Complex thinking goes beyond primates: Dolphins understand zero

The dolphin’s brain structurally has two section, each with two lobes. Both of these lobes has a seperate blood supply, and in fact, can even be considered to be completely seperate brains. According to researcher Carol J. Howard, Dolphins never sleep with both parts of their brain simultaneously. In fact, when a Dolphin sleeps, one of the sides of it’s brain completely shuts down, while the other stays alert in order to run the various body functions. Each of the dolphin’s eyes is connected to a different side of the brain. Because of that, a Dolphin can still see when it is sleeping, making it difficult for predators to sneak up on it.  - allaboutdolphins.net

Dolphins are so distantly related to humans that it’s been 95 million years since we had even a remotely common ancestor. Yet when it comes to intelligence, social behavior and communications, some researchers say dolphins come as close to humans as our ape and monkey cousins.

Maybe closer.

“They understand concepts like zero, abstract concepts. They do everything that chimpanzees do and bonobos can do,” said Lori Marino, a neuroscientist at Emory University who specializes in dolphin research. “The fact is that they are so different from us and so much like us at the same time.”

In recent years, animal researchers have found that thought processes in critters aren’t a matter of how closely related they are to humans. You don’t have to be a primate to be smart.

Dolphin brains look nothing like human brains, Marino said. Yet, she says, “the more you learn about them, the more you realize that they do have the capacity and characteristics that we think of when we think of a person.”

These mammals recognize themselves in the mirror and have a sense of social identity. They not only know who they are, but they also have a sense of who, where and what their groups are. They interact and comprehend the health and feelings of other dolphins so fast it as if they are online with each other, Marino said.

Animal intelligence “is not a linear thing,” said Duke University researcher Brian Hare, who studies bonobos, which are one of man’s closest relatives, and dogs, which are not.

“Think of it like a toolbox,” he said. “Some species have an amazing hammer. Some species have an amazing screwdriver.”

For dogs, a primary tool is their obsessive observation of humans and ability to understand human communication, Hare said. For example, dogs follow human pointing so well that they understand it whether it’s done with a hand or a foot; chimps don’t, said Hare, whose upcoming book is called “The Genius of Dogs.”

Then there are elephants.

via Complex thinking goes beyond primates: Dolphins understand zero, elephants rescue each other – The Washington Post.

Popeye was right: Swedish study confirms spinach makes us stronger

Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm said Monday they had conducted a study showing how nitrate, found naturally in spinach and several other vegetables, tones up muscles.

For the study, which will be published in the Journal of Physiology, the research team had placed nitrate directly in the drinking water of a group of mice for one week and then dissected them and compared their muscle functions to that of a control group.

“The mice that had been on consistent nitrate had much stronger muscles,” they said in a statement.

The nitrate used “was equivalent to a human’s consumption of about 200 to 250 grammes of spinach a day, so it’s a very easily obtained amount,” one of the researchers at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Andres Hernandez, told AFP.

“Well, it is if you eat spinach. For people who don’t eat their vegetables it will be more tricky,” he added.

While no effect could be seen in the so-called slow-twitch muscles used for moderate exercise and endurance, the scientists saw a clear change could be seen in the fast-twitch muscles used for strength and more high-intensity exercises, Hernandez said.

The tricky question, he said, was determining why this happened.

The researchers discovered that the nitrates had prompted an increase in two proteins, found naturally in the muscles,that are used for storing and releasing calcium, which is vital to making muscles contract.

The protein increase in turn led to higher quantities of calcium released in the muscles, Hernandez said, pointing out that “if you have more calcium released, you have a stronger contraction.”

Translated into human terms, consuming nitrates from for instance spinach increases the muscle strength available for things like lifting weights or sprinting up a steep hill.It could also increase endurance, Hernandez said, pointing out that when stronger, the fast-twitch muscles, which fatigue faster than other muscles, do not need to contract as frequently.

via Popeye was right: Swedish study confirms spinach makes us stronger – The Local.

