Will You Ever Be Able to Upload Your Brain?
SOME hominid along the evolutionary path to humans was probably the first animal with the cognitive ability to understand that it would someday die. To be human is to cope with this knowledge. Many have been consoled by the religious promise of life beyond this world, but some have been seduced by the hope that they can escape death in this world. Such hopes, from Ponce de León’s quest to find a fountain of youth to the present vogue for cryogenic preservation, inevitably prove false.
In recent times it has become appealing to believe that your dead brain might be preserved sufficiently by freezing so that some future civilization could bring your mind back to life. Assuming that no future scientists will reverse death, the hope is that they could analyze your brain’s structure and use this to recreate a functioning mind, whether in engineered living tissue or in a computer with a robotic body. By functioning, I mean thinking, feeling, talking, seeing, hearing, learning, remembering, acting. Your mind would wake up, much as it wakes up after a night’s sleep, with your own memories, feelings and patterns of thought, and continue on into the world.
I am a theoretical neuroscientist. I study models of brain circuits, precisely the sort of models that would be needed to try to reconstruct or emulate a functioning brain from a detailed knowledge of its structure. I don’t in principle see any reason that what I’ve described could not someday, in the very far future, be achieved (though it’s an active field of philosophical debate). But to accomplish this, these future scientists would need to know details of staggering complexity about the brain’s structure, details quite likely far beyond what any method today could preserve in a dead brain.
How much would we need to know to reconstruct a functioning brain? Let’s begin by defining some terms. Neurons are the cells in the brain that electrically carry information: Their electrical activity somehow amounts to your seeing, hearing, thinking, acting and all the rest. Each neuron sends a highly branched wire, or axon, out to connect or electrically “talk” to other neurons. The specialized connecting points between neurons are called synapses. Memories are commonly thought to be largely stored in the patterns of synaptic connections between neurons, which in turn shape the electrical activities of the neurons.
Much of the current hope of reconstructing a functioning brain rests on connectomics: the ambition to construct a complete wiring diagram, or “connectome,” of all the synaptic connections between neurons in the mammalian brain. Unfortunately connectomics, while an important part of basic research, falls far short of the goal of reconstructing a mind, in two ways. First, we are far from constructing a connectome. The current best achievement was determining the connections in a tiny piece of brain tissue containing 1,700 synapses; the human brain has more than a hundred billion times that number of synapses. While progress is swift, no one has any realistic estimate of how long it will take to arrive at brain-size connectomes. (My wild guess: centuries.)
Second, even if this goal were achieved, it would be only a first step toward the goal of describing the brain sufficiently to capture a mind, which would mean understanding the brain’s detailed electrical activity. If neuron A makes a synaptic connection onto neuron B, we would need to know the strength of the electrical signal in neuron B that would be caused by each electrical event from neuron A. The connectome might give an average strength for each connection, but the actual strength varies over time. Over short times (thousandths of a second to tens of seconds), the strength is changed, often sharply, by each signal that A sends. Over longer times (minutes to years), both the overall strength and the patterns of short-term changes can alter more permanently as part of learning. The details of these variations differ from synapse to synapse. To describe this complex transmission of information by a single fixed strength would be like describing air traffic using only the average number of flights between each pair of airports.
Underlying this complex behavior is a complex structure: Each synapse is an enormously complicated molecular machine, one of the most complicated known in biology, made up of over 1,000 different proteins with multiple copies of each. Why does a synapse need to be so complex? We don’t know all of the things that synapses do, but beyond dynamically changing their signal strengths, synapses may also need to control how changeable they are: Our best current theories of how we store new memories without overwriting old ones suggest that each synapse needs to continually reintegrate its past experience (the patterns of activity in neuron A and neuron B) to determine how fixed or changeable it will be in response to the next new experience. Take away this synapse-by-synapse malleability, current theory suggests, and either our memories would quickly disappear or we would have great difficulty forming new ones. Without being able to characterize how each synapse would respond in real time to new inputs and modify itself in response to them, we cannot reconstruct the dynamic, learning, changing entity that is the mind.
But that’s not all. Neurons themselves are complex and variable. Axons vary in their speed and reliability of transmission. Each neuron makes a treelike branching structure that reaches out to receive synaptic input from other neurons, as a tree’s branches reach out to sunlight. The branches, called dendrites, differ in their sensitivity to synaptic input, with the molecular composition as well as shape of a dendrite determining how it would respond to the electrical input it receives from synapses.
Nor are any of these parts of a living brain fixed entities. The brain’s components, including the neurons, axons, dendrites and synapses (and more), are constantly adapting to their electrical and chemical “experience,” as part of learning, to maintain the ability to give appropriately different responses to different inputs, and to keep the brain stable and prevent seizures. These adaptations depend on the dynamic molecular machinery in each neural structure. The states of all of these components are constantly being modulated by a wash of chemicals from brainstem neurons that determine such things as when we are awake or attentive and when we are asleep, and by hormones from the body that help drive our motivations. Each element differs in its susceptibility to these influences.
To reconstruct a mind, perhaps one would not need to replicate every molecular detail; given enough structure, the rest might be self-correcting. But an extraordinarily deep level of detail would be required, not only to characterize the connectome but also to understand how the neurons, dendrites, axons and synapses would dynamically operate, change and adapt themselves.
I don’t wish to suggest that only hopelessly complicated models of the brain are useful. Quite the contrary. Our most powerful theoretical research tools for understanding brain function are often enormously simplified models of small pieces of the brain — for example, characterizing synapses by a single overall strength and ignoring dendritic structure. I make my living studying such models. These simple models, developed in close interaction with experimental findings, can reveal basic mechanisms operating in brain circuits. Adding complexity to our models does not necessarily give us a more realistic picture of brain circuits because we do not know enough about the details of this complexity to model it accurately, and the complexity can obscure the relationships we are trying to grasp. But far more information would be needed before we could characterize the dynamic operation of even a generic whole brain. Capturing all of the structure that makes it one person’s individual mind would be fantastically more complicated still.
Neuroscience is progressing rapidly, but the distance to go in understanding brain function is enormous. It will almost certainly be a very long time before we can hope to preserve a brain in sufficient detail and for sufficient time that some civilization much farther in the future, perhaps thousands or even millions of years from now, might have the technological capacity to “upload” and recreate that individual’s mind.
I certainly have my own fears of annihilation. But I also know that I had no existence for the 13.8 billion years that the universe existed before my birth, and I expect the same will be true after my death. The universe is not about me or any other individual; we come and we go as part of a much larger process. More and more I am content with this awareness. We all find our own solutions to the problem death poses. For the foreseeable future, bringing your mind back to life will not be one of them.
Kenneth D. Miller is a professor of neuroscience at Columbia and a co-director of the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/opini ... ef=opinion
Articles of Interest in Science
Gamblers, Scientists and the Mysterious Hot Hand
IN the opening act of Tom Stoppard’s play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” the two characters are passing the time by betting on the outcome of a coin toss. Guildenstern retrieves a gold piece from his bag and flips it in the air. “Heads,” Rosencrantz announces as he adds the coin to his growing collection.
Guil, as he’s called for short, flips another coin. Heads. And another. Heads again. Seventy-seven heads later, as his satchel becomes emptier and emptier, he wonders: Has there been a breakdown in the laws of probability? Are supernatural forces intervening? Have he and his friend become stuck in time, reliving the same random coin flip again and again?
Eighty-five heads, 89… Surely his losing streak is about to end.
Psychologists who study how the human mind responds to randomness call this the gambler’s fallacy — the belief that on some cosmic plane a run of bad luck creates an imbalance that must ultimately be corrected, a pressure that must be relieved. After several bad rolls, surely the dice are primed to land in a more advantageous way.
If you flip a fair coin four times in a row, there are 16 possible outcomes. Now calculate for each sequence the odds that a head is followed by a head and average the results. The answer is not 50-50, as most people would expect, but 40.5 percent — in favor of tails.
This is not, however, a violation of the laws of randomness. A head is followed by a head 12 times and by a tail 12 times. But by concentrating only on the flips that follow heads and ignoring the other data, we are fooled by a selection bias.
The opposite of that is the hot-hand fallacy — the belief that winning streaks, whether in basketball or coin tossing, have a tendency to continue, as if propelled by their own momentum. Both misconceptions are reflections of the brain’s wired-in rejection of the power that randomness holds over our lives. Look deep enough, we instinctively believe, and we may uncover a hidden order.
Recent studies show how anyone, including scientists, can be fooled by these cognitive biases. A working paper published this summer has caused a stir by proposing that a classic body of research disproving the existence of the hot hand in basketball is flawed by a subtle misperception about randomness. If the analysis is correct, the possibility remains that the hot hand is real.
I was thinking about Guil and the psychologists last week as I walked into the Camel Rock Casino, operated by the pueblo of Tesuque, a few miles north of Santa Fe. With five full-scale gambling operations in a stretch of 30 miles, the highway there has become a kind of elongated Las Vegas Strip.
Gamblers, with their systems and superstitions, sat nearly immobile at video slots, trying to outguess the algorithmic heart beating inside. They were immersed in what the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll calls “the machine zone.”
In her book “Addiction by Design,” she describes how modern slot machines are engineered to maximize “gaming productivity” — the velocity with which dollars fly from the players’ pockets. Mechanical levers have been replaced by faster, more efficient electronic buttons, while the simulated reels of cherries, bars and other symbols are programmed to give the illusion that you missed a jackpot by just a hair — fuel for the gambler’s fallacy.
I’d first come to Camel Rock more than 20 years ago while I was writing a book about the human drive to find order in the world — and impose it when it is not really there. In those days there was only a makeshift bingo hall, and all eyes were on a large machine in which the lettered and numbered balls jumped around like popcorn — an analog equivalent of the random-number-generating chips driving today’s slots. I thought of how an omniscient intelligence, like the one imagined by the philosopher Pierre-Simon Laplace, could precisely track the trajectories of the balls, the elasticity of their impacts, the buoyancy of the air — a vast amount of data — and predict the outcome of the game.
We mortals can benefit, at least in theory, from islands of predictability — a barely perceptible tilt of a roulette table that makes the ball slightly more likely to land on one side of the wheel than the other. The same is true for the random walk of the stock market. Becoming aware of information before it has propagated worldwide can give a speculator a tiny, temporary edge. Some traders pay a premium to locate their computer servers as close as possible to Lower Manhattan, gaining advantages measured in microseconds.
But often the patterns we see are illusions. Some research has suggested that more excitable people are likelier to embrace the magic of the hot hand (go, go, go!) while those with “higher cognitive skills,” as the studies put it, are prone to the gambler’s fallacy — the belief that a run of heads will probably be followed by tails. Their swaggering brains think they have psyched out the system, discovering an underlying regularity.
Or maybe they are misapplying a real phenomenon called regression toward the mean. In the long run the number of heads and tails will even out, but that says nothing about how the next flip will fall. A paper this summer in a German economics journal found that in clearly random situations, the tables are turned: People with lower cognitive abilities are likelier than more rational types to be led astray by the gambler’s fallacy.
In a study that appeared this summer, Joshua B. Miller and Adam Sanjurjo suggest why the gambler’s fallacy remains so deeply ingrained. Take a fair coin — one as likely to land on heads as tails — and flip it four times. How often was heads followed by another head? In the sequence HHHT, for example, that happened two out of three times — a score of about 67 percent. For HHTH or HHTT, the score is 50 percent.
Altogether there are 16 different ways the coins can fall. I know it sounds crazy but when you average the scores together the answer is not 50-50, as most people would expect, but about 40-60 in favor of tails.
There is not, as Guildenstern might imagine, a tear in the fabric of space-time. It remains as true as ever that each flip is independent, with even odds that the coin will land one way or the other. But by concentrating on only some of the data — the flips that follow heads — a gambler falls prey to a selection bias.
In an interesting twist, Dr. Miller and Dr. Sanjurjo propose that research claiming to debunk the hot hand in basketball is flawed by the same kind of misperception. Studies by the psychologist Thomas Gilovich and others conclude that basketball is no streakier than a coin toss. For a 50 percent shooter, for example, the odds of making a basket are supposed to be no better after a hit — still 50-50. But in a purely random situation, according to the new analysis, a hit would be expected to be followed by another hit less than half the time. Finding 50 percent would actually be evidence in favor of the hot hand. If so, the next step would be to establish the physiological or psychological reasons that make players different from tossed coins.
Dr. Gilovich is withholding judgment. “The larger the sample of data for a given player, the less of an issue this is,” he wrote in an email. “Because our samples were fairly large, I don’t believe this changes the original conclusions about the hot hand. ”
Flaws in perceptions about randomness affect more than gambling and basketball. When multiple cases of cancer occur in a community, especially among children, it is only human to fear a common cause. Most often these cancer clusters turn out to be statistical illusions, the result of what epidemiologists call the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. (Blast the side of a barn with a random spray of buckshot and then draw a circle around one of the clusters: It’s a bull's-eye.)
Taken to extremes, seeing connections that don’t exist can be a symptom of a psychiatric condition called apophenia. In less pathological forms, the brain’s hunger for pattern gives rise to superstitions (astrology, numerology) and is a driving factor in what has been called a replication crisis in science — a growing number of papers that cannot be confirmed by other laboratories.
For all their care to be objective, scientists are as prone as anyone to valuing data that support their hypothesis over those that contradict it. Sometimes this results in experiments that succeed only under very refined conditions, in certain labs with special reagents and performed by a scientist with a hot hand.
We’re all in the same boat. We evolved with this uncanny ability to find patterns. The difficulty lies in separating what really exists from what is only in our minds.
George Johnson is the author of the “Raw Data” column for Science Times. His book “Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith and the Search for Order” is being published this month in a 20th-anniversary edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/sunda ... inion&_r=0
IN the opening act of Tom Stoppard’s play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” the two characters are passing the time by betting on the outcome of a coin toss. Guildenstern retrieves a gold piece from his bag and flips it in the air. “Heads,” Rosencrantz announces as he adds the coin to his growing collection.
Guil, as he’s called for short, flips another coin. Heads. And another. Heads again. Seventy-seven heads later, as his satchel becomes emptier and emptier, he wonders: Has there been a breakdown in the laws of probability? Are supernatural forces intervening? Have he and his friend become stuck in time, reliving the same random coin flip again and again?
Eighty-five heads, 89… Surely his losing streak is about to end.
Psychologists who study how the human mind responds to randomness call this the gambler’s fallacy — the belief that on some cosmic plane a run of bad luck creates an imbalance that must ultimately be corrected, a pressure that must be relieved. After several bad rolls, surely the dice are primed to land in a more advantageous way.
If you flip a fair coin four times in a row, there are 16 possible outcomes. Now calculate for each sequence the odds that a head is followed by a head and average the results. The answer is not 50-50, as most people would expect, but 40.5 percent — in favor of tails.
This is not, however, a violation of the laws of randomness. A head is followed by a head 12 times and by a tail 12 times. But by concentrating only on the flips that follow heads and ignoring the other data, we are fooled by a selection bias.
The opposite of that is the hot-hand fallacy — the belief that winning streaks, whether in basketball or coin tossing, have a tendency to continue, as if propelled by their own momentum. Both misconceptions are reflections of the brain’s wired-in rejection of the power that randomness holds over our lives. Look deep enough, we instinctively believe, and we may uncover a hidden order.
Recent studies show how anyone, including scientists, can be fooled by these cognitive biases. A working paper published this summer has caused a stir by proposing that a classic body of research disproving the existence of the hot hand in basketball is flawed by a subtle misperception about randomness. If the analysis is correct, the possibility remains that the hot hand is real.
I was thinking about Guil and the psychologists last week as I walked into the Camel Rock Casino, operated by the pueblo of Tesuque, a few miles north of Santa Fe. With five full-scale gambling operations in a stretch of 30 miles, the highway there has become a kind of elongated Las Vegas Strip.
Gamblers, with their systems and superstitions, sat nearly immobile at video slots, trying to outguess the algorithmic heart beating inside. They were immersed in what the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll calls “the machine zone.”
In her book “Addiction by Design,” she describes how modern slot machines are engineered to maximize “gaming productivity” — the velocity with which dollars fly from the players’ pockets. Mechanical levers have been replaced by faster, more efficient electronic buttons, while the simulated reels of cherries, bars and other symbols are programmed to give the illusion that you missed a jackpot by just a hair — fuel for the gambler’s fallacy.
I’d first come to Camel Rock more than 20 years ago while I was writing a book about the human drive to find order in the world — and impose it when it is not really there. In those days there was only a makeshift bingo hall, and all eyes were on a large machine in which the lettered and numbered balls jumped around like popcorn — an analog equivalent of the random-number-generating chips driving today’s slots. I thought of how an omniscient intelligence, like the one imagined by the philosopher Pierre-Simon Laplace, could precisely track the trajectories of the balls, the elasticity of their impacts, the buoyancy of the air — a vast amount of data — and predict the outcome of the game.
We mortals can benefit, at least in theory, from islands of predictability — a barely perceptible tilt of a roulette table that makes the ball slightly more likely to land on one side of the wheel than the other. The same is true for the random walk of the stock market. Becoming aware of information before it has propagated worldwide can give a speculator a tiny, temporary edge. Some traders pay a premium to locate their computer servers as close as possible to Lower Manhattan, gaining advantages measured in microseconds.
But often the patterns we see are illusions. Some research has suggested that more excitable people are likelier to embrace the magic of the hot hand (go, go, go!) while those with “higher cognitive skills,” as the studies put it, are prone to the gambler’s fallacy — the belief that a run of heads will probably be followed by tails. Their swaggering brains think they have psyched out the system, discovering an underlying regularity.
Or maybe they are misapplying a real phenomenon called regression toward the mean. In the long run the number of heads and tails will even out, but that says nothing about how the next flip will fall. A paper this summer in a German economics journal found that in clearly random situations, the tables are turned: People with lower cognitive abilities are likelier than more rational types to be led astray by the gambler’s fallacy.
