Mohammed: the Anti-Innovator, with Ayaan Hirsi Ali click2x Transcript Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Early on, it seemed as if Mohammed's ambition was simply to go from door to door from person to person and say, "Leave alone what you believe in. Believe in the one God, the one who spoke to me through the angel Gabriel." Of course I don't argue with that.
We're More than Stardust — We're Made of the Big Bang Itself Transcript Anna Frebel: The work of stellar archaeology really goes to the heart of the "we are stardust" and "we are children of the stars" statement. You’ve probably heard it all but what does it actually mean? We are mostly made all humans and all life forms that we know of are made mostly of carbon and a bunch of other elements but in much lesser quantities. Where does this carbon come from? Well, you could say it comes from the Earth and yes that is true. And so this is how we can piece together the chemical evolution of the universe that is really the basis for any biological evolution to take place on Earth.
Why Apple Pay Is a Huge Milestone in Payments Breakthrough A service that makes it practical to use your smartphone as a wallet in everyday situations. Why It Matters Credit card fraud damages the economy by raising the costs of goods and services. Key Players Apple Visa MasterCard Google When Apple Pay was announced in September, Osama Bedier was unimpressed. Yet when Apple Pay launched just a few weeks later, Bedier was a convert. Momentum for mobile payment technologies was building even before Apple Pay debuted last fall. None of the individual technologies is novel, but Apple turned them into a service that is demonstrably easier than any other. But even if Apple didn’t invent mobile payments, it has significantly enhanced them. That doesn’t mean most of us will be ditching our wallets and waving phones in every store in 2015—far from it. Still, Apple has done a lot of things right, suggesting that Apple Pay will turn out to be a milestone. As a result, Apple is now cementing standards for the payment industry. —Robert D.
Clumps of Living Human Brain Tissue Could Reshape Medical Research A new method for growing human brain cells could unlock the mysteries of dementia, mental illness, and other neurological disorders. Availability: now Breakthrough Three-dimensional clusters of living neurons that can be grown in a lab from human stem cells. Why It Matters Researchers need new ways of understanding brain disorders and testing possible treatments. Key Players Madeline Lancaster and Jürgen Knoblich, Institute of Molecular Biotechnology Rudolph Tanzi and Doo Yeon Kim, Massachusetts General Hospital As Madeline Lancaster lifts a clear plastic dish into the light, roughly a dozen clumps of tissue the size of small baroque pearls bob in a peach-colored liquid. Before it grows in one of Lancaster’s dishes, a brain organoid begins as a single skin cell taken from an adult. This is just the beginning, says Lancaster. The breakthrough in creating these organoids happened as part of a side project. A stained section of an organoid is seen in close-up. —Russ Juskalian
6 Dietary Factors That Powerfully Affect Your Mental Health Mental health is intrinsically linked to your diet. Studies have shown that certain nutrients and deficiencies are increasingly responsible for the health of your brain. Here are 6 dietary factors that can exert a profound influence over your mental wellness. Omega-3s. Most of us don’t get enough omega-3s in our diets. Love This? Vitamin D. B vitamins. Zinc. Iron. Probiotics. The nutrients in our diets are our best medicine. Related7 Often Overlooked Ways to Make Yourself Happier4 Healthy Comfort Food TweaksThe Surprising Foods That Alleviate Anxiety Spooky Action 101: Is Space as We Know It a Kind of Illusion? Transcript George Musser: So spooky action at a distance was [Albert] Einstein’s kind of appellation for the idea of nonlocality. Non-locality is the technical term for it. And what it means is that there’s a connection between different objects or places in the universe. This phenomenon of nonlocality that worried Einstein actually comes out in many different ways. So the example I often give is two coins. So if you think of those two coins — they’re on opposite sides of the universe or the continent or wherever they may be.
Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everything Ken Prehoda, a biochemist and director of the University of Oregon's Institute of Molecular Biology, discusses his research identifying the mutation that led to multicellular animals. (YouTube/University of Oregan) If life is effectively an endless series of photocopies, as DNA is transcribed and passed on from one being to the next, then evolution is the high-stakes game of waiting for the copier to get it wrong. Too wrong, and you’ll live burdened by a maladaptive mutation or genetic disorder. But if the flaw is wrong in exactly the right way, the incredible can happen: disease resistance, sharper eyesight, swifter feet, big brains, better beaks for Darwin’s finches. In a paper published in the open-access journal eLife this week, researchers say they have pinpointed what may well be one of evolution’s greatest copy mess-ups yet: the mutation that allowed our ancient protozoa predecessors to evolve into complex, multi-cellular organisms. For this, the choanoflagellates were perfect.
