duh

By MyHealthNewsDaily Staff

posted: 10 December 2010 02:46 pm ET

Women who use lubricant during sex have higher levels of satisfaction and less pain than those who don't, according to a new study.

The finding showed that women using lubricants reported higher ratings of sexual pleasure, and lower rates of negative genital symptoms, such as pain or burning, than those not using lubricant.

More women also reported that water-based lubricant was more effective in reducing negative symptoms than silicone-based lubricant, the report said.

For example, 8.9 percent of women reported discomfort during sex without a lubricant. But for women who used a water-based lubricant, only 3.1 percent reported discomfort. Silicone-based lubricant didn't fare as well — 9.7 percent of women who used it experienced discomfort during sex.

Lubricant also reduced entry pain for women, the study said, with 9.4 percent of women experiencing entry pain without lubricant, compared with 4.1 percent of women who used a water-based lubricant. However, 10.6 percent of women who used silicone-based lubricant experienced pain, the study said.

"These findings demonstrate how lubricant can be used during foreplay or sex play with a partner, and incorporated into a couple's sexual experience," study researcher Debby Herbenick, associate director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University Bloomington, said in a statement.

Researchers randomly assigned 2,453 women ages 18 to 68 to use one of six lubricants for two weeks, and asked them to compare their levels ofsexual satisfaction and any negative symptoms they experienced when they used it with when they didn't. Four of the lubricants were water-based and two were silicone-based.

Researchers analyzed the ratings these women gave for more than 10,000 acts of penile-vaginal intercourse and more than 3,000 masturbation experiences over the study period.

Two of the study researchers received funding from Pure Romance, the company that produces two of the lubricants. The study was published in the November issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

Pass it on: Lubricant may lessen a woman's pain during sex.

• 
  

Turning Kids From India’s Slums Into Autodidacts

Turning Kids From India’s Slums Into Autodidacts: "

Replacing the medieval habit of schooling — one teacher telling a bunch of children what to think — Sugata Mitra, an Indian physicist whose self-learning experiment inspired the film “Slumdog Millionaire”– is convinced that, with the Internet, kids can learn by themselves, so long as they are in small groups and have well-posed questions to answer.

Dr. Mitra asked a class of poor Tamil-speaking kids to use the Internet, which they had not yet encountered, to learn biotechnology, which they had never heard of, in English, which they did not speak. Two months later he was astounded at what they had taught themselves.

On their own, children can get about 30% of the knowledge required to pass exams. To go further, Dr. Mitra supplements SOLE with e-mediators, or the “granny cloud” as he calls it: amateur volunteers who use Skype to help kids learn online.

And now, Mitra’s Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLE) are going global.

"

the long road home

We were all Africans…before the intermission | Gene Expression

Discover Main Feed • 1 day ago • keep as unread • preview • visit site

        

  6 people recommended this

Quick review. In the 19th century once the idea that humans were derived from non-human ancestral species was injected into the bloodstream of the intellectual classes there was an immediate debate as to the location of the proto-human homeland; the Urheimat of us all. Charles Darwin favored Africa, but in many ways this ran against the cultural grain. The theory of evolution was birthed before the highest tide of the age of white supremacy and European hegemony, and Darwin’s model had to swim against the conviction that Africans were the most primitive of the colored races. After the waning of the ideological edifice of white supremacy, and the shock it received during and after World War II, the debates as to the origin of humanity still remained contentious and followed the same outlines (though without the charged normative inferences). But as the decades wore on many more researchers began to believe that Darwin was correct, and that the origin of humanity lay in the African continent. First, the deep origin of the human lineage in Africa was accepted, but eventually a more recent expansion out of Africa was argued for by one school. The turning point in these academic disputes was the popularization of the“mitochondrial Eve” theory of the 1980s.

the realness of reality

World’s Most Precise Clock Will Measure Realness of Reality

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Researchers at Fermilab are determined to figure out whether our third dimension is just an illusion by building the world’s most precise clock ever. The somewhat baffling theory behind the experiment goes something like this: spacetime is not exactly smooth, but rather pixelated like a digital photo once you zoom in ultra-close. Since, as far as we know, nothing moves faster than the speed of light, what we perceive as the third dimension might in fact be an illusion created by an intertwining of depth and time.

The theory has been proposed by multiple physicists, but there is no real evidence to back it up – only mathematical theories derived from black hole physics. That’s why the Fermilab team is building theirholometer, an instrument meant to measure the uncertainty or “wobble” theorized to be present in spacetime.

The holographic interferometer being constructed at Fermilab works in a way similar to classic interferometers: it splits a beam of light into two, then measures the difference in “holographic noise,” or vibrations in spacetime, between the identical beams. This is the first experiment of its kind and the first time that a team of physicists will be able to measure the fundamental nature of spacetime. The first measurements from the holometer should be taken sometime in 2011, so get ready for your mind to be permanently blown.

knowledge is power

Published online 14 November 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.606

News

Demonic device converts information to energy

Experiment inspired by a paradox tempts a bead uphill.

Zeeya Merali

 

Knowledge is power.iStockphoto

The laws of physics say that you can't get energy for nothing — worse still, you will always get out of a system less energy than you put in. But a nanoscale experiment inspired by a nineteenth-century paradox that seemed to break those laws now shows that you can generate energy from information.

Masaki Sano, a physicist at the University of Tokyo, and his colleagues have demonstrated that a bead can be coaxed up a 'spiral staircase' without any energy being directly transferred to the bead to push it upwards. Instead, it is persuaded along its route by a series of judiciously timed decisions to change the height of the 'steps' around it, based on information about the bead's position. In this sense, "information is being converted to energy", says Sano. The work is published by Nature Physics today¹.

The team's set-up was inspired by a nineteenth-century thought experiment proposed by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, which — controversially, at the time — suggested that information could be converted into energy. In the thought experiment, a demon guards a door between two rooms, each filled with gas molecules. The demon allows only fast-moving gas particles to pass out of the room on the left and into the room on the right, and only slow-moving particles to pass in the opposite direction.