In a study that appeared this summer, Joshua B. Miller and Adam Sanjurjo suggest why the gambler’s fallacy remains so deeply ingrained. Take a fair coin — one as likely to land on heads as tails — and flip it four times. How often was heads followed by another head? In the sequence HHHT, for example, that happened two out of three times — a score of about 67 percent. For HHTH or HHTT, the score is 50 percent.
Altogether there are 16 different ways the coins can fall. I know it sounds crazy but when you average the scores together the answer is not 50-50, as most people would expect, but about 40-60 in favor of tails.
There is not, as Guildenstern might imagine, a tear in the fabric of space-time. It remains as true as ever that each flip is independent, with even odds that the coin will land one way or the other. But by concentrating on only some of the data — the flips that follow heads — a gambler falls prey to a selection bias.
In an interesting twist, Dr. Miller and Dr. Sanjurjo propose that research claiming to debunk the hot hand in basketball is flawed by the same kind of misperception. Studies by the psychologist Thomas Gilovich and others conclude that basketball is no streakier than a coin toss. For a 50 percent shooter, for example, the odds of making a basket are supposed to be no better after a hit — still 50-50. But in a purely random situation, according to the new analysis, a hit would be expected to be followed by another hit less than half the time. Finding 50 percent would actually be evidence in favor of the hot hand. If so, the next step would be to establish the physiological or psychological reasons that make players different from tossed coins.
Dr. Gilovich is withholding judgment. “The larger the sample of data for a given player, the less of an issue this is,” he wrote in an email. “Because our samples were fairly large, I don’t believe this changes the original conclusions about the hot hand. ”
Flaws in perceptions about randomness affect more than gambling and basketball. When multiple cases of cancer occur in a community, especially among children, it is only human to fear a common cause. Most often these cancer clusters turn out to be statistical illusions, the result of what epidemiologists call the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. (Blast the side of a barn with a random spray of buckshot and then draw a circle around one of the clusters: It’s a bull's-eye.)
Taken to extremes, seeing connections that don’t exist can be a symptom of a psychiatric condition called apophenia. In less pathological forms, the brain’s hunger for pattern gives rise to superstitions (astrology, numerology) and is a driving factor in what has been called a replication crisis in science — a growing number of papers that cannot be confirmed by other laboratories.
For all their care to be objective, scientists are as prone as anyone to valuing data that support their hypothesis over those that contradict it. Sometimes this results in experiments that succeed only under very refined conditions, in certain labs with special reagents and performed by a scientist with a hot hand.
We’re all in the same boat. We evolved with this uncanny ability to find patterns. The difficulty lies in separating what really exists from what is only in our minds.
George Johnson is the author of the “Raw Data” column for Science Times. His book “Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith and the Search for Order” is being published this month in a 20th-anniversary edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/sunda ... inion&_r=0
Sorry, Einstein. Quantum Study Suggests ‘Spooky Action’ Is Real.
In a landmark study, scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands reported that they had conducted an experiment that they say proved one of the most fundamental claims of quantum theory — that objects separated by great distance can instantaneously affect each other’s behavior.
The finding is another blow to one of the bedrock principles of standard physics known as “locality,” which states that an object is directly influenced only by its immediate surroundings. The Delft study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, lends further credence to an idea that Einstein famously rejected. He said quantum theory necessitated “spooky action at a distance,” and he refused to accept the notion that the universe could behave in such a strange and apparently random fashion.
In particular, Einstein derided the idea that separate particles could be “entangled” so completely that measuring one particle would instantaneously influence the other, regardless of the distance separating them.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/scien ... 87722&_r=0
In a landmark study, scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands reported that they had conducted an experiment that they say proved one of the most fundamental claims of quantum theory — that objects separated by great distance can instantaneously affect each other’s behavior.
The finding is another blow to one of the bedrock principles of standard physics known as “locality,” which states that an object is directly influenced only by its immediate surroundings. The Delft study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, lends further credence to an idea that Einstein famously rejected. He said quantum theory necessitated “spooky action at a distance,” and he refused to accept the notion that the universe could behave in such a strange and apparently random fashion.
In particular, Einstein derided the idea that separate particles could be “entangled” so completely that measuring one particle would instantaneously influence the other, regardless of the distance separating them.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/scien ... 87722&_r=0
Cassini Seeks Insights to Life in Plumes of Enceladus, Saturn’s Icy Moon
Where there is water, is there life?
That’s the $64 billion question now facing NASA and the rest of lonely humanity. When the New Horizons spacecraft, cameras clicking, sped past Pluto in July, it represented an inflection point in the conquest of the solar system. Half a century after the first planetary probe sailed past Venus, all the planets and would-be planets we have known and loved, and all the marvelous rocks and snowballs circling them, have been detected and inspected, reconnoitered.
That part of human history, the astrophysical exploration of the solar system, is over. The next part, the biological exploration of space, is just beginning. We have finished counting the rocks in the neighborhood. It is time to find out if anything is living on them, a job that could easily take another half century.
NASA’s mantra for finding alien life has long been to “follow the water,” the one ingredient essential to our own biochemistry. On Wednesday, NASA sampled the most available water out there, as the Cassini spacecraft plunged through an icy spray erupting from the little Saturnian moon Enceladus.
Enceladus is only 300 miles across and whiter than a Bing Crosby Christmas, reflecting virtually all the sunlight that hits it, which should make it colder and deader than Scrooge’s heart.
But in 2005, shortly after starting an 11-year sojourn at Saturn, Cassini recorded jets of water squirting from cracks known as tiger stripes near the south pole of Enceladus — evidence, scientists say, of an underground ocean kept warm and liquid by tidal flexing of the little moon as it is stretched and squeezed by Saturn.
And with that, Enceladus leapfrogged to the top of astrobiologists’ list of promising places to look for life. If there is life in its ocean, alien microbes could be riding those geysers out into space where a passing spacecraft could grab them. No need to drill through miles of ice or dig up rocks.
As Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, said, it’s as if nature had hung up a sign at Enceladus saying “Free Samples.”
Discovering life was not on the agenda when Cassini was designed and launched two decades ago. Its instruments can’t capture microbes or detect life, but in a couple of dozen passes through the plumes of Enceladus, it has detected various molecules associated with life: water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, molecular nitrogen, propane, acetylene, formaldehyde and traces of ammonia.
Wednesday’s dive was the deepest Cassini will make through the plumes, only 30 miles above the icy surface. Scientists are especially interested in measuring the amount of hydrogen gas in the plume, which would tell them how much energy and heat are being generated by chemical reactions in hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the moon’s ocean.
It is in such ocean vents that some of the most primordial-looking life-forms have been found on our own planet. What the Cassini scientists find out could help set the stage for a return mission with a spacecraft designed to detect or even bring back samples of life.
These are optimistic, almost sci-fi times. The fact that life was present on Earth as early as 4.1 billion years ago — pretty much as soon as asteroids and leftover planet junk stopped bombarding the new Earth and let it cool down — has led astrobiologists to conclude that, given the right conditions, life will take hold quickly. Not just in our solar system, but in some of the thousands of planetary systems that Kepler and other missions squinting at distant stars have uncovered.
And if water is indeed the key, the solar system has had several chances to get lucky. Besides Enceladus, there is an ocean underneath the ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa, and the Hubble Space Telescope has hinted that it too is venting into space. NASA has begun planning for a mission next decade to fly by it.
And of course there’s Mars, with its dead oceans and intriguing streaks of damp sand, springboard of a thousand sci-fi invasions of Earth, but in recent decades the target of robot invasions going the other direction.
Some scientists even make the case that genesis happened not on Earth but on Mars. Our biochemical ancestors would then have made the passage on an asteroid, making us all Martians and perhaps explaining our curious attraction to the Red Planet.
And then there is Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, the only moon in the solar system with a thick atmosphere and lakes on its surface, except that in this case the liquid in them is methane and the beaches and valleys are made of hydrocarbon slush.
NASA’s working definition of life, coined by a group of biologists in 1992, is “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”
Any liquid could serve as the medium of this thing, process, whatever it is. Life on Titan would expand our notions of what is biochemically possible out there in the rest of the universe.
Our history of exploration suggests that surprise is the nature of the game. That was the lesson of the Voyager missions: Every world or moon encountered on that twin-spacecraft odyssey was different, an example of the laws of physics sculpted by time and circumstance into unique and weird forms.
And so far that is the lesson of the new astronomy of exoplanets — thousands of planetary systems, but not a single one that looks like our own.
The detection of a single piece of pond slime, one alien microbe, on some other world would rank as one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. Why should we expect it to look anything like what we already know?
That microbe won’t come any cheaper than the Higgs boson, the keystone of modern particle physics, which cost more than $10 billion to hunt down over half a century.
Finding that microbe will involve launching big, complicated chunks of hardware to various corners of the solar system, and that means work for engineers, scientists, accountants, welders, machinists, electricians, programmers and practitioners of other crafts yet to be invented — astro-robot-paleontologists, say.
However many billions of dollars it takes to knock on doors and find out if anybody is at home, it will all be spent here on Earth, on people and things we all say we want: innovation, education, science, technology.
We’ve seen this have a happy ending before. It was the kids of the aerospace industry and the military-industrial complex, especially in California, who gave us Silicon Valley and general relativity in our pockets.
In this era, a happy ending could include the news that we are not alone, that the cosmos is more diverse, again, than we had imagined.
Or not.
In another 50 years the silence from out there could be deafening.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/scien ... d=71987722
Where there is water, is there life?
That’s the $64 billion question now facing NASA and the rest of lonely humanity. When the New Horizons spacecraft, cameras clicking, sped past Pluto in July, it represented an inflection point in the conquest of the solar system. Half a century after the first planetary probe sailed past Venus, all the planets and would-be planets we have known and loved, and all the marvelous rocks and snowballs circling them, have been detected and inspected, reconnoitered.
That part of human history, the astrophysical exploration of the solar system, is over. The next part, the biological exploration of space, is just beginning. We have finished counting the rocks in the neighborhood. It is time to find out if anything is living on them, a job that could easily take another half century.
NASA’s mantra for finding alien life has long been to “follow the water,” the one ingredient essential to our own biochemistry. On Wednesday, NASA sampled the most available water out there, as the Cassini spacecraft plunged through an icy spray erupting from the little Saturnian moon Enceladus.
Enceladus is only 300 miles across and whiter than a Bing Crosby Christmas, reflecting virtually all the sunlight that hits it, which should make it colder and deader than Scrooge’s heart.
But in 2005, shortly after starting an 11-year sojourn at Saturn, Cassini recorded jets of water squirting from cracks known as tiger stripes near the south pole of Enceladus — evidence, scientists say, of an underground ocean kept warm and liquid by tidal flexing of the little moon as it is stretched and squeezed by Saturn.
And with that, Enceladus leapfrogged to the top of astrobiologists’ list of promising places to look for life. If there is life in its ocean, alien microbes could be riding those geysers out into space where a passing spacecraft could grab them. No need to drill through miles of ice or dig up rocks.
As Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, said, it’s as if nature had hung up a sign at Enceladus saying “Free Samples.”
Discovering life was not on the agenda when Cassini was designed and launched two decades ago. Its instruments can’t capture microbes or detect life, but in a couple of dozen passes through the plumes of Enceladus, it has detected various molecules associated with life: water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, molecular nitrogen, propane, acetylene, formaldehyde and traces of ammonia.
Wednesday’s dive was the deepest Cassini will make through the plumes, only 30 miles above the icy surface. Scientists are especially interested in measuring the amount of hydrogen gas in the plume, which would tell them how much energy and heat are being generated by chemical reactions in hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the moon’s ocean.
It is in such ocean vents that some of the most primordial-looking life-forms have been found on our own planet. What the Cassini scientists find out could help set the stage for a return mission with a spacecraft designed to detect or even bring back samples of life.
These are optimistic, almost sci-fi times. The fact that life was present on Earth as early as 4.1 billion years ago — pretty much as soon as asteroids and leftover planet junk stopped bombarding the new Earth and let it cool down — has led astrobiologists to conclude that, given the right conditions, life will take hold quickly. Not just in our solar system, but in some of the thousands of planetary systems that Kepler and other missions squinting at distant stars have uncovered.
And if water is indeed the key, the solar system has had several chances to get lucky. Besides Enceladus, there is an ocean underneath the ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa, and the Hubble Space Telescope has hinted that it too is venting into space. NASA has begun planning for a mission next decade to fly by it.
And of course there’s Mars, with its dead oceans and intriguing streaks of damp sand, springboard of a thousand sci-fi invasions of Earth, but in recent decades the target of robot invasions going the other direction.
Some scientists even make the case that genesis happened not on Earth but on Mars. Our biochemical ancestors would then have made the passage on an asteroid, making us all Martians and perhaps explaining our curious attraction to the Red Planet.
And then there is Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, the only moon in the solar system with a thick atmosphere and lakes on its surface, except that in this case the liquid in them is methane and the beaches and valleys are made of hydrocarbon slush.
NASA’s working definition of life, coined by a group of biologists in 1992, is “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”
Any liquid could serve as the medium of this thing, process, whatever it is. Life on Titan would expand our notions of what is biochemically possible out there in the rest of the universe.
Our history of exploration suggests that surprise is the nature of the game. That was the lesson of the Voyager missions: Every world or moon encountered on that twin-spacecraft odyssey was different, an example of the laws of physics sculpted by time and circumstance into unique and weird forms.
And so far that is the lesson of the new astronomy of exoplanets — thousands of planetary systems, but not a single one that looks like our own.
The detection of a single piece of pond slime, one alien microbe, on some other world would rank as one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. Why should we expect it to look anything like what we already know?
That microbe won’t come any cheaper than the Higgs boson, the keystone of modern particle physics, which cost more than $10 billion to hunt down over half a century.
Finding that microbe will involve launching big, complicated chunks of hardware to various corners of the solar system, and that means work for engineers, scientists, accountants, welders, machinists, electricians, programmers and practitioners of other crafts yet to be invented — astro-robot-paleontologists, say.
However many billions of dollars it takes to knock on doors and find out if anybody is at home, it will all be spent here on Earth, on people and things we all say we want: innovation, education, science, technology.
We’ve seen this have a happy ending before. It was the kids of the aerospace industry and the military-industrial complex, especially in California, who gave us Silicon Valley and general relativity in our pockets.
In this era, a happy ending could include the news that we are not alone, that the cosmos is more diverse, again, than we had imagined.
Or not.
In another 50 years the silence from out there could be deafening.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/scien ... d=71987722
The Light-Beam Rider
THIS month marks the 100th anniversary of the General Theory of Relativity, the most beautiful theory in the history of science, and in its honor we should take a moment to celebrate the visualized “thought experiments” that were the navigation lights guiding Albert Einstein to his brilliant creation. Einstein relished what he called Gedankenexperimente, ideas that he twirled around in his head rather than in a lab. That’s what teachers call daydreaming, but if you’re Einstein you get to call them Gedankenexperimente.
As these thought experiments remind us, creativity is based on imagination. If we hope to inspire kids to love science, we need to do more than drill them in math and memorized formulas. We should stimulate their minds’ eyes as well. Even let them daydream.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/opini ... d=45305309
THIS month marks the 100th anniversary of the General Theory of Relativity, the most beautiful theory in the history of science, and in its honor we should take a moment to celebrate the visualized “thought experiments” that were the navigation lights guiding Albert Einstein to his brilliant creation. Einstein relished what he called Gedankenexperimente, ideas that he twirled around in his head rather than in a lab. That’s what teachers call daydreaming, but if you’re Einstein you get to call them Gedankenexperimente.
As these thought experiments remind us, creativity is based on imagination. If we hope to inspire kids to love science, we need to do more than drill them in math and memorized formulas. We should stimulate their minds’ eyes as well. Even let them daydream.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/opini ... d=45305309
A Learning Advance in Artificial Intelligence Rivals Human Abilities
Computer researchers reported artificial-intelligence advances on Thursday that surpassed human capabilities for a narrow set of vision-related tasks.
The improvements are noteworthy because so-called machine-vision systems are becoming commonplace in many aspects of life, including car-safety systems that detect pedestrians and bicyclists, as well as in video game controls, Internet search and factory robots.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University and the University of Toronto reported a new type of “one shot” machine learning on Thursday in the journal Science, in which a computer vision program outperformed a group of humans in identifying handwritten characters based on a single example.
The program is capable of quickly learning the characters in a range of languages and generalizing from what it has learned. The authors suggest this capability is similar to the way humans learn and understand concepts.
The new approach, known as Bayesian Program Learning, or B.P.L., is different from current machine learning technologies known as deep neural networks.
Neural networks can be trained to recognize human speech, detect objects in images or identify kinds of behavior by being exposed to large sets of examples.
Although such networks are modeled after the behavior of biological neurons, they do not yet learn the way humans do — acquiring new concepts quickly. By contrast, the new software program described in the Science article is able to learn to recognize handwritten characters after “seeing” only a few or even a single example.
The researchers compared the capabilities of their Bayesian approach and other programming models using five separate learning tasks that involved a set of characters from a research data set known as Omniglot, which includes 1,623 handwritten character sets from 50 languages. Both images and pen strokes needed to create characters were captured.
“With all the progress in machine learning, it’s amazing what you can do with lots of data and faster computers,” said Joshua B. Tenenbaum, a professor of cognitive science and computation at M.I.T. and one of the authors of the Science paper. “But when you look at children, it’s amazing what they can learn from very little data. Some comes from prior knowledge and some is built into our brain.”
Also on Thursday, organizers of an annual academic machine vision competition reported gains in lowering the error rate in software for finding and classifying objects in digital images.
