A famous variable star in Cepheus

Want to catch the moon sliding past the planets, Mars, Jupiter and Venus this week? Click here for a chart.

Tonight … come to know Delta Cephei, a famous variable star in the constellation Cepheus. With clock-like precision, this star doubles in brightness, fades to a minimum and then doubles in brightness again every 5.36 days. You can notice this brightness change with the eye alone, and can see it best by contrasting this star with two nearby stars.

The constellation Cepheus requires a dark sky to be seen. But if you can spot this constellation, you might be able to find Delta Cephei, the famous variable star. You’ll find it high in your northern sky on November and December evenings. The pattern of stars in Cepheus resembles a stick house, the kind we all drew as children. The variable star – Delta Cephei – is located near the bottom corner of the house pattern.

Click here to see the light curve for Delta Cephei, the famous cepheid variable star.

Best gift ever! Order your EarthSky Lunar Calendar today!

Cepheid variable stars are a class of stars named in honor of Delta Cephei. They are known as pulsating variables. The image up above is what astronomers call a “light curve” of a variable star. Each point represents the brightness of the star at a particular time. You can see that the star’s brightness changes in a regular way over a period of days.

The brightness of a Cepheid variable star changes because the star is actually expanding and contracting in size. The radius of a Cepheid variable star changes by several million kilometers (30%) as the star expands and shrinks. There is a very precise relationship between a Cepheid variable’s luminosity, or true brightness, and pulsation period. The greater the intrinsic brightness of the star, the longer the period. For that reason, these variable stars serve as standard candles – in other words, their true brightness is known, so astronomers can see how bright they look to measure the distances to the stars – and hence to faraway galaxies.

Now look again at the chart showing the constellations Cepheus the King and Cassiopeia the Queen at the top of this page. In the actual sky, the two stars near Delta Cephei – Epsilon Cephei and Zeta Cephei – mark the low and high ends of Delta Cephei’s brightness scale. At its faintest, the variable star Delta Cephei is as dim as the fainter star, Epsilon Cephei. At its brightest, Delta Cephei matches the brightness of Zeta Cephei.

Cepheid variable stars enabled the astronomer Edwin Hubble to figure out that the Andromeda galaxy lies outside the bounds of our local galaxy, the Milky Way.

Delta Cephei. This is a Space Telescope Science Institute photo, via StarSplitters

Bottom line: Delta Cephei is a famous variable star in the constellation Cepheus. With clock-like precision, this rather faint star doubles in brightness, dims and then doubles in brightness every 5.36 days.

Easily locate stars and constellations during any day and time with EarthSky’s Planisphere.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/1rEXMHE

Want to catch the moon sliding past the planets, Mars, Jupiter and Venus this week? Click here for a chart.

Tonight … come to know Delta Cephei, a famous variable star in the constellation Cepheus. With clock-like precision, this star doubles in brightness, fades to a minimum and then doubles in brightness again every 5.36 days. You can notice this brightness change with the eye alone, and can see it best by contrasting this star with two nearby stars.

The constellation Cepheus requires a dark sky to be seen. But if you can spot this constellation, you might be able to find Delta Cephei, the famous variable star. You’ll find it high in your northern sky on November and December evenings. The pattern of stars in Cepheus resembles a stick house, the kind we all drew as children. The variable star – Delta Cephei – is located near the bottom corner of the house pattern.

Click here to see the light curve for Delta Cephei, the famous cepheid variable star.

Best gift ever! Order your EarthSky Lunar Calendar today!

Cepheid variable stars are a class of stars named in honor of Delta Cephei. They are known as pulsating variables. The image up above is what astronomers call a “light curve” of a variable star. Each point represents the brightness of the star at a particular time. You can see that the star’s brightness changes in a regular way over a period of days.

The brightness of a Cepheid variable star changes because the star is actually expanding and contracting in size. The radius of a Cepheid variable star changes by several million kilometers (30%) as the star expands and shrinks. There is a very precise relationship between a Cepheid variable’s luminosity, or true brightness, and pulsation period. The greater the intrinsic brightness of the star, the longer the period. For that reason, these variable stars serve as standard candles – in other words, their true brightness is known, so astronomers can see how bright they look to measure the distances to the stars – and hence to faraway galaxies.

Now look again at the chart showing the constellations Cepheus the King and Cassiopeia the Queen at the top of this page. In the actual sky, the two stars near Delta Cephei – Epsilon Cephei and Zeta Cephei – mark the low and high ends of Delta Cephei’s brightness scale. At its faintest, the variable star Delta Cephei is as dim as the fainter star, Epsilon Cephei. At its brightest, Delta Cephei matches the brightness of Zeta Cephei.

Cepheid variable stars enabled the astronomer Edwin Hubble to figure out that the Andromeda galaxy lies outside the bounds of our local galaxy, the Milky Way.

Delta Cephei. This is a Space Telescope Science Institute photo, via StarSplitters

Bottom line: Delta Cephei is a famous variable star in the constellation Cepheus. With clock-like precision, this rather faint star doubles in brightness, dims and then doubles in brightness every 5.36 days.

Easily locate stars and constellations during any day and time with EarthSky’s Planisphere.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/1rEXMHE

Science Surgery: ‘Is the one-size-fits-all treatment approach obsolete?’

This entry is part of 5 in the series Science Surgery

Our Science Surgery series answers your cancer science questions.

