A recent breakthrough at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania is set to make the spastic and jerky movements of robots a thing of the past. Using animals for inspiration, researchers have genetically engineered muscle cells to flex in response to light. The breakthrough could result in the creation of highly articulated robots that move with the grace of real creatures, while also giving them similar levels of strength.

Rebecca Boyle of PopSci reports:

This is the first time tough, powerful skeletal muscle has been modified to react to light. Optogenetics researchers have done it with cardiac cells, which are already primed to beat on their own - now skeletal muscle, which normally requires some outside stimulus, can contract and expand at the command of light bursts. Harry Asada, an engineering professor at MIT, said it's more effective and less bulky than stimulating muscle with electrodes, especially for a robotics system where light weight and mobility are key.

Optogenetics entails introducing new genes into cells that make them react to a pulse of light, usually short bursts of laser light. Asada's team worked with myoblasts, cultures of skeletal muscle cells, to express a light-activated protein. They combined several myoblasts into long muscle fibers and exposed them to 20-millisecond pulses of blue light. In the video [above], the blue dot represents the pulses, and you can see the fibers contract in response. A targeted burst of light makes one fiber contract, while a more diffuse beam can make the whole sheet move.

Be sure to check out Boyle's entire article.

Details of the study can be found at the journal Lab on a Chip.

As the most intelligent and technologically advanced species on Earth, we humans like to think that we own the place. But evolutionary success can be measured any number of ways. As evolutionary biologist Stephen G. Gould once noted, complexity, intelligence, and ferocity don't count for much in the long run — adaptability and reproductive success matter more. With that in mind, here are the eight most prolific and versatile organisms that rule our planet.

Photo by Alex Wild.

1. Bacteria

There's no question that bacteria is the killer app of nature. In fact, a number of biologists have suggested that we actually live in the Age of Bacteria. And indeed, bacteria can be found virtually everywhere, including soil, acidic hot springs, radioactive waste, water, and deep within the Earth's crust. A large prokaryotic microorganism, bacteria is best understood as a domain of organisms rather than a distinct species, so it's worth breaking them down into smaller groups. Take, E. coli for example. Over the course of life, there will be more E. coli living in the gut of each human being than the total number of people who have ever lived. And according to Lynn Margulis, "Fully 10 percent of our own dry body weight consists of bacteria, some of which, although they are not a congenital part of our bodies, we can't live without." Another particularly prolific type of bacteria is cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae. It's been known to dwell in a diverse range of habitats and take on extremophile characteristics. But no classification of bacteria compares to the SAR11 clade, a bacteria that that lives on the surface of oceans. Its population has been estimated at an unfathomable 2.4 x 10²⁸ individuals, making it the most successful organism on the planet.

2. Phytoplankton

Phytoplankton are microscopic organisms that blanket the surface of most oceans and bodies of fresh water. A subset of the larger plankton community, they cannot be seen with the unaided eye, but because they exist in such large numbers they can actually discolor large expanses of water. These tiny autotrophic critters account for half of all photosynthetic activity on Earth — which, when considering how many plants exist on the planet, is nothing short of astounding. As a result, they are integral to the planet's oxygen supply. They also drive the 'biological pump' that converts 100 million tonnes of atmospheric carbon dioxide a day into organic material. Phytoplankton also serve as the base for the aquatic food web, offering themselves a readily available meal for baleen whales. In terms of numbers, there are over 5,000 known species — but because new ones keep getting discovered, it's difficult to put an exact number on them. And disturbingly, their numbers are decreasing at a rate of 10% a year, likely on account of climate change.

3. Ants

Emerging from wasp-like ancestors over 130 million years ago, ants have become the most successful terrestrial macro-scale species this planet has ever seen. Often considered a superorganism on account of their hive-mind composition, their evolutionary success has been attributed to their highly coordinated social organization, an ability to modify habitats, exploit resources, and defend themselves. Nearly 12,500 species have been identified, but it's thought that as many as 22,000 species may actually exist. Ants have also colonized virtually every landmass on Earth, and may comprise anywhere from 15 to 25% of the total terrestrial animal biomass. Put another way, there are more ants on this planet by weight than all humans combined. In terms of numbers, E. O. Wilson has estimated that there are 10,000 trillion individual ants alive at any given moment.

4. Beetles

Coleoptera, what are commonly called beetles, includes more species than any other insect order, constituting almost 25% of all known life-forms. They make up about 40% of all known insect species (about 400,000 in total) and comprise about 500 recognized families and subfamilies. Actually, it's probably even more than that; it has been estimated that there may be as many as one million different beetle species. Highly adaptable, beetles can be found in all major habitats (except marine and polar regions), and are non-specialist detritus feeders — a generalized adaptation that allows them to break down animal and plant debris — including waste and fungi.

5. Termites

Another social insect, termites are members of the Isoptera order, and contrary to belief are only distantly related to ants (they're actually more closely related to beetles). Like ants, they are eusocial insects that divide their labor among castes and take care of their young collectively. There are an estimated 4,000 species of termites, and colonies can contain anywhere from hundreds to millions of individuals. And as many of us tragically know, they are insatiable devours of wood — but their ability to recycle wood and other plant matter has made them an indelible component of the biosphere. It has been estimated that termites cause around $22 billion in structural damage annually around the world. Termites are so prolific that they're actually being considered as a potential renewable fuel source by the U.S. Department of Energy on account of their ability to produce copious amounts of hydrogen.

6. Grass

Simply put, grass is the most dominant form of vegetation on the planet. Among the most versatile life forms on Earth, grasses have adapted to conditions in rain forests, deserts, mountains and even intertidal habitats. They are now the most widespread plant on the planet, and as a consequence, have become a primary food source for all sorts of wildlife. Also known as graminoids, there may be as many as 3,500 different species. Grass has also benefited from humans, owing to our love for lush lawns, parks, and playing fields.

7. Cockroaches

Originally a tropical insect, cockroaches have adapted disturbingly well to human civilization. Though not as prolific as some of the other creatures on this list, cockroaches are incredibly hardy and resilient. Some species are capable of remaining active for months without food and are able to survive on limited resources — including glue from the back of postage stamps. Some cockroaches can even go without air for up to 45 minutes. And as for the old adage that cockroaches can survive a nuclear holocaust, there may be some truth to it. Because their cells divide only once each time it molts, it has a higher radiation resistance than most vertebrates, capable of withstanding a dose six to 15 times that which a human could endure.

8. Rats

Rats are probably the most resilient mammal on the planet — and like the cockroach, they have benefited from human activity. Known as commensals (opportunistic survivors that have taken full advantage of urban environments), rats, or more accurately the brown rat, will eat almost anything. They can live in a wide variety of habitats, and are expert jumpers, climbers, and swimmers. They can produce up to five litters per year, each one containing anywhere from six to 22 young. In fact, a single pair of rats can multiply to 200 in just one year. It's thought that there are billions of rats on this planet, making them the most successful mammal (excepting humans). They're also hard to kill — and are becoming increasingly immune to poisons. In fact, genetic mutations are so pronounced in some populations that their DNA has become irrevocably altered.

Images: Alexander Raths/Shutterstock.com, Michael Rappe, SOEST/UHM, Gordon T. Taylor/Stony Brook University, Gail Shumway/Guardian, Larson Morgan, Alfredo Flores/USDA Forest Service, eddard.com, literatureandtravels, capitaldragons.

