13 Stunning Photos From 10-Year Sea Census
“Yeti Crab
Its fuzzy, winter-white coat might look at home in the Himalaya, but the yeti crab was discovered skittering around hydrothermal vents about a mile and a half (2.4 kilometers) under the South Pacific off Easter Island (map) in March 2005.
The 6-inch (15-centimeter), blind crustacean—officially Kiwa hirsuta—is among the more than 6,000 new species discovered during the Census of Marine Life, a ten-year effort to document all sea life that concluded Monday.
The project’s 500-plus expeditions have also amassed a visual legacy as unique as the organisms uncovered—from which National Geographic News has selected these images as the 13 best of the census. ”
See them over at National Geographic (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Anger Management for Online Trolls
“Browse through a few typical online comment threads, and the need for anger management quickly becomes clear, likely sending sane people scurrying off to more pleasant corners of the internet. Now scientists at Yahoo and their colleagues are devising ways to automatically flag inordinately irate commenters to keep them from ruining online conversations for others.
To help curb so-called trolls who spew disruptive comments as a kind of sport, researchers developed techniques for automatically identifying negative posts that are off-topic while staying away from relevant ones. But rather than banishing hostile jerks or deleting their comments, the system could someday help steer them into more productive discussions.
“We might want mechanisms where you can ask people to tone it down, or ‘take it outside’ to not disrupt others, or use humor to defuse situations,” said cognitive scientist Elizabeth Churchill of Yahoo Research, who presented the work Sept. 30 at the 2010 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Atlanta.
Churchill and computer scientist Sara Owsley Sood of Pomona College analyzed 782,934 comments from 168,095 distinct threads from October 2009 articles on the news-story commenting site Yahoo! Buzz. To determine whether comments were on-topic or not, they first used the same techniques used by search engines to evaluate the relevance of a site to a query: The more words a comment contained that were also found in the story it was connected to, the more on-topic the comment was judged.
Next, the comments were judged as either angry, happy or sad. For example, “sucks” is linked with anger. The system learned to recognize emotions by reading LiveJournal posts, which bloggers can tag with moods such as “creative,” and analyzing which word combinations were linked most with certain moods.
The algorithms fared well at catching irrelevant comments and deciphering sentiments. The researchers agreed with the angry-sad-happy judgments on comments taken at random from their data 65 to 80 percent of the time. They hope to upgrade the system by having it learn from comments they manually classify by mood.”
Read more at Wired (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Chief scientist who questioned evolution theory fired
“The Education Ministry’s chief scientist, Dr. Gavriel Avital, was dismissed on Monday following a scandal-filled trial period of less than a year.
Sources familiar with the affair said Avital was fired over past statements he had made, in which he questioned evolution and the global warming theory.
Avital, who was named chief scientist in December 2009, said Darwinism should be analyzed critically along with biblical creationism.
“If textbooks state explicitly that human beings’ origins are to be found with monkeys, I would want students to pursue and grapple with other opinions. There are many people who don’t believe the evolutionary account is correct,” he said.
“There are those for whom evolution is a religion and are unwilling to hear about anything else. Part of my responsibility, in light of my position with the Education Ministry, is to examine textbooks and curricula,”
Avital added, “If they keep writing in textbooks that the Earth is growing warmer because of carbon dioxide emissions, I’ll insist that isn’t the case.”"
Read more at Y Net News
The World’s First Artificial Heart
“This is the world’s first total artificial heart.
Surgeons Domingo Liotta and Denton Cooley placed it into Haskell Carp’s chest on April 4, 1969 in Houston. They removed it 64 hours later when a donor heart became available.
But the heart did what it was supposed to do, explained Judy Chelnick, an associate curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The patient did not live long, but not because the manmade heart malfunctioned. It worked just fine, laying the stage for many later variations.
The piece of medical history is now stored in a formaldehyde solution in a cabinet behind the scenes at the museum. The NMAH had kindly invited us over to look at their patent medicine collection, and we just happened to stumble upon Chelnick going about her business.
She pulled the heart from a cabinet and set it on a cart for us to look at. ”
Read more at The Atlantic
Mental muscle: six ways to boost your brain?
“Brain training games won’t make you smarter – but a dose of blue light or an electrical shock just might
BREATHE in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. I crack open an eye. Everyone else has theirs closed. I shut it again. Breathe in, breathe out. Around me people are sitting crossed-legged, meditating. For some it’s spiritual, for others an oasis of calm. Me? I’m building a better brain.
A few months ago I would probably have bought a brain-training game, but alas, it turns out they are probably useless. Although your performance on the games improves, that effect doesn’t seem to translate into the real world (see “The rise and fall of brain training”). With that in mind, I wondered if there was anything else I could do to give my grey matter a boost.
Our brains are constantly adapting to information from the world around us. However, some activities make a bigger impression than others. In recent years, researchers have been probing how outside influences, from music to meditation, might change and enhance our brains.
One of the most promising is music – and not via the famous but controversial “Mozart effect”, whereby merely listening to classical music is supposed to improve brain performance. Learning to play an instrument brings about dramatic brain changes that not only improve musical skills but can also spill over into other cognitive abilities, including speech, language, memory, attention, IQ and even empathy. Should I dust off my trumpet and get practising?
Musical training, especially at a young age, seems to significantly alter the structure of your brain. For instance, after 15 months of piano lessons young children had more highly developed auditory and motor areas than their untrained peers. These brain areas are very active when you play an instrument ”
Read more at New Scientist (Thanks XxLadyClaireXx)
Museum Intentionally Showcases Particularly Bad Art
“The world’s greatest art museums have a new rival in their midst — kind of. While New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre in Paris need not lock up their treasures just yet, there is a new kid on the block. The Museum of Particularly Bad Art in Melbourne, Australia, is attempting to boost the blossoming genre of paintings in poor taste with an annual exhibition and competition spotlighting, well, particularly bad art.