If you have a question that you’d like us to answer, send it to us using the email address at the bottom of this post.

Toyin asked: “Do you think personalised therapy will soon be the norm in the management of cancer? Do you think that the standard practice of one-size-treatment-fits-all doesn’t work and is obsolete?”

Medicine has been becoming more personal for some time now. This is partly down to a growing understanding of diseases, including cancer. And with new technology, scientists and doctors can study a person’s own, individual cancer.

With this information they hope to identify the best proverbial spanner to stick in its works. That’s the goal of personalised medicine.

Whether this is likely to become the go-to way of treating cancer is a question best answered by those working in this rapidly growing field. That’s why we spoke to a number of Cancer Research UK-funded experts to see how they would answer Toyin’s question.

Professor Adele Fielding, University College London

“Ironically, the term ‘personalised therapy’ can mean something different to everyone,” says Fielding. “As a broad definition, it is a treatment approach specific to the individual and their own genes.

“Conceptually, personalised therapy predicts that treatment for cancer could become significantly more effective and less toxic for the patient if it were more ‘tailored’ to the genetics of their cancer.

Cancer treatment will become increasingly personalised by default, as we learn more and more.

– Prof Adele Fielding

“But where we lack new treatments that can target a patient’s specific cancer, personalised therapy simply means putting our best foot forward in choosing the most appropriate treatment from lots of existing drugs.”

But in order to reach its potential, Fielding points out that there are a number of obstacles that need to be overcome.

“Doctors and nurses would require access to sophisticated diagnostic techniques, and a huge increase in the range of effective and approved treatments” she says. “We’d also need large-scale clinical trial data which connects those hundreds of new therapies with certain tumour characteristics, or ‘biomarkers’, to assign them to individuals in a personal fashion.

“We will continue to refine our approach to cancer treatment. It will become increasingly personalised by default, as we learn more and more.”

Professor Andrew Biankin, Glasgow University

“Personalised medicine is not a new paradigm or a revolution, it’s simply the natural evolution of healthcare,” says Biankin. “What’s changed is our ability to measure differences in the diseases that people develop, and the realisation that these differences matter.

“For many years we’ve assumed that because a disease looks similar under the microscope, it shares similar molecular features, however this has proven to be untrue. Understanding the molecular basis of cancer can start to explain why there are so many differences in how diseases affect people, and how differently they respond to treatment.”

Personalised medicine… is a natural evolution of how we study and treat disease.

Prof Andrew Biankin

Biankin points out that personalised medicine has been around for a long time, highlighting the important example of tamoxifen, a hormone therapy for breast cancer that was developed in the ‘60s. This drug, and other similar hormone therapies developed afterwards, targets the oestrogen-sensing molecule on the surface of cells, called the oestrogen receptor.

But Biankin says that research is finding that cancers are more complex than previously imagined, which raises challenges for personalised medicine.

“Some cancers have a common target that drugs might be able to be developed against, like the oestrogen receptor in breast cancer. But personalised medicine is becoming difficult in other cancers where there are few of these targets, and our health systems and clinical trial networks aren’t built to accommodate these challenges.

“Personalised medicine is a reality. It is the way forward. It is a natural evolution of how we study disease and how we treat disease, and we need to understand and change our systems in order to respond to this new knowledge.”

Professor Kevin Brindle, University of Cambridge

“A better understanding of tumour biology has led to the development of targeted therapies,” says Brindle, adding that these drugs are designed to interfere with molecules used by tumour cells to survive and grow.

“The introduction of these drugs, however, has shown that patients’ cancers can vary widely in their responses.”

Patients’ cancers can vary widely in their responses [to targeted therapies].

Prof Kevin Brindle

Brindle says that better techniques are needed to detect these responses in real-time.

He believes that molecular imaging – a technique that allows researchers to see inside tumours using scans and measure the processes happening inside cells – is likely to play an increasingly important role in this.

The techniques could predict and detect “early responses to these drugs and thus guide treatment in individual patients, allowing rapid selection of the most effective treatment”, he says.

Dr Alastair Greystoke, Newcastle University

“Personalised therapy is already the norm for some cancers. Lung cancer is the best example of this, but other cancers are following,” says Greystoke.

“There are now 4 different sub-types of lung cancer where we can target the genetic fault driving the cancer with tablets that are more effective and have fewer side-effects than chemotherapy. Whilst these make up a relatively small number of patients, there are international efforts to find more lung cancer patients we can treat in this manner (for example through the UK’s National Lung Matrix study and the US Lung MAP study). Similar efforts are underway in a number of other cancers too.”

Greystoke also highlights the potential of ‘liquid biopsies’, blood tests which fish out fragments of tumour DNA or cancer cells and analyse them. These are being trialled in a large number of studies across the globe, and could one day allow researchers to track and target how a person’s cancer changes over time and in response to treatment.

To just treat a cancer on the basis of where it arose in the body is an oversimplification.

Dr Alastair Greystoke

“The other way we are personalising therapy is drugs to help the immune system attack the cancer,” says Greystoke. “It is clear that some cancers respond much better to these drugs than others, so with immunotherapies – such as nivolumab and pembrolizumab – some patients are alive and well 5 years after their advanced lung cancer was diagnosed.”

Researchers now need to understand how to predict if immunotherapy will work, while also finding ways to make it work for more patients.

