Scientists image nanoparticles in action

Again, not technically from the Big Ten. Actually, not from the Big Ten in any way, shape, or form, except that I wrote it and I’m from the Big Ten. But it’s still cool science and I’m too busy to put together fresh material at the moment.

So deal with it.

ROANOKE, Va. – The macroscopic effects of certain nanoparticles on human health have long been clear to the naked eye. What scientists have lacked is the ability to see the detailed movements of individual particles that give rise to those effects.

In a recently published study, scientists at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute invented a technique for imaging nanoparticle dynamics with atomic resolution as these dynamics occur in a liquid environment. The results will allow, for the first time, the imaging of nanoscale processes, such as the engulfment of nanoparticles into cells.

“We were stunned to see the large-ranged mobility in such small objects,” said Deborah Kelly, an assistant professor at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. “We now have a system to watch the behaviors of therapeutic nanoparticles at atomic resolution.”

Nanoparticles are made of many materials and come in different shapes and sizes. In the new study, Kelly and her colleagues chose to make rod-shaped gold nanoparticles the stars of their new molecular movies. These nanoparticles, roughly the size of a virus, are used to treat various forms of cancer. Once injected, they accumulate in solid tumors. Infrared radiation is then used to heat them and destroy nearby cancerous cells.

To take an up-close look at the gold nanoparticles in action, the researchers made a vacuum-tight microfluidic chamber by pressing two silicon-nitride semiconductor chips together with a 150-nanometer spacer in between. The microchips contained transparent windows so the beam from a transmission electron microscope could pass through to create an atomic-scale image.

Using the new technique, the scientists created two types of visualizations. The first included pictures of individual nanoparticles’ atomic structures at 100,000-times magnification – the highest resolution images ever taken of nanoparticles in a liquid environment.

The second visualization was a movie captured at 23,000-times magnification that revealed the movements of a group of nanoparticles reacting to an electron beam, which mimics the effects of the infrared radiation used in cancer therapies.

In the movie, the gold nanoparticles can be seen surfing nanoscale tidal waves.

“The nanoparticles behaved like grains of sand being concentrated on a beach by crashing waves,” said Kelly. “We think this behavior may be related to why the nanoparticles become concentrated in tumors. Our next experiment will be to insert a cancer cell to study the nanoparticles’ therapeutic effects on tumors.”

The team is also testing the resolution of the microfluidic system with other reagents and materials, bringing researchers one step closer to viewing live biological mechanisms in action at the highest levels of resolution possible.

The study appeared in Chemical Communications in the article “Visualizing Nanoparticle Mobility in Liquid at Atomic Resolution,” by Madeline Dukes, an applications scientist at Protochips Inc. in Raleigh, N.C.; Benjamin Jacobs, an applications scientist at Protochips; David Morgan, assistant manager of the Cryo-Transmission Electron Microscopy Facility at Indiana University Bloomington; Harshad Hegde, a computer scientist at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute; and Kelly, who is also an assistant professor of biological sciences in the College of Science at Virginia Tech.

Hacking Games in the Name of Science

In my many years and many sessions of training at the gym, I’ve seen a lot of multitasking. I’ve seen people talking on their phones instead of working out, doing many other things on their phones instead of working out, and in general just being distracted from the reason they’re supposedly there.

Some multitasking isn’t as annoying, though. It seems perfectly reasonable that low-level cardio machines are well suited for reading. I myself have been known to put some pages behind me while on an exercise bike. I see others doing the same on stair steppers and ellipticals, though I’ve never tried those particular tricks.

One thing you almost never see, however, is people reading while running on a treadmill. And why is that? Because it’s really friggen’ hard, that’s why. I have seen the feat performed a few times, but almost exclusively by people wasting their time and the treadmill’s time by walking. Running hard almost exclusively requires too much head bobbing and weaving to get a good beat on small lines of text.

But I can imagine a world where this obstacle has been overcome. With the recent release of Google glasses, many frivolous and unnecessary developments are bound to be on the horizon. And one of them just might be ReadingMate.

ReadingMate is a system recently developed at Purdue University designed to stabilize text on a screen in environments that are inherently unstable. The person in question puts on a pair of goggles equipped with LED lights shining out the fronts. An infrared sensor picks up these lights and keeps track of the motion of the person’s head. The sensor then relays the data to a software program designed to translate the information to instructions for text on a screen, which moves back and forth in order to compensate. In theory, the result is text on a screen that appears to stand still to the bobbing head of an unsteady individual.

And according to a recent study, the system works.

