La curiosité n'est pas un « vilain » défaut chez les souris Dans notre quotidien, nous sommes fréquemment confrontés à des prises de décision. Quand il s'agit de choisir entre différentes options, celles-ci peuvent être sures et connues, ou bien plus incertaines. Estimer le « degré d'incertitude » associé à ces alternatives est indispensable pour prendre une décision adaptée. Jusqu'à présent, la manière dont l'évaluation de l'incertitude était régulée restait méconnue. Première étape : les souris étaient placées dans une arène constituée de trois zones, chacune d'elle étant corrélée à l'obtention d'une récompense. Afin de comprendre les mécanismes moléculaires sous-tendant ce type de comportement, les chercheurs ont ensuite testé des souris dépourvues du gène codant pour une sous-unité des récepteurs nicotiniques à l'acétylcholine2. Ces résultats établissent clairement le rôle de l'acétylcholine dans la motivation induite spécifiquement par l'incertitude du résultat. © Naudé, Faure (CNRS/UPMC/Inserm) Télécharger le communiqué de presse : Notes :
How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars This is Part 3 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies. For an explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved, start with Part 1. Pre-Post Note: I started working on this post ten weeks ago. When I started, I never intended for it to become such an ordeal. But like the Tesla post, I decided as I researched that this was A) a supremely important topic that will only become more important in the years to come, and B) something most people don’t know nearly enough about. Thanks for your patience. About the post itself: There are three main parts. 1) PDF and ebook options: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing (see a preview here), and an ebook containing the whole four-part Elon Musk series: There are two versions of the PDF: Normal and G-Rated. 2) An audio version. Contents Part 1: The Story of Humans and Space Part 2: Musk’s Mission A SpaceX Future 2365 AD, Ganymede One more day until departure. Part 1: The Story of Humans and Space
How Tesla Will Change The World This is Part 2 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies. For an explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved, start with Part 1. PDF and ebook options: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing (see a preview here), and an ebook containing the whole four-part Elon Musk series: A Wait But Why post can be a few different things. One type of WBW post is the “let’s just take this whole topic and really actually get to the bottom of it so we can all completely get it from here forward.” The ideal topic for that kind of post is one that’s really important to our lives, and that tends to come up a lot, but that’s also hugely complex and confusing, often controversial with differing information coming out of different mouths, and that ends up leaving a lot of people feeling like they don’t totally get it as well as they “should.” I’ve heard people compare knowledge of a topic to a tree. Two disclaimers before we start: Contents Taming a Dragon
Secrets From The Brains Of 13 Creative Geniuses In 1963, Nancy Andreasen was the first female tenure-tracked English professor at the University of Iowa. Soon after, her first book about the poet John Donne was accepted by a publisher. Her career was off to a smashing start, but she had a nagging feeling. "Who would this book help?" she couldn't stop herself from thinking. Within a month, she enrolled in the medical school at the University of Iowa. In her latest study, which she recently wrote about for the Atlantic, Andreasen scanned the brains of 13 of the most famous scientists, mathematicians, artists, and writers alive today. The study was challenging given how hard it is to pin down the creative process. Andreasen had to find a way to study these creative minds at work. In her findings she has distilled some key patterns in the minds of creative geniuses. Creative people like to teach themselves rather than be taught by others. Many creative people love both the arts and the sciences. Creative geniuses have crappy ideas too.
