Flat Earth Theory: Does it have a scientific leg to stand on?

By:Alexandria Addesso

Although the Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 300s BCE explained in his writings that the Earth was spherical and not flat, most of the world did not come to agreement on this rational until the 1700s. Yet lately, there is in growing popularity a segment of people who currently hold the belief that the world is flat. Being that the scientific findings are constantly influx, is there any grounds for this non-spherical belief?

The most common flat-earth theory states that the Earth is a disc, with the Arctic Circle in the center of it and Antarctica around the rim in the form of a 150-foot-tall ice wall. This is a theory popularized by Orlando Ferguson, a real estate developer, in 1893. While the Earth is believed to be a disc, in this theory the sun and moon are believed to be spherical, thus explaining the Earth's day and night cycle by positing that the sun and moon are wide 32 miles (51 kilometers) and move in circles 3,000 miles (4,828 km) above the plane of the Earth. These celestial spheres illuminate different portions of the Earth in a 24-hour cycle. Yet this theory does not come with experimental evidence to back it up.



On the Flat Earth Society’s website there is a page listing simple experiments done by seven different people that support the theory. Most having to do with the lack of a “bulge” when looking, over 30 miles out into the ocean, with a telescope.

“IF the earth is a globe, and is 24,900 English statute miles in circumference, the surface of all standing water must have a certain degree of convexity--every part must be an arc of a circle,” said Tom Bishop, a flat Earth believer cited on the Flat Earth Society website. “From the summit of any such arc there will exist a curvature or declination of 8 inches in the first statute mile. In the second mile the fall will be 32 inches; in the third mile, 72 inches, or 6 feet, as shown in this chart. Ergo; looking at the opposite beach 30 miles away there should be a bulge of water over 600 feet tall blocking my view. There isn't.”



PBS NewsHour’s website also published an article several years ago about seven DIY experiments that could be down to prove the Earth is indeed spherical. One of the experiments directly challenges Bishop’s findings by simply suggesting that the experimenter watch the sunset, while laying on a beach, on the Pacific coast. If, while laying on your back you see the sun’s rays completely disappear, you will be able to see them again if you simply hop up and stand on your feet, thus justifying the Earth’s curvature.

Everything is to be questioned, even those questioning what is accepted.

Parallel Computation Provides Deeper Insight into Brain Function

Unlike experimental neuroscientists who deal with real-life neurons, computational neuroscientists use model simulations to investigate how the brain functions. While many computational neuroscientists use simplified mathematical models of neurons, researchers in the Computational Neuroscience Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) develop software that models neurons to the detail of molecular interactions with the goal of eliciting new insights into neuronal function. Applications of the software were limited in scope up until now because of the intense computational power required for such detailed neuronal models, but recently Dr. Weiliang Chen, Dr. Iain Hepburn, and Professor Erik De Schutter published two related papers in which they outline the accuracy and scalability of their new high-speed computational software, "Parallel STEPS". The combined findings suggest that Parallel STEPS could be used to reveal new insights into how individual neurons function and communicate with each other.

The first paper, published in The Journal of Chemical Physics in August 2016, focusses on ensuring that the accuracy of Parallel STEPS is comparable with conventional methods. In conventional approaches, computations associate with neuronal chemical reactions and molecule diffusion are all calculated on one computational processing unit or 'core' sequentially. However, Dr. Iain Hepburn and colleagues introduced a new approach to perform computations of reaction and diffusion in parallel which can then be distributed over multiple computer cores, whilst maintaining simulation accuracy to a high degree. The key was to develop an original algorithm separated into two parts - one that computed chemical reaction events and the other diffusion events.

"We tested a range of model simulations from simple diffusion models to realistic biological models and found that we could achieve improved performance using a parallel approach with minimal loss of accuracy. This demonstrated the potential suitability of the method on a larger scale," says Dr. Hepburn.



In a related paper published in Frontiers in Neuroinformatics this February, Dr. Weiliang Chen presented the implementation details of Parallel STEPS and investigated its performance and potential applications. By breaking a partial model of a Purkinje cell - one of the largest neurons in the brain - into 50 to 1000 sections and simulating reaction and diffusion events for each section in parallel on the Sango supercomputer at OIST, Dr. Chen and colleagues saw dramatically increased computation speeds. They tested this approach on both simple models and more complicated models of calcium bursts in Purkinje cells and demonstrated that parallel simulation could speed up computations by more than several hundred times that of conventional methods.

"Together, our findings show that Parallel STEPS implementation achieves significant improvements in performance, and good scalability," says Dr. Chen. "Similar models that previously required months of simulation can now be completed within hours or minutes, meaning that we can develop and simulate more complex models, and learn more about the brain in a shorter amount of time."

Dr. Hepburn and Dr. Chen from OIST's Computational Neuroscience Unit, led by Professor Erik De Schutter, are actively collaborating with the Human Brain Project, a world-wide initiative based at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, to develop a more robust version of Parallel STEPS that incorporates electric field simulation of cell membranes.

So far STEPS is only realistically capable of modeling parts of neurons but with the support of Parallel STEPS, the Computational Neuroscience Unit hopes to develop a full-scale model of a whole neuron and subsequently the interactions between neurons in a network. By collaborating with the EPFL team and by making use of the IBM 'Blue Gene/Q' supercomputer located there, they aim to achieve these goals in the near future.



"Thanks to modern supercomputers we can study molecular events within neurons in a much more transparent way than before," says Prof. De Schutter. "Our research opens up interesting avenues in computational neuroscience that links biochemistry with electrophysiology for the first time."
Source: Journal of Chemical Physics. Provided by: Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology

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Nonverbal Influence and Forensic Psychology

How Police Witnesses could be misled by a Simple Wave of the Hand
Hand it over.

How easy do you think it would be for someone to convince you that you’d seen something that never really happened? What about them doing this without actually saying anything misleading? That would almost be impossible, surely? Well, research into verbal and nonverbal influence suggests this can happen, and that we’re actually far more suggestible than we might like to think.

