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A Hubble image of the spiral disc galaxy NGC3972. Astronomers have developed a new model to explain why the star formation rate in nearly all disk galaxies, including the Milky Way, is so small, and why it correlates in the same way with a galaxy’s gas mass and motions. NASA/Hubble

Disc galaxies like our own Milky Way, characterized by a flattened disc of stars and gas (often with a central bulge of material as well) have a wide range of masses, spatial extents, and stellar content. Nonetheless all disc galaxies, both locally and in the distant Universe, share some strikingly similar properties. Most notable is that the star formation rate correlates tightly with the galaxy’s gas content, the gas motions (the “velocity dispersion”), and the dynamical lifetime (roughly, the time it takes for the galaxy to rotate once). Moreover, this curiously universal rate is remarkably small: only about one per cent of the gas in disc galaxies turns into stars over that timescale, with mu commercial  ch of the activity concentrated in the galaxies’ central regions. Most simple models of star formation predict that gravity should be much more effective in forming stars as it compresses the gas in molecular clouds. Observations indicate that both the correlations and the inefficiency extend down to the scale of individual molecular clouds.

CfA astronomers Blakesley Burkhart and John Forbes and two colleagues have developed a new unified model for galaxy discs that explains these phenomena, and some others besides. The scientists show that the correlation of star formation rate with gas motion is not caused by these motions but rather is the result of the transport of material within the gal Remote Maintenance  axy, which affects both. The model maintains a state of gas equilibrium and marginal gravitational stability by including in a galaxy the radial transport of gas towards its nucleus and also the turbulent feedback from star formation. These two considerations are relatively straightforward in principle but produce a dramatic improvement in the agreement between observations and theory, for example by explaining how the eventual quenching of the star formation happens. The new 4g   work also provides a natural explanation for the cosmic epochs at which galaxies build up bulges and discs.

Reference(s): “A Unified Model for Galactic Discs: Star Formation, Turbulence Driving, and Mass Transport,” Mark R. Krumholz, Blakesley Burkhart, John C. Forbes, and Roland M. Crocker,MNRAS, 477, 2716, 2018.

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Porous silicon powder mixed with pyrolyzed polyacrylonitrile is the basis for a robust anode for lithium-ion batteries. Anodes developed with the powder at Rice University have achieved more than 600 charge-discharge cycles in the lab. Credit: Madhuri Thakur/Rice University

Scientists at Rice University, in collaboration with Lockheed Martin, are working on next-generation battery technology, reporting the creation of a silicon-based anode that easily achieves 600 charge-discharge cycles at 1,000 milliamp hours per gram (mAh/g).

Researchers at Rice University have refined silicon-based lithium-ion technology by literally crushing their previous work to make a high-capacity, long-lived and low-cost anode material with serious commercial potential for rechargeable lithium batteries.

The team led by Rice engineer Sibani Lisa Biswal and research scientist Madhuri Thakur reported in Nature’s open access journal Scientific Reports on the creation of a silicon-based anode, the negative electrode of a battery, that easily achieves 600 charge-discharge cycles at 1,000 milliamp hours per gram (mAh/g). This is a significant improvement over the 350 mAh/g capacity of current graphite anodes.

That puts it squarely in the rea Industrial Wireless M2M Router lm of next-generation battery technology competing to lower the cost and extend the range of electric vehicles.

The new work by Rice through the long-running Lockheed Martin Advanced Nanotechnology Center of Excellence at Rice (LANCER) is the next and biggest logical step since the partners began investigating batteries four years ago.

“We previously reported on making porous silicon films,” said Biswal, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. “We have been looking to move away from the film geometry to something that can be easily transferred into the current battery manufacturing process. Madhuri crushed the porous silicon fil IoT Connectivitym to form porous silicon particulates, a powder that can be easily adopted by battery manufacturers.”

Silicon can hold 10 times more lithium ions than the graphite commonly used in anodes today. But there’s a problem: Silicon more than triples its volume when completely lithiated. When repeated, this swelling and shrinking causes silicon to quickly break down.

