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Developing Brains Fold Like Crumpled Paper to Get Their Convolutions
A single mathematical function explains how both a sheet of paper and a developing brain folds
By Sabrina Imbler | July 7, 2015


The growing mammalian brain folds just like any sheet of office paper, governed by a single mathematical function.
Suzana & Luiza Herculano-Houzel

A brain and a crisp sheet of office paper may seem to have little in common. But if someone crumples the paper into a ball, they’re holding the solution to one of the most longstanding mysteries of brain development, according to a study published July 2 in Science. As it turns out, the growing mammalian brain folds just like any sheet of office paper, governed by a single mathematical function.

The “brilliant study” represents a significant advance in scientists’ understanding of how the brain develops, says neurologist Arnold Kriegstein of the University of California, San Francisco, who was not part of the study. The research also casts light on the mechanisms behind certain structural disorders of the brain and could inform future efforts to ease those ailments.

Cryptic cortices
The human brain cortex—its outer layer—is an intricately furrowed landscape with ridges called gyri and valleys called sulci. There is a clear advantage to such cortical folding. Having a thinner, folded cortex means ...

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The Problem of Artificial Willpower
The ethical threat posed by Adderall and other drugs that improve motivation
By Hazem Zohny | July 7, 2015


What do we risk by using substances that enhance our enjoyment and interest in certain pursuits – say, a university major or career – which we would otherwise find meaningless and alienating?
Credit: FtWashGuy via Wikimedia Commons

For the avid coffee drinker bound to a monotonous desk job, there is a moment – perhaps two thirds of the way through a cup – when the unbearably tedious task at hand starts to look doable. Interesting, even. Suddenly, data entry is not something that merely pays the rent, it’s something you’re into. A caffeine-triggered surge of adrenaline and dopamine works to enhance your motivation, and the meaninglessness of it all fades as you are absorbed into your computer screen.

At least until the effect wears off. Then it’s time for another caffeine hit. Except, several thousand of those hits later, you find yourself middle-aged and struggling with a sense that you haven’t quite spent your life as you would have liked.

Unlikely as this may sound, it illustrates a reasonable possibility: drugs like caffeine can positively alter ...

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Discovery: Fish Live beneath Antarctica
Scientists find translucent fish in a wedge of water hidden under 740 meters of ice, 850 kilometers from sunlight
By Douglas Fox | January 21, 2015 |


Credit: Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling Projectl

Stunned researchers in Antarctica have discovered fish and other aquatic animals living in perpetual darkness and cold, beneath a roof of ice 740 meters thick. The animals inhabit a wedge of seawater only 10 meters deep, sealed between the ice above and a barren, rocky seafloor below—a location so remote and hostile the many scientists expected to find nothing but scant microbial life.

A team of ice drillers and scientists made the discovery after lowering a small, custom-built robot down a narrow hole they bored through the Ross Ice Shelf, a slab of glacial ice the size of France that hangs off the coastline of Antarctica and floats on the ocean. The remote water they tapped sits beneath the back corner of the floating shelf, where the shelf meets what would be the shore of Antarctica if all that ice were removed. The spot sits 850 kilometers from the outer edge of the ice shelf, the nearest place where the ocean is in contact with sunlight that allows tiny plankton to grow and sustain a food chain.

“I’m surprised,” says Ross Powell, a 63-year old glacial geologist from Northern Illinois University who co-led the expedition with two other scientists. Powell spoke with ...

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Greenland Experiences Sudden Onset of Melt Season
Two maps show Greenland's sudden, rapid meltdown
By Brian Kahn and Climate Central | July 7, 2015


Temperatures in the upper 30s and low 40s are still doing a number on Greenland’s ice sheet.
Doc Searls/Flickr

It appears that Greenland’s melt season is making up for lost time.

After a cool spring kept Greenland’s massive ice sheet mostly solid, a (comparatively) warm late June and early July have turned half the ice sheet’s surface into liquid, well outside the range of normal for this time of year.

