We talked about the antiparticles, which form antimatter atoms when combined in the same way as regular particles and regular atoms. Hydrogen atoms are one electron orbiting one proton. Antihydrogen is one positron orbiting one antiproton.
Antihydrogen was produced at CERN in 1995. This was done by making antiprotons using a particle accelerator and shooting them into xenon clusters (a bunch of xenon atoms). Only a very small number of antihydrogen atoms can be made this way.
Theoretically, there would be a lot of antimatter in the universe, and therefore a lot of antihydrogen floating out there in space. This could result in higher antimatter atoms (helium, lithium, etc), and even antimatter stars and planets. This appears not to be the case, or at least it cannot be detected if it is.
Psychopaths’ brains show differences in structure and function
Images of prisoners’ brains show important differences between those who are diagnosed as psychopaths and those who aren’t, according to a new study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.
The results could help explain the callous and impulsive anti-social behavior exhibited by some psychopaths.
The study showed that psychopaths have reduced connections between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), the part of the brain responsible for sentiments such as empathy and guilt, and the amygdala, which mediates fear and anxiety. Two types of brain images were collected. Diffusion tensor images (DTI) showed reduced structural integrity in the white matter fibers connecting the two areas, while a second type of image that maps brain activity, a functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI), showed less coordinated activity between the vmPFC and the amygdala.
“This is the first study to show both structural and functional differences in the brains of people diagnosed with psychopathy,” says Michael Koenigs, assistant professor of psychiatry in the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “Those two structures in the brain, which are believed to regulate emotion and social behavior, seem to not be communicating as they should.”
The study, which took place in a medium-security prison in Wisconsin, is a unique collaborative between three laboratories.
UW-Madison psychology Professor Joseph Newman has had a long term interest in studying and diagnosing those with psychopathy and has worked extensively in the Wisconsin corrections system. Dr. Kent Kiehl, of the University of New Mexico and the MIND Research Network, has a mobile MRI scanner that he brought to the prison and used to scan the prisoners’ brains. Koenigs and his graduate student, Julian Motzkin, led the analysis of the brain scans.
The study compared the brains of 20 prisoners with a diagnosis of psychopathy with the brains of 20 other prisoners who committed similar crimes but were not diagnosed with psychopathy.
“The combination of structural and functional abnormalities provides compelling evidence that the dysfunction observed in this crucial social-emotional circuitry is a stable characteristic of our psychopathic offenders,” Newman says. “I am optimistic that our ongoing collaborative work will shed more light on the source of this dysfunction and strategies for treating the problem.”
Newman notes that none of this work would be possible without the extraordinary support provided by the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, which he called “the silent partner in this research.” He says the DOC has demonstrated an unprecedented commitment to supporting research designed to facilitate the differential diagnosis and treatment of prisoners.
The study, published in the most recent Journal of Neuroscience, builds on earlier work by Newman and Koenigs that showed that psychopaths’ decision-making mirrors that of patients with known damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex(vmPFC). This bolsters evidence that problems in that part of the brain are connected to the disorder.
“The decision-making study showed indirectly what this study shows directly – that there is a specific brain abnormality associated with criminal psychopathy,” Koenigs adds.
(http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-11-psychopaths-brains-differences-function.html)
Arteries and veins of the adult body.
Wonders of the Human Body. A. Le Pileur, 1871.
I really like this depiction because it made me realize that you never see a black background for a body even when it would probably make things like nerves and veins and arteries easier to see… hmm. interesting.
(via smithsonious)
1) Sniffing paint — Yes, sniffing paint will give you a “high” for awhile, but it can really inflict severe brain damage. Avoid inhalants like paint and keep your brain cells healthy. Even worse than just killing your brain cells is the fact that sniffing paint has the potential to kill you —…
(Source: 4mind4life.com)
A view of the cell anatomy of a microscopic fungus’ zoospore, as shown through UA’s Transmission Electronic Microscope. One species of this type of fungus, known as chytrids, has been implicated in the extinction of more than 150 species of frogs, world-wide. Comparing the cell anatomy of various chytrid zoospores - mechanisms by which they reproduce - is key in identifying different species.
Credit: Dr. Peter Letcher
Source: Dual NSF Grants Enable UA Scientists, Students to Peer Deeply, The University of Alabama
It’s stories like this that really make me realize how fast science is progressing. You can read a published report here.
