30 janeiro 2015

A Night at Poker Flat



Four NASA suborbital sounding rockets leapt into the night on January 26, from the University of Alaska's Poker Flat Research Range. This time lapse composite image follows all four launches of the small, multi-stage rockets to explore winter's mesmerizing, aurora-filled skies. During the exposures, stars trailed around the North Celestial Pole, high above the horizon at the site 30 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska. Lidar, beams of pulsed green lasers, also left traces through the scene. Operating successfully, the payloads lofted were two Mesosphere-Lower Thermosphere Turbulence Experiments (M-TeX) and two Mesospheric Inversion-layer Stratified Turbulence (MIST) experiments, creating vapor trails at high altitudes to be tracked by ground-based observations.



from NASA http://ift.tt/1LoEhJN

via IFTTT
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thekidshouldseethis:Small Circuits! This is one of the many...





thekidshouldseethis:



Small Circuits! This is one of the many wonderfully-presented lessons from Harvard’s Fundamentals of Neuroscience free and open online course (or MOOC). While the video’s terminology can be technical at times, the simple presentation style and painterly illustrations by Grace Helmer help translate each idea in a very approachable way.


So, how do neurons integrate signals in small circuits?


Watch the video.



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Source for more facts follow NowYouKno





Source for more facts follow NowYouKno


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Source for more facts follow NowYouKno





Source for more facts follow NowYouKno


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Anyone interested in food history? Learn a little about kichari (or khichari, or keecharee,...

Anyone interested in food history? Learn a little about kichari (or khichari, or keecharee, or…) one of the most basic Indian dishes over at historical-nonfiction.com


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Lots of new facts and photosets coming soon, thank you for following nowyoukno on tumblr!

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What's the weirdest conspiracy theory you ever heard of?

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movie:Disney Movie Facts! More movie facts

























movie:



Disney Movie Facts! More movie facts



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interesting-linkz:swoilli: interesting-linkz: What Kind of...





interesting-linkz:



swoilli:



interesting-linkz:





literally me the rest of the night, just clicking every link like




More links for later/future reference! Compiled everything for everyone




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clouds over the pacific northwest, photographed by goes-13, 25th...









clouds over the pacific northwest, photographed by goes-13, 25th january 2015.


12 images, photographed noon to 3pm pst. i’m not sure - it might just be sunlight glancing off high cloud - but is that lightning at far right? (just above the “british columbia” label).


image credit: noaa/nasa. animation: ageofdestruction.


age
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Source for more facts follow NowYouKno





Source for more facts follow NowYouKno


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Collective Forgetting - The Forgotten Collections at the Smithsonian and the Curating Crisis

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Citrus! There Are Benefits

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Decoding sugar addiction Together, obesity and Type 2 diabetes...





Decoding sugar addiction


Together, obesity and Type 2 diabetes rank among our nation’s greatest health problem, and they largely result from what many call an “addiction” to sugar. But solving this problem is more complicated than solving drug addiction, because it requires reducing the drive to eat unhealthy foods without affecting the desire to eat healthy foods when hungry.


In a new paper in Cell, neuroscientists at MIT have untangled these two processes in mice and shown that inhibiting a previously unknown brain circuit that regulates compulsive sugar consumption does not interfere with healthy eating.


“For the first time, we have identified how the brain encodes compulsive sugar seeking and we’ve also shown that it appears to be distinct from normal, adaptive eating,” says senior author Kay Tye, a principle investigator at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory who previously developed novel techniques for studying brain circuitry in addiction and anxiety. “We need to study this circuit in more depth, but our ultimate goal is to develop safe, noninvasive approaches to avert maladaptive eating behaviors, first in mice and eventually in people.”


Drug addiction is defined as compulsive drug-seeking despite adverse consequences at school, work, or home. Addictive drugs “hijack” the brain’s the natural reward-processing center, the ventral tegmental area (VTA). But food is a natural reward and, unlike a drug, is necessary for survival, so it has been unclear whether overeating results from a similar compulsion, or from something else.


“This study represents, in my opinion, an outstanding step forward in understanding the many intricate aspects of feeding behaviors,” says Antonello Bonci, scientific director at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who was not involved with the research. “While there have been many excellent studies in the past, looking at the compulsive drive of substance-use disorders, this is the first time that a study goes very deeply and comprehensively into the same aspects for compulsive feeding behavior. From a translational perspective, the extraordinary multidisciplinary approach used in this study produced a very exciting finding: that compulsive sugar consumption is mediated by a different neural circuit than physiological, healthy eating.”


For the study, Tye and her graduate student Edward Nieh focused on the connections between the VTA and the lateral hypothalamus (LH), which controls feeding. But because the LH also controls diverse other behaviors and connects to multiple other brain regions, no one had yet isolated a feeding and reward-processing circuit. Tye and Nieh first identified and characterized just the LH neurons that connect to the VTA and recorded their naturally occurring activities in brain slices, with the help of Gillian Matthews, before moving to animal experiments. Electrodes recorded the activity of these identified neurons during animal behaviors.


Mice naturally love sucrose — similar to humans loving sugar-rich sodas — so Nieh trained mice to seek out sucrose at a delivery port upon hearing and seeing a cue. After the mice learned to predict a sucrose reward upon cue, he randomly withheld the reward about half the time — a bitter disappointment. Other times, the mice unexpectedly received a sucrose reward without any predictive cue — a sweet surprise. This difference between the expectation and the experience is called the reward-prediction error.


The neural recordings showed that one type of LH neurons connecting to the VTA only became active after the animal had learned to seek a sucrose reward, whether or not it actually received the reward. Another set of LH neurons, upon receiving feedback from the VTA, encoded the response to the reward or to its omission.


