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Investors Who 'Gamble' In The Stock Market Have Same Characteristics As Lottery PlayersThe socioeconomic characteristics of people who play state lotteries are similar to investors who pick stocks with a lottery quality -- high risk with a small potential for high return, and just like the lottery, returns on average are lower for those who invest this way in the stock market.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Mar 2009 | 4:00 am Stroke Patients Who Reach Hospitals Within 'Golden Hour' Twice As Likely To Get Clot-busting DrugStroke patients who reach the hospital within one hour of symptoms receive a clot-busting drug twice as often as those arriving later. Researchers call the first hour of symptom onset "the golden hour." The study reinforces the importance of reacting quickly to stroke symptoms because "time lost is brain lost."Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Mar 2009 | 4:00 am Gene Identified That Helps Plant Cells Keep Communication Channels OpenStem cells in plants' growing tips, called "meristems," communicate via microscopic channels called plasmodesmata. These channels, which transport nutrients and growth instructions, respond to cues such as growth signals or stress by changing shape and altering traffic flow. Scientists have identified a gene called GAT1, which encodes an enzyme that improves traffic flow by acting as an antioxidant -- a molecule that relieves cellular stress.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Mar 2009 | 4:00 am Protein Found Linking Stress And DepressionStress, the ever-present threat to health and happy living, is tough on the brain. If the strain goes on too long, it can lead to debilitating psychological problems. Part of the reason, according to scientists, may have to do with a little-known family of proteins called kainate receptors that has recently been implicated in major depression. New research in rats may help explain one mechanism by which stress reshapes the brain: namely, by ramping up production of a particular part of these proteins.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Mar 2009 | 4:00 am Controversy Over World’s Oldest Traces Of LifeThe argument over whether an outcrop of rock in South West Greenland contains the earliest known traces of life on Earth has been reignited. The research argues that the controversial rocks 'cannot host evidence of Earth's oldest life', reopening the debate over where the oldest traces of life are located.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Mar 2009 | 4:00 am Screening For Vision Loss, Diabetic Retinopathy And Age-related Macular Degeneration, In The Blink Of An EyeIn the blink of an eye, people at risk of becoming blind can now be screened for eye diseases such as diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Mar 2009 | 4:00 am Case Report Of A Brain And Spinal Tumor Following Human Fetal Stem Cell TherapyA case report, published in a medical journal, describes a rare side effect of human fetal stem cell therapy.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 Feb 2009 | 10:00 pm 'Wireless' Activation Of Brain CircuitsTraditionally, stimulating nerves or brain tissue involves cumbersome wiring and a sharp metal electrode. But a team of researchers is going "wireless." And it's a unique collaboration between chemists and neuroscientists that led to the discovery of a remarkable new way to use light to activate brain circuits with nanoparticles.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 Feb 2009 | 10:00 pm How Inflammatory Disease Causes FatigueNew animal research may indicate how certain diseases make people feel so tired and listless. Although the brain is usually isolated from the immune system, the study suggests that certain behavioral changes suffered by those with chronic inflammatory diseases are caused by the infiltration of immune cells into the brain. The findings suggest possible new treatment avenues to improve patients' quality of life.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 Feb 2009 | 10:00 pm Oral Microbiome: Spit Reveals A Lot About What Lives In Your MouthYour mouth is home to a thriving community of microbial life. More than 600 different species of bacteria reside in this "microbiome," yet everyone hosts a unique set of bugs, and this has important implications for health and disease. Scientists have now performed the first global survey of salivary microbes, finding that the oral microbiome of your neighbor is just as different from yours as someone across the globe.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 Feb 2009 | 10:00 pm Hurricane Season 2008 (weather.com)weather.com -Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 Feb 2009 | 5:06 pm Being a Scientist Means (Almost) Never Wearing a TieJ.C. Poutsma is not afraid to push formalities out of the way.Source: Livescience.com | 28 Feb 2009 | 3:57 pm Women More Religious Than MenWomen are more religious than men in many ways.Source: Livescience.com | 28 Feb 2009 | 3:18 pm Indonesia's psychedelic fish named a new species (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 Feb 2009 | 3:10 pm Sex Sells, But Who's Buying? (LiveScience.com)LiveScience.com - Sex in advertising? Women aren't buying it, for the most part.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 Feb 2009 | 3:00 pm Fossil skull of giant toothy seabird found in Peru (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 Feb 2009 | 2:19 pm China plans to master space docking: reportBEIJING (Reuters) - China aims to dock two craft in outer space by as early as 2011, a government spokesman told Xinhua news agency on Saturday, part of its plans to secure its footing in space.Source: Reuters: Science News | 28 Feb 2009 | 1:28 pm How NPR Stays on Air as Sun Blanks Sat Transmission
The sun will pass directly behind National Public Radio's Galaxy 16 satellite on Feb. 23, knocking it off the air for a few minutes. It's a phenomenon known as a solar outage, and it happens to satellites in geosynchronous orbit for about five days twice each year when the sun passes directly behind them at just the right angle to drown out their signals. In the old days — you know, 10 years ago — that meant something. If you needed a live feed, you had to hack together a solution using an old invention known as a telephone, said Jim Stagnitto, chief of engineering at New York City NPR-affiliate WNYC. "Everybody knew when the outage was going to occur, so you'd program around it," Stagnitto told Wired.com. "But if you needed to get a newscast right then and there, you'd get at telephone coupler and hook it up."
