astrodidact:

Nasa buys into ‘quantum’ computer

A $15m computer that uses “quantum physics” effects to boost its speed is to be installed at a Nasa facility.

It will be shared by Google, Nasa, and other scientists, providing access to a machine said to be up to 3,600 times faster than conventional computers.

Unlike standard machines, the D-Wave Two processor appears to make use of an effect called quantum tunnelling.

This allows it to reach solutions to certain types of mathematical problems in fractions of a second.

Effectively, it can try all possible solutions at the same time and then select the best.

Google wants to use the facility at Nasa’s Ames Research Center in California to find out how quantum computing might advance techniques of machine learning and artificial intelligence, including voice recognition.

University researchers will also get 20% of the time on the machine via the Universities Space Research Agency (USRA).

Nasa will likely use the commercially available machine for scheduling problems and planning.

Canadian company D-Wave Systems, which makes the machine, has drawn scepticism over the years from quantum computing experts around the world.

Until research outlined earlier this year, some even suggested its machines showed no evidence of using specifically quantum effects.

Quantum computing is based around exploiting the strange behaviour of matter at quantum scales.

Most work on this type of computing has focused on building quantum logic gates similar to the gate devices at the basis of conventional computing.

But physicists have repeatedly found that the problem with a gate-based approach is keeping the quantum bits, or qubits (the basic units of quantum information), in their quantum state.

“You get drop out… decoherence, where the qubits lapse into being simple 1s and 0s instead of the entangled quantum states you need. Errors creep in,” says Prof Alan Woodward of Surrey University.

One gate opens…

Instead, D-Wave Systems has been focused on building machines that exploit a technique called quantum annealing - a way of distilling the optimal mathematical solutions from all the possibilities.

Annealing is made possible by physics effect known as quantum tunnelling, which can endow each qubit with an awareness of every other one.

“The gate model… is the single worst thing that ever happened to quantum computing”, Geordie Rose, chief technology officer for D-Wave, told BBC Radio 4’s Material World programme.

“And when we look back 20 years from now, at the history of this field, we’ll wonder why anyone ever thought that was a good idea.”

Dr Rose’s approach entails a completely different way of posing your question, and it only works for certain questions.

But according to a paper presented this week (the result of benchmarking tests required by Nasa and Google), it is very fast indeed at finding the optimal solution to a problem that potentially has many different combinations of answers.

In one case it took less than half a second to do something that took conventional software 30 minutes.

A classic example of one of these “combinatorial optimisation” problems is that of the travelling sales rep, who needs to visit several cities in one day, and wants to know the shortest path that connects them all together in order to minimise their mileage.

The D-Wave Two chip can compare all the possible itineraries at once, rather than having to work through each in turn.

Reportedly costing up to $15m, housed in a garden shed-sized box that cools the chip to near absolute zero, it should be installed at Nasa and available for research by autumn 2013.

US giant Lockheed Martin earlier this year upgraded its own D-Wave machine to the 512 qubit D-Wave Two.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22554494

neurosciencestuff:

Scientists develop drug that slows Alzheimer’s in mice

A drug developed by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, known as J147, reverses memory deficits and slows Alzheimer’s disease in aged mice following short-term treatment. The findings, published May 14 in the journal Alzheimer’s Research and Therapy, may pave the way to a new treatment for Alzheimer’s disease in humans.

“J147 is an exciting new compound because it really has strong potential to be an Alzheimer’s disease therapeutic by slowing disease progression and reversing memory deficits following short-term treatment,” says lead study author Marguerite Prior, a research associate in Salk’s Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory.

Despite years of research, there are no disease-modifying drugs for Alzheimer’s. Current FDA-approved medications, including Aricept, Razadyne and Exelon, offer only fleeting short-term benefits for Alzheimer’s patients, but they do nothing to slow the steady, irreversible decline of brain function that erases a person’s memory and ability to think clearly.

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, more than 5 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s disease, the sixth leading cause of death in the country and the only one among the top 10 that cannot be prevented, cured or even slowed.

