Science and Technology

[ibmconsulting]

 IBM wants to predict earthquakes and volcanoes with Watson - Quartz

IBM announced on Nov. 20 that it had created an award-winning simulation of the Earth’s tectonic plates that could soon be used to make predictions about when the next great earthquakes and volcanic eruptions will occur. And its artificial intelligence system, Watson, may prove to be the computer brain that can tell us when it’s time to get out of the Bay Area.

[themedicalstate]

Sensation of Taste Is Built into Brain

Roast turkey. Stuffing. Mashed potatoes and gravy. Pie. Thanksgiving conjures up all sorts of flavors. If you close your eyes you can almost taste them. In fact, one day you may be able to—without food.

Scientists from Columbia University have figured out how to turn tastes on and off in the brain using optogenetics—a technique that uses penetrating light and genetic manipulation to turn brain cells on and off. They reported their findings in an article published in Nature. By manipulating brain cells in mice this way, the scientists were able to evoke different tastes without the food chemicals actually being present on the mice’s tongues.

The experiments “truly reconceptualize what we consider the sensory experience,” said Charles Zuker, head of the Zuker lab at Columbia and co-author on the paper. The results further demonstrate “that the sense of taste is hardwired in our brains,” Zuker said, unlike our sense of smell, which is strongly linked to taste but almost entirely dependent on experience.

Typically when we eat, the raised bumps, or papillae, that cover our tongues, pick up chemicals in foods and transmit tastes to the brain. There are five main types of papillae corresponding to each of the five basic tastes—sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami. Contrary to popular belief, these aren’t clustered in particular places on the tongue, with bitter in the back and sweet at the front, but are spaced about evenly on the tongue.

A taste map may in fact exist, but it appears to be in the brain rather than on the tongue. First the researchers singled out the mice’s sweet and bitter taste centers in the brain, which are separated by approximately two millimeters in the insula. They concentrated on only sweet and bitter because the two are the most distinct from each other and also the most salient for humans, mice and other animals due their evolutionary importance to survival. Sweet usually indicates the presence of nutrients, whereas bitter signals potential danger of poison.

Zuker and his team then optogenetically stimulated the areas with light and in a series of behavioral tests, were able to have the mice taste sweet or bitter with only plain water. When the researchers activated the sweet neurons, they observed behavior consistent what with happens when mice normally encounter sweet foods: their licking increased significantly, even when the animals’ thirst was satiated. When the scientists stimulated neurons associated with bitter flavors, the mice stopped licking, seemed to scrub at their tongues and even gagged, depending on the level of optogenetic stimulation.

The researchers then performed the tests on animals that had never tasted sweet or bitter in their lives and found the same results. In the last set of experiments the researchers applied to the tongue of the mice chemicals that tasted sweet and bitter and compared their reactions to what happened when they simply stimulated the corresponding neurons optogenetically. There was no difference in the way the animals responded, “proving taste is hardwired in the brain,” Zuker said.

This doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as an “acquired taste,” Zuker clarified. For example, hákarl, fermented shark meat and national dish of Iceland, once called “the single worst, most disgusting and terrible tasting thing,” by famously acerbic food critic Anthony Bourdain is relished by many on the Nordic island nation. Humans are more complicated than mice. Taste can also be shaped by experience and culture. But the basics of this sensation are present from the beginning.

“Every baby smiles to sweet and frowns for bitter,” Zuker explained. “Taste mostly retains that hardwired response unless there is something that supersedes it. There are some things we consume [that] are innately aversive. But we take the gain with the bad if they have a positively reinforcing result.” Coffee or alcohol, for instance, are distinctly bitter, but many people learn to enjoy them over time due to the feelings of stimulation and inebriation they bring, respectively.

