Wonderful Photography Of Seashore

Geographical Photos of Birds

Glorious Macro Photography of Nature By Magdalena Wasiczek

These stunning macro photographs created by award-winning Magdalena Wasiczek from Trzebinia, Poland, would take you into a magical world that might exist just outside your door or window on any green patch. Born in 1973, Magdalena is a graduate from Jagiellonian University in Philology with a passion in photography – especially nature at a macro level with a predilection for natural landscapes and animals of various species.

The richness of colour and detail of the meticulous work of Magdalena Wasiczek reveals an almost magical world, which goes unnoticed by almost everyone.

The Polish artist through his photos captures the macro phenomena imperceptible to the naked eye. In his pictures, vegetation, lighting and small living things come into harmony to compose beautiful portraits of life in nature.

When it comes to capturing life and nature beauty in macro photography, this young Polish artist, Magdalena Wasiczek is unsurpassed and absolutely the best! Have a look at this gallery and I hope you’ll enjoy in her work as much as I did.

Magdalena Wasiczek has won the International Garden Photographer of the Year 2012 competition with her image called Upside Down.

Andrew Lawson, one of the judges, said: "I love the subtlety and balletic simplicity of this picture. The brimstone alighting on a sweet pea is a fortuitous event, brilliantly seen. The butterfly and the flower are the perfect complements to each other. The 

outlines of the insect's wings are continuous with the lines of the flowers, and the patterning on its wings picks up an echo of the pink colour of the flowers."

Magdalena also won first place in The Beauty of Plants category as well as other Finalist and Highly Commended awards.

Picture: Magdalena Wasiczek

RUSSIAN WALLPAPERS

The Sound of Color

A completely colorblind musician and painter perceives the world in a new way with help from technology.

By Jef Akst | 

ORANGE TONES: Neil Harbisson wearing his “eyeborg,” a device that converts light waves into vibrations that lend a touch of color to his worldDan Wilton/RedBulletin

As a kid growing up in Barcelona, Spain, Neil Harbisson could tell you that the sky was blue, the grass was green, and a lemon was yellow. But he couldn’t tell you exactly what all those descriptions really meant. Born with a rare inherited condition  similar to the one that plagued the Pacific islanders neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote about in The Island of the Colorblind, Harbisson sees only in shades of gray, and had simply memorized the colors he thought he was supposed to know. But it wasn’t until he was 11 years old that he learned that he didn’t perceive the world in the same way as most people.

“I noticed that other students at school could identify colors easier than me,” he recalls. “Then I knew there was a problem with color.”

A decade later, as a music composition student at the Dartington College of Arts in England, Harbisson discovered there was hope that he might see things differently. In 2003, he attended a lecture about using technology to change the way we see the world. After the talk, Harbisson approached the speaker, young cybernetics innovator Adam Montandon, then at the University of Plymouth, to describe his condition and ask if there might be a way to help him perceive color.

On his train ride home, Montandon thought about the possibility of using a system that would assign different musical instruments to colors—drums for red and violins for blue, for example. But realizing that this would introduce his own interpretations of color, Montandon then considered a device that would simply say the names of colors aloud, but this didn’t sit right with him either. “I wanted to give him something a bit more magical,” Montandon recalls. Finally, he thought about the physical similarities of light and sound. “Light is a wavelength that moves very fast,” he says. “[If] you slow it down enough, it stops becoming visible. It starts becoming audible.”

In just 2 weeks’ time, Montandon and Harbisson created a device that translated the light waves that correspond to different colors into sounds with different pitches. The prototype, constructed from an inexpensive computer webcam, a laptop carried in a backpack, and a pair of old headphones, was a bit “crude,” Montandon admits. “It was fairly primitive, but it was good enough,” he says.

