Lola Gayle, STEAM Register Election rigging concerns are an ever-present issue during most elections. Many voters wonder if their vote will be registered accurately, or perhaps feel that voting systems may be vulnerable to tampering. Of course these concerns have great merit when you consider that voting is a fundamental aspect of participating in a democracy.…
A group of space industry experts that advises NASA has told the U.S. space agency there are safety risks in a proposal by Elon Musk's SpaceX to fuel its rockets while astronauts are on board.
"This is a hazardous operation," Space Station Advisory Committee Chairman Thomas Stafford, a former NASA astronaut and retired Air Force general, said during a conference call on Monday.
Stafford said the group's concerns were heightened after an explosion of an unmanned SpaceX rocket while it was being fueled on Sept. 1.
The causes of that explosion are still under investigation.
Members of the eight-member group, which includes veterans of NASA's Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle programs noted that all previous rockets that have flown people into space were fueled before astronauts got to the launch pad.
"It was unanimous ... Everybody there, and particularly the people who had experience over the years, said nobody is ever near the pad when they fuel a booster,” Stafford said, referring to an earlier briefing the group had about SpaceX's proposed fueling procedure.
SpaceX needs NASA approval of its launch system before it can put astronauts into space.
In an email to Reuters sent late Monday, SpaceX said its fueling system and launch processes will be re-evaluated pending the results of the accident investigation.
SpaceX uses extremely cold liquid propellants loaded just prior to blastoff to increase the rocket's power so it can fly back to Earth and be reused.
“As needed, any additional controls will be put in place to ensure crew safety, from the moment the astronauts reach the pad, through fueling, launch, and spaceflight, and until they are brought safely home,” SpaceX said.
SpaceX said Friday that it believes a fueling system issue caused a pressurized container of helium inside the rocket’s upper stage to burst on Sept. 1, triggering a fireball that destroyed the booster and a $200 million Israeli communications satellite it was to carry into orbit two days later.
SpaceX’s passenger spaceships, which are expected to begin flying in 2018, will be outfitted with an emergency escape system that can fly the capsule away from a failing rocket before or during launch.
NASA hired SpaceX and Boeing Co to fly crews to the space station after the shuttles were retired in 2011. Since then, astronauts have been flying on Russian Soyuz capsules, at a cost of more than $70 million per person.
(Reporting by Irene Klotz; Editing by David Gregorio)
Enthusiasm for precision medicine, from the White House down to everyday physicians, is at an all-time high. But serious problems with the databases used to interpret patients' genetic profiles can lead to "inappropriate treatment" with "devastating consequences," researchers at the Mayo Clinic warned on Monday. Their report describes the cases of some two dozen people who…
Lola Gayle, STEAM Register There are now a total of 15,000 known near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), and we're adding an average of 30 new discoveries every single week. That's a 50 percent increase in the number of known NEAs since 2013, when discoveries reached 10,000 in August of that year. "The rate of discovery has been high…
OSLO (Reuters) - Almost one in seven children worldwide live in areas with high levels of outdoor air pollution, mostly in South Asia, and their growing bodies are most vulnerable to damage, the U.N. children's agency UNICEF said on Monday.
UNICEF called on almost 200 governments, which will meet in Morocco from Nov. 7-18 for talks on global warming, to restrict use of fossil fuels to give twin benefits of improved health and slower climate change.
About 300 million children, or almost one in seven worldwide, lived in areas where outdoor pollution was highest, defined by UNICEF as at least six times international guidelines set by the World Health Organization (WHO), it said.
Of the total, 220 million lived in South Asia. It identified the regions with satellite imagery developed by NASA.
UNICEF executive director Anthony Lake said air pollution was a "major contributing factor in the deaths of around 600,000 children under five every year", causing illnesses such as pneumonia.
"Pollutants don't only harm children's developing lungs - they can actually cross the blood-brain barrier and permanently damage their developing brains - and, thus, their futures," he said in a statement.
"Air pollution affects poor children the most," Nicholas Rees, a UNICEF specialist on climate and economic analysis who wrote the report, told Reuters.
Worldwide, the WHO estimates that outdoor air pollution killed 3.7 million people in 2012, including 127,000 children aged under five. Factories, power plants and vehicles using fossil fuels, dust and burning of waste were among sources.
Indoor air pollution, often caused by coal- or wood-burning cooking stoves used in homes in developing nations, killed even more people, 4.3 million, of whom 531,000 were aged under five, it said.
