“Conceited, Spoiled, And Arrogant- All Of Those Things, Of Course, Are True To The Character. But She

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To keep pain in check, count down

Diverse cognitive strategies affect our perception of pain. Studies by LMU neuroscientist Enrico Schulz and colleagues have linked the phenomenon to the coordinated activity of neural circuits located in different brain areas.

Is the heat still bearable, or should I take my hand off the hotplate? Before the brain can react appropriately to pain, it must evaluate and integrate sensory, cognitive and emotional factors that modulate the perception and processing of the sensation itself. This task requires the exchange of information between different regions of the brain. New studies have confirmed that there is a link between the subjective experience of pain and the relative levels of neural activity in functional structures in various sectors of the brain. However, these investigations have been carried out primarily in contexts in which the perception of pain was intensified either by emotional factors or by consciously focusing attention on the painful stimulus. Now, LMU neuroscientist Enrico Schulz, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Oxford, has asked how cognitive strategies that affect one’s subjective perception of pain influence the patterns of neural activity in the brain.

In the study, 20 experimental subjects were exposed to a painful cold stimulus. They were asked to adopt one of three approaches to attenuating the pain: (a) counting down from 1000 in steps of 7, (b) thinking of something pleasant or beautiful, and (c) persuading themselves – by means of autosuggestion – that the stimulus was not really that bad. During the experimental sessions, the subjects were hooked up to a 7T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner to visualise the patterns of neural activity in the brain, which were later analysed in detail.

In order to assess the efficacy of the different coping strategies, participants were also asked to evaluate the subjective intensity of the pain on a scale of 0 to 100. The results revealed that the countdown strategy was the most effective of the three methods. “This task obviously requires such a high level of concentration that it distracts the subject’s attention significantly from the sensation of pain. In fact some of our subjects managed to reduce the perceived intensity of pain by 50%,” says Schulz. “One participant later reported that she had successfully adopted the strategy during the most painful phase of childbirth.”

In a previous paper published in the journal Cortex in 2019, the same team had already shown that all three strategies help to attenuate the perception of pain, and that each strategy evoked a different pattern of neural activity. In the new study, Schulz and his collaborators carried out a more detailed analysis of the MRI scans, for which they divided the brain into 360 regions. “Our aim was to determine which areas in the brain must work together in order to successfully reduce the perceived intensity of the pain,” Schulz explains. “Interestingly, no single region or network that is activated by all three strategies could be identified. Instead, under each experimental condition, neural circuits in different brain regions act in concert to varying extents.”

The attenuation of pain is clearly a highly complex process, which requires a cooperative response that involves many regions distributed throughout the brain. Analysis of the response to the countdown technique revealed close coordination between different parts of the insular cortex, among other patterns. The imaginal distraction method, i.e. calling something picturesque or otherwise pleasing to mind, works only when it evokes intensive flows of information between the frontal lobes. Since these structures are known to be important control centres in the brain, the authors believe that engagement of the imaginative faculty may require a greater degree of control, because the brain needs to search through more ‘compartments’ – to find the right memory traces, for instance. Comparatively speaking, counting backwards stepwise – even in such awkward steps – is likely to be a more highly constrained task. “To cope with pain, the brain makes use of a recipe that also works well in other contexts,” says Anne Stankewitz, a co-author of the new paper: “success depends on effective teamwork.” Her team now plans to test whether their latest results can be usefully applied to patients with chronic pain.

What’s Up for July 2017

Prepare for the August total solar eclipse by observing the moon phases this month. Plus, two meteor showers peak at the end of July.

Solar eclipses occur when the new moon passes between the Earth and the sun and moon casts a traveling shadow on Earth. A total solar eclipse occurs when the new moon is in just the right position to completely cover the sun’s disk.

This will happen next month on August 21, when the new month completely blocks our view of the sun along a narrow path from Oregon to South Carolina.

It may even be dark enough during the eclipse to see some of the brighter stars and few planets!

Two weeks before or after a solar eclipse, there is often, but not always, a lunar eclipse. This happens because the full moon, the Earth and the sun will be lined up with Earth in the middle.

Beginning July 1, we can see all the moon’s phases.

Many of the Apollo landing sites are on the lit side of the first quarter moon. But to see these sites, you’ll have to rely on images for lunar orbiting spacecraft.

On July 9, the full moon rises at sunset and July 16 is the last quarter. The new moon begins on July 23 and is the phase we’ll look forward to in August, when it will give us the total solar eclipse. The month of July ends with a first quarter moon.

We’ll also have two meteor showers, both of which peak on July 30. The Delta Aquarids will have 25 meteors per hour between midnight and dawn.

The nearby slow and bright Alpha Capricornids per at 5 per hour and often produce fireballs.

Watch the full video:

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Cool! Go theoretical -and experimental-physics!

Heating up exotic topological insulators

Fashion is changing in the avant-garde world of next-generation computer component materials. Traditional semiconductors like silicon are releasing their last new lines. Exotic materials called topological insulators (TIs) are on their way in. And when it comes to cool, nitrogen is the new helium.

This was clearly on display in a novel experiment at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that was performed by a multi-institutional collaboration including UCLA, NIST and the Beijing Institute of Technology in China.

