{ A black-headed female Gouldian finch, Erythrura gouldiae, chooses her mate. Having a genetically incompatible mate can increase a female bird’s stress hormone levels which then can affect the sex ratio of her offspring. | Nature | Continue reading }
related { Effects of stress can be inherited, and here’s how }
Lanchester Theory and the Fate of Armed Revolts
Major revolts have recently erupted in parts of the Middle East with substantial international repercussions. Predicting, coping with and winning those revolts have become a grave problem for many regimes and for world powers. We propose a new model of such revolts that describes their evolution by building on the classic Lanchester theory of combat.
The model accounts for the split in the population between those loyal to the regime and those favoring the rebels. We show that, contrary to classical Lanchesterian insights regarding traditional force-on-force engagements, the outcome of a revolt is independent of the initial force sizes; it only depends on the fraction of the population supporting each side and their combat effectiveness.
{ arXiv | Continue reading | Related: Lanchester’s Theory of Warfare }
photo { Clint Eastwood photographed by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin }
Nicotine is not only very, very addictive, as a central nervous system stimulant it can also affect our motivations and behaviors in a wider sense. One of the behaviors it can modify is appetitive behavior. It’s a well-funded fact that smokers tend to have a lower body-mass than non-smokers, and that smokers who quit have a tendency to gain weight, although until now the neurobiological mechanism for this modulation was unknown.
Recent findings from two different publications reveal parts of this mechanism, but while most reports have pin-pointed the results involving appetite suppression through pro-opiomelanocortin neurons, there is evidence that the complete picture is more complicated than that.
photo { Penny Cottee }
Previous studies have shown that dogs are capable of a remarkable range of human-like behaviours; they have been shown to perform as well or even better than chimpanzees at responding to human body language, verbal commands and attention states.
This has led to debate as to whether dogs are aware of people’s behaviour and can predict how a person will act as a result of it, or whether they are simply responding to the presence or absence of certain stimuli.
Publishing in the journal Learning & Behaviour, Udell and colleagues carried out two experiments to test the ability of pet dogs, rescue shelter dogs and wolves, to successfully beg for food from an attentive individual, versus an inattentive individual. (…)
In the first experiment, two people simultaneously offered food to the subject dog or wolf. One person was always attentive, giving the animal eye contact, while the other was unable to see the animal as they either had a camera or book obscuring their eyes, their back turned or a bucket over their head. (…)
The results showed, for the first time, that wolves as well as domestic dogs tended to beg for food from an attentive individual rather someone who was not paying attention. (…)
“The logical conclusion of the study must be that both genetics and the environment can play a role in the dogs’ behaviour, but the fundamental aspect seems to be genetic with only fine tuning being done by the dogs’ experience in the human environment,” he added.
{ Ogilvy Malaysia hired some local Lego artists to create the posters that play off of the surrounding environment. | copyranter | more }
Police charge man with using pool as commode.
Iran plans to send a live monkey into space.
A home-made heroin substitute is having a horrific effect on thousands of Russia’s drug addicts.
Corrupt officials funnelled £76bn out of China.
Five economic lessons from Sweden, the rock star of the recovery.
A prion is a misshapen protein that acts like an infectious agent (hence the name, which comes from the words protein and infection). Prion Disease: Secret of Immunity Revealed.
The United Nations is officially declaring that for only the second time in history, a disease has been wiped off the face of the earth.
Researchers pinpoint reasons for dramatic rise in cesarean births.
Parent-adolescent cell phone conversations reveal a lot about the relationship.
More Evidence Vitamin D Boosts Immune Response.
Shiatsu is Japanese for “finger pressure,” and consists of finger and palm pressure, stretches, and other massage techniques. Shiatsu is traditionally performed on a futon mat, with clients fully clothed. There is no scientific evidence proving that shiatsu can treat any disease.
No scientific evidence supports the alleged benefits of colon cleansing.
Marriage improves odds of surviving colon cancer.
The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient mechanical computer designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was recovered in 1900-1901. Its significance and complexity were not understood until decades later. Its time of construction is now estimated between 150 and 100 BC.
Jungle Geometry: Who Needs Euclid?
Why Wall Street went for gay marriage.
How Google Finds New Recruits.
Google Introduces Facebook Competitor, Emphasizing Privacy. And: On Facebook I overshare. On Twitter, I undershare. If Google hits that spot in the middle…
Here are six ways Google Ventures is attempting to disrupt the VC industry.
Shazam Raises $32 Million. Music is only the beginning for the company — next, they’re taking on television.
In February 2011, News Corp., which bought Myspace and its parent company, Intermix, in 2005 for $580 million, started officially looking for a potential buyer at an asking price of $100 million. The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace.
