Volunteers needed for round trip Mars simulation, in Russia!

Strange, but apparently true.

From cnet news:

The European Space Agency wants you to join the astro-nut corps. At the Paris Air Show, the agency announced that it is now taking applications for people who want to simulate a trip from Earth to Mars and back, locked up in a test facility in Russia for about 520 days.
The final six people selected for the mission will not see the rest of the world for almost two years, and will have to wait as long as 40 minutes for each radio contact with "Earth" stations. The mission will take place at a special facility in Moscow in conjunction with the Russian Institute of Biomedical Problems and the ESA.

Apply at the ESA. Deadline is September 30, 2007.

Who knows, this could be the next hot reality TV series, like Survivor or Big Brother.

Names and face shape

Melissa Lea, PhD, conducted some studies at the University of Ohio around names and shapes of faces. When people's names suit the person's facial shape, they are easier to remember.

They did three experiments, quoted below from here.

1. "150 students in an introductory psychology class to use a computer software program to sketch the facial features of imaginary men with one of the following 15 names: Bob, Bill, Mark, Joe, Tim, John, Josh, Rick, Brian, Tom, Matt, Dan, Jason, Andy, and Justin. Using the computer program, the students tweaked a standard set of male facial features to come up with a face that they thought suited their assigned name. The drawings didn't include eyeglasses or facial hair.
Another group of students approved the drawings, which suggests that people may associate certain facial features with certain names."

2. "...researchers asked 139 other students to match the drawings and names from the first experiment. The faces and names were printed separately and shuffled. Ten out of 15 times, the students matched the faces and names correctly."

3. "...researchers showed the names and faces to 67 students on a computer screen. In a series of quizzes, the students learned to link the names and faces. The students learned the faces and names more quickly when they suited each other. For instance, they learned "Bob" faster when he had a round face, not a thin face."

If wonder if our pets' names would yield the same results?

http://www.webmd.com/news/20070517/whats-in-a-name-face-shape-maybe?src=RSS_PUBLIC

Another parenting must: Mediation training

"Science Daily — Children whose parents were trained in mediation skills had better conflict-resolution skills than those whose parents did not receive training. That's the finding of a new study conducted by researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and published in the May/June 2007 issue of the journal Child Development."

This skill would be useful in so many aspect of every day life that they should add it to the home economics curriculum. Just as important as learning to cook, or carrying an egg around in a basket for days on end.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070517063046.htm

Self compassion more helpful than self esteem for weathering life?

Totally makes sense, though not something I often think about.

“Self-compassion involves three components. They are self-kindness (being kind and understanding toward oneself rather than self-critical); common humanity (viewing one’s negative experiences as a normal part of the human condition); and mindful acceptance (having mindful equanimity rather than over-identifying with painful thoughts and feelings). "

In other words, don't be so hard on yourself.

The researchers found that:

• People with higher self-compassion had less negative emotional reactions to real, remembered and imagined bad events.
  Self-compassion allowed people to accept responsibility for a negative experience, but to counteract bad feelings about it.
• Self-compassion protects people from negative events differently –- and in some cases better -- than self-esteem. In addition, the positive feelings that characterize self-compassionate people do not appear to involve the hubris, narcissism or self-enhancing illusions that characterize many people with high self-esteem.
• Being self-compassionate is particularly important for people with low self-esteem. People with low self-esteem who treat themselves kindly in spite of unflattering self-evaluations fare as well as, if not better than, those with high self-esteem.
• For self-compassionate people, their view of themselves depends less on the outcomes of events, presumably because they respond in a kind and accepting manner toward themselves whether things go well or badly.

Deceptively simple.
http://www.physorg.com/news98466411.html

Ceiling height influences your frame of mind

Sounds odd at first, but spend some time in a room with low ceilings, and a room with high ceilings. They do feel different.

