Quantcast
Channel: Popular Science | RSS
Viewing all 20161 articles
Browse latest View live

The Myth Of The Incredible Antique Violin

0
0

Antonio Stradivari
Wikimedia Commons

Even non-musicians might be familiar with the tale of the Stradivariuses, stringed instruments built in the 17th and 18th centuries renowned for their gorgeous tones, supposedly unparalleled, even by today's finest craftsmen. But is that just a romantic, apocryphal idea?

The answer is: yes, probably. Over at Live Sciencethere's a good rundown on how the myth was recently tested. In 2010, researchers pitted the antiques against modern instruments, but the methodology of the experiment was disputed. (It was done in a hotel room. Critics argued a concert hall was the only reasonable venue.) In a more recent study, the same team again had a group of 10 soloists play a set of instruments; modified welders glasses kept the musicians ostensibly blind, and adding wear to the new instruments made them physically indistinguishable from the antiques. The musicians each played 12 instruments, then ranked them. Once they'd picked a favorite, they then attempted to choose between their own instrument, the one they'd chosen as their favorite, and an "alternative favorite"; the "alternative" was was the highest-ranked antique or modern instrument, depending on which type the musician selected as the best.

At the very least, the results proved musicians didn't heavily prefer the old instruments. In fact, just the opposite: six out of 10 musicians picked an old violin as the best, and the new violins were much more likely to appear near the top of musicians' rankings. The musicians consistently rated the older instruments as worse, and couldn't distinguish between old and new at a rate better than chance. 

Not that a Stradivarius or Guarneri isn't wonderful—it's beautiful, finely constructed, itself a work of art only incidentally meant to create other works of art. But, as it turns out, modern instrument makers shouldn't be getting short shrift, either.

[Live Science]









Prozac Alters Prawns' Behavior, Reproduction, Even Their Color

0
0

Amphipods on anti-depressants found their lives brightened, right up until they were eaten.

The idea that tiny amounts of antidepressants present in our rivers and estuaries may be affecting aquatic life is generally met with surprise, sometimes skepticism, or even a degree of humor.

The public were first alerted to pharmaceuticals in the environment in the 1990s through studies which showed that synthetic oestrogens, such as in the contraceptive pill, could feminise male fish, even in incredibly low concentrations of nanograms per liter (ng/L). This led to concerns of a similar effect on male human fertility, although it’s been hard to draw any conclusions.

The idea that even tiny amounts of chemicals might dramatically alter the physiology of fish and other aquatic organisms isn’t that new. Back in the 1980s scientists were aware that concentrations even below 10ng/L of tributyltin or TBT, a compound used in anti-fouling paints for ships' hulls, would cause female dog whelks (a sort of sea snail) to grow a penis. This resulted in catastrophic reproductive failure in females which wiped out snail populations along the world’s coasts, which had knock-on effects on organisms further up and down the food chain.

A more recent example is diclofenac, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug given to lame cattle in India and Pakistan. While considered harmless to mammals, what was not predicted was that vultures preying on dead cattle would suffer catastrophic renal failure, resulting in their populations plunging by 90%.

Some scientists have suggested that reduced vulture populations led to a boom in feral dog populations and an increase in rabies among the human population. Highly publicized, this focused people’s attention on the toxicological impact of human and veterinary drugs on wildlife.

Amphipods on anti-depressants

So what’s the evidence that anti-depressants, now quite commonly prescribed medicines, are affecting aquatic wildlife? After all, studies have found that sewage effluent entering rivers can carry anti-depressants at concentrations up to around 1µg/l (one microgram, equal to 1000ng/L), although in most rivers the concentrations recorded are considerably less at around 10-20ng/L. There is growing evidence that even at these low concentrations of under 100ng/L medicines can cause changes in a wide range of biological functions and behaviours.

For example, many anti-depressants were designed to modulate serotonin. Serotonin is a hormone that is found throughout the animal kingdom and is known to play a role in controlling behavior, growth, metabolism, reproduction, color, and the immune system.

At the Institute of Marine Sciences in the University of Portsmouth we published an article in 2010 that demonstrated that serotonin in amphipods, a crustacean rather like a tiny prawn, was responsible for controlling their preference to seek light or dark areas.

As amphipods high in serotonin preferred light areas, would anti-depressants such as fluoxetine (Prozac) have the same effect? We found that a few weeks' exposure to 10-100ng/L of fluoxetine – about the level found in rivers around urban areas – resulted in a five times greater preference for light.

Many effects on many creatures

A special edition of the journal Aquatic Toxicology has pooled together studies of antidepressants in the aquatic environment. The most striking results suggest that many species, including fish, snails, bivalves, cuttlefish and crustaceans, are affected by anti-depressants even in low concentrations. The observed effects include altered swimming and behaviour patterns, locomotion, immune function, reproduction, feeding and predator behavior through to gene expression – even a physical change of colour. There appears to be considerable variability between the species affected.

Despite these findings however, there is no evidence that these particular pharmaceuticals have the same effects in the wild as all studies to date have been laboratory studies. While it’s relatively easy to determine whether a fish has had past exposure to, for example, an oestrogenic chemical, it’s currently very difficult to determine abnormal behavior from exposure to antidepressants. Others have expressed caution, suggesting that these studies must be repeated at other laboratories and rigorous measurements must be taken on the exposure concentrations used in the laboratory experiments.

There are other factors to consider too: while the crustaceans exposed to serotonin showed a preference for light, some of the species studied also carry parasites which have evolved to alter their host’s serotonin precisely so that they swim in open areas. This makes them more vulnerable to being eaten – the ultimate goal of the parasite, for whom the crustacean is merely an intermediate step towards entering the predator’s body where it completes its lifecycle.

