On a beautiful day in Moscow, can sit on a bench, enjoy the scenery…and find out how much they weigh. New park benches will include that capture a weight. The smart seats are to be sponsored by local gyms, according to . In a bid to boost fitness, the benches will also display health tips. And, of course, advertise nearby fitness centers.The idea has been vetted before: a fitness club in the Netherlands installed benches with scales at a public bus stop. The sitter’s weight was shown in large lettering on a nearby electronic panel. Russia aims to scale up the experiment: Moscow plans to debut at least 20 weighing benches by the end of the year.The benches have their limits: they don’t throw people off so they’ll get some exercise instead of sitting, and they have yet to be programmed to make snide remarks. Still, perhaps the way the benches will most likely improve health by motivating Muscovites to extend a stroll rather than sit and have their weights displayed to curious passersby.—Dina Fine Maron
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
How Much Are Drug Companies Paying Your Doctor?
The New York Times
On Tuesday, the federal government is expected to release details of payments to doctors by every pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturer in the country.
The information is being made public under a of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. The law to doctors, dentists, chiropractors, podiatrists and optometrists for things like promotional speaking, consulting, meals, educational items and research.
It's not quite clear what the data will show 2014 in part because the first batch will be incomplete, covering spending for only a few months at the end of 2013 2014 but we at ProPublica have some good guesses. That's because we have been detailing relationships between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry for the past four years as part of our project.
We've aggregated information from the websites of some large drug companies, which publish their payments as a condition of settling federal whistle-blower lawsuits alleging improper marketing or kickbacks. Today, in cooperation with the website , we've added data for 2013, which now covers 17 drug companies accounting for half of United States drug sales that year. (You can look up your doctor using .)
Here are some facts we've learned from the data:
Many, many health professionals have relationships with industry.
It's not possible to calculate the exact number of physicians represented, because drug companies haven't used unique identification numbers that cross company lines. But it's clear that the figure is in the hundreds of thousands.
Excluding research payments, the drugmaker Pfizer appeared to have interactions with the most health care professionals last year 2014 about 142,600. AstraZeneca came in second with about 111,200. Johnson & Johnson and Forest Labs each had nearly 100,000. There are an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 active doctors in the United States.
"Most physicians that are in private practice are touched in some way" by the industry, said George Dunston, co-founder of Obsidian HDS, the creator of Pharmashine. "You add that up and it's a pretty significant number."
Some doctors have relationships with many companies.
Some highly sought-after key opinion leaders, as they are known in the industry, work for half a dozen or more companies in a given year.
Dr. Marc Cohen, chief of cardiology at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center, received more than $270,000 last year for speaking or consulting for six companies listed in Dollars for Docs. He is a prolific researcher and author.
In an interview, Dr. Cohen said he works only with companies whose drugs are backed by large clinical studies. "In general terms, the science behind the product is very strong," he said. "These are the companies that I've chosen to work with."
Source: IMS Health and ProPublica's
but last year he told ProPublica, "I actually enjoy the aspect of educating my counterparts about developments in the field."
The biggest companies aren't always the ones that spend the most. Some smaller drug companies spend big, too.
Its sales were far lower than those of Novartis and Pfizer, the top two companies by sales last year. Yet Forest easily outspent these competitors on promotional speaking events last year.
Forest spent $32.3 million on paid talks in 2013, compared with $12.7 million for Novartis and $12.6 million for Pfizer.
An Actavis spokesman declined to comment on the company's strategy, but a Forest spokesman said last year that the company spent more on speakers because it didn't use pricey direct-to-consumer TV marketing. It also had more new drugs than its competitors.
Companies with newer drugs or newly approved uses for their existing drugs often seem to spend more. Companies that don't have many new products or have lost patent protection on their drugs, or are about to lose it, tend to pull back.
"A lot of this has to do with where companies are in their development cycle of new products or emerging products, rather than an industry-specific trend," said John Murphy, assistant general counsel at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry trade group.
Meals vastly outnumber all other interactions between drug companies and doctors. But they account for a much smaller share of costs. Source: ProPublica's Dollars for Docs.
Other companies followed the same pattern; speakers can command $2,000 to $3,000 per engagement, or more.
Given doctors' busy schedules treating patients, mealtimes are often the only time to reach them, said Murphy, PhRMA's lawyer. Company sales representatives bring information 2014 and a meal. "A lot of doctors' offices are closed for lunch," he said. "During patient care hours, we want them to see patients."
Researchers say that whatever the motivation, even small gifts or meals can influence a doctor's perception of a drug and lead to more prescribing of it.
From year to year, doctors cycle in and out of relationships with companies.publicly report their payments to its licensed health professionals since 2009.
We looked at all of the physicians 2014 about 3,500 of them 2014 who received at least one payment for "bona-fide services," such as speaking or consulting, from 2010 to 2012.
About 60 percent of the doctors received payments in only one of those years. What this suggests is that most speakers and consultants are tapped for a particular task.
Still, some doctors do appear to have long-term roles with companies. About 20 percent of doctors in the data received a payment in all three years. They represented most of the top-earners over the three-year period 2014 and for that matter, the top earners in any given year.
