Elon Musk is going to launch a satellite that displays ads in space, reports @BusinessInsider.
He is one of several billionaires investing vast sums on the space race.
SpaceX will launch the satellite with a display screen in 2022.
Ad space will be bought using cryptocurrency.
{ AJPlus | More: Daily Mail }
Nimrod, the builder of cities from Babel to Calah, was the first “mighty man” on earth, and a “mighty hunter before the Lord.” So were other African, Asian, European, and New World kings. They hunted everything from lions to guanacos, on four of the six continents, from the beginning of recorded time. But why?
Hunting provided meat, and it may have also provided military exercises; but most kings subsisted on domesticated animals and plants and delegated their wars to specialists. […]
Hunting was extremely expensive. Kings lost time with their ministers and with their families; they spent enormous resources on elephants and horses, hounds, hawks, manpower, and fodder. In addition to the obvious time and money costs, there were huge risks. Hunting kings and their sons were often wounded. And more than a few died. […]
Some were felled by stray arrows, whereas others were felled by their own arrows; some caught cold in the forest, and others fell off their horses. It is impossible to quantify the time and money costs or the morbidity and mortality risks. However, a list of anecdotes is impressive: Plenty of kings were wounded or killed chasing game in the woods. […]
The benefits seem to have been outweighed by the costs. […]
Evolutionary psychology is predicated on the assumption that humans are collections of vestiges; that Pleistocene ecologies shaped our mental and physical traits, which are often at odds with modern environments, and maladaptive behaviors resulted. Hunting was the human adaptation on the savannah for hundreds of thousands of years. Good hunters won mates by providing meat; or they attracted them by showing off the talents involved in killing game. Human bodies and minds should have been shaped to reflect those facts.
image { Horse Laughs (1891) }
Eye Contact Marks The Rise And Fall of Shared Attention in Conversation
Conversation is the platform where minds meet —the venue where information is shared, ideas co-created, cultural norms shaped, and social bonds forged. Its frequency and ease belie its complexity.
Every conversation weaves a unique shared narrative from the contributions of independent minds, requiring partners to flexibly move into and out of alignment as needed for conversation to both cohere and evolve. How two minds achieve this coordination is poorly understood.
Here we test whether eye contact, a common feature of conversation, predicts this coordination by measuring dyadic pupillary synchrony (a corollary of shared attention) during natural conversation.
We find that eye contact is positively correlated with synchrony as well as ratings of engagement by conversation partners.
However, rather than elicit synchrony, eye contact commences as synchrony peaks and predicts its immediate and subsequent decline until eye contact breaks. This relationship suggests that eye contact signals when shared attention is high.
Further, we speculate that eye contact may play a corrective role in disrupting shared attention (reducing synchrony) as needed to facilitate independent contributions to conversation.
In building your book I wanted to pursue my own process of decomposition. I began to think about the ways in which paper degrades. Rotting in the ground, exposure to rain, chemicals (I used Xylene, a paint thinner, for the image transfers on the cover), and fire. Although rain or burying paper in the ground would have created unique and unpredictable patterns of ruin in the paper, these seemed like passive processes, whereas burning paper could achieve some level of stochastic design but in a more involved, active, and risk-exposed situation. I followed the traditional recipe for Chinese blackpowder: 75% potassium nitrate, or saltpeter, 15% carbon, 10% sulphur. […]
On a hot plate, outside, the potassium nitrate is usually dissolved in a pot of water, however instead of water I poured into the potassium nitrate a jar of my stale, sunbaked urine since it accelerates the burn process.
for every generation until now, climate change has always been “the next generation’s problem.”
Between the 1970s and the early aughts, the incidence of myopia in the US nearly doubled, to 42 percent. Myopia’s rise has been the starkest in Asia; one survey in Korea found a rate as high as 96 percent among teenagers.
Clearly, something is going on. But scientists can’t agree on exactly what. Being constantly tethered to devices and books indoors might be part of it: Based on a handful of large epidemiological studies on myopia, spending time outdoors—especially in early childhood—reduces the onset of myopia. […]
Neuroscientists discovered the classic animal model for myopia by accident in the 1970s, when they were sewing one eye shut in newborn monkeys to study the development of the brain’s visual system. […] Around the same time as the eye-sewing experiments, neuroscientists figured out they could do the same in chickens and tree shrews—much easier to keep in the lab than monkeys. And instead of sewing the eyelid shut, they could just put what looks like half a ping pong ball over the eye. This “form deprivation” model of myopia has inspired some fascinating science. In 2010, for example, Morgan’s collaborators found that exposure to bright light could reverse this type of induced myopia in chickens. Further experiments pinned down the mechanism, too: Light activates the neurotransmitter dopamine, which prevents the eyes from growing longer.