Medicines, medicines, everywhere

This isn’t just about anti-depressants. We consume hundreds of different types of medication every day and they all appear to some extent in sewage effluent. Even the most modern, most costly sewage treatment processes still aren’t able to filter out all chemical contaminants.

The question of “greener” pharmaceuticals that break down more readily into harmless chemicals has been suggested, but this may prove incredibly difficult to achieve given they are formulated specifically to work optimally in the human (or animal) body. Some countries are strongly debating the need for nationaltake-back programs whereby unused medication is collected and appropriately disposed.

I expect the next few years will strengthen the evidence that anti-depressants and other biologically active compounds are pollutants of concern, in which case they will join a long list of chemicals, including industrial pollutants such as sulphur and lead, whose effects on health were scientifically established and regulations passed to protect human and environmental health.

The Conversation

Alex Ford receives funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) & EU Interreg program (PeReNE) to study reproductive and neuro-endocrine disruption in crustaceans.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.








How To Make A More Environmentally Friendly Cow

0
0

photo of a cow wearing a backpack equipped to measure the cow's methane emissions
Measuring A Cow's Methane Production
Marcos Brindicci

Scientists around the world have worked on making buildings, cars and light bulbs more environmentally friendly. What's next? Cows.

Cattle emit methane, a greenhouse gas that's less abundant than carbon dioxide, but, pound for pound, has contributed more to global warming than CO2 over the last 100 years. Methane is often an underappreciated greenhouse gas, but it's been back in the news lately. Late last month, the Obama Administration launched an effort to reduce the U.S.' methane emissions. Just weeks beforehand, fatal, gas-leak-triggered building collapses in New York City reminded the nation that American cities may have thousands such leaks, which contribute to global warming. Worldwide, however, domestic livestock are actually the top source of human-related methane emissions. So researchers have come up with some interesting ideas for making cows less methane-ey. Financial Times recently reported on a few of these efforts, as has Popular Science.

First things first. Apparently, most cow methane doesn't come from cow farts. "Ninety-seven per cent of all the methane gas is released by the front end through burps, not from the back end," Juan Tricarico of the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, a nonprofit research organization, told Financial Times. Tricarico directs a project at his center called Cow of the Future.

So what goes into the cow of the future?

Academic researchers are trying to better understand the microbes that live in the cow digestive system, whence cow methane comes. Such research could reveal the best, least methane-ey diet for cows. Or maybe the cow of the future could take probiotic supplements to boost her gut population of non-methane-producing microbes?

One U.S. company already puts research like that to work. C-Lock of South Dakota sells feeding stations containing supplements, such as basil, that reduce the methane cows produce, Financial Times reports. C-Lock also sells a machine that vacuums up cows' breath and measures its methane content.

In one quirky solution, researchers in Argentina have developed backpacks for cows that collect the cows' gaseous emissions. Theoretically, such gas could be a power source. But collecting cow methane on a large scale is "totally improbable," Jorge Antonio Hilbert, a researcher with Argentina's National Institute of Agricultural Technology, told Financial Times. The backpacks are mainly for measuring cow emissions, as Popular Sciencereported in 2008.

[Financial Times]








A Glowing Ring Powered By Body Heat

0
0

Chris Philpot

Sean Hodgins enjoys ring smithing, a hobby he adopted from his grandpa, and loves building small electronic gadgets. So he combined his passions to make a ring that turns body heat into light. Hodgins milled a two-finger band out of aluminum—an excellent thermal conductor—to cradle a 6-millimeter by 3-millimeter Peltier module and custom circuit board. The Peltier module converts heat flowing from the ring into a small voltage, and the circuit board amplifies the current. For now, cold weather best illuminates an LED on the ring, but Hodgins is designing a new circuit to make it blink brightly at any temperature. 

Approximate time: 150+ hours

Cost: $200 to $250

 

This article originally appeard in the April 2014 issue of Popular Science. 








New Document Security Layer Makes It Easier For Government To Keep Secrets

0
0

Monday morning in National Harbor, Maryland, Popular Science met with BAE Systems Director of Business Development & Intelligence Security John Murphy to discuss SIBA, a new way of keeping and sharing secrets. Unspoken in the interview, which took place at the Sea Air Space expo, was Chelsea Manning, the former Army private first class responsible for leaking hundreds of thousands of secret documents to Wikileaks, but everything about BAE's new SIBA system seems like it is written with her impact in mind.

SIBA stands for “Secure Information Broker for big datA,” and it's a cloud-based information security system made for the military but designed for anywhere that needs to balance dispensing information while keeping some of it secret. At its heart, Murphy explains, it takes a document on the cloud and then lets the original author of that document filter that document in layers of relevance down to the people below.

Here's an example. The Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, New Mexico state police, and the Mexican government are all looking at some dangerous individuals running arms from Las Cruces across the Mexican border. Homeland Security writes the report on the gang, with everything they know about the individuals, including names, pictures, whereabouts. It also includes connections those gang members have to cartels and other groups across the border. When writing the report, DHS chooses to apply three filters. The first shows information that stays within DHS – not everything is relevant for everyone. That's the high security setting, and on the original document it appears highlighted in blue.

The second layer is highlighted in yellow, and that's information important for sharing with the FBI and the Mexican government, but not information the New Mexico state police need to know. When looking at the document, they see everything except the blue parts from the DHS original version.

