I'm watching a bit on TV about brewing coffee. They say that 203°F is the ideal brewing temperature.
They say that if the water boils it "burns" the coffee. So, if we assume that, at sea level, water boils at 212ºF is this enough added heat to spoil the coffee?
Or, is it the re
AT&T may have improved their dropped call performance lately, but they've still got a lot of work to do. According to a recent survey from ChangeWave Research, AT&T customers experience 3x the percentage of dropped calls as Verizon users. Ouch. More »
NASA Ames Stimulates Economy with Jobs, Innovation
"NASA's Ames Research Center generated 5,300 jobs and $877 million in total annual economic activity in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area in 2009, according to a new economic benefits study. The study found that nationally, NASA Ames supports more than 8,400 jobs and generates $1.3 billion in annual economic activity. Coordinated by the NASA Research Park Office and prepared by Emeryville-based Bay Area Economics (BAE) in association with Architecture, Engineering, Consulting, Operations and Management's San Francisco office, the study also reported that NASA Ames produced 5,900 jobs and contributed $932 million to California's economy in 2009. The study also forecast that NASA Ames' total economic impacts will grow significantly as its NASA Research Park (NRP) is completed."
Keith's 5:50 pm EDT note: Weird. ARC PAO sent this out at 3:38 pm EDT and they haven't even bothered to get it on their website. You'd think they'd be crowing about this information.
Keith's 6:20 pm EDT update: It took more than 2 hours but ARC PAO finally got this important press release online. Alas, still no mention of it on the Ames Research Park website yet even though it is prominently mentioned in the release. No one out in the real world seems to have these PR and web server issues - just NASA.
Nearly 150 years after scientists discovered the first specimen of the dino-bird archaeopteryx, we get to see what it was made of. Researchers who scanned one of the fossils with x-rays say the specimen contains not just impressions of fossils, but actually the remains of soft tissue with some of the chemical components intact. They published their findings (in press) today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The team led by Roy Wogelius scanned a 150-million-year-old Archaeopteryx fossil using a synchrotron-type particle accelerator located at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource in California.
The synchrotron excites atoms in target materials to emit X rays at characteristic wavelengths. The scan reveals the distribution of elements throughout the fossil. The green glow of the bones in this false-colour image shows that Archaeopteryx, like modern birds, concentrated zinc in its bones. The red of the rocks comes from calcium in the limestone that had encased the fossil since the animal died [New Scientist].
That distinct difference you can see between the bird remains and the surrounding ground, made clear by the false-color image, made Wogelius confident that the elements he found came from the Archaeopteryx remains and not from contamination. To him, then, it was clear:
“We talk about the physical link between birds and dinosaurs, and now we have found a chemical link between them. In the fields of palaeontology and geology, people have studied bones for decades. But this whole idea of the preservation of trace metals and the chemical remains of soft tissue is quite exciting” [Sydney Morning Herald].
While this Archaeopteryx finding adds to our knowledge of this strange creature, the real importance of this study could lie in the method.
Other methods to analyse fossil specimens such as x-ray fluorescence and electron microscopy can only analyse samples on microscope slide scale and therefore to study Archaeopteryx by these methods, it would have to be destroyed. Breaking up the specimen was not an option, says Wogelius [Chemistry World].
Thus, he argues, this tool—which goes by “synchrotron rapid scanning x-ray fluorescence” (SRS-XRF)—could prove invaluable to paleontologists who want to know what a specimen is made of without tearing it apart.
“We’re able to read so much more into these organisms now using this technology – we’re literally touching ghosts” [Sydney Morning Herald].
Related Content:
DISCOVER: Birds May Have Used Big Brains To Outlast the Dinosaurs
The Loom: A Hairy Archaeopteryx?
80beats: “Bizarre” And Fluffy Dino May Have Used Feathers To Attract Mates
Science Tattoo Emporium: Archaeopteryx
Image: W.I. Sellers/ PNAS
HyperMac, our favorite brand of precious-extra-juice-giving external batteries, has updated their line to offer 10W USB charging of the iPad. The four capacities will give your tablet a total run time ranging from 34 to 99 hours. Yes, that'll do. More »
When Faisal Shahzad left his bomb-loaded car parked in Times Square, every step of his escape route through Manhattan was caught by both police and private spycams. If they're the NYPD's eyes, this room is its central nervous system. More »
Am a prosthetist and orthopaedic technologist whom wish to know more on design and fabrication of high technology prosthesis.Do you have information on prosthesis? if yes,please kindly inform me.
Thanks.
For a while today, a Twitter bug let anyone force anyone to follow their accounts. It was a hilariously simple trick, and equally bizarre. Even better? This bug was discovered by accident, by a Turkish Twitter user. Here's what happened. More »
I missed the NECSS meeting last month, but my pal (and JREF President) D.J. Grothe was there, and gave a great talk about the meaning of skepticism, and how it relates to humanism. And, wonderfully, the whole thing is online!
