“Earlier this month, organisers of a physics meeting requested that the Higgs boson – the still-hypothetical particle thought to endow other particles with mass – instead be referred to as either the BEH or scalar boson. The name change might seem esoteric, but it hints at a complex past – and trouble ahead over credit for the boson, if it is found.To understand, rewind about 50 years.” (via New Scientist).
“Recent much-publicized studies have claimed that scepticism about free will makes people behave less morally. “Disbelief in Free Will Increases Aggression and Reduces Helpfulness” as the title of one of hese papers puts it.
In his article (free pdf), British ‘independent researcher’ James B. Miles says that these experiments are flawed, because they didn’t distinguish between determinism (lack of free choice) and fatalism (lack of the ability to change events).
More fundamentally, though, Miles says that free will is used to justify things, such as punishment and poverty, that would otherwise be seen as scandalous…” (via Neuroskeptic).
“The Toynbee tiles (also called Toynbee plaques) are messages of mysterious origin found embedded in asphalt of streets in about two dozen major cities in the United States and four South American capitals.[1][2] Since the 1980s, several hundred tiles have been discovered. They are generally about the size of an American license plate, but sometimes considerably larger. They contain some variation on the following inscription:
TOYNBEE IDEA
IN Kubrick’s 2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPITER.
Some of the more elaborate tiles also feature cryptic political statements or exhort readers to create and install similar tiles of their own.” (via Wikipedia)
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is finding hundreds of new objects at the very edge of the electromagnetic spectrum. Many of them have one thing in common: Astronomers have no idea what they are. (via NASA Science).
“This close examination of Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey theorises that Kubrick was working on this film with a “double narrative” structure. Thus, the imagery, set design and camera shots created a complex story all of their own that was separate, and sometimes in direct opposition to, the commonly accepted themes of the Arthur C. Clarke screenplay.
Ager’s work falls on just the right side of conspiracy-culture to be of interest to skeptics and conspiracist’s alike, and with this particular film analysis he is careful to avoid any “tin foil hat” readings of the text, which can be a major downfall of “critical” videos of this kind.
What Ager does posit is that Kubrick was working with a language of imagery that spoke directly to the subconscious and could be in contrast to the spoken words. This is more than a little believable when you take into account that Kubrick’s incredible talent and the huge amounts of time and effort that he spent on the various different aspects of his craft.” (via Dangerous Minds).
I haven’t watched this yet — waiting for a spare hour — but I am eager. I saw 2001 eleven times in the weeks after it came out in 1968 and several more times in the decades since. I think it was my introduction to having my mind blown, and it was also the occasion for my first work of film exegesis; I wrote a review about how profound it was for my high school newspaper, which I fantasized introduced my classmates to layers of meaning they otherwise would not have appreciated. Cocky me. I no longer recall what I said but perhaps I was responding to the unconscious narrative Ager posits here. I’ll see if it makes sense once I watch.
‘Just when you thought the religious right couldn’t get any crazier, with its personhood amendments and its attacks on contraception, here comes the academic left with an even crazier idea: after-birth abortion.
No, I didn’t make this up. “Partial-birth abortion” is a term invented by pro-lifers. But “after-birth abortion” is a term invented by two philosophers, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.’ (via Slate)
“The UN special rapporteur on torture has formally accused the US government of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment towards Bradley Manning, the US soldier who was held in solitary confinement for almost a year on suspicion of being the WikiLeaks source.” (via guardian.co.uk)
“More often than not, neutrino experiments throughout history have turned up perplexing results. While most of these experiments didn’t get the high-profile attention that disputing Einstein provides, they’ve challenged scientists and helped them learn ever more about the natural world.
In this gallery, we take a look at some of the strangest historical neutrino results and the findings that still have scientists scratching their heads.” (via Wired.com)
Forget the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – we need a new system based on brain physiology, says psychiatrist Nick Craddock.
You don’t believe we should update the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) used to classify mental illness. Why not?
