Our work featured in Science news of the week

1. www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 340 21 JUNE 2013 1385
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Transport Studies, Earth Modeling
Earn Blue Planet Prizes
The Blue Planet Prize, which recognizes
research addressing environmental prob-
lems, will go this year to climatologist
Taroh Matsuno, now at the Japan Agency
for Marine-Earth Science and Technology,
for leading the devel-
opment of the Earth
Simulator, a supercom-
puter tailored for work
on climate change; and
to engineer Daniel
Sperling, of the Uni-
versity of California,
Davis, for opening
new fields of study
into more efficient
and environmentally
friendly transportation
systems. Each man
will receive $527,000
at an October cere-
mony in Tokyo.
FINDINGS
Beer Goggles for Your Brain
Hot? Or not? The lightning-quick spark
that triggers desire when you see an attrac-
tive face is kindled within the ventral mid-
brain, associated with processing reward.
Now, researchers have discovered a way
to stoke that fire … with 2 milliamps
of electrical current.
The research teams asked 19 volun-
teers to rate the attractiveness of two sets of
computer-generated male and female faces
with neutral expressions (examples above)
before and after the activity in their ventral
midbrains was ramped up using a technique
called transcranial direct current stimula-
tion (tDCS), which passes current through
the brain between two electrodes on the
scalp. A control group did the same, while
receiving “sham” electrical stimulation that
produced a tingling sensation but no real
current. Compared with the control group,
the volunteers who received tDCS rated the
second set of faces as significantly >>
NEWSMAKERS
Matsuno
Sperling
Memories of Home Delay Learning New Language
Reminders of home can hinder an immigrant’s ability to speak a new
language, suggests a new study by Columbia Business School psychol-
ogist Michael Morris and colleagues. The findings could help explain
why cultural immersion is the best way to learn a foreign tongue and
why immigrants who settle in ethnic enclaves acculturate more slowly.
To determine how cultural icons affect language, the research-
ers recruited Chinese students who had lived in the United States for
less than a year. They sat opposite a computer displaying the face of
“Michael Lee,” either a Chinese or Caucasian male. Lee spoke English.
The team compared the fluency of the volunteers’ English when
talking to a Chinese versus a Caucasian face. Participants reported
a more positive experience chatting with the Chinese Michael, but
were significantly less fluent, producing 11% fewer words per min-
ute on average, the authors report online on 17 June in the Proceed-
ings of the National Academy of Sciences. And when asked to tell a
story while viewing an image of the Great Wall, they were 85% more
likely to use literal translations from Chinese for an object rather than
the English term—for example, “happy nuts” instead of pistachio.
http://scim.ag/langremind
receive tuition funding and its alumni scien-
tists haven’t been big contributors. “It’s not a
sustainable business model anymore,” says
Joan Ruderman, MBL’s president and direc-
tor. Scientists at both organizations also see
opportunities for collaboration in areas such
as neuroscience, evolutionary and develop-
mental biology, cell biology, and ecosystems
science. http://scim.ag/MBLChicago
Baltimore, Maryland 5
More Eyes for ‘Invisible’ Trials
Publish your data, or we will—that’s the
warning to drug companies from Peter Doshi,
a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity in Baltimore, Maryland, and his col-
leagues.They want to convince researchers
and journals to print unpublished data that is
essentially privately held—but has become
publicly available, such as through litiga-
tion or Freedom of InformationAct requests.
For example, Doshi’s group at Hopkins has
178,000 pages of data on various drugs,
many obtained from litigation against drug
companies.An effort by the European Medi-
cinesAgency to share clinical trials data upon
request led to the release of 1.9 million pages
(since curtailed by lawsuits).
Doshi’s team calls its proposal RIAT,
for Restoring Invisible and Abandoned Tri-
als. It was published on 13 June in BMJ and
endorsed by PLOS Medicine. The authors
propose several steps: Those interested in
publishing the data should first notify the
drug company behind the research. If the
company declines, those holding the docu-
ments should contact a RIAT-friendly jour-
nal about publishing the work themselves.
