Group items tagged

Brain, bodily awareness, and the emergence of a conscious self: these entities and their relations are explored by Germanphilosopher and cognitive scientist Metzinger. Extensively working with neuroscientists he has come to the conclusion that, in fact, there is no such thing as a "self" -- that a "self" is simply the content of a model created by our brain - part of a virtual reality we create for ourselves. But if the self is not "real," he asks, why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct the self? In a series of fascinating virtual reality experiments, Metzinger and his colleagues have attempted to create so-called "out-of-body experiences" in the lab, in order to explore these questions. As a philosopher, he offers a discussion of many of the latest results in robotics, neuroscience, dream and meditation research, and argues that the brain is much more powerful than we have ever imagined. He shows us, for example, that we now have the first machines that have developed an inner image of their own body -- and actually use this model to create intelligent behavior. In addition, studies exploring the connections between phantom limbs and the brain have shown us that even people born without arms or legs sometimes experience a sensation that they do in fact have limbs that are not there. Experiments like the "rubber-hand illusion" demonstrate how we can experience a fake hand as part of our self and even feel a sensation of touch on the phantom hand form the basis and testing ground for the idea that what we have called the "self" in the past is just the content of a transparent self-model in our brains. Now, as new ways of manipulating the conscious mind-brain appear on the scene, it will soon become possible to alter our subjective reality in an unprecedented manner. The cultural consequences of this, Metzinger claims, may be immense: we will need a new approach to ethics, and we will be forced to think about ourselves in a fundamentally new way. At

AskMe - Experiment Publisher is a simple to use software package for users to publish their large scale life science experiment data on to the web by use of data mining and visualization concepts. With use of AskMe, scientists can share these datasets easily with their collaborators or they can be made publicly accessible to the scientific community by Sciencenet - our distributed peer to peer search and share engine.

"The results are indeed worthy of attention, with Prof Taylor's team finding that in an early stage clinical trial of 11 people who were put on a diet of just 600 calories As written about in Dr Ben Goldacre's latest Bad Science column, producing a pattern from experimental data to come to a conclusion can be a 'magical' experience, but medicine is an 'imperfect art'. "We all know one atom of experience isn't enough to spot a pattern." writes Goldacre, "But when you put lots of experiences together and process that data, you get new knowledge.""

"I am going to try and experiment within an experiment today. I cloned a couple genes from yeast and have been spending months now trying to get them into several vectors for my combinatorial overexpression project. However, as it goes with wet messy biology, this seemingly simple process has been fighting me tooth and nail. I have retrieved one good clone out of 56 minipreps (plasmid construct isolation) and tried several ligations. So I have tripled down this week. In the picture here, I have 32 tubes, each with 5 individual E. coli colonies. That is a grand total of 160 isolates. 1.5 mL of cells have been transferred from overnight cultures and I am about to spin, lyse, and retrieve."

AskMe - Experiment Publisher is a simple to use software package for users to publish their large scale life science experiment data on to the web by use of data mining and visualization concepts. With use of AskMe, scientists can share these datasets easily with their collaborators or they can be made publicly accessible to the scientific community by Sciencenet - our distributed peer to peer search and share engine.

(PhysOrg.com) -- One of the greatest puzzles of the double-slit experiment - and quantum physics in general - is why electrons seem to act differently when being observed. While electrons traveling through a barrier with two slits create interference patterns when unobserved, these interference patterns disappear when scientists detect which slit each electron travels through. By designing a modified version of the double-slit experiment with a new "which-way" electron detector at one of the slits, a team of scientists from Italy has found a clue as to why electron behavior appears to change when being observed.

"It's a hoax," said coal company CEO Don Blankenship, "because clearly anyone that says that they know what the temperature of the Earth is going to be in 2020 or 2030 needs to be put in an asylum because they don't." On the other side of the debate was environmentalist Robert Kennedy, Jr. "Ninety-eight percent of the research climatologists in the world say that global warming is real, that its impacts are going to be catastrophic," he argued. "There are 2 percent who disagree with that. I have a choice of believing the 98 percent or the 2 percent." To social scientist and lawyer Don Braman, it's not surprising that two people can disagree so strongly over science. Braman is on the faculty at George Washington University and part of The Cultural Cognition Project, a group of scholars who study how cultural values shape public perceptions and policy

At Trivedi Science, there are many scientific researches and experiments done by Mahendra Trivedi.

FUSE Labs works in partnership with product and research teams to ideate, develop, and deliver new social, real-time, and media-rich experiences for home and work. FUSE Labs experiences give users new ways to create, connect and collaborate with the people, information and ideas that matter to them.

"Introducing A.I. Experiments. Explore machine learning by playing with pictures, language, music, code, and more."

