Science Online

"For clearly the first particles of things // did not all place themselves in due order // by their own planning or intelligence, // nor did they through some agreement assign // the motions each of them should have. Instead, // since there are many of them and they change // in many ways through all the universe, // they are pushed, energized by collisions, // for a limitless length of time, and then, /// having gone through every kind of motion // and combination, they at length fall into // those arrangements which make up and create // this totality of things, which also, // once suitably set in patterned motion, // has been preserved through many lengthy years. // (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Since earth // was made by nature. Seeds of things themselves, // jostling freely here and there in various ways // and forced to random, confused collisions, // produced nothing—then finally those ones // suddenly united which could become, // every time, the beginnings of great things. (...) Since the moment earth was first created, // that day sea, land, and rising sun were born, //... more... - Amira

See also: How Epicurus’ ideas survived through Lucretius’ poetry, and led to toleration http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post... Lucretius: ‘O unhappy race of men, when they ascribed actions to the gods’ http://amiquote.tumblr.com/post... #universe #atoms #higgsboson #ancient #poetry - Amira

"Lucretius (borrowing from Democritus and others), says [more than 2,000 years ago] the universe is made of an infinite number of atoms. (...) All things, including the species to which you belong, have evolved over vast stretches of time. The evolution is random, though in the case of living organisms, it involves a principle of natural selection, (...) there is no life after death, and that there is no purpose to creation beyond pleasure. (...) Lucretius argued for a mechanistic universe governed by chance. He also argued for a plurality of worlds (and these planets, like the Earth, need not be spherical) and a non-hierarchical universe. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"[It] dropped like an atomic bomb on the fixedly Christian culture of Western Europe. But this poem’s radical and transformative ideas survived (...) One reason is that it was art. (...) In the spirit of commonplace books, readers of that era focused on individual passages rather than larger (and disturbing) meanings. Readers preferred to see the poem as a primer on Latin and Greek... more... - Amira

More than three decades ago, before the world’s most powerful particle collider was even on the drawing board, two physicists discovered a Higgs boson. On a tabletop. In 1981, Peter Littlewood and Chandra Varma, two solid-state theorists at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, realized that a mysterious effect seen in a niobium selenide superconductor could be explained by the jiggling of the invisible field that causes electrons in the material to pair up and move as one without resistance. Mathematically, the disturbance in the field looked very like one that is associated with the Higgs particle found by particle physicists. - Eric from Bookmarklet

If you meet Baxter, the latest humanoid robot from Rethink Robotics – you should get comfortable with him, because you'll likely be seeing more of him soon. Rethink Robotics released Baxter last fall and received an overwhelming response from the manufacturing industry, selling out of their production capacity through April. He's cheap to buy ($22,000), easy to train, and can safely work side-by-side with humans. He's just what factories need to make their assembly lines more efficient – and yes, to replace costly human workers. But manufacturing is only the beginning. This April, Rethink will launch a software platform that will allow Baxter to do a more complex sequencing of tasks – for example, picking up a part, holding it in front of an inspection station and receiving a signal to place it in a "good" or "not good" pile. The company is also releasing a software development kit soon that will allow third parties – like university robotics researchers – to create applications for... more... - Eric from Bookmarklet

"We’re beginning to come to grips with the idea that your brain is not this well-organized hierarchical control system where everything is in order, a very dramatic vision of bureaucracy. In fact, it’s much more like anarchy with some elements of democracy. Sometimes you can achieve stability and mutual aid and a sort of calm united front, and then everything is hunky-dory, but then it’s always possible for things to get out of whack and for one alliance or another to gain control, and then you get obsessions and delusions and so forth. You begin to think about the normal well-tempered mind, in effect, the well-organized mind, as an achievement, not as the base state. (...) You’re going to have a parallel architecture because, after all, the brain is obviously massively parallel. It’s going to be a connectionist network. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

Bernard Williams: “The generic human need to make and listen to music, for instance, might be explained at the level of evolutionary psychology, but the emergence of the classical symphony certainly cannot. In fact, the insistence on finding explanations of cultural difference in terms of biological evolution exactly misses the point of the great evolutionary innovation represented by... more... - Amira

