171631652
submission
sciencehabit writes:
The guitar chords echo strangely, as if emanating from the bottom of a well. The singer’s voice is also garbled, his lyrics barely intelligible. Nevertheless, if you know what’s coming, the song is recognizable: “All in all, it was just a brick in the wall.” It’s a snippet of “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)” from the album “The Wall,” which was a smash hit in 1979 for the U.K. rock band Pink Floyd. And it was re-created from brain recordings from people who listened to it. The reconstructed tune provides new insights into where in the brain music is processed.
The reconstruction is a “technical tour de force” that provides new insight into how the brain understands music, says Robert Zatorre, a neuroscientist at McGill University who was not involved in the study.
But the team, lead by Ludovic Bellier, was not only interested in “mind reading,” says Sylvain Baillet, a neuroscientist at McGill who was not involved in the work. The researchers also tried to identify brain areas responsible for perceiving different musical features. To do that, they fed the model neural recordings in which the data from some electrodes had been removed and observed the effect on the re-created song. That approach revealed a newly identified brain region that is involved in the perception of musical rhythm, such as the thrumming guitar in “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1),” the researchers report today in PLOS Biology. The work also confirms that music perception, unlike regular speech processing, involves both halves of the brain.
Bellier hopes this research might one day be used to help patients who struggle to speak as a result of strokes, injuries, or degenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Thanks to advances in assistive technology, many of these patients are able to communicate using brain machine interfaces, which is “a fantastic advancement,” Bellier says. But these technologies fail to adequately reproduce the musical nature of speech, he notes, so patients’ voices sound stilted and robotic. Brain machine interfaces that rely on artificial intelligence could account for these musical elements, allowing patients to communicate more naturally, he speculates.
171631616
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Nearly everyone has fun on a carousel—including, possibly, fruit flies. Scientists observed some flies embarking on a spinning platform voluntarily and repeatedly, suggesting the animals may find the movement appealing for some reason, according to a study posted on the bioRxiv preprint server earlier this month.
“The flies are fulfilling all the criteria of play as we understand it in other animals,” says Samadi Galpayage, a behavioral scientist at Queen Mary University of London who discovered bumble bees play with objects and who was not involved in the work. “There isn't really an alternative explanation so far. Whether that’s [evidence of] fun in itself—that’s the next question.”
Sergio Pellis, a behavioral scientist at the University of Lethbridge, says he finds the study—which has yet to be peer reviewed—“very exciting.” If confirmed, he notes, it would add to the small but growing pile of evidence for play in invertebrates—and would be the first instance of a type called “locomotor play” in these animals. Locomotor play involves the movement of one’s own body, such as running, jumping, or swinging. It’s different from object play, as bees have been observed doing, or social play, which has been observed in certain wasps and spiders.
Some of the flies ignored the contraption. But a small group of them acted as if they’d just discovered Disneyland. The fact that some flies apparently liked the carousel and others didn’t came as no surprise to University of Tennessee, Knoxville, behavioral scientist Gordon Burghardt, an expert on play in nonhuman animals who wasn’t involved in the study. “You take a bunch of kids to the fairground, and some are really anxious to get on the rides while others are a little more hesitant.”
Pellis notes there has been resistance to the idea that animals outside of mammals engage in play. He recalls research in the 1970s on roughhousing in cockroaches, for example, that would immediately be considered an example of play if puppies were doing it. Now, he says, there are enough solid examples of play in other species that it makes sense to ask just how widespread various kinds of play are across the animal kingdom.
Ultimately, the findings suggest locomotor play “might really be deeply rooted in our evolutionary history,” says Burghardt. So, it’s possible it’s happening all around us—and we’ve just been too focused on the playful antics of furry critters to notice.
171582464
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Roughly one in five people are born with at least one copy of a gene variant called APOE4 that makes them more prone to heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease in old age. That the variant is so common poses an evolutionary mystery: If it decreases our fitness, why hasn’t APOE4 been purged from the human population over time?
Now, a study of nearly 800 women in a traditional society in the Amazon finds that those with the disease-promoting variant had slightly more children. Such a fertility benefit may have allowed the gene to persist during human evolution despite its harmful effects for older people today.
