Science & TechnologyS


Eye 2

Mind control: Cutting edge microscope changes behavior of mice in an instant

Ryan O'Hare
The Daily Mail, UK
Wed, 06 Apr 2016 06:16 UTC
Brain cells
© David Scharf/CorbisScientists at the University of California, Berkeley combined cutting-edge techniques to develop a tool which can zoom in on a patch of brain cells (pictured) and alter their activity using laser light.
In a breakthrough that wouldn't look out of place in a science fiction film, researchers said they have been able to control the minds of living animals by tweaking the activity of their brain cells.

Using a specialised microscope to tweak activity of brain circuits, they were able to control the behaviour of mice, leading to hopes that we could one day selectively stimulate cells in the brain, like hitting keys on a piano.

While mind control may seem like the stuff of dystopian sci-fi nightmares, the team said the findings could provide insight how the different regions of the brain communicate with one another and even shed new light on brain disorders.

The brain is an incredibly complex organ, made up of interconnected clusters of cells which form neural circuits for different functions.

Cells within circuits may fire in response to a given task, but deciphering which combination of on-off signals within the circuits achieves the desired effect has remained unclear.

In experiments with mice, a team at the University of California, Berkeley, combined cutting edge neurobiology techniques to develop a microscope which is able to zoom in on a relatively small patch of thousands of brain cells and alter their activity using laser light. By targeting an area of just a few thousand cells with the tool, they were able to change the electrical signals passed between them, so altering the activity of the animal's brain circuitry.

Comment: Wireless mind control?: New technique allows direct stimulation of neurons

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Robot

Robots make dumb waiters: Chinese restaurants pull the plug on AI servers

Celine Ge
South China Morning Post
Wed, 06 Apr 2016 18:01 UTC
robot chefs
© XinhuaRobots cook dishes at a restaurant, staffed by robot waiters and cooks, in Hefei, the capital of east China's Anhui Province
Employing artificial intelligent robots in Chinese restaurants - an idea that attracted national headlines - has not proved such a smart idea after all, mainland media reports.

A number of restaurant owners have chosen to fire about 10 robots because they were just not clever or sophisticated enough to do their jobs properly, the Xiamen Daily reported.

The plug has been pulled on a number of the robots - employed as chefs and waiters - only a few years after a catering business in the seaport city of Xiamen, in southern Fujian province, scrambled to employ them instead of people, the newspaper said on Tuesday.

Comment: So much for the robot revolution -- at least in this case.

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Sherlock

Genomes from mummies reveal indigenous Americans' first contact with Europeans was more catastrophic than researchers thought

Lizzie Wade
Science
Fri, 01 Apr 2016 15:02 UTC
Llullaillaco maiden
© Johan ReinhardThe Llullaillaco maiden is one of the mummies that contributed their DNA to a new genetic study of ancient Americans.
The earliest Americans have long been shrouded in mystery. For decades, scientists have debated what route they traveled into North America and how long it took for them to spread to every nook and cranny of the New World. Now, a new genetic study traces those ancient populations from their first foray all the way through European contact, which may have been even more cataclysmic for indigenous populations than researchers thought.

"[The study] is confirming a picture that has been emerging" about how and when the first people arrived in the Americas, says Jon Erlandson, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon in Eugene who wasn't involved in the research. "It challenges archaeologists to catch up with the genomics people, because they're creating models for us that need to be tested."

At the heart of the new research is a unique dataset: 92 skeletons and mummies, mostly from the western part of South America. These individuals lived between 8600 to 500 years ago in regions ranging from Mexico to Chile. A team of researchers sequenced each sample's mitochondrial genome, or the genes found in the power plants of a person's cells. Mitochondrial genes are passed down directly from mother to offspring, so the sequences open a window onto the matrilineal heritage of indigenous Americans extending all the way back to their roots in Siberia.
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Key

Researchers find sexual past between modern humans and Neanderthals

Ann Gibbons
Science
Thu, 17 Mar 2016 20:25 UTC
neanderthals humans
© JOE MCNALLYA genetic study uncovers the hidden Neandertals in the family tree of people from Europe and Asia
Only a bit of the DNA coiled inside the cells of Europeans and Asians comes from Neandertals, but those snippets have sparked a flurry of research. In the past few years, researchers have traced them to one or two ancient encounters with our extinct cousins. Now, a report published online in Science this week details a far richer sexual past for modern humans and their archaic cousins, one that played out at multiple times and places over the past 60,000 years.

