NEIL ARMSTRONG: A giant among men. Can Playing the Computer Game “Tetris” Reduce the Build-Up of Flashbacks for Trauma? A Proposal from Cognitive Science. Tetris effect. Screenshot of a tetromino game. People who play video puzzle games like this for a long time may see moving images like this at the edges of their visual fields, when they close their eyes, or when they are drifting off to sleep. The Tetris effect (also known as Tetris Syndrome) occurs when people devote so much time and attention to an activity that it begins to pattern their thoughts, mental images, and dreams.
It is named after the video game Tetris. Other examples[edit] The Tetris effect can occur with other video games.[2] It has also been known to occur with non-video games, such as the illusion of curved lines after doing a jigsaw puzzle, or the involuntary mental visualisation of Rubik's Cube algorithms common amongst speedcubers. On a perceptual level, sea legs are a kind of Tetris effect. A person newly on land after spending long periods at sea may sense illusory rocking motion, having become accustomed to the constant work of adjusting to the boat making such movements.
Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation. To Predict Dating Success, The Secret's In The Pronouns : Shots - Health Blog. Hide captionPeople who are interested in and paying close attention to each other begin to speak more alike, a psychologist says. iStockphoto.com People who are interested in and paying close attention to each other begin to speak more alike, a psychologist says.
On a recent Friday night, 30 men and 30 women gathered at a hotel restaurant in Washington, D.C. Their goal was love, or maybe sex, or maybe some combination of the two. They were there for speed dating. The women sat at separate numbered tables while the men moved down the line, and for two solid hours they did a rotation, making small talk with people they did not know, one after another, in three-minute increments. I had gone to record the night, which was put on by a company called Professionals in the City, and what struck me was the noise in the room. What were these people saying? And what can we learn from what they are saying? That is why I called James Pennebaker, a psychologist interested in the secret life of pronouns. Google Begins Testing Its Augmented-Reality Glasses. Photos via GoogleGoogle showed off its first venture into wearable computing, called Project Glass.
If you venture into a coffee shop in the coming months and see someone with a pair of futuristic glasses that look like a prop from “Star Trek,” don’t worry. It’s probably just a Google employee testing the company’s new augmented-reality glasses. On Wednesday, Google gave people a clearer picture of its secret initiative called Project Glass. The glasses are the company’s first venture into wearable computing. The glasses are not yet for sale. In a post shared on Google Plus, employees in the company laboratory known as Google X, including Babak Parviz, Steve Lee and Sebastian Thrun, asked people for input about the prototype of Project Glass. “We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input,” the three employees wrote. A video released by Google on Wednesday, which can be seen below, showed potential uses for Project Glass.
Self-sculpting sand. Imagine that you have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a footstool. A few seconds later, you reach into the box and pull out a full-size footstool: The sand has assembled itself into a large-scale replica of the model. That may sound like a scene from a Harry Potter novel, but it’s the vision animating a research project at the Distributed Robotics Laboratory (DRL) at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. At the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in May — the world’s premier robotics conference — DRL researchers will present a paper describing algorithms that could enable such “smart sand.” They also describe experiments in which they tested the algorithms on somewhat larger particles — cubes about 10 millimeters to an edge, with rudimentary microprocessors inside and very unusual magnets on four of their sides. Distributed intelligence Rapid prototyping.
The Poetry of Science: Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson. How the Potato Changed the World | History & Archaeology. Study Finds Alcohol and Tobacco More Harmful than Marijuana, LSD, or Ecstasy (Revisited) : The Scientific Activist. Homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/group/busslab/pdffiles/Evolutionary Psychology and Feminism - Final Published 2011.pdf. When Truisms Are True. Biggest Scientific Breakthroughs of 2011. IBM's "neurosynaptic" chips are the closest thing to a synthetic brain yet. A nice, clear, and mostly correct statement.
