A Japanese inventor is hoping a robot that still needs humans will win over Asia's largest tech fair, offering a counterpoint to major technology firms pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence (AI).
Katsumori Sakakibara was showing off his little droid called Caiba at the Cutting-Edge IT & Electronics Comprehensive Exhibition (CEATEC), which kicked off Tuesday near Tokyo.
Waist-high Caiba -- whose name means hippocampus, a key area of the brain, in Japanese -- is controlled by a human wearing a virtual reality handset and mechanical arms.
If the person waves their arms, the little robot follows suit. But whatever Caiba does, it depends on a human to control it.
"People say what an amazing AI (artificial intelligence) we're using for the robot. So I tell them: 'well, it's actually a middle-aged guy'," Sakakibara told AFP during a press preview this week.
"Humans are more flexible in that they can recognise a huge amount of different information, but so far AI can only be used in limited situations" such as playing chess, he added.
"We thought it would be better to use humans instead of AI."
Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft are among a growing number of technology firms that have been investing in making machines smarter, contending the goal is to improve lives through artificial intelligence.
Some critics, however, have warned that AI could turn on humanity and be its ruin instead of a salvation.
Less risky to the future of humanity was a robot arm made by automation parts maker Omron that can play -- and coach -- humans at ping pong.
- 'A perfect serve!' -
The machine is now a Guinness World Record holder as the first robot table tennis tutor, according to the company.
"It can now understand if a player is a beginner or experienced and change how it plays," said Omron's Taku Oya, referring to the robot's AI capabilities.
It can even give a compliment or two in text that appears on a screen beside the ping pong table.
"A perfect serve!" it says, or apologises for missing a ball.
"But its AI is not good enough so that it could beat professional table tennis players," Oya warned.
Meanwhile, Sharp is taking aim at the housing market with pint-sized Rin-chan, which can operate home appliances based on its owners' feelings.
For example, if a house dweller says 'it's too hot', the robot will turn on the air conditioning.
Another star of the show is a mug-sized, doe-eyed robot called Kirobo Mini made by Toyota as a chatty companion for its human owners.
The 10 centimetre (four inch) tall robot will go on sale next year in Japan for 39,800 yen ($400).
Meanwhile, Sakakibara hopes his little firm's AI-free droid could be used as a translator or guide at airports and other tourist spots.
"This way, translators don't have to run around -- they can just sit at a central office and connect with the robots," he said.
British-born scientists David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday for their studies of unusual states of matter, which may open up new applications in electronics.
Their discoveries, using advanced mathematics, had boosted research in condensed matter physics and raised hopes for uses in new generations of electronics and superconductors or future quantum computers, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
"Thanks to their pioneering work, the hunt is now on for new and exotic phases of matter," the academy said in a statement awarding the 8 million Swedish crown ($937,000) prize.
"Many people are hopeful of future applications in both materials science and electronics."
Thouless was awarded half the prize with the other half divided between Haldane and Kosterlitz. Nils Martensson, acting chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, told a news conference the winners had discovered a set of totally unexpected regularities in the behaviour of matter.
"This has paved the way for designing new materials with novel properties and there is great hope that this will be important for many future technologies," he said.
Physics is the second of this year's crop of Nobels and comes after Japan's Yoshinori Ohsumi was awarded the prize for medicine on Monday.
As Nobel physics laureates, the trio of researchers join the ranks of some of the greatest names in science, including Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Marie Curie.
The prizes were first awarded in 1901 to honour achievements in science, literature and peace in accordance with the will of the Swedish dynamite inventor and business tycoon Alfred Nobel, who left much of his wealth to establish the award.
For a graphic on Nobel laureates, click on: https://tmsnrt.rs/1jLPeM7
(Reporting by Anna Ringstrom, Bjorn Rundstrom, Simon Johnson and Johan Ahlander; Writing by Niklas Pollard; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
President Barack Obama is having a sit-down with Academy Award winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio from the South Lawn of the White House.
The president and DiCaprio will be joined by Dr. Katharine Hayhoe to discuss the challenges facing Earth in light on growing and tumultuous climate change.
The Guardian, a British newspaper, asked its readers if they would be willing to risk their lives for the chance to go to Mars. The results are interesting in that the people who responded in the affirmative seemed to share two characteristics: they were largely male and largely American, at least based on the responses that The Guardian chose to publish.
One of America's foundational myths is that of the "frontier," the idea of unexplored (by white folks) territory that is open to settlement, where a person can stake a claim. Whether it was fulfilling "Manifest Destiny" or following newspaper editors' commands to "go west, young man," white men were pushed to move outward, to claim land for themselves, and in so doing, to expand the American nation. So, is going to Mars just a new form of vestiges of Manifest Destiny?
So, what drives people to risk death for a chance to participate in something new? Is it the opportunity to participate in something monumental and of historical import? Is it a chance to travel farther than humans have ever ventured? Is it a quest for novelty?
Here are some of the responses that were sent to The Guardian's editor:
A 28-year-old photographer from New Mexico doesn't want to "limit" his life, but also, of course, wants the opportunities to photograph the wonders of Mars.