An international team of scientists working at European HARPS have announced the discovery of a large rocky planet residing within the stellar habitable zone of the red dwarf star Gliese 163. That increases the number of known potentially habitable planets to six — the majority of which have been discovered in the past year.

To better understand the significance of the discovery, we contacted Abel Méndez, an Associate Professor of Physics and Astrobiology in the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo. Méndez told us that the detection of Earth-like worlds is pacing up — and that there's likely a lot more to come. "There are more observatories dedicated to these types of searches, "he told io9, "and many of them now have the required sensitivity to find these potentially habitable planets."

Considered a superterran, or "super-Earth", the exoplanet is being called Gliese 163c. Located at the reasonable distance of 50 light years from Earth in the Dorado constellation, it is no smaller than 6.9 Earth masses and requires only 26 days to orbit its star.

That said, the HARPS astronomers speculate that Gliese 163c might be significantly smaller, about 1.8 to 2.3 Earth radii — but that will depend on subsequent analyses to detect its composition, most notably its rock and water content. It also receives on average about 40% more light from its parent star than the Sun, making it considerably hotter than Earth.

Méndez and the rest of the team at HARPS aren't sure what the atmosphere is like, but they suspect that it's a scaled up version of Earth's — giving it a surface temperature around 60°C. Most organisms on Earth cannot withstand temperatures above 50°C, but we know of many forms of extremophilic microbial life forms can thrive at those temperatures or higher.

Gliese 163c is now the sixth potentially habitable planet catalogued by Méndez, a list that includes four that orbit a red dwarf (Gliese 581d, Gliese 667Cc, Gliese 581g, and now Gliese 163c), one around a K-Star (HD 85512), and one around a Sun-like star (Kepler-22b). Méndez told us that upwards of 40% of red dwarf stars may have habitable planets. "Gliese 163c is now part of this statistic," he said, "but there should be many more waiting to be discovered."

That said, Méndez believes it still qualifies as an important object of inquiry as far as astrobiology is concerned. "Gliese 163c ranks fifth in our current list of six potentially habitable exoplanets because it is nearly twice the size of Earth and its temperature is also higher," he told io9, "but it's still an object of interest for the search of biosignatures by future observatories."

Gliese 163c was discovered by the European HARPS team led by Xavier Bonfils from the UJF-Grenoble/CNRS-INSU, Institut de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique of Grenoble, France. The paper is not yet available online, but the authors say it'll be available to the general public in about two weeks. The title of the paper is "The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets⋆ XXXX. A planetary system around the nearby M dwarf GJ 163, with a super-Earth in the habitable zone." It was submitted to the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

We will update this page once the paper has been posted online.

All images via PHL @ UPR Arecibo.

It would now appear that cuckoo birds are not the only animal that has the nasty habit of laying its eggs in another animal's nest. A newly discovered species of bee has been observed to invade the nests of other bees while they're out collecting pollen. It's during this opportune time that the female members of these newly dubbed "cuckoo bees" lay their eggs in the hive. And because invader eggs hatch early, the immature bees are able to get rid of the host bee eggs — leaving the pollen and nectar reserves for themselves.

The discovery of the five new species of parasitic bees was made in in the Republic of Cape Verde by Jakub Straka of Charles University in Prague and Michael S. Engel of the University of Kansas. The islands are about 570 kilometers off the west coast of Africa, home to an abundant array of species — many of which have not yet been discovered. And in fact, there have only been 10 scientific expeditions to these islands in the past 150 years.

The cuckoo bees are zebra-like in appearance, featuring mostly black-and-white patterns. Some of the bees are actually quite large, including C. batelkai which measures 5 mm in length (compared to the others which range around 3.2 to 4.2 mm). The scientists believe that this is a classic example of "island gigantism" — an evolutionary effect where a the size of an animal isolated on an island environment dramatically increases over time relative to their mainland relatives.

The researchers are now hoping to explore the diversity of the cuckoo bees' hosts and get a better sesne of their evolutionary diversification across the archipelago.

Citation: Straka J, Engel MS (2012) The apid cuckoo bees of the Cape Verde Islands (Hymenoptera, Apidae). ZooKeys 218: 77. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.218.3683.

All images via Dr. Jakub Straka & Dr. Michael S. Engel.

A retired civil servant living in Plymouth, England, recently decided to figure out once and for all why there was a dip in the floor underneath his sofa. After three days of work, and much to his amazement, he discovered that the house he had been living in for the past 25 years was built on top of a 33 foot medieval well dating back to the 16th century. Donna Bowater of the Telegraph reports:

Mr Steer managed to excavate it using a rope to carry out the debris with the help of a friend before discovering an old sword.

"It was hidden at a 45 degree angle and sort of just fell out. It looks like an old peasant's fighting weapon because it appears to be made up of bits of metal all knocked together," he added.

According to Mr Steer's research, the land on which his house in Mannamead Road now stands was woodland until 1895, with Drake's leat running through it.

The watercourse was built in the 16th century by Sir Francis Drake to carry water from Dartmoor to Plymouth.

He said: "I've been doing lots of research into its history but I'd like to try and find someone to date it.

"I love the well and think it's fascinating. I'd love to find out who was here before us. I've got a piece of Plymouth's history in my front room."

Looking at the inset image, I love how Steer has covered the top of the well with a glass enclosed trap door. His wife looks thrilled.

Images via Telegraph/SWNS.

Researchers working at MIT have successfully manipulated the content of a rat's dream by replaying an audio cue that was associated with the previous day's events, namely running through a maze (what else). The breakthrough furthers our understanding of how memory gets consolidated during sleep — but it also holds potential for the prospect of "dream engineering."

Working at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, neuroscientist Matt Wilson was able to accomplish this feat by exploiting the way the brain's hippocampus encodes self-experienced events into memory. Scientists know that our hippocampus is busy at work replaying a number of the day's events while we sleep — a process that's crucial for memory consolidation. But what they did not know was whether or not these "replays" could be influenced by environmental cues.

To see if this could be done, Wilson and his team trained a group of rats to run through a maze using two distinct audio cues. The rats quickly learned that the tones were helpful; one sound indicated that food could be found by going left, while the other sound indicated that a food reward awaited them on the right. And while the rats were doing this, the neuroscientists were recording their neural activity.

Later, while the rats were sleeping, the researchers once again recorded the neural activity of their brains. Using correlative analysis, Wilson confirmed that the rats were dreaming of their maze navigating exploits from the day before.

But when the researchers played the audio cues from the experiment, they noticed a very interesting thing: the rats would dream about the section of the maze previously associated with the audio cue. The experiment demonstrated that the content of a rat's dream can be biased by re-activating certain memories while they're asleep.

Looking ahead, the researchers believe that this simple example of dream engineering could open up the possibility of more extensive control of memory processing during sleep — and even the notion that selected memories could be either enhanced, blocked, or modified. Wilson is also aiming to develop new approaches to learning and behavioral therapy through similar kinds of cognitive manipulation.

Check out the entire study at Nature Neuroscience.

Image Fer Gregory/Shutterstock.com.

Several weeks ago, 23-year old Kim Suozzi asked the Reddit community what she should do with the last few months of her life. Suozzi, who has terminal brain cancer, is only expected to live for another three to six months, making her request all the more urgent. Among the many responses received, Suozzi was particularly intrigued by the suggestion that she have herself cryonically preserved. Her ensuing interest in the possibility instigated a firestorm of debate in Reddit and other online communities. But at the same time it also inspired a group of futurists to set up a charity to help Suozzi afford the expensive procedure — and it looks like they just might help her do it.

