Ten years ago, Portugal decriminalized all drugs. One decade after this unprecedented experiment, drug abuse is down by half:

Health experts in Portugal said Friday that Portugal’s decision 10 years ago to decriminalise drug use and treat addicts rather than punishing them is an experiment that has worked.

“There is no doubt that the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal,” said Joao Goulao, President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction, a press conference to mark the 10th anniversary of the law.

The number of addicts considered “problematic” — those who repeatedly use “hard” drugs and intravenous users — had fallen by half since the early 1990s, when the figure was estimated at around 100,000 people, Goulao said.

Other factors had also played their part however, Goulao, a medical doctor added.

“This development can not only be attributed to decriminalisation but to a confluence of treatment and risk reduction policies.”

Many of these innovative treatment procedures would not have emerged if addicts had continued to be arrested and locked up rather than treated by medical experts and psychologists. Currently 40,000 people in Portugal are being treated for drug abuse. This is a far cheaper, far more humane way to tackle the problem. Rather than locking up 100,000 criminals, the Portuguese are working to cure 40,000 patients and fine-tuning a whole new canon of drug treatment knowledge at the same time.

None of this is possible when waging a war.

Source: Forbes

Vostok is the largest in a sub-glacial web of more than 200 lakes that are hidden 4 kilometers beneath the ice. Some of the lakes formed when the continent was much warmer and still connected to Australia.

The lakes are rich in oxygen (making them oligotrophic), with levels of the element some 50 times higher than what would be found in your typical freshwater lake. The high gas concentration is thought to be because of the enormous weight and pressure of the continental ice cap.

If life exists in Vostok, it will have to be an extremophile — a life form that has adapted to survive in extreme environments. The organism would have to withstand high pressure, constant cold, low nutrient input, high oxygen concentration and an absence of sunlight.

The conditions in Lake Vostok are thought to be similar to the conditions on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus. In June, NASA probe Cassini found the best evidence yet for a massive saltwater reservoir beneath the icy surface of Enceladus. This all means that finding life in the inhospitable depths of Vostok would strengthen the case for life in the outer solar system.

Back on planet Earth, the team at Vostok are running short on time. Antarctica’s summer will soon end and the researchers need to leave their remote base while they still can. Temperatures will drop as low as -80 degrees Celsius, grounding planes and trapping the team.

They missed their chance last year. “Time is short, however. It’s possible that the drillers won’t be able to reach the water before the end of the current Antarctic summer, and they’ll need to wait another year before the process can continue,” we wrote in January 2011. The drill halted in February.

Meanwhile, Russian engineers are planning to venture into the lake itself, with swimming robots. In the Antarctic summer of 2012 to 2013, they plan to send a robot into the lake to collect water samples and sediments from the bottom. An environmental assessment of the plan will be submitted at the Antarctic Treaty’s consultative meeting in May 2012.

Source: Wired UK

Why not bring elephants to Australia? That’s the proposal made by biologist David Bowman of the University of Tasmania in a comment published February 2 in Nature. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

The pachyderms could help to polish off gamba grass, introduced from Africa to Australia in the 1930s as fodder for cattle. Nowadays, it also provides fuel for devastating fires, such the one that killed 173 people and burned 400,000 hectares on February 7, 2009. Neither local cattle nor kangaroos consume enough of the weedy grass to keep it in check.

But African savannah elephants eat plenty of it, so why not import them to control the fire fodder? The approach also could start to remedy 50,000 years worth of human impacts—from the hunting of ancient giant marsupials to the introduction of alien species such as gamba grass. It’s an attempt to begin to restabilize food webs that have been “out of balance,” according to Bowman, for tens of thousands of years.

In fact, no continent has a worse record of human ecological devastation, some of it even well-intentioned. Australia is a hotbed of introduced species: a whole suite of European mammals runs wild there, from buffalo to rabbits. Even camels have gone feral after being imported in the 19th century for transportation. Perhaps most famously, the cane toad was introduced to control an agricultural pest but found the antipodes to its liking and is now frog-marching through the outback with devastating effects on indigenous marsupials.

