31 janeiro 2015
Yellow Balls in W33
Infrared wavelengths of 3.6, 8.0, and 24.0 microns observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope are mapped into visible colors red, green, and blue in this striking image. The cosmic cloud of gas and dust is W33, a massive starforming complex some 13,000 light-years distant, near the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. So what are all those yellow balls? Citizen scientists of the web-based Milky Way Project found the features they called yellow balls as they scanned many Spitzer images and persistently asked that question of researchers. Now there is an answer. The yellow balls in Spitzer images are identified as an early stage of massive star formation. They appear yellow because they are overlapping regions of red and green, the assigned colors that correspond to dust and organic molecules known as PAHs at Spitzer wavelengths. Yellow balls represent the stage before newborn massive stars clear out cavities in their surrounding gas and dust and appear as green-rimmed bubbles with red centers in the Spitzer image. Of course, the astronomical crowdsourcing success story is only part of the Zooniverse. The Spitzer image spans 0.5 degrees or about 100 light-years at the estimated distance of W33.
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swoilli:interesting-linkz: What Kind of Tumblr Blogger Are...
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snowclouds over the great lakes, photographed by goes-13, 28th...
snowclouds over the great lakes, photographed by goes-13, 28th january 2015.
11 images, 10am-1pm central standard time. notice clouds blowing east off lake huron.
image credit: noaa/nasa. animation: ageofdestruction.
age
"By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation,..."
“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”
- Confucius (551–479 BCE)
- Confucius (551–479 BCE)
GO HERE —>...
GO HERE —> http://ift.tt/17cYJxE to check out 6 brilliant online psychology courses you can do for free.
January 31st 1606: Guy Fawkes executedOn this day in 1606, Guy...
The Discovery of the Gunpowder Plot by Henry Perronet Briggs
The execution of Guy Fawkes
January 31st 1606: Guy Fawkes executed
On this day in 1606, Guy Fawkes (or Guido Fawkes) was executed for plotting against the British Parliament and King James I. Fawkes was born in York in 1570 and soon converted to Catholicism, which prompted him to fight in the Thirty Years’ War on the side of Catholic Spain against Protestant Dutch reformers. His Catholic zeal led to his involvement with Robert Catesby in England, who planned to assassinate King James I and restore a Catholic monarchy by blowing up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament. The group leased an undercroft beneath the House of Lords and stockpiled gunpowder there. The authorities were alerted by an anonymous letter and arrested Fawkes, who was guarding the explosives, on 5th November 1605. He was questioned and tortured until he divulged the details of the Catesby plot against the monarchy - Fawkes’s signature on his confession is a barely-evident scrawl after his long torture. Fawkes and his co-conspirators were hanged in Westminster, London on January 31st 1606 in front of jeering spectators. The failure of the plot is commemorated in England every November 5th; this tradition began soon after the original plot and was even enshrined in law until 1859.
SMAP Takes to the Skies
A United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket with the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observatory onboard is seen in this long exposure photograph as it launches from Space Launch Complex 2, Saturday, Jan. 31, 2015, Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. SMAP is NASA’s first Earth-observing satellite designed to collect global observations of surface soil moisture and its freeze/thaw state. SMAP will provide high resolution global measurements of soil moisture from space. The data will be used to enhance scientists' understanding of the processes that link Earth's water, energy, and carbon cycles. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
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FREE ON KINDLE TODAY!Classic Insights into Life and Human...
FREE ON KINDLE TODAY!
Classic Insights into Life and Human Behavior:* (Timeless Psychology Book 1) See following links.
http://ift.tt/1JTakjj or http://ift.tt/1JTajf8 (UK)
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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.
ON THIS DAY IN THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY (31st January 1969)Neal...
ON THIS DAY IN THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY (31st January 1969)
Neal E. Miller’s classic article on biofeedback “Learning of Visceral and Glandular Responses" was published in the prestigious journal Science.
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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.
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thekidshouldseethis:Small Circuits! This is one of the many...
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?
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
interesting-linkz:swoilli: interesting-linkz: What Kind of...