The third layer is everything highlighted in red. It's the minimal version, and it shows the New Mexico state troopers the pictures they need, the location of who they're looking for, and that's about it. When they get a tip about one of the gang members, they add it to the document, and DHS then decides at what level that information gets shared with everyone else.

Of course, it's not just first responders interested in that information. If a journalist files a Freedom of Information Act request for the Department of Homeland Security's Las Cruces Report, then DHS can create a version of that document with what Murphy called “granular redaction,” limiting what is published down to the specific character, so that the agency retains control over the information. No unsightly blacked-out names, no awkwardly limited paragraphs, just a deceptively clear and excerpted version of the full truth known by the government.

At present, information sharing among agencies, locals, and allies is a tricky process. Part of this is an agency's inclination to hold onto its own information, and the federal government's desire to retain authorship of its own intelligence. Another challenge is that state and local government still need a person with a clearance to access the intelligence. There's also rules about what computers and information systems can access what level of clearance, and finally there's a sanitization process for sharing information further down the chain without revealing too much.

SIBA integrates with Microsoft products Sharepoint, Powerpoint, and Word. It saves one original copy in the cloud for the original author and sends out the filtered versions of that copy over a secure pipeline to each other person accessing the document. Murphy says the original author retains “ultimate version control,” which limits the reach of information that the author doesn't want out. The term BAE uses is “Realtime Human Review.” This, according to Murphy, keeps a person watching the document and the filters, making sure that first responders, say, have new information as it's added while also making sure that they aren't handed extra irrelevant facts. In a lot of ways this seems designed to counter security leaks like the one caused by Chelsea Manning, where a low-level intelligence analyst released hundreds of thousands of government files to Wikileaks.

It could also pose a challenge for journalists working with government information. When documents are declassified under FOIA requests, redacted information is clearly obscured but because it's usually blacked out, the very existence of redaction is visible. A document that can be released while appearing complete doesn't just hide information the government chooses to keep secret, it hides that there were even any secrets in the document the government chose to keep.








Gear For The New Era Of Sports Stats

0
0

Sports have always been about numbers. We obsessively rank and handicap athletes based on averages and percentages. But while we can tally jump shots or backhands, we’ve never been able to fully understand why some are successful and others aren’t. Now manufacturers are releasing equipment embedded with data-gathering capabilities, allowing a first look into the dynamics of any shot. 

By and large, the gear will appear unchanged. The Babolat Play tennis racket, for example, has the same weight (300 grams) and balance as the base Pure Drive model—even with a circuit board in the handle. The difference is the mountain of data the equipment collects, much of which can help players improve. For instance, the app for the 94Fifty basketball may offer advice on how to get more arc on your jump shot.

Fans may benefit too. With a fresh set of data to pore over, they’ll have something new to obsess about. Perhaps they’ll even answer that long-vexing question: Was that incredible shot the result of pure skill or just plain luck?

The New Era Of Sports Stats
Jonathon Kambouris

1) Babolat Play

Sensors inside the racket ($399) monitor swing motion and power; frame vibrations also indicate where shots connect with the racket face. The handle also includes a gyroscope, accelerometer, battery, and Bluetooth radio.

2) 94Fifty Smart Sensor Basketball

The regulation-size ball ($295, est.) tracks metrics including dribble control, shot speed, and basket-entry angle.

3) Kayak Power Meter

One Giant Leap, a New Zealand company, developed the Kayak Power Meter ($999) to record a rower’s cadence. 

This article originally appeared in the April 2014 issue of Popular Science.








This Badger Fits Inside An Osprey

0
0

Phantom Badger
Boeing's Phantom Badger at the Sea Air Space Exposition 2014
Kelsey D. Atherton

Phantom Badger. "Phantom Badger?" Phantom Badger. "Phantom Badger," Phantom Badger, "Phantom Badger." Phantom Badger.

At the Navy League's Sea Air Space Exposition this year in National Harbor, Maryland, there was an unusual craft on display next to Boeing's usual display of aircraft. It was a jeep-like thing, both narrower and longer than expected. Dubbed the "Phantom Badger," it solves a very specific problem: it fits (just barely) inside Boeing's tiltrotor V-22 Ospreys used by Marines and Special Forces. Now when those troops deploy far ahead and into tricky places, they can finally bring a working vehicle with them.

To understand the Badger, first one must understand the Osprey. The V-22 Osprey is a tilt-rotor aircraft. This means that it can land and take off like a helicopter, which greatly expands the number of places it can go. In air, the rotors tilt forward, so it carries troops fast, carrying up to 32 troops or 10,000 pounds of cargo where it needs to be. The problem with the V-22, then, is that it can get into  many places, and few other aircraft can go where it goes. So special forces or Marines operating from Ospreys can only use what Ospreys can carry with them, and for a long time that meant only small vehicles, similar to commercial ATV four-wheelers, were the only ground transportation an Osprey could supply.

The Badger lets troops do more, and gives them a better vehicle for Osprey-accessible areas than they could otherwise get. It can go 80mph on roads, ford up to three feet of water, and the entire back can be converted into a few different versions, depending on the modules available. These include a stretcher rack that can wounded back to an Osprey for evacuation, a machine gun mount, and others. It's not going to be as durable as an MRAP, but at under 8,000 pounds and only 60 inches wide, it can go a lot of places a heavier vehicle can't.

Phantom Badger And Osprey
It's a snug fit.
Boeing

At the exposition, Popular Science spoke with Boeing's Garret Kasper about the Phantom Badger. This isn't exactly the first time Boeing's designed a car, Kasper quipped. "Back in the 1960s we made the lunar rover." Still, land vehicles are relatively new for the company. For the Badger, they collaborated with North Carolina's MSI Defense Solutions. 

