16 | NewScientist | 9 January 2010

HEAD injuries sustained by Vietnam veterans have revealed parts of the brain vital for two types of emotional intelligence.

Depending on the site of their injuries, the veterans studied were poor either at “experiential” emotional intelligence (the capacity to judge emotions in other people) or “strategic” emotional intelligence (the ability to plan socially appropriate

responses to situations).Led by Jordan Grafman

at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland, researchers gave standard tests for measuring emotional intelligence to 38 injured vets and 29 healthy controls. The 17 vets with injuries to their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex performed worse on experiential

Ghost galaxies haunt Milky Way

THOUGH telescopes routinely spot galaxies billions of light years away, they may be missing many in our own cosmic backyard.

Astronomers have bagged some extremely faint galaxies near the Milky Way in recent years, including one just 350 times as bright as the sun . But hundreds more have probably been overlooked, say James Bullock of the University of California in Irvine and his colleagues ( arxiv.org/abs/0912.1873 ).

Galaxies with less dark matter than those found to date would have weaker gravity, allowing their stars to spread out more. That would make them harder to spot amid the clutter of foreground stars in our galaxy, the team says.

Beth Willman of Haverford College in Pennsylvania says this is an exciting possibility, adding that future observatories could uncover the hidden population.

Egg whites: meringues today, baby saviours tomorrow?

BETTER known for giving meringues and soufflés their

texture, egg white is being tested as a sealant for the

amnion, a membrane that surrounds developing fetuses.

The amnion can rupture spontaneously, but can also

tear after amniocentesis – in which a needle is used to

extract amniotic fluid to test for genetic diseases – or

fetal surgery. Such a breach can cause the mother’s

waters to break prematurely, resulting in miscarriage.

Noting its stickiness and its role in protecting a

developing chick, Ken Moise and his colleagues at the

Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, turned

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Seats of emotional intelligence found tasks but performed normally on strategic tasks. In the other 21 vets, who had damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the situation was reversed (Proceedings of the National

Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0912568106).

Damage to these regions didn’t affect cognitive intelligence, suggesting that emotional and general problem-solving tasks are handled independently in the brain.

to purified, treated white from chicken eggs, which they

had already used to repair holes in balloons and condoms.

They took discarded human amnions and stretched

each across the bottom of an open-ended glass tube,

which they then filled with human amniotic fluid. Next

they ruptured the membrane with a needle, and after

30 seconds applied purified egg white. Of 21 tubes,

19 stopped leaking immediately. The others stopped after

a second application (American Journal of Obstetrics &

Gynecology, DOI: 10.1016/j.ajog.2009.10.862).

Moise had to use antibiotics to quell microbial

infections caused by the procedure, which would

complicate using it in the body. But as other attempts

to seal or patch amnions have been disappointing,

the development is a positive step, he says.

A PULSE of light so short that it contains just a single oscillation of a light wave has been produced. The flash is almost as short as a light pulse can be, according to the laws of physics, and could be used to sense a photon interacting with an electron, says Alfred Leitenstorfer of the University of Konstanz in Germany, whose team pulled off the feat.

The researchers split pulses from a single fibre laser between two sets of fibres containing atoms of erbium, which amplified the light waves. Each fibre had a second stage, one stretching, the other shrinking the wavelength by about 40 per cent. The two fibres then converged, causing the light beams to interfere, leaving a cycle lasting 4.3 femtoseconds.

Single light wave from fibre laser