Not sure if this experiment proves that kids with autism see motion more vividly or see contrast more vividly, but the University of Rochester certainly seems to think that the difference is motion detection. Either way, this new understanding of the way autistic people view the world may help us understand what Autism truly is:

Enhanced Motion Detection in Autism May Point to Underlying Cause of the Disorder : Rochester News

“We think of autism as a social disorder because children with this condition often struggle with social interactions, but what we sometimes neglect is that almost everything we know about the world comes from our senses. Abnormalities in how a person sees or hears can have a profound effect on social communication.”

The experiment showed kids video loops of parallel lines which moved either to the left or to the right. Kids were asked to tell which direction the lines were moving in. At low contrast, when the darkness of the lines was only subtly more dark than the surrounding background, kids in both groups performed about as well. But when the contrast was heightened, autistic kids’ abilities shot off the charts, relative to their non-autistic peers.

The article goes on to note that people with autism often report sensitivity to light. Why then does this report focus on motion when the variable that is being adjusted is contrast?

As a post script to the whole Amazing Spider-Man 2 phenomenon in Rochester, it is nice to know that at least one student at RIT got some genuine learning experience out of the whole thing. School of Film and Animation student Loren Azlein worked as a camera production assistant while the crew filmed shots in downtown Rochester. Not simply fetching coffee for the pros, it looks like her experience was pretty hands-on:

RIT film and animation student helping shoot ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2’ – RIT News

As a camera PA, Azlein is serving the set’s entire camera crew. She helps the crew with whatever it needs, but primarily takes the camera magazines—light-tight chambers designed to hold the film and move motion-picture film stock before and after it has been exposed in the camera—from the film loader and delivers them directly to the camera on set. She also charges and distributes batteries for the cameras, assists in the changing of lenses, collects and distributes camera reports, and “many other little things that make the camera crew function smoothly,” Azlein says.

In case you’ve decided that this world no longer holds any charms for you, good news! This week’s space updates include a lot of promising research into getting you off this rock. Space ahead!

Things that go BOOM!

NASA’s Heliophysics program – which monitors the sun, get it? “Helio?” – has an amazing compilation of videos of what they call a “prominence,” or a blast of solar radiation. The videos compile several different distances, bands of energy and even two completely different sides of the same explosion.

View full video at DFE.Net

Meanwhile, we have also recorded and are studying the largest star explosion ever recorded.

Come to the Off-World Colonies

The first and most basic problem we have as a species in visiting other worlds. Sure, provided that we stay within our own solar system, travel is not that far. Visiting any of Jupiter’s moons, for example. But if we’re to really break the bonds of our home system, it requires light speed travel.

New research puts light speed travel within at least hypothetical reach, though. Close enough in reach, in fact, that NASA actually has some basic testing in the works. The concept put forth decades ago as a “warp bubble,” which compresses space time ahead of it while expanding space-time behind it, might be possible for both sub- and superluminal (slower and faster than the speed of light, respectively) travel.

Now for the bad news: the nearest star and potentially-inhabitable exoplanet to the Earth is Alpha Centauri Bb at a whopping 4.25 lightyears away. So at light speed, assuming it can be achieved, we’re still looking at 51 months of crappy spaceline food and kids kicking the backs of our seats before we get to our destination.

As for our next stop, humanity’s original spacefarers have ideas of their own. Buzz Aldrin was quoted this week as saying that humanity’s future lies on the surface of Mars

Buzz Aldrin: Humanity’s Future Is on Mars:

Aldrin’s plan calls for NASA and the United States to focus technology development efforts for a manned Mars mission while still remaining a global leader in human spaceflight. The plan does not completely forgo a return of astronauts to the moon, but does state that NASA should not send astronauts there. Instead, his plan states, other countries like China, India and Russia can focus on exploration of the lunar surface while NASA fine-tunes the tech needed for Mars trips from stable Lagrange points near the moon.

Meanwhile, as the debate continues about the feasibility of travel both in and out of the Solar System, others continue to explore exoplanets in ways both innovative and old-school. One method for understanding the makeup of expolanets is to borrow slightly from the world of star analysis and use spectometry to see the signatures of elements. In this case, rather than putting the light of stars through a prism to determine the elements being burned off, the light of the stars as it passes through exoplanets as the occlude our view of the star is being analyzed for the same data about the possible atmospheres and planetary make up of our new long-distance BFFs.

Odds and Ends

If you’re looking for a way to contribute to deeper space exploration, why not try NASA’s call to search for “Space Warp” galaxies? No, these are not galaxies traveling at the speed of light. These are galaxies who by their nature create telephoto lenses into even deeper space. NASA hopes to be able to use these galaxies to peer deeper than ever before into the cosmos, and with much greater detail.

And finally, it turns out that the Milky Way’s own resident black hole has a surprising taste for gasses. Whereas scientists expected to find the crushed remnants of stars at the center of our galaxy – being dragged inevitably towards the deadly embrace of a super-massive black hole that keeps time in the Milky Way – they have instead discovered a collection of gasses equivalent to the size of our own Earth about to be gobbled up within the year.

