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WATCH: Denver Zoo Lion Begins Chemotherapy Treatments

2013-06-18T22:56:53Z

The Denver Zoo is partnering with veterinarians from Colorado State University to give an elderly lion a never-before attempted cancer treatment.

In mid-March, zookeepers began noticing that Rian, a 15-year-old South African lion, was acting lethargic and immediate tests revealed a large mass in the lion's abdomen. After calling in CSU veterinary surgeon Dr. Dean Hendrickson to perform an exploratory surgery on the lion, it was revealed that Rian was suffering from a type of cancer known as high-grade splenic lymphoma.

During the surgery Rian's spleen was removed and was found to weigh 12 pounds, or nearly 10 times its normal size because it had become infiltrated with the cancer.

Medical oncologist Dr. Douglas Thamm recommended six months of chemotherapy, and a veterinary team decided to begin treatments in May in an effort to kill cancerous cells that had migrated to other parts of Rian's body.

"This treatment approach is a first at a zoo," said Dr. Thamm. "The veterinary team working with Rian is modeling treatment on that used with domestic cats, who often suffer from lymphoma as they age."

The zoo and veterinary team are hoping to both improve the quality of Rian's life as well as explore how chemotherapy treatments could help other zoo lions and large cats.

"Any time we're doing things in wild animals there are few established treatment protocols. So we use what works in domestic animals and adapt it to the best of our knowledge," Thamm said in a statement. "Rian's appetite has been a little better, so I hope that means he's feeling better and the drugs are doing their job."

Rian's first chemotherapy treatment was May 27 and he repeats it each week while the veterinarians monitor his comfort levels and attitude throughout the process.

"I hope we can establish a treatment protocol that can be tolerated by big cats and used as a jumping-off point so next time veterinarians see this they have a place to start," Thamm said.

Rian was born in 1998 at the Knoxville Zoo in Tennessee with his brother being his constant companion since birth. Both lions have lived at the Denver Zoo since they were cubs.

According to the zoo, the median life span of zoo lions is 16.8 years, while lions in the wild live about 15 years.

James Rollins: We're All Mad Scientists Now

2013-06-18T22:15:41Z

The pendulum has swung, and it's cool to be a nerd again. No longer must we attend science lectures in dusty classrooms in some remote corner of a university campus. We now have TED lectures online, where scientists have become rock stars strutting a stage. Books by physicists and neurobiologists regularly hit bestseller lists. On The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, guests are as likely to be sporting scientific Ph.D.s as they are to be political pundits.

Such a resurgence of interest in all things scientific has sparked a new movement. Not only has science become more popular, but it's become more populist. With today's easy access to technology and knowledge, do-it-yourself (DIY) scientists are popping up all over the United States. The fringes of scientific exploration have shifted out of the white towers of university labs and into neighborhood garages and basements.

Back in 2001, it cost $10,000 to sequence a million base pairs of DNA. Today it costs roughly 10 cents. As a consequence of that drop in price, it is now possible to build a genetics lab in your own backyard -- and people are doing just that. The cyberpunks of the past have become the biopunks of today, hacking into genetic codes as readily as computer codes. In closets and attics around the world, ordinary people are creating synthetic life, performing experiments with genetic engineering, or patenting DNA sequences. Already success stories abound, like a new vaccine against stomach ulcers discovered by a group of Slovenian students, none of whom have even a bachelor's degree.

But with such discoveries come risks. The ready availability of such tools to create new life forms, including pathogens, makes it much harder to regulate, especially as the number of these homegrown labs proliferates. The FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate's Biological Countermeasures Unit attempts to police such labs, but even they recognize the limits to their reach and instead encourage a "neighborhood watch" -- like cooperation among such labs. So, in the end, it raises the question: Will such grassroots research lead to a cure for cancer, or will it unleash some Franken-microbe into the world? Only time will tell.

The same burst of homegrown experimentation is happening in the material sciences, too, where 3D printers hold the promise to revolutionize not only manufacturing but medicine and food production. Yet with the precipitous drop in the cost of such devices (from the $50,000 range to $1,000), experimentation with this new technology has shifted out of corporate labs and into the fringes of the Wild West. On May 6, 2013, the first firearm produced from a printer was fired successfully. But the true threat of such newly minted weapons (manufactured out of hardened resin) is that they could pass undetected through most screening processes. And now others are working at producing ammunition from these same printers. How long will it be until an entire arsenal could be downloaded and printed at home? The short answer: not long at all.

Elsewhere, DIY scientists are taking a more personal approach: experimenting on their own bodies. A growing movement, called transhumanism, merges technology and biology in an attempt to expand the human condition, to enhance both the physical and intellectual capacity of the body. Sometimes referred to as "biohacking," there are warehouses and backroom surgical facilities that for the right price will alter your body in surprising and new ways. Some individuals have had radio frequency identification (RFID) chips inserted under their skin. Such chips allow the wearers to unlock their cars, cell phones, or password-protected laptops merely by touching them.

