Rats appear capable of a complex form of thinking before known to exist only in humans and other primates — the capacity to reflect on what they do or do not know.
“If rats can do it, this capability may be more widespread than imagined,” Jonathon Crystal, a comparative psychologist at University of Georgia, told LiveScience.
Humans often are aware of what knowledge they possess or lack and what they are or are not capable of.
“Imagine, for instance, that you’re a student going into a classroom to take an exam,” Crystal said. “You will often have some idea how well you’re going to do on the test. You know before you answer the questions whether you know or don’t know the answers. This pretty complex form of cognition, known as metacognition, is at the heart of the human condition.”
Increasingly, evidence of metacognition is found in rhesus monkeys and other primates, but little research has been done on it in other mammals. Crystal and his colleague Allison Foote decided to push the limit and see if rats were capable of it.
Chinese scientists have succeeded in implanting electrodes in the brain of a pigeon to remotely control the bird’s flight, state media said.
Xinhua News Agency said the scientists at the Robot Engineering Technology Research Center at Shandong University of Science and Technology in eastern China used the micro electrodes to command the bird to fly right or left, and up or down.
The implants stimulated different areas of the pigeon’s brain according to electronic signals sent by the scientists via computer, mirroring natural signals generated by the brain, Xinhua quoted chief scientist Su Xuecheng as saying.
It was the first such successful experiment on a pigeon in the world, said Su, who conducted a similar successful experiment on mice in 2005.
A team of French doctors say they have carried out a successful operation on a human under “weightless” conditions in an adapted aircraft. The trial is being seen as a first step to performing surgery in space.
The doctors removed a benign tumour from the arm of a volunteer as their plane made a series of swoops to mimic a reduced-gravity environment.
The medics and patient were strapped down for the procedure which was done inside a hygienic plastic tent.
It’s the stuff of science fiction: a prosthetic arm that can be moved just by thinking about it and that can feel heat and the pressure of a handshake. It became a reality for US Marine Claudia Mitchell two years after she lost her arm to a motorcycle, researchers said last week.
The bionic arm is controlled by rerouting nerves in Mitchell’s shoulder to healthy muscles in her chest. This targeted muscle reinnervation directs the signals once sent to the amputated arm to the robotic arm via surface electrodes that respond to Mitchell’s thoughts.
Brain scans of nuns have revealed intricate neural circuits that flicker into life when they feel the presence of God.
The images suggest that feelings of profound joy and union with a higher being that accompany religious experiences are the culmination of ramped-up electrical activity in parts of the brain.
The scans were taken as nuns relived intense religious experiences. They showed a surge in neural activity in regions of the brain that govern feelings of peace, happiness and self-awareness. Psychologists at the University of Montreal say the research, which appears in the journal Neuroscience Letters, was not intended to confirm or deny the existence of God, but set out to examine how the brain behaves during profound religious experiences.
What if, seconds before your laptop began stalling, you could feel the hard drive spin up under the load? Or you could tell if an electrical cord was live before you touched it? For the few people who have rare earth magnets implanted in their fingers, these are among the reported effects—a finger that feels electromagnetic fields along with the normal sense of touch.
It’s been described as a buzzing sensation, a tingling, an oscillation, movement, pure stimulation and, in the case of body-modification expert Shannon Larrett’s encounter with a too-powerful antitheft gateway at a retail store, “Like sticking your hand in an ultrasonic cleaner.”
Body-mod artists Jesse Jarrell and Steve Haworth’s original idea was to implant a magnet to carry metal gadgets. It turns out that doesn’t work: If you try to carry something magnetic on your implant regularly, the pinched skin between the magnets dies and your body rejects the implant. But they came up with a new application when a mutual friend suffered an accident that left a shard of iron in his finger. He worked with audio equipment, and found that he could tell which speakers were magnetized from the sensation that passed through his finger at close range.
That gave Jarrell and Haworth a new direction: Could they obtain that effect deliberately, extending the sense of touch into a sense of magnetism?
SITTING in a culture dish, a layer of chicken heart cells beats in synchrony. But this muscle layer was not sliced from an intact heart, nor even grown laboriously in the lab. Instead, it was “printed”, using a technology that could be the future of tissue engineering.