“To just treat a cancer on the basis of where it arose in the body is an oversimplification,” says Greystoke. “Cancer cells are immensely complex, and are trying to survive against the efforts of our immune system and drugs designed to kill them.

“Advances in science mean we know far more about this complexity and how to target it. We now need to adjust our treatments and the way we treat cancers in light of this, if we are to improve the outcomes for our patients.”

Justine

We’d like to thank Toyin for asking us this question. If you’d like to ask us something, email sciencesurgery@cancer.org.uk, leaving your first name and location (optional).

from Cancer Research UK – Science blog http://ift.tt/2yyMIRh

This entry is part of 5 in the series Science Surgery

Our Science Surgery series answers your cancer science questions.

If you have a question that you’d like us to answer, send it to us using the email address at the bottom of this post.

Toyin asked: “Do you think personalised therapy will soon be the norm in the management of cancer? Do you think that the standard practice of one-size-treatment-fits-all doesn’t work and is obsolete?”

Medicine has been becoming more personal for some time now. This is partly down to a growing understanding of diseases, including cancer. And with new technology, scientists and doctors can study a person’s own, individual cancer.

With this information they hope to identify the best proverbial spanner to stick in its works. That’s the goal of personalised medicine.

Whether this is likely to become the go-to way of treating cancer is a question best answered by those working in this rapidly growing field. That’s why we spoke to a number of Cancer Research UK-funded experts to see how they would answer Toyin’s question.

Professor Adele Fielding, University College London

“Ironically, the term ‘personalised therapy’ can mean something different to everyone,” says Fielding. “As a broad definition, it is a treatment approach specific to the individual and their own genes.

“Conceptually, personalised therapy predicts that treatment for cancer could become significantly more effective and less toxic for the patient if it were more ‘tailored’ to the genetics of their cancer.

Cancer treatment will become increasingly personalised by default, as we learn more and more.

– Prof Adele Fielding

“But where we lack new treatments that can target a patient’s specific cancer, personalised therapy simply means putting our best foot forward in choosing the most appropriate treatment from lots of existing drugs.”

But in order to reach its potential, Fielding points out that there are a number of obstacles that need to be overcome.

“Doctors and nurses would require access to sophisticated diagnostic techniques, and a huge increase in the range of effective and approved treatments” she says. “We’d also need large-scale clinical trial data which connects those hundreds of new therapies with certain tumour characteristics, or ‘biomarkers’, to assign them to individuals in a personal fashion.

“We will continue to refine our approach to cancer treatment. It will become increasingly personalised by default, as we learn more and more.”

Professor Andrew Biankin, Glasgow University

“Personalised medicine is not a new paradigm or a revolution, it’s simply the natural evolution of healthcare,” says Biankin. “What’s changed is our ability to measure differences in the diseases that people develop, and the realisation that these differences matter.

“For many years we’ve assumed that because a disease looks similar under the microscope, it shares similar molecular features, however this has proven to be untrue. Understanding the molecular basis of cancer can start to explain why there are so many differences in how diseases affect people, and how differently they respond to treatment.”

Personalised medicine… is a natural evolution of how we study and treat disease.

Prof Andrew Biankin

Biankin points out that personalised medicine has been around for a long time, highlighting the important example of tamoxifen, a hormone therapy for breast cancer that was developed in the ‘60s. This drug, and other similar hormone therapies developed afterwards, targets the oestrogen-sensing molecule on the surface of cells, called the oestrogen receptor.

But Biankin says that research is finding that cancers are more complex than previously imagined, which raises challenges for personalised medicine.

“Some cancers have a common target that drugs might be able to be developed against, like the oestrogen receptor in breast cancer. But personalised medicine is becoming difficult in other cancers where there are few of these targets, and our health systems and clinical trial networks aren’t built to accommodate these challenges.

“Personalised medicine is a reality. It is the way forward. It is a natural evolution of how we study disease and how we treat disease, and we need to understand and change our systems in order to respond to this new knowledge.”

Professor Kevin Brindle, University of Cambridge

“A better understanding of tumour biology has led to the development of targeted therapies,” says Brindle, adding that these drugs are designed to interfere with molecules used by tumour cells to survive and grow.

“The introduction of these drugs, however, has shown that patients’ cancers can vary widely in their responses.”

Patients’ cancers can vary widely in their responses [to targeted therapies].

Prof Kevin Brindle

Brindle says that better techniques are needed to detect these responses in real-time.

He believes that molecular imaging – a technique that allows researchers to see inside tumours using scans and measure the processes happening inside cells – is likely to play an increasingly important role in this.

The techniques could predict and detect “early responses to these drugs and thus guide treatment in individual patients, allowing rapid selection of the most effective treatment”, he says.

Dr Alastair Greystoke, Newcastle University

“Personalised therapy is already the norm for some cancers. Lung cancer is the best example of this, but other cancers are following,” says Greystoke.

“There are now 4 different sub-types of lung cancer where we can target the genetic fault driving the cancer with tablets that are more effective and have fewer side-effects than chemotherapy. Whilst these make up a relatively small number of patients, there are international efforts to find more lung cancer patients we can treat in this manner (for example through the UK’s National Lung Matrix study and the US Lung MAP study). Similar efforts are underway in a number of other cancers too.”

Greystoke also highlights the potential of ‘liquid biopsies’, blood tests which fish out fragments of tumour DNA or cancer cells and analyse them. These are being trialled in a large number of studies across the globe, and could one day allow researchers to track and target how a person’s cancer changes over time and in response to treatment.

