Archive for the ‘Science’ Category

…is in the brain?

I’ve long believed this – being a non-dualist I don’t believe that spiritual experiences are fully external. Yes, I do think there is a spiritual reality – but that doesn’t presuppose that our brains and genes have something to do with it as well.

Cosimo Urgesi of the University of Udine and his colleagues combined pre- and post-surgical personality assessments with advanced lesion mapping techniques to correlate changes in self-transcendence with brain structures in a total of 88 patients with brain tumours of different types and severity. 24 of the patients were being treated for high-grade glioma, which arises from astrocytes and is malignant; 24 had low-grade, or benign glioma; 20 were having a second operation to treat highly aggressive recurrent glioma; and 20 had meningioma, which arises in the membranes enveloping the brain but does not affect the brain itself.

Within each of these four groups, approximately half of the patients had tumours located toward the front of the brain in the frontal and temporal lobes, while in the rest the tumours were further back, around the junction between the occipital, temporal and parietal lobes. During formal interviews conducted prior to the surgery, they asked each of the patients about aspects of their religion-related behaviour and experiences. Some of the questions were designed to measure three different aspects of self-transcendency: creative self-forgetfulness, or the ability to “lose one’s self” in the moment; transpersonal identification, or the extent to which one feels connected to other people and to the natural world; and spiritual acceptance, or belief in a supernatural power.

The rest is here.

…NASA would work on this. Serious. Like, NOW!

Now imagine these NASA C-3POs roaming our satellite, controlled by all kind of scientists using telepresence suits down here, all looking for interesting things using high definition visors, and able to move just like they would move on planet Earth. It won’t work for Mars, but with a communication delay of only three seconds, it will work beautifully on the Moon.

NASA Project M Puts Scientists’ Avatars On the Moon

…how science can’t escape using religious terminology to describe it’s own theories.

The “theory of everything” is one of the most cherished dreams of science. If it is ever discovered, it will describe the workings of the universe at the most fundamental level and thus encompass our entire understanding of nature. It would also answer such enduring puzzles as what dark matter is, the reason time flows in only one direction and how gravity works. Small wonder that Stephen Hawking famously said that such a theory would be “the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God”.

But theologians needn’t lose too much sleep just yet. Despite decades of effort, progress has been slow. Many physicists have confined themselves to developing “quantum gravity” theories that attempt to reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity – a prerequisite for a theory of everything. But rather than coming up with one or two rival theories whose merits can be judged against the evidence, there is a profusion of candidates that address different parts of the problem and precious few clues as to which (if any) might turn out to be correct.

Knowing the mind of God: Seven theories of everything

…can we PLEASE just fire this thing up already and quit whining about how some crappy scientist is claiming it’s going to destroy mankind? I want the Higgs Boson found, dammit!

A German woman fearing that Earth would be sucked into oblivion in a black hole failed on Tuesday in her court attempt to halt the world’s most powerful atom-smasher.

The Constitutional Court in the western Germany city of Karlsruhe threw out the woman’s appeal because she was “unable to give a coherent account of how her fears would come about.”

“The overwhelming scientific opinion is that the experiments carried out at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) present no dangers,” the court added.

CERN scientists are looking to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to mimic the conditions that followed the Big Bang and help explain the origins of the universe.

German fails to prove atom-smasher will end world

…that doesn’t involve spinning magnets? Sweet!

The phenomenon, described as thermopower waves, “opens up a new area of energy research, which is rare,” says Michael Strano, MIT’s Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, who was the senior author of a paper describing the new findings that appeared in Nature Materials on March 7. The lead author was Wonjoon Choi, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering.

Like a collection of flotsam propelled along the surface by waves traveling across the ocean, it turns out that a thermal wave — a moving pulse of heat — traveling along a microscopic wire can drive electrons along, creating an electrical current.

The key ingredient in the recipe is carbon nanotubes — submicroscopic hollow tubes made of a chicken-wire-like lattice of carbon atoms. These tubes, just a few billionths of a meter (nanometers) in diameter, are part of a family of novel carbon molecules, including buckyballs and graphene sheets, that have been the subject of intensive worldwide research over the last two decades.

