Dark Matter Almost "Seen"

First Signs of Self-interacting Dark Matter?
Dark matter may not be completely dark after all
ESO, April 15, 2015

 

For the first time dark matter may have been observed interacting with other dark matter in a way other than through the force of gravity. Observations of colliding galaxies made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have picked up the first intriguing hints about the nature of this mysterious component of the Universe.

Using the MUSE instrument on ESO’s VLT in Chile, along with images from Hubble in orbit, a team of astronomers studied the simultaneous collision of four galaxies in the galaxy cluster Abell 3827. The team could trace out where the mass lies within the system and compare the distribution of the dark matter with the positions of the luminous galaxies.

Although dark matter cannot be seen, the team could deduce its location using a technique called gravitational lensing. The collision happened to take place directly in front of a much more distant, unrelated source. The mass of dark matter around the colliding galaxies severely distorted spacetime, deviating the path of light rays coming from the distant background galaxy — and distorting its image into characteristic arc shapes.

Our current understanding is that all galaxies exist inside clumps of dark matter. Without the constraining effect of dark matter’s gravity, galaxies like the Milky Way would fling themselves apart as they rotate. In order to prevent this, 85 percent of the Universe’s mass [1] must exist as dark matter, and yet its true nature remains a mystery.

In this study, the researchers observed the four colliding galaxies and found that one dark matter clump appeared to be lagging behind the galaxy it surrounds. The dark matter is currently 5000 light-years (50 000 million million kilometres) behind the galaxy — it would take NASA’s Voyager spacecraft 90 million years to travel that far.

A lag between dark matter and its associated galaxy is predicted during collisions if dark matter interacts with itself, even very slightly, through forces other than gravity [2]. Dark matter has never before been observed interacting in any way other than through the force of gravity.

Lead author Richard Massey at Durham University, explains: “We used to think that dark matter just sits around, minding its own business, except for its gravitational pull. But if dark matter were being slowed down during this collision, it could be the first evidence for rich physics in the dark sector — the hidden Universe all around us.”

The researchers note that more investigation will be needed into other effects that could also produce a lag. Similar observations of more galaxies, and computer simulations of galaxy collisions will need to be made.

Team member Liliya Williams of the University of Minnesota adds: “We know that dark matter exists because of the way that it interacts gravitationally, helping to shape the Universe, but we still know embarrassingly little about what dark matter actually is. Our observation suggests that dark matter might interact with  forces other than gravity, meaning we could rule out some key theories about what dark matter might be.”

This result follows on from a recent result from the team which observed 72 collisions between galaxy clusters [3] and found that dark matter interacts very little with itself. The new work however concerns the motion of individual galaxies, rather than clusters of galaxies. Researchers say that the collision between these galaxies could have lasted longer than the collisions observed in the previous study — allowing the effects of even a tiny frictional force to build up over time and create a measurable lag [4].

Taken together, the two results bracket the behaviour of dark matter for the first time. Dark matter interacts more than this, but less than that. Massey added: “We are finally homing in on dark matter from above and below — squeezing our knowledge from two directions.”

Notes

[1]  Astronomers have found that the total mass/energy content of the Universe is split in the proportions 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter and 5% “normal” matter. So the 85% figure relates to the fraction of “matter” that is dark.

[2] Computer simulations show that the extra friction from the collision would make the dark matter slow down. The nature of that interaction is unknown; it could be caused by well-known effects or some exotic unknown force. All that can be said at this point is that it is not gravity.

All four galaxies might have been separated from their dark matter. But we happen to have a very good measurement from only one galaxy, because it is by chance aligned so well with the background, gravitationally lensed object. With the other three galaxies, the lensed images are further away, so the constraints on the location of their dark matter too loose to draw statistically significant conclusions.

[3] Galaxy clusters contain up to a thousand individual galaxies.

[4] The main uncertainty in the result is the timespan for the collision: the friction that slowed the dark matter could have been a very weak force acting over about a billion years, or a relatively stronger force acting for “only” 100 million years.

http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1514/

Gifted Kids Often Bored

Report says schools still shortchanging gifted kids
University of Iowa research finds many high-ability children bored and unchallenged, despite increased access to programming
By: Sara Agnew, University of Iowa, April 3, 2015

The report A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students changed the conversation about academic acceleration in this country's schools when it was published 10 years ago.