Topological insulators are a new class of materials that were discovered less than a decade ago after earlier theoretical work, recognized in the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics, predicted they could exist. The materials are electrical insulators on the inside and they conduct electricity on the outer surface. They are exciting to computer designers because electric current travels along them without shedding heat, meaning components made from them could reduce the high heat production that plagues modern computers. They also might be harnessed one day in quantum computers, which would exploit less familiar properties of electrons, such as their spin, to make calculations in entirely new ways. When TIs conduct electricity, all of the electrons flowing in one direction have the same spin, a useful property that quantum computer designers could harness.

Read more.

Scientists build bacteria-powered battery on single sheet of paper

Instead of ordering batteries by the pack, we might get them by the ream in the future. Researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York have created a bacteria-powered battery on a single sheet of paper that can power disposable electronics. The manufacturing technique reduces fabrication time and cost, and the design could revolutionize the use of bio-batteries as a power source in remote, dangerous and resource-limited areas.

“Papertronics have recently emerged as a simple and low-cost way to power disposable point-of-care diagnostic sensors,” said Assistant Professor Seokheun “Sean” Choi, who is in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department within the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science. He is also the director of the Bioelectronics and Microsystems Lab at Binghamton.

“Stand-alone and self-sustained, paper-based, point-of-care devices are essential to providing effective and life-saving treatments in resource-limited settings,” said Choi.

On one half of a piece of chromatography paper, Choi and PhD candidate Yang Gao, who is a co-author of the paper, placed a ribbon of silver nitrate underneath a thin layer of wax to create a cathode. The pair then made a reservoir out of a conductive polymer on the other half of the paper, which acted as the anode. Once properly folded and a few drops of bacteria-filled liquid are added, the microbes’ cellular respiration powers the battery.

Read more.

Measuring Cosmic Rays at the Edge of Space

It’s a bird!  It’s a plane!  It’s a… SuperTIGER?

No, that’s not the latest superhero spinoff movie - it’s an instrument launching soon from Antarctica! It’ll float on a giant balloon above 99.5% of the Earth’s atmosphere, measuring tiny particles called cosmic rays.

Right now, we have a team of several scientists and technicians from Washington University in St. Louis and NASA at McMurdo Station in Antarctica preparing for the launch of the Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder, which is called SuperTIGER for short. This is the second flight of this instrument, which last launched in Antarctica in 2012 and circled the continent for a record-breaking 55 days.  

SuperTIGER measures cosmic rays, which are itty-bitty pieces of atoms that are zinging through space at super-fast speeds up to nearly the speed of light. In particular, it studies galactic cosmic rays, which means they come from somewhere in our Milky Way galaxy, outside of our solar system.

Most cosmic rays are just an individual proton, the basic positively-charged building block of matter. But a rarer type of cosmic ray is a whole nucleus (or core) of an atom - a bundle of positively-charged protons and non-charged neutrons - that allows us to identify what element the cosmic ray is. Those rare cosmic-ray nuclei (that’s the plural of nucleus) can help us understand what happened many trillions of miles away to create this particle and send it speeding our way.

The cosmic rays we’re most interested in measuring with SuperTIGER are from elements heavier than iron, like copper and silver. These particles are created in some of the most dynamic and exciting events in the universe - such as exploding and colliding stars.

In fact, we’re especially interested in the cosmic rays created in the collision of two neutron stars, just like the event earlier this year that we saw through both light and gravitational waves. Adding the information from cosmic rays opens another window on these events, helping us understand more about how the material in the galaxy is created.

Why does SuperTIGER fly on a balloon?

While cosmic rays strike our planet harmlessly every day, most of them are blocked by the Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field.  That means that scientists have to get far above Earth - on a balloon or spacecraft - to measure an accurate sample of galactic cosmic rays.  By flying on a balloon bigger than a football field, SuperTIGER can get to the edge of space to take these measurements.  

It’ll float for weeks at over 120,000 feet, which is nearly four times higher than you might fly in a commercial airplane. At the end of the flight, the instrument will return safely to the ice on a huge parachute. The team can recover the payload from its landing site, bring it back to the United States, repair or make changes to it, if needed, and fly it again another year!

There are also cosmic ray instruments on our International Space Station, such as ISS-CREAM and CALET, which each started their development on a series of balloons launched from Antarctica. The SuperTIGER team hopes to eventually take measurements from space, too.  

Why do we launch from Antarctica?

McMurdo Station is a hotspot for all sorts of science while it’s summer in the Southern Hemisphere (which is winter here in the United States), including scientific ballooning.  The circular wind patterns around the pole usually keep the balloon from going out over the ocean, making it easier to land and recover the instrument later. And the 24-hour daylight in the Antarctic summer keeps the balloon at a nearly constant height to get very long flights - it would go up and down if it had to experience the temperature changes of day and night. All of that sunlight shining on the instrument’s array of solar cells also gives a continuous source of electricity to power everything.

Antarctica is an especially good place to fly a cosmic ray instrument like SuperTIGER. The Earth’s magnetic field blocks fewer cosmic rays at the poles, meaning that we can measure more particles as SuperTIGER circles around the South Pole than we would at NASA scientific ballooning sites closer to the Earth’s equator.  

The SuperTIGER team is hard at work preparing for launch right now - and their launch window opens soon! Follow @NASABlueshift for updates and opportunities to interact with our scientists on the ice.

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Dead Poets Society (1989)

“You wanna appease me, compliment my brain!” -Christina Yang