Nature Has A Good Beat, But Can You Dance To It?

Rhythm in music is about timing ? when notes start and stop. And now scientists say they've found a curious pattern that's common to musical rhythm. It's a pattern also found in nature.

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Let's consider now some new research on rhythm. Rhythm in music is about timing - when notes start and stop. What makes for that swing? Scientists say they've found a curious pattern that's common to musical rhythm, and it's a pattern also found in nature. NPR's Christopher Joyce has the story.

CHRISTOPHER JOYCE, BYLINE: Psychologist Daniel Levitin plays the saxophone. Lately, though, he's been feeding musical scores into a computer - 558 musical scores, in fact, spanning four centuries. And he found a pattern in their rhythms. It's produced by a mathematical equation that also creates patterns in nature. You can see it in a snowflake or the leaf of a fern, where the smallest part of an object repeats itself over and over again to create the hole. Scientists call these patterns fractals, and that kind of pattern is buried in the music's rhythms, whether it's Bach or Chopin.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

JOYCE: Levitin says you need a computer to reveal it.

DANIEL LEVITIN: When I try to think about that in my head, it starts to explode. But it's there. It's there in the mathematics and it's there implicitly in the music.

JOYCE: Psychologists believe the human brain recognizes and responds to repeating patterns like this one in nature.

LEVITIN: It seems as though composers have internalized these regularities of the physical world and are bringing them back out in their composition.

JOYCE: Other scientists have seen this fractal thread in melodies, the distribution of the pitches of the notes, but it didn't differ much from one composer to the next. When it comes to rhythm, though, Levitin found that the pattern showed more variety. Composers, whether they knew it or not, seemed to have played around more with rhythm.

LEVITIN: The rhythm is really what separates them. We found that Beethoven has the most predictable rhythm. Mozart has among the least predictable rhythms.

JOYCE: Each composer, in fact, had his own rhythmic signature. Some were quite similar to each other, but not the ones you might expect. Take Monteverdi, for example.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

JOYCE: Monteverdi wrote madrigals and operas in the 16th century, but mathematically the rhythms of his music were more similar to...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

JOYCE: Scott Joplin, the popularizer of ragtime and early jazz.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

JOYCE: Levitin points out that you can't really recognize the fractal patterns by listening to a few musical phrases. You need to analyze hours of music, but it's there.

LEVITIN: So much so that if you were to give me a new undiscovered piece by the composer, I think we could tell you which composer it was.

JOYCE: Not by listening but by parsing the mathematical reason in its rhythms. Levitin's research appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. You can hear him play his sax with his band, Diminished Faculty, at McGill University in Montreal, where he's a professor. Christopher Joyce, NPR News.

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Source: http://www.npr.org/2012/02/21/147180161/nature-has-a-good-beat-but-can-you-dance-to-it?ft=1&f=1007

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Source: http://sci.rutgers.edu/forum/showthread.php?t=179591

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Hubble reveals a new class of extrasolar planet

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

An international team of astronomers led by Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) made the observations of the planet GJ 1214b.

"GJ 1214b is like no planet we know of," Berta said. "A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water."

The ground-based MEarth Project, led by CfA's David Charbonneau, discovered GJ 1214b in 2009. This super-Earth is about 2.7 times Earth's diameter and weighs almost seven times as much. It orbits a red-dwarf star every 38 hours at a distance of 2 million kilometres, giving it an estimated temperature of 230 degrees Celsius.

In 2010, CfA scientist Jacob Bean and colleagues reported that they had measured the atmosphere of GJ 1214b, finding it likely that it was composed mainly of water. However, their observations could also be explained by the presence of a planet-enshrouding haze in GJ 1214b's atmosphere.

Berta and his co-authors, who include Derek Homeier of ENS Lyon, France, used Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to study GJ 1214b when it crossed in front of its host star. During such a transit, the star's light is filtered through the planet's atmosphere, giving clues to the mix of gases.

"We're using Hubble to measure the infrared colour of sunset on this world," Berta explained.