The study included 15 students who completed reading tasks both with and without the system, and with varying font sizes and line spacing. The task was to look at two particular lines of text embedded within a paragraph and count the number of times that the letter “f” appeared. All of the participants were more accurate, answered in less amounts of time, and didn’t simply decide the task was too difficult if they were using the ReadingMate system.

For the moment, I’m going to ignore the frivolity of desiring the ability to read while running on a treadmill; I think the world has bigger problems than solving that age-old dilemma. Instead of complaining too awfully much, there’s some interesting aspects to the software and hardware of the system that I’d like to explore.

For one, the system is more complicated than merely moving the text the same amount that a person moves their head. Your eyes already accommodate for the vibration to a certain degree; there are reflex mechanisms that tend to stabilize your head and eyes in order to maintain your gaze. After all, there are a few yoyo’s out there who I’ve seen manage to accomplish this feat without the aid of computerized hardware. The system’s algorithm takes your natural stabilization into account and moves the text slightly out of sync with the motion of the head.

I don’t know about you, but to me this sounds like a fairly fancy software programming accomplishment.

Secondly, the system makes use of hardware that most of us are already intimately familiar with – the controller of a Nintendo Wii. If you think about it, this makes good sense. A Nintendo Wii’s controller is a mass-produced mobile device that picks up infrared signals. It’s perfect.

This makes me want to mention some other ways in which modern gaming systems are being put to use by the scientific world.

First of all, there’s the immense amount of computing power out there just ready to be utilized in the form of idle gaming consoles. You’ve probably already heard of the program that donates your computer’s idle processing power to science. The same thing exists for modern gaming systems.

Beyond that, a gaming console’s hardware and software is explicitly designed to produce three-dimensional renderings of characters, surroundings, items, etc. Why not take advantage of that? One particular study modified an X-Box 360’s console chip so that instead of producing graphics, it delivers data tracking how electrical signals in the heart move around damaged cardiac cells. The system can produce analysis of this sort of data better than supercomputers or networked desktops. And not just a little better. The modified gaming system comes in five times faster and ten times cheaper.

And then there’s the most useful piece of equipment for science that has come out of the gaming world – the X-Box Kinect. In case you’re unfamiliar, this attachment sends out infrared signals and catches them bouncing back from objects within a certain range. The time it takes for those signals to return allows the console to map objects within a short range. This has all sorts of uses in science.

For example, doctors have used several of these systems set up throughout a room to monitor and track the movements of children playing. Analyzing their motions can reveal symptoms of an array of mental disorders. Another use has graduate students taking modified versions of the system down into caves to map them, or to glaciers to scan meltwater lakes that form over the summer.

Or it can be used to take a 3D scan of Newton’s desk mask.

Pretty much anything that needs to be mapped out in space, the X-Box Kinect system can do it more easily and cheaper than anything else out on the market. There might, however, be something even more useful on the horizon.

X-Box recently came out with the Kinect Fusion – a form of 3D augmented reality. And if scientists have already figured out how to use it in order to help neurosurgeons get a better idea of where tumors reside in the patients head, I can’t wait to see how it gets used in the coming years.

If You’re Thinkin’ About My Fat Cells It Does Matter if They’re Brown or White

Deep within your body, there are two forces at work. One is on the side of light and most everyone is aware of its presence. But there’s another, lesser known side to the same coin. Few people know of its existence; even scientists weren’t aware that it resided in humans until relatively recently.

It’s the dark side.

And you should embrace this dark side. It’s here to help you. Rather than shutting it out, in fact, scientists are trying to figure out how to make even more of it and keep it from shutting down in the bodies of the people of the world.

I am talking, of course, about fat. Pretty much everybody is all too aware of the white, flabby stuff that sticks out of terrible, terrible crevices of people who wear too tight of clothing. The website www.peopleofwalmart.com should be a sufficient lesson on the ills of not owning a mirror or any self-respect.

Oh yes, peopleofwalmart.com

However, there’s also a darker kind known as brown fat that serves a much different purpose. Rather than storing energy – which is, after all, the role of the regular jelly roll variety – it burns energy in order to regulate body temperature. For instance, mammals that hibernate use brown fat to keep their bodies warm during the winter months. Mice have a decent amount, which keeps them warm in cool temperatures. And it’s been known for a while that human infants also have a lot of brown fat in order to keep them nice and cozy. Because, in case you didn’t know, babies don’t shiver.

But until recently, scientists thought all of a baby’s brown fat disappeared as it grew. As it turns out, most of us have a little bit left lining our skeleton and skeletal muscles. And just like brown fat in babies and mice, our adult brown fat burns calories instead of storing them. It may come as no surprise then to learn that slender people tend to have much higher amounts of brown fat than gigantic blimp people.