Does any of this disclosure work?
Dollars for Docs has been consulted more than eight million times during the past four years. Some patients have told us that a payment has caused them to question a doctor's prescription for a certain drug. Other patients have said that it gives them confidence that their physician is an expert.
Our efforts have also prompted industry wide changes. Early on, we reported how , disciplined by state boards or lacked credentials. Many drug companies subsequently said they would check for state actions against doctors before hiring them.
Medical schools also said they would tighten up their oversight after we reported how some top schools and teaching hospitals against faculty physicians getting speaker payments from drug companies.
Finally, we've reported that many companies . Scott Liebman, a New York lawyer who advises pharmaceutical companies, says it's too early to know what's causing this: it could be business factors, it could be the disclosure or it could be some mixture of the two.
Reporting recipe: With more data on relationships between doctors and drug companies soon to be released,
newsletter.
Alaska Highway Getting More Bumps in the Road
More In This Article
The thick layer of permafrostunderneath the Alaska Highway is thawing, and with it goes the highway’s integrity. “It is really, really bumpy,” says Tanis Davey of the , where scientists study the on permafrost. Permafrost is a layer of frozen soil or rock that sits under an estimated 20 percent of the world’s total land area. That includes stretches of the Alaska Highway—the only land route from Alaska to the continental U.S.— where the layer can be up to 65 feet thick. Geoscientists from the center have collected samples of permafrost () along the 1,390-mile-long highway for the past three summers to record how global warming is changing the ground and to predict where future damage may appear. Roadways with recurring damage from thawing permafrost cost about roads to maintain, according to scientist Fabrice Calmels, who submitted this photograph to
2014 Nobel Prize Prediction
Zz.
Point of View Affects How Science is Done
Productivity and equity are probably the most often cited reasons to attend to diversity in science. Gender and culture also affect the science itself, however. They influence what we choose to study, our perspectives when we approach scientific phenomena and our strategies for studying them. When we enter the world of science, we do not shed our cultural practices at the door.
Evolutionary biology is one example. Despite popular images of Jane Goodall observing chimpanzees, almost all early studies of primate behavior were conducted by men. Male primatologists generally adopted Charles Darwin's view of evolutionary biology and focused on competition among males for access to females. In this view, female primates are passive, and either the winning male has access to all the females or females simply choose the most powerful male.
The idea that females may play a more active role and might even have sex with many males did not receive attention until female biologists began to do field observations. Why did they see what men missed? “When, say, a female lemur or bonobo dominated a male, or a female langur left her group to solicit strange males, a woman fieldworker might be more likely to follow, watch, and wonder than to dismiss such behavior as a fluke,” wrote anthropologist Sarah Hrdy. Her interest in maternal reproductive strategies grew from her empathy with her study subjects.
Culture also made a difference in approach. In the 1930s and 1940s U.S. primatologists, adopting the stance of being “minimally intrusive,” tended to focus on male dominance and the associated mating access and paid little attention to individuals except to trace dominance hierarchies; rarely were individuals or groups tracked for many years. Japanese researchers, in contrast, gave much more attention to status and social relationships, values that hold a higher relative importance in Japanese society.
This difference in orientation led to striking differences in insight. Japanese primatologists discovered that male rank was only one factor determining social relationships and group composition. They found that females had a rank order, too, and that the stable core of the group was made up of lineages of related females, not males. The longer-term studies of Japanese researchers also allowed them to notice that maintaining one's rank as the alpha male was not solely dependent on strength.
Diversity has had an effect on studies of education and social science. Lawrence Kohlberg's highly influential work on stages of moral development in children in the early 1970s was later called into question by psychologist Carol Gilligan on the grounds that it ignored the perspective of women, who tended to emphasize the ethic of caring. Nor did Kohlberg's model account for moral principles associated with Eastern religious traditions, in part because his scheme did not include principles of cooperation and nonviolence.
Validity in the sciences involves much more than attending to canons about the need for proper controls, replicability, and the like. It involves choices about what problems and populations to study and what procedures and measures to use. Diverse perspectives and values are important in these choices. For instance, predominantly white, middle-class social scientists focus their research programs primarily on white, middle-class populations, which may lead to conclusions that are not generalizable.
If participation in cultural practices is central to our development as humans, then these practices will influence we learn and practice science. In psychology, scholars who have intentionally focused on cultural orientations have expanded previously accepted conceptions of identity development, motivation and resilience. Research on the effect of teaching children to appreciate their racial heritage has pushed boundaries of accepted conceptions of identity development. Minority scholars have pointed out that studies tend to focus on the effects of diversity rather than the effects of homogeneity and other gaps in scientific practices.
A diversity of scientists is important for reducing bias and for providing different ways of looking at the world. Two of us (Bang and Medin) and our colleagues have documented consistent cultural influences on the perceived relationship between humans and nature: rural European-Americans tend to see themselves as apart from nature, whereas Native Americans see themselves as a part of nature (although it is more complicated than we have space to explain). This may influence how we think about environmental issues. It may also be why the mainstream view excludes urban settings as part of any ecosystem and sees ideal ecosystems as free of human influence, and so on.