UNICEF called on the U.N.-led meeting in Morocco to hasten a shift from fossil fuels to cleaner energies such as wind or solar power, to improve children's access to health care, limit children's exposure to pollution and to step up monitoring of the air.
(Reporting By Alister Doyle; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
Lola Gayle, STEAMRegister.com Trick-or-treat time is nearly here, and the folks at CE&N's Speaking of Chemistry have been "boning up" on the chemistry of three creepy classics – mummies, ghosts, and vampires. First off, let's talk about mummies. The ancient Egyptians are famous for their mummification techniques. But did you know that some bodies can actually…
Lola Gayle, STEAM Register Millions of Americans contract foodborne diseases every year, with Salmonella leading the pack. Despite its bad reputation, however, Salmonella may actually hold promise for treating cancer due to its ability to penetrate through cell barriers and replicate inside its host, according to work by scientists at the Cancer Research Center and the…
SpaceX said on Friday its investigation of the cause of a Sept. 1 explosion that destroyed a Falcon 9 rocket is focusing on a possible flaw in the fueling system.
The space launch company led by billionaire Elon Musk said it has not confirmed the cause of a failure in the fueling system. However, the company said in a statement that during testing at a facility in Texas it had replicated a failure of a pressurized vessel inside the rocket's liquid oxygen tank that is similar to the failure believed to have occurred while helium was being loaded into the rocket.
(Reporting By Irene Klotz; Editing by Joseph White and Chris Reese)
In an interview with the Financial Times, former Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO and global poster child for prescription drug price-gauging Martin Shkreli said that he regrets nothing about his decision to raise the per-pill cost of the drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750.
The Guardian reported Friday that Shkreli maintains that Daraprim -- which is used to treat the blood disease toxoplasmosis in AIDS and cancer patients -- was "woefully underpriced" before his firm jacked up the cost.
“To me the drug was woefully underpriced,” he said. “It is not a question of ‘Is this fair?’ or ‘What did you pay for it?’ or ‘When was it invented?’ It should be more expensive in many ways.”
The 32-year-old hedge funder and entrepreneur then tried to style himself as a martyr to the whims of his companies' shareholders.
“My whole life has been one theme, of self-sacrifice for my investors,” he said. “I did it for my shareholders’ benefit because that’s my job. The political risk is being shamed, and shame isn’t dilutive to earnings per share.”
Earlier this year, he told VICE that his business practices may be unpopular, but they are not unethical.
“Yea, I’m a capitalist, I’d love to make an even bigger fortune then I’ve got now,” he said. “But I’m not gonna do it at the expense of a human life. We sell our drugs for a dollar to the government, but we sell our drugs for $750 a pill to Walmart, to Exxon Mobil, to all these big companies, they pay full price because fuck them, why shouldn’t they? If I take their money to do research for dying kids, I think I’m a hero, let alone evil.”
Shkreli was taken into custody by the FBI on charges of defrauding investors. He posted the $5 million bail and is awaiting trial in June.
Nontrivial numbers of Americans believe in the paranormal. These beliefs have spawned thousands of groups dedicated to investigating paranormal phenomena and a proliferation of ghost-hunting entries in the reality television market. Anecdotal evidence even suggests that ghost-hunting reality shows have increased public openness to paranormal research, which usually entails a small group traipsing through reportedly haunted locales at night with various ghost-hunting technologies.
Audio recorders figure prominently in paranormal researchers’ toolkits. Microphones capture ambient sounds during the investigation. Later, the audio recordings are scoured in search of messages from spirits. The premise is that audio recording devices can register otherwise inaudible communications from discarnate entities.
These purported communications have been dubbed electronic voice phenomena (EVP). The sounds are generally brief – most examples consist of single words or short phrases. Perceived contents of EVP range from threatening (“You’re going to hell”) to bizarre (“Egypt Air”).
An EVP recorded at Lizzie Borden’s house.
Part of the attraction of the audio recorder for paranormal researchers is its apparent objectivity. How could a skeptic refute the authenticity of a spirit captured by an unbiased technical instrument? To the believers, EVP seem like incontrovertible evidence of communications from beyond. But recent research in my lab suggested that people don’t agree much about what, if anything, they hear in the EVP sounds – a result readily explained by the fallibility of human perception. Despite the technological trappings, EVP research bears several characteristics of pseudoscience.
What are the EVP sounds?
