2016

From ScienceDaily: Repeated binge drinking during adolescence can affect brain functions in future generations, potentially putting offspring at risk for such conditions as depression, anxiety, and metabolic disorders, a Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine study has found. “Adolescent binge drinking not only is dangerous to the brain development of teenagers, but also may impact the brains of their children,” said senior author Toni R. Pak, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Cell and Molecular Physiology of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. … The study, which was based on an animal model, found that adolescent binge drinking altered the on-off switches of multiple genes in the brains of offspring. When genes are turned on, they Read More ›

It seems the impact of Brexit followed by Trump [= “Amer-exit” ?] is stirring up a sharp reaction in global halls of power, leading for instance to resort to a loaded, one-word, barbed dismissal of the presumed ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked masses:   U/D: Let’s add a clip on the wave of upcoming elections in Europe: Thus, we see in the just linked and clipped Bloomberg report: >>The rise of populism in developed nations is tearing at the political fabric of Europe, unsettling markets and undermining growth prospects, top European bankers said in Frankfurt on Friday. “The uncertainty in the market, especially the political and economic instability, has never been as pronounced as it is today,’’ Commerzbank AG Martin Read More ›

From Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience: Stephen Hawking thinks humanity has only 1,000 years left of survival on Earth and that our species needs to colonize other planets. The famed physicist made the statement in a speech at Oxford University Union, in which he promoted the goal of searching for and colonizing Earth-like exoplanets. Developing the technology to allow humans to travel to and live on faraway alien worlds is a challenge, to say the least. But is Hawking right that humanity has only 1,000 years to figure it out? The dangers Hawking cited — from climate change, to nuclear weapons, to genetically engineered viruses — could indeed pose existential threats to our species, experts say, but predicting a millennium into Read More ›

Most perplexing mystery in astronomy. From Elizabeth Gibney at Nature: What causes split-second blasts of radio waves that appear in the sky from billions of light years away is one of the most perplexing mysteries in astronomy. Now, for the first time, astronomers have seen a flash of high-energy γ-rays [gamma rays] that looks as if it was emitted by the same event that produced a fast radio burst (FRB) — a correlation that was predicted to help whittle down the zoo of possible explanations for the origin of FRBs. “If FRBs have γ-ray counterparts, it would be hugely constraining of models and extremely interesting,” says Victoria Kaspi, an astrophysicist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. But as well as exciting Read More ›

Yes. From astrophysicist Caleb Sharf at Nautilus: Alien life could be so advanced it becomes indistinguishable from physics. After all, if the cosmos holds other life, and if some of that life has evolved beyond our own waypoints of complexity and technology, we should be considering some very extreme possibilities. Today’s futurists and believers in a machine “singularity” predict that life and its technological baggage might end up so beyond our ken that we wouldn’t even realize we were staring at it. That’s quite a claim, yet it would neatly explain why we have yet to see advanced intelligence in the cosmos around us, despite the sheer number of planets it could have arisen on—the so-called Fermi Paradox. … In Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A subtle change occurred in our evolutionary history 100,000 years ago which allowed people who thought and behaved differently – such as individuals with autism – to be integrated into society, academics from the University of York have concluded. The change happened with the emergence of collaborative morality – an investment in the well-being of everyone in the group – and meant people who displayed autistic traits would not only have been accepted but possibly respected for their unique skills. It is likely our ancestors would have had autism, with genetics suggesting the condition has a long evolutionary history. Okay, so morality emerged and people who were different were not just cast out. But… Many people with autism Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Our current understanding is that mice have either no — or extremely limited — neural circuitry and genes similar to those that regulate human speech. According to a recent study published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, this understanding may be incorrect. … Dr. Jarvis and colleagues report the results of their investigation into the effect of a genetic mutation in the Forkhead box protein #2 (FOXP2) on the vocalization patterns of adult male mice. FOXP2 regulates speech production in humans. Individuals with deficiencies in FOXP2 protein have difficulty forming complex syllables and complex sentence construction. Although mice are unable to communicate using speech in the same way as humans, they do vocalize as a means of communicating with Read More ›