We know that people easily can be misled through words, and that changing the way we phrase a question can affect how somebody answers it. For instance, if you ask someone “how tall was the man?” they will probably say he was taller on average than if you asked “how short was the man?” A cleverly-worded question that implies something was present can make people believe they saw it, and biased questions can implant false memories in people, causing them to remember something fictional as if it were real.

But speech isn’t the only way we communicate with people. We also give lots of information away through our nonverbal behavior, especially our hand gestures. When we talk, we tend to gesture a lot, and the people we’re speaking to can use these gestures to make sense of what we’re saying.



Handy hints
Imagine you’re telling a friend that you hurt your arm recently. You might say “I hurt myself last week” and rub your arm while doing so. Here, you communicate part of the message through your speech (“hurt”) and the other part through your gesture (“arm”). A listener will combine these two pieces of information to get one full story, and probably won’t even realize the information came from two different places.

Giving somebody helpful information through gesture is one thing, but what about if we gave them some misleading information? Could a misleading gesture implant a suggestion in someone, and cause them to believe something that isn’t true? These questions sparked my research into the “gestural misinformation effect”.

In one of my first academic studies, I wanted to see if people would misremember seeing something if false information was given to them through a hand gesture. To test this, I showed participants a video (a man coming into my office and stealing a phone from my desk) and arranged for them to be interviewed on what they could remember afterwards.



After softening them up with a few distractor questions, the interviewer asked if they could describe the man’s face. We found that if the interviewer stroked his chin while asking this, significantly more participants would claim that the man had a beard or stubble than if he didn’t gesture.

We tried this with other questions, too. If the interviewer pinched his finger while asking if the man was wearing any jewelry, the participants remembered him wearing a ring. If he grasped his wrist, they remembered a watch. People seemed to remember parts of the video differently according to what was suggested to them through the interviewer’s hand gestures.

In my original set of studies, our participants were largely psychology students but, since then, we’ve replicated the effect in children, members of the general public and even lawyers. In light of this, the gestural misinformation effect seems to be quite robust.

But are people aware of how much influence these gestures have on them? Even if we can remember what has been said to us in speech, we often cannot identify when extra information has been given to us through gestures, so nonverbal influence is a bit more subtle. Typically, we’re not really aware of when we gesture, and listeners don’t generally see our gestures either.



Because of this, people can extract information from gestures without even realizing it. In a follow-up study, I found suggestions made through gesture can be just as effective as those made through speech, but that people were less likely to know when they’d been misled by a gesture compared to speech.

Forensic implications
The fact that people can be misled through gesture so easily is very interesting (if not a little scary), but there are some clear implications for this research, particularly in forensic psychology, too. Because witnesses are so prone to misleading questions, police officers have to be very careful not to suggest any leading information to them through their questions.

To make sure no unwanted influence has occurred, interviews are also audio-recorded. However, currently, there is very little training on how our gestures can influence others in interviews and, without a video recording of an interview it’s possible for a witness to be misled by gestures without a record of this happening.

These findings on nonverbal suggestion can extend to any interview situation, or any dialogue between two people. There may be times when we’ve been influenced by someone’s hand gestures, and without even knowing it. Because of this, we should be aware of the power of nonverbal suggestion and how susceptible we can be to its effects.
Source: Daniel Gurney - The Conversation, Academic -Journal

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Myths and Truths about Phlegm, Snot and Boogers

By: Alexandria Addesso

Although Spring is slowly approaching, the cold and flu season is still among us. One of the most unpleasant symptoms of such winter sicknesses as the cold and flu is an increased amount of mucus. Whether, if it's in the form of phlegm, a runny nose or dry booger build-up, an increase in mucus production is a major annoyance and inconvenience.

Although it seems that most people experience an increased production of mucus at least once a year, whether it be during cold and flu season or allergy season, there is still a lot of misinformation about it. Although it seems like a nuisance, mucus actually plays a beneficial role for the human body’s ecosystem. Mucus functions as naturally occurring moisturizer for nasal, mouth, and sinuses, without which the tissue surface could easily become dry and crack. The thick and sticky consistency of mucus also helps prevent bacteria, dust, and other harmful substances from entering the body by trapping it and removing it when it is extracted.



Many parents have taught their children that you can tell what type of common illness you have by judging the color of the snot or phlegm. This is not exactly true, when a harmful virus or bacteria enters the sinuses the enzymes in the mucus contain high levels of iron to combat it thus producing a thick green consistency. When mucus sits for several hours without being expelled, such as when a person is asleep, it becomes more concentrated thus making it a dark yellow or green, thick consistency.

Mucus in all forms; snot, phlegm, and boogers; usually gross most of the general population out. Most believe that they are loaded with harmful germs. Yet, these forms of mucus are actually loaded with a variety of strong antibacterial, antiviral, and other protective chemicals that work to keep you healthy. Now this doesn't mean that you should seek out other people’s runny noses to bask in, but rather just not be too freaked out about it. Especially when it comes to your own. When someone touches snot or phlegm and then touches an object or surface without washing their hands first, the virus will only live on that surface for 24 hours.
Be safe, don’t be too grossed out by mucus, and wash your hands.

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The Possible Cause of Flashbacks Discovered

Traumatic events can stop the brain storing the context in which they took place.

Remembering the past is an important function and defines who we are. In some situations though, the normal processes that store our experiences into memory can go wrong. After experiencing a distressing event, people can develop memory disturbances where they re-experience the event in the form of flashbacks – distressing vivid images that involuntarily enter consciousness, as happens in post-traumatic stress disorder.

Our latest study shows that a distressing experience has opposite effects in two different parts of the brain: the amygdala and the hippocampus. The amygdala, a region of the brain involved in emotion, seemed to strongly encode the negative content of an experience while the hippocampus, which is involved in storing new memories, is only weakly activated.

When remembering something from the past, we can bring to mind what we were doing, the people we were with, and where the event took place. An important aspect of memory is that these separate pieces of information are bound together as a single memory so that all of it can easily be recalled at a later time. But when experiencing a distressing event, the normal processes that help to integrate this information in memory can be disrupted.

The hippocampus is crucial for forming these associations so that all parts of a memory can be later retrieved as a single event (and damage to this brain region can stop a person from forming new memories). In contrast, the amygdala is involved in processing emotional information and making basic responses to things associated with fear, such as recoiling from a snake or spider.


