Residents of poorer nations find greater meaning in life

Association for Psychological Science / December 18, 2013 / Social / 0
Ref:  http://www.psypost.org/2013/12/residents-of-poorer-nations-find-greater-meaning-in-life-21792

While residents of wealthy nations tend to have greater life satisfaction, new research shows that those living in poorer nations report having greater meaning in life.
These findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that meaning in life may be higher in poorer nations as a result of greater religiosity. As countries become richer, religion becomes less central to people’s lives and they lose a sense of meaning in life.

“Thus far, the wealth of nations has been almost always associated with longevity, health, happiness, or life satisfaction,” explains psychological scientist Shigehiro Oishi of the University of Virginia.
“Given that meaning in life is an important aspect of overall well-being, we wanted to look more carefully at differential patterns, correlates, and predictors for meaning in life.”
Oishi and colleague Ed Diener of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign investigated life satisfaction, meaning, and well-being by examining data from the 2007 Gallup World Poll, a large-scale survey of over 140,000 participants from 132 countries. In addition to answering a basic life satisfaction question, participants were asked: “Do you feel your life has an important purpose or meaning?” and “Is religion an important part of your daily life?”

The data revealed some unexpected trends:

“Among Americans, those who are high in life satisfaction are also high in meaning in life,” says Oishi. “But when we looked at the societal level of analysis, we found a completely different pattern of the association between meaning in life and life satisfaction.”

When looking across many countries, Oishi and Diener found that people in wealthier nations were more educated, had fewer children, and expressed more individualistic attitudes compared to those in poorer countries – all factors that were associated with higher life satisfaction but a significantly lower sense of meaning in life.

The data suggest that religiosity may play an important role: Residents of wealthier nations, where religiosity is lower, reported less meaning in life and had higher suicide rates than poorer countries.

According to the researchers, religion may provide meaning in life to the extent that it helps people to overcome personal difficulty and cope with the struggles of working to survive in poor economic conditions:  “Religion gives a system that connects daily experiences with the coherent whole and a general structure to one’s life…and plays a critical role in constructing meaning out of extreme hardship,” the researchers write.

Oishi and Diener hope to replicate these findings using more comprehensive measures of meaning and religiosity, and are interested in following countries over time to track whether economic prosperity gives rise to less religiosity and less meaning in life.

Neural prosthesis restores behavior after brain injury

Case Western Reserve University / December 29, 2013 / Mental Health / 1
Full article:  http://www.psypost.org/2013/12/neural-prosthesis-restores-behavior-after-brain-injury-21893



Scientists from Case Western Reserve University and University of Kansas Medical Center have restored behavior—in this case, the ability to reach through a narrow opening and grasp food—using a neural prosthesis in a rat model of brain injury.

Ultimately, the team hopes to develop a device that rapidly and substantially improves function after brain injury in humans. There is no such commercial treatment for the 1.5 million Americans, including soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, who suffer traumatic brain injuries (TBI), or the nearly 800,000 stroke victims who suffer weakness or paralysis in the United States, annually.

The prosthesis, called a brain-machine-brain interface, is a closed-loop microelectronic system. It records signals from one part of the brain, processes them in real time, and then bridges the injury by stimulating a second part of the brain that had lost connectivity.

Their work is published online this week in the science journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“If you use the device to couple activity from one part of the brain to another, is it possible to induce recovery from TBI? That’s the core of this investigation,” said Pedram Mohseni, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Case Western Reserve, who built the brain prosthesis.
“We found that, yes, it is possible to use a closed-loop neural prosthesis to facilitate repair of a brain injury,” he said.

The researchers tested the prosthesis in a rat model of brain injury in the laboratory of Randolph J. Nudo, professor of molecular and integrative physiology at the University of Kansas. Nudo mapped the rat’s brain and developed the model in which anterior and posterior parts of the brain that control the rat’s forelimbs are disconnected.

