Why my dog drinks beer

* 17:00 26 April 2007
* NewScientist.com news service
* Roxanne Khamsi
When dogs learn new tricks, they do not simply copy what they see, but interpret it, suggests a new study, which provides evidence that man's best friend possesses a human-like ability to understand the goals and intentions of others.

In the experiment, a well-trained Border collie bitch demonstrated to untrained dogs how to pull a lever for food using her paw. If she did this while carrying a toy ball between her teeth, the dogs in her audience would instead tug the lever with their mouths when their turn arrived. These animals appeared to be thinking that she used her paw only because her mouth held a ball, say researchers.

Forty other dogs – none of which had seen the food lever before – observed the well-trained collie pull it for a biscuit 10 times. Half of them saw the collie carry out the task with nothing in her mouth. Almost all of these observers used their paws when given a chance to tug the lever for food.

"We were very surprised to see this 'selective imitation' by the dogs," says Range, referring to how the dogs' actions depended on whether the Border collie carried a ball. "They didn't just copy blindly what they saw." She believes it is the first time that this sort of selective imitation has been shown in animals besides humans.

The new dog study involved almost two dozen breeds, including Labradors and various herding dogs, ranging in age from one to 12 years. So Range believes that most dogs rely on selective imitation to learn.Read on...

Thinking out of the box

She notes that some experiments in chimps have shown signs of a related – but not identical – type of sophisticated imitation. In one study, for example, chimps observed a human poke a stick twice into a transparent box of food. The first, an ineffective jab from above, was always followed by a fruitful jab from the side. The chimps skipped the first, unnecessary jab when they had a chance to try for the food reward themselves.

But while Range argues that sophisticated imitation might help animals learn, some experts believe that mindless copying can actually give species – even humans – an advantage when used appropriately.

Basic copycat behaviour can result in speedier mastery of very simple tasks, they say (see Mindless imitation teaches us how to be human).

Journal reference: Current Biology (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2007.04.026)

Door to another universe

* 20:42 27 April 2007
* NewScientist.com news service
* David Shiga

The objects scientists think are black holes could instead be wormholes leading to other universes, a new study says. If so, it would help resolve a quantum conundrum known as the black hole information paradox, but critics say it would also raise new problems, such as how the wormholes would form in the first place.

A black hole is an object with such a powerful gravitational field that nothing, not even light, can escape it if it strays within a boundary known as the event horizon. Einstein's theory of general relativity says black holes should form whenever matter is squeezed into a small enough space.

Though black holes are not seen directly, astronomers have identified many objects that appear to be black holes based on observations of how matter swirls around them.

But physicists Thibault Damour of the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette, France, and Sergey Solodukhin of International University Bremen in Germany now say that these objects could be structures called wormholes instead.

Wormholes are warps in the fabric of space-time that connect one place to another. If you imagine the universe as a two-dimensional sheet, you can picture a wormhole as a "throat" connecting our sheet to another one. In this scenario, the other sheet could be a universe of its own, with its own stars, galaxies and planets.

Damour and Solodukhin studied what such a wormhole might look like, and were surprised to discover that it would mimic a black hole so well that it would be virtually impossible to tell the difference.
Hawking radiation

Matter would swirl around a wormhole in the same way as for a black hole, since both objects distort the space around them in the same way.

One might hope to distinguish the two by something called Hawking radiation, an emission of particles and light which should only come from black holes and would have a characteristic energy spectrum. But this radiation is so weak that it would be completely swamped by other sources, such as the background glow of microwaves left over from the big bang, making it unobservable in practice.

Another difference one might hope to exploit is that unlike black holes, wormholes have no event horizon. This means that things could go in a wormhole and come back out again. In fact, theorists say one variety of wormhole wraps back onto itself, so that it leads not to another universe, but back to its own entrance.
Daring plunge

But this does not provide a foolproof test either. Depending on the detailed shape of the wormhole, it could take billions of years or more for things to pop back out after falling in. With the right shape, even the oldest wormholes in our universe would not have had time to spit anything back out yet.

It seems the only way to decide the issue for sure with astronomical black holes is to make a daring plunge inside. That would be a dangerous gamble, because if it is a black hole, the incredibly strong gravitational field inside would tear apart every atom in your body. Even if it turns out to be a wormhole, the forces inside could still be deadly.

Assuming you could survive, and the wormhole was not symmetric, you might find yourself in another universe on the other side. Without further intervention, the wormhole would tend to suck you back in and carry you back to the opening in your universe.
Yo-yo motion

"The spaceship would do this yo-yo motion," Damour told New Scientist. "[But] if you use your fuel, then you can escape from the attracting power of the wormhole and explore" the space on the other side, he says.

But a friend in either universe might have to wait billions of years to hear back from you, since the transit time could be excruciatingly long.

Such a delay would make meaningful communication with anyone on the other side impossible. But the delay gets smaller with smaller wormholes. If a microscopic wormhole could be found or constructed, the delay across it could be as short as a few seconds, Solodukhin says, potentially making two-way communication possible.

Stephen Hsu of the University of Oregon in Eugene, US, who has studied the formation of black holes and the properties of wormholes, says he agrees that distinguishing between the two types of object with observations is practically impossible, at least with current technology.
Exotic matter

"The most important property of a black hole – that there is a 'point of no return' for an object falling in – is not something we can test at the moment," he told New Scientist.

Still, he says the objects out there suspected to be black holes probably really are black holes rather than wormholes. There are plausible scenarios for forming black holes, he says, such as the collapse of a massive star, but it is not clear how you would form a wormhole.

"Wormholes that might be confused with a macroscopic black hole require some kind of exotic matter to stabilise them, and it is not known whether such exotic matter exists," he says.

Solodukhin says that a wormhole might form in much the same way that black holes form, such as from a collapsing star. Physicists normally expect in these situations that a black hole would be produced, but Solodukhin says that quantum effects may stop the collapse just short of producing a black hole, leading to a wormhole instead.
Microscopic black holes

He says this mechanism might be inevitable in a more complete picture of physics that unites gravity and quantum mechanics – a longstanding goal of physics. If he is right, then wherever we used to expect black holes to form, wormholes would form instead.

And there might be a way to test the conjecture. Some physicists say that future particle accelerator experiments could produce microscopic black holes (see Atom smasher may give birth to 'Black Saturns').

Such tiny black holes would emit measurable amounts of Hawking radiation, proving that they are black holes rather than wormholes. But if Solodukhin is right, and microscopic wormholes are formed instead, no such radiation would be expected. "In that case, you would actually see if it is a black hole or a wormhole," he says.

An added benefit of wormholes is that they could resolve the so-called black hole information paradox. The only way anything can exit a black hole is in the form of Hawking radiation, but it is not clear how the radiation carries information about the original object that was swallowed. This scrambling effect conflicts with quantum mechanics, which forbids such erasing of information (see Black holes: The ultimate quantum computers?).

"Theoretically, wormholes are much better than black holes because all these problems with information loss don't exist in this case," Solodukhin says. Since wormholes have no event horizons, things are free to leave without first being converted into Hawking radiation, so there is no problem with lost information.

Dyslexia the Gift

Information and Resources for Dyslexia

Let the smashing commence!

World's top atom-smasher ready to rumble



This picture provided by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) shows a large dipole magnet symbolically lowered into the tunnel in Geneva, to mark the end of a crucial phase of installation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), 26 April 2007.

This completes the basic installation of the more than 1700 magnets that make up the collider, which measures 27 km in circumference and is scheduled to be commissioned at the end of 2007.

The final piece in the world's greatest particle accelerator in a 27-kilometre (43-foot) circular tunnel 100 metres under the French-Swiss border was put into place on Thursday, organisers said.

Scientists installed the final magnet in the so-called Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a project organised by the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN where subatomic particles will collide at close to the speed of light.

The LHC, assembled over 15 years and involving more than 10,000 physicists and 500 research bodies and firms around the world, will be operational from November and may help unlock the final secrets on sub-atomic particles.

The project "could be the most ambitious scientific undertaking ever," and its results "will probably change our fundamental knowledge of the universe," its organisers say.

Scientists plan to smash together high-energy protons in two counter-rotating beams in the tunnel, just outside Geneva, to look for signatures of supersymmetry, dark matter and the origins of mass.Read on...

The beams are made up of bunches containing billions of protons which will be injected, accelerated, and kept circulating for hours, guided by thousands of powerful superconducting magnets.

Each proton goes around the 27 kilometre ring over 11,000 times a second.

The detectors will be able to see up to 600 million collision events per second, with scientists scouring the debris for signs of extremely rare events such as the creation of the Higgs boson, a suspected particle whose existence would explain mass.

"It will be like smashing two Swiss watches with complex workings against each other: afterwards we will look at the wreckage from the watches and try to understand how they were made," CERN project director Philippe Bloch said.