Others have had tiny rare-earth magnets implanted near their fingertips that vibrate in the presence of electromagnetic fields. Those I've interviewed describe these newly sensed fields as having texture, shape, rhythms, and even colors. It allows them to sense the flow of electricity through wires, to "feel" a hard drive that is malfunctioning, or to even diagnose a misfiring carburetor. Such magnets open up an entirely new way of experiencing the world. And once accustomed to them, it's apparently hard to go back. Many say they feel blind without them. It definitely is a new world out there, and now DIY biohackers are finding new ways to explore it.

The next frontier for these DIY scientists is crowdfunding, where they are beginning to pool their resources. In Sunnyvale, Calif., a new 2000-square-foot lab opened, funded by a Kickstarter campaign, called the BioCurious Community Lab. From the lab's website, the end goal is clear: "We believe that innovations in biology should be accessible, affordable, and open to everyone. We're building a community biology lab for amateurs, inventors, entrepreneurs, and anyone who wants to experiment with friends." After a short training class on safety protocols, anyone with an interest in experimenting with the building blocks of life will have access to a bevy of equipment normally available only at major biology labs.

And this is only the beginning. This current trend of democratizing science is growing rapidly, stripping exploration of science from the purview of academia and corporate control and placing it into the hands of anyone with the passion to know more about the mysteries of life. For better or worse, it allows us all to be mad scientists out there -- which is both exhilarating and very, very frightening. But isn't that how all great adventures start?

WATCH: Heroic Rottweiler Saves Smaller Pooch From Coyote

2013-06-18T21:12:34Z

The general public might have mixed feelings about Rottweilers, but it's hard to deny that the pup in this recently unearthed video is all hero.

Originally posted a few years ago by YouTube user Jdpmep, the video shows the moment a Rottweiler named Happy saves tiny Chihuahua-wiener dog Trixxie from a marauding coyote. The footage has so far been watched by more than 300,000 people.

According to YouTube, Trixxie was chained up outside at the time of the early-morning attack, but there had been no prior sightings of coyotes in the area.

Luckily for Trixxie, Happy charges at the coyote, forcing it to drop the struggling dog and flee the yard.

Coyotes are responsible for numerous attacks on dogs each year. According to the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, coyotes rarely attack humans but may see pets are potential prey.

Happy is not the first dog to be lauded for its bravery in the face of the wily predator.

In January, a 2-year-old Maltipoo named Sophie saved its family's 7-month-old Maltipoo from a coyote attack in Southern California. While Sophie sustained several injuries, she survived the confrontation.

Archaeologists Close In On Ship Lost In Lake Michigan Since 1679

2013-06-18T21:02:34Z

FAIRPORT, Mich. — A wooden beam embedded at the bottom of northern Lake Michigan appears to have been there for centuries, underwater archaeologists announced Tuesday, a crucial finding as crews dig toward what they hope is the carcass of a French ship that disappeared while exploring the Great Lakes in the 17th century.

Expedition leaders still weren't ready to declare they had found a shipwreck or the long-lost Griffin. The ship, commanded by the French explorer Rene Robert Cavelier de la Salle, was never seen again after setting sail in September 1679 from an island near the entrance of Green Bay, in what is now northern Wisconsin, with a crew of a six and a cargo of furs.

But Michel L'Hour, director of France's Department of Underwater Archaeological Research and a shipwreck expert, said the timber appears to be a bowsprit, which is a spur or pole that extends from a vessel's stem. It also seems to be attached to another structure below the lake bed, he said.

"All the details could be interpreted as part of a bowsprit and there's no details which contract this hypothesis," said L'Hour, who dove to inspect the beam with two French colleagues Monday and Tuesday. "It's why it's the main hypothesis now. A bowsprit which has been buried in the sediment of the lake for many centuries."

Commercial divers overseen by scientists last week began excavating at the base of the wooden beam, hoping to determine whether it is part of the Griffin. Steve Libert, a diver and shipwreck enthusiast who has searched three decades for the Griffin, discovered the timber in 2001 and recently obtained state and federal permits to probe beneath the surface.

The beam extends 10.5 feet above the lake bed, and underwater excavators were opening a pit at the base of the post to determine whether it's affixed to anything beneath. In another key development Tuesday, they reported that a probing device had detected a hard surface 18 to 20 feet below the lake bed. It could be a ship's hull or deck.

"In essence, we have found a floor under that exposed wooden timber," said Ken Vrana, the project manager. "We have more excavation to do before verifying what that surface is."

L'Hour said the French archaeologists drew their conclusion about the beam's age after observing differences between the section above the lake floor and the portion below the surface that the pit has exposed. The aboveground section is narrower because of erosion that must have happened over hundreds of years, he said.

Libert said he was excited by the reports and had "no doubt" the beam was part of a ship. But it remained uncertain when the team might be able to positively identify the presumed vessel.

