Can blocking a frown keep bad feelings at bay?

Your facial expression may tell the world what you are thinking or feeling. But it also affects your ability to understand written language related to emotions, according to research that was presented today to the Society for Personal and Social Psychology in Las Vegas, and will be published in the journal Psychological Science.

The new study reported on 40 people who were treated with botulinum toxin, or Botox. Tiny applications of this powerful nerve poison were used to deactivate muscles in the forehead that cause frowning.

The interactions of facial expression, thoughts and emotions has intrigued scientists for more than a century, says the study’s first author, University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology Ph.D. candidate David Havas.

Scientists have found that blocking the ability to move the body causes changes in cognition and emotion, but there were always questions. (One of the test treatments caused widespread, if temporary, paralysis.) In contrast, Havas was studying people after a pinpoint treatment to paralyze a single pair of “corrugator” muscles, which cause brow-wrinkling frowns.

To test how blocking a frown might affect comprehension of language related to emotions, Havas asked the patients to read written statements, before and then two weeks after the Botox treatment. The statements were angry (“The pushy telemarketer won’t let you return to your dinner”); sad (“You open your email in-box on your birthday to find no new emails”); or happy (“The water park is refreshing on the hot summer day.”)

Havas gauged the ability to understand these sentences according to how quickly the subject pressed a button to indicate they had finished reading it. “We periodically checked that the readers were understanding the sentences, not just pressing the button,” says Havas.

The results showed no change in the time needed to understand the happy sentences. But after Botox treatment, the subjects took more time to read the angry and sad sentences. Although the time difference was small, it was significant, he adds. Moreover, the changes in reading time couldn’t be attributed to changes in participants’ mood.

The use of Botox to test how making facial expressions affect emotional centers in the brain was pioneered by, Andreas Hennenlotter of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany.

“There is a long-standing idea in psychology, called the facial feedback hypothesis,” says Havas. “Essentially, it says, when you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you. It’s an old song, but it’s right. Actually, this study suggests the opposite: When you’re not frowning, the world seems less angry and less sad.”

The Havas study broke new ground by linking the expression of emotion to the ability to understand language, says Havas’s advisor, UW-Madison professor emeritus of psychology Arthur Glenberg. “Normally, the brain would be sending signals to the periphery to frown, and the extent of the frown would be sent back to the brain. But here, that loop is disrupted, and the intensity of the emotion, and of our ability to understand it when embodied in language, is disrupted.”

Practically, the study “may have profound implications for the cosmetic-surgery,” says Glenberg. “Even though it’s a small effect, in conversation, people respond to fast, subtle cues about each other’s understanding, intention and empathy. If you are slightly slower reacting as I tell you about something made me really angry, that could signal to me that you did not pick up my message.”

Such an effect could snowball, Havas says, but the outcome could also be positive: “Maybe if I am not picking up sad, angry cues in the environment, that will make me happier.”

In theoretical terms, the finding supports a psychological hypothesis called “embodied cognition,” says Glenberg, now a professor of psychology at Arizona State University. “The idea of embodied cognition is that all our cognitive processes, even those that have been thought of as very abstract, are actually rooted in basic bodily processes of perception, action and emotion.”

With some roots in evolutionary theory, the embodied cognition hypothesis suggests that our thought processes, like our emotions, are refined through evolution to support survival and reproduction.

Embodied cognition links two seemingly separate mental functions, Glenberg says. “It’s been speculated at least since Darwin that the peripheral expression of emotion is a part of the emotion. An important role of emotion is social: it communicates, ‘I love’ or ‘I hate you,’ and it makes sense that there would be this very tight connection between peripheral expression and brain mechanism.”

“Language has traditionally been seen as a very high level, abstract process that is divorced from more primitive processes like action, perception and emotion,” Havas says. “This study shows that far from being divorced from emotion, language understanding can be hindered when those peripheral bodily mechanism are interrupted.”

via Can blocking a frown keep bad feelings at bay?.

Man Wielding Fork Attempts Gas Station Robbery

Police reported a bizarre gas station robbery in Westmoreland County Tuesday night.

According to police, Gino Conti, 31, walked into the Shell gas station on Route 30 in Hempfield Township and asked for a box of cigarettes.

When the clerk turned around, police said Conti pulled out a fork and demanded money.

Police said there was no money in the cash register, so Conti grabbed the cigarettes and left.

Police caught up with Conti a short time later. He faces several charges including robbery and simple assault.

No one was hurt when Conti pulled the fork out.

via Man Wielding Fork Attempts Gas Station Robbery – News Story – WPXI Pittsburgh.