On Tuesday, Boeing announced that the U.S. Navy has certified the Phantom Badger for flight onboard military V-22s Ospreys. And at the expo, Kasper shared this: there's "an undisclosed Department of Defense customer" interested in the Badger, and it's not the Marine Corps. That's a truth by omission: the only part of the military outside the Marine Corps that uses V-22 Ospreys are Air Force Special Operations.

 








'Indisputable' Proof Of A New Four-Quark Particle

0
0

photo of a tube in the Large Hadron Collider
Large Hadron Collider
CERN

Using the most powerful particle collider in the world, a research group at CERN has forged a particle made of four quarks, the European organization announced yesterday.

Most particles of matter in the universe today consist of two or three quarks. Over the past decade, however, particle-accelerator projects all over the world have gathered some evidence that a few different kinds of four-quark particles might exist. Physicists give such particles names starting with the letter Z. "These Z particles, you can think of them as a new type of matter," Eric Swanson, a University of Pittsburgh particle physicist who wasn't involved in the CERN research, tells Popular Science.

The Z particles the CERN group found go by the name Z(4430). They're extremely short-lived and exist only in extremely high-energy environments. Physicists think they would have been abundant in the universe a microsecond after the Big Bang, after which they would have fallen apart.

Cosmic rays could make Z(4430) particles, but powerful particle accelerators—like CERN's enormous Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland—are some of the only other places on Earth where they're made. "It's just an incredibly rare process, so where they're really being created is in the LHC in Geneva," Swanson says. The so-called "Large Hadron Collider beauty collaboration" recreated Z(4430) particles by smashing together protons, which are each made of three quarks.

The new CERN data are strong, with a statistical significance of 13.9 sigma. This value is far, far beyond five sigma: the level of statistical significance physicists around the world agree as the cutoff to say discoveries are true. So, the new data help confirm that Z(4430) particles really exist.

CERN's work resolves a once-heated debate. In 2008, the Belle Collaboration announced it saw the world's first evidence of Z(4430) particles, in data from Japan's KEK particle accelerator. Then another group, called BaBar, ran its own experiments in the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. BaBar said their results could be explained by something else—something that didn't involve exotic, four-quark particles.

At a conference, Swanson nabbed Belle and BaBar scientists and asked them to explain their discrepancies. "Then I watched while they had a fight—I mean, an exchange; it was pleasant—about their relative interpretations. I have to admit I left that meeting confused," he says. "So LHCb has come along and broken the tie."

Not all Z particles that groups have discovered are as well-proven—with data from independent groups—as Z(4430) particles. One Z particle that's been well documented is the Zc(3900) particle, which two labs independently announced they'd found last year.

You can read CERN's paper about its new findings on the pre-print physics study server arXiv.

Edited April 10, 2014: A previous version of this story called the newly confirmed particle Z(4330). It is actually Z(4430). I apologize for the error.  Thanks to reader Vinz for the correction!









Parasitic Amoeba Eats People Alive, Bite By Bite

0
0

An amoeba bites
E. histolytica, in green, taking a "bite" out of a human red blood cell, in purple.
Katherine S. Ralston et al / Nature
It used to be thought that the parasite Entamoeba histolytica killed human cells with toxins and only ate them once they were dead--and that during its meals, it would eat cells by engulfing them whole, like other amoebas. But a new study shows that these parasites instead chomp on human cells while they are still alive, taking little bites until the cells die and then moving on. If people were completely rational, we would fear E. histolytica much more than something like sharks, since these tiny amoebae kill as many as 100,000 people every year (and sharks only kill about five to ten people worldwide annually).

“This process of nibbling of cells went unrecognized by everyone in this field, including me, for over a hundred years,” study co-author and infectious disease specialist William Petri of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville told Science. The finding completely changes how scientists think of the parasites, and may lead to new treatments for pathogen, which lives in the gut and infects about 50 million around the world. In certain circumstances they can trigger amoebiasis, a potentially fatal diarrhoeal disease

This habit of chewing bits of live cells in this way and moving on is remarkably strange, and basically unprecedented. "The ingestion of live cell material and the rejection of corpses illuminate a stark contrast to the established model of dead cell clearance in multicellular organisms," the authors wrote in the study, published this week in Nature

The scientists discovered the nibbling after introducing fluorescent material into amoebas and human cells, and observing them in a petri dish in the lab. “It was remarkable to see the amoebae were taking bites,” said microbiologist Katherine Ralston of the University of Virginia. The biting "resembled trogocytosis, a process in which immune cells extract bits of other immune cells, but was unique in that it occurred between a parasite and its host and ultimately caused cell death," Science noted. 

[Science Magazine]








Stick-On Monitoring Patch Moves And Stretches With Skin

0
0

flexible health-monitoring device
Credit: John Rogers

Bracelets or belts that track your activity and vitals may soon be a thing of the past. Engineers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University have produced a health-monitoring device that looks like a Band-Aid. The thin, soft patch can stick to and move with the skin, all while wirelessly sending vital updates to your designated cellphone or computer.

To track physiological signs, you need hard integrated circuit chips, rigid sensors, batteries, and other electronic components. The skin, on the other hand, constantly moves around, so wearable electronics that stick to the surface have long been an engineering challenge.

The research team, led by John A. Rogers of UIUC and Yonggang Huang of Northwestern, has found a way of embedding hard chips inside skin-soft patches that move with the skin. Their findings are published in the April 4 issue of Science.

