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Don't Trust the Applause

2013-06-18T23:30:00Z

The next time you hear extended applause for a performance you didn't think was that great, don't feel like a snob. A new study reveals that audience response has more to do with the people in the seats than those up on stage.

Applause is a bit like a pandemic, according to previous research. It begins with a few individuals and then catches on with more and more people until everyone is "infected." And as the applause dies down, the pandemic disappears. But researchers didn't fully understand the dynamics of what happens in the audience.

Enter Richard Mann, a mathematician at Uppsala University in Sweden. He and colleagues filmed groups of 13 to 20 students at the University of Leeds who were clapping after a number of different oral presentations by undergraduate and postgraduate students. Then the team took the videos back to the lab and analyzed them.

Applause, it turns out, is a bit like peer pressure. Individuals were more likely to start clapping if a larger percentage of the audience had already started, Mann's group reports online today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. If 50% of the audience was clapping, for example, individuals were 10 times more likely to start clapping than if 5% of the audience was clapping. People stop clapping for the same reason.

Mann and colleagues made a couple of other interesting observations. People decided to start or stop clapping not based on what they saw, but rather on what they heard. You don't have to witness the people clapping to become infected, Mann says; you just have to hear them.

Even more surprising, the applause for a bad presentation could be just as long as applause for a good one. "You should be careful about interpreting how good a talk is depending on how long the applause was," Mann says. Random interactions in the audience can result in very different lengths of applause regardless of the quality of the talk.

Other studies have shown that high-risk actions like booing can depend on a tipping point: A certain number of people have to start doing it before the momentum picks up and the rate at which people join in increases. There was no similar threshold with applause, Mann says. Even though individuals were more likely to clap when they heard others doing so, there was no minimum number of people clapping that suddenly caused a huge surge in participants.

Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University, applauds the study. "It's an interesting way of measuring a kind of human dynamic process that takes place over a short window of time," he says. Kleinberg also notes that applause is a unique social behavior to study because people are immediately aware of what everyone else around them is doing. So remember that the next time you put your hands together.

Arctic Birds Have Wild Rhythms

2013-06-18T23:15:00Z

Life high above the Arctic Circle gets kind of trippy in summer. For months on end, it never becomes totally dark. The sun stops setting altogether for a while. Humans get a little weird—and so do birds. A new study examines the activity patterns of four birds that migrate to northern Alaska and finds that there's no single way they cope with 24-hour light. Some rest every night; some are active all the time. The patterns even vary within species and can change over time—apparently depending on whether the bird is caring for eggs.

Animals have internal clocks, but they have to be synchronized by external cues like sunlight. Researchers have found a total absence of daily rhythms in some animals that live in the Arctic year-round. It seemed like the ability to keep a daily schedule might have disappeared through evolution. But nobody knew what happened to migratory animals that go only to the far north in summer.

Behavioral ecologist Bart Kempenaers works most of the year at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, where the sun sets every night like it's supposed to. Since 2003, he's been doing fieldwork at 71°N in Barrow, Alaska. The long days and nights had an impact on his team. "We noticed in ourselves that our timing was becoming strange after a while," he says. By the end of the field season, the researchers were eating dinner at midnight or later. And they had no problem staying up all night to catch birds; the scientists just didn't seem to get that tired.

But how do the birds themselves react? Kempenaers and his colleagues picked four species that all spend their winters in tropical or temperate zones and breed in the same environment, the tundra at a research station near Barrow, littered with antennas, electric cables, and debris. "All of the logistics are really good to do this type of work, but the environment itself is a little bit ugly. But the birds don't care and there are lots and lots of them," Kempenaers says.

To track the birds' activity patterns, the researchers caught 142 of the animals by walking around on the tundra and tossing nets over them—the birds aren't afraid of humans—and glued a radio transmitter to each, the size of a small bean. Receivers constantly scanned and recorded the strength of each bird's signal; if it remained the same from minute to minute, the bird wasn't moving.

One of the four species was a songbird, the Lapland longspur (Calcarius lapponicus), included because songbirds' circadian systems have been studied a lot. It stuck to a regular schedule, a few hours of rest every night between midnight and 4 a.m. The other three were spindly-legged shorebirds with different mating systems. The researchers thought that might mean different activity patterns, and they were right. At the beginning of the breeding season, none of the shorebirds had regular schedules. But things changed when the eggs were laid.

The male red phalarope (Phalaropus fulicarius) and female pectoral sandpiper (Calidris melanotos) are the egg-sitting parents in their respective species—and both had a rest period at night. Although "night" might seem like an irrelevant concept in the Arctic summer, it does get colder and dimmer when the sun is low, around midnight. The opposite sex, on the other hand—the female red phalarope and male pectoral sandpiper—were gallivanting about at all hours, probably looking for new mates.

With semipalmated sandpipers (Calidris pusilla), both parents sit on the eggs. And they did something totally unexpected. While they have eggs, the male and female both show regular activity patterns, with a few hours of rest in a row. But the patterns are in non-24-hour cycles, and they're out of sync. So if the male takes his daily rest an hour later every day, the female might be active a couple of hours earlier every day. "Nobody knew that this existed," Kempenaers says. He and his colleagues speculate that the different patterns come about as a kind of social negotiation over who's going to be active when—because it would be tough if one parent is always stuck foraging at night. Puddles and ponds can freeze, and it probably gets hard for the birds to find the invertebrates that they eat.

All of this suggests that circadian clocks can be cued by social roles and that the rhythms can be much more complicated than scientists thought, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. "People seem to think about daily activity patterns as something that's more or less fixed in a species," Kempenaers says. "What we show in this paper is it's much more flexible."