So, Bowman’s plan is well-intentioned: imported African elephants or other “uber-herbivores,” such as critically endangered rhinos, could help to control the gamba grass. But unlike other “re-wilding” schemes around the globe, no member of the modern day elephant family has ever lived in Australia in the wild, though giant marsupials of the past may have played a similar role in that ancient ecosystem now long gone. And elephants can become pests—witness South Africa’s practice ofculling herds to protect native flora. “The greatest challenge would be managing the density of herbivore populations so that their demand on resources does not degrade the ecosystem,” Bowman wrote. Indeed, and there is nothing to say that introduced elephants might not chomp on embattled native plants along with gamba grass.

Bowman also suggests importing the Komodo dragon from Indonesia to fill the predatory role once played in Australia by ancient giant lizards or, perhaps least controversially, stopping the poisoning of a predator that still exists—the dingo. Letting dingoes rebound could act as a check on the spread of other feral mammals. Of course, that would aid and abet an ecological process kicked off by the ancestors of Aborigines when they brought the wild dogs to the continent tens of thousands of years ago. It seems that humans have been messing with the ecology down under for a very long time and show little inclination to stop.

No musical expertise is required in the interactive project which will use the internet to feed suggestions for content to Machover, music director Peter Oundjian announced Wednesday.

In presenting the 2012/2013 schedule, Oundjian promised there’d be “lots of surprises.”

“It is important that what we do is not predictable,” he said, in announcing a program that mixes “the old and the new” and features 40 Canadian performers and composers.

For example, the opening concert will feature old standby Brahms Violin Concerto played by James Ehnes but also a new composition by John Adams, Harmonielehre.

“The traditional programs always sell,” says Oundjian, who used his time at the podium to plug the New Creations Festival which features new works, many by Canadians.

“People really like the old favourites but, at the same time, we have something you’ve never heard before,” he said in an interview. “There are a lot of interesting voices (in Canada) and we’re doing this from a good place and good spirit.

“It is important when we have a Canadian performance that the audience says, Wow, that was great. Otherwise, we don’t do ourselves any favours.”

More details about “A Toronto Symphony: Concerto for Composer and City” will be revealed in the spring and it will be premiered in the 2013 New Creations Festival.

Machover, who teaches at the MIT Media Lab, is fascinated by new technologies for music, says Oundjian, adding that all of the suggestions from citizens will be played by orchestra instruments — even if it is the sound of a hockey player hitting the boards.

He also announced the appointment of Steven Reineke as principal pops conductor and the creation of two new positions for young professionals — resident conductor and affiliate composer. This is part of the orchestra’s commitment to developing new talent.

In the spirit of surprises, Oundjian also announced a new visual element in performances that will include the orchestra playing Leonard Bernstein’s score from West Side Story while the audience watches a remastered film behind them onstage. In partnership with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the TSO has commissioned photographer James Westwater to photo-choreograph Smetana’s Czech homeland for a production of Ma Vlast.

The TSO will play host to many famous violinists including Joshua Bell, Jonathan Crow (concert master), Karen Gomyo, Ehnes, Anne-Sophie Mutter and Pekka Kuusisto.

Tenors and baritones include Michael Schade, Gustavo Pena, Russell Braun and Jonathan Eastabrooks. Sopranos Measha Brueggergosman, Erin Wall, Betsy Wolfe, Klara Ek and Yulia Van Doren will also perform.

Guest conductors include Bramwell Tovey, Maxim Vengerov, Pinchas Zukerman, Sir Andrew Davis, Johannes Debus and Jiri Belohlavek.

Source: Toronto Star

Aeroplanes can fly because their wings cause the air pressure underneath to be greater than that above, lifting them into the air.

Forty years later, Burrhus Frederic Skinner built upon Pavlov’s observations as a young psychologist in graduate school. He constructed a soundproof, lightproof chamber that housed a small animal; a lever was placed within the animal’s reach, which triggered a primary reinforcer. Called the Skinner box, the device opened up many possibilities for experimentation, leading to breakthroughs in later research: from the relative addictiveness of cocaine in isolation versus in a larger community, to the question of whether rats have empathy.

