Vitamin D instead of a flu shot?

Offbeat and quirky, World Games make their mark in Taiwan

The World Games, an Olympics-sanctioned event, showcases 31 sports that have regional appeal but globally fly under the radar.

Televised in 20 countries, viewers saw mermaid-like swimmers glide down lanes without surfacing in the hunt for finswimming medals. They also saw sword duels and female sumo wrestlers. Korfball and lifesaving also got their 15 minutes of fame.

And when female Brazilian athletes went topless on a Kaohsiung beach, police simply asked them to wear more clothes.

As of Friday, Russia led 97 other countries with 33 World Games medals including 15 golds.

via Offbeat and quirky, World Games make their mark in Taiwan | Oddly Enough | Reuters.

The events on the official World Games Site include Aikido and something called “Orienteering”.

Game utilizes human intuition to help computers solve complex problems

A new computer game prototype combines work and play to help solve a fundamental problem underlying many computer hardware design tasks.

The online logic puzzle is called FunSAT, and it could help integrated circuit designers select and arrange transistors and their connections on silicon microchips, among other applications.

Designing chip architecture for the best performance and smallest size is an exceedingly difficult task that’s outsourced to computers these days. But computers simply flip through possible arrangements in their search. They lack the human capacities for intuition and visual pattern recognition that could yield a better or even optimal design. That’s where FunSAT comes in.

Developed by University of Michigan computer science researchers Valeria Bertacco and Andrew DeOrio, FunSAT is designed to harness humans’ abilities to strategize, visualize and understand complex systems.

“Computer games can be more than a fun diversion,” said Bertacco, an associate professor in computer science and engineering. “Humans are good at playing games and they enjoy dedicating time to it. We hope that we can use their strengths to improve chip designs, databases and even robotics.”

…A single-player prototype exists at http://funsat.eecs.umich.edu, implemented in Java by U-M undergraduate Erica Christensen. Bertacco and DeOrio are working on growing it to a multi-player game, which would allow more complicated problems to be solved.

via Game utilizes human intuition to help computers solve complex problems.

Is Pluto a planet after all?

HOW many planets are in the solar system? The official answer is eight – unless you happen to live in Illinois. Earlier this year, defiant Illinois state governors declared that Pluto had been unfairly demoted by the International Astronomical Union, the authority that sets the rules on all matters planetary.

Three years ago, the IAU decided to draw up the first scientific definition of the term planet. After days of stormy arguments at its general assembly in Prague, the delegates voted for a definition that excluded Pluto, downgrading it to the new category of dwarf planet.

The decision caused outrage among many members of the public who had grown up with nine planets, and among some astronomers who pointed out that only 4 per cent of the IAU’s 10,000 members took part in the vote. The governors of Illinois saw the decision as a snub to Pluto’s discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh, who was born in the state.

Next week the IAU’s general assembly will convene for the first time since Pluto was axed from the list of planets. Surprisingly, IAU chief Karel van der Hucht does not expect anyone to challenge the ruling made in Prague, but Pluto fans can take heart: resistance remains strong.

If Pluto is reinstated, it will probably be thanks to discovery rather than debate. Mark Sykes of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, believes that revelations within and beyond our solar system over the coming years will make the IAU’s controversial definition of a planet untenable (see diagram). “We are in the midst of a conceptual revolution,” he says. “We are shaking off the last vestiges of the mythological view of planets as special objects in the sky – and the idea that there has to be a small number of them because they’re special.”

via Is Pluto a planet after all? – space – 27 July 2009 – New Scientist.

Common household pesticides linked to childhood cancer cases in Washington area

A new study by researchers at the Georgetown’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center finds a higher level of common household pesticides in the urine of children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), a cancer that develops most commonly between three and seven years of age. The findings are published in the August issue of the journal Therapeutic Drug Monitoring.

Researchers caution that these findings should not be seen as cause-and-effect, only that the study suggests an association between pesticide exposure and development of childhood ALL.

“In our study, we compared urine samples from children with ALL and their mothers with healthy children and their moms. We found elevated levels of common household pesticides more often in the mother-child pairs affected by cancer,” says the study’s lead investigator, Offie Soldin, PhD, an epidemiologist at Lombardi. Soldin cautions, “We shouldn’t assume that pesticides caused these cancers, but our findings certainly support the need for more robust research in this area.”

The study was conducted between January 2005 and January 2008 with volunteer participants from Lombardi and Children’s National Medical Center who live in the Washington metropolitan area. It included 41 pairs of children with ALL and their mothers (cases), and 41 pairs of healthy children and their mothers (controls). For comparison purposes, the case pairs were matched with control pairs by age, sex and county of residence. Previous studies in agricultural areas of the country have suggested a relationship between pesticides and childhood cancers, but researchers say this is the first study conducted in a large, metropolitan area.

via Common household pesticides linked to childhood cancer cases in Washington area.

