Flat Earth Theory: Does it have a scientific leg to stand on?

By:Alexandria Addesso

Although the Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 300s BCE explained in his writings that the Earth was spherical and not flat, most of the world did not come to agreement on this rational until the 1700s. Yet lately, there is in growing popularity a segment of people who currently hold the belief that the world is flat. Being that the scientific findings are constantly influx, is there any grounds for this non-spherical belief?

The most common flat-earth theory states that the Earth is a disc, with the Arctic Circle in the center of it and Antarctica around the rim in the form of a 150-foot-tall ice wall. This is a theory popularized by Orlando Ferguson, a real estate developer, in 1893. While the Earth is believed to be a disc, in this theory the sun and moon are believed to be spherical, thus explaining the Earth's day and night cycle by positing that the sun and moon are wide 32 miles (51 kilometers) and move in circles 3,000 miles (4,828 km) above the plane of the Earth. These celestial spheres illuminate different portions of the Earth in a 24-hour cycle. Yet this theory does not come with experimental evidence to back it up.



On the Flat Earth Society’s website there is a page listing simple experiments done by seven different people that support the theory. Most having to do with the lack of a “bulge” when looking, over 30 miles out into the ocean, with a telescope.

“IF the earth is a globe, and is 24,900 English statute miles in circumference, the surface of all standing water must have a certain degree of convexity--every part must be an arc of a circle,” said Tom Bishop, a flat Earth believer cited on the Flat Earth Society website. “From the summit of any such arc there will exist a curvature or declination of 8 inches in the first statute mile. In the second mile the fall will be 32 inches; in the third mile, 72 inches, or 6 feet, as shown in this chart. Ergo; looking at the opposite beach 30 miles away there should be a bulge of water over 600 feet tall blocking my view. There isn't.”



PBS NewsHour’s website also published an article several years ago about seven DIY experiments that could be down to prove the Earth is indeed spherical. One of the experiments directly challenges Bishop’s findings by simply suggesting that the experimenter watch the sunset, while laying on a beach, on the Pacific coast. If, while laying on your back you see the sun’s rays completely disappear, you will be able to see them again if you simply hop up and stand on your feet, thus justifying the Earth’s curvature.

Everything is to be questioned, even those questioning what is accepted.

Alzheimer’s Disease: Possibly Caused From Haywire Immune System Eating Brain Connections?

By: Alexandria Addesso

Memory loss and absent-mindedness has long been seen as an inevitable flaw that comes with old age. Although there is a slew of medications on the market that are prescribed for those suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, none seem to change it by too large of a margin. This has led scientists to rethink what in particular is the root cause of Alzheimer’s.

New studies done on laboratory test rodents have found that there is a marked loss of synapses, which are a junction between two nerve cells, consisting of a minute gap across which impulses pass by diffusion of a neurotransmitter. Specifically synapses that are located in brain regions that are highly significant and key to memory.



These junctions between nerve cells are where neurotransmitters are released to spark the brain’s electrical activity. Currently, all pharmaceutical drugs on the market for the treatment of Alzheimer’s, focus on eliminating β amyloid, a protein that forms telltale sticky plaques around neurons in people with the disease. But, more β amyloid does not always mean more severe symptoms such as memory loss or poor attention.

Researchers at the University of Virginia, School of Medicine, in Charlottesville found that a protein called ‘C1q’ sets off a series of chemical reactions that ultimately mark a synapse for destruction. After this occurs immune cells called microglia-glial cells derived from mesoderm that function as macrophages (scavengers) in the central nervous system and form part of the reticuloendothelial system, destroy or “eat” the synapse.



“It is beautiful new work brings into light what’s happening in the early stage of the disease,” said one of the researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine neuroscientist Jonathan Kipnis.

These findings could mean that treatment that blocks C1q could be pivotal and highly successful in fighting Alzheimer’s Disease. When researchers gave the laboratory rodent test subjects an antibody to stop the destruction of cells by microglia, synapse loss did not appear. This could also mean a slowing in cognitive decline, but according to Edward Ruthazer, a neuroscientist at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital in Canada, using microglia as such a central role to fight the disease is “still on the controversial side.”

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

Are the Well Read More Likely to Succeed?

By: Alexandria Addesso

With television, movies, and the internet to entertain us many have been reading less and less. So much information can now be attained in small sound bites or social media posts, which often leaves large knowledge filled tomes on the shelf. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, “reading has declined among every group of adult Americans,” and for the first time in American history, “less than half of the United States adult American population is reading literature.” But could this trend be detrimental? How important is reading and how does it affect a person’s chances at achieving success in their lifetime?



Studies done at The New School, a New York City private University found that reading is crucial for socialization especially in children. Researchers also found evidence that literary fiction improves a reader’s capacity to understand what others are thinking and feeling. In one study done by the university and published in Science, participants read non-fiction/nothing, popular fiction, or literary fiction then were tested on their ability to understand other people’s thoughts and emotions. Participants that read non-fiction/nothing showed unimpressive results. When they read excerpts of popular fiction their test results were dually insignificant. But, when they read literary fiction their test results improved vastly and so did their capacity for empathy.

Reading is also the key for those who want to be leaders or chief executive officers (CEO). Reading in general has shown to increases verbal intelligence, making a leader a more adept as well as a more articulate communicator. Being that reading is a form of leisurely recreation, it has been shown to be a good stress reliever which overall leads to a more peaceful work environment. Some very well read successful people include Steve Jobs the founder of Apple, Phil Knight the founder of Nike, and Winston Churchill who won the Nobel Prize for Literature.



Currently about 60 million Americans suffer from some form of a sleep disorder. A lack of sleep can negatively affect a person’s mental, physical, and emotional well-being. Sleep experts often recommend establishing a regular de-stressing routine before bed to calm your mind and ready your body for rest. Reading is one of the top strategies recommended to add to your routine right before going to sleep. Bright lights from electronic devices signal the brain to wake up, whereas reading a book under a dim light can tell your system to do the inverse.

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

Smartphone Usage Linked to Male Infertility

By: Alexandria Addesso

The use of cellular phones, have become so common in our day-to-day lives that the inanimate objects almost become another appendage. Smart phones, the most commonly used type of cellular phones today rely on electromagnetic frequency (EMF) radiation to receive real time messaging. But could this form of frequencies be harmful when they are being transmitted all day?

Being that cell phones are portable, people tend to have them on their person all day. Men, more often than women, usually keep their cellular smart phones in their front pockets. Multiple recent studies have been conducted on whether keeping these cellular devices in such a close proximity to a man’s genitalia while transmitting EMF radiation could be harmful.



“Collectively, the research indicates that exposure to cell phone radiation may lead to decreases in sperm count, sperm motility and vitality, as well as increases in indicators of sperm damage such as higher levels of reactive oxygen species (chemically reactive molecules containing oxygen), oxidative stress, DNA damage and changes in sperm morphology ,” said The Environmental Working Group (EWG) after publishing a scientific literature review of 10 studies linking smartphone usage and male infertility.

Other studies even indicate specifically an 8 percent decrease in sperm motility and an approximate 9 percent decrease in sperm viability.
“Overall, these findings raise a number of related health policy and patient management issues that deserve our immediate attention. Specifically, we recommend that men of reproductive age who engage in high levels of mobile phone use do not keep their phones in receiving mode below waist level,” wrote researcher GN De Iuliis in the study Mobile phone radiation induces reactive oxygen species production and DNA damage in human spermatozoa in vitro published in 2009.



