Project Icarus is an ambitious plan to reassess our ability to send a spacecraft to another star. But is it any more than science fiction?
Until recently, planetary geologists had only a handful of subjects to study. The discovery of exoplanets has changed all that, however. The number of known planets orbiting other stars now approaches 500 and few astronomers seriously doubt that an Earth-like body will turn up somewhere soon.
When that happens, we’ll want to study it in unprecedented detail. We’ll want to know its mass, temperature, atmospheric composition, its colour, whether it has seas and continents and if so whether these support life, perhaps even of the intelligent kind. But above all we’ll want to know whether we can visit this place.
Such a trip will not be easy but it may not be entirely impossible. In fact, rocket scientists have dreamed up various plans for interplanetary probes. One of the more famous was Project Daedalus, a 1970s plan by the British Interplanetary Society for a nuclear-powered spacecraft capable of visiting Barnard’s Star some 6 light years away within a human lifetime.
Today, the British Interplanetary Society and another organisation called the Tau Zero Foundation have posted plans on the arXiv to redesign Daedalus in the light of the 30 years of advances that have taken place since the original. The new plan is called Project Icarus. (In Greek mythology, Icarus was the son of Daedalus who died after flying too close to the Sun and melting the wax that held his wings together.)
Icarus could be an interesting measure of the progress in nuclear propulsion technology in the 30 years since Daedalus was conceived.
People who meditate regularly find pain less unpleasant because their brains anticipate the pain less, a new study has found.
Scientists from The University of Manchester recruited individuals into the study who had a diverse range of experience with meditation, spanning anything from months to decades. It was only the more advanced meditators whose anticipation and experience of pain differed from non-meditators.
The type of meditation practised also varied across individuals, but all included ‘mindfulness meditation’ practices, such as those that form the basis of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), recommended for recurrent depression by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in 2004. (…)
“The results of the study confirm how we suspected meditation might affect the brain. Meditation trains the brain to be more present-focused and therefore to spend less time anticipating future negative events. This may be why meditation is effective at reducing the recurrence of depression, which makes chronic pain considerably worse.”
While many of us watch 3-D entertainment in awe, others are compelled to look away. There just so happens to be a group of unlucky moviegoers who find that watching hyper 3-D images whiz by while sitting in the relatively still environment of a movie theater causes dizziness nausea, and other ill effects.
With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), experimental psychologists Frederick Bonato and Andrea Bubka of Saint Peter’s College in Jersey City, N.J., study this phenomenon, known as ‘cybersickness.’
“Cybersickness is a form of motion sickness that occurs in virtual reality environments,” says Bonato. “We have 3-D video games and 3-D movies, and now we have 3-D television. Viewing stimuli in 3-D may lead to some motion sickness symptoms to some degree.”
To understand cybersickness, you’ll need a quick lesson on motion sickness. “When we move around in the natural way, which is walking or running, the senses give you agreeing inputs,” says Bubka.
“But when your sense of motion doesn’t match up to your sense of sight, your brain may be reacting as if it’s been poisoned,” adds Bonato. “The reaction is to eliminate the poison by either vomiting or having diarrhea. It’s because of evolutionary hardwiring in the brain that leads the brain to mistakenly react as if poisoning has occurred.”
There is no real known reason why some people are more prone to motion sickness than others, the two researchers explain, but they do note some research has found that motion sickness seems to affect more women than men, and even people of certain ethnicities more than others.
“This isn’t just a human problem, either,” notes Bonato. “Motion sickness is experienced by most vertebrates. When some fish are transported in tanks in aircraft, they later find fish vomit, which indicates that the fish developed motion sickness on the ride.”
Two Cornell psychologists found we have two separate systems for memories, which helps explain how we can “remember” things that never happened. (…)
here are two distinct types of memory: Verbatim, which allows us to recall what specifically happened at any given moment, and gist, which enables us to put the event in context and give it meaning. (…) They occupy different sections of the brain. (…)
When an event occurs, verbatim memory records an accurate representation. But even as it is doing so, gist memory begins processing the information and determining how it fits into our existing storehouse of knowledge. Verbatim memories generally die away within a day or two, leaving only the gist memory, which records the event as we interpreted it. Under certain circumstances, this can produce “phantom recollection” in which gist memory creates a vivid but illusory image in our mind.