MIT researchers discover new way of producing electricity

…is for those not intelligent enough to use sarcasm.

Sarcasm is a cognitive challenge. In order to get the sarcastic sentiment, we can’t simply decode the utterance, or decipher the literal meaning of the sentence. Instead, we have to understand the meaning of the words in their larger social context. For example, if it’s a beautiful day outside – the sun is shining, etc – and somebody states “What a nice day!,” there is no sarcasm; the sentence makes perfect sense. However, if the same statement is uttered on a rainy day, then there is a clear contradiction, which leads to an interpretation of sarcasm. (We typically exaggerate the expression of sarcastic statements, thus making it easier to pick up the verbal/social contradiction.) Psychologists refer to such utterances as an incongruent word-emotion situation.

Sarcasm

It brings to mind everything from aliens to ghosts. Who knows what we’d discover – should this be true – and what it would say for the paranormal?

The possibility of strange forms of alien life seems to have just got a whole lot closer to home. Astrobiologists from Arizona State University, Florida, UC Boulder, NASA, Harvard and Australia have recently theorized about a “shadow biosphere” – a biosphere within a biosphere where alternative biochemistry may be thriving in a way that we haven’t yet thought to examine. Such “weird life” may have had, for hundreds of millions of years, their own ecologies right here in our own backyard.

ALTERNATE “LIFE” STYLES: SCIENTISTS PREDICT THE POSSIBILITY OF A SHADOW BIOSPHERE

…you mean acting like a bunch of Type-A, self-centered assholes concerned with instant gratification and riches and bitches and the timing of your next orgasm leads to a culture prone to depression? My mind, she is blown.

In other words, a genetic vulnerability to depression is much more likely to be realized in a Western culture than an East Asian culture that is more about we than me-me-me.

The study coming out of the growing field of cultural neuroscience takes a global look at mental health across social groups and nations.

Depression, research overwhelmingly shows, results from genes, environment and the interplay between the two. One of the most profound ways that people across cultural groups differ markedly, cultural psychology demonstrates, is in how they think of themselves.

“People from highly individualistic cultures like the United States and Western Europe are more likely to value uniqueness over harmony, expression over agreement, and to define themselves as unique or different from the group,” said Joan Chiao, the lead author of the study and assistant professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern.

‘Culture Of We’ Buffers Genetic Tendency To Depression

God Damn it’s awesome to F****** swear! Didn’t need a scientific study to know that, but this is interesting nonetheless.

In fact, so good that he wondered whether there might be something to the power of profanity—a curiosity that only increased when his wife, while participating in the miracle that is childbirth, swore like a drunken sailor.

So Stevens looked into it. And he discovered that uttering profanity may actually make one better able to withstand pain. In a study published in this month’s issue of NeuroReport, he and his colleagues put that theory to the test. They asked participants to submerge their nondominant hand in ice-cold water for as long as possible (or for a maximum of 10 minutes) while either repeating a swear word or a neutral word (one that describes a table). The volume and pace used for swear words and neutral words were kept similar. Then, the researchers compared those who swore and those who didn’t to determine the effect on the length of time that participants were able to keep their hands submerged.

Subjects who swore managed an average of 40 seconds, or about a third longer than those who didn’t—evidence that a few well-placed word bombs of your choosing actually has a protective effect.

Dirty Words, Filthy Kids, and Other Surprisingly Good-for-You Vices

…is not for all of us.

Boy, I woulda LOVED to get these two in the sleep lab to see their brainwaves.

EARLIER this year, a puzzling report appeared in the journal Sleep Medicine. It described two Italian people who never truly slept. They might lie down and close their eyes, but read-outs of brain activity showed none of the normal patterns associated with sleep. Their behaviour was pretty odd, too. Though largely unaware of their surroundings during these rest periods, they would walk around, yell, tremble violently and their hearts would race. The remainder of the time they were conscious and aware but prone to powerful, dream-like hallucinations.

