The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Drones that think.

Endgadgets prepares us for robot dominance of the skies by 2047:

In its recently released “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047″ report, the US Air Force details a drone that could fly over a target and then make the decision whether or not to launch an attack, all without human intervention. The Air Force says that increasingly, humans will monitor situations, rather than be deciders or participants, and that “advances in AI will enable systems to make combat decisions and act within legal and policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input.”

Oh, dear.

Entered on 31 July 2009 at 20:24 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Oh. That smell.

New Scientist reacquaints us with the smell of fear:

Lilianne Mujica-Parodi, a cognitive neuroscientist at Stony Brook University in New York and colleagues collected sweat from the armpits of first-time tandem skydivers as they hurtled towards the earth.

The smell of their sweat was wafted under the noses of volunteers as they lay in an fMRI scanner. Even though they had no idea what they were inhaling, two separate sets of volunteers showed activation of the amygdala – the area of the brain responsible for emotion-processing, plus areas involved in vision, motor control and goal-directed behaviour. Sweat produced under non-stressed conditions didn’t produce this reaction.

What’s more, in behavioural tests, the “stress sweat” seemed to heighten people’s awareness of threat, making them 43 per cent more accurate in judging whether a face was neutral or threatening.

Entered on 30 July 2009 at 6:21 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Good doggie. Smart baby.

Health Day News reports on a new neuroscience project from Brigham Young University demonstrating the emotional wisdoms of infants. They’ve shown that babies, like Dr. Dolittle, know the language of dogs:

The researchers believe that they can glean whether a baby is making a connection between two things by monitoring how long they look at a picture. In this case, 6-month-old babies were more likely to look longer at the picture of a canine expression that matched the bark.

Only about 15 percent of the babies spent more time looking at the wrong dog picture or looked equally at both, Flom said.

…

Still, it’s “remarkable” that babies that aren’t exposed to dogs can figure out how to link their barks to their faces, Flom said. That means they can connect audio and visual cues, he said.

Entered on 29 July 2009 at 6:29 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Mouse made from scratch. (Just add stem cells!)

Scientific American really does incur a sense of wonder and mystery sometimes. Here’s a group of scientists who have turned a bunch of stem cells into a living mouse:

Xiao Xiao, as the rodent is called in its native Chinese, was one of dozens created from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) and born to a surrogate mother. …

Researchers used a virus to deliver four genes into fibroblast cells taken from adult mice, triggering the change to iPS cells. These cells were then implanted into an embryo that didn’t have the requisite genetic information for it to develop beyond a placenta. That these implanted embryos developed into full baby mice proved that these cells could indeed do all the work of natural embryonic stem cells.

1. Embryonic stem cells are already taking a back seat to the pluripotent kind.

2. They can make something alive from parts. Not only alive, but capable of reproducing – they’ve got third-generation descendants of these little stem cell mice crawling around.

Entered on 28 July 2009 at 6:53 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Acid therapy.

Der Spiegel is sounding the call – psychedelics are coming back to the lab… and helping people heal:

“I would welcome it if it were easier to use psychoactive substances in therapy,” says Rolf Verres, medical director of the Department of Medical Psychology at the University of Heidelberg Hospital. “In Germany, there is simply a deficit in this respect.”

Elsewhere, however, a comeback of hallucinogens in psychotherapy seems possible. In the United States, Britain, Israel and Switzerland, a number of studies have been recently approved involving the use of Ecstasy and psilocybin, an agent derived from hallucinogenic mushrooms. The goal of the research is to determine whether these substances can help in the treatment of traumatized war veterans and patients with anxiety disorders. Some of the researchers involved in the studies say that initial results are consistently encouraging.

But before Peter Gasser embarked on his study, no researcher had dared to use LSD, the strongest and most notorious of the hallucinogenic drugs. The outcome of his study will play a key role in determining how authorities handle similar applications in the future.

…

Gasser, 49, ignored media inquiries from around the world for almost one-and-a-half years, so as not to jeopardize his sensitive experiment. Today, as he invites SPIEGEL to visit his practice for the first time, the first thing he does is to make one thing clear: “I am not a messiah, nor am I someone who aims to change society.” He is interested exclusively in research, not creeping legalization of the drug, says Gasser, and he wants to demonstrate that LSD can play a positive role in psychotherapy.

…

Within the framework of the study, Gasser is permitted to treat 12 patients suffering from anxiety disorders as a result of a severe physical illness. Eight of them receive a capsule of 200 micrograms of LSD each, in two full-day sessions spaced several weeks apart. The remaining four patients, the control group, receive a dose of 20 micrograms, which is too small to have much of an effect. “With a substance like LSD, a placebo-controlled procedure is, of course, questionable,” Gasser admits, noting that the patient quickly realizes what he or she has swallowed. But that is just the way things are done in medicament research, he says.

The three patients who have received the effective dose to date have all benefited from the treatment, says Gasser, but the study is still underway. Besides, he adds, a study group of only 12 patients is much too small to be able to make statistically valid statements. “What we hope to demonstrate in the end is that no serious incidents occurred, and that the results suggest that this is an effective treatment method.”

There’s an interview with one of Gasser’s patients at the link. He’s pretty grateful to have been in the study.

Entered on 27 July 2009 at 6:07 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: The Apollo 11 Launch.

