A collection of the best space images of the week. Above: June 30: A magnificent view of the region around the star R Coronae Australis, which lies at the heart of a nearby star-forming region and is surrounded by a delicate bluish reflection nebula embedded in a huge dust cloud. The image reveals surprising new details in this dramatic area of sky.
See more at Fox News (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
“Researchers reporting in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin last week say people are drawn to others who resemble their parents or themselves. This may explain why incest taboos are found in many cultures – to counter a natural tendency.
University of Illinois psychologist, Chris Fraley, said there had been a century-long debate on whether incest taboos are psychological or cultural adaptations designed to suppress a biological urge. In the early 20th century Sigmund Freud, a psychoanalyst, proposed it was psychological, while Edward Westermarck, a sociologist, proposed it was cultural. Westermarck thought there was a critical time in childhood during which people would not find attractive people who were raising them or raised with them.
Most modern researchers think Westermarck was correct, but a new study led by Fraley suggests there may also be a psychological component in which we align ourselves with our kin, who are genetically close to us.
The research involved three experiments. In the first, volunteers were shown pictures of strangers’ faces and asked to rate them on sexual attractiveness. They were unaware that they were also being shown photographs just before the strangers’ faces, and these were flashed so quickly they could only be processed subliminally. Half the volunteers were flashed a picture of their opposite gender parent, while the remaining subjects were flashed a picture of an unrelated person.
The results of this experiment were that those who were exposed to a picture of their parent generally found the stranger’s face more sexually attractive than those who were shown the photo of an unrelated person.”
Read more at Physorg
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, a Distinguished Speaker at the University at Buffalo, answered a student’s question about federal cutbacks to NASA funding. Tyson is host of the PBS series NOVA scienceNOW and director of New York City’s Hayden Planetarium.
“Through the process of natural selection, it finds new uses for existing features, often resulting in what is known as convergent evolution — the development of similar biological traits in different orders of animals, such as powered flight in birds and bats.
Now, research by University of Nebraska-Lincoln biologists has found convergent evolution of a key physiological innovation that traces back through the two deepest branches of the vertebrate family tree.
A team led by Jay Storz (prounounced storts), assistant professor of biological sciences, analyzed the complete genome sequences of multiple vertebrate species and found that jawless fishes (e.g., lampreys and hagfish) and jawed vertebrates (pretty much everything else, including humans) independently invented different mechanisms of blood-oxygen transport to sustain aerobic metabolism.”
Read more at Physorg
“Your brain is hard wired to pay attention to about 150 people. Try to have a relationship with any more than that, and your life will turn to pure crap. Just ask the Military, Gore-Tex, or Krippendorf’s tribe. They’ll all tell you the same thing. One fifty is the way to go. They’ve known for hundreds of years that people work best in groups of 150 or less. Now it’s your turn.
The human cortex, responsible for complex thought and reasoning, is overgrown in humans when compared to other mammals. Scientists have argued for years about why this is the case.
One theory holds that our brains evolved because our primate ancestors began to gather food in more complex ways. They began eating fruit instead of grasses and leaves. This involved traveling long distances to find food, and required each species to maintain a complex mental map in order to keep track of fruit trees. More brainpower might have been needed to determine if a fruit was ripe, or to discern proper methods for peeling fruit or cracking nuts.
The problem with this theory is that if one tries to match brain size with the eating habits of primates, it doesn’t work. Some small-brained monkeys are eating fruit and maintaining complex maps and some larger brained primates are eating leaves.”
Read more at Common Sense
“We have successfully uncovered and mapped the most comprehensive long-distance network of the Macaque monkey brain, which is essential for understanding the brain’s behavior, complexity, dynamics and computation,” Dr. Modha says. “We can now gain unprecedented insight into how information travels and is processed across the brain.
“We have collated a comprehensive, consistent, concise, coherent, and colossal network spanning the entire brain and grounded in anatomical tracing studies that is a stepping stone to both fundamental and applied research in neuroscience and cognitive computing.”
The scientists focused on the long-distance network of 383 brain regions and 6,602 long-distance brain connections that travel through the brain’s white matter, which are like the “interstate highways” between far-flung brain regions, he explained, while short-distance gray matter connections (based on neurons) constitute “local roads” within a brain region and its sub-structures.
