ON THIS DAY IN THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY (11th February 1916)
Bernice Levin Neugarten was born.
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10 fevereiro 2015
An Extremely Long Filament on the Sun
Yesterday, the Sun exhibited one of the longest filaments ever recorded. It may still be there today. Visible as the dark streak just below the center in the featured image, the enormous filament extended across the face of the Sun a distance even longer than the Sun's radius -- over 700,000 kilometers. A filament is actually hot gas held aloft by the Sun's magnetic field, so that viewed from the side it would appear as a raised prominence. The featured image shows the filament in light emitted by hydrogen and therefore highlights the Sun's chromosphere. Sun-following telescopes including NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) are tracking this unusual feature, with SDO yesterday recording a spiraling magnetic field engulfing it. Since filaments typically last only from hours to days, parts of this one may collapse or erupt at any time, either returning hot plasma back to the Sun or expelling it into the Solar System. Is the filament still there? You can check by clicking on SDO's current solar image.
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The Attention Machine Human attention isn’t stable, ever, and...
Human attention isn’t stable, ever, and it costs us: lives lost when drivers space out, billions of dollars wasted on inefficient work, and mental disorders that hijack focus. Much of the time, people don’t realize they’ve stopped paying attention until it’s too late. This “flight of the mind,” as Virginia Woolf called it, is often beyond conscious control.
So researchers at Princeton set out to build a tool that could show people what their brains are doing in real time, and signal the moments when their minds begin to wander. And they’ve largely succeeded, a paper published today in the journal Nature Neuroscience reports. The scientists who invented this attention machine, led by professor Nick Turk-Browne, are calling it a “mind booster.” It could, they say, change the way we think about paying attention—and even introduce new ways of treating illnesses like depression.
Here’s how the brain decoder works: You lie down in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI)—similar to the MRI machines used to diagnose diseases—which lets scientists track brain activity. Once you’re in the scanner, you watch a series of pictures and press a button when you see certain targets. The task is like a video game—the dullest video game in the world, really, which is the point. You see a face, overlaid atop an image of a landscape. Your job is to press a button if the face is female, as it is 90 percent of the time, but not if it’s male. And ignore the landscape. (There’s also a reverse task, in which you’re asked to judge whether the scene is outside or inside, and ignore the faces.)
To gauge attention from the brain, the researchers used a learning algorithm like the one Facebook uses to recognize friends’ photos. The algorithm can discern “Your Brain On Faces” versus “Your Brain On Scenes.” Whenever you start spacing out, it detects more “scene” than “face” in your brain signal, and tells the program to make the faces you are watching grow dimmer. In turn, you have to focus harder to figure out what you’re seeing, and to succeed at the “game.” In the Princeton face-scene game, college students made errors 30 percent of the time.
If this were a test, they would have gotten a D.
“Internal states are kind of ineffable,” says Turk-Browne, an associate professor of psychology at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. “You may not know when you’re in a good or bad state. We wanted to see: If we give people feedback before they make mistakes, can they learn to be more sensitive to their own internal states?”
It turns out they can, Turk-Browne says. The key is that, for some subjects, the pictures were controlled not by their own brains, but by someone else’s: meaningless jitter. Of the 16 subjects who got their own brain feedback, 11 said they felt they were making the pictures clearer by focusing, as opposed to four of 16 who watched the placebo feedback. What the scientists found is that only people whose own brains drove the images’ dimming improved their ability to focus. Paying attention, in other words, is like learning basketball or French: Good old-fashioned practice matters.
“I think what’s exciting about this finding,” explains Turk-Browne, “is the idea that certain aspects of cognition like attention are only partly consciously accessible. So, if we can directly access people’s mental states with real time fMRI, we can give them more information than they could get from their own mind.”
suck-err:riverplants: foods dangerous to dogs: avocadoes alcohol raw bread...
suck-err:riverplants: foods dangerous to dogs: avocadoes alcohol raw bread...
solar corona, photographed by stereo a, 5th march 2014.38 images...
solar corona, photographed by stereo a, 5th march 2014.
38 images over 19 hours. the dots you can see moving left-to-right at the end of the gif are background stars.
thanks to infinity-imagined for reminding me the gif size limit has been upped to 2mb.
image credit: nasa/stereo. animation: ageofdestruction.
age
pbstv:They are poets, playwrights, novelists and scholars who...
They are poets, playwrights, novelists and scholars who left their mark on the literary world forever –– 10 black authors everyone should read.
Who would make your list?
Psychology Fortune Cookie: The Spotlight Effect!Studying...
Psychology Fortune Cookie: The Spotlight Effect!
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Meet The Scientist Who Never Sleeps
An infectious disease researcher named Eve has made a surprising discovery—a compound named TNP-470 that stops tumors from growing also shows promise in fighting malaria.
It’s an important early-stage drug development find. Around 200 million people suffer from malaria around the world and half a million die from it every year. But this isn’t a story about TNP-470; it’s about Eve.
The scientist worked day and night in a University of Manchester lab in the UK to uncover this promising lead. To link the compound with a new disease target takes a lot of mind-numbing, repetitive tasks from the earliest stages of work. Either in a lab experiment or on a computer, compounds are run through initial tests to see if they might do something useful against a disease. All those that might show promise, which could be in the thousands or millions of experimental compounds, are then tested again in a mass screening. Some will appear to do something useful against the disease; others that must be weeded out will offer false positives. This subset is then retested to confirm the results.
Hurdles continue to be thrown at candidate compounds and the reject list expands until just one really promising molecule remains. This long process is part of the reason why it can take more than 10 years and $1 billion to develop a new drug.
But Eve didn’t care about all the work that goes into the basic research behind drug discovery. And she sped up the discovery curve as she worked, learning from early tests to do better in later ones. When the sun went down and other researchers went home for the evening, the scientist kept working. She didn’t take a break to get caffeinated, or even to turn the lights on. That’s because Eve is a robot, with arms to manipulate samples and advanced instruments to analyze them, that learns as it processes compounds through complex artificial intelligence.
Mr. UncleanSenator Tillis is against basic sanitation.(From The...
The Daily Show
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Mr. Unclean
Senator Tillis is against basic sanitation.
(From The Daily Show)
Hubble Sees A Smiling Lens
In the center of this image, taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is the galaxy cluster SDSS J1038+4849 — and it seems to be smiling. You can make out its two orange eyes and white button nose. In the case of this “happy face”, the two eyes are very bright galaxies and the misleading smile lines are actually arcs caused by an effect known as strong gravitational lensing. Galaxy clusters are the most massive structures in the Universe and exert such a powerful gravitational pull that they warp the spacetime around them and act as cosmic lenses which can magnify, distort and bend the light behind them. This phenomenon, crucial to many of Hubble’s discoveries, can be explained by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. In this special case of gravitational lensing, a ring — known as an Einstein Ring — is produced from this bending of light, a consequence of the exact and symmetrical alignment of the source, lens and observer and resulting in the ring-like structure we see here. Hubble has provided astronomers with the tools to probe these massive galaxies and model their lensing effects, allowing us to peer further into the early Universe than ever before. This object was studied by Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) as part of a survey of strong lenses. A version of this image was entered into the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures image processing competition by contestant Judy Schmidt. Image Credit: NASA/ESA Caption: ESA > More information and image products
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Great cartoon about the virtue of modesty by Alex Noriega via...
Great cartoon about the virtue of modesty by Alex Noriega via http://www.snotm.com/
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