Anthropology News, Science News

Scientists at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center are
about to embark on a human trial to test whether a new cancer treatment
will be as effective at eradicating cancer in humans as it has proven
to be in mice.

The treatment will involve transfusing
specific white blood cells, called granulocytes, from select donors,
into patients with advanced forms of cancer. A similar treatment using
white blood cells from cancer-resistant mice has previously been highly
successful, curing 100 percent of lab mice afflicted with advanced
malignancies.

Zheng Cui, Ph.D., lead researcher and
associate professor of pathology, will be announcing the study June 28
at the Understanding Aging conference in Los Angeles.

The
study, given the go-ahead by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,
will involve treating human cancer patients with white blood cells from
healthy young people whose immune systems produce cells with high
levels of cancer-fighting activity.

The basis of the study
is the scientists’ discovery, published five years ago, of a
cancer-resistant mouse and their subsequent finding that white blood
cells from that mouse and its offspring cured advanced cancers in
ordinary laboratory mice. They have since identified similar
cancer-killing activity in the white blood cells of some healthy humans.

"In
mice, we’ve been able to eradicate even highly aggressive forms of
malignancy with extremely large tumors," Cui said. "Hopefully, we will
see the same results in humans. Our laboratory studies indicate that
this cancer-fighting ability is even stronger in healthy humans."

The
team has tested human cancer-fighting cells from healthy donors against
human cervical, prostate and breast cancer cells in the laboratory –
with surprisingly good results. The scientists say the anti-tumor
response primarily involves granulocytes of the innate immune system, a
system known for fighting off infections.

Granulocytes are
the most abundant type of white blood cells and can account for as much
as 60 percent of total circulating white blood cells in healthy humans.
Donors can give granulocytes specifically without losing other
components of blood through a process called apheresis that separates
granulocytes and returns other blood components back to donors.

In
a small study of human volunteers, the scientists found that
cancer-killing activity in the granulocytes was highest in people under
age 50. They also found that this activity can be lowered by factors
such as winter or emotional stress. They said the key to the success
for the new therapy is to transfuse sufficient granulocytes from
healthy donors while their cancer-killing activities are at their peak
level.

For the upcoming study, the researchers are currently
recruiting 500 local potential donors who are 50 years old or younger
and in good health to have their blood tested. Of those, 100 volunteers
with high cancer-killing activity will be asked to donate white blood
cells for the study. Cell recipients will include 22 cancer patients
who have solid tumors that either didn’t respond originally, or no
longer respond, to conventional therapies. The study will cost $100,000
per patient receiving therapy, and for many patients (those living in
22 states, including North Carolina) the costs may be covered by their
insurance company. There is no cost to donate blood. For general
information about insurance coverage of clinical trials, go to the
American Cancer Society’s web site at www.cancer.org/docroot/ETO/content/ETO_6_2x_State_Laws_Regarding_Clinical_Trials.asp.)

For more information about qualifications for donors and participants, go to www.wfubmc.edu/LIFT
(Web site will be available the evening of 6/27.) Cancer-killing
ability in these cells is highest during the summer, so researchers are
hoping to find volunteers who can afford the therapy quickly.

"If the study is effective, it would be another arrow in the quiver of
treatments aimed at cancer," said Mark Willingham, M.D., a
co-researcher and professor of pathology. "It is based on 10 years of
work since the cancer-resistant mouse was first discovered."

Volunteers
who are selected as donors – based on the observed potential
cancer-fighting activity of their white cells – will complete the
apheresis, a two- to three-hour process similar to platelet donation,
to collect their granulocytes. The cancer patients will then receive
the granulocytes through a transfusion – a safe process that has been
used for more than 30 years. Normally, the treatment is used for
patients who have antibiotic-resistant infectious diseases. The
treatment will be given for three to four consecutive days on an
outpatient basis. Up to three donors may be necessary to collect enough
blood product for one study participant.

"The difference
between our study and the traditional white cell therapy is that we’re
selecting the healthy donors based on the cancer-killing ability of
their white blood cells," said Cui. The scientists are calling the
therapy Leukocyte InFusion Therapy (LIFT).

The goal of the
phase II study is to determine whether patients can tolerate a
sufficient amount of transfused granulocytes for the treatment.
Participants will be monitored on a regular basis, and after three
months scientists will evaluate whether the treatment results in clear
clinical benefits for the patients. If this phase of the study is
successful, scientists will expand the study to determine if the
treatment is best suited to certain types of cancer.