The idea that animals can have different circadian rhythms based on their social role is "amazing," says Qing-Jun Meng, a circadian biologist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. He says that scientists in his field are starting to realize that lab experiments don't say much about how animals' internal clocks work in the real world; last year, for example, researchers reported that fruit flies in their natural environment have a third active period each day, in addition to the two that were known from the lab.

"It suggests, overall, that these systems are much more [flexible] than we thought," says John Lesku, a comparative sleep physiologist at La Trobe University, Melbourne. "And that there's much more diversity than we thought." And he agrees with Meng that this shows the value of studying animals in their natural environment. "If you took any of those birds and put them in a box, they're not going to do this."

ScienceShot: Spider Dies From Sex

2013-06-18T23:01:00Z

For the male dark fishing spider, the price of love is death. New research shows that the male Dolomedes tenebrosus (right) expires just after the height of passion, despite no visible assault by his partner. Scientists collected the common U.S. arachnids (see image) in Nebraska parks and did a little matchmaking. In 25 observed matings, after the male stuffed his sperm into the female's body using his antennalike pedipalp, he immediately went limp and his legs curled underneath him, researchers report online today in Biology Letters. By counting the pulse rate in the spiders' abdomens, researchers measured the heartbeat of motionless males and confirmed that they do indeed die. As if death weren't sacrifice enough, the scientists found that lovemaking also disfigures the male. In most spiders, part of the male's pedipalp swells to deliver sperm before shrinking to normal size. In D. tenebrosus, the pedipalp remains enormously enlarged and presumably useless even after the deed is done. Evolutionary theory predicts male monogamy—such as that shown by the dark fishing spider—when females are larger than males. Smaller animals are more likely to survive to mating age than big ones, the thinking goes, making larger females scarcer than smaller males. And that means males must settle for just one inamorata. True to theory, the female dark fishing spider, whose outstretched legs span a human's palm, outweighs her man 14-to-1.

See more ScienceShots.

NASA Asks for Help Finding Asteroids and Capturing One

2013-06-18T22:20:00Z

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Today at their headquarters here, NASA officials launched a two-pronged campaign that is mostly a call for help but is also an attempt to raise the profile of NASA's ambitious plan to snag a passing asteroid that astronauts could inspect close to home.

One component is a Grand Challenge—an element of President Barack Obama's Strategy for American Innovation—to "find all [asteroid] threats to human populations and know what to do about them," according to Jason Kessler of NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist. Because any asteroid headed toward Earth bigger than 40 meters or so in size could wipe out a city, the challenge is a tall order, said Harold Reitsema at the headquarters meeting. He is lead designer of the privately funded B612 effort to search for asteroids using a satellite. "I would like to emphasize how grand your Grand Challenge is," he said, pointing out that astronomers are finding only 1000 asteroids a year when they need to be finding 100,000 a year to develop a robust defense system.

Kessler acknowledged the problem but contended that "we do have the ability to prove that we are smarter than the dinosaurs," which were wiped out by a 10-kilometer asteroid. The president's fiscal year 2014 budget request includes $20 million to beef up NASA's existing search for "near-Earth objects," but the Grand Challenge would go further, Kessler said. There would be monetary prizes to encourage search innovations, crowdsourcing to speed up the identification of new objects, citizen science programs to draw in more amateur astronomers to the search, and a request for new ideas for how to improve and accelerate what NASA is already doing. The agency's effort to tap outside wisdom appeared to start paying off during the teleconference itself, which included questions and comments from a self-identified "mad scientist," a "geek," and a retired aerospace engineer.

]]> The Grand Challenge to accelerate the discovery of threatening asteroids dovetails with NASA's proposed Asteroid Retrieval Mission, announced in early April. Before sending a robotic spacecraft to capture a 7- to 10-meter-diameter, 500-tonne asteroid and haul it into a high orbit around the moon where astronauts could study it, NASA will have to find a very special asteroid. It would have to be the right size and shape and be in the right orbit around the sun, among many constraints. Many planetary scientists have voiced concerns that no one could find and characterize enough candidates in time to meet NASA's launch schedule for the robotic spacecraft and the crewed vehicle that would carry astronauts out to the corralled asteroid.

NASA had two responses to those concerns. In the second prong of its campaign, the agency is issuing a request for information to any and all organizations—private and public—and any individuals—academic or otherwise—anywhere in the world for ideas about how to accomplish the retrieval mission. Officials also clarified that a crewed mission to an asteroid need not launch in 2021, as has appeared on NASA timelines. That could be put off as late as 2025 and still meet President Obama's goal of sending astronauts to an asteroid by then.

The agency also plans to collect information at NASA advisory group meetings, public gatherings, preliminary reviews, and from targeted requests for information. NASA will feed what it learns into a mission concept review by around the first of the year, officials said.

China's Supercomputer Regains No. 1 Ranking

2013-06-18T22:00:00Z

China has regained the top spot on a list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. The latest version of a semiannual ranking posted yesterday shows that Tianhe-2, built by China's National University of Defense Technology, was clocked at 33.86 petaflops (a petaflop is a thousand trillion floating point operations per second). That's nearly twice as powerful as the 17.59 pflops performance of Titan, a supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which led the previous Top 500 list put out by a team of supercomputer researchers in the United States and Germany.

Tianhe-2 marks the second time a Chinese machine has been a world-beater. Tianhe-1 grabbed the top spot in November 2010 before relinquishing it 6 months later to Japan's K computer. China's second ascent demonstrates the country's sustained commitment to funding high performance computing, says Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who closely follows international supercomputing trends. "It shows no signs of changing, only increasing," Dongarra says about China's investment in supercomputing.