As a result, the room on the right gradually gets warmer as the average speed of particles in that room increases, and the room on the left gets colder. The demon thus creates a difference in temperature without ever imparting any energy directly to the gas molecules — simply by knowing information about their speeds. This seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics, which states that you cannot make a system more ordered without any energy input.

A paradox put into practice

To create a real-life version of the demon experiment, Sano and his colleagues placed an elongated nanoscale polystyrene bead, which could rotate either clockwise or anticlockwise, into a bath of buffer solution. The team applied a varying voltage around the bead, making it progressively harder for the bead to rotate a full 360 degrees in the anticlockwise direction. This effectively created a "spiral staircase" that was harder to "climb up" in the anticlockwise direction than to "fall down" in the clockwise direction, says Sano.

“This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content.”

 

When left alone, the bead was randomly jostled by the surrounding molecules, sometimes being given enough of a push to turn anticlockwise against the voltage — or jump up the stairs — but more often turning clockwise — or going "downstairs". But then the team introduced their version of Maxwell's demon.

They watched the motion of the bead, and when it randomly turned anticlockwise they quickly adjusted the voltage — the equivalent of Maxwell's demon slamming the door shut on a gas molecule — making it tougher for the bead to turn back clockwise. The bead is thus encouraged to keep climbing "upstairs", without any energy being directly imparted to the bead, says Sano.

The experiment does not actually violate the second law of thermodynamics, because in the system as a whole, energy must be consumed by the equipment — and the experimenters — to monitor the bead and switch the voltage as needed. But it does show that information can be used as a medium to transfer energy, says Sano. The bead is driven as a mini-rotor, with a information-to-energy conversion efficiency of 28%.

 

"This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content," says Christopher Jarzynski, a statistical chemist at the University of Maryland in College Park. In 1997, Jarzynski formulated an equation to define the amount of energy that could theoretically be converted from a unit of information²; the work by Sano and his team has now confirmed this equation. "This tells us something new about how the laws of thermodynamics work on the microscopic scale," says Jarzynski.

Vlatko Vedral, a quantum physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, says that it will be interesting to see whether the technique can be used to drive nanomotors and artificial molecular machines. "I would also be excited to see whether something like this is already at work in nature," he says. "After all, you could say that all living systems are 'Maxwell's demons', trying to defy the tendency for order to turn back into randomness." 

• References

  1. Toyabe, S. , Sagawa, T. , Ueda, M. , Muneyuki, E. & Sano, M.Nature Physics doi:10.1038/NPHYS1821 (2010).
  2. Jarzynski, C. Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 2690-2693 (1997).

what would darwin say?

ADHD more common in offspring of mothers with genetic serotonin deficiencies

ADHD more common in offspring of mothers with genetic serotonin deficiencies

October 4th, 2010 in Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry

Children whose mothers are genetically predisposed to have impaired production of serotonin appear more likely to develop attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) later in life, according to a report in the October issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.

"Serotonin is a hormone and transmitter that performs a broad range of physiological functions in the human body," the authors write as background information in the article. "In addition to its transmitter function in the mature nervous system, serotonin has an important role during development"; it is involved in the formation and differentiation of neurons, their migration to their proper position and the arrangement of the synapses between them. The human genome encodes two enzymes involved in the biosynthesis of serotonin; previous studies have suggested alterations in these genes or enzymes in pregnant females could result in birth defects.

Anne Halmøy, M.D., of University of Bergen, Norway, and colleagues studied 459 adult outpatients with ADHD, 97 of their family members and 187 control individuals recruited from across Norway. Participants provided blood samples for gene sequencing along with information about psychiatric diagnoses and symptoms.

By sequencing 646 individuals, the researchers identified nine different mutations, of which eight were significantly associated with impaired function of the enzymes. Family analysis of 38 individuals who carried these mutations and 41 of their offspring revealed that children of mothers who had one of the mutations—and, therefore, had impaired serotonin production—had a 1.5- to 2.5-time higher risk of ADHD than control individuals or offspring of fathers with the mutations.

There was a large variance in the number and severity of symptoms reported by these individuals, suggesting that for offspring of mothers with these mutations, "the clinical outcome probably depends on a sum of many different genetic or environmental factors in addition to variations in maternal serotonin levels."

The results may have public health implications, the authors note. "Whether it is caused by genetic vulnerability, chronic inflammation, malnutrition or other processes, maternal serotonin deficiency during pregnancy might predispose to neuropsychiatric disorders and cardiovascular illnesses," they conclude. "However, further replication studies, preferably in larger samples, will be required to corroborate this relationship."

More information: Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2010;67[10]:1033-1043.

Provided by JAMA and Archives Journals

"ADHD more common in offspring of mothers with genetic serotonin deficiencies." October 4th, 2010. www.physorg.com/news205431466.html

Quantum physics: Flavors of entanglement

Quantum physics: Flavors of entanglement: "The entanglement of quantum objects can take surprising forms. Quantum physicists at the University of Innsbruck have investigated several flavors of entanglement in four trapped ions and report their results in the journal Nature Physics. Their study promotes further developments towards quantum computing and a deeper understanding of the foundations of quantum mechanics."

How injured nerves grow themselves back

How injured nerves grow themselves back: "Unlike nerves of the spinal cord, the peripheral nerves that connect our limbs and organs to the central nervous system have an astonishing ability to regenerate themselves after injury. Now, a new report in the October 1st issue of Cell offers new insight into how that healing process works."

Solar cells thinner than wavelengths of light hold huge power potential

Solar cells thinner than wavelengths of light hold huge power potential: "(PhysOrg.com) -- Ultra-thin solar cells can absorb sunlight more efficiently than the thicker, more expensive-to-make silicon cells used today, because light behaves differently at scales around a nanometer, say Stanford engineers. They calculate that by properly configuring the thicknesses of several thin layers of films, an organic polymer thin film could absorb as much as 10 times more energy from sunlight than was thought possible."

