Human baby brains are wired to hear the call of the lemur

NBC News.com

Nidhi Subbaraman

Sebastien Bozon / AFP / Getty Images

When human babies are 3 months old, they pay attention to lemur calls as well as human voices - but the attentiveness to a lemur call fades away by the time they're 6 months old.

Infants respond to the voices of their doting parents — but it's not just human voices that hold them spellbound. In what may be a hallmark of our ancestry, human brains begin life hard-wired to hear the calls of non-human primates, an ability that fades away after just a few months. 

Past studies with infants have shown that deep cognitive wheels are set turning as they listen to human speech. Now researchers have found that sounds from the blue-eyed Madagascar lemur engage their attention, too, in ways that artificial sounds don't.

"The link is sufficiently broad to include the call of this adorable lemur," Sandra Waxman, professor of cognitive psychology at Northwestern University and a co-author on the new study, told NBC News. "The fact that there's this precocious link between language and thought ... it's just hands-down amazing."  

In the first months of childhood, "twin engines of development" — nature and nurture — are at work, Waxman explained. Babies are born sensitive to primate sounds, even from non-humans. When they grow older, they no longer pay attention to the non-human sounds. It's the human voices that stay relevant in their lives. 

'Candy to a baby's ears'Waxman and colleagues studied how 72 infants between the ages of 3 months and 6 months responded to human, lemur and artificial sounds. The babies listened to high-pitched baby talk — "It's like candy to a baby's ears," Waxman said — and similarly high-pitched lemur calls. They also heard human speech played backward, and mechanical tones. 

The difference was clear. "They were doing some much fancier cognitive dancing during the lemur and human vocalization than in the case of backward speech or tones," Waxman explained. 

Babies can't answer questions verbally, and it will be years before they can fill out multiple-choice surveys. So for psychologists, the gaze of babies — where they look, and for how long — is a tried-and-true way of indicating whether they're engaged. 

Project on Child Development/Sandra Waxman/Northwestern University

A 3-month-old at Sandra Waxman's lab at Northwestern University gazes at a blue dinosaur projected on the screen (inset) in front of her.

In the tests conducted by Waxman and her colleagues, 3- and 4-month-olds were shown a series of eight similar shapes — all dinosaurs — projected on a screen in front of them. In the background, one of the four kinds of sounds would play on a loop. Then they were shown an image of a ninth dinosaur, placed next to a dissimilar image shaped like a fish.

"If the baby has noticed what's common about the objects, they're going to prefer this as one over the other," Waxman explained.

The babies who were trained on the first eight images while they listened to the speech played backward or the mechanical tones didn't master the categorization task as easily as they did when they heard the human or lemur sounds. That indicates that the babies were less engaged in the task while they were listening to the artificial sounds. 

The babies who were 6 months old exhibited a different trend: They seemed receptive to the human voices, but not to the lemur calls. That suggests that they lost their sensitivity to the non-human primate sounds because they were hearing human voices all the time. 

Having established that babies can be sensitive to the lemur sounds, Waxman and her colleagues are working on refining their understanding of the qualities of lemur calls and human voices that attract an infant's attention, and finding out what other kinds of sounds — primate or otherwise — can bring out a similar response. 

Meanwhile, a second study at Waxman's lab is investigating whether babies can retain their ability to engage with lemur calls and human voices, if their parents play them the lemur calls at bedtime every day.

Scientists grow a miniature artificial human liver

COSMOS magazine

derrenbrown.co.uk

A miniature artificial human liver has been grown by British scientists in a major medical breakthrough this week.

LONDON: A miniature artificial human liver has been grown by British scientists in a major medical breakthrough this week.

The organ, which is about the size of a thumbnail, was grown using stem cells in blood taken from umbilical cords.

It is hoped such mini-livers could be used to test drugs – reducing the need for animal experiments – to help repair damaged livers and eventually to produce entire organs for lifesaving transplants.

Colin McGuckin, a professor specialising in regenerative medicine, made the breakthrough with Nico Forraz at Newcastle University in northeast England.

While other scientists have created liver cells, the Newcastle team are the first to create sizeable sections of tissue from stem cells from the umbilical cord.

The pair extracted blood from the umbilical cords of newborn babies. They were then placed in a ‘bioreactor’ developed by the U.S. space agency NASA, which mimics the effects of weightlessness. This allowed the cells to multiply more quickly. Chemicals and hormones were then added to encourage the stem cells to turn into liver tissue.

“We take the stem cells from the umbilical cord blood and make small mini-livers,” said McGuckin. “We then give them to pharmaceutical companies and they can use them to test new drugs on.

“When a drug company is developing a new drug it first tests it on human cells and then tests it on animals before beginning trials on humans,” he said.