The chain of evidence for most purported EVP makes hoaxes difficult to rule out, but let’s assume that many of these sounds are not deliberate fraud. In some instances, alleged EVP are the voices of the investigators or interference from radio transmissions – problems that indicate shoddy data collection practices. Other research, however, has suggested that EVP have been captured under acoustically controlled circumstances in recording studios. What are the possible explanations for these sounds?
The critical leap in EVP research is the point at which odd sounds are interpreted as voices that communicate with intention. Paranormal investigators typically decode the content of EVP by arriving at consensus among themselves. EVP websites advise paranormal researchers to ask themselves, “Is it a voice…are you sure?” or to “Share results among fellow investigators and try to prevent investigator bias when reviewing data.” Therein lies a methodological difficulty.
We asked three questions: Do people perceive alleged EVP to be voices under controlled conditions? If they hear voices, do they agree about what the voices are saying without being told what they’re supposed to hear? And finally, does it matter whether or not they think the research topic is paranormal?
Half of participants were told that the experiment was part of a research project on paranormal EVP. The other half were told that we were studying speech perception in noisy environments – a typical (if perhaps boring) perceptual psychology experiment.
In a study trial, participants heard a sound and were asked if they detected a voice in the stimulus. If they responded “no,” the trial ended. If they responded “yes,” they reported what they thought the voice had said. Across the study, participants heard the purported EVP, recordings of actual human speech, recordings of human speech obscured in noise, and recordings of only noise. The EVP and speech-in-noise sounds were inherently ambiguous – they sort of sounded like a voice was present and sort of did not.
Compared to the control condition, the suggestion of a paranormal research topic made people more likely to report hearing voices for both the EVP (48% versus 34% “yes” responses) and the voices hidden in noise (58% versus 40% “yes” responses). For real human speech, all participants nearly always heard a voice (99% “yes” responses), and for noise all participants almost never heard a voice (1% “yes” responses). So suggesting a paranormal research topic mattered only when the audio was ambiguous.
Further, when people said they heard a voice in the EVP, only 13% agreed about exactly what the voice said. To compare, 95% percent of people on average agreed about what the voice said when they heard actual speech.
In one final analysis, we showed that the participants’ interpretations agreed with the paranormal researchers’ interpretations less than 1% of the time. These findings suggest that paranormal researchers should not use their own subjective judgments to confirm the contents of EVP.
But perhaps most importantly, we showed that the mere suggestion of a paranormal research context made people more likely to hear voices in ambiguous stimuli, although they couldn’t agree on what the voices were saying.
A perceptual explanation of EVP
We concluded that EVP are an auditory example of pareidolia – the tendency to perceive human characteristics in meaningless perceptual patterns. There are many visual examples of pareidolia – things like seeing human faces in everyday objects (such as Jesus in a piece of toast).
Research from cognitive psychology has shown that paranormal believers may be especially prone to misperceiving chance events. A face-like configuration in a slice of toast seems meaningful. People ask, "What are the chances?“ But if you add up all of the slices of toast you see over the days and weeks and months of a lifetime, it becomes inevitable that you will encounter some of these human-like configurations in toast due to chance.
Assuming some of these voice-like sounds can’t be attributed to shoddy data collection practices, their actual sources likely run the spectrum from ambient environmental noises to electrical interference to audio processing artifacts. If the listener is intently expecting to hear a person, virtually any sound can meet that expectation. One writer aptly suggested that EVP are like an auditory inkblot test: a blank slate upon which the listener can project any interpretation. The tendency for EVP investigators to hear a voice – a meaningful sound with agency and intention – is likely amplified by the suggestion of a paranormal context.
EVP research bears hallmarks of pseudoscience
In pseudoscience, there is a semblance of adherence to the values of science. Objectivity in EVP research is equated with the use of a technological recording device per se, but subjectivity permeates the critical step of interpreting what the sounds mean. In science, objectivity is a critical value for researchers – an ideal that we attempt to apply to all aspects of inquiry – rather than a feature of our equipment.
Another characteristic of pseudoscience is a lack of integration with related areas of inquiry. There is a rich history of using experimental methods to examine auditory perception, yet EVP enthusiasts are either unaware or willfully ignorant of this relevant work.
Science also values parsimony – the idea that the simplest explanation is preferred. To explain EVP as the result of human auditory perception, we need a theory to account for how and why a human listener sometimes misperceives ambiguous stimuli.
