Trial, error and the God complex (video)
Economics writer Tim Harford studies complex systems — and finds a surprising link among the successful ones: they were built through trial and error. In this sparkling talk from TEDGlobal 2011, he asks us to embrace our randomness and start making better mistakes.
World population to hit 7 billion by October
The United Nations commemorates World Population Day against the backdrop of an upcoming landmark event: global population hitting the seven billion mark by late October this year.
According to current projections, and with some of the world’s poorest nations doubling their populations in the next decade, the second milestone will be in 2025 when the global population will reach eight billion.
Dr Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), said seven billion represents a challenge, an opportunity and a call to action.
On World Population Day, July 11, he launches a campaign called “7 Billion Actions”.
“It will engage people on what it means to live in a world with seven billion people and encourage action on issues that affect all of us,” he said.
The rise in population is expected to have a devastating impact on some 215 million women who want – but do not have – access to quality reproductive health and family planning services.
The world’s five most populous countries are China (1.3 billion), India (1.2 billion), the United States (310.2 million), Indonesia (242.9 million) and Brazil (201.1 million).
The date for the eight billion population milestone is projected now to be 2025.
Full story and more facts at Aljazeera.net
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies
In this work synthesizing thirty years of research, psychologist, historian of science, and the world’s best-known skeptic Michael Shermer upends the traditional thinking about how humans form beliefs about the world. Simply put, beliefs come first and explanations for beliefs follow. The brain, Shermer argues, is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses, the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning.
Our brains connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen, and these patterns become beliefs. Once beliefs are formed the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive-feedback loop of belief confirmation.
Shermer outlines the numerous cognitive tools our brains engage to reinforce our beliefs as truths. Interlaced with his theory of belief, Shermer provides countless real-world examples of how this process operates, from politics, economics, and religion to conspiracy theories, the supernatural, and the paranormal. Ultimately, he demonstrates why science is the best tool ever devised to determine whether or not a belief matches reality.
Scientists Turn Memories Off and On With Flip of Switch
Scientists have developed a way to turn memories on and off — literally with the flip of a switch. Using an electronic system that duplicates the neural signals associated with memory, they managed to replicate the brain function in rats associated with long-term learned behavior.
“Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Flip it off, and the rats forget,” said Theodore Berger of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Berger is the lead author of an article that will be published in the Journal of Neural Engineering. His team worked with scientists from Wake Forest University in the study, building on recent advances in our understanding of the brain area known as the hippocampus and its role in learning.
Full article at ScienceDaily
Scientist-Politician-Atheist Offers Own Money For Origin of Life Prize
A millionaire scientist who once ran as a Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate has just launched a $50,000 prize to promote research on the origin of life. Yes, he has an ulterior motive: He hopes that researchers working on the question will eventually prove that life’s origins can be fully explained by physical and chemical processes, without invoking a creator.
Harry Lonsdale is a chemist in Bend, Oregon, who made a fortune when he sold his drug development and research company to Pfizer more than 25 years ago. Since then, he has leveraged his wealth for social, civic, and political causes, including a series of unsuccessful bids to become a U.S. senator. The 79-year-old Lonsdale is an avowed atheist who has advocated for gay rights, campaign finance reform, and environmental protections. Now, he’s on a mission to accelerate the quest to understand how life originated. Over the past 2 weeks, Lonsdale has taken out ads in Science, Nature, and Chemical and Engineering News announcing an Origin of Life Research Award that includes $50,000 for the best proposal to study the origin of life and up to $2 million in potential funding to carry out the work.
Full story at Richard Dawkins
Study raises questions on how much info the brain can store throughout life
A little practice goes a long way, according to researchers at McMaster University, who have found the effects of practice on the brain have remarkable staying power.
The study, published this month in the journal Psychological Science, found that when participants were shown visual patterns – faces, which are highly familiar objects, and abstract patterns, which are much less frequently encountered – they were able to retain very specific information about those patterns one to two years later.