Gary Beauchamp, president of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Pennsylvania, calls the research “a very clear and elegant approach,” confirming the long-standing hypothesis that taste is indeed evolutionarily hardwired. But Beauchamp also notes that sweet and bitter compounds can influence each other in the mouth to affect taste before they reach the brain. “In the real world, where foods are mixtures of things, it’s much more complex than what this study would suggest. Nevertheless, this is excellent work showing that these pathways are innately organized,” he said.  

Zuker is aware that sweet and bitter are at the extremes of the taste spectrum and may not be representative of all tastes. But he expects similar results testing other tastes, which are also evolutionarily based. Salt, for example, signals electrolytes. “The next question is how activity in these cortical fields integrates with rest of brain,” to form experience and lasting taste memories – such as those we make at Thanksgiving.

Source: Scientific American

[wildcat2030]

First Human Tests of Memory Boosting Brain Implant a Big Leap Forward - Singularity HUB

See on Scoop.it - The future of medicine and health

“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all.” — Luis Buñuel Portolés, Filmmaker Every year, hundreds of millions of people experience the pain of a failing memory. The reasons are many: traumatic brain injury, which haunts a disturbingly high number of veterans and football players; stroke or Alzheimer’s disease, which often plagues the elderly; or even normal brain aging, which inevitably touches us all. Memory loss seems to be inescapable. But one maverick neuroscientist is working hard on an electronic cure. Funded by DARPA, Dr. Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer at the University of Southern California, is testing a memory-boosting implant that mimics the kind of signal processing that occurs when neurons are laying down new long-term memories. The revolutionary implant, already shown to help memory encoding in rats and monkeys, is now being tested in human patients with epilepsy — an exciting first that may blow the field of memory prosthetics wide open. To get here, however, the team first had to crack the memory code.

See on singularityhub.com

[wildcat2030]

Why it matters that you realize you’re in a computer simulation

See on Scoop.it - Philosophy everywhere everywhen

What if our universe is something like a computer simulation, or a virtual reality, or a video game? The proposition that the universe is actually a computer simulation was furthered in a big way during the 1970s, when John Conway famously proved that if you take a binary system, and subject that system to only a few rules (in the case of Conway’s experiment, four); then that system creates something rather peculiar. What Conway’s rules produced were emergent complexities so sophisticated that they seemed to resemble the behaviors of life itself. He named his demonstration The Game of Life, and it helped lay the foundation for the Simulation Argument, its counterpart the Simulation Hypothesis, and Digital Mechanics. These fields have gone on to create a massive multi-decade long discourse in science, philosophy, and popular culture around the idea that it actually makes logical, mathematical sense that our universe is indeed a computer simulation. To crib a summary from Morpheus, “The Matrix is everywhere”. But amongst the murmurs on various forums and reddit threads pertaining to the subject, it isn’t uncommon to find a word or two devoted to caution: We, the complex intelligent lifeforms who are supposedly “inside” this simulated universe, would do well to play dumb that we are at all conscious of our circumstance. The colloquial warning says we must not betray the knowledge that we have become aware of being mere bits in the bit kingdom. To have a tipping point population of players who realize that they are actually in something like a video game would have dire and catastrophic results. Deletion, reformatting, or some kind of biblical flushing of our entire universe (or maybe just our species), would unfold. Leave the Matrix alone! In fact, please pretend it isn’t even there.

See on ieet.org

[neurosciencenews]

It’s Music to Our Eyes: Emotional Reactions to Music Reflected in Pupil Size

When people are listening to music, their emotional reactions to the music are reflected in changes in their pupil size. Researchers from the University of Vienna and the University of Innsbruck, Austria, are the first to show that both the emotional content of the music and the listeners’ personal involvement with music influence pupil dilation.

The research is in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. (full open access)

[neurosciencenews]

“Chatting” with Watson Sparks More Creativity in Humans

Georgia Institute of Technology researchers are exploring and pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence (AI) by partnering with one of AI’s most notable citizens – IBM’s Watson – to advance how computers could help humans creatively solve problems in a wide variety of professions.