J147 was developed at Salk in the laboratory of David Schubert, a professor in the Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory. He and his colleagues bucked the trend within the pharmaceutical industry, which has focused on the biological pathways involved in the formation of amyloid plaques, the dense deposits of protein that characterize the disease. Instead, the Salk team used living neurons grown in laboratory dishes to test whether their new synthetic compounds, which are based upon natural products derived from plants, were effective at protecting brain cells against several pathologies associated with brain aging. From the test results of each chemical iteration of the lead compound, they were able to alter their chemical structures to make them much more potent. Although J147 appears to be safe in mice, the next step will require clinical trials to determine whether the compound will prove safe and effective in humans.

“Alzheimer’s disease research has traditionally focused on a single target, the amyloid pathway,” says Schubert, “but unfortunately drugs that have been developed through this pathway have not been successful in clinical trials. Our approach is based on the pathologies associated with old age-the greatest risk factor for Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases-rather than only the specificities of the disease.”

To test the efficacy of J147 in a much more rigorous preclinical Alzheimer’s model, the Salk team treated mice using a therapeutic strategy that they say more accurately reflects the human symptomatic stage of Alzheimer’s. Administered in the food of 20-month-old genetically engineered mice, at a stage when Alzheimer’s pathology is advanced, J147 rescued severe memory loss, reduced soluble levels of amyloid, and increased neurotrophic factors essential for memory, after only three months of treatment.

In a different experiment, the scientists tested J147 directly against Aricept, the most widely prescribed Alzheimer’s drug, and found that it performed as well or better in several memory tests.

“In addition to yielding an exceptionally promising therapeutic, both the strategy of using mice with existing disease and the drug discovery process based upon aging are what make the study interesting and exciting,” says Schubert, “because it more closely resembles what happens in humans, who have advanced pathology when diagnosis occurs and treatment begins.” Most studies test drugs before pathology is present, which is preventive rather than therapeutic and may be the reason drugs don’t transfer from animal studies to humans.

Prior and her colleagues say that several cellular processes known to be associated with Alzheimer’s pathology are affected by J147, including an increase in a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which protects neurons from toxic insults, helps new neurons grow and connect with other brain cells, and is involved in memory formation. Postmortem studies show lower than normal levels of BDNF in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s.

Because of its broad ability to protect nerve cells, the researchers believe that J147 may also be effective for treating other neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), as well as stroke, although their study did not directly explore the drug’s efficacy as a therapy for those diseases.

The Salk researchers say that J147, with its memory enhancing and neuroprotective properties, along with its safety and availability as an oral medication, would make an “ideal candidate” for Alzheimer’s disease clinical trials. They are currently seeking funding for such a trial.

(Marguerite Prior, Richard Dargusch, Jennifer L Ehren, Chandramouli Chiruta and Dave Schubert. The neurotrophic compound J147 reverses cognitive impairment in aged Alzheimer’s disease mice. Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy, 2013 (in press))

neurosciencestuff:

Grammar errors? The brain detects them even when you are unaware

Your brain often works on autopilot when it comes to grammar. That theory has been around for years, but University of Oregon neuroscientists have captured elusive hard evidence that people indeed detect and process grammatical errors with no awareness of doing so.

Participants in the study — native-English speaking people, ages 18-30 — had their brain activity recorded using electroencephalography, from which researchers focused on a signal known as the Event-Related Potential (ERP). This non-invasive technique allows for the capture of changes in brain electrical activity during an event. In this case, events were short sentences presented visually one word at a time.

Subjects were given 280 experimental sentences, including some that were syntactically (grammatically) correct and others containing grammatical errors, such as “We drank Lisa’s brandy by the fire in the lobby,” or “We drank Lisa’s by brandy the fire in the lobby.” A 50 millisecond audio tone was also played at some point in each sentence. A tone appeared before or after a grammatical faux pas was presented. The auditory distraction also appeared in grammatically correct sentences.

