Want to find your mind? Learn to direct your dreams

AM I awake or am I dreaming?” I ask myself for probably the hundredth time. I am fully awake, just like all the other times I asked, and to be honest I am beginning to feel a bit silly. All week I have been performing this “reality check” in the hope that it will become so ingrained in my mind that I will start asking it in my dreams too. Read the rest of this entry »

How your brain remembers the future

IT’S like remembering the future. Our brain generates predictions of likely visual inputs so it can focus on dealing with the unexpected.

Predictable sights trigger less brain activity than unfamiliar stimuli, bolstering the view that the brain is not merely reactive, but generates predictions based on the recent past. “The brain expects to see things and really just wants to confirm it now and again,” says Lars Muckli at the University of Glasgow, UK. Read the rest of this entry »

A Solution to Help Farmers

Rikin B. Gandhi, 28, has developed a solution to help farmers adopt better farmer practices through locally produced videos of sustainable agriculture techniques.

Farmers in rural India now have something to smile about, courtesy Rikin Gandhi. An aeronautical and astronautical engineer from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S., Gandhi is the founder of Digital Green which disseminates targeted agricultural information to farmers at a reasonable cost using participatory video and mediated instruction. Read the rest of this entry »

Remote controlled system for power tillers

Remote Power For the Fields

A bachelor in electronics and communication from Visveswaraiah Technological University, Karnataka, Prajwal Kumar specializes in robotics and automation. He has recently developed a remote controlled system for power tiller. Farmers have to walk along with the power tiller to control its direction. However, now the electronics remote control device can enable the farmers to operate his power tiller without even getting into the field. It ain’t just this. His other inventions include tree-climbing and harvesting robots, paddy field weeding machine, industrial inspections robots, and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). Read the rest of this entry »

Mind tricks: Six ways to explore your brain

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Super Velcro : Reusable Superglue

A novel adhesive is extremely strong, and its stickiness is reversible.

General Motors researchers have made an extremely strong adhesive that comes apart when heated. The adhesive is 10 times stickier than Velcro and the reusable gecko-inspired glues that many research groups have been trying to perfect.

The polymers in the glue bond to each other within minutes when they are initially heated. Thus, when two pieces of the adhesive materials are heated, they stick together strongly. Once stuck, it takes a lot of force to peel the polymers away from each other, but they come apart easily when heated again. The researchers were able to attach and pull apart the polymers twice before losing one-third of the adhesive strength, according to a Langmuir paper published online. Read the rest of this entry »

A Pivot Irrigator With a Difference

Developed by a Pune-based engineer, the solar machine saves energy and time while irrigating large stretches of land.

When rains failed all of a sudden last year after having started on a promising note in June, the researchers at the National Research Centre for Onion and Garlic in Rajgurunagar went into a tizzy.

The soy bean crop that had been planted in 4.5 acres of land at the center was at risk of failure. What came to their rescue was a solar-powered pivot irrigator, developed by Pune-based Padmakar Kelkar, an engineer by profession and an entrepreneur by choice. Kelkar’s innovation saved the entire soy bean crop that was almost on the verge of getting wiped out. Read the rest of this entry »

Drowned cities: Myths and secrets of the deep

Deep Secrets

The idea that great cities, rich in forgotten knowledge and treasure, lie hidden beneath the sea holds immense appeal. Scarcely a year goes by without someone claiming to have found Atlantis. But what’s really out there under the waves?

Jo Marchant looks at some of the sunken towns and cities discovered worldwide, and separates the facts from the myths. Read the rest of this entry »

Ground-Breaking Science: Very Old Papers Are Both Awesome and Hilarious

Can one species be transmuted into another just by swapping their blood? What are those funny little things swimming in my water? Did this Einstein guy get his math right?

Those are a few of the questions addressed in a trove of history-making papers published by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society and released in their entirety to celebrate the 350th birthday of the world’s oldest scientific body. Read the rest of this entry »

Sleep success: How to make ZZZs = memory

Sounds played as you sleep can reinforce memories, suggest Ken Paller and his colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

They asked people to memorise which images and their associated sounds – such as a picture of a cat and a miaow – were associated with a certain area on a computer screen and then to take a nap. They played half the group the sounds in their sleep, and these people were better at remembering the associations than the rest when they woke up. Read the rest of this entry »

Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn’t mean you’re smart

IS GEORGE W. BUSH stupid? It’s a question that occupied a good many minds of all political persuasions during his turbulent eight-year presidency. The strict answer is no. Bush’s IQ score is estimated to be above 120, which suggests an intelligence in the top 10 per cent of the population. But this, surely, does not tell the whole story. Even those sympathetic to the former president have acknowledged that as a thinker and decision-maker he is not all there. Even his loyal speechwriter David Frum called him glib, incurious and “as a result ill-informed”. The political pundit and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough accused him of lacking intellectual depth, claiming that compared with other US presidents whose intellect had been questioned, Bush junior was “in a league by himself”. Bush himself has described his thinking style as “not very analytical”. Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow’s weather: Cloudy, with a chance of fractals

Umbrella or sunscreen? Flood or drought? The secret of flawless weather forecasting turns out to be surprisingly simple

WE’VE all watched those vast heaps of cotton wool float across the sky. Lofted and shaped by updrafts of warm air, cumulus clouds mesmerise with their constantly changing shape. Some grow ever taller, while others wither and die before our eyes. All bear witness to the ceaseless roiling of the ocean of air we call the atmosphere.

