Brain Power

I know these stories aren't exactly new, but since they follow in the vein of what my story is about I thought I'd post them actually for me to reference..

Via the The Wall Street Journal of all papers...:

For the last four years, Henry Markram has been building a biologically accurate artificial brain. Powered by a supercomputer, his software model closely mimics the activity of a vital section of a rat's gray matter.

Dubbed Blue Brain, the simulation shows some strange behavior. The artificial "cells" respond to stimuli and suddenly pulse and flash in spooky unison, a pattern that isn't programmed but emerges spontaneously.

[snip]

At the Lausanne lab one recent afternoon, a pink sliver of rat brain sat in a beaker containing a colorless liquid. The neurons in the brain slice were still alive and actively communicating with each other. Nearby, a modified microscope recorded some of this inner activity in another brain slice. "We're intercepting the electro-chemical messages" in the cells, then testing the software against it for accuracy, said Dr. Markram.

The rat's NCC has 10,000 neurons, and it takes the power of one desktop computer to mimic the behavior of a single neuron. To model the entire NCC, Dr. Markram relies on an IBM computer that can perform 22.8 trillion operations a second. This enables the simulation to be rendered as a three-dimensional object. Thus, when Blue Brain is running, its deepest inner workings are seen in astonishing detail, in the form of a 3-D simulation that unfolds on a computer screen.

In a darkened room, Blue Brain displays a virtual NCC as a column-like structure, its blue color signifying a state of rest. When zapped by a simulated electrical current, the neurons start to signal to each other and their wiring progressively sparks to life different colors. Tests indicate the same areas light up in the model as do in a real rat's brain, suggesting that Blue Brain is accurate, says Dr. Markram.

And this one also caught my eye...

Via the good folks at Popular Science:

Srinivasan explains that the chip is sending electric pulses through the needle into the brain slice, which is passing them on to the screen we´re watching. â€The difference in the waves´ modulation reflects the signals sent out by the brain slice,†he says. â€And they´re almost identical in frequency and pattern to the pulses sent by the chip.†Put more simply, this iron-gray wafer about a millimeter square is talking to living brain cells as though it were an actual body part.
Ted Berger, Srinivasan´s boss and the mastermind behind the tangle of coils and electrodes, has arranged this demonstration to provide a small but profound glimpse into the future of brain science. The chip´s ability to converse with live cells is a dramatic first step, he believes, toward an implantable machine that fluently speaks the language of the brain-a machine that could restore memories in people with brain damage or help them make new ones.

WHO doesn't want us to call it Swine Flu

I think it is a little too little too late...

Via Yahoo News:

GENEVA – The World Health Organization announced Thursday it will would stop using the term "swine flu" to avoid confusion over the danger posed by pigs. The policy shift came a day after Egypt began slaughtering thousands of pigs in a misguided effort to prevent swine flu.

WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said the agriculture industry and the U.N. food agency had expressed concerns that the term "swine flu" was misleading consumers and needlessly causing countries to ban pork products and order the slaughter of pigs.

"Rather than calling this swine flu ... we're going to stick with the technical scientific name H1N1 influenza A," Thompson said.

Dude you have diarrhea of the mind if you think people are going to refer to this as H1N1 influenza A.

Archaic Microscope

Ran into this archaic hunk of junk while picking up my grandfather's prescription for Temazepam.

Conservatives scare easier than Liberals

Excerpted from the UK Times:

In the study, the scientists recruited 46 volunteers living in Lincoln, Nebraska, all of whom had strong political beliefs. They were asked for their opinions on a wide variety of controversial issues. All the questions concerned social or international issues, rather than economic matters.

The participants were then given two laboratory tests, to establish their physiological responses to frightening or unexpected stimuli. In the first test, they viewed 33 images, three of which were distressing or threatening: a large spider on the face of a frightened person; a dazed person with a bloody face; and maggots in an open wound. The scientists measured the electrical conductance of the skin, a standard measure of distress and arousal.

In the second test, the volunteers were subjected to a loud, unexpected noise, with scientists measuring the involuntary blinking that followed. A strong startle response is indicative of heightened fear and arousal. The results, which are published in the journal Science, revealed significant differences in both responses, which corresponded with people’s political views. Those with “markedly lower physical sensitivity to sudden noises and threatening visual images” tended to support liberal positions, while those with strong responses tended to be more conservative.