But do they iron?

Scientists Unveil Internet-Controlled Robots That Anyone Can Build

Qwerkbot a three-wheeled robot that can send images over the Internet is one of several robots that can be built with the Telepresence Robot Kit (TeRK) a combination of a robot controller commonly available parts and assembly instructions (recipes) d ...
Qwerkbot, a three-wheeled robot that can send images over the Internet, is one of several robots that can be built with the Telepresence Robot Kit (TeRK), a combination of a robot controller, commonly available parts and assembly instructions (recipes) developed by the CREATE Lab in Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. Photo credit: Ken Andreyo/CMU

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed a new series of robots that are simple enough for almost anyone to build with off-the-shelf parts, but are sophisticated machines that wirelessly connect to the Internet.

The robots can take many forms, from a three-wheeled model with a mounted camera to a flower loaded with infrared sensors. They can be easily customized and their ability to wirelessly link to the Internet allows users to control and monitor their robots’ actions from any Internet-connected computer in the world.

The new tools that make this possible are a single piece of hardware and a set of "recipes" that people follow to build their ’bots. Both are part of the Telepresence Robot Kit (TeRK) developed by Associate Professor of Robotics Illah Nourbakhsh and members of his Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab. Their goal is to make highly capable robots accessible and affordable for college and pre-college students, as well as anyone interested in robots.

Unlike other educational robot kits on the market, TeRK is not sold as a complete set of parts. The CREATE Lab’s recipes allow for a variety of robots to be built with parts commonly available through hardware and hobbyist outlets.

At the heart of each TeRK robot is a unique controller called Qwerk that combines a computer with the software and electronics necessary to control the robot’s motors, cameras and other devices. Qwerk, developed by the CREATE Lab and Charmed Labs of Austin, Texas, also connects the robot automatically and wirelessly to the Internet so it can be controlled by any Internet-connected computer.

"The Internet connection means the robots are much more global," Nourbakhsh said. Not only can the robot be operated remotely at any location with a wireless Internet connection, but it can also send photos or video, respond to RSS feeds, or access the Internet to find information. That combination opens a wide range of possibilities. "We’re hoping people notice that the sky’s the limit," he added.

Among the TeRK recipes already available is a small, wheeled robot with a video camera that people might use to keep an eye on their home or pet while they are at work or school. Another recipe under development includes environmental sensors for air quality and sound pollution. A less conventional recipe will produce a robotic, six-petaled flower that can open and close based on moods or use its petals to play a game of catch.

"We want robots that don’t just subscribe to geeky notions of what robots should be," Nourbakhsh said. One recipe under development, for instance, can control a stuffed teddy bear.

"Once people have followed a recipe and become acquainted with robots, they can build on their experience," said Emily Hamner, a senior research associate in the CREATE Lab. "Not only can they customize the recipes to their liking, they can also design new robot types using the Qwerk controller."

Qwerk itself is a full-fledged computer with a Linux operating system that can use any computer language. It features a field programmable gate array (FPGA) to control motors, servos, cameras, amplifiers and other devices. It also accepts USB peripheral devices, such as Web cameras and GPS receivers. "We leveraged several low-cost, yet high-performance components that were originally developed for the consumer electronics industry when we designed Qwerk," said Rich LeGrand, president of Charmed Labs. "The result is a cost-effective robot controller with impressive capabilities."

Building such a capable robot only five years ago would have been all but impossible, Nourbakhsh said. Using the Internet to provide telepresence on a routine basis, he explained, is practical today because of widespread broadband Internet access and the ubiquity of wireless hotspots in both public and residential settings.

Recipes, software, technical support and other information are available free at the TeRK Web site, http://www.terk.ri.cmu.edu . The Qwerk controller is available for sale from Charmed Labs, http://www.charmedlabs.com/ .

Source: Carnegie Mellon University




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Universal Foam

Mathematics Points the Way to a Perfect Head of Beer

April 25, 2007

Mathematics Points the Way to a Perfect Head of Beer

Simple formula may lead to a host of improved materials—and the perfect pour

Researchers may have cracked the code for the perfect head on a glass of beer, and perhaps much more in the process. The key lies in a long sought equation for the growth and shrinkage of individual bubbles in foam and crystalline grains in metals, semiconductors and other materials.

The finding extends a formula that specifies how the area of two-dimensional shapes will change, discovered in part by famed mathematician John von Neumann in 1952. Researchers say the new math may help improve a wide range of industrial processes, from treating metals with heat to controlling the amount of foam in poured beer.

Metals, foams and multicellular organisms are all mosaics of microscopic spaces or domains that jostle with each other, grow or shrink, cave in or bulge out. The driving force behind this evolution is surface tension, the same property that lets a bug sit on water and draws liquid up a narrow straw.

According to the new equation, the change in volume of such a tension-driven domain is essentially the sum of the lengths of the domain's edges (imagine a honeycomb) minus six times the mean width of the domain, all multiplied by a constant that is particular to the material in question.

The key to the discovery was applying the pure math concept of mean width, which is trickier to measure than its cousins—surface area and volume, says materials scientist David Srolovitz of Yeshiva University in New York City, who, along with mathematician Robert MacPherson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., published the finding online today in Nature.

"It's exhilarating," Srolovitz says. "I've always found this problem very sexy." He says he does not know where it will be applied, but "the ideas are so general it's going to really change the way we think about geometric objects."

"It's very universal. It will touch everything" in materials design, says mathematician David Kinderlehrer of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who studies materials. He predicts it may lead to longer lasting, more efficient materials for everything from airplane wings to nuclear reactors to microprocessors.

For that to happen, researchers must learn to crunch numbers on groups of domains. That is no problem in two dimensions, but the 3-D case adds a new twist, Kinderlehrer says, because the domains have more edges that can shorten or lengthen affecting their neighbors.

"It's a very complicated type of evolution," he says. "It's going to be much harder to figure out how the network behaves."

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Lost world

University of Birmingham researchers are heralding "stunning" findings as they map the "best-preserved prehistoric landscape in Europe".

This large plain disappeared below the water more than 8,000 years ago.

The Birmingham researchers have been using oil exploration technology to build a map of the once-inhabited area that now lies below the North Sea - stretching from the east coast of Britain up to the Shetland Islands and across to Scandinavia.

'Terrifying'

"It's like finding another country," says Professor Vince Gaffney, chair in Landscape Archaeology and Geomatics.

Map of Doggerland
Prehistoric rivers, hills and valleys are mapped off the east coast
It also serves as a warning for the scale of impact that climate change can cause, he says.

Human communities would have lost their homelands as the rising water began to encroach upon the wide, low-lying plains.

"At times this change would have been insidious and slow - but at times, it could have been terrifyingly fast. It would have been very traumatic for these people," he says.

"It would be a mistake to think that these people were unsophisticated or without culture... they would have had names for the rivers and hills and spiritual associations - it would have been a catastrophic loss," says Professor Gaffney.

As the temperature rose and glaciers retreated and water levels rose, the inhabitants would have been pushed off their hunting grounds and forced towards higher land - including to what is now modern-day Britain.

Map of rising water
The rising water levels began to remake the coastline
"In 10,000 BC, hunter-gatherers were living on the land in the middle of the North Sea. By 6,000 BC, Britain was an island. The area we have mapped was wiped out in the space of 4,000 years," explains Professor Gaffney.

So far, the team has examined a 23,000-sq-km area of the sea bed - mapping out coastlines, rivers, hills, sandbanks and salt marshes as they would have appeared about 12,000 years ago.

And once the physical features have been established, Professor Gaffney says it will be possible to narrow the search for sites that could yield more evidence of how these prehistoric people lived.

These inhabitants would have lived in family groups in huts and hunted animals such as deer.

The mapping of this landscape could also raise questions about its preservation, says Professor Gaffney - and how it can be protected from activities such as pipe-laying and the building of wind farms.

