A Tribute to Oliver Sacks from Colleague and Friend Christof Koch

The famed neurologist–author found uniqueness in every patient and savored the miracle of existence, whether it be found in squirrel monkeys or people

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Oliver Sacks has left the world. The British-born neurologist-cum-writer who called New York City his home for the past half century at his Greenwich Village apartment at the age of 82.

Sacks practiced and revived an almost extinct form of medicine that consisted of literary case studies focusing on the singular neurological patient hidden underneath the dry diagnostic labels of autism, ocular cancer, amnesia, Tourette’s syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, achromatism, blindness and so on. Sacks excelled at bringing the individual to life, describing with a riot of coruscated imagery and an exuberance of words what it was to be so afflicted and how it affected the patient’s life.

Through his many books, and the movies and documentaries they inspired, Sacks brought the mind–brain connection to the reading public. He educating those who would never think of opening a neuroscience treatise describing how the aftermath of a stroke, virus infection or other physical pathology leaves telltale signs and causes specific symptoms and deficits in the mental life of the brain. In his writings Sacks documented the inability to perceive a familiar face (such as the signature case of face blindness in the loss of color vision despite the eyes being physically intact or that strange malady known as the “sleepy sickness,” encephalitis lethargica that struck the world during World War I and was the theme of his landmark work, These books brought him fame, a dedicated readership and helped to displace Freudian narratives that dominate public discourse in favor of neuroscientific ones.

The emphasis of modern medicine on molecular mechanisms, pharmacological interventions, magnetic scanners and other complex instruments is a great and powerful machine; yet it is also an impersonal one, both in its practice once the patient passes through the maw of the hospital and in its view of patients as statistical entities, with a precise numerical code for his or her medical condition and a “metadata” field to account for any peculiarities. Neuroscience’s take on the nervous system is an even more abstract one, treating members of the same species as statistical variants on a common theme, experiments that flatten individual subjects into averages.

Sacks begged to differ—he brought out the unique, the idiosyncratic in each one of his patients. He was dispassionate enough to apply the same artistic temperament to himself, as in his account of his ocular melanoma, a condition that would finally kill him. Surgical removal of the tumor with focused radiation saved most of his retina but left an empty region, void of visual processing, termed a scotoma, in his right eye. One chapter of (2010) detailed his changed visual experience—how the nothingness that is the scotoma filled in when looking at a blue sky or at a patterned brick wall. Like a child playing with a new toy, Sacks experimented with his gaze to discover the limits of this fill-in phenomenon. When he closed his left eye Sacks “amputated” his leg by moving his gaze until it was contained within the scotoma. Yet when he wiggled his leg the sensory-motor feedback from what he couldn’t see rendered it visible in a ghostly sort of way. Conversely, a flock of birds that entered his scotoma abruptly disappeared, only to emerge intact on the other side. He meditated on his loss of the sense of depth and other changes to his sight.

Although Sacks aspired to be a scientist early on in his career, he wisely followed a different calling—that of physician. He cared about particulars, leaving to others inductive inferences from the particular to the general. Yet he loved chemistry and biology and kept close company with many of its practitioners, through visits and hand-written correspondence—no e-mailing for Sacks.

It was through his friendship with that I first met Sacks. Subsequently, I would visit him in his warm and book-cluttered apartment in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District whenever I could. We would swap old and new scientific discoveries. I vividly remember debating with him on Charles Darwin’s view on the mental life of the lowly earthworm. We would trade gifts. He would leave me with his latest book or article or crampons he thought I was more likely to use or would bequeath me colorful knitted socks. He was an imp who retained a childlike wonder about the world and all of its inhabitants, whether ferns, squirrel monkeys or people. And he never lost the sense of the sheer miracle of existence. He reminded me of a big, lovable teddy bear, and I often felt the urge to simply hug him.

Sacks epitomized the ancient dictum, that is to say, the art of dying is the art of living. I did talk to him about his cancer and he was unafraid, calmly speaking about how much time was left to him. (He expressed the same sentiments in a widely circulated editorial.)

Let me end with a quote that epitomized the Oliver Sacks I knew and admired. It is from a wise man who lived a long time ago, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius: “Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature and end thy journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.”

Oliver Sacks—I salute your memory. I am glad that we shared a few precious moments of eternity.

—

Consciousness Redux Scientific American MIND .

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Public Health Hero Jimmy Carter; SciAm Turns 170

Jimmy Carter talks about his public health efforts to eradicate guinea worm and improve global mental health and women's health. Plus, magazine collector Steven Lomazow brings part of his collection to the 170th birthday party.  

Fears of Future Belligerence Should Not Derail Iranian Nuclear Deal

IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano and Vice President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Ali Akhbar Salehi at the signing of a roadmap for the clarification of past and present issues regarding Iran’s nuclear program in Vienna. Coburg Palace, Vienna, Austria, 14 July 2015.

As a scientist I am acutely aware of the perils associated with predicting the future. On a professional level, like many of my colleagues, I write grant proposals describing my planned research over the coming three to five years.  However, even as I write, I know that the plans are in part fiction. As new and unexpected experimental or theoretical discoveries are made, my research focus changes in response. The world of science evolves at a lightning pace. Thus, as I often tell my students, no active researcher is likely to accurately know what they will be working on three years from now.

What is true for science is certainly also true for world affairs, and in particular when it comes to national security. To be able to accurately assess all of the likely security concerns globally a decade from now is highly unlikely at best.

It is in this context that regarding the potential ability of Iran to produce nuclear weapons 15 years from now—when many of the restrictions of the proposed agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear capability in exchange for lifting international financial sanctions expire—should be considered.

In 1940, even in the midst of war, not even most physicists could have anticipated the game-changing role that nuclear weapons would have on international conflicts a mere five years later. In 1978, when I was still a Ph.D. student at MIT and at least 15 percent of the foreign incoming engineering students were from Iran, none of us could have anticipated that merely a year later the Iranian Revolution would completely change the security relationship between the U.S. and their home country. Following the tumultuous presidential election in 2000, few of us might have imagined that 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq would almost completely change the focus of U.S. foreign policy and the nature of national security threats for much of the last decade.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was established in 1945 by former Manhattan Project scientists to address the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons, but as constant and deep a threat as these weapons have been, even we at the have had to examine other dangers on a yearly basis (I chair the ). A decade ago we began to explore hazards such as bioterrorism and human-induced climate change. More recently, a new deep threat emerged on the radar: cyberterrorism.

When it comes to uncertainties associated with the Iranian nuclear deal, as my colleague Frank Von Hippel, founder of Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security, , “In 10 years we may still be worrying about Iran, but may also be worrying about Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey having enrichment programs.” Dynamics in the Middle East change rapidly on a regular basis, as events in Egypt and Syria have underscored.

At the same time Iran has many internal pressures on its policies, and the that will become accessible if the nuclear agreement goes through could easily have a greater effect on its domestic and foreign policies than its nuclear program itself.  Where Iran will be in 15 years in relation to its friends and enemies in the region and its partnerships with global powers is, it is fair to say, anyone’s guess.

IAEA’s Integrated Regulatory Review Service (IRRS) mission members visited Iran’s first nuclear power plant in Bushehr in February 2010 when it was in preparation for operation, as part of their review of the country’s safety regulation of the power plant. (Photo by )

While many of the provisions of the proposed agreement expire after 15 years, many enhanced verification procedures, none of which are in place now, will continue well beyond that time. Iran’s adherence to the is permanent, including its significant access and transparency obligations. Inspections of Iran’s uranium supply chain will last for 25 years. Thus, as physics colleague and Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz , “The difference is whether one is going to be confronted with a very large Iranian nuclear program essentially tomorrow, with little verification … versus an Iran that could rebuild a substantial program after 15 years, but with consider enhanced verification…”

In large part, as the recent supporting the current agreement underscores, the technical verification components and restrictions on nuclear technology created by the proposed agreement are both comprehensive and unprecedented. Given this, the question becomes, should Congress hesitate to support the agreement because it doesn’t have an unrestricted timeframe?

As Secretary Moniz has also recently emphasized “…there’s a concern that okay, after 15 years they become a threshold state. But of course we point out that they are today a threshold state”.

Fifteen years is an eternity in international affairs, just as it is in science and technology in the current world. Should we scuttle a nuclear deal, which takes Iran from its current threshold nuclear capability with limited international verification and access to one that removes the capability for at least 10 to 15 years, because of a concern about what might happen more than a decade from now?