By developing powerful new statistical methods, an international team has identified how often and on which continents modern humans, Neandertals, and a second kind of archaic human called Denisovans met and mated. The researchers conclude that if you're an East Asian, you have three Neandertals in your family tree; Europeans and South Asians have two, and Melanesians only one. (Africans, whose ancestors did not mate with Neandertals, have none.) Add in two additional liaisons known only from fossil DNA, and the ancestors of modern humans and Neandertals mixed it up at least five times. (Any matings that produced no offspring can't be traced.) Meanwhile, the Denisovans bred at least once with Melanesians. "It was apparently separate events, so not just one single happy party at some point," says evolutionary biologist Alan 
Cooper of the University of Adelaide in Australia, who was not part of the new study.

When researchers first spotted traces of Neandertal nuclear DNA in living people, they assumed that it must have come from a rare mating or two, likely when modern humans left Africa and first pushed into Neandertal territory in western Asia. But since then, the family history of modern humans and their cousins has grown tangled.
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Beaker

Corticospinal injury in animals repaired using stem cells


EurekAlert
Mon, 28 Mar 2016 00:00 UTC
stem cell research
© ALAMY
For first time, researchers show functional benefit in animal model of key motor control system.

Writing in the March 28, 2016 issue of Nature Medicine, researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System, with colleagues in Japan and Wisconsin, report that they have successfully directed stem cell-derived neurons to regenerate lost tissue in damaged corticospinal tracts of rats, resulting in functional benefit.
"The corticospinal projection is the most important motor system in humans," said senior study author Mark Tuszynski, MD, PhD, professor in the UC San Diego School of Medicine Department of Neurosciences and director of the UC San Diego Translational Neuroscience Institute. "It has not been successfully regenerated before. Many have tried, many have failed -- including us, in previous efforts."

"The new thing here was that we used neural stem cells for the first time to determine whether they, unlike any other cell type tested, would support regeneration. And to our surprise, they did."

Comment: Nature Medicine

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HAL9000

Science relies on computer modelling, but what happens when it goes wrong?

Jeremy Gibbons
The Conversation
Thu, 31 Mar 2016 19:58 UTC
earth moon sun
© Kevin Gill/FlickrModelling three bodies interacting with each other is harder than it may seem.
From the transforming discovery of penicillin to the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, science progressed with mind-boggling speed even before there were computers. Much of this is down to the robustness of the scientific method: scientific results are validated by being replicated and extended by other scientists.

But the way we do science is changing - we now rely increasingly on complex computer models to understand nature. And it turns out that these models can be nearly impossible to reproduce - meaning an important touchstone of science is being challenged. So what are the real-world repercussions of this change and what can we do about it?

Pre-modern science - known as "natural philosophy" - was empirical. Empirical science uses past observations to make predictions about the future, which may then be tested. Tycho Brahe, a 16th-century Danish astronomer, managed to make accurate and comprehensive observations of the heavens in this way.

Tycho Brahe’s observatory in Denmark
© Willem Blaeu/wikimedia Drawing of Tycho Brahe’s observatory in Denmark.
Modern science, however, is theoretical. Theoretical science also makes predictions, but it derives them from mathematical models rather than from prior observations. Think of Isaac Newton's laws of motion, such as the inverse square law of gravitation.

Comment: The theoretical approach to trying and testing pervades our society to the point where people are no longer able to see the truth of something based on empirical evidence, instead falling back on what they believe is or is not possible.