The work will be presented at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2015 Fall Symposium on Cognitive Assistance in Government, Nov. 12-14, in Arlington, Va.

[wildcat2030]

Exponential Medicine: What to Expect When You're Expecting Designer Babies - Singularity HUB

See on Scoop.it - The future of medicine and health

For thousands of years, Metzl says, we’ve been a relatively stable species, subject to the natural world’s slow evolutionary rules. But this is all about to change. “We are now at the beginning of an evolutionary phase guided by a different set of rules of self-evolution, driven by new technologies,” Metzl said. Metzl explains it like this. If an infant from a thousand years ago were transported into today’s world and raised by a typical family, the child would be pretty similar to a kid born in 2015. But reach a thousand years into the future and bring an infant into today’s world—and comparatively, the future child would be superhuman. Metzl splits the oncoming transformation of the human species into three phases in human genetic engineering. Phase One: Embryo Selection In-vitro fertilization (IVF) reinvented treatment for women with common forms of infertility. Now, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) enables disease detection in an embryo as young as five days. Eventually, we’ll be able to identify polygenic traits, mendelian traits, do full genomic analyses, and select embryos for implantation based on what we find. At first, we’ll select against genetic diseases. But that may lead to selection of other traits too. “We’re going to understand not just which child is a carrier for Huntington’s disease, but we’re going to be able to know everything that is knowable through the genome,” says Metzl. Stephen Hsu, vice president of research and professor of theoretical physics at Michigan State University, for example, believes that superintelligent humans are coming, and that in roughly ten years we’ll be able to predict an individual’s IQ from a cell.

See on singularityhub.com

[neurosciencestuff]

Music listening habits tell about mental health

Brain imaging reveals how neural responses to different types of music really affect the emotion regulation of persons. The study proves that especially men who process negative feelings with music react negatively to aggressive and sad music.

Emotion regulation is an essential component to mental health. Poor emotion regulation is associated with psychiatric mood disorders such as depression. Clinical music therapists know the power music can have over emotions, and are able to use music to help their clients to better mood states and even to help relieve symptoms of psychiatric mood disorders like depression. But many people also listen to music on their own as a means of emotion regulation, and not much is known about how this kind of music listening affects mental health. Researchers at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Music Research at the University of Jyväskylä, Aalto University in Finland and Aarhus University in Denmark decided to investigate the relationship between mental health, music listening habits and neural responses to music emotions by looking at a combination of behavioural and neuroimaging data. The study was published in August in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

“Some ways of coping with negative emotion, such as rumination, which means continually thinking over negative things, are linked to poor mental health. We wanted to learn whether there could be similar negative effects of some styles of music listening,” explains Emily Carlson, a music therapist and the main author of the study.

Participants were assessed on several markers of mental health including depression, anxiety and neuroticism, and reported the ways they most often listened to music to regulate their emotions. Analysis showed that anxiety and neuroticism were higher in participants who tended to listen to sad or aggressive music to express negative feelings, particularly in males. “This style of listening results in the feeling of expression of negative feelings, not necessarily improving the negative mood,” says Dr. Suvi Saarikallio, co-author of the study and developer of the Music in Mood Regulation (MMR) test.

To investigate the brain’s unconscious emotion regulation processes, the researchers recorded the participants’ neural activity as they listened to clips of happy, sad and fearful-sounding music using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at the AMI Center of Aalto University. Analysis showed that males who tended to listen to music to express negative feelings had less activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). In females who tended to listen to music to distract from negative feelings, however, there was increased activity in the mPFC. “The mPFC is active during emotion regulation,” according to prof. Elvira Brattico, the senior author of the study. “These results show a link between music listening styles and mPFC activation, which could mean that certain listening styles have long-term effects on the brain.”

“We hope our research encourages music therapists to talk with their clients about their music use outside the session,” concludes Emily Carlson, “and encourages everyone to think about the how the different ways they use music might help or harm their own well-being.”

