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Mars Base

Dream contents deciphered by computer | Body & Brain | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...ontents_deciphered_by_computer

scibyte89 Dreams

shared by Mars Base on 05 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Experiments with mice have revealed aspects of sleep and dreaming, such as how the experiences contribute to forming memories
  • researchers recorded brain activity in three adult male volunteers during the early stages of sleep
  • After the subjects had dozed off, they were repeatedly awakened and asked for detailed reports on what they had seen while sleeping
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • After gathering at least 200 such reports from the three men, the researchers used a lexical database to group the dreamed objects in coarse categories, such as street, furniture and girl
  • On average, the computer could pick which of two objects had appeared in a dream 70 percent of the time
  • Computer algorithms sorted through
  • patterns of brain activity, linking particular patterns with objects
  • The study bolsters the notion that the vivid imagery of dreams, no matter how fantastic, is as real as waking life,
  • from the brain’s perspective
Mars Base

Could scientists peek into your dreams? (w/ video) - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...2013-04-scientists-peek.html

scibyte89 Dreams

shared by Mars Base on 05 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • small new study suggests
  • Visual experiences you have when dreaming are detectable by the same type of brain activity that occurs when looking at actual images when you're awake
  • The scientists created decoding computer programs based on brain activity measured while wide-awake study participants looked at certain images
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • right after being awakened from the early stages of sleep, the researchers asked the subjects to describe the dream they were having
  • used functional MRI to monitor brain activity of the participants and polysomnography to record the physical changes that occur during sleep
  • compared evidence of brain activity when participants were awake and looking at real images to the brain activity they saw when participants were dreaming
  • the study shows it may be possible to use brain activity patterns to understand something about what a person is dreaming about
  • current approach requires the data of image viewing and sleep within the same [person
  • methods being developed for aligning brain patterns across people
  • there are practical applications to the research
  • evidence suggesting that the pattern of spontaneous brain activity is relevant to health issues
  • researchers chose to awaken the subjects in light sleep rather than in deeper "rapid eye movement" (REM) sleep solely to make the research easier to do
  • it takes at least an hour to reach first REM stage, it would be difficult to get sleep and dream data from multiple participants
  • why it is so hard to remember a dream minutes after waking up
  • thinks it is because particular neurotransmitters or brain regions involved in memory are not active during sleep
  • During sleep and dreaming, part of the brain—the higher visual cortex—is working as if seeing images
  • one expert said the results are intriguing, he was cautious
  • previous disappointments relating brain activity to complex visual experience
  • like to see this replicated
Mars Base

How the Air Force and SpaceX Saved Dragon from Doom - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...-spacex-saved-dragon-from-doom

scibyte89 dragon

shared by Mars Base on 04 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Barely 11 minutes after I witnessed the spectacular March 1 blastoff of the Dragon atop the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida
  • contact had been lost
  • Right after spacecraft separation in low Earth orbit , a sudden and unexpected failure of the Dragon’s critical thrust pods had prevented three out of four from initializing and firing
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The oxidizer pressure was low in three tanks. And the propulsion system is required to orient the craft for two way communication and to propel the Dragon to the orbiting lab complex
  • The problem was a very tiny change to the check valves that serve the oxidizer tanks
  • Three of the check valves were actually different from the prior check valves that had flown – in a very tiny way. Because of the tiny change they got stuck
  • able to write some new software in real time and upload that to Dragon to build pressure upstream of the check valves and then released that pressure- to give it a kind of a kick
  • that got the valves unstuck and then they worked well
  • difficulty communicating with the spacecraft because it was in free drift in orbit
  • worked closely with the Air Force to get higher intensity, more powerful dishes to communicate with the spacecraft and upload the software
  • there had been a small design change to the check valves by the supplier
  • supplier had made mistakes that we didn’t catch
  • You would need a magnifying glass to see the difference
  • SpaceX had run the new check valves through a series of low pressurization systems tests and they worked well and didn’t get stuck. But SpaceX had failed to run the functional tests at higher pressures
  • SpaceX will revert to the old check valves and run tests to make sure this failure doesn’t happen again
Mars Base

