#scifact

[sushrutbrainandspine]

India sees around 15,000 to 20,000 new spinal cord injuries annually. The leading causes? Road traffic accidents (40-50%), followed by falls (20-30%), and violence (5-10%). Let’s work towards injury prevention and awareness!

#Sushrut #Brain #Spine #SushrutBrainAndSpine #SCIFacts #InjuryPrevention #IndiaHealth

[artbylok]

Dr Clemency Dullem founder of the Dullem Institute. Looking towards a bright future for the Nano Sciences division. Character and world building for the latest book. . #comicbooks #comicart #comicbookart #comicbookartist #digitalillustrator #digitalartist #digitalart #digitalillustration #character #characterdesign #book #bookdesign #illustrator #illustration #illustrationartists #bookillustration #scifi #scifact #scifiart #sciencefictionart #science #illuminati #control #graphicdesigner #graphicdesign (at Botany industrial Park) https://www.instagram.com/p/COEVsqRnHWA/?igshid=zq013k8y1yuu

[c0ry-c0nvoluted]

I wonder if we (humans) will get our shit together in time for me to take a casual stroll on Triton to see Neptune rising into the horizon before I die. I mean, the technology is there. We’ve got these new engines that can get us there in weeks instead of years. And medicine is advancing fast enough that I may live a shit-ton longer than anyone now would ever guess... But all any one really cares about is if the trip can make them money... So sad... -cc

Triton by JustV23

[techrev0-60]

I’d say this will be introduced mainstream in about 5 years and the norm in about 10-15

Scientists have developed a brain implant that noticeably boosted memory in its first serious test run, perhaps offering a promising new strategy to treat dementia, traumatic brain injuries and other conditions that damage memory.

The device works like a pacemaker, sending electrical pulses to aid the brain when it is struggling to store new information, but remaining quiet when it senses that the brain is functioning well.

In the test, reported Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications,the device improved word recall by 15 percent — roughly the amount that Alzheimer’s disease steals over two and half years.

The implant is still experimental; the researchers are currently in discussions to commercialize the technology. And its broad applicability is unknown, having been tested so far only in people with epilepsy.

Experts cautioned that the potential for misuse of any “memory booster” is enormous — A.D.H.D. drugs are widely used as study aids. They also said that a 15 percent improvement is fairly modest.

Still, the research marks the arrival of new kind of device: an autonomous aid that enhances normal, but less than optimal, cognitive function.

Doctors have used similar implants for years to block abnormal bursts of activity in the brain, most commonly in people with Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.

“The exciting thing about this is that, if it can be replicated and extended, then we can use the same method to figure out what features of brain activity predict good performance,” said Bradley Voytek, an assistant professor of cognitive and data science at the University of California, San Diego.

The implant is based on years of work decoding brain signals, supported recently by more than $70 million from the Department of Defense to develop treatments for traumatic brain injury, the signature wound of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The research team, led by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jefferson University, last year reported that timed electrical pulses from implanted electrodes could reliably aid recall.

“It’s one thing to go back through your data, and find that the stimulation works. It’s another to have the program run on its own and watch it work in real time,” said Michael Kahana, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the senior author of the new study.

“Now that the technology is out of the box, all sorts of neuro-modulation algorithms could be used in this way,” he added.

Dr. Edward Chang, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of California, San Francisco, said, “Very similar approaches might be relevant for other applications, such as treating symptoms of depression or anxiety,” though the targets in the brain would be different.

The research team tested the memory aid in 25 people with epilepsy who were being evaluated for an operation.

The evaluation is a kind of fishing expedition, in which doctors thread an array of electrodes into the brain and wait for seizures to occur to see whether surgery might prevent them. Many of the electrodes are placed in the brain’s memory areas, and the wait can take weeks in the hospital.

Cognitive scientists use this period, with patients’ consent, to give memory tests and take recordings.

In the study, the research team determined the precise patterns for each person’s high-functioning state, when memory storage worked well in the brain, and low-functioning mode, when it did not.

The scientists then asked the patients to memorize lists of words and later, after a distraction, to recall as many as they could.

Each participant carried out a variety of tests repeatedly, recalling different words during each test. Some lists were memorized with the brain stimulation system turned on; others were done with it turned off, for comparison.

On average, people did about 15 percent better when the implant was switched on.

“I remember doing the tests, and enjoying it,” said David Mabrey, 47, a study participant who owns an insurance agency outside of Philadelphia. “It gave me something to do while lying there.”

