A brain scan that detects autism in adults could mean much more straightforward diagnosis of the condition, scientists say.

Experts at King’s College London said the scan – tested on 40 people – identified tiny but crucial signs of autism, only detectable by computer.

Current methods of diagnosis can be lengthy and expensive.

But some experts say further research will be needed before the new technique can be widely used.

via BBC News – New brain scan to diagnose autism.

The region, which lies just behind the right ear, becomes more active when we think about other people’s misdemeanours or good works.

In an extraordinary experiment, researchers were able to use powerful magnets to disrupt this area of the brain and make people temporarily less moral.

The study highlights how our sense of right and wrong isn’t just based on upbringing, religion or philosophy – but by the biology of our brains.

Dr Liane Young, who led the study, said: ‘You think of morality as being a really high-level behaviour. To be able to apply a magnetic field to a specific brain region and change people’s moral judgements is really astonishing.’

The moral compass lies in a part of the brain called the right temporo-parietal junction. It lies near the surface of the brain, just behind the right ear.

The researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used a non-invasive technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the area of the brain.

The technique generates a magnetic field on a small part of the skull which creates weak electric currents in the brain. These currents interfere with nearby brain cells and prevent them from firing normally.

In the first experiment, 12 volunteers were exposed to the magnetic field for 25 minutes before they were given a series of ‘moral maze’ style scenarios.

For each of the 192 scenarios, they were asked to make a judgement about the character’s actions on a scale of 1 for ‘absolutely forbidden’ to 7 for ‘absolutely permissible’.

In the second experiment, the magnetic field was applied to their heads at the time they were asked to weigh up the behaviour of the characters in the scenario.

In both experiments, the magnetic field made the volunteers less moral.

Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk

The Age of Aquarius? Not quite — It’s the Anthropocene Epoch, say the scientists writing in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

And they add that the dawning of this new epoch may include the sixth largest mass extinction in Earth’s history.

Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams from the University of Leicester Department of Geology; Will Steffen, Director of the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute and Paul Crutzen the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist of Mainz University provide evidence for the scale of global change in their commentary in the American Chemical Society’s’ bi-weekly journalEnvironmental Science & Technology.

The scientists propose that, in just two centuries, humans have wrought such vast and unprecedented changes to our world that we actually might be ushering in a new geological time interval, and alter the planet for millions of years.

Zalasiewicz, Williams, Steffen and Crutzen contend that recent human activity, including stunning population growth, sprawling megacities and increased use of fossil fuels, have changed the planet to such an extent that we are entering what they call the Anthropocene (New Man) Epoch.

First proposed by Crutzen more than a decade ago, the term Anthropocene has provoked controversy. However, as more potential consequences of human activity — such as global climate change and sharp increases in plant and animal extinctions — have emerged, Crutzen’s term has gained support. Currently, the worldwide geological community is formally considering whether the Anthropocene should join the Jurassic, Cambrian and other more familiar units on the Geological Time Scale.

Think about it. First, everyone in the financial system – especially the banks and bond traders – made a lot of money using complex new financial instruments to lay bets backed by mountains of debt. Then the crisis came, and the bets turned bad, threatening to bring the global financial system with it. Governments around the advanced economies had to spend hundreds of billions of dollars propping up banks and standing behind the likes of AIG, and hundreds of billions more dealing with the global recession which the credit crunch had caused.

Now, economists and traders at some of the same financial institutions have the audacity to look shocked (shocked!) at the amount of debt which has gone onto the governments’ balance sheets. And we know they will punish them with high interest rates if the politicians don’t show how, exactly, they are going to clean up their act. Talk about poetic injustice.

Of course, no self-respecting expert would ever talk about it in such a simplistic way. They know that the institutions and investors that are now raising the alarm about sovereign debt aren’t necessarily the same ones that had to be bailed out.

The experts would also probably point out that “Western governments” and “international financial markets” can’t talk to each other, because abstract nouns can’t talk.

But I’m surprised that non-experts don’t draw the link. After all, everyone gets very upset about bankers in bailed-out institutions awarding themselves big bonuses. But the economists and bond vigilantes who complain about the scale of government borrowing could ultimately cost us all a lot more money and pain.

It was “heads I win, tails you lose” for bond markets before and during the crisis (unless, that is, you happened to hold Lehman Brothers bonds). Now the average punter would say the same thing is happening in the market for sovereign debt: or it could, if governments don’t impress the markets with their dedication to slash their deficits.

If any institution has come to embody the skewed odds for the big players it is Goldman Sachs. The New York Times has already skewered them by revealing how the investment bank had helped Greece disguise some of its debt. This week the newspaper reported how Goldmans had last summer started recommending credit default swaps to its clients, as a way of shorting sovereign debt. The article continued:

“One report said the price of swaps “may be too cheap as it may underestimate the risks to developed countries who have recently issued large amounts of debt.” “Buy C.D.S. of developed sovereigns,” the report said. Again, no countries were singled out.

