Reinforcements ordered in the war on brains. Abstact, Supernatural. Through the Wormhole. Eureka! Neural Evidence for Sudden Insight. June 17, 2010 § I had my “eureka” moment a couple of years ago just ridding home in the car. It was truly a moment of sudden-insight. I had never meditated a day in my life (that I knew of). I had been working through post traumatic stress disorder on my own for over a year.
That means I had been spending a lot of time thinking about life, existence, the meaning of the universe, you know the typical depression crap. Then one afternoon while my husband and I were driving home from Costco, everything changed. Like this: Like Loading... Tagged: Brain, Brain Matters, Zen. How We Fool Ourselves Over and Over. Unified Field Theory. June 26, 2010 § We are one. We all started out together as a singularity or super-string then BANG we expanded.
We didn’t separate. We are all still connected, every person, animal, rock, tree, star, planet at a subatomic level. We are all connected. Watch Frank Wilczek First. FORA.tv – Frank Wilczek: The LHC and Unified Field Theory. Grand Unified Theory-Wikipedia Like this: Like Loading... Tagged: Brain Matters, LHC, Physics, Supersymmetry, Unification, Unified Field Theory.
Our Queer Universe. Are you conscious now. Are you letting your ideas have sex. Can Science Explain Everything. What’s wrong with evolutionary biology 101?:Pharyngula. July 24, 2010 § I learn more about biology reading PZ Myer’s blog than I ever did in school. Of course I went to mostly private religious schools, and then their were the dark ages spent in the Utah public school system. I don’t remember them teaching biology in Utah. They did have an animal husbandry class. “Here’s the problem, and also a brief introduction to Evolutionary Biology 201.First, [evolutionary biology 101] it’s not exactly wrong — it’s more like taking one good explanation of certain kinds of evolution and making it a sweeping claim that that is how all evolution works. Via It’s more than genes, it’s networks and systems : Pharyngula. Like this: Like Loading... Tagged: Biology, Brain, creationist, Denial, Science, Skeptics.
Will the Biological Universe Trump Physics. July 26, 2010 § This is a short article that pretty closely says what I have been trying to articulate for so long. I would appreciate any of comments, insight, and re-tweets. “most of the comprehensive theories universe are no more than stories that fail to take into account one crucial factor: we are creating them.
It is the biological creature that makes observations, names what it observes, and creates stories. Science has not succeeded in confronting the element of existence that is at once most familiar and most mysterious—conscious experience.” Please read full article» via Will the Biological Universe Trump Physics?. Like this: Like Loading... Tagged: Biology, Bubbles, Evolution, Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Science, Unified Field Theory. Is it time for the Phone Call to die. July 31, 2010 § Having spent most my working life at the mercy of the telephone, I now have learned to ignore its melodic cries for attention. The only people who call on the telephone anymore are telemarketers, charities and pollsters. Family and friends will call out of the blue once in a while. But, most of the time we know what calls to expect when. The rest go to voice mail.
“This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don’t just have more options than we used to. Via Clive Thompson on the Death of the Phone Call | Magazine. Like this: Like Loading... Tagged: Behavior, Communication, Electronics, Evolution. We are never ever alone. Smithsonian Human Origins Program - Smithsonian National Museum. BeInSpace. Bat fellatio causes a scandal in academia - science-in-society - University College Cork in Ireland is coming under international pressure to lift a punishment meted out to one of its academics.
Dylan Evans, a psychologist at the university's school of medicine, has been saddled with a two-year period of intensive monitoring and counselling after discussing a scientific paper with a colleague. The title of the paper? "Fellatio in fruit bats prolongs copulation time". As part of what he says was an ongoing discussion on human uniqueness, Evans showed a copy of the fellatio paper to a female colleague in the school of medicine. "There was not a shred of a sign of offence taken at the time," Evans says. "She asked for a copy of the article. " A week later he got a letter informing him that he was being accused of sexual harassment. No offence intended It seems there was more to the grievance between Evans and the complainant than the fellatio paper incident, but an independent investigation found that Evans was not guilty of sexual harassment.
Eureka! Neural evidence for sudden insight. A recent study provides intriguing information about the neural dynamics underlying behavioral changes associated with the development of new problem solving strategies. The research, published by the Cell Press in the May 13 issue of the journal Neuron, supports the idea of "a-ha" moments in the brain that are associated with sudden insight. Our daily lives are filled with changes that force us to abandon old behavioral strategies that are no longer advantageous and develop new, more appropriate responses. While it is clear that new rules are often deduced through trial-and-error learning, the neural dynamics that underlie the change from a familiar to a novel rule are not well understood. "The ability of animals and humans to infer and apply new rules in order to maximize reward relies critically on the frontal lobes," explains one of the researchers who led the study, Dr.
Jeremy K. Specifically, Dr. Fellatio keeps male fruit bats keen - life - 29 October 2009 - N. Video: Bat fellatio The video is sexually explicit and was edited and soundtracked by the researchers. Female short-nosed fruit bats have been observed performing fellatio on their partners during copulation. Mating pairs spent more time copulating if the female did so. Cynopterus sphinx live in south-east Asia. Min Tan of the Guangdong Entomological Institute in Guangzhou, China, and colleagues captured 30 male and 30 female short-nosed fruit bats in Yuexiu Park in Guangzhou City and observed their mating behaviour in enclosures.
