SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: The Strange Science of Floating

Image via TIME.

"While floating has always had fans in the wellness world, it’s undeniably grown in popularity. In 2011, there were 85 float centers in the United States, according to Aaron Thompson, who runs an online directory of flotation centers, and now there are more than 250. Floating has also attracted the interest of a small group of scientists who are trying to figure out if it has a place as a kind of therapy for some kinds of distress, including PTSD. Any proof that this helps people with stress disorders is anecdotal at this point, but something special appears to happen in brain while the body floats. Now, some scientists, like the neuropsychologist Justin Feinstein, are trying to find out what.

Feinstein believes so deeply in the therapeutic potential of floating that he built his whole career, and laboratory, around trying to prove it. This year he opened the only float lab in the country: the Float Clinic and Research Center at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Inside, you won’t find the claustrophobic coffin-like pods that make up most of the float tank market. His custom-made float pool has no enclosure, ensuring that people with anxiety disorders won’t be afraid to get in."

Read full article in TIME. E.T.P. 9'

SCIENCE 6 TECHNOLOGY: How Not to Die of Botulism

Image via The Atlantic.

"Botulinum toxin, a protein produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, could be “the most poisonous poison” there is, as writer Carl Lamanna called it in an article for Science, in 1959. First weaponized by Imperial Japan in the 1930s, and later, Nazi Germany, the United States, the Soviet Union, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, a single gram of toxin could theoretically kill more than a million people if dispersed into the air and inhaled. But before botulinum toxin became a bioweapon and a smoother of crow's feet as the drug Botox, botulism was historically a foodborne malady, and the toxin lurked in sausage and cured meats.

Botulism, the illness caused by toxin exposure, first received scientific attention in rural Germany in the late 18th century. Officials in Stuttgart saw an increase in “sausage poisoning” in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, possibly due to poor sanitation and widespread poverty. In the 1820s, a young German physician named Justinus Kerner was the first scientist to publish an accurate and comprehensive description of the disease. He analyzed more than 200 cases of suspected sausage poisoning. He fed extracts of these “sour” sausages to animals and described the classic symptoms of botulism. Muscle weakness leading to drooped eye lids, difficulty swallowing, and respiratory failure; altered autonomic nerve function leading to vomiting, pupil dilation, and dry mouth. Brazenly, he sampled a few drops of this extract himself—he survived, though it caused a “great drying out of the palate and pharynx,” a harbinger of Botox’s modern application in treating uncontrollable salivation for those with amyotrophic  lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Grateful citizens dubbed the scientist “Wurst-Kerner,” for his pioneering contributions to public health and sausagery. In 1870, another German physician renamed the illness “botulism” after the Latin word “botulus,” or sausage."

Read full article in The Atlantic. E.T.P. 8'

SCIENCE: Relaxing Makes You More Creative

Image via INC

You've probably heard the saying "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." I suspect that most people interpret this as a comment on Jack's personality: He's "dull" because all he can think or talk about is work.
But that's not what the saying actually means. According to the latest neuroscience, overwork makes your brain "dull" in the sense of being the opposite of "sharp." Overwork, in other words, kills your creativity.
Scientists studying brain scans recently discovered that moments of creativity take place when the mind is at rest rather than working on something. And since creative approaches are so crucial to success, workaholics are working themselves out a job." That's why you should relax when you procrastinate, you'll probably end up doing a more creative job anyway! Read full article by Geoffrey James in INC. E.T.P. 5'

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: Comets are Like Deep Fried Ice-Cream

Image via Quartz.

"Comets have always fascinated scientists. Centuries ago it was their glowing tails streaking across skies, and now it is the tantalizing possibility that they may have seeded life on Earth.

To firm up these answers, it helps to understand the structure of these weird celestial bodies. In its most recent dispatch from comet 67P, the Philae lander has found that, unlike solid-rock asteroids, the comet is mostly porous—as much as 85% of it is empty.

Murthy Gudipati, a NASA scientist, who has worked on understanding the structure of comets, has the perfect analogy: “A comet is like deep fried ice cream. The crust is made of crystalline ice, while the interior is colder and more porous. The organic [compounds] are like a final layer of chocolate on top.” Read full article in Quartz. E.T.P. 3'

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: Screen Addiction Is Taking a Toll on Children

Illustration Paul Rogers via The New York Times.