Many researchers have been working on strategies to make silicon more suitable for battery use. Scientists at Rice and elsewhere have crea secure web based scada  ted nanostructured silicon with a high surface-to-volume ratio, which allows the silicon to accommodate a larger volume expansion. Biswal, lead author Thakur and co-author Michael Wong, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and of chemistry, tried the opposite approach; they etched pores into silicon wafers to give the material room to expand. By earlier this year, they had advanced to making sponge-like silicon films that showed even more promise.

Even those films presented a problem for manufacturers, Thakur said. “They’re not easy to handle and would be difficult to scale up.” But by crushing the sponges into porous grains, the material gains far more surface area to soak up lithium ions.

Biswal held up two vials, one holding 50 milligrams of crushed silicon, the other 50 milligrams of porous silicon powder. The difference between them was obvious. “The surface area of our material is 46 square meters per gram,” she said. “Crushed silicon is 0.71 square meters per gram. So our particles have more than 50 times the surface area, which gives us a larger surface area for lithiation, with plenty of void space to accommodate expansion.” The porous silicon powder is mixed with a binder, pyrolyzed polyacrylonitrile (PAN), which offers conductive and structural support.

“As a powder, they can be used in large-scale roll-to-roll processing by industry,” Thakur said. “The material is very simple to synthesize, cost-effective and gives high energy capacity over a large number of cycles.”

“This work shows just how important and useful it is to be able to control the internal pores and the external size of the silicon particles,” Wong said.

In recent experiments, Thakur designed a half-cell battery with lithium metal as the counter electrode and fixed the capacity of the anode to 1,000 mAh/g. That was only about a third of its theoretical capacity, but three times better than current batteries. The anodes lasted 600 charge-discharge cycles at a C/2 rate (two hours to charge and two hours to discharge). Another anode continues to cycle at a C/5 rate (five-hour charge and five-hour discharge) and is expected to remain at 1,000 mAh/g for more than 700 cycles.

“This successful endeavor between Rice University and Lockheed Martin Mission Systems and Sensors will provide a significant improvement in battery technology by the development of this inexpensive manufacturing technique for silicon anode material,” said Steven Sinsabaugh, a Lockheed Martin Fellow who works with LANCER and a co-author of the paper along with Lockheed Martin researcher Mark Isaacson. “We’re truly excited about this breakthrough and are looking forward to transitioning this technology to the commercial marketplace.”

“The next step will be to test this porous silicon powder as an anode in a full battery,” Biswal said. “Our preliminary results with cobalt oxide as the cathode appear very promising, and there are new cathode materials that we’d like to investigate.”

Note: Because of Hurricane Sandy, Nature’s servers have been down this week and no papers have been posted to Scientific Reports since Monday. Please check theScientific Reports websitefor updates.

Image: Madhuri Thakur/Rice University;

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Topological map of a toxic pore formed by hundreds of copies of the hormone IAPP.

Focusing on a simple hormone in us all, a Yale researcher has found specific forms of it that poke toxic holes in cells — a discovery that he is leveraging into a treatment for patients with diabetes.

The research, published April 3 in Nature Communications,  computer  is also central to the recent awarding of two grants totaling $600,000 from the Connecticut Bioscience Innovation Fund and the Blavatnik Fund for Innovation at Yale.

Andrew Miranker, a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry and of chemical & environmental engineering, and his team will use these funds to translate the discoveries into novel therapies for type 2 diabetes. Part of this effort includes the formation of a new biotechnology company, ADM Therapeutics, based in Connecticut. Although the researchers are currently focusing on type 2 diabetes, the approaches they developed also apply to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

Type 2 diabetes is a degenerative ailment that affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Its progression is tied directly to the health of insulin-producing cells in the islets — groups of cells in the pancreas. These cells carefully coordinate the release of insulin in response to changes in blood glucose. Failure of these cells plays a significant role in the cause of the disease as the body loses the ability to regulate blood glucose. Currently available drugs work by stimulating alternative ways for the body to use or eliminate glucose. There are no approved drugs available to address the causes of type 2 diabetes.