"A recent study at the University of Minnesota suggests that ceiling height affects problem-solving skills and behavior by priming concepts that encourage certain kinds of brain processing."Priming means a concept gets activated in a person's head," researcher Joan Meyers-Levy told LiveScience. "When people are in a room with a high ceiling, they activate the idea of freedom. In a low-ceilinged room, they activate more constrained, confined concepts."

In the study, they gave people problem solving tests, and product evaluation tests. Seem weird to me that there were such measureable differences between a 10 foot ceilin, and an 8 foot ceiling. Unfortunately, the article made no mention of sample size, or the degree of difference between the groups.

http://www.livescience.com/health/070507_high_ceilings.html

Meditation: The key to improved attention?

"...a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests that attention does not have a fixed capacity - and that it can be improved by directed mental training, such as meditation. "

In this study, subjects received 3 months of intensive training in Vipassana meditation. They then gave them the following test, with promising results.

"Volunteers were asked to look for target numbers that were mixed into a series of distracting letters and quickly flashed on a screen. As subjects performed the task, their brain activity was recorded with electrodes placed on the scalp. In some cases, two target numbers appeared in the series less than one-half second apart - close enough to fall within the typical attentional blink window.

The research group found that three months of rigorous training in Vipassana meditation improved people's ability to detect a second target within the half-second time window. In addition, though the ability to see the first target did not change, the mental training reduced the amount of brain activity associated with seeing the first target. "The decrease [of brain activity associated with the first target] strongly predicted the accuracy of their ability to detect the second target," Davidson says."

I wonder how much of their improvement has to do with practice and learning? The blurb does not mention whether there was a control group of subjects that also took these same tests over the same period of time, but did not get the meditation training.
Either way, this does indicate that attention is something that can be improved, whether it be from meditation, or simply practice of a task.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070507202029.htm

Emotional Mapping of Cities

(Pic): Artist Christian Nold demonstrates his system for detecting peoples' emotions while waking a neighborhood in San Francisco's Mission District.

Apparently, he's been doing this for 3 years, and his latest project is San Francisco. He's also made emotional maps of parts of Siena, Italy, Munich, and Germany. Here's his website.

How does he do it?

"First, he outfits volunteers with global positioning system devices and the sensors used in lie detector tests. Then, he sends his subjects out to wander their neighborhoods. When they return, Nold asks them to recount what they saw and felt when the polygraph recorded a quickened heartbeat or an elevated blood pressure."

http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/05/03/emotional.mapping.ap/index.html?eref=rss_health

'Virtual Iraq' to aid in treating post traumatic stress disorder

Kinda cool. Basically, a holo-deck for helping desensitize soldiers to their combat experience by using exposure therapy.

"Professor Paul Sharkey, a Director of the University of Reading's Visualisation Centre has been working with Professors Albert "Skip" Rizzo and Jarrell Pair from the USC Institute for Creative Technologies to port the software – which recreates the sights, smells, sounds and jolts of the battlefield – from USC's headset-delivered application to one which can be delivered via a fully immersive 3mtr × 3mtr virtual room (called the ReaCToR) at Reading's Visualisation Centre. "

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070312231458.htm

A blood test for panic disorder

Researchers at the University of Iowa are now developing a blood test for commercial use that will examine the genetic expression of immature white blood cells to detect panic disorder.

How they came up with this: "The team compared gene expression in lymphoblasts (immature white blood cells) culled from 16 participants with panic disorder and 17 participants without the disorder. The study found many genes were more expressed in people with panic disorder than in people without the condition. Similarly, the study found many genes were less expressed in people with panic disorder. There were also sex-related differences.
Overall, people with panic disorder had noticeably different patterns of gene expression than people without the disorder. Although panic disorder is a disease of brain cells, the study used lymphoblasts as "stand-ins" for the genetic testing because brain cells are not accessible or easily tested. "

Seems like an awfully small sample size, and there could be so many other confounding factors.

