Neuroscientist James Fallon is a self-styled “hobbit scientist.” The rules are simple: Don’t talk to the press and don’t go out of your area of expertise. But when a fascinating new brain scanner enters the lab, Fallon can’t resist. He ends up breaking both rules, and learns a lot more about himself than he bargained for.
Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
The Eye Limits the Brain’s Learning Potential
April 26, 2012
The concept of a critical period for visual development early in life during which sensory experience is essential to normal neural development is now well established. However recent evidence suggests that a limited degree of plasticity remains after this period and well into adulthood. Here, we ask the question, “what limits the degree of plasticity in adulthood?” Although this limit has been assumed to be due to neural factors, we show that the optical quality of the retinal image ultimately limits the brain potential for change. We correct the high-order aberrations (HOAs) normally present in the eye’s optics using adaptive optics, and reveal a greater degree of neuronal plasticity than previously appreciated.
Read this scientific report at Nature
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Lawrence Krauss: another physicist with an anti-philosophy complex
April 26, 2012
Massimo Pigliucci writes:
I don’t know what’s the matter with physicists these days. It used to be that they were an intellectually sophisticated bunch, with the likes of Einstein and Bohr doing not only brilliant scientific research, but also interested, respectful of, and conversant in other branches of knowledge, particularly philosophy. These days it is much more likely to encounter physicists like Steven Weinberg or Stephen Hawking, who merrily go about dismissing philosophy for the wrong reasons, and quite obviously out of a combination of profound ignorance and hubris (the two often go together, as I’m sure Plato would happily point out). The latest such bore is Lawrence Krauss, of Arizona State University.
I have been ignoring Krauss’ nonsense about philosophy for a while, even though it had occasionally appeared on my Twitter or G+ radars. But the other day my friend Michael De Dora pointed me to this interview Krauss just did with The Atlantic, and now I feel obliged to comment, for the little good that it may do. And before I continue, kudos to Ross Andersen, who conducted the interview, for pressing Krauss on several of his non sequiturs. Let’s take a look, shall we?
Krauss is proud (if a bit coy) of the fact that Richard Dawkins referred to his latest book, entitled “A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing,” as comparable to Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” on the grounds that it upends the “last trump card of the theologian.” Well, leave it to Dawkins to engage in that sort of silly hyperbolic rhetoric. (Dawkins still appears to be convinced that religion will be defeated by rationality alone. Were that the case, David Hume would have sufficed.) The fact is, Krauss’s book is aimed at a general audience, popularizing other people’s (as well as his own) work, and is not the kind of revelation of novel scientific findings that Darwin put out in his opus, and that makes all the difference.
Continue at Rationally Speaking
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Meet Arvind Gupta and his Toys from “Trash”
April 25, 2012
Arvind Gupta is an Indian toy inventor that popularizes science. His series of films by Arvind Gupta Toys is absolutely wonderful.
Books on Education from Arvind Gupta
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Increasing Number of Kids Are Growing Up Addicted to Porn
April 25, 2012
UK government officials have been warned that a “guinea pig” generation of children is becoming addicted to hardcore internet porn.
A cross-party Independent Parliamentary Inquiry Into Online Child Protection concluded in a report on Wednesday that the government and internet service providers need to do more to stop children from easily gaining access to pornography and websites with violent content.
The inquiry found that four out of five 16-year-old boys and girls regularly access porn on the internet and one in three ten-year-old children has seen explicit sexual material, according to a cross party report.
Additionally, the report revealed that more than a quarter of young patients at a leading private clinic are being treated for addiction to online pornography.
One parliament member said that her son had told her that his students at his school frequently traded memory sticks that contained hardcore pornographic images.
Excerpt of an article written by Christine Hsu at Medical Daily
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Attention tunes the mind’s ear. Brain activity shows how one voice pattern stands out from the crowd
April 23, 2012The brain’s power to focus can make a single voice seem like the only sound in a room full of chatter, a new study shows. The results help explain how people can pick out a speaker from a jumbled stream of incoming sounds.
A deeper understanding of this feat could help scientists better treat people who can’t sort out sound signals effectively, an ability that can decline with age.
“I think this is a truly outstanding study, which has deep implications for the way we think about the auditory brain,” says auditory neuroscientist Christophe Micheyl of the University of Minnesota, who was not involved in the new research.
