neuroscience

Coming on the heels of my blog post Clearing up confusion: The amygdala is not the same as the reptile brain & it's probably not reserved for fear is a news release from Association of Psychological Sciences with more information which I hope will continue the cleaning up of the amygdala's reputation in the media. And clear up its role...

What a great week!

I managed to finish the basic seating structure completely, now only awaiting ergonomic foam build up and coating. But, even better Claus Nørregaard and I managed to perform the first two tests of the drogue separation system for space capsule Tycho Deep Space.

If you have no idea what the drogue separation system is, you better read this previous blog post before proceeding. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/top-dome-and-drogue-chute-jettison-system/

This system was designed one late night after work by myself and Claus after a couple of old nasty beers and was based on previous wonderful experiences with thin alu-sheets which hold the parachutes of the old spacecraft Tycho Brahe-1. In general, the idea is to have 3 fragile points holding the lid of the new space capsule, containing the drogue, which will break during induced pressure. So, no matter the amount of fragile alu-plates holding the lid or the amount of nitrocellulose, providing the pressure, the system should work. Bang. Lid off. Drogue out.

And it did…

We rigged the top lid, holding the drogue, to a rope preventing self destruction or damage to the spacecraft when deployed from the spacecraft. Claus brutally drilled holes for the igniter cable through various parts of the capsule which we will close later on.

Underneath the top-lid we placed nitrocellulose and the actual drogue. In each of the 3 openings where the lid will be bolted to the spacecraft we placed alu-plated. 2 plates in each opening for test 1 and 3 for test 2.

The bolts where tightened using a regular Copenhagen Suborbitals method. This time it was: until your fingers give up and then a little more with a wrench before the alu-plates became deformed. I do not want to rely on accurate measurement on such adjustments. If it works the “sloppy” way it will always work. As long as your design are made for this you are GO.

The test can be seen in the video below.

After performing a couple of tests like these you always get back home from work a little high. Somehow it is the climax of any development period. You have worked hard for a long time preparing for this, building the hardware really not knowing if it is a good idea or not. The minutes before the test everyone is very excited. Will you blow up the entire space capsule? Will you create a hole in the ceiling or get knocked out yourself by a flying top dome from a space capsule. Many questions which can only be answered by letting someone push the button… KABOOM..

Test 1 was really right on the spot. More than we expected. The lid was lifted off the space capsule with an even pressure and the 3 attachments point using alu-plated where beautifully deformed the way we predicted. The second test was less great but would still work. The main difference was that the nitrocellulose was formed as a ball which always becomes a joker. If you do this the explosion and pressure has a tendency to move to one certain direction instead of 360 degrees which is pretty clear in the test2-part of the video.

Coming test will include: adding more alu-plates and identify by brute force (crowbar) how much the lid is actually attached the top of the space capsule. More lid detonations using more nitro preferably placed above the drogue chute instead of underneath.

I have a great feeling about this system and it is only a matter of fine tuning and small adjustments. I will bet one beer with all the readers that the drogue will be deployed from the capsule. Whatever happens after deployment is not for betting yet..

Ad Astra Kristian von Bengtson

By Matthew Francis, Ars Technica

For a variety of obvious reasons, it’s impossible to reproduce the exact environment in which galaxies form. The lack of direct experimental tests for a the models astrophysicists use creates a disconnect between what astronomers observe and theoretical work. However, that barrier is being broken down by a combination of high-powered lasers and a new understanding of how lab-scale experiments can be related to vastly larger systems such as galaxies.

Researchers at the Laboratoire pour l’Utilisation de Lasers Intenses (LULI), along with colleagues at various universities, have successfully simulated the magnetic fields that form in early galaxies. Naively, there seems to be no correspondence between the experiment and the real astrophysical system. The lab set-up is very small, works on a very short time frame, and uses carbon rods and lasers; the real environment for galaxy formation is clouds of gas and dark matter, and the time-scale is hundreds of millions of years. Nevertheless, a magnetic field strength (along with other effects) has been observed in the lab that corresponds to that experienced by early protogalaxies.

In galaxy formation models, a gravitational nucleus is formed out of cold dark matter. Ordinary matter in the form of gas collects around the nucleus and, as it collapses, it heats up. The relatively rapid gravitational collapse sends shock waves through the gas, blowing some of it away from the protogalaxy, but driving star formation in the process. (A shock wave is a wave that travels faster than the speed of sound in a material, as with a sonic boom.)