Source

Amazonian tribe has no word to express ‘one,’ other numbers

An Amazonian language with only 300 speakers has no word to express
the concept of "one" or any other
specific number, according to a new
study from an MIT-led team.

The team, led by MIT professor of
brain and cognitive sciences Edward Gibson, found that members of the
Piraha tribe in remote northwestern Brazil use language to express
relative quantities such as "some" and "more," but not precise numbers.

It
is often assumed that counting is an innate part of human cognition,
said Gibson, "but here is a group that does not count. They could
learn, but it’s not useful in their culture, so they’ve never picked it
up."

The study, which appeared in the June 10 online edition of
the journal Cognition, offers evidence that number words are a concept
invented by human cultures as they are needed, and not an inherent part
of language, Gibson said.

The work builds on a study published in
2004, which found that the Piraha had words to express the quantities
"one," "two," and "many." The MIT researchers observed the same
phenomenon when they asked Piraha speakers to describe sets of objects
as they were added, from one to 10.

However, the MIT team decided
to add a new twist–they started with 10 objects and asked the tribe
members to count down. In that experiment, the tribe members used the
word previously thought to mean "two" when as many as five or six
objects were present, and they used the word for "one" for any quantity
between one and four.

This indicates that "these aren’t counting numbers at all," said Gibson. "They’re signifying relative quantities."

He
said this type of counting strategy has never been observed before,
although it may also be found in other languages believed to have
"one," "two," and "many" counting words.

The paper is part of a
larger project that investigates the relationship between Piraha
culture and their cognition and language, testing some claims by Daniel
Everett, a linguist at Illinois State University, in a 2005 issue of
Current Anthropology.

One other discovery of the project is
that the Piraha can perform exact matching tasks as long as there is no
memory component to them, but once there is a memory component, they
approximate their matches. This suggests that language is a cognitive
technology that aids humans in memory tasks.

Lead author of the
paper is Michael Frank, a graduate student in Gibson’s lab. Other
authors are Evelina Fedorenko, a postdoctoral associate at the McGovern
Institute for Brain Research at MIT, and Everett.

massachusetts institute of technology

Evidence of Violent Eruptions on Gakkel Ridge in the Arctic Defies Assumptions about Seafloor Pressure and Volcanism

A research team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
has uncovered evidence of
explosive volcanic eruptions deep beneath the
ice-covered surface of the Arctic Ocean. Such violent eruptions of
splintered, fragmented rock—known as pyroclastic deposits—were not
thought possible at great ocean depths because of the intense weight
and pressure of water and because of the composition of seafloor magma
and rock.

Researchers found jagged, glassy rock fragments spread out over a 10
square kilometer (4 square mile) area around a series of small volcanic
craters about 4,000 meters (2.5 miles) below the sea surface. The
volcanoes lie along the Gakkel Ridge, a remote and mostly unexplored
section of the mid-ocean ridge system that runs through the Arctic
Ocean.

“These are the first pyroclastic deposits we’ve ever
found in such deep water, at oppressive pressures that inhibit the
formation of steam, and many people thought this was not possible,”
said WHOI geophysicist Rob Reves-Sohn, lead author and chief scientist
for the Arctic Gakkel Vents Expedition (AGAVE) of July 2007. “This
means that a tremendous blast of CO2 was released into the water column
during the explosive eruption.”

The paper, which was co-authored by 22 investigators from nine
institutions in four countries, was published in the June 26 issue of
the journal Nature.

Seafloor volcanoes usually emit lobes and
sheets of lava during an eruption, rather than explosive plumes of gas,
steam, and rock that are ejected from land-based volcanoes. Because of
the hydrostatic pressure of seawater, ocean eruptions are more likely
to resemble those of Kilauea than Mount Saint Helens or Mount Pinatubo.

Making
just the third expedition ever launched to the Gakkel Ridge—and the
first to visually examine the seafloor–researchers used a combination
of survey instruments, cameras, and a seafloor sampling platform to
collect samples of rock and sediment, as well as dozens of hours of
high-definition video. They saw rough shards and bits of basalt
blanketing the seafloor and spread out in all directions from the
volcanic craters they discovered and named Loke, Oden, and Thor.

They
also found deposits on top of relatively new lavas and high-standing
features—such as Duque’s Hill and Jessica’s Hill–indications that the
rock debris had fallen or precipitated out of the water, rather than
being moved as part of a lava flow that erupted from the volcanoes.