The Tsimané data also allowed the team to home in on how APOE4 may boost fertility: Women carrying it were slightly heavier that those without it, started bearing children about 1 year earlier, and had their next child a few months sooner. That fits with being more resistant to parasites, says siological anthropologist Benjamin Trumble . “Being in a better immune state means that you can then devote more calories towards growing faster, and then you’re able to reproduce faster.”
Alzheimer’s and heart disease rates are low even among older Tsimané people, perhaps because of their active lifestyle, Trumble’s group has reported. But he says APOE4 could still have detrimental effects that balance the benefits—it may reduce fertility in men, for example, or decrease child survival. “Our next step is to figure out whether there are disadvantages at certain life stages,” he says.
171574356
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Whether they're in mortal peril or just suffering from indigestion, infants across the animal kingdom cry out to tell their parents they need help. Unfortunately for them, the parents aren't the only ones attuned to the cries of their vulnerable young. Nile crocodiles are uniquely sensitive to the wails of distressed primate babies, according to a new study—and the more anxious the cry, the more interested the crocs become.
Indeed, according to the research, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, the reptiles are even better at identifying the emotional cues hidden in the wails of babies than we are—perhaps because they’ve evolved to home in on helpless prey.
“Oh, what a pity yum, yum!” jokes Stephan Reber, a cognitive zoologist at Lund University who was not involved in the study. On a more serious note, he says, the work raises the possibility that emotion may be communicated across species lines in more ways than scientists thought. “If crocs can do it, it probably means that many, many more animals can do it.”
171567358
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Rapid COVID-19 tests gave many people a firsthand appreciation for the value of quick and cheap diagnostics. Now, researchers have shown how to conduct thousands of rapid molecular screenings simultaneously, using light to identify target molecules snared on top of an array of tiny silicon blocks. In theory, the tool could be used to spot 160,000 different molecules in a single square centimeter of space. Developed to spot gene fragments from the SARS-CoV-2 virus and other infectious organisms, the technology should also be able to identify protein markers of cancer and small molecules flagging toxic threats in the environment.
171510580
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Tesla’s Powerwall, a boxy, wall-mounted, lithium-ion battery, can power your home for half a day or so. But what if your home was the battery?
Researchers have come up with a new way to store electricity in cement, using cheap and abundant materials. If scaled up, the cement could hold enough energy in a home’s concrete foundation to fulfill its daily power needs. Scaled up further, electrified roadways could power electric cars as they drive. And if scientists can find a way to do this all cheaply the advance might offer a nearly limitless capacity for storing energy from intermittent renewable sources, such as solar and wind.
If this "carbon black cement" was used to make a 45-cubic-meter volume of concrete—roughly the amount used in the foundation of a standard home—it could store 10 kilowatt-hours of energy, enough to power an average household for a day. If the same approach were used to build roads, parking lots, or driveways, electrified concrete could store renewable power and deliver it to electric cars via inductive chargers. One approach might be sending electricity to the underbellies of cars via copper coils embedded in the roadway—a bit like how wireless chargers charge smartphones. Such technology is already being developed in Germany and the Netherlands.
171491058
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Do rats like to be tickled? The furry rodents can be quite fun-loving, scientists say. And yes, under the right circumstances, they do enjoy a bit of rough-and-tumble play, letting out high-pitched squeaks akin to human laughter. Now, researchers say they have identified the area of the brain responsible for this playfulness.
The discovery, reported today in Neuron, represents “a fantastic step forward” for understanding the neural basis of play and laughter, says Sergio Pellis, a neuroscientist at the University of Lethbridge who was not involved in the study.
The work could help uncover the neural mechanisms of play in humans. By understanding how the brain processes positive as well as negative emotions, researchers may be able to develop more personalized and effective treatments for patients who suffer from anxiety and depression.
171488740
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Water is a near-universal solvent, able to dissolve substances ranging from limestone to the sugar in your coffee. That chemical superpower originates, oddly enough, in water’s electrical properties. It can oppose and almost entirely cancel electric fields—including attractions among dissolved ions that might otherwise pull them together. Curiously, dissolving salt in water weakens that electrical response. Now, a team of physicists has figured out exactly why this happens, using state-of-the-art computer simulations bolstered by artificial intelligence (AI).