Study says Turmeric may help prevent osteoporosis

Study says Turmeric may help prevent osteoporosis: "Research by Dr. Janet Funk at the University of Arizona College of Medicine supports the potential health benefits of the spice turmeric, showing that it may be an effective resource for preventing bone loss, a significant concern for postmenopausal women."

New book examines how ordinary women revolutionized health care in America

New book examines how ordinary women revolutionized health care in America: "As 40th anniversary celebrations get underway surrounding the book, 'Our Bodies Ourselves,' a new history examines the battles of ordinary women in demanding equality, choice and respect in medical treatment and education about their own bodies."

Unlocking the secret of beauty: Scientists discover the complexities of attractive female bodies

Unlocking the secret of beauty: Scientists discover the complexities of attractive female bodies: "Scientists in Australia and Hong Kong have conducted a comprehensive study to discover how different body measurements correspond with ratings of female attractiveness. The study, published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, found that across cultural divides young, tall and long armed women were considered the most attractive."

Can Caffeine Really Cause Insanity?

Can Caffeine Really Cause Insanity?: "A Kentucky man is citing 'temporarily insanity' brought on by 'caffeine intoxication' as his legal strategy to claim that he is not responsible for allegedly murdering his wife.

"

The Higher You Are, the Faster You Age

The Higher You Are, the Faster You Age: "Scientists measured a time dilation only 90 billionths of a second long.

"

New Drug Kills Pain by Boosting Body's Naturally Occurring Marijuana-Like Compound

New Drug Kills Pain by Boosting Body's Naturally Occurring Marijuana-Like Compound: "

Medical Marijuana If only all medicines had such fun names. Wikimedia Commons

In a boon for pain research, American and Italian scientists say they have found a new drug that allows a marijuana-like substance to control pain at a specific site in the body. Their study suggests cannabinoid compounds could be used in new pain medications that are non-addictive and non-sedative, unlike opiates.

The drug works by blocking an enzyme that degrades a compound called anandamide, whose name comes from the Sanskrit word for 'bliss.' Anandamide exists naturally in humans and is chemically similar to THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. It was thought to work only in the brain, but with the new drug, URB937, anandamide works in peripheral tissues, too.

Led by Daniele Piomelli, director of the Center for Drug Discovery at the University of California-Irvine, teams from the Italian universities of Urbino and Parma gave the URB937 drug to rats and mice. It suppresses an enzyme called FAAH, which boosts the amount of anandamide. It doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier, but it still does lessen pain at the site of an injury, the researchers say.

Anandamide is part of the endocannabinoid system, which is involved in modulating appetite, pain, mood and memory. (The name is derived from the system's involvement in responding to THC.) Blocking FAAH can have the same pain-mitigation effects without generating a marijuana high, according to a UC-Irvine news release.

Only a handful of states allow marijuana to be used for medicinal purposes, one of which is modulating pain. So a drug that enhances the body's natural cannabinoid compounds could be helpful for millions of patients.

Or they could just move to Denver.

"

Robotic Swan Majestically Dances to 'Swan Lake,' Moving Viewers to Tears

Robotic Swan Majestically Dances to 'Swan Lake,' Moving Viewers to Tears: "

The Dying Swan Absolutely majestic. Kerstin Gauffin

In America, the animalistic automatons at Chuck E. Cheese entertain (and sometimes terrify) children with their inelegant, slack-jawed singing, spastic motions, and soulless, lifeless eyes. It's a stark contrast with Sweden, where a robot swan is literally moving people to tears with a four-minute, professionally choreographed routine, dramatically executed to Tchaikovsky's 'Swan Lake.'

The Dying Swan moves sometimes gently, sometimes with energetic passion, but apparently always beautifully, leading the few people who have witnessed its dance to describe it with words like 'touching' and 'beautiful.' In other words, its display conjures adjectives not usually associated with the motions of a robot.

The Dying Swan's creators at the Mälardalen University wanted to explore the role of robotics in art and dance, hiring a respected professional choreographer to teach the swan its routine, which it performs elegantly via 19 different joints that give it a high degree of flexibility and dexterity. While the routine hasn't been released publicly yet, the rest of the world won't have to wait very long to weep over the Dying Swan's majesty; it makes its public debut on Thursday at Sweden's largest book fair in Gothenburg.

"

DARPA Funds Neurophotonics Center to Develop Fiber-Optic Link Between Brain and Prosthetics

DARPA Funds Neurophotonics Center to Develop Fiber-Optic Link Between Brain and Prosthetics: "

A Neurophotonic Interface SMU

With some help from DARPA, researchers at Southern Methodist University may soon establish a lightning-fast two-way fiber optic connection between the brain and prosthetic limbs. Working with $5.6 million in DARPA funding, the Neurophotonics Research Center has a singular goal: build a biocompatible fiber optic sensor scaled down to carry individual nerve signals to and from the brain.

The ultimate objective is nothing less than the 'Skywalker hand,' prosthetics that interface seamlessly with the brain like real limbs. DARPA (and others) have pursued such technology actively for years, but while strides have been made modern prosthetics are still a long way from even closely mimicking the feeling of a real limb.

Most 'robotic' prosthetics simply connect to healthy tissue to trigger movement in the limb - for instance, connecting a prosthetic arm to healthy chest muscle that the user then clenches to manipulate the hand - which requires the user to learn a whole new way of operating his or her new limb. DARPA wants to change that by figuring out how to convert and carry nerve signals through synthetic channels.

To that end, fiber optics are ideal. Where metallic implants might be rejected or corroded by the body's natural processes, fiber optic technology can more easily be made compatible with living tissue. And optical technology can shrink signal channels down very small, so small that hundreds or even thousands of sensors could be embedded into a single fiber connecting brain and prosthetic.