Despite the ice sheet’s remote location, its slushy fingers reach across the globe, influencing sea levels and how fast the Gulf Stream current moves. As temperatures rise, its influence could grow larger as major summer melt events become regular occurrence. Recent warming has already contributed to ice loss in some areas previously thought to be stable and sped the trip of some glaciers into the sea.

Persistent high pressure has been ...

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Super-Magnetic Stars Forged in High-Energy Blasts
Scientists find that the biggest, brightest bursts of light herald the creation of the universe’s most magnetic objects
By Maria Temming | July 10, 2015


Artist's impression of a magnetar
NASA

Magnetars certainly know how to make an entrance. A recent study suggests that these highly magnetized stars make their cosmic debut amid the brightest flares of radiation in the universe, called ultralong-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). This discovery ties together some of the most magnetic and energetic phenomena in the cosmos and sheds light on the mysterious origins of ultralong-duration GRBs.

GRBs are blasts of gamma-ray radiation that typically fade after a few seconds, but on rare occasions can last up to a half hour. The majority of these events are “long-duration” GRBs. Whereas normal GRBs are likely formed by the merging of two neutron stars, scientists think that long GRBs are forged in the explosive deaths of massive stars called supernovae, says lead author Jochen Greiner, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.

When a massive star explodes, part of its material is ejected into space whereas the rest collapses into a remnant neutron star or black hole. This violent death spawns two jets of ...

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Supreme Court Decision Aside, Lethal Injection Looks Increasingly Unsustainable
Pharma companies—and maybe, eventually, the Supreme Court—will ensure that it only becomes harder to execute people with drugs in America
By Dina Fine Maron | July 9, 2015


PhotoDisc/Getty Images

Filling an order for a lethal drug cocktail has been getting harder for quite some time. Four years ago companies in the European Union stopped shipping pharmaceuticals to the U.S. when they would be used for executions, leading to a shortage of sodium thiopental, a once-common general anesthetic. Then there were issues getting pentobarbital—a backup drug that is also a staple in many animal euthanasia mixes.

The drug at the center of the U.S. Supreme Court case Glossip v. Gross, which the high court ruled on last month, was the sedative midazolam—a backup for the backup. The Court ruled that Oklahoma could continue using the drug but it left most big questions about capital punishment in the U.S. unanswered. No matter what the court said, however, it is only going to become harder to obtain drugs for use in executions, largely because the pharmaceutical companies that make them are increasingly refusing to sell them for that purpose.

By the time Glossip v. Gross reached the court there had already been several botched executions using the drug. In Ohio, where the execution drug replacement was not tested before ...

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Why the FBI Wants "Special Access" to Your Smartphone
And why security experts warn that this is a terrible idea
By Larry Greenemeier | July 9, 2015


Encryption Tug-of-War: FBI Director Comey took his concerns about the widespread use of encryption in consumer tech to Congress Wednesday, one day after some of the world’s top cybersecurity experts and computer scientists weighed in on the contentious issue.
Courtesy of Thinkstock.

Yesterday, FBI Director James Comey told Congress that the federal government was increasingly concerned about the widespread use of data encryption in consumer technology, implying—although not explicitly demanding—that tech companies give law enforcement easier access to cryptographically scrambled customer data. Comey’s testimony came one day after some of the world’s top cybersecurity experts and computer scientists issued a report arguing that the government’s call for special access to encrypted information is technically unfeasible and unworkably vague. Law enforcement officials need to get specific about what they want, the report’s authors argued, instead of simply waving their hands and hoping for a technological unicorn that gives them on-demand access to personal information while also protecting user privacy and securing data.

And this is where the debate gets complicated. Here’s what each side wants and what might happen next:

What is FBI director Comey asking for?

Comey called for a “front-door” approach to customer data access in an October 2014 speech but he was unclear about how ...