The hippocampus. The brain region involved in consolidating new memories.

People who have suffered a trauma often have difficulty remembering the context of the event. We thought that, while processing in the amygdala might be increased during a negative experience, processing in the hippocampus might be decreased, disrupting the way it binds the different aspects of the experience together as a single memory.

To test this idea we showed 20 volunteers pairs of pictures and asked them to remember the pictures while lying in an MRI scanner. Some of the pictures were of traumatic
scenes, such as a badly injured person.

The volunteers’ memory of the pictures was then tested in two ways. First, they were shown one picture from each pair and asked if they recognized previously seeing it. Second, if the picture was recognized, we then asked whether they could remember what other picture had been part of the original pair.

When asked whether they recognized the individual pictures, people showed better memory for previously seen pictures that were negative (traumatic) compared with pictures that were neutral, such as a person sitting at an office desk. Improved memory for negative pictures related to increased activity in the amygdala. In contrast, their memory for remembering what pictures were presented together as a pair was worse when one of the pictures was negative.



We also found that activity in the hippocampus was reduced by the presence of negative pictures suggesting that its function in storing the associations between the pictures was impaired. This imbalance could lead to strong memories for the negative content of an event that is not properly stored with the other parts of the event and the context in which it took place.

Implications for psychotherapy
This work supports the view that experiencing a traumatic event might alter how memory works. The re-experiencing of intrusive images in post-traumatic stress disorder might happen because of strengthened memory for the negative aspects of a trauma but not their context – that is, the location where the event occurred or the time it occurred. This may result in the person involuntarily retrieving the traumatic event “out of context” and experiencing it as though it was in the present.

In this case, therapy should focus on strengthening or recreating appropriate contextual associations for the negative event. This view is supported by current psychotherapies where a person is taken back to the place where the traumatic event took place to help in strengthening memory for the context.

These findings also highlight potential issues with eyewitness testimony as trauma sufferers with poorly contextualized memories are likely to provide a fragmented report of an event.

The author of this James Bisby, Research Associate, University College London. This article was originally published in The Conversation under a Creative Commons Attribution

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The Time Reality: How its Rules Your Body—and Your Social Life

Time is inescapable, even if you try to ignore it, as author Alan Burdick did, by not wearing a watch.

We can’t smell it, we can’t taste it, we can’t hear it or touch it, but time is with us every second of our lives. And for thousands of years, philosophers and psychologists, from St. Augustine to William James, have pondered its meaning and how we perceive it. For his book Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation, Alan Burdick, who refused to wear a watch for much of his life, set off on a journey in search of time, which took him from a research station in the Arctic to the office of Coordinated Universal Time in Paris.

Speaking from his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, Burdick explains how having twins changed his ideas about time, why as far back as the Romans people have complained about being slaves to time, and how new discoveries in neuroscience show that our bodies are filled with clocks.

It’s ironic that, for many years, the author of a book about time refused to wear a watch. Why was that? And how did your perception of time change after you finally relented?

I started this book some time ago, when I was rather a different person. I really was of the mind that if I could take the time off of me physically, that I somehow made it go away. Part of it was that I am prone to think about mortality. Having a watch on me felt like being a grown up! It meant plugging into, and being subject to, all the things that time requires, like being on time, and it made me feel like my day was chopped up into little bits and my watch was going to parse them out to me, like pellets to a rat.



I used to think that this was a modern outlook but I came across a great quote from a Roman poet, complaining about the sundial and how awful it is that it chops our days up into hours.
A lot of other things changed, too. In my case, I had a family—two fraternal twin boys, ten years old—and that forced me to be on time and get more things done than I used to be able to. I had to come to peace with it in that regard. Also, the more I learned about my subject, the more I came to appreciate the extent to which time and timing is embedded in every aspect of our social lives. You and I are going to have a conversation on such-and-such date at such-and-such time and, in order to do that, the time on your watch in the U.K. has to exactly match my time in the U.S. That’s all made possible by this incredible process that goes into making universal coordinated time, which involves atomic clocks and this global coordinated.



One of the most original ideas in your book is that “time is contagious” and even leads us to feel empathy for one another. Unpack that idea for us.

Yes, it’s super weird! We can come at it from a bunch of different ways. One is that research has found that when people are in conversation in person, there are all these things we do without even noticing. If we’re having lunch, you and I will unconsciously pick up our forks more or less at the same time. There’s a great study about two people playing the game Whack-A-Mole. Even though they were competing against each other, their movements fell into synch, even at the expense of losing points. They would unconsciously work toward this synchrony. The more affiliated and friendly you are with that other person, the more you are in synch.



If I watch a video of two people talking, I will be able to tell, unconsciously, how friendly they are, based on the extent to which their movements fall into synch with each other. The difference between a fake and real smile is a matter of milliseconds. It’s incredibly important to know the difference, right? And, in order to tell the difference, you need, as a viewer, to have a really sensitive timing mechanism that can parse one from the other. We have these clocks in us, which are operating all the time. It’s a very open question where exactly in the brain they are and how they work. But it’s clear that they’re there and utterly essential to making our social interactions go smoothly.

The cool thing about hummingbirds is that their timing mechanism is super sophisticated. In one experiment, they flew around outdoors to different flowers, which recharge their nectar at different rates. The hummingbirds want to get to the flower when it has maximum nectar, before its competitor does. So it’s got to do this elaborate optimization and algorithm to figure out how to get there often enough to get what it wants, without getting there too soon and wasting time, or getting there too late and being beaten to it.

Scientists have known about circadian rhythms for a couple of hundred years in plants. But in the last 20 years, the genetic mechanism has become clear in humans. The idea is that each of our cells can essentially tell the time; they have a 24-hour clock, which enables the cell to organize all the things it needs to do, just like you and I. We need to meet at a certain time, or talk at a certain time. Within yourself, your organelles and proteins and genes have stuff to do. It has to happen in a certain order, and that requires a clock. In humans it’s a little over 24 hours long, pretty close to, but not exactly, the length of a day.



