Tech's Corner

Spending a Lot of Time on Facebook Does Not Imply Depression

7/15/2012

Over the past few years, a number of studies have proposed that a correlation exists between the amount of time a person spends on Facebook and their chances of suffering from depression. A new research now refutes these claims.

The study was carried out on university students, and covered their online habits, including surfing social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter. The work was conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USM) School of Medicine and Public Health, Science Blog reports.

The main conclusion of the investigation is that Facebook Depression is an imaginary condition. In other words, parents should not be alarmed that their children are at risk of developing depression simply because they spend too much time on the Internet.

At the same time, their length of time they spend online is not an indicator that they are prone to depression. Additional details of the study were published in the July 10 online issue of the esteemed Journal of Adolescent Health.

The study was conducted in response to a report released by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2011, which argued that prolonged exposure to Facebook and other social media websites could cause depression. The new investigation found no evidence to support these claims.

The UWM research group, led by scientists Lauren Jelenchick and Dr. Megan Moreno, selected a group of 190 students at the university, aged between 18 and 23, and then performed a series of real-time assessments of the participants' online activity.

At the same time, the team also used a validated, clinical screening method for depression on the study group. The study revealed that the students were on Facebook over half of the total time they spent online. These results were then cross-referenced with the results of the depression screening tests.

The team was unable to find any statistically significant correlation between social media use and participants' risk of developing depression.

“Our study is the first to present scientific evidence on the suggested link between social-media use and risk of depression. The findings have important implications for clinicians who may prematurely alarm parents about social-media use and depression risks,” Jelenchick explains.

“While the amount of time on Facebook is not associated with depression, we encourage parents to be active role models and teachers on safe and balanced media use for their children,” Moreno concludes.

Financial Crisis Triggered by Maniacs, Literally

7/15/2012

The financial crisis was brought on by maniacs

Most of the actors involved in the events that culminated with the 2008 global financial crisis – bankers, politicians and economists – displayed signs of maniac behavior, investigators in the United Kingdom say. The indicators were there for anyone who was looking.

The behavior these people exhibited was comparable to that of psychologically disturbed individuals, says award-winning scholar Dr. Mark Stein, from the University of Leicester School of Management.

According to the expert, there is currently no safeguard in place to ensure that a similar crisis will not happen again. His analysis lists the main causes and indicators of the crisis, as well as a description of the actions taken by those in a position of power.

Stein says that a “shared manic culture” existed in the years leading up to the 2008 economic crisis, which was not addressed by anyone. In fact, it was promoted and allowed to continue, and everyone gladly joined in, PsychCentral reports.

Those who could have done something about it entered an extremely deep denial mode, which then pushed them to engage in risky and dangerous financial practices, insuring and lending without analyzing the implications of their decisions. Details of the study appear in the journal Organization.

“Unless the manic nature of the response in the run up to 2008 is recognized, the same economic disaster could happen again,” Stein says. He lists the four main characteristics of the manic culture as denial, overactivity, triumphalism and omnipotence.

“A series of major ruptures in capitalist economies were observed and noted by those in positions of economic and political leadership in Western societies,” the investigator explains.

“These ruptures caused considerable anxiety among these leaders, but rather than heeding the lessons, they responded by manic, omnipotent and triumphant attempts to prove the superiority of their economies,” he goes on to say.

One of the manic responses to the developing crisis was the removal of regulatory safety checks within the banking system, a massive increase in credit derivative deals, and industrializing credit default swaps.

Stein has been analyzing group dynamics from a psychoanalytic perspective for many years, and he says that similar behaviors can be observed (in hindsight) before most of the world's major financial crash events.

“Witnessing the collapse of Communism, those in power in the West developed the deluded idea that capitalist economies would do best if they eschew any resemblance to those Communist economies, thereby justifying unfettered financial liberalization and the destruction of the regulatory apparatuses of capitalism,” Stein adds.

