Reality Crowd

I enjoy this discovery because it reminds me of a concept I learned while studying music. Playing very high notes or very low notes (especially on wind instruments) is difficult. Players spend years trying to stretch that one half-step further or gain the ability to play just a little louder or keep control at the very softest tone. Stretching your ability that far, though, has more value than just being able to finally hit that high C. The benefit also lies in the fact that all the notes you play in between—the notes you have played for years—become stronger as you expand your total range.

This gamma ray burst is like that high C, and understanding it will bring the benefit of better understanding all the galaxies, stars, and other celestial objects in between that we have been “playing” for years. Our understanding of physics will become more refined as scientists may now have a glimpse into the very first generation of stars (with undoubtedly different properties from stars we commonly study today). For a more detailed description of this event and its implications, view the NewScience article here.

Please comment what this discovery means to you (even if you don’t see why a little yellow smudge could get people so excited)!

Every morning I wake up, and I still feel like me. My conscious experience feels stable, natural, consistent, and singular (me). However, as Jill Bolte Taylor, our speaker and brain scientist describes, the two halves of our brains have distinctly separate experiences. They function very differently from one another and care about different things entirely. Having a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain and having left-brain functions individually shut down gave to her unique insight to her mind. She describes in vivid detail how her unaffected right hemisphere became more and more responsible for her entire conscious experience as her left-brain failed. She describes a profound awakening experience as she came to know pure right-brain thought and the hemisphere’s personal experience. She gives insights to the mind on a scientific level and even reaches into—dare I say—a spiritual realm offering her own words of hope for the experience of the human race.

Now for the fun part! Test your own hemispheres with this optical illusion.

If we can’t travel to the beginning of time to observe the Big Bang, then we will just have to make our own miniature Big Bang right here on Earth. It may sound a little far-fetched and maybe even a little dangerous. (It’s neither.)

After 10 years of construction and about $8 billion invested in the cause, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has given rise to the Large Hadron Collider. This astounding technological marvel (a ring 27 kilometers in circumference) is constructed for the purpose of recreating conditions that only existed within the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang—unimaginable measures of heat and density—by literally smashing bits of matter together near the speed of light. Recording particles present in this not-since-the-dawn-of-time formation, will give us insight to the very fabric of our universe and further the pursuit of answering arguably the biggest questions human beings have ever set out to answer.

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Have a seat and enjoy your free virtual reality haircut (with headphones). Enjoy the amazing ability of your brain to perceive the location of a sound by calculating input from both ears.

Researchers now say they have strong evidence to suggest that the area of the brain responsible for this discerning ability is the planum temporale. Read this Science Daily article here discussing recent findings of the planum temporale and the brain’s amazing ability to locate sounds in three-dimensional space.

We have seen robot walkers before, but nothing like this. Watch what happens when the developers try to knock over the Big Dog. It suddenly seems very much alive! This has all sorts of applications, from offroad transport to our soon to be invented robot overlords (pray they have mercy on us!)

Thanks Laughing Squid for the link!

University of Sydney scientists have discovered that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is twice as wide as previously thought. It seems very strange that this could be the case, doesn’t it? Scientists have peered billions of light years into the cosmos. They have made observations and calculations of mass and distance of a multitude of celestial objects and even of the universe itself. But right here at home, our own galaxy we calculated to be about 6,000 light-years thick, and these scientists now claim that in reality, it is 12,000 light-years thick. It is fascinating to learn that these scientists did not even make any new observations; they simply used data already collected that was available on the Internet! This surprising result has elicited mixed emotions from the scientific community. From the University of Sidney article:

“Some colleagues have come up to me and have said ‘That wrecks everything!’” says Professor Gaensler. “And others have said ‘Ah! Now everything fits together!’”

Here at RealityCrowd, we often cite ways in which science and religion are opposed. This event is a beautiful example of how in the scientific community, new evidence can change even a long-held belief. If assertions are supported by evidence, then those assertions must be taken seriously. However, religion, as many readers realize, does not change in the light of new evidence, and this is why we incessantly hear unsupported claims from many Christians such as the age of the universe being only about 6,000 years. Not even the mountain of evidence to the contrary will convince a true Bible believer. This unwavering stance may be comfortable for those who need the universe to be predictable and simple, but those of us with open and inquisitive minds will celebrate these times that we can say, “Hey, we were wrong!”

Read the entire University of Sydney article here.

See Update to this story Below

Science Educator Roy Gould and Curtis Wong from Microsoft give an amazing preview of the Worldwide Telescope. Think of it as a Google Maps for the entire Universe. Set to debut this spring, the worldwide telescope will take images from many different telescopes and stitch them into one comprehensive view of the universe. This is a revolutionary idea, for the first time normal everyday people will get to see what until now only astronomers and astronauts have had access to. What’s the cost for all this amazingness? Nothing!