All your cells have this clock. Your stomach and liver, all your organs, have a clock. In order to keep those clocks in synch, mammals and we humans have a master clock in our brains that sends out a neuro-chemical signal on a regular basis. Like the conductor of an orchestra, it keeps all of these clocks in time so your body knows that when you eat, 30 minutes later, your liver’s going to jump into action, then your adrenal glands and kidneys are going to do their thing, and your fat cells are going to absorb energy on a certain schedule.

There’s been a lot of research showing that, for night shift workers, truck drivers and other people who work on schedules that don’t match the circadian rhythm, their metabolism is thrown off. Some cancers may even be associated with night shift work or circadian imbalances. Your body is expecting to metabolize food at certain times of the day but if you are living at a different time of day, you’re eating food when your fat cells want to be sleeping.

Michel Siffre is a French cave explorer. In the 1960s, at the height of the space race, scientists were thinking about whether humans could live for a long time in isolation in deep space. Siffre had this idea: What if I go live in this cave for a period of weeks, and monitor my own heart rate and sleep cycle? What does living in isolation away from the sun do to the body? It was clear that humans have circadian cycles and that our body temperatures go up and down on a reliable 24-hour cycle. But Siffre was the first to show that the circadian
cycle in humans is not exactly 24 hours long.

He went on to repeat a similar experiment in a cave in Texas. He was down there for about 6 months, all by himself. He could talk to people up on the surface every once in a while by message. But he had no idea what time it was. He all but went nuts from loneliness and sensory deprivation, because his sleep cycle went totally out of whack. There were times when he would sleep for 40 hours straight then be awake for a couple of days in a row, without knowing it. When he finally came out, he thought that he had been called out a month too soon because his count of the days was so far off.

Two very good but very separate questions! Time speeds up when we’re having fun for reasons that are going to sound circular and even tautological: i.e. when you’re having fun you aren’t looking at the clock or paying attention to the time. By contrast, when you’re bored and have nothing else to do, you’re thinking about the time.

Why does time seem to speed up as we get old? It’s one of the great paradoxes. The funny thing is, in surveys, whether they’re 20, 40, 60 or 80, 85 percent of people in every range say time is speeding up. All indications seem to be that it’s not so much that the time goes by faster, though. My sense of it is that, as you get older, you become more aware of how little time you have, so the time you have feels more precious.



The neatest experience I had was spending two weeks at a biological research station on the north slope of Alaska, just above the Arctic Circle. We were in constant daylight and I’d never experienced anything like that before. It was amazing and unnerving. Like everyone, I am accustomed to thinking of sleep as this demarcation between one day and the next. But when the sun is always up, I might sleep for 8 hours and it would seem like a nap. Two weeks was really one long day. It was deeply disorienting but that’s what I went there to experience.
I had hoped I would meet people who were studying circadian rhythms but none of them were. They were all studying different aspects of ecology and climate change on a much longer time scale than I had gone there to find. It did make me face the profound reality of the kind of long term change that we are now causing on the planet.

The thing that fascinated me most is the idea of time as a social glue, a language, which is
fundamental to all of our social interactions. We can’t interact and have social lives without it. What we do as a social species is share time. That’s almost the definition of being a social species. Once I understood that, it suddenly felt more important to wear a watch.

Even if I’m lying in bed at night with no clock or watch, I have clocks in every cell. All of those clocks together make a master clock. It’s not like I can get away from time. I might delude myself briefly into thinking so, but I can’t. We are filled with clocks.
By Simon Worrall

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Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: What's the Next Step?

It's difficult to describe in a concise list with less than 1,000 words what the definitive direction of artificial intelligence is going to be in a 12-month span. The year 2016 surprised several people in terms of the speed of certain technologies' development and the revised ETA of new AI-driven products hitting the public market.
Here are the four trends that will dominate artificial intelligence in 2017.

1. Language processing will continue
We could call this "natural language processing" or NLP, but let's think more broadly about language for a moment. The key to cognition, for you mavens of Psychology 101, is sophisticated communication, even internal abstract thinking. That will continue to prove critical in driving machine learning 'deeper.'

One place to keep track of progress in the space is in machine translation, which will give you an idea of how sophisticated and accurate our software currently is in translating some of the nuance and implications of our spoken and written language.



That will be the next step in getting personal assistant technology like Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, or Cortana to interpret our commands and questions just a little bit better.

2. Efforts to square machine learning and big data with different health sectors will accelerate
"I envision a system that still has those predictive data pools. It looks at the different data you obtain that different labs are giving all the time," eBay Director of Data Science Kira Radinsky told an audience at Geektime TechFest 2016 last month, pioneering "automated processes that can lead to those types of discoveries."

Biotech researchers and companies are trying to get programs to automate drug discoveries, among other things. Finding correlations in data and extrapolating causation is not the same in all industries, nor in any one sector of medicine. Researchers in heart disease, neurological disorders, and various types of cancer are all organizing different metrics of data. Retrieving that information and programming the proper relationship between all those variables is an endeavor.



One of the areas where this is evident is in computer vision, exemplified by Zebra Medical Vision, which can detect anomalies in CT scans for a variety of organs including the heart and liver. But compiling patient medical records and hunting for diagnostic clues there, as well as constructing better treatment plans, are also markets machine learning is opening in 2017. Other startups like Israel's ‘HealthWatch’ are producing smart clothes that constantly feed medical data to doctors to monitor patients.

This developing ecosystem of health trackers should produce enough information about individual patients or groups of people for algorithms to extract new realizations.
3. They will probably have to come up with another buzzword to go deeper than 'deep learning'

Machines building machines? Algorithms writing algorithms? Machine learning programs will continue adding more layers of processing units, as well as more sophistication to abstract pattern analysis. Deep neural networks will be expected to draw even more observations from unsorted data, just as was mentioned above in regards to health care.



That future buzz term might be “generative” or “adversarial,” as in generative adversarial networks (GANs). Described by MIT Technology Review as the invention of Open AI scientist Ian Goodfellow, GANs will set up two networks like two people with different approaches to a problem. One network will try to create new data (read “ideas”) from a given set of data while the other “tries to discriminate between real and fake data” (let’s assume this is the robotic equivalent to a devil’s advocate).

