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Mars Base

Casual marijuana use linked to brain abnormalities in students - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...inked-brain-abnormalities.html

scibyte127 marijuana

shared by Mars Base on 19 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Young adults who used marijuana only recreationally showed significant abnormalities in two key brain regions that are important in emotion and motivation
  • This is the first study to show casual use of marijuana is related to major brain changes
  • the degree of brain abnormalities in these regions is directly related to the number of joints a person smoked per week
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • The more joints a person smoked, the more abnormal the shape, volume and density of the brain regions
  • Some of these people only used marijuana to get high once or twice a week
  • think a little recreational use shouldn't cause a problem
  • data directly says this is not the case
  • Scientists examined the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala—key regions for emotion and motivation, and associated with addiction—in the brains of casual marijuana users and non-users
  • chers analyzed three measures: volume, shape and density of grey matter
  • to obtain a comprehensive view of how each region was affected.
  • Both these regions in recreational pot users were abnormally altered for at least two of these structural measures
  • The degree of those alterations was directly related to how much marijuana the subjects used
  • Through different methods of neuroimaging, scientists examined the brains of young adults
  • ages 18 to 25, from Boston-area colleges; 20 who smoked marijuana and 20 who didn't. Each group had nine males and 11 females
  • The users underwent a psychiatric interview to confirm they were not dependent on marijuana
  • The changes in brain structures indicate the marijuana users' brains are adapting to low-level exposure to marijuana
  • The study results fit with animal studies that show when rats are given tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) their brains rewire and form many new connections. THC is the mind-altering ingredient found in marijuana
  • think when people are in the process of becoming addicted, their brains form these new connections
  • In animals, these new connections indicate the brain is adapting to the unnatural level of reward and stimulation from marijuana. These connections make other natural rewards less satisfying
  • The brain changes suggest that structural changes to the brain are an important early result of casual drug use
  • researchers did not know the THC content of the marijuana, which can range from 5 to 9 percent or even higher
  • The THC content is much higher today than the marijuana during the 1960s and 1970s, which was often about 1 to 3 percent
Mars Base

Has Dark Matter Finally Been Found? Big News Soon | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/ter-found-nasa-experiment.html

scibyte82 scibyte83 DarkMatter

shared by Mars Base on 19 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a particle collector mounted on the outside of the International Space Station
  • first paper of results
  • in about two weeks
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • e said the results bear on the mystery of dark matter,
  • "It will not be a minor paper,"
  • important enough that the scientists rewrote the paper 30 times before they were satisfied with it
  • it represents a "small step" in figuring out what dark matter is, and perhaps not the final answer
  • Some physics theories suggest that dark matter is made of WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles), a class of particles that are their own antimatter partner particles
  • When matter and antimatter partners meet, they annihilate each other, so if two WIMPs collided, they would be destroyed, releasing a pair of daughter particles — an electron and its antimatter counterpart, the positron, in the process
  • Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer has the potential to detect the positrons and electrons produced by dark matter annihilations in the Milky Way
  • was installed on the International Space Station in May 2011, and so far, it has detected 25 billion particle events, including about 8 billion electrons and positrons
  • This first science paper will report how many of each were found, and what their energies are
  • If the experiment detected an abundance of positrons peaking at a certain energy, that could indicate a detection of dark matter,
  • while electrons are abundant in the universe around us, there are fewer known processes that could give rise to positrons
  • The smoking gun signature is a rise and then a dramatic fall" in the number of positrons with respect to energy
  • he positrons produced by dark matter annihilation would have a very specific energy, depending on the mass of the WIMPs making up dark matter
  • Another telling sign will be the question of whether positrons appear to be coming from one direction in space, or from all around
  • f they're from dark matter, scientists expect them to be spread evenly through space, but if they're created by some normal astrophysical process, such as a star explosion, then they would originate in a single direction
  • There is a lot of stuff that can mimic dark matter,"
  • Regardless of whether AMS has found dark matter yet, the scientists said they expected the question of dark matter's origin to become clearer soon
Mars Base

Israelis develop 'cannabis without the high' - 0 views

phys.org/...05-israelis-cannabis-high.html

scibyte49 cannabix marijuana

shared by Mars Base on 30 May 12 - No Cached
  • Israeli scientists have cultivated a cannabis plant that doesn't get people stoned in a development that may help those smoking marijuana for medical purposes
Mars Base

The Rock that Appeared Out of Nowhere on Mars - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...ppeared-out-of-nowhere-on-mars

scibyte116 opportunity

shared by Mars Base on 18 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • An intriguing recent mystery is a strange rock that suddenly appeared in photos from the Opportunity rover in a spot where photos taken just 12 sols earlier showed no rock
  • described the rock as “white around the outside, in the middle there’s low spot that is dark red.
  • haven’t driven over that spot.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • “One theory is that we somehow flicked it with a wheel,”
  • . “We had driven a meter or two away from here and somehow maybe one of the wheels managed spit it out of the ground. That’s the more likely theory.”
  • Mars Exploration Rovers, mission principal investigator Steve Squyres
  • “The other theory is that there might be a smoking hole in the ground nearby and this may be crater ejecta. But that one is less likely,”
  • Another idea suggested by others is that it may have tumbled down from a nearby rock outcrop
  • making measurements on this rock.
  • looks like a jelly donut
  • We’ve taken pictures of both the donut part and the jelly part,”
  • . “The jelly part is like nothing we’ve seen before on Mars. It’s very high in sulfur and magnesium and it has twice as much manganese as anything we’ve seen before
  • I don’t know what any of this means. We’re completely confused, everybody on the team is arguing and fighting. We’re having a wonderful time!”
Mars Base

May 18 - Today in Science History - Scientists born on May 18th, died, and events - 0 views

todayinsci.com/5_18.htm

scibyte130 LookingBackMay

shared by Mars Base on 11 May 14 - No Cached
  • Mount St. Helens
  • In 1980, following a weeklong series of earthquakes and smaller explosions of ash and smoke, the long-dormant Mount St. Helens volcano erupted in Washington state, U.S., hurling ash 15,000 feet into the air and setting off mudslides and avalanches. The eruptions caused minimal damage in the sparsely populated area, but about 400 people - mostly loggers and forest rangers - were evacuated. The explosion was characterized as the equivalent of 27,000 atomic bombs. The cloud of ash eventually circled the globe
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