In fact, this very tendency is one of many well-documented cognitive shortcuts that may have adaptive value. A voice may indicate the presence of a potential mate or foe, so it may be useful to err on the side of perceiving agency in ambiguous auditory stimuli.
A paranormal theory is much more complex. We have to explain how disembodied entities acquire agency. We have to explain why they have the ability to produce sound but only communicate in audio recordings instead of simply speaking aloud. We have to explain why they apparently can’t speak clearly in full sentences, but only brief, garbled, often seemingly random phrases.
What’s the harm?
Many forms of popular entertainment require the suspension of disbelief, and viewers of paranormal reality shows are hopefully tuning in for the entertainment rather than scientific value of these programs. There are many important public issues, however, for which pseudoscientific beliefs have harmed public discourse.
Currently, there is only limited, tentative evidence to link exposure to pseudoscience on television to pseudoscientific beliefs. Still, one study showed that people find paranormal research to be more credible and scientific when it is shown using technological tools such as recording devices. Other evidence has suggested that popular opinion may outweigh scientific credibility when people evaluate pseudoscientific claims.
A good ghost story may hold entertainment and even cultural value, but the popular portrayal of pseudoscientific practices as science may be detracting from efforts to cultivate a scientifically literate public.
Dinosaurs have a fearsome reputation for their hunting abilities but less so when it comes to their intelligence. This is partly due to the fact that many species have long been thought to have had relatively small brains, their heads full of protective tissue that supposedly left little room for grey matter. But the recent discovery of the first recorded fossilised brain tissue could help challenge that image.
The fossilised brain was found by a collector on a beach near Bexhill in Sussex, England. It preserves brain tissue of a large herbivorous dinosaur similar to Iguanodon, one of the first dinosaur species to be identified. Found among rocks laid down during the early Cretaceous Period around 133m years ago, the fossil is an endocast, formed as layers of sediment gradually filled up the skull.
Endocast fossils have been found before but what is unusual about this specimen is that the outer millimetre or so of the brain tissues themselves were mineralised. This means the fossil records some of the fine structure of the original tissues. Looking at the fossil with a scanning electron microscope (a powerful microscope that allows visualisation of very small structures) allowed us to study this structure in great detail.
This revealed evidence of the dinosaur’s meninges, the tough, collagenous outer membranes that protect the main brain. It also showed up tiny blood vessels preserved as tubes running across the surface of the specimen. There are even hints of deeper tissues that may have formed part of the brain cortex, the functional part of the brain that contains neurons.
Brain preservation.
University of Cambridge
We think this level of preservation was possible because the brain tissue was effectively pickled before it was mineralised, probably after the dinosaur died in a highly acidic and low-oxygen body of water. The soft tissues were preserved by phosphate and iron minerals, and CT (computed tomography) scans show the fossil also contains sediment, as well as fragments of leaves, twigs and bone.
Taken together, these observations create a picture of the dinosaur dying in a well-vegetated, swampy environment. Its head probably became buried in the sediment on a river- or lake-bed, and the lack of oxygen allowed the brain tissues to mineralise before they had a chance to decay.
While it is not surprising to find that dinosaurs had brains, it is remarkable that these tissues can be preserved for so many millions of years. Now that we know dinosaur brains can be preserved in this way, it might lead to further discoveries as scientists look back through museum collections to search for other specimens that could be studied in a similar way.
Bird-brained dinosaurs
This specimen may also reveal information about the size of dinosaur brains, which has been considered by some researchers as a rough indicator of their intelligence. The brains of modern reptiles such as crocodiles are often surrounded by thick protective tissues. Researchers have previously speculated that the brains of dinosaurs may have been similar, with actual brain tissue filling as little as half of the volume of the braincase.
But the brain fossil appears to show that in Iguanodon, the protective membranes were in the region of 1mm thick. This would suggest that the brain of this dinosaur filled the majority of the braincase, more like modern birds. That in turn could imply that Iguanodon had a greater intelligence than it has previously been given credit for. Being “bird-brained” was perhaps no bad thing after all. A caveat to this is that during the preservation process, gravitational settling of the brain within the braincase may have squashed the protective tissues prior to them being preserved, possibly making them appear thinner than they actually were.
Further work and more specimens are needed before this finding can be confirmed. But hopefully, greater recognition that such delicate tissues can actually be preserved in the fossil record will lead to more discoveries that advance our understanding of dinosaur behaviour and physiology.