Before leaving town I was determined to scope out that $1 billion Apple data center in Maiden, NC. So I drove over, took some pictures, and talked to folks at the convenience store down the road. My conclusions from this unscientific research is that the giant Apple facility is mainly empty.
We thought the idea of electronic mail was a great idea. We said, “Where’s electronic mail? That would be so cool.” And they said, “Oh, there’s no time to write that. It’s not important.” And we said, “Well, can we write it?” And we did. And then it became part of the system.
Reid Hoffman. The venture capitalist on how to hit a fast-moving target in the second-wave Web boom.
In my philosophy class of 36 students I had six instances of plagiarism. One is a case of self-plagiarism, in which the third paper was turned in a second time for the fourth paper. He changed the introduction and the conclusion, but left the body paragraphs the same.
“No one will ever thank you for saving money at Conde Nast magazines,” Liberman once scolded an editor. “They’ll only thank you for making a great magazine.” Cosmopolitan, the popular Hearst monthly that competes directly with a number of Conde Nast titles, made nearly as much money last year as all of Conde Nast put together.
X-Ray Specs, Sea-Monkeys… Von Braunhut’s adventures in American kitsch.
He also began to believe that the power of orgasm, called orgone, could be stored in batteries and could be absorbed from the sky by the use of a special machine called a cloudbuster. Related: The current consensus of the scientific community is that orgone theory is pseudoscience. And: Reich with one of his cloudbusters.
Wood models of human heads. Inscription on bottom of models reads “National Bureau of Standards 6-1-1946. Size 7″. Some heads are also inscribed “Size 7.5″. We have some artifacts in our collection we want to identify, so we thought we could exhibit them online and ask for help.
Humans may be near the top of the food chain now, but who were our ancestors’ biggest predators? The Top Ten Deadliest Animals of Our Evolutionary Past.
Does the Smithsonian consider tattoos works of art?
How the Hippies Saved Physics.
Why Do Tennis Balls Bounce Faster on Wimbledon’s Grass?
What’s actually cracking when you crack your knuckles?
How to Know if Hackers Have Stolen Your Password.
Why you should eat fruits and vegetables.
Could Shakespeare’s Bones Tell Us if He Smoked Pot?
Grossinger’s was once an upscale retreat for the wealthy. Since closing its doors nearly 35 years ago, the resort has remained abandoned and untouched in the New York countryside.
Chinese Ghost Town That Looks Like It Was Plucked From The British Countryside.
657 new islands have been discovered around the world.
Photos of the world at night. Related videos: Milky Way.
The average color of the New York City sky, updated every 5 minutes. [Thanks Tim]
One Year of the Moon in 2.5 Minutes. [Thanks Chris]
Over or Under: The Great Toilet Paper Debate.
Toyota plant in Valenciennes, France
The making of a Coca-Cola neon sign, 1954.
State of Vermont Pure Maple Syrup.
Findings suggest that, at least at the level of the male hormone, marriage doesn’t matter.
At some point, the Mongol military leader Kublai Khan (1215–1294) realized that his empire had grown so vast that he would never be able to see what it contained. To remedy this, he commissioned emissaries to travel to the empire’s distant reaches and convey back news of what he owned. Since his messengers returned with information from different distances and traveled at different rates (depending on weather, conflicts, and their fitness), the messages arrived at different times. Although no historians have addressed this issue, I imagine that the Great Khan was constantly forced to solve the same problem a human brain has to solve: what events in the empire occurred in which order?
Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Because different types of sensory information (hearing, seeing, touch, and so on) are processed at different speeds by different neural architectures, your brain faces an enormous challenge: what is the best story that can be constructed about the outside world?
The days of thinking of time as a river—evenly flowing, always advancing—are over. Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain and is shockingly easy to manipulate experimentally. We all know about optical illusions, in which things appear different from how they really are; less well known is the world of temporal illusions. When you begin to look for temporal illusions, they appear everywhere.
photos { Henri Cartier-Bresson | Ruben Natal-San Miguel }
‘Your own life while it’s happening to you never has any atmosphere until it’s a memory.’ –Warhol. I like that.
Wish I was back in school so I could do a thesis on how things like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc are technology’s attempt to ’solve’ this problem, effectively making us nostalgic for the present as we advertise it, not live it.
{ Colleen Nika }
photo { Becky Ninkovic }
Is male libido the ultimate cause of war?
Across four experiments Lei Chang and his team showed that pictures of attractive women or women’s legs had a raft of war-relevant effects on heterosexual male participants, including: biasing their judgments to be more bellicose towards hostile countries; speeding their ability to locate an armed soldier on a computer screen; and speeding their ability to recognise and locate war-related words on a computer screen.