“There are many reasons we should pause. The DSM checklist of symptoms is not fit for purpose: its categories don’t map onto the emerging science of emotion and cognition, yet the DSM-5 rewriters plan to pull in more areas in the new categories and over-medicalise the situation further. Obviously the people rewriting DSM are not stupid, but the project is the wrong thing now. There are lots of great findings coming out of biology, neuroscience and psychology. We will need a new diagnostic system based on these…” (via New Scientist)
How Typing May Shape the Meaning of Words: ‘ “We know how a word is spoken can affect its meaning. So can how it’s typed,” said cognitive scientist Kyle Jasmin of the University of College London, co-author of a study about the so-called “QWERTY effect” in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. “As we filter language, hundreds or thousands of words, through our fingers, we seem to be connecting the meanings of the words with the physical way they’re typed on the keyboard.”
The effect may arise from the fact that letter combinations that fall on the right side of the keyboard tend to be easier to type than those on the left.
“If it’s easy, it tends to lend a positive meaning. If it’s harder, it can go the other way,” Jasmin said.’ (via Wired.com).
“In the 21st century, it can feel as if the future has already arrived. But we’re only getting started. It’s fashionable to be pessimistic about our prospects, yet our species may very well endure for at least 100,000 years. So what’s in store for us?” (via New Scientist)
‘To an outsider, it might seem like stage-fighting with battery-powered lightsabers, but to Mr. Michael, it is aspiring righteous warriors communing with the Force, that energy that gives the Jedi his power and binds the galaxy. So what if the place attracts, as Mr. Michael said, “a bunch of ‘Star Wars’ dorks.” ‘ (via NYTimes)
“While we have systems in place for literary citation, image attribution, and scientific reference, we don’t yet have a system that codifies the attribution of discovery in curation as a currency of the information economy, a system that treats discovery as the creative labor that it is.
This is what The Curator’s Code is – a system for honoring the creative and intellectual labor of information discovery by making attribution consistent and codified, the celebrated norm.
It’s an effort to make the rabbit hole open, fair, and ever-alluring.” (via curator’s ǝpoɔ)
‘RepRap is a free desktop 3D printer capable of printing plastic objects. Since many parts of RepRap are made from plastic and RepRap can print those parts, RepRap is a self-replicating machine – one that anyone can build given time and materials. It also means that – if you’ve got a RepRap – you can print lots of useful stuff, and you can print another RepRap for a friend…
RepRap was the first of the low-cost 3D printers, and the RepRap Project started the open-source 3D printer revolution. It is described in the video on the right.’ (via RepRapWiki).
Does anyone have one of these and want to print me out one?
“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” is a grammatically valid sentence in the English language, used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs. It has been discussed in literature since 1972 when the sentence was used by William J. Rapaport, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo. It was posted to Linguist List by Rapaport in 1992. It was also featured in Steven Pinker’s 1994 book The Language Instinct. Read on to parse the sentence. (via Wikipedia).
- Firesign Theatre
Satirist at Firesign Theater Dies at 72: “We started out as four friends, up all night, taking calls from people on bad acid trips and having the time of our lives,” Mr. Austin said in a phone interview Friday. “And that’s what we always were: four friends talking.”
Mr. Bergman and his friends recorded their first album, “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him,” in 1968, followed the next year by “How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All?”
By 1970, their mordant humor and their mastery of stereophonic recording techniques had made them to their generation of 20-somethings what Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are to today’s (if Mr. Colbert and Mr. Stewart had a weakness for literary wordplay, psychedelic references and jokes about the Counter-Reformation).
Their records employed sound effects in ways considered pioneering in audio comedy at the time. More generally, they were considered important forerunners of comedy shows like “Saturday Night Live.”
Ed Ward, writing in The New York Times in 1972, described the third Firesign album, “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers,” as “a mind-boggling sound drama” and a “work of almost Joycean complexity.”
“It’s almost impossible to summarize any Firesign album,” Mr. Ward wrote, because most of their albums were so filled with “intricate wordplay, stunning engineering and use of sound effects, breakneck pacing and, of course, a terribly complex story line.”