It is commonly said that scientists should have a professional distance from what they study. But the metaphor of distance is misleading. Science, like a painting, necessarily has a perspective. To the extent that we can remove our biases and learn from multiple perspectives, we will understand our world better.
Steven Pinker’s Sense of Style
Writing guides tend to be pretty unsatisfying. They offer plenty of concrete rules, but why, a reader might ask, should the rules be followed? The answer is usually “because” — as in, “because I say so.” This, of course, is where humanity found itself before the advent of the scientific method: the mystics spoke, and everyone had to decide for themselves whom to believe. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker takes a different approach, one that is both more ambitious and more modest. In his new book, “,” he draws on research, and particularly his deep knowledge of linguistics, to give his writing principles a scientific basis. Readers can thus have some assurance that Pinker’s advice is good, and, knowing the reasons why, they will be more likely to know when a rule should be broken. Yet he does not push this method beyond its natural limits. Scientists, after all, still know relatively little about the ways dark squiggles communicate ideas. Instead, he shows readers how to take apart a piece of fine writing to see what makes it tick. He does this with affection and enthusiasm. In Pinker’s hands, we do not feel ordered around capriciously, but truly guided by an inspiring teacher. He was interviewed by Gareth Cook, the editor of Mind Matters.
There are many, many books about writing in the world. What did you hope to add?
That’s fascinating. Can you give any examples of writing lessons that come from cognitive science research?
The authors of traditional style guides, like Strunk and White, were dimly aware of the problem, but lacked the technical concepts to analyze it, and offered useless advice such as “Keep related words together.” The advice is useless for the Yale sentence, the related words and in fact are already together; disambiguating it requires moving related words to get For that matter, if it had been then the word-moving solution would make things worse: is just as misleading as the panel on sex with four professors.
Psycholinguists call these temporary ambiguities “garden paths,” and have run hundreds of experiments on what causes them and what prevents them. In the Yale example, the problem is that the human sentence understanding process parses sentences with the help of statistically frequent word pairs that have a standard structure and meaning—in this case, ,and A careful writer has to scan for them and recast the sentence to avoid the ambiguity. The advice is better stated as “pull unrelated (but mutually attracted) phrases apart.”
It seems that it is pretty standard, in books about writing style, to bemoan the decline of the written word. Yet you don’t. Why?
You write of “directing the gaze of the reader to something in the world she can see for herself.” Can you explain what you mean by this and how it defines your view of good writing?
Did working on this book change how you approach your own writing in any ways?
I really enjoyed the way the book examines examples of good writing, and then explains what makes them good. Why did you decide to do that?
3 Rules for Absurd Internet Stunts
Kickstarter wasn't intended to be a platform for elaborate, participatory jokes. It's a Web site where entrepreneurs seek funding help from the public. You watch a video or read a pitch about a project, and then, if compelled, you donate a few bucks—not because you're investing (you're not) but just to show your support, maybe to feel like a part of someone's quest.
In July, Ohio resident Zack Brown started what may have been the silliest Kickstarter project ever. He set a fundraising goal of $10—to make a potato salad.
He didn't even bother with a video. His entire pitch was: “Basically I'm just making potato salad. I haven't decided what kind yet.”
The Internet loves a good joke. Within a couple of days, this one went viral. Thousands of Web surfers thought of the same punch line: contribute to the absurd campaign. The media picked up on the gag, too; next thing anyone knew, Brown's potato salad quest had racked up more than $70,000 in pledges.
Brown isn't a snake oil salesman or a huckster; he was absolutely transparent about what you'd get for your contribution: pretty much nothing. (For $1, he'd say your name aloud while making the salad. For $3, he'd mail you a bite.) The Internet, in other words, makes possible a scheme that has never existed before: get rich quick through sincere goofiness. We, the public, get to be part of the high jinks; they, the gagsters, get the profits.
It had happened before. The Million Dollar Homepage was a 2005 experiment by a British college student. He offered to sell individual pixels of his Web site (a 1,000 × 1,000 pixel grid) to advertisers for $1 each. He sold every last pixel.
Then there was also One Red Paperclip. Canadian Kyle MacDonald asked what someone might trade him for the red paper clip on his desk. Someone offered a fish-shaped pen. MacDonald bartered the pen for a doorknob, which he traded for a camp stove, and so on—until, after 14 trades, he had himself an actual house.
See? Sincere public goofiness. But the reactions to each case suggest that there are some rules to making these farcical schemes successful.
First: you can't repeat the viral success of a nutty Internet stunt. There were, inevitably, other “million-dollar home page” attempts—and at least a dozen copycat potato salad campaigns on Kickstarter. They failed. (One, called “I'm also making potato salad,” earned a whopping $10 in contributions.) Only the original idea thinker gets the loot.
Second rule: don't stray from straight goofiness. You'll ruin it. Case in point: Brown appeared on , vowing to figure out how to “do the most good” with the money. The goofiness was gone; now he was a do-gooder.
