Google isn’t the only company working on mapping out the entire world with satellite imagery and detailed information about every nook and cranny in the universe. Two companies are teaming up to create publishable information on your site or news article using detailed satellite imagery and advanced publishing tools. Skybox, a company that has raised $91 million?to launch its own satellites into outer space to capture detailed imagery of our streets and buildings, is working with MapBox, an OpenStreetMap contributor, on some pretty sweet analysis and publishing tools. Two Skybox satellites will be launched this summer, so the tools are coming at the perfect time. One of the examples of analyzing all of the images that Skybox captures, is a “change detection” system that focuses on one area and builds a playlist of photos that you can go through to detect changes in the area. Why would something like this be useful? Well, say you’re a company that has a fleet of ships and wants to know when they dock and leave. This tool could help track that: Additionally, MapBox provides tools that allow anyone to annotate imagery. In the example above, you could easily add notes to each coming and going ship that you’ve detected, with important context that will help you go back in time to make sense of all of the imagery you’ve collected: When I spoke with MapBox’s founder, Eric Gundersen, about the project, he pointed out that what you can do with maps is very limited right now, which is what makes this partnership important: You can’t annotate images, you can’t zoom in, can’t interact on your tablet. This is our first experiment of “how do you package up information along with data,” that would usually be a PDF. As Gundersen pointed out, the information that the tools above allow you to surface and track would normally be passed around in a huge Word document or PDF, which is a pretty rough and manual process for people who?are analyzing thousands of images a day. MapBox, which is fully bootstrapped, is working on some other really neat tools on their own, which should be available in the coming weeks. Think Google Map Maker, but easier to use and more available to the community that is already participating on the OpenStreetMap project.
Today SoftBank Capital, the NY-based venture arm of Japan's largest wireless provider Softbank Corp., has strengthened its ties to Japan even further, announcing that Yahoo Japan will be injecting $20 million into SoftBank's early-stage Technology Fund '10. The $20 million investment and partnership will help U.S. startups at any point in their development, from early-stage companies who need funding to more mature companies looking to expand into new markets. Yahoo Japan's investment will be an addition to the $100 million early-stage fund, which is a complement to the freshly announced PrinceVille fund.
Let's start with a disclaimer ? my religious beliefs are probably best described as "agnostic," although I do believe that there is a greater force that is beyond our ability to understand with scientific rationale.
Other members of my family belong to various faiths and certainly many of my friends believe in their religion, attend houses of worship, and perform truly remarkable deeds in the name and mission.
Yet I just can't comprehend the underlying tenets of this tragedy. Religious freedom is sacrosanct in our society; so is the welfare of our most vulnerable population of children.
When these worlds collide, it has to become the charge of society to protect the child. In the 21st century, we simply know with significant certainty that science-based medical practice provides a chance of survival.
Given the condition that this has happened once before with another child makes it all the more bizarre.
How did that happen? What mechanisms failed to monitor, track and intervene in this case?
I've been fortunate to have had only one incident in my career where there was conflict with a family over religious beliefs and the care of their child.
Suffice to say it was awkward and uncomfortable. In the end, it was another member of that family who was able to convince the parents to have us transport their very ill child. Nothing I said, or could have said, would have changed their belief.
Afterwards, those of us on the scene debated whether we had to report the parents for child endangerment. While the decision to report was unanimous, it wasn't simple and it wasn't an easy discussion.
Our job can be challenging in ways one wouldn't expect. In this case I hope ? pray ? that an investigation will reveal the issues that must be addressed to prevent this from happening again.
Inzen Studio, a small game startup in Singapore has just released an ambitious project called Game Show Warriors. The launch kicks off with the release of an iOS game called Amazing Studly Strikes, but the studio has quietly released the first two episodes of a Web comic, and episode three just dropped to accompany the release of the mobile game. The game app will also include the Web comic, according to Inzen’s co-founder, Gerald Tock. Inzen was started in October last year, and is made of six developers, with the founders and writers in Singapore, and relies on some development work from China. Its Web comic was created by artists in Uruguay. The comic and its first game center on a character they created, G-man Studly. The game appears to be a tapping frenzy, with waves of enemies attacking G-man Studly from different corners of the screen, requiring you to tap on them furiously as your character scales a skyscraper. Tock said the team is hoping to make the rest of its project happen. It has enough material for another “larger” game and four mini games to be produced under the Game Show Warriors banner. It plans to wait for the response to the first episode to decide whether to continue, however. Besides having people download and play their games, Inzen is hoping that the investment into the online manga will get fans making derivative works such as fan fiction, videos or cosplaying as the characters. Inzen is angel-funded in the “low six figures”, said Tock. The five founding developers in Singapore are graduates from the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab. Prior to creating this project, some of them produced apps that enjoyed some success on the mobile scene. Dark Dot was a shooter they produced in 2011 that climbed to the top of the action charts in 48 countries including China, the US and Singapore, and was the top free iOS app in several Southeast Asian countries. Check out the trailer for Amazing Studly Strikes here:
Five years ago from their native city of Barcelona, Maria Alegre and her husband Pepe Agell used to watch old Stanford Technology Ventures Program videos from entrepreneurs sharing their founding stories. Intrigued by what they heard, they picked up and moved to the Valley, where Alegre dug into mobile gaming at early developer Tapulous, which went on to be acquired by Disney. Fast forward to today, Alegre is running one of the fastest-growing mobile ad networks in Silicon Valley (one that we’ve heard from three separate sources grossed about $50 million last year). Her company Chartboost is quietly sucking in talent from an older generation of mobile ad networks and gaming studios like Google’s AdMob, DeNA’s Ngmoco and EA’s Popcap. They also picked up $19 million in funding led by storied VC firm Sequoia earlier this year. “It’s kind of crazy. This all happened in four years,” she said. “Anyone can do it. People running these companies are not super humans. They are just people like you and me.” Today Chartboost is opening its first office abroad in Europe, led by Ilja Goossens, who founded Gamundo and Virtual Fairground. The new location in Amsterdam is meant to strengthen the company’s relationships with the biggest game developers across the continent. Europe is having something of a Renaissance in mobile gaming right now with players like Finland’s Supercell (which made $104 million in profit with just 100 people last quarter), Berlin’s Wooga and London’s King. While other newer mobile ad networks were less focused, Chartboost wedged itself into the gaming world where it built an early platform for developers to trade advertising inventory. Because games are the biggest category for apps in terms of time spent on iOS and Android, it was the ideal place to build a focused business. Chartboost earns revenue through excess inventory, which can be sold in an exchange. Chartboost now has 16,000 games in its network and 8 billion ad impressions per month and has grown 30 percent since January. Instead of the old banner ads, which had poor clickthrough rates, Chartboost instead focused on creating interstitials that looked and felt like they belonged in a game. At first, it wasn’t easy, however. Alegre said that when she and her co-founder Sean Fannan were starting out, they did 30 phone pitches to potential investors in a week. In late 2011, they picked up a small round from
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea demanded on Tuesday that it be recognized as a nuclear weapons state, rejecting a U.S. condition that it agree to give up its nuclear arms program before talks can begin.
