German researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development have discovered a gene mutation in certain individuals that seems to give them enhanced mental abilities.

…people graced with this genotype showed more activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, activity that is probably linked to metabolism of the brain chemical dopamine.

This extra dopamine may increase the reward response making people more prone to learning things quickly.

As we know from history (Marvel Comics history), it’s the X Gene that separates mankind from the next generation of super mutants. While there’s no immediate application for this discovery, other than explaining why some of us feel more like Forrest Gump than Professor Xavier, long term implications could include gene therapy – giving us all an extra boost.

The fact that German researchers discovered this should surprise no one.

link: Gene Mutation May Speed Learning – Yahoo! News

Science Daily reports that a Smithsonian research team has uncovered the first megafossils of a neotropical rainforest.

Titanoboa, the world’s biggest snake, lived in this forest 58 million years ago at temperatures 3-5 C warmer than in rainforests today, indicating that rainforests flourished during warm periods.

While, modern day snakes have been measured over 30 feet in length, it’s been speculated that that the warmer climate contributed to Titanboa’s 42 foot length.

If 58 million years sounds like a good amount of distance to keep between you and a creature capable of swallowing you and all your friends whole, keep this in mind from a recent National Geographic article on the creature:

So could Titanoboa-size snakes return with global warming? “Maybe,” study co-author Jonathan Bloch said. “They definitely could, or maybe … the warming could happen so rapidly that [snakes] wouldn’t have time to adapt.”

Let’s hope this cooling trend continues.

link: First Neotropical Rainforest Was Home Of The Titanoboa — World’s Biggest Snake

link: VIDEO: Biggest Snake Found

The US Defense department has green-lit a two-year $10 million dollar program to look for practical applications of the Casimir Effect. This is a quantum of effect with potential in everything from energy to levitation.

It’s the quantum version of the attractive force that pulls two ships at sea closer together when they’re nearby. Hendrick Casimir, discoverer of the effect, speculated that two metal plates held apart from each other in a vacuum could tap into the energy in a vacuum that quantum electrodynamics predicts.

Getting actual energy from the effect has proved quite elusive. Now researchers are exploring the potential of the repulsive and attractive forces created by the Casimir effect. One possibility is levitation. From the Scientific American article, researcher Hong Tang:

Then we’re going to engineer the structure of the surface of the silicon device to get some unusual Casimir forces to produce repulsion,” he says. In theory, he adds, that could mean building a device capable of levitation.

We’re all for device capable of levitation – even on the nanometer scale.

link: Research in a Vacuum: DARPA Tries to Tap Elusive Casmir Effect for Breakthrough Technology: Scientific American

link: Casimir effect – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

According to Science News, hypnosis is gaining new found respect in the laboratory as experiments indicate that hypnotic suggestions actually have a measurable effect on parts of the brain.

In one experiment, suggestion of a paralyzed hand actually changed the way the brain routed instructions for motor movement differently than those with no instruction or those told to just imagine their hand was paralyzed.

The Mesmerized Mind / Science News

Check out this video that’s eerily remiscent of the 1980’s TV series V and District 9 (if the aliens spaceships were made from vaporous ice crystals and not actual technology…).

The Sun has an article here on it: Mystery UFO halo in clouds over Moscow | The Sun |News

According to ScienceDaily it turns out those ugly yellow splotches of bug guts on your car can serve science. They use the bug guts to to do DNA sequencing to determine species distribution and other information.

To gather genetic material, they utilized a simple but effective collection method – the front bumper of a moving vehicle. Two samples of bug splatter were collected, the first after driving from Pennsylvania to Connecticut, and the second after traveling from Maine to New Brunswick, Canada.

link: Bug Splatter On Your Car’s Windshield Is A Treasure Trove Of Genomic Biodiversity

Technically John P. Holdren wasn’t the science advisor when he made his dire predictions of an Ice Age and Ice Age powered super tidal waves bringing destruction upon us all in 1971. He was just trying to make sense of the data at hand back then (global cooling!) – and maybe give it a teensy tiny Roland Emmerich dramatic effect.

John Tierney over at TierneyLab at the NY Times points out some essays by Holdren and longtime doom and gloomer Paul Ehrlich that have been republished over at Zombietime.

