The Milky Way captured over Ussita in Marche, Italy by Alessio Andreani from London. The 27-year-old, who is originally from Loreto, Italy, says: "When I take photographs of the Milky Way and stare up at all those stars, it reminds me of just how tiny I am."
|
Adult obesity remains high across the U.S. Learn what you can do to get to a healthy weight. Obesity is a common, serious, and costly health issue that affects people in every state in the nation. New data show that at least 1 of 5 adults in every state has obesity. This condition is linked to some of the leading causes of death, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers. Obesity and the health problems it causes cost the U.S. health care system as much as $147 billion per year. States differ in their levels of obesity.The percentage of people with obesity varies from state to state, and the problem is worse in some parts of the country than in others. The percentage of people with obesity also varies by other factors, such as race and ethnicity. These differences may be partly due to difference in people's access to healthy foods and safe places to be physically active. Some Americans have less access to stores and markets that sell healthy, affordable food such as fruits and vegetables. Safe routes for walking or biking do not exist in some neighborhoods. Some communities do not have parks and recreation centers that people can get to easily.
Adults should aim for 150 minutes of moderate activity every week. All the US people can take actions to get to and stay at a healthy weight.Everyone can:
National, state, and local governments can:
http://www.cdc.gov/features/adult-obesity-us/
|
 A drug may be able to make it easier to learn a language, sharpen your memory and help those with dementia and Alzheimer's disease. (Stock image) Credit: © kenwnj / Fotolia Can you imagine a drug that would make it easier to learn a language, sharpen your memory and help those with dementia and Alzheimer's disease by rewiring the brain and keeping neurons alive? New Rutgers research published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that a drug -- RGFP966 -- administered to rats made them more attuned to what they were hearing, able to retain and remember more information, and develop new connections that allowed these memories to be transmitted between brain cells. "Memory-making in neurological conditions like Alzheimer's disease is often poor or absent altogether once a person is in the advanced stages of the disease," said Kasia M. Bieszczad, lead author and assistant professor in Behavioral and Systems Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology. "This drug could rescue the ability to make new memories that are rich in detail and content, even in the worst case scenarios." What happens with dementias such as Alzheimer's is that brain cells shrink and die because the synapses that transfer information from one neuron to another are no longer strong and stable. There is no therapeutic treatment available that reverses this situation. The drug being tested in this animal study is among a class known as HDAC inhibitors -- now being used in cancer therapies to stop the activation of genes that turn normal cells into cancerous ones. In the brain, the drug makes the neurons more plastic, better able to make connections and create positive changes that enhance memory. Researchers found that laboratory rats, taught to listen to a certain sound in order to receive a reward, and given the drug after training, remembered what they learned and responded correctly to the tone at a greater rate than those not given the drug. Scientists also found that the rodents were more "tuned in" to the relevant acoustic signals they heard during their training -- an important finding Bieszczad said because setting up the brain to better process and store significant sounds is critical to human speech and language. "People learning to speak again after a disease or injury as well as those undergoing cochlear implantation to reverse previous deafness, may be helped by this type of therapeutic treatment in the future," said Bieszczad "The application could even extend to people with delayed language learning abilities or people trying to learn a second language." This hypersensitivity in processing auditory information enabled the neurons to reorganize and create new pathways -- allowing more of the information they learned to become a long-term memory, said Bieszczad who collaborated with colleagues in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California Irvine. "People normally remember an experience with limited detail -- not everything we see, hear and feel is remembered," she said. "What has happened here is that memory becomes closer to a snapshot of the actual experience instead of being sparse, limited or inaccurate." Story Source: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Rutgers University.Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151002113548.htm |
Newsfeeds have been abuzz lately with discussions about the safety of Google’s self-driving cars. On the heels of the news that none of the autonomous vehicles were at fault in the motor vehicle ‘incidents’ they’ve been involved in, Google’s Self-Driving Car Project plans to free the cars from the confines of their test track and let them loose this summer on the streets of Mountain View, California. Well, sort of.