Despite such advice, Goldman promptly went back to work for the Greek government. Since last September, the bank played a role in underwriting more than $33 billion of new bonds for Greece, Spain and Britain, according to data compiled by Dealogic. Those three countries are among the most heavily indebted developed nations, as measured by their debts relative to economic output.

Goldman Sachs, in a statement, said its reports merely outlined a variety of trading strategies. The bank said it saw no conflicts in its various roles.”

Here you have one arm of an institution recommending to clients, in effect, that they short debt which another arm has helped to sell.

www.bbc.co.uk

From the LA offices of Pimco, the investment fund he co-founded nearly 40 years ago, Gross is sorry for the Greeks but is zealous about separating his investor from his global citizen self. He also feels sorry for millions of Britons, whose government has to pay higher interest to lure investors after he said in January that gilts were “resting on a bed of nitroglycerine”. Despite his sympathy, while in his office, which has a view of the Pacific, the investor always prevails.

“My clients don’t pay me to feel sorry, they pay me to bring them money. I am tough but I have a soft side,” Gross says. “When I go home, I don’t watch Fox [the Murdoch-owned right-wing news channel] and I vote for Obama.”

Given the choice, he would vote for Labour in the forthcoming UK election. People need jobs and the economy needs to grow, he says. “I would vote Labour. Favouring employment versus the financial markets is a decent policy; certainly not beneficial for the currency or the gilt market but beneficial for the people,” Gross says. “Good for you, go for it – but beware of the consequences.”

The prospects of low interest rates and inflation, as well as a potential fall in sterling, could lose bond investors a lot of money. These scenarios could be considered a “default” in Gross’s view – hence his comparison of Britain’s debt to volatile nitroglycerine.

Devaluation

“The UK will try to get out of 16 tonnes of debt by reflation [low rates and high inflation] or devaluation,” Gross says. “The pound is going down and they will have to keep policy rates under 1% for a long, long time because of the housing market, and because many mortgages have a floating rate.”

Gross, however, gives credit to the government for having left the door open to continuing the gilt-purchasing programme – quantitative easing – as a way to re-ignite the financial system. Despite his ferocious criticism of British finances, he admits he holds some short-term UKbonds as they are less vulnerable to inflation.

At 65, and with $2bn (£1.3bn) to his name, Gross’s idea of a fun weekend is to have a $12 dinner with Sue, his wife of 25 years, in the local El Torito Mexican chain, and dedicating time to golf, stamps and his three children. All of them are artists, encouraged by their father, who thought his big shadow might bring them more pressure than help. Son of a steel sales executive who moved from Ohio to San Francisco when he was 10, Gross landed in bonds by chance – he was unemployed after finishing an MBA at UCLA, when his mother found an ad for a junior credit analyst at Pacific Mutual in Newport Beach and encouraged him to apply.

Forty years and some $1trillion under management later, Gross still works from 4.30am to 6pm and has a small circle of friends. He doesn’t like to socialise and hates cocktail parties. He admits he is not a “people person”, although he declares himself anything but a “stuffed-shirt Wall Street-type”.

Mild mannered and shy, he is proud that his trading room is quiet, far from Wall Street’s tension and aggression. Interested in people above all, he studied psychology at Duke University – although he never thought human behaviour would affect finance so much.

“It gave me a window of interest into ‘animal spirits’ [Keynes' phrase for naive consumer confidence],” he says. “I am not a quant [quantitative analyst], I don’t have a 150 IQ, so you behave according to where you are, and I tried to put an amount of suspicion in the modelling of anything. The model could get broken by animal behaviour.”

He did not trust the investment bank models that so hugely overvalued toxic assets – one factor leading to the credit crunch. But now the worst recession since the second world war will put an end to the financial extravagance, he says. “It was a terrible display of excess and greed. Wall Street has had it too good for decades, it’s time for Main Street to go on the ascendancy.”

Time for people

Markets will be downsized by regulation, even if governments are slow in applying new laws. “The sun is not setting on Wall Street – there will always be sunshine on financiers – but high noon is in the past. It’s time for ordinary people to benefit.”

Governments should raise taxes on bankers, who “don’t deserve all this”, Gross says, including himself. “I don’t need so much,” he says. Economies such as the UK and the US should look to making “things, rather than paper” to prosper. “The bubble was reflective of wealth as a function of house prices and derivatives – that’s not wealth. The Chinese are showing us what wealth is: transforming creative and well-trained work into exportable goods.”