Although access to programs and support for gifted students has grown since then, editors Susan Assouline and Nicholas Colangelo knew their work wasn't done. Far too many high-ability children are still languishing in classrooms, bored and unchallenged, their potential lost and futures jeopardized.

Now these researchers, professors, and top administrators with the University of Iowa's College of Education are updating their call to action with A Nation Empowered: Evidence Trumps the Excuses Holding Back America's Brightest Students. This two-volume report is designed to "empower" parents, educators, administrators, and policy-makers with evidence and tools to implement 20 types of acceleration, which include early entrance to school, grade-skipping, moving ahead in one subject area, or Advanced Placement courses.

And just as important, A Nation Empowered aims to keep the conversation about acceleration going.

"The first report was an unmasking—an exposing of the reality about acceleration," says Assouline, director of the UI College of Education's Belin-Blank International Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development. "This report is about making decisions about what we know."

There will be a public launch event for A Nation Empowered from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Saturday, April 18, during the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in Chicago. The event will take place at the Water Tower, West Tower - Bronze Level of the Hyatt Regency Chicago. Light refreshments will be served.   

In their groundbreaking first report, Assouline and Colangelo exposed disparities between the research on acceleration and the educational beliefs and practices that often run contrary to research. They showed research supports acceleration as the most effective curriculum intervention for gifted children. For bright students, acceleration is not only cost-effective but has long-term beneficial effects, both academically and socially.

A Nation Empowered builds on those notions.

"It goes beyond affirmation," says Colangelo, dean of the College of Education and director emeritus of the Belin-Blank Center. "It presents solid, unequivocal evidence that can be used."

Volume 1 includes personal stories from students, teachers, and families while Volume 2 presents the evidence-based research with eight new chapters and updates to chapters that appeared in the first report.

Ultimately, the hope of A Nation Empowered is to continue pushing the needle toward dispelling myths about acceleration for gifted students, says Joyce VanTassel-Baska, a contributing author in Volume 1 and professor emerita and founding director of The Center for Gifted Education at the College of William and Mary.

"A powerful argument can be made, based on research, about the importance of acceleration for gifted students," says VanTassel-Baska in chapter one of A Nation Empowered. "Yet false ideas about the supposed dangers of moving students through school faster still get air time in teachers' lounges and at neighborhood kitchen tables."

Andrew and Kimberly Carter know all too well the challenges of advocating for a gifted child. When Andrew Carter accepted a coaching job at the UI, his son Mason moved from a streamlined program for gifted children in Miami to a school district in Iowa that did not have a full-time, self-contained gifted program.

For months, the Carters’ son struggled, bored in the regular classroom. Eventually, the couple began research of their own, which included reading A Nation Deceived and understanding the Iowa Acceleration Scale. They pushed for whole-grade acceleration, and after additional testing and a number of meetings with district-level administrators and teachers, their son was allowed to skip the sixth grade.

"In our journey so far, we’ve learned that educators and educational administrators face parents with gifted claims all the time," Andrew Carter says. "As you might expect, they naturally enter into those discussions with a great deal of skepticism, not to mention assumptions that the claims are driven by adult ego more than anything.”

Carter says if you want to be taken seriously, know the research and the signs of a gifted child.

"Speak to experts in the field, like those at Belin-Blank and be prepared to have your son/daughter tested and to have honest discussions about him/her," he says. "You need to be able to hear the truth, even if it’s not what you want to hear."

Above all, the Carters encourage parents to stay involved with their child's day-to-day activities in school.

"Don't get distracted by trying to fix the entire system," Andrew Carter says. "That may sound like a selfish approach, but it's not. It's a manageable approach."

While A Nation Empowered continues to chip away at misconceptions about the dangers of acceleration—chapters in Volume 2 are authored by 30 different experts in the field—researchers like Assouline and Colangelo know work remains to be done on behalf of America's brightest students. They say training teachers and galvanizing more attention at the federal level are among the biggest issues facing gifted education.

