Category — science

The two teams used the same technique in their experiments. They managed to do what had previously been thought impossible: they probed reality without disturbing it. Not disturbing it is the quantum-mechanical equivalent of not really looking. So they were able to show that the universe does indeed exist when it is not being observed.

[...]

The only mathematically consistent explanation known for this result is therefore Hardy’s. The weird things he predicted are real and they can, indeed, only be seen by people who are not looking. Dr Yokota and his colleagues went so far as to call their results “preposterous”. Niels Bohr, no doubt, would have been delighted.

I’m not looking, honest! - The Economist

Thankfully for humans, courtship doesn't involve figuring out which partner is male and female. Not so for the hermaphroditic flatworm, who settle their similarities with penis jousting contests. The winner gets to be the man in the relationship.

Penis Jousting and 7 Other Great Animal Mating Rituals - Wired Science from Wired.com (seen in the Web Clip box while reading work e-mail; I kid you not)

The Turritopsis Nutricula is able to revert back to a juvenile form once it mates after becoming sexually mature.

Marine biologists say the jellyfish numbers are rocketing because they need not die.

Telegraph: ‘Immortal’ jellyfish swarming across the world, via Warren Ellis

Everybody, please take today to do something nice for the (borderline) autistic in your life.

Research is not yet at the stage where autism can be detected prenatally using a biological test, but this may not be far off.

Such a test will need to prove itself clinically in terms of whether it is highly specific (in detecting just autism).

But assuming such a test is developed, we would be wise to think ahead as to how such a test would be used.

If it was used to ‘prevent’ autism, with doctors advising mothers to consider termination of the pregnancy if their baby tested ‘positive’, what else would be lost in reducing the number of children born with autism?

Would we also reduce the number of future great mathematicians, for example?

Or if this test led to some kind of prenatal treatment, such as the use of drugs to block the effect of testosterone which is already medically possible, would this be desirable?

If reducing the testosterone in a foetus helped that baby’s future social development, we would all be delighted.

But what if such a treatment reduced that baby’s future ability to attend to details, and to understand systematic information like maths?

BBC News: Autism test ‘could hit maths skills’

Healthy mice have been cloned for the first time from dead mice that had been frozen for several years, raising the possibility, scientists say, of “resurrecting” extinct animals such as mammoths from their frozen carcasses.

The Guardian, Healthy mice cloned from frozen bodies, found via Bryan Alexander’s Infocult

And women really do feel the cold more than men, but this is because they are better at conserving heat than men. Mark Newton, a scientist at W.L. Gore, the company that makes Gore-Tex, and a researcher at the University of Portsmouth, explains: “Women have a more evenly distributed fat layer and can pull all their blood back to their core organs.”

However, this female heating system means that less blood flows to their hands and feet, and as a result they feel cold. So there is literal truth in the old saying cold hands, warm heart. One theory as to why women have evolved this system, says Newton, is to enable them to survive freezing temperatures. Women carry less fat and muscle mass than men, and so need a more efficient technique of protecting their core body temperature.

Why do women always feel colder than men? - Times Online

Even the word ’science’ comes from an Indo-European root meaning ‘to cut’ or ‘to separate’. The same root led to the word ’shit’, which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us ’scythe’ and ’schism’, which have obvious connections to the concept of separation.

The word science comes through the Old French, and is derived from the Latin word scientia for knowledge, the nominal form of the verb scire, “to know”. The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root that yields scire is *skei-, meaning to “cut, separate, or discern”. Other words from the same root include Sanskrit chyati, “he cuts off”, Greek schizo, “I split” (hence English schism, schizophrenia), Latin scindo, “I split” (hence English rescind). From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, science or scientia meant any systematic recorded knowledge. Science therefore had the same sort of very broad meaning that philosophy had at that time. In other languages, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, the word corresponding to science also carries this meaning.

Jeff Hawkins, the author of On intelligence and founder of Palm One and Handspring, is not just an expert in mobile computing. For a long time, Hawkins has been interested in understanding how the brain works. His hope is that a better understanding on human intelligence will make it possible to build intelligent machines.

This passion for understanding intelligence led Hawkins to found the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in 2002 to advance research the field and, eventually, to write this book (together with Sandra Blakeslee).