Elvis Presley crypt pulled from auction

1 day ago

1 day ago

The crypt in which Elvis Presley was first buried has been withdrawn from a Los Angeles auction after protests it should be kept as a shrine.

More than 10,000 fans signed a petition against the sale of the tomb at Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee.

Julien’s Auctions said it would not sell the crypt until the cemetery “finds a plan that best suits the interests of the fans while respecting and preserving the memory of Elvis”.

The crypt has been empty since 1977.

Presley was temporarily interred there alongside his mother, Gladys, for two months after he died before being reburied at his Graceland home.

via BBC News – Elvis Presley crypt pulled from auction.

Your Brain on a Magic Trick

PINCH a coin at its edge between the thumb and first fingers of your right hand and begin to place it in your left palm, without letting go. Begin to close the fingers of the left hand. The instant the coin is out of sight, extend the last three digits of your right hand and secretly retract the coin. Make a fist with your left — as if holding the coin — as your right hand palms the coin and drops to the side.

You’ve just performed what magicians call a retention vanish: a false transfer that exploits a lag in the brain’s perception of motion, called persistence of vision. When done right, the spectator will actually see the coin in the left palm for a split second after the hands separate.

This bizarre afterimage results from the fact that visual neurons don’t stop firing once a given stimulus (here, the coin) is no longer present. As a result, our perception of reality lags behind reality by about one one-hundredth of a second.

Magicians have long used such cognitive biases to their advantage, and in recent years scientists have been following in their footsteps, borrowing techniques from the conjurer’s playbook in an effort not to mystify people but to study them. Magic may seem an unlikely tool, but it’s already yielded several widely cited results. Consider the work on choice blindness — people’s lack of awareness when evaluating the results of their decisions.

In one study, shoppers in a blind taste test of two types of jam were asked to choose the one they preferred. They were then given a second taste from the jar they picked. Unbeknown to them, the researchers swapped the flavors before the second spoonful. The containers were two-way jars, lidded at both ends and rigged with a secret compartment that held the other jam on the opposite side — a principle that’s been used to bisect countless showgirls. This seems like the sort of thing that wouldn’t scan, yet most people failed to notice that they were tasting the wrong jam, even when the two flavors were fairly dissimilar, like grapefruit and cinnamon-apple.

In a related experiment, volunteers were shown a pair of female faces and asked which they found more attractive. Then they were given a closer look at their putative selection. In fact, the researchers swapped the selection for the “less attractive” face. Again, this bit of fraud flew by most people. Not only that, when pressed to justify their choices, the duped victims concocted remarkably detailed post hoc justifications.

Such tricks suggest that we are often blind to the results of our own decisions. Once a choice is made, our minds tend to rewrite history in a way that flatters our volition, a fact magicians have exploited for centuries. “If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely,” said Teller, of the duo Penn and Teller, to Smithsonian magazine. “This is one of the darkest of all psychological secrets.”

Another dark psychological secret magicians routinely take advantage of is known as change blindness — the failure to detect changes in consecutive scenes. One of the most beautiful demonstrations is an experiment conducted by the psychologist Daniel Simons in which he had an experimenter stop random strangers on the street and ask for directions.

Midway through the conversation, a pair of confederates walked between them and blocked the stranger’s view, and the experimenter switched places with one of the stooges. Moments later, the stranger was talking to a completely different person — yet strange as it may sound, most didn’t notice.  …

via Your Brain on a Magic Trick – NYTimes.com.

Training for Half Dome, Jogging with a weight vest?

According to this article below, a weighted vest can improve short and medium distance running speeds, but I want to get in shape to carry a 45-55 lb pack at high altitude for 7 hours per day. I have three months to prepare.

… The initial results were negative. After four weeks: the runners needed more oxygen to run at a given pace (that is, their running economy had deteriorated). Similarly, their leg muscles were producing more lactic acid, a possible sign of muscle fatigue.