NYC man sells fart for $85, cashing in on NFT craze […] Ramírez-Mallis and his fellow farters compiled the recordings into a 52-minute “Master Collection” audio file. Now, the top bid for the file is currently $183. Individual fart recordings are also available for 0.05 Ethereum, or about $85 a pop.
unrelated { Illegal Content and the Blockchain }
Back in the 1980s, when DNA forensic analysis was still in its infancy, crime labs needed a speck of bodily fluid—usually blood, semen, or spit—to generate a genetic profile.
That changed in 1997, when Australian forensic scientist Roland van Oorschot stunned the criminal justice world with a nine-paragraph paper titled “DNA Fingerprints from Fingerprints.” It revealed that DNA could be detected not just from bodily fluids but from traces left by a touch. Investigators across the globe began scouring crime scenes for anything—a doorknob, a countertop, a knife handle—that a perpetrator may have tainted with incriminating “touch” DNA.
But van Oorschot’s paper also contained a vital observation: Some people’s DNA appeared on things that they had never touched. […]
In one of his lab’s experiments, for instance, volunteers sat at a table and shared a jug of juice. After 20 minutes of chatting and sipping, swabs were deployed on their hands, the chairs, the table, the jug, and the juice glasses, then tested for genetic material. Although the volunteers never touched each other, 50 percent wound up with another’s DNA on their hand. A third of the glasses bore the DNA of volunteers who did not touch or drink from them.
Then there was the foreign DNA—profiles that didn’t match any of the juice drinkers. It turned up on about half of the chairs and glasses, and all over the participants’ hands and the table. The only explanation: The participants unwittingly brought with them alien genes, perhaps from the lover they kissed that morning, the stranger with whom they had shared a bus grip, or the barista who handed them an afternoon latte.
related { The Hunt for the Golden State Killer and A New Way to Solve Murders }
Romantic love is a basic brain system, like fear and anger or disgust. We humans have evolved three distinct brain systems for mating and reproduction: the sex drive, romantic love, and feelings of deep attachment. People make the mistake of thinking that these are phases. They’re not phases, they’re brain systems, and they can operate in any combination and order. […]
I estimate the people I studied, on average, thought about their beloved about 85 percent of the time. […]
I looked at the demographics from the United Nations from 1947–2011 and across 80 cultures. People tend to divorce around the fourth year of marriage. […]
still { Catherine Deneuve in Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, 1963 }
When he was two years old, Ben stopped seeing out of his left eye. His mother took him to the doctor and soon discovered he had retinal cancer in both eyes. After chemotherapy and radiation failed, surgeons removed both his eyes. For Ben, vision was gone forever.
But by the time he was seven years old, he had devised a technique for decoding the world around him: he clicked with his mouth and listened for the returning echoes. This method enabled Ben to determine the locations of open doorways, people, parked cars, garbage cans, and so on. He was echolocating: bouncing his sound waves off objects in the environment and catching the reflections to build a mental model of his surroundings.
Echolocation may sound like an improbable feat for a human, but thousands of blind people have perfected this skill, just like Ben did. The phenomenon has been written about since at least the 1940s, when the word “echolocation” was first coined in a Science article titled “Echolocation by Blind Men, Bats, and Radar.” […]
Neuroscience used to think that different parts of the brain were predetermined to perform specific functions. But more recent discoveries have upended the old paradigm. One part of the brain may initially be assigned a specific task; for instance, the back of our brain is called the “visual cortex” because it usually handles sight. But that territory can be reassigned to a different task. There is nothing special about neurons in the visual cortex: they are simply neurons that happen to be involved in processing shapes or colors in people who have functioning eyes. But in the sightless, these same neurons can rewire themselves to process other types of information. […]
we refer to the brain’s plasticity as “livewiring” to spotlight how this vast system of 86 billion neurons and 0.2 quadrillion connections rewires itself every moment of your life. […]
In Ben’s case, his brain’s flexible wiring repurposed his visual cortex for processing sound. As a result, Ben had more neurons available to deal with auditory information, and this increased processing power allowed Ben to interpret soundwaves in shocking detail. Ben’s super-hearing demonstrates a more general rule: the more brain territory a particular sense has, the better it performs. […]
Recent decades have yielded several revelations about livewiring, but perhaps the biggest surprise is its rapidity. Brain circuits reorganize not only in the newly blind, but also in the sighted who have temporary blindness. In one study, sighted participants intensively learned how to read Braille. Half the participants were blindfolded throughout the experience. At the end of the five days, the participants who wore blindfolds could distinguish subtle differences between Braille characters much better than the participants who didn’t wear blindfolds. Even more remarkably, the blindfolded participants showed activation in visual brain regions in response to touch and sound. When activity in the visual cortex was temporarily disrupted, the Braille-reading advantage of the blindfolded participants went away. In other words, the blindfolded participants performed better on the touch- related task because their visual cortex had been recruited to help. After the blindfold was removed, the visual cortex returned to normal within a day, no longer responding to touch and sound.
