Smithsonian.com

What causes fear? Image courtesy of Flickr user stuant63

Forget about zombies, paranormal possession or the Greek economy.  If you want to know terror, you must travel deep inside the brain to the almond-shaped region known as the amygdala.

That is where fear lives.

Technically, it’s one of the parts of the brain that processes memory and emotional responses. In that capacity, it’s been front and center in two of the odder brain studies done in the past year—one concluding that conservatives have larger amygdalas than liberals, seemingly backing up previous research finding that those leaning right are more likely to respond to threatening situations with aggression. The second study, reported this month, found a correlation between the number of Facebook friends a person has and the size of his amygdala. (Don’t get the idea, though, that you can bulk up that part of your brain by friending anyone who can pronounce your name; the researchers aren’t sure what the relationship, assuming it’s widespread, really means.)

The fear factor, though, is what really intrigues scientists about the amygdala. It not only helps register our scary memories, but also controls our response to them. Research released this summer helped to explain why particularly frightening experiences create such strong memories.  In stressful situations, according to the study from the University of California at Berkeley, the amygdala induces the hippocampus—another part of the brain important for memory—to create new neurons.  These neurons become a kind of blank slate, where a particularly strong imprint can be made of a fearful memory.

Even more revealing is the case of a woman with a very rare condition that has deteriorated her amygdala, and with it, her sense of fear. She’s apparently not afraid of anything—not scary movies or haunted houses, not spiders or snakes. (She told researchers she didn’t like snakes, but when they took her to a pet store, she couldn’t keep her hands off them.) And the stories she shared in a diary showed she routinely put herself in situations the rest of us would do anything to avoid.

Post-traumatic stress

The more scientists learn about how the amyglada creates and stores memories, the better their chances of erasing bad ones. They’ve discovered, for instance, that memories aren’t locked in forever. Instead, each time an experience arouses a fear, the memory associated with it is revived and is actually open to manipulation. That window of opportunity to change a memory through therapy apparently can  stay open as long as six hours. It also could close within an hour.

No question that the need to deal more aggressively with fear is being driven by the surge in victims of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It’s estimated that at least one out of five people who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan—or roughly 300,000 veterans—have been diagnosed with it. A number of therapeutic approaches have emerged, including a promising small-scale program that combines medical treatment and counseling in a residential setting.

Some scientists think the key to defusing terrifying memories is to deal with them within hours of a trauma, that there’s a “golden hour” for treating victims most effectively, much like there is for heart attacks and strokes. Two Israeli researchers say their studies show that giving patients Valium or Xanax to calm them down after trauma actually increases the likelihood of them developing PTSD, whereas a shot of cortisone, they contend, can decrease it by as much as 60 percent.

Others say more research is needed on drugs such as propranolol, best known as a treatment for high blood pressure, but a medication that also seems to defang traumatic memories. Still other scientists say they have evidence that MDMA, the active agent in the party drug ecstasy, and marijuana have a lot of potential as a long-term PTSD treatment, although some advocates claim that research on the latter has been stalled by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Probably the most innovative approach to confronting the demons of PTSD involves 3D goggles. This month the Army kicked in $500,000 for a pilot project to train PTSD victims in something the military’s calling “Power Dreaming.” The treatment, rolling out at the Naval Hospital Bremerton in Washington State next year, would work like this: A veteran who wakes from a stress nightmare reaches for the 3D glasses. He or she is transported to a soothing virtual world, one  filled with images that relax them. 

Bonus  fear: It may not be as traumatic as PTSD, but fear of math is the real deal. A new study published in Cerebral Cortex has brain scans to back it up. 

Hand gestures could replace your house keys. Image courtesy of Flickr user Smeerch

Over the past few months I’ve talked about the potential of crowdsourcing, whether technology is dumbing us down and why creative people don’t feel the love. Sometimes, though, you just need to cut to the chase and talk about cool things.

Here are nine recent inventions that have caught my imagination. Some are ingenious, some long overdue and some a bit strange. What do you think?

1) The bend is near: I’ve never had a strong desire to bend my phone, but maybe that’s just me.  Anyhow, researchers at the Queens University Human Media Lab in Ontario have created a prototype of a device that would allow us to do just that. In fact, that’s how you operate it. You bend corners or sides of the paper-thin computer into itself to go online, make calls, play music. It’s interactive paper that works like an iPhone. They actually describe it as a “paperphone.” It definitely would make carrying a phone in your pocket more convenient, although if my son is any indication, we’ll also see a spike in phones going through the wash.

