Any parent trying to hustle a school-bound kid out the door in the morning knows that her child’s skull possesses a strange and powerful form of black magic: It can repel parents’ voices. Important messages like “find your shoes” bounce off the impenetrable fortress and drift unheeded to the floor.

But when this perplexing force field is off, it turns out that mothers’ voices actually have profound effects on kids. Children’s brains practically buzz when they hear their moms’ voices, scientists report in the May 31 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (Fun and not surprising side note: Babies’ voices get into moms’ brains, too.)

The parts of kids’ brains that handle emotions, face recognition and reward were prodded into action by mothers’ voices, brain scans of 24 children ages 7 to 12 revealed. And words were not required to get this big reaction. In the study, children listened to nonsense words said by either their mother or one of two unfamiliar women. Even when the words were fake, mothers’ voices still prompted lots of neural action.

The study was done in older kids, but children are known to tune into their mothers’ voices early. Really early, in fact. One study found that fetuses’ heart rates change when they hear their moms read a story. For a fetus crammed into a dark, muffled cabin, voices may take on outsized importance.

And voices carry particularly powerful messages throughout childhood. “A tremendous amount of emotional information is conveyed to children through auditory channels,” says University of Wisconsin-Madison child psychologist Seth Pollak. And, he points out, kids are small. “Kids’ faces are down around our knees. And children who are crawling are looking at the ground,” he says. This obvious point means that facial expressions and other visual signals might not pack as much punch as a voice.

Of course, voices other than those belonging to moms are also important. Pollak says that voices of fathers — or any other caregiver who spends lots of time around a child — probably affect children’s brains in a similar way. It’s just that those studies haven’t been done yet.

The results of the latest brain scan study make a lot of sense, says Pollak. Some of the brain regions activated are those involved in feeling good. “A caregiver’s voice is actually rewarding. It activates the systems that make us feel calm,” he says.
And the new study might help explain some of Pollak’s earlier results. He and his colleagues stressed out 68 girls, who happened to be the same ages as those in the brain scanning study, by making them do math and word problems in front of three unsmiling adult strangers — a terrifying prospect for most kids. (And adults.) After their ordeal, the girls either talked to their moms in person, on the phone or by instant messenger.

Compared with the instant messenger typers, the girls who saw their moms in person or talked to them on the phone were more soothed, showing lower levels of stress hormones. That finding, published in 2012 in Evolution and Human Behavior, suggests that to a kid, there’s something especially calming about hearing her own mother’s voice.

And now, by showing the widespread reaction to a mother’s voice, the brain data back that up. “It all kind of hangs together in a way that I think is very intuitive,” Pollak says. In other words, a mother’s voice is powerful, perhaps even strong enough to overcome a force field.

Thanks to modern laser technology, Southeast Asia’s Khmer Empire is rising from forest floors for the first time in centuries.

New findings show the remarkable extent to which Khmer people built cities and transformed landscapes from at least the fifth to the 15th century, and perhaps for several hundred years after that, says archaeologist Damian Evans of Cambodia’s Siem Reap Center. Laser mapping in 2015 of about 1,910 square kilometers of largely forested land in northern Cambodia indicates that gridded city streets and extensive canals emerged surprisingly early, by around A.D. 500, Evans reports June 13 in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Researchers have generally assumed that large-scale urban development began later at Greater Angkor, capital of the Khmer Empire from the ninth to 15th centuries (SN: 5/14/16, p. 22).
A helicopter carrying light detection and ranging equipment, lidar for short, flew sorties over seven Khmer sites in the vicinity of Greater Angkor. Lidar’s laser pulses gathered data on the contours of jungle- and vegetation-covered land. Lidar maps revealed city blocks, canals and other remnants of past settlements.
Mysterious ground features previously identified by lidar surveys at Angkor Wat temple in Greater Angkor also turned up at several sites, some located as many as 100 kilometers from Greater Angkor. Those sites include the eighth to ninth century city of Mahendraparvata and a 12th century city, Preah Khan of Kompong Svay. Fields of precisely arranged earthen mounds at these settlements may have been used to collect rainwater, Evans speculates. Earthen embankments forming coiled or spiral patterns might have been gardens or ceremonial spaces.

“It’s humbling to see the lidar data and realize how much was previously missed in ground surveys at Preah Khan,” says archaeologist Mitch Hendrickson of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Hendrickson conducts research at Preah Khan, one of several ancient cities that provided food and other services to Greater Angkor via an extensive road system.