Closer
analysis has shown that the some of the tiny fragments are angular bits
of quenched glass known to volcanologists as limu o Pele, or “Pele’s
seaweed.” These fragments are formed when lava is stretched thin around
expanding gas bubbles during an explosion. Reves-Sohn and colleagues
also found larger blocks of rock—known as talus—that could have been
ejected by explosive blasts from the seafloor.

Much of Earth’s
surface is made up of oceanic crust formed by volcanism along seafloor
mid-ocean ridges. These volcanic processes are tied to the rising of
magma from Earth’s mantle and the spreading of Earth’s tectonic plates.
Submerged under several kilometers of cold water, the volcanism of
mid-ocean ridges tends to be relatively subdued compared to land-based
eruptions.

To date, there have been scattered signs of
pyroclastic volcanism in the sea, mostly in shallower water depths.
Samples of sediment and rock collected on other expeditions have hinted
at the possibilities at depths down to 3,000 meters, but the likelihood
of explosive eruptions at greater depths seemed slim.

One
reason is the tremendous pressure exerted by the weight of seawater,
known as hydrostatic pressure. More importantly, it is very difficult
to build up the amount of steam and carbon dioxide gas in the magma
that would be required to explode a mass of rock up into the water
column. (Far less energy is needed to do so in air.) In fact, the
buildup of CO2 in magma in the sea crust would have to be ten times
higher than anyone has ever observed in seafloor samples.

The
findings from the Gakkel Ridge expedition appear to show that deep-sea
pyroclastic eruptions can and do happen. “The circulation and plumbing
of the Gakkel Ridge might be different,” said Reves-Sohn. “There must
be a lot more volatiles in the system than we thought.” The research
team hypothesizes that excess gas may be building up like foam or froth
near the ceiling of the magma chambers beneath the crust, waiting to
pop like champagne beneath a cork.

“Are pyroclastic eruptions
more common than we thought, or is there something special about the
conditions along the Gakkel Ridge?” said Reves-Sohn. “That is our next
question.”

Support for the Arctic Gakkel Vents Expedition and
for vehicle development was provided by the National Science
Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs; the NSF Division of Ocean
Sciences; the Gordon Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems,
an NSF Engineering Research Center; the NASA Astrobiology Program; and
the WHOI Deep Ocean Exploration Institute.

The Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution is a private, independent organization in
Falmouth, Mass., dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher
education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National
Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the oceans
and their interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a
basic understanding of the oceans’ role in the changing global
environment.

Pictures of volcanoe eruptions

Source

Just a quick warning, If you have sound on for this video turn it down a little bit as the frequancy gets very high and can hurt your ears >.<, It hurt mine!

Found this on Hollowmarked’s Blog

I was recently contact by a gentleman from that was involved in an interview with Brain Cox. The Interview is really long so I have put some highlights from the interview below! Thanks Tim at Oreilly.com

For a video of Brian Cox at the TED conference check out an earlier post I made

Brian Cox on CERN’s supercollider

TO: Is there any real disagreement? Are there camps that have developed?

BC: Oh absolutely; there’s a huge disagreement
because this is–it’s truly a leap into the unknown. I mean you hear
that a lot about scientific experiments but this one really is a big
jump. The most powerful accelerator at the moment is in Chicago
actually; the Tevatronat Fermilab where I’ve worked. I worked there before I moved onto the LHC. And the
LHC is an order of magnitude pretty much–increase in energy and it’s a
huge increase in the number of proton/proton collisions we can have
every second, so it–in a sense I was going to say all bets are off.
It’s not quite true; I mean we know some things that we’re going to
discover so we will discover the origin of mass in the universe, the
mechanism that generates the mass for the fundamental particles.

TO: And that would be the Higgs Boson?

BC: Well yeah it would be. I mean the correct thing
to say is whatever does that job we should see. I mean I would say
actually we will see; as long as the machine functions properly we’ll
see it. It could be the Higgs; yes–in a sense the most likely and that
it’s a theory that works and–but it could be something else and you
will find people who don’t–certainly don’t believe in the so-called
standard model Higgs. There–there are many different Higgs theories;
there’s the–or Higgs manifestations of the Higgs mechanism. One of
the–the standard model of the Higgs at the [simplest] you find one
Higgs particle covers standard model Higgs, but there are so-called
sleeper symmetric theories that many people think are actually possibly
more likely. And in some of those theories, the [simplest] you get five
Higgs particles. You know so–so even the Higgs–you can have different
camps as to how many Higgs particles you’ll find. It’s fascinating
times to be a particle physicist.

