Tag: reality
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Statistical significance. Not so… significant!
In science, the success of an experiment is often determined by a measure called “statistical significance.” A result is considered to be “significant” if the difference observed in the experiment between groups (of people, plants, etc) would be very unlikely if no difference actually exists. The common cutoff for “very unlikely” is that you’d see…
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Knowledge. Destruction.
Powerful DNA-sequencing techniques have spurred an avalanche of discoveries about ancient humans, but each one comes at a price: the partial destruction of the specimens from which the DNA was taken. Anthropologists Keolu Fox and John Hawks call for researchers to think harder about safeguarding. “Unless some ground rules are established, future scientists, armed with…
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Seeing better. And better. And better. Until we see nothing at all…
A few years ago, a team of scientists at EPFL's Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology, headed by Aleksandra Radenovic in the School of Engineering, developed an algorithm that can estimate a microscope's resolution in just a few seconds based on a single image. The algorithm's result indicates how closely a microscope is operating to its full…
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Virtual 'universe machine'. Galaxy evolution. Understanding unicorns.
By creating millions of virtual universes and comparing them to observations of actual galaxies, researchers have made discoveries that present a powerful new approach for studying galaxy formation. (1) A cosmos full of phenomena. Phenomena we try to understand. Because we imagine we can. A cosmos full of laws. Laws we expect to decipher because…
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Hallucinations…
Hallucinations are spooky and, fortunately, fairly rare. But, a new study suggests, the real question isn't so much why some people occasionally experience them. It's why all of us aren't hallucinating all the time. In the study, Stanford University School of Medicine neuroscientists stimulated nerve cells in the visual cortex of mice to induce an…
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