That's not to say it will be easy. But SMU researchers and DARPA clearly think it's technology worth striving for. If they can figure out the right combination of optical nerve stimulation and nerve-sensing tech, they may just develop a two-way interface that not only lets the brain command the limb naturally, but also allows the limb to 'feel' sensations like heat or pressure. It might also allow for a spinal cord patch that could help those with spinal traumas regain mobility.

[SMU]

"

Brain Coprocessors

Brain Coprocessors: "

“We are entering a neurotechnology renaissance, in which the toolbox for understanding the brain and engineering its functions is expanding in both scope and power at an unprecedented rate,” says Ed Boyden, an Assistant Professor, Biological Engineering, and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the MIT Media Lab..

“Consider a system that reads out activity from a brain circuit, computes a strategy for controlling the circuit so it enters a desired state or performs a specific computation, and then delivers information into the brain to achieve this control strategy. Such a system would enable brain computations to be guided by predefined goals set by the patient or clinician, or adaptively steered in response to the circumstances of the patient’s environment or the instantaneous state of the patient’s brain.

“Some examples of this kind of ‘brain coprocessor’ technology are under active development, such as systems that perturb the epileptic brain when a seizure is electrically observed, and prosthetics for amputees that record nerves to control artificial limbs and stimulate nerves to provide sensory feedback. Looking down the line, such system architectures might be capable of very advanced functions–providing just-in-time information to the brain of a patient with dementia to augment cognition, or sculpting the risk-taking profile of an addiction patient in the presence of stimuli that prompt cravings.

“In the future, the computational module of a brain coprocessor may be powerful enough to assist in high-level human cognition or complex decision making.”

"

Avatar therapy: From couch to cyberspace

Avatar therapy: From couch to cyberspace: "

(Second Life)

Proponents of “avatar therapy” in a virtual environment such as Second Life say it has some unique advantages that take psychotherapy to the next level.

In Second Life, therapy sessions are not confined to the therapist’s virtual office; they can also involve role-play scenarios to allow the patient to practice their newly learned coping skills in virtual environments tailored to their needs.

Many of the conditions treated by face-to-face talk therapy can also be treated virtually, including depression and anxiety. Avatar therapy is proving useful for traumatic brain injury, schizophrenia and Asperger’s syndrome. Studies have shown success rates similar to those of traditional therapy for social anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, according to James Herbert, head of the anxiety treatment and research program at Drexel University.

"

Brain-hacking art: Making an emotional impression

Brain-hacking art: Making an emotional impression: "

Monet's Water Lilies

The popularity of impressionist art could be caused by the ambiguous images forcing the brain to create a more personal interpretation of the work, says Harvard neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh.

The blurry shapes and splashes of color mean that people have to draw on their own memories to fill in the missing visual details, he says.

These paintings may also be attractive because their blurred forms speak directly to the amygdala, a brain region involved in the processing of emotions, suggests Cavanagh. The amygdala acts like an early warning system, on the lookout for unfocused threats lurking in our peripheral vision, and it tends to react more strongly to things we haven’t yet picked up consciously.

"

Researchers engineer adult stem cells that do not age

Researchers engineer adult stem cells that do not age: "(PhysOrg.com) -- Biomedical researchers at the University at Buffalo have engineered adult stem cells that scientists can grow continuously in culture, a discovery that could speed development of cost-effective treatments for diseases including heart disease, diabetes, immune disorders and neurodegenerative diseases."

If you were given a brand new yacht, what would you name it?

for sale

Ask me anything

What was the best advice you've ever received?

keep your head down

Ask me anything

When was the last time you gave flowers?

last year

Ask me anything

Who's the most overrated musician?

barry manillow. rofl

Ask me anything

What would be the best thing about being a vampire?

flying

Ask me anything

brain map- ok. mind map? doubtful.

IBM Researchers Create the Most Detailed Brain Map Yet | Popular Science

A Map of the Mind The highways and byways connecting the various regions of a Macaque monkey's brain. PNAS

Researchers at IBM have created the most complex neurological map ever seen, detailing the comprehensive long-distance network that makes up the macaque monkey brain in unprecedented detail. Such a roadmap through the brain's complex networking processes could have major implications for attempts at reverse-engineering neural networks and creating cognitive computer chips that "think" as powerfully and efficiently as the biological brain.

Focusing on a long-distance network connecting 383 brain regions and 6,602 long-distance connections that function like highways to connect disparate regions of the brain. Shorter, more localized connections were found to carry signals within regions.

Related Articles
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Tags
Science, Clay Dillow, brain mapping, cognitive computing, IBM, neural maps, neural networks, neurology
But most importantly, they found what they describe in a paper published in PNAS as a "tightly integrated core" that might be they key to cognition in higher-thinking biological creatures. That core might be what gives us consciousness (we won't get into the philosophical implications there). Further, the core isn't located in one, or even two regions. The researchers found it stretches through the premotor cortex, prefrontal cortex, temporal lobe, thalamus, visual cortex and a handful of other regions.

Another surprising find: the prefrontal cortex, though at the front of the brain, might actually serve as its central information hub that distributes information throughout the brain.

The study included mapping of four times as many regions and three times the number of connections than the largest previous attempt. Those findings could finally help researchers mimic the brain -- which, even in this seemingly advanced era, is something of a mystery to us. That in turn could lead to network architecture and computer chips that process and move information as quickly and seamlessly as our brains do.

be happy

f | My Digest

Happiness and Sadness Spread Just Like Disease
Wired: Wired Science • by Brandon Keim • 14 days ago • keep as unread • preview • visit site

There may be a literal truth underlying the common-sense intuition that happiness and sadness are contagious.

A new study on the spread of emotions through social networks shows that these feelings circulate in patterns analogous to what’s seen from epidemiological models of disease.

Earlier studies raised the possibility, but had not mapped social networks against actual disease models.

“This is the first time this contagion has been measured in the way we think about traditional infectious disease,” said biophysicist Alison Hill of Harvard University.