The United States remains the overall supercomputing leader, with 252 of the top 500 systems. But China is in second place, with 66 machines. Japan, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany fill out the top six, with 30, 29, 23, and 19 systems, respectively.

]]> Dongarra and others are concerned that the U.S. lead may be slipping, however. The Tianhe-2 machine was built using more than 3 million Intel computing "cores," essentially the brains of the machine. But Dongarra, who toured the site of the machine last month, says that most of the rest of the components were designed and built in China. "The interconnect, operating system, front-end processors, and software are mainly Chinese," Dongarra says.

The country is also hard at work developing its own high-end processor chips. If and when those are used as the brains of a top-of-the-line machine, "that will be a game-changer," Dongarra says. It would signal that China no longer needs to rely on outside technology suppliers and also that the country is ready to compete with chipmakers Intel and AMD for the commercial chip market. Still, another supercomputer technology watcher who asked not to be identified due to his close ties with many of the companies involved says he believes that China has a ways to go to close the gap in processor chip technology.

China's surge in supercomputing also comes as the path forward for the U.S. supercomputing program has become obscured. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has been considering a plan to build an exascale supercomputer, a next-generation machine 30 times more powerful than Tianhe-2. But that plan appears to be stuck in bureaucratic limbo. According to multiple sources on Capitol Hill that asked not to be identified, the plan has been bouncing back and forth between DOE and the Office of Management and Budget because of the Obama administration's concerns about its projected $3 billion price tag.

An exascale program appears to have strong backing among both Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. And House and Senate members have repeatedly asked DOE officials to give them an outline of the program so legislators can begin lining up funding. But DOE has already missed two deadlines. "We're baffled," says one Senate staffer about the administration's apparent lack of interest.

Another Hill staffer speculates that the exascale program may be a casualty of the numerous vacancies among top science officials at the DOE, who are in the best position to be its advocate. The program will also require a decade of sustained research funding to tackle the many technological challenges to building an exascale machine. "I don't see how it is doable with the present technology," says Horst Simon, a supercomputer expert at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

DOE is gearing up to build Trinity, a 30 pflops supercomputer expected to go into operation by the end of 2015. By that date, however, China's 5-year plan says that it will have built up to two 100 pflops-scale machines. China hasn't specified whether it will pursue an exascale machine as part of its next 5-year plan that begins in 2016. But as the Magic 8 ball says: "Signs Point to Yes."

NIH Announces Nine Projects to Repurpose Old Drugs

2013-06-18T21:35:00Z

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) today unveiled the winners of an unusual competition in which academic researchers teamed up with pharmaceutical companies to propose new uses for abandoned drugs. The nine projects, funded at a total of $12.7 million a year, show that NIH's 19-month-old National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) is achieving its goal of finding new ways to speed drug development, NCATS officials said.

The program, called Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules, aims to help companies work with academic researchers to repurpose drugs that passed safety testing but didn't help patients with the intended disease or were dropped for business reasons. A year ago, eight companies agreed to contribute 58 compounds and share data about them. NCATS invited researchers to submit ideas for developing the drugs, and the agency received about 160 preapplications. NCATS then linked up the investigators and companies to hone the strongest proposals and flesh out template legal agreements. The NIH then reviewed full applications, nine of which made the final cut.

]]> The projects will study seven of the 58 compounds. The research will include animal studies and some early clinical trials for eight diseases, including Duchenne muscular dystrophy, alcohol and nicotine addiction, and common disorders like Alzheimer's. "We can say with great confidence that the crowdsourcing of potential diseases these molecules might treat … did exactly what we hoped," said NCATS Director Christopher Austin during a teleconference today. NCATS has identified only some of the compounds in its announcement in order to protect the companies' intellectual property.

Don Frail, a vice president at AstraZeneca, which will contribute two compounds for three of the projects, says that the effort has already disproved skeptics who doubted that academic researchers could generate ideas that companies hadn't thought of already. "To me this creates unmatched partnerships," Frail says. "I think all of those who have participated have been quite pleased."

Austin says that NCATS now hopes to expand the pilot program, but that will depend on NIH funding—the agency's budget was cut 5% in 2013 due to sequestration and could face more trims next year.

Extra Sleep May Help Combat Diabetes

2013-06-18T18:40:00Z

Losing sleep doesn't just make us hazy and irritable. It can also lead to cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and a host of other conditions. But catching up on some shuteye may help combat these problems. According to a new study, sleep-deprived men who dozed an extra 2 to 3 hours on the weekend may reduce their risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

Researchers led by Peter Liu, an endocrinologist at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at the Harbor-University of California, Los Angeles, Medical Center, recruited 19 men in good health who, due to their workload, were poor sleepers. The subjects, age 29 on average, had been clocking about 6 hours of shuteye on weeknights for just over 5 years. However, they made the most of their weekends and slept an extra 2.3 hours a night on Friday and Saturday. When selecting the candidates for the trial, the scientists verified their reported schedules using sleep actigraphs, devices worn like wrist watches that record sleep patterns.

The men slept in the lab for three nights. Some were allowed to sleep 10 hours without interruption, catching up on the sleep that they had lost earlier in the week. Others slept 10 hours with frequent interruption, and still others slept 6 hours without interruption. All the subjects ate the same diet, so the researchers could normalize their insulin and sugar levels.

