IdeaFestival

Robots roam Eden

Having spent a little less than a year studying the exposed rock layers in Victoria Crater (background), the Mars rover Opportunity recently climbed out and took a look back in this picture. The rover, along with its twin, Spirit, have been on the Red planet for 4 and a half years.

As pointed out by Paul Gilster, on Friday the robotic spacecraft Rosetta maneuvered past the asteroid Šteins, which served as a reference point for mission control as the craft ventured into the asteroid belt located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Rosetta is on its way to comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Beginning in 2014, it will be the first craft to undertake the long term exploration of a comet at close quarters, and will deliver a lander, called Philae (this image has been my Macbook desktop for a while now), to the comet's surface. For the next year as the comet hurtles sunward and the lander does its work, Rosetta will orbit both bodies and return science to Earth.

Why land on a comet? Cometary formation is coincidental with the development of our solar system, estimated at 4.6 billion years old. The spacecraft will provide scientists with a view to an epoch when no planets existed and only a vast swarm of asteroids and comets surrounded our star.

Pictures from the Steins' flyby will be streamed beginning Sept. 6. The newly-created Rosetta blog is here.

Wayne

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Artist's impression: ESA, image by AOES Medialab

Wikipedia: Rosetta Stone

Seeing Memories to Come

In the course of procedures to prepare epilepsy patients for surgery, medical science has for the first time mapped mental time travel, recording the firing of individual cells responsible for recall. The understanding of the responsible biology may eventually lead to help for sufferers of dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

In this case epilepsy patients were asked to watch a series of brief video clips. Then:

After briefly distracting the patients, the researchers then asked them to think about the clips for a minute and to report 'what comes to mind.' The patients remembered almost all of the clips. And when they recalled a specific one — say, a clip of Homer Simpson — the same cells that had been active during the Homer clip reignited. In fact, the cells became active a second or two before people were conscious of the memory, which signaled to researchers the memory to come.

The discoveries are being reported today in the journal Science, according to the New York Times.

Wayne

Biology of stress: ouch

Scientific American: stress is bad for you. Speaking of Faith follows up on that idea:

After the discovery of antibiotics, a new assumption arose that treatment of infectious or inflammatory disease requires only the elimination of the foreign organism or agent that triggers the illness. In the rush to discover antibiotics and drugs that cure specific infections and diseases, the fact that the body's own responses can influence susceptibility to disease and its course was largely ignored by medical researchers....

SEED profiles "revolutionary minds" working between sciences

Covering young pioneers in emerging scientific fields such as immunocomputing, stochastic biology, genetic acculturation, neuroarchaeology and astronomical medicine, SEED Magazine is running a terrific piece on how science increasingly "hybridizes" multiple fields of study, how insight so often happens between fields of study.

Seeing the article about how the concept of information is under new scrutiny because of insights derived from the study of the immune system brought to mind recent experiments confirming that "information" travels faster than the previous limit - the speed of light - between entangled particles hundreds of kilometers apart. 

SEED is also, of course, home to one of my favorite science writers, Jonah Lehrer, who will be at the IdeaFestival this month.

Wayne

"The Mind and Brain," part two

The very latest podcast, featuring part two of Jeffrey Schwartz's "The Mind and the Brain," is out at iTunes. As always, you may get IF podcasts on the front page of IdeaFestival web site or by taking take the podcast feed. If you're wondering, a brief description of the difference between the two the mind and the brain is here.

Wayne

Storing memories: Building the two-wheeled brain

This is a first as far as I know. Researchers at the University of Reading have created a primitive biological brain from artificially cultured biological neurons and connected it to a diminutive two-wheeled robot. The goal? To understand how the brain stores specific information and how recall functions. Roland Piquepaille:

'The robot’s biological brain is made up of cultured neurons which are placed onto a multi electrode array (MEA). The MEA is a dish with approximately 60 electrodes which pick up the electrical signals generated by the cells. This is then used to drive the movement of the robot. Every time the robot nears an object, signals are directed to stimulate the brain by means of the electrodes. In response, the brain’s output is used to drive the wheels of the robot, left and right, so that it moves around in an attempt to avoid hitting objects. The robot has no additional control from a human or a computer, its sole means of control is from its own brain.'

By studying how memories are processed, researchers hope, among many other things, to understand how people afflicted by Alzheimer’s disease might be helped.

