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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. ? NASA is all set to launch the world's biggest extraterrestrial explorer.
A six-wheeled, one-armed Mars rover is due to blast off Saturday morning from Cape Canaveral. The unmanned Atlas V rocket will put the spacecraft on an 8 1/2-month trek to the red planet.
The rover, nicknamed Curiosity, is the size of a car. It's a mobile laboratory holding 10 science instruments that will sample Martian soil and rocks, and analyze them right there on the surface. There's a drill as well as a stone-zapping laser machine.
Curiosity will spend two years looking for evidence that Mars may once have been ? or still is ? suitable for microbial life.
The mission costs $2.5 billion.
Forecasters expect decent launching weather.
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Brain imaging, behavior research reveals physicians learn more by paying attention to failure
Thursday, November 24, 2011When seeking a physician, you should look for one with experience. Right? Maybe not. Research on physicians' decision-making processes has revealed that those who pay attention to failures as well as successes become more adept at selecting the correct treatment.
"We found that all the physicians in the study included irrelevant criteria in their decisions," said Read Montague, Ph.D., director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, who led the study. "Notably, however, the most experienced doctors were the poorest learners."
The research is published in the Nov. 23 issue of PLoS One, the Public Library of Science open-access journal, in the article, "Neural correlates of effective learning in experienced medical decision-makers," by Jonathan Downar, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto and Toronto Western Hospital; Meghana Bhatt, Ph.D., assistant research professor at Beckman Research Institute, the City of Hope Hospital, Duarte, Calif.; and Montague, who is also a professor of physics in the College of Science at Virginia Tech.
The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at the brain activity of 35 experienced physicians in a range of non-surgical specialties as they made decisions.
The doctors were instructed to select between two treatments for a series of simulated patients in an emergency room setting. "First they had a chance to learn by experience which of two medications worked better in a series of 64 simulated heart-attack patients, based on a simplified history with just six factors," said Bhatt.
Unknown to the test subjects, of the six factors, only one was actually relevant to the decision: diabetes status. One medication had a 75 percent success rate in patients with diabetes, but only a 25 percent success rate in patients without diabetes. The other had the opposite profile. The physicians had 10 seconds to select a treatment. Then they were briefly presented with an outcome of "SUCCESS: (heart attack) aborted" or "FAILURE: No response."
"After the training, we tested the physicians to see how often they were able to pick the better drug in a second series of 64 simulated patients," said Bhatt. "When we looked at their performance, the doctors separated into two distinct groups. One group learned very effectively from experience, and chose the better drug more than 75 percent of the time. The other group was terrible; they chose the better drug only at coin-flipping levels of accuracy, or half the time, and they also came up with inaccurate systems for deciding how to prescribe the medications, based on factors that didn't matter at all."
In fact, all the doctors reported including at least one of the five irrelevant factors, such as age or previous heart attack, in their decision process.
"The brain imaging showed us a clear difference in the mental processes of the two groups," said Montague. "The high performers activated their frontal lobes when things didn't go as expected and the treatments failed." Such activity showed that the doctors learned from their failures, he said. These physicians gradually improved their performance.
In contrast, the low performers activated their frontal lobes when things did go as expected, said Bhatt. "In other words, they succumbed to 'confirmation bias,' ignoring failures and learning only from the successful cases. Each success confirmed what the low performers falsely thought they already knew about which treatment was better." The researchers termed this counterproductive learning pattern "success-chasing."
"The problem with remembering successes and ignoring failures is that it doesn't leave us any way to abandon our faulty ideas. Instead, the ideas gain strength from each chance success, until they evolve into something like a superstition," said Downar.
The fMRI showed that a portion of the brain called the nucleus accumbens "showed significant anticipatory activation well before the outcome of the trial was revealed, and this anticipatory activation was significantly greater prior to successful outcomes," Montague said. "Based on the outcome of the training phase, we were actually able to predict results in the testing phase for each low-performing subject's final set of spurious treatment rules."
The authors state in the article that the formation of spurious beliefs is universal, such as an athlete's belief in a lucky hat. "But the good news is that physicians can probably be trained to think more like the high performers," said Downar. "I tell my students to remember three things: First, when you're trying to work out a diagnosis, remember to also ask the questions that would prove your hunches wrong. Second, when you think you have the answer, think again and go through the possible alternatives. Third, if the treatment isn't going as expected, don't just brush it off ? ask yourself what you could have missed."
"These findings underscore the dangers of disregarding past failures when making high-stakes decisions," said Montague. "'Success-chasing' not only can lead doctors to make flawed decisions in diagnosing and treating patients, but it can also distort the thinking of other high-stakes decision-makers, such as military and political strategists, stock market investors, and venture capitalists."
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Virginia Tech: http://www.vtnews.vt.edu
Thanks to Virginia Tech for this article.
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Mistras Group (NYSE: MG - News), which provides technology-enabled non-destructive testing solutions, recently reported better-than-expected results for the first quarter with profits surging a whopping 103%. Let's take a closer look at the impressive numbers.
