Studies in rats indicate that endocrine disrupters can affect breast development in humans. Their effect on breast development
The post Endocrine disrupters can affect breast development has been published on Technology Org.
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NO ONE, IT seemed, knew what the patient clutching the stuffed blue bunny was feeling. At 33, he looked like a bewildered boy, staring at the doctors who crowded into his room in Massachusetts General Hospital. Lumpy oyster-sized growths shrouded his face, the result of a genetic condition that causes benign tumors to develop on the skin, in the brain, and on organs, hindering the patient's ability to walk, talk, and feel normally. He looked like he was grimacing in pain, but his mother explained that her son, Josh, did not have a clear threshold for pain or other sensations. If Josh felt any discomfort at all, he was nearly incapable of expressing it.
"Any numbness?" asked Joel Salinas, a soft-spoken doctor in the Harvard Neurology Residency Program. "Like it feels funny?" Josh did not answer. Salinas pulled up a blanket, revealing Josh's atrophied legs. He thumped Josh's left leg with a reflex hammer. Again, Josh barely reacted. But Salinas felt something: The thump against Josh's left knee registered on Salinas' own left knee as a tingly tap. Not just a thought of what the thump might feel like, but a distinct physical sensation.
That's because Salinas himself has a rare medical condition, one that stands in marked contrast to this patient's: While Josh appeared unresponsive even to his own sensations, Salinas is peculiarly attuned to the sensations of others. If he sees someone slapped across the cheek, Salinas feels a hint of the slap against his own cheek. A pinch on a stranger's right arm might become a tickle on his own. "If a person is touched, I feel it, and then I recognize that it's touch," Salinas says.
The condition is called mirror-touch synesthesia, and it has aroused significant interest among neuroscientists in recent years because it appears to be an extreme form of a basic human trait. In all of us, mirror neurons in the premotor cortex and other areas of the brain activate when we watch someone else's behaviors and actions. Our brains map the regions of the body where we see someone else caressed, jabbed, or whacked, and they mimic just a shade of that feeling on the same spots on our own bodies. For mirror-touch synesthetes like Salinas, that mental simulacrum is so strong that it crosses a threshold into near-tactile sensation, sometimes indistinguishable from the synesthete's own. Neuroscientists regard the condition as a state of "heightened empathic ability."
This might sound like a superpower of sorts, a mystical connection between one person's subjective experience and another's. But to be clear, Salinas cannot read minds. He doesn't know whether Josh felt the impact of the reflex hammer, and the tingling in his kneecap says more about his own extraordinary nervous system than it does about that of his patient. What's more, for those who experience mirror-touch synesthesia — an estimated 1.6 percent of the general population — the condition is often more debilitating than it is empowering.
Mirror-touch synesthetes struggle with the constant intrusion of others' feelings. At a symposium on mirror-touch synesthesia last year in London, a woman named Fiona Torrance, of Liverpool, described how she had once seen one man punch another. She promptly passed out. "I felt the punch," she explained. To this day, she takes medication to control the sensory onslaught. A recent episode of the NPR program Invisibilia profiled another woman with the condition who has essentially become a shut-in.
Salinas, then, is a remarkable case in a couple of ways. As a neurologist, not only is he far better equipped than most people to understand the peculiarities of his own brain, but he also exposes himself daily to immense doses of other people's pain and discomfort. His patients suffer from strokes, spinal cord injuries, and a myriad of other disorders and injuries. Some are also depressed, anxious, or in extreme pain. When Salinas performs a spinal tap on a patient, he can feel the needle going into his own lower back. When a psychotic patient goes into a rage, Salinas feels himself getting worked up. When a patient dies, Salinas feels an involuntary glimmer of the event firsthand. His body starts to feel vacant — empty, like a limp balloon. And then he moves on to the next patient.
FOR CENTURIES, SCIENTISTS have known that some people's senses get crossed. Some of us hear words in colors. Others see music in bright bursts or glimmers. Studies have shown that about 4 percent of the population has some form of synesthesia, which tends to run in families. And if you have one form of synesthesia, it appears likely that you will have another as well.
