Futures Thermometer, as instituted in Andres Agostini's Futuretronium Book at http://3.ly/rECc

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Reinventing the wheel: designing an 'impossible' bike

If the usual ideas of how bicycles balance themselves are right, this weird contraption ought to quickly topple over. In fact it stays upright, an observation that might lead to a rethink of bicycle dynamics – and perhaps to better bike designs.

Push a riderless bike fast enough, and it stays upright for a surprising distance. When it starts tipping to the right or left, the front wheel steers into the fall, correcting the tilt.

Earlier studies attributed this in part to the gyroscopic effect of the spinning wheels. But this model, built by Andy Ruina of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and colleagues, nullifies the gyroscopic effect with discs that spin in the opposite direction to the wheels. Also, its front wheel is mounted at a much steeper angle than normal – a change expected to make the bike topple.

The key to its stability seems to be that the centre of gravity of the handlebars is lower than the frame's and forward of the steering axis. So when the handlebars start to fall, they do so faster than the frame. This twists the hinge to the front wheel, steering it into a fall.

http://goo.gl/6b2P2

Source and/or read more and/or additional resources: http://3.ly/rECc Publisher and/or Author and/or Managing Editor:__Andres Agostini ─ @Futuretronium at Twitter! Futuretronium Book at http://3.ly/rECc

First evidence that some dinosaurs were nocturnal

Many dinosaurs and pterosaurs were active both by day and night, and some were entirely nocturnal, a new study suggests.

Lars Schmitz and Ryosuke Motani at the University of California, Davis, wanted to test the assumption that dinosaurs were mainly active by day.

They hit upon a clever way to reconstruct the activity patterns of extinct archosaurs – a group which includes crocodiles, dinosaurs and birds – by comparing the size and shape of their eyes to those of present-day animals.

The soft tissues of the eye, including the iris, rarely fossilise, but most archosaurs have a ring of bones within the eye called the scleral ring, which is preserved in some fossils. In modern archosaurs, the size and shape of this ring relative to the eye socket varies depending on whether the animal is diurnal, nocturnal or is active mainly at dawn and dusk.

A matter of size

Living nocturnal species tend to have a large pupil for the size of their retina, and this helps them see in dim light. Fossils with a large internal scleral ring diameter relative to the diameter of the eye socket, or orbit, probably had a large pupil too – suggesting they were nocturnal.

By contrast species active by day have a small pupil for a given eye size. This means they can avoid overstimulating the retina and contract the iris for better depth of focus.

"If you have a particularly circular orbit and a pretty circular scleral ring you can get a reasonably good idea of the size of the eyeball and the size of the iris within the eye," says David Hone of University College Dublin in Ireland, who was not involved in the study. "There's certainly nothing wrong with applying that to dinosaurs."

Schmitz and Motani measured the eye-socket size and the external and internal scleral ring diameter in 33 Mesozoic archosaur species, and compared them with similar measurements from 1401 living species of mammals, birds, lizards and snakes with known activity patterns.

"What we saw is that the perception that dinosaurs were just day active can be rejected," says Schmitz. "Many were nocturnal and many were day and night active."

Terrestrial predators like Microraptor and Velociraptor emerged as at least partially nocturnal, and the eye shapes of large herbivorous dinosaurs like Psittacosaurus and Diplodocus suggested they were active both by day and by night.

Wider comparisons

"These results are very interesting and certainly plausible, but I would want to see other analyses before I was really convinced," says Hone. He suggests that adding more living species to the analysis, especially those with unusual ecologies – nocturnal species that are part of a wider, mainly diurnal group with a common ancestor, for example – could make a stronger case.

But he agrees that the presence of the scleral ring offers an opportunity to address the question. "We should be grateful [archosaurs] have a scleral ring," he says. "We are trying to reconstruct [the behaviour of] animals which in some cases are 230-odd-million years old."

http://goo.gl/BgLB7

Dark matter no-show at sensitive underground lab

17:52 14 April 2011

It's just like a wimp to be a no-show when summoned for interrogation. That seems to be the result of an experiment to detect the weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, thought to make up elusive dark matter that is thought to make up much of the mass of the universe.

