http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/18/neutr..._truncated

EXCERPT: About four years ago, CERN made a claim that sent shockwaves through the scientific community. During the course of an experiment, CERN scientists apparently discovered that neutrinos -- tiny subatomic particles that travel near light speed -- could possibly accelerate faster than light. That, however, turned out to be an error, apparently due to some faulty testing equipment [Sad trombone]. Why are we talking about this now? Well, scientists have finally completed the experiment's original goal, which was to see if neutrinos could shift from one type to another [...] And, well, they can....

I thought it was. Which raised the question, if a particle is not made of anything more basic, basically being a structure without substance, or a whole without parts, is it even physically real anymore? In the end, we may be left with nothing but values, like that of numbers, or properties, or locations, or information.

"Amazing news: Researchers in Switzerland have separated an Electron into two smaller quasi-particles – a “Spinon” and an “Orbiton;” meaning they have physically separated the spin and the orbit properties of an Electron.

Until now, standard physics generally accepted that an Electron was a fundamental particle – that it was not made of smaller components.
However, as early as 1980 theorists had predicted an electron could be made of three smaller pieces: A “Spinon” (providing spin), an “Orbiton” (providing the orbit) and a “Holon” (carrying the charge).

In 1996, physicists seemed to split an electron into a holon and spinon.

In 1996, American physicists C. L. Kane and Matthew Fisher made a theoretical prediction that if you confine electrons to individual atomic chains, the Wiedemann-Franz law could be strongly violated. In this one-dimensional world, the electrons split into two distinct components or excitations, one carrying spin but not charge (the spinon), the other carrying charge but not spin (the holon).

This year Swiss and German researchers1 led by experimenter Thorsten Schmitt fired a tightly focused X-ray beam at a copper-oxide compound called “strontium cuprate,” special because particles in it can only move in one-dimension, one degree of freedom – forward or backwards.
They observed an electron split into two of the three predicted parts – a Spinon and an Orbitron.

What solidified their observation is finding distinct properties for the two parts. “These quasiparticles can move with different speeds and even in different directions in the material,” said Jeroen van den Brink, a condensed-matter physicist at the Institute for Theoretical Solid State Physics in Dresden, Germany.

For more here is a news report in Nature Journal “Not-quite-so elementary, my dear electron”
The original paper: Spin–orbital separation in the quasi-one-dimensional Mott insulator [strontium cuprate].."===http://cosmologyscience.com/cosblog/elec...-particle/

I was watching the Golden State Warriors victory parade in Oakland this morning, and was amazed by the fire-breathing Snail Car. Oakland's mayor was riding atop it.

Apparently the Snail Car was origionally built by some Oakland artists (Oakland has some extraordinary artists) for Burning Man and has now become an Oakland icon.

It's a very fanciful body atop an old VW Bug chassis and engine.

There's a cord, and if those riding on top pull it, flames come out of the eye-stalks.

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/06...-snail-car

http://formandreform.com/wordpress/the-snail/

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...111557.htm

RELEASE: Columbia University scientists have developed a computational method to investigate the relationship between birth month and disease risk. The researchers used this algorithm to examine New York City medical databases and found 55 diseases that correlated with the season of birth. Overall, the study indicated people born in May had the lowest disease risk, and those born in October the highest. The study was published in the Journal of American Medical Informatics Association.

"This data could help scientists uncover new disease risk factors," said study senior author Nicholas Tatonetti, PhD, an assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and Columbia's Data Science Institute. The researchers plan to replicate their study with data from several other locations in the U.S. and abroad to see how results vary with the change of seasons and environmental factors in those places. By identifying what's causing disease disparities by birth month, the researchers hope to figure out how they might close the gap.

Earlier research on individual diseases such as ADHD and asthma suggested a connection between birth season and incidence, but no large-scale studies had been undertaken. This motivated Columbia's scientists to compare 1,688 diseases against the birth dates and medical histories of 1.7 million patients treated at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/CUMC between 1985 and 2013.

