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Wolf

Your dog really does love you: Scans reveal affection comes from same part of brain as humans

Lucy Osborne
Dialy Mail, UK
Mon, 27 Jan 2014 15:11 UTC
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For years scientists have told us the bond between a pet and its owner goes no further than their need for food and security. But new research suggests what dog owners knew all along - that they do in fact experience feelings of love and affection
  • They do experience feelings of love and affection, research says
  • Team trained more than a dozen dogs to cope with noisy MRI scanners
  • Scientists hope to show that the animals love us for things far beyond food
For years scientists have told us the bond between a pet and its owner goes no further than their need for food and security.

But new research suggests what dog owners knew all along - that they do in fact experience feelings of love and affection.

Scientists at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, discovered that a part of the brain associated with positive emotions, was similar in dogs and humans.
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Eye 1

Google acquires UK artificial intelligence startup Deepmind

Samuel Gibbs
The Guardian
Mon, 27 Jan 2014 07:21 UTC
Demis Hassabis
© Graham Turner
Computer scientist Demis Hassabis has sold his artificial intelligence firm DeepMind to Google for around £400m
Google has made one its largest European acquisitions to date with a deal to buy DeepMind technologies, a London-based artificial intelligence firm which specialises in machine learning, advanced algorithms and systems neuroscience.

The Guardian understands that Google paid £400m ($650m) for DeepMind, which develops technologies for e-commerce and games, and has demonstrated computer systems capable of playing computer games. It aims, it says, to develop computers that think like humans.

The two-year-old artificial intelligence startup was founded by former child chess prodigy and neuroscientist Demis Hassabis alongside Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman.
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Nebula

Thunderbolts weekly review: Mythology, the electric nature of 'Star Forces' and why our Sun is literally like a giant light-bulb

ThunderboltsProject
YouTube
Sun, 19 Jan 2014 08:22 UTC
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Our weekly review of the Thunderbolts Picture of the Day, with new articles every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and "best of" every Tuesday and Thursday.


Monday: Touching Ground, by Rens van der Sluijs

Wednesday: Star Forces, by Stephen Smith

Friday: Why the Lower Corona of the Sun is Hotter than the Photosphere, by Dr. Donald E. Scott
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Galaxy

Stephen Hawking changes his mind regarding black holes


Huffington Post
Mon, 27 Jan 2014 08:12 UTC
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'Black hole', or something else entirely?
Stephen Hawking might have just lost himself a bet. Again.

The famed physicist has written in a new paper that "there are no black holes" - despite being one of the minds behind modern black hole theory.

Hawking writes in his paper that the notion of an event horizon - a gravitational boundary beyond which no information about a black hole, or even light, can escape - doesn't actually exist.

Instead he writes that a black hole is instead marked by an "apparent horizon" - from which matter and energy can escape, though in a confused form compared to when they entered.
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Hourglass

Neanderthal genes may be to blame for modern killer diseases such as cancer and diabetes

Chris Pleasance
Mail Online
Sun, 26 Jan 2014 07:21 UTC
neanderthals

Seeking revenge: While early humans wiped out Neanderthals around 30,000 years ago, their DNA could be making modern Europeans vulnerable to diseases such as cancer and diabetes
It has been around 30,000 years since the ancestors of modern-day humans are thought to have wiped out the ancient Neanderthals.

But new research shows that the extinct species could be taking revenge on us from beyond the grave by making us more vulnerable to potentially killer diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

Neanderthals and modern humans are thought to have co-existed for thousands of years and interbred, meaning Europeans now have roughly 2 per cent Neanderthal DNA.
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Info

Early Spanish hunter-gatherer was dark and blue-eyed

Larry O'Hanlon
Discovery News
Sun, 26 Jan 2014 12:00 UTC
Ancient Hunter
© CSIC
Artistic impression of the male-hunter gatherer.
The first whole human genome from the bones of a southern European who lived before farming shows he was blue-eyed, dark skinned, lactose-intolerant, and well equipped to fight diseases.

The discoveries about the 7,000-year-old Mesolithic ancestral European suggest the young man represents a transition that was still underway to create the lighter-skinned, milk-drinking people of more recent millenniums.

The genome of what's called the La Braña individual appears to have already acquired immunities to diseases that were thought to have been introduced to humans later, at the time when Europeans domesticated animals, which are thought to have transmitted the diseases to humans. The results were a surprise to the researchers who fully expected the man would have lighter skin and a more ancient set of immunity alleles, or groups of genes.
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Wolf

Dogs carry the oldest known living cancer

Marc Silver
National Geographic
Sun, 26 Jan 2014 12:06 UTC
Image
© Danny Lawson,Pa Wire via AP
Scrooble the dog, who overcame cancer, looks through a CT scanner.