Final rule: stay sincere. Next Brown began promoting other stuff—a local restaurant, a photography studio, a radio station—on his Kickstarter page; now the earnestness was gone, too. “This is outrageous!” said one commenter. “Stop plugging businesses,” said another. “It's really lame, and takes away from the tongue in cheek fun of the whole ‘potato salad’ kick.”
Shortly thereafter, the pledges actually dropped by $30,000, leading to rumors of an anticommercialism backlash. (Kickstarter says that, instead, it canceled three large donations that seemed to be phony.) By the time the campaign was finished, Brown had raised more than $55,000.
The Web's short history of silly fundraising campaigns demonstrates that the public loves a good, pure, zany stunt. Yes, there will be some who begrudge any get-rich-quickers—especially those who succeed based on a little online joke. Others will disparage the apparent frivolity. But if your joke is good enough, a lot of the (paying) public will enjoy coming along for the ride.
Just remember the prime directives: Be original. Stay sincere. And stay goofy.
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Monday, September 29, 2014
What Are the Most Dangerous Threats to Air Quality?
Smog and soot top the list, even though there are remedies for both
Sep 29, 2014
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Know the Jargon: “Human Shield Effect”
One morning in South Africa's mountainous , an adult female samango monkey came down from the trees to search for peanuts in an experimental food dispenser. Every once in a while she scanned her surroundings for predators, but she never bothered to look behind her once she realized that Katarzyna Nowak was there.
Animals that are not at the top of their food chains are adept at avoiding their predators. , for example, stay up in trees. But to retrieve peanuts from the center's dispensers, they have to be on the ground—and that makes them vulnerable. Only when it is certain that no predators are around will a monkey spend time looking for food. So why did this one stop checking for danger behind her? Nowak, a biological anthropologist at Durham University in England and at South Africa's University of the Free State, suspects that the monkey figured that if a human was around, then a leopard was probably not. “[It was] as if she was thinking that I had that area covered,” Nowak says.
Nowak put her suspicion to the test. She and her colleagues watched 100 individuals in all and found that they ate more food available on the ground when humans were present than when humans were absent (and observing them via camera). “Researchers were perceived as shields against terrestrial predators,” in the journal .
Test of Time Dilation Using Relativstic Li Ion Clocks
A new result on the measurement of the effect of relativistic time dilation in stored Li ion has come up trumps for Special Relativity.
To carry out such a test, Benjamin Botermann of Johannes Gutenberg-University, Germany, and his colleagues looked for the relativistic Doppler shift in lithium ions accelerated to a third of the speed of light at the Experimental Storage Ring in Damstadt, Germany. The team stimulated two separate transitions in the ions using two lasers propagating in opposite directions with respect to the ion motion. The experiment effectively measures the shift in the laser frequencies relative to what these transition frequencies are for ions at rest. The combination of two frequency shifts eliminates uncertain parameters and allows the team to validate the time dilation prediction to a few parts per billion, improving on previous limits. The result complements other Lorentz violation tests that use higher precision atomic clocks but much slower relative velocities.
The more they test it, the more convincing it becomes.
Zz.
“Glass Brain” Offers Tours of the Space between Your Ears
3-D visualizations combine EEG and MRI data to illustrate how brain signals propagate and could be used to study neural disorders
Sep 29, 2014 | |
Acting Classes Could Help Kids with Autism
Kids with autism may learn valuable social skills in drama-based therapies
Aug 14, 2014 | |
When I Learned the Value of Diversity for Innovation
I was a young African-American woman in 1996, determined to do my best at Lockheed Martin, one of the world's foremost technology companies, when I was named to lead an integrated-product team for a mission-critical U.S. Navy program.
I was confident in my abilities as a software engineer, and I had been intimately involved in writing the program requirements. But the scope of the program was much broader than software development. We were tasked with creating an advanced launch control unit peripheral for a navy vertical-launch system.
Our challenge was to take a legacy system, based on a 16-bit computer with a rudimentary keypad input and tape cartridge device, and design a new unit that incorporated off-the-shelf technology—a 166-megahertz PowerPC VME processor and a touch-screen graphical user interface. This was before the iPad, when touch screens were a big deal. It was one of the navy's first ventures into forward-compatible, off-the-shelf technology. The system also had to be ruggedized to withstand a near-miss explosion. And we had to deliver it quickly and affordably.
Given the complexity, deadline and the amount of innovation required for the program, we needed every ounce of original thinking from people of many different backgrounds, both professional and personal. Our team of about 30 individuals had several people of color and several women, which was significant for my industry at the time, and a healthy mix of experience and youth. I had to establish an atmosphere of inclusion across race, gender and age diversity.
It was the diversity of professional expertise on the team that proved to me that an inclusive, sharing environment is imperative to success. We had systems, software, and electrical and human factors engineers. We had experts in shock attenuation, electromagnetic pulses and testing simulation systems. And we needed to engage all of them in a give-and-take dialogue in which ideas were stood up, picked apart and modified to become stronger with each iteration.
It was the kind of environment that not only benefits from diversity, it it. And because we were successful in establishing and managing it, we were also successful in delivering the capability that the customer required.