Skinner is now credited as the father of operant conditioning: a form of learning where a subject is conditioned to respond to a secondary reinforcer through association with some form of primary reinforcement. Not only did Skinner’s work show that associations between primary and secondary reinforcers appear in nature, it also demonstrated that new reinforcers can be manufactured.

Skinner and Pavlov proved that primary reinforcers are extremely powerful motivators. After sex and sleep, bacon is one of nature’s most powerful primary reinforcers, partly due to its high fat and protein content in comparison to other meats. Bacon has become known as the “gateway meat”: the smell triggers intense cravings, even in vegetarians. But in our modern world, our instinctual craving for bacon and other fatty foods can cause significant health problems.

The box also taught us two fundamental lessons, one of which had ramifications that extended far beyond Skinner’s experiments. Humans are hardwired to respond to primary reinforcers, just like any other animals. And while primary reinforcers have a diminishing effect once we’re satiated, secondary reinforcers, like money or social status, exist outside our biological needs, and these never hit a satiation point. In other words, we are hardwired to seek approval from our peers, and we can never get enough of it.

Many people defend FarmVille as a harmless distraction, arguing that the thousands of hours spent playing the game would still have been wasted on other activities. But there’s no question that the social game market, with its virtual currencies and unlimited stock of goods, is a huge cash cow. And it’s also clear, when you look more closely at FarmVille, that it was engineered with one goal in mind: to coerce users into tending their virtual plots of land for as long as possible. Using our natural tendency to reciprocate gratitude from our peers, we end up pestering our friends to keep returning. And cleverly-timed crop cycles force players to return to their farms at all times of day. But what about the techniques employed in other games?

Black, White, and 254 Shades of Gray

Moral relativism aside, I think “bad” games exist — provided we define “bad” in unambiguous terms. In Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant tried to specifically define this with the Categorical Imperative: a set of rules that could gauge an action’s morality. But regardless of how we choose to evaluate a game’s morality, there are certain traits which can push it closer to the “evil” side of the spectrum.

The primary characteristic of unethical games is that they are manipulative, misleading, or both. From a user-experience standpoint, these games display dark patterns, which I define as common design decisions that trick users into doing something against their will. Dark patterns are usually employed to maximize some metric of success, such as email signups, checkouts, or upgrades; they generally test well when they’re released to users.

For example, FarmVille, Tap Fish, and Club Penguin play on deep-rooted psychological impulses to make money from their audiences. They take advantage of gamers’ completion urge by prominently displaying progress bars that encourage leveling up. They randomly time rewards, much like slot machines time payouts to keep players coming back, even when their net gain is negative. And they spread virally by compelling players to constantly post requests to their friends’ walls.

This trend is not just limited to social games, though: many combat games, like America’s Army, are funded by the U.S. military and serve as thinly-veiled recruitment tools. Some brands have launched Facebook games like Cheez-It’s Swap-It!, and they serve as tools to sell more products. These techniques can be used in any sort of game, in any context.

Of course, not all games fall neatly into a clear division between good and evil. “Good” games can ask little in the way of critical thinking and problem solving, but still be fulfilling. Tetris is a complex, enriching game that is just as addictive today as when it debuted in 1988; and yet many would argue that it lacks the problem solving challenges or rich plots that make adventure games like Sword & Sworcery and The Legend of Zelda so compelling. Different people find meaning and fulfillment in different aspects of gameplay; that’s what makes gaming so fun for players and game designers.

Hard Fun

One of the best-selling independent iOS games is a side-scrolling jumper called Canabalt. It consists of a tiny man running over the rooftops of a dystopian cityscape. Players tap to jump, and the gameplay speeds up over time. There is no end to Canabalt, only longer runs: the longest run yet recorded, at 8 minutes and 16 seconds, takes the player through more than 22 kilometers of crumbling buildings, falling obstacles, and inconveniently placed windows.

At IndieCade in October 2011, Adam Saltsman, Canabalt’s creator, discussed the notion of “time until death.” All of us have a finite amount of time on earth, and any time we spend on a particular activity is time that we can’t spend doing something else. This means that the time we spend gaming represents most of a game’s cost of ownership, far more than any money that we spend. If that time is enjoyable (or rather, if its benefits outweigh its costs), then the game was worth our time.

