Category: Perspective
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Aging…
Zachariah Reagh, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis found that brain activity in older adults isn’t necessarily quieter when it comes to memory. “It’s just different,” he said. What he found out is that while a 20-year-old notes all details in a movie, an…
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Colour where there is no colour… A cosmos where there is no cosmos…
Engineers have found that under the right conditions, ordinary clear water droplets on a transparent surface can produce brilliant colors, without the addition of inks or dyes. By tuning size, illumination angle, and curvature, MIT engineers can produce brilliant colors, in patterns they can predict, in otherwise transparent droplets. (1) Under the right angle, everything…
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Happy hamster… [Reading minds]
Is your pet hamster high on life — or just a sad little ball of fur? A new study from England suggests that — just like humans — some hamsters can have a shift in mood, from a gloomy demeanor to a more rosy view of life, for instance. What’s more, the research shows that…
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Microbes, arrogance, wrong perceptions.
Methane-producing microbes may be responsible for the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history. Fossil remains show that sometime around 252 million years ago, about 90 percent of all species on Earth were suddenly wiped out — by far the largest of this planet’s five known mass extinctions. It turns out that Methanosarcina had acquired a…
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Mapping a brain. Infinite level of analysis. Monads. Decisions…
Mapping the human brain is a noble goal, but a rather ill-defined one. It’s like making a map of the United States. You could just show political boundaries and the locations of cities. Or you might depict geographical features like mountains and rivers. Or transportation routes, like interstate highways and railroad tracks. You might even…
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