Intriguing science findings - not spacey

[Beyond]

Blood Falls Antarctica.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscur ... nique.html

[Beyond]

22 new species discovered. http://learni.st/users/60/boards/15073- ... discovered

[mjimih]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/scien ... .html?_r=0
Scientists Trace Memories of Things That Never Happened

Not only are false, or mistaken, memories common in normal life, but researchers have found it relatively easy to generate false memories of words and images in human subjects. But exactly what goes on in the brain when mistaken memories are formed has remained mysterious.

Now scientists at the Riken-M.I.T. Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say they have created a false memory in a mouse, providing detailed clues to how such memories may form in human brains.

Steve Ramirez, Xu Liu and other scientists, led by Susumu Tonegawa, reported Thursday in the journal Science that they caused mice to remember being shocked in one location, when in reality the electric shock was delivered in a completely different location.

The finding, said Dr. Tonegawa, a Nobel laureate for his work in immunology, and founder of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, of which the center is a part, is yet another cautionary reminder of how unreliable memory can be in mice and humans. It adds to evidence he and others first presented last year in the journal Nature that the physical trace of a specific memory can be identified in a group of brain cells as it forms, and activated later by stimulating those same cells.

Although mice are not people, the basic mechanisms of memory formation in mammals are evolutionarily ancient, said Edvard I. Moser, a neuroscientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, who studies spatial memory and navigation and was not part of Dr. Tonegawa’s team.

At this level of brain activity, he said, “the difference between a mouse and a human is quite small.” In both, memories form in an area of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus.

“What I find fascinating about this,” Dr. Moser said, “is that you actually can point to a physical substrate to memory,” what the researchers call an engram. Neuroscientists have long talked about engrams, but Dr. Moser said the recent research is the closest they have gotten to pointing to a spot in the brain and saying, “That is the memory.”

In the research reported Thursday, Dr. Tonegawa’s team first put mice in one environment and let them get used to it and remember it. They identified and chemically labeled the cells in the animals’ brains where that memory was being formed. The mice were not shocked in that environment.

A day later, in a completely different environment, the researchers delivered an electric shock to the mice at the same time that they stimulated the previously identified brain cells to trigger the earlier memory.

On the third day, the mice were reintroduced to the first environment. They froze in fear, a typical and well studied mouse behavior, indicating they remembered being shocked in the first environment, something that never happened. The researchers ran numerous variations of the experiment to confirm that they were in fact seeing the mice acting on a false memory.

The tools of optogenetics, which are transforming neuroscience, were used to locate and chemically label neurons, as well as make them susceptible to activation by blue light transmitted by a fiber optic cable. With these techniques the researchers were able to identify and label which neurons were involved in forming the initial memory of the first environment, and to reactivate the labeled cells a day later with light.

Dr. Tonegawa said that because the mechanisms of memory formation are almost certainly similar in mice and humans, part of the importance of the research is “to make people realize even more than before how unreliable human memory is,” particularly in criminal cases when so much is at stake.

That unreliability, he said, prompts a question about evolution: “Why is our brain made in such a way that we form false memories?”

No one knows, he said, but he wonders if it has to do with the creativity that allows humans to envision possible events and combinations of real and imagined events in great detail. That rich internal experience fuels work in the arts and sciences and other creative activities, he said. “Unless you have that kind of ability, there is no civilization,” he said.

But it could also provide raw material for false memories — a possible “tradeoff for this tremendous benefit.”

[bystander]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/scien ... .html?_r=0
Scientists Trace Memories of Things That Never Happened

Scientists Produce False Memories In Mice
Inside Science News Service | Joel N. Shurkin | 2013 Jul 25

False memories can be implanted in mice and presumably humans.

[Ann]

This may explain why different people sometimes remember crucial events quite differently, and interpret them very differently, too.

The idea that our human creativity is somehow related to our ability to form false memories is interesting. The fact that mice have the same ability to form false memories must mean that they, too, are creative and able to come up with new ideas.

But mice are relatively social animals, aren't they? Certainly rats are, at least. And people are of course extremely social. We are genetically programmed to live in groups. Perhaps it helped our survival in the not too distant past if all the members of a group not only had the same convictions, but also a set of shared memories? And perhaps it was more important that the memories were shared than that they were "true".

Of course, as humanity has made itself ever more powerful, being motivated by false memories is not a good idea.