Because this formation is happening on a large physical scale (since galaxies are on the scale of tens or hundreds of thousands of light-years across), some parts of the protogalaxy will be more dense than others, which means the shock waves will be unevenly distributed. The ionizing effect of the shocks strips atoms of their electrons; the accelerating charged particles then produce magnetic fields. This process is known as the Biermann battery.

Numerical simulations and comparison with observational data bear out the Biermann battery model, but how to test it in the laboratory? The solution is to use a series of physical analogies. For clouds of gas, the researchers substitute a carbon rod immersed in low pressure helium. Instead of gravitational collapse to drive the shock waves, they use intense short bursts of laser light.

The rod is 0.5 millimeters in diameter, and it is subjected to either one or two laser pulses, each of which are about 0.4 millimeters wide and that last about 1.5 nanoseconds. The combination of a relatively wide laser beam and very high energy sends shock waves out from the carbon rod into the gas. The both the strength and direction of the magnetic field can be measured in three dimensions using induction coils.

When the laser strikes the carbon rod, the rod expands dramatically and ionizes the gas, sending hot electrons in a wave outward. The shock wave is not perfectly spherical, which agrees with galaxy formation scenarios. That’s quite important, as perfectly spherical shock waves do not produce magnetic fields, according to standard models.The magnetic induction coils, placed at two different distances from the blast center, were able to measure the evolution of the wave shape as it dissipates.

The magnetic field is produced directly at the wave front, so it is strongest when the shock passes the detector, and weakens after that. (The researchers also noted a second peak in the magnetic field, when the material blasted off the carbon rod reaches the detector, which has no analog in astrophysical systems.) The entire experiment occurs over a period of a few nanoseconds, but high-resolution instruments are able to track the shock waves and confirm their correlation with the magnetic field peaks.

The researchers looked at two different gas pressures inside the helium, and compared both to the results generated without helium. The model predicts that the helium is the source of the electrons, which themselves produce the magnetic fields; as expected, the experiment with no helium gas did not produce the strong magnetic fields. The lower-pressure trials generated slightly higher magnetic fields, again to be expected since higher pressure means higher density of gas, which slows the shock wave formation.

Relating the experimental results back to astronomy involves dramatic rescaling. The time-frame goes from a few nanoseconds in the lab to approximately 700 million years for gravitational collapse, and the relatively high magnetic field strength in the lab (from the large number of electrons in a small space) subsequently becomes much smaller. By using standard scaling formulas, the magnetic fields observed correspond to each other—a dramatic confirmation that non-spherical shock waves during galaxy formation are indeed the source of the galactic magnetic fields we’ve observed.

Image: A shockwave in models (top) and one from the experiment (bottom). (Ravasio [LULI], A. Pelka [LULI], J. Meinecke and C. Murphy [Oxford], F. Miniati [ETH])

Source: Ars Technica

Citation: “Generation of scaled protogalactic seed magnetic fields in laser-produced shock waves.” By G. Gregori, A. Ravasio, C. D. Murphy, K. Schaar, A. Baird, A. R. Bell, A. Benuzzi-Mounaix, R. Bingham, C. Constantin, R. P. Drake, M. Edwards, E. T. Everson, C. D. Gregory, Y. Kuramitsu, W. Lau, J. Mithen, C. Niemann, H.-S. Park, B. A. Remington, B. Reville, A. P. L. Robinson, D. D. Ryutov, Y. Sakawa, S. Yang, N. C. Woolsey, M. Koenig and F. Miniati. Nature, Vol. 481, Pg. 480-483. Published online Jan. 25, 2012. DOI: 10.1038/nature10747

Democrat and Republican voters' views on touchstone issues are not as strongly polarised as they assume – but mistrustful activists may often swing elections

By Kate Shaw, Ars Technica

If you ever sit back and wonder what it might have been like to live in the late Pleistocene, you’re not alone. That’s right about when humans emerged from a severe population bottleneck and began to expand globally. But, apparently, life back then might not have been too different than how we live today (that is, without the cars, the written language, and of course, the smartphone). In this week’s Nature, a group of researchers suggest that we share many social characteristics with humans that lived in the late Pleistocene, and that these ancient humans may have paved the way for us to cooperate with each other.

Modern human social networks share several features, whether they operate within a group of schoolchildren in San Francisco or a community of millworkers in Bulgaria. The number of social ties a person has, the probability that two of a person’s friends are also friends, and the inclination for similar people to be connected are all very regular across groups of people living very different lives in far-flung places.

So, the researchers asked, are these traits universal to all groups of humans, or are they merely byproducts of our modern world? They also wanted to understand the social network traits that allowed cooperation to develop in ancient communities.