He added that: “Moving from testing on animals to humans is a massive leap and there is still a risk. But by using the mini-livers we have developed there is no need to test on animals or humans.”

The mini-livers could potentially be used like dialysis machines, buying time for a patient’s liver to repair itself or for doctors to find a replacement liver, according to the researchers.

Professor Ian Gilmore, a liver specialist at the Royal Liverpool Hospital in northwest England, said that the Newcastle team had made a “big ethical leap forward” in not requiring embryos to produce tissue.

“It is exciting because there is a real dearth of treatments available for people with liver disease,” he said.

Exploración sobre la calidad de las investigaciones y la producción científica en Camagüey, Cuba

medigraphic

Betancourt BJA, Fernández FN, Mirabal NM, Losano CJ

[Texto completo - PDF]

RESUMEN

Introducción: existen problemas en la calidad de las investigaciones de salud sobre la cuales se desea tener una perspectiva desde el punto de vista de algunos profesionales de la atención primaria.
Métodos: durante el mes de noviembre de 2011 se realizó una encuesta exploratoria en ocho áreas de salud del municipio de Camagüey. Se procedió a reducir la dimensionalidad de las respuestas mediante la técnica de componentes principales (PCA); se compararon los resultados obtenidos en cada área con la técnica no paramétrica de Kruskal-Wallis. Todos los análisis se realizaron con el programa SPSS 19.
Resultados: se caracterizó a los encuestados y sus respuestas. Las respuestas fueron agrupadas en seis constructos con más del 63 % de la varianza explicada. Los resultados reflejan que los profesionales de la salud de la atención primaria encuestados en el municipio de Camagüey son conformados por personas con bastante experiencia en la actividad. La técnica PCA permitió reducir la dimensionalidad. Los constructos encontrados en todos los casos demostraron afectaciones potenciales a la calidad de las investigaciones y la producción científica.
Conclusiones: las investigaciones necesitan un enfoque transdisciplinar, hay insuficiente conocimiento de estadística e idioma inglés. Se pudo constatar que es insuficiente la divulgación de los esquemas nacionales e internacionales de financiamientos y donaciones para la investigación.

Teaching a robot to anticipate human actions

KurzweilAI

By Amara D. Angelica

“Hey, you spilled my last beer!” “Sorry, Frank, Kinect crashed.”

A robot that anticipates your actions (credit: Robot Learning Lab, Computer Science Department, Cornell University)

Why can’t a robot be like a servant (to paraphrase My Fair Lady)? You know, one who would anticipate your every need — even before you asked?
The folks at the Personal Robotics Lab of Ashutosh Saxena, Cornell assistant professor of computer science have gone and done just that.
When we last (virtually) visited the lab, we learned that the roboticists taught  “hallucinating” robots to arrange your room for you, and before that to pick up after you, These are important robot skills if you’re disabled, for example — or you live in a dorm.
Now they’ve taken the next step: they’ve taught a Cornell robot to foresee a human action, the person’s likely trajectory, and what it needs to do to help the person. Let’s say you’re walking toward a refrigerator carrying something with both hands; the robot could open the door for you (as shown in the video below).
Anticipating human actions
Understanding when and where to open the door (or when and how to pour a beer, also in the video) can be difficult for a robot because of the many variables it encounters while assessing the situation. But the Cornell team has created an elegant solution.

(Left) Robot’s video view. (Next) Heatmap of objects. (Next) Heatmap of trajectories (Right) Robot opening the door (credit: Robot Learning Lab, Computer Science Department, Cornell University).

For starters, the Cornell robot has access to a Microsoft Kinect 3-D camera and a database of 3D videos. The robot identifies the activities it sees, considers what uses are possible with the objects in the scene, and determines how those uses fit with the activities.
It then generates a set of possible trajectories or continuations into the future — such as eating, drinking, cleaning, putting away — and finally chooses the most probable. As the action continues, the robot constantly updates and refines its predictions.
“We extract the general principles of how people behave,” said Ashutosh Saxena, Cornell professor of computer science and co-author of a new study tied to the research. “Drinking coffee is a big activity, but there are several parts to it.” The robot builds a “vocabulary” of such small parts that it can put together in various ways to recognize a variety of big activities, he explained.
In tests, the robot made correct predictions 82 percent of the time when looking one second into the future, 71 percent correct for three seconds, and 57 percent correct for 10 seconds.
“Even though humans are predictable, they are only predictable part of the time,” Saxena said. “The future would be to figure out how the robot plans its action. Right now we are almost hard-coding the responses, but there should be a way for the robot to learn how to respond.”
This is amazing research, getting us closer to the robot butler in Robot & Frank and countless other science-fiction stories.
The research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office, the Alfred E. Sloan Foundation and Microsoft.
Saxena will join Cornell graduate student Hema S. Koppula as they present their research at the International Conference of Machine Learning, June 18–21 in Atlanta, and the Robotics: Science and Systems conference, June 24–28 in Berlin, Germany.

rss Anticipation

Físicos logran entrelazar dos partículas a través del tiempo

www.sciencedirect.com

La Patilla

Un grupo de físicos israelíes acaba de conseguir entrelazar dos fotones que nunca habían coincidido en el tiempo, esto es, que existieron en momentos diferentes. Primero generaron un fotón y midieron su polarización, un procedimiento que destruye la partícula que se quiere medir. Después generaron un segundo fotón, y a pesar de no haber existido al mismo tiempo que el primero, comprobaron que tenía exactamente la polarización opuesta, lo que demuestra que ambos estaban entrelazados. El hallazgo acaba de publicarse en arXiv.org.  abc.es

A pesar de que el experimento parece más propio de la ciencia ficción que de un laboratorio real, no hay que olvidar que en el mundo de la física cuántica, el de las partículas subatómicas, las reglas no son las mismas que en el mundo que nos rodea. De hecho, las leyes de la física clásica, las que gobiernan la realidad que vemos a diario, dejan de funcionar a pequeñísima escala. Allí, en el reino de lo infinitamente pequeño, nuestra percepción y nuestra lógica, basados en la mecánica clásica, sencillamente, no sirven.

A pesar de ello, y por extraño que parezca, la mecánica cuántica no tiene problema alguno con el comportamiento observado por los físicos israelíes en su experimento. El entrelazamiento cuántico, en efecto, no es una propiedad que pueda explicarse con las leyes físicas a las que estamos acostumbrados. Se trata de un estado en el que dos partículas (por ejemplo, dos fotones) entrelazan sus propiedades de forma tal que cualquier cambio que sufra una de ellas es inmediatamente “sentido” por la otra, que reacciona al instante y sin importar cual sea la distancia que las separa.

Y es que las partículas subatómicas, debido a un principio llamado de “superposición cuántica”, pueden existir en cualquier estado teóricamente posible al mismo tiempo. Un fotón, por ejemplo, es capaz de girar horizontal y verticalmente (polarizaciones diferentes) simultáneamente. Solo cuando se efectúa una medición concreta la partícula observada adopta un estado determinado. Y cuando se trata de partículas entrelazadas, como las del experimento, cuando se mide una de las dos y ésta se “congela” en un estado determinado, podemos estar seguros de que la otra ha asumido, en el mismo instante, el estado opuesto. Si medimos un fotón y observamos que tiene una polarización vertical, su “alter ego” tendrá una polarización horizontal.

Relaciones complejas

La técnica usada por los físicos israelíes para entrelazar dos fotones que nunca habían coincidido en el tiempo es bastante compleja. El experimento empezó produciendo dos fotones (que llamaremos 1 y 2) y entrelazándolos. El fotón 1 fue inmediatamente medido, por lo que quedó destruido, aunque no sin fijar antes el estado del fotón 2. Entonces los físicos generaron otra pareja de fotones entrelazados (3 y 4) y enlazaron a su vez el fotón 3 con el “superviviente” de la primera pareja, el fotón 2. Lo cual, por asociación, también entrelazó el fotón 1 (que ya no existía) con el 4. A pesar de que los fotones 1 y 4 no habían coincidido en el tiempo, el estado del 4 era exactamente el opuesto del 1. Es decir, ambos estaban entrelazados.

El entrelazamiento funciona de forma instantánea sin importar cual sea la distancia entre las dos partículas, ya sea de pocos cm. o que ambas se encuentren en extremos opuestos del Universo. Ahora, este experimento ha demostrado que el entrelazamiento no solo existe en el espacio, sino también en el tiempo o, más propiamente dicho, en el espaciotiempo.

Es pronto para decir cuáles podrían ser las aplicaciones prácticas del descubrimiento, aunque su potencial es enorme en el campo de la computación y de las telecomunicaciones. Por ejemplo, en lugar de esperar que una de las dos partículas entrelazadas llegue a su destino a través de una fibra óptica, esta técnica de “dobles parejas” permitiría al emisor manipular sus fotones, y por lo tanto su comunicación, de forma instantánea.

Curse or coincidence? Scientists study Tornado Alley’s past and future

science

National Weather Service

This map shows the track of a tornado on May 3, 1999, in green; and the track of Monday's tornado in red. The similarity of the paths is coincidental, but the larger patterns of storm activity in "Tornado Alley" are due in part to the region's geography.