Miranker’s lab is focused on a protein partner to insulin. The protein, known as islet amyloid polypeptide (IAPP), is also a hormone made by these same cells. The group has discovered that when IAPP adopts the wrong shape, it pokes holes in the membranes of islets large enough to kill the insulin-secreting cells.

“If we ameliorate these very large holes by designing a compound to target a particular IAPP structure, we can prevent toxicity,” said Miranker.

IAPP works alone in its industrial iot   healthy state, but the toxic version of IAPP is formed from tens to hundreds of copies of the protein. This sprawling structure poses a formidable challenge, note the researchers, and controlling it requires an approach very different from those of traditional drugs. Finding a drug to close a specific toxic hole should be a simple matter of finding the one square peg among round pegs, Miranker said, but mused, “What if your target is more like a porous pile of spaghetti than a hole?”

“Instead of thinking of a protein disease target as a rigid object with a well-defined pocket to aim at, you make the drug extremely well-defined and rigid, and you demand the protein adopt a structure to interact with it,” Miranker said. This amounts to designing a drug that acts like a fork for the spaghetti to wrap around, he said, noting, “you can’t eat spaghetti with a spoon.”

To that end, the Miranker lab has developed a drug lead, ADM-116, that binds to IAPP and can rescue cells that make insulin. The water-soluble ADM-116 crosses the outer cell membrane, finds IAPP, and winds it up. By doing so, ADM-116 prevents IAPP from punching a hole in a sensitive internal cell membrane. Miranker and his team, and ultimately his Connecticut-based company, will translate these discoveridistribution line fault detectiones into drugs that improve the long-term health of these cells.

Miranker has been studying how changes in protein shape can result in toxicity for more than 20 years. Only now has this work reached a stage where his team can build off these fundamentals and apply it to human health. Miranker noted that the $500,000 grant from Connecticut Bioscience Innovation Fund, awarded in January, and last year’s $100,000 grant from the Blavatnik Fund for Innovation at Yale were essential to making this leap.

Christopher Unsworth, associate director of business development for the Yale Office of Cooperative Research, said the promise of Miranker’s research is that he takes such a different approach to the problem.

“His lab has developed a whole range of techniques to evaluate what is going on with these proteins and then designed a compound that could interfere with that process,” he said. “A lot of times, we see basic research that identifies novel mechanisms that may be related to a disease, but understanding those mechanisms doesn’t necessarily take you to a drug. Andrew’s work, though, is directed pretty much toward chemical matter that could be a potential therapeutic.”

Publication: Melissa Birol, et al., “Conformational switching within dynamic oligomers underpins toxic gain-of-function by diabetes-associated amyloid,” Nature Communications, volume 9, Article number: 1312 (2018) doi:10.1038/s41467-018-03651-9

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Engineers from MIT have developed a way to isolate genetic circuits within individual synthetic “cells,” prevent remote access  ing the circuits from disrupting each other.

Synthetic biology allows scientists to design genetic circuits that can be placed in cells, giving them new functions such as producing drugs or other useful molecules. However, as these circuits become more complex, the genetic components can interfere with each other, making it difficult to achieve more complicated functions.

MIT researchers have now demonstrated that these circuits can be isolated within individual synthetic “cells,” preventing them from disrupting each other. The researchers can also control communication between these cells, allowing for circuits or their products to be combined at specific times.

“It’s a way of having the power of multicomponent genetic cascades, along with the ability to build walls between them so they won’t have cross-talk. They won’t interfere with each other in the way they would if they were all put into a single cell or into a beaker,” says Edward Boyden, an associate professor of biological en compact industrial router gineering and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. Boyden is also a member of MIT’s Media Lab and McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and an HHMI-Simons Faculty Scholar.

This approach could allow researchers to design circuits that manufacture complex products or act as sensors that respond to changes in their environment, among other applications.