On the 4th day, the team took blood samples from the men and calculated their sensitivity to insulin, the hormone that helps regulate blood sugar; low sensitivity is a precursor to type 2 diabetes. The researchers also calculated the men's HOMA-B score, which indicates the level of insulin resistance—a condition that prevents cells from responding to the hormone making glucose. The HOMA index also measures the function of the body's β cells—the workhorses of the pancreas that store and release insulin.

Overall, men who got catch-up sleep (10 hours) showed a 31% increase in insulin sensitivity over the subjects who slept only 6 hours per night, Liu and colleagues report today at the annual meeting of The Endocrine Society in San Francisco, California. Their insulin resistance also decreased. "The good news is that by extending the hours they sleep, adult men—who over a long period of time do not get enough sleep during the working week—can still improve their insulin sensitivity," Liu said.

The study suggests a new way to combat type 2 diabetes, which is the seventh highest cause of death in the United States, says Hans Van Dongen, head of the Human Sleep and Cognition Laboratory at Washington State University, Spokane. "Liu's work provides yet another good reason to challenge the stigma associated with 'sleeping in' and recognize that catching up on sleep when given the chance may be a good thing."

Transportation Studies and Climate Change Modeling Net 2013 Blue Planet Prizes

2013-06-18T05:00:00Z

TOKYO—The Blue Planet Prize strives to highlight both basic and applied research addressing global environmental problems, and this year's laureates represent both ends of that spectrum. Climatologist Taroh Matsuno, of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, is winning for leading the development of the Earth Simulator, a supercomputer designed to run climate and environmental models, and then using it to clarify aspects of the El Niño phenomenon and processes affected by climate change.

Engineer Daniel Sperling, of the University of California, Davis, joins the roster of Blue Planet laureates for research on the impact of transportation on the environment and pioneering studies leading toward more efficient and environmentally friendly transportation systems.

The prize announcement, made by the Asahi Glass Foundation here today, also cites both men for their efforts to influence policy. Matsuno has served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and in various efforts of the World Meteorological Organization. Sperling has had a hand in shaping California's air pollution and climate change policies.

Each winner will be $527,000 richer after the October award ceremony.

Video: Cat Robot Stands and Runs, On Its Own Four Legs

2013-06-17T20:40:00Z

Credit: Biorobotics Laboratory, EPFL

The latest addition to the growing field of fast four-legged robots is no bigger than a housecat, yet it can tackle more realistic terrain than its larger predecessors. Three years in the making, "Cheetah-cub" runs about 5 kilometers per hour and can descend steps up to 20% its leg length. For its size—23 centimeters long and 1 kilogram in weight—it may be a record-holder among other robo-quadrupeds, its developers say, attaining speeds seven times its body length per second. It even has an advantage over real cats: It runs with no brain telling it what to do. As researchers report today in the The International Journal of Robotics Research, Cheetah-cub self-adjusts its movement as needed because of three springs in each leg that adapt dynamically to the irregularities in its stride. The legs are modeled after a cat's, with three segments (think foot, calve, and thigh) moved via cables that connect to motors in the body. Power is supplied through a leash attached to the robot. The researchers hope to use the robot to study the biomechanics of animal locomotion and eventually to come up with quadruped robots that can be used in search and rescue operations.

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Trying to Learn a Foreign Language? Avoid Reminders of Home

2013-06-17T19:50:00Z

Something odd happened when Shu Zhang was giving a presentation to her classmates at the Columbia Business School in New York City. Zhang, a Chinese native, spoke fluent English, yet in the middle of her talk, she glanced over at her Chinese professor and suddenly blurted out a word in Mandarin. "I meant to say a transition word like 'however,' but used the Chinese version instead," she says. "It really shocked me."

Shortly afterward, Zhang teamed up with Columbia social psychologist Michael Morris and colleagues to figure out what had happened. In a new study, they show that reminders of one's homeland can hinder the ability to speak a new language. The findings could help explain why cultural immersion is the most effective way to learn a foreign tongue and why immigrants who settle within an ethnic enclave acculturate more slowly than those who surround themselves with friends from their new country.

Previous studies have shown that cultural icons such as landmarks and celebrities act like "magnets of meaning," instantly activating a web of cultural associations in the mind and influencing our judgments and behavior, Morris says. In an earlier study, for example, he asked Chinese Americans to explain what was happening in a photograph of several fish, in which one fish swam slightly ahead of the others. Subjects first shown Chinese symbols, such as the Great Wall or a dragon, interpreted the fish as being chased. But individuals primed with American images of Marilyn Monroe or Superman, in contrast, tended to interpret the outlying fish as leading the others. This internally driven motivation is more typical of individualistic American values, some social psychologists say, whereas the more externally driven explanation of being pursued is more typical of Chinese culture.

To determine whether these cultural icons can also interfere with speaking a second language, Zhang, Morris, and their colleagues recruited male and female Chinese students who had lived in the United States for a less than a year and had them sit opposite a computer monitor that displayed the face of either a Chinese or Caucasian male called "Michael Lee." As microphones recorded their speech, the volunteers conversed with Lee, who spoke to them in English with an American accent about campus life.

Next, the team compared the fluency of the volunteers' speech when they were talking to a Chinese versus a Caucasian face. Although participants reported a more positive experience chatting with the Chinese version of "Michael Lee," they were significantly less fluent, producing 11% fewer words per minute on average, the authors report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It's ironic" that the more comfortable volunteers were with their conversational partner, the less fluent they became, Zhang says. "That's something we did not expect."