After weeks of tension on the Korean peninsula, including North Korean threats of nuclear war, the North has in recent days begun to at least talk about dialogue in response to calls for talks from both the United States and South Korea.
The North's Rodong Sinmun newspaper rejected as groundless and unacceptable the U.S. and South Korean condition that it agrees to dismantle its nuclear weapons and suspend missile launches.
"If the DPRK sits at a table with the U.S., it has to be a dialogue between nuclear weapons states, not one side forcing the other to dismantle nuclear weapons," the newspaper said, referring to the North by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
A White House spokesman said this month North Korea would need to show it was serious about abandoning its nuclear ambitions for talks to be meaningful.
North Korea signed a denuclearization-for-aid deal in 2005 but later backed out of that pact. It now says its nuclear arms are a "treasured sword" that it will never give up.
It conducted its third nuclear test in February.
That triggered new U.N. sanctions which in turn led to a dramatic intensification of North Korea's threats of nuclear strikes against South Korea and the United States.
But in a sign the hostility was easing, North Korea last Thursday offered the United States and South Korea a list of conditions for talks, including the lifting of U.N. sanctions.
The United States responded by saying it awaited "clear signals" that North Korea would halt its nuclear weapons activities.
North Korea has a long record of making threats to secure concessions from the United States and South Korea, only to repeat the process later. Both the United States and the South have said in recent days that the cycle must cease.
(Reporting by Robert Birsel; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)
MONDAY, April 22 (HealthDay News) ? It is nearly impossible for migraine sufferers to pinpoint the causes of their attacks on their own, researchers say.
Many people with migraines try to figure out for themselves the things that trigger their migraines. For example, they may conclude that it is stress, hormones, alcohol or even the weather.
?But our research shows this is a flawed approach for several reasons,? Timothy Houle, an associate professor of anesthesia and neurology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C., said in a center news release.
?Correctly identifying triggers allows patients to avoid or manage them in an attempt to prevent future headaches,? Houle said. ?However, daily fluctuations of variables ? such as weather, diet, hormone levels, sleep, physical activity and stress ? appear to be enough to prevent the perfect conditions necessary for determining triggers.?
Houle and a colleague conducted a study that included nine women who suffered migraines and kept a daily diary and tracked their stress for three months. Daily morning urine samples were collected from the women and tested for hormone levels. In addition, the researchers analyzed local weather data during the study.
It was extremely difficult for the women to identify the causes of their migraines, according to the findings, which were published recently in the online version of the journal Headache.
?People who try to figure out their own triggers probably don?t have enough information to truly know what causes their headaches,? study co-author Dana Turner, also of the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center anesthesiology department, said in the news release. ?They need more formal experiments and should work with their doctors to devise a formal experiment for testing triggers.?
?Many patients live in fear of the unpredictability of headache pain,? Houle said. ?As a result, they often restrict their daily lives to prepare for the eventuality of the next attack that may leave them bedridden and temporarily disabled.?
?They may even engage in medication-use strategies that inadvertently worsen their headaches,? he said. ?The goal of this research is to better understand what conditions must be true for an individual headache sufferer to conclude that something causes their headaches.?
More information
The U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke has more about migraines.
Apr. 21, 2013 ? Afghanistan's geography is dominated by a collection of craggy peaks, the highest -- a mountain known as Noshaq -- has been measured to 7,492 meters. Consequently, the soldiers on duty in this mountainous terrain must often ascend to great heights as part of their duty. However, quick climbs without aadapting to altitude can lead to a condition called acute mountain sickness (AMS), marked by headache, fatigue, gastrointestinal distress, nausea, and insomnia.
Conventional knowledge suggests that to avoid AMS, climbers need to "stage," or set up camp, at a lower altitude for four days when summiting peaks as high as 4300 meters. However, with this being impractical in a combat environment, military researchers set out to test whether this goal could be accomplished more quickly -- in half the time. In a new study by Beth A. Beidleman, Charles S. Fulco, Robert W. Kenefick, Allen Cymerman, Janet E. Staab, and Stephen R. Muza, all of the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, researchers tested whether two days of staging at a moderate altitude is enough to avoid AMS before ascent to 4300 meters. Their findings show that this significant shortcut is about as effective as utilizing twice the time to stage, providing evidence that soldiers can ascend safely much quicker than previously thought.