With the presidential campaign just beginning in the U.S., we have no idea what the foreign policy direction of the country will be just 18 months from now. Neither can we be certain about what new international security threats may arise just beyond our current technological horizon of perhaps 18 months to two years. Seen in this light, concerns about scenarios that may unfold 15 years from now seem more like worrying about science fiction than dealing with urgent current realities.

Oliver Sacks, Who Depicted Brain-Disorder Sufferers' Humanity, Dies

The prolific author–neurologist gave the world empathetic insights into disorders of the brain while also inspiring films, plays, an opera and likely many careers in medicine and brain science

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“I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms and extreme immoderation in all my passions,” wrote Oliver Sacks six months ago in a in which he told the world that he was dying of cancer. And although he admitted to feeling an incipient sense of detachment from the transient events of the day, the renowned neurologist and peerless chronicler of the quirks and intricacies of the human brain said he was doubling down on life: “I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.”

And that’s exactly what Sacks, 82, did before dying August 30 from melanoma that had spread to his liver. In a final flurry he completed a revelatory autobiography, , published to rhapsodic reviews in May; wrote a children’s book about the periodical table of elements (chemistry ranked among his immoderate passions); a philosophical ode to Sabbath as a day of rest; and other works, some of which will likely be revealed posthumously. His longtime assistant Kate Edgar told a reporter that Sacks, who always wrote with pen on paper, would likely die “with fountain pen in hand.”

In all his work—as a clinician and writer—Sacks applied acute powers of observation, far-ranging curiosity and compassion that reflected his personal familiarity with suffering and alienation. He said that he modeled his writing on the detailed, almost novelistic case studies that were popular in 19th-century medicine and was particularly inspired by the great, Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria.

Most scientists and clinicians interested in the brain tend to ponder the characteristic traits found across a population of patients with autism, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia and other conditions, but Sacks was fascinated by and what light it shed on the human condition.

His works of nonfiction achieved the level of literary art in the way that only a handful of scientist–authors—Lewis Thomas, Stephen Jay Gould, for instance—have managed. (In fact The Rockefeller University recognized Sacks with a 2001 Lewis Thomas Prize.)

No wonder Sacks’s writing so often inspired other works of art. The title essay of his 1985 collection of case histories, —about a man with a brain disorder called visual agnosia that left him unable to understand what he was seeing—inspired a 1986 opera by the same name. His 1973 book, —which documented Sacks’s remarkable experiment using the drug levodopa (aka L-dopa) to reactivate patients who had been frozen motionless for decades by encephalitis—was the basis for a 1990 movie with the same title, starring the late Robin Williams as a character based on Sacks.

Two films and a play were inspired by essays from , a 1995 collection that also did much to reframe autism as a condition of abilities as well as disabilities. The title came from a profile of the autistic animal behaviorist Temple Grandin, who used the Martian metaphor to describe how it felt to be autistic person trying to understand ordinary human behavior.

Born in London, Sacks was the youngest of four sons of two doctors (his mother was one of the first female surgeons in the U.K.), both observant Jews. It is a remarkably distinguished family. Among Sacks’s relatives are Israeli statesman Abba Eban, Nobel Prize–winning mathematician Robert Aumann and American cartoonist Al Capp.

Sacks’s 2015 autobiography revealed for the first time that he was gay and spent decades in closeted loneliness and celibacy, finding love only late in life. A remarkable athlete, he set a weightlifting record (272 kilograms in the squat press) while living in southern California and continued to swim 1.6 kilometers a day in the waters near his home on City Island in New York City into his final years.

In his youth Sacks was a motorcycle enthusiast and a serious recreational drug taker who enjoyed experimenting with hallucinogens. In one drug-fueled fantasy described in his 2012 book he engaged in a long philosophical discourse with a spider on the wall.

His almost reckless passion for exploring the fringe of experience and his outsider status as both a homosexual and expatriate almost certainly contributed to his ability to understand and sympathize with his patients. That, plus his personal psychological quirks: “I am very tenacious, for better or worse,” he wrote in the autobiographical essay . “If my attention is engaged, I cannot disengage it. This may be a great strength—or weakness. It makes me an investigator. It makes me an obsessional.”

It is impossible to say how many careers in neurology, neuroscience and psychology were inspired by the work of Oliver Sacks or how many people with autism, Tourette’s syndrome and baffling post-stroke syndromes found themselves represented in his artful words and empathetic insights.

In his February op-ed about facing death Sacks once again conveyed his passionate appreciation for the uniqueness of individuals, expressing for fans the very sentiments so many would feel at his passing: “When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate—the genetic and neural fate—of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.”

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The Unusual Abundance of Ascension Island

Luiz Rocha swims through a mixed school of triggerfish, chromis, and jacks off the coast of Ascension Island.

“Let the games begin,” says, as we each heft 40-plus pounds of gear onto our shoulders and begin the long trudge over volcanic boulders and through deep sand, zig-zagging around enormous craters left by nesting sea turtles during their latest bout of egg-laying.

Rocha, a curator of ichthyology at the , and his Brazilian collaborators, and , have waited 20 years for this moment. Although they have all studied from afar and have published several papers about this 88-square-kilometer volcanic rock’s place in Atlantic Ocean biogeography, they’ve never actually set foot on its shores. Now, for the first time, they’re about to plunge into the clear, blue water of Ascension’s English Bay to witness this elegant natural experiment for themselves.

The team prepares for a beach-entry shore dive on the north coast of Ascension. (Photo by Steven Bedard)

On this, their first day in the field, the team of four, including the enthusiastic and hard-working , a recent Master’s student of Floeter’s at the , are armed only with cameras (not to mention several decades’ worth of experience studying reef organisms in the Atlantic). On subsequent dives, they’ll swap the cameras for spears, nets, tape measures and an array of GoPros that they’ll anchor to the bottom at strategic locations. With only 12 days here, they know they’ll need to work quickly to collect as much data as possible. No one knows when or if they’ll be able to return to this strange and remote place, so they’re determined to learn as much as they can while they’re here.

Ascension Island sits , nearly equidistant from West Africa on one side and Brazil on the other. Ascension’s sister island and closest point of comparison, both geographically and biologically, is . At a distance of nearly 750 miles (1,200 kilometers), it’s the closest landmass in any direction. There are other islands and archipelagos in the Atlantic, but they’re all farther away and none sits as far out to sea as Ascension.

The cinder cones and basalt flows that dot the landscape here are a constant reminder of the island’s volcanic origins. (Photo by Steven Bedard)

That isolation and the island’s relatively young age of 1.15 million years—by far the youngest of the tropical Atlantic islands—have painted a peculiar biological and ecological picture. To start, this is a tremendously challenging place for most species to reach. While large-bodied pelagic fish, like tuna and sharks, are able to make the trip as adults, most reef fishes rely on hardy larvae, friendly currents and a boatload of luck to cross the thousand or so miles of deep ocean from some distant coast before they can even hope to settle into suitable habitat here.

The odds are so poor, it’s astonishing any have managed to make the journey, but dozens have—nearly an equal number of species from the west as from the east, including reefs as far away as the Indian Ocean. At present, the number of successful colonizers sits at 108. Of these, 11 species are endemic, which means they’re found nowhere else on Earth—it also means they’ve been here long enough to have evolved and differentiated from the original gene pools from which they came.

The resplendent angelfish (), one of Ascension’s 11 endemic species and a fish highly sought by the aquarium trade. (Photo by Luiz Rocha)

Although Ascension has seen a fair number of these successful colonizations, the diversity here remains remarkably low. To put this into perspective, the island has about one-tenth the number of fish species you’d find within any similar-sized stretch of reef in the of the Indo-Pacific. Only two other islands in the tropical Atlantic have fewer coastal fish species than Ascension.

Still, as low as the diversity here is, the sheer number of fish is anything but. The nutrient-rich waters around Ascension support a staggering abundance of bodies. On this very first dive, we encounter breathtaking schools of just some of the species that have made it here: and , and , and one of Ascension’s best known species, the . At times, we’re absolutely surrounded by heavy, disk-shaped creatures, each one at least the size of a salad plate, many much larger than that. Rocha estimates that the density of fish here is 100 times what he saw during a recent trip to Bermuda. “It’s hard to even get a good picture,” he says of his efforts to capture individual portraits of Ascension’s endemics. “There’s always someone photo-bombing your shot.”