Of course, the researchers couldn’t poll a group of ancient humans, so they had to find a community living today that has a lifestyle that closely resembles those of people who might have lived 130,000 years ago. They chose the Hadza, a group of hunter-gatherers that live in Tanzania and are very insulated from industrialization and other modern influences. The Hadza community functions much like ancient hunter-gatherer groups did, by cooperating and sharing resources like food and child care. Hadza society is organized into camps, which are taken up and abandoned regularly; the makeup of each camp also changes often, with individuals leaving one camp to join another.

The researchers visited 17 Hadza camps and surveyed 205 adults. First, they looked at individuals’ donations of honey sticks to other community members. They also asked questions like, “With whom would you like to live after this camp ends?” From the answers, the researchers constructed a model of the Hadza social network.

Many features of the hunter-gatherer network are very similar to those of modern, industrialized communities. Those who live farther away from each other are less likely to name each other as friends. Individuals who name more friends are also named more frequently by others, even among people they did not claim as their friends. People who resemble each other in some physical way tend to be connected as well; for Hadza people, similarity in age, body fat, and handgrip strength increases the likelihood of friendship.

There are also several features of the Hadza social network that may facilitate extensive cooperation. People that cooperate (in this case, by donating more honey sticks) are connected to other cooperators, while non-cooperators tend to be connected to each other. This type of clustering allows for cooperators to benefit from others’ large donations and increase in the population.

Evolutionary biologists have predicted that, for cooperation to evolve and spread, there should be more variance in cooperative behavior between groups than within groups. This is another example of clustering, and it allows for differences in the productivity and fitness of groups with different cooperation levels. And indeed, in Hadza society, there is more variance in cooperation between different camps than within camps.

From these results, two things are clear; first, that many of the universal characteristics of modern social networks also hold true for the Hadza, suggesting that these traits may have also governed the social networks of ancient humans. Second, several social features that have been predicted to facilitate the evolution and spread of cooperation are present in Hadza communities.

Clearly, ancient societies likely differed from the Hadza in many ways, but this community of hunter-gatherers may be as close as we can now get to the structure and characteristics of extinct human communities. Cooperation is one of the most heavily researched, yet poorly understood aspects of human life, and this research gives us insight into the type of community in which this phenomenon could have evolved and spread.

Image: A member of the Hadza identifies her social network for researchers. (Coren Apicella)

Source: Ars Technica

Citation: “Social networks and cooperation in hunter-gatherers.” By Coren L. Apicella, Frank W. Marlowe, James H. Fowler and Nicholas A. Christakis. Nature, Vol. 481, Pg. 497-501. Published online Jan. 25, 2012. DOI: 10.1038/nature10736

Insights from brain science are finally coming into the classroom with a method based on seeing patterns, finds Peter Aldhous

I pass on this contribution from Rose and Markus as their answer to this year's annual question from Edge.org (What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?):

"I think, therefore I am." Cogito ergo sum. Remember this elegant and deep idea from René Descartes' Principles of Philosophy? The fact that a person is contemplating whether she exists, Descartes argued, is proof that she, indeed, actually does exist. With this single statement, Descartes knit together two central ideas of Western philosophy: 1) thinking is powerful, and 2) individuals play a big role in creating their own I's—that is, their psyches, minds, souls, or selves. Most of us learn "the cogito" at some point during our formal education. Yet far fewer of us study an equally deep and elegant idea from social psychology: Other people's thinking likewise powerfully shapes the I's that we are. Indeed, in many situations, other people's thinking has a bigger impact on our own thoughts, feelings, and actions than do the thoughts we conjure while philosophizing alone. In other words, much of the time, "You think, therefore I am." For better and for worse. An everyday instance of how your thinking affects other people's being is the Pygmalion effect. Psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson captured this effect in a classic 1963 study. After giving an IQ test to elementary school students, the researchers told the teachers which students would be "academic spurters" because of their allegedly high IQs. In reality, these students' IQs were no higher than those of the "normal" students. At the end of the school year, the researchers found that the "spurters'" had attained better grades and higher IQs than the "normals." The reason? Teachers had expected more from the spurters, and thus given them more time, attention, and care. And the conclusion? Expect more from students, and get better results. A less sanguine example of how much our thoughts affect other people's I's is stereotype threat. Stereotypes are clouds of attitudes, beliefs, and expectations that follow around a group of people. A stereotype in the air over African Americans is that they are bad at school. Women labor under the stereotype that they suck at math. As social psychologist Claude Steele and others have demonstrated in hundreds of studies, when researchers conjure these stereotypes—even subtly, by, say, asking people to write down their race or gender before taking a test—students from the stereotyped groups score lower than the stereotype-free group. But when researchers do not mention other people's negative views, the stereotyped groups meet or even exceed their competition. The researchers show that students under stereotype threat are so anxious about confirming the stereotype that they choke on the test. With repeated failures, they seek their fortunes in other domains. In this tragic way, other people's thoughts deform the I's of promising students. As the planet gets smaller and hotter, knowing that "You think, therefore I am" could help us more readily understand how we affect our neighbours and how our neighbours affect us. Not acknowledging how much we impact each other, in contrast, could lead us to repeat the same mistakes.