A 59-year old IT manager from the UK, after detailing how he had followed the space program his entire life, and had dreamed of space travel since he was a boy, ended his answer with this:
"Today, it looks as though the possibility of travel to Mars might soon be here, optimistically within my lifetime. It’s a step which must be taken by the human race, regardless of the individual risk. If I died in the process, lessons will be learnt and progress will be made. If I lived to see Mars, it would be the single most amazing achievement of my life. How could I not take an opportunity like this?"
A 32-year old transport planner from New Jersey placed his sacrifice in the context of human progress, while an anonymous 18-year old from North Carolina hopes to encounter alien life on Mars.
One of the responses that I resonated with, because his experiences echoed mine, was that of a teacher who talked about how small his students' worlds were, and how journeying to Mars might make their worlds larger. The number of Americans who never venture beyond their state lines is extraordinary: I taught many college students who had never left the Eastern Seaboard, and had never been to Canada, which was just 100 miles to our north.
Perhaps the most poignant answer comes from a 25-year old in Alabama, who would go to Mars for a chance not be part of an anonymous mass on Earth, but to be somebody:
"Mars, however, offers you the chance to be more than that. Much like the religious groups colonizing the new world, you have the opportunity to shape society with your very existence. The legends and culture of this future society will be influenced by your actions. You will be the people legends are written about, you might be the next Abraham Lincoln, people might tell tall tales of your hidden wealth or you might be known for your infamous villainy. You might be one of the men and women who throw off the shackles of oppressive companies or you might be one of those who ensured their hold and success. Even if you’re never directly attributed to anything, even if you live a quiet life. The way you lived, your attitudes, the culture you helped create, your political leanings, all of that will contribute to an ingrained memory in this new society. You will be one of the people who helps shape the identity of a whole new society, and the opportunity to be part of that is worth the risk of dying on the way there."
As for me? There are things that keep me bound to Earth: my emotional attachments to the people I love, mostly. But I know that dying is not the threat that would keep me from going. I'm not afraid to die, only because I realize that death is inevitable, and if I'm going to die, why not go in the midst of a great adventure? The chance to see for myself the Hesperian volcanoes and the Amazonian river beds draws me.
The word, "cosmos" comes to us from the Greek for "order," and for me, peace and solitude are what I find when I am able to get "right-sized" in the universe, that is, when on earth, for example, I'm standing next to a Doug Fir, and realize how small I am, or standing next to a 14,000-foot peak and realize I'm an ant. That's when I feel most in awe and quiet. I would love to experience that in the infinitude of space, and it seems to me, it might be worth giving up a noisy live on Earth to experience that.
Trolling has literally changed culture, both online and off. The word is now used to categorize a wide and varying swath of behaviors, from absurdist contrarian comment posts, to harassment and abuse disproportionately aimed at women of all races and people of color, to entire presidential campaigns. There now exist troll scholars, many of whom have been studying trolls for years, and an academic area of study, trollology. That’s evidence of just how widespread trolling is, and how it’s sparked a sort of anthropological interest in troll behavior and culture. The question for non-trolls is, behind the layer of protective anonymity, what lies at the core of the troll psyche. The findings of a few studies suggest that trolls who are mean-spirited and manipulative online have offline personalities to match, and that insecurity drives a fair amount of their trollery.
Case in point are two 2014 studies from Canada’s University of Manitoba that looked at the personalities of some 1,200 people who engage in trolling, which the researchers described as “behaving in a deceptive, destructive, or disruptive manner in a social setting on the internet” for seemingly no purpose at all. (The trolls would likely say they do it for the "lulz,” or laughs that come at another person’s expense.)
In the first study, participants were given tests measuring sadistic tendencies to get a feel for how much they enjoyed hurting other people. One a scale of 1 to 5, those surveyed were asked to rate the extent to which they agreed with statements like, "hurting people is exciting’’ and, ‘‘I enjoy hurting people.’’ They were also posed questions that gauged their levels of psychopathy, and asked about fairly mundane things, like the amount of time they spend on the internet and their favorite online activities (with trolling given as one option). The second study “assessed trolling behavior, identification and enjoyment” along a rating scale, along with a few other things.
“Both studies revealed similar patterns of relations between trolling and the Dark Tetrad of personality: trolling correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism,” the researchers wrote. In other words, those who took part in trolling generally enjoyed watching others suffer, were pathologically self-absorbed and lacked “conscience and empathy.”
“Of all personality measures, sadism showed the most robust associations with trolling and, importantly, the relationship was specific to trolling behavior,” study authors note. “Enjoyment of other online activities, such as chatting and debating, was unrelated to sadism. Thus cyber-trolling appears to be an internet manifestation of everyday sadism... Both trolls and sadists feel sadistic glee at the distress of others. Sadists just want to have fun… and the internet is their playground!”
A 2015 collaborative study from the University of New South Wales and Miami University found that male trolls who exhibited sexism in gaming, hurling misogynist threats and insults at women online, were particularly likely to be among the crappy players. The scientists observed players in the online first-person shooter game Halo 3, and found that the success of male players informed how they behaved toward women.
“Men who were of lower skill were more positive towards men and more negative towards women,” Michael Kasumovic, one of the study authors, told Wired magazine. “But the really neat result is that when men were of higher skill, they were much more positive to women.”
