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MIT scientists say new device makes dream control possible

Chris Mahon
Outer Places
Fri, 27 Apr 2018 23:12 UTC
Dream Control
© YouTube/MIT/Outer Places
From Inception to the anime classic Paprika, science-fiction is filled with devices that let people manipulate dreams. Though researchers have started work on machines that can read your mind and translate thoughts into text, the realm of sleep has remained relatively unexplored...until now.

Scientists at MIT are working on the third generation of a device called Dormio, which is already being described as "workable system for dream control."

Surprisingly, Dormio isn't concerned with REM sleep, the deep stage of sleep where most dreams occur-instead, it's focused on the hypnagogic state, the area between waking and dreaming.

In hypnagogia, people can experience vivid 'microdreams' and even auditory and visual hallucinations, along with strong bursts of creativity.

During hypnagogia, a person can still speak and hear people talking to them, but their thinking begins to change.
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Pyramid

'Perfectoid geometry' may be the secret that links numbers and shapes

Gilead Amit
New Scientist
Wed, 25 Apr 2018 13:29 UTC
Geometry math
© Mario De Meyer
If Joey was Chloe's age when he was twice as old as Zoe was, how many times older will Zoe be when Chloe is twice as old as Joey is now?

Or try this one for size. Two farmers inherit a square field containing a crop planted in a circle. Without knowing the exact size of the field or crop, or the crop's position within the field, how can they draw a single line to divide both the crop and field equally?

You've either fallen into a cold sweat or you're sharpening your pencil (if you can't wait for the answer, you can check the bottom of this page). Either way, although both problems count as "maths" - or "math" if you insist - they are clearly very different. One is arithmetic, which deals with the properties of whole numbers: 1, 2, 3 and so on as far as you can count. It cares about how many separate things there are, but not what they look like or how they behave. The other is geometry, a discipline built on ideas of continuity: of lines, shapes and other objects that can be measured, and the spatial relationships between them.

Mathematicians have long sought to build bridges between these two ancient subjects, and construct something like a "grand unified theory" of their discipline. Just recently, one brilliant young researcher might have brought them decisively closer. His radical new geometrical insights might not only unite mathematics, but also help solve one of the deepest number problems of them all: the riddle of the primes. With the biggest prizes in mathematics, the Fields medals, to be awarded this August, he is beginning to look like a shoo-in.
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Question

'Am I Stoned?' New app created to test marijuana's effect on on cognition

Marco Torres
Prevent Disease
Thu, 26 Apr 2018 17:05 UTC
cannabis app
Scientists have developed a prototype for an app that's been designed for cannabis users so that they can determine whether or not they're actually high. The app tests memory, attention and reaction -- traits that are often impaired by cannabis use.

The app, called "Am I Stoned", has been created by researchers from the University of Chicago to assess the effects of cannabis on cognitive ability.

Co-authors Elisa Pabon, a doctoral student, and Harriet de Wit, professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioural neuroscience, presented the app yesterday at the Emerging Biology conference in California.

The app, which has been supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse Grant, provides users with a series of tasks to test the impact of cannabis use on memory, reaction time and attention span.
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Satellite

Deep-sea robots are scoping out the origins of algae blooms - finds oxygen levels decreased ten-fold in coastal regions in the last 50 years

Marlene Cimons
Nexus Media
Sun, 25 Feb 2018 12:00 UTC
https://www.popsci.com/sites/popsci.com/files/styles/655_1x_/public/images/2018/01/barents_tmo_2016188_lrg.jpg?itok=NR0O33T_&fc=50,50
© NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz and Joshua StevensA phytoplankton bloom in the Barents Sea.
Every spring, the North Atlantic Ocean sees an explosion of tiny, free-floating algae that form the base of the ocean's food chain. While these microorganisms are turning themselves into fish food, they also are gobbling up enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, making them one of nature's key warriors in the fight against climate change.


Comment: CO2 is not the driver behind the earth changes we're witnessing - and anyway, weren't we promised 'global warming'?


But scientists have never understood exactly what triggers the annual bloom. It's a puzzle that has stymied oceanographers for decades. For many years, the traditional way of studying these blooms was via satellites. But that doesn't work when clouds are overhead, meaning researchers were frequently in the dark.

Now, however, thanks to a new generation of sophisticated sea robots, researchers finally can learn about algae - and other things too.

Comment: One wonders whether the algae induced hypoxia occurring in the Atlantic Ocean could also be related to the slowing down of the Atlantic circulation system which has been recorded as being the weakest in over 1000 years. It is, however, not the first we've seen of strange and hazardous algae blooms all around the world, which are also on the increase:

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Galaxy

Astronomers witness galaxy megamerger that raises questions about current galaxy cluster formation theories


Phys Org
Wed, 25 Apr 2018 16:27 UTC
galaxies
© NRAO/AUI/NSF; S. DagnelloArtist impression of the 14 galaxies detected by ALMA as they appear in the very early, very distant universe. These galaxies are in the process of merging and will eventually form the core of a massive galaxy cluster.
Peering deep into space-an astounding 90 percent of the way across the observable universe-astronomers have witnessed the beginnings of a gargantuan cosmic pileup, the impending collision of 14 young, starbursting galaxies.

This ancient megamerger is destined to evolve into one of the most massive structures in the known universe: a cluster of galaxies, gravitationally bound by dark matter and swimming in a sea of hot, ionized gas.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international team of scientists has uncovered a startlingly dense concentration of 14 galaxies that are poised to merge, forming the core of what will eventually become a colossal galaxy cluster.