Excerpt from an article written by Laura Sanders, Science News. Continue HERE
For the project, engineer Nima Mesgarani and neurosurgeon Edward Chang, both of the University of California, San Francisco, studied what happens in the brains of people who are trying to follow one of two talkers, a scenario known to scientists as the cocktail party problem.
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Post-Prozac Nation
April 23, 2012
Few medicines, in the history of pharmaceuticals, have been greeted with as much exultation as a green-and-white pill containing 20 milligrams of fluoxetine hydrochloride — the chemical we know as Prozac. In her 1994 book “Prozac Nation,” Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote of a nearly transcendental experience on the drug. Before she began treatment with antidepressants, she was living in “a computer program of total negativity . . . an absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest.” She floated from one “suicidal reverie” to the next. Yet, just a few weeks after starting Prozac, her life was transformed. “One morning I woke up and really did want to live. . . . It was as if the miasma of depression had lifted off me, in the same way that the fog in San Francisco rises as the day wears on. Was it the Prozac? No doubt.”
Like Wurtzel, millions of Americans embraced antidepressants. In 1988, a year after the Food and Drug Administration approved Prozac, 2,469,000 prescriptions for it were dispensed in America. By 2002, that number had risen to 33,320,000. By 2008, antidepressants were the third-most-common prescription drug taken in America.
Fast forward to 2012 and the same antidepressants that inspired such enthusiasm have become the new villains of modern psychopharmacology — overhyped, overprescribed chemicals, symptomatic of a pill-happy culture searching for quick fixes for complex mental problems. In “The Emperor’s New Drugs,” the psychologist Irving Kirsch asserted that antidepressants work no better than sugar pills and that the clinical effectiveness of the drugs is, largely, a myth. If the lodestone book of the 1990s was Peter Kramer’s near-ecstatic testimonial, “Listening to Prozac,” then the book of the 2000s is David Healy’s “Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression.”
Excerpt of an article written by SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE, NYT. Continue HERE
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Evolution has given humans a huge advantage over most other animals: middle age
April 23, 2012
As a 42-year-old man born in England, I can expect to live for about another 38 years. In other words, I can no longer claim to be young. I am, without doubt, middle-aged.
To some people that is a depressing realization. We are used to dismissing our fifth and sixth decades as a negative chapter in our lives, perhaps even a cause for crisis. But recent scientific findings have shown just how important middle age is for every one of us, and how crucial it has been to the success of our species. Middle age is not just about wrinkles and worry. It is not about getting old. It is an ancient, pivotal episode in the human life span, preprogrammed into us by natural selection, an exceptional characteristic of an exceptional species.
Compared with other animals, humans have a very unusual pattern to our lives. We take a very long time to grow up, we are long-lived, and most of us stop reproducing halfway through our life span. A few other species have some elements of this pattern, but only humans have distorted the course of their lives in such a dramatic way. Most of that distortion is caused by the evolution of middle age, which adds two decades that most other animals simply do not get.
Excerpt of an article written by David Bainbridge, WP. Continue HERE
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The Crisis of Big Science
April 23, 2012Last year physicists commemorated the centennial of the discovery of the atomic nucleus. In experiments carried out in Ernest Rutherford’s laboratory at Manchester in 1911, a beam of electrically charged particles from the radioactive decay of radium was directed at a thin gold foil. It was generally believed at the time that the mass of an atom was spread out evenly, like a pudding. In that case, the heavy charged particles from radium should have passed through the gold foil, with very little deflection. To Rutherford’s surprise, some of these particles bounced nearly straight back from the foil, showing that they were being repelled by something small and heavy within gold atoms. Rutherford identified this as the nucleus of the atom, around which electrons revolve like planets around the sun.
This was great science, but not what one would call big science. Rutherford’s experimental team consisted of one postdoc and one undergraduate. Their work was supported by a grant of just £70 from the Royal Society of London. The most expensive thing used in the experiment was the sample of radium, but Rutherford did not have to pay for it—the radium was on loan from the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Nuclear physics soon got bigger. The electrically charged particles from radium in Rutherford’s experiment did not have enough energy to penetrate the electrical repulsion of the gold nucleus and get into the nucleus itself. To break into nuclei and learn what they are, physicists in the 1930s invented cyclotrons and other machines that would accelerate charged particles to higher energies. The late Maurice Goldhaber, former director of Brookhaven Laboratory, once reminisced:
The first to disintegrate a nucleus was Rutherford, and there is a picture of him holding the apparatus in his lap. I then always remember the later picture when one of the famous cyclotrons was built at Berkeley, and all of the people were sitting in the lap of the cyclotron.
