This June, the US Department of Defense proclaimed that those woefully parched mountains in Afghanistan contained a $900 billion trove of mineral deposits including copper, gold, iron and lithium. Of the four minerals, lithium was the one that sent Pentagon officials into a swoon. Some even claimed that as a result of the discovery, the impoverished nation could become “the Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

The mood-stabilizing properties of lithium have been known for a century. Physicians have used lithium for nearly that long to treat and prevent episodes of mania in people with bipolar disorder, for example. The popular soft drink 7-Up included lithium citrate as a “mood-booster” for 20 years after it was first commercialized in 1929.

Of course the mood stabilizing properties of lithium isn’t what has those Pentagon types excited. They’re pumped because lithium has become the can’t-do-without ingredient in the batteries that power smartphones, computers and other electronic devices. Lithium is also expected to become the prime source of battery power for hybrid-electric vehicles.

No one knows how much lithium exists in the Earth’s crust, and with demand for lithium batteries exploding, people worry the demand for lithium might outstrip supply. There is no shortage of the mineral today, but this worry has caused lithium prices to double since 2003.

Not all lithium deposits are equally easy to mine, by the way. Chile and Argentina currently supply half the world’s lithium, because deposits there can be mined inexpensively by drilling below the surface of dried-up lake beds and exposing lithium-laced saltwater beneath. From there, it’s a simple matter to evaporate the water and what’s left is lithium.

There are vast lithium deposits in Nevada as well, but they are mixed into clay. Extracting lithium from clay involves complex chemical reactions and heating the mix to 1,000 degrees. Lithium miners in Australia have to drill through granite, a still more expensive process.

No one knows yet how to extract the lithium from those forlorn mountains in Afghanistan. But so long as demand for the stuff remains high, the most important withdrawal plan for Afghanistan may have more to do with getting lithium out of the ground than getting troops out of the country.

Recently, 5 scientists clambered into a steel capsule and shut the door behind them, unceremoniously beginning a scientific experiment designed to simulate a 520-day flight to Mars. Their mission is to help space crews of the future understand the stresses of interplanetary travel.

The all-male crew includes 3 Russians, a Chinese man, a Frenchman and an Italian-Colombian. They will execute a rigorous series of experiments and exercises, while being video-monitored the whole time by researchers from the European Space Agency, Russia’s Institute of Medical and Biological Problems and China’s space training center.

Conditions inside the capsule will mimic space travel in every respect, with the important exception of weightlessness.

The participants will communicate with “Earth” using an Internet connection that will be intentionally delayed and disrupted from time-to-time, to simulate likely communication outages during space travel. Their diet will consist of canned food similar to that consumed by astronauts on the International Space Station. They will shower once, and have 2 days off, per week except during simulated emergencies.

Of course, they can’t go far on their days off.

“For me, it will be mainly my family, the sun and fresh air,” French participant Romain Charles answered in response to a reporters question regarding what he will miss most during the project.

“Certainly, the crew is on its own here, with limited communications with the outside world,” the European Space Agency’s Martin Zell told the Washington Post. “They have to cope with a lot of conditions and organize themselves.”

Human beings are decades away from an actual Mars mission because of cost and technological barriers, including the creation of a lightweight shield to protect crews from space radiation.

Everyone knows that bathroom mirrors fog up during a hot shower. To evaporate the mist for its privileged guests, some top-end hotels put heating coils behind the mirrors.

But humid conditions can cloud-up eyeglasses or camera lenses by the same mechanism, and there has heretofore been no way to fix the problem short of a smudge-producing wipe.

And the same problem can become dangerous when a car’s windshield is affected, especially for those who don’t understand that the AC needs to be on in order to solve that problem.

When warm, humid air contacts a relatively cold glass surface, water vapor will condense on the glass. The condensate consists of billions of water droplets that diffract light.

Various sprays and chemical alterations have largely failed to solve the annoyance, but now a Chinese team may have figured it out once and for all.

Junhui He and colleagues from Beijing’s Chinese Academy of Sciences have created an anti-mist coating made of nanoparticles that can be applied to windshields at a cost of a few cents per item.

He’s team recognized that certain nanoparticles, applied just so, effectively break the surface tension of the water droplets when they try to form. The result is a transparent film of water that does not scatter light.

After experimenting with various shapes and chemicals, He’s team determined that oxygen-treated, silicone-covered polystyrene spheres shaped like raspberries were most effective in this regard.

The team plans to commercialize the process immediately.

Prospects at major research universities have improved for female scientists and engineers, although they still struggle to match male peers when it comes to salary, according to a report published by the National Research Council.

“Men and women faculty in science, engineering and mathematics have enjoyed comparable opportunities,” in recent years, the report concluded.