Photo
Three researchers who have created a computer model that captures humans’ unique ability to learn new concepts from a single example: from left, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Brenden M. Lake and Joshua B. Tenenbaum.Credit Alain Decarie for The New York Times
“I’m constantly amazed by the rate of progress in the field,” said Alexander Berg, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
The competition, known as the Imagenet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, pits teams of researchers at academic, government and corporate laboratories against one another to design programs to both classify and detect objects. It was won this year by a group of researchers at the Microsoft Research laboratory in Beijing.
The Microsoft team was able to cut the number of errors in half in a task that required their program to classify objects from a set of 1,000 categories. The team also won a second competition by accurately detecting all instances of objects in 200 categories.
The contest requires the programs to examine a large number of digital images, and either label or find objects in the images. For example, they may need to distinguish between objects such as bicycles and cars, both of which might appear to have two wheels from a certain perspective.
In both the handwriting recognition task described in Science and in the visual classification and detection competition, researchers made efforts to compare their progress to human abilities. In both cases, the software advances now appear to surpass human abilities.
However, computer scientists cautioned against drawing conclusions about “thinking” machines or making direct comparisons to human intelligence.
“I would be very careful with terms like ‘superhuman performance,’ ” said Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle. “Of course the calculator exhibits superhuman performance, with the possible exception of Dustin Hoffman,” he added, in reference to the actor’s portrayal of an autistic savant with extraordinary math skills in the movie “Rain Man.”
The advances reflect the intensifying focus in Silicon Valley and elsewhere on artificial intelligence.
Last month, the Toyota Motor Corporation announced a five-year, billion-dollar investment to create a research center based next to Stanford University to focus on artificial intelligence and robotics.
Also, a formerly obscure academic conference, Neural Information Processing Systems, underway this week in Montreal, has doubled in size since the previous year and has attracted a growing list of brand-name corporate sponsors, including Apple for the first time.
“There is a sellers’ market right now — not enough talent to fill the demand from companies who need them,” said Terrence Sejnowski, the director of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. “Ph.D. students are getting hired out of graduate schools for salaries that are higher than faculty members who are teaching them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/scien ... d=71987722
******
First I.V.F. Puppies Are Born in Breakthrough at Cornell
Scientists at Cornell University announced Wednesday that for the first time they had been successful in delivering a litter of puppies conceived through in vitro fertilization.
In what was described as a “breakthrough,” the results of the research, which took decades to accomplish, were announced in the scientific journal Public Library of Science ONE and online by the university.
The successful multiple, live births open the door for the future conservation of endangered species and for the use of gene-editing technologies that could help scientists get rid of inherited diseases in dogs.
The research could also help in the study of genetic diseases, because dogs share more than 350 disease traits with humans, almost twice as many as any other species.
“Since the mid-1970s, people have been trying to do this in a dog and have been unsuccessful,” said Alexander J. Travis, associate professor of reproductive biology in the Baker Institute for Animal Health in Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine.
The scientists described two main challenges, such as finding the optimal stage for fertilization of the female dog’s eggs, and simulating the conditions in the lab for preparing the sperm. Ultimately, the team was able to achieve fertilization rates of 80 percent to 90 percent, Dr. Travis said.
Eventually, 19 embryos were transferred to a host female dog, which gave birth July 10 to seven puppies: five conceived from beagles and two that were a beagle and cocker spaniel mix.
Dr. Travis’s team reported in 2013 the successful birth of Klondike, a beagle-Labrador mix puppy born from a frozen embryo in a procedure that used artificial insemination.
But the announcement this week is different because it involves a litter and because the multiple embryos were cultivated in a dish and then implanted in the recipient female, Skylar Sylvester, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/scien ... pe=article
Computer researchers reported artificial-intelligence advances on Thursday that surpassed human capabilities for a narrow set of vision-related tasks.
The improvements are noteworthy because so-called machine-vision systems are becoming commonplace in many aspects of life, including car-safety systems that detect pedestrians and bicyclists, as well as in video game controls, Internet search and factory robots.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University and the University of Toronto reported a new type of “one shot” machine learning on Thursday in the journal Science, in which a computer vision program outperformed a group of humans in identifying handwritten characters based on a single example.
The program is capable of quickly learning the characters in a range of languages and generalizing from what it has learned. The authors suggest this capability is similar to the way humans learn and understand concepts.
The new approach, known as Bayesian Program Learning, or B.P.L., is different from current machine learning technologies known as deep neural networks.
Neural networks can be trained to recognize human speech, detect objects in images or identify kinds of behavior by being exposed to large sets of examples.
Although such networks are modeled after the behavior of biological neurons, they do not yet learn the way humans do — acquiring new concepts quickly. By contrast, the new software program described in the Science article is able to learn to recognize handwritten characters after “seeing” only a few or even a single example.
The researchers compared the capabilities of their Bayesian approach and other programming models using five separate learning tasks that involved a set of characters from a research data set known as Omniglot, which includes 1,623 handwritten character sets from 50 languages. Both images and pen strokes needed to create characters were captured.
“With all the progress in machine learning, it’s amazing what you can do with lots of data and faster computers,” said Joshua B. Tenenbaum, a professor of cognitive science and computation at M.I.T. and one of the authors of the Science paper. “But when you look at children, it’s amazing what they can learn from very little data. Some comes from prior knowledge and some is built into our brain.”
Also on Thursday, organizers of an annual academic machine vision competition reported gains in lowering the error rate in software for finding and classifying objects in digital images.
Photo
Three researchers who have created a computer model that captures humans’ unique ability to learn new concepts from a single example: from left, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Brenden M. Lake and Joshua B. Tenenbaum.Credit Alain Decarie for The New York Times
“I’m constantly amazed by the rate of progress in the field,” said Alexander Berg, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
The competition, known as the Imagenet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, pits teams of researchers at academic, government and corporate laboratories against one another to design programs to both classify and detect objects. It was won this year by a group of researchers at the Microsoft Research laboratory in Beijing.
The Microsoft team was able to cut the number of errors in half in a task that required their program to classify objects from a set of 1,000 categories. The team also won a second competition by accurately detecting all instances of objects in 200 categories.
The contest requires the programs to examine a large number of digital images, and either label or find objects in the images. For example, they may need to distinguish between objects such as bicycles and cars, both of which might appear to have two wheels from a certain perspective.
In both the handwriting recognition task described in Science and in the visual classification and detection competition, researchers made efforts to compare their progress to human abilities. In both cases, the software advances now appear to surpass human abilities.
However, computer scientists cautioned against drawing conclusions about “thinking” machines or making direct comparisons to human intelligence.
“I would be very careful with terms like ‘superhuman performance,’ ” said Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle. “Of course the calculator exhibits superhuman performance, with the possible exception of Dustin Hoffman,” he added, in reference to the actor’s portrayal of an autistic savant with extraordinary math skills in the movie “Rain Man.”
The advances reflect the intensifying focus in Silicon Valley and elsewhere on artificial intelligence.
Last month, the Toyota Motor Corporation announced a five-year, billion-dollar investment to create a research center based next to Stanford University to focus on artificial intelligence and robotics.
Also, a formerly obscure academic conference, Neural Information Processing Systems, underway this week in Montreal, has doubled in size since the previous year and has attracted a growing list of brand-name corporate sponsors, including Apple for the first time.
“There is a sellers’ market right now — not enough talent to fill the demand from companies who need them,” said Terrence Sejnowski, the director of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. “Ph.D. students are getting hired out of graduate schools for salaries that are higher than faculty members who are teaching them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/scien ... d=71987722
******
First I.V.F. Puppies Are Born in Breakthrough at Cornell
Scientists at Cornell University announced Wednesday that for the first time they had been successful in delivering a litter of puppies conceived through in vitro fertilization.
In what was described as a “breakthrough,” the results of the research, which took decades to accomplish, were announced in the scientific journal Public Library of Science ONE and online by the university.
The successful multiple, live births open the door for the future conservation of endangered species and for the use of gene-editing technologies that could help scientists get rid of inherited diseases in dogs.
The research could also help in the study of genetic diseases, because dogs share more than 350 disease traits with humans, almost twice as many as any other species.
“Since the mid-1970s, people have been trying to do this in a dog and have been unsuccessful,” said Alexander J. Travis, associate professor of reproductive biology in the Baker Institute for Animal Health in Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine.
The scientists described two main challenges, such as finding the optimal stage for fertilization of the female dog’s eggs, and simulating the conditions in the lab for preparing the sperm. Ultimately, the team was able to achieve fertilization rates of 80 percent to 90 percent, Dr. Travis said.
Eventually, 19 embryos were transferred to a host female dog, which gave birth July 10 to seven puppies: five conceived from beagles and two that were a beagle and cocker spaniel mix.
Dr. Travis’s team reported in 2013 the successful birth of Klondike, a beagle-Labrador mix puppy born from a frozen embryo in a procedure that used artificial insemination.
But the announcement this week is different because it involves a litter and because the multiple embryos were cultivated in a dish and then implanted in the recipient female, Skylar Sylvester, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/scien ... pe=article
SpaceX Successfully Lands Rocket After Launch of Satellites Into Orbit
People living along the central Atlantic coast of Florida have for decades enjoyed the spectacle of rockets headed for space. On Monday night, they were treated to a new sight that may become common: a rocket coming back down to a gentle landing.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/22/scien ... 87722&_r=0
******
Gene Drives Offer New Hope Against Diseases and Crop Pests
Biologists in the United States and Europe are developing a revolutionary genetic technique that promises to provide an unprecedented degree of control over insect-borne diseases and crop pests.
The technique involves a mechanism called a gene drive system, which propels a gene of choice throughout a population. No gene drives have yet been tested in the wild, but in laboratory organisms like the fruit fly, they have converted almost the entire population to carry the favored version of a gene.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/22/scien ... d=71987722
*******
In Developing World, Cancer Is a Very Different Disease
In the United States the median age at which colon cancer strikes is 69 for men and 73 for women. In Chad the average life expectancy at birth is about 50. Children who survive childbirth — and then malnutrition and diarrhea — are likely to die of pneumonia, tuberculosis, influenza, malaria, AIDS or even traffic accidents long before their cells accumulate the mutations that cause colon cancer.
In fact, cancers of any kind don’t make the top 15 causes of death in Chad — or in Somalia, the Central African Republic and other places where the average life span peaks in the low to mid-50s. Many people do die from cancer, and their numbers are multiplied by rapidly growing populations and a lack of medical care. But first come all those other threats.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/22/scien ... ctionfront
People living along the central Atlantic coast of Florida have for decades enjoyed the spectacle of rockets headed for space. On Monday night, they were treated to a new sight that may become common: a rocket coming back down to a gentle landing.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/22/scien ... 87722&_r=0
******
Gene Drives Offer New Hope Against Diseases and Crop Pests
Biologists in the United States and Europe are developing a revolutionary genetic technique that promises to provide an unprecedented degree of control over insect-borne diseases and crop pests.
The technique involves a mechanism called a gene drive system, which propels a gene of choice throughout a population. No gene drives have yet been tested in the wild, but in laboratory organisms like the fruit fly, they have converted almost the entire population to carry the favored version of a gene.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/22/scien ... d=71987722
*******
In Developing World, Cancer Is a Very Different Disease
In the United States the median age at which colon cancer strikes is 69 for men and 73 for women. In Chad the average life expectancy at birth is about 50. Children who survive childbirth — and then malnutrition and diarrhea — are likely to die of pneumonia, tuberculosis, influenza, malaria, AIDS or even traffic accidents long before their cells accumulate the mutations that cause colon cancer.
In fact, cancers of any kind don’t make the top 15 causes of death in Chad — or in Somalia, the Central African Republic and other places where the average life span peaks in the low to mid-50s. Many people do die from cancer, and their numbers are multiplied by rapidly growing populations and a lack of medical care. But first come all those other threats.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/22/scien ... ctionfront
Gene Editing Offers Hope for Treating Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, Studies Find
After decades of disappointingly slow progress, researchers have taken a substantial step toward a possible treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy with the help of a powerful new gene-editing technique.
Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a progressive muscle-wasting disease that affects boys, putting them in wheelchairs by age 10, followed by an early death from heart failure or breathing difficulties. The disease is caused by defects in a gene that encodes a protein called dystrophin, which is essential for proper muscle function.
Because the disease is devastating and incurable, and common for a hereditary illness, it has long been a target for gene therapy, though without success. An alternative treatment, drugs based on chemicals known as antisense oligonucleotides, is in clinical trials.
But gene therapy — the idea of curing a genetic disease by inserting the correct gene into damaged cells — is making a comeback. A new technique, known as Crispr-Cas9, lets researchers cut the DNA of chromosomes at selected sites to remove or insert segments.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/01/scien ... ctionfront
After decades of disappointingly slow progress, researchers have taken a substantial step toward a possible treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy with the help of a powerful new gene-editing technique.
Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a progressive muscle-wasting disease that affects boys, putting them in wheelchairs by age 10, followed by an early death from heart failure or breathing difficulties. The disease is caused by defects in a gene that encodes a protein called dystrophin, which is essential for proper muscle function.
Because the disease is devastating and incurable, and common for a hereditary illness, it has long been a target for gene therapy, though without success. An alternative treatment, drugs based on chemicals known as antisense oligonucleotides, is in clinical trials.
But gene therapy — the idea of curing a genetic disease by inserting the correct gene into damaged cells — is making a comeback. A new technique, known as Crispr-Cas9, lets researchers cut the DNA of chromosomes at selected sites to remove or insert segments.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/01/scien ... ctionfront
Looking Beyond the Internet of Things
Excerpt:
Imagine if almost everything — streets, car bumpers, doors, hydroelectric dams — had a tiny sensor. That is already happening through so-called Internet-of-Things projects run by big companies like General Electric and IBM.
All those devices and sensors would also wirelessly connect to far-off data centers, where millions of computer servers manage and learn from all that information.
Those servers would then send back commands to help whatever the sensors are connected to operate more effectively: A home automatically turns up the heat ahead of cold weather moving in, or streetlights behave differently when traffic gets bad. Or imagine an insurance company instantly resolving who has to pay for what an instant after a fender-bender because it has been automatically fed information about the accident.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/02/techn ... d=71987722
Excerpt:
Imagine if almost everything — streets, car bumpers, doors, hydroelectric dams — had a tiny sensor. That is already happening through so-called Internet-of-Things projects run by big companies like General Electric and IBM.
All those devices and sensors would also wirelessly connect to far-off data centers, where millions of computer servers manage and learn from all that information.
Those servers would then send back commands to help whatever the sensors are connected to operate more effectively: A home automatically turns up the heat ahead of cold weather moving in, or streetlights behave differently when traffic gets bad. Or imagine an insurance company instantly resolving who has to pay for what an instant after a fender-bender because it has been automatically fed information about the accident.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/02/techn ... d=71987722
Parents hope 'frozen' child will live again
Thai parents, both doctors, put their trust in the future of medical research, when they requested Arizona-based cryonic company Alcor to preserve their daughter’s brain at the point of death. Two-year-old Matheryn Naovaratpong became the youngest person to be cryogenically frozen after dying from a rare form of cancer in January 2015.
The toddler's brain and body were frozen separately at -196 C, to be revived at a date in the distant future.
Alcor’s website describes cryonics as: “an experimental procedure that preserves a human being using the best available technology for the purpose of saving his/her life.”
The company calls itself a ‘Life Extension Foundation,’ and backers say they “believe medical technology will advance further in coming decades than it has in the past several centuries, enabling it to heal damage at the cellular and molecular levels and to restore full physical and mental health.”
In June scientists who work for Alcor published studies showing for the first time that memories formed before an animal has been frozen can survive after it has been thawed.
However, their experiments were carried out on namatode worms with much simpler brains than those of humans.
Alcor researcher Natasha Vita-More said that 'further research on larger organisms with more complex nervous systems could prove to be beneficial to the issue of cryopreservation, including, specifically, memory retention after reviving.'
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/weekendre ... tmd#page=4
Thai parents, both doctors, put their trust in the future of medical research, when they requested Arizona-based cryonic company Alcor to preserve their daughter’s brain at the point of death. Two-year-old Matheryn Naovaratpong became the youngest person to be cryogenically frozen after dying from a rare form of cancer in January 2015.
The toddler's brain and body were frozen separately at -196 C, to be revived at a date in the distant future.
Alcor’s website describes cryonics as: “an experimental procedure that preserves a human being using the best available technology for the purpose of saving his/her life.”
The company calls itself a ‘Life Extension Foundation,’ and backers say they “believe medical technology will advance further in coming decades than it has in the past several centuries, enabling it to heal damage at the cellular and molecular levels and to restore full physical and mental health.”
In June scientists who work for Alcor published studies showing for the first time that memories formed before an animal has been frozen can survive after it has been thawed.
However, their experiments were carried out on namatode worms with much simpler brains than those of humans.
Alcor researcher Natasha Vita-More said that 'further research on larger organisms with more complex nervous systems could prove to be beneficial to the issue of cryopreservation, including, specifically, memory retention after reviving.'
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/weekendre ... tmd#page=4
In a First, Element Will Be Named by Researchers in Japan
Since the 19th century, European and American discoveries have monopolized the naming of elements on the periodic table. It is evident in entries like francium, germanium, scandium, polonium, europium, californium, berkelium and americium.
But now, for the first time, researchers in Asia will make an addition to chemistry’s most fundamental catalog.
Scientists from the Riken institute in Japan will bestow an official name on Element 113, currently known by the placeholder name ununtrium, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry announced last week.
The organization said that studies published by the Japanese scientists from 2004 to 2012 give the team the strongest claim to having discovered the element. The declaration comes more than 12 years after the Japanese team first attempted to synthesize the superheavy element, by firing beams of zinc at a thin bismuth film.
Led by Kosuke Morita, the group began to bombard bismuth atoms in a particle accelerator at 10 percent the speed of light in 2003. A year later, they successfully fused two atomic nuclei from these elements, creating their first nucleus of Element 113, but it decayed in less than a thousandth of a second. In 2005, the team produced Element 113 in a second event, but the chemistry union did not consider the demonstration strong enough to denote a discovery.