From James M. Chappell et al. at Frontiers in Physics: The proper description of time remains a key unsolved problem in science. Newton conceived of time as absolute and universal which “flows equably without relation to anything external.” In the nineteenth century, the four-dimensional algebraic structure of the quaternions developed by Hamilton, inspired him to suggest that he could provide a unified representation of space and time. With the publishing of Einstein’s theory of special relativity these ideas then lead to the generally accepted Minkowski spacetime formulation of 1908. Minkowski, though, rejected the formalism of quaternions suggested by Hamilton and adopted an approach using four-vectors. The Minkowski framework is indeed found to provide a versatile formalism for describing the relationship Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The formation of different languages and language groupings appears to have happened in the same broad period and geographical locations as the development of facial features in various human populations, according to linguistics professor, Gerhard Jäger, and paleoanthropologists, Professor Katerina Harvati and Dr. Hugo Reyes-Centeno. In their study, the researchers examined 265 skulls from Africa, Asia, and Oceania and the vocabularies of more than 800 languages and dialects from those regions. If these findings are confirmed in further investigations, it would give researchers a characteristic which would help them to follow the development of various language families as far back as the early development of humankind. The linguists developed a method to measure the degree of similarity between Read More ›

. . . as in, it’s a delusion: >>When the machines take over our important decisions we will do the same thing we do now – we will imagine that we are making the decisions on our own. Today our important decisions are made with emotions, and rationalized after the fact. We incorrectly call this process “thinking.” In the near future, our machines will make our daily decisions using Big Data and whatever they know about us as individuals to maximize our outcomes. You’ll like that future because the machines will make better decisions than you, and you’ll have better quality of life. In the new world ahead, you will be the robot – albeit a moist one. The machines Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Contrary to popular belief, language is not limited to speech. In a recent study published in the journal PNAS, Northeastern University Prof. Iris Berent reveals that people also apply the rules of their spoken language to sign language. Language is not simply about hearing sounds or moving our mouths. When our brain is “doing language,” it projects abstract structure. The modality (speech or sign) is secondary. “There is a misconception in the general public that sign language is not really a language,” said Berent. “Part of our mandate, through the support of the NSF, is to reveal the complex structure of sign language, and in so doing, disabuse the public of this notion.” To come to this conclusion, Read More ›

From Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: Back in 2013 one could read lots of claims in the media that “Hard evidence for the multiverse” had been found, based on “effects of quantum entanglement between our horizon patch and others”. These claims were discussed on this blog (with a response from the authors here). A new paper by Will Kinney has now been published in JCAP, including the following conclusion about such claims: It is worthwhile to discuss in general the “concrete predictions” originally claimed by the authors of refs. [1,2], since several key claims do not survive even cursory scrutiny. For example, the discontinuity in the effective potential claimed to be correlated with voids and the CMB cold spot Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Nature is full of parasites — organisms that flourish and proliferate at the expense of another species. Surprisingly, these same competing roles of parasite and host can be found in the microscopic molecular world of the cell. A new study by two Illinois researchers has demonstrated that dynamic elements within the human genome interact with each other in a way that strongly resembles the patterns seen in populations of predators and prey. … Goldenfeld and Xue embarked on this work because of their interest in transposons, small regions of DNA that can move themselves from one part of the genome to another during the lifetime of a cell — a capability that has earned them the name “jumping Read More ›

From Daniel Stolte at University of Arizona News: Sputnik Planitia, a 1,000-kilometer-wide basin within the iconic heart-shaped region observed on Pluto’s surface, could be in its present location because accumulation of ice made the dwarf planet roll over, creating cracks and tensions in the crust that point toward the presence of a subsurface ocean. Published in the Nov. 17 issue of Nature, these are the conclusions of research by James Keane, a doctoral student at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, and his adviser, assistant professor Isamu Matsuyama. They propose evidence of frozen nitrogen pileup throwing the entire planet off kilter, much like a spinning top with a wad of gum stuck to it, in a process called Read More ›

Leonid Meteor Shower: In mid-November, spectacular “shooting stars” will streak through the night sky as the Leonid meteor shower hits Earth once again. This annual meteor shower is responsible for some of the most intense meteor storms in history, with meteors falling at rates as high as 50,000 per hour. This year’s Leonid meteor shower won’t be quite as impressive, though, said NASA meteor expert Bill Cooke. “This year, the Leonids are not in outburst, so the rates are going to be about 10 to 15 per hour,” he said. Outbursts occur when the Earth passes through a particularly dense patch of meteors. [Top 10 Leonid Meteor Shower Facts] Sure, but the show is free.