4. Self-driving cars will force an expensive race among automotive companies
I saved this for last because many readers probably consider this patently obvious. However, the surprise many laypeople and people who might fancy themselves tech insiders had by seeing the speed of the industry’s development might be duplicated in 2017 for the opposite reason. While numbers of companies are testing the technology, it will run into some pun-intended roadblocks this year.



While talking about an “autonomous” vehicle is all the rage, several companies in the testing stage not only are cautious to keep someone behind the wheel if needed, but are also creating entire human-administered command centers to guide the cars.
There are some companies that will likely be able to avoid burning capital because of competition. Consider how NIVDIA is developing cars in conjunction with Audi and Mercedes-Benz, but separately. Still, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan-Renault, Ford, and General Motors are all making very big bets while trying to speed up their timeline and hit autonomous vehicle research milestones more quickly.

Even if the entire industry were to be wrong in a cataclysmic way about the unstoppable future of the self-driving car (which it won't be, but bear with me), there will still be more automated features installed in new vehicle models relatively soon. Companies will be forced to spend big, and fast to match features offered by their competitors.

By Gedalyah Reback

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Meditation in virtual reality: When Philosophy and the Business of Synthetic Technology meet

There’s no paradox in finding your true self via virtual reality because everyday reality is a simulation, says self-help guru Deepak Chopra of his latest venture

The cosmos swirls, wisps of purple, yellow and orange light flickering across the darkness of space, then across the visage of Buddha. An otherworldly plain fills the horizon, framed by the branches of a tree – the tree of enlightenment.

A familiar voice intrudes. “What or who is having this experience right this moment, right now?” Pause. “It is your own being. It is your innermost being that is having the experience, your true self.”

The voice continues. “Live here, with no regrets, no anticipation, no resistance, and you will be free. Freedom is always now. Being is now.”



Even if you enjoy psychedelic animation graphics you may struggle to live here, however, because visits last just 20 minutes and they are not real, not free and not quite now.
Welcome – if you have the headset or appropriate app – to Deepak Chopra’s latest venture: virtual reality (VR) meditation.

The new age entrepreneur and self-help guru unveiled the simulation, titled “Finding your true self”, this week at the headquarters of Wevr, a VR firm in Silicon Beach, Los Angeles’ tech hub.

Chopra, who narrates the simulation, hopes to sell the experience via booths at airports, hospitals and other locations, and via phones and laptops enabled with VR platforms.
“In 20 minutes you get a journey to enlightenment. The goal is to feel grounded and understand yourself a little better,” he told the Guardian. The technology, he said, facilitated an understanding of consciousness which eluded even René Descartes, the 17th century French philosopher. “He was good for his time but didn’t have VR to take it to the next level.”
A bold claim for a nascent technology more associated with gaming and pornography than reflection and contemplation. But Chopra, 68, has not built a lucrative brand and sold millions of books such as The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success through timidity.



Meditation’s benefits – improved focus, lower stress, inner peace – require investments of time, effort and discipline which frustrate many would-be practitioners. A vast market, Chopra hopes for a simulation which mixes “insights, contemplation and entertainment”.

Meditation purists may wonder if that is cheating. Those who simply wonder if it works will be able to find out when the product launches, perhaps in a few weeks. “Soon, very soon,” said Anthony Batt, Wevr’s co-founder. The app will cost $10, he said.

For that, according to a three-minute trailer shown to the Guardian and others at the company’s headquarters, you get trippy graphics, heavy on purple, with otherworldly sound effects laid over statements which, depending on perspective, are insightful, gnomic or nonsense.

There was no paradox between finding your true self via virtual reality because everyday reality is itself a simulation, said Chopra. An insect with 100 eyes, for instance, views the world differently than a human.

“For 30 years people have been coming to my lectures saying they don’t get it. Well now they can.”

Asked if the simulation tried to cross Descartes, who coined the maxim “I think, thefore I am,” with the science fiction film The Matrix, Chopra beamed. “Absolutely!”



The simulation features the Bodhi tree under which Buddha is said to have sat.
The project is the brainchild of Chopra’s son, Gotham, a Los Angeles film-maker. “I’ve been hearing my father talk about simulation for 30 years. I realized this would be a tool for him.”

Earlier versions featuring water were discarded for an impressionistic interpretation of the Bodhi tree in eastern India under which Buddha is said to have sat around 500 BC, seeking and eventually finding enlightenment. “We wanted to replicate that,” said Gotham.

Designers worked on the project at Wevr’s headquarters, a Frank Gehry-designed house where Dennis Hopper lived, partied and encountered his own virtual reality through alcohol and drugs.

Strapping on a headset or peering at a computer screen, were not inimical to contemplation, said Chopra. “I’ve never been too attached to tradition. We’re an evolving species. If you don’t keep up with technology you’re not in touch with the zeitgeist and you may as well pack it in.”
Source Rory Carroll, Los Angeles

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Experimental Treatment for Parkinson’s Symptoms Shows Early Promise

Depicted is a reconstruction of bi-hemispheric DBS electrodes that have been surgically placed into the most common target structure for treatment of Parkinson Disease, the sub-thalamic nucleus (orange). Other subcortical structures include the red nucleus (green), the substantia ‘nigra’ (yellow), the internal (cyan) and external (blue) pallidum and the striatum (red). A stimulation volume is modeled by applying 2V (at 1000Ω impedance) to the second-uppermost contact of the left electrode. Structural ‘fibertracts’ traversing through this volume are visualized and cortical regions that they connect with the stimulation volume are selected from an automatic anatomical labeling atlas and visualized. NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Andreashorn and is for illustrative purposes only

DBS Plus, a new version of deep brain stimulation, shows promise in helping to relieve Parkinson’s symptoms.

About 14 years ago, Bill Crawford noticed a persistent twitching in one of his fingers that was interfering with his rehearsal time as the music pastor at Porter Memorial Church.
“It was driving me crazy,” said the 57-year-old Lexingtonian.

He’d noticed a few other things too, like weakness. He had mentioned it to his primary care physician, who ordered heart and lung function tests, but both were negative.