“In other words,” the Washington Post suggests, “sexist dudes are literally losers.” The Post helped provide a bit more insight into the study findings:
A recent influx of female participants has disrupted a pre-existing social hierarchy. That’s okay for the guys at the top—but for the guys at the bottom, who stand to lose more status, that’s very threatening.... “As men often rely on aggression to maintain their dominant social status,” Kasumovic writes, “the increase in hostility towards a woman by lower-status males may be an attempt to disregard a female’s performance and suppress her disturbance on the hierarchy to retain their social rank.”
What else might be at work here? There’s a fairly popular theory that much of the bullying that happens online can be chalked up to online disinhibition effect, first written about by John Suler in 2004. The theory holds that when people are online, where their identities and physical bodies are hidden and a sort of lawless virtual environment presents itself, social conventions fall by the wayside, and they behave in ways they never would in real life. Innocuous behavioral shifts (like becoming more honest or emotionally open) are labeled benign disinhibition; yucky behaviors (like the racist name-calling often seen in comment sections and social media feeds) is toxic disinhibition. The latter is more likely to occur among members of privileged groups who target those from historically oppressed communities.
Wikipedia points to a 1978 New Yorker article that mentioned similarly disgusting behavior—proto-trolling, you might say—among the anonymous users of CB radio in the 1970s:
Most of what you hear on CB radio is either tedious (truck drivers warning one another about speed traps) or banal (schoolgirls exchanging notes on homework), but at its occasional—and illegal—worst it sinks a pipeline to the depths of the American unconscious. Your ears are assaulted by the sound of racism at its most rampant, and by masturbation fantasies that are the aural equivalent of rape. The sleep of reason, to quote Goya's phrase, brings forth monsters, and the anonymity of CB encourages the monsters to emerge.
For more proof, Wired points to a study from Israel’s University of Haifa that found a way to put the kibosh on bad behaviors using eye contact. When college students were asked to debate topics over instant messenger, they were far more civil when forced to maintain eye contact with those they IM’d with.
For a real-life application of this idea, watch men in the following video read actual offensive tweets directed to sports writers Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro. Despite the fact that the guys reading the comments didn’t write the tweets, as they turn from standard insults to full-on abuse, the men grow increasingly uncomfortable and visibly troubled. It feels gross in real life (IRL), because it is gross. And because real life includes the internet, making it as real and authentic as every other thing we experience each day.
These fiendish clowns have reportedly tried to lure women and children into the woods, chased people with knives and machetes, and yelled at people from cars. They’ve been spotted hanging out in cemeteries and they have been caught in the headlights of cars as they appear alongside desolate country roads in the dead of night.
This isn’t the first time there has been a wave of clown sightings in the United States. After eerily similar events occurred in the Boston area in the 1980s, Loren Coleman, a cryptozoologist who studies the folklore behind mythical beasts such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, came up with something called “The Phantom Clown Theory,” which attributes the proliferation of clown sightings to mass hysteria (usually sparked by incidents witnessed only by children).
It’s impossible to determine which of these incidents are hoaxes and which are bona fide tales of clowning around taken to the extreme. Nonetheless, the perpetrators seem to be capitalizing on our longstanding love-hate relationship with clowns, tapping into the primal dread that so many children (and more than a few adults) experience in their presence.
In fact, a 2008 study conducted in England revealed that very few children actually like clowns. It also concluded that the common practice of decorating children’s wards in hospitals with pictures of clowns may create the exact opposite of a nurturing environment. It’s no wonder so many people hate Ronald McDonald.
But as a psychologist, I’m not just interested in pointing out that clowns give us the creeps; I’m also interested in why we find them so disturbing. Earlier this year I published a study entitled “On the Nature of Creepiness” with one of my students, Sara Koehnke, in the journal New Ideas in Psychology. While the study was not specifically looking at the creepiness of clowns, much of what we discovered can help explain this intriguing phenomenon.
The march of the clowns
Clown-like characters have been around for thousands of years. Historically, jesters and clowns have been a vehicle for satire and for poking fun at powerful people. They provided a safety valve for letting off steam and they were granted unique freedom of expression – as long as their value as entertainers outweighed the discomfort they caused the higher-ups.
Jesters and others persons of ridicule go back at least to ancient Egypt, and the English word “clown” first appeared sometime in the 1500s, when Shakespeare used the term to describe foolish characters in several of his plays. The now familiar circus clown – with its painted face, wig and oversized clothing – arose in the 19th century and has changed only slightly over the past 150 years.
Nor is the trope of the evil clown anything new. Earlier this year, writer Benjamin Radford published “Bad Clowns,” in which he traces the historical evolution of clowns into unpredictable, menacing creatures.
A detail from one of serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s clown paintings.
The persona of the creepy clown really came into its own after serial killer John Wayne Gacy was captured. In the 1970s, Gacy appeared at children’s birthday parties as “Pogo the Clown” and also regularly painted pictures of clowns. When the authorities discovered that he had killed at least 33 people, burying most of them in the crawl space of his suburban Chicago home, the connection between clowns and dangerous psychopathic behavior became forever fixed in the collective unconscious of Americans.
Following the notoriety of Gacy, Hollywood exploited our deep ambivalence about clowns via a terror-by-clown campaign that shows no signs of going out of fashion. Pennywise, the clown from Stephen King’s 1990 movie “It,” may be the scariest movie clown. But there are also the “Killer Klowns from Outer Space” (1988), the scary clown doll under the bed in “Poltergeist” (1982), the zombie clown in “Zombieland” (2009) and, most recently, the murderous clown in “All Hallow’s Eve” (2013).
