Saturday 1 August 2015

The Pillars Of Creation Poster

Here's a great poster featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: m16, eagle nebula, pillars of creation, nebula, astronomy, nasa, hubble, space, telescope, stars, creation, galaxy, big bang, 2014, clouds, hubble space telescope, deep space, phenomena, outer space

This dramatic image was made by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014. It is a section of the Eagle Nebula named The Pillars Of Creation by the Hubble imaging team.

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5 ways good science goes bad

Science Focus

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Good science is a continual process, susceptible at many points to introduced errors and outright manipulation by the misguided and the devious. It's critically important, as public faith in science continues to be tested, to take an honest look at some of the ways good science can be turned into something that misleads and erodes public trust.

1. Publication bias stunts the free flow of ideas

Publication in a top journal like Nature or The New England Journal of Medicine is the "coin of the realm" in science, says Ivan Oransky, vice president and global editorial director of MedPage Today and the founder of Embargo Watch. Unfortunately, research has shown that journals suffer from publication bias — subjectively favoring some studies over others.

"Positive publication bias" is the tendency for the leading journals to print positive studies and avoid publishing negative ones. Oransky notes that many journals make revenue from selling copies of published studies. When pharmaceutical companies use positive clinical trial results in their drug sales pitches, for example, they pay for many reprints — reducing the incentive for journals to run less lucrative stories on drug trials that didn't work out.

It helps with any journal's branding to publish ooh-ahh findings and breakthrough discoveries that result in citations in other papers, and that "impact factor" can introduce a different bias. "There's a straight line between the sexiness of a study's results and its number of citations," Oransky says. With a premium on papers with citation-worthy big outcomes, prestigious journals sometimes overlook basic but useful research papers.

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The case of the antidepressant reboxetine is one example of publication bias. Ben Goldacre, a doctor and author of The Guardian's Bad Science column working hard to blow the whistle on publication bias, discovered that seven clinical trials had been conducted on the drug. Only one — the one with the smallest number of participants — found reboxetine had a marked benefit vs. a placebo. That study was published, and the other six were not, giving doctors a false impression of consensus.

2. Scientists commit fraud, leading to retractions

(iStock)

Each year, more than a million scientific papers are published in hundreds of peer-reviewed journals…and between 400 to 500 of these are later retracted. That's a very small percentage, admits Adam Marcus, the managing editor of two medical publications and co-founder, with Oransky, of the watchdog blog Retraction Watch. The big problem, Marcus says, is that two-thirds of retractions stem from researcher misconduct — fraud, fabrication, plagiarism, or other ethical failures. The general public may not hear about every retraction, but some cases are so egregious they make headlines.

Take discredited anesthesiologist Scott Reuben. In 2009, he admitted fabricating data in 21 papers that praised the benefits of pain drugs like Celebrex and Lyrica. Or Haruko Obokata, a stem-cell researcher at Japan's top institute, who had two papers published in Nature retracted this year. Obokata claimed she found a way to generated embryonic stem cells from an adult cell through simple stress, but her peers were unable to replicate the blockbuster results. But the world-record holder, according to Marcus, is Japanese anesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii with a grand total of 173 retractions for various offenses.

This kind of shoddy science, when widely reported, can have disastrous long-term impact. Disgraced British researcher Andrew Wakefield claimed, in a 1998 paper, that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine could cause autism in children. Following its investigation in 2011, the British Medical Journal said Wakefield had misrepresented his 12 study subjects (some of whom did not have autism at all) and willfully faked data. But the widely-cited results of this flawed study became the foundation of an anti-vaccine movement putting untold numbers of children at risk today.

As comfortingly low as the overall percentage of retractions may be, that number has increased tenfold since 1975. Greater scrutiny from watchdog groups and investigative journalists are bringing the growing problem into the open, in hopes of stemming the tide.

3. Disinformation spreads, impairing public understanding of science

The infamous Climategate scandal is a shining example of what can go wrong when the scientific process meets conspiracy theory. Anonymous hackers broke into servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit in November 2009, stealing thousands of private documents and emails, just before world leaders gathered to discuss climate change solutions at a meeting in Copenhagen. Global warming skeptics said that the unvarnished conversations proved that scientists had cooked up anthropogenic change as a vast environmental conspiracy.

(More from World Science Festival: Life in the universe: An optimistic cosmic perspective)

The researchers, including Michael Mann, said their emails had been taken out of context, and critics said the timing of the hack was suspicious. Multiple independent investigators combed the documents for scientific misconduct and found nothing, but the damage had been done. A Yale University survey in 2010 found that the public's belief in anthropogenic climate change and its trust in scientists had fallen significantly following the Climategate kerfuffle. Journalists and science educators are still trying to combat the incorrect impression that climate change is a hoax.