Boyden is the senior author of a paper describing this technique in the November 14 issue of Nature Chemistry. The paper’s lead authors are former MIT postdoc Kate Adamala, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, and former MIT grad student Daniel Martin-Alarcon. Katriona Guthrie-Honea, a former MIT research assistant, is also an author of the paper.

Circuit control

The MIT team encapsulated their genetic circuits in droplets known as liposomes, which have a fatty membrane similar to cell membranes. These synthetic cells are not alive but are equipped with much of the cellular machinery necessary to read DNA and manufacture proteins.

By segregating circuits within their own liposomes, the researchers are able to create separate circuit subroutines that could not run in the same container at the same time, but can run in parallel to each other, communicating in controlled ways. This approach also allows scientists to repurpose the same genetic tools, including genes and transcription factors (proteins that turn genes on or off), to do different tasks within a network.

“If you separate circuits into two different liposomes, you could have one tool doing one job in one liposome, and the same tool doing a different job in the other liposome,” Martin-Alarcon says. “It expands the number of things that you can do with the same building blocks.”

This approach also enables communication between circuits from different types of organisms, such as bacteria and mammals.

As a demonstration, the researchers created a circuit that uses bacterial genetic parts to respond to a molecule known as theophylline, a drug similar to caffeine. When this molecule is present, it triggers another molecule known as doxycycline to leave the liposome and enter another set of liposomes containing a mammalian genetic circuit. In those liposomes, doxycycline activates a genetic cascade that produces luciferase, a protein that generates light.

Using a modified version of this approach, scientists could create circuits that work together to produce biological therapeutics such as antibodies, after sensing a particular molecule emitted by a brain cell or other cell.

“If you think of the bacterial circuit as encoding a computer program, and the mammalian circuit is encoding the factory, you could combine the computer code of the bacterial circuit and the factory of the mammalian circuit into a unique hybrid system,” Boyden says.

The researchers also designed liposomes that can fuse with each other in a controlled way. To do that, they programmed the cells with proteins called SNAREs, which insert themselves into the cell membrane. There, they bind to corresponding SNAREs found on surfaces of other liposomes, causing the synthetic cells to fuse. The timing of this fusion can be controlled to bring together liposomes that produce different molecules. When the cells fuse, these molecules are combined to generate a final product.

More modularity

The researchers believe this approach could be used for nearly any application that synthetic biologists are already working on. It could also allow scientists to pursue potentially useful applications that have been tried before but abandoned because the genetic circuits interfered with each other too much.

“The way that we wrote this paper was not oriented toward just one application,” Boyden says. “The basic question is: Can you make these circuits more modular? If you have everything mishmashed together in the cell, but you find out that the circuits are incompatible or toxic, then putting walls between those reactions and giving them the ability to communicate with each other could be very useful.”

Vincent Noireaux, an associate professor of physics at the University of Minnesota, described the MIT approach as “a rather novel method to learn how biological systems work.”

“Using cell-free expression has several advantages: Technically the work is reduced to cloning (nowadays fast and easy), we can link information processing to biological function like living cells do, and we work in isolation with no other gene expression occurring in the background,” says Noireaux, who was not involved in the research.

Another possible application for this approach is to help scientists explore how the earliest cells may have evolved billions of years ago. By engineering simple circuits into liposomes, researchers could study how cells might have evolved the ability to sense their environment, respond to stimuli, and reproduce.

“This system can be used to model the behavior and properties of  openvpn  the earliest organisms on Earth, as well as help establish the physical boundaries of Earth-type life for the search of life elsewhere in the solar system and beyond,” Adamala says.

Publication: Katarzyna P. Adamala, et al., “Engineering genetic circuit interactions within and between synthetic minimal cells,” Nature Chemistry (2016) doi:10.1038/nchem.2644

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War sand is sand that is a result from wartime operations. The beaches of Normandy are covered in a fine dust of particles resulting from the D-Day operations of World War II. The grains are hidden among the beaches of the Normandy.

