Humans and Rats Think Alike After Making Mistakes

When it comes to learning from mistakes, humans and rats think alike, research suggests.

In a study that tracked how humans and their rodent cousins adapted to errors during a time estimation task, the two species showed similar brain activity in the medial frontal cortex (MFC), which sends signals that synchronize neurons in the part of the brain that controls movement.

The findings suggest rats could serve as models for studying human adaptive control, the process of modifying choices based on experience. This knowledge could be useful in treating psychiatric diseases, such as obsessive compulsive disorder, depression and schizophrenia, the researchers say

"With this rat model of adaptive control, we are now able to examine if novel drugs or other treatment procedures boost the integrity of this system," study researcher James Cavanagh, now a psychology professor at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, said in a statement.

Lesions to the MFC in humans and other animals are known to cause impaired performance in tasks that require learning from mistakes, such as a false start in a race. But the mechanism for how MFC achieved this control wasn't known.

Cavanagh and his colleagues at Brown and Yale Universities measured the brainwaves of rats and humans as both performed a task that involved estimating time in response to a cue.

The researchers saw an increase in low-frequency brainwaves in the MFC of rats and humans after they made errors during the task. The brain activity in this area was synchronized with activity in the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls muscle movement.

When the scientists used drugs to inactivate the MFC in the rats, the animals were worse at learning from their mistakes on the task, and their MFC brainwaves were less in sync with the motor cortex.

The results, detailed today (Oct. 20) in the journal Nature Neuroscience, "describe a new mechanism for behavioral adaptation through low-frequency oscillations," the authors write. The findings suggest rodents could be a good model for testing new drugs or brain stimulation treatments for diseases involving problems with adaptive control, they 

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Government Shutdown Could Cost Defense Department Billions

As the United States entered its 14th day of the federal government shutdown, experts had more bad news about the long-term impacts of a lengthy budget impasse: It could cost the Department of Defense billions of dollars.

It typically costs between $4 billion and $8 billion to shutter and reopen the federal government, but Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C., said the shutdown could cost the Department of Defense billions of dollars down the line, reported DefenseNews.com. 

For one, agencies will have to deal with all the work that has accumulated since the shutdown began on Oct. 1. The final price tag, however, will also depend on how the government deals with issues such as back pay for federal employees.

While special legislation has helped to insulate many military and Pentagon employees, the inefficiencies created by the government shutdown could have lasting consequences. "It's not that it's immediate," Harrison told DefenseNews.com. "It won't cost you billions of dollars in the first year. It's billions of dollars over the life of these programs."

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Bowflex Boost: Fitness Tracker Review

he maker of Bowflex fitness equipment, Nautilus, recently launched an activity tracker called Bowflex Boost. At $49.95, it's one of the least expensive activity trackers on the market (For comparison, the Jawbone Up will cost you $129.99, and the Fitbit Flex goes for $99.95).
But how well does the Boost perform compared to other, more pricey trackers? I tried it out for a few days to see.
The Boost excels in comfort. Made from silicone material, the wristband is flexible, and is designed to coil around the wrist before it is snapped into place with a plastic clasp.
My favorite thing about the Boost has to be the 14 size settings, which allow you to adjust the band so that it fits snuggly around your wrist. Although a simple feature, you'd be surprised at how much less fun afitness trackeris to wear if it doesn't fit right. I have small wrists, and the Boost fit me much better than some other wristband fitness trackers, such as the Nike FuelBand, which can be only minimally adjusted, andJawbone Up, which cannot be adjusted at all.
The Boost has just one button on the top of the device, which you press to see your progress — a red, yellow or green light shines to indicates how far you are toward reaching your activity goal for the day — to put the device in sleep mode, or to wirelessly sync the device with your phone.
I found this button somewhat hard to operate. The button needs to be held for three seconds to put into sleep mode, and five seconds to sync. It sometimes took me several tries to get the device into sleep mode, or to sync, even though I was pushing the button down quit firmly. Instead of syncing, the light on the device would simply turn off, and I would have to start over.
User-Friendliness:  ★★★☆☆
The device is simple enough to use. The red, yellow, green lighting system gives you a quick snapshot of your daily activity progress. However, there is no screen on the wristband, so users must look at the app to know exactly how many steps they've taken or calories burned. For people interested in knowing exactly how they're doing "right now," an activity tracker with a screen might be a better fit. [Top Fitness Gadgets for 2013]
To see your data, you have to download the Boost app, which is currently available only for the iPhone. When you launch the app for the first time, a graphic explains how to use the device, and the meaning of Boost's red/yellow/green lights. (Red means you've reached 0-50 percent of your goal, yellow 51-99 percent and green 100 percent).
Boost tracks the steps you've taken, the calories you've burned and the distance walked. It also tracks your sleep time, and how long it takes you to fall asleep. With the app launched, you simply swipe the screen to switch between viewing your activity and sleep.
Over time, the Boost tracks your weekly, monthly and yearly activity, and can display it in a graph. However, it doesn't store the daily data -- after a day has passed, there's no way for you to view how many steps you took on that day, how many calories you burned, and your distance traveled.