Now THAT’s a fork.

Driver fined for blowing nose in van

A MAN told today of his disbelief at being fined for blowing his nose while his van was stopped in London.

Michael Mancini wiped his nose with a handkerchief while stuck in traffic in October 2009.

But when the traffic cleared, he was pulled over by police who told him he had not been in control of his vehicle.

Mr Mancini, from Ayrshire in Scotland, was handed a $US97 fine and three points on his driving license.

“I was stopped in traffic and had the handbrake on and thought to myself, ‘I?ve just got time to blow my nose,’” he said.

“Then police pulled me over and I was booked. I genuinely thought they were joking.”

Mr Mancini refused to pay the penalty.

His solicitor wrote to prosecutors earlier in January explaining that Mr Mancini was in charge of the vehicle because his handbrake was on, therefore the offense did not occur.

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But prosecutors replied the next day warning that if the fine wasn’t paid the case would be taken to court.

Mr Mancini said, “I intend on taking this all the way to court. I still don’t believe it actually happened”.
Driver fined for blowing nose in van | News.com.au.

Well he should know that blowing your nose can make you pass out and crash.

Aging of Blood Stem Cells May Be Reversible

Older mice ‘rejuvenated’ when treated with blood factors from younger mice, researchers found

Scientists have found a way to make old stem cells in the blood act like young stem cells, a discovery that could lead to ways to slow the aging process.

Taking certain factors from the blood of young mice and putting them in old mice made old stem cells take on the characteristics of younger stem cells. In addition, the tissues of the older mice appeared much more “youthful,” according to the Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers at the Joslin Diabetes Center.

The change in the older stem cells is driven by signals from another type of cell nearby in the bone, the researchers explained. They added that this finding improves understanding of aging of the blood-forming system and points toward blood-based treatments for age-related health problems.

The study findings are published in the Jan. 27 issue of the journal Nature.

“What’s most exciting is that the changes that occur in blood stem cells during aging are reversible, through signals carried by the blood itself. This means that the blood system offers a potential therapeutic avenue for age-related stem cell dysfunction,” Amy J. Wagers, an associate professor in Harvard’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, and an investigator at the Joslin Diabetes Center, said in a news release from the center.

The study doesn’t directly address diabetes-related mechanisms but “there’s more and more evidence of an overlap in the regulatory pathways that are implicated in aging and in type 2 diabetes,” Wagers said.

via Aging of Blood Stem Cells May Be Reversible – BusinessWeek.

Photo from: Scientists Create Blood From Stem Cells (2008)

Presidential approval of assassinations of U.S. citizens

The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest today reports that “U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people.”  T

… buried in Priest’s article is her revelation that American citizens are now being placed on a secret “hit list” of people whom the President has personally authorized to be killed:

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. . . .

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, “it doesn’t really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them,” a senior administration official said. “They are then part of the enemy.”

Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called “High Value Targets” and “High Value Individuals,” whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including [New Mexico-born Islamic cleric Anwar] Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi’s name has now been added.

Indeed, Aulaqi was clearly one of the prime targets of the late-December missile strikes in Yemen, as anonymous officials excitedly announced — falsely, as it turns out — that he was killed in one of those strikes.

Just think about this for a minute. Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests.” They’re entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations. Amazingly, the Bush administration’s policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges — based solely on the President’s claim that they were Terrorists — produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn’t Obama’s policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind — not imprisoned, but killed — produce at least as much controversy? …

via Presidential assassinations of U.S. citizens :: www.uruknet.info :: informazione dal medio oriente :: information from middle east :: [vs-4].

‘Superman’ vision penetrates opaque glass

It’s not quite X-ray vision, but a way has been found to transmit simple images through opaque objects using ordinary light – and physicists have used the method to project an image through glass covered in thick paint.

Some things we consider opaque – “not able to be seen through”, in the New Oxford Dictionary of English definition – are slightly translucent, meaning some light does in fact make it through. However, it is scattered so much as it bounces around inside the materials’ lattice of atoms that physicists thought it was beyond practical use for seeing what is on the other side of the object.

A 2007 experiment that managed to focus light through eggshells and a human tooth demonstrated that might not be so. Now the first simple images have been transmitted through an opaque object and reconstructed on the far side, by physicist Sylvain Gigan and colleagues at École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles in Paris, France.

Snapshot

By reverse engineering the scattering process, the team were able to reconstruct an image from the light that had passed through the opaque paint layer. That scattering is complex, but it’s also predictable: the same light wave will always be scattered in the same way.