Finally, however, he was so weak that he could no longer ride his bike. “I just couldn’t seem to go,” he said. So he made an appointment with a neurologist.

After a few minutes with Crawford, the neurologist asked him to return on Monday – and bring his wife Lisa with him.

On that dreadful day, the neurologist told Bill that he had Parkinson’s disease. At the time, Bill was just 44 years old.

“Obviously not what you want to hear,” Crawford said. “But then I began to think of Michael J. Fox and all he had accomplished, and I thought I could do that too.”

Eventually, though, the medicines that helped Bill control his Parkinson’s symptoms began to lose their effectiveness.

“There is no cure for Parkinson’s, and treatments we currently have at our disposal can only reduce symptoms,” explained Dr. John T. Slevin, a specialist at UK HealthCare’s Kentucky Neuroscience Institute, who began treating Crawford in 2006. “The disease progression inevitably overcomes the drugs’ capacity to alleviate the rigidity and tremor that are hallmarks of Parkinson’s.”

That meant that Crawford would go into what he called “full body charley horses” – sudden, painful involuntary spasms that left him paralyzed and lying on the floor for as much as 45 minutes.

“It was the pits,” Crawford said. Sometimes at the last minute he would be unable to conduct
musical performances at church services, which was particularly disheartening. “I didn’t want to be a spectacle.”

It was then that Slevin suggested a treatment called Deep Brain Stimulation and connected Crawford with UK HealthCare neurosurgeon Dr. Craig van Horne.

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is a surgical procedure used to treat the problems associated with Parkinson’s disease. The procedure involves implanting electrodes into the brain that are connected to a small, pacemaker-like device implanted in the chest. These electrodes produce electrical signals that override the abnormal electrical impulses caused by the disease, which attacks and breaks down nerve cells in the brain.



The procedure isn’t suitable for everyone and requires thorough psychological testing and motion studies to ensure that a patient is ready for DBS. “I wasn’t sure I would qualify,” Crawford said. “But I knew this was my last chance.”

Crawford considers it a blessing that he was, in fact, qualified to receive DBS. But then came an additional surprise: after further testing, van Horne told Crawford that he was qualified to participate in a study for a new version of DBS called “DBS Plus.”

Van Horne explains that the central nervous system – which is comprised of the brain and spinal cord – is unable to heal itself after injury or disease. However, peripheral nerves from the rest of the body are able to regenerate.

“Our study is designed to test whether taking a small part of peripheral nerve tissue and putting it in the brain would prompt healing in the areas of the central nervous system damaged by Parkinson’s,” he said.

With DBS Plus, van Horne and his team (Greg Gerhard, PhD, and George Quintero, PhD,) take a small piece of nerve tissue from the patient’s ankle and implant it in their brain. Because the tissue is from a patient’s own body there are no concerns about rejection, and because the experimental treatment is applied during a procedure that was declared safe and effective by U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) almost two decades ago, DBS Plus is considered relatively safe with only minimal additional risk.



Nonetheless, van Horne is cautious about the process of enrolling patients in the study.
“It’s more ethical, in my opinion, to wait until after a patient qualifies for the basic DBS before I tell them about my study,” he said. “I don’t want patients to elect to do DBS just because they want DBS Plus.”

And van Horne says he was thrilled that Crawford qualified for the study.
“When I met Bill for the first time, he was lying paralyzed on the floor in the treatment room,” van Horne recalled. “It was a startling and heart-breaking sight.”
Crawford received DBS Plus in August 2015. His family can’t get over the dramatic changes in his mobility.

“I’m climbing ladders now, I can plan our church’s worship time, I can lead the services, I can still lead others in worship,” he said.

The charley horses have gone away, and Crawford now takes just one or two pills a day, down from 12 before the surgery. A before and after video of Crawford walking the halls outside van Horne’s office is astonishing.

To date, 34 patients have participated in the DBS Plus study with encouraging results. Of the 17 patients that are 12 months out from their procedure, 65 percent of them have shown a clinically important improvement in motor performance as a result of the graft.



Van Horne is quick to point out that the study needs to be tested on a larger sample size at many other medical centers around the country before it can be deemed a viable treatment. Furthermore, he cautions, while 12-month results are promising, it’s important to evaluate effectiveness over a longer term. But assuming all goes as well as it has so far, DBS Plus shows promise as a means of slowing down the disease process.

Van Horne and his team garner no financial benefit from DBS Plus, which adds just a fraction of cost to the DBS surgery that is already covered by most insurance plans. “Our payback is the gratification we receive in seeing our patients do well,” van Horne said.

Crawford understands that DBS Plus isn’t a cure for his Parkinson’s, but is delighted to have a little more time to enjoy life.

“‘Feeling the beat’ is critical to my work as a musician, and my Parkinson’s had begun to take that away from me,” he said. “I couldn’t even snap my fingers with the music anymore.”
But, said Crawford, as he woke up from the surgery, he instinctively began to tap his fingers like a metronome. Two members of the team, Julie Gurwell, the PA responsible for programming the DBS equipment, and Ann Hanley, a Parkinson’s patient who personally accompanies patients through their surgeries, were sitting with him, and they asked him what he was doing.

“I was too emotional to explain but I managed to say ‘I can feel the beat.’ And they high-fived each other.”
Source: Laura Dawahare – University of Kentucky
NEUROSCIENCE NEWSJANUARY 6, 2017

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Glass Solar Roofing: Helpful Innovation or Unrealistic Luxury Item?

By: Alexandria Addesso

Cost-efficient and eco-friendly are buzzwords used in many new product pitches being that they are major concerns of “conscious” consumers. Solar energy has grown as an industry tremendously in the past several years due to its use as a cleaner power source. Solar panels, although initially more expensive when first installed, are believed to save users money on their energy bills in the long run.



Last October Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX amongst many other occupational titles, unveiled his newest project which is solar roof made out of many glass tiles. He revealed the solar glass roof at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, CA.

"So the basic proposition will be: Would you like a roof that looks better than a normal roof, lasts twice as long, costs less and—by the way—generates electricity? Why would you get anything else?," said Musk.