Full story at Kurzweil
“Computational rephotography is a fancy name for photos taken from the exact same viewpoint as an old photograph. Actually, that’s just rephotography. The “computational” part is when software helps out.
I’m a sucker for photos of old street scenes. Seeing familiar parts of your city as they were many decades ago is fascinating, and if people are good enough to snap a new version, you can enjoy the differences of places you have never seen. At Flickr and a site called Historypin, you can see the old shots lined up over the new, like a window into the past.
Researchers at MIT have found a way to automate the process. Currently, they use a laptop to do the heavy lifting, but the software could just as easily sit inside a camera. In fact, that’s the plan. The system compares the scene in front of the camera with a historical photograph. It then works out the difference between the two and gives the photographer instructions along the lines of “up a bit, left a bit more.”
According to an abstract on rephotography, it is a lot more complicated than it seems. In lining up the images you must consider “six degrees of freedom of 3-D translation and rotation, and the confounding similarity between the effects of camera zoom and dolly”
Read more at Wired (Thanks @LairyT)
“If you’re studying for a test, putting on background music that you like may seem like a good idea. But if you’re trying to memorize a list in order – facts, numbers, elements of the periodic table – the music may actually be working against you, a new study suggests.
Researchers at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff, United Kingdom, looked at the ability to recall information in the presence of different sounds. They instructed 25 participants between ages 18 and 30 try to memorize, and later recall, a list of letters in order. The study authors are Nick Perham and Joanne Vizard, and the study will appear in the September 2010 issue of Applied Clinical Psychology.
Participants were tested under various listening conditions: quiet, music that they’d said they liked, music that they’d said they didn’t like, a voice repeating the number three, and a voice reciting random single-digit numbers.
The study found that participants performed worst while listening to music, regardless of whether they liked that music, and to the speech of random numbers. They did the best in the quiet and while listening to the repeated “three.”
Music may impair cognitive abilities in these scenarios because if you’re trying to memorize things in order, you may get thrown off by the changing words and notes in your chosen song, the authors speculate.”
Read more at CNN Health (Thanks @XLadyClaireX)
“Why does human conversation come so easily? A new study chalks it up to a sort of “mind meld” between participants. Researchers have found that the brains of speakers and listeners become synchronized as they converse and that this “neural coupling” is key to effective communication.
Scientists have traditionally considered talking and listening to be two independent processes. The idea is that speech is produced in some parts of the brain, including a region known as Broca’s area, and understood in others, including a region known as Wernicke’s area. But recent studies suggest that there’s actually much more overlap. For example, partners in a conversation will unconsciously begin imitating each other, adopting similar grammatical structures, speaking rates, and even bodily postures.
This overlap helps people establish a “common ground” during conversation and may even help them predict what the other is going to say next, argue psychologist Martin Pickering of the University of Edinburgh and psychologist Simon Garrod of the University of Glasgow, both in the United Kingdom. Some researchers think that so-called mirror neurons, which fire when one individual observes the actions of another, might be involved in these interactions.”
Read more at Science Mag (Thanks @XLadyClaireX)
One of the highlights of the tour this year was indoor skydiving at Airkix in Milton Keynes. This is quite something. An enormous structure which is in essence an inverted wind tunnel, circulating air through a central chamber. Jump in and you’re airborne. We received the essential lowdown from Sean, our cool and perky trainer, and then each got a go in the flight chamber with Sean helping us along. It is extraordinary, exhilarating, and SO much fun. The team there looked after us very well and what you see in the video is Coops’ edit of Airkix’s footage. We’ve spared the rest of the team from having their escapades published, as, well, you don’t look your best when you’re at it.
Attached to our helmets – by which I mean, you know, our helmets – are toy animals, flapping in the wind. Coops has a monkey, I have a vampire bat. We chose well. You’ll see my effort first, then Mr Coops, and then finally me again doing a few tricks after some more practice. OK, that last bit’s not true. Make sure you watch the last section to show what can be done – it’s the brilliant Sean and he’s a living Spiderman. Just incredible. All this has made us very enthusiastic to do a proper (ie outdoor, terrifying etc) skydive at some point, and the lovely people at The Red Devils have offered to host it. Wowzers. Expect more footage when that happens, though more likely of Coops and me wetting ourselves at so many thousand feet. Wheee!
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