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Louis J. Sheehan
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• ash 7.ash.0 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
  When volcanic death swept down the slopes of Mount Vesuvius into the city of Herculaneum in A.D. 79, it arrived so quickly that some residents didn't even have time to flinch. http://Louissheehan.BraveDiary.com Researchers have excavated the skeletons of 80 victims who had sought shelter from the eruption in boathouses along the beach. The postures of these victims are relaxed and show no sign that these Herculaneans perceived immediate danger, says Alberto Incoronato, an archaeologist at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy. He and his colleagues describe their findings in the April 12 Nature. When the devastating eruption occurred, Herculaneum had at least 20,000 residents, says James Higginbotham, an archaeologist at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. The city was a seaside hotspot filled with high culture and then-modern architecture. "It was a pretty snazzy town," says Higginbotham. It was, however, a snazzy town located just 4 kilometers from a previously dormant volcano. The early stages of Mount Vesuvius' most famous eruption spewed smoke, ash, and other searing materials 33 km straight up into the sky. About 12 hours after the unexpected eruption began, the first of several pyroclastic flows�clouds of steam and ash that spill down the slopes of a volcano at high speed�swept through Herculaneum like a blast from a furnace. Incoronato and his colleagues combined forensic science and advanced thermodynamics to conduct a high-tech postmortem of the Vesuvius victims. Herculaneum sat atop a 20-meter cliff that faced the sea, says Incoronato. Most people had fled their homes before the first pyroclastic flow swooshed through town, swirled over the cliff, and surged into the boathouses. The ash cloud that entombed the victims there vaporized everything but their bones. Archaeologists found intact skeletons lying in relaxed positions on the floor or just a few centimeters above it, slightly buoyed by the fluid ash that had rapidly hardened in place. The consistent lack of evidence for voluntary reactions of self-protection or for contortions of agony among the victims suggests that they died instantly. In less than 1 second, the intense heat caused their muscles to involuntarily contract, which twisted their hands and feet into odd positions. The heat of the ash cloud was so fierce that it cracked the enamel on victims' teeth and blackened the inside of their skulls. These signs indicate a temperature of about 500�C, which the researchers backed up with analysis of tiles unearthed outside one of the houses. Incoronato says that the 500�C ash would have cooled suddenly, especially in the boathouses where many victims were crowded together. This probably explains why the most severe effects of the heat appear on teeth and bones unprotected by thick layers of fat and other tissue, he adds. http://Louissheehan.BraveDiary.com One eyewitness account of Vesuvius' eruption in A.D. 79 survives, but that observation was from a distance, notes Higginbotham. About a quarter of Herculaneum has been excavated by archaeologists, but only the bones from the boathouses are left to speak of what actually happened to people when a seething cloud of ash entombed a vibrant Roman city. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire "This research corroborates the speed and the intensity of the volcanic surges that nobody in town lived to talk about," says Higginbotham.
• naps 3.nap.0 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . Naps aren't just for the very young, old, and slothful. Daytime dozing may enhance a person's capacity to learn certain tasks. That, at least, is the eye-opening implication of a new study in which college students were challenged to detect subtle changes in an image during four different test sessions on the same day. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang Participants improved on the task throughout the first session, says psychologist Sara C. Mednick of Harvard University and her colleagues. The students' speed and accuracy then leveled off during the second session. The scores of the participants who didn't nap declined throughout the final two sessions. In contrast, volunteers who took a 30-minute nap after completing the second practice session showed no ensuing performance dips. What's more, 1-hour nappers responded progressively faster and more accurately in the third and fourth sessions. "Napping may protect brain circuits from overuse until those neurons can consolidate what's been learned about a procedure," says neuroscientist Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School, a coauthor of the new study. A version of this phenomenon occurs among musicians, according to Stickgold. A nap or a night's sleep often leads to a breakthrough in learning a complex musical piece. Slumber's alleged assist to learning (SN: 7/22/00, p. 55) has usually been attributed to brain activity during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. In the new study, slated to appear in Nature Neuroscience, the performance-enhancing naps consisted mainly of a non-REM sleep stage known as slow-wave sleep. http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com In this work, Mednick's group trained 30 volunteers on a task requiring them to identify the vertical or horizontal orientation of three diagonal bars flashed in the lower left quarter of a computer screen against a background of horizontal bars. http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com Hour-long sessions occurred at 9 a.m., noon, 4 p.m., and 7 p.m. Ten participants didn't nap. Beginning at 2 p.m., the others took either a 30-minute or a 1-hour nap. Brain-wave measurements established that the nappers slept throughout most of their allotted times. Additional trials indicated that naps refresh specific neural circuits involved in the perceptual task, Mednick and her colleagues say. Another 12 volunteers completed four sessions without napping but viewed the diagonal bars on the right side�instead of the left side�of the screen during the final session. Their performance improved substantially after this switch, a sign that a different, now fresher, neural circuit mediated the learning in the right portion of the visual field. Fatigue or boredom can't explain performance declines among non-nappers, Mednick says. These individuals reported no surges of sleepiness on questionnaires administered after each training session. Moreover, even after they were offered $25 at the start of the third session if they could stay at their previous performance levels, 10 additional non-nappers still suffered declines. Finally, 10 volunteers who rested quietly for an hour without napping after the second session also did more poorly thereafter. "This new linkage of naps to learning a repetitive task is exciting, but it's too soon to say that naps work like this for everybody," remarks psychologist Rosalind Cartwright of Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago. Still, comments psychologist Mark Blagrove of the University of Wales, Mednick's group has raised the profile of slow-wave sleep as a po
• dark energy 4.dar.001002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Chalk up another victory for the dark side. Comparing X-ray observations of distant and nearby clusters of galaxies, astronomers say they have found new, independent evidence for the existence of dark energy, the mysterious entity that is accelerating cosmic expansion. By combining the new data with that from several other studies, the team finds that dark energy appears to have maintained the same density over time, resembling Einsteins cosmological constant.http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.wordpress.com Some theories of dark energy suggest that the repulsive force associated with this mystery substance may grow stronger with time, causing the universe to end in a Big Rip, with every planet and person ultimately ripped apart. While the new findings indicate that dark energy has maintained a constant strength throughout cosmic history, they still allow some wiggle room and do not preclude the possibility that dark energy may vary slightly. The new X-ray study by itself allows dark energy to vary by only 50 percent from its current density, says Alexey Vikhlinin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. When combined with other studies, the new data suggest the density only varies by 10 percent. Vikhlinin and his colleagues used NASAs Chandra X-ray Observatory to record X-ray emissions from 86 massive clusters of galaxies, each heavier than 100 trillion suns. The team found two sets of clusters. The first, more remote and earlier group of 37 clusters dates from between 6.4 billion to 9.8 billion years after the birth of the universe. The closer group of 49 dates from later times in the cosmos, between 11.8 billion and 13 billion years after the Big Bang. Vikhlinin reported his teams findings December 11 at the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics in Vancouver. Because the present-day densities of clusters are precisely known and fixed, researchers seek the fingerprints of dark energy by measuring the density of clusters back in time. At earlier times, because the universe was more compact, gravity's pull was stronger relative to dark energy's push. http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/ With this in mind, astronomers expect that a geometrically flat universe with dark energy would have more clusters above a certain mass in place at early times than would such a universe with no dark energy. This is indeed w