“This certainly increases the transparency, reliability and cross-checking of proposed research findings,” he wrote.

“There seems to be a higher community standard for ‘shaming’ reputations if people step out and make claims that are subsequently refuted.” Cold fusion was a notorious example. He also saw less of an aversion to publishing negative experimental results — that is, failed replications.

Almost anything might be suspected of causing cancer, but physicists are unlikely to propose conjectures that violate quantum mechanics or general relativity. But I’m not sure the difference is always that stark. Here is how I put it my blog post:

“I have no doubt that false positives occur in all of these fields,” he concluded, “and occasionally they may be a major problem.”I’ll be looking further into this matter for a future column and would welcome comments from scientists about the situation in their own domain.

These physiological differences, which didn’t appear in stark contrast in those under 14, could possibly give rise to behavioral differences between the sexes

The female connections likely facilitate integration of the analytic and sequential processing modes of the left hemisphere with the spatial, intuitive information processing modes of the right side.

the opposite prevailed in the cerebellum, the part of the brain that plays a major role in motor control,

Females outperformed males on attention, word and face memory, and social cognition tests.

The researchers studied a group of brain cells in the hippocampal region of the mouse brain. They found that they could create false associations between events and environments by artificially stimulating the neurons.

A member of the MIT team, Susumu Tonegawa, commented on the significance of the research in Science  magazine's weekly podcast:Independent of what is happening around you in the outside world, humans constantly have internal activity in the brain. So just like our mouse, it is quite possible we can associate what we happen to have in our mind with a bad or good high valence, online event. So, in other words, there could be a false association of what you have in your mind rather than what is happening to you, so this is a way we believe that at least some form of strong force memory observed in humans could be made. Because our study showed that the false memories and the genuine memories are based on very similar, almost identical, brain mechanisms, it is difficult for the false memory bearer to distinguish between them. So we can study this, because we have a mouse model now.

Once he gets the fruit, his dopamine stops. The good feeling will be gone as soon as it's metabolized. To get more, he will have to do more.  Natural selection produced a brain that feels good when it works toward a goal.

The monkey's brain weighs the evidence based on past experience. The fruit he scored in the past triggered dopamine that paved neural pathways and trigger his dopamine today. But the pain of past setbacks built cortisol pathways that alert him to the risk of setbacks today.

Your brain evolved to stimulate them by takig action to meet your needs. Just taking steps toward skill building gets your happy chemicals flowing once you've built the circuits that kick-start the process.

different kind of motivation comes from serotonin. Let's say our monkey's fruit is snatched by a bigger, stronger monkey when he finally gets to the top of the tree. Experience has taught him that bigger monkeys cause pain, and falling from a tree causes pain.

A surge of serotonin causes this feeling. Experience teaches a monkey to determine when he is in the superior position and when he is in the inferior position.

These words horrify us in today's culture, but a monkey would starve to death if it always saw itself as inferior. It has to feel confident to go for it some of the time. Serotonin creates that confidence.

You may say that monkeys should cooperate, share the bananas, or leave the bananas for the needy. By saying these things, you mark yourself as a superior person in today's society. You are just seeking serotonin in the modern way. You stimulate oxytocin when your self-restraint helps you belong

 Oxytocin causes the good feeling of social solidarity, and low oxytocin warns your inner mammal that you're in immediate danger. Our brains are constantly aware of potential threats to our social bonds. Competition can threaten your bonds, but it can also strengthen them. Superior skills can bring recognition that reassures you of social acceptance and belonging. Secure social bonds feel good because they stimulate oxytocin.

Your inner mammal is always looking for ways to stimulate your dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin.

Your mirror neurons stimulate dopamine when you see other people get rewards

Challenging the assertion that the key to life is low expectations: Some people believe the secret to happiness is low expectations.

Research shows that whatever the outcome, whether we succeed or we fail, people with high expectations tend to feel better.

We wear rose-tinted glasses whether we are eight or eighty.

Although the belief in a better future is often an illusion, optimism has clear benefits in the present. Hope keeps our minds at ease, lowers stress, and improves physical health. This is probably the most surprising benefit of optimism.

Yes, optimism is on one level irrational and can also lead to unwanted outcomes.

As compared to dogmatic atheists, non-dogmatic disbelievers go only one (modest) step beyond the undecided agnostic. It’s accurate to say that neither the non-dogmatic atheist nor the agnostic holds any faith in the existence of a god. But the more tolerant (or less “doctrinaire”) atheist—unlike the agnostic, who prefers to remain non-committal—is still ready to take a stand on the matter, asserting (though as an opinion): “I believe that no god (and certainly not God in the traditional sense)  exists.”

But even though they strive to keep an open mind on all things—for they’re oriented toward the world empirically and governed by facts rather than faith— non-dogmatic atheists simply can’t find any compelling evidence for a (monotheistic or biblical) god's existence.

To them, all that humans are able to know for sure exists in the realm of the relative. Anything beyond that points to the insoluble mysteries of the universe—which even today’s scientists recognize may be forever beyond their ever-more-precise instruments of knowing.