By Alan Boyle and John Roach, NBC News

Do tornadoes follow well-worn tracks? Where do the deadliest twisters hit? Will climate change make such storms worse? Monday's devastating tornado in Oklahoma raises some questions for which scientists have ready answers, and others that could puzzle them for years to come:
Was this tornado a repeat of a famous twister in 1999?
For a time, Monday's storm followed a track that was similar to the path of a tornado with the fastest wind speed ever recorded, 318 mph (512 kilometers per hour), which occurred on May 3, 1999. That twister was one of 74 tornadoes that touched down in Oklahoma and Kansas in less than 21 hours, according to the National Severe Storms Laboratory. The 1999 outbreak of severe weather caused 46 deaths and nearly $1.5 billion in property damage.
The tracks weren't all that similar, however: Monday's tornado took a more southerly route as it moved east. And there's nothing unique about the area's geography to make it a magnet for super-powerful twisters, according to Bob Henson, a tornado expert with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.
"If there were geographic features, that would tend to cause multiple tornadoes every few years," the meteorologist and writer told NBC News. "Well, why has this been happening only since 1999?"
The similarity in the tracks of these devastating storms is "a good example for how weather events can be clustered in ways that are striking yet ultimately coincidental," Henson said.
A classic example of this phenomenon, he noted, is Codell, Kan., which was hit by tornadoes on the same day — May 20 — in 1916, 1917, and 1918. The third tornado killed 10 people and destroyed a part of the community. "That's a good illustration of how sometimes things like this can just happen in clusters," he said.

NOAA SPC

The purple streaks on this map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Storm Prediction Center stand for tornado tracks from 1950 to 2011. The dark blotches indicate population densities.

But isn't Tornado Alley more prone to deadly twisters?
On a wider scale, the geography of America's midsection makes it more prone to tornadoes than any other region on Earth. That's because the Rocky Mountains tend to impede the eastward flow of moist air, while the Great Plains allow frigid Arctic air to stream southward from Canada and meet up with warm, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico. It's the collision of that warm and cold air that breeds powerful twisters.
"Tornado Alley" generally refers to the region centered in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and points north, where tornadoes are most frequent — but multiple studies indicate that the deadliest twisters occur to the east, in a region that's come to be known as "Dixie Alley." The reasons for that have to do with geography and demographics as well as meteorology in the southeastern United States: Storms tend to move faster, and they're more likely to strike at night. There are more trees and other obstructions to raise havoc. Population densities are generally higher, and the region has many manufactured homes that lack basements in which to take shelter.
The United States has the highest incidence of tornadoes, with an average of more than 1,000 every year, according to the National Climatic Data Center. But other regions of the world have twisters as well. Canada is No. 2 with about 100 per year, followed by northern Europe, western Asia, Bangladesh, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, China, South Africa and Argentina. Britain has more tornadoes than any other country, relative to its land area. "Fortunately, most UK tornadoes are relatively weak," the data center says.
Why do these tornadoes seem to be hitting all of a sudden?
After a relatively quiet start to the tornado season, tornadoes have been erupting from Texas to Minnesota over the past week. A cold front advancing to the east appears to be to blame. That pocket of cold air has run into warm air from the Gulf, causing the warm air to rise and spawning powerful thunderstorms. "It's kind of like the perfect setup," Jeff Weber, a scientist with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, told LiveScience.
The earlier calm was due to the fact that jet stream had been dipping farther south than usual for this time of year. That kept the Gulf's warm, moist air from advancing into Tornado Alley. Now that warm air is pushing northward, and the cold front has moved on to Minnesota and Wisconsin. As a result, the storm system that created Monday's big tornado should soon weaken, Weber said.
Will climate change make tornadoes worse? More frequent?
"The short answer is, we have no idea," Michael Wehner, a climate researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told NBC News. For years, Wehner has been studying the climate models for extreme weather, and he's a lead author for the next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as the federal government's latest national assessment on climate change.
One problem is that the observational record for tornadoes has not been uniform over time. "It has a bias to it, because more people are living where tornadoes occur, and more people are out looking for them," Wehner said. That contributes to the perception that tornadoes are happening more frequently than they used to.

The other big problem is that current climate models don't have the resolution that's needed to simulate the localized, violent activity of a tornado. Currently, global models are built up from atmospheric interactions on a scale of 100 kilometers (62 miles). Improvements in computer power could soon bring that down to a scale of 25 kilometers (16 miles). That should make it possible for scientists to simulate the weather phenomena that give rise to tornadoes, but not the tornadoes themselves, Wehner said.
On a larger scale, extreme weather events are expected to become more frequent in a warmer world, Wehner said. "The metric that I like to look at is the daily amount of rain for a storm that happens once every 20 years," he said. "That storm, in a much warmer world, would happen more frequently." For example, if the world follows a "business-as-usual" scenario, he projects that the average temperature would rise 11 degrees Fahrenheit (6 degrees Celsius) by the end of the century, and that a once-in-20-years rainstorm would come around every five to 10 years on average.
That doesn't necessarily mean tornadoes would be more frequent, however. In fact, the current projection calls for wetter spring weather in the northern U.S., and drier weather in the Southwest — with Tornado Alley right in the middle. "There's some evidence that there might not be a change" in the character of a tornado season, Wehner observed.
Wehner may sound a bit apologetic about the lack of clear answers in the short term, but in the long term, he's optimistic. "The reason I'm optimistic that we can get somewhere on this is that supercomputing technology is driving this very hard," he said. "We're just getting into the sweet spot for these kinds of issues, with the largest mainframes that money can buy."

