Monday, December 29, 2014
Friday, December 26, 2014
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
"Turn off your mind, relax, and float down stream..."
Maybe John Lennon was onto something when he wrote those words for the Beatles' song "Tomorrow Never Knows."
It turns out that that reality and imagination flow in different directions in the brain, researchers say. The visual information from real events that the eyes see flows "up" from the brain's occipital lobe to the parietal lobe, but imagined images flow "down" from the parietal to the occipital.
"There seems to be a lot in our brains and animal brains that is directional — that neural signals move in a particular direction, then stop, and start somewhere else," said Dr. Giulio Tononi, a psychiatry professor and neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the study's co-authors. "I think this is really a new theme that had not been explored."
Optical Illusions: Your Brain Is Way Ahead of You
The finding, published in the November issue of the journal NeuroImage, may lead to a better understanding of how the brain processes short-term memories and how memory is connected to imagination, the researchers said.
By "flow," the scientists are referring to the general direction of electrical signaling of neurons in the brain. This direction is oriented against the various lobes of the brain. [Inside the Brain: A Photo Journey Through Time]
The occipital lobe sits in the lower, back part of the brain. Containing the visual cortex, this lobe's primary function is to process visual information. The parietal lobe lies above the occipital lobe, and its primary function is to integrate sensory information, such as vision, but also touch and sound. In doing so, the parietal lobe assembles elementary building bricks from so-called "lower-order" brain regions to create concepts, said Daniela Dentico, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author on the report.
This is Your Brain on Video Games (Infographic)
A leading theory in image processing "posits that our visual mental images are not stored somewhere in the brain, but get actively reconstructed," Dentico told Live Science. The brain does this, she said, by reversing the order it uses for visual perception. She described this as the "top-down" direction, which starts from the big concept and moves back toward the smaller elements.
"Our study represents the first direct measure of the prevalence of top-down signal flow during imagery," Dentico added.
To determine the flow of neural firing, the Madison researchers, along with scientists at University of Liege in Belgium, asked study participants who were hooked up to an electroencephalography (EEG) machine to watch videos or to imagine fantastical scenes, such as traveling on a magic bicycle. EEG is an established technique that uses sensors on the scalp to measure underlying electrical activity.
The Brain: Now in Ultra High-Res 3D
But because the brain isn't "quiet," EEGs tend to reveal the cacophony of brain activity, said Barry Van Veen, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Madison and senior author on the report.
So, to zero in on the flow of reality and imagination, the researchers created complex statistical modeling requiring high-throughput computing. From this, they could determine, for the first time, the average directional flow of neural firing during the tasks of seeing and imagining.
The researchers could not determine, however, whether imagination originates in the parietal lobe. It may instead flow through the parietal lobe from the frontal lobe, the brain region most associated with human intelligence. This is a topic for further investigation, the researchers said.
More from Live Science
Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind 6 Foods That Are Good for Your Brain5 Mind-Bending Facts About Dreams
Copyright 2014 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Originally published on LiveScience.com.
http://news.discovery.com/human/imagination-reality-look-different-in-the-brain-141214.htm#mkcpgn=rssnws1
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
If you're a fan of epic ultra high definition time-lapse videos from space -- and really who isn't — then you'll be happy to know that Christmas arrived early and Hannukah is right on time. The European Space Agency has stiched together more than five months of astronaut Alexander Gerst's time-lapse photography from the International Space Station (ISS) and made it into a six-minute video.
Photos: When Earth Wows
Gerst spent 166 days in orbit starting in late May on the ISS as one of five flight engineers, all part of the European Space Agency's aptly named mission, Blue Dot. Luckily for us mere mortals, he also had an excellent photographic eye and captured some pretty spectacular views as the ISS hurtled around the planet at 17,200 mph, making more than 15 laps each day.
Lightning from space looks like daubs of electric paint atop of clouds. Large-scale weather patterns including spinning areas of low pressure look just like they do on weather maps. The aurora takes on the appearance of a shimmering green curtain draped around the high latitudes of Earth. And day and night on the horizon of Gerst and his fellow astronaut's view, the crystaline strip of the atmosphere -- the one we're filling with greenhouse gases -- is clearly visible, separating those of us back on planet Earth from the rest of the universe.