Geologist Earle McBride, from the University of Texas at Austin, states that up to 4% of the sand of the beaches of Normandy is made up of this shrapnel. The sand-sized fragments of steel are magnetic and easily discernible under a microscope. The artificial landscape of eroded machinery is still detectable using special instruments in the coastal dunes. At the present rate of deterioration, t remote maintenance  he magnetic particles will probably be wiped from the sands in another 100 years.

Waves, storms and rust will wipe these spherical magnetic shards from the coasts. Earle McBride didn’t set out to find these shards, but a visit to Omaha Beach in 1988 resulted in the discovery of these tiny remnants of shrapnel. The shards were actually collected 20 years ago and only analyzed recently. The samples revealed that the jagged-edged grains had a metallic sheen and a rust-colored coating. The angular grains proved to be magnetic.

McBride m2m comm high-speed  unication   published his findings in the journal Sedimentary Record.

[via Archeology]

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For the first time, a team of physicists has discovered a way to observe and control quantum motion of an object that is large enough to see.

Consider the pendulum of a grandfather clock. If you forget to wind it, you will eventually find the pendulum at rest, unmoving. However, this simple observation is only valid at the level of classical physics—the laws and principles that appear to explain the physics of relatively large objects at human scale. However, quantum mechanics, the underlying physical rules that govern the fundamental behavior of matter and light at the atomic scale, state that nothing can quite be completely at rest.

For the first time, a team of Caltech researchers and collaborators has found a way to observe—and control—this quantum motion of an object that is large enough to see. Their results are published in the August 27 online issue of the journal Science.

Researchers have known for years that in classical physics, physical objects indeed can be motionless. Drop a ball into a bowl, and it will roll back and forth a few times. Eventually, however, this motion will be overcome by other forces (such as gravity and friction), and the ball will come to a stop at the bottom of the bowl.

“In the past couple of years, my group and a couple of other groups around the world have learned how to cool the motion of a small micrometer-scale object to produce this state at the bottom, or the quantum ground state,” says Keith Schwab, a Caltech professor of applied physics, who led the study. “But we know that even at the quantum ground state, at zero-temperature, very small amplitude fluctuations—or noise—remain.”

Because this quantum motion, or noise, is theoretically an intrinsic part of the motion of all objects, Schwab and his colleagues designed a device that would allow them to observe this noise and then manipulate it.

The micrometer-scale device consists of a flexible aluminum plate that sits atop a silicon substrate. The plate is coupled to a superconducting electrical circuit as the plate vibrates at a rate of 3.5 million times per second. According to the laws of classical mechanics, the vibrating structures eventually will come to a complete rest if cooled to the ground state.

But that is not what Schwab and his colleagues observed when they actually cooled the spring to the ground state in their experiments. Instead, the residual energy—quantum noise—remained.

“This energy is part of the quantum description of nature—you just can’t get it out,” says Schwab. “We all know quantum mechanics explains precisely why electrons behave weirdly. Here, we’re applying quantum physics to something that is relatively big, a device that you can see under an optical microscope, and we’re seeing the quantum effects in a trillion atoms instead of just one.”

Because this noisy quantum motion is always present and cannot be removed, it places a fundamental limit on how precisely one can measure the position of an object.

But that limit, Schwab and his colleagues discovered, is not insurmountable. The researchers umts   and collaborators developed a technique to manipulate the inherent quantum noise and found that it is possible to reduce it periodically. Coauthors Aashish Clerk from McGill University and Florian Marquardt from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light proposed a novel method to control the quantum noise, which was expected to reduce it periodically. This technique was then implemented on a micron-scale mechanical device in Schwab’s low-temperature laboratory at Caltech.

“There are two main variables that describe the noise or movement,” Schwab explains. “We showed that we can actually make the fluctuations of one of the variables smaller—at the expense of making the quantum fluctuations of the other variable larger. That is what’s called a quantum squeezed state; we squeezed the noise down in one place, but because of the squeezing, the noise has to squirt out in other places. But as long as those more noisy places aren’t where you’re obtaining a measurement, it doesn’t matter.”

