Could taking a pill make you more compassionate? by Science Today

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Could taking a pill make us more compassionate? In a new study at the University of California, Berkeley, researchers found people were more willing to distribute money equally when they were given tolcapone, an FDA-approved drug used to treat Parkinson’s disease. Co-author Dr. Andrew Kayser says that participants were given either tolcapone or a placebo and played a simple economic game in which they divided money between themselves and an anonymous partner.

“When people took the tolcapone, as compared to when they took the sugar pill, they didn’t change how much money they gave away, but they did change how equal the distributions were. So we found that when people were on tolcapone, they wanted the distribution of the money to be more equal than when they were on the sugar pill.”

Kayser says he hopes the study could potentially lead to better treatments for mental illnesses and other disabling conditions.

“Social dysfunction is reasonably widespread and we don’t have great treatments for it. And so our hope is that we can add another arrow to the quiver, so to speak.”

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Neural implants that can access all portions of the brain by Science Today

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We have hundreds of millions of neurons in our brain and thousands of those can be accessed by electrodes using microfabrication technology, which is also used to make computer chips. According to research engineer Angela Tooker of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, microfabrication technology allow neural implants to get very small and able to access all portions of the brain.

“The brain is very specialized, so different regions control different things – there’s a visual cortex that controls all things related to vision; there’s an auditory cortex; there’s sensory regions as well. And depending upon what you want to do, if you want to get to some of the regions which are very deep, you need technology that can get in there, but also want the technology that’s not limited to one electrode. So, with microfabrication technology, we can do thousands of electrodes to be able to access tens of thousands of neurons and we’re starting to be able to then get a real ability to manipulate the brain.”

In particular, researchers are working to develop the world’s first neural device to restore memory loss from disease or traumatic brain injury.

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Astronomers Describe Chaotic Dance of Pluto’s Moons by KENNETH CHANG

By KENNETH CHANG

On Nix, one of Pluto’s five moons, the sun could rise in the east and set in the north. The moons form a sort of miniature planetary system.

Published: June 3, 2015 at 08:00PM

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Acid ocean

Originally posted on Ocean Science:

The ocean is getting more acid. Some people know exactly what I am talking about, but ocean acidification is still a poorly known subject. Two aspects about ocean acidification are important, and they come in the form of questions: why the ocean is getting more acid? And how is the ocean getting more acid?

To understand this specific process happening in the ocean, we need to turn our attention to the atmosphere. That is because the substance that makes the ocean more acid is found in big quantities in the air. What we should be concerned the most is the fact that we are one of the big responsible for the production of this chemical, I am talking about the carbonic gas, carbonic dioxide or just CO₂.

All the gases present in the atmosphere, which are in direct contact with the ocean surface, goes into the water naturally, dissolving in…

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Uncovering Diversity in an Invisible Ocean World

Originally posted on Cassie Writes Science:

By Cassie Martin

Originally published at Oceans at MIT and MIT News, May 26, 2015

Plankton are vital to life on Earth — they absorb carbon dioxide, generate nearly half of the oxygen we breathe, break down waste, and are a cornerstone of the marine food chain. Now, new research indicates the diminutive creatures are not only more diverse than previously thought, but also profoundly affected by their environment.

The Tara schooner. Credit: S. Bollet/Tara Expeditions

Tara Oceans, an international consortium of researchers from MIT and elsewhere that has been exploring the world’s oceans in hopes of learning more about one of its smallest inhabitants, reported their initial findings this week in a special issue of Science. From 2009 to 2012, a small crew sailed on a 110-foot schooner collecting 35,000 samples of marine microbes and viruses from 200 locations around the globe — facing pirates, high winds…

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What drives me to be a scientist?: Impacting society through science

Originally posted on Real Science at SOEST!:

“Originally, I was driven by the type of job that I didn’t want to have, but am now driven by the potential impact that I can have while solving marine environmental problems.”

Read on to find out more about what led Stu to his career!

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Contributed by Stuart Goldberg

If you put a label on me, I am a microbial oceanographer. I study the function of microscopic bacteria and phytoplankton in marine food webs. I do so because these organisms support healthy ecosystems and fisheries by transferring energy and nutrients to organisms at higher levels of the food chain. But how did I get to studying microbes in the ocean? Well, thinking back, what drives me to be a scientist has changed over the years. Originally, I was driven by the type of job that I didn’t want to have, but am now driven by the potential impact that I…

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In Defense of space exploration

Originally posted on letstalkgeneral:

Opponents of space exploration will normally quote two main arguments against it: it’s too expensive and we have enough problems here as is. But let’s pause and think for a second here, why shouldn’t we explore space? Why shouldn’t the human race try to spread its presence across worlds?

