Science & TechnologyS


Satellite

Second Chinese space station plunged towards Earth and no one knows why

Tiangong-2, a Chinese Space Station
A drawing of the Tiangong-2, a Chinese Space Station
A Chinese space station's mysterious manoeuvres have sparked fears it's about to plunge to Earth.

Earlier this year, Beijing's Tiangong 1 satellite burned up over the South Pacific after spending months locked in a death spiral. Now Tiangong-2, its sister craft, was spotted diving 60 miles toward the surface of our planet before mysteriously climbing back to its usual orbital height.

The strange movements suggest China has a plan for its spaceship. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Space News: 'It seems likely that the lowering of Tiangong-2's orbit is the first step in safely disposing of it.'

Clock

How your brain creates the illusion of time

time illusion1
© Trent Parke/Magnum Photos
What is "now"? It is an idea that physics treats as a mere illusion, yet it is something we are all familiar with. We tend to think of it as this current instant, a moment with no duration. But if now were timeless, we wouldn't experience a succession of nows as time passing. Neither would we be able to perceive things like motion. We couldn't operate in the world if the present had no duration. So how long is it?

That sounds like a metaphysical question, but neuroscientists and psychologists have an answer. In recent years, they have amassed evidence indicating that now lasts on average between 2 and 3 seconds. This is the now you are aware of - the window within which your brain fuses what you are experiencing into a "psychological present". It is surprisingly long. But that's just the beginning of the weirdness. There is also evidence that the now you experience is made up of a jumble of mini subconscious nows and that your brain is choosy about what events it admits into your nows. Different parts of the brain measure now in different ways. What's more, the window of perceived now can expand in some circumstances and contract in others.

Now is clearly a slippery concept. Nevertheless, it would be good to pin it down because it could tell us something about the bigger picture of how the brain tracks time. Not just that, the perception of the present is also crucial to how we experience the world. If events appear simultaneous when they aren't, that has implications for our understanding of what causes what. "Your sense of nowness underpins your entire conscious experience," says Marc Wittmann at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. Understanding now even helps us address the question of whether we have free will.

We have long known that the brain contains structures that use cycles of light and dark to set its daily clock. How it tracks the passing of seconds and minutes is much less well understood. At this level, there are two broad types of timing mechanism, an implicit and an explicit one. The explicit one relates to how we judge duration - something we're surprisingly good at. The implicit mechanism is the timing of "now" - it is how the brain defines a psychological moment and so structures our conscious experience.

Comment: See also: The illusion of time: Carlo Rovelli's book 'The Order of Time' posits that reality is simply a complex network of events


Moon

Researchers find that air pollution can cloud your morality, increase anxiety and lead to unethical behavior

air pollution
Polluted air doesn't just affect our physical health, but it can disturb our psychological health too. The findings of a recent study show that exposure to air pollution, or even just the belief that you've been exposed to toxic air whether you have or not, can compromise a person's sense of morality.

Researchers from Columbia University conducted experimental studies and surveys of past data to find indications of air pollution exposure affecting crime and deviant behavior. The results showed a link between pollutants and a person's likelihood of committing a criminal act or cheating. The authors believe the connection has to do with increased anxiety that people experience in areas with greater levels of pollution.

"Our findings suggest that air pollution not only corrupts people's health, but also can contaminate their morality," says first author Jackson G. Lu, a behavioral scientist at Columbia Business School, in a release by the Association for Psychological Science.

Previous research has associated elevated levels of air pollution to heightened anxiety in individuals, which has long been correlated with unethical behaviors.

Brain

California scientists successfully grow Neanderthal mini-brains

life of a neanderthal family
© ReutersAn exhibit shows the life of a neanderthal family in a cave in the new Neanderthal Museum in the northern town of Krapina
Scientists no longer need a time machine to study Neanderthal cognitive abilities, after a group of geneticists managed to successfully create miniature Neanderthal brains.

A group of geneticists at the University of California, San Diego led by Professor Alysson Muotri conducted a breakthrough experiment, engineering miniature pea-sized versions of the Neanderthal brain.

The results of this unprecedented experiment were presented at June's UCSD conference called 'Imagination and Human Evolution.'