Value is created in different ways for different people, but the most immediate is through generating engagement until players achieve mastery. In a panel held at Seattle’s Casual Connect in 2011, game designer and consultant Nicole Lazzarodescribed two types of fun: easy fun and hard fun. Games that don’t challenge players beyond a certain point — “easy fun” — will never allow them to achieve mastery, which could deprive them of a highly rewarding part of playing.

The panel also included Demetri Detsaridis, the general manager of Zynga’s New York office. Zynga has its own ideas of what constitutes the “real fun” in FarmVille and similar games, which align neatly with the company’s business interests. His answer of how they approach “easy” vs. “hard” fun was telling:

You know, while we don’t necessarily have this framework in particular in mind… you know, while I was looking at this chart yesterday, while we were talking, I was thinking “Well, Zynga does a lot, if not most, of its development work in this kind of infinity symbol loop here between ‘people’ fun and ‘easy’ fun… there’s sort of an overlap here that isn’t maybe entirely clear on the chart, but a lot of… I think a lot of social games kind of are really quite close to the top, you know three-quarters of this, that the ‘people’ fun and the ‘easy’ fun are really sort of mushed together, and that where you see the hard fun coming in is in perhaps surprising places, like thinking about your social graph and how you, in real life, are managing that – well, am I sending, you know, friend requests to these, these people? Is that – you know, so that’s actually part of the game, and designers know that, so that sort of is an interesting almost meta-game layer of almost ‘hard’ fun on top of what otherwise might seem in this structure to be really people- and easy-centric.

Detsardis nodded in approval as Rob Tercek, the panel’s moderator, summed it up:

The games themselves aren’t where the action happens; the strategy component is: when do you reach out into your social graph? When are you going to spam that list? How frequently are you gonna do that?

I’ll reiterate this in plainer language, just in case the quote wasn’t clear: Detsaridis said that one of the most compelling parts of playing Zynga’s games is deciding when and how to spam your friends with reminders to play Zynga’s games.

Creating hard fun isn’t an easy task. It requires thinking deeply about the gamer’s experience, not just using cheap tricks to drive engagement. FarmVille, Tap Fish, and Club Penguin all employ Skinner-like techniques to persuade people to spend more time and money. But there are plenty of honest ways to create real engagement, and it’s our responsibility as creators and consumers of games to demand more honest and fulfilling fun from our entertainment.

Orchids are seducers. They trick animals into pollinating them and usually give nothing in exchange. Some orchid species mimic nectar-producing flowers to lure bees; others emit the fetid smell of rotting meat to attract carrion flies. In China, Dendrobium sinense orchids release a chemical normally broadcast by bees in distress; the scent attracts bee-eating hornets expecting an easy meal. The scent of Cymbidium serratum entices a wild mountain mouse, which spreads pollen from flower to flower with its snout. And around the world, orchid species have evolved to look or smell like female insects; males try to mate with the flowers but gather and deposit pollen, which they carry on their flight from deception to deception.

But perhaps the most spectacular evidence of the plant’s powers of attraction could be seen several weeks ago in Singapore, at the 20th World Orchid Conference, a triennial affair that drew about 1,000 participants from 55 countries and more than 300,000 spectators. It was one of the largest orchid competitions in history, a colorful, heavily scented affair that showcased the growing popularity and cutting-edge science of orchid breeding.

“Orchids are such manipulators. After the birds and the bees, they have enticed us humans into doing the dirty deed for them,” joked Kiat Tan, chairman of the conference’s organizing committee.

The day before the conference, the four-acre exhibition hall in Singapore’s convention center was strewn with half-opened crates: “Fragile! Handle with care. Store at 8 degrees C.” Hundreds of jet-lagged exhibitors delicately extracted cut flowers and orchid plants from their packaging. Some had carried their orchids by hand on flights and through customs, with the requisite certifications that the plants were disease-free and approved for travel by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

The flowers “tend to suffer if it’s too cold or sweat if it’s too warm in the boxes,” said Chris Purver, an orchid breeder and curator with the Eric Young Orchid Foundation on the Isle of Jersey, a British crown dependency. “We had a few sleepless nights in getting them here.”

