photo via flickr by Amy Loves Yah

Do you remember how your breakfast plate was arranged this morning? Even if you don’t, your hippocampus might—and growing evidence suggests that there is a way to retrieve this unconscious memory: through your eye movements.

In a study from the University of California, Davis, neuroscientist Deborah Hannula and her team showed participants photographs of faces superimposed on scenes. Later the volunteers saw the individual scenes again and had to pick the matching faces. By tracking their eye movements, Hannula and her co-workers saw that even when volunteers picked the wrong face, their eyes were drawn for a longer time to the correct one.

Previous studies yielded similar results, but the findings have been controversial because of difficulties replicating them, Hannula says. Her study also showed that the participants’ hippocampus was active during the process, indicating that, contrary to conventional thinking, the brain region is involved not only in conscious memory processing but in other memory tasks as well.

The findings suggest that eye movements can be a sensitive measure for both unconscious and conscious memories, Hannula says. This fact could open up new avenues for working with cognitively impaired patients, who may not be able to verbally or otherwise report what they remember.

The results also have implications for crime scene investigations, Hannula says. For example, eyewitnesses may unconsciously remember the face of a perpetrator. Even the eye movements of the person who committed the crime could betray important information.

via Scientific American Mind

Photo via Architecture and Vision

“From Pyramids to Spacecraft” is a travelling exhibition by design studio Architecture and Vision, founded by Italian architect Arturo Vittori and Swiss architect Andreas Vogler. The exhibition will appear at The Goldstein Museum of Design, University of Minnesota in Minneapolis from March 14-May 2nd, 2010.

Projects shown in the exhibition include MoonBaseTwo, an inflatable space station for conducting experiments on the Moon, First and Business Class for Asiana Airlines, La Macchina di Santa Rosa di Viterbo and the MercuryHouseOne, which was presented at the Biennale in Venice in 2009 as well as many other inspiring projects ranging from product design to architecture.

Vittori and Vogler are known for their keen interest in technology and the endless beauty of the world. It is their  work in the aerospace field that has challenged the way they think about life on Earth. They share the belief that respect of nature and the intelligent use and development of its resources can have a deep impact on the quality of our lives.

Sponsored by: College of Design, Goldstein Museum of Design, Consulate General of Switzerland of Chicago, Italian Cultural Institute Chicago.

Photo via flickr by mawel

“The smell of fear” turns out to have a foundation in science. All sweat smells—and some sweat screams anxiety to the world, according to a study published in June in PLoS One. “The chemical transfer of anxiety may cause a feeling of discomfort in the perceiver. It’s like a sixth sense,” says psychologist Bettina Pause of the University of Düsseldorf in Germany, one of the authors of the paper. Pause and her colleagues collected sweat from 49 students at two times—right before a university exam and during exercise. The researchers then had other students sniff the samples and scanned their brains with fMRI, which registers activity. Sniffers’ brains responded to sweat made during an anxious period differently from sweat produced through physical exertion. In humans, anxious sweat activates a cluster of brain areas known to be involved in empathy. “That suggests,” Pause says, “that anxiety—and maybe also other emotions—can be chemically transferred between people.”

via Discover Magazine

In a conversation with Sputnik Observatory, Bettina Pause explains how our emotional state triggers the apocrine glands responsible for the body odor:

The skin is actually a supporting organ for microorganisms, for example. There are a lot of glands in the body which produce some chemicals which are odorless. And the odor has to be produced by the bacteria from these substances. And, of course, the skin gives the environment for the bacteria. And without bacteria, no body odor – and without skin, no body odor. There are glands, of course, across the whole body, but there are some so-called apocrine glands which are probably more responsible for the production of body odors, of the quality of body odors, than the so-called eccrine glands. The eccrine glands only produce water for your temperature balance. That you produce more water, if you’re hot.

The apocrine glands, there is a very complex mixture of substances from the apocrine glands, and people are still busy searching for very certain or special substances which might be responsible for the body odor. And this research is not really very successful. Where you have got the most successful results in human research is when you present the whole body odor mixture as a complex. Well, the apocrine glands, their production is dependent again on your emotional state. They are more productive if you are in an emotional arousing state and less productive when you just don’t care about the situation. The apocrine glands are, for example, strongly in the axillary area or also in the genital areas. And we think that important body odor signals are produced by the axillary glands.