To just treat a cancer on the basis of where it arose in the body is an oversimplification.

Dr Alastair Greystoke

“The other way we are personalising therapy is drugs to help the immune system attack the cancer,” says Greystoke. “It is clear that some cancers respond much better to these drugs than others, so with immunotherapies – such as nivolumab and pembrolizumab – some patients are alive and well 5 years after their advanced lung cancer was diagnosed.”

Researchers now need to understand how to predict if immunotherapy will work, while also finding ways to make it work for more patients.

“To just treat a cancer on the basis of where it arose in the body is an oversimplification,” says Greystoke. “Cancer cells are immensely complex, and are trying to survive against the efforts of our immune system and drugs designed to kill them.

“Advances in science mean we know far more about this complexity and how to target it. We now need to adjust our treatments and the way we treat cancers in light of this, if we are to improve the outcomes for our patients.”

Justine

We’d like to thank Toyin for asking us this question. If you’d like to ask us something, email sciencesurgery@cancer.org.uk, leaving your first name and location (optional).

from Cancer Research UK – Science blog http://ift.tt/2yyMIRh

The Lying Conference: Uncovering truths about deception

The Lying Conference will unmask the many factors involved in deception, including evolution, culture and the human affinity for storytelling and make believe.

By Carol Clark

We grow up with this notion that we should always tell the truth. But can we live without lying? 

That’s one of the questions to be explored in a day-long event, “The Lying Conference,” on Friday, November 17, from 8:30 am to 6:30 pm at Emory Conference Center. Emory’s Department of Psychology is bringing together scientists from psychology, neuroscience and anthropology — along with a leading journalist, a theater director and a professional magician — to discuss their insights into lying and deception. The conference is free and open to the public, but registration is requested. 

Topics to be covered include: The deep, evolutionary roots of lying. How children learn to tell lies. Cultural differences in lying. How we decide whether someone is trustworthy. How technology and the changing media and political landscapes are affecting our collective beliefs. The role of deception in the arts and entertainment.

“Lying is kind of a hot topic right now, with all the buzz about fake news and accusations of cover-ups and deception,” says Emory development psychologist Philippe Rochat, lead organizer of the event. “When we talk about lying, what we are indirectly trying to understand is, what is the truth? It can be a profound question.”

Science uses probabilities to approximate the truth, Rochat notes. “It’s a never-ending journey and you keep trying to get closer.”

In day-to-day interactions, we regularly negotiate the truth with one another, trying to convince others of a point of view. “People put on makeup to exaggerate their features,” Rochat says. “We amplify some things about ourselves and hide others. We make believe. We seduce.”

People can lie maliciously, in an anti-social way. Or they can tell white lies, to be polite and avoid hurting another person’s feelings.

Rochat is particularly interested in the developmental trajectory of lying. Between the ages of two and three, children begin to engage in pretend play. By around age four, when children start to have ideas about what other people are thinking, lying emerges. “They can be explicit at this stage, because they can understand that someone can be deceived,” Rochat says. “But they still cannot lie very well. They tend to leak the truth.” By the age of six or seven, he adds, “we become much better at concealing the truth and keeping a secret tight.”

Whatever the reasons for lying, one thing is clear: “We’ve evolved to lie,” Rochat says. “It’s deeply rooted in our nature and somehow important to our survival.”

Following are the seven speakers of the conference and brief summaries of their topics.

“Perspective-taking and Dishonest Communication in Primates and Other Animals,” by Emory primatologist Frans de Waal: While there is plenty of evidence for functional deception in animals — such as the way a butterfly might use mimicry as camouflage — but tactical deception requires anticipating the reaction of others. Tactical deception is clearly more developed in apes than most other species, although there is also evidence for corvids.

“Lying, American Style,” by Emory anthropologist Bradd Shore: He will discuss the role of culture in lying and how it differs across cultures. Shore will also touch on the some of the ways the American cultural model has been politically deployed and manipulated in recent decades.

“Little Liars — How Children Learn to Tell Lies,” by Kang Lee a developmental psychologist from the University of Toronto: Lee will use scientific evidence from his lab to show how lying begins early in life, what factors contribute to the development of lying, why children lie and whether adults can easily detect children’s lies. He will also discuss recent developments in technology that may help in detecting lies.

“Face Value — The Irresistible (and Misleading) Influence of First Impressions,” by neuroscientist Alexander Todorov from Princeton University: People form instantaneous impressions from faces and act on these impressions. In the last 10 years, data-driven computational methods allow scientists to visualize the configurations of face features leading to specific impressions such as trustworthiness. But these appearance stereotypes are not often accurate. So why do we form first impressions?

“What Happened to the News? Technology, Politics and the Vanishing Truth,” by Johnathan Mann, former CNN International anchor: Many American believe that the news media intentionally lie to them. President Donald Trump is the best-known detractor of “fake news,” though he himself has been accused of lying more than any other public figure in recent memory. Mann will address the overlapping changes to technology, politics and business that have crippled our national conversation with deception and distrust.

“Onions and Identities — Theater and the True Self,” by Emory dramatist Tim McDonough: Drama is densely populated by duplicitous schemers, by power figures whose lies maintain the sociopolitical status quo, and by characters in search of themselves, who mirror to us our confusions and self-deceptions about self. Theater provides a template for understanding identity and insight into existentially and socially necessary forms of deceit.