As for the future, Assouline and Colangelo hope educators continue to use technology to customize education for bright students and that researchers develop new methods for identifying gifted students from diverse backgrounds.

But perhaps what inspires Assouline and Colangelo most are the stories they hear from adults who were accelerated as children.

"From everything we're able to gather, acceleration was really a plus in their lives," Colangelo says in the report. "The part that stuck with me is that these students, later in life when they're adults, are saying if they could do it over again, they'd want more chances at acceleration.”

http://now.uiowa.edu/2015/04/report-says-schools-still-shortchanging-gifted-kids

Afterword by the Blog Author

The blog author skipped his senior year of high school, graduating at age 16.  He also attended college for ten straight quarters, earning a bachelor’s degree at age 19.  “It’s a mistake to slow down and bore a quick mind.”

The Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl, also known as the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the US and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent wind erosion (the Aeolian processes) caused the phenomenon. The drought came in three waves, 1934, 1936, and 1939–40, but some regions of the high plains experienced drought conditions for as many as eight years.  With insufficient understanding of the ecology of the plains, farmers had conducted extensive deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains during the previous decade; this had displaced the native, deep-rooted grasses that normally trapped soil and moisture even during periods of drought and high winds. The rapid mechanization of farm equipment, especially small gasoline tractors, and widespread use of the combiner harvester contributed to farmers' decisions to convert arid grassland (much of which received no more than 10 inches (250 mm) of precipitation per year) to cultivated cropland.

During the drought of the 1930s, the unanchored soil turned to dust, which the prevailing winds blew away in huge clouds that sometimes blackened the sky. These choking billows of dust – named "black blizzards" or "black rollers" – traveled cross country, reaching as far as such East Coast cities as New York City and Washington, D.C.  On the Plains, they often reduced visibility to 1 metre (3.3 ft) or less. Associated Press reporter Robert E. Geiger happened to be in Boise City, Oklahoma to witness the "Black Sunday" black blizzards of April 14, 1935; Edward Stanley, Kansas City news editor of the Associated Press coined the term "Dust Bowl" while rewriting Geiger's news story.  While the term "the Dust Bowl" was originally a reference to the geographical area affected by the dust, today it is usually used to refer to the event, as in "It was during the Dust Bowl". The meaning of the term "bowl" – a hollow container – in this context is however still not quite clear.

The drought and erosion of the Dust Bowl affected 100,000,000 acres (400,000 km²) that centered on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and touched adjacent sections of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas.

The Dust Bowl forced tens of thousands of families to abandon their farms. Many of these families, who were often known as "Okies" because so many of them came from Oklahoma, migrated to California and other states to find that the Great Depression had rendered economic conditions there little better than those they had left. Author John Steinbeck, borrowing closely from field notes taken by Farm Security Administration worker and author Sanora Babb, wrote Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939) about migrant workers and farm families displaced by the Dust Bowl. Babb's own novel about the lives of the migrant workers, Whose Names Are Unknown (2004), was eclipsed and shelved in response to the success of Steinbeck's works, and was finally published in 2004.

Geographic Characteristics and Early History

The Dust Bowl area lies principally west of the 100^th meridian on the High Plains, characterized by plains which vary from rolling in the north to flat in the Llano Estacado. Elevation ranges from 2,500 feet (760 m) in the east to 6,000 feet (1,800 m) at the base of the Rocky Mountains.  The area is semiarid, receiving less than 20 inches (510 mm) of rain annually; this rainfall supports the shortgrass prairie biome originally present in the area. The region is also prone to extended drought, alternating with unusual wetness of equivalent duration.  During wet years, the rich soil provides bountiful agricultural output, but crops fail during dry years. The region is also subject to high winds.  During early European and American exploration of the Great Plains, this region was thought unsuitable for European-style agriculture; explorers called it the Great American Desert. The lack of surface water and timber made the region less attractive than other areas for pioneer settlement and agriculture.