EYES AND EARS: The original version of the eyeborg used a computer webcam to detect light, a laptop to compute the conversion to sound, and headphones to transmit that sound to Harbisson’s ears.an Wilton/RedBulletin

Harbisson tested the device in a school hallway in front of a big red notice board as a friend pointed to different objects, identifying their colors. He quickly learned the color/pitch associations. “Then he just ran off down the corridor,” Montandon says. “I couldn’t stop him. He went to listen to absolutely everything.” And when Montandon returned to the school 2 weeks later, he learned that Harbisson “hadn’t even switched off the computer.”

Harbisson listened to the colors of the houses in the street. He went to local grocers’ shops to listen to the sounds of fruits and vegetables. “It’s like listening to electronic music,” says Harbisson, who now wears a refined version of the device, which he calls an “eyeborg.”

“And it’s constant,” he adds. “I wasn’t expecting that I would be listening to colors all the time, but there’s color absolutely everywhere.”

The device has since been through many iterations, with the help of Montandon; a software developer from Kranj, Slovenia, named Peter Kese; and most recently, Matias Lizana, a computer engineering student at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona. Today, the system comprises a camera that sticks out above Harbisson’s head like an antenna, and a small computer chip that converts light to sound. Harbisson has since also forgone the need for headphones, mounting the chip to the back of his head, where it transmits the sound vibrations directly into his skull bones. “I receive color through the bone, and I’m listening to you through the ears,” Harbisson says. This helps him “differentiate what is a visual sound and what is an audio sound.”

Harbisson can also hear many more colors than the handful portrayed by the original device. He can even hear colors of wavelengths not visible to the human eye, such as those in the infrared. This year, he plans to add ultraviolet. The project is the ultimate demonstration of the promise of cyborgs, says Montandon, now a digital technologies professor at Erhvervsakademiet Lillebælt in Denmark. “It’s very easy with the technology we have now to explore different parts of the spectrum that we don’t normally experience,” Montandon adds. “You’re not just enabling someone with a disability, but you’re enabling someone to be more than a regular human.”

Of course, the device is not the most practical medical solution to color blindness, its creators recognize. First, wearing a camera around all day is inconvenient. Furthermore, the device is really designed for those with true color blindness, or achromatopsia, which affects only about 1 in 30,000 people—not for those who simply are unable to distinguish red from green, a far more common condition. And people with achromatopsia “also have a whole host of other vision problems,” says Medical College of Wisconsin neuroscientist Joseph Carroll, including involuntary eye movements called nystagmus, very poor acuity, and photophobia. “The ability to perceive color is the least of their worries,” he says. A more promising treatment for these patients is gene therapy to restore cone function, and thus increase acuity and reduce photophobia, he adds. Human trials for these treatments are expected to start this year.

That said, Carroll adds, “this is really cool and adds a dimensionality to your visual experience.” Indeed, Harbisson’s eyeborg is catching the attention of some musicians and artists. The pianist Jools Holland, for example, used a version of the device to accompany live concerts held in 2009–2010 across the U.K., Montandon says. “He likes to improvise, [so] we created a reverse system that would turn his music into colors and lights as he played.”

And Harbisson himself, who now works full-time as a freelance “colorologist,” pairing colors with music, uses the device for artistic inspiration, often painting what he hears. Listening to his world has definitely changed how he perceives it, he says. “People said that cities were gray—they’re not. They are actually extremely colorful. I’m discovering color in a different way.”

Source: TheScientist
http://the-scientist.com/2012/05/01/the-sound-of-color/

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Robert Karl Stonjek

The Waterfall Restaurant in Philippines

Resilient people more satisfied with life

A study conducted by researchers at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona reveals that individuals with a larger capacity to overcome adversities, those more resilient, are also the ones most satisfied with life. The research was published inBehavioral Psychology.

When confronted with adverse situations such as the loss of a loved one, some people never fully recover from the pain. Others, the majority, pull through and experiment how the intensity of negative emotions (e.g. anxiety, depression) grows dimmer with time until they adapt to the new situation. A third group is made up of individuals whose adversities have made them grow personally and whose life takes on new meaning, making them feel stronger than before.