Coming full circle, if scientists in general—and physicists in particular—can’t ever be absolutely certain about Absolutes, how much more difficult must it be for metaphysicists to attain such certitude? To answer my own question: very difficult, indeed!

The curtain has apparently been on the verge of eviction for months. In November, Mr. Rosen called the conservancy to say steam was leaking from the wall in what is informally known as Picasso Alley, and needed repairs that could be done only by taking down the curtain.

But the Picasso biographer John Richardson once called “Le Tricorne” the artist’s “supreme theatrical achievement,” and many art historians and architects consider it an integral part of the Four Seasons.

“But then the question is when anyone would ever see it again,” she added, “if it survived the move.”

“They’d be bumping into Neanderthals at every street corner,” he joked.

Both studies suggest that Neanderthal genes involved in skin and hair were favored by natural selection in humans. Today, they are very common in living non-Africans.

“We don’t understand enough about the biology of those particular genes yet,” he said. “It makes it hard to pinpoint a reason why they’re beneficial.”

“This experiment of nature has been done,” said Dr. Reich, “and we can study it.”

New encounters — some cordial, some not — have swept Syrians of all stripes out of their comfort zones. That could make a difference eventually, in a war so polarized that opposing sides do not even agree on basic facts, let alone on how to solve the conflict and on who is most responsible.

With a cameraman, they asked them if they would accept Mr. Assad’s ouster through negotiations. Many protesters answered politely, but others yelled “God, Bashar and nothing else!” and began shoving and shouting. A man grabbed Mr. Hadad’s phone and threw it.

“We agreed on one thing,” Ms. Maala said. “The killing in Syria needs to stop.”

a reporter from Al Manar introduced himself by saying, “I’m Hezbollah.”

“Do you think we’re happy you’re slaughtering the Syrians?” Mr. Hadad said he answered. Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia, has intervened on the government’s side. The man replied that Hezbollah was fighting to protect a revered shrine near Damascus.“You killed half of Syria for the sake of a shrine,” Mr. Hadad said, and anger flickered across the man’s face.“If I were in an Arab country, I wouldn’t dare,” Mr. Hadad recalled. He said he then relented and told the man that dialogue between them would help.

“We think we’re all unique, and we think every novel is individual, and it is. So when they reduce us all to a bunch of data about words, I guess you have to laugh.

A 1999 study found that when social and economic conditions were bad, movie actresses with “mature facial features” — small eyes, thin cheeks, large chins — were popular, but when conditions were good, the public liked actresses with childlike features.

In the new study, researchers also analyzed 650,000 German books and found the same misery correlation.

Still, the practice of applying data-sorting algorithms to art can only go so far. For one thing, the lists of emotion words, created by other researchers and used for years, include some surprising choices: words like “smug” and “wallow” were among 224 words on the “joy” list; potentially neutral adjectives like “dark” and “low” were among 115 words on the “sadness” list.

All were told that there would be a second phase to the experiment, also lasting five minutes, in which they could eat the chocolate they earned. But they were told they would forfeit any chocolate they couldn’t consume, and they were asked how much they expected to be able to eat.

On average, people in the high-earner group predicted that they could consume 3.75 chocolates. But when it came time to “earn” chocolates, they accumulated well beyond their estimate

“We introduce the concept of ‘mindless accumulation,’ ” said one of the paper’s authors, Christopher Hsee, a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Busi

The impulse seemed less pronounced, even mixed, with the low earners. They earned less chocolate than they predicted they could eat. But the high earners and the low earners listened to about the same amount of obnoxious noise in the five-minute period, which Dr. Hsee said strongly suggested that both groups were driven by the same thing: not by how much they need, but by how much work they could withstand.

The author retorts “I really have an issue with the word hoax.” He regards himself as a performance artist. His response – “It’s the people who reported it who are deceiving their audience.”

Why is fake news so popular on newssites? Here are two reasons: first, it provides emotional “buzz.” Second, because it can make a lot of money. As the Washington Bureau chief of the Pulitzer winning Huffington Post lamented, “If you throw something up without fact checking it, and you’re the first one to put it up, and you get millions and millions of views, and later it’s proved false, you still got those views. That’s a problem. The incentives are all wrong.”Especially when, as at places like Bloomberg, remuneration is based on the number of hits an article receives. But incentives are wrong not just for news gathering organizations.

Americans continue to believe important historical “facts” that are untrue. After 9/11, Americans were incensed to hear that the many in the Middle East thought Osama bin Laden’s horrifying attack was the product of a CIA-Mossad plot. To this day, large majorities in countries like Pakistan think the massacre of 9/11 was created in Washington or Tel Aviv.

Yet close to a majority of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein, tyrant of Iraq, was in cahoots with Al-Qaeda, especially before the 9/11 attack. The Bush administration told them so.Which people in the Middle East rightly regard as preposterous.Saddam Hussein was the leader of a boldly secular, Arabist tyranny. Sunni fanatics like Al Qaeda were his regime’s blood enemies. That they would work together rather than murder each other was just insane. Welcome to the world of fict and faction.