In a blog post, Chris Urmson, director of the Google Self-Driving Car Project, explains that the cars will head out onto the open road with a safety driver on board. One of the biggest goals of the self-driving car movement is to free up drivers to do other tasks instead of, well, driving. Google’s autonomous car, like many other emerging prototypes, still has a steering wheel and brakes so a human driver can take over if necessary, but the car’s ability to drive itself is ever-improving. In a press conference, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said the search engine giant’s self-driving vehicles are capable of recognizing police cars, joggers, hand signs from traffic cops, and the inevitable fact that “occasionally people make terrible decisions—turning right from the far left lane, for instance, or running a red light—and is on alert for them.” Related: Google unveils the first fully functional prototype of its self-driving car By putting the autonomous cars on the road, Google’s engineering team aims to learn even more about how the vehicles operate and play with other traditionally operated cars (i.e. human-driven cars), as well as the host of variables that drivers encounter on a daily basis. The team is also really keen on getting people excited about the technology, by allowing them to see and interact with the cars. From the announcement, it doesn’t appear that Google plans to roll out all 23 of the self-driving prototype cars—just “a few.” The models that will be tooling around Mountain View have “the same software that our existing fleet of self-driving Lexus RX450h SUVs uses,” according to Urmson’s blog post. “That fleet has logged nearly a million autonomous miles on the roads since we started the project, and recently has been self-driving about 10,000 miles a week. So the new prototypes already have lots of experience to draw on—in fact, it’s the equivalent of about 75 years of typical US adult driving experience.” I guess that explains why they haven’t been to blame for any of the accidents. Images via Google
http://inhabitat.com/googles-autonomous-cars-will-drive-themselves-around-mountain-view-this-summer/
|
| (The image above is a snapshot, not a video) A company called – wait for it – Robot Taxi has announced it will begin trials on autonomous taxi cabs in Japan next year. Fifty lucky residents of Kanagawa prefecture, just south of Tokyo, will be the first to ride the taxis of the future on round-trip journeys from their homes to local stores. And don’t worry, there will still be a human riding along in the driver’s seat during the test runs just in case the self-driving car gets into any trouble. Robot Taxi is optimistic about the trials and is aiming for a full commercial release of self-driving taxi service by 2020. The company will target areas that aren’t currently served by public transportation in an effort to close the gap and provide wider city access to people without cars, like tourists and the elderly. Robot Taxi’s two-minute ad, above, illustrates that idea, as it follows an empty robo-cab on its way to pick up an older couple from their home. The only question is, why are so many people waving at the empty taxi? Related: 6 Problems driverless cars will have to overcome Self-driving car technology is progressing like gangbusters, and now it really does seem like everyone has a horse in the race. Google’s already got self-driving cars on the streets of Mountain View, California. Uber is reportedly researching autonomous car technology, and even big car makers like Chevy and Hyundai are in on the game. Even Tesla has committed to producing a self-driving car by next year. Although it’s not clear what make of car the Robot Taxi will employ, one thing is quite certain: within just a few years, there will be a lot of driverless cars on the roadways. Via Engadget
http://inhabitat.com/japan-will-begin-testing-self-driving-cabs-next-year/ |
|
Posted: 01 Oct 2015 07:00 AM PDT Neil Leifer est un photographe américain né en 1942. Il a saisi de nombreux évènements de la société américaine. Sa photographie sportive est un de ses travaux les plus célèbres. Il a capturé les heures de gloire du sport américain. Des combats de Muhammad Ali aux matches de Michael Jordan en passant par le célèbre point levé des athlètes afro-américains Tommie Smith et John Carlos aux Jeux Olympiques de Mexico en 1968, tous ces instants figurent dans toutes les mémoires.
|