About 80 years ago, the British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson was pondering the shapes of such clouds when a startling thought occurred to him: the laws that govern the atmosphere might actually be very simple. Read the rest of this entry »

Serendipity: Out of the Blue Islands Seen From Space

Islands are some of the most beautiful, peaceful, violent, desolate and unique places on Earth. While experiencing a tropical island from its sandy beaches, or a volcanic island from its towering peaks is wonderful, experiencing them from above can be inspiring as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Brain scanners can tell what you’re thinking about

WHAT are you thinking about? Which memory are you reliving right now? You may think that only you can answer, but by combining brain scans with pattern-detection software, neuroscientists are prying open a window into the human mind.

In the last few years, patterns in brain activity have been used to successfully predict what pictures people are looking at, their location in a virtual environment or a decision they are poised to make. The most recent results show that researchers can now recreate moving images that volunteers are viewing – and even make educated guesses at which event they are remembering. Read the rest of this entry »

Darwin’s Wolf Mystery Solved

Genetic analysis of the now-extinct Falkland Islands Wolf has answered a biological riddle that caught the attention of a young Charles Darwin, and helped shape his understanding of evolution.

During his voyage aboard the HMS Beagle, Darwin observed that the wolves — like his now-famous finches — varied widely in size between different islands, suggesting that the traits of species were not immutable, but changed over time in response to their environments. Read the rest of this entry »

An App so You’ll Never Forget

A language-learning application that’s already big in Japan is coming to the U.S. in the form of a new iPhone app. Smart.fm, based in Tokyo, says that the adaptive-learning algorithms behind its software can help users memorize all kinds of information.

Smart.fm is one of several companies selling software designed to help users remember. The company’s algorithms were inspired by research that shows people remember information more effectively they try to memorize it at key times, says founder and chairman Andrew Smith Lewis. Read the rest of this entry »

Birds Use Light, Not Magnetic Field, to Migrate

A cell in the eye may be worth two in the beak, at least when it comes to a migratory bird’s magnetic compass. In European robins, a visual center in the brain and light-sensing cells in the eye — not magnetic sensing cells in the beak — allow the songbirds to sense which direction is north and migrate correctly, a new study finds. The study, appearing Oct. 29 in Nature, may improve conservation efforts for migratory birds. Read the rest of this entry »

Butterflies Use Antenna GPS to Guide Migration

Scientists have finally located the 24-hour clock that guides the migration of monarch butterflies. Instead of being in the brain where most people expected, it turns out the circadian clock is located in the butterflies’ antennae.

Every fall, monarchs make an impressive 2,000-mile trek south, using the sun to guide them to the exact same wintering spot in central Mexico. But because the sun is a moving target, changing position throughout the day, biologists have long speculated that in addition to having a “sun compass” in their brains, butterflies must use some kind of 24-hour clock to guide their migration. Now, researchers have located this special GPS system, but it’s not what everyone expected. Read the rest of this entry »

Intelligence Explained

Tracking and understanding the complex connections within the brain may finally reveal the neural secret of cognitive ability.

A series of black-and-white snapshots is splayed across the screen, each capturing a thin slice of my brain. The gray-scale pictures would look familiar to anyone who has seen a brain scan, but these images are different. Andrew Frew, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, uses a cursor to select a small square. Thin strands like spaghetti appear, representing the thousands of neural fibers passing through it. A few clicks of the cursor and Frew refines the tract of fibers pictured on the screen, highlighting first my optic nerve, then the fibers passing through a part of the brain that’s crucial for language, then the bundles of motor and sensory nerves that head down to the brain stem. Read the rest of this entry »

Plants Know Their Relatives — And Like Them!

Unlike many human brothers and sisters, plant siblings appear to do their best to get along, sharing resources and avoiding competition.

In a study of more than 3,000 mustard seedlings, scientists discovered that the young plants recognize their siblings — other plants grown from the seeds of the same momma plant — using chemical cues given off during root growth. And it turns out mustard plants won’t compete with their brethren the way they will with strangers: Instead of rapidly growing roots to suck up as much water and minerals as possible, plants who sensed nearby siblings developed a shallower root system and more intertwined leaves. Read the rest of this entry »

Future of shopping

Look at those production values and the sound design as one of the majors horns in.