Even though keeping your cell phone on a belt clip has long been seen as more safe, much data has shown that it is only slightly better than carrying it in your front pocket. If a man is trying to conceive a child it is best that he reduces his cell phone usage. Data on smartphone usage and female infertility is still widely unknown.

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

Evolutionary Psychology: A New Approach to Understand Crime

Relative new branch of Psychology addresses crime towards a comprehensive explanation of Punishment, Public Policy, and Prevention

Crime is responsible for a significant amount of human suffering in society. The lives of victims and their families can be adversely affected; often in profound ways. Crime can erode social trust in communities and lead to fear amongst the residents. Crime is expensive for police and even more expensive to prosecute and contain. Perpetrators, too, suffer from the effects of their actions as their lives are altered, often permanently, and typically for the worse. It’s important to analyze an evolutionary approach, which will be invaluable for advancing our understanding of why crime occurs and what accounts for the main patterns in offending that we observed.

We need to keep in mind that problematic behaviors can arise as a result of evolved psychological mechanisms operating as they were “designed” by natural and sexual selection. A significant amount of male to male aggression, for instance, reflects selection for intra-sexual competition amongst males because success in such context advances reproductive success. Male to male violence reflects the operation of evolved adaptation working as they were designed to. Problem behaviors can also arise through the operation of conditional adaptations operating as they were designed by natural and sexual selection in response to specific social and ecological environments.



Before we begin considering specific approaches for preventing crime, we think it is useful to recognize three general points regarding an evolutionary approach towards reducing problematic behaviors. First, where it is possible, programs and policies should work with “human nature” rather than against it. Even if we recognize that humans are enormously flexible in their behavioral repertories, there are likely to be certain practices, policies, and social arrangements that work too crudely against the grain of evolved predisposition and proclivities. Hence, this will likely lead to ineffectiveness. A second related point is that it can often be possible to affect “workarounds” that act on the same evolved motivations that lead to problematic behavior, but instead, channeling the behavior along more societally desirable paths is ideal.

Police officers can’t help but think they have a magical effect on the flow of traffic as all they have to do is enter a stream of vehicles in a marked patrol car and the cars around them immediately slow down and become more cautious. Of course there is no magic involved: human behavior is enormously flexible and will change in predictable ways to different features of the situation as they emerge.

There are two interesting strategies (increasing the effort and reducing the rewards of offending) that are fairly explicable from both a rational choice and evolutionary perspective. If a good deal of offending is related to the pursuit of social status, then changing the reward structure of the environment will alter the relative value of criminal actions as a means to increase social standing. Better locks, bars, screens, security measures and so forth. Simple means that offenders find it harder to obtain the rewards of offending.



Efforts to increase the risk of offending such as the implementation of closed-circuit television, improved street lighting, and better opportunity for natural surveillance have shown to be effective in reducing certain types of offending . Strategies to remove excuses for offending such as instructions, signs, notices, and techniques for altering the conscience of individuals have been evaluated less rigorously. However, we suggest that both of these situational crime prevention strategies can be effective for largely the same reasons. Both strategies provide ecological context that enhance prosocial behavior by reinforcing social and moral norms and alerting individuals to the risk of punishment.

There are a large number of different social crime prevention programs that have been developed and are subject to formal evaluations. Most of these programs focus on addressing the known risk factors for offending and there is a good deal of evidence that properly developed and implemented social crime prevention programs that can be effective in reducing offending. From an evolutionary perspective, the importance of developmental focused social crime prevention initiatives cannot be emphasized enough.



Approaches to interventions that largely focus on merely preventing or stopping risky behavior without any consideration of the ‘function’ of that behavior are not likely to be effective. We think that the key contribution of an evolutionary approach is to help us to go beyond our understanding of the developmental risk factors for offending to identify the key causal processes that are most likely to be implicated. For example, prevention programs like education and home visitation provide information about proper prenatal and antenatal care, parenting practices, and health care which create less harsh intrauterine and early childhood environments that, in turn, can promote the development of slower life history strategies.

An evolutionary perspective suggests that the existence of punishment is essential for the viable functioning of any society, small or large. Without the existence of the third-party punishment of individuals who violate important social and moral norms, there will almost certainly be a substantial reduction in cooperation and an increase in unsanctioned punishment. We are not simply suggesting that we should punish norm transgressions because that is how we have evolved to respond to such transgression. Rather, any attempt to abolish punishment is likely to have unintended negative consequences given our evolved predispositions and the evolutionary function of punishment.



Psychological and behavioral adaptations along with cultural practices have evolved in tandem in response to the violation of significant moral norms. One result of this dynamic and evolving interaction of biology and human nature has been a suite of normative systems and institutions specifically designed to prevent, and if necessary, manage serious wrongdoing (crime).
A problem with groups or individuals seeking revenge without the mediation of an impartial agency is that it can lead to a seemingly endless cycle of harmful actions and counteractions that destabilize social networks.

Punishment can be defined loosely as the intentional infliction of sanctions by the state on individuals who have unjustifiably harmed other people. There are numerous normative justifications of punishment including retributivism, consequentialism, and communicative justification.

The focus of the communicative justification of punishment on the well-being of a community means that relationships between moral stakeholders are of critical importance and the role of individual entitlements and duties assumes lesser importance. It is a collectivist approach to resolving disputes between people and arriving towards solutions to ethical problems such as crime. The process of reconciliation involves forgiveness and the willingness of individuals and the state to look beyond the imposition of punishment, or vengeance, to the moral task of repairing damaged relationships between offenders, victims, and the community.

Because humans are cultural species whose behavior is strongly influenced by social and moral norms and the ecological contexts in which they are embedded, changes in these norms can affect significant changes in behavior that can be sustained through cultural and ecological inheritance. Sustained efforts to support and facilitate the development of pro-social norms and change norms that support or facilitate antisocial behavior, are therefore, likely to be one essential component of efforts to reduce the harmful effects of crime. Changes in legal practices have an important role to play in this context. An evolutionary perspective does not provide all the answers. It does offer a coherent, theoretical framework for integrating the basic and applied sciences in a way that can foster the development of a science of intentional change that has implications for our efforts to reduce offending and the various harms that arise from crime and its management.
By: Jaime F. Adriazola
American Graduate University, Washington DC
References:
Evolutionary Criminology, Russil Durrant / Tony Ward
The Psychology of criminal conduct; New Providence NJ, Mathew Bender & Company Inc.
Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for social Scientists, Oxford: University Press
Handbook of evolutionary psychology, D. M. Buss
Why evolution is true; New York: Viking
The evolutionary psychology of violence; Psicothema

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

The Science of Solidarity

By: Alexandria Addesso

To many Charles Darwin is the utmost authority when it comes to the study of evolution. Many people took his findings about the importance of competition and how it plays a role in evolution and ran with it. Even as far as applying it to society and thus creating social Darwinism. Anarcho-scientist Peter Kropotkin was inspired by the publication of On the Origin of Species to go and do his own observations of a multitude of species and seemed to come to the opposite conclusion of such Darwinism backers. He argued against claims that competition alone led to evolution or ‘survival of the fittest’, and insisted that mutual aid is a major factor of evolution. The following is an introductory excerpt from Kropotkin’s book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.

Two aspects of animal life impressed me most during the journeys which I made in my youth in Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria. One of them was the extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most species of animals have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the enormous destruction of life which periodically results from natural agencies; and the consequent paucity of life over the vast territory which fell under my observation. And the other was, that even in those few spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I failed to find – although I was eagerly looking for it – that bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.



Kropotkin chronicled his findings while observing a wide variety of insects, birds, sea-life, and different mammals including humans. When it came to who was fittest to survive and further their species, it was most often those who cooperated via forms of mutual aid and solidarity.

