How do you know you exist? - James Zucker | TED-Ed René Descartes believed that most of what he acquired and learned came from the senses, but his senses had deceived him in the past. Can you give an example of when your senses have deceived you? Is there an experience that has made you doubt what you have seen or heard? Could this give you reason to doubt EVERYTHING you have learned from your senses? Check out this video for some background on this idea or watch the TED-Ed Lesson How Optical Illusions Trick Your Brain for one example of how and why your mind can be tricked into seeing something differently than it is. Descartes believed that if you doubt your own existence, you must exist to doubt it! René Descartes was an extremely talented man. Some famous quotes from Descartes are written below.
How Does the Brain Learn Best? Smart Studying Strategies In his new book, “How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why It Happens,” author Benedict Carey informs us that “most of our instincts about learning are misplaced, incomplete, or flat wrong” and “rooted more in superstition than in science.” That’s a disconcerting message, and hard to believe at first. But it’s also unexpectedly liberating, because Carey further explains that many things we think of as detractors from learning — like forgetting, distractions, interruptions or sleeping rather than hitting the books — aren’t necessarily bad after all. They can actually work in your favor, according to a body of research that offers surprising insights and simple, doable strategies for learning more effectively. Society has ingrained in us “a monkish conception of what learning is, of you sitting with your books in your cell,” Carey told MindShift. “How We Learn” presents a new view that takes some of the pressure off. Getting to Know Your Brain’s Memory Processes
Just How Small Is an Atom? - Jonathan Bergmann Whether we’re zooming in to the wavelength of a gamma ray or zooming out to the size of a galaxy, it can be difficult to wrap our heads around the big numbers we’re measuring—like nanometers (10-9meters) or gigameters (109). Take a look at these efforts to represent big numbers. What are the strengths of each? How would you represent a large number (like a gigameter)? Cary Huang: The Scale of the Universe 2 NOVA: A Sense of Scale: String Theory Chris Jordan pictures some shocking stats More than 2,400 years ago, the Greek philosopher Democritus began thinking about how many times matter could be divided. Something surprising happens to your body when you freedive Featured image: Photo of freediver Hanli Prinsloo by Annelie Pompe. In 1949, a stocky Italian air force lieutenant named Raimondo Bucher decided to try a potentially deadly stunt off the coast of Capri, Italy. Bucher would sail out to the center of the lake, take a breath and hold it, and free-dive down one hundred feet to the bottom. Waiting there would be a man in a diving suit. Bucher would hand the diver a package, then kick back up to the surface. Scientists warned Bucher that, according to Boyle’s law, the dive would kill him. Boyle’s law, which science had taken as gospel for three centuries, appeared to fall apart underwater. Bucher’s dive resonated with a long line of experiments — most of them very cruel and even monstrous by modern standards — that seemed to indicate that water might have life-lengthening effect on humans and other animals. The human body in its natural form (without weights or wetsuits) is the perfect buoyancy for deep-water diving.
The Mistaken Assumptions That Changed Physics History - The Nature of Reality “Don’t assume,” they always say. Last month, Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard, published an essay on how mistaken assumptions have delayed the progress of astronomy. In the same spirit, I wanted to find out how the course of physics has been influenced by assumptions, acknowledged or otherwise. Can lessons from the past help us be more aware of the assumptions we bring to physics today? Is it desirable—or even possible—to work without assumptions? In the years after scientists came to accept light as a wave, brilliant researchers spent untold hours chasing after the “ether,” hypothetical stuff through which light waves were thought to propagate. If Einstein resolved one roadblock, he set up another. Dice or no dice? It’s hard to imagine an astronomer dismissing observational data on the evidence of her “instinct for astronomy,” which highlights a key difference between the two fields. Hidden assumptions can also live at the heart of how we do science.
As Babies, We Knew Morality - Emily Esfahani Smith New research supports the understanding that all people are born with a sense of good and bad. What does that say about altruism, community, and the capacity to kill one another? Several years ago, an energetic young mother, Tia, was out and about with her infant Aimee when disaster struck: a group of men, accompanied by vicious dogs, surrounded the pair, snatched up Aimee, and brutalized Tia. They left her helpless and without her daughter. Aimee was eventually rescued. But Tia was too battered to look after her. Mike, a squat and especially hairy fellow, didn't exactly look the part of a knight in shining armor. Is it correct to say that Mike's actions were "moral"? Though we share more than 95 percent of our DNA with these apes, many people think that morality is a uniquely human creation. Another idea, equally influential, is what the primatologist Frans de Waal calls veneer theory. After the babies watched these scenarios, the researchers presented each puppet to the babies.