Although they noted that the greenhouse effect from rising emissions of carbon dioxide emissions could cause future warming of the planet, they concluded from the mid-century cooling trend that the consequences of human activities (like industrial soot, dust from farms, jet exhaust, urbanization and deforestation) were more likely to first cause an ice age.

Holdren’s speculation and conclusion that forced abortion and mass sterilization would be viable and Constitutional avenues for population control to stave off environmental disaster are certainly out of box ideas. In his defense, the 1970’s was a scary time for Science Fiction. Logan’s Run, Silent Running and THX 1138 did not present an inspiring view of the future. Then again, outside Star Trek (which also prophesied a 21st Century collapse of civilization), what sci-fi films have a hopeful view of the future?

link: Holdren’s Ice Age Tidal Wave – TierneyLab Blog – NYTimes.com and zombietime

From New Scientist comes research that sleep is even weirder than we thought. Microsleep, hallucinations and sleepwalking murder are just some of the symptoms…

EARLIER this year, a puzzling report appeared in the journal Sleep Medicine. It described two Italian people who never truly slept. They might lie down and close their eyes, but read-outs of brain activity showed none of the normal patterns associated with sleep. Their behaviour was pretty odd, too. Though largely unaware of their surroundings during these rest periods, they would walk around, yell, tremble violently and their hearts would race. The remainder of the time they were conscious and aware but prone to powerful, dream-like hallucinations.

link: Are you asleep? Exploring the mind’s twilight zone – life – 07 October 2009 – New Scientist via KurzweilAI

Ron Bailey at Reason.com attended the Singularity Summit on NYC and was presented with several scenarios of the future. Many of them were quite frightening.

As the Singularity Institute’s Anna Salamon explained in her opening presentation at the summit, smarter intelligences might choose to get rid of us because our matter is not optimally arranged to achieve their goals.

Fun stuff. Let’s hope our matter is as optimally arranged as possible.

Will Our Robot Overlords Be Friendly? – Reason Magazine

Mr. Show had it first…

Real story.

Recordings reportedly capturing the voices of the dead are nothing new, but we couldn’t help but wonder what some of the oddest things ever uttered via EVP were. We contacted Chris Page, the founder of Ohio Researchers of Banded Spirits to find out:

Most Common: TIED between “Help!” (including derivations ‘help me’ and ‘help us’) and “Get out!”

Chris Says: At times they’ve even gotten mixed messages from a single spot that is particularly packed with paranormal activity. For example it happened once while investigating an insane asylum. “There’s going to be more than one spirit running around,” Chris added. He stopped short of speculating that it might have just been one schizophrenic specter.

Whoops From Beyond The Grave: When asking one spirit how it shuffled this mortal coil, Mike’s team was answered with “accident.”

At Least They Used The Magic Word: Two or three ghosts have requested that the paranormal investigators “please check” into the circumstances of their demise.

Sassiest: While recording in an abondoned Victorian home, investigators asked a spirit if they were one of the maids who worked the residence. The response, “Hell No!”

Chris Says: “It was angry, like ‘how dare you!'”

Trust Me, I’m An Expert: During an investigation of a sprawling home built on an indian burial ground, investigators made their way to library where they recorded the words, “you’ll die.”

Chris Says: A family abandoned this house after hauntings (including visions of floating severed heads and being thrown out of bed by unseen forces) reportedly became too intense to ignore. Mike aded it was the scariest single quote they’ve captured.

Dead Language: Again, at the indian burial ground house, while trolling the grounds recorded a voice saying “Tuebor.” After much researching, the team discovered it meant “I will defend” in Latin.

Blue State: The team has recorded spirits mentioning Presidents Clinton and Roosevelt.

Double Talk: Once asked a group of spirits, “Can you see us?” only to receive the answer “Can you see us?”

Child’s Play: Often while the ghost of child is being investigated, researchers will record “mommy.”

Chris Says: Nothing is creepier than the child spirit recordings.

Thanks to Chris and the Ohio Researchers of Banded Spirits for help with this.