Now, radio engineering is a little less MacGyver and lot more I.T. To prepare for the sun blanking out the satellite transmission, NPR affiliates can just log in to an FTP server and get whatever shows they need. It's just another sign that the actual broadcast component of most broadcasters is slowly ebbing away. "The challenges have changed. The basics remain the same," Stagnitto explained. "You have to get audio out to a transmitter somewhere. But we're no longer called broadcasters, we're content providers. You get that content in various forms to computers." Most people don't receive their entertainment over the "airwaves" nearly as much as they used to. "Consider the fact that only 20 percent of television viewership is done over the air," Stagnitto said. "Eighty percent is by cable or by wire." Jad Abumrad, host of the show Radiolab at WNYC, saw some poetry to the astronomical quieting down of the humans on Earth. "All the things that we used to be sending into space, those kinds of broadcasts are ebbing. Everything is through wires now," Abumrad said. "If you were an alien watching the planet, you would see that the earth is gradually going quiet." Quiet in space maybe, but ever louder for those here on the ground, err, internet. See Also:
Image: Intelsat's basic diagram of solar interference. The Galaxy 16 is an Intelsat satellite. WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and project site, Inventing Green: the lost history of American clean tech; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 28 Feb 2009 | 12:56 am The idea of spying on 60m people is preposterousThis week Sir David Omand, the former Whitehall security and intelligence co-ordinator, described how the state should analyse data about individuals in order to find terrorist suspects: travel information, tax, phone records, emails, and so on. "Finding out other people's secrets is going to involve breaking everyday moral rules," he said, because we'll need to screen everyone to find the small number of suspects. There is one very significant issue that will always make data mining unworkable when used to search for terrorist suspects in a general population, and that is what we might call the "baseline problem": even with the most brilliantly accurate test imaginable, your risk of false positives increases to unworkably high levels, as the outcome you are trying predict becomes rarer in the population you are examining. This stuff is tricky but important. If you pay attention you will understand it. Let's imagine you have an amazingly accurate test, and each time you use it on a true suspect, it will correctly identify them as such eight times out of 10 (but miss them two times out of 10); and each time you use it on an innocent person, it will correctly identify them as innocent nine times out of 10, but incorrectly identify them as a suspect one time out of 10. These numbers tell you about the chances of a test result being accurate, given the status of the individual, which you already know (and the numbers are a stable property of the test). But you stand at the other end of the telescope: you have the result of a test, and you want to use that to work out the status of the individual. That depends entirely on how many suspects there are in the population being tested. If you have 10 people, and you know that one is a suspect, and you assess them all with this test, then you will correctly get your one true positive and - on average - one false positive. If you have 100 people, and you know that one is a suspect, you will get your one true positive and, on average, 10 false positives. If you're looking for one suspect among 1,000 people, you will get your suspect, and 100 false positives. Once your false positives begin to dwarf your true positives, a positive result from the test becomes pretty unhelpful. Remember this is a screening tool, for assessing dodgy behaviour in a general population. We are invited to accept that everybody's data will be surveyed and processed, because MI5 have clever algorithms to identify people who were never previously suspected. There are 60 million people in the UK, with, let's say, 10,000 true suspects. Using your unrealistically accurate imaginary screening test, you get 6 million false positives. At the same time, of your 10,000 true suspects, you miss 2,000. If you raise the bar on any test, to increase what statisticians call the "specificity", and thus make it less prone to false positives, then you also make it much less sensitive, so you start missing even more of your true suspects. Or do you just want an even more stupidly accurate imaginary test, without sacrificing true positives? It won't get you far. Let's say you incorrectly identify an innocent person as a suspect one time in 