Researchers at the Basic Psychology Unit at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona analysed the responses of 254 students from the Faculty of Psychology in different questionnaires. The purpose was to evaluate their level of satisfaction with life and find connections between their resilience and their capacity of emotional recovery, one of the components of emotional intelligence which consists in the ability to control one's emotions and those of others.

Research data shows that students who are more resilient, 20% of those surveyed, are more satisfied with their lives and are also those who believe they have control over their emotions and their state of mind. Resilience therefore has a positive prediction effect on the level of satisfaction with one's life.

"Some of the characteristics of being resilient can be worked on and improved, such as self-esteem and being able to regulate one's emotions. Learning these techniques can offer people the resources needed to help them adapt and improve their quality of life", explains Dr Joaquín T Limonero, professor of the UAB Research Group on Stress and Health at UAB and coordinator of the research.

Provided by Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

"Resilient people more satisfied with life." May 23rd, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-05-resilient-people-life.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek

The Goldilocks effect: Babies learn from experiences that are 'just right'

Long before babies understand the story of Goldilocks, they have more than mastered the fairy tale heroine's method of decision-making. Infants ignore information that is too simple or too complex, focusing instead on situations that are "just right," according to a new study to be published in the journal PLoS ONE on May 23.

Dubbed the "Goldilocks effect" by the University of Rochester team that discovered it, the attention pattern sheds light on how babies learn to make sense of a world full of complex sights, sounds, and movements. The findings could have broad implications for human learning at all ages and could lead to tools for earlier diagnosis of attention-related disabilities such as ADHD or autism, says Celeste Kidd, lead author on the paper and a doctoral candidate in brain and cognitive sciences at the University.

With the aid of eye-tracking devices and statistical modeling, the research is the first to provide both a theory and quantifiable measures of what keeps a baby's attention, says coauthor Richard Aslin, the William R. Kenan Professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University.

For years, researchers have explored what types of events most effectively capture babies' attention. In some situations, infants reliably prefer familiar items, such as a favorite toy; in others, they favor novel objects. The new study resolves such seeming contradictions. Instead of novelty or familiarity per se, the research shows that babies seek out situations with just the right amount of surprise or complexity.

To measure complexity, the Rochester team developed a test based on the probability of surprising events in a video. Unlike hard-to-quantify concepts such as novelty or unlimited dimensions such as size, probability exists in a well-defined range from 0 (never happens) to 1 (always happens). Probability provides a continuous measure and is often employed by computer scientists and engineers to describe complexity, says Aslin.

In the study, researchers measured the attention patterns of 72 seven- and eight-month-old infants in two separate experiments. The babies watched video animations of fun items, such as a pacifier or ball, being revealed from behind a set of colorful boxes. The researchers varied where and when the objects would appear across dozens of short trials.

To measure attention, an eye-tracking device located below the computer screen followed the infants' gaze. As long as they looked at the screen, the events continued; as soon as they looked away, the trial ended. Babies quickly learned that they were in control. If they wanted to continue watching they just needed to keep their eyes on the screen. To reduce distractions, infants sat in a darkened space on the lap of their parent, who wore headphones playing music and a visor to prevent them from biasing their infant's performance.

Using a specialized statistical model, the researchers were able to calculate and predict how likely infants were to lose interest based on the complexity of each event depicted in the video. Complexity was defined as how surprising each event was in light of the previous events an infant had observed in the video.

Across both experiments, babies reliably lost interest when the video became too predictable – when the probability of a subsequent event was very high. "But here's the counterintuitive part," says Aslin. "You would think that the more complex something is, the more interesting it would be. That's not the case with babies." They drifted away from the screen when the sequence of events also became too surprising – when the pattern seemed random and unpredictable because the probability of something happening was very low.

"The study suggests that babies are not only attracted by what is happening, but they are able to predict what happens next based on what they have already observed," says Kidd. "They are not passive sponges. They are active information seekers looking for the best information they can find."