"I think that maybe Steve found the Griffin," L'Hour said at a briefing for reporters. "I can't be sure, which is why I'm waiting and waiting and waiting for the proof."

Although visibly optimistic, the searchers cautioned against expecting quick resolution of a mystery that has thrown numerous hurdles in Libert's path.

After years of research led him to an area near Poverty Island a few miles off Michigan's Upper Peninsula, he literally bumped into the timber during a dive. That touched off years of legal battles between his Great Lakes Exploration Group and the state over access to the presumed shipwreck.

When the excavation finally got underway last Friday, divers expected to find an object similar to the Griffin's reputed size a couple of feet below the surface, based on sonar readings. It's now believed to be perhaps 10 times farther down. Libert, who says he has spent more than $1 million on his long quest and put the excavation's price tag at "six figures," scrambled to obtain equipment that can dig deeper and is better able to break through the hard-packed mud.

It probably will take another day or two to widen the hole and reach the hard surface, Vrana said. The excavation permits expire Friday, although the group could seek extensions. But with the French team scheduled to leave by then, the divers were working faster in hopes of confirming at least the presence of a shipwreck.

State officials and Libert's group agree if the Griffin is found, it will belong to France because it was operating under authority of King Louis XIV. Graham Paul, a French consul general based in Chicago, visited the team over the weekend and said his government would favor attempting to recover the vessel.

"It would be a major excavation and very costly," Vrana said.

But the wreckage could be in surprisingly good condition after being encased in cold mud for 334 years because it wouldn't have been exposed to oxygen, which causes wood and metals to deteriorate, said Dave Miller, an archaeologist with Great Lakes Exploration Group.

"That's the best way of conservation for all the artifacts and for the hull," L'Hour said. "One can't imagine something better than this kind of clay and mud."

Nobel-Winning Physics Pioneer Dies At 77

2013-06-18T20:54:40Z

PORTLAND, Maine — Physicist Kenneth Wilson, who earned a Nobel prize for pioneering work that changed the way physicists think about phase transitions, has died in Maine, where he retired to enjoy kayaking with his wife. He was 77.

Wilson, who died from complications of lymphoma, was in the physics department at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., when he won the Nobel Prize in 1982 for applying his research in quantum physics to phase transitions, the transformation that occurs when a substance goes from, say, liquid to gas. Wilson created a mathematical tool called the renormalization group that is still widely used in physics.

The son of a Harvard University chemist, the Waltham, Mass., native joined Cornell University in 1963 and later retired from Ohio State University, where he founded the Physics Education Research Group.

His wife, Alison Brown, still recalls the morning they learned of the Nobel Prize. She said on Tuesday that she eventually had to take the phone off the hook so he could finish his breakfast.

Wilson loved to talk physics, she said.

"He was very patient and willing to explain things to people. He never talked down to people and made them feel like they were dumb," Brown said. "He was a kind person. He had a good way of wanting to explain what he was doing, because he always loved what he was doing."

Part of Wilson's gift was his ability to remain focused on complex problems, said Kurt Gottfried, emeritus professor of physics at Cornell. His first project at Cornell involving elementary particle physics took him about five years to complete, Gottfried said.

"He worked very difficult problems that required concentration for a long time – I mean months and years," Gottfried said.

In his down time, Wilson was an avid hiker who enjoyed treks in Swiss Alps and Italian Dolomites, as well as the mountains of New Zealand, his wife said.

Wilson didn't talk much during the hikes because he was busy working out problems, she said.

"His brain was still turning over. He was cogitating on whatever problem he was working on," she said.

The couple met through international folk dancing, a passion they both shared, while they were at Cornell, where Brown worked in the computing center.

Their love of kayaking brought them to Maine. The couple moved to Maine in 1995, residing in Gray, and Wilson remained on staff at Ohio State until retiring in 2008. He died Saturday in a nursing home in Saco, his wife said.

___

Follow David Sharp at http://twitter.com/David_Sharp_AP

Frank Swain: 11 Reasons That Zombies Are Real

2013-06-18T20:17:52Z

Frank Swain is the author of How To Make A Zombie: The Real Life (and Death) Science of Reanimation and Mind Control ($15.95, Oneworld)

You see them every day, these zombies; they're all around you.

They shamble across the cinema screen on broken limbs and snatch at girls with long blonde hair. In the closeness of your home they explode in satisfying blossoms of rotting flesh at the flick of a trigger. Their scabby hands reach out at you with stiff cardboard fingers from the comic book display stand. When you walk home at night, you catch them in silhouette, stumbling through the shadows, confused, drunk, and lost.

They sit slack-faced opposite you on the bus, their will ground away by the constant rasping of the parasites buried deep in their skulls. And as you walked in duty-free sandals over the soft ground of the tropics, did you not stop to see the quiet graves where infant wasps lay spring-loaded in the chests of their comatose prey?