A few examples of where typical deposits of brown fat reside

So what I’m naturally saying is that you should totally buy this book on how to exercise in order to ramp up your stores of brown fat! All you have to do is the right kinds of exercises and eat the right kinds of food and your body will make a ton of the calorie-burning brown blessing! If you don’t believe me, believe the book’s author, a plastic surgeon from Connecticut. Who else would know how to make and activate a complex biological componenet that continues to stump the best minds in the biomolecular fields?

Yes, I’m being facetious. As you might guess, the body is much more complicated than that, and it takes just a tad more than eating and moving in certain ways to get it to behave in a new, slightly unnatural way on a cellular level.

Insert science.

There is a lot of work being done at this very moment on how to get more brown fat in the bodies of your average person. Some studies are trying to identify molecular switches that determine whether developing fat cells become white or brown. Others are trying to identify gene regulators that can direct muscle cells early in development to differentiate into brown fat instead of muscle fiber. And while both studies have identified markers that seem to have some effect on the production of brown fat, both have only been done in mice and neither is anywhere close to developing the entire picture.

I’ve got your brown fat activation right here, Marquette, Michigan

Let’s suspend reality for a second and suppose that science could make the human body produce higher levels of brown fat. Most of the time it does little more than sit around; it only gets activated when animals go into hibernation or get really cold. How many of us would want to move to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in order to drop a few pounds?

Thus, there’s a second branch of research on brown fat dealing with how to turn on the brown fat that some of us already have. That’s where today’s featured publication comes in. Slowly but surely, researchers are identifying the molecular pathways that lead to brown fat’s energy consumption getting flipped to the “on” position.

And it’s not the Schwartz.

There are several sure signs that brown fat has started burning the midnight fat, including an increase in the breakdown of the body’s lipids, an increased uptake of circulating sugar, and an increase in the activation of a protein called UCP1. That last one, in fact, is found only in brown fat, making it a great target for molecular biologists.

All of these processes are controlled by what’s called a “second messenger.” It is within a cell’s best interests to keep most everything that is outside of itself, well, outside of itself. Even the body’s own messengers are shut out. When hormones get released, they don’t actually ever get inside of a cell. Instead, they interact with receptors on the cell’s surface and second messengers relay the signal to the proper structures within the cell.

In case you’re a visual learner

So it’s the job of these second messengers – specifically cAMP in this case – to tell the brown fat’s “batteries” (mitochondria) to start their engines and begin burning fuel. But the chain of command doesn’t end there. There’s a whole other class of molecules that regulate the cAMP called cyclic nucleotide phosphodiesterases, or PDEs for short.

I know. That’s a bunch of big, scary words. But they’re really not so bad. A phosphodiesterase is an enzyme that breaks apart phosphodiester bonds – the backbone of the helical strands of DNA and RNA.

In short, different types of PDEs destroy different types of DNA and RNA, and the cyclic nucleotide type has an appetite for the RNA of cAMP.

In shorter, PDEs destroy cAMP, which turns on brown fat.

A recent study from the University of Washington took a look at several types of PDEs to see which ones might play a role in signaling cAMP to turn on the calorie burning duties of brown fat. You could look at it as any good Italian mobster family would. If you want a person bumped off, you go to the guy who regulates the goons, a certain Don Corleone.

But if you’re smart, you won’t go straight to the horse’s mouth. Instead, you’ll get his wife Carmela to play some devil woman mind games to get him to tell the goons to snuff out your target. You’ll go to the regulator of the regulator of the killers. And coming full circle, the researchers at the University of Washington went to the regulator of the regulator of brown fat.

The study showed that no single type of PDE was responsible for getting the brown fat turned on; it requires a combination of several actors. More specifically for all you biochemists out there, it took a combination of PDE3 and PDE4 to stimulate glucose uptake in the brown fat of warm but starving mice.

No need for normal brown fat activation here

And the condition of the mice was key. If they were cold, the brown fat would be turned on anyways. Keeping them above 86 degrees Fahrenheit took away any background noise that would muddle up the results, which turned out to be interesting.

It seems that it’s not the production or presence of the cAMP regulators that is important in the activation of brown fat; those molecules seem to constantly make brown fat fairly active no matter what. It’s the PDEs that chew up all of the cAMP that keeps brown fat deactivated.

