Want to visit the real or imagined past and future without having a pack of wild Lybians trying to shoot you with a GD bazooka? Scientists have found evidence that you can travel through time where you comically meets a horny, teenage version of your mom using only your brain:

Researchers have found evidence for “chronesthesia,” which is the brain’s ability to be aware of the past and future, and to mentally travel in subjective time. They found that activity in different brain regions is related to chronesthetic states when a person thinks about the same content during the past, present, or future.

Heavy, Doc.

[PhysOrg via Kurzweil]

A new finger bone fossil in Southern Siberia belonged to a young lady of an unknown human ancestor. She ain’t Neanderthal and she ain’t early human.

Yes, this means we have to set an extra place at Christmas dinner. No, you don’t have to get her a present. Maybe a nice ring.

[Science Daily]

Seriously though… dude…

Just like solids, liquids and gases, this recently discovered condition represents a state of matter. Called a Bose-Einstein condensate, it was created in 1995 with super-cold atoms of a gas, but scientists had thought it could not be done with photons, which are basic units of light. However, physicists Jan Klärs, Julian Schmitt, Frank Vewinger and Martin Weitz of the University of Bonn in Germany reported accomplishing it. They have dubbed the new particles “super photons.”

The discovery has created a mad rush for the creation of a new strain of weed to fully appreciate the splendor. In other news: dude…

[Live Science]

We’ve finally demonstrated the ability to create and sustain antimatter.

In a new study, physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva were able to create 38 antihydrogen atoms and preserve each for more than one-tenth of a second. The project was part of the ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser PHysics Apparatus) experiment, an international collaboration that includes physicists from the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

It is thought that most antimatter was eliminated shortly after the Big Bang. This will go a long way to our understanding of the mysterious phenomenon.

Or it will create Negaduck.

[Live Science]

Japanese scientists have created a cyborg moth that can track odors by plugging a robot into the moth’s nervous system. The robot’s actions were controlled by electrodes plugged into the moth and the brain signals were rerouted to the motors of the robot. When the moth was exposed to the smell of a female, the robot replicated the moth dance in an attempt to track down the odor. Scientists believe that they can use this system in tracking down explosives.

[New Scientist]

Scientists in London claim that new materials with the ability to control the speed of light would not only be capable of bending light around the object, but also creating an invisibility cloak capable of hiding in both time and space. These materials currently only exist in the mathematical theory of “metamaterials”. Metamaterials are artificial materials “designed and manipulated at a molecular level to interact with and control electromagnetic waves.”

“In some senses our work is mathematically quite closely related to the idea of invisibility cloaking,” McCall told CNN. “It’s just that we’re doing it in space and time instead of just in space. It’s added a new dimension to cloaking, quite literally.”

The scientists are already thinking of real world uses for this technology:

“A safe cracker would be able, for a brief time, to enter a scene, open the safe, remove its contents, close the door and exit the scene, whilst the record of a surveillance camera apparently showed that the safe door was closed all the time,” they write.

I can’t wait.

[CNN]

CERN research scientists have stated that their Big Bang project is going along so swimmingly that, by the end of 2011, they may be able to offer the first proof of extra dimensions beyond the known four.

Guido Tonelli, spokesman for one of the CERN specialist teams monitoring operations in the vast, subterranean LHC, said probing for extra dimensions — besides length, breadth, height and time — would become easier as the energy of the proton collisions in it is increased in 2011.

The LHC will be shut down for maintenance in early December, but will be starting up again in February running full blast looking for those extra dimensions.

[Reuters]

Did you know that male nipples need to be surgically detached and repositioned sometimes? Then you probably didn’t know that the same Golden Ratio used in modern architecture is employed to make sure a gentlemen’s chest nubs look A-OK.

Science!

[Improbable Research]

Researchers have discovered that all primates have an innate ability to repair spinal damage, including humans. They have never noticed this before because scientists usually use rodents in neurology experiments and rodents simply don’t possess neural sprouting.