Top image courtesy Christopher Barnatt/ExplainingTheFuture.

Suozzi, who has recurrent glioblastoma multiforme, turned to Reddit in an effort to raise some money. Indeed, cryonics contracts are not cheap — an expense that can cost upwards of $35,000. "I want to be cryogenically preserved when I die from brain cancer but can't afford it," she wrote in an updated post, "I am literally begging for financial help."

But in addition to asking for financial assistance, Suozzi has had to go out of her way to explain herself and her seemingly controversial decision.

"I know this is a big thing to ask for, and I'm sure many people are doubtful that preservation is plausible with cryonics," she wrote, "I'm far from convinced, but I would rather take the chance with preservation than rot in the ground or get cremated."

Suozzi's effort to be cryonically preserved has subsequently created considerable turmoil in her family. "I can tell I've alienated them quite a bit as they are Christian and don't see why I'd want to be preserved; in their mind, I am going to heaven and my "soul" will forever leave my body when I die anyway," she wrote, "I clearly upset both of them with the implication that I was agnostic (I didn't say this outright, but it's true)."

And just to make herself clear, Suozzi has made it known that she's not completely sold on cryopreservation. "I am aware of the problems with the current state of cryonics, but I have the hope that technology might come up with a solution in the future," she said, "No one knows what technology will be available in 50 years. Yes, it takes 'faith' in technology, but it takes faith to assume that technology won't be sufficient to reverse these problems someday."

To that end, Suozzi has adopted the personal slogan, "Live again or die trying."

Soon after Suozzi's posting, a cryonics-friendly futurist group called Society for Venturism set up a charitable fund in an effort to help. The group's mission is "To advocate and promote the worldwide conquest of death and the continuation and enhancement of life through technological means, including cryonic suspension." The current fund is the fourth cryonics charity case launched by the group — efforts which have led to two successful cryopreservations.

And over the course of just one week (August 25 to 31) the group managed to raise an astounding $27,000 — a sizeable portion of which came from the Life Extension Foundation which contributed $10,000. The Society for Venturism is hoping to raise another $8,000 to ensure that all costs get covered, including standby and transportation.

Independant of this, Suozzi has raised $2,100 through her efforts on Reddit — so given all this momentum, it appears that she may very well get her wish.

Those looking to help can donate here.

Shulamith Firestone, author of the highly influential The Dialectic of Sex, has died at the age of 67. A major figure in the development of cyberfeminism, Firestone will be remembered for her promotion of artificial wombs and other reproductive technologies as a means for women to liberate themselves from biological impositions and patriarchal oppression. She died on August 28 in her Manhattan apartment of natural causes.

Top image by Mondolithic Studios.

Born in Ottawa on January 7, 1945, Firestone was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in St. Louis, Missouri. During the 1960s she studied fine arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and moved to New York City in 1967 where she co-founded New York Radical Women, the Redstockings group, and New York Radical Feminists.

In 1970, at the age of 25, Firestone wrote The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution — a book that effectively kickstarted the cyberfeminist movement, influencing later thinkers like Joanna Russ (author of "The Female Man"), sci-fi author Joan Slonczweski, and of course, Donna "I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess" Harraway, author of "The Cyborg Manifesto." To come up with her unique feminist philosophy, Firestone took 19th and 20th century socialist thinking and fused it with Freudian psychoanalysis and the existentialist perspectives of Simone de Beauvoir.

Essentially, Firestone argued that gender inequality was the result of a patriarchal social structure that had been imposed upon women on account of their necessary role as incubators. She argued that pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing imposed physical, social, and psychological disadvantages upon women. Firestone believed that the only way for women to free themselves from these biological impositions would be to seize control of reproduction.

To that end, she advocated for the development of cybernetic and assistive reproductive technologies, including artificial wombs, gender selection, and in vitro fertilization (the latter two now being in existence). In addition, she also advocated for the dissemination of contraception, abortion, and state support for child-rearing. It would be through these "revolts" and transformations that women could eliminate the presence of sexual classes. Firestone wrote:

[The] end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. (A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality Freud's 'polymorphous perversity' - would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.) The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would born to both sexes equally, or independently of. either, however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally.

The division of labor (and labor altogether) would be ended through cybernetics, she argued, so that the "tyranny of the biological family would be broken."

Not a fan of traditional biological human reproduction, Firestone described pregnancy as "barbaric," and noted how a friend of hers described labor to "shitting a pumpkin."

Modern feminists have largely turned a blind eye to Firestone and the role of technology in feminist discourse, but her influence can still be seen today in such things as transhumanism and the rise of postgenderist theory.

Soon after the publication of Dialectics, Firestone excused herself from public life and largely disappeared from the scene. In 1998 she published her book, Airless Spaces, in which she detailed her struggles with schizophrenia. Firestone became reclusive in her later years, dying alone in her apartment. She is survived by her mother, two brothers, and two sisters.

Over the course of its 69-year history, the Soviet Union was notorious for its heavy-handed suppression of political dissent — most infamously through its use of the Siberian GULAGs. But it was during the 1960s and 1970s that the Communist Party took their intolerance for ideological deviance to extremes by diagnosing and institutionalizing so-called counterrevolutionaries with mental illness. It was a frightening episode in Soviet history in which perfectly healthy citizens could be deemed psychotic simply on account of their political views.

And indeed, what better way to deal with activists and naysayers than to diagnose them as being mentally unstable. Dissenters, who were often seen as both a burden and a threat to the system, could be easily discredited and detained.

Moreover, it served as a powerful and disturbing way to convince the masses that they needed to adhere to the party line — and that any deviant thinking was surely a sign of mental instability. As Nikita Khrushchev noted in 1959, it should be impossible for people in a communist society to have an anti-communist consciousness, and "Of those who might start calling for opposition to Communism on this basis, we can say that clearly their mental state is not normal."

Consequently, it was around this time that Soviet definitions of mental disease were expanded to include political disobedience. But in the end, all it ever amounted to was a form of political abuse and repression. Anti-Soviet activists were not mentally ill — but instead the victims of politically inspired pseudoscience and the misuse of psychiatric diagnosis.

"Politically defined madness"

The advent of Soviet psychoprisons coincided with the rise in power and influence of the KGB, the infamous secret service wing of the Communist Party. They started to take an interest in medicine as a potential instrument of control as early as 1948 under the Stalin regime. The use of GULAGs was starting to fall out of favor, so it was around this time that the high-ranking KGB officer Andrey Vyshinsky ordered the use of psychiatry as a way to both quash dissent and still send a message to any would-be activists.

Indeed, psychiatry had great potential as a control mechanism — more so than other areas of medicine. The Communist Party was eager to take advantage. They knew that a diagnosis of mental illness could confer them broad powers by allowing them to detain persons against their will conduct therapy — all while proclaiming it to be within the interest of the "patient" and the broader interests of society.