This approach, said lead author Laura Batterink, a postdoctoral researcher, provided a signature of whether awareness was at work during processing of the errors. “Participants had to respond to the tone as quickly as they could, indicating if its pitch was low, medium or high,” she said. “The grammatical violations were fully visible to participants, but because they had to complete this extra task, they were often not consciously aware of the violations. They would read the sentence and have to indicate if it was correct or incorrect. If the tone was played immediately before the grammatical violation, they were more likely to say the sentence was correct even it wasn’t.”

When tones appeared after grammatical errors, subjects detected 89 percent of the errors. In cases where subjects correctly declared errors in sentences, the researchers found a P600 effect, an ERP response in which the error is recognized and corrected on the fly to make sense of the sentence.

When the tones appear before the grammatical errors, subjects detected only 51 percent of them. The tone before the event, said co-author Helen J. Neville, who holds the UO’s Robert and Beverly Lewis Endowed Chair in psychology, created a blink in their attention. The key to conscious awareness, she said, is based on whether or not a person can declare an error, and the tones disrupted participants’ ability to declare the errors. But, even when the participants did not notice these errors, their brains responded to them, generating an early negative ERP response. These undetected errors also delayed participants’ reaction times to the tones.

“Even when you don’t pick up on a syntactic error your brain is still picking up on it,” Batterink said. “There is a brain mechanism recognizing it and reacting to it, processing it unconsciously so you understand it properly.”

The study was published in the May 8 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

The brain processes syntactic information implicitly, in the absence of awareness, the authors concluded. “While other aspects of language, such as semantics and phonology, can also be processed implicitly, the present data represent the first direct evidence that implicit mechanisms also play a role in the processing of syntax, the core computational component of language.”

It may be time to reconsider some teaching strategies, especially how adults are taught a second language, said Neville, a member of the UO’s Institute of Neuroscience and director of the UO’s Brain Development Lab.

Children, she noted, often pick up grammar rules implicitly through routine daily interactions with parents or peers, simply hearing and processing new words and their usage before any formal instruction. She likened such learning to “Jabberwocky,” the nonsense poem introduced by writer Lewis Carroll in 1871 in “Through the Looking Glass,” where Alice discovers a book in an unrecognizable language that turns out to be written inversely and readable in a mirror.

For a second language, she said, “Teach grammatical rules implicitly, without any semantics at all, like with jabberwocky. Get them to listen to jabberwocky, like a child does.”

sagansense:

New Steel Production Method Cuts Out Carbon Dioxide Emissions

Material chemists at MIT have developed a way to produce steel without carbon dioxide as a side product, potentially heralding a way to eliminate one of the major sources of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide.

Steel production has steadily risen for years, driven by countries like China and India that have been undergoing rapid and intensive industrialisation. According to the World Steel Association, even with the worldwide economic slump, steel production still rose 1.2 percent between 2011 and 2012 to 1,547 million tonnes. The production of steel — from extracting the iron ore to smelting the steel itself — accounts for more than three percent of global carbon dioxide emissions by some estimates.

To make steel, iron oxide is heated with carbon — the carbon and iron alloy is the steel, while excess carbon reacts with the oxygen to form carbon dioxide. Every tonne of steel creates almost two tonnes of carbon dioxide. Unexpectedly, a way to create steel without the problematic carbon dioxide waste product came about as a result of research into lunar bases.

Antoine Allanore, Lana Yin and Donald Sadoway, material chemists at MIT, received a grant from Nasa to look into ways to produce oxygen cheaply and easily on the Moon, a key precursor to being able to establish permanent lunar bases. Moon dust is rich in iron oxide, and in the course of their research they looked at a process called molten oxide electrolysis. The process, which electrolyses molten metal ores into their constituent elements, proved capable of extracting pure oxygen from Moon dust — with steel as a byproduct.

This was not unexpected, but the breakthrough now is that the team has found a way to make the method economical back on Earth. The original electrolysis used an iridium anode, but iridium is extremely expensive. The new method instead uses an alloy of chromiun and iron, which, when exposed to air, oxidises enough to be protected from significant oxidation, but still thin enough to allow current to flow through it. The team tested its Earth-based adaptation using lunar-like soil from Meteor Crater in Arizona.

