Billions of brain cells are communicating at any given moment. Like an organic supercomputer they keep everything going, from breathing to solving riddles, and “programming errors” can lead to serious conditions such as schizophrenia, Parkinson’s Disease and Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

{ University of Copenhagen | Continue reading }

One of the great puzzles of cell biology is how information is stored, processed and passed from generation to generation at the biochemical level.

By far the most famous mechanism is the sequence of nucleotides in DNA. However, in recent years a number other data storage mechanisms have emerged, so-called epigenetic processes, and their role is under fierce debate. For example, the pattern of methyl groups attached to DNA seems to be an important data storage system as do modifications to the proteins that control how DNA is packaged.

Today, Georg Fritz at the University of Cologne and a few buddies put forward a new idea. They say that a simple network of genes can act as a conditional memory, that either stores or ignores information when it is told to do so. “The circuit behaves similarly to a “data latch” in an electronic circuit, i.e. it reads and stores an input signal only when conditioned to do so by a “read command,” say the group.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

One of the extraordinary features of the mammalian sound detection system is the range over which it works. This extends from 11 KHz in birds to 200 KHz in marine mammals.

This is only possible because the inner ear amplifies sounds by a factor of up to 4000. That’s a huge amount of gain. So much, in fact, that it’s hard to square with conventional thinking about mechanical amplification. So there is much head scratching among biologists over how the ear achieves this amplification.

Part of the puzzle is that the amplification is not entirely passive. The inner ear is essentially a fluid-filled tube, divided along its length by a thin elastic membrane. This membrane is covered in hair cells, which come in two types.

The so-called inner hair cells convert pressure waves within the fluid into electrical signals the brain can interpret. However, the outer hair cells act like mechanical amplifiers. When struck by a pressure wave, the cells themselves begin to vibrate at the same frequency, thereby boosting the wave as it passes.

The trouble is that measurements using outer hair cells indicate that they amplify pressure waves by a factor of about 10, a gain that falls far short of what’s required.

Today, however, Tobias Reichenbach and James Hudspeth at The Rockefeller University in New York city say they’ve worked out what else is going on to boost the signal.

Sound enters the inner ear as a pressure wave which travels through the fluid filled chamber, causing the membrane that divides it along its length to vibrate, like a sheet of rubber. Since the hair cells sit on this membrane they also move.

Reichenbach and Hudspeth calculate that the vibration of the outer hair cells not only amplifies the pressure wave, but also increases the displacement of the membrane, like a child bouncing on a trampoline.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

String theory suggests that matter can be broken down beyond electrons and quarks into tiny loops of vibrating strings. Those strings move and vibrate at different frequencies, giving particles distinctive properties like mass and charge. This strange idea could unite all the fundamental forces, explain the origins of fundamental particles and connect Einstein’s general relativity to quantum mechanics. But to do so, the theory requires six extra dimensions of space and time curled up inside the four that we’re used to.

To understand how these extra dimensions could hide from view, imagine a tightrope walker on a wire between two high buildings. To the tightrope walker, the wire is a one-dimensional line. But to a colony of ants crawling around the wire, the rope has a second dimension: its thickness. In the same way that the tightrope walker sees one dimension where the ants see two, we could see just three dimensions of space while strings see nine or ten.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to know if this picture is real. But although string theorists can’t test the big idea, they can use this vision of the world to describe natural phenomena like black holes. (…)

Now, physicists at Imperial College London and Stanford University have found a way to make string theory useful, not for a theory of everything, but for quantum entanglement.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

From the perspective of an anthropologist, or a psychologist, or someone trying to understand humanness: What is that thing? What is that mental process where we invisibilize something that’s present all the time? (…)

Why have we developed, or, rather, why have we found ourselves implicated in a system that not only generates so much trash, but relies upon the accelerating production of waste for its own perpetuation? (…)

Every single thing you see is future trash. Everything. (…)

There’s a Buddhist saying about housework, that it’s invisible labor because you see it only when it’s not done.

