New technology lets teleconferencing cameras switch automatically among speakers.
For the first time, seismologists have captured detailed images of the deep underground processes that give birth to most of the planet's new surface along mid-ocean ridges where the seafloor pulls apart. Early results from one of the largest marine geophysical experiments ever undertaken suggest that the separating seafloor guides magma up to the mid-ocean ridge, where it erupts and cools to form new oceanic crust. Lead author Craig Packer, ecology professor at the University of Minnesota, and co-author Marc Tatar, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University, say their data fit the theory that reproductive decline begins once a mother can no longer expect to successfully carry a new infant to its reproductive maturity. Tadpole hearing may provide model for fetal hearing development Tadpoles can hear, except for a brief period during metamorphosis when they go deaf, as their auditory systems rewire for adulthood. Until the recent paper by Brown University researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists had assumed tadpoles were deaf, even though it's well known that adult frogs rely greatly on their sense of hearing to catch food, to find mates and to defend their territories.