A slow mind may nurture more creative ideas

AS FAR as the internet or phone networks go, bad connections are bad news. Not so in the brain, where slower connections may make people more creative.

Rex Jung at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and his colleagues had found that creativity correlates with low levels of the chemical N-acetylaspartate, which is found in neurons and seems to promote neural health and metabolism.

But neurons make up the brain’s grey matter – the tissue traditionally associated with thinking power, rather than creativity. So Jung is now focusing his creativity studies on white matter, which is largely made of the fatty myelin sheaths that wrap around neurons. Less myelin means the white matter has a lower “integrity” and transmits information more slowly.

Several recent studies have suggested that white matter of high integrity in the cortex, which is associated with higher mental function, means increased intelligence. But when Jung looked at the link between white matter and creativity, he found something quite different.

He used diffusion tensor imaging to study the white matter of 72 volunteers. Unlike MRI, which measures tissue volume, DTI measures the direction in which water diffuses through white matter, an indication of its integrity.

The volunteers’ capacity for divergent thinking – a factor in creativity that includes coming up with new ideas – had already been tested. Jung found that the most creative people had lower white-matter integrity in a region connecting the prefrontal cortex to a deeper structure called the thalamus, compared with their less creative peers (PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009818).

Jung suggests that slower communication between some areas may actually make people more creative. “This might allow for the linkage of more disparate ideas, more novelty, and more creativity,” he says.

Other studies have hinted that white matter might be similarly affected in some psychiatric disorders (see “The brain’s other half”). So the result also strengthens the link between creativity and mental illness. One of the triggers for Jung’s study was the finding that when white matter begins to break down in people with dementia, they often become more creative.

The results are surprising, given that high white-matter integrity is normally considered a good thing, says Paul Thompson at the University of California in Los Angeles. He acknowledges that speedy information transfer may not be vital for creative thought. “Sheer mental speed might be good for playing chess or doing a Rubik’s cube, but you don’t necessarily think of writing novels or creating art as being something that requires sheer mental speed,” he says. …

via A slow mind may nurture more creative ideas – life – 30 March 2010 – New Scientist.

Atom smasher will help reveal ‘the beginning’

The world’s largest atom smasher threw together minuscule particles racing at unheard of speeds in conditions simulating those just after the Big Bang — a success that kick-started a megabillion-dollar experiment that could one day explain how the universe began.

Scientists cheered Tuesday’s historic crash of two proton beams, which produced three times more energy than researchers had created before and marked a milestone for the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider.

“This is a huge step toward unraveling Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 1 — what happened in the beginning,” physicist Michio Kaku told The Associated Press.

“This is a Genesis machine. It’ll help to recreate the most glorious event in the history of the universe.”

Tuesday’s smashup transforms the 15-year-old collider from an engineering project in test phase to the world’s largest ongoing experiment, experts say. The crash that occurred on a subatomic scale is more about shaping our understanding of how the universe was created than immediate improvements to technology in our daily lives.

The power produced will ramp up even more in the future as scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, watch for elusive particles that have been more theorized than seen on Earth.

The consequences of finding those mysterious particles could “affect our conception of who we are in the universe,” said Kaku, co-founder of string field theory and author of the book “Physics of the Impossible.”

Physicists, usually prone to caution and nuance, tripped over themselves in superlatives praising the importance of the Large Hadron Collider and the significance of its generating regular science experiments.

“This is the Jurassic Park for particle physicists,” said Phil Schewe, a spokesman for the American Institute of Physics. He called the collider a time machine. “Some of the particles they are making now or are about to make haven’t been around for 14 billion years.”

via Atom smasher will help reveal ‘the beginning’ – Yahoo! News.

******* SPOILER WARNING ******

We actually end up creating the Universe by trying to figure out what created the Universe.  The future influences the past because the future is the past. Time is an illusion.  Don’t try to understand it.

James Lovelock: Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change

Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades. This is the stark conclusion of James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and independent scientist who developed the Gaia theory.

It follows a tumultuous few months in which public opinion on efforts to tackle climate change has been undermined by events such as the climate scientists’ emails leaked from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit.

“I don’t think we’re yet evolved to the point where we’re clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change,” said Lovelock in his first in-depth interview since the theft of the UEA emails last November. “The inertia of humans is so huge that you can’t really do anything meaningful.”