A school of sergeant-majors () on a mission as they mob-feed through the reef. (Photo by Luiz Rocha) A black triggerfish () photobombs Luiz Rocha’s portrait of a whitespotted filefish (). (Photo by Luiz Rocha)

While many of the species here are found elsewhere, the scientists suspect the fish have likely found a wealth of open niches around Ascension—foods, breeding habitats and hiding places that would have been filled by any number of other species where they evolved. There might simply be an abundance of opportunity here, particularly for generalists or fish capable of a greater degree of plasticity in terms of behavior and food choices. The fact is, no one really knows. Aside from the basic list of ingredients—the age of the island, its location, size and the number of species that have managed to colonize the place—no one knows much about Ascension Island’s marine ecosystem. Where many of these fish came from, how long they’ve been here, and exactly how they’re making a living in this remote place is a mystery. That’s why these scientists have waited so long to come to Ascension, and why they’re so happy to be here now.

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be watching as they examine the rich and strange marine community of Ascension Island. Next we’ll take a closer look at one of the island’s most iconic species, the black triggerfish, to try to better understand how it’s managed to become so wildly successful way out here above the mid-Atlantic ridge.

Luiz Rocha (left) and Sergio Floeter celebrate their first dive at Ascension and look forward to many more over the next 11 days. (Photo by Steven Bedard)

Sun Accused of Stealing Planetary Objects from Another Star

New study shows the sun may have snatched Sedna, Biden and other objects away from a neighbor

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Sedna () and 2012 VP₁₁₃ () never come close to the orbits of the four giant planets () or even to Pluto's home in the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt ().

At the time of Sedna's discovery in 2003, it was the farthest body ever seen in our planetary club. Its peculiar path—it never ventures near the giant planets—suggested an equally peculiar history. How did it get there? The sun may have snatched Sedna away from another star, new computer simulations show.

A clue to Sedna's past came in 2012, when observers spotted a second and even smaller object with a similarly elongated and remote orbit. Astronomers Lucie Jílková and Simon Portegies Zwart of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands and their colleagues decided to investigate whether interstellar robbery could produce the orbits of both Sedna and its sidekick, 2012 VP₁₁₃. “We show that it's possible,” Jílková says. Moreover, the researchers reconstructed the crime scene and even the likely properties of the victim star, which they dubbed “Star Q.” In work submitted to , the astronomers say Star Q was originally about 80 percent more massive than the sun. It passed within 34 billion kilometers of us—just 7.5 times greater than the distance from the sun to Neptune. This proximity means the star arose in the same stellar group or cluster as the sun. Although Star Q still exists, its fiercest light probably burned out long ago because of its greater mass. As a dim white dwarf, it will be hard to find.

The new work makes a “pretty convincing case” that Sedna could be captured, says astronomer Scott Kenyon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. But Sedna discoverer Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology contends that the object most likely is native to our solar system and got yanked outward by the gravitational tug of the sun's siblings—a simpler scenario.

The issue may remain unresolved until more objects with odd orbits are found in the outer reaches of our solar system. “When we have something like a dozen, I think we'll probably know,” Brown says. If the sun stole these objects from Star Q, they should all come closest to Earth on the same side of the sun. But if their orbits differ, the sun probably is innocent of theft.

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Terse Titles Cited

Scientific papers with shorter titles receive more citations than those with long-winded headings

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When it comes to communicating ideas, brevity is all the rage. which allows just 140 characters to speak your piece. Now scientists, it seems, could learn a lesson from the power of the tweet. Because a new study shows that scientific papers with shorter titles receive more citations. The article, tidily entitled ‘The advantage of short paper titles,’ is in the Royal Society journal . [Adrian Letchford, Helen Susannah Moat, Tobias Preis, ]

. And the success of individual articles is often determined by how frequently those papers are referenced in other publications. But what makes a paper popular?

Previous studies of the length of an article’s title have yielded mixed findings, perhaps due to relatively small sample sizes. So researchers decided to cast a wider net. Fishing in an academic database called Scopus, they pulled out the most highly cited 20,000 papers for each of the seven years from 2007 to 2013.

And they found that papers with terser titles top the citation count. Even when the researchers took into account the journal in which the publication appeared—some have stricter restrictions on title length than do others—the findings held true.

Of course title length isn’t everything. The article’s content and subject area obviously attract different levels of interest. But a snappy title can’t hurt. I mean, which would you rather read, an article from with the title:

.

Or a related article from the journal simply called:

.

You, me and John Donne will probably pick the short and quick.

—Karen Hopkin

[]

A New Billion-Mile Journey for New Horizons

What do you do when you've flown 3 billion miles through interplanetary space?

You keep going.

Although NASA's has only just begun to transmit the bulk of the from its with the Pluto-Charon system (at an excruciatingly slow 2 kilobits per second) the spacecraft team has been hard at work on a critical, and time-sensitive, decision.

It had long been hoped that New Horizons would be able to deploy its instruments to study further objects in the Kuiper belt. But back in early 2014 it wasn't clear that astronomers and planetary scientists were going to be able to find any suitable candidates within the range of trajectories that the mission - with its limited on-board fuel resources - could reasonably adjust to. Despite searching with Earth-bound telescopes it was clear that our understanding of the number of objects smaller than Pluto (but still large enough to study) was incomplete, as candidates were in short supply.

Using the in what was a bit of a last-ditch attempt, there was huge relief as just five plausible targets finally revealed themselves, with two later confirmed to be good for an intercept.

The first of these, called PT1 (potential target one) or more officially 2014 MU69, has now been chosen as the next goal for New Horizons.

This object is thought to be at most 30 miles across - akin to a cometary nucleus on steroids - and barely 1% the size of Pluto. In other words, it's an entirely different beast than Pluto, but it may be the kind of body that helped form Pluto itself some 4.5 billion years ago, and it's within reach for New Horizons at a mere billion miles further along the interplanetary road.

The exact location of PT1 is shown in this wonderful animation as the brighter orange dot along the proposed spacecraft trajectory.

The ring-like 'cloud' of orange dots represent a speculative distribution of 'classic' Kuiper belt objects - known ones are highlighted with larger white points, and PT1 is in brighter orange. Major planetary orbits are shown, along with the New Horizons trajectory which has already intersected Pluto's orbit (Credit: Alex Parker)

One Earthly hurdle is that NASA must still approve and find the funds to support this extended scientific mission, since the agency is forced to run a lean operation (in total NASA receives barely 0.5% of the total federal budget per year). We can only hope that humanity's first visit to the ancient Kuiper belt, and new clues to our own origins, is not stymied by a cost that's less than what some wealthy individuals seem to spend on tasteless mansions and other trinkets.

2016 SATs Will Put Stronger Emphasis on Graphic Literacy

The standardized test undergoes its first redesign in more than a decade

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“Fortune favors the prepared mind,” as Louis Pasteur once said. So as school revs up this month, so do SAT prep classes. Students might be surprised, however, at the amount of time dedicated to visual literacy skills. The increased focus on graphics is designed to prepare an estimated 1.6 million college-bound pupils for the first redesign of the standardized college admissions test in more than a decade. Along with other updates, test takers of the March 2016 exam will encounter graphics not only in the math section as in past years but also in the reading and writing and language portions. Students will be asked to interpret information presented in tables, charts and graphs and to correct text so it accurately describes data found in accompanying figures.

Mounting evidence indicates that such literacy is a key skill for success in college, careers and daily life in general. In an increasingly data-rich world, graphics now pop up routinely in formats ranging from political campaign literature to household bills. “Being a literate consumer of that information is valuable regardless of your career,” says Jim Patterson, an executive director at the College Board, the nonprofit corporation that owns and publishes the SAT.

Education experts agree that students in many developed nations, including the U.S., lack experience with visual data. “Apart from basic - and - axis graphs, educators [around the world] don't sufficiently teach students how to represent information graphically,” says Emmanuel Manalo, a professor of education psychology at Kyoto University in Japan. The SAT's new focus most likely will nudge educators to shift their lesson plans accordingly. Students, in other words, won't be the only ones with bubble charts or scatter plots on the mind this fall—teachers will, too.