Before the 2015 lidar survey, Mahendraparvata was known “only from inscription texts and a few bits of broken-down masonry,” adds archaeologist Charles Higham of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Mahendraparvata’s laser-traced layout indicates it was an early, small-scale version of Greater Angkor, Higham says.
A military invasion and sacking of Greater Angkor in the 15th century apparently did not result in most of its roughly 750,000 residents abandoning the site, as many investigators have thought. Lidar data from 2015 indicate that Khmer capitals established after Greater Angkor’s defeat, such as Longvek and Oudong, show no signs of dense populations created by mass relocations from the former capital, Evans says.

That suggests that the political state collapsed at Greater Angkor, but hundreds of thousands of rice farmers carried on, Hendrickson says. “Lots of fish and rice were still available,” he says. “Local farmers were more resilient than the state was.”

Coral reefs won’t be out of hot water anytime soon. A global bleaching event that began in June 2014 is the longest on record and now covers a larger area than ever before. What’s worse, it shows no signs of ending.

Global warming exacerbated by the latest El Niño is to blame, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists reported Monday at the 13th International Coral Reef Symposium in Honolulu. Since 1979, periodic mass bleachings covering hundreds of kilometers have only lasted for “a year or so,” said NOAA Coral Reef Watch Coordinator Mark Eakin. But this one has dragged on for two years, threatening more than 40 percent of reefs globally, and more than 70 percent in the United States.

When corals are stressed by heat, they reject the colorful algae living inside them and turn a ghostly white. Those algae are a major source of food, so reefs can die if conditions don’t improve.

NOAA scientists aren’t sure what will end this episode. It could extend into 2017, and more frequent events are possible in the future, the scientists said. “Climate models suggest that most coral reefs may be seeing bleaching every other year by mid-century,” Eakin added. “How much worse that gets will depend on how we deal with global warming.”

Everyone ages. Growing old is a fundamental feature of human existence.

Though we might not always be aware of aging, it looms in all of our futures. As Science News editor in chief Eva Emerson writes, “Aging happens to each of us, everywhere, all the time. It is so ever-present and slow that we tend to take little notice of it. Until we do.”

But, our scientific understanding of aging pales in comparison to its significance in our lives. While new studies reveal exciting prospects for slowing the effects of aging, its causes and extensive effects remain enigmatic.
Scientists are still divided on some fundamentals of aging, and that’s why aging research raises some interesting questions. For example, how does it change the brain? How did different life histories evolve? How old is the oldest blue whale? This special report addresses those questions and more.

In Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, male and female valerian plants have responded differently to hotter, drier conditions, a new study shows. Rapidly changing ratios of the sexes could be a quick sign of climate change, the researchers say.

Valerian (Valeriana edulis) plants range from hot, scrubby lowlands to cold alpine slopes. In each patch of plants, some are male and some are female. The exact proportion of each sex varies with elevation. High on the mountain, females are much more common than males; they can make up 80 percent of some populations.
Four decades ago, in patches of valerian growing in the middle of the plant’s elevation range, 33.4 percent of the plants were males. Those patches grew in the Rockies at elevations around 3,000 meters. Today, you would have to hike considerably higher to find the same proportion of male plants. Males, now 5.5 percent more common on average, are reaching higher elevations than in the past, researchers report in the July 1 Science.

“We think climate is acting almost like a filter on males and females,” says Will Petry of ETH Zurich, who led the study while at the University of California, Irvine. “The settings on this filter are controlling the sex ratio.” Those settings are sweeping up the mountainside like a rising tide at a rate of 175 meters per decade, Petry and colleagues found.
Ecologists already knew that the ratio of male to female plants can vary with altitude or water availability, says ecologist Spencer Barrett of the University of Toronto, who was not involved in this study. But “the idea that a sex ratio is moving upslope — nobody’s ever done that before.”

Those moving sex ratios have kept pace with climate change since the late 1970s. Today, winter snows are melting earlier and summers are hotter, with less rain. As a result, the same amount of precipitation that would have fallen at one elevation in 1978 now falls at higher elevations instead; it has moved upslope by 133 meters per decade. Soil moisture has moved up the mountain, too, by 195 meters per decade.