Hazes are more transparent to infrared light than to visible light, so the Hubble observations help to tell the difference between a steamy and a hazy atmosphere.

They found the spectrum of GJ 1214b to be featureless over a wide range of wavelengths, or colours. The atmospheric model most consistent with the Hubble data is a dense atmosphere of water vapour.

"The Hubble measurements really tip the balance in favour of a steamy atmosphere," Berta said.

Since the planet's mass and size are known, astronomers can calculate the density, of only about 2 grams per cubic centimetre. Water has a density of 1 gram per cubic centimetre, while Earth's average density is 5.5 grams per cubic centimetre. This suggests that GJ 1214b has much more water than Earth does, and much less rock.

As a result, the internal structure of GJ 1214b would be extraordinarily different from that of our world.

"The high temperatures and high pressures would form exotic materials like 'hot ice' or 'superfluid water', substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience," Berta said.

Theorists expect that GJ 1214b formed further out from its star, where water ice was plentiful, and migrated inward early in the system's history. In the process, it would have passed through the star's habitable zone, where surface temperatures would be similar to Earth's. How long it lingered there is unknown.

GJ 1214b is located in the constellation of Ophiuchus (The Serpent Bearer), and just 40 light-years from Earth. Therefore, it's a prime candidate for study by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, planned for launch later this decade.

A paper reporting these results has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal and is available online.

###

ESA/Hubble Information Centre: http://www.spacetelescope.org

Thanks to ESA/Hubble Information Centre for this article.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/117756/Hubble_reveals_a_new_class_of_extrasolar_planet

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The Riviera Country Club is a country club with a championship golf course. It is located in Pacific Palisades, California, a community within the city limits of Los Angeles. The country club opened in 1926, with George C. Thomas, Jr. as the course architect. The course has been the primary host for the PGA Tour?s Northern Trust Open (better known as the Los Angeles Open). Riviera has also hosted the U.S. Open in 1948, the PGA Championship in 1983 and 1995, and the U.S. Senior Open in 1998. The course is located in the Santa Monica Canyon, just below the Santa Monica Mountains and a block south of Sunset Boulevard. It is not to be confused with the clubs of the same name in Coral Gables, Florida, Chicago, Illinois, or Dublin, Ohio.

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Can the stock market pick the next president?

NEW YORK?? The number has been repeated so often by presidential prognosticators that it's an article of faith: No president has been re-elected since World War II with an unemployment rate higher than 7.2 percent.

But the stock market turns out to be a pretty good predictor, too.

The Dow Jones industrial average has soared 62 percent since President Barack Obama took the oath of office during some of the darkest days of the Great Recession. The Dow was just below 8,000 then and stands near 13,000 today.

If a recent study of stock markets and presidential elections is any guide, Obama can start preparing his second inaugural address.

"There's something to this," says Phil Orlando, chief equity market strategist at Federated Investors, the $370 billion investment firm.

There are plenty of other signs often consulted for their political forecasting power, like whether a team from the National Football Conference or the American Football Conference wins the Super Bowl.

This one makes a little more sense: When the economy picks up and unemployment falls, confident investors put money into riskier investments and stocks rise. Voters are likely to reward the sitting president with another four years.

"The stock market reflects trends in the economy," Orlando says. And as any political operative can attest, in a presidential campaign, it's the economy ? you know the rest.

The study was backed by the Socionomics Institute, a think tank studying how a shared mood among a group sways its members' actions. Their researchers dug up data on economic output, prices, unemployment and stock-market performance and matched them to presidential elections.

They went all the way back to the first re-election in 1792, when George Washington beat John Adams and won a second term as the president.

The researchers found a solid connection between the stock market's direction in the three years leading up to Election Day and the election results. Gains of 20 percent or more for the Dow nearly assured victories for sitting presidents. Drops of 10 percent or worse got them tossed out.

Voters returned Calvin Coolidge to the White House in 1924, just as the Roaring '20s started roaring. They booted Herbert Hoover in 1932 while the stock market suffered through a three-year plunge.