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Moon

Researcher links mass extinctions to 'Planet X'

Bob Whitby
Phys.org
Wed, 30 Mar 2016 19:35 UTC
Solar System
© NasaSolar System
Periodic mass extinctions on Earth, as indicated in the global fossil record, could be linked to a suspected ninth planet, according to research published by a faculty member of the University of Arkansas Department of Mathematical Sciences.

Daniel Whitmire, a retired professor of astrophysics now working as a math instructor, published findings in the January issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that the as yet undiscovered "Planet X" triggers comet showers linked to mass extinctions on Earth at intervals of approximately 27 million years.

Though scientists have been looking for Planet X for 100 years, the possibility that it's real got a big boost recently when researchers from Caltech inferred its existence based on orbital anomalies seen in objects in the Kuiper Belt, a disc-shaped region of comets and other larger bodies beyond Neptune. If the Caltech researchers are correct, Planet X is about 10 times the mass of Earth and could currently be up to 1,000 times more distant from the sun.

Comment: Something wicked this way comes. For more on extinction cycles and mystery objects in our solar system (with a slightly different, and more comprehensive explanation than the one provided in this article), check out SOTT editor Pierre Lescaudron's book Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection.

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Family

Animal study shows that having cooperative social skills enhances mental abilities

Virginia Morrell
Science
Fri, 01 Apr 2016 09:00 UTC
animal puzzle experiment, animal social skills
Using tools doesn't make humans, dolphins, and crows smart. Rather, it's the stress and challenge of living with others—recognizing friend from foe, calculating who to deceive and who to befriend—that led these and other social creatures to evolve their cognitive skills. That's the gist of the social intelligence hypothesis, an idea that's been around since 1966. But does having to remember whose lice need picking actually improve other mental abilities, like figuring out how to open a locked box with a hunk of meat inside? A new study of four carnivores—two social and two solitary species—suggests that it does.

"They've taken an important issue and tested it in a simple but novel way," says Richard Byrne, an evolutionary psychologist at The University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the study. "The results are clear: The cognitive benefit from being a social carnivore does transfer" to a mental ability that has nothing to do with being social, he says.

Other researchers think the results aren't as clear-cut. "It is important and a valuable stepping stone in our quest to understand how intelligence evolved, but like all studies, it is one piece of a larger puzzle," says Sarah Benson-Amram, a zoologist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, whose recent comparative study of 39 species of carnivores reached the opposite conclusion.
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Eye 1

Futurizon: Home security for a Minority Report world

Kevin Samson
Activist Post
Mon, 04 Apr 2016 15:01 UTC
surveillance city
Home security is big business the world over, and is destined to become more so as an increasingly disarmed population will be encouraged to turn over their protection to the corporate State.

A new report commissioned by the United States' largest home security firm, ADT, offers a preview of a future that makes today's security methods seem like the Stone Age by comparison. And it could arrive in as little as ten years' time.

Most people have become acclimated to the following seemingly disparate technologies that are becoming part of everyday life: drones, surveillance cameras, biometric identification, and smart technology for the home. While people have become more aware of how government has argued for the use of these systems to combat the ever-present threat of terrorism, they have not imagined how this will eventually trickle down to a common consumer experience, nor would they probably expect a full synthesis to be available at their fingertips.
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Cassiopaea

Mysterious, new quantum state of matter discovered


Science Daily
Mon, 04 Apr 2016 19:38 UTC
spin liquid
© University of CambridgeThe excitation of a spin liquid on a honeycomb lattice with neutrons.
An international team of researchers have found evidence of a mysterious new state of matter, first predicted 40 years ago, in a real material. This state, known as a quantum spin liquid, causes electrons -- thought to be indivisible building blocks of nature -- to break into pieces.

The researchers, including physicists from the University of Cambridge, measured the first signatures of these fractional particles, known as Majorana fermions, in a two-dimensional material with a structure similar to graphene. Their experimental results successfully matched with one of the main theoretical models for a quantum spin liquid, known as a Kitaev model. The results are reported in the journal Nature Materials.
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