Both had been diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disorder called multiple system atrophy. According to the report’s authors, Roberto Vetrugno and colleagues from the University of Bologna, Italy, the disease had damaged the pair’s brains to such an extent that they had entered status dissociatus, a kind of twilight zone in which the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness completely break down.

Are you asleep? Exploring the mind’s twilight zone

…is not a release, but a burst of activity.

Electrical readings from seven patients who died in hospital suggest that the brain undergoes a surge of activity at the moment of death, according to a study just published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine.

Palliative care is a medical approach that aims to make dying patients as comfortable as possible. As part of this, doctors from George Washington University Medical Centre’s intensive care unit were using standard alertness monitors for seven patients that include EEG measurements of the frontal lobes.

The monitors are commercial devices designed to help anaesthetists monitor how ‘awake’ patients are, and they combine the electrical readings from the brain into a single signal that reflects alertness.

For each of the seven patients, the researchers noticed that at the point where blood pressure dropped to zero there was a surge in brain activity. The graph on the right is from one of the patients and shows a typical activity burst.

The rest is here.

…being a conformist sheep will destroy the world!

Quick! Call the anarchists!

The capacity to learn from others is one of the traits that have made humans such a global success story. Relying on it too much, however, could have contributed to the demise of past populations, such as the Maya of southern Mexico in the eighth and ninth centuries and Norse settlers in Greenland 1,000 years ago.

Over-hunting, deforestation and over-population are well-worn routes to societal collapse. Now, Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and Pete Richerson of the University of California, Davis, have modelled how different learning strategies fare in different environments. They found that conformist social learning — imitating and emulating what the majority are doing — may also cause the demise of societies. When environments remain stable for long periods, behaviour can become disconnected from environmental demands, so that when change does come, the effects are catastrophic¹.

The rest is here.

…is good for the mind.

In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.

An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”

At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.

Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.

The rest is here.

…to make science cool again?

Ghostbusters 3 has been lusted after since the second one nearly two decades ago. Lately there seems to be the will to get it done, but the project continues sputtering around in development hell with Dan Akyroyd declaring that he’s already tuning up Ecto 1 and on the other side crotchety Bill Murray insistant that it’ll never get done. But Bill, we need it to get done. The world needs Ghostbusters 3 and I’m here to tell you why.

Science is in trouble.

On film our heroes are underage douche bags who befriend robots or children with mystical powers or worse, vapid bimbos who lust after fangless vampires. Peter Parker the awkward but brilliant student from the comics has been replaced by Peter Parker that emo kid who whines about relationships. Batman is still a detective, but he steals all his best gadgets from the hapless, underpaid inventors in his mega-corporation’s cellar. Indiana Jones, former man of science, hides inside a fridge to escape a nuclear explosion. Wolverine is a product of science, but he’d like the scientists who did it dead and spends most of the time trying to stab anyone who knows how to use a particle accelerator. Dr. Robert Langdon wastes his degrees solving cases to help shore up fervent religious belief in the corrupt Catholic Church. Star Wars has turned into a religion in which people worship microscopic aliens. Watching Jesus being beat to death by Mel Gibson’s camera was a moviegoing event of unparalleled scale and the less said about The Chronicles of Narnia’s Christ obsession the better. In WALL-E it was science that made everyone fat and in The Matrix we’re all just batteries plugged into science’s mechanical menace. Paranormal Activity is the number one movie at the box office this weekend because it makes a world full of mysticism and evil spirits seem like reality, a reality beyond our control.

The rest is here.

…is near.

Perhaps. I remain unconvinced we’ll transcend all of humanity’s problem within my lifetime…but then, that may be the cynic in me talking.

By the time Al Gore released his Oscar winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth“, few skeptics were left that the world’s climate was changing. Now, Ray Kurzweil — one of the most prolific inventors of the 20th century -  is releasing an eminent documentary of his own.

Many futurists, including a growing band of leading scientists, predict that by 2045 we will have multiplied the intelligence of the human-machine civilization a billion-fold and reached the Singularity.

Whereas personal computers, videogames and cellphones were the emerging technologies of the 1970’s and 1980’s, today’s include mind-reading headsets, organic computing and nanotechnology.

The rest is here.