Earlier research on individual diseases such as ADHD and asthma suggested a connection between birth season and incidence, but no large-scale studies had been undertaken. This motivated Columbia's scientists to compare 1,688 diseases against the birth dates and medical histories of 1.7 million patients treated at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/CUMC between 1985 and 2013.

The study ruled out more than 1,600 associations and confirmed 39 links previously reported in the medical literature. The researchers also uncovered 16 new associations, including nine types of heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States. The researchers performed statistical tests to check that the 55 diseases for which they found associations did not arise by chance.

"It's important not to get overly nervous about these results because even though we found significant associations the overall disease risk is not that great," notes Dr. Tatonetti. "The risk related to birth month is relatively minor when compared to more influential variables like diet and exercise."

The new data are consistent with previous research on individual diseases. For example, the study authors found that asthma risk is greatest for July and October babies. An earlier Danish study on the disease found that the peak risk was in the months (May and August) when Denmark's sunlight levels are similar to New York's in the July and October period.

For ADHD, the Columbia data suggest that around one in 675 occurrences could relate to being born in New York in November. This result matches a Swedish study showing peak rates of ADHD in November babies.

The researchers also found a relationship between birth month and nine types of heart disease, with people born in March facing the highest risk for atrial fibrillation, congestive heart failure, and mitral valve disorder. One in 40 atrial fibrillation cases may relate to seasonal effects for a March birth. A previous study using Austrian and Danish patient records found that those born in months with higher heart disease rates--March through June--had shorter life spans.

"Faster computers and electronic health records are accelerating the pace of discovery," said the study's lead author, Mary Regina Boland, a graduate student at Columbia. "We are working to help doctors solve important clinical problems using this new wealth of data."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...075033.htm

EXCERPT: The recent craze for human breast milk amongst certain fitness communities, fetishists and chronic disease sufferers is ill advised say the authors of an editorial published by the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. There is a lucrative online market for adult buyers of human breast milk, with websites and forums describing it as a 'clean' super food that can lead to gains in the gym, and even help with erectile dysfunction and cancer. There are claims that it is more digestible and contains positive immune building properties. The authors, led by Dr Sarah Steele, of the Global Health and Policy Unit, Queen Mary University of London, write that these purported benefits do not stand up clinically and raw human milk purchased online or in an unpasteurised state poses many risks. [...] Failure of women to sanitize properly when expressing milk, the failure to sterilize equipment properly, and the improper or prolonged storage and transportation of milk can expose consumers to bacterial food-borne illnesses like any other raw milk. The lack of pasteurisation and testing not only indicates a bacterial risk but also exposes consumers to a host of infectious diseases, including hepatitis, HIV and syphilis....

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...061715.php

RELEASE: Like homing pigeons, humans have a nose for navigation because our brains are wired to convert smells into spatial information, new research from the University of California, Berkeley, shows.

While humans may lack the scent-tracking sophistication of, say, a search-and-rescue dog, we can sniff our way, blindfolded, toward a location whose scent we've smelled only once before, according to the UC Berkeley study published today (June 17) in the journal PLOS ONE.

Similar investigations have been conducted on birds and rodents, but this is the first time smell-based navigation has been field-tested on humans. The results evoke a GPS-like superpower one could call an "olfactory positioning system."

"What we've found is that we humans have the capability to orient ourselves along highways of odors and crisscross landscapes using only our sense of smell," said study lead author Lucia Jacobs, a UC Berkeley psychology professor who studies evolution and cognition in animals and humans.

Smell is a primitive sense that our early ancestors used for foraging, hunting and mating, among other skills necessary for survival. Early sailors and aviators gave anecdotal reports of using odors to navigate, but there have been no experiential scientific studies on this until now.

The process of smelling, or olfaction, is triggered by odor molecules traveling up the nasal passage, where they are identified by receptors that send signals to the olfactory bulb - which sits between the nasal cavity and the brain's frontal lobe - and processes the information. A key to the connection between smell, memory and navigation is that olfactory bulbs have a strong neural link to the brain's hippocampus, which creates spatial maps of our environment.