Big Data Demands

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Book Review: The Road to Relativity

The Road to Relativity: The History and Meaning of Einstein’s “The Foundation of General Relativity”Princeton University Press, 2015 (($35))

Any devotee of Einstein will relish the chance to parse this annotated facsimile of the physicist's original manuscript on general relativity. The authors provide a full English translation and painstakingly explain, page by page, Einstein's text and equations, which lay out his theory and the path he took to derive it. Their cogent descriptions and the accompanying illustrations and documents open a fascinating window onto Einstein's otherwise inaccessible opus.

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Physics Week in Review: August 29, 2015

Start your weekend with some data-driven eye candy. Artists Turn Tectonic Activity Into Surprisingly Soothing Data Visualizations with Bloom. "The horizontal position of each of the blooms is based on time, while its vertical position is based on the magnitude of the rate of change of motion detected at the seismograph. Large tectonic tremors create big blooms, small jitters are tiny buds." 

Stephen Hawking made headlines yet again when he gave a talk this week at a Nordita (Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics) conference (held at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Switzerland to better accommodate his accessibility needs) exploring his black hole information paradox, announcing that he had solved the mystery. Eureka! Specifically, he has figured out a possible mechanism for how information might eventually escape (sort of) a black hole. (The Backreaction blog was there live-tweeting the discussion.) He's building on prior work positing that the information isn't destroyed, but rather gets encoded in some kind of structure at the event horizon, and is then carried out with the Hawking radiation as the black hole evaporates. To wit: "The information is stored in a super translation of the horizon that the ingoing particles [from the source star] cause," Hawking explained. "The information about ingoing particles is returned, but in a chaotic and useless form. For all practical purposes the info is lost." Alternatively, it may emerge into another universe.

Ah, but not so fast: he's still working out the devilish details with collaborator Andrew Strominger of Harvard. And while Hawking says that paper will be ready by the end of September, Strominger told the Los Angeles Times they're nowhere near done working on it, adding, "Stephen is very optimistic that it's all going to work perfectly. But physics is a hard mistress. You have to get all the calculations to work perfectly and everything has to line up." It's also worth remembering that Hawking is not the only physicist to have claimed to have solved the information paradox in recent years. A cautious observer would conclude, as Scientific American did, that Hawking's not quite solved it yet, because  the mystery of black holes and information loss is too thorny for a quick resolution.

I've covered this topic extensively for Quanta: see here (firewalls) and here (fuzzballs), as well as this piece by K.C. Cole. Related: Medium's Ethan Siegel offers a handy backgrounder on Ten Things You Should Know About Black Holes. And what makes them different — or not so different— from everything else in the Universe.  Also: Physicist Robert McNees Storified his series of 20 tweets on black hole entropy, for your reading pleasure.

The Shadow of a Black Hole. "Event Horizon Telescope astronomers have already achieved resolutions nearly good enough to see the event horizon of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. With the upgrades and addition of more telescopes in the near future, the EHT should be able to see if the event horizon size corresponds to what general relativity predicts."

New Experiment Closes Quantum Loopholes, Confirms Spookiness. 

How quantum biology might explain life’s biggest questions.  "How does a robin know to fly south? The answer might be weirder than you think: Quantum physics may be involved. Jim Al-Khalili rounds up the extremely new, extremely strange world of quantum biology, where something Einstein once called 'spooky action at a distance' helps birds navigate, and quantum effects might explain the origin of life itself."

A New Energy Plant In Hawaii Generates Power From Ocean Temperature Extremes."There's a big [temperature] difference between the warm, shallow seawater lapping up against a beach and the icy depths of the ocean." And that means energy can be harnessed for useful work. Yay, physics!

How Quantum Pachinko Makes Solid Matter Possible. Dividing the universe into fermions and bosons might seem arcane and arbitrary, but without that weird quantum rule, our macroscopic world could not exist.

A little light interaction leaves quantum physicists beaming. They "have taken a step toward making the essential building block of quantum computers out of pure light: h a specific part of computer circuitry known as a logic gate."

How do you go about embracing complexity? It's complicated (duh!), but two physicists offer a set of principles for where to start.

L is for LIDAR, a laser tool whose uses include scanning objects for cinematic special effects. "We’ve scanned horses. We’ve scanned dogs. The beauty of working in film is that one day we can be scanning a Roman villa, and that evening be scanning the set of some futuristic robot movie."  For more about LIDAR, see my own 2012 post. 

High-Tech Tools Used to Understand Medieval Manuscripts. "Fragile pieces of parchment can be difficult to study because of their age, rarity and susceptibility to contamination. Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Gunnerus Library are developing new high-tech tools to unlock the secrets hidden in old parchment."

How That Spinning Spacecraft From The Martian Would Work for Artificial Gravity.

The Science And Fiction Behind Blade Runner, still widely regarded as one of the best science fiction films ever made.

The story of how a guitar got to the Space Station: A Larrivee Parlour floats weightless there. Astronaut Chris Hadfield visits Larrivée Guitar factory and talks about playing guitar in space.

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Spiders Tune Their Webs Like Guitars. "How does a spider tell a potential meal from a potential mate? The answer lies in the vibrations of its finely-tuned web." Resonances for the win!

Looking for strings inside inflation. Theorists from the Institute for Advanced Study have proposed a way forward in the quest to test string theory.

Would a Falling Drone Crush Your Skull? The fine folks at Motherboard Did the Math.

Who'll Freeze First? A Puzzle About Size and Staying Warm.  

How long does it take an electron to tunnel? The attoclock provides a unique window into quantum tunneling dynamics. 

Scientists explore the origins of energy in chemical reactions using experimental quantum chemistry. 

The Courage to Venture Beyond: Of Polymaths and Multidisciplinarians. 

Engineers unexpectedly discover new type of glass. "What we have done is to demonstrate that one can create glasses where there is some well-defined organization. And now that we understand the origin of such effects, we can try to control that organization by manipulating the way we prepare these glasses.” 

Surfing Antimatter: Accelerating positrons with plasma is a step toward smaller, cheaper particle colliders. 

Massachusetts parents cite shaky science in lawsuit over Wi-Fi network. Claim their child is harmed due to "Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity Syndrome." This is totally not a thing: studies show that "people who claim to have the disorder simply can't tell whether equipment that emits this radiation is switched on or not."

Capture sunlight with your quantum dot window. A luminescent solar concentrator is an emerging sunlight harvesting technology that has the potential to disrupt the way we think about energy.

Hydrophobic sand turns to goo in water and magically turns back to sand when dry.

Quantum Political Scientists Hypothesize Country Headed In Both Right And Wrong Directions Simultaneously. “Rather than inhabiting a single reality where the nation’s future looks bright or an opposite one where Americans are struggling like never before, our research suggests that these two conditions actually exist concurrently in a state of superposition.” When, oh when, will the wave function collapse and rid us of this blasted superposition?

21 Reasons Why I Hate Math by slam poet Shappy Seasholtz. "19: Math made Russell Crowe go crazy in that one movie."

Why the Poohsticks formula is wrong: The equation is just a collection of sciency-looking symbols.

What NASA Calls Microgravity is Really Freefall. "Astronauts and everything else that isn't tied down on the ISS appear to float about not because they are in "microgravity" or even small gravity (as NASA prefers to define micro). Nor are they floating about because they are "weightless." They aren't actually floating at all. They are falling."

Motherboard reports from a conference of space elevator enthusiasts. So naturally the takeaway is: Space Elevators Are Totally Possible (If Someone Will Just Pay for It). “This would of course all go a lot faster if we had, you know, money.” Um, no -- the technical challenges are truly daunting and will require more than big wads of cash. See my own take on space elevators from April. 

Labyrhythms, a sound art piece by David Harris (artist in residence at TRIUMF in Vancouver, and new editor of the Facts So Romantic Blog at Nautilus), is based on scientists reading abstracts of their papers.  Also: Journey to the Heart of TRIUMF: A Narrative in Silences, "explores the little noticed “silences” of the spaces in which scientists work. It is a collection of room tone and ambiance mixed together to represent a journey into the heart of the lab where the main cyclotron lives."

The cool science behind how the Lexus hoverboard: works

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It Takes 26 Fundamental Constants To Give Us Our Universe, But They Still Don't Give Everything.

The Geology Of Star Trek: From Extraterrestrial Minerals To Alien Life-Forms. “You must be one with the rock.” - Spock to Kirk in Star Trek V

New Sugar Substitute: Nanoparticles Of Sand Coated In Sugar. Related: When Size Matters: Big questions about risk assessment of nanomaterials.

Time Travel To-Do List: "1. Locate/build time machine."