The chips used in the device are made of silicon with a plastic casing. A thin membrane made of silicone rubber encloses the chips. Within this enclosure, a silicone fluid permeates around the chips. The plastic casing of the chips isolates the active components from the fluid, and the fluid itself is an electrical insulator, so it doesn’t influence the behavior of the devices.

To ensure the device doesn’t break while stretching with the skin, the team used an origami-inspired design in constructing the electrical wiring. Essentially, the wiring is in a folded-up configuration that can unfold in a very controlled yet natural way as the device stretches with the motion of the skin. The crucial part is the unfolding process, as it allows the distances between the chips to change without disrupting the wiring interconnect.

Moving forward, the team hopes to improve the device's ability to cope with overstretching, and to develop biochemical sensors for the device. For example, the ability to sample sweat coming out of the skin and being able to do chemical analysis on that sweat on the spot can open up a whole new range in the realm of health monitoring. Professor Rogers is a co-founder of MC10, an electronics startup company responsible for pursuing commercialization for the device, and he hopes to unveil a commercial product within two years.  

“The body’s a vehicle for doing sophisticated, clinical quality physiological status monitoring,” Professor Rogers said. “The skin is a great window into body processes.” 

Professor Rogers' other engineering work--a pacemaker powered by heartbeats--was featured in our April 2014 Issue

Here is a video demonstration of the device, showing its flexibility. 








A Pacemaker Powered By Heartbeats

0
0

Illustration by Son Of Alan

A pacemaker’s battery needs to be swapped out about every five to eight years, requiring surgery. Engineers are now working on a device that converts the mechanical energy of a beating heart into electrical energy and could last indefinitely. A prototype tested in farm animals has generated a microwatt of power, enough to keep a pacemaker going.

The Parts

A) Flexible polymer holds system in place.

B) Piezoelectric ribbons harvest energy.

C) Rectifier switches current.

D) Micro­battery stores energy.

E ) Leads connect battery to pacemaker.

F) Pacemaker controls heart rhythm.

Source: John A. Rogers, professor of materials science and engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This article originally appeared in the April 2014 issue of Popular Science.








Company Plans To Make Paper Towels And Diapers Out Of Jellyfish

0
0

Jellyfish
Henry Kaiser, National Science Foundation
In many places, like beaches in Israel, there are too many jellyfish, nourished by rising ocean temperatures and acidity. Besides stinging swimmers in that country and worldwide, they can cause other thorny problems, like recently clogging the intake pipes of a Swedish nuclear plant.  One Israeli company took a look at the jellies and decided to not just to do something about them, but to make something from them. Cine'al Ltd. is developing an absorbent material made of jellyfish called hydromash, and which the company claims is many times more absorbent than most types of paper towels. This product could be made into napkins, medical sponges, diapers and, of course, "paper" towels, the company told The Times of Israel. (Maybe they should be called "jelly" towels?)

This material can hold several times its weight in water, and unlike the polymers that currently make up absorbent material in diapers and other products, breaks down in about 30 days. The product owes is absorbent abilities to its cellular structure of jellyfish bodies. “Jellyfish are marine creatures composed of 90 percent water and that live in water," according to Capital Nano, a company funding Cine'al. "Their bodies are formed from material that can absorb high volume of liquids and hold them without disintegrating or dissolving." 

If the company could actually make a biodegradable, economically competitive diaper, that would be huge. In its first year, for example, a single newborn baby produces at least 155 pounds (70 kilograms) of diapers--and most of the products on the market are made of synthetic materials that never really completely break down.

“There are too many jellyfish in the sea, and too many Pampers in landfills," company president Ofer Du-Nour told the Times. "Cine'al may have the ultimate answer to both those issues.”








Australia Declares Homeopathy "Useless"

0
0

Homeopathic Remedies
kh1234567890 via flickr
Australia's main medical group, the National Health and Medical Research Council, has concluded that homeopathy is "useless." The ruling came in the form of a 300-page report, in which doctors and other health professionals reviewed research on homeopathic remedies and found them wanting: “There is no reliable evidence that homoeopathy is effective for treating health conditions," they wrote. As Melbourne's Herald Sun reported

The judgement is likely to influence a crucial government review which is deciding whether the 30 per cent tax rebate for private health insurance coverage ofcomplementary therapies should continue. Australians spend almost $4 billion a year on complementary therapies like vitamins and herbs and almost $10 million on homeopathic remedies.

Homeopathy claims to “let like cure like,” by using diluted forms of the ailment it is treating, the Guardian noted. But in looking at evidence as to whether homeopathic treatments worked on 68 different conditions and diseases, the review concluded that homeopathy worked no better than a placebo, or that there was no reliable evidence to show it was better.

Just how implausible is homeopathy? Check out this Popular Science story that answers that question in detail. Also of interest: A homeopathy company recently recalled some products because they might have contained effective antibiotics.

[Herald Sun]








Facial Expressions Aren't As Universal As Scientists Have Thought

0
0

Two Expressions
Two of the six expressions that were shown to participants in the study ("Happy" and "Disgusted")
Stephen Vedder, courtesy of IASLab

For nearly half a century, social scientists have operated under the assumption that all basic human emotions are universally recognizable. Countless cross-cultural experiments—not to mention a few television shows—have both directly and implicitly referenced the notion that every person on earth expresses facial emotion in the same way. Regardless of cultural context, we can all interpret happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust in the expressions of the people around us. 

This belief has impacted countless studies and our general understanding of how emotions affect our daily lives, and it stemmed largely from the 1972 research of psychologist Paul Ekman. According to research published this month in the journal Emotion, however, it's wrong.

