The Man Who Turned Paper into Pixels: How Mathematician and Black Jack Wizard Claude Shannon Ignited the Information Age. What Actually Happens While You Sleep and How It Affects Your Every Waking Moment. By Maria Popova “We are living in an age when sleep is more comfortable than ever and yet more elusive.” The Ancient Greeks believed that one fell asleep when the brain filled with blood and awakened once it drained back out. Nineteenth-century philosophers contended that sleep happened when the brain was emptied of ambitions and stimulating thoughts.
“If sleep doesn’t serve an absolutely vital function, it is the greatest mistake evolution ever made,” biologist Allan Rechtschaffen once remarked. Most of us will spend a full third of our lives asleep, and yet we don’t have the faintest idea of what it does for our bodies and our brains. But before we get too anthropocentrically arrogant in our assumptions, it turns out the quantitative requirement of sleep isn’t correlated with how high up the evolutionary chain an organism is: Lions and gerbils sleep about thirteen hours a day. What, then, happens as we doze off, exactly? (Recall the role of REM sleep in regulating negative emotions.) Japanese Students Create Brilliant Straw Home Heated by Compost. Japanese students at Waseda University have designed and built an innovative straw house that produces its own heat through agricultural fermentation. During the cold months, dried straw is composted in acrylic cases within the house using the low-odor Japanese “bokashi” method.
The fermentation naturally heats up the house by generating 30° celsius heat for up to four weeks. The project, called “A Recipe To Live,” stands in the coastal town of Taiki-cho in Hokkaido. It was designed by students Masaki Ogasawara, Keisuke Tsukada and Erika Mikami to follow the natural cycles of the dairy farm town, which features many straw pastures. During the hot summer months, the natural shelter dries straw inside transparent window shelves. These shelves serve as “heat shield panels,” and they release cool moisture as the straw dries. Photos by LIXIL. GMin's Innovation Labs: Enabling Generations of Young Innovators | GLOBAL MINIMUM. It will take anywhere from 3 seconds to 1 minute for your pic to upload, depending on how big it is. You're going to see this message every time you post a new pic. So, we're making the text really long so that it'll take you at least five picture uploads to read it all. Here's what we're thinking...While your first picture is uploading think about someone you want to kiss.
When you upload your second pic think about one friend who you can beat in a race. On your third photo upload think about your favorite food that begins with the letter H. While your fourth picture is uploading think about how great it would be if you were a world class breakdancer. What It’s Like to Live in a Universe of Ten Dimensions. By Maria Popova What songwriting has to do with string theory. What would happen if you crossed the physics of time with the science of something and nothing? You might get closer to understanding the multiverse. In Imagining the Tenth Dimension: A New Way of Thinking About Time and Space, Rob Bryanton — a self-described “non-scientist with an inquisitive mind,” whose dayjob as a sound designer involves composing music for TV series and films — proposes a theory of the universe based on ten dimensions, a bold and progressive lens on string theory based on the idea that countless tiny “superstrings” are vibrating in a tenth dimension.
For a taste, here is a mind-bending explanation of ten dimensions might mean: The project began as a set of 26 songs, exploring the intersection of science and philosophy. Before launching into the additional dimensions, Bryanton also breaks down the familiar three: HT It’s Okay To Be Smart Donating = Loving Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. We Are a Cosmic Accident: Alan Lightman on Dark Energy, the Multiverse, and Why We Exist. By Maria Popova How we drew the one we have from the zillions of possible universes in the cosmic lottery hat. Questions like why our world exists and what nothing is have occupied minds great and ordinary since the dawn of humanity, and yet for all our scientific progress, they continue to do so, yielding only hypotheses rather than concrete answers.
But there is something immutably heartening in the difference between the primitive hypotheses of myth, folklore and religion, which handed off such mysteries to various deities and the occasional white-bearded man, and the increasingly educated guesses of modern science. The most compelling example of fine-tuning is dark energy — an invisible and unexpected cosmological force that hides in empty space and works against the universe’s slowing expansion, a sort of “cosmic accelerator pedal” that is speeding up its expansion and causing galaxies to drift away from one another. On one thing most physicists agree. Donating = Loving. Mathemusician Vi Hart Explains Space-Time with a Music Box and a Möbius Strip. Dear Blue Lobster.
Scientists Discover a Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics - Wired Science. Physicists reported this week the discovery of a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality. “This is completely new and very much simpler than anything that has been done before,” said Andrew Hodges, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University who has been following the work.
The revelation that particle interactions, the most basic events in nature, may be consequences of geometry significantly advances a decades-long effort to reformulate quantum field theory, the body of laws describing elementary particles and their interactions. Interactions that were previously calculated with mathematical formulas thousands of terms long can now be described by computing the volume of the corresponding jewel-like “amplituhedron,” which yields an equivalent one-term expression.
The amplituhedron itself does not describe gravity. 'Black Holes' In Ocean Exist, Scientists Say. Nothing escapes the yawning chasm of a black hole. Not matter, sound nor even light. Normally confined to the reaches of space, black holes and their seemingly insatiable appetites for everything, have fascinated — and enlightened — scientists for years. Now, they may not have to look so far to study them.
Researchers at Switzerland's ETH Zurich and the University of Miami say black holes are among us — at least, massive eddies in the southern Atlantic Ocean bear their telltale signatures. What a black hole is to light, an ocean eddy, scientists suggest, is to water. And scientists are discovering more every day. In a paper published earlier this month in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, George Haller, a professor at ETH Zurich and Francisco Beron-Vera of the University of Miami claim they can track and define these engorged eddies — a feat that has, until now, proven elusive.
The ocean's natural turbulence has thwarted previous attempts to demarcate these islands of intensity.