Gabor Forgacs, a biophysicist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, described his “bioprinting” technique last week at the Experimental Biology 2006 meeting in San Francisco. It relies on droplets of “bioink”, clumps of cells a few hundred micrometres in diameter, which Forgacs has found behave just like a liquid.
This means that droplets placed next to one another will flow together and fuse, forming layers, rings or other shapes, depending on how they were deposited. To print 3D structures, Forgacs and his colleagues alternate layers of supporting gel, dubbed “biopaper”, with the bioink droplets. To build tubes that could serve as blood vessels, for instance, they lay down successive rings containing muscle and endothelial cells, which line our arteries and veins. “We can print any desired structure, in principle,” Forgacs told the meeting.
To date, most inquiries into race and cyberspace have focused on the “digital divide” – whether racial minorities have access to advanced computing-communication technologies. This paper asks a more fundamental question: Can cyberspace change the way that race functions in American society? Professor Jerry Kang starts his analysis with a social-cognitive account of American racial mechanics that centers the role of racial schemas. These schemas consist of racial categories, rules of racial mapping that place individuals into these categories, and racial meanings associated with each category. He argues that cyberspace can disrupt racial schemas because it alters the architecture of both identity presentation (enabling racial anonymity and pseudonymity) and social interaction (enabling increased interracial interactions). Thus, cyberspace presents society with three design options: abolition, which challenges racial mapping by promoting racial anonymity; integration, which reforms racial meanings by promoting interracial social interaction; and transmutation, which disrupts the very notion of fixed racial categories by promoting racial pseudonymity (or “cyber-passing”). After analyzing each option’s merits, Professor Kang concludes that society need not adopt a single, uniform design strategy for all of cyberspace. Instead, society can embrace a policy of digital diversification, which explicitly zones different cyber spaces according to different racial environments. For example, most market places could be zoned abolition, whereas most social spaces could be zoned integration. By encouraging a diversified policy portfolio, society can exploit synergies created by flexible zoning while avoiding policy lock-in. Although cyberspace is no panacea for the racial conflicts and inequality that persist, it offers new possibilities for furthering racial justice that should not be wasted.
According to this news release by Nature, The American Association for the Advancement of Science has finally begun to believe, and thus make it a science fact, that culture actually exists in non-Human ape species.
The evidence is mounting that great apes are a cultured lot, researchers heard at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in St. Louis this week.
It is well established that apes are clever: gorillas lift electric wires with sticks to slip underneath; orang-utans can crack nuts open with rocks; and chimpanzees have been spotted elegantly sipping water from a sponge of crumpled leaves.
But these tool-using apes also show signs of cultural traditions that vary from group to group, just as some customs are passed down from one generation to another in human societies. According to a trio of researchers at the AAAS, recent work has underscored the rich cultures of our nearest relatives.
This acceptance comes at glacial speed compared to anthropological, ethological and post/trans humanist theory, as well as a heap of field data well over two decades old.
Regardless of the slow acceptance (compared to philosophy and theory... political and religious acceptance will come far slower), it is a notable waypoint in the evolution of the group mind towards a post/transhumanist future.
Now how long is it going to take before the bounds of our acceptance grow wider?
Social animals have been studied in the context of complex systems especially in regards to the emergence of collective solutions of problems involving cooperative behavior. The standard example are ant colonies that can exhibit behavioral patterns that are often associated with intelligence of the colony. Individual ants, however, follow simple rules and do not show signs of individual intelligence. Although they have a sophisticated communication system they are not able to learn from each other.
This is, however, what takes place among whales and dolphins, whose individual intelligence is, along with us humans and other primates, the most highly developed on our planet. Rendell & Whitehead build a case for the claim that cetaceans (as well as apes) satisfy the defining criteria for forming different cultures that are robust (over several generations) and that can interact.
HORDES OF GREEN, SUB-MICROSCOPIC BALLOONS FLOAT in a watery mixture in Jack Szostak’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School. They come in a variety of shapes: spheres, blimps, worms. And as Szostak examines magnified images of them, he can’t help but notice a striking resemblance to bacterial ecosystems, pulsing with that fetid, yet undeniable quality that has eluded definition for generations – life.
But these orbs aren’t alive.