The team will discuss the abstract of their study entitled, "Two Days of Staging at Moderate Altitude Reduces Acute Mountain Sickness Upon Further Ascent to 4300 m in Unacclimatized Lowlanders," during a poster presentation at the Experimental Biology 2013 meeting, being held April 20-24, 2013 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, Boston, Mass. The presentation is sponsored by the American Physiological Society (APS), a co-sponsor of the event. As the findings are being presented at a scientific conference, they should be considered preliminary, as they have not undergone the peer review process that is conducted prior to the data being published in a scientific journal.
At the Peak
Study leader Beidleman explains that the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine's stated mission is to improve health and performance of the Warfighter when exposed to extreme environments. That includes heat and cold, as well as extreme altitude, Beidleman's own area of expertise.
Years ago, researchers showed that staging for four days cut the prevalence of AMS by about half. However, Beidleman says, researchers had never studied whether this time could be trimmed down even further.
To investigate, she and her colleagues studied male soldiers ascending Pike's Peak in Colorado, the summit of which stands at 4,302 meters above sea level. They assigned 12 of these soldiers to stage for two days at 2500 meters. Another seven soldiers staged for two days at 3000 meters. Seven more ascended directly to the peak.
Trimming AMS by Half
Their findings showed that about 73 percent of soldiers who took a direct route to the peak showed symptoms of AMS. However, only 30 to 40 percent of those who staged for two days ended up with this condition, regardless of their staging height.
"These results suggest that you don't have to stay at a moderate altitude for four days. You can stay there for two days and reap the same benefits," Beidleman says.
She explains that two days is enough time for the body to begin affecting the biological changes necessary to live comfortably at a higher altitude. Within hours to days, she says, climbers begin to breathe faster and reduce blood plasma volume which helps the body bring more oxygen to cells, she says. These immediate changes help cells survive until the body implements more long-term changes, such as increasing the number of red blood cells and other metabolic changes.
"The military is always looking for faster, more effective solutions to problems," she says. "Now we know that our soldiers can climb quicker with less risk of serious problems."
Beidleman notes that future studies will investigate the effects of shorter staging at higher altitudes and in female soldiers.
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PARIS (Reuters) - Germany has reported new cases of a low pathogenic bird flu virus at two turkey farms in the northwestern part of the country, the World Animal Health Organisation (OIE) said on Monday.
The H5N1 virus, last found in Germany in late March, differs from the H7N9 type which has killed 20 people and infected 105 in China this month, the Paris-based OIE said on its website.
German authorities reported to the OIE that 10 infected turkeys were found last week in Badbergen, Lower Saxony, leading to the culling of 7,920 animals.
Another 10 cases were found at a turkey farm in Halen, near Badbergen, where 17,150 turkeys were culled, the OIE said.
The H5N1 virus mainly affects birds but occasionally jumps to people. Experts fear it may mutate into a form that could spread easily among humans, who have no natural immunity against it.
(Reporting by Sybille de La Hamaide; editing by Jason Neely)
CLARKSVILLE, Mo. (AP) ? Those fighting floods in several communities along the Mississippi River were mostly successful Sunday despite the onslaught of water, but an ominous forecast and the growing accumulation of snow in the upper Midwest tempered any feelings of victory.
The surging Mississippi was at or near crest at several places from the Quad Cities south to near St. Louis ? some reaching 10 feet above flood stage. Problems were plentiful: Hundreds of thousands of acres of swamped farmland as planting season approaches; three people died; roads and bridges closed, including sections of major highways like U.S. 61 in Iowa and Missouri and crossings at Quincy, Ill., and Louisiana, Mo.
The U.S. Coast Guard said 114 barges broke loose near St. Louis on Saturday night, and four hit the Jefferson Barracks Bridge in St. Louis County. The bridge was closed about six hours for inspection but reopened around 8 a.m. Sunday. The runaway barges were corralled but authorities believe a few sank.
Flooding has now been blamed in three deaths ? two at the same spot in Indiana and one in Missouri. In all three cases, vehicles were swept off the road in flash floods. High water could be responsible for two more, both in Illinois, where a decomposed body was found Thursday in an Oak Brook creek and a body was found Saturday in the Mississippi River at Cora. Investigations continue.
And the danger is far from over, as spots south of St. Louis aren't expected to crest until next week, and significant flooding is possible in places like Ste. Genevieve, Mo., Cape Girardeau, Mo., and Cairo, Ill.
Adding to concern is a forecast that calls for heavy rain Monday night and Tuesday throughout much of the Midwest. National Weather Service meteorologist Julie Phillipson said an inch of rain is likely in many places, some places even more.
"That's not what we want to see when we have this kind of flooding, that's for sure," Phillipson said.
Meanwhile, the northern Midwest has received heavy snow this month, and concerns are turning to what happens when it melts and makes its way into tributaries of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Forecasters said up to 6 inches of new snow was possible in the Black Hills area of South Dakota through Monday morning.
Hundreds of miles to the southeast, in La Grange, Mo., Lewis County emergency management director David Keith wasn't bothered by the soggy forecast. Sandbags were holding back the murky Mississippi from La Grange City Hall, a bank and a handful of threatened homes, and the water was receding.
"What we're worried about now is all that snow melt in North and South Dakota and Minnesota," Keith said.
A handful of river towns are most affected by the high waters ? places like Clarksville, Mo., and Grafton, Ill., that have chosen against flood walls or levees.
By Sunday, sandbagging had all but stopped in Clarksville, evidence of the confidence that the makeshift sandbag levee hurriedly erected to protect downtown would hold. Volunteers, including nearly three dozen prison inmates, worked since Wednesday, using 6,000 tons of sand and gravel.
The river was at 34.7 feet Sunday, nearly 10 feet above the 25-foot flood stage ? a somewhat arbitrary term the NWS defines as the point when "water surface level begins to create a hazard to lives, property or commerce" ? and expected to rise another foot before cresting Monday.
"We believe we'll have a successful conclusion," said Jo Anne Smiley, longtime mayor of the 442-resident hamlet.