While attending last year’s American Elasmobranch Society conference, I was asked to fill out a survey concerning my views on lethal shark research. (…)
It is undeniably true that certain important information can only be gained through lethal sampling. One of the main examples of this is “age and growth” data. Managers need to know how big certain species get, how quickly they grow, and how big they are when they are reproductively active. This kind of data is absolutely critical for any species management plan, and the best way we can get it is by looking at the vertebrae of sharks (like tree rings, shark vertebrae develop annual markings which can be clearly viewed under a microscope). You can’t look at shark vertebrae while they are still attached to the shark, and you can’t remove vertebrae without killing the shark.
“Creativity is a complex concept; it’s not a single thing,” he said, adding that brain researchers needed to break it down into its component parts. Dr. Kounios, who studies the neural basis of insight, defines creativity as the ability to restructure one’s understanding of a situation in a nonobvious way.
Everyone agrees that no single measure for creativity exists. While I.Q. tests, though controversial, are still considered a reliable test of at least a certain kind of intelligence, there is no equivalent when it comes to creativity — no Creativity Quotient, or C.Q.
Dr. Jung’s lab uses a combination of measures as proxies for creativity. One is the Creativity Achievement Questionnaire, which asks people to report their own aptitude in 10 fields, including the visual arts, music, creative writing, architecture, humor and scientific discovery.
Another is a test for “divergent thinking,” a classic measure developed by the pioneering psychologist J. P. Guilford. Here a person is asked to come up with “new and useful” functions for a familiar object, like a brick, a pencil or a sheet of paper.
Dr. Jung’s team also presents subjects with weird situations. Imagine people could instantly change their sex, or imagine clouds had strings; what would be the implications?
In another assessment, a subject is asked to draw the taste of chocolate or write a caption for a humorous cartoon, as is done in The New Yorker magazine’s weekly contest. “Humor is an important part of creativity,” Dr. Jung said.
related { How did one ape 45,000 years ago happen to turn into a planet dominator? The answer lies in an epochal collision of creativity. | Why They Triumphed | full story }
We often find ourselves wondering what people will do next. Will partners still love us? Our employers keep us in work? (…) When contemplating predictive dilemmas people often evoke the folk wisdom that the only person who can truly know what will happen next is the person in question. (…)
Psychologist Timothy D. Wilson, however, disagrees. His book Strangers to Ourselves uses wide-ranging psychological research to show that when it comes to predicting our own behaviour other people can be as good, or even better, than we are. How can this be?
We like to think of our introspected motivations as predictive facts that will tell us what we will do. However, as Wilson demonstrates, our inner reflections discover not facts but a story we tell to ourselves about ourselves. These stories tend to be rose-tinted. We see ourselves as more consistent, admirable and steadfast than we turn out to be. We forget contrary behaviour and previous weakness and focus on being better.
What do brains and computer chips have in common? Not that much. Sure both use electricity, but in neurons the origin of electrical pulses is chemical while for computer chips it comes from electrical currents. Neurons are highly plastic, rearranging their connections to adapt to new information while computer chips are locked in their arrangement for their entire existence. But one thing they do share is the pattern of connections in their overall structure, specifically both brains and computer chips use the shortest and most efficient pathway they can to avoid the costs associated with taking long detours for the signals to get to their destination. Evolution and chip designers seemed to have reached the same conclusions when bumping up against the same very basic and very important limits, says a recent research paper from a small international team in PLoS. (…)
First, the human brain, the nematode’s nervous system, and the computer chip all had a Russian doll- like architecture, with the same patterns repeating over and over again at different scales. Second, all three showed what is known as Rent’s scaling, a rule used to describe relationships between the number of elements in a given area and the number of links between them.
The first finding confirms the research being done on intelligence and cognition in insects and mammals. (…) The second finding also seems to confirm something we know about evolution, mainly that natural selection tends to trim down waste and excess if it can and over a long period of trial and error, it will eventually arrive at efficient solutions to basic problems.
{ A quick draw beetle that fires volatile liquids with the pulse of a Tommy Gun, aphids that self-combust at the threat of a predator and a double-pistoled worm that sprays its victim with streams of goo. Of course, these insects are not the only invertebrates carrying chemical artillery—bees are maybe the most famous projectile-launching bugs around. | Meet the ballistics experts of the bug world. | ESA | full story | Photo: Ann Johansson for The New York Times }
An international study of almost 500,000 people has confirmed that eating fruit and vegetables does not ward off cancer, debunking a 20-year-old edict by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
It also casts a shadow over the federal government’s $4.8 million advertising campaign, launched five years ago, to encourage people to eat two pieces of fruit and five serves of vegetables a day.
But cancer experts yesterday urged people not to disregard the advice, saying a high intake of fruit and vegetables was still beneficial against heart disease and that some cancers, such as bowel and breast, were linked to obesity.