Next, Nieh worked with an MD/PhD student in Tye’s lab, Stephen Allsop, to modify mice so that the LH-VTA neural projections carried light-sensitive proteins that can activate or silence neurons with pulses of light, a method called optogenetics. Activating the projections led to compulsive sucrose-eating and increased overeating in mice that were full. Inactivating this pathway reduced the compulsive sucrose-seeking that resembles addiction, but did not prevent mice that were hungry from eating regular chow. “That was exciting because we have the recording data to show how this compulsive sugar-seeking happens,” Nieh says, “and we can drive or suppress just the compulsive behavior by making very precise changes in the neural circuit.”


“Addiction researchers have hypothesized that the transition from actions to habits to compulsion is the path to addiction formation, but exactly where and how this happens in the brain has been a mystery,” says Tye, who is also the Whitehead Career Development Assistant Professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “Now we have evidence showing that this transition is represented in the LH-VTA circuit.”


Nieh, working with Matthews, a postdoc in the Tye lab, also showed that the LH neurons send a mix of excitatory (glutamate) and inhibitory (GABA) signals to the VTA. But contrary to expectation, it was the inhibitory signals, not the excitatory ones, that triggered the feeding activity in the mice. When GABA projections alone were activated, the mice behaved bizarrely, gnawing on the bottom of the cage and pantomiming the motions of bringing a food nugget to the mouth and chewing it. (They had been fed, so they were not hungry.) “We think the glutamatergic projections regulate the role of the GABAergic projections, directing what’s appropriate to gnaw on,” Nieh says. “Both components must work together to get meaningful feeding signals.”


“This is very important for the field, because this is something we did not know before,” Bonci says, “and bears the potential to revolutionize the way we approach treatment for compulsive overeating.”


The researchers also characterized the heterogeneous neurons on the receiving end of these projections in the VTA. Each subset of LH neurons connects with dopamine- and GABA-producing neurons in the VTA. The lab is now investigating how feeding and sucrose-seeking behaviors differ based on the target neuron type.


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neuromorphogenesis:Hacking The Brain Abuse of these mind hacking...





































neuromorphogenesis:



Hacking The Brain


Abuse of these mind hacking drugs is one of the fastest growing problems of our generation. As long as doctors keep prescribing these harmful drugs to too many youngsters the problem will continue to grow. Although some children really do need these drugs to function regularly, my personal opinion is that the requirements and potency of these drugs should wait until the patient is of age – the same as tobacco or alcohol. The availability of these drugs to young Americans needs to diminish if the trend of usage wants to decrease.


- By AllTreatment



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Seeing is Not RememberingGO HERE —>...





Seeing is Not Remembering



GO HERE —> http://ift.tt/1JUtcOW to read an interesting article about research into ‘attribute amnesia.’


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"There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties, each arranged..."

“There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader and converting measures in opposition to each other.”



- John Adams, in a letter to Jonathan Jackson (October 2, 1780)
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January 30th 1649: Charles I executedOn this day in 1649, King...



Charles I of England (1600-1649)





The execution of Charles I



January 30th 1649: Charles I executed


On this day in 1649, King Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland was executed in London aged 48. He was born in 1600 the son of James VI of Scotland, who in 1603 became King James I of England and Ireland, in addition to Scotland, when Queen Elizabeth I died. Charles succeeded to the throne in 1625 when his father died, becoming the second Stuart monarch. Charles inherited from his father a firm belief in the divine right of kings to absolute rule, which led to conflict between the King and Parliament. These tensions lay in part due to debates over money and religion, with Charles’s Anglicanism alienating Puritans in England. Charles dissolved Parliament three times, and in 1629 resolved to rule the nation alone, without Parliament. During this period his actions appeared increasingly tyrannical, raising taxes and cracking down on Puritans and Catholics, leading to an exodus of the former to the American colonies. Personal rule ended when the King attempted to interfere with the Scottish Church, and had to restore Parliament to raise the funds to fight the Scottish. The English Civil War broke out in the last years of his reign, which pitted the crown against Parliament and occurred after he attempted to arrest members of Parliament. Charles’s Royalist supporters were defeated in 1646, and the King himself was eventually captured. The Parliamentarians, including general Oliver Cromwell, put the King on trial for treason, which resulted in his execution in 1649 outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall. The monarchy was then abolished, leading to the short-lived Commonwealth of England. A leading figure of this republic was Oliver Cromwell, though his rule as Lord Protector became increasingly authoritarian. Cromwell died of natural causes in September 1658, but on January 30th 1661, on the anniversary of Charles’s death, Cromwell’s remains were ritually executed. The monarchy was restored in 1660 with Charles’s son in power ruling as King Charles II.


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PSYCHOLOGY FRIDAY FREEBIEClassic Insights into Life and Human...





PSYCHOLOGY FRIDAY FREEBIE



Classic Insights into Life and Human Behavior: (Timeless Psychology Book 1) Free on kindle (January 30/31) See following links.


http://ift.tt/1JTakjj or http://ift.tt/1JTajf8 (UK)



If you live outside the USA/UK just type the title or B00K6TBUIG into the Amazon search box.



If you like psychology, you’ll love this collection of classic insights from the golden age of the discipline when the doctrine of inquiry was quite simply, if it’s interesting; study it and then write about it.



In this first volume you’ll learn about the machinery of the mind, great leaders, why we laugh, facts about dreams and whether it’s possible to perform arithmetic by the sole medium of imaginary smells!



Written by people who shared an unquenchable curiosity to gain a deeper understanding of human behavior, the timeless psychology series is perfect for psychology enthusiasts looking for something thoroughly engaging to read and ponder.


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