TO: So the existence of the Higgs was suggested in the early ’90s in Chicago; is that true?

BC: No; it was the–we’ve got no direct
experimental evidence for the Higgs particle. We’ve got–we’ve got
indirect evidence in that the standard model of which it starts, which
our best theory of particle physics at the moment–works and as far
as–and you can–we tested it to immense precision in Chicago at
Tevatron and experiments at CERN and at SLAC for that matter in San Francisco and elsewhere. And it always–it works beautifully well and the Higgs is a part of that. So you can claim it
as indirect evidence but you can evade that indirect evidence actually
very easily in the theories. So the correct thing to say is it might
not exist; it might be something else that we haven’t thought of yet.

TO: It’s called the Large Hadron Collider but I’ve heard you say protons.

BC: Yeah.

TO: Was the reasoning behind calling it the Large Hadron Collider is it going to be colliding other things besides protons?

BC: Well you can actually yes; it can collide nuclei so there is a program at the LHC to collide gold nuclei which is what RHIC does–the Relative Heavy Iron Collider–at
Brookhaven in New York. And so it can–it can collide different things.
The proton program is kind of the you know–the lead program in a sense
because that’s how you get the most amount of energy to the smallest
amount of space, so you can try to look at things like Higgs particles.
But there’s a whole program–clan within a detector called Alice which
is dedicated to heavy iron collisions, the nucleus collisions and they
look at these things called quark gluon plasmas, which that’s the way
the universe was believed to be let’s say a millionth of a second after
it began–it’s a big soup of quarks and gluons. So it can bang together
other things, but–yeah; maybe it’s just–I don’t know why you’d call
it–you could have called it the Large Collider I suppose. I don’t know
why it’s called the LHC; I’d have to ask–Lyn Evans is one of the LHC
Project Leaders. It’s a good question; I’m going to ask him that.

TO: So it’s not a large particle per se; it’s just a "large Collider"? It could be called the "Hadron Collider"?

BC: Yeah, yeah; no large just means big
27-kilometer in circumference ring, so [Laughs] yeah. I mean–although
it’s got to be said actually that protons are pretty big things
compared to the things we’re looking for, the elementary particles of
matter.

Some questions excluded

TO: In the circle and the protons travel in some sort of perfect vacuum? I mean how do they–

BC: Yes; there are actually two pipes for most of
the LHC, so two beam pipes and they’re about you know
what–10-centimeters maybe across you know–they’re not very big pipes,
so one going one way and one going the other way and those pipes are in
a–in what we call a cryostat so which is where the magnets are as well
and that’s I’m told one yard across–. Now that’s not me being quaint
in English. It’s the only imperial measurement in the LHC and it’s
there because that’s the diameter of a standard oil pipe. This is what
I’m told, so it’s cheaper to make things one-yard across. So basically
you’ve got a big pipe–one yard across with all the magnets and the
beam pipes embedded in it and that’s the thing that’s down at the–at
minus 271-degrees. And then as you say the beams are in beam pipes and
those bean pipes emerge into one pipe at the interaction point so at
the places where you cross the beams through each of the–so you get
the collision and that happens inside the four detectors of the LHC.

TO: There are four main test points on the circle?

BC: Yeah; basically–that’s right.

TO: And these are–what have these machines
like–if you look at something called the Atlas or the CMS, these are
at each of the points and that’s what you work on?

BC: Yes; so Atlas is a–you think of a digital
camera. It really is except that it’s 40-meters long and 20-meters
high; it’s a big cylinder. It’s in a cavern 100-meters below the
ground. It’s bigger than the nave of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
So it’s an immense structure but its job is to sit around the point
where you pass the beams through each of them so you collide the
protons together and it’s in those collisions that you–one way of
thinking about it is recreating the conditions that were present less
than a billionth of a second after the universe began–for a fraction
of a second and it’s in those conditions that you hope to reveal the
earth–I suppose the underlying simplicity of the universe.

TO: Two protons, two positively charged particles
each made up of three quarks a piece–what do you get when you bang
those together?