The parallel shifts mean that changing sex ratios could be a marker of climate change, says population biologist Tom Miller of Rice University in Houston, a coauthor of the study. Today, movements of whole species — often up in latitude or altitude — are a hallmark of climate change. But proportions of males and females are changing “substantially faster than species are moving,” Miller says. They “might be a much more rapid fingerprint of climate change than where species are migrating to.”
Petry’s team found that fingerprint while hiking around the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Crested Butte, Colo. As the scientists walked through the mountains in Chaffee and Gunnison counties, they counted flowering males and females at 31 sites in 2011, then compared their modern data with historical counts from nine of the same populations, made by coauthor Judy Soule from 1978 to 1980. When Petry saw that the percentage of males and females had changed, “we also started thinking about the consequences,” he says.

If one sex vastly outnumbers the other, populations could die out. “Imagine if it became an Amazonia situation,” says Kailen Mooney, whose lab at UC Irvine led the new study. A 100 percent female population wouldn’t be pollinated, and would disappear once the mature females died, he says.

If those female-only populations grew above a certain altitude and died out because males couldn’t reach them, then male plants would set the upper boundary for the whole species. Sex ratios “add nuance” to the way scientists think about climate-driven migration, Mooney says, because one sex could determine geographic limits for whole species.

A new book on aging starts with what sounds like a promise: “It is a common belief that aging is inevitable and universal. Nothing could be further from the truth.” From this, you might expect the final pages to offer a list of options for fending off the ravages of time. But this is less a how-to guide and more of a dive into why aging happens.
The authors, theoretical biologist Josh Mitteldorf and writer Dorion Sagan, take an extensive stroll through evolutionary theory and aging research in support of an off-center view. After pointing out problems with several theories of why aging evolved, the authors present the controversial premise that aging is a programmed march toward oblivion that evolved as a form of population control. “Aging in animals enforces a common, predictable life span, helping to prevent the dominance of any one individual or one gene type. Diversity is preserved for the health of the community.” Other researchers have been skeptical of that idea.

Aging, however, is unyielding. The authors describe how certain hardships — starvation, exertion, even small amounts of poison — can paradoxically lead to life extension in lab animals. From these findings, Mitteldorf and Sagan make antiaging recommendations that start with familiar medical advice: exercise, lose weight and take a daily aspirin or ibuprofen. But then they jump to suggestions that have not yet been proven, including supplementation with “huge doses of vitamin D” and melatonin, plus metformin (a diabetes drug) and selegiline (a drug used to treat early Parkinson’s and depression). Next comes a list of herbs that could restore telomeres, the protective tips of chromosomes. The book spends much less real estate describing the research behind all of these recommendations, perhaps because the human studies haven’t been done yet.

The crystal ball section of the book is an optimistic look at very preliminary research on the benefits of lengthening telomeres, removing senescent cells from the body and regrowing the shrinking thymus, the organ that produces immune system T cells. The authors may be onto something. But none of these ideas have yet had a chance to mature.

Buy Cracking the Aging Code from Amazon.com. Sales generated through the links to Amazon.com contribute to Society for Science & the Public’s programs.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has sent back its first picture of Jupiter since arriving at the planet July 4 (SN: 7/23/16, p. 14). The image, taken July 10 when the spacecraft was 4.3 million kilometers from Jupiter, shows off the planet’s clouds, its Great Red Spot (a storm a bit wider than Earth) and three of its moons (Io, Europa and Ganymede).

Juno is on the outbound leg of its first of two 53.5-day orbits of the gas giant (Juno will then settle into 14-day orbits). During orbit insertion, all of Juno’s scientific instruments were turned off while the spacecraft made its first dive through the harsh radiation belts that encircle the planet. This first image indicates that Juno is in good health and ready to study the largest planet in the solar system.

The probe is the ninth to visit Jupiter and the second to stay in orbit (SN: 6/25/2016, p. 32). For the next 20 months, Juno will investigate what lurks beneath the opaque clouds that enshroud the planet (SN: 6/25/2016, p. 16). The spacecraft won’t take its first intimate pictures of Jupiter until August 27, when it flies within 5,000 kilometers of the cloud tops.

Standoffish electrons typically keep one another at arm’s length, repelling their neighbors. But surprisingly, under certain circumstances, this repulsion can cause pairs of electrons to soften their stance toward one another and attract instead, new research shows. The effect may be the key to someday producing a new type of high-temperature superconductor, scientists report in the July 21 Nature.