By Elsa Youngsteadt, ScienceNOW

With their keen vision and deadly-accurate pounce, jumping spiders are the cats of the invertebrate world. For decades, scientists have puzzled over how the spiders’ miniature nervous systems manage such sophisticated perception and hunting behavior. A new study of Adanson’s jumping spider (Hasarius adansoni) fills in one key ingredient: an unusual form of depth perception.

Like all jumping spiders, the Adanson’s spider has eight eyes. The two big ones, front and center on the spider’s “face,” have the sharpest vision. They include a lens that projects an image onto the retina—the light-sensitive tissue at the back of the eye. That much is common in animal vision, but the jumping spider’s retina takes things a step further: It consists of not one but four distinct layers of light-sensitive cells. Biologists weren’t sure what all those layers were for, and research in the 1980s made them even more enigmatic. Studies showed that whenever an object is focused on the base layer, it is out of focus on the next layer up—which would seem to make the spider’s vision blurrier rather than sharper.

That led to a “long-standing mystery,” says Duane Harland, a biologist who studies spider vision at AgResearch in Lincoln, New Zealand, and who was not involved in the new study. “What’s the point of having a retina that’s out of focus?” The answer, it turns out, is that having two versions of the same scene—one crisp and one fuzzy—helps spiders gauge the distance to objects like fruit flies and other prey.

A team of researchers led by biologists Akihisa Terakita, Mitsumasa Koyanagi, and Takashi Nagata of Osaka City University in Japan reached this conclusion after playing a clever trick on the spider’s eyes. First, they used a combination of gene expression studies, electrophysiology, and other methods to determine that the bottom two layers of the spider’s retina were the most sensitive to green light. Those two layers also responded weakly to red. The spiders are red-green colorblind, though, so to them, Harland says, a bright red object would look the same as a dim green one.

To test the spiders’ depth perception, Terakita’s team scooped up four Adanson’s spiders from around campus. They dabbed black paint on each spider’s six secondary eyes to make sure they were only testing depth perception in the two main eyes. Then, inside a tall plastic dish, each spider pounced—or tried to pounce—on several roaming fruit flies under green light or under red light. In the green light, they almost always snatched the flies with a single leap. But under red light, they fell short—sometimes by almost a centimeter, the team reports today in Science. Their jumps covered, on average, only 90% of the actual distance to the target fly.

That color difference was telling. In either lighting, a jumping spider’s eye will focus a sharp image of a fly on the first layer of the retina. But, because the lens at the front of the eye bends green light more sharply than red, the image on the second layer turns out fuzzier in green light. Since the less-blurry red images tricked the spiders into thinking that objects were closer than they really were, the experiment suggests that the spiders uses the fuzziness of that secondary image to judge distance. (Ordinarily, the spiders don’t get confused in nature because their sensitivity to the green wavelengths in sunlight overwhelms any input from red.)

Marie Herberstein, a behavioral ecologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, is convinced that the spiders gain a sense of depth by comparing the clear and fuzzy images projected on the different layers of their complicated retinas. The study makes a “watertight case,” she says.

The results not only explain the usefulness of an out-of-focus retina, Harland says, they also provide an exciting example of how half-centimeter-long animals with brains smaller than those of house flies still manage to gather and act on complex visual information. The next step, he adds, will be figuring out how their eyes and brains actually compare those clear and fuzzy images to get a sense of distance.

This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.

Image: Thomas Shahan/Flickr

A year ago, electronic textbook publishers turned down David Johnston’s big idea: the first interactive marine science textbook.

Johnston, who runs a marine biology lab at Duke University, wanted the digital tome to show undergraduate students what his scientific field has to offer. But e-book publishers said the subject matter was too niche and the requested features too expensive to make financial sense.

“When we approached them, they essentially told us we were too small,” Johnston said. Frustrated by the experience, Johnston set out to create open-source software to publish the book himself.