Linguists doubt exception to universal grammar

Controversies in the field of linguistics seldom make headlines, which is why the current imbroglio over an alleged counterexample to Universal Grammar (UG), made famous in the 1960s by Noam Chomsky, MIT professor of linguistics, is so unusual.On one side is Daniel L. Everett, a linguist at Illinois State University, who has spent several decades studying Pirahã, a language spoken by roughly 350 indigenous hunter-gatherers in the Amazon rainforest. On the other are a number of linguists, including MIT linguistics professor David Pesetsky, who have thrown doubt upon many of Everett's claims, both cultural and linguistic, about the Pirahã.In a telephone interview, Pesetsky said, "What we tried to do in our response was to highlight the ways in which we are trying to unravel the system that unites all the languages in the world," including Pirahã. The attributes that Everett claims are unique to that language are in fact extant in other well-documented languages, such as Bengali and even German.Linguistics began to focus attention on UG several decades ago in an attempt to move their study from the particularization of philology--the detailed description of individual languages and language families, with which the field was preoccupied for centuries--to an understanding of the remarkable wealth of features that all languages share, and thence to an understanding of the human mind.
The current contretemps began with Everett's 2005 paper in Cultural Anthropology, "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language," which described a number of "gaps" in Pirahã morphosyntax (the relationships between words and how their elements convey meaning).
As a culture, says Everett, Pirahã speakers lack any sense of the past beyond what living individuals have personally experienced, and they have no creation myths or fiction, no sense of numbers or counting, and no art. Constraints of culture, Everett believes, in turn impoverish the language, which has no tenses, no names for colors and other allegedly unique paucities.
The language constraints, he claims, indicate "some of the components of so-called core grammar are subject to cultural constraints, something that is predicted not to occur" by Chomsky's universal-grammar model.
Everett's article and his colorful field career have been taken up by the popular press, with stories in the Independent, Der Spiegel and, most recently, the New Yorker, among other publications.
His critics--Pesetsky, Andrew Nevins of Harvard and Cilene Rodrigues of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil--fired back in March of this year with a paper entitled "Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment," taking issue with virtually every claim to Pirahã's uniqueness that Everett advanced. Everett hastily answered (also in March), with "Cultural Constraints on Grammar in Pirahã: A Reply to Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues (2007)." (Those two papers may be viewed at the LingBuzz linguistics archive site, ling.auf.net/lingbuzz, where they head the "Top Recent Downloads" list.)
Pesetsky marvels at the interest this debate has sparked, not only within the field but in the world at large. As of April 12, he noted in an e-mail, "Our paper has been downloaded 1,300 times and (Everett's) reply has been downloaded 910 times--astonishing figures for the site and for a field like linguistics."
While linguists at MIT pay a lot of attention to theoretical questions, such as the universal properties of sound systems, speech perception and speech production, field linguistics is far from moribund here. Linguistics grad student Seth Cable is heading off soon to Alaska on an National Science Foundation dissertation grant, to study the syntax and semantics of questions in Tlingit, a language spoken by an indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest. And one of the great figures in field linguistics, the late Kenneth Hale, was an esteemed member of the MIT faculty until his retirement in 1999; in his long career, he worked on languages as diverse as Hopi, Tohono O'odham (of the Sonoran desert region) and Warlpiri. His fluency in the latter, an indigenous language of Australia, was such that he was able to keep his sons, Ezra and Caleb, fluent in the language even after they had moved back to the United States. "He was a linguist's linguist," as Pesetsky put it.

Source: MIT

Does migraine protect your memory?

Women with a lifetime history of migraine showed less of a performance decline over time on cognitive tests than women who didn’t have migraines. Researchers say medications for migraine, diet and behavior changes may play a role in helping women with migraine protect their memory. The findings are published in the April 24, 2007, issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
For the community based study, 1,448 women, of which 204 had migraine, underwent a series of cognitive tests beginning in 1993 and again approximately 12 years later.
The study found while women with migraine performed worse on cognitive tests, such as word recall, at the beginning of the study, their performance declined 17 percent less over time than women without migraine. Women over age 50 with migraine showed the least amount of cognitive decline on a test used to assess cognitive functioning.
"Some medications for migraine headaches, such as ibuprofen, which may have a protective effect on memory, may be partially responsible for our findings, but it’s unlikely to explain this association given we adjusted for this possibility in our study and the medications showed no indication of a significant protective effect," said study author Amanda Kalaydjian, PhD, MS, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD.
Dr. Kalaydjian says another factor that needs to be explored is the possibility that women with migraine may change their diet or behavior in some way that might improve cognition. "For example, alternative treatment for migraine includes adequate sleep, as well as behavioral and relaxation techniques, and a reduction in caffeine," said Dr. Kalaydjian.
"Despite these theories, it seems more likely that there may be some underlying biological mechanism, such as changes in blood vessels or underlying differences in brain activity, which results in decreased cognitive decline over time," said Dr. Kalaydjian. "More research is needed to fully understand how migraine affects cognition."
Source: American Academy of Neurology

Physicists bid farewell to reality

Quantum mechanics just got even stranger.
In the quantum world, it is meaningless to imagine which cars are which colours, or what might happen if you step into a busy road.
Getty
There's only one way to describe the experiment performed by physicist Anton Zeilinger and his colleagues: it's unreal, dude.
Measuring the quantum properties of pairs of light particles (photons) pumped out by a laser has convinced Zeilinger that "we have to give up the idea of realism to a far greater extent than most physicists believe today."
By realism, he means the idea that objects have specific features and properties —that a ball is red, that a book contains the works of Shakespeare, or that an electron has a particular spin.
For everyday objects, such realism isn't a problem. But for objects governed by thelaws of quantum mechanics, like photons and electrons, it may make no sense to think of them as having well defined characteristics. Instead, what we see may depend on how we look.
This notion has been around ever since the advent of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century. The theory seemed to show that, in the quantum world, objects are defined only fuzzily, so that all we can do is work out the probability that they have particular characteristics — such as being located in a specific place or having a specific energy.
Allied to this assault on reality was the apparent prediction of what Albert Einstein, one of the chief architects of quantum theory, called 'spooky action at a distance'. Quantum theory suggests that disturbing one particle can instantaneously determine the properties of a particle with which it is 'entangled', no matter how far away it is. This would violate the usual rule of locality: that local behaviour is governed by local events.
We have a little more evidence that the world is really strange.
Anton Zeilinger
University of Vienna
Einstein could not believe that the world was really so indeterminate. He supposed that a deeper level of reality had yet to be uncovered — so-called 'hidden variables' that specified an object's properties precisely and in strictly local terms.
Failed test
In the 1960s the Irish physicist John Bell showed how to put locality and realism to the test. He deduced that if both ideas applied to the quantum world, then two particular quantities calculated from measurements made on a pair of entangled photons would be equal to one another. If so, there would be nothing 'spooky' about entanglement after all.
Experiments were done to test his prediction in the ensuing two decades, and results showed that Bell's equality was violated. Thus, either realism or locality, or possibly both of these ideas, do not apply in the quantum world.
But which is it? That's what Zeilinger, based at the University of Vienna in Austria, and his colleagues tried to find out.
They came up with a similar test to Bell's, to see whether quantum mechanics obeys realism but not locality. Again the experiment involves comparing two quantities calculated from measurements on entangled photons, to see if they are equal. But whereas in Bell's test these quantities are derived from the so-called 'linear' polarization of the photons — crudely, whether their electromagnetic fields oscillate in one direction or the other — Zeilinger's experiment looks at a different sort of polarization, called elliptical polarization.
Like Bell's, Zeilinger's equality proved false. This doesn't rule out all possible non-local realistic models, but it does exclude an important subset of them. Specifically, it shows that if you have a group of photons that all have independent polarizations, then you can't ascribe specific polarizations to each. It's rather like saying that you know there are particular numbers of blue, white and silver cars in a car park — but it is meaningless even to imagine saying which ones are which.
Truly weird
If the quantum world is not realistic in this sense, then how does it behave? Zeilinger says that some of the alternative non-realist possibilities are truly weird. For example, it may make no sense to imagine what would happen if we had made a different measurement from the one we chose to make. "We do this all the time in daily life," says Zeilinger — for example, imagining what would have happened if you had tried to cross the road when a truck was coming. If the world around us behaved in the same way as a quantum system, then it would be meaningless even to imagine that alternative situation, because there would be no way of defining what you mean by the road, the truck, or even you.
Another possibility is that in a non-realistic quantum world present actions can affect the past, as though choosing to read a letter or not could determine what it says.
Zeilinger hopes that his work will stimulate others to test such possibilities. "Our paper is not the end of the road," he says. "But we have a little more evidence that the world is really strange."

The Wisdom of Great Grandma Sea Squirt

Scientists make major breakthrough in regenerative medicine
Findings described in a new study by Stanford scientists may be the first step toward a major revolution in human regenerative medicine—a future where advanced organ damage can be repaired by the body itself. In the May 2007 issue of The FASEB Journal, researchers show that a human evolutionary ancestor, the sea squirt, can correct abnormalities over a series of generations, suggesting that a similar regenerative process might be possible in people.
"We hope the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon will ultimately lead to new insights regarding the potential of cells and tissues to be reprogrammed and regenerate compromised organs in humans," said Ayelet Voskoboynik, Ph.D., of Stanford University and first author of the study.
Missing limbs, scarred hearts, broken spines, and wounded muscles always try to repair themselves, but often the result is invalidism or disease. Even some tumors try to revert to normal, but are unsuccessful. If the genetic sequence described in the sea squirt applies to humans, this study represents a major step for regenerative medicine.
The sea squirt is more closely related to humans than many would expect. It may appear similar to a sea sponge, worm, or plant, but it is actually not closely related to any of these organisms. Sea squirt larvae have primitive spinal cords, distinguishing them in the greater chain of life and on the evolutionary ladder. Specifically, sea squirts, like humans, belong to a group of animals called chordates (organisms with some level of spinal cord development), and many scientists believe that sea squirts approximate what the very first human chordate ancestor may have been like 550 million years ago. By studying this modern day representative of our evolutionary ancestor, researchers are able to identify fundamental principles of complex processes, such as healing and organ regeneration, on which new treatments are based.
"The aim of biomedical science is to understand life so we can defend our bodies against injury, deformity, and disease. The ultimate medical treatment would be to change an abnormal organ or tissue back to its vibrant, normal state," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. "This study is a landmark in regenerative medicine; the Stanford group has accomplished the biological equivalent of turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse and back again."