Credit: Rocky Mountain Laboratories, NIAID, NIH

Down, down, two miles below the surface of a Greenland glacier, in sub-zero temperatures inhospitable to most existing life, a new form of bacteria was discovered frozen in time. A team of scientists from the University of Pennsylvania played microbial Frankenstein and revived the tiny bacteria now dubbed Herminiimonas glaciei.

The debate still continues over whether the bacteria had been reproducing at an incredibly slow metabolic rate for thousands of years, or if they lay dormant as spores for the elapsed time. Either way, the discovery of these microscopic critters gives insight into what bacteria might be like that exist in similar harsh climates on other planets.

photo credit: trodel_wiki

You thought that one natural disaster was bad enough, scientists have now concluded from a five year study on the island of Taiwan, that the typhoons wreaking havoc from the sky, are also responsible for earthquakes on the island.

Not to worry though, the tremors are a specific kind of quake known as slow earthquakes. According to Breitbart News:

Slow quakes entail a slippage in the fault that unfolds progressively over hours or days, rather than a sudden, violent release of the kind that destroys buildings and lives.

So these quakes are actually a good thing, dispelling potential energy over a long period of time that could have been unleashed in a short, devastating earthquake. Out of a total of twenty slow quakes detected by underground sensors in Taiwan, eleven of them coincided with typhoons, confirming that, at least in Taiwan’s case, natural disasters come in pairs.

A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…

Probably the most fascinating idea that Star Trek popularized was the idea of a warp drive. This was a concept from golden age sci-fi that went mainstream via Trek as space-age audiences became sophisticated enough to realize that NASA’s fastest rockets wouldn’t take you very far in a human lifetime. Even going the speed of light wouldn’t work for a show that tried to visit more than one star system in it’s 3 season run (due to time dilation your characters could visit those places, but their friends back on earth would be long dead). What was needed was a (plot) device that allowed you to visit distant planets in the time it takes to drive to the next state.

Since Star Trek, warp drive has become a part of public consciousness. It’s a theoretical form of technology that some feel is as inevitable as AI and teleportation.

There’s one big catch; while AI (or something that acts like it) seems to be a problem solved at some point on a graph projecting the development of intelligent systems and teleportation seems to be more of an energy problem, there’s not a viable theory for how a warp drive could work (exotic matter, worm holes, Alcubierre drives etc.) that doesn’t violate the laws of physics (as we know them) or result in some equation balancing phenomenon like a “quantum scream” (an obscure term used in an equally obscure paper on the subject).
(more…)

A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…

In an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation called the “The Chase” a long running problem in Star Trek was finally solved – Why do all the aliens in Star Trek look humanoid. The answer was not “budget”. It was that a race that lived 4.5 billion years ago seeded the galaxy with its DNA. Humans, Vulcans, klingons etc., all got their imprint from them. We kind of look like each other because we all look like some alien race from 4.5 billion years ago. Problem solved. But is Intelligent Design really a satisfying answer?

If we find aliens that look like us, what other explanations could account for them?

Kidnapping
Having to deal with a slightly more sophisticated audience that grew up watching Star Trek, the producers of Stargate and the producers of the television series had to come up with a simple explanation for there being humans all over the galaxy in present day time. Their solution was a popular one in sci-fi literature: We were kidnapped. Over the last 100,000 years humans have been relocated to the distant corners of our universe. Once there, they go about their business. Building monuments to their gods (Star Trek and Stargate) or becoming thriving interstellar civilizations more advanced than us on earth (Iain Banks’s The Culture).

(more…)

A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…

Time Travel stories generally suck. There are some noteworthy exceptions – specifically stories that deal with the problems of time travel and not just time travel as a plot device (Primer, Back to the Future, to name a few).

Star Trek has done some great and some very bad time travel stories. Story merits aside, there’s one big problem with most time travel stories; Transmitting people back in time (information) has no theoretical basis: It’s impossible. For every worm hole propped open with exotic matter or giant Tippler tube, someone always finds an equation to show how the universe corrects itself with quantum screams, bubbles or other annoyances that get in the way of us correcting that horrible thing that happened in 6th grade or saving the whales.

Assuming for a moment that the killjoys at MIT and Princeton who relish in pointing out that time travel as we understand it is impossible, then what? How can we tell scientifically literate time travel stories? (more…)