Tag: reality
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Filling in the gaps (of the blind spot). Believing (what is not there). Lies. Truth.
To make sense of the world, humans and animals need to combine information from multiple sources. This is usually done according to how reliable each piece of information is. For example, to know when to cross the street, we usually rely more on what we see than what we hear - but this can change…
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X, Y, Male, Female…
In most mammals, us included, biological sex is determined by a lottery between two letters: X and Y, the sex chromosomes. Inherit one X each from mom and dad, and develop ovaries, a womb and a vagina. Inherit an X from mom and a Y from dad, and develop testes and a penis. But there…
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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…
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Remembering. Verifying memories. Self-reference.
Research on eyewitness testimony has shown that false details put forth during an interrogation can lead some people to develop vivid memories of events that never happened. While this “false memory” phenomenon is alive and well, new research suggests that a bit of misinformation also has potential to improve our memories of past events —…
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Seeing via an app… Not seeing...
A mobile phone application from Microsoft is designed to help people with color blindness see the world a little bit more clearly. Color Binoculars, created by two Microsoft software engineers (one of whom is colorblind), applies a filter to incoming images, changing the colors on the screen to ones that are easier to distinguish. Looking…
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