Brain Scanner Can Tell What You’re Looking At

Tell me what you see.

On second thought, don’t: A computer will soon be able to do it, simply by analyzing the activity of your brain.

That’s the promise of a decoding system unveiled this week in Nature by neuroscientists from the University of California at Berkeley.

The scientists used a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine — a real-time brain scanner — to record the mental activity of a person looking at thousands of random pictures: people, animals, landscapes, objects, the stuff of everyday visual life. With those recordings the researchers built a computational model for predicting the mental patterns elicited by looking at any other photograph. When tested with neurological readouts generated by a different set of pictures, the decoder passed with flying colors, identifying the images seen with unprecedented accuracy.

“No one that I know would ever have guessed our decoder would do this well,” study co-author Jack Gallant said.

As the decoder is refined, it could be used to explore the phenomenon of visual attention — concentration on one part of a complicated scene — and then to illuminate the dimly understood intricacies of the mind’s eyes. – wired

Can the brain scanner tell that I’m looking at the output of the brain scanner?

Study Says Grand Canyon Older Than Thought

Coming upon the Grand Canyon long ago, an old prospector is supposed to have said in amazement, “Something awful happened here.”

The something appears to have started happening some 17 million years ago, geologists concluded in a study reported in Friday’s issue of the journal Science. If correct, that is at least 11 million years earlier than previous estimates.

By dating mineral deposits inside caves up and down the canyon walls, the geologists said they determined the water levels over time, as erosion carved out the mile-deep canyon as it is known today. They concluded that the canyon started from the west, then another formed from the east, and the two broke through and met as a single majestic rent in the earth some six million years ago.

Previous theories had posited six million years as the earliest age for the beginning of the entire Grand Canyon of the Colorado River.

The new research was conducted by geologists at the University of New Mexico, led by Victor Polyak. The researchers, supported by the National Science Foundation, used an improved uranium-lead dating technique, which yields ages of mineral back tens to hundreds of million years.

Tests at nine sites established the ages of thick white and yellowish-orange calcite deposits lining walls of cave interiors, as a measure of lowering water levels as the canyon deepened. The results indicated that the erosion rate was much slower in the western canyon than in the eastern section, the geologists reported.

“We were surprised by our results,” Dr. Polyak said in a telephone interview. “There have been a lot of theories over the last 100 years, and we didn’t expect the canyon history to go back so far.”

In an accompanying commentary, two British geologists who were not involved in the research wrote that some scientists had suspected the greater time-scale for the canyon’s formation, but the new study “demonstrates it firmly for the first time.” – nytimes

A One-Way, One-Person Mission to Mars

Will humans ever really go to Mars? Let’s face it, the obstacles are quite daunting. Not only are there numerous, difficult, technical issues to overcome, but the political will and perseverance of any one nation to undertake such an arduous task just can’t be counted on. However, one former NASA engineer believes a human mission to Mars is quite doable, and such an event would unify the world as never before. But Jim McLane’s proposal includes a couple of major caveats: the trip to Mars should be one-way, and have a crew of only one person.

McLane worked at NASA for 21 years before leaving in 2007 to work for a private engineering firm. Being able to look from afar at NASA’s activities has given him a new perspective, he says.But McLane was still at NASA when he originally had an idea for a one-way, one-person mission to Mars. He calls his proposal the “Spirit of the Lone Eagle,” in deference to Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight from New York to Paris in 1927.

McLane’s idea came from his acquaintance with a Russian cosmonaut. “I noticed the cosmonaut seemed to be a slightly different type of person than the American astronaut,” McLane said. “Cosmonauts are primarily pilots, and like test pilots, they are very focused on getting the job done. The current American astronauts are picked for things such as their speaking ability and social skills, and most of them have advanced degrees. But the cosmonaut struck me as an adventurous, get-things-done-type person, like our original astronauts back in the 1960’s.”

A return to the “get it done” attitude of the 1960’s and a goal of a manned landing within a short time frame, like Apollo, is the only way we’ll get to Mars, McLane believes. Additionally, a no-return, solo mission solves many of the problems currently facing a round-trip, multiple person crew.

“When we eliminate the need to launch off Mars, we remove the mission’s most daunting obstacle,” said McLane. And because of a small crew size, the spacecraft could be smaller and the need for consumables and supplies would be decreased, making the mission cheaper and less complicated.