Although the experiments were limited to infants, the results provide a window into the way the brain works in general. "If you are interested in human nature, then babies are the place to look," because their reactions are less complicated by cultural filters and learned responses, says Steven Piantadosi, a coauthor and post-doctoral fellow in brain and cognitive sciences.

For example, the "Goldilocks" attention pattern supports other theories of adult learning, the authors note. Cognitive scientists have proposed that learners direct their attention to material that contains just the right amount of challenge, because this optimal complexity triggers the right amount of stimulation in learners.

In real life, babies are also attracted to faces, voices, foods, and other aspects of their world that are key to survival. These "special" stimuli may trigger attention in a different way, the authors acknowledge. But complexity does help to explain how infants gather information about the rest of their environment, they write.

Does this mean that parents should worry about providing material that is "just right" for their little ones? Not really, says Aslin. "Infants are learning all the time, as long as they have reasonably stimulating environments. They focus in on what they can handle and filter out the rest," he says.

Kidd agrees: "Parents don't need to buy fancy toys to help their children learn. They make the best use of their environment. They are going to look around for what fits their attention level." And even though the experiment employed an animated video, the scientists emphasize that human interactions are the most critical for development. "Kids learn best from social interaction," reminds Kidd.

The study's insights into attention patterns may help to explain why children ask to hear the same story over and over. For an adult, the repetition can be mind numbing, says Kidd, "but for a child, they are likely getting something new out of the story every time. Because adults know so much, we often take for granted how many new things an infant needs to learn."

Provided by University of Rochester

"The Goldilocks effect: Babies learn from experiences that are 'just right'." May 23rd, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-05-goldilocks-effect-babies.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek

Research suggests cells communicate via biophotons

Example of ’message’ send by fish eggs, full time scale 400 sec. Image from arXiv:1205.4134v1

(Phys.org) -- Biologists have long been familiar with luminescence in organisms, where plants and animals produce visible light, but more intriguing perhaps is the newer field of study centered around biophotons, whereby cells in organisms produce photons, but in numbers that are too few to be seen. How they do so and why, is an area that has come under more scrutiny of late. Now, new research by Sergey Mayburov, of the Lebedev Institute of Physics in Moscow, has uncovered a pattern in photons being generated by cells in fish eggs that gives credence to the theory that some cells use biophotons to communicate. He has written a paper describing his results and has posted it on the preprint server arXiv.

Mayburov is not alone in his thinking. Other researchers have found what they believe to be evidence of cells communicating by emitting streams of biophotons. Some have even have found what they believe are associations between the emittance of biophotons and increased cell division in plants growing in close proximity; so much so that they have measured increases of up to 30%. Others have found that biophotons emitted from older eggs in a clutch, appear to inhibit the growth of immature eggs; a form of survival of the fittest, or at least the more mature.

To find out if fish eggs are able to play a similar role, Mayburov turned out the lights in his lab and recorded biophotons as they were emitted from the eggs. His aim was to see if any discernible pattern could be found, which would perhaps offer some clues as to how biophotons could be used by organisms or their cells to communicate. After much study, he says he has indeed found such a pattern and that it resembles the way we humans send binary data over noisy communications channels. The biophotons he studied he says, emit near periodic bursts of photons which could conceivably be seen and interpreted by other organisms or their cells who could then respond accordingly.

Mayburov’s results don’t really prove anything of course, his results are purely speculative, yet they do suggest that there might be more to biophotons than has been previously thought. More work will have to be conducted to find answers to the many questions that still exist, such as how do cells actually create them, and if other cells in other organisms are really listening, how do they do it, and perhaps more importantly, how do they know how to respond to them?