2) Good  vibrations: No one weeps for a dead battery. In anything, we resent them for failing us. But now, finally, there are batteries that won’t fade to dead. Instead, they charge themselves. MicroGen is developing small batteries that are able to create energy from the slightest vibration. They don’t generate much energy, but then again they don’t need much.

3) Get inside your head: Don’t you sometimes wonder what’s really going on inside that brain of yours? Is anything happening up there while you’re watching a Powerpoint presentation? Do sparks fly when you see time left on a parking meter? Soon you may be able to watch all the action on a smart phone. Scientists in Denmark have connected an Emotiv EEG brain scanning headset to a Nokia phone, allowing a person to follow how his brain is going about its day.

4) You’re looking quite Pepsi today: In the long, uneasy relationship between man and vending machines, the balance appears to be shifting. Time was, a person could shake one with impunity. But in Japan the machines are taking over; they’re telling people what to drink. One called the Acure Beverage Dispenser scans your face to determine your age and gender, then checks out the weather and time of day. Based on all that intelligence, it suggests a drink. It would be wise to take the advice. Vending machines are big and they have scores to settle.

5) A cane that’s able: And now canes have brains. By using mobile apps such as Foursquare, a GPS navigator in the handle and a Bluetooth earpiece, a cane called Blindspot helps blind people locate their friends. Then, through a rolling ball in the handle, it leads them in the right direction.

6) Giving new meaning to close-ups: It’s also time to have new respect for contact lenses. Researchers at the University of Washington have implanted red and blue LED lights into them. It may make you look possessed, but it’s so images and video can be directly projected on to your eyeballs. And we lived without this for how long?

7) What took so long? An Israeli inventor has pushed the lowly pooper scooper into the 21st century. Oded Shoseyov, of the Hebrew University, has created the AshPoopie. It may sound silly, but it takes care of business and, within seconds, turns waste into odorless, sterile ashes.

You can run, but you can’t hide: At last we’re catching up with Superman. Scientists at MIT have developed a radar system that will allow soldiers to see through walls. By using an amplifier device, they’re able to push radar waves through walls up to eight inches thick. A receiver would pick up movement on the other side  and then display it as a bright spot on a screen.

9) Magic fingers: Right next to that ridiculously powerful phone in your purse or pocket is a ring of keys not much different from what people carried around 50 years ago? Now, thanks to a Taiwanese inventor, we have reached a watershed moment in the cozy lock-and-key relationship. With the use of sensors, Tsai Yao-pin has made it possible to open a lock with only a gesture. Like a Nintendo Wii, Tsai Yao-pin’s system can track the movement of a hand. Once you record your secret gesture, all you have to do is repeat it in front of the lock’s sensor and you’re in.

Today’s bonus: For a different type of creative thinking, consider the work of Nathalie Miebach who converts weather data to sculpture and music.

Which one of the nine inventions above do you think is the most impressive? And is there a cutting-edge product you know about that you have would made #10 on the list?

Gamers using FoldIt solved a riddle about the AIDS epidemic. Image courtesy of Nature.

New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki seemed quite the contrarian back in 2004 when he came out with a book titled “The Wisdom of Crowds.” Clearly, he had never been to a pro football game or gone shopping the day after Thanksgiving.

In fairness to Surowiecki, he wasn’t talking about mindless mob mentality, but rather the notion that diverse opinions within a group, when aggregated, can result in better decisions than the smartest person in the group would make.

He won over plenty of believers with his anecdotal evidence. Unfortunately, more than one company wishfully thought Surowiecki’s conclusions also applied to Web behavior and attempted to glean insight and intelligence from online reviews, ratings and message boards. Alas, a study at Carnegie-Mellon University two years ago confirmed what most site managers already knew—on the Web, it’s easy for a relatively small number of hyperactive users to assert their opinions and distort perceptions about a product or service.

So if virtual crowds aren’t to be trusted, it follows that crowd-sourcing—reaching out to the public to gather information, solve problems or complete tasks—should have fallen out of favor.

Not really. People have just become a lot smarter about tapping into collective knowledge. Crowdsourcing has morphed into “smartsourcing,” where companies and organizations are sharpening the focus of both what they expect from outsiders and who they’re soliciting for help. Forget about those open invitations to the masses for fresh ideas. (Dell and Starbucks are just two of the bigger names among the companies who’ve learned it’s a whole lot easier to ask for suggestions than do something with them.)

Now scientists are finding that fresh eyes and innovative ways to engage outsiders can move their research forward.  Last month the journal Nature announced that two teams of computer gamers, using a game called FoldIt, solved, in three weeks, a biological puzzle related to the AIDS virus that scientists had wrestled with for years.

