Metamaterials offer route to room-temperature superconductivity. A new way of making high-temperature superconductors that is based on metamaterials has been proposed by physicists in the US. Their plan involves combining a low-temperature superconductor with a dielectric material to create a metamaterial that is a superconductor at much higher temperatures than its constituent materials. The team is now looking at testing its proposal in the lab and is hopeful that its work could offer a route to creating a superconductor that operates at room temperature. Ever since the first high-temperature superconductor was discovered nearly 30 years ago, physicists have searched in vain for a material that remains a superconductor at room temperature.
But despite a massive effort, physicists have not been able to create a superconductor that endures at temperatures higher than about 140 K, which is still 150 degrees below room temperature. Maximum attraction Hyperbolic design. Jungle Drug Ayahuasca Could Revolutionize Psychotherapy - Tracy James knew the drug she'd just swallowed was working when her old injuries from high school started twitching with new life.
Pressure throbbed from a forgotten busted knee. Her ankle tingled. The fingers she'd sprained roller-skating decades back began to ache. Whatever the 37-year-old had just taken, it shot feeling back into the long-gone ailments. "When I did vomit, it was one of the most amazing moments of my life. " For the past 45 minutes, the hut had been dark and silent, the air dripping with jungle moisture. It was June 2009. Emily Utne Dennis McKenna has taken ayahuasca hundreds of times since 1981. Courtesy of Dennis McKenna For ayahuasca ceremonies, users typically gather in a hut at night, when visions are more intense.
Shutterstock / Dr. Expert Dennis McKenna has spent time with the Peruvian tribes who harvest the vine. Shutterstock / Jason Mintzer A ceremonial hut in Peru. Related Stories More About Waves of nausea began crashing over James. Its most common name is ayahuasca. US government to back massive effort to understand the brain. Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that the Obama administration is preparing to launch biology into its first big project post-genome: mapping the activity and processes that power the human brain. The initial report suggested that the project would get roughly $3 billion dollars over 10 years to fund projects that would provide an unprecedented understanding of how the brain operates. But the report was remarkably short on the scientific details of what the studies would actually accomplish or where the money would actually go.
To get a better sense, we talked with Brown University's John Donoghue, who is one of the academic researchers who has been helping to provide the rationale and direction for the project. Although he couldn't speak for the administration's plans, he did describe the outlines of what's being proposed and why, and he provided a glimpse into what he sees as the project's benefits. What are we talking about doing? How will we actually do this? Swarm Theory. I used to think ants knew what they were doing. The ones marching across my kitchen counter looked so confident, I just figured they had a plan, knew where they were going and what needed to be done. How else could ants organize highways, build elaborate nests, stage epic raids, and do all the other things ants do?
Turns out I was wrong. Ants aren't clever little engineers, architects, or warriors after all—at least not as individuals. When it comes to deciding what to do next, most ants don't have a clue. "If you watch an ant try to accomplish something, you'll be impressed by how inept it is," says Deborah M. How do we explain, then, the success of Earth's 12,000 or so known ant species? "Ants aren't smart," Gordon says. Where this intelligence comes from raises a fundamental question in nature: How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group? One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. A Real Neural Network. Using Neural Networks to Classify Music.
New work from students at the University of Hong Kong describes a novel use of neural networks, collections of artificial neurons or nodes that can be trained to accomplish a wide variety of tasks, previously used only in image recognition. The students used a convolutional network to “learn” features, such as tempo and harmony, from a database of songs that spread across 10 genres. The result was a set of trained neural networks that could correctly identify the genre of a song, which in computer science is considered a very hard problem, with greater than 87 percent accuracy.
In March the group won an award for best paper at the International Multiconference of Engineers and Computer Scientists. What made this feat possible was the depth of the student’s convolutional neural network. In each layer (pictured above) a single node, or neuron, “hears” only a tiny portion of the song, about 23 milliseconds. Advanced Robotic Hand Mimics Human's. A European project called Sensopac, made up of 12 groups, came out today with advances in its robot hand.
The hand mimics the flexibility and sensitivity of a human hand and is controlled by a neural-network-based program modeled on the cerebellum. Scientists at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) made a robotic “skin” out of a thin, flexible carbon that changes its resistance depending on pressure. This allows the robot hand to tell the shapes of an object, the amount of force placed upon it, and the direction of that force.
Thirty-eight opposing motors control the hand’s joints, giving it a touch that ranges from light to forceful. The researchers modeled the robot hand by utilizing hundreds of MRI images of human hands. As for the robot’s learning ability, the team hopes to improve its understanding of movement and sensation through its neural network. Will We Ever Have a Fully Digital Brain? Mapping How the Brain Matures. Using a new way of analyzing brain-imaging data, scientists have mapped out how the complex networks of connections in the brain evolve as children age. The researchers are now using the technology to examine how brain development in children with specific disorders, such as autism, veers off the norm.