"Olfaction is like this background fabric to our world that we might not be conscious of, but we are using it to stay oriented," Jacobs said. "We may not see a eucalyptus grove as we pass it at night, but our brain is encoding the smells and creating a map."

Pigeons and rats, for example, are known to orient themselves using odor maps, or "smellscapes," but sighted humans rely more heavily on visual landmarks, and so the study turned up some surprising results.

Two dozen young adults were tested on orientation and navigation tasks under various scenarios in which their hearing, sight or smell was blocked. The test location was a 25-by-20-foot room where 32 containers with sponges were placed at points around the edge of the room. Two of the sponges were infused with essential oils such as sweet birch, anise or clove.

In the smell-only experiment, study participants were led, one at a time, into the room wearing blindfolds, earplugs and headphones and walked in circles for disorientation purposes. They spent a minute at a specific point on the grid, where they inhaled a combination of two fragrances. After being walked in circles again for disorientation purposes, they were tasked with sniffing their way back to the starting point where they had smelled the two fragrances.

Overall, study participants navigated relatively closely to the targeted location when using only their sense of smell, compared to when other sensory inputs were blocked. Moreover, they were not just following one scent, but using information from both scents to orient themselves toward a point on an odor grid.

"We never thought humans could have a good enough sense of smell for this," said Jacobs. But in retrospect, she noted, the results are "as obvious as the nose on my face." Jacobs will be exploring this mechanism further as a scientist selected to be on the team of the National Science Foundation's "Cracking the Olfactory Code" Ideas Lab, which takes place this summer.

Emotional brains 'physically different' to rational ones

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...061715.php

RELEASE: Researchers at Monash University have found physical differences in the brains of people who respond emotionally to others' feelings, compared to those who respond more rationally, in a study published in the journal NeuroImage.

The work, led by Robert Eres from the University's School of Psychological Sciences, pinpointed correlations between grey matter density and cognitive and affective empathy. The study looked at whether people who have more brain cells in certain areas of the brain are better at different types of empathy.

"People who are high on affective empathy are often those who get quite fearful when watching a scary movie, or start crying during a sad scene. Those who have high cognitive empathy are those who are more rational, for example a clinical psychologist counselling a client," Mr Eres said.

The researchers used voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to examine the extent to which grey matter density in 176 participants predicted their scores on tests that rated their levels for cognitive empathy compared to affective - or emotional - empathy.

The results showed that people with high scores for affective empathy had greater grey matter density in the insula, a region found right in the 'middle' of the brain. Those who scored higher for cognitive empathy had greater density in the midcingulate cortex - an area above the corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres of the brain.

"Taken together, these results provide validation for empathy being a multi-component construct, suggesting that affective and cognitive empathy are differentially represented in brain morphometry as well as providing convergent evidence for empathy being represented by different neural and structural correlates," the study said.

The findings raise further questions about whether some kinds of empathy could be increased through training, or whether people can lose their capacity for empathy if they don't use it enough.

"Every day people use empathy with, and without, their knowledge to navigate the social world," said Mr Eres.

"We use it for communication, to build relationships, and consolidate our understanding of others."

However, the discovery also raises new questions - like whether people could train themselves to be more empathic, and would those areas of the brain become larger if they did, or whether we can lose our ability to empathise if we don't use it enough.

"In the future we want to investigate causation by testing whether training people on empathy related tasks can lead to changes in these brain structures and investigate if damage to these brain structures, as a result of a stroke for example, can lead to empathy impairments," said Mr Eres.

= = = = = = = = = =

Musicians don't just hear in tune, they also see in tune

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...061815.php

RELEASE: That is the conclusion of the latest scientific experiment designed to puzzle out how the brain creates an apparently seamless view of the external world based on the information it receives from the eyes.

"Our brain is remarkably efficient at putting us in touch with objects and events in our visual environment, indeed so good that the process seems automatic and effortless. In fact, the brain is continually operating like a clever detective, using clues to figure out what in the world we are looking at. And those clues come not only from what we see but also from other sources," said Randolph Blake, Centennial Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University, who directed the study.