[howstuffworks]

“You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

[neurosciencenews]

Imitating Synapses Could Lead to Smarter Electronics

Making a computer that learns and remembers like a human brain is a daunting challenge. The complex organ has 86 billion neurons and trillions of connections – or synapses – that can grow stronger or weaker over time. But now scientists report the development of a first-of-its-kind synthetic synapse that mimics the plasticity of the real thing, bringing us one step closer to human-like artificial intelligence.

The research is in Nano Letters. (full access paywall)

[themedicalstate]

Microsoft’s Hololens allows you to bring your computer’s images into 3D hologram!

For education, Microsoft HoloLens will help make incredible leaps forward in productivity, collaboration, and innovation. Microsoft HoloLens transforms the way we teach anatomy and our understanding of the human body as we help to prepare the next generation of doctors.

Source: Microsoft

[neurosciencenews]

Artifical Neural Network Learns to Use Human Language

A computer simulation of a cognitive model entirely made up of artificial neurons learns to communicate through dialogue starting from a state of tabula rasa.

The research is in PLOS ONE. (full open accessl)

[wildcat2030]

Exponential Medicine: Deep Learning AI Better Than Your Doctor at Finding Cancer - Singularity HUB

See on Scoop.it - The future of medicine and health

On Monday, Google released the code for its deep learning software TensorFlow into the wild. Deep learning is responsible for some of Google’s most advanced services, including recent additions like auto-reply emails and image search. But by making the code free to anyone, the company hopes to accelerate progress in deep learning software and the machine learning field more generally. “Google is five to seven years ahead of the rest of the world,” Chris Nicholson, who runs a deep learning startup called Skymind told Wired. “If they open source their tools, this can make everybody else better at machine learning.” That’s a big deal because the field is already moving incredibly fast. Howard noted that long-imagined capabilities like real-time translation and computer-generated art didn’t exist just a few years ago. Even Google’s auto-reply emails (recently announced) were an April Fool’s joke back in 2011. Computers are now capable of all of these things and more. “So, something amazing has happened that’s caused an April Fool’s joke from just four years ago to be something that’s actually a real technology today,” Howard said.

See on singularityhub.com

[wildcat2030]

Breakthrough Prize for Illuminating the Brain's Secret Code

See on Scoop.it - The future of medicine and health

Optogenetics is probably the biggest buzzword in neuroscience today. It refers to techniques that use genetic modification of cells so they can be manipulated with light. The net result is a switch that can turn brain cells off and on like a bedside lamp. The technique has enabled neuroscientists to achieve previously unimagined feats and two of its inventors—Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Ed Boyden of Massachusetts Institute of Technology—received a Breakthrough Prize in the life sciences on November 8 in recognition of their efforts. The technology is able to remotely control motor circuits—one example is having an animal run in circles at the flick of a switch. It can even label and alter memories that form as a mouse explores different environments. These types of studies allow researchers to firmly establish a cause-and-effect relationship between electrical activity in specific neural circuits and various aspects of behavior and cognition, making optogenetics one of the most widely used methods in neuroscience today.

See on scientificamerican.com

[wired]

From the ground, the height and density of skyscrapers in Hong Kong only allows slivers of sky to come through a canyon of concrete, steel, and glass. In Peter Stewart’s series Stacked, he uses his signature POV style to capture the high-rises most Hongkongers call home.

Check out more of Stewart’s photos and find out how he creates these dizzying shots.

[sci-universe]

Today, it would have been Carl Sagan’s 81st birthday (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996). Here’s one of his most important messages to humanity from the episode 8 of Cosmos “Journeys in Space and Time.”

[neurosciencenews]

Blood-Brain Barrier Opened Non-Invasively to Deliver Chemotherapy

Sunnybrook scientists made history this week as they used focused ultrasound to non-invasively breach the blood-brain barrier and more effectively deliver chemotherapy into the brain tumour of a patient.