“The Science of Magic and the Art of Deception,” by professional magician Alex Stone: Magicians trick our brains into seeing what isn’t real, and for whatever reason our brains let them get away with it. Through a mix of psychology, storytelling and sleight-of-hand, Stone will explore the cognitive underpinnings of misdirection, illusion, scams and secrecy, pulling back the curtain on the many curious and powerful ways our brains deceive us not just when we’re watching a magician but throughout our everyday lives.

from eScienceCommons http://ift.tt/2AGGCzx

The Lying Conference will unmask the many factors involved in deception, including evolution, culture and the human affinity for storytelling and make believe.

By Carol Clark

We grow up with this notion that we should always tell the truth. But can we live without lying? 

That’s one of the questions to be explored in a day-long event, “The Lying Conference,” on Friday, November 17, from 8:30 am to 6:30 pm at Emory Conference Center. Emory’s Department of Psychology is bringing together scientists from psychology, neuroscience and anthropology — along with a leading journalist, a theater director and a professional magician — to discuss their insights into lying and deception. The conference is free and open to the public, but registration is requested. 

Topics to be covered include: The deep, evolutionary roots of lying. How children learn to tell lies. Cultural differences in lying. How we decide whether someone is trustworthy. How technology and the changing media and political landscapes are affecting our collective beliefs. The role of deception in the arts and entertainment.

“Lying is kind of a hot topic right now, with all the buzz about fake news and accusations of cover-ups and deception,” says Emory development psychologist Philippe Rochat, lead organizer of the event. “When we talk about lying, what we are indirectly trying to understand is, what is the truth? It can be a profound question.”

Science uses probabilities to approximate the truth, Rochat notes. “It’s a never-ending journey and you keep trying to get closer.”

In day-to-day interactions, we regularly negotiate the truth with one another, trying to convince others of a point of view. “People put on makeup to exaggerate their features,” Rochat says. “We amplify some things about ourselves and hide others. We make believe. We seduce.”

People can lie maliciously, in an anti-social way. Or they can tell white lies, to be polite and avoid hurting another person’s feelings.

Rochat is particularly interested in the developmental trajectory of lying. Between the ages of two and three, children begin to engage in pretend play. By around age four, when children start to have ideas about what other people are thinking, lying emerges. “They can be explicit at this stage, because they can understand that someone can be deceived,” Rochat says. “But they still cannot lie very well. They tend to leak the truth.” By the age of six or seven, he adds, “we become much better at concealing the truth and keeping a secret tight.”

Whatever the reasons for lying, one thing is clear: “We’ve evolved to lie,” Rochat says. “It’s deeply rooted in our nature and somehow important to our survival.”

Following are the seven speakers of the conference and brief summaries of their topics.

“Perspective-taking and Dishonest Communication in Primates and Other Animals,” by Emory primatologist Frans de Waal: While there is plenty of evidence for functional deception in animals — such as the way a butterfly might use mimicry as camouflage — but tactical deception requires anticipating the reaction of others. Tactical deception is clearly more developed in apes than most other species, although there is also evidence for corvids.

“Lying, American Style,” by Emory anthropologist Bradd Shore: He will discuss the role of culture in lying and how it differs across cultures. Shore will also touch on the some of the ways the American cultural model has been politically deployed and manipulated in recent decades.

“Little Liars — How Children Learn to Tell Lies,” by Kang Lee a developmental psychologist from the University of Toronto: Lee will use scientific evidence from his lab to show how lying begins early in life, what factors contribute to the development of lying, why children lie and whether adults can easily detect children’s lies. He will also discuss recent developments in technology that may help in detecting lies.

“Face Value — The Irresistible (and Misleading) Influence of First Impressions,” by neuroscientist Alexander Todorov from Princeton University: People form instantaneous impressions from faces and act on these impressions. In the last 10 years, data-driven computational methods allow scientists to visualize the configurations of face features leading to specific impressions such as trustworthiness. But these appearance stereotypes are not often accurate. So why do we form first impressions?

“What Happened to the News? Technology, Politics and the Vanishing Truth,” by Johnathan Mann, former CNN International anchor: Many American believe that the news media intentionally lie to them. President Donald Trump is the best-known detractor of “fake news,” though he himself has been accused of lying more than any other public figure in recent memory. Mann will address the overlapping changes to technology, politics and business that have crippled our national conversation with deception and distrust.

“Onions and Identities — Theater and the True Self,” by Emory dramatist Tim McDonough: Drama is densely populated by duplicitous schemers, by power figures whose lies maintain the sociopolitical status quo, and by characters in search of themselves, who mirror to us our confusions and self-deceptions about self. Theater provides a template for understanding identity and insight into existentially and socially necessary forms of deceit.

“The Science of Magic and the Art of Deception,” by professional magician Alex Stone: Magicians trick our brains into seeing what isn’t real, and for whatever reason our brains let them get away with it. Through a mix of psychology, storytelling and sleight-of-hand, Stone will explore the cognitive underpinnings of misdirection, illusion, scams and secrecy, pulling back the curtain on the many curious and powerful ways our brains deceive us not just when we’re watching a magician but throughout our everyday lives.

from eScienceCommons http://ift.tt/2AGGCzx

‘My Alcohol Tracker’: could Amazon’s Alexa help you cut down on your drinking?