Our busy lives sometimes feel like they are spinning out of control, and we lose track of the little things we can do to add meaning to our lives and make our loved ones feel appreciated. A new article in Personal Relationships points the way to the methods of gratitude we can use to give a boost to our romantic relationships, and help us achieve and maintain satisfaction with our partners.
Humans are interdependent, with people doing things for each other all the time. Simply because a person does something for another does not mean that the emotion of gratitude will be felt. In addition to the possibility of not even noticing the kind gesture, one could have many different reactions to receiving a benefit from someone else, including gratitude, resentment, misunderstood, or indebtedness.
Positive thinking has been shown to have a longstanding constructive effect on our emotional life. Extending these positive emotions and gratitude to our romantic partners can increase the benefit of positive thinking tenfold, say the authors of this new study. (…)
The authors propose that the emotion of gratitude is adaptive, and ultimately helps us to find, remind, and bind ourselves to people who seem to care about our welfare. (…)
However, the authors are quick to warn that the everyday emotional response of indebtedness did not facilitate relationship maintenance. Indebtedness implies a need to repay kind gestures. This may work to help to keep relationships in working order, but will not yield as many benefits or long-term growth in the relationship as an expression of gratitude.
How love and sex can influence recognition of faces and words: A processing model account
A link between romantic love and face recognition and sexual desire and verbal recognition is suggested. When in love, people typically focus on a long-term perspective which enhances global perception, whereas when experiencing sexual encounters they focus on the present which enhances a perception of details. Because people automatically activate these processing styles when in love or sex, subtle reminders of love versus sex should suffice to change ways of perception. Global processing should further enhance face recognition, whereas local processing should enhance recognition of verbal information.
In two studies participants were primed with concepts and thoughts of love versus sex. Compared to control groups, recognition of verbal material was enhanced after sex priming, whereas face recognition was enhanced after love priming. In Experiment 2 it was demonstrated that differences in global versus local perception mediated these effects. However, there was no indication for mood as a mediator.
Ever since ancient times, scholars have puzzled over the reasons that some musical note combinations sound so sweet while others are just downright dreadful. The Greeks believed that simple ratios in the string lengths of musical instruments were the key, maintaining that the precise mathematical relationships endowed certain chords with a special, even divine, quality. Twentieth-century composers, on the other hand, have leaned toward the notion that musical tastes are really all in what you are used to hearing.
Now, researchers reporting online on May 20th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, think they may have gotten closer to the truth by studying the preferences of more than 250 college students from Minnesota to a variety of musical and nonmusical sounds. (…)
The researchers’ results show that musical chords sound good or bad mostly depending on whether the notes being played produce frequencies that are harmonically related or not. Beating didn’t turn out to be as important. Surprisingly, the preference for harmonic frequencies was stronger in people with experience playing musical instruments. In other words, learning plays a role—perhaps even a primary one, McDermott argues.
When making moral judgements, we rely on our ability to make inferences about the beliefs and intentions of others. With this so-called “theory of mind”, we can meaningfully interpret their behaviour, and decide whether it is right or wrong. The legal system also places great emphasis on one’s intentions: a “guilty act” only produces criminal liability when it is proven to have been performed in combination with a “guilty mind”, and this, too, depends on the ability to make reasoned moral judgements.
MIT researchers now show that this moral compass can be very easily skewed. In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they report that magnetic pulses which disrupt activity in a specific region of the brain’s right hemisphere can interfere with the ability to make certain types of moral judgements, so that hypothetical situations involving attempted harm are perceived to be less morally forbidden and more permissable.
I am a nerd. This fact was quite apparent to many of those around me growing up, but came as quite a surprise to me. Part of the reason that I was regarded as a nerd was because I wasn’t into sports. (…) Being a nerd, of course, I developed my love through study, through reading. (…)
Through reading, sports ceased to be a private vocabulary—one that every other boy seemed to have had whispered into his ear at infancy, but which had strangely been denied to me—and became instead a new intellectual problem, something else to be considered and solved.
The thrill of sports is and will always be largely visceral. I would have it no other way. But behind the moments of raw action are endless intricacies, seemingly limitless geometries of movement which can be studied and enjoyed in precisely the same way one enjoys science, math or history. I’m sure some people are probably reading that sentence in horror–the division between jock and nerd is so elementary and animalistic I’m surprised Joseph Campbell never wrote about it–but I mean merely that intellectual play in the consideration of sports is little different than in any other subject. There is something universal in the basic pleasure of applying mind to (subject) matter and slowly, gradually, feeling the unknown become the familiar.
