Science Odds and Ends

Scientific inspiration sometimes comes from unlikely sources. Two years ago, Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist at Emory University in Atlanta, was on the couch with his kids watching American Idol. One of the contestants sang the melancholy hit song Apologize by the alternative rock band OneRepublic, and something clicked in Berns's mind.

He'd used the song a few years earlier in a study on the neural mechanisms of peer pressure, in this case, how teenagers' perceptions of a song's popularity influence how they rate the song themselves. At the time, OneRepublic had yet to sign its first record deal. A student in Bern's lab had pulled a clip of Apologize from the band's MySpace page to use in the study. When Berns heard the song on American Idol, he wondered whether anything in the brain scan data his team had collected could have predicted it would become a hit. At the time, all 120 songs used in the experiment were by artists who were unsigned and not widely known. "The next day, in the lab, we talked about it."

To find out what had become of the songs, the lab bought a subscription to Nielsen SoundScan, a service that tracks music sales. The database contained sales data for 87 of the 120 songs (not surprisingly, many songs had languished in MySpace obscurity). Berns reexamined the functional magnetic resonance imaging scans his group had collected from 27 adolescents in 2007, looking for regions of the brain where neural activity during a 15-second clip of a song correlated with the subject's likeability ratings. Two regions stood out: the orbitofrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens. "That was a good check that we were on the right track, because we knew from a ton of other studies that those regions are heavily linked to reward and anticipation," Berns says.

Next, the researchers looked to see whether the activity in either of these two brain regions, averaged across subjects for each song, correlated with the song's sales through May 2010. It did...Intriguingly, the brain scan data predicted commercial success better than the subjects' likeability ratings, which did not correlate with sales.Showing that brain activity in a small group of people can predict the buying behavior of a much larger group of people is a novel and provocative finding, he says. But how does it work, and why would brain activity be better than the subjects' ratings?

NASA’s final shuttle mission will feature outer space’s first iPhone, tricked out with an app to measure spacecraft radiation levels, orbital location and altitude.

The iOS-based software, called SpaceLab, will come pre-loaded on two iPhone 4s. Testing the software isn’t mission-critical, but it may lead to terrestrial commercial devices being repurposed for space in the near future.

“When Apple added gyros to the iPhone, it suddenly became a small avionics platform,” said Brian Rishikof, CEO of Odyssey Space Research, the company that designed SpaceLab. “You can imagine using it to do backup functions to recover navigational state. If it has any potential life-saving functions, it suddenly becomes a whole different animal.”

“We’re attempting to show how a commercial product that millions of people use can function as spaceflight hardware,” Rishikof said. “Once you demonstrate that it’s capable, you begin to wonder what else is possible.”

Before the phone launches into orbit, NASA will review its software one final time. Rishikof said it’s safe to assume a copy of Angry Birds won’t make its way on. “We don’t want to compromise astronauts’ time,” he said.

Many people affected by mental illness are facing a bleak future as drug companies abandon research into the area and other funding providers fail to take up the slack, according to a new report.

Produced for the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP), the report warns that "research in new treatments for brain disorders is under threat". With current treatments inadequate for many patients, it says, "withdrawal of research resources is a withdrawal of hope for patients and their families"1.

Since 2000, there have been 110 million car accidents in the United States, more than 443,000 of which have been fatal — an average of 110 fatalities per day. These statistics make traffic accidents one of the leading causes of death in this country, as well as worldwide.

Engineers have developed myriad safety systems aimed at preventing collisions: automated cruise control, a radar- or laser-based sensor system that slows a car when approaching another vehicle; blind-spot warning systems, which use lights or beeps to alert the driver to the presence of a vehicle he or she can’t see; and traction control and stability assist, which automatically apply the brakes if they detect skidding or a loss of steering control.

Still, more progress must be made to achieve the long-term goal of “intelligent transportation”: cars that can “see” and communicate with other vehicles on the road, making them able to prevent crashes virtually 100 percent of the time.

The theory behind the algorithm and some experimental results will be published in the journal IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine. According to Del Vecchio, a common challenge for ITS developers is designing a system that is safe without being overly conservative.

That’s where predicting human behavior comes in.

A few weeks ago Nature published a piece, which asked "The world is producing more PhDs than ever before. Is it time to stop?". A couple of weeks later the Royal Institution in London arranged a panel discussion about careers in science, a panel which included the UK science minister. Many of the problems discussed buzz around the problems junior researchers have in finding permanent jobs, and in how science is funded by providing short-term grants, which don't give any job security.

Looking at these discussion, I've concluded that the root cause of the problem is the way the PhD is viewed and used by Society, and how this has changed over the decades.

In a new study, biochemist James San Antonio and colleagues offer evidence to support the claims by Mary Higby Schweitzer back in 2005, that she and her colleagues had unearthed a soft tissue specimen that belonged to a Tyrannosaurus rex. Roundly criticized by many in the science community, the specimen, discovered inside a femur fragment, has yet to be proven to be anything else. Now, in a paper published on PLoS ONE, San Antonio and his colleagues (including Mary Schweitzer) claim they’ve found a plausible explanation for the survival of soft dinosaur material after some 68 million years.

When psychiatrists write a prescription for a typical antidepressant such as Zoloft or Paxil, they don't expect their patients to show much improvement for a few weeks. Clinical trials, however, have shown that low doses of a drug known as ketamine, which is used at higher doses as an anesthetic and is taken recreationally as a hallucinogen (sometimes called "Special K"), can ease the symptoms of depression within hours. Now, scientists have figured out how ketamine works in the brain. In the process, they've uncovered a new molecular pathway involved in clinical depression.