Imagine that you could name a new element on the periodic table. Send your ideas to scitimes@nytimes.com with a 50-100 word explanation. Before your imagination gets away, consider these published guidelines for new elements (For linguistic consistency, the names of all new elements should end in “-ium”). In keeping with tradition, elements are named after:
A mythological concept or character (including an astronomical object);
A mineral, or similar substance;
A place or geographical region;
A property of the element; or
A scientist.
“For over seven years, we continued to search for data conclusively identifying Element 113, but we just never saw another event,” Dr. Morita said in a statement. “I was not prepared to give up, however, as I believed that one day, if we persevered, luck would fall upon us again.”
In 2012, the team finally produced strong evidence that they had synthesized Element 113. Over the course of those nine years, the beam was active for 553 days and launched more than 130 quintillion zinc atoms, according to Nature.
The chemistry union, along with the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, granted the Riken researchers naming rights to Element 113 over a joint Russia-United States team that had also claimed to discover the element.
The chemistry union’s decisions are detailed in two reports to appear in the journal Pure and Applied Chemistry. In addition to Element 113, Elements 115, 117 and 118 will also receive official names. Teams from Russia and the United States discovered those elements.
With their discovery, the bottom row of the periodic table will be complete. Elements are numbered by the protons they have in their nucleus, and Elements 114 (flerovium) and 116 (livermorium) had previously been confirmed and named.
Dr. Morita has not yet announced what he intends to name Element 113, but according to a 2004 article in The Japan Times when the team first published its results, one likely contender may be “japonium.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/05/scien ... d=71987722
Since the 19th century, European and American discoveries have monopolized the naming of elements on the periodic table. It is evident in entries like francium, germanium, scandium, polonium, europium, californium, berkelium and americium.
But now, for the first time, researchers in Asia will make an addition to chemistry’s most fundamental catalog.
Scientists from the Riken institute in Japan will bestow an official name on Element 113, currently known by the placeholder name ununtrium, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry announced last week.
The organization said that studies published by the Japanese scientists from 2004 to 2012 give the team the strongest claim to having discovered the element. The declaration comes more than 12 years after the Japanese team first attempted to synthesize the superheavy element, by firing beams of zinc at a thin bismuth film.
Led by Kosuke Morita, the group began to bombard bismuth atoms in a particle accelerator at 10 percent the speed of light in 2003. A year later, they successfully fused two atomic nuclei from these elements, creating their first nucleus of Element 113, but it decayed in less than a thousandth of a second. In 2005, the team produced Element 113 in a second event, but the chemistry union did not consider the demonstration strong enough to denote a discovery.
Imagine that you could name a new element on the periodic table. Send your ideas to scitimes@nytimes.com with a 50-100 word explanation. Before your imagination gets away, consider these published guidelines for new elements (For linguistic consistency, the names of all new elements should end in “-ium”). In keeping with tradition, elements are named after:
A mythological concept or character (including an astronomical object);
A mineral, or similar substance;
A place or geographical region;
A property of the element; or
A scientist.
“For over seven years, we continued to search for data conclusively identifying Element 113, but we just never saw another event,” Dr. Morita said in a statement. “I was not prepared to give up, however, as I believed that one day, if we persevered, luck would fall upon us again.”
In 2012, the team finally produced strong evidence that they had synthesized Element 113. Over the course of those nine years, the beam was active for 553 days and launched more than 130 quintillion zinc atoms, according to Nature.
The chemistry union, along with the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, granted the Riken researchers naming rights to Element 113 over a joint Russia-United States team that had also claimed to discover the element.
The chemistry union’s decisions are detailed in two reports to appear in the journal Pure and Applied Chemistry. In addition to Element 113, Elements 115, 117 and 118 will also receive official names. Teams from Russia and the United States discovered those elements.
With their discovery, the bottom row of the periodic table will be complete. Elements are numbered by the protons they have in their nucleus, and Elements 114 (flerovium) and 116 (livermorium) had previously been confirmed and named.
Dr. Morita has not yet announced what he intends to name Element 113, but according to a 2004 article in The Japan Times when the team first published its results, one likely contender may be “japonium.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/05/scien ... d=71987722
A Placebo Treatment for Pain
THE crisis of painkiller addiction is becoming increasingly personal: Sixteen percent of Americans know someone who has died from a prescription painkiller overdose, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey; 9 percent have seen a family member or close friend die.
Addictive opioid painkillers were once reserved for extreme situations like terminal cancer. But opioids like Vicodin and OxyContin are now widely prescribed for common conditions like arthritis and lower back pain. The consequences have been catastrophic: In 2013, prescription painkillers caused nearly 7,000 emergency room visits and 44 deaths every day.
How do we tackle this crisis? We often hear about efforts to clamp down on abuse, for example by regulating pain clinics and monitoring prescription patterns. But these won’t dent the demand for opioids unless we can find better ways to treat the hundred million Americans said to suffer from chronic pain. Simply switching to other drugs isn’t the answer. Few new painkillers are being approved, and existing ones, like Motrin and Tylenol, come with their own risks when used long-term, and some appear to be less effective than we once thought.
Help might instead come from an unexpected corner: the placebo effect.
This phenomenon — in which someone feels better after receiving fake treatment — was once dismissed as an illusion. People who are ill often improve regardless of the treatment they receive. But neuroscientists are discovering that in some conditions, including pain, placebos create biological effects similar to those caused by drugs.
Taking a placebo painkiller dampens activity in pain-related areas of the brain and spinal cord, and triggers the release of endorphins, the natural pain-relieving chemicals that opioid drugs are designed to mimic. Even when we take a real painkiller, a big chunk of its effect is delivered not by any direct chemical action, but by our expectation that the drug will work. Studies show that widely used painkillers like morphine, buprenorphine and tramadol are markedly less effective if we don’t know we’re taking them.
Placebo effects in pain are so large, in fact, that drug manufacturers are finding it hard to beat them. Finding ways to minimize placebo effects in trials, for example by screening out those who are most susceptible, is now a big focus for research. But what if instead we seek to harness these effects? Placebos might ruin drug trials, but they also show us a new approach to treating pain.
It is unethical to deceive patients by prescribing fake treatments, of course. But there is evidence that people with some conditions benefit even if they know they are taking placebos. In a 2014 study that followed 459 migraine attacks in 66 patients, honestly labeled placebos provided significantly more pain relief than no treatment, and were nearly half as effective as the painkiller Maxalt. (The study also found that a placebo labeled “placebo” was 60 percent as effective as Maxalt if it was labeled “placebo.” If the placebo was labeled “Maxalt,” it was again 60 percent as effective as the real drug under its real label.)
With placebo responses in pain so high — and the risks of drugs so severe — why not prescribe a course of “honest” placebos for those who wish to try it, before proceeding, if necessary, to an active drug?
Another option is to employ alternative therapies, which through placebo responses can benefit patients even when there is no physical mode of action. A series of large trials in Germany published between 2005 and 2009 compared real and sham acupuncture (in which needles are placed at nonacupuncture points) with either no treatment or routine clinical care, for chronic pain conditions including migraine, tension headaches, lower back pain and osteoarthritis. Patients who received the acupuncture, real or sham, reported a similar amount of pain relief — and more than those who received no treatment or routine care that included pain medication.
Rather than relying on dummy pills and treatments, however, a broader hope is that teasing out why and when placebos work — and for whom — will help to maximize the effectiveness of drugs, and in some cases allow us to do without them.
The available funding for such research is minuscule compared with the efforts poured into developing new drugs. But a key ingredient is expectation: The greater our belief that a treatment will work, the better we’ll respond.
Individual attitudes and experiences are important, as are cultural factors. Placebo effects are getting stronger in the United States, for example, though not elsewhere. Researchers reported last year that in trials published in 1996, drugs for chronic pain produced on average 27 percent more pain relief than placebos. By 2013, that advantage had slipped to just 9 percent. Likely explanations include a growing cultural belief in the effectiveness of painkillers — a result of direct-to-consumer advertising (illegal in most other countries) and perhaps the fact that so many Americans have taken these drugs in the past.
These findings have implications for deciding which patients are likely to benefit from drugs — someone who has strong faith in painkillers’ effectiveness is more likely to benefit than someone who is suspicious of conventional medicine — as well as how physicians explain the benefits and side effects of treatments they prescribe. Trials show, for example, that strengthening patients’ positive expectations and reducing their anxiety during a variety of procedures, including minimally invasive surgery, while still being honest, can reduce the dose of painkillers required and cut complications.
Placebo studies also reveal the value of social interaction as a treatment for pain. Harvard researchers studied patients in pain from irritable bowel syndrome and found that 44 percent of those given sham acupuncture had adequate relief from their symptoms. If the person who performed the acupuncture was extra supportive and empathetic, however, that figure jumped to 62 percent.
Placebos tell us that pain is a complex mix of biological, psychological and social factors. We need to develop better drugs to treat it, but let’s also take more seriously the idea of relieving pain without them. With dozens of Americans dying every day from prescription painkillers, we need all the help we can get.
Jo Marchant is the author of the forthcoming book “Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/opini ... ef=opinion
THE crisis of painkiller addiction is becoming increasingly personal: Sixteen percent of Americans know someone who has died from a prescription painkiller overdose, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey; 9 percent have seen a family member or close friend die.
Addictive opioid painkillers were once reserved for extreme situations like terminal cancer. But opioids like Vicodin and OxyContin are now widely prescribed for common conditions like arthritis and lower back pain. The consequences have been catastrophic: In 2013, prescription painkillers caused nearly 7,000 emergency room visits and 44 deaths every day.
How do we tackle this crisis? We often hear about efforts to clamp down on abuse, for example by regulating pain clinics and monitoring prescription patterns. But these won’t dent the demand for opioids unless we can find better ways to treat the hundred million Americans said to suffer from chronic pain. Simply switching to other drugs isn’t the answer. Few new painkillers are being approved, and existing ones, like Motrin and Tylenol, come with their own risks when used long-term, and some appear to be less effective than we once thought.
Help might instead come from an unexpected corner: the placebo effect.
This phenomenon — in which someone feels better after receiving fake treatment — was once dismissed as an illusion. People who are ill often improve regardless of the treatment they receive. But neuroscientists are discovering that in some conditions, including pain, placebos create biological effects similar to those caused by drugs.
Taking a placebo painkiller dampens activity in pain-related areas of the brain and spinal cord, and triggers the release of endorphins, the natural pain-relieving chemicals that opioid drugs are designed to mimic. Even when we take a real painkiller, a big chunk of its effect is delivered not by any direct chemical action, but by our expectation that the drug will work. Studies show that widely used painkillers like morphine, buprenorphine and tramadol are markedly less effective if we don’t know we’re taking them.
Placebo effects in pain are so large, in fact, that drug manufacturers are finding it hard to beat them. Finding ways to minimize placebo effects in trials, for example by screening out those who are most susceptible, is now a big focus for research. But what if instead we seek to harness these effects? Placebos might ruin drug trials, but they also show us a new approach to treating pain.
It is unethical to deceive patients by prescribing fake treatments, of course. But there is evidence that people with some conditions benefit even if they know they are taking placebos. In a 2014 study that followed 459 migraine attacks in 66 patients, honestly labeled placebos provided significantly more pain relief than no treatment, and were nearly half as effective as the painkiller Maxalt. (The study also found that a placebo labeled “placebo” was 60 percent as effective as Maxalt if it was labeled “placebo.” If the placebo was labeled “Maxalt,” it was again 60 percent as effective as the real drug under its real label.)
With placebo responses in pain so high — and the risks of drugs so severe — why not prescribe a course of “honest” placebos for those who wish to try it, before proceeding, if necessary, to an active drug?
Another option is to employ alternative therapies, which through placebo responses can benefit patients even when there is no physical mode of action. A series of large trials in Germany published between 2005 and 2009 compared real and sham acupuncture (in which needles are placed at nonacupuncture points) with either no treatment or routine clinical care, for chronic pain conditions including migraine, tension headaches, lower back pain and osteoarthritis. Patients who received the acupuncture, real or sham, reported a similar amount of pain relief — and more than those who received no treatment or routine care that included pain medication.
Rather than relying on dummy pills and treatments, however, a broader hope is that teasing out why and when placebos work — and for whom — will help to maximize the effectiveness of drugs, and in some cases allow us to do without them.
The available funding for such research is minuscule compared with the efforts poured into developing new drugs. But a key ingredient is expectation: The greater our belief that a treatment will work, the better we’ll respond.
Individual attitudes and experiences are important, as are cultural factors. Placebo effects are getting stronger in the United States, for example, though not elsewhere. Researchers reported last year that in trials published in 1996, drugs for chronic pain produced on average 27 percent more pain relief than placebos. By 2013, that advantage had slipped to just 9 percent. Likely explanations include a growing cultural belief in the effectiveness of painkillers — a result of direct-to-consumer advertising (illegal in most other countries) and perhaps the fact that so many Americans have taken these drugs in the past.
These findings have implications for deciding which patients are likely to benefit from drugs — someone who has strong faith in painkillers’ effectiveness is more likely to benefit than someone who is suspicious of conventional medicine — as well as how physicians explain the benefits and side effects of treatments they prescribe. Trials show, for example, that strengthening patients’ positive expectations and reducing their anxiety during a variety of procedures, including minimally invasive surgery, while still being honest, can reduce the dose of painkillers required and cut complications.
Placebo studies also reveal the value of social interaction as a treatment for pain. Harvard researchers studied patients in pain from irritable bowel syndrome and found that 44 percent of those given sham acupuncture had adequate relief from their symptoms. If the person who performed the acupuncture was extra supportive and empathetic, however, that figure jumped to 62 percent.
Placebos tell us that pain is a complex mix of biological, psychological and social factors. We need to develop better drugs to treat it, but let’s also take more seriously the idea of relieving pain without them. With dozens of Americans dying every day from prescription painkillers, we need all the help we can get.
Jo Marchant is the author of the forthcoming book “Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/opini ... ef=opinion
http://www.ozy.com/rising-stars/this-mi ... tein/65094
She's Being Called the Next Albert Einstein
A 22-Year-Old Harvard Ph.D. candidate could change our understanding of the universe.
This Millennial Might Be the New Einstein
Rising Stars By Farah Halime JAN 122016
One of the things the brilliant minds at MIT do — besides ponder the nature of the universe and build sci-fi gizmos, of course — is notarize aircraft airworthiness for the federal government. So when Sabrina Pasterski walked into the campus offices one cold January morning seeking the OK for a single-engine plane she had built, it might have been business as usual. Except that the shaggy-haired, wide-eyed plane builder before them was just 14 and had already flown solo. “I couldn’t believe it,” recalls Peggy Udden, an executive secretary at MIT, “not only because she was so young, but a girl.”
OK, it’s 2016, and gifted females are not exactly rare at MIT; nearly half the undergrads are women. But something about Pasterski led Udden not just to help get her plane approved, but to get the attention of the university’s top professors. Now, eight years later, the lanky, 22-year-old Pasterski is already an MIT graduate and Harvard Ph.D. candidate who has the world of physics abuzz. She’s exploring some of the most challenging and complex issues in physics, much as Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein (whose theory of relativity just turned 100 years old) did early in their careers. Her research delves into black holes, the nature of gravity and spacetime. A particular focus is trying to better understand “quantum gravity,” which seeks to explain the phenomenon of gravity within the context of quantum mechanics. Discoveries in that area could dramatically change our understanding of the workings of the universe.
Among the many skills she lists on her no-frills website: “spotting elegance within the chaos.”
She’s also caught the attention of some of America’s brightest working at NASA. Also? Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com and aerospace developer and manufacturer Blue Origin, who’s promised her a job whenever she’s ready. Asked by e-mail recently whether his offer still stands, Bezos told OZY: “God, yes!”
But unless you’re the kind of rabid physics fan who’s seen her papers on semiclassical Virasoro symmetry of the quantum gravity S-matrix and Low’s subleading soft theorem as a symmetry of QED (both on approaches to understanding the shape of space and gravity and the first two papers she ever authored), you may not have heard of Pasterski. A first-generation Cuban-American born and bred in the suburbs of Chicago, she’s not on Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram and doesn’t own a smartphone. She does, however, regularly update a no-frills website called PhysicsGirl, which features a long catalog of achievements and proficiencies. Among them: “spotting elegance within the chaos.”
Pasterski stands out among a growing number of newly minted physics grads in the U.S. There were 7,329 in 2013, double the four-decade low of 3,178 in 1999, according to the American Institute of Physics. Nima Arkani-Hamed, a Princeton professor and winner of the inaugural $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize, told OZY he’s heard “terrific things” about Pasterski from her adviser, Harvard professor Andrew Strominger, who is about to publish a paper with physics rock star Hawking. She’s also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from the Hertz Foundation, the Smith Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
Pasterski, who speaks in frenetic bursts, says she has always been drawn to challenging what’s possible. “Years of pushing the bounds of what I could achieve led me to physics,” she says from her dorm room at Harvard. Yet she doesn’t make it sound like work at all: She calls physics “elegant” but also full of “utility.”
Despite her impressive résumé, MIT wait-listed Pasterski when she first applied. Professors Allen Haggerty and Earll Murman were aghast. Thanks to Udden, the pair had seen a video of Pasterski building her airplane. “Our mouths were hanging open after we looked at it,” Haggerty said. “Her potential is off the charts.” The two went to bat for her, and she was ultimately accepted, later graduating with a grade average of 5.00, the school’s highest score possible.
An only child, Pasterski speaks with some awkwardness and punctuates her e-mails with smiley faces and exclamation marks. She says she has a handful of close friends but has never had a boyfriend, an alcoholic drink or a cigarette. Pasterski says: “I’d rather stay alert, and hopefully I’m known for what I do and not what I don’t do.”