How will the information be used? The hope is that you could use this information to train and treat people with a predisposition for panic disorder to better manage and cope with it. The fear is that it could be used to deny people jobs, health coverage, or even social standing. Gattaca is closer than we think.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070306101139.htm

Software to mimic the human brain

The guy that created Palm and Treo, Jeff Hawkins, has been working on an artificial intelligence program based on principles of how our brain works.

His newest company and software platform is Numenta, "which has three main components: the core problem-solving engine, which works sort of like an operating system based on Hawkins’ theory of the cortex; a set of open source software tools; and the code for the learning algorithms themselves, which users can alter as long as they make their creations available to others. "

"How Numenta’s Software IDs a Chopper
Scan and match

1) The system is shown a poor-quality image of a helicopter moving across a screen. It’s read by low-level nodes that each see a 4 x 4-pixel section of the image.
2) The low-level nodes pass the pattern they see up to the next level.
3) Intermediate nodes aggregate input from the low-level nodes to form shapes.
4) The top-level node compares the shapes against a library of objects and selects the best match.

Predict and refine

5) That info is passed back down to the intermediate - level nodes so they can better predict what shape they’ll see next.
6) Data from higher-up nodes allows the bottom nodes to clean up the image by ignoring pixels that don’t match the expected pattern (indicated above by an X). This entire process repeats until the image is crisp. "

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/hawkins.html

The whole thing sounds revolutionary, but I get flashbacks of VIKI from the I, Robot movie when I think about it.

Remote controlled cyborg pigeons

These pigeons have brain implants.

"Scientists with the Robot Engineering Technology Research Center of east China's Shandong University of Science and Technology say they implanted micro electrodes in the brain of a pigeon so they can command it to fly right or left or up or down."

So much for homing pigeons. Now that they come with remote controls, these flying rats could actually be useful. Just think of all the disease you could spread to your enemies! :-P

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/02/cyborg_flying_r.html

Montessori for college students?

A nice study that supports giving college kids freedom to learn and think, instead of cookbook lab experiments provided better test scores, and more objective thinkers.

"Science Daily — Give college students less instruction and more freedom to think for themselves in laboratory classes, and the result may be a four-fold increase in their test scores."

Here's the breakdown: "Roughly 300 students, all taking an introductory biology course for science majors, were in each group. The first group used what Rissing calls the “cookbook method” – they followed step-by-step instructions on how to carry out the experiment and display their results. These students were provided with a standard, prepared enzyme solution.
The second group of students had to prepare their own enzyme solutions from a piece of raw turnip. They were also given more freedom to think through their approach to the same experiment, and were encouraged to use critical thinking and hands-on discovery to come up with their approach. "

Results: ..."(23 percent) in the “cookbook” group answered the question correctly. But 83 percent of the students who developed their own approach gave the right answer".

The goal is to increase scientific literacy for the masses, and this is a good start.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070221093213.htm

Thinking You Got A Work Out May Actually Make You Healthier

Another argument for mind over matter, and support for the placebo effect.

" Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer and her student Alia Crum found that many of the beneficial results of exercise are due to the placebo effect.

The researchers studied 84 female housekeepers from seven hotels. Women in 4 hotels were told that their regular work was enough exercise to meet the requirements for a healthy, active lifestyle, whereas the women in the other three hotels were told nothing. To determine if the placebo effect plays a role in the benefits of exercise, the researchers investigated whether subjects' mind-set (in this case, their perceived levels of exercise) could inhibit or enhance the health benefits of exercise independent of any actual exercise.

Four weeks later, the researchers returned to assess any changes in the women's health. They found that the women in the informed group had lost an average of 2 pounds, lowered their blood pressure by almost 10 percent, and were significantly healthier as measured by body-fat percentage, body mass index, and waist-to-hip ratio. These changes were significantly higher than those reported in the control group and were especially remarkable given the time period of only four weeks. "

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=62513&nfid=rssfeeds