The uncanny resemblance reflects the fact that these ersatz sacs may passably mimic the wrappings of primitive life: cell membranes. But infusing in them the real “stuff” of life requires more work. Lately, Szostak, a professor of genetics, has been putting simple RNA enzymes inside, showing that they can conduct their characteristic activities. Thus some of life’s chemistry is compatible with artificial membranes, he says, something that required a careful tweaking of the membrane chemistry. He has also made the sacs grow spontaneously, and even divide – with help.1 “It’s a simplified model of the situation we’d really like to have,” says Szostak: a growing, dividing, living organism of totally synthetic origins.
But even at present, he says, “These simple membrane systems do pretty fascinating things.”
OTTAWA, CANADA (PRWEB) November 24, 2005—A former Canadian Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister under Pierre Trudeau has joined forces with three Non-governmental organizations to ask the Parliament of Canada to hold public hearings on Exopolitics—relations with “ETs.”
By “ETs,” Mr. Hellyer and these organizations mean ethical, advanced extraterrestrial civilizations that may now be visiting Earth.
On September 25, 2005, in a startling speech at the University of Toronto that caught the attention of mainstream newspapers and magazines, Paul Hellyer, Canada’s Defence Minister from 1963-67 under Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Prime Minister Lester Pearson, publicly stated: “UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head.”
Mr. Hellyer went on to say, “I’m so concerned about what the consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just think I had to say something.”
Deleting a gene thought to extend lifespan has counterintuitively yielded the longest recorded life extension in any organism.
An extra copy of the gene, SIR2, promotes longevity in yeast, worms and fruit flies, a finding that has driven longevity-oriented drug-development.
Reporting in the journal Cell, molecular geneticists at the University of Southern California have now found evidence that SIR2 may also promote aging.
Rather than adding copies of SIR2 to yeast, Valter Longo and colleagues deleted the gene altogether.
The result: a lifespan up to six times normal when the SIR2 deletion was combined with caloric restriction or a mutation in one or two genes, RAS2 and SCH9, that control storage of nutrients and resistance to cell damage.
The effect was also seen with human cells, although this wasn’t reported in the Cell paper.
Squirrel squeaks seem to actually comprise a complex language, according to zoologist James Hare of the University of Manitoba. Hare had previously found that squirrels squeak in ultrasound as well as normal audible noises. The new report notes that some birds may be able to interpret squirrel warnings.
“Justifying “progress” in human terms is a losing game—the deeper you look under the shiny surface, the uglier it gets. So they don’t play. They point to the shiny surface, they pretend to talk in human terms while still talking in technological terms (faster, bigger, longer, more), and they point to a purely imaginative future. They’re very careful to make the existence of the acceleration pass the falsifiability test—to make it answer the question, “What evidence would prove your idea wrong?” But it doesn’t occur to them to apply this test to the preferability of the acceleration. It’s a full-on, by-its-bootstraps religion.
Now they could say that everyone’s religious, that their opponents have untestable beliefs in the intrinsic value of humans or nature. But one difference is, I can stand up in public and say that life on Earth is valuable on its own terms, and higher speed has to justify itself in terms of what it does for life on Earth. They can’t stand up and say the reverse—it sounds totally insane. They have to hide their core assumptions from the public, and probably even from themselves. So they’re allied to lack of awareness. Also, my position is not that human existence is valuable on its own terms—it’s that the test of the value of anything is how it serves the whole. And the largest whole we know of, that our actions affect, is the biosphere. They can tell stories about how the acceleration will benefit the universe beyond the universe, but then they’re grounded in speculation, in fantasy, while I’m grounded in something that can be directly experienced—which might be why they’re in such a hurry to kill off nature.”
Computer scientists have created a hat that can read your thoughts. It allows you to stroll down a virtual street. All you have to do is think about walking.
Called a brain-computer interface, the device detects activity in certain brain areas linked to movement, and uses the signals to mimic that movement in a virtual world. The technology could one day help paralysed patients to move robotic arms, or help sufferers of motor neuron disease to type out words on a virtual keyboard.
“Just thinking about movement activates the same neurons as actually moving,” explains Gert Pfurtscheller of Graz University of Technology in Austria, who has been working on the device for around four years. By picking up on these bursts of nerve activity, the computer can decide whether you are thinking about moving your hands or feet, and react accordingly.
Computer scientists have created a hat that can read your thoughts. It allows you to stroll down a virtual street. All you have to do is think about walking.