But such changes don’t have to take five days; that just happened to be when the measurement took place. When blindfolded participants are continuously measured, touch-related activity shows up in the visual cortex in about an hour. […]
In the ceaseless competition for brain territory, the visual system has a unique problem: due to the planet’s rotation, all animals are cast into darkness for an average of 12 out of every 24 hours. (Of course, this refers to the vast majority of evolutionary time, not to our present electrified world.) Our ancestors effectively were unwitting participants in the blindfold experiment, every night of their entire lives.
So how did the visual cortex of our ancestors’ brains defend its territory, in the absence of input from the eyes?
We suggest that the brain preserves the territory of the visual cortex by keeping it active at night. In our “defensive activation theory,” dream sleep exists to keep neurons in the visual cortex active, thereby combating a takeover by the neighboring senses. […]
In humans, sleep is punctuated by rapid eye movement (REM) sleep every 90 minutes. This is when most dreaming occurs. (Although some forms of dreaming can occur during non-REM sleep, such dreams are abstract and lack the visual vividness of REM dreams.)
REM sleep is triggered by a specialized set of neurons that pump activity straight into the brain’s visual cortex, causing us to experience vision even though our eyes are closed.
image { Michael Mann, Manhunter, 1986 }
quote { Does the popular quote, “No artist tolerates reality,” belong to Nietzsche? }
Previous studies on aesthetic chills (i.e., psychogenic shivers) demonstrate their positive effects on stress, pleasure, and social cognition. We tested whether we could artificially enhance this emotion and its downstream effects by intervening on its somatic markers using wearable technology.
{ as coastal homeowners face rising sea levels brought on by climate change, the state is increasingly approving sandbags and other structures that are speeding the loss of its beaches | ProPublica | full story }
Female 29 years of age, university student, from dysfunctional family. She began her suffering 11 years ago with personality dissociation, characterized by aversion to sacred objects and images, and psychomotor agitation with transient states of loss of consciousness with manifestations of spiritual possession that required psychiatric, and psychological treatment, and 5 exorcisms without improvement over a period of ten years. […]
With informed consent, a fMRI was accomplished before and in the beginning of a possession induced by exorcism performed by a Catholic priest. […] due to the involuntary motor activity and the patient’s loss of consciousness, it is not possible to perform the analysis completely in this case.
{ Trends in Medicine | Continue reading }
There were 16 people in total that participated in the project “Resting Stated-Tractography-fMRI in initial phase of spiritual possession.” 13 of them are health professionals: a surgeon, psychiatrist, psychologist, neurophysiologist, family medicine physician, neurosurgeon, 2 radiology technicians, a gynecologist, medical doctor, diagnostic radiology physician, exorcist and patient (Ex former medical student). The priest, mother and an aunt of the patient were not included. […]
8 out of 13 participants (61.53%) had accidents and sudden events that put their lives in danger […]
Eight days before the exorcism, the psychiatrist experienced malfunctioning of his computer […]
Seven days after the exorcism, the surgeon had a head trauma, chest trauma and multiple bruises in a forest accident with fall from a height of one meter; he also had a MVA (motor vehicle accident) 15 minutes before receiving the images of the patient’s tractografies […]
22 days after the exorcism the medical doctor presented sudden breakup of a ten years relationship with her boyfriend.
Eight days before and during the exorcism, the father of the patient (a family medicine physician) presented chest and back pain with a normal electrocardiogram; 37 days after the exorcism he is admitted to the Critical Care Unit “CCU” for massive acute myocardial infarction, with loss of myocardial function of 90%.
41 days after the exorcism, the gynecologist is involved in an offense she did not commit.
[…]
On the survey carried out, the 12 participants are much more afraid of organized crime in Mexico than of the devil.
Given that everything in the universe reduces to particles, a question presents itself: What are particles?