In the words of first author, Steve Kraynik, “What is most interesting about our work is that brown fat seems fairly active at all times, but it is the PDEs that keep it in a subdued state. That’s why taking out the PDEs appears to turn the brown fat on. Certain receptors cause the cells to have cAMP being made all the time, but the PDEs may be working to chew it all up.”

P.S. – You may be wondering why I’m covering the University of Washington on a Big Ten science blog. The first author of the study went to Ohio State, so I think that’s enough to count. And like a lot of research papers out there, this one was responsible for getting a graduate student a Ph.D.

Congrats, Steve!

The paper, “PDE3 and PDE4 isozyme selective inhibitors are both required for synergistic activation of brown adipose tissue,” was published in Molecular Pharmacology by Steven Kraynik, Robert Miyaoka, and Joseph Beavo of the University of Washington.

Yet Another Green Tea Health Benefit – Fighting Alzheimer’s

According to scientists everywhere – and just about every paper I’ve ever read on the topic – green tea has a nearly unlimited number of health benefits. We’re talking everything from helping people lose weight to reducing the amount of cholesterol absorbed through the bloodstream. Apparently it can even inhibit the growth of tumors, both in a Petrie dish and in live mice that have had human pancreatic cancer cells grafted into them.

The source of the power of green tea is no mystery; it doesn’t come from the yellow sun and it doesn’t come from a hammer made of neutron stars. The molecule causing all this hype is known as epigallocatechin-3-gallate.

You might know it better as EGCG.

EGCG is the most abundant type of catechin found in tea, so long as the leaves are green and not black. And even then, you might not be getting as much of it as you think. Think of all those sugary, sweet, mass produced green tea drinks. Most of them barely have any of the stuff in them at all.

But of course, that is all just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to green tea. There’s probably a whole host of other benefits that science hasn’t even gotten around to, such as the ability to come back from the dead when smoked. (And you thought Longbottom leaf was a type of tobacco.) Or the ability to slow the affects of one of the most debilitating diseases of our lifetime – Alzheimer’s disease.

One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s that isn’t apparent to the naked eye is the accumulation of amyloid plaques in the brain. These are basically clumps of insoluble protein aggregates that come about through improperly folded proteins. They wreak all kinds of havoc on the nervous system by killing off the support system of the brain. They don’t just attack the nerves that send the signals, they attack the neural cells that support and protect the entire brain.

Whether or not these plaques are the cause of Alzheimer’s or just another product of the real underlying problem, however, remains a mystery. But one thing is for sure; While the overall body of research is ambiguous, some research has suggested that if you reduce the amount of plaque in the brain, you extend the quality of life for the patient.

There are a few things that science has revealed that help the human body achieve this end goal. Vitamin D, for one, has been found to help clear the plaques. Curcumin has also been shown to do the trick. But before you run out and sunbathe naked all day or eat Indian food every day (curcumin is found in turmeric), you might want to consider green tea.

Not worth it for the Vitamin D

In a recent study from the University of Michigan, researchers determined that the little superhero EGCG is able to thwart the mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease as well. In the study, researchers found that EGCG prevents the misfolding of the specific proteins that lead to the aggregation of the plaque. What’s more, they’re most useful in preventing the build up of plaques that have metals attached to their molecular structures.

But besides this general finding, the paper went even further to determine what exactly was going on structurally at the molecular level. They discovered that EGCG binds to certain protein configurations and prevents them from building large complexes. The introduction of EGCG caused the formation of smaller chunks, which can then be more easily cleared by the body. The scientists expect that this fundamental insight on the structure-interaction-reactivity will, “undoubtedly aid in rational design and structure-based screening strategies to identify chemical tools to elucidate the contributions of multiple and/or interconnected factors in Alzheimer’s disease pathogenesis.”

In other words, it should help other scientists develop better ways to screen for the disease and come up with better ways to fight it. As for this group, their next step is to make a whole bunch of different, tiny modifications to EGCG and see which of the mutations works best on Alzheimer’s disease in fruit flies.

As for me, my next step is to start drinking more green tea.

The paper, “Insights into antiamyloidogenic properties of the green tea extract (-)-epigallocatechin-3-gallate toward metal-associated amyloid-beta species,” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better; or Can She?

I’ve often wondered whether or not the cognitive differences amongst individuals causes us all to perceive time differently. Often you’ll hear about athletes “in the zone” who say that the ball flying toward them seemed to slow down, or that the actions of the players around them became clearer. To be sure, some people naturally have faster reaction times than others. Does this perhaps indicate faster or more efficient neural pathways? And does that, in turn, cause the person to experience time more slowly on a second-to-second basis? Perhaps what seems like one second to me seems like five to the person calculating the waiter’s tip faster than I can remember my own telephone number.