While some might classify this as a suicide mission, McLane feels the concept is completely logical.

“There would be tremendous risk, yes,” said McLane, “but I don’t think that’s guaranteed any more than you would say climbing a mountain alone is a suicide mission. People do dangerous things all the time, and this would be something really unique, to go to Mars. I don’t think there would be any shortage of people willing to volunteer for the mission. Lindbergh was someone who was willing to risk everything because it was worth it. I don’t think it will be hard to find another Lindbergh to go to Mars. That will be the easiest part of this whole program.” – universetoday

I’ve heard the theory that one or more unnamed astronauts landed on the moon during the Apollo missions and never came back.  The idea is that the astronauts we know were part of an Earth-based simulation at the same time and the capsules we saw land in the ocean were dropped from a jet. This was supposedly done because the radiation in space makes the mission deadly. We haven’t had any manned missions beyond Low Earth Orbit (100 to 1200 miles high) since Apollo, right? I think the ISS is about 240 miles high.

Antarctic fish’s winter ‘sleep’

The Antarctic cod puts itself into a state similar to hibernation for the winter, researchers have found, which is highly unusual for a fish. Scientists with the British Antarctic Survey (Bas) found Notothenia coriiceps lowers its metabolic rate during winter, saving energy.

As with hibernating mammals, the fish rouse themselves now and again from their dormant state for short periods.

Researchers suspect the “hibernation” is triggered by changes in sunlight.

The sea temperature varies by only about 2C between summer and winter, which is probably too small a difference to induce such a significant change in behaviour. “It appears the fish utilise the short Antarctic summers to gain sufficient energy from feeding to tide them over in winter,” said Keiron Fraser from Bas.

“The hibernation-like state… is presumably a mechanism for reducing their energy requirements to the bare minimum. – bbc

Giant Fossil Bats Out Of Africa, 35 Million Years Old

When most of us think of Ancient Egypt, visions of pyramids and mummies fill our imaginations. For a team of paleontologists interested in fossil mammals, the Fayum district of Egypt summons an even older and equally impressive history that extends much further back in time than the Sphinx.
In a recent issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, scientists report on the discovery of six new bat species dating to around 35 million years ago, which sheds new light on the early evolution of bats.

It took over 25 years of fieldwork to collect the 33 specimens that form the basis of the new study. “That translates to a little over one specimen per year – a lot of effort for a single fossil,” said Erik Seiffert, a paleontologist at Stony Brook University. “But it shows just how important patience and long term field programs are to science. Our long-term commitment to field work certainly paid off in this case.” Among the new species is “a giant among bats; though weighing in at less than a half-pound, it is one of the largest fossil bats ever discovered,” said Greg Gunnell, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan.

Fossil bats of Eocene age are rare in Africa. Only a few fragmentary remains from Egypt, Morocco, Tanzania and Tunisia were previously known. The discovery of six new kinds of bats illustrates the remarkably rich, and previously unsuspected, diversity of bats in Africa 37-34 million years ago. – sciencedaily

Whistle-Blower: Feds Have a Backdoor Into Wireless Carrier — Congress Reacts

A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier’s systems, exposing customers’ voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003.”What I thought was alarming is how this carrier ended up essentially allowing a third party outside their organization to have unfettered access to their environment,” Babak Pasdar, now CEO of New York-based Bat Blue told Threat Level. “I wanted to put some access controls around it; they vehemently denied it. And when I wanted to put some logging around it, they denied that.”

Pasdar won’t name the wireless carrier in question, but his claims are nearly identical to unsourced allegations made in a federal lawsuit filed in 2006 against four phone companies and the U.S. government for alleged privacy violations. That suit names Verizon Wireless as the culprit.

Pasdar has executed a seven-page affidavit for the nonprofit Government Accountability Project in Washington, which on Tuesday began circulating the document (.pdf), along with talking points (.doc), to congressional staffers hashing out a Republican proposal to grant retroactive legal immunity to phone companies who cooperated in the warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

According to his affidavit, Pasdar tumbled to the surveillance superhighway in September 2003, when he led a “Rapid Deployment” team hired to revamp security on the carrier’s internal network. He noticed that the carrier’s officials got squirrelly when he asked about a mysterious “Quantico Circuit” — a 45 megabit/second DS-3 line linking its most sensitive network to an unnamed third party.