As a leader, I had to set the tone for people to express their ideas, even if they differed from those of their colleagues. I would not allow someone's ideas to be dismissed without consideration. I also established an environment where people felt safe in asking questions that often go unasked because everybody is afraid of being the only one who doesn't already know the answer. Asking those questions early in a discussion gets us past them (because, in truth, many other people have them, too) and allows us to use our time more efficiently.
Among my biggest concerns as a leader is that I will allow the best idea in the room to go unexpressed because someone did not feel comfortable enough to express it.
Once I found myself sitting next to a young engineer in a roomful of more experienced colleagues. I noticed he had something he wanted to say, but he was always a split second late in gaining the floor. After this had gone on for a while, I stopped the discussion, turned to him and asked for his opinion. He proceeded to make a suggestion that nobody else had considered. It was risky, and the group was skeptical. Eventually we adopted his idea, and it resulted in completely winning over a customer.
Perhaps the most important outcome of my experience as team leader was that it helped me evolve my understanding of diversity into a broader concept of inclusion. Diversity of age, gender, skin color, ethnicity, and more—the attributes of a diverse workplace that are the first to come to mind—is often visible and easy to identify and requires focus to engage and develop. The presence of diversity that you can see is often an indicator of an inclusive environment that embraces diversity of thought. A team dynamic that opens the door to inclusion will elicit ideas that spring from varied professional, educational and social experiences.
It's a truism that the best teams are greater than the sum of their parts. I believe that is true when those parts are diverse. When everyone looks the same, acts the same and the same, is it any wonder that they often fail to embrace—or even produce—innovative and unconventional ideas?
I am fortunate to work for an organization that not only understands that concept but makes a conscious choice to live by it. To choose otherwise would be to resign ourselves to comfortable mediocrity—and that will never be a viable option in the pursuit of excellence.
Saturday, September 27, 2014
More Editorial On BICEP-2 Results
Rowing back on a triumphant announcement about the first instants of creation may be a little embarrassing, but the saga is a useful reminder of how science works. There is no suggestion that anyone has behaved dishonourably. Admittedly, the BICEP team’s original press conference looks, with hindsight, seriously overconfident. More information-sharing between the various gravitational wave-hunters, all of whom guard their data jealously, might have helped tone down the triumphalism. But science, ideally, proceeds by exactly this sort of good-faith argument and honourable squabbling—until the weight of evidence forces one side to admit defeat.
This is where many in the general public don't fully understand. Reporting something and publishing something are merely the FIRST step in a tedious process of verification. The publication of something in peer-reviewed journals allows for others to scrutinize, verify, test, and duplicate the results, often in differing ways. Only when there is an independent agreement would something be considered to be valid or accepted.
How many other fields outside of science have that level of scrutiny and verification process?
Zz.
Book Review: Alive Inside
More than 35 million people worldwide have dementia, and many of them become unreachable as their cognitive impairment advances. Incredibly, though, when these same people listen to personally meaningful music, they can sometimes reconnect with their emotions, memories and identities. Filmmaker Rossato-Bennett follows social worker Dan Cohen as he brings iPods into nursing homes around the country. One resident with advanced dementia instantly awakens from a stupor when he hears music from his past and recalls decades-old details about his favorite singer, Cab Calloway. Cohen's ultimate goal is to make personalized music a standard tool at the tens of thousands of elderly care facilities in the U.S. “We need to use music to engage with people,” Cohen says, “to allow them to express themselves, enjoy themselves, and live again.”
Friday, September 26, 2014
Wireless Robot Octopus Swims With the Fishes [Video]
Image courtesy of Dimitris Tsakiris et al.
Robot can already walk, jet along and . But new advances have these machines swimming faster than ever. And thanks to the addition of soft, fleshy webs, they’re starting to look—and move—much more like the real thing, too. In fact, the latest octopus robot has already been for a successful swim—alongside real fish—in the sea off the coast of Crete.
The same team of researchers from Greece built —and even added a “sculling” stroke—last year. This year they have made a new step toward a more lifelike robotic octopus by adding the web to its soft arms. And setting it free from cables.
The robot is controlled wirelessly via radio frequencies, and its on-board battery can last for an hour of solid swimming. The body of the robot is Polyurethane, cast in molds . The soft web-arm combo is made from silicone, which, like a real octopus, has a similar density to water. The webby octopus was presented last week at the in Chicago.
Some swimming robot competitors, such as the and machines, have already used a web-style approach to propulsion. But these have been based instead on jellyfish and have more limited swimming styles, the researchers note. The robot octopus can turn and crawl, if awkwardly, as well.
Octopus! The Most Mysterious Creature In the Sea
Liquid Benzene Squeezed to Form Diamond Nanofibers
High-pressure cycles unexpectedly convert benzene into superstrong and ultrathin fibers. Will they put a space elevator within reach?
Sep 26, 2014 | |
Two New Arrivals Send Back Pictures Of Mars
The skies of Mars just got a little more crowded. On September 21st, 2014 NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) fired its engines for some 33 minutes in order to swing into a safe orbit. And a few days later, early on Sept 24th, India’s Space Research Organization (ISRO) made history by joining the likes of the US, the former Soviet Union, and Europe, in successfully placing a spacecraft into martian orbit – their Mars Orbiter, or Mangalyaan (“Mars-craft”) mission.
