15 posts tagged “science”
Check out this fantastic, dare I say hypnotic, video of a Briggs-Rauscher chemical reaction.
Two chemical reactions happen - one which changes the solution from clear to amber, and another which changes it from amber to bright blue. Then the blue becomes clear and it all starts over again.
People tended to impulse shop, and seemed to have their reward system short circuited.
This is important because advertisers are starting to investigate scented advertising messages, not just in stores or in magazines (which is an old technology) but in bus shelters and other unusual spots.
I'm going to have to tell my boss I need a nap after a tasty lunch so I don't make any bad decisions....
Scientific American has an interesting (long) article up about using tools from neuroscience to find connections with religious experiences. One experiment involved scanning the brains of nuns while they recalled intense spiritual experiences to see which parts of the brain "lit up". Turns out it's the temporal lobes (near the ears).
Most interestingly, there is evidence (from at least 1892) that makes a link between religious experiences and certain forms of epilepsy that may involve misfirings of the brain in the same regions. People with this form of epilepsy often report intense spiritual experiences.
Depending on how religious you are (and how dualistic you are), you may not believe that the experience of God can be reduced to simple firings (or even misfirings) of electricity in the brain. On the other hand, it is interesting to know that there might be a special place in the brain dedicated to experiencing God.
I'm not a religious person myself, so I'd be interested to know what the "God spot" in the brain does for people who haven't had an intense spiritual experience. Can it register strong reactions to nature, to music, or art, or philosophy?
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was very important to the beginning of the US. He is well known for his political importance before, during, and after the Revolutionary War. He's also known as an inventor, a scientist, a writer and satirist, and a ladies' man.
He was an early advocate for the abolition of slavery, the first Postmaster General, a founder of the country's first hospital, of the University of Pennsylvania, and the first volunteer fire department. He suggested Daylight Savings Time as a way to increase national productivity. He tried to make many spelling reforms, but they never caught on.
He invented a stove, bifocals, the lightning rod, and the glass harmonica (a musical instrument based on touching the wet rims of wine glasses, but laid out like a keyboard). He was the first to use the terminology "positive" and "negative" when referring to electric charges, and of course he showed that lightning was electricity. Despite being a polymath and able to speak 5 languages, he only went to school until age 10. He did eventually receive honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Oxford Universities.
A contemporary parody of Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac about a long term trust fund that was intended to mock the overbearing optimism of Americans. However, Ben Franklin liked the idea in the parody so much that he bequeathed a thousand pounds each to his favorite cities of Boston and Philadelphia. The interest was to be disbursed every two hundred years. The Franklin Trusts today are worth several million dollars are used for loans and school funding.
Similarly to Thomas Jefferson, Franklin was unsure about Christianity. He liked its ideas but not the religious institutions. He did believe in God, but not necessarily the specific Christian God.
His mother's maiden name was Folger - those relatives would later go on to found Folger's Coffee
The agency was founded in the late 1950s spurred by the Soviet Sputnik program and general Cold War hysteria.
Due to their very-few-holds-barred attitude, DARPA has funded research into the strangest things over the years including a cannon to launch a person onto a roof, the ability to "steer" sharks and use them as spies, and the "urban combat skateboard". There's your tax dollars hard at work.
Notable achievements include ARPAnet, the precursor to the internet as well as early hypertext work, the computer mouse, hybrid vehicle engines, as well as contributions to satellites, cell phones, water purification, lasers, and pain-free needles, a real babelfish. Also important but less fun is the recently commercialized Active Denial System (ADS) which is a targeted microwave "pain cannon" intended for crowd control.
Current areas of interest for DARPA include all kinds of robots, suspended animation, mechanical exoskeletons for soldiers, the ability to see through walls, elimination of post-traumatic stress disorder, personal invisibility shields, really good holograms, the ability to function without sleep, and the unfortunately just-cancelled Slingatron - a spiral slingshot to launch payloads into space.
Very fine moon dust contains glass and tiny iron nanoparticles with an especially high surface area. If these particles pass into the blood system (as some would through inhalation), it deactivates the oxygen-carrying capability of red blood cells.
If serious it can cause an effect similar to carbon monoxide poisoning. So keep your helmet on next time you're on the moon, even if it interferes with your golf game there.
Edgar Allan Poe was abandoned and orphaned, disowned by his foster family, was court-martialed, married his 13 year old first cousin, was an alcoholic, probably suicidal, and died at age 40. However he was also one of the best American short story writers, and one of the best poets around.
He wrote a long, convoluted, little-known prose poem called Eureka in 1848 which is mostly about the nature of the universe and metaphysics. In it though he proposes what we recognize as the Big Bang theory of the beginning of the universe, as well as certain concepts from general relativity.
"Oneness, then, is all that I predicate of the originally created matter... This constitution [the current state of the world] has been effected by forcing the originally and therefore normally One into the abnormal condition of Many...A diffusion from unity..."
He claims that God's only direct creation was the original particle (singularity) from which the universe exploded, and that the universe will eventually collapse back to this singularity - both ideas which are still current in many respected theologies including Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, and some Hindu traditions. Most physicists accept Big Bang theory, although there's a contingent who disagree, including Stephen Hawking (who used to be all for it).
The Big Bang theory was scientifically proposed in 1927 by Georges LeMaitre based on Einstein's general relativity. Exactly 100 years after Eureka! was published, George Gamow predicted the existence of cosmic microwave radiation background (radiation left over from the Big Bang). This kind of radiation was discovered, depending on whom you believe, by Soviets on purpose or by Americans by accident in 1964.
Squirrels can slow their heart rate from the usual 300 beats/minute to about 5 beats/minute when hibernating. Their body temperature falls dramatically and their oxygen use decrease to 1/50 of their active state. They can also go between the two states without any problems.
Implications and applications of humans being able to regulate body temperature, oxygen consumption, and heart rate are numerous in both military, civilian, and especially medical arenas.
Buddhists monks (and the occasional regular guy!) are sometimes known to be able to regulate these body processes, although science has yet to crack the case of exactly how to do it.
Toxoplasmodia gondii beyond having a pretty cool name, is generally a pretty benign infectious agent in most humans, although it can affect animals like cats and mice.
If mice are infected, the plasmodium causes them to not fear cats and sometimes even to seek out areas with cats. Then the parasite can gain entry to the cat, its preferred host (it can only reproduce in a cat).
Humans can contract the parasite themselves through contact with cat feces, like from a litter box. It can also be contracted by eating undercooked or raw meat. Toxoplasmosis in humans is even more interesting and freakish, with possible wide-ranging effects, although most infected people do not know they have it; it can remain latent. However, it can also become acute and cause death (rarely).
Studies suggest that toxoplasmosis in humans:
- can affect the gender of children born to infected mothers. She is much more likely to give birth to a boy.
- can cause antisocial behavior and decreased IQ in men and promiscuity and higher IQ in women
- can cause schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and neuroticism in all infected people
- can slow reaction times
- can increase risk-taking behavior in all people
- can cause cysts on the brain, a kind of mild encephalitis (even in its latent phase, although usually does not cause problems and often remains undiagnosed)
The incidence of toxoplasmodium carriers is surprisingly high: averaging 30-65% of the worldwide population, but especially high in certain countries that eat a lot of raw or rare red meat, such as France and Germany (in the 80%), compared to Britain (22%) and South Korea (4%). It's been suggested the the pandemic nature and the mental symptoms could impact entire cultures.
While a lot more research needs to be done on the effects of toxoplasmosis, it is really interesting!
