There are those among us who are “health blind”, i.e., handicapped at sensing the health signals most of us easily recognize on others around us. They are the color blind. But we at O2Amp can fix that.1. The Health-Blind Among UsDespite the presence of modern electronic medical sensing tools, medical personnel still rely on their naked-eye visual skills when examining and judging the symptoms and health of patients (Savin et al. 1997).
Our everyday visual perceptions rely upon unfathomably complex computations carried out by tens of billions of neurons across over half our cortex. In spite of this, it does not “feel” like work to see. Our cognitive powers are, in stark contrast, “slow and painful,” and we have great trouble with embarrassingly simple logic tasks.
I have yet to be bored watching the 27-and-a-half-hour extended versions of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy with the kids. It is truly an awe-inspiring cinematic masterpiece.There is, however, one persistently annoying aspect of the trilogy that I am petitioning the studio to change on the next release and for the prequels that will appear soon. What’s that one annoying thing about the Lord of the Rings? You know what it is…
Textbooks are not mere non-fiction books. Whereas you can feel free to doubt what ispresented in a typical non-fiction book (mine excluded), textbooks are a record of the true facts and principles in a field. Textbooks, you see, should not be questioned.
There are currently two ambitious projects straddling artificial intelligence and neuroscience, each with the aim of building big brains that work. One is The Blue Brain Project, and it describes its aim in the following one-liner:
A generation ago it was only a brave eclectic minority of psychologists and neuroscientists who dared to address the arts. Things have changed considerably since then. “Art and brain” is now a legitimate and respected target of study, and is approached from a variety of viewpoints, from reductionistic neurophysiology to evolutionary approaches.Things have changed so quickly that late 20th century conversations about how to create stronger art-science collaborations and connections are dated only a decade later – everyone’s already doing it! And the new generation of students being trained are at home in both the arts and sciences in a way that was rare before.
Migraine sufferers have long complained about how their headaches worsen with bright light, and in case you ever doubted their complaints, Rami Burstein and other researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Moran Eye Center at the University of Utah recently made a giant step in understanding the light-to-headache mechanism in Nature Neuroscience. They found neurons in the rat thalamus sensitive to both light and to the dura (the membrane surrounding the brain).
For those who have not entered the world of Twitter, it is hard to fathom why people feel compelled to stream their lives to strangers 140 characters at a time. And such non-Twitter folk are also unlikely to fathom the purpose of blogging, especially in a world with more than 170 million blogs. Imagine the non-tweeting non-blogger’s disbelief, then, when they read story after story about how Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, Posterous and the other “Social Web 2.0” heavyweights are changing the world as we know it.
Markets work well when there’s a chain from wholesaler to retailer to customer…and back. If none of the customer payments makes it back to the wholesaler, soon there may be few to no wholesalers producing anything worth buying. That’s bad for wholesalers, bad for retailers, and bad for customers. That’s why, for example, Napster, Youtube and torrents upset the system. Now let’s consider the analog for science journalism, which aims to bring science to the public.
It’s Valentine Day, and children everywhere celebrated friendship and love by giving cards and candy to their friends. In what alien observers must consider one of the most bizarre human customs, these same children were asked to draw lewd pictures of human private parts. You don’t think you or your children participated in this custom? Take a look a the figure below…
There is an apocryphal story about a graduate mathematics student at the University of Virginia studying the properties of certain mathematical objects. In his fifth year some killjoy bastard elsewhere published a paper proving that there are no such mathematical objects. He dropped out of the program, and I never did hear where he is today. He's probably making my cappuccino right now.
Other people have an accent, but not me. And this is not just because I have no accent. I wouldn’t have an accent even if I had one!Accent is a strange thing (as is my reasoning style). No matter the accent you get stuck with – southern, New Yorker, or my valley girl rendition – you feel as if it is the other accents that sound accented to you. Your own accent sounds, well, unaccented, like vanilla, corn flakes, or white bread. Arguments about which person “has an accent” don’t tend to be productive; just a lot of pointing and reiterating the pearl, “No, you’re the one with the accent.”
It’s nearing the end of American football season, with the Super Bowl fast approaching. These games involve displays of tremendous strength, agility and heart. What you may not have known is that some of the most talented players out on the field are doing it all with their eyes closed. Literally. The American football player Larry Fitzgerald of the Arizona Cardinals made news last year when photographers captured him catching the ball with his eyes closed. He apparently does this all the time. And it is not just Fitzgerald who does this: after just five minutes searching online I found evidence that acclaimed college wide receiver Austin Pettis of Boise State, this year’s Fiesta Bowl Champion’s, closes his eyes when catching, as seen in the photo here.