“The consequences of this manic response have been catastrophic, with the ongoing Eurozone crisis being – in many ways – a result of this,” he concludes.

Overclocking the Human Brain via DIY Kit

3/12/2012

TDS may be a side-effects-free way of bettering our brains

Startup GoFlow is planning to develop and commercialize do-it-yourself (DIY) Transcranial Direct Stimulation (TDS) kits, which could be made available for as little as $99. These devices would allow people to overclock their brains in the comfort of their own homes.

The technique relies on delivering a steady direct current to the brain, similarly to how computer CPUs are made to run faster by feeding more electricity through them. Some scientists believe that this approach may work on the human brain as well, simply because it too relies on electricity to operate.

Basically, a TDS kit would include a few electrodes, which people would attach to whatever area of their brains they want to improve. A constant, low-level current would pass through neurons, forcing them to strengthen their connections, called synapses.

At this point, the approach is mostly used to treat psychological disorders, including anxiety and depression. Additionally, some doctors employ it to address the motor disturbances that develop in patients following a stroke, Technology Reviewreports.

Many bioethicists are currently debating whether TDS should be used at all. For example, some parents have already showed their interest in using these devices to promote learning and memory formation in their children. The end goal would be to improve their academic performances.

This raises the question of whether that is fair to the other kids. TDS devices would be more accessible to the rich, which means that the divide between the proverbial 1 percent and the other 99 percent may grow even wider.

However, other scientists say that direct transcranial stimulation may be a new kind of coffee, or Adderall. The latter is a drug commonly administered to kids and teenagers suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

One advantage that TDS could have over other methods of stimulating the brain is that it has no side-effects, since it acts directly on neurons, but not through chemicals. At this point though, scientists are not recommending that people use TDS kits unsupervised, at home.

But this approach to bettering our minds is not likely to go away anytime soon. Most likely, in a few years' time, scientists will develop TDS kits that people could use at home for a wide range of applications. That world would be very interesting to see.

People Are Increasingly Skeptic of Global Warming

1/16/2012

One of the most alarming trends researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found in a new study is that the general public is becoming increasingly skeptical that global warming exists, even as the scientific community is becoming increasingly certain of its reality.

Among scientists, issues raised by skeptics have been addressed with solid arguments, and experts who at first were not convinced that climate change was occurring bowed to the data they were presented with. However, the general public is not willing to accept sound arguments.

The issue of whether or not to accept global warming as a reality has more to do with the changes each individual has to make in themselves. Finally coming to terms that climate change is real implies dealing with the fact that you are part of the problem, and therefore need to change your habits.

What Makes People Happy

1/16/2012

Happiness found to be unrelated to macroeconomic factors.

For decades, politicians and economists believed that happiness is linked with macroeconomic factors in modern societies. As this view began to change over the past few years, researchers started wondering about what actually makes people happy. A new study finally comes up with some answers.

Scientists carried out what could best be described as a statistical analysis of attitudes among US citizens. The main goal was to determine the exact factors that people perceive as increasing their own happiness. Experts were motivated by some interesting researches.

For starters, global data show that people living in countries such as Brazil, Panama and Cost Rica tended to declare themselves to be happier than their US counterparts. This puzzled experts, since these countries do not have a very strong economy.

The highest volume of data researchers had access to was collected from the General Social Survey, a study that began in 1972, and which covers about 32,000 people living in the United States. They are asked to answer a series of questionnaires covering different topics every year.

One thing that investigators learned right away is that collecting data on this topic – and later interpreting them – is a very complex task, and one that can easily lead investigators astray. As such, the team used the utmost caution in interpreting the data, Technology Review reports.

What researchers could not find for the life of them was a link between happiness and GDP, or between happiness and changes in GDP. If such a connection exists, it is even too weak to show up in statistical correlations, the team says.

Researchers Teng Guo and Lingyi Hu found that health was the most important thing determining people's happiness level. They learned that age, marital status and personal income were also very important in establishing individual happiness levels.