The ability to control quantum noise could one day be used to improve the precision of very sensitive measurements, such as those obtained by LIGO, the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-wave Observatory, a Caltech-and-MIT-led project searching for signs of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time.

“We’ve been thinking a lot about using these methods to detect gravitational waves from pulsars—incredibly dense stars that are the mass of our sun compressed into a 10 km radius and spin at 10 to 100 times a second,” Schwab says. “In the 1970s, Kip Thorne [Caltech’s Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus] and others wrote papers saying that these pulsars should be emitting gravity waves that are nearly perfectly periodic, so we’re thinking hard about how to use these techniques on a gram-scale object to reduce quantum noise in detectors, thus increasing the sensitivity to pick up on those gravity waves,” Schwab says.

In order to do that, the current device would have to be scaled up. “Our work aims to detect quantum mechanics at bigger and bigger scales, and one day, our hope is that this will eventually start touching on something as big as gravitational waves,” he says.

These results were published in an article titled, “Quantum squeezing of moti iiot  on in a mechanical resonator.” In addition to Schwab, Clerk, and Marquardt, other coauthors include former graduate student Emma E. Wollman (PhD ’15); graduate students Chan U. Lei and Ari J. Weinstein; former postdoctoral scholar Junho Suh; and Andreas Kronwald of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in Erlangen, Germany. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, an NSF Physics Frontiers Center that also has support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Publication: E. E. Wollman, et al., “Quantum squeezing of motion in a mechanical resonato ATM Remote Diagnostic  r,” Science 28 August 2015: Vol. 349 no. 6251 pp. 952-955; DOI: 10.1126/science.aac5138

Image: Chan Lei and Keith Schwab/Caltech

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University of Utah psychology Professors David Sanbonmatsu and David Strayer with the driving simulator they use in some of their research on cell phone use and driving. Photo Credit: David Strayer, University of Utah

New research from the University of Utah shows that the people most likely to multitask have the lowest multitasking ability, including people who talk on cell phones while driving.

Most people believe they can multitask effectively, but a University of Utah study indicates that people who multitask the most – including talking on a cell phone while driving – are least capable of doing so.

“What is alarming is that people who talk on cells phones while driving tend to be the people least able to multitask well,” says psychology Professor David Sanbonmatsu, a senior author of the study. “Our data suggest the people talking on cell phones while driving are people who probably shouldn’t. We showed that people who multitask the most are those who appear to be the least capable of multitasking effectively.”

The new study was scheduled for publication Jan. 23 in PLOS ONE, an cashless vending   online journal of the Public Library of Science.

The other senior author, University of Utah psychology Professor David Strayer, adds, “The people who are most likely to multitask harbor the illusion they are better than average at it, when in fact they are no better than average and often worse.”

Citing humorist Garrison Keillor’s catchphrase about kids in Keillor’s fictitious hometown, Strayer says people who use cell phones while driving “all think they live in Lake Wobegon, where everybody is above average. But it’s a statistical impossibility.”

The study ran 310 undergraduate psychology students through a battery of tests and questionnaires to measure actual multitasking ability, perceived multitasking ability, cell phone use while driving, use of a wide array of electronic media, and personality traits such as impulsivity and sensation-seeking. The key findings:

“The persons who are most capable of multitasking effectively are not the persons who are most likely to engage in multiple tasks simultaneously.” Instead, people who score high on a test of actual multitasking ability tend not to multitask because they are better able to focus attention on the task at hand. The more people multitask by talking on cell phones while driving or by using multiple media at once, the more they lack the actual ability to multitask, and their perceived multitasking ability “was found to be significantly inflated.” In fact, 70 percent of participants thought they were above average at multitasking, which is statistically impossible. People with high levels of

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impulsivity and sensation-seeking reported more multitasking. However, there was an exception: People who talk on cell phones while driving tend not to be impulsive, indicating that cell phone use is a deliberate choice. The research suggests that people who engage in multitasking often do so not because they have the ability, but “because they are less able to block out distractions and focus on a singular task.”