"If kids are allowed to play 'Candy Crush' on the way to school, the car ride will be quiet, but that’s not what kids need. They need time to daydream, deal with anxieties, process their thoughts and share them with parents, who can provide reassurance." Technology, remind us Jane Brody, is a poor substitute for personal interaction. Read full article in The New York Times. E.T.P. 4'

SCIENCE: Your brain actually doesn't suck at passwords

Illustration via Motherboard.

"Last year, two researchers asked a group of volunteers to log into a website 90 times over the span of ten days, using whatever password the volunteers chose.
After entering their password, the website showed the volunteers a short security code, made of either four random letters or two random words, and asked them to type it. Throughout the ten-day experiment, the site added more letters and words to the code—up to 12 random letters or six random words—and the security code would take just a little longer to be displayed, prompting the participants to remember it themselves before it appeared.
At the end of the experiment, and three days after the last login, a whopping 94 percent of the test subjects were able to remember from memory their random code word or phrase, which were seemingly nonsensical strings of characters like “zljndjjgjana” or meaningless phrases like “gaze sloth laugh grace relic born.” Without the volunteers knowing, the researchers had tricked their minds." Read full article by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai in Motherboard. E.T.P. 3'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION: Why Open Platform is the future of the Internet of Things

Video still via INC.

In a video from INC, Valerie Casey, CPO of Samsung's Global Innovation Center, describes the benefits of an open platform where the best products are celebrated as the Internet of Things will become a dominant part of our lives. Watch video in INC. E.T.P. 2'

SCIENCE: The Bionic Man

Video Still via New York Times.

This is truly brilliant: "Les Baugh lost his arms as a teenager. Engineers at Johns Hopkins are trying to give them back, but better. Mr. Baugh is testing a robotic prosthetic that he can control with his mind." Have a look at the Zackary Canepari, Drea Copper and Emma Cott video in The New York Times Bits. E.T.P. 9'

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: The Worst Place on Earth

Photo via BBC Future.

According to Tim Maughan in BBC Future reportage, the worst place on earth is a dystopian lake in Mongolia "filled by the world's tech lust."

"Hidden in an unknown corner of Inner Mongolia is a toxic, nightmarish lake created by our thirst for smartphones, consumer gadgets and green tech, discovers Tim Maughan. From where I'm standing, the city-sized Baogang Steel and Rare Earth complex dominates the horizon, its endless cooling towers and chimneys reaching up into grey, washed-out sky. Between it and me, stretching into the distance, lies an artificial lake filled with a black, barely-liquid, toxic sludge." Read full article in BBC Future. E.T.P. 8'

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: Parallel Universes

Image via Next Nature Network.

It sounds like a Christopher Nolan film, but apparently it's real. "One of the most expensive scientific instruments ever built, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, will be driven to its highest energy levels in an attempt to detect or create mini black holes. If the experiment proves to be successful, scientists hope to reveal a new universe.
A member of the team , Mir Faizal, explained the theory behind the experiment: “Just as many parallel sheets of paper, which are two dimensional objects -breadth and length- can exist in a third dimension -height- parallel universes can also exist in higher dimensions“." Read full article in Next Nature Network. E.T.P. 2'

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: Mars One

"Three volunteers are on the shortlist to be among four people on the Mars One programme, the first manned space flight to Mars – a one-way trip that's effectively a suicide mission. A physics student in the UK, a young doctor from Mozambique and an Iraqi-American woman, all happy to sacrifice their futures for a place in history. Why do they want to leave Earth, and who are they leaving behind? As the list of potential Mars explorers is whittled down further on 16 February, meet those competing to be the first to land on the Red Planet." Have a look at the video produced by The Guardian. E.T.P. 11'

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: Self-Aware Mario

Photo via The Guardian.

German researchers have developed a version of Super Mario Bros., that makes Mario self-aware. He is able to experience emotions and act autonomously in response to them. The AI also understands voice instructions and questions. It's sophisticated enough that Mario can be fed information that he will remember and eventually act upon it. There's a five-minute video in Polygon that gives a detailed explanation of how this experiment works, have a look here. (E.T.P. 5')

And a nice article by our beloved Charlie Brooker in The Guardian: "This meta-Mario experiences basic emotions, is compelled to act by urges such as “hunger” and “curiosity”, and is painfully aware that he only exists within a meaningless two-dimensional artificial framework from which he can never escape. As such, he’s more advanced than I am. And he looks better in a hat. I think I hate him, although there’s every possibility that’s just what I’ve been programmed to do." Read full article in The Guardian. E.T.P. 3'

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Photo via Fast Company.