Ann

[mjimih]

Our memories are made/recorded in a language, words with specific meanings. We can remember stories told around the campfire. Animals arguably only have a feeling or vague idea of what happened to remember bc their language isn't as specific as ours(?). Specific knowledge isn't passed on as readily. So there is a greater chance for error remembering a story to tell verbatim as apposed to, say, an animal warning another about a dangerous area to stay away from for example. Therefore to guard against errors (of memory) and gullibility that we are prone to, it's more important than ever to give our children the best education we can, in order to fill their brains with facts and accurate memories (or ideas) about the past, present, and future of the ever smaller ever more challenging World around them. An education exercises the brain's memory functions anyways right?

Mark

[Beyond]

Giant electromagnet makes 3,200 mile journey to Fermilab in Illinois. http://www.wfsb.com/story/22939681/afte ... es-ill-lab

[neufer]

Giant electromagnet makes 3,200 mile journey to Fermilab in Illinois.
http://www.wfsb.com/story/22939681/afte ... es-ill-lab

[img3="Muon g-2 (pronounced gee minus two) will use Fermilab's powerful accelerators to explore the interactions of short-lived particles known as muons with a strong magnetic field in "empty" space. Scientists know that even in a vacuum, space is never empty. Instead, it is filled with an invisible sea of virtual particles that—in accordance with the laws of quantum physics—pop in and out of existence for incredibly short moments of time. Scientists can test the presence and nature of these virtual particles with particle beams traveling in a magnetic field."]http://www.fnal.gov/pub/images/2013/muo ... 613-sm.jpg[/img3]

Muon g-2 Collaboration to Solve Mystery

<<The muon, like its lighter sibling the electron, acts like a spinning magnet. The parameter known as "g" indicates how strong the magnet is and the rate of its gyration. The value of g is slightly larger than [the simple Dirac equation value of] 2. This difference from 2 is caused by the presence of virtual particles that appear from the vacuum and then quickly disappear into it again. An experiment that concluded in 2001 at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a tantalizing greater-than-3-sigma (standard deviation) discrepancy between the theoretical calculation and the measurement of the muon g-2. The level necessary for claiming a discovery is 5 sigma. Fermilab will pick up where Brookhaven left off, making an even more precise measurement. With a four-fold increase in the measurement's precision, Muon g-2 will be more sensitive to virtual or hidden particles and forces than any previous experiment of its kind. About 100 scientists from China, England, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia and more than 15 institutions in the United States are collaborating with Fermilab on this experiment.

The centerpiece of the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab is a large, 50-foot-diameter superconducting muon storage ring. This one-of-a-kind ring, made of steel, aluminum and superconducting wire, was built for the previous g-2 experiment at Brookhaven. The ring will be moved from Brookhaven to Fermilab during the second half of 2013. Making use of Fermilab's intense particle beams, scientists will be able to significantly increase the science output of this unique instrument. The experiment will start taking data in 2016.

Creating a muon beam

The Muon g-2 experiment begins with a beam of protons. About 12 times every second, Fermilab's accelerators smash a bunch of protons, roughly 10¹² particles, into a fixed target. Scientists on the Muon g-2 experiment are interested in the emerging pions, which quickly decay into muons, whose spins point in the same direction. Magnets steer the pions and the resulting muons into a 14-meter-diameter ring called the Muon Delivery Ring. As the particles travel hundreds of yards around the ring, essentially all of the pions decay into muons. This beam of muons is then transferred into a second ring, the experiment's precision storage ring, which was also used in the Brookhaven experiment. This 50-foot-diameter ring will be housed in a new building adjacent to the Muon Delivery Ring on the Muon

As the muons travel around the ring, they are continually decaying into neutrinos and positrons. The neutrinos fly away undetected, but the positrons, which travel in the same direction that the bar magnet was pointing when the muon decayed, can be measured. The number of high-energy positrons detected as a function of time, along with their energy, provides all the information researchers need to understand how much the muon's internal bar magnet is precessing.

What is g-2?

A muon has an internal magnet, sort of like a miniature bar magnet. It also has an angular momentum, called spin, much like a spinning top. The strength of the magnet and the rate of the magnet's gyration determine the muon's gyromagnetic ratio "g". The Muon g-2 experiment gets its name from the fact that the gyromagnetic ratio "g" of the muon differs ever so slightly — by about 0.1 percent — from [the simple Dirac equation value of] 2. This anomaly is commonly called the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. When placed in a magnetic field, the muon's internal magnet wants to rotate itself to align along the magnetic field axis like a compass that aligns with the Earth's magnetic field. However, the muon's angular momentum prevents this from happening. Instead, the muon's spin axis rotates, or precesses, about the magnetic field axis. This is similar to a spinning top whose spin axis is not exactly vertical — angular momentum prevents the top from tipping over due to gravity. Physicists can predict precisely the precession rate of the muon's spin axis about the magnetic field axis.

