Dear Data. Cognitive Science Movie Index. The Ghost Shrimp | Image of the Week. Image of the Week #53, July 30th, 2012: From: Hitchhiking jellyfish, gonad-loving parasites and the skeleton shrimp by Becky Crew at Running Ponies. Source: Alexander Semenov The alien creatures in movies like Prometheus still pale next to the dreamlike unpredictability of actual ocean-biodiversity. Caprella septentrionalis, seen here in a photo from the amazing biologist and photographer Alexander Semenov, looks impossible, menacing and whimsical all at once. Running Ponies blog author Becky Crew features more about this ghost shrimp in her post, Hitchhiking jellyfish, gonad-loving parasites and the skeleton shrimp, including a link to a video of C. septentrionalis walking. ” …sometimes the subjects seemed to have been taken from the nightmarish dreams of science, and hark back to prehistoric times; monstrous flora bloomed on the rocks; everywhere…,” Huysmans, describing art by Symbolist Odilon Redon.
Translucent Ants Photographed Eating Colored Liquids. Art of science: extremely small, incredibly close | Science | The Observer. Deep Green Cuts: Reading Tree Rings - Media. Aside from the gentle rustling of leaves in the breeze or the creaking of a bough in a winter gale, a tree’s character may best be described as “the strong and silent type”—but, as so often is the case with such personalities, they have the most hauntingly beautiful stories to tell. For nearly a century, dendrochronologists have practiced reading tree rings for clues about the lives of trees. And though the field of study has helped shed light on historic growth cycles for scientists, it’s all been rather dry and clinical. But now, thanks to a special turntable designed to read tree rings as if they were tracks on an LP, a tree’s biography can be heard like its very own discography. German artist Bartholomäus Traubeck recently debuted a record player he developed that is capable of digitally reading tree slices and translating them into moving piano music.
Tree rings, of course, are considered to be annual records of a tree’s growth rate. A child couldn’t paint that – can people tell abstract art from a child’s or chimp’s work? | Not Exactly Rocket Science. Study finds that spoilers aren't such a big deal. As any citizen of the Internet knows, people tend to lose their minds at the slightest hint of a “spoiler,” the definition of which seems to vary wildly between extremes, from stuff like knowing the ending of a movie ahead of time to merely knowing that the movie will end, GODDAMN IT, WHERE WAS THE SPOILER ALERT THAT THE MOVIE WOULD END?
I HOPE YOU GOT FIRED FOR THAT. Anyway, much of this reaction is based on a hypothesis that knowing beforehand what will happen in a story will negatively affect, or “spoil” your enjoyment of it. And according to a research team from UC San Diego, that hypothesis is wrong. Psychologists there recently ran an experiment in which a group of 30 people were given 12 separate short stories they’d never read before, by the likes of Raymond Carver, Agatha Christie, Anton Chekhov, Roald Dahl, and John Updike—some presented as-is, some with an introductory paragraph that gave away the ending, and some with that paragraph incorporated into the text.
Inside the head of a beatboxer. Michael Marshall, reporter Meet Reeps One, the UK's champion beatboxer. Last month he took some time out from his regular schedule of dubstep gigs to perform inside an MRI machine. The video above reveals the muscle movements involved in beatboxing. Carolyn McGettigan, a neuroscientist at University College London, UK, tracked down Reeps One and persuaded him to beatbox while she scanned his brain. A second volunteer, who wasn't an expert beatboxer, did the same thing. You can see the results in the pictures below. McGettigan and her colleagues previously identified the brain regions involved in mimicking someone's voice. If you enjoyed this video, you might also like to watch a couple having sex in an MRI scanner. What Caricatures Can Teach Us About Facial Recognition | Magazine. Wired asked four top caricaturists to sketch the writer of this story. The results are shown here and throughout the story. To read about how writer Ben Austen reacted to the images, see the end of the story.Photo: Joshua Anderson; caricature: Court Jones Our brains are incredibly agile machines, and it,s hard to think of anything they do more efficiently than recognize faces.
Just hours after birth, the eyes of newborns are drawn to facelike patterns. An adult brain knows it’s seeing a face within 100 milliseconds, and it takes just over a second to realize that two different pictures of a face, even if they’re lit or rotated in very different ways, belong to the same person. Neuroscientists now believe that there may be a specific region of the brain, on the fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe, dedicated to facial recognition.
Pawan Sinha, director of the Sinha Laboratory for Vision Research at MIT, thinks caricature is the key to better computer vision. How Does the Brain Perceive Art? | Wired Science In 1995, the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted a controversial exhibition entitled “Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt,” in which works considered to be genuine Rembrandts were displayed alongside those done by his students and admirers. (These lesser paintings are often dismissed as “the school of Rembrandt.”) The point of the exhibition was to reveal the fine line between genius and imitation, authenticity and fakery. A hundred years ago, about 700 works were attributed to Rembrandt. Over the course of the 20th century, that number declined by 50 percent, as critics and historians began searching for those tell-tale marks that distinguish the old master from his young pupils. Such critical distinctions have massive financial consequences: While a painting by celebrated Rembrandt pupil William Drost might sell for a few hundred thousand dollars — his best canvases can go for a couple million — a genuine Rembrandt is worth many times more.
What accounts for this staggering difference in value?