The federal government encouraged settlement and development of the Plains for agriculture via the Homestead Act of 1862, offering settlers 160-acre (65 ha) plots. With the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the completion of the Firsst Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, waves of new migrants and immigrants reached the Great Plains, and they greatly increased the acreage under cultivation.  An unusually wet period in the Great Plains mistakenly led settlers and the federal government to believe that "rain follows the plow" (a popular phrase among real estate promoters) and that the climate of the region had changed permanently.  While initial agricultural endeavors were primarily cattle ranching, the adverse effect of harsh winters on the cattle, beginning in 1886, a short drought in 1890, and general overgrazing, led many landowners to increase the amount of land under cultivation.

Recognizing the challenge of cultivating marginal arid land, the United States government expanded on the 160 acres (65 ha) offered under the Homestead Act—granting 640 acres (260 ha) to homesteaders in western Nebraska under the Kinkaid Act (1904) and 320 acres (130 ha) elsewhere in the Great Plains under the Enlarged Homestead Act (1909). Waves of European settlers arrived in the plains at the beginning of the 20th century. A return of unusually wet weather seemingly confirmed a previously held opinion that the "formerly" semiarid area could support large-scale agriculture. At the same time, technological improvements such as mechanized plowing and mechanized harvesting made it possible to operate larger properties without high labor costs.

The combined effects of the disruption of the Russian Revolution, which decreased the supply of wheat and other commodity crops, and World War I increased agricultural prices; this demand encouraged farmers to dramatically increase cultivation. For example, in the Llano Estacado of eastern New Mexico and northwestern Texas, the area of farmland was doubled between 1900 and 1920, then tripled again between 1925 and 1930. The agricultural methods favored by farmers during this period created the conditions for large-scale erosion under certain environmental conditions.  The widespread conversion of the land by deep plowing and other soil preparation methods to enable agriculture eliminated the native grasses which held the soil in place and helped retain moisture during dry periods. Furthermore, cotton farmers left fields bare over winter months, when winds in the High Plains are highest, and burned the stubble as a means to control weeds prior to planting, thus depriving the soil of organic nutrients and surface vegetation.

More at:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl

A Few Cancers Are Contagious

Columbia University researcher Michael Metzger has investigated a leukemia in clams that seems to come infect other clams and come from the clam cancer itself.  This would mean that a few cancers are contagious.  Such contagious cancers may be infecting clams as well as Tasmanian devils and dogs.  The link below has a comment that goes as follows:

You all missed another transmissible cancer which is a malignancy spread from Syrian hamster to Syrian hamster. The vector is the Aedes aegypti mosquito. The tumor is non-viral and is transmitted as a malignant cell explant. Reportedly, all the Syrian [golden] hamsters in captivity originated more than 100 years ago from a single pair. Therefore all of the domesticated hamsters are highly inbred and can apparently accept one another’s tissues and cells. Something similar apparently happened with Tasmanian Devils. I’m informed that genetic studies reveal that these marsupials passed through a tight genetic bottleneck in the not so distant past.

This can’t be true of the transmissible canine malignancies, though, because this cancer is transmissible to entirely separate canine species including wolves, coyotes, jackals and foxes. I’m unaware of transmissible cancers in cheetahs but they’d be animals to watch. I read somewhere that animals from different parts of Africa are so immunologically similar that they can accept tissue grafts from completely unrelated cheetahs.

     -- Ron, April 9, 2015

This is more than a little big scary, because hamsters and dogs are placental mammals, like human beings.

The above article and comment are both from this link:

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/09/selfish-shellfish-cells-cause-contagious-clam-cancer/

Secure Erasing of a Drive

How to Wipe (Securely Erase) Your Devices Before Disposing of or Selling Them

 Very useful advice on how to achieve this can be found at:

http://www.howtogeek.com/213295/how-to-wipe-securely-erase-your-devices-before-disposing-of-or-selling-them/

The Sun's Magnetic Seasons

Seasonal, Year-Long Cycles Seen on the Sun
NASA, April 8, 2015

Our sun is constantly changing. It goes through cycles of activity – swinging between times of relative calm and times when frequent explosions on its surface can fling light, particles and energy out into space. This activity cycle peaks approximately every 11 years. New research shows evidence of a shorter time cycle as well, with activity waxing and waning over the course of about 330 days.