The cancer, which causes genital tumors in dogs and is spread by sexual contact, is 11,000 years old.

Canines are in a rare category when it comes to cancer: They and Tasmanian devils are the only two animals that can transmit it from one individual to another.

A new genetic study reveals that the dog form of the cancer, which causes genital tumors, is 11,000 years old - making it the oldest continuously living cancer.

Canines can also develop cancers that are akin to human cancers, but their transmissible cancer spreads when cells from one dog's tumor rub off during sexual contact and grow into a new tumor on the other animal. The study notes that the cancer originated in an ancient dog closest to the modern-day breeds of Alaskan malamutes and huskies.

We spoke with Elizabeth Murchison, the study's first author. She's a cancer geneticist at the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the U.K. (This interview has been edited and condensed).
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Network

Big web crash in China: Experts suspect great firewall

Nicole Perlroth
Bits
Wed, 22 Jan 2014 22:30 UTC
Image

A screen shot of Google Street View shows the building in Cheyenne, Wyo., into which Wyoming Corporate Services recently moved.
The story behind what may have been the biggest Internet failure in history involves an unlikely cast of characters, including a little-known company in a drab building in Wyoming and the world's most elite army of Internet censors a continent away in China.

On Tuesday, most of China's 500 million Internet users were unable to load websites for up to eight hours. Nearly every Chinese user and Internet company, including major services like Baidu and Sina.com, was affected.

Technology experts say China's own Great Firewall - the country's vast collection of censors and snooping technology used to control Internet traffic in and out of China - was most likely to blame, mistakenly redirecting the country's traffic to several sites normally blocked inside China, some connected to a company based in the Wyoming building.

The Chinese authorities put a premium on control. Using the Great Firewall, they police the Internet to smother any hint of antigovernment sentiment, sometimes jailing dissidents and journalists; they blacklist major websites like Facebook and Twitter; and they block access to media outlets like The New York Times and Bloomberg News for unfavorable coverage of the country's leaders.
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Eye 2

NSA data tapping of Google enrages company

Charles Arthur
The Guardian
Tue, 21 Jan 2014 16:30 UTC
Image
© Rebecca Naden/Reuters
Google chairman Eric Schmidt says he wasn't briefed about the NSA tapping of the company's data.
Executive chairman says search company has 'complained at great length' to the US government over intrusion

Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has insisted he had no knowledge of the US National Security Agency's tapping of the company's data, despite having a sufficiently high security clearance to have been told.

He said that he and other members of the search company were outraged by the tapping carried out by the NSA and the UK's GCHQ - first revealed in the Guardian in June - and that they had "complained at great length" to the US government over the intrusion. Google had since begun encrypting internal traffic to prevent further spying, he said.

Speaking in a private session at the Guardian, Schmidt, 58, said: "I have the necessary clearances to have been told, as do other executives in the company, but none of us were briefed.

"Had we been briefed, we probably couldn't have acted on it, because we'd have known about it. I've declined briefings [from the US government] about this because I don't want to be constrained."

Comment: Considering Google's cozy relationship with the Obama Administration / NSA, we are left to wonder if the company was as ignorant of NSA spying as they claim:

Google Comes Under Fire for 'Secret' Relationship with NSA

Google to enlist NSA 'to help it ward off cyberattacks'

Life with Big Brother: Does Google Spy for NSA? Judge Says You Can't Know

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Info

Stephen Hawking: 'There are no black holes'

Heather Saul
The Independent, UK
Sat, 25 Jan 2014 14:53 UTC
Black Holes
© The Independent, UK
At least not in the way we perceive them now, he suggests.
Stephen Hawking has produced a "mind-bending" new theory that argues black holes do not actually exist - at least not in the way we currently perceive them.

Instead, in his paper, Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes, Hawking proposes that black holes can exist without 'event horizons', the invisible cover believed to surround every black hole.

During a previous lecture, 'Into the Black Hole', Hawkins described an event horizon as the boundary of a black hole, "where gravity is just strong enough to drag light back, and prevent it escaping".

"Falling through the event horizon, is a bit like going over Niagara Falls in a canoe", he said. "If you are above the falls, you can get away if you paddle fast enough, but once you are over the edge, you are lost. There's no way back.

"As you get nearer the falls, the current gets faster. This means it pulls harder on the front of the canoe, than the back. There's a danger that the canoe will be pulled apart. It is the same with black holes."

But now, Hawking is proposing 'apparent horizons' could exist instead, which would only hold light and information temporarily before releasing them back into space in 'garbled form', Nature has reported.

The internationally-renowned theoretical physicist suggests that quantum mechanics and general relativity remain intact, but black holes do not have an event horizon to catch fire.
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