More information: Photonic Communications and Information Encoding in Biological Systems, arXiv:1205.4134v1 [q-bio.OT]http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.4134

Abstract 
The structure of optical radiation emitted by the samples of loach fish eggs is studied. It was found earlier that such radiation perform the communications between distant samples, which result in the synchronization of their development. The photon radiation in form of short quasi-periodic bursts was observed for fish and frog eggs, hence the communication mechanism can be similar to the exchange of binary encoded data in the computer nets via the noisy channels. The data analysis of fish egg radiation demonstrates that in this case the information encoding is similar to the digit to time analogue algorithm.

via Arxiv Blog

© 2012 Phys.Org

"Research suggests cells communicate via biophotons." May 23rd, 2012. http://phys.org/news/2012-05-cells-biophotons.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek

Wearing two different hats: Moral decisions may depend on the situation

An individual's sense of right or wrong may change depending on their activities at the time – and they may not be aware of their own shifting moral integrity — according to a new study looking at why people make ethical or unethical decisions.

Focusing on dual-occupation professionals, the researchers found that engineers had one perspective on ethical issues, yet when those same individuals were in management roles, their moral compass shifted. Likewise, medic/soldiers in the U.S. Army had different views of civilian casualties depending on whether they most recently had been acting as soldiers or medics.

In the study, to be published in a future issue of The Academy of Management Journal, lead author Keith Leavitt of Oregon State University found that workers who tend to have dual roles in their jobs would change their moral judgments based on what they thought was expected of them at the moment.

"When people switch hats, they often switch moral compasses," Leavitt said. "People like to think they are inherently moral creatures – you either have character or you don't. But our studies show that the same person may make a completely different decision based on what hat they may be wearing at the time, often without even realizing it."

Leavitt, an assistant professor of management in the College of Business at OSU, is an expert on non-conscious decision making and business ethics. He studies how people make decisions and moral judgments, often based on non-conscious cues.

He said recent high-profile business scandals, from the collapse of Enron to the Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff, have called into question the ethics of professionals. Leavitt said professional organizations, employers and academic institutions may want to train and prepare their members for practical moral tensions they may face when asked to serve in multiple roles.

"What we consider to be moral sometimes depends on what constituency we are answering to at that moment," Leavitt said. "For a physician, a human life is priceless. But if that same physician is a managed-care administrator, some degree of moral flexibility becomes necessary to meet their obligations to stockholders."

Leavitt said subtle cues – such as signage and motivation materials around the office – should be considered, along with more direct training that helps employees who juggle multiple roles that could conflict with one another.

"Organizations and businesses need to recognize that even very subtle images and icons can give employees non-conscious clues as to what the firm values," he said. "Whether they know it or not, people are often taking in messages about what their role is and what is expected of them, and this may conflict with what they know to be the moral or correct decision."

The researchers conducted three different studies with employees who had dual roles. In one case, 128 U.S. Army medics were asked to complete a series of problem-solving tests, which included subliminal cues that hinted they might be acting as either a medic or a soldier. No participant said the cues had any bearing on their behavior – but apparently they did. A much larger percentage of those in the medic category than in the soldier category were unwilling to put a price on human life.

In another test, a group of engineer-managers were asked to write about a time they either behaved as a typical manager, engineer, or both. Then they were asked whether U.S. firms should engage in "gifting" to gain a foothold in a new market. Despite the fact such a practice would violate federal laws, more than 50 percent of those who fell into the "manager" category said such a practice might be acceptable, compared to 13 percent of those in the engineer category.

"We find that people tend to make decisions that may conflict with their morals when they are overwhelmed, or when they are just doing routine tasks without thinking of the consequences," Leavitt said. "We tend to play out a script as if our role has already been written. So the bottom line is, slow down and think about the consequences when making an ethical decision."