Visualize this!

Spankometers -God save the Queen

London learns how to love at new sex academy

The hottest new attraction in the throbbing heart of London opened its doors this week: Amora -- The Academy of Sex and Relationships, dedicated to looking at love in a new light.
Stereotypical Britons may be all stiff upper lips and cucumber sandwiches rather than sexually open, passionate lovers, but this visitor attraction promises to get themout of their shells.
"We consciously differentiate ourselves from a museum: we are about sex today andtomorrow, not in the past," Amora's founder and chairman Johan Rizki told AFP.
"The Amsterdam sex museum is sleazy; New York's is rather boring," added the Frenchman, New Yorker and Harvard Business School graduate.
Nestled between Leicester Square and the famous electronic billboards of Piccadilly Circus, Amora is a world away from the busy London streets surrounding it.
Visitors descend the stairs to a backdrop of seductive whispers from the red wallsand are offered an aphrodisiac cocktail on entry.Three years in the making, Amora uses visuals, interactive displays and sound to explore and explain relationships and sexual behaviour.
There are touch screens, hands-on exhibits -- including dildos, model vaginas, and fake breasts and testicles to show how to check for potentially dangerous lumps -- as well as video screens, hand-held audio guides, life-size models, computer animations and wall displays to educate and excite once inside.
Visitors discover seven zones blending knowledge with entertainment, covering aspects of sexual relationships including the chemistry of dating, erogenous zones, fantasies, techniques and sexual health.
"My idea was to create somewhere for talking about sex, but in a very fun, interesting, up-to-date way," said Rizki.
"No-one before has ever brought love into a physical space where it is accessible to people. We have sex therapists where people can go and ask questions and there are workshops and academics host debates," said Rizki, touting the venue as "the most emotive visitor attraction in London."
All the displays are penned by one of 30 experts -- including academics, medical doctors, relationship councillors, psychologists and sex therapists -- and come with a safe sex message.
Inside the Sexplorium section, a young pair with their arms around each other watch a video clip on using sex furniture. In the Fantasy and Fetish zone, a laughing couple test their strength on the spankometer.
Londoners Chloe and Hannah, both 18, rushed to the academy. "We saw it on television and thought we'd come down. We like doing different things," Chloe told AFP.
Hannah -- who like her friend preferred not to give her last name -- found some of the plaster casts "eye-popping."
A young male visitor in shorts said: "For me it's very important that young people have all the information they need about sex, so they can decide."
Amora is intended to be a hub for sex education and enlightenment. Visitors become part of its Internet community and an exhibition will tour Britain.
School parties have already asked to visit, Rizki said, and will be able to explore the health section -- complete with its gory pictures of sexual disease sufferers -- the gallery-cum-seminar room and the library.
Rizki, who made his wealth in investment banking and hedge funds, said he recruited investors strictly from the finance and health sectors -- deliberately ruling out those from the pornography industry.
"My first drive is making the world a sexier place and helping people pick up a few tips and tricks that can make a difference to their lives," the investor said.
"I've always been attracted by 'how-to' things."
But, critics might ask, how will the seven-million-pound (14-million-dollar, 10-million-euro) academy ultimately go down in the the land of make tea, not love?
"In Britain, there is a desire to learn, and to learn about love. Shops like Ann Summers (a well-known sex toy and lingerie shopping chain) and broadcasters like Channel Four here have brought sex into the mainstream, using down-to-earth language," said Rizki.
"If it can be timely somewhere, it can be timely here.
"People are attracted to things around sex. The British public is a lot smarter than the way it has been portrayed."
Not everyone is completely convinced.
"One problem is that we've glamourised sex to the extent that ordinary people feel uncomfortable when they don't live up to their imagination," said Kaye Wellings of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
"If the sex academy does that it's a shame," she told The Guardian.
"We talk about love in an entertaining way," Rizki said. "There are no taboos. We don't take a stand, but we ask you, is it for you?"
There are plans to open an Amora in Paris, Germany and the United States.
Amora costs 12 pounds (24 dollars, 18 euros) before 5:00 pm and 15 pounds from then on until midnight, seven days a week. Students and the elderly get a discount.

Hawaii Aims to Deter Volcano Offerings

Rangers at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park are launching a program to stop people from leaving religious offerings at the summit of Mount Kilauea - including food they say attracts rats and cockroaches.
Visitors leave 45 pounds of offerings from Halemaumau Crater each week, including flowers, bottles, money, incense, candles and crystals, park rangers say.
But food offerings are the most problematic, they say.
"The accumulation of rotting food and foliage attracts rats, flies, ants and cockroaches," a park statement said.One ranger recently found a whole, cooked piglet replete with a papaya, orange and apple in a cardboard box, the park service said.
The rotting offerings pose a hazard to the endangered nene goose, the state bird endemic to the islands, the park service said.
People also burn fake money which in Chinese culture is meant to aid people in the afterlife. Such fires are illegal, the park statement said.
Park Superintendent Cindy Orlando said the park must preserve the summit area, which has special significance in Hawaiian culture.
Some Hawaiians believe lava is the physical representation of the fire goddess Pele, making the volcano summit sacred.
"We look to our partners and local communities to assist us in communicating the value of resource protection and cultural sensitivity," Orlando said.
Kilauea, one of the world's most active volcanoes, has been in continuous eruption since Jan. 3, 1983.

celestial music

Giant pipe organ in the solar atmosphere

Astronomers have found that the atmosphere of the Sun plays a kind of heavenly music. The magnetic field in the outer regions (the corona) of our nearest star forms loops that carry waves and behave rather like a musical instrument.
In a talk on Thursday 19 April at the Royal Astronomical Society National Astronomy Meeting in Preston, Dr Youra Taroyan and Professor Robert von Fay-Siebenburgen of the Solar Physics and Space Plasma Research Centre (SP2RC), University of Sheffield will explain the origin of these magnetic sound waves. They will present a series of animations and sound files that demonstrate how these dramatic events appear and fade away rapidly.

In recent years scientists have worked hard to better explain and predict the dynamic behaviour of the Sun. For example, missions like STEREO and Hinode watch as material is ejected towards the Earth, events which are controlled by the solar magnetic field.

In their research, led by Professor von Fay-Siebenburgen, SP2RC scientists combined observations with new theoretical models to study the magnetic sound waves that are set up along loops in the corona. “These loops can be up to 100 million kilometres long and guide waves and oscillations in a similar way to a pipe organ.” - says Dr Taroyan

The acoustic waves can be extremely powerful and reach amplitudes of tens of kilometres per second. Professor von Fay-Siebenburgen adds, “we found that the waves are often generated at the base of the magnetic pipes by enormous explosions known as micro-flares. These release energy equivalent to millions of hydrogen bombs. After each micro-flare, sound booms are rapidly excited inside the magnetic pipes before decaying in less than an hour and dissipating in the very hot solar corona.”

Source: Royal Astronomical Society

celestial art

'Van Gogh' simulations give new insight into turbulent stars

'Van Gogh' simulations give new insight into turbulent stars
Stunning simulations that give a multi-dimensional glimpse into the interior of stars show that material bubbling around the convection zone induces a rich spectrum of internal gravity waves in the stable layers above and below.
The swirling simulations, which are reminiscent of Van Gogh’s star paintings, show the interior of a star during the Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) phase, the final stage of a low- and intermediate-mass star’s life before it becomes a white dwarf. It is during this phase that many of the heavier elements, such as carbon and sodium, are created inside the stars.

The core of the star is surrounded by shells of helium and hydrogen, in which nuclear fusion periodically switches off and on in a process called Helium-Shell Flashes, triggering increased bursts of mixing and heating. The models focus on the turbulent convection zone in the helium shell and show how it interacts with the stable, stratified layers above and below.

Dr Falk Herwig said, “Until recently we’ve only had one-dimensional models of the interior. That’s very different from being able to work out in detail and 2 or 3 dimensions what’s going on deep inside and seeing how the different layers interact. The three-dimensional simulation is so complicated that we have been using as much computing time as some of the large cosmological simulations. This is the first time that we’ve been able to see and actually measure the internal gravity waves that are caused by the convective motions in the unstable layer.”