Richard Cottrell, a 64-year-old antique shop owner, was hopeful, but nervous. After two days of endless sandbagging, Cottrell thought he could rest Saturday night, but the constant beeping of heavy equipment outside and flood worries kept him up.
"I had a rough night last night. I had an anxiety attack," he admitted.
Many towns on smaller rivers in other states were dealing with floodwaters, too.
Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn has declared four more counties disaster areas, bringing the statewide number of disaster declarations to 41. Several rivers were approaching record levels there, and thousands of people have been evacuated, especially in Peoria and other communities along the Illinois River.
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence spent part of the weekend surveying flood damage. He said state officials have begun assessing the scope of the damage to determine if affected communities are eligible for disaster assistance. Hundreds of people have been evacuated, and the towns of Kokomo, Tipton and Elwood were especially affected.
In Wisconsin, several rivers were starting to fall off, but are expected to rise again with rainfall next week. Everyone from high school volunteers in jail inmates have proactively filled thousands of sandbags in the Janesville area for residents who might need them in the coming days.
The mayor of Grand Rapids, Mich., declared a state of emergency Saturday, and the Grand River is likely to surpass its high-water mark either Sunday or Monday.
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham is a father figure to countless startup he’s helped accelerate, but had never taken a board of directors seat until now. Today he announced he’s accepted board seat with Watsi, a site that lets people donate money to pay the medical bills of needy people. Watsi came out of this season’s Winter 2013 Y Combinator class and is the first non-profit it’s ever backed. More specifically, Watsi hosts profiles of people in dire need of medical care, but who can’t afford it. Donors can browse the profiles and donate as little as $5 to help someone get well. 100% of donations go to the sick, and Watsi funds its operations and even pays credit card processing fees on donations out of its own pocket. We named Watsi one of the top seven startups from the last YC Demo Day. Today, Graham tweeted: For the first time I agreed to be on a board of directors: @watsi's.— Paul Graham (@paulg) April 19, 2013 We’ve reached out to Graham for comment about why he accepted the position.?But he had already been showing the startup some love. After discovering the startup on Hacker News and meeting the team he invited them to be the first ever YC-backed non-profite. When the company launched, Graham wrote a blog post exclaiming “After about 30 seconds of looking at the site, I realized I was looking at one of the more revolutionary things I’d seen the Internet used for. Technology can now put a face on need. The people who need help around the world are individuals, not news photos, and when you see them as individuals it’s hard to ignore them.” He concluded, “I’ve never been so excited about anything we’ve funded.” Then after the Boston Marathon bombings he tweeted: When terrible things happen to people I can't help, I go to watsi.org and help people I can.— Paul Graham (@paulg) April 15, 2013 Beyond a few advising investing roles with companies like 280 North, he’s known to devote himself full to Y Combinator. He could help Watsi navigate the balancing act between being a startup designed for rapid growth, and being a non-profit with a mission for social good.
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In an unprecedented move, the city of Boston, in its entirety, is being asked to shelter-in-place, with schools and mass transit closed. Nearby Watertown, where police and federal authorities are searching for the Boston Marathon bomber who is still at large, is in lock-down.
Apr. 17, 2013 ? In the wake of recent mass shootings such as the one in Newtown, Conn., physicians are increasingly being called on to pass judgment in the permitting process on whether their patient is physically and mentally competent to safely have and use a concealed weapon.
But most physicians have no medical training in weapons or how to make a determination of competence to use a weapon, and there are few if any established standards in place to help guide them, according to a new perspective article in the New England Journal of Medicine. The article was written by Adam Goldstein, MD, MPH, of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, with colleagues from UNC and Duke University.
"The Newtown and other mass shooting incidents have permanently changed the conversation regarding regulations and policies about gun ownership and gun violence in this country," said Goldstein, a professor in the UNC Department of Family Medicine. "This horrific event has raised significant questions as well for the medical community, particularly when we are now requested to assist law enforcement in assessing our patient's competency to carry or safely use a concealed weapon."
In their perspective article, Goldstein and colleagues urge that "moving forward, we must consider all of the ethical, legal and policy issues." This includes the development of a universally standard assessment of mental and physical competency for using concealed weapons, usually handguns, in this permitting process, medical training for physicians who are being called upon to make such assessments, the role of physician choice based on personal ethics in the participation of assessments, and the legal implications regarding current patient privacy laws and tort liability.
"When are patients with insomnia, seizures, prior strokes, severe arthritis, frequent alcohol use, chronic pain, depression and many other conditions competent for safely using concealed weapons? Reasonable physicians may disagree about competency in the absence of standards. Unfortunately, such decisions may be based on s personal view of gun ownership rather than safety standards" says Goldstein.
Further, "What happens if someone is granted a concealed-weapon permit based on limited medical and psychological background information and then goes out and kills or injures others, or even commits suicide? When physicians are asked and then sign off on permits, do they share in the responsibility and the liability when deaths occur?" asks Goldstein.
The current environment has brought up many questions about how to handle gun ownership and ultimately gun violence. "The United States has an obligation to protect its citizens from gun violence and to prevent whenever possible the increasing harm that comes from guns. Congress is wrestling with bipartisan solutions. The role of physicians is growing and important.
"Physicians will continue to have a role in concealed-weapons permitting processes and many other areas linked to gun violence and its prevention. Medical educators should examine curricula for teaching about guns and gun violence to students and physicians, and policy-makers should examine whether new restrictions should occur over the carrying of concealed weapons into all health care facilities," said Goldstein.
Co-authors of the article from UNC are Kathleen K. Barnhouse, MD and Anthony J. Viera, MD, MPH, both from the Department of Family Medicine. Co-authors from Duke University are James A. Tulsky, MD, from the School of Medicine, and Barak D. Richman, JD, PhD, from the School of Law.