How the Science of Swarms Can Help Us Fight Cancer and Predict the Future | Science The first thing to hit Iain Couzin when he walked into the Oxford lab where he kept his locusts was the smell, like a stale barn full of old hay. The second, third, and fourth things to hit him were locusts. The insects frequently escaped their cages and careened into the faces of scientists and lab techs. The room was hot and humid, and the constant commotion of 20,000 bugs produced a miasma of aerosolized insect exoskeleton. Many of the staff had to wear respirators to avoid developing severe allergies. In the mid-2000s that lab was, however, one of the only places on earth to do the kind of science Couzin wanted. Couzin would put groups of up to 120 juveniles into a sombrero-shaped arena he called the locust accelerator, letting them walk in circles around the rim for eight hours a day while an overhead camera filmed their movements and software mapped their positions and orientations. Couzin wanted to know what if-then rules produced similar behaviors in living things.
Top 10 emerging technologies of 2015 Technology is perhaps the greatest agent of change in the modern world. While never without risk, technological breakthroughs promise innovative solutions to the most pressing global challenges of our time. From zero-emission cars fuelled by hydrogen to computer chips modelled on the human brain, this year’s 10 emerging technologies offer a vivid glimpse of the power of innovation to improve lives, transform industries and safeguard our planet. To compile this list, the World Economic Forum’s Meta-Council on Emerging Technologies, a panel of 18 experts, draws on the collective expertise of the Forum’s communities to identify the most important recent technological trends. By doing so, the Meta-Council aims to raise awareness of their potential and contribute to closing the gaps in investment, regulation and public understanding that so often thwart progress. The 2015 list is: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 1. Zero-emission cars that run on hydrogen 2. Rolling away from the production line
Scientists Theorize Inflammation May Trigger Some Mental Illnesses Katherine Streeter for NPR Sometime around 1907, well before the modern randomized clinical trial was routine, American psychiatrist Henry Cotton began removing decaying teeth from his patients in hopes of curing their mental disorders. If that didn't work, he moved on to more invasive excisions: tonsils, testicles, ovaries and, in some cases, colons. Cotton was the newly appointed director of the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane and was acting on a theory proposed by influential Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, under whom Cotton had studied, that psychiatric illness is the result of chronic infection. Cotton ran with the idea, scalpel in hand. This 1920 newspaper clipping from The Washington Herald highlights Dr. In 1921 he published a well-received book on the theory called The Defective Delinquent and Insane: the Relation of Focal Infections to Their Causation, Treatment and Prevention. Following his death in 1933, interest in Cotton's cures waned. Dr.
160 years of US immigration trends, mapped US immigration trends shifted dramatically between 1850 and 2013 —including changes in the dominant countries of origin for each state and decade, and the total size of foreign-born population — according to a new series of historical maps from the Pew Research Center. There's no argument about the fact that immigrants have consistently played an important part in American history, but the maps, based on recent US Census data, reveal lesser-known facts about immigrant population rate changes over time. The census shows us that different decades saw changing sizes of non-US-born populations. Compare, for example, the largest immigrant populations by country of origin in 1900, 1950, and 2000. In 1900, 2.7 million Germans made up the largest total percentage of immigrants. USA immigrants by country or origin in 1900. By 1950, an estimated 1.5 million Italians comprised the largest group of immigrants that year, more than a million less than the largest group (Germans) in 1900.
Scientists have used groundbreaking technology to figure out how the Earth looked a billion years ago By the time Dietmar Mueller arrived at the University of Texas as a graduate student in the mid-1980s, scientists had already long embraced a once-astonishing idea: that the continents on which all human history has unfolded, rather than fixtures of constancy, were orphans of a former grand supercontinent called Pangaea. Showered with awards, the pioneers of this theory—plate tectonics—had by and large dispersed in search of the next big challenge. But Mueller and his classmates sensed far more ground to cover. Three decades later, Mueller, now at the University of Sydney, is part of a new upheaval in tectonics, this time ignited by advances in computing power. The same leaps in big-data analysis, supercomputing, and intelligent algorithms that have shaken up finance, genetics, and espionage are transforming our view of the elusive ancient world. “It’s like detective work. To some degree, paleogeology is merely an academic enthusiasm. “It’s like detective work,” Mueller said.
Google Ventures is coming to Europe with a $100 million fund for startups Google has confirmed that it is launching a European arm of its Google Ventures VC fund, following media speculation last week. The company’s first European fund is $100 million and it will be used “invest in the best ideas from the best European entrepreneurs, and help them bring those ideas to life”. The company has an initial team of four general partners at its European office in London, which the Financial Times reports includes Google Europe exec Eze Vidra, entrepreneur Tom Hulme, angel investor Peter Read, and Code.org UK head Avid Larizadeh. The team will be based in Clerkenwell, a stone’s throw from London’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’ startup district, but it will invest across Europe. ➤ Google Ventures invests in Europe [Google]