Can Playing the Computer Game “Tetris” Reduce the Build-Up of Flashbacks for Trauma? A Proposal from Cognitive Science 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. 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. The. Dear Dr.
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 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. The prototype version Google showed off on Wednesday looked like a very polished and well-designed pair of wrap-around glasses with a clear display that sits above the eye.
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. Unlike many other approaches to reconfigurable robots, smart sand uses a subtractive method, akin to stone carving, rather than an additive method, akin to snapping LEGO blocks together. Distributed intelligence Algorithmically, the main challenge in developing smart sand is that the individual grains would have very few computational resources. To attach to each other, to communicate and to share power, the cubes use 'electropermanent magnets,' materials whose magnetism can be switched on and off with jolts of electricity. Rapid prototyping
Study Finds Alcohol and Tobacco More Harmful than Marijuana, LSD, or Ecstasy (Revisited) : The Scientific Activist Back in August, I reported on an ACMD study buried in the back of a UK government report. The study gave strong evidence that the current drug classification scheme in the UK was fundamentally flawed and was not based on the actual danger of a given drug. The study has now been published in this week’s issue of The Lancet. Here’s what I originally wrote: (1 August 2006) Yesterday, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee released a report entitled Drug Classification: Making a Hash of It? The conclusions of the report were based on findings from extensive observations and oral and written testimony. In the US, drugs are classified primarily by schedules, which divide up drugs into five schedules based on their relative medical utility compared to their potential for abuse and dependence. The UK also uses drug schedules, but it additionally divides drugs into three classes strictly on their perceived health risks. Image from the BBC
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. 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. The flip side of this, still, is what part of a human enhanced with technology is required to be "original" before they are considered more machine than man. Hence, blurry line. Like I said, its not here yet, but it will be soon.
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. One of the women in the trial had Stargardt disease, an inherited form of eye degeneration in which the pigment cells wither and die. Before the treatment she could only make out hand movements, but afterwards her vision in the treated eye had improved enough to discern finger movements too. "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 More from the web
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? 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? Oh, how the Explainer loves a false premise. The idea that an ugly face might hide a subtle mind has attracted scientific inquiries for many years.
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.