I agree with pretty much everything he said there. The idea of why we do what we do in the skeptical movement has come up a lot in my life (online and IRL) lately, and I have been doing a lot of thinking about it. I may write a post (or more likely a series of them) outlining my thoughts on this. It’s important, and the movement itself has been debating it internally recently as well. Certainly D.J.’s calm, rational discourse on this can only help.
As I've said, there is much that is surprising or unexpected about Elaine Ecklund's findings on religion among scientists. I'm going to be blogging on this all week, but again, as background, if you haven't yet you should first check out our Point of Inquiry episode (show website here; listen here; download/subscribe here). The second point that arises from Ecklund's research that I find intriguing is this. There's a cliche out there, particularly among some conservative religious folks, that there is something nasty about science (and particularly evolutionary science), such that studying it will kill off your belief system. However, Ecklund's research seems to give the lie to this idea--and our discussion of this topic begins around minute 17:55-19:10. First, among scientists who are atheists, Ecklund found that they tended to come from irreligious or not very observant family backgrounds. In other words, their atheism or lack of religion was in place long before their scientific training began. Meanwhile, for scientists who retained religious beliefs, they tended to have started out with them to begin with, and then held on to them after a struggle or crisis of faith. But once again, if I understand Ecklund right, the struggle tended to happen before one's ...
The thing about wirelessly streaming video to millions and millions of phones is that it's, like, hard. More »
How should teachers use the media to teach students about evolution? Carefully! That’s my advice in a paper I was asked to write for the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach, where I take a look at the history of journalists writing about evolution.
I start way back, at the beginning:
Evolution has been news from the start. On March 28, 1860, The New York Times ran a massive article on a newly published book called On the Origin of Species (Anonymous 1860). The article explained how the dominant explanation for life’s staggering diversity was the independent creation of every species on Earth. “Meanwhile,” the anonymous author wrote, “Mr. DARWIN, as the fruit of a quarter of a century of patient observation and experiment, throws out, in a book whose title has by this time become familiar to the reading public, a series of arguments and inferences so revolutionary as, if established, to necessitate a radical reconstruction of the fundamental doctrines of natural history.”
If you want to read the rest of that 1860 article, you can find it here. And if you want to read the rest of my paper, check out the pdf I’ve posted over at my web site.
From BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition:
A prosthetic foot that mimics the muscle actions of real feet has been short-listed for the UK's top engineering prize. Four projects are on the shortlist for the Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award, worth £50,000.
For this week's Shooting Challenge, we've brought in a special guest judge. Martin Waugh is not only a master of catching water drops in flight; he's oft-labeled the inventor of the "drop collision" shot. More »
NPD Group's smartphone survey* puts total iPhone's sales for the first quarter at 21%. That's third in the ranking. Second position goes, for the first time, to the Android platform, with 28%. El Número Uno belongs to BlackBerry, with 36%. More »
For the definition of mistake, look no further than the Oxford English Dictionary. A physics professor from Australia's Queensland University of Technology discovered that the go-to source has carried a mistake for nearly a century: an error in the definition of the word "siphon." The dictionary erroneously stated that a siphon's ability to move liquids from one location to another is due to atmospheric pressure. In fact, it's really thanks to the force of gravity, according to an article in Physorg.com:
"Senior lecturer [Stephen Hughes]... discovered the error after viewing an enormous siphon in South Australia, which was transferring the equivalent of 4000 Olympic swimming pools from the Murray River system into depleted Lake Bonney"... "It is gravity that moves the fluid in a siphon, with the water in the longer downward arm pulling the water up the shorter arm," he said."
Conveniently, when the team in charge of revising the Oxford English Dictionary received Hughes' email pointing out the error, they were working on words starting with the letter "R:"
"I thought, 'oh good, just in time', because S is next," Dr Hughes said.
The de facto dictionary-of-record is planning to make the change, but its editors shouldn't feel too bad: Hughes said he couldn't ...
I know its been discussed before but this is mainly to educate those out there who have these cars and what to do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT07_JbnKWQ&feature=related
First, Verizon changed their mind about the Google Phone after releasing the similar HTC Incredible. Now Sprint, weeks before the release of the Evo 4G, has done the same. And with that, the CDMA Nexus One is all but dead. More »
A murder suspect sits in a quiet room with electrodes placed on her head. The prosecution reads out its narrative of the crime and the suspect’s alleged role in it. As she listens, the machines record her brain activity and reveal that she experienced aspects of the crime that only the murderer could have. Teased out by technology, her own memories have betrayed her. The verdict is guilty.
This scenario might seem far-fetched, but it’s actually what happened in an Indian trial that took place in 2008. The judge “explicitly cited a scan as proof that the suspect’s brain held “experiential knowledge” about the crime that only the killer could possess, sentencing her to life in prison.” There has been a smattering of attempts to use of brain-scanning technology in this way, accompanied by an uproar about the technology’s readiness.
But a new study by Jesse Rissman from Stanford University suggests that these promises are overplayed. Together with Henry Greely and Anthony Wagner, he has shown that brain scans can accurately decode whether people think they remember something, but not whether they actually remember something. And that gap between subjective and objective memory is a vast chasm as far as the legal system is concerned.