{ Interview with NY sanitation depart’s resident anthropologist | The Believer | Continue reading }

Li Pingri remembers swimming with fish and shrimp as a boy in Guangdong’s Chigang waterway in China. Today, even after the city spent 48.6 billion yuan ($7.2 billion) on a cleanup, he can’t stand the canal’s smell.

“We are surrounded by black and smelly waterways, breathing the foul air every day and paying the price at the cost of our health,” said Li, 79, a former researcher at the Guangzhou Institute of Geography. “If we can’t breathe clean air or drink clean water, high economic growth is meaningless.”

China, the world’s worst polluter, needs to spend at least 2 percent of gross domestic product a year — 680 billion yuan at 2009 figures — to clean up 30 years of industrial waste, said He Ping, chairman of the Washington-based International Fund for China’s Environment. Mun Sing Ho, a senior economist at Dale W. Jorgenson Associates and a visiting scholar at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, put the range at 2 percent to 4 percent of GDP.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

“There is really no debate about climate change in China,” said Peggy Liu, chairwoman of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, a nonprofit group working to accelerate the greening of China. “China’s leaders are mostly engineers and scientists, so they don’t waste time questioning scientific data.” The push for green in China, she added, “is a practical discussion on health and wealth. There is no need to emphasize future consequences when people already see, eat and breathe pollution every day.”

So while America’s Republicans turned “climate change” into a four-letter word — J-O-K-E — China’s Communists also turned it into a four-letter word — J-O-B-S.

“China is changing from the factory of the world to the clean-tech laboratory of the world,” said Liu. “It has the unique ability to pit low-cost capital with large-scale experiments to find models that work.” China has designated and invested in pilot cities for electric vehicles, smart grids, LED lighting, rural biomass and low-carbon communities.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Even demonstrably false or irrelevant information can influence judgments, which in turn influence decisions. (…)

Policy makers have long recognized the potential danger of false statements by advertisers. But in the belief that most adults are suitably skeptical about promotional puffery, Congress has tried to prohibit only the most blatantly false or explicitly misleading claims.

But what about merely irrelevant statements, or only implicitly misleading ones? Standard economic models say such claims are, well, irrelevant, so there should be no need to regulate them. But according to recent behavioral research, it’s a distinction without a difference.

Although cigarette advertisements, for example, typically portray smokers as young, healthy and attractive, smoking can make people look older and less healthy. Such ads make no explicitly false claims, but that doesn’t make them less misleading, even for informed consumers.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

related { A girl playing noughts and crosses, a Playboy centrefold, Sky satellite dishes, the trill of a modem – all have hidden meanings | The secret messages written into the fabric of our world }

About 13.7 billion years ago, the big bang created a big mess of matter that eventually gave rise to life, the universe, and everything. Now a new material may help scientists understand why.

The material was designed to detect a theorized but unproven property of electrons, subatomic particles with a negative charge that orbit the centers of atoms.

If this “new” property of electrons exists, scientists say, it would help explain the current imbalance between matter and antimatter in the universe. (…)

The sheer fact that we’re here must mean that matter behaves slightly different than antimatter, so that over time the universe has accumulated more ordinary matter than antimatter.

{ National Geographic | Continue reading }

related { Nonexpanding Cosmology Attempts to Oust Big Bang Theory }

Reverse-engineering the human brain so we can simulate it using computers may be just two decades away, says Ray Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert and author of the best-selling book The Singularity is Near.

It would be the first step toward creating machines that are more powerful than the human brain. These supercomputers could be networked into a cloud computing architecture to amplify their processing capabilities. Meanwhile, algorithms that power them could get more intelligent. Together these could create the ultimate machine that can help us handle the challenges of the future, says Kurzweil.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

related { The Man Who Made a Copy of Himself. A Japanese roboticist is building androids to understand humans–starting with himself. | ieee Spectrum | full story }

{ Imogen Cunningham }

David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business analysed the transcripts of nearly 30,000 conference calls by American chief executives and chief financial officers between 2003 and 2007. They noted each boss’s choice of words, and how he delivered them. They drew on psychological studies that show how people speak differently when they are fibbing, testing whether these “tells” were more common during calls to discuss profits that were later “materially restated”, as the euphemism goes. They published their findings in a paper called “Detecting Deceptive Discussions in Conference Calls”.