While mentors offer predictions of physics fame, Pasterski appears well grounded. “A theorist saying he will figure out something in particular over a long time frame almost guarantees that he will not do it,” she says. And Bezos’s pledge notwithstanding, the big picture for science grads in the U.S. is challenging: The U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent American Community Survey shows that only about 26 percent of science grads in the U.S. had jobs in their chosen fields, while nearly 30 percent of physics and chemistry post-docs are unemployed. Pasterski seems unperturbed. “Physics itself is exciting enough,” she says. ”It’s not like a 9-to-5 thing. When you’re tired you sleep, and when you’re not, you do physics.”
Farah Halime Ozy Author
Farah is a British-Palestinian transplant to Brooklyn who is still trying to figure out the strange habits of New Yorkers. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, and she’s the founder of a blog called Rebel Economy.
She's Being Called the Next Albert Einstein
A 22-Year-Old Harvard Ph.D. candidate could change our understanding of the universe.
This Millennial Might Be the New Einstein
Rising Stars By Farah Halime JAN 122016
One of the things the brilliant minds at MIT do — besides ponder the nature of the universe and build sci-fi gizmos, of course — is notarize aircraft airworthiness for the federal government. So when Sabrina Pasterski walked into the campus offices one cold January morning seeking the OK for a single-engine plane she had built, it might have been business as usual. Except that the shaggy-haired, wide-eyed plane builder before them was just 14 and had already flown solo. “I couldn’t believe it,” recalls Peggy Udden, an executive secretary at MIT, “not only because she was so young, but a girl.”
OK, it’s 2016, and gifted females are not exactly rare at MIT; nearly half the undergrads are women. But something about Pasterski led Udden not just to help get her plane approved, but to get the attention of the university’s top professors. Now, eight years later, the lanky, 22-year-old Pasterski is already an MIT graduate and Harvard Ph.D. candidate who has the world of physics abuzz. She’s exploring some of the most challenging and complex issues in physics, much as Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein (whose theory of relativity just turned 100 years old) did early in their careers. Her research delves into black holes, the nature of gravity and spacetime. A particular focus is trying to better understand “quantum gravity,” which seeks to explain the phenomenon of gravity within the context of quantum mechanics. Discoveries in that area could dramatically change our understanding of the workings of the universe.
Among the many skills she lists on her no-frills website: “spotting elegance within the chaos.”
She’s also caught the attention of some of America’s brightest working at NASA. Also? Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com and aerospace developer and manufacturer Blue Origin, who’s promised her a job whenever she’s ready. Asked by e-mail recently whether his offer still stands, Bezos told OZY: “God, yes!”
But unless you’re the kind of rabid physics fan who’s seen her papers on semiclassical Virasoro symmetry of the quantum gravity S-matrix and Low’s subleading soft theorem as a symmetry of QED (both on approaches to understanding the shape of space and gravity and the first two papers she ever authored), you may not have heard of Pasterski. A first-generation Cuban-American born and bred in the suburbs of Chicago, she’s not on Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram and doesn’t own a smartphone. She does, however, regularly update a no-frills website called PhysicsGirl, which features a long catalog of achievements and proficiencies. Among them: “spotting elegance within the chaos.”
Pasterski stands out among a growing number of newly minted physics grads in the U.S. There were 7,329 in 2013, double the four-decade low of 3,178 in 1999, according to the American Institute of Physics. Nima Arkani-Hamed, a Princeton professor and winner of the inaugural $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize, told OZY he’s heard “terrific things” about Pasterski from her adviser, Harvard professor Andrew Strominger, who is about to publish a paper with physics rock star Hawking. She’s also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from the Hertz Foundation, the Smith Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
Pasterski, who speaks in frenetic bursts, says she has always been drawn to challenging what’s possible. “Years of pushing the bounds of what I could achieve led me to physics,” she says from her dorm room at Harvard. Yet she doesn’t make it sound like work at all: She calls physics “elegant” but also full of “utility.”
Despite her impressive résumé, MIT wait-listed Pasterski when she first applied. Professors Allen Haggerty and Earll Murman were aghast. Thanks to Udden, the pair had seen a video of Pasterski building her airplane. “Our mouths were hanging open after we looked at it,” Haggerty said. “Her potential is off the charts.” The two went to bat for her, and she was ultimately accepted, later graduating with a grade average of 5.00, the school’s highest score possible.
An only child, Pasterski speaks with some awkwardness and punctuates her e-mails with smiley faces and exclamation marks. She says she has a handful of close friends but has never had a boyfriend, an alcoholic drink or a cigarette. Pasterski says: “I’d rather stay alert, and hopefully I’m known for what I do and not what I don’t do.”
While mentors offer predictions of physics fame, Pasterski appears well grounded. “A theorist saying he will figure out something in particular over a long time frame almost guarantees that he will not do it,” she says. And Bezos’s pledge notwithstanding, the big picture for science grads in the U.S. is challenging: The U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent American Community Survey shows that only about 26 percent of science grads in the U.S. had jobs in their chosen fields, while nearly 30 percent of physics and chemistry post-docs are unemployed. Pasterski seems unperturbed. “Physics itself is exciting enough,” she says. ”It’s not like a 9-to-5 thing. When you’re tired you sleep, and when you’re not, you do physics.”
Farah Halime Ozy Author
Farah is a British-Palestinian transplant to Brooklyn who is still trying to figure out the strange habits of New Yorkers. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, and she’s the founder of a blog called Rebel Economy.
Unraveling the Ties of Altitude, Oxygen and Lung Cancer
Epidemiologists have long been puzzled by a strange pattern in their data: People living at higher altitudes appear less likely to get lung cancer.
Associations like these can be notoriously misleading. Slice and dice the profusion of data, and there is no end to the coincidences that can arise.
There is, for instance, a strong correlation between per-capita cheese consumption and the number of people strangled accidentally by their bedsheets. Year by year, the number of letters making up the winning word for the Scripps National Spelling Bee closely tracks the number of people killed by venomous spiders.
These are probably not important clues about the nature of reality. But the evidence for an inverse relationship between lung cancer and elevation has been much harder to dismiss.
A paper published last year in the journal PeerJ plumbed the question to new depths and arrived at an intriguing explanation. The higher you live, the thinner the air, so maybe oxygen is a cause of lung cancer.
Oxygen cannot compete with cigarettes, of course, but the study suggests that if everyone in the United States moved to the alpine heights of San Juan County, Colo. (population: 700), there would be 65,496 fewer cases of lung cancer each year.
This idea didn’t appear out of the blue. A connection between lung cancer and altitude was proposed as early as 1982. Five years later, other researchers suggested that oxygen might be the reason.
But the authors of the PeerJ paper — two doctoral students at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, San Francisco — have made the strongest case yet. At the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, the paper won last year’s Abramson Cancer Center prize for basic research. And in July it was chosen as one of PeerJ’s best papers on cancer biology.
Skeptics were quick to strike back, though not very effectively. A would-be debunking on the Cancer Research UK website was quickly followed by a debunking of the debunking.
All of the usual caveats apply. Studies like this, which compare whole populations, can be used only to suggest possibilities to be explored in future research. But the hypothesis is not as crazy as it may sound. Oxygen is what energizes the cells of our bodies. Like any fuel, it inevitably spews out waste — a corrosive exhaust of substances called “free radicals,” or “reactive oxygen species,” that can mutate DNA and nudge a cell closer to malignancy.
That is not a good reason to consume antioxidant pills. While the logic may seem sound, there is no convincing evidence that these supplements add to nature’s already formidable means of repairing oxidative damage — and they may even disrupt some delicate biological balance, increasing cancer risk and speeding tumor growth.
But there is no question that oxidation, so crucial to life, rusts our cells and can edge them closer to becoming cancerous.
In examining the possibility that breathing itself significantly increases the risk of lung cancer, the authors of the paper, Kamen P. Simeonov and Daniel S. Himmelstein, began by eliminating confounding variables. Maybe younger, healthier people tend to live at higher altitudes, with older and weaker ones, including smokers, retreating to lower lands. That could create the illusion of a protective altitude effect, but one that has nothing to do with oxygen.
The authors also took into account factors like income, education and race, which affect access to medical care. To reduce distortions caused by noisy data, the researchers excluded counties with large numbers of recent immigrants, who might have acquired cancer-causing mutations elsewhere. Also ruled out were places with a large number of Native Americans, whose cancer rates often go underreported.
Beyond the human variables were geophysical ones. Air at higher altitudes may be less polluted by carcinogens. And since sunlight exposure is more intense, maybe the increase in vitamin D helps stave off lung cancer — an idea previously suggested. Differences in precipitation and temperature might also have some effect.
These data, too, were added to the scales, along with the influence of radon gas and ultraviolet rays, which is greater at higher elevations. The frequency of obesity and diabetes, which are risks for many cancers, was adjusted for, along with alcohol use, meat consumption and other factors.
After an examination of all these numbers for the residents of 260 counties in the Western United States, situated from sea level to nearly 11,400 feet, one pattern stood out: a correlation between the concentration of oxygen in the air and the incidence of lung cancer. For each 1,000-meter rise in elevation, there were 7.23 fewer lung cancer cases per 100,000 people. (The study found no similar correlations for breast, colon and prostate cancer.)
That is not a good reason to inhale less deeply at sea level or to flee to the mountains. Wherever you live, smoking accounts for as much as 90 percent of lung cancer. Radon is considered a distant second cause. But the PeerJ study complicates things.
For various reasons, radon levels are generally higher at higher altitudes, while lung cancer rates are lower. Does that mean radon is not so dangerous after all? Or are its bad effects offset by the healthy deficit of carcinogenic oxygen?
Or maybe radon, like thinner air, protects against lung cancer. According to a long-debated hypothesis called hormesis, the earth’s low levels of natural radiation actually might reduce cancer risk.
However this all shakes out, the study is a reminder that not all carcinogens are manufactured by chemical plants. And not all of them can be avoided. You can quit smoking and mitigate the radon in your basement. But you can’t mitigate oxygen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/scien ... d=71987722
Epidemiologists have long been puzzled by a strange pattern in their data: People living at higher altitudes appear less likely to get lung cancer.
Associations like these can be notoriously misleading. Slice and dice the profusion of data, and there is no end to the coincidences that can arise.
There is, for instance, a strong correlation between per-capita cheese consumption and the number of people strangled accidentally by their bedsheets. Year by year, the number of letters making up the winning word for the Scripps National Spelling Bee closely tracks the number of people killed by venomous spiders.
These are probably not important clues about the nature of reality. But the evidence for an inverse relationship between lung cancer and elevation has been much harder to dismiss.
A paper published last year in the journal PeerJ plumbed the question to new depths and arrived at an intriguing explanation. The higher you live, the thinner the air, so maybe oxygen is a cause of lung cancer.
Oxygen cannot compete with cigarettes, of course, but the study suggests that if everyone in the United States moved to the alpine heights of San Juan County, Colo. (population: 700), there would be 65,496 fewer cases of lung cancer each year.
This idea didn’t appear out of the blue. A connection between lung cancer and altitude was proposed as early as 1982. Five years later, other researchers suggested that oxygen might be the reason.
But the authors of the PeerJ paper — two doctoral students at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, San Francisco — have made the strongest case yet. At the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, the paper won last year’s Abramson Cancer Center prize for basic research. And in July it was chosen as one of PeerJ’s best papers on cancer biology.
Skeptics were quick to strike back, though not very effectively. A would-be debunking on the Cancer Research UK website was quickly followed by a debunking of the debunking.
All of the usual caveats apply. Studies like this, which compare whole populations, can be used only to suggest possibilities to be explored in future research. But the hypothesis is not as crazy as it may sound. Oxygen is what energizes the cells of our bodies. Like any fuel, it inevitably spews out waste — a corrosive exhaust of substances called “free radicals,” or “reactive oxygen species,” that can mutate DNA and nudge a cell closer to malignancy.
That is not a good reason to consume antioxidant pills. While the logic may seem sound, there is no convincing evidence that these supplements add to nature’s already formidable means of repairing oxidative damage — and they may even disrupt some delicate biological balance, increasing cancer risk and speeding tumor growth.
But there is no question that oxidation, so crucial to life, rusts our cells and can edge them closer to becoming cancerous.
In examining the possibility that breathing itself significantly increases the risk of lung cancer, the authors of the paper, Kamen P. Simeonov and Daniel S. Himmelstein, began by eliminating confounding variables. Maybe younger, healthier people tend to live at higher altitudes, with older and weaker ones, including smokers, retreating to lower lands. That could create the illusion of a protective altitude effect, but one that has nothing to do with oxygen.
The authors also took into account factors like income, education and race, which affect access to medical care. To reduce distortions caused by noisy data, the researchers excluded counties with large numbers of recent immigrants, who might have acquired cancer-causing mutations elsewhere. Also ruled out were places with a large number of Native Americans, whose cancer rates often go underreported.
Beyond the human variables were geophysical ones. Air at higher altitudes may be less polluted by carcinogens. And since sunlight exposure is more intense, maybe the increase in vitamin D helps stave off lung cancer — an idea previously suggested. Differences in precipitation and temperature might also have some effect.
These data, too, were added to the scales, along with the influence of radon gas and ultraviolet rays, which is greater at higher elevations. The frequency of obesity and diabetes, which are risks for many cancers, was adjusted for, along with alcohol use, meat consumption and other factors.
After an examination of all these numbers for the residents of 260 counties in the Western United States, situated from sea level to nearly 11,400 feet, one pattern stood out: a correlation between the concentration of oxygen in the air and the incidence of lung cancer. For each 1,000-meter rise in elevation, there were 7.23 fewer lung cancer cases per 100,000 people. (The study found no similar correlations for breast, colon and prostate cancer.)
That is not a good reason to inhale less deeply at sea level or to flee to the mountains. Wherever you live, smoking accounts for as much as 90 percent of lung cancer. Radon is considered a distant second cause. But the PeerJ study complicates things.
For various reasons, radon levels are generally higher at higher altitudes, while lung cancer rates are lower. Does that mean radon is not so dangerous after all? Or are its bad effects offset by the healthy deficit of carcinogenic oxygen?
Or maybe radon, like thinner air, protects against lung cancer. According to a long-debated hypothesis called hormesis, the earth’s low levels of natural radiation actually might reduce cancer risk.
However this all shakes out, the study is a reminder that not all carcinogens are manufactured by chemical plants. And not all of them can be avoided. You can quit smoking and mitigate the radon in your basement. But you can’t mitigate oxygen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/scien ... d=71987722
British Researcher Gets Permission to Edit Genes of Human Embryos
A British researcher has received permission to use a powerful new genome editing technique on human embryos, even though researchers throughout the world are observing a voluntary moratorium on making changes to DNA that could be passed down to subsequent generations.
The British experiment would not contravene the moratorium because there is no intention to implant the altered embryos in a womb. But it brings one step closer the fateful decision of whether to alter the human germ line for medical or other purposes.
The new genetic editing technique, known as Crispr or Crispr-Cas9, lets researchers perform cut-and-paste operations on DNA, the hereditary material, with unprecedented ease and precision. Unlike most types of gene therapy, a longstanding approach that aims to alter only adult human tissues that die with the patient, the Crispr technique could be used to change human eggs, sperm and early embryos, and such alterations would be inherited by the patient’s children. Because changing the human germ line is perceived to hold far-reaching consequences, the leading scientific academies of the United States, Britain and China issued a joint statement in December asking researchers around the world to hold off on altering human inheritance.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/02/healt ... ctionfront
A British researcher has received permission to use a powerful new genome editing technique on human embryos, even though researchers throughout the world are observing a voluntary moratorium on making changes to DNA that could be passed down to subsequent generations.
The British experiment would not contravene the moratorium because there is no intention to implant the altered embryos in a womb. But it brings one step closer the fateful decision of whether to alter the human germ line for medical or other purposes.
The new genetic editing technique, known as Crispr or Crispr-Cas9, lets researchers perform cut-and-paste operations on DNA, the hereditary material, with unprecedented ease and precision. Unlike most types of gene therapy, a longstanding approach that aims to alter only adult human tissues that die with the patient, the Crispr technique could be used to change human eggs, sperm and early embryos, and such alterations would be inherited by the patient’s children. Because changing the human germ line is perceived to hold far-reaching consequences, the leading scientific academies of the United States, Britain and China issued a joint statement in December asking researchers around the world to hold off on altering human inheritance.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/02/healt ... ctionfront
New Ways Into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’
Whether to enliven a commute, relax in the evening or drown out the buzz of a neighbor’s recreational drone, Americans listen to music nearly four hours a day. In international surveys, people consistently rank music as one of life’s supreme sources of pleasure and emotional power. We marry to music, graduate to music, mourn to music. Every culture ever studied has been found to make music, and among the oldest artistic objects known are slender flutes carved from mammoth bone some 43,000 years ago — 24,000 years before the cave paintings of Lascaux.
Given the antiquity, universality and deep popularity of music, many researchers had long assumed that the human brain must be equipped with some sort of music room, a distinctive piece of cortical architecture dedicated to detecting and interpreting the dulcet signals of song. Yet for years, scientists failed to find any clear evidence of a music-specific domain through conventional brain-scanning technology, and the quest to understand the neural basis of a quintessential human passion foundered.
Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.
Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.
Nancy Kanwisher and Josh H. McDermott, professors of neuroscience at M.I.T., and their postdoctoral colleague Sam Norman-Haignere reported their results in the journal Neuron. The findings offer researchers a new tool for exploring the contours of human musicality.
“Why do we have music?” Dr. Kanwisher said in an interview. “Why do we enjoy it so much and want to dance when we hear it? How early in development can we see this sensitivity to music, and is it tunable with experience? These are the really cool first-order questions we can begin to address.”
