Science & TechnologyS


Syringe

Opioid addiction may be tied to brain chemical implicated in narcolepsy

Laurel Hamers
Science News
Wed, 27 Jun 2018 14:07 UTC
drug injection
© Thomasaf/iStockphotoLong-term use of opioids, such as heroin, increases the number of brain cells that release a molecule called hypocretin that's known to regulate wakefulness.
Heroin and other opioids increase the amount of hypocretin-producing nerve cells

Using opioids gives some brain cells a call to action.

Opioid addicts' brains, examined after death, contain about 50 percent more nerve cells that release a molecule called hypocretin, compared with people who didn't use the drugs, a new study finds. Giving the opiate morphine to mice also induced similar changes in their brains. But the increase didn't come from new nerve cells, or neurons, being born. Instead, once-dormant neurons appear to rev up their hypocretin machinery in response to the addictive drugs, researchers report June 27 in Science Translational Medicine.

The findings fit with a growing body of research that suggests that hypocretin, a brain chemical that regulates wakefulness and arousal, may also be involved in addiction.
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Document

US Special Forces develop 'talking' leaflets

Chris Mahon
Outer Places
Thu, 28 Jun 2018 11:21 UTC
Talking Leaflet
© AP/Amy Sancetta
From Tokyo Rose's radio broadcasts to American soldiers blasting Van Halen to force out Panamanian dictators, breaking the will of an enemy has always been one of the most important goals of warfare, primarily because it's much easier to win battles if the enemy gives themselves up without a fight. For years, many armies have relied on dropping leaflets on the enemy from the air, but a new prototype created by the U.S. Special Operations Forces Command (USSOCOM) takes the concept of propaganda leaflets to the next level by essentially being a piece of paper that can talk to enemy combatants who pick it up.

The USSOCOM prototype is incredibly thin-only the thickness of four sheets of paper-and has the ability to repeat a 30-second message. Now that they have a prototype to show people what they're looking for, they're asking private companies to propose improvements on it, including potential features like "printable electronics incorporating 'flexible micro-circuitry', [a] flexible speaker, and super thin photovoltaic batteries."
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Cassiopaea

Cosmic explosion 100 times brighter than a supernova baffles scientists

Nicole Arce
Tech Times
Wed, 27 Jun 2018 14:56 UTC
Supernova
© NASA/CXC/MIT/UMass Amherst/M.D.Stage et al.Astronomers found what could be one of the most enigmatic objects in space today. An enormous cataclysm more powerful than a supernova was detected just 200 million light-years away.
Astronomers have spotted a mysteriously gargantuan explosion a hundred times more massive than an exploding star and they have no idea what it is.

More than a dozen telescopes from all over the world have recorded the inexplicable event, which was first seen on June 16 in the skies above Hawaii.

Early speculations point to a giant cloud of high-speed particles moving at a rate of 12,000 miles per second and registering a temperature of 16,000 degrees Fahrenheit. However, everything is a wild guess at this point.
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Black Cat 2

How real-life Schrödinger's cats probe the boundary of the quantum world

Philip Ball
Quanta Magazine
Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:00 UTC
Schrodingercats
© Allison Filice
Schrödinger's kittens have never been very cute, and the latest litter is no exception. Images of nebulous clouds of ultracold atoms or microscopic strips of silicon are unlikely to go viral on the internet. All the same, these exotic objects are worth heeding, because they show with unprecedented clarity that quantum mechanics is not just the physics of the extremely small.

"Schrödinger's kittens," loosely speaking, are objects pitched midway in size between the atomic scale, which quantum mechanics was originally developed to describe, and the cat that Erwin Schrödinger famously invoked to highlight the apparent absurdity of what that theory appeared to imply. These systems are "mesoscopic" - perhaps around the size of viruses or bacteria, composed of many thousands or even billions of atoms, and thus much larger than the typical scales at which counterintuitive quantum-mechanical properties usually appear. They are designed to probe the question: How big can you get while still preserving those quantum properties?

To judge by the latest results, the answer is: pretty darn big. Two distinct types of experiments - both of them carried out by several groups independently - have shown that vast numbers of atoms can be placed in collective quantum states, where we can't definitely say that the system has one set of properties or another. In one set of experiments, this meant "entangling" two regions of a cloud of cold atoms to make their properties interdependent and correlated in a way that seems heedless of their spatial separation. In the other, microscopic vibrating objects were maneuvered into so-called superpositions of vibrational states. Both results are loosely analogous to the way Schrödinger's infamous cat, while hidden away in its box, was said to be in a superposition of live and dead states.
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2 + 2 = 4

Lockdowns in US schools are so prevalent that companies are making apps to help schools manage them

Rachel Metz
MIT Technology Review
Tue, 19 Jun 2018 17:07 UTC
School lockdown app
© MIT Technology Review
A new app lets school administrators send an emergency lockdown notification to their entire staff and communicate with teachers to see if they're safe.

The details

TABS-which stands for "Tracking Appropriate Behaviors"-rolled out on Tuesday. It's a web-based app meant for use on laptops and smartphones that combines tools for keeping an eye on students with ways for schools to automatically enact lockdown procedures. It's designed as a way to keep staff members in touch with each other during emergencies such as school shootings.

It's not alone

As if the need for one app weren't horrifying enough, TABS is just the latest to include this kind of lockdown capability. App makers apparently expect that schools will want to have them handy at a time when on-campus shootings regularly dominate headlines.
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Butterfly

Australian moth species found to use magnetism to migrate

Tanya Loos
Cosmos
Thu, 28 Jun 2018 14:57 UTC
bogong moth magnetism navigation
© Frank Greenaway/Getty Images
Research uncovers the first insect known to use the same navigation method as night-flying migratory birds.

