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Brain

Brain imaging bias: Whose brain represents the average?

Bethany Brookshire
Science News
Wed, 20 Dec 2017 11:53 UTC
Brain scans
© sfam_photo/Shutterstock
Brain scan studies of large groups of people can tell us things about what the “average” brain looks like. But when the sample itself isn’t average, are the brains?
An astonishing number of things that scientists know about brains and behavior are based on small groups of highly educated, mostly white people between the ages of 18 and 21. In other words, those conclusions are based on college students.

College students make a convenient study population when you're a researcher at a university. It makes for a biased sample, but one that's still useful for some types of studies. It would be easy to think that for studies of, say, how the typical brain develops, a brain is just a brain, no matter who's skull its resting in. A biased sample shouldn't really matter, right?

Wrong. Studies heavy in rich, well-educated brains may provide a picture of brain development that's inaccurate for the American population at large, a recent study found. The results provide a strong argument for scientists to pay more attention to who, exactly, they're studying in their brain imaging experiments.

Comment: Given the plasticity of the brain, choosing a sample that is reflective of the overall population must be quite difficult, if not impossible. But choosing a sample from more diverse populations will, no doubt, offer more answers to the mysteries of the brain.

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Galaxy

A new kind of spiral wave that embraces disorder is discovered (VIDEO)

Emily Conover
Science News
Mon, 18 Dec 2017 16:49 UTC
SAY YES TO THE MESS A new type of spiral wave has a disordered center. For the first time, a spiral wave chimera (shown in 3-D in a computer simulation) has been created in a laboratory.
© Jan F. Totz
SAY YES TO THE MESS: A new type of spiral wave has a disordered center. For the first time, a spiral wave chimera (shown in 3-D in a computer simulation) has been created in a laboratory.
Spiral waves are waves that ripple outward in a swirl. Now scientists from Germany and the United States have created a new type of spiral wave in the lab. The unusual whorl has a jumbled, disordered center rather than an orderly swirl, making it the first "spiral wave chimera," the researchers report online December 4 in Nature Physics.

Waves, which exhibit a variety of shapes, are common in nature. For example, they can be found in cells that undergo cyclical patterns, such as heart cells rhythmically contracting to produce heartbeats or nerve cells firing in the brain. In a normal heart, electrical signals propagate from one end to another, triggering waves of contractions in heart cells. But sometimes the wave can spiral out of control, creating swirls that can lead to a racing or irregular heartbeat. Such spiral waves emanate in an orderly fashion from a central point, reminiscent of the red and white swirls on a peppermint candy. But the newly observed spiral wave chimera is messy in the middle.

Comment: According to Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics by Paul Davies,‎ Niels Henrik Gregersen
'If the universe or life were simply "designed," it would be frozen in a fixed and eternally unchanging identity. Design is a dead end. Its rigidity would prevent the entrance of emergent novelty. Absolute order would be antithetical to any genuine cosmic emergence, as everything would be fixed in frozen formality.'
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UFO 2

Boeing to unveil secret plane that will 'change future air power'

Mark Prigg
Daily Mail
Tue, 19 Dec 2017 07:35 UTC
boeing secret plane

The craft, seen hidden under a cloth, is believed to be a radical new craft using electric 'hairdryer' to allow it to land and take off vertically.
Boeing's defence arm is set to unveil a mysterious new plane - and says it will 'change future air power'

The aerospace giant's defence arm teased the new craft, covered in a black cloth.

It is believed to be a radical new craft using electric 'hairdryer' to allow it to land and take off vertically.

Scroll down for video


Boeing will unveil their mystery aircraft on December 19th.

Speculation has so far said it could be anything from a new spaceplane to an electric fighter jet.
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Galaxy

A new approach for detecting planets in Alpha Centauri

Jim Shelton
Yale
Mon, 18 Dec 2017 12:00 UTC
A new approach for detecting planets in the Alpha Centauri system
© Michael S. Helfenbein
Yale astronomers have taken a fresh look at the nearby Alpha Centauri star system and found new ways to narrow the search for habitable planets there.

According to a study led by Professor Debra Fischer and graduate student Lily Zhao, there may be small, Earth-like planets in Alpha Centauri that have been overlooked. Meanwhile, the study ruled out the existence of a number of larger planets in the system that had popped up in previous models.