Photo via flickr by chefranden

Scientists have long suspected that the sun affects climate on Earth, but that connection has proved hard to pin down. Researchers recently demonstrated that the 11-year cycle of solar activity influences weather in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Even then the exact cause remained obscure, since the sun’s brightness varies by just one-tenth of a percent.

An international team led by Gerald Meehl, a climatologist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, announced that the sun’s outsize influence results from its combined effects on our atmosphere and oceans. When the sun is at its most intense, ozone in the stratosphere absorbs more ultraviolet energy, making areas near the equator warmer than usual. The added heat changes wind patterns, bringing more rain to the western tropics. At the same time, the extra sunlight causes more evaporation off  the ocean, which adds to downpours in the western tropics. His results should help climatologists predict monsoons in Asia and overall climate in North America and might someday allow them to estimate seasonal rainfall years in advance.

Meanwhile, Henrik Svensmark of the Technical University of Denmark and his colleagues are exploring a broader climate impact of solar activity. He believes that cosmic rays—energetic subatomic particles from outer space—help seed cloud-forming water droplets in the lower atmosphere. During peak solar activity, eruptions from the sun spew out huge clouds of plasma that shield Earth from those cosmic rays. After examining cloud cover and cosmic ray fluxes, Svensmark concluded that declines in cosmic rays lead to fewer clouds, implying that an active sun could lead to warmer surface temperatures. Following the strongest solar eruptions, he found that the sky lost 7 percent of its cloud water.

via Discover Magazine

Photo via flickr by heyjoewhereyougoingwiththatguninyourhand

Subatomic particles do it. Now the observation that groups of brain cells seem to have their own version of quantum entanglement, or “spooky action at a distance”, could help explain how our minds combine experiences from many different senses into one memory.

Previous experiments have shown that the electrical activity of neurons in separate parts of the brain can oscillate simultaneously at the same frequency – a process known as “phase locking.”  The frequency seems to be a signature that marks out neurons working on the same task, allowing them to identify each other.

According to research by Dietmar Pienz and Tara Thiagarajan at the National Institute of Mental Health, unique patterns of electrical signals (”coherence potentials”) are “cloned” or spread to neurons in different areas of the brain.

The purpose of coherence potentials may be to trigger activity in the various parts of the brain that store aspects of the same experience. So a smell or taste, say, might trigger a coherence potential that then activates the same potential in neurons in the visual part of the brain.

via KurzweilAI and New Scientist

Photo via flickr by Ghost of Kuji

Researchers at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, announced they had made an earthbound analogue of a black hole. Not to worry: Instead of a superdense object from which no light can escape, their more docile version merely prevents sound waves from getting out.

Constructing a sonic black hole was first proposed by Canadian physicist William Unruh nearly 30 years ago, but the Israeli team was the first to successfully create one. They cooled 100,000 rubidium atoms to a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero and used a laser to create a void in this tiny cloud. As the atoms, attracted to the breach, zipped across it at more than four times the speed of sound, they gave rise to a black hole effect. Under such conditions, no sound wave could travel against the flow of the racing fluid. “It’s like trying to swim upstream in a river whose current is faster than you,” says team member Jeff Steinhauer. The boundary between the subsonic and supersonic flows mimics a black hole’s event horizon, the point of no return.

The discovery could potentially provide a way to test Stephen Hawking’s prediction that a real black hole should slowly evaporate as it emits radiation generated in the quantum turmoil at its event horizon. A sonic black hole ought to act in the same way by releasing phonons, or packets of sound energy. Finding phonons would provide strong evidence that “black holes ain’t so black.”

via Discover Magazine

Photo via Auroville

Auroville is a universal township in the making for a population of up to 50,000 people from around the world.  It is located in south India, mostly in the State of Tamil Nadu (some parts are in the State of Puducherry), a few kilometres inland from the Coromandel Coast, approx 160 kms south of Chennai (previously Madras) and 10 kms north of the town of Puducherry.

The concept of Auroville - an ideal township devoted to an experiment in human unity - came to “the Mother” as early as the 1930s. In the mid 1960s the Sri Aurobindo Society in Pondicherry proposed to Her that such a township should be started. She gave her blessings. The concept was then put before the Govt. of India, who gave their backing and took it to the General Assembly of UNESCO. In 1966 UNESCO passed a unanimous resolution commending it as a project of importance to the future of humanity, thereby giving their full encouragement.

The purpose of Auroville is to realize human unity—in diversity. Today Auroville is recognized as the first and only internationally endorsed ongoing experiment in human unity and transformation of consciousness, also concerned with—and practically researching—sustainable living and the future cultural, environmental, social and spiritual needs of mankind.