Data in the research, in the July 7 Proceedings of the Royal Society, comes from the Framingham Heart Study, a one-of-a-kind project which since 1948 has regularly collected social and medical information from thousands of people in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Earlier analyses found that a variety of habits and feelings, including obesity, loneliness, smoking and happiness appear to be contagious.

In the current study, Hill’s team compared patterns of relationships and emotions measured in the study to those generated by a model designed to track SARS, foot-and-mouth disease and other traditional contagions. They discounted spontaneous or immediately shared emotion — friends or relatives undergoing a common experience — and focused on emotional changes that followed changes in others.

In the spread of happiness, the researchers found clusters of “infected” and “uninfected” people, a pattern considered a “hallmark of the infectious process,” said Hill. “For happiness, clustering is what you expect from contagion rates. Whereas for sadness, the clusters were much larger than we’d expect. Something else is going on.”

Happiness proved less social than sadness. Each happy friend increased an individual’s chances of personal happiness by 11 percent, while just one sad friend was needed to double an individual’s chance of becoming unhappy.

Patterns fit disease models in another way. “The more friends with flu that you have, the more likely you are to get it. But once you have the flu, how long it takes you to get better doesn’t depend on your contacts. The same thing is true of happiness and sadness,” said David Rand, an evolutionary dynamics researcher at Harvard. “It fits with the infectious disease framework.”

The findings still aren’t conclusive proof of contagion, but they provide parameters of transmission rates and network dynamics that will guide predictions tested against future Framingham results, said Hill and Rand. And whereas the Framingham study wasn’t originally designed with emotional information in mind, future studies tailored to test network contagion should provide more sophisticated information.

Both Hill and Rand warned that the findings illustrate broad, possible dynamics, and are not intended to guide personal decisions, such as withdrawing from friends who are having a hard time.

“The better solution is to make your sad friends happy,” said Rand.

language -lost and found

"Lost" Languages to Be Resurrected by Computers?A gift-shop replica of a clay tablet with Akkadian writing from the city of Ugarit.

Photograph courtesy S.R.K. Branavan

Tim Hornyak

for National Geographic News

Published July 19, 2010

A new computer program has quickly deciphered a written language last used in Biblical times—possibly opening the door to "resurrecting" ancient texts that are no longer understood, scientists announced last week.

Created by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the program automatically translates written Ugaritic, which consists of dots and wedge-shaped stylus marks on clay tablets. The script was last used around 1200 B.C. in western Syria.

Written examples of this "lost language" were discovered by archaeologists excavating the port city of Ugarit in the late 1920s. It took until 1932 for language specialists to decode the writing. Since then, the script has helped shed light on ancient Israelite culture and Biblical texts.

(Related: "Oldest Hebrew Text Is Evidence for Bible Stories?")

Using no more computing power than that of a high-end laptop, the new program compared symbol and word frequencies and patterns in Ugaritic with those of a known language, in this case, the closely related Hebrew.

Through repeated analysis, the program linked letters and words to map nearly all Ugaritic symbols to their Hebrew equivalents in a matter of hours.

The program also correctly identified Ugaritic and Hebrew words with shared roots 60 percent of the time. Shared roots are when words in different languages spring from the same source, such as the French homme and Spanish hombre, which share the Latin root for "man."

The team may be the first to show that a computer approach to dead scripts can be effective, despite claims that machines lack the necessary intuition.

(Related: "Video Games Help U.S. Soldiers Learn Arab Language, Culture.")

"Traditionally, decipherment has been viewed as a sort of scholarly detective game, and computers weren't thought to be of much use," study co-author and MIT computer science professor Regina Barzilay said in an email.

"Our aim is to bring to bear the full power of modern machine learning and statistics to this problem."

Not Always a "Rosetta Stone"

The next step should be to see whether the program can help crack the handful of ancient scripts that remain largely incomprehensible.

Etruscan, for example, is a script that was used in northern and central Italy around 700 B.C. but was displaced by Latin by about A.D. 100. Few written examples of Etruscan survive, and the language has no known relations, so it continues to baffle archaeologists.

(Related: "Languages Racing to Extinction in Five Global 'Hotspots.'")

"In the case [of Ugaritic], you're dealing with a small and simple writing system, and there are closely related languages," noted Richard Sproat, an Oregon Health and Science University computational linguist who was not involved in the new work.

"It's not always going to be the case that there are closely related languages that one can use" for Rosetta Stone-like comparisons.

But study co-author Barzilay and her colleague, Benjamin Snyder, think the decoding program can overcome this hurdle by scanning multiple languages at once and taking contextual information into account—improvements that could uncover unexpected similarities or links to known languages.

A paper describing the new computer program was presented last week at the 48th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Uppsala, Sweden.

wherever you look, there it is

Quantum mechanics flummoxes physicists again : Nature News

Published online 22 July 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.371

A fresh take on a classic experiment makes no progress in unifying quantum mechanics and relativity.

Jon Cartwright


Single photon source impeaching on a 3-slit apertureA 3-slit experiment has confirmed a basic rule of quantum mechanics but failed to help physicists to reconcile the theory with relativity.Science/ AAAS

If you ever want to get your head around the riddle that is quantum mechanics, look no further than the double-slit experiment. This shows, with perfect simplicity, how just watching a wave or a particle can change its behaviour. The idea is so unpalatable to physicists that they have spent decades trying to find new ways to test it. The latest such attempt, by physicists in Europe and Canada, used a three-slit version — but quantum mechanics won out again.

In the standard double-slit experiment, a wide screen is shielded from an electron gun by a wall containing two separated slits. If the electron gun is fired with one slit closed, a mound of electrons forms on the screen beyond the open slit, trailing off to the left and right — the sort of behaviour expected for particles. If the gun is fired when both slits are open, however, electrons stack along the screen in comb-like divisions. This illustrates the electrons interfering with each other — the hallmark of wave behaviour.

Such a crossover in behaviour — known as wave–particle duality — is perhaps not too hard to swallow. But quantum mechanics gets weirder. Slow down the gun so that just one electron at a time reaches the screen, and the interference pattern remains. Does each electron pass through both slits at once and interfere with itself? The obvious way to answer this question is to watch the slits as the gun fires, but as soon as you do this the interference pattern disappears.