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Journal Reference:
Adam O. Goldstein, Kathleen K. Barnhouse, Anthony J. Viera, James A. Tulsky, Barak D. Richman. Assessing Competency for Concealed-Weapons Permits ? The Physician's Role. New England Journal of Medicine, 2013; : 130417140008006 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1302795
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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
A debate among scientists about the geologic formation of the supervolcano encompassing the region around Yellowstone National Park has taken a major step forward, thanks to new evidence provided by a team of international researchers led by University of Rhode Island Professor Christopher Kincaid.
In a publication appearing in last week's edition of Nature Geoscience, the URI team demonstrated that both sides of the debate may be right.
Using a state-of-the-art plate tectonic laboratory model, they showed that volcanism in the Yellowstone area was caused by severely deformed and defunct pieces of a former mantle plume. They further concluded that the plume was affected by circulation currents driven by the movement of tectonic plates at the Cascades subduction zone.
Mantle plumes are hot buoyant upwellings of magma inside the Earth. Subduction zones are regions where dense oceanic tectonic plates dive beneath buoyant continental plates. The origins of the Yellowstone supervolcano have been argued for years, with sides disagreeing about the role of mantle plumes.
According to Kincaid, the simple view of mantle plumes is that they have a head and a tail, where the head rises to the surface, producing immense magma structures and the trailing tail interacts with the drifting surface plates to create a chain of smaller volcanoes of progressively younger age. But Yellowstone doesn't fit this typical mold. Among its oddities, its eastward trail of smaller volcanoes called the Snake River Plain has a mirror-image volcanic chain, the High Lava Plain, that extends to the west. As a result, detractors say the two opposite trails of volcanoes and the curious north-south offset prove the plume model simply cannot work for this area, and that a plates-only model must be at work.
To examine these competing hypotheses, Kincaid, former graduate student Kelsey Druken, and colleagues at the Australian National University built a laboratory model of the Earth's interior using corn syrup to simulate fluid-like motion of Earth's mantle. The corn syrup has properties that allow researchers to examine complex time changing, three-dimensional motions caused by the collisions of tectonic plates at subduction zones and their effect on unsuspecting buoyant plumes.
By using the model to simulate a mantle plume in the Yellowstone region, the researchers found that it reproduced the characteristically odd patterns in volcanism that are recorded in the rocks of the Pacific Northwest.
"Our model shows that a simple view of mantle plumes is not appropriate when they rise near subduction zones, and that these features get ripped apart in a way that seems to match the patterns in magma output in the northwestern U.S. over the past 20 million years," said Kincaid, a professor of geological oceanography at the URI Graduate School of Oceanography. "The sinking plate produces a flow field that dominates the interaction with the plume, making the plume passive in many ways and trapping much of the magma producing energy well below the surface. What you see at the surface doesn't look like what you'd expect from the simple models."
The next step in Kincaid's research is to conduct a similar analysis of the geologic formations in the region around the Tonga subduction zone and the Samoan Islands in the South Pacific, another area where some scientists dispute the role of mantle plumes.
According to Kincaid, "A goal of geological oceanography is to understand the relationship between Earth's convecting interior and our oceans over the entire spectrum of geologic time. This feeds directly into the very pressing need for understanding where Earth's ocean-climate system is headed, which clearly hinges on our understanding of how it has worked in past."
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University of Rhode Island: http://www.uri.edu
Thanks to University of Rhode Island for this article.
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Universities aren't just places for students to cut classes and enjoy themselves before eventually embarking on careers. They are also places where problems get solved, like the one facing runners who find it hard to read on the jog. That bane is the focus of a group of researchers at Purdue University, who are working on a system called ReadingMate, which moves text on a display in reaction to the bobbing head of a runner to stabilize what's being seen. The screen is sent information from a pair of infrared LED-equipped glasses, but it's not as simple as shifting text in time with head movement -- your eyes are performing corrections of their own, so the words dance slightly out of sync with your noggin to take this into account. It's performed well in testing, and could have applications beyond the gym, such as in heavy machinery and aircraft, where vibration can hamper reading ability in important situations. Those uses make the most sense -- we don't often find ourselves eager to attack that next Twilight chapter during a near-death treadmill experience.
Training the brain to improve on new tasksPublic release date: 15-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Lisa M.P. Munoz cns.publicaffairs@gmail.com 703-951-7331 Cognitive Neuroscience Society
April 15, 2013 San Francisco - A brain-training task that increases the number of items an individual can remember over a short period of time may boost performance in other problem-solving tasks by enhancing communication between different brain areas. The new study being presented this week in San Francisco is one of a growing number of experiments on how working-memory training can measurably improve a range of skills from multiplying in your head to reading a complex paragraph.
"Working memory is believed to be a core cognitive function on which many types of high-level cognition rely, including language comprehension and production, problem solving, and decision making," says Brad Postle of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is co-chairing a session on working-memory training at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) annual meeting today in San Francisco. Work by various neuroscientists to document the brain's "plasticity" changes brought about by experience along with technical advances in using electromagnetic techniques to stimulate the brain and measure changes, have enabled researchers to explore the potential for working-memory training like never before, he says.
The cornerstone brain-training exercise in this field has been the "n-back" task, a challenging working memory task that requires an individual to mentally juggle several items simultaneously. Participants must remember both the recent stimuli and an increasing number of stimuli before it (e.g., the stimulus "1-back," "2-back," etc). These tasks can be adapted to also include an audio component or to remember more than one trait about the stimuli over time for example, both the color and location of a shape.
Through a number of experiments over the past decade, Susanne Jaeggi of the University of Maryland, College Park, and others have found that participants who train with n-back tasks over the course of approximately a month for about 20 minutes per day not only get better at the n-back task itself, but also experience "transfer" to other cognitive tasks on which they did not train. "The effects generalize to important domains such as attentional control, reasoning, reading, or mathematical skills," Jaeggi says. "Many of these improvements remain over the course of several months, suggesting that the benefits of the training are long lasting."