The nature of creepiness
Psychology, however, can help explain why clowns – the supposed purveyors of jokes and pranks – often end up sending chills down our spines.
My research was the first empirical study of creepiness, and I had a hunch that feeling creeped out might have something to do with ambiguity – about not really being sure how to react to a person or situation.
We recruited 1,341 volunteers ranging in age from 18 to 77 to fill out an online survey. In the first section of the survey, our participants rated the likelihood that a hypothetical “creepy person” would exhibit 44 different behaviors, such as unusual patterns of eye contact or physical characteristics like visible tattoos. In the second section of the survey, participants rated the creepiness of 21 different occupations, and in the third section they simply listed two hobbies that they thought were creepy. In the final section, participants noted how much they agreed with 15 statements about the nature of creepy people.
The results indicated that people we perceive as creepy are much more likely to be males than females (as are most clowns), that unpredictability is an important component of creepiness and that unusual patterns of eye contact and other nonverbal behaviors set off our creepiness detectors big time.
Unusual or strange physical characteristics such as bulging eyes, a peculiar smile or inordinately long fingers did not, in and of themselves, cause us to perceive someone as creepy. But the presence of weird physical traits can amplify any other creepy tendencies that the person might be exhibiting, such as persistently steering conversations toward peculiar sexual topics or failing to understand the policy about bringing reptiles into the office.
When we asked people to rate the creepiness of different occupations, the one that rose to the top of the creep list was – you guessed it – clowns.
The results were consistent with my theory that getting “creeped out” is a response to the ambiguity of threat and that it is only when we are confronted with uncertainty about threat that we get the chills.
For example, it would be considered rude and strange to run away in the middle of a conversation with someone who is sending out a creepy vibe but is actually harmless; at the same time, it could be perilous to ignore your intuition and engage with that individual if he is, in fact, a threat. The ambivalence leaves you frozen in place, wallowing in discomfort.
This reaction could be adaptive, something humans have evolved to feel, with being “creeped out” a way to maintain vigilance during a situation that could be dangerous.
Why clowns set off our creep alert
In light of our study’s results, it is not at all surprising that we find them to be creepy.
Rami Nader is a Canadian psychologist who studies coulrophobia, the irrational fear of clowns. Nader believes that clown phobias are fueled by the fact that clowns wear makeup and disguises that hide their true identities and feelings.
This is perfectly consistent with my hypothesis that it is the inherent ambiguity surrounding clowns that make them creepy. They seem to be happy, but are they really? And they’re mischievous, which puts people constantly on guard. People interacting with a clown during one of his routines never know if they are about to get a pie in the face or be the victim of some other humiliating prank. The highly unusual physical characteristics of the clown (the wig, the big red nose, the makeup, the odd clothing) only magnify the uncertainty of what the clown might do next.
There are certainly other types of people who creep us out (taxidermists and undertakers made a good showing on the creepy occupation spectrum). But they have their work cut out for them if they aspire to the level of creepiness that we automatically attribute to clowns.
The path for a cure or vaccine for HIV is littered with disappointments – much-hyped treatments or trials have ultimately ended in failure.
Today, however, the HIV research community is more hopeful, especially in lieu of PrEP – pre-exposure prophylaxis – the use of the antiretroviral drug Truvada to prevent HIV infection. With PrEP, HIV-negative individuals take a daily dose of Truvada to halt HIV transmission, and the drug is more than 99 percent effective at preventing HIV when taken daily.
Therein, however, lies the rub: PrEP requires daily adherence.
Flush on the heels of PrEP is a major new, multi-continent trial that will test a lab-created antibody to determine if it is effective in preventing HIV transmission.
The antibody was discovered in an HIV-infected individual who was able to control HIV infection without medication. Replicated in a lab, researchers will inject a solution containing the antibody into HIV-negative men and transgender individuals who have sex with men through an IV, then monitor whether infections occur.
The new study is called AMP, for antibody-mediated prevention.
“This is landmark study,” said Shobha Swaminathan, an infectious disease specialist who is part of the study. “It is the first study of this magnitude to see whether an antibody infusion can help prevent new HIV infections. If it proves effective, it could potentially pave a way for developing a vaccine for HIV infection.”
Typically, vaccines introduce a biological agent that stimulates the body’s immune system to recognize and fight off a particular disease. Many vaccines spark the body to create antibodies.
In AMP, patients recruited for the study will receive transfusions of saline solution including the antibody once every eight weeks. The trial will continue for roughly two years.
AMP is not a test for a vaccine. The antibody being studied dissipates over time. The hope, however, is that scientists can find antibodies that prevent HIV from replicating, and eventually create a vaccine that induces the body to produce antibodies that prevent HIV infection.
The study will recruit 2,700 men and transgender individuals whose sexual partners are men. In addition to being offered the antibody IV, participants will be counseled on safer sex practices and offered PrEP. Those already taking PrEP are not ineligible for the study.
The AMP study isn’t the only study looking at options for HIV prevention. Researchers are also currently testing long-lasting injectable medication, also administered about once every two months. The drug currently being tested is called cabotegravir and is owned by ViiV Healthcare. Cabotegravir has performed well in safety studies and animal testing.