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/09/scien ... d=71987722
Whether to enliven a commute, relax in the evening or drown out the buzz of a neighbor’s recreational drone, Americans listen to music nearly four hours a day. In international surveys, people consistently rank music as one of life’s supreme sources of pleasure and emotional power. We marry to music, graduate to music, mourn to music. Every culture ever studied has been found to make music, and among the oldest artistic objects known are slender flutes carved from mammoth bone some 43,000 years ago — 24,000 years before the cave paintings of Lascaux.
Given the antiquity, universality and deep popularity of music, many researchers had long assumed that the human brain must be equipped with some sort of music room, a distinctive piece of cortical architecture dedicated to detecting and interpreting the dulcet signals of song. Yet for years, scientists failed to find any clear evidence of a music-specific domain through conventional brain-scanning technology, and the quest to understand the neural basis of a quintessential human passion foundered.
Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.
Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.
Nancy Kanwisher and Josh H. McDermott, professors of neuroscience at M.I.T., and their postdoctoral colleague Sam Norman-Haignere reported their results in the journal Neuron. The findings offer researchers a new tool for exploring the contours of human musicality.
“Why do we have music?” Dr. Kanwisher said in an interview. “Why do we enjoy it so much and want to dance when we hear it? How early in development can we see this sensitivity to music, and is it tunable with experience? These are the really cool first-order questions we can begin to address.”
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/09/scien ... d=71987722
Gravitational Waves Detected, Confirming Einstein’s Theory
A team of scientists announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
That faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago. (Listen to it here.) It completes his vision of a universe in which space and time are interwoven and dynamic, able to stretch, shrink and jiggle. And it is a ringing confirmation of the nature of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape, which were the most foreboding (and unwelcome) part of his theory.
More generally, it means that a century of innovation, testing, questioning and plain hard work after Einstein imagined it on paper, scientists have finally tapped into the deepest register of physical reality, where the weirdest and wildest implications of Einstein’s universe become manifest.
Conveyed by these gravitational waves, power 50 times greater than the output of all the stars in the universe combined vibrated a pair of L-shaped antennas in Washington State and Louisiana known as LIGO on Sept. 14.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/scien ... d=71987722
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35524440
Einstein's gravitational waves 'seen' from black holes
Gravitational waves: it's impossible not to be thrilled by this discovery
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/techandsc ... lsignoutmd
******
Finding Beauty in the Darkness
WITH presidential primaries in full steam, with the country wrapped up in concern about the economy, immigration and terrorism, one might wonder why we should care about the news of a minuscule jiggle produced by an event in a far corner of the universe.
The answer is simple. While the political displays we have been treated to over the past weeks may reflect some of the worst about what it means to be human, this jiggle, discovered in an exotic physics experiment, reflects the best. Scientists overcame almost insurmountable odds to open a vast new window on the cosmos. And if history is any guide, every time we have built new eyes to observe the universe, our understanding of ourselves and our place in it has been forever altered.
When Galileo turned his telescope toward Jupiter in 1609, he observed moons orbiting the giant planet, a discovery that destroyed the Aristotelian notion that everything in heaven orbited the Earth. When in 1964 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Laboratories detected radio waves emitted by celestial objects, they discovered that the universe began in a fiery Big Bang.
Photo
Albert EinsteinCredit Popperfoto/Getty Images
One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein used his newly discovered general theory of relativity (which implies that space itself responds to the presence of matter by curving, expanding or contracting) to demonstrate that each time we wave our hands around or move any matter, disturbances in the fabric of space propagate out at the speed of light, as waves travel outward when a rock is thrown into a lake. As these gravitational waves traverse space they will literally cause distances between objects alternately to decrease and increase in an oscillatory manner.
This, of course, is far from the realm of human experience. In the absence of alcohol, your living room doesn’t appear to shrink and grow repeatedly. But, in fact, it does. The oscillations in space caused by gravitational waves are so small that those ripples in length had never been seen. And there was every reason to suspect they would never be seen.
Yet on Thursday, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, announced that a signal from gravitational waves had been discovered emanating from the collision and merger of two massive black holes over a billion light-years away. How far away is that? Well, one light-year is about 5.88 trillion miles.
To see these waves, the experimenters built two mammoth detectors, one in Washington State, the other in Louisiana, each consisting of two tunnels about 2.5 miles in length at right angles to each other. By shooting a laser beam down the length of each tunnel and timing how long it took for each to be reflected off a mirror at the far end, the experimenters could precisely measure the tunnels’ length. If a gravitational wave from a distant galaxy traverses the detectors at both locations roughly simultaneously, then at each location, the length of one arm would get smaller, while the length of the other arm would get longer, alternating back and forth.
To detect the signal they observed they had to be able to measure a periodic difference in the length between the two tunnels by a distance of less than one ten-thousandth the size of a single proton. It is equivalent to measuring the distance between the earth and the nearest star with an accuracy of the width of a human hair.
If the fact that this is possible doesn’t astonish, then read these statements again. This difference is so small that even the minuscule motion in the position of each mirror at the end of each tunnel because of quantum mechanical vibrations of the atoms in the mirror could have overwhelmed the signal. But scientists were able to resort to the most modern techniques in quantum optics to overcome this.
The two black holes that collided, which the LIGO experiment claimed to have detected, were immense. One was about 36 times the mass of our sun, the other, 29 times that mass. The collision and merger produced a black hole 62 times our sun’s mass. If your elementary arithmetic suggests that something is wrong, you’re right. Where did the extra three solar masses disappear to?
Into pure energy in the form of gravitational waves. Our sun will burn for 10 billion years, with the intensity of over 10 billion thermonuclear weapons going off every second. In the process, only a small fraction of its total mass will be turned into energy, according to Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2. But when those black holes collided, three times the entire mass of our sun disappeared in less than a second, transformed into pure energy. During that time, the collision generated more energy than was being generated by all the rest of the stars in the observable universe combined.
Too often people ask, what’s the use of science like this, if it doesn’t produce faster cars or better toasters. But people rarely ask the same question about a Picasso painting or a Mozart symphony. Such pinnacles of human creativity change our perspective of our place in the universe. Science, like art, music and literature, has the capacity to amaze and excite, dazzle and bewilder. I would argue that it is that aspect of science — its cultural contribution, its humanity — that is perhaps its most important feature.
What more can we learn about the universe from a stupefying experimental feat observing a stupefying wonder of nature? The answer is anyone’s guess. Gravitational-wave observatories of the future will be able to explore the exotic features of black holes. This may shed light on the evolution of galaxies, stars and gravity. Eventually, we may be able to observe gravitational waves from the Big Bang, which will push the limits of our current understanding of physics.
Gravitational waves emerge from near the “event horizon” of black holes, the so-called exit door from the universe through which anything that passes can never return. Near such regions, for example, time slows down by a huge amount, as anyone who went to see the movie “Interstellar” knows. (Coincidentally the original treatment for “Interstellar” was written by Kip Thorne, one of the physicists who helped conceive of the LIGO experiment.)
Ultimately, by exploring processes near the event horizon, or by observing gravitational waves from the early universe, we may learn more about the beginning of the universe itself, or even the possible existence of other universes.
Every child has wondered at some time where we came from and how we got here. That we can try and answer such questions by building devices like LIGO to peer out into the cosmos stands as a testament to the persistent curiosity and ingenuity of humankind — the qualities that we should most celebrate about being human.
Lawrence M. Krauss is a theoretical physicist and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. He is the author of “A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/opini ... d=71987722
A team of scientists announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
That faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago. (Listen to it here.) It completes his vision of a universe in which space and time are interwoven and dynamic, able to stretch, shrink and jiggle. And it is a ringing confirmation of the nature of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape, which were the most foreboding (and unwelcome) part of his theory.
More generally, it means that a century of innovation, testing, questioning and plain hard work after Einstein imagined it on paper, scientists have finally tapped into the deepest register of physical reality, where the weirdest and wildest implications of Einstein’s universe become manifest.
Conveyed by these gravitational waves, power 50 times greater than the output of all the stars in the universe combined vibrated a pair of L-shaped antennas in Washington State and Louisiana known as LIGO on Sept. 14.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/scien ... d=71987722
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35524440
Einstein's gravitational waves 'seen' from black holes
Gravitational waves: it's impossible not to be thrilled by this discovery
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/techandsc ... lsignoutmd
******
Finding Beauty in the Darkness
WITH presidential primaries in full steam, with the country wrapped up in concern about the economy, immigration and terrorism, one might wonder why we should care about the news of a minuscule jiggle produced by an event in a far corner of the universe.
The answer is simple. While the political displays we have been treated to over the past weeks may reflect some of the worst about what it means to be human, this jiggle, discovered in an exotic physics experiment, reflects the best. Scientists overcame almost insurmountable odds to open a vast new window on the cosmos. And if history is any guide, every time we have built new eyes to observe the universe, our understanding of ourselves and our place in it has been forever altered.
When Galileo turned his telescope toward Jupiter in 1609, he observed moons orbiting the giant planet, a discovery that destroyed the Aristotelian notion that everything in heaven orbited the Earth. When in 1964 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Laboratories detected radio waves emitted by celestial objects, they discovered that the universe began in a fiery Big Bang.
Photo
Albert EinsteinCredit Popperfoto/Getty Images
One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein used his newly discovered general theory of relativity (which implies that space itself responds to the presence of matter by curving, expanding or contracting) to demonstrate that each time we wave our hands around or move any matter, disturbances in the fabric of space propagate out at the speed of light, as waves travel outward when a rock is thrown into a lake. As these gravitational waves traverse space they will literally cause distances between objects alternately to decrease and increase in an oscillatory manner.
This, of course, is far from the realm of human experience. In the absence of alcohol, your living room doesn’t appear to shrink and grow repeatedly. But, in fact, it does. The oscillations in space caused by gravitational waves are so small that those ripples in length had never been seen. And there was every reason to suspect they would never be seen.
Yet on Thursday, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, announced that a signal from gravitational waves had been discovered emanating from the collision and merger of two massive black holes over a billion light-years away. How far away is that? Well, one light-year is about 5.88 trillion miles.
To see these waves, the experimenters built two mammoth detectors, one in Washington State, the other in Louisiana, each consisting of two tunnels about 2.5 miles in length at right angles to each other. By shooting a laser beam down the length of each tunnel and timing how long it took for each to be reflected off a mirror at the far end, the experimenters could precisely measure the tunnels’ length. If a gravitational wave from a distant galaxy traverses the detectors at both locations roughly simultaneously, then at each location, the length of one arm would get smaller, while the length of the other arm would get longer, alternating back and forth.
To detect the signal they observed they had to be able to measure a periodic difference in the length between the two tunnels by a distance of less than one ten-thousandth the size of a single proton. It is equivalent to measuring the distance between the earth and the nearest star with an accuracy of the width of a human hair.
If the fact that this is possible doesn’t astonish, then read these statements again. This difference is so small that even the minuscule motion in the position of each mirror at the end of each tunnel because of quantum mechanical vibrations of the atoms in the mirror could have overwhelmed the signal. But scientists were able to resort to the most modern techniques in quantum optics to overcome this.
The two black holes that collided, which the LIGO experiment claimed to have detected, were immense. One was about 36 times the mass of our sun, the other, 29 times that mass. The collision and merger produced a black hole 62 times our sun’s mass. If your elementary arithmetic suggests that something is wrong, you’re right. Where did the extra three solar masses disappear to?
Into pure energy in the form of gravitational waves. Our sun will burn for 10 billion years, with the intensity of over 10 billion thermonuclear weapons going off every second. In the process, only a small fraction of its total mass will be turned into energy, according to Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2. But when those black holes collided, three times the entire mass of our sun disappeared in less than a second, transformed into pure energy. During that time, the collision generated more energy than was being generated by all the rest of the stars in the observable universe combined.
Too often people ask, what’s the use of science like this, if it doesn’t produce faster cars or better toasters. But people rarely ask the same question about a Picasso painting or a Mozart symphony. Such pinnacles of human creativity change our perspective of our place in the universe. Science, like art, music and literature, has the capacity to amaze and excite, dazzle and bewilder. I would argue that it is that aspect of science — its cultural contribution, its humanity — that is perhaps its most important feature.
What more can we learn about the universe from a stupefying experimental feat observing a stupefying wonder of nature? The answer is anyone’s guess. Gravitational-wave observatories of the future will be able to explore the exotic features of black holes. This may shed light on the evolution of galaxies, stars and gravity. Eventually, we may be able to observe gravitational waves from the Big Bang, which will push the limits of our current understanding of physics.
Gravitational waves emerge from near the “event horizon” of black holes, the so-called exit door from the universe through which anything that passes can never return. Near such regions, for example, time slows down by a huge amount, as anyone who went to see the movie “Interstellar” knows. (Coincidentally the original treatment for “Interstellar” was written by Kip Thorne, one of the physicists who helped conceive of the LIGO experiment.)
Ultimately, by exploring processes near the event horizon, or by observing gravitational waves from the early universe, we may learn more about the beginning of the universe itself, or even the possible existence of other universes.
Every child has wondered at some time where we came from and how we got here. That we can try and answer such questions by building devices like LIGO to peer out into the cosmos stands as a testament to the persistent curiosity and ingenuity of humankind — the qualities that we should most celebrate about being human.
Lawrence M. Krauss is a theoretical physicist and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. He is the author of “A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/opini ... d=71987722
Virgin Galactic unveils new commercial spacecraft
Virgin Galactic, the commercial spaceflight company owned by Richard Branson, unveiled a new passenger spacecraft on Feb. 19, 2016. The appearance of the spacecraft is similar to SpaceShipTwo, the company’s earlier vehicle, which was destroyed nearly 16 months back over California's Mojave Desert.
The spacecraft was named Virgin Spaceship (VSS) Unity by physicist Stephen Hawking, who has been offered a trip in the spaceship. The scientist said: "If I am able to go, and if Richard will still take me, I will be proud to fly on this spaceship."
More than 700 people have already paid $250,000 for a ticket.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=1
******
Herpesvirus CMV-based vaccine effective against Ebola
Researchers from Plymouth University, the National Institutes of Health and University of California have found a possible cure for Ebola virus. The research, conducted on macaques, revealed that a vaccine based on a common herpes virus was effective against Ebola.
The study is regarded as a crucial step toward the invention of the vaccine for humans and other great apes.
Dr. Michael Jarvis, the leader of the project, said: "This finding was complete serendipity. Although we will definitely need to explore this finding further, it suggests that we may be able to bias immunity towards either antibodies or T cells based on the time of target antigen production. This is exciting not just for Ebola, but for vaccination against other infectious as well as non-infectious diseases."
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=2
******
Half of the world's population may become short-sighted by 2050
According to a study published in the journal Ophthalmology, nearly five billion people (half of the world’s projected population) will become short-sighted by 2050 if the current trend continues. It also said that one fifth of them (one billion) may face a high risk of blindness.
The authors from the Brien Holden Vision Institute, University of New South Wales Australia and Singapore Eye Research Institute, believe that the “environmental factors, principally lifestyle changes resulting from a combination of decreased time outdoors and increased near work activities, among other factors," are at the root of the rising vision problem.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=3
******
Mind-controlled prosthetic arm can move individual fingers
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University reported that a mind-controlled prosthetic arm was able to control the movement of individual fingers. The experiment was conducted on a man who was not missing an arm, but he was outfitted with a device which was used for brain mapping.
Senior author Nathan Crone, M.D., professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said: “We believe this is the first time a person using a mind-controlled prosthesis has immediately performed individual digit movements without extensive training. This technology goes beyond available prostheses, in which the artificial digits, or fingers, moved as a single unit to make a grabbing motion, like one used to grip a tennis ball."
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=5
********
Frozen animals successfully revived and reproduced
Tardigrades, also known as water bears, were successfully revived and reproduced after having been frozen for over 30 years. Roughly 0.2 mm-long, tardigrades were retrieved from a moss sample, which was collected in Antarctica in November 1983. The sample was stored at -20°C and was thawed in May 2014.
Tardigrades are believed to be the most durable lifeform on Earth, withstanding astonishing extremes of temperature and pressure. Even so, this discovery marks their most impressive survival feat to date.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=6
******
Living tissue structures can be printed to replace injured or infected tissues
Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center proved that with the help of a sophisticated, custom-designed 3D printer, it is possible to print living tissue structures to replace injured or infected tissues.
During an experiment, the scientists printed ear, bone and muscle structures, which they implanted in animals. Those tissues matured and became functional and developed a system of blood vessels. Moreover, the structures had the right size, strength and functionality for use in humans.
Anthony Atala, who is senior author of the study and director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM), said: "This novel tissue and organ printer is an important advance in our quest to make replacement tissue for patients. It can fabricate stable, human-scale tissue of any shape. With further development, this technology could potentially be used to print living tissue and organ structures for surgical implantation."
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=7
******
Raising a child affects immune systems more than gastroenteritis
Did you know raising a child together affects your immune system more than gastroenteritis? Researchers at VIB and KU Leuven in Belgium and the Babraham Institute in the UK conducted a study on 670 people, from 2-86 years of age, in order to understand how immunity differs from person to person.
The study, which focused on a range of factors, including age, gender and obesity, revealed that couples who lived together and raised a child had a 50 percent reduction in the variation between their two immune system as compared to others.
Dr Adrian Liston, who co-led the research, said: " Since parenting is one of the most severe environmental challenges anyone willingly puts themselves through, it makes sense that it radically rewires the immune system — still, it was a surprise that having kids was a much more potent immune challenge than severe gastroenteritis.”
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=8
Virgin Galactic, the commercial spaceflight company owned by Richard Branson, unveiled a new passenger spacecraft on Feb. 19, 2016. The appearance of the spacecraft is similar to SpaceShipTwo, the company’s earlier vehicle, which was destroyed nearly 16 months back over California's Mojave Desert.