It can tell you the time, read you the news and even crack a joke or two, but could Amazon’s Alexa play a role in your health too?

Alexa is one of a growing number of voice technologies that are slowly becoming part of people’s everyday lives. Most smartphones have some form of voice assistant, and ‘hands-free’ speakers such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home Mini have become increasingly common in homes around the world.

We’ve blogged about this growing trend already, and how we’re exploring voice technology as a possible new way to reach people.

One area we want to explore is whether voice technology could help people make changes to their lifestyle that could improve their health. And today, tied to Alcohol Awareness Week, we’re launching an alcohol tracker that can be used with Alexa-compatible devices.

What has voice technology got to do with our health?

Several Alexa skills, which are essentially apps for Alexa devices, have been launched in the US with healthcare in mind. They range from one that can help parents check the severity of their child’s fever, to another that can help the elderly keep in touch with their support and care network. And the ideas being tested are endless. Could voice technology help patients complete registration forms in hospital waiting rooms, or record a doctor’s notes during an examination?

It’s early days, and there are no clear answers yet on where voice might work best. But it’s easy to see that this kind of technology has the potential to have a real impact in the world of health and wellbeing.

Given that the stage looks set for voice to become a major player in how we use technology to communicate in the future, we wanted to find out if Alexa could help people access heath and cancer-related information. To test this, we’ve developed an alcohol tracker for Alexa-enabled devices, such as the Amazon Echo or Dot, called My Alcohol Tracker.

Why would I want to track my alcohol?

It’s well known that alcohol can lead to a sore head in the morning, but awareness of the link between alcohol and cancer is worryingly low. Drinking alcohol increases the risk of 7 different types of cancer, including some of the most common types, such as breast and bowel cancer. But the good news is the less you drink, the lower the risk of cancer, which means cutting down even a little bit can make a difference to your health.

Share a link to this graphic

Whether it’s a glass of wine in front of the telly, or a couple of beers after work with friends, it’s easy for the amount we drink to stack up throughout the week without us realising. To keep health risks from alcohol low, it’s recommended that we drink no more than 14 units a week – that’s about 7 pints of 3-4% beer or 6 standard glasses of wine. And the guidance is the same for everyone, no matter your build, height or gender.

Share a link to this graphic

Research is helping us delve into the psychology behind the things we do and what techniques could help change people’s behaviour. Understanding how to help people live more healthily is complicated, but one method that has often set people on the right course is self-monitoring, or tracking.

It can be a helpful first step in understanding your habits, or what influences your choices – conscious or otherwise, such as realising that you only reach for a glass of wine when you’re stressed, or snacking every time you sit down to watch TV.

What can My Alcohol Tracker do?

You can use My Alcohol Tracker to:

• Add drinks to your weekly total
• Set yourself a personal goal to drink no more than a certain amount (you can use the recommended guidelines of no more than 14 units a week or pick a limit of your own).
• Get a summary of how you’re doing this week

Along the way, we’ve also included information on the number of calories you’re drinking as well as hints and tips on ways to cut down.

We recently took My Alcohol Tracker to some of our shops and asked our customers to give it a go.

• Watch the video of My Alcohol Tracker being tested in one of our shops

No Alexa? No problem

You can find all the same information that My Alcohol Tracker provides on our website, in our leaflets, through our nurse helpline and out on the streets with our Cancer Awareness Roadshows. So if you don’t use voice technology, you definitely won’t miss out. And there are lots of other ways to keep an eye on what you’re drinking, including mobile apps, websites and good old fashioned pen and paper.

Can voice technology really make a difference?

At the moment, voice recognition devices may just seem like toys for the more techy among us. But in time, this technology has the potential to help us overcome some of the challenges we face with written leaflets or websites.

With its ease of use, and no need to fiddle around with handheld devices, voice could also be a valuable aid for people with visual impairments or certain physical disabilities – such as limited mobility or dexterity. It could also help people access and understand information if reading lots of text isn’t for them, offering something that better suits their needs.

If you have an Alexa-enabled device and would like to try and cut down on alcohol, give Cancer Research UK’s My Alcohol Tracker a try. You can enable it for free from the Amazon Skill Store, and leave reviews and comments to help us learn more about this technology and develop it further.

Katie Edmunds is a health information officer at Cancer Research UK

• Find more tips and support on cutting down on alcohol.

from Cancer Research UK – Science blog http://ift.tt/2zBsDgy

It can tell you the time, read you the news and even crack a joke or two, but could Amazon’s Alexa play a role in your health too?

Alexa is one of a growing number of voice technologies that are slowly becoming part of people’s everyday lives. Most smartphones have some form of voice assistant, and ‘hands-free’ speakers such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home Mini have become increasingly common in homes around the world.

We’ve blogged about this growing trend already, and how we’re exploring voice technology as a possible new way to reach people.

One area we want to explore is whether voice technology could help people make changes to their lifestyle that could improve their health. And today, tied to Alcohol Awareness Week, we’re launching an alcohol tracker that can be used with Alexa-compatible devices.

What has voice technology got to do with our health?

Several Alexa skills, which are essentially apps for Alexa devices, have been launched in the US with healthcare in mind. They range from one that can help parents check the severity of their child’s fever, to another that can help the elderly keep in touch with their support and care network. And the ideas being tested are endless. Could voice technology help patients complete registration forms in hospital waiting rooms, or record a doctor’s notes during an examination?