When the Library of Congress placed “Don’t Crush That Dwarf” in its National Recording Registry in 2005, The Los Angeles Times described Firesign Theater as “the Beatles of comedy.” (via NYTimes)
Is it akin to a perpetual motion machine? Does it violate the first law of thermodynamics? No; it turns out that it sucks in ambient heat energy to make up the difference. Commercial application is unlikely, though. (via Wired UK).
“
The Japanese people will be recovering from this catastrophe for years to come. For those of us outside of Japan, however, it’s all too easy to forget. That’s why, to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami, GOOD will join the Japan Society of New York in observing a moment of silence led by Ambassador Shigeyuki Hiroki, Japan’s consul general in New York, at 2:46 p.m. this Sunday, March 11. We invite you to join us, wherever you are. At 2:46 p.m. in your time zone, take a minute to reflect on the incredible challenge facing Japan.” (via GOOD).
Maggie Koerth-Baker writes on Boing Boing:
“Yesterday, I got to host an eye-opening Q&A with Dan Edge, a PBS FRONTLINE producer who just finished a documentary about what happened at Fukushima during the first few days of the nuclear crisis there.
During that discussion, we touched a bit on the psychological impact all of this—the earthquake, the tsunami, the nuclear meltdowns—has had on the Japanese people. From studies of what’s happened to the people who lived near Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, we know that the fear and stress associated with these kinds of disasters can have complex and long-ranging health effects.
Today, Paul Voosen, a journalist with Greenwire, emailed me a story he wrote last year, during the first month of the Fukushima crisis, that delves into some of the science behind how disasters (and especially nuclear disasters) affect the human psyche. If you’ve already read it, it’s worth reading again.”
“Bruce Levine, a clinical psychologist, has written on Mad in America about his colleagues’ propensity for diagnosing anti-authoritarians with mental illness. Levine says diagnoses like oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder and anxiety disorder are applied to people who question authority’s legitimacy by mental health practitioners who are, themselves, unconsciously deferential to authority.” (via Boing Boing)
Theologian Susannah Cornwall of Manchester: “…[T]hose who met and interacted with Jesus seem to have had no doubt that he was a man – but, crucially, this is not the same as certainty that he was biologically male. Most of us will meet people on a regular basis who identify as completely unremarkable men or women, but who also have an interest condition. There will hardly ever be any need for us to know about the specificities of someone else’s chromosomes, gonads, hormone levels or sex cells – but if we did, we might be surprised by the number of people whose physical sex varies in some way from what we consider “normal”.
Some of those who argue that women should not be consecrated as priests or bishops do so because they believe that there is something intrinsic to maleness which makes males able to govern and lead in a way females cannot. Others who oppose women priests and bishops argue that a priest or bishop somehow participates in Jesus’ own priesthood, standing in Jesus’ place, and that since Jesus was male, a female cannot take on this role.
However, I believe that most people who argue in this way never make the distinction between sex and gender which I have outlined above.” (via Boing Boing)
“Rush Limbaugh’s statement on Sandra Fluke was a textbook example of what not to say.” (via Slate).
Advertisers really know their demographics. I would of course never listen to Rush Limbaugh and, with his latest offensive idiocy, was all set to stop patronizng his sponsors. But apparently they don’t want me as a customer either, because none of the advertisers on this list from The Atlantic Wire.have the least bit of appeal to me. The sole exception, and they say they do not really support Limbaugh, is Netflix.
“We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night – but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.
In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.
It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.” (via BBC News).
26 Epic Retro Horror Movie Posters; how many of these have you seen? By my count, I’m 18:26. This collection includes my all-time favorite, The Crawling Eye (1958). (via WebUrbanist)
“…Military commanders pressure clinicians to issue unwarranted psychiatric diagnoses to get rid of troops.” (via NYTimes). In civilian psychiatry, as well, the status of personality disorder diagnoses is dubious. Especially when applied loosely, these diagnoses are little more than pejorative.