The authors of the Socionomics Institute study say everything can be traced back to the prevailing optimism or pessimism. Their organization studies "the social mood." But how do you read the mood of a whole country?

The authors say that the stock market is the best available gauge of how the country is feeling, "because investors can act swiftly to express their optimism or pessimism." Bad day? Time to sell. Things looking up? Time to buy.

"An increasingly positive social mood produces a rising stock market as well as votes for the incumbent, and an increasingly negative social mood produces a falling stock market as well as votes against the incumbent," they write.

To the authors, it's the mood that determines the election, not the stock market. The stock market is just a reliable gauge of the national temper, an incredibly accurate mood ring.

In recent successful re-election campaigns, the connection appears clear. Ronald Reagan won re-election in 1984 following the Dow's 41 percent surge and despite an unemployment rate of 7.2 percent. Bill Clinton was awarded a second term after the Dow gained 63 percent in the three years leading up to Election Day.

The Bottom Line: Obama may keep his job even if you lose yours

But there are misfires. James Madison, for instance, won re-election in 1812 despite a 34 percent drop in the market over three years. George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton even though the Dow rose 51 percent over his term in office.

Doug Wead, a presidential historian who served in the elder Bush's administration, says the stock market theory sounds suspect.

"The stock market isn't even a good indicator of the economy," he says. "You can have the stock market going up while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer."

Story: This could be week stocks' rally comes to an end

There's also the danger of oversimplifying ? relying on one number, in this case the Dow's performance, while ignoring everything from scandals and wars to third-party candidates.

In William Howard Taft's last three years in office, the Dow lost 12 percent, and Taft lost the 1912 election to Woodrow Wilson. But if Theodore Roosevelt hadn't split from the Republicans and run under the Progressive Party banner against Taft that year, Taft might have returned to office.

It was a similar story with the first President Bush in 1992. The independent candidate Ross Perot siphoned off votes from both candidates, but historians generally believe more came from Bush's Republican camp. Clinton won with just 43 percent of the popular vote.

The Bottom Line: The 10 richest US presidents

The economy also slipped into a recession during Bush's second year in office, and as he campaigned for re-election, the unemployment rate hovered well above the dreaded 7.2 percent mark.

Orlando, of Federated Investors, says a change in any single statistic won't guarantee a president gets re-elected. Analysts should consult a range of figures. One that looks less reassuring for Obama is his approval rating, he says.

No president has been re-elected with a Gallup approval rating below 48 percent approaching Election Day. Obama's numbers are improving, and the election is more than eight months away, but for now he's teetering on the edge ? 48 percent.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46454352/ns/business-stocks_and_economy/

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APNewsBreak: FDA to review inhalable caffeine

FILE - In this Monday, Jan. 23, 2012 still file photo taken from video, students try free samples of AeroShot, an inhalable caffeine packed in a lipstick-sized canister, on the campus of Northeastern University in Boston. The Food and Drug Administration will investigate the safety and legality of the product created by Harvard biomedical engineering professor David Edwards. (AP Photo/Rodrique Ngowi, File)

FILE - In this Monday, Jan. 23, 2012 still file photo taken from video, students try free samples of AeroShot, an inhalable caffeine packed in a lipstick-sized canister, on the campus of Northeastern University in Boston. The Food and Drug Administration will investigate the safety and legality of the product created by Harvard biomedical engineering professor David Edwards. (AP Photo/Rodrique Ngowi, File)

In this Feb. 7, 2012 file photo, a woman holds an AeroShot inhalable caffeine device in Boston. The Food and Drug Administration will investigate the safety and legality of the product, created by Harvard biomedical engineering professor David Edwards. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

This Monday, Jan. 23, 2012 still file photo taken from video shows Harvard biomedical engineering professor David Edwards, creator of AeroShot, during an interview at Breathable Foods Lab, Inc., in Cambridge, Mass. The Food and Drug Administration will investigate the safety and legality of the product, an inhalable caffeine packed in a lipstick-sized canister. (AP Photo/Rodrique Ngowi, File)

BOSTON (AP) ? U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials plan to investigate whether inhalable caffeine sold in lipstick-sized canisters is safe for consumers and if its manufacturer was right to brand it as a dietary supplement.