No, Da Vinci Wasn't The First Inventor to Dream About Human Flight. List includes my personal fave, Eilmer of Malmesbury, circa 1125 AD.

Clever! Teach kids chemistry with this DIY Periodic Table Battleship. 

3M Creates Scientific Rube Goldberg Machine with Own Products. "There are some awesome bits of science at work here, like the fluid mechanics of a ball floating on an air jet."

It's Easier To Tell Time Than do Math on This Slide Rule Watch.

2015 Nobel Prizes October Madness: Pick your faves in physics, chemistry, and physiology/medicine.

Take an Epic Quest across a Hyperbolic Surface. David Madore's online mazes let you explore complicated hyperbolic surfaces from the comfort of your favorite web browser.

Of Pi and Tau: "[Michael] Hartl makes a compelling case for the idea that 2π, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its radius, is a far more fundamentally significant and useful construct. He calls his new 'circle constant' tau."

Scientific Revolutions in Optics Made Vermeer a Revolutionary Painter.

LISA Pathfinder to Refine Hunt for Gravitational Waves. 

Revealed: how a wobbly axis helped our planet escape 'snowball Earth.' 

Fire tornadoes, despite their name, are more closely related to dust devils or waterspouts than to true tornadoes. Here's more about fire tornadoes from the Bad Astronomer.

How Fast Are We Moving Through Space? According to relativity, there’s no universal frame of reference. But the Big Bang gave us one anyway. Related: Here's How Ludicrously Fast A Space Probe Is. 

Misusing Galileo to criticise the Galileo gambit. 

"Supersonic" (2014), Oil and linen, 72 x 54 inchesn. Credit: Michael Kagen

Michael Kagen’s Space-Based Paintings (above) Explore the Fatalistic Power of Manmade Machinery. "Kagen exhibited this series of space-based paintings last year at Joshua Liner Gallery in an exhibition titled Thunder in the Distance. He was also recently commissioned by The Smithsonian to create three large paintings inspired by their air and space archives."

US astronauts drink recycled urine aboard space station but Russians refuse.   “It tastes like bottled water,” Layne Carter, water subsystem manager for the ISS at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center told Bloomberg. “As long as you can psychologically get past the point that it’s recycled urine and condensate that comes out of the air.” Related: Japan Delivered Whiskey to Space Station on Monday -- for Science. And maybe for the Russians refusing to drink recycled pee. Kanpai! Except maybe not. Even Without Gravity They Can't Raise A Glass.

Meet the Woman Who Discovered the Composition of the Stars. When she first finished her revolutionary thesis, Cecilia Payne was told that the results were "clearly impossible."

Five classic American books that inspired Susan Helms in her career as an astronaut.

Carbon Monoxide 'Fire Fountains' Erupted on the Moon.

How SETI Will Understand Messages Broadcast by an Alien Intelligence. 

No, a giant asteroid won't hit the Earth in September. It's BS: Bad Science. Related (kinda): We now understand the Universe’s doom better than ever.

The Huge, Pricey Detectors That Capture Tiny Neutrinos: IceCube, NoVA and more.

Vapor cones typically appear around aircraft flying in the transonic regime –- near, but still below, the speed of sound.

Secretive fusion company claims reactor breakthrough. Caveat: It's a Startup With No Website. Related: How Close Are We To Nuclear Fusion? "Naysayers love to claim that nuclear fusion is always decades away — and always will be — but the reality is we’ve moved ever closer to the breakeven point and solved a large number of technical challenges over the past twenty years."

Recently found in American backyards (specifically, Missouri’s St. Louis County): radioactive nuclear waste (thorium 230) from the Manhattan Project.

Q: What Would Happen If You Dropped A Nuclear Bomb Into A Volcano? A: Nothing, actually. "The bomb would melt without starting a nuclear reaction."

The geometry of Islamic art.

The Science Behind Antarctica's Blood Falls: Iron-rich brine from a subglacial lake accounts for Blood Falls' creepy crimson hue.

In science we trust… up to a point. "Science is emphatically not a belief system." 

How to Tell Science Stories with Maps. “Maps are some of the most information-dense ways of communicating data,” says Len De Groot, director of data visualization at the Los Angeles Times. ... “You can do a lot in a map because people already understand the fundamentals—unlike, say, a scatterplot.”

Q&A: How the Franco dictatorship destroyed Spanish science.  

Lab coats and leggings: when science and dance connect it's quite a show. "Initiated in 2013 by Liz Lea and Cris Kennedy at CSIRO in Canberra, the DANscienCE Festival provides a platform for delving into how dance can be help scientists understand more about brain function and how our bodies respond to movement. It also examines how dance can serve as a powerful teaching tool for helping those outside academia understand sophisticated academic ideas."

"Waiter, there's a tiny boat in my martini..." A "Cocktail Boat" Can Propel Itself Around Your Drink Using the Marangoni Effect.

The Physics Girl Explains How to Make a Cloud in Your Mouth. "you’ll need to make tiny water droplets in your mouth. Then up the pressure." Related: How To Make a Hurricane on a Bubble. Per IFL Science: "A team from the University of Bordeaux managed to mimic the physics of a hurricane on a bubble, and subsequently recreated the behavior of hurricanes and cyclones in our atmosphere."

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How Does a Gymnast--Or Even a Fitness Walker--Keep From Falling?

Kathleeen Cullen jokes that when she was studying electrical engineering at Brown University during the 1980s, she heard a rumor that neurons use electricity. That prompted her to take a course on the brain that convinced her to major in neuroscience as well as electrical engineering. Cullen arrived at the University of Chicago—and later at McGill for a postdoc—at a time that researchers were starting to explore how neurons in the brain react to inputs from the senses when making voluntary movements. Many earlier observations were conducted by looking at the activity of the cells in stationary animals.

In the ensuing years, Cullen’s work as a has specialized in studying the vestibular system that allows us to maintain our balance. Cullen has retained a fasciation with the vestibular system because of its elegant simplicity. Vestibular neurons both receive sensory input and send commands to peripheral nerves to initiate movement. In recent weeks, Cullen and colleagues online  in that demonstrates how the calculations individual neurons make in a part of the brain called the cerebellum—a region directly connected to the vestibular system—can perform the simple task of making sure our bodies are positioned where we want them to be in relation to our surroundings. Here’s an interview with Cullen, edited for clarity.

Scientific American: The paper begins with an interesting observation about how the brain allows us to acquire new skills in response to changes in the external environment. That seems still to be a major question in neuroscience that people are trying to come to grips with in various way.

I think so. A lot of people who are working in neuroscience are trying to understand the neural mechanisms of learning. You probably don't think about it that often but even if you're working on a tennis serve and you think you've got the movement down perfectly, your muscles are still changing. They’re fatiguing. You have to be updating your motor commands constantly in order to deal with the fact that your motor system is dynamic and changing over time. Put another way, because the  biomechanical properties of the motor system constantly change over time we need to keep its systems calibrated.

Using a combination of behavioral and theoretical approaches, people have speculated that when you move, your brain keeps track in real time of how you're actually moving vs. how you intended to move in order to appropriately update and adjust your movements. We know that the intrinsic delays of feedback from sensory signals are too slow. Instead, our brains need to calculate in real time any errors in order to accomplish motor learning.

Studies in which researchers experimentally perturbed voluntary movements had suggested that our brains ensure accurate motion by computing sensory prediction errors. The sensory prediction error is the difference between the sensory inflow your brain is expecting if you generate a movement vs. the actual sensory inflow it pulls in. The proposal had been that the brain can compare these two quantities very quickly to compute a sensory prediction error signal immediately during voluntary movement. 

What would be an example of a sensory prediction error?

Imagine a gymnast doing a back flip on a balance beam. The gymnast has done this many times and has a great appreciation, an internal model of exactly the type of sensory inflow he or she should be getting from the vestibular system, which lets one know about their three-dimensional motion through space, as well as input from the proprioceptor receptors, which provide feedback from different muscles to also give a sense of body motion.

The body’s internal model compares its expectations based on having done something before to what it’s actually pulling in from its sensory receptors. When there’s a small error, that error may be because you lost your balance a little bit or it could be because you're in a slightly different motor state than you had been when initiating some motion. So you need to recalibrate. We had a paper in the journal that preceded this one in , which showed that the cerebellum computes this sensory prediction error to help you maintain balance by computing this error signal.