Provided by Oregon State University

"Wearing two different hats: Moral decisions may depend on the situation." May 23rd, 2012. http://phys.org/news/2012-05-hats-moral-decisions-situation.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek

The living fossils of brain evolution

Ancestor (left) and descendant (right). The image shows a reconstruction of the common ancestor of all living mammals (Hadrocodium wui) from the Early Jurassic, which has the size of a paper clip. Right, a model of a human brain. In terms of brain organisation, the mouse (centre) is probably a “living fossil”. The diagrams to the right show a mixed (right) and a modular ordered structure of nerve cells in the cortex. Credit: MPIDS

(Phys.org) -- In the course of its evolution, the architecture of the mouse brain may have barely changed. Similar to the tiny ancestors of modern mammals that lived about 80 million years ago, nerve cells in the mouse visual cortex are densely packed in a small area of ​​the brain. However, during the subsequent evolution of larger brains the architecture of the cerebral cortex was radically restructured. This is the conclusion of an international team of researchers led by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, the University of Göttingen and the Bernstein Center Göttingen. The brains of larger mammals, such as humans, however, have a completely different structure to those of mice. Processes of self-organisation led to the emergence of modules in which neurons conjointly are responsible for specific tasks.

Humans are considerably larger than almost all of their ancestors. Our great-great-great-grandparents were on average about 10 centimetres shorter than us. Going further back in time, the difference increases impressively. The ancestors of humans, and modern mammals in general, that lived 80 million years ago all weighed less than 100 grams and were usually only a few centimetres in size. Ecological niches that would have allowed a larger body were occupied by dinosaurs. Only the great extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago allowed our ancestors a “growth spurt” of historical dimensions. Within just a few million years mammals evolved that were more than 100 times as large as their Mesozoic ancestors.

A well-known international team of scientists led by Max Planck researchers reports in the journal Science that this growth spurt probably led to a fundamental reshaping of neural circuits in the brain. Scientists from the Goethe University in Frankfurt and their international partners hwere also involved in the study. As the researchers discovered, neural circuits in the visual cortex of the brain, corresponding to the smallest details, developed independently in different lineages. Computer simulations and mathematical calculations show that this correspondence reflects basic laws of self-organisation of large-scale neuronal networks. The researchers point towards the existence of “living fossils of brain development”. This refers to species which preserved our ancestors’ neuronal circuits’ architecture until today. Among them, amazingly, is also one of the closest relatives of primates: the mouse.

An essential aspect of human evolution was the enlargement of the brain and especially of the cerebral cortex, whose tasks include conscious perception, decision making, and many memory processes. This brain area in humans – as in many other mammals – is divided into modules in which groups of neurons are interconnected in dense networks and contribute to  common tasks, such as the perception of a certain hue. The paper, which has been published in Science, analyses the evolution of what is known as orientation columns, modules of the visual cortex that build the basis of the perception of form.

Hundreds of these modules, which typically have a size of about one millimetre, are located side by side within the visual cortex. The new study shows that this spatial orientation precisely follows geometric rules. Surprisingly, the same laws have evolved independently in separate lineages that led to the development of big brains and even in animals that differ greatly from each other in brain size. The new results thus refute a competing hypothesis that assumes strong dependencies of geometrical properties and brain size. It suggests that during a substantial period of ​​the evolutionary enlargement of the brain only the number of modules increased. The laws of their arrangement, however, remained unchanged.

The authors point out that these laws cannot apply for the entire phylogeny. Wolfgang Keil, first author of the study explains: “In our Mesozoic ancestors, these rules of brain architecture must have reached their limits. Their brains were so tiny that not even a single module would have fitted in the cerebral cortex.” Thus, the researchers consider it to be likely that our ancestors had a fundamentally different architecture of their visual cortex.

In fact, all living mammals that are lighter than 100 grams seem to lack orientation columns completely. In mice, for example, nerve cells that process different tasks in the visual cortex are seemingly randomly mixed. Whether our brain architecture originates from a mixed or an even stranger brain organisation can only be deduced after further investigations, the researchers argue. An important task for future studies will be an investigation of laws that govern small brains. “In fact, there are many dark continents in terms of the architecture of the visual cortex in the different lineages of mammals,” says Fred Wolf, head of the study at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience. The scientists hope that their work will encourage colleagues around the world to help resolve this fundamental mystery of our origins.