After 100 days of monitoring, a tub of cryogenically chilled liquid xenon deep in an Italian mountain has shown no trace of the particles it is designed to catch. The result doesn't rule out the existence of WIMPs, but it does seem these particles are slipperier than previously hoped.

The Xenon100 experiment, at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory near L'Aquila, Italy, is one of the most sensitive dark matter detectors in the world. The results of the 100-day trial were hotly anticipated.

"It's like being at a wedding waiting for the bride," one nervous team member said before they were announced, according to Science News.

Dark matter is needed to explain where the gravity comes from that stops spinning galaxies from flying apart. It is thought to make up about 83 per cent of the universe but what it is actually made of is one of the biggest mysteries in physics.

Most cosmologists now think it is made of WIMPS. Such particles are thought to form an enormous cloud surrounding the Milky Way, through which the Earth is moving.

As their name suggests, WIMPs are expected only rarely to interact with normal matter. Occasionally however, particles should hit xenon atoms in the tub at Gran Sasso, producing telltale light signals. Because the tub is down a mine, it is shielded from interference from cosmic radiation by 1400 metres of rock.

But yesterday the Xenon100 team posted a paper online in which they report that, over a period of 100 days last year, they saw signals corresponding to only three particles. That is consistent with what they expected to see from background radiation. So no dark matter signal was seen.

http://goo.gl/v3YlS

World's first human brain map unveiled

18:09 15 April 2011

The world's first computerised map of the brain was released yesterday by scientists at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, in Seattle, Washington, after more than four years of cutting-edge research.

The Human Brain Atlas is an interactive research tool that will help scientists to understand how the brain works and aid new discoveries in disease and treatments.

The information used to build it comes from the analysis of two human brains, using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and a variation of MRI called diffusion tensor imaging.

Allan Jones, the CEO of the institute, told Wired how the brains were also chopped up into small pieces, and RNA extracted from the tissue. They used this RNA to obtain a read-out of the 25,000 genes in the human genome.

All this information was put together to create a detailed map of the brain. One thousand anatomical sites in the brain can be searched, supported by more than 100 million data points that indicate the gene expression and biochemistry of each site.

For example, a researcher could quickly create a 3D snapshot (see image below) of all the locations in the brain where Prozac's biochemical targets are expressed.

http://goo.gl/FzIu6

How Japan will survive psychological fallout of crisis

Eventually the debris will be cleared, the radiation will fade and the nearly 200,000 people in temporary shelters will find new homes. But memory of the most powerful earthquake to strike Japan in recorded history, the devastating tsunami that followed and the worst nuclear emergency since Chernobyl will persist. The most enduring consequence of the ongoing crisis in Japan will not be medical, financial or environmental: it will be psychological.

Barbara Lopes-Cardozo remembers the screaming. One of the founding members of Doctors Without Borders, she was in Colombia in 1985 just after the Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupted, killing more than 23,000 people. She administered anaesthesia to those who survived, some of whom shrieked and howled from the terror of flashbacks.

The experience helped convinced her to focus her career on mental healthcare in emergencies and disasters. "I think it has been a mistake in the past not to focus on mental health," she says.

K. A. S. Wickrama of Iowa State University in Ames, who studied survivors of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, agrees. "Recovery of physical infrastructure is one thing – but recovery should also focus on psychological processes, on the social infrastructure."

Types of trauma

In the past three decades, psychologists and psychiatrists have published numerous studies on how disasters influence mental health. A 2004 review suggests that in the year following a technological disaster – such as a plane crash – between 25 and 75 per cent of survivors develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – the symptoms of which may include flashbacks to the trauma, as witnessed in Colombia by Lopes-Cardozo. Following a natural disaster, PTSD seems somewhat less prevalent; but that may be because it is often easier to identify the direct victims of a technological disaster than, for example, the victims of an earthquake that affects a large area (Epidemiologic Reviews, DOI: 10.1093/epirev/mxi003).

The crisis in Japan is both natural and technological, which suggests that some PTSD can be expected. The problem will probably be compounded by "radiation anxiety" – the stress caused by the dread of radioactive contamination. Some researchers have suggested that, for most people, the widespread fear of radiation is more harmful than the radiation itself.