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At Pluto, the End of a Beginning
By Lee Billings | July 14, 2015


Taken at 4pm Eastern time on July 13, this is the final, most detailed view of Pluto beamed home by New Horizons before its closest approach. The spacecraft was 766,000 kilometers from the surface.
NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI

Early this morning, if all has gone well, the first golden age of interplanetary exploration will have come to a close. At 7:49 Eastern time, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft was slated to reach its primary target, Pluto and its moons, concluding what some call the preliminary reconnaissance of the known solar system.

Though it was conceived in the late 1980s, New Horizons wasn’t launched until 2006, after long years of delays, redesigns, and even near-death cancellations. Its unlikely five-billion-kilometer voyage to Pluto has been the work of decades. And yet today, at the climax of its mission, the spacecraft was expected to traverse the expanse of Pluto in less than three minutes, whizzing 12,500 kilometers above the surface at nearly 50,000 kilometers per hour. From the start, the spacecraft was custom-built for speed. Carrying enough fuel to crash into orbit at Pluto would have made New Horizons too bulky, expensive, and slow to even launch in the first place, so instead it will flyby and continue outward, on an endless journey into interstellar night.

During its brief close encounter, New Horizons will be ...

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Zero Carbon or Bust
Scientists remind policy makers that CO2 pollution must end--and soon
By Larry Greenemeier | By David Biello | July 13, 2015


NO CARBON: Scientists reminded policymakers that CO2 pollution must be eliminated this century to prevent dangerous climate change.
© INRA / C. Maitre.

On July 10 in Paris a gathering of nearly 2,000 scientists and academics reaffirmed what most climate scientists have been saying for decades: The cost of making cuts in greenhouse gas pollution rises with every day of delay and zero emissions must be the goal for this century. Such was the outcome of the Our Common Future under Climate Change conference held in Paris from July 7–10 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, better known by its acronym, UNESCO, and meant to advise the upcoming international negotiations to curb global warming in Paris this December.

The dangers include sea level rise of more than six meters at an unknown rate, more downpours, heat waves, wildfires and droughts as well as the loss of ice everywhere, among other challenges. To avoid global warming of as much as 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, the scientists suggested ...

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70 Years Since the First A-Bomb, Humanity Still Lives in Its Afterglow
Iran’s attempt to develop nuclear weapons will not be the last challenge faced in a journey that began with the world’s first fission bomb test during World War II
By David Biello | July 16, 2015


U.S. Department of Energy

The nuclear problem with Iran started 70 years ago in the desert of New Mexico. July 16, 1945, was a day with two dawns: the latter powered by hydrogen atoms fusing at a comfortable remove of 150 million kilometers. The earlier one entailed a blinding flash of white light fading away as the Trinity test of an atomic bomb exploded at 5:29 A.M. local time—“Up n' atom,” as the slogan for kids went from a little later in the new Atomic Age.

One dawn means a sky smeared with pink clouds drifting in a baby blue sky, accompanied by a chorus of birds singing in a wide flat valley carved by the Rio Grande and its tributaries. The other means a deafening roar that follows in the wake of a blinding flash and the world's first nuclear mushroom cloud.

The Trinity site within the White Sands Missile Range looks ...

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Important Link between the Brain and Immune System Found
The new line of communication prompts rethinking of neurologic disease
By Bret Stetka | July 21, 2015


T-cells present in vessels separate from arteries and veins confirm that the brain does in fact have a lymphatic system linking it directly the peripheral immune system.
Credit: lixuyao via Thinkstock

When the ancient Egyptians prepared a mummy they would scoop out the brain through the nostrils and throw it away. While other organs were preserved and entombed, the brain was considered separately from the rest of the body, and unnecessary for life or afterlife. Eventually, of course, healers and scientists realized that the three pounds of entangled neurons beneath our crania serve some rather critical functions. Yet even now the brain is often viewed as somewhat divorced from the rest of the body; a neurobiological Oz crewing our bodies and minds from behind the scenes with unique biology and unique pathologies.