To rule out the possibility that the volunteers were speaking more fluently to the Caucasian face on purpose, thus explaining the performance gap, Zhang and colleagues asked the participants to invent a story, such as a boy swimming in the ocean, while simultaneously being exposed to Chinese and American icons rather than faces. Seeing Chinese icons such as the Great Wall also interfered with the volunteers' English fluency, causing a 16% drop in words produced per minute. The icons also made the volunteers 85% more likely to use a literal translation of the Chinese word for an object rather than the English term, Zhang says. Rather than saying "pistachio," for example, volunteers used the Chinese version, "happy nuts."

Understanding how these subtle cultural cues affect language fluency could help employers design better job interviews, Morris says. For example, taking a Japanese job candidate out for sushi, although a well-meaning gesture, might not be the best way to help them shine.

"It's quite striking that these effects were so robust," says Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a developmental psychologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. They show that "we're exquisitely attuned to cultural context," she says, and that "even subtle cues like the ethnicity of the person we're talking to" can affect language processing. The take-home message? "If one wants to acculturate rapidly, don't move to an ethnic enclave neighborhood where you'll be surrounded by people like yourself," Morris says. Sometimes, a familiar face is the last thing you need to see.

*Correction, 10:50 a.m., 18 June: Volunteers conversed with Michael Lee, not Michael Yee, as previously reported. The name has been corrected.

How to Turn Your Cell Phone Into a Dolphin

2013-06-17T19:10:00Z

If you stand in the middle of Lausanne Cathedral in Switzerland and snap your fingers, the sound waves will project outward until they bounce off the stone walls, arches, altars, and statues of the Gothic church, and return, in a series of echoes, to your ears. From the noise, your brain might be able to infer the large size and openness of the sanctuary. But with a few microphones and a newly developed mathematical algorithm, scientists can now get more much information than that: They can determine the precise shape of the room.

The algorithm—based on the sort of echolocation that bats and dolphins use to navigate—could be incorporated into cell phone apps to determine room dimensions for architectural or design purposes, says the study's lead author, electrical engineer Ivan Dokmanic of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. It could also be used to develop more realistic echoes in video games and virtual reality simulations and to eliminate the echo from phone calls.

The study of how to model the relationship between echoes and physical surrounding is relatively new, with scientists turning to the problem within the past decade. But sorting out individual echoes from a recording is technically challenging. Dokmanic and his colleagues started with a much simpler structure than Lausanne Cathedral: a small, empty lecture room at his university. They placed four microphones at random spots in the room; the point was to make sure that their calculations worked with any configuration of mics. "People working on this problem in the past have typically used multiple sound sources and a whole lot of microphones in very constrained, precisely measured arrangements," Dokmanic says. "But we wanted to be able to use as little machinery as possible to do this."

The researchers had someone stand in the center of the room and snap their fingers or pop a balloon. Then they developed a mathematical algorithm to analyze the recordings from each microphone. Their method first eliminated echoes that had bounced off more than one wall or off small objects within the room in order to simplify the problem. The researchers then made an assumption: Every echo could be considered mathematically equivalent to a sound that emanated from a mirror image of the source. This mathematical trick gave them a new way of looking at the problem and manipulating the data that turned out to be the key to sifting through the sounds. It allowed a mathematical program to sort out which echoes came from the same walls, and then the placement and angles of the walls, giving the researchers the distances and angles between walls.

But the model still needed a real-world trial. So Dokmanic and his colleagues took the setup to Lausanne Cathedral. "The cathedral is not one of those rooms that satisfies our modeling assumptions of an empty box," he says. "It's kind of a nightmare scenario for the algorithm, with lots of small objects giving off echoes."

Even in the Gothic structure, echoes from the popping of a balloon were correctly interpreted by the algorithm, which sorted out reverberations from the main walls and determined their distances and angles from the balloon, while ignoring echoes reflected from the smaller surfaces, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For now, the algorithm is a series of equations and mathematical matrices on the researcher's computers, but integrating the calculations in other programs would open up real-world applications, Dokmanic says. Cell phone apps—requiring a few cell phones in one room—could be programmed to spit out room dimensions faster than it takes to pull out a tape measure and do it manually. The information assists designers and help sound engineers determine where to place speakers to minimize echo. And backtracking from a room shape could work, too. In a criminal investigation, sound recordings of a gunshot could be combined with known room data to find the exact position of a gunman.

"This is a very elegant method, and I don't see much room for improvement in terms of the mathematics," says electrical engineer Jason Filos of Imperial College London, who was not involved in the new work. But Tapio Lokki, a virtual acoustic researcher at Aalto University in Finland, says there's still room for new models to get more detailed information out of echoes. "They have found a few [walls] here, but what do the corners look like? What is the roughness of the surfaces? These kinds of questions are much more challenging," he says, and such information would advance the understanding and minimization of echoes. "But the field is progressing and I think in 5 years we will know much more."

Chinese Academy in Climate Change Uproar

2013-06-17T15:35:00Z

BEIJING—Every year, the National Science Library here, affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), coordinates the translation, rights, and publication of thousands of papers and books from other languages into Chinese. Usually this activity doesn't cause a stir. Last week was the exception, when CAS released a Chinese-language edition of Climate Change Reconsidered, published by the Heartland Institute, which is a libertarian think tank in Chicago, Illinois, that disseminates research arguing that human activity is not driving climate change.

Jim Lakely, Heartland's director of communications, told the conservative online news site Breitbart News: "Translating and publishing nearly 1,300 pages of peer-reviewed scientific literature from English to Chinese is no small task, and indicative of how important CAS considers Climate Change Reconsidered to the global climate change debate." (The Brietbart.com article featured a picture of a wincing Al Gore.)