Atop each animal’s head, the brain-machine-brain interface is a microchip on a circuit board smaller than a quarter connected to microelectrodes implanted in the two brain regions.
The device amplifies signals, which are called neural action potentials and produced by the neurons in the anterior of the brain. An algorithm separates these signals, recorded as brain spike activity, from noise and other artifacts. With each spike detected, the microchip sends a pulse of electric current to stimulate neurons in the posterior part of the brain, artificially connecting the two brain regions.

Two weeks after the prosthesis had been implanted and run continuously, the rat models using the full closed-loop system had recovered nearly all function lost due to injury, successfully retrieving a food pellet close to 70 percent of the time, or as well as normal, uninjured rats. Rat models that received random stimuli from the device retrieved less than half the pellets and those that received no stimuli retrieved about a quarter of them.

“A question still to be answered is must the implant be left in place for life?” Mohseni said. “Or can it be removed after two months or six months, if and when new connections have been formed in the brain?”

Brain studies have shown that, during periods of growth, neurons that regularly communicate with each other develop and solidify connections.

Mohseni and Nudo said they need more systematic studies to determine what happens in the brain that leads to restoration of function. They also want to determine if there is an optimal time window after injury in which they must implant the device in order to restore function.

Replacement artificial heart keeps first patient alive

13:49 31 December 2013 by Niall Firth in NewScientist

(Image: Carmat)

 

If you stayed awake during biology in school, you might recognise the shapes at the left and top right of this image: they are models of the heart. The object at lower right, looking like a cross between a tape dispenser and a second-world-war gas mask, will be less familiar.

 

Developed by French firm Carmat, this is an artificial heart designed for people whose hearts are so weak that they can no longer pump enough blood to sustain life. It was implanted in its first human patient on 18 December 2013 at the Georges Pompidou European Hospital in Paris.

The device replaces the real heart and is meant to keep patients going while they wait for a donor: Carmat claims it can be used for up to five years. Lithium-ion batteries outside the body keep it pumping, while sensors monitor and automatically control blood flow to adapt to the patient's activity.

 

Biomaterials in the artificial heart help to prevent the body from rejecting it. It is about three times larger than the natural organ, so it fits only about 65 per cent of patients. It would fit 86 per cent of men, though, because they have larger chest cavities.

 

So far, the operation seems to have been a success: the patient is said to be awake and talking to his family, and in a statement issued to Reuters, the hospital said the device is working well.

"The artificial heart is functioning normally, automatically catering to the body's needs without any manual adjustment necessary," the surgeons said.

For you who do not accept evolution

For you who do not accept evolution (and some that do): you have a point. Claims shouldn't be accepted on authority, even scientific authority -- even your own authority. Evidence and logic is all that counts. Of course, you must recognize evidence and be trained in logic, or all is lost. For some people, alas, that is the case, and they will spend their lives as fools. For the rest, there are authors such as Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, John Maynard Smith, Darwin himself of course, and others who will at least explain what evolution is and how it works, and present a great deal of the evidence supporting it. You could peruse a few of these and then ask yourself how you really think about it. That's all I'm recommending and asking for, not some kind of faith. Indeed, just about any scientific subject, from climate warming theory to the Big Bang, that always must be your beginning.

Simon And Garfunkel – I Am A Rock Lyrics

Simon And Garfunkel – I Am A Rock Lyrics

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKY-smJ6aBQ&feature=player_detailpage

 

Translation in progress. Please wait...

A winter's day
In a deep and dark December;
I am alone,
Gazing from my window to the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

I've built walls,
A fortress deep and mighty,
That none may penetrate.
I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain.
It's laughter and it's loving I disdain.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

Don't talk of love,
But I've heard the words before;
It's sleeping in my memory.
I won't disturb the slumber of feelings that have died.
If I never loved I never would have cried.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

And a rock feels no pain;
And an island never cries.

Nothing Can't Exist!

