Sci-Tech
A new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests memory is faulty and can insert things from the present into memories from the past. In terms of accuracy, your memory is no video camera. Rather, memory rewrites the past with current information, updating your recollections with new experiences to aid survival. Love at first sight, for example, is more likely a trick of your memory than a Hollywood-worthy moment. READ MORE: Your memory is no video camera: It edits the past with present experiences
Conventional thinking has it that the universe and all the matter within it exploded out from a single point, the so-called Big Bang Singularity. But a German theoretical physicists says this never happened. Instead, the universe started empty and cold, slowly emerging from a deep freeze.
“He moistened his lips uneasily.” It sounds like a cheap romance novel, but this line is actually lifted from quite a different type of prose: a neuroscience study. Along with other sentences, including “Have you got enough blankets?” and “And what eyes they were”, it was used to build the first map of how the brain processes the building blocks of speech – distinct units of sound known as phonemes. The map reveals that the brain devotes distinct areas to processing different types of phonemes. It might one day help efforts to read off what someone is hearing from a brain scan.
The United States is one step closer to a future where cars will communicate with each other to avoid accidents. The Department of Transportation announced on Monday it was moving forward with the steps necessary to one day mandate vehicle-to-vehicle — V2V — communication technology on light automobiles. The big deal here is that research — including a 3,000-vehicle test of the system in Ann Arbor, Mich. — finds that V2V technology has the potential to “help drivers avoid or mitigate 70 to 80 percent of vehicle crashes involving unimpaired drivers.”
Two weeks ago, the New York Times’ truth-humor strip on “The Home of the Future” came on the heels of Google’s purchase of ‘smart thermostat’ manufacturer Nest for $3.2 Billion. With power utility commissions such as California already stating their intention to “expand third-party access” to in-home data, the perfect storm is brewing for Google’s mission of making you their product – even in your own home.
Google recently filed a patent for a system that identifies when and where a “mob” event takes place and sends multimedia alerts to relevant parties. The patents are actually titled “Mob Source Phone Video Collaboration” and “Inferring Events Based On Mob Sourced Video“.
NewsyScience: An astrobiologist says the jelly donut-shaped Martian rock appears to be a kind of fungus that grew into the shot rather than being physically moved there.
Nuclear Fusion and creating energy through cold fusion could potentially liberate the world of many of the energy struggles we currently are caught up in. Big oil and energy companies could learn to profit from nuclear energy through advanced innovation, or it could serve to act as a disruptive technology–the possibilities are explored in this interview clip with Stanford Research Institute director Dr. Michael McKubre and Buzzsaw host Sean Stone.
What if the universe itself is math? That’s what cosmologist Max Tegmark believes. In Tegmark’s view, everything in the universe — humans included — is part of a mathematical structure. All matter is made up of particles, which have properties such as charge and spin, but these properties are purely mathematical, he says. And space itself has properties such as dimensions, but is still ultimately a mathematical structure.
For the first time in history, scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have captured how our brain makes memories in video, watching how molecules morph into the structures that, at the end of the day, make who we are.
China’s first lunar rover successfully landed on the moon in December, but a malfunction is already jeopardizing its mission. China’s Jade Rabbit moon rover experienced a “mechanical control abnormality” according to state media said on Saturday, in what appears to be a setback for a landmark mission in the country’s ambitious space program
Renowned British scientist Stephen Hawking has stunned physicists by declaring there are no black holes. In a paper published online, Professor Hawking says instead of black holes there are grey holes. The fresh theory tries to address what is known as the black-hole firewall paradox, which has puzzled scientists for almost two years. The professor’s new grey hole theory would allow matter and energy to be held for a period of time before being released back into space. The theory offers a solution to the paradox.