Understanding when to expect such bursts of solar activity is crucial to successfully forecast the sun's eruptions, which can drive solar storms at Earth. These space weather events can interfere with satellite electronics, GPS navigation, and radio communications. The quasi-annual variations in space weather seem to be driven by changes in bands of strong magnetic field that are present in each solar hemisphere, said researchers in a paper published on April 7, 2015, in Nature Communications.

“What we’re looking at here is a massive driver of solar storms,” said Scott McIntosh, lead author of the paper and director of the High Altitude Observatory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. “By better understanding how these activity bands form in the sun and cause these seasonal instabilities, we can greatly improve forecasts of space weather.”

The new study is one of several by the research team to examine what creates the magnetic bands and how they influence solar cycles. McIntosh and his co-authors detected the bands by drawing on a host of NASA satellites and ground-based observatories that observe the sun and its output -- from the constant flow of particles in the solar wind to large explosions such as solar flares or giant eruptions of solar material called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs.

The scientists note that the changes in the magnetic field in the bands gives rise to a 330-day activity cycle on the sun that is observable but has often been downplayed and overlooked when trying to seek the cause of the sun's longer, 11-year cycle.

"People have not paid much attention to this nearly-annual cycle," said McIntosh. "But it's such a driver of space weather that we really do need to focus on it. Cycles over this time frame are observed in all sorts of output from the sun: the sun’s radiance, the solar wind, solar flares, CMEs."

Magnetic band interaction can also help explain a puzzle first discovered in the 1960s: Why does the number of powerful solar flares and CMEs peak a year or more after the maximum number of sunspots? This lag is known as the Gnevyshev Gap, after the Soviet scientist who first noticed the pattern. The answer appears to also depend on two activity bands. Having one band located in each solar hemisphere provides an opportunity for them to mix -- magnetic field from one band effectively leaking into the other -- creating more unstable active regions on the sun and leading to more flares and CMEs. In other papers, scientists have shown that this process happens only after the sunspot maximum.

In doing their analysis on band interaction the scientists noticed that the bands themselves undergo strong quasi-annual variations, taking place separately in both the northern and southern hemispheres. Those quasi-annual variations in magnetism could be almost as large in magnitude as those of the more familiar, approximately 11-year solar cycle, giving rise to the appearance of stormy seasons.

“The activity bands on the sun have very slow-moving waves that can expand and warp,” said Robert Leamon, co-author on the paper at Montana State University in Bozeman and NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Sometimes this results in magnetic field leaking from one band to the other. In other cases, the warp drags magnetic field from deep in the solar interior and pushes it toward the surface.”

The surges of magnetic fuel from the sun’s interior can catastrophically destabilize the existing corona, the sun’s outermost atmosphere. They are a driving force behind the most intense solar storms.

Researchers can turn to advanced computer simulations and focused observations to learn more about the influence of these bands on solar activity. McIntosh suggested that this could be assisted by a proposed network of satellites observing the sun, much as the global networks of satellites around Earth has significantly advanced terrestrial weather models since the 1960s.

“If you understand what the patterns of solar activity are telling you, you’ll know whether we’re in a stormy phase or quiet phase in each hemisphere,” McIntosh said. “If we can combine these pieces of observational information with modeling efforts, then space weather forecast skill can go through the roof.”

The research was funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation, which is NCAR’s sponsor.

 http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/goddard/sunearth/news/seasonal-year-long-cycles-seen-on-the-sun/

Footnote by the Blog Author

Click on the link and take a look at the visualization of the pattern of movement on the surface of the sun created by these flexing magnetic bands.  This is new knowledge.  It's important.  It's something no one associated with IPCC 2007 imagined when they forecast "global warming" over the upcoming century.
 

Diagnosis from Keystrokes (!)

By revealing loss of motor skills, typing patterns

may help to identify early onset of Parkinson’s.
By Anne Trafton | MIT News Office, April 1, 2015

Analyzing people’s keystrokes as they type on a computer keyboard can reveal a great deal of information about the state of their motor function, according to a new study from MIT.

In a paper appearing in Scientific Reports, the researchers found that their algorithm for analyzing keystrokes could distinguish between typing done in the middle of the night, when sleep deprivation impairs motor skills, and typing performed when fully rested.