What we've shown in this second paper in is that when you have a persistent error - specifically a persistent unexpected sensory error, your brain actually learns and we can watch it learn trial by trial by trial. That's what you should expect to happen so that's why we called the paper ‘Learning to Expect the Unexpected’. Strikingly, as the brain learns to update its internal model of what to expect, we can actually watch this updating in real time by recording from single cerebellar output neurons.

What is important about recording from single neurons?

Researchers like me, systems neuroscientists who often also trained as engineers or physicists, like to compute these quantities that, in a mathematical sense, explain how the brain actually does something. This is all good and fine for describing a theoretical way in which the brain may be doing something. But the most important question remains—is the brain really performing the computation in this way and if so how would this look? So what we've actually found a neural correlate for these little black boxes that we draw to illustrate our theories. To see that this is actually the way that these neurons are performing computations is very exciting. Basically, in our work we have been able to very cleanly bridge the gap between the computational methods that have been applied to solving the problem using engineering approaches and actual reality. We discovered that the brain does indeed perform this sort of elegant math. The fact that we can see this manifested at the level of single neurons lets us know that the brain is actually using a particular algorithm.

Does the brain do it the way you expected it do it?

There has been some evidence that the cerebellar cortex (the surface of the cerebellum) is involved in developing this internal model of the expected sensory consequences. The cerebellar cortex is a network of cells that has a very beautiful and almost crystalline structure. Cerebellar damage does not cause paralysis, but instead produces disorders in fine movement, equilibrium, posture, and motor learning.  Researchers now have good evidence that the cerebellum is involved in encoding signals consistent with what is called a forward model. This is an idea that's been developing considerable support over the last decade. What people hadn’t demonstrated before this study was the actual computation of this error signal. This demonstration is important for most current models of motor learning. That's what we've demonstrated at the level of neurons that get direct cerebellar input. We took advantage of a particular pathway where the Purkinje cells in the cerebellar cortex project directly to a specific region of the deep cerebellar nuclei. The deep cerebellar nuclei are effectively located at the base of the ‘cauliflower shaped’ cerebellar cortex – and this is where we recorded from a small group of cells, within a subdivision of the cerebellar nuclei called the rostral fastigial nucleus.

The fastigial nucleus is a sphere that's maybe a millimeter in radius and contains neurons that are very interesting because they connect the cerebellar cortex to the spinal cord and are vital for postural and head movement control. One of the really interesting things we found is that we can see the response of these neurons beautifully tracking the comparison between predictive and actual sensory feedback systems during voluntary motion.

How did you do the experiment? 

We carried out a trial-by-trial analysis of cerebellar neurons during the execution and adaptation of voluntary head movements and found that neuronal sensitivities dynamically tracked the comparison of predictive and feedback signals. (The extent that a neuron is activated by a particular input is known as its sensitivity.) When the relationship between the motor command and resultant movement was altered, neurons robustly responded to sensory input as if the movement was externally generated. Neuronal sensitivities then declined with the same time course as the concurrent behavioral learning. These findings provide direct evidence for an elegant computation requiring the comparison of predicted and actual sensory feedback to signal unexpected sensation.

 Were any of these findings a surprise?

People have been studying behaviors like reaching which are quite complex. Because we were looking at a relatively simple sensory motor pathway that controls head motion, we were able to see this computation very cleanly. You can say maybe it was expected based on computational models, but there are many models that people have built of the brain in neuroscience that cannot be directly compared to actual neuronal responses and circuits. It’s often not possible to directly correlate any sort of actual neuronal properties with the models. That the link we found is so explicit is to me quite exciting.

How does your work relate to that of others in the field?

There are currently researchers at a number of institutions, including Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, who are using computational modeling to understand deficits in patients with damage to the cerebellum. If you look at these patients, their disabilities are consistent with an inability to calculate sensory prediction errors. By Occam’s Razor, it would appear that this computation should exist but again these sorts of computation could exist and not be evident using current techniques. So it’s exciting that we can see this playing out in real time using conventional single-unit electrophysiology. I don't think people would have guessed that we would see it so clearly. 

What next experiments does this work suggest?

It’s one thing to show the computation has occurred. It’s like a smoking gun in a way but we’d now like to understand how the brain actually accomplishes this computation. Our research demonstrates that the cerebellum actually computes unexpected motion within milliseconds so that we can send an appropriate signal to the spinal cord to rapidly adjust our balance and learn new motor skills. By understanding how this computation is accomplished, we can develop better approaches for treating patients and can potentially also translate this knowledge to advance new technologies, such as improving how robots move and perform.

What about potential clinical implications?

If we understand the computations that the cerebellum is doing, then we have an opportunity to understand what happens in patients with loss of cerebellar function – for example, following stroke or in brain disorders such as multiple sclerosis. In addition, this knowledge can lead to the design of better, more effective, protocols for rehabilitation or even for sports training of athletes.

It’s particularly important to continue developing and improving rehabilitation programs because at the moment, it can be a bit of the Wild West. Health professionals do what they think is best for the patient, but we do not yet fully understand how to optimize training and exercises. But by being a little more systematic so that we take advantage of the brain’s own computational algorithms, we might get much better outcomes in the future.

(.)

MIND Staff Share Their Reading Picks

Reviews and recommendations from

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On the Move: A LifeKnopf, 2015 ($27.95)

In his new book, neurologist and bestselling author Sacks takes readers on a journey across decades and continents. His scientific proclivities are in evidence throughout—in his childhood chemistry experiments, his studies of the brain and even his dabbling in psychoactive drugs. But it is the stories of human triumphs and losses, whether intimate romantic encounters or the deaths of great friends, that will likely remain with his readers longest.

The Small Big: Small Changes That Spark Big InfluenceGrand Central Publishing, 2015 ($28.00) Knopf, 2015 ($27.95)

How can we persuade people to donate to charity, recycle or obey the law? Martin, Goldstein and Cialdini give answers that are subtler than one might think. In their entertaining new book, the authors break down the persuasion literature into 52 mini chapters, offering surprisingly simple techniques to help us influence our peers.

Thinking in Numbers: On Life, Love, Meaning, and MathLittle, Brown, 2013 ($26.00)

In this collection of 25 essays, Tammet, an autistic savant, polyglot and author of two previous books, explores the beauty and complexity of numbers. He elaborates on his passion by delving into the importance of number in how we perceive the world while sprinkling intriguing anecdotes from his own life.

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Quantum "Spookiness" Passes Toughest Test Yet

It’s a bad day both for Albert Einstein and for hackers. The most rigorous test of quantum theory ever carried out has confirmed that the ‘spooky action at a distance’ that the German physicist famously hated — in which manipulating one object instantaneously seems to affect another, far away one — is an inherent part of the quantum world.

The experiment, performed in the Netherlands, could be the final nail in the coffin for models of the atomic world that are more intuitive than standard quantum mechanics, say some physicists. It could also enable quantum engineers to develop a new suite of ultrasecure cryptographic devices.

“From a fundamental point of view, this is truly history-making,” says Nicolas Gisin, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

Einstein’s annoyance

This idea galled Einstein because it seemed that this ghostly influence would be transmitted instantaneously between even vastly separated but entangled particles — implying that it could contravene the universal rule that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. He proposed that quantum particles do have set properties before they are measured, called hidden variables. And even though those variable cannot be access, he suggested that they pre-program entangled particles to behave in correlated ways.

In the 1960s,  proposed a test that could discriminate between Einstein’s hidden variables and the spooky interpretation of quantum mechanics. He calculated that hidden variables can explain correlations only up to some maximum limit. If that level is exceeded, then Einstein’s model must be wrong.

The first Bell test was carried out in 1981, by Alain Aspect’s team at the Institute of Optics in Palaiseau, France. Many more have been performed since, always coming down on the side of spookiness — but each of those experiments has had loopholes that meant that physicists have never been able to fully close the door on Einstein’s view. Experiments that use entangled photons are prone to the ‘detection loophole’: not all photons produced in the experiment are detected, and sometimes as many as 80% are lost. Experimenters therefore have to assume that the properties of the photons they capture are representative of the entire set.

To get around the detection loophole, physicists often use particles that are easier to keep track of than photons, such as atoms. But it is tough to separate distant atoms apart without destroying their entanglement. This opens the ‘’: if the entangled atoms are too close together, then, in principle, measurements made on one could affect the other without violating the speed-of-light limit.