The spacecraft was named Virgin Spaceship (VSS) Unity by physicist Stephen Hawking, who has been offered a trip in the spaceship. The scientist said: "If I am able to go, and if Richard will still take me, I will be proud to fly on this spaceship."
More than 700 people have already paid $250,000 for a ticket.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=1
******
Herpesvirus CMV-based vaccine effective against Ebola
Researchers from Plymouth University, the National Institutes of Health and University of California have found a possible cure for Ebola virus. The research, conducted on macaques, revealed that a vaccine based on a common herpes virus was effective against Ebola.
The study is regarded as a crucial step toward the invention of the vaccine for humans and other great apes.
Dr. Michael Jarvis, the leader of the project, said: "This finding was complete serendipity. Although we will definitely need to explore this finding further, it suggests that we may be able to bias immunity towards either antibodies or T cells based on the time of target antigen production. This is exciting not just for Ebola, but for vaccination against other infectious as well as non-infectious diseases."
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=2
******
Half of the world's population may become short-sighted by 2050
According to a study published in the journal Ophthalmology, nearly five billion people (half of the world’s projected population) will become short-sighted by 2050 if the current trend continues. It also said that one fifth of them (one billion) may face a high risk of blindness.
The authors from the Brien Holden Vision Institute, University of New South Wales Australia and Singapore Eye Research Institute, believe that the “environmental factors, principally lifestyle changes resulting from a combination of decreased time outdoors and increased near work activities, among other factors," are at the root of the rising vision problem.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=3
******
Mind-controlled prosthetic arm can move individual fingers
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University reported that a mind-controlled prosthetic arm was able to control the movement of individual fingers. The experiment was conducted on a man who was not missing an arm, but he was outfitted with a device which was used for brain mapping.
Senior author Nathan Crone, M.D., professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said: “We believe this is the first time a person using a mind-controlled prosthesis has immediately performed individual digit movements without extensive training. This technology goes beyond available prostheses, in which the artificial digits, or fingers, moved as a single unit to make a grabbing motion, like one used to grip a tennis ball."
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=5
********
Frozen animals successfully revived and reproduced
Tardigrades, also known as water bears, were successfully revived and reproduced after having been frozen for over 30 years. Roughly 0.2 mm-long, tardigrades were retrieved from a moss sample, which was collected in Antarctica in November 1983. The sample was stored at -20°C and was thawed in May 2014.
Tardigrades are believed to be the most durable lifeform on Earth, withstanding astonishing extremes of temperature and pressure. Even so, this discovery marks their most impressive survival feat to date.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=6
******
Living tissue structures can be printed to replace injured or infected tissues
Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center proved that with the help of a sophisticated, custom-designed 3D printer, it is possible to print living tissue structures to replace injured or infected tissues.
During an experiment, the scientists printed ear, bone and muscle structures, which they implanted in animals. Those tissues matured and became functional and developed a system of blood vessels. Moreover, the structures had the right size, strength and functionality for use in humans.
Anthony Atala, who is senior author of the study and director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM), said: "This novel tissue and organ printer is an important advance in our quest to make replacement tissue for patients. It can fabricate stable, human-scale tissue of any shape. With further development, this technology could potentially be used to print living tissue and organ structures for surgical implantation."
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=7
******
Raising a child affects immune systems more than gastroenteritis
Did you know raising a child together affects your immune system more than gastroenteritis? Researchers at VIB and KU Leuven in Belgium and the Babraham Institute in the UK conducted a study on 670 people, from 2-86 years of age, in order to understand how immunity differs from person to person.
The study, which focused on a range of factors, including age, gender and obesity, revealed that couples who lived together and raised a child had a 50 percent reduction in the variation between their two immune system as compared to others.
Dr Adrian Liston, who co-led the research, said: " Since parenting is one of the most severe environmental challenges anyone willingly puts themselves through, it makes sense that it radically rewires the immune system — still, it was a surprise that having kids was a much more potent immune challenge than severe gastroenteritis.”
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=8
Scientists Ponder the Prospect of Contagious Cancer
For all its peculiar horror, cancer comes with a saving grace. If nothing else can stop a tumor’s mad evolution, the cancer ultimately dies with its host. Everything the malignant cells have learned about outwitting the patient’s defenses — and those of the oncologists — is erased. The next case of cancer, in another victim, must start anew.
Imagine if instead, cancer cells had the ability to press on to another body. A cancer like that would have the power to metastasize not just from organ to organ, but from person to person, evolving deadly new skills along the way.
While there is no sign of an imminent threat, several recent papers suggest that the eventual emergence of a contagious human cancer is in the realm of medical possibility. This would not be a disease, like cervical cancer, that is set off by the spread of viruses, but rather one in which cancer cells actually travel from one person to another and thrive in their new location.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/scien ... ctionfront
For all its peculiar horror, cancer comes with a saving grace. If nothing else can stop a tumor’s mad evolution, the cancer ultimately dies with its host. Everything the malignant cells have learned about outwitting the patient’s defenses — and those of the oncologists — is erased. The next case of cancer, in another victim, must start anew.
Imagine if instead, cancer cells had the ability to press on to another body. A cancer like that would have the power to metastasize not just from organ to organ, but from person to person, evolving deadly new skills along the way.
While there is no sign of an imminent threat, several recent papers suggest that the eventual emergence of a contagious human cancer is in the realm of medical possibility. This would not be a disease, like cervical cancer, that is set off by the spread of viruses, but rather one in which cancer cells actually travel from one person to another and thrive in their new location.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/scien ... ctionfront
HTC Vive Virtual Reality headset grabs headlines at Mobile World Congress
The launch of HTC Vive, a Virtual Reality (VR) headset, took center stage at the ongoing Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on Feb. 25. Taiwan-based firm HTC, which was a part of this four-day event, announced that the much-hyped VR headset will be available for customers from April 2016. Vive headset has been developed by HTC in collaboration with Steam, which is the software distribution platform for American game-developer Valve. According to experts, the VR business is heading towards a billion-dollar valuation in the coming years and the launch of HTC Vive is just the beginning. The headset, which is available at a pre-order price of US $799, comes with four separate units, including two hand-tracking controllers and two laser tracking boxes for measuring its position while the user walks around.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=1
******
First ever phone camera with thermal imaging launched at Mobile World Congress
British electronics manufacturing firm Bullitt has launched a Cat S60 smartphone, which contains a camera capable of providing access to thermal imaging. This phone has been created in collaboration with Caterpillar, a firm that manufactures construction equipment, and technology giants FLIR Systems Inc. Manufactured mainly for “tradespeople,” this phone enables access to thermal imaging through the presence of a sensor, which has been developed by FLIR. Pete Cunningham, Product Manager of Bullitt, spoke about how thermal imaging will be beneficial for firefighters and police offers in an interview with Reuters. In addition, he said that this technology, which might not forge a global appeal at present, will join the mainstream within half a decade.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=2
******
Study reveals unique method of decoding brain’s language processing capability
A recent study by experts has revealed that synaesthesia, a neurological phenomenon capturing automatic response to a certain sensory simulation, could help in understanding how the human brain processes languages. According to a study published in Cognition, an international journal, psycholinguists are trying to analyze how theoretical concepts in language might have a psychological connotation attached to them. There are many forms of synaesthesia including association with musical tones, attachment of personalities to letters and relating music to certain colors. For instance, someone who attaches colors to alphabets would regularly relate the letter “A” with red color. Another study worked towards analyzing compound words and how humans store complexities in their mind.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=3
******
Ebola survivors face long term issues
A study in Liberia has claimed that people who have survived Ebola will face several issues in the long run due to the drastic effects of the virus. Neurologists from the United States, working in Liberia, have confirmed suspicions that the Ebola virus has drastic long term effects. Some of the serious long term effects of this virus include depression, headache and memory loss. This news was made public after a nurse named Pauline Cafferkey, who contracted the virus during her time as a volunteer in Sierra Leone, was hospitalized for the third time. A group of neurologists belonging to US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, selected just under 90 people who survived the epidemic in order to study the long-term impacts. Upon close observation, it was concluded that these survivors were suffering from some kind of neurological damage.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=4
******
Stress levels of male mice affect health of their sons
A report submitted by researchers in Cell Metabolism on Feb. 18 suggested that a male mouse’s stress levels directly affect the health of its son. Repeated and consistent exposure to psychological stress leads to the development of high blood sugar, which is passed on to the offspring despite it being totally bereft of any such issue. The report states that stress has a direct impact on the DNA of the male sperm, which is caused due to alteration in chemical tags. Scientists are planning to study this issue in greater depth.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=5
******
NASA plans to attempt exploration of Neptune again
Improvement in the technological sophistication of rockets could propel NASA to orbit Neptune and Uranus again, according to reports. Both these colossal ice giants have not been the target of an attempted exploration since the 1980s, when the Voyager 2 whizzed past Uranus and Neptune afterwards. However, the effort towards sending these unexplored giants is gathering momentum and they are being considered as important frontiers. Jim Green, NASA’s Planetary Science Division Director, said, “We really don’t know much about them. This is a really exciting time for us to be able to study them.”
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=6
******
Earth’s sea levels rising at an alarming rate
According to a report published in Nature Climate Change, the consistent rise in sea level is going to result in large migrations of people away from coastal areas, even if carbon reduction targets are met. The report analyzes the relationship between carbon emissions by humans and the consequential rise in global sea level. Though ice sheets melt slowly, the report states, the elongated presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere combines the former with the latter. To put some figures into perspective, humans have emitted enough carbon pollution to result in a sea level rise of 1.7 meters (5.5 feet). Also, even if we stay within the targeted carbon budget of 1 trillion, sea levels, no matter what, will rise about 9 meters (30 feet).
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=7
******
Scientists say that the dodo was an intelligent bird
Scientists claim that the dodo, an ancient flightless bird whose name is sometimes used to call someone stupid, might have been a reasonably intelligent creature. Speaking on Feb. 24 in Washington, United States, scientists said that they were able to figure out the brain size of the dodo by studying a skull present in a museum. Contrary to what is believed, a dodo’s brain was in complete synchronization with its body size. Interestingly, due to the presence of an enlarged olfactory region, it might have possessed better smelling sense than other birds.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=8
*******
Swedish company develops a musical tablecloth
Two employees of Smart Textiles, a Swedish technology firm, have worked together to develop a tablecloth capable of playing music. The tablecloth features a drum kit as well as piano keys, which are printed on the fabric. Mats Johansson and Li Guo, the men behind this creation, believe that the concept of mixing textiles and music is quite intriguing. They have highlighted the importance of sensors in creating this tablecloth. Speaking to Reuters, Johansson said, “The special thing is, of course, that it is all from textile technologies. We have the woven cloth but on that we added prints for the piano, we added other laminated textile structures for the drums.”
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=9
******
Apollo 10 crew listened to “outer space” music during mission
An audio tape from NASA has revealed that astronauts who were aboard the Apollo 10 used to listen to music, which they described as “outer space type music.” The 1969 mission, which was one of the most historic in human history, around the moon’s dark side is spoken about in the tape. John Young and Eugene Cernan, crew members of the Apollo 10, also discuss the whistling sound in the tape that was clandestine due to the competition with Soviet Union in those times.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... md#page=10
The launch of HTC Vive, a Virtual Reality (VR) headset, took center stage at the ongoing Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on Feb. 25. Taiwan-based firm HTC, which was a part of this four-day event, announced that the much-hyped VR headset will be available for customers from April 2016. Vive headset has been developed by HTC in collaboration with Steam, which is the software distribution platform for American game-developer Valve. According to experts, the VR business is heading towards a billion-dollar valuation in the coming years and the launch of HTC Vive is just the beginning. The headset, which is available at a pre-order price of US $799, comes with four separate units, including two hand-tracking controllers and two laser tracking boxes for measuring its position while the user walks around.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=1
******
First ever phone camera with thermal imaging launched at Mobile World Congress
British electronics manufacturing firm Bullitt has launched a Cat S60 smartphone, which contains a camera capable of providing access to thermal imaging. This phone has been created in collaboration with Caterpillar, a firm that manufactures construction equipment, and technology giants FLIR Systems Inc. Manufactured mainly for “tradespeople,” this phone enables access to thermal imaging through the presence of a sensor, which has been developed by FLIR. Pete Cunningham, Product Manager of Bullitt, spoke about how thermal imaging will be beneficial for firefighters and police offers in an interview with Reuters. In addition, he said that this technology, which might not forge a global appeal at present, will join the mainstream within half a decade.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=2
******
Study reveals unique method of decoding brain’s language processing capability
A recent study by experts has revealed that synaesthesia, a neurological phenomenon capturing automatic response to a certain sensory simulation, could help in understanding how the human brain processes languages. According to a study published in Cognition, an international journal, psycholinguists are trying to analyze how theoretical concepts in language might have a psychological connotation attached to them. There are many forms of synaesthesia including association with musical tones, attachment of personalities to letters and relating music to certain colors. For instance, someone who attaches colors to alphabets would regularly relate the letter “A” with red color. Another study worked towards analyzing compound words and how humans store complexities in their mind.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=3
******
Ebola survivors face long term issues
A study in Liberia has claimed that people who have survived Ebola will face several issues in the long run due to the drastic effects of the virus. Neurologists from the United States, working in Liberia, have confirmed suspicions that the Ebola virus has drastic long term effects. Some of the serious long term effects of this virus include depression, headache and memory loss. This news was made public after a nurse named Pauline Cafferkey, who contracted the virus during her time as a volunteer in Sierra Leone, was hospitalized for the third time. A group of neurologists belonging to US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, selected just under 90 people who survived the epidemic in order to study the long-term impacts. Upon close observation, it was concluded that these survivors were suffering from some kind of neurological damage.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=4
******
Stress levels of male mice affect health of their sons
A report submitted by researchers in Cell Metabolism on Feb. 18 suggested that a male mouse’s stress levels directly affect the health of its son. Repeated and consistent exposure to psychological stress leads to the development of high blood sugar, which is passed on to the offspring despite it being totally bereft of any such issue. The report states that stress has a direct impact on the DNA of the male sperm, which is caused due to alteration in chemical tags. Scientists are planning to study this issue in greater depth.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=5
******
NASA plans to attempt exploration of Neptune again
Improvement in the technological sophistication of rockets could propel NASA to orbit Neptune and Uranus again, according to reports. Both these colossal ice giants have not been the target of an attempted exploration since the 1980s, when the Voyager 2 whizzed past Uranus and Neptune afterwards. However, the effort towards sending these unexplored giants is gathering momentum and they are being considered as important frontiers. Jim Green, NASA’s Planetary Science Division Director, said, “We really don’t know much about them. This is a really exciting time for us to be able to study them.”
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=6
******
Earth’s sea levels rising at an alarming rate
According to a report published in Nature Climate Change, the consistent rise in sea level is going to result in large migrations of people away from coastal areas, even if carbon reduction targets are met. The report analyzes the relationship between carbon emissions by humans and the consequential rise in global sea level. Though ice sheets melt slowly, the report states, the elongated presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere combines the former with the latter. To put some figures into perspective, humans have emitted enough carbon pollution to result in a sea level rise of 1.7 meters (5.5 feet). Also, even if we stay within the targeted carbon budget of 1 trillion, sea levels, no matter what, will rise about 9 meters (30 feet).
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=7
******
Scientists say that the dodo was an intelligent bird
Scientists claim that the dodo, an ancient flightless bird whose name is sometimes used to call someone stupid, might have been a reasonably intelligent creature. Speaking on Feb. 24 in Washington, United States, scientists said that they were able to figure out the brain size of the dodo by studying a skull present in a museum. Contrary to what is believed, a dodo’s brain was in complete synchronization with its body size. Interestingly, due to the presence of an enlarged olfactory region, it might have possessed better smelling sense than other birds.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=8
*******
Swedish company develops a musical tablecloth
Two employees of Smart Textiles, a Swedish technology firm, have worked together to develop a tablecloth capable of playing music. The tablecloth features a drum kit as well as piano keys, which are printed on the fabric. Mats Johansson and Li Guo, the men behind this creation, believe that the concept of mixing textiles and music is quite intriguing. They have highlighted the importance of sensors in creating this tablecloth. Speaking to Reuters, Johansson said, “The special thing is, of course, that it is all from textile technologies. We have the woven cloth but on that we added prints for the piano, we added other laminated textile structures for the drums.”
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... tmd#page=9
******
Apollo 10 crew listened to “outer space” music during mission
An audio tape from NASA has revealed that astronauts who were aboard the Apollo 10 used to listen to music, which they described as “outer space type music.” The 1969 mission, which was one of the most historic in human history, around the moon’s dark side is spoken about in the tape. John Young and Eugene Cernan, crew members of the Apollo 10, also discuss the whistling sound in the tape that was clandestine due to the competition with Soviet Union in those times.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... md#page=10
LATEST DIALOGUES
Let’s Rethink Space
Does space exist without objects, or is it made by them? By George Musser
Space is brutally egalitarian. When you become separated from your lover, the two of you retain no tighter a physical connection than do two lumps of coal. In this way, space serves as the organizing principle of the natural world—the glue that binds the universe together, as the English physicist Julian Barbour has put it. Physical objects do not interact willy-nilly; their behavior is dictated by how they are related to one another, which depends on where they lie in space at a given time. This structuring role is easiest to see in the classical laws of mechanical motion, but also occurs in field theories. The value and rate of change of a field at different points in space fully determine what the field does, and points in the field interact only with their immediate neighbors.
This kind of behavior reflects what scientists call “locality,” which means that everything has a place. You can always point to an object and say, “Here it is.” The world we experience possesses all the qualities of locality. We have a strong sense of place and of the relations among places. Locality grounds our sense of self, our confidence that our thoughts and feelings are our own. With all due respect to John Donne, every man is an island, entire of himself. We are insulated from one another by seas of space, and we should be grateful for it.