We found that this type of learning, called perceptual learning, was very precise and long-lasting, says Zahra Hussain, lead author of the study who is a former McMaster graduate student in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour and now a Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham. These long-lasting effects arose out of relatively brief experience with the patterns about two hours, followed by nothing for several months, or years.
Over the course of two consecutive days, participants were asked to identify a specific face or pattern from a larger group of images. The task was challenging because images were degradedfaces were cropped, for exampleand shown very briefly. Participants had difficulty identifying the correct images in the early stages, but accuracy rates steadily climbed with practice.
About one year later, a group of participants were called back and their performance on the task was re-measured, both with the same set of items theyd been exposed to earlier, and with a new set from the same class of images. Researchers found that when they showed participants the original images, accuracy rates were high. When they showed participants new images, accuracy rates plummeted, even though the new images closely resembled the learned ones, and they hadnt seen the original images for at least a year.
Full Story with details at McMaster Uni
Acoustic ‘cloaking device’ shields objects from sound
Scientists have shown off a “cloaking device” that makes objects invisible – to sound waves.
Such acoustic cloaking was proposed theoretically in 2008 but has only this year been put into practice.
Described in Physical Review Letters, the approach borrows many ideas from attempts to “cloak” objects from light.
It uses simple plastic sheets with arrays of holes, and could be put to use in making ships invisible to sonar or in acoustic design of concert halls.
Much research has been undertaken toward creating Harry Potter-style “invisibility cloaks” since the feasibility of the idea was first put forward in 2006.
Full Article at BBC News
Polly-math Parrots, smarter than you think
Parrots are even less bird-brained than previously thought, suggests a new study in the journal Biology Letters. In a series of tests, researchers have learned that some African grey parrots can use logical reasoning to uncover hidden food.
Sandra Mikolasch and her colleagues at the University of Vienna in Austria trained seven African grey parrots to find treats stashed under cups. While the birds watched, Mikolasch placed food under one cup and left an adjacent cup empty—the parrots had to choose the correct cup to get their snacks.
After training the birds, Mikolasch hid a seed and a walnut under two separate cups in front of the on-looking parrots. In plain view, she removed one of the treats and allowed the birds to choose cups again. Three of the parrots were able to correctly pick the cup with food at least 70 percent of the time. If the birds were purely guessing, they would have chosen the correct cup roughly half of the time.
Mikolasch repeated the experiment with one alteration: she masked her movements behind an opaque screen. She removed one of the treats and showed it to the birds, then had the birds choose cups. By noting which snack was removed, one of the parrots, Awisa, was able to deduce which cup still had food in 23 of the 30 trials (about 77 percent). The other parrots chose more randomly. Mikolasch suspects that Awisa was successful because she’s the parrot equivalent of a “whiz kid.”
Full story with examples at Discover
Study suggests that urbanite brains are more susceptible to stress
Between the crowds and the noise and the pressure, city life often seems to set one’s brain on edge. Turns out that could literally be true.
A study of German college students suggests that urbanite brains are more susceptible to stress, particularly social stress, than those of country dwellers. The findings don’t indicate which aspects of city life had changed the students’ brains, but provide a framework for future investigations.
“Whether people are exposed to noise, live near a park, have a big group of friends or not — you can do those experiments, and tease apart which parts of urban living are associated with these changes,” said Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, a psychiatrist at German’s Central Institute of Mental Health.
Meyer-Lindenberg’s findings, published June 23 in Nature, are a neurological investigation into the underpinnings of a disturbing social trend: As a rule, city life seems to generate mental illness.
Compared to their rural counterparts, city dwellers have higher levels of anxiety and mood disorders. The schizophrenia risk of people raised in cities is almost double. Literature on the effect is so thorough that researchers say it’s not just correlation, as might be expected if anxious people preferred to live in cities. Neither is it a result of heredity. It’s a cause-and-effect relationship between environment and mind.
What those causes are is unknown, but many researchers have speculated that urban social environments are partly responsible. After all, cities are hyper-social places, in which residents must be constantly on guard, and have mathematically more opportunity to experience stressful interaction. Too much stress may ultimately alter the brain, leaving it ill-equipped to handle further stress and prone to mental illness.
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