This would fit with the hypothesis that people who have more fearful responses to perceived threats are more likely to be conservative, while those who have weaker responses develop more liberal views.

Of course I already knew this considering I grew up around this crap my whole life...

Why did Kubrick choose the song "Daisy" when killing off Hal?

Ok, this is just creepy but yet interesting.

Praying for health

Excerpted from The Economist:

SOME people, notably Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, regard religion as a disease. It spreads, they suggest, like a virus, except that the “viruses” are similar to those infecting computers—bits of cultural software that take over the hardware of the brain and make it do irrational things.

Corey Fincher, of the University of New Mexico, has a different hypothesis for the origin of religious diversity. He thinks not that religions are like disease but that they are responses to disease—or, rather, to the threat of disease. If he is right, then people who believe that their religion protects them from harm may be correct, although the protection is of a different sort from the supernatural one they perceive.

Personally I think it stems from lack of education, but this is an interesting theory.

Patriotic answer to $4-a-gallon gas: Drive less, and slow down

Excerpted from Yahoo News:

The main force reducing mileage is air drag, says Dr. Greene. The faster you go, the greater the drag. Drag forces increase exponentially, so doubling your speed from 40 to 80 increases drag fourfold.

It makes a huge difference, for at 80 m.p.h. your car pushes against wind with the force of a hurricane.

Consumer Reports tested the effect of higher speeds on gas mileage. David Champion, director of auto testing, found that boosting the highway speed of a 2006 Toyota Camry cut gasoline mileage dramatically:

•55 m.p.h. – 40.3 miles per gallon

•65 m.p.h. – 34.9 miles per gallon

•75 m.p.h. – 29.8 miles per gallon

On a hypothetical 1,900-mile round trip from New York City to Disney World in Florida, the Camry would use 47 gallons of gas at 55 m.p.h.. But at 75 m.p.h., it would burn nearly 64 gallons – a $70 difference.

Tell that to the pushy raised pick-up trucks with yellow ribbon magnets that try to run me off the road on a near daily basis.

Amonia on Mars?

Excerpted from BBC News:

Ammonia may have been found in Mars' atmosphere which some scientists say could indicate life on the Red Planet.

Researchers say its spectral signature has been tentatively detected by sensors on board the European Space Agency's orbiting Mars Express craft.

Ammonia survives for only a short time in the Martian atmosphere so if it really does exist it must be getting constantly replenished.

There are two possible sources: either active volcanoes, none of which have been found yet on Mars, or microbes.

I sure hope they find microbes just because I would like to see how the creationists would explain that one.

Ancient Extinct Palm Tree Reserected

Excerpted from Yahoo News:

WASHINGTON - Just over three years old and about one metre tall, Methuselah is growing well.

"It's lovely," Dr. Sarah Sallon said of the date palm, whose parents may have provided food for the besieged Jews at Masada some 2,000 years ago. The little tree was sprouted in 2005 from a seed recovered from Masada, where rebelling Jews committed suicide rather than surrender to Roman attackers.

Radiocarbon dating of seed fragments clinging to its root, as well as other seeds found with it that didn't sprout, indicate they were about 2,000 years old: the oldest seed known to have been sprouted and grown.

Scientists Re-engineer E-Coli to Manufacture Crude Oil

No, really.

Excerpted from The UK Times:

Inside LS9’s cluttered laboratory – funded by $20 million of start-up capital from investors including Vinod Khosla, the Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems – Mr Pal explains that LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA. “Five to seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.”

Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.

This is an amazing breakthrough. Let's see how fast it gets swept under the rug by Big Oil.

Stephen Hawking's Car Problems

Ba da dum...

The Crow Vending Machine

Imagine a world where crows pick up loose change for us... no really.

A simple example of why you can't believe your lying eyes.

'Frog from hell' fossil unearthed

Excerpted from BBC News:

A 70-million-year-old fossil of a giant frog has been unearthed in Madagascar by a team of UK and US scientists.

The creature would have been the size of a "squashed beach ball" and weighed about 4kg (9lb), the researchers said.