What can g-2 tell us about matter and space?

A vacuum is never truly empty space. It is filled with a bath of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence and interact with light and other particles. These particles can be massless photons (the quanta of light), lightweight particles such as electrons or very massive particles such as the W, Z and Higgs bosons. Because these particles are virtual — they emerge only fleetingly from the vacuum — they can be so massive that they cannot be made in the current accelerators at Fermilab or CERN or are difficult to detect there. Thus, scientists can use the vacuum, which knows about all particles discovered and as yet undiscovered, as a tool to study nature's elementary particles without having to create the particles directly.

One ingenious way to use the vacuum as a tool is to study the behavior of muons in a magnetic field. Muons are readily produced at Fermilab in high-energy collisions. Muons also result from high-energy cosmic rays striking our upper atmosphere, so we are constantly being bombarded by muons on the surface of the Earth. When placed in a magnetic field, the muon — with its bar-magnet-in-miniature — precesses because of the torque the magnetic field exerts on the muon's spinning magnetic moment. The muon's g-value, is altered by particles that appear and disappear within the vacuum. So the muon precession rate is also altered, by the amount g-2.

The Standard Model of particle physics makes a very precise prediction of the muon g-2, accurate to 400 parts per billion. The purpose of the Fermilab Muon g-2 experiment is to make a measurement that is precise to 140 parts per billion. With this increased precision, scientists can compare the experimental g-2 measurement to the Standard Model prediction. The difference between the two values should provide an unambiguous answer to the question, Are there new, as yet unobserved, particles and forces that exist in nature?

Why muons?

[b][color=#0000FF][size=125]One-loop MSSM corrections to the muon g-2 involving a neutralino and[/size][/color][/b] [url=http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19342&p=121055&hilit=shmoo#p121055][size=125][b]a smuon[/b][/size][/url][b][color=#0000FF][size=125], and a chargino and a muon sneutrino respectively.[/size][/color][/b]

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The muon is 207 times heavier than the electron, which makes it particularly sensitive to new types of virtual particles, and Fermilab's accelerators can produce more muons than any other accelerator in the United States. Circulating in a storage ring at close to the speed of light, the muon lives long enough — about 64 microseconds — to allow scientists to make precision measurements of its properties before it decays into an electron and two neutrinos.

Sensitive detectors installed along the ring will measure the orbits and the precessions of these positrons with greater accuracy than ever before — to 140 parts per billion. The results, which will only be known upon the completion of a several-year run, will be compared to theorists' g-2 prediction. If the experimental result differs from the theoretical prediction, it could be a sign of undiscovered physics beyond the Standard Model. Several scenarios are possible. The g-2 measurement may simply place stricter limits on what we can expect to find in the way of new physics, providing the fundamental groundwork for future experiments and theories. It could also point to more exotic physics such as supersymmetry or the postulated "dark photon" that could be part of the dark matter in the universe. Combining the Muon g-2 results with those from other experiments could help explain, or even point to, new physics the LHC might find. Particle physics theorists at Fermilab and elsewhere are driving a worldwide program in high-powered computational physics to calculate part of the Standard Model contribution to g-2.>>

[Beyond]

Wow! what a good post, Art. I almost understand it.

[mjimih]

It made a quantum leap over my head. My positrons blew up after 2.2us. But it doesn't matter, it's a theory of something cool anyways.

[mjimih]

Some daylight photos

[neufer]

Anomalous magnetic dipole moment

<<In quantum electrodynamics, the anomalous magnetic moment of a particle is a contribution of effects of quantum mechanics, expressed by Feynman diagrams with loops, to the magnetic moment of that particle. (The magnetic moment, also called magnetic dipole moment, is a measure of the strength of a magnetic source.)

