Logical Paradoxes » The Barber Paradox The Barber paradox is attributed to the British philosopher Bertrand Russell. It highlights a fundamental problem in mathematics, exposing an inconsistency in the basic principles on which mathematics is founded. The barber paradox asks us to consider the following situation: In a village, the barber shaves everyone who does not shave himself, but no one else. The question that prompts the paradox is this: Who shaves the barber? No matter how we try to answer this question, we get into trouble. If we say that the barber shaves himself, then we get into trouble. If we say that the barber does not shave himself, then problems also arise. Even if we try to get clever, saying that the barber is a woman, we do not evade the paradox. Both cases, then, are impossible; the barber can neither shave himself nor not shave himself.
Want to Retain More Memories? Get More Deep Sleep | Biomedical Engineering & Biotechnology News Posted on 06 February 2013 by Aristo Wong. We know that as we age it can become harder for us to remember things; but why is that? Researchers at Berkeley have found a correlation between poor sleep, memory loss, and brain deterioration as we grow older. The researchers found that slow brain waves that are generated during sleep assist in transporting memories from the hippocampus (short term memory storage) to the prefrontal cortex (long term memory storage). In older adults, memories are getting stuck in the hippocampus due to the poor quality of deep sleep. These memories (which have failed to transfer over to the prefrontal cortex) are then overwritten by newer memories. Researchers say healthy adults typically spend about 25% of their night in deep sleep. Right now the results of the study show that on average the quality of older adults’ deep sleep is about 75% worse than that of younger adults.
Bionic Muscles Could Find Use in Robots and Cardiac Medicine The tissues of the heart are mechanically tough and electrically conductive, and they keep a strong, rhythmic beat—properties that are tough to mimic in the lab. But a new hybrid material that combines cell-friendly gel, strong, conductive carbon nanotubes, and living cardiac cells mimics natural heart tissue more successfully than previous attempts. Eventually the new material could be useful in both medical and robotic applications. The bionic tissues, made by Ali Khademhosseini, a professor at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, could serve as muscles for biological machines—moving, programmable living tissues that take synthetic biology beyond single cells. A lot of the things that natural tissues and biological cells can do, such as sense and respond to their environment, are hard for engineers to achieve with the synthetic materials used in conventional robotics.
Ultra-stretchy battery to power bionic life Our cyborg future may not be far off. Skip to next paragraph A new, ultra-stretchy battery could be used to power bionic eyes, robotic skins, and other biological implants Yonggang Huang Subscribe Today to the Monitor Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS ofThe Christian Science MonitorWeekly Digital Edition An ultra-stretchy battery could one day be used to power bionic eyeballs, brain-wave monitoring devices and robotic skins, new research suggests. The new device, which embeds tiny lithium-based batteries in a silicone sheet, can stretch up to three times its initial length and could be recharged wirelessly, Yonggang Huang, study co-author and a mechanical engineer at Northwestern University, wrote to LiveScience in an email. The new battery is described today (Feb. 26) in the journal Nature Communications. Powering devices For decades, science-fiction writers have envisioned dystopian worlds in which humans and machines are seamlessly integrated with bionic implants.
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky Speed Mathematics People who excel at mathematics use better strategies than the rest of us, they don't necessarily have better brains. We teach simple strategies that can have you multiplying large numbers in your head, doing mental long division, even squaring and finding square roots of numbers off the top of your head. And here is a secret. People equate intelligence with mathematical ability. In other words, if you are able to do lightning calculations in your head, people will think you are intelligent in other areas as well. Here is one of my most important rules of mathematics. The easier the method you use to solve a problem, the faster you will solve it and there is less chance of making a mistake. So, the people who use better methods are faster at getting the answer and make fewer mistakes. The methods we teach are not only fun to use, they are easy to learn. The methods are more than techniques for fast calculation. How well do you know your basic multiplication tables? How did you go?