Called psikhushkas, Soviet psychiatric wards were a place where dissenters could be both confined and treated for their perceived conditions. Psikhushkas soon became an integral part of the larger psychiatric system, in which genuine psychiatric science worked in parallel with the politically imposed version. To a degree, it became part of a two-tiered system in which psychiatry was used as a form of political repression (primarily operating out of the Moscow Institute for Forensic Psychiatry) and a more genuine psychiatry (as practiced in the Leningrad Psychoneurological Institute). Once in full swing, the new system became integrated in hundreds of hospitals across the Soviet Union.

The campaign adopted a greater sense of mission during the late 1960s when open dissention started to become more commonplace, most notably through the agitation of such thinkers and activists as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. KBG chairman Yuri Andropov, who went on to become Premier, called for a renewed struggle against "dissidents and their imperialist masters." To that end he outlined and implemented a plan that went into effect in 1969. Looking to wipe out political dissent in the Soviet Union once and for all, Andropov made sure that psychiatry would continue to be used as a tool in the struggle.

Specifically, he issued a decree on "measures for preventing dangerous behavior (acts) on the part of mentally ill persons." Consequently, psychiatrists were both empowered and expected to diagnose and confine anyone who fit the description of a political agitator. Doctors were even told to "haul" or "entrap" suspected dissenters, thus making them not only de facto arresting officers, but interrogators as well. Psychiatrists were compelled to come-up with diagnoses, allowing the police and the state to forego inconveniences such as due process and court judgments (such that they were at the time).

Sluggish schizophrenia

That said, Soviet doctors did use formal procedures to diagnoses their patients. The state, with the help of some overzealous psychiatrists, was considerate enough to provide a list of symptoms that could be used to make a diagnosis.

The most common of these was a condition called "sluggish schizophrenia," a psychological disorder that was developed by Andrei Snezhnevsky at the Moscow School of Psychiatry. Snezhnevsky agreed with the Communist Party's sentiment that citizens who opposed the Soviet regime must be mentally unwell since there could be no other logical rationale why anyone would oppose the world's greatest sociopolitical system.

Consequently, he came up with a form of schizophrenia that not only characterized political deviance as a failure to properly grasp reality, but one that could very easily be applied to anyone exhibiting contrarian tendencies. Specifically, they described it as "a continuous type [of schizophrenia] that is defined as unremitting, proceeding with either a rapid ("malignant") or a slow ("sluggish") progression and has a poor prognosis in both instances."

In other words, it was a pervasive, subtle, and pernicious kind of schizophrenia that couldn't be cured. Moreover, psychotic symptoms were not required for the diagnosis. Psychiatrists were told to look for other underlying conditions, such as psychopathy, hypochondria, and anxiety. But they were also on the lookout for such socially reprehensible traits like pessimism, poor social adaptation, conflict with authorities, "reform delusions," perseverance, and "struggles for truth and justice" — traits that could, on their own, be sufficient for a diagnosis.

According to Snezhnevsky, patients with sluggish schizophrenia could go unnoticed by the untrained eye and pass for regular folk — that they were "quasi-sane." It was only through a proper diagnosis by a trained professional that they could be identified.

In reality, it was a tool to isolate and imprison hundreds or thousands of political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally. It was nothing less than torture.

The imprisoned

The human toll inflicted by Soviet psychoprisons is one that's largely lost in history, but significant nonetheless. Some survivors, such as Viktor Nekipelov, have gone on to suggest that the those involved were "no better than the criminal doctors who performed inhuman experiments on the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps."

Other prominent dissidents included renowned Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, poet Joseph Brodsky, Pyotr Grigorenko, Valery Tarsis, and Natalya Gorbanevskaya.

As for the exact scale of the practice, it is difficult to discern the numbers — but as work by historians continues a picture is starting to emerge.

According to the archives of the International Association on the Political Use of Psychiatry, no less than 20,000 citizens were hospitalized for political reasons — a number that most historians agree is likely low on account of unreleased documentation (there are a lot of people alive today who could be badly implicated by this information).

What is known is that, with the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, the practice was (mostly) discontinued, leading to the release of many political prisoners. The year 1986 saw the release of 19 prisoners, followed by 64 in 1987. In 1988, it was announced that, of the 5.5 million Soviets listed on the psychiatric register, over 30% would be taken off the list. A year later the number was revised and shown to be closer to 10.2 million people registered at "psychoneurological dispensaries" — along with a whopping 335,200 hospital beds set aside.

And sadly, the practice has not gone completely out of favor in today's Russia, with some concerned that punitive psychiatry is making a comeback.

Disturbing episode for all of psychiatry

While it might be easy to dismiss this chapter of Soviet history as an interesting consequence of totalitarian and authoritarian politics, it also serves as a disturbing reminder of the normative nature of psychiatry and the assessment of psychiatric disorders. Mental health is a culturally sanctioned thing. Our definitions of mental health change over time depending on the values and morals of the society in question.

Today, our concerns are with those people who pose a threat to themselves and impose a burden on society, and in turn we've come to pathologize such things as gambling, depression, anxiety, and overeating. Looking to the future, it's not ridiculous to think we might do the same for shyness, extreme religious beliefs, or racial bigotry. But given the diversity of human culture and individual experience, could we ever in all fairness agree upon and impose a singular vision of what's mentally normal?

Sources: Here, here, here, here, here, here, here. Images: mi9.

They say that turnabout is fair play. And indeed, after all the talk that Oscar Pistorius's prosthetic Cheetah's were giving him an unfair advantage against normal functioning athletes, it would appear that he has himself become the victim of an opponent with a technological edge.

This past Sunday September 2 at the Paralympic Games in London, Pistorius was defeated by Brazilian runner Alan Oliveira in the 200-meter dash. Pistorius quickly lashed back, accusing Oliveira of using carbonfibre prosthetic limbs that were four inches higher than they should be. But according to the IPC, Fonteles's artificial legs were completely within spec.

Pistorius has since apologized, but insists that it's an issue that needs to be addressed.

Andy Miah, Director of the Creative Futures Institute at the University of the West of Scotland, had this to say about the incident:

The big question emerging from the race last night is whether the Paralympic rules within the T43 200m race need to be tighter. It's normal that a past winner should face young challengers and that they should eventually dethrone the champion. However, this looks like an unusual win and the concerns have been raised by other Paralympians about athletes adjusting their blade dimensions.

If Oliveira's prosthetic legs are bigger and better and legal, then Pistorius really ought to get some. If his body height precludes this and the only reason why Alan Fonteles Oliveira has longer blades is that he is taller, then Pistorius has been beaten by a more biologically privileged athlete. However, there might be an argument to divide athletes by height as well as disability – and this is something I've argued should be applied not just to Paralympic sport, but also the Olympics. In the same way that we separate athletes in weight divisions, height also has a huge impact on likely achievements.

He concludes:

The deeper issue underpinning this debate is what counts as a legitimate human within either Olympic and Paralympic sport. This is why the fall of Oscar Pistorius is more important than the fall of any other athlete before him, even Lance Armstrong. This is because Pistorius symbolizes the rise of the cyborg and the demise of the natural human. If his loss yesterday was fair, two conclusions are possible. Either, there are more like him coming and this will spark a tidal wave of change within Olympic and Paralympic sport, but, more broadly, in how society perceives ability. If his loss was unfair, then we may ask whether it is ok to transcend the normal human body and change people in a way that bears no resemblance to species typical norms. Either way, the debacle is a step forward for a transhuman view of sport, the only sure winner of which is technology. Just in case this is unclear, I think this is good for sport, as it exposes what has been there under the surface for some time. In fact, as the technology progresses to the nanoscale, our reinforcements – our prosthetics – will become imperceptible to the naked eye.