The simulations show that there is minimal penetration of material into adjoining layers from the convection zone but gravitational mode oscillations with a dominating horizontal velocity component, induced at the convective boundaries do cause some of mixing across layers.

Helium-shell flash convection is dominated by large convective cells that are centered in the lower half of the convection zone. The animations show entropy or temperature fluctuations which start off as small bumps at the bottom of the convection zone and expand upwards, developing mushroom-like instabilities that merge into large-scale features. The stable regions above and below are filled with horizontal waves, which are induced almost as soon as the convection plumes start to grow. This means that the gravity waves are not created by the plumes actually hitting the boundaries, but are induced by the build-up of pressure above the plumes.

Source: RAS

Device uses solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into fuel

Device uses solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into fuel

Device uses solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into fuel
Chemists at the University of California, San Diego have demonstrated the feasibility of exploiting sunlight to transform a greenhouse gas into a useful product.
Many Earth Week activities will draw attention to the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the resulting impact on global climate. Now Clifford Kubiak, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and his graduate student Aaron Sathrum have developed a prototype device that can capture energy from the sun, convert it to electrical energy and "split" carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide (CO) and oxygen.

Because their device is not yet optimized, they still need to input additional energy for the process to work. However, they hope that their results, which they presented at last month's meeting of the American Chemical Society, will draw attention to the promise of the approach.

"For every mention of CO2 splitting, there are more than 100 articles on splitting water to produce hydrogen, yet CO2 splitting uses up more of what you want to put a dent into," explained Kubiak. "It also produces CO, an important industrial chemical, which is normally produced from natural gas. So with CO2 splitting you can save fuel, produce a useful chemical and reduce a greenhouse gas."

Breast Cancer Vaccine Stimulates Potent Immune Response To Cancer Cells

Breast Cancer Vaccine Stimulates Potent Immune Response To Cancer Cells

Science Daily — Mayo Clinic researchers have designed a new strategy in the promising field of cancer vaccine research that's proven to be successful in boosting T cells -- the immune builders akin to a super defense force against cancer cells. Scientists say their strategy may prove to be more successful than methods currently under study and in clinical trials.

Using vaccines to prevent or slow the growth of cancerous tumors is based on the premise that the body's immune system can be strengthened with an engineered vaccine that would stimulate an antibody and cellular response against cancer cells. Cancer vaccines are still considered experimental and so far, research results have been mixed. New studies, such as this, demonstrate that researchers are closing in on designing viable cancer vaccines, the investigators say.

In this study, Pilar Nava-Parada, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues designed a synthetic peptide vaccine that stimulated an anti-tumor T cell response that recognized and successfully waged a battle against the spread of breast cancer cells in mouse models. (T cells are white blood cells with a key function in immune response.) Dr. Nava-Parada was a postdoctoral fellow in immunology at Mayo Clinic when she and Esteban Celis, M.D., Ph.D., began this research, which they planned to continue at Tulane University and Louisiana State University in New Orleans. But Hurricane Katrina struck before they had a chance to resume the research, so Dr. Nava-Parada returned to Mayo Clinic in Rochester where she began the research anew.

In female mouse models bred with the cancer-producing oncogene HER-2/neu, researchers administered a synthetic peptide vaccine during the early stage of tumor development. The experiment was effective in 100 percent of the study samples by either slowing or stopping the progression of breast cancer. In at least one case, the vaccine worked for as long as 39 weeks.

Because the use of synthetic peptides alone generally does not trigger a strong immune response, researchers administered the vaccine in combination with a Toll-like receptor stimulant that is designed to mimic the way in which an invading bacterial agent would induce an immune response in humans.

Under normal conditions, the response is generally strong enough for the body to recognize and attack invading bacteria. Researchers used this strategy, but also introduced anti-CD25 antibodies to increase the immune response. These antibodies control the production of T regulatory cells that can prevent the vaccine from doing its job, but by combining the two strategies (immunization and depletion of T regulatory mechanisms), the vaccine successfully passed through the T cell checkpoint. This approach was successful in stimulating an effective immune response.

"We found that we could train the immune system to recognize these synthetic peptides as dangerous foreign agents of the HER-2/neu gene by mimicking what the bacteria would do in your body. The body responded by killing everything that expressed HER-2/neu in high amounts," Dr. Nava-Parada said. In addition, "we estimate that in a real life scenario, we could probably use this technique to decrease the number of immunizations a patient would need (one instead of three), to build an immune response strong enough to destroy the tumor."

Dr. Nava-Parada said that up until now, researchers undertaking similar work have only been able to get vaccines to work in about 30 percent of HER-2/neu study models, but only by depleting T regulatory cells, which can have negative side effects, such as an autoimmune disorder. "In our study we showed that we can prevent tumors without depleting these cells and can achieve this success only by using a bacterial-like adjuvant administered with the right peptide," she said.

In addition, Dr. Nava-Parada said that other studies fail to accurately represent human cancers because they measure acute rejection of a tumor cell line that is produced in the laboratory and then injected into healthy animal models. Study models like the one described in this AACR presentation are thought to be more realistic because the study considers the entire natural history of the tumor in an animal that harbors the HER-2/neu gene.

"When the animal has a precancerous lesion, we vaccinate it and closely follow the appearance of the spontaneous tumor through its life. Conducting the research in this manner allows us to gain a clearer insight into a real-life cancer patient's situation," she said.

Cancer vaccines are intended for patients with a strong genetic predisposition or personal history of cancer; patients who do not respond to traditional therapies; or, as a preventive measure for patients who have successfully completed traditional courses of treatment, such as surgery, radiation and/or chemotherapy.

Change The Past

Scientific American: A Do-It-Yourself Quantum Eraser

A Do-It-Yourself Quantum Eraser

Using readily available equipment, you can carry out a home experiment that illustrates one of the weirdest effects in quantum mechanics

By Rachel Hillmer and Paul Kwiat

Notoriously, the theory of quantum mechanics reveals a fundamental weirdness in the way the world works. Commonsense notions at the very heart of our everyday perceptions of reality turn out to be violated: contradictory alternatives can coexist, such as an object following two different paths at the same time; objects do not simultaneously have precise positions and velocities; and the properties of objects and events we observe can be subject to an ineradicable randomness that has nothing to do with the imperfection of our tools or our eyesight.

Gone is the reliable world in which atoms and other particles travel around like well-behaved billiard balls on the green baize of reality. Instead they behave (sometimes) like waves, becoming dispersed over a region and capable of crisscrossing to form interference patterns.

Yet all this strangeness still seems remote from ordinary life. Quantum effects are most evident when tiny systems are involved, such as electrons held within the confines of an atom. You might know in the abstract that quantum phenomena underlie most modern technologies and that various quantum oddities can be demonstrated in laboratories, but the only way to see them in the home is on science shows on television. Right? Not quite.

We will show you how to set up an experiment that illustrates what is known as quantum erasure. This effect involves one of the oddest features of quantum mechanics--the ability to take actions that change our basic interpretation of what happened in past events.

Before we explain what we mean by that and outline the experiment itself, we do have to emphasize one caveat in the interest of truth in advertising. The light patterns that you will see if you conduct the experiment successfully can be accounted for by considering the light to be a classical wave, with no quantum mechanics involved. So in that respect the experiment is a cheat and falls short of fully demonstrating the quantum nature of the effect.

Nevertheless, the individual photons that make up the light wave are indeed doing the full quantum dance with all its weirdness intact, although you could only truly prove that by sending the photons through the apparatus and detecting them one at a time. Such a procedure, unfortunately, remains beyond the average home experimenter. Still, by observing the patterns in your experiment and by thinking about what they mean in terms of the individual photons, you can get a firsthand glimpse of the bizarre quantum world.

If you want to go straight to the home experiment, it is detailed in the sidebar. The discussion that follows here delves into the science of quantum erasers in general. This explanation will help you understand what the do-it-yourself eraser demonstrates, but you might want to come back to it after seeing what that specific kind of eraser does.

What a Quantum Eraser Erases
One of the strange features of quantum mechanics is that the behavior that something exhibits can depend on what we try to find out about it. Thus, an electron can behave like a particle or like a wave, depending on which experimental setup we subject it to. For example, in some situations particlelike behavior emerges if we ascertain the specific trajectory that an electron has followed and wavelike behavior transpires if we do not.

