about the same time and in the same place. But that's not what Erik Seiffert of Stony Brook University in New York state and Elwyn Simons of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and their colleagues found when they unearthed Afradapis in the Fayum desert of Egypt in 2001. Working with 100 teeth and jaws from multiple individuals--all about 37 million years old--they compared 360 morphological traits in 117 living and extinct primates, in the most complete analysis assembled so far of extinct primates. When they scored Ida and Afradapis against those other primates, Seiffert and colleagues found that adapids do share some traits with anthropoids, such as the loss of a third upper and lower premolar. But these traits evolved more than once among primates, the team reports tomorrow in Nature. They are the result of convergent evolution, which is the acquisition of the same biological trait in unrelated lineages--and, thus, do not indicate inheritance of the trait from a shared ancestor.Indeed, other extinct primates, including two species from the Fayum in Egypt that are about the same age asAfradapis, had not evolved those so-called anthropoid-like traits (such as the loss of the premolar). And another new discovery of a 37-million-year-old primate from Asia called Ganlea megacanina also had features that suggest it is an early anthropoid--but not the same ones that supposedly tie Ida or Afradapis to our lineage. All these lines of evidence suggest that those "anthropoid-like" features emerged later and independently in anthropoids, says Seiffert. "It's coincidental."One of the researchers who studied Ida, however, responds that Ida andAfradapis look more like the group that gave rise to anthropoids than the group that gave rise to lemurs and lorises--and that there are too many traits to dismiss as convergent evolution. "The complete convergence postulated for Afradapis seems implausible to me," says paleontologist Philip Gingerich of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.Other researchers, however, say that the new analysis convincingly shows that adapids, including Ida, were not our direct ancestor. "Adapids never were a good bet for [higher primate] relatives, and the more data we get, the worse the case gets," says paleontologist Callum Ross of the University of Chicago in Illinois, who was not involved in either the Ida or Afradapis papers. Adds paleontologist K. Chris Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh: "This debate over adapids would have been dead long ago if it weren't for Ida."

By Ann Gibbons

lunteer Ministers Help L'Aquila Quake Victims

L’Aquila Scientology Volunteer Ministers have joined the disaster relief effort in the wake of Monday’s 6.3 magnitude earthquake in the city of L’Aquila in Central Italy. The 30-second earthquake, which collapsed thousands of buildings, killing more than 200 and leaving tens of thousands homeless, is the worst quake to hit this country in almost 20 years.

Rescue workers are carrying out the search and rescue operation, locating survivors trapped in buildings and pinned under rubble. The streets are clogged with fallen stone and masonry and boulders jarred loose by the earthquake from surrounding hills.

Scientology Volunteer Ministers, whose help in nearly every major disaster over the past decade has earned them a reputation for their indiscriminate acts of kindness and compassion, have joined the rescue workers. They have been manning field kitchens to provide hot meals, setting up tents for the homeless and working with local emergency services to locate survivors. They also bring personal help to the survivors using technology developed by Scientology Founder, L. Ron Hubbard. No matter how hopeless the situation may seem, their motto is “something CAN be done about it.”

To join or help fund the disaster relief effort contact the Scientology Volunteer Ministers Consultant at vm@volunteerministers.org.

by Scientology news
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Gizmo Converts Light Into Motion

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Conceptual bridge. This tiny silicon beam links light to vibration, potentially opening the way to technologies that combine optics and mechanics.

CREDIT: M. EICHENFIELD ET AL.,NATURE, ADVANCED ONLINE A tiny ladderlike beam of silicon converts light into vibrations and vice versa with extremely high efficiency, physicists report. That may seem like an esoteric result, but the finding could open the way to new physics and someday serve as a key element in optical microcircuits akin to the electronic microcircuits in computer chips.

Although the effect is ordinarily very small, light exerts forces on the things it strikes or flows through. In recent years, physicists have exploited those forces to set micrometer-sized objects aquiver. For example, 4 years ago, a team led by Kerry Vahala of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena showed that light leaking out the side of a nearby optical fiber could make a tiny disk of glass vibrate. And 2 years ago, Daniel Gauthier of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and colleagues showed that light traveling down a fiber could make the fiber itself shake. In fact, they stored a pulse of light as a vibration and released it nanoseconds later.

Now, Oskar Painter, Matt Eichenfield, and colleagues at Caltech have taken these efforts a big step forward. Along with Vahala, the applied physicists have designed a gadget that increases the strength of the interaction of light and vibrations by orders of magnitude, potentially opening the way to optical microchips in which low-frequency vibrations or microwaves control high-frequency optical signals or vice versa. The device combines two different but related fields: photonics and phononics.

For more than a decade, physicists have been developing so-called photonic crystals. These are samples of glass or other light-transmitting materials filled with regular patterns of holes, which alter the way light waves can travel--in much the same way that the array of atoms in a crystal affects the way electrons can move through it. In such photonic crystals, light of certain wavelengths cannot propagate, as the waves overlap and interfere to cancel themselves out. However, light of such a wavelength can be trapped within the crystal if the spacing of the holes is changed in one spot to allow it to exist there. Sound also consists of waves, so similar holey structures can be used to make phononic crystals that affect sounds in much the same way.

Eichenfield, Painter, and colleagues fashioned a hybrid photonic/phononic crystal out of a tiny bridge of silicon less than a micrometer wide and about 20 micrometers long. They etched rectangular holes into the beam to make a ladderlike structure, with several of the holes in the middle slightly closer together to trap light and vibrations of the same wavelengths but vastly different frequencies. The researchers then fed light into the beam with an optical fiber and measured the light reemerging from it. At predictable wavelengths, the amount of light coming back out dipped, showing that some of the light was getting trapped in the beam.