Entanglement swapping

This did not work every time. In total, the team managed to generate 245 entangled pairs of electrons over the course of nine days. The team's measurements exceeded Bell’s bound, once again supporting the standard quantum view. Moreover, the experiment closed both loopholes at once: because the electrons were easy to monitor, the detection loophole was not an issue, and they were separated far enough apart to close the communication loophole, too.

“It is a truly ingenious and beautiful experiment,” says Anton Zeilinger, a physicist at the Vienna Centre for Quantum Science and Technology.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next few years we see one of the authors of this paper, along with some of the older experiments, Aspect’s and others, named on a Nobel prize,” says Matthew Leifer, a quantum physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo for Theoretical Physics, Ontario. “It’s that exciting.”

A loophole-free Bell test also has crucial implications for quantum cryptography, says Leifer. Companies already sell systems that use quantum mechanics to block eavesdroppers. The systems produce entangled pairs of photons, sending one photon in each pair to the first user and the other photon to the second user. The two users then turn these photons into a cryptographic key that only they know. Because observing a quantum system disrupts its properties, if someone tries to eavesdrop on this process it will produce a noticeable effect, setting off an alarm.

The final chink

In practice, however, the entanglement-swapping idea will be hard to implement. The team took more than week to generate a few hundred entangled electron pairs, whereas generating a quantum key would require thousands of bits to be processed per minute, points out Gisin, who is a co-founder of the quantum cryptographic company ID Quantique in Geneva.

Zeilinger also notes that there remains one last, somewhat philosophical loophole, first identified by Bell himself: the possibility that hidden variables could somehow manipulate the experimenters’ choices of what properties to measure, tricking them into thinking quantum theory is correct.

Leifer is less troubled by this ‘freedom-of-choice loophole’, however. “It could be that there is some kind of superdeterminism, so that the choice of measurement settings was determined at the Big Bang,” he says. “We can never prove that is not the case, so I think it’s fair to say that most physicists don’t worry too much about this.”

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Scientific American Soiree Celebrates 170 Years of Science Communication

’s first issue appeared exactly 170 years ago today. The four-page, black and white broadsheet was published every Thursday morning, with the promise to serve as an advocate of industry and enterprise. Over the decades, from to Carl Sagan have filled its pages.

On the evening of August 26, current and former staffers joined other influential science communicators at the publication’s new office in Lower Manhattan to celebrate a long legacy of science communication— is the oldest continuously published magazine in the U.S. after all. The night featured an exhibit of memorabilia from company archives and personal holdings, as well as a short, verbal walk through the magazine’s history, delivered by Mariette DiChristina, the current editor-in-chief.

Mariette DiChristina, current editor-in-chief

Items on display included original copies of the publication from the 1800s, dummy issues from its major redesign in 1948, and copper printing plates that were once used to print issues.

Copper printing plates

After 170 years, has accumulated a trunk-load of memories. Rufus Porter, an inventor and artist, founded the publication in 1845 (recently, a opened in Bridgton, Maine). Since then, the publication has covered many of the major discoveries and innovations in the world of science—ranging from the Wright’s brothers’ first successful airplane to Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Original issues from the 1800s

It in 1911 when her application to the French Academy of Sciences was turned down (despite her two Nobel prizes). It was censored by the federal government in 1950, when the 3,000 copies of the magazine over an article written by Hans Bethe on the hydrogen bomb. For decades, it has unflinchingly presented the evidence in support of hot topics such as climate change and evolution.

More recently, in 2012, with to ask President Barack Obama and former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney to provide answers about 14 science-related policy questions facing America. “Scientific American has been an important part of my organization, which has tried to get presidential candidates to have a debate on science issues,” says Matthew Chapman, co-founder of Science Debate and one of the evening’s many guests (and also, one of Charles Darwin’s great great grandsons).

The magazine has gone through a number of agenda-setting alterations in order to best serve a changing society and readers. “In a time when we hear gloomy stories about the media, it’s great to see a place that has managed to keep reinventing itself to keep it important and relevant,” says John Rennie, ’s editor-in-chief from 1994-2009. During that era, the magazine went through a significant modernization. “There was a feeling that the magazine was wonderful,” Rennie says, “but it still looked like the same publication that was around in the 50s and 60s. The problem was how to change something that people clearly loved exactly the way it was.”

now is part of Springer Nature and more broadly contributes to a global network of science communication. On multiple platforms, the publication continues to document breakthroughs in scientific thought and findings, while also dispelling scientific myths for the general public. “I hope and expect that Scientific American will be here for another 170 years and more,” says DiChristina. “The reason I feel that way is that science itself is inherently an optimistic endeavor and it reflects what it is to be a human—to be curious, to learn, and to discover.” 

U.S. Vaccination Rates High, But Pockets of Unvaccinated Pose Risk

The vast majority of U.S. kindergarten-age children are vaccinated against preventable diseases but sizable pockets of unprotected children still exist, posing a public health threat

August 28, 2015

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By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The vast majority of U.S. kindergarten-age children are vaccinated against preventable diseases but sizable pockets of unprotected children still exist, posing a public health threat, according to a government study.

Only 1.7% of U.S. parents of kindergartners sought exemptions in 2014 from laws requiring children be vaccinated, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study published August 28 in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Rates vary nationwide, however, with at least one state reporting over 6% of parents seeking exemptions, the study found.

"Pockets of children who miss vaccinations exist in our communities and they leave these communities vulnerable to outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases," Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters in a media briefing.

Lawmakers in at least 10 states including California are making efforts to tighten school vaccination exemption rules after a measles outbreak at Disneyland in Anaheim sickened more than 100 people earlier this year.

All states require a schedule of vaccines that a child must have before he or she can be enrolled in school. Every state allows exemptions from vaccines for medical reasons, and all but Mississippi and West Virginia allow exemptions for religious reasons.

Because U.S. measles vaccination rates are high, at 94% among kindergarten-age children, the Disney outbreak was less of a problem than in Canada, Schuchat said.

"We were lucky in the U.S. We didn't see large outbreaks in schools," she said, adding that in one province in Canada, there were more than 100 measles cases from the Disney exposure "because of a big pocket of undervaccinated people."

High vaccination rates provide herd immunity, preventing the spread of a virus to individuals too young or too sick to be vaccinated.

According to the report, which included data on 45 states that met reporting requirements and the District of Columbia, the median rate of kindergartners with any exemption was less than 1% in six states and greater than 4% in 11 states.

Mississippi reported the lowest rates of vaccine exemptions with a median of 0.1%, while Idaho reported the highest at 6.5%.

Schuchat said she was encouraged that states increasingly are making vaccination coverage information available to residents online, with as many as 21 states doing so in the current reporting period.

Parents can use that data to check on vaccination coverage in their own communities and schools, depending on how the state reports the data, she said.

SOURCE: http://1.usa.gov/1JBLvu1

MMWR 2015.

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FDA Approves New Cholesterol-Lowering Drug

The new drug, Repatha (evolocumab), is approved for patients with hereditary forms of high cholesterol and those with cardiovascular disease

August 28, 2015

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By Toni Clarke

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved Amgen Inc's Repatha (evolocumab) drug for patients with hereditary forms of high cholesterol and those with cardiovascular disease.

Last month the FDA approved a similar drug from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc and Sanofi SA. The drugs belong to a potent new class of injectable LDL-lowering drugs known as PCSK9 inhibitors.

Repatha was approved to treat patients with heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (HeFH) and patients with the rarer homozygous (HoFH) form of the disease. It was also approved for patients with cardiovascular disease including heart attack or stroke, who require additional cholesterol lowering.

The scope of the approval was similar to the approval given to the Regeneron drug, Praluent (alirocumab), which was approved for patients with cardiovascular disease and those with HeFH.

The drugs are expected to generate more than $2 billion a year each in sales by 2020, according to Thomson Reuters data.

"The back-to-back approvals for Praluent and Repatha should allow natural market competition to influence the immediate cost for the PCSK9 inhibitors," Steve Miller, chief medical officer at pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts Holding Co, said in an emailed statement.

"And we plan to leverage this competition to achieve the greatest possible discounts for our clients and patients."

Praluent is given every other week by injection in doses of 75 mg or 150 mg. Both doses of the drug will be priced wholesale at $1,120 for a 28-day supply, or roughly $14,560 a year.

After rebates, analysts expect the drug to cost about $12,400 a year.