The way a particular object scatters light is known as its transmission matrix. “If the [layer of paint] is a maze for light, then you could think of the transmission matrix as the map for it,” says Gigan.

His team worked out the transmission matrix for their painted glass slide by hitting it with a weak laser beam more than 1000 times, changing the shape of the beam each time using a spatial light modulator – the same device used to control the light emerging from a video projector. A digital camera on the other side of the glass detected the different scattering patterns produced each time. By comparing what the camera saw with what had been done to the laser beam, the team measured the paint’s complete transmission matrix.

Invisible image

If a simple image was then projected onto the paint, a person simply looking at the painted glass from behind would see only an even glow. But the team used knowledge of the transmission matrix to decode the faint, noisy trace that reached the digital camera and reconstruct the image.

“Once the matrix is known, reconstructing the image is very quick,” Gigan says. “We can achieve almost video-rate focusing or imaging.”

However, it will be some time before the technique is used to transmit and reconstruct any truly interesting images – the test images were very simple patterns: a 256-pixel rectangular grid with a handful of its squares lit up more brightly. “The quality of the images degrades rapidly when increasing the number of pixels, because the signal-to-noise ratio degrades,” says Gigan, although he says there is “room for improvement” with future study.

Allard Mosk at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands, who together with his colleague Ivo Vellekoop focused light through eggshells and teeth in 2007, is impressed. “We can see that technically this work is at the beginning of a long and exciting road,” he says. Although at the moment the technique is restricted to simple 256-pixel images, he thinks other groups around the world will now be inspired to send larger and more complex images through opaque objects.

via ‘Superman’ vision penetrates opaque glass – physics-math – 28 January 2010 – New Scientist.

Physicists Investigate Possibility of an ‘Unhiggs’

One of the biggest goals of the LHC is to discover the Higgs boson, the only particle in the Standard Model that has not yet been observed. In general, physicists are pretty confident that the Higgs does in fact exist, although they have spent a lot of effort searching for the particle in less powerful accelerators without success. While patiently waiting for the LHC to reach its full energy and a Higgs particle to leave a signature in a detector, some physicists are investigating alternative scenarios. One of the most recent proposals is that the Higgs is not a particle, but an unparticle called the Unhiggs.

The Unhiggs idea was first suggested in a paper published in November 2009 by physicists David Stancato and John Terning of the University of California, Davis. The Unhiggs is not all that different from the Higgs, except that it demonstrates unparticle behavior and, subsequently, does not fit in with the Standard Model. While a particle has discrete parameters, the Unhiggs’ parameters are continuous. In this sense, the Unhiggs is itself a continuum, and can be thought of as a collection of many Higgs bosons, each carrying a fraction of the Unhigg’s total value.

“In particle physics, we are used to dealing with (surprise) particles,” Adam Falkowski, a physicist at Rutgers University, told PhysOrg.com. Falkowski and Manuel Pérez-Victoria of the University of Granada are also investigating the possibility of the Unhiggs. “One property of particles is a well defined mass. For an unstable particle (such as the Higgs boson in the Standard Model), we can experimentally determine the mass by measuring the momenta of its decay products and computing the so-called invariant mass. Particles show as bumps, or resonances, in the invariant mass spectrum or other kinematical distributions.

“Unparticles, on the other hand, do not have a well defined mass; in fact, an unparticle can be thought of as a superposition of an infinite number of particles with different masses. For this reason, unparticles don’t show up as resonances. Instead, they show up as subtle modifications of kinematical distributions measured by experiment, and therefore they can be difficult to spot.” …

via Physicists Investigate Possibility of an ‘Unhiggs’.

Optical refrigeration expected to enhance airborne and spaceborne applications

Under an Air Force Office of Scientific Research, multi-university grant, a team led by University of New Mexico professor, Dr. Mansoor Sheik-Bahae created the first-ever all-solid-state cryocooler that can be applied to airborne and spaceborne sensors.

This technology, which allows coolers to reach temperatures so cold that they can only be obtained by liquefying gases, may lead to advances in superconducting electronics because it would enable miniaturization for cooling purposes.

Graduate students Denis Seletskiy and Seth Melgaard designed and performed the experiments at UNM’s department of Physics and Astronomy in collaboration with researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Pisa, Italy.

“Optical refrigeration or solid state optical refrigeration technology offers many advantages over currently used, bulky mechanical coolers because it is vibration free (no moving parts), compact, lightweight and agile (fast turn-on and off),” said Sheik-Bahae.

Previously, only solid-state coolers based on standard thermoelectric devices were able to reach temperatures as low as 170K, and even so, only with minimal efficiency.

