September 26, 2011

Good Morning,

Scientists breach the brain with highly developed computing techniques, and now they say it is possible to see the images and/or "movies" that are playing upstairs. Check out this eerie development in the third article.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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Satellite produces map of global salinity

WASHINGTON - A NASA satellite studying the Earth's oceans has produced its first global map of the salinity of the planet's seas, the space agency said. The Aquarius satellite's instruments have revealed a rich tapestry of global salinity patterns, revealing large-scale salinity distribution features clearly and with sharp contrast, the space agency said in a release Thursday. Salinity variations mapped by the satellite are a key component of Earth's climate, linked to the cycling of freshwater around the planet and influencing ocean circulation. "Aquarius is making continuous, consistent, global measurements of ocean salinity, including measurements from places we have never sampled before," Michael Freilich, director of NASA's Earth Science Division at agency headquarters in Washington, said. Although considerable calibration and validation work remains, scientists say they are impressed by the initial data's quality. "Aquarius has exposed a pattern of ocean surface salinity that is rich in variability across a wide range of scales," Aquarius science team member Arnold Gordon, professor of oceanography at Columbia University, said. "This is a great moment in the history of oceanography. The first image raises many questions that oceanographers will be challenged to explain."


Web users help find new planets

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - U.S. astronomers say 40,000 "citizen scientists" using the Internet to help analyze data from a space telescope have discovered two potential exoplanets. In the Planet Hunters project launched last December, Web users around the world have been helping professional astronomers analyze the data collected by NASA's Kepler mission from 150,000 stars in the hope of discovering Earth-like planets orbiting around them, a Yale University release said Thursday. The discovery of the two new candidate exoplanets will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "This is the first time that the public has used data from a NASA space mission to detect possible planets orbiting other stars," Yale astronomer Debra Fischer, who helped launch the Planet Hunters project, said. "I think there's a 95 percent chance or greater that these are bona fide planets." The Kepler team has already announced the discovery of 1,200 exoplanet candidates and will follow up on the highest potential ones with further analysis, it said. "Obviously Planet Hunters doesn't replace the analysis being done by the Kepler team," Meg Schwamb, a Yale researcher and Planet Hunters co-founder, said. "But it has proven itself to be a valuable tool in the search for other worlds."


Scientists reconstruct brain's 'movies'

BERKELEY, Calif. - U.S. researchers say with brain scans and computation models they can decode and reconstruct people's dynamic visual experiences, their internal brain "movies." Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, say functional magnetic resonance imaging combined with powerful computational power is unlocking the visuals within people's heads, a university release reported Thursday. While the technology now can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed -- in the case of the Berkeley study, Hollywood movie trailers -- and the reconstructed moving images are round and blurry, researchers say the breakthrough could one day lead to reproducing the moving images inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories. "This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery," study co-author Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist, said. We are opening a window into the movies in our minds." Researchers said eventually the technology could offer 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.


Particles seem to break cosmic speed limit

GENEVA, Switzerland - Physicists at Cern, Switzerland, home of the Large Hadron Collider, say it appears some subatomic particles are traveling faster than the speed of light. In an experiment, neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward another laboratory more than 450 miles away seemed to arrive there a tiny fraction of a second earlier than the speed of light, long considered the universe's ultimate speed limit, the BBC reported Thursday. The experimenters, who say their results will be posted online for other scientists to examine, are being cautious about their findings. "We tried to find all possible explanations for this," report author Antonio Ereditato said. "We wanted to find a mistake -- trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects -- and we didn't." Much of modern physics theory, based largely on Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, is grounded on the idea that nothing can exceed the speed of light. Ereditato and his colleagues, carrying out neutrino experiments for the last three years, have found the particles apparently showed up a few billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance. The experiment has been repeated about 15,000 times, with results reaching a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery, some researchers say. But Ereditato remains cautious. "We are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result -- because it is crazy," he said.

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