The "Dirac" magnetic moment, corresponding to tree-level Feynman diagrams (which can be thought of as the classical result), can be calculated from the Dirac equation. It is usually expressed in terms of the g-factor; the Dirac equation predicts g = 2. For particles such as the electron, this classical result differs from the observed value by a small fraction of a percent. The difference is the anomalous magnetic moment, denoted and defined as

[b][color=#0000FF]One-loop correction to the fermion's magnetic dipole moment.[/color][/b]

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• 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

• Anomalous magnetic moment of the electron

The one-loop contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment—corresponding to the first and largest quantum mechanical correction—of the electron is found by calculating the vertex function shown in the diagram on the right. The calculation is relatively straightforward and the one-loop result is:

• 

where is the fine structure constant. This result was first found by Schwinger in 1948.

As of 2009, the coefficients of the QED formula for the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron have been calculated through order .

The QED prediction agrees with the experimentally measured value to more than 10 significant figures,
making the magnetic moment of the electron the most accurately verified prediction in the history of physics.

The current experimental value and uncertainty is:

• 
  
  According to this value, is known to an accuracy of around 1 part in 1 billion.
  This required measuring g to an accuracy of around 1 part in 1 trillion.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

• Anomalous magnetic moment of the muon

[b][color=#0000FF][size=125]One-loop MSSM corrections to the muon g-2 involving a neutralino and[/size][/color][/b] [url=http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19342&p=121055&hilit=shmoo#p121055][size=125][b]a smuon[/b][/size][/url][b][color=#0000FF][size=125], and a chargino and a muon sneutrino respectively.[/size][/color][/b]

---

The anomalous magnetic moment of the muon is calculated in a similar way; its measurement provides a precision test of the Standard Model. The prediction for the value of the muon anomalous magnetic moment includes three parts: αμ_SM = αμ_QED + αμ_EW + αμ_had. The first two components represent the photon and lepton loops, and the W boson and Z boson loops, respectively, and can be calculated precisely from first principles. The third term represents hadron loops, and cannot be calculated accurately from theory alone. It is estimated from experimental measurements of the ratio of hadronic to muonic cross sections (R) in e+e- collisions. As of November 2006, the measurement disagrees with the Standard Model by 3.4 standard deviations, suggesting beyond the Standard Model physics may be having an effect (or theoretical/experimental errors not completely under control).

The E821 experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) studied the precession of muon and anti-muon in a constant external magnetic field as they circulated in a confining storage ring. The E821 Experiment reported the following average value:

• 

where the first errors are statistical and the second systematic.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[BMAONE23]

Some daylight photos

WOW talk about magnetism...look at that croud being drawn in

[Beyond]

croud u replaced the w. Can't say as i blame u. The w hasn't looked right in a long time.

[geckzilla]

Now grim news from Fukushima:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23584008

What to do?

[mjimih]

Is this potentially worse than earlier discharges of radioactive water into the ocean from the plant?

They might try an elaborate huge project to divert ground water around the plant, isolating it?

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

.
.

A giant octopus from the Mindanao Deep and has been forced out of its natural habitat due to hydrogen bomb testing whose radioactivity has driven off its natural food supply.

[stephen63]

A Mini Mona!

http://phys.org/news/2013-08-mini-mona-lisa.html

[Ann]

Wow! And Mini Lisa is colorless, too, because nanometers are too tiny to stimulate the color receptors in our eyes.

Fascinating!!!!

Ann

[mjimih]

Nanodiamonds Levitated With Laser Light, Scientists Held Trapped Particle ‘For Hours’
http://www.ibtimes.com/nanodiamonds-lev ... eo-1383439

For the first time, scientists used light to levitate a diamond in free space.
In a study published this week, University of Rochester researchers described how they trapped nanodiamonds in space using lasers, in a process known as laser trapping.

To catch the tiny diamonds in space, scientists sprayed an aerosol that contained dissolved nanodiamonds into a 10-inch wide chamber. The diamonds were attracted to the laser’s focus point which allowed them to drift directly into its light path.
"It takes a couple of squirts and in a few minutes we have a trapped nanodiamond; other times I can be here for half an hour before any diamond gets caught. Once a diamond wanders into the trap we can hold it for hours," Graduate student Levi Neukirch said about the experiment.

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

The nanodiamonds were as small as 100 nanometers in length, approximately one-thousandth the diameter of human hair. The feat, captured on camera, may one day lead to applications in quantum information and computing.

"We are yet to explore this, but in theory we could encode information in the vibrations of the diamonds and extract it using the light they emit," Nick Vamivakas, an assistant professor of optics who led the experiment, said in a press release.
The nanodiamonds emitted light due to photoluminescence where defects inside the diamonds allowed them to absorb photons from the second laser in the experiment. Absorbing these particles excited the diamond and changed its spin. Once the diamond relaxed it emitted other photons in a process called optical pumping.

