The conservation of luck
“In the first of a new series, Ian Stewart, a professor of mathematics at Warwick University, takes a look at how we perceive luck and chance.
“A friend of mine won seven million on the Lottery,” said the chap next to me in the gym. “That’s the end of my chances. You can’t win if you know someone who has.”
There are as many urban myths about the National Lottery as there are legs on a millipede, but I’d not come across this one before. It set me wondering: why do people so readily believe this kind of thing?
Think about it. In order for the statement to be true, the Lotto machine has to somehow be influenced by your network of friends and acquaintances. It has to know whether any of them has won before, and then take steps to avoid your particular choice of numbers – which means that it also has to know what you have chosen. In fact, all 11 Lotto machines must know this, because the one used each week is itself chosen at random. Since a Lotto machine is an inanimate mechanical device, this doesn’t make a great deal of sense.
The maths is straightforward. Each week, the chance of any particular set of six numbers winning the jackpot is 1 in 13,983,816. That’s because there are that many possible combinations of numbers, and each is equally likely to occur. If not, the machine would be biased, and it is designed to avoid that. So it seems clear that the explanation for the myth must lie in human psychology, rather than probability theory. A possible reason is an unconscious belief in magic, here manifesting itself as luck. If you think that luck is a real thing that people possess, and it improves their chances, and if you think that there is only a certain amount of luck to go round — then perhaps your fortunate friend has used up all the luck in your neighbourhood. Which in this instance seems to be your social network.
Omigod. Can you tweet your luck away? Put your luck on Facebook for your so-called friends to steal? It’s a nightmare!”
Read more at The Telegraph (Thanks Tracey)
Incredible paper sculptures by Jeff Nishinaka
“Jeff Nishinaka carves and pinches paper to create intricate paper sculptures. The 52-year-old Los Angeles based illustrator and sculptor has been refining his paper craft since 1982. Taking anywhere from three days to four months to produce, Jeff’s detailed pieces range from 8in by 8in to 20 feet tall and 20 feet wide.
Jeffrey is a full time artist and estimates that he has produced hundreds of his paper sculptures during his career. “I use very simple tools: tweezers, a mechanical pencil, toothpicks, art knives, cutting mats, French curves & triangles, and a small round wooded dowel to curve the edges,” said Jeffrey.
The works are given a three-dimensional look through careful layering of the paper and clever lighting. He uses acid-free 100% Cotton Vellum paper, so the pieces will not deteriorate or yellow with age.”
View more example of his work at The Telegraph (Thanks Tracey)
Daydreams really can take you far away
“Just how distracting daydreams can be depends on where exactly your wandering mind takes you, a new study suggests. The farther away your mind drifts — in time and space — the harder it is to remember what you just did. For instance, daydreams of your childhood home or a vacation on the other side of the world had a more pronounced effect on memory than thoughts of where you just were an hour ago.
However, since the study was conducted in an experimental environment and not the real world (subjects were prompted to daydream), future work should examine whether the same holds true for natural daydreams, the researchers say. Previous studies have shown that daydreams — or off-task thoughts — can hinder our ability to remember thingswe’ve just learned. Peter Delaney of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and his colleagues wanted to know if the content of the daydream could influence this effect.
In the first experiment, 148 college-age students were asked to memorize two lists of words presented on a computer screen. Between learning the first list and the second, students engaged in one of three tasks – reading a passage aloud, thinking about their parent’s home or thinking about the place where they currently live. Afterwards, they were asked to recall as many of the words as they could from both lists. Those who daydreamed about their parent’s home remembered fewer of the words from the first list than those who thought about their own home. On average, it had been several weeks since participants had visited their parents’ home and several hours since they had been in their own home.”
Read more at MSNBC (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Crowdsourced Science: 5 Ways You Can Help the Hive-Mind
“Today DISCOVER blogger Ed Yong reports on a project called Foldit, in which citizen scientists playing a slick computer game helped to unravel the complex structure of proteins, and in doing so got the game into the prestigious journal Nature. There are plenty of great ways for non-professional scientists to help out scientific projects. DISCOVER previously brought you the ways to donate your computer’s free time to projects like SETI@home and Stardust@home. But what if you want to use your own brainpower in the aid of science? That can be arranged, as there are plenty of more active ways to contribute to crowdsourced science.
1. Mapping the place where Genghis Khan was buried
This summer archaeologist Albert Yu-Min Lin led an expedition to Mongolia in search of the lost tomb of Genghis Khan—but not before putting out the call for a little help. Lin’s team provided high-resolution satellite photography of the area they plan to survey. On the mission’s website, volunteers can sign up to scan the images for anything that could help the team on its quest: roads, rivers, or perhaps even the outlines of where long-gone structures once stood centuries ago.
2. Amateur Martians
As we noted yesterday with the Spirit rover’s apparent demise, the rovers and orbiters NASA has sent to Mars have been a smashing success. The only problem is, those robot explorers have sent home more data than NASA’s people can map on their own. You can help: Play “Be a Martian,” a game set up through the Jet Propulsion Lab. Players earn points and badges by finding the most interesting martian craters for study, or by matching up high-resolution images of the red planet’s surfaces to wider photos taken from above—thereby improving maps of Mars.”
Find out about the other 3 at Discover Magazine
Ragbir Bhathal: Aussie Alien Hunter
“Just about a year ago Ragbir Bhathal was scanning the night sky for alien activity, just as he does every night. Except on this December eve Ragbir Bhathal found a strong, regular, repeating signal. Unless the whole thing stemmed from a huge glitch occurring simultaneously in all his million-dollar lab equipment, there stands a strong chance that Ragbir found a message sent by some intelligent, alien race.