NASA Unveils New Public Web Portal for Research Results Public access to NASA-funded research data now is just a click away, with the launch of a new agency public access portal. The creation of the NASA-Funded Research Results portal on NASA.gov reflects the agency’s ongoing commitment to providing broad public access to science data. “At NASA, we are celebrating this opportunity to extend access to our extensive portfolio of scientific and technical publications,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman. “Through open access and innovation we invite the global community to join us in exploring Earth, air and space.” NASA now requires articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and papers in juried conference proceedings be publicly accessible via the agency’s PubSpace: PubSpace is an archive of original science journal articles produced by NASA-funded research and available online without a fee. For more information, visit: -end-
How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars - Page 2 of 5 - Wait But Why | Page 2 Part 2: Musk’s Mission Like the rest of us, Elon Musk has a handful of life goals. Unlike the rest of us, one of those life goals is to put 1,000,000 people on Mars. In the last few months, as I’ve explained to friends what I’m doing with this post series, there’s always that distinct moment when I mention the whole…Mars thing. One reaction I haven’t seen is, “Cool, that makes sense.” I get it—I felt the same way until pretty recently. To explain why Musk wants to put a million people on Mars, I’m going to introduce you to two aliens living on an Earth-like planet on the other side of the Milky Way—Zurple and Quignee: Zurple and Quignee’s planet, Uvuvuwu, formed 1.2 billion years later than the Earth, but because it only took 300 million years on Uvuvuwu for simple single-cell organisms to evolve into complex single-cell organisms (it took 1.6 billion years on Earth), life on Uvuvuwu beat us to the punch and reached human-level intelligence 11 million years ago. A nearby supernova. Mercury
Facing Chaos? Focus on What You CAN Control | Daniel Goleman This Space Available: Space Myths Busted: How Skylab Nearly Was Lost With rising internal temperatures and a trickle of electrical power, it became apparent shortly after Skylab’s launch on May 14th, 1973 that America’s first space station was in serious trouble. During the Skylab panel at Spacefest VII conducted on June 10th, 2016, astronauts Rusty Schweickart (Skylab 2’s backup commander) and Paul Weitz (Skylab 2’s pilot) discussed the fixes that were required to restore Skylab back to health after it had been severely crippled by several launch anomalies. Schweickart (along with backup crew members Dr. Myth #1: Mach 1, Not Max-Q It is often reported that the sequence resulting in the loss of the micrometeroid shield and the damage to the solar panels began during Max-Q, the period of maximum aerodynamic pressure. At 62.807 seconds after liftoff, the launch vehicle began to react to an external, abnormal aerodynamic force… Max-Q was a full 10.63 seconds [after Mach 1] into the future and the meteoroid shield would be long gone by then. 2. 3.
How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars - Page 3 of 5 - Wait But Why | Page 3 Part 3: How to Colonize Mars There are some tough “going from A to B” situations in life. Going from A) I can’t believe my alarm just went off to B) Now I’m sitting at work. From A) My lease ends next month to B) Now I’m totally moved into a new apartment and all the things are even hung on the walls. But A) I think I’d like to put 1,000,000 people on Mars to B) Now there are 1,000,000 people on Mars—that one seems extra difficult. Elon Musk is more ambitious than you. Since the beginning of this project, I’ve spoken with Musk six times, not that I’m counting, and much of that time was spent talking about how this Mars thing is actually going to happen. 1) A will 2) A way The conventional wisdom might be that this is a case of, “If there’s a will, there’s a way.” But Musk believes it’s the other way around. If someone told me that a penthouse apartment in Manhattan with a huge balcony had dropped in price by 95%, I’d have plenty of will to sign a lease and move in. So kinda like: Bad times.
Les secrets du cerveau pour maintenir l'attention de votre public Je vais partager avec vous une méthode que j’ai découverte en lisant le livre de John Medina, les 12 lois du cerveau. Une idée m’a particulièrement marqué en lisant le livre et qui est en lien direct avec les présentations : Il s’agit de la règle des 10 minutes. C’est une règle qui est très simple à comprendre : Au bout de 10 minutes, l’attention du public diminue. Pour répondre à cette question, nous allons nous pencher sur 3 points : Tout d’abord, comme fonctionne l’attentionEnsuite, je vais partager les 4 ingrédients à connaître pour obtenir une attention soutenueEnfin, nous verrons le modèle qu’utilise John Medina lorsqu’il donne des cours et comment cette structure lui permet de maintenir l’attention de son auditoire. Attention et influence Alors voici schématiquement comment fonctionne l’attention. Tout d’abord, la mémoire : Ce à quoi nous portons attention est profondément influencé par notre mémoire. Comment fonctionne l’attention : le modèle de Posner La signification La focalisation
Space Radiation Devastated the Lives of Apollo Astronauts A startling new study has revealed that a troubling number of the lunar astronauts from NASA’s Apollo program are suffering high mortality rates due to heart disease. The cause? Exposure to high levels of deep space radiation during their trip to the Moon. This is the first time research has been done into the mortality of the Apollo astronauts and it was published in Scientific Reports by Professor and Dean of the college of Human Sciences at Florida State University, Michael Delp. The conclusions drawn from studying the deaths of the only humans that have ventured into deep space casts an immense shadow on the manned missions to Mars being planned by both NASA and SpaceX. “We know very little about the effects of deep space radiation on human health, particularly on the cardiovascular system,” said Delp in an official release. The number of cardiovascular disease-related deaths among the deep space astronauts were significantly higher. The rate among astronauts who never flew is 9%.