Equivalent effects after looking at pictures of attractive men were not found for female participants.
Why masturbation helps procreation
Evidence from elephants to rodents to humans shows that masturbating is—counterintuitively—an excellent way to make healthy babies, and lots of them. (…)
There are four basic theories. (…)
1. Masturbation might remove old, worn-out, broken sperm from the reproductive tract.
Four and three and two and one, what up! And when I’m on the mic, the suckers run (Word!)
images { 1 | 2. Magic Rays May Signal New Laws of the Universe }
Sleeping Beauty goes into an isolated room on Sunday and falls asleep. Monday she awakes, and then sleeps again Monday night. A fair coin is tossed, and if it comes up heads then Monday night Beauty is drugged so that she doesn’t wake again until Wednesday. If the coin comes up tails, then Monday night she is drugged so that she forgets everything that happened Monday – she wakes Tuesday and then sleeps again Tuesday night. When Beauty awakes in the room, she only knows it is either heads and Monday, tails and Monday, or tails and Tuesday. Heads and Tuesday is excluded by assumption. The key question: what probability should Beauty assign to heads when she awakes?
photo { Man Ray, Solarization, 1929 }
Although it might be called a form of lying, most societies have highly valued storytelling. (…)
If “magic” is the creation of subjective realities in the minds of other peoples, then we moderns have learned how to perform magical incantations on a vast, industrial scale.
And now comes an era when we live immersed in computer-generated “virtual” realities, rendered through lavish games where ersatz selves get to do countless things that our mundane, fleshy selves cannot. Is it any wonder that some people have been talking about a near future when this process may reach its ultimate conclusion? When the denizens of Reality will not be able to verify, by any clear-cut means, that they aren’t living in—or even existing because of—a simulation?
If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s nobody around to hear, does it make a sound?
Of course, the answer depends on how we choose to interpret the use of the word ‘sound’. (…)
Here the word ‘sound’ is used to describe a physical phenomenon –- the wave disturbance. But sound is also a human experience, the result of physical signals delivered by human sense organs which are synthesized in the mind as a form of perception.
Now, to a large extent, we can interpret the actions of human sense organs in much the same way we interpret mechanical measuring devices. The human auditory apparatus simply translates one set of physical phenomena into another, leading eventually to stimulation of those parts of the brain cortex responsible for the perception of sound. It is here that the distinction comes. Everything to this point is explicable in terms of physics and chemistry, but the process by which we turn electrical signals in the brain into human perception and experience in the mind remains, at present, unfathomable.
Philosophers have long argued that sound, colour, taste, smell and touch are all secondary qualities which exist only in our minds. We have no basis for our common-sense assumption that these secondary qualities reflect or represent reality as it really is. So, if we interpret the word ‘sound’ to mean a human experience rather than a physical phenomenon, then when there is nobody around there is a sense in which the falling tree makes no sound at all.
This business about the distinction between ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘things-as-they-appear’ has troubled philosophers for as long as the subject has existed, but what does it have to do with modern physics, specifically the story of quantum theory? In fact, such questions have dogged the theory almost from the moment of its inception in the 1920s.
photo { Walter Pickering }
Belief in a causal loop between the stomach and the mind never disappeared. (…) In the 1880s, Nietzsche diagnosed the whole Western philosophical tradition as a case of indigestion.
{ Review of A Modern History of the Stomach: Gastric Illness, Medicine and British Society, 1800-1950 by Ian Miller | London Review of Books | Continue reading }
Take a look at your hands. In them, you find atoms that once belonged to stars dead more than five billion years ago. Those stars, bigger than our sun, forged much of the chemistry of life during their last moments, before exploding into giant supernovae. They forged chemical elements spread through the interstellar medium, collecting here and there in self-gravitating hydrogen clouds. Occasionally, these clouds would become unstable to their own gravity and contract. These contracting nebulae gave rise to stars and their orbiting planets, trillions of them in our Milky Way alone.
In at least one of them, elements combined in incredibly complex ways to create living creatures. And of these myriad beings, one developed mind, the ability to sustain complex thoughts and to wonder about its origins.
We are, in a very real sense, self-aware stardust. (…)
There are many gaps to fill in this cosmic narrative, and this is what makes science exciting. As we thrust ahead, we learn more about the universe and our place in it. Perhaps one of the most controversial questions that follows from this discussion concerns our inevitability. Is our existence an inevitable consequence of the laws of Nature? Or are we an accident, and the cosmos could equally well exist without us?