The researchers also looked at the total range of frequencies of the light coming out and found that some of it had been transferred to microwave frequencies--the exact frequencies of trapped vibrations, the team reports online this week in Nature. That shift proved that the light was making the beam vibrate and that the jiggling was then affecting the light and converting some of it to microwaves. In fact, each photon pushes on the beam with 10 times the force of gravity, Painter estimates.

"It's an incredibly exciting piece of work," says Duke's Gauthier. That's because the conversion of light to vibration is so much stronger than it has been in previous experiments. "People tend to use meters of optical fiber and milliwatts of laser power, whereas they have used a micrometer-sized device and microwatts of power." The device could have numerous applications, says physicist John Page of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. Specifically, the advance could pave the way to using vibrations or microwaves to control optical signals and to fashion switches, filters, or mixers in optical circuits on microchips.

By Adrian Cho

Why Sleepyheads Forget

Red-eye flights, all-night study sessions, and extra-inning playoff games all deprive us of sleep and can leave us forgetful the next day. Now scientists have discovered that lost sleep disrupts a specific molecule in the brain's memory circuitry, possibly leading to treatments for tired brains.

Neuroscientists studying rodents and humans have found that sleep deprivation interrupts the storage of episodic memories: information about who, what, when, and where. To lay down these memories, neurons in our brains form new connections with other neurons or strengthen old ones. This rewiring process, which occurs over a period of hours, requires a rat's nest of intertwined molecular pathways within neurons that turn genes on and off and fine-tune how proteins behave.

Neuroscientist Ted Abel of the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues wanted to untangle these molecular circuits and pinpoint which one sleep deprivation disrupts. The researchers started by studying electrical signals in slices of the hippocampus--the brain's memory center--from sleep-deprived mice. They tested for long-term potentiation (LTP), a strengthening of connections between neurons that neuroscientists think underlies memory. When the scientists tried to trigger LTP in these brain slices with electrical stimulation or chemicals, they found that methods that fired up cellular pathways involving the molecule cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) didn't work. Brain cells from sleep-deprived mice also held about 50% less cAMP than did cells from well-rested mice. In the brain, cAMP acts as a molecular messenger, passing signals between proteins that regulate activity of genes responsible for memory formation.

So how does sleep deprivation diminish levels of this important signaling molecule? The researchers measured 40% more of the enzyme PDE4A5 in the brains of sleep-deprived mice than in normal mouse brains. PDE4A5 is a type of phosphodiesterase (PDE) enzyme and chews up cAMP.

To confirm that extra enzyme led to sleep deprivation's effects on memory, the scientists next tried to counteract it with rolipram, a drug that inhibits PDE4A5 and other similar PDEs. Applying rolipram to brain slices from sleep-deprived mice restored LTP. The researchers then tested the animals' memories by conditioning them to associate a small electric shock with a specific cage. Mice kept awake for 5 hours--about half a full night's sleep for the rodents--lacked a specific memory for the conditioning cage. But sleep-deprived mice that received shots of rolipram after their training remembered just as well as well-rested animals, the scientists report tomorrow in Nature. "The animals lost about half of their sleep in a 24-hour period and they don't know it," Abel says. He and colleagues are now working to find molecules that knock out only PDE4A5.

The findings begin to answer a "long-standing mystery" about the specific cellular pathways disrupted by sleep deprivation, says David Dinges, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania who wasn't involved in the study. "Scientists like me can only describe what is affected [by sleep deprivation] at the behavioral level in humans," Dinges says. Linking observed memory deficits to the PDE4A5 enzyme "suggests a potential target for alleviating the effects of sleep deprivation in humans," says neuroscientist Sam Deadwyler of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

By Michael Torrice

Research Nurse Completes Scientology Volunteer Minister Training

New York — It is not unusual for the Church of Scientology of New York to train new Scientology Volunteer Ministers. But one of last week’s graduates was special—Dr. Channakan Boonnuch, a research nurse at the Siriraj Hospital of Thailand, the largest public hospital in that southeast Asian country.

Dr. Boonnuch was introduced to the Volunteer Ministers program last year at a seminar conducted by a Scientology Volunteer Ministers team from the Church of Scientology Mission of Bangkok. The Mission’s volunteers gained first-hand knowledge of the value of the Scientology Volunteer Ministers program when they helped the people of their country recover from the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Scientology religion and the Scientology Volunteer Ministers program, developed Scientology “Assists,” which address the mental and spiritual aspects of a person’s physical difficulties.

In her speech at the graduation ceremony in New York, Dr. Boonnuch spoke of her experience at a disaster site last year, which taught her how gratifying it was to help people with this Assist technology. She later prepared a medical paper on how to perform Scientology Assists and how using them enabled her to relieve trauma and suffering quickly and effectively. She was amazed that people who came to her crushed and despondent left smiling only minutes later.

“Using your techniques, I was able to help people who were suffering from pain and trauma, and make them smile,” said Dr. Boonnuch. “I have seen the effectiveness of these methods, and now I intend to speak about them in international journals and conferences.”

Dr. Boonnuch was so impressed with the Scientology technology she learned that she came to New York to undertake formal Volunteer Minister’s training, which she has now completed.

The Reverend John Carmichael, of the Church of Scientology of New York, presented Dr. Boonnuch with her Scientology Volunteer Ministers Assist Technology certificate and a bouquet of flowers. He also surprised her with a special jacket bearing the insignia of the Scientology Volunteer Ministers program to acknowledge how she exemplifies the qualities of such a volunteer, as stated by L. Ron Hubbard: “A Volunteer Minister is a person who helps his fellow man on a volunteer basis by restoring purpose, truth and spiritual values to the lives of others.”

by Scientology news