Salinas, for instance, also sees letters and numbers in colors, a condition known as grapheme-color synesthesia. He also associates these colored characters with personality traits and feelings. For example, a certain person might feel like a five, which to Salinas is a red-orange color that he associates with pride and self-interest. "People with strong fours and sevens are a cool grayish blue — sky blue with Russian blue. Very soothing."
Mirror-touch synesthetes vary in how intensely they register the feelings of others. Some report feeling sensations of pain more viscerally, and even claim to feel temperatures vicariously. Others describe feeling another person's pain as a mere tickle, tingle, or twinge. Salinas experiences other people's sensations of injury and intense emotions, but only to a muted, partial degree. If he saw someone being stabbed in the arm, he says, he would not feel the sharpness of the blade but rather "an echo of pain" on his own arm.
While other types of synesthesia have been studied for ages, scientists have only been studying mirror-touch synesthesia for a little over a decade. Researchers have found that subjects with mirror-touch synesthesia recognize the facial emotions of others better than people without the condition. They've also found that mirror-touch synesthetes tend to have a greater volume of gray matter in areas of the brain linked to social cognition and empathy, and less brain volume in the temporoparietal junction, which plays a key role in distinguishing self from other.
There is still a huge amount to be learned about the condition, and the specific mechanisms behind mirror-touch synesthesia remain somewhat mysterious. Outside a tiny world of researchers, the condition is so little known, and sounds so otherworldly, that it is still often met with skepticism — which is why, for Salinas, coming out as someone with synesthesia has felt similar to coming out as gay. "You never know who is going to be open to it. It's not something you easily bring up in conversation."
SALINAS WAS BORN in Miami to a pair of political refugees from Nicaragua. As an emotionally precocious and hypersensitive child, Salinas avoided the sensory overstimulation of sports and running around with packs of kids. He preferred to read alone, or sit with adults. He remembers being fascinated by their faces, their reactions. Sometimes he engaged in self-soothing behaviors, like flapping his arms. "People probably thought I was autistic," Salinas says.
But in high school's morass of angst-ridden teenagers, Salinas was forced to learn how to regulate his own emotional responses. He learned whom to stay away from, how to calm his own mind, how to let sensations pass — skills that he would come to master and rely upon as a physician. The key was learning to direct his attention.
Salinas' ability to achieve a kind of serenity in the middle of chaos was fortified during his time as a medical student and resident, especially when he worked in the emergency room. It would take all of Salinas' strength to stay professional as he treated car-crash victims, informed distraught families that their loved ones were brain-dead, and, most vividly, treated a man whose arm had been ripped off by a train. To calm himself he would take deep breaths and focus on the calmest person in the room.
Surprisingly enough, it wasn't until the summer after his first year in medical school that Salinas realized his condition was unusual, and that it had a name. During a medical trip to India, he heard a friend with a neuroscience Ph.D. talking about people who experience colors as sound. Salinas pulled him aside afterward and asked, "Isn't that everybody?" Salinas had always figured that others saw the world the way he did, in colors and feelings. "I just figured it was like being human," he said.
THERE ARE MANY ways in which mirror-touch synesthesia probably makes Salinas a better doctor. In recent years, there has been a lot of talk in medical circles about the decline of doctors' observational powers; as more and more diagnostic work is done by machines, the fear is that physicians are becoming worse at paying close attention to patients with their own eyes and ears. Some hospitals have even taken to offering doctors modified classes in art appreciation, in an attempt to revive their atrophying skills of pattern recognition and awareness.
Salinas' condition arguably makes him unusually gifted at these tasks. Empathy itself is another quality that modern doctors are said to lack in sufficient doses. Here, too, Salinas' mirror-touch synesthesia gives him advantages — particularly his heightened facility for reading people's facial expressions and emotional states.
On the day I shadowed him at Massachusetts General Hospital, an HIV patient with a fungal infection in her brain lay in bed, screaming, hacking, and vomiting. She had fluid backing up in her lungs. The nurse in charge was visibly stressed. The family stood nearby looking terrified. Salinas felt the nurse's anxiety and the family's distress. As he later described to me, he could feel the patient's constricted chest, his own chest rising and falling with hers. When she took a turn for the worse and was intubated, Salinas said, he felt the tightening of his vocal chords as if being intubated himself. Yet as I watched him manage the emergency, he never seemed ruffled.
