What Colliding Galaxies Look Like: Photos That Will Amaze
“Earlier today NASA released this gorgeous new image of two colliding galaxies that began colliding about 100 million years ago.
The imaging data, which were taken between 1999 and 2005, show the Antennae galaxies, so called because of the long antenna-like “arms,” viewed in wide-angle views of the system. NASA says the features got generated by tidal forces produced during the collision, which is still occurring some 62 million light-years away from the Earth.
It must be one heck of a show to observe up close as it has led to the formation “of millions of stars in clouds of dusts and gas in the galaxies”. The biggest of these young stars have already grown up and since exploded as supernovas.
To find your way through this composite photo, the image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory is blue, the Hubble Space Telescope is in ggold and brown, while and the Spitzer Space Telescope is in red.”
Read more at CBS News
Thinking About God Calms Believers, Stresses Atheists
“Researchers have determined that thinking about God can help relieve anxiety associated with making mistakes. However, the finding only holds for people who believe in a God. The researchers measured brain waves for a particular kind of distress response while participants made mistakes on a test. Those who had been prepared with religious thoughts had a less prominent response to mistakes than those who hadn’t.
“Eighty-five percent of the world has some sort of religious beliefs,” says Michael Inzlicht, who cowrote the study with Alexa Tullett, both at the University of Toronto-Scarborough. “I think it behooves us as psychologists to study why people have these beliefs; exploring what functions, if any, they may serve.” With two experiments, the researchers showed that when people think about religion and God, their brains respond differently—in a way that lets them take setbacks in stride and react with less distress to anxiety-provoking mistakes. Participants either wrote about religion or did a scrambled word task that included religion and God-related words.
Then the researchers recorded their brain activity as they completed a computerized task—one that was chosen because it has a high rate of errors. The results showed that when people were primed to think about religion and God, either consciously or unconsciously, brain activity decreases in areas consistent with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The ACC is associated with a number of things, including regulating bodily states of arousal and alerting us when things are going wrong.
Interestingly, atheists reacted differently. When they were unconsciously primed with God-related ideas, their ACC increased its activity. The researchers suggest that for religious people, thinking about God may provide a way of ordering the world and explaining apparently random events and thus reduce their feelings of distress. In contrast, for atheists, thoughts of God may contradict the meaning systems they embrace and thus cause them more distress.”
Read more at Live Science
Future Crimes Can Be Predicted Perfectly, Scientists Say
“A team from Northwestern University claim they have achieved 100 percent accuracy in reading the minds of make-believe terrorists — simply by attaching electrodes to their scalps and examining their brain waves.
For the study, 29 students were given mock terrorist plans and 30 minutes to learn about an attack on a certain U.S. city. They were asked to work out their own details based on information they were given regarding weapons and methods.
The researchers, who also knew about the mock terrorist plans, monitored the students’ brain waves to find out whether they gave away details of where and when the attacks were to take place. They correlated a rise in brain wave activity to guilty knowledge with 100 percent accuracy across all the students that participated.
According to psychology professor J. Peter Rosenfeld, the “guilty” patterns occur in “P300″ brain waves when meaningful information is shown to a person with “guilty knowledge.”
What makes the result so impressive is that in a real-life situation, the knowledge would be much more deeper entrenched, given the months or years of planning that a participant would be subject to.”
Read more at Fox News (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Indian Officials Held Pigeon Captive on Suspicion of Spying
“Indian police, seemingly terrified that a rat with wings will glean some secrets for neighboring enemies in Pakistan, recently took into custody a white pigeon found near the border of the two countries. The cause for suspicion: a ring around the bird’s foot and written on its body in red ink a phone number and address from Pakistan.
Although it was taken into captivity in late May, seeing as how Indian police took a pigeon to jail, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to assume that it’s still there for refusing to talk. No note was found with the pigeon, so unless it has a little camera somewhere in that band of his, I don’t think keeping the bird in captivity is going to do much good.
Despite this, at least the pigeon is being kept safe. The health of the bird was a major concern, and its lodgings in captivity are being kept nice and air conditioned for maximum comfort.
The best part of the story is the news that the pigeon is being kept on lock down under armed guard. I’m guessing a cage and a small room wasn’t official enough?”