Led by Northeastern University's Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett and her post-doctoral researcher Maria Gendron, the new study shows that facial emotional recognition isn't universal at all, and that previous studies pointing to universal expressions used methods that were highly dependent on context. In reality, a person's ability to correctly register the emotion on another's face hinges entirely on how those emotions are presented.

Skeptical both of the original research methods used to prove the "universality" theory, which involved prompting subjects with emotion words and asking them to label expressions with them, Barrett and Gendron led a team of researchers from Northeastern, the University of Essex, and the University of Namibia in conducting a cross-cultural experiment. Using Americans and members of the Himba ethnic group, a traditional northeast Namibian culture notable for its isolation from almost all Western cultural influence, the tram investigated whether recognition of facial expressions might instead be contextual, and whether subjects' ability to correctly label expressions might hinge entirely on cues from the experimenters.

The Method

Par­tic­i­pants from the Namibian Himba tribe did not rec­og­nize the same emo­tions in facial expres­sions and vocal­iza­tions as Amer­ican par­tic­i­pants.
courtesy Maria Gendron
The way Barrett and Gendron went about proving their theory is disconcertingly simple. Researchers split two participant sets—a group of 68 Americans visiting Boston's Museum of Science, and 54 Himba from two remote villages in Namibia—into two additional groups, a "free sorting" group and an "anchored sorting" group. (the latter meant to replicate the previously accepted Ekman studies, which were initially published in 1971 and required subjects from the Fore people of New Guinea to match a given set of words with corresponding photos).

The researchers then showed subjects 36 photographs of three male and three female African Americans with their faces posed in the six different so-called "universal" emotional expression categories: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and neutral. In each set, the "anchored sorting" group was told those six emotion words and asked to sort the photos according to those categories, while the "free sorting" group was simply asked to sort the 36 photos into piles where each face in the pile is expressing the same emotion. There was no limit on the number of piles the "free sorting" group could create for their photos. Once they had sorted the photos, all participants were then asked to label each pile they had created.

The Results

The data set they produced in no way bolstered an argument for universality. While the anchored sorting groups performed in the way Ekman's findings suggested they would—participants were able to sort according to the words provided to them with almost universal accuracy—the free-sorters were all over the map. Americans used "discrete emotion words" like "anger" and "disgust" to describe their piles, but also used "additional mental state words" like "surprise" and "concern." Meanwhile, the Himba labeled their piles with physical action words, like "laughing" or "looking at something." Free-sorters also did not sort into the six distinct piles that would support the universal recognition theory; instead, the piles varied in number. The only consistency across both groups seemed to be that participants sorted the faces well according to the positivity or negativity of the emotion and level of arousal (the extremity of the emotion).

"By giving people six words and six faces, you're already pre-categorizing, you're pre-loading the choices for the subject—you're [actively] reducing ambiguity," Barrett tells Popular Science. "You're priming a set of emotion categories, providing a conceptual context for the subject, and that's helping their response. So when we provide conceptual context, we get six piles. When we don't, the subject gives you—they don't give you a random sort, they certainly separate positive from negative, and they do better at separating some of the negatives from each other, but it's not a perfect sort, by any means. It's a very noisy sort." In other words, those basic emotions aren't really universally perceived at all—whether or not you've been culturally conditioned to look for them, and whether or not you're given them as options in advance, absolutely matter. (For the record, though humans are pretty lousy at identifying each other's expressions, robots do it really well these days.)

Almost Too Easy

There are literally thousands of experiments that claim emotions are universally perceived from the face.

In actuality, the evidence confirmed by Barrett and Gendron's study has existed for decades. Universality champion Ekman himself conducted several studies around the same time he began getting attention in the late 1960s that used free sorting methods and found little evidence for universality, but those studies, unlike the ones that did find a cross-cultural correlation, were disregarded by peer-reviewed psychology journals of the era. Studies in the years since Ekman's initial experiments have failed to find the correlation to support universality as well; Barrett and Gendron—who also conducted a complementary study, published earlier this year in Psychological Science, that found the same contextual pattern in the way we recognize basic emotion in each other's vocalizations—are simply the first to concretely prove that context matters.

Still, this hasn’t seemed to matter for the countless ways in which the universality argument has been taken for granted in scientific, educational, pop-cultural, and even policy-making contexts. As Barrett and Gendron write, “This view is standard curriculum in introductory psychology, is used by government agencies to train security agents...and is a popular example when social science is communicated to the public (e.g., stories in National Geographic, Radiolab, etc.).” There are literally “thousands of experiments that casually claim that emotions are universally perceived from the face.” It would be impossible to measure the lasting effects of those offhand claims on the scientific and public understanding of emotion, but as more studies like Barrett and Gendron’s begin to emerge, it may be easier to poke holes in the establishments bolstered by those assumptions.

The ease with which this new study was able to invalidate the commonly referenced research about emotion recognition, in addition to the little-acknowledged research that preceded their study, points to chronic concerns about scientific research and how it's shared. Not only does the acceptance that all people feel the same "basic" emotions in the same way and can detect those emotions in others' faces and voices reflect the deeply rooted, mostly unintentional bias inherent in the research models of Western science (the "six basic inherent universal emotions" just so happen to be identified by American scientists, in English, for example); more basically, it reflects the public's preference for accepting essentialist scientific ideas.

"People have a deeply held belief that anger, sadness, fear and so on are biologically basic, that they're naturally occurring, immutable categories, and scientists just haven't looked hard enough for the right brain circuit for each emotion yet," says Barrett, "instead of [considering] the idea that every instance of anger or sadness or fear has a biological basis, but there isn't a one-to- one correspondence between a facial expression and an emotion category. I think [the idea that emotions are contextual] is just too complex for people. It's not the story people are interested in."