Scientists report hint of dark matter in first results from $2 billion cosmic ray detec... - 0 views

phys.org/...hint-dark-results-billion.html

scibyte89 DarkMatter

shared by Mars Base on 04 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • A $2 billion cosmic ray detector on the International Space Station has found the footprint of something that could be dark matter
  • the evidence isn't enough to declare the case closed
  • And after two years, the first evidence came in Wednesday: tantalizing cosmic footprints that seem to have been left by dark matter.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • the first results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, known by its acronym AMS,
  • show evidence of new physics phenomena that could be the strange and unknown dark matter or could be energy that originates from pulsars
  • expects a more definitive answer in a matter of months
  • Unraveling the mystery of dark matter could help scientists better understand the composition of our universe and, more particularly, what holds galaxies together
  • The 7-ton detector with a 3-foot magnet ring at its core was sent into space in 2011
  • The device is transmitting its data to CERN, where it is being analyzed
  • For 80 years scientists have theorized the existence of dark matter but have never actually observed it directly
  • They have looked for it in accelerators that smash particles together at high speed
  • deep underground with special detectors
  • no luck
  • there's a third way: looking in space for the results of rare dark matter collisions
  • If particles of dark matter crash and annihilate each other, they should leave a footprint of positrons—the anti-matter version of electrons—at high energy levels
  • found some. But they could also be signs of pulsars
  • What's key is the curve of the plot of those positrons. If the curve is one shape, it points to dark matter. If it's another, it points to pulsars
  • they should know the curve—and the suspect—soon
  • since its installation on 19 May 2011 it has measured over 30 billion cosmic rays at energies up to trillions of electron volts
  • Its permanent magnet and array of precision particle detectors collect and identify charged cosmic rays passing through AMS from the far reaches of space
  • Over its long duration mission on the ISS, AMS will record signals from 16 billion cosmic rays every year and transmit them to Earth for analysis by the AMS Collaboration.
  • In the initial 18 month period of space operations, from 19 May 2011 to 10 December 2012, AMS analyzed 25 billion primary cosmic ray events
  • Of these,
  • 6.8 million, were unambiguously identified as electrons and their antimatter counterpart, positrons.
  • Positrons are clearly distinguished from this background through the robust rejection power of AMS of more than one in one million
  • Currently, the total number of positrons identified by AMS, in excess of 400,000, is the largest number of energetic antimatter particles directly measured and analyzed from space
  • The exact shape of the spectrum, as shown in Figure 2, extended to higher energies, will ultimately determine whether this spectrum originates from the collision of dark matter particles or from pulsars in the galaxy
  • by measuring the ratio between positrons and electrons and by studying the behavior of any excess across the energy spectrum, a better understanding of the origin of dark matter and other physics phenomena can be obtained
Mars Base

Watch Curiosity's Parachute Flap in the Martian Breeze - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...ute-flap-in-the-martian-breeze

scibyte89 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 04 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • The images were acquired by HiRISE between August 12, 2012 and January 13, 2013
  • The different images show distinct changes in the parachute, which is attached to the backshell that encompassed the rover during launch, flight and descent
  • This type of motion may kick off dust and keep parachutes on the surface bright, to help explain why the parachute from Viking 1 (landed in 1976) remains detectable
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • An animation of seven images from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show a “flapping” of the parachute that allowed the Curiosity rover to descend safely through Mars atmosphere images
Mars Base

Cholesterol-lowering eye drops could treat macular degeneration - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...s-atherosclerosis-macular.html