BC: Well what you do is you get a big mess is the
answer. [Laughs] And what happens I mean protons are actually full of
stuff. The three quarks is a simple view; there’s other things called
gluons in there. There are more quarks that are not in there in a sense
so it’s a big bag of particles and what you actually do is you collide
two of the constituents together so let’s say two gluons bump into each
other. The rest of the protons fly out in the direction in which they
came as a big cloud of debris really. So typically you’ll bang two
gluons together and it’s that–that you’re interested in. Those two
gluons could produce a Higgs particle let’s say and then the Higgs
particle will decay into other particles and you’ll collect that debris
as well. So you’re interested–the protons are really energy
deliverers. All you’re doing is trying to get energy into this small
space and out of that energy you would hope to make new particles that
you’ve never seen before.

For more of the interview please check the whole thing over at Oreilly

Canadian researcher launches science version of Google News. 

A
Canadian graduate student dissatisfied with science coverage on online
sites such as Google News and Yahoo News has created a news aggregator
especially for scientists.

Michael Imbeault, an HIV researcher
at the Université Laval in Quebec, launched his fully automated site
called e! Science News (http://esciencenews.com) last month. It has already attracted 300,000 different users, and averages 5,000 visits a day, he says.

News
aggregators display headlines and snippets from other media sources,
but don’t produce their own content. Of the top five online US news
sites, three are aggregators — Google News, AOL News and Yahoo News —
and only two — CNN.com and MSNBC.com — generate original content. Yahoo
and AOL use human editors and source almost all science stories from
wire agencies, such as Reuters. Google News uses computer algorithms to
aggregate headlines from thousands of news sources, ranking them by how
often and on which sites stories appear. Science and technology
coverage on Google News, for example, is notoriously devoid of basic
science.

Imbeault’s site indexes science news sites, clusters similar
articles together on the basis of the frequency of word co-occurrence,
and then uses Bayesian statistics to automatically assign articles to
topics such as astronomy, health and climate. It then ranks them using
factors such as timeliness, and the number of sites reporting the same
news, which indicates the story’s importance. At present, it is limited
to around 40 news sources — including Nature News, The New York Times
science section and institutional news sites such as NASA, which offer
free content for at least a period — but this will be increased, he
says.

Imbeault built the site on top of the Drupal open-source
content management software. He says that his aggregator will also be
improved by moving to semantics-based techniques that better capture
the meaning of a text.

Source

A compound in marijuana may be a potent anti-inflammatory agent that won’t get people high, scientists say.

The finding could be a boon to sufferers of arthritis, cirrhosis, and other diseases. Existing drugs can be less effective for some people and can carry side effects, from stomach ulcers to increased risk of heart attacks.

Marijuana supporters have long argued that the plant’s active ingredients, known as cannabinoids, are safe and effective treatments for pain, nausea, and other ailments. y 2015.

The most active cannabinoid—delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC—is known to have anti-inflammatory properties. But it is also responsible for the plant’s psychotropic effects.

Now researchers say that another cannabinoid, called beta-caryophyllene, or (E)-BCP, helps combat inflammation without affecting the brain. (E)-BCP is already part of many people’s daily diets, the researchers note. Foods that are particularly high in the compound include black pepper, oregano, basil, lime, cinnamon, carrots, and celery.

Essential oils from cannabis plants whose leaves and flowers are used to make the marijuana drug contain up to 35 percent (E)-BCP.

But even after decades of cannabis research, scientists hadn’t previously known that the compound had anti-inflammatory properties. Jürg Gertsch of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology said "This is because the focus was on the classical cannabinoids [rather than (E)-BCP],"

Lone Receptor
Cannabinoids in marijuana are known to primarily affect two of the many molecular receptors in the human body. The CB1 receptor is found in the brain and central nervous system and is responsible for the high people experience when they smoke pot.

The other receptor, called CB2, is found in tissues in the rest of the body and triggers a cascade of biochemical reactions that can help combat inflammation.

"Our interest is to exploit the pharmacological nature of the CB2 receptor," because it does not have psychotropic side effects, Gertsch explained in an email.

"Targeting the CB2 receptor could be a therapeutic strategy to prevent or treat diseases like Crohn’s disease (inflammation of the intestinal tract), liver cirrhosis, osteoarthritis, and therosclerosis."

THC activates both receptors, so it won’t alleviate inflammation without also making people high.

