Brain Waves

Generated ice cream flavors: now it’s my turn

Last week, I featured new ice cream flavors generated by Ms. Johnson’s coding classes at Kealing Middle School in Austin, Texas. Their flavors were good - much better than mine, in fact. In part, this was because they had collected a much larger dataset than I had, and in part this was because they hadn’t accidentally mixed the dataset with metal bands.

(the three at the bottom were mine)

But not only are Ms. Johnson’s coding class adept with textgenrnn, they’re also generous - and they kindly gave me their dataset of 1,600 ice cream flavors. They wanted to see what I would come up with.

So, I fired up char-rnn, a neural network framework I’ve used for a lot of my text-generating experiments - one that starts from scratch each time, with no memory of its previous dataset. There was no chance of getting metal band names in my ice cream this time.

But even so, I ended up with some rather edgy-sounding flavors. There was a flavor in the input dataset called Death by Chocolate, and I blame blood oranges for some of the rest, but “nose” was nowhere in the input, candied or otherwise. Nor was “turd”, for that matter. Ice cream places are getting edgy these days, but not THAT edgy.

Bloodie Chunk Death Bean Goat Cookie Peanut Bat Bubblegum Cheesecake Rawe Blueberry Fist Candied Nose Creme die Mucki Ant Cone Apple Pistachio  mouth Chocolate Moose Mange Dime Oil Live Cookie Bubblegum Chocolate Basil Aspresso Lime Pig Beet Bats Blood Sundae Elterfhawe Monkey But Kaharon Chocolate Mouse Gun Gu Creamie Turd

Not all the flavors were awful, though. The neural network actually did a decent job of coming up with trendy-sounding ice cream flavors. I haven’t seen these before, but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if I did someday.

Smoked Butter Lemon-Oreo Bourbon Oil Strawberry Churro Roasted Beet Pecans Cherry Chai Grazed Oil Green Tea Coconut Root Beet Peaches Malted Black Madnesss Chocolate With Ginger Lime and Oreo Pumpkin Pomegranate Chocolate Bar Smoked Cocoa Nibe Carrot Beer Red Honey Candied Butter Lime Cardamom Potato Chocolate Roasted Praline Cheddar Swirl Toasted Basil Burnt Basil Beet Bourbon Black Corn Chocolate Oreo Oil + Toffee Milky Ginger Chocolate Peppercorn Cookies & Oreo Caramel Chocolate Toasted Strawberry Mountain Fig n Strawberry Twist Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Road Chocolate Peanut Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate  Japanese Cookies n'Cream with Roasted Strawberry Coconut

These next flavors seem unlikely, however.

Mann Beans Cherry Law Rhubarb Cram Spocky Parstita Green Tea Cogbat Cheesecake With Bear Peanut Butter Cookies nut Butter Brece Toasterbrain Blueberry Rose The Gone Butter Fish Fleek Red Vanill Mounds of Jay Roasted Monster Dream Sweet Chocolate Mouse Cookies nutur Coconut Chocolate Fish Froggtow Tie Pond Cookies naw Mocoa Pistachoopie Garl And Cookie Doug Burble With Berry Cake Peachy Bunch Kissionfruit Bearhounds Gropky Pum Stuck Brownie Vanilla Salted Blueberry Bumpa Thyme Mountain Bluckled Bananas Lemon-Blueberry Almernuts Gone Cream with Rap Chocolate Cocoa Named Honey

For the heck of it, I also used textgenrnn to generate some more ice creams mixed with metal bands, this time on purpose. 

Swirl of Hell Person Cream Dead Cherry Tear Nightham Toffee

For the rest of these, including the not-quite-PG flavors, enter your email here.