‘The Composites blog takes descriptions of literary characters and runs them through police composite sketch software to produce composite sketches… This is one of those “why didn’t I think of this?” projects…well done,’ says kottke.
Robert Krulwich: There are people who live long enough to create a link — a one-generation link — to figures from what feels like a distant past, and their presence among us shrinks history. When “Long Ago” suddenly becomes “So I said to him …,” long ago jumps closer.There are many examples of people who shrink history this way. The blogger Jason Kottke has been collecting examples. He calls them “human wormholes,” because these people help us leap across space/time. Here are my favorites.’ (via NPR)
For instance:
– ”I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them other people’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn their money and provide for themselves and their families. The best way to do that is to get the manufacturing sector of the economy rolling.”
–
“(Same-sex marriage) is an issue just like 9-11. We didn’t decide we wanted to fight the war on terrorism because we wanted to. It was brought to us. And if not now, when? When the supreme courts in all the other states have succumbed to the Massachusetts version of the law?”
[via Addicting Info (thanks, jill)]
Hollywood Illuminati explains that Madonna’s Superbowl halftime show was actually an elaborate homage to Baphomet.
Evgeny Morozov: “The other day, while I was rummaging through a stack of oldish articles on the future of the Internet, an obscure little essay from 1998 — published, of all places, on a Web site called Ceramics Today — caught my eye. Celebrating the rise of the “cyberflâneur,” it painted a bright digital future, brimming with playfulness, intrigue and serendipity, that awaited this mysterious online type. This vision of tomorrow seemed all but inevitable at a time when “what the city and the street were to the Flâneur, the Internet and the Superhighway have become to the Cyberflâneur.”
Intrigued, I set out to discover what happened to the cyberflâneur. While I quickly found other contemporaneous commentators who believed that flânerie would flourish online, the sad state of today’s Internet suggests that they couldn’t have been more wrong. Cyberflâneurs are few and far between, while the very practice of cyberflânerie seems at odds with the world of social media. What went wrong? And should we worry?” (via NYTimes.com)
‘Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft is en route to intercept a comet– and to make history. In 2014, Rosetta will enter orbit around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenkoand land a probe on it, two firsts.
Rosetta’s goal is to learn the primordial story a comet tells as it gloriously falls to pieces.
Comets are primitive leftovers from our solar system’s ‘construction’ about 4.5 billion years ago. Because they spend much of their time in the deep freeze of the outer solar system, comets are well preserved—a gold mine for astronomers who want to know what conditions were like back “in the beginning.” ‘ (via NASA Science)
Doug Schoen: “Today’s jobs report that the unemployment rate has fallen from 8.5% to 8.3% while total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 243,000 in January is just one of many reasons why there is an increasing air of optimism in the White House.” (via Forbes).
“It took Vermont officials four years to notice a little creative editing by one or more inmates. Look at this police decal:
Look at the cow underneath the tree. Embedded within the cow’s spots is an image of a pig, which as the Burlington Free Press reminds us is the ’60s-era epithet used by protesters to refer to police.
Reuters reports that it was likely put there by inmates. The state, Reuters adds, “contracts with correctional facilities employing prisoners to make some print products, including the cruiser decals.” One or more inmates somehow accessed the computer program holding the image and rejiggered it. The quality assurance department failed to notice it and as far as the state police know, the modified decal was used on as many as 30 Vermont State Police cruisers.” (via NPR).
Self-guided bullet could hit laser-marked targets from a mile away: “A group of researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have built a prototype of a small-caliber bullet capable of steering itself towards a laser-marked target located approximately 2,000 meters (1.2 miles) away. The dart-like design has passed the initial testing stage… The four-inch (10 cm) long projectile is to be used with smoothbore arms, meaning ones with non-rifled barrels. Rifling involves cutting helical grooves in the barrel to give the bullet a spin that, thanks to the gyroscopic effect, improves its aerodynamic stability and accuracy. In a self-guided projectile, however, such spinning movement would prevent the bullet from reliably turning towards the target when in flight. For this reason, the group of researchers lead by Red Jones and Brian Kast decided to use a dart-like design that includes tiny fins to allow the projectile to fly straight, without a spin.” (via Gizmag).