Perhaps the most commonly cited division between body and brain concerns the immune system. When exposed to foreign bacteria, viruses, tumors, and transplant tissue, the body stirs up a torrent of immune activity: white blood cells devour invading pathogens and burst compromised cells; antibodies tag outsiders for destruction. Except, that is, in the brain. Thought to be too vulnerable to host an onslaught of angry defensive cells, the brain was assumed to be protected from this immune cascade. However research published this month reported a previously unknown line of communication between our brains and immune systems, adding to a fast-growing body of research suggesting that the brain and body are more connected than previously thought. The new work could have important implications for understanding and treating disorders of the brain.

As early as 1921 scientists recognized that the brain is different, immunologically speaking. Outside tissue grafted into most parts of the body often results in immunologic attack; tissue grafted into the central nervous system on the other hand sparks a far less hostile response. Thanks in part to ...

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Why Nobody Intervened in the July 4 Metro Murder
By R. Douglas Fields | July 17, 2015


A Red Line train on the Washington D.C. underground at Metro Center in 2004.
Photo: Ben Schumin via Wikimedia Commons

On Saturday, July 4 a group of people traveling on a Red Line Metro train headed to Fourth of July festivities in Washington, D.C. watched as one young man brutally murdered another, but no one intervened. Widespread criticism of the “apathetic” response of onlookers, who reportedly did nothing to help the victim, erupted in the press and on social media. From the perspective of brain science, however, this scorn is misguided.

The attack occurred when a man boarded the train and snatched a cell phone from 24-year-old Kevin Joseph Sutherland. During the struggle the robber viciously beat, kicked and stabbed the life out of the young man, inflicting 30 to 40 knife wounds. Passengers fled to opposite ends of the car and watched Sutherland die. At the next stop the blood-spattered murderer walked casually off the train and escaped into the crowd. Police later arrested 18-year-old Jasper Spires in connection with the crime based on evidence recovered from the scene.

Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak contrasted the inertia of ...

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Fossil Fuels Must Be Phased Out to Avoid Drowned Coastlines
New research suggests rising oceans could swamp the world’s coasts by the end of the century—sooner than previously anticipated
By David Biello | July 20, 2015


ICE FRONT: Ice shelves and glaciers in Antarctica could collapse if action is not taken quickly to restrain greenhouse gas emissions.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UC Irvine

The world's ice is in trouble. Based on paleoclimate records, observations of the world today and computer models, a warming ocean is speeding the meltdown of massive ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica. This new finding, by climatologist James Hansen of Columbia University and colleagues, suggests that sea levels could rise at least five meters—and possibly as much as nine meters—within 50 to 100 years, a rate both faster than and six times as deep as previous estimates. And such dramatically rising seas and stronger storms followed during past periods when the global annual average temperature was only roughly 1 degree Celsius warmer than today, the team found. An outcome of that magnitude could doom most of the megalopolises lining today's coastlines, the team says. And the extent of current efforts to combat climate change are nowhere near what will be required to prevent the submersion of thousands of kilometers of coastline.

Already, freshwater flooding into the oceans from ice sheet meltdowns in Antarctica and Greenland has slowed the circulation of seawater—the upwelling and downwelling that draws both heat and CO2 out of the atmosphere. The cold freshwater flooding into the oceans has ...

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How to Build a Better Ocean Sensor Far from the Sea
Montana–based Sunburst Sensors will help scientists monitor rise in ocean acidity more widely and precisely
By David Biello | July 21, 2015


ACID TEST: The finalists of the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE are lowered on a rosette deep into the Pacific Ocean.
Courtesy of XPRIZE

Montana is about as far from the sea as it gets, and has been since at least 60 million years ago. And yet when it comes to measuring the acidity of ocean water, a group from Missoula has proved to be the best at building both a cheap and durable sensor, capable of accurately measuring changes in pH, or degree of acidity/alkalinity, while plumbing depths of 3,000 meters. That's how Sunburst Sensors came to win both of the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZEs, as announced at a gala on July 20.