Our memories are stored within networks of neurons so it’s reasonable to think that by studying the patterns of activity within these networks, we should be able to decipher individual memories. Studies have already started to show that this is possible with our existing brain-scanning techniques, and with every positive result, the temptation to use such advances in a practical setting grows.
The courtroom is an obvious candidate, especially because our brains respond differently when it experiences something new compared to something old. You could use brain scans to tell if someone has actually seen a place, person or thing, reliably corroborating the accounts of witnesses and suspects without having to rely on the vagaries of accurate recall and moral fortitude. For this reason, techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have been enticingly billed as the ultimate in lie detection technology and claims of “mind-reading machines” and “psychic computers” have abounded in the press.
To assess these claims, Rissman asked 16 volunteers who studied 210 faces for four seconds each. An hour later, they saw 400 faces, half of which were old and half were new. They had to separate the two and for each face, they had one of five responses – a certain recollection, or a sense that it was old or new, with either high or low confidence. Throughout these trials, Rissman scanned their brains using fMRI. He used pattern recognition software to analyse the scans and identify patterns of activity that corresponded to each response – a “neural signature” of viewing an old face, or a new one.
At first, his software seemed to be very accurate. When Rissman analysed trials where the recruits correctly classified the faces, his software could separate the old and new faces, based on brain activity alone, with an average accuracy of 83%. In trials where the volunteers were most confident in their judgments, that score rose as high as 95%.
The software passed other challenges too. For trials when the faces were all old (or all new), it separated ‘hits’ (where the volunteers rightly said that they’d seen the faces before) from ‘misses’ (where they incorrectly said that the faces were new) with an accuracy of 75%. It could separate trials where the recruits felt certain or confident in their judgments from those where they weren’t so confident with accuracies between 79 and 90%. And best of all, the software could even reliably decode the brain scans of one individual after it was “trained” on the data from another.
So far, everything seemed promising. But all of these tests focused on the recruits’ subjective memories – what they thought they remembered. If fMRI scans are to be truly admissible in court, they have to do better than that. Scientists must be able to use them to decode a person’s objective memories – whether they actually remember something they saw.
To assess that, Rissman focused on trials where the recruits classified a face as old with low confidence. He wanted to see if the software could tell the difference between faces that were actually old and correctly remembered, from those that were actually new and falsely remembered. It succeeded, but only just, with an average accuracy of 59%. For trials where they classified faces as new with low confidence, the program did even worse at telling the right assessments from the wrong ones – guesswork would have been just as good.
These results were bolstered by a variation on the same experiment. Again, Rissman showed seven recruits a set of 210 faces but this time, he told them to rate their attractiveness rather than memorise them. When they saw the larger set of 400 faces, they initially only had to say if they were male or female. The brain scans should still be able to reveal whether they recognised the faces even when they aren’t explicitly trying to do so. But they couldn’t – it only achieved an accuracy of 56%, not significantly different from a guesswork.
These results are impressive and disappointing at the same time. They demonstrate that fMRI can decode the neural signatures of subjective recognition, at least under controlled laboratory conditions. It also shows that software trained on one person can be used to reliably decode the brain activity of another – that’s fascinating in itself because it suggests that these neural signatures are highly consistent from person to person. Vaughan Bell from King’s College London (and the excellent Mind Hacks blog) says, “In other words, it is identifying brain activation patterns for conscious experiences of remembering, which seem to generalise across people.”
But given all that, the technique’s inability to separate what people think they saw from what they actually limits its use as a source of legal evidence. It means that the scans are only as good as the memories of the people who are being scanned, and we know that our memories are fickle and sometimes untrustworthy things.
Bell says, “Any potential fMRI ‘lie detector’ technology may be equally as liable to the memory distortions that affect eye witness testimony or other forms of courtroom recall. Perhaps a little speculatively, this may mean that although such technology could pick up someone who deliberately lies about what they remember, it may not be able to distinguish between someone whose memory had become distorted over time or who has come to believe false information.”
Of course, fMRI scans have already found their way into courtrooms and more attempts are on the horizon. Just last week, a Brooklyn judge dismissed fMRI evidence from an employer-retaliation case, and Wired reports that on May 13, a Tennessee court will hear arguments over the admissibility of fMRI evidence in another hearing. Both cases involved a company called Cephos (whose CEO has, incidentally, turned up on this blog before).
But Rissman’s work casts serious doubts over the role of suggests that there are massive barriers to the use of fMRI scans in court. Of course, evidence with dodgy reliability is often used in trials, but the big danger for brain scans is their appearance of reliability. What could be more compelling than a view inside someone’s mind? And what could be more dangerous than an unreliable source of evidence that is over-interpreted as being reliable, as the recent Indian case attests to?
Rissman concludes his paper with a stark warning. He says, “The neuroscientific and legal communities must maintain an ongoing dialogue so that any future real-world applications will be based on, and limited by, controlled scientific evaluations that are well understood by the legal system before their use. Although false positives and false negatives can have important implications for memory theory, their consequences can be much more serious within a legal context.”
Reference: PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.100102810 If this link isn’t working, read why here
Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/killermonkeys/304439098/
More on fMRI scans:
