Sept. 29, 2018
What catches our eye
Brain selects visual
objects according to specific mechanism
Source:
Technical University of Munich (TUM)
This
is really worth reading. The implications are “eye opening”.
Summary:
Our unconscious gaze is controlled by an automatic selection
process computed by a neural network in the brain. Details of this computation
have now been studied and could soon become relevant for robotic
implementations.
Does
consciousness create the material world? Before we answer this question,
it’s important to first go into what the material world is actually composed of
at a fundamental level. “Reality” is not simply made of tiny physical
pieces, like a bunch of marbles or tiny little bowling balls. Molecules
are made out of atoms, and atoms are made out of subatomic particles such as
protons and electrons which are 99.99999% empty space and electrical spin.
These are then made out of quarks, which then are a part of a Superstring field
which consists of vibrating strings that give rise to fundamental particles
based on the nature of their vibration.
We
interact with a world of physical objects, but this is only due to the way our
brains translate sensory data. At the smallest and most fundamental
scales of nature, the idea of “physical reality” is non-existent. From
the Nobel Prize winning father of quantum mechanics Neils
Bohr, “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as
real. In quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you yet, you don’t
understand it well enough.” When you touch your hands together, it is really
just empty space touching more empty space, with the slightest ingredient of
energetic spin of these minuscule particles. The constituents of matter
have absolutely no physical structure.
Young
children are significantly more likely than adults to have their opinions and
decisions influenced by robots, according to new research. Professor
Belpaeme said: "People often follow the opinions of others and we've known
for a long time that it is hard to resist taking over views and opinions of
people around us. We know this as conformity. But as robots will soon be found
in the home and the workplace, we were wondering if people would conform to
robots.
"What
our results show is that adults do not conform to what the robots are saying.
But when we did the experiment with children, they did. It shows children can
perhaps have more of an affinity with robots than adults, which does pose the
question: what if robots were to suggest, for example, what products to buy or
what to think?"
Ah….and then there is the issue of time to consider in all
this. Only the certainty of change is absolute.
speaking of time:
Estimating When Life
Could Have Arisen on Earth?
Barring those who adhere to the Judeo-Christian-Muslim
mythology, this is truly an interesting question.
The question how life began on Earth has always been a matter of profound
interest to scientists. But just as important as how life emerged is the
question of when it emerged. In addition to discerning how non-living elements
came together to form the first living organisms (a process known as
abiogenesis), scientists have also sought to determine when the first living
organisms appeared on Earth.
Life/earth pic
In a new
study by a team of Canadian researchers, the question of when life emerged
on Earth is constrained using two approaches. By combining astrophysical and
geophysical evidence with biosignatures in geological samples, they estimate
that life emerged roughly 200 to 800 million years after Earth became habitable
(ca. 3.7 billion years ago). This study could have drastic implications for our
understanding of life and how long it takes to emerge on Earth-like planets.
The study which describes their findings was recently published in the
journal Astrobiology
under the title “Constraining the
Time Interval for the Origin of Life on Earth“. The study was led by PhD
student Ben K. D. Pearce, and included several of his colleagues from the Origins Institute and Dept of Physics and
Astronomy at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
https://www.universetoday.com/139887/estimating-when-life-could-have-arisen-on-earth/
Relevant to this question are these tantalizing bits of new knowledge.
Meet Ligulalepis, our common fishy
ancestor.
Searching in limestone outcrops of New South Wales, Australia, a team led by
scientists from Flinders University recently unearthed the second skull found
to date — and the most complete one yet — of this tiny prehistoric bony fish.
The researchers applied modern scanning techniques and powerful X-rays to
these two preserved specimens — each only about a centimetre across — to reveal
hidden features of Ligulalepis’ brain cavity. The 3D anatomical picture
helped the team place the 400-million-year-old creature at the base of the
evolutionary tree that leads to all bony fish, one offshoot of which includes
humans and all other four-limbed vertebrates.
“This resolves the big question about what the ancestor of all modern bony
fish looked like,” said Flinders paleontologist and lead study author, Alice
Clement, in a press release. The results were published in the journal eLife.
https://www.natureindex.com/institution-outputs/australia/flinders-university/5139072d34d6b65e6a002140?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=AugRH&utm_term=paid&utm_content=Flinders#highlight
Scientists in Siberia have made an extraordinary find: the fossilized
remains of an extinct baby Palaeolithic horse, in almost perfect condition.
