Science
With Romantic Partners Men Walk Slower
When walking with female romantic partners, males tend to slow down by about 7 percent, according to new research published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, by Cara Wall-Scheffler and colleagues at Seattle Pacific University.
People have an optimal walking speed that minimises energy expenditure. This optimal speed varies with physical features like mass and lower limb length, and therefore males in any given population tend to have faster optimal walking speeds than females.
The authors examined individuals' speed choices when they walked around a track alone, with a significant other (with and without holding hands), and with friends of the same and opposite sex. They found that males walk at a significantly slower pace to match the females' paces, only when the female is their romantic partner. The paces of friends of either same or mixed sex walking together did not significantly change, suggesting that significant pace adjustments occur only for romantic partners.
These findings could have implications for both mobility and reproductive strategies of groups, and could help interpret fossil footprint trails and hunter gatherer strategies.
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PEOPLE LOOK BETTER IN A GROUP
People tend to be rated as more attractive when they're part of a group than when they're alone, according to findings published in Psychological Science.
This phenomenon – first dubbed the "cheerleader effect" by lady killer Barney Stinson on the popular TV show How I Met Your Mother – suggests that having a few friends around might be one way to boost perceived attractiveness.
According to psychological scientists Drew Walker and Edward Vul of the University of California, San Diego, people tend to "average out" the features of faces in a group, thereby perceiving an individual's face as more average than they would be otherwise.
To test this, the researchers performed five experiments with over 130 undergraduate students.
Participants were shown pictures of 100 people, and were asked to rate their attractiveness. Sometimes the person being rated was in a group portrait with two other people, and other times the pictures were cropped to show the person alone.
Overall, participants rated both female and male subjects as more attractive in the group shot than when pictured alone.
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India, US Preparing Satellites to Explore Martian Atmosphere
Two new science satellites are being prepared to join a fleet of robotic Mars probes to help determine why the planet most like Earth in the solar system ended up so different.
India's Mars Orbiter Mission, the country's first interplanetary foray, is due to blast off on November 5 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India.
Billed as a pathfinder to test technologies to fly to orbit and communicate from Mars, the satellite follows India's successful 2008-2009 Chandrayaan-1 moon probe, which discovered water molecules in the lunar soil.
The Mars Orbiter Mission has ambitious science goals as well, including a search for methane in the Martian atmosphere. On Earth, the chemical is strongly tied to life.
Methane, which also can be produced by non-biological processes, was first detected in the Martian atmosphere a decade ago.
But recent measurements made by NASA's Mars rover, Curiosity, show only trace amounts of methane, a puzzling finding since the gas should last about 200 years on Mars.
India's Mars Orbiter Mission also will study Martian surface features and mineral composition.
Also launching in November is NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, spacecraft.
MAVEN will focus on Mars' thin atmosphere, but rather than hunting methane, it is designed to help scientists figure out how the planet managed to lose an atmosphere that at one time was believed to be thicker than Earth's.
MAVEN is due to launch on November 18 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida and reach Mars on September 22, 2014 - the day after India's spacecraft arrives.
They will join two NASA rovers, two NASA orbiters and a European Space Agency satellite already studying Mars.
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How Seals Sleep With Only Half Their Brain at a Time
A new study led by an international team of biologists has identified some of the brain chemicals that allow seals to sleep with half of their brain at a time.
The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience and was headed by scientists at UCLA and the University of Toronto. Findings from this study may explain the biological mechanisms that enable the brain to remain alert during waking hours and go off-line during sleep.
The study's first author, University of Toronto PhD student Jennifer Lapierre, made this discovery by measuring how different chemicals change in the sleeping and waking sides of the brain. She found that acetylcholine – an important brain chemical – was at low levels on the sleeping side of the brain but at high levels on the waking side. This finding suggests that acetylcholine may drive brain alertness on the side that is awake.
These findings have possible human health implications because "about 40 percent of North Americans suffer from sleep problems and understanding which brain chemicals function to keep us awake or asleep is a major scientific advance. It could help solve the mystery of how and why we sleep" says the study's senior author Jerome Siegel of UCLA's Brain Research Institute.
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