This tightly bound galactic smashup, known as a protocluster, is located approximately 12.4 billion light-years away, meaning its light started traveling to us when the universe was only 1.4 billion years old, or about a tenth of its present age. Its individual galaxies are forming stars as much as 1,000 times faster than our home galaxy and are crammed inside a region of space only about three times the size of the Milky Way. The resulting galaxy cluster will eventually rival some of the most massive clusters we see in the universe today.

The results are published in the journal Nature.
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Beaker

When it comes to evaluating medical evidence, informed wisdom should trump rigid rules

Tom Siegfried
Science News
Mon, 23 Apr 2018 15:56 UTC
science studies stack of papers
© Elnur/Shutterstock
Systematic reviews emphasize process at the expense of thoughtful interpretation

Everybody agrees that medical treatments should be based on sound evidence. Hardly anybody agrees on what sort of evidence counts as sound.

Sure, some people say the "gold standard" of medical evidence is the randomized controlled clinical trial. But such trials have their flaws, and translating their findings into sound real-world advice isn't so straightforward. Besides, the best evidence rarely resides within any single study. Sound decisions come from considering the evidentiary database as a whole.

That's why meta-analyses are also a popular candidate for best evidence. And in principle, meta-analyses make sense. By aggregating many studies and subjecting them to sophisticated statistical analysis, a meta-analysis can identify beneficial effects (or potential dangers) that escape detection in small studies. But those statistical techniques are justified only if all the studies done on the subject can be obtained and if they all use essential similar methods on sufficiently similar populations. Those criteria are seldom met. So it is usually not wise to accept a meta-analysis as the final word.
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Clipboard

Study: Billions of gallons of water will be saved by thinning down forests in California

Anthony Watts
WUWT
Wed, 25 Apr 2018 15:05 UTC
sunshine forest
There are too many trees in Sierra Nevada forests, say scientists affiliated with the National Science Foundation (NSF) Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory (CZO).

That may come as a surprise to those who see dense, verdant forests as signs of a healthy environment. After all, green is good, right? Not necessarily. When it comes to the number of trees in California forests, bigger isn't always better.

That's in part because trees use lots of water to carry out basic biological tasks. In addition, they act as forest steam stacks, raking up water stored in the ground and expelling it as vapor into the atmosphere, where it's accessible to humans and forest ecosystems only when it falls back to Earth as rain and snow.
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Microscope 2

Enzyme telomerase, that affects ageing and cancer, decoded

Marlowe Hood
Yahoo!
Wed, 25 Apr 2018 00:01 UTC
old hands
© AFP Photo/PHILIPPE HUGUENDecoding the architecture of the enzyme, called telomerase, could lead to drugs that slow or block the ageing process, along with new treatments for cancer.
Elated scientists announced Wednesday the completion of a 20-year quest to map the complex enzyme thought to forestall ageing by repairing the tips of chromosomes in plants and animals, including humans.

Decoding the architecture of the enzyme, called telomerase, could lead to drugs that slow or block the ageing process, along with new treatments for cancer, they reported in the journal Nature.

"It has been a long time coming," lead investigator Kathleen Collins, a molecular biologist at the University of California in Berkley, said in a statement.

Comment: While this is no doubt an amazing step forward in the science of telomeres, it may be a little premature for people to start dreaming of a future where aging is a thing of the past. Genetics are profoundly complicated, and it is quite likely fixing the "caps on shoelaces" will turn out to be the tip of the iceberg.

See also:

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Alarm Clock

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

Andrew Jaffe
Nature
Mon, 16 Apr 2018 00:01 UTC
time spiral illustration
© Illustration by Stephan Schmitz

Andrew Jaffe probes Carlo Rovelli's study arguing that physics deconstructs our sense of time.

The Order of Time Carlo Rovelli Allen Lane (2018)

According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn't correspond to physical reality. Indeed, as Rovelli argues in The Order of Time, much more is illusory, including Isaac Newton's picture of a universally ticking clock. Even Albert Einstein's relativistic space-time - an elastic manifold that contorts so that local times differ depending on one's relative speed or proximity to a mass - is just an effective simplification.

So what does Rovelli think is really going on? He posits that reality is just a complex network of events onto which we project sequences of past, present and future. The whole Universe obeys the laws of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, out of which time emerges.

Comment: It's difficult, maybe impossible, to conceptualize time as an illusion within our human limitations. Yet it seems that the cutting edge of science is showing that our perception of the flow of time is nothing more than an illusion.

See also:

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Cloud Grey

3D renderings of real weather data prove just how complex and captivating clouds are

Devin Coldewey
Tech Crunch
Thu, 26 Apr 2018 08:29 UTC
cloud 3d
Visualisation from the ground to the Tropopause
Some people, when they look up at the sky and see a cloud, think "dog" or "fluffy." And some people think "it's a waning cumulus with a feathered edge suggesting a pressure system from the north ending in an updraft, which would probably cause turbulence. Also looks a bit like a dog." Clearly one of those people created these complex, beautiful renderings of weather data.

The idea behind this project at ETH Zürich, led by Markus Gross, is that different visualizations of detailed weather data may be highly useful in different fields. He and his colleagues have been working on a huge set of such data and finding ways of accurately representing it with an eye to empowering meteorologists from the TV station to the research lab.

"The scientific value of our visualisation lies in the fact that we make something visible that was impossible to see with the existing tools," explained undergraduate researcher Noël Rimensberger in an ETHZ news release. Representing weather "in a relatively simple, comprehensible way" is its own reward, really.

Comment: As is often the case, what the average person may see as a relatively simple concept, like clouds, is infinitely more complex and even our scientific communities knowledge is sorely lacking, and their theories may actually be off - that may explain the unreliability of weather forecasts! One thing is for sure, these days, opportunities to study awesome events in the skies are increasing by the day: For more, check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Earth changes in an electric universe: Is climate change really man-made?

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