A standard demonstration of this duality relies on what is called a two-slit experiment (your do-it-yourself quantum eraser is similar to this experiment in that it involves two pathways, but not two slits). A source emits particles, such as electrons, toward a screen that has two slits they can pass through. The particles ultimately arrive at a second screen where each one produces a spot. Where each particle lands is to some extent random and unpredictable, but as thousands of them accumulate, the spots build up into a definite, predictable pattern. When the conditions are right for the particles to behave as waves, the result is an interference pattern--in this case a series of fuzzy bars, called fringes, where most of the particles land, with very few hitting the gaps between them.
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The particles will generate the interference pattern only if each particle could have traveled through either of the two slits, and there is no way of ascertaining which slit each one passed through. The two pathways are then said to be indistinguishable and each particle acts as if it actually traveled through both slits. According to the modern understanding of quantum mechanics, interference occurs when indistinguishable alternatives are combined in this way.

When two or more alternatives coexist, the situation is called a superposition. Erwin Schrödinger highlighted the oddity of quantum superpositions in 1935, when he proposed his now infamous concept of a cat that is simultaneously alive and dead, sealed inside a hermetic box where it cannot be observed. When quantum interference happens, something in the experiment is like a kind of Schrödinger's cat. But instead of being alive and dead at the same time, the cat may be walking by a tree, passing on both sides of it simultaneously.

Schrödinger's cat ceases to be in a superposition as soon as we look inside its box: we always see it to be either alive or dead, not both (although some interpretations of quantum mechanics have it that we become in a superposition of having seen a dead or a live cat). If a spotlight is shining near the tree, we see the quantum cat go one way or the other. Similarly, we can add a measurement tool to watch each particle as it passes the slits. One could imagine having a light shining on the slits so that as each particle comes through we can see a flash of light scatter from where the particle went. The flash makes the two alternative pathways distinguishable, which destroys the superposition, and the particles arrive at the final screen not in a pattern of fringes but in one featureless blob. Experiments analogous to this scenario have been conducted, and, as predicted by quantum mechanics, no interference pattern builds up.

We need not actually "do the looking." We do not have to detect the light flashes and ascertain which way each particle went. It suffices that the information is available in the flashes and could have been observed in that way.

Now we finally get to the quantum eraser. The eraser is something that can erase the information indicating which path each particle has followed, thereby restoring the indistinguishability of the alternatives and restoring interference.

How might an eraser do that? Imagine that the "flash of light" that scatters from each particle is a single photon. For the photon to reveal the "which path?" information of the particle, it must be possible (even if only in principle) to tell which slit the photon came from. That means we must be able to measure the position of where each photon scattered accurately enough to tell the slits apart. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, however, tells us that if we instead measure the momentum of each photon with great accuracy, then the photons' positions become less well defined. So if we pass the photons through a lens that makes their momentum information available, the information about their positions is erased. When that happens, the two paths the particles can follow are again indistinguishable and interference is restored.

We have omitted one last tricky detail, but we will come back to that. First, stop and think a bit more about what is happening in the erasing process we just described, because that is where the weirdness lies. When we detect the position where one of the photons scattered, we learn which slit its corresponding particle went through, which means the particle did go through one slit or the other, not both. If we instead detect the photon's momentum, however, we cannot know which slit the particle went through. What is more, when we do many momentum measurements and see an interference pattern, we infer that in those cases the particles went through both slits (interference would be impossible otherwise).

In other words, the answer to the question, "Did the particle go through one slit or both slits?" depends on what we do with its corresponding photon long after the particle has gone through. It is almost as if our actions with the photons influence what has happened in past events. We can find out which slit the particle went through, or with our quantum eraser we can delete that information from the universe.

Strangest of all, we can decide which measurement to make after the particle has passed through the slits--we can have the apparatus for both alternative measurements in place, with a switch that we flick one way or the other just before each photon arrives. Physicists call this variation a delayed-choice experiment, an idea introduced by John A. Wheeler of the University of Texas at Austin in 1978 that extends a scenario that Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein used in their arguments about quantum mechanics and the nature of reality in 1935.

At this point, some particularly clever readers will be worrying about a fundamental problem that seems to undermine what we have just described: Why can't we delay the choice of our photon measurement until after we have seen if the particles form an interference pattern? We could, in fact, arrange to do just that by having the final screen not too far from the slits and the photon detector much farther away. So what would happen if we saw the particles form fringes but then chose to do photon position measurements that should prevent such fringes from forming? Wouldn't we have created a paradox? Surely we would not expect the already registered interference pattern to vanish! Similar reasoning suggests we could use the delayed-choice effect to transmit messages instantaneously over arbitrary distances (thereby circumventing the speed of light).

That tricky detail that we omitted earlier is what saves the day: to see the interference of the particles after applying the quantum eraser, we first have to divide them into two groups and observe the groups separately. One group will display the original pattern of fringes; the other will display the inverse of that pattern, with particles landing on what were originally the dark bands and avoiding the places where the bright fringes were. The two groups combined fill in all the gaps, hiding the interference.

The paradox is avoided because we need data from the photon measurement to know which group each particle belongs to. Thus, we cannot observe the fringes until after we have done the photon measurements, because only then do we know how to split the particles into groups. In the home experiment, dividing particles into groups is done for you automatically because one group gets blocked by a polarizing filter, and you can therefore see the interference pattern of the group that gets through with your own eyes. In the final step you can see the interference patterns of the two groups right next to each other.

From a practical standpoint, the inability to send messages faster than the speed of light and create a paradox is perhaps disappointing, but physicists and logicians consider it to be a very good feature.

So it goes

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber. -KV
By Arthur Salm
UNION-TRIBUNE BOOKS EDITOR
April 15, 2007

Listen: Kurt Vonnegut has come unstuck in time.

The American novelist, short-story writer, essayist and would-be curmudgeon died Wednesday at 84 – the age at which he dispatched his fictional alter ego, Kilgore Trout – several weeks after suffering head trauma from a fall.

Fans will recognize the first line, above, as a variation on a line from “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Vonnegut's masterpiece. His protagonist, Billy Pilgrim – “unstuck in time” – ricochets from childhood to old age and back again, from his experiences as a POW in the Second World War to a humdrum life as an optometrist to animals-in-a-zoo-like captivity on the planet Tralfamador with the adult film star Montana Wildhack.

The semi-autobiographical novel opens with “All this happened, more or less,” and it did – the part about being a prisoner of war, at least. Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden, and the unspeakable carnage he witnessed in its aftermath imbued him with a horror of war in all its forms and heartfelt contempt for those who wage it.

It's comforting to imagine the rumpled, latter-day Mark Twain (to whom he has been compared, to neither's detriment) zipping forever, Billy Pilgrim-like, among various stations of his eventful and productive life.

Right now – whatever, in Vonnegut's way of thinking, that means – he could be a young man toiling away as an advertising copywriter; taking in three of his sister's children after her and her husband's tragic deaths; typing a second draft of his breakthrough novel “Cat's Cradle”; absent-mindedly leaving one of his still-smoldering unfiltered Pall Malls in an ashtray, burning down half his East Side Manhattan brownstone, consuming most of his archives (he almost died from smoke inhalation); or – fingers crossed! – frolicking with an adult film star in a pressurized dome, if not on Tralfamador, then maybe on the asteroid 25399 Vonnegut, named in his honor.

Or appearing on “The Daily Show” in September 2005. Speaking on humans' place in the evolutionary scheme of things, he told (is telling?) host Jon Stewart, “Our planet's immune system is trying to get rid of us, and it should.”

But it was always clear, from the gentle nature of his fiction to the warmth that radiated from the cracks and creases in his crusty person and persona, that Vonnegut could never qualify as a misanthrope. His life was not without its tragedies – in addition to the untimely death of his sister, his mother committed suicide – but the bitterness of his later years, unlike Twain's, was not all-consuming.

Though a pessimist to his core, he must have harbored some hope for humanity, as he served for a time as the president of the American Humanist Association. Humanism, he once explained, “is trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.”

And behave decently, and honorably, he did, despite his self-effacement about things such as his Purple Heart (“a ludicrously negligible wound”) and his AHA presidency (“that totally functionless capacity”). And write well – make that, brilliantly – he did, too, from the early, straight science fiction of the 1950s (“Player Piano,” “The Sirens of Titan”) to the high-watermark novels of the '60s like “Cat's Cradle,” “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” and “Slaughterhouse-Five,” to his lesser (by comparison, remember) fiction beginning with 1973's “Breakfast of Champions.”

All this happened.

Or maybe, is happening.

Unified Theory -FINALLY, Somebody gets it!

chickens inherited parents' stress symptoms

Scientists shake Darwin's foundation -- chickens inherited parents' stress symptoms

Scientists shake Darwin's foundation -- chickens inherited parents' stress symptoms
Evolutionary theory ever since Darwin is based on the assumption that acquired traits, such as learnt modifications of behaviour, cannot be inherited by the offspring. Now, a Swedish-Norwegian research group, led by professor Per Jensen at Linköping university in Sweden, shows that chickens can actually inherit behavioural modifications induced by stress in their parents.
The scientists grew groups of chickens under stressful conditions, where a randomly fluctuating day-night rhythm made access to food and resting perches unpredictable. This caused a marked decrease in the ability of the stressed birds to solve a spatial learning task. Remarkably, their offspring also had a decreased learning ability, in spite of being kept under non-stress conditions from the point of egg-laying. They were also more competitive and grew faster than offspring of non-stressed birds.