But lest you think it's all eye candy and fodder for philosophical musings, there are also a few hidden insights into how the various apparati that ensure the ISS can sustain the astronauts that call it home. Solar panels rotate to catch the most sun and keep all systems up and running. At the 1:35 mark, a robotic arm extends to pluck a Cygnus spacecraft -- one of the commercial spacecraft that help supply the ISS -- out of, well, space. After collecting its payload, the same arm releases it on its homeward journey at the 4:50 mark. It truly looks like science fiction.
So go ahead, ratchet the video up to ultra high definition and enjoy each one of the 12,500 images it took to create it. And let it not go unnoted that the European Space Agency also found some pretty futuristic background music for the video. Hope you're taking notes, NASA.
More From Climate Central:
Dreaming of a White Christmas? Check This MapClues in Coral Hint at Looming Temperature SpikeNY Fracking Ban Divides Experts on Climate Impacts
This article originally appeared on Climate Central, all rights reserved.
http://news.discovery.com/earth/see-five-months-of-earth-from-space-141224.htm#mkcpgn=rssnws1
Chances are, you probably champagne with living the high life. But uncorking a bottle of the bubbly stuff is also provides an illustration of a phenomenon that Japanese researchers say could be used to make electrical-generating plants more efficient.
When you open a bottle of champagne, the pressure upon the liquid is abruptly removed, which causes bubbles to form in it. Those bubbles, in turn, quickly begin a process called Ostwald ripening, named after the scientist who discovered it back in 1896. Bigger bubbles, which are more energetic than the smaller ones, attract molecules from them and grow even larger. It’s a phenomenon that’s not only seen in champagne, but in foams and metallic alloys as well, and even in ice cream.
NEWS: Giant Bubbles Found in Space
And most important, Ostwald ripening happens on a much larger scale in power plants, when bubbles form in heated water that’s being converted to steam to drive the blades of electrical turbines — a factor that can reduce the efficiency of the process. But up to this point, scientists haven’t been able to figure exactly how that works inside the superheated environment of a power plant, and they’ve been unable to accurately calculate the rate at which bubbles form there.
But now, according to a just-published study in the Journal of Chemical Physics, researchers from the University of Tokyo, Kyusyu University and RIKEN, a private research institution in Tokyo, have made a breakthrough in understanding Ostwald ripening. By using RIKEN’s computer network, the most powerful one in Japan, they’ve managed to simulate the formation of bubbles.
VIDEO: Is It Possible to Power Jets with Water?
“A huge number of molecules, however, are necessary to simulate bubbles — on the order of 10,000 are required to express a bubble,” researcher Hiroshi Watanabe explained in a press release. “So we needed at least this many to investigate hundreds of millions of molecules — a feat not possible on a single computer.”
The team eventually simulated an astonishing 700 million particles, following their collective motions through a million time steps — a feat they accomplished by performing massively parallel simulations using 4,000 processors.
Eventually, the research may yield knowledge that enables engineers to design more efficient turbines.
http://news.discovery.com/earth/bubbles-could-provide-energy-breakthrough-141219.htm#mkcpgn=rssnws1
Entrepreneur Elon Musk, co-founder of Paypal, founder of Tesla Motors, CEO of SpaceX, doesn’t have time for Hyperloop, his envisioned subsonic mass transit system that would whisk people between Los Angeles and San Francisco at 800 miles per hour.
Yes, he put about a dozen of his engineers on the project for nine months and then dropped a white paper on us in 2013 describing the technology. But like he said, his hands are full.
Hyperloop Vs. High-Speed Rail
But a new crowd-sourcing platform said it does have the time and they think they could have a working version up in ten years.
JumpStartFund, which leverages crowd-funded money to finance crowd-funded ideas, launched in 2013, around the time that Musk was talking about Hyperloop. It seemed like the perfect idea to tackle, and so the company’s CEO Dirk Ahlborn reached out to Musk, proposed the idea for JumpStartFund and created the company Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, to devote resources to.