Though the effect was first predicted over 50 years ago, previous attempts to coerce electrons to behave in this chummy way have failed. Like charges repel, so negatively charged electrons ordinarily rebuff one another. But now researchers have validated the counterintuitive idea that an attraction between electrons can emerge. “Somehow, you have [this] magic that out of all this repulsion you can create attraction,” says study coauthor Shahal Ilani, a physicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.
Ilani and colleagues produced the effect in a bare-bones system of electrons in carbon nanotubes. Operating at temperatures just above absolute zero, the system is made up of two perpendicular carbon nanotubes — hollow cylinders of carbon atoms — about 1 nanometer in diameter.

Two electrons sit at sites inside the first nanotube. Left to their own devices, those two electrons repel one another. A second nanotube, known as the “polarizer,” acts as the “glue” that allows the two electrons to attract. When the scientists brought the two nanotubes close together, says Ilani, “the electrons in the first nanotube changed their nature; they became attractive instead of repulsive.”

This flip is due to the nature of the polarizer. It contains one electron, which is located at one of two sites in the carbon nanotube — either between the first nanotube’s pair of electrons or farther away. The pair of electrons in the first nanotube repels the polarizer’s electron, kicking it from the near to the far site. And the electron’s absence leaves behind a positively charged vacancy, which attracts the pair of electrons toward it — and toward each other.
It’s a “tour de force,” says Takis Kontos, a physicist at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, who wrote a commentary on the paper in the same issue of Nature. Although the system the scientists created is very simple, he says, “the whole experiment built around it is extremely complex.”
Electrons are known to attract in certain situations. In conventional superconductors, electrons pair up due to their interactions with ions in the material. This buddy system allows superconductors to conduct electricity without resistance. But such superconductors must be cooled to very low temperatures for this effect to occur.

But in 1964, physicist William Little of Stanford University theorized that electron pairs could likewise attract due to their interactions with other electrons, instead of ions. Such pairs should stay linked at higher temperatures. This realization sparked hopes that a material with these attracting electrons could be a room-temperature superconductor, which would open up a wealth of technological possibilities for efficiently transmitting and storing energy.

It’s yet to be seen whether the effect can produce a superconductor, and whether such a superconductor might work at higher temperatures — the new discovery shows only that the attraction can occur due to electrons’ repulsion. It’s “the first important step,” says Ilani. Now, scientists can start thinking of how to build “interesting new materials that are very different than what you can find in nature.”

U.S. drivers love to hit the road. The problem is doing so safely.

In 2013, 32,894 people in the United States died in motor vehicle crashes. Although down since 2000, the overall death rate — 10.3 per 100,000 people — tops 19 other high-income countries, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported July 8. Belgium is a distant second with 6.5 deaths per 100,000. Researchers reviewed World Health Organization and other data on vehicle crash deaths, seat belt use and alcohol-impaired driving in 2000 and 2013.
Canada had the highest percentage of fatal crashes caused by drunk drivers: 33.6 percent. New Zealand and the United States tied for second at 31 percent. But Canada and 16 other countries outperformed the United States on seat belt use — even though, in 2013, 87 percent of people in the United States reported wearing safety belts while riding in the front seat.

Spain saw the biggest drop — 75 percent — in its crash death rate. That country improved nearly all aspects of road safety, including decreasing alcohol-impaired driving and increasing seat belt use, the researchers say.

The newest and thorniest members of a diverse ant family may have extra help holding their heads high.

Found in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea, Pheidole drogon and Pheidole viserion worker ants have spines protruding from their thoraxes. For many ant species, the spiky growths are a defense against birds and other predators. But Eli Sarnat and colleagues suggest the spines might instead be a muscular support for the ants’ oversized heads, which the insects use to crush seeds. The heads “are so big that it looks like it would be difficult to walk,” says Sarnat, an entomologist at the Okinawa Institute of Science & Technology Graduate University in Japan.
Micro‒CT scans of worker ants with larger heads revealed bundles of thoracic muscle fibers within spines just behind their heads. Worker ants with smaller heads did not have muscles in their spines, the researchers report online July 27 in PLOS One. More research is needed to establish the spines’ function and understand why they evolved, Sarnat says. While buff spines may support big heads, hollow spines probably keep predators at bay, the researchers suspect.
Researchers named the ants after two fearsome dragons, Drogon and Viserion, in the popular book and TV series Game of Thrones.