Members of a South African orchid society, disappointed that international trade regulations had denied them permission to bring real animal parts or live birds, huffily constructed a jungle display with fake leopards, rhino horns and elephant tusks.

Justin Tkatchenko, from the Orchid Society of Papua New Guinea, was adding finishing touches to a display that included gigantic carved masks and a bird made of orchids. “We are aiming to be the best in the world. This will be the most photographed display in the whole show,” he said.

Orchids may be the most diverse flower family in the world, with more than 25,000 species. (Their only competition comes from daisies.) The orchid family maintains such diversity in the wild in part because individual orchid species summon only specific pollinators; the flowers thus avoid mingling their genes with those of other nearby orchids that are visited by their own pollinators. But most of the 50,000 orchids from 5,000 varieties on display at the conference do not occur in the wild; they are hybrids, created by people who have cross-fertilized orchid species, often from far-flung lands.

“The joy of breeding orchids is to see if you can combine two species in order to create something even more beautiful than either of the parents,” Martin Motes, a commercial grower from Florida and conference judge, said as visitors poured into the hall and crowded around the displays. He has been breeding orchids for 40 years, and many varieties of his 500 hybrids are named after his wife, Mary. “My wife thinks I am playing God! Well, man is given dominion over the beasts of the fields and orchids of the greenhouse, I guess,” he said.

An orchid breeder begins with a vision—the color, shape, size, fragrance and longevity of the desired flower—and then searches for the ideal parents. “When we craft orchids for celebrities and delegates, we also consider their tastes, personalities and occupation, said Tim Yam, a senior researcher and orchid breeder at the Singapore Botanic Gardens. “For example, the orchid named for Princess Diana was white—the color of royalty—and very fragrant. But if it’s for a prime minister or president, we might choose a deeper color and majestic spray.”

At the Orchid Breeding and Micropropagation Laboratory of the Singapore Botanic Gardens, Yam showed me how orchids are grown in the lab. The tiny seeds are strewn on nutrients in a sterile glass flask; after a few months, the seedlings are transferred to new flasks. Generally, they spend their first year under glass, their second year in community pots, their third in individual thumb pots. Only after four years do they begin to flower. The plants with the most favored characteristics, such as vigor, length of spray, and size, shape and color of flowers, are then cloned. A meristem, or growth tip, is clipped from the orchid and shaken in a flask. Normally a meristem produces one shoot, but “shaking the plant tissue confuses it and it will start producing many shoots,” Yam said. Growers separate the shoots to produce clones of the same hybrid.

Gone are the days when owning an orchid was a luxury. Thanks to cloning, orchids can be grown en masse, and you can buy a stem at the grocery store for $20. Orchids are the most commonly sold type of potted flowering plant in the United States, where the wholesale business reached $171 million in 2010, up 6 percent from the year before.

At the conference, a retired English professor, a cattle farmer from South Africa, a patent attorney from Singapore and an Italian fashion designer living in Bali mingled in the crowd. People discussed voluptuous bodies with slick curves, unblemished skin, flamboyant posture and perfectly curved luscious lips.

“Orchids are fascinating because they are shaped just like us—two sepals and two petals on either side,” said Motes, gesturing with his sepal-like legs and petal-like arms. “There’s a dorsal sepal at the top, a central column and a lip at the bottom that’s actually a landing pad for potential pollinators,” he went on. “This intricate structure of orchids tends to be sensual and touches something primal in us on a subliminal level.”

Another exhibitor, Haruhiko “Harry” Nagata, and his family hand-carried 275 orchid plants and 26 cut flowers from Japan to Singapore. “I have been growing orchids for 35 years and for me breeding orchids is all about fun and anticipation—pollinating two plants with different characteristics and getting to see the first bloom after several years!” he said. Nagata’s contender for the show’s big prize was a flamboyant white orchid with an exotic purple-tinged lip, named Mikkie Nagata, after his wife. Pointing to a pink flower, he said, “This is Cattleya Jimmy Nagata, named after my son. Very, very lousy,” he joked, pointing to his son in the distance. “But the flower is OK!”