As soon as we study animals – not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains – we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defense amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Of course it would be extremely difficult to estimate, however roughly, the relative numerical importance of both these series of facts. But if we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: "Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?" we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization. If the numberless facts which can be brought forward to support this view are taken into account, we may safely say that mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle, but that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater importance, inasmuch as it favours the development of such habits and characters as insure the maintenance and further development of the species, together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of life for the individual, with the least waste of energy.



Solidarity scientifically leads to the continuation of life. Through the solidarity of family units, as wells even sometimes larger communities, children are able to be raised and protected. Solidarity is also pivotal for any revolution, social movement, or major change to occur. The slogan “workers of the world unite,” first mentioned in the Communist Manifesto in 1848, called for solidarity among all proletariat (the lower/working class) regardless to nation or ethnicity. These were truly powerful words of unity for those across a particular class line against their oppressors that belonged to the bourgeoisie (the middle/capitalist class).

A major group that unified lower class people across ethnic and gender lines on U.S. soil in the aftermath of the Democratic Convention protests of 1968 was the original Rainbow Coalition. It was formed by the Illinois Chapter of The Black Panthers in Chicago and also included the Young Patriots (a group of white youth who had migrated from Appalachia to Chicago), the Young Lords (a group of Puerto Rican nationalist youth), disenfranchised jewish youth and members of the women’s movement. The Rainbow Coalition epitomized solidarity and intersectionality within the class struggle. Because of its diversity, the Rainbow Coalition was able to bring about treaties among violent rivaling gangs as well as fight against police brutality that did nothing but add to the wave of violence. With unity comes power, and this was highly threatening to both local and national government.



“It seems to me that a lot of the real intense government repression didn’t happen until the Black Panthers started building coalitions,” said Bobby Lee a Black Panthers member who helped organize the Rainbow Coalition along with Deputy Chairman of the Illinois Chapter Fred Hampton, in an interview with Chicago Area. “Once the party departed from the ‘hate whitey’ trip and got serious about building real politics, we were a threat—plain and simple. The FBI were always watching us. But the Rainbow Coalition was their worst nightmare.”

For major changes to occur, for the preservation of life, and to strive towards survival and thus evolution, solidarity is a major factor.

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

Archaeologists Unearthed the First Pope In History. What They Found Proved Something Incredible

The mummy of Pope St. Pius I is one of the best preserved in the history of mankind. His corpse was not embalmed it was mummified naturally for a period of about 1,700 years.

His remains are considered a true discovery for science, because even though during life he suffered from cardiovascular diseases, gallstones, gout, diabetes, caries and tuberculosis, these organs preserved very well.

This bishop is considered as the first official Pope. He was born in Aquileia, Italy. And he died in 155, to be buried in the beautiful cathedral of Aquileia.

Much later, in the year 1789 the building of the cathedral was demolished. The coffin of the Pope was opened and everyone was surprised by the fact that the body was in perfect condition. Finally the body was transferred to a chapel in the year 1875.

Studies say there are several reasons why the body has been preserved in such a good way. First, because he was naturally mummified thanks to the air between the months of November and December, which are the coldest of the year and because of the large amount of plants and humidity inside the crypt.



But until 2010 scientists had no possibility to study the remains carefully.
The coffin’s pillow and mattress were filled with plants and vegetables that gave off a strong smell, probably to hide the smell of the corpse, but also to preserve it. There were lavender, mint, hops and juniper berries. ”

However, the most surprising thing was that they found a plenty of documents narrating different versions of the alleged life of the son of God, Jesus of Nazareth.



The discovery suggests that senior leaders of the Catholic Church hid the evidence that proves that the history of the Messiah was only an invention to carry out the purposes of the order.

Among the documents could be found the stories of hundreds of prophets who had a life very similar to that of Christ, among which stand out the figures of Horus, Mithra, Krishna, Dionysius, etc.

After the find, a large number of versions about what actually happened with Jesus has emerged. Science, on the other hand, claims that there is evidence to prove the existence of Jesus the man, but not as the life of the supposed son of God, that the narrative created from the life of other prophets and different cultures of the world.

Source: www.smithsonianmag.com

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

Does the Universe have a Rest Frame?

Experiment aims at resolving divergence between special relativity and standard model of cosmology

Physics is sometimes closer to philosophy when it comes to understanding the universe. Donald Chang from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China, attempts to elucidate whether the universe has a resting frame. The results have recently been published in EPJ Plus.

To answer this tricky question, he has developed an experiment to precisely evaluate particle mass. This is designed to test the special theory of relativity that assumes the absence of a rest frame, otherwise it would be possible to determine which inertial frame is stationary and which frame is moving. This assumption, however, appears to diverge from the standard model of cosmology, which assumes that what we see as a vacuum is not an empty space. The assumption is that the energy of our universe comes from the quantum fluctuation in the vacuum.

In a famous experiment conducted by Michelson and Morley in the late 19th century, the propagation of light was proved to be independent of the movement of the laboratory system. Einstein, his Special Theory of Relativity, inferred that the physical laws governing the propagation of light are equivalent in all inertial frames -- this was later extended to all physics laws not just optics.



In this study, the author set out to precisely measure the masses of two charged particles moving in opposite directions. The conventional thinking assumes that the inertial frame applies equally to both particles. If that's the case, no detectable mass difference between these two particles is likely to arise. However, if the contrary is true, and there is a rest frame in the universe, the author expects to see mass difference that is dependent on the orientation of the laboratory frame. This proposed experiment partially inspired by the Michelson and Morley experiments can be conducted using existing experimental techniques. For simplicity, an electron can be used as the charged particle in the experiment.

Story Source: Material provided by Springer
Journal Reference: Donald C. Chang. Is there a resting frame in the universe? A proposed experimental test based on a precise measurement of particle mass.

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

Your Blood Type May Help Protect you From Cognitive Decline

A pioneering study conducted by leading researchers at the University of Sheffield has revealed that blood types play a role in the development of the nervous system and may cause a higher risk of developing cognitive decline.

The research, carried out in collaboration with the IRCCS San Camillo Hospital Foundation in Venice, shows that people with an ‘O’ blood type have more grey matter in their brain, which helps to protect against diseases such as
Alzheimer’s, than those with ‘A’, ‘B’ or ‘AB’ blood types.

Research fellow Matteo De Marco and Professor Annalena Venneri, from the University’s Department of Neuroscience, made the discovery after analyzing the results of 189 Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans from healthy volunteers.
The researchers calculated the volumes of grey matter within the brain and explored the differences between different blood types.

The results, published in The Brain Research Bulletin, show that individuals with an ‘O’ blood type have more grey matter in the posterior proportion of the cerebellum.



In comparison, those with ‘A’, ‘B’ or ‘AB’ blood types had smaller grey matter volumes in temporal and limbic regions of the brain, including the left hippocampus, which is one of the earliest part of the brain damaged by Alzheimer’s disease.

These findings indicate that smaller volumes of grey matter are associated with non-‘O’ blood types.

As we age a reduction of grey matter volumes is normally seen in the brain, but later in life this grey matter difference between blood types will intensify as a consequence of ageing.

“The findings seem to indicate that people who have an ‘O’ blood type are more protected against the diseases in which volumetric reduction is seen in temporal and middle-temporal regions of the brain like with Alzheimer’s disease for instance,” said Matteo DeMarco.



“However additional tests and further research are required as other biological
mechanisms might be involved.”