Brain

People who anthropomorphize are actually smarter than those who don't

Your habit of talking to your pets, plants or any inanimate object, for that matter, is a sign of intelligence, not stupidity.
man and dog
Pet owners around the globe, if not all then most of them, have daily conversations with their pets, how they'd talk to normal human beings. They wish their pets good morning, ask them if they're hungry and if they wish to go for a walk, almost as if their pets are understanding them and will talk back any second now.

Do you talk to your pets like you talk to your friends? Be it a dog, cat, parrot or a guinea pig. If so, we're sure you've heard things like "Are you nuts?", "You've gone cuckoo" and seen people get weirded out by your behavior.

Grey Alien

A new study out of Oxford university says humans might be the only civilization in the observable universe

Alien Civilizations
© YouTube
The Fermi Paradox may finally have an answer.

Between claims that humans aren't the first civilization to call the Milky Way home and warnings that advanced alien civilizations could destroy us with their interstellar messages, it's surprising how many studies have been written about extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs) without the confirmation that they exist in the first place.

One of the greatest hopes of the scientific community is knowing that even the most pessimistic versions of the Drake Equation (the mathematical formula proposed to estimate the number of alien civilizations in existence) still predict that humans aren't alone-at least, until now.

New research from the Future of Humanity Institute and Oxford University claims that humans might be the only civilization in the observable universe.

Of course, the research is still based on estimates, since there's so much we still don't know about our universe. Still, even when experimenting with different probabilities, the research has found that there's still a good chance that we might be alone.

Galaxy

'The cow': Astronomers puzzled by incredibly bright and fast mystery burst from space

mystery burst from space dubbed “the cow”
A mystery burst from space has been dubbed “the cow”
Something is exploding incredibly quickly in the sky, and astronomers are scrambling to figure out what it is. On 17 June, the twin ATLAS telescopes in Hawaii spotted a bright flash in space that hadn't been there when they'd checked about two days before.

Most supernovae take a few weeks or even longer to reach their full brightness, but this explosion took days. "It really just appeared out of nowhere," says Kate Maguire at Queen's University Belfast, who is part of the ATLAS team. Its peak brightness was incredibly high, 10 to 100 times brighter than most normal supernovae.

"There are other objects that have been discovered that are as fast, but the fastness and the brightness, that's quite unusual," says Maguire. "There hasn't really been another object like this."

Horse

Horses know when something's amiss

Putin with his horse
© Alexey Druzhinin/AFP/Getty ImagesVladimir Putin talking to his favourite horse. The animals are able to detect a disconnect between word and deed, research suggests.
Horses, it seems, may have a sense of the incongruous.

Research led by cognitive scientist Kosuke Nakamura from the University of Tokyo in Japan examines the reaction of horses to visual and audio cues when the emotion expressed in one does not match that of the other.

The results, published in the journal Scientific Reports, is believed to be the first time this type of cognition has been tested in horses - a remarkable thing, given that the species was domesticated around 5000 years ago and has lived in close proximity to humans ever since.

To conduct their research, Nakamura and colleagues recruited 19 horses from their own institution and the nearby Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology.

Bandaid

A plan to exterminate mosquitoes just received major funding from the Gates Foundation

So crazy it just might work.
mosquito
Beyond being itch-provoking summer pests, mosquitoes kill an estimated 830,000 people around the world each year. That makes them more deadly than any animal on Earth, humans included.

A majority of those mosquito-caused deaths (more than 440,000) are cases of malaria, which are transmitted person to person in a one-celled parasite that female mosquitoes pass around when they suck our blood.

Comment: Fooling with the complexities of nature without fully understanding these relationships will have 'unintended' consequences. The biotech industry is hell-bent on developing these GMO mosquitoes and won't let anyone get in their way:

Anti-GMO mosquito activist delivering petition to EPA found floating dead in DC hotel pool

See also:


Brain

Brain cells once thought to disappear during development were just found in adults

They've been there the whole time.
brain cells
© Rockefeller U
Scientists have thought for decades that one area of the brain simply disappears during human development. Now, genetic similarities between cells in the subplate and neurons linked to autism suggest a different scenario.

In a new paper, researchers demonstrate that subplate neurons survive, and in fact become part of the adult cerebral cortex, a brain area involved in complex cognitive functions.