Science Simplified!

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 16, 2013 at 6:34am

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-explodin...;
For Scientists, an Exploding World of Pseudo-Academia
The scientists who were recruited to appear at a conference called Entomology-2013 thought they had been selected to make a presentation to the leading professional association of scientists who study insects.
But they found out the hard way that they were wrong. The prestigious, academically sanctioned conference they had in mind has a slightly different name: Entomology 2013 (without the hyphen). The one they had signed up for featured speakers who were recruited by e-mail, not vetted by leading academics. Those who agreed to appear were later charged a hefty fee for the privilege, and pretty much anyone who paid got a spot on the podium that could be used to pad a résumé.

“I think we were duped,” one of the scientists wrote in an e-mail to the Entomological Society.

Those scientists had stumbled into a parallel world of pseudo-academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them. Many of the journals and meetings have names that are nearly identical to those of established, well-known publications and events.

Steven Goodman, a dean and professor of medicine at Stanford and the editor of the journal Clinical Trials, which has its own imitators, called this phenomenon “the dark side of open access,” the movement to make scholarly publications freely available.

The number of these journals and conferences has exploded in recent years as scientific publishing has shifted from a traditional business model for professional societies and organizations built almost entirely on subscription revenues to open access, which relies on authors or their backers to pay for the publication of papers online, where anyone can read them.

Open access got its start about a decade ago and quickly won widespread acclaim with the advent of well-regarded, peer-reviewed journals like those published by the Public Library of Science, known as PLoS. Such articles were listed in databases like PubMed, which is maintained by the National Library of Medicine, and selected for their quality.

My take on this: I have seen several common people gaining 'some partial knowledge' from the internet and actually arguing with scientists about science! Even I don't  do that with my well qualified colleagues! Wikipedia is one such thing which doesn't give full proof  information on science. Anybody can write anything on the site. I came across people giving references of Wikipedia with regard to science. Internet is confusing people too. Everybody is an expert here! Who can people believe here? Who is a 'real scientist'?

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 16, 2013 at 5:23am

http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/saying-it-with-science/a...
Saying it with Science

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 16, 2013 at 5:04am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 14, 2013 at 7:08am

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2013/04/12/secrets.bacterial.slime...
Secrets of bacterial slime revealed
Newcastle University scientists have revealed the mechanism that causes a slime to form, making bacteria hard to shift and resistant to antibiotics. When under threat, some bacteria can shield themselves in a slimy protective layer, known as a biofilm. It is made up of communities of bacteria held together to protect themselves from attack.

Biofilms cause dental plaque and sinusitis; in healthcare, biofilms can lead to life threatening and difficult to treat infections, particularly on medical implants such as catheters, heart valves, artificial hips and even breast implants. They also they coat the outside of ships and boats polluting the water.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 10, 2013 at 5:25am

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9977464/Scientists-...
Scientists should be celebrities, says Prof Brian Cox
It means he can no longer visit his favourite pub incognito, but Professor Brian Cox has argued scientists should be celebrities as it gets people interested in the subject.

The particle physicist and television presenter said he hoped for a return to the way of the 19th century, when British scientists such as Michael Faraday and Humphry Davy were “celebrities hanging out with the romantic poets.”

It was a time when attending science lectures was a popular pursuit and “ideas were seen as exciting,” he said.

Reflecting on the renown that means he can no longer visit the Clapham High Street pub he loves in south London for fear of being ambushed by fans, he said: "Why wouldn't you want academics to be celebrities?... Of course I want science to be part of popular culture like that again.

“It's the way you get people interested in scientific ideas."

Prof Cox, who has recently returned to lecturing at Manchester University, where he teaches quantum physics and relativity, denied that his students were star struck by him however.

He told the Sunday Times News Review: “Maybe in the first lecture that I give in September they'll behave differently when they first come in, but within minutes they're criticising the size of your writing or whatever."

While he did not tend to listen to his critics, he said, “sometimes they make you aware of the clichés you've created or any laziness that's coming into what you do, so for that reason they can be good.”

Prof Cox, who played the keyboard in a hard rock band called Dare before joining the better known pop group D:Ream, said he had learned his lesson about critics then.

“Our first album was criticised for not being heavy enough, so we followed it up with one that was heavier but basically fairly s***,” he said of Dare.

“It was exactly the wrong thing to do and I've always remembered that.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 10, 2013 at 5:05am

Thank you, Georgescu, for posting this information!

Comment by Georgescu Dan on April 9, 2013 at 3:54pm

Scientists 'read dreams' using brain scans

Scientists have found a way to "read" dreams, a study suggests.

Researchers in Japan used MRI scans to reveal the images that people were seeing as they entered into an early stage of sleep.

Writing in the journal Science, they reported that they could do this with 60% accuracy.

The team now wants to see if brain activity can be used to decipher other aspects of dreaming, such as the emotions experienced during sleep.

Professor Yukiyasu Kamitani, from the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, in Kyoto, said: "I had a strong belief that dream decoding should be possible at least for particular aspects of dreaming... I was not very surprised by the results, but excited."

Brain activity correlated with the images that people saw in their dreams

Brain wave

People have been trying to understand dreams since ancient Egyptian times, but the researchers who have carried out this study have found a more direct way to tap into our nighttime visions.

The team used MRI scans to monitor three people as they slept.

Just as the volunteers started to fall asleep inside the scanners, they were woken up and asked to recount what they had seen.

Each image mentioned, from bronze statues to keys and ice picks, was noted, no matter how surreal.

This was repeated more than 200 times for each participant.

The researchers used the results to build a database, where they grouped together objects into similar visual categories. For example, hotel, house and building were grouped together as "structures".

The scientists then scanned the volunteers again, but this time, while they were awake and looking at images on a computer screen.

With this, they were able to see the specific patterns of brain activity that correlated with the visual imagery.

Dream machines?

During the next round of sleep tests, by monitoring the brain scans the researchers could tell what the volunteers were seeing in their dreams. They were able to assess which broad category the images were in with 60% accuracy.

"We were able to reveal dream content from brain activity during sleep, which was consistent with the subjects' verbal reports," explained Professor Kamitani.

The researchers now want to look at deeper sleep, where the most vivid dreams are thought to occur, as well as see whether brain scans can help them to reveal the emotions, smells, colours and actions that people experience as they sleep.

Dr Mark Stokes, a cognitive neuroscientist from the University of Oxford, said it was an "exciting" piece of research that brought us closer to the concept of dream-reading machines.

"It's obviously a long way off, but there is no reason why not in principle. The difficult thing is to work out the systematic mapping between the brain activity and the phenomena," he explained.

However, he added that a single dream-reading system would not work for everyone.

"All of this would have to be done within individual subjects. So you would never be able build a general classifier that could read anybody's dreams. They will all be idiosyncratic to the individual, so the brain activity will never be general across subjects," he said.

"You would never be able to build something that could read other peoples thoughts without them knowing about it, for example."

Sursa: bbc.co.uk

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 6, 2013 at 5:53am

Crime drama CSI, which airs on KHQA-CBS.
One of that show's saying is, "Science doesn't lie." - Very True!

Comment by Georgescu Dan on April 5, 2013 at 8:27am

Official mind reading is possible

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 5, 2013 at 6:23am

http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/27-science-fictions-that-became-scie...
27 Science Fictions That Became Science Facts In 2012

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