The tiles will come in four different variations which include slate glass tile, textured Glass Tile, Tuscan Glass Tile, and Smooth Glass Tile. But could such an innovation really be cheaper than a good old shingled roof? According to Musk the solar glass roofs will be cheaper than the terra cotta or slate roof styles that they are trying to mimic, which are the most expensive roofs on the market.

"The solar roof consists of uniquely designed glass tiles that complement the aesthetics of any home, embedded with the highest efficiency photovoltaic cells," explained a statement released by Tesla. "Customers can choose which sections of their roof will contain the hidden solar technology while still having the entire roof look the same."



The solar glass roofs function by utilizing three levels of glass film, then solar cells. When the sunlight reaches solar cells it is converted to energy and saved on a power wall. The glass solar roofs have not been priced or mass produced yet, the projected date is mid-2017. Although they may be beneficial and aesthetically pleasing, they will most likely be a highly priced luxury item.

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Tangled Up in Space-time

Hundreds of researchers in a collaborative project called “It from Qubit” say space and time may spring up from the quantum entanglement of tiny bits of information

“All the world’s a stage…,” Shakespeare wrote, and physicists tend to think that way, too. Space seems like a backdrop to the action of forces and fields that inhabit it but space itself is not made of anything—or is it? Lately scientists have begun to question this conventional thinking and speculate that space—and its extension according to general relativity, spacetime—is actually composed of tiny chunks of information. These chunks might interact to create spacetime and give rise to its properties, such as the concept that curvature in spacetime causes gravity. If so, the idea might not just explain spacetime but might help physicists achieve a long-sought goal: a quantum theory of gravity that can merge general relativity and quantum mechanics, the two grand theories of the universe that tend not to get along. Lately the excitement of this possibility has engrossed hundreds of physicists who have been meeting every three months or so under the banner of a project dubbed “It from Qubit.”

The “it” in this case is spacetime, and the qubit (pronounced “cue-bit,” from “quantum bit”) represents the smallest possible amount of information—a computer “bit” on a quantum scale. The idea suggests the universe is built up from some underlying code, and that by cracking this code, physicists will finally have a way to understand the quantum nature of large-scale events in the cosmos. The most recent It from Qubit (IfQ) meeting was held in July at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, where organizers were expecting about 90 registrants. Instead, they got so many applications they had to expand to take 200 and simultaneously run five satellite sessions at other universities where scientists could participate remotely. “I think this is one of the most, if not the most, promising avenues of research toward pursuing quantum gravity,” says Netta Engelhardt, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University who is not officially involved in It from Qubit but who has attended some of its meetings. “It’s just taking off.”



Because the project involves both the science of quantum computers and the study of spacetime and general relativity, it brings together two groups of researchers who do not usually tend to collaborate: quantum information scientists on one hand and high-energy physicists and string theorists on the other. “It marries together two traditionally different fields: how information is stored in quantum things and how information is stored in space and time,” says Vijay Balasubramanian, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania who is an IfQ principal investigator.

About a year ago the Simons Foundation, a private organization that supports science and mathematics research, awarded a grant to found the It from Qubit collaboration and finance physicists to study and hold meetings on the subject. Since then excitement has grown and successive meetings have drawn in more and more researchers, some official members of the collaboration funded by Simons and many others simply interested in the topic.



“The project is addressing very important questions, but very difficult questions,” says IfQ collaborator Beni Yoshida, a postdoctoral researcher at Perimeter. “Collaboration is necessary—it’s not like a single person can solve this problem.” Even scientists outside of the project have taken notice. “If the link with quantum information theory proves as successful as some anticipate, it could very well spark the next revolution in our understanding of space and time,” says string theorist Brian Greene of Columbia University, who is not involved in IfQ. “That’s a big deal and hugely exciting.”
Source: Clara Moskowitz

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Are Indigenous Australians The Oldest Civilization?

By: Alexandria Addesso

When ancient civilizations are spoken of Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Mesopotamians usually get brought up. We look to these groups as instrumental in the building of early civilized societies. Yet a recent study coming out of the University of Cambridge has uncovered new information that will change who we recall when thinking about the oldest civilization.

According to this study, aboriginal Australians are the oldest civilization on the planet. Researchers from several different continents studied groups of indigenous Australians and spoke to them about what they themselves knew about their origins. They also extracted DNA samples from the saliva of 83 Aboriginal Australians and 25 Papuans from New Guinea. After the DNA was sequenced it was uncovered that Aboriginal Australians most likely migrated out of Africa approximately 75,000 years ago in comparison to European and Asian ancestral groups who would have made the same migration about 58,000 years ago.



“Our results suggest that, rather than having left in a separate wave, most of the genomes of Papuans and Aboriginal Australians can be traced back to a single ‘Out of Africa’ event which led to modern worldwide populations,” said senior author from the Sanger Institute and University of Cambridge Manjinder Sandhu.

"It was a truly amazing journey that must have demanded exceptional survival skills and bravery," said Professor Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen.
In their trek through Asia to Australia via the landbridge, it is also believed that the oldest civilization on Earth interbred with a Serbian ancestral group called the Denisovans. This was discovered to have taken place around 44,000 years ago, the researchers also found out that Aboriginal Australians separated from Papuans approximately 37,000 years ago, before the Australian land mass separated from New Guinea roughly 10,000 years ago.

Common knowledge, while always common is not always accurate but is always changing. What was believed to be scientifically accurate when we were children is often disproven by the time we are adults. This is the result of inquiring minds constantly questioning everything. Will an even older civilization be uncovered in the next several decades? Stay curious.

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Scientists find evidence for Alternate Theory of How Life Arose

A new study led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) offers a twist on a popular theory for how life on Earth began about four billion years ago.

The study questions the "RNA world" hypothesis, a theory for how RNA molecules evolved to create proteins and DNA. Instead, the new research offers evidence for a world where RNA and DNA evolved simultaneously.

"Even if you believe in a RNA-only world, you have to believe in something that existed with RNA to help it move forward," said Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, associate professor of chemistry at TSRI and senior author of the new study. "Why not think of RNA and DNA rising together, rather than trying to convert RNA to DNA by means of some fantastic chemistry at a prebiotic stage?"

