Science Notes Biology and archaeology
Published: November 15, 2009, 12:30 am
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Juggling may build brains
Juggling and other physically complex activities may hold some promise for brain regeneration among those who have suffered stroke or are coping with other neurological diseases where the pathways that connect how people think with how they move their bodies begin to break down.
Researchers at Britain’s University of Oxford used diffusion, a new type of magnetic resonance imaging, to compare the physical structure of white matter— the nerve fibers that connect parts of the brain—in a control group of 24 men and women to a second group of 24 who had practiced juggling for 30 minutes a day for six weeks. The MRIs showed an increase in white matter among the jugglers, regardless of their skill level. And the increase persisted even after the juggling sessions ended.
According to Heidi Johansen-Berg, an Oxford neuroscientist and lead author of the study, “the findings may have a clinical relevance in the future—but that would be a long way down the line. There are a number of brain diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, that result in degeneration of pathways. Our results show that, in healthy adults, those pathways can change positively as a result of training.”
New light on clay tablets
Four thousand years ago, a government bureaucrat in Mesopotamia jotted down a tally of slave laborers on a clay tablet. The bureaucrat left behind the count in wedge-shaped symbols that proved hard to fully decipher with the naked eye.
Until now. Researchers at the University of Southern California’s West Semitic Research Project have helped uncover its hidden narrative with the aid of lighting and imaging techniques that are credited with revolutionizing the study of ancient texts.
Over the last three decades, the USC project has produced thousands of crisp images of inscriptions and other artifacts from biblical Israel and other Near Eastern locales, making the pictures available to the public in an online archive, InscriptiFact.com.
Among the items shown in the online collection is a Dead Sea Scroll dating to the first century that discusses a buried treasure in modern-day Israel. (It’s impossible to pinpoint the precise location because landmarks mentioned in the text no longer exist.)
“A picture is worth a thousand words,” said Bruce Zuckerman, a USC religion professor who founded the research project in the early 1980s with his older brother, Ken. “Sometimes big issues in history can turn on the interpretation of a single letter.”
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