The Future of Emotion?

Barrett and Gendron's study—as well as most of the work done at Barrett's Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory, which conducts ongoing research into the basis (or bases, as is more likely) of emotion —posits that the "six discrete emotion categories" idea is a cultural concept created by Westerners.

"We have to understand that an emotion, like anger, is not a physical thing, one physical form with a physical essence," says Barrett. "It's a conceptual category, a heterogeneous population of instances…You feel lots of different angers, and your body does different things in anger; you behave different ways in anger depending on context, and science has to stop treating variability in all these different angers as if it's error, and start treating it as if it's meaningful and important.

And textbooks have to stop saying that there are six universal emotions that are universally experienced and expressed all around the world, because it's not really clear that that's true."








Big Pic: A Prettier Greenhouse For Growing Veggies In Space

0
0

photo of an open plant pillow vegetable-growing structure for space
A Vegetable Production System 'Plant Pillow'
NASA/Bryan Onate

The latest design for growing vegetables in space is a bit prettier than its predecessors. This is a collapsible growth chamber made by Orbital Technologies Corporation in Wisconsin. The lettuces inside live in individual "plant pillows." NASA plans to send the chamber and the plant pillows to the International Space Station on April 14, aboard a SpaceX launch.

The growth chamber is not made of iridescent pink tulle, although it looks that way here. Its sides are pleated white plastic. That means it's able to collapse into a flat shape for travel. Once it reaches the International Space Station, astronauts can open it to use it and stretch it up to a foot and a half in height as the plants inside grow. Astronauts can also push the sides down completely to observe their plants.

The structure comes with red, blue and green LEDs for the plants. Those lights make the white walls look pink in this picture.

Russian cosmonauts have grown a number of crops aboard the International Space Station using a stiff-sided greenhouse with removable trays. This new growing unit will be the largest ever put into space, so astronauts can try growing more and larger vegetables. For the April 14 flight, the veggie pillows will carry romaine lettuce seedlings of the "Outredgeous" variety.

photo of a lettuce seedling growing in a "plant pillow" for space
A 28-Day-Old Outredgeous Lettuce Seedling in a Plant Pillow
NASA/Gioia Massa

[NASA]









Sound Waves Sculpted On Walls And Other Amazing Images From This Week

0
0

Sculpted Waves
Artist Loris Cecchini freezes wave forms on walls with paint and resin. Maybe we can see Sgt. Pepper instead of listening to it.
Loris Cecchini via Visual News








What You Post On Yelp Says More About You Than About The Food

0
0

Crackcakes
OMG these cupcakes are soooooo addictive......
Cookies Cupcakes and Cardio / Youtube
"Like meth, but in a good way." "Seriously, the Bacon Maple is like heroin." "These cupcakes are like crack." 

When people review cheap restaurants in particular on Yelp, they often use drug metaphors, and speak in the language of addiction. This is but one of the interesting findings of a linguistic study of 900,000 restaurant reviews on Yelp.com. The researchers found that these reviews offered a unique look into the human psyche... and how much people love references to drugs and sex (representatives for the sadly snubbed rock 'n roll couldn't be reached for comment). Here are some of the other patterns found, as described by Stanford University

  • Positive reviews of expensive restaurants tended to use metaphors of sex and sensual pleasure, such as "orgasmic pastry" or "seductively seared foie gras." And the words used in those reviews were longer and fancier.
  • Negative reviews were frequently associated with the language of personal trauma and poor customer service: "We waited 10 min. before we even got her attention to order."
  • Women were more likely than men to use drug metaphors to describe their attitudes toward food.
  • The foods most likely to be described using drug metaphors were pizza, burgers, sweets and sushi.

The more expensive the restaurant, the more people's language focused on sex. Words that poppped up with increasing frequency as the price sky-rocketed include erotic, naughty, pornographic, seductive, sinful, and voluptuous. The less expensive the food, the more drug references. With words like addiction, craving, chocoholic, jonesing, and binging. Is everybody deep down just a horny drug addict? That's a rhetorical question. 

Dan Jurafsky et al / First Monday

But Yelp reviews have a darker side. The most surprising thing to study co-author and Stanford researcher Dan Jurafsky "was how strongly the language of negative Yelp reviews resembled the language of people who have been traumatized by tragedies or the deaths of loved ones."

"Negative reviews, especially in expensive restaurants," the researchers wrote, "were more likely to use features previously associated with narratives of trauma: negative emotional vocabulary, a focus on the past actions of third person actors such as waiters, and increased use of references to 'we' and 'us', suggesting that negative reviews function as a means of coping with service–related trauma." 

Well, there you have it. In the case of bad service, it's us vs. them. Unless they are bringing us some lascivious lobster frittatas, amirite?

The study was published this week in the online journal First Monday








Software Shows What Children Will Look Like In 70 Years, With Unprecedented Accuracy

0
0

a series of aging photos created by a computer algorithm from one photo of a three-year-old boy
100 Years of Life, As Extrapolated By Software
You might notice the algorithms were unable to remove the milk mustache from its original reference photo.
U of Washington

Look at a kid under the age of five, and it's hard to imagine what he'll look like in 70 years. But this new piece of software does just that. Check out this series of photos, which compares actual photos of a boy as he grows up (photos on the right) with photos generated by the new aging software, using only the three-year-old picture as a reference (photos on the left):

a series of photos comparing computer-generated aged photos with real photos of the person at different ages
Software-Generated Pictures vs Real Photos
U of Washington

Of course, many computer scientists have tried to make face-aging software before. The umbrella field of getting computers to recognize human faces is a hot topic of research; Facebook recently published some work on getting its "DeepFace" software to recognize people from the side, given only head-on pictures. This new work is based on the largest-yet database of photos for aging software—40,000 pictures of people ages 0 through 100. The new software is also unusual in its ability to create accurate results from photos of very young children.

