Science

Saving marriages by watching movies

Discussing five movies about relationships over a month could cut the three-year divorce rate for newlyweds in half, researchers report. The study, involving 174 couples, is the first long-term investigation to compare different types of early marriage intervention programs.
The findings show that an inexpensive, fun, and relatively simple movie-and-talk approach can be just as effective as other more intensive therapist-led methods – reducing the divorce or separation rate from 24 to 11 percent after three years.

“We thought the movie treatment would help, but not nearly as much as the other programs in which we were teaching all of these state-of-the-art skills," wrote Ronald Rogge, associate professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and lead author of the study. "The results suggest that husbands and wives have a pretty good sense of what they might be doing right and wrong in their relationships. Thus, you might not need to teach them a whole lot of skills to cut the divorce rate. You might just need to get them to think about how they are currently behaving. And for five movies to give us a benefit over three years – that is awesome."

Wolves are considerably better imitators than dogs

Although wolves and dogs are closely related, they show some striking differences. Scientists from the Messerli Research Institute at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna have undertaken experiments that suggest that wolves observe one another more closely than dogs and so are better at learning from one another.
Their findings have been published in the online journal PLOS ONE.
The scientists found that wolves are considerably better than dogs at opening a container, providing they have previously watched another animal do so. Their study involved 14 wolves and 15 mongrel dogs, all about six months old, hand-reared and kept in packs. Each animal was allowed to observe one of two situations in which a trained dog opened a wooden box, either with its mouth or with its paw, to gain access to a food reward. Surprisingly, all of the wolves managed to open the box after watching a dog solve the puzzle, while only four of the dogs managed to do so. Wolves more frequently opened the box using the method they had observed, whereas the dogs appeared to choose randomly whether to use their mouth or their paw.
The researchers think that it is likely that the dog-human cooperation originated from cooperation between wolves. During the process of domestication, dogs have become able to accept humans as social partners and thus have adapted their social skills to include interactions with them, concomitantly losing the ability to learn by watching other dogs.

Drug trafficking leads to deforestation in Central America

Add yet another threat to the list of problems facing the rapidly disappearing rainforests of Central America: drug trafficking.
In an article in the journal Science, seven researchers who have done work in Central America point to growing evidence that drug trafficking threatens forests in remote areas of Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and nearby countries.
Traffickers are slashing down forests, often within protected areas, to make way for clandestine landing strips and roads to move drugs, and converting forests into agribusinesses to launder their drug profits, the researchers say.
“Much of this appears to be a response to US-led anti-trafficking efforts, especially in Mexico, wrote  Kendra McSweeney, lead author and an associate professor of geography at The Ohio State University. “In response to the crackdown in Mexico, drug traffickers began moving south into Central America around 2007 to find new routes through remote areas to move their drugs from South America and get them to the United States.”
For example, the researchers found that the amount of new deforestation per year more than quadrupled in Honduras between 2007 and 2011 – the same period when cocaine movements in the country also spiked.

To hear without being heard: First nonreciprocal acoustic circulator created

A team of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering has built the first-ever circulator for sound. The team's experiments successfully prove that the fundamental symmetry with which acoustic waves travel through air between two points in space ("if you can hear, you can also be heard") can be broken by a compact and simple device. Andrea Alù, associate professor at the Cockrell School's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering was led the experiment which was published in the Jan 31 issue of Science.  
An electronic circulator, typically used in communication devices and radars, is a nonreciprocal three-port device in which microwaves or radio signals are transmitted from one port to the next in a sequential way. When one of the ports is not used, the circulator acts as an isolator, allowing signals to flow from one port to the other, but not back. The UT Austin team realized the same functionality is true for sound waves traveling in air, which led to the team's building of a first-of-its-kind three-port acoustic circulator.
The experiment may lead to advances in noise control, new acoustic equipment for sonars and sound communication systems, and improved compact components for acoustic imaging and sensing.