"In [Hilary Putnam’s] view, there is no reason to suppose that a complete account of reality can be given using a single set of concepts. That is, it is not possible to reduce all types of explanation to one set of objective concepts. (...) The full scope of reality is simply too complex to be fully described by one method of explanation. The problem with all of this, and one that Putnam has struggled with, is what sort of picture of reality we are left with once we accept these three central arguments: the collapse of the fact-value dichotomy, the truth of semantic externalism and conceptual relativity. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"We could—like Putnam before the 1970s—become robust realists and simply accept that values and norms are no less a part of the world than ,elementary particles and mathematical objects. We could—like Putnam until the 1990s—become “internal realists” and, in a vaguely Kantian move define reality in terms of mind-dependent concepts and idealised rational categories. Or we could adopt... more... - Amira

Our digital age is all about bits, those precise ones and zeros that are the stuff of modern computer code. But a powerful new type of computer that is about to be commercially deployed by a major American military contractor is taking computing into the strange, subatomic realm of quantum mechanics. In that infinitesimal neighborhood, common sense logic no longer seems to apply. A one can be a one, or it can be a one and a zero and everything in between — all at the same time. It sounds preposterous, particularly to those familiar with the yes/no world of conventional computing. But academic researchers and scientists at companies like Microsoft, I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard have been working to develop quantum computers. Now, Lockheed Martin — which bought an early version of such a computer from the Canadian company D-Wave Systems two years ago — is confident enough in the technology to upgrade it to commercial scale, becoming the first company to use quantum computing as part of its business. - Eric from Bookmarklet

Although now called the big bang, Belgian cosmologist Georges Lemaître, who was the first to mathematically investigate the origin of the universe, wistfully referred to it as the 'day without yesterday'. If Efstathiou is right, however, the big bang did have a yesterday after all. - Eric from Bookmarklet

A miniscule bit of DNA from an African American man now living in South Carolina has been traced back 338,000 years, according to a new study. The man’s Y chromosome — a hereditary factor determining male sex — has a history that’s so old, it even predates the age of the oldest known Homo sapiens fossils, according to the report, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. - Eric from Bookmarklet

While quantum mechanics is by now a well-established theory, it nonetheless still fascinates both newcomers and experts alike with unusual phenomena. The paradox of Schrödinger’s cat and the subtleties of the two-slit interference are timeless classics. Another less-familiar quantum effect, the oscillations of neutral mesons (bound states of a quark and an antiquark), has also intrigued legions of physicists for nearly sixty years [1]. These mesons oscillate back and forth between particle and antiparticle states. The theoretical ideas underlying this behavior involve concepts that are woven deeply into the history of particle physics - Eric from Bookmarklet

The world was a very different place 3.5 million years ago. A land bridge connected Alaska and Russia. Our ancestors, the australopithecines, were first appearing in Africa. And giant camels roamed the Arctic, looking a whole lot like their desert-based descendants do today. That’s right—the shaggy animals that embody arid, sandy settings once thrived in decidedly chillier climes. According to a study published today in Nature Communications, researchers have evidence that camels lived all the way up in Canada’s northernmost territory, now home to polar bears, grey wolves and caribou. Far from feeling out of place, camels were ideally suited for the region’s harsh winters—and incredibly, the same features that helped them withstand the cold would later help their successors brave the desert. - Eric from Bookmarklet

Medical illustrators and neurological imaging experts at Johns Hopkins have figured out how night-hunting owls can almost fully rotate their heads - by as much as 270 degrees in either direction - without damaging the delicate blood vessels in their necks and heads, and without cutting off blood supply to their brains. - Halil from Bookmarklet

Nature has much to teach us. - Peter Dawson

It took over two-and-a-half-years for the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics to finally accept a paper outlining a new meteorological hypothesis in which condensation, not temperature, drives winds. If proven correct, the hypothesis could have massive ramifications on global policy—not to mention meteorology—as essentially the hypothesis means that the world's forest play a major role in driving precipitation from the coast into a continent's interior. The theory, known as the biotic pump, was first developed in 2006 by two Russian scientists, Victor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva of the St. Petersburg Nuclear Physics, but the two have faced major pushback and delays in their attempt to put the theory before the greater scientific community. "It is, at first glance, incredible that such a process could be so influential, be based on basic physics, and yet have gone unnoticed for so long by so many," says co-author Douglas Sheil who worked with Gorshkov and Makarieva on the new paper. "I shared this view initially, but over time it has withstood a large number of queries and challenges." - Halil from Bookmarklet