Additionally, researchers are currently recruiting participants to test another iteration of Truvada. A study on non-human primates found the drug 100% effective at preventing HIV, but a second study suggested blood levels of the primary HIV-fighting drug in the body might be too low to be effective.
Gilead Sciences, the maker of Truvada, will soon be testing a modified version of the drug that has fewer reported side effects. Results from that study are expected in 2020.
Roughly 45,000 people contract HIV in the United States every year. Worldwide, roughly 37 million people are living with HIV. Most live in sub-Saharan Africa, where many of the AMP test sites are located.
When first recognized in 1981, HIV was usually fatal; today, it can typically be treated – but not cured – with a single daily pill that combines several anti-retroviral drugs.
To find out more about AMP, or to volunteer for the study, visit ampstudy.org.
The ancient oceans of Earth were filled with monstrous beings. Long before sharks or whales – 520m years ago – there were carnivorous, swimming beasts that resembled giant bizarre crustaceans, and huge, spiny insect-like creatures that scuttled along the ocean floor.
We know about these prehistoric animals because of the fossils they left behind. But because these imprints are often incomplete, we sometimes have to guess the details of exactly what the creatures looked like. But a new complete fossil we found has helped solve a mystery about the origins of a certain type of scary-looking mouth. We now know it was shared by several different extinct creatures and can still be found in living animals today.
Diverse animal life suddenly appeared on Earth about half a billion years ago in the Cambrian period (542m to 488m years ago). One explanation for this is that an increase in the amount of oxygen in the air and oceans enabled carnivorous predators (which need more oxygen to support their active lifestyles) to evolve for the first time.
This spurred an evolutionary arms race during which animals evolved skeletons to protect themselves or to help them attack their prey more efficiently. In the seas, some creatures learned to burrow to safety in the sand and mud or evolved pelagic (swimming and floating) lifestyles to escape predators.
Some of the largest predators in the Cambrian period were primitive members of the arthropods, the group of animals that today includes insects, spiders and crustaceans. These nektonic (free swimming) predators were called anomalocaridids. Each had a set of swimming flaps down its body, a pair of large stalked, compound eyes on the head, a set of segmented grasping appendages and a circular mouth apparatus. This mouth was made up of rings of plates and teeth, and was remarkably similar to that of the “sarlacc” monster in the film Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.
Quite the mouthful
When the first anomalocaridid fossils were found, they were thought to be the remains of several different animals. The head appendages were interpreted as the tail of a shrimp, the body a sea cucumber, the mouth a jelly fish. However, painstaking analyses in the 1980s of the Burgess Shale fossils from Canada showed that they were a single animal and, at 70cm long, it was the largest known to have lived in the Cambrian period.
Penis worm. J. Vinther and F. Pleijel, Author provided
When what appeared to be a giant anomalocaridid mouth was found on its own in 1994, researchers used it to argue that some anomalocaridids must have been up to two metres in length. But in 2006, other scientists argued that the mouth was more similar to that of a distantly related group of animals known as priapulans. The modern day “penis worm” (named after its shape) is in this group and can grow up to tens of centimetres long in today’s oceans. But the researchers imagined the fossil mouth must have belonged to a giant priapulan they named Omnidens.
Shared appendages
But we have now described new fossils that show both these theories are wrong – and right. The fossil comes from another exceptional site in the northernmost part of Greenland, called Sirius Passet, and is of a more primitive relative of the anomalocaridids known as Pambdelurion. It had large grasping appendages on its head and flaps on the body but had not evolved the unique appendage joints that arthropods have. However, we did find that its mouth was the spitting image of that of Omnidens, formed from the same three kinds of teeth and plates in the same circular arrangement.
So it turns out that this kind of mouth was shared by anomalocaridids, Omnidens and Pambdelurion, as well as today’s penis worms, and was present in their latest common ancestor, which probably originated sometime just before the Cambrian (540m years ago). What’s more, we can now estimate that Omnidens grew to be 1.5 metres long. This is about twice the estimated length of any Cambrian anomalocaridid, which was previously thought to be the largest animal of the period.
This mouth worked with the robust grasping appendages and a complex digestive system to allow these creatures to effectively consume prey. This gave them a competitive edge in the brutal undersea world of the Cambrian. It was these kinds of features that helped shape the predatory arms race that accelerated the explosion of life on Earth and shaped the early seeds of modern biodiversity.
SAN FRANCISCO - The mice were decidedly smart. Normal mice put inside a watery maze took more than a minute to locate the submerged platform that would let them escape. But these mice - which had been injected with a curious new molecule - found it in an average of just 16 seconds. That news startled…
SpaceX chief Elon Musk is set Tuesday to unveil his ambitious plan to build a human colony on Mars after sending a manned spacecraft to the Red Planet within a decade.
He will lay out his vision during a presentation titled "Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species" at the International Astronautical Congress in the western Mexican city of Guadalajara.
Although the South Africa-born Canadian-American entrepreneur has given few details about his plan, he promised in a Washington Post interview in June that it will be "mind blowing."
He will discuss the "long-term technical challenges that need to be solved to support the creation of a permanent, self-sustaining human presence on Mars," the conference's program says.