“We obtained cooling down to 155K using optical refrigeration,”said Sheik-Bahae. “We expect that material research may lead to temperatures dipping below 77K (boiling point of liquid nitrogen) and in the future as low as 10K may be possible,” he added.

In order to achieve their results, the scientists enhanced cooling efficiency by exploiting resonances in the absorption spectrum, growing pure crystals, using thin optical fibers, keeping their sample in thermal isolation inside a vacuum and by trapping laser light in a resonant space. …

via Optical refrigeration expected to enhance airborne and spaceborne applications.

Related:

Byline: John Fleck Journal Staff Writer

* Keeping satellites from overheating a possible use for cold technology

When you fire a laser at something, you expect it to get hot, not cold.

In a nondescript lab building tucked in the shadow of University of New Mexico Hospital, Mansoor Sheik-Bahae is defying expectations.

UNM physics professor Sheik-Bahae is exploiting one of those loopholes that makes quantum mechanics endlessly puzzling, even to a hardened physicist.

In the lab, a narrow beam of green light bounces through a series of mirrors and a filtering system, creating the precise frequency used to make the quantum magic work.…

Laser Cools It in UNM Laboratory

Scientists Turn Mouse Skin Cells Into Nerve Cells

Scientists at Stanford University have succeeded in creating brain nerve cells directly out of skin cells taken from the tails of adult mice.

The new approach could revolutionize human stem cell therapy and science’s understanding of how cells choose and maintain their specialized roles in the body, the researchers said.

The findings also seem to radically upturn established thinking about how cells become cells, and potentially avoid the controversial approach of using embryonic stem cells for cellular therapy. And the research could conceivably open new doors in the future to treating diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, the researchers said.

The researchers had not actually expected to succeed in the endeavor.

“We were blown away,” said Dr. Marius Wernig, senior author of a paper appearing online Jan. 27 in Nature and a member of Stanford’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine.

“We wanted to ask the question, ‘Do we have to go back in development to be able to go forward or can there be a direct way,’ ” he said, adding, “This is the first direct conversion that is totally artificial. It doesn’t occur in nature.”

Paul Sanberg, a stem cell expert and distinguished professor of neurosurgery and director of the University of South Florida Center for Aging and Brain Repair in Tampa, said, “It [the new study] really changes the idea of how one cell can change to another cell and it may change the concept of how an organism develops.”

But experts were cautious in their interpretation of the findings, especially as to what they might mean for the thorny yet expanding area of stem cell research.

“From a basic point of view it’s exciting because it shows that you can go straight from one differentiated cell and transform it to a different differentiated cell. It doesn’t have to go back to being pluripotent,” Sanberg said. “But it’s still early. It will be a while until cells are made that can be used therapeutically.”

via Scientists Turn Mouse Skin Cells Into Nerve Cells – BusinessWeek.

Coincidence or Precognition?

Image: Maldives, island paradise, by daniel pozo

Sometimes it seems that ripples from the future influence the present.

I once had a vivid lucid dream where I walked through a particular tree. Years later I got a job in a building very close to that tree, and my office is straight through that particular tree in the exact direction I walked in the dream.  Years after I took the job in that office, I went away on vacation to Hawaii with someone I thought I would marry. When I returned, that tree was cut down. Now I walk through that tree every day on the way to lunch and back.

There is no way I or anyone else could have known, years before, where I would work, where my office would be or that this tree would be cut down due to disease.

Another strange coincidence has now attached itself to that dream, as if what I call “a quantum strange loop” is acting as a bridge between waking and sleeping, life and death.

I dedicated a blog post about my strange tree dream on Oct 21st to a friend of mine who killed herself.  When a friend told me she’d committed suicide, I did not wish to know the manner. I assumed until yesterday that she took her life with a gun, but I just found out yesterday Jan 27, 2010, that she lept to her death.

Coincidence or Precognition?

On July 25, 2009, three months before she died, I posted a song called “What Have I Done” about leaping. (Click the link for the lyrics.) I was thinking of myself when I wrote it, that love requires a leap of faith. I was expressing a fear of commitment that has kept me single my entire life. Now the song has a new meaning.  I don’t think she ever heard it, but if she did, “What have I done” becomes even more self-referential.

My rational mind tells me, as my friend once seemed to do, “ignore conspiracy theories” and “don’t be superstitious”.  I assume my song and the method of my friend’s death are just strange coincidence.

Magical thinking–though we may fight it–is a part of each of us. If I help create the world by what I choose to see, my brain says to me, I should fill my thoughts and time with positive things, like nice vacations in the Maldives or things nice equally.