Ants are more rational than humans.

20 Page British government manual for twitter + Tweeting the Mona Lisa

The British government has told civil servants: Go forth and tweet.The government has published guidelines for its departments on using the microblogging service Twitter.In contrast to Twitter’s limit of 140 characters per message, the document published Tuesday runs to 20 pages.It advises government departments to produce between two and 10 tweets a day, so as not to inundate followers. It says departments should not follow any Twitter users who are not following them, as this could be interpreted as “Big Brother” behavior.The prime minister’s office, the Foreign Office and some individual lawmakers already use Twitter to broadcast their activities online. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s 10 Downing St. office has more than 1 million followers. – ap

… goal to write an image encoder/decoder that allows to send an image in a tweet. The image on the left is what I currently manage to send in 140 characters via twitter. … I am using chinese characters here since in UTF-8 encoding they allow me to send 210 bytes of data in 140 chars. In theory I could use the whole character code range from 0×0000-0xffff, but there are several control chars among them which probably could not be sent properly. With some tweaking and testing it would be possible to use at least 1 or 2 more bits which would allow to sneak 17 or 35 more bytes into a tweet, but the whole encoding would be way more nasty and the tweets would contain chars that have no font representation. …

A typical RGB color needs 24 bits which is 3 bytes. This means if you just stored raw colors you could send 70 colors. Unfortunately you couldn’t send anything else. At least that would allow you to send a 7×10 pixel matrix.

The worst way to store one full x/y coordinate would be 2 times 4 bytes, which is 26 coordinates in one tweet. That’s 8 triangles. Obviously you have to do some concessions with the precision here. 2 bytes per number maybe? Gives you 52 points or 17 triangles. Unfortunately those come without color info.

The color info is stored in the third byte and the way it is done is quite nifty I think: since my lookup table stores only 8 colors I just need 3 bits to store an index to a color. This would leave me with 5 unused bits. So I use these additional bits to give me a wider range of colors by creating blends between the colors in the table. So additionally to one color index I store another color index in the same byte. The remaining 2 bits I use as the blending factor. 2 bits allow for 4 different values. The ones I pick are 0 = 0.125, 1=0.25, 2=0.375, 4 = 0.5. I don’t need any higher values since I can simply switch the order of the “upper” and “lower” color to get the same result as e.g. 0.75. I also do not need 0 or 1 since if I want a full color I just mix two times the same color. The 0.5 is a bit of a waste since it means I get the same mix in both directions, maybe it would be smarter to use 0.45 in this case. Overall this trick means that instead of just 8 colors I have a choice of about 256 shades of color.

The actual creation of the image is an evolutionary algorithm. I start by quantizing the image’s colors to get 8 representative colors. And I scatter the 61 points over the image area. At each point I read the pixel color of the blurred image and choose the closest shade I can create with my extended color table. With this data I greate a binary “gene” ( the encoded version of is the chinese twitter tweet). From the gene I create a voronoi diagram which is the image you see on the left.

In order to get the best representation (meaning best positions of points and their choice of color) I compare the rendered image with the original by summing up the squared difference of the pixel colors and dividing it by the amount of pixels. The result is the fitness value. The ideal value would be 1 which meant that there is no difference at all between original and rendered image, but obviously that is improssible to reach for most images.

After calculating the fitness value I clone the gene and make a few random mutations to it. Once again I calculate the fitness of the mutation and if it is higher than of its parent the mutation becomes the new parent. This process can run indefinitely but usually the rate of improvement decreases rapidly after a few minutes. – flickr

Maternal, paternal genes’ tug-of-war may last well into childhood

An analysis of rare genetic disorders in which children lack some genes from one parent suggests that maternal and paternal genes engage in a subtle tug-of-war well into childhood, and possibly as late as the onset of puberty.

This striking new variety of intra-family conflict, described this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the latest wrinkle in the two-decades-old theory known as genomic imprinting, which holds that each parent contributes genes that seek to nudge his or her children’s development in a direction most favorable, and least costly, to that parent.

“Compared to other primates, human babies are weaned quite early, yet take a very long time to reach full nutritional independence and sexual maturity,” says author David Haig, George Putnam Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “Human mothers are also unusual among primates in that they often care for more than one child at a time. Evidence from disorders of genomic imprinting suggests that maternal and paternal genes may skirmish over the pace of human development.”

Previous research has offered evidence of a genetic struggle for supremacy only during fetal development: In the womb, some genes of paternal origin have been shown to promote increased demands on mothers, leading to fetal overgrowth, while genes of maternal origin tend to have the opposite effect. This new work suggests maternal and paternal genes continue to engage in internal genetic conflict past childbirth.

