Human brain has its own form of ‘bat sight’
The part of the brain used by people who can “see like a bat” has been identified by researchers in Canada. Some blind people have learned to echolocate by making clicking noises and listening to the returning echoes.
A study of two such people, published in PLoS ONE, showed a part of the brain usually associated with sight was activated when listening to echoes.
Action for Blind People said further research could improve the way the technique is taught. Bats and dolphins bounce sound waves off their surroundings and by listening to the echoes can “see” the world around them.
Some blind humans have also trained themselves to do this, allowing them to explore cities, cycle and play sports.
The study looked at only two people so cannot say for certain what happens in the brains of all people who learn the technique, but the study concludes: “EB and LB use echolocation in a way that seems uncannily similar to vision.”
Full article at BBC
China creates an “online army”
The Chinese government confirms it has established an online warfare team to beef up the defense capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), according to various reports Friday.
Geng Yansheng, spokesperson for China’s Defense Ministry, was quoted to say that the PLA set up the cyberwar unit, or “cyber blue team”, to support its military training and upgrade the army’s Internet security defense.
A report from China’s state-owned Xinhua News Agency noted that Geng’s comments came after the PLA Daily on May 17 revealed the existence of a cyber warfare unit. The media outlet, which covers news on the army, added that the blue team operates under the Guangzhou Military Region–one of seven across China–and had conducted a synchronized Internet exercise with different military units in late-April.
The Guangzhou cyberwar network reportedly employs over 30 Internet specialists.
Geng rebuffed suggestions that the cyber warfare unit was set up to be a “hacker” squad launching online attacks against other countries’ systems.
“Cyberattacks have become an international problem affecting both civilian and military areas,” he said in a report from Global Times. “China is relatively weak in cybersecurity and has often been targeted. This temporary program is aimed at improving our defenses against such attacks.”
First quantum computer just sold to Lockheed Martin but binary computers fight back
On Wednesday, D-Wave Systems made history by announcing the sale of the world’s first commercial quantum computer. The buyer was Lockheed Martin Corporation, who will use the machine to help solve some of their “most challenging computation problems.” Lockheed purchased the system, known as D-Wave One, as well as maintenance and associated professional services. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
D-Wave One uses a superconducting 128-qubit (quantum bit) chip, called Rainier, representing the first commercial implementation of a quantum processor. Built around a superconducting processor, the entire system’s footprint is approximately 100 square feet. The total wall-plug power consumed by a D-Wave One system is 15 kilowatts (a standard laptop uses about 60 watts). Unfortunately the actual speed of the computer is secret, but this is because speed isn’t actually the point of a quantum computer.
A normal computer operates on the basis of units known as bits. Each bit in a normal computer can only be one of 0 or 1 and nothing else. No matter how many bits you have, each computer at a single point in time can only occupy one combination of these bits in order for the programming to actually work.
A quantum computer is different from this because of a principle in quantum mechanics known as superposition. The sort of problem that a conventional computer is very slow at which a quantum computer would be very good at are the ones where you are trying to find one out of billions of billions of billions of combinations which produces an answer. A conventional computer has to go through all the possibilities one by one, the quantum computer can in some sense try them all out at once and can therefore do the calculation in far fewer steps. They are however extremely expensive, the DWave has been rumoured to cost a cool $10-Million.
Despite the fact traditional binary machines have started to reach their limits, new emerging concepts are showing incredible promise. Marc McAndrew is one individual who has invented a machine known as The Charity Engine. The surprising thing is it’s more of a concept than an actual computer. McAndrew has realised that the wasted processing power of machines can be collectively harnessed to make the worlds most powerful supercomputer – for nothing.
By simply running his software on your PC (when it’s idle), you’ll be part of the world’s fastest computer, helping research cures for cancer or new technologies. And the best part of this is that the money the network generates from this research goes to charity. It’s infinitely more environmentally friendly and is so revolutionary that the likes of Amnesty International, Water Aid, Oxfam and ActionAid have all created donation programs to plug in to it – they also monitor the research that takes place to make sure it’s all completely 100% ethical from head to toe. McAndrew (an already successful business owner) has also signed up to a The Giving Pledge that guarantees if he ever makes any real money from the business most of his share will go to charity too. Could you ask for more?