Images via Reuters.

A three-year-old female black labrador cross named Migaloo has become the world's first trained archeology dog. Working with Brisbane dog expert Gary Jackson, she is expected to help archeologists uncover ancient grave sites across Australia. And looking to the future, it's expected that Migaloo and other archeology dogs will work on excavations at ancient civilisation sites in Egypt, the Americas, Asia, and Europe.

And it's all because of the nose. Dogs have a sense of smell that's thousands of times more sensitive than a human's, allowing them to detect even the faintest of odors lying beneath the surface. For archeology dogs, this means looking for bones. To that end, Migaloo was trained for six months, completing a curriculum that included field trials and a final search test in which she was expected to uncover a 250-year-old skeletal remain from a native burial site.

More impressively, Migaloo recently set a world record for the oldest bone discovered by a dog — a 600-year-old human bone buried 2 meters (6.6 feet) underground. Her accomplishment beat the previous record by 425 years — a remarkable achievement that also demonstrated the potential for dogs to locate very old bones at fairly reasonable depths.

Peter Michael of the Courier-Mail reports:

Dogs are known to have such sophisticated olfactory senses they can detect cancer or smell seizures in people, sniff out mobile phones in prisons, or help in therapy, find lost children, criminals, explosives, drugs or people buried under an avalanche of snow, he said.

"We can all see the potential commercial applications in finding animal or human remains going back hundreds and thousands of years, it is just astounding.

"Look at the money that goes into archaeological digs and native title claims."

SA Museum archaeology researcher Keryn Walshe, who observed the latest search, said the dog found the first of four burial sites within a minute.

"She is an extremely clever little dog, quite amazing, she is certainly on her way to fame and fortune "We gave absolutely no cues, the dog sniffed around and went stood over it, she was spot on.

"We've never heard of fossil dogs, nobody ever thought there would be any scent left on these old bones, nobody thought it could be done."

Her reward, rather than a juicy bone, is a game of catch-and-chase with a tennis ball.

You can read more about Migaloo here.

Images via new.com.au/The Courier-Mail.

Many of us pay a huge premium at the grocery store for items that are labeled as "organic" — or feel guilty if we don't. The coveted "organic" label is supposed to mean something is all-natural, and therefore better for you. But it's not true.

A recent study suggests the $27 billion organic food industry is based on a myth.

Research from Stanford University suggests that organic foods do not offer more nutrients and vitamins than regular foods — a conclusion that could have a profound impact on an industry that has grown to $27 billion per year in the United States. But the researchers also discovered, however, that organic foods do contain lower levels of pesticides in fruits and vegetables, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria in meat — so you might not want to make that switch back to conventional foods just quite yet.

The researchers, Dena Bravata, Crystal Smith-Spangler, and others, reached this conclusion by reviewing 240 studies — 17 of which were clinical trials of people on both organic and conventional diets, and 223 studies that looked into nutrient and contaminant levels in foods.

It's important to note that, for the clinical trials, the researchers did not look into any long-term studies of health outcomes of people eating organic versus conventionally produced foods. At most, the duration of the trials ranged from two days to two years. In addition, the researchers admitted that the studies were heterogeneous (meaning that they employed various methodologies and scope), and limited in number.

Now all that said, analysis of all this data showed no significant differences between the health of organic food eaters compared to conventional food eaters, particularly when it came to such things as allergies (like eczema) or Campylobacter bacterial infections.

Moreover, they found little significant difference in the vitamin content of organic products, with only one nutrient, phosphorus, appearing in organic foods at significantly higher rates (which isn't really an issue considering how few people suffer from phosphorus deficiencies).

In addition, the researchers found no difference in protein or fat content between organic and conventional milk — though they did find evidence that organic milk may contain considerably higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids (which is quite significant from a health perspective).

But what the researchers did discover was that lower pesticide levels could be detected among children who ate organic foods compared to those on conventional diets. The researchers found that organic produce is 30% less likely to be contaminated with pesticides than conventional fruits and vegetables — but they cautioned that the differences in biomarkers and nutrient levels in serum, urine, breast milk, and semen in adults were not "clinically meaningful."

They conclude the study by noting that the published literature lacks the evidence to suggest that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods.

Check out the entire study at the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Images via Stephan Savoia/Associated Press, Nick Saltmarsh, Kafka 4 Prez, and Niko Retro on Flickr.

Progressive Roman Catholic Cardinal Carlo Martini died last Friday of Parkinson's disease at the age of 85. Shortly before his death, however, and knowing that he didn't have much time left, he did a candid interview with the Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, in which he lashed out at the Church for its backwardness and stubborn unwillingness to reform. "The Church is tired," he said, "our prayer rooms are empty."

Martini, a Jesuit priest who was once regarded as a potential Pope, urged leaders to acknowledge the faults of the Roman Catholic Church and start the process of reform. Not one to toe the party line, he made a name for himself back in 2008 when he unilaterally declared that the Church's stance had likely driven many of the faithful away, while also stating that condoms could "in some situations be a lesser evil."

The BBC shares some of the details of the interview:

Catholics lacked confidence in the Church, he said in the interview. "Our culture has grown old, our churches are big and empty and the church bureaucracy rises up, our religious rites and the vestments we wear are pompous."

Unless the Church adopted a more generous attitude towards divorced persons, it will lose the allegiance of future generations, the cardinal added. The question, he said, is not whether divorced couples can receive holy communion, but how the Church can help complex family situations.

And the advice he leaves behind to conquer the tiredness of the Church was a "radical transformation, beginning with the Pope and his bishops".

"The child sex scandals oblige us to undertake a journey of transformation," Cardinal Martini says, referring to the child sex abuse that has rocked the Catholic Church in the past few years.

He was not afraid, our correspondent adds, to speak his mind on matters that the Vatican sometimes considered taboo, including the use of condoms to fight Aids and the role of women in the Church.

As their Vatican correspondent David Willey reports, It's highly unusual for a leading member of the Catholic hierarchy to openly challenge Church teaching.

But for people hoping to see the Catholic Church reform, they're likely going to have to wait for someone brave enough to make these sorts of proclamations while they're still alive.

Images via BBC, Catholic Press Photo.

Nobody likes the idea of experimenting on animals. It seems like the definition of inhumanity, especially when you consider the growing evidence that animals have awareness just like us. But there's no doubt that the human race has gained incalculable benefits from the scientific testing of animals. Most scientists don't want to rule out animal testing, because we just don't have any decent alternatives.

Until now. Technology is finally coming up with solutions that could eliminate the practice altogether.

Putting an end to animal experimentation is more than just a matter of ethics. A growing number of scientists and clinicians are challenging the use of animal models on medical and scientific grounds. A 2006 study in JAMA concluded that, "patients and physicians should remain cautious about extrapolating the findings of prominent animal research to the care of human disease," and that "even high-quality animal studies will replicate poorly in human clinical research."

Two years ago, independent studies published in PLOS showed that only animal trials with positive results tend to get published, and that only two stroke treatments out of 500 verified that animal models actually worked on humans.