Source: Posted by Bruce Sterling for Wired.

Indian Teen Pays it Forward by Teaching His Peers

What did you do with your free time when you were sixteen? I didn’t have access to the World Wide Web yet (that was about two years away), but that was probably when I was playing NES and enjoying my hand-me-down Toyota Corolla. (I just checked to be sure, and even Doom was a couple years away. Now I feel old.) Sixteen-year-old Americans now, of course, have higher-resolution ways of wasting time, even as their “free” time has shrunk somewhat over the past few decades. But I bet when they’ve got nothing to do, a lot of them are still playing videogames, enjoying the new-found freedom of driving and hanging out with friends. Read the rest of this entry »

The biggest questions ever asked

New Scientist tackles eight of the deepest challenges faced by science – from reality and consciousness, to free will and death.

1. What is reality?

Can we be sure that the world we experience is not just a figment of our imaginations, asks Roger Penrose.

WHAT do we understand by “reality”? For those of us who consider ourselves hard-headed realists, there is a kind of common-sense answer: “Reality consists of those things – tables, chairs, trees, houses, planets, animals, people and so on – which are actual things made of matter.” We might tend to include some more abstract-seeming notions such as space and time, and the totality of all such “real” things would be referred to as “the universe“. Read the rest of this entry »

13 more things that don’t make sense

13 Things sent to try us

Strive as we might to make sense of the world, there are mysteries that still confound us.  Michael Brooks presents thirteen of the most perplexing. Cracking any one of them could yield profound truths.

Axis of evil

Radiation left from the big bang is still glowing in the sky – in a mysterious and controversial pattern

WHAT would you do if you found a mysterious and controversial pattern in the radiation left over from the big bang? In 2005, Kate Land and João Magueijo at Imperial College London faced just such a conundrum. What they did next was a PR master stroke: they called their discovery the cosmic “axis of evil“. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s luck got to do with it? The math of gambling

FIVE years ago, Londoner Ashley Revell sold his house, all his possessions and cashed in his life savings. It raised £76,840. He flew to Las Vegas, headed to the roulette table and put it all on red.

The wheel was spun. The crowd held its breath as the ball slowed, bounced four or five times, and finally settled on number seven. Red seven.

Revell’s bet was a straight gamble: double or nothing. But when Edward Thorp, a mathematics student at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, went to the same casino some 40 years previously, he knew pretty well where the ball was going to land. He walked away with a profit, took it to the racecourse, the basketball court and the stock market, and became a multimillionaire. He wasn’t on a lucky streak, he was using his knowledge of mathematics to understand, and beat, the odds. Read the rest of this entry »

Brilliant Solution: Inventor Creates LED Wrenches

Gone, at last, are the days of bribing your best friend with pizza and beer to hold your flashlight as you tinker (or fumble) with a wrench in the dark recesses of your car. Grab yourself a set of Hi Beam-Light Wrenches and you can use one hand to hold the wrench and the light, leaving your other hand free to hold anything else — including your beer.

San Diego gearhead and inventor Clifford Wright has come up with the brilliant idea of adding LEDs to wrenches, creating a tool that lets you see that damn bolt tucked up behind the starter. It’s one of those simple solutions to a frustrating problem we wish we’d thought of. Read the rest of this entry »

You Don’t Need to Count to Be a Math Genius

That the ability to count may be inborn struck me as a boon for people who struggle with math.

“Let’s say you’re God-awful at math,” I asked Brian Butterworth, a University College, London researcher who found that Australian aboriginal kids — their languages free of words for numbers, or even a concept of precise counting — count as well as their English-speaking counterparts. “Does this mean it’s not your fault, that you’re born that way?”

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Scientists Track Down Source of Earth’s Hum

You can’t hear it, but the Earth is constantly humming. And some parts of the world sing louder than others.

After discovering the mysterious low-frequency buzz in 1998, scientists figured out that the Earth’s hum is caused not by earthquakes or atmospheric turbulence, but by ocean waves colliding with the seafloor. Now, researchers have pinpointed the source of the Earth’s “background noise,” and it looks like it’s coming primarily from the Pacific coast of North America.

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How To Make a Solar Cell with Donuts and Tea

DonutholesDonuts and tea are the main ingredients in a MacGyver-style do-it-yourself solar cell, explained step-by-step in this video.

“It turns out these delicious little things contain everything we need to make a simple solar cell,” said Blake Farrow, a Canadian scientist who filmed the video while visiting Prashant Kamat’s lab at the University of Notre Dame.

Powdered sugar contains titanium dioxide nanoparticles, a substance that is also used in paint. When that powder is coated with an organic dye, like the colorful chemicals in pasionfruit tea, it can be used as the light-absorbing layer of a photovoltaic device.
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Irish Student Hoaxes World’s Media With Fake Quote

Web hoaxes and the pitfalls of quick journalism

When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.

His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.

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