The researchers found that the injured nerves didn’t regrow. Instead, new nerves sprouted in a process called “spontaneous plasticity,” essentially routing the spinal column around the injury. This kind of neural sprouting doesn’t occur in rodents, which are the animals that scientists typically use in neuroscience experiments. As a result, nobody had noticed this phenomenon before. This new study may lead to more testing on monkeys, but hopefully it will lead to discoveries that allow all primates to grow new nerve cells in the future.

When legendary horse Secretariat died, the veterinary doctors performing the necropsy made a startling realization. There was a reason Big Red destroyed other horses en route to the most convincing Triple Crown win of all time, his heart was gigantic. Over twice the normal size for a horse his weight.

Genome scientists have made a similar discovery with Ozzy Osbourne, thankfully without The Prince Of Darkness having to croak first.

Simply speaking: he’s the Secretariat of drug users.

… the most notable differences in Osbourne’s genes had to do with how he processes drugs and alcohol. Genes connected to addiction, alcoholism and the absorption of marijuana, opiates and methamphetamines all had unique variations in Osbourne, a few of which Knome geneticists had never seen before.

“He had a change on the regulatory region of the ADH4 gene, a gene associated with alcoholism, that we’ve never seen before,” Conde told ABCnews.com. “He has an increased predisposition for alcohol dependence of something like six times higher. He also had a slight increased risk for cocaine addiction, but he dismissed that. He said that if anyone has done as much cocaine he had, they would have been hooked.”

They also found some Neanderthal DNA, because, well why not.

[ABC News via Reason]

“This may sound like science fiction, the ability to selectively erase memories,” says Huganir. “But this may one day be applicable for the treatment of debilitating fearful memories in people, such as post-traumatic stress syndrome associated with war, rape or other traumatic events.”

[Physorg.com via Kotaku]

A complex mathematical problem known as the Travelling Salesman Problem, and which is known to take a supercomputer days to solve, is effectively being solved by bees in real time. Researchers at Queen Mary, University of London and Royal Holloway have discovered that bees can quickly determine the shortest route between flowers even when they learn about the flowers in a different order. The problem that the Travelling Salesman must solve is finding the shortest route that allows him to visit all the locations on his route. The current method used by computers to solve it is by comparing the length of all possible routes and choosing the shortest. Scientists hope to study the bees to better manage our own networks while also learning the “minimal neural circuitry required for complex problem solving.”

[Queen Mary via Robots.net]

According to our most recent studies, fears that we are the last generation to see coral reef due to the rising acidification of our waters is unfounded. This has been a fear raised by climate change studies which suggest CO2 concentration could jack up the pH balance of the seas and kill off marine life.

There is a whole ton of science on Matt Ridley’s awesome blog but here is the money shot:

In conclusion, claims of impending marine species extinctions driven by increases in the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration do not appear to be founded in empirical reality, based on the experimental findings we have analyzed above.

We are safe! Hooray!

No word on if we can just affect the pH balance enough to create monster fish or open a crack in an Arizona lake releasing thousands of blood-thirsty piranhas, in 3D.

[Rational Optimist]

Is our reality really 2D? Is our concept of third dimensional space really an optical illusion? Are our eyes deceiving us to believe we are anything other than Super Mario sidescrolling through life?

Is the above commercial featuring Peyton Manning and Justin Timberlake really a frightening prophecy?

Fermilab is currently building a Holometer to determine the answer to all these questions. Or something. To be honest, I really can’t even wrap my head around what they are talking about but here is open season for you kind readers to take your stab at it.

[Pop Sci]

Israeli researchers have discovered a way to assemble transparent nanospheres that unite to form the stiffest biological material the world has ever seen. This could lead to printable body armor, tougher steel and more bullet-proof bulletproof glass.

Frank Castle wants to know the shipping cost from Tel Aviv to Brooklyn.

[Pop Sci]

There has been a long simmering debate in the scientific community over “the Hobbit” or Homo floresiensis by it’s fancy name. On one side is a cadre of folks who claim that the Hobbits (whose remains were first found inside a Indonesian cave in 2003) are a different species than humans.

But new research suggests those people can stick that theory in their pipes an smoke it. It looks like Homo floresiensis could be just regular old Homo sapiens afflicted with an iodine deficiency.

Oh well.

[Science Daily]