It's as if the electrons know when they're being watched and decide to behave as particles again. According to Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, the phenomenon "has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery".
Mind the gaps

The new three-slit version of the experiment, performed by Gregor Weihs at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and his colleagues, sought to uncover gaps in our understanding of quantum mechanics through which modern physics might make some headway. Perhaps the greatest problem in modern physics is how to reconcile quantum mechanics, which allows for seemingly instantaneous communication, with Einstein's theories of special and general relativity, which imply that nothing should travel faster than light.

Weihs's group thought that a route to reconciliation could lie in Born's rule, a central tenet of quantum mechanics that says interference should exist only between two paths, such as the two paths of the double-slit experiment. If there were any three-way interference in the three-slit version, Born's rule would break down and an area of quantum mechanics in which relativity might take hold would be exposed.

To perform their experiment, Weihs and colleagues aimed a source of single photons (which, like electrons, exhibit wave–particle duality) at a mask containing various open and closed combinations of three slits. The authors fired photons repeatedly through the mask, while building a probability distribution of photons arriving on a detector beyond it. From the probabilities of each combination, they could calculate a crucial interference term, which would highlight any three-path interference.

As Weihs's group had secretly feared, the three-path interference term came to more or less zero1. Co-author Ray Laflamme of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, "always hoped for three-path interference", says Weihs. "But then he's more of a theoretician. If there was three-path interference, there would be a Nobel prize waiting."

It is true that the experiment has yielded little for theorists to work with, but it's not all bad news, as Markus Aspelmeyer at the University of Vienna points out. "The fact that one does not observe deviations from quantum theory also has profound implications," he says. "It suggests that the present theory is a good description of our physical world and that we have to work harder to understand its fundamental message."

Weihs is now considering a more rigorous test of Born's rule with an interferometer, a highly accurate device that employs a layout of mirrors and beam splitters in place of physical slits. Still, Weihs and his colleagues probably feel they have worked hard enough already. Their experiment involved the logging of billions of photons, a process that took over two years. "It's becoming a little tedious, I must stress," says Weihs.

*
References
1. Sinha, U., Couteau, C., Jennewein, T., Laflamme, R. & Weihs, G. Science 329, 418-421 (2010). | Article | ChemPort |

it's the end of the world as we know it -this time, for sure

It's the World's Strongest, Most Expensive Beer -- Inside a Squirrel - Asylum.com

Our old buddies BrewDog have done it again. Not content with winning back the "strongest beer in the world" title last February with its Sink the Bismarck!, they've now upped their game with a new brew that is 55 percent alcohol by volume and carries a $765 price tag. It's called The End of History.

Oh, and did we mention that the bottles come in stuffed animals-like stuffed animals that were once alive? The 12 bottles have been made featuring seven dead stoats (a kind of weasel), four squirrels and one rabbit. James Watt, one of the two guys behind BrewDog, put it better than we ever could: "The impact of The End of History is a perfect conceptual marriage between taxidermy, art and craft brewing." Just like we've all been waiting for!

For those interested in the actual beer, it's a blond Belgian ale with touches of nettles and juniper berries -- and in order to achieve the brain-blasting alcohol content, it had to be created using extreme freezing techniques.

Keep reading for another photo and a video about the making of the super-strong beer.




This BrewDog video about the creation of The End Of History is well worth a watch.

cancer vaccine/cure on the way

New Cancer Vaccine Kills Lymphoma, Now in Phase III Clinical Trials | Singularity Hub

July 17th, 2010 by Drew Halley
Why fight cancer with chemotherapy or radiation when you can teach the immune system to do it for you? Sound far-fetched? In fact, cancer vaccines have already arrived. We’ve recently reported on Provenge, a new vaccine that rewires your body’s own defenses to wipe out prostate cancer. Now, Accentia Biopharmaceuticals and Biovest International have developed a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) vaccine that teaches the body’s immune system to identify and destroy tumor cells while leaving healthy tissue intact. The vaccine, called BiovaxID, is already in Phase III clinical trials.
The vaccine has already passed Phase I and II clinical trials with promising results: previous studies have shown that BiovaxID significantly increases both the time interval between relapses (44.2 months, as compared with 30.6 months in a placebo group) as well as patients’ overall survival rates. In some cases, the vaccine reportedly clears cancer completely from the body. Phase III trials have expanded the subject pool, and are currently studying the vaccine’s long-term effectiveness on 375 NHL patients. If all goes well, BiovaxID will then be passed on to the FDA for market approval.
Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is actually an umbrella term for 16 different types of blood cancer that show up in the lymphatic system. Every year, about 65,000 people are diagnosed with some form of NHL in the United States alone. BiovaxID is being developed and tested for follicular lymphoma, an indolent but ultimately fatal subtype of the disease that affects B-cells in the blood. The disease goes through periods of remission and relapse, with 90% of follicular lymphoma patients dying of the disease within 7 years of diagnosis. Current treatments involve a combination of chemotherapy, radiation and monoclonal antibodies. These therapies often show initial success, but fail in subsequent relapses as the cancer develops resistance.

zeno's arrow / the arrow of time

What Is Time? One Physicist Hunts for the Ultimate Theory | Wired Science | Wired.com

* By Erin Biba
* February 26, 2010 |
* 5:30 am |
* Categories: Physics
*

multiverse_1

SAN DIEGO — One way to get noticed as a scientist is to tackle a really difficult problem. Physicist Sean Carroll has become a bit of a rock star in geek circles by attempting to answer an age-old question no scientist has been able to fully explain: What is time?
carroll_mug2Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech where he focuses on theories of cosmology, field theory and gravitation by studying the evolution of the universe. Carroll’s latest book, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, is an attempt to bring his theory of time and the universe to physicists and nonphysicists alike.

