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Tag: discovery
Is Autism Like A Magic Show That Won’t End

Is Autism Like A Magic Show That Won’t End

By Geoffrey Mohan, Los Angeles Times

The brain is a biological machine that makes predictions. But what happens when a wrench is thrown in the works, and jams up the ability to foresee the trajectory of a moving object, or what happens after a frown?

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believe such a wrench lies at the core of autism, a disorder with widely disparate symptoms that strike with varied intensity.
Social and language deficits, repetitive behavior, hypersensitivity to stimuli and other symptoms may be manifestations of an impaired ability to predict the behavior of the outside world, according to an analysis published online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

An impairment in the ability to place stimuli in context with what came before and after them leaves people with autism struggling with a seemingly capricious world that makes excruciating demands on their attention, according to the report.

“We sometimes affectionately call this the magical world theory of autism,” said MIT neuroscientist Pawan Sinha, lead author of the study. “The hallmark of a magical performance is the surprise, the unpredictability of the outcome. … Although for a brief period of time, a magic show might be pleasurable, if one is constantly immersed in that kind of a magical world, one can begin to get overwhelmed.”

Those who follow developments in the field of autism research can be forgiven if they sometimes think scientists are grasping at different parts of an elephant in a pitch-dark room. Studies often isolate the oddities of certain brain regions or genes, focus on isolated symptoms or examine niches of the disorder.

About 1 in 68 children have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The new analysis does not offer new data – it instead surveyed developments in the field and tried to unite them under one over-arching hypothesis. It is likely to draw the attention of neuroscientists in large part because it was led by Richard Held, an emeritus MIT professor who has researched the brain for a half century. (His 92nd birthday is Friday.)

“This paper is deliberately a theory-heavy paper,” said Sinha. “We wanted to take a broader look at many pieces of experimental evidence that have already been collected by many different labs and see whether there were some commonalities, some way to explain the very diverse collection of results.”

The MIT researchers believe that impaired prediction often leads to anxiety, which can lead to many of the behaviors that have come to be associated with autism spectrum disorder.
For example, many people with autism are hypersensitive to sensory stimuli, even though studies show their senses are no more acute than those of others. Some can’t wear tight clothing because they find it irritating.

The authors suggest that people on the autism spectrum don’t habituate well to outside stimuli. While typical brains “get used to” touch, sounds and sights, and can prioritize them, the autistic brain is unable to do so and is constantly aroused.

That hypersensitivity is at the heart of another attempt to unify the symptoms of autism, known at the “intense world theory.” It holds that hyper-reactive brain circuits can become autonomous and follow their own development path. This could explain many extremes in relatively narrow areas, such as near-photographic memory as well as acute sensation, emotion and attention, according to the theory outlined by Swiss researchers Kamila and Henry Markram.

The theory, however, “leaves open what is causing the intensity of the world,” said Sinha. “We are saying that the world perhaps is appearing hyper-intense because it appears unpredictable,” he said.

Under the predictive impairment hypothesis, social difficulties could stem from an inability to place behaviors in context, such as what usually comes before or after a smile, a cry or a shout.

In addition, people with autism often fill their lives with routines, and some even resort to repetitive or self-stimulating behaviors, which “almost seem to be an attempt to impose order on a seemingly chaotic world,” Sinha noted.

The report suggested several general ways to test the hypothesis, and highlighted brain regions related to prediction that also are implicated in autism, such as the cerebellum, basal ganglia and anterior cingulate cortex.

“This theory is intuitive; it makes sense,” said University of California, Los Angeles neuroscientist Dr. Carlos Portera-Cailliau, who was not involved in the analysis. “It’s very exciting that people are thinking about autism beyond experiments like I do in the lab.”

Nonetheless, the hypothesis does not address “the underlying defect in the brain” that impairs prediction, Portera-Cailliau said. “I think that’s where more work needs to be done — what are the experiments that can be done to test this theory and prove it right or wrong?”

Photo via Wikicommons

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NASA’s MAVEN Spacecraft Enters Mars Orbit

NASA’s MAVEN Spacecraft Enters Mars Orbit

Washington (AFP) — NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft began orbiting Mars on Sunday, on a mission to study how the Red Planet’s climate changed over time from warm and wet to cold and dry.

The unmanned orbiter has traveled more than 10 months and 442 million miles (711 million kilometers) to reach Mars for a first-of-its kind look at the planet’s upper atmosphere.

“Wow, what a night. You get one shot with Mars orbit insertion and MAVEN nailed it tonight,” said project manager David Mitchell.

The data from the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft aims to help scientists understand what happened to the water on Mars and the carbon dioxide in its atmosphere several billion years ago.

How Mars lost its atmosphere is one of science’s biggest mysteries. The answers could shed light on the planet’s potential to support life — even if that was just microbial life — long ago.

MAVEN’s findings are also expected to help add to knowledge of how humans could survive on a future visit to the Red Planet, perhaps as early as 2030.

“Mars is a cool place, but there is not much atmosphere,” said John Clarke of the MAVEN science team.

“It is very cold, it is well below zero. The atmosphere is about half a percent of what we are breathing,” he added.