Classic reaction time test

Taking this idea further, what if our own perceptions of time can be changed? Research indicates that practice and training can improve our reaction times for both simple tasks like pushing a button and complex ones like hitting a baseball. If our brains get faster, does the world around us slow down?

Having an active interest in the topic, a recent paper from the University of Illinois caught my eye. The headline proclaims that elite athletes also excel at some cognitive tasks.

This is right up my ally. My undergraduate fraternity of choice espoused the Greek motto of, “Sound mind, sound body,” and its something that I’ve always taken to heart. Of course, the title alone tells nothing of whether the research was able to tease out causation versus correlation; do elite athletes develop better cognitive skills or do people with better cognitive skills become elite athletes?

I figured I’d better investigate.

I was cruising along in the paper when I came across a rather curious claim. It read, “In the general population, a common finding is that females usually perform worse than males in reaction time (RT) measures.”

The Virtruvian Man symbolizes balance and symmetry in people

Huh.

Being the well-rounded individual that I am – and having the raging feminists for friends that I have – this matter-of-fact statement left me somewhat doubtful. With all the research coming out saying male and female brains are essentially identical, I wondered what the proof of this reaction time claim was. And then I thought, well, most of that research I’d been reading about cognitive abilities dealt mainly with differences in math and science abilities. Maybe there’s something to reaction times?

Luckily, it was a scientific paper I was reading and not just some wild un-sourced internet claim. So I went to the sources.

Sex differences in the brain explained

The first source was from a study done in 1991 that compared the continuous attention of a group of 128 typical subjects. Note that a continuous attention test requires a person to respond to a simple stimulus with a simple action at odd intervals for extended periods of time.

For example, you might be asked to sit and stare at a computer screen, and hit a button every time the letter “A” comes on the screen. Sometimes the letter shoes up a lot in a short time and sometimes it takes forever to repeat. As you might imagine, staying vigilant with your attention gets difficult after an hour.

Because this test includes hitting a button to a certain stimulus, it’s not all that hard to also get reaction time data out of such a test, which is exactly what the authors did. The only issue is that the test was on 128 children with ages ranging from 6 to 11.

Another nice little potentially relevant fact is that a person’s brain is not done developing until the ages of 11 or 12, at minimum, and more likely not until the mid-20s. It has also been well established that different people develop at different paces, and that more broadly, male and female brains develop at different paces. Might that be a tad bit of a factor when testing the cognitive abilities of children?

Graphic on the neurodevelopment in children

Okay, well, it’s still a study, so one finding of females having slower reaction times is a relevant finding, even if it does have a ton of caveats. So moving on, I went to the next article cited. This one was a study from 1996 that was a review of the literature of factors affecting performance on continuous attention tests. Scrolling down the paper, I found the part that referenced differences in reaction times based on sex. It, too, says, “…although reaction time is sometimes faster for males than females…” And this is where I ran into another issue.

It cited the exact same paper from 1991 on children as evidence.

Huh.

Now, if it were me, I would want a lot more studies and a lot more solid evidence before just ascertaining that men have a higher brain functioning in any way, shape, or form, than women. I would certainly want more evidence than a single study on 128 children, especially before making the claim in a press release.

So I decided to do a little research of my own. In exactly 13 seconds, I Googled, “sex differences cognitive reaction time,” and came up with a nice 2012 (recent!) paper in Developmental Psychology. It reads:

“Much research interest has been devoted to the study of sex difference in reaction time, and it is often reported that men have faster reaction times than do women. This effect has been found in a number of samples, ranging from university students 18-25 years of age to representative samples of middle-aged and older adults. Gilbert (1894) found the same pattern in simple reaction time in schoolchildren, although the effect was not clear when a two-way complex [four-choice] reaction time was considered. Goodenough (1935) found that, already at age 3, boys responded faster than girls. However, null findings in two studies and even the opposite pattern have also been reported. One study found that, when RT was separated into decision and movement components, females outperformed males on the former, while males outperformed females on the latter. These two effects were thought to counteract each other, so that no sex difference in the overall RT was found.”

This guy would have definitely skewed the results

Imagine that. Who would imagine that any difference in gender could just be result of men’s trigger fingers being physically slightly faster than women’s? Some smart people who wrote a couple of research papers, that’s who.

Going back, I suppose we should be fair to the Illinois paper. It is indeed often cited that men have faster reaction times than women. It’s just also cited fairly often that they don’t.

So what did the new study find? No difference in reaction times between the genders; at least for the elite athletes.