Wait, you think you know what a zombie looks like? Sure, you think you do. You've seen the movies, and committed their model organisms to memory. But I'm not talking about fictional zombies. This is a book about what happens to the zombie when it crawls off the page and out of the screen and into our world, the really real world. What must a zombie do to make that journey? Could we hijack another person's body and compel it to follow our every command? Could we die and come back again?

Were America's Oldest Cave Paintings Finally Found?

2013-06-18T20:17:26Z

Archaeologists recently discovered hidden cave drawings which may be the oldest works of rock art in America, according to a new paper in Antiquity.

The images, found in Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau, were discovered by researchers Jan F. Simek, Alan Cressler, Nicholas P. Herrmann and Sarah C. Sherwood. The team employed non-destructive tools to find out more information, according to Fox News, which included a high-resolution laser scanner to analyze the faint drawings.

The 6,000-year-old cave art revealed clues as to what Native American life in the South may have been like at the time. Many drawings depicted humans with pointed tools alongside wild dogs, serpents and other beasts. Other drawings of celestial designs allude to a spiritual understanding of the universe.

Simek told Discovery News: "The discoveries tell us that prehistoric peoples in the Cumberland Plateau used this rather distinctive upland environment for a variety of purposes and that religion was part of that broader sense of place."

Herrmann then commented on the mythical roles humans take in the drawings. "Human images are often shown in activities suggesting heroic or ceremonial action, flying, transforming into animal shapes or reaching through the rock surface," he told Discovery News.

This remarkable find follows on the heels of last month's news that 5,000 year old drawings were uncovered in Mexico. Check out the images below from the archaeological discovery, and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Marc Zimmer: Luminescent Eel Muscles Fluorescent Protein Revolution Into the Clinic

2013-06-18T19:01:44Z

Fluorescent proteins have completely revolutionized the way medical and biological science is being done. They have been used to watch broken hearts mend themselves, explain HIV virulence, monitor self-destructing dengue mosquitoes and create bird-flu-resistant chickens. According to Robert Hoffman, professor of surgery at the University of San Diego Medical School, fluorescent protein technology is "the greatest revolution in bio-medical science since the first microscope and the first x-ray." In acknowledgement of the importance of the field, Roger Tsien, Martin Chalfie and Osamu Shimomura were awarded the 100th Nobel Prize in chemistry for "the discovery and development of the Green Fluorescent Protein, GFP."

Crystal jellyfish emit pinpricks of green light. They have roughly 350 photoorgans that produce the light, and it is in these organs that the first fluorescent protein, GFP, was found. Since then, there has been a major effort to find fluorescent proteins in other organisms with successes in over 125 different species. Just this week, a paper in Cell reported finding the first fluorescent protein in vertebrates, as well as its structure and potential uses. This protein was found in a Japanese freshwater eel.

The Japanese freshwater eel, Unagi, gives off green light when illuminated with blue light. It is the first vertebrate found to contain a fluorescent protein. (Image courtesy of RIKEN)

The eel is considered a delicacy in Japan and is on the verge of extinction due to global warming and overconsumption. Although it is a freshwater fish, the mature eel swims thousands of miles to spawn in the Philippine Seas. And then, quite amazingly, over the course of several months, the larvae will swim all the way back to Japan.

In 2009, intrigued by the energy required for these tiny larva to swim thousands of miles, researchers had a closer look at their muscles and discovered that their muscle fibers are fluorescent. Atsushi Miyawaki, a superstar in the fluorescent protein field (he has developed a way to make mouse brains transparent, and a technique for tracking the cell cycle in cell development and cancerous growth) from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Wako-city, Japan, read the 2009 paper and was inspired to hunt down the source of the fluorescence in the eel. He was hoping that it was a protein that was responsible for the fluorescence, a protein that could be added to the existing fluorescent protein tool chest.

Miyawaki hit pay dirt: Not only was it a fluorescent protein, but it was a completely new type of fluorescent protein, very different from the GFP-like proteins found in the other 125 species. However, when Miyawaki expressed the protein, UnaG, in bacteria, the protein did not glow; it seemed that there was something in the eels that was required for fluorescence but was not present in bacteria.

The missing ingredient turned out to be bilirubin, which is the yellow breakdown product of old red blood cells. Elavated levels of bilirubin are indicative of liver problems, and the molecule is also responsible for the yellow color seen in bruises or jaundiced individuals. Currently, bilirubin levels are measured using a convoluted and imprecise methods. In this week's Cell paper, Miyawaki and his co-workers have shown that the fluorescent eel protein can be used to measure bilirubin in human serum with an improved sensitivity over existing tests. Fluorescent proteins have been used to light up a myriad of laboratory experiments, but this would be the first clinical use of a fluorescent protein.

"We believe the system is going to revolutionize the clinical measurement of bilirubin in hospitals worldwide and lead to a better understanding of blood and liver metabolism in humans," says Miyawaki. "Before the discovery of UnaG, I couldn't imagine that basic science could have such a direct impact on human health. From a simple eel, we found a new path to the clinic."