As yet unresolved and controversial, however, has been understanding which factors determine whether working-memory training will generalize to other domains, as well as how the brain changes in response to the training. Work by Postle's group using a new technique of applying electromagnetic stimulation on the brains of people undergoing working-memory training addresses some of these questions.
Training increases connectivity
Bornali Kundu of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who works in Postle's laboratory, used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) with electroencephalography (EEG) to measure activity in specific brain circuits before and after training with an n-back task. "Our main finding was that training on the n-back task increased the number of items an individual could remember over a short period of time," explains Kundu, who is presenting these new results today. "This increase in short-term memory performance was associated with enhanced communication between distant brain areas, in particular between the parietal and frontal brain areas."
In the n-back task, Kundu's team presented stimuli one-at-a-time on a computer screen and asked participants to decide if the current stimulus matched both the color and location of the stimulus presented a certain number of presentations previously. The color varied among seven primary colors, and the location varied among eight possible positions arranged in a square formation. The control task was playing the video game Tetris, which involves moving colored shapes to different locations, but does not require participants to remember anything. Before and after the training, researchers administered a range of cognitive tasks on which subjects did not receive training, and simultaneously delivered TMS while recording EEG, to measure communication between brain areas during task performance.
After practicing the n-back task for 5 hours a day and 5 days per week over 5 weeks, subjects were able to remember more items over short periods of time. Importantly, for those whose working memory improved, communication between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and parietal cortex also improved. "This is in comparison to the control group, who showed no such differences in neural communication after practicing Tetris for 5 weeks," Kundu says.
Working-memory training also produced improvement on cognitive tasks for which participants were not trained that are also believed to rely on communication between the parietal cortex and DLPFC. For two of these tasks the ability to detect a change in a briefly presented array of squares, and the ability to detect a red letter "C" embedded in a field of distracting stimuli of rotated red "C"s and blue "C"s those who had trained in the n-back test also showed a decrease in task-related EEG. The training exercise had registered a similar decrease. "The overall picture seems to be that the extent of transfer of training to untrained tasks depends on the overlap of neural circuits recruited by the two," Kundu says.
Developing future therapies
Moving forward, many cognitive neuroscientists are working to see how working-memory training may specifically help clinical populations, such as patients with ADHD. "If we can learn the 'rules' that govern how, why, and when cognitive training can produce improvements that generalize to untrained tasks, it may be that therapies can be developed for patients suffering from neurological or psychiatric disease," Postle says.
Both Jaeggi's team, as well as Torkel Klingberg of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, who is also presenting at the symposium today in San Francisco, have had success with such training for children with ADHD, decreasing the symptoms of inattention. "Here, the reason working-memory training may transfer to tests of fluid intelligence, as well as to a reduction in ADHD-associated hyperactivity symptoms, may be because both of those complex behaviors use some of the same brain circuits also used in performing the working-memory training tasks," Kundu says.
"Individual differences in working memory performance have been related to individual differences in numerous real world skills such as reading comprehension, performance on standardized tests, and much more," she adds. "I would not expect the same sorts of transfer effects that have been seen with working-memory training to happen if an individual practiced a task that used a minimally overlapping network, such as, for example, shooting three-pointers which presumably uses different brain areas like primary and secondary motor cortex and the cerebellum."
Jaeggi says that it is important to understand that cognitive abilities are not as unchangeable as some might think. "Even though there is certainly a hereditary component to mental abilities, that does not mean that there are not also components that are malleable and respond to experience and practice," she says. "Whereas we try to strengthen participants' working memory skills in our research, there are other routes that are possible as well, such as for example physical or musical training, meditation, nutrition, or even sleep."
Despite all the promising research, Jaeggi says, researchers still need to understand many aspects of this work, such as "individual differences that influence training and transfer effects, the question of how long the effects last, and whether and how the effects translate into more real-world settings and ultimately, academic achievement."
The symposium "The effects of working memory training on brain and behavior" takes place on April 15, 2013, at the 20th CNS annual meeting. More than 1,500 scientists are attending the meeting in San Francisco, CA, from April 13 to April 16, 2013.
###
Follow the meeting on Twitter: @CogNeuroNews #CNS2013
CNS is committed to the development of mind and brain research aimed at investigating the psychological, computational, and neuroscientific bases of cognition. Since its founding in 1994, the Society has been dedicated to bringing its 2,000 members worldwide the latest research to facilitate public, professional, and scientific discourse.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Training the brain to improve on new tasksPublic release date: 15-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Lisa M.P. Munoz cns.publicaffairs@gmail.com 703-951-7331 Cognitive Neuroscience Society
April 15, 2013 San Francisco - A brain-training task that increases the number of items an individual can remember over a short period of time may boost performance in other problem-solving tasks by enhancing communication between different brain areas. The new study being presented this week in San Francisco is one of a growing number of experiments on how working-memory training can measurably improve a range of skills from multiplying in your head to reading a complex paragraph.
"Working memory is believed to be a core cognitive function on which many types of high-level cognition rely, including language comprehension and production, problem solving, and decision making," says Brad Postle of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is co-chairing a session on working-memory training at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) annual meeting today in San Francisco. Work by various neuroscientists to document the brain's "plasticity" changes brought about by experience along with technical advances in using electromagnetic techniques to stimulate the brain and measure changes, have enabled researchers to explore the potential for working-memory training like never before, he says.
The cornerstone brain-training exercise in this field has been the "n-back" task, a challenging working memory task that requires an individual to mentally juggle several items simultaneously. Participants must remember both the recent stimuli and an increasing number of stimuli before it (e.g., the stimulus "1-back," "2-back," etc). These tasks can be adapted to also include an audio component or to remember more than one trait about the stimuli over time for example, both the color and location of a shape.