The non-athlete men still had faster reaction times the non-athlete women. But again, was that a measure of cognitive speed or physical speed? Perhaps the athletically elite women were able to develop fingers just as fast as their male counterparts.

I should also probably mention some of the other interesting results from the paper, rather than just ranting on about reaction times. For both men and women, the elite athletes scored better than their average peers on many cognitive tasks, including the ability to inhibit behavior, being able to pick up information from a glance, and managing to switch between tasks quickly. They were faster at memory tests, quicker at noticing things in their peripheral vision, and better able to detect subtle changes in a scene. In general, they were better able to accomplish tasks while ignoring confusing or irrelevant information.

Again, this goes back to the whole sound mind, sound body mantra. It is of no surprise to me that consistently focusing on training, repeating tasks, and keeping the mental discipline required to excel in any sport results in enhanced neural networks overall.

‘Nuff said.

In any event, maybe the whole study should just be thrown out because the elite athletes in questions are all volleyball players.

Elite athletes? Volleyball players?

HA!

Sleep to Remember, Not to Dream

The scientific reasons behind the need for animals to sleep have long been a mystery. Outside of, “because they feel sleepy,” it’s been a pretty tough nut to crack. But thanks in large part to the technique of optogenetics, progress is finally being made toward the nutty goodness of discovery.

Optogenetics is something that sounds like it is straight out of science fiction. Researchers use genetic therapies to introduce a new light-sensitive protein to specific neurons. Depending on the technique used, the neurons can then be turned on or off at will by the simple flash of a light. In a petrie dish, it’s pretty easy to shine a spotlight on them. Within an animal’s brain, you end up with a Frankenstein effect of fiber optic cables being strung into its cranium.

One example of such an experiment is that the quality of sleep is just as important – if not more so – than the quantity of sleep. Bringing optogenetics into play, scientists engineered mice with built-in alarm clocks triggered by flashes of light delivered to the brain. (No word yet on when this will become available to the snooze button addicts among us.) These mice were allowed to play with a new object for 30 minutes and then were put to sleep for four hours. But some of them had their sleep cycles interrupted every minute; not enough to fully wake them, but enough to disrupt their REM/deep cycles.

To understand the results, you first have to understand the behavior of mice, and not just whether or not they’re satisfied with a cookie. When mice are given a new object to explore, they take the opportunity and tend to ignore objects they are familiar with, sort of like a kid on Christmas. In the experiment, both sets of mice were given a second new toy to play with after their sleep session. Those that had restless nights spent just as much time the next morning with the old play toy as they did with a new one. By contrast, mice with uninterrupted sleep spent 70 percent of their time with the new object. This leads to the conclusion that the mice lacking full sleep cycles did not remember having played with the old toy the day before.

And just in case you’re wondering, a mouse’s sleep cycle is about 9 minutes long, whereas ours are about 90 minutes. So if you extrapolate the times, if a sleep disorder or full bladder wakes a person every 10 to 15 minutes, they won’t be able to fully incorporate new information from the previous day into their long-term memory. While this may sound extreme, there are cases of sleep apnea where this is a real problem for some people.

Besides waking animals up, the opposite has also been engineered in animals, but in this case the lowly fly. But rather than using optogentics, fruit flies have been genetically modified to sleep on command through a simple change in temperature. This was accomplished by making sodium channels in their brain responsible for sleep sensitive to temperature so that they fire at 88 degrees Fahrenheit.

In short, turn up the thermostat, get a lot of sleeping flies.

In the experiment, flies were exposed to male peers that had been engineered to have a female scent. It’s the scientific equivalent of Bugs Bunny in drag. Initially, the uninitiated flies tried to mate with them, predictably to no avail. After the “training,” some of the flies were sent to live in cages with 90 of their peers. Living in this environment completely saturated their minds, pushing out the “training” they had received. After being socially stimulated, they soon forgot not to try to mate with the sexified males.

But not if they got to sleep first. If the temperature was turned up and they were forced to sleep before being caged, the fact that their male buddies were churning out female pheromones stayed in their memories.

In another study with fruit flies, a group of them was immersed in rich, social environments beginning at birth while some of their brothers and sisters were kept socially isolated in dark, quiet, boring quarters. The flies that were constantly stimulated required twice as much sleep as their peers – a finding indicating the added stimulus required more sleep to form lasting memories. That finding was solidified by the fact that the extra sleep disappeared when mutant flies in the same stimulating environment were deprived of their vision and hearing. What’s more, those long-sleepers had higher levels of dopamine in their brains, a molecule with critical roles in memory formation.

