The drug Ritalin is commonly prescribed for use in treating ADHD, but researchers also know that Ritalin boosts cognitive function in people without the disorder. How? The drug works in two ways. First, Ritalin increases dopamine activity in the brain, which enhances attention and learning. Second, it enhances neural plasticity – “changes in strength of the connections between nerve cells.” Research was published in Nature Neuroscience:
Rats given Ritalin were able to more quickly learn that a combination of signals–a flash of light and sound–meant they could get a sugar water reward. But if the rats were also given a drug to block one type of dopamine receptor, the effect was lost. Treated animals also focused more intently on the task at hand, engaging in less unrelated behavior. Another drug, designed to block a second type of dopamine receptor, blocked Ritalin’s ability to enhance focus.
Researchers say this study will help them to develop more targeted drugs with fewer side effects. It also provides additional evidence for what many college students already know – taking a cognitive enhancement drug can help them perform much better than they would unaided.
The biggest barrier to manned exploration of Mars is the time it would take to get there – with current technology (chemical rockets) it would take about eight months. However, a new propulsion technology that uses jets of superheated plasma to propel a craft using “steady, efficient thrust” could cut that time to merely 40 days. Road trip!
A mission trajectory study estimated that a VASIMR-powered spacecraft could reach the red planet within 40 days if it had a 200 megawatt power source. That’s 1,000 times more power than what the current VASIMR prototype will use, although Ad Astra says that VASIMR can scale up to higher power sources.
The real problem rests with current limitations in space power sources. Glover estimates that the Mars mission scenario would need a power source that can produce one kilowatt (kW) of power per kilogram (kg) of mass, or else the spacecraft could never reach the speeds required for a quick trip.
Existing power sources fall woefully short of that ideal. Solar panels have a mass to power ratio of 20 kg/kW. The Pentagon’s DARPA science lab hopes to develop solar panels that can achieve 7 kg/KW, and stretched lens arrays might reach 3 kg/KW, Glover said. That’s good enough for VASIMR to transport cargo around low-Earth orbit and to the moon, but not to fly humans to Mars.
Unfortunately, while we may actually have the propulsion technology to send humans to Mars in a relatively timely manner, we don’t have the power source. Solar panels won’t do the trick, and the proposed power source, a nuclear reactor, is only a concept at this point. Even so, Ad Astra, the company that created VASMIR, has approached commercial spaceflight providers to explore potential launch options.
Silicon.com asked leading thinkers in the realm of artificial intelligence where they think AI will be in the year 2100. On the conservative side, we have responses from Noel Sharkey, who sees autonomous cars and more use of robots in medicine. On the more radical side, we have Ray Kurzweil, who believes we will have human-level AI by 2029 and will be exploring beyond our solar system by the year 2100.
With the exception of Kurzweil, however, the other respondents are much less sure about what the year 2100 will hold for humanity. Will we even have machines capable of passing the Turing Test? Will we still be the dominant species?
It’s safe to say humanity will undergo more change in the next century than it has in its entire existence. If Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns is even somewhat accurate, however, it will be difficult to predict what, exactly, that change will look like.
We’ve known that the Moon definitively contains water ice since late last year when NASA crashed a probe into the south pole and measured the resulting plume of debris. This evening NASA unveiled findings that measured the presence of water ice on the north pole, and we learned that ice is abundant there to the tune of at least 600 million tons:
“The emerging picture from the multiple measurements and resulting data of the instruments on lunar missions indicates that water creation, migration, deposition and retention are occurring on the moon,” said Paul Spudis, principal investigator of the Mini-SAR experiment at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. “The new discoveries show the moon is an even more interesting and attractive scientific, exploration and operational destination than people had previously thought.”
During the past year, the Mini-SAR mapped the moon’s permanently-shadowed polar craters that aren’t visible from Earth. The radar uses the polarization properties of reflected radio waves to characterize surface properties. Results from the mapping showed deposits having radar characteristics similar to ice.
“After analyzing the data, our science team determined a strong indication of water ice, a finding which will give future missions a new target to further explore and exploit,” said Jason Crusan, program executive for the Mini-RF Program for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate in Washington.
The presence of abundant water ice on the Moon makes it all the more feasible for humans to set up a long-term presence there, enabling potential colonists to create oxygen and hydrogen, as well enabling them to avoid having to ship water for basic human needs, i.e. drinking and washing, from Earth.