They added that the fossil, nicknamed Beelzebufo or "frog from hell", was "strikingly different" from present-day frogs found on the island nation. Continue article...

The Pill protects against cancer

Excerpted from Associated Press:

LONDON - Women on the birth control pill are protected from ovarian cancer, even decades after they stop taking it, scientists said.

British researchers found that women taking the pill for 15 years halved their chances of developing ovarian cancer, and that the risk remained low more than 30 years later, though protection weakened over time. The findings were published Friday in The Lancet.

"Not only does the pill prevent pregnancy, but in the long term, you actually get less cancer as well," said Valerie Beral, the study's lead author and director of the Cancer Research UK Epidemiology Unit at Oxford University. "It's a nice bonus." The study was paid for by Cancer Research UK and Britain's Medical Research Council.

How long do you think it will take for James Dobson, Pat Robertson, or [insert fanatically religious douche bag here] to spontaneously combust due to feigned moral outrage?

An Eye for Sexual Orientation

Excerpted from Science Now:

Talk about "gaydar." In just a fraction of a second, people can accurately judge the sexual orientation of other individuals by glancing at their faces, according to new research. The finding builds on the growing theory that the subconscious mind detects and probably guides much more of human behavior than is realized.

Just one more nail in the coffin of the evangelical's notion of choice in sexuality.

Bond between trees, ants is broken without animals

Excerpted from The LA Times:

The acacias provide food and home to the insects which protect the leaves. But if there is no threat, the deal is off and both suffer.

From the Associated Press

January 12, 2008

For thousands of years, thorny African acacia trees have provided food and shelter to aggressive biting ants, which protected the trees by attacking animals that try to eat the acacia leaves.

Called mutualism, it's a good deal for the trees and the ants.

Scientists studying the decline in large animals in Africa wondered what would happen if the animals no longer were eating the leaves. So they fenced off some of the acacias from elephants, giraffes and other animals.

After a few years, the fenced-in trees began looking sickly and grew slower than their unfenced relatives.

Edited by Administrator for consistency.

US National Academy of Sciences defends the teaching of evolution

Excerpted from The LA Times:

Creationism confuses students about what constitutes science, a report says, and it should not be taught.

From Reuters
January 4, 2008

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. National Academy of Sciences on Thursday issued a spirited defense of evolution as the bedrock principle of modern biology, arguing that it, not creationism, must be taught in public-school science classes.

The academy, which operates under a mandate from Congress to advise the government on science and technology matters, issued the report at a time when the theory of evolution, first offered in the 19th century, faces renewed attack by some religious conservatives.

The report says creationism, based on the explanation offered in the Bible, and the related idea of "intelligent design" are not science and, as such, should not be taught in science classrooms at public schools.

Richard Dawkins: Why Are We Here?

Lessons on the surge from economics 101

Excerpted from The Rutland Herald:

September 12, 2007

By OLIVER R. GOODENOUGH

Economics professors have a standard game they use to demonstrate how apparently rational decisions can create a disastrous result. They call it a "dollar auction." The rules are simple. The professor offers a dollar for sale to the highest bidder, with only one wrinkle: the second-highest bidder has to pay up on their losing bid as well. Several students almost always get sucked in. The first bids a penny, looking to make 99 cents. The second bids 2 cents, the third 3 cents, and so on, each feeling they have a chance at something good on the cheap. The early stages are fun, and the bidders wonder what possessed the professor to be willing to lose some money.

The problem surfaces when the bidders get up close to a dollar. After 99 cents the last vestige of profitability disappears, but the bidding continues between the two highest players. They now realize that they stand to lose no matter what, but that they can still buffer their losses by winning the dollar. They just have to outlast the other player. Following this strategy, the two hapless students usually run the bid up several dollars, turning the apparent shot at easy money into a ghastly battle of spiraling disaster.

Theoretically, there is no stable outcome once the dynamic gets going. The only clear limit is the exhaustion of one of the player's total funds. In the classroom, the auction generally ends with the grudging decision of one player to "irrationally" accept the larger loss and get out of the terrible spiral. Economists call the dollar auction pattern an irrational escalation of commitment. We might also call it the war in Iraq. Continue article...

Interesting... very interesting.