"Fast-forward to 2018. That year, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, the country will have 1.2 million unfilled jobs in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and math, known by that increasingly inescapable acronym STEM.
Look at those positions now and the lack of women—a group who make up more than half of the workforce—isn't a problem just for women. The whole economy feels it. And without question, changing gender stereotypes and breaking down what scientists and engineers should look like is a long overdue transformation. The good news is, it's all happening." Read about the 9 giant leaps women made in science and technology this year in Fast Company. E.T.P. 6'

Photo via Quartz.

Google is heading for the exits in Russia and others are likely to follow. "After president Vladimir Putin called the internet a “CIA project,” this was probably just a matter of time: Google confirmed late Thursday (Dec. 11) that it’s getting its engineers out of Russia. According to tech site The Information, which first reported the news (paywall), its 50 mostly Moscow-based engineers will have the option to leave the company or relocate to other countries. Google will, however, keep marketing and sales teams in Russia, and it’s not shutting down its services; on the contrary, company sources have told both Western and Russian media that it plans to up its investment in Russia next year." Read full article in Quartz. E.T.P. 3'

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

This section's Estimated Time of Procrastination is: 7'

Image via Wired.

To investigate the aspects of conciousness that can arise from neurological meta-networks (how cells and regions interact, with consciousness shaped not by any given set of brain regions, but by their interplay), researchers analyzed fMRI scans of 15 people after being injected with psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, a sure-fire way of altering consciousness, and compared them to scans of their brain activity after receiving a placebo.

A representation of that is seen in the image above, and as the title of this Wired article clearly indicate: this is how magic mushrooms rearrange your brain. Read full article in Wired. E.T.P. 3'

Illustration: Ellen Porteus via The New York Times.

I don't know exactly where to fit this article in the Procrastinator structure. We should have a Social Anthropology section for sure (someone interested in that?), but as we don't, I'll just share it here because, technology.

"Americans say they are deeply concerned about privacy on the web and their cellphones. They say they do not trust Internet companies or the government to protect it. Yet they keep using the services and handing over their personal information. That paradox is captured in a new survey by Pew Research Center . . . Distrust of digital communication has only increased, Pew found, with the young expressing the most concern by some measures, in the wake of the revelations by Edward Snowden about online surveillance by the government. Yet Americans for now seem to grudgingly accept that these are the trade-offs of living in the digital age — or else they fear that it is too late to do anything about it." Read full article in The New York Times. E.T.P. 4'

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Photo Nicky Bay via Wired.

Photo via Planet Minecraft.

This news is absolutely (almost literally) fantastic: "Velvet worms are adorable caterpillar-y looking things, silently plodding along on stumpy legs in tropical forests around the world. A recently discovered species was so cute, it got a name straight out of Studio Ghibli: Eoperipatus totoros. The species name is an homage to the CatBus in the film My Neighbor Totoro." Read full article in Wired. E.T.P. 3'

 

Photo via Vice.

Vice's Thijs Roes got in touch with Professor Brian Cox to have an interesting chat about the one thing we all want to have a chat about with Cox: the meaning of life. "Human civilisation has caught up with a good chunk of science fiction. We drive around in electric cars, send spaceships beyond our solar system and use silicon and electricity to help us get laid. Things that seemed like some distant fantasy less than 20 years ago (like, say, reading this article on your phone like some kind of wizard) are now accepted – and often overlooked – parts of our everyday reality.
Professor Brian Cox – who you’ll probably recognise from the past decade of British popular culture – is one of a few doing a good job of pointing all this out to us. For instance, his new BBC series, Human Universe, sets out to make us understand our place in the universe – why we’re here, what we’ve achieved and how we can use those achievements to better ourselves." Read full interview in Vice. E.T.P. (with videos): 9'

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Photo via Gizmodo.

Andrew Liszewski writes in Gizmodo: The first videos we saw of DARPA's advanced ATLAS robot it was just an infant, learning to walk and balance on its own. During the DARPA Robotics Challenge the humanoid robot handled itself like a capable child. And now almost a year later the folks at MIT are happy to announce that ATLAS has finally reached the level of a lazy, shiftless teenager. Read full article in Gizmodo. E.T.P. 3' And learn about DARPA's plans and future challenges in this article of Humanoïdes (in French). E.T.P 8'

GIF by Zoe Burnett via Rhizome.

