Stanford Report, April 1, 2009
Molecules key to immune system also play role in brain
BY BRUCE GOLDMAN
Carla Shatz
Molecules assumed to be in the exclusive employ of the immune system have been caught moonlighting in the brain—with a job description apparently quite distinct from their role in immunity.
Carla Shatz, PhD, professor...
Just the first few paragraphs of the paper.
Leaving it up here for archive and for comments! :-)
In a time where physical possessions begin to lose their once-crucial roles, where more and more live in multiple countries and spend much of their time traveling, where identity is becoming less rooted to a physical form and more to an...
Original article at
May 1, 2009
Doing science in the open
Online networking tools are pervasive, but why have scientists been so slow to adopt many of them? Michael Nielsen explains how we can build a better culture of online collaboration
In your high-school science classes you almost certainly learned Hooke’s law, relating a...
Human progress : first it was exponential, then climate change brought it down to linear, until our energy capture capacity brought everything to a slow and final halt. It took hundreds of years past the third world war to finally reach our carrying capacity. It is a state in which we let all go to waste, smothered and drowned in petrochemical...
#Marie is not called Marie anymore, she is now called NotMarie.
And so goes the conversation
3V: “I represent another reality, similar, yet packaged differently;
I am packaged in a fashion that allows me to disregard my origins”
NotMarie: ” another? Relating to which reality”
3V: “yours”
NotMarie:
“Ok, and in what...
I am often struck with the absurdity of certain academic pursuits. For instance, when I encounter natural beauty I usually think how amusing it would be to model the growth of plants. I then realize that this reality is already rendered perfectly (or as perfectly as the limited senses can convey) for me right now, why would I want anything less?...
First of all, I ask for forgiveness, I can hardly manage to express myself in English
with some clarity, not to speak of correctness, apropiateness or whatever "-ness"
you might wish or expext.
Second: (Side number two, said number two)
I would like to open a question
here
about Emerson, Thoreau and that line of
beautiful...
Attention - interest - sync - time passage, now there might be a measurement of the correlation by observing blinking.
"Worried you'll blink and miss a crucial piece of the action? Then you can relax. While watching a film, we subconsciously control the timing of blinks to make sure we don't miss anything important. And because we tend to...
Recently I came across a very interesting article by Timothy Lenoir, bringing a fresh perspective on the concept Singularity and posthumanist future.
In the introductory note Lenoir writes:
Most researchers agree that there is no reason in principle why we will not eventually develop conscious machines that rival or surpass human...
The Serious ARG (Alternate Reality Game)
In a 2007 article, columnist Chris Dahlen (of Pitchfork Media) voiced a much-discussed ARG concept: if ARGs can spark players to solve very hard fictional problems, could the games be used to solve real-world problems?[37] Dahlen was writing about World Without Oil, the first ARG centered on a serious...
Even though the brain contains about a trillion glia—10 times as many as there are neurons—the assumption was that those cells were nothing more than a passive support system. Glia, in fact, are busy multitaskers, guiding the brain’s development and sustaining it throughout our lives. Glia also listen carefully to their neighbors, and they...
Young brains can forget painful memories, but old ones tend not to… Now an enzyme can cut through imprisoned memories…
"In the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Joel and Clementine's relationship ends so sourly that the couple elects to have their mutual memories swept away via a non-surgical procedure called "targeted...
I do not understand cargo shorts. Or plaid shorts, let alone consumerism and our infidelity to our higher faculties.
I do not understand a lot of things--there is some Chinese saying about how it is an 'honor' to live in such 'interesting' times and that is really great, I suppose, but I'm a little resentful.
On good days I am something more...
Hello reader of the future.
I was born in 1971 in Cairns, Australia, and somehow over the last 38 years (it's 25 September 2009 right now, just after 21.46pm AEST) I have developed a strong sense of history. For this reason I am aware that the written word can cross the ages, enduring long after the writer has perished and turned to dust.
Of...
The Mesmerized Mind - Study of Hypnosis
“The motor cortex is connected to the idea that it cannot move the left hand, So even if you try to move, it will neglect to send signals to the motor execution areas.”