At 7 p.m., the end of his shift, Salinas removed his white doctor's coat and replaced it with a heavy black parka with a fuzzy hood. I followed alongside as he made his way to an elevator, stepped out into a crowded main lobby and then into the bustling Boston streets, filled with commuters. I asked what it felt like for him to move through the throng of people. Could he describe it to me moment by moment?
When the elevator doors opened, a man on a knee scooter, his left leg folded up beneath him on the seat, had rolled in after us. Salinas told me he'd felt his own leg folded beneath him at the knee. He began to point out people around him: A woman with a phone pressed against the right part of her face; he felt the hardness of the phone. A woman rushing down a set of stairs, her bobbing hair in a bun, a few strands against her face; he felt the wispiness.
His descriptions came rapid-fire as the crowd swelled. Feelings, gestures, movements, facial expressions; so many people passing by so fast that I wouldn't have paid the slightest attention to them on my own. A husky man in a corridor wearing a knit hat: "I felt the heaviness of the knit hat on my head." A woman sitting at a table on a balcony, tapping her fingers together: Salinas felt the fingers touch. Another woman at the bottom of the escalator, legs crossed: He felt the tangle of the legs.
In hearing his stream of descriptions, I could almost understand what Salinas meant when he described the daily bombardment of ambient feelings as a kind of white noise. It's as if Salinas feels everything and nothing at the same time. By necessity, he keeps himself remarkably detached from all the errant sensations that tug at his attention. He would probably lose his sense of self if he didn't. And the most surprising thing about him, once you know all this, is that being in his presence is calming.
Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in Pacific Standard. Reprinted with permission.
Like the before-tremors of a massive earthquake, there has been a crisis brewing in the world of academic psychology, known as the "replication crisis." It's now made The New York Times.
Put simply, the findings in many — maybe most — experiments done in academic psychology and published in peer-reviewed journals cannot be replicated. In other words, if you run the experiment twice, you get a different result.
That, to put it lightly, is a problem.
The reason we know gravity exists is because if you run the experiment of dropping a pin to the ground, you will get an identical result every single time. This is what the entire scientific revolution was built on: Through controlled experiments, you can derive reliable scientific findings. And the way you know those findings are reliable is if the experiment can be replicated. If, when you dropped a pin, half the time it would fall to the ground, and half the time it would fly out in a random direction, we would quite literally not know the law of gravity.
That word "controlled" in "controlled experiment" is the key one, the clincher. The reason why the scientific method produces reliable findings is because experiments are set up to isolate all possible causes from an effect, save one. Thus, when you run an experiment, you know which cause leads to which effect.
We sometimes hear the myth of how Galileo disproved Aristotle's theory that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones by dropping two balls from the tower of Pisa. But in reality he built elaborate contraptions to run his experiment, to account for, for example, air resistance. If he'd simply dropped two objects from the Tower of Pisa, anybody could have legitimately concluded that air resistance, or the wind, or any other factor, could have led to the result. It's the fact that the experiment was both controlled and replicable that made his finding reliable, and allowed him in a short time to overturn a 2,000-year-old consensus.
This is what scientists call "omitted variable bias." If your experiment doesn't account for all potential variables, then there is always the possibility that a variable other than the one you're trying to measure is affecting your result. And that means your result is not viable.
Which leads to an obvious problem: The more potential variables you have, the harder it is to be sure you've isolated all of them. This is known as the problem of causal density. The more potential causes there are, the harder it is to isolate any one of them.
And it turns out that within the Universe, the thing — as far as we know — with the highest causal density is human beings. We know a lot — a lot — more about the Big Bang, billions of years ago, than we do about what makes us happy or sad. (Think about that for a second.) Or, for that matter, how interest rate policy maximizes growth and employment, or how to effectively police a neighborhood.
Let's say, as an example, you have a psychology experiment trying to show, say, that when people are happy they learn better. You might have a group of people who are given something to memorize, then are shown happy pictures, then have to memorize it. And you have a control group of people who aren't shown the happy pictures. And let's say the result is positive (i.e. statistically significant according to some more-or-less arbitrary criteria that the profession of academic psychologists has decided upon).