Wray Herbert: Spooky Judgments: How Agents Think About Danger

2013-06-18T18:27:23Z

We are watching Big Brother watching us. Whatever one thinks of Edward Snowden, hero or traitor or something in between, his revelations about sweeping NSA surveillance have gotten America's attention. His whistle blowing has raised important questions about the balance of liberty and safety, and will heighten suspicions and scrutiny of the nation's intelligence agencies for some time to come.

We hire and train intelligence agents to weigh risks and make judgments, and most of us want to believe that these assessments are sound. But how rational are the individual men and women who are making the life-and-death decisions that influence national security?

A new study raises some serious questions about our usual view of rationality, and how it applies to intelligence agents' judgments about risk. Cornell University psychological scientist Valerie Reyna, one of the nation's experts on risk assessment and decision making, persuaded a federal intelligence agency to let her study agents' thinking. She found a pattern of irrational judgments about risk. In fact, college students were better than intelligence agents at weighing danger in a technical, logical way.

Reyna actually predicted that she would see these results. She is the originator of what's called "fuzzy trace theory," which posits that decision makers simultaneously confront problems in two very different ways. We deliberately and painstakingly calculate risk based on the quantitative information available -- like solving a math problem -- but we also process, very rapidly, the simple but meaningful "gist" of the situation. Since calculation is so taxing, in time and cognitive energy, gist thinking is often the best option, especially for decisions under pressure.

Gist thinking is paradoxical. For example, study after study has shown that children tend to employ slow and deliberate calculation, but as we get older, we rely more and more on rapid, impressionistic gist thinking. Similarly, experts in fields like finance and emergency medicine come to rely more on intuitive gist thinking, the more experienced they are. This developmental "reversal" is well documented but counterintuitive, since we expect maturity and experience to improve all cognitive performance.

Based on this body of evidence, Reyna predicted such a cognitive reversal in intelligence analysts as well. She recruited volunteers from an unnamed federal intelligence agency, mostly special agents with an average of seven years with the agency. For comparison, she also recruited a group of college students and another group of post-college adults. She tested all the volunteers on a series of what are called framing problems, which assess the tendency to make risky choices. Here's an example:

A dread disease is threatening a town of 600, and you have the authority to make choices. Do you: Save 200 people for sure, or choose the option with 1/3 probability that 600 will be saved and a 2/3 probability that none will be saved? Or, alternatively, do you pick the option where 400 will surely die, or instead a 2/3 probability that all 600 will die and a 1/3 probability that nobody dies?

These two choice scenarios are identical, except that one is framed in terms of gain, the other in terms of loss. A fundamental tenet of decision making theory is that rational people are consistent in their choices, regardless of whether the odds are framed as gain or loss. But many people switch in this scenario from risk-seeking to risk-avoiding. Fuzzy trace theory says that this is the result of focusing on the "good" gist -- all saved, or none die. Even explained this way, however, it's nevertheless a cognitively biased form of decision making -- and not what one would expect in a professional intelligence agent.

But that's precisely what Reyna found in her experiment, described in a forthcoming article in the journal Psychological Science. Based on 30 gain-loss framing decisions, not only did the federal agents exhibit larger framing biases than college students, they were also more confident in their judgments. The post-college adults occupied an interesting middle ground between the students and agents: They were as flawed in their choices as the students -- sometimes more so -- but less cognitively biased than the intelligence agents.

These results show that experienced intelligence agents think irrationally about risk and loss, even when human lives are at stake. If it's any comfort, Reyna concludes that this distorted judgment is the ironic consequence of a cognitively advanced style of thinking, an intuitive style perhaps more suitable for finding meaning in the murky world of spies and counterspies.

Selections from Wray Herbert's blogs--"We're Only Human" and "Full Frontal Psychology"--appear regularly in The Huffington Post and elsewhere.

Eye Movements May Reveal Common Brain Disorders, Scientists Say

2013-06-18T16:49:49Z

Eye-tracking has become the tech trend du jour. Advertisers use data on where you look and when to better capture your attention. Designers employ it to improve products. Game and phone developers utilize it to offer the latest in hands-free interaction.

But eye-tracking can do more than help sell products or give your finger a rest while playing Fruit Ninja. Years of research have found that our tiny, rapid eye movements called saccades serve as a window into the brain for psychologists just as for advertisers—but instead of giving clues about our preferred cookie brands (pdf), they elucidate our inner mental functioning. The question is, can capturing such movements help clinicians make diagnoses of mental and neurological disorders, such as autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, Parkinson’s disease and more? For many researchers in this growing field, the outlook so far looks positive.

