Cosmic Microwave Background radiation map of the Universe…Credit: ESA, Planck Collaboration
The big news for this week and I do mean big as in as big as the whole Universe, is a new collation and analysis of data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Planck observatory mission. The new analysis reveals several things about the observable Universe that revise astronomer’s thinking.
The Planck observatory is a satellite, the flagship mission of ESA launched with the assistance of the U.S. space agency NASA, that sits in a location over a million kilometers from Earth. It scans the observable Universe for tiny differences in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the faint traces of radiation (photons, light particles) that are remnants from the Big Bang. The Planck microwave receivers are the most sensitive and technically sophisticated yet assembled and they have made it possible to map the fluctuations (“hot or cold”) in the Universe to an unprecedented degree of resolution. It is providing astronomers with a picture of the Universe only 380,000 years after its formation in the Big Bang (which in cosmic time is only trillionths of a second). From this information, a great deal can be deduced about the nature of the Universe: More
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Getting your head around huge brain projects
As the ‘thinking’ goes – a billion here, a few billions there and eventually we’ll know how the brain works. The billions are Euros and dollars. The “there” are two projects aimed at learning how the human brain works. Even President Obama got into the act a while ago to mention in the State of the Union address about U.S. government funding for the Brain Activity Map project. Though at the moment this project is hardly more than an interesting article in the journal Neuron. The underlying assumption is that neuroscience is ready for big breakthroughs, if only there is enough money to coordinate and fund a massive research project – sort of like the all-out effort of putting man on the moon. Only in this case, substitute “explaining mental activity” for the “getting to the moon.”
If that sounds like an odd juxtaposition, it should. The Moon is a very real, measureable, and as we’ve seen, reachable object. Mental activity – with such useful but nebulous concepts like ‘thinking,’ ‘intelligence,’ ‘rationality,’ ‘memory,’ ‘cognition,’ or even (shudder) the soul – is elusive, controversial and vastly complex.
There is a similarity in the brain projects to the Human Genome Project of the 1990s. At the time the human genome project began, it seemed like mapping all of the genes in human DNA would provide a road map to cure thousands of diseases, unlock the secrets of human development and generally bring about a new level of understanding of the ‘blueprint’ of life. At the time, biochemists were just beginning to understand the chemical pathways by which DNA is created and goes about its work. As it turns out, this research led to the discovery of an entire field of study – epigenetics – that seeks to explain how genes are expressed and regulated. The knowledge of epigenetics vastly complicates the interpretation of DNA. For example, where medical researchers once thought that reading the human genome would lead to explaining and curing thousands of diseases, they now believe that perhaps 1 to 3 percent of diseases have a purely genetic cause. Otherwise, most diseases including cancer, heart and neurological disease are a complicated mixture of genetic, epigenetic and environmental causes. In short, the Human Genome Project was important, influential and worth the effort – but it was hardly the answer to all the mysteries of DNA or of human development. More »