In particular, women who apply for university positions, promotion and tenure are at least as likely to succeed as men.

A great equalizer in encouraging women to apply for jobs, the report found, was the presence of women on the committees tasked to fill the positions.

The Council, part of the National Academy of Science, was convened by Congress. It surveyed biology, chemistry, civil and electrical engineering, mathematics and physics. It relied on faculty interviews and data from federal registries and professional societies.

It was chaired by Claude Canizares, the VP for research at MIT, and Sally Shaywitz, a learning expert at Yale.

Meanwhile, a second report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the gender-related achievement gap in mathematics has vanished of late.

“U.S. girls have reached parity with boys, even in high school and even for measures requiring complex problem solving,” reported Wisconsin University-based researchers Janet Hyde and Janet Mertz.

And, Laurence Summers take note, girls are catching up in the ranks of so-called math prodigies, a finding that undermines claims that profound mathematical talent is the biological destiny of males.

The Wisconsin researchers used data from the No Child Left Behind program and the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Gender-related differences were “close to zero in all grades,” they found, including high school where gaps had previously existed.

When scientists showed that images of nearly nude females triggered alterations in cerebral blood flow and certain behaviors that were not entirely under the conscious control of males, some just shrugged.

What could be more obvious?

But the link between conscious and unconscious thought remains a hot topic among neurobiologists, even when sexual desire is not involved.

Joydeep Bhattacharya of Goldsmiths’ College in London and Bhavin Sheth of the University of Houston recently demonstrated that insight itself, the eureka moment when one reaches a breakthrough solution to a problem, is generated unconsciously before one becomes aware she’s solved it.  

The remarkable findings appear in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

The scientists affixed electroencephalographs to 18 adults and then challenged them with a brain-teaser that required just such a flash of insight to solve.

The problem was that there are 3 light switches on the ground-floor of a house, 2 of which do nothing while the third controls a light bulb on the second floor. The bulb is off at the start. Determine which switch is operational while making only one trip to the second floor.

Each EEG-wired subject was given 90 seconds to solve the puzzle, at which point a hint was provided. The hint was to turn one switch on for a good while before turning it off.

Some subjects solved it, some did not. What was interesting though was data from the EEG could be used to differentiate the insightful few from the rest of us.

Only the former exhibited increased gamma wave activity in the right frontal cortex.

And the knock-your-socks off corollary was that the gamma wave activity was observed up to eight seconds before the subject had the “aha!” moment.  (more…)

A congressionally mandated report by the National Research Council concludes that our nation’s crime labs are understaffed, underfunded and lack proper oversight.

The report concludes that aside from DNA analysis, no forensic method has been demonstrated to be consistently reliable and accurate as a tool linking crime scene evidence to specific suspects. 
 

In fact outside of forensic DNA analyses, there are remarkably few peer-reviewed studies in the literature that even bother to validate the basic premises underlying forensic procedures, according to BurrillReport.

 “Reliable forensic evidence increases the ability of law enforcement officials to identify those who commit crimes, and it protects innocent people from being convicted of crimes they didn’t commit,” co-author Harry Edwards told Burrill.

The senior circuit judge and chief judge emeritus of the US Court of Appeals added that “judicial review alone will not cure the infirmities of the forensic science community.”
 
The NRC report recommends establishing a National Institute of Forensic Science to spearhead necessary research, set standards for forensic experts and labs, and oversee educational initiatives.
 
It also suggests that forensic lab governance should be separate from prosecutor’s offices and police departments. This would improve budgeting processes and eliminate cultural issues arising from the sometimes conflicting missions of these organizations.
 
And it favors mandatory certification for forensic science experts, which would involve written exams, internship-like programs, proficiency testing, and development of a code of conduct.

Forensic labs themselves should have to be accredited, and be required to establish quality-control procedures and assure adherence to best practice guidelines, the report recommended.

Just about everyone gestures in meaningful ways when they talk.

Heck the Big O once playfully recounted that his kneecapping chief of staff Rahm Emanuel had lost some middle finger as a teen while slicing beef at Arby’s and it “rendered him practically mute.”

But can it be that gesturing actually helps people think?

Yes, according to Susan Goldin-Meadow who reported her findings at the recent meeting of the AAAS.

Goldin-Meadow showed children a blackboard containing an equation like this: 3 + 4 + 5 = x + 5, and asked them to solve for x.

In the equation, the number immediately to the left of the equal sign is the same as the last one on the right, so x equals the sum of the first two numbers on the left.

Goldin-Meadow knew that kids just learning math don’t necessarily see things that way; they solve the problem by adding the three numbers on the left and going from there.

In previous experiments, Goldin-Meadow observed that kids use gestures when describing how they solved math problems.