While some may consider this “equivalent to
intellectual property theft,” the authors write,
“you cannot steal what is already in the pub-
lic domain.” http://scim.ag/RIATprop
Published by AAAS
onJune22,2013www.sciencemag.orgDownloadedfrom

2. 1386 21 JUNE 2013 VOL 340 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org
NEWS OF THE WEEK
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ONE, comes from a rare genetic anomaly
in which both incisors are missing from the
upper jaw. The incidence ranges from 0.5%
to 3.0% in today’s human populations, but it
was 35.7% in 28 buried skeletons with pre-
served upper jaws. Even in groups known
from their genealogy to have engaged in
intensive inbreeding, this proportion never
exceeds 20%, the team notes.
Many artifacts found at the site, includ-
ing stone tools and jewelry, came from other
farming sites in the Near East, a sign that
the inhabitants traded widely. That means
inbreeding was a deliberate social choice
rather than the result of geographic isolation,
the team concludes. Despite hints of inbreed-
ing at other sites, the researchers say that it’s
too early to tell if this social system helped
create the ties that bound other farming vil-
lages together. http://scim.ag/BastaInbreed
Random Sample
Ocean Models Help Swimmer
Navigate Florida Straits
Many endurance swimmers have an eye on the treacherous, tan-
talizing waters between Cuba and Florida. Australian swimmer
Chloe McCardel’s 12 June attempt to cross the Florida Straits
was not the first—but she had a secret weapon: oceanography.
In 2012, University of Miami meteorologist Villy Kourafalou
heard about a previous swimmer’s unsuccessful attempt to be
the first woman to swim the 170-kilometer distance unaided.
Penny Palfrey’s problem was clear, Kourafalou says: She was
thwarted by shifting swirls, called eddies, spawned by the Flor-
ida current as it flows through the straits. Success, Kourafalou
realized, may be all in the timing: Depending on ocean con-
ditions on a given day, the eddies can either give a swimmer a boost
or push her back. And that, Kourafalou adds, is how modeling could
help McCardel. “We wanted her to know the circulation she’s going to
encounter,” she says.
The Florida-based forecasting service ROFFS, which guides research-
ers, fishing expeditions, and commercial vessels through the straits, was
also interested. “The current dominates the course rather than the swim-
mer,” says founder Mitchell Roffer. “It’s like a snake trapped between
more attractive than the first set, the scien-
tists reported online last week in Transla-
tional Psychiatry.
Similar techniques, the researchers say,
could be used to treat disorders associated
with faulty ventral midbrain circuitry, such
as Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia—
without drugs or invasive surgery.
Did Inbreeding Bind Early
Farmers Together?
About 10,000 years ago, roving hunter-
gatherers in the Near East began settling
down to form farming villages. What were
the social ties that bound them into com-
munities?A German team working at the
9500-year-old early farming site of Basta
in Jordan has one answer:The inhabitants
apparently engaged in inbreeding, although
not necessarily incest.
The evidence for this startling conclu-
sion, reported online last week in PLOS
Join us on Thursday, 27 June, at 3 p.m. EDT
for a live chat with experts on a hot topic in
science. http://scim.ag/science-live
two walls, constantly wiggling and changing its shape.” ROFFS provided
McCardel’s team with high-resolution current models and streaming
satellite data of surface ocean conditions, including infrared and water
color imaging that show the density of plankton.
Using the models, the team selected a 12 June departure date,
and McCardel set out. But her swim was cut short just 11 hours later
—through no fault of physical oceanography, but after “debilitating”
stings from jellyfish.
>>FINDINGS
Tell-tale teeth. A high percentage of early farmers
from Basta are missing two of their upper incisors
(inset) due to inbreeding.
Published by AAAS
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