CAS sees things differently. Heartland's characterization of the academy's decision to translate Climate Change Reconsidered was "strongly misleading … implying that the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) supports their views." A CAS official points out that the decision to translate Climate Change Reconsidered was made by the National Science Library. In his preface to the translated edition, Zhang Zhiqiang, the library's deputy director, stated that the project was undertaken "to help Chinese researchers understand different points, opinions and positions in debates on climate change."

Heartland's spin has forced CAS to be more assertive. Before a release ceremony for the translation at the science library on 15 June, the CAS official says, the academy's headquarters told Zhang to make explicit in his remarks at the ceremony that CAS does not endorse Climate Change Reconsidered's findings. Heartland has since issued a statement acknowledging that the translation does not amount to an endorsement.

*Clarification, 2:20 p.m., 18 June: The decision to translate Climate Change Reconsidered was made by the National Science Library, not by Zhang Zhiqiang, the library's deputy director.

Magnet's Mississippi Journey Delayed by 1 Week

2013-06-14T22:00:00Z

As we report in this week's issue of Science, a physics experiment known as Muon g-2 is getting a new start by moving from Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. Physicists and engineers had planned to begin moving the experiment's delicate storage ring by truck and barge this weekend, but the move has been delayed by 1 week due to inclement weather in New York.

The Brookhaven area experienced heavy rain and strong winds yesterday and this morning, forcing the scientists and their collaborators at Emmert International, a heavy haul transportation company, to halt their work for 2 days. The weather "wouldn't allow them to do the work they needed to do to get [the ring] ready to go," forcing them to push back the departure date from Sunday, 16 June, to Saturday, 22 June, Peter Genzer, a Brookhaven spokesperson, tells ScienceInsider.

]]> Now, the 15-meter storage ring will make its way across the Brookhaven campus next Saturday, travel by truck down the William Floyd Parkway overnight on Sunday, and arrive at the Smith Point Marina on Long Island's southern shore in the wee hours of Monday, 24 June 24. From there, it will be loaded onto a waiting barge and undertake a 5000-kilometer journey down the Eastern Seaboard, around Florida, across the Gulf of Mexico, and up the Mississippi River to Illinois. It will arrive at Fermilab 4 to 6 weeks after it leaves New York.

This isn't the first time that the weather has interfered with Muon g-2's best laid plans. The ring was originally supposed to set sail from Long Island's northern shore, but the port the team planned to use was damaged by Hurricane Sandy last fall. With many months to spare, the team rerouted the ring to the island's southern shore.

Muon g-2 is designed to precisely measure the muon's magnetic moment in order to see if the result agrees with the standard model's prediction. If it doesn't—as the experiment's first run at Brookhaven suggested—it could be a sign of new physics. Read more about Muon g-2's move here, and track its journey here.

Turkish Protests Roil Academia

2013-06-14T21:45:00Z

Turkish academics are hoping for a peaceful resolution to the protest movement that has gripped their country. After weeks of disrupted final exams and televised threats leveled at two universities, the first official meeting on 14 June between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and protest leaders may spell an end to the violent clashes.

The drama began on 28 May, when environmental activists staged a sit-in at Gezi Park, one of the last expanses of trees in Istanbul. Their stated goal was to block the planned demolition of the park to make room for a new shopping mall. As the days passed, the protest took on a festival-like atmosphere, with university students playing music and grilling meat. But after police cleared the park with batons and tear gas on 31 May, Turkey convulsed in violent protests in many cities. The violence has caused five confirmed deaths and thousands of injuries.

]]> Some Turkish academics have used the conflict as a natural laboratory. A team from Istanbul Bilgi University surveyed 3000 protestors in person, sharing their findings immediately on the Internet. Contrary to government claims that the protests have been fomented by political opponents or even foreign governments to destabilize Turkey, only 7% of protestors identified themselves with any political organization. Instead, they found a young population—60% under 30—that named government corruption and political repression as their main grievances. Another survey, led by a private social science institute in Istanbul, used the protests as a lens for examining the demography of dissent in the country. Not surprisingly, dissatisfaction with the conservative government was correlated with youth, level of education, and political liberalism.

The protests were gathering steam just as Turkish universities began administering final exams. "The public transportation was being cut, and there were security concerns, so the students were having difficulty coming to school," a Turkish scientist at Koç University in Istanbul writes to ScienceInsider in an e-mail. (He asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals for communicating with the press.) On 2 June, university president Umran İnan sent an e-mail to all faculty and students, advising them that given the circumstances, students unable to attend their exams could reschedule. The next evening, Erdoğan announced on national television that Koç University was encouraging students to join the protests. "He read the email word by word and added that he will be fighting with the university from now on," says the Koç scientist. In another televised announcement, Turkish sources tell ScienceInsider, Erdoğan took aim at another Istanbul-based university, Sabancı University, stating that the government only "allows" faculty and students there to use the state-owned land.

Just before the 14 June meeting with protest leaders, Erdoğan announced that the fate of Gezi Park would be left to the courts and a democratic referendum. During the meeting, according to Turkish media, he issued a "final warning" for activists to vacate the park; protesters responded that they would stay put until the park is officially protected.Even if the protestors disband, some Turkish academics aren't optimistic about the future. "Fear, corruption, and unethical behavior have become the new normal here," says a Turkish molecular biology postdoc who requested anonymity because his research is government-funded.

Protesters to Government: 'Save Spanish Science'

2013-06-14T19:35:00Z

Spanish researchers arrived at a closed gate at the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness in Madrid this afternoon, where they had wanted to deliver a clear message to their government: Save Spanish science. Their march was one of 19 protests in cities across Spain against recent cuts in research budgets and delays in allocating government money. Protesters carried a 10-point wish list, signed by 45,000 supporters, that includes increasing national spending for research to 2% of the gross domestic product by 2016, improving opportunities for young researchers, and creating an independent funding agency.