Here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he gave a presentation on the arrow of time, scientists stopped him in the hallway to tell him what big fans they were of his work.

Carroll sat down with Wired.com on Feb. 19 at AAAS to explain his theories and why Marty McFly’s adventure could never exist in the real world, where time only goes forward and never back.



Wired.com: Can you explain your theory of time in layman’s terms?

Sean Carroll: I’m trying to understand how time works. And that’s a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it. A lot of them go back to Einstein and spacetime and how we measure time using clocks. But the particular aspect of time that I’m interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don’t remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet into an egg.

And we sort of understand that halfway. The arrow of time is based on ideas that go back to Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist in the 1870s. He figured out this thing called entropy. Entropy is just a measure of how disorderly things are. And it tends to grow. That’s the second law of thermodynamics: Entropy goes up with time, things become more disorderly. So, if you neatly stack papers on your desk, and you walk away, you’re not surprised they turn into a mess. You’d be very surprised if a mess turned into neatly stacked papers. That’s entropy and the arrow of time. Entropy goes up as it becomes messier.

So, Boltzmann understood that and he explained how entropy is related to the arrow of time. But there’s a missing piece to his explanation, which is, why was the entropy ever low to begin with? Why were the papers neatly stacked in the universe? Basically, our observable universe begins around 13.7 billion years ago in a state of exquisite order, exquisitely low entropy. It’s like the universe is a wind-up toy that has been sort of puttering along for the last 13.7 billion years and will eventually wind down to nothing. But why was it ever wound up in the first place? Why was it in such a weird low-entropy unusual state?


That is what I’m trying to tackle. I’m trying to understand cosmology, why the Big Bang had the properties it did. And it’s interesting to think that connects directly to our kitchens and how we can make eggs, how we can remember one direction of time, why causes precede effects, why we are born young and grow older. It’s all because of entropy increasing. It’s all because of conditions of the Big Bang.

Wired.com: So the Big Bang starts it all. But you theorize that there’s something before the Big Bang. Something that makes it happen. What’s that?

Carroll: If you find an egg in your refrigerator, you’re not surprised. You don’t say, “Wow, that’s a low-entropy configuration. That’s unusual,” because you know that the egg is not alone in the universe. It came out of a chicken, which is part of a farm, which is part of the biosphere, etc., etc. But with the universe, we don’t have that appeal to make. We can’t say that the universe is part of something else. But that’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m fitting in with a line of thought in modern cosmology that says that the observable universe is not all there is. It’s part of a bigger multiverse. The Big Bang was not the beginning.

And if that’s true, it changes the question you’re trying to ask. It’s not, “Why did the universe begin with low entropy?” It’s, “Why did part of the universe go through a phase with low entropy?” And that might be easier to answer.

multiverse_2

Wired.com: In this multiverse theory, you have a static universe in the middle. From that, smaller universes pop off and travel in different directions, or arrows of time. So does that mean that the universe at the center has no time?

Carroll: So that’s a distinction that is worth drawing. There’s different moments in the history of the universe and time tells you which moment you’re talking about. And then there’s the arrow of time, which give us the feeling of progress, the feeling of flowing or moving through time. So that static universe in the middle has time as a coordinate but there’s no arrow of time. There’s no future versus past, everything is equal to each other.

Wired.com: So it’s a time that we don’t understand and can’t perceive?


Carroll: We can measure it, but you wouldn’t feel it. You wouldn’t experience it. Because objects like us wouldn’t exist in that environment. Because we depend on the arrow of time just for our existence.

Wired.com: So then, what is time in that universe?

Carroll: Even in empty space, time and space still exist. Physicists have no problem answering the question of “If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?” They say, “Yes! Of course it makes a sound!” Likewise, if time flows without entropy and there’s no one there to experience it, is there still time? Yes. There’s still time. It’s still part of the fundamental laws of nature even in that part of the universe. It’s just that events that happen in that empty universe don’t have causality, don’t have memory, don’t have progress and don’t have aging or metabolism or anything like that. It’s just random fluctuations.

Wired.com: So if this universe in the middle is just sitting and nothing’s happening there, then how exactly are these universes with arrows of time popping off of it? Because that seems like a measurable event.

Carroll: Right. That’s an excellent point. And the answer is, almost nothing happens there. So the whole point of this idea that I’m trying to develop is that the answer to the question, “Why do we see the universe around us changing?” is that there is no way for the universe to truly be static once and for all. There is no state the universe could be in that would just stay put for ever and ever and ever. If there were, we should settle into that state and sit there forever.

It’s like a ball rolling down the hill, but there’s no bottom to the hill. The ball will always be rolling both in the future and in the past. So, that center part is locally static — that little region there where there seems to be nothing happening. But, according to quantum mechanics, things can happen occasionally. Things can fluctuate into existence. There’s a probability of change occurring.

So, what I’m thinking of is the universe is kind of like an atomic nucleus. It’s not completely stable. It has a half-life. It will decay. If you look at it, it looks perfectly stable, there’s nothing happening … there’s nothing happening … and then, boom! Suddenly there’s an alpha particle coming out of it, except the alpha particle is another universe.

Wired.com: So inside those new universes, which move forward with the arrow of time, there are places where the laws of physics are different — anomalies in spacetime. Does the arrow of time still exist there?

Carroll: It could. The weird thing about the arrow of time is that it’s not to be found in the underlying laws of physics. It’s not there. So it’s a feature of the universe we see, but not a feature of the laws of the individual particles. So the arrow of time is built on top of whatever local laws of physics apply.

the maddening weirdness of time travel

“You’re dealing with time travel. Maybe you should expect it to be weird.”

Novelists and screenwriters know that time travel can be accomplished in all sorts of ways: A supercharged DeLorean, Hermione’s small watch and, most recently, a spacetime-bending hot tub have allowed fictional heroes to jump between past and future.

sciencenewsBut physicists know that time travel is more than just a compelling plot device — it’s a serious prediction of Einstein’s general relativity equations. In a new study posted online July 15, researchers led by Seth Lloyd at MIT analyze how some of the quirks and peculiarities of real-life time travel might play out. This particular kind of time travel evades some of its most paradoxical predictions, Lloyd says.