Come work with us Interested in working with researchers from different disciplines within the Harvard, MIT and Broad community and an unique opportunity to participate in world-class research to make an impact on human health? Come work with us! We are looking for a computational biologists to handle data from a wide variety of experimental methods, focusing on next-gen sequencing technologies. Keep Reading...  SCDE is live The Stem Cell Discovery Engine (SCDE) is an integrated platform that allows users to consistently describe, share and compare cancer and tissue stem cell data. It is made up of an online database of curated experiments coupled to a customized instance of the Galaxy analysis engine with tools for gene list manipulation and molecular profile comparisons. The SCDE currently contains more than 50 stem cell-related experiments. Each has been manually curated and encoded using the ISA-Tab standard to ensure the quality of the data and its annotation. Keep Reading...  The Center for Health Bioinformatics at the Harvard School of Public Health provides consults to researchers for the management, integration and contextual analysis of biological high-throughput data. We are a member of the Center for Stem Cell Bioinformatics, the Environmental Statistics and Bioinformatics Core at the Harvard NIEHS Center for Environmental Health and the Genetics & Bioinformatics Consulting group for Harvard Catalyst and work closely with our colleagues in the Department of Biostatistics and the Program in Quantitative Genomics to act as a single point of contact for computational biology,

MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses for free to a virtual community of learners around the world. It will also enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences.

University of Michigan researchers George Mashour, M.D., Ph.D., and Jimo Borjigin, Ph.D., provide the first scientific framework for near-death experiences. "The "near-death experience" reported by cardiac arrest survivors worldwide may be grounded in science, according to research at the University of Michigan Health System. Whether and how the dying brain is capable of generating conscious activity has been vigorously debated"

"Manche sehen ein helles Licht, andere erleben Stationen ihres Lebens noch einmal im Schnelldurchlauf: Viele Menschen, die kurzzeitig klinisch tot waren, dann aber gerettet wurden, berichten von intensiven Nahtod-Erfahrungen. Woher diese Gefühls- und Sinneseindrücke kommen und wie sie sich biologisch erklären lassen, war bisher allerdings umstritten. Ein Experiment von US-Forschern an Ratten belegt nun: Diesen Erfahrungen liegt tatsächlich ein messbarer neurologischer Effekt zugrunde. Nach einem Herzstillstand erlebt das Gehirn eine kurze Phase extrem koordinierter Aktivität, die sogar stärker ist als im wachen Zustand. "

"Interactive climbs are now possible for the first time in the history of alpinism. Experience the most famous routes of the world in a 360° view. Please use a smart phone or a tablet of the latest generation or an up-to-date browser for a perfect 360° experience."

Music, an abstract stimulus, can arouse feelings of euphoria and craving, similar to tangible rewards that involve the striatal dopaminergic system. Using the neurochemical specificity of [11C]raclopride positron emission tomography scanning, combined with psychophysiological measures of autonomic nervous system activity, we found endogenous dopamine release in the striatum at peak emotional arousal during music listening. To examine the time course of dopamine release, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging with the same stimuli and listeners, and found a functional dissociation: the caudate was more involved during the anticipation and the nucleus accumbens was more involved during the experience of peak emotional responses to music. These results indicate that intense pleasure in response to music can lead to dopamine release in the striatal system. Notably, the anticipation of an abstract reward can result in dopamine release in an anatomical pathway distinct from that associated with the peak pleasure itself. Our results help to explain why music is of such high value across all human societies.

Researchers at the University of Rochester have determined that when humans see the color red, their reactions become both faster and more forceful. The researchers measured the reactions of students in two experiments. In the first, 30 fourth-through-10th graders pinched and held open a metal clasp. Right before doing so, they read aloud their participant number written in either red or gray crayon. In the second experiment, 46 undergraduates squeezed a handgrip with their dominant hand as hard as possible when they read the word "squeeze" on a computer monitor. The word appeared on a red, blue, or gray background. In both scenarios, red significantly increased the force exerted, with participants in the red condition squeezing with greater maximum force than those in the gray or blue conditions, the researchers said. Ref.: Andrew J. Elliot, Henk Aarts, Perception of the color red enhances the force and velocity of motor output, Emotion, Vol 11(2), Apr 2011, 445-449

In 1967, Simon Kochen and Ernst Specker proved mathematically that even for a single quantum object, where entanglement is not possible, the values that you obtain when you measure its properties depend on the context. So the value of property A, say, depends on whether you chose to measure it with property B, or with property C. In other words, there is no reality independent of the choice of measurement. It wasn't until 2008, however, that Alexander Klyachko of Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, and colleagues devised a feasible test for this prediction. They calculated that if you repeatedly measured five different pairs of properties of a quantum particle that was in a superposition of three states, the results would differ for the quantum system compared with a classical system with hidden variables. That's because quantum properties are not fixed, but vary depending on the choice of measurements, which skews the statistics. "This was a very clever idea," says Anton Zeilinger of the Institute for Quantum Optics, Quantum Nanophysics and Quantum Information in Vienna, Austria. "The question was how to realise this in an experiment." Now he, Radek Lapkiewicz and colleagues have realised the idea experimentally. They used photons, each in a superposition in which they simultaneously took three paths. Then they repeated a sequence of five pairs of measurements on various properties of the photons, such as their polarisations, tens of thousands of times. A beautiful experiment They found that the resulting statistics could only be explained if the combination of properties that was tested was affecting the value of the property being measured. "There is no sense in assuming that what we do not measure about a system has [an independent] reality," Zeilinger concludes.