Gross says speculative products, such as the instruments that investors buy to protect themselves against a sovereign default, should also be withdrawn, backing a recent call by Germany and France, whose leaders have criticised speculators who use this market to bet against a country, most recently, Greece.

But Greece, as well as Spain, Britain and Portugal, have a bigger enemy than speculators: the bond vigilantes, or activist bond investors, of whom Gross is an arch-exponent. With funds worth almost half the size of the UK economy, high-deficit European countries need Gross, and the 15,000 investors who follow his podcasts, to buy their bonds.

This year alone, Britain is due to raise £220bn to pay for bailed-out banks, rising unemployment and falling taxes. Calling Britain a “must avoid” area, and one of the highly indebted countries that Gross calls the “ring of fire”, doesn’t help governments market their bonds…

www.guardian.co.uk

The finding, reported Friday in the journal Science, suggests people trust and play fair with strangers because markets and religion — not some deep psychological instinct inherited from our dim tribal past — have helped shape our neural circuitry over the eons. The 13 researchers on Henrich’s international team spent time — and played clever psychological games — with more than 2,000 people in 15 different societies.

One researcher trekked to Bolivia to play the games with the Tsimane people who hunt and forage for food in the rain forest. Another anthropologist introduced the games to the Hadza living in small nomadic groups on the savannah in Tanzania. At the other end of the human spectrum, the researchers studied wage earners in Accra, Ghana, and Missouri, in the American Midwest.

In each of the 15 societies they recruited volunteers to play Dictator, Ultimatum and Third-Party Punishment — games widely used by researchers to gauge people’s willingness to share with strangers, and punish people who make unfair allocations. The study found that the likelihood that people “played fair” with strangers increased with the degree people were integrated into markets and participated in a world religion. Participants in the larger-scale societies were also more likely to punish players who did not play fair.

The hunter-gatherer and tribal societies studied are known for sharing among family and close acquaintances. But the researchers found fair play in monetary transactions with strangers was almost an alien concept. People in the simpler societies treated strangers less fairly, and were less likely to punish people who kept most of the money for themselves. Social scientists — and economists in particular — have long been baffled with the way people in large societies are so trusting and fair in dealings with strangers. Many academics have argued it is a throwback to a time when humans were hunter-gatherers. Henrich and his colleagues say their findings indicate playing fair with strangers is a behaviour that was favoured as the size of societies and populations grew.

Read more: www.montrealgazette.com

Statins like Zocor, Lipitor and Crestor have been around for decades. They lower your cholesterol level.

They have been around long enough that they are in the process of going generic. Zocor is simvastatin. I use it. Lipitor is atorvastatin. It will be a generic next year.

The generic name for Crestor is rosuvastatin. It is under patent through 2016, although a coalition of generic makers are now in courttrying to bring that date up.

Until now you have been told to take statins only if your cholesterol level is high, roughly 200 milligrams per deciliter of blood. It is a simple test patients take every six months. (I get my next one next week.)

Now, thanks to a study called JUPITER, the FDA is approving use of Crestoreven in normal middle-aged people, to prevent heart attacks and stroke.

JUPITER was a company-sponsored study — it stands for Justification for the Use of statins in Primary prevention: an Intervention Trial EvaluatingRosuvastatin. (Drug companies like snappy acronyms the way computer companies like words with Xs and Zs and Qs without Us in them.)

The fact this was a company-sponsored study, and the authors had many, many conflicts of interest, are troubling to critics, but the result was clear.

Eat all you want, we’ll make more.

JUPITER claimed heart attacks dropped 54%, strokes 48% and the need for operations opening up arteries by 46% among statin-eating old-timers, compared with those who didn’t take the meds. (By old-timers I mean men over 50 and women over 60.) Those are big numbers.

The FDA has been on the road to this decision for 14 months, since the results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

This is a big deal. The last major event in statin marketing came decades ago, when the makers of Lipitor got the bright idea of testing their drug at higher dosages. When they found it well-tolerated Lipitor zoomed past Zocor and became the number-one statin in the market.

But in a follow-up study Lipitor was also found to reduce heart attack risks, which led Astra-Zeneca to pony up for JUPITER.

There remain some big questions:

1. When a study shows one statin has a specific effect, does that mean all statins might have it? The drugs are similar.
2. Is the purpose of these studies to save lives or to just extend patent protection and profits? Funny how these studies come out when sales need a boost, when patent end dates are approaching.
3. What about side effects? There are side effects from statins, usually (not always) minor, but if everyone is taking them won’t we soon find people with really bad side effects?
4. What about the cost? Patients saved billions when Zocor became simvastatin. They are due to save more when Lipitor goes generic. Crestor is presently patented through 2016. Will vast new patient populations now be pushed toward a name brand drug?

Just as the statin industry has grown, so has the anti-statin industry. There have been studies that came out negative for statins. Some call the whole issue a con.