The easy answer quickly shows itself to be unsatisfying. Namely, electrons, photons, quarks and other “fundamental” particles supposedly lack substructure or physical extent. “We basically think of a particle as a pointlike object,” said Mary Gaillard, a particle theorist at the University of California, Berkeley who predicted the masses of two types of quarks in the 1970s. And yet particles have distinct traits, such as charge and mass. How can a dimensionless point bear weight? […]
Quantum mechanics revealed to its discoverers in the 1920s that photons and other quantum objects are best described not as particles or waves but by abstract “wave functions” — evolving mathematical functions that indicate a particle’s probability of having various properties. The wave function representing an electron, say, is spatially spread out, so that the electron has possible locations rather than a definite one. But somehow, strangely, when you stick a detector in the scene and measure the electron’s location, its wave function suddenly “collapses” to a point, and the particle clicks at that position in the detector.
A particle is thus a collapsed wave function. But what in the world does that mean? Why does observation cause a distended mathematical function to collapse and a concrete particle to appear? And what decides the measurement’s outcome? Nearly a century later, physicists have no idea.
Restaurant A was located on the first floor of a six-story building totaling 96.6 square meters in size (9.2 × 10.5 m) without windows or a ventilation system. […] The index case was infected at a 6.5 m away from the infector and 5 minutes exposure without any direct or indirect contact.
related { New Orleans swingers’ convention led to 41 Covid-19 infections, event organizer says }
Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up
In the last 10 years, warming in the Arctic has outpaced projections so rapidly that scientists are now suggesting that the poles are warming four times faster than the rest of the globe. This has led to glacier melt and permafrost thaw levels that weren’t forecast to happen until 2050 or later. In Siberia and northern Canada, this abrupt thaw has created sunken landforms, known as thermokarst, where the oldest and deepest permafrost is exposed to the warm air for the first time in hundreds or even thousands of years. […]
Permafrost covers 24 percent of the Earth’s land surface. […]
The layers may still contain ancient frozen microbes, Pleistocene megafauna and even buried smallpox victims. […] Other permafrost microbes (methanotrophs) consume methane. The balance between these microbes plays a critical role in determining future climate warming. […] Others are known but have unpredictable behavior after release. […]
Permafrost thaw in Siberia led to a 2018 anthrax outbreak and the death of 200,000 reindeer and a child.
inkjet print and silkscreen ink on canvas { Richard Prince, Untitled (Cartoon), 2015 }
An astrophysicist of the University of Bologna and a neurosurgeon of the University of Verona compared the network of neuronal cells in the human brain with the cosmic network of galaxies, and surprising similarities emerged. […]
The human brain functions thanks to its wide neuronal network that is deemed to contain approximately 69 billion neurons. On the other hand, the observable universe can count upon a cosmic web of at least 100 billion galaxies. Within both systems, only 30% of their masses are composed of galaxies and neurons. Within both systems, galaxies and neurons arrange themselves in long filaments or nodes between the filaments. Finally, within both system, 70% of the distribution of mass or energy is composed of components playing an apparently passive role: water in the brain and dark energy in the observable Universe. […]
Probably, the connectivity within the two networks evolves following similar physical principles, despite the striking and obvious difference between the physical powers regulating galaxies and neurons”
oil on canvas { Karel Appel, Portrait, 1966 }
Evaluating other people’s sincerity is a ubiquitous and important part of social interactions.
Fourteen experiments show that response speed is an important cue on which people base their sincerity inferences. Specifically, people systematically judged slower responses as less sincere […].
the present study highlights the potential effects that may be observed in judicial settings, since the response speed of innocent suspects may mislead people to judge them as insincere and hence guilty.
painted glass, in 26 parts { Xia Xiaowan, Lao P, 2005 }
The possibility of points-of-no-return in the climate system has been discussed for two decades. A point-of-no-return can be seen as a threshold which, once surpassed, fundamentally changes the dynamics of the climate system. For example, by triggering irreversible processes like melting of the permafrost, drying of the rainforests, or acidification of surface waters. Recently, Lenton et al. summarized the global situation and warned that thresholds may be closer in time than commonly believed.
The purpose of this article is to report that we have identified a point-of-no-return in our climate model—and that it is already behind us. ESCIMO is a climate model which we run from 1850 to 2500. In ESCIMO the global temperature keeps rising to 2500 and beyond, irrespective of how fast humanity cuts the emissions of man-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. […]
To stop the self-sustained warming in ESCIMO, enormous amounts of CO2 have to be extracted from the atmosphere.
oil on canvas { John William Waterhouse, Pandora, 1898 }