The crowd of folks currently working on Hyperloop are either students at UCLA or have day jobs at companies such as Boeing, NASA, Yahoo!, Airbus and SpaceX. But in their free time, they are contributing ideas and solutions related to design, route planning and cost analysis in exchange for stock options.
Elon Musk’s ‘Hyperloop’: More Details Revealed
Alex Davies from Wired reports that so far, the team has made progress in three main areas: the capsules, the stations, and the route. Here’s a summary.
The route: Instead of Musk’s proposed route of L.A. to San Francisco, the team is currently looking at different routes for the beta run — ones that would be flatter and would avoid some of the regulatory hurdles. That means the first Hyperloop might not be built in the United States.
The capsules: The subsonic tube-like passenger cars need doors that let people on and off, but doors could compromise the low-pressure environment required for the tube to move fast. The engineers decided that the capsule that people ride inside would slip into a shell built to handle the ride.
The stations: The team wants to streamline security and efficiency using robots who would check luggage and moving sidewalks that would pass through security. Keep it moving, people.
Hyperloop Simulation Shows It Could Work
The team is currently looking at the best mode for propulsion too. It could be a vacuum tube as Musk has proposed, but it could also use magnetic levitation, which several high-speed trains in China already use.
And, Davies points out, “At some point, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies will likely have to shift from this work-when-you-can-but-don’t-expect-money model to something a bit more conventional with, you know, employees. But for now, it’s a fitting approach.”
Credit: Hyperloop Transportation Technologies and JumpStartFund
via Wired
http://news.discovery.com/autos/transportation-infrastructure/hyperloop-transit-could-be-running-in-10-years-141222.htm#mkcpgn=rssnws1
Saturday, December 20, 2014
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
Monday, December 15, 2014
Sunday, December 14, 2014
Society bloomed with gentler personalities, more feminine faces: Technology boom 50,000 years ago correlated with less testosterone
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140801171114.htm
Evolution depends on rare chance events, 'molecular time travel' experiments show
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140618220554.htm
Saturday, December 13, 2014
Friday, December 12, 2014
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Saturday, December 6, 2014
New Horizon about to wake up after 9 year trip to Pluto
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-pluto-new-horizons-hibernation-nasa-20141205-story.html
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
Monday, December 1, 2014
When Americans sit down to their Thanksgiving feast, many will take a moment to focus on what they are grateful for.
But psychologists, religious leaders and scientists have said that this practice should be more than a once-a-year tradition. In fact, many think that gratitude is the key to happiness.
“Grateful attention is the key to joy,” said Br. David Steindl-Rast, co-founder of A Network for Grateful Living.
Top 20 Happiest Countries in The World
Gratefulness encompasses more than thankfulness. Definitions vary, but most include the idea of being present in the moment. A Network for Grateful Living describes it as “the full response to a given moment and all it contains.”
Gratitude is one of the few concepts that is highly regarded in most religions -- and also by psychologists and scientists. It’s been linked with everything from better school performance to lower cardiovascular risk and joy, according to Emiliana Simon-Thomas, who is teaching a class called "The Science of Happiness."
Gratitude is the “feeling of joy with the knowledge that another person has instrumentally benefitted yourself,” said Simon-Thomas, science director of the University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center.
Does $36,000 Buy Happiness?
The center launched a program called Expanding the Science and Practice of Gratitude three years ago, and has supported 29 research projects on the science of gratitude. Preliminary research into how gratitude is processed in the brain has linked it to reward systems that signal pleasure and joy, Simon-Thomas said.
The science of gratitude is a trifecta, she said. The first part is called savoring: “You’re committing neural resources perceiving and feeling the goodness about something,” she said. “The second piece is that you’re linking goodness to something outside yourself. And, third, gratitude involves focusing on the goodness in another person.”
http://news.discovery.com/human/psychology/does-gratitude-bring-happiness-141127.htm#mkcpgn=rssnws1
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