The study, which grew out of the Madrid-MIT M+Vision Consortium, is based on the premise that “there might be hidden information in the way that we type,” says Ian Butterworth, one of the authors and an M+Vision fellow. “At the moment, pretty much all of the other information in typing is thrown out. We just pay attention to what keys are being pressed, not when or for how long.”

While this study focused on the effects of fatigue, it also represents a first step toward using keystroke patterns to diagnose conditions that impair motor function, such as Parkinson’s disease, much earlier than is now possible, the researchers say.

Preliminary results from a study of about two dozen Parkinson’s patients suggest that the researchers’ algorithm for analyzing keystrokes can also distinguish people who have the disease from those who don’t. The team is now planning a larger study of Parkinson’s patients.

M+Vision fellows Luca Giancardo, Alvaro Sanchez-Ferro, and Carlos Sanchez Mendoza are also authors of the paper, along with Jacob Hooker, an associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School.

“Window into the brain”

To initiate movement, the brain’s primary motor cortex sends signals through several other brain regions, including the supplementary motor area, cerebellum, and basal ganglia. These brain areas activate spinal neurons that stimulate muscles to execute the movement.

Many factors can interfere with motor ability, including sleep deprivation, which reduces dexterity. For the Scientific Reports study, the MIT team designed a computer algorithm that can capture timing information from computer keystrokes, allowing the researchers to detect patterns that distinguish typing that occurs when motor skills are impaired.

Keystroke patterns have been used previously as a biometric signature to identify individuals for security purposes, but this is the first time that scientists have tried to extract diagnostic information from typing. The primary feature that the researchers analyzed is known as “key hold time” — a measure of how long a key is pressed before being released.

To gather the data, the researchers created a plug-in software component that could be incorporated into a web browser to capture keystrokes; it does not capture the content of what is being typed. The team is also working on smartphone apps that could be used to gather the same kind of data from mobile devices.

“We thought this was a unique opportunity to have a window into the brain using your normal interactions with an electronic device,” Sanchez-Ferro says.

Sanchez Mendoza adds, “You already have the hardware. You just have to let someone evaluate the information you collect every day when you use the device, and try to pull it out for health-related purposes.”

For the sleep deprivation study, the researchers recruited 14 healthy volunteers from around MIT and had them type a randomly chosen Wikipedia article. The participants were then told that they would be awakened during the night to type another article. Participants were awakened 70 to 80 minutes after going to sleep, when they should be in the deepest part of their sleep cycle.

The researchers found that after the late-night awakening, students’ keystrokes showed much more variation in timing, as opposed to the typing they did when alert, which was very consistent in its timing.

Potential for Parkinson’s diagnosis

This approach could also be applicable to Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative neurological disorder that kills dopamine-producing cells in the brain’s substantia nigra, leading to tremors, slowness of movement, and difficulty walking.

Preliminary results from a study of 21 Parkinson’s patients and 15 healthy subjects suggest that there is greater variation in the keystrokes of Parkinson’s patients than in control subjects, Sanchez-Ferro says. If the findings are validated in larger studies, the researchers believe this approach could lead to earlier diagnosis for Parkinson’s and aid in the development of better treatments. Currently, there is no way to diagnose Parkinson’s in early stages of the disease.

“People are usually diagnosed five to 10 years after the beginning of the disease, and lot of the damage has already been done,” says Giancardo, the paper’s first author, who is also supported by the MIT Translational Fellows Program.

John Growdon, director of the Memory and Movement Disorders Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, says it will be important for the researchers to demonstrate in future studies that the typing deficiencies correlate with the severity of Parkinson’s disease and that they appear early enough to offer a significant improvement in diagnosis.

“Overall, it strikes me that this has great potential to detect subtle motor impairments even in advance of a clinician’s ability to find them,” adds Growdon, who was not involved in the study.

The researchers believe this strategy could also be used to evaluate patients with other diseases that affect motor skills, such as rheumatoid arthritis. “This might have applications in any disease producing a motor impairment, whether it’s in your hands and muscles or the brain,” Sanchez-Ferro says.

The research was funded by the Community of Madrid.

http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/typing-patterns-diagnose-early-onset-parkinsons-0401