“We are not going after the biology 101 iPad textbook. We are not trying to build the digital textbook for chemistry,” Johnston said. “We’ve created a simple tool for specialized subjects where there isn’t a textbook, and knowledge advances quickly. Being an open-source effort gives academics the flexibility they need.”

The first interactive marine science textbook for the iPad is called Cachalot (French for “sperm whale”). It’s a free, app-based book that covers the latest science of marine megafauna like whales, dolphins and seals with expert-contributed text, images and open-access studies. Through a digital publication system called FLOW, the book also offers students note-taking tools, Twitter integration, Wolfram|Alpha search and even National Geographic “critter cam” videos.

FLOW isn’t the first or most feature-rich publication tool, nor is Cachalot the slickest interactive textbook on the market (a market in which Apple just announced its interest). But Johnston’s title is an easy-to-update, “good-enough” product that didn’t require millions of dollars and years of effort to create and manage. A cadre of Duke computer science graduates, in fact, built the platform in one semester on a $5,000 budget.

Johnston and his collaborators hope to get FLOW serving interactive textbooks like Cachalot to Android tablets by fall. “Our real hope in the next few years is to make this a truly cross-platform tool,” Johnston said. “Theoretically, you could access your science textbook and notes from any device. Even your web browser.”

Printed textbooks first landed in American student laps during the late 1700s. Since then they’ve become ubiquitous. It was only last year, however, that digital-only textbooks began showing up for sale.

Scientific data on digital and printed textbooks’ comparative impacts on learning is lacking, but the digital revolution is well underway. Apple’s iPads, Amazon’s Kindles and Google Android-powered devices continue to flood the market and drive down tablet computer prices.

“Kids are now growing up with these things,” Johnston said. “There’s no turning back.”

Apple’s Jan. 19 iBook announcement brought all-digital interactive textbooks like E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth into the public spotlight. The move was more of a strategy to open up and own a tricky marketplace, however, than to create its products. The grunt work of developing software and digital textbooks was left to other companies.

“Digital publishing is orders of magnitude more complicated than print publishing. It’s really freakin’ hard to build this kind of content well,” said Matt MacInnis, founder and CEO of digital publishing startup Inkling.

Developing interactive features, dynamic text, and smooth displays of high-quality photography, video and audio all adds up, he said, to “an incredible fixed cost on the order of millions of dollars.” Making textbooks on Inkling doesn’t necessarily cost clients that much — rates vary according to the customer’s size — but it’s still a fairly intensive undertaking.

Duke University’s open-source effort represents a departure from Inkling and other commercial ventures. It sacrifices a wide offering of interactive features, monolithic downloads and wow-factor in exchange for simplicity, speed and flexibility. As new scientific knowledge enters a field, a leading academic could make a quick edit in FLOW to instantly and seamlessly update a student’s textbook.

As important as high-quality content is, Johnston sees the software’s open-source aspect as a crucial component of its future.

“You need only look at the power and success of WordPress to understand how far open-source can take you,” said Tom McMurray, president and CEO of Marine Ventures Foundation, a conservation organization that plans to support FLOW’s continued development.

Johnston and McMurray hope to succeed where free, collaborative “Wikibooks” textbook efforts have floundered. Those invited the public at large to contribute; Johnston and McMurray seek expert contributions, and the final text is rigorously edited and peer-reviewed. The process not only provides students with the most current knowledge on a topic, but gives contributors incentive in the form of items on their academic resume.

“Scientists are often measured by their publications, and few systems allow for citable book chapters,” Johnston said. “Cachalot and future books will be peer-reviewed, so this becomes legitimate component of a [curriculum vitae].”

McMurray and Johnston plan to develop FLOW into a commercial business that offers help to universities, government agencies and NGOs looking to develop textbooks and instructional materials. But both acknowledged the difficulty of competing in a tough market, as did Inkling’s MacInnis.

“These guys are building an incredible proof of concept, something that serves us all in the pursuit of digital publishing by showing people what’s possible,” said MacInnis. “But academic projects tend not to make great business projects. It remains to be seen what happens here.”

Image: Screen capture from Cachalot, an interactive digital textbook powered by a student-created system called FLOW. (David Johnston/Cachalot)

Much as tablet computers went mainstream in the iPad’s wake, Apple’s latest educational project heralds an age of tablet-based schoolbooks.

That, at least, is the hope and hype surrounding iBooks textbooks, launched Jan. 19 at a promotional gala held in the Guggenheim Museum and advertised in terms as glowing as an iPad’s screen.