Any theory of time travel has to confront the devastating “grandfather paradox,” in which a traveler jumps back in time and kills his grandfather, which prevents his own existence, which then prevents the murder in the first place, and so on.

One model, put forth in the early 1990s by Oxford physicist David Deutsch, can allow inconsistencies between the past a traveler remembers and the past he experiences. So a person could remember killing his grandfather without ever having done it. “It has some weird features that don’t square with what we thought time travel might work out as,” Lloyd says.

In contrast, Lloyd prefers a model of time travel that explicitly forbids these inconsistencies. This version, posted at arXiv.org, is called a post-selected model. By going back and outlawing any events that would later prove paradoxical in the future, this theory gets rid of the uncomfortable idea that a time traveler could prevent his own existence. “In our version of time travel, paradoxical situations are censored,” Lloyd says.

But this dictum against paradoxical events causes possible but unlikely events to happen more frequently. “If you make a slight change in the initial conditions, the paradoxical situation won’t happen. That looks like a good thing, but what it means is that if you’re very near the paradoxical condition, then slight differences will be extremely amplified,” says Charles Bennett of IBM’s Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.

For instance, a bullet-maker would be inordinately more likely to produce a defective bullet if that very bullet was going to be used later to kill a time traveler’s grandfather, or the gun would misfire, or “some little quantum fluctuation has to whisk the bullet away at the last moment,” Lloyd says. In this version of time travel, the grandfather, he says, is “a tough guy to kill.”

This distorted probability close to the paradoxical situation is still strange, says physicist Daniel Gottesman of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada. “The thing is, that when we modify physics in this way, weird things end up happening. And that’s kind of unavoidable,” he says. “You’re dealing with time travel. Maybe you should expect it to be weird.”

In an earlier paper posted in May at arXiv.org, Lloyd and his team present an experiment designed to simulate this post-selection model using photons. Though the team couldn’t send the photons into the past, they could put them in quantum situations similar to those that might be encountered by a time traveler. As the photons got closer and closer to being in self-inconsistent, paradoxical situations, the experiment succeeded with less and less frequency, the team found, hinting that true time travel might work the same way.

The experiments were meant to simulate freaky paths through spacetime called closed timelike curves, which carry anything traveling along them into the past and then back to the future. Einstein’s equations predicted that travelers on a closed timelike curve would eventually end up back where they started. Although predicted to exist on paper, no such paths have been observed in the wild. Some physicists predict that these loops might exist in exotic regions where spacetime is drastically different, such as in the depths of black holes.

Despite its strange predictions, the new model forms “a nice, consistent loop,” says theoretical physicist Todd Brun of the University of Southern California. The new papers make up “a really interesting body of work.”

These days, deciding which theory of time travel is best is largely a matter of taste. Until someone discovers a closed timelike curve in the wild, or figures out how to build a time machine, no one will know the answer, says Brun. “I don’t expect these will be tested anytime soon. These are ideas. They’re fun to play with.”

beam me up

SPACE.com -- Virgin Galactic's Private Spaceship Makes First Crewed Flight

Virgin Galactic's Private Spaceship Makes First Crewed Flight
By Clara Moskowitz
SPACE.com Senior Writer
posted: 16 July 2010
06:06 pm ET

A private suborbital spaceship built for the space tourism firm Virgin Galactic made its first flight with a crew onboard Thursday as it soared over California's Mojave Desert beneath its enormous mothership.

The commercial spaceliner – called VSS Enterprise, one of the company's fleet of SpaceShipTwo spacecraft – did not try to reach space in the test flight. Instead, it stayed firmly attached to its WhiteKnightTwo VMS Eve mothership.

The two crewmembers riding onboard VSS Enterprise evaluated all of the spacecraft's systems and functions during the 6-hour, 12-minute flight, Virgin Galactic officials said in a statement. In addition, automated sensors and ground crews conducted thorough vehicle systems tests. [Photos from the SpaceShipTwo test flight.]

"Objectives achieved," Virgin Galactic officials said in a statement on the company's website. "Congratulations to the whole team!"

Three other crewmembers flew aboard the Eve mothership, which is designed to carry SpaceShipTwo to an altitude above 50,000 feet (15,240 meters) before the spacecraft drops and fires its hybrid rocket motor to launch into suborbital space.

Virgin Galactic was founded by British billionaire Sir Richard Branson. The SpaceShipTwo spacecraft and their WhiteKnightTwo motherships are built for Virgin Galactic by Mojave, Calif.-based Scaled Composites, which was founded by veteran aerospace designer Burt Rutan.

SpaceShipTwo is built to carry eight people (six passengers and two pilots) on suborbital flights that would reach outer space for a few minutes, though would not go high enough to enter Earth orbit.

The flights will provide a weightless experience and a view of the blackness of space and glowing Earth below. Tickets cost $200,000 per person.

Rutan and Scaled Composites also built SpaceShipTwo's predecessor, the smaller suborbital craft SpaceShipOne financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, which won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for reusable, manned suborbital spacecraft in 2004.

Thursday's captive flight test was the 33rd voyage of the mothership VMS Eve, one of company's the WhiteKnightTwo craft. It was the third captive-carry flight for VSS Enterprise. The first of these joint flights occurred earlier this year in March.

The mothership crew consisted of Mark Stucky, Peter Kalogiannis and Brian Maisler, while Peter Siebold and Michael Alsbury rode aboard VSS Enterprise.

The VSS Enterprise is the first in a planned fleet of suborbital SpaceShipTwo spacecraft for Virgin Galactic. While the first test flights are being flown from Mojave, Calif., Virgin Galactic is building a terminal for space tourism flights at Spaceport America in New Mexico as well.

The VSS Enterprise named after the fictional starship of the same name from the science fiction television franchise "Star Trek."