"It's so much easier to fly by Pluto than to get data out of the oceans," says Wendy Schmidt, who funded the prizes to help develop technologies to solve real-world problems. "But one is our lungs, and one isn't. One gives us food and one doesn't."

Schmidt has previously funded an XPRIZE that developed ...

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Kepler Mission Discovers a Near-Twin of Earth Orbiting Sunlike Star
The planet, Kepler 452 b, is likely rocky and orbits in its star’s habitable zone where liquid water can exist
By Lee Billings | July 23, 2015


An artist's rendition of Kepler 452b. The newfound planet is estimated to be 60 percent larger than Earth, and resides in a year-long orbit in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star some 1,400 light-years away.
Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

Since rocketing into space in 2009, NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope has discovered more than 4,500 confirmed or candidate worlds, in the process reshaping our entire view of the prospects for life in the universe. Thanks to Kepler, we can now conjecture that planets circle essentially every star in the sky, perhaps 10 percent of those might be habitable, and our solar system’s familiar architecture of small inner worlds and outer giants is rather rare in the cosmos.

And yet despite all these revolutionary results, Kepler’s most sought-after quarry—a mirror Earth around another sunlike star—has proved elusive. At least, that is, until now. At a NASA press conference today that also unveiled more than 500 other new candidate planets, Kepler’s mission scientists announced they have finally found and confirmed what looks to be the mission’s long-sought holy grail, a near-twin of Earth called Kepler 452 b. The discovery is detailed in a paper to be published in The Astronomical Journal. “Yes, this is the first small, possibly rocky planet in the habitable zone of a sunlike star,” says lead author Jon Jenkins, an astronomer and 20-year veteran of the Kepler mission at the NASA Ames Research Center. Kepler 452 b is estimated to be 1.6 times the size of our own world, and resides in a clement, life-friendly orbit around a star in the constellation of Cygnus some 1,400 light-years away that is eerily similar to our own sun.

The discovery marks the end of a long road. Before reaching the launch pad, Kepler endured decades of developmental woes as ...

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Can Police Use Data Science to Prevent Deadly Encounters?
As part of Obama's Police Data Initiative, researchers and police are studying "predictive analytics" to improve existing officer early warning systems
By Larry Greenemeier | July 22, 2015


Law enforcement and academia are working together to find ways of improving early warning systems meant to flag bad police behavior before it becomes a problem. (Image for illustration purposes only.)
Courtesy of Thinkstock.

Several high-profile cases of law enforcement officers using deadly force against civilians within the past year have politicians, police and researchers looking for ways to prevent such incidents. This search includes a closer look at the computerized early warning systems that many large police departments have used for years to identify officers who are most likely to overreact violently during stressful situations. The main challenge: it is difficult to say with certainty how well or even if these systems actually work.

Early warning systems debuted in large police departments—those with more than 1,000 officers—decades ago as a way to identify those officers whose unprofessional behavior could cause problems in the communities they served. Departments programmed these systems to flag recurring complaints against officers and notify supervisors when certain thresholds were reached, such as a certain number of use-of-force complaints over a given period of time. Early systems’ predictive abilities were crude, primarily because they were capable of basing their analyses only on individual data sources—such as formal complaints—rather than combining information from various police databases that could provide context for an officer’s behavior. This might include the officer’s level of experience, whether the officer responded to an incident alone as well as the time and location of the event.

Pres. Barack Obama’s recently announced Police Data Initiative seeks to ...

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Poverty Disturbs Children's Brain Development and Academic Performance
Delayed brain development predicts lower tests scores in low-income children
By Diana Kwon | July 22, 2015

Income inequality is growing in the U.S., and the problem is much worse than most people believe. For children, growing up poor hinders brain development and leads to poorer performance in schools, according to a study published this week in JAMA Pediatrics.