Quantico, Virginia, is home to a Marine base. But perhaps more relevantly, it’s also the center of the FBI’s electronic surveillance operations.

“The circuit was tied to the organization’s core network,” Pasdar writes in his affidavit. “It had access to the billing system, text messaging, fraud detection, web site, and pretty much all the systems in the data center without apparent restrictions.”

The 2006 lawsuit (.pdf), which is suspended pending an appeals court ruling, describes a similar arrangement, naming Verizon. – wired

The Election That Might Not Happen

by Betsy Hartmann

In 2000 Bush and Cheney stole the election in Florida. In 2004 they played dirty tricks in Ohio. In 2008 could they go one step further — and suspend the election altogether?The necessary architecture may already be in place. On May 4 last year, the White House issued the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, key parts of which remain classified and hence shrouded from public view. The directive outlines procedures to respond to a “catastrophic emergency,” defined broadly as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.” Of course previous administrations also had emergency plans. But the Bush directive transfers power from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to the White House, where the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism is assigned the job of “National Continuity Coordinator”….

The assassination of a presidential candidate. Obama evokes memories of JFK and Martin Luther King. The bullet could come from a lone racist, a terrorist, or an agent of a state. The threat is real. The Secret Service knows it and so should we.

A terrorist strike, on the scale of 9/11 or worse. Again, not so far-fetched. Bush and Cheney have been Osama bin Laden’s greatest recruiters, making the U.S. appear to be the enemy of millions across the world. Al Qaeda may consider that regime change in the U.S. is not in their interest.

With the right spin, any of these events might be construed as a “catastrophic emergency.”

These worst-case scenarios probably will not come to pass. We’ll probably all be able to sleep peacefully in our beds in the early hours of November 5, after watching the election results on TV. The value of worst-case scenarios lies not in their accurate prediction of events, but rather in what they tell us about the risks we face. – global-sisterhood

It is interesting what people think may happen.

Insects become fly-on-the-wall spies with tiny cameras, radio controls and microphones

This week’s New Scientist reports: “The next time a moth lands on your window sill, watch what you say.

“It may look like an innocent visitor, irresistibly drawn to the light in your room, but it could actually be a spy – one of a new generation of cyborg insects with implants wired into their nerves to allow remote control of their movement.

“Be warned, flesh-and-blood bugs may soon live up to their name.”

Such mechanised animals, or cyborgs, have many advantages over robots. Sharks, moths and rats, for example, have an amazing sense of smell that allows them to detect the faintest traces of chemicals.

And if you can hide the controls within the creature’s body, it would be virtually indistinguishable from any other animal – and so the perfect spy.

Chief among the cyborg inventors is the U.S. military, with its research bureau ploughing money into projects from remote-controlled rats to battery-operated beetles.

Trained to sniff out particular scents, such as human bodies or explosives, the rats’ movements are controlled by electrodes implanted in their brains.

Video camera backpacks transmit images of their mission back to the spymaster. Although the U.S. has stopped funding the rat research, the Israeli government is keen to use the creatures to search for survivors of explosions.

While rats might be big enough to carry video cameras and other paraphernalia, their size makes it difficult for them to blend into the background.

With this in mind, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has switched its focus to insects such as moths and beetles.

In an attempt to make the insects as inconspicuous as possible, miniaturised brain probes are inserted during the pupa stage.

The idea is the ultra-light implants will naturally integrate into the body of the developing insect.

DARPA’s ultimate aim is to create cyborg insects that can fly more than 300 feet to their target and then stay put until commanded to buzz off again. -dailymail

French Mayor Bans Dying

The mayor of a village in southwest France has threatened residents with severe punishment if they die, because there is no room left in the overcrowded cemetery to bury them.

In an ordinance posted in the council offices, Mayor Gerard Lalanne told the 260 residents of the village of Sarpourenx that “all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish.”

It added: “Offenders will be severely punished.”

The mayor said he was forced to take drastic action after an administrative court in the nearby town of Pau ruled in January that the acquisition of adjoining private land to extend the cemetery would not be justified.

Source: Reuters