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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
Decoding sugar addiction Together, obesity and Type 2 diabetes...
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.
neuromorphogenesis:Hacking The Brain Abuse of these mind hacking...
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
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.’
"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)
- John Adams, in a letter to Jonathan Jackson (October 2, 1780)
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.
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.
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29 janeiro 2015
ON THIS DAY IN THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY (30th January...
ON THIS DAY IN THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY (30th January 1863)
Joseph Jastrow was born.
GO HERE —> http://ift.tt/1eWNk1f for free psychology information & resources.
Close Encounter with M44
On Monday, January 26, well-tracked asteroid 2004 BL86 made its closest approach, a mere 1.2 million kilometers from our fair planet. That's about 3.1 times the Earth-Moon distance or 4 light-seconds away. Moving quickly through Earth's night sky, it left this streak in a 40 minute long exposure on January 27 made from Piemonte, Italy. The remarkably pretty telescopic field of view includes M44, also known as the Beehive or Praesepe star cluster in Cancer. Of course, its close encounter with M44 is only an apparent one, with the cluster nearly along the same line-of-sight to the near-earth asteroid. The actual distance between star cluster and asteroid is around 600 light-years. Still, the close approach to planet Earth allowed detailed radar imaging from NASA's Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California and revealed the asteroid to have its own moon.
from NASA http://ift.tt/1uDIdf4
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Seeing is not remembering People may have to “turn...
People may have to “turn on” their memories in order to remember even the simplest details of an experience, according to Penn State psychologists. This finding, which has been named “attribute amnesia,” indicates that memory is far more selective than previously thought.
"It is commonly believed that you will remember specific details about the things you’re attending to, but our experiments show that this is not necessarily true," said Brad Wyble, assistant professor of psychology. "We found that in some cases, people have trouble remembering even very simple pieces of information when they do not expect to have to remember them."
Wyble and Hui Chen, postdoctoral fellow in psychology, tested the memories of 100 undergraduate students, divided into several groups. Each group performed a variation of the experiment in order to replicate the results for different kinds of information, such as numbers, letters or colors.
In each trial participants were shown four characters on a screen arranged in a square — for example three numbers and one letter — and were told that they would need to report which corner the letter was in. After a set amount of time, the characters disappeared from the screen and the participants reported where they remembered the letter had been. This part of the task was expected to be easy — participants rarely made an error.
After repeating this simple task numerous times, the participant was asked an unexpected question in order to probe the memory for the very information used to find the letter’s location. Four letters appeared on the screen and the participant was asked to identify which one had appeared on the previous screen. Only 25 percent of the participants identified the correct letter — the same percentage as would be expected to randomly guess it.
Similar results were obtained when participants were asked to locate odd numbers, even numbers and colors.
"This result is surprising because traditional theories of attention assume that when a specific piece of information is attended, that information is also stored in memory and therefore participants should have done better on the surprise memory test," said Wyble.
Chen and Wyble have called the phenomenon they observed attribute amnesia, as they reported in an article recently published online in the journal Psychological Science. Attribute amnesia occurs when a person uses a piece of information to perform a task, but is then unable to report specifically what that information was as little as one second later.
"The information we asked them about in the surprise question was important, because we had just asked them to use it," said Chen. "It was not irrelevant to the task they were given."
After the surprise trial, the same question was repeated on the next trial, however it was no longer a surprise. Participants did dramatically better with the average of correct answers between 65 and 95 percent across the different experiments.
The researchers point out that this result suggests that people’s expectations play an important role in determining what they remember, even for information they are specifically using.
"It seems like memory is sort of like a camcorder," said Wyble. "If you don’t hit the ‘record’ button on the camcorder, it’s not going to ‘remember’ what the lens is pointed at. But if you do hit the ‘record’ button — in this case, you know what you’re going to be asked to remember — then the information is stored."
Wyble and Chen argue that this selective memory storage might be a useful adaptation because it prevents the brain from remembering information that is probably not important. The researchers plan to continue this line of research as they study whether people are aware of their own lack of memory.
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