Welcome to Sott.net
Fri, 15 Oct 2021
The World for People who Think

Science & Technology
Map

Info

Vegetative state patient becomes minimally conscious after vagus nerve stimulation

Beth Mole
Ars Technica
Mon, 25 Sep 2017 17:53 UTC
Pre and Post Vagus nerve stimulation
© Current Biology
Information sharing across all electrodes before and after vagus nerve stimulation. On the right, the warmer colors (yellow/orange) indicated an increase of connectivity among posterior parietal regions.
After lying in a vegetative state for 15 years, a 35-year-old male patient in France appears to have regained minimal consciousness following months of vagus nerve stimulation, researchers report today in Current Biology.

The patient, who suffered severe brain damage in a car crash, had shown no signs of awareness or improvement before. He made no apparent purposeful movements and didn't respond to doctors or family at his bedside. But after researchers surgically implanted a device that stimulates the vagus nerve, quiet areas of his brain began to perk up-as did he.

His eyes turned toward people talking and could follow a moving mirror. He turned his head to follow a speaker moving around his bed. He slowly shook his head when asked. When researchers suddenly drew very close to his face, his eyes widened as if he was surprised or scared. When caregivers played his favorite music, he smiled and shed a tear.

The reignited activity bumped his clinical status from vegetative to minimally conscious-an improvement, but still a severely disabled condition. Nevertheless, it gives the researchers optimism that this type of nerve stimulation could help treat other patients with severe brain damage and impaired consciousness. The fact that he was in a vegetative state for so long beforehand makes the results even more convincing, they argue. (The likelihood of regaining consciousness after a single year in an unresponsive state is rather dismal.)
      Read More...
Info

Meteorite impacts may have created Earth's tectonic plates

Andrew Masterson
Cosmos Magazine
Mon, 25 Sep 2017 16:38 UTC
Meteorites hitting the early Earth
© Mark Stevenson/UIG
An artist’s impression of meteorites hitting the early Earth.
Meteorite impacts might have kick-started the Earth's tectonic plates and boosted the planet's magnetic field, according to a study from Australia's Macquarie University.

The research, led by Craig O'Neil from the university's Planetary Research Centre, and published in the journal Nature Geoscience, offers a scenario to illuminate what happened during the first 500 million years of the Earth's existence - a period known as the Hadean, or, more poetically, the geologic dark ages.

To date, the question of whether the young planet featured moving tectonic plates has been moot, primarily because almost nothing of its early crust remains.

Some scientists have proposed that grains of zircon, dating to before 4.1 billion years ago, are evidence of early, active tectonics. Others, however, are more convinced by geochemical data indicating that in its formative years the Earth was encased in a motionless "lid", with moving tectonic plates emerging later.

Tectonic plates were until recently thought to be unique to Earth, at least within the solar system. However, research by scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2012, using satellite imagery, established that Mars also experiences plate movement, although on a smaller scale.
      Read More...
Robot

As if human dentists weren't scary enough, robot dentist performs first successful implant surgery

Alice Yan
South China Morning Post
Thu, 21 Sep 2017 08:41 UTC
robot dentist
A robot dentist has carried out the first successful autonomous implant surgery by fitting two new teeth into a woman's mouth, mainland media has reported.

Although there were human medical staff present during the operation, they did not play an active role while it was being carried out.

The one-hour procedure took place in Xian, Shaanxi, on Saturday, according to Science and Technology Daily.

The implants were fitted to within a margin of error of 0.2-0.3mm, reaching the required standard for this kind of operation, experts said.

The technology was designed to overcome mainland China's shortage of qualified dentists and frequent surgical errors.

Comment:



      Read More...
R2-D2

Putin expresses concern about AI tech to Yandex head - "When will AI eat us?"


RT
Sun, 24 Sep 2017 20:46 UTC
putin yandex
© Sergey Guneev / Sputnik
Vladimir Putin may secretly be on the side of Elon Musk in their indirect debate over the threat posed by artificial intelligence (AI). As Arkady Volozh, the head of Yandex, pitched him on the technology's potential, the Russian president inquired about when AI 'will eat us'.

The question seemed to baffle the head of Russia's biggest tech firm, who was giving Putin a tour on the company's Moscow HQ on Thursday.

"I hope never", he replied after taking a pause to gather his thoughts. "It's not the first machine to be better than humans at something. An excavator digs better than we do with a shovel. But we don't get eaten by excavators. A car moves faster than we do..."

But Putin seemed unconvinced. "They don't think," he remarked.
      Read More...
Galaxy

NASA's asteroid chasing spacecraft "Osiris-Rex" swings by earth en route to space rock

Marcia Dunn
Associated Press
Sun, 24 Sep 2017 02:42 UTC
NASA spacecraft asteroid
NASA's asteroid-chasing spacecraft swung by Earth on Friday on its way to a space rock.

Launched a year ago, Osiris-Rex passed within 10,711 miles (17,237 kilometers) of the home planet early Friday afternoon - above Antarctica. It used Earth's gravity as a slingshot to put it on a path toward the asteroid Bennu.

Osiris-Rex should reach the small, roundish asteroid next year and, in 2020, collect some of its gravel for return to Earth. If all goes well, scientists should get the samples in 2023.

Friday's flyby was a quick hello: The spacecraft zoomed by at about 19,000 mph (31,000 kph). NASA took precautions to ensure Osiris-Rex - about the size of an SUV - did not slam into any satellites.
      Read More...
People 2

Phrenology is IN! Study asks if people with wide faces have a higher sex drive than those with narrow faces

Ana Sandoiu
Medical News Today
Sat, 23 Sep 2017 00:00 UTC
Woman in bed

The shape of your face may say a lot about your sexuality, according to a new study
New research published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior suggests that the size and shape of your face may predict your sex drive and how likely you are to cheat on your partner.

