Mathematical Processes In The Brain Influenced By Language

Pleasantville (1998)

Chances are you or somebody you know has recently become the owner of an Instant Pot, the multifunction electric pressure cooker that can produce fork-tender pot roasts in less than an hour, as well as brown meat, cook beans without soaking, and even do the job of a rice cooker or crockpot. The Instant Pot­­ isn’t advertised on TV or in the newspapers, and yet it’s become a viral marketing success story, with owners often describing themselves as “addicts” or “cult members.” That’s the kind of word-of-mouth publicity Instant Pot founders dreamed of when they first began designing the countertop appliances.

The Instant Pot electric pressure cooker has been around since 2010, but really became the buzz during the last six months of 2016. While the company’s electric pressure cookers are sold at Wal-Mart, Target and Kohl’s, the bulk of its sales come from Amazon, driven by social media. Deep discounts on Amazon Prime Day and again on Black Friday, along with the viral online sharing of these sales, turned Instant Pot into a household name. With 215,000 units sold on Prime Day alone, the Instant Pot Duo is Amazon’s top-selling item in the U.S. market. Not bad for a company that does no TV or print advertising and only recently began the process of hiring a marketing agency.

Not Just A Crock: The Viral Word-Of-Mouth Success Of Instant Pot

Photo: Grace Hwang Lynch

Earlier this year, The Lutetium Project explored how microfluidic circuits are made, and now they are back with the conclusion of their microfluidic adventures. This video explores how microfluidic chips are used and how microscale fluid dynamics relates to other topics in the field. Because these techniques allow researchers very fine control over droplets, there are many chemical and biological possibilities for microfluidic experiments, some of which are shown in the video. Microfluidics in medicine are also already more common than you may think. For example, test strips used by diabetic patients to measure their blood glucose levels are microfluidic circuits! (Video and image credit: The Lutetium Project; submitted by Guillaume D.)

You are the center of wonderland & Keep the last glow in mind by Jana Luo

First and last appearances.

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.

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

Spinal Stimulators Repurposed to Restore Touch in Lost Limb

Imagine tying your shoes or taking a sip of coffee or cracking an egg but without any feeling in your hand. That’s life for users of even the most advanced prosthetic arms.

Although it’s possible to simulate touch by stimulating the remaining nerves in the stump after an amputation, such a surgery is highly complex and individualized. But according to a new study from the University of Pittsburgh’s Rehab Neural Engineering Labs, spinal cord stimulators commonly used to relieve chronic pain could provide a straightforward and universal method for adding sensory feedback to a prosthetic arm.

For this study, published in eLife, four amputees received spinal stimulators, which, when turned on, create the illusion of sensations in the missing arm.

“What’s unique about this work is that we’re using devices that are already implanted in 50,000 people a year for pain — physicians in every major medical center across the country know how to do these surgical procedures — and we get similar results to highly specialized devices and procedures,” said study senior author Lee Fisher, Ph.D., assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. 

The strings of implanted spinal electrodes, which Fisher describes as about the size and shape of “fat spaghetti noodles,” run along the spinal cord, where they sit slightly to one side, atop the same nerve roots that would normally transmit sensations from the arm. Since it’s a spinal cord implant, even a person with a shoulder-level amputation can use this device 

Fisher’s team sent electrical pulses through different spots in the implanted electrodes, one at a time, while participants used a tablet to report what they were feeling and where.

All the participants experienced sensations somewhere on their missing arm or hand, and they indicated the extent of the area affected by drawing on a blank human form. Three participants reported feelings localized to a single finger or part of the palm.

“I was pretty surprised at how small the area of these sensations were that people were reporting,” Fisher said. “That’s important because we want to generate sensations only where the prosthetic limb is making contact with objects.”

When asked to describe not just where but how the stimulation felt, all four participants reported feeling natural sensations, such as touch and pressure, though these feelings often were mixed with decidedly artificial sensations, such as tingling, buzzing or prickling.

Although some degree of electrode migration is inevitable in the first few days after the leads are implanted, Fisher’s team found that the electrodes, and the sensations they generated, mostly stayed put across the month-long duration of the experiment. That’s important for the ultimate goal of creating a prosthetic arm that provides sensory feedback to the user. 

“Stability of these devices is really critical,” Fisher said. “If the electrodes are moving around, that’s going to change what a person feels when we stimulate.” 

The next big challenges are to design spinal stimulators that can be fully implanted rather than connecting to a stimulator outside the body and to demonstrate that the sensory feedback can help to improve the control of a prosthetic hand during functional tasks like tying shoes or holding an egg without accidentally crushing it. Shrinking the size of the contacts — the parts of the electrode where current comes out — is another priority. That might allow users to experience even more localized sensations. 

“Our goal here wasn’t to develop the final device that someone would use permanently,” Fisher said. “Mostly we wanted to demonstrate the possibility that something like this could work.”

Moonlight