Professor Annalena Venneri added: “What we know today is that a significant difference in volumes exists, and our findings confirm established clinical observations. In all likelihood the biology of blood types influences the development of the nervous system. We now have to understand how and why this occurs.”
Source: Neuroscience News / Amy Pullan – University of Sheffield

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

Robot is Helping Autistic Children with their Social Skills

"This is nice, it tickles me," Kaspar the social robot tells four-year-old Finn as they play together at an autism school north of London.

Kaspar, developed by the University of Hertfordshire, also sings song, imitates eating, plays the tambourine and combs his hair during their sessions aimed at helping Finn with his social interaction and communication.

Finn is one of around 170 autistic children that Kaspar has helped in a handful of schools and hospitals over the last 10 years.

But with approximately 700,000 people in Britain on the autism spectrum, according to the National Autistic Society who will mark ‘World Autism Day’ on Sunday, the university wants Kaspar to help more people.

"Our vision is that every child in a school or a home or in a hospital could get a Kaspar if they wanted to," Kerstin Dautenhahn, professor of artificial
intelligence at the University of Hertfordshire, told Reuters.



Achieving that goal will largely depend on the results of a two-year clinical trial with the Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust, which, if successful, could see Kaspar working in hospitals nationwide.

TRACKS, an independent charity and specialist early years center for children with autism in Stevenage, have seen positive results from working with Kaspar, who sports a blue cap and plaid shirt for play sessions.

"We were trying to teach a little boy how to eat with his peers. He usually struggled with it because of his anxiety issues," said deputy principal Alice Lynch.

"We started doing it with Kaspar and he really, really enjoyed feeding Kaspar, making him eat when he was hungry, things like that. Now he's started to integrate into the classroom and eat alongside his peers. So things like that, are just a massive progression."



Many children with autism find it hard to decipher basic human communication and emotion so Kaspar's designers avoided making him too lifelike and instead opted for simplified, easy to process features.

Autism support groups have been impressed.

"Many autistic people are drawn to technology, particularly the predictability it provides, which means it can be a very useful means of engaging children, and adults too," Carol Povey, director of the National Autistic Society's Centre for Autism, told Reuters.

"This robot is one of a number of emerging technologies which have the potential to make a huge difference to people on the autism spectrum."

Source: Fox News, Health

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

Parallel Computation Provides Deeper Insight into Brain Function

Unlike experimental neuroscientists who deal with real-life neurons, computational neuroscientists use model simulations to investigate how the brain functions. While many computational neuroscientists use simplified mathematical models of neurons, researchers in the Computational Neuroscience Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) develop software that models neurons to the detail of molecular interactions with the goal of eliciting new insights into neuronal function. Applications of the software were limited in scope up until now because of the intense computational power required for such detailed neuronal models, but recently Dr. Weiliang Chen, Dr. Iain Hepburn, and Professor Erik De Schutter published two related papers in which they outline the accuracy and scalability of their new high-speed computational software, "Parallel STEPS". The combined findings suggest that Parallel STEPS could be used to reveal new insights into how individual neurons function and communicate with each other.

The first paper, published in The Journal of Chemical Physics in August 2016, focusses on ensuring that the accuracy of Parallel STEPS is comparable with conventional methods. In conventional approaches, computations associate with neuronal chemical reactions and molecule diffusion are all calculated on one computational processing unit or 'core' sequentially. However, Dr. Iain Hepburn and colleagues introduced a new approach to perform computations of reaction and diffusion in parallel which can then be distributed over multiple computer cores, whilst maintaining simulation accuracy to a high degree. The key was to develop an original algorithm separated into two parts - one that computed chemical reaction events and the other diffusion events.

"We tested a range of model simulations from simple diffusion models to realistic biological models and found that we could achieve improved performance using a parallel approach with minimal loss of accuracy. This demonstrated the potential suitability of the method on a larger scale," says Dr. Hepburn.



In a related paper published in Frontiers in Neuroinformatics this February, Dr. Weiliang Chen presented the implementation details of Parallel STEPS and investigated its performance and potential applications. By breaking a partial model of a Purkinje cell - one of the largest neurons in the brain - into 50 to 1000 sections and simulating reaction and diffusion events for each section in parallel on the Sango supercomputer at OIST, Dr. Chen and colleagues saw dramatically increased computation speeds. They tested this approach on both simple models and more complicated models of calcium bursts in Purkinje cells and demonstrated that parallel simulation could speed up computations by more than several hundred times that of conventional methods.

"Together, our findings show that Parallel STEPS implementation achieves significant improvements in performance, and good scalability," says Dr. Chen. "Similar models that previously required months of simulation can now be completed within hours or minutes, meaning that we can develop and simulate more complex models, and learn more about the brain in a shorter amount of time."

Dr. Hepburn and Dr. Chen from OIST's Computational Neuroscience Unit, led by Professor Erik De Schutter, are actively collaborating with the Human Brain Project, a world-wide initiative based at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, to develop a more robust version of Parallel STEPS that incorporates electric field simulation of cell membranes.

So far STEPS is only realistically capable of modeling parts of neurons but with the support of Parallel STEPS, the Computational Neuroscience Unit hopes to develop a full-scale model of a whole neuron and subsequently the interactions between neurons in a network. By collaborating with the EPFL team and by making use of the IBM 'Blue Gene/Q' supercomputer located there, they aim to achieve these goals in the near future.



"Thanks to modern supercomputers we can study molecular events within neurons in a much more transparent way than before," says Prof. De Schutter. "Our research opens up interesting avenues in computational neuroscience that links biochemistry with electrophysiology for the first time."
Source: Journal of Chemical Physics. Provided by: Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

Nonverbal Influence and Forensic Psychology

How Police Witnesses could be misled by a Simple Wave of the Hand
Hand it over.

How easy do you think it would be for someone to convince you that you’d seen something that never really happened? What about them doing this without actually saying anything misleading? That would almost be impossible, surely? Well, research into verbal and nonverbal influence suggests this can happen, and that we’re actually far more suggestible than we might like to think.

We know that people easily can be misled through words, and that changing the way we phrase a question can affect how somebody answers it. For instance, if you ask someone “how tall was the man?” they will probably say he was taller on average than if you asked “how short was the man?” A cleverly-worded question that implies something was present can make people believe they saw it, and biased questions can implant false memories in people, causing them to remember something fictional as if it were real.

But speech isn’t the only way we communicate with people. We also give lots of information away through our nonverbal behavior, especially our hand gestures. When we talk, we tend to gesture a lot, and the people we’re speaking to can use these gestures to make sense of what we’re saying.



Handy hints
Imagine you’re telling a friend that you hurt your arm recently. You might say “I hurt myself last week” and rub your arm while doing so. Here, you communicate part of the message through your speech (“hurt”) and the other part through your gesture (“arm”). A listener will combine these two pieces of information to get one full story, and probably won’t even realize the information came from two different places.

Giving somebody helpful information through gesture is one thing, but what about if we gave them some misleading information? Could a misleading gesture implant a suggestion in someone, and cause them to believe something that isn’t true? These questions sparked my research into the “gestural misinformation effect”.

In one of my first academic studies, I wanted to see if people would misremember seeing something if false information was given to them through a hand gesture. To test this, I showed participants a video (a man coming into my office and stealing a phone from my desk) and arranged for them to be interviewed on what they could remember afterwards.



After softening them up with a few distractor questions, the interviewer asked if they could describe the man’s face. We found that if the interviewer stroked his chin while asking this, significantly more participants would claim that the man had a beard or stubble than if he didn’t gesture.

We tried this with other questions, too. If the interviewer pinched his finger while asking if the man was wearing any jewelry, the participants remembered him wearing a ring. If he grasped his wrist, they remembered a watch. People seemed to remember parts of the video differently according to what was suggested to them through the interviewer’s hand gestures.