scibyte89

shared by Mars Base on 03 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • A new study raises the intriguing possibility that drugs prescribed to lower cholesterol may be effective against macular degeneration, a blinding eye disease.
  • Researchers
  • have found that age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss in Americans over 50, shares a common link with atherosclerosis
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Both problems have the same underlying defect: the inability to remove a buildup of fat and cholesterol
  • researchers shed new light on how deposits of cholesterol contribute to macular degeneration and atherosclerosis and even blood vessel growth in some types of cancer
  • Patients who have atherosclerosis often are prescribed medications to lower cholesterol and keep arteries clear
  • This study suggests that some of those same drugs could be evaluated in patients with macular degeneration
  • we need to investigate whether vision loss caused by macular degeneration could be prevented with cholesterol-lowering eye drops or other medications that might prevent the buildup of lipids beneath the retina
  • The new research centers on macrophages, key immune cells that remove cholesterol and fats from tissues
  • In macular degeneration, the excessive buildup of cholesterol begins to occur as we age, and our macrophages begin to malfunction
  • In the "dry" form of age-related macular degeneration, doctors examining the eye can see lipid deposits beneath the retina
  • As those deposits become larger and more numerous, they slowly begin to destroy the central part of the eye, interfering with the vision needed to read a book or drive a car
  • As aging macrophages clear fewer fat deposits beneath the retina, the macrophage cells themselves can become bloated with cholesterol, creating an inflammatory process that leads to the formation of new blood vessels that can cause further damage
  • Those vessels characterize the later "wet" form of the disease
  • that inflammation creates a toxic mix of things that leads to new blood vessel growth
  • Most of the vision loss
  • is the result of bleeding and scar-tissue formation related to abnormal vessel growth
  • the scientists identified a protein that macrophages need to clear fats and cholesterol
  • As mice and humans age, they make less of the protein, and macrophages become less effective at engulfing and removing fat and cholesterol
  • team found that macrophages, from old mice and in patients with macular degeneration, have inadequate levels of the protein, called ABCA1, which transports cholesterol out of cells
  • As a result, the old macrophages accumulated high levels of cholesterol and couldn't inhibit the growth of the damaging blood vessels
  • when the researchers treated the macrophages with a substance that helped restore levels of ABCA1, the cells could remove cholesterol more effectively, and the development of new blood vessels was slowed
  • able to deliver the drug, called an LXR agonist, in eye drops
  • found that we could reverse the macular degeneration in the eye of an old mouse
  • could focus therapy only on the eyes, and we likely could limit the side effects of drugs taken orally
  • since macrophages are important in atherosclerosis and in the formation of new blood vessels around certain types of cancerous tumors, the same pathway also might provide a target for more effective therapies for those diseases
  • can reverse the disease cascade in mice by improving macrophage function, either with eye drops or with systemic treatments,
  • Some of the therapies already being used to treat atherosclerosis target this same pathway, so we may be able to modify drugs that already are available and use them to deliver treatment to the eye
Mars Base

Astronomers Watch as a Black Hole Eats a Rogue Planet - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...black-hole-eats-a-rogue-planet

scibyte89 BlackHole

shared by Mars Base on 03 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Astronomers using the Integral space observatory were able to watch as the planet was eaten by a black hole that had been inactive for decades
  • The observation was
  • from a galaxy that has been quiet for at least 20–30 years
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • the event is a preview of a similar feeding event that is expected to take place with the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy
  • galaxy NGC 4845, 47 million light-years away
  • Astronomers were using Integral to study a different galaxy when they noticed a bright X-ray flare coming from another location in the same wide field-of-view
  • the origin was confirmed as NGC 4845, a galaxy never before detected at high energies
  • the emission was traced from its maximum in January 2011, when the galaxy brightened by a factor of a thousand, and then as it subsided over the course of the year
  • By analyzing the characteristics of the flare, the astronomers could determine that the emission came from a halo of material around the galaxy’s central black hole as it tore apart and fed on an object of 14–30 Jupiter masses, and so the astronomers say the object was either a super-Jupiter or a brown dwarf
  • This object appears to have been ‘wandering,’ which would fit the description of recent studies
  • The black hole in the center of NGC 4845 is estimated to have a mass of around 300,000 times that of our own Sun
  • This is the first time where we have seen the disruption of a substellar object by a black hole
  • estimate that only its external layers were eaten by the black hole, amounting to about 10% of the object’s total mass, and that a denser core has been left orbiting the black hole
  • The flaring event in NGC 4845 might be similar to what is expected to happen with the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy
  • these events will tell astronomers more about what happens to the demise of different types of objects as they encounter black holes of varying sizes
  • Estimates are that events like these may be detectable every few years in galaxies around us
  • the emission brightened and decayed shows there was a delay of 2–3 months between the object being disrupted and the heating of the debris in the vicinity of the black hole.
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