The Indian accomplishment is hugely impressive. Even if Mangalyaan is primarily a test bed for a variety of spacecraft engineering designs – carrying a handful of scientific instruments – to get to Mars in one piece is quite something. The history of efforts to explore the 4th planet from the Sun is littered with disappointments, and quite a few unintentional craters. Only about . Little wonder that the men were very, very happy.
The surface of Mars imaged by Mangalyaan from about 7,300 km (ISRO)
At the same time, NASA’s MAVEN is firing up its own scientific instruments for a highly detailed study of the Martian atmosphere. Although it’s presently in an elliptical orbit with a 35 hour period (not yet in its final science orbit with a 4.5 hour period) MAVEN’s array of detectors are getting to work.
On board are a Solar Wind Ion Analyzer, a Solar Wind Electron Analyzer, a Solar Energetic Particle detector, a SupraThermal and Thermal Ion Composition instrument, a Langmuir Probe and Waves device (looking at fast plasma oscillations), a Magnetometer, an Extreme Ultraviolet Monitor, a Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, and an Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph. A principle goal is to learn about how Mars’s atmosphere is being lost today, and to try to use this data to extrapolate back into martian history to evaluate what the atmospheric evolution may have been over millions and billions of years. During its primary mission MAVEN will also ‘dip’ to within 77 miles of Mars to probe its upper atmosphere in more detail.
Interestingly, MAVEN does not carry a methane detector – methane being a of biological activity today – but Mangalyaan does. Nor does MAVEN have a conventional visible light camera. But it does have that ultraviolet imaging spectrograph, and so naturally that’s provided one of the first images sent back – a mere 8 hours after arrival.
Images of Mars in 3 ultraviolet bands(Courtesy Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics /University of Colorado and NASA).
What are we looking at? Blue colors represent far-ultraviolet light from the Sun that’s getting scattered by atomic hydrogen which exists in a great halo-like cloud above Mars. Green is the ultraviolet scattering due mostly to oxygen. Red is mid-ultraviolet light bouncing off the surface of Mars – showing a brighter region at the southern pole, either ice or cloud.
You may wonder where hydrogen and oxygen are coming from if the thin martian atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide? It’s from the dissociation of water and carbon dioxide molecules at high altitudes
The blue glow in these images is therefore part of the very thing that MAVEN went to Mars to study – hydrogen being lost to space, hydrogen that used to be in water and which therefore represents the ongoing drying out of this dusty world.
Can Adults Improve their Emotional Intelligence?
John D. Mayer, professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, replies:
A cautious answer is that psychologists still are not sure whether adults can enhance their emotional intelligence. Current research suggests, however, that people can almost surely increase their emotional competence.
To explain the distinction, I first need to define these terms. Emotional intelligence is the ability to reason about emotions and emotional information, which includes recognizing, understanding and managing feelings in ourselves. Psychologists view intelligence as mental capacities. Demonstrating an increase in a person's potential to learn something is very difficult, which is why we do not know whether emotional intelligence can improve.
In contrast, emotional competence—a person's emotional functioning or ability to learn about emotions—is relatively straightforward to measure. The largest review of curricula in social and emotional learning, which aggregated studies with thousands of participants, indicated that the programs improve students' social interactions, well-being and sometimes even academic achievement. The few studies that have focused exclusively on adult learning appear to follow the same pattern, so there is good reason to believe that emotional knowledge and functioning can be enhanced in adulthood.
Finally, I would ask: Is it worth improving our emotional functioning? Some pundits overestimate the importance of emotional intelligence—saying, for example, that emotional intelligence explains more than 85 percent of outstanding performance in top leaders and that emotional intelligence—not IQ—predicts exemplary performance. My colleagues and I have never found such claims to be true. Rather we have uncovered more modest benefits, namely that greater emotional intelligence can improve relationships and happiness over time.
Individuals can find success in many ways and may not feel the need to improve emotional intelligence. But those who do want to learn about their emotions may be pleased with the rewards.
Bigger Cities Do More with Less
For centuries people have painted cities as unnatural human conglomerations, blighted by pathologies such as public health crises, aggression and exorbitant costs of living. Why, then, do people throughout the world keep leaving the countryside for the town? Research that has been forming a multidisciplinary science of cities is beginning to reveal the answer: cities concentrate, accelerate, and diversify social and economic activity.
The numbers show that urban dwellers produce more inventions and create more opportunities for economic growth. Often large cities are also the greenest places on the planet because people living in denser habitats typically have smaller energy footprints, require less infrastructure and consume less of the world's resources per capita. Compared with suburban or rural areas, cities do more with less. And the bigger cities get, the more productive and efficient they tend to become.
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Thursday, September 25, 2014
Fan-mail Friday
| Frog life cycle |
See-Through Rats
One thing is clear: peering inside animals leads to scientific discovery. In the 1960s and 1970s genetic and developmental biology research exploded after laboratories began studying naturally transparent critters, such as the nematode and With them, scientists could watch young cells develop into a full organism. Now, for the first time, they can see through mammalian bodies, thanks to a technique that can make mice and rats— and perhaps larger animals—clear.