Making matters worse is the fact that mice are used in nearly 60% of all experiments. As Slate's Daniel Engber argues, mice are among the most unreliable test subjects, when it comes to approximating human biological processes. But most scientists are reluctant to move away from this tried-and-true model, mostly because mice are cheap, docile, and good subjects for genetic engineering experiments. They're also denied many of the rights afforded to other animals. Still, Engber points out, "It's not at all clear that the rise of the mouse — and the million research papers that resulted from it — has produced a revolution in public health."

Given these problems, and combined with the overarching ethics question, it's clear that something better has to come along. Thankfully, the process of replacing animal models is largely underway — an effort that began over 50 years ago.

The three R's of animal testing

Back in 1959, English scientists William Russell and Rex Burch conducted a study to see how animals were being treated at the hands of research scientists. To make their assessments, they looked at the degree of "humaneness" or "inhumaneness" that was afforded to the animals during testing. By analyzing the work being done by scientists in this way, Russell and Burch sought to create a set of guidelines that could be used to reduce the amount of suffering inflicted on laboratory animals.

To that end, they proposed the three R's of animal testing: Reduction, Refinement, and Replacement.

By practicing reduction, scientists were asked to to acquire high quality data using the smallest possible number of animals. Experiments needed to be designed so that they could continue to yield valuable results, while minimizing (if not eliminating) the need for endless repetition of the same tests. Consequently, scientists were told to work closer with statisticians (to better understand the required level of statistical significance) and to refer to previous studies that had essentially performed the same tests.

Refinement was simply the idea that more humanitarian approaches were required. It was a call to reduce the severity of distress, pain, and fear experienced by many lab animals.

More significantly, however, was the suggestion that scientists replace their lab animals with non-sentient animals — things like microorganisms, metazoan parasites, and certain plants. The less cognitively sophisticated the animal, it was thought, the less capacity it had to experience emotional, physical, and psychological distress.

Since the publication of Russell and Burch's guidelines, a number of scientists and bioethicists have put these policies into practice. But now, as more sophisticated tools emerge, scientists have been given entirely new options for testing — options that will enable them to honor the "R" of replacement.

Technological alternatives

Most of these new alternatives that are emerging are coming from the fields of biotechnology, hi-res scanning, and computer science.

Take research laboratory CeeTox, for example. They're using human cell-based in vitro (lab grown) models to predict the toxicity of drugs, chemicals, cosmetics, and consumer products — tests that are replacing the need to pump potentially hazardous chemicals into animals' stomachs, lungs, and eyes. Likewise, biotech firm Hurel has developed a lab-grown human liver that can be used to break down chemicals.

There's also MatTek's in vitro 3D human skin tissue that's being used by the National Cancer Institute, the U.S military, private companies, and a number of universities. Their virtual skin is proving to be an excellent substitute for the real thing, allowing scientists to conduct burn research, and to test cosmetics, radiation exposure, and so on.

The development of non-invasive brain scanning techniques are also enabling scientists to work on human test subjects. Technologies such as MRI, fMRI, EEG, PET, and CT are replacing the need to perform vivisections on the brains of rats, cats, and monkeys.

Likewise, the practice of microdosing, where volunteers are given extremely small one-time drug doses, is allowing researchers to work ethically with humans.

There's also the tremendous potential for computer models — and this is very likely where the future of drug testing and other scientific research lies. And this is a revolution that's already well underway.

The first heart models were developed 13 years ago, kickstarting efforts into the development of simulated lungs, the musculoskeletal system, the digestive system, skin, kidneys, the lymphatic system — and even the brain.

Today, computer simulations are being used to test the efficacy of new medications on asthma, though laws still require that all new drugs get verified in animal and humans tests before licensing. Models are also being used to simulate human metabolism in an effort to predict plaque build-up and cardiovascular risk. These same systems are also being used to evaluate drug toxicity — tests that would have normally involved the use of lab animals. And as we reported a few months ago, new computer simulations can even help scientists predict the negative side effects of drugs. All this is just the tip of the iceberg.

This said, not everyone agrees that computer simulations are the way to go. Some people feel that simulations can never truly paint an accurate picture of what they're trying to model — that it's a classic case of "garbage in, garbage out." The basic reasoning is that scientists can't possibly simulate something they don't truly understand. Consequently, if their models are off by even just a little bit, the entire simulation will diverge dramatically from reality.

But even though these problems are real, they're not necessarily intractable — nor are they deal breakers. It may very well turn out that the margin of error achieved in computer simulations will be comparable (or better) than the current margin of error when testing animal models. And given the rate of technological advance, both in biotechnology and information technology, it's even conceivable that we can simulate the intricate complexity that makes up organisms with extreme accuracy. And at that point, animal experimentation won't even seem like a sensible option.

Other sources: Siftung Forschung 3R, New Scientist, PETA. Images: Vit Kovalcik/Shutterstock, Everett Collection/Shutterstock, Mattek, James King-Holmes/Science Photo Library.

People often say that men and women tend to have dramatically different perspectives — but a new study from Brooklyn and Hunter Colleges of the City University of New York literally suggests that this may be the case. Research now shows that men have greater sensitivity to fine detail and rapidly moving objects, while women are better at distinguishing between colors.

PsychCentral explains:

When the volunteers were asked to describe colors shown to them across the visual spectrum, it became obvious that the color vision of men was shifted. Men required a slightly longer wavelength to experience the same hue as the women, according to the researchers.

Males also had a bigger range in the center of the spectrum where they were less able to discriminate between colors.

The researchers then used an image of light and dark bars to measure contrast-sensitivity functions of vision. The bars were either horizontal or vertical and volunteers had to choose which one they saw. In each image, when the light and dark bars were alternated, the image appeared to flicker.

By varying how rapidly the bars alternated or how close together they were, the researchers found that at moderate rates of image change, observers lost sensitivity for close together bars, and gained sensitivity when the bars were farther apart.

However when the image change was faster, both sexes were less able to resolve the images over all bar widths.

The researchers also noted that, overall, the men were better able to resolve more rapidly changing images that were closer together than the women.

You can check out the entire two-part study at the BSD's Biology of Sex Differences here and here.

Image: Shutterstock/Antony McAulay.

Early last month we told you about the satellite archaeologist who thought she discovered lost Egyptian pyramids using Google Earth. Well, it turns out that the structures may not be pyramids — but they still have archeological significance, in any case.

As NBC science editor Alan Boyle reports, the site has been known to Egyptologists since the 1920s. The remnants are located in an area around the present-day town of Dimai in Egypt's Fayoum Desert. The locale used to be a desert settlement during Egypt's Ptolemaic era, back when Greek and Roman influence were on the rise.

According to Italian archaeologist Paola Davoli, the structures may have been watchtowers — but she hasn't ruled out the possibility that they might also be tombs or well sites. What's needed is an excavation to unlock the secrets hidden within — and this is what Davoli's Soknopaiou Nesos Project aims to do.

And interestingly, Davoli has been in touch with Angela Micol, the satellite archaeologist who brought the structures back into the spotlight. Boyle writes:

Based on the satellite imagery, Micol suggested that the mounds might represent eroded pyramids. The up-close pictures make the formations look more like piles of rocky rubble. The largest one appears to have the ruins of a square building or walls on its summit, but it'll take a full-blown excavation to unravel the mystery.

"Since the sites haven't been excavated so far, I don't see how anyone could say it's not a pyramid," Micol told me today. "The potential that it still is a pyramid is very plausible. I wouldn't throw it out."