You can sign up to the facebook page here, find out when the Engine will be launching and do your bit for charity too. To encourage you, everyone who signs up is automatically entered in to a completely free lottery draw of $1Million.
Priest Sex-Abuse Case Hits Church of Pope’s Adviser
Time Magazine: The latest sex-abuse case to rock the Catholic Church is unfolding in the archdiocese of an influential Italian Cardinal who has been working with Pope Benedict XVI on reforms to respond to prior scandals of pedophile priests.
Father Riccardo Seppia, a 51-year-old parish priest in the village of Sastri Ponente, near Genoa, was arrested last Friday, May 13, on pedophilia and drug charges. Investigators say that in tapped mobile-phone conversations, Seppia asked a Moroccan drug dealer to arrange sexual encounters with young and vulnerable boys. “I do not want 16-year-old boys but younger. Fourteen-year-olds are O.K. Look for needy boys who have family issues,” he allegedly said.
According to investigators, Seppia told a friend — a former seminarian and barman who is currently under investigation — that the town’s malls were the best places to entice minors.
The evidence amounts to at least 50 messages and phone calls. In the tapped phone conversations, the drug dealer contacted the boys and gave their phone numbers to the priest, who paid them with cocaine or 50 euros each time for sexual intercourse.
“[The investigators] made us listen to that man saying terrifying things about our children. Things so terrible that I cannot repeat them,” a father of one of the boys said.
Seppia’s defense lawyers are expected to argue that those conversations — monitored since Oct. 20, 2010 — were just words, sex games that were played by adults. It was just a game even when he claimed to have “kissed on the mouth” a 15-year-old altar boy, according to the defense.
Full Article at Time Magazine via La Stampa
Loom – incredible masterpiece of 3D
Loom is the work of specialist animators Polynoid. It took an entire year to construct this truly jaw dropping 5 1/2 minutes of excellence. If you’re a little squeamish and don’t like spiders, this one might give you nightmares.
‘Time’ not necessarily deeply rooted in our brains
(Medical Xpress) — Hidden away in the Amazonian rainforest a small tribe have successfully managed what so many dream of being able to do – to ignore the pressures of time so successfully that they don’t even have a word for it.
It is the first time scientists have been able to prove ‘time’ is not a deeply entrenched human universal concept as previously thought.
Researchers, led by Professor Chris Sinha from the University of Portsmouth Department of Psychology, studied the way in which time was talked about and thought about by the Amondawa people of Brazil. Their research is published in the journal Language and Cognition.
Professor Sinha said: “For the Amondawa, time does not exist in the same way as it does for us. We can now say without doubt that there is at least one language and culture which does not have a concept of time as something that can be measured, counted, or talked about in the abstract. This doesn’t mean that the Amondawa are ‘people outside time’, but they live in a world of events, rather than seeing events as being embedded in time.”
Team members including linguist Wany Sampaio and anthropologist Vera da Silva Sinha, spent eight weeks with the Amondawa researching how their language conveys concepts like ‘next week’ or ‘last year’. There were no words for such concepts, only divisions of day and night and rainy and dry seasons. They also found nobody in the community has an age. Instead, they change their names to reflect their life stage and position within their society, so that for example a little child will give up their name to a newborn sibling, and take on a new one.
Professor Sinha said: “We have so many metaphors for time and its passing – we think of time as a ‘thing’ – we say ‘the weekend is nearly gone’; ‘she’s coming up to her exams’; ‘I haven’t got the time’, and so on, and we think such statements are objective, but they aren’t. We’ve created these metaphors and they have become the way we think. The Amondawa don’t talk like this and don’t think like this, unless they learn another language.
Full Story at Medical Xpress
When ninjas do card tricks
Some card tricks just require a rare kind of brute force.
Scientists Afflict Computers with Schizophrenia
AUSTIN, Texas — Computer networks that can’t forget fast enough can show symptoms of a kind of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers further clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic brains, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Yale University have found.