Overall, the study found that people who were healthy tended to be about 20 percent happier than the average. Conversely, sick people were 8.25 percent less happy than the average established in the study.

Interestingly, researchers learned that personal income played a very small role in establishing people's happiness levels. Those in the highest income bracket tended to be only about 3.5 percent happier than the study average.

The new study should provide policymakers and politicians with a new angle to look for methods of increasing happiness in society. The macroeconomic angle is obviously not working out, so maybe it's time for a new approach altogether.

Scientists: Earth Has Two Moons

12/24/2011

This is view of how Earth would look like from its second moon.

A group of scientists proposed in a new scientific paper that Earth has two moons, the familiar one we see in the sky at night, influencing our planet's tides, and another one, only as big as a very small car.

The asteroid is not always the same, the team behind the paper believes. They say that there is a space rock around Earth at all times, an object at least 3.3 feet (1 meter) in diameter. However, any given rock flies away at one point, and is replaced by another with the same attributes.

According to the proposal – published in the December 20 issue of the scientific journal Icarus – a theoretical model they developed indicates the presence of such objects in donut-shaped orbits around Earth. However, this very path is what's constantly kicking them out of sync with the planet.

The simulation shows that Earth is capable of attracting some of the asteroids that make their way through the inner solar system, as they prepare to slingshot around the Sun and make their way to the outer edges of the system yet again.

Each of the companions our planet captures stays with us for about 9 months, completing 3 of the aforementioned orbits before being finally sent on its merry way. This scenario is not at all exaggerated, astronomers say, since they admit very little attention has been given to objects orbiting Earth.

Obviously, this is not the case with the Moon, but scientists always knew deep down inside that there must be other objects making their way around the planet. The research included Paris Observatory astronomer Jeremie Vauballion.

“There are lots of asteroids in the solar system, so chances for the Earth to capture one at any time is, in a sense, not surprising,” adds the expert, who is also a coauthor of the new study. He adds that this is one of the first models to try to simulate Earth's influence on surrounding asteroids, Space reports.

One of the temporary moons the team proposes was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey, in Arizona, about 5 years ago, and was named 2006 RH120. The object was between 3 to 6 meters (10 and 20 feet) in diameter, and was most likely larger than other Earth companions before and after it.

Speaking about the smaller ones, Mikael Gravnik says that “objects of this size are too faint to be detected when being at a distance of, say, a few lunar distances from the Earth.” The expert, who is based at the University of Helsinki, is the lead author of the Icarus paper.

“When coming closer in during their orbit, they are moving too fast to be detected, because the limited amount of photons is spread over too many pixels,” he concludes.

Physicists Offer Mundane Explanations for Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos

10/15/2011

Faster-than-light neutrinos mean Einstein is wrong! At least, that’s what some popular press articles have suggested since researchers with the OPERA experiment in Italy presented evidence of neutrinos arriving 60 nanoseconds earlier than thought possible.

But scientists, quite intrigued by the anomalous results, have since been busy generating more measured responses. In the three weeks after the announcement, more than 80 explanations have been posted to the preprint server arxiv. While some suggest the possibility of new physics, such as neutrinos that aretraveling through extra dimensions or neutrinos at particular energies traveling faster than light, many offer less revolutionary explanations for the OPERA experiment.

One of the earliest objections to the faster-than-light interpretation came from an astrophysical observation. In 1987, a powerful supernova showered Earth with light and neutrinos. While neutrino detectors observed neutrinos arriving about three hours before the light, this was due to the lightweight particles getting a head start. Neutrinos, which hardly interact with matter, escaped the exploding stellar core with relative ease while photons, absorbed and re-emitted by the various elements, took longer to flee. If the effect from OPERA were as large as observed, scientists have calculated that the neutrinos should have arrived more than four years in advance of the light.