Many of you, I am certain, have heard what would seem to be (and was for a while) the most "profound" question for philosophy and science, particularly physics, of all:  Why is there something rather than nothing?  It is also a question religious people often ask, contradictorily, as their ironic proof of the particular deity's existence.

And yet the answer is easy.  Something exists because nothing logically cannot.

I am not speaking about recent developments in quantum mechanics (QM) and virtual particles, but I should sum some things up.  QM is physically founded on the so-called Uncertainty Principle.  This principle declares that non-commutative variables of particles -- the typical example being location and momentum -- can never be simultaneously measured with no uncertainty.  If you need perfect certainty in one variable, you must sacrifice all knowledge of the other.

Another pair of non-commutative properties are time and energy.  If we measure time in shorter and shorter intervals, an uncertainty builds up in energy (or mass) as a result of the Uncertainty Principle.  This means that if we sample a reason of space over exceedingly short intervals (like a trillionth of a trillionth of a second and smaller), we will find filled with so-called "virtual particles" popping into and out of existence at all times.  Nor are they trivial, not at all.  The total mass/energy of these particles can be enormous; we are fortunate they exist, or all known physical forces (possibly excepting gravity) require them to carry them to exist, and if they didn't exist -- well, we wouldn't either.

Thus, from a QM (and experimental) point of view, nothing isn't nothing, and can't be, as long as the laws of physics are still in our otherwise empty space.  But what if we press further (assuming we can), and remove all physical laws, and perhaps even logic, from the space?  Would it then be empty.  My answer is still NO.  For example, without the First Law of Thermodynamics (the ordinary law of conservation of mass/energy), what would there be preventing not just virtual but permanent particles, or all kinds, coming into existence?  And without the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which govern order and the inexorable evolution toward disorder (entropy), what would prevent all this mass/energy from assuming the most possibly ordered form possible?  Nothing.

Add to that all the other physical laws and logical and -- is it possible?  We might find ourselves right at the very beginning of the Big Bang.  Of course, many other arrangements are possible too, so multiverses of all kinds are possible.  We may be living in an infinite reality containing an infinite number of universes, infinitely creating more all the time.  But I leave here to let the theoreticians and philosophers to seek truth, and conclude my essay with my conclusion:  nothing cannot exists, any time, anywhere.  Oh, and no deities needed at all.

Significant Science of 2013: An Explosion of Exoplanets

Posted by Tim De Chant on Mon, 30 Dec 2013 on Novanex
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/space/significant-science-of-2013-an-explosion-of-exoplanets/?preview=true

This year was a banner year for planet-hunters. Though 2013 doesn’t hold the record for number of exoplanets detected, many of them are Earth-like, meaning they have masses, compositions, and orbits that put them in the sweet spot of habitability. Astronomers have found so many that some estimate that up to 22% of sunlike stars could harbor Earth-like planets.

Leading the charge has been the Kepler space telescope, an orbiting, purpose-built, planet-seeking machine that has been spotting potential exoplanets by the hundreds.

An artist's impression of exoplanet Kepler-22b

John Timmer, writing for Ars Technica:

With 34 months of data in total, the number of planet candidates has grown to over 3,500, a rise of roughly 30 percent. Although larger planets are easier to spot since they block more light, 600 of these candidates are now Earth-sized or smaller.

Kepler operates by observing the faint dimming that occurs when a planet passes between its star and the telescope. Astronomers have focused on sunlike stars, 42,000 of which have been in Kepler’s view.

Unfortunately, Kepler suffered the debilitating loss of two of its four reaction wheels, devices which keep the craft steady. Without them, its vision isn’t nearly clear enough to keep up its planet-hunting mission, and astronomers can’t shift its gaze to different parts of the universe.

But all is not lost. Kepler may soldier on with a new mission—searching for starquakes—and the time it spent looking for exoplanets has yielded so much data that it’ll be another another few years before scientists have sifted through the backlog. Who knows? Maybe 2014 will be an even better year for exoplanet enthusiasts.

 

 

Image credit: NASA