To investigate whether there was any genetic basis for the effect, the research group examined the expression levels of about 9000 genes in the brain of the chickens. In birds exposed to stress, there was a number of genes where the expression was either increased or decreased, and the same genes were similarly affected in the offspring.

The results therefore demonstrate that both the changes in gene function and the behavioural changes caused by stress were transferred to the offspring. Both these effects were only seen in domesticated chickens, not in the ancestor, the red junglefowl. The scientists therefore speculate that domestication may have favoured animals which are able to affect the biology of their offspring through genetic modifications.

The results offer new insights into how animal populations may be capable of adaptation to stressful environments in evolutionary short times. This can help explain both the rapid development of animals during domestication, and evolutionary responses to changing conditions in nature.

Google Earth adds hiking trails

Google Earth adds hiking trails - Lifehacker

Want to scout out some hikes before your next trip? Google Earth's new layer has hundreds of them.

Specifically, the Trimble Outdoors Trips layer features GPS-marked trails for activities including hiking, biking, backpacking and running. The info includes directions to trailheads, a difficulty ranking, and notes on interesting sights to see along the way. Some legs also include photos, audio and even video clips. But here's where it really gets interesting: One click sends the trip info straight to your phone--and if it's a GPS-enabled phone, you can get the actual coordinates as well (as opposed to just the map).

Users can, of course, submit their own hike routes as well. To see the new layer in action, fire up Google Earth and look under the Featured Content tree in the Layers pane. Then dig out your backpack. —Rick Broida
Google Earth [via Official Google Blog

Find a tutor

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TutorLinker.com pairs tutors and students
from Lifehacker
tutorlinker.png

Need to find a French tutor in your area? Want to offer your mad microbiology skills to nearby students? TutorLinker.com matches tutors and students on a local level.

The site leverages Google Maps: Just type in your address to see all the tutors in your area. You can apply filters to search by subject or language, or just mouse over a tutor to see his or her details. Each tutor's profile lists education history, subject(s) taught, hourly rates and a contact form. Those interested in becoming a tutor need only register with the site, which is free. TutorLinker shows a ton of polish; it's a potentially killer resource for tutors and parents/students alike. While you're at it, check out our post on finding affordable tutoring. —Rick Broida
TutorLinker.com

back pain

Swell gel could bring relief to back pain sufferers

Swell gel could bring relief to back pain sufferers
Scientists at The University of Manchester believe injections of tiny sponge-like particles could provide an alternative to major surgery in the treatment of chronic lower back pain.
Dr Brian Saunders from The School of Materials and Professor Tony Freemont from The Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences have developed tiny gel particles that swell and stiffen when injected into a damaged area.

Investigations have revealed that degenerated animal intervertebral discs containing the injected 'microgels' regain their mechanical properties.

This development opens up the possibility of human patients being able to regain full mobility and flexibility after receiving spinal injections.

This would compare favourably with spinal fusion - a major surgical procedure with considerable recovery time for the patient, resulting in a significant loss of mobility at the fused and adjacent discs.

Degeneration of intervertebral discs causes holes in the load-bearing tissue of the disc, decreasing disc height and resulting in pain.

The microgel particles the research team have developed are like 'smart sponges' when dispersed in water.

The material is a fluid at a low pH - in other words, a low level of acidity - and can be injected through a syringe. It changes to a stiff gel at physiological pH values - that is, once it enters the body - due to absorption of water by the particles.

During their investigations, the research team injected the material into a damaged bovine intervertebral disc and increased the pH to biological levels by injecting an alkaline solution.

Professor Freemont, who works in the Division of Regenerative Medicine in the School of Medicine, said: "This research was motivated by the urgent need for a non-surgical method for repairing intervertebral discs.

"Our approach has the advantage of restoring spinal mobility whereas spinal fusion surgery results in a significant loss of mobility at the fused and adjacent discs."

Dr Saunders said: "Although we are encouraged by our findings, much work lies ahead to develop a viable non-surgical repair technology to replace spinal fusion as the standard surgical treatment for chronic lower back pain."

He added that future work will investigate biodegradable microgels that release additives to stimulate regeneration of intervertebral disc tissue.

Source: University of Manchester

Wired for sound

: How the brain senses visual illusions

Wired for sound: How the brain senses visual illusions
In a study that could help reveal how illusions are produced in the brain's visual cortex, researchers at the UCSD School of Medicine have found new evidence of rapid integration of auditory and visual sensations in the brain. Their findings, which provide new insight into neural mechanisms by which visual perception can be altered by concurrent auditory events, will be published online in the April 12 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience.
When subjects were shown a single flash of light interposed between two brief sounds, many subjects reported seeing two distinct flashes of light. Investigating the timing and location of the brain processes that underlie this illusory effect – the illusion of seeing two flashes in the presence of two auditory signals, when only one flash actually occurs – can reveal how information from different senses are integrated in the brain.

The study of 34 subjects was carried out in the laboratory of Steven A. Hillyard, Ph.D., UCSD professor of neurosciences. "This type of perceptual illusion has been described before," said first author Jyoti Mishra, graduate student in the Hillyard lab. "The surprising finding we made is that the illusion depends on a rapidly timed sequence of interactions between the auditory and visual cortical areas."

"This is part of a set of new findings by scientists in the field that show how integration of multiple sensations can happen much more rapidly than we thought before," said Mishra. "We show physiological evidence that visual and auditory stimulation might not be processed separately, then merged together, as previously assumed, but that an almost-simultaneous integration of the sensations may actually take place in the brain."

The UCSD scientists measured event-related potentials (ERPs), brain responses that are directly related to the perceptual experiences induced by sensory stimuli, using an electrophysiological or EEG recording procedure that measures electrical activity of the brain through the skull.

"In subjects who reported seeing a second flash, the ERP measurements showed a boost of activity within the visual cortex of the brain immediately after hearing the second sound," said Mishra, adding that the second sound amplified the brain activity stimulated by the first sound. Perception of the second illusory flash was also marked by a rapid enhancement of processing in the auditory cortex of the brain. By observing the auditory boost, the researchers could predict when subjects would report seeing the visual illusion of a second flash.

"Our results provide evidence that perception of the illusory second flash is based on a very rapid and dynamic interplay between the auditory and visual cortices of the brain – on a time scale less than one tenth the blink of an eye." Mishra said. Interestingly, the pattern was very different between individuals who did or didn't see the second flash, indicating that the brain's wiring and the strength of integration between the different sensory cortices may differ between individuals, or even vary over time. "It suggests that there are consistent differences in the neural connectivity that are possibly shaped during one's development and through experience," she said.

Next, the researchers plan to look at whether or not attention affects these illusory sensations. These studies could shed light on how people deprived of one sensation often compensate by developing another – for instance, blind people with a more acute sense of hearing.

Source: University of California - San Diego

While the official cause of human sexuality remains debatable...

Report: Sexuality less varied in women

Report: Sexuality less varied in women
While the official cause of human sexuality remains debatable, one Michigan State University scientist has said women typically are more sexually flexible.
Neuroscientist Marc Breedlove told The New York Times that his research has found that men typically maintain an attraction to one specific gender, while women tend to be more flexible regarding their sexuality.

"Most males are quite stubborn in their ideas about which sex they want to pursue, while women seem more flexible," Breedlove said.

The neuroscientist added that the prevailing approach to sexuality in the scientific community appears to support the formation of male sexuality before birth.

"I think most of the scientists working on these questions are convinced that the antecedents of sexual orientation in males are happening early in life, probably before birth," Breedlove told the Times, "whereas for females, some are probably born to become gay, but clearly some get there quite late in life."

"The Situation is Dismal"

Survey: 40 Pct. in Japan Not Having Sex
(AP) -- The secret behind Japan's plunging birth rate? A record 39.7 percent of Japanese citizens ages 16-49 have not had sex for over a month - up 5 percentage points from two years ago - according to a survey published this week by the Japan Family Planning Association.
Among married couples, the rate was only slightly lower, at 34.6 percent.
"This is very bad news for the country's birth rate, and something the government needs to look into urgently," said Dr. Kunio Kitamura, the family planning association's director.
The survey comes amid concerns over Japan's faltering birthrate, which fell in 2005 to a record low of 1.26 births in an average woman's lifetime. The decline has stoked fears of impeding tax revenue shortfalls and labor shortages.
"The situation is dismal," Kitamura said. "My research shows that if you don't have sex for a month, you probably won't for a year."
Kitamura partly blamed stress from busy working lives.
A decline in physical communication skills in an increasingly Web-based society was also a factor, he said.
The association said it handed out survey forms to 2,713 randomly selected people, and received responses from 636 men and 773 women in November 2006. It gave no margin of error. In a similar poll taken two years ago, 35 percent reported having no sex for a month.
Japan came last in a 29-country study of sexual satisfaction published by the University of Chicago last year, with a mere 25.7 percent of lovers expressing satisfaction in bed.
The country was also in last place among 41 nations in a 2005 poll by condom manufacturer Durex, with people having sex just 45 times a year compared to a global average of 103.