Other scientists have taken the faster-than-light results to task using the Standard Model of physics, which describes all known subatomic particles and their interactions. According to the Standard Model, neutrinos at sufficiently high energies should produce a virtual electron-positron pair through a process known at Cohen-Glashow emission. As explained in a paper by Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow and his colleagues, these emanations would have sapped energy from the faster-than-light neutrinos, causing them to slow down.

Theoretical physicist Matt Strassler also noted on his blog that the Standard Model’s properties suggest that making neutrinos go faster than light requires electrons to do the same. But if electron neutrinos moved at the speed suggested by the OPERA experiment, then electrons should also travel faster than the speed of light by at least one part in 1,000,000,000, or one billionth. Experiments have established theoretical limits that electrons remain subliminal at a precision down to more than 5 part in a thousand trillion, effectively ruling this scenario out.

Among the most recent ideas is a paper invoking Einstein’s supposedly challenged theory of relativity. The OPERA team used GPS satellites to accurately measure the 730-km distance between their detector and the CERN beam where the neutrinos were produced. Yet, according to special relativity, calculations will be slightly different when two observers are moving relative to one another.

Since the satellites were zipping around the Earth, the positions of the neutrino source and the detector changed. According to the paper, the movement would account for a 64 nanoseconds discrepancy, nearly exactly what the OPERA team observes.

Ultimately, it will take a great deal more time and scholarship before the physics community settles on the true explanation for the OPERA results. Until then, vigorous debate is likely to continue.

Forensic DNA Could Make Criminal Justice Less Fair

10/15/2011

Forensic DNA databases are a potentially powerful law enforcement tool, but may disproportionately target poor and dark-skinned wrongdoers, biotechnologically magnifying flaws in criminal justice systems.

“Forensic DNA databases are growing to mirror racial disparities in arrest practices and incarceration rates,” write sociologists Troy Duster and Peter Chow-White in an Oct. 4 Public Library of Science Medicine essay.

In the last decade, as DNA became the gold standard of forensic evidence, DNA collection by law enforcers became routine. At least 56 countries have a national DNA database. In the United States, the FBI’s database contains 5 million profiles, and DNA is also gathered at state and local levels, where a patchwork of laws govern how it’s collected and managed. Some states gather DNA from anyone arrested for a felony, or use so-called “DNA dragnets” to gather samples from anyone in geographical proximity to a crime. And samples may be kept indefinitely, even if suspects are cleared of charges.

Civil rights advocates have warned that demographically unbalanced forensic DNA data banks could “create a feedback loop.” Because samples are stored and compared against DNA collected at future crime scenes, police will be more likely to pursue crimes committed by members of overrepresented groups, while underrepresented groups can more easily evade detection.

The potential for problems expands when states permit so-called familial DNA searches, in which police who can’t find a database match to crime scene DNA can search the database for partial matches, ostensibly from the suspect’s family and relatives, who can then be targeted. It’s even possible to imaginesituations in which some races or groups become universally covered, while others remain only partially surveyed.

According to Duster and Chow-White, this represents a biotechnological aspect of the “digital divide,” a term better known from debates in the 1990s, meaning that the internet’s benefits could be unfairly distributed. It might sound strange in this context, but “DNA technology is information technology,” said Chow-White. “DNA is closely tied to our analog ideas of biology, to blood and kin. But when DNA turns into digital code, much like when our lives turn into digital code,” the consequences become social and networked.

Ironically, the overrepresentation of minorities in forensic DNA databases has occurred even as they’ve become underrepresented in medical genetics research, said Chow-White and Duster.

As for criminal justice, the solutions aren’t clear. Some people have advocated taking DNA from everyone. Others say a universal database violates Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searchesand betrays the principle of presumed innocence.

Duster and Chow-White have no prescription, but “the first and foremost step in addressing the problem is recognizing that this is an issue,” they write. “We cannot address the problem unless or until there is awareness.”

