Creative New

Via physorg

This undated photo provided by the Onassis Cultural Center shows a 2nd century A.D. marble statuette of Athena, sometime worshiped as a goddess of war, wearing a breastplate made up of coiled snakes. A woman’s place has never been just in the home - not even in ancient Greece. The proof is in an exhibit titled “Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens,” a collection of artifacts at the Onassis Cultural Center in New York that corrects the cliched idea of Athenian women as passive, homebound nurturers of men and children. (AP Photo/Onassis Cultural Center)

 A woman’s place has never been just in the home - not even in ancient Greece. The proof is in an exhibit titled “Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens” - a collection of artifacts that correct the cliched idea of Athenian women as passive, homebound nurturers of men and children.

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Via plosone.org

image source

The concept of an individual swapping his or her body with that of another person has captured the imagination of writers and artists for decades. Although this topic has not been the subject of investigation in science, it exemplifies the fundamental question of why we have an ongoing experience of being located inside our bodies. Here we report a perceptual illusion of body-swapping that addresses directly this issue. Manipulation of the visual perspective, in combination with the receipt of correlated multisensory information from the body was sufficient to trigger the illusion that another person’s body or an artificial body was one’s own. This effect was so strong that people could experience being in another person’s body when facing their own body and shaking hands with it. Our results are of fundamental importance because they identify the perceptual processes that produce the feeling of ownership of one’s body.

Via nytimes

Two scientists, drawing on their own powers of observation and a creative reading of recent genetic findings, have published a sweeping theory of brain development that would change the way mental disorders like autism and schizophrenia are understood.

The theory emerged in part from thinking about events other than mutations that can change gene behavior. And it suggests entirely new avenues of research, which, even if they prove the theory to be flawed, are likely to provide new insights into the biology of mental disease.

At a time when the search for the genetic glitches behind brain disorders has become mired in uncertain and complex findings, the new idea provides psychiatry with perhaps its grandest working theory since Freud, and one that is grounded in work at the forefront of science. The two researchers — Bernard Crespi, a biologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and Christopher Badcock, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, who are both outsiders to the field of behavior genetics — have spelled out their theory in a series of recent journal articles.

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Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Via theatlantic

 Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

More:Nicholas Carr- The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google

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Via newscientist

Via plosone.org

The proverbs tell us that there’s a fine line between love and hate, and new scans of the brain’s “hate circuit” have confirmed similarities between the two powerful emotions.

But whereas loved-up partners are likely to be less rational, the new scans show hate to be colder and more calculating.

Semir Zeki of University College London, UK, who has previously mapped the neural circuits involved in romantic and maternal love, and colleague John Romaya selected 17 subjects who expressed a strong hatred for an individual – typically an ex-lover or colleague.

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Finding the Switches to Our Cells’ ‘Computer’

Via nsf.gov

What do you and your favorite electronic gadgets have in common? According to new research sponsored by the National Science Foundation, more than you’d think.

If you could look inside the computer chips that power your computer or iPod, you’d find arrays of transistors made up of tiny switches. Each switch can be turned on or off and be in a ‘one’ or a ‘zero’ state. This complex system of switches allows electronic devices to hold data in their memories and complete the jobs we want them to do.

It turns out the cells in our bodies also depend on switches, comprised of different chemical reactions that can be switched on or off, to store information and perform their vital functions. Until recently, however, finding these switches has been difficult, and scientists were only able to identify a handful of them.

That was until Naren Ramakrishnan, a professor of computer science at Virginia Tech, and Upinder S. Bhalla at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in India tried a new approach by looking at cells from the standpoint of an electrical engineer.

“A biochemical switch is a basic memory unit,” Ramakrishnan said. “We wanted to try to understand the cellular basis of memory and to see exactly how cells make their decisions.”

More:

Higher-Order Cellular Information Processing with Synthetic RNA Devices

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Via www.redorbit.com

The world’s first “unbreakable” quantum encryption network was unveiled this week at a science conference in Vienna.

The EU-sponsored network (called SECOQC) uses 200 km of fiber optic cables, provided by Siemens, to interconnect six locations in Vienna and the neighboring town of St. Poelten.

Quantum cryptography is markedly different from current security schemes, which are based on complex mathematical procedures that are extremely difficult, but not impossible, for outsiders to crack.

Instead, quantum systems harness the inherently unbreakable laws of quantum theory.  The notion of quantum cryptography was established 25 years ago by Charles Bennett of IBM and Gilles Brassard of Montreal University, who was in attendance this week in Vienna to observe the new network in action.

“All quantum security schemes are based on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, on the fact that you cannot measure quantum information without disturbing it,” Brassard told BBC News.

“Because of that, one can have a communications channel between two users on which it’s impossible to eavesdrop without creating a disturbance. An eavesdropper would create a mark on it. That was the key idea.”

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Making Waves

Quantum Unique Ergodicity (QUE) Conjecture Proven

Via aimath.org

In a seminar co-organized by Stanford University and the American Institute of Mathematics, Soundararajan announced that he and Roman Holowinsky have proven a significant version of the quantum unique ergodicity (QUE) conjecture. “This is one of the best theorems of the year,” said Peter Sarnak, a mathematician from Princeton who along with Zeev Rudnick from the University of Tel Aviv formulated the conjecture fifteen years ago in an effort to understand the connections between classical and quantum physics.

The problems of quantum chaos can be understood in terms of billiards. On a standard rectangular billiard table the motion of the balls is predictable and easy to describe. Things get more interesting if the table has curved edges, known as a “stadium.” Then it turns out most paths are chaotic and over time fill out the billiard table, a result proven by the mathematical physicist Leonid Bunimovich.

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A team of UC Irvine scientists has been awarded a $4 million grant from the U.S. Army Research Office to study the neuroscientific and signal-processing foundations of synthetic telepathy.

Via physorg.com

The research could lead to a communication system that would benefit soldiers on the battlefield and paralysis and stroke patients, according to lead researcher Michael D’Zmura, chair of the UCI Department of Cognitive Sciences.

“Thanks to this generous grant we can work with experts in automatic speech recognition and in brain imaging at other universities to research a brain-computer interface with applications in military, medical and commercial settings,” D’Zmura says.

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