Scientists have known for some time that the brain exploits clues from sources outside of vision to figure out what we are seeing. For example, we tend to see what we expect to see based on past experience. Moreover, we tend to see what our other senses tell us might be present in the world, including what we hear. A remarkable example of this kind of bisensory influence is a beguiling visual illusion created by sound: When a person views a single flash of light accompanied by a pair of beeps presented in close succession, the individual incorrectly perceives two flashes, not just one.

"In our study we asked just how abstract can this supplementary information be?" Blake said.

The discovery of Blake and his colleagues that information as abstract as musical notation can affect what we see is reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition in an article titled "Melodic sound enhances visual awareness of congruent musical notes, but only if you can read music." Blake's co-authors are Associate Professor of Psychology Chai-Youn Kim and graduate students Minyoung Lee and Sujin Kim from Korea University in Seoul.

To answer their question, the researchers turned to a classical test called binocular rivalry that presents the brain with a clear visual conflict, which it struggles to resolve. The binocular rivalry effect is created by presenting incompatible images separately to each eye. Evidently, the brain can't settle on a single image because the viewer's perception fluctuates back and forth between the two images every few seconds.

In their study, the researchers presented participants with an array of moving contours in one eye and a scrolling musical score in the other. Participants pressed one button when seeing the contours and another button when seeing the musical score. As expected perception switched back and forth between the conflicting possibilities, with each view being perceptually dominant for roughly the same length of time.

Next the researchers played a simple melody through the headphones that their subjects wore as they performed the task. When they heard the music, the participants reported that they tended to spend more time watching the visual score and less time watching the moving contours.

For non-musicians it didn't matter whether or not the melody being played matched the musical score that they were viewing. But the people able to read music reported watching the visual score for longer periods when the melody they were hearing was identical to the melody they were viewing than they did when the two were different.

A second key finding in the study was that the influence of the audible melody on the predominance of the visual score disappeared during the periods when the moving contours were dominant. The researchers found that playing the melody prolonged the periods when the musical score dominated a person's perception but it did not cut short the periods when the moving contours were predominant. In other words, the musical melody and visual melody appear to be temporarily uncoupled when the visual member of the pair is temporarily erased from awareness.

"What this tells us is that the kind of information the brain uses to interpret what we see around us includes abstract symbolic input such as music notation," said Blake. "However, this kind of input is only effective while an individual is aware of it."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...124719.htm

RELEASE: Imagine you are in charge of the switch on a trolley track. The express is due any minute; but as you glance down the line you see a school bus, filled with children, stalled at the level crossing. No problem; that's why you have this switch. But on the alternate track there's more trouble: Your child, who has come to work with you, has fallen down on the rails and can't get up. That switch can save your child or a bus-full of others, but not both. What do you do?

This ethical puzzler is commonly known as the Trolley Problem. It's a standard topic in philosophy and ethics classes, because your answer says a lot about how you view the world. But in a very 21st-century take, several writers have adapted the scenario to a modern obsession: autonomous vehicles. Google's self-driving cars have already driven 1.7 million miles on American roads, and have never been the cause of an accident during that time, the company says. Volvo says it will have a self-driving model on Swedish highways by 2017. Elon Musk says the technology is so close that he can have current-model Teslas ready to take the wheel on "major roads" by this summer.

Who watches the watchers?

The technology may have arrived, but are we ready?

Google's cars can already handle real-world hazards, such as cars' suddenly swerving in front of them. But in some situations, a crash is unavoidable. (In fact, Google's cars have been in dozens of minor accidents, all of which the company blames on human drivers.) How will a Google car, or an ultra-safe Volvo, be programmed to handle a no-win situation -- a blown tire, perhaps -- where it must choose between swerving into oncoming traffic or steering directly into a retaining wall? The computers will certainly be fast enough to make a reasoned judgment within milliseconds. They would have time to scan the cars ahead and identify the one most likely to survive a collision, for example, or the one with the most other humans inside. But should they be programmed to make the decision that is best for their owners? Or the choice that does the least harm -- even if that means choosing to slam into a retaining wall to avoid hitting an oncoming school bus? Who will make that call, and how will they decide?