One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is “modern democracy”, he added. “Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”

Lovelock, 90, believes the world’s best hope is to invest in adaptation measures, such as building sea defences around the cities that are most vulnerable to sea-level rises. He thinks only a catastrophic event would now persuade humanity to take the threat of climate change seriously enough, such as the collapse of a giant glacier in Antarctica, such as the Pine Island glacier, which would immediately push up sea level.

“That would be the sort of event that would change public opinion,” he said. “Or a return of the dust bowl in the mid-west. Another Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report won’t be enough. We’ll just argue over it like now.” The IPCC’s 2007 report concluded that there was a 90% chance that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are causing global warming, but the panel has been criticised over a mistaken claim that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2030.

Lovelock says the events of the recent months have seen him warming to the efforts of the “good” climate sceptics: “What I like about sceptics is that in good science you need critics that make you think: ‘Crumbs, have I made a mistake here?’ If you don’t have that continuously, you really are up the creek. The good sceptics have done a good service, but some of the mad ones I think have not done anyone any favours.

via James Lovelock: Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change | Environment | The Guardian.

I agree. Denial may doom our species… but at the moment there are waaaaay too many of us… so bring on the floods.  Our descendants who survive the hot phase will be amazing individuals.

For one tiny instant, physicists may have broken a law of nature

For a brief instant, it appears, scientists at Brook­haven National Laboratory on Long Island recently discovered a law of nature had been broken.

Action still resulted in an equal and opposite reaction, gravity kept the Earth circling the Sun, and conservation of energy remained intact. But for the tiniest fraction of a second at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), physicists created a symmetry-breaking bubble of space where parity no longer existed.

Parity was long thought to be a fundamental law of nature. It essentially states that the universe is neither right- nor left-handed — that the laws of physics remain unchanged when expressed in inverted coordinates. In the early 1950s it was found that the so-called weak force, which is responsible for nuclear radioactivity, breaks the parity law. However, the strong force, which holds together subatomic particles, was thought to adhere to the law of parity, at least under normal circumstances.

Now this law appears to have been broken by a team of about a dozen particle physicists, including Jack Sandweiss, Yale’s Donner Professor of Physics. Since 2000, Sandweiss has been smashing the nuclei of gold atoms together as part of the STAR experiment at RHIC, a 2.4-mile-circumference particle accelerator, to study the law of parity under the resulting extreme conditions.

The team created something called a quark-gluon plasma — a kind of “soup” that results when energies reach high enough levels to break up protons and neutrons into their constituent quarks and gluons, the fundamental building blocks of matter.

Theorists believe this kind of quark-gluon plasma, which has a temperature of four trillion degrees Celsius, existed just after the Big Bang, when the universe was only a microsecond old. The plasma “bubble” created in the collisions at RHIC lasted for a mere millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, yet the team hopes to use it to learn more about how structure in the universe — from black holes to galaxies — may have formed out of the soup.

When the gold nuclei, traveling at 99.999% of the speed of light, smashed together, the plasma that resulted was so energetic that a tiny cube of it with sides measuring about a quarter of the width of a human hair would contain enough energy to power the entire United States for a year.

It was the equally gargantuan magnetic field produced by the plasma — the strongest ever created — that alerted the physicists that one of nature’s laws might have been broken.

“A very interesting thing happened in these extreme conditions,” Sandweiss says. “Parity violation is very difficult to detect, but the magnetic field in conjunction with parity violation gave rise to a secondary effect that we could detect.” …

via For one tiny instant, physicists may have broken a law of nature.

Some people break a few laws of nature every morning before breakfast.

Astronomers discover 90 per cent more universe

Astronomers know that many surveys of the universe miss a large proportion of their targets, but a new survey has found that 90 per cent of galaxies have gone undetected.

Traditional surveys use light emitted by hydrogen, known as the Lyman-alpha line, to probe the number of stars in the distant universe.

But the new survey found that Lyman-alpha light gets trapped within the galaxy that emits it and that 90 per cent of galaxies do not show up in Lyman-alpha surveys, according to Universe Today.

Astronomers always knew they were missing some fraction of the galaxies in Lyman-alpha surveys,’ explains Matthew Hayes, the lead author of the paper, published this week in Nature.

‘But for the first time we now have a measurement. The number of missed galaxies is substantial.’