Read more at Weird Asia News
Brain’s reward system helps drive placebo effect
“Want to maximize the placebo effect? A good way to do this, according to a new study, is to tell someone they have a decent chance of getting the real treatment instead of a fake pill, but keep them guessing. In the study, Parkinson’s disease patients given a placebo after being told they had a 75 percent chance of receiving an active drug produced significant amounts of dopamine, a chemical key to the brain’s reward system that is scarce in the brains of patients with this disease. But no dopamine response occurred in patients given placebo after being told they had a 25 percent, 50 percent, or 100 percent chance of getting real treatment.
The findings show that expectations directly regulate the power of the placebo effect by kicking the brain’s reward system into gear, probably not just in Parkinson’s patients but in a number of different illnesses, such as chronic pain and depression, according to Dr. A. Jon Stoessl of the Pacific Parkinson’s Research Center in Vancouver, British Columbia, and his colleagues. “The greatest form of reward is really to get better, so expectation of improvement is akin to expectation of reward,” Stoessl explained in an interview.
Stoessl and his colleagues first demonstrated a relationship between the placebo effect and dopamine release in Parkinson’s patients nine years ago. Given dopamine’s role in the reward system, he explained, “perhaps it would be important for the placebo effect in other conditions.” In the current study, the researchers used PET scans to examine whether patients’ expectations of getting an active drug would be related to the amount of dopamine released in their brain after they took a placebo. They randomly assigned 35 patients to be informed that they had a 25 percent chance, 50 percent chance, 75 percent chance, or 100 percent chance of receiving an active drug. But all were given inactive placebo. “There was a substantial amount of dopamine released, but only when the stated probability was 75 percent,” Stoessl explained. “What that means is when you’re told that the outcome is certain, that there’s a 100 percent chance, you don’t activate reward pathways. At lower probabilities, you just don’t think there’s much chance, so you don’t activate the reward system either.”"
Read more at Reuters (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Stephen Hawking’s Warning: Abandon Earth—Or Face Extinction
“Let’s face it: The planet is heating up, Earth’s population is expanding at an exponential rate, and the the natural resources vital to our survival are running out faster than we can replace them with sustainable alternatives. Even if the human race manages not to push itself to the brink of nuclear extinction, it is still a foregone conclusion that our aging sun will expand and swallow the Earth in roughly 7.6 billion years.
So, according to famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, it’s time to free ourselves from Mother Earth. “I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space,” Hawking tells Big Think. “It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let’s hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.”
Hawking says he is an optimist, but his outlook for the future of man’s existence is fairly bleak. In the recent past, humankind’s survival has been nothing short of “a question of touch and go” he says, citing the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963 as just one example of how man has narrowly escaped extinction. According to the Federation of American Scientists there are still about 22,600 stockpiled nuclear weapons scattered around the planet, 7,770 of which are still operational. In light of the inability of nuclear states to commit to a global nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the threat of a nuclear holocaust has not subsided.
In fact, “the frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future,” says Hawking, “We shall need great care and judgment to negotiate them all successfully.” ”
Read more at Big Think
Win Tickets to Questival
Questival is a weekend camping trip organised by The National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies and Leeds Atheist Society, inspired by Camp Quest UK, and sponsored by the British Humanist Association.
Unlike Camp Quest, which is aimed at children, Questival is for fully grown atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers and all those who are curious about the world in which we live. In addition to walks around the Dales, discussions about critical thinking and logical fallacies, scientific methods, pseudo-science, philosophy and ethics, Iszi Lawrence (www.iszi.com) and Rebecca Watson (www.skepchick.org) will be attending to speak at the event.
Questival runs from 5pm on Friday 13/08/2010 until 4pm on Sunday 15/08/2010. The event will be held at Dalesbridge Camp Site, Austwick, Near Settle, North Yorkshire, LA2 8AZ.
Tickets can be purchased from the British Humanist Association (http://www.humanism.org.uk/shop/85).
How to win two tickets
You can also enter a competition to win two tickets (worth £60 total) donated by the organisers to The Skeptic Magazine (UK). To win the tickets, email competitions@skeptic.org.uk with your answer to the following:
What activity, event or product would you like sceptical groups to hold or develop within the UK?
The tickets will be given to the individual who submits the idea judged to be the best, by staff from The Skeptic and by any other nominated judge(s). Responses should be concise and feasible. The competition will close at midnight (GMT) on Saturday 07/08/2010. By submitting ideas, you agree they may be used or developed at a future point. Details are also available at http://skeptic.org.uk/magazine/competitions
Why cab drivers have bigger brains
“Everyone knows that the black cab is a London icon, but have you ever wondered what makes London cabbies different from the rest of us?
