Video: How to explain remarkable coincidences
“A poor understanding of probability leads many people to put forward supernatural explanation for events that are far more common than they think.
This video shows how probability theory is sufficient to explain even seemingly remarkable coincidences.”
(Thanks ’1984′ who left this in a blog comment)
‘Grow-your-own’ organs hope after scientists produce liver in lab from stem cells
“Scientists have grown a liver in a laboratory, offering fresh hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with diseased and damaged organs. It raises the prospect of those in need of transplants one day being offered livers that are ‘made to order’. The first pieces of lab-grown livers could be used in hospitals within just five years, the researchers said.
Scientists have grown a liver in a laboratory, offering fresh hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with diseased and damaged organs. It raises the prospect of those in need of transplants one day being offered livers that are ‘made to order’. The first pieces of lab-grown livers could be used in hospitals within just five years, the researchers said.”
Read more at The Daily Mail
Want to find your mind? Learn to direct your dreams
“Am I awake or am I dreaming?” I ask myself for probably the hundredth time. I am fully awake, just like all the other times I asked, and to be honest I am beginning to feel a bit silly. All week I have been performing this “reality check” in the hope that it will become so ingrained in my mind that I will start asking it in my dreams too.
If I succeed, I will have a lucid dream – a thrilling state of consciousness somewhere between waking and sleeping in which, unlike conventional dreams, you are aware that you are dreaming and able to control your actions. Once you have figured this out, the dream world is theoretically your oyster, and you can act out your fantasies to your heart’s content.
Journalistic interest notwithstanding, I am pursuing lucid dreaming for entertainment. To some neuroscientists, however, the phenomenon is of profound interest, and they are using lucid dreamers to explore some of the weirder aspects of the brain’s behaviour during the dream state (see “Dream mysteries”). Their results are even shedding light on the way our brains produce our rich and complex conscious experience.”
Read more at New Scientist
LA Dodgers owners paid Russian scientist for psychic baseball boost
“As a sport that arouses almost religious fervour it is unsurprising that baseball has its fair share of superstitions. It’s said that you will be jinxed if you lend your bat to another hitter, while some players stick chewing gum on their caps to bring good luck. But rarely in the history of America’s national game has there been anything quite like this. Frank and Jamie McCourt, the multi-millionaire owners of the LA Dodgers, have been revealed to have employed a Russian scientist to beam thought waves to boost the team’s chances.
According to Bill Shaikin of the LA Times, the McCourts paid Vladimir Shpunt several hundred thousand dollars over five years to apply his “V energy” and help the Dodgers to victory. Between 2004, the first season under the McCourts’ ownership, and 2009, Shpunt was retained for Dodgers matches, despite the fact that he knew little about baseball.
He would channel positive vibes towards the players as he sat in Boston, some 3,000 miles from LA. By watching the game on television, he could get instant feedback on how his energy was affecting performance. “It’s very big work. I like this team to win,” Shpunt told Shaikin. Shpunt began his professional life as a physicist in St Petersburg but says he discovered he had healing powers in the 1980s.”
Read more at The Guardian
Homeopathy Awareness Week: Is this the homeopaths’ last stand?
“British homeopaths are celebrating Homeopathy Awareness Week, yet it seems to me there is very little for them to celebrate.
Earlier this year, a report from the Commons Science and Technology Committee concluded that the principles of homeopathy are implausible and that the evidence fails to show that it works better than placebo. The MPs also criticised homeopaths for trying to mislead the public by providing inaccurate information. Their recommendation to government was to stop funding homeopathy on the NHS.
Then the Prince of Wales’s Foundation for Integrated Health, a staunch supporter of homeopathy in the NHS, folded in the midst of a police investigation for fraud and money laundering.
Last month, the British Medical Association described homeopathy as “witchcraft” and called for an end to all funding on the NHS.
A streak of bad luck? Not really. Homeopathy’s fortunes have been crumbling for quite some time. The evidence to suggest that it has effects beyond those of a placebo has become less and less convincing. In 2005, The Lancet even pronounced “the end of homeopathy”.
As a result, one of the five NHS-funded homeopathic hospitals had to close. After assessing the science, its NHS trust found that the evidence did not justify any further funding.
Faced with increasing criticism, UK homeopaths become more and more desperate. My team has found that the Society of Homeopaths even appears to have been in breach of its own code of ethics in attempting to promote homeopathy. On the society’s website, numerous statements about efficacy were made that were not backed by science and so were not allowed under its own regulations.”
Read more at The Guardian
New generation of film makers show surprising results
If ever I saw an example of instant “wow” factor from a camera it’s the following little film. The fact this Cannon SLR is so small means you can “hide” it easier and film without people being quite so aware. The D5Mk2 and other cameras like it are traditionally SLR stills cameras – but their ability to capture incredible HD footage is showing some surprising results from places that are unexpected.