But (E)-BCP affects only the CB2 receptor, according to the new study, which appeard in yesterday’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As part of their research, the scientists engineered a strain of mice that lacked the CB2 receptor. The team then fed the modified mice and normal mice a diet rich in (E)-BCP. When the scientists induced inflammation with chemicals, normal mice experienced an anti-inflammatory effect while the genetically
engineered mice did not.

"This experiment shows that the anti-inflammatory effects are mediated via the CB2 receptor," Gertsch said.

Drug Building Block?
Stephen Safe, director of the Texas A&M University’s Center for Environmental and Genetic medicine, said he is impressed by the team’s results both in mouse cells and in live mice.

"They did a good study," said Safe, who was not involved in the research.

He also noted that a lot of other studies have been finding that fat-soluble chemicals from plants activate many receptors in the body.

"A lot of these [come from plants that] have been used in traditional
medicine," he said. "This is another example of that—but a bit of a
sexy one."

In this case, he noted, Gertsch’s team has identified some "petty good" activators of the CB2 receptor.

"Can they be further developed and modified into better anti-inflammatory drugs?" he asked. "Maybe. [(E)-BCP] could be a new model [compound] for drug design."

National Geographic

No-take marine reserves, in which fishing is completely banned, can
lead to very rapid comebacks of the fish species most prized by
commercial and recreational fisheries, reveals a new study of
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef published in the June 24th issue of
Current Biology.

The researchers found in most cases that coral trout–the major
targets of commercial and recreational hook-and-line fisheries in
Australia–bounced back in no-take reserves compared to fished sites in
two years or less.

" We were surprised that we documented increases in coral trout
density of 31% to 68% in such a short time," said study author Garry
Russ of James Cook University in Queensland. "Others have seen such
rapid increases in smaller-scale studies, usually at one or a few small
reserves. The big surprise was that we detected a consistent, rapid
increase in multiple large reserves spread over 1000 km offshore and
700 km inshore. This represents a positive and unprecedented response
to reserve protection."

The new findings come from a joint study by scientists from James
Cook University and the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park generates AU$5.8 billion
annually from tourism and fisheries, the researchers said. In mid-2004,
the Australian Government rezoned the park, placing more than 20% of
each of 70 bioregions within it into the world’s largest network of
no-take marine reserves, covering more than 100,000 km.

The move sparked intense community interest and affected
livelihoods, making monitoring of the new reserve network’s effects
imperative, the authors noted. In the new study, the teams used
underwater visual census to survey reef organisms in new coral reef
reserves and in control areas that remained open to fishing before and
again 1.5 to 2 years after the reserves were put into place.

They found that the coral trout numbers were significantly higher in
no-take reserves than in sites that remained open to fishing in four of
five offshore regions and two of three inshore regions of the Great
Barrier Reef.

The findings are probably due to decreased fishing mortality inside
the new reserves, rather than increased fishing outside, they said. In
inshore areas, where most recreational fishing occurs, the data showed
increases in coral trout density inside reserves rather than decreases
in adjacent fished areas after rezoning.

"Although preliminary, our results provide an encouraging message
that bold political steps to protect biodiversity can produce rapid,
positive results for exploited species at ecosystem scales," Russ said.
"The people of Australia got what they wanted: more protection for an
Australian icon. And it will help to boost tourism even more. It is an
important lesson for the entire world."

souce

I don’t think this will effect the local fishing hotspots here in Cornwall quite so much but the fisherman do have catch quotas to be concerned about.

Bicultural people may unconsciously change their personality when they switch languages, according to a US study on bilingual Hispanic women.

It found that women who were actively involved in both English and Spanish speaking cultures interpreted the same events differently, depending on which language they were using at the time.

It is known that people in general can switch between different ways of interpreting events and feelings – a phenomenon known as frame shifting. But the researchers say their work shows that bilingual people that are active in two different cultures do it more readily, and that language is the trigger.

Onepart of the study got the volunteers to watch TV advertisements showingwomen in different scenarios. The participants initially saw the ads in one language – English or Spanish – and then six months later in the other.

Researchers David Luna from Baruch College, New York, US, and Torsten Ringberg and Laura Peracchio from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee US, found that women classified themselves and others as more assertive when they spoke Spanish than when they spoke English.

"In the Spanish-language sessions, informants perceived females as more self-sufficient and extroverted," they say.

For example, one person saw the main character in the Spanish version of a commercial as a risk-taking, independent woman, but as hopeless, lonely, and confused in the English version.