Auroville is considered a “laboratory of evolution.”

Visitors to Auroville are sometimes disappointed to find here no Ashram, no typical tourist attractions or generally welcoming atmosphere. This is firstly because Auroville is an experiment in human unity and secondly because Auroville is not a tourist place, despite being referred to in travel and tourist literature. Guests are requested to give a contribution of Rs 100 per day per adult, reduced to Rs 50 per day for students and teenagers up to the age of 18.

Photo via flickr by Photography by J. Campbell

Doug Levey, a biologist at the University of Florida, found that birds can easily pick out a threatening person from a crowd.

According to a paper in the journal PNAS, Levey sent students, aka “intruders”, to perturb nests of mockingbirds. An ‘intrusion’ consisted of standing by an egg-filled nest for 15 seconds, then touching it for an additional 15 seconds. This aggressive loitering, which was repeated over four days, elicited an increasingly intense response. The mockingbirds ignored the approach of other, non-threatening students, but every time the ‘intruder’ student swung by, the birds quickly and sneakily left the nest and eventually dive-bombed the ‘intruder.’ “The first time a male mockingbird drew blood on the back of my neck, I was shocked,” says intruder Monique Hiersoux.

Mockingbirds’ strong awareness of their surroundings makes them well suited for living so close to humans, Levey concludes. We might be walking along on campus and see a mockingbird perched on a branch and think, “Oh, that bird is minding its own business,” he says, “but what we don’t realize is that we are its business.”

via Discover Magazine

Photo via Soundwalk

KILL THE EGO began as a song, as an epic 40-minute-long poem composed of 10 years of sound recordings captured in New York by Soundwalk between 1998 and 2008. The fragmented memories of poets and dominatrixes, of pimps and prophets, of visionaries and lost children – the gamut of stories from the street: of the most obscure corners, of underground unrest, intimate and universal biographies of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx – Soundwalk has captured and woven together the sounds, conversations, and songs of urbanity. This soundtrack of New York City has been represented visually onscreen by the artist Rostarr, who used the sound recordings as a launch for an art series documented by directors Jim Helton and Ron Patane. Inspired by the technique used in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterpiece “Le mystère Picasso”, the directors sought to give life to the creative process and gave birth to the aural and visual work that is the film KILL THE EGO.

Photo via flickr by Aaron Gustafson

Scientists from China and the UK have the latest evidence to prove that feathers evolved in dinosaurs before birds adapted them for flight.

Using electron microscopy technology to analyze membranes in fossilized dinosaurs discovered in October 2009 in northeast China, the scientists were able to determine what color the feathers were—reddish orange.

“This is the first direct evidence of a certain color in a known dinosaur feather,” Patrick Orr, co-author of the study from Bristol University told CNN.

However, this isn’t the first discovery of feathers on dinosaurs. In 2002, palaeontologists from China and the United States wrote in the journal Nature that evidence from a fossil  they found in Northeastern China of a carnivorous dinosaur called a dromesaur, showed perhaps the first evidence that dinosaurs may at some point in their lives may have been covered with true feathers like those we see on modern birds, suggesting dinosaurs may have looked more like odd-shaped, large birds than huge, scaly lizards. Scientists have continued to debate this discovery.

In a 2002 discussion with Sputnik Observatory, theoretical physicist John A. Wheeler (1911 - 2008), put the debate into perspective, suggesting humans should question what faculty do we have but not put to use, as the dinosaurs and their feathers.

It’s fantastic that evolution should have ended up with us. What other kind of creature could it have been? You’ve probably followed these fantastic recent discoveries in China about the dinosaur having feathers to keep them warm, but then they learned how to use the feathers to fly. Do we have something, some faculty, that we haven’t put to use the way the dinosaurs hadn’t put to use these feathers of theirs until later?

Other new dinosaur findings:

During the October 2009 dig, scientists also found 20 fossilized pterodactyls dating back more than 160 million years.

In early January 2010, another group of scientists found the oldest fossilized footprints made by a four-legged creature. The discovery of the footprints in a former quarry in the Holy Cross Mountains in southeastern Poland are thought to be 395 million years old—18 million years older than the earliest tetrapod (a vertebrate with limbs rather than fins) body fossils. The footprints are also 10 million years older than the earliest known elpistostegids—creatures which displayed some animal characteristics but retained fins.
via CNN and BBC News