SpaceX plans to send an unmanned Dragon cargo capsule to Mars as early as 2018, paving the way for a human mission that would leave Earth in 2024 and arrive on the Red Planet the following year.
However, experts are skeptical of the feasibility.
Reaching Mars -- 225 million kilometers (140 million miles) from Earth on average -- and living there would require major feats of engineering and a massive budget.
"It's unlikely that (Musk) will be able to get humans on Mars by 2025," John Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said, noting that Musk has wrongly forecast the launch of SpaceX rockets in the past.
SpaceX would have to team up with a state space agency to afford such a mission, he said.
"Bottom line is the cost. You're talking of tens of billions of dollars and SpaceX doesn't have that type of money."
However, while Musk's timeline is ambitious, "it's exciting to have someone with the vision" and "we are all interested to see what he has in mind and whether he can make a compelling case," Logsdon added.
The US space agency NASA, which is also studying the effects of long-term space flight on the human body, has announced its own plans to send people to Mars by the 2030s.
- Rocket blast -
A research village could be built on the Moon to serve as a "stepping stone" to a Mars mission, European Space Agency chief Jan Woerner said at a news conference on Monday.
"To go to Mars means also to use the resources over there and this can be also tested on (the) Moon," he said.
SpaceX has designed the powerful Falcon Heavy rocket, which could send a manned Dragon spacecraft into space.
The company plans to launch the 70-meter (230-foot) tall rocket, which has a liftoff thrust equivalent to 18 Boeing 747 jets, later this year.
SpaceX was hit by a setback on September 1 when its smaller Falcon 9 rocket exploded on the launch pad during a test in Florida, destroying a satellite Facebook had planned to use to beam high-speed internet to Africa.
SpaceX had previously logged 18 successful Falcon 9 launches.
The California-based company has also successfully landed a spent rocket vertically four times -- a key achievement for the company's goal of producing reusable rockets instead of jettisoning their parts into the ocean during lift off.
Astronomers on Monday said they have spotted evidence of water vapor plumes rising from Jupiter's moon Europa, a finding that might make it easier to learn whether life exists in the warm, salty ocean hidden beneath its icy surface.
The apparent plumes detected by the Hubble Space Telescope shoot about 125 miles (200 km) above Europa's surface before, presumably, raining material back down onto the moon's surface, NASA said.
Europa, considered one of the most promising candidates for life in the solar system beyond Earth, boasts a global ocean with twice as much water as in all of Earth's seas hidden under a layer of extremely cold and hard ice of unknown thickness.
While drilling through the ice to test ocean water for signs of life would be a daunting task, sampling water from the plumes might be a simpler project.
"If the plumes are real, it potentially gives us easier access to the ocean below ... without needing to drill into miles of ice," said lead researcher Williams Sparks of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Europa is about 1,900 miles (3,100 km) in diameter, slightly smaller than Earth’s moon. Among Jupiter's four largest moons, Europa is the second closest to the biggest planet in the solar system.
The telescope observed the plumes three times in 2014, mostly around Europa's southern polar region, scientists told a conference call with reporters.
On Earth, life is found everywhere where there is water, energy and nutrients, so scientists have a special interest in places elsewhere in the solar system, like Europa, with similar characteristics, said Paul Hertz, director of NASA's astrophysics division.
The findings, which will be published in The Astrophysical Journal, follow an initial Hubble sighting of a water vapor plume over Europa's south pole in December 2012.
Scientists got their first hint that bright, icy Europa, which is crisscrossed by dark bands and ridges, contains an underground ocean from NASA's twin Voyager probes, which flew by Jupiter in 1979.
The follow-on Galileo spacecraft, which circled around and through Jupiter's system from 1995 to 2003, detected a magnetic field that likely was triggered by a salty, global ocean beneath Europa's surface.
Two more missions are in development to visit Europa.
A NASA spacecraft, targeted for launch in the mid-2020s, would make more than 40 close flybys of the moon and possibly sample material in any plumes shooting out from its surface.
Jupiter has 67 known moons, plus many smaller ones that have not yet been named.
(Reporting by Irene Klotz in Guadalajara,Mexico; Editing by Will Dunham
These stories have spurred hopes that a Zika virus vaccine will be available to prevent this infection, and its secondary effects, such as abnormal fetal development. But, even with pre-clinical and early stage clinical trials underway, we still may not see a Zika vaccine licensed and approved for use in humans for years.
I am a scientist who studies how vaccines are used, and a large part of my academic and teaching interest is focused on how we use evidence to make policy and regulatory decisions about vaccines.
Developing a vaccine requires hitting just the right sweet spot on a number of conditions, including organism strain, vaccine type, dosage and best age to vaccinate, through pre-clinical and clinical testing, licensing and approval. This process can take a lot of time, often up to 10-15years.
Start by learning about the disease
We use vaccines to prepare our immune system for the potential exposure to a disease-causing organism. When we are exposed to the vaccine, our immune system responds by producing antibodies which attack the virus or bacteria.
This particular exposure is then stored in the memory of the immune system, so that if the vaccinated individual is exposed to that virus or bacteria again, these antibodies can be rapidly produced in great numbers to fight back.
Prior to developing and testing new vaccines, extensive surveillance is done to identify all strains of the pathogen causing disease in humans. This allows scientists to weigh the benefits and costs related to which strains should be used in the vaccine. For Zika virus there are two strains – Asian and African – and so far it appears that vaccination with one strain protects against both types.