In fact, some studies have revealed a time “window” available to animals to transition short-term memories to more permanent locations. If you don’t sleep within that time frame, the ability to form long-term memories quickly evaporates. In humans, this window appears to be 12 hours. Test subjects allowed to nap within 12 hours of learning new skills – both physical and mental – kept those memories better than those who weren’t.

All of these experiments and more point to the idea that sleep gives our brains the chance to replay events from the previous day and put the pieces into their places in long-term storage. It allows for the pruning of unneeded synaptic connections, keeping only those that are useful and needed, paring them down to well-formed networks.

And now, a new study from the University of Chicago is adding another piece to the sleep puzzle. According to their results, it seems that sleep is also a necessary component of solidifying memories competing for the same space in your noggin.

Starling birds were played two songs recorded from their peers and tested on their ability to repeat what they’d heard. A few hours later, those same birds were then taught to mimic an additional two songs.

Hopefully none of them were Party in the U.S.A., or else they’re screwed. That damn song pushes all other thoughts out of a normally well-functioning brain, especially the goat version.

It’s sort of like when you’re at a bar and forced to try to remember two different girls’ phone numbers – a terrible situation, I know. The chances of the numbers getting jumbled in your head leading to the dialing of the local laundromat the next day increases exponentially due to the competing information.

As with the blondes’ digits, the starlings had trouble remembering both sets of songs when tested on them at a later time. If they were allowed to sleep before the test, however, they showed increases in performance on both sets of songs. This suggests that sleep consolidation enhances their memory and overcomes the competing information’s interference. Even when the birds were given yet more interference by being taught another set of songs the following morning, they were still able to retain the information from before their sleep session.

“The study demonstrates that sleep restores performance and makes learning robust against interference encountered after sleep,” said Howard Nusbaum, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, and one of the authors of the paper. “This process is critical to the formation and stability of long-term memories.”

You know what this means, right? If you’re cramming for several finals in different subjects, you should take a nap between switching textbooks. And if you’re cramming several telephone numbers in your head, hit the sack before they get permanently jumbled up in your head.

But don’t take a nap in the bar, the chances of waking up to sharpie-induced profanity on your face is way too great.

The paper, “Sleep consolidation of interfering auditory memories in starlings,” was published in Psychological Science by Nusbaum, Timothy Brawn, graduate researcher in psychology at the University of Chicago, and Daniel Margoliash, professor of psychology, organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago.

Finding Frogstar World B More Likely Than Previously Thought

For some reason that continues to elude me, the general public always loves a good space story. Or, at least, the mass media seems to think they do. And seeing as how the media can easily keep track of which of their stories are viewed the most times, I tend to trust their analytics.

Classic shot of Tatooine with its binary star system

Whether it be a newly discovered planet that orbits a binary star system like Anakin Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine, or the millionth artist’s rendition of what a cosmic meltdown might or might not look like, it seems people just can’t get enough of the great beyond. I suppose it shouldn’t be that surprising. After all, people have always gazed up at the stars and wondered what was out there. It has only been recently, however, that enormous telescopes have allowed us to actually find out.

But of all the senseless attention-grabbing headlines out there, the most sensationalist has to be the discovery of every new planet orbiting a star that is not our own. There are countless numbers of exoplanets out there, and even if we can determine that they’re close enough to their star to maintain liquid water, there’s no way we can tell whether or not it has the potential for life.

Pointless artist rendition of astronomical phenomenon. Who knows that it looks like really?

So what’s the big fuss?

What’s more interesting than the planets themselves, I think, are the methods by which they are detected. It takes quite the trick of mathematics to be able to deduce the existence of a tiny planet orbiting a comparatively giant star a mind-boggling distance away from our own eyes.

As it is, there are several ways in which we detect new planets. The first would be the same way in which classical astronomers deduced the planets on the fringes of our own solar system – by their gravitational influences. But rather than tugging at other known planets, the sought-after exoplanets are tugging on their own stars.

Directly observing and measuring this tiny wobble is impossible at the moment.

If we were to gaze at a solar system from a birds-eye view with the planets moving around like a record player, we should be able to detect faint wobbles of the star about a central point caused by the constantly moving tugs of gravity from its planets. This is nice in theory, but for now it remains no more than an idea, much like a “Diving with the Stars” television show. Oh wait, shit, nevermind. Stars are so far away and their potential wobbles so minimal (unlike Kristy Alley’s, zing!) that current techniques aren’t sensitive enough to measure the movements.

Observing the wobble using Doppler shift, however, is completely possible.