This news is brought to you by PhysOrg.com

Weekend Project: Make your own hood ornament - Lifehacker

Weekend Project: Make your own hood ornament - Lifehacker

I'll Take 160G, Please, And Can I Get Bluetooth with That?

KurzweilAI.net

The Memory Hacker

Popular Science, April 2007

USC's Center for Neural Engineering researchers have developed a chip that can communicate with brain cells, a first step toward an implantable machine that could restore memories in people with brain damage or help them make new ones.
The chip can receive analog signals from live brain tissue, convert them to digital signals, and then reconvert them to an analog signal relayed to healthy neurons on the other side.
Later this year, colleagues at Wake Forest will hook up a more complex version of the chip to live lab rats whose memories have been temporarily disabled by drugs. If the animals' brains react to the computer-supplied signals with the same regularity as the slice of rat brain in Wet Lab 412C does, it will, Berger says, be a "monumental" moment. "We'll prove we can replace a central part of the brain that has lost a higher cognitive function, such as memory, with a microchip," he says.
Within four years, the team aims to wire a chip beneath the skulls of monkeys, whose brains are even closer to humans. Berger predicts that human trials of a prosthetic device that can actually replace impaired memory cells are less than 15 years away.

The Eye of the Beholder

ScienceDaily: Eye Diseases Gave Great Painters Different Vision Of Their Work

Eye Diseases Gave Great Painters Different Vision Of Their Work

Michael Marmor, MD, wanted to know what it was like to see through the eyes of an artist. Literally. After writing two books on the topic of artists and eye disease, the Stanford University School of Medicine ophthalmologist decided to go one step further and create images that would show how artists with eye disease actually saw their world and their canvases.
Marmor blurred the image in "Woman Drying Her Hair" to a visual acuity of 20/300 to replicate what Degas might have seen. (Credit: Michael Marmor)
Combining computer simulation with his own medical knowledge, Marmor has recreated images of some of the masterpieces of the French impressionistic painters Claude Monet and Edgar Degas who continued to work while they struggled with cataracts and retinal disease.
The results are striking. In Marmor's simulated versions of how the painters would most likely have seen their work, Degas' later paintings of nude bathers become so blurry it's difficult to see any of the artist's brush strokes. Monet's later paintings of the lily pond and the Japanese bridge at Giverny, when adjusted to reflect the typical symptoms of cataracts, appear dark and muddied. The artist's signature vibrant colors are muted, replaced by browns and yellows.
"These simulations may lead one to question whether the artists intended these late works to look exactly as they do," said Marmor who has long had interest in both the mechanics of vision and the vision of artists. "The fact is that these artists weren't painting in this manner totally for artistic reasons."
Degas and Monet were both founders of the Impressionist era, and their artistic styles were well formed before their eye disease affected their vision. But their paintings grew significantly more abstract in later life as, coincidentally, their eye problems increased.
"Contemporaries of both have noted that their late works were strangely coarse or garish and seemed out of character to the finer works that these artists had produced over the years," Marmor wrote in a paper titled "Ophthalmology and Art: Simulation of Monet's Cataracts and Degas' Retinal Disease" that was published in the December issue of the Archives of Ophthalmology.
It's well-known that such artists as Monet, Degas, Rembrandt, Mary Cassatt and Georgia O'Keefe all reached their heights of artistic vision while facing a decline in their ocular vision. Marmor chose to focus on Degas and Monet for these simulations because both artists suffered from eye disease that was well-documented in historical records, journals and medical histories. Degas had retinal eye disease that frustrated him for the last 50 years of his long career. Monet complained of cataracts interfering with his ability to see colors for 10 years before he finally underwent surgery to have them removed.
"We understand better from these simulations what Degas and Monet struggled with as vision failed," Marmor said.
Over the past 32 years, the Harvard-educated physician has published 200-plus scientific articles on the science of eye disease while at the same time writing about famous artists and how eye disease may have affected their artwork. He authored one book, Degas Through His Own Eyes, and co-authored another, The Eye of the Artist, with James G. Ravin.
"As an ophthalmologist, I'm fascinated with the visual components of art," said Marmor, whose Stanford home is decorated with pieces of modern art that emphasize optical illusions. His family donated works of art to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford. "I've also spent years talking to patients about the symptoms of their eye diseases. This was a natural outgrowth of my science and art interests."
One museum curator, Richard Kendall, called Marmor's publications on Degas and Monet "of considerable value to the art historical community."
"I consider him one of the most thoughtful commentators from the scientific community on questions of eyesight among French 19th-century artists,'' said Kendall, who is curator-at-large at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass.
To create the images of the artists' paintings as seen through their own eyes, Marmor used Adobe Photoshop software. He adjusted the blur and filter settings to what he determined would be the different stages of Degas' and Monet's eye diseases, based on medical expertise and historical research.
Degas suffered failing vision from 1860 to 1910. As his eye disease progressed, his paintings grew increasingly rough. From treating hundreds of patients with retinal disease similar to what Degas suffered, Marmor said, he knows that the shading and contrast of images becomes less defined and blurriness increases as such illness progresses.
"Friends would ask Degas, 'Why are you still painting?'" Marmor wrote in his December paper. "His works in the 1870s were drawn quite precisely with facial detail, careful shading and attention to the folding of ballet costumes and towels." By the 1880s and 1890s, the shading lines and details of the face, hair and clothing of the same subjects became progressively less refined.
"After 1900," Marmor said, "these effects were quite extreme and many pictures seem mere shadows of his customary style."
Monet wrote of his growing frustration with his deteriorating vision, describing how he was forced to memorize where the colors were placed on his palette. In 1914 he wrote in his correspondence that colors no longer had the same intensity. "Reds had begun to look muddy," he wrote. "My painting was getting more and more darkened." He was forced to rely on the labels on the tubes of paint in place of his own vision.
"Like retinal disease, cataracts also blur vision," Marmor said, "but more importantly for a painter like Monet, whose style was based on the use of light and color, they can affect the ability to see colors."
"Monet must have struggled mightily as he looked out into the murky yellow-brown garden and tried to decide what subtle impression to create on canvas," Marmor wrote in the December paper. "Slowly progressive age-related cataracts manifest as yellowing and darkening of the lens. This has a major effect on color perception as well as visual acuity."
After reluctantly submitting to cataract surgery in 1923, Monet returned to his original painting style, even throwing away much of the artwork he'd done during the 10-year period that he had cataracts.
"He just couldn't see the colors," Marmor said. "These simulations show how much his sense of color had been destroyed. Some people say, 'Oh, it's a stylistic change.' Gosh, I don't think so."
Understanding the challenges these artists faced because of eye disease helps further illuminate the accomplishments they achieved despite their disabilities, Marmor said.
"There's some reluctance among people in the art world to look outside the historical or psychological influences on the great artists," Marmor said. "I'm open to debate about what these visual changes might mean stylistically or aesthetically. What is not open to debate is what the artists saw. If you ignore that, you're ignoring facts."

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Stanford University Medical Center.

Making it up as we go

Technology Review: Special Reports: 10 Emerging Technologies

Comparative Interactomics By creating maps of the body’s complex molecular interactions, Trey Ideker is providing new ways to find drugs.

Nanomedicine James Baker designs nanoparticles to guide drugs directly into cancer cells, which could lead to far safer treatments.

Epigenetics Alexander Olek has developed tests to detect cancer early by measuring its subtle DNA changes.

Cognitive Radio To avoid future wireless traffic jams, Heather “Haitao” Zheng is finding ways to exploit unused radio spectrum.

Nuclear Reprogramming Hoping to resolve the embryonic-stem-cell debate, Markus Grompe envisions a more ethical way to derive the cells.

Diffusion Tensor Imaging Kelvin Lim is using a new brain-imaging method to understand schizophrenia.

Universal Authentication Leading the development of a privacy-protecting online ID system, Scott Cantor is hoping for a safer Internet.

Pervasive Wireless Can't all our wireless gadgets just get along? It's a question that Dipankar Raychaudhuri is trying to answer.

Nanobiomechanics Measuring the tiny forces acting on cells, Subra Suresh believes, could produce fresh understanding of diseases.

Stretchable Silicon By teaching silicon new tricks, John Rogers is reinventing the way we use electronics.