Scientists say babies decipher speech as early as three months before birth. The evidence comes from detailed brain scans of 12 infants born prematurely. At just 28 weeks' gestation, the babies appeared to discriminate between different syllables like "ga" and "ba" as well as male and female voices. Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the French team said it was unlikely the babies' experience outside the womb would have affected their findings. - Halil from Bookmarklet

Anecdotal stories from my pregnant patients include a few heading to the drag races while pregnant. Each person stated how when the engines started with the very loud noise, their pregnant belly literally went to a jolted point. They had to leave the venue. Early days of ultrasound we would bang on a metal pot near the womb to make the baby change positions. - Janet:#TeamMonique

Now a team of researchers led by Yi Cui, a professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University, has developed a Li-S battery that can retain more than 80% of its 1180 mAh/g capacity over 300 cycles, with the potential for similar capacity retention over thousands of cycles. In contrast, most Li-S batteries lose much of their capacity after a few tens of cycles. - Halil from Bookmarklet

Tiny gold particles called nonocages that emit Cerenkov light could be used to image tumours and deliver drugs to destroy them at the same time. That is the claim of researchers in the US, who have detected Cerenkov light from within live mice that had been injected with the nanoparticles. The nanocages are among the very first reported "theranostic" nanoparticles that have the potential to fulfil both therapeutic and diagnostic roles in medicine. - Halil from Bookmarklet

Extra Info: 1) Cherenkov radiation is electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle (such as an electron) passes through a dielectric medium at a speed greater than the phase velocity of light in that medium. The charged particles polarize the molecules of that medium, which then turn back rapidly to their ground state, emitting radiation in the process. The characteristic... more... - Halil

The parasites that cause schistosomiasis, one of the most common parasitic infections in the world, are notoriously long-lived. Researchers have now found stem cells inside the parasite that can regenerate worn-down organs, which may help explain how they can live for years or even decades inside their host. Schistosomiasis is acquired when people come into contact with water infested with the larval form of the parasitic worm Schistosoma, known as schistosomes. Schistosomes mature in the body and lay eggs that cause inflammation and chronic illness. Schistosomes typically live for five to six years, but there have been reports of patients who still harbor parasites decades after infection. - Halil from Bookmarklet

"The impact on Earth from a 3,000-foot-wide asteroid would cause an explosion equivalent to 40,000 megatons of TNT—and would likely end human civilization altogether, regardless of where it hit. The odds that such an asteroid impact would make us the last generation of human civilization are no lower than the odds of an average American dying in an earthquake (about 0.001%). \\ The chance in your lifetime of an asteroid impact with explosive energy of 100 megatons of TNT is about 1%. Such an impact would deliver many times the explosive energy of all the munitions used in World War II, including the atomic bombs." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

See also discussion on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Meteor-... and this latest NASA paper: Yarkovsky-driven impact risk analysis for asteroid (99942) Apophis... more... - Amira

"We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research. The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research." - Amira

Feb 23, 2013 [65,704 signatures] Today The White House responded to the petition https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/respons... - Amira

"Why does the music that to some people is lovely, even transcendent, sound to others like a lot of noise? Researchers at the University of Melbourne attribute to the amount of pleasure we take in music to how much dissonance we hear -- the degree of "perceived roughness, harshness, unpleasantness, or difficulty in listening to the sound." The team played both "pure tones" and various chords for participants -- a mixed group of trained musicians studying at the school's conservatory and members of the general public -- and had them rate the sounds for perceived dissonance, and for familiarity, on a five-point scale. Trained musicians, perhaps predictably, were more sensitive to dissonance than lay listeners. But they also found that when listeners hadn't previously encountered a certain chord, they found it nearly impossible to hear the individual notes that comprised it. Where this ability was lacking, the chords sounded dissonant, and thus, unpleasant." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"The ability to identify tones and thus enjoy harmonies was positively correlated with musical training. Said study co-author Sarah Wilson, "This showed us that even the ability to hear a musical pitch (or note) is learned." (...) The more ambitious implication of the findings, according to lead author Neil McLachlan, is that it "overturns centuries of theories that physical properties... more... - Amira

"The natural phenomenon, called 'murmuration', has become rare as starling populations have declined. Professor Yossi Leshem, director of the International Center for the Study of Bird Migration at Tel Aviv University, said the birds' synchronized movements are a way to communicate the location of food sources to other starling, as well create a defence mechanism against birds of prey. The spectacle lasted 20 minutes before dissipating." More: http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Amira from Bookmarklet