However, Micol acknowledged that her experience is more in the line of architecture and scoping out satellite imagery for unusual features - which she said she's been doing for 10 years. "I really want to help archaeologists - that's my dream, that's my goal," she said. "I had no idea that this was going to go viral. I was shocked. I just wanted to help."

Now she's hoping to stay in contact with the experts on Egyptology, to find out more about Dimai as well as another site about 90 miles (144 kilometers) away, known as Abu Sidhum. Micol marveled over a triangle-shaped feature in the satellite imagery that she thought might represent the remnants of a pyramid. Geologists say the 190-meter-wide (625-foot-wide) feature at Abu Sidhum is merely a naturally formed butte, and one expert has been quoted as complaining that Micol appeared to be "one of the so-called 'pyridiots' who see pyramids everywhere."

Pyridiots. Ouch. Though "pyramidiots" has a much better ring to it...

Read all of Boyle's account here, including some more images.

Images via NBC/Soknopaiou Nesos Project, University of Salento.

Back in 2003, biotech company Yorktown Technologies developed a genetically modified fluorescent fish that was neon-bright and glowed in the dark under black light. Since that time, the company has sold millions of these "GloFish," which have made their way into various living room aquariums and sushi bars. But now it appears that they may be ending up somewhere else — namely our oceans, lakes, and rivers. And needless to say, a number of scientists are saying this is not a good thing.

The concern is with one of the GloFish in particular, the Electric Green Tetra. It's a modified black tetra fish capable of living in freshwater. But as Adrianne Appel of the Washington Post reports, this one is not like the others:

The two GloFish are very different, however, in what environmentalists and some experts say is a crucial way: The heat-loving zebra fish is from southern Asia and can't survive long in cooler U.S. waters; thus, the Food and Drug Administration has ruled that there would be little threat of invasion of U.S. waterways if it were released from home aquariums. But the black tetra is native to South America and likely to be happy making a splash in the inland waterways of South Florida and Latin America.

In South Florida, the modified black tetras could upset an environment already burdened with 30 types of nonnative fish. In South America, they could mean an undesirable interference in natural biodiversity.

"My worry is that they'll be such a novelty that they will be imported back to [South America] and kids will let them go and they'll start interbreeding with fish whose genomes are very similar,'' said Barry Chernoff, a freshwater fish biologist and chair of the environmental studies program at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. "We would see the spreading of the fluorescent coral gene in the native fish.''

At the same time, though, the neon GloFish may actually be a rather poor adaptation. A 2011 study by Jeffrey Hill found that largemouth bass and mosquito fish in Florida ate twice as many red GloFish as regular zebra fish when they were all put in tanks together.

Sometimes in nature, it doesn't pay to stand out.

Read more.

Images via GloFish.com.

As we approach the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack, we can be grateful that nothing like it has happened since. But that doesn't mean that something very much like 9/11 — or even worse — couldn't happen again. In fact, new research suggests that we may be seriously underestimating the risk of another large terrorist event.

In fact, statisticians say there's a 50% chance that another 9/11-scale attack will happen again, within the next ten years.

Show me your dataset

Data is the fuel that drives statistics. Without it, statisticians cannot make proper predictions, whether it be the next hurricane, earthquake, or stock market crash. The same can be said for terrorist attacks.

And like all meteorological, geological, or economic events, these attacks tend to happen at different frequencies and at different intensities. Plus it's not enough to predict an event — what's often more valuable is the ability to predict the accompanying severity.

Such is the case with terrorism. And as a recent study by statisticians Aaron Clauset and Ryan Clauset suggests, the 9/11 attacks provided a valuable piece of information to their dataset, namely the so-called "large terrorist event." The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon resulted in nearly 3,000 fatalities — nearly six times more than the next largest event. The question that Clauset and Woodard wanted to answer was, just how probable or improbable was this event? And just how likely is it to happen again?

Algorithms, outliers, and tails

To help them make their assessment, they gathered a global database of 13,274 terrorist events dating from 1968 to 2007. Then, rather than treating 9/11 as an outlier event, they created a statistical algorithm for estimating the probability of similarly large events (including global terrorism) within complex social systems. And their broad-scale and long-term probabilistic approach is similar to the one used in seismology, forestry, hydrology, and natural disaster insurance.

Specifically, their algorithm combined multiple models of the data distribution's tail and various computational techniques to account for parameter and model uncertainty.

Using their algorithm, they estimated that the historical probability of a 9/11 scale event was between 11-35%. Given this relatively high range, and given that 9/11 did in fact happen, Clauset and Woodward were satisfied that their model was generating reasonable estimations. Armed with this, and applying three different futurological scenarios, they were able to estimate the likelihood of future terrorist events.

Technology Review elaborates:

Assuming that the number of terrorist events per year remains the same as it is now, about 2000 per year, then the likelihood of another 9/11 is between 20 and 50 per cent, depending on the choice of distribution.

The 50 per cent prediction comes from the power law distribution which many experts argue is a good fit to the data. By that measure, a catastrophic attack is as likely as not.

Of course, conditions might change. The current level of terrorist incidents is heavily influenced by the number of attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's possible to argue that the numbers will drop in the near future as these regions become more stable.

In that case, the likelihood of a 9/11-type attack in the next ten years drops to between 5 and 20 per cent, say Clauset and Woodward.

But as Clauset and Woodward note, the number of attacks could increase on account of any number of social, political, or economic factors — things like ongoing environmental degradation or rising food prices. Should this prove to be the case, they predict with 95% certainty that another 9/11 scale attack will occur within the next ten years.

So, what does 50% actually mean?

All this said, and on the face of it, their 50% normative assessment seems profoundly unsatisfactory. It's like a weather forecast in which a meteorologist says it might rain — or it might not. It seems like they did a hell of a lot of work simply to produce a rather wishy-washy prediction.

And while that's certainly one way of looking at it, there is a decidedly disturbing side to this figure — especially given that the 1968-2007 estimation was as high as 35% — and that 9/11 did in fact happen. As frustratingly ambiguous as the 50/50 chance appears to be, it is certainly far higher than a reasonable person would hope.

Check out the entire study here.

Images: history.army.mil, Aaron Clauset & Ryan Woodard.

Kevin J. Anderson's latest novel, Clockwork Angels, officially hit the bookshelves this past Tuesday (September 4). Set in a quasi-dystopian steampunk and alchemy-infused world, the novel is a collaboration with his longtime friend, famed Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart. We recently had a chance to talk to Anderson about his experience working with the prog rock legend and what we can expect in his new book.

Your relationship with Rush and Neil Peart goes back a few years. Can you tell us how your friendship started?

Neil and I have known each other for more than 20 years. My very first novel Resurrection Inc. (1988) was inspired by the Rush album Grace Under Pressure — which I acknowledged in the book. I sent copies off to Mercury Records, expecting they would vanish into a black hole somewhere, but about a year later I received a letter from Neil telling me how much he liked the novel, and we struck up a correspondence, met in person, and have done plenty of things together over the years, but Clockwork Angels is our most ambitious project yet.

You've mentioned that Rush has been a major influence on your work. How so?

Ever since I was a kid in a small town in Wisconsin, listening to Rush (which I chose from the Columbia Record Club because their covers looked cool, even though I had never heard them), I found that the stories in the songs inspired scenes and ideas in my mind. Their concept album 2112 is a science fiction dystopia; "Xanadu" is a big fantasy epic based on the Coleridge poem; "Cygnus X-1" and "Hemispheres" together are a science fiction epic. But the Rush songs didn't just tell me stories; the lyrics and music made me think of my own stories, and I liked to think of them as the soundtracks to what I was writing.