The default settings for Boost's activity goals are 10,000 steps, 500 calories and three miles, although you can adjust these goals if you so choose.
However, the device does not tell you how much activity you need to "be healthy," or how much sleep you need, and does not provide tips to boost your activity or help you get more shuteye. In other words, there's very little "hand-holding" with the Boost.
The device tracks your activity, but it's up to you to figure out how to improve it. (For comparison, the Withings Pulse tells users that the World Health Organization recommends 150 minutes of activity per week, and that most adults need between seven and nine hours of sleep.)
The Boost's light does not shine green until you've reached all three of your goals, for steps, calories and miles. So if you've walked 15,000 steps, but burned only 300 calories, the light remains yellow. This method may help users focus on all three metrics, rather than just one.
A small criticism is that the activity graphs on the app — which show your daily, weekly, monthly or yearly activity — have a Y axis labeled simply as "%." Which begs the question, percent of what?

        

The Boost tracks your activity, but I can't say it was very inspiring. It does not prompt you to get moving when you have a sedentary day, nor praise you when you meet your goal.

The app also does not allow you to compare your daily activity with others, however, you can share your activity to Facebook and Twitter. But if you're looking for a no-frills device, and you simply need to see your activity numbers for a little motivation, the Boost might be for you.

Conclusion: 10 out of 20 stars

The pros of the Boost include its affordable price, adjustable strap and ability to view a month's or year's worth of data on a single graph.

The cons of the Boost are a lack of a screen on the wristband, no tips for how to improve physical activity or sleep, and no way to look up exactly how many steps you took after a day has passed.

        

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British students arrive in Zambia to help build school

St Mary’s Calne, a leading British independent boarding and day school for girls based in Wiltshire, has sent fifteen A Level and GCSE pupils and two members of staff to Zambia to help build a school in Chama, one of the remotest districts based in the Eastern Province of Zambia.

The project is focused on helping the Anglican Street Children’s Programme in Zambia and has been organised in conjunction with The Livingstone Arts, Cultural & Sporting Events Development Organisation (LACSEDO) and The David Livingstone Bicentenary and Livingstone 2013 Initiative, to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Dr David Livingstone.

In a statement a statement to ACNS and other media, Chairperson of The David Livingstone Bicentenary & Livingstone 2013 Initiative, Belinda Hodge said, "St Mary’s Calne sees this as the start of a long-term relationship with the new school and are hugely excited to be given such an amazing opportunity to make a difference to the everyday lives of vulnerable children in this region of Zambia."

The Director of the Anglican Street Children’s Programme in Zambia, Fr Katete Jones, said he was happy with the development; that "it would go a long way in helping the vulnerable young girls in the region".

He said: "In Chama, girls are missing out on education as a result of the poverty and bad traditional practices of early marriages. This opportunity of a better education will be a dream come true for them."

"It must be pointed out that Chama is one of the remotest areas in Zambia and not many charitable organisations would want to render help as the distances from the main (tarred) roads are enormous," he said.

St Mary’s pupils have raised over £1,000 towards building materials, over and above paying for their trip themselves. They have been fundraising all year by hosting a variety of activities in the school’s calendar, including selling Krispy Kreme Doughnuts during school mid-morning breaks and holding non-school uniform days when pupils can pay to wear their own clothes rather than the required school uniform.

As well as making a start on the structure of the new school, the St Mary’s girls and staff will be meeting children and their families, leaders of the local community, playing sport with the children, learning about the different culture and getting a first-hand feel of what it is like to live in Zambia.

The suggested name for the new school is St Mary’s Anglican Girls Secondary School, creating a very important link between the two schools.

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Why Australia's Wildfires Are So Bad

A dry, warm winter set the stage for dozens of wildfires currently threatening populated areas in New South Wales, Australia.