"Ultimately, this problem devolves into a choice between utilitarianism and deontology," said UAB alumnus Ameen Barghi. Barghi, who graduated in May and is headed to Oxford University this fall as UAB's third Rhodes Scholar, is no stranger to moral dilemmas. He was a senior leader on UAB's Bioethics Bowl team, which won the 2015 national championship. Their winning debates included such topics as the use of clinical trials for Ebola virus, and the ethics of a hypothetical drug that could make people fall in love with each other. In last year's Ethics Bowl competition, the team argued another provocative question related to autonomous vehicles: If they turn out to be far safer than regular cars, would the government be justified in banning human driving completely? (Their answer, in a nutshell: yes.)

Death in the driver's seat

So should your self-driving car be programmed to kill you in order to save others? There are two philosophical approaches to this type of question, Barghi says. "Utilitarianism tells us that we should always do what will produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people," he explained. In other words, if it comes down to a choice between sending you into a concrete wall or swerving into the path of an oncoming bus, your car should be programmed to do the former.

Deontology, on the other hand, argues that "some values are simply categorically always true," Barghi continued. "For example, murder is always wrong, and we should never do it." Going back to the trolley problem, "even if shifting the trolley will save five lives, we shouldn't do it because we would be actively killing one," Barghi said. And, despite the odds, a self-driving car shouldn't be programmed to choose to sacrifice its driver to keep others out of harm's way.

Every variation of the trolley problem -- and there are many: What if the one person is your child? Your only child? What if the five people are murderers? -- simply "asks the user to pick whether he has chosen to stick with deontology or utilitarianism," Barghi continued. If the answer is utilitarianism, then there is another decision to be made, Barghi adds: rule or act utilitarianism.

"Rule utilitarianism says that we must always pick the most utilitarian action regardless of the circumstances -- so this would make the choice easy for each version of the trolley problem," Barghi said: Count up the individuals involved and go with the option that benefits the majority.

But act utilitarianism, he continued, "says that we must consider each individual act as a separate subset action." That means that there are no hard-and-fast rules; each situation is a special case. So how can a computer be programmed to handle them all?

"A computer cannot be programmed to handle them all," said Gregory Pence, Ph.D., chair of the UAB College of Arts and Sciences Department of Philosophy. "We know this by considering the history of ethics. Casuistry, or applied Christian ethics based on St. Thomas, tried to give an answer in advance for every problem in medicine. It failed miserably, both because many cases have unique circumstances and because medicine constantly changes."

Preparing for the worst

The members of UAB's Ethics and Bioethics teams spend a great deal of time wrestling with these types of questions, which combine philosophy and futurism. Both teams are led by Pence, a well-known medical ethicist who has trained UAB medical students for decades.

To arrive at their conclusions, the UAB team engages in passionate debate, says Barghi. "Along with Dr. Pence's input, we constantly argue positions, and everyone on the team at some point plays devil's advocate for the case," he said. "We try to hammer out as many potential positions and rebuttals to our case before the tournament as we can so as to provide the most comprehensive understanding of the topic. Sometimes, we will totally change our position a couple of days before the tournament because of a certain piece of input that was previously not considered."

That happened this year when the team was prepping a case on physician addiction and medical licensure. "Our original position was to ensure the safety of our patients as the highest priority and try to remove these physicians from the workforce as soon as possible," Barghi said. "However, after we met with Dr. Sandra Frazier" -- who specializes in physicians' health issues -- "we quickly learned to treat addiction as a disease and totally changed the course of our case."

Barghi, who plans to become a clinician-scientist, says that ethics competitions are helpful practice for future health care professionals. "Although physicians don't get a month of preparation before every ethical decision they have to make, activities like the ethics bowl provide miniature simulations of real-world patient care and policy decision-making," Barghi said. "Besides that, it also provides an avenue for previously shy individuals to become more articulate and confident in their arguments."