Posts Tagged ‘Science’

…is coming!

Step one towards the Singularity, check. This opens up all kinds of doors, eventually allowing us to install computers in our brains. A scientific revolutions would then take place.

This research is the first step in examining how memories create neurological structures in the brain, and how the brain stores specific pieces of data. The researchers hope that this will lead to a better understanding of diseases and disorders that affect the brain such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, stroke, and brain injury.

Warwick comments, “This new research is tremendously exciting as firstly the biological brain controls its own moving robot body, and secondly it will enable us to investigate how the brain learns and memorizes its experiences. This research will move our understanding forward of how brains work, and could have a profound effect on many areas of science and medicine.”

Using Human “Wetware” to Control Robots

…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 Peter Parker the awkward but brilliant student from the comics has been replaced by Peter Parker that emo kid who whines about relationships.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.

…well, maybe not.

We hear at Chaos Seeds believe the world, as we know it, will come to an end.

However, two of the thirteen voices in my head seem to disagree on how or when exactly this is going to end. The current and most popular date for the apocalypse is December 21, 2012. However, when it comes to mankind trying to figure out when it’s going to die, well golly gee, the track record doesn’t exactly speak well.

One of the oldest doomsday dates is 2,800BC, when, on an Assyrian clay tablet is written:

“Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common.”

Sounds like something you’d hear around the old folk’s home, isn’t it?

Then in 1284, Pope Innocent III decided that the world would end that year. You may ask yourself, did the Good Lord illuminate him in a golden aura and whisper in his ear this Divine Truth?…Well, no. He took the date the Muslim religion was founded and added 666. Not in the least bit racist, thankyouverymuch.

Jumping ahead a bit, in May 18, 1910, Halley’s Comet came ’round our neck of the woods and for some reason everybody got caught up in a tizzy. Jehova’s Witnesses decided that the coming of the comet would portend our doom. While the death of misunderstood genius Mark Twain is certainly tragic in of itself, nothing else happened.

Then, as we all know, the world was supposed to end in 1999 with the Y2K catastrophe shooting off nuclear missiles and dropping planes out of the sky and computers coming to life to eat our young…but again, we’re still here.

Notwithstanding our excellent track record at predicting our doom and then being shown just how crazy we are to predict our own doom, let’s see what’s going to happen on December 21, 2012.

Read the rest of this entry »

…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.

…holds many secrets.

Scientists are reporting evidence that contrary to our current beliefs about what is possible, intact double-stranded DNA has the “amazing” ability to recognize similarities in other DNA strands from a distance. Somehow they are able to identify one another, and the tiny bits of genetic material tend to congregate with similar DNA. The recognition of similar sequences in DNA’s chemical subunits, occurs in a way unrecognized by science. There is no known reason why the DNA is able to combine the way it does, and from a current theoretical standpoint this feat should be chemically impossible.

Even so, research published in ACS’ Journal of Physical Chemistry B, shows very clearly that homology recognition between sequences of several hundred nucleotides occurs without physical contact or presence of proteins. Double helixes of DNA can recognize matching molecules from a distance and then gather together, all seemingly without help from any other molecules or chemical signals.

In the study, scientists observed the behavior of fluorescently tagged DNA strands placed in water that contained no proteins or other material that could interfere with the experiment. Strands with identical nucleotide sequences were about twice as likely to gather together as DNA strands with different sequences. No one knows how individual DNA strands could possibly be communicating in this way, yet somehow they do. The “telepathic” effect is a source of wonder and amazement for scientists.

Just shows how little we still understand our body.

The rest is here.

…is caused by not putting the fork down!

Seriously, did we need research on this? Did we have to spend thousands, or perhaps even millions of dollars on figuring out that an  overabundance of calories or an underabundance of calories causes either starvation or obesity?

Geeze. I’m all for the scientific method, but come on, do we have to quantify common sense?

The risk of becoming obese is 2.5 times higher for those who have double copies of the best known risk gene for overweight and obesity. However, this is only true if the fat consumption is high. A low fat diet neutralizes the harmful effects of the gene.

“This means that the critical factor is what you eat. At least in the case of the FTO gene, the most important obesity gene identified so far” says Emily Sonestedt, member of Marju Orho-Melanders research group at Lund University Diabetes Centre.

She is the main author of a study that is currently being published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Several studies have found that exercise diminishes the effect of the risk gene but this is the first study where the effect of the gene has been studied in relation to food habits. The risk variant of the FTO gene (fat mass and obesity associated) is common in the general population. 17 percent have double copies, meaning they have inherited it from both parents. Another 40 percent have a single copy.