Dug out from the permafrost in Siberia's Batagaika crater - AKA the "Doorway
to the Underworld" - the tiny colt is so beautifully preserved, it
looks like it could be sleeping. But the equine died a long time ago - between
30,000 and 40,000 years, during the Upper Palaeolithic.
More cool animal stuff coming but change of
pace needed. Yeah, you guessed it – astronomy!
Dark
matter – once understood (at least basically), profoundly expands a person’s
concept of the universe.
The known universe contains trillion
of galaxies
with billions of stars in it. Looking at the big picture, the galaxies in universe
are connected to each other by an invisible web of dark matter. Due to some
clever use of gravitational lensing these threads of dark matter are now
captured for the first time. A team of astronomers at the University of
Waterloo in Canada has seen the unseeable using the space-bending effects of
dark-matter to create a visual of their dark features by combining the
catalogues of galaxy groups that act as lenses with catalogues of data on the
light-sources behind them.
Another
“mind expander”
A recent observation of the red giant star Antares, the
largest in the constellation Scorpio—shows that from its cosmic depths, the
star is expelling unknown matter as it approaches the end of its life. In the
insides of the star Antares lies a powerful and hitherto unknown force that
astronomers have not seen until now.
Someday, sooner or later, the sun we see every day will
become a giant star and grow to such an extent that it will swallow the Earth
and other planets in the inner solar system. For scientists, this inescapable
fate involves the challenge of looking beyond our solar system to decipher and
understand the evolutionary cycles of these incandescent stars and their
mechanisms at each stage.
A Japanese Company is
About to Test a Tiny Space Elevator… in Space
Let’s be honest, launching things into space with rockets is a pretty
inefficient way to do things. Not only are rockets expensive to build, they
also need a ton of fuel in order to achieve escape velocity. And while the
costs of individual launches are being reduced thanks to concepts like reusable
rockets and space planes, a more permanent solution could be to build a Space
Elevator.
And while such a project of mega-engineering is simply not feasible right
now, there are many scientists and companies around the world that are
dedicated to making a space elevator a reality within our lifetimes. For
example, a team of Japanese engineers from Shizuoka University‘s Faculty of
Engineering recently
created a scale model of a space elevator that they will be launching into
space tomorrow (on September 11th).
The concept for a
space elevator is quite simple. Basically, it calls for the construction of a
space station in geosynchronous orbit (GSO) which is tethered to Earth by a
tensile structure. A counterweight would be attached to the other end of the
station to keep the tether straight while the Earth’s rotational velocity
ensures that it remains over the same spot. Astronauts and crews would travel
up and down the tether in cars, which would remove the need for rocket launches
altogether.
Our
successes in exploring space have been many and varied. One of our most
reliable and worthy was the Cassini probe of Saturn. It is now dead.
Cassini
is dead; long live Cassini. On the evening of 14 September, 2017, the Cassini
spacecraft sent back its final images of the Saturn system. Early this morning,
it sank into the top of the giant planet’s atmosphere and melted. It survived
about 30 seconds longer than scientists expected.
A little history that changed the world
According
to his 18-year-old nephew Pliny the Younger’s heart-stopping firsthand account, written to the historian
Tacitus, the sky turned black as Mount Vesuvius erupted, spewing fire and ash
over Pompeii and its neighboring towns. Within a matter of days, almost the
entire Bay of Naples, as well as thousands of its inhabitants—including the
eminently quotable Elder statesman—were buried. It was a movie-quality tragedy
that today may incite a fear of increased natural disasters in our own age of
rapid global warming.
But
the event also served to freeze a moment in the past, and the perfectly
preserved ruins—petrified over the centuries—offer the world’s most complete
picture of ancient Roman life.
The terrible Lisbon earth quake
Most of the population of Lisbon was in church when the first quake hit. It was the morning of All Saints Day, 1755, and
this was the most prominent city in one of the world’s most powerful countries. None of that mattered, of course, when
the shaking started.