AeroShot went on the market late last month in Massachusetts and New York, and it's also available in France. Consumers put one end of the canister in their mouths and breathe in, releasing a fine powder that dissolves almost instantly.

Each grey-and-yellow plastic canister contains B vitamins, plus 100 milligrams of caffeine powder, about the equivalent of the caffeine in a large cup of coffee.

AeroShot inventor, Harvard biomedical engineering professor David Edwards, says the product is safe and doesn't contain taurine and other common additives used to enhance the caffeine effect in energy drinks.

AeroShot didn't require FDA review before hitting the U.S. market because it's sold as a dietary supplement. But New York's U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer said he met with FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg and she agreed to review the safety and legality of AeroShot.

"I am worried about how a product like this impacts kids and teens, who are particularly vulnerable to overusing a product that allows one to take hit after hit after hit, in rapid succession," Schumer said.

He planned to announce the AeroShot review Sunday.

Tom Hadfield, chief executive of Breathable Foods, which makes AeroShot in France, said in a statement that the company will cooperate fully with the FDA's review to address the issues raised by Schumer and are confident it will conclude that AeroShot is a safe, effective product that complies with FDA regulations.

The company said that when used according to its label, AeroShot provides a safe amount of caffeine and B vitamins and does not contain common additives used to enhance the effect of caffeine in energy drinks.

It said each AeroShot contains B vitamins and 100 milligrams of caffeine, about the equivalent of caffeine in a large cup of coffee, and that AeroShot is not recommended for those under 18 and is not marketed to children.

Meanwhile, an FDA official who was at the meeting confirmed the decision, telling The Associated Press that the review will include a study of the law to determine whether AeroShot qualifies as a dietary supplement. The product will also be tested to figure out whether it's safe for consumption, the official said.

The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because that official was not authorized to discuss the matter.

Schumer pressed the FDA in December to review AeroShot, saying he fears that it will be used as a club drug so that young people can keep going until they drop. He cited incidents that occurred last year when students looking for a quick and cheap buzz began consuming caffeine-packed alcoholic drinks they dubbed "blackout in a can" because of their potency.

Pressure from the senator and others helped persuade the FDA to stop the marketing, distribution and sale of these beverages, including Four Loko.

"We need to make sure that AeroShot does not become the next Four Loko by facilitating dangerous levels of drinking among teenagers and college students," Schumer said in a statement.

Breathable Foods says the product is different from the potent beverages. The company says that it's not targeting anyone under 18 and that AeroShot safely delivers caffeine into the mouth, just like coffee does.

A single unit costs $2.99 at convenience stores, mom-and-pops, and liquor and online stores. The product packaging warns people not to consume more than three AeroShots a day.

"When used in accordance with its label, AeroShot provides a safe shot of caffeine and B vitamins for ingestion," the manufacturer says on its website. "Caffeine has been proven to offer a variety of potential benefits for health to individuals when consumed in moderation, from providing energy to enhancing attention and focus."

AeroShot, the flagship product of Cambridge, Mass.-based Breathable Foods, is the product of a conversation that Edwards had with celebrity French chef Thierry Marks over lunch in the summer of 2007.

The first venture Edwards worked on with Harvard students was the breathable chocolate, called Le Whif. Now he's preparing to promote a product called Le Whaf, which involves putting food and drinks in futuristic-looking glass bowls and turning them into low calorie clouds of flavor.

___

Rodrique Ngowi can be reached at www.twitter.com/ngowi.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/bbd825583c8542898e6fa7d440b9febc/Article_2012-02-19-Inhalable%20Caffeine/id-4bebfa87b7a64936b36aa06c98ddb348

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