Monarch butterflies and bogong moths are the only insects known to undertake migratory journeys to specific sites year after year.

An Australian species, bogong moths (Agrotis infusa) flee the harsh conditions of the arid plains by migrating long distances to spend summer in cool caves of the continent's alpine region. The butterflies (Danaus plexippus) use an internal sun compass for their journey, but the bogongs moths can't do that because they fly at night.

How millions of the adult moths find their way across 1000 kilometres or more of country in darkness, then back again at the end of summer, was unknown - until now. New research published in the journal Current Biology reveals that, like migratory birds, they use the Earth's magnetic field and visual landmarks to navigate this journey.

Comment: Further reading:

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Chart Bar

Twitter bot analysis: Bots focus on business and tech more than politics - MSM gets just as many fake tweets as RT, Breitbart, InfoWars

Stefan Wojcik and Michael Barthel
Pew Research Center
Thu, 21 Jun 2018 14:03 UTC
russian bots twitter accounts
Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, much attention has been focused on the role of bots in promoting political news on Twitter. But bots can play a role in spreading many other types of news and information as well.

Indeed, a new Pew Research Center analysis finds that suspected bots are far more active in sharing links to news sites focusing on nonpolitical content than to sites with a political focus. And when they do share political news on Twitter, suspected bots are more likely to link to sites with ideologically centrist audiences than to ones with staunchly liberal or conservative followings.

To conduct the analysis, researchers examined 108,552 tweeted links to 50 popular news websites sent during a six-week period in the summer of 2017. The sites all produce original content and include those associated with legacy news organizations (outlets that originated in print or broadcast) as well as digital-native sites (outlets that were "born on the web"). Researchers identified potential bot accounts by using a multistep process that is explained here.

Here are some key findings from the analysis:

1 Suspected bots share a smaller proportion of links to popular news sites compared with other kinds of websites. Suspected bots shared 59% of tweeted links to the 50 news sites in the analysis. While that figure may sound high, it is lower than the average from a previous Pew Research Center analysis, which found that suspected bots shared 66% of tweeted links to a broader set of more than 2,000 popular websites, including sites focused on commercial products, sports and other subjects.

The 50 sites in the news analysis include the digital versions of print newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as sites for television and radio broadcasting organizations such as CNN, Fox News and NPR.
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Seismograph

Experts: The "big one" will devastate even those not living in California

Isabelle Z.
Natural News
Tue, 26 Jun 2018 00:01 UTC
United States crumble earthquake big one

Californians have been buzzing about "The Big One," a huge earthquake that many experts feel is long overdue along one of the state's major fault lines. If you think this doesn't concern you because you don't live in the Golden State, you could end up paying a big price for that denial as experts outline just how far of a reach such a natural disaster would have.

After all, the U.S.'s second-biggest city, Los Angeles, sits on 100 geological faults and would be severely impacted by The Big One. This would have a significant knock-on effect that would reverberate throughout the American economy.

Writing for Market Watch, seismologist Dr. Lucy Jones warns that people who are focused on the loss of homes and infrastructure damage aren't seeing the big picture. When she worked at the U.S. Geological Survey, Dr. Jones was in charge of a team that was tasked with estimating what the consequences of a big earthquake would be.

Comment: See also:

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2 + 2 = 4

Boys and men are disappearing from the field of psychology

Douglass Todd
Vancouver Sun
Wed, 27 Jun 2018 21:12 UTC
Males are disappearing from the field of North American psychology - both as research subjects and as psychotherapists.
man walking on beach
© menuha / Getty Images/iStockphoto
The evidence is overwhelming that psychological research is becoming heavily focused on girls' and women's issues, and that males are rapidly vanishing from psycho-therapeutic professions.

The consequences of these dual trajectories, say specialists, is that the distinct emotional struggles of boys and men are largely being sidelined and that many psychotherapists are lacking expertise in dealing effectively with males' psychological difficulties.
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Seismograph

Infrasound reveals song of Ecuador's Cotopaxi volcano, and it could help predict eruptions

Carolyn Gramling
Science News
Mon, 25 Jun 2018 07:00 UTC
Ecuador’s Cotopaxi volcano
SINGING VOLCANO For several months after Ecuador’s Cotopaxi volcano erupted in August 2015, scientists recorded odd patterns of reverberating sound.
SINGING VOLCANO

For several months after Ecuador's Cotopaxi volcano erupted in August 2015, scientists recorded odd patterns of reverberating sound.

Ecuador's Cotopaxi volcano has a deep and distinct voice. Between late 2015 and early 2016, Cotopaxi repeated an unusual pattern of low-frequency sounds that researchers now say is linked to the unique geometry of the interior of its crater. Identifying the distinct "voiceprint" of various volcanoes could help scientists better anticipate changes within the craters, including those that foretell an eruption.

Ecuadoran scientists installed a network of specialized microphones on the volcano's flanks that can record very low frequency sounds, or infrasound. Two weeks after the volcano's August 2015 eruption, the network recorded the unusual sound pattern - a strong, clear oscillation that tapers off through time. The sound curve resembles a screw, or "tornillo" in Spanish, scientists report online June 13 in Geophysical Research Letters.

Comment: Monitoring volcano activity is becoming quite a pressing matter considering the uptick in activity these days:

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