“Visual scanning reflects a model of the world that exists inside the brain of each individual,” explains Moshe Eizenman, a leading eye-tracking researcher at the University of Toronto. “People with mental disorders have a model of the world that is slightly different than that of normal people—and by moving their eyes, they provide information about this different model.” Autistic children, for example, tend to avoid social images in favor of abstract ones, and they also more rarely and fleetingly make eye contact when looking at faces in an image or video in comparison with nonautistic kids. Similarly distinct, abnormal eye-movement patterns occur in a number of mental disorders, scientists have found.

Until recently, such insights have remained relegated to the lab setting, where researchers traditionally rely on special tools (like mounted headgear) and instructed tasks (like following a moving target across a computer screen). Now, as the cost of the technology drops and accuracy of more common—and practical—tools improves, eye tracking may find wider use in the clinical setting. “There is going to be a huge growth in the accessibility of eye-tracking devices to clinicians and others,” Eizenman predicts. “It won’t remain the domain of experts.” But technological advancements themselves are not enough to make eye-tracking for mental health monitoring go mainstream. The big challenge ahead, he says, is meaningful analysis of eye movement information.

Laurent Itti of the University of Southern California’s iLab is a part of a team working on this very challenge. Along with a group of researchers from U.S.C. and Queen’s University in Ontario, last year Itti devised a data-heavy, low-cost method of identifying brain disorders via eye-tracking. Subjects in this “free viewing” test sit and naturally watch a video on TV for 15 minutes while their eye-movements are recorded. The result is a deluge of data (the average person makes three to five saccadic eye movements per second), so Itti’s team uses advanced machine learning—algorithms that enable a computer to recognize patterns without explicit human instruction—to parse the results and distinguish deviant eye-movements from normal patterns.

In a small, proof-of-concept study (pdf) Itti’s team found that their algorithm could classify mental disorders through eye-movement patterns: They identified elderly Parkinson’s patients with nearly 90 percent accuracy as well as children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or fetal alcohol spectrum disorder with 77 percent accuracy. “This is very different from what people have done before. We’re trying to have completely automated interpretation of the eye movement data,” Itti says. “So you don’t need to have a scientist look at the data to figure out what’s going on; we’re using algorithms and machines to [identify] the linkage between eye-movement and cognition.”

China Launches Major Emissions Program

2013-06-18T16:43:47Z

By Mark Nicholls:
(click here for original article)

On June 18 China’s pioneering city of Shenzhen is set to notch up another first. From that day 635 companies in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone—which in 1979 became the vanguard for China’s capitalist revolution—will start using the markets to help meet greenhouse gas emissions targets.

This year, alongside the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing as well as the regions of Guangdong and Hubei, Shenzhen is imposing greenhouse gas targets on hundreds of companies, ranging from power plants to airport operators. The goal is to develop a national carbon market over the next decade that could help put the brakes on the world’s largest carbon dioxide emitter.

“China has internationally pledged 2020 climate targets,” observes Chai Hongliang, an analyst at Thomson Reuters Point Carbon, an Oslo-based information-provider specializing in carbon markets. He is referring to a commitment first made by China ahead of the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks to reduce its economy’s overall carbon emissions per unit of GDP to 40 to 45 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. “It has two ways to reach the target: shut down factories in the last months of 2020 or use more market-based approaches like emissions trading,” Chai adds.

As with emission-trading programs elsewhere, polluters in China’s pilots have two options: First, they can meet their targets by reducing their own emissions—by investing in energy efficiency, say, or curbing production. Alternatively, they can buy carbon allowances or credits from companies that have spare allowances or from projects elsewhere in China.

Shenzhen faces the toughest target. The companies in its pilot emitted the equivalent of 31 million metric tons (Mt) of CO2 in 2010. They will be allocated around 100 Mt of allowances for the duration of the three-year trial, although expected economic growth means they will have to reduce their carbon intensity by an estimated 30 percent by 2015 compared with 2010.

Balancing the need for economic growth with carbon control is a challenge. Emissions in China are expected to rise for years, given the importance China’s political elite continue to place on economic growth. Some observers question how much pressure China’s planners are prepared to put on its big emitters. The pilots set emission limits from January 2013 through the end of 2015. “I think the emissions caps will be relatively lenient,” Chai says.

Certainly the regulators will be eager to avoid any “carbon leakage”—that is, driving industry out of their jurisdictions through imposing too stringent targets ahead of any national program. But at this point Chai can only speculate about their stringency. Limited information is available about participating companies, their historical emissions—and even the rules under which the pilots will operate. And part of the reason is that some of these data do not exist.

The problem with data
To run effectively markets rely on an unimpeded flow of information, clear rules and rigorous oversight. China could both benefit from the lessons of earlier efforts, such as Europe’s flagship carbon market—the world’s largest, known as the European Union Emissions Trading System, or ETS. It is under fire from some environmentalists because of its relatively lax targets and low carbon prices, along with its vulnerability to fraud and abuse.