^{Click to embiggen}

This is a Saturn V rocket, the largest, heaviest vehicle ever to hurl itself from our small ball of mud into the vastness of space.

At the time the photographer is snapping this photograph on a hot Central Florida summer day, there are three human beings inside its nose. They are about to go to the moon.

The moon.

And they’ll come back, too.

Entered on 26 July 2009 at 6:29 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Lights out for Ares?

New Scientist’s “Short Sharp Science” blog is not very hopeful about the rocket that’s supposed to take us to Mars. Apparently, there was an oversight in the safety systems around the Orion (the space capsule with the people inside) and the Ares rocket’s big, explosive Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs):

If the accident occurred during the time of high wind blast – at least the period between 30 and 60 seconds after launch, maybe longer – an escaping Orion wouldn’t be able to pull clear of the fragment cloud. Something similar happened in 1998, when a Titan IVA rocket exploded about 40 seconds after launch. It had two somewhat smaller SRBs, but the total load of solid fuel was only a little less than an Ares I SRB, and various other aspects were broadly similar. The debris cloud generated in that accident was half a kilometre across within about 3 seconds, and about 5 km across within about 20 seconds.

But that analysis discovered a much more serious problem, one that nobody had noticed. The big problem is that much of that debris is big chunks of flaming solid fuel, still burning at over 2000 °C. For an accident anywhere in that vulnerable period, Orion will be inside the blazing debris cloud for its whole descent. And its parachutes are nylon, which melts at about 200 °C. They will overheat and disintegrate, and the capsule will crash.

You can imagine the headlines. Even though there’s only a 0.3 percent chance of this ever actually happening, that’s too much for NASA’s safety folks. And there’s not much they can do about it, short of – and this is a serious suggestion – replacing the chute with a fold-out helicopter blade.

Otherwise, it looks like something less colossal with liquid fuel instead of the solid kind will be the only way up.

Entered on 24 July 2009 at 6:12 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

The Crocodillo

I can’t figure out why something like this wouldn’t have survived pretty much anything. National Geographic reports on the discovery of an armored, omnivorous, desert-dwelling armadillo-crocodile:

Dubbed Armadillosuchus arrudai, the newly described species of crocodile roamed the arid interior of Brazil about 90 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous period, scientists said.

…

And “the strangeness did not stop there,” Thiago Marinho, a paleontologist with the Federal University, added in an email. “This crocodyliform could [chew] like mammals do, like we do.”

Most modern crocs simply use their powerful jaws to clamp down on their prey. But the fossil crocodile could move its lower jaw forward and backward, using its teeth to tear into dried meat, roots, pine branches, and mollusks, Marinho said.

Apparently the 6.6-foot-long beastie could burrow like an armadillo, possibly to hide from other prehistoric killing machines, or possibly because that’s the only way it could have gotten a good soak.

You can read more about Armadillosuchus arrudai (the armadillo-like sphagesaurid) at Science Direct.

Entered on 23 July 2009 at 18:43 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: Like Salamanders Do

SONG: “Like Salamanders Do” _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Regenerated legs no big trick for salamanders”, Reuters, 1 July 2009, as used in the post “If salamanders can do it….”

ABSTRACT:
If someone was to walk up to me and offer to replace any body part of mine with a new version, I still think I’d say, “My heart. I need a new one.” Not just because of the cardiomyopathy, either (although really, it’s hard for me to conceptualize the physical problems without the emotional history). A blastema is, if you’ve forgotten, the layer of cells that grows over a wound and eventually shapes itself into a replacement limb.

I spent last weekend in Miami, and there’s a certain genre of music that you still always hear in the chic eateries. It hasn’t changed much, even though over the last decade the restaurants with the lychee-grilled mahi-mahi and disturbing martini menus have mostly moved from South Beach to the Design District. It’s a kind of techno jazz thing with lots of reverb and vaguely Latin rhythms. This song isn’t that genre at all (I don’t think the cool Miami sound has room for lyrics like “my cells were embryonic” or “not maudlin, but modular”), but a lot of the parts kind of came out of it. If you’re going to sing optimistically about growing your heart back, it seems like that kind of music is the way to do it. I suppose I should have been using more drums and a guitar, but instead I stuck with the ukulele. Sounded right. Hope you like it.

Entered on 23 July 2009 at 6:48 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Wolfe on the Space Race

That fella who wrote The Right Stuff got into the New York Times this week and allowed to do a little ranting about the big picture of humans in space:

Unfortunately, NASA couldn’t present as its spokesman and great philosopher a former high-ranking member of the Nazi Wehrmacht with a heavy German accent.

As a result, the space program has been killing time for 40 years with a series of orbital projects … Skylab, the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission, the International Space Station and the space shuttle. These programs have required a courage and engineering brilliance comparable to the manned programs that preceded them. But their purpose has been mainly to keep the lights on at the Kennedy Space Center and Houston’s Johnson Space Center — by removing manned flight from the heavens and bringing it very much down to earth. The shuttle program, for example, was actually supposed to appeal to the public by offering orbital tourist rides, only to end in the Challenger disaster, in which the first such passenger, Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher, perished.

The whole piece is a little full-steam-ahead and kind of cranky-sounding, but I can’t shake the feeling he’s telling the truth. NASA needs philosophers.

Entered on 22 July 2009 at 6:18 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print