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Subscribe to RSS FeedBMW Builds a Shape-Shifting Car Out of Cloth : Wired
How Much Sleep Do You Really Need? : Yahoo!
Sleep is one of the richest topics in science today: why we need it, why it can be hard to get, and how that affects everything from our athletic performance to our income. Daniel Kripke, co-director of research at the Scripps Clinic Sleep Center in La Jolla, Calif., has looked at the most important question of all. In 2002, he compared death rates among more than 1 million American adults who, as part of a study on cancer prevention, reported their average nightly amount of sleep. To many his results were surprising, but they’ve since been corroborated by similar studies in Europe and East Asia. Kripke explains.
Scientists Changing Theories About Memory : NPR
Everyone knows that frustrating feeling when something is just “on the tip of your tongue.” Like when you run into an old acquaintance on the street — you know you know the person’s name, but it just seems slightly out of your grasp.
Neuroscientists are now studying that phenomenon with brain scanners, and their research is completely changing their view of how human memory works, explains Jonah Lehrer, editor-at-large at Seed magazine and author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist.
Tags: Brain, Memory, NPR, Science
Will We Recognize the Future? : NPR
Technology is ever-changing — and changing ever faster. But what happens when the rate of technological change becomes so fast that the fundamental nature of what it means to be human changes, too?
Inventor, technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil talks with host Ira Flatow about the idea of the “singularity” — what happens when technology advances so much that it’s impossible to predict what happens next. Will artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and biotechnology be able to completely reshape what it means to be human?
Tags: NPR, Ray Kurzweil
Building a Baby Earth to Test Its Magnetic Field : NPR
The compass has been around since at least the 12th century, but scientists still don’t know exactly how the Earth generates the magnetic field that keeps a compass needle pointing north.
But geophysicist Dan Lathrop is trying to find out — by building his own planet.
His latest effort at the University of Maryland towers over him, a massive stainless steel sphere that looks like a prop from some old science fiction movie. Later this year he plans to fill it with molten metal and set the whole 26-ton ball spinning. At top speed the equator will whirl by at 80 miles an hour.
“It was a little scary the first time we spun it up,” he says.
If all goes well, the planet will generate its own magnetic field.
Tags: Compass, Earth, Geophysics, NPR, Planet, Science
Model Predicts Mob Behavior : LiveScience
Scientists who want to see how a crowd behaves in an emergency can’t exactly shout “Fire!” on a city street and watch everyone panic and run. But a newly developed computer model can.
The 3-D model starts with patterns of human behavior and movement and uses them to simulate the behavior of a crowd in mob situations and pedestrian habits under certain building configurations, resulting in a virtual crowd video.
“Crowds are vital to the lifeblood of our cities,” said the model’s creator, Paul Torrens of Arizona State University. But, he adds, it is impractical “to establish live experiments with hundreds or thousands of people along busy streetscapes.”
Tags: Cognitive Science, Psychology, Social Experiment
Key to All Optical Illusions Discovered : LiveScience
Tags: Cognitive Science, Optical Illusions
NNDB Mapper: Tracking the entire world.
The NNDB Mapper allows you to explore NNDB visually by graphing the connections between people.
Tags: nndb, Social Experiment