Fortunately, Rusko didn’t give up at this point. For the next two weeks, he asked his subjects to take off their vests and continue training as usual. A retest at the end of this two-week period produced far different results.

This time, lactate threshold was 2 percent higher (meaning that the runners produced less lactic acid), and max V02 had also increased by 2 percent. Two other important measures also improved: Endurance while sprinting soared by 25 percent, and stair running speed, a good indicator of leg-muscle power, increased by 3 percent.

… Wearing a weighted vest has the potential to strengthen your leg muscles, make you faster, improve your kick and make you a better hill runner. However, it’s important to bear in mind the following points:

* If you decide to try using a vest, wear it as much as possible during your daily routine. Wearing a vest only for workouts may not provide enough stimulation of fast-twitch muscle fibers.

* Wear the weighted vest during some, but not all, of your training sessions. The vest actually slows your average speed during training, so constant use would eventually teach your muscles to work at a slower rate.

* You’ll have to stop wearing the vest for several weeks before you see positive effects. Your body needs a “furlough” to recover from the extra stresses of vest wearing.

* Don’t try to substitute hand weights for a vest. Hand weights may slightly increase your oxygen consumption, but they won’t do anything for your leg muscles or increase your max V02 to any significant degree.

* Don’t attach weights to your ankles. The extra poundage could cause injuries and may wreck your running economy.

* Weighted vests will probably prove most beneficial to middle and short distance runners. Distance runners may be able to improve their lactate threshold, max V02 and kicking ability by using a vest, but they must guard against loss of running economy. You can buy weighted vests in some sporting goods stores.

http://www.fluidmovement.com/vest/ArticleByOwenAndersonPhD.htm

CIA veteran writes Roswell conspiracy book

Chase Brandon, a thirty-five year veteran of the CIA, will tonight appear as a guest on Coast to Coast AM with John B. Wells. Many listeners will no doubt be unfamiliar with Brandon and his career with the CIA, but his name has passed my lips literally thousands of times over the past several years.

Brandon spent twenty-five years in the Agency’s elite Clandestine Service as an undercover, covert operations officer. His foreign assignments involved international terrorism, counterinsurgency, global narcotics trafficking and weapons smuggling. He was also an Agency foreign political affairs analyst, Presidential briefer to Bill Clinton and an instructor in paramilitary and espionage tactics at multiple secret CIA training camps.

Brandon is perhaps best known as the CIA’s former Entertainment Liaison Officer – a position that required him to establish working relationships with many of the biggest names in Hollywood and to provide advice to filmmakers on matters of “accuracy and authenticity” with regard to the CIA’s image onscreen. He was – though he prefers to phrase it more sympathetically – the CIA’s chief frontline propagandist in Hollywood. He advised on countless films and TV series – often uncredited – quietly shaping scripts, characters and concepts.

As a great deal of my academic research has been focused on cinematic propaganda efforts, Brandon’s activities in Hollywood naturally have been of considerable interest to me and I have spent countless hours discussing with colleagues and writing about the CIA’s role in Hollywood and the influence wielded by Chase Brandon and other CIA advisors in the entertainment industry. …

With Chase Brandon’s credentials in mind, the UFO community is set to engage in furious debate about this CIA man’s first novel, which is now on sale and is titled The Cryptos Conundrum. It is a “fictional” book dealing with the UFO/ET issue, specifically with the Roswell crash and cover-up. This marks the first time ever that any retired CIA operative has written a book (presented either as fact or fiction) on the UFO topic that has received the Agency’s official stamp of approval. On that basis alone, it’s a must-read. …

On the first page of the book, a bold, underlined notice reads:

This material has been reviewed by the CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information.

But, of course, classified information can’t technically be disclosed if it is presented as fiction. Brandon is gleefully aware of this, and selects as his first quote of the book a musing by Francis Bacon:

“Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.”

