Today marks the 50^th birthday of Bubble Wrap, the truest "pop icon." The now-famous material was envisioned by inventors Marc Chavannes and Al Fielding of Sealed Air Corporation (US) in the late 1950s.
Originally, Bubble Wrap was to be used as textured w
Ok, so reading an article on smog made me recall a thought I had some time ago.
The article complains about methane being a cause for global warming, another article I read some time ago blames cows for methane release. My thought was what about feeding the cows something that would absorb t
Unless you're an absolute newbie to the old car hobby (in which case, welcome!), you've by now surely seen some sort of mention of the 1913 Bi-Autogo, the two-wheeled "automobile" that James Scripps-Booth built. But you probably haven't read an account of the vehicle quite like the one that hi
Despite the prevalence of post traumatic stress disorder, especially in veterans (an estimated one in five from Iraq and Afghanistan have it, according to the Department of Defense), it can be maddeningly tricky to diagnose. But in a new study in Journal of Neural Engineering, brain researcher Apostolos Georgopoulos argues that his team has found, through the brain scanning technique called magnetoencephalography (MEG), a pattern in the brain associated with PTSD. In a MEG scan, researchers measure the magnetic fields generated by electric activity in the brain; the scans are far faster than those taken via MRI.
Georgopoulos and colleagues studied 74 U.S. veterans with PTSD and 250 people with no mental health problems. They scanned the brains of study participants looking for a signal that might distinguish a PTSD patient from a healthy volunteer [Reuters]. The researchers mapped the neural interactions for both groups, and they say that the resulting map of biomarkers allowed them to look at brain scans, without knowing whether the person had PTSD or not, and pick out the PTSD patients from controls with 90 percent accuracy.
The main upshot of finding reliable biomarkers for PTSD would be making diagnosis easier and more accurate. In addition, the map shows changes over time, which therapists could consult to see how well treatment is working. But for Georgopoulos, there’s something more: “This shows that PTSD is a brain disease,” he says. “There have been questions that this is a made-up disorder and isn’t a true brain disease, but it is” [TIME].
The biomarkers in question are patterns of tiny magnetic fluctuations that occur as groups of neurons fire in synchrony, even when subjects are not thinking of anything. These “synchronous neural interactions” have already been shown to distinguish signals from subjects with a range of disorders including Alzheimer’s [BBC News].
Not all are convinced that Georgopoulos is on to something: Dr. Sally Satel, a psychiatrist now affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute who has studied PTSD, says she’s skeptical that there’s “a fixed neural signature” for the condition [TIME]. However, she says, Georgopoulos’ approach could become part of a more through PTSD diagnostic process, and he says he plans more ambitious studies beyond this first step. The researchers say they want to evaluate 500 vets and 500 civilians to further test their findings, and it will be important to investigate whether certain pre-existing conditions that are also PTSD symptoms, i.e. anxiety and insomnia, skew the results [CNET].
Related Content:
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DISCOVER: Treating Agony With Ecstasy
Cosmic Variance: Guest Post: Tom Levenson on the Iraq War Suicides And the Material Basis of Consciousness
Image: iStockphoto
At least 1/3 of Americans don't believe in Global Warming, or that man is causing Global Warming. Meanwhile the 2000s were the warmest decade since they started keeping track thoroughly in the 1880s. 2009 was the second warmest year in the modern record (2005 was the warmest). This during a solar
Are you ready for some free fall?
Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner officially announced that sometime this year, he intends to jump from a balloon at a height of nearly 23 miles, breaking the 50-year-old world record for the highest parachute jump held by retired U.S. Air Force pilot Joe Kittinger. Kittinger is the Stratos mission’s capcom (short for capsule communicator), which means that he will be the voice in Baumgartner’s helmet. Kittinger’s advice to his successor: “Have fun, enjoy it, and tell us all about it when you get down” [Scientific American].
Baumgartner is a BASE jumper who once flew a glider across the English Channel, but he and his team say they have loftier goals than simply a world record and a huge adrenaline rush. If he makes the jump, Baumgartner could be the first person to break the sound barrier without the benefit of an aircraft, and his crazy stunt could provide valuable data on how that affects the body. Just as Kittinger did, Baumgartner will go up in a balloon, though his pressure suit, capsule and monitoring equipment will be much more advanced [Reuters]. Baumgartner says that a successful test would also benefit future spaceflight, showing that if astronauts had a problem as their craft entered the stratosphere, it theoretically would be possible for them to bail out and safely reach the ground.
Baumgartner’s pressurized, airtight suit is much like those worn by space shuttle astronauts, and Art Thompson, the project’s technical director, explains that it’s vital to his success. The jump height is above a threshold at [62,000 feet] called the Armstrong line, where the atmospheric pressure is so low that fluids start to boil. “If he opens up his face mask or the suit, all the gases in your body go out of suspension, so you literally turn into a giant fizzy, oozing fluid from your eyes and mouth, like something out of a horror film,” Thompson explained. “It’s just seconds until death” [New Scientist].
Hopefully Baumgartner has better luck than others who have tried to fall to Earth from the highest heights. The most recent attempt was made in 2008, by a former French paratrooper, Michel Fournier, who spent years preparing only to have the balloon that was set to take him up break from its moorings and float away [The Independent]. Fournier, however, pledges to try again this year, so it could be a race to jump from the stratosphere—if everybody remembers to keep their balloons strapped down until they’re ready.