ESTUDIO DEL SEDIMENTO SUPERFICIAL DEL LECHO MARINO FRENTE A LA COSTA NOROCCIDENTAL DE CUBA, EN EL ESTRECHO DE LA FLORIDA

Texto completo en PDF >>

Oldest water on Earth found deep underground

Science

B. Sherwood Lollar et al.

A scientist takes a sample of water from a mine deep
 underground in Ontario, Canada. The water turned 
out to be 2.6 billion years old, the oldest known
 water on Earth.

By Charles Q. Choi
LiveScience
A pocket of water some 2.6 billion years old — the most ancient pocket of water known by far, older even than the dawn of multicellular life — has now been discovered in a mine 2 miles below the Earth's surface.
The finding, announced in the May 16 issue of the journal Nature, raises the tantalizing possibility that ancient life might be found deep underground not only within Earth, but in similar oases that may exist on Mars, the scientists who studied the water said.
Geoscientist Barbara Sherwood Lollar at the University of Toronto and her colleagues have investigated deep mines across the world since the 1980s. Water can flow into fractures in rocks and become isolated deep in the crust for many years, serving as a time capsule of what their environments were like at the time they were sealed off.
In gold mines in South Africa 1.7 miles (2.8 kilometers) deep, the scientists previously discovered microbes could survive in pockets of waterisolated for tens of millions of years. These reservoirs were many times saltier than seawater, "and had chemistry in many ways similar to hydrothermal vents on the bottom of the ocean, full of dissolved hydrogen and other chemicals capable of supporting life," Sherwood Lollar said. [Strangest Places Where Life Is Found on Earth]
To see what other ancient pockets of water might exist, Sherwood Lollar and her colleagues investigated copper and zinc mines near the city of Timmins in Ontario, Canada. "As the prices of copper, zinc and gold have gone up, mines now go deeper, which has helped our search for long-isolated reservoirs of water hidden underground," Sherwood Lollar said.
'Mind-blowing' find"Sometimes we went down in cages — they're not called elevators underground — that dropped us to the levels we wanted to go," Sherwood Lollar told OurAmazingPlanet. "Other times, we went down ramp mines, which have curling spiral roadways, so we could actually drive all the way down."
The scientists analyzed water they found 2 miles (2.4 km) deep. They focused on noble gases such as helium, neon, argon and xenon. Past studies analyzing bubbles of air trapped within ancient rocks found that these rare gases could occur in distinct ratios linked with certain eras of Earth's history. As such, by analyzing the ratios of noble gases seen in this water, the researchers could deduce the age of the water.
The scientists discovered the fluids were trapped in the rocks between 1.5 billion and 2.64 billion years ago.
"It was absolutely mind-blowing," Sherwood Lollar said. "These weren't tens of millions of years old like we might have expected, or even hundreds of millions of years old. They were billions of years old."
The site was formed by geological activity similar to that seen in hydrothermal vents. "We walked along what used to be ocean floor 2.7 billion years ago," Sherwood Lollar said. "You could still see some of the same pillow lava structures now seen on the bottom of the ocean."
Signs of life?This ancient water poured out of the boreholes the team drilled in the mine at the rate of nearly a half-gallon (2 liters) per minute. It remains uncertain precisely how large this reservoir of water is.
"This is an extremely important question and one that we want to pursue in our future work," Sherwood Lollar said. "We also want to see if there are habitable reservoirs of similar age around the world."
Sherwood Lollar emphasized they have not yet found any signs of life in the water from Timmins. "We're working on that right now," she said. "It'd be fascinating to us if we did, since it'd push back the frontiers of how long life could survive in isolation."
And the implications of such a finding would extend beyond the extremes of life on Earth.
"Finding life in this energy-rich water is especially exciting if one thinks of Mars, where there might be water of similar age and mineralogy under the surface," Sherwood Lollar said.
If any life once arose on Mars billions of years ago as it did on Earth, "then it is likely in the subsurface," Sherwood Lollar said. "If we find the water in Timmins can support life, maybe the same might hold true for Mars as well."

