Posts tagged as Scientific American
Birds Am Learn Grammar
"This study revealed that Bengalese finches can learn grammar and, furthermore, that their grammatical abilities involve a specific part of the brain region distinct from other brain regions involved in singing. This is similar to what neuroscientists understand about human language processing. If the tweets of birds can be roughly likened to strings of human words, and if birdbrains process songs in a way similar to how human brains process language, future research may tackle whether these animals possess other cognitive abilities once thought to be singularly characteristic of human intelligence." READ MORE
The Jig Is Up: Thought-Scanning Is Almost Here
This is mind-blowing and deeply disturbing: Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, using functional magnetic imaging, have "reconstructed the internal 'movie' that plays in a person’s head." So, the images on the left there are of what volunteers were watching on a screen, the images on the right are simultaneous electronic pulses in their brains. Pretty close to a motion-picture scanning of thought. This presents trouble for people who, no matter what they might be seeing outside their head, are always only seeing the pentagram from the cover of Rush's 2112 album or a giant pile of pistachio nuts inside their head. Similarly troubling, scientists are also making progress on the first physiological gauge of pain. Which will eventually make it more difficult to get out of class to go to the nurse by saying your foot hurts.
Donald Sutherland's Riding-Mower Pipe-Organ Rain-Seed Gun To Be Replaced By Kilometer-High Suspended Hose And Stadium-Sized Hydrogen Balloon
"Next month, researchers in the U.K. will start to pump water nearly a kilometer up into the atmosphere, by way of a suspended hose. The experiment is the first major test of a piping system that could one day spew sulfate particles into the stratosphere at an altitude of 20 kilometers, supported by a stadium-size hydrogen balloon. The goal is geoengineering, or the 'deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment' in the words of the Royal Society of London, which provides scientific advice to policymakers. In this case, researchers are attempting to re-create the effects of volcanic eruptions to artificially cool Earth." READ MORE
Computers Get All Weirded Out When They Hear More Than One Person Talking At A Time
"You are at a party, and Alex is telling a boring story. You are much more interested in the gossip that Sam is recounting to Pat, so you tune out Alex and focus on Sam’s words. Congratulations: you have just demonstrated the human ability to solve the 'cocktail party problem'—to pick out one thread of speech from the babble of two or more people. Computers so far lack that power." READ MORE
Being High Makes People Nicer
"In the first study they found that twice as many mall shoppers who had just ridden an up escalator contributed to the Salvation Army than shoppers who had just ridden the down escalator ... In a final study, participants watched film clips of scenes taken from an airplane above the clouds, or through the window of a passenger car. Participants who had watched the clip of flying up above the clouds were 50 percent more cooperative in a computer game than those who had watched the car ride down on the ground. Overall these studies show remarkable consistency, linking height and different prosocial behaviors—i.e., donations, volunteering, compassion, and cooperation." READ MORE
Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest And Perhaps Least Effective Word
"Sometimes apologies are offered not to make amends with victims but to signal to an external audience that one is a good person." READ MORE
So That's Why It Seems Like The World Is Ending
"We all believe we live in an exceptional time, perhaps even a critical moment in the history of the species. Technology appears to have given us power over the atom, our genomes, the planet-with potentially dire consequences. This attitude may stem from nothing more than our desire to place ourselves at the center of the universe. "It's part of the fundamental limited perspective of our species to believe that this moment is the critical one and critical in every way-for good, for bad, for the final end of humanity," says Nicholas Christenfeld, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego. Imagining the end of the world is nigh makes us feel special." READ MORE
South Africans: Trust Me, Don't Smoke Vulture Brains
This is pretty embarrassing, but one night, when I was a freshman in college, my friend Todd and I got so high from smoking pot that we thought we could read each other's minds. We were in my room doing too many bong hits and one of us (I'll take responsibility, though I don't remember for sure) had the brilliant idea of, "What would happen if we drank the bongwater?" I know: yuck: we might as well have eaten used cigarette butts. But this is the state we'd put ourselves in. So we drank the bongwater. READ MORE
There Are So Many Terms For Women Who Like Men Who Like Men
"There was absolutely no link between a woman's relationship status, the number of times she'd been on the receiving end of a breakup, or her body esteem and the number of gay male friends in her life," observes Scientific American's Jesse Bering of a recent study which debunks myths about the type of lady he calls "the elusive fag hag." In the course of the discussion, research psychologist Bering cites an impressive number of other appellations with which I was previously unfamiliar. "The French refer to such women as soeurettes ('Little Sisters'), the German brand them as Schwulen-Muttis ('Gay Moms'), and the Mexicans know them as joteras ('jota' is commonly used for 'fag'). In Japan, these women are called okoge, translated literally as 'the burnt rice that sticks to the bottom of the pot.'" And there are plenty of exciting variations in the English language as well! READ MORE
They Need To Teach This Robot To Nod Like It Agrees Even When It's Thinking About Something Else
Soon human office workers will not have to put on their pants or get up from their cubicles to attend meetings. This fall, a company called Anybots will start selling a robot called QB that is designed to attend meetings, on-site tours, or probably any other gathering or presentation that people can't or don't really want to be at in person. It looks a little bit like a vacuum cleaner or push-mower with video-camera eyes and a hat with a screen on it. (Or, as Scientific American notes, Olivia Newton-John.) A lazy human can control a QB over the internet from the comfort of his or her own desk. One can see what the robot sees, hear what the robots hear, and talk or shout at colleagues through a speaker on the robot head. There's even a laser pointer to point at stuff. READ MORE