According to Sadoway, this method has several advantages over conventional steel production beyond the avoidance of carbon dioxide emissions. The metal is reportedly extremely pure, and the same process could theoretically be adapted to the production of other metals, such as nickel or titanium.

However, the economical advantages are yet to be explored. It’s not easy to create steel normally, as a factory must produce millions of tonnes each year to be considered profitable, and while the team claims that this process would be economical on the scale of only hundreds of thousands of tonnes per year, there’s no evidence yet to back that up.

Furthermore, the temperatures required limit the materials that can be used as ovens. The same problem applies to molten oxide electrolysis — it has to be kept at a temperature of 1,600 degrees Celsius throughout, “a really challenging environment” Sadoway said. “The melt is extremely aggressive. Oxygen is quick to attack the metal.”

The research has been published in Nature.

sagansense:

Good Scientists Don’t Think Like Lawyers

Are scientists different than you and me? I don’t think that’s particularly true. I think the difference is how they think about things. One thing that most scientists I know have at their core is when they hear an explanation for something and they don’t think it works they do an experiment to probe whatever it is they’re studying to determine whether the current explanation holds or whether it is challenged by new experiments. So this constant posture of disbelief of the current is what makes science great. And over time the underlying science gets better and better and better. That is the scientist’s mind that is at work.

There are a lot of professions that don’t do that. They go and learn the rulebook of their profession and they play by the rules and don’t say “I think this thing ought to be thrown out.” Law is one example. In law there is a rulebook and what the lawyers get extremely skilled at doing is learning how to play by the rules and they can tell you when you’re not playing by the rules. That’s fantastic and they’re running that show, but that’s not how scientists think. Scientists say “you know that is a silly thing, just get rid of it, let me show you why because there is new thinking on it and so forth and so on.”

So there are these cultural conflicts between the various professions and scientists are always saying “I don’t think you know, let’s make sure it works that way, let’s try again and come at this another way and see if we come up with the same answer as we have had before.” So that is a big deal within science.

by MICHAEL S. GAZZANIGA

Stay Curious: bigthink’s In Your Own Words interviews experts who are either at the top of their fields or disrupting their fields. This blog presents key ideas from the experts in their own words.

neuromorphogenesis:

New Test Distinguishes Physical From Emotional Pain in Brain for First Time

New research suggests physical pain may have a distinct brain “signature” that distinguishes it from emotional hurt.

In the brain, the pain from broken leg and the anguish of a broken heart share much of same circuitry. But the latest evidence points to distinct ways that the brain processes each type of pain and could lead to a greater understanding of how to detect and treat them.

“Of all the things I’ve observed in the brain, nothing is more similar to physical pain than social pain,” says lead author Tor Wager, associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Colorado in Boulder, “What we’ve done in the latest paper is to develop something that predicts physical pain at a much more fine-grained level.”

The research, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, included 114 young adults who participated in several different experiments. The first test involved scanning the brains of 20 people while they experienced varying degrees of warmth or painful heat on their left forearms. These were calibrated to the individual to be either not painful or mild, moderately or severely painful—but they were not harmful. The second experiment included another 33 people, also exposed to varying levels of painful heat or mild warmth. Using data from the brain activity in the first participants, the researchers developed a program to predict whether people in the second experiment were experiencing pain. The model accurately determined whether they had been subjected to pain or to just warmth 93% of the time.

The third study, however, provided the most revelatory information about how physical and emotional pain may differ. In that experiment, 40 people who had recently been dropped by their romantic partners underwent the same type of physical pain testing while their brains were scanned. They were also scanned while viewing either an image of a close friend or a picture of the person whom they still loved, but had lost.

What Wager wanted to know, he says, is “Does this physical pain pattern [detector] get fooled into thinking that [social rejection] is physical pain? The answer we get is, no, not at all. What we find is that there are different patterns. There’s a pattern of response to physical pain, but [it isn’t seen] with emotional pain stimuli at all.”