While using lasers to trap ions is a well-known practice in physics, nanodiamonds had never been levitated before.

"Levitating particles such as these could have advantages over other optomechanical oscillators that exist, as they are not attached to any large structures," Vamivakas said, adding that they could be used to create Schrödinger Cat states and sensors to measure displacements between metal plates or mirrors in nanoscale objects like microchips.

Wow! and Fascinating!

[mjimih]

http://blog.nwf.org/2013/07/dolphins-ca ... tion|STAct
Dolphins Call Each Other Out by Their Names

Bottlenose dolphins can use learned vocal labels to address each other
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/32/13216

In animal communication research, vocal labeling refers to incidents in which an animal consistently uses a specific acoustic signal when presented with a specific object or class of objects. Labeling with learned signals is a foundation of human language but is notably rare in nonhuman communication systems. In natural animal systems, labeling often occurs with signals that are not influenced by learning, such as in alarm and food calling. There is a suggestion, however, that some species use learned signals to label conspecific individuals in their own communication system when mimicking individually distinctive calls. Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) are a promising animal for exploration in this area because they are capable of vocal production learning and can learn to use arbitrary signals to report the presence or absence of objects. Bottlenose dolphins develop their own unique identity signal, the signature whistle. This whistle encodes individual identity independently of voice features. The copying of signature whistles may therefore allow animals to label or address one another. Here, we show that wild bottlenose dolphins respond to hearing a copy of their own signature whistle by calling back. Animals did not respond to whistles that were not their own signature. This study provides compelling evidence that a dolphin’s learned identity signal is used as a label when addressing conspecifics. Bottlenose dolphins therefore appear to be unique as nonhuman mammals to use learned signals as individually specific labels for different social companions in their own natural communication system.

e.g., "Hey Mac. Which restaurant you going to tonight?" "I dunno Joe, Fred's Seafood Palace is having a special on Mackerel on the menu tonight tho'."

[Otdoorsey]

Earth wasn't supposed to stand out that much from Mars and Venus.

Ann, on what do you base that statement, please?

The few golden age sci-fi books about trips to Mars and Venus that I read all promised me that Mars and Venus were going to be full of life, just like the Earth. Why aren't they? Are they te ones that are strange, or is it the Earth that is exceptional? I have come to believe quite strongly in the "rarity" of the Earth.

Science fiction promised nothing. It's, by definition, fiction.

We'll find lots of life on Mars. There is almost certainly lots of life in the Venusian clouds. We will find life on the moon. Life and the Cosmos just go together like a horse and carriage.

[Chris Peterson]

We'll find lots of life on Mars. There is almost certainly lots of life in the Venusian clouds. We will find life on the moon. Life and the Cosmos just go together like a horse and carriage.

I'm not going to hold my breath on those predictions.

And FWIW, I have a horse, and it wouldn't have a clue what to do with a carriage (and neither would I).

[mjimih]

Ann wrote:The few golden age sci-fi books about trips to Mars and Venus that I read all promised me that Mars and Venus were going to be full of life, just like the Earth. Why aren't they? Are they te ones that are strange, or is it the Earth that is exceptional? I have come to believe quite strongly in the "rarity" of the Earth.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23872765
28 August 2013 - Earth life 'may have come from Mars'
http://www.space.com/22577-earth-life-f ... heory.html
Earth Life Likely Came from Mars, Study Suggests

http://mars.nasa.gov/programmissions/science/goal1/
Life: [*]Goal 1: Determine if Life Ever Arose On Mars[/i][/b]

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Ok it's starting to get complicated...
I'm 80% bacterium, (by weight)
I'm 80% space (by volume)
I'm 80% water (by weight)
I'm 5% Neanderthal (maybe speaking for myself of course...)
and now! 3.14% Martian!?!
ee gads

[geckzilla]

This is getting pretty ridiculous. Even though we know a lot about how life began on Earth, the details are pretty sketchy. This guy is taking one small problem and asserting that because oxidized molybdenum was probably not present on Earth but it probably was on Mars ...ergo life came from Mars. That's a pretty BIG leap in logic there, don't you think? Wouldn't it be much more likely that a rock which was knocked off Mars then traveled to Earth and brought this oxidized molybdenum to our planet, where it could have then been utilized? I think the article could be more appropriately titled "Earth Life May Have Had Help From Mars"

Meanwhile, at Wikipedia...