Sheep gets metal heart made with rocket science in China

ITN

78,000 People Apply for One-Way Trip to Mars

By Time.com/ Ollie John

www.dailymail.co.uk

An ambitious project to establish a human colony on Mars has attracted applications from tens of thousands of would-be astronauts, just two weeks after applications opened.

The mission, a private venture by the Dutch non-profit organization Mars One, aims to send a crew to the Red Planet in 2022 – and, due to the physiological change in the human body after a stay on Mars, there’d be no coming back. That hasn’t deterred people, though: so far, over 78,000 people have applied to become one of Mars’ first immigrants (the company is expecting 500,000 applicants by the time applications close on August 31). “This is turning out to be the most desired job in history,” says Bas Lansdorp, co-founder of Mars One.

(MORE: Asteroid in a Bag: NASA’s Long, Strange Trip) 

Day-to-day life on Mars will be no picnic: The organization says that the daily routine on the planet would involve construction work on the colony (installing greenhouses, for example), maintenance of the settlement’s systems and research into Mars’ climate and geological history–all in an inhospitable environment with unbreathable air and an average temperature in the planet’s mid-latitudes of around -58 degrees Farenheit.

But Mars One says it is not looking for applicants with specific skills, such as a science degree, that might be useful during an interplanetary posting. Instead, they are looking for people who “have a deep sense of purpose, willingness to build and maintain healthy relationships, the capacity for self-reflection and ability to trust.” They also want volunteers who are “resilient, adaptable, curious, creative and resourceful.” Candidates will receive a minimum of eight years training before leaving Earth, the company says.

(MORE: Dirt Found on Mars! Why the Red Planet Makes Us Crazy)

“Gone are the days when bravery and the number of hours flying a supersonic jet were the top criteria for selection. Now, we are more concerned with how well each astronaut works and lives with the others–and for a lifetime of challenges ahead,” said Norbert Kraft, a former Senior Research Associate at NASA and Chief Medical Director for Mars One in a statement published on Mars One’s website.

Candidates hailing from over 120 countries (although the vast majority are from the U.S.) uploaded a video to Mars One’s website explaining why they’re suitable for the mission. Kyle, a 21-year-old grocery store clerk from the U.S., says he wants to be “an explorer and pioneer at the forefront of history.” Steven, a 43-year-old American who works in electronics, has even higher hopes for the mission: “I would like to go to Mars… to discover new life,” he says.

In addition to people skills, successful applicants must be good fundraisers too: Mars One plans to raise much of the mission’s $6 billion estimated cost through a reality TV show following the applicants as they undergo preparations for the one-way trip to Mars. They’ve got a little way to go yet, though: as of April 29, the money raised through donations and merchandise stood at $84,121.

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/05/09/78000-people-apply-for-one-way-trip-to-mars/#ixzz2Soc185i8

Massive solar eruption from the Sun captured in NASA time-lapse video

ITN

A Boy And His Atom: The World's Smallest Movie

IBM

Speed of light may not be constant, physicists say

science

www.news.com.au

By Jesse Emspak, LiveScience contributor

The speed of light is constant, or so textbooks say. But some scientists are exploring the possibility that this cosmic speed limit changes, a consequence of the nature of the vacuum of space.

The definition of the speed of light has some broader implications for fields such as cosmology and astronomy, which assume a stable velocity for light over time. For instance, the speed of light comes up when measuring the fine structure constant (alpha), which defines the strength of the electromagnetic force. And a varying light speed would change the strengths of molecular bonds and the density of nuclear matter itself.

A non-constant speed of light could mean that estimates of the size of the universe might be off. (Unfortunately, it won't necessarily mean we can travel faster than light, because the effects of physics theories such as relativity are a consequence of light's velocity). [ 10 Implications of Faster-Than-Light Travel ]

Two papers, published in the European Physics Journal D in March, attempt to derive the speed of light from the quantum properties of space itself. Both propose somewhat different mechanisms, but the idea is that the speed of light might change as one alters assumptions about how elementary particles interact with radiation. Both treat space as something that isn't empty, but a great big soup of virtual particles that wink in and out of existence in tiny fractions of a second.

Cosmic vacuum and light speedThe first, by lead author Marcel Urban of the Université du Paris-Sud, looks at the cosmic vacuum, which is often assumed to be empty space. The laws of quantum physics, which govern subatomic particles and all things very small,  say that the vacuum of space is actually full of fundamental particles like quarks, called "virtual" particles. These matter particles, which are always paired up with their appropriate antiparticle counterpart, pop into existence and almost immediately collide. When matter and antimatter particles touch, they annihilate each other.

Photons of light, as they fly through space, are captured and re-emitted by these virtual particles. Urban and his colleagues propose that the energies of these particles — specifically the amount of charge they carry — affect the speed of light. Since the amount of energy a particle will have at the time a photon hits it will be essentially random, the effect on how fast photons move should vary too.