Through a number of experiments over the past decade, Susanne Jaeggi of the University of Maryland, College Park, and others have found that participants who train with n-back tasks over the course of approximately a month for about 20 minutes per day not only get better at the n-back task itself, but also experience "transfer" to other cognitive tasks on which they did not train. "The effects generalize to important domains such as attentional control, reasoning, reading, or mathematical skills," Jaeggi says. "Many of these improvements remain over the course of several months, suggesting that the benefits of the training are long lasting."
As yet unresolved and controversial, however, has been understanding which factors determine whether working-memory training will generalize to other domains, as well as how the brain changes in response to the training. Work by Postle's group using a new technique of applying electromagnetic stimulation on the brains of people undergoing working-memory training addresses some of these questions.
Training increases connectivity
Bornali Kundu of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who works in Postle's laboratory, used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) with electroencephalography (EEG) to measure activity in specific brain circuits before and after training with an n-back task. "Our main finding was that training on the n-back task increased the number of items an individual could remember over a short period of time," explains Kundu, who is presenting these new results today. "This increase in short-term memory performance was associated with enhanced communication between distant brain areas, in particular between the parietal and frontal brain areas."
In the n-back task, Kundu's team presented stimuli one-at-a-time on a computer screen and asked participants to decide if the current stimulus matched both the color and location of the stimulus presented a certain number of presentations previously. The color varied among seven primary colors, and the location varied among eight possible positions arranged in a square formation. The control task was playing the video game Tetris, which involves moving colored shapes to different locations, but does not require participants to remember anything. Before and after the training, researchers administered a range of cognitive tasks on which subjects did not receive training, and simultaneously delivered TMS while recording EEG, to measure communication between brain areas during task performance.
After practicing the n-back task for 5 hours a day and 5 days per week over 5 weeks, subjects were able to remember more items over short periods of time. Importantly, for those whose working memory improved, communication between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and parietal cortex also improved. "This is in comparison to the control group, who showed no such differences in neural communication after practicing Tetris for 5 weeks," Kundu says.
Working-memory training also produced improvement on cognitive tasks for which participants were not trained that are also believed to rely on communication between the parietal cortex and DLPFC. For two of these tasks the ability to detect a change in a briefly presented array of squares, and the ability to detect a red letter "C" embedded in a field of distracting stimuli of rotated red "C"s and blue "C"s those who had trained in the n-back test also showed a decrease in task-related EEG. The training exercise had registered a similar decrease. "The overall picture seems to be that the extent of transfer of training to untrained tasks depends on the overlap of neural circuits recruited by the two," Kundu says.
Developing future therapies
Moving forward, many cognitive neuroscientists are working to see how working-memory training may specifically help clinical populations, such as patients with ADHD. "If we can learn the 'rules' that govern how, why, and when cognitive training can produce improvements that generalize to untrained tasks, it may be that therapies can be developed for patients suffering from neurological or psychiatric disease," Postle says.
Both Jaeggi's team, as well as Torkel Klingberg of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, who is also presenting at the symposium today in San Francisco, have had success with such training for children with ADHD, decreasing the symptoms of inattention. "Here, the reason working-memory training may transfer to tests of fluid intelligence, as well as to a reduction in ADHD-associated hyperactivity symptoms, may be because both of those complex behaviors use some of the same brain circuits also used in performing the working-memory training tasks," Kundu says.
"Individual differences in working memory performance have been related to individual differences in numerous real world skills such as reading comprehension, performance on standardized tests, and much more," she adds. "I would not expect the same sorts of transfer effects that have been seen with working-memory training to happen if an individual practiced a task that used a minimally overlapping network, such as, for example, shooting three-pointers which presumably uses different brain areas like primary and secondary motor cortex and the cerebellum."
Jaeggi says that it is important to understand that cognitive abilities are not as unchangeable as some might think. "Even though there is certainly a hereditary component to mental abilities, that does not mean that there are not also components that are malleable and respond to experience and practice," she says. "Whereas we try to strengthen participants' working memory skills in our research, there are other routes that are possible as well, such as for example physical or musical training, meditation, nutrition, or even sleep."
Despite all the promising research, Jaeggi says, researchers still need to understand many aspects of this work, such as "individual differences that influence training and transfer effects, the question of how long the effects last, and whether and how the effects translate into more real-world settings and ultimately, academic achievement."
The symposium "The effects of working memory training on brain and behavior" takes place on April 15, 2013, at the 20th CNS annual meeting. More than 1,500 scientists are attending the meeting in San Francisco, CA, from April 13 to April 16, 2013.
###
Follow the meeting on Twitter: @CogNeuroNews #CNS2013
CNS is committed to the development of mind and brain research aimed at investigating the psychological, computational, and neuroscientific bases of cognition. Since its founding in 1994, the Society has been dedicated to bringing its 2,000 members worldwide the latest research to facilitate public, professional, and scientific discourse.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Google isn’t the only company working on mapping out the entire world with satellite imagery and detailed information about every nook and cranny in the universe. Two companies are teaming up to create publishable information on your site or news article using detailed satellite imagery and advanced publishing tools. Skybox, a company that has raised $91 million?to launch its own satellites into outer space to capture detailed imagery of our streets and buildings, is working with MapBox, an OpenStreetMap contributor, on some pretty sweet analysis and publishing tools. Two Skybox satellites will be launched this summer, so the tools are coming at the perfect time. One of the examples of analyzing all of the images that Skybox captures, is a “change detection” system that focuses on one area and builds a playlist of photos that you can go through to detect changes in the area. Why would something like this be useful? Well, say you’re a company that has a fleet of ships and wants to know when they dock and leave. This tool could help track that: Additionally, MapBox provides tools that allow anyone to annotate imagery. In the example above, you could easily add notes to each coming and going ship that you’ve detected, with important context that will help you go back in time to make sense of all of the imagery you’ve collected: When I spoke with MapBox’s founder, Eric Gundersen, about the project, he pointed out that what you can do with maps is very limited right now, which is what makes this partnership important: You can’t annotate images, you can’t zoom in, can’t interact on your tablet. This is our first experiment of “how do you package up information along with data,” that would usually be a PDF. As Gundersen pointed out, the information that the tools above allow you to surface and track would normally be passed around in a huge Word document or PDF, which is a pretty rough and manual process for people who?are analyzing thousands of images a day. MapBox, which is fully bootstrapped, is working on some other really neat tools on their own, which should be available in the coming weeks. Think Google Map Maker, but easier to use and more available to the community that is already participating on the OpenStreetMap project.