| The TruPosture smart shirt is designed to provide real-time posture feedback (Credit: Adela Health) Those who have suffered through any type of back pain know it's not a fun feeling. Given the amount of sedentary slouching at desks and/or strained hunkering over display screens done on a daily basis, it's a wonder that more people haven't been afflicted by the pinch of poor posture. Adela Health has just unveiled TruPosture, a shirt that's designed to help reduce back pain by improving the way we sit. Having just read the mention of posture, some of you may be finding yourselves sitting up a little straighter in your seats. And that's the idea behind TruPosture. This latest wearable features patented nano-sensors embedded within a machine-washable, breathable stretchy material. These sensors are designed to measure the spine's movement with an accuracy of half a degree, and then send real-time feedback as necessary to the user. When TruPosture detects an excess in slouching or leaning, it sends vibrations to the target area so the user knows where and how to sit straighter. And by sitting straighter, one may be less susceptible to back pain and fatigue. Physical monitoring and feedback is at the heart of wearables like the Sensoria smart running system, but instead of tracking typical fitness data, TruPosture focuses on core muscles and spine alignment. TruPosture also features Bluetooth connectivity, which transmits measured data to the free TruPosture app. Through the app (compatible with iOS, Android, and Windows devices), users can see a real-time graphical represenation of their spine as well as track individual progress. TruPosture also offers additional modes to help users improve postures for standing, stretching, or a custom activity. Those who want more coaching can switch the difficulty from beginner to intermediate or advanced. The TruPosture smart shirt is currently the subject of a US$50,0000 Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign. Backers will need to pledge $99 for a single TruPosture smart shirt, saving 50 percent off the planned retail price, and will be able to choose shirt style (men's or women's), size, and color. If production and quality assurance go according to schedule, backers can expect shipments of the TruPosture to start sometime in May, 2016. http://www.gizmag.com/truposture-smart-shirt/39682 Sources: Adela Health, Indiegogo
|
| Ice House is based on NASA's "follow the water" approach to exploration (Credit: Team Space Exploration Architecture and Clouds Architecture Office) NASA has announced the winners of its 3-D Printed Habitat Challenge Design Competition. The contest sought architectural concepts for how 3D printing might be used to create shelters on the Red Planet. The overall winner, Ice House, would be built using the planet's predicted abundant water supply. More than 165 submissions to the competition, which was launched in May, were received by NASA. The 3-D Printed Habitat Challenge, of which the design competition is part, is ultimately aimed at contributing towards the development of new technologies for additive manufacturing using "local indigenous materials" in space and on Earth. "The creativity and depth of the designs we’ve seen have impressed us," says NASA's Centennial Challenges Program Manager Monsi Roman. "These teams were not only imaginative and artistic with their entries, but they also really took into account the life-dependent functionality our future space explorers will need in an off-Earth habitat." Ice House was designed by Team Space Exploration Architecture, and Clouds Architecture Office. It is based on NASA's "follow the water" approach to exploration. As water is a means of sustaining life and ice a potential building material, the team opted to locate at Alba Mons in Mars' northern hemisphere, where it is believed sub-surface water ice is plentiful. The proposal uses a lander as the basis of the shelter, containing both private and communal interior spaces. Once in situ, it would deploy an inflatable ETFE membrane to create an interstitial environment between the outside of the capsule and the Mars atmosphere. Rovers would then extract water from the ice below the surface at Alba Mons and apply it to form a protective skin on the inside of the inflatable environment. Not only does the layer of ice provide protection from radiation in the outside atmosphere, it is also translucent and allows light into the habitat. By conditioning the environment within the inflatable section, it is proposed that the ice be kept frozen indefinitely and vegetation could be grown, which would help to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. The second place award of $15,000 went to Team Gamma, from architecture firm Foster + Partners. Its concept proposes using semi-autonomous robots to build a shelter using regolith (the loose soil and rocks found on the surface of Mars). Finally, third place honors went to Team LavaHive. It proposes using construction rovers with inflatable attachment sections as the basis for the shelter. Once inflated, the sections would be covered in "lava-casted" regolith to create a protective layer. This approach would be used to create a number of adjacent shelters with adjoining corridors. Teams were judged on many factors, including architectural concept, design approach, habitability, innovation, functionality, Mars site selection and 3D print constructability. The highest ranked 30 submissions, including the three winners, were displayed at the New York Maker Faire on Sunday, Sep. 27. Source: NASA
http://www.gizmag.com/nasa-3d-printed-habitat-challenge-design-competition-winners/39673
|
Based in Brazil, along with his human owner and at least eight pet birds, ‘Bob’ is a golden retriever and his best friends–a chubby hamster and eight birds. The owner of this cuddly group posts photos of the group under Instagram moniker ‘bob_goldenretriever’.