That’s it for this week, space fans!

I’m sure you’re quite proud of the SimCity world you’ve created. Awesome stadium, bro. But the technologists and evolutionary scientists at Cornell University have just reduced your accomplishment to correctly assembling a Dominoes pizza. Bravo:

The team incorporated concepts from developmental biology and how nature builds complex animals—from jellyfish to jaguars. The result is an array of bizarre, simulated robots that evolve a diverse series of gaits and gallops.

The video shows evolution in action: A creature evolves into a galloping, soft robot over 1,000 generations. While 1,000 generations is relatively short by natural evolution standards, it is enough to demonstrate the power of evolution to create counterintuitive designs, according to the researchers.

In still more primate news for this week, it now turns out that yet another tenet of human arrogation goes up in a huff of baboon fur. It turns out that, given the choice of more or less treats in a cup, Seneca Park Zoo olive baboons proved they understand numbers just fine.

The baboons were given a choice of two cups, each containing a random selection of one to eight peanuts, to choose from. Based on their snap assessment of which cup had the greater number of treats, the baboons got to keep their booty. And after 54 trials with eight baboons, the research revealed that they were able to come up with the right answer 75% of the time:

Count on it: Baboons ‘know’ numbers

The baboons’ choices clearly relied on the “more than” or “less than” cognitive approach, known as the analog system. The baboons were able to consistently discriminate pairs with numbers larger than three as long as the relative difference between the peanuts in each cup was large.

Research has shown that children who have not yet learned to count also depend on such comparisons to discriminate between number groups, as do human adults when they are required to quickly estimate quantity.

So yeah. The next time you think the clerk at the Dollar General may have gotten the count wrong of your items despite having picked each one up, maybe you realize the reason is that they’re using the same cognitive appraisal technique as babies and your buddies in the new expansion of the SPZ.

There is no “Missing Link.” There is no one species of life that solely links humans to the rest of the primate chain because evolution doesn’t work that way.

Rather, evolution is a constant and ongoing process of minor selection and mutation that produces lots of failed and very few successful mutations. Some of those mutations become, over the course of millions of generations, their own separate species of life. Most do not.

But there is, when taking the long view, a tree of life that traces the path of evolution throughout the history of life. This tree is rarely complete in even the smallest twigs, because adding to the difficulty of tracing paleontological history is the fact that most bones – to say nothing of full skeletons – never become fossils. Rare is the evidence of prehistoric life, and the more specific the requirements of science, the harder the evidence is to come by.

A new study coauthored by boffins in Stony Brook and the University of Missouri reveals the discovery in 2002 of yet another interesting branching point in the evolution of Great Apes, including chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos (not the overpriced pants), gorillas, and humans:

Ape pelvis fills gap in evolution puzzle – Futurity.org

… the fingers of the P. catalaunicus are unlike those of modern great apes, indicating that great apes may have evolved differently than scientists originally hypothesized.

“Pierolapithecus catalaunicus seemed to use a lot of upright behaviors such as vertical climbing, but not the fully suspensory behaviors we see in great apes alive today,” Hammond says.

“Today, chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos and gorillas use forelimb-dominated behaviors to swing below branches, but Pierolapithecus catalaunicus didn’t have the long, curved finger bones needed for suspension, so those behaviors evolved more recently.”

Let’s all let Sarah Palin decide what is scientifically valid and what is not, shall we? Sound like a bad idea to you?

Well, it sounds like a grand idea to House of Representatives Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith of Texas. According to Science Insider, the Texas Rep has drafted a bill requiring all National Science Foundation grants to pass a rigorous political review to determine if the research is “in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense by promoting the progress of science.” Smith is also one of the principal “architects” for the House version of SOPA. So… there’s that.

In whose interest and by what standard do we measure “the interests” of the United States? Would studying something like or somehow related to evolution be ok? Or should our nation’s scientists delve into the abyss of creationism? Does every grant in the National Science Foundation’s queue need to get rewritten every time there is a new majority in the House? The Senate? A new party in the White House?

The route to this wonderworld of science-as-policy is as drearily predictable as it is fundamentally flawed. The vehicle, of course, is money:

Two weeks ago, Republicans on the science committee took to task both John Holdren, the president’s science adviser, and Cora Marrett, the acting NSF director, during hearings on President Barack Obama’s proposed 2014 science budget. They read the titles of several grants, questioned the value of the research, and asked both administration officials to defend NSF’s decision to fund the work.

On Thursday, Smith sent a letter to Marrett asking for more information on five recent NSF grants. In particular, he requested copies of the comments from each reviewer, as well as the notes of the NSF program officer managing the awards.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell my audience that simply reading the titles of science grants is not at all adequate to assessing the scientific – to say nothing of societal or national – interest of a research grant. But this is AM radio propaganda made manifest: let the bumpkins puzzle over the silly names of grants and determine whether those grants have value, based solely on their own relatively limited set of interests.