What we can do, however, is measure such a star’s Doppler shift. If we were to look at that same solar system from its edge, the star’s wobble would be moving away from us, then parallel to us, and then towards us, depending on the point of its wobble. If that seems confusing, imagine watching a kid on a merry-go-round. If you stay in the same spot, the kid will be moving towards you or away from you at different times, depending on where he is on the ride. When moving toward us, its light would be detected slightly bluer. When moving away, it would be shifted red.

HAHAHAHA!

You’re already familiar with this idea, but with sound waves instead of light waves. As a douchebag in a muffler-less Camry with a spoiler comes racing toward you, the sound his POS makes gets higher in pitch. Then, after he crawls past you at the speed of smell, the sound gets lower in pitch.

Similarly, as a star’s wobble moves toward us, the frequency gets higher, making it bluer. As it moves away, the frequency gets lower, and thus redder. This effect is not too small for our instruments to pick up. In fact, there have been 31 confirmed exoplanets discovered with this method and 323 more potential candidates.

The next method of discovering potential planet Vulcans is called the transit method. This one again requires that we be looking at a distant solar system from its edge. Then, any planet revolving around it would pass between Earth and its planet star at regular intervals. By picking up on this minute, periodic dimming, we can deduce the presence of planets. This method has confirmed a whopping 231 exoplanets.

Third on the list is gravitational lensing. You might recall at some point having heard that space is curved due to gravity. Well, it’s true, and when light gets close to a massive object like a star, it will bend right along with the curved space around that object. This effect causes objects behind massive objects to become magnified – a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.

Now, this magnification allows researchers to measure a star’s brightness with even more precision. Those stars with planets, as it turns out, appear brighter than similar stars without planets. This is because those planets reflect light, causing tiny changes in total brightness. This form of detection has managed to bag 15 exoplanets.

Another pointless artist rendition, this time of a pulsar.

Moving on, we come to a slightly rarer form of star called a pulsar, which give off radio waves in flashes that occur more regularly and precisely than an atomic clock. Any disturbance in those radio waves indicates a planet. This form of detection – which also happens to have been around the longest – has netted 16 confirmed exoplanets.

Last but not least, there’s good old direct observation. Our telescopes have become so advanced, that for some of the closer and dimmer stars, we can blot out the glare of the parent star enough to detect planets in a distant orbit. So far, we’ve managed to find 13 using this method.

As of March 1 of this year, there have been 861 planets not orbiting Sol to have had their existence confirmed. But we’re not nearly done there. The Kepler Space Observatory was launched in March of 2009 with the express intent of discovering Earth-like exoplanets, and it’s managed to glimpse an additional 18,000 candidates.

If you’re a PhD student in the field of astronomy, there is no shortage of projects for you to work on or data to get your hands on.

Habitable zone by temperature of star

But what makes a planet potentially Earth-like? Currently, scientists point to its size, the distance from the parent star that it orbits, and what type of star is hosting its presence. In short, they’re looking for conditions for planets that would have gravity similar to Earth’s and the ability to have liquid water.

There are seven different types of stars out there, and of them, Class Ms are both the dimmest and most common. They also just happen to be our best chance at discovering a suitable planet for life. First of all, as previously mentioned, they’re the most common, so that raises the odds right there. But also, being the dimmest, they’re some of the easiest to look for planets.

A recent study by researchers at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics analyzed 3,987 M-dwarf stars and calculated the frequency of planets in their potentially habitable zone. However, they were using old models for said habitable zone; models that were, in fact, written by a Penn State professor more than 20 years ago.

Telescopes these days are incredible.

An even more recent study from that same Penn State professor updated the estimates of a habitable zone by taking into account more accurate information on how water and carbon dioxide absorb light and heat. The new numbers allow planets to be further away from their stars and maintain the possibility of liquid water.

After applying the new habitable zone calculations to the Harvard study, researchers report that of the eight M-dwarf stars within 10 light years, we should expect to find 3 Earth-like planets. Extrapolating, that indicates that 4 out of every 10 M-dwarf stars should also have one across the entire universe. In the Harvard study alone, that’s almost 1,600 potentially habitable planets.

Frogstar World A’s most notorious son.

And the closest should be no more than a mere seven light years away. Perhaps finding Vulcan or Frogstar World A isn’t that far off after all.

The paper, “A Revised Estimate of the Occurrence Rate of Terrestrial Planets in the Habitable Zones Around Kepler M-Dwarfs,” was published on the Arxiv by Ravi kumar Kopparapu, professor at the Penn State Astrobiology Research Center.