Different diseases require different vaccine forms
Next, scientists have to decide how to make the vaccine in such a way as to safely trigger the immune system to produce antibodies against the disease. Some vaccines, such as the one for rotavirus, which causes severe diarrhea, contain weakened versions of the virus that do not cause disease to trigger the immune system. Others, like the flu shot, use purified pieces of the virus.
Another kind of vaccine uses virus-like particles – an empty protein shell that looks like the actual virus to the immune system – to trigger an immune response. These types of vaccines can work in two ways. Some, such as hepatitis B vaccine, use injections of the whole outer virus shell to start the immune response. Others use just a small piece of DNA that is the code for the outside virus coat to produce the virus-like particles in the body, but with no ability to cause infection.
The virus-like particle approaches are playing key roles in Zika vaccine development. There are two vaccines currently undergoing clinical trials in humans, one from the National Institutes of Health and one from Inovio Pharmaceuticals, and both use the DNA virus-like particle approach. Another company, Geovax, is developing a vaccine using the whole virus-like particle.
Clinical trials: Phases 1, 2 and 3
Developing the vaccine concept and platform is just one step. This is followed by a rigorous set of testing to show that the vaccine is safe for use in humans and works to prevent disease. These studies involve controlled clinical trials, in which the experimental vaccine, and in later phases a placebo, are given to volunteers who are intensively monitored to evaluate their immune response and any adverse events that may occur following vaccination. These clinical trials are conducted in three phases.
Phase 1 clinical trials are usually small – often a few dozen people. They are done to evaluate if there are any very severe side effects associated with the new vaccine and to get a preliminary sense of how the body responds to the vaccine. This is where we are at with the Zika vaccine. The NIH launched this initial Zika vaccine trial in August 2016, and it is expected to include about 80 people. On the heels of their first study of 40 patients, Inovio is currently enrolling 160 people for a second Phase 1 trial of their Zika vaccine.
If Phase 1 trials are completed successfully, we move on to Phase 2 trials. These are larger – often a few hundred people. In these Phase 2 trials, scientists are looking not only at safety, but at how well the new vaccine produces an immune response.
Finally, after Phase 1 and 2 trials are finished, scientists conduct Phase 3 trials to determine the efficacy of the vaccine in preventing disease. These trials typically contain thousands of participants, with some Phase 3 trials studying up to 70,000 people.
This process is more complex for vaccines like the ones for Zika, because one focus group for Zika vaccines will be pregnant women. Studies must be conducted in nonpregnant people first, and special considerations must be taken for vaccine studies in pregnant women. These considerations go beyond studying the effect of the vaccine on the recipient, to monitoring the effects on the fetus and young infant as well.
Just completing these trials successfully does not automatically bring a new vaccine to market. Multiple reviews by expert panels advising the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are used to determine if a vaccine should be licensed for use, and then recommended for routine use, respectively.
The review does not stop there. Once a vaccine is licensed and recommended for use, there is continued monitoring of how many people are taking the vaccine, how well it works in widespread use, and how safe it is. These post-licensure studies, using systems like the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System coordinated by the CDC and FDA and the Vaccine Safety Datalink, often study hundreds of thousands of people who have who have received the vaccine, and are regularly reported to regulatory bodies for review.
A Zika vaccine is still a long way off
The process is long, but recent experience shows it can be streamlined. The testing and emergency use of Ebola vaccines occurred in a remarkably short time during the recent West African Ebola outbreak. However, we were fortunate to have existing Ebola vaccine products on the shelf – based on research done years earlier – that could be tested again during the outbreak.
So, will we have a Zika vaccine in the near future? Early laboratory studies have been efficiently and rapidly conducted and have produced promising data. With multiple Phase 1 clinical trials ongoing in humans, we are progressing well into the vaccine testing process. But the long vaccine development process is focused on ensuring production of the safest and most effective vaccine for use.
In the current issue of the journal Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, Australian dissident psychiatrist Niall McLaren titles his article, “Psychiatry as Bullshit” and makes a case for just that.
The great controversies in psychiatry are no longer about its chemical-imbalance theory of mental illness or its DSM diagnostic system, both of which have now been declared invalid even by the pillars of the psychiatry establishment.
In 2011, Ronald Pies, editor-in-chief emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, stated, “In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.” And in 2013, Thomas Insel, then director of the National Institute of Mental Health, offered a harsh rebuke of the DSM, announcing that because the DSM diagnostic system lacks validity, the “NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.”
So, the great controversy today has now become just how psychiatry can be most fairly characterized given its record of being proven wrong about virtually all of its assertions, most notably its classifications of behaviors, theories of “mental illness” and treatment effectiveness/adverse effects.
Among critics, one of the gentlest characterizations of psychiatry is a “false narrative,” the phrase used by investigative reporter Robert Whitaker (who won the 2010 Investigative Reporters and Editors Book Award for Anatomy of an Epidemic) to describe the story told by the psychiatrists’ guild American Psychiatric Association.
In “Psychiatry as Bullshit,” McLaren begins by considering several different categories of “nonscience with scientific pretensions,” such as “pseudoscience” and “scientific fraud.”