In coming years, schools worldwide will grapple with whether to adopt tablet-based materials, on the iPad or on other platforms. They’ll consider many factors — including cost, intellectual property issues and logistics — that may ultimately prove as important as the textbooks’ contents. But as learning is the ultimate purpose, the question remains: Will kids really learn more and better on tablets than existing media?

That’s far from clear now, and the reality may prove less revolutionary than the hardware.

“Is there any real learning advantage from electronic textbooks? Probably not,”said Ron Owston, director of the Institute for Research in Learning Technologies at Canada’s York University. “It will just be more up-to-date learning.”

Richard Mayer, a University of California, Santa Barbara educational psychologist and author of Multimedia Learning, was slightly more optimistic. “Media don’t cause learning. Instructional methods cause learning,” he said. “Given that idea, it’s possible that some media enable instructional methods more easily than others.”

So far, just one pilot study has compared children learning the same material with and without iPads. It was conducted by Apple and textbook manufacturer Houghton Mifflin, which reported a 20 percent improvement in test scores among students using Houghton Mifflin’s new algebra iPad textbook at a middle school in Riverside, California.

The study’s methodology, however, was limited: The iPad and control groups were randomly picked, but not necessarily equal in ability, and important measures of comparison were not included in the resulting report. As currently written, it probably wouldn’t pass peer review, and Houghton Mifflin calls it a positive but inconclusive data point.

More data points come from recent history and the introduction of other educational technologies, particularly the computer — not because iPads and computers offer the same experience, but because certain themes are likely to recur.

Computers were supposed to be an educationally revolutionary technology, but actual research on computer-aided learning paints a surprisingly complicated picture (.pdf). Some studies found a link between using computers and improved school performance; others found no connection. What seemed to matter most was the environment in which computers were used.

In perhaps the most thorough review ever conducted of technology and academic performance, education policy expert and McGraw-Hill research director Harold Wenglinsky found that socioeconomic status — and all the real-world factors that signifies, from parental involvement to teacher quality to domestic stress — mediate technology’s effects. Given equal access to computers, affluent students benefited more than poor students, a digital divide of effect rather than access.

The experience of the One Child Per Laptop program in Birmingham, Alabama is an important cautionary tale: In an ambitious and radical move to improve education through technology, laptops were distributed to more than 15,000 students and teachers, but with little attention paid to how they were used. Lacking a defined plan and trained teachers, many students barely use the machines.

Once a scientist has finished her research and published a paper, where is that data stored?

Three of the panelists at Science Online New York City (SONYC)’s event last night, “Thinking Digital: Giving your research more reach (and making sure others can find it),” are figuring out answers to this question.

Carol Feltes, Rockefeller University’s head librarian, comes from a business background. In a for-profit setting, there are clear policies and procedures for data management, retention, and removal. But at Rockefeller, each lab head is responsible for his or her data—there is no overarching policy for data management.

The library encourages lab heads to store data on its DSpace, “a managed, digital repository designed to archive, preserve and make accessible the scholarly works authored by The Rockefeller University faculty, staff and students.” So far, only six labs have started using the open-access repository. “Unless they absolutely need it, we can’t sell it,” Feltes said.

There are also data storage solutions outside institutional settings. The new repository Figshare invites researchers to post research data, both publically and privately, under a creative commons license (materials can used with proper attribution). Figshare developer Mark Hahnel finished his Ph.D. in September, and during the process realized that most of his research would never be seen outside of his lab group—much of it was negative, or simply didn’t fit into the larger research picture. He wanted to share and get credit for all his research, and found that existing online places to store and share data were too difficult to use. Thus, Figshare was born. Hahnel hopes that the visible metrics on the site, tracking page views, shares, and citations, will encourage people to post their research.

Efforts are also underway to make published literature available. One such undertaking is the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), a consortium of 12 libraries digitizing all published biodiversity literature. To date, said Cathy Norton, library scholar at BHL and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library, 32 million pages—or 6.5 percent of the literature—has been scanned. Much of that material predates 1923, and is no longer under copyright. In addition, publishers have given the project materials to scan.

But once these materials are available, how can people find them? Rare and old works do not have DOIs or ISBNs, and digitizers must add metadata and discoverability tools. The next step, said Norton, it to contextualize data, providing a story regarding what the collection is all about.

Clearly, research tools are changing as more information becomes available. And, if used well, this could change the speed of science. As Feltes said, “People begin to realize that with greater access to a greater variety [of data], the pace of knowledge generation increases. Having data available accelerates the pace at which problems are solved and disparate disciplines are stitched together.”