It has long been known that low socioeconomic status is linked to poorer performance in school, and recent research has linked poverty to smaller brain surface area. The current study bridges these converging lines of evidence by revealing that up to 20 percent of the achievement gap between high- and low-income children may be explained by differences in brain development.

Using a sample of 389 healthy children and adolescents from age four to 22, psychologist Seth Pollak and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin–Madison compared scores on academic achievement tests with tissue volume in select areas of the brain. Researchers placed subjects in a magnetic resonance imaging machine to scan and measure gray matter volume in the temporal lobes, frontal lobes and hippocampus—brain areas that are critical to cognitive processes required for academic success and vulnerable to a person’s early environment. Some of the individuals came back for reassessment after 24 months and returned for follow-ups over a period of up to six years.

The researchers found that children who ...

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Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET
Milner, a tech start-up entrepreneur and philanthropist, is partnering with scientists around the world to search for life among the stars
By Lee Billings | July 20, 2015


The Green Bank Telescope is the world's largest steerable radio telescope, and one of three telescopes Breakthrough Listen will use extensively in its groundbreaking search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Geremia

SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—has been one of the most captivating areas of science since its inception in 1960, when the astronomer Frank Drake used an 85-foot radio telescope in the first-ever attempt to detect interstellar radio transmissions sent by beings outside our solar system. Yet despite its high public visibility and near-ubiquity in blockbuster Hollywood science fiction, throughout most of its 55-year history SETI has languished on the fringes of scientific research, garnering relatively scant funding and only small amounts of dedicated observation time on world-class telescopes.

Today, in a live webcast originating from London and set for 6:30 am Eastern, the Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, along with the physicist Stephen Hawking, is announcing ...

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New Horizons Finds Nitrogen Glaciers and Hazy Air on Pluto
Astronomers astounded by the dwarf planet's active geology and atmosphere
By Alexandra Witze and Nature magazine | July 24, 2015 |


Mountains, plains and glaciers are found in and around Pluto's heart, Tombaugh Regio.
Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

Pluto has nitrogen glaciers flowing down from its distinctive, icy heart. And the dwarf planet's thin atmosphere may have begun to freeze out onto its surface—a change long expected, as Pluto moves farther away from the Sun, but never before seen.

Scientists with NASA's New Horizons mission unveiled the findings, and a raft of new images, at a press conference on July 24, just ten days after the spacecraft flew by Pluto.

A radio-science instrument aboard the New Horizons probe measured the surface pressure at Pluto for the first time, in what amounts to a measure of the mass of the atmosphere above it. What scientists found puzzled them.

“The mass of Pluto's atmosphere has decreased by a factor of ...

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Deadly SpaceShipTwo Crash Caused by Co-Pilot Error: NTSB
A pilot error was responsible for the crash that killed one person and seriously injured another last October
By Tariq Malik and SPACE.com | July 28, 2015


Virgin Galactic/Mark Greenberg/Wikipedia

The fatal breakup and crash of Virgin Galactic's first SpaceShipTwo space plane last year was caused by a co-pilot error, as well as the failure of the spacecraft's builders to anticipate such a catastrophic mistake, federal safety investigators say.

SpaceShipTwo crashed in October when co-pilot Michael Alsbury unlocked the commercial space plane's re-entry "feathering" system too early during a test flight over California's Mojave Desert, investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board said in a hearing today (July 28).

The aerospace company Scaled Composites, which built the spacecraft, also "set the stage" for the accident through its "failure to consider and protect against the possibility that a single human error could result in a catastrophic hazard to the SpaceShipTwo vehicle," NTSB Chairman Christopher Hart said as he read the board's findings. [Video: SpaceShipTwo Co-Pilot Error Led to Crash, NTSB Says]

"It is our hope that ...

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