Check out also http://www.youtube.com/watch... (in HD) - Amira

"Technology has changed the speed and the scope of social influence and has really transformed our realities. (...) I see that most of our learning is by social modeling and through indirect experiences. Errors can be very costly and you can’t afford to develop our values, our competences, our political systems, our religious systems through trial and error. Modeling shortcuts this process. (…) With new technologies, we’re essentially transcending our physical environment and more and more of our values and attitudes and behavior are now shaped in the symbolic environment – the symbolic environment is the big one rather than the actual one. The changes are so rapid that there are more and more areas of life now in which the cyber world is really essential. One model can affect millions of people worldwide, it can shape their experiences and behaviors. We don’t have to rely on trial and error. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"The revolutionary tendency of technology has increased our sense of agency. If I have access to all global knowledge, I would have fantastic capacities to educate myself. (…) The important thing in psychology is that we need a theory of human agency, rather than arguing that we’re controlled by neural networks. In every aspect of our lives we now have a greater capacity for exercicing agency." - Amira

We assume that aggression is inbred, but some societies are remarkably pacifistic. And we can also see large variations within a society. But the most striking example might be the transformation from warrior societies into peaceful societies. Switzerland is one example. Sweden is another: Those vikings were out mugging everyone and people would pray for protection: - Elestirel Gunluk

"Two days after the long lost bones of Richard III were found in a parking lot, 528 years after his death, we can take a look at a 3D-printed reproduction of his face. The project, funded by the Richard III Society, was led by Caroline Wilkinson, Professor of Craniofacial Identification at the University of Dundee. She used 3D scanning and printing, with a technique called stereolithography, to reconstruct Richard III's head, based on his actual remains. An artist, guided by Wilkinson, then painted the colorless head and added glass eyes, a wig, a hat and the appropriate clothes. Richard III has always been one of the most mysterious and vilified kings in British history. Historically, he's always been portrayed as a malformed, hideous person. This 3D-printed replica of his face seems to contradict at least the claims about his appearance." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

@grossdm: "Ironic. Remains of Richard III, who said, "my kingdom for a horse" unearthed at same time kingdom revealed to be eating horse en masse." - Adriano

"A pair of Indiana University researchers has found that a pair of predictive modeling techniques can make significantly better decisions about patients’ treatments than can doctors acting alone. How much better? They claim a better than 50 percent reduction in costs and more than 40 percent better patient outcomes. (...) The researchers worked with “clinical data, demographics and other information on over 6,700 patients who had major clinical depression diagnoses, of which about 65 to 70 percent had co-occurring chronic physical disorders like diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease.” They built a model using Markov decision processes — which predict the probabilities of future events based on those immediately preceding them — and dynamic decision networks — which extend the Markov processes by considering the specific features of those events in order to determine the probabilities. Essentially, their model considers the specifics of a patient’s current state and then determines the best action to effect the best possible outcome." - Amira from Bookmarklet

I believe it. Many moons ago for a project in an expert systems class it seemed obvious doctors could be helped a lot with such a system and it wouldn't even be that hard to build. As always though "best possible outcome" is quite a fluid thing. - Todd Hoff

Then Big Pharma would come up with a pharmaceutical rep virus. - Spidra Webster

"A group in mathematics is an object that measures symmetry in the same way that a number measures quantity, groups can be used to cast light on Neo-Riemannian theory" More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... // "The red lines connect notes that are a major third apart. The green lines connect notes that are a minor third apart. The blue lines connect notes that are a perfect fifth apart. Each triangle is a chord with three notes, called a triad. These are the most basic chords in Western music. There are two kinds: A major triad sounds happy. The major triads are the triangles whose edges go red-green-blue as you go around clockwise. A minor triad sounds sad. The minor triads are the triangles whose edges go green-red-blue as you go around clockwise. This pattern is called a tone net, and this one was created by David W. Bulger." https://plus.google.com/u... - Amira

"In these ground-breaking essays, Heinz von Foerster discusses some of the fundamental principles that govern how we know the world and how we process the information from which we derive that knowledge. The author, Austrian American scientist combining physics and philosophy was one of the founders of the science of cybernetics" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

'Heinz Von Foerster’s Theorem Number One': “The more profound the problem that is ignored, the greater are the chances for fame and success.” (p.191) // 'Heinz Von Foerster’s Theorem Number Three': “The Laws of Nature are written by man. The laws of biology must write themselves.” (p.195) - Amira

"The important thing is the obvious thing nobody is saying." --William S. Burroughs - Adriano