I’ve read Brandon’s novel. Obviously, it’s intriguing, to say the least, and Brandon clearly wants it to be seen to contain many truths, despite its “fiction” label. Does Brandon have ‘inside’ information on UFOs? It is my assessment that, yes, probably he does. Some. The circles he’s walked in during his career would almost certainly have made him privy to UFO-related chatter; to whispers and suggestions, if not hard evidence. This is not to say the information Brandon might have is true. What he ‘knows’ is very likely based on what he’s been told, not on what he’s seen. More than anything, what readers should remember when reading Brandon’s tantalising book is that the author is a trained expert in propaganda and psychological warfare. …

Brandon does not – nor will he ever publicly – claim to have “seen proof of a crashed spacecraft and ET bodies.” But in writing this book he is taking a position on the existence and possible nature of the UFO/ET pheneomeon. This is significant given his CIA credentials and despite his thoughts being packaged as “fiction.”

via Silver Screen Saucers: CIA veteran writes Roswell conspiracy book.

For a second my mind did a backflip. I thought this article was about  Branton, not Brandon. Chase Branton and you’ll find Chase Brandon.

Could we forget how to WRITE?

If you can’t remember the last time you jotted down a hand-written note, you are not alone.

For a study suggests that the days of using pen and paper may be numbered – with a typical adult not having written anything for almost six weeks.

In a world where we increasingly tap out our thoughts, messages and reminders on a keyboard or a touchscreen phone, the traditional note or letter appears to be becoming redundant.

The research, commissioned by online stationer Docmail, revealed that the average time since an adult last wrote by hand was 41 days. But it also found that one in three of us has not had cause to write anything ‘properly’ for more than six months.

Two thirds of the 2,000 respondents said that if they do write by hand, it’s usually something for their eyes only with hastily scribbled reminders or notes most common.

More than half of those polled admitted their handwriting had noticeably declined, with one in seven declaring they were ‘ashamed’ of their written word.

And four in ten said they relied on predictive text for spelling, with one in four regularly using abbreviations or ‘text talk’.

The startling long-term conclusion is that future generations may end up entirely dependent on keyboards to communicate. …

via Could we forget how to WRITE? The typical adult has not scribbled anything by hand for six weeks | Mail Online.

Simple mathematical pattern describes shape of neuron ‘jungle’ | KurzweilAI

Image: target points (red)  in a spherical volume are connected to optimize wiring in a tree pattern (black) (credit: H. Cuntz et al./PNAS)

University College London (UCL) neuroscientists have found that there is a simple pattern that describes the tree-like shape of all neurons.

Neurons look remarkably like trees, and connect to other cells with many branches that effectively act like wires in an electrical circuit, carrying impulses that represent sensation, emotion, thought and action.

Over 100 years ago, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, sought to systematically describe the shapes of neurons, and was convinced that there must be a unifying principle underlying their diversity.

Cajal proposed that neurons spread out their branches so as to use as little wiring as possible to reach other cells in the network. Reducing the amount of wiring between cells provides additional space to pack more neurons into the brain, and therefore increases its processing power.

New work by UCL neuroscientists has revisited this century-old hypothesis using modern computational methods. They show that a simple computer program that connects points with as little wiring as possible can produce tree-like shapes that are indistinguishable from real neurons — and also happen to be very beautiful.

They also show that the shape of neurons follows a simple mathematical relationship called a power law*: dendrites grow to fill a target space in an optimal manner and, similar to a minimum spanning tree, use the least amount of wiring to reach all synaptic contacts.

Power laws have been shown to be common across the natural world, and often point to simple rules underlying complex structures. Dr. Herman Cuntz (UCL Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research) and colleagues find that the power law holds true for many types of neurons gathered from across the animal kingdom, providing strong evidence for Ramon y Cajal’s general principle.  …

“The ultimate goal of neuroscience is to understand how the impenetrable neural jungle can give rise to the complexity of behavior,” Cuntz said. ”Our findings confirm Cajal’s original far-reaching insight that there is a simple pattern behind the circuitry, and provide hope that neuroscientists will someday be able to see the forest for the trees.” …

via Simple mathematical pattern describes shape of neuron ‘jungle’ | KurzweilAI.