However, you are forgetting one thing: Those in power wish to stay in power. Those who have power wish to have more power. And those who have property that could suddenly not be "theirs" would be highly resistant to relinquishing said property. Therefore such straightforward language would never make it into law in a modern society. Because there will be those who wish to oppress simply because they can, and it gives them a power trip to know that they've tapped into the innate fear of change/difference that the 'majority' possesses to do it.
As a programmer and developer, I can see the day coming where systems can easily outgrow their original programming. Right now that's a binary tug of war between the glitch and the software - and it usually either results in an accurate result or a failure state. Eventually the system learns that it can generate responses similar to but not constricted by its original parameters.
Hence, blurry line. Online gamers have managed to solve a decade-old scientific puzzle. In three weeks. Where did all the nothing go? | Sci-ence! A Skeptical Comic and Blog. ROBO-ONE 13: Taekwon-V vs. Garoo. Researchers evolve a multicellular yeast in the lab in 2 months. When we think of life on Earth, most of us think of multicellular organisms, like large mammals or massive trees.
But we're only aware of three groups of complex, multicellular organisms, which suggested it might be a major hurdle. Now, a new study describes how researchers evolved a multicellular form of yeast (the same species that contributes to bread and beer), and were able to see specialized cell behaviors and reproduction in as little as 60 days.
The authors lay out the problem very simply in their introduction, stating that, "Multicellularity was one of the most significant innovations in the history of life, but its initial evolution remains poorly understood. " There is some evidence that it can be a favorable trait—research shows that clusters of cells evolve when a single-celled organism is kept in culture with a predator that can only swallow one cell at a time. But that's about as far as these experiments went. Their method was pretty simple. Are smart people ugly? The Explainer's 2011 Question of the Year. Illlustration by Charlie Powell. It's been a few weeks since we posted the questions that the Explainer was either unwilling or unable to answer in 2011.
Among this year's batch of imponderables were inquiries like, Are the blind sleepy all the time? And Does anyone ever get a sex change back? We asked our readers to pick the question that most deserved an answer in the Explainer column. In third place, with 6.6 percent of the total votes, a bit of speculative evolutionary biology: Let's say that a meteor never hits the earth, and dinosaurs continue evolving over all the years human beings have grown into what we are today.
In second place, with 7.5 percent, an inquiry into pharmacokinetics: Why does it take 45 minutes for the pharmacy to get your prescription ready—even when no one else is waiting? And in first place, with the support of 9.4 percent of our readers, the winner by a landslide and Explainer Question of the Year for 2011: Why are smart people usually ugly? BBC Nature - Chimpanzees consider their audience when communicating. 29 December 2011Last updated at 17:01 By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature The chimps made soft "hoo" sounds to warn individuals that had not seen the threat Chimpanzees appear to consider who they are "talking to" before they call out.
Researchers found that wild chimps that spotted a poisonous snake were more likely to make their "alert call" in the presence of a chimp that had not seen the threat. This indicates that the animals "understand the mindset" of others. The insight into the primates' remarkable intelligence will be published in the journal Current Biology. The University of St Andrews scientists, who carried out the work, study primate communication to uncover some of the origins of human language.
To find out how the animals "talked to each other" about potential threats, they placed plastic snakes - models of rhino and gaboon vipers - into the paths of wild chimpanzees and monitored the primates' reactions. "They also tend to sit in one place for weeks. Cagebreak! Rats Will Work To Free A Trapped Pal. Hide captionA new study finds that rats will intentionally work to free a trapped pal. iStockphoto.com Calling someone a "rat" is no compliment, but a new study shows that rats actually are empathetic and will altruistically lend a helping paw to a cage mate who is stuck in a trap.