Citation: “Do Health and Forensic DNA Databases Increase Racial Disparities?” By Peter Chow-White and Troy Duster. PLoS Medicine, Vol. 8 No. 10, October 4, 2011

Humans Now Experiencing Supercharged Evolution

10/14/2011

Population growth is one of the main engines driving evolution at a faster pace than ever before

According to the conclusions of a new scientific study, it would appear that evolution in modern humans has entered into full gear. Over the past 40,000 years or so, experts show, the rate at which our species evolves has accelerated remarkably.

The new results are in direct contradiction with the conclusions of other scientific studies, which have proposed that our species has stopped evolving, or that evolution takes place at a very slow pace.

It would appear that exponential population growth and cultural shifts are the primary reasons why we evolve so fast at this point. These data were derived from an examination of data collected by an international genomics project.
The research team, which is based at the University of Wisconsin Madison (UWM), suggests that the pace of evolution has quickened even more in the last 5,000 years, while humanity was still in the Stone Age.

The rate of positive selection has increased 100 times from any other period of human evolution. “We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals,” explains UWM anthropologist John Hawks.

The expert, who was the leader of the new research, says that the new study was made possible by impressive advancements made in the science of sequencing and deciphering the basic building code of life, DNA. Genes that allow us to become more fit for survival can now be identified.

Most of the changes human beings now displays appeared in order to allow the body to improve its resistance to microorganisms, or to allow for it to process new foods, that only became available with the advent of agriculture.

“In evolutionary terms, cultures that grow slowly are at a disadvantage, but the massive growth of human populations has led to far more genetic mutations,” Hawks says of the basic of the phenomenon.

“And every mutation that is advantageous to people has a chance of being selected and driven toward fixation. What we are catching is an exceptional time,” he adds, saying that his team mostly looked for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) in the new study.

“Five thousand years is such a small sliver of time -- it's 100 to 200 generations ago. That's how long it's been since some of these genes originated, and today they are in 30 or 40 percent of people because they've had such an advantage. It's like 'invasion of the body snatchers,” Hawks comments.

The work he and his team conducted appears in a paper that was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS),Daily Galaxy reports.

Your Memories Might End Up on YouTube

10/14/2011

Your memories and dreams could soon be converted to a digital format

In a study that is bound to entice numerous moral and ethical controversies, scientists at the University of California in Berkeley (UCB) announce the development of a new technique that allows them to tap into the human brain's video feed, hijacking the signal for display on computer monitors.

According to the team, this could be used to communicate with comatose patients, enabling doctors to experience whatever the person in front of them is experiencing. In the future, it may even be possible to post videos of one's dreams on YouTube.

But this cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation will undoubtedly be used against the people as well, for torture or peering into someone's brain without their consent. This is why the work will cause so much stir.
The UCB group was able to obtain this new capability by combining computer models with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Together, these two instruments can decode and reconstruct a person's visual signal, albeit with some errors and a lot of fuzziness.

Interestingly, the method also works for moving images, in the sense that scientists can look at a live feed recorded from the brain of a test subject watching a video. The images of researchers' screens also change as the participant views different actions.

At this point, the technology is limited by the fact that it can only see videos we've already seen ourselves. However, the team plans to improve this approach by becoming capable of taping into our dreams and memories as well.

“This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery. We are opening a window into the movies in our minds,” UCB neuroscience professor Jack Gallant explains. He is also the coauthor of a new study detailing the findings, in the September 22 online issue of the journal Current Biology.

“Our natural visual experience is like watching a movie. In order for this technology to have wide applicability, we must understand how the brain processes these dynamic visual experiences,” UCB post-doctoral researcher and lead study author Shinji Nishimoto adds.

“We addressed this problem by developing a two-stage model that separately describes the underlying neural population and blood flow signals. We need to know how the brain works in naturalistic conditions. For that, we need to first understand how the brain works while we are watching movies,” he concludes.