4. Scientists flock to well-funded fields, increasing risk of distorted results

(Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

It's tempting to follow the money. When the government, corporations, or foundations announce a major initiative to fund a specific type of research, there's an obvious incentive for scientists to flock to that field. Oransky says that some universities encourage its post-docs to use "keywords" like cancer or HIV in their proposals, or spin their project descriptions to suggest a real-world outcome for the average Joe, to attract the attention of the big grant-givers. Industry funders, in turn, might try to control the parameters of a study once they release its funding.

A 2010 study led by Trinity College economics researcher William Butos found three major consequences when the bulk of research funding comes from a handful of major institutions: "Effects on the choices of research activity, destabilizing effects (both long-run and short-run) on physical arrangements and resources supporting science and on the employment of scientists themselves, and distorting effects on the procedures scientists use to generate and validate scientific knowledge." And, there's an even greater chance of distortion when the funder exerts regulatory oversight.

The byproduct of this scenario? Fewer scientists focus on untrendy, poorly-funded research; and scientists in the better-funded fields have a greater risk of distorted results. It's a lose-lose scenario, which will likely continue as long as a small number of superrich funders are pulling the majority of the strings.

5. Science is skewed to suit political and corporate agendas

Politicians can be quick to misinterpret science to push their agenda or shape their message, but the media is no better when it comes to reporting on climate change. Cable news outlets discuss global warming with wildly varying degrees of accuracy, a UCS survey found: Fox News is scientifically accurate only 28 percent of the time, while MSNBC gets it right 92 percent of the time.

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Earlier this year, conservative lawmakers pounced on reports of a lull in the rate of Earth's surface warming — badly misworded as a "global warming pause" — as proof that global warming had stopped or had never really existed at all. Researchers, however, explained that the increasing amount of heat trapped in Earth's atmosphere affects oceans much more than land, so surface temperature isn't an accurate tool for measuring all the warming that's actually occurring, but it was a point largely lost on the audience.

As fallible as scientists can be, censoring them from speaking creates its own kind of damaging distortion, as their biased counterparts in the political and corporate spheres are not similarly restrained. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has moved to prohibit its scientists and independent advisers from talking to reporters without permission, and the Canadian government has prevented its climatologists from holding press conferences or speaking to the media. In hearings before the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology of the 112th Congress, industry witnesses from oil and gas, aerospace, computer and agriculture corporations outnumbered academic and independent witnesses.

 
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 » see original post http://theweek.com/articles/442544/5-ways-good-science-goes-bad
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The science of fear

Science Focus

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A healthy aversion to snakes might be useful in the jungle, but a ramped-up phobia of them that has you running screaming from garden hoses is obviously maladaptive in suburbia. And then there are phobias that seem to lack rational explanation: an aversion to pigeons, avoiding anything to do with the number 13, to fear of the color yellow.

"Fear mechanisms have helped us survive for millions of years," says UC Davis neuroscientist and psychologist Philippe Goldin. But even a natural mechanism can become twisted into something strange.

Where fear lies

The primary seat of fear in the brain lies in the amygdala, two almond-shaped clusters of neurons nestled deep in the temporal lobe. Scientists have found that there are actually two fear-related pathways involving the amygdala — one more direct route from a stimulus, and another, longer way that first passes through the cortex, where much of your higher-order thinking happens.

Either way, tripping the amygdala's alarm "puts you in a mode where you are prepared for action," says Nouchine Hadjikhani, a Harvard University neuroscientist.

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Registering a fear-causing stimulus can happen at lightning speed; Swedish scientist Arne Ohman and colleagues have found that flashing images of snakes or spiders so quickly that people are not consciously aware of seeing a snake or spider can still trigger a fear response. Interestingly, when these high-speed stimuli flash by, people's amygdalas respond equally fearfully to all stimuli — so an arachnophobic person would be equally unnerved by images of spiders and snakes. But when the images are shown slowly enough for people to comprehend them, their amygdala lights up only in response to their specific phobia (spiders, say). Our amygdalas seem to be primed to react quickly to anything that seems threatening, but once there's enough time for other, more sober parts of the brain to weigh in, we can filter out what's not worth getting worked up about.

The pathways leading out of the amygdala lead to lots of other brain regions; one particularly important output for the fear response is the connection to the hypothalamus. This brain region regulates the production and secretion of hormones like adrenaline, a key player in the fight-or-flight response. "The amygdala is one of the most highly interconnected regions of the brain, and that makes sense," Goldin says. "Arousal — positive or negative — activates many different mechanisms."