Not precisely a very recent article, but these past days I came across the review that Megan Heuer wrote of Jonathan Crary's book: 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep. Megan analyzes the book really well highlighting Crary's most interesting arguments (as some other of his claims sound like something a crazy man with a megaphone would shout in a public square, and I personally think that is not necessary "capitalism" but "industrialism", but well, that's the subject of a different book, ain't it?). Anyway, here's an extract of Megan's article: "Offering a genealogical account of the reformatting of time from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the present, 24/7 is relentlessly negative: sleep is the last unleveraged form of human activity and it is violently threatened by a world in which the divisions between night and day, between rest and work, are disappearing due to mutations in the experience of time produced by unceasing digital networks, new metrics for productivity, and ever-expanding forms of control and surveillance . . . As he elaborates the specific textures (or lack thereof) of this new temporality, signaled with the shorthand 24/7, Crary ties the disruption of sleep to an emerging and intensifying set of demands around our productivity as workers." Read full article in Rhizome, and please (I've been reading a lot about this: sleep at least 7 hours every night). E.T.P. 7'

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Photo via Fast Company.

Liz Taurasi writes in Fast Company: Flying Cars Predicted In Two Years: What Then? "Massachusetts-based company Terrafugia, which makes a car-plane hybrid called the Transition. Scheduled to debut in 2016 at an estimated cost of $279,000, the Transition is a street-legal car with wings that fold out to make an FAA-approved airplane." Read full article in Fast Company. E.T.P. 7'

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Photo via The Independent.

The moon will appeared unusually large and bright on Saturday evening, but if you couldn't see it, worry not because this was just the first of three so-called ‘Supermoon’ events that will take place this summer. "On 12 July and at 01:38 (GMT) on 9 September, it will become full on the same day it is in perigree, and appear in the sky as an enormous, glowing orb." Read full article in The Independent. E.T.P. 2'

Photo via Dazed.

Thomas Gordon in Dazed Magazine writes: "Sci-fi authors have long predicted that robots will take over the world, but that moment may be closer than you think. Louis Del Monte, a physicist and the author of a new book, The Artificial Intelligence Revolution, has warned that humans won't be running the world anymore in 30 years time – robots will be." Read full article in Dazed Magazine. E.T.P. 2'

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Photo: A droplet bouncing on the surface of a liquid has been found to exhibit many quantum-like properties, including double-slit interference, tunneling and energy quantization.  Taken by John Bush.

"For nearly a century, “reality” has been a murky concept. The laws of quantum physics seem to suggest that particles spend much of their time in a ghostly state, lacking even basic properties such as a definite location and instead existing everywhere and nowhere at once. Only when a particle is measured does it suddenly materialize, appearing to pick its position as if by a roll of the dice.

This idea that nature is inherently probabilistic — that particles have no hard properties, only likelihoods, until they are observed — is directly implied by the standard equations of quantum mechanics. But now a set of surprising experiments with fluids has revived old skepticism about that worldview. The bizarre results are fueling interest in an almost forgotten version of quantum mechanics, one that never gave up the idea of a single, concrete reality." Read full article by Natalie Wolchover in Wired, originally published in Quanta Magazine. E.T.P. 21'

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Photo: Family Walking by Marc Cohen, 1977.

"Any experienced parent will tell you: You really can't expect your kids to start reading until long after they start talking. If your daughter or son can make out words at 4, jump for joy. And this parent, like many others, learned the hard way that it's a bad idea to try and force your kids to learn before they're ready. But reading to a child is something entirely different. After all, you're the one doing the work, and your son or daughter is sure to enjoy simply being in your presence and listening to the sound of your voice as you tackle, say, the tongue-twisters in some vintage Dr. Seuss. As one reading expert put it to me once: Kids understand that being read to is an act of love. When they get older, they "transfer" that love to the book." Read full article in LA Times. E.T.P. 3'

Too sick to go to work, but not too sick to go out. Super interesting article (that makes all the sense in the world!) by Julie Beck in The Atlantic. "In the face of dragging yourself out of bed for yet another day of expectations and responsibilities, illness on top of it all can seem at times an insurmountable obstacle. How can you be expected to work? You’re sick. It’s not fair.
But if you haven’t shaken off the cold by the time the weekend rolls around, sickness might seem more manageable in the face of a party you were really looking forward to. You suddenly feel like you can power through." Read full article in The Atlantic. E.T.P.