It’s early days, and there are no clear answers yet on where voice might work best. But it’s easy to see that this kind of technology has the potential to have a real impact in the world of health and wellbeing.

Given that the stage looks set for voice to become a major player in how we use technology to communicate in the future, we wanted to find out if Alexa could help people access heath and cancer-related information. To test this, we’ve developed an alcohol tracker for Alexa-enabled devices, such as the Amazon Echo or Dot, called My Alcohol Tracker.

Why would I want to track my alcohol?

It’s well known that alcohol can lead to a sore head in the morning, but awareness of the link between alcohol and cancer is worryingly low. Drinking alcohol increases the risk of 7 different types of cancer, including some of the most common types, such as breast and bowel cancer. But the good news is the less you drink, the lower the risk of cancer, which means cutting down even a little bit can make a difference to your health.

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Whether it’s a glass of wine in front of the telly, or a couple of beers after work with friends, it’s easy for the amount we drink to stack up throughout the week without us realising. To keep health risks from alcohol low, it’s recommended that we drink no more than 14 units a week – that’s about 7 pints of 3-4% beer or 6 standard glasses of wine. And the guidance is the same for everyone, no matter your build, height or gender.

Share a link to this graphic

Research is helping us delve into the psychology behind the things we do and what techniques could help change people’s behaviour. Understanding how to help people live more healthily is complicated, but one method that has often set people on the right course is self-monitoring, or tracking.

It can be a helpful first step in understanding your habits, or what influences your choices – conscious or otherwise, such as realising that you only reach for a glass of wine when you’re stressed, or snacking every time you sit down to watch TV.

What can My Alcohol Tracker do?

You can use My Alcohol Tracker to:

• Add drinks to your weekly total
• Set yourself a personal goal to drink no more than a certain amount (you can use the recommended guidelines of no more than 14 units a week or pick a limit of your own).
• Get a summary of how you’re doing this week

Along the way, we’ve also included information on the number of calories you’re drinking as well as hints and tips on ways to cut down.

We recently took My Alcohol Tracker to some of our shops and asked our customers to give it a go.

• Watch the video of My Alcohol Tracker being tested in one of our shops

No Alexa? No problem

You can find all the same information that My Alcohol Tracker provides on our website, in our leaflets, through our nurse helpline and out on the streets with our Cancer Awareness Roadshows. So if you don’t use voice technology, you definitely won’t miss out. And there are lots of other ways to keep an eye on what you’re drinking, including mobile apps, websites and good old fashioned pen and paper.

Can voice technology really make a difference?

At the moment, voice recognition devices may just seem like toys for the more techy among us. But in time, this technology has the potential to help us overcome some of the challenges we face with written leaflets or websites.

With its ease of use, and no need to fiddle around with handheld devices, voice could also be a valuable aid for people with visual impairments or certain physical disabilities – such as limited mobility or dexterity. It could also help people access and understand information if reading lots of text isn’t for them, offering something that better suits their needs.

If you have an Alexa-enabled device and would like to try and cut down on alcohol, give Cancer Research UK’s My Alcohol Tracker a try. You can enable it for free from the Amazon Skill Store, and leave reviews and comments to help us learn more about this technology and develop it further.

Katie Edmunds is a health information officer at Cancer Research UK

• Find more tips and support on cutting down on alcohol.

from Cancer Research UK – Science blog http://ift.tt/2zBsDgy

Perspective on Tunneling Control

Over the past nine years the Schreiner group, often in collaboration with the Allen group, have produced some remarkable studies demonstrating the role of tunneling control. (I have made quite a number of posts on this topics.) Tunneling control is a third mechanism for dictating product formation, in tandem with kinetic control (the favored product is the one that results from the lowest barrier) and thermodynamic control (the favored product is the one that has the lowest energy). Tunneling control has the favored product resulting from the narrowest mass-considered barrier.

Schreiner has written a very clear perspective on tunneling control. It is framed quite interestingly by some fascinating quotes:

It is probably fair to say that many organic chemists view the concept of tunneling, even of hydrogen atoms, with some skepticism. – Carpenter 1983²

Reaction processes have been considered as taking place according to the laws of classical mechanics, quantum mechanical theory being only employed in calculating interatomic forces. – Bell 1933³

Schreiner’s article makes it very clear how critical it is to really think about reactions from a truly quantum mechanical perspective. He notes the predominance of potential energy diagrams that focus exclusively on the relative energies and omits any serious consideration of the reaction coordinate metrics, like barrier width. When one also considers the rise in our understanding of the role of reaction dynamics in organic chemistry (see, for example, these many posts), just how long will it take for these critical notions to penetrate into standard organic chemical thinking? As Schreiner puts it:

It should begin by including quantum phenomena in introductory textbooks, where they are, at least in organic chemistry, blatantly absent. To put this oversight in words similar to those used much earlier by Frank Weinhold in a different context: “When will chemistry textbooks begin to serve as aids, rather than barriers, to this enriched quantum-mechanical perspective?”⁴

References

1) Schreiner, P. R., "Tunneling Control of Chemical Reactions: The Third Reactivity Paradigm." J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2017, 139, 15276-15283, DOI: 10.1021/jacs.7b06035.

2) Carpenter, B. K., "Heavy-atom tunneling as the dominant pathway in a solution-phase reaction? Bond shift in antiaromatic annulenes." J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1983, 105, 1700-1701, DOI: 10.1021/ja00344a073.