The fires have destroyed hundreds of homes and sent smoke and ash into the air over Sydney. The region, which is now entering summer, also experienced hundreds of fires this January during a catastrophic heat wave. 

The past three months have been among the driest 10 percent on record in New South Wales (NSW), said Todd Lane, a meteorologist at the University of Melbourne. The region has received about 4 inches (100 millimeters) less rain than normal. At the same time, temperatures during the winter months averaged 5 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) hotter than normal across much of NSW.

"These prolonged warm and dry conditions lead to dry fuels, which is a key ingredient for severe fires," Lane told LiveScience.

Difficult weather

There are four big fires and 53 smaller ones burning in NSW. Thousands of homes in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney are close to natural areas and are at risk from the flames.

Firefighters are expecting difficult conditions today (Oct. 23, Australian time). A weak cold front is expected to move through, which should alleviate the heat in the long term, but which will likely stoke the flames before it starts helping. The wind will likely increase in front of the front, Lane said, and gusts can send flames spreading in surprising directions. In previous fires, he said, the hours before a "cool change" have been the deadliest.

Complicating the response is the mountainous terrain where the fires are burning. Mountain wind is often "stronger, gustier and less predictable," Lane said. Eucalyptus forests may also be feeding the flames.

The flames are also creating their own weather, as they are expected tofuel huge pyrocumulus clouds over the area, which can also create winds that fuel the fire further.

A changing climate

Australia is no stranger to major fires. In 1983, the Ash Wednesday fires killed 75 people. In 2009, a heat wave fueled the Black Saturday fires, which raged across the province of Victoria. One hundred and seventy-three people died, and thousands of homes were destroyed.

Such fires are too infrequent to judge whether they're coming harder and faster as the climate warms, Lane said. But researchers do expect Australia to see more fires thanks to climate change. Canada, Russia, the United States and the Mediterranean will likely see more fires as well. [Gallery: California Wildfires]

"Fuels are drier when temperatures go up," said Peter Fulé, a fire ecologist at Northern Arizona University. "You have basically more evaporation, so fuels dry out more. You also have longer fire seasons."

Over time, though, the effect of climate change on forest fires becomes more complex, Fulé told LiveScience. In some regions, the climate will become more arid, resulting in less vegetation in forests, with the end result being less fuel. Changing temperatures might also influence what vegetation returns after a fire — some forests may never come back.

Adding to the complexity is the fact that fires are a natural part of many forest ecosystems. It's not enough to say fire is good or bad in a particular region, Fulé said.

"In some places, you want to have fires rarely, but very intensively. And in other places, it fits better in those communities to have frequent, low intensity fires," he said. "Trying to balance that all out, trying to relate it to what human society wants and is willing to pay for, and how to deal with houses in the middle of that is an important issue. And then, the way that climate change affects it is also important."

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Why Obama's spin on Healthcare.gov may only make things worse

An IT problem has never escalated faster than the president's Rose Garden speech Monday addressing the problems with Healthcare.gov. He could no longer outsource responding to user complaints. At first, the White House had said the headaches signing people up for health care coverage were just technical glitches, but now the sheer number of those glitches defies that explanation. Reporting about deeper systemic problems suggest that fixes will not come quickly. As my colleague Matthew Yglesias explains, adding more bodies to the problem adds more complexity, which may exacerbate the problem. It's hard to untangle Christmas lights by committee.

Barack Obama doesn't like to play the action-hero president where the application of his overwhelming will is supposed to directly correlate with a snappy solution. There are too many constraints on the presidency--Congress, a fickle public, world leaders, a $17 trillion economy, and the vagaries of time and space. But with the botched Obamacare rollout, the president was applying all the rhetorical torque he could muster. "Nobody's madder than me about the fact that the website isn't working as well as it should," Obama said on Monday, "which means it's going to get fixed."

Rhetoric and will isn't going to solve this problem. That helped the president triumph over the government shutdown and debt limit crisis, when through determination and superior political positioning he out maneuvered his Republican opponents. Now he has a different kind of challenge--an operational challenge--where his talent for politics and persuasion are less useful and may even make matters worse. Putting a good spin on things only sets expectations that can then be dashed by reality.

It's a challenge of the president's own making. Unlike his battle with Republicans over the serial budget crises or the economic mess or smoldering wars he inherited from the Bush administration, the president is not reacting to uncontrollable events. He can't blame BP or Halliburton. The Affordable Care Act is his baby. Republicans made the rollout harder, but more than any other domestic challenge, his administration should have been able to anticipate the problems they're now scrambling to fix.