“It’s certainly an interesting avenue for future research,” says Daniel Randles, a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, who has studied pain processing but was not associated with the study. He says that more data will be needed to determine whether the differences observed in the study actually relate to differences between physical and emotional pain or were related to another distinction between the groups. For instance, the people seeing images of their exes weren’t being actively rejected by them while in the scanner, but they were experiencing current physical pain during the scan. Therefore the difference between memory and current experience might also explain the results.

Tor, however, says that the rejected people did express current distress upon seeing the pictures, so the scans were likely recording current pain, not just pain from the past. “That may be why social pain is so painful: every time you remember it, you feel it all over again and that’s not true for physical pain,” he says.

He is reassured that the brain responses he recorded during physical pain were indeed reflecting a distinct pattern of processing from emotional or social pain because the signal was remarkably consistent. “You could take the signature developed on one group and apply it to another and make accurate predictions,” Wager says, “It was surprisingly generalizable.”

But he cautions that this doesn’t mean that lack of the signature suggests that a patient is faking. “This can’t be used as a pain lie detector,” he says, “If it doesn’t show up, [it may just mean] that people’s brains are wired differently.” Chronic pain, for example, could actually look very different from the acute pain studied here — some types clearly involve the activation of pain circuitry long after the initial source of the pain has been removed and this almost certainly includes emotional brain regions.

Additional research on far larger samples of different types of people with different types of pain are needed before these findings could be useful in the clinic. But the study suggests that brain patterns might be able to detect and diagnose different types of pain, particularly for people who cannot describe it, such as children, those who cannot speak or are unconscious. “It’s proof of principle and a bit more, an initial stage of development of a biomarker for physical pain,” says Tor. Whether a brain scan could ever distinguish between an addict faking physical pain (but, typically in real emotional pain) and a chronic pain patient who needs medication, however, remains to be seen.

wildcat2030:

Why getting scared ‘magnifies’ our eyes

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We go wide-eyed with fear because a larger visual field makes it easier to see threats, and the expression can help others spot the source of danger, say researchers. “Emotional expressions look the way they do for a reason,” says Daniel Lee, a graduate student in the University of Toronto department of psychology. “They are socially useful for communicating emotional states, but they are also useful as raw physical signals. In the case of widened eyes, they help send a clearer gaze signal that tells observers to ‘look there.’”

Lee, his supervisor Adam Anderson, and Joshua Susskind of University of California, San Diego, first found that participants who made wide-eyed fear expressions could literally see more: they were able to discriminate visual patterns farther out in their peripheral vision than participants who made neutral expressions or expressions of disgust.

As reported in Psychological Science, they next investigated the benefits that wide-eyed expressions might confer to onlookers. They found that participants were better able to tell which direction a pair of eyes was looking as the eyes became wider.

And these wider eyes helped participants respond to targets that were located in the direction of the gaze.

Importantly, these benefits did not depend on recognizing the eyes as fearful.

bpod-mrc:

08 May 2013

Breaking Down Defences

We inhale a host of potentially infectious germs with each breath, but most are removed before they can cause harm, trapped in mucus and cleared out by the beating hairs of cells lining our airway. However, bacteria may evade this first line of defence by altering the organisation of cells in the trachea, the tube connecting the throat and lungs. These 3D representations of mouse tracheal tissue, constructed using fluorescence microscopy images, reveal the effect of infection with Streptococcus pneumoniae, which causes pneumonia when it enters the lungs. In the bottom panel, exposure to bacteria (shown in yellow) triggers the breakdown of the carefully ordered structure seen in the healthy tissue (top). Networks of protein fibres (in red) become disorganised, and the hairs, or cilia (in green), no longer form a plane surface. These changes will distort the flow of mucus along the airway, preventing efficient removal of unwanted particles.

Written by Emmanuelle Briolat

—

• Manfred Fliegauf
• University of Freiburg, Germany
• Originally published under a Creative Commons Attribution license
• Published in PLoS ONE 8(3): e59925