But there are other brain structures involved in fear, too, as demonstrated by studies of people with a rare genetic disorder called Urbach-Wieth disease, which causes the amygdala to shrivel up. In experiments conducted by University of Iowa researchers, Urbach-Wieth patients were unmoved by horror movies or exposure to large spiders, but did experience terror when they were asked to inhale a carbon dioxide mixture through a mask — which simulates suffocation. Therefore, there must be some amygdala-independent fear pathway; further research is needed to trace that trail through the brain.

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How fear takes hold: Through direct association

Just as Pavlov's dogs salivated at the sound of a dinner bell, the power of association can turn even the most relatively innocuous thing into a phobia. Scientists are able to induce phobias of certain sounds or smells in lab rats by administering a painful shock in conjunction with that stimulus. Eventually the rodents are hard-wired to associate that scent or sound with pain, and remain fearful of that trigger.

How fear takes hold: Through indirect association

The process of how phobias form by association in humans is, of course, more subtle than a guy in a lab coat tormenting you. University of North Dakota psychologist Ric Ferraro invites you to consider someone with a phobia of the color green — how could something like that have formed? Any number of ways; it could have been that, as a child, "they could have fallen down, got green grass on their clothes, and their mom or dad yelled at them so now they associate fear with the color green," Ferraro told the UND news service.

How fear takes hold: Through fear transference

There's also a social component to some human phobias. We learn a lot of our behavior through observation, and this includes fear: "You see your mother panicking frantically in response to a wasp when you're a child, you'll likely be afraid of wasps too," neuroscientist Dean Burnett wrote in the Guardian.

How fear takes hold: Through instruction

We may even convince ourselves that something's incredibly scary thanks to receiving information (whether true or false) that something is threatening, a uniquely human phenomenon called instructional fear acquisition. A team led by New York University researcher Elizabeth Phelps found that if a person is told they might get a shock when a square of a certain color flashes on a screen, their amygdala will activate even without the shock, possibly because the brain creates an abstract representation of the pain. In a more real-world setting, instructional fear acquisition could be the reason you get the urge to avoid showers or flocks of birds after seeing a Hitchcock film.

How fear takes hold: Through inheritance

Another, less-well-understood factor in our fear is epigenetics — heritable changes outside of the changes to our genetic code. Goldin thinks that epigenetics could potentially explain a lot of the variance among people in terms of how they respond to and control their own fears.

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"You have had, from birth to this moment, this whole trajectory of learning that sculpts your brain," Goldin says. "In addition to that, there's genetic factors that come from your mom and dad and beyond, even your grandparents, great-grandparents…things that happened to them are influencing what parts of your genetic code are or are not activated."

Evidence bears this out: In 2013, researchers published a paper in the journal Nature Neuroscience about an experiment in which they trained mice to associate the smell of the compound acetophenone (an odor another researcher describes as something like orange blossoms plus artificial cherry flavor) with pain. The scientists then saw that the offspring of those mice showed more signs of agitation and fear at the scent of acetophenone than control mice.

What can be done to fight the fear

Though fears can stem from many different sources, therapy can help undo the psychological knots of phobias. The treatment of choice these days is exposure-based cognitive behavioral therapy, in which a person works with a therapist to unlock the thought patterns underlying their fears, and also gradually learns to tolerate exposure to the phobic stimulus. An arachnophobe may talk about the realistic level of danger that spiders actually pose, then look at pictures of spiders, then get closer and closer to an actual spider.

So, if you shudder at snakes, pale at the sight of pigeons, or come undone when a clown honks his malevolent horn, don't despair. Your brain might be wired for fear, but it can be rewired just the same.

 
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 » see original post http://theweek.com/articles/442712/science-fear
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Monogram - Emission Nebula NGC 2467 in Puppis Classic Round Sticker

Here's a great sheet of stickers featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: envelope sealers, galaxies and stars, sculptured gas clouds, enebicp, constellation puppis, ngc 2467, the stern, hot young stars, star incubator, monogram initials

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A colourful star-forming region is featured in this stunning image of NGC 2467 located in the southern constellation of Puppis (The Stern). Looking like a roiling cauldron of some exotic cosmic brew, huge clouds of gas and dust are sprinkled with bright blue, hot young stars. Strangely shaped dust clouds, resembling spilled liquids, are silhouetted against a colourful background of glowing gas. Like the familiar Orion Nebula, NGC 2467 is a huge cloud of gas, mostly hydrogen, that serves as an incubator for new stars. Some of these youthful stars have emerged from the dense clouds where they were born and now shine brightly, hot and blue in this picture, but many others remain hidden.