http://trenf.com/a-golden-retriever-8-birds-and-a-hamster-are-the-best-friends/
| A "connectome," or map of neural pathways and wires, of a human brain (Credit: Human Connectome Project) Our brains are wondrous, incredible machines. They're slower than the earliest personal computers in terms of raw processing power, yet capable of leaps of intuition and able to store a lifetime of memories that are cross-referenced and instantly-accessible at the slightest prompting. We know so very little about how they do these things, however. But imagine for a moment if we could build a complete wiring diagram of a human brain – to map in detail every one of the hundred trillion or so synapses and roughly hundred billion neurons together with all the tiniest supporting mechanisms. What might that mean, and would it even be possibl
Keep thinking about that. We'll come back to it in a bit. First let's cover some more background. The functioning of a healthy brain relies on its network of neuronal connections. Multiple layers of connections and pathways, like the wires of an old mainframe computer, all add up to a single entity. This network of connections has been called the "connectome" by scientists. To map it is essentially to build the brain's wiring diagram. The human brain connectome has not yet been fully mapped at the cellular or the macro (high-level structural and functional) scale, though efforts to do the latter are much further along than the former – which has only just even become possible (more on that later). Both avenues of connectome study promise all sorts of insights about how the brain works. The Human Connectome Project, which is an international effort to map the connectomes of 1,000 people on a macro scale – mostly just the white matter, or active myelinated (insulated) nerve cell bundles – using magnetic resonance imaging, this week announced its finding that brain wiring patterns correlate with behavioral and demographic traits. An fMRI-generated connectome of the human brain that shows active connections between neurons The study found that in a sample of 460 people aged between 22 and 35, people with more education, better physical endurance, above-average memory, and other "positive" traits seem to have more strongly-connected brains than people with "negative" traits such as smoking, aggressive behavior, or a history of drug use. The results don't indicate whether one causes the other, but they do show that connectivity patterns could one day help predict traits or offer broad indicators of the effect of drugs on the brain. It's all connectedJeff Lichtman is a professor at Harvard University. He's one of the world's leading researchers in neurobiology, which looks at the brain and nervous system of animals and humans in terms of its anatomy and physiology (i.e., its cells and tissues, and the way they function and are organized). And he runs Harvard'sLichtman Lab. His journey in the field started when he was taking a course on histology – the study of tissues of the body – in medical school. During the clinical component of the course – which delves into pathology, or the study of disorders/diseases in bodily tissues – he was struck by how there's no physical sign of what's wrong in autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other maladies of the nervous system. "This was very different from all the other organ systems where when you look at the tissue there's something to see that is the physical equivalent or correlate of the disease," Lichtman tells us. There's always a physical abnormality like an inflammation or discoloration. But not so for most diseases and disorders that affect the brain. "After a while I realized that the reason there aren't abnormalities is not that there really aren't any, but because no one's ever actually looked at the brain at the level of resolution they'd have to look to see these abnormalities," Lichtman continues. The brain is vastly more complicated than any other organ, however, so it's not just a matter of zooming in further – although that's a big part of it. "People will take a single section through a piece of brain and show a synapse," Lichtman explains. "But the brain works by virtue of these connections that allow one nerve cell to talk to many other nerve cells, sort of like a Twitter account, and each nerve cell is also the recipient of a network of information from thousands of other nerve cells." As a graduate student, Lichtman studied the peripheral nervous system of human babies and other mammalian babies. He noted dramatic rewiring of the nervous system as the babies developed, then developed a technique to map it out using colors. But there aren't enough colors to show all of the wires in the cerebral cortex. He needed another method. Lichtman's Brainbow technique was used here to color code the wires in a mouse's (a) ear muscle, (b) brainstem axon tract, and (c) hippocampal dentate gyrus, as part of a 2008 study Size mattersOnly one animal's full connectome has been constructed thus far: the roundworm C. elegans, which has a mere 302 neurons and serves as the model for research and data sharing in the field. But researchers are also putting considerable effort into mapping the mouse connectome, since mice are easily accessible in the lab and they serve as animal models for many kinds of medical studies. It's in the mouse connectome that Lichtman and 20 of his colleagues in a joint Harvard and Boston University-led study chose to show off the latest new imaging technology earlier this year. They essentially figured out a way to adapt electron microscopy, which goes down to nanoscale resolutions, for brain imaging. And they tested the technology on a tiny slice of an adult mouse's neocortex, gaining new insights into the complex relationship between axons (nerve fibers) and dendrites (branches on neurons that act kind of like electric input sockets). Lichtman believes this technology may help with many clinical studies, such as one his lab is working on that explores the difference in brains of healthy mice and those that have an equivalent of a human autism gene for the rare neurodevelopmental disorder Rett syndrome. A key part of science is coming up not only with hypotheses to test but also with questions to ask. And nanoscale imaging of the brain promises to open up a brave new world of questions about brain function and structure on a cellular and subcellular level. Principle to the quest to map the human connectome is the question of how memories are stored. "You have all these experiences of your life that are basically in there forever," Lichtman says. "You're never going to get rid of them. You may have trouble recalling things, but once you're reminded they just pop back into consciousness, which