The University of Reading's School of System's Engineering has the original news, a picture of the robot and a video interview with the researchers. As might be expected, the post on Piquepaille's blog has drawn over 70 comments.

Wayne

All Doped up and Thinking ahead

SEED editor Jonah Lehrer, who will be at the IdeaFestival in September, has written often and thoughtfully about the wonders of the human brain in his blog, Frontal Cortex, and in particular - my favorite topic - about how we as sense-making beings can - or cannot - know.

In his latest full length article, "New State of Mind," Lehrer again connects knowing to biology, describing research linking dopamine to pleasure and to a host of social behaviors that result, from simple disappointment to stock market bubbles.

Connecting pleasure to understanding is one reason play in general, and game design in particular, has emerged as a valuable economic and intellectual pursuit. He should really sit down at IF and have a long discussion with alternative reality game designer Jane McGonigal, who will also attend.

Read Montague is director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab at Baylor College of Medicine, and collaborates with Peter Dayan of the Salk Institute. More than discovering the link between pleasure and understanding, current neurology goes further and demonstrates how we use the resulting that data to extend that understanding.

Lehrer:

The crucial feature of these dopamine neurons, say Montague and Dayan, is that they are more concerned with predicting rewards than with the rewards themselves. Once the cells memorize the simple pattern — a loud tone predicts the arrival of juice — they become exquisitely sensitive to variations on the pattern. If the cellular predictions proved correct and the primates experienced a surge of dopamine, the prediction was reinforced. However, if the pattern was violated — if the tone sounded but the juice never arrived — then the monkey’s dopamine neurons abruptly decreased their firing rate. This is known as the “prediction error signal.” The monkey got upset because its predictions of juice were wrong.

What’s interesting about this system is that it’s all about expectation. Dopamine neurons constantly generate patterns based upon experience: If this, then that. The cacophony of reality is distilled into models of correlation.

"Models of correlation" are only a couple of sentences away from something else. On this reading, story takes those correlative values and arranges them in a meaningful way. 

Story is the human-readable data we pull around our shoulders on a cold winter night when things haven't gone as expected. When the doctor has bad news. Or when we watch a loved one slipping toward the unknown.

Alternatively, it can map how we might overcome impossible odds to reach previously unattainable goals, or, thoughtfully conceived, take us to places and people that thrill and make life worth the living. Story can get the past wrong. But it can also get the future oh so right.

Wayne

At the bottom of the Earth, extreme life

Using autonomous submarines, researchers are planning very dives deep into the Cayman Trench in the Caribbean to study one of the least explored areas of Earth's inner space, the volcanic vents that lie at the bottom. According to Roland Piquepaille, they believe they will find brand new life forms with unusual chemistries - sometimes called "extromophiles" - and that one of every two species encountered will be entirely new to science.

Wayne

Magicians: Neurologists!

Proving once again that innovation can come from anywhere, the conjunction between magic and neuroscience has of late been quite productive. Boston Globe:

In the past year... a few researchers have begun to realize that magic represents... a deep and untapped store of knowledge about the human mind.

At a major conference last year in Las Vegas, in a scientific paper published last week and another due out this week, psychologists have argued that magicians, in their age-old quest for better ways to fool people, have been engaging in cutting-edge, if informal, research into how we see and comprehend the world around us. Just as studying the mechanisms of disease reveals the workings of our body's defenses, these psychologists believe that studying the ways a talented magician can short-circuit our perceptual system will allow us to better grasp how the system is put together.

'I think magicians and cognitive neuroscientists are getting at similar questions, but while neuroscientists have been looking at this for a few decades, magicians have been looking at this for centuries, millennia probably,' says Susana Martinez-Conde, a neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute and coauthor of one of the studies, published online last week in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 'What magicians do is light-years ahead in terms of sophistication and the power of these techniques.' (hyperlink added)

If you're interested in experiencing that short-circuited perception for yourself, catch Teller, who will be at the IdeaFestival in September. Individual and all-access passes are available now.

Wayne

Lakeside on Titan

This is an artist's conception of the only known body besides Earth with liquid water on the surface, Titan. Cassini scientists have concluded that at least one of the large lakes observed on Saturn's moon contains liquid hydrocarbons, and have positively identified ethane.

Wayne

Image credit: NASA/JPL