“It turns out that if you didn’t grow up with Oreos and develop an emotional attachment to the cookie, it can be a weird-tasting little thing. And this started a whole process in the Chinese division of Kraft of rethinking what the essence of an Oreo really is.” (via Planet Money : NPR).
Psychologist L. Alan Sroufe, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development: “Attention-deficit drugs increase concentration in the short term, which is why they work so well for college students cramming for exams. But when given to children over long periods of time, they neither improve school achievement nor reduce behavior problems. The drugs can also have serious side effects, including stunting growth.” (via NYTimes.com)
‘ “Chemical imbalance is sort of last-century thinking. It’s much more complicated than that,” says Dr. Joseph Coyle, a professor of neuroscience at Harvard Medical School. “It’s really an outmoded way of thinking.”
…Still, the story of serotonin remains. Why does it continue to have such a powerful grip on the popular imagination?’ (via NPR).
“False memories can be distinguished from real ones with a simple physiological test, report researchers from Germany.” (via Guardian.UK)
“The standout of this year’s Sundance and among the best films to play at the festival in two decades, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” isn’t an obvious studio-dependent title. Directed by Benh Zeitlin, who wrote the screenplay with Lucy Alibar, the film is a magical realist tale, as well as a hero’s journey, set in a gloriously mythologized part of southern Louisiana nicknamed the Bathtub. There, a 6-year old girl, Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis, a sensational find), lives in a state of grace and wonder with her hard-boozing father, Wink (Dwight Henry), amid wandering (and later cooked) chickens, stumbling drunks and rampaging creatures.
This is the first feature from Mr. Zeitlin, a Queens native who grew up in Westchester County, graduated from Wesleyan University and counts among his influences Mr. Malick, John Cassavetes and Emir Kusturica. After a stint working in the Czech Republic for another inspiration, the animator Jan Svankmajer, Mr. Zeitlin made his way, post-Katrina, to southern Louisiana, where he shot “Beasts” with a collective called Court 13. (“More of an idea than an organization,” as Mr. Zeitlin puts it, Court 13 takes its name from a Wesleyan squash court that he and some friends commandeered.) Shot on Super 16-millimeter film, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is hauntingly beautiful both visually and in the tenderness it shows toward the characters, who live on the edge and perhaps somewhat in Hushpuppy’s head.” (via NYTimes)
“The Navy is testing an autonomous plane that will land on an aircraft carrier. The prospect of heavily armed aircraft screaming through the skies without direct human control is unnerving to many.” (via LA Times)
‘Whenever someone plays all coy like “I know something you don’t know, nah-nah-na-nah-nah” it’s always maddening, but when the subject of the withheld secret is disgraced former Speaker of the House, Newton Leroy Gingrich, and the holder of the keys to that mystery taunting the American electorate is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—who was on a House ethics committee that investigated Gingrich for a year and who looked at thousands of pages of documents—it’s got to be pretty explosive.
So far Pelosi has twice—not once, but twice—come right out and point-blank told the country that she knows “something” about Gingrich that insures that he will never become the President of the United States. As in never, ever, it ain’t gonna happen, no way, Jose, never, nope, sorry, uh-uh.’ (via Dangerous Minds).
“In a bitter skirmish over the definition of depression, a new report contends that a proposed change to the diagnosis would characterize grieving as a disorder and greatly increase the number of people treated for it.” (via NYTimes).
As readers know, I have done intermittent coverage of the proposed revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the official ‘bible’ of psychiatric diagnoses in US practice and currently awaiting its 5th edition. While lat week’s scandal was about the possible contraction of the definition of autism (which has many parents and patient advocates up in arms about the potential loss of qualifications for services for thousands), most of the suggested changes have one thing in common. They broaden the criteria for various disorders or create new, questionable diagnoses. In so doing, many more aspects of emotional life become medicalized or pathologized and subject to treatment with powerful drugs. Proponents of these changes claim they will allow the more rapid, preemptive identification of people deserving treatment. Critics claim that millions would be labelled mentally ill for behaviors previously conceived as normal, with insufficient evidence that they would benefit from treatment and needless exposure to the malignant side effects of powerful medications. Not to mention lining the pockets of Big Pharma.