--Johanna Goldberg

A key feature of human and animal brains is that they are adaptive; they are able to change their structure and function based on input from the environment and on the potential associations, or consequences, of that input. To learn more about such neural adaptability, researchers have explored the brains of insects and identified a mechanism by which the connections in their brain change to form new and specific memories of smells.

We have received many excellent questions regarding our upcoming online course How to Be Your Own Brain Fitness Coach in 2012 (March 2012); let us answer the most common ones below.

Question: Who has registered to participate so far?

Answer: 79 individuals, representing a fascinating diversity of backgrounds. We have health and medical professionals, educators, business executives, traders, consultants, coaches, software engineers, therapists,  retired and unemployed people, and even one self-described “Mom/ Manager of Own Household”.

Question: Is this a train-the-trainer? are you offering CME/ CEUs?

Answer: Nope. This is a course designed for a well-educated general audience (which of course includes interested professionals). Let us explain the inception of the course: Alvaro Fernandez, the main course instructor, has been teaching a similar course at UC-Berkeley Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. By offering this course online we want to engage everyone who is interested in learning “how to be their own brain fitness coach”, no matter their occupation, geography or age. This is nei­ther an over­sim­pli­fied self-help course, nor a medical/ pro­fes­sional con­tin­u­ing edu­ca­tion one. Aris­to­tle is quoted as say­ing, “Virtue is the mean between two extremes,” and we intend to ensure a vir­tu­ous learning expe­ri­ence, think­ing of it as the course that any­one in our team would love to take for our own ben­e­fit. We will issue a Cer­tifi­cate of Atten­dance to those inter­ested, but we grant no CME/CEU units.

Question: I have already read your book The SharpBrains Guide to Brain Fitness (May 2009; 182 pages). Is it still worthy to attend the course?

Answer: The book is indeed a key reference for the course, but the course goes well beyond it both in terms of content and quality of learning experience. Books are an excellent medium to share information, but educational courses are a better medium to ensure true learning and true understanding on how to apply information. Think about the difference between reading a biology book and attending a Biology 101 course.

Question: I cannot participate in the four scheduled live sessions. Can I still get value from the course?

Answer: It may require a bit more effort on your side, but we certainly think so. All live sessions will be recorded for later access, and the online course platform will enable continued interaction among Faculty and Participants throughout March and April. And the weekly activities are designed to be completed on your own.

Question: When will Guest Lecturers participate?

Answer: Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone is scheduled to co-teach the March 7th session on Debunking Brain and Brain Fitness Myths, and Dr. Robert Bilder is scheduled to co-teach the March 14th session on How to Address the Basics.

Question: Are you planning to offer the same course later in the year?

Answer: We have no plans about that yet, but most likely we would wait until 2013. What we are planning now is how to make this course a valuable experience for everyone involved.

If you have more questions, please Contact Us.

To Learn More and Register: please click on How To Be Your Own Brain Fitness Coach in 2012. Early-bird rates are available until next Tuesday, January 31st.

Which? magazine is the UK equivalent of Consumer Reports – an independent magazine primarily focused on product reviews and providing objective information to the consumer. They recently conducted an investigation of nutritional therapists, with scandalous (although not surprising) results.

This kind of expose is becoming more common, and that is a very good thing. The concept is very simple – just present as a typical client off the street and ask practitioners to do what they do every day, give their professional advice.

This is a good real-world assessment of what a profession is like. When they know they are in a public forum they try to put their best foot forward, and the more savvy members will know to pretend to be moderate and evidence-based. But when they do not think anyone is looking, they are more likely to represent what they are really about. And that’s what matters, of course – what they actually do in practice.

In this case they asked five investigators to pose as patients and consult three nutritional therapists each. They found:

Our expert panel concluded that visiting a nutritional therapist wasn’t worth the money – and in some cases could have actually endangered the health of the researcher. Six of the fifteen consultations were rated as ‘dangerous fails’.

Of the remaining visits, eight were rated as ‘fails’ and only one was graded as a ‘borderline pass’. Our experts were disappointed by the advice given by therapists and concerned at their poor knowledge of the body and how it works.

That’s 40% rated as dangerous fails, 53% regular fails, and 7% borderline pass. Those kind of numbers represent a broken industry. Of course, this is a study of only 15 therapists, but it is highly unlikely (assuming no cherry picking or missing data) that the therapists used in the study are significantly unrepresentative of UK nutritional therapists in general. Perhaps they just happened to hit 15 duds – but it’s unlikely.