“This is a fundamental property of water and one can finally do a calculation in which this can be entirely predicted from first principles,” says Roberto Car, a physicist at Princeton University who was not involved in the work. The AI-aided approach should allow physicists to probe in other settings, he says, such as batteries and fuel cells.
171488726
submission
sciencehabit writes:
This week, social media has been aflutter over a claim for a new superconductor that works not only well above room temperatures, but also at ambient pressure. If true, the discovery would be one of the biggest ever in condensed matter physics and could usher in all sorts of technological marvels, such as levitating vehicles and perfectly efficient electrical grids. However, the two related papers, posted to the arXiv preprint server by Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim of South Korea’s Quantum Energy Research Centre and colleagues on 22 July, are short on detail and have left many physicists skeptical. The researchers did not respond to Science’s request for comment.
“They come off as real amateurs,” says Michael Norman, a theorist at Argonne National Laboratory. “They don't know much about superconductivity and the way they’ve presented some of the data is fishy.” On the other hand, he says, researchers at Argonne and elsewhere are already trying to replicate the experiment. “People here are taking it seriously and trying to grow this stuff.” Nadya Mason, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign says, “I appreciate that the authors took appropriate data and were clear about their fabrication techniques.” Still, she cautions, “The data seems a bit sloppy.”
171423182
submission
sciencehabit writes:
This week, the much anticipated movie Oppenheimer hits theaters, giving famed filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s take on the theoretical physicist who during World War II led the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who died in 1967, is known as a charismatic leader, eloquent public intellectual, and Red Scare victim who in 1954 lost his security clearance in part because of his earlier associations with suspected Communists. To learn about Oppenheimer the scientist, Science spoke with David C. Cassidy, a physicist and historian emeritus at Hofstra University. Cassidy has authored or edited 10 books, including J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century. How did Oppenheimer compare to Einstein? Did he actually make any substantiative contributions to THE Bomb? And why did he eventually lose his security clearance?
171066223
submission
sciencehabit writes:
The truth may be out there about UFOs, or what the government currently calls “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (UAPs). But finding it will require collecting data that are more rigorous than the anecdotal reports that typically fuel the controversial sightings, according to a panel of scientists, appointed by NASA to advise the agency on the topic, that held its first public meeting today.
The 16-person panel, created last year at the behest of NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, is not itself evaluating UFO claims. Instead, it is advising NASA on how the agency can contribute to federal investigations that have been led by the Department of Defense (DOD) and intelligence agencies, says panel chair David Spergel, an astrophysicist and president of the Simons Foundation, who spoke to Science ahead of the meeting. “NASA is a public agency, an open agency, that encourages the use of the scientific method for looking at results.” But science can only be done when there are data to work on, he adds. “You’re not going to learn much from fuzzy pictures from the 1950s.”
So far, most “unidentified” phenomena flagged by the military have ended up being weather balloons, drones, camera glitches, or undisclosed military aircraft, Spergel says. “It’s very unlikely there are space aliens that travel through space and use technology that looks remarkably like what we have right now.”
170951785
submission
sciencehabit writes:
On a stormy night in 1816, Mary Shelley had a terrifying dream about a corpse coming to life—a nightmare that inspired her to write Frankenstein. More than a century later, a melody in a dream led Paul McCartney to compose one of The Beatles’s most beloved songs, Yesterday.
Is there something about dreaming that enhances our creativity? Or is it just sleep itself? Scientists say they’re closer to an answer, thanks to an unusual study that used an electronic glove to guide people’s dreams while they slumbered.
To conduct the work, researchers invited 50 volunteers, mostly students and professors, to either stay awake or take a nap in a laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Those in the nap group laid down with an eye mask, while wearing a Dormio, a glovelike device with sensors that measure heart rate and muscle tone changes to track sleep stages. A computer linked to the device relayed audio cues to inspire the wearers to dream about specific subjects—a process called “targeted dream incubation.”
Overall, volunteers who dreamt about trees scored 78% higher on the creativity metrics than those who stayed awake just observing their thoughts and 63% higher than those who stayed awake thinking about trees. Participants who napped without hearing the prompt still got a creativity boost, but those who dreamed about trees still performed 48% better than them.