Ultimately, researchers aim to use the technology to predict, for example, whether a child at risk for autism will actually develop the disorder, or what treatments might work best for that individual. Previous research by the same team at the Washington University School of Medicine had shown that between age five and 30, the short-range connections in the brain tend to weaken, while longer-range connections get stronger. In the new study, scientists plotted the trajectory for normal brain development and showed for the first time that they could determine a child’s development based on a brain scan. Still Waiting on Neural Nets. The promise of artificial neural networks is the stuff of sci-fi movies: computers that learn and work much like humans-through experience.
In the real world, however, neural networks haven’t begun to live up to their potential. It appears that human nature is at least partially standing in the way-with a failure to communicate fully between two key groups. Researchers gathered to discuss real-world applications of neural networks at a session of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks held in Washington, DC, in July. But besides research to spur the development of tiny, connected “smart” sensors for use in defense, very little of the discussions had much to do with what anyone outside academia would consider the real world. Instead, researchers outlined the need to better connect neural network technology with current research about how the human brain works.
Missing a Core Connection Needed: Neuroinformatics What’s the solution? Brain waves encode rules for behavior. Public release date: 21-Nov-2012 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Sarah McDonnells_mcd@mit.edu 617-253-8923Massachusetts Institute of Technology CAMBRIDGE, MA -- One of the biggest puzzles in neuroscience is how our brains encode thoughts, such as perceptions and memories, at the cellular level.
Some evidence suggests that ensembles of neurons represent each unique piece of information, but no one knows just what these ensembles look like, or how they form. A new study from researchers at MIT and Boston University (BU) sheds light on how neural ensembles form thoughts and support the flexibility to change one's mind. The results suggest that the nature of conscious thought may be rhythmic, according to the researchers, who published their findings in the Nov. 21 issue of Neuron. "As we talk, thoughts float in and out of our heads.
Rules for behavior "Effectively what they're doing is focusing on some parts of information in the world and ignoring others. . [ Print | E-mail. How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death. Facts about the Brain and Sleep. Neurogenesis - “The birth of new neurons in the brain; also referred to as the process in which neurons are created.” The growth of new brain cells occurs in the region of the brain called the “hippocampus.” The ‘hippocampus’ is an area involved with memory, learning, and other cognitive functions. In order to live and become part of our brain, new neurons formed in the hippocampus-region need support from surrounding nutrients from blood and glial cells. Most importantly, they need support from other surrounding neurons - otherwise these new brain cells will die. Though thousands of new brain cells are formed and produced via the hippocampus each and every day, many die quickly after birth. When we can keep them alive for this crucial period after birth, we are able to effectively boost the power of the human brain by adding new brain cells to the bank of existing cells.
Eating blueberries can trigger the growth of new brain cells? Sci STKE. 2003 Aug; (195):318. -Biotele [Source]) 9. How Magic Mushrooms Work - Lifestyle. Psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, has a "long history of use in healing ceremonies," but it has yet to achieve the legitimacy afforded regulated pharmaceutical drugs. A growing body of shroom research may change that. One recent study found that when volunteers took psilocybin—and were subjected to a soundtrack of "world music"—the subjects reported "improved relationships with family and others, increased physical and psychological self-care, and increased devotion to spiritual practice"—typical mind-expansion stuff.
Now, a new pair of studies claim that magic mushrooms don't actually expand the mind—in a sense, they contract it. In one study, researchers took a set of 15 "healthy, hallucinogen-experienced" volunteers, gave them psilocybin, then watched their brains. The result? The powerful and mysterious brain circuitry that makes us love Google, Twitter, and texting. Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves. Emily Yoffe is a contributing editor at the Atlantic. We actually resemble nothing so much as those legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a little electrical jolt to the brain.
In 1954, psychologist James Olds and his team were working in a laboratory at McGill University, studying how rats learned. Olds, and everyone else, assumed he'd found the brain's pleasure center (some scientists still think so). But to Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, this supposed pleasure center didn't look very much like it was producing pleasure. Creating False Memories. Elizabeth F. Loftus In 1986 Nadean Cool, a nurse's aide in Wisconsin, sought therapy from a psychiatrist to help her cope with her reaction to a traumatic event experienced by her daughter. During therapy, the psychiatrist used hypnosis and other suggestive techniques to dig out buried memories of abuse that Cool herself had allegedly experienced. In the process, Cool became convinced that she had repressed memories of having been in a satanic cult, of eating babies, of being raped, of having sex with animals and of being forced to watch the murder of her eight-year-old friend.
She came to believe that she had more than 120 personalities-children, adults, angels and even a duck-all because, Cool was told, she had experienced severe childhood sexual and physical abuse. When Cool finally realized that false memories had been planted, she sued the psychiatrist for malpractice. False Childhood Memories My research associate, Jacqueline E. Imagination Inflation Impossible Memories The Author.
Pamela Meyer: How to spot a liar.
Cognitive Psycology.