The Lisbon quake is still a defining moment in the city’s
history. Estimated to be an 8.5 magnitude or higher on the modern-day Richter
scale, it was followed by two smaller quakes and a tsunami, as high as 15
meters, then by days of fires that engulfed the city. Hundreds of aftershocks
happened over subsequent months. No official death count exists, but sources
both contemporary and modern estimate somewhere between 10,000 and 60,000
people died (the population numbered about 1 million at the time). About 82
percent of the city’s buildings were destroyed, among them churches,
cathedrals, royal palaces and the opera house.
That the rich and the outwardly godly weren’t spared in the quake may have
been one factor that spurred what amounted to an existential crisis among some
Europeans. While many did turn to religion in the time of crisis — and
18th-century Portugal had its share of spiritual leaders blaming the quake on
human sin, a phenomenon that persists today — science and philosophy also had
their part to play. Thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau and Immanuel Kant (there’s
more on Kant; keep going) all meditated on the earthquake and what it meant for
humankind and its trust in fate.
The highly venomous forest cobra, the largest of Africa’s
true cobras, is not one, but five separate species, according to a new study. At
first glance, forest cobras, which can grow to lengths of nearly 3 meters (10
feet) and are frequently kept in zoos, research institutes and private
collections, may not look very different. But Wolfgang Wüster, a herpetologist
at Bangor University, U.K., and colleagues chanced upon the snake’s potential
diversity around 15 years ago by accident.
The
team had been working on another species, and had collected some DNA samples of
forest cobras from captive collections for comparison.
“To
our surprise we found that the mitochondrial DNA sequence differences between
[the forest cobra samples] were far greater than between clearly distinct
species of other cobras, even though the forest cobras did not appear very
distinct visually,” Wüster told Mongabay.
Vultures,
often overlooked and underappreciated ( but intelligently revered by the
ancient Egyptians), are up against eager hunters, dangerous power lines, and
accidental poisoning. Ecologist Jen Guyton is studying what a world without the
critically endangered birds would look like—and in Africa’s Gorongosa National
Park, it becomes an ecosystem with a missing link.
The
world's only freshwater seal dives under the winter ice of Russia's Lake
Baikal. How the species established a home in this place—the oldest, deepest,
and most voluminous mass of freshwater in the world—remains a mystery. Experts
hypothesize that members of the species may have traveled up ice-choked rivers
from the Arctic Ocean during the last ice age.
When
temperatures drop, macaques huddle together to pool their body heat, forming
what’s known as a saru dango, or “monkey dumpling.” This behavior is especially
important for Japanese macaques, which live in colder climates than any other
non-human primate.
Megabats constitute the suborder Megachiroptera, and its only family Pteropodidae of
the order Chiroptera (bats). They are also
called fruit bats, Old World fruit bats, or, especially the genera Acerodon and Pteropus, flying foxes.
Megabats are found in tropical and subtropical areas of Eurasia, Africa, and Oceania.
Compared to insectivorous bats, fruit bats are relatively large, and with some
exceptions, do not navigate by echolocation. They are herbivores
and rely on their keen senses of sight and smell to locate food.
Always
wondered about this.
They
say practice makes perfect, and believe it or not, that's just what this
Eurasian Ay and Sparrow Hawk are doing—practicing their predatory strikes.
A little fancy detecting:
Decoding the Symbolism
in Hans Holbein’s “Ambassadors”
The
artist’s most iconic painting, however, eludes direct interpretation. Jean de Dinteville and Georges de
Selve (1533), also known as The
Ambassadors, has been heavily scrutinized by centuries of historians.
The double portrait, proudly displayed at London’s National Gallery, remains a fascinating
enigma within which every detail seems to suggest multiple meanings.
As
different as the next two pictures are, they both speak of dignity in my mind – a
bit weird I know but some of you will get it (not a trick question).
Claudette
Colbert as Cleopatra confronting Caesar
A
forgotten presence: Hollow Horn Bear, speaker for the Brulé branch of The
Lakota, 1907
Never forgotten: my
grandmother Ami told me this when I was just a boy.
Got
me to thinking even then.
Till next time, may The Great Mystery be kind to you.
The first draft of the
sequence of the Neanderthal genome was published in 2010 (“Neanderthal
Genome Decoded,” July/August 2010). One might think that it would tell us
everything we need to know about the genetic differences between modern humans
and our closest evolutionary cousins. But it turns out the raw genetic code is
only half the story. Just as important is epigenetics—features of the genome
that determine which genes are active and which are inactive, factors that can
in turn have a dramatic effect on one’s traits.