The researchers also noticed that the volunteers used the content of their dreams to answer the tests. The person who dreamed that their limbs were made of old wood wrote a story about an oak king with a wood body, for example. The person who dreamed of becoming bigger than trees, meanwhile, listed “toothpick for a giant” as an alternative use for a tree.
170926741
submission
sciencehabit writes:
On a chilly holiday Monday in January 2020, a medical milestone passed largely unnoticed. In a New York City operating room, surgeons gently removed the heart from a 43-year-old man who had died and shuttled it steps away to a patient in desperate need of a new one.
More than 3500 people in the United States receive a new heart each year. But this case was different—the first of its kind in the country. “It took us 6 months to prepare,” says Nader Moazami, surgical head of heart transplantation at New York University (NYU) Langone Health, where the operation took place. The run-up included oversight from an ethics board, education sessions with nurses and anesthesiologists, and lengthy conversations with the local organization that represents organ donor families. Physicians spent hours practicing in the hospital’s cadaver lab, prepping for organ recovery from the donor. “We wanted to make sure that we controlled every aspect,” Moazami says.
That’s because this donor, unlike most, was not declared dead because of loss of brain function. He had been suffering from end-stage liver disease and was comatose and on a ventilator, with no hope of regaining consciousness—but his brain still showed activity. His family made the wrenching choice to remove life support. Following that decision, they expressed a wish to donate his organs, even agreeing to transfer him to NYU Langone Health before he died so his heart could be recovered afterward.
In individuals declared brain dead, organs can be recovered before life support is disconnected, as these people have already died; such machinery keeps organs oxygenated and healthy prior to transplant. But for this man the donation process would be altered: Life support had to be withdrawn for death to occur. His heart stopped, and his circulation with it.
As is customary regardless of whether organs will be donated, physicians waited 5 minutes to ensure that the heart didn’t start beating again on its own. It did not, and the man was declared dead. The baton then passed to the organ recovery and transplant team. They clamped blood vessels running from the torso to the brain and reconnected his body to machines that circulated oxygenated blood, causing the heart to begin pumping again.
These two interventions—initiating a heartbeat after death is declared and taking steps to prevent blood flow to the brain—are at the core of a raging debate about the ethics of such donations. To some people, the approach risks disrupting the dying process; to others, it allows that process to continue as the family desires, while also honoring individual or family wishes for organ donation.
The debate touches on the definition of death, Moazami says. “When the heart stops, we say, ‘time of death, 5:20 a.m.’” But, “The fact of the matter is, death is a process. Death is not a time point.” Cells can take hours to die. Sophisticated machinery can induce a heartbeat hours after death, but does that make a person “alive”?Link to Original Source
170873610
submission
sciencehabit writes:
For the first time, astronomers have observed a dying star billowing up and swallowing one of its planets—just as the Sun will someday consume Earth. Researchers spotted the event some 12,000 light-years away in the constellation Aquila while searching for the fireworks associated with stellar mergers. The relatively minor cataclysm, which flared only 1/1000th as brightly as a binary star merger, could open a whole new field of study, researchers say.
170824658
submission
sciencehabit writes:
A research team has turned the bodies of dead mice into vivid 3D maps of anatomy, with tissues, nerves, and vessels highlighted in color. The technique, which renders the corpses transparent and then exposes them to fluorescent antibodies that label distinct cell types, could help everything from drug development to understanding the spread of cancer, its creators and other scientists say.
The developers, at the Helmholtz Munich research institute, call their technique wildDISCO—wild because it can work on any “wild type,” or normal, mice, and DISCO for 3D imaging of solvent-cleared organs. Building on their previous success at making mouse bodies transparent, the new technique removes cholesterol from the bodies so that a vast array of existing antibodies can penetrate deep into the animals. “wildDISCO is a game changer—it allows us to see the hidden highways and byways in the body,” says Muzlifah Haniffa, a dermatologist and immunologist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Newcastle University’s Biosciences Institute who was not involved in the research.
The method should let scientists map a mouse at the cellular level and explore previously hidden links between tissues, like neural connections between organs, says neuroscientist Ali Ertürk, director of Helmholtz Munich, who led the work, posted recently as a preprint. His group in Germany has already posted eye-catching videos of “flying” through the 3D anatomy of a mouse with different tissues labeled.