On intelligence proposes a unified model to describe how the human cortex (the site of our intelligence) works. Hawkins’ hope is that neuroscientists will be able to use this model to accelerate the advance of research in that field; computer scientists might be able to use the model to start experimenting with new approaches to artificial intelligence.

The main ideas behind this model are summarized by Hawkins thus:

The human cortex is particularly large and therefore has a massive moemory capacity. It is constantly predicting what you will see, hear and feel, mostly in ways you are unconscious of. These predictions are our thoughts, and, when combined with sensory input, they are our perceptions. I call this view of the brain the memory-prediction framework of intelligence.

[...]

To make predictions of future events, your neocortex has to store sequences of patterns. To recall the appropriate memories, it has to retrieve patterns by their similarity to past patterns (auto-associative recall). And, finally, memories have to be stored in an invariant form so that the knowledge of past events can be applied to new situations that are similar but not identical to the past.

In the last chapters of the book, Hawkins briefly addresses ethical concerns around building intelligent machines, suggests possible applications of these ideas to the field of artificial intelligence and offers some cautious predictions.

Overall, I found the book an interesting and informative read. I definitely recommend it for those that are interested in learning a bit more about how the human brain works, or in new possible paths of exploration for the field of AI.

On the negative side, I got a bit bored by the overly detailed 70-page-long description of the cortex. Surely this detailed description is more interesting for someone that has some background in neuroscience (which I don’t), and it is necessary to give Hawkins’ ideas some scientific validity, but I found it the least fun part of the book.

More on the book’s official site: http://www.onintelligence.org/.

Google Mars is totally cool. Geeks rejoice!

Now I am waiting for the local Mars business search.

From BBC News - Female chromosome has X factor:

[...] They found that female mammals, who possess two copies of the X chromosome, express more genes than males, who only have one X and a Y chromosome.

They also said that females were protected from many diseases because of their double dose of the X chromosome. [...]

This means that female mammals contain over 1,000 more genes than males. To compensate for this, the female body switches off one X chromosome - quite randomly - in each cell, thus evening up protein production between the sexes. [...]

“It turns out 15% of genes escape inactivation altogether, each of which now becomes a candidate for explaining differences between men and women,” said Robin Lovell-Badge, of the National Institute for Medical Research, UK.

“Moreover, another 10% are sometimes inactivated and sometimes not, giving a mechanism to make women much more genetically variable than men. I always thought they were more interesting!” [...]

But there are also good news for men:

[...] New Scientist reports that although men are more likely to be mentally retarded, they are also more likely to be geniuses.

Although the average IQ of men and women is equal, men are more frequently found at both extremes of intelligence.

This is because, if you have very good intelligence genes on your X chromosome, it pays not to have them muffled by more average genes on another X chromosome.

So now genetecists have proved what I suspected: that men are women are different, but it all compensates and evens out in the end.

Yes, seriously, BBC Vatican offers exorcism lessons:

Lessons at the prestigious Athenaeum Pontificium Regina Apostolorum will include the history of Satanism and its context in the Bible.

Practical lessons in psychology and the law will also feature.

What I don’t really get is this:

Concern is high in Italy about the influence of Satanic cults - especially among the young and impressionable.

So they think that offering “exorcism lessons” as if it were some sort of serious subject will diminish the influence of Satanic cults? Uh-uh.

From an NASA article about a Cassini-Huygens image of “Saturn’s intriguing moon Iapetus”:

The most unique, and perhaps most remarkable feature discovered on Iapetus in Cassini images is a topographic ridge that coincides almost exactly with the geographic equator. The ridge is conspicuous in the picture as an approximately 20-kilometer wide (12 miles) band that extends from the western (left) side of the disc almost to the day/night boundary on the right. On the left horizon, the peak of the ridge reaches at least 13 kilometers (8 miles) above the surrounding terrain. Along the roughly 1,300 kilometer (800 mile) length over which it can be traced in this picture, it remains almost exactly parallel to the equator within a couple of degrees. The physical origin of the ridge has yet to be explained.

Have a look at the full-sized image and tell me what you think. Maybe a product of Slartibartfast’s training years?

From “Museum has a flush of inspiration”, at BBC News:

Management at the museum estimate recycling toilet waste could
generate 1,530 kilowatt hours from its three million visitors annually.

Museum boss Jon Tucker said: “With free admission it would be a
great way for visitors to give something back and help keep the
overheads down.”