Unlike most of the tin-foil hat wearing whackadoos in his field, Dr. Bhathal is a hard scientist working with university money to find extraterrestrials. In fact, he teaches the only Search for ExtraTerrestrial Life class offered in all of Australia. His hard-nosed approach perhaps explains why you’ve yet to hear this big news: Before he can broadcast his findings to the world, Bhathal must put them through rigorous examination. First, he needs to make sure it wasn’t caused by a glitch or some random, weird space phenomenon. After that, he’ll will need his findings peer-reviewed. Both steps require finding the signal again, which has taken nearly a year already
As proprietor of OZSETI, Dr. Bhathal combs the universe in search of light signals, not radio transmission. See, FM and AM can only travel so far, barely the distance between galaxies, before their signal’s lost in the noisiness of space. Light, on the other hand, travels far, fast, and without getting jumbled on the way to its destination. It was, in part, his interest in light-based contact that made Arthur C. Clarke put Ragbir on his shortlist of researchers who actually stand a chance of contacting alien life. With his recent findings, he goes straight to the top of ours.”
Read more at VBS Blog
We don’t have to get sick as we get older
“If we can stop the physical deterioration that comes with age, molecular biologist Aubrey de Grey sees no reason why human beings shouldn’t live to be 1,000.;
With his beard and robust opinions, there’s something of the Old Testament prophet about Aubrey de Grey. But the 47-year-old gerontologist (who studies the process of ageing) says his belief that he might live to the very ripe old age of 1,000 is founded not on faith but science. De Grey studied computer science at Cambridge University, but became interested in the problem of ageing more than a decade ago and is the co-founder of the Sens (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in the US.
What’s so wrong with getting old?
It is simply that people get sick when they get older. I don’t often meet people who want to suffer cardiovascular disease or whatever, and we get those things as a result of the lifelong accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage. This is harmless at low levels but eventually it causes the diseases and disabilities of old age – which most people don’t think are any fun.
Is this the biggest health crisis facing the world?
Absolutely. If we look at the industrialised world, basically 90% of all deaths are caused by ageing. They are deaths from causes that affect older people and don’t affect young adults. And if we look at the whole world, then the number of deaths that occur each day is roughly 150,000 and about two-thirds of them are because of ageing.”
Read more at The Guardian
Study Shows Women Attracted to Men in Red
“What could be as alluring as a lady in red? A gentleman in red, finds a multicultural study published Aug. 2 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Simply wearing the color red or being bordered by the rosy hue makes a man more attractive and sexually desirable to women, according to a series of studies by researchers at the University of Rochester and other institutions. And women are unaware of this arousing effect.
The cherry color’s charm ultimately lies in its ability to make men appear more powerful, says lead author Andrew Elliot, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. “We found that women view men in red as higher in status, more likely to make money and more likely to climb the social ladder. And it’s this high-status judgment that leads to the attraction,” Elliot says.
Why does red signal rank? The authors see both culture and biology at work. In human societies across the globe, red traditionally has been part of the regalia of the rich and powerful. Ancient China, Japan and sub-Saharan Africa all used the vibrant tint to convey prosperity and elevated status, and Ancient Rome’s most powerful citizens were literally called “the ones who wear red.” Even today, the authors note, businessmen wear a red tie to indicate confidence, and celebrities and dignitaries are feted by “rolling out the red carpet.””
Read more at Techvert
New solar energy conversion process discovered
“Stanford engineers have figured out how to simultaneously use the light and heat of the sun to generate electricity in a way that could make solar power production more than twice as efficient as existing methods and potentially cheap enough to compete with oil.
Unlike photovoltaic technology currently used in solar panels – which becomes less efficient as the temperature rises – the new process excels at higher temperatures.
Called “photon enhanced thermionic emission,” or PETE, the process promises to surpass the efficiency of existing photovoltaic and thermal conversion technologies.
“This is really a conceptual breakthrough, a new energy conversion process, not just a new material or a slightly different tweak,” said Nick Melosh, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering, who led the research group. “It is actually something fundamentally different about how you can harvest energy.”"
Read more at Stanford University News
Molecular Power Behind Memory Discovered
Neuroscientists have long wondered how individual connections between brain cells remain diverse and “fit” enough for storing new memories. Reported in the science journalNeuron, a new study led by Dr. Inna Slutsky (heh – sorry! – PD) of the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University describes what makes some memories stick.
The key is GABA (γ-Aminobutyric acid), a natural molecule that occurs in the brain, which could be the main factor in regulating how many new memories we can generate, the new study has found. The understanding of these mechanisms might lead to the development of new memory enhancers and new treatments for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Memories, Dr. Slutsky says, are stored in synaptic connections between neurons in our brain. In the past, other teams, including her own, have demonstrated that the strength of individual synapses is highly variable, even at the single neuron level. This variability ultimately determines if and how new memories are stored, and the key to this variability is GABA, a naturally-occurring chemical found in the brain.
Dr. Slutsky’s graduate student Tal Laviv and postdoctoral fellow Inbal Riven, the lead authors in the study, applied advanced nanotechnology methods in optical imaging to track how proteins engineered by Prof. Paul Slesinger and his team at The Salk Institute interact with GABA at the single-synapse level.
In the hippocampus, one of the main areas of the brain involved in learning and memory, the strength of neuronal connections is known to be highly variable. Some neurons are tightly connected to others, while some appear to be “lone rangers.”