Bruce Young from the University of Massachusetts is antagonising a spitting cobra. He approaches, keeping outside of the snake’s strike radius, while moving his head from side to side. The cobra doesn’t like it and erects its hood in warning. Young persists, and the snake retaliates by launching twin streams of venom at him from forward-facing holes in its fangs. The aim is spot-on: right at Young’s eyes. Fortunately, he is wearing a Perspex visor that catches the spray; without it, the venom would start destroying his corneas, giving him minutes to seek medical aid before permanent blindness set in.
It may seem a bit daft to provoke a snake that can poison you from afar, but Young’s antics were all part of an attempt to show just how spitting cobras make their shots. Their venom is a potent defensive weapon, but it’s also completely useless if it lands on the skin or even in the mouth. To work, the cobra must aim for the eyes.
Just think about how hard that is. The cobra must hit a moving target that’s up to 1.5 metres away, using a squirt gun attached to their mouth. The fang is fixed with no movable nozzle for fine-tuned aiming. And the venom spray lasts just 50 milliseconds – not long enough to correct the stream after watching its arc.
By taunting cobras from behind his visor, Young discovered their secret. The snake waits for a particularly jerky movement to trigger its attack and synchronise the movements of its heads in the same way. It shakes its head rapidly from side to side to achieve a wide spray of venom. And it even predicts the position of its target 200 milliseconds later and shoots its venom at where its eyes are going to be.
Things that appear on the left are better remembered
The aim of the present study was to investigate whether neurologically intact individuals demonstrate a lateralized bias in remembering mental images of recently presented novel material comprising arbitrary combinations of shape, colour, and location in a temporary memory binding paradigm. The material involved arrays of a small number of simple geometric or animal shapes, so as to make it very unlikely that there would be any difficulties in perception, thereby focusing on memory. Recall was assessed by asking participants to report stimulus features using a forced-choice task in which they selected the colour, shape, and location of each item shown in the study array. In three related experiments, we report evidence of a new phenomenon: a leftward bias when people try to remember visually presented novel information.
During REM sleep, where most dreaming takes place, your eyes move around but it’s never been clear exactly why. A new study just published online by neuroscience journal Brain suggests that they are looking at the ever-changing dream world.
The first question you might ask is how the researchers knew what the dreamers were looking at. To study this, the project recruited people with a condition called REM sleep behaviour disorder who lack the normal sleep paralysis that keeps us still when we dream.
In other words, people with REM sleep behaviour disorder act out their dreams. (…) When the eyes move during REM sleep they are looking at something in the dream world. The eyes seem genuinely to be a bridge between the land of dream consciousness and waking life.
New research shows a possible explanation for the link between mental health and creativity. By studying receptors in the brain, researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have managed to show that the dopamine system in healthy, highly creative people is similar in some respects to that seen in people with schizophrenia.
High creative skills have been shown to be somewhat more common in people who have mental illness in the family. Creativity is also linked to a slightly higher risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Certain psychological traits, such as the ability to make unusual pr bizarre associations are also shared by schizophrenics and healthy, highly creative people. And now the correlation between creativity and mental health has scientific backing.
Subjective experience poses a major problem for neuroscientists and philosophers alike, and the relationship between them and brain function is particularly puzzling. How can I know that my perception of the colour red is the same as yours, when my experience of the colour occupies a private mental world to which nobody else has access? How is the sensory information from an object transformed into an experience that enters conscious awareness? The neural mechanisms involved are like a black box, whose inner workings are a complete mystery.
In synaesthesia, the information entering one sensory system gives rise to sensations in another sensory modality. Letters can evoke colours, for example, and movements can evoke sounds. These extraordinary additional sensations therefore offer a unique opportunity to investigate how the subjective experiences of healthy people are related to brain function. Dutch psychologists now report that different types of synaesthetic experiences are associated with different brain mechanisms, providing a rare glimpse into the workings of the black box.
Men are far more likely to tell lies than women, researchers have revealed.
Their study found that the average male tells 1,092 lies every year - roughly three a day.
By contrast, the average woman will lie 728 times a year - around twice a day.
And while men said their lies were most likely to relate to their drinking habits, the most popular female fib - ‘Nothing’s wrong, I’m fine’ - hides their true feelings.
Men are also less likely to feel guilty about lying. (…)
‘The jury is still out as to whether human quirks like lying are the result of genes, evolution or upbringing.’
According to the findings, we are most likely to spin a yarn to our mothers, with 25 per cent of men and 20 per cent of women admitting to this.