means that they're sitting in your brain in some form. Almost certainly in the form of which particular nerve cells are connected together in little networks. But no one knows how that information is encoded." Mapping the wires of the brain might just provide the answer – which Lichtman expects will be some sort of learning algorithm that takes faces, shapes, objects, textures, sounds, names, or whatever else and converts them into wires and electrical signals. Lichtman is also excited to see whether wiring diagrams might show why and how the brain changes as we get old. He suspects that old brains may have simpler wiring diagrams than younger ones, but connectome mapping – particularly at the finer resolutions – could hold the answer. A super-close-up reconstructed view of the synapses on a dendrite, with the synaptic vesicles (little white dots that store neurotransmitters) also visible Big dataIf nothing else, this wiring diagram of the brain will provide a lot of data. What you might call big data. You need to look at every cubic millimeter of brain to see every synapse, which is necessary to map the brain's connectome in full. "In a cubic millimeter of brain there is about two terabytes of image data," Lichtman says. "I think the original Google Maps was on the range of several terabytes – that was for the whole planet." As of August 2012, it was around 20 petabytes, or 20,500 terabytes, for satellite, aerial, and street imagery combined. A human brain has something on the order of a million cubic millimeters, which means you'd need around two million terabytes to store a map of its wires. Two million terabytes is around two thousand petabytes, or two exabytes. "That's a big number," Lichtman notes. "Even today. Even for Google." It's so big, even, that most people cannot fathom it. Even that 302-neuron C. elegans worm connectome is too much for most people, and it's more on the order of 12 terabytes. "You couldn't ask for a smaller [connectome] dataset than that, and it's impossibly complicated," Lichtman says. "You can't just look at it and say, 'Oh now I understand how the worm swims and why it makes a sinusoidal movement when the worm moves around in the soil or why it backs up when something noxious bumps into its nose.' It's in there, but you can't look at it and say, 'I see it.'" If you grew up in a world where a megabyte is a big dataset, you probably have no hope of understanding the scale of a human connectome dataset. If you came of age this millennium, you'll likely have a somewhat easier time of it, because your brain is wired differently, but Lichtman cautions that we may be crossing an important threshold in human development – not just in neuroscience or science more broadly, but in everything from politics to economics to religion. "The biggest casualty of big data is big ideas, in the sense that there are no big ideas that encompass the data any more," he says. "The data is more complicated than the thoughts of most people." There are too many variables and complex interactions for us to hold in our heads, basically. With the death of big ideas could come a fundamental change in the human experience, wherein we don't understand and believe so much as steer the analyses and follow the data. What we're looking at with big data is a division between understanding and analysis. We can simulate, model, and analyze with computers, but we can no longer be confident about understanding the results in their entirety. Reconstructed mouse neurons (the large blotches) with their dendrite branches Man or machine?That's not the only potential change Lichtman sees on the horizon. As the newly-discovered behavioral links allude to, mapping the brain could radically transform how we treat people. As we demystify the brain with these wiring diagrams, he warns, "virtually all behavior can begin to be judged on the machine that's causing that behavior. Criminality becomes just an expected behavior given the starting condition of that particular brain." Conceptions of free will could evaporate, and deep-rooted philosophical and religious beliefs may be challenged to their core. That's no reason to abandon the research, because the payoffs – the secret workings of our minds – are so great, but it's cause for concern, and a possible challenge for what Lichtman concedes is a very expensive field of study that advances incredibly slowly. What we know now about the brain is infinitesimally small relative to the full picture. Lichtman says that mouse neocortex test study for nanoscale brain imaging looked at a mere three billionths or so of the brain's volume. That scale makes it a somewhat controversial point in science, because it seems like an impossible feat to map an entire human brain at the cellular level. But Lichtman says that this kind of work in general is controversial for a more fundamental reason. Seeking descriptionScience is traditionally experimental, whereas connectome mapping is descriptive. Experiments test ideas and manipulate things. Descriptive projects like this one or the Hubble space telescope, or the whole field of archeology, on the other hand, merely look. They are tools of ponderance: what's out there? To many people that sounds perfectly reasonable, but Lichtman says, "A lot of people in the biomedical sciences think that we are in some way beyond description." Instead, we should be manipulating things – knocking out genes, adding chemicals, activating nerve cells. Not wondering what uncharted, unheard of mysteries remain in the depths of the brain. That cylinder in the middle of the image is the tiny, cubic millimeter-sized chunk of mouse neocortex studied as a test case for nanoscale brain imaging technology Lichtman likens neuroscience on the whole to a staircase with a million stairs. At the top is a complete one-to-one mapping of the human brain. "We maybe have gone one step," he says, "but that's the goal – to turn this field into something productive enough that it is able to generate enough data that one can begin to approach these deep mysteries about the brain." In truth we probably know more about the universe beyond our Earth than about that which lies between our ears. And that is precisely why Lichtman and his connectome-mapping colleagues will persevere. "As long as we're seeing things we've never seen before, as long as we're discovering things that look different from what we expected, we should keep doing it," he says. "Obviously, because it's adding insight to things that were mysterious." "Once you understand something well enough that there's nothing to learn and everything is the same, then yeah, maybe it's time to stop. But we're far, far from there."
http://www.gizmag.com/connectome-wiring-diagram-human-brain/39659 |
