Meet the World’s Most Advanced Brain Scanner

The super-MRI used in the Human Connectome Project is the ultimate brain hacking machine.

On the outside, it looks like every other brain scanner — a hollow metal cylinder with a hard, retractable cot. On the inside, however, the Connectome scanner boasts the most advanced brain imaging technology in the world. Installed at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in September 2011, this magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner is poised to be the Hubble Space Telescope of neuroscience.

Continue Reading

Nanotechnology Could Help Fight Diabetes

Injectable nanogel can monitor blood-sugar levels and secrete insulin when needed.

Injectable nanoparticles developed at MIT may someday eliminate the need for patients with Type 1 diabetes to constantly monitor their blood-sugar levels and inject themselves with insulin.

Continue Reading

Venus, Jupiter and Mercury Will Dance on May 28

Understanding events in the night sky is much like enjoying a cup of coffee in your favorite coffee shop!

For example, right now, a delicious ‘grande’ mug of decaf skinny peppermint latte (it’s really good, you should try it) is sitting a foot or two behind my screen. From where I am sitting, the screen and cup appear to be right next to each other, yet I know that they are separated by some distance.

Continue Reading

M8 and M20 in CFHT Filters — Cesar Blanco

Two Views of Iapetus

Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.

In most cases, paper books have more obvious topography than onscreen text. An open paperback presents a reader with two clearly defined domains—the left and right pages—and a total of eight corners with which to orient oneself. A reader can focus on a single page of a paper book without losing sight of the whole text: one can see where the book begins and ends and where one page is in relation to those borders. One can even feel the thickness of the pages read in one hand and pages to be read in the other. Turning the pages of a paper book is like leaving one footprint after another on the trail—there’s a rhythm to it and a visible record of how far one has traveled. All these features not only make text in a paper book easily navigable, they also make it easier to form a coherent mental map of the text.

In contrast, most screens, e-readers, smartphones and tablets interfere with intuitive navigation of a text and inhibit people from mapping the journey in their minds.

Scientific American explores the reading brain in the digital age. Also see the death of the book through the ages, the publishing world on future of print and writers on the future of books. (via explore-blog)

(Source: )

The Sun

MIT ‘Cheetah’ Robot Rivals Running Animals in Efficiency

Watch the Biggest Explosion Ever Seen on the Moon

NASA scientists recorded the biggest explosion from a meteorite impact seen on the moon in eight years of monitoring.

The lunar burst was caused by a 40-kilogram boulder-sized rock slamming into the surface at about 90,000 kph. It generated a flash 10 times brighter than anything seen before, which came from the thermal glow of molten rock at the point of impact.

The moon, like most bodies in the solar system, is subject to relatively frequent bombardment by small space rocks. Most of these objects are fairly tiny, pebble-sized or smaller, but in 2005 NASA set up a specific program to identify how often they occur. The lunar impact team has since identified more than 300 explosions, most of them faint and usually happening at the same time as a meteor shower on Earth. Researchers want to know how often they can expect such impacts, which could come in handy when planning moonwalks during future astronaut trips to our satellite.

The March 17 impact created a blast that was bright enough to be seen from Earth with the naked eye. It may have generated a crater roughly 20 meters wide, which could be imaged by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter next time it passes over the area, allowing researchers to see a very fresh impact on the moon.

Video: NASA

(Source: Wired)

science-junkie:

Beautiful ‘flowers’ self-assemble in a beaker

With the hand of nature trained on a beaker of chemical fluid, the most delicate flower structures have been formed in a Harvard laboratory—and not at the scale of inches, but microns.

These minuscule sculptures, curved and delicate, don’t resemble the cubic or jagged forms normally associated with crystals, though that’s what they are. Rather, fields of carnations and marigolds seem to bloom from the surface of a submerged glass slide, assembling themselves a molecule at a time.

By simply manipulating chemical gradients in a beaker of fluid, Wim L. Noorduin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and lead author of a paper appearing on the cover of the May 17 issue of Science, has found that he can control the growth behavior of these crystals to create precisely tailored structures.

“For at least 200 years, people have been intrigued by how complex shapes could have evolved in nature. This work helps to demonstrate what’s possible just through environmental, chemical changes,” says Noorduin.

Read more

Images: [x]

Requiem for the World’s Greatest Planet Hunter

After more than four years in space, restlessly searching for planets orbiting other stars, NASA’s Kepler space telescope may have met its demise.

The Kepler project is typically described in terms of raw numbers. As of the last official announcement, it had found 2,740 likely new planets–including 1,200 Neptune-size planets, 350 Earth-size planets, and at least 4 planets that orbit within the “habitable zone” where liquid water can exist. All of those numbers are sure to increase, as more observations are confirmed and as mission scientists continue to dig through a trove of archived data. But spirit, not statistics, is what really defines Kepler. It is a modern version of the expedition of Lewis and Clark, or the great voyages of Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan. It is a headlong plunge into the unknown cosmic territory around us.

Continue Reading

Cells as Living Calculators

Using analog computation circuits, MIT engineers design cells that can compute logarithms, divide and take square roots.

MIT engineers have transformed bacterial cells into living calculators that can compute logarithms, divide, and take square roots, using three or fewer genetic parts.

