Three decades ago researchers discovered what are essentially enormous saltwater lakes in the Atlantic Ocean. These “lakes,” called meddies, are gently spinning lenses of water up to 100 kilometers across and one kilometer thick. They float a few hundred meters below the surface of the ocean. Such large, warm bodies, which turned out to come from the Mediterranean Sea, should have an impact on heat exchange in the ocean—and on the planet’s climate. But efforts to study meddies—conventionally by dropping probes that directly measure the ocean’s temperature, salinity and velocity—have proved too costly, infrequent and spread out to reveal how the meddies dissipate their heat. Continue reading Seismic “Noise”–Oil Prospecting Data Could Decipher Ocean Mixing
Category Archives: News
Motion Magic
The brain looks forward
The brain takes nearly one tenth of a second to consciously register a scene. But the scenery changes far more quickly than that when we move. How does our brain cope? By constantly predicting the future, posits Mark Changizi, now at Rensselaer Polytechnic University.
[See pdf for illustration and the rest of the text.]
In The Fold
Mom wanted you to be a doctor, but you were too busy playing videogames to take the MCATs? Now is your chance to make amends.
Foldit, a new online game, taps our inner competitive streak to advance a key area of medicine: the understanding of how proteins form. Proteins are the engines of cellular life—they are, in layman’s terms, what make cells work—and hold the secret to many of the world’s worst viruses. Viruses use particular proteins to reproduce, and by figuring out the precise shape of these proteins, we’ll be well on our way to a cure. The problem, however, is that computers, for all their powers, aren’t terribly adept at determining the shape of proteins. That’s where you come in.
At Foldit, researchers post initial guesses of how a protein might be shaped, and challenge players to improve the guesses by making the virtual protein more compact (proteins naturally form the most compact shape possible). The more compact your protein model, the higher your score. It may not be as fun as Halo, but it’s a lot more helpful.
The Invisible Hand
Researchers in the United Kingdom are trying to help amputees speed up the process of getting used to prostheses by harnessing a well-known illusion.
In the “rubber hand” illusion, a person’s hand and an adjacent rubber hand are both brushed gently. The real hand is kept out of sight. Before long, the subject’s brain creates a new spatial link, imagining that the sensation in the real hand is arising where the rubber hand is.
Graduate student Matthew Mulvey of Leeds Metropolitan University has now shown that the effect will work if the researchers deliver transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) not to the hidden hand but to the wrist. After being primed with the illusion, subjects perceive the impulses–which hijack the nerve pathways between hand and brain–as a tingling located in the rubber hand. The researchers predict that with an amputee, a TENS signal from above the site of amputation would seem to come from the fake limb.
The team, which showed its results at the Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition last week, hopes TENS can help amputees adapt faster to prostheses and possibly counter phantom limb pain, a major problem. Kate MacIver, a research nurse at the Pain Research Institute at the University of Liverpool in the U.K., says the idea is “harmless, … so it’s worth a try.”
Originally appeared in Science Magazine as a Random Sample: [html] [pdf]