When judging commenced, more than 200 connoisseurs, most with salt-and-pepper hair and clad in loose clothes and comfortable running shoes, scrambled from one exhibit to another armed with judging sheets, measuring tapes and laser pointers. Some examined from a distance, while others sat on their haunches and lifted the leaves delicately with a pen.

“My flowers have really done well, a lot of medals and ribbons,” said Purver, the Isle of Jersey grower. “I will be disappointed if I don’t win the big prize.”

But his entry was a runner-up in the best plant category, losing to a Taiwanese competitor whose winning orchid, Cycnodes Taiwan Gold, had a rich yellow flower that resembled the shape of a swan. The Orchid Society of Papua New Guinea also won a runner-up trophy, for overall display. Wiping tears of joy, Tkatchenko said, “This is absolutely sensational. Who knew where Papua New Guinea was and now we’re up against the world’s best!”

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Orchid-Olympics.html#ixzz1kIBj10Ix

Popular Mechanics has a nice article by David Kushner about the portrayal of science in Hollywood. It’s a topic I’m extremely interested in because the scientists that appear on film and television inform a great deal of public opinion about who we are and what we do.

In Unscientific America, Chris Mooney and I devoted an entire chapter to this topic called “Hollywood and the Mad Scientists.” We described how most Americans cannot even name a living scientists and do not know one personally. And unfortunately, on the big screen, they are most often freaks, geeks, or villains.

Kushner does a good job with the subject, outlining where we’ve made strides and why science doesn’t always win at the movies–which can at times be the fault of the science community. Biomedical engineer Malcolm MacIver is quoted describing the way that some scientists do not respect filmmakers, while some filmmakers find scientists difficult to hard to work with.

I’m also included in the article:

Most scientists are willing to advise not only because it allows them to be gate-keepers of their disciplines, but because they want to be portrayed accurately on-screen. “It’s rare that you have a relatable character,” says Sheril Kirshenbaum, a research associate at the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. That’s why James Cameron created Avatar’s xenobotanist, Grace. “Scientists are usually shown as geeks or losers or evil,” he says. “I wanted to celebrate the mind and the passion of a scientist.”

Hollywood is about entertainment and not everything onscreen needs to be completely plausible. That said, when science is portrayed well and motivated by realistic goals and interests, everyone wins.

Go read the entire piece..

Researchers have pinpointed differences between the brains of believers and nonbelievers, but the neural picture is not yet complete.

Several studies have revealed that people who practice meditation or have prayed for many years exhibit increased activity and have more brain tissue in their frontal lobes, regions associated with attention and reward, as compared with people who do not meditate or pray. A more recent study revealed that people who have had “born again” experiences have a smaller hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in emotions and memory, than atheists do. These findings, however, are difficult to interpret because they do not clarify whether having larger frontal lobes or a smaller hippocampus causes a person to become more religious or whether being pious triggers changes in these brain regions.

Various experiments have also tried to elucidate whether believing in God causes similar brain changes as believing in something else. The results, so far, show that thinking about God may activate the same parts of the brain as thinking about an airplane, a friend or a lamppost. For instance, one study showed that when religious people prayed to God, they used some of the same areas of the brain as when they talked to an average Joe. In other words, in the religious person’s brain, God is just as real as any object or person.

Research also suggests that a ­religious brain exhibits higher levels of dopamine, a hormone associated with increased attention and motivation. A study showed that believers were much more likely than skeptics to see words and faces on a screen when there were none, whereas skeptics often did not see words and faces that were actually there. Yet when skeptics were given the drug L-dopa, which increases the amount of dopamine in the brain, they were just as likely to interpret scrambled patterns as words and faces as were the religious individuals.

So what does the research mean? At the moment, we do not have a clear way to connect all the dots. For now we can say that the religious and atheist brains exhibit differences, but what causes these disparities remains unknown.

Source: Scientific American

California’s catalog of historic artifacts includes two pairs of boots, an American flag, empty food bags, a pair of tongs and more than a hundred other items left behind at a place called Tranquillity Base.