Science Snax
Dec. 16th, 2008 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xthreadThree science snacks for the day -
Scientists in Asia have demonstrated that they can use fMRI techniques to determine what someone is seeing by monitoring the flow of blood in the processing centers of the brain. No idea, since I haven't read the underlying research, and probably couldn't follow it well if I could, how much training-to-an-individual-human it requires, although the article implies that while it's too much to remotely scan a bunch of humans, it's still a short enough amount of training to an individual user that personal visual recording devices are a tractable engineering problem. Exceedingly interesting stuff. This has interesting implications in terms of life-recording, entertainment, and potentially criminal justice. It's not as creepy as it first seems, because 'fMRI techiniques' and 'monitoring at a distance' don't interoperate well, but it definitely has lots of interesting implications. It will also interact very interestingly with the fact that memory is pretty synthetic - in the same way that your visual cortex fills in your field of view with objects that it believes are there, your memory will fill in details to make memories make sense, even when they're of events that didn't actually happen.
Astronomers have confirmed observation of CO2 in an exoplanet's atmosphere. It's a gas giant with a surface temperature on the order of 1700° C, so they're scrambling to figure out why the CO2 is stable, but it's still pretty interesting. This is not quite the tell-tale astronomical marker of cellular life (that would be finding a planet with free oxygen in its atmosphere; we do that, we know there is complex life elsewhere in the universe), but, still, a number of those constants in the Drake Equation that looked like they might be very small seem to be turning out to be very big. In particular, planets seem to be common, and they appear to routinely have atmospheres, and planetary systems also seem to be common. I don't remember if we've been able to find a system with small rocky planets in relatively near orbits around their primary with guard gas giants further out, we may not be able to see those still. And See is a word here which means detect through some measurable, repeatable observation technique.
Finally, Nasa has been doing dark matter observation experiments, and it looks like we've got more good confirmation of the existence of dark matter, and its prevalence in the universe. This puts some additional oomph behind Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
For Science!
Scientists in Asia have demonstrated that they can use fMRI techniques to determine what someone is seeing by monitoring the flow of blood in the processing centers of the brain. No idea, since I haven't read the underlying research, and probably couldn't follow it well if I could, how much training-to-an-individual-human it requires, although the article implies that while it's too much to remotely scan a bunch of humans, it's still a short enough amount of training to an individual user that personal visual recording devices are a tractable engineering problem. Exceedingly interesting stuff. This has interesting implications in terms of life-recording, entertainment, and potentially criminal justice. It's not as creepy as it first seems, because 'fMRI techiniques' and 'monitoring at a distance' don't interoperate well, but it definitely has lots of interesting implications. It will also interact very interestingly with the fact that memory is pretty synthetic - in the same way that your visual cortex fills in your field of view with objects that it believes are there, your memory will fill in details to make memories make sense, even when they're of events that didn't actually happen.
Astronomers have confirmed observation of CO2 in an exoplanet's atmosphere. It's a gas giant with a surface temperature on the order of 1700° C, so they're scrambling to figure out why the CO2 is stable, but it's still pretty interesting. This is not quite the tell-tale astronomical marker of cellular life (that would be finding a planet with free oxygen in its atmosphere; we do that, we know there is complex life elsewhere in the universe), but, still, a number of those constants in the Drake Equation that looked like they might be very small seem to be turning out to be very big. In particular, planets seem to be common, and they appear to routinely have atmospheres, and planetary systems also seem to be common. I don't remember if we've been able to find a system with small rocky planets in relatively near orbits around their primary with guard gas giants further out, we may not be able to see those still. And See is a word here which means detect through some measurable, repeatable observation technique.
Finally, Nasa has been doing dark matter observation experiments, and it looks like we've got more good confirmation of the existence of dark matter, and its prevalence in the universe. This puts some additional oomph behind Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
For Science!
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no subject
Date: 2008-12-17 04:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-17 05:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-17 05:22 am (UTC)I'm taking Biology of the Brain next semester, and I cannot even express how much I'm looking forward to it. I think experimental neuropsychology might be my calling.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-17 05:24 am (UTC)Personally, my engine gets seriously revved by psycholinguistics. I'm looking at going back to school to get some training in it, not sure what I can do with it but the classes alone are such a tempting tease.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-17 05:32 am (UTC)I'd love to learn about psycholinguistics, but one of the cons of taking a whole bunch of fun community college classes and then transferring to a university for the real academic stuff is that all my electives are used up and I have to spend my remaining two years on pretty much nothing but my degree. Also, I don't think I've seen any linguistics courses in the catalog. It is the sort of thing I'm sure I can find good books about, though.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-17 05:39 am (UTC)I made the dubious decision of doing all of my ling undergrad classes in my first 2 years (I just got so excited about it!) and then had 2 years of upperclassman quarters that I had to fill with GE courses... I was the one Senior in a lecture hall of Freshmen. The bonus was that I got to take classes I'd never have known about my first two years, so I did things like 'Overview of the Universe' or 'The Muppets'. Bwahahaha.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-17 05:50 am (UTC)See, I always read the course catalog all the way through the day it becomes available, so I know about all the cool classes I'm missing even though this is my first semester here. I did get to take some fun classes in community college--The Bible As Literature was a particularly interesting one. There's so much awesome shit to learn, though! Even if I had four years, it wouldn't be anywhere near long enough.