With other projects, the motivation for outside collaborators comes through competitions for prizes or grants. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, for instance, is staging a competition to see how crowdsourcing from a diverse group of experts can help it get better at predicting world events. One of the competing groups from George Mason University in Virginia is using blog postings, Twitter feeds and social networks to assemble a team of more than 500 forecasters who make educated guesses about what might happen in the future–on everything from disease outbreaks to agricultural trends to political patterns.

DARPA, the Defense Department’s research agency, is taking a similar approach for a project to develop a battlefield robot. It wants to produce a miniature unmanned vehicle that can fit into a backpack and, when needed, hover over an area and transmit surveillance video. But instead of going the conventional route of contracting with the usual collection of defense industry players and research institutions, DARPA is sponsoring a competition through a website called UAVForge. A diverse group, including hobbyists and ‘citizen scientists,” have been posting their concepts on the site since early summer.

The goal is to mix ideas from different angles and without traditional  biases and see what happens.  At worst, you have sparks of fresh thinking.  At best, you have true innovation.

Playing to the crowd

Here are some of the latest ways scientists and museum curators are tapping into crowd power:

• Deep space spotters: Earlier this month amateur astronomers participating in a crowdsourcing initiative for the European Space Agency spotted an asteroid that qualified as a “near-Earth object,” the first time that’s happened.
• Watching TB: Harvard researchers, faced with the enormously time-consuming process of labeling thousands of images of multiplying tuberculosis cells used the crowdsourcing firm CrowdFlower  to recruit 1,000 outsiders to do the job. They finished in three days what would have taken the scientists three months.
• Picture this: To make its huge photo archive available online, the George Eastman House needs to tag more than 400,000 images. So it’s hired Clickworker to recruit an army of taggers.
• See and you shall find: NASA has partnered with the website Zooniverse to round up volunteers with the mission of identifying plants, animals and other items in images of astronauts training underwater off the coast of Florida.
• Scroll call: Even some of the oldest documents on Earth, the Dead Sea Scrolls, are getting the crowdsourcing treatment, as part of a partnership between the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and Google.

Bonus video: Still struggling to understand how people playing a 3D puzzle game can help solve an AIDS mystery? Watch this video from The Guardian.  

Makerbot shot glasses, image courtesy of Flickr user jabella

Used to be that when you heard “3D,” you thought of goofy gimmicks and glasses that would go well with a lampshade on your head. Not any more. In just the past week, news articles detailed important advances made with 3D laser scans: Scientists concluded that teenage T. rex were pretty hefty. Engineers identified which parts of Venice are most at risk of sinking. And police have recreated accident scenes.

But the coolest thing happening with the third dimension involves printers. Yes, printers. A 3D printer works much like your inkjet printer does, only instead of creating a two-dimensional image on a sheet of paper, it builds a physical object by stacking one very thin layer of material on top of another. That’s the idea, anyway. But to me it’s like electricity—let’s call it magic and leave it at that.

The printers are already having an impact in manufacturing. Companies are no longer using them just to create prototypes; they’re making actual parts. In fact, it has been estimated that by 2020, half of the parts used in machines will be designed on a computer and then built by printers. And why not? Printer-produced objects are lighter, cheaper, more energy efficient, result in less waste and can be made from a wider range of materials. They’re also much easier to customize, which has led some to foresee the day when we’ll download products as we now do music, then print them out at home. But first we’ll be able to tweak them into our own special versions.

That flexibility is likely one reason some artists have started using printers to express themselves. Laurie Anderson has included a 3D printer piece in an exhibit now showing in Philadelphia. Micah Ganske is has integrated small plastic printed sculptures into his artwork, which is featured in a show opening next month in New York.

The artist needs only to provide the original design on a computer. The machine does the rest. This raises the prospect of being able to download designs an artist has made available and printing out our own 3D sculptures. That’s happening already on the website Thingiverse, which is loaded with what’s described as “open-source art.”

3D printers are making waves in medicine (prosthetic limbs) food (customized candy) fashion (the first printed bikini) and even the military. (The U.S. Army has reportedly experimented with a mobile printer that could crank out tank or truck parts on the battlefield.) Still, this replication revolution won’t really take hold until we have 3D printers in our homes, just like the PC transformed the Internet into a daily obsession.

That’s where an outfit like MakerBot Industries comes in. Started in Brooklyn almost three years ago, the company hopes to make 3D printers so affordable and personal they’ll become part of our daily lives. It sells a basic model of its Thing-O-Matic, aka the MakerBot, for under $1,000. It fits on a desktop.