I Saw It on the Internet, part one This is part one of a series on posts on fact checking science related articles. Read part two of this series. -- Part 3 - Part 4 The next time you log into your favorite social media site, take a moment to look at all the “amazing”, “shocking”, and “astounding” articles that your friends and family have shared. Are those things true? Why fact check? Why should you verify information before posting it? Rest assured that if you don’t fact check the information, someone else will. Misinformation also hurts your “cause”. Why would someone post information that is wrong? Well, there are several reasons. Some articles are trying to convince you to accept their viewpoint, and are willing to “bend the truth” a bit in the process. Over the next few posts, we will be looking at warning signs that you need to fact check, and some quick fact checking techniques.
Brains flush toxic waste in sleep, including Alzheimer’s-linked protein, study of mice finds Scientists say this nightly self-clean by the brain provides a compelling biological reason for the restorative power of sleep. “Sleep puts the brain in another state where we clean out all the byproducts of activity during the daytime,” said study author and University of Rochester neurosurgeon Maiken Nedergaard. Those byproducts include beta-amyloid protein, clumps of which form plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Staying up all night could prevent the brain from getting rid of these toxins as efficiently, and explain why sleep deprivation has such strong and immediate consequences. Too little sleep causes mental fog, crankiness, and increased risks of migraine and seizure. Rats deprived of all sleep die within weeks. Although as essential and universal to the animal kingdom as air and water, sleep is a riddle that has baffled scientists and philosophers for centuries. One line of thinking was that sleep helps animals to conserve energy by forcing a period of rest.
wait but why: Putting Time In Perspective Humans are good at a lot of things, but putting time in perspective is not one of them. It’s not our fault—the spans of time in human history, and even more so in natural history, are so vast compared to the span of our life and recent history that it’s almost impossible to get a handle on it. If the Earth formed at midnight and the present moment is the next midnight, 24 hours later, modern humans have been around since 11:59:59pm—1 second. And if human history itself spans 24 hours from one midnight to the next, 14 minutes represents the time since Christ. To try to grasp some perspective, I mapped out the history of time as a series of growing timelines—each timeline contains all the previous timelines (colors will help you see which timelines are which). All timeline lengths are exactly accurate to the amount of time they’re expressing. A note on dates: When it comes to the far-back past, most of the dates we know are the subject of ongoing debate.
The Story of Saliva Humans secrete two kinds of saliva, stimulated and unstimulated, no more alike than most siblings. The prettier child is stimulated saliva. It comes from the parotid glands, between cheek and ear. When a plate of Erika Silletti’s spaghetti carbonara makes your mouth water, that’s stimulated saliva. It makes up 70 to 90 percent of the two to three pints of saliva each of us generates daily. We’re going to gather some now. The Salivette instructions are printed in six languages. The Salivette makes an unmistakable point: your parotid glands don’t care what you chew. Allowing you to eat is the most obvious but far from the only favor granted by saliva. Vinegar, cola, citrus juice, wine, all are in the acid range of the pH scale: from around pH 2 to 3. Sugar contributes to tooth decay only indirectly. You may be wondering, though probably not, why newborns—who have no teeth to protect—produce excessive volumes of drool. About the Author Author photo by Chris Hardy Photography
How Human Beings Almost Vanished From Earth In 70,000 B.C. : Krulwich Wonders... Add all of us up, all 7 billion human beings on earth, and clumped together we weigh roughly 750 billion pounds. That, says Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, is more than 100 times the biomass of any large animal that's ever walked the Earth. Well, we've waxed. Forty? I'd never heard of this almost-blinking-out. Toba, The Supervolcano Once upon a time, says Sam, around 70,000 B.C., a volcano called Toba, on Sumatra, in Indonesia went off, blowing roughly 650 miles of vaporized rock into the air. That eruption dropped roughly six centimeters of ash — the layer can still be seen on land — over all of South Asia, the Indian Ocean, the Arabian and South China Sea. With so much ash, dust and vapor in the air, Sam Kean says it's a safe guess that Toba "dimmed the sun for six years, disrupted seasonal rains, choked off streams and scattered whole cubic miles of hot ash (imagine wading through a giant ashtray) across acres and acres of plants." So we almost vanished. But now we're back.