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《Nature》1月6日内容提要（中英文对照）
封面故事：为什么你不知道害怕？
我们不断观察他人的面部表情来判断他们的感觉：是欢乐，是忧伤，是生气还是害怕？在大脑扁桃体区域有损伤的患者会失去识别面部害怕表情的能力，一项新的研究工作揭示了其中的原因。研究对象有一种罕见的疾患，即双侧扁桃体损伤。研究人员对其眼睛运动进行了测定，发现她识别面部害怕表情的能力和看其他人眼睛的能力都受到损伤。但当有人教她看其他人眼睛时，她识别害怕表情的能力又恢复正常。这说明，我们的大脑在主动从环境中寻找重要社会线索，在孤独症等疾病中这一机制的损伤也许可通过教患者改变他们看世界的方式得到克服。Page: 68
Nature 433, 68 - 72 (06 January 2005); doi:10.1038/nature03086
A mechanism for impaired fear recognition after amygdala damage
Ten years ago, we reported that SM, a patient with rare bilateral amygdala damage, showed an intriguing impairment in her ability to recognize fear from facial expressions. Since then, the importance of the amygdala in processing information about facial emotions has been borne out by a number of lesion and functional imaging studies. Yet the mechanism by which amygdala damage compromises fear recognition has not been identified. Returning to patient SM, we now show that her impairment stems from an inability to make normal use of information from the eye region of faces when judging emotions, a defect we trace to a lack of spontaneous fixations on the eyes during free viewing of faces. Although SM fails to look normally at the eye region in all facial expressions, her selective impairment in recognizing fear is explained by the fact that the eyes are the most important feature for identifying this emotion. Notably, SM's recognition of fearful faces became entirely normal when she was instructed explicitly to look at the eyes. This finding provides a mechanism to explain the amygdala's role in fear recognition, and points to new approaches for the possible rehabilitation of patients with defective emotion perception.
2005年被宣布为“世界物理年”
为纪念爱因斯坦撰写后来成为相对论、量子力学和布朗运动等理论之基础的论文100周年，2005年已被宣布为“世界物理年”。在全世界，物理学作为大学的一个学科在走下坡路，尽管它在作为现代社会基础的科学与技术的发展中扮演着至关重要的角色。物理学家已着手提升物理学作为一门学科在公众眼里、尤其是在***家眼里的重要性（http://www.wyp2005.org/）。Nature 杂志对“世界物理年”的第一个贡献是，介绍一些新生代物理学家，此后还将有更多特写文章和互动机会。Page: 8
Nature 433, 8 (06 January 2005); doi:10.1038/433008a
2005: Year of Physics: So, what's your theory?
P. GINTER
One hundred years ago, when Albert Einstein penned his era-defining papers on brownian motion, the photoelectric effect and special relativity, he was just 26 years old. Reaching scientific greatness at such a young age was exceptional then and may be even harder today. But when looking at physics in the twenty-first century, there's still much to discover by asking a young physicist: what's your theory?
In the following pages, Nature offers a glimpse into the lives of four young theorists (all under 35) who are making waves in their chosen fields.
In Einstein's youth, the focus of theoretical physics was in Europe: Niels Bohr was in Copenhagen, Max Planck was in Berlin. Today it is harder to find the centre of the theoretical universe — collaborative research is increasingly international, and most theorists, who need little more than a laptop, can work anywhere.
But it seems that many young theorists opt to spend their formative years in the United States. Although US enrolment of foreign graduate students has fallen in recent years, they still make up about half of the total in physics, and of these some 40% are theorists. Not all of these students will stay in the United States — many, including three featured here, will head for good positions back home.
All of our interviewees share a willingness to push big ideas forwards while also asking how — and how soon — they can be tested. Einstein had to wait just a few years for predictions from his 1915 general theory of relativity to be confirmed by observations of a solar eclipse. But many theorists finish their careers without seeing any experimental check on their ideas. Our young theorists not only know that they must think big, but also that they must pit their wildest theories against reality.
Over the next few years, many theorists will be directing their attention to the world's largest particle accelerator, currently being built near Geneva in Switzerland, for experimental confirmation of their ideas. Here, physicists hope to find some support for exotic notions such as extra dimensions (see 'In search of hidden dimensions', page 10). Elsewhere, missions such as the Planck satellite will provide data on the early Universe that may help to shore up theories about the moment of creation (see 'The long-distance thinker', page 12). The hoped-for construction of the first quantum computer would test fundamental ideas about the quantum world (see 'A theorist of errors', page 9), whereas the creation of exotic materials is continually pushing our knowledge of electron behaviour (see 'Can electrons do the splits?', page 11).
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作者:admin@医学,生命科学 2011-07-04 11:57
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