Using the new HAWK-I camera attached to a telescope, Mr Hayes and his team surveyed an area of space previously measured in terms of Lyman-alpha light.

The new survey recorded light emitted at a different wavelength also by glowing hydrogen and known as the H-alpha line.

They specifically looked at galaxies whose light has been travelling for 10 billion years.

‘This is the first time we have observed a patch of the sky so deeply in light coming from hydrogen at these two very specific wavelengths, and this proved crucial,’ said team member Goran Ostlin.

The astronomers concluded that traditional surveys carried out using Lyman-alpha only see a tiny part of the total light that is produced, since most of the Lyman-alpha photons are destroyed by interaction with the interstellar clouds of gas and dust.

As a result, as much as 90 per cent of galaxies go unseen in these surveys.

‘If there are ten galaxies seen, there could be a hundred there,’ Mr Hayes said.

‘Now that we know how much light we’ve been missing, we can start to create far more accurate representations of the cosmos, understanding better how quickly stars have formed at different times in the life of the universe,’ said co-author Miguel Mas-Hesse.

via Astronomers discover 90 per cent more universe | Mail Online.

They may not realize that they are seeing space time warps which cause some galaxies to be duplicated.

Teen sees with ‘kaleidoscope eyes’

When The Beatles sang about Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and her kaleidoscope eyes, they could have been talking about 19-year-old Danielle Burton.

British teen, Danielle Burton has been diagnosed with Persistent Migraine Aura, where a nerve in the brain is stuck in a constant state of migraine, causing ‘visual snow’.

PMA is a medical condition suffered by just twenty people worldwide.

Suffering from PMA is like looking through the lens of a kaleidoscope, where the field of vision is crowded by colourful clouds, zig-zags or blurring.

The condition came on suddenly last October, when Burton, from Portsmouth, thought she was suffering another migraine.

“The next day, it was not any better. I got in the shower but as soon as the water hit my back, my sight went completely,” she explained.

After scans revealed no problem with her eyes, Burton was at a loss until a doctor in January diagnosed her with PMA in January.

“I have had [PMA] for six months now and I have got my eyesight back for one hour in that time,” she said.

Sometimes she can make out fuzzy shapes and but spends the majority of the time with colours snowing in front of her like “television static.”

At times, she is rendered completely blind by purple and blue florescent clouds.

Her symptoms are considered some of the worst in PMA sufferers, as she cannot escape the bright colours, even when her eyes are closed.

“Even when I see, I can’t see what a normal person can see. It is television static, there are lots of different colours raining the whole time,” she said.

Burton is looking for other people to offer any information about her condition, as doctors have been of limited help.

From all of this, she has gained a newfound appreciation of the wonder of sight.

“I went 19 years of my life being able to see everything and didn’t even realise how precious sight is.”

via Teen sees with ‘kaleidoscope eyes’.

The pathogenesis of this condition is unknown, but I’m betting it is not caused by oral sex.  And speaking of which, … (smooth segue no?)… you might want to read this to update your education about head cancer.

Human Bones Successfully Grown in Lab From Stem Cells

Figuring out a good bone replacement for limbs has proved a problem since the days of the wooden peg leg. Yet scientists have now grown two small bones based on digital images and a 3-D scaffolding, the New York Times reports.

The recent bone work comes from Columbia University, where biomedical researchers led by Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic first created their replica scaffolding based on digital images of an intact jaw bone. Such work has helped solve the problem of how to create lab-grown bones in the exact shape of the originals.

Vunjak-Novakovic’s group converted the bone material scaffolding into living tissue by placing it in a similar-shaped chamber, and added human stem cells extracted from bone marrow or liposuctioned fat. The bioreactor chamber then fed oxygen, growth hormones, and nutrients to the bone.

Another team at the University of Michigan plans to recreate jaw bones within the human body itself. It will create its bone scaffolding based on a printer laser system and CT scan, and then fill the scaffolding with cells taken from the patient who requires the bone replacement. Once implanted, the scaffolding would get absorbed by the body.

Developments such as these could do away with the need for painful bone grafts or using materials such as titanium that aren’t completely biocompatible with host bones. It’s almost a shame, really — wooden synthetic bones better than anything 18th-century pirates had were just making a comeback as artificial bone material substitutes.

via Human Bones Successfully Grown in Lab From Stem Cells | Popular Science.