Excerpt of an article written by Steven Weinberg, The New York Review of Books. Continue HERE
Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory/Photo Researchers. Construction of an underground shaft for the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas. The SSC was supposed to be the largest particle accelerator in the world, but its funding was canceled by Congress in 1993.
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Computer Built Using Swarming Behavior of Soldier Crabs
April 21, 2012
Computer scientists at Kobe University in Japan have built a computer that draws inspiration from the swarming behavior of soldier crabs.
The computer is based on theories from the early 1980s that studies how it could be possible to build a computer out of billiard balls. Proposed by Edward Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli, the mechanical computer was based on Newtonian dynamics and relied on the motion of billiard balls in an idealized, friction-free environment instead of electronic signals like a conventional computer.
The model was developed to investigate the relation between computation and reversible processes in physics. A channel in this computational system would carry information encoded in the form of the presence or absence of billiard balls. The information is processed through a series of gates which the balls either bump into and emerge in a predictable direction based on the ballistics of the collision or which they don’t bump into and emerge with the same velocity.
Excerpt of an article written by WIRED UK. Continue HERE
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Science in court: Arrested development
April 20, 2012
Neuroscience shows that the adolescent brain is still developing. The question is whether that should influence the sentencing of juveniles.
Advocates for juveniles have been embracing this work as part of a long-term strategy to ensure that young criminals are given less punishment than adults and more opportunities for rehabilitation. And many neuroscientists studying the adolescent brain are gratified that their work is contributing to these efforts. “It’s so satisfying to think that maybe in some minuscule way my work was relevant to society,” says Bea Luna, who studies adolescent brain development at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.
But the brain research may not have as great an influence in court as some scientists and advocates like to think. Some say that the neuroscience offers no fresh insight into adolescent behavior, and may serve merely as a rhetorical flourish in judges’ opinions or as a tool that lawyers and advocates exploit to make their case. “The neuroscience is being used for an advocacy position,” says Emily Murphy of Stanford University in California, who was a fellow with the MacArthur Foundation’s Law and Neuroscience Project. “That’s all it’s always been, in a legal context.” Murphy and others worry that the neuroscience currently being used in court may be abused, and might overshadow other research that could make a deeper impact on juvenile crime and punishment.
Excerpt of an article written by Lizzie Buchen, Nature. Read it HERE
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Study Suggests Lead Dust Is Linked to Violence
April 20, 2012
Childhood exposure to lead dust has been linked to lasting physical and behavioral effects, and now lead dust from vehicles using leaded gasoline has been linked to instances of aggravated assault two decades after exposure, says Tulane toxicologist Howard W. Mielke.
Vehicles using leaded gasoline that contaminated cities’ air decades ago have increased aggravated assault in urban areas, researchers say.
The new findings are published in the journal Environment International by Mielke, a research professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the Tulane University School of Medicine, and demographer Sammy Zahran at the Center for Disaster and Risk Analysis at Colorado State University.
The researchers compared the amount of lead released in six cities: Atlanta, Chicago, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, New Orleans and San Diego, during the years 1950-1985. This period saw an increase in airborne lead dust exposure due to the use of leaded gasoline. There were correlating spikes in the rates of aggravated assault approximately two decades later, after the exposed children grew up.
After controlling for other possible causes such as community and household income, education, policing effort and incarceration rates, Mielke and Zahran found that for every one percent increase in tonnages of environmental lead released 22 years earlier, the present rate of aggravated assault was raised by 0.46 percent.
“Children are extremely sensitive to lead dust, and lead exposure has latent neuroanatomical effects that severely impact future societal behavior and welfare,” says Mielke. “Up to 90 per cent of the variation in aggravated assault across the cities is explained by the amount of lead dust released 22 years earlier.” Tons of lead dust were released between 1950 and 1985 in urban areas by vehicles using leaded gasoline, and improper handling of lead-based paint also has contributed to contamination.