“This analysis suggests that human life history, and especially humans’ unusual extended childhood, may reflect a compromise between what’s best for mothers, fathers, and the offspring themselves,” Haig says.

Haig delved into clinical case reports on patients with four rare genetic disorders. He found evidence that children with disorders characterized by dominance of some maternal genes — Silver-Russell syndrome, Prader-Willi syndrome, and Temple syndrome — place fewer demands on their mothers’ resources.

For example, newborns with all three disorders display a weak desire to nurse, and slower childhood growth in general. Many also show early onset of puberty, which often marks a point at which children become less dependent on their mothers’ sustenance.

Conversely, babies with Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, in which some maternally derived genes are suppressed and paternal genes dominate, are born heavy with particularly large tongues. These individuals usually end up being tall, owing to their rapid growth both in the womb and as young children. They have a high frequency of childhood cancers.

“Clinical data from imprinting disorders suggest paternally-expressed genes promote, and maternally-expressed genes inhibit, childhood growth,” Haig writes. …

via Maternal, paternal genes’ tug-of-war may last well into childhood.

Buzz Aldrin says there is a monolith on Mars’ moon Phobos

Detailsd based on work by Efrain Palermo and Lan Fleming:

via Damn Data ¦ Buzz Aldrin says there is a monolith on Phobos | Cabinet of Wonders.

Brain Reading Improvement

It is widely known that the brain perceives information before it reaches a person’s awareness. But until now, there was little way to determine what specific mental tasks were taking place prior to the point of conscious awareness.That has changed with the findings of scientists at Rutgers University in Newark and the University of California, Los Angeles who have developed a highly accurate way to peer into the brain to uncover a person’s mental state and what sort of information is being processed before it reaches awareness. With this new window into the brain, scientists now also are provided with the means of developing a more accurate model of the inner functions of the brain.

As reported in a forthcoming (Oct. 2009) issue of Psychological Science, the findings obtained by Stephen José Hanson, psychology professor at Rutgers; Russell A. Poldrack, professor at UCLA, and Yaroslav Halchenko, (now a post-doctoral student at Dartmouth College), have provided direct evidence that a person’s mental state can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The research also suggests that a more comprehensive approach is needed for mapping brain activity and that the widely held belief that localized areas of the brain are responsible for specific mental functions is misleading and incorrect.

The research was funded with grants from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the James S. McDonnell Foundation and National Science Foundation. The McDonnell Foundation recently awarded Hanson another $1 million for ongoing studies in this area.

Over the last several years, much of neuroimaging has focused on pinpointing areas of the brain that are uniquely responsible for specific  mental functions, such as learning, memory, fear and love. But this latest research shows that the brain is more complex than that simple model. In their analysis of global brain activity, the researchers found that different processing tasks have their own distinct pattern of neural connections stretching across the brain, similar to the fingerprints that distinctively identify each of us. Rather than being a static pattern, however, the brain is able to arrange and rearrange the connections based on the mental task being undertaken.

“You can’t just pinpoint a specific area of the brain, for example, and say that is the area responsible for our concept of self or that part is the source of our morality,” says Hanson. “It turns out the brain is much more complex and flexible than that. It has the ability to rearrange neural connections for different functions. By examining the pattern of neural connections, you can predict with a high degree of accuracy what mental processing task a person is doing.“

- via Rutgers

Trasnparent Aluminum is a ‘new state of matter’

Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminium by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser. ‘Transparent aluminium’ previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion. // In this week’s Nature Physics an international team, led by Oxford University scientists, report that a short pulse from the FLASH laser ‘knocked out’ a core electron from every aluminium atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure. This turned the aluminium nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation.

”What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before,’ said Professor Justin Wark of Oxford University’s Department of Physics, one of the authors of the paper. ‘Transparent aluminium is just the start. The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of ‘miniature stars’ created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth.’

The discovery was made possible with the development of a new source of radiation that is ten billion times brighter than any synchrotron in the world (such as the UK’s Diamond Light Source). The FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany, produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city.

The Oxford team, along with their international colleagues, focused all this power down into a spot with a diameter less than a twentieth of the width of a human hair. At such high intensities the aluminium turned transparent.

Whilst the invisible effect lasted for only an extremely brief period – an estimated 40 femtoseconds – it demonstrates that such an exotic state of matter can be created using very high power X-ray sources.

Professor Wark added: ‘What is particularly remarkable about our experiment is that we have turned ordinary aluminium into this exotic new material in a single step by using this very powerful laser. For a brief period the sample looks and behaves in every way like a new form of matter. In certain respects, the way it reacts is as though we had changed every aluminium atom into silicon: it’s almost as surprising as finding that you can turn lead into gold with light!’

- via physorg