The study was published recently in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

A Look Back in Time
Researchers have explored the RNA world hypothesis for more than 30 years. The idea behind this theory is that a series of chemical reactions led to the formation of self-replicating RNA molecules. RNA then evolved to create proteins and enzymes that resembled early versions of what makes up life today. Eventually, these enzymes helped RNA produce DNA, which led to complex organisms.

On the surface, RNA and DNA molecules look similar, with DNA forming a ladder-like structure (with nucleobase pairs as the rungs and sugar molecule backbones as the sides) and RNA forming what looks like just one side of a ladder.



If the RNA world theory is accurate, some researchers believe there would have been many cases where RNA nucleotides were mixed with DNA backbones, creating "heterogeneous" strands. If stable, these blended "chimeras" would have been an intermediate step in the transition to DNA.

Problems with Instability
However, the new study shows a significant loss of stability when RNA and DNA share the same backbone. The chimeras do not stay together as well as pure RNA or pure DNA, which would compromise their ability to hold genetic information and replicate.

"We were surprised to see a very deep drop in what we would call the 'thermal stability,'" said Krishnamurthy, who in addition to his position at TSRI has joint appointments with the National Science Foundation (NSF)-National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Center for Chemical Evolution and the Simons Collaboration on the Origins of Life. This instability appeared to be due to a difference in the DNA sugar molecule structure versus the RNA sugar molecule.

The finding supported previous research from Nobel laureate and Harvard University Chemistry and Chemical Biology Professor Jack Szostak that showed a loss of (nucleotide-binding aptamer) function when RNA mixed with DNA.



Because of this instability, chimeras in the RNA world would have likely died off in favor of more stable RNA molecules. This reflects what scientists see in cells today: If RNA nucleobases mistakenly join a DNA strand, sophisticated enzymes will rush to fix the mistake. Evolution has led to a system that favors more stable, "homogeneous" molecules.

These sophisticated enzymes were probably not around at the time of RNA and DNA's early evolution, so these substitutions may have had a crippling effect on the molecules' ability to replicate and function. "The transition from RNA to DNA would not have been easy without mechanisms to keep them separate," said Krishnamurthy.

Considering a Second Theory
This realization led the scientists to consider an alternate theory: RNA and DNA may have arisen in tandem.

Krishnamurthy emphasized that his lab is not the first to propose this theory, but the findings on chimeric instability give scientists new evidence to consider.
If the two evolved at the same time, DNA could have established its own homogeneous system early on. RNA could have still evolved to produce DNA, but that may have occurred after it first met DNA and got to know its raw materials.

Krishnamurthy added that scientists will never know exactly how life began (barring the invention of a time machine), but by considering circumstances of early evolution, scientists can gain insights into the fundamentals of biology.



In addition to Krishnamurthy, authors of the study "RNA-DNA Chimeras in the Context of an RNA-world Transition to an RNA/DNA-world," were Jesse V. Gavette (first author) and Matthias Stoop of TSRI and the NSF-NASA Center for Chemical Evolution; and Nicholas V. Hud of the Georgia Institute of Technology and the NSF-NASA Center for Chemical Evolution.


This is a computer graphic of an RNA molecule. Credit: Richard Feldmann/Wikipedia

Source:
Jesse V. Gavette ,Provided by: The Scripps Research Institute

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Albert Einstein was Wrong!

Quantum Spookiness Confirmed

An international group effort and a recently issued research paper may have just settled a century old physics debate. Quantum mechanics is, indeed, spooky. Quantum Entanglement, a part of quantum mechanics, tells us that two particles can be openly linked even across huge distances. If you measure the rotation of one particle, you will instantly know the spin of its entangled particle.

Physicists have considered this behavior as “spooky” as it doesn’t follow our daily logic at all. Common sense tells us that objects across the cosmos cannot possibly be linked, but in the quantum world, they are. Quantum mechanics also states that properties of particles are only stable when the particle is perceived.



Several physicists, counting Albert Einstein, opposed this idea as it went in contradiction of the very nature of the actual world. In the 1930s when quantum mechanics was a developing field, Einstein was a supporter of “local realism,” saying that only nearby objects could affect each other. Einstein and several other physicists established the ‘hidden variables theory’ to clarify the spooky behavior.

They claimed that our knowledge of quantum mechanics was partial and there might be unseen variables that we didn’t yet understand. In the 1960s a physicist called John Bell formulated a mathematical expression, called an inequality, to check for these so-called unseen variables. He comprehended that if these unseen variables did certainly exist, there would be a boundary to how linked the particles were. If they surpassed the set limit then the hidden variables did not exist.

Though, the experiment, called as Bell’s Inequality, did not ultimately close the door on local realism. The tests involved entangled photons, which can get lost along the way, and researcher conducting the experiments might not detect all photons produced.



In the recent experiment, directed by Professor Ronald Hanson of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, we have two scientists, we will name them Alice and Bob, in two workshops 1.3 kilometers apart. Each laboratory has a diamond chip, containing an electron whose rotation was entangled with a photon. The photons were then directed to a third lab in between Alice and Bob, where a sensor records the entrance time. If two photons reached at the same time they would be entangled, resulting in the electrons being entangled also.

The experiment took time of nine days. In that time, scientists noted 245 positive entanglements. While other experiments over the last few decades have also maintained Bell’s limit, this new experiment acquires from their inadequacies to overcome experimental drawbacks. Previous test used incompetent detectors, only measuring a slight number of the particles passing through them. New experiments used near-perfect sensors, but the entangled particles were close enough to possibly connect. In the recent experiment, the team used high-quality sensors and measurements collected before the electrons could conceivably exchange signals with each other, creating it the first to close both loopholes.



The outcomes of this experiment have big consequences for the world of quantum cryptography, meaning entangled photons could possibly generate safe encryption keys. Terminating the loopholes would guarantee that computer systems could sense if anyone tried to interrupt the keys, as it would halt the entanglement and activate an alarm.

Source: Umer Abrar - mirzavadoodulbaig@gmail.com

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