The researchers used a virtual computer model, or “neural network,” to simulate the excessive release of dopamine in the brain. They found that the network recalled memories in a distinctly schizophrenic-like fashion.
Their results were published in April in Biological Psychiatry.
“The hypothesis is that dopamine encodes the importance — the salience — of experience,” says Uli Grasemann, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. “When there’s too much dopamine, it leads to exaggerated salience, and the brain ends up learning from things that it shouldn’t be learning from.”
The results bolster a hypothesis known in schizophrenia circles as the hyperlearning hypothesis, which posits that people suffering from schizophrenia have brains that lose the ability to forget or ignore as much as they normally would. Without forgetting, they lose the ability to extract what’s meaningful out of the immensity of stimuli the brain encounters. They start making connections that aren’t real, or drowning in a sea of so many connections they lose the ability to stitch together any kind of coherent story.
Full Story at University of Texas
Adam Curtis – All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
Without a doubt Adam Curtis is one of the most important documentary makers alive today. His work isn’t just ground breaking in it’s messaging, the sheer volume of information and the way he delivers is food for thought itself. Using a mixture of well found retro footage and expert narration, Curtis delivers his own distinct form of sociopolitical theatre. Even if you were to completely disagree with him, it’s utterly thought-provoking and entertaining. It’s possibly the only reason to own a TV.
Curtis completed a Bachelor of Arts in Human Sciences at the University of Oxford, where he studied genetics, evolutionary biology, psychology, politics, sociology and elementary statistics. Curtis also taught Politics there for a time.
His work has received more than a few awards to date – here’s a run down of our favourites:
1992 – Pandora’s Box – examines the dangers of technocratic and political rationality – BAFTA Award for Best Factual Series.
1996 - 25 Million Pounds – study of Nick Leeson, collapse of Barings Bank – Winner at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
1997 – The Way of All Flesh – The story of Henrietta Lacks - Golden Gate award.
1999 – The Mayfair Set – the climate of the Thatcher years - BAFTA Award for Best Factual Series.
2002 – The Century of the Self - Edward Bernays’ development of public relations - Broadcast Award, Longman Award.
2004 - The Power of Nightmares - the rise of Islamism and Neoconservatism - BAFTA for Best Factual Series
2007 – The Trap – a series addressing the modern concepts of freedom.
Curtis has also provided many snippets of brilliance to the Charlie Brooker series Screenwipe in 2007 and Newswipe in 2009. What more you could ask for I do not know.
His current series All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace is now showing on BBC 2 / iPlayer and is utterly essential watching. It is a series of films about how humans have been colonised by the machines they have built. Although we don’t realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.
Episode one of 3 is available now – I recommend watching it 3 times at least and take notes too.
Rapture: Harold Camping issues new apocalypse date
Harold Camping, the voice of Family Radio in Oregon, USA, today announced that the rapture had in fact started, but we couldn’t see it because it was “invisible”.
Camping predicted that on May 21st 2011, 200 Million Christians (all American of course) would be lifted up in to heaven, the rest of us would be left on earth so that God, in all his infinite love, could spend 5 months slowly killing everyone with fireballs, earthquakes and general nastiness.
Thousands of Family Radio listeners donated money, some gave away everything they owned and the estimated $100 Million raised helped plaster billboards across the US and Europe. It also funded a fleet of elaborately emblazoned rapture vans.
Reports of people raptured on May 21 turned out to be elaborately and carefully planned hoaxes (see top image) by non-believers. Also organised were a series of “Rapture After Parties” and similar low profile events across America.
However skeptics may be in for a surprise, according to Camping they haven’t yet escaped judgement. It turns out the rapture was “invisible” and we can’t see it happening.
Camping, now 89 years old, first predicted the rapture in 1994, but changed his mind when it didn’t happen. His third attempt is now 5 months after the 21st of May (October 21) and he is still asking for funds to help spread the word.
According to the New York Times, when asked if his organisation would return any of the money raised, Camping stated “We’re not at the end. Why would we return it?”.
