A 3D Atlas Of The Universe
“For the last 12 years, Carter Emmart has been coordinating the efforts of scientists, artists and programmers to build a complete 3D visualization of our known universe. He demos this stunning tour and explains how it’s being shared with facilities around the world. (Recorded at TED2010, February 2010 in Long Beach, CA. Duration: 6:57)”
Via TED Blog
Our brains are more like birds’ than we thought
“For more than a century, neuroscientists believed that the brains of humans and other mammals differed from the brains of other animals, such as birds (and so were presumably better). This belief was based, in part, upon the readily evident physical structure of the neocortex, the region of the brain responsible for complex cognitive behaviors.
A new study, however, by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine finds that a comparable region in the brains of chickens concerned with analyzing auditory inputs is constructed similarly to that of mammals.
“And so ends, perhaps, this claim of mammalian uniqueness,” said Harvey J. Karten, MD, professor in the Department of Neurosciences at UCSD’s School of Medicine, and lead author of the study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition.
Generally speaking, the brains of mammals have long been presumed to be more highly evolved and developed than the brains of other animals, in part based upon the distinctive structure of the mammalian forebrain and neocortex – a part of the brain’s outer layer where complex cognitive functions are centered.”
Read more at Physorg
Scientists Cite Fastest Case of Human Evolution
“Tibetans live at altitudes of 13,000 feet, breathing air that has 40 percent less oxygen than is available at sea level, yet suffer very little mountain sickness.
The reason, according to a team of biologists in China, is human evolution, in what may be the most recent and fastest instance detected so far. Comparing the genomes of Tibetans and Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group in China, the biologists found that at least 30 genes had undergone evolutionary change in the Tibetans as they adapted to life on the high plateau. Tibetans and Han Chinese split apart as recently as 3,000 years ago, say the biologists, a group at the Beijing Genomics Institute led by Xin Yi and Jian Wang. The report appears in Friday’s issue of Science.
If confirmed, this would be the most recent known example of human evolutionary change. Until now, the most recent such change was the spread of lactose tolerance — the ability to digest milk in adulthood — among northern Europeans about 7,500 years ago. But archaeologists say that the Tibetan plateau was inhabited much earlier than 3,000 years ago and that the geneticists’ date is incorrect.
When lowlanders try to live at high altitudes, their blood thickens as the body tries to counteract the low oxygen levels by churning out more red blood cells. This overproduction of red blood cells leads to chronic mountain sickness and to lesser fertility — Han Chinese living in Tibet have three times the infant mortality of Tibetans.
The Beijing team analyzed the 3 percent of the human genome in which known genes lie in 50 Tibetans from two villages at an altitude of 14,000 feet and in 40 Han Chinese from Beijing, which is 160 feet above sea level. Many genes exist in a population in alternative versions. The biologists found about 30 genes in which a version rare among the Han had become common among the Tibetans. The most striking instance was a version of a gene possessed by 9 percent of Han but 87 percent of Tibetans.”
Read more at NYTimes (Thanks DG)
Butterfly Effect In The Brain
“This may not seem surprising to most of us, but it has puzzled neuroscientists for decades. Given that the brain is the most powerful computing device known, how can it perform so well even though the behaviour of its circuits is variable?
A long-standing hypothesis is that the brain’s circuitry actually is reliable – and the apparently high variability is because your brain is engaged in many tasks simultaneously, which affect each other.
It is this hypothesis that the researchers at UCL tested directly. The team – a collaboration between experimentalists at the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research and a theorist, Peter Latham, at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit – took inspiration from the celebrated butterfly effect – from the fact that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas. Their idea was to introduce a small perturbation into the brain, the neural equivalent of butterfly wings, and ask what would happen to the activity in the circuit. Would the perturbation grow and have a knock-on effect, thus affecting the rest of the brain, or immediately die out?
It turned out to have a huge knock-on effect. The perturbation was a single extra ‘spike’, or nerve impulse, introduced to a single neuron in the brain of a rat. That single extra spike caused about thirty new extra spikes in nearby neurons in the brain, most of which caused another thirty extra spikes, and so on. This may not seem like much, given that the brain produces millions of spikes every second. However, the researchers estimated that eventually, that one extra spike affected millions of neurons in the brain.”
Read more at PhysOrg.com
How Old Is The Magic Circle?
You mean you don’t know? No, it doesn’t count if you had to Google it.
The Magic Circle is 105 this year.