Inspired by the Museum of Bad Art in Boston, Museum of Particularly Bad Art curator Helen Round said her collection was kick-started in 1996 when friends presented her with a portrait of actor Scott Baio. “Maybe you should never verbalize your dreams because someone will always make you follow them,” Round joked to AOL News. Subsequently hooked on art of dubious merit, Round began to amass a personal collection of paintings and other works of art that she eventually thought deserved a wider audience. She mounted her debut exhibition in 1999 and another, more controversial, display in 2004. That year, Round used her exhibition to protest the amount of money a local street festival was spending for what she perceived as little return. “I said that for $400 I will get more attention than the $400,000 [they were spending],” Round explained. “The people I was protesting against heard and the next year they gave me funding.”
An annual portrait exhibition and competition was born with art sourced from yard sales, secondhand stores and garbage piles. “You find them everywhere,” said Round, who says she owns more than 600 pieces of art — a collection that could be the world’s worst. “I love earnest renderings and I love a passionate, yet uneducated, hand. That is what strikes a chord for me.”"
Read more at AOL News (Thanks XxLadyClaireXx)
Instant Expert: Rebuilding Human Minds
“Age-related memory loss—the kind where you remember friends from decades ago but can’t remember your grandchildren—is largely a mystery, but a class of com-pounds used to treat cancer has given neuroscientists clues to its molecular underpinnings. Scientists also suspect that the compounds responsible for this insight, called histone deacetylase inhibitors, could significantly slow memory loss—perhaps for years. (Two drugs used now to treat memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease work only for a short time.) A study on aging mice by scientists at the European Neuroscience Institute in Germany published this May in Science showed that histone deacetylase inhibitors helped mice perform more than 50 percent better on a memory test than controls did. Study co-author André Fischer says these drugs would be used together with others to treat Alzheimer’s patients.
HOW WE MAKE MEMORIES
The process of forming long-term memories—those that persist for more than a few dozen seconds—is poorly understood, but here’s what we know: Neuroscientists have evidence that the brain’s hippocampus is central to the process. To consolidate a memory, a cascade of electrical pulses fire across the gaps between neurons, called synapses. This triggers the release of neurotransmitters, which form new connections between neighboring neurons. But neurotransmitters can’t be synthesized without each cell tapping into its DNA.”
Read more at Pop Sci (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Gigantic Spider Webs Made of Silk Tougher Than Kevlar
“A spider discovered deep in the jungles of Madagascar spins the largest webs in the world, using silk that’s tougher than any known biological substance.
Named Caerostris darwini, or Darwin’s bark spider, the inch-wide arachnid’s webs can cover 30-square-foot areas, hanging in midair from 80-foot-long anchor lines.
The webs’ size generates enormous structural stresses, magnified by the struggles of trapped prey. Strands must “absorb massive kinetic energy before breaking,” and are “10 times better than Kevlar,” wrote University of Puerto Rico zoologist Igni Agnarsson in Public Library of Science One.
Agnarsson and Slovenian Academy of Sciences biologist Matjaž Kuntner discovered C. darwini in 2008. It’s similar in many ways to Caerostris species found in Africa, but those spiders live at the edges of forest clearings. In Madagascar, where animals have taken kaleidoscopic forms since the island split from mainland Africa 165 million years ago, C. darwini evolved to exploit the airspace above streams and rivers.”
Read more at Wired (Thanks Christopher C)
Druidry recognised as religion in Britain for first time
“The Druid Network has been given charitable status by the Charity Commission for England and Wales, the quango that decides what counts as a genuine faith as well as regulating fundraising bodies. It guarantees the modern group, set up in 2003, valuable tax breaks but also grants the ancient religion equal status to more mainstream denominations. This could mean that Druids, the priestly caste in Celtic societies across Europe, are categorised separately in official surveys of religious believers.
Supporters say the Charity Commission’s move could also pave the way for other minority faiths to gain charitable status. Phil Ryder, Chair of Trustees for The Druid Network, said it had taken four years for the group to be recognised by the regulator. “It was a long and at times frustrating process, exacerbated by the fact that the Charity Commissioners had no understanding of our beliefs and practices, and examined us on every aspect of them. Their final decision document runs to 21 pages, showing the extent to which we were questioned in order to finally get the recognition we have long argued for,” he said.
Emma Restall Orr, founder of The Druid Network, added: “The Charity Commission now has a much greater understanding of Pagan, animist, and polytheist religions, so other groups from these minority religions – provided they meet the financial and public benefit criteria for registration as charities – should find registering a much shorter process than the pioneering one we have been through.” In its assessment of the Druid Network’s application, the Charity Commission accepts that Druids worship nature, in particular the sun and the earth but also believe in the spirits of places such as mountains and rivers as well as “divine guides” such as Brighid and Bran.”
Read more at The Telegraph (Thanks Tracey)
Monkeys See Selves in Mirror, Open a Barrel of Questions
“Monkeys may possess cognitive abilities once thought unique to humans, raising questions about the nature of animal awareness and our ability to measure it.
In the lab of University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Luis Populin, five rhesus macaques seem to recognize their own reflections in a mirror. Monkeys weren’t supposed to do this.
“We thought these subjects didn’t have this ability. The indications are that if you fail the mark test, you’re not self-aware. This opens up a whole field of possibilities,” Populin said.
Populin doesn’t usually study monkey self-awareness. The macaques described in this study, published Sept. 29 in Public Library of Science One, were originally part of his work on attention deficit disorder. But during that experiment, study co-author Abigail Rajala noticed the monkeys using mirrors to study themselves.”
Read more at Wired