3) Bell, R. P., "The Application of Quantum Mechanics to Chemical Kinetics." Proc. R. Soc. London, Ser. A 1933, 139 (838), 466-474, DOI: 10.1098/rspa.1933.0031.

4) Weinhold, F., "Chemistry: A new twist on molecular shape." Nature 2001, 411, 539-541, DOI: 10.1038/35079225.

from Computational Organic Chemistry http://ift.tt/2ABYo6q

Over the past nine years the Schreiner group, often in collaboration with the Allen group, have produced some remarkable studies demonstrating the role of tunneling control. (I have made quite a number of posts on this topics.) Tunneling control is a third mechanism for dictating product formation, in tandem with kinetic control (the favored product is the one that results from the lowest barrier) and thermodynamic control (the favored product is the one that has the lowest energy). Tunneling control has the favored product resulting from the narrowest mass-considered barrier.

Schreiner has written a very clear perspective on tunneling control. It is framed quite interestingly by some fascinating quotes:

It is probably fair to say that many organic chemists view the concept of tunneling, even of hydrogen atoms, with some skepticism. – Carpenter 1983²

Reaction processes have been considered as taking place according to the laws of classical mechanics, quantum mechanical theory being only employed in calculating interatomic forces. – Bell 1933³

Schreiner’s article makes it very clear how critical it is to really think about reactions from a truly quantum mechanical perspective. He notes the predominance of potential energy diagrams that focus exclusively on the relative energies and omits any serious consideration of the reaction coordinate metrics, like barrier width. When one also considers the rise in our understanding of the role of reaction dynamics in organic chemistry (see, for example, these many posts), just how long will it take for these critical notions to penetrate into standard organic chemical thinking? As Schreiner puts it:

It should begin by including quantum phenomena in introductory textbooks, where they are, at least in organic chemistry, blatantly absent. To put this oversight in words similar to those used much earlier by Frank Weinhold in a different context: “When will chemistry textbooks begin to serve as aids, rather than barriers, to this enriched quantum-mechanical perspective?”⁴

References

1) Schreiner, P. R., "Tunneling Control of Chemical Reactions: The Third Reactivity Paradigm." J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2017, 139, 15276-15283, DOI: 10.1021/jacs.7b06035.

2) Carpenter, B. K., "Heavy-atom tunneling as the dominant pathway in a solution-phase reaction? Bond shift in antiaromatic annulenes." J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1983, 105, 1700-1701, DOI: 10.1021/ja00344a073.

3) Bell, R. P., "The Application of Quantum Mechanics to Chemical Kinetics." Proc. R. Soc. London, Ser. A 1933, 139 (838), 466-474, DOI: 10.1098/rspa.1933.0031.

4) Weinhold, F., "Chemistry: A new twist on molecular shape." Nature 2001, 411, 539-541, DOI: 10.1038/35079225.

from Computational Organic Chemistry http://ift.tt/2ABYo6q

See it! Venus and Jupiter meet at dawn

Gorgeous photo of Venus and Jupiter on November 13, 2017 from Siddhartha Thapa in Dharan, Nepal

Venus and Jupiter – November 13, 2017 – from Jean Marie André Delaporte in Normandy, France. Lucky shot, Jean Marie!

Another lucky shot from Judy Allen in Minnesota on November 13.

Miska Saarikko in Stockholm, Sweden wrote: “There was a point when I thought I would give up when I saw the clouds form over my hometown, but, by watching on several forecast websites, I noticed that they would disappear by the time this conjunction was present. So I stuck on my plan to stay up all night long, watching Netflix and some movies, and here we are.”

Dave Chapman in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada wrote: “I set the alarm to rise at 6 a.m. about an hour before sunrise to catch this appulse of Venus and Jupiter in a clear sky … I knew they would be about 1/4 of a full moon diameter apart, which sounded close to me, but when I saw them against the treeline, the separation seemed wide. Is this the planetary version of the famous moon illusion?”

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2hpJlVU

Gorgeous photo of Venus and Jupiter on November 13, 2017 from Siddhartha Thapa in Dharan, Nepal

Venus and Jupiter – November 13, 2017 – from Jean Marie André Delaporte in Normandy, France. Lucky shot, Jean Marie!

Another lucky shot from Judy Allen in Minnesota on November 13.

Miska Saarikko in Stockholm, Sweden wrote: “There was a point when I thought I would give up when I saw the clouds form over my hometown, but, by watching on several forecast websites, I noticed that they would disappear by the time this conjunction was present. So I stuck on my plan to stay up all night long, watching Netflix and some movies, and here we are.”

Dave Chapman in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada wrote: “I set the alarm to rise at 6 a.m. about an hour before sunrise to catch this appulse of Venus and Jupiter in a clear sky … I knew they would be about 1/4 of a full moon diameter apart, which sounded close to me, but when I saw them against the treeline, the separation seemed wide. Is this the planetary version of the famous moon illusion?”

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2hpJlVU

DARPA Needs Your Ideas for Drone Swarms

This program needs participants for frequent “swarm sprint” exercises to inform tactics for large groups of unmanned air and ground robots.

from http://ift.tt/2zUaz1X

This program needs participants for frequent “swarm sprint” exercises to inform tactics for large groups of unmanned air and ground robots.

from http://ift.tt/2zUaz1X