‘Hollywood is acting like the Big Bad Wolf by portraying the animals as violent man-eating killers in the controversial action thriller The Grey, wildlife experts are complaining.Liam Neeson’s big-budget gore-fest, which shows a wolf pack picking off plane-crash survivors on the Alaskan tundra, couldn’t be further from the truth, said Maggie Howell, managing director of the Wolf Conservation Center in Westchester County.“Wolves don’t hunt humans — they actually shy away from them,” said Howell, a biologist.’ (via NYPost).
No matter how much Neeson appeals to you, please boycott this film.
In 2006, Adam Sternbergh wrote a memorable and snarky piece in New York magazine, “Up With Grups“, disparaging “40-year-old men and women who look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old”:
“This is an obituary for the generation gap. … It’s not about a fad but about a phenomenon that looks to be permanent. It’s about the hedge-fund guy in Park Slope with the chunky square glasses, brown rock T-shirt, slight paunch, expensive jeans, Puma sneakers, and shoulder-slung messenger bag, with two kids squirming over his lap like itchy chimps at the Tea Lounge on Sunday morning. It’s about the mom in the low-slung Sevens and ankle boots and vaguely Berlin-art-scene blouse with the $800 stroller and the TV-screen-size Olsen-twins sunglasses perched on her head walking through Bryant Park listening to Death Cab for Cutie on her Nano.”
But, while there are certainly some ‘grown-ups’ whose undying affectation of youth culture comes from some pitiful Peter Pan complex, I think the explanation often has more to do with this phenomenon. As Kurt Anderson observed recently in Vanity Fair, popular culture simply may not have changed that much in the past twenty years or so:
“Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972—giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps—with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ’n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins—again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising—all of it. It’s even true of the 19th century: practically no respectable American man wore a beard before the 1850s, for instance, but beards were almost obligatory in the 1870s, and then disappeared again by 1900. The modern sensibility has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives, our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned.” (via kottke)
It seems to me that this isn’t across the board, of course. Music and casual dress seem to have changed less than, for instance, literary style, cuisine, automobile design, or film, off the top of my head. It is no accident that Sternbergh focuses mostly on what his so-called ‘grups’ wear and listen to.
A mind-boggling piece on Tatiana and Krista, 4-year old sisters in rural British Columbia, which mounts a serious challenge to our “one-person-one-mind” convictions:
“Twins joined at the head — the medical term is craniopagus — are one in 2.5 million, of which only a fraction survive. The way the girls’ brains formed beneath the surface of their fused skulls, however, makes them beyond rare: their neural anatomy is unique, at least in the annals of recorded scientific literature. Their brain images reveal what looks like an attenuated line stretching between the two organs, a piece of anatomy their neurosurgeon, Douglas Cochrane of British Columbia Children’s Hospital, has called a thalamic bridge, because he believes it links the thalamus of one girl to the thalamus of her sister. The thalamus is a kind of switchboard, a two-lobed organ that filters most sensory input and has long been thought to be essential in the neural loops that create consciousness. Because the thalamus functions as a relay station, the girls’ doctors believe it is entirely possible that the sensory input that one girl receives could somehow cross that bridge into the brain of the other. One girl drinks, another girl feels it.” (via NYTimes).
“This month, researchers are inaugurating the Event Horizon Telescope, a project that will try to take the first detailed pictures of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.
This observation would be a remarkable achievement, underscoring the progress that has been made in black-hole research in just the last few decades. As recently as the 1970s, astronomers still argued over whether black holes were theoretical constructs or real physical objects. They now have ample evidence that black holes are not only real, but abundant in the cosmos.” (via Wired)