More information: Wolfgang Keil, et al. Response to Comment on “Universality in the Evolution of Orientation Columns in the Visual Cortex.” Science 27 April 2012: Vol. 336 no. 6080 p. 413 DOI: 10.1126/science.1206416

Provided by Max Planck Society

"The living fossils of brain evolution." May 23rd, 2012. http://phys.org/news/2012-05-fossils-brain-evolution.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek

Dollars and sense: Why are some people morally against tax?

As the U.S. presidential election campaigns heat up, the economic debate is dominated by bailouts, austerity and, inevitably, taxation. Now a new study published in Symbolic Interaction asks why tax is such an important issue to voters and explores the moral ideas which underpin their views.

Americans are famously hostile to taxes even though they are not heavily taxed in comparison to Canadians and the British. In their study Dr Jeff Kidder and Dr Isaac Martin, from Northern Illinois University and the University of California-San Diego, explore how middle class feelings of exploitation lie behind this hostility.

"Everyday tax talk among the middle class is not simply part of a wider ideological view about economics or free markets," said Kidder. "Tax talk is morally charged and resonates with how Americans see themselves and their place in society."

The researchers conducted 24 semi-structured, open-ended interviews with taxpayers in the Southern states who owned or managed small businesses to discover how they talk about taxes in everyday life. Entrepreneurs are a demographic group which is typically strongly anti-tax, while the Southern States provide many supporters for the radical Tea Party.

Respondents saw themselves as morally deserving and hard-working people, sandwiched between an economically more powerful group that manipulates the rules for its own benefit and a subordinate group that benefits from government spending but escapes taxation.

"We found that people associate income tax with a violation of the moral principle that hard work should be rewarded," said Kidder. "Our research shows that when Americans lash out at 'takeovers,' 'massive taxes' and 'bailouts,' they are looking at these issues from the perspective of a hard-working middle class besieged on all sides. Tax talk is about dollars, but it is also about a moral sense of what is right."

It is typically believed that those who are anti-tax will also be hostile to government aid for the poor and minorities. However, rich recipients of bailouts were also disparaged as people who did not deserve money because they did not work for it.

"A lot of the tax talk you will hear from politicians this election season makes no sense as arithmetic," Martin said. "But it makes sense as an appeal to the moral sensibilities of small business."

"Our research shows that tax talk is not actually about individual self-interest, but about our respondents' sense of the proper relations among groups," concluded Kidder. "It's a view summed up by one respondent: Don't take my paycheck."

Provided by Wiley

"Dollars and sense: Why are some people morally against tax?." May 23rd, 2012. http://phys.org/news/2012-05-dollars-people-morally-tax.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek

Chronic Pain Is Relieved by Cell Transplantation in Lab Study

Science Daily — Chronic pain, by definition, is difficult to manage, but a new study by UCSF scientists shows how a cell therapy might one day be used not only to quell some common types of persistent and difficult-to-treat pain, but also to cure the conditions that give rise to them.

In their study, published in the May 24, 2012 issue of Neuron, the scientists transplanted immature embryonic nerve cells that arise in the brain during development and used them to make up for a loss of function of specific neurons in the spinal cord that normally dampen pain signals.The researchers, working with mice, focused on treating chronic pain that arises from nerve injury -- so-called neuropathic pain.

A small fraction of the transplanted cells survived and matured into functioning neurons. The cells integrated into the nerve circuitry of the spinal cord, forming synapses and signaling pathways with neighboring neurons.

As a result, pain hypersensitivity associated with nerve injury was almost completely eliminated, the researchers found, without evidence of movement disturbances that are common side effects of the currently favored drug treatment.

"Now we are working toward the possibility of potential treatments that might eliminate the source of neuropathic pain, and that may be much more effective than drugs that aim only to treat symptomatically the pain that results from chronic, painful conditions," said the senior author of the study, Allan Basbaum, PhD, chair of the Department of Anatomy at UCSF.