Scientists have been able to render tissues such as the mammal brain transparent, but the procedure can take months. To speed up the process and apply it on a larger scale, Viviana Gradinaru, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology, exploited a rodent’s blood vessels. Using a dead rat, the team pumped a series of chemicals through its vessels and into its tissues. The compounds removed cloudy fats and replaced them with clear liquids. In just two weeks the entire rat turned into a see-through, jellylike specimen. The researchers (, if you’re not about to eat) in August in
Do Americans Appreciate Climate Change Risks?
NEW YORK—A trio of senior environmental officials from local and federal government yesterday offered its views on how the average American might need to get a better grasp of the risks posed by climate change.
Speaking here during a conference on rising seas, the officials were pressed by a moderator from the Association of Climate Change Officers to discuss how they tend to approach widespread ambivalence or downright ignorance about global warming.
Explaining the executive federal view was Alice Hill, senior adviser for preparedness and resilience to President Obama on the national security staff. Hill said there is a recognition at the White House that climate is an issue of national security significance. She stressed that the president takes the matter seriously, but she also worries that Americans tend not to follow in his footsteps or view the issue with much urgency.
"It is not a priority for the American public," she said. "I don't pick up the sense of urgency that matches what we're hearing" from climate scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Hill said she sees the need for better education at the local level as well as development of national standards that might trickle down. She identified development of national flood building and disaster resiliency standards as two examples that could "drive locals to make better decisions," and noted the president just announced that all international development programs will have to undertake a climate risk assessment going forward to qualify for federal funds.
"The challenge is, how do we convey how urgent the scientists are telling us this is?" she said, adding that, in her view, part of the problem is those charged with tackling the problem at the local, corporate or federal level often have no formal education on climate change.
"When you're starting to talk about policy, you're not playing on a level playing field," said Hill, herself a former Los Angeles-area judge who came to the Obama administration with little experience on climate. "That really hampers meaningful discussion at times."
Lessons of Sandy didn't reach Boston
Offering that "it's very hard to do a systematic change," Girard cited her work as the chairwoman of Boston's interagency green building committee, in which every major construction project has to pass a checklist produced by the agency to comply with new adaptation codes.
What Girard has found is that "it's almost better to sit down and talk face to face with certain people," to discuss broad topics like sea-level rise or the threat of storms like Superstorm Sandy at the local level, project by project rather than systematically.
"I have to do this one on one with people; I want them to change their linear mindset," she said. "I will talk to them about how [the Federal Emergency Management Agency's] maps are backwards-looking, so the next building they put up can float and live with water."
Girard added, "Slowly, we're going to get that message out."
Girard, formerly at the Conservation Law Foundation before coming to government, also discussed the state of education from the ground up. She believes the way to reach a community that might not care about climate historically is to connect with the children, through sustainability ambassadors at schools, teachers and the kids directly.
"My secret weapon is children in schools; they bring home a lot of papers to their parents," she said. "They have this wonderful mindset that will go home and teach their parents."
Girard added that the stakes couldn't be more important for Boston, which she described as the fourth-most-imperiled city in the United States and eighth-most-vulnerable worldwide in terms of potential for economic impact.
"We have had to translate what happened in New York" during Sandy, she said. "But for five hours and a high tide, that could have been Boston."
What happens in a submerged sewage plant?
"I don't know if any of you were in Manhattan this Sunday," Enck said with a smile to the audience of climate professionals. "I took a walk with 300,000 of my friends."
She added that the march "sent a strong political statement that the time to act on climate was yesterday."
In Enck's view, the emergence of terms like "resilience" and "adaptation" is a sign of progress. She said EPA has been working on wetlands resiliency for 42 years, since President Nixon signed the Clean Water Act, but "we just never called it that."
Enck added that the key is to meet with community leaders as much as possible and engage at the local level. She said reaching out quickly was essential after Sandy hit to address sewage discharges from the fifth-largest sewage treatment plant in the country, in Newark, N.J., or when the highly toxic Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site, overflowed into Brooklyn basements.
"There's certainly a new emphasis on it, a new name on it," she said of resiliency. "We're really happy to have a greater focus on hopefully more resources for communities."
www.eenews.net
A New Book Examines What Laughter Was All about in Ancient Rome
That joke is so old that when it was first told the Dead Sea just had a bad cough. It's one of some 265 in a quip collection called , which translates to “Laughter Lover,” often cited as being the world's oldest book of jokes. If the story did not compel you to guffaw, no worries—when Samuel Johnson published parts of , he said that the punch line left him befuddled.
That Henny Youngmanesque offering is also in , which is the subject of intense scrutiny in the much newer book , by University of Cambridge classics professor Mary Beard. She points out that although is thought to date back to the fourth or fifth century a.d., our copy “never existed in the ancient world, certainly not in the form in which we now read it.” What we have, as is true for much literature from antiquity, is an amalgam of surviving bits of various versions. Think of a giant game of telephone played in numerous languages for a couple of millennia.