The bats copulate dorso-ventrally, with the male mounting the female from behind. The tip of the penis had already penetrated the female's vagina, and the males did not withdraw when the female licked the base of the penis. Both the duration of an individual copulation, and the overall time a mating pair spent copulating, were increased if the female performed fellatio. Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0007595 More From New Scientist. The joke is on us: A new interpretation of bared teeth in archae. Bared teeth are a prominent and eye-catching feature on many historical and archaeological artifacts, and are commonly interpreted as representing death, aggression and the shamanic trance. But a study in the forthcoming issue of Current Anthropology argues that the bared-teeth motif often expresses something a bit less sinister: the smile.
Alice V. M. Samson, Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University, the Netherlands, and Bridget M. Waller, Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, examined the bared-teeth motif (BTM) of the Taíno, who lived in the Greater Antilles (the Caribbean) from AD 1000 to the early decades of European contact (1492-1550). Interpretations of the BTM by early European observers reflect a western religious and cultural worldview rather than an understanding of indigenous practices. However, Samson and Waller argue that the negative interpretation misses the mark. The Greater Antilles were home to several different societies. All Present-day Life Arose From A Single Origin. Out of the shadows: our unknown immune system - 02 June 2010 - N.
Editorial: Tread carefully in the immune system's shadowlands DELIBERATE infection with a blood-sucking worm seems an odd way to treat multiple sclerosis (MS). Yet more surprising is what this experiment may tell us about a "shadow" branch of our immune system. Completely unknown until recently, this is pointing to new ways of treating a host of complex diseases. A couple of recent studies suggest that parasitic infection dampens inflammation and reduces relapse rates in people with MS, in which the body's own cells are attacked by the immune system as if they were "foreign".
So Cris Constantinescu at the University of Nottingham, UK, and his colleagues plan to place tiny hookworm larvae on the skin of 32 people with MS, allowing the worms to burrow down and infect the volunteers. The team won't just be looking for a reduction in volunteers' symptoms though. They will also be ... Mystery seafaring ancestor found in the Philippines - life - 03. The discovery of a single foot bone is forcing anthropologists to rethink how people first reached the islands off south-east Asia. It suggests that humans arrived on Luzon, the largest and northernmost major island in the Philippines, at least 67,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years earlier than had been thought.
"The arrival of people in Australia 50,000 to 60,000 years ago is a good comparison," says expedition member Florent Detroit of the National Museum for Natural History in Paris, France. We have no idea how settlers got to Australia, he says, but we know from the archaeological evidence that they reached it settled it. "It seems coherent for us to think that in south-east Asia and Australia, humans had sea-faring capabilities by 60,000 to 70,000 years ago. " Castaways Getting to Luzon would have required crossing the open sea, long before any evidence that people had mastered boat-building or navigation.
If the foot fits More From New Scientist More from the web Recommended by. Evolution of cetaceans. About 80 of the 87 modern species in the order Cetacea. A phylogeny showing the relationships among cetacean families.[1] illustrative evolution-line of cetaceans The cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) are marine mammal descendants of land mammals. Their terrestrial origins are indicated by: Their need to breathe air from the surface;The bones of their fins, which resemble the limbs of land mammalsThe vertical movement of their spines, characteristic more of a running mammal than of the horizontal movement of fish. The question of how a group of land mammals became adapted to aquatic life was a mystery until discoveries starting in the late 1970s in Pakistan revealed several stages in the transition of cetaceans from land to sea. Earliest ancestors[edit] The molecular data is supported by the recent discovery of Pakicetus, the earliest proto-whale (see below).
Indohyus[edit] Possible relationships between cetaceans and other ungulate groups.[1][3] Pakicetidae[edit] General[edit] Say red to see it. (Image: Gary Parker/Getty) Christine Kenneally, contributor IN THE 1850s, the British scholar, politician and future prime minister William Gladstone proudly published a 1700-page work on the writings of Homer. The opus ranged over Greek geography, society and morality, and it included a small but remarkable chapter on the use of colour in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Gladstone observed that Homer, whose powers of description and evocation were as exceptional then as they were hundreds of years before, was oddly non-exuberant when it came to colour. The epic poet overwhelmingly described objects as either black or white, and when he mentioned an actual colour, like red or (much less commonly) green, there was a strangeness about it.
Gladstone's work may be little-read now, but his musings on colour kicked off one of the most fascinating and fractious debates in the psychological sciences: does the language you speak affect the way you see the world? Tacit knowledge: you don't know how much you know - opinion - 31. TAKE a long look at the Mona Lisa. How do you see her? As blobs of paint or as a woman with an enigmatic smile? Now explain how you came to see those blobs of paint as a smile. For your second mission, think back to learning to form sentences. Your parents never told you "verb in the middle" (if you're English) or "verb at the end" (if you're German) but still you picked it up. These abilities demonstrate what's known as "tacit knowledge" - something as big and taken for granted as "air", "thought", or "language".
On the subject of duh… July 1, 2010 § Isn’t it wonderful when science catches up to what everybody already knew? I am referring to the recent study published by Association For Psychological Science. The study was cited in an article Science Daily June 30, 2010. Is your left hand more motivated than your right hand? The article states in part: Motivation doesn’t have to be conscious; your brain can decide how much it wants something without input from your conscious mind. We all knew this right? Like this: Like Loading... Tagged: Behavior, Brain, Brain Matters. And the truth shall set you free… A new way to count. Big Bang Big Boom.