Although pain and hypersensitivity after injury usually resolve, in some cases they outlast the injury, creating the condition of chronic pain. Many types of chronic pain are induced by stimuli that are essentially harmless -- such as light touch -- but that are perceived as painful, according to Basbaum.

Chronic pain due to this type of hypersensitivity is often a debilitating medical condition. Many people suffer from chronic neuropathic pain after a bout of shingles, years or decades after the virus that causes chicken pox has been vanquished. Chronic pain is not merely prolonged acute pain, Basbaum said.

Those who suffer from chronic pain often get little relief, even from powerful narcotic painkillers, according to Basbaum. Gabapentin, an anticonvulsant first used to treat epilepsy, now is regarded as the most effective treatment for neuropathic pain. However, it is effective for only roughly 30 percent of patients, and even in those people it only provides about 30 percent relief of the pain, he said.

The explanation for neuropathic pain, research shows, is that following injury neurons may be lost, or central nervous system circuitry may change, in ways that are maladaptive, compromising signals that normally help dampen pain. These changes contribute to a state of hyper-excitability, enhancing the transmission of pain messages to the brain and causing normally innocuous stimuli to become painful.

The inhibitory neurons that are damaged in the spinal cord to cause pain hypersensitivity release a molecule that normally transmits inhibitory signals -- the neurotransmitter GABA. A loss of GABA inhibition also is implicated in epilepsy and may play a role in Parkinson's disease. Gabapentin does not mimic GABA, but it helps to compensate for the loss of inhibition that GABA normally would provide.

Basbaum's UCSF colleagues, including study co-authors Arturo Alvarez-Buylla, PhD, and Arnold Kriegstein, MD, PhD, along with Scott Baraban, PhD, had already been experimenting with transplanting immature neurons that make GABA, using the transplanted neurons to bolster inhibitory signals in mouse models to prevent epileptic seizures and to combat a Parkinson's-like disease.

However, in those experiments the cells -- which originate in a region of the forebrain known as the medial ganglionic eminence -- were transplanted within the brain itself, which is their normal home.

Upon hearing about the research, Basbaum became interested in transplanting the same cells into the spinal cord as a potential treatment for the loss of GABA-driven inhibition in neuropathic pain. Success was by no means assured, as cells normally do not survive outside their natural environments within such a complex organism.

Another co-author of the Neuron study, UCSF researcher John Rubenstein, PhD, has made major progress in identifying molecules that can be manipulated to lead an embryonic stem cell to go through developmental stages that cause it to acquire the properties of GABA neurons that derive from the medial ganglionic eminence.

According to Kriegstein, who directs the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCSF, "This research is at a very early stage, and we're a long way from thinking about it in human trials, but we do have a method of making cells that are like these inhibitory neurons, starting with human embryonic stem cells."

As a step toward eventual therapies, the UCSF team plans to graft fetal human cells from the medial ganglionic eminence, or cells derived from human embryonic stem cells, into a rodent model of neuropathic pain, to see if the human cells also will alleviate neuropathic chronic pain.

"Unlike drugs, the transplanted cells can have very focused effects, depending on where they are transplanted," Kriegstein said.

According to Alvarez-Buylla, a leading scientist among those working to define the potentialities of various cells in the developing brain at different stages, "One of the amazing properties of these cells from the medial ganglionic eminence is their unprecedented migratory capacity, which enables them to navigate through multiple terrains within the central nervous system, and to then become functionally integrated with other cells. Those properties have proved useful in other places where we have transplanted them, and now in the spinal cord."

Joao Braz, PhD, an assistant research scientist, and Reza Sharif-Naieni, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow, both working in the Basbaum laboratory, carried out the bulk of the experiments published in Neuron. The authors have a patent pending on the treatment outlined in the study.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Association for the Study of Pain and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.