Over the course of a year, taking cranberry capsules did nothing to stave off urinary tract infections (UTIs) among older women living in nursing homes, a U.S. study finds.
Women taking the capsules had just as many UTIs and infection-promoting factors in their urine as women taking inert placebo pills, researchers conclude.
"I think it reinforces what many of the other studies have said so far," said lead author Dr. Manisha Juthani-Mehta, of the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.
Previous studies on the use of cranberry products like juice and capsules produced mixed results. A systematic look at that evidence published in 2012 by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates and reviews medical research, concluded "cranberry juice cannot currently be recommended for the prevention of UTIs."
Originally, it was thought that eating or drinking cranberry products increased the acidity of urine and prevented UTIs. There was also speculation that a compound in cranberries known as proanthocyanidin prevented bacteria from adhering to the bladder wall.
For the new study, the researchers randomly assigned 185 women over 65 years old living in 21 nursing homes near Yale to take pills every day. The participants received either two capsules containing cranberry extracts including a total of 72 milligrams of proanthocyanidin, the equivalent of a person drinking a 20-ounce bottle of cranberry juice, or they got look-alike dummy pills.
At the start of the study, about a third of the women had positive urine tests for bacteria and white blood cells, which doesn't mean the women had UTIs but these are needed elements for an infection to occur.
The researchers had a year of data on 147 women. The other women either died, withdrew from the study or were discharged from the nursing home.
Overall, there was no difference between women who took cranberry pills or placebos in the proportion who had bacteria and white blood cells in their urine at the end of the study period. Additionally, there was no difference between the two groups in the share of women who experienced symptomatic UTIs, died, were sent to hospitals or used antibiotics.
The results were published in JAMA to coincide with their presentation at the infectious disease conference known as IDWeek, which is being held in New Orleans.
"It is time to move on from cranberries," writes Dr. Lindsay Nicolle in an editorial accompanying the new study.
"The continuing promotion of cranberry use to prevent recurrent UTI in the popular press or online advice seems inconsistent with the reality of repeated negative studies or positive studies compromised by methodological shortcomings," writes Nicolle, of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada.
Juthani-Mehta told Reuters Health that there is probably little downside to people eating or drinking cranberry products if they like, but she wouldn't recommend those as a way to prevent UTIs - especially among older adults who may be on a fixed income.
"Capsules can range from not a lot of money to $200 per month for a 30-day supply," she said.
For UTI prevention, Juthani-Mehta said there are a couple approaches people - especially women - can take, including making sure they stay hydrated.
"In terms of prevention, hydration is certainly important," she said. "The other factor in post-menopausal women is topical estrogen therapy among women who had recurrent UTIs. It has shown some benefit."
"We may not have a study to say drinking water can prevent UTIs, but that’s really what I recommend," she said.
SOURCE: https://bit.ly/2eKztGl and https://bit.ly/2eKABtx JAMA, online October 27, 2016.
British and Australian scientists have identified an unassuming brown pebble, found more than a decade ago by a fossil hunter in southern England, as the first known example of fossilized dinosaur brain tissue.
The fossilized brain, found by fossil enthusiast Jamie Hiscocks near Bexhill in Sussex in 2004, is most likely from a species similar to Iguanodon - a large herbivore that lived during the early cretaceous period, some 133 million years ago.
In a report of their analysis in a Special Publication of the Geological Society of London, the researchers said they believed this piece of tissue was so well-preserved because the dinosaur's brain was "pickled" in a highly acidic and low-oxygen body of water – like a bog or swamp – shortly after it died.
"The chances of preserving brain tissue are incredibly small, so the discovery of this specimen is astonishing," said Alex Liu of Cambridge University's department of earth sciences, who worked on its identification.
Cambridge's David Norman, who led the work, said the finding also raised questions about the common perception of dinosaurs as animals with very small brains.
In typical reptiles, the brain is sausage-shaped and surrounded by a dense region of blood vessels and sinuses, meaning the brain itself only takes up about half of the space in the cranial cavity.
The tissue in the fossilized brain, however, appeared to have been pressed against the skull, the scientists said, raising the possibility that some dinosaurs had larger brains.
But Norman's team cautioned against drawing any firm conclusions from this single fossil about dinosaurs' brain size or intelligence levels.
"As we can't see the lobes of the brain itself, we can't say for sure how big this dinosaur's brain was," he said. "Of course, it's entirely possible that dinosaurs had bigger brains than we give them credit for, but we can't tell from this specimen alone."
(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