Becoming a London taxi driver isn’t as easy as you may think. Unlike other London folk who choose to take the tube or bus, drivers have to spend hours learning the city’s road network for a face-to-face exam at the Public Carriage Office to get a licence to kick-start their cabbie careers.
So what exactly does this gruelling process do to their brains? Well for starters, all that worthwhile learning not only makes them money, but according to research included in the Science Museum’s new ‘Who Am I?’ gallery, it also increases their memory power.
With 320 routes around London and scores of notable historic landmarks to recall, it is not surprising that London taxi drivers are now known to have different brains to the rest of us.
Neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire and her team discovered in the unique study that part of the hippocampus – an area of the brain supporting spatial navigation and memory – becomes larger when learning road knowledge.
A series of MRI brain scans on certain taxi drivers revealed that the volume of information that licensed cabbies have to remember makes physical changes to their brains.”
Read more at Yahoo News (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories
“In case you haven’t noticed, this site (WIRED) is currently being bombarded with a certain strand of conspiracy theorist. I’m still not entirely sure what these people believe in, apart from being absolutely certain that the government is developing brain-eating vaccines, spiking the water with lithium and trying to subdue the population with “reactive” medicine. While it’s always sad to see so much angry ignorance on parade, it’s also a fascinating case study in cognitive dissonance.
The theory of cognitive dissonance – one of most influential theories in social psychology – was pioneered by Leon Festinger, at the University of Minnesota. In the summer of 1954, Festinger was reading the morning newspaper when he encountered a short article about Marion Keech, a housewife in suburban Minneapolis who was convinced that the apocalypse was coming. Keech had started getting messages from aliens a few years before, but now the messages were getting eerily specific. According to Sananda, an extra-terrestrial from the planet Clarion who was in regular contact with Keech, human civilization would be destroyed by a massive flood at midnight on December 20, 1954.
Keech’s sci-fi prophecy soon gained a small band of followers. They trusted her divinations, and marked the date of Armageddon on their calendars. Many of them quit their jobs and sold their homes. The cultists didn’t bother buying Christmas presents or making arrangements for New Years Eve, since nothing would exist by then.
Festinger immediately realized that Keech would make a great research subject. He decided to infiltrate the group by pretending to be a true believer. What Festinger wanted to study was the reaction of the cultists on December 21, when the world wasn’t destroyed and no spaceship appeared. Would Keech recant? What would happen when her prophesy failed?
On the night of December 20, Keech’s followers gathered in her home and waited for instructions from the aliens. Midnight approached. When the clock read 12:01 and there were still no aliens, the cultists began to worry. A few began to cry. The aliens had let them down. But then Keech received a new telegram from outer space, which she quickly transcribed on her notepad. “This little group sitting all night long had spread so much light,” the aliens told her, “that god saved the world from destruction. Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room.” In other words, it was their stubborn faith that had prevented the apocalypse. Although Keech’s predictions had been falsified, the group was now more convinced than ever that the aliens were real. They began proselytizing to others, sending out press releases and recruiting new believers. This is how they reacted to the dissonance of being wrong: by becoming even more certain that they were right.
There is, of course, something deeply troubling about cognitive dissonance, since it suggests that we double-down on our beliefs even in light of conflicting evidence. While neuroscientists have begun to decipher the anatomy of this mental flaw – you can blame your anterior cingulate cortex – I sometimes worry that the internet is making things worse. Although we’re all vulnerable to cognitive dissonance – and the paranoid style has always been a loud presence in American politics – we seem to squander ever more time on worthless conversations about Obama’s birth certificate or the spurious link between autism and vaccines. After all, thanks to Google we can find “evidence” in support of practically any belief. If you can imagine the conspiracy theory, there is a website out there ardently promoting it, and a clan of fellow believers who share your peculiar obsession with fluoridated drinking water and the New World Order. The end result is that we never have to recant. We can always find another link to “prove” that the government is trying to “zombify” us, or that aliens are going to destroy the earth at midnight.”
Read More at Wired
Childish thinking: Today’s TEDTalks playlist
“TED’s on its annual two-week vacation; during the break, we’re posting new playlists from the TEDTalks archive.
Today’s playlist is about kids and their brains, which hold the dreams and possibilities of our future. How can we teach them … and how can we learn from them? Adora Svitak makes the case that grownups have lots to learn from “childish” thinking — creativity, audacity, open-mindedness.”
Watch further videos in the collection over at TED Blog