Text and Image via Science Daily
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Memory Foraging: When the Brain Behaves Like a Bee
April 20, 2012
Researchers test the idea that we hunt for memories in our minds the same way some animals search for food. In search of nectar, a honeybee flies into a well-manicured suburban garden and lands on one of several camellia bushes planted in a row. After rummaging through the ruffled pink petals of several flowers, the bee leaves the first bush for another. Finding hardly any nectar in the flowers of the second bush, the bee flies to a third. And so on.
Our brains may have evolved to forage for some kinds of memories in the same way, shifting our attention from one cluster of stored information to another depending on what each patch has to offer. Recently, Thomas Hills of the University of Warwick in England and his colleagues found experimental evidence for this potential parallel. “Memory foraging” is only one way of thinking about memory—and it does not apply universally to all types of information retained in the brain—but, so far, the analogy seems to work well for particular cases of active remembering.
Excerpt of an article written by Ferris Jabr, Scientific American. Continue HERE
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Synthetic DNA Created, Evolves on Its Own
April 20, 2012
Nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA are composed of four bases—A, G, C, and T. Attached to the bases are sugars and phosphates.
First, researchers made XNA building blocks to six different genetic systems by replacing the natural sugar component of DNA with one of six different polymers, synthetic chemical compounds.
The team—led by Vitor Pinheiro of the U.K.’s Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology—then evolved enzymes, called polymerases, that can make XNA from DNA, and others that can change XNA back into DNA.
This copying and translating ability allowed for genetic sequences to be copied and passed down again and again—artificial heredity.
Last, the team determined that HNA, one of the six XNA polymers, could respond to selective pressure in a test tube.
Excerpt of an article written by Christine Dell’Amore, National Geographic News. Continue HERE
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Eyeless shrimp and fish with lesions are becoming common, with BP oil pollution believed to be the likely cause
April 19, 2012
Regenerative medicine repairs mice from top to toe. Three separate studies in mice show normal function can be restored to hair, eye and heart cells.
April 19, 2012
Transplanting bioengineered stem cells into nude mice enabled them to grow hair.Takashi Tsuji/Tokyo University of Science.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the promise of regenerating damaged tissue was so far-fetched that Thomas Hunt Morgan, despairing that his work on earthworms could ever be applied to humans, abandoned the field to study heredity instead. Though he won the Nobel Prize in 1933 for his work on the role of chromosomes in inheritance, if he lived today, the advances in regenerative medicine may have tempted him to reconsider.
Three studies published this week show that introducing new cells into mice can replace diseased cells — whether hair, eye or heart — and help to restore the normal function of those cells. These proof-of-principle studies now have researchers setting their sights on clinical trials to see if the procedures could work in humans.
Excerpt from an article written by Leila Haghighat, Nature. Continue HERE
Hair Regeneration from Adult Stem Cells
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Tiny animals solve problems of housing and maintaining oversized brains, shedding new light on nervous-system evolution
April 17, 2012
A basic fact of life is that the size of an animal’s brain depends to some extent on its body size. A long history of studies of vertebrate animals has demonstrated that the relationship between brain and body mass follows a power-law function. Smaller individuals have relatively larger brains for their body sizes. This scaling relationship was popularized as Haller’s Rule by German evolutionary biologist Bernhard Rensch in 1948, in honor of Albrecht von Haller, who first noticed the relationship nearly 250 years ago. Little has been known, however, about relative brain size for invertebrates such as insects, spiders and nematodes, even though they are among Earth’s more diverse and abundant animal groups. But a recent wave of studies of invertebrates confirms that Haller’s Rule applies to them as well, and that it extends to much smaller body sizes than previously thought.
These tiny animals have been able to substantially shift their allometric lines—that is, the relationship between their brain size and their overall body size—from those of vertebrates and other invertebrates. Animals that follow a given allometric line belong to the same grade and changes from one grade to another are known as grade shifts. The result is that different taxonomic groups have different, variant, versions of Haller’s Rule.
Excerpt from a paper by William G. Eberhard, William T. Wcislo, American Scientist. Continue HERE
Where Do Space and Time Come From? New Theory Offers Answers, If Only Physicists Can Figure It Out
April 17, 2012”Maybe we’re just too dumb,” Nobel laureate physicist David Gross mused in a lecture at Caltech two weeks ago. When someone of his level wonders whether the unification of physics will always be beyond mortal minds, it gets you worried. Since his lecture, I’ve been learning about a theory that seems to confirm Gross’s worry. It is so ridiculously hard that it could be the subject of an Onion parody. But at the same time, I’ve been watching how physicists are trying to power through their intimidation, because the theory promises a new way of understanding what space and time really are, at a deep level.