100: you get 600,000 false positives. One time in 1,000? Come on. Even with these unfeasibly accurate imaginary tests, when you screen a general population as proposed, it is hard to imagine a point where the false positives are usefully low, and the true positives are not missed. And our imaginary test really was ridiculously good: it's very difficult to identify suspects, just from slightly abnormal behavioural patterns. Things get worse. These suspects are undercover operatives, so they will go out of their way to produce trails which can confuse you. And lastly, there is the problem of validating your algorithms, and calibrating your detection systems. To do that, you need training data: 10,000 people where you know for sure if they are suspects, to compare your test results against. It's hard to picture how that can be done. I'm not saying you shouldn't spy on everyday people: I'll leave the morality and politics to those less nerdy than me. I'm just giving you the maths on specificity, sensitivity, and false positives. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 28 Feb 2009 | 12:01 am Fossil skull of giant, toothed bird found in Peru (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Feb 2009 | 10:12 pm SLIDE SHOW: The Week's Top StoriesThis week: hope and despair for two NASA missions, a long-necked dinosaur, and more.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 27 Feb 2009 | 9:25 pm Eagle Cam: It's No Puppy Cam, But Good Enough for Friday Afternoon
For everyone who'd rather be watching eagles than working, the Nature Conservancy brings you the Eagle Cam. Installed next to a nest on California's Santa Cruz island, the Eagle Cam is a window onto the lives of two bald eagles named K-10 and K-26. (You might want to give them new names, of course; for now I'm calling them Archie and Edith, but it's temporary.) Two years ago, Eagle Cam watchers saw the Channel Islands' first wild-born eagle birth in more than half a century. But life isn't always so idyllic: last year, an unknown eagle attacked the nest, knocking two eaglets onto the forest floor. Alerted by viewers, researchers from the Institute for Wildlife Studies rushed to the scene and rescued the eaglets, who were treated for their wounds. Video from the attack is shown above. On Wednesday, the eagles K laid an egg. For the next month they'll take turns sitting on it. That might sound a bit dull, but I've got the feed on my screen right now, and it's unexpectedly compelling. And the soothing sound of singing birds and peeping insects is reason enough to keep the film rolling. Come late March, if you happen to see the egg start hatching, let Wired Science know! Video: Nature Conservancy See Also:
Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 27 Feb 2009 | 9:14 pm Shoulder problems? It may be all in your genesNEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People may inherit a genetic predisposition to rotator cuff injury, according to a study presented Thursday at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons meeting in Las Vegas, which found that rotator cuff injury seems to run in families.Source: Reuters: Science News | 27 Feb 2009 | 8:54 pm Shoulder problems? It may be all in your genes (Reuters)Reuters - People may inherit a genetic predisposition to rotator cuff injury, according to a study presented Thursday at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons meeting in Las Vegas, which found that rotator cuff injury seems to run in families.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Feb 2009 | 8:54 pm Fossil of 10 million-year-old bird found in PeruLIMA (Reuters) - Paleontologists working in Peru have found a fossil from a bird that lived 10 million years ago, scientists said on Friday after returning from the dig site on the country's desert coast.Source: Reuters: Science News | 27 Feb 2009 | 7:57 pm Greenland Warming Lags, But Bound to Catch UpOnce Greenland catches up with the rest of the warming world, sea levels could swell.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 27 Feb 2009 | 7:25 pm Extreme Green: Reusable Toilet WipesThey're comfy and environmentally friendly.Source: Livescience.com | 27 Feb 2009 | 7:18 pm Space Dust More Pervasive Than Thought (SPACE.com)SPACE.com - The vast spaces between galaxies might seem pretty empty. But they are actually littered with clouds of cosmic dust that were likely ejected from the galaxies themselves. And the dust scatters farther into intergalactic space than astronomers expected, a new study finds.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Feb 2009 | 6:33 pm Sex Sells, But Who's Buying?Sex in advertising? Women aren't buying it.Source: Livescience.com | 27 Feb 2009 | 6:28 pm
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