{"id":8233,"date":"2013-05-10T11:00:50","date_gmt":"2013-05-10T10:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/ofschemesandmemes\/?p=8233"},"modified":"2013-05-10T15:10:55","modified_gmt":"2013-05-10T14:10:55","slug":"best-of-nature-com-blogs-scilogs-com-and-scitable-4-10-may","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/ofschemesandmemes\/2013\/05\/10\/best-of-nature-com-blogs-scilogs-com-and-scitable-4-10-may","title":{"rendered":"Best of nature.com blogs, SciLogs.com and Scitable: 4 \u2013 10 May"},"content":{"rendered":"

NASA astrophysicists seek ideas for the next 30 years<\/strong><\/p>\n

Alexandra Witze<\/a>\u00a0reports in the News Blog<\/a>,\u00a0one NASA advisory group is going for the long haul: between now and December it intends to draw up \u201ca compelling, 30-year vision\u201d for NASA\u2019s\u00a0astrophysics division<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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{credit}NASA\/ESA\/SAO\/CXC\/JPL-CALTECH\/STSCI{\/credit}<\/p><\/div>\n

This might seem like overkill, given that astronomers already perform \u201cdecadal surveys\u201d every 10 years to prioritize future missions. In fact, the\u00a0latest decadal survey<\/a>\u00a0came out just three years ago, with a midterm review due to start two years from now. The new\u00a0 \u2018roadmap\u2019 isn\u2019t meant to replace the decadal survey process, says NASA\u2019s Paul Hertz, head of the astrophysics division. \u201cWhat the roadmap does is it looks out 30 years and provides a vision of what astrophysics might do,\u201d he told a virtual town-hall meeting on 6 May.<\/em><\/p>\n

In other words, more of a wish list than a prioritizing document. Chryssa Kouveliotou, an astrophysicist at NASA\u2019s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, is heading up the road map under the auspices of a NASA advisory council subcommittee. In late February, her team\u00a0put out a call<\/a>\u00a0for astronomers to submit one-page abstracts of what they considered the biggest science and technology goals and challenges for NASA astrophysics in the next three decades. Oh, and the deadline was just one month later.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More details in\u00a0Alexandra’s\u00a0post.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Show, Don\u2019t Tell:
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

In this week’s Soapbox Science guest post,<\/a>\u00a0Dan Drollette talks about the human side of research:<\/p>\n

\"Thumb_Dan_Drollette_Hawaii\"<\/a>\u00a0I recently discovered one of the most thrilling \u2013 and terrifying \u2013 parts of getting a book published by a traditional, large, old-line print house: reading the reviews.<\/em><\/p>\n

Most of the time they contain good and thoughtful insights about the thing you have sweated over for years. On rare occasions, you wonder how in the world the reviewer ever came up with their conclusions. Rarer still, sometimes a reviewer really connects with the content on a profoundly deep level, to the point where you want to stand up, cheer, and shout aloud \u201cThat\u2019s why I did this!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The latter feeling came over me after reading a review of a nonfiction book I wrote,\u00a0\u201cGold Rush in the Jungle: The Race to Discover and Defend the Rarest Animals of Vietnam\u2019s \u2018Lost World,<\/a>\u2019 \u201d by Christie Wilcox of Discover Magazine. Wilcox said she related so strongly to the protagonists that it made her cry in public.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Share your\u00a0experiences\u00a0in Dan’s post.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Quantum computer passes speed test<\/strong><\/p>\n

The world\u2019s only commercially-available quantum computer has faced much controversy about whether it is actually faster or better than a conventional computer.\u00a0Nicola Jones<\/a>\u00a0reveals in the\u00a0News Blog<\/a>, that a\u00a0new independent speed test helps to answer that question:<\/p>\n

In short: the D-Wave quantum computer is thousands of times faster than other commercial computers at the very specific problem it was designed to solve. The computer is above-average or slower on other types of problems, and, importantly, it is still not clear if the speed advantage will scale up as the computer gets bigger. That would be necessary to fulfil one of the big promises of quantum computing: making otherwise-intractable problems solvable.<\/em><\/p>\n

Catherine McGeoch, a computer science professor and algorithm-speed-tester at Amherst College in Massachusetts, was asked by D-Wave, a quantum computer company based near Vancouver, Canada, to put the company\u2019s latest quantum computer through its paces. This was not an easy thing to do. The D-Wave device operates differently from other computers, not just because it uses quantum bits that exploit fuzzy quantum behaviour to speed up calculations, but also because it doesn\u2019t use logic gates to perform operations. Instead it does something called \u2018annealing\u2019, where an answer is arrived at by looking for the lowest energy state of the bits in the computer chip. \u201cIt\u2019s like comparing apples and oranges, or apples and fish,\u201d says McGeoch.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dream Catcher: The Neuroscience Behind Decoding Dreams<\/strong><\/p>\n

Over at Scitable, guest blogger Mark Stokes <\/a>looks at how scientists are beginning to decode dreams:<\/p>\n

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{credit}Image credit: fMRI scan by Martin Hieslmair of Ars Electronica {\/credit}<\/p><\/div>\n

Freud described dreams as the royal road to the unconscious. Mystics and soothsayers have been interpreting dreams for millennia. Now scientists from Japan\u00a0have demonstrated<\/a>\u00a0first-time proof-of-principle that non-invasive brain scanning can be used to decode the content of dreams.<\/em><\/p>\n

Over the last ten years, developments in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have allowed researchers to map the phenomena of mind to patterns of neural activity in the brain with increasing precision. Essentially, fMRI allows us to measure patterns of brain activity, which can be decoded using sophisticated machine-learning statistical algorithms. This approach provides a unique opportunity to peer into the private subjective contents of thought, but the idea of reading dreams takes fMRI mind-reading to an exciting new level.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So how did they do it? Find out in Mark’s post.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Measuring the Unmeasurable<\/strong><\/p>\n

SciLogs blogger\u00a0Tania Browne<\/a>, asks in her\u00a0latest post<\/a>, “How the heck do you measure health?”<\/p>\n

How healthy are we?” Is a big, hazy question that’s hard to out your finger on. You might as well ask people what love means, or whether they believe in unicorns.<\/em><\/p>\n

But if you start narrowing down your definitions a bit, it becomes quite a simple task – who do you mean by “we”? “How healthy” in what terms? Whether we have gum disease? Diabetes? Chicken pox? When we’re statistically likely to die? In epidemiology we have a series of basic definitions that help us get to grips with the really big questions.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Hear Tania’s thoughts in the post <\/a>and share your own too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NASA astrophysicists seek ideas for the next 30 years  … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-round-up"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/ofschemesandmemes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/ofschemesandmemes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/ofschemesandmemes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/ofschemesandmemes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/ofschemesandmemes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/ofschemesandmemes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/ofschemesandmemes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/ofschemesandmemes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/ofschemesandmemes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}