The demonstrators wanted to deliver their petition at the ministry, which is responsible for science; when reporters weren't allowed to accompany them inside, they taped it to the gate instead.

*Correction, 2:10 p.m., 18 June: The protesters' wish list includes increasing national spending, not just public spending, for research. This has been corrected.

ScienceShot: Sunflowers Do the Math

2013-06-14T18:05:00Z

The spiraling shapes in cauliflower, artichoke, and sunflower florets (above) share a remarkable feature: The numbers of clockwise and counterclockwise spirals are consecutive Fibonacci numbers—the sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and so on, so that each number is the sum of the last two. What's more, those spirals pack florets as tight as can be, maximizing their ability to gather sunlight for the plant. But how do plants like sunflowers create such perfect floret arrangements, and what does it have to do with Fibonacci numbers? A plant hormone called auxin, which spurs the growth of leaves, flowers, and other plant organs, is the key: Florets grow where auxin flows. Using a mathematical model that describes how auxin and certain proteins interact to transport each other around inside plants, researchers could predict where the hormone would accumulate. Simulations of that model reproduced patterns exactly matching real "Fibonacci spirals" in sunflowers, the team reports this month in Physical Review Letters. Based on their results, the researchers suggest that such patterns might be more universal in nature than previously thought, so keep an eye out: Fibonacci numbers might be spiraling in every direction.

See more ScienceShots.

Unmasking 'Invisible' Drug Trials

2013-06-13T22:30:00Z

Publish your data, or else we will—that's the stark warning to drug companies in a new proposal released today. Peter Doshi (shown right), a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and his colleagues are fed up that only about half of all clinical trials are published. They want to change that, by convincing researchers and journals to print data that have been publicly released through other means, such as litigation and Freedom of Information Act requests, but, practically speaking, are sitting dormant in the filing cabinets or computers of individual scientists.

The unusual proposal is called RIAT, for Restoring Invisible and Abandoned Trials. It was published today in BMJ and also endorsed by PLOS Medicine. Doshi, who studies comparative effectiveness research, came up with the idea when his colleague, Swaroop Vedula, was analyzing reporting biases involving the drug gabapentin. Gabapentin's maker Pfizer had been sued for the way in which they marketed the drug for unapproved indications. During litigation, Pfizer had released thousands of pages involving gabapentin trials, and Vedula was poring through them. (One of the authors of the RIAT paper, Kay Dickersin, served as an expert witness against Pfizer in gabapentin litigation.) Pfizer had published only 12 of its 20 trials in gabapentin. But Doshi's center at Hopkins had the clinical study reports detailing the results of the other eight.

At the time, "it just hits me," Doshi says. "Why are we still referring to these as unpublished trials? Why aren't we publishing them ourselves?"

]]> And so RIAT was born. Doshi can't say how much other unpublished drug data has been disseminated outside the pharmaceutical companies, but he knows it's substantial. An effort by the European Medicines Agency to share clinical trials data upon request has led to the release of 1.9 million pages, although it's since been curtailed by two lawsuits. The Hopkins group alone has 178,000 pages of data on drugs including paroxetine (the antidepressant Paxil), quetiapine (the antipsychotic Seroquel), and oseltamivir (the influenza drug Tamiflu), in addition to gabapentin. "We are hoping that others in a similar situation … are holding on to public data," Doshi says.

In their BMJ paper, he and his colleagues set forth a series of steps that researchers can follow to get the data out in the public domain. First, they need to confirm that the company hasn't already published it, or that if it is published the descriptions are misleading. In those cases, researchers should notify the company and give it 30 days to respond. If the company agrees to publish the work itself, it's given a year to do so. If that doesn't happen—or if the researchers are brushed off or get no response—they should contact a RIAT-friendly journal about publishing the work themselves.

The plan's success depends on journal participation, and Doshi is hoping that more will sign up. Its authors acknowledge that it's an unorthodox way to think about publishing. "Some people may think that publications based on clinical study reports with which the authors have no connection is equivalent to intellectual property theft, but you cannot steal what is already in the public domain," they write. That said, the authors can't definitively say if there are any legal issues that might stymie publication, even if the documents are public.

In an accompanying editorial, editors from PLOS Medicine and BMJ call the effort a "bold remedy," and "another step on the road towards a complete and unbiased account of the effectiveness and safety of medical interventions."

Finding Less Risky Ways to Make Medical Isotopes

2013-06-13T22:10:00Z

Is nuclear medicine a cover for countries intent on acquiring nuclear weapons? For years, that question has clouded efforts to expand production of medical radioisotopes, many of which are made in nuclear reactors that run on highly enriched uranium (HEU)—the fissile material in a bomb—or use HEU as targets for generating radioisotopes. A report released today by AAAS, the publisher of ScienceInsider, highlights a growing range of alternative methods of radioisotope production that would make it harder for would-be proliferators to lay hands on fissile material.

The safer methods could help defuse tensions surrounding nations with nuclear ambitions, analysts say. Iran, for instance, has been engaged in a decadelong standoff with the United States and its allies over its nuclear program and has cited the need to produce medical isotopes and power as key justifications for its efforts. One confidence-building measure might be for Iran to explore medical isotope production that avoids using or producing fissile material. In this respect, if U.S. State Department negotiators "can sell the idea of Iran participating in advanced nuclear technologies [that steer clear of fissile material], then maybe you've got something," says Mark Jansson, special projects director at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C. In laying out the alternatives, the report's authors, he says, "have done a fantastic job."