Fans of Rush will be thrilled to discover a number of clever references and homages to the band sprinkled throughout the story. What is it about Rush fans that sets them apart?

Rush fans are very devoted; they are not casual listeners who pick up a song or two. They immediately buy the whole album and listen to every track. When Clockwork Angels was released, it immediately became the #1 bestselling album in North America…and the band has been together 38+ years. The library of songs (20 studio albums now) is so rich, covering so many thematic landscapes and so many moods, it was a large treasure chest for me to draw from. The Rush lyrical references sprinkled throughout the novel are natural extensions of the prose, not shoehorned in with a big grin and a wink. If you catch them, you catch them, but if you don't get the references, it should not affect your enjoyment in any way.

Neil and I plotted this story from its inception; he approached me with his own ideas for scenes and characters, and he knew the lyrics he was writing, so we built the world, the storyline, the villains and heroes around the songs; but it also had to work as a novel, too. Clockwork Angels should be an enjoyable steampunk fantasy regardless of whether or not you're a Rush fan.

After Neil and I had mapped out the blueprint of the novel, I wrote drafts of the chapters and sent the roughs to Neil every day, and he read and commented, usually within hours. Some scenes he suggested; others he wrote himself. (Neil has published several of his own books and is an accomplished author in his own right.) We went back and forth, sometimes with a dozen emails a day. He was so pleased with the finished manuscript that he offered to read the unabridged audiobook himself-so if you listen to the audio, it's his voice carrying the words.

Collaborations are now something you're quite experienced with. What are the most pronounced benefits of working with another creative force? How do you resolve creative differences?

Some writers prefer the solitary experience, being the sole arbiter and inspiration behind a story. I like the "let's pretend" aspect of collaborating, bouncing ideas back and forth, building one idea upon another, drawing the best from my partner's imagination as well as mine. My most frequent collaborations have been with Brian Herbert (on the Dune novels and the Hellhole trilogy), my wife Rebecca Moesta (the Young Jedi Knights series, Crystal Doors, and Star Challengers), and Doug Beason (numerous high-tech thrillers). Collaborators have to choose each other well, someone to work with, someone whose intellect and experiences will complement your own. After talking through a project, exchanging ideas, being open to other ideas, we really don't have any creative blowups…we always try to steer through to a finished book we're both proud of.

My other collaborators were experienced novelists, but Neil brought a different perspective to the table, approaching it as a lyricist and musician. His insights and images made the story blossom in ways I would never have been able to do myself.

Clockwork Angels takes place in a hyper-regimented dystopia. How did the steam punk elements help you convey the "clockwork" nature of this world in a way that conventional science fiction could not?

Even though the Watchmaker makes certain that every tiny detail of society is rigid, on schedule, and well planned — sort of a Big Brother figure — the land of Albion isn't a particularly unpleasant place. It's bucolic, clean, colorful…you don't really see steampunk and dystopia together. Neil in particular thinks it isn't a repressive or bad place to live…but the regimented rules could feel like a straightjacket to a dreamer. On the other hand, we try to convey that the opposite end of the spectrum, the "freedom extremist" Anarchist, is just as unpleasant.

The steamliners, the alchemy, the lost cities, the pirates, "magical" Clockwork Angels, the Watchmaker all give this story a sense of wonder and high adventure that you don't see in grim dystopias.

Alchemy plays an important part of your world-building. What was it like being able to infuse this element into your story?

Neil was fascinated with the history and beliefs of alchemy and spent a lot of time researching the various aspects so we could include it into the world-building. "In a world lit only by fire…" Clean and abundant energy as well as readily available gold — that would radically change the economic and social landscape, allowing the Watchmaker to create his perfect world and meet the needs of all his citizens. We added the Alchemy College, the backstory of the Anarchist, and the extensive mines in the mountains of Atlantis.

How do the struggles and desires of your protagonist, Owen Hardy, compare to your own? Is Owen more like you or Neil?

Many Rush songs are about dreamers struggling to find an outlet for expression against tough obstacles or repressive societies ("2112," "Red Barchetta," "Middletown Dreams," "The Enemy Within," "The Analog Kid," "The Body Electric"), an independent explorer going to see what's beyond the horizon ("Cygnus X-1/Hemispheres," "The Fountain of Lamneth")…that's by no means a complete list.

For myself, I grew up in a very small farming town, dreaming about becoming a writer and seeing the world someday. I can definitely relate to Owen in a very deep and personal way. There's a lot of my upbringing in his character, and a lot of my grandfather in the frame story (with Owen as an older man). One of the key lines in the album is "In a world where I feel so small, I can't stop thinking big" — and I think that sums it up perfectly.

What are the modern day analogues to the Watchmaker and the Anarchist?

The Watchmaker and the Anarchist are opposites, and both are relevant. Some people insist on absolute Libertarianism, with utter freedom and no safety net, which might work in a theoretical sense but can only function if everybody accepts responsibility. Others don't want to think for themselves and want all decisions made for them, to let the safety net wrap them up like a mummy so they forget how to be individuals. I want to emphasize that the Watchmaker is not portrayed as evil — he's just more extreme and stifling than a dreamer can be comfortable with. But not everybody's a dreamer.

We have one small scene in the carnival with a fabulous contraption called the Cage of Imaginary Creatures, with colored-glass portholes for viewing. Customers peer inside to see what their imagination inspires; one frumpy woman demands her money back in a huff because "there's nothing inside!" And for her, alas, it is the truth.

What's next for you? And do you have any further plans to work with Neil and Rush?

Released simultaneously with Clockwork Angels is the first in my new "Dan Shamble, Zombie PI" series, Death Warmed Over, a humorous horror series about a zombie detective solving cases with monsters, vampires, werewolves, mummies, etc. I've already written the first three of those books, and they were enormously fun and entertaining; next week is the reissue of my steampunk alternate history The Martian War, in which a young HG Wells and his college professor head to Mars to prevent the War of the Worlds. Brian Herbert and I have our next original novel, Hellhole Awakening, out in February, and I'm just starting a new trilogy set in my Saga of Seven Suns universe. So, plenty busy.

Rush are just embarking on a full US concert tour for Clockwork Angels, which will then lead into a European tour, and then (my guess, at least) another US tour leg. Neil and I loved working on this project and I expect we will do something together in the future, but no definite plans yet. (It took us 20 years to figure out this one!)

You can find out more about Kevin J. Anderson at his website.

Yet another reason to never leave home without your toothbrush. As Gina Sunseri of ABC reports:

A $100 billion space station saved by a simple $3 toothbrush? It was the brainstorm of astronauts Sunita Williams and Akihido Hoshide and NASA engineers on the ground: a tool to clean a bolt that gave them so much trouble during a marathon 8-hour spacewalk last week.

They were trying to replace an electrical switching unit, but on Thursday they couldn't bolt it to the outside of the station.

What to do if there is no hardware store in the neighborhood and the next supply ship is months away? Build it yourself — so they attached a simple toothbrush to a metal pole and voila! They were able to clean out the bolt's socket today and finish the job. Shades of Apollo 13 — when engineers threw parts on a table and brainstormed a solution, which saved the crew.

ABC/Images: NASA/AP.