“It’s too expensive”. Facts beg to differ. America, for instance, spends way more (and I mean a lot way more) on National Defense and Social Security programs alone than it ever did in the short history of space exploration. I’ll let the numbers do the talking:

Federal spending on General Science, Space and Technology in 2014 was only 28,908 million dollars while National defense and Social Security each took the bigger pie at 813,551 and 633,385 million dollars respectively. I’m no economist and I definitely have no right to tell Americans how to spend their money but clearly a few more…

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Can geoengineering help save coral reefs?

davidfratantoni:

I certainly hope so!

Originally posted on Science Crush:

Geoengineering of the climate may be the only way to save coral reefs from mass bleaching, according to new research.

Coral reefs are considered one of the most vulnerable ecosystems to future climate change due to rising sea surface temperatures and ocean acidification, which is caused by higher atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.

Mass coral bleaching, which can lead to coral mortality, is predicted to occur far more frequently over the coming decades, due to the stress exerted by higher seawater temperatures.

Scientists believe that, even under the most ambitious future CO2 reduction scenarios, widespread and severe coral bleaching and degradation will occur by the middle of this century.

The collaborative new research, which includes authors from the Carnegie Institution for Science, the University of Exeter, the Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of Queensland, suggest that a geoengineering technique called Solar Radiation Management (SRM) reduces the risk of…

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Chasing the ocean’s ‘missing’ heat

Originally posted on julia rosen:

Scientists say the recent pause in rising global temperatures is probably due to increased heat uptake by the world’s oceans, particularly the Pacific. However, researchers have struggled to figure out exactly where this heat has accumulated. According to a new study, the ‘missing’ heat may have escaped into the Indian Ocean through the islands of Indonesia. Learn more in my story for Nature.

According to new research led by Sang-Ki Lee, warm water from the Pacific has leaked into the Indian Ocean through the Indonesian Throughflow. (Credit: Sang-Ki Lee)

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The CWSLab workflow tool: an experiment in community code development

Originally posted on Dr Climate:

Give anyone working in the climate sciences half a chance and they’ll chew your ear off about CMIP5. It’s the largest climate modelling project ever conducted and formed the basis for much of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, so everyone has an opinion on which are the best models, the level of confidence we should attach to projections derived from the models, etc, etc. What they probably won’t tell you about is the profound impact that CMIP5 has had on climate data processing and management. In the lead up to CMIP5 (2010/11), I was working at CSIRO in a support scientist role. When I think back on that time, I refer to it as The Great Data Duplication Panic. In analysing output from CMIP3 and earlier modelling projects, scientists simply downloaded data onto their local server (or even personal computer) and did their own analysis in isolation. At the CSIRO…

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How did we come about from the primordial soup?

Originally posted on Winlund:

“..RNA did not have to invent itself from the primordial soup. Instead, even before there were cells, it seems more likely that there were interactions between amino acids and nucleotides that led to the co-creation of proteins and RNA.”

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How space wreaks havoc on the human body We already know quite a…

Originally posted on Scientiflix:

How space wreaks havoc on the human body

We already know quite a bit about the dangers of spending a long time in a zero gravity environment. And with two astronauts spending an entire year in space, we’re about to learn more.

By: Vox.

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The Ocean Impacts Us All -- Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Women in Oceanography

Adventures in Oceanography - Perspectives on Ocean Science

Bill Nye The Science Guy on Ocean Currents (oceanography (Full Clip)

Photos from David Fratantonis trip to St. Thomas

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Vintage postcard Scripps Institution of Oceanography La Jolla by hmdavid

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Photos from David Fratantonis 2014 trip to Rio!

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Islands by Andy Brown (mrbuk1)

Not much time for photography in recent weeks… This was perhaps the best of a bad lot from a recent trip to Porth Nanven in Cornwall – having set off at 5am (a good sunrise was forecast but didn’t emerge) I felt duty bound to post something!

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Scripps Institution of Oceanography by ddouangc

View from underneath the pier at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

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