Personally I don’t think so. My dad had his first heart attack at 47, before statins were developed. When I got checked at age 45, I had a cholesterol count of 373. One of my neighbors died of a heart attack recently at 44, before he could get his cholesterol checked.

The danger is real.

But does everyone face it? The JUPITER study says yes. The FDA says yes. Which means your doctor will soon be told to say yes, too.

Are you going to say no?

www.smartplanet.com

The controlled fusion of atoms – creating conditions like those in our Sun – has long been touted as a possible revolutionary energy source.

However, there have been doubts about the use of powerful lasers for fusion energy because the “plasma” they create could interrupt the fusion.

An article in Science showed the plasma is far less of a problem than expected.

The report is based on the first experiments from the National Ignition Facility (Nif) in the US that used all 192 of its laser beams.

Along the way, the experiments smashed the record for the highest energy from a laser – by a factor of 20.

Construction of the National Ignition Facility began at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1997, and was formally completed in May 2008.

The goal, as its name implies, is to harness the power of the largest laser ever built to start “ignition” – effectively a carefully controlled thermonuclear explosion.

It is markedly different from current nuclear power, which operates through splitting atoms – fission – rather than squashing them together in fusion.

Proving that such a lab-based fusion reaction can release more energy than is required to start it – rising above the so-called breakeven point – could herald a new era in large-scale energy production.

In the approach Nif takes, called inertial confinement fusion, the target is a centimetre-scale cylinder of gold called a hohlraum.

It contains a tiny pellet of fuel made from an isotope of hydrogen called deuterium.

During 30 years of the laser fusion debate, one significant potential hurdle to the process has been the “plasma” that the lasers will create in the hohlraum.

The fear has been that the plasma, a roiling soup of charged particles, would interrupt the target’s ability to absorb the lasers’ energy and funnel it uniformly into the fuel, compressing it and causing ignition.

Siegfried Glenzer, the Nif plasma scientist, led a team to test that theory, smashing records along the way.

“We hit it with 669 kiloJoules – 20 times more than any previous laser facility,” Nif’s Siegfried Glenzer told BBC News.

That isn’t that much total energy; it’s about enough to boil a one-litre kettle twice over.

However, the beams delivered their energy in pulses lasting a little more than 10 billionths of a second.

By way of comparison, if that power could be maintained, it would boil the contents of more than 50 Olympic-sized swimming pools in a second.

Crucially, the recent experiments provided proof that the plasma did not reduce the hohlraum’s ability to absorb the incident laser light; it absorbed about 95%.

But more than that, Dr Glenzer’s team discovered that the plasma can actually be carefully manipulated to increase the uniformity of the compression.

“For the first time ever in the 50-year journey of laser fusion, these laser-plasma interactions have been shown to be less of a problem than predicted, not more,” said Mike Dunne, director of the UK’s Central Laser Facility and leader of the European laser fusion effort known as HiPER.

“I can’t overstate how dramatic a step that is,” he told BBC News. “Many people a year ago were saying the project would be dead by now.”

Adding momentum to the ignition quest, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced on Wednesday that, since the Science results were first obtained, the pulse energy record had been smashed again.

They now report an energy of one megaJoule on target – 50% higher than the amount reported in Science.

The current calculations show that about 1.2 megaJoules of energy will be enough for ignition, and currently Nif can run as high as 1.8 megaJoules.

. . .

Dr Glenzer is confident that with everything in place, ignition is on the horizon.

He added, quite simply, “It’s going to happen this year.”

There’s more at the link. All pictures courtesy of NIF.

This is really exciting news! If the scientists can, indeed, initiate a controlled (and controllable) nuclear fusion reaction, fast breeder reactors can’t be too far away, and the prospect of large quantities of relatively cheap, safe energy is a lot closer. I’ll be watching this with great interest.

via Peter  bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com

Click here to view the embedded video.

Robert Sapolsky studies the universal human ailment of stress, but his main research subjects are the wild baboons of Kenya.

We all have some measure of stress, and Robert Sapolsky explores its causes as well as its effects on our bodies (his lab was among the first to document the damage that stress can do to our hippocampus). Every year, he goes to Kenya to visit a population of wild baboons, who experience stress very similarly to humans. By measuring hormone levels and stress-related diseases in each primate, he determines their relative stress, looking for patterns in personality and social behavior that might contribute. These exercises have given Sapolskyamazing insight into all primate social behavior, including our own.

Besides being an accomplished researcher, Sapolsky has a special knack for conveying his complex work with ease and humor. He’s authored four popular books, among them Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers and The Trouble With Testosterone. He’s also a recipient of the famous MacArthur “Genius Grant” and subject of the National Geographic documentary Killer Stress.