“It is difficult to calculate how much people eat with any certainty, which is one of the reasons why no one has done this before. But we have good data” says Emily Sonestedt.

Read the rest here.

…is sometimes kinda cool.

Kim Delvaux was undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumor when doctors at Loyola University Hospital woke her up. Dr. Vikram Prabhu talked to her about her favorite topics — NASCAR and her kids.

“I can remember two distinct conversations,” said Delvaux, who lives in Downers Grove. “My friends can’t believe it, but it’s true.”

While she was awake, Prabhu gently probed brain tissue surrounding the tumor. If this affected Delvaux’s ability to speak or move, Prabhu would avoid those areas when he later removed the tumor. “We call these areas ‘No Fly Zones,’” he said.

The technique allows the surgeon to map out sites that are essential for speech and motor skills. Surgeons have been doing various forms of brain mapping for decades. But advances in preoperative imaging, anesthesia and surgical tools and techniques have significantly improved outcomes. Consequently, surgeons are able to remove tumors in close proximity to critical parts of the brain, and patients are experiencing fewer cognitive and motor deficits, Prabhu said.

Read the rest here.

…does not always require copulation.

Kang Mengru left doctors baffled after her belly became enlarged, The Sun reported.

Read the rest here.

…or proof positive of evolution?

Dean Qiongxiu, 66, said she discovered the reptile clinging to the wall of her bedroom with its talons in the middle of the night.

“I woke up and heard a strange scratching sound. I turned on the light and saw this monster working its way along the wall using his claw,” said Mrs Duan of Suining, southwest China.

Mrs Duan said she was so scared she grabbed a shoe and beat the snake to death before preserving its body in a bottle of alcohol.

The snake – 16 inches long and the thickness of a little finger – is now being studied at the Life Sciences Department at China’s West Normal University in Nanchang.

The rest is here, along with a really creepy pic of the critter.

…is down the shitter.

Yeah, as if any of us really thought we were going to get back to the moon any time soon. The public at large doesn’t give a crap about the possibilities that being a space faring nation would offer; instead we drown our sorrows in reality TV and Halo. Thanks, America.

NASA’s human spaceflight program appears headed on an “unsustainable trajectory” under its current budget, according to a committee charged with reviewing the US space program for the Obama administration.

While NASA has big plans to retire the Shuttle Program in 2011, de-orbit the ISS in 2016, and begin a fresh round of lunar surface exploration, there simply isn’t enough money to go around. “It is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursing goals that do not match allocated resources,” the Review of US Human Flight Plans Committee report stated.

As if the government could get us there anyways. If there were any smarts in the White House we’d sell off NASA to private ownership. Throw the space race into the public domain fully; capitalism, not national mandates, will get us there quicker.

The rest is here.

…may very well be windows into your soul. At the very least, they are windows into your memories.

The hippocampus is a brain region that is critical for conscious recollection of past events but the precise role of this area in memory remains controversial. According to one theory, even if explicit retrieval fails, the hippocampus might still support expressions of relational memory (e.g., memory for the co-occurrence of items in the context of some scene or event) when sensitive, indirect testing methods are used.

To test this theory, Drs. Deborah Hannula and Charan Ranganath, both from the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine participants’ brain activity while they attempted to remember previously studied face-scene pairings. During scanning, participants were shown a previously studied scene along with three previously studied faces and were asked to identify the face that had been paired with that scene earlier. Eye movements were also monitored during the task and provided an indirect measure of memory.

During each test trial, participants frequently spent more time viewing the face that had been previously paired with the scene—an eye-movement-based memory effect. What is more surprising is that hippocampal activity was closely tied to participants’ tendency to view the associated face, even when they failed to identify it. Activity in the prefrontal cortex, an area required for decision making, was sensitive to whether or not participants had responded correctly and communication between the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus was increased during correct, but not incorrect, trials.

The rest is here.

…shrinking brain?

We hear at Chaos Seeds believe in moderation. That is, you moderate how quickly Dr. Pepper and Papa John’s Pizza is shoveled into your stomach. However, this policy may need to be repealed after reading this article:

TUESDAY, Aug. 25 (HealthDay News) — For every excess pound piled on the body, the brain gets a little bit smaller.

That’s the message from new research that found that elderly individuals who were obese or overweight had significantly less brain tissue than individuals of normal weight.
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“The brains of obese people looked 16 years older than their healthy counterparts while [those of] overweight people looked 8 years older,” said UCLA neuroscientist Paul Thompson, senior author of a study published online in Human Brain Mapping.

Much of the lost tissue was in the frontal and temporal lobe regions of the brain, the seat of decision-making and memory, among other things.