Continue Reading

This Day in Science History

Geneva was selected as the site for the CERN Laboratory at the third session of the provisional Council in 1952. This choice was approved in a referendum in the canton of Geneva in June 1953 by 16539 votes to 7332. On 17 May 1954, the first shovel load of earth was dug on the Meyrin site under the eyes of Geneva officials and members of CERN staff.

(Source: cern50.web.cern.ch)

Charted: Extraterrestrial Driving Records

NASA has just released this cute chart depicting the various distances traveled by wheeled machines on other worlds (click to enlarge).

The comparison was put out in honor of the agency’s Opportunity rover, which has been on Mars since 2004, beating NASA’s previous distance record-holder, the Apollo 17 moon buggy. During its nine years of operations, Opportunity has roved 35.760 kilometers, edging out the Apollo astronaut’s 35.744-kilometer drive.

The champion for driving on another surface still goes to the Soviet Lunokhod 2 rover, which traveled 37 kilometers across the moon in 1973. Of course, Opportunity still has the *ahem* opportunity to overtake the international record holder since it’s continuing to rove around the rim of Endeavour crater on Mars. The little robot has been exploring that area since 2011 and has uncovered some of the most unambiguous evidence for water on ancient Mars. Though NASA’s celebrated Curiosity rover has only gone less than one kilometer since landing in August, it has nuclear batteries that could last 14 years at minimum — ample time to beat all competitors.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

neuromorphogenesis:

Bach to the blues, our emotions match music to colors

Whether we’re listening to Bach or the blues, our brains are wired to make music-color connections depending on how the melodies make us feel, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley. For instance, Mozart’s jaunty Flute Concerto No. 1 in G major is most often associated with bright yellow and orange, whereas his dour Requiem in D minor is more likely to be linked to dark, bluish gray.  

Moreover, people in both the United States and Mexico linked the same pieces of classical orchestral music with the same colors. This suggests that humans share a common emotional palette – when it comes to music and color – that appears to be intuitive and can cross cultural barriers, UC Berkeley researchers said.

“The results were remarkably strong and consistent across individuals and cultures and clearly pointed to the powerful role that emotions play in how the human brain maps from hearing music to seeing colors,” said UC Berkeley vision scientist Stephen Palmer, lead author of a paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Using a 37-color palette, the UC Berkeley study found that people tend to pair faster-paced music in a major key with lighter, more vivid, yellow colors, whereas slower-paced music in a minor key is more likely to be teamed up with darker, grayer, bluer colors.

“Surprisingly, we can predict with 95 percent accuracy how happy or sad the colors people pick will be based on how happy or sad the music is that they are listening to,” said Palmer, who will present these and related findings at the International Association of Colour conference at the University of Newcastle in the U.K. on July 8.  At the conference, a color light show will accompany a performance by the Northern Sinfonia orchestra to demonstrate “the patterns aroused by music and color converging on the neural circuits that register emotion,” he said.

The findings may have implications for creative therapies, advertising and even music player gadgetry. For example, they could be used to create more emotionally engaging electronic music visualizers, computer software that generates animated imagery synchronized to the music being played. Right now, the colors and patterns appear to be randomly generated and do not take emotion into account, researchers said.

They may also provide insight into synesthesia, a neurological condition in which the stimulation of one perceptual pathway, such as hearing music, leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a different perceptual pathway, such as seeing colors.  An example of sound-to-color synesthesia was portrayed in the 2009 movie The Soloist when cellist Nathaniel Ayers experiences a mesmerizing interplay of swirling colors while listening to the Los Angeles symphony. Artists such as Wassily Kandinksky and Paul Klee may have used music-to-color synesthesia in their creative endeavors.

Nearly 100 men and women participated in the UC Berkeley music-color study, of which half resided in the San Francisco Bay Area and the other half in Guadalajara, Mexico. In three experiments, they listened to 18 classical music pieces by composers Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johannes Brahms that varied in tempo (slow, medium, fast) and in major versus minor keys.

In the first experiment, participants were asked to pick five of the 37 colors that best matched the music to which they were listening. The palette consisted of vivid, light, medium, and dark shades of red, orange, yellow, green, yellow-green, green, blue-green, blue, and purple.

Participants consistently picked bright, vivid, warm colors to go with upbeat music and dark, dull, cool colors to match the more tearful or somber pieces. Separately, they rated each piece of music on a scale of happy to sad, strong to weak, lively to dreary and angry to calm.  

Two subsequent experiments studying music-to-face and face-to-color associations supported the researchers’ hypothesis that “common emotions are responsible for music-to-color associations,” said Karen Schloss, a postdoctoral researchers at UC Berkeley and co-author of the paper. 

For example, the same pattern occurred when participants chose the facial expressions that “went best” with the music selections, Schloss said. Upbeat music in major keys was consistently paired with happy-looking faces while subdued music in minor keys was paired with sad-looking faces. Similarly, happy faces were paired with yellow and other bright colors and angry faces with dark red hues.

Next, Palmer and his research team plan to study participants in Turkey where traditional music employs a wider range of scales than just major and minor. “We know that in Mexico and the U.S. the responses are very similar,” he said. “But we don’t yet know about China or Turkey.”