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image code: enebicp

Image credit: NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

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Stripping ESO 137-001

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Spiral galaxy ESO 137-001 hurtles through massive galaxy cluster Abell 3627 some 220 million light years away. The distant galaxy is seen in this colorful Hubble/Chandra composite image through a foreground of the Milky Way's stars toward the southern constellation Triangulum Australe. As the spiral speeds along at nearly 7 million kilometers per hour, its gas and dust are stripped away when ram pressure with the cluster's own hot, tenuous intracluster medium overcomes the galaxy's gravity. Evident in Hubble's near visible light data, bright star clusters have formed in the stripped material along the short, trailing blue streaks. Chandra's X-ray data shows off the enormous extent of the heated, stripped gas as diffuse, darker blue trails stretching over 400,000 light-years toward the bottom right. The significant loss of dust and gas will make new star formation difficult for this galaxy. A yellowish elliptical galaxy, lacking in star forming dust and gas, is just to the right of ESO 137-001 in the frame.

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Heart Nebula IC 1805 Wall Sticker

Here's a great wall decal featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: photo, photography, space, universe, wallpaper, background, stars, nebula, galaxy, astronomy, scifi, space photography, science, beautiful, decorative, black, dark, colors, red, purple, pink, green, colorful, mosaic, planets, abstract, art, artistic

A mosaic of images from WISE in the constellation of Cassiopeia. This region contains a large star forming nebula within the Milky Way Galaxy, called IC 1805 (sometimes called the Heart Nebula), a portion of which is seen at the right of the image. IC 1805 is over 6 thousand light-years from Earth. Also visible in this image are two nearby galaxies, Maffei 1 and Maffei 2. Available on posters, canvas prints, phone cases and many great gifts.

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Orion Nebula Powis iPad Air 2 Case

Here's a great iPad case from Zazzle featuring a Hubble-related design. Maybe you'd like to see your name on it? Click to personalize and see what it's like!


tagged with: orion, nebula, rust, aqua, green, space, cosmic, astronomy, images, nasa, hubble

A lovely image of the Orion Nebula thanks to NASA/Hubble Space Telescope.

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Researchers will test 3D-printed, autonomous ‘SmartCarts’

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A fleet of autonomous “SmartCarts”—high-tech, 3D-printed, low-speed electric vehicles—could one day zip around the University of Michigan’s North

The post Researchers will test 3D-printed, autonomous ‘SmartCarts’ has been published on Technology Org.

 
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Pillars of creation poster

Here's a great poster featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: space, universe, photo, photography, science, astronomy, galaxy, nebula, wallpaper, eagle nebula, planets, pillars, creation, beautiful, dark, ancient, amazing, background, pattern, ngc 6611, eagle, landscape, space photography, purple, pink, red

The colors in the image highlight emission from several chemical elements. Oxygen emission is blue, sulfur is orange, and hydrogen and nitrogen are green. <br
Object Names: M16, Eagle Nebula, NGC 6611.

Amazing high resolution photo of Pillars of Creation. This is the highest quality of space photography available and you can get it on prints, canvas prints, phone cases and many many other gifts.

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Monogram, Witch Head Nebula deep space image Classic Round Sticker

Here's a great sheet of stickers featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: monogram initials, star galaxies, outer space picture, deep space astronomy, witch head nebula, cursing witch, nasa space photograph, faces in space, witches curse, hrbstslr wtchneb, screaming witch

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A witch appears to be screaming out into space in this image from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The infrared portrait shows the Witch Head nebula, named after its resemblance to the profile of a wicked witch. Astronomers say the billowy clouds of the nebula, where baby stars are brewing, are being lit up by massive stars. Dust in the cloud is being hit with starlight, causing it to glow with infrared light, which was picked up by WISE's detectors.
The Witch Head nebula is estimated to be hundreds of light-years away in the Orion constellation, just off the famous hunter's knee.
WISE was recently "awakened" to hunt for asteroids in a program called NEOWISE. The reactivation came after the spacecraft was put into hibernation in 2011, when it completed two full scans of the sky, as planned.
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Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Heart Nebula IC 1805 Wall Graphics

Here's a great wall decal featuring a beautiful image from deep space


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A mosaic of images from WISE in the constellation of Cassiopeia. This region contains a large star forming nebula within the Milky Way Galaxy, called IC 1805 (sometimes called the Heart Nebula), a portion of which is seen at the right of the image. IC 1805 is over 6 thousand light-years from Earth. Also visible in this image are two nearby galaxies, Maffei 1 and Maffei 2. Available on posters, canvas prints, phone cases and many great gifts.

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