In my original set of studies, our participants were largely psychology students but, since then, we’ve replicated the effect in children, members of the general public and even lawyers. In light of this, the gestural misinformation effect seems to be quite robust.

But are people aware of how much influence these gestures have on them? Even if we can remember what has been said to us in speech, we often cannot identify when extra information has been given to us through gestures, so nonverbal influence is a bit more subtle. Typically, we’re not really aware of when we gesture, and listeners don’t generally see our gestures either.



Because of this, people can extract information from gestures without even realizing it. In a follow-up study, I found suggestions made through gesture can be just as effective as those made through speech, but that people were less likely to know when they’d been misled by a gesture compared to speech.

Forensic implications
The fact that people can be misled through gesture so easily is very interesting (if not a little scary), but there are some clear implications for this research, particularly in forensic psychology, too. Because witnesses are so prone to misleading questions, police officers have to be very careful not to suggest any leading information to them through their questions.

To make sure no unwanted influence has occurred, interviews are also audio-recorded. However, currently, there is very little training on how our gestures can influence others in interviews and, without a video recording of an interview it’s possible for a witness to be misled by gestures without a record of this happening.

These findings on nonverbal suggestion can extend to any interview situation, or any dialogue between two people. There may be times when we’ve been influenced by someone’s hand gestures, and without even knowing it. Because of this, we should be aware of the power of nonverbal suggestion and how susceptible we can be to its effects.
Source: Daniel Gurney - The Conversation, Academic -Journal

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

Scientists use parasite's internal clock to attack sleeping sickness

Trypanosoma brucei is a parasite that causes the deadly sleeping sickness. Scientists have determined the parasite has its own biological clock that makes it more vulnerable to medications in the afternoon.

The parasite that causes deadly sleeping sickness has its own biological clock that makes it more vulnerable to medications during the afternoon, according to international research that may help improve treatments for one of Africa's most lethal diseases.

The finding from the Peter O'Donnell Jr. Brain Institute could be especially beneficial for patients whose bodies can't handle side effects of toxic treatments used to eradicate the parasite. By knowing the optimal time to administer these medications - which can be fatal - doctors hope to reduce the duration and dosage of the treatment and save more lives.

"This research has opened a door," said Dr. Filipa Rijo-Ferreira, first author of the study from the O'Donnell Brain Institute at UT Southwestern Medical Center. "If the same therapeutic effect can be obtained with a lower dose, then it may be possible to reduce the mortality associated with the treatment."

Establishing that parasites have their own internal clock is a key step in finding new ways to treat a variety of parasitic conditions, from sleeping sickness to malaria. While many of these diseases are often not deadly, sleeping sickness has been among the most lethal.

The condition - known formally as African trypanosomiasis - is transmitted through the bite of the Tsetse fly and threatens tens of millions of people in sub-Saharan African countries. After entering the body, the parasite causes such symptoms as inverted sleeping cycles, fever, muscle weakness, and itching. It eventually invades the central nervous system and, depending on its type, can kill its host in anywhere from a few months to several years.

Control efforts have significantly reduced the number of cases over the last decade. However, an unknown number of people still die annually from sleeping sickness as scientists continue seeking a vaccine and alternative treatments to the arsenic-based medications that are occasionally fatal to patients.
Dr. Joseph S. Takahashi, who oversaw the collaborative study published in Nature

Microbiology with Dr. Luisa Figueiredo at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, said the finding will likely apply to all types of parasites and perhaps lead to improved treatment for their associated conditions.



"There have been many observations of the presence of daily patterns in parasites, but until now we didn't know if this was the result of an intrinsic molecular clock. In the future, we may consider biological rhythms when defining therapies to treat sleeping sickness and potentially other infections," said Dr. Takahashi, Chairman of Neuroscience at UT Southwestern, holder of the Loyd B. Sands Distinguished Chair in Neuroscience, and Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Researchers from UT Southwestern and the Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Lisbon in Portugal made their finding after isolating the parasite - known as Trypanosoma brucei - in the lab and obtaining a type of genetic fingerprint to gauge its daily cycles independent of a host. They found the parasite has daily metabolic cycles that make it more vulnerable to treatments in the afternoon.

Scientists now hope to learn what drives the parasite's internal clock so they can target specific genes and disrupt its circadian rhythms. Much like humans struggle to cope when their sleep cycle is interrupted, scientists expect the parasite would become weaker if its cycle is disturbed.

"We know that in other organisms if we mutate their clock they are less adapted to the world," said Dr. Rijo-Ferreira, an HHMI Associate. "We're trying to jetlag these parasites, trying to make them less fit."

5 parasite diseases to watch for in the U.S.

While deadly sleeping sickness is primarily transmitted in rural regions of Africa, millions of people in the U.S. are exposed to other forms of parasitic diseases. Here are five such diseases the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists as public-health priorities.

Chagas: This disease is most commonly acquired through contact with the feces of an infected kissing bug, a blood-sucking insect. There may be swelling where the parasite enters the body, and in rare cases the disease results in life-threatening inflammation of the heart or brain. If untreated, infection is lifelong. CDC estimates about 300,000 people in the U.S. have the condition.

Toxoplasmosis: This condition is a leading cause of death related to food-borne illness in the U.S. More than 30 million Americans carry the parasite, though few show symptoms because their immune systems protect against the illness. People can become infected by eating undercooked, contaminated meat, and women who are infected during pregnancy sometimes pass the parasite to their unborn children. This transfer can result in a miscarriage, a stillborn child, eye disease, or unusual head size.



Toxocariasis: Caused by two species of roundworm and is typically spread through the feces of dogs and cats. Most infected people don't show symptoms, though in some cases the parasite can travel through parts of the body such as the liver, lungs, or central nervous system. The larvae can also travel to the eye and cause blindness. Each year about 70 people, mostly children, are blinded by the condition.

Cysticercosis: Spread through ingesting larval cysts of a tapeworm, causing infections in the muscles, brain, or other tissue. People become infected when they drink water or eat food contaminated with tapeworm eggs, or if they put contaminated fingers in their mouths. Cysts in the brain or spinal cord commonly cause seizures or headaches. The condition may also cause life-threatening brain swelling or strokes. CDC estimates that at least 1,000 people are hospitalized each year with the more severe brain-related form of the disease.

Trichomoniasis The parasite that causes trichomoniasis is transferred from human to human during sex. About 3.7 million people in the U.S. have the condition, though most do not know they have it. Symptoms may include itching, burning, redness or soreness in the infected areas. The parasite can be eradicated through medications. Without treatment, the infection can last for months or years.

Source: Nature Microbiology - Provided by: UT Southwestern Medical Center

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

Neanderthal dental tartar reveals plant-based diet – and drugs

This Neanderthal individual was eating poplar, a source of aspirin, and had also consumed molded vegetation including ‘penicillium fungus,’ source of a natural antibiotic. Photograph: Paleoanthropology Group MNCN-CSIC

Analysis of teeth of Spanish Neanderthals shows diet of pine nuts, mushrooms and moss and indicates possible self-medication for pain and diarrhea

A diet of pine nuts mushrooms and moss might sound like modernist cuisine, but it turns out it was standard fare for Spanish Neanderthals.

Researchers studying the teeth of the heavy-browed hominids have discovered that while Neanderthals in Belgium were chomping on woolly rhinoceros, those further south were surviving on plants and may even have used naturally occurring painkillers to ease toothache.

The findings, the researchers say, are yet another blow to the popular misconception of Neanderthals as brutish simpletons.