Rise and fall
Revenue increased by 34% to $91.4 million due to increased demand for inspection services along with an increase in "run and maintain" or "evergreen" contracts. Advanced non-destructive testing services, which have higher margins than traditional NDT services, also increased noticeably over the last year. NDT services are basically analysis techniques to evaluate the properties of a material, component, or system cost-effectively and without causing damage. Increased growth of 40% from targets other than oil and gas also added to the revenue.
Oil and gas contributed 56% to the top line, down from 61% in the same period previous year. Gross profits decreased because of lower margins associated with the energy sector caused by longer contracts and a high concentration of traditional NDT services. When it came to new contracts, the company was not able to command prices, which may lead to lower margins in the short term. However, Mistras put a sizable effort in improving gross profits by focusing on utilization rates of its service technicians, controlling other costs of revenues, and introducing more advanced NDT tools to its services segment.
The net effect on the bottom line was a whopping 103% increase to $3.2 million, primarily due to an increase in revenue. The growth could have been higher but was stymied by higher selling, general, and administrative expenses. These were borne from infrastructure- and acquisitions-related costs.
Is it just Mistras or is it an industry trend?
Although the three-digit growth was not felt across the board, peers didn't do badly either. Team (Nasdaq: TISI - News) put up a good show in its last quarter with a 78% increase in net income. Furmanite (NYSE: FRM - News) also experienced a 98% increase in the bottom line. This shows that the industry is going through a strong positive trend.
And this is a big advantage for Mistras as it is well-positioned as a "one source asset protection solution" provider for its customers. In other words, it is like a one-stop shop. This should assist the company in further enhancing its top line.
Mistras, which earns a major chunk of revenues from the oil and gas industry, has many midstream and upstream companies as its clients. This particular sector is poised for huge growth given the high natural gas reserves around the world and the demand associated with it. The impending expansion should also increase opportunities for Mistras' services.
What's cooking?
Mistras Group has shown a strong uptrend through its top-line growth. The company's positioning as a one-stop shop within the target market has the potential to maintain the growth momentum. Given that it can market its services well, I believe it is worth keeping an eye on.
Abantika Chatterjee does not own shares of the companies mentioned. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
The Thanksgiving menu for astronauts aboard the International Space Station includes turkey, yams, and cherry-blueberry cobbler, all served up ? or is it down? ? in a microgravity environment.?
A light Thanksgiving dinner doesn't necessarily mean skimping on the turkey or stuffing, not even aboard the International Space Station. The three crew members, who arrived just in time to spend a weightless holiday in orbit, will enjoy a feast of irradiated smoked turkey and heat-treated yams while floating 220 miles (354 kilometers) above Earth tomorrow (Nov. 24).
Skip to next paragraphThe?weightless feast?will include traditional favorites with a space-y twist, such as NASA's own cornbread dressing, home-style potatoes, cranberries, and for dessert ? drum roll! ? cherry-blueberry cobbler, served in a space pouch.
Around the table will be NASA astronaut Dan Burbank and Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin. The trio arrived at the space station Tuesday (Nov. 22), and they are scheduled to live and work aboard the outpost until March. Their time will be spent conducting experiments and preparing for the arrival of new commercial cargo-carrying spacecraft.
Burbank recently described the crew's Thanksgiving plans in a NASA holiday video message, with Burbank catching floating food packages as he gave Earthlings a rundown of the Thursday menu. [A Gallery of Space Food]
The one important missing ingredient? Family.
"We're going to be missing the family and friends back home; we're going to hopefully get a chance to talk to them," Burbank said.
Even so, the astronaut has a lot on his gratitude list.
"We're going to enjoy some great food, we're going to enjoy?a view of planet Earth from here, we're going to be real thankful for the opportunity that we have to fly aboard this magnificent space station, and we're going to be thankful for the love and support of all the folks that we have back home," Burbank said.
Even though the crew members won't be able to bow their heads in thanks with their families and friends, the feast will provide a reminder of home. "The food we eat in space tastes very much like the food we enjoy on Earth," a former space station occupant, NASA astronaut Clay Anderson, said from the ground.
The trickiest part of preparing a space Thanksgiving meal has to do with shelf life: Without any food refrigerators or freezers on the space station, food must last in room temperature for long periods of time, said NASA food scientist Vickie Kloeris, manager of the space station's food system. That's why they freeze-dry and thermostabilize the foods. Thermostabilizing involves pre-heating the food to kill bacteria.
Outdoing a meal with family and friends may be difficult, but the space station has something Grandma's house doesn't, and that's microgravity.
"It's totally legal to play with your food in outer space," Anderson told SPACE.com, adding that astronauts can spin the floating food on their spoon, which is "great fun." And Anderson would know. He spent 152 days living aboard the station in 2007, returning to the outpost in 2010 as a member of space shuttle mission STS-131.
During his stays, he said, he ate all of the foods being served at Thanksgiving, though he wasn't on the station for turkey day or?Christmas in space.
The astronauts may wind up in the same?turkey coma?as people on Earth. Anderson said that even in microgravity it's tempting to stuff yourself. "I ate like a pig when I was there," he said, "and I still lost weight."
Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter?@Spacedotcomand on?Facebook.
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