The workers who have risked their lives at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant may be particularly at risk. A study published in 2008 compared the mental health of 295 men who helped clean up the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine after the 1986 disaster and 397 people who lived in the same areas as the clean-up workers but did not work on-site: it found that the former group suffered higher levels of depression and anxiety, and contemplated suicide more frequently (Psychological Medicine, DOI: 10.1017/s0033291707002371).

But a study by Wickrama published last year offers reasons for optimism. He investigated the role of community participation in the mental health of mothers from 325 families in southern Sri Lanka who were affected by the 2004 tsunami. In many developing nations, mothers are the primary caregivers of their families – a role that leaves them more vulnerable to mental health problems.

Wickrama found that mothers who believed they were part of a supportive community were at lower risk of PTSD and depression. What's more, those who formed grass-roots groups to distribute emergency relief and construct housing and roads benefitted psychologically as well as materially (International Journal of Social Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1177/0020764010374426).

Cultural strength

Japanese culture encourages familial intimacy, which will be an "important social resource", Wickrama says. News reports of the behaviour of the Japanese evacuees confirm they possess what psychologists and sociologists call a collectivist orientation: a belief that the welfare of the community overrides that of the individual.

But Japan has not always embraced psychological counselling and mental healthcare, points out Joshua Breslau of the University of California, Davis. He was in Japan in 1995 when the Kobe earthquake struck. "The idea of responding to mental health problems was new – some people embraced it, some people didn't." He remembers people using a Japanese phrase (kokoro no kea) that translates as "care for the heart" as a way of promoting mental health awareness.

Today, Japan has organisations like the Hyogo Institute for Traumatic Stress, which opened in 2004 and is currently sending mental health experts into the Sendai region to counsel evacuees who have lost their homes. But Wickrama points out that many developing nations lack such resources, and depend on counsellors supplied by foreign organisations, who typically disappear after a few months.

Lopes-Cardoso has recognised this failing as well: "We need to train primary health professionals to give basic psychological care," she says. What concerns Lopes-Cardoso even more, however, is the need for psychiatric therapy based on rigorous scientific studies for the aftermath of disaster.

"We are doing major mental health surveys, but we still don't have nearly enough research," she says. "In all disaster situations we find that mental illness increases – what we need to do now is develop proper psychological first aid based on research."

http://goo.gl/oPeOc

America is fifth in IT rankings

April 15, 2011

The U.S. has placed fifth for the second consecutive year in the World Economic Forum’s annual IT report — behind Singapore, Finland and Switzerland.

The report maintains that “there is no area on the globe that has an inherent advantage” in the digital economy. The rankings are based on those countries it believes are making the best use of new technologies and high-speed networks, and it also measures the percentage of households with PCs, the percentage of mobile devices with data access, political environment, and other factors.

The forum’s competitiveness report lowers the U.S. ranking by two places to fourth, trailing behind Switzerland, Sweden, and Singapore.

http://goo.gl/vmVjT

AI algorithm gives computers ‘hindsight’ to anticipate the future

April 15, 2011

An AI algorithm that gives computers “hindsight” to anticipate the future has been developed by computer scientists and economists at Tel Aviv University.

Funded by Google, the researchers have developed an algorithm that uses academic game theory to measure the distance between a desired outcome and an actual outcome. The algorithm can adapt to the situation at hand by analyzing the behavior of users as it is running. The results, a form of hindsight, may prove useful in more accurately predicting future outcomes — such as a bidding war on an online auction site, a sudden spike of traffic to a media website, or demand for an online product.

“If the servers and routing systems of the Internet could see and evaluate all the relevant variables in advance, they could more efficiently prioritize server resource requests, load documents, and route visitors to an Internet site, for instance,” Tel Aviv University Professor Yishay Mansour said.

Google hopes to use the research to improve its technologies and businesses, including the AdWords and Adsense advertising platforms.

The project was launched at the International Conference on Learning Theory in Haifa, Israel earlier this year.

http://goo.gl/sueKa