Update - Here is another great video from fastcompany.tv

Here are some highlights from the www.worldwidetelescope.org frequently asked questions page (FAQ):

Q. What is WorldWide Telescope?
A. The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground- and space telescopes to enable seamless, guided explorations of the universe. WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft®’s high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience.

Q. What are some of the most compelling features of WWT?
A. WorldWide Telescope is an observatory on your desktop, allowing you to see the sky in a way you have never seen before; individual exploration, multi-wavelength views, stars and planets within context to each other, zoom in/out, and a capability for anyone to create and share a tour of the universe.

The Visual Experience Engine delivers seamless panning zooming around the night sky.

WWT delivers seamless integration of science:-relevant information including multi-wavelength, multiple telescope distributed image and data sets, and one-click contextual access to distributed Web information and data sources.

You can also download this video in High Definition from the TED website (highly recommended).

For more than four decades Moore’s Law has been consistently correct, and since 1965 scientists have made silicon chips twice as efficient about every 18 months. We all experience this exponential increase in processing power directly: by the changing tools we use, the increasing capabilities of software and computer hardware, changing physical and social systems, and especially by the way change keeps coming faster. Think about how much technology has changed over your lifetime.

This speeding-up process has become an important part of the way our society functions. As noted by Michael Foster, division director of computing and communication foundations at the National Science Foundation, human and economic progress in the U.S. over the past 20 years has depended on the predictability of this growth.

Silicon chips, however, do have limitations--physical limitations on how small a scale you can actually place transistors on an integrated circuit. When you get down to the atomic scale, there’s not much further you can go, and quantum effects will start to pose serious problems. Moore’s Law will reach an end, predicted to be within the next 10 to 20 years. Will we find new innovations to leave Moore’s Law in the dust? Many hope so.

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Long the domain of science fiction and futurists, it seems that connecting the human brain to computers is coming sooner than you might think. We recently discussed scientists working on mapping a rat’s brain at the neuron level. They think they will have a working model of a human brain within a decade. On the hardware front, engineer Ted Berger at The University of Southern California has spent the past ten years designing a computer chip that can re-create thoughts. Using a needle hooked into a rat’s brain tissue and attached to a small silicone chip, the team of researchers has been able to send and receive electrical pulses from the brain. The chip is a huge first step toward implantable computers in our brains. Eventually, researchers hope to be able to help patients with all sorts of memory disorders, from Alzheimer’s to absent mindedness.

Some day you should be able to stop forgetting where you put your keys with a simple hardware upgrade. However, don’t get excited quite yet. Berger’s chip currently models about 12,000 neuron connections while the brain has an astounding 100 billion! Not to fear though, Richard H. Granger, Jr., a professor of brain sciences who leads the Neukom Institute for Interdisciplinary Computational Sciences at Dartmouth College states that:

Replicating memory is going to happen in our lifetimes, and that puts us on the edge of being able to understand how thought arises from tissue--in other words, to understand what consciousness really means.

Can’t wait a lifetime? Well, the BrainGate Neural Interface System is currently undergoing clinical FDA trials for approval. The System consists of a sensor that is implanted on the motor cortex of the brain and a device that analyzes brain signals. The principle of operation behind the BrainGate System is that with intact brain function, brain signals are generated even though they are not sent to the arms, hands and legs. The signals are interpreted and translated into cursor movements, offering the user an alternate “BrainGate pathway” to control a computer with thought, just as individuals who have the ability to move their hands use a mouse. Currently aimed at severely disabled people, the product is expected to be quickly ramped up for use on people with lesser disabilities.

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This historic image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, shows a very unique looking galaxy. These concentric rings that seem artificially imposed or smeared by mistake are actually a real distortion caused by an effect called gravitational lensing. The gravity of massive objects, such as clusters of galaxies, bend space in such a way that huge lenses are created--just as if a 10,000 light-year-wide magnifying glass were just sitting in space. Depending on the distribution of matter creating a gravitational lens, there are varied types of distortions possible. Multiple images and warping are common effects.

The specific distortion captured in the above picture is called an “Einstein ring.” Predicted by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity , this ring is created by the gravitational forces of two other galaxies directly behind the foreground galaxy in our line of sight--an amazing stroke of luck.

Scientists can use this phenomenon to to draw accurate conclusions about the mass of the galaxies and the amount of dark matter they contain. According to the article:

A sample of several dozen double rings such as this one would offer a purely independent measure of the curvature of space by gravity. This would help in determining what the majority of the Universe is made of, and the properties of dark energy.

Read the entire article here.

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