“Pseudoscience” is commonly defined as a collection of beliefs and practices promulgated as scientific but in reality mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method. The NIMH director ultimately rejected the DSM because of its lack of validity, which is crucial to the scientific method. In the DSM, psychiatric illnesses are created by an APA committee, 69 percent of whom have financial ties to Big Pharma. The criteria for DSM illness are not objective biological ones but non-scientific subjective ones (which is why homosexuality was a DSM mental illness until the early 1970s). Besides lack of scientific validity, the DSM lacks scientific reliability, as clinicians routinely disagree on diagnoses because patients act differently in different circumstances and because of the subjective nature of the criteria.
“Fraud” is a misrepresentation, a deception intended for personal gain, and implies an intention to deceive others of the truth—or “lying.” Drug companies, including those that manufacture psychiatric drugs, have been convicted of fraud, as have high-profile psychiatrists (as well as other doctors). Human rights activist and attorney Jim Gottstein offers an argument as to why the APA is a “fraudulent enterprise”; however, the APA has not been legally convicted of fraud.
To best characterize psychiatry, McLaren considers the category of “bullshit,” invoking philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s 1986 journal article “On Bullshit” (which became a New York Times bestselling book in 2005).
Defining Bullshit
What is the essence of bullshit? For Frankfurt, “This lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.”
Frankfurt devotes a good deal of On Bullshit to differentiating between a liar and a bullshitter. Both the liar and the bullshitter misrepresent themselves, representing themselves as attempting to be honest and truthful. But there is a difference between the liar and the bullshitter.
The liar knows the truth, and the liar’s goal is to conceal it.
The goal of bullshitters is not necessarily to lie about the truth but to persuade their audience of a specific impression so as to advance their agenda. So, bullshitters are committed to neither truths nor untruths, uncommitted to neither facts nor fiction. It’s actually not in bullshitters’ interest to know what is true and what is false, as that knowledge can hinder their capacity to bullshit.
Frankfurt tells us that liar the hides that he or she is “attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality.” In contrast, the bullshitter hides that “the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him.”
Are Psychiatrists Bullshitters?
Recall establishment psychiatrist Pies' assertion: “In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.” What Pies omits is the reality that the vast majority of psychiatrists have been promulgating this theory. Were they liars or simply not well-informed? And if not well-informed, were they purposely not well-informed?
If one wants to bullshit oneself and the general public that psychiatry is a genuinely scientific medical specialty, there’s a great incentive to be unconcerned with the truth or falseness of the chemical imbalance theory of depression. Bullshitters immediately recognize how powerful this chemical imbalance notion is in gaining prestige for their profession and themselves as well as making their job both more lucrative and easier, increasing patient volume by turning virtually all patient visits into quick prescribing ones.
Prior to the chemical imbalance bullshit campaign, most Americans were reluctant to take antidepressants—or to give them to their children. But the idea that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance that can be corrected with Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor antidepressants sounded like taking insulin for diabetes. Correcting a chemical imbalance seemed like a reasonable thing to do, and so the use of SSRI antidepressants skyrocketed.
In 2012, National Public Radio correspondent Alix Spiegel began her piece about the disproven chemical imbalance theory with the following personal story about being prescribed Prozac when she was a depressed teenager:
My parents took me to a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She did an evaluation and then told me this story: “The problem with you," she explained, “is that you have a chemical imbalance. It’s biological, just like diabetes, but it’s in your brain. This chemical in your brain called serotonin is too, too low. There’s not enough of it, and that’s what’s causing the chemical imbalance. We need to give you medication to correct that.” Then she handed my mother a prescription for Prozac.
When Spiegel discovered that the chemical imbalance theory was untrue, she sought to discover why this truth had been covered up, and so she interviewed researchers who knew the truth. Alan Frazer, professor of pharmacology and psychiatry and chairman of the pharmacology department at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, told Spiegel that by framing depression as a deficiency—something that needed to be returned to normal—patients felt more comfortable taking antidepressants. Frazer stated, “If there was this biological reason for them being depressed, some deficiency that the drug was correcting, then taking a drug was OK.” For Frazer, the story that depressed people have a chemical imbalance enabled many people to come out of the closet about being depressed.
Frazer’s rationale reminds us of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent, the title deriving from presidential adviser and journalist Walter Lippmann’s phrase “the manufacture of consent”—a necessity for Lippmann, who believed that the general public is incompetent in discerning what’s truly best for them, and so their opinion must be molded by a benevolent elite who does know what’s best for them.
There are some psychiatrists who view the chemical imbalance theory as a well-meaning lie by a benevolent elite to ensure resistant patients do what is best for them, but my experience is that there are actually extremely few such “well-meaning liars.” Most simply don’t know the truth because they have put little effort in discerning it.
I believe McLaren is correct in concluding that the vast majority of psychiatrists are bullshitters, uncommitted to either facts or fiction. Most psychiatrists would certainly have been happy if the chemical-imbalance theory was true but obviously have not needed it to be true in order to promulgate it. For truth seekers, the falseness of the chemical imbalance theory has been easily available, but most psychiatrists have not been truth seekers. It is not in the bullshitters’ interest to know what is true and what is false, as that knowledge of what is a fact and what is fiction hinders the capacity to use any and all powerful persuasion. Simply put, a commitment to the truth hinders the capacity to bullshit.