As such, the amount of time the light takes to cross a given distance should vary as the square root of that distance, though the effect would be very tiny — on the order of 0.05 femtoseconds for every square meter of vacuum. A femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second. (The speed of light has been measured over the last century to high precision, on the order of parts per billion, so it is pretty clear that the effect has to be small.)

To find this tiny fluctuation, the researchers say, one could measure how light disperses at long distances. Some astronomical phenomena, such as gamma-ray bursts, produce pulses of radiation from far enough away that the fluctuations could be detected. The authors also propose using lasers bounced between mirrors placed about 100 yards apart, with a light beam bouncing between them multiple times, to seek those small changes.

Particle species and light speedThe second paper proposes a different mechanism but comes to the same conclusion that light speed changes. In that case, Gerd Leuchs and Luis Sánchez-Soto, from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Light in Erlangen, Germany, say that the number of species of elementary particle that exist in the universe may be what makes the speed of light what it is.

Leuchs and Sanchez-Soto say that there should be, by their calculations, on the order of 100 "species" of particle that have charges. The current law governing particle physics, the Standard Model, identifies nine: the electron, muon, tauon, the six kinds of quark, photons and the W-boson. [ Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature ]

The charges of all these particles are important to their model, because all of them have charges. A quantity called impedance depends on the sum of those charges. The impedance in turn depends on the permittivity of the vacuum, or how much it resists electric fields, as well as its permeability, or how well it supports magnetic fields. Light waves are made up of both an electric and magnetic wave, so changing those quantities (permittivity and permeability) will change the measured speed of light.

"We have calculated the permittivity and permeability of the vacuum as caused by those ephemeral virtual unstable elementary particles," Soto-Sanchez wrote in an email to LiveScience. "It turns out, however, from such a simple model one can discern that those constants contain essentially equal contributions of the different types of electrically charged particle-antiparticle pairs: both, the ones known and those so far unknown to us."

Both papers say that light interacts with virtual particle-antiparticle pairs. In Leuchs' and Sanchez-Soto's model, the impedance of the vacuum (which would speed up or slow down the speed of light) depends on the density of the particles. The impedance relates to the ratio of electric fields to magnetic fields in light; every light wave is made up of both kinds of field, and its measured value, along with the permittivity of space to magnetic fields, governs the speed of light.

Some scientists are a bit skeptical, though. Jay Wacker, a particle physicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, said he wasn't confident about the mathematical techniques used, and that it seemed in both cases the scientists weren't applying the mathematical tools in the way that most would. "The proper way to do this is with the Feynman diagrams," Wacker said. "It's a very interesting question [the speed of light]," he added, but the methods used in these papers are probably not sufficient to investigate it.

The other issue is that if there really are a lot of other particles beyond what's in the Standard Model, then this theory needs some serious revision. But so far its predictions have been borne out, notably with the discovery of the Higgs boson. This doesn't mean there aren't any more particles to be found — but if they are out there they're above the energies currently achievable with particle accelerators, and therefore pretty heavy, and it's possible that their effects would have shown up elsewhere.

Computer Scientists Suggest New Spin On Origins Of Evolvability

By Eurasia Review

www.sciencedaily.com

Scientists have long observed that species seem to have become increasingly capable of evolving in response to changes in the environment. But computer science researchers now say that the popular explanation of competition to survive in nature may not actually be necessary for evolvability to increase.

In a paper published this week in PLOS ONE, the researchers report that evolvability can increase over generations regardless of whether species are competing for food, habitat or other factors.

Using a simulated model they designed to mimic how organisms evolve, the researchers saw increasing evolvability even without competitive pressure.

“The explanation is that evolvable organisms separate themselves naturally from less evolvable organisms over time simply by becoming increasingly diverse,” said Kenneth O. Stanley, an associate professor at the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Central Florida. He co-wrote the paper about the study along with lead author Joel Lehman, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.

The finding could have implications for the origins of evolvability in many species.

“When new species appear in the future, they are most likely descendants of those that were evolvable in the past,” Lehman said. “The result is that evolvable species accumulate over time even without selective pressure.”

During the simulations, the team’s simulated organisms became more evolvable without any pressure from other organisms out-competing them. The simulations were based on a conceptual algorithm.

“The algorithms used for the simulations are abstractly based on how organisms are evolved, but not on any particular real-life organism,” explained Lehman.

The team’s hypothesis is unique and is in contrast to most popular theories for why evolvability increases.

“An important implication of this result is that traditional selective and adaptive explanations for phenomena such as increasing evolvability deserve more scrutiny and may turn out unnecessary in some cases,” Stanley said.