For the regulators drawing up targets, “there are existing processes and mechanisms on energy consumption which could be drawn on, as well as local exercises in creating GHG [greenhouse gas] inventories,” says Lina Li, a Beijing-based carbon markets expert at Netherlands-based consultancy Ecofys. Her firm has advised local regulators and international donors on creating carbon market regulations and infrastructure in China. “But there are still challenges regarding emissions data at the company level.”

This is exactly where the E.U. was in 2005, when it embarked on the pilot phase of its ETS—and the lack of emissions data allowed companies to game the system. E.U. governments asked companies to provide their own, unverified historical emissions data, and many inflated their numbers so as to claim more free allowances from government. This practice created an overhang of surplus permits that led to a price collapse in 2007.

Generous allocations of allowances are probably inevitable as the price paid for industry acceptance, however, suggests Karl Upston-Hooper, legal counsel of GreenStream Network, a Finnish carbon asset manager that is active in China. “You will struggle to find an ETS that is not overallocated” in its early phases, he says. Indeed, he argues that the pilots in China are less about creating carbon markets and more about gathering data. “I’ve taken the view that they’re implementing an emissions-monitoring system, not a carbon market—and I’m okay with that as a first step on the road.”

Most observers—including from the environmental movement—are prepared to give China’s regulators time to get things right. “It is our view that the first step for Chinese ETS is to get the system right from the beginning—the trading platform; the monitoring, reporting and verification system; [emissions] inventories; getting companies informed and cooperative—and gradually shift toward more stringent caps,” says Li Shuo, a climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace East Asia. Plenty of studies see China’s emissions peaking by 2030. Some are more optimistic: recent ones predict 2025 to 2030.

A further data challenge is whether China’s regulators will be sufficiently transparent and even-handed when it comes to the country’s carbon markets. “In Europe and elsewhere, ETS data are under public scrutiny. That may not be the case in China,” says Point Carbon’s Chai.

Another concern is insufficient coordination among the seven pilots, Li says. Indeed, rivalry exists among the various authorities, with Beijing deliberately encouraging a degree of “policy competition” to test differing approaches to see which works best.

Last, despite a recent announcement by the powerful National Development and Reform and Commission (NDRC) that it is to propose a national carbon cap for China’s next five-year plan, which runs from 2016 to 2020, a national Chinese carbon market is not assured. Other methods could prove more effective. “In China the ETS is not the only tool,” says Wu Changhua, Beijing-based Greater China director of the nonprofit Climate Group. She notes that the nation’s finance ministry is promoting a carbon tax whereas other government ministries are considering a system for crediting and trading energy-efficiency improvements.

Wu also cautions that international media speculation around the introduction of a national carbon cap by 2016 is overblown. She argues that the NDRC is agitating for the inclusion of the concept in the next plan to ensure resources are available for more research and policy development. “One thing is for sure,” she adds. “The political leadership in China is much more serious, stronger and determined to tackle environmental problems. But it will be a journey. We’re not going to get there immediately.”

Last Telegram Ever Will Be Sent Next Month

2013-06-18T16:32:15Z

The world's final telegram will be sent next month by India's state-run telecommunications company, the Christian Science Monitor reported. The July 14 stop date will be over 160 years after Samuel Morse sent the first telegram in the U.S. in 1844.

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited is losing more than $23 million a year by keeping telegraph services running, the company's general manager of telegraph services told The Christian Science Monitor. Only about 5,000 telegrams are sent a day in India, a country with a population of 1.24 billion. About 65 percent of India's telegrams are sent by the government, according to The Monitor.

With the rise of computers and telephones, even the U.S. Postal Service has struggled immensely, so it's surprising that an old-fashioned technology like the telegraph has lasted this long. In March, the U.S. Post Office announced that it had lost $1.9 billion in the previous 3 months.

Western Union sent the last telegram in the U.S. back in 2006, 150 years after the company was founded. Samuel Morse's first telegram read “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?” and was sent from the U.S. Supreme Court.

Mario Livio: The Other Scientific Revolution

2013-06-18T16:12:07Z

The year 1543 witnessed the publication of Copernicus's On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres, which initiated the so-called "Copernican Revolution" in science. Humans were displaced from their central position in the cosmos. In the same year, however, the Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius published another book: On the Fabric of the Human Body, which may have marked an equally important turning point -- it founded modern anatomical science -- putting humans at center stage in another sense. Dissecting scores of corpses of executed criminals, Vesalius quickly realized that the descriptions of human anatomy that were accepted at his time were often completely wrong. Those descriptions were based on the writings of the revered second century physician Galen.

Vesalius demonstrated that Galen's assertions were largely based on the bodies of dogs and monkeys, rather than on information gathered from the human body. Vesalius accompanied his monumental text (seven volumes) with exquisitely detailed woodcut illustrations drawn by Jan van Calcar, a student of the great painter Titian (Figure 1 shows one of these drawings). Vesalius broke with tradition in two important ways. First, he insisted on performing the dissections by himself, rather than consigning that task to an assistant surgeon. Second, he noted in the preface to his book that Galen's writings contained "many incorrect observations... even regarding his monkeys." Galileo Galilei, who incidentally was born in the same year in which Vesalius died, adopted these two guidelines. First, he noted that "sensate experiences and necessary demonstrations" take precedence "not only over philosophical but also theological dogmas." Second, Galileo highlighted the fact that authority had no role to play in deciding scientific questions.