To determine whether the hand movements actually helped kids think things through, she taught kids in 2 groups the short-cut way to solve these equations. She asked kids in the first group to gesture all they wanted during the lesson, and those in the second to refrain from doing so.

Kids in the first group learned more from the tutorial than those in the second. Also it seemed, kids in the first group often touched or pointed to the equation’s first two numbers on the left.

So in a follow-up experiment, Goldin-Meadow used this gesture explicitly in teaching another group of kids, call them Group A. She taught a Group B by pointing to different numbers in the equation, and a third group using no gestures.

Kids in Group A learned the most, followed by those in Group B. In last place were those who learned without the gestures.

The conclusion was that gesturing improves thinking, and even incorrect gestures have value.

NASA scientists have detected methane in the atmosphere of Mars, making it more likely—though far from certain—that life exists or existed on the planet.

In early 2003, the scientists observed methane plumes arising from 3 regions of the Red Planet’s northern hemisphere. A little more than a pound of the gas was vented per second according to the scientists, and 19,000 metric tons were spewed in total.

Methane is the primary component of what Earthlings call natural gas. Most of the methane found on Earth is produced by living things (cows come to mind) as a byproduct of food digestion.

But some non-biological processes also produce methane.

So Martian methane comes either from living things past or present, weird and wholly unexplained geological activity or a comet strike.

Lisa Pratt put her money on the former. “Perhaps we need to…think in terms of present-day life holding on somewhere in the subsurface,” she said at a NASA briefing covered by CNN and the New York Times.

The Indiana University geologist who was not involved with the research added, “It’s prudent that we begin to explore Mars looking for the possibility of a life form that’s exhaling methane.”

The NASA scientists observed the methane plumes on Mars using the Keck Telescope and a NASA-owned Infrared Telescope in Hawaii. They recently published their findings in Science.

If someone accidentally pokes you in the eye, it hurts. But is it more painful if you believe he did it on purpose? Probably yes, according to the findings of a study in Psychological Science.

Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner didn’t poke anyone in the eye, but they did set up a study calling for participants to receive electric shocks and then lured 43 students to participate with offers of course credit or cash.

At the beginning of the study, participants met their “partner,” who was casually introduced as another student but who was in fact in cahoots with the scientists.

Participants were then assigned several tasks including judging musical tones, matching colors, solving number problems and assessing discomfort levels in response to an electric shock. 

The scientists cared only about the latter.

In this task, the student receiving the shock was asked to rate the pain on a 7-point scale, in which 1 meant no discomfort and 7 meant child birth. According to the study design, this rating took place just after scientists gave participants a rather key piece of information.

Half the time, the scientists informed participants that their study partner signed them up for the shock test. The rest of the time, scientists told the participants their partner chose a non-shocking task for them but the trial design called for the decision to be reversed and the shock to be administered.

Students rated the pain they thought was administered intentionally as a 3.62. They rated the unintentionally administered pain at 3.00.

As well, pain associated with shocks perceived to be unintentional decayed with time, but there was no attenuation when the pain was perceived to be deliberate.

We’ve deployed nanoparticles (that is, particles measured in billionths of a meter) in the war on cancer for awhile now. For example, Abraxane packages the breast-cancer drug Taxol with albumin, a tiny blood protein that improves drug delivery and reduces side-effects.

Now, scientists have begun testing a new generation of nanoparticles that attack malignancies in a different way. By focusing energy from external sources, the new nanoparticles destroy cancers physically rather than chemically.

Jennifer West at Rice University for example, has developed gold- and silicon-based nanoparticles that absorb infra-red light and then heat up. If we can deliver these nuggets exclusively to the site of a cancer and turn on the juice, the tumor cooks while normal tissue remains unharmed.

It turns out this is quite possible because the pores of tumor capillaries are many nanometers larger than normal. It’s just a matter of creating nanoparticles exactly the right size to exploit the difference.

West’s nanoparticles have proven effective and safe in mice and dogs. Her team has begun testing them in humans with head and neck cancer.

Other teams are deploying nanoparticles of their own. The privately held German company MagForce Nanotechnologies for example, injects iron-containing particles directly into tumors and heats them with magnetic fields.

And the Taxol/albumin vehicle is only the first of what will likely be many cancer-fighting, drug-based nanoparticles. CytImmune Sciences of Rockville, Maryland has initiated a study of another gold nanoparticle that delivers tumor necrosis factor, while Calando Pharmaceuticals of Pasadena, California has enclosed camptothecin in a protective nanoparticle made of sugar.

The particular nanoparticles mentioned here may or may not prove effective, but those leaky tumor capillaries provide an opening big enough to drive a truck through.