Today 
Inzen Studio, a small game startup in Singapore has just released an ambitious project called Game Show Warriors. The launch kicks off with the release of an iOS game called Amazing Studly Strikes, but the studio has quietly released the first two episodes of a Web comic, and episode three just dropped to accompany the release of the mobile game. The game app will also include the Web comic, according to Inzen’s co-founder, Gerald Tock. Inzen was started in October last year, and is made of six developers, with the founders and writers in Singapore, and relies on some development work from China. Its Web comic was created by artists in Uruguay. The comic and its first game center on a character they created, G-man Studly. The game appears to be a tapping frenzy, with waves of enemies attacking G-man Studly from different corners of the screen, requiring you to tap on them furiously as your character scales a skyscraper. Tock said the team is hoping to make the rest of its project happen. It has enough material for another “larger” game and four mini games to be produced under the Game Show Warriors banner. It plans to wait for the response to the first episode to decide whether to continue, however. Besides having people download and play their games, Inzen is hoping that the investment into the online manga will get fans making derivative works such as fan fiction, videos or cosplaying as the characters. Inzen is angel-funded in the “low six figures”, said Tock. The five founding developers in Singapore are graduates from the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab. Prior to creating this project, some of them produced apps that enjoyed some success on the mobile scene. Dark Dot was a shooter they produced in 2011 that climbed to the top of the action charts in 48 countries including China, the US and Singapore, and was the top free iOS app in several Southeast Asian countries. Check out the trailer for Amazing Studly Strikes here:
Five years ago from their native city of Barcelona, Maria Alegre and her husband Pepe Agell used to watch old Stanford Technology Ventures Program videos from entrepreneurs sharing their founding stories. Intrigued by what they heard, they picked up and moved to the Valley, where Alegre dug into mobile gaming at early developer Tapulous, which went on to be acquired by Disney. Fast forward to today, Alegre is running one of the fastest-growing mobile ad networks in Silicon Valley (one that we’ve heard from three separate sources grossed about $50 million last year). Her company Chartboost is quietly sucking in talent from an older generation of mobile ad networks and gaming studios like Google’s AdMob, DeNA’s Ngmoco and EA’s Popcap. They also picked up $19 million in funding led by storied VC firm Sequoia earlier this year. “It’s kind of crazy. This all happened in four years,” she said. “Anyone can do it. People running these companies are not super humans. They are just people like you and me.” Today Chartboost is opening its first office abroad in Europe, led by Ilja Goossens, who founded Gamundo and Virtual Fairground. The new location in Amsterdam is meant to strengthen the company’s relationships with the biggest game developers across the continent. Europe is having something of a Renaissance in mobile gaming right now with players like Finland’s Supercell (which made $104 million in profit with just 100 people last quarter), Berlin’s Wooga and London’s King. While other newer mobile ad networks were less focused, Chartboost wedged itself into the gaming world where it built an early platform for developers to trade advertising inventory. Because games are the biggest category for apps in terms of time spent on iOS and Android, it was the ideal place to build a focused business. Chartboost earns revenue through excess inventory, which can be sold in an exchange. Chartboost now has 16,000 games in its network and 8 billion ad impressions per month and has grown 30 percent since January. Instead of the old banner ads, which had poor clickthrough rates, Chartboost instead focused on creating interstitials that looked and felt like they belonged in a game. At first, it wasn’t easy, however. Alegre said that when she and her co-founder Sean Fannan were starting out, they did 30 phone pitches to potential investors in a week. In late 2011, they picked up a small round from
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham is a father figure to countless startup he’s helped accelerate, but had never taken a board of directors seat until now. Today he announced he’s accepted board seat with Watsi, a site that lets people donate money to pay the medical bills of needy people. Watsi came out of this season’s Winter 2013 Y Combinator class and is the first non-profit it’s ever backed. More specifically, Watsi hosts profiles of people in dire need of medical care, but who can’t afford it. Donors can browse the profiles and donate as little as $5 to help someone get well. 100% of donations go to the sick, and Watsi funds its operations and even pays credit card processing fees on donations out of its own pocket. We named Watsi one of the top seven startups from the last YC Demo Day. Today, Graham tweeted: For the first time I agreed to be on a board of directors: @watsi's.— Paul Graham (@paulg) April 19, 2013 We’ve reached out to Graham for comment about why he accepted the position.?But he had already been showing the startup some love. After discovering the startup on Hacker News and meeting the team he invited them to be the first ever YC-backed non-profite. When the company launched, Graham wrote a blog post exclaiming “After about 30 seconds of looking at the site, I realized I was looking at one of the more revolutionary things I’d seen the Internet used for. Technology can now put a face on need. The people who need help around the world are individuals, not news photos, and when you see them as individuals it’s hard to ignore them.” He concluded, “I’ve never been so excited about anything we’ve funded.” Then after the Boston Marathon bombings he tweeted: When terrible things happen to people I can't help, I go to watsi.org and help people I can.— Paul Graham (@paulg) April 15, 2013 Beyond a few advising investing roles with companies like 280 North, he’s known to devote himself full to Y Combinator. He could help Watsi navigate the balancing act between being a startup designed for rapid growth, and being a non-profit with a mission for social good.
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Public release date: 15-Apr-2013
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