“But I could not honestly tell how the stimulation was affecting my memory. You don’t feel anything; you don’t know whether it’s on or off.”

The new technology presents both risks and opportunities. Dr. Kahana said the implants could potentially sharpen memory more dramatically if the approach were refined to support retrieval — digging out the memory — rather than only storage.

Still, as currently devised, the implant requires that multiple electrodes be placed in the brain to determine its high- or low-functioning state (though stimulation is sent to just one location).

This makes it an extremely delicate operation that would likely be reserved only for severe cases of impairment — and certainly not for students cramming for tests, Dr. Voytek said.

“Ideally we can find other, less invasive ways to switch the brain from these lower to higher functioning states,” he said. “I don’t know what those would be, but eventually we’re going to have to work out the ethical and public policy questions raised by this technology.”

[gerbueliinmdral]

As a major Star Wars fan & for 45th of Star Wars Day, I eagerly await for the stuff inside to come, especially since peace & help to humanity (as well as other life forms) could be easier to come by. Goes to show that alongside Star Trek, scifi can sometimes become scifact (science fact). May the 4th be with ye.

[theveracity]

"We are extremely excited to have achieved Japan's first-ever manned flight of a flying car in the two years since we founded SkyDrive... with the goal of commercializing such aircraft," CEO Tomohiro Fukuzawa said in a statement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . #japan#japanco#flyingcar#japanese#flyingcarfacts#factsai#ai#car#japan#firstflyingcar#fly#air#facts#artificialintelligence#science#scifacts#follow#factsfollow https://www.instagram.com/p/CEmeOOYHw4H/?igshid=fezggo2z2fjt

[lorieallfacts]

SciFacts Part 1

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[jaunepoisson]

This is some #fish #blood. 🐟 We can safely draw some fishie blood similar to human blood! 💉 This lil vial has been spun to separate the plasma (the clear liquid) and the red blood cells (the red stuff)! 🐠 This helps us understand the #chemistry and #science happening in each part of the blood! 🌊 #scientists #marine #lab #sealife #ocean #marinebiology #scifacts #didyouknow #animals #physiology https://www.instagram.com/p/Bve6Hl5HJcX/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=719suvw4ng38

[wsmith215]

Allen Institute’s VeriSci uses AI to fact-check scientific claims

Researchers affiliated with the University of Washington and Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence say they’ve developed an AI system — VeriSci — that can automatically fact-check scientific claims. Ostensibly, the system can not only identify abstracts within studies that support or refute the claims, but can also provide rationales for their predictions in the form of evidence extracted from the abstracts.

Automated fact-checking could help to address the reproducibility crises in scientific literature, in which it’s been found that many studies are difficult (or impossible) to replicate. A 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists reported that 70% of them had tried but failed to reproduce at least one other scientist’s experiment. And in 2009, 2% of scientists admitted to falsifying studies at least once, and 14% admitted to personally knowing someone who did.

The Allen Institute and University of Washington team sought to tackle the problem with a corpus — SciFact — containing (1) scientific claims, (2) abstracts supporting or refuting each claim, and (3) annotations with justifying rationales. They curated it with a labeling technique that makes use of citation sentences, a source of naturally occurring claims in the scientific literature, after which they trained a BERT-based model to identify rational sentences and label each claim.

The SciFact data set comprises 1,409 scientific claims fact-checked against a corpus of 5,183 abstracts, which were collected from a publicly available database (S2ORC) of millions of scientific articles. To ensure that only high-quality articles were included, the team filtered for articles with fewer than 10 citations and partial text, randomly sampling from a collection of well-regarded journals spanning domains from basic science (e.g., Cell, Nature) to clinical medicine.

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To label SciFact, the researcher recruited a team of annotators, who were shown a citation sentence in the context of its source article and asked to write three claims based on the content while ensuring the claims conformed to their definition. This resulted in so-called “natural” claims where the annotators didn’t see the article’s abstract at the time they wrote the claims.

A scientific natural language processing expert created claim negations to obtain examples where an abstract refutes a claim. (Claims that couldn’t be negated without introducing obvious bias or prejudice were skipped.) Annotators labeled claim-abstract pairs as Supports, Refutes, or Not Enough Info, as appropriate, identifying all rationales in the case of Supports or Refutes labels. And the researchers introduced distractors such that for each citation sentence, articles cited in the same document as the sentence were sampled but in a different paragraph.

Above: Results of VeriSci on several claims concerning COVID-19. In some cases, the label is predicted given the wrong context; the third evidence sentence for the first claim is a finding about lopinavir, but for the wrong disease (MERS-CoV).