What can we learn from this? Plausibility is not truth; when something is “too good to be true” it generally isn’t; institutions increasingly do not back up what they proclaim and sell.And the “free informational marketplace” of the Internet is a wonderful site for fraud, scams, lies, plausible lies, and pleasant, beautiful untruths. So we all need our own truth detectors.

In coming years, the approach will make possible a new generation of artificial intelligence systems that will perform some functions that humans do with ease: see, speak, listen, navigate, manipulate and control.

They are not “programmed.” Rather the connections between the circuits are “weighted” according to correlations in data that the processor has already “learned.” Those weights are then altered as data flows in to the chip, causing them to change their values and to “spike.” That generates a signal that travels to other components and, in reaction, changes the neural network, in essence programming the next actions much the same way that information alters human thoughts and actions.

The new approach, used in both hardware and software, is being driven by the explosion of scientific knowledge about the brain. Kwabena Boahen, a computer scientist who leads Stanford’s Brains in Silicon research program, said that is also its limitation, as scientists are far from fully understanding how brains function.

“We’re moving from engineering computing systems to something that has many of the characteristics of biological computing,” said Larry Smarr

Traditional computers are also remarkably energy inefficient, especially when compared to actual brains, which the new neurons are built to mimic. I.B.M. announced last year that it had built a supercomputer simulation of the brain that encompassed roughly 10 billion neurons — more than 10 percent of a human brain. It ran about 1,500 times more slowly than an actual brain. Further, it required several megawatts of power, compared with just 20 watts of power used by the biological brain.

Running the program, known as Compass, which attempts to simulate a brain, at the speed of a human brain would require a flow of electricity in a conventional computer that is equivalent to what is needed to power both San Francisco and New York, Dr. Modha said.

In our smaller-brained ancestors, the researchers argue, neurons were tightly tethered in a relatively simple pattern of connections. When our ancestors’ brains expanded, those tethers ripped apart, enabling our neurons to form new circuits.

There are cortices for the other senses, too. The sensory cortices relay signals to another set of regions called motor cortices. The motor cortices send out commands. This circuit is good for controlling basic mammal behavior. “You experience something in the world and you respond to it,” Dr. Krienen said.

After mammals are born, their experiences continue to strengthen this wiring. As a mammal sees more of the world, for example, neurons in the visual cortex form more connections to the motor cortices, so that the bucket brigade moves faster and more efficiently.

Human brains are different. As they got bigger, their sensory and motor cortices barely expanded. Instead, it was the regions in between, known as the association cortices, that bloomed. Our association cortices are crucial for the kinds of thought that we humans excel at. Among other tasks, association cortices are crucial for making decisions, retrieving memories and reflecting on ourselves.

Association cortices are also unusual for their wiring. They are not connected in the relatively simple, bucket-brigade pattern found in other mammal brains. Instead, they link to one another with wild abandon. A map of association cortices looks less like an assembly line and more like the Internet, with each region linked to others near and far.

This new wiring may have been crucial to the evolution of the human mind. Our association cortices liberate us from the rapid responses of other mammal brains. These new brain regions can communicate without any input from the outside world, discovering new insights about our environment and ourselves.

"It turns out we are not as good at picking good offers as you might expect, with the average shopper in our experiment only picking 60% of good offers compared to bad. We also found that age had a strong negative affect on the ability to choose good offers, with older people less able to choose good offers over bad ones. We find this latter effect very interesting and would like to do some more research to find out why this may be the case."

The advantage of using fMRI to image the brain while actively making shopping decisions is that it enables us to see how the whole brain responds, including the 'deeper' areas of the brain, such as those associated with emotion and desire. This lets us understand more about what makes an offer appealing: in some cases the choice appears to be more rational, and in other cases we can see emotional circuitry getting involved in the decision-making process".

In particular we are interested in how factors we are unconsciously aware of can override what might be considered the optimal choice based on conscious judgements. We hope this partnership with SBXL will lead to further research in this area."

We can't employ an entirely programmatic approach to human affairs. However well we think we might be embedding our technologies with the values we hope to express, more often than not we also get unexpected consequences.

Still, we can't help but do a bit of evil when we build technology upon technology, without taking a pause to ask what it's all for. New technologies give us the opportunity to reevaluate the systems we have been using up until now, and consider doing things differently.

our best Stanford computer science graduates end up writing algorithms that better extract money from the stock market, rather than exploring whether capital is even serving its original purpose of getting funds to new businesses.

When we develop technology in a vacuum, disconnected from the reality in which people really live, we are too likely to spend our energy designing some abstract vision of a future life rather than addressing the pains and injustices around us right now. Technology becomes a way of escaping the world's problems, whether through virtual reality or massive Silicon Valley stock options packages, rather than engaging with them.

. It's not enough to computerize and digitize the society we have, and exacerbate its problems by new means. We must transcend the mere avoidance of the patently evil and instead seek to do good. That may involve actually overturning and remaking some institutions and processes from the ground up. That's the real potential of digital technology. To retrieve the values and ideas that may have seemed impossible before and see whether we can realize them today in this very new world.