Recently, behavioral and psychological researchers have taken an interest in facial morphology - that is, how the shape of the human face may correlate with certain attitudes, behaviors, and personality traits.

For example, some studies have suggested that in men, a high facial width-to-height ratio (FWHR) may signal aggressiveness, unethical behavior, and even psychopathy.

New research - led by Steven Arnocky, of Nipissing University in Ontario, Canada - examines the role of men and women's FWHR in sexual relationships, infidelity, and mate selection.

Comment: It's good to remember in studies like this that they're only ever talking about correlations and trends (usually slight ones). It's not as if every person with a wide face has a higher sex drive. Here's the study's results in graph form:
sex drive graph
So even if people with wide faces are somewhat more likely to have higher sex drives, big deal. There are people with wide faces with low sex drives, narrow faces with high sex drives. Researchers will come up with some evo-psych explanation, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily true, or that the correlation is really meaningful. It's an interesting trend, but people most likely will latch onto a headline like this and turn it into a new phrenology.

Interestingly, this isn't the only recent study to examine facial characteristics as it relates to sexuality:

Gaydar: Stanford U. creates computer algorithm that can distinguish straight from gay

      Read More...
Blue Planet

Research suggests gravity waves have influence over weather and climate

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That?
Thu, 21 Sep 2017 14:55 UTC
asteroid earth
In fluid dynamics, gravity waves are waves generated in a fluid medium or at the interface between two media when the force of gravity or buoyancy tries to restore equilibrium. An example of such an interface is that between the atmosphere and the ocean, which gives rise to wind waves. -source

From Goethe University in Frankfurt

Gravity waves form in the atmosphere as a result of destabilizing processes, for example at weather fronts, during storms or when air masses stroke over mountain ranges. They can occasionally be seen in the sky as bands of cloud. For weather forecast and climate models, however, they are mostly "invisible" due to their short wavelength. The effects of gravity waves can only be taken into consideration by including additional special components in the models. The "MS-GWaves" research unit funded by the German Research Foundation and led by Goethe University Frankfurt has meanwhile further developed such parameterizations and will test them in the second funding period.
      Read More...
Arrow Down

Planned obsolescence: Apple products become much slower just before release of a new model

Mr. Robot
Anonymous
Thu, 21 Sep 2017 00:00 UTC
iphone
(Editor's note: Snopes made an effort to debunk this article. They claim it is misleading to quote the work of a student as a "Harvard Study," but we specifically said she did "what any person with Google Trends could do." The original article was published in 2014, and it is still relevant today. The purpose of this article is to get people questioning the incentives and behavior of powerful corporations.)

If you were Apple, what tricks would you utilize to increase the sales of your latest product?

If you know corporations, you'd know they use any possible trick they can as a generality to increase their profit: think of how huge a factor it would make in the sale of new iPhones if the old ones became slower.

People have made the anecdotal observation that their Apple products become much slower right before the release of a new model.

Now, a Harvard student's study has done what any person with Google Trends could do, and pointed out that Google searches for "iPhone slow" spiked multiple times, just before the release of a new iPhone each time.
      Read More...
Info

Advanced life may exist in a form beyond matter


The Daily Galaxy
Thu, 21 Sep 2017 20:01 UTC
Alien?
© p1.pichost.me
Astrophysicist Paul Davies at Arizona State University suggests that advanced technology might not even be made of matter; that it might have no fixed size or shape; have no well-defined boundaries; is dynamical on all scales of space and time; or, conversely, does not appear to do anything at all that we can discern; does not consist of discrete, separate things; but rather it is a system, or a subtle higher-level correlation of things. Are matter and information, Davies asks, all there is? Five hundred years ago, Davies writes, " the very concept of a device manipulating information, or software, would have been incomprehensible. Might there be a still higher level, as yet outside all human experience, that organizes electrons? If so, this "third level" would never be manifest through observations made at the informational level, still less at the matter level.

We should be open to the distinct possibility that advanced alien technology a billion years old may operate at the third, or perhaps even a fourth or fifth level - all of which are totally incomprehensible to the human mind at our current state of evolution.

Susan Schneider of the University of Pennsylvania appears to agree. She is one of the few thinkers-outside the realm of science fiction - that have considered the notion that artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons.

Her study, Alien Minds, asks "How would intelligent aliens think? Would they have conscious experiences? Would it feel a certain way to be an alien?"
      Read More...
Microscope 1

Applying the math of theoretical physics helps in studying organism interactions without reference to species

Leah Burrows
SEAS Harvard University
Wed, 20 Sep 2017 19:45 UTC
finch species Darwin

The categorization of organisms into species, like Darwin's finches (above), has generated contentious debates in the biology community. Now, a SEAS researcher asks if there's a better way.
Applied mathematician rethinks how we differentiate organisms on the microbial scale

Even Charles Darwin, the author of The Origin of Species, had a problem with species.

"I was much struck how entirely vague and arbitrary is the distinction between species and varieties," Darwin wrote in his seminal 1859 work.

Categorizing species can get especially hazy at small, microbial scales. After all, the classical definition of species as interbreeding individuals with sexually viable offspring doesn't apply to asexual organisms. Examining shared DNA doesn't help either: collectively, E. Coli bacteria have only 20 percent of genes in common. The classification process gets even trickier as many microbes work so closely that it is unclear what to call separate organisms, let alone separate species.

The woes of classification generate contentious debates in the biology community. But, for postdoctoral fellow Mikhail Tikhonov, one field's contentious debate is another's theoretical playground. In new research, he asks: Could organism interactions be described without mentioning species at all?
      Read More...
Amazon Smile
Revolt! T-shirts