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I have taken the liberty to rework these jokes the way I might tell them, which may actually be in the spirit of the —in addition to being the kind of tract that a Roman might peruse in the barbershop, the collection may have been what musicians call a “fake book,” a compilation of simple versions of material that the performer then embellishes with his or her personal style.
Beard discusses theories of humor, power relationships, evolutionary psychology and much more in . But her focus is on the laughter itself. “One big question that hovers over the whole of the book,” she writes, “is this: How comprehensible, in any terms, can Roman laughter now be?”
Indeed, we may laugh today at the jokes that lampoon the absent-minded professor types. (They made me think of the lecturing Nobel laureate I saw point with his microphone and talk into his laser pointer.) But contemplate such identity-confusion jokes in a society, Beard writes, “where formal proofs of identity were minimal: no passports, no government-issued ID … or any of those other forms of documentation that we now take for granted as the means of proving who we are.”
Such caveats about the possible impenetrability of ancient wisecracks turn up frequently throughout the text. But Beard also cites University of California, Berkeley, emeritus historian Erich S. Gruen, whose problem is with “the comprehensibility of Roman laughter, not the reverse.” And she quotes philosopher Simon Critchley of the New School: “The comedian is the anthropologist of our humdrum everyday lives.” She then extends his observation: “[The comedian] turns those of who see the point of the joke—those who it—into domestic anthropologists too.”
Perhaps the superannuated material that still works, even under vastly different circumstances, nonetheless serves as a link between the shared anxieties of then and now—after all, identity theft is all the rage.
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Mysterious Flying Squirrel Could Get Endangered Species Protection
The squirrels gliding amid the mountains east of Los Angeles have been, for the most part, flying under the scientific radar. There has never been a single scientific paper published specifically about the San Bernardino flying squirrel (), even though hundreds of papers about squirrels in general are published every year.
Despite this scientific oversight, the San Bernardino flying squirrel—a subspecies of the northern flying squirrel—has become very popular among some conservationists, who have been fighting to get it protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) since at least 1985. This week they finally made progress: the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), in response to a 2010 petition from the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), agreed that the squirrels may deserve ESA protection. The agency said it will make a recommendation, either for or against protection for the subspecies, by April 2016.
Of course protecting a rare species depends on possessing detailed scientific information about its ecology, habitat use, threats and behaviors. We don’t have much of that for the San Bernardino squirrel. Here’s what we do know: They are medium-sized gray-brown squirrels which, like others in their family, possess wing-like skin flaps between their legs, which allows them to jump and glide up to 90 meters from tree to tree. They live in high-elevation forests exclusively on the San Bernardino Mountains. They used to be found on the San Jacinto Mountains as well, but the squirrels haven’t been seen there since at least 1980. Their remaining habitat is completely isolated by the Mojave Desert and several deep passes, so they can’t expand their range. The most recent estimate of their population put it at less than one squirrel per hectare, but that was from a trapping survey of the entire region conducted way back in 1998.
FWS started looking into the status of the squirrel in 2012 when, prompted by the CBD petition, they opened a public-comment period on the animals. That should have been followed within months by a decision to propose an endangered listing or not—but that next step never happened. CBD threatened to sue. The agreement this week was part of a settlement with CBD under which FWS promised to move forward on the squirrel and nine other species that have been stuck in a backlog of ESA decisions.
According to CBD’s petition, the squirrels face multiple threats. The San Bernardino Mountains are warming and drying due to climate change and drought, making the lower elevations too dry for truffles (the squirrels’ favorite food). Meanwhile, forest management practices the CBD calls “misguided” have removed too many of the high forest canopy limbs the squirrels use to traverse the mountains. More people are moving into the area, which could result in more habitat loss. To top it all off, those people are bringing more domestic animals such as cats, which are apparently preying upon the squirrels.
The next 18 months could make or break the fate of the rare squirrels. We can hope that FWS biologists and others will be able to dig up enough information to protect the subspecies. Maybe someone will even get a scientific paper out of the process.
Earth’s Impending Magnetic Flip
Earth's magnetic field is shown in midreversal.
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Earth's magnetic north and south poles have many times in our planet's history—most recently, around 780,000 years ago. Geophysicists who study the magnetic field have that the poles may be getting ready to switch again, and , it might happen earlier than anyone anticipated.
Geophysicists do not yet fully understand the process of geomagnetic reversals, but they agree that our planet's field is like a . Earth's center consists of an inner core of solid iron and an outer core of liquid iron, a strong electrical conductor. The liquid iron in the outer core is buoyant, and as it heats near the inner core, it rises, cools off and then sinks. Earth's rotation twists this moving iron liquid and generates a self-perpetuating magnetic field with north and south poles.
It is hard to know how a geomagnetic reversal would impact our modern-day civilization, but it is . Although the field provides essential protection from the sun's powerful radiation, fossil records reveal no mass extinctions or increased radiation damage during past reversals. A flip could possibly interfere with power grids and communications systems—external magnetic field disturbances have burned out transformers and caused blackouts in the past. But Glatzmaier is not worried. “A thousand years from now we probably won't have power lines,” he says. “We'll have advanced so much that we'll almost certainly have the technology to cope with a magnetic-field reversal.”