Radioisotopes are widely used in medical imaging and for irradiating certain kinds of tumors. They were long seen as a dividend of nuclear technology and were an important reason that the world's nuclear powers in the 1950s and 1960s promoted the construction of research reactors around the world. Medical isotopes can also be produced in cyclotrons or spallation neutron sources, for example, but dedicated facilities were prohibitively expensive—until the wide embrace of a technology called positron emission (PE) scanning in the 1980s. High demand for the short-lived medical isotopes used in PE tomography scanning has driven down the cost of hospital-based ion accelerators. As a result, "accelerator technology is far less expensive and more capable than in the past," notes the report, authored by Derek Updegraff and Seth A. Hoedl of AAAS's Center for Science, Technology, and Security Policy.

Their report focuses on the world's most widely used medical isotope: technetium-99m (Tc-99m), which is used in about 80% of all nuclear medicine procedures: some 30 million procedures a year. Tc-99m is popular in nuclear medicine because it is readily incorporated into a variety of chemical compounds that can concentrate the radioisotope in various tissue types for imaging. Hospitals that use Tc-99m purchase its parent radioisotope, molybdenum-99 (Mo-99), which is a decay product of uranium-235. The main way that Mo-99 is now produced is to irradiate uranium targets in a research reactor. It doesn't have to be that way: The AAAS report notes that Mo-99 can be created by a photonuclear reaction on Mo-100, or Mo-99 can be skipped entirely by producing Tc-99m directly by bombarding Mo-100 with protons. The latter approach is now being tested by a cyclotron maker in Canada, the report notes. "The proliferation risk with accelerators is dramatically lower," Updegraff says.

Dogs Provide Insight Into Rare Genetic Disease

2013-06-13T21:40:00Z

A rare genetic disease may be going to the dogs. About six in 100,000 babies are born with centronuclear myopathy, which weakens skeletal muscles so severely that children have trouble eating and breathing and often die before age 18. Now, by discovering a very similar condition in canines, researchers have a means to diagnose the disease, unravel its molecular intricacies, and target new therapies.

The story began when Jocelyn Laporte, a geneticist at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Strasbourg, France, uncovered the genetic roots of an odd form of centronuclear myopathy that showed up in a Turkish family. Three children, two of them fraternal twins, were born normal. Then, at the age of 3-and-a-half, they grew progressively and rapidly ill. (Most forms of the illness do not come on so suddenly.) The twins died by the age of 9. Their younger brother recently reached the same age but is very ill. Investigators traced the problem to a mutation in a gene called BIN1, which makes a protein that helps shape the muscle so that it can respond to nerve signals that initiate muscle contraction.

To find out how mutations in this gene could lead to such dire consequences, other researchers tried to genetically engineer mice models. But deleting the BIN1 gene failed to recreate the disease in mice, so the researchers had to look elsewhere.

Enter the dogs.

Laporte's team joined with geneticist and veterinarian Laurent Tiret, at the Alfort School of Veterinary Medicine in Paris, to tap a network of vets in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and France. The idea was to track down and analyze dogs that had spontaneously acquired a similar condition. Because of their longer lifespans and larger size, the canines could model how the disease progresses and might respond to new therapies. Using veterinary records and muscle biopsies, the researchers found five dogs with features that mimicked human symptoms. The animals first showed problems at the age of 6 months, collapsing after exercise due to muscle weakness, for example. Biopsies of their muscle tissue also appeared similar to those of afflicted children.

Gene sequencing confirmed that the animals bore an analogous DNA mutation to the one seen in humans, which removes a large chunk of the BIN1 gene, known as exon 11. The finding of dogs with a similar defect that developed similar symptoms was key to confirming that the BIN1 is, indeed, the culprit in the human disease, Laporte says.

The team then tackled the question of how the BIN1 mutation causes such devastation. Using genomics tools, studies in cells, and analyses of biopsies, the researchers showed that the problem hovers around the formation of balloonlike structures called T-tubules deep in the muscle fibers. They are part of a muscle structure called a triad that helps convert electrical stimuli from nerve cells into mechanical muscle motion. When the T-tubules gradually become faulty, due to mutation, the muscles cannot receive the electrical stimulus to properly contract, leading to devastating symptoms. First comes muscle pain during exercise and trouble with walking, then weakness in muscles that control eye movement, and eventually problems with breathing. Using the dogs, researchers correlate d the destruction of the tubules to these kinds of symptoms, as they report this month in PLOS Genetics.

Going forward, dogs will continue to be critical to unraveling this disease, Tiret says. In addition to the Great Danes, researchers, including Laporte, have found Labrador retrievers that bear two other gene mutations that cause different forms of recessive centronuclear myopathy, one linked to chromosome 2 and the other to the X chromosome. The investigators have bred those animals into two colonies. They can be used to study the natural progression of the illnesses and also to test new treatments, such as gene therapy. In fact, those treatments are already showing promise in the dogs, improving leg strength and diaphragm function during breathing, paving the way for clinical trials in humans.

The canines get around a huge hurdle that mice, zebrafish, and other organisms present when researchers try to recapitulate human disease. Often, those smaller animals express the genetic abnormality very differently from humans, says clinical scientist and pediatric neurologist James Dowling at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who studies the myopathies and their genetic causes in both children and zebrafish. "The fact that the dog model seems to really faithfully recapitulate the clinical disease is really very telling," he says. "Something that intervenes there would have a very good chance of working in patients."

"Thanks to genomic comparison, we are understanding finally that dogs and humans are sick in the same way and can be treated the same way," Tiret says. "Dogs help us and we help them."