Another strike against Zoom: the brain learns faces better in person

Face-to-face interactions beat digital ones for gaining familiarity with someone else’s face. Face-to-face interactions beat digital ones for gaining familiarity with someone else’s face. A group of friends meeting in a pub A group of friends meeting in a pub

In the early twentieth century, the physicist Robert Millikan used a microscope to observe the motion of falling oil droplets exposed to an electric field -an iconic experiment that helped to pin down the value of the electron's charge. It also showed that charge is packaged in discrete units, and that an object's charge depends on the number of electrons it has.
Javier Marmolejo at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and his colleagues have devised a version of the experiment that can be seen with the naked eye. The team used a laser to levitate a single oil droplet in an electric field, and a lens to project an image of the droplet onto a wall in the laboratory. A radioactive source added charge to the droplet.
As the blob of oil accumulated electrons, the added charge changed how strongly the droplet resisted the force of gravity, and it jumped upwards. The projections showed that the height of each jump was a multiple of 10 micrometres, the amount attributable to a gain of one electron. Sci. Rep. 11, 10703 (2021)

ZOOM OUT: BRAIN LEARNS FACES BETTER IN PERSON
The brain remembers faces better after an in-person meeting than after viewing faces in photos or video.
The human brain has a special network devoted to remembering human faces, but how those memories form has been a mystery. Géza Gergely Ambrus and Gyula Kovács at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany and their colleagues had volunteers either sort photos of celebrities they didn't know, watch a television show or speak in person with two laboratory members. Next, the researchers recorded the volunteers' brain activity as they viewed photos of the celebrities, the show's actors or the lab members.
About half a second after the volunteers saw a familiar face, their brains showed a spike in a particular activity pattern. Volunteers who had interacted with the lab members had the strongest activity, and those who'd seen the television show had the next strongest, suggesting that these faces were the most familiar. The brains of volunteers who'd sorted celebrity photos didn't show much activity at all.
The researchers say that in-person interactions boost the brain's ability to register familiarity.

ICE SHAKER: DISTANT QUAKES RATTLE ANTARCTIC VOLCANO
Massive earthquakes can trigger much smaller 'icequakes' at a volcano thousands of kilometres away in Antarctica.
The ice-covered slopes of Mount Erebus, the world's southernmost active volcano, are peppered with high-tech seismometers. Chenyu Li at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and her colleagues studied data gathered by those sensors, as well as by another nearby seismometer, between 2000 and 2017.
Seismic activity at Erebus spiked in the hours after two large earthquakes: a magnitude-8.8 one that rattled Chile in February 2010, and a magnitude-8.6 quake that hit the Indian Ocean in April 2012. The scientists conclude that seismic energy rippling through Earth from these distant quakes set off faint icequakes -tremors that ripple through ice rather than solid ground -in the ice covering Erebus.
Icequakes might be more easily triggered in the warmer Antarctic months, when temperature changes weaken the brittle ice. Although Erebus erupted frequently in 2010 and 2012, these eruptions were relatively tame, and don't seem to have been affected by the quakes.