“Neanderthals, not surprisingly, are doing different things, exploiting different things, in different places,” said Keith Dobney, a bio-archaeologist and co-author of the research from the University of Liverpool.

Writing in the journal Nature, Dobney and an international team of colleagues describe how they analyzed ancient DNA – from microbes and food debris – preserved in the dental tartar, or calculus, of three Neanderthals dating from 42,000 to 50,000 years ago. Two of the individuals were from the El Sidrón cave in Spain while one was from the Spy Cave in Belgium.



The results reveal that northern Neanderthals had a wide-ranging diet, with evidence of a mushroom known as grey shag in their tartar, together with traces of woolly rhinoceros and wild sheep.

By contrast Neanderthals from El Sidrón showed no evidence of meat eating – instead they appear to have survived on a mixture of forest moss, pine nuts and a mushroom known as split gill.

The difference was further backed up by DNA-based analysis of the diversity and make-up of microbial communities that had lived in the Neanderthals’ mouths.

The findings support previous studies suggesting that the Neanderthals of El Sidrón ate little meat, although Dobney cautioned against drawing broader conclusions, citing the small sample size of the latest study. “I hesitate to say that we have clear, definitive proof that Neanderthals in Spain were vegetarian,” he said.

Indeed, research looking at marks on the bones of Neanderthals from ‘El Sidrón’ has suggested they, might been the victims of cannibalism. While Dobney does not rule out the possibility, he points out that the two Neanderthals in the latest study are unlikely to have been feasting on their relatives.



“You would expect if Neanderthals were eating each other, that the quantity of Neanderthal DNA would be a lot higher in [the tartar] – it would be part of the food debris,” he said. “[That] doesn’t appear to be the case.”

One of the Spanish Neanderthals is known to have had a painful dental abscess, while analysis of the tartar from the same individual yielded evidence of a parasite known to cause diarrhea in humans.

To cope, the researchers add, the unfortunate individual might have been self-medicating. While previous work has suggested the El Sidrón Neanderthals might have exploited yarrow and chamomile, the tartar of the unwell individual shows evidence of poplar, which contains the active ingredient of aspirin, salicylic acid, and a species of ‘penicillium fungus’, suggesting the Neanderthal might have benefited from a natural source of antibiotics.

“Potentially this is evidence of more sophisticated behavior in terms of knowledge of medicinal plants,” said Dobey. “The idea that Neanderthals were a bit simple and just dragging their knuckles around is one that has gone a long time ago, certainly in the anthropological world.”



Dobney believes the new approach could prove valuable in understanding the evolution not only of our diet but also of our microbiota, suggesting similar analysis be carried out on the remains of even earlier hominid relatives. “We can really start to mine this amazing record of our joint evolutionary history with these key microorganisms that are basically part of our lives and keep us alive,” he said.

Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist and expert in human origins from the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the research, welcomed the study. “It is tremendous work and very exciting,” he said.
But, he warns, the dental tartar might not tell the full story, since it might not preserve all components of a Neanderthal’s diet, nor the proportions in which they were eaten. Contamination from DNA preserved in sediments in the cave must also be considered, he said, while the plant material found in meat-eating Neanderthals might, at least in part, have come from the hominids eating the stomach contents of their prey.

Stringer is also enthusiastic about the revelations around the Neanderthals’ microbiota. “To have that data from inside the mouth of a Neanderthal from 50,000 years ago is astonishing stuff,” he said.
Source: Nicola Davis - The Guardian

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

How Small Can Superconductors Be?

Topographic image of a lead nanocrystal used in the study. Scale bar: 10 nm. Credit: Vlaic et al. Nature Communications

For the first time, physicists have experimentally validated a 1959 conjecture that places limits on how small superconductors can be. Understanding superconductivity (or the lack thereof) on the nanoscale is expected to be important for designing future quantum computers, among other applications.

In 1959, physicist P.W. Anderson conjectured that superconductivity can exist only in objects that are large enough to meet certain criteria. Namely, the object's superconducting gap energy must be larger than its electronic energy level spacing—and this spacing increases as size decreases. The cutoff point (where the two values are equal) corresponds to a volume of about 100 nm3. Until now it has not been possible to experimentally test the Anderson limit due to the challenges in observing superconducting effects at this scale.

In the new study published in Nature Communications, Sergio Vlaic and coauthors at the ‘University Paris Sciences et Lettres’ and French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) designed a nano-system that allowed them to experimentally investigate the Anderson limit for the first time.

The Anderson limit arises because, at very small scales, the mechanisms underlying superconductivity essentially stop working. In general, superconductivity occurs when electrons bind together to form Cooper pairs. Cooper pairs have a slightly lower energy than individual electrons, and this difference in energy is the superconducting gap energy. The Cooper pairs' lower energy inhibits electron collisions that normally create resistance. If the superconducting gap energy gets too small and vanishes—which can occur, for example, when the temperature increases—then the electron collisions resume and the object stops being a superconductor.

The Anderson limit shows that small size is another way that an object may stop being a superconductor. However, unlike the effects of increasing the temperature, this is not because smaller objects have a smaller superconducting gap energy. Instead, it arises because smaller crystals have fewer electrons, and therefore fewer electron energy levels, than larger crystals do. Since the total possible electron energy of an element stays the same, regardless of size, smaller crystals have larger spacings between their electron energy levels than larger crystals do.



According to Anderson, this large electronic energy level spacing should pose a problem and he expected superconductivity to disappear when the spacing becomes larger than the superconducting gap energy. The reason for this, generally speaking, is that one consequence of increased spacing is a decrease in potential energy, which interferes with the competition between kinetic and potential energy that is necessary for superconductivity to occur.

To investigate what happens to the superconductivity of objects around the Anderson limit, the scientists in the new study prepared large quantities of isolated lead nanocrystals ranging in volume from 20 to 800 nm3.

Although they could not directly measure the superconductivity of such tiny objects, the researchers could measure something called the parity effect, which results from superconductivity. When an electron is added to a superconductor, the additional energy is partly affected by whether there is an even or odd number of electrons (the parity), which is due to the electrons forming Cooper pairs. If the electrons don't form Cooper pairs, there is no parity effect, indicating no superconductivity.

Although the parity effect has previously been observed in large superconductors, this study is the first time that it has been observed in small nanocrystals approaching the Anderson limit. In accordance with Anderson's predictions from more than 50 years ago, the researchers observed the parity effect for larger nanocrystals, but not for the smallest nanocrystals below approximately 100 nm3.



The results not only validate the Anderson conjecture, but also extend to a more general area, the Richardson-Gaudin models. These models are equivalent to the conventional theory of superconductivity, the Bardeen Cooper Schrieffer theory, for very small objects.

"Our experimental demonstration of the Anderson conjecture is also a demonstration of the validity of the Richardson-Gaudin models," coauthor Hervé Aubin at the ‘University Paris Sciences et Lettres’ and CNRS told Phys.org. "The Richardson-Gaudin models are an important piece of theoretical works because they can be solved exactly and apply to a wide range of systems; not only to superconducting nanocrystals but also to atomic nuclei and cold fermionic atomic gas, where protons and neutrons, which are fermions like electrons, can also form Cooper pairs."

On the more practical side, the researchers expect the results to have applications in future quantum computers.