Liver, colon and kidneys be damned – but once you start affecting the brain, it’s time to take action.

The rest is here.

…prefer men who are taken? DEAR GOD ALERT THE INTERNETS! WHAT  A REVELATION!

Unknown to the participants, everyone was offered a fictitious candidate partner who had been tailored to match their interests exactly. The photograph of “Mr Right” was the same for all women participants, as was that of the ideal women presented to the men. Half the participants were told their ideal mate was single, and the other half that he or she was already in a romantic relationship.

“Everything was the same across all participants, except whether their ideal mate was already attached or not,” says Burkley.

The most striking result was in the responses of single women. Offered a single man, 59 per cent were interested in pursuing a relationship. But when he was attached, 90 per cent said they were up for the chase.

The rest of the completely non-surprising article is here.

…is the crack of the 21st Century!

OK, well, not completely. But he does raise valid points about how the brain rewards us when we find pleasant information that we like. I personally wonder, as the internet becomes more and more ingrained into our lives, how serious this addiction can be. One wonders how this could relate to gaming addiction as well, since similar neural networks would be at play.

That said, I think it’s worth qualifying this “information equals crack” meme. The brain, as we all know, is not an indiscriminate curiosity machine. Most people don’t want to know more about quantum mechanics, or the actual details of health care reform, or what’s happening in the Afghanistan presidential campaign. In other words, our craving for news tends towards the local and the personal – our curiosity is circumscribed. Why might this be? The answer, I think, has to do with the molecular details of how information triggers rewards.

This isn’t the post for another summary of computational models of dopamine activity – see here and here, if you’re interested – but suffice to say that our brain cells are finely tuned to want more information about stuff which they already know. In essence, these cells work by constantly striving to reduce their “prediction-error signal,” which is the gap between what these cells expect to happen and what actually occurs. If a monkey has been trained to get a squirt of juice everytime a bell is rung, then these dopaminergic cells quickly learn that the bell predicts the sweet reward. As a result, they want more information about that specific rewarding stimulus. What, for instance, predicts the bell? Maybe the scientist flicks a switch before ringing the bell? Or maybe he scratches his nose? Or maybe he simply enters the room? What numerous experiments have found is that our dopamine neurons aren’t interested in responding to the reward itself – instead, they want to find the first reliable bit of information that predicts the reward. This is why we crave new facts: they are means of updating our old facts, of extending our cognitive models forward in time.

The rest is here.

…is a simulation. Cue the ‘Matrix’ soundtrack!

At today’s rates of compression, you could download the entire 3 billion digits of your DNA onto about four CDs. That 3-gigabyte genome sequence represents the prime coding information of a human body — your life as numbers. Biology, that pulsating mass of plant and animal flesh, is conceived by science today as an information process. As computers keep shrinking, we can imagine our complex bodies being numerically condensed to the size of two tiny cells. These micro-memory devices are called the egg and sperm. They are packed with information.

That life might be information, as biologists propose, is far more intuitive than the corresponding idea that hard matter is information as well. When we bang a knee against a table leg, it sure doesn’t feel like we knocked into information. But that’s the idea many physicists are formulating.

The spooky nature of material things is not new. Once science examined matter below the level of fleeting quarks and muons, it knew the world was incorporeal. What could be less substantial than a realm built out of waves of quantum probabilities? And what could be weirder? Digital physics is both. It suggests that those strange and insubstantial quantum wavicles, along with everything else in the universe, are themselves made of nothing but 1s and 0s. The physical world itself is digital.

The scientist John Archibald Wheeler (coiner of the term “black hole”) was onto this in the ’80s. He claimed that, fundamentally, atoms are made up of of bits of information. As he put it in a 1989 lecture, “Its are from bits.” He elaborated: “Every it — every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself — derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely from binary choices, bits. What we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions.”

To get a sense of the challenge of describing physics as a software program, picture three atoms: two hydrogen and one oxygen. Put on the magic glasses of digital physics and watch as the three atoms bind together to form a water molecule. As they merge, each seems to be calculating the optimal angle and distance at which to attach itself to the others. The oxygen atom uses yes/no decisions to evaluate all possible courses toward the hydrogen atom, then usually selects the optimal 104.45 degrees by moving toward the other hydrogen at that very angle. Every chemical bond is thus calculated.

If this sounds like a simulation of physics, then you understand perfectly, because in a world made up of bits, physics is exactly the same as a simulation of physics. There’s no difference in kind, just in degree of exactness. In the movie The Matrix, simulations are so good you can’t tell if you’re in one. In a universe run on bits, everything is a simulation.

The rest is here.