Figure 1. An illustration from Vesalius's book (from Wikipedia)."

In the same way that Galileo has put the Copernican revolution on a firmer basis, the second person to have revolutionized physiological thought was the English physician William Harvey (1578–1657; Figure 2). Harvey was, in fact, a student at the University of Padua at the same time that the young Galileo was a professor there.

Figure 2. William Harvey (from Wikipedia).

Harvey's greatest achievement was the demonstration that the heart, arteries and veins were all part of one circulatory system, with the heart at its center. This replaced Galen's complex motion of many intertwined cycles. In this respect, Harvey's discovery (achieved through many experiments and observations) is very reminiscent of the Copernican theory, in which one planetary system, revolving around the Sun, replaced the collection of epicycles in the Ptolemaic astronomy. In the same way that Galileo's observations (in particular of the phases of Venus) demolished Ptolemy's theory, Harvey's observations and pioneering quantitative logic in biology have brought about the demise of the centuries-old Galen doctrine. The revolution in human anatomy was complete.

Today, every time we analyze the detailed structure or interior of something, we speak of its "anatomy." Figure 3, for instance, shows the "anatomy" of the Sun.

Figure 3. "Anatomy" of the Sun. Credit: NASA/Jenny Mottar.

Toddlers Have Better Grammar Than You Think

2013-06-18T15:48:55Z

By: Megan Gannon, News Editor
Published: 06/18/2013 08:32 AM EDT on LiveScience

The little sounds and puffs of air that toddlers often inject into their baby babble may actually be subtle stand-ins for grammatical words, new research suggests.

For their study, Cristina Dye, a Newcastle University researcher in child language development, made recordings of tens of thousands of utterances of French-speaking children between 23 months and 37 months old.

Dye and her colleagues analyzed each sound the kids made and the context in which it was produced. The team said they documented a pattern of sounds and puffs of air that seemed to replace grammatical words in many cases. Their findings suggest that toddlers may properly use little words (as, a, an, can, is) sooner than thought. [That's Incredible! 9 Brainy Baby Abilities]

"Many of the toddlers we studied made a small sound, a soft breath, or a pause, at exactly the place that a grammatical word would normally be uttered," Dye said in a statement.

"The fact that this sound was always produced in the correct place in the sentence leads us to believe that young children are knowledgeable of grammatical words. They are far more sophisticated in their grammatical competence than we ever understood."

Though Dye was studying French-speaking toddlers, she and her colleagues expect their findings to apply to other languages as well. She also thinks their results could have implications for understanding language delay in children.

"When children don't learn to speak normally it can lead to serious issues later in life," Dye said in a statement. "For example, those who have it are more likely to suffer from mental illness or be unemployed later in life. If we can understand what is 'normal' as early as possible then we can intervene sooner to help those children."

Previous research has shown that toddlers, before they articulate full sentences themselves, may be able to understand complex grammar. A 2011 study published in the journal Cognitive Science found that as early as 21 months, children could match made-up verbs with pictures that made sense grammatically. For example, if they were told "The rabbit is glorping the duck," they would point to a picture of a rabbit lifting a duck's leg rather than the duck lifting its leg on its own.

The new research on the French-speaking toddlers was detailed in the Journal of Linguistics.

Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

Al Gore: Keystone XL Is An 'Atrocity'

2013-06-18T15:22:49Z

In a recent interview with The Guardian, former vice-president Al Gore made his opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline clear.

"This whole project [Keystone XL] is an atrocity,” Gore insisted in the interview, “but it is even more important for [Obama] to regulate carbon dioxide emissions."

Gore spoke from Istanbul, where he presented on climate change to nearly 600 activists. Following his loss in the 2000 presidential election, Gore dedicated himself to environmental issues, launching The Climate Reality Project and starring in the Academy Award-winning climate documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

This is not the first time Gore spoke out against Keystone. In January 2012 he blogged on the matter, noting that “opponents of the Keystone pipeline must remain engaged and prepared to beat this proposal.”

A former employee of TransCanada, the company behind Keystone, recently told a Canadian Senate committee the pipeline company had "deeply entrenched business practices that ignored legally required regulations and codes. He also compared the company's business practices to "organized crime" in an interview with The Huffington Post. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), a supporter of Keystone, has dismissed the project as "the Kim Kardashian of energy."

Gore also reiterated his support for carbon emissions regulations in his interview with The Guardian. "If it hurts the feelings of people in the carbon polluting industries that's too bad," he said. "Just because the opponents of doing anything on global warming are trying to intimidate people to not even consider it, that is no reason for the rest of us to conclude that it is impossible."