World-famous movie critic Roger Ebert lost his ability to speak, eat or drink when he was treated for thyroid cancer and had his jaw removed in 2006. Now, a Scottish company called CereProc has literally given Ebert his voice back via software that uses old recordings of his voice to determine speech patterns and how he would pronounce certain words, and then used this information to re-create his voice (which, Ebert notes, is currently in “beta”):
Before I lost my voice due to cancer-related surgery, I’d recorded commentary tracks for some movies on DVD: “Citizen Kane,” “Casablanca,” “Floating Weeds,” “Dark City” and, ah, “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.” These tracks had been recorded separately from the movies, so they could be edited to fit scenes. They might be “pure” audio. I asked two friends of mine, Ronnie Sass of Warner Bros. and Kim Hendrickson of the Criterion Collection, if they still had the original digital recordings. They rummaged in warehouses and found they did. So did New Line and 20th Century-Fox, studios for which I’d also recorded commentary tracks.
This began a back-and-forth process with CereProc, which had to transcribe every recording with perfect accuracy so they could locate every word. The “normal person” may use 5,000 words, not all of them on the same day. A college professor may use 15,000. Shakespeare used more than 25,000, but he was making up a lot of them as he went along.
Anyway, CereProc didn’t need to hear me speaking a specific word in order for my “voice” to say it. They needed lots of words to determine the general idea of how I might say a word. They transcribed and programmed and tweaked and fiddled, and early this February, sent me the files for a beta version of my voice. I played it for Chaz, and she said, yes, she could tell it was me. For one thing it knew exactly how I said “I.”
There are a total of seven challenges on which they are calling for solutions:
Plan and execute approach and regress routes within both urban and wilderness terrain, and without preloaded maps or terrain models
Communicate with and facilitate communications between patients and human medics
Execute command, control, and coordination of individual robots, robot teams, and medical payloads
Perform remote/stand-off initial casualty assessment to iidentify injuries sufficient to prevent further injury during robotic casualty extraction
Lift, move, drag, tow, or otherwise effect recovery of patients in any of numerous body positions from hazardous environments in any terrain to safe locations
Provide closed loop or semi-autonomous casualty monitoring and enroute care sufficient to mitigate risk associated with “abandonment” concerns during unattended CASEVAC (casualty extraction and evacuation – ed.)
Plan and conduct recovery from errors or the unexpected
The posting also notes that the Army has been working on research in this area, but is having particular trouble solving the issue of safely picking up wounded soldiers for transport (number five). From the information in the posting, as well as the added questions and answers, any proposals that could come up with a solution to this particular issue would have the best chance at a positive evaluation.
Researchers in Canada have discovered that a cocktail of “natural” supplements can extend the lives of mice up to 10 percent, keep them active longer into old age, and even make them smarter. From CBC News:
David Rollo, a professor of biology at McMaster has found a cocktail of 30 dietary supplements such as B vitamins, vitamin D, ginseng and garlic counteracts symptoms of aging in mice.
The experiment was prompted by research that suggests single vitamin and antioxidant pills don’t work. The researchers wondered if mixing the ingredients would.
Rollo said the results were profound, as not only were the mice twice as active, they also seemed to get smarter.
When researchers examined the animals’ brains, they found the cells were generating fewer of the free radicals that cause aging — evidence that they say shows the supplements make a difference.
Choosing which health supplements to take can be fairly daunting, as manufacturers make a lot of claims that are often not backed up with firm scientific evidence.
Information is Beautiful is a Web site that takes information and conveys it through well-designed graphs and charts. They’ve evaluated the evidence of supplements for use in treating various conditions and have created a “balloon graph” showing which ones have the evidence backing up health claims, which have little evidence for their claims, and which have little evidence but hold promise.
The graph also notes where evidence for certain supplements is strong and where it is weaker. For instance, scientific evidence exists showing that fish oil has a positive effect on secondary heart disease and high blood pressure. However, it’s merely “promising” for behavior and general health.
For a few years I’ve been reading about technology that enables doctors to “print” human organs for transplants. Unlike the traditional sources for transplant organs (willing donors and cadavers), 3D printers would enable patients in need to receive organs without having to wait on a list, as well as produce organs created from the patients’ own cells, which would eliminate the risk of rejection.
To start with, only simple tissues, such as skin, muscle and short stretches of blood vessels, will be made, says Keith Murphy, Organovo’s chief executive, and these will be for research purposes. Mr Murphy says, however, that the company expects that within five years, once clinical trials are complete, the printers will produce blood vessels for use as grafts in bypass surgery. With more research it should be possible to produce bigger, more complex body parts. Because the machines have the ability to make branched tubes, the technology could, for example, be used to create the networks of blood vessels needed to sustain larger printed organs, like kidneys, livers and hearts.
The article notes that future applications of this technology may even enable doctors to engineer effective replacement organs that aren’t exact copies of the original, so long as they do the same job. Of course, if we can re-engineer organs, wouldn’t that enable us to improve their function over the originals, as well?