Don’t get me wrong: I have very little interest in chicken sperm, as a rule. I might perhaps not find it interesting enough to spend money on. But my limited set of interests aren’t what matter. The multitude interests of a wider community of scientists who may just make the next great discovery in some far-flung field are what have the most intrinsic value. They are the great strength of the scientific community and the engine of new technologies that will indeed have direct value for our society.

I’ve discussed this at length many times before, but the truth of science is that you can’t necessarily know where the next great discovery will come from. Or what tangential sciences may aid another in finding it. If a cancer researcher needs more information about the diet and life of commercial chickens, it may just be the guy studying rooster jizz that has the answers he’s looking for. And – I cannot stress this enough – the peer-reviewed research to positively document the answer.

If on the other hand, we allow politicians to control the NSF, not only might we lose the key to finding a cure for a certain type of cancer, but we might lose the credibility of the peer review process that provides all sciences a common link. If the idea of religious extremists setting scientific agenda doesn’t scare you, consider this: would you as a cancer patient be willing to trust the research approved and funded by Sarah Palin? Dennis Kucinich? God help us all, Randy Savage?

There is a petition going around asking our representatives to resist this new attack. I highly encourage my audience to read sign and pass it on.

In a litany of problems facing our healthcare system, one of the biggest we hear about the most is emergency room visits. The ER is expensive and meant to be used in genuine emergencies, but people who lack health care services or for a variety of other reasons will not see a conventional doctor end up filling our ERs and taxing the system, often without the means to pay for the services they received. Even if I personally think Excellus oversteps the bounds of decency when trying to convince us not to waste ER time, it is a very serious problem.

And one major component of that problem is that patients leave the ER and then fail to follow up with necessary after-visit care. The result is that they end up right back in the ER for the same problem. And ER doctors treat patients who then disappear, so there is really no way to follow up. Patients leave the ER and are cut off from their only means of education.

But a recent University of Buffalo project aims to solve that problem, and has won an award for their efforts. GE Healthcare awarded the new mobile app $25k in grants for solving the problem if readmittance with a program of follow-up measures aimed to keep the patient informed well after the visit:

Seeing an opportunity to reduce the readmission rate, the UB team conceived the app, called “Discharge Roadmap,” after the competition was announced in November.

The app allows patients and their caregivers to fully participate in the discharge planning process, Casucci said. It provides a convenient and stress free way to learn about proper health management, assess personal health care needs, and communicate care preferences to hospital and community-based care providers, she said.

The goal is to ultimately improve the hospital discharge planning process by reducing patient readmissions, she said.

Certain types of cancers seem to show resistance to treatments that in earlier stages are very effective. An example of this is the breast cancer fighting drug known as Tamoxifan. In early stages, it is a standard drug to prescribe because of its effectiveness. But in later stages, it appears to have no effect whatsoever.

University of Rochester researchers believe they have isolated the difference between the two stages that causes this stymie. They have isolated a specific protein. that seems to make the difference. And with it, they may have discovered a way to extend the treatment of breast and other forms of cancer well beyond the early stages:

Led by doctoral student Hsing-Yu Chen and Mark Noble, Ph.D., professor of Biomedical Genetics at URMC, the team studied the molecular mechanism that allows basal-like breast cancer cells to escape the secondary effects of tamoxifen, and discovered that two proteins are critical in this escape. One protein, called c-Cbl, controls the levels of multiple receptors that are critical for cancer cell function. A second protein, Cdc42, can inhibit c-Cbl and is responsible for the tumor’s underlying resistance.

The team also discovered that targeting Cdc42 – and thus inhibiting the inhibitor – with an experimental drug compound known as ML141 restored c-Cbl’s normal function. Through additional work in animal models and in human cell cultures, the team demonstrated that when ML141 is paired with tamoxifen, it enhances the ability of tamoxifen to induce cancer cell death and suppress the growth of new cancer cells. Neither drug alone had the same effect on basal-like breast cells.

So in the future, a one / two punch of Tamoxifan and ML141 may be the program of choice when dealing with this difficult cancer.

Gold nanoparticles are used in a variety of medical applications, including delivery of drugs and also in what are known as “MRI contrast agents.” Basically, to make certain organs stand out among the noise of your innards, techs pump a little gold dust in you.

But new research at Stony Brook University suggests that those nanoparticles – once thought harmless – actually disrupt cell production and functioning:

 The scientists discovered that the human adipose-derived stromal cells—a type of adult stem cells—were penetrated by the gold nanoparticles almost instantly and that the particles accumulated in the cells with no obvious pathway for elimination.

The presence of the particles disrupted multiple cell functions, including movement, replication (cell division), and collagen contraction—all processes that are essential in wound healing.

Oh, and the fun doesn’t stop there! It turns out that the introduction of nanoparticles seems to veer into the Incredible Hulk territories:

The most disturbing finding was that the particles interfered with genetic regulation, RNA expression and inhibited the ability to differentiate into mature adipocytes or fat cells.

So in summary, pumping your body with gold dust may actually turn you into Midas. For realzies. Or maybe not. This is just one study…