They also found:

Of course, there is benefit in following healthy dietary advice, but most of what was provided by the nutritional therapists is freely available on websites such as the NHS site.

Plus, most of the therapists in our investigation recommended quite restrictive diets that excluded several foods (predominantly dairy and wheat) and taking expensive supplements.

If their experience is indeed representative then going to a nutritional therapist in the UK is likely to include wrong or even dangerous advice, recommending a restrictive diet that most people cannot follow, and recommending expensive supplements (and not to get them at chains where they might be cheaper).

Taken together this is a pretty good description of a scam. Some UK nutritional therapists even use iridology (a pure pseudoscience based on iris diagnosis) as a fake diagnostic method to determine which expensive supplements their clients need to purchase.

None of this implies that nutrition itself is not important. Perhaps the best nutritional advice is to have a varied diet with appropriate calorie control and sufficient fruits and vegetables. If you need more specific advice all of the science-based information is freely available on government and academic websites. If you have a serious chronic illness, like diabetes, and require medical nutritional counseling it is best to get this in coordination with your doctor.

There may even be competent independent nutritional therapists out there, but if this study is any indication they are few and far between.

This is all partly due, in my opinion, to attempts on the part of so-called “alternative” medicine proponents to make nutrition alternative. This is more than a bit of historical revisionism, but by trying to pull nutrition into the alternative camp they are encouraging the proliferation of non-science-based nutritional advice.

This is also a good example of what happens when a profession is regulated without a science-based standard. Regulation means nothing if there is no objective transparent standard of quality.

As Edzard Ernst said – regulating nonsense still results in nonsense.

 

Findings published Online First by Archives of Neurology, a JAMA/Archives journal, show that people who keep their brain active throughout their lives with cognitively stimulating activities like reading, writing and playing games seem to have lower levels of the β-amyloid protein, which is the major part of the amyloid plaque in Alzheimer disease...

Population studies suggest that exercise protects against diabetes, cancer, and age related diseases such as Alzheimer's. Work by Congcong He et al. has now shown that at least part of this effect is due to the increased "self-eating" (Autophagy) that cells must do to meet the energy demands of exercise. Autophagy recycles used or flawed membranes and internal cell structures by encircling its target material and then dumping it into a compartment that digests it. It has been shown in animal models to reduce diabetes, cancer, and neuro-degenerative diseases. The He et al. work documents that exercise induces autophagy in the skeletal muscles of mice, which in turn lowers glucose and insulin in the bloodstream. Mutant mice that don't induce more autophagy during exercise didn't show this effect. Further, the exercise induced reversal of diabetes induced by overfeeding mice was observed only the mice who showed a exercise induced increased autophagy. Here is the abstract with more details:

Exercise has beneficial effects on human health, including protection against metabolic disorders such as diabetes. However, the cellular mechanisms underlying these effects are incompletely understood. The lysosomal degradation pathway, autophagy, is an intracellular recycling system that functions during basal conditions in organelle and protein quality control. During stress, increased levels of autophagy permit cells to adapt to changing nutritional and energy demands through protein catabolism. Moreover, in animal models, autophagy protects against diseases such as cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, infections, inflammatory diseases, ageing and insulin resistance. Here we show that acute exercise induces autophagy in skeletal and cardiac muscle of fed mice. To investigate the role of exercise-mediated autophagy in vivo, we generated mutant mice that show normal levels of basal autophagy but are deficient in stimulus (exercise- or starvation)-induced autophagy. These mice (termed BCL2 AAA mice) contain knock-in mutations in BCL2 phosphorylation sites (Thr69Ala, Ser70Ala and Ser84Ala) that prevent stimulus-induced disruption of the BCL2–beclin-1 complex and autophagy activation. BCL2 AAA mice show decreased endurance and altered glucose metabolism during acute exercise, as well as impaired chronic exercise-mediated protection against high-fat-diet-induced glucose intolerance. Thus, exercise induces autophagy, BCL2 is a crucial regulator of exercise- (and starvation)-induced autophagy in vivo, and autophagy induction may contribute to the beneficial metabolic effects of exercise.

Hear answers to that question by listening to this very interesting video from University of California at San Diego and Association of Psychological Sciences. If you have read past posts here about music and conflict resolution, you may guess what is said about music, cooperation, and facilitated interaction in this video. From the Web page of A Conversation About Music,...

New research by Australian scientists reveals that males who are exposed to high levels of testosterone before birth are twice as likely to experience delays in language development compared to females. The research, published in Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, focused on umbilical cord blood to explore the presence of testosterone when the language-related regions of a fetus' brain are undergoing a critical period of growth.