“But we know that Mars could change and it was probably different in the past. There is a lot of evidence of flowing water on the surface from Mars’s ancient history.”

– Mission begins –

Next, MAVEN will enter a six-week phase for tests.

It will then begin a one-year mission of studying the gases in Mars’s upper atmosphere and how it interacts with the sun and solar wind.

“We are looking at early November as the official start of science,” said MAVEN principal investigator Bruce Jakosky.

Much of MAVEN’s year-long mission will be spent circling the planet 3,730 miles above the surface.

However, it will execute five deep dips to a distance of just 78 miles above the Martian landscape to get readings of the atmosphere at various levels.

NASA is the world’s most successful space agency at sending rovers and probes to Mars, and past missions have included the Viking 1 and 2 in 1975 and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2005.

The U.S. space agency’s latest robotic vehicle, Curiosity, is exploring Gale Crater and Mount Sharp, looking for interesting rocks and returning data on whether the Martian environment shows evidence of a past ability to support life.

Later this week, an Indian spacecraft, the Mars Orbiter Mission, is expected to reach Mars.

The unmanned MOM probe is set to enter Mars’s orbit in the coming days after 10 months in space, marking India’s first mission to the Red Planet.

“We are anxiously awaiting the arrival in two days of the India MOM mission and we are hoping for their success,” said Jakosky.

“We are sending them the best wishes from the entire MAVEN team for a successful orbit insertion and mission.”

AFP Photo

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San Jose State Students Report Major Discovery In Space

San Jose State Students Report Major Discovery In Space

By Katy Murphy, San Jose Mercury News

SAN JOSE, Calif. — A San Jose State undergrad grieving the loss of his mother shifted his gaze to outer space and made what could prove to be a remarkable discovery: a system of stars so dense, his professor said, astronomy has no word for it.

In only a week 21-year-old Michael Sandoval stumbled upon what he and his professor have named a hypercompact cluster, which they argue is the intensely starry remains of one galaxy that has been consumed by another.

Astrophysics professor Aaron Romanowsky said it’s astounding how quickly his student may have discovered what “some people take years and never find.”

The stellar search was a welcome diversion for Sandoval, whose mother, Holly Houser, died of cancer in October. In the last years of his mom’s life, the physics major lived at home, juggling her care with his education, sometimes rushing her to the emergency room at night and dragging himself to class the next day from Fremont.

Months later, enrolled in his first astrophysics course, he learned classmate Richard Vo had discovered an unusual stellar object — possibly the densest ever found.

His reaction was immediate: “I want to find one too.”

With free, publicly available data from the Hubble Space Telescope archive and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Sandoval set to work on his laptop, combing the universe using some of Vo’s research methods. “I didn’t want to be sitting home, feeling sorry for myself,” said Sandoval, the younger of two brothers who both took care of their mother after her diagnosis. “That’s not what she would have wanted anyway.”

Instead, he and Vo are rushing to publish their findings with Romanowsky, a temporary staff researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz before joining the San Jose State faculty in 2012.

Romanowsky was on a team of astronomers from a number of universities that was among the first to discover a dense galaxy like the one Vo found: an ultracompact dwarf galaxy. They published their findings in The Astrophysical Journal in September.

But Sandoval’s search for a similar object turned up something “weird,” Romanowsky said, unlike anything he had seen.

If a dwarf galaxy is like an apple core, Romanowsky said, what Sandoval found is like the seeds.

They are keeping the names and locations of both findings secret until they have been published.

Their discoveries, though yet to be reviewed by other scientists, reveal what’s possible today in undergraduate science education, particularly at teaching universities like San Jose State that don’t have fancy equipment or massive research budgets, Romanowsky said.

One reason a pair of undergraduates might have pulled off this feat is that until recently, astronomers simply weren’t looking for these dense stellar systems.

“It’s something that’s been hiding in plain sight,” Romanowsky said.

If verified, their research could lead to breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe — and of the black holes within galaxies, which have a gravitational pull so powerful they are thought to trap light, making them difficult to spot.

Both students were so passionate about the project, Romanowsky said, that they were pushing him, not the other way around. “They’re sending me emails at midnight: ‘Professor, will you send me more data?’ ” he said.

Experiences like theirs could bring more students into the sciences, said Natalie Batalha, a research astronomer at NASA Ames Research Center. Glimpsing something no human has ever seen feels like “all the mysteries of the universe are right there for us to discover,” she said.

“Not very many young people are choosing to pursue scientific careers,” she added, “and I wonder how much of that is because of stereotypes and a poor understanding of what it means to be a scientist.”

Between his forearm tattoos and outspoken, boyish sense of humor, Vo certainly shatters the boring-scientist stereotype. Recalling the start of his research project, he described the task ahead of him then as “basically finding Waldo.”

The youngest of 10 children of Vietnamese immigrants, Vo graduated from San Jose State on Saturday with a physics degree. He hopes to continue his research at San Francisco State.

Sandoval’s foray into astronomy makes him think of his mom. It always embarrassed him when she bragged about his physics studies, he said, because he felt he had done nothing special.

“After this has happened,” he said, “I’m pretty sure she’s proud.”

Photo via Flickr