From vision to hand action

Our hands are highly developed grasping organs that are in continuous use. Long before we stir our first cup of coffee in the morning, our hands have executed a multitude of grasps. Directing a pen between our thumb and index finger over a piece of paper with absolute precision appears as easy as catching a ball or operating a doorknob. The neuroscientists Stefan Schaffelhofer and Hansjörg Scherberger of the German Primate Center (DPZ) have studied how the brain controls the different grasping movements. In their research with rhesus macaques, it was found that the three brain areas AIP, F5 and M1 that are responsible for planning and executing hand movements, perform different tasks within their neural network. The AIP area is mainly responsible for processing visual features of objects, such as their size and shape. This optical information is translated into motor commands in the F5 area. The M1 area is ultimately responsible for turning this motor commands into actions. The results of the study contribute to the development of neuroprosthetics that should help paralyzed patients to regain their hand functions (eLife, 2016).

The three brain areas AIP, F5 and M1 lay in the cerebral cortex and form a neural network responsible for translating visual properties of an object into a corresponding hand movement. Until now, the details of how this “visuomotor transformation” are performed have been unclear. During the course of his PhD thesis at the German Primate Center, neuroscientist Stefan Schaffelhofer intensively studied the neural mechanisms that control grasping movements. “We wanted to find out how and where visual information about grasped objects, for example their shape or size, and motor characteristics of the hand, like the strength and type of a grip, are processed in the different grasp-related areas of the brain”, says Schaffelhofer.

For this, two rhesus macaques were trained to repeatedly grasp 50 different objects. At the same time, the activity of hundreds of nerve cells was measured with so-called microelectrode arrays. In order to compare the applied grip types with the neural signals, the monkeys wore an electromagnetic data glove that recorded all the finger and hand movements. The experimental setup was designed to individually observe the phases of the visuomotor transformation in the brain, namely the processing of visual object properties, the motion planning and execution. For this, the scientists developed a delayed grasping task. In order for the monkey to see the object, it was briefly lit before the start of the grasping movement. The subsequent movement took place in the dark with a short delay. In this way, visual and motor signals of neurons could be examined separately.

The results show that the AIP area is primarily responsible for the processing of visual object features. “The neurons mainly respond to the three-dimensional shape of different objects”, says Stefan Schaffelhofer. “Due to the different activity of the neurons, we could precisely distinguish as to whether the monkeys had seen a sphere, cube or cylinder. Even abstract object shapes could be differentiated based on the observed cell activity.”

In contrast to AIP, area F5 and M1 did not represent object geometries, but the corresponding hand configurations used to grasp the objects. The information of F5 and M1 neurons indicated a strong resemblance to the hand movements recorded with the data glove. “In our study we were able to show where and how visual properties of objects are converted into corresponding movement commands”, says Stefan Schaffelhofer. “In this process, the F5 area plays a central role in visuomotor transformation. Its neurons receive direct visual object information from AIP and can translate the signals into motor plans that are then executed in M1. Thus, area F5 has contact to both, the visual and motor part of the brain.”

Knowledge of how to control grasp movements is essential for the development of neuronal hand prosthetics. “In paraplegic patients, the connection between the brain and limbs is no longer functional. Neural interfaces can replace this functionality”, says Hansjörg Scherberger, head of the Neurobiology Laboratory at the DPZ. “They can read the motor signals in the brain and use them for prosthetic control. In order to program these interfaces properly, it is crucial to know how and where our brain controls the grasping movements”. The findings of this study will facilitate to new neuroprosthetic applications that can selectively process the areas’ individual information in order to improve their usability and accuracy.

source [x]

First birds made honking sounds more than 66 million years ago

A new fossil discovery has shown that birds developed the unique vocal organ that enables them to sing more than 66 million years ago when dinosaurs were around

Birds developed the unique vocal organ that enables them to sing more than 66 million years ago when dinosaurs walked the Earth, a new fossil discovery has shown.

But the earliest syrinx, an arrangement of vibrating cartilage rings at the base of the windpipe, was still a long way from producing the lilting notes of a song thrush or blackbird.

Scientists believe the extinct duck and goose relative that possessed the organ was only capable of making honking noises.