Stanley is an associate professor at UCF. He has a bachelor’s of science in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin. He serves on the editorial boards of several journals. He has over 70 publications in competitive venues and has secured grants worth more than $1 million. His works in artificial intelligence and evolutionary computation have been cited more than 4,000 times.

Cuba: Intrusión marina en la Cuenca Artemisa [Estudio]

www2.ine.gob.mx

Revistas PUCP

Manuel Núñez Lafitte

Resumen

La intrusión marina es el proceso por el cual el agua de mar desplaza en un acuífero el agua dulce como consecuencia de una reducción sensible de la carga hidráulica, ya sea por acciones naturales o por actividad antrópica.
La intrusión marina tiene lugar principalmente en los acuíferos costeros independientemente a la litología predominante.
En este trabajo se aborda el análisis del escenario que en el abasto de agua subterránea a la Ciudad de La Habana y Provincia Habana produciría la intrusión marina durante la ocurrencias de años secos, simultaneados, con altas explotaciones del acuífero y el no mantenimiento de obras de recarga como es el caso del Dique Sur.
Se cartografía el escenario de peligro que muestra el pronóstico de la penetración expresada en longitud de la cuña de intrusión marina tomando como condiciones de contorno las variables que pueden ser desfavorables por su variación temporal, tales como la precipitación, explotación y abatimiento. Se considera constante el espesor de la lámina de agua dulce.
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Stephen Hawking Says Humans Won't Survive Another 1,000 Years On Earth

Popular Science

By Colin Lecher 

Stephen Hawking Wikimedia Commons

Physicist Stephen Hawking, speaking at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said if humans don't migrate from the planet Earth to colonize other planets, they'll face extinction in 1,000 years. So, phew, we're good, guys. We've got like 900-plus years to just sit on this. That's a relief. [RT]

Ancient mammoth skeleton discovered in Mexico City

itnnews

Synthetic Biology and Conservation Biology Meet

phenomena

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Presentan registro fósil de Cuba

granma

Fósil de lagarto - juventudrebelde.cu

Orfilio Peláez

Tras más de un lustro de investigaciones, especialistas del Museo Nacional de Historia Natural (MNHN) completaron el primer registro de fósiles con dimensiones visibles hallados en Cuba desde el siglo XVIII, resultado que fue presentado ayer en la V Convención Cubana de Ciencias de la Tierra Geociencias 2013, cuya clausura tendrá lugar este viernes.

El doctor Reinaldo Rojas Consuegra, director del MNHN y autor principal del trabajo, explicó a Granma que el compendio recoge toda la información sobre ese temática generada en el país durante el transcurso de más de doscientos años, datos de suma utilidad para conocer el origen de nuestra flora y fauna, los patrones de evolución de las diferentes especies y la abundancia de cada grupo de organismos en los distintos periodos geológicos.

La obra contabiliza un total de 1 200 elementos, donde figuran 986 invertebrados, 178 vertebrados, 55 plantas, y 38 huellas fósiles dejadas por el paso de algún animal, con una importante contribución al conocimiento del patrimonio paleontológico de la nación.

Como señala el doctor Rojas Consuegra, entre los registros más llamativos aparecen los referidos a la presencia en Cuba en épocas pasadas de águilas, ballenas, monos, perezosos, y otros ejemplares de la fauna ya desaparecidos de nuestro entorno.

Además de los aportes mencionados, la compilación constituye una herramienta de uso práctico para la docencia en varios niveles de enseñanza, y contribuye a la formación de una cultura científica.

Con el propósito de promover la divulgación de los resultados de la ciencia, el MNHN muestra en el evento dos recientes productos informáticos en formato digital nombrados Bosques y Anfibios de Cuba, respectivamente.

Obama Names Himself ‘Scientist-in-Chief’

visiontoamerica

At a speech yesterday at the White House to outline a new science initiative, President Barack Obama named himself “Scientist-in-Chief.”

“I’m glad I’ve been promoted Scientist-in-Chief,” Obama said to laughter at the White House. “Given my grades in physics, I’m not sure it’s deserving.  But I hold science in proper esteem, so maybe that gives me a little credit.”

Obama said he brought together a lot of smart people, which would help grow the eocnomy. “Today I’ve invited some of the smartest people in the country, some of the most imaginative and effective researchers in the country — some very smart people to talk about the challenge that I issued in my State of the Union address:  to grow our economy, to create new jobs, to reignite a rising, thriving middle class by investing in one of our core strengths, and that’s American innovation,” said Obama.

Ideas are what power our economy.  It’s what sets us apart.  It’s what America has been all about.  We have been a nation of dreamers and risk-takers; people who see what nobody else sees sooner than anybody else sees it.  We do innovation better than anybody else — and that makes our economy stronger.  When we invest in the best ideas before anybody else does, our businesses and our workers can make the best products and deliver the best services before anybody else.”

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