It was founded in 1905, when stage magic was incredibly popular with the theatre-going public and was initially proposed by Neil Weaver and Martin Chapender, both magicians, who felt that there was an open risk of the exposure of trade secrets.
In the wake of Chapender’s untimely death at the very young age of 25 a group of amateur and professional magicians assmebled to found an exclusive society. Louis Nikola suggested The Magic Circle as its name and pointed out that it incorporated Chapender’s initials.
Over the past several years The Magic Circle has seen a surge of new interest in the medium, spurred on by the Harry Potter franchise as well as successes of several high-profile stage and television illusionists (including one with a finely chiselled beard).
To join the Circle you have to be nominated by two current members. Being as that’s unlikely to happen for any of us, we can still poke our noses around their headquarters (best unusual venue by the hospitality industry )via an online virtual tour.
Stephen Fry on Wagner
“Stephen Fry explores his passion for controversial composer Richard Wagner. Can he salvage the music he loves from its dark association with Hitler’s Nazi regime? His journey takes him to Germany, Switzerland and Russia as he pieces together the story of the composer’s turbulent career.
Along the way he plays Wagner’s piano, meets the composer’s descendants and eavesdrops on rehearsals for the legendary Bayreuth Festival, the annual extravaganza of Wagner’s music held in a theatre designed by the composer himself.”
Watch on BBC iPlayer
Stephen Fry portrait is also available in the Art Store
2-Billion-Year-Old Fossils May Be Earliest Known Multicellular Life
“A newly discovered group of 2.1 billion-year-old fossil organisms may be the earliest known example of complex life on Earth. They could help scientists understand not just when higher life forms evolved, but why.
The fossils — flat discs almost five inches across, with scalloped edges and radial slits — were either complex colonies of single-celled organisms, or early animals. Either way, they represent an early crossing of a critical evolutionary threshold, and suggest that the crossing was made necessary by radical changes in Earth’s atmosphere.
“There is clearly a relationship between the concentration of oxygen and multicellularity,” said Abderrazak El Albani, a paleobiologist at France’s University of Poitiers. The fossils are described June 30 in Nature. Single-celled organisms emerged from the primordial soup about 3.4 billion years ago. Almost immediately, some gathered in mats. But it was another 1.4 billion years before the first truly multicellular organism, called Grypania spiralis, appears in the fossil record.”
Read more at Wired (Thanks DG)
Computer program deciphers a dead language that mystified linguists
“The lost language of Ugaritic was last spoken 3,500 years ago. It survives on just a few tablets, and linguists could only translate it with years of hard work and plenty of luck. A computer deciphered it in hours.
The computer program relies on a few basic assumptions in order to make intuitive guesses about the language’s structure. Most importantly, the lost language has to be closely related to a known, deciphered language, which in the case of Ugaritic is Hebrew. Second, the alphabets of the two languages need to share some consistent correlations between the individual letters or symbols. There should also be recognizable cognates of words between the two languages, and words that have prefixes or suffixes in one language (like verbs that end in “-ing” or “-ed” in English) should show the same features in the other language.
That might seem like a lot of information for the program to require, but even all that is no guarantee of decipherment. After Ugaritic was first discovered in 1929, it remained untranslatable for years. It finally revealed some of its secrets to German cryptographer Hans Bauer, who was only able to make substantial headway when he guessed the drawing of an ax was next to the Ugaritic word for “ax.” Even this breakthrough wasn’t a complete success, because although Bauer’s guess was correct he matched the wrong sounds and letters together, resulting in a mistranslation.
So, the question for the computer program wasn’t just how quickly it could translate Ugaritic compared to its human counterparts; there’s also whether it could avoid the mistakes and pitfalls that had slowed down the initial decipherment. The program worked by looking for correlations and correspondences at the various levels of languages described above – individual sounds and letters, different segments of the word, and cognates between languages. It then mapped the similarities between Hebrew and Ugaritic, starting with the sounds and then bringing in the other aspects to figure out the most probable matches. By cross-referencing these different parts of language and repeating the process hundreds of thousands of times, the program arrives at a fully deciphered Ugaritic.
The results were stunning. Of the thirty letters in the Ugaritic alphabet, the computer correctly identified twenty-nine of them.”
Read more at io9 (thanks DG)
Happy Birthday Coops!
It’s young Coops Birthday and this time instead of flooding his email – you shuold follow him on @lordcoopy and say a Happy 13th Birthday to him yourself.