The bird, Vegavis iaai, lived during the Cretaceous era. Although its fossil bones were unearthed from Vega Island in Antarctica in 1992, it was not until three years ago that experts spotted the syrinx.

All birds living today are descended from a particular family of dinosaurs that developed feathers and the ability to fly.

The new discovery suggests the syrinx is another hallmark of birds that was absent from non-avian dinosaurs…

Physicists Detect Gravitational Waves, Proving Einstein Right

On Thursday (Feb. 11, 2016) at 10:30 a.m. ET, the National Science Foundation will gather scientists from Caltech, MIT and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration in Washington D.C. to update the scientific community on the efforts being made by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) to detect gravitational waves.

But why is this exciting? And what the heck are “gravitational waves”?

Keep reading

Asteroid Terms: Explained

There are interesting asteroid characters in our solar system, including an asteroid that has its own moon and even one that is shaped like a dog bone! Our OSIRIS-REx mission launches at 7:05 p.m. EDT today and will travel to asteroid Bennu.

Scientists chose Bennu as the target of the OSIRIS-REx mission because of its composition, size and proximity to Earth. Bennu is a rare B-type asteroid (primitive and carbon-rich), which is expected to have organic compounds and water-bearing minerals like clays.

Our OSIRIS-REx mission will travel to Bennu and bring a small sample back to Earth for study.

When talking about asteroids, there are some terms scientists use that might not be in your typical vocabulary…but we’ll help with that!

Here are a few terms you should know:

Orbital Eccentricity: This number describes the shape of an asteroid’s orbit by how elliptical it is. For asteroids in orbit around the sun, eccentricity is a number between 0 and 1, with 0 being a perfectly circular orbit and 0.99 being a highly elliptical orbit.

Inclination: The angle, in degrees, of how tilted an asteroid’s orbit is compared to another plane of reference, usually the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the sun.

Orbital Period: The number of days it takes for an asteroid to revolve once around the sun. For example, the Earth’s orbital period is 365 days.

Perihelion Distance: The distance between an asteroid and the sun when the asteroid is closest to the sun.

Aphelion Distance: The distance between the asteroid and the sun when the asteroid is farthest away from the sun.

Astronomical unit: A distance unit commonly used to describe orbits of objects around the sun. The distance from the Earth to the sun is one astronomical unit, or 1 AU, equivalent to about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers.

Diameter: A measure of the size of an asteroid. It is the length of a line from a point on the surface, through the center of the asteroid, extending out to the opposite surface. Irregularly shaped asteroids may have different diameters depending on which direction they are measured.

Rotation Period: The time it takes for an asteroid to complete one revolution around its axis of rotation. For example, the rotation period of the Earth is approximately 24 hours, or 1 day.

Spectral Type: The classification of an asteroid, based on a measurement of the light reflected by the asteroid. 

Watch live launch coverage of OSIRIS-REx to asteroid Bennu starting at 5:30 p.m, on NASA TV: http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

this fibonacci joke is as bad as the last two you heard combined

Newborns or survivors? The unexpected matter found in hostile black hole winds

"This is the first time that the molecule formation process has been simulated in full detail, and in our view, it is a very compelling explanation for the observation that molecules are ubiquitous in supermassive black hole winds, which has been one of the major outstanding problems in the field," Faucher-Giguère said.

The existence of large numbers of molecules in winds powered by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies has puzzled astronomers since they were discovered more than a decade ago. Molecules trace the coldest parts of space, and black holes are the most energetic phenomena in the universe, so finding molecules in black hole winds was like discovering ice in a furnace.

Astronomers questioned how anything could survive the heat of the energetic outflows, but a new theory from researchers in Northwestern University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Exploration in Astrophysics (CIERA) predicts that these molecules are not survivors at all, but brand-new molecules, born in the winds with unique properties that enable them to adapt to and thrive in the hostile environment.

Continue Reading.

The actual position of a particle in an ocean wave. (Source)