Month: February 2018
-
Changing color. Turing. Von Neumann. Automata. Thinking. Tautologies.
Skin colour patterns in animals arise from microscopic interactions among coloured cells that obey equations discovered by the mathematician Alan Turing. Researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, and SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics reported in the journal Nature that a southwestern European lizard slowly acquires its intricate adult skin colour by changing the […]
-
Editing DNA vs. Evolution. Change vs. One. A battle lost before it even starts.
Octopus, squid, and cuttlefish are famous for engaging in complex behavior, from unlocking an aquarium tank and escaping to instantaneous skin camouflage to hide from predators. A new study suggests their evolutionary path to neural sophistication includes a novel mechanism: Prolific RNA editing at the expense of evolution in their genomic DNA.
-
Translating in a “dead” language. More “freedom”. Thinking without thinking.
Bochum-based philologist Prof Dr Reinhold Glei has figured out why Latin still turned up in many documents in the 17th to 19th centuries, even though it had not been a spoken language for a long time. During that period, Latin served as an instrument for translating languages that had hitherto been little known in Western […]
-
Giant atoms. The same as small atoms…
Scientists have proposed a new theory that combines some of the most mysterious phenomena in the Universe – black holes, gravitational waves, and axions – to solve one of the most confounding problems in modern physics. And it’s got experts in the field very excited. The theory, which imagines a Universe filled with colossal ‘gravitational […]
-
Synchronizing the brain with the cosmos. Not remembering.
The ability to remember sounds, and manipulate them in our minds, is incredibly important to our daily lives. New research is shedding light on how sound memory works in the brain, and is even demonstrating a means to improve it. Scientists previously knew that a neural network of the brain called the dorsal stream was […]
You must be logged in to post a comment.