Deceptive bosses, it transpires, tend to make more references to general knowledge (“as you know…”), and refer less to shareholder value (perhaps to minimise the risk of a lawsuit, the authors hypothesise). They also use fewer “non-extreme positive emotion words”. That is, instead of describing something as “good”, they call it “fantastic”. The aim is to “sound more persuasive” while talking horsefeathers.

When they are lying, bosses avoid the word “I”, opting instead for the third person. They use fewer “hesitation words”, such as “um” and “er”, suggesting that they may have been coached in their deception.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }

installation { Sebastian Wickeroth, Strategie der Steine 3, Junger Westen, Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, 2007 }

On May 15, 1985, trainers at Hawaii Sea Life Park were stunned when a 400- pound gray female bottlenose dolphin named Punahele gave birth to a dark-skinned calf that partly resembled the 2,000-pound male false killer whale with whom she shared a pool. The calf was a wholphin, a hybrid that was intermediate to its parents in some characteristics, like having 66 teeth compared with the bottlenose’s 88 and the 44 of the false killer whale, a much larger member of the dolphin family. (…)

While several examples of human-bred animal hybrids are well known and can thrive in captivity including zorses (zebra-horse), beefalo (bison-beef cattle) and, of course, mules (donkey-horse), naturally occurring animal hybrids have many factors working against their longer-term success.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Kent Kiehl has studied hundreds of psychopaths. Kiehl is one of the world’s leading investigators of psychopathy and a professor at the University of New Mexico. He says he can often see it in their eyes: There’s an intensity in their stare, as if they’re trying to pick up signals on how to respond. But the eyes are not an element of psychopathy, just a clue.

Officially, Kiehl scores their pathology on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which measures traits such as the inability to feel empathy or remorse, pathological lying, or impulsivity.

“The scores range from zero to 40,” Kiehl explains in his sunny office overlooking a golf course. “The average person in the community, a male, will score about 4 or 5. Your average inmate will score about 22. An individual with psychopathy is typically described as 30 or above. Brian scored 38.5 basically. He was in the 99th percentile.”

“Brian” is Brian Dugan, a man who is serving two life sentences for rape and murder in Chicago. (…)

Dugan is smart — his IQ is over 140 — but he admits he has always had shallow emotions. He tells Kiehl that in his quarter century in prison, he believes he’s developed a sense of remorse.

“And I have empathy, too — but it’s like it just stops,” he says. “I mean, I start to feel, but something just blocks it. I don’t know what it is.”

Kiehl says he’s heard all this before: All psychopaths claim they feel terrible about their crimes for the benefit of the parole board.

“But then you ask them, ‘What do you mean, you feel really bad?’ And Brian will look at you and go, ‘What do you mean, what does it mean?’ They look at you like, ‘Can you give me some help? A hint? Can I call a friend?’ They have no way of really getting at that at all,” Kiehl says.

Kiehl says the reason people like Dugan cannot access their emotions is that their physical brains are different. And he believes he has the brain scans to prove it.

{ NPR | Continue reading }

image { Richard Boulet }

Biologists who study mutualism have long believed that the solution to cheating is to punish cheaters—but a new model suggests that the benefits gained from playing nice might be enough to deter cheating.

{ denim and tweed | Continue reading }

photos { 1. Ron Jude | 2 }

Along with some other researchers, Gati has also explored the various factors that lead to decision-making difficulties. (…) They break their list of difficulties down into problems that occur before the decision-making process starts which lead to a lack of readiness and problems that occur during the process.

Before the process

Lack of motivation — a reluctance to engage with this particular decision, perhaps because it is not perceived as important or not the right time

General indecisiveness — perhaps stemming from a need for approval, a desire to avoid commitment or a fear of making mistakes

Dysfunctional myths — belief in a perfect career option, belief that this is a once-and-for-all choice

Ignorance of the decision making process — not knowing what factors to consider or how to analyse information

{ Careers – in Theory | Continue reading }

photo { Stephen Shore }

It turns out that, when males and females are scanned by fMRI while told to close their eyes and not think about anything in particular, their brain activations are virtually the same.