Related Content:
DISCOVER: The Daredevils Who Chase One of the Sky’s Greatest Mysteries
DISCOVER: Here’s Your Jetpack
DISCOVER: The X-Prize, an in-depth look at the contest back in 2002
Image: Red Bull Stratos
I remember my 6th or 7th grade science teacher being able to place the laser on the wall and generate sound. We would hit the wall and the compression on the light wave caused audio from a speaker. Does anyone know how to do this?
From Fast Company:
Flowing Data has dug up a lovely old infographic, depicting how to make any one of 44 mixed drinks--but using the visual vocabulary of technical drawings. This being a monochrome blueprint, all of the various alcohols have patterns; the diagrams of the drinks
i am looking for information about clean and waste water treatment plants ,
If any body has any information or some body is working in similar plants . please give some idea , or you can guide me , if I can able to get information from websites
thanks
Normaly MTBE is stored in fixed roof tanks with internal floating roof and nitrogen blanketing. What are the risks of storing it without nitrogen blanketing?
As of today, the 10-day forecast on weather.com for Titusville, Florida looks great. This is a relief after several weeks of sub-Florida temperatures that had most of us huddled indoors in disbelief.
If you are driving to the Festival on Tuesday, you should encounter mostly sunny conditions in the upper 60’s in Florida. By Friday, daytime [...]
Just a hair over ten nine years ago, the Cassini spacecraft caromed past Jupiter, stealing a tiny bit of the giant planet’s energy to hasten the space probe’s journey to Saturn. When it passed Jupiter at a distance of about 10 million kilometers (6 million miles), Cassini saw this:
[Click to enjovianate. Seriously, the full-res picture is jaw-dropping.]
This stunning shot is actually a mosaic of 27 images: 9 images to cover the planet in a 3×3 grid, and 3 images at each location to get red, green, and blue exposures to make this near true-color image. While the Voyagers (which also flew past Jupiter) and Galileo (which orbited the planet for about 8 years) took higher-resolution images, this is the sharpest color global view of Jupiter taken.
It’s one of my favorite shots of Jupiter, too, edged out by the crescent view of the planet from Cassini (with the added bonus of a crescent Io) as it left on its way to Saturn. You can see that image and more on the Cassini Jupiter Encounter page. The probe has been in orbit around the ringed planet for a long time now, but when you peruse those gorgeous images, don’t forget that in space, you can almost always get more than just one bird with one stone.
Tip o’ the Red Spot to Carolyn Porco, who mentioned this on her Twitter feed.
Please help me out I want to come up with DIY motorcycle maintenance packages -ei;oil changes,chain and belt,tire repair, onboard compressors etc.tell me want would turn you on to buy for motorcycles.
I do not want to leave anyone out, so even car & truck owners--give me feedback!!!!
“STUDY OBJECTIVE: To determine the incidence of blunt trauma in northern New York City before and after the distribution of 25,000 baseball bats at Yankee Stadium… …MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Seventy-seven patients sustained bat injuries, 38 (49%) before and 36 (47%) after Bat Day. There were no significant differences between the two groups with respect to age, sex, time of injury, number and distribution of fractures and lacerations, incidence of loss of consciousness, source of history, or dispostion. There was a positive association between the number of cases on a given day and the average temperature that day (r = .5; P < .01). CONCLUSION: The distribution of 25,000 wooden baseball bats to attendees at Yankee Stadium did not increase the incidence of bat-related trauma in the Bronx and northern Manhattan. There was a positive correlation between daily temperature and the incidence of bat injury. The informal but common impressions of emergency clinicians about the cause-and-effect relationship between Bat Day and bat trauma were unfounded.”
Thanks to Timon for today’s ROFL!
Posted by David McRee at BlogTheBeach.com
This Wednesday is the opening day of the 13th Annual Space Coast Birding & Wildlife Festival in Titusville, Florida. The opening reception, sponsored by Swarovski Optik, is located in the Brevard Community College Gymnatorium from 4 to 6 p.m. Wednesday. You’ll find a room full of birders as well as [...]
Grades which are written on the head of bolts like 10.9 etc means??? What does the alphabates written on the head means???
how to measure the angle of section plane when it is making some angle with HP, is it clockwise or anticlockwise
Over the weekend, to prepare for my keynote at the Hope Summit 2010 in St. Louis, I went back through the Unscientific America PowerPoint and added a number of updates and new observations. I may blog a number of the changes, but I want to highlight one of them in particular–I added this figure from the latest Science and Engineering Indicators report out of NSF:
Contrary to popular misconceptions, the U.S. is producing an increasing, not decreasing, number of scientists and engineers right now. But China…whoa. The figures above only go through 2007, and in light of that slope, it may well be that China is producing more science and engineering Ph.D.s annually than any other country in the world by now.
What you’re looking at, folks, is the rapid birth of a science superpower.
So when you hear concerns about declining U.S. leadership in science, there is definitely something to it. In fact, those concerns aren’t just rearview mirror watching any more; China is the car that’s blowing past us in the left lane. Whether they are producing scientists who are as talented, as well-trained, or as interdisciplinary as American scientists, I can’t say. But boy are they ever producing scientists.
Can anyone provide me the details regarding Valmet (Finland) energy meter.
Type of the energy meter - K5J (Valmet designation).
This energy meter was installed in the year 1985 in our CPP. Nothing has been mentioned regarding the accuracy class of the meter on its nameplate. If anybody
Henri J. M. Nouwen on openness in prayer.