The theory was put forward in the late 1980s by Russian physicists Mikhail Vasiliev and the late Efin Fradkin of the Lebedev Institute in Moscow, but is so mathematically complex and conceptually opaque that whenever someone brought it up, most theorists started talking about the weather, soccer, reality TV—anything but that theory. It became a subject of polite conversation only in the past couple of years, as math whizzes who take a peculiar pleasure in impossible problems dove in and showed that the theory is not impossible to grasp, merely almost impossible.
Continue this article written by George Musser at Scientific American
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Can a hallucinogen from Gabon, Africa cure addiction?
April 15, 2012
Since the 1960s a disparate group of scientists and former drug addicts have been advocating a radical treatment for addiction – a hallucinogen called ibogaine, derived from an African plant, that in some cases seems to obliterate withdrawal symptoms from heroin, cocaine and alcohol. So why isn’t it widely used?
Read article HERE
Enemy me on Facebook: In a friend-obsessed world, research is uncovering real benefits to having a nemesis
April 15, 2012
No one wants an enemy. Few things could be more stressful and potentially damaging: We dread the nemesis vying for the same job, a rival business trying to steal customers, or the opposing sports team that always sweeps.
A half-century ago, however, a British ornithologist put forth a surprising new idea about enemies in the natural world: Maybe they aren’t always such a bad thing. In a 1954 book chapter, James Fisher suggested that territorial birds might actually gain some advantages from living near threatening rivals. He called it the “dear enemy” phenomenon: Birds that compete with their neighbors would also be bound to them in helpful ways.
Over time, the notion of the dear enemy developed and spread. Naturalists observing birds found that multiple species reserved their fiercest aggression not for next-door rivals, but for strangers. Birds that were enemies in the most obvious sense, neighbors competing directly for territory, seemed to fight less, maintaining a kind of détente with their known rivals. Biologists began to study the effect in other animals, from crabs to beavers. Today, there are dozens of studies that examine what happens when animals keep their enemies close.
Excerpt of and article written by Carolyn Y. Johnson at the Boston Globe. Continue HERE
A CULTURAL HISTORY OF PHYSICS
April 13, 2012
An excerpt from a new book by Karoly Simonyi.
INTRODUCTION
by Freeman Dyson
A Cultural History of Physics is a grand monument to the life of its author. Karoly Simonyi was teacher first, scholar second, and scientist third. His book likewise has three components. First a text, describing the history of science over the last four thousand years in a rich context of philosophy, art and literature. Second, a collection of illustrations, many of them taken from Hungarian archives and museums unknown to Western readers, giving concrete reality to historical events.Third an anthology of quotations from writers in many languages, beginning with Aeschylus in “Prometheus Bound”, describing how his hero brought knowledge and technical skills to mankind, and ending with Blaise Pascal in “Pensées”, describing how our awareness of our bodies and minds remains an eternal mystery. Different readers will have different preferences. For me, the quotations are the most precious part of the book. Dip anywhere among these pages, and you will find a quotation that is surprising and illuminating.
I have a vivid memory of my one meeting with the author. I came with his son Charles Simonyi to visit him in his home in Budapest. He had an amazing collection of books that had survived centuries of turbulent history. Several of them had bullet holes from the various battles that were fought in the neighboring streets. Many of them were historically important relics from the early days of printing. He proudly showed me these treasures, and even more proudly showed me the German edition of A Cultural History of Physics, which he had recently translated from the Hungarian original. I had only a few minutes to explore the beauties of this work, but I recognized it at once as a unique and magnificent achievement. Now it is finally available in English, and we can enjoy it at our leisure.
Thank you, Charles, for making this happen.
—Freeman Dyson
April 5, 2012
KÁROLY SIMONYI was a Hungarian scholar-educator and physicist, whose lectures, and the trilogy of his great books The Foundations of Electrical Engineering, The Physics of Electronics and Electromagnetic Theory founded an international invisible college in electrical and electronic engineering.
FREEMAN DYSON is Professor of Physics, Institute for Advanced Study; Author, Many Colored Glass; The Scientist as Rebel; Essayist, New York Review of Books.
More Info via EDGE
Can You Live Forever?
April 12, 2012Discovery Channel documentary show about curious questions in science, technology, society etc. In each episode different question is being answered or is tried to be answered, featuring different celebrity host.
Season 01, Episode 11 : Can You Live Forever?
Host : Adam Savage
No, a Universal Cancer Vaccine Was Not Just Developed
April 12, 2012Thanks to The Atlantic, our previous “Universal cancer vaccine developed?” post found at The Telegraph has been demystified. Here is what Neal Emery writes for the Atlantic:
While a recent media report was more hype than science, it did focus on a promising pathway for cancer treatments.
More than 40 years after Nixon called for “a national commitment for the conquest of cancer”, is victory finally in sight?
An article published in the Telegraph on Sunday suggested that a weapon able to crush cancer had arrived. Headlined “‘Universal’ cancer vaccine developed”, the piece about Israeli Vaxil BioTherapeutics’ new drug ImMucin, has seen a deluge of interest.
Unlike November 2011 reports about the drug that were met with little fanfare, this piece has been covered by dozens of news outlets and shared 19,000 times on Facebook alone. According to the Telegraph, Vaxil’s wonderdrug, “which targets a molecule found in 90 percent of all cancers, could provide a universal injection that allows patients’ immune systems to fight off common cancers including breast and prostate cancer.”
Continue article HERE
3D visualizations of breast cells. Vivek Nandakumar/Arizona State University.
Lessons From Ants to Grasp Humanity
April 12, 2012
To the biologist Edward O. Wilson, the Metropolitan Museum of Art encapsulates some of the conflicting impulses natural selection has instilled in humans: the innate drive for expression that spurs some of us to make art, the selfishness that motivates others to earn the riches needed to collect it, and the altruism that compels the donation of collections for the public good — as long as the donors’ names are inscribed on the walls too.
But asked to imagine the museum from the perspective of ants, whose intricate social world he has built a towering reputation by studying, Dr. Wilson painted a scene that was less a lesson in evolution than a chaotic free-for-all.
“To them the crowds would just be a flank-to-flank herd of enormous elephants you have to dodge around,” he said with a boyish giggle from the museum’s teeming steps during a recent visit to New York to promote his 27th book, “The Social Conquest of Earth,” which is being published Monday by Liveright. “I don’t think ants would have any aesthetic or intellectual interest in the museum, though they would certainly find a happy home in Central Park.”
Excerpt of an article by JENNIFER SCHUESSLER at NYT. Continue HERE
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Geometry, Topology and Destiny by Mark Trodden
April 11, 2012
I’ve reached the cosmology part of my General Relativity (GR) course, and one of the early points that comes up is my traditional rant against confusing three very distinct concepts when thinking about the universe. Roughly stated, these are; What is the shape of the universe? Is the universe finite or infinite? and Will the universe expand forever or recollapse.
When we apply GR to cosmology, we make use of the simplifying assumptions, backed up by observations, that there exists a definition of time such that at a fixed value of time, the universe is spatially homogeneous (looks the same wherever the observer is) and isotropic (looks the same in all directions around a point). We then specialize to the most general metric compatible with these assumptions, and write down the resulting Einstein equations with appropriate sources (regular matter, dark matter, radiation, a cosmological constant, etc.). The solutions to these equations are the famous Friedmann, Robertson-Walker spacetimes, describing the expansion (or contraction) of the universe.
It is important to take a moment to emphasize what we have done here. GR is indeed a beautiful geometric theory describing curved spacetime. But practically, we are solving differential equations, subject to (in this case) the condition that the universe look the way it does today. Differential equations describe the local behavior of a system and so, in GR, they describe the local geometry in the neighborhood of a spacetime point.
Excerpt of an article written by Mark Trodden at DISCOVER. Continue HERE
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‘Universal’ cancer vaccine developed?
April 11, 2012
The therapy, which targets a molecule found in 90 per cent of all cancers, could provide a universal injection that allows patients’ immune systems to fight off common cancers including breast and prostate cancer.
Preliminary results from early clinical trials have shown the vaccine can trigger an immune response in patients and reduce levels of disease.
The scientists behind the vaccine now hope to conduct larger trials in patients to prove it can be effective against a range of different cancers.
They believe it could be used to combat small tumors if they are detected early enough or to help prevent the return and spread of disease in patients who have undergone other forms of treatment such as surgery.
Cancer cells usually evade patient’s immune systems because they are not recognized as being a threat. While the immune system usually attacks foreign cells such as bacteria, tumors are formed of the patient’s own cells that have malfunctioned.
Read full article via The Telegraph
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The failure of European intellectuals?
April 11, 2012
Intellectuals have been accused of failing to restore a European confidence undermined by crisis. Yet calls for legitimating European narratives – combined with nostalgia for a golden age of Europeanism – remain faithful to the logic of nineteenth-century nation building, argues Jan-Werner Müller. What, then, should Europe’s intellectuals be doing?
Towards the end of last year, as the Eurozone crisis was reaching (yet another) climax, a number of journalists in the German quality press alerted their readers to an aspect of the crisis which had received scant attention so far: the euro crisis marked not only the failure of Europe’s central bankers, or Greek bureaucrats, or Italian non-taxpayers, or Angela Merkel (all depending on one’s perspective) – it also signified a comprehensive failure of intellectuals. Why were they not defending the great achievements of European integration? Why were they not putting forward appealing visions of the continent’s future, instead squandering a great legacy of mutual trust and understanding among Europeans which had been nurtured over many decades? Were they simply sleeping through a crisis that might eventually usher in the return of ugly nationalisms? Or even military conflict, as elder European statesmen like Helmut Kohl never tire of warning?
Excerpt of an article written by Jan-Werner Müller at EUROZINE. Continue HERE
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Is Some Homophobia Self-Phobia?
April 10, 2012Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires, a series of psychology studies demonstrates.
The study is the first to document the role that both parenting and sexual orientation play in the formation of intense and visceral fear of homosexuals, including self-reported homophobic attitudes, discriminatory bias, implicit hostility towards gays, and endorsement of anti-gay policies. Conducted by a team from the University of Rochester, the University of Essex, England, and the University of California in Santa Barbara, the research will be published the April issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
“Individuals who identify as straight but in psychological tests show a strong attraction to the same sex may be threatened by gays and lesbians because homosexuals remind them of similar tendencies within themselves,” explains Netta Weinstein, a lecturer at the University of Essex and the study’s lead author.
Excerpt from an article on Science Daily
Brain imaging: fMRI 2.0
April 9, 2012
Functional magnetic resonance imaging is growing from showy adolescence into a workhorse of brain imaging.
The blobs appeared 20 years ago. Two teams, one led by Seiji Ogawa at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the other by Kenneth Kwong at Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown, slid a handful of volunteers into giant magnets. With their heads held still, the volunteers watched flashing lights or tensed their hands, while the research teams built the data flowing from the machines into grainy images showing parts of the brain illuminated as multicoloured blobs.
The results showed that a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) could use blood as a proxy for measuring the activity of neurons — without the injection of a signal-boosting compound1, 2. It was the first demonstration of fMRI as it is commonly used today, and came just months after the technique debuted — using a contrast agent — in humans3. Sensitive to the distinctive magnetic properties of blood that is rich in oxygen, the method shows oxygenated blood flowing to active brain regions. Unlike scanning techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG), which detects electrical activity at the skull’s surface, fMRI produces measurements from deep inside the brain. It is also non-invasive, which makes it safer and more comfortable than positron emission tomography (PET), in which radioactive compounds are injected and traced as they flow around the body.
Excerpt of an article written by Kerri Smith at NATURE. Continue HERE
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Scientists rewrite rules of human reproduction: Lab-grown egg cells could revolutionize fertility – and even banish menopause
April 7, 2012
The first human egg cells that have been grown entirely in the laboratory from stem cells could be fertilized later this year in a development that will revolutionize fertility treatment and might even lead to a reversal of the menopause in older women.
Scientists are about to request a license from the UK fertility watchdog to fertilize the eggs as part of a series of tests to generate an unlimited supply of human eggs, a breakthrough that could help infertile women to have babies as well as making women as fertile in later life as men.
Producing human eggs from stem cells would also open up the possibility of replenishing the ovaries of older women so that they do not suffer the age-related health problems associated with the menopause, from osteoporosis to heart disease.
Excerpt of an article written by Steve Connor at the Independent. Continue HERE
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