Ancient Egyptian ‘Door To Afterlife’ Found

Archaeologists have unearthed a 3,500-year-old door to the afterlife from the tomb of a high-ranking Egyptian official near Karnak temple in Luxor, the Egyptian antiquities authority said Monday.

These recessed niches found in nearly all ancient Egyptian tombs were meant to take the spirits of the dead to and from the afterworld. The nearly six-foot- tall (1.75 meters) slab of pink granite was covered with religious texts.

The door came from the tomb of User, the chief minister of Queen Hatshepsut, a powerful, long ruling 15th century B.C. queen from the New Kingdom with a famous mortuary temple near Luxor in southern Egypt.

User held the position of vizier for 20 years, also acquiring the titles of prince and mayor of the city, according to the inscriptions. He may have inherited his position from his father.

Viziers in ancient Egypt were powerful officials tasked with the day-to-day running of the kingdom’s complex bureaucracy.

As a testament to his importance, User had his own tomb on the west bank of the Nile in Luxor, where royal kings and queens were also buried. A chapel dedicated to him has also been discovered further south in the hills near Aswan.

The stone itself was long way from its tomb and had apparently been removed from the grave and then incorporated into the wall of a Roman-era building, more than a thousand years later.

False doors were placed in the west walls of tombs and faced offering tables where food and drink were left for the spirit of the deceased.

via Ancient Egyptian ‘Door To Afterlife’ Found.

An archaeological mystery in a half-ton lead coffin

In the ruins of a city that was once Rome’s neighbor, archaeologists last summer found a 1,000-pound lead coffin.

Who or what is inside is still a mystery, said Nicola Terrenato, the University of Michigan professor of classical studies who leads the project — the largest American dig in Italy in the past 50 years.

The sarcophagus will soon be transported to the American Academy in Rome, where engineers will use heating techniques and tiny cameras in an effort to gain insights about the contents without breaking the coffin itself.

“We’re very excited about this find,” Terrenato said. “Romans as a rule were not buried in coffins to begin with and when they did use coffins, they were mostly wooden. There are only a handful of other examples from Italy of lead coffins from this age — the second, third or fourth century A.D. We know of virtually no others in this region.”

This one is especially unusual because of its size.

“It’s a sheet of lead folded onto itself an inch thick,” he said. “A thousand pounds of metal is an enormous amount of wealth in this era. To waste so much of it in a burial is pretty unusual.”

Was the deceased a soldier? A gladiator? A bishop? All are possibilities, some more remote than others, Terrenato said. Researchers will do their best to examine the bones and any “grave goods” or Christian symbols inside the container in an effort to make a determination.

“It’s hard to predict what’s inside, because it’s the only example of its kind in the area,” Terrenato said. “I’m trying to keep my hopes within reason.”

Human remains encased in lead coffins tend to be well preserved, if difficult to get to. Researchers want to avoid breaking into the coffin. The amount of force necessary to break through the lead would likely damage the contents. Instead, they will first use thermography and endoscopy. Thermography involves heating the coffin by a few degrees and monitoring the thermal response. Bones and any artifacts buried with them would have different thermal responses, Terrenato said. Endoscopy involves inserting a small camera into the coffin. But how well that works depends on how much dirt has found its way into the container over the centuries.

If these approaches fail, the researchers could turn to an MRI scan — an expensive option that would involve hauling the half-ton casket to a hospital. …

via An archaeological mystery in a half-ton lead coffin.

Scientists found a region in brain responsible for temptation

American scientists have identified a region in the human brain which is responsible for a person’s ability to resist temptation, in a research that could help explain why some people are so impulsive and often give in to their desire.

Researchers at Columbia University here have claimed that the brain area, called the left lateral prefrontal cortex, actually plays a major role in the person’s ability to resist enticement of any object or service.

“The lateral prefrontal cortex really is one of the last brain structures to mature; it matures rather late during puberty and even during adolescence and into young adulthood,” said lead researcher Bernd Figner.

“So this can help explain why adolescents and young adults often seem to have a hard time delaying gratification.”

According to the research, when the left lateral prefrontal cortex is impaired people are more likely to choose immediate yet smaller rewards over larger rewards that won’t come until later, LiveScience reported.

For their study, Figner and his team carried out a brain stimulant experiment on 52 college-going youths.

via Scientists found a region in brain responsible for temptation.