In some countries like Saudi Arabia filming is pretty much illegal. I was recently talking to Gareth from Turquoise TV who told me about a job for Saudi TV they were asked to film and were consequently arrested by the army for doing so. However photographers manage to slip through the net and so they’ve switched to this format as a necessity and with it have significantly reduced costs.
Large Hadron Collider Pop-Up Book
“Pop-up books have always been the exhibitionists of the literary world—all those creases and protrusions. In Voyage to the Heart of Matter, Emma Sanders applies the in-your-face form to science: the Large Hadron Collider. It took CERN 12 years to build the subatomic smasher, and it took Sanders two years to re-create the folded-paper mini-me. She enlisted pop-up genius Anton Radevsky to painstakingly transform the LHC’s many elements into pulp sculpture, but they needed a lot of technical assistance—nearly 40 physicists provided scientific guidance, photos, and sketches of various parts of the $9 billion science experiment.
The scale of the paper particle detector is exact, and you put it together as you read through the book. The process mimics construction of the real collider (except you won’t need an enormous crane). “I nearly created a political incident, because I almost missed one of the magnets,” Sanders says. In the underground version, this magnet is made up of 5.5 miles of wire, but on paper it’s practically imperceptible. “It’s very skinny, but it’s there.”
Why go to all this trouble? Well, before the collider opened, tens of thousands of visitors packed in to see it. Now that it’s up and running, however, the facility is generally off-limits. “To a lot of people, the experiments at the LHC might as well be a black box,” Sanders says. “They’re very excited about it, but they don’t have a clue how it works.” This book makes the science accessible. Dark matter—visible at last!”
Read more at Wired
Drawing reveals if you are lying
“Forget expensive fMRI-based lie detection or iffy polygraph tests, give your suspect a pencil and paper and get them to draw what happened – a new study suggests their artistic efforts will betray whether they are telling the truth or not.
Aldert Vrij’s new study involved 31 police and military participants going on a mock mission to pick up a package from another agent before delivering it somewhere else. Afterwards the participants answered questions about the mission. Crucially, they were also asked to draw the scene of the package pick-up. Half the participants acted as truth-tellers, the others played the part of liars.
Vrij’s team reasoned that clever liars would visualise a location they’d been to, other than where the exchange took place, and draw that. They further reasoned that this would mean they’d forget to include the agent who participated in the exchange. This thinking proved shrewd: liars indeed tended not to draw the agent, whereas truth-tellers did. In fact, 80 per cent of truth tellers and 87 per cent of liars could be correctly classified on the basis of this factor alone.
‘These are high accuracy rates and will be difficult to exceed by any traditional verbal, nonverbal or physiological lie detection tool,’ Vrij’s team said. ‘In fact, we would certainly expect such tools to fare worse.’”
Read more at BPS Research Digest
From Bat Bombs to Goo Guns: Crazy Military Experiments
“Military researchers have poured blood, sweat, tears and taxpayer dollars into all sorts of wacky experiments. There are plenty of reasons that they are willing to take a take a chance on just about anything. Some may feel that we need to invest in risky projects to keep an edge over our adversaries. Others may view unusual projects as a way of raising money for their own personal crusades.
Bat Bombs
Toward the end of World War II, the Air Force was looking for a better way to burn Japanese cities to the ground. A dental surgeon contacted the White House, and suggested strapping small incendiary devices to bats, loading them into cages shaped like bombshells and dropping them over a wide area.
According to the plan, millions of bats would escape from the bombshells as they parachuted toward earth, and the flying mammals would find their way into the attics of barns and factories, where they would rest until the charges they were carrying exploded. In the early 1940s, a test with some armed bats went awry, and they set fire to a small Air Force base in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
After that accident, the project was turned over to the Navy, which continued it for more than a year. During that time, the Marines conducted a successful proof of concept at Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, where they released bats over a mock-up of a Japanese city. The critters were able to start quite a few fires.”
Head over to Wired to read more on 11 crazy military experiments.
Unconscious purchasing urges revealed by brain scans
“You spend more time window shopping than you may realise. Whether someone intends to buy a product or not can be predicted from their brain activity – even when they are not consciously pondering their choices.
The ability to predict from brain scans alone what a person intends to buy, while leaving the potential buyer none the wiser, could bring much-needed rigour to efforts to meld marketing and neuroscience, says Brian Knutson, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California who was not involved in the research.
Neuromarketing, as this field is known, has been employed by drug firms, Hollywood studios and even the Campbell Soup Company to sell their wares, despite little published proof of its effectiveness.
Rather than soup, John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany, attempted to predict which cars people might unconsciously favour. To do so, he and colleague Anita Tusche used functional MRI to scan the brains of two groups of male volunteers, aged 24 to 32, while they were presented with images of a variety of cars.
One group was asked to rate their impressions of the vehicles, while the second performed a distracting visual task while cars were presented in the background. Each volunteer was then shown three cars and asked which they would prefer to buy.”
Read more at New Scientist