But locality isn’t what it used to be. Quantum mechanics predicts that two particles can become blood brothers. For want of a mechanism to couple them, the particle should be completely autonomous—yet to touch one is to touch the other, as if distance meant nothing to them. The scientific method of divide and conquer fails for them. The particles have joint properties that escape you if you view them one at a time; you must measure the particles together.
Our world is crisscrossed by a web of these seemingly mystical relationships. And in the past 20 years, I’ve witnessed a remarkable evolution in attitudes among physicists toward locality. In my career as a science writer and editor, I have had the privilege of talking to scientists from a wide range of communities—people who study everything from subatomic particles to black holes to the grand structure of the cosmos. Over and over, I heard some variant of: “Well, it’s weird, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen if for myself, but it looks like the world has just got to be nonlocal.” -
See more at: http://scienceandnonduality.com/lets-rethink-space/
Let’s Rethink Space
Does space exist without objects, or is it made by them? By George Musser
Space is brutally egalitarian. When you become separated from your lover, the two of you retain no tighter a physical connection than do two lumps of coal. In this way, space serves as the organizing principle of the natural world—the glue that binds the universe together, as the English physicist Julian Barbour has put it. Physical objects do not interact willy-nilly; their behavior is dictated by how they are related to one another, which depends on where they lie in space at a given time. This structuring role is easiest to see in the classical laws of mechanical motion, but also occurs in field theories. The value and rate of change of a field at different points in space fully determine what the field does, and points in the field interact only with their immediate neighbors.
This kind of behavior reflects what scientists call “locality,” which means that everything has a place. You can always point to an object and say, “Here it is.” The world we experience possesses all the qualities of locality. We have a strong sense of place and of the relations among places. Locality grounds our sense of self, our confidence that our thoughts and feelings are our own. With all due respect to John Donne, every man is an island, entire of himself. We are insulated from one another by seas of space, and we should be grateful for it.
But locality isn’t what it used to be. Quantum mechanics predicts that two particles can become blood brothers. For want of a mechanism to couple them, the particle should be completely autonomous—yet to touch one is to touch the other, as if distance meant nothing to them. The scientific method of divide and conquer fails for them. The particles have joint properties that escape you if you view them one at a time; you must measure the particles together.
Our world is crisscrossed by a web of these seemingly mystical relationships. And in the past 20 years, I’ve witnessed a remarkable evolution in attitudes among physicists toward locality. In my career as a science writer and editor, I have had the privilege of talking to scientists from a wide range of communities—people who study everything from subatomic particles to black holes to the grand structure of the cosmos. Over and over, I heard some variant of: “Well, it’s weird, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen if for myself, but it looks like the world has just got to be nonlocal.” -
See more at: http://scienceandnonduality.com/lets-rethink-space/
Astronomers just saw farther back in time than they ever have before
To look through the lens of a telescope is to peer back in time.
The light we view through it has spent hundreds, millions, even billions of years crossing the vastness of space to reach us, carrying with it images of things that happened long ago.
On Thursday, astronomers at the Hubble Space Telescope announced that they’d seen back farther than they ever have before, to a galaxy 13.4 billion light years away in a time when the universe was just past its infancy.
The finding shattered what’s known as the “cosmic distance record,” illuminating a point in time that scientists once thought could never be seen with current technology.
More...
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/ast ... lsignoutmd
To look through the lens of a telescope is to peer back in time.
The light we view through it has spent hundreds, millions, even billions of years crossing the vastness of space to reach us, carrying with it images of things that happened long ago.
On Thursday, astronomers at the Hubble Space Telescope announced that they’d seen back farther than they ever have before, to a galaxy 13.4 billion light years away in a time when the universe was just past its infancy.
The finding shattered what’s known as the “cosmic distance record,” illuminating a point in time that scientists once thought could never be seen with current technology.
More...
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/ast ... lsignoutmd
Science stories of the week: March 4, 2016
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly returns from space after almost a year
New cosmic distance record set by Hubble Space Telescope
Scientists find a way to help immune system destroy cancer cells
China to launch new space lab later this year
Europe's largest floating solar farm to open near Heathrow airport, London
Scientists have finally identified the gene involved in turning hair gray
Blind woman regains sight after a stem cell treatment
Details of each item by slide show at:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... Nb9#page=1
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly returns from space after almost a year
New cosmic distance record set by Hubble Space Telescope
Scientists find a way to help immune system destroy cancer cells
China to launch new space lab later this year
Europe's largest floating solar farm to open near Heathrow airport, London
Scientists have finally identified the gene involved in turning hair gray
Blind woman regains sight after a stem cell treatment
Details of each item by slide show at:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... Nb9#page=1
Hopeful Start for First Uterus Transplant Surgery in U.S
CLEVELAND — Just minutes after the patient’s name was placed on the waiting list for a transplant, details about a matching donor popped up.
“I was shocked,” said Dr. Andreas G. Tzakis, the director of solid organ transplantation at the Cleveland Clinic’s hospital in Weston, Fla. “I really considered it an act of God.”
Less than 24 hours later, on Feb. 24, the patient, a 26-year-old woman from Texas, became the first in the United States to receive a uterus transplant, in a nine-hour operation here at the Cleveland Clinic. Born without a uterus, she hopes the transplant will enable her to become pregnant and give birth.
........
Medically, uterus transplants are a new frontier. Ethically, they reflect an increasing acceptance that transplants are justified not only to save lives, but also to improve the quality of life. That belief has already led to hand and face transplants for people with horrific injuries. Penis transplants may be next: Doctors at Johns Hopkins University plan to perform them for men wounded in combat.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/healt ... d=71987722
CLEVELAND — Just minutes after the patient’s name was placed on the waiting list for a transplant, details about a matching donor popped up.
“I was shocked,” said Dr. Andreas G. Tzakis, the director of solid organ transplantation at the Cleveland Clinic’s hospital in Weston, Fla. “I really considered it an act of God.”
Less than 24 hours later, on Feb. 24, the patient, a 26-year-old woman from Texas, became the first in the United States to receive a uterus transplant, in a nine-hour operation here at the Cleveland Clinic. Born without a uterus, she hopes the transplant will enable her to become pregnant and give birth.
........
Medically, uterus transplants are a new frontier. Ethically, they reflect an increasing acceptance that transplants are justified not only to save lives, but also to improve the quality of life. That belief has already led to hand and face transplants for people with horrific injuries. Penis transplants may be next: Doctors at Johns Hopkins University plan to perform them for men wounded in combat.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/healt ... d=71987722
Science stories of the week: March 11, 2016
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... lsignoutmd
Items:
Meldonium - The banned drug Sharapova was found using
Carbon dioxide levels record largest hike
A new approach to remove congenital cataracts
Zika virus may infect adult brains
Google's artificial intelligence program beats Go champion
The Pacific witnesses the year's first complete solar eclipse
Jeff Bezos-founded Blue Origin announces private space travel by 2018
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/photos/sc ... lsignoutmd
Items:
Meldonium - The banned drug Sharapova was found using
Carbon dioxide levels record largest hike
A new approach to remove congenital cataracts
Zika virus may infect adult brains
Google's artificial intelligence program beats Go champion
The Pacific witnesses the year's first complete solar eclipse
Jeff Bezos-founded Blue Origin announces private space travel by 2018
Science stories of the week: March 18, 2016
SLIDE SHOW
http://www.msn.com/en-za/news/science/s ... 9em#page=1
Highlight:
Russia’s Dmitry Itskov’s plan to make the idea of immortality a possibility
If Russian multi-millionaire Dmitry Itskov's project is successful, the concept of immortality could become a reality. The ambitious project aims to create robots capable of storing human personalities. The project is based on the idea that a robot works on the same principle as a human brain and hence it can store a person's thoughts and feelings. A group of neuroscientists, robot builders, and consciousness researchers are working together to come up with an android capable of storing human personality as early as 2045.
SLIDE SHOW
http://www.msn.com/en-za/news/science/s ... 9em#page=1
Highlight:
Russia’s Dmitry Itskov’s plan to make the idea of immortality a possibility
If Russian multi-millionaire Dmitry Itskov's project is successful, the concept of immortality could become a reality. The ambitious project aims to create robots capable of storing human personalities. The project is based on the idea that a robot works on the same principle as a human brain and hence it can store a person's thoughts and feelings. A group of neuroscientists, robot builders, and consciousness researchers are working together to come up with an android capable of storing human personality as early as 2045.
What We’ve Learned About Pluto
The story of Pluto is largely a story of ice.
On Earth, the only ice is frozen water. On Pluto, nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide also freeze solid.
The most striking feature that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft saw when it flew past Pluto last July was a heart-shape region now named Tombaugh Regio after Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto.
The left half is covered by mostly nitrogen snow; the right side is more methane ice.
Eight months since NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft had its quick, close-up look at Pluto, scientists are reaping the scientific rewards from a bounty of data the spacecraft collected. Mission scientists reported their findings in five articles published Thursday in the journal Science.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016 ... d=45305309
******
Risky Rats Give Clues on Brain Circuitry Behind Taking a Chance
When people make risky decisions, like doubling down in blackjack or investing in volatile stocks, what happens in the brain?
Scientists have long tried to understand what makes some people risk-averse and others risk-taking. Answers could have implications for how to treat, curb or prevent destructively risky behavior, like pathological gambling or drug addiction.
Now, a study by Dr. Karl Deisseroth, a prominent Stanford neuroscientist and psychiatrist, and his colleagues gives some clues. The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, reports that a specific type of neuron or nerve cell, in a certain brain region helps galvanize whether or not a risky choice is made.
The study was conducted in rats, but experts said it built on research suggesting the findings could be similar in humans. If so, they said, it could inform approaches to addiction, which involves some of the same neurons and brain areas, as well as treatments for Parkinson’s disease because one class of Parkinson’s medications turns some patients into problem gamblers.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/24/scien ... ctionfront
****
Parrots Are a Lot More Than ‘Pretty Bird’
Out of the cage, they speak their own language, make tools,
and wreak havoc on plants and researchers’ efforts alike.
More..
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/scien ... ctionfront
The story of Pluto is largely a story of ice.
On Earth, the only ice is frozen water. On Pluto, nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide also freeze solid.
The most striking feature that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft saw when it flew past Pluto last July was a heart-shape region now named Tombaugh Regio after Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto.
The left half is covered by mostly nitrogen snow; the right side is more methane ice.
Eight months since NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft had its quick, close-up look at Pluto, scientists are reaping the scientific rewards from a bounty of data the spacecraft collected. Mission scientists reported their findings in five articles published Thursday in the journal Science.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016 ... d=45305309
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Risky Rats Give Clues on Brain Circuitry Behind Taking a Chance
When people make risky decisions, like doubling down in blackjack or investing in volatile stocks, what happens in the brain?
Scientists have long tried to understand what makes some people risk-averse and others risk-taking. Answers could have implications for how to treat, curb or prevent destructively risky behavior, like pathological gambling or drug addiction.
Now, a study by Dr. Karl Deisseroth, a prominent Stanford neuroscientist and psychiatrist, and his colleagues gives some clues. The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, reports that a specific type of neuron or nerve cell, in a certain brain region helps galvanize whether or not a risky choice is made.
The study was conducted in rats, but experts said it built on research suggesting the findings could be similar in humans. If so, they said, it could inform approaches to addiction, which involves some of the same neurons and brain areas, as well as treatments for Parkinson’s disease because one class of Parkinson’s medications turns some patients into problem gamblers.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/24/scien ... ctionfront
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Parrots Are a Lot More Than ‘Pretty Bird’
Out of the cage, they speak their own language, make tools,
and wreak havoc on plants and researchers’ efforts alike.
More..
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/scien ... ctionfront
Science stories of the week: March 25, 2016
SLIDESHOW
http://www.msn.com/en-za/news/science/s ... ar-BBqUdLi
Science stories of the week: April 1, 2016
Slideshow
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/weekendre ... tmd#page=1
Highlight:
Scientists develop transparent wood
Swedish scientists have developed transparent wood that could be used in building materials and help save energy costs. This material could also find application in solar cell windows. A structural polymer called lignin makes wood opaque. In their experiments on balsa wood, scientists removed this component and incorporated acrylic or plexiglass to make the wood transparent. The resulting product was twice as strong and transmitted 85 percent of light falling through it.
Right now, the transparent wood developed is only a few millimeters thick. "This is only a prototype. We expect to make thicker structures very soon," said Lars Berglund, the main author of the report.
SLIDESHOW
http://www.msn.com/en-za/news/science/s ... ar-BBqUdLi
Science stories of the week: April 1, 2016
Slideshow
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/weekendre ... tmd#page=1
Highlight:
Scientists develop transparent wood
Swedish scientists have developed transparent wood that could be used in building materials and help save energy costs. This material could also find application in solar cell windows. A structural polymer called lignin makes wood opaque. In their experiments on balsa wood, scientists removed this component and incorporated acrylic or plexiglass to make the wood transparent. The resulting product was twice as strong and transmitted 85 percent of light falling through it.
Right now, the transparent wood developed is only a few millimeters thick. "This is only a prototype. We expect to make thicker structures very soon," said Lars Berglund, the main author of the report.
To Beat Go Champion, Google’s Program Needed a Human Army
Nearly 20 years ago, after a chess-playing computer called Deep Blue beat the world grandmaster Garry Kasparov, I wrote an article about why humans would long remain the champions in the game of Go.
“It may be a hundred years before a computer beats humans at Go — maybe even longer,” Dr. Piet Hut, an astrophysicist and Go enthusiast at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., told me in 1997. “If a reasonably intelligent person learned to play Go, in a few months he could beat all existing computer programs. You don’t have to be a Kasparov.”
That was the prevailing wisdom. Last month, after a Google computer program called AlphaGo defeated the Go master Lee Se-dol, I asked Dr. Hut for his reaction. “I was way off, clearly, with my prediction,” he replied in an email. “It’s really stunning.”
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/scien ... d=71987722
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Why Some Societies Practiced Ritual Human Sacrifice
One thing that’s definitely gotten better over time: not as much ritualistic human sacrifice.
But a new study published Monday in Nature revisits the ancient practice to look for fresh insights. The scientists found that, for better or worse (and only worse for the victims, of course), human sacrifice helped create the hierarchies present in many modern societies.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/scien ... pe=article
Nearly 20 years ago, after a chess-playing computer called Deep Blue beat the world grandmaster Garry Kasparov, I wrote an article about why humans would long remain the champions in the game of Go.
“It may be a hundred years before a computer beats humans at Go — maybe even longer,” Dr. Piet Hut, an astrophysicist and Go enthusiast at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., told me in 1997. “If a reasonably intelligent person learned to play Go, in a few months he could beat all existing computer programs. You don’t have to be a Kasparov.”
That was the prevailing wisdom. Last month, after a Google computer program called AlphaGo defeated the Go master Lee Se-dol, I asked Dr. Hut for his reaction. “I was way off, clearly, with my prediction,” he replied in an email. “It’s really stunning.”
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/scien ... d=71987722
*******
Why Some Societies Practiced Ritual Human Sacrifice
One thing that’s definitely gotten better over time: not as much ritualistic human sacrifice.
But a new study published Monday in Nature revisits the ancient practice to look for fresh insights. The scientists found that, for better or worse (and only worse for the victims, of course), human sacrifice helped create the hierarchies present in many modern societies.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/scien ... pe=article
Science stories of the week: April 9, 2016
Sideshow at:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/weekendre ... lsignoutmd
Highlights:
World's first 3D-printed drug goes on sale
The 3D printing technology touched yet another high as Aprecia Pharmaceuticals, a Pennsylvania.-based company, has become the world’s first brand to manufacture drugs by using powder-liquid three-dimensional printing technology, according to Science News journal. The drug, named Spritam, is meant to treat epilepsy.
The 3D drug has received necessary approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and is now commercially available in the United States. Made using power bed inkjet printing, where the elements of the drug are created layer upon layer, its instant melt-in-the-mouth property gives it a distinct advantage over traditional anticonvulsants that have to be swallowed.
A baboon survives with a 'pig's heart' in stomach
As part of a National Institutes of Health research on xenotransplantation — the process of grafting or transplanting organs between different species, a baboon has survived with a pig's heart beating inside its abdomen for nearly three years. The baboon had its own heart in place and did not rely on the pig’s heart for functioning. All the baboons used in this experiment were administered a combination of immune-suppressing drugs to stop their immune systems from attacking the new hearts; once the drugs were withdrawn, the pig hearts stopped working.
While it's too early before xenotransplantation can be successfully carried out in humans, this experiment sure gives hope. Around 22 people die in the U.S. everyday while waiting for human organs that are in short supply, according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.
Sideshow at:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/weekendre ... lsignoutmd
Highlights:
World's first 3D-printed drug goes on sale
The 3D printing technology touched yet another high as Aprecia Pharmaceuticals, a Pennsylvania.-based company, has become the world’s first brand to manufacture drugs by using powder-liquid three-dimensional printing technology, according to Science News journal. The drug, named Spritam, is meant to treat epilepsy.
The 3D drug has received necessary approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and is now commercially available in the United States. Made using power bed inkjet printing, where the elements of the drug are created layer upon layer, its instant melt-in-the-mouth property gives it a distinct advantage over traditional anticonvulsants that have to be swallowed.
A baboon survives with a 'pig's heart' in stomach
As part of a National Institutes of Health research on xenotransplantation — the process of grafting or transplanting organs between different species, a baboon has survived with a pig's heart beating inside its abdomen for nearly three years. The baboon had its own heart in place and did not rely on the pig’s heart for functioning. All the baboons used in this experiment were administered a combination of immune-suppressing drugs to stop their immune systems from attacking the new hearts; once the drugs were withdrawn, the pig hearts stopped working.
While it's too early before xenotransplantation can be successfully carried out in humans, this experiment sure gives hope. Around 22 people die in the U.S. everyday while waiting for human organs that are in short supply, according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.