Kitchens And Appliances Of The Future - Announcing The Top 25 Entries of Electrolux Design Lab 2010 The Top 25 Entries of Electrolux Design Lab 2010 It’s not always easy to predict the future. For its 2010 competition, Electrolux Design Lab went with the theme: The 2nd Space Age; this essentially translating to designing a home environment for the year 2050, when 74% of the global population are predicted to live in urban areas. 25) A- Laundry: Community Laundry Concept by Kai Wai Lee A communal laundry for the entire apartment block! 24) Bio Robot Refrigerator by Yuriy Dmitriev The Bio Robot fridge cools biopolymer gel through luminescence and uses non sticky, odorless gel to envelope stored food as individual pods. 23) Bio Tank, Robotic ‘FishWasher’ by Akifusa Nakazawa The Bio Tank does the dishes, is a pet and a composter…all-in-one! 22) Bx7 Preparation Unit by Losif Mihailo Don’t pack in vitamin pills like Samantha in Sex and The City 2, instead gorge on capsules of zinc, calcium, magnesium, or carbohydrates with water to for nutritious juice! 19) Community Fridge by Pedro Sanin Perez
Numbers Near Multiples Of Ten It's fairly easy to multiply two numbers that are close to the same multiple of 10. The algorithm for doing it is called “Nikhilam Navatascaramam Dasata.” It is part of a system of algorithms and mnemonics to remember them, collectively known as “Vedic Math”, that was developed by Jagadguru Swami Bharati Krishna Tirthaji Maharaj in the early 20th century. The easiest way to explain the algorithm is to give examples, and explain the algorithm along the way. 7 x 8 First find a suitable “base”. base 10 7 | -3 x 8 | -2 Multiply the differences. -3 x -2 = 6. base 10 7 | -3 x 8 | -2 ________ | 6 Now add the difference between the one number to be multiplied and 10, to the other number to be multiplied. Put the result on the left side of the answer: base 10 7 | -3 x 8 | -2 ________ 5 | 6 7 x 8 = 56 Now let's try it with significantly bigger numbers, to see why this is such an advantage. 98 x 89 ____ Since both numbers are close to 100, we will use 100 as our base. 10200 + (-08) = 10192 104 x 98 = 10192
» How I Was Able to Ace Exams Without Studying Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Scott Young of ScottYoung.com. In high school, I rarely studied. Despite that, I graduated second in my class. Recently I had to write a law exam worth 100% of my final grade. Right now, I’m guessing most of you think I’m just an arrogant jerk. Why do Some People Learn Quickly? The fact is most of my feats are relatively mundane. The story isn’t about how great I am (I’m certainly not) or even about the fantastic accomplishments of other learners. It’s this different strategy, not just blind luck and arrogance, that separates rapid learners from those who struggle. Most sources say that the difference in IQ scores across a group is roughly half genes and half environment. However, despite those gifts, if rapid learners had a different strategy for learning than ordinary students, wouldn’t you want to know what it was? Rote memorization is based on the theory that if you look at information enough times it will magically be stored inside your head.
Gardner's Multiple Intelligences Howard Gardner of Harvard has identified seven distinct intelligences. This theory has emerged from recent cognitive research and "documents the extent to which students possess different kinds of minds and therefore learn, remember, perform, and understand in different ways," according to Gardner (1991). According to this theory, "we are all able to know the world through language, logical-mathematical analysis, spatial representation, musical thinking, the use of the body to solve problems or to make things, an understanding of other individuals, and an understanding of ourselves. Where individuals differ is in the strength of these intelligences - the so-called profile of intelligences -and in the ways in which such intelligences are invoked and combined to carry out different tasks, solve diverse problems, and progress in various domains."
Scientists Build Baseball-Playing Robot With 100,000-Neuron Fake Brain If you’ve been to the RoboGames, you’ve seen everything from flame-throwing battlebots to androids that play soccer. But robo-athletes are more than just performers. They’re a path to the future. Researchers at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology have built a small humanoid robot that plays baseball — or something like it. The robot, you see, is also equipped with an artificial brain. Yes, it’s fun. When a ball is pitched to the robot, an accelerometer at the back of a batting cage records information about the flight of the ball, including its speed, and this data is relayed back to a machine that holds the GPU-powered brain. This is not the first time researchers have modeled a cerebellum to control robots. Just as he did with a previous artificial brain model, Yamazaki plans to release the source code for the system.
Cutting-edge Prosthetic Limbs " One of the most cutting-edge technologies used to control prosthetic limbs is called targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR) and was developed by Dr. Todd Kuiken at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. To understand TMR, you need to know some basic physiology. Your brain controls the muscles in your limbs by sending electrical commands down the spinal cord and then through peripheral nerves to the muscles. Now imagine what would happen to this information pathway if you had a limb amputated. In the surgical procedure required for TMR, these amputated nerves are redirected to control a substitute healthy muscle elsewhere in the body. If electrodes can sense the electricity caused by muscle contractions, why can't they just go to the source of the information and measure the electrical signals carried in the nerves, or even the brain? As an example of neural interfacing technology, scientists can implant micro-scale electrodes in the brain to listen in on brain activity.