"The universe has told us the most common types of planets are small planets, and our study shows these are exactly the ones that are most likely to be orbiting Alpha Centauri A and B," said Fischer, a leading expert on exoplanets who has devoted decades of research to the search for an Earth analog.

Comment: Hawking backs project to launch space probe to Alpha Centauri

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Bullseye

Peer reviewed 'science' losing credibility due to fraudulent research

Arjun Walia
Collective Evolution
Wed, 01 Mar 2017 00:00 UTC
corruption science, false research
Science today, in all fields, is plagued by corruption. Yet, more often than not, attempts to create awareness about scientific fraud — an issue that few journalists have been willing to address — are met with the response, "Well, is it peer-reviewed?"

Although good science should always be reviewed, using this label as a form of credibility can be dangerous, causing people to dismiss new information and research instantaneously if it doesn't have it, particularly when that information counters long-held beliefs ingrained into human consciousness via mass marketing, education, and more.

Unfortunately, it's becoming increasingly apparent that we are being lied to about the products and medicines we use on a daily basis.

If you're one who commonly points to the "peer-reviewed" label, then you should know that there are many researchers and insiders who have been creating awareness about the problem with this label for years.

Comment:

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Better Earth

Asteroid dust may influence weather, may play 'more important climate role than previously recognized'


Sandia National Laboratories
Thu, 25 Aug 2005 18:24 UTC
Dust from asteroids entering the atmosphere may influence Earth's weather more than previously believed, researchers have found.

In a study to be published this week in the journal Nature, scientists from the Australian Antarctic Division, the University of Western Ontario, the Aerospace Corporation, and Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories found evidence that dust from an asteroid burning up as it descended through Earth's atmosphere formed a cloud of micron-sized particles significant enough to influence local weather in Antarctica.

dust
©Sandia
The asteroid's dust trail as seen by lidar at Davis, Antarctica. The plot shows the strength of the vertical laser light scattered back from the atmosphere as a function of time and altitude above mean sea level. The dust trail, blown by the stratospheric winds, moved through the beam.

Micron-sized particles are big enough to reflect sunlight, cause local cooling, and play a major role in cloud formation, the Nature brief observes. Longer research papers being prepared from the same data for other journals are expected to discuss possible negative effects on the planet's ozone layer.

"Our observations suggest that [meteors exploding] in Earth's atmosphere could play a more important role in climate than previously recognized," the researchers write.
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Magnify

As CRISPR gene editing moves into new territory ethical debates on use in humans take on new urgency

Tina Hesman Saey
Science News
Wed, 13 Dec 2017 13:30 UTC
ADN crispr
© Inconnu
Scientists reported selectively altering genes in viable human embryos for the first time this year. For nearly five years, researchers have been wielding the molecular scissors known as CRISPR/Cas9 to make precise changes in animals' DNA. But its use in human embryos has more profound implications, researchers and ethicists say.

"We can now literally change our own species," says Mildred Solomon, a bioethicist and president of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute in Garrison, N.Y.

CRISPR/Cas9 is a bacterial immune system (SN: 4/15/17, p. 22) turned into a powerful gene-editing tool. First described in 2012, the editor consists of a DNA-cutting enzyme called Cas9 and a short piece of RNA that guides the enzyme to a specific spot that scientists want to edit. Once the editing machinery reaches its destination, Cas9 cleaves the DNA. Cells can repair the break by gluing the cut ends back together, or by pasting in another piece of DNA. Scientists have developed variations of the editor that make other changes to DNA without cutting, including one version described in October that performs a previously impossible conversion of one DNA base into another.

Comment: The question of discrimination seems a minor concern considering the unintended mutations that may result. One of the most dangerous ideas being propagated is that CRISPR and related technologies are capable of creating precise, accurate and specific alterations to DNA and that we have control over the consequences for the organism. Yet, a supposedly simple genetic tweak can have wide effects on the organism throughout its lifecycle.
If CRISPR were already precise, accurate and specific there would, for example, be no publications in prominent scientific journals titled "Improving CRISPR-Cas nuclease specificity using truncated guide RNAs." And these would not begin by describing how ordinary CRISPR "can induce mutations at sites that differ by as many as five nucleotides from the intended target," i.e. CRISPR may act at unknown sites in the genome where it is not wanted.