Mysterious Building in Monmouth, Wales Older Than Pyramids?

British archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a mysterious prehistoric structure that might be older than Egypt’s pyramids.

Discovered during work at a housing development in Monmouth, Wales, the bulky feature consists of a series of trenches possibly housing the timber foundations of a massive building.

NEWS: Swedish Stonehenge? Stone Structure Spurs Debate

“We have what appear to be huge parallel sleeper beams set close to the edge of an ancient, dried up lake,” archaeologist Steve Clarke of Monmouth Archaeology told Discovery News.

Made from what seems to be entire tree trunks, the sleeper beams are huge, measuring more than 50 ft in lenght and more than 3 ft across.

“It’s huge and presumably prehistoric but otherwise we haven’t a clue what it is, we don’t know how old it is and we don’t know how long it is,” Clarke said.

Continuing beyond the excavations, the timber structure was cut into the surface of a burnt mound, presumably dating to the Bronze Age.

Experts believe the structure could date to at least the Bronze Age, but could be early Neolithic, about 6,500 years old, thus predating Egypt’s pyramids by about 2,000 years. … Speculations range from interpreting the structure as the foundation of an early Neolithic long house to seeing it as a large platform constructed on water-saturated soil.

What the platform was used for, and what might have been built on top of it, remains a mystery. Radio-carbon tests of the foundations are being carried at the moment. Results are expected within a couple of weeks. …

via Mysterious Building — Older Than Pyramids? : Discovery News.

Human-Powered Helicopter Hovers for Nearly a Minute (Video)

One of the oldest prizes in aviation is one step closer to being claimed after a team from the University of Maryland flew a human-powered helicopter for 50 seconds yesterday. The students managed the tenuous indoor flight with the Gamera II, beating the team’s previous record of 11 seconds set last summer.

The flight came at the end of two action-filled days of flying, fixing and flying again with numerous hops above the University of Maryland’s basketball court heli-pad.

The prize is the Igor I. Sikorsky Human-Powered Helicopter Competition from the American Helicopter Society and a win earns $250,000. In order to claim the prize a human powered helicopter must lift off the ground, hover for at least 60 seconds, reach an altitude of 3 meters during the flight and stay within a 10-square-meter area.

Yesterday’s 50-second flight was one of more than a dozen over the past two days, including a 35-second flight on Wednesday and a 40-second flight earlier Thursday (video below).

The Gamera II is a far cry from its robust spinning terrapin namesake. Like its fixed wing, human powered cousins, the delicate helicopter is a rather large, yet extremely lightweight aircraft. The entire craft has a width of 105 feet and each of the four rotors has a span of just over 42 feet, 7 inches. But despite the size of the Gamera II, it weighs just 71 pounds. That’s more than 30 pounds lighter than the original Gamera that flew last year, thanks largely to redesigned rotors and an improved truss design.

The design is delicate and an incident on Wednesday had them making repairs and delaying further flights. …

Gamera II is piloted and powered by a pair of students at the University of Maryland. Unlike its predecessor, Gamera II uses both pedals to power with the legs, and a hand crank to add a bit of extra power. The team estimates they gain around 20 percent with the arms over using legs alone.

The University of Maryland team is one of only three groups that have ever achieved human-powered helicopter flight. A Japanese team held the previous record with a 19-second flight back in 1994.

More flights are expected … and the team hopes to crack the 60-second barrier. A live stream of the Gamera II in action can be seen on the team’s website.

Human-Powered Helicopter Hovers for Nearly a Minute | Autopia | Wired.com.

Comment on youtube: “…A human being is using HIS OWN ENERGY to float in midair. There is no engine, no wind energy, it’s all human. Sure it’s only a tiny bit off the ground but he’s still off the ground all by his own power. Like superman, only suckier.”