Software like this would be especially helpful to missing children searches, Seattle TV station KOMO News reports. Right now, expert artists try to help with searches by making drawings of missing kids at their current age. The artists use a combination of photos of the kids, the looks of the kids' older family members, and current knowledge about how faces age. (Scientists already know, for example, that people's faces and noses lengthen as they get older.) The craft of interpolating how a person will have aged is "part art, part science and a little intuition," as one firm describes it.

This new software boosts the science part of that a bit. It's based on measurements of about 1,500 people for every age group, including very narrow age groups for kids, who can change drastically from year to year. The photos came from, well, the internet. In a paper, the software's creators—three researchers from the University of Washington and Google—described how they searched for photos to analyze:

To analyze aging effects we created a large dataset of people at different ages, using Google image search queries like 'Age 25', '1st grade portrait,' and so forth. We additionally drew from science competitions, soccer teams, beauty contests, and other websites that included age/grade information.

Aha, so that's who's been looking at those old photos of you competing in Math Olympiad.

The team wrote algorithms that calculate, based on its database of photos, what's different between photos of people at age X versus photos of people at age Y.  How do face shapes develop between those two ages? How do skin textures change? The algorithms also deal with things like funny facial expressions and weird lighting that might show up in a reference photo. All the software needs is one photo of a child to create a series of images for ages up to 80.

One of the software's creators, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, told KOMO News she contacted the Center for Missing and Exploited Children about her work. But the software isn't ready for crime-fighting yet. The team wants to try to add other things to make it more accurate, including hair color changes and ethnicity-specific data, if that's relevant. (To my untrained eye, the algorithm already appears to work well for people of a few different ethnicities.)

You can see many more age series like the one above in Kemelmacher-Shlizerman and her colleagues' website and paper. They will present the paper at an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers conference in June.








Transforming Helicopter-Truck Hybrid Makes First Flight

0
0

Black Knight Transformer first flight
First Flight Of The Black Knight
Advanced Tactics

Yesterday Advanced Tactics announced the successful first flight of their Black Knight Transformer, a hybrid truck helicopter designed for military missions. In December, the truck completed driving tests. 

One of the more modern features of the transformer, besides being a freaking flying truck, is that pilots can fly it either while sitting inside it, or remotely. For this first test, it obtained an altitude of less than 10 feet off the ground and was remotely piloted. While it's still a long way from entering military service, the successful flight and drive tests mean the concept at least works at a human scale. Its transformation between the two modes is subtle—eight rotors, four on each side, spring out for takeoff, fold in for driving through tighter streets, and tilt forward in the air for faster flight. 

In the future, the Pentagon may want the Black Knight Transformer (or its smaller sibling, the Panther Transformer) to carry and retrieve troops from difficult to reach places. Sometimes flying is the better way to do that, getting the Transformer over canyons and clear of landmines. Once past obstacles, the Transformer can drive out to where it needs to be, letting troops evacuate their wounded right from the site of battle. There are other ways to accomplish this, like trucks carried inside V-22 Ospreys, but the Transformer combines that usefulness into one body, and a remotely pilotable one at that.

Black Knight Transformer hybrid helicopter truck as filmed by a quadcopter
Black Knight In The Air
This is a drone filming a drone. The Transformer here is unmanned, and the picture comes from an unmanned quadcopter, flying even higher.
Advanced Tactics







Four Women Doing Fine After Getting Vagina Implants Made From Their Own Cells

0
0

photo of scaffolding designed to support patients' cells as they grow into an implantable vagina
Biodegradable Scaffolding for the Lab-Grown Vagina
Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center

So. Yes. A team of doctors is reporting that they grew vaginas in a lab and implanted them in four girls who had underdeveloped vaginas and uteruses because of a rare genetic condition. This is the first time anybody has reported growing vaginas in lab for human patients. About seven years after their initial surgeries, the girls are grown up and doing well. Two of the four could theoretically have children, although neither has reported yet she is pregnant, the BBC reports

The vaginas sound wonderfully personalized, as the BBC reports. Doctors took scans of each girl's pelvis, then built biodegradable scaffolds to fit each girl. They took biopsies from each girl, then grew those cells in lab, coaxing muscle cells to grow on the outside of their scaffolds and epithelial cells to grow on the inside of their scaffolds. Annual biopsies since the implants show that the women have normal vaginal walls. The women also report they have normal levels of "desire, arousal, lubrication, orgasm, satisfaction, and painless intercourse," researchers reported in their paper.

The vaginas sound wonderfully personalized.

Relatively few people may need vagina implants in their lives, but the lab-grown organs may also be a harbinger for many more folks. The vaginas are proofs of concepts that show that researchers are able to make a fairly complex organ from scratch, according to the U.K.'s National Health Services. The feat was reported at the same time as a report that surgeons had implanted lab-grown nostrils in five people who had to have nasal cartilage removed because they had skin cancer. You can find both reports in the journal The Lancet.

Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University led the research. We've seen some cool things from his lab in recent years, including urethras grown from patients' own cells, which Atala and his colleagues implanted for five boys. Atala also 3-D printed cells into a hollow kidney shape onstage at the TED conference in 2011. 








Viewing all 20161 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images