Repatha is given as a 140 mg injection every other week or as a monthly injection of 420 mg. Amgen said the wholesale cost of the drug will be $14,100 a year for the every other week injection. The product will be available next week.

Amgen said it plans to make the monthly dosing option available next year.

The drugs are more potent than traditional cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, such as Pfizer Inc's Lipitor. But it is not yet known whether their cholesterol-lowering power will translate into a reduced number of heart attacks.

The companies are conducting cardiovascular outcomes trials to determine whether their ability to dramatically lower bad LDL cholesterol will lead to fewer heart attacks, strokes and deaths.

America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade group, has protested the high price of Praluent, saying it has concerns about the health system's ability to sustain the long-term costs.

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Scientific American, on the Move

The view from 1 New York Plaza

We have a grand view of the bustling New York Harbor from our new offices high above Battery Park. It took us 170 years to get here, and we have made a few stops along the way.

Our first office was described as “a little ‘7 by 9’ office” that founder Rufus Porter rented on 11 Spruce Street, in a building that appears on insurance maps but for which no photograph seems to exist. This building was probably five floors of light manufacturing, including, unfortunately, “the cellar, in which a large quantity of liquors were stored, and in which a man was employed with fire and kettles (a circumstance of which we were not aware) in the manufacture of spirituous bitters” [November 13, 1845]. On October 20 the whole building went up in flames. There is a four-week gap between issue number 8, on October 16 and issue number 9, on November 13, so I leave it up to the more nit-picky of you to determine if we have really been continuously published since August 28, 1845 or since November 13, 1845.

Porter rented new office space at 128 Fulton Street, on the southwest corner of Fulton and Nassau in the building occupied by the newspaper (the November 13, 1845 issue is being listed as published at “Sun Buildings”).

In 1859 publication moved to 37 Park Row, at Beekman Street, sharing a large building with other printers and publishers. For over 20 years the publication grew and thrived in this building. But it, too, went up in flames—famously and rapidly—on January 31, 1882. There was no break in publication. The resilience and responsiveness was and is impressive: “Two hours later we had leased the elegant series of offices in the large building of the United States Life Insurance Company, 261 Broadway, corner of Warren, across the Park, opposite our former quarters; and before nightfall loads of desks, chairs, drawing tables, books, and instruments had been delivered, our helpers were at work, and the hum of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN beehive had again begun” [February 11, 1882].

View of the Park Row office, from , April 16, 1859

In 1884 there was a more peaceful move to a more suitable location on 361 Broadway, corner of Franklin Street, where the magazine remained until 1915.

361 Broadway, from , 1887

The move in 1915 to 233 Broadway was anything but humdrum. That address is otherwise famously known as the Woolworth Building, one of the earliest and still one of the tallest skyscrapers in New York City, which had just been finished in 1913.

In 1924 Munn and Co. purchased land and commissioned a suitable edifice for it, and in 1926 the magazine moved into the “Scientific American Building” at 24-26 West 40th Street. The building still stands, and it still has our name on it. Sadly, the fortunes of the magazine declined over the next couple of decades. The building itself was sold in 1943 for $425,000, and in 1948 the magazine was spun off from Munn & Company. In 1951 the new, ascendant, moved out of its building to 2 West 45th Street.

In 1956 we moved into our longest-inhabited space, a brand new building completed the previous year at 415 Madison Avenue. Occupying various floors in that location over the years, we stayed until 2009.

After various aspects of our publication business were folded in with those of Nature Publishing Group, headed downtown again, to 75 Varick Street, at Canal Street in SoHo, an old manufacturing building enjoying the early revitalization of the area.

In July 2015, the magazine, now part of Springer Nature, moved even farther downtown, to the water’s edge overlooking New York Harbor. The best part of our space here is that when we take a break from our labors and look up, we have a sweeping view of the progress of history and the energy of human creativity, some of which, such as the Statue of Liberty, we documented as it was being built, and all of which I would like to think that we have been contributing to in some small way for the past 170 years.

The view from 1 New York Plaza, photograph by Daisy Chung

Strawberries, Basil and Beans Thrive in Underwater Greenhouses

The produce aisle goes undersea in a new approach to farming

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In transparent plastic bubbles 20 feet beneath the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, an experimental garden grows. The strawberries, basil, beans and tomatoes within these air-filled biospheres thrive in their submerged homes. Surrounding water provides the constant temperature and humidity elusive at most terrestrial farms, and freshwater trickles down the spheres' interiors after the seawater below evaporates and then condenses.

These marine greenhouses, located off the coast of Italy, represent a foray into underwater farming by Ocean Reef Group, a diving and scuba gear company. Company president Sergio Gamberini chose to grow his crops hydroponically after noticing, during an early trial, that soil brought along stowaway insect pests. He hopes to introduce this gardening approach to coastal developing countries with arid lands. In fact, Gamberini has received requests for biospheres from nations ranging from the Maldives to Saudi Arabia. His son, Luca Gamberini, admits a long path lies ahead: “Our dream is, on a large scale, utopic.”

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Russia Raises an "Ice Curtain" in the Arctic Thanks to Climate Change

Russia has developed an "anti-access" presence in the Arctic in the past year with a stronger military presence, a push for more territory, and nationalist rhetoric, a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies notes.

While not focused entirely on climate change, the analysis offers a preview of ongoing geopolitical tensions — and legal issues — likely to be exacerbated by ice loss. It urges Arctic nations to negotiate a "declaration on military conduct" requiring nations to give a 21-day advance notice of major military exercises — which could prevent actions like the unannounced Russian Arctic military exercises this year involving more than 45,000 forces.

NATO has reported that Russia has increasingly been turning off aircraft tracking devices when flying over Northern Europe, and the country has announced the reopening of dozens of previously closed military bases in the Arctic.

"The Arctic is beginning to become militarized and there is no forum or place to discuss security-related issues and to promote greater transparency and confidence," states the , which refers to the current situation as "the new ice curtain."

"We are in quite a different place than we were a year, even a year and half ago," added Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at CSIS and the report's co-author.

According to the center, there should be a joint U.S.-Russia working group to enhance safety in the Bering Strait and more coordination between the U.S. Coast Guard and Russia over issues such as vessel traffic lanes. A new Arctic Coast Guard Forum to be launched this fall — involving the United States, Russia and other Arctic countries — offers an important opportunity to "maintain contact" with Russian officials at a time when bilateral military contacts are not an option, said the research institution.

Tensions, trade or both?

In one sign of tension, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said this year that "some developed countries that don't have direct access to the polar regions obstinately strive for the Arctic."

On one level, Russia's actions are not surprising, considering that the Arctic accounts for approximately 20 percent of the country's gross domestic product and exports, according to Conley. Efforts on things like search-and-rescue and oil spill prevention are "understandable," she said.

What is unusual, the report says, is the degree of the aggressiveness, and that it is occurring at a time when many Arctic oil and gas activities and infrastructure projects are still on hold. Military exercises in September 2014, for example, were the largest since the collapse of the Soviet Union and involved a new military base in the New Siberian Islands.

The report also highlights challenges that may flare up as ice melt opens up more sea lanes. The Northern Sea Route, for instance, is viewed by Russia as "internal waters" subject to transit fees for passage, while other countries view it as an open right of way. China's recent activity along the route highlights a potential conflict that currently is "little discussed," the center said.

Claims for more territory amid cooperation, Dec. 10, 2013).

"Could the Kremlin grow frustrated with this extensive process and assert unilateral claims?" the CSIS report asks.

It also documents a range of climate impacts to Russia, from melting permafrost bending gas lines to increased fires damaging Siberia's peatlands.

One potential area of cooperation between the United States and Russia is scientific research on climate change, said Marlene Laruelle, a research professor of international affairs at George Washington University, during a CSIS panel discussion.

"It is something we should be pushing for," Laruelle said, noting earlier conservation measures, as well as cooperation on space exploration during the Cold War. Russia has been involved with environmental working groups of the Arctic Council and allocated $5 billion last year to implement council environmental projects in its territory, according to Russian News Agency TASS. Russia also backed a recent fishing moratorium in the central Arctic Ocean.

However, there may be limits for shared research, considering that Russia passed a law in 2012 requiring nonprofit organizations to register as "foreign agents" with the government.

"Now, in some ways, it's anathema to have a Western scientist contact" in Russia, Conley said about the law. "That is just a practical issue that is going to make scientific cooperation more difficult."

www.eenews.net

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