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Ice Cube

Researchers plan expeditions to Larsen C ice shelf to investigate newly exposed marine life

Carolyn Gramling
Science News
Wed, 13 Dec 2017 15:41 UTC
Larsen C ice shelf
© NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY, JOSHUA STEVENS, LANDSAT DATA, USGS
WIDENING GULF: A Delaware-sized iceberg calved when a crack in the Larsen C ice shelf reached the Weddell Sea this year. In this satellite image from September, rifts are visible in the ice and clouds cast a shadow on the new iceberg.
In 2015, glaciologist Daniela Jansen reported that a large rift was rapidly growing across one of the Antarctic Peninsula's ice shelves, known as Larsen C. When the shelf broke, she and colleagues predicted, it would be the largest calving event in decades.


Comment: Larsen C ice shelf crack may portend formation of giant Antarctic iceberg


It was. In July, a Delaware-sized iceberg split off from Larsen C (SN: 8/5/17, p. 6). And researchers knew practically the moment it happened.

After Jansen's 2015 paper, a U.K.-led group called Project MIDAS began keeping close track of the rift, aided by new data delivered every six days from a pair of European polar-orbiting satellites known as Sentinel-1. Jansen, of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, and glaciologist Adrian Luckman of Swansea University in Wales were among the MIDAS team members who reported their observations on the team's blog.

To the scientists' surprise, the news media, perhaps anticipating a climate change moment, began to track the trackers. When interviewed, the researchers repeatedly noted that ice shelves calve naturally, and that any link between the new rift and climate change is complicated at best. But the crescendo of public interest still rose, particularly during the spring and summer of 2017 as the final break loomed.
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Galaxy

Astronomers discover 7 exoplanets roughly the size of Earth

Lisa Grossman
Science News
Wed, 13 Dec 2017 15:35 UTC
TRAPPIST-1
© JPL-CALTECH/NASA
SEVEN IN ONE GO: The small, cool star TRAPPIST-1, illustrated here, hosts a bevy of Earth-sized planets. There could be many more stars like it worth studying.
Discoveries of planets around distant stars have become almost routine. But finding seven exoplanets in one go is something special. In February, a team of planet seekers announced that a small, cool star some 39 light-years away, TRAPPIST-1, hosts the most Earth-sized exoplanets yet found in one place: seven roughly Earth-sized worlds, at least three of which might host liquid water (SN: 3/18/17, p. 6).

These worlds instantly became top priorities in the search for life outside the solar system. "TRAPPIST-1 is on everybody's wish list," says exoplanet astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger of Cornell University. But the planets and their dim star have also stoked a raging debate about what makes a planet habitable in the first place.

Comment: See also:

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Info

Quantum memory with record-breaking capacity


University of Warsaw
Fri, 15 Dec 2017 14:16 UTC
Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw
© UW Physics, Mateusz Mazelanik
The emerging domain of parallelized quantum information processing opens up new possibilities for precise measurements, communication and imaging. Precise control of multiple stored photons allows efficient handling of this subtle information in large amounts. In the Quantum Memories Laboratory at Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw a group of laser-cooled atoms has been used as a memory which can store simultaneously up to 665 quantum states of light. The experimental results have been published in a prestigious Nature Communications journal.

Every information processing task requires a memory. As any classical computer cannot exist without a RAM memory, quantum computer could not be built without a quantum memory. Quantum memory is a device capable of storage and on demand retrieval of quantum states. The key parameter of such memory is its capacity, in other words the number of qubits (quantum bits) which the memory can effectively process. Simultaneous operation on many qubits is a key to efficient quantum parallel computation, providing new possibilities in the fields on imaging or communication.

Regardless of significant efforts, the on demand generation of many photons remains a key challenge for many experimental groups dealing with quantum information. For a recently widely-used method of multiplexing many single-photon emitters into one network the complexity of experimental systems grows unfavorably with its advantages. Using a quantum memory on the other hand one can generate a group of a dozen photons within seconds rather than years. Among many methods of encoding information about single photons in a quantum memory the spatial multiplexing aided by a single-photon sensitive camera stands out as an effective way to obtain high capacity at low cost.
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