Researchers examined the brain activity of 26 females and 23 males who rested in a scanner and daydreamed.

{ Neuroküz | Continue reading }

photos { August Sander }

In the long run, physicists are, no doubt, getting closer and closer to the truth. But you can never be sure when the long run has arrived. And in the short run—to adapt Keynes’s proverb—we are often all wrong.

It is perhaps the biases of science reporting in the popular press that produce the most misinformation, especially in medicine. (…) When a drug is tested on animals and seems promising, it makes headlines, even though the majority of drugs that pass animal trials never become usable for people. And barely a day goes by without the media exploiting an almost universal misunderstanding of statistics and reporting something that has no relevance to anything. When researchers are said to have found that an effect occurs to a statistically significant degree, this means that it probably isn’t caused by a fluke, not that it is large or definite enough to be useful.

A school of ancient philosophers, the followers of Pyrrho of Elis (who died C270BC), came up with a consistent but impractical response to the problem of whom to believe when expert sources disagree or are found to be unreliable. Believe nobody, they said: suspend judgment on everything. Scholars have debated whether anyone could have lived a life according to this principle, and the consensus is no, they could not. Suspending judgment may keep you free from erroneous beliefs, but it also makes it impossible to decide rationally on what to do about anything.

{ Intelligent Life | Continue reading }

A fascinating new paper in Psychological Science explores an apparent paradox of eavesdropping: It’s harder to not listen to a conversation when someone is talking on the phone (we only hear one side of the dialogue) than when two physically present people are talking to each other. Although the phone conversation contains much less information, we’re much more curious about what’s being said.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

image { Phil Hale }

European scientists say they’ve figured out the recipe for water in space: Just add starlight.

They made the discovery while examining a dying star that is 500 light-years away from Earth, using an infrared observatory launched by the European Space Agency last year.

“This is a good example of how better instruments can change our picture completely,” said Leen Decin of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.

{ CNN | Continue reading }

artwork { Roy Lichtenstein, Drowning Girl, 1963 }

{ The Sun’s motion about the centre of mass of the Solar System is complicated by perturbations from the planets. Every few hundred years this motion switches between prograde and retrograde. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Adopt a growth mindset. Students who believe that intelligence and academic ability are fixed tend to stumble at the first hurdle. By contrast, those with a ‘growth mindset’, who see intelligence as malleable, react to adversity by working harder and trying out new strategies. (…)

Sleep well. Study found that lack of sleep impairs students’ ability to learn new information. (…)

Forgive yourself for procrastinating. Everyone procrastinates at some time or another – it’s part of human nature. The secret to recovering from a bout of procrastination is to forgive yourself. (…)

Take naps. Numerous studies have shown that naps as short as ten minutes can reduce subsequent fatigue and help boost concentration. It’s only recently, however, that researchers have turned their attention to napping technique. Dayong Zhao and colleagues recruited 30 undergrad regular nappers and tested whether it makes any difference if you nap lying down or leaning forward with your head rested on a desk. Zhao’s team found that a post-luncheon twenty-minute nap in either position was associated with increased performance at an auditory oddball task (listening to a series of tones and spotting the odd one out), but only napping lying down was associated with an increased P300 brain wave signal during the task recorded via EEG – a sign of increased mental alertness. (…)

Believe in yourself. Self-belief affects problem-solving abilities even when the influence of background knowledge is taken into account.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

Italian scientists are to try to establish whether there really is such a phenomenon as Stendhal Syndrome — the giddiness, sweaty state of confusion and even hallucinations that are supposedly aroused when one looks at great works of art.

The condition is named after the 19th-Century French author Stendhal, who wrote of feeling utterly overwhelmed by the Renaissance masterpieces he saw during a trip to Florence in 1817.

{ Independent.ie | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

photo { Tookie Smith photographed by Jean-Paul Goude, 70s }