Well, you can get it published in a peer-reviewed journal. But have you actually proven anything?
You've proved that 20 undergraduates who were bribed with beer money, on such and such a date and in such and such location, could memorize stuff better when they were shown happy pictures. Does that actually prove that, for all human psychology, we learn better when we're happy? Well, if you can get the experiment replicated many times, it might.
But the causal density in human beings is so extreme, that you can't get it replicated, and so, in reality, it doesn't.
What should we do about all this?
First, we should get more humility. Just because someone has tenure and occasionally wears a lab coat doesn't make them a magician. We all too often think of "science" as something akin to "magic," when it is not. Whether it's an economist or a psychologist, we should realize that what they're doing is, by and large, not science, in the sense that physics is a science.
Second, we should do more experiments not less. Does what I've said mean it's worthless to do psychology experiments? No, actually, it means the opposite. The only way we're going to get replicable experimental results is if we do lots and lots and lots of different experiments, in lots and lots of different contexts.
Third, related to the first and second, is that we should have a different approach to the human sciences, and realize that they are more like a "science" in the ancient sense — a form of wisdom, which is what the Latin word sapientia, where we get "science" from, means — than they are a science in the experimental sense. We should of course take replicated experimental findings seriously (if with a grain of salt) and we should, again, try to get a lot more of them. But we should also be realistic and realize that, at least for the foreseeable future, Shakespeare and Plato will probably teach us as much about human psychology as textbooks will.
We need a new word, and a new approach, for those disciplines of the human "sciences" where the scientific method is only going to get us part of the way there. For those approaches, we should steer clear of two extremes: a science cargo cult, where we think if we only imitate the moves of physicists we will understand everything, and an anti-intellectualism that rejects all experimental findings. A reliable picture of the human person is more like a jigsaw puzzle. Some parts will come from scientific experimentation, but some parts will also come from the wisdom of the ages, such as philosophy and literature, and we need to fit the pieces together as we get them, and as they change.
How, exactly do we do that? As yet, I have no idea. But what concerns me is that so few people are even trying.
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Not long before the dawn of recorded human history, our distant ancestors would have witnessed what appeared to be a bright new star briefly blazing in the northern sky, rivaling the glow of our moon. In fact, it was the titanic detonation of a bloated star much more massive than our sun. Now, thousands of years later, the expanding remnant of that blast can be seen as the Cygnus Loop, a donut-shaped nebula that is six times the apparent diameter of the full moon. The Hubble Space Telescope was used to zoom into a small portion of that remnant, called the Veil Nebula. Hubble resolves tangled rope-like filaments of glowing gases. Supernovae enrich space with heavier elements used in the formation of future stars and planets and possibly life.
Learn even more about the Veil Nebula in a discussion with Hubble Heritage Team scientists during the live Hubble Hangout at 3pm EDT on Thurs., Sept. 24 at http://hbbl.us/z7f .
Stars are forming in dark, dusty molecular cloud LDN 988. Seen near picture center some 2,000 light-years distant, LDN 988 and other nearby dark nebulae were cataloged by Beverly T. Lynds in 1962 using Palomar Observatory Sky Survey plates. Narrowband and near-infrared explorations of the dark nebula reveal energetic shocks and outflows light-years across associated with dozens of newborn stars. But in this sharp optical telescopic view, the irregular outlines of LDN 988 and friends look like dancing stick figures eclipsing the rich starfields of the constellation Cygnus. From dark sites the region can be identified by eye alone. It's part of the Great Rift of dark clouds along the plane of the Milky Way galaxy known as the Northern Coalsack.Here's a great wall decal featuring a beautiful image from deep space
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The ALPHA experiment, one of five experiments that are studying antimatter at CERN (Image: Maximilien Brice/CERN)
Twenty years ago a team of scientists at CERN led by Walter Oelert succeeded in producing the first atoms made of antimatter particles.
The nine atoms of antihydrogen – the antimatter counterpart of the simplest atom, hydrogen – were made at CERN’s Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR) facility. This world premiere happened exactly 30 years after the discovery of the antiproton and opened a new chapter in the study of antimatter.