The model trained on SciFact — VeriSci — consists of three parts: Abstract Retrieval, which retrieves abstracts with the highest similarity to a given claim; Rationale Selection, which identifies rationales for each candidate abstraction; and Label Prediction, which makes the final label prediction. In experiments, the researchers say that about half of the time (46.5%), it was able to correctly identify Supports or Refutes labels and provide reasonable evidence to justify the decision.

To demonstrate VeriSci’s generalizability, the team conducted an exploratory experiment on a data set of scientific claims about COVID-19. They report that a majority of the COVID-related claims produced by VeriSci — 23 out of 36 —  were deemed plausible by a medical student annotator, demonstrating the model could successfully retrieve and classify evidence.

The researchers concede that VeriSci is far from perfect, namely because it becomes confused by context and because it doesn’t perform evidence synthesis, or the task of combining information across different sources to inform decision-making. That said, they assert their study demonstrates how fact-checking might work in practice while shedding light on the challenge of scientific document understanding.

“Scientific fact-checking poses a set of unique challenges, pushing the limits of neural models on complex language understanding and reasoning. Despite its small size, training VeriSci on SciFact leads to better performance than training on fact-checking datasets constructed from Wikipedia articles and political news,” wrote the researchers. “Domain-adaptation techniques show promise, but our findings suggest that additional work is necessary to improve the performance of end-to-end fact-checking systems.”

The publication of VeriSci and SciFact follows the Allen Institute’s release of Supp AI, an AI-powered web portal that lets consumers of supplements like vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and hormones identify the products or pharmaceutical drugs with which they might adversely interact. More recently, the nonprofit updated its Semantic Scholar tool to search across 175 million academic papers.

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[meteorologistaustenlonek]

We are bombarded by news releases, scientific studies and an evolving hierarchy of sources. How do you sort through what is real, what is noise and what is flat-out deception?

Poynter will host a free one-day workshop to discuss the key challenges of reporting the facts about science at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 17.

During this special daylong event we will explore how journalists can combat misinformation and cover evolving or contradictory findings without reducing trust in the scientific method. We’ll also look at the evolving role of scientific reporting in public policy.

[booksabovethebend-blog]

1970s Analog ScFi/SciFact. Complete set + extras. Includes first appearance of Children of Dune. #scifi #scifiart #sciencefiction #magazinecover #dune #frankherbert #asimov #arthurclarke #booksabovethebend https://www.instagram.com/p/Bn8nd63lBcc/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=wa2qmlu0svo8

[itemitem]

SHOE PHONE

http://www.sliceofscifi.com/2009/03/04/scifi-to-scifact-the-shoe-phone/

[swampmusicplayers]

This could be us.... But you ain't believing 👅 Swamp Music Players 👽 ... have a second listen to our popular song 'Warrior' (Link to links in bio ) Warrior is on #Youtube #Spotify #Deezer #Bandcamp 👾 ************** Produced by award winning Producer Wynn Gogol, Featuring Matt Franke on vocals and special guest Nick Dokter on drums. Real plate reverb !! ************* #CosmicAmericana #americanamusic #americanarock #americana #southernrock #transistorized #reverb #platereverb #ufology #ufo #ufoabduction #ufoabductee #scifi #scifact #closeencounters #paranormal #swamprock

[theveracity]

Chunks of diamonds may be floating in hydrogen and helium fluid deep in the atmospheres of Saturn and Jupiter. ... What's more, at even lower depths, the extreme pressure and temperature can melt the precious gem, literally making it rain liquid diamond, researchers said . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . #jupiter#saturn#diamondrain#rainsdiamond#shine#methanegas#solarsystem#planets#rainfall#atmosphere#solarfacts#jupiterandsaturn#diamond#graphite#carbongas#hydrogen#scifacts#follow#veracity#followusnow#followforfollowdaily https://www.instagram.com/p/CEbWtkNnzDZ/?igshid=5j8rrxym770t

[lorieallfacts]

SciFacts Part 7

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#educational #science #facts #sciencefacts #tiktok #youtubeshorts #reelsinstagram

[jaunepoisson]

This the system for my first #experiment. This is a Respirometer, and we use to it measure #Oxygen uptake for metabolism! This is how we know how a #fish rests and it’s activity. 🐟 💨 #fishes #marinelife #marinebio #marinebiology #science #scientists #biology #metabolism #lab #laboratory #sea #ocean #animal #animals #scienceexperiment #didyouknow #scifacts (at Port Aransas, Texas)