MakerBot, which helped launch Thingiverse, has been a big driver in getting artists to dabble in printer sculpting. And it’s the impetus behind a new crowdsourced science project called Project Shellter, where it’s asking people to come up with a design for a shell hermit crabs can use for homes.

But the real sweet spot of makerbotting, as the process has come to be known, may be in schools. Bre Pettis, one of MakerBot’s co-founders and a former teacher, sure thinks so. His take: Let kids design their own things and then actually watch them take shape, and you’ve opened a door to technology and engineering much more personal than any Lego could ever be.

I think he’s on to something.

Prepare to be amazed

Here’s are videos that will give you a taste of what’s possible with 3D printers:

• Little Lady Liberty: Watch a mini Statue of Liberty take shape on a MakerBot.
• You can print chocolate: British scientists fulfill a chocoholic’s dream.
• Back to nature: The MIT Media lab is looking at ways to create 3D products from recycled stuff.
• Such a tool: Check out this clip on making a wrench set on a printer.
• Anything goes: Here’s a sampling of things a 3D printer can produce.

Bonus video: You don’t want to miss this BBC report on two guys who set out to make a working bicycle from parts created by a 3D printer.

The Chevy Spark

Sunday was National Plug In Day. Missed it? So did just about everyone else in America.

For a few thousand people, though, it was a chance to stand up and shout, “I drive an electric car and I’m not half as crazy as you think I am.” A few cities in California held oddly quiet electric vehicle parades; other places staged tailpipe-free tailgate parties.

But you have to keep things in perspective. Through September, Nissan had sold a little more than 7,000 all-electric Leafs in the U.S., while fewer than 4,000 people have bought GM’s semi-electric Volt. And no more than 2,000 high-end Teslas have been sold around the world since 2008. By contrast, Ford sells more than 10,000 F-series pickups in a week.

Still, this is shaping up to be a sweet little watershed month for electric vehicles, aka EVs.

(1) Nissan announced that, together with researchers at Kansai University, it has developed the technology to fully charge an electric car battery in only 10 minutes. It could be years before such an efficient charging station is widely available, but the fact that it’s coming eases one of the bigger anxieties about EVs—that it takes forever to get a full charge.

(2) Last week, seven car companies—Ford, GM, Audi, BMW, Daimler-Chrysler, Porsche and Volkswagen—agreed to standardize charging stations in North America. Which means you won’t have to drive all over town looking for a place to charge your particular EV. There goes that anxiety.

(3) GM also announced last week that it will start selling a truly all-electric vehicle called the Spark in 2013. (The Volt’s back-up gas engine makes it a plug-in hybrid.)

(4) The sequel to the scathing documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? opens in theaters this Friday. The new film, Revenge of the Electric Car, is a lovefest by comparison. This time, filmmaker Chris Paine had the cooperation of the three companies selling EVs in the United States—Nissan came on board after it heard GM and Tesla were in. One of the screening parties will actually be held in a Tesla showroom and each of the three carmakers will be showing off models.

So now that everyone’s holding hands, the electric car is finally ready to silently roar into the future, right?

Reality check: GM’s commitment to start rolling out all-electric Sparks in 2013 is for only 2,000 vehicles. (Talk about putting half a toe in the water.) Some think this is more about GM wanting to qualify for zero emission credits in California than it is about getting serious about EVs.

And the Chevy Volt is touted by car dealers for its “halo effect.” People who haven’t been in a Chevy showroom in years are stopping by to look at the Volt. But they aren’t ready to go electric yet, and some end up buying gas-powered Chevys. In fact, GM now recommends that Chevy dealers always keep one Volt around.

All charged up

Here’s a bit more electrified news:

• (5) Thanks for sharing: Wary drivers are now able to get a taste of electric cars through car-sharing networks. In fact, the first all-electric car-sharing service, called Autolib, is starting up in Paris and may have as many as 2,000 EVs available next year.
• (6) Upping the ante: For the first time, electric cars were given their own hall in Germany’s big auto show. Earlier this year Germany said that by 2013 it would double, to 2 billion euros, its commitment to EV research and development. The goal is a million electric cars on the road by 2020.
• (7) Got juice? AAA has started a pilot program on the West Coast where mobile charging units will provide service to vehicles out of juice.
• Air power: Earlier this month NASA awarded the largest prize in aviation history—$1.35 million—to a Pennsylvania team for setting a new record in an electric plane. It flew a 200-mile course in less than two hours.

Bonus video: How times have changed. Take a look at the Revenge of the Electric Car trailer.