The researchers conclude, “The negative relation between cellular communication while driving and multitasking ability appears to further bolster arguments for legislation limiting the use of cell phones while operating a motor vehicle.”

Sanbonmatsu and Strayer conducted the study with University of Utah co-authors Jason Watson, an associate professor of psychology, and Nathan Medeiros-Ward, a doctoral student in psychology. The study was funded by the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety.

How the Study Was Performed

The researchers say that while people frequently multitask to try to achieve several goals at once, “relatively little is known about when and why people perform more than one attention-demanding task at a time. Related to this, little is known about who is most likely to multitask.”

The study participants were 310 University of Utah psychology undergraduates – 176 female and 134 male with a median age of 21 – who volunteered for their department’s subject pool in exchange for extra course credit.

To measure actual multitasking ability, participants performed a test named Operation Span, or OSPAN. The test involves two tasks: memorization and math computation. Participants must remember two to seven letters, each separated by a math equation that they must identify as true or fa Industrial 3G Router  lse. A simple example of a question: “is 2+4=6?, g, is 3-2=2?, a, is 4×3=12.” Answer: true, g, false, a, true.

Participants also ranked their perceptions of their own multitasking ability by giving themselves a score ranging from zero to 100, with 50 percent meaning average.

Study subjects reported how often they used a cell phone while driving, and what percentage of the time they are on the phone while driving. They also completed a survey of how often and for how many hours they use which media, including printed material, television and video, computer video, music, nonmusic audio, video games, phone, instant and text messaging, e-mail, the Web and other computer software such as word processing. The results were used to compute an index of media multitasking.

They also completed well-established questionnaires that measure impulsivity and sensation-seeking.

Who Multitasks and Why?

The researchers looked for significant correlations among results of the various tests and questionnaires.

“The people who multitask the most tend to be impulsive, sensation-seeking, overconfident of their multitasking abilities, and they tend to be less capable of multitasking,” says Strayer, summarizing the findings.

The 25 percent of the people who performed best on the OSPAN test of multitasking ability “are the people who are least likely to multitask and are most likely to do one thing at a time,” Sanbonmatsu says.

In contrast, 70 percent of participants said they were above-average at multitasking, and they were more likely to multitask.

“One of the main reasons people multitask is because they think they are good at it,” Sanbonmatsu says. “But our study suggests people rarely are as good at multitasking as they think they are.”

Multitasking ability on the OSPAN was significantly and negatively correlated with actual media multitasking and cell phone use while driving, meaning the people who multitask the most have the least ability to do so.

“If you have people who are multitasking a lot, you might come to the conclusion they are good at multitasking,” Strayer says. “In fact, the more likely they are to do it, the more likely they are to be bad at it.”

Sanbonmatsu adds: “Our data show people multitask because they have difficulty focusing on one task at a time. They get drawn into secondary tasks. … They get bored and want that stimulation of talking while they are driving.”

Study participants reported spending 13 percent of their driving time talking on a cell phone, which Strayer says roughly squares with federal estimates that one in 10 drivers are on the phone at any given time.

Media multitasking – except cell phone use while driving – correlated significantly with impulsivity, particularly the inability to concentrate and acting without thinking. Impulsive people tend to be more reward-oriented and more apt to take risks, so they may be less sensitive to the costs of multitasking, the researchers say.

Multitasking, including cell phone use while driving, correlated significantly with sensation-seeking, indicating some people multitask because it is more stimulating, interesting and challenging, and less boring – even if it may hurt their overall performance.

Publication: David M. Sanbonmatsu, David L. Strayer, Nathan Medeiros-Ward, Jason M. Watson, “Who Multi-Tasks and Why? Multi-Tasking Ability, Perceived Multi-Tasking Ability, Impulsivity, and Sensation Seeking,” 2013; PLOS ONE 10.1371/journal.pone.0054402

Image: David Strayer, University of Utah