Comparisons of hydrogen and antihydrogen atoms constitute one of the best ways to make precise tests of differences between matter and antimatter. Their spectra are predicted to be identical, so any tiny differences would open a window to new physics, and could help in solving the antimatter mystery.
The atoms produced in 1995 remained in existence for about 40 billionths of a second, travelling for 10 metres at nearly the speed of light before being annihilated by ordinary matter and producing the signal that showed the anti-atoms had been formed.
Seven years later, CERN's Antiproton Decelerator (AD) made headlines around the world when the ATHENA and ATRAP experiments successfully produced large numbers of antihydrogen atoms for the first time.
Today, the AD serves five experiments that are studying antimatter in different ways: AEgIS, ALPHA, ASACUSA, ATRAP and BASE.
ALPHA – ATHENA’s successor – is specifically designed to trap antihydrogen particles for longer than its predecessors, so they can be studied in finer detail than ever before. The ALPHA collaboration has already measured the electric charge of an antiatom to a much higher precision than before. The ASACUSA collaboration, which also has high-precision studies of antihydrogen in its sights, has demonstrated the first-ever production of a beam of antiatoms.
Earlier this year further advances were made when the Baryon Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) reported the most precise comparison of the charge-to-mass ratio of the proton to that of its antimatter equivalent, the antiproton. The study, which took 13,000 measurements over a 35-day period, showed that protons and antiprotons have identical mass-to-charge ratios.
The AEgIS experiment, which has just started operation this year, is designed specifically to measure the gravitational interaction of antimatter. Another, future experiment, GBAR, will make similar investigations.
These recent successes mark a growth in antimatter research that CERN’s AD can no longer keep up with, as more and more low-energy antiprotons are needed for experiments. An upgrade to the AD, called ELENA, will become operational in 2017. This is where GBAR will be installed.
ELENA will decelerate the antiprotons from the AD still further, allowing many more to be trapped by the experiments. With the additional ability to serve four experiments almost simultaneously, ELENA will usher in a new era in the investigation of the relationship between matter and antimatter in the universe.
For more read: "In the steps of the antiproton"
Researchers at the University of Tokyo have demonstrated that during cellulose catalysis by cellulase produced by wood-degrading fungi,
The post Newton's cradle proton relay in cellulase has been published on Technology Org.
Remember all the high-tech transparent technology Tom Cruise used in Minority Report? Well, it's been 13 years since
The post Invisible Batteries Come Closer To Reality has been published on Technology Org.
Graphenea was selected as one of Europe's top scaleups – fast growing startups – and is presenting at Silicon Valley's “SEC2SV European Innovation Day (EID)”. The EID is an action oriented investors' day, bringing together stakeholders from the Silicon Valley and Europe's most promising startup companies. Fifteen businesses from ten countries were selected. Cumulatively, the 15 startups represent over $60 million in revenue and 1,000 employees, although each company has $1-5M in revenue and 20-200 employees.
Image: Graphenea selected among 15 top EU scaleups.
The EID was the opening day of this week's meeting “Startup Europe Comes To Silicon Valley” (SEC2SC). Topics discussed at EID included Silicon Valley trends, top EU scaleups, EU & US cooperation, startups/innovation vs. regulation, investments and acquisitions, etc. The meeting was honored by the presence of many key figures in business, education, and politics, including a president of state, EU commissioners, ambassadors, cabinet ministers, and university representatives. Graphenea CEO Jesus de la Fuente took the opportunity to showcase the unique benefits and potential of graphene.
Image: Graphenea CEO Jesus de la Fuente presenting at EID.
The other days of the week are also focused on promoting EU – US business relations, but instead of a lecture format relations are established through discussions and workshops. Tuesday hosted workshops on talent, growth, and funding, while Wednesday focused on policy making, communications, and legal aspects. The rest of SEC2SC left time for partner meetings and social events.
Image: HQ of Airbnb, where parts of the meeting were held.
The meeting was inspired by SVC2UK (Silicon Valley Comes to United Kingdom), an annual summit to take place in November this year. The primary goal of these meetings is to create and foster a policy and business dialog between both sides of the Atlantic, helping startups from both continents to scale up beyond their borders.
Here's a great poster featuring a beautiful image from deep space
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