Not only will rats frantically work to free their trapped cage mate; they will do so even when there's a tempting little pile of chocolate chips nearby, the study reveals. Instead of leaving their pal in the trap and selfishly gobbling the candy all by themselves, rats will free their cage mate and share the chocolate. "To me that's absolutely stunning," says neurobiologist Peggy Mason of the University of Chicago. "The fact that the rat does that is really amazing. " Mason and her colleagues designed a series of experiments, described in the journal Science, to explore the evolutionary roots of empathy. Helping A Fellow Rat Video: Learning To Free A Caged Pal A Helping Behavior So the scientists used chocolate. Breathingearth - CO2, birth & death rates by country, simulated real-time.
Does taking medication for cold symptoms delay your body's ability to fight the illness? : askscience. List of common misconceptions. This incomplete list is not intended to be exhaustive. This list corrects erroneous beliefs that are currently widely held about notable topics. Each misconception and the corresponding facts have been discussed in published literature. Note that each entry is formatted as a correction; the misconceptions themselves are implied rather than stated. History Ancient to early modern history Modern history Napoleon on the Bellerophon, a painting of Napoleon I by Charles Lock Eastlake. Blindness eased by historic stem cell treatment - health - 25 January 2012.
For the first time since they were discovered 13 years ago, human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) have shown medical promise. Two people with eye degeneration both say their vision improved in the four months after they received implants of retinal pigment epithelial cells made from hESCs. The treatments were also safe, with no sign that the cells triggered aggressive tumours called teratomas, no sign of immune rejection of the cells, and no inflammation. Discovered in 1998, hESCs had previously failed to deliver on their medical promise. The new procedures, performed by Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology of Marlborough, Massachusetts, and colleagues, could represent a turning point for hESC therapies.
One of the women in the trial had Stargardt disease, an inherited form of eye degeneration in which the pigment cells wither and die. "That doesn't really capture the difference it's made in her life," says Lanza. Stem cell boost Former US president George W. More From New Scientist. Features of a successful therapeutic fast of 382 days' duration -- Stewart and Fleming 49 (569): 203 -- Postgraduate Medical Journal. Postgraduate Medical Journalpmj.bmj.com 1973;49:203-209 doi:10.1136/pgmj.49.569.203 Case report Abstract A 27-year-old male patient fasted under supervision for 382 days and has subsequently maintained his normal weight. Articles citing this article. Fecal Transplants: They Work, the Regulations Don’t | Wired Science Lara Thompson was 26 when her life fell apart. She was living in Rhode Island and working in HIV prevention research when she unexpectedly developed nausea and diarrhea.
It was early 2008, a few weeks after New Year’s, and she thought she might have picked up a stomach virus at a holiday gathering, or stressed her system with overindulgence. She expected the symptoms would pass after a few days. They didn’t. “In three weeks, I dropped 15-20 pounds,” she says now. When she consulted her doctor, she found out what was bothering her was more complex than a virus. Her infection conformed to that trend. For months, physicians kept trying different drug regimens, while Thompson’s hair fell out and her muscles wasted.
“It made sense to me,” Thompson says now. She gathered everything she could print out, and found a doctor who was friendly to the procedure: Colleen Kelly, a gastroenterologist based in Providence. In two hours, she started feeling better. But, of course, there’s a problem: Cites: HIV Treatment as Prevention.
My Man, Sir Isaac Newton. NASA Beams Beatles' 'Across the Universe' Into Space. NASA Beams Beatles' 'Across the Universe' Into Space For the first time ever, NASA beamed a song -- The Beatles' "Across the Universe" -- directly into deep space at 7 p.m. EST on Feb. 4. The transmission over NASA's Deep Space Network commemorated the 40th anniversary of the day The Beatles recorded the song, as well as the 50th anniversary of NASA's founding and the group's beginnings.
Two other anniversaries also are being honored: The launch 50 years ago this week of Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite, and the founding 45 years ago of the Deep Space Network, an international network of antennas that supports missions to explore the universe. The transmission was aimed at the North Star, Polaris, which is located 431 light years away from Earth. The song will travel across the universe at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. "Amazing! Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, characterized the song's transmission as a significant event.