BERKELEY — Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one’s own dream on YouTube. With a cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are bringing these futuristic scenarios within reach. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people’s dynamic visual experiences – in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers. As yet, the technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed. However, the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories, according to researchers. “This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery,” said Professor Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the study published online today (Sept. 22) in the journal Current Biology. “We are opening a window into the movies in our minds.” Eventually, practical applications of the technology could include a better understanding of what goes on in the minds of people who cannot communicate verbally, such as stroke victims, coma patients and people with neurodegenerative diseases. It may also lay the groundwork for brain-machine interface so that people with cerebral palsy or paralysis, for example, can guide computers with their minds. However, researchers point out that the technology is decades from allowing users to read others’ thoughts and intentions, as portrayed in such sci-fi classics as “Brainstorm,” in which scientists recorded a person’s sensations so that others could experience them. <!—more—> Previously, Gallant and fellow researchers recorded brain activity in the visual cortex while a subject viewed black-and-white photographs. They then built a computational model that enabled them to predict with overwhelming accuracy which picture the subject was looking at. In their latest experiment, researchers say they have solved a much more difficult problem by actually decoding brain signals generated by moving pictures. “Our natural visual experience is like watching a movie,” said Shinji Nishimoto, lead author of the study and a post-doctoral researcher in Gallant’s lab. “In order for this technology to have wide applicability, we must understand how the brain processes these dynamic visual experiences.” Nishimoto and two other research team members served as subjects for the experiment, because the procedure requires volunteers to remain still inside the MRI scanner for hours at a time. They watched two separate sets of Hollywood movie trailers, while fMRI was used to measure blood flow through the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual information. On the computer, the brain was divided into small, three-dimensional cubes known as volumetric pixels, or “voxels.” “We built a model for each voxel that describes how shape and motion information in the movie is mapped into brain activity,” Nishimoto said. The brain activity recorded while subjects viewed the first set of clips was fed into a computer program that learned, second by second, to associate visual patterns in the movie with the corresponding brain activity. Brain activity evoked by the second set of clips was used to test the movie reconstruction algorithm. This was done by feeding 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos into the computer program so that it could predict the brain activity that each film clip would most likely evoke in each subject. Finally, the 100 clips that the computer program decided were most similar to the clip that the subject had probably seen were merged to produce a blurry yet continuous reconstruction of the original movie. Reconstructing movies using brain scans has been challenging because the blood flow signals measured using fMRI change much more slowly than the neural signals that encode dynamic information in movies, researchers said. For this reason, most previous attempts to decode brain activity have focused on static images. “We addressed this problem by developing a two-stage model that separately describes the underlying neural population and blood flow signals,” Nishimoto said. Ultimately, Nishimoto said, scientists need to understand how the brain processes dynamic visual events that we experience in everyday life. “We need to know how the brain works in naturalistic conditions,” he said. “For that, we need to first understand how the brain works while we are watching movies.” Other coauthors of the study are Thomas Naselaris with UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute; An T. Vu with UC Berkeley’s Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering; and Yuval Benjamini and Professor Bin Yu with the UC Berkeley Department of Statistics. via: UC Berkeley
We talked about how there is a lowest possible temperature, and that it’s absolute zero: -273 °C. You may wonder: how did they discover that? They must have had a bunch of fancy equipment and huge rooms full of machines to achieve low temperatures, right?
No. They couldn’t get anywhere near absolute zero when they discovered it. (Even though now we can, and yes you have to have lots of fancy equipment.) What they did was realized that PV=nRT was a good relation between properties of a gas. Think about this: what if P became 0 in that equation? Then T would also have to be zero. So a gas in a pure vacuum will have zero temperature.
Well, a pure vacuum doesn’t really exist, because if the gas is there, then there can’t be a pure vacuum. But this is still useful, because what they did is measured the P of several gases at 2 T values. That’s easy enough. Then you notice that they all extrapolate back to the same “zero” temperature. This is absolute zero.
Lots of people in the history of science contributed to this, but Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac was the first person (in 1802) to use the number -273.
Philosopher Descartes once believed that the soul was the source of all our thoughts and that it was contained within the pineal gland. This is because the pineal gland is the only unpaired, mid-line structure in the brain.
Although Descartes’ “seat of the soul” hypothesis hasn’t entirely been proven wrong, the major function of the pineal gland has been discovered to be the regulation of our sleep/wake cycle via melatonin (not to be confused with the skin pigment, melanin).
(via fuckyeahnervoussystem)