In the Rose Garden on Monday morning, the president had a tough balancing act. On the one hand, he wanted to show that he was personally peeved, but he also had to simultaneously argue that the problems that made him so angry weren't threatening the underlying health of the product. That's a proposition that has yet to be tested. There are substantive ways in which the rollout can damage the fundamental enterprise. If the problems are as systemic as some reporting suggests, then they will not be fixed easily or anytime soon. The premise of the website was that its rollout would initiate a wave of social media success stories that would reach those younger applicants who are so vital to Obamacare's success. Younger, healthy people must sign up to keep the insurance pools from being dominated by older sicker Americans, an outcome that would make prices soar. But those great sign up stories are not filtering through social media to this hard-to-reach group. Instead, they're hearing that the program is a mess. If enough young people don't sign up, then the death-spiral scenario kicks in.

The president's speech was just the latest attempt to put the problems with Healthcare.gov into perspective--a job that is not going well. Before the site was launched, the president said it would make signing up for health care as easy asmaking a plane reservation. When, after a few rocky days that turned out to be too rosy, the administration dropped the airline analogy. Now the experience more closely approximates the saga of having your flight delayed. First, the airline tells you it will be a half hour, then it stretches it to an hour, then two, then you're offered a voucher for a drink. After four hours, it dawns on you that the plane is never taking off. They continue to assure you it will--just before they cancel your flight.

The stories keep shifting. Administration officials said the site had been tested as thoroughly as the IRS computer systems that handle electronic tax returns. Now Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admits the system wasn't tested enough. In the first several days, administration officials spoke of "glitches," and Secretary Sebelius asked that people give the government the same amount of slack Apple gets when it launches a new product. But the administration dropped that analogy because, unlike Apple's quick admission that Apple Maps was a mess, the government can't just let users install Google Maps (and there have been no quick firings for the mess, as there were at Apple). The president and his team then said the website snafus were the result of huge traffic, but that explanation doesn't explain the considerable technical problems now being reported. Reports of the extraordinary number of people who have accessed the site are themselves full of fuzzy claims that seek to oversell the success.

There's a dangerous spiral that can take hold in these situations, as spin intended to distract from the current mess becomes its own problem. That is especially true when the facts demonstrate that the story the administration was selling is too optimistic: Either the White House knew how bad things were and wasn't playing it straight or it didn't know how bad things were and is just inept. Which one the public chooses--or whether they forgive the launch pad mishaps when everything is repaired--depends on the administration's operational, rather than its political, skill. The customer support ticket has reached the highest level; now the country must wait.

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58 percent support marijuana legalization, poll says

The times, they are a-changin.

With marijuana now legal in two states (and perhaps more to follow), a clear majority of Americans - 58 percent - say marijuana should be legalized, according to new poll from Gallup.

The results mark the first time since Gallup began polling on the issue in 1969 that a majority have voiced support for marijuana legalization.

In 1969, only 12 percent supported legalization. By 2000 that number had jumped to 31 percent. And while support has generally increased steadily over time, it seems to have jumped dramatically since 2012, when only 48 percent of respondents supported legalization.

In this latest poll, 67 percent of young adults between 18 and 29 years of age support legalization - the highest of any age group - and majorities of every age group except those over 65 also support legalization.

But ask grandma, and she might surprise you - even 45 percent of seniors think marijuana should be legal.

• Washington state reveals proposed regulation for recreational pot
• Chris Christie pressed to approve medical marijuana law

And file this under "response bias": While a clear majority supports legalizing pot, only 38 percent of respondents will admit to having used the drug.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a stark political divide - 65 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support legalizing marijuana, but only 35 percent of Republicans agree.

"Success at the ballot box in the past year inColorado and Washington may have increased Americans' tolerance for marijuana legalization," notes Gallup's Art Swift. "The increasing prevalence of medical marijuana as a socially acceptable way to alleviate symptoms of diseases such as arthritis, and as a way to mitigate side effects of chemotherapy, may have also contributed to Americans' growing support."

"The legal momentum shows no sign of abating," he adds. "Last week, California's second-highest elected official, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, said that pot should be legal in the Golden State, and advocates of legalization are poised to introduce a statewide referendum in 2014 to legalize the drug."

Gallup's poll surveyed 1,028 adults between October 3 and 6, and it carries a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent.

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