"One of the most interesting applications of superconducting islands is their use as Cooper pair boxes employed in quantum bits, the elemental unit of a hypothetical quantum computer," Aubin said. "So far, Cooper pair boxes, used in qubits, are much larger than the Anderson limit. Upon reducing the size of the Cooper pair box, quantum computer engineers will eventually have to cope with superconductivity at the Anderson limit."
Source: Lisa Zyga - Nature Communications

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

Researchers Find the Existence of another Immune System in Humans

The good news is that doctors can determine which antigens a patient’s cancer cells release. By targeting sequestered antigens – the ones unknown to the immune system – doctors could greatly increase vaccines’ chances of success. NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to United States Department of Health and Human Services and is for illustrative purposes only.

A groundbreaking new study reveals an unexpected interaction between men’s testes and the immune system. Additionally, the findings could help explain the development of certain autoimmune disorders and why some cancer vaccines are ineffective.

Unexpected connection likely sabotaging vaccines designed to treat cancer.
The University of Virginia, School of Medicine, has again shown that a part of the body thought to be disconnected from the immune system actually interacts with it, and that discovery helps explain cases of male infertility, certain autoimmune diseases and even the failure of cancer vaccines.

Scientists developing such vaccines may need to reconsider their work in light of the new findings or risk unintentionally sabotaging their own efforts. UVA’s Kenneth Tung, MD, said that many vaccines likely are failing simply because researchers are picking the wrong targets – targets that aren’t actually foreign to the immune system and thus won’t provoke the desired immune responses.

Overturning Orthodoxy
Tung, of UVA’s Beirne B. Carter Center for Immunology Research, and a team of collaborators have discovered an unexpected interaction between men’s testes and the immune system. While science textbooks insist the testes are barricaded from the immune system by an impenetrable wall of cells, the researchers have determined there’s actually a very small door in that wall, a door that appears to open in only one direction.



The team discovered that the testes release some, but not all, of the antigens – substances that can spur an immune response – that are created during the production of sperm. Because the testes release these antigens naturally, the immune system ignores them. That’s a normal, healthy response, but it also may explain why cancer vaccines are failing. Cancer vaccines target antigens, so if vaccine developers rely on antigens that are ignored by the immune system, the vaccine won’t work.

“In essence, we believe the testes antigens can be divided into those which are sequestered [behind the barrier] and those that are not,” Tung said. “Antigens which are not sequestered would not be very good cancer vaccine candidates.”

The good news is that doctors can determine which antigens a patient’s cancer cells release. By targeting sequestered antigens – the ones unknown to the immune system – doctors could greatly increase vaccines’ chances of success.



Treating Infertility
The finding also may prove important for couples seeking to have children. Up to 12 percent of men who suffer from infertility have an autoimmune response to their own reproductive cells. That means their immune systems are attacking their sperm, essentially. Tung and his collaborators shed light on what may be happening, showing that a particular step during the creation of sperm is responsible for determining whether the sperm antigens will spark an immune response. Cells called “regulatory T cells” then help control the immune system’s response to the non-sequestered antigens. In men who are infertile because of an autoimmune disorder, something is going wrong with the process, leading the immune system to attack when it shouldn’t. With that knowledge, doctors may be able to develop new treatments for the autoimmune disorders and the resulting infertility.

Rethinking the Immune System
The discovery of the unknown immune interaction comes less than two years after UVA’s Jonathan Kipnis and Antoine Louveau rewrote textbooks when they discovered that the brain has a direct connection to the immune system, a connection long thought not to exist. That discovery could have profound effects in the quest to defeat diseases ranging from Alzheimer’s to multiple sclerosis.
Source: University of Virginia Health System.

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

Robot Eavesdrops on Men and Women to See how much They Talk

Who would you get to observe differences in how men, women and children interact? A robot in a fur-lined hat, of course.

Experiments using a robotic head, called Furhat, aimed to uncover inequalities in people’s participation when working on a shared activity, and see if a robot could help redress the balance. They revealed that when a woman is paired in conversation with another woman, she speaks more than if paired with a man. And two men paired together speak less than two women.

But this only holds for adults. “Surprisingly, we didn’t find this same pattern for boys and girls. Gender didn’t make much difference to how much children speak,” says Gabriel Skantze at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, who is also one of the robot’s creators.

Furhat interacted with 540 visitors at the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology over nine days. Two people at a time would sit at an interactive table with a touchscreen opposite the robot. They were asked to play a game that involved sorting a set of virtual picture cards, such as arranging images of historical inventions in chronological order.
The people worked with the robot to try to solve the task. During this time, the robot’s sensors tracked how long each person spoke for.

“This turned out to be a really nice opportunity to study the differences between men and women, and adults and children,” says Skantze.



Pairs of women spoke for 45 per cent of the time on average, compared with just 26 per cent for pairs of men. When women were paired with men, the speaking time was 28 per cent, with each gender sharing the time about equally. For children, there was no significant difference between gender pairings.

Making conversation
In cases of adults paired with children, the former dominated the conversation. The largest imbalance occurred when a male adult was paired with a female child, with the men speaking more than twice as much as the girls.

When it was the robot’s turn to say something, its behaviour was randomly selected from four options, such as addressing a question to the dominant or non-dominant speaker. This hints at how a robot could influence the conversation.

“When Furhat directly addressed the less dominant speaker, they were more likely to speak,” he says. “We want to use this idea to make interactions with the robot more equal.”
The research was presented at the Conference on Huma-Robot Interaction in Vienna, Austria, last week.



Most studies of this type are performed in a lab, so it’s interesting to see the outcomes in a more natural setting, says Sarah Strhkorb at Yale University. However, the results may be affected by the fact that interacting with a robot is still an unusual situation for most people. The findings could also differ for different cultures.

But having a robot that can successfully influence conversations could have useful applications, such as in educational settings, says Strohkorb. “It’s really exciting to see robots used to help change behaviour for the better.”
Source: Timothy Revell / Journal reference: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

Model of Anorexia Created Using Stem Cells

Though often viewed as a non-biological disorder, new research suggests 50 to 75 percent of risk for AN may be heritable; with predisposition driven primarily by genetics and not, as sometimes presumed, by vanity, poor parenting or factors related to specific groups of individuals. NeuroscienceNews.com image is for illustrative purposes only.

Findings suggest a strong genetic factor could predispose people to anorexia and other eating disorders. Technique suggests novel gene may contribute to eating disorder.

An international research team, led by scientists at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, has created the first cellular model of anorexia nervosa (AN), reprogramming induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) derived from adolescent females with the eating disorder.

Writing in the March 14th issue of Translational Psychiatry, the scientists said the resulting AN neurons — the disease in a dish — revealed a novel gene that appears to contribute to AN pathophysiology, buttressing the idea that AN has a strong genetic factor. The proof-of-concept approach, they said, provides a new tool to investigate the elusive and largely unknown molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying the disease.

“Anorexia is a very complicated, multifactorial neurodevelopmental disorder,” said Alysson Muotri, PhD, professor in the UC San Diego School of Medicine departments of Pediatrics and Cellular and Molecular Medicine, director of the UC San Diego Stem Cell Program and a member of the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine. “It has proved to be a very difficult disease to study, let alone treat. We don’t actually have good experimental models for eating disorders. In fact, there are no treatments to reverse AN symptoms.”



Primarily affecting young female adolescents between ages 15 and 19, AN is characterized by distorted body image and self-imposed food restriction to the point of emaciation or death. It has the highest mortality rate among psychiatric conditions. For females between 15 and 24 years old who suffer from AN, the mortality rate associated with the illness is 12 times higher than the death rate of all other causes of death.

Though often viewed as a non-biological disorder, new research suggests 50 to 75 percent of risk for AN may be heritable; with predisposition driven primarily by genetics and not, as sometimes presumed, by vanity, poor parenting or factors related to specific groups of individuals.

But little is actually known about the molecular, cellular or genetic elements or genesis of AN. In their study, Muotri and colleagues at UC San Diego and in Brazil, Australia and Thailand, took skin cells from four females with AN and four healthy controls, generated iPSCs (stem cells with the ability to become many types of cells) from these cells and induce these iPSCs to become neurons.



(Previously, Muotri and colleagues had created stem cell-derived neuronal models of autism and Williams syndrome, a rare genetic neurological condition.)

Then they performed unbiased comprehensive whole transcriptome and pathway analyses to determine not just which genes were being expressed or activated in AN neurons, but which genes or transcripts (bits of RNA used in cellular messaging) might be associated with causing or advancing the disease process.

No predicted differences in neurotransmitter levels were observed, the researchers said, but they did note disruption in the Tachykinin receptor 1 (TACR1) gene. Tachykinins are neuropeptides or proteins expressed throughout the nervous and immune systems, where they participate in many cellular and physiological processes and have been linked to multiple diseases, including chronic inflammation, cancer, infection and affective and addictive disorders.

The scientists posit that disruption of the tachykinin system may contribute to AN before other phenotypes or observed characteristics become obvious, but said further studies employing larger patient cohorts are necessary.



“But more to the point, this work helps make that possible,” said Muotri. “It’s a novel technological advance in the field of eating disorders, which impacts millions of people. These findings transform our ability to study how genetic variations alter brain molecular pathways and cellular networks to change risk of AN — and perhaps our ability to create new therapies.”
Source: NEUROSCIENCE NEWS

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

Viruses Created to Selectively Attack Tumor Cells

The image shows tumor cells infected by the virus, which expresses a fluorescent protein. Over the days (in the image fifth day), the virus multiplies, generating new virus that infect more cancer cells

It is an innovative approach that takes advantage of the different expression profiles of certain proteins between tumor and healthy cells that make the virus to only infect the first ones.

Scientists at the IDIBAPS Biomedical Research Institute and at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) lead a study in which they have designed a new strategy to get genetically modified viruses to selectively attack tumor cells without affecting healthy tissues. The study, published today by the journal Nature Communications, is part of Eneko Villanueva's work for his PhD and it is co-lead by Cristina Fillat, head of the Gene Therapy and Cancer Group at IDIBAPS, and Raúl Méndez, ICREA researcher at IRB Barcelona.

Conventional cancer treatment may cause undesirable side effects as a result of poor selectivity. To avoid them it is important that new therapies can efficiently remove cancer cells and preserve the healthy ones. One of the new approaches in cancer therapy is based on the development of oncolytic viruses, ie, viruses modified to only infect tumor cells. In recent years several studies have been focused on the development of viruses created by genetic engineering to maximize their anticancer effect but, as their potency increases, so does the associated toxicity. Limiting this effect on healthy cells is now the key for the application of this promising therapy.



An innovative and specific approach
In the study published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers from IDIBAPS and IRB Barcelona have developed an innovative approach to provide adenovirus with high specificity against tumor cells. "We have taken advantage of the different expression of a type of protein, CPEBs, in normal and tumor tissues," explains Raúl Méndez from IRB Barcelona.

CPEB is a family of four RNA binding proteins (the molecules that carry information from genes to synthesize proteins) that control the expression of hundreds of genes and maintain the functionality and the ability to repair tissues under normal conditions. When CPEBs become imbalanced, they change the expression of these genes in cells and contribute to the development of pathological processes such as cancer. "We have focused on the double imbalance of two of these proteins in healthy tissues and tumors: on the one hand we have CPEB4, which in previous studies we have shown that it is highly expressed in cancer cells and necessary for tumor growth; and, on the other hand, CPEB1, expressed in normal tissue and lost in cancer cells. We have taken advantage of this imbalance to make a virus that only attacks cells with high levels of CPEB4 and low CPEB1, that means that it only affects tumor cells, ignoring the healthy tissues," says Méndez.



"In this study we have worked with adenoviruses, a family of viruses that can cause infections of the respiratory tract, the urinary tract, conjunctivitis or gastroenteritis but which have features that make them very attractive to be used in the therapy against tumors," explains Cristina Fillat. To do this, it is necessary to modify the genome of these viruses. In the study researchers have inserted sequences that recognize CPEB proteins in key regions for the control of viral proteins. Their activity was checked in in vitro models of pancreatic cancer and control of tumor growth was observed in mouse models.

The onco-selective viruses created in this study were very sophisticated, being activated by CPEB4 but repressed by CPEB1. Thus, researchers achieved attenuated viral activity in normal cells, while in tumor cells the virus potency was maintained or even increased. "When the modified viruses entered into tumor cells they replicated their genome and, when going out, they destroyed the cell and released more particles of the virus with the potential to infect more cancer cells," says Fillat. She adds that, "this new approach is very interesting since it is a therapy selectively amplified in the tumor."



Since CPEB4 is overexpressed in several tumors, this oncoselective strategy may be valid for other solid tumors. Researchers are now trying to combine this treatment with therapies that are already being used in clinical practice, or that are in a very advanced stage of development, to find synergies that make them more effective.
Source: Materials provided by the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona)

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.

NASA to launch Cold Atom Lab in Space

Free falling: NASA is putting ultracold atoms in space

A laboratory for cooling an atomic gas to just a billionth of a degree above absolute zero will soon be sent up to the International Space Station (ISS) by physicists working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The goal of the Cold Atom Lab (CAL) mission is to create long-lived Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs) that could lead to better sensors and atomic clocks for use on spacecraft. The BECs could even provide important insights into the nature of dark energy, according to the researchers.

First created in 1995, a BEC is made by trapping and cooling an atomic gas to an extremely low temperature so the atoms fall into the same low-energy quantum state. Instead of behaving like a collection of individual atoms, a BEC is essentially a large quantum object. This makes it very sensitive to disturbances such as stray magnetic fields and accelerations, and therefore BECs can be used to create extremely good sensors.

Falling down
Here on Earth, gravity puts an upper limit on the lifetime of a BEC – the atoms fall down and after a fraction of a second the BEC has dropped out of view of the experiment. In the microgravity environment of the ISS, however, NASA's Robert Thompson and colleagues reckon that their BECs should be observable for 5–10 s. As well as allowing physicists to make more precise measurements of the quantum properties of BECs, the longer lifetime should also make the BECs better sensors. With further development, the team believes that BECs in space could endure for hundreds of seconds.

Five scientific teams will do experiments using Cold Atom Lab, including one led by Eric Cornell of the University of Colorado – who shared the 2001 Nobel Prize for Physics for creating the first BECs.



As well as creating BECs, CAL will also cool fermionic atoms to create degenerative Fermi gases. These systems can be made to mimic the behaviour of electrons in solids and could provide important insights into phenomena such as superconductivity. Physicists will also study ultracold mixtures of bosonic and fermionic atoms. Other planned experiments include atom interferometry and very precise measurements of gravity itself.

Pervasive forces
"Studying these hyper-cold atoms could reshape our understanding of matter and the fundamental nature of gravity," says Thompson. "The experiments we'll do with the Cold Atom Lab will give us insight into gravity and dark energy – some of the most pervasive forces in the universe."



CAL will be contained within a package about the size of an "ice box". This will contain a vacuum chamber, lasers and electronics. It will also include an electromagnetic "knife", which will be used to cool the atoms. The